Gender Identity

In the film Raising Arizona, the scene where HI and Ed are sitting outside with Dot discussing the needs of Nathan Jr. is one that relates to our studies of America on Film. The concepts of Class and Gender roles are evident in this scene. HI and Ed can be considered part of the lower-middle class. Glen and Dot are part of the upper-middle class. One of the ways that the film distinguishes between them is that Glen’s job as supervisor shows that he has a more respectable job with higher income.

Also, Glen and Dot have many children that they adopted. They are able to support all those children and are actually looking for another one to adopt. This concept of Class also relates to how each couple fits into their gender roles. Prior to marrying HI, Ed had somewhat of a career as a policewoman. She was providing for herself. HI on the other hand, was constantly in and out of prison for robbing the same convenience store. After the marriage, and having obtained Nathan Jr. , they each assimilated into their perspective gender roles.

HI left his life of crime behind and got a job to support the family. Ed left her job behind and became a housewife. It was important to mention this before discussing the scene at the lunch table with Dot. The way that HI and Ed fit into their gender roles, and the fact that they are in a lower class than Glen and Dot, shapes the way the conversation takes place. During this conversation, Dot is telling Ed about all the things that they must do for Nathan Jr. Every time Dot mentions something to Ed, Ed looks to HI for answers.

At this point, Ed playing the role of the housewife looks to her husband, the provider and man of the house, for all the answers. Class also comes into play at this moment. HI has no clue what the woman are talking about. Since we don’t know much of HI’s past, we can only presume that since he was constantly robbing that store, he has been part of the lower class. HI has no experience in these kinds of things like flu shots and trust funds. Class is also evident here when you consider that Dot is aware of all these things.

Since she is part of the upper-middle class, she has responsibilities, or at least knows how to take care of these things. So even though Dot is a housewife and Glen provides for the family, because they are part of the higher class than Ed and HI, it slightly changes the responsibilities of the gender roles. That was a scene that stuck out, at first only the way each person fit into their gender roles. Only after giving it some thought did I come to the realization that Class plays a factor on Gender roles.

Name: Karl Dent Instructor: Morgen Thomas SP13: SOC 101 Date: Mar 19, 2013 “A Toy’s Story Observation” When you think about toys the first thing that comes to mind is the joy they gave when you were a kid growing up, and the smile they put on your kid’s face when you see them playing with them on a daily basis. What if toys could talk? What information would they give us? What would they tell us? Recently I set out on a quest to better understand what information I could get just by looking at the toys in my local neighborhood toy store and how they shape the mind of kids from a young age.

Unfortunately for me, the day I went to the toy store there were not many people shopping, so this made my research a little harder to complete. I wandered around the store for several hours, going through many different aisles and looking at many different toys. At times I felt like I was being watched; it was so quiet I could hear whispers as if the little action figures were giving me the information I needed. By looking at toys as a way of seeing things from a sociological stand point, I can understand why the manufacturers of toys make certain types and what goals they are trying to accomplish.

By studying different toys, I started to use them as tools to see the world in a new way and to see how they shape society from both nature and nurture. My views of toys were like sociological imagination; I started to see how contextual our lives are. I then realized our individual identities were only sensible in a social context. But how can you look at toys and figure out how humans behave in our society? The only possible answer I found to my question was sociology. Toys help to form one important aspect of our lives which we come to understand as gender identity.

By having toys specific to boys and girls it helps us to understand what it means to be male or female. Understanding gender identity is said to be one of the most important ways we develop who we are and where we belong in our society. With many of the toys I observed, I noticed they would have a specific age group on the box, which is known as the functional age symbol. This helps parents understand the expected developmental growth of their child, being able to compare it with the age of the kids on the toy boxes.

There was a lot of cooking toys for girls, and a lot of police toys for boys, which illustrated to me gender inequality. These toys present the message that men are dominant and above women. By looking at the boxes they showed boys play an authority figure of catching bad guys and there weren’t any girl cops on any of the police toys that I saw. This led me to believe that they saw women as being weak and not able to go out and be a police officer in the community that they would eventually grow up and be a part of.

There were also toys that sent the message that some men were over other men and some women where over other women. G. I. Joe toys are a way of showing boys what they should grow up to be, while a princess doll shows a girl that she is expected to be a pretty lady. This is the process of general socialization in our society. While this process starts at birth, it continues throughout our lives by way of the nurturing of kids through toys. Laser tag toys are more group oriented because they require more than one person to play.

This then teaches group cohesion, this is where an individual would start learning how to work as a team while playing with other people. Looking at a play house princess set you can see how that particular toy prepares girls for the future role that society would proclaim them to have. Society expects our girls to grow up and be wives, the one who is always back at home taking care of the kids and the house and making dinner for the husband. The differences in toys between girls and boys also create gender inequality.

It would lead you to think that girls will grow up doing just domestic jobs and that boys will grow up to be cops, soldiers, firefighters, etc. Gender inequality also creates a wage gap for women in our society because it puts male and female with the same potential on an unequal playing field. NBA toys are modeled after real people. They were of James, Bosh, Williams, Durant and Griffin which are all black male players. There were not any female basketball toys; this showed the separation of race, sex, color and gender, and how sports and athletes are seen in American society.

By giving athletes the achieved status of celebrity and role model, it enables the toy company to create a new market of toys based on the person and not the sport. By not promoting female sports as much as male sports, we are sending a message that male sports are more dominant than female sports and males are more important than females when it comes to sports. There were not any white basketball toys and this was an appeal by the toy company to get whiter kids involve in basketball so they can be famous and one day own their own toy in a toy store.

