Social Construction of Gender

Historicizing Constructionism

• Historicizing means when one presents something as a product of historical development.
• Constructionism means that we view the world through certain self made constructs (or ideas about reality).
• Historicizing Constructionism hence means that over the course of history certain ideas have been constructed about gender.
• These ideas have been enforced and reinforced throughout time. So in contemporary times, these are presented as facts and not constructs developed over time.
• Social constructionism means that our realities are based on our experiences and interactions with other people and their culture. So one person might consider a dishwasher a necessity and the other might consider it a luxury.
• Good examples of gender as a social construct are:
  1. Women have to perform domestic tasks whereas men have to work in the public sphere.
  2. Women are associated with the color pink whereas men are associated with the color blue.
  3. Women are encouraged to play indoor sports whereas men are encouraged to play outdoor sports.
  4. Women are seen as a symbol of beauty and compassion whereas men are seen as a symbol of power and strength.

Judith Butler’s Perspective on Social Constructionism

• Judith Butler is one of the most prominent social theorists currently working on issues pertaining to the social construction of gender.
• Butler’s book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published in 1991, argues for gender performativity: gender is not an essential category.
• Essentially, she talks about how we have made gender a category to which we associate individuals with.
• Individuals keep performing tasks of a certain gender (or “doing gender”) thereby reinforcing the idea that gender is natural and it is what makes man and woman different.
• Gender is also said to be omnirelevant; meaning that people are always judging our behavior to be either male or female.
• Gender is so much the routine ground of everyday activities that questioning it’s taken far-granted assumptions and presuppositions is like thinking about whether the sun will come up. Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and recreated out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly “doing gender”.
• For the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth. Then, babies are dressed and adorned in a way that displays category because parents don’t want to be constantly asked; whether their baby is a girl or a boy. A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dressing, and the use of other gender markers. As soon as they can talk, they start to refer to themselves as members of their gender. Sex doesn’t come into play again until puberty, but by that time, sexual feelings and desires and practices have been shaped by gendered norms and expectations. Adolescent boys and girls approach and avoid each other in an elaborately scripted and gendered mating dance.
• Although many traditional social groups are quite strict about maintaining gender differences in other social groups but they seem to be blurring.
• So why did this concept of gender originate in the first place? According to Butler, it originated due to the need for division of labor. Gender became a social institution which divided labor, resources and responsibilities. People should have been chosen for tasks on the basis of their motivations, talents and competence. However, they were chosen on the basis of gender, race and ethnicity.
• Western society’s values legitimate gendering by claiming that it all comes from physiology - female and male procreative differences. But gender and sex are not equivalent and gender as a social construction does not flow automatically from genitalia and reproductive organs - the main physiological differences of females and males. Butler argued that gender cannot be equated with biological and physiological differences between human females and males. The building blocks of gender are socially constructed statuses. Western societies have only two genders, “man” and “woman.” Some societies have three genders-men, women, and berdaches or hijras or xaniths. Berdaches, hijras, and xaniths are biological males who behave, dress, work, and are treated in most respects as social women; they are therefore not men, nor are they female women; they are, in English language, “male women”. There are American and American Indian societies that have a gender status called manly hearted women - biological females who work, marry, and parent as men; their social status is “female men”.
• Modern Western societies’ transsexuals are the nearest equivalent of these crossover genders, but they are not institutionalized as third genders. Transsexuals are biological males and females who have sex-change operations to alter their genitalia. They do so in order to bring their physical anatomy in congruence with the way they want to live and with their own sense of gender identity. They do not become a third gender; they change genders.
• Genders, therefore, are not attached to a biological substratum. Gender boundaries are breachable, and individual and socially organized shifts from one gender to another call attention to “cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances”. These odd or deviant or third genders show us what we ordinarily take for granted-that people have to learn to be women and men.

