Journal Entry 1

Chapter one of Gender Stories explores and analyzes the different aspects of our gender identity development. Sex is the biological body you are born with and gender is what you identify as. There are three different approaches to understanding gender. The first approach views gender and sex equally; if you are a male your testosterone will be a cause and reason of aggressive behavior. The second approach looks at gender separate from sex, meaning you can be born a female but identify as a man and so forth. Lastly, the approach that this book takes is looking at gender as the assignment to bodies, Foss writes, “…which refers to gender as socially constructed and includes two perspective which are sex”. At first I was confused, even though I am a female and I identify as a woman, my femininity and masculinity varies depending on my environment and I know it has definitely shifted over time due to my life experiences. What the book explains is that organizing gender as a binary means you are putting people in a category forcing them to be all those standards or else, they will be classified as the opposite category. In this case, whatever is not feminine is masculine and vice versa. This creates a conflict that I believe is not widely noticed. The definition the book takes explains that our gender is socially constructed and that it considers our entire person (Foss 9). We can see how personal stories and identities such as race and social class influence gender. 

Agency is the process by which we can make a difference in how we are viewed and how we view ourselves. This is very important once we understand how gender is socially constructed. Accepting gender as nonbinary does not make you less of a man or less of a woman, it in fact helps you reclaim your power to be human. Just like a woman you can cry and not be called out for being unmanly. Lastly, reframing is a concept that I will apply in my life personally. Having the option of interpretation is something that I was not aware of clearly. In the book a woman felt that she was being discriminated against because of her gender, at first, she thought about quitting or even suing her boss, but she decided to treat the situation as if things were already different. She gave her opinion as if she felt her boss cared for it, slowly their relationship grew, this is a clear example of reframing. My mom has always been the type to smile at people and bless them specifically when they would give her a bad attitude or curse her out in the subway, and I always wondered why. She always told me that you must be nice to people because you don’t know what they might be going through and that with a positive attitude the conflict will dissolve. I still never understood. Looking back, there was once a security guard where we lived that did not like us, we had just moved in and my mom always said hello, smiled, asked how she was doing and tried her best to interact with her in English. To me this was funny and dumb, but slowly the security guard started smiling at us back, until she became a very close friend. Reframing is a way I can approach my conflicts now.