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Sunday, October 25, 2015

Gender Socialization Blog Post

How is gender socially constructed and what effect does this have?
Gender does not exist innately in individuals. It is a learned behavior that is taught through the agents of socialization: media, family, peers, education, religion, etc. These people and groups raise a child and teach them proper social behavior. Without this education, humans can appear oddly inhumane, as seen in Genie's case. Socialization helped her develop. Unfortunately these agents are teaching an unnecessary, oppressive, social paradigm: gender.
As discussed by West and Zimmerman, gender is an active choice in every mannerism. These social patterns exist in every expression of self, including minor details like speech patterns and appearance and major details like activities and careers. The crucial element of the definition of "Doing Gender" is the risk of judgement for fitting one's gender role at any time. These roles are enforced by social accountability. Individuals who defy these norms will be rejected.
The problem with society doing gender is that it is inherently oppressive to women. Missrepresentation demonstrated the display of women as predominantly sex objects. The media socializes young women to view their bodies and its status as a sexual object as their value. Men are represented as the objectifies, and women the objects.  As seen in Fiji's increase in eating disorders from the integration of technology, strict beauty standards and strong focus on women's beauty as their value damage women and girls livelihoods. Media is one of the most powerful forces of socialization because it removes the I, and only appeals to the Me. The viewer is only able to passively absorb social interactions and the lessons about the values of different symbols in those interactions. This power is extremely undeserved by the media because of their willingness to misrepresent and unfairly socialize individuals with prejudices.
Women were socialized to be sex objects because the agents of socialization wanted them to be usable to attain masculinity. Kimmel describes women as "currency" in male interactions. This social interaction approach uses women as a symbol for power. Masculinity is defined by Kimmel is a constant search to earn manhood from male peers, which causes a constant push down on others to validate one's own ranking. It is the result of socializing males to highly value the looking glass self, so much so that their is a constant fear of embarrassment.
This objectification of women for the sake of masculinity disenfranchises each woman's autonomy and is a result of the inherent dominance in masculinity. That is why the patriarchy (the social system created to perpetuate the power of white, straight, and cisgendered males) disenfranchised any possible threat to themselves: racial and ethnic groups and women as discussed by Kimmel. Masculinity is a force a dominance. In socialization of gender, power is a prevailing theme. I have learned in this unit that gender is the result of teaching one segment of the population that they are powerful and another segment that they are not. Subsequently those in power will perpetuate their own power as seen in the social conflict approach.

How has learning about socialization and gender effected the development of your own sociological imagination?
I can recognize that the way I formulate my looking glass self is through the gender that I was socialized. In myself, I notice more female patterns of thought: trying to appear kind, assuming guilt, and other thoughts routed in low self confidence. Someone who is male would have been socialized to formulate their looking glass self in the context of masculinity which is shown to be more confident by "The Confidence Gap." I can see how my individual narrative, in patterns of thought and behavior, was defined by the collective narrative of gender. I came out as non-binary because I saw that any femininity in me is the result of history and that I was then socialized based on this history. I didn't feel comfortable letting my biography be defined by a random circumstance that our collective history places significant value upon. To accept my gender as a result of my sex organs is to lack the sociological imagination to see the dependency of my biography on history.
Mills says that in analyzing an society in the context of the sociological imagination, one must ask "what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?" Gender is a crucial feature in our society. I believe it has been continued by the dominant nature of masculinity. Gender has been enforced by men to grant them innate but undeserved power. Kimmel fundamentally described masculinity as fear of powerlessness in society. Capitalism perpetuates gender because it feeds the fear and subsequently competition and dominance. Our larger social structure perpetuates gender and therefore impact every individual narrative.

How, if at all, can problems dealing with gender stratification and gender discrimination be solved?
Gender is inherently a power structure, as illustrated in the social-conflict approach. It would not serve it's function if it did not create discrimination and stratification. For centuries, in a structural functional perspective, it served as means to divide the labor force into raising the next generation (clearly the more important duty) and doing the physical labor needed to keep society functioning. As previously discussed, the divide has highly problematic effects. Moreover there is no need for division along those lines. Females are capable of serving society to the same degree.
Gender should be dissolved to eliminate this power structure that causes women to be disenfranchised. Although structural functionalist would see "I'm glad I'm a boy, I'm glad I'm a girl," as a demonstration of the complementary nature of masculinity and femininity. But what it demonstrates is that gender roles benefit men and put women in an inferior role.
There is no gender without this divide in power. To eliminate gender discrimination and stratification, we have to eliminate gender. The fundamental differences in the sexes are not enough that they require the amount of social divide we have created for them. Target demonstrated that not every children's product needs to be for girls or for boys. These products are ultimately designed to serve humans. From a symbolic-interaction approach, one can see that without gender defining the subtleties of daily interaction, women could finally exit their deferential role. In fact, there wouldn't be any roles. People would be able to dress, speak, and act how they want to based on their own individuality instead of their gender.

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