Night To His Day Analysis

Gender Roles and its Construction in Society

In "Night to His Day" The Social Construction of Gender," Lorber says that gender "is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced" (324). We do not think about gender roles in regular basis until we notice that either a man or a woman is not acting how society expects his/her to act. This is when we start questioning what gender is and how it works in society.

We all are experiencing and learning about gender since we are born; we either become a girl or a boy based on our genitalia. At the point that we are born, most parents in different cultures do not want to create a confusion in society about their baby's gender,

What makes it complicated is the structure of society.

Lorber explains how society is in charge of maintaining the separation of gender roles:

Gendered norms and expectations are enforced through informal sanctions of gender-inappropriate behavior by peers and by formal punishment or threat of punishment by those in authority should behavior deviate too far from socially imposed standards for women and men. (327)

Society already has its expectations in regards of gender, and going against these social norms can easily put people in the "others" category. Clothing is the first factor that catches people's eyes for the determination of gender. Today, females can wear any color without feeling excluded, what really affect them is not color, but what type of clothing they wear. For example, if a female dresses like males do, then that is considered against social norms. It is the same thing for males, but color does affect them, is not usual to see a male wearing pink without categorizing him as part of the "other"