Portrayal Of Gender And Symbolic Interactionism

Gender derives its formative meaning from culture and societal values, it is not a universal entity as there are various cultures, societal values, beliefs, and preferred ways of organizing collective life across the globe and even within a single culture the meaning of gender varies over time. Chapters three and four of Gendered Lives by Julia T. Wood helps to insightfully look at those views, and rhetorical movements (women and men’s movements) that have overtime influenced, defined and given various meanings to gender (masculinity and femininity).

Gender is a sociological idea, in which it is not based on biology. While there is some biological differences between the sexes, the “meaning” of being male or female is based on social norms. Like race, these “biological” differences provided a system of enabling inequality between the sexes. History offers many examples of the gender norms over time. Women, for centuries, are few as the homemakers and often viewed as intelligent. Despite living in the twentieth century with greater equality, one does not need to go far to see how society and media influence our perception of gender. Advertisements in various media persuade its audience to buying their products. However, the means of attracting and persuading the audience can have underlying messages. Even in entertainment for young girls these underlying messages are prevalent. One example is the popular film, The Little Mermaid, in which the main protagonist is a young female. The protagonist gave up her identity to satisfy her lover. Even traditional gender roles are at work; the film showed young girls that to be happy and successful one had to find a husband and must relinquished one’s identity (Wood 1994). The generalized perception of male and female are polar opposites. Males are viewed as masculine, strong, authoritative, powerful, and devoid of emotions. Females are viewed as beauty, fragile, nurturing, emotional and sole purpose is to please men. These ideas can lead to sexism, which can have negative effects on

Gender can be defined as “sex roles” which are conditions that one considers to be for men or women. People tends to mistake it with sex or thinks that they are both the same. We discussed about the patterns of gender which how the authors of The Kaleidoscope of Gender describes it as “regularized, prepackaged ways of thinking, feeling, and acting” (Spade and Valentino,2017). It becomes an identity for us. We believe that there is and can only be two genders, being masculine for men and feminine for women. These roles has been forced onto us since birth: blue for boys, and pink for girls. You can see the roles being push onto a person throughout one’s life, but we don’t notice it since it’s “normal” to us.

I decided to observe gender socialization by analyzing the themes and colors associated with birthday cards at Wal-Mart. I looked at the cards directed at the 1-10 year old age groups. I noted that the cards label for girls in this age group were dominantly pink, purple, and glittery. Cards related to the movie “Frozen” were the exception. Those character cards included generally light blue hues. I did note, surprisingly, that there was no glitter or anything shiny on the “Frozen” cards. The most used words and phrases in general were: sweetie, princess, cuddly, little, and perfect. Most of the girls’ cards had a princess or animal on the front. The Frozen cards were once again the surprising exception with the most common adjectives being: BRAVE, STRONG, and INDEPENDENT.

What does it mean to be a woman or man? Whether we a man or a woman, in today’s society it is not determined just by our sex organs. Our gender includes a complex mix of beliefs, behaviors, and characteristics. How do you act, talk, and behave like a woman or man? Are you feminine or masculine, both, or neither? These are questions that help us get to the core of our gender and gender identity. Gender identity is how we feel about and express our gender and gender roles: clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It is a feeling that we have as early as age two or three. In the article, “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meaning of Gender,” the author, Aaron Devor, is trying to persuade his readers that gender shapes how we behave because of the expectation from us and relate to one another. He does this by using an educational approach, describing gender stereotypes, and making cultural references. He gets readers to reflect on how “Children’s developing concepts of themselves as individuals are necessarily bound up …to understand the expectations of the society which they are a part of” (389). Growing up, from being a child to an adult is where most of us try to find ourselves. We tend to struggle during this transition period, people around us tell us what to be and not to be, Jamaica Kincaidt in her short story, “Girl” tells just that, the setting is presented as a set of life instructions to a girl by her mother to live properly. The mother soberly

Gender has been described as masculine or feminine characteristics that encompass gender identity sex as well as social roles (Nobelius 2004). According to sexologist John Money, there is a difference between gender as a role and the biologically of differences in sex (Udry 1994). Within scholarly disciplines, cultures and contexts, gender frequently has its own mean, contextual frame of reference and the manner in which it is used to describe a variety of issues and characteristics. The sociocultural codes, conventions and the suggested and literal rules that accompany the notion of gender are vast and diverse. There has been and continues to be much scholarly debate regarding the idea of gender and how it has been viewed historically; as well as changes in the grammatical use of the

In many shops, there seems to be an obvious separation between boys and girls items, for example, the birthday cards, books, clothes, and toys. This is shown in a variety of ways the boy's items are mainly the color blue and the books have pictures of either action figures, superheroes or tools. Whereas the girl's items are mainly the color pink. The books show pictures of fairies, princess, and Bratz. The cards also have the theme of the color pink for girls and blue for boys. The girl's cards have a lot of sparkles and pretty pictures whereas the boy's cards are covered in camo kind of illustrations and also have action figures on the covers. The children's clothes are separated into sections where there are labels for the boy's clothes and labels for the girl's clothes. The girl's clothing is all pretty and pink, it is covered in sparkles. Whereas boys clothing has camo patterns, blue colors, and pictures of action figures.

