Social Construction Gender

What we think of as proper behaviours for men and women are rooted in the gender binary: the idea that there are only two genders, that those genders have distinct and separate sets of inherent characteristics and traits, and that any deviation from these is somehow wrong. The way that our society constructs gendered categories goes far beyond people. For example, fruity cocktails and wine coolers are considered to be “women’s drinks”, while whiskey and beer are “men’s drinks”. Even certain cars and genres of music and movies are considered to be more “manly” than others. These things all help to define the social construction of gender. In this paper, I will argue that the social construction of gender shapes women’s lives by policing what

She describes quasi-public and semi-private spaces quite similarly as spaces that are privately owned, but generally open to the public, provided that certain behaviour standards are met (pp. 641, 645). Though neither of these spaces are truly public, Doan argues that they both provide a different experience of gender normativity and gender policing than private spaces such as one’s own home, or the home of a close and trusted friend. She described feeling “panoptic” in semi-private spaces such as shopping malls (p. 645), invoking images of Bentham’s Panopticon prison where each prisoner was constantly surveilled (Banerjee 2016). This analogy applies quite literally in Doan’s shopping mall: between security cameras and guards, one is very nearly always being watched in that setting. However, in a broader sense when women inhabit public and quasi-public spaces, they are prisoners under the watchful eye of the patriarchy and heteronormativity which dictate the standards they must meet in order to be seen as a “proper woman”. This creates situations where women feel the need to perform to this level of femininity that they may not feel in private spaces, forcing them to police their own behaviour based on the space they exist

Women are expected to perform to a certain level of femininity in order to meet the normative gender standards and prove their worth as human beings. In order to survive in this panoptic society, women must self-police their gender in order to avoid being singled out by the ever present guards of the patriarchy and