大学思辨英语教程 精读3教师用书unit14.pdfVIP

Unit 14 Gender Unit Overview Sociologists make a distinction between gender and sex. Gender is the perceived or projected masculinity or femininity of a person or characteristic. Sex, on the other hand, is conventionally perceived as a dichotomous state or identity for most biological purposes, such that a person can only befemale or male. Before going into more detail about the differences between gender and sex, it should be made clear why this is an important difference. Differentiating gender from sex allows social scientists to study influences on gender without confusing their audience. If a social scientist were to continually talk about how sex is socially constructed, her audience might get confused, thinking the scientist is ill-informed about the biological determinants of sex. Using one term, gender, to refer to the socially constructed and malleable component of human sexuality and another term, sex, to refer to the biological and immutable component of human sexuality allows scientists interested in these two components to study them without confusion. Gender is the social and representational component of human sexuality. Perhaps the best way to understand gender is to understand it as a process of social representation. Because gender roles are delineated by behavioral expectations and norms, once those expectations and norms are known by the individual, the individual can or does adopt the behaviors that represent the gender they wish to portray. The gender one wishes to portray is not solely a cognitive, self-driven desire but also the socialized gender role imputed by parents, peers, and society. Tex A In “On Becoming Male: Reflections of a Sociologist on Childhood and Early Socialization”, James M. Henslin analyzes how some of