Boys will be boys, you throw like a girl, man-up, she’s a girly-girl, he’s a man’s man. These phrases are commonplace in our society, but what is the underlying discourse of such utterances? What value judgments, beliefs and ideologies do they contain? Being accepted as a man in this culture seems to require reject everything associated with femininity. Consequently, female traits, and thereby girls and women, are devalued and denigrated. Human traits become sorted into rigid boxes of feminine and masculine and straying out of one’s socially-designated box regularly invites gender policing and enforcement by society in the form of jokes, homophobia, bullying, and violence. We will examine and evaluate how genders are socially constructed, and how gender differences and gender inequality are connected. We will examine concepts and theories from sociology and gender studies in order to establish a framework with which to analyze gender inequality in various realms of our cultural environment including the internet, media, film, art, education, health, work and intimate relationships. Gender will not be examined in isolation, but in relation to other inseparable parts of one’s identity such as race, culture, sexual diversity and socioeconomic status.
