What part does gender play in your writing?

"Raised in a matriarchal environment by an iron woman I am profoundly used to feminine interference, feminine tastes." (Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey).

A man is always a momma's boy. You could say men only start wars because their mothers aren't there to smack them across the back of the head and make them go to bed early. When it comes to deciding the best course of action in my work my mother's voice is always loud and clear, trying to make my intoxicating tangents capitulate. Although my mother has never been particularly imaginative or creative, she has never erred in her propensity for pragmatism. Coupled with my father's reticent poetic spark, my identity as a writer is torn between the goal-oriented aspect and the creative indulgences.

Having a mother with masculine undertones and a father with feminine undertones has affected how I perceive the sexes in my writing, and for this I am eternally grateful to my parents for their respective idiosyncrasies. I am inherently encouraged to challenge gender paradigms; I envision women as the smug heroes and men as the cowering damsels, thus nullifying any notion of rightful association these stereotypes might convey. Either sex is as powerful as its opposite, in both fiction and life.

Recently I have begun to see and be excited by the visceral and philosophical complications inherent within our divisions as gender-centred entities (note: man is always written before woman, unless intentionally otherwise. Why?). I am fuelled by both desire and duty to construct characters who aren't slaves to archaic concepts of gender roles. So, undoubtedly, gender does play a pretty substantial part in my writing. My conscience is a war zone of masculine and feminine ideals, and as such my work is quite often a massacre.