Name: Daphne Holtmaat
Student Number: 10087533
Gender and Society – Gender Identities Assignment
We are all familiar with those situations. Situations were we suddenly change our way of acting and become very aware of our sex. These are situations, where we are playing our gender roles. We, ladies, go out to a bar and all we have to do is blink our beautiful eyes and throw our hair back and we get free drinks whole night! Or we smile our best smile at the bus driver when we, ones again, forgot our bus key. We play our gender roles all the time and we are taking advantage of it!
We are playing our gender roles without really thinking about what we are doing. We just act and it feels like a totally naturally thing to do. It might be interesting to think about it for a second and wonder where we learned all those ideas about gender. It all seems to appear naturally, but maybe it isn’t that natural after all. Social sciences have been researching this subject for years now. A lot of them agree that we live a life that is structured by the social world. They feel that gender roles are forces by us and the challenge us to think about anything without relating it to gender (Connell, 2009). Of course you cannot deny that there are biological differences between men and women, but, according to the sciences, that does not automatically explain the differences in gender roles and the inequalities that we are dealing with nowadays. We are creating those roles ourselves and they are just an illusion. It is a hard challenge to go out and see the world without any gender perspective. It is simply impossible to do that. Everywhere you go, everything you see and every conversation you have it is all defined by gender (Connell, 2009). But having gender everywhere doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We are forces into our social roles, but we often select our gendered path our self (Risman, 2004). Whether you agree or not, it might be interesting to think about how gender infects our lives and how it influences our behavior.
