Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender Article Analysis

The chapter I have chosen is The Paradoxes of Gender “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender written by Judith Lorber. The author's argument in this piece is that gender is a social construct and does not exist. This particular chapter talks about how doing gender has been so well written into our daily lives that as members of this society we often forget that every day we are choosing to do our particular gender. The author goes on to give examples of how she helps to contribute to socially constructing gender on the daily. This chapter also talks of how human beings organize their lives based on what genitalia they were given at birth, and how human society depends on that segregation. 

At the beginning of the chapter the reader’s attention is brought to the term gender, this term is quickly dismissed as a social construct. The author goes on to say that people often forget that gender is completely made up and isn’t encoded into our genes. The next part of the chapter is written about her own personal experiences gendering people.  She says that because she saw a baby on the train wearing blue, she automatically thought it was a boy, this was until she saw the earrings and flower sneakers the baby was wearing and realized that she had just gendered a baby based on the colour of clothes it was wearing. The chapter then goes on to point out that unless the “normal” gender signs are missing we fail to notice them at all. When they are missing it tends to make people feel very uncomfortable, as they don’t understand why certain people choose to not fit the gender norms.  Next in this chapter comes the explanation as to why no one seems to notice gender being completely fictitious. This is because gender is taught to us from a very young age, it begins when we learn to talk and only gains influence on us as we grow. When we are children, we refer to ourselves with our given gender’s pronouns this is how it all begins. Then comes puberty, this next step is where we learn more about the opposite gender and begin to do what the author calls the “gendered mating dance” (Lorber 14), this is the stage in life where boys and girls don’t quite know what to do with one another. Looking further into these children’s futures we see that gender still plays a big role, moms dads, workers, bosses every one of these people has different experiences, feelings, relationships, and situations that our society defines as being feminine or masculine.  All the progressions we go through in life all relate to being constructed in our gender. To finish off this piece of the article, the author goes on to say how one of the major ways that human society organizes itself is through gender. 

Throughout this chapter, several arguments stood out to me that furthered my agreement with the author's original idea that gender doesn’t exist. The arguments I will be using are, how gender has been so bred into our minds to make us think it is an actual physical part of us, how uncomfortable people get when another human can’t be placed into a gender category, and finally how our society bases career opportunities on gender. 

I believe that gender is a made-up construct something people have created so meticulously that it now seems to be a part of our genetic makeup. Judith Lorber shares a similar opinion, and that is why I have chosen her short story as my basis for this paper. One of the early lines that Lorber writes is “Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes” (Lorber 13). This stood out because I believe it resonates well with the society we live in now. Gender is being used as a guideline to determine things we can and can not do. An example of this was the stigma around makeup and clothing specifically for the male gender, it was very unacceptable for a long time for a man to be caught wearing a dress or makeup as these items were seen as only something for the female gender.  This consistently puzzles me as the only thing that physically sets men and women apart are our genitalia yet as a society, we segregate almost everything based on gendered categories. An example of this is “men’s and women’s razors… there is no difference in the razors themselves society simply tells us that based on our gender we need to use a certain product. Gender is consistently changing; we see this when we look back 1000 years nothing from then to now is the same. When we look at it this way gender is more comparable to a fashion trend than to being a biological part of us. 

The next argument I would like to make is about people who choose to not identify with a gender and how it makes absolutely no impact on them as human beings. “Gender signs and signals are so ubiquitous that we usually fail to note them—unless they are missing or ambiguous. Then we are uncomfortable until we have successfully placed the other person in a gender status; otherwise, we feel socially dislocated” (Lorber 14). An illustration of this author's quote today is that we now have multiple people that don’t identify with a specified gender. These new genders have caused quite a lot of backlash from society as they no longer fit into gendered categories. This makes many people uncomfortable because as a society we have deemed identifying with a gender to be essential. These people are still human and live like you and me nothing changes biologically with them other than the pronouns they use to identify with, this is a prime example of how unnecessary gender is.

The final idea I would like to state is that society uses gender to give out specific jobs that are associated with them. It is quite interesting that every society uses gender to be the basis of many things. Like Lorber said, “Although societies vary in the extent to which they use one or the other of these ways of allocating people to work and to carry out other responsibilities, every society uses gender and age grades” (Lorber 15). Instances of gendered jobs exist throughout our society jobs like nursing, daycare and home care providers and even public-school teachers are all considered to be female jobs. Where jobs like mechanics, welders and carpenters are associated with “male jobs”.  The dividing of jobs amongst genders seems so archaic but does still happen. Gender doesn’t affect the way you can do your job, we as a society have just created gendered stereotypes like women are nurturing and men are strong, that tell people solely based on their gender, what jobs they would be good at.  

Thus, I strongly believe that gender is simply a social construct that affects aspects of our lives.  From birth to death gender stereotypes follow you throughout your entire journey confining you to do what is socially acceptable. So why do we rely so heavily on gender norms?  In conclusion, I believe that we create gender norms because we rely on the segregation it provides.