Lisa Hammel On Gender Roles

When I first began my observation assignment my goal was to research the subject of gendered media. However, as I began to review articles from the New York Times I found that especially in the 1970’s the theme and articles related to the word “gendered” leaned more towards the theory that gender is a social construction. This caused me to change my focus, to idea of Doing Gender and the theory that gender is a social construct. Kimmel explains that “gender is less a property of the individual than it is a product of our interactions with others” (2013:139). In plain English this means that one does not own female or male. Rather, one performs actions that society has determined are the proper representations of female and male. In order

Hammel quotes a Dr. Houseman who stated, “…there is undoubtedly a relation between women’s lib and the increasing number of handymen. The woman today not only knows which end of the hammer to use, but enjoys using it. It is a reflection of the basic change of women’s self image, as well as men’s. This definitely has to do with changing relations in male and female roles.” While the article discussed the increased ability of women to be “handy,” it also addressed the gendered approach that was taken to teach basic home repair skills and that even that activity had been sexualized in order for it to remain “okay” for women to use tools. A Dr.

Though one still finds the idea that there are biological differences, the idea in the articles was the shifting attitudes toward what was acceptable performance of a specific gender. And what was glaringly obvious was how the institutions of media, education, families all constructed and reinforced what was acceptable. The question is have we advanced as a society and moved away from such structured inequality? CNN political commentator, Sally Kohn summed up the sexual revolution of the 1970’s as “The sex freak-out of the 1970s” and argues that the 1970’s were “more about personal empowerment than changes in law and politics” Kohn, 2015). I would say that today our society is picking up what the revolutions of the 1970’s left behind and are demanding changes in law and politics. One only has to look to the ruling of same-sex marriage in 2015. Though, currently one can still find cultural pushback int he example of the Wedding Cake Case that has made it to the supreme court. This gives example to Kimmel’s statement that “we need to think of masculinity and felinity ‘not as a single object with its own history, but as being constantly constructed within the history of an evolving social structure” (2013: