GSST Exam 1

Judith Lorber, “The Social Construction of Gender,” from Paradoxes of Gender (1994)

Gender is a verb rather than a noun

woman is "the night to his day"

dismantling the idea that gender is essential and is rather a social construct

BIG ISSUES: sex vs gender

Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Pink and Blue Forever,” and “The Dynamics of Pink and Blue,”from Sex/Gender:  Biology in a Social World (2012)

pink and blue are super arbitrary -> used to be the opposite

reinforces how gender is a social construct

preferences for color could be that we are comforted by them

men could be adverse to pink rather than liking blue

How much gender are we performing unconsciously?

BIG ISSUE: sex vs gender, misogynist tradition

Riki Wilchins, “It’s Your Gender, Stupid,” from Genderqueer:  Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary (2002)

Gender binary forms a hierarchy

Punishments for not performing gender correctly

People are performing gender all the time

Big issues: sex vs gender, "A" and "Not A"

Christine de Pizan, from The Book of the City of Ladies (1405)

"men being afraid of women" misogyny

misogyny is passed down and sometimes internalized

works at the cultural level

lots of internalized misogyny and tells a story of a fake city ran by famous women

idea of larger in life women in literature that is the opposite of reality -> trying to hide something

BIG ISSUES: the misogynist intellectual tradition, internalized misogyny, women and complicity

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Address to the Seneca Falls Convention" and "Declaration of Sentiments" (1848)

Argues about how men are not better than women in any capacity

thinks men should be held to the same purity standard as women -> this doesn't address the larger problem

God as evidence on both sides of the argument

uses race and class assumptions and is kind of making it a white women's only movement

"ignorant foreigners and silly boys fully recognized"

big issues: Chasity and purity, the double standard

Rosa Luxemburg, "Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle" (1912)

Advocating for suffrage

Establishes the upper class as the "enemy" and calls out upper class women for being complicit in discrimination

Women are involved in politics and help advance the proletariat movement -> deserve to vote

Class concern rather than women's concern

BIG ISSUE: race, class differences, suffrage

Ida B. Wells, "Southern Horrors" (1892)

Lynching= white men punishing black men for raping white women

break apart the idea that this is justified

lynchings are an effort to protect white women from black men

"that is the only successful method of deal thing with a certain class of crimes"

lynchings for non-crimes exceeds the lynchings for those crimes

it's just racism

BIG ISSUE: race, class differences, women's purity

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (1929)

Women need money, education, and their own room to write fiction

thinks income is more important than suffrage

material conditions shape what they're able to do

lack of access to jobs that pay well and laws dont allow them to inherit wealth

shifts blame from individuals to the system

BIG ISSUES: women and education, misogynist intellectual tradition, economic autonomy

Simone de Beauvoir, introduction to The Second Sex (1949)

Existentialist philosopher, which was traditionally a masculine field

pieces together many disciplines

"existence precedes essence"

Talks about the difference between gender and sex

man is the default/universal

Women are complicit in being submissive because they don't have to deal with "real world problems" and actually enjoy it -> not entirely being fair

BIG ISSUES: women and complicity, man as mind and woman as body, "A" and "Not A"

Gender essentialism

the idea that men and women have inherent, unique, and natural attributes that qualify them as their separate genders

critiqued by the idea of gender being a social construct

denaturalization

tool of feminist critique to say that gender is not natural, it's a social construct

this can be applied to other movements!