believe that advertising plays a huge part in regard to the enforcement of gender roles

Assignment 4: Online Discussions Submission (10% total)

Please collect and submit your 3 completed Assignment 4 discussions here.

Online Discussion 1: Family (10 marks)

This is the first of three online discussions that you are required to complete. There are two tasks in each web discussion and you must complete both tasks to get full discussion marks. All three of your discussions will count for 10% of your overall course grade and will be awarded at the end of the course. In both parts, provide evidence and reasons to support your position.

1. From your learning journal, review your answer to Activity 2 under Topic 1 in this unit (Me in Context: An Autobiography). Then have a few conversations with friends and relatives on the importance of family in their lives and on how people define family. Post a comment (around 400 words) answering the following questions: In what way did you find that people in your community define family? Does family have a big role in people’s lives? In what way and why?

2. Respond to one of the comments posted by another student (no more than 200 words). Do you agree with their comment? Are there points of convergence and points of divergence between your opinion and the one expressed in this peer’s posting? What are they? If there is no posting for you to comment on right away, keep checking back right up until you finish the course.

Peer Posting

Online Discussion 1: Family

by Haoyuan – Friday, 27 December 2019, 7:00 PM

          In my community, there are varying definitions of family, but the common thread is that every person noted family as important. Therefore, while no two people provided synonymous definitions of family, they agreed that family plays a big role in their lives. In the first chapter of the course textbook, Mitchell (2017) explains that the definition of family is both a social and political construction. There are many different ways to define a family, but a person’s definition will largely be influenced by their agents of socialization (Mitchell, 2017). Moreover, the sociological imagination provides a basis for studying families. The sociological imagination, a concept developed by sociologist C. Wright Mills, is an individual’s ability to separate from the situation at hand and to see social interactions and influences (Mitchell, 2017). The sociological imagination provides us with a means to examine families with recognition for historical and biological contexts. When I consider that each person in my community gave me different inputs regarding their definition of family, it makes sense within the context of what I learned in this unit about the social and political construction of family.

          Another interesting facet of learning that came from my conversations with friends and relatives is the emphasis on family function over structure. There were a variety of family structures mentioned during the course of these conversations. Some families had a biological mother and father, other families had a single parent, while some families had step-parents, two parents of the same gender, or grandparents and aunts/uncles filling parental roles. There was no uniform structure identified throughout my conversations. However, there were certain key themes that emerged about the function of families. Some of the words used to describe the function of families include: love, support, trust, rely, safety, and acceptance. It is these functionalities that the family unit serves that are valued rather than the structural composition of family members. This is an important understanding for me as I move forward in this course. My perception of what comprises a family has been greatly broadened and I see how the value in families is very much about the support they provide for each member.

Reference

Mitchell, B.A. (2017). Family matters: An introduction to family sociology in Canada (3rd ed.). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars Press.

Online Discussion 2—Family Diversity (10 marks)

This is the second of three online discussions that you are required to complete. There are two tasks in each web discussion and you must complete both tasks to get full discussion marks. All three of your discussions will count for 10% of your overall course grade and will be awarded at the end of the course. In both parts, provide evidence and reasons to support your position.

1. Review the reflexive activities in your learning journal for this unit (on social location, masculinity/femininity, diversity of generational friendship, non-heterosexuality, and accessibility). Post a comment (around 400 words) where you discuss what you learned in this unit about family diversity in Canada and how this relates to your own sense of identity and belonging. Is there anything that jumps out for you in what you learned on how the family lives of minorities are impacted by dominant societal and cultural expectations? You can focus your posting on one specific example.

2. Respond to one of the comments posted by another student (no more than 200 words). Do you agree with their comment? Are there points of convergence and points of divergence between your opinion and the one expressed in this peer’s posting? What are they? If there is no posting for you to comment on right away, keep checking back right up until the end of the course.

Peer Posting

Online Discussion 2

by Ruoqi – Thursday, 19 September 2019, 5:09 PM

          The dominant expectations of society have put forth the idea that certain families are normal or preferable. This puts all other families outside of the preferred norm, resulting in discrimination and negative impacts. When I was going through the learning activities of this unit, I realized that we have many non-discrimination laws, which are important. But the problem really starts before discrimination. What I mean is that the problem is with our thought process in the first place, seeing one type of family as “normal.” If we really want to make a change for the better in society, then we have to start with the way that we think.

