SOCI 270 Sociology of Gender

January 6 - Introduction 

• Attendance only on guest speaker days and zoom sessions 

• Midterm - 30 multiple choice and true and false questions in the classroom, review session on the 24th 

Gender in sociology 

• Is understood as a set of ideas that are socially constructed 

• Social differences ascribed to biological sex (more diverse than primarily binary social script) 

• Learned through social interaction 

  • Would there be gender without social interaction 

• About power and social order 

• Intimately connected to politics 

Ideas about what gender is are contested 

• Often doesn't translate well and reflects ideas formulated in English 

• Regularly used as a stand in for biological sex, and binary terms and thinking are still prevalent even though gender is not considered to be based on “essential” nature 

• If we learn gender via dominant social scripts, why do some of us not follow them?

• The idea that gender is socially constructed can be seen as undermining certain right claims 

Talking about gender as 

• A function of socialization and/or as identity (not necessarily mutually exclusive) 

• As identity, as a continuum 

• Assuming that any discussion of masculinity or femininity are also references to socially created categories - these are gender related ideas 

Sociology of gender 

• Definition : the critical analysis of gendered meanings that are otherwise assumed to be natural or neutral 

• New, not everywhere 

• Brought into academia from activism, social movement first 

• Both the object of study and the analyst are gendered 

• A site of perpetual contestation - the development of the field is marked by  its capacity to look at its own history critically 

• Inter-disciplinary 

Why theorize gender 

• Gender is complex and imbued with power but still regularly assumed to be simple and natural. This hides all kinds of oppression, limitations, and possibilities 

  • Many people impose ideas about gender unthinkingly and this continues to do damage 

• There is no real possible separation between theory and practice, there is no not theorizing option - there is only not being aware of, or accountable for, unspoken theory at work 

• Practice without theory can be 

  • Nihilistic : reflection is a luxury 

  • Relativist : why focus on the concepts and ideas too much when there are many ways of thinking about this issue 

January 8 - Gender, Feminist, and the Academy 

Alway Work 

• Sociology questions “naturalized” explanations - including evolutionary and essentialist 

• Questioning what gender is, the social norms that create gender etc 

• According to sociologists, social existence - existence among other humans - does a lot of the work to make us what we are 

• Sociology also aims to address social problems 

• Sociology excludes feminist and queer theories 

• Alway tries to unpack the lack of engagement of feminist theory 

Studying gender challenges binaries 

• Gender theory challenges the dichotomous categories (sociology and other sciences have tended to use) 

• Binaries make us think in a hierarchy, dominance terms 

• Bell hooks also makes this argument, alway draws on her 

• Embedded at the core of western thought works 

It pokes holes in the “sociological / social science canon”

• The insights of gender theory point to the ways that many sociologists and other social scientists have ignored or not fully understood a significant part of history and social phenomena 

• Studying gender means seeing silences and gaps everywhere in our established knowledge 

• Challenges the training and expertises of the foundational works 

• Gender throy tends to critique the “founding fathers” of sociology - Marx, Weber and Durkheim 

It displaces sociology’s original focus 

• Sociology has traditionally focused on trying to explain different pathways and outcomes of “modernization” or “development” 

• Gender norms as the key issue 

• Thinks that it puts gender theorist outside of its disciplin

• Displaces sociology’s founding problematic (focus) 

Challenging classical texts 

• Marx : critique of capitalism and theory that change is/will be driven by workers (without consideration of gendered unpaid labour) 

  • Built onto by feminist economist 

• Charles Tilly : modernization is about states waging war (mainly actions of men) 

• Barrington Moore : democratization depends on aspects of class struggle between aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, and peasants (but “democratization” means that aristocratic men who own land can participate in gov) 

• Immanuel Wallerstein : modernization was achieved through colonial oppression/globalized exploitation (but no analysis of how this is gendered) 

Gender theory blurs the boundaries of the discipline 

• Sociologists and other social scientists are often skeptical of inter-disciplinary studies or forms of “mixing”

• They are often puritanical in the sense of attempting to keep the discipline “pure”

• Gender theory (esp queer theory) is generally open to ideas of fluidity, blurred or mixed categories 

• Feminist, gender, and queer theory/studies often seek to work across disciplines (critiquing the academy’s traditional boundaries that are often about self-justification) 