Gender Perspectives

For Individuals, Gender means Sameness

• Realistically, the possible combinations of genitalia, body shapes, clothing, mannerisms and roles should provide infinite varieties in humans. Individuals are born sexed but not gendered.
• As Simone de Beauvoir said: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”.
• Yet, the social institution of gender keeps things similar.
• Children learn to walk, talk, and gesture the way their social group says.
• Clothing paradoxically, often hides the sex but displays the gender.
• In early childhood, humans develop gendered personality structures and sexual orientations through their interactions with parents of the same and opposite gender.
• Gender norms are inscribed in the way people move, gesture, and even eat. In one African society, men were supposed to eat with their “whole mouth, wholeheartedly, and not, like women, just with the lips, that is halfheartedly, with reservation and restraint”.
• A well brought-up woman is expected to walk with a slight stoop, avoiding every misplaced movement of her body.
• The gendered practices of everyday life reproduce a society’s view of how women and men should act. Gendered social arrangements are justified by religion and cultural productions and backed by law, but the most powerful means of sustaining the moral hegemony of the dominant gender ideology is that the process is made invisible; any possible alternatives are virtually unthinkable.

For Society, Gender means Difference

• The pervasiveness of gender as a way of structuring social life demands that gender statuses be clearly differentiated.
• At a rock and roll dance at West Point in 1976, the year women were admitted to the prestigious military academy for the first time, the school’s administrators “were reportedly perturbed by the sight of mirror-image couples dancing in short hair and dress gray trousers,” and a rule was established that women cadets could dance at these events only if they wore skirts.
• Women recruits in the U,S. Marine Corps are required to wear makeup-at a minimum, lipstick and eye shadow and they have to take classes in makeup, hair care, poise, and etiquette. Is this necessary for a woman recruit? No, but it maintains difference.
• Even if a woman and a man is doing the same task, the task is given different names e.g. personal assistant vs. executive secretary.
• A man converted from a man to a woman and was treated differently by society in every manner. He is a travel writer. His name was James Morris and now, she is known as Jan Morris.

Theories of Gender Inequality

Queer Theory

• Definition: An approach to literary and cultural study that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality.
• Queer theory is a set of ideas based around the idea that identities are not fixed and do not determine who we are.
• The phrase ‘queer theory’ was coined by the Italian feminist, Teresa de Lauretis.
• Queer means:
  • derogatory noun for homosexuality
  • something strange
  • word that describe a particular type of politics

Michel Foucault

• Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, is considered the central architect of the “construct” concept of sexuality.
• Foucault argued that homosexuality was a subject position within culture, rather than a personality type per se. He argued that this position developed within 19th century psychological sciences.

Judith Butler

• Queer Theory originated in Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble who was influenced by Foucault.
• Basic objective of Butler was to remove the categorization of sex and gender so that all forms of sexual identity can be accepted.
• Queer theory attacks the binary oppositions such as man/woman, active/passive, gay/straight and heterosexual/homosexual.
• Butler argued that gender should be seen as a fluid human trait that can shift and change in a given context rather than one that remains fixed.
• Furthermore, she stated that this fixed identities limit exploration and the ability to choose to their identities.
• Butler rejects the idea that any one of us has an innate sexual identity. Instead, she focuses on “performance”, so that repeated performances and representations of heterosexuality will create the illusion that heterosexuality is not only normal but right. However, if someone is pressurized into hiding their actual identity and going with what is “right”, is that person properly expressing themselves?
• Queer theorists, including Butler, appropriated this term, insisting that all sexual behaviors, all concepts linking sexual behaviors to sexual identities and all categories of normative and deviant sexualities are social constructs, which create certain types of social meaning. Butler sees sex as no more a natural category than gender.
• Thus, for instance, Butler points out that discrimination against gays is a function not of their sexuality, but rather of their failure to perform heterosexual gender norms.
• Queer theorists are known as post-modern theorists or advocates of deconstructionism.
• Queer theorists underscores the idea that sexual identity is fluid. It can evolve and change over time. Being “straight” means nothing as five years from now, you may be “bi” and so on.
• Queer theory argues against this innate “naturalness” of heterosexuality and how society is biased towards it.
• Queer theorists stated that sexual orientations are a binary construct and nothing is masculine or feminine. Hollywood depicts men as masculine and heroic except for the film, Brokeback Mountain.

