Gender Class
Basic Understanding of Gender
What
is GENDER? Why do we need to discuss and understand it? The first question came
from Ariani Narwastujati, SS, M.Pd., the discussion facilitator to all participants
in Understanding of Gender. The discussion was held by Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta
on 23 March 2013.
Yohanes,
one of the participants tried to highlight the Bible stories, that we must
admit that the men were more dominant than women. It can be read on the stories
of Abraham and Sarah, David and Bathsheba, or Queen Vashti. They were based on
the past traditions. Thus, now the Bible readings must be reconstructed by
understanding the story with the equality perspective between men and women.
"So, gender can be understood as a concept to give new perspective for men
and women equality," he added.
While
Trustha reminded that based on the Bible, eventhough women are still
culture-marginalized, as they were never mentioned in
family geneaology, there were some women playing very important role
such as Mary, Rahab,
Ruth, Deborah, Mary Magdalene dan Esther. In todays
Indonesian context, another
participant, Maria told that girls or women in Adonara, Nusa Tenggara Timur,
studying to other islands were mocked, because the local people assumed that
women did not need to have higher study. Even the local custom treats women
to have meal after all men in every banquets.
Gender
understanding is often associated with sex (male or female), whereas gender is
different from sex. Etymologically, 'gender' is derived from the English
language meaning 'sex' (John M. Echols and Hassan Shadily, 1983: 265). Long
process of gender discriminations between men and women happen and they are constructed by social-cultural and religious conditions. Because
of its long process,
gender is often considered as God’s destiny or cannot biologically changed.
Furthermore, the social and cultural constructions, values, mental, emotions and other factors are used to
distinguish men and women. It may be found in such
conventions that women are restricted to laugh loudly, to go out at
night, or pink color belongs
only to women, only women are for domestic
work,
and women should absolutely obey men.
Through
gender discussions, participants learned about gender and understand the distinction between
men and women based on social construction what exactly causes gender
inequality in society. ***
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