ANTH 0780 Exam 2

Sex

• The physical characteristics that traditionally distinguish males from females

• Ex. body shape, distribution of body hair, reproductive organs, sex chromosomes

Gender

• The culturally constructed roles assigned to males or females

• Vary considerably from society to society

• Femininity and masculinity

• Gender is not just something we are or have, but something that we produce through repeated performances of feminine or masculine actions

• Becoming gendered is a process

• Masculinities and femininities are defined in relation to one another

• Thinking of gender as what we do

  • Not fixed and natural

  • Individuals are considered as active agents, not passive

  • Possibility to improvise, challenge, or reject gender norms

biological essentialism

• Explaining someone's interests, attitudes, or behaviors through some aspect of their biology (their sex, their genetic make up, etc.)

gender performance

• Judith Butler (1990)

• Gender as a set of performative actions that people learn and attempt to recreate through actions and presentation

• Parody, repetition, citation

• Gender as a set of performative action

• Initiating change

• Performative: something that not only describes reality but also acts it (makes it real)

femininity

the culturally constructed set of roles, behaviors, expressions, and values attached to women, girls, and female-bodied individuals within a specific society, rather than a fixed biological essence

hegemonic masculinity

• Top of the hierarchy

• Hegemonic: cultural dynamics through which a group claims and sustains a dominant position in society

• Cultural ideal of manhood, ideal set of traits, often embodied by fantasy figures

Complicit masculinity

• Men who benefit from hegemonic masculinity but do not enact it

• Don't fit the stereotypes, but don’t challenge it either

subordinated masculinity

Men who are oppressed by definitions of hegemonic masculinity

marginalized masculinity

• Men who are positioned powerfully in terms of gender but not class or race

intersectionality

an analytical framework that studies how overlapping social identities—such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability—interact to create complex, interdependent systems of discrimination or privilege

the 5 sexes

• The state and legal system are built around a two-party sexual system “in defiance of nature”

• No that this is constructed based on the natural world, but in opposition to what actually exists

• Genetic variance allows for biological individuals who are both male and female

• The Five Sexes:

  • Herms

    • True hermaphrodites

    • People who possess one testis and one ovary

  • Merms

    • Male pseudohermaphrodites

    • People who have testes and some aspects of the female genitalia but no ovaries

  • Ferms

    • Female pseudohermaphrodites

    • People who have ovaries and some aspects of the male genitalia but lack testes

intersex

an umbrella term for individuals born with sex traits—such as chromosomes, hormones, gonads, or genitals—that do not fit typical definitions of strictly male or female bodies

biopower

• The regulation by political, medical, and other authorities of life processes themselves

• It’s about optimizing and disciplining bodies and individuals to make them more productive members of society, to make them fit in

• Exercising this power relies on the knowledge developed by biologists and medical professionals

  • Developed in biochemistry, embryology, endocrinology, psychology, and surgery has enabled physicians to control the sex of the human body

kinship

• How people conceptualize their relationships with others and their own identity

• Helps people manage and address human interdependence – birth, child-rearing, emotional support, generational ties, illness, dying, death

• An imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation

• Relationship between nature and culture

• Kinship is “an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation”

bilateral/cognatic descent

• descent is traced through both sexes, mother and father

• Kinship traced through both men and women

• Generally done automatically and symmetrically

• Prevalent in modes of production where there is an advantage to focusing on nuclear family as a productive unit and/or there is an advantage in having many collateral relatives

• Produces many relatives

matrilineal descent

• 15% of all cultures 

• Kinship traced through female line

• Women control land and products

• Found globally, especially Pacific, Australia, parts of Mediterranean

patrilineal or agnatic descent

• Unilineal descent through men

• Individuals join the father’s group automatically at birth and stay members throughout life

• 44% of all cultures, much more common than matrilineal

• Found in East and South Asia and Middle East

consanguineal

“blood” relatives

affinal

relatives by marriage

American kinship

• Order of nature: related by blood

• Dictated by sharing some natural, genetic substance

• Unalterable, fixed at birth

• An enduring, inherent part of our identity

• Order of law: related by marriage

• Produced through legal means

• Can be terminated

• Bilateral or cognatic descent

kinship in north India

• Women remain part of their own patrilineage

• Consider their true home to be with their father, their real kin = their siblings and sibling’s spouses

• Derived identities from father, and remain dependent on legal, moral, econ support of her fathers/brothers

  • Generally leave their family to go join their husband’s household, contributing their labor to that household

  • Live with mother-in-laws, are low status

  • Maintain connections/support with birth family, often demonstrated through trips home, gifts

  • Divorce: women return to their father’s home

  • Any children remain with father and father’s kin group

• Sons

  • Stay in the house they grew up in

  • Bring wives to live there

  • Children are part of their kin group

infertility treatment and kinship

• Kinship is “an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation”

