Blog Two
For me, gender is the performance of roles determined by our sex. For example, in our Western society, male and female mate and procreate. After a child is born, the mother stays home and performs the gender tasks given to her involved in being a mother. Meanwhile, the father continues working and being the breadwinner for the family. During this time, the mother ceases to work. Instead, her full time job consists of caring for the child. Obviously a newborn requires a lot of attention, and it's not always a singular effort by the mother to raise a child (baring a single parent family), however, generally it's the mother who takes on full-time child raising.
Though some may consider gender inauthentic, the idea of the nuclear family is so well-entrenched in Western life that it has become the norm. Variation does exist for example, such as the transgendered man who became pregnant before becoming a man. In that case, the man will be caring for the child more likely.
This idea of child-raising becomes one of the way women seem to interact with each other. One must present themselves as an always-caring mother lest others look down upon them. This means reading about housekeeping and children's books. It's not just mothers though; teenage girls are supposed to read magazine such as Seventeen and dress glamorously. Meanwhile, men read Maxim and talk about football and women. All of these perform the gender social functions set forth for male and female.