The 's Room By James Baldwin

Many people have different understandings of what gender means to them. To some, gender might mean you are either male or female depending on what you are assigned to at birth. To others, gender might mean what you identify as. However, there is one constant definition of what gender really means. Throughout the years, modern scholars have studied what it means to be a man and a woman and have come up with a specific definition. Modern scholars define gender as a socially constructed term of men or women. This socially constructed definition is based on everyday life roles. This could be from how you interact with others and how you expressed yourself physically or emotionally to the rest of the world. An example would be, women wear dresses

​​Gender is defined as whatever behaviors and attitudes a group considers proper for its males and females. Unlike sex, gender is something that we learn from the day we are born. “Young children begin to acquire gender role stereotypes at about the same time they develop gender identity and by the age of 3 or 4 most children” (Amanda Youmans). Peers, community, media, religion and our upbringing all play a role in the understanding of our culture and what is considered acceptable for males and females. When the sex of a child is revealed, they are automatically placed into a gender specific role with certain expectations. There are things in this world such as colors, toys, media depiction and taught behaviors that play into these gender roles.

Gender is defined as the state of being male or female. In most instances, this state is determined based on the biology of an individual’s genitalia. Those born

Gender is defined as being male or female as defined by roles, social status, and attitude. The perception of oneself and what characterizes gender identity. Included in gender identity is hormone and behavior interaction, along with the examination of psychological, biological, and environmental influences on sexual separation.

The Room, by Russell E. Mullen, is an account of the author's racial journey. Russell is a Caucasian raised in Central Florida, and being a baby boomer born in 1957, he experienced the racial conflicts that existed during the civil rights movement. As a child, he constantly heard negative comments about Black Americans from most of his relatives and other people around him, but he just couldn't understand the reason for the racial discrimination. His father was the only one he knew that never said anything bad about the African-American people and this got him more confused. Consequently, he sought answers to many questions popping in his head.

Harvey Milk once said “it takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no survey to remove repressions.” He lived in a time when there was discrimination of homosexuals and he experienced it; being the first gay man elected to Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. In the 1940’s and 50’s homosexual people were discriminated it was viewed as a disease and was described as “sociopathic personality disturbance. Homosexual activities were illegal and people were imprisoned for having consensual sex with another man. Despite the dangers and difficulties, homosexual people found a way to meet and confide in themselves. Most wrote books as a way to express themselves; it gave

Gender is often described as the state of being ether male or female. In most communities,

From the moment a child is born, the society in which they are born into begins to teach the child what is normal, and what is not. If the aforementioned child has a vagina, they will be labeled a girl and assumed to be heterosexual, and the same principle applies if the child has a penis. Yet the human world is not as simple as this established gender binary. For example, there are people who identify with a gender other than the sex assigned at birth.1 There are also people who are not sexually attracted strictly to the opposite gender, or at all. Such diversions from societal normality are more often than not greeted with opposition, as what is considered normal is also deemed right. The LGBT community has had to deal with fierce societal

Giovanni’s Room written by James Baldwin was written in the 1950’s. A book about love, homosexuality, and the struggles of both. During the 1950’s being a homosexual wasn’t exactly a desirable thing to be, in America or England. The fifties was a hard time for homosexuals and bisexuals. In Europe families were starting back up as the men returned home from World War II, due to this being gay was seen as a threat to the typical family. This was a time in which one could go to prison for their sexual orientation and the sexual acts they pursued. Chain arrest could be made as well, where one would get arrested, questioned on if they knew other gays and if they did and could identify them, then their sentence would be lesser or easier (CITATION). So as imagined “coming out of the closet” wasn’t a thing that many wanted to do, they wanted to stay hidden. The phrase “coming out of the closet” or even just the term “closet” represents an idea where people hid their sexuality. If one were to “come out of the closet” they would announce or make it known in public that they were accepting their sexuality and letting others see it as well. In Giovanni’s Room we as readers can see a lot of this hiding, confusion, and struggle with the idea of being gay, especially with the character of David. David uses Giovanni’s room as his own sort of “closet”.

What is gender? According to the American Psychology Association (APA), Gender refers to the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex (APA.ORG). Unfortunately, many people tend to think that

Gender as defined by society as a division between biological sex and the roles you must take on in society. In reality gender is a true spectrum that does not follow a simple linear pattern. There are three major aspects that make a person who they are inside. These aspects are Sex, Gender and Gender Identity.

Gender is a learned social construction on what you do. It is a cultural system based on the binary opposition of men and women but there are also variations

Merriam-Webster provides two definitions for the meaning of gender. The first is simply that gender is a synonym for sex. The second, however, states that gender is “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex (Merriam-Webster).” This is the definition for gender used in this paper, while sex is defined separately, as the biological differences between males and females.

The term ‘gender’ was coined by John Money in 1955: “Gender is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself/herself as having the status of a boy or man, girl or woman, respectively” (Coleman and Money, 1991, 13). In

Gender, as defined by the United Nations, includes the psychological, social, cultural, and behavioral characteristics associated with being female or male. It further defines acceptable and allowable behavior in for both men and women in a broad cultural sense (United Nations, 2016). Gender identity impacts our development and how we interact with society. Our daily life decisions are impacted by our gender role beliefs.