Choice : Challenging Traditional Binary Gender Identity

How we learn gender is part of gender socialization. It begins the moment we are born and continues till the end of our life. We are exposed to many factors that may influence our gender identity. Some of the factors are, media, our experience in school and our parents. In Martin & Kazyak’s essay titled “Hetero-Romantic Love and Hetereosexiness”, he explains how the media plays a part in shaping a child’s gender identity. In Thorne’s essay titled “Girls and Boys together…” he explores how sex segregation occurs predominantly in elementary school. In the film “Tough Guise”, Katz explains that men aren’t naturally violent but are taught to be so. And lastly, in Cornell’s essay titled “Masculinities and Globalization” he says that there are

Describing how Cal became intersex grounds the novel in realism and makes the fiction seem like nonfiction. There are many instances where this occurs like in the first page when Cal tells the readers that, “Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, ‘Gender Identity in 5 Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,’ published in the Journal of Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity” (Eugenides 1). Eugenides implements science to make Cal seem like an actual hermaphrodite. This can make readers who are unaware that Middlesex is fiction believe that Cal is more lifelike and this adds more human characteristics. This is a method to bring needed attention to the lives and discrimination that hermaphrodites faced and still face. Eugenides use of heredity also adds more realism to the novel by describing how Cal became intersex. This adds more color to the ancestors of Cal and grounds him in realism down to his genes. This kind of microscale realism adds to the effect that this is nonfiction. Eugenides goes even further by describing Cal’s genitals. This may seem to be inappropriate, but it

He gets the honor of performing an old Greek funerary custom that only men are allowed to do. As Cal stands outside Middlesex, guarding it against his father’s spirit, he writes, “And so it was I, who upholding an old Greek custom no remembered anymore stayed behind on Middlesex... It was always a man who did this, and now I qualified” (529). While religion once constrained Cal, it now allows him the opportunity to publicly show his true identity. Eugenides redefines old Greek traditions to be transformative and triumphant moments for the characters as they defy the society’s expectations and redefine their identities.

The central conflict of the book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is gender identity which is shown through Calliope’s struggle with determining and accepting her true gender as a hermaphrodite. The conflict also affects other characters as it causes grief, confusion, and leads to. Calliope’s first encounter with her gender identity crisis was when she develops feelings and sexual attraction to the Object which is stated in “Jerome knew what I was, as suddenly I did, too, for the first time clearly understood that I wasn’t a girl but something in between. I knew this from how natural it had felt to enter Rex Reese’s body, how right it felt, and I knew this from the shocked expression on Jerome’s face”(375). The experience of having intercourse with Jerome and fantasizing being in Rex’s position shows that Calliope isn’t just a female but something in between and that adds more to her suspicion and confusion of her actual gender. This also affects other characters as it leads up to Calliope having a sexual relationship with the Object which reveals the Object’s true feelings towards Calliope and her actual sexuality. She also has another encounter with her gender identity when she discovers that she’s biologically a boy who had been raised as a girl. In the file by Dr. Luce, it describes Calliope’s condition with the description “ As the girl’s gender identity was firmly established as female at that time

​Gender identity has changed its definition over time. The psychological definition as stated from the social learning theory is that gender identity is the sense of being male or female. Seems simple but we now know in todays world the definition has broadened. Gender identity is now defined as one 's personal experience of one 's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it completely. All societies have a set of gender categories that can serve as the basis of the formation of a person 's social identity in relation to other members of society. From the past when we had many strong women’s rights activist who fought so what your gender was did not

In Debating Sex and Gender and After Identity, Dr. Warnke presents various arguments that demonstrate how sex, gender, and race are all social constructs. Do you agree or disagree with her argument, and why?

​​Gender is defined as whatever behaviors and attitudes a group considers proper for its males and females. Unlike sex, gender is something that we learn from the day we are born. “Young children begin to acquire gender role stereotypes at about the same time they develop gender identity and by the age of 3 or 4 most children” (Amanda Youmans). Peers, community, media, religion and our upbringing all play a role in the understanding of our culture and what is considered acceptable for males and females. When the sex of a child is revealed, they are automatically placed into a gender specific role with certain expectations. There are things in this world such as colors, toys, media depiction and taught behaviors that play into these gender roles.

