Doing Gender

     As Tibbals discusses in her article, the act of “doing gender” occurs when “gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its preproduction.” As an athlete throughout my entire life I am forced to think about how the implications from being an athlete in a male dominant sport affect women. Are women that play basketball, hockey, tennis or any other sport which is known for predominantly being a male sport successfully resisting being a hostage to gender reproduction? I recently read sociology of sport article by Michael Messner and his feminist approach toward the subject of doing gender can help teach us how to forget about any sense  of “doing gender” regarding females involved in predominantly male occupied sports. Messner uses what he calls a social justice model to explain a trend in sports he hopes is soon to occur. This model calls for social activist organizations to stress the significance of an altered gender ideology to league officials and owners in order for change to occur. Only once a change has transpired within the center - high-status and in-group members - of the institution of sport will a cultural change in values, beliefs, and media imagery begin to arise. Like Messner, I believe through this model women will eventually receive sex equity in sports by fighting the oppression and ghettoization which female athletes encounter. Because I consider myself a feminist I see the restraints reproduced through doing gender. This social justice model has the ability to fully allow women of all ages to free themselves from the consequences of doing gender in an unconventional sense. Through the social justice model, women in sports will not have to worry about “doing the wrong gender.”

Urban Legend and Rumors

   




     As Best and Horiuchi examine the concept of urban legends and the effects they have on society, they state in their article, “Urban legends, like collective behavior and social problems construction, are responses to social strain, shaped by the perception of the threat and social organization.” This type of fear and the outcome it has on the surrounding public took place on a smaller scale in my neighborhood when I was a young child. When I was around the age of ten there was a belief spreading through our neighborhood that an older man had been sneaking into peoples’ homes late at night and stealing personal items while committing deviant acts of behavior with female undergarments. I never learned how this rumor initially started but I do know that my friends parents as well as mine took it very seriously. Not only did my parents check all doors and windows before they went to bed each night but they would walk outside around the house as well check the bushes and other random places. These acts were actually suggested in the monthly bulletin our neighborhood has so most parents were believed to do the same before they went to bed also. It turns out around a month later that a group of pre-pubescent teens were arrested in the middle of the night for trying to break into someone’s car. They ended up admitting to other crimes such as breaking into garages to steal beer and the occasional bicycle never admitted to actually breaking into peoples’ homes. After the young boys were arrested no household reported the breaking of an entry for quite some time. It was believed that the rumor of the old man was finally put to rest and that the truth finally surfaced that is was only the young teenagers in the first place. Why was the undergarments and personal items involved in the rumor then? Did those events actually happen or was it just neighborhood gossip that spread like wildfire causing the occasional house mom to exaggerate? I guess I’ll never know the truth about the rumor but since then I am never one to believe any type of urban legend unless I witness it firsthand.  For me, I have to see it to believe it.  

Impression Management throughout High School

Last post I discussed the idea of an individual’s personal and social identity and how that person has somewhat control over the self-censoring of the social identity others label them with. Though we will never full possess the capability of controlling which labels others assign to us we do have the  ability to control how others see us or to convince them that we are who we say we are. This type of control is called impression management and it is something we all do whether we notice it or not. Kenneth J, Gergen concludes that in the technologically advanced world we live in today an individual has the ability to “create and re-create” their personal identity more than ever before. This occurs because of how easy it is through facebook, twitter, email and texting (just to name a few) to quickly establish a new relationship or in some cases, end a relationship. I can remember back to my sophomore year in high school when I heard about a girl one year younger than me from my grade school. As most freshmen do, whether in high school or college, they try fit in with their new crowd by portraying themselves as part of the same institution with the clothes they wear, the way they talk, how they act around their fellow peers and teachers at school, and how they present themselves on facebook. This particular girl fell victim to this need to impress. Trying so hard to impress this new older boy she had romantic feeling for, she decided to send him nude pictures of herself. Unfortunately, the boy which was my age thought it would be an easy way to impress his friends with a laugh by mass emailing the photos of the girl out to three different area high schools. Soon most high school students in the St. Louis area had either heard of or seen the pictures and knew the name of the girl in them. For her remaining years in high school the girl was forced to learn a convincing from of impression management. However she acted in public, what she wore out at night, who she hung out with, however she designed her facebook profile and whatever she said on the internet for her remaining three years in high school was all one entire effort to convince others that she was not a “slut.” Personally , I believe she successfully practiced her own type of impression management. After attending Mizzou, which is known for being a college many St. Louis kids attend, she is no longer associated with these photos. In fact she is one of the classier girls I know and is well respected by both her male and female peers. 

Personal and Social Identities

I do not think William James or Herbert Blummer would argue with the notion that in order to develop a strong willed personal identity then one must continue to expand upon their social identity. However, this may be a complicated process because an individual does not have complete control over their social identity. One must be fully aware that their social identity runs the risk of changing our evolving into a new identity every time they participate in social interaction with their peers or anyone in the public for that matter.

When thinking about the development of an individual’s social identity I can’t help but think about how our very own Columbia, Missouri factors in. In a few days I will be turning 22 which has caused me to reflect upon my last year as a 21 year old or in other words the first year I was able to socially interact with Columbia’s drinking and bar scene. Don’t worry I don’t play on telling some Friday night story dealing with intoxicated decision making. Instead, I ask my readers to use their imagination and think about how an individual self-censors their own social identity when they decide to go out one night in Columbia to one of these public drinking scenes. If most peoples’ objectives are to have fun and enjoy themselves then how do they manage to use this self-censorship? If they are self-censoring their social identity then does this mean they are too worried about the label others assign to them therefore, are not allowing themselves to release any stress and enjoy themselves? The answers to these depend on the individual I believe. Whichever way someone decides to manage their social identity it will directly affect their own label for themselves, their personal identity. By participating in social interaction within a public scene, just as many college students do in Columbia on various nights down town, an individual is able to produce a complete sense of identity through the social and personal self. Allowing others to assign a label to you correlates with how you will perceive yourself at the end of the interaction. Below are just a few pictures of how some people unfortunately choose to self-censor their social identity around others: