Gender Roles

Topic:  Gender

Source: I decided to use my recent trip home and observe how my family interacts with one another based on their gender. Specifically I am using my interaction with my 4 year old baby cousin and my observations at a family gathering.

Relation: After reading the Robbins text on the ideas of gender, I was able to relate my observations in various ways, such as language, and even the way you dress. The roles of a male and female have been constructed and placed and oppressed those who may not seem to fit into these categories.

Description: I haven’t seen my family in over a few months, so being home was full of great emotions of the things I missed and some of the things I didn’t so much. My family decided to have a welcome home gathering at one of my uncle’s house. While there I began seeing and hearing things such as, “No, that’s for girls” coming from my 4 year old cousin. Afterwards I just began to watch and see how my cousin interacted with his mother and his older brothers.  On one occasion, my cousin began to cry because he wanted something that he couldn’t have. So I decided to go over to him and pick him up and console him, telling him why he couldn’t have that toy he wanted. Then my aunt came up to me and told me that I needed to put him down because he needs to learn how to toughen up. “Toughen Up!?” I repeated to her and she said, “Yeah, he is going to be a man someday and he need to stop crying all the time, like a baby”. The sad thing about it, is that my cousin is a baby, and already is learning that it is not okay to cry as a boy because one day you will be a man.

Commentary/Analysis: When looking into the Robbins text, you learn how the construction of male and female start and end. I talks about how U.S. Gender assignments start from birth, where boys are given gender –appropriate clothing and spoken to in a gender-appropriate way. In the Robins text it states, “Parents and other caregivers then teach male children that it is manly to be tough and endure pain. Male children are discouraged from expressing discomfort and encouraged when they can withstand it”. This is something that my observation made clear to me when I able to watch this scenario with my cousin with a different view. I would have, in the past, agreed and would have told my cousin to not cry and that he is a big boy. My family is continuing to teach these normalized roles that we have created. So what we may see as being normal is quite harmful to the ones we force to put in these roles. We recognize a lot of “isms”, but fail to recognize the ones that we play and enforce.