Social construction of gender
Specifically, in the assumption of a positivist basis for knowledge; which is to say that social constructionism rejects the notion that empirical facts can be known about reality, where as objectivism is defined by it.
[4] In this manner, Pinker explicitly contradicts social constructionist scholars Marecek, Crawford & Popp who in "On the Construction of Gender, Sex, and Sexualities", argue against the idea that socially organized patterns can emerge from isolated origins and favor instead the theory of Tabula rasa, which states that knowledge and meaning are generated exclusively as a collective effort and that the individual is incapable of doing so independently.
The view as achieved is supported by the contemporary constructionist perspective, as proposed by Fenstermaker and West, asserts regarding gender as an activity ("doing") of utilizing normative prescriptions and beliefs about sex categories based on situational variables.
These "gender activities" constitute sets of behavior, such as masculine and feminine, which are associated with their sexual counterpart and thus define concepts such as "man" and "woman" respectively.
[13]In the context of feminist theory, the word status deviates from its colloquial usage meaning rank or prestige[14] but instead refers to a series of strata or categories by which societies are divided, in some ways synonymous with "labels" or "roles".
Ethan Zell and colleagues examined more than 20,000 findings from 12 million participants comparing men and women on topics ranging from risk-taking to body image.
[20] In Argentina, missionaries intending to educate the Qom people reinforced a conversion to gender norms and European modernity on the indigenous community.
[20] In some subdomains of feminism, such as intersectional feminism, gender is a major though not solitary axis along which factors of oppression are considered, as expressed by Berkowitz, who wrote "The gender order is hierarchical in that, overall, men dominate women in terms of power and privilege; yet multiple and conflicting sources of power and oppression are intertwined, and not all men dominate all women.
Girls seemed to be "under increasing scrutiny to behave respectably as parents attempted to protect them from America's public sexual culture in the only way they know: early arranged marriage and lots of responsibilities for domestic tasks".
The distinction between the responsibilities of boys and girls define the refugees' children's understanding of what it means to belong to a particular gender in America with association to "parental authority".
LaFrance, Paluck and Brescoll note that as a term, "gender identity" allows individuals to express their attitude towards and stance in relation to their current status as either women or men.
West and Fenstermaker conclude that doing gender involves different versions of accountability, depending on women's "relational position" to white men.
[27] Disadvantages include the view of women in their twenties as busy with homemaking and child-rearing, and the Islamic tradition of wearing a headscarf leading to discrimination.
[28] In recent years, elementary schools in the U.S. have started carrying chapter books that include either non-traditional families with same-sex parents, homosexual role models, or (in fewer cases) an adolescent who is discovering and accepting their own sexuality/sexual orientation.
Hermann-Wilmarth and Ryan acknowledge this rise in representation, while critiquing the way that the limited selection of books present these characters with an eye towards popularized characterizations of homosexuality.
[29] The authors characterize this style of representation as "homonormative", and in the only example of a book where the protagonist questions their gender identity, it is left ambiguous as to whether or not they are a trans man or that they were simply pretending.
[19][31] Their analysis, which was heavily based in the observation of transsexuality, is one of the earliest affirmations of the everyday production of gender in social interactions, and was further developed by West and Zimmerman.
[42] Following this sexual assignment, parents begin to influence gender identity by dressing children in ways that clearly display this biological category.
Gender is a cultural construction which creates an environment where an adolescent's performance in high school is related to their life goals and expectations.
Because some young women believe that they want to be mothers and wives, the choice of professions and future goals can be inherently flawed by the gender constraints.
[48] In a 2015 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers stated that gender construct can differ depending on the man's race or ethnicity and stated that for white men there was an emphasis on "education, employment, and socioeconomic status" whereas the expectations for black men focused on "sexual prowess, physical dominance, and gamesmanship".
There are many different factors that affect body image, "including sex, media, parental relationship, and puberty as well as weight and popularity".
[53] Due to these findings, it is shown that these body image issues are especially prevalent in girls but as boys enter puberty, expectations of height and muscle mass change as well.
Jones believes the performative power to act out gender is extremely useful as a framework, offering new ways to consider images as enactments with embodied subjects rather than inanimate objects for men's viewing pleasure.
[77][78] In discussing these points, Penelope Eckert, in her text titled Language and Gender, states: "the first thing people want to know about a baby is its sex, and social convention provides a myriad of props to reduce the necessity of asking".
Butler suggests in both "Critically Queer" and "Melancholy Gender"[80] that the child/subject's ability to grieve the loss of the same-sex parent as a viable love object is barred.
Butler adapts the psychoanalytical term of melancholia to conceptualize homoerotic subtext as it exists in western literature and especially the relationship between women writers, their gender, and their sexuality.
[86]In Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (2010), Gayle Salamon examined trans studies' affinity with feminist and queer theorizing of gender.
[87]Such objections can be found in the works of Jay Prosser, Viviane Namaste, and Henry Rubin, often in relation to Butler's theory of gender performativity.
[89] Conversely, Susan Stryker affirmed that gender performativity "became central to the self-understandings of many transgender people" and is in line with Sandy Stone's posttranssexual call.
