Sociocultural CKA 3

Gender vs. Sex

Gender = social construct, cultural/socal, identity, production (money, work, power). Sex = biology, fixed, identity, reproduction

Defining gender

the linguistic index of political opposition between the sexes. Indeed, there are not two genders: there is only the feminine, because masculine is the default

Gender lenses + experiences in schools

There are normative positions of gender by teachers, others in the school, and peers. Students’ understanding of gender is along a continuum of friends, family, media, and culture. Schools can interfere with broadening perspectives of gender by indoctrination disguised as objective curriculum. The complex dimensions of gender presented by each student pose challenges for recognition within and by curriculum. Teachers need to educate themselves about their students and their gender identities and shifting representation of gender in all its grand facets.

History of Gender Reproduction

Western Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism + Subordination of Women

Western Capitalism

Industrial capitalism of the mid-eighteenth century Women primarily depended on men’s income, Domesticity: women were viewed and assigned the role of primary caretaker of the home.

Industrial Capitalism + Subordination of Women

Sexual segregation of jobs, machines, household responsibilities, and unequal political rights. Women’s sexuality became regulated and controlled by men. Gender differences were produced both ideologically and materially. Women and men’s roles and how they expressed them continued to produce and recognize gender through rigid casting and division of labor.

Geddes & Thompson (1889)

Biological determinism. Social, psychological, and behavioral traits were caused by metabolic state. Women = anabolic, which mens passive, conservative, sluggish, stable, and uninterested in politics. Men = catabolic, which means passionate, eager, energetic, and variable, meaning interested in politics. Idea mainly used to justify withholding political rights from women.

Robert Stoller (1968)

“Sex” = biological traits, “gender” = exhibitions of masculinity or femininity. The “dosage” of masculinity or femininity that you exhibit determines your gender.

Gayle Rubin (1975)

Uses the phrase “sex/gender system” in order to describe a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human social intervention. Gender = “the socially imposed division of the sexes.” Biological differences are fixed, but the way they’re interpreted are not. Gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how men and women should behave.

Simone de Beauvoir

Gender = relational, not an individual attribute; a relative point of convergence between cultural and historical sets of relations. Views women as “other;” the second sex, as portrayed by Aristotle and Aquinas. Gender is socialization (TV, family, etc.) where males are the normative and females become women through acquiring feminine traits + behaviors. One is not born but rather becomes a woman.

Nancy Chodorow (1975, 1995)

Socialization is simplistic to explain gender differences. Gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevailing parenting practices, and gender personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers. Mothers are the source of our gendered society, as well as schools with prominently female teachers. Gender personalities can be changed, so both parents should be equally involved to correct this situation.

Luce Irigaray

“Masculine” = subject of a closed phallogocentric economy that excludes feminine altogether (a society that privileges masculine viewpoints and language as the center of meaning and truth). Women = the unrepresentable: a paradox and contradiction within the discourse of identity. Women are the sex which is not one but multiple. Female eludes the very requirements of representation for she is neither “other” nor the “lack.” Women = commodities between men; exchange value determined by society (mother, virgin, and prostitute)

Catherine MacKinnon (1989)

The social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women; women seen + treated as objects to satisfy men’s desires. Masculinity = sexual dominance, femininity = sexual submissiveness. Gender is created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. Gender is constitutively constructed: in considering gender we have to consider the position one occupies in the sexualized dominance/submission dynamics. Gender is a function of sexuality that is hierarchical in patriarchal societies.

Elizabeth Spelman (1988)

Gender is not constructed independently of race, class, and ethnicity. All women do not experience womanhood the same way (“golden nugget of womanness” doesn’t exist). White middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as a “metaphysical truth” thereby privileging some women while marginalizing others. Challenges Betty Friedan’s (1963) view that domesticity was the main vehicle for gender oppression. Notes that such an assertion fails to acknowledge women from less privileged backgrounds (often poor, non-white).

Schooling and Gender Transformation

Schools are a source of cultural capital, employment, and social mobility, but they are also conservative institutions that reflect the values and roles of a patriarchal society. Schooling is organized in gendered ways, having different impacts on girls vs. boys and facilitating differential gender participation in society.

Gender Differences for Ed Outcomes

Female students hold a significant advantage in high school graduation and college attendance, present across racial/ethnic groups (but still greater in size among Black and Hispanic youth than White). Men gain more advantages in the postsecondary scene; overrepresented at elite schools and STEM fields. Gendered postsecondary patterns are best explained by theories of gender essentialism. Women’s access to college is encouraged within modern industrial societies while men retain their high social status via overrepresentation in the most elite schools and majors.

Queer Theorization

Analytical frameworks that disrupt normative binary views of gender and sexuality by examining how cultural, historical, and media texts produce normalcy and deviances such as (LGBTQIA+) 

Sexuality

A historical way of perceiving, categorizing, and imagining the social relations of the sexes that privileges one sexual behavior as normal and natural and other behaviors as abnormal

Heterosexual

A word and concept, a norm and role, an individual and group identity. The idea is a modern invention, dating to the late 19th century. From 1820-1860, the word “heterosexual” did not exist. Past societies and other people named, perceived, and socially organized bodies, lusts, and intercourse of the sexes in ways radically different from the way we do.

Early Victorian True Love/Late Victorian Sex-Love

Fine, pure romance. True women were defined by their distance from lust. People of this era were procreators. Legitimate natural desire was for procreation and proper “manhood” or “womanhood.” Procreation + production > pleasure. / German Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in 1862.

Reasons for Heterosexual Hegemony

1/ Society progressed from Producers to Consumers. 2/ Medical Interpretations. 3/ Early Sexologists and Medical Dictionaries. 4/ The cult of domesticity post-WWII. 5/ Post-WWII Media and Institutions. 6/ Conservative Mental Health Professionals.

“Space” is…

Physical, political, symbolic, and ideological. Symbolizes exercise of power and marking of territory. Defines and shapes power, identity, and position. Creates power asymmetries by confining and controlling marginalized groups.

Edward Soja (1996, 2009)

Conceptualizes “space” as a social construct that is inseparable from social life and justice. Perceived measurable space is locational and material spatiality. Imagined conceptualized space is the mental aspects of space; how we think about and represent space through maps, plans, and ideas

Henry Lefebvre (1974, 1991)

Space is not a neutral container, but a social product that is constantly produced and reproduced through social relations, power dynamics, and economic structures. Commodification of space: a commodity and means of production. Every person has a right to shape the city but people with power and capital usually dictate city sociology and culture.

Lesley Mazer and Katherine Rankin (2011)

Space is both social and symbolic. Constitutes collective use of values, feeling of security or insecurity, inclusion and exclusion, symbols of neighborhood identity. Discuss the subtle, non-physical ways that gentrification displaces residents. Changes in neighborhood’s “social space” can make long-term residents feel unwelcome and marginalized.

“Spatial Trustees” & Territories Markings

Dominant groups position themselves as “spatial trustees”: some space occupants snitch on who is in, who is out, and who is doing what? Realtors; real estate developers; community leaders; home associations. Use of social, economic, and political tools to draw and redraw territories and boundaries (keep people from social services and institutions, use of surveillance strategies and tech, and space laws like barriers and fences).

Judith Butler

Normativity argument: women do not share a single golden nugget of womanhood. Multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of women are constructed. Should be careful about “shared femininity”— “woman” implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman. But gender is not static: set of acts that can evolve over time. The definition of “woman” becomes fixed and operates as a policing force which generates + legitimizes certain practices + experiences. Need to historicize the concept “woman.”