vedanti Singhal: week 1

 Night to Day: The Social Construction of Gender by Judith Lorber talks about gender being a ubiquitous notion which is highly pervasive in society. The article expounds on the claim that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Society, consciously or subconsciously, reinforce the process of gendering. Humans tend to link gender with sex category which is determined by physiological traits. However, gender as a concept is more fluid and gender and sex cannot be used interchangeably. Individuals are born sexed but not gendered. More specifically, it is a concept that describes how society determines and manage sex categories; the cultural meaning attached to men’s and women’s roles; and how individuals understand their identities, which more commonly boils down the to these two categories only. Societies and culture condition humans to be either masculine or feminine. The article also has underlying nuances of how the male is the superior gender, making the other inferior. As a part of stratification system, gender ranks men above women of the same race and class. Society constructs gender and categorizes its members similar as it does with age, ethnicity, race, social class and status. However the categorization opens an avenue of another parameter for discrimination. There are obvious biological and anthropological differences between the two sexes but we cannot use these differences to infer conclusions and provide stereotyped models about gender.