Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Gender Roles

How long has there been such a thing as a “gender role?” Depending on your believe system, it could be one of the inherent fundamental properties of human life. Believers of the Christian faith are taught that men are the caretakers of the world in a sense and women are there to be their companion and support them. Looking at America, and its dominant culture, the consistent trend had been that the women should be submissive to the men and the men are supposed to take care of the family and do the killing in war. That most people can agree has remained pretty static, but the realm of gender roles unfortunately are not quite so shallow. As such there are many other traits of both men and women that have changed and been accepted and there are those that are still resisted or stereotyped. If one looks far back to what men used to be in Eurocentric culture, the essence of male behavior, the knights (go Carleton!) were much different from what we as the descendants of such culture think of men today. Knights were kind, compassionate, and courteous, took extreme pride in their appearance and hygiene, and openly showed emotion. Today’s male is to pretty much smell, fart, or belch profusely, not really care how he looks when leaving the house, not show emotion, to cry is to make him weak and “girly” and should not be overly compassionate to people. What would the revered knights of such lore think about the men they see today? They would more than likely be appalled at the behavior exhibited by today’s men. Something interesting is if one were to watch movies about knights, they would immediately see they have been updated to fit the macho male role of today. What does someone say about such a metamorphosis in thought? It brings up lots of interesting questions. Also, if one were to refer to the same sources, they would note that the “independent woman” of today, is not all that new of a concept. Though they had husbands, many women of feuding eras had to bring in money, and support their community, while taking care of their children because their husbands were away at war. The difference of today is women are actually declaring their independence noting that they don’t actually NEED men, rather than just doing all of the work, while still holding on to that vacant male figure.


So now that there is clear proof that gender roles have not always been this way, why is it so shocking and upsetting that they are changing again? When researching gender roles one can actually find a list of “Atypical Gender Roles.”It is increasingly clear that due to the rise of Homosexuality as an identity, born of pathology, that this is what causes gender roles to hold so much weight now and is held to be so taboo if one is to deviate from them. The fact that effeminate males and masculine females are now the poster images for gays and lesbians respectively, brings in that ever present burden of heteronormitivity when talking about gender roles. If all gay men played football and drank beer, and all lesbians loved kids, were submissive and adored pink and frilly clothes, people who deviate from these roles would not be so examined when they do deviate.

1 comment:

Aureliano DeSoto said...

White gender normativity seems to affect LGBT people, their relative control over the images and models seems limited, no? There are indeed gay men who like football and drink beer, and lesbians who love children (this was a funny characterization). An argument made by some gender radicals in the LGBT community is that these people are actually mimicking heteronormative society, whereas the true Queen or Dyke is the resistant, "queer" image.

Yet, both sides of the aesthetic and attitudinal debate are in conversation with an idea of what is normal, natural, and right about gender, one you note is changeable and transitory. We can understand gender as a transformative idea that has no stable expression in time (even as related to the body), but ideologies like to be invisible, so we are taught to think of gender as "just is" as opposed to "made."

Yet, one of the intriguing and problematic things is that genetic science is demonstrating, in its rudimentary way, that there does seem to be some difference between male and female, as well as complicating the idea of gender dyad (i.e., there are potentially more than two genders in the human species). Many people point to science as a way to reinforce human ideas (this should be ringing some bells). Yet, in fact, the nexus between science and society is too complicated to reduce it to nature or nurture. It quite obviously is both, working together and mysteriously, that creates who we are, and our interior emotional lives that can mean we like football or want to dance to Judy Garland (or perhaps again, both).