Communion

Describe the gender-specific relationship between men, women and love. How is it different? Why? How does gender socialization contribute to these masculine and feminine roles in relationship to love and relationships in general?

In Communion, Hooks discusses a plethora of sometimes conflicting and contradictory gender roles. Women are "prophetesses," "advisors," wives, homemakers, mothers, nurses, nurturers, and teachers. The differences between gender roles in intimate heterosexual relationships can be traced to social construction, social learning, and socialization. When the woman becomes the primary earner in a household, she subverts traditional gender norms and roles. Resentment might build within the man, who has no way of navigating his own role within the newly constructed and unconventional relationship. Hooks points out that males ascribing to traditional gender roles in relationships see themselves as patriarch; and that "power, not love" defines his role in the family (18).

Women are socialized to be supreme...
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