Chapter 2 - Understanding Sociology and Gender

Accountability

the ways in which we gear our actions with attention to our specific circumstances so that others will correctly recognize our actions for what they are

Accounts

the descriptions we engage in as social actors to explain to each other the state of affairs, or what we think is going on

Allocation

in doing-gender theory, the way decisions get made about who does what, who gets what, and who does not, who gets to make plans, and who gets to give orders or take them

Backlash

a strong and adverse reaction by a large number of people to a political development

Breach

a social experimental method used by ethnomethodologists that disrupts normal social interactional rules to reveal the taken-for-granted norms of our everyday lives

Complicit masculinity

men who do not perfectly conform to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity but still receive the benefits of patriarchy; this category includes most men

Confirmation bias

the tendency to look for information that confirms one's preexisting beliefs while ignoring information that contradicts those beliefs

Consciousness-raising

activities that seek to help women see the connection between their personal experiences with gender exploitation and the politics and structure of society

Ethnomethodology

a subfield in sociology concerned with the taken-for-granted assumptions of social interaction

Expressive

a role oriented toward interactions with other people

Fundamental attribution error

the tendency to explain behavior by invoking personal dispositions while ignoring the roles of social structure and context

Gender identity

one's internal sense of one's gender

Gendered organization

a social aggregate in which "advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine" (Acker, 1990, p. 146).

Hegemonic masculinity

educational institutions that legitimize the dominant culture and marginalize or reject other cultures and forms of knowledge

Ideal worker norm

the set of expectations attached to employees emerging from the organizational logic of the workplace; generally, these expectations assume a male employee whose life is centered on his job and who has a wife or some other woman to take care of his own needs as well as those of any family he might have

Individual approach

a perspective that locates gender inside individuals and assumes that gender works from the inside out

Institutional approaches

gender theories that draw attention to the way in which large-scale organizations and institutions in society help to create and reinforce gender

Instrumental

goal and task oriented

Interactionist approaches

gender theories that posit that gender in created in and through social interactions

Marginalized masculinity

the relations between the masculinities in dominant and subordinated classes or ethnic groups

Matrix of domination

in intersectional theory, the way in which the social structures of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation work with and through each other so that any individual experiences each of these categories differently depending on his or her unique social location

Multiple consciousness

the way of thinking that develops from a person's position at the center of an intersecting and mutually reliant system of oppression

Organizational logic

the taken-for-granted assumptions and practices that underlie an organization and that often have gendered implications

Patriarchal dividend

the advantage to men as a group for maintaining the unequal gender order

Private troubles

those problems we face that have to do with ourselves and our immediate surroundings

Privilege

a set of mostly unearned rewards and benefits that come with a given status in society

Public issues

issues beyond the individual that are located within the larger structures of our societies

Sex categorization

the way we use cues of culturally presumed appearance and behavior to represent physical sex differences that we generally cannot see

Sex roles

the set of expectations attached to one's particular sex category

Size

in social network theory, the number of others to whom someone is linked in a network

Social aggregates

building blocks of society that are composed of individuals but become more than the sum of the individuals within them

Social role

a set of expectations attached to a particular status or position in society

Sociological imagination

the ability to see the connection between one's own life and larger social structures

Studying up

the need to study those at the top of any particular power structure or hierarchy

Subordinated masculinity

men who are at the bottom of the hierarchy of masculinities created by hegemonic masculinity

Transmisgynoir

The ways in which sexism, cissexism, and racism all intersect in the oppression of black trans women and trans women of color more generally