When it comes to gender identity, I identify myself as a masculine or a man. As a masculine I’m going to play the role of a female where I would go to a neighborhood close to where I live, wear a wedding dress, and see how people around the block reacting to my kind of behavior. Base of my moral norm, I think it would be shameful, and I expect people to feel disgusting by it because that’s how I would feel if I were the public. As we all know when it comes to the behaviors between men and women, there is a lot of thing women can do but man can’t do because if a man does it, it would look weird or shock the society. For instance, throughout the weekend I was thinking about an experiment to see what exactly a woman can do which would be normal,

In the United States of America, genders are organized into two categories, male and female. According to Oxford Dictionary, gender is defined as, “the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).” The “sex” of a person includes the physical characteristics, like genitals or sex chromosomes. Gender expectations and norms have been taught since birth; the family, the media, peers, and religion are examples of where these beliefs are learned. Another way gender norms are taught is through separated colors, toys, and clothes for male and female. There are specific gender roles for males and females. Men are seen as dominant and in charge,

Gender binary involves the categorization of gender into two separate types that form the ideas of “femininity” and “masculinity.” The concept Gender binary could be found as a constant theme within the various science fiction texts and films that we have encountered in class. Using science fiction, these authors and directors could direct the readers away from gender binary and instead open their minds by introducing new ideas. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland, Frank Oz’s 2004 film The Stepford Wives, and Leslie F. Stone’s 1931 short story “The Conquest of Gola” all contain narrative science fiction worlds that make readers question and challenge the conventional ideas of gender stereotypes.

Gender identity is the personal conception of being a man or a woman and the society creates standards and comes up with gender roles basing them on existing norms and traditions which will in turn influence gender identity. For instance, most societies associate strength and dominance to be masculine roles while caring and assisting or subordination known to be feminine roles. This clearly makes gender identity be bred within the society. One’s identity is important as it influences his or her life through events like life experiences, how one is being taken or treated, how to do one associate or socialize with others, the type of job one will have to do and also opportunities that may come up favoring a certain type of gender identity. One is also likely to face obstacles or discrimination due to his or her identity.

West and Zimmerman claim that gender is not something we are but something we do.

The construction of a self-identity can be a very complex process that every individual is identity is developed through the lenses of cultural influences and how it is expected to given at birth. Through this given identity we are expected to think, speak, and behave in a certain way that fits the mold of societal norms. This paper aims to explain how gender perform gender roles according these cultural values. I intend to analyze the process in which individuals learned and internalized their respective gender identities, through their cultural background. I will be conducting a set of interviews with the intention to compare my experience as a self-identified male of Mexican descent, to the experience of another male character of Japanese heritage in order to understand how we come to self-identify as masculine in diverged cultures. In this paper, I argue that the construction of gender identities is a direct consequence of societal influential factors such as family values; values that reflect the individual’s culture. This analysis will not only utilize evidence from these identity formations, but also in explaining why and how these self-identities were constructed using both theoretical sources and empirical studies as a framework.

Conformity is caused when there is pressure to follow the standards of society, but some still question their identity and who they really are. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s book, Middlesex, Cal Stephanides is first born as Calliope and raised as a female. In her adolescence, Callie begins to have feelings for another of the same sex, but in the society it was seen as wrong, and therefore has a short relationship with someone of the opposite sex instead. While Callie was raised as a female, she always questioned why she was behind her peers in development. She later finds out that she was born with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, which means that while Callie looks like a girl, she has male hormones. This causes Callie to run away and become Cal; he no longer wants to be a girl and wants to be who he really is. Cal’s childhood was always him conforming to what other people wanted, even though he still questioned who he was.

The roles and expectations that coincide with gender are displayed in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. By chronicling Cal Stephanides’ family history, Eugenides displays the continual and generational disconnect between sex and gender. As his focus shifts from one generation to the next, this disconnect becomes more clear and prevalent, making gender identity an increasingly fluid concept. In literature, a similar shift can be seen as eras and periods pass, reflecting the ideas within those time periods regarding gender and sex and how they change. This including various texts from the Ancient Period, Medieval Period, Renaissance Period, and Age of Reason such as the story of Lilith from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, and “To the Fair Clarinda” by Aphra Behn. Constantly evolving, gender has become less defined by one’s biological sex, and more so determined by personal comfortability either within or outside of