Warren J. Blumenfeld
Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Iowa State University
A Call to Rewrite the Scripts in the Gender Drama
Posted: 05/09/2012 12:03 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-j-blumenfeld/a-call-to-rewrite-the-scr_b_1500966.htmlRev. Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church of Fayetteville, North Carolina loudly and vehemently lectured during his Sunday sermon (April 29, 2012) that parents must enforce strict gender role behaviors, their duty before God, on their children.
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Though he later retracted and apologized for the tenor of his arguments, he reiterated his basic premise "that parents have a responsibility to maintain the gender distinction that God created in them." This, he said, is a message for which he will never apologize.
Though extreme in his language and tone, Harris promotes what most of us have been very consciously and carefully taught throughout our lives. Gender roles (sometimes called sex roles) include the set of socially-defined roles and behaviors assigned to the sex we are assigned at birth. This can and does vary from culture to culture. Our society recognizes basically two distinct gender roles. One is the "masculine," having the qualities and characteristics attributed to males. The other is the "feminine," having the qualities and characteristics attributed to females. A third gender role, rarely condoned in our society, at least for those assigned "male" at birth, is "androgyny" combining assumed male (andro) and female (gyne) qualities.
