Q:
We have not provided essay bullets for the following essays because the answers should attempt to synthesize the entire course. We hope these questions provide helpful examples to provoke such responses. Identify one issue you consider especially important in the ongoing cultural conversation about gender. Explain why you regard this issue as particularly pivotal now and how different resolutions of it might affect social life. Throughout your Gendered Lives textbook and especially in the final chapter, Julia T. Wood encourages you to become an active and critical member of society. Explain what this means pertinent to individual and social views of gender. Discuss how laws and organizational policies that regulate leaves from work influence gender roles in families. In your essay, explain both how laws and policies shape family life and how family life sculpts the kinds of laws and policies that are endorsed in the society. Queer performative theory argues that gender is performed; at the same time, gender performances are enacted within a context that defines the possibilities that exist and what gender means. Reflect on an instance of gender performance that you think may broaden gender norms and discuss how this performance works with cultural norms to push gender boundaries. This gender performance may be real (Lady Gaga comes to mind) or hypothetical. Drawing on all of your readings and class discussions, and especially on Chapters 3 and 4, define and discuss the sameness-difference (or sexual equality-sexual difference) debate. What are the positions in this debate and what are the social, legal, and personal implications of the different positions? Class discussions and the textbook have emphasized this point: gender is constructed. Explain what it means to claim that gender is constructed. Your response should define gender and describe HOW gender is constructed and how it is changed over time. In addition, your response should discuss what viewing gender as a social construction implies for individual action and agency. Include specific examples of how gender is constructed, reproduced, and changed. What does feminism mean to you? Are you a feminist? Consider the conversations and readings that we have done over the semester. The textbook and the class have discussed ways gender norms have changed as a result of feminist and men’s movements. Name what you believe to be the three most significant changes that have resulted from these movements and explain why you believe they are significant.
