SOSC 1130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Immigration, Double Burden, Premarital Sex
24 Oct 2013
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Document Summary
Gender roles that we normally identify as normal were historically created. For some time, there has been an increasing awareness that women are disadvantaged in international migration. International migration policies affect men and women differently. Gender is a social construction that is power based. Like race and ethnicity, the social aspect of gender is often appears as natural rather than as something that has been constructed and open to change. It becomes part of common sense and is not questioned. The first distinction to be made is the sex/gender distinction: sex refers to biological differences between men and women who have different characteristics. When we classify people according to sex, the classification is male and female. Some individuals are born with characteristics that are more ambiguous and are a mixture of both who are called intersex. Our society does not tolerate ambiguity: gender appears to be natural but it is not and is social.
