Moulya Subbaramaiah Week 1

Night to his Day: The Social Construction of Gender

Judith Lorber

In “Night to his day,” the author Judith Lorber discusses how sex and gender have been influenced by society’s human interaction. Lorber describes gender as a human creation that requires constant human participation or everyone ‘doing gender.’ The reference of the father and the daughter in ‘boyish’ clothes on the subway and the ‘Women Marines’ who are required to wear make up in the US are used as examples of this constant human participation. According to Lorber, gender is an important tool essential to the process of structuring social life which calls for clear differentiation of gender statuses. Gender is a social construct, created by individuals of that society. As a result some societies and cultures accept more genders than just the earliest coined terms- man and woman, and that gender does not always flow from genitalia that one is born with. Society is essentially prescribing how one should live in society’s contracted social life. Lorber recounts the process as to how gender is constructed. It begins with an assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth, followed by parents dressing their children based on their gender to avoid confusion and using other gender markers while raising the child. Lorber mentions the environmental influences, the individual being encouraged and inspired by other cultures that exist within his/her environment and certain internal influences like emotions and motivations. Gender creates the social differences that define "woman" and “man.” Lorber believes that humans produce gender at every turn, either accepting and learning or rebelling and rejecting against existing gender norms which inevitably alters gender. Lorber recalls Gould’s fantasy of how to raise a child free of gender typing and explains that the outcome of someone brought up in a totally androgynous manner would be very ambiguous and one couldn’t predict what the child would be like like sexually or socially as an adult. Lorber argues that gender devaluates women and creates a social domination of men. In most societies genders rank men higher than women. What men do is usually valued more highly than what women do.

In conclusion, Lorber says that one’s gender role should not be decided based on an their physical appearance or actions because everyone has a disparate opinion on sex and gender. Whether one’s belief and knowledge of sex and gender comes from science, religion , law or even society prescribed values, gender roles cannot be laid out plainly because gender and how one looks at gender and sex are constantly changing. The differences of sex and gender, if not truly understood by individuals, can have a cataclysmic effect on how gender roles are created in society and how it leads to gender inequality.