WMST 1000 Lecture Notes - Verbal Behavior, Sexual Politics, Proxemics

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Women's Studies
• Course: WMST 1000
• Professor: Andrew Robinson

Document Summary

Night to his day: the social construction of gender. Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced. Gender signs and signals are so uncomfortable until we have successful placed the other person in a gender status; otherwise, we feel socially dislocated. Transvestite- a person who dresses in opposite gender clothes. Transsexual- a person who has had sex-change surgery. Transvestite and transsexuals constructs their gender status by dressing, speaking, walking, gesturing in the ways prescribed for women and men and so does any normal person. Gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth. A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers.