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Cool for you is a book about an Irish-American girl and her progress while growing up in the working class while living in Boston, Massachusetts. She is a young Catholic girl who attends Catholic school where she feels students get treated unfairly due to their class. She is a tomboy heroin addict who has many family issues. She encountered sexual activities at an early age and had many different jobs. Throughout the course of the novel she states how she wants to be an astronaut but instead she becomes a poet. All through the novel Eileen discusses her female experiences and what it’s like to be a female in today’s world, while illustrating her female experience through fifty years of being a female.
What is gender? According to the University of Texas in El Paso Texas it means “The socially-constructed concepts of masculinity and femininity; the “appropriate” qualities or characteristics that are expected to accompany each biological sex.” http://admin.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=43916. Gender is consistently being re-created and comes in only two forms; masculine or feminine and the two sex categories are male and female. There is an invisible lien between gender and the two sex categories.” Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced.”(Lorber, 335) Such as, being a transvestite or a transsexual. A transvestite is someone who changes their gender from male to female or vice versa by the way they dress. A transsexual is someone who gets a sex change due to surgery.”People are believed to be unable to change genders without sex change surgery, and those who do change sex are considered to be both disturbed and exceedingly rare.”(Devor, 141) Aaron Devor stated that “Learning to behave in accordance with one’s gender identity is a lifelong process.”(Devor, 140)
“For the individual, gender construction...