5.7: Social Construction of Gender
While research has come a long way to help dismantle gender binaries, it is important to fully understand the binaries we currently still live in day to day, perhaps even without realizing it.
Scholars generally regard gender as a social construct —meaning that it does not exist naturally, but is instead a concept that is created by cultural and societal norms. Gender socialization begins at birth and occurs through major agents of socialization like family, education, peer groups, and mass media.
As soon as we are born, and even before birth, if we are from a country that views gender as specifically female or male, we have entered the socially constructed binary. At an early age, we begin learning cultural norms for what is considered masculine and feminine. For example, American children may associate long hair or dresses with femininity. Later in life, as adults, we often conform to these norms by behaving in gender-specific ways: as men, we build houses; as women, we bake cookies (Marshall, 1989; Money et al., 1955; Weinraub et al., 1984).
Children are given traditional male or female names, nurseries decorated either in pink or blue, accessorized with dolls or trucks, and closets full of dresses or collared button-up shirts. As a young child were you ever told you could not use a certain colored pen or pencil? Pink is for girls, blue is for boys? Did you learn what you could and could not wear based on your predetermined gender?
Because cultures change over time, so too do ideas about gender. For example, European and American cultures today associate pink with femininity and blue with masculinity. However, less than a century ago, these same cultures were swaddling baby boys in pink, because of its masculine associations with “blood and war,” and dressing little girls in blue, because of its feminine associations with the Virgin Mary (Kimmel, 1996).
It is hard to scroll on social media, or even watch the news today without coming across a “gender-reveal” extravaganza. These gender reveals are planned events, meant to inform the parents’ relatives, friends, and community what their child’s biological sex is. There was a deep dive into finding out who created this trend as it has caused much controversy and catastrophe. In 2008, Jenna Karvunidis created a blog post sharing details of a party she threw in which she cut a cake to reveal pink icing, to share the gender of her first child (Langmuir, 2020). In an interview with The Guardian, she claims to regret having started the trend and believes the idea is gender limiting (2020). Contrary to gender-reveal parties and what they over-emphasize, are some parents raising their children without gender, or “gender-neutral parenting.” In the New Yorker Documentary, titled “Raising Baby Grey”, two parents are raising their one-year-old child named Grey, with pronouns they/them, and offering clothing of all varieties (Long, 2020). Their hopes are to allow their child the freedom to choose their gender if and when they want, and prevent the harm that the gender binary can cause to children leading up to their adulthood (Long, 2020).
In a 1987 article by sociologists Candace West and Don Zimmerman, the phrase, “ doing gender ” was coined. They stated that “doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures’” (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p.126). Embedded into our everyday thoughts and actions, an example of doing gender could be that men are expected to open doors for women. This shows chivalry, a typically masculine trait, which reinforces the idea that women need to be taken care of, and are fragile.
These societal expectations and norms shape our understanding of gender from a very young age and we perform gender without questioning it. Think about how you sit, what you wear, and how much physical space you take up; how did you learn this performance? Through socialization and policing of boundaries over the life course, we learn to do gender as taken for granted reality. Even amongst children, if a peer were to veer off this binary course, they would experience ostracization and quickly learn to play along with the rules. Internalization of social rules and norms over time, causes us to forget that sometimes these rules we abide by, are not natural but rather a social construction.
The terms sex and gender have not always been differentiated in the English language. It was not until the 1950s that U.S. and British psychologists and other professionals working with intersex and transsexual patients formally began distinguishing between sex and gender. Since then, psychological and physiological professionals have increasingly used the term gender (Moi 2005). By the end of the twenty-first century, expanding the proper usage of the term gender to everyday language became more challenging—particularly where legal language is concerned. In an effort to clarify [the] usage of the terms sex and gender , U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1994 briefing, “The word gender has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male” ( J.E.B. v. Alabama , 144 S. Ct. 1436 [1994]). The late great Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a different take, however. Viewing the words as synonymous, she freely swapped them in her briefings to avoid having the word “sex” pop up too often. It is thought that her secretary supported this practice by [suggesting] to Ginsberg that “those nine men” (the other Supreme Court justices), “hear that word and their first association is not the way you want them to be thinking” (Case 1995). This anecdote reveals that both sex and gender are actually socially defined variables whose definitions change over time.