FOCUS ON KEY TERMS, KEY CONCEPTS, AND KEY POINTS. YOU’RE MAKING A
STUDY GUIDE FOR FINAL EXAMS
Social Construct Video
● Gender and sex are different: sex is biological and gender is a social construct. Gender is
policed.
● Gender doesn’t exist in a simple binary (girl or boy), there are many other genders.
● Different gender performance.
● Gender discrimination and policing: programmed to us since birth, very one way.
● Cis-gender: identify as the sex/gender they were born as.
● Intersectionality: Biologically born with parts of male and female genitalia and can
present both ways (very broad). Variations in sex differentiations or definitions related to
ambiguous genitalia, sex organs, chromosomes, or hormones.
● Gender changes over time; evolving in timelines and within ourselves.
“Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender (Lorber)
● Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created 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" (West and Zimmerman 1987)
● . In our society, in addition to man and woman, the status can be transvestite (a person
who dresses in opposite-gender clothes) and transsexual (a person who has had
sex-change surgery). Transvestites and transsexuals carefully construct their gender status
by dressing, speaking, walking, gesturing in the ways prescribed for women or men
whichever they want to be taken for - and so does any "normal" person.
● For the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the
basis of what the genitalia look like at birth.2
● A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other
gender markers. Once a child's gender is evident, others treat those in one gender
differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different
treatment by feeling different and behaving differently.
● Parenting is gendered, with different expectations for mothers and for fathers, and people
of different genders work at different kinds of jobs.
● Then why the one-year-old's earrings? Why is it still so important to mark a child as a girl
or a boy, to make sure she is not taken for a boy or he for a girl? What would happen if
they were? They would, quite literally, have changed places in their social world.
● As a social institution, gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their
lives. Human society depends on a predictable division of labor, a designated allocation
of scarce goods, assigned responsibility for children and others who cannot care for
themselves, common values and their systematic transmission to new members,
, legitimate leadership, music, art, stories, games, and other symbolic productions. One
way of choosing people for the different tasks of society is on the basis of their talents,
motivations, and competence - their demonstrated achievements. The other way is on the
basis of gender, race, ethnicity - ascribed membership in a category of people.
● The process of gendering and its outcome are legitimated by religion, law, science, and
the society's entire set of values
● 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.
● Social statuses are carefully constructed through prescribed processes of teaching,
learning, emulation, and enforcement. Whatever genes, hormones, and biological
evolution contribute to human social institutions is materially as well as
qualitatively transformed by social practices. Every social institution has a material
base, but culture and social practices transform that base into something with
qualitatively different patterns and constraints. The economy is much more than
producing food and goods and distributing them to eaters and users; family and
kinship are not the equivalent of having sex and procreating; morals and religions
cannot be equated with the fears and ecstasies of the brain; language goes far
beyond the sounds produced by tongue and larynx. No one eats "money" or
"credit"; the concepts of "god" and "angels" are the subjects of theological
disquisitions; not only words but objects, such as their flag, "speak" to the citizens
of a country
● Similarly, gender cannot be equated with biological and physiological differences
between human females and males. The building blocks of gender are socially
constructed statuses.
● 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.
● Transvestites are males who live as women and females who live as men but do not
intend to have sex-change surgery. Their dress, appearance, and mannerisms fall within
the range of what is expected from members of the opposite gender, so that they "pass."
They also change genders, sometimes temporarily, some for most of their lives
● 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" (Garber 1992, 16)
● Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine
or feminine. 8 As Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman…; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature... which is described as
feminine" (1952, 267)
STUDY GUIDE FOR FINAL EXAMS
Social Construct Video
● Gender and sex are different: sex is biological and gender is a social construct. Gender is
policed.
● Gender doesn’t exist in a simple binary (girl or boy), there are many other genders.
● Different gender performance.
● Gender discrimination and policing: programmed to us since birth, very one way.
● Cis-gender: identify as the sex/gender they were born as.
● Intersectionality: Biologically born with parts of male and female genitalia and can
present both ways (very broad). Variations in sex differentiations or definitions related to
ambiguous genitalia, sex organs, chromosomes, or hormones.
● Gender changes over time; evolving in timelines and within ourselves.
“Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender (Lorber)
● Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created 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" (West and Zimmerman 1987)
● . In our society, in addition to man and woman, the status can be transvestite (a person
who dresses in opposite-gender clothes) and transsexual (a person who has had
sex-change surgery). Transvestites and transsexuals carefully construct their gender status
by dressing, speaking, walking, gesturing in the ways prescribed for women or men
whichever they want to be taken for - and so does any "normal" person.
● For the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the
basis of what the genitalia look like at birth.2
● A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other
gender markers. Once a child's gender is evident, others treat those in one gender
differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different
treatment by feeling different and behaving differently.
● Parenting is gendered, with different expectations for mothers and for fathers, and people
of different genders work at different kinds of jobs.
● Then why the one-year-old's earrings? Why is it still so important to mark a child as a girl
or a boy, to make sure she is not taken for a boy or he for a girl? What would happen if
they were? They would, quite literally, have changed places in their social world.
● As a social institution, gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their
lives. Human society depends on a predictable division of labor, a designated allocation
of scarce goods, assigned responsibility for children and others who cannot care for
themselves, common values and their systematic transmission to new members,
, legitimate leadership, music, art, stories, games, and other symbolic productions. One
way of choosing people for the different tasks of society is on the basis of their talents,
motivations, and competence - their demonstrated achievements. The other way is on the
basis of gender, race, ethnicity - ascribed membership in a category of people.
● The process of gendering and its outcome are legitimated by religion, law, science, and
the society's entire set of values
● 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.
● Social statuses are carefully constructed through prescribed processes of teaching,
learning, emulation, and enforcement. Whatever genes, hormones, and biological
evolution contribute to human social institutions is materially as well as
qualitatively transformed by social practices. Every social institution has a material
base, but culture and social practices transform that base into something with
qualitatively different patterns and constraints. The economy is much more than
producing food and goods and distributing them to eaters and users; family and
kinship are not the equivalent of having sex and procreating; morals and religions
cannot be equated with the fears and ecstasies of the brain; language goes far
beyond the sounds produced by tongue and larynx. No one eats "money" or
"credit"; the concepts of "god" and "angels" are the subjects of theological
disquisitions; not only words but objects, such as their flag, "speak" to the citizens
of a country
● Similarly, gender cannot be equated with biological and physiological differences
between human females and males. The building blocks of gender are socially
constructed statuses.
● 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.
● Transvestites are males who live as women and females who live as men but do not
intend to have sex-change surgery. Their dress, appearance, and mannerisms fall within
the range of what is expected from members of the opposite gender, so that they "pass."
They also change genders, sometimes temporarily, some for most of their lives
● 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" (Garber 1992, 16)
● Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine
or feminine. 8 As Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman…; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature... which is described as
feminine" (1952, 267)
