Doing Gender Assignment
For this week’s assignment, you’ll be engaged in experiential learning, which is learning through reflection on doing. Through this week’s experiential learning, you will gain a deeper understanding of West and Zimmerman’s theory of doing gender.
- The first step is to consider carefully your gender as a “routine, methodical, recurring accomplishment.” What constitutes your gender routine or how you do your gender? For every person, this will look differently.
- Once you have a good sense of how you do your gender, isolate one aspect of it and do it differently for 24-48 hours. Interrupting the daily maintenance of norms, including gender norms, is a practice of ethnomethodology.
- As you do your gender differently, note how it feels and how others react to you. Think about the situation(s) in which you are doing your gender differently. How, if at all, does the situation impact the way you are doing your gender?
- Write a 3-5 page (double-spaced) reflection on how you did your gender differently for 24-48 hours and what you learned about gender through this experience. Draw on course material, especially West and Zimmerman, to help with your analysis.
Your paper will be graded based on the depth of reflection, quality of analysis, and creativity/courage displayed.
