Afterreading Judith Lorber article” Night to his day” the social construction of gender, I realized that we have been “doing gender” every day without us noticing. These “doing gender”activities have implement into our brain through life experience, parents and social life. In her article, she “denaturalized” gender into three different categories: “individual; society; and gender”.
First of all, she talks about how we determine gender for each individual by the time he or she was born. The moment an infant was born, their sex was determined by genitalia. The infants will be taught by their sex whether to be a “masculine or feminine”. According to Simone de Beauvoir said” One is not born, but rather becomes, a women; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature. Which is described as feminine.”(Page 57, para 3). This statement is very true to the extent in which our society was build or “constructed” the gender system. In my opinion, our gender roles was taught rather than we decide our own gender. I was taught to be a male and do things what a man should do.
Judith Lorber also describes the different between in male and female roles and how the society hold each individuals responsible for their designated gender Male and female act differently depend on their culture but their roles are very similar. Female will do all the housework and male will be the breadwinner. By taking out the biological sex, everyone in this whole world is the same. We are just “doing gender” every day to portrait and follow the expectation from the “socially constructed gender”.
Secondary, our society view each gender differently. Judith Lorber criticizes on how the society value “male” and “female” role just based on the status of his/her gender rather than result or outcome. Our society already determine what job we will do by our gender such as: office secretary or operation manager. In our society, women seem to be treated unfairly because their role was viewed as not important because of their label. Judith Lorber notes” It does not matter what men and women actually do, it does not even matter if they do exactly the same thing. The social institution of gender insists only that what they do is perceived as different.”Even in today society, women have always had lower status than menandthere are not many female hold a high position in organization job or in our government system.If our society was able to strip off the status label, the gender itself means “different” and “segregation”.
The last point which Judith Lorber talks about is the “gender” systems itself. “Gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of right and responsibilities. As a process gender creates the social differences that define “woman “and “men”(Page 60, para1)”In general, the formation of our “gender” system seem to put men in a higher status than women. It does not even matter what the capability of women can do but by comparison of the label “man” and “women”. If we compare the result/performance of what women can bring in without their label, I doubt that man would do any better. Even in any cultures, women always deem to be the “subordinate” according in Judith Lorber article. Our society build a “structure” frame in our “gender” system which underestimate the women role. Judith Lorber talks about the inequality provides by “stratification system”. The inequality attached to individual at the moment he/she was born by the “social constructed gender” system.
The “gender” system overestimate the value of “men” and view “men” as the “social dominant”. It does not matter where and what “men” do things, their role and jobs are always deem to be value at high bracket thanthe other types of gender. In Judith Lorber’s article, “when gender is a major component of structured inequality, the devalued genders have less power, prestige, and economic rewards than the value genders.”(Page 61, para4) This “gender” type of differentia does not stop at the level of between “men” and “women” but it applies in any race of human, organizations and social norms. Judith mentions about the point of view of Nancy Jayabout how our society divided other type of race or origin into different type of groups and label them as “A” for the favored groups and “ Not-A” for the unfavorable.
In summary, Judith Lorber article “Night to his day”: the social construction of gender, she point out the failure of “the social constructed gender”. If we are able to denaturalize the entire “gender” system, we would be better off living a better role in which we “doing our gender” rather than living a given label “gender” by the “constructed gender system”. Each individual should have the right to determine or develop their own gender through their life experience, development in social and their own personal perception. Our social norms always portraits a slogan about the equality for every one and when we look closely to the “gender system”; we can hardly find any equality.