• New reproductive technology

  • In vitro fertilization

  • Donor eggs

  • Donor sperm

  • Surrogacy

sperm banks

• Sperm banks as a social formation

  • Commodity capitalism

    • Need to pay for everything: access to donor profiles, sperm

    • Paying for a donor somehow similar to the parent

    • health/genetic screening

    • Anonymity and absence of legal claim on child

    • Reinforces the extension of commodification into ever more realism of life: if you have money, you can buy anything

commodity capitalism

• Need to pay for everything: access to donor profiles, sperm

• Paying for a donor somehow similar to the parent

• health/genetic screening

• Anonymity and absence of legal claim on child

• Reinforces the extension of commodification into ever more realism of life: if you have money, you can buy anything

genetical essentialism

• Belief that human abilities, behavior, and identity are reducible to/dictated by genetic inheritance

• Apparent in tools for sorting donors

  • Skin tone, eye color, hair texture, blood type, weight, height

  • Education level, college major, religion, level of religious observance, astrological sign

stratified reproduction

Structural inequities empower some people to reproduce while disempowering others

eugenics

• Projects aimed to improve the population through the control of reproduction

• Negative: prevention of reproduction

• Positive: enabling reproduction

• Sperm banks encourage people to perceive others in terms of hierarchies and to believe that these hierarchical positions are transmitted through sperm/gametes

• Folk beliefs/popular eugenics (beliefs in the heritability of things like MBA degrees, hobbies, tastes) are encouraged through the free market

linguistic anthrpology

• Study of how language influences social life

• Language is a system of arbitrary symbols humans use to communicate their experiences

• Sets humans apart from other animals

• Possessed by all human societies

• Set of socially embedded practices – tied to the culture in which it is produced

language ideology

• Attitudes, opinions, beliefs, or theories that we all have about language

• We may or may not be aware of them

• Can be about language as whole

• Can be ideas about particular languages

• Can be ideas about people who employ specific languages or usages

• Ex. Fancy Nancy is written with a lot of language ideologies

• Characteristics

  • Almost always serve the interests of a specific social or cultural group

  • There are always multiple language ideologies in a given society

  • People may not be aware of their own language ideologies

language socialization

the dual process of learning a language while simultaneously acquiring the cultural values, norms, and communicative competencies needed to join a social group

• The process of acquiring a language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of society

• The process of becoming a competent member of society is realized to a large extent through language

• Starts in infancy but continues throughout the lifespan

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

proposes that the structure of a language influences or determines how its speakers perceive and think about the world

• Strong version: language determines thought, the particular language you speak rigidly structures your thought in an inescapable manner

• Language has the power to control how you see the world

linguistic relativity

people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently from one another

linguistic determinism

• the language we use determines the way we view and think about the world around us

phatic communion

• Talk whose function is the establishment of social bonds or building rapport

• As performed via alignment and adequation

backchannel

• An indirect line of communication or cues a speaker makes to signal continued attention to the channel of communication 

adequation

• Interactants positioning themselves as “sufficiently similar”

• not the erasure of all differences, but rather the highlighting of shared traits to claim

alignment

• A participant takes up a congruent or “harmonious” position with another through verbal or nonverbal cues

discourse analysis

• Critical discourse analysis

  • Interrogates the relationship of social power dynamics through language use

• Conversation analysis

  • Focused on patterns of interaction, both verbal and nonverbal

white public space

mock Spanish

• Borrowing Spanish words, using them “humorously” in phrases like hasta la vista or adding “Spanish” modifiers to words like “el cheap-o”

• Uses bad grammar

• Often uses foul language

• Sends and relies on racist images of Spanish-speaking populations: turns ordinary Spanish words into pejorative ones

covert racist discourse

vulgar racist discourse

direct indexicality

• The intentional, overt, and commonsensical aspects of language use

  • Mock Spanish: expressly indicates that the person using it is cosmopolitan, funny, or has a regional identity

indirect indexicality

• Systematic but covert and often counter-intuitive aspects of language

• Racism of Mock Spanish is never acknowledged by speakers

• Racism is not on the surface

race

racial essentialism

naturalizing discourse

Native American DNA

lineal descendancy

tribal blood

blood quantum

Ancestry Informative Markers

Human Genome Project

Sickle cell disorder

Malaria

Gender essentialism

• viewing biological differences as the basis for gender distinction is essentializing

  • Ex. Gender reveal parties

  • People have drawn on a variety of physical or biological attributes or mechanisms to essentialize or naturalize differences between men and women.

  • Sex roles, gender divisions of labor, inequalities of power, have all been argued to be biologically determined (and therefore permanent, unchallengeable).