It has (at times) taken an anti-academy position 

• Causing hostility to gender theory 

• Marginality, to some extent, has been a strategy of gender theorists 

  • Part of the “ethos” of gendre studies is to remain with regular people and grounded in the world 

  • It has sometimes had an anti-ivory tower perspective 

  • Sometimes this is how clarity and critique forms - from seeing from “outside” and not being co-opted into the inner circle or a dominant position 

It is politically committed 

• The “classical” idea of “objectivity” argues that you cannot be politically committed and be a good “scientist” to produce reliable knowledge, you have to be disinterested or dispassionate 

• Sandra harding has called this the view from nowhere 

  • They dont really have a social position 

• Feminist and gender theroist argue this type of objectivity is both not necessary and not possible 

What has gender theory offered to sociology 

• Feminist scholarship has reduced reliance on and acceptance of male experiences and perspectives, added to existing knowledge about social institutions and processes, introduced new topics and concepts, redirected inquiry about previously overlooked areas of social life ,and helped forge and maintain interdisciplinary linkages within the field of sociology 

• The effort to theorize more adequately the interrelationships between levels and categories of social reality (there is no micro vs macro analysis, public vs private realm) 

• A conceptual shift from either/or to both/and thinking 

  • E.g the personal is political (you cant divide politics from the personal realm) 

  • E.g the oppressor and the oppressed are not necessarily different people / groups (most people dont fit neatly into one category) 

  • E.g bifurcated consciousness vs false or true consciousness ( a marxist concept) (false consciousness is when workers accept the oppression their under as they are lead to believe this is a normal situation, marxist feminist critqiues this as it doesnt afford alot of agency, the privileged theorists can always say when u agree with me u have a liberated consciousness and when u dont agree with me u have a false consciousness, abuse on the side of the theorists, alot of things can happen inside a person at the same time women can use to their advantage even if it is labelled false consciousness) 

Changing treatment of power, resistance, and oppression 

• Power is reconceptualized as personal, inter-personal, omni-present, as is resistance 

• This expands our analysis of power from a unique focus on dominance 

• Introduce new ideas of how power works 

Not struck between objectivism and relativism 

• Reliable or valuable knowledge is understood as not only produced through disinterested or dispassionate approaches and people but also not infinitely relative or particularist (where it becomes impossible to really know anything about the world) 

Standpoint theory 

• Standpoint theory is the idea that all science is embedded in a particular time and place and influenced by politics 

• Standpoint theorists assert that the motivation of the researcher cannot define the quality or objectivity of the research, and that reliable science can be produced by those who have distinct political projects and personal motivations or pursuing the research. 

• All knowledge is situated knowledge (alway) 

• All knowledge is politically committed knowledge (alway) 

• Stereotyped way of looking at knowledge 

Value neutrality, diversity, and strong objectivity 

• Strong objectivity : diversity (applied to various aspects of the research or knowledge development process) can help us “maximize objectivity” - holding objectivity to a higher standard - without references to a “value-free” ideal 

• Diversity (in this usage) means we recognize we cannot see things neutrally and can only mitigate this problem by seeking a range of views, influences, collaborators, critics etc 

Act Up 

• Activist movement during the AIDS crisis for medication 

• Many activists died during their fight 

• Forced phramcula companies and gov to change 

A journey within the study of gender 

• Gender theorists are shifting into a less categorical perspective (away from “women”) 

Queer Theory 

• Challenges the perceived coherence of sex, gender and sexuality 

• Chalelnges the nature of the categories as singular and fixed - people may identify in different ways over time and multiple ways at once, ror not really embrace any of the labels we have so far 

• Challenges the modernist idea that we all have “coherent” selves 

• Engages with ideas of power that relate toz “self-dicipline” or “self policing” based on norms 

The Trouble with Gender: Tales of the Still-Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociological Theory  - Joan Alway 

• In this article, sociological thoery refers to the range of abstract general approaches and competing and complementary schools of thought that exist in the discipline of sociology 

• Social theories develop out of a need to explain and understand something in our social experience 

• Postmodernist social theory has developed as changes in the cultural, political, social, and economic bases of the modern world have called into question the adequacy, assumptions, and implications of long-dominant explanations 

• Feminist theory developed as changes in women’s situations and experiesaaances gave rise to a political movement that challenged prevailing explanations of women’s subordinate position in the social world

  • Seeks to describe and explain women’s experiences and situations in ways that inform efforts to end their subordination 

  • Women centered 

  • Offers explanations about how the social world is structured and critiques of how that world has been studied and understood 

• The impact of feminism on sociology has been far smaller than expected 

• Texts on sociological theory often make no mention of feminism or feminist theory 

• The generalizations of mainstream and feminist social theorist often have failed to account for, an indeed have excluded the experiences of many women 

• Feminism exposes sociology 

• The feminist theory has its origins and base in political movement - that is defined by an overriding political commitment - further taints its scholarly and scientific standing 

  • Political identity makes it convenient for sociologists to deal with its primarily as a social movement and therefore to treat feminist theory as simply the ideology of a social movement 

• Gender upsets a vert basic opposition (of nature and culture) which has informed the discipline’s self understanding. 

  • Requires reassessment of basic sociological categories and distinctions 

  • Displaces the founding and defining, problematic of the discipline 

• The problematic of modernity and the problematic of gender postmodernist, feminist, and sociological theory 

  • Postmodernist theory introduces a new set of social actors and is not clearly aligned with a social movement of the interests of a particular group 

    • Not as easily subsumed, neutralized or dismissed 

    • More often viewed as the viewpoint of the time 

  • Sociology developed as a response to social and intellectual concerns aroused by the economic and political revolutions that created modern capitalist society

    • In its origins and its development - in its central concerns, categories, concepts and methods - sociology has sought to identify the nature, dynamics, problems, limits and possibilities of modernity 

  • Feminist theorist focus on the sig of gender, on the range of gender roles and gender symbolis found in social life, and on how they either maintain social order or promote social change 

  • Direct practical and theoretical attention to the changing, varied and intersecting forms and functions of hierarchy, oppression, difference and invisibility in all dimensions of the social world 

  • The problematic of gender leads away from an exclusive focus on women to a more general concern with structures and practices of social inequality and social life 

  • The discursive center of sociological and postmodernist theory is modernity; the discursive center of feminist theory is gender 

• On common issues / for critical encounters 

  • Four issues 

    • The effort to theroize more adequately the interrelationships between levels of social reality 

    • The treatment of power, resistance, and oppression 

    • Work on effecting a conceptual shift from either/or to both/and thinking 

    • The effort to establish grounds for assessing knowledge claims that avoid the pitfalls of both objectivism and relativism 

  • Defining power in terms of the ability of one person or group to prevail over others through various means focuses sociological attention on the actions of dominants 

• To posit the social as irreducibly heterogeneous is to render this project infeastible. Thus both feminism and sociology face the chalenge of recognizing and respecting individual subjects and differences among subjects and groups, while also developing generalizations that provide a basis for social analysis and critique 

Not Yet Queen Enough : The Lessons of Queer Theory for the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality - Stephen Valocchi 

• The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical directions which involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, and sexuality 

• Four monogrpahs are evaluated in light of the main tenets of queer theory as they have been developed in the past decade 

  • Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor's (2003) Drag Queens at the 801 Caba ret, 

  • Steven Seidman's (2002) Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life, 

  • Julie Bettie's (2003) Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity, 

  • Mimi Schippers's (2000) Rockin 'out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alter native Hard Rock

    • Examples of utilizing key components of a queer perspective in empirical research 

    • Serve as templates for future queer work in the area of gender and sexuality 

• This experience does not invalidate the constructed nature of these categories. It simply attests to the ideological power of categorical thinking and the modernist assumptions of coherent selves 

• A queer analysis challenge this understanding of sexual identity by focusing on the historical constructed and contingent nature of the homosexual/heterosexual binary and the many ways in which individual desires, practices, and affiliations cannot be accurately defined by the sex of object choice 

• Most socioogist understand sexual and gender identities as products of the interaction between structure and agency 

• The gay liberation movement did not eliminate the category homosexual or make sex of object choice an irrelevant or unmarked social characteristic; it reversed the discourse by changing the meaning of the category from sick and deviant to healthy and normal 

• Juidth bulter - identiies are the effect of the repeated performance of certain cultural signs and conventions 

