What is gender?

Simply cannot wait to get into the details of this course. Even there is no required reading for first week, I still have something prepared to talk about, I will first express my views about gender.

What is gender and what is sex? According to WHO, "Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women. That means if your genetic makeup is XX or XY. (Not being totally ignorant, I do recognize there are XXY, XYY and other combinations as well) While the meaning of gender is so much different. "Gender" on the other hand refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. That is when we are talking about if someone is feminine or masculine, this is related to gender.

I would like to start talking about a topic called gender advertising. I think some of you may come across with this topic before and it is super interesting to look at it.
Let's take a look at the two commercials by NIKE featuring the two tennis stars:

Maria Sharapova
 

and Roger Federer

What do you find out? Both of them are tennis stars, professional athletes but they are perceived so differently in the commercials. In Sharapova's video, it emphasizes on her beauty, along with the theme song "I feel pretty" This is as an intertextual element referencing to the 1961 movie West Side Story , the song was sang by Maria in the movie. Again, Maria in West Side Story is very feminine. Only towards the very end of the commercial, Sharapova hits the tennis once.

How about in Federer's commercial? Federer is being very confident, active and showing off his tennis skills in the commercial. It shows that he is a strong athlete. The above commercials reinforces the gender roles of female and male perceive in commercials. Female continues to be more passive and concern most about their beauty while male take the challenge and be active.


Sorry for the long entry, I would still like to talk about more before finishing this week. Some of you may have heard of Jean Kilbourne, a feminist author, speaker who is internationally recognized for her work on the image of women in advertising. One of her series called Killing Us Softly

 

She tells us about how advertising can shape our perceptions of females and males. Also on how to be a perfect woman, being thin, pretty, sexy and passive. And we cannot escape from advertising, since advertising is everywhere and it has a great impact on us all. What do you think about this? Do you think you can avoid advertising in daily life?

I have some extra links for you to look at if you are interested in gender advertising:

• Erving Goffman & Gender Advertisements 
• Gender Ads 

Hope you all enjoy my first post, please let me know your thoughts so I can improve over time!