SOC346H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Sexual Differentiation, Masculinity, Gay Liberation
Document Summary
The (presumed) biological underpinnings of gender: sex: the physical aspects of our bodies, including genitals and hormones, gender: how we perceive our identity as male, female, both or neither, regardless of our sex. Society is organized around a pervasive differentiation between men"s and women"s roles, and these roles are internalized by all individuals. There is an obvious commonsense appeal to this approach. But the first objection to be made is that it does not actually describe the concrete reality of people"s lives. Not all men are "responsible" fathers, nor "successful" in their occupations, and so on. Most men"s lives reveal some departure from what the "male sex role" is supposed to prescribe. " (p. 578) Idea of distinct roles of how roles should look like. May not exactly represent what is considered to be expected from individual: "the underlying structural notion in his analysis of gender is always differentiation, not relation.