Queer Nation

• LGBTQ activist organization founded in March 1990 in New York City.
• Objective: Protest against escalation of anti-gay and anti-lesbian violence and rhetoric. It also talks about elimination of homophobia, and awareness regarding homosexuality.
• The used slogans like:
  • “Two, four, six, eight, how do you know your kids are straight?”
  • “Out of the closets, into the streets.”
  • “We are here! We are Queer! Get used to it!”
• It was famous in the 1990s and it became resurgent in 2013 especially after Russia’s anti-gay laws.

Is “Sex” Socially Determined too?

• It can be said that to an extent sex is also socially constructed.
• Sex depends upon 6 main anatomical features described in the table below. However, there are cases where classification of sex based on these features becomes ambiguous.

Anatomical Feature	Male	Female	Ambiguous Case
Chromosomes	XY	XX	Klinefelter Syndrome, Turner Syndrome
External Genitalia	Penis	Vagina	Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia and are classified as intersex
Gonads (Internal Genitalia)	Testicles	Ovaries	Internal genitalia of some people may not match their external genitalia
Hormonal State	Testosterone	Estrogen	Hormonal imbalances may occur in both sexes. Does that change their sex?
Secondary Sex Characteristics	Beards	Widening of hips; lower waist to hip ratio than adult males.	These characteristics may be found in either sexes

• In Klinefelter Syndrome (KS), also known as 47, XXY is the set of symptoms that result from two or more X chromosomes in males.[3] The primary features are infertility and small poorly functioning testicles. However, some countries classify two X chromosomes as the female sex. So people who are male and have Klinefelter syndrome, they will be considered as female in those countries.
• In Turner Syndrome, a female is partly or completely missing an X chromosome. Some societies classify sex based on the number of X chromosomes. The same argument will apply if that a female has one X chromosome, does that make her a male? Hence, we can see that sometimes, even sex is socially constructed.
• Who determines when the size of the genitalia is sufficient for male? Not every genitalia is of the same size. When is a male genitalia small enough to be categorized as a female genitalia?
• Some tribes in Africa do not classify the sex of a baby until it matures to a certain point. This is also an example how sex is socially constructed.

Masculinity vs. Femininity

• Theorists argue that masculinity and femininity are also socially constructed ideas of gender.
• A woman living in a mountainous region is going to much more braver and stronger than a man who is living in a city.
• In the same way, a woman in England may express more feminine traits as compared a woman in a village in Pakistan.
• Some traits that are associated with masculinity and femininity are listed below.

Masculinity	Femininity
Competent	Empathetic
Rational	Sensitive
Assertive	Passive
Independent	Dependent
Aggressive	Submissive
Strong-Headed	Caring
Dominant	Emotional
Active	Passive
Tough	Gentle
Kind	Cruel
Verbal	Analytical
Tactful	Blunt

Nature vs. Nurture: A Debate in Gender Development

• There is an ongoing debate whether gender is based on biological differences or social differences.
• As it stands today, gender in our current society is rather ambiguous. However, there are logical theories on both sides of the spectrum that needs to explored.

Biological Theories of Gender

• Biological theory maintains that biological characteristics are the basis of gender differences.
• Biological theories are characterized by:
  1. Chromosomes
  2. Hormonal activity
  3. Brain structure
  4. Nerves
  5. Freud’s Essentialism

Sex Chromosomes

• Males have XY chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes.
• Genetic evidence suggests that several genes that control intelligence and certain social skills are located only on the X chromosome.
• This implies that some aspects of males’ intelligence are inherited only from their mothers, whereas females inherit an X chromosome from each parent.

Hormones

• Sex hormones affect the development of the brain and the body.
• Women’s bodies produce estrogen, the primary female hormone. Estrogen strengthens the immune system which makes women more resistant to infections and viruses. Even in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, only 46% of the total cases reported were women. Estrogen causes fat tissue to form around women’s hips which provides cushioning for a fetus during pregnancy. Furthermore, estrogen seems to impede liver functioning such that women eliminate alcohol more slowly than men.
• Men’s bodies produce testosterone, the primary male hormone. Higher levels of testosterone are linked to jockeying for power, attempts to influence or dominate others and physical expression of anger.
• Research shows that girls favored trucks over dolls when their mothers had unusually high levels of testosterone and males who are given estrogen experience decline in spatial skills (navigation, estimation, etc.).

