Aditya Verma week 1

In Judith Lorber’s article ‘Night to his day’, She explores Gender as various things like a construct or a process. Lorber analyses various Societal behavioral patterns and processes which enforces and adds to separation of the two genders, as socially and legally humans are supposed to be. Androgynists being equivalent to taboo. She talks about the lengths that society can go through to enforce and avoid the taboo of what she calls ‘Gender Sameness’. Trans people and transvestites are the ultimate examples of this taboo existing, they seem to be prosecuted on the basis of it.

Emily Martin in her work ‘The Egg and the Sperm’ uses biological explanations of how reproduction works in Humans to show how society enforces the ‘concept’ of male gender supremacy. She highlights various medical textbooks which she categorizes in 2 types, those that give the Ovum an extremely passive role to play and those that give the ovum a less passive and more active role in reproduction. She writes that the basic difference between the older texts which show the Ovum as more passive and the new ones which show the Ovum as less passive. She talks about it as a problem that these definitions enforce Gender norms even as new research is emerging where the Ovum is shown to be taking an active role. She points out that the language used by these texts are the problem.

Both texts talk about how description is used as a tool to enforce gender norms and avoid the taboo of Androgyny. Although, they can be differentiated on the basis of the sources used and that Lorber calls sexual difference 'scientifiically contested' and Martin uses Science to prove the same conclusion.