Brief for 09/17
This article, The Technology of Gender, is heavily filled with the substance of social concepts and relations regarding Gender. In the core of the substance, I sense, lies a logical relationship as the author states in one sentence: “The construction of gender is the product and the process of both representation and self-representation” (9). In other words, there is a mutual impact between the ideology of gender and the representation of the society, where the former is causally formed by and actively forming the society.
I will explain these two segments respectively.
First, the concept of gender is a social construction, which includes the biological facts as its fundamental and the cultural and socio-economic values that lie above. Each individual man and woman carries a gene that separates them from the opposite group of people, which is known as sex, that has a great impact on how people of different groups behave: it varies from which restroom to use to which size of T-shirt to wear. However, it is the cultural and socio-economic structure that has a greater impact on the construction of Gender, which is different from and the ideology of sex. As stated in the article, “…gender is not a property of bodies or something originally existent in human beings, but ‘the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors and social relations’.” (3) Gender is constructed by cultural values and socio-economic hierarchies that might have accumulated for thousands of years. One of the driving forces is “patriarchy” as mentioned on the very first page of the article, which resonates with “power relation” and “dominance” we discussed in the previous classes. The power inequality between groups identified as Males and Females used to create deformed “public consumption” (I’m stealing the concept from Can you be Black and Look at this). For example, try to search for the word “prostitute” in an English dictionary, and it’s easy to get an explanation like “A person, in particular a WOMAN, who engages in sexual activity for payment” (English, Oxford Living Dictionaries). Whether it’s conscious or not, it puts Male in a rather dominant position as the “stagers” and “consumers” in this business spectacle (also from Can you be Black and Look at this).
The ideology of Gender is an “imagination” that draws one’s “borders” (Emergent Strategy, 18) and “governs their existence” (The Technology of Gender, 6). It helps reinforce the social norms we are living with and the recognition of oneself. However, this imagination could also be “an indication of capability” that traps people and hard to break free (Emergent Strategy, 18). As an example of how the imagination forms social representation, the author quotes from Michele Barrett: “the ideology of gender…has played an important part in the historical construction of the capitalist division of labour and in the reproduction of labour power” (The Technology of Gender, 7). The way the large majority of people view the opposite-gendered group, as well as themselves, continues to build the social structure they’re living in that includes roles and responsibilities for Males and Females in both domestic and public spheres. This gender system also reflects the relationship between “witness and participants” from Can you be Black and Look at this. When people are viewing the same events, they are more likely to picture themselves in the perspective that the subject shares more similarities with them, which is why Females tend to consider themselves as victims in terms of rape whereas Males are likely regarded as culprits. This phenomenon is greatly shaped by the way media describes the incidents, as well as the self perception of our roles in similar incidents.