Separating gender by toys can also lead to other things such as stigma and sanction by family, friends and even teachers. A girl playing with a boy toy and doing boy things will be seen as a tom boy and a boy playing with a girl toy will be seen as s sissy. This can cause serious sanction by parents if they are around friends out in public and society will view this as being deviant because they are going against the norm of what is expected from them. Ranking boys above girls is a form of social inequality and relates to the structure of mobility because it brings about what is called social stratification.

One set of toys that stood out were the Home Depot toys. They showed white males being builders and taking control of the development of buildings and handling tools. This was showing men as being engineers and future bosses and did not show where girls could do the same jobs as men in the future. By not giving girls the opportunity from a young age to do what they want, we continue to limit the ability of women in our society. Toys are a very important way for kids to develop. This is one of the many ways they learn to start sharing things with each other.

Toys help kids to understand their roles and gender. Day-care, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten are very good places for kids to start their venture of learning. This is where individuals and groups get a chance to interact. In this setting, they have the ability to focus on the creation of their personal identity through playing with toys and others. Of particular interest is the relationship between individual action and group pressures. Having this opportunity to be away from their parents and spend time around other kids will help them nderstand what friendship is and learn the difference between boys and girls. We can expand military toys not only to boys but also to girls because women have proven to be just as productive in the military work forces as men. Allowing boys to play with dolls without being sanctioned is a good way of teaching them how to take care of a child and be more loving when they hit adulthood. Making NBA toys for both males and females is a way to promote the WNBA as much as we do for the men and to gain the interest in the sports for more women.

Making white NBA toys will show our kids that white basketball players are as good as black. Teaching girls how to work in construction is not a bad thing because women can also be successful engineers and builders. Domestic jobs such as taking care of the kids should be taught to boys and not just girls. Giving girls more access to the things that are normally set aside for boys from an early age and allowing social mobility will allow them to move from one class to another. If we made these changes we could reduce gender inequality in our society between girls and boys.

Throughout history, women have made up a sort of “minority” in the world’s many societies. They have been looked upon as property to husbands and fathers. Their place was deemed the male’s home. Women were to provide services to men, ranging from carrying an heir (hopefully a male) to providing a clean home and cooked meals. Women in high-income nations still continue to face challenges because of their gender, and those in low-income nations often remain thought of as property.

From a symbolic interactionist perspective, gender is an issue that is based on many underlying historical concepts, and it continues to contribute to world-wide poverty. As symbolic interactionists view social problems using a microlevel perspective, they see that gender roles are learned behaviors taught by individual socializing agents in each society. Parents immediately begin teaching their children what it is to be a male or female in how they treat their sons and daughters. For example, parents are more likely to play rough with their sons, who are often dressed in clothes pertaining to superheroes.

This teaches the young male that strength, athletic ability, and courage are “desirable. ” He might then try to epitomize this throughout his lifetime. On the other side, a daughter is often dressed in frilly outfits depicting maidens in distress (Cinderella, for example), and they are usually kept inside from getting dirty to learn homemaking skills. Throughout their lifetime, then, they will remember what it is to be a female according to their parents. Thus, from birth, children are subjected to differing gender roles within a society.

Symbolic interactionists also see that gender roles could be taught with something as seemingly insignificant as communication. Linguistic sexism, which is patterns of communication that degrade a particular sex (usually female), is often cited as employing the dominance of one gender to perpetuate traditional gender roles. For example, the English word “mankind” includes every human being on Earth, whether male or female, even though it conjures up the idea of a group of males. Also, if a female enters a medical profession, she is often referred to as a “female doctor” to avoid confusion in this traditionally male-dominated job.

Even nonverbal communication can perpetuate dominance. A female that always touches a male at her prerogative in public is easily viewed as the dominant figure within the relationship. Eye contact can be used to stress the dominance of one over another (as in animals, when a “stare down” has been won, the winner has taken dominance). As communication is passed from parent to child in every generation, until it changes, it will perpetuate inequality. Though women’s roles in the world are changing rapidly in high-income nations, many still face problems regarding poverty through all sociological perspectives.

Not all women will grow up to become doctors and lawyers, as these fields are still dominated by males. According to the glass ceiling idea, women can only go so far in their dominated jobs. However, the glass elevator idea lifts men to reach even higher than women in female-dominated jobs, such as nursing. Men are typically paid more and regarded as being able to handle more complicated problems (so they are well-suited to move up in companies and manage others). Therefore, women without husbands to help them may not be able to provide the usual income it would take for her to live above the poverty level.

This is restrictive to single mothers who are trying to provide for themselves as well as their children. If they cannot move up in their job, they will not be able to provide money for food, housing, child care during her work hours, and other basic necessities (such as clothes for her children). She may get help from the government, but as soon as she gets above a certain income level (which is still on the poverty line), she is cut off of federal aid. It will then take her months to get back into the system, even though she has already been in it before.

This creates a cycle of poverty for the woman and her children, who, growing up in poverty, will be more likely to be stuck in poverty throughout their lifetimes. Therefore, the inequality of women in the economy and government as compared to men burdens them in different ways. Since the government does not bother to consider these differences when coming up with plans of action, poverty is still perpetuated. However, the government has tried to cut back on poverty by giving states incentives (additional funds) for having less poverty. This legislation is known as B. O. B. nd encourages states to solve the poverty problem from its roots to wipe it out. Resolutions have also been introduced to reinforce less discrimination against women. These macrolevel answers have little to do with the problem on the microlevel, which has yet to be solved. Language and gestures are hard to change, even over generations and generations. Traditions ebb and flow on their own with regards to advancing technology, ideas, and beliefs. Therefore, from a symbolic interactionist perspective, there is not yet a true solution to the problems of gender inequality and resulting poverty.