Gender performativity

Examples of Gender performativity in the following topics:

• The Social Construction of Gender

  • Social constructivists propose that there is no inherent truth to gender; it is constructed by social expectations and gender performance.
  • Butler's most known work is Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published in 1991, which argues for gender performativity.
  • The repetitious performances of "male" and "female" in accordance with social norms reifies the categories, creating the appearance of a naturalized and essential binary.
  • Gender is never a stable descriptor of an individual, but an individual is always "doing" gender, performing or deviating from the socially accepted performance of gender stereotypes.
  • These performances normalize the essentialism of gender categories.

• Gender Socialization

  • Gender socialization is the process of teaching people how to behave as men or women.
  • In regards to gender socialization, the most common groups people join are the gender categories male and female.
  • Even the categorical options of gender an individual may choose is socialized; social norms act against selecting a gender that is neither male or female.
  • This clearly demonstrates the influence of socialization on the development of gender roles; subtle cues that surround us in our everyday lives strongly influence gender socialization.
  • Research has found that adolescents encounter stereotypes of gendered performance in the workforce in their first jobs.

• The Interactionist Perspective

  • From a symbolic interactionist perspective, gender is produced and reinforced through daily interactions and the use of symbols.
  • Both masculinity and feminity are performed gender identities, in the sense that gender is something we do or perform, not something we are .
  • Thus, when people perform tasks or possess characteristics based on the gender role assigned to them, they are said to be doing gender (rather than "being" gender), a notion first coined by West and Zimmerman (1987).
  • West & Zimmerman emphasized that gender is maintained through accountability.
  • Men and women are expected to perform their gender to the point that it is naturalized, and thus, their status depends on their performance.

• Gender vs. Sex

  • These schemes have therefore been built to match reproductive functions that an individual may perform during life cycles.
  • In a play, performances are determined to be believable or not based upon audience reaction, and audiences typically arrive at performances with a pre-established set of expectations and ideas about what they will be witnessing.
  • Since gender - like a play - is ultimately a human created fiction (e.g., a performance of shared understandings), it can only exist as long as others believe and approve of the performance.
  • In so doing, the aforementioned children could adopt relatively varied behaviors that create an androgynous or gender neutral self, or they could simply adopt the opposite (raised masculine, but decide to live feminine sometimes or all the time and vice versa) gender performances (see the image of drag queens for male people that adopt feminine expressions and behaviors sometimes).
  • Either change, however, would require (a) adopting different gender performances than those promoted and enforced by dominant social structures, and (b) risking ridicule, harassment, and discrimination at the hands of cisgender people (often referred to as cissexism or transphobia).

• Gender and Research

  • Gender, and how it is shaped by societal influences, is an important focus of much sociological research.
  • Sociological research will study such things as social stratification between genders, the socialization of gender, influences of sexism on educational performance, gender and mass media, inequality in the workplace, gender roles and social norms , and other gender-related topics and social phenomena.
  • Other conceptions of gender influenced by queer theory see gender as multidimensional, fluid and shifting; something that cannot be plotted linearly at all.
  • Sex and gender research, therefore, focus on different areas of study.
  • Gender refers to social or cultural distinctions associated with being male or female (Diamond 2002).

• Gender and Health

  • Disparities in health services play out based on different systems of stratification, such as gender.
  • The World Health Organization defines gender as the result of socially constructed ideas about the behavior, actions, and roles a particular sex performs.
  • Researchers also find health disparities based on gender stratification.
  • This often means a focus on gender-equality, ensuring participation, but includes an understanding of the different roles and expectations of the genders within the community.
  • Examine the role gender plays in health care services, particularly for women

• Gender Roles in the U.S.

  • There has been significant variation in gender roles over cultural and historical spans, and all gender roles are culturally and historically contingent.
  • Much scholarly work on gender roles addresses the debate over the environmental or biological causes for the development of gender roles.
  • Gender role theory posits that boys and girls learn to perform one's biologically assigned gender through particular behaviors and attitudes.
  • The division of labor creates gender roles, which in turn, lead to gendered social behavior.
  • While some claim that this was a sexist structure, others maintain that the structure simply represented a division of labor, or a social system in which a particular segment of the population performs one type of labor and another segment performs another type.

• Learning the Gender Gap

  • Men are paid more per hour and are promoted more frequently than women, both examples of the gender pay gap.
  • If it is a result of gender differences, then the pay gap is not a problem; men are simply better equipped to perform more valuable work than women.
  • Most who study the gender wage gap assume that it is not due to differences in ability between genders - while in general men may be better at physical labor, the pay gap persists in other employment sectors as well.
  • This implies that the gender gap stems from social, rather than biological, origins.
  • This PSA by the European Union illustrates the gender pay gap in Europe.

• Gender Bias in the Classroom

  • Gender-based achievement gaps suggest the existence of gender bias in the classroom.
  • If test score gaps are evidence of gender bias, where does that gender bias come from?
  • Teachers may interact with boys and girls in ways that reinforce gender roles and gender inequality.
  • In fact, the latest national test scores, collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, show that girls have met or exceeded the reading performance of boys at all age levels; by fourth grade, boys have fallen two years behind girls in their reading and writing skills.
  • The gendering of school subjects may, in itself, lead to gender bias in the classroom, and, further down the line, gender inequality in the workforce.

• Theories of Gender Differences

  • Sociologists and other social scientists generally attribute many of the differences between genders to socialization (note that even physiological differences mirror existing gender socialization processes).
  • In gender socialization, the groups people join are the gender categories, "cisgender women and men" and "transgender people".
  • Preparations for gender socialization begin even before the birth of the child.
  • One illustration of early life gender socialization can be seen in preschool classrooms.
  • Of the 11.5 million cosmetic surgeries performed in 2005, women accounted for 85% to 90% of them.