Abhijeet Shrivastava, Week 1

This is a reflection on Lorber’s work, “Night to his Day” – The Social Construction of Gender.

She argues that gender is a social construct created by “invisible” processes in which humans intuitively locate themselves and others in pre-set categories and social scripts. I have studied in an all-boys missionary school throughout my childhood and my experiences confirm this. As per the script pre-set for boys, we could never have long hair, let alone stylistic, lest our P.T Sirs tie humiliating pony-tails with our hair. Men wearing make-up was unimaginable, unlike in JGU where it’s normalized to an extent. There were even certain music tastes that were rewarded – mainly Bollywood rap music that elaborately objectified women’s body parts.

Lorber mentions that gender and one’s biological sex are separate, though society does often attribute masculinity or femininity to one’s physiology, such as in puberty. For the short or beardless, or for those whose voices don’t become deeper, boys-school is horror when those around one hit puberty. Boys lacking such emergent physical characteristics are seen as feminine – objects of ridicule.

As a process, gender, Lorber maintains, creates social differences that define “woman” and “man”, evident from the above anecdotes. As a stratification-system, it ranks men above women of their demographic – in my city, the “tall, dark, and handsome” tag is validating for boys, but dark women are seen as unattractive. Therefore, Lorber’s final conclusion that the purpose of gender is to construct women as a group subordinate to men quite literally hits home.