Blog Two
Gender is a performance in the sense that it is something we do to show others that we are either male or female. A man who wants other men to think he is manly will do the types of things society has told him make a man masculine. For example, a man who aspires to be the kind of man society tells him to be won’t be caught doing the things society expects of a woman. In our culture a decent majority of women will admit that they love to dance. Ask an average man in our society whether or not he enjoys dancing in front of all his guy friends and he’ll probably say something to the effect of “heck no.� In this sense we all act in a way that will identify us as either a man or a woman to the people who surround us.
Although gender is just something we do to fit in, it is also responsible for creating the social conditions that surround us in our everyday lives. By changing ourselves to meet the expectations of society, we begin to have these same expectations for others. As we identify the gender we want people to see in us, we start to want other people to identify themselves to us as well. We are responsible for the social conditions and expectations placed upon us because we perpetuate them in our daily interactions with others. In this way, the expectations placed upon us are a cycle. We conform to meet the expectations and, in turn, come to expect the same things from other people.
The way we present ourselves plays a big role in the treatment we receive from others. If I started to walk around in high heels and wear lipstick, my friends would probably react differently to me than they have in the past. The way we act lets us fit in with different groups of people and once we start to make major changes to our behavior, we change which groups of people we will fit in with. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to change our gender performance. For example, say I hung out with a crowd that others with different social expectations had deemed “nerdy.� Making minor changes to my gender performance could turn me from a geek into a jock in a month or two.