Anusha Sinha Week 1

Analysis of “Night to his day” by Judith Lorber and “The Gender trap” by Emily Kane. 

Gender as a concept being one of the most fluid is yet the most restricted aspect of society. Lorber and Kane, both talk about how gender is an inbuilt aspect of our daily lives in which parents play a major role. Gender is seen as social institution carried on for years with parents acting as agents and shaping the life of the next generation by making them conform to the fixed notion of gender. This observation can be vouched by every child who has had to dress up or behave in a way to appear ‘normal’ as per the instructions of their parents. For individuals gender means sameness and thus one try to adopt practices like choosing a profession or picking a certain colour which they see as feminine or masculine otherwise one feels socially dislocated. With people acknowledging the right of transgenders to live by breaching the established social norms tells us how they still aren’t treated the same as the other two ‘fixed’ genders. However with recent times, the concept of gender is seen to be transforming, with men investing the same to take care of children and women earning bread for their family. Thus we can conclude that even though gender is seen as a social institution with allocation of responsibilities, it is after all a concept shaped by us and can be transformed.