          One type of dominance that we learned about in this unit is heteronormativity. This suggests that families comprised of a man, woman, and children are the preferable model. This excludes families with parents who are homosexual or transgender. What is problematic is not only the obvious discrimination, but also the fact that so many social institutions are founded on this false narrative. For example, I mentioned in my assignment for this unit that activities such as a Mommy & Me yoga class can be discriminatory because it assumes that there is a mother in the home. What about families with two fathers? Anytime that we single out one type of parent – father or mother – then we are eliminating families do not have these two specific roles. This heteronormativity can be very harmful to LGBTQ families, with our textbook author even stating that children of LGBTQ families have higher rates of depression and struggle more with self-esteem (Mitchell, 2017).

          I think another way that the dominant expectations of society can be harmful to families is the lack of consideration for parents or children with disabilities. After reading the assigned selections for this module, I decided to be more aware of the places that I normally go, seeing how accessible they are for a disabled individual. What I found is that many places comply with the law, but they do the bare minimum. There are wheelchair ramps that would be hard for a person to navigate or narrow corridors that barely allow enough room. Because buildings are constructed with walking people in mind, there is a disregard for how to make the building not only accessible, but preferable for someone in a wheelchair. This is just one type of disability, but there are countless more that I think are neglected or disregarded by dominant society. Overall, I think that there is too little consideration or thought for families that are outside the dominant model. Not only does this create discrimination, but it also deprives all of us from truly embracing each other and learning from one another.

Reference

Mitchell, B.A. (2017). Family matters: An introduction to family sociology in Canada (3rd ed.). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars Press.

Online Discussion 3: Gender Roles (10 marks)

In this course, there are three mandatory online discussions that you are required to complete. This is the third of three. There are two tasks in each web the discussion and you must complete both tasks to get full discussion marks. All three of your discussions will count for 10% of your overall course grade and will be awarded at the end of the course. In both parts, provide evidence and reasons to support your position.

1. Review the activities in your learning journal for this unit (on personal labour market attachment, domestic labour audit, screening prime time television, critical analysis of advertisement, analysis of personal consumption). Post a comment (around 400 words) where you discuss one specific way in which gender roles structure our lives (for example, in job choices, the effects of certain patterns of consumption, or the impact of cultural expectations of female beauty, but this list is not exhaustive). Focus your posting on one specific example and add evidence of the statements you make about social patterns.

2. Respond to one of the comments posted by another student (no more than 200 words). Do you agree with their comment? Are there points of convergence and points of divergence between your opinion and the one expressed in this peer’s posting? What are they? If there is no posting for you to comment on right away, keep checking back right up until the end of the course.

When you have completed this third part of Assitnment 4, compile your disucssion posts into a Word document and submit to your Open Learning Faculty Member using this submission tool.

Peer Posting

Online Discussion #3: Gender Roles

by Madison – Friday, 15 November 2019, 6:54 PM

I believe that advertising plays a huge part in regard to the enforcement of gender roles. Many commercials and advertisements both consciously and subconsciously tell us how we should be living our lives, what products we should be buying, etc. As a female, I notice that products geared towards women (especially cosmetics) will consistently feature starving models dramatically flaunting their good looks while speaking highly of a product which supposedly helped them obtain their dazzling complexion, flowing hair, etc, when in reality these models have never even touched the product. To me, this seems like an extremely manipulative method of gaining clientele, as it essentially preys on the insecurity and desires of women, and uses unattainable standards of beauty as a way to get people to buy their products. Using this method of advertising tells us that women should look and act a certain way, that we should all look like models who never have acne or bad hair days. I think I speak for all of us when I say that’s not how it works. I see these commercials every day, and many of them seem to get increasingly ridiculous and unattainable, which is disappointing considering the efforts of many other companies to be more inclusive to the general population, such as Gillette and Dove.

Gender roles are not only restricted to advertising, however. Gender roles can take form is basically anything, including education and career paths. Coming from a family of engineers, I definitely explored the possibility of becoming an engineer when I was applying to universities, however, I soon found myself feeling like an outcast when touring engineering buildings at various universities around BC. Engineering is a notoriously male-dominated field, and unfortunately, this played a large part in why I decided to enter the humanities, which from my experience is a much more balanced field when it comes to gender. To feel like you don’t belong somewhere because of gender is not a fun thing, and it while it may seem extreme to avoid a certain university degree because of it, I couldn’t help but feel that I would have been an outcast amongst my (primarily male) engineering peers, not something that I desired for my “university experience”. I believe that gender roles are forced on us from the day we’re born until the end of our life. To undo all of this psychological conditioning would no doubt take a long time and a lot of hard work, however, we need to focus more in inclusivity and becoming a society which encourages self-expression and the freedom to be who we are.

(For those of you who don’t enjoy the falsity of advertising, please enjoy this!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTfS0nAgfuE