Brain Structure

• A third focus of biological theories is the difference of brain structure between males and females.
• Men tend to have better development in the lobe that controls linear thinking, sequential information, spatial skills and analytical reasoning. Furthermore, the amygdala is larger in men which is the center of emotions like anger and fear. This may explain why men are more likely than women to engage in risky and aggressive behavior.
• Women tend to have greater development of the lobe that controls imagination, artistic activity, intuitive thinking and multi-tasking. Furthermore, women have a larger prefrontal cortex which restrains aggression.

Nerves

• A bundle of nerves and connecting tissue called the corpus callosum links the lobes of the brain. Women generally can use this structure efficiently to use both lobes of the brain whereas men largely use one side of their brain.

Essentialism

• Sigmund Freud offered an explanation of gender roles based on anatomy; he believed anatomy is destiny.
• He believed that biology, particularly the genitals, determines which parent a child identifies with and how his psyche will develop.
• Psychoanalysis is the theory of personality that stresses the influence of unconscious mental processes, the importance of sexual and aggressive instincts, and the enduring effects of early childhood experiences on personality.
• Freud believed that our psychological makeup is divided into conscious mental process (just the tip) and unconscious mental processes (the whole iceberg).
• Thus to understand personality and roles, it is important to expose what is in the unconscious.
• He divided personality development in stages, the first of which is the phallic stage.
• Phallic stage starts around age 3. This is the stage of Oedipal conflict where a male child unconsciously begins to develop a sexual interest in the mother, starts to see his father as a rival and wants to kill him (as Oedipus did in ancient Greece). However, the boy child views the father as more powerful so he develops a fear that the father may retaliate by castrating him. To resolve this castration anxiety, he teams up with his father and starts identifying as him: he ends up imitating his behavior, adopting similar beliefs and values. In the end, he internalizes his father’s values, attitudes and norms resulting in a personality.
• Girls also resolve the Electra complex by identifying with the same-sex parent. They experience penis-envy and wish they had a penis like the other boys and the father. Girls start blaming their mothers for their “castration”. However, she attempts to be like her mother and identifies as her so she could get someone as a partner like her father.
• Criticism: Gender differences are declining rapidly and Freud’s influence on essentialism is waning. Women have become more assertive, competitive and independent in the last three decades. Secondly, essentialism harshly generalizes gender and base it solely on anatomy. It ignores variations within the gender group. Thirdly, there is so substantial study which links the assertiveness of boys to their sexual organs. Finally, essentialists’ explanation of gender differences ignores the role of power developed over history. There is no reason young girls’ sexual organs should represent her identity or self-confidence.

The Bruce Case

• A case of ‘sex reassignment surgery’ in Canada in 1968.
• At eight months, baby Bruce’s penis was burned off.
• Dr. John Money thought that gender was solely a social construct and agreed to take on Bruce’s case.
• Although born as a boy, Bruce underwent surgery to become a girl - Brenda.
• However, Brenda always showed masculine attributes such as playing with male toys, fighting with her brother and preferring to stand to urinate.
• At age 14, she was told about her surgery. She felt elated and decided to reverse back to being a male again.
• At age 18, Brenda became David and had her penis reconstructed.
• This case shows that gender identity might be inborn. Nurture’s role is given little credit in the process, even though Dr. John Money favored the social constructionist argument for gender.
• However there are just as many counterarguments from the nurture side (that gender identity is learned).

Summary

• Biological theories of gender attribute masculine and feminine qualities and abilities to genetics and biology. Yet biological theories tell us only about physiology and genetic qualities of men and women in general. This doesn’t necessarily describe individual men and women.
• A number of researchers also argue that while biology does determine our abilities and behavior, environmental forces may end up mitigate and override these biological factors e.g. interpersonal, societal and cultural influences on gender.

Evolutionary Psychology

• The primary concept of evolutionary psychology caters to the notion that the differences between genders and sexuality are a result of evolution and the different factors in men and women strategies for success.