Gender roles influence every characteristic and aspect of our life, from how we feel about ourselves to the degree of our contribution in social life. From a ripe young age, children become exposed to this type of gender bias right away, which can negatively affect and shape their whole outlook on life. Consequently, as these young boys and girls mature both physically and emotionally and move on into adulthood, they are, in essence, shoved into a world that impacts their attitudes and behaviors towards gender roles and stereotypes. These specific attitudes and behaviors first cultivate in the private doors of their parent’s house. Afterwards, these same biases become reinforced by the child’s peers, school experience (education), television viewing, and, of course, advertisements in the realm of print and television media. From the looks of it, it is near impossible, for children to not become subject to some degree of gender bias at an early age. As a child grows and develops, the stereotypes follow them into the next phases of their lives (i.e. adolescence) and then on into adulthood. Not only are these gender stereotypes destroying girls, they are also killing boys. The components of this essay will attempt to illustrate how advertising in print and television helps to perpetuate gender stereotypes in our world. Along with that, one must ask the question of how much harm these negative biases in gender roles truly affects the minds of men, women, and young children.

The gender describes how our understandings and perception of differences between masculinity (what society deems appropriate behaviour a “man” and femininity (what society deems appropriate behaviour for a “woman”) are influenced.

West and Zimmerman’s theory of “Doing Gender” defines sex and gender as two separate entities within this binary society. Sex refers to the biological characteristics that are typically attributed to males and females. Gender is the status of the individual performing the activities that are commonly associated with masculinity and femininity. These traits are rigid in dictating the individual’s consistent performance of them. A gendered individual must execute the appropriate acts that are linked to masculinity or femininity respectively. It is a learned behavior that is taught at an early age through observation of society. Therefore, it is society that decides whether an action is attributed to masculinity or femininity. Gender is a socially constructed idea of thought that people unconsciously follow. The acts that constitute a particular gender can change based on the views of society within a generation. Certain activities and forms of appearance have shifted between males and females. As society evolves throughout history, the interactions between individuals and their gendered actions have changed. West and Zimmerman state, “When we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional and, ultimately, institutional arenas” (West and Zimmerman, 1987, page 126). Thus the performance of gender has developed passed the individual and is engrained within the

It is apparent that there are clear distinctions between men and women and what is meant by ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity.’ For example, as noted by Södergren (2014), feminine women possess qualities of empathy, weakness and nurturing. Men, on the other hand, are shown with qualities of ambition and dominance (2014). It should come to no surprise, then, that men and women are represented differently in the media. Studies have shown that women are usually portrayed as younger than men

The concept of gender has a strong social impact on me. When I was born, I was immediately assigned to a biological sex as a female with two X chromosomes. I was then socially classified as a girl in the society with feminine gender roles. Gender is defined as a social principle which attribute to the roles and expectations of males and females through the years of different societies (Phillips, 2005). Gender can be considered as behavioural, cultural and psychological traits

interactions performed by people on a daily basis; gender is not merely a concept, but an

The term gender refers to the characteristics of a person despite the person’s biological sex. Gender role, which is the focus of sociologists, is the anticipated attitude and behavior that a certain society connects with each sex. With this definition, gender is placed evenly in the sociocultural context. Events that previously occurred had a vital impact on gender roles. Due to this, the study of gender emerged as one of the significant disciplines in the field of sociology in the twentieth century. The gender issues were studied using various research and theory. The research on gender issues provided a testament that all social interactions that occur, and the institutions where they occur, are gendered in one way or the other. Sociologists explain gender roles with respect to various theoretical perspectives. The perspectives are the ways of perceiving social reality that guide the process of research and provide a method for understanding the data. The sociological perspectives on gender roles include functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interaction, and feminist sociological theory (pearsonhighered.com).

“Gender” is a social construct that is developed solely by our society and the early developmental stages of an adolescent’s life. By introducing youths to the roles, behaviors, expectations and activities that correspond with males or females we give a clear guideline of what is accepted from a young male or female. An individual however can identify his or her gender based on their own system of beliefs without corresponding to their natural biological sex. Our lives are shaped by our true biological identities but the influence of the world and society is enough to define what a male and what a female truly is to an individual.