Issues on Gender

Katharina Jones        

Soc 31501

April, 28 2015

                                        Question 1

We have been examining many different areas from life concerning gender. One of the first things we did this semester was, that Professor Rogalin asked us what would be different if I was a man instead of a girl. (Lecture, January 13th) I decided that there would be some advantages in my life, like people not judging me if I dressed manly and that it would be easier for me to be successful. However, there are also some disadvantages, like i would consistently show that I am masculine to not look weak and I would have to seem tough all the time.My class came up with other ideas on how being a man would be more of an advantage or disadvantage. For example some of the other female students said that it would be good to be a man because you would be less oppressed, you would make more money, people would listen to you more and you would be able to have more opportunities, for the disadvantages they said that males receive more pressure have awkward conversations with their daughters and do not get to stay home with the kids because they are the primary providers.

I realized that being a man, and i later realized that we are only talking about white males here is more of an advantage than being a woman let alone a woman of a different race. We had to read the article “Oppression” by Frye for class on January, 22. In her article Frye compares oppression to a birdcage. She states that if you only look at one of the bars connecting the cage you cannot see or understand why the bird simply doesn’t fly away but once you take a step back you can see the whole cage and realize that all the bars are connected to each other, making it impossible for the bird to fly away. She states that “It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.” With that she means that it can be hard for others to understand and see how others are oppressed because if they only focus on one part of oppression they are incapable to see the whole issue as a whole.

In the article “Doing Gender” by West & Zimmerman show in their article how we all do gender. They say that “doing gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures’.” (P#1, pg. 4) With that we mean that we all are constantly doing gender because we are being gendered ourselves from before we are born and later are taught to gender others. West & Zimmerman argue that gender is not a set of traits but a learned interaction. In our lecture on January 20th Dr. R explained that Gender shows the status of women & men in society and how they are different from one another and also how the expectations very for women and men because we are evaluated differently. (Dr. R, Lecture)