Blog Post 5 - Hanfler, TED Talk/Radio Lab, Lorber, and Young

Hanfler seems to base his idea of social construction differently than I would have expected; his explanation seems to focus on the construction of deviances, saying “deviance is not automatically understood as an objective fact but as constructed and interpreted meanings that are subject to change” (13). While I think many of us and many explanations - including some that we have studied for this class like the TED talk - construct sociality based on what is considered “normal,” we fail to focus on the idea that “normal” is constructed through deviances. Social construction is more so based on what we consider to be “not normal” and creating the judgements and stereotypes that either glorify or shame people from them. Yet, while we are able to recognize that society does in fact create judgements based on these ideas, we still attempt to construct the very foundation of gender and sexuality - aspects completely grounded within a person’s being.  “Schools, parents, peers, and the mass media guide young people into gendered work and family roles,” Lorber writes, “For human beings there is no essential femaleness or maleness, femininity or masculinity, womanhood or manhood, but once gender is ascribed, the social order constructs and holds individuals to strongly gendered norms and expectations,” (57, 58). I find it interesting that we are able to create a social construction of gender, gender identity, and sexuality, and yet remain socially oblivious to the fact that such elements are unrestrained and virtually never fit into exactly one category that we, as a society, have created.

Until I came to UNL I did not possess the understanding that gender was a social construct, I believed (and I think many others - in society I mean - still agree with this, sadly) that gender and sex were synonymous. Thankfully there has been a great deal of focus on the social construction of gender in almost every class I have taken in my two years here, and while I continue to learn more about the topic, the more examples I see of socially constructed ideas about gender and its representation - in both life and art, film and literature. Last semester I read the text “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” by Annie Proulx (famous for her story “Brokeback Mountain,” included in “Close Range”) and for my final paper I deeply analyzed Proulx’s construction of masculinity and queerness in the western genre and in relation to the iconic image of the cowboy - and that paper was basically my magnum opus at a whopping eighteen pages long. Anyway, social construction of gender is one of my favorite things to learn and study, so the TED Talk was not only very informative for me but very interesting as well. I think the most intriguing aspect of the talk was the fact that I thought it was interesting that the talk was from a heterosexual male (that sentence was a doozy!). I suppose I already attributed gender studies and professionals within that study to be either female, homosexual, or otherwise not a heterosexual male. Great, not only am I feeding into a social construct, but I’m feeding into a social construct ABOUT a social construct! Where does the forever overseeing cloud of social construction end???!!!!