Social Learning Theory

• From birth, males and females are treated differently
• Girls are supposed to play with dolls, boys are supposed to play with action figures.
• Girls are supposed to wear pink, boys are supposed to wear blue.
• Social learning theory states that children learn gender from other people, mostly parents. Based on their socialization, they end up identifying with a certain gender.
• Socialization is based on:
  • Rewards: Reinforcing appropriate behavior e.g. a dog is rewarded when he plays fetch properly so he tries to do it again and again.
  • Punishments: Extinguishing inappropriate behavior.
• Gender roles are learned directly through reprimand and rewards and indirectly through observation and imitation of the gendered behavior of same-sex playmates and adults especially their mothers and fathers.
• Some other examples are:
  1. “Don’t be a sissy”
  2. “Big boys don’t cry”
  3. Boys should play outside sports
  4. Girls should knit
• The traditional division of labor - women to be at home, men to be in the public sphere - is a consequence of traditional socialization. Females and males have been socialized to perform various roles and to expect their partners to perform other complementary roles.

Cultural Sexism

• Cultural sexism refers to the ways the culture of society - norms, values, beliefs, symbols - perpetuates the subordination of an individual/group based on sex.
• Sexism can be found in many different areas of our culture:
  1. Education system; men are preferred to study in Pakistan over women as evident by the literacy rate.
  2. Females are more likely to be in need of rescue and with fewer occupational roles than males.
  3. Males are encouraged to participate in outdoor sports.
  4. Media portrays females in a stereotypical fashion.
  5. An image of a woman pops up in our head when we hear the words “nurse” but an image of a man pops up in our head when we hear the words “engineer”.

Cognitive Development Theory: Gender Schema Theory

• Gender Schema theory was first developed by Sandra Bem in 1981.
• It states that once children have form a basis of gender identity, they start developing gender schemas: organized sets of beliefs about the sexes that influence behavior.
• This gender schema is learned through their:
  1. Parents
  2. Gender
  3. Culture
• After the child has figured out their gender schema, they start seeking information concerning the appropriate gender roles and traits.
• Information that does not fit the gender schemas tend to be either forgotten or distorted to fit the schema e.g. if one day a child suddenly saw his father cook, he would be confused. As a result, gender schemas promote gender stereotypes.
• According to Jean Piaget, children are detectives and active seekers who want to determine their gender. By the age of 3, they have an understand of genders. By the age of 6, they have figured out their genders which remain permanent throughout their lives. They value their own gender more and believe theirs is superior to the other.
• While social learning theory portrayed children as passive taking in gender messages, this theory portrays that children are actively seeking to comprehend their gender.

Psychodynamic Theory

• Psychodynamic theory states that early relationships are central to human development. For most children, the relationship with the mother influences how an infant comes to define his or her gender.
• According to Nancy Chodorow, a psychodynamic theorist, argued that:
  • Mothers generally interact with daughters more and keep them close. As a result, the feminine traits of the mother passes down to the daughter.
  • Mothers generally give more independence to sons. As a result, independence and self-reliance, masculine traits, become part of the son. They try to differentiate themselves from the mother.
• Male psychological development, thus, tends to internalize both an intense fear and intense desire for woman. They see start seeing women as objects rather than human beings. So, they end up participating in gender discrimination and violence.

Cultural Constructionism - Anthropological Theory

• A third group of theories focus on understanding gender from a cultural perspective. Cultural scholars do not necessarily dispute biological or social factors, but they do assume that these are qualified by the influence of culture.
• Tahitian men tend to display personality traits that may be considered feminine in other cultures e.g. mild-tempered, emotional, showing fear and crying.
• Samoan men have to tattoo themselves to transition from a boy to a man.
• In history, Native American tribes had established matrilineal links of kinship which were traced through females, not males. Many of these tribes also viewed women as relatively autonomous as compared to Western Europeans who colonized America.

Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture?

• Homosexuality plays a significant role in the debate between nature and nurture primarily due to the significant findings that have been established to the cause of homosexuality.
• The debate is whether homosexuals have the ability to be nurtured into homosexuality, or if certain biological factors attribute to one being a homosexual.
• The advancements of neuro scans have shown plausibility that there is a difference in homosexual brain scans as compared to heterosexual brain scans. The part of the brain that is associated with behavior and reproductive physiology known as the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus is shown to be larger in heterosexual males compared to homosexual males.
• some researchers argue that homosexuality is a learned behavior from homosexual parents. However, there are some studies that show many children of homosexual parents end up establishing their own gender identities.