Personal Experiences of Gendered Expectations, Essay Example

From the subjective perspective, gendered expectations can be said to exist on an almost unconscious level. When such expectations become the object of reflective consciousness, that is, when one becomes attentive of these expectations, their pervasiveness within society become apparent. Every individual can certainly reflect back upon their childhood and the clear gender roles that exist in this period. Even the conception of play, such as in the form of toys, can be said to bear the trace of such gendered expectations. This demonstrates the depth of this social discourse within our daily lives and simultaneously its affectivity in delineating and determining styles of life.

Certainly, from the perspective of my own family background, it can be said that gendered expectations were not explicitly or implicitly followed. My parents never placed such gender expectations on me, for example, they never discouraged me from participating in particular activities in accordance with how the dominant social discourse conceived of these same activities in terms of gender lines. In this regard, on a subjective level I was oblivious to gendered expectations, at least from the side of parental influence. Yet gendered expectations precisely exist because we are oblivious to them: we do not understand how they continue to structure our lives. Any example of the continued discrepancy between male and females in society, for example, the disparity in wages, clearly shows that gendered expectations remain effective in society, despite a growing attentiveness to them, in particular after the 1960s.

Such a phenomenon underscores the pertinence of feminist theory and gendered based readings of society. The practice of this theory can be summarized as an attempt to make such gendered based expectations even more explicit. In this gesture of making the implicit explicit, one is able to potentially subject such expectations to critique. A decisive part of this process is personal reflection about how one encounters gender roles in everyday life. Hence, despite my own background lacking a clear emphasis on such expectations, I am now able to better discern their presence. Social arrangements in high school and university, such as what men and women respectively are “supposed” to study (or are encouraged to study) clearly reflect that these expectations are even operative within the supposedly free space of academia. Accordingly, the commitment to feminist and gender theory serves as a means with which to realize the potential of this free space.