Gender as a Social Construction

Answer

Gender as a Social Construction

Society plays a significant role in our conception of what men and women are and what they are supposed to be. Such conceptualization has been the reason most individuals allude to the social construction of gender. Therefore, in nearly every generation, gender or gender identity has attracted a reference of a malleable trait, which has become intellectually fashionable across the board. In essence, the primary connotation of such sentiments surrounds the perception that gender significantly lacks biological constraints, thereby, remains at the mercies of parental wits and other social powers. This has often been the primary difference between sex and gender, where the former involves biological qualities used to allocate people into either female or male while the latter entails how society influences our understanding of femininity and masculinity. However, the conceptualization of these concepts create an inevitable backlash, which makes some people declare that gender is a social construct. In contrast, others affirm that such ideas are only hogwash, thereby forming the basis of this paper to discuss the social construction of gender.

From the onset, the debate around social construction of gender suffers three significant problems that lead to the confusion and technicalities of developing a concise understanding across the board. First, the debate involves terms such as gender, sex, gender identity, and gender roles, which in most cases, are poorly defined, thereby furthering the confusion. Secondly, several partakers in these debates use the term gender to mean two separate things and finally, the debates often attracts obstinate voices on either side, which hinders the possibility of having proper dialogue concerning the role played by nature and nurture to produce behavioural outcomes (Ferguson, 2019).

These problems require a little examination, especially in line with definitions, to help understand the basis for social construction of gender. Primarily, sex refers to biological traits that help in assigning people, whether male or female, through a focus of their genitalia, chromosomes, or other physical ascription (Haslanger, 2017). Sex entails a genetic profiling and genitalia correspondence, a connotation that they create problems for individuals with a mismatch between their genitalia and chromosomes such as those with multiple sex organs. On the contrary, gender refers to the internal perception of being male or female. Although sex and gender correspond with many people, it has a significant difference for some, primarily since it is used in reference to the cultural and social differences rather than biological differences. On the other hand, gender role refers to the societal expectations of individual behaviour based on their gender (Ferguson, 2019). This has been responsible for the labour differentiation and the assigning of particular social roles to a specific gender.

Social Construction

According to social constructivists, gender has no inherent truth since it only comprises of social expectations and gender performance. The ideology of social construction of gender arises from the social constructionism school of thought. In their presupposition, social constructionism proposes that everything people may have knowledge of or view as reality is either partially or fully situated socially. The concept of social construction does not mitigate the power therein, which then explains deeply how certain things mean so much to society (Krieken et al., 2016). For example, in explaining the concept of power and social construction, money is socially constructed in reality. Still, the power thereof depends on the values that society ascribes to them. Without value, the paper bills are worth nothing. Therefore, value ascription forms a great deal in social constructionism.

More profoundly, the determination of whether gender is an essential category or a social construct is critical toward clearing the air and developing resourceful ideologies around the social dynamics. Primarily, this will help determine how gender functions if it is a social construct and who benefits from it. Therefore, a social constructionist perception of gender must go beyond the categories to evaluate the intersections of multiple identities and the obscuring of the confines between essentialist categories. This becomes more relevant in the categorization of males and females, which in most cases, people view as binary and opposite. Therefore, through social constructionism, the blurring of the binary and muddling of these categories, which predominately have an essential presumption, becomes possible.

Notwithstanding, the theory of social construction of gender helps in developing a concept that assists in understanding how meanings arise through social interaction (Ljungholm, 2016). Therefore, sociologists use the theory to create a historical and cultural focus of gender through the things said and done by the people of a particular social setting. In other words, the theory shows that gender varies across time and place with no fixed or innate facts. For example, through childhood socialisation, the child learns of gender norms from birth. As they grow, they learn what is expected of them as taught by the parents, who are the immediate social agents. They then pick further gender norms in schools, through religion, and cultural teachings through the media outlets and other social institutions. Such instructions form their view of what their gender entails which may or may not have anything to do with their biological composition.

Additionally, gender is ever in influx, which means that it continues to evolve over a person's lifetime. A more in-depth consideration of the aspects of gender across the globe illustrates an exciting trend where though generalisation and intergenerational changes within societies, families, technology, and legal issues, the changes have significantly influenced social values in gender leading to a subsequent change (Krieken et al., 2016). Thus, gender informally deals with the manner in which humanity deals with human bodies to depict a collective social fate that is likely to change across time and place. Nonetheless, gender identities are not any different from the other social identities since they are also dialectical. That is, gender identities involve at least two sets of actors referenced against each other, with one seeming too dominant and act as the default setting.

In this context, gender is constructed under the notion of otherness, meaning that it is masculine versus feminine in most societies. Primarily, masculine often becomes the default human experience by social norms and other social, institutional identities. For this course, masculinities attract social rewards over femininity. This often becomes explicit through an example of the gender pay gap that vividly discriminates against women, not because of their qualifications but gender (Alexander et al., 2016). By their gender, men enjoy better payment compared to women; they have more sexual and social freedom, and other benefits (Ljungholm, 2016). However, these things vary across class, sexuality, and race, among other socioeconomic measures.

Masculinity and Femininity

Culture plays a significant role in dictating what it takes to be masculine and "unmasculine," the effects of culture, personality, and bodily experience. In most societies, masculinity operates within the confines of hegemonic, subordinate, compliant, and marginalised, thereby forming masculine interactions and conceptualizations (Thompson et al., 2016). All these aspects rest on the fact that the construction of masculinity relates to the existence of social hierarchies pertaining to race, class, and age. Conversely, femininity, on the other hand, hangs on patriarchal ideas since women are often perceived as inferior to men. Therefore, in every situation, women will lack the same level of power as men because of such socialisation. The comparisons thus entail gender categories to see the social groups' differences and maintenance of social institutions such as the family and the economy.

Time to move beyond the Social Construction of Gender

In the concept of social construction, gender is a product of society in contrast to the biological sex. Therefore, since society can determine what entails masculinity and femininity, it can also change what attains a masculine or feminine consideration. This will help move people out of the fixed gender categories to allow them to freely identify their genders as they deem fit (Mascolo, 2019). However, this can only be possible by unmasking the various contradictions and problems that arise with these concepts. For example, we have to realise that gender cannot simultaneously be socially constructed and inherent to the individual. Gender cannot come from culture and still be an intrinsic feature of an individual person (Mascolo, 2019). Besides, the contradiction of invisibility and social verifiability of gender has to come out precisely to help understand gender as a product of socialisation and self-chosen.

Conclusion

The politics of gender have made it appear that the mere differences between gender and sex mean that one can replace the other. Whether biological or a psychological process, self-identification should not replace identification by other means, and it has to remain unbiased across the population. Essentially, the debate revolves around ideologies, with some fearing that if gender does not attract the aspect of social construction, the political goals of gender equality in such contexts will lose grip and credibility. Conversely, others also presume that embracing the concept of gender's social construction will limit the biological contributions in nature, which demands an inevitable transition for gender to move beyond social development to incorporate critical issues of complex relationships between biology and culture.