A lot of scholars have been arguing about the gender as a reason of social inequality and as a social construct. The modern life is definitely overwhelmed with different social processes. One of the most crucial issues for scientists is the gender definition. Feminism, being the contradictory phenomenon is interpreted in different ways by various scholars.
When one starts to analyze the concepts of feminism from different approaches, one could agree that the best definition is proposed by famous Bell Hooks. It is well- known, that she is a representative of black feminism and in her works she analyzes gender relations through various historic decades. Her definition of feminism fits perfectly into the gender studies: “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (Alpízar Durán, Payne and Russo, 2007). The surprising issue to many people is the fact that the men are tended to die earlier than women. According to Bell Hooks, “Husbands are likely to die eight years earlier than their same age wives due to the stress of having to support a family and repress an emotional life, and a lot earlier than that if women have followed the custom of marrying older, authoritative, paternal men(Alpízar Durán, Payne and Russo, 2007). However, this process is more applicable for females. Taking care of kids, keeping the house clean – those are typical stereotypes of women. So, why males are dying earlier remains as a nonsense statistic.
After reading multiple works on gender inequality, it could be said that the position that the relations between the sexes are socially constructed is based on the rejection of biological determinism. Proponents of the theory of social construction of gender have claimed that the social processes build the biological ones, but not vise versa. Thus they criticized ignoring the historical facts and essentialism. Biological determinism seems unacceptable for feminists, who are focused on dismantling the gender stratification system. They aim to develop an ideology, hence, a theory that focuses on social change. Feminist theory is opposed to common sense of biological determinism or fundamentalism, so none of the works demonstrated could be considered as supporting for biological determinism. According to feminists, gender roles are constructed, and how are they constructed is a buzzword for them. Both men and women are born in a particular social group, however they are not born with gender as a tag, they socially obtain their gender. This thesis is paradoxical for essentialists, who argue that there is neither female nor male essence. In contrary, according to feminists and proponents of the theory of social construction of gender, biology is not a law either for men or for women, or for the child or old individual. All males and females, young and old are created in different contexts, have different faces and filled up with different contents of experience and different meanings. That is why gender is socially constructed, but not biologically.
People do gender all the time. Parents but toys for their small kids, and there are only two types of toys: boys’ and girls’ ones. The girls are supposed to cook, boys are supposed to go to the gym. Implementing the last sentence into ancient times, one could agree that females were making food, and males were hunting. So it is impossible to avoid historical method in understanding gender. The question arises, in what contexts the gender relations are created? It is obvious that the theory of social construction of the answer has to deal with the sociological interactionism. Asserting that gender is created in everyday life, researchers have come to the conclusion that in order to understand its reason, one must apply to the analysis of gender its micro context. The second source, which became fundamental for feminist theory is dramatic interactionism, created by Erving Goffman. According to the latter, gender is understood as a result of social interaction.
Unfortunately, in the terms of modern society the gender discrimination is extra powerful. Talking about institutions and social organization it could be given some good examples. For instance, as it was said earlier, at high schools, the role of the principal is usually taken by a male. However, the women are only teachers. Another example: at hospital the doctor is usually a man, when a role of a nurse is introduced by a female. Consequently, their salaries will differ a lot. In fact, gender discrimination happened not only in a process of men oppressing the women.
Reference
Alpízar Durán, L., Payne, N., & Russo, A. (2007). Building feminist movements and
organizations. London: Zed.