• Gendering sexuality : drag queens at the 801 cabaret 

  • Drage queens perform cultural critique by highlighting the performativity of sexual and gender identities and the constructed natuer of the normative alignments between anatomical sex, gender roles and sexual identity 

January 13 - Sex and Gender 

• Sex and gender are seen as inseparable 

• Leading up to the second wave of the feminist movement, theorist and philosophers began to distinguish gender from sex 

• Second wave feminism 

  • The gendered public / private divide : the idea that many aspects of women’s lives are (or should be seen as) more private than men’s lives

  • Paid work and domestic responsibilities 

  • Reproductive rights 

• Men are allowed to just be the standard human, allowed to valislate and neutrality, women are only particular 

• Men are never just the other as they are allowed an neutral space 

• Can we think of consciousness without competition / battle 

The Second Sex - Simone De Beauvoir 

• Women are defined by the negative 

• Humanity is male 

• Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought 

• Precursor to second wave feminism 

• De Beauvoir used to always be pictured and theorized in the context of her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. They were a couple and were coupled as theorists.

•  in Second Wave feminism, de Beauvoir gained salience in her own right. Her most famous idea is that “women are not born, they are made.” 

• She asserts that men are both particular and neutral or standard, while women are seen as only particular or different.

• De Beauvoir believed that women often participated in making themselves into an ‘object’, or self-objectifying. 

  • This meant conceptualizing oneself as existing to be seen and to be defined by the way men see you, rather than existing to do the seeing and participating in defining what you see. 

  • Critized for not acknowledge the risks of breaking outside social norms (talks about her privileged life like its available to everyone) 

• saw women who were primarily in heterosexual couples, primarily living in nuclear families, and primarily not working in paid employment. 

• saw that women as a group were divided up among men and structurally dependent on them.

• believed this resulted in more challenging solidarity structures and mobilization potential. 

• by the time her memoire comes out in 1958, this seems to be changing

• Class privilege 

• Compared relationship between men and women to slave and slavemaster 

Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideolog - Judith Lober 

• Until the 18th century, people in western societies thought there was only one sex (and that women’s genitalia were the inverse of men’s). 

• From the 18th – 20th centuries, people embraced the ideology of extreme difference between two binary sexes. 

  • (As Maria Mies argues, this coincided with industrialization, the deepening of the gendered division of labour, and the onset of intensive capitalism). 

• Actual human bodies (and their diversity) have not changed. 

• Lorber suggests that continuing to produce knowledge, do research, or make public policy based on socially imagined categories is misleading. 

• She suggests we look for empirical patterns in different types of behaviour and experience and then see if those patterns map onto gender and sex categories (rather than starting with gender and sex categories and looking for similarities within categories and differences between them).

• Lorber argues for a ‘no fixed sex or gender categories’ approach to research and the production of knowledge.

• Biology is ideology 

• Western ideology takes biology as the cause, and behaviour and social statuses as the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the "naturalness" of gendered behavior and gendered social statues 

January 15 - Patriarchy, Power, and Gender Oppression 

• Patriarchy as a system of social leadership, decision-making, and organization

Origins of patrarichy : women as farmers 

• The advent of settled agriculture (an invention attributed to women) was a key moment in the development of a division of labour (earlier hunter-gatherer societies were more gender equal).

• Women were more likely to be agriculturalists and gatherers, due to having an earlier responsibility to provide food for others

• Pastoralism

  •  men tended to look after cattle and they needed weapons to protect their herds. 

  • Learning to make and use weapons made men more powerful. 

  • They then targeted women (who tended to be agriculturalists and gatherers) because they had more fixed assets to steal and less ability to evade attack.

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale - Maria Mies (Sexual Division of Labour) 

• The persecution and burning of the midwives as witches was directly connected to the emergence of modern society; the professionalization of medicine, the rise of medicine as a “natural science”, the rise of science and of modern economy 

• The persecution of the witches was a manifestation of the rising modern society and not as is usually believed a remnant of the irrational dark middle ages 

  • Responsible for abortion, infertility and sexual intercourse without conception 

• The witch trials provided employment and money for a host of lawyers, advocates, judges, councils 

• Critic of marx, marxist feminist 

• Monopoly of arms 

• She then links the modernization process and the drive toward capital accumulation to the further gender division of labour

