Summary Of My Response To My Mother's Response

Sociology 1101

Zhiyuan Li

Summary of Responses

The three people I interviewed are my mother, my significant other and a close friend.

For my mother, she finds herself compelled to fulfill gender expectations, but only in specific situations. These situations are almost exclusively related to work and office. For example, she will dress and act in a more feminine way and control her emotions if she is visiting a client, which is something she will not likely do if she is meeting a friend. She calls it a way of “covering up” herself. Also, one thing I didn’t realize before about my mother is how difficult it was when she decided to go to college. While her parents supported her decision, other people around her (including her own grandparents)

She dresses and acts differently depending on who she is interacting with. She finds this practice useful likely because it helps to promote role performance, especially by creating specific types of impression on the other person. It’s important to note here that this role performance is in some important way gender-related—it’s not only necessary to act as a professional, but also as a professional woman, which explains why she would describe the way her dresses as a more feminine way, rather than just a more professional way.

My mother also appears to endorse some version of the functional division of labor view in regard to gender. For her, gender difference is naturalized and unavoidable because “God” created it. But God should have done this for a reason, and according to her this is perhaps difference in what men and women specialize in. For instance, in the interview, she also mentioned that she was planning on hiring a male employee to help with physical labor in the

My mother thought long haircut looked bad on boys and all my efforts were to delay being forced into a barber shop, which for me was at best a death trial. This experience of struggle is significant because it made me aware of certain normative expectations imposed on me, and that these expectations are very distinct in the sense that they are not based on individual traits and relationships, but on a very simple group membership—I am expected to do and not to do certain things because and merely because I am perceived to be a member of a certain gender. From a first-person perspective, these distinct expectations based on group membership feel like some sort of psychologically horrible internal conflict—my opinion on what I would like to do does not matter, and what only matters is the gender that I’m perceived to be