Aspects of the question you may consider include:

Which of the ways in which you acquired gender were explicit (or conscious), and which were implicit (or unconscious)?
Who were the different people or institutions involved in your learning of gender?
Did this learning involved tensions (for example, disagreements in your social environment about what it means to be masculine or feminine), and if so how did you negotiate these tensions?
Are you still learning gender at the age of 20 or so?
Are there ways of doing gender (that is, ways of being “a man” or “a woman”) that you would now like to unlearn? If so, why?

Category: Essays