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What Is Gender?

What does it mean? How is it enforced?

“Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.  This includes norms, behaviors and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other.” (World Health Organization)

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Gender vs. Sex
 

Sex describes the grouping of biological features, like reproductive functions, and chromosones. Gender refers to characteristics and roles assigned to these groupings based on their relation to reproductive labor. When biology is gendered, we claim gender to be innate, as if it's a natural thing as opposed to an imposed contruct. 

Traditionally, gender has been determined by means of reproduction. For example, actions like childcare and home-making, and an individuals relation to them, are supposedly determinate of gender.  Women are expected to be motherly and often their value is reduced to simply be incubators. Men are expected to be strong-willed, ambitious, and often aggressive.

In recent decades, gender norms and expectations have been noticeably challenged. We see androgynous and queer people in everyday life, or even merely just people existing on their own terms. And while behaviorally, that may manifest itself in various ways, gender manifests itself physically as well. 

When I say gender is physical, I don’t mean genetic attributes. Our modern understanding of gender challenges the idea that it is absolute and determined by anatomy. However, gender is still enforced physically by the way our bodies are gendered. Our anatomy is gendered from birth, our clothes are gendered, our behaviors are gendered, and we live by a set of gendered expectations that keep us subject to patriarchal oppression. Not only this, but it is clear that gender is enforced physically through sexual violence as well, with 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault being women or those outside of the gender binary and 99% of perpetrators being cisgender males (US Department of Justice).

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Me!

I'm Angie, I'm 17, and I'm a Junior in highschool. This project is for my AP Language class, where we've been asked to create an outreach project that reshapes our experience and research from a semester of inquiry about a topic of our choosing. My initial point of inquiry was in exploring women's anger and the ways it's weaponized against us. This led me to a rage room with 4 other girls in my class, where I discovered somewhat ironically, that a space designed to be destructive felt actually very safe to me, because we were given a space to exhibit our anger without judgment.  

This lead to further examination of the implications of this, and how gender expectations and roles influence the way anger is percieved in women. I found that as a woman, to be angry is to be perceived as ugly and to be ugly is to be worthless. This sparked my interest in Gender Theory as a whole and I conducted further research, like reading Judith Butler and other various essays. All of this has accumulated in this blog, which explores gender as a concept, along with my personal relationship with my gender.

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