• Mies sees capitalism as continuing a pre-existing patriarchal pattern – pre-capitalist relations were also patriarchay

• Tries to come up with origins for patriarchy 

• Mens tasks are seen as truly human (more imp), women dont have to put any work in, there is no labour its what women naturally do 

• Invention of housewife and breadwinner relationship is late in history 

• Naturalized every aspect of raising a child that we think it happens on autopliot 

• Super exploitation 

  • People like marx and angles talk about the exploitation of workers (underpaid, pushed to work long hours so someone else can make money off of it) 

  • This exploitation on non wage labourers which then wage labour exploitation is then possible 

The Age of Patriarchy: How an Unfashionable Idea Became a Rallying Cry for Feminism Today - Charlotte Higgins 

January 20 - Gender and Sexuality Diversity 

• Context of rubin’s essay 

  • Expansion of sexual/erotic communities during turn of the century urbanization processes and during the world wars 

  • 1950s post war backlash 

  • 1960s-1970s second wave feminism and the sexual revolution 

  • 1960s-1990s cold war politics linked to “purging” LGBTQ personnel from civil services in western countries 

  • 1980s - a period of reaction to second wave feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s

    • Characterized by a kind of sex panic that created a host of new laws and perspectives 

  • Concerned about the direction of feminist theory 

  • Aruges that certain tools / beliefs are used to justify the oppression of some sexualities (sexual essentialism) 

• LGBTQ purges 

  • LGBTQ gov personnel were cast as social and political subversives and seen as targets for blackmail by communist regimes seeking classified information 

  • Characterizations were justified by arguments that people who engaged in sam-sex relations suffered from a character weakness and had something to hide because of their sexuality 

  • The RCMP investigated large numbers of people. Many of them were fired, demoted or forced to resign - even if they had no access to security info 

  • PM Trudeau apologized in 2017 

  • Canadian gov settled a class action suit for 145 million CAD in 2018 

• Sexuality has a history 

  • Foucault : sexualities have been shaped by 

    • An increased interest in studying, talking about and analyzing sex 

    • Distinct sexualities have been shaped by different social interests (and reactions to them) over time 

  • Rubin : cont sexual persecution against emergent identity groups has its roots in the industrialization process - people migrated to cities and formed communities in ways that were previously impossible 

• Sexuality as a system of power 

  • Sex negativity : generalized sense of suspicion towards sex/sexuality 

  • The fallacy of misplaced scale : the underlying idea that sexual “immorality” is a kind of sin worse than others 

  • The hierarchical valuation of sex acts 

    • Heterosexual sex between married people is at the top of a pyramid of sexual practices, which ranks sexuality on a scale of acceptability 

      • Elsewhere, rubin calls rewarded sexualities “the charmed circle of sexuality” 

  • The domino thoery of sexual peril 

    • Part of the slippery slop logical fallacy the idea that there is a line between order and chaos and we are forever in danger of falling into chaos 

  • Complexity and nuance are afforded to favoured sexualities 

  • The lack of a concept of benign sexual variation 

    • Sexuality variation is assumed to be dangerous, leaving us without a functional framework for assessing actual harm (or lack thereof) 

• A critique of rubin’s “benign sexual variation” 

  • Rubin fails to thoroughly conceptualize key aspects of two central concepts 

    • The power within the sexual power system lacks a robust theorizing of interpersonal power dynamics 

      • Through the word consent is used, it is not defined or discussed carefully 

      • The power in the system of power she has conceptualized in quite institutional 

      • For her, power is coming from those who make the rules (the state, religious standards, social norms upheld by the socially powerful) 

    • She is not consistently clear about what it means for sexual ariation to be actually be benign 

      • She never provides a direct definition or a framework for determining what sexual practices can be considered harmless 

      • Sometimes laws are designed to provide a blanket protection for those who are most vulnerable to harm, partly because the concept of consent (or the lack of it) is so difficult to evidence/prove/conceptualize 

• Consequences of analytical gaps 

  • To be clear, extensive information exists about the harms of sexual abuse of a child by an adult 

    • Statuory rape laws exist today due to patterns of documented harm experienced by minors 

Gayle Rubin (1984) - Thinking Sex : Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexulaity 

• History of sex being viewed as deviant (masturbation as a sin, dangerous, prostitution etc) