The Biological Limits to Gender Constructivism by Richard Udry

The easy adjustment of the Batista children led scientists to challenge the usual view that male or female behaviour is determined more by the way we are brought up than by our physiology. They suggest that there may be part of the brain which is different in males and females which governs much of what we think of as sex-role behaviour. However, critics of the Biological approach would argue the Batista’s may have been able to adopt masculine behaviour more readily because of their supportive environment, rather than biological changes. If biological factors explained gender

Both Deborah Blum’s The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over? and Aaron Devor’s “Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes” challenges the concept of how gender behavior is socially constructed. Blum resides on the idea that gender behavior is developed mainly through adolescence and societal expectations of a gender. Based on reference from personal experiences to back her argument up, Blum explains that each individual develops their expected traits as they grow up, while she also claims that genes and testosterones also play a role into establishing the differentiation of gender behavior. Whereas, Devor focuses mainly on the idea that gender behavior is portrayed mainly among two different categories: masculinity and

In the excerpt “Why Do We Make So Much of Gender?”, from his 1997 book The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, Allan Johnson argues gender through identity and culture. Johnson starts out by expressing opposition on how women are looked at through a patriarchal society and not the biology from which they came. He mentions the feminist argument that women in a patriarchal society are “oppressed” and that this comes from social order (545). He goes on to point out, the focus should be on raising children to adulthood rather than worrying about reproduction. Although, I agree with Johnson’s arguments, there are things in this world that cannot and should not be changed.

Gender is actually a set of rules, customs and traditions assigned to people of a particular sex. Gender is not biological but sex is. Rather, according to Lorber, it is influenced by our society and our culture. By proving this claim, Judith Lorber has put forth the example of the man and this example is efficient in distinguishing “gender” as a practice than as an innate attribute.

Although men and women have significant biological differences, the question whether gender-specific labels stems from these biological differences or are gender constructed remains a polarised nature versus nurture debate. Whether it is through the process of socialisation or genetic make-up, “gender identity” is given from a person’s birth, determining how a person culturally interacts and the expectations society places on them. Along with a “gender identity” comes a whole set of “norms”, “values” and so-called “gender characteristics”, which are supposed to define the differences between a male and a female. According to the World Health Organisation (n.d.), the term “sex” is often used to define the biological and physiological

The nurture argument can explain why some people adopt the gender role not expected of their sex. In theory, a feminine boy would have had a set of experiences which have led him to acquire a different gender role from most boys. If gender roles are nurtured, it also explains why an individual’s gender may change over time as anything that is learnt can be unlearnt and replaced by a new set of behaviours.

Sociologists reject the idea that behavioural differences between men and women are biologically determined. Outline the key grounds for this rejection and discuss what this means for a sociological understanding of gender.

According to sociobiology our sex, or, our biological differences are what determines our gender. Sociobiologists suggest that biological elements such as our hormones, chromosomes and the size of our brain are what influence our behaviour and consequently what differentiates our gender. Because men produce more testosterone and androgens than women, which are linked to strength and aggression, sociobiologists argue that this explains men’s dominant and aggressive behaviour. (Haralambos & Holborn, 2000)

Judith Lorber is able to convey many of her ideals about our contemporary conceptions of gender in her essay, ?The Social Construction of Gender.? Not only does she clearly express her opinions on the roles of physiological differences of the male and female bodies, but she also elaborates on the roles of the mass media and professional sports among other things. It rapidly becomes clear that there are many legitimate arguments that support this movement for near or complete equality in genders and the roles that they perform.

Judith Lorber’s idea of gender meaning both sameness and difference is the key concept in Night to His Day, an excerpt from her book The Paradoxes of Gender. In Night to His Day Lorber’s main goal in this piece is to show how gender is socially constructed. She does this by stating the many components of gender within society that could be perpetrated either as a social institution (sameness) or what gender is composed of at an individual level (difference). This paper will use examples from Marilyn Monroe’s The Seven Year Itch to demonstrate these components of gender.

“The social construction of gender comes out of the general school of thought entitled social constructionism. Social constructionism proposes that everything people "know" or see as "reality" is partially, if not entirely, socially situated. To say that something is socially constructed does not mitigate the power of the concept. These basic theories of social constructionism can be applied to any issue of study pertaining to human life, including gender. This is

The way society is taught to be socialized is salient and goes unnoticed, therefore it is valid to claim that gender is socially constructed through our everyday practices, whether we are aware of the construction or not. With socialization beginning the instant a child is born, the process is continuous through out adolescence and varies dramatically across the two genders. With guidance from institutions and arenas such as education, sports, music and the mass media gender seems to be coerced, as it comes with a scripted set of behaviors and attitudes. This essay argues that gender is socially constructed on an everyday basis. To further explain this thesis the essay will draw on early childhood socialization of masculinity and femininity,

Gender refers to the concepts o masculine and feminine whereas sex is the biological fact of being a male or female. According to the evolutionary approach, gender differences are neither deliberate nor conscious; they exist because they enhanced or helped men and women perform particular types of roles in the past. Therefore, the role differences we observe are more a product of our biological inheritance than acquired through socialisation.

In her paper on the biological differences in cognition between men and women, Doreen Kimura suggests that the social differences between genders arose out of biological necessity (Kimura 46). Even so, it is difficult to argue that social factors do play a large part in gender in society today. A closer look at both biological and social perspectives will reveal more about the processes that determine gender roles.

As evident from the generalized patterns found in differences in behaviour and outlook observed between the sexes, it may be tempting, as has been done in the past, to conclude that gender is an unavoidable aspect of human existence as determined purely from one 's genes. Indeed, human physiology is subject to sexual dimorphism; statistically significant differences in brain size and rate of maturation of specific substructures in the brain exist between males and females (Giedd, Castellanos, Rajapakese, Vaituzis, & Rapoport, 1997), yet these physical differences fail to explain how individuals form their concept of their own gender, and why they tend to conform to their perceived gender roles as defined by the society in which they live, when these roles are ever-changing. Thus, it is important to differentiate between the physical and nonphysical traits, and how the labels of femininity and masculinity should not confuse the two aspects. As defined by Unger (1979), “sex” would be used to refer to the biological differences in males and females, while “gender” describes socioculturally determined, nonphysiological traits which are arbitrarily designated as being appropriate for either females or males. With more recent awareness and interest in matters of gender nonconformity and individual gender identity, new research now explains how these concepts of gender are shaped by social influences (Perry