Gender and Sexuality, Assessment Example

The three respective texts, Roscoe’s “An Introduction to North American Gender Diversity”, Martin’s “The Egg and the Sperm”, and Herdt’s “Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea” all provide accounts of gender and sexuality within a specific social context. Through empirical observation and commentary, the three authors identity the significance of gender and sexuality in general societal formations; moreover, they discuss both how gender and sexuality contribute to these very formations and how society shapes gender and sexuality.

Roscoe’s article specifically examines Native American societies where traditional gender distinctions and non-traditional gender roles and relations co-exist. For example, the “berdaches” represent a reversal of gender roles, as females perform male roles and vice versa. (Roscoe, 118) The central argument of Roscoe’s text suggests that gender roles are socially relative and dynamic, which means that gender cannot only be thought of in terms of biological male and female distinctions: For Roscoe, gender is essentially a social construct as evidenced by the unique gender identities of the Native Americans. This notion of the social construction of gender is also prevalent in Emily Martin’s text, where she takes this theme and applies it to an examination of science and reproductive technologies. Martin discerns a clear influence of the social construction of gender on how science itself conceives of gender, particularly in portraying women as “a dangerous and aggressive threat.” (Martin, 498) This view of women leads Martin to suggest that the sciences inherit the social gender distinctions of society without any critical thought, which implies that science is not a discourse free from societal influence. In his article on the Sambian tribe, Herdt focuses on the notion of gender ambiguity. He notes that manhood in the Sambian tribe is something that must be earned through ritual. Thus, Herdt writes that maleness “is not a biological given” and “must be artificially induced through a secret ritual.” (Herdt, 205) As such, Herdt suggests that gender roles in the Sambian tribe are not fixed, but are rather dynamic to the extent that they are subject to societal as opposed to biological factors.

All three authors attempt to identify a central ambiguity to gender, one that is a result of the societal constructions of gender. Moreover, the subtext in all three articles is a theoretical imperative to move away from accounts of gender that reduce the phenomenon to scientific or biological causes, insofar as this fails to capture the unique relationship between society and gender. In the sense that the authors analyze highly specific cases of gender in diverse communities, such as science, Native Americans, and the Sambian tribe, the presence of gender ambiguity across such diverse paradigms certainly suggests that gender roles are heavily constituted by societal influences. However, perhaps all the authors perform too radical a reduction of gender towards society, which in itself may be construed as a simplification. The emphasis, for example, in Martin that science inherits gender differences from science, emphasizes the societal interpretation of gender, while ignoring the biological aspect of the phenomenon: Martin is more concerned with choices of diction in the scientific discourse, as opposed to the objects of science themselves. In Herdt’s text, the fact that maleness must be earned through ritual does not necessarily entail an interpretation that suggests gender ambiguity, but rather could imply a built-in evolutionary mechanism present within the tribe that encourages the reproduction of the “best” genes.

In all three texts, therefore, there is a crucial emphasis placed on the role of society in gender formation. When considering all the respective paradigms that are investigated together, the repeated presence of societal roles in the conception of gender certainly suggests that gender and society are fundamentally interrelated. Nonetheless, the commitment to a societal explanation in all three texts seems to overlook other important factors relevant to gender and sexuality, such as biology. In this regard, accounts that consider a greater variety of factors would perhaps be more accurate when rigorously positing the question of gender and sexuality analysis.

Works Cited

Herdt, Gilbert H. “Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea.”

Martin, Emily. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.”

Roscoe, Will. ““Strange Country This”: An Introduction to North American Gender Diversity.”