Akankshya Misra Week- 1

The reading “Night to his Day” begins with giving a basic understanding of how normalization of gender takes place and mentions about how talking about gender is considered equivalent to fish talking about water. Every person in the society consciously or unconsciously somehow does gender in some or the other way but again then there is a hierarchy in that as well. The society has formed a binary system for gender and makes every individual feel the need to fit in the one socially and sexually assigned to them by birth. Otherwise it feels uncomfortable and dislocated until it successfully places the other person in a gender status. It further elaborates on gender as a social institution and Gender as a means of sameness, difference, process, stratification and structure. The dichotomy of either being masculine or feminine and being A or Not-A is further talked about. The most striking argument of the reading is when it mentions women and men could be different but equal and for humans the social is the natural.

The reading “egg and sperm” basically talks about the masculinity of the sperm and the femininity of the egg. The egg that forms a part of the female reproductive body is looked down upon when compared to the sperm that belongs to the male. Since the male ejects millions of sperm in a single ejaculation where as a female produces only one egg on one cycle the former is considered better than the latter. The male keeps on producing germ cells throughout his life where as the female is not capable of regenerating any more germ cells and is already born with all of it. Male is capable of regeneration whereas female is only capable of degeneration. Oogenesis is considered destructive and spermatogenesis is considered constructive. It is considered remarkable how feminine the egg is and how masculine the sperm is. Egg is small and passive whereas sperm is active and large. The reading talks about the perilous journey of the sperm into the warm darkness of the egg. Egg is damsel in distress whereas sperm is a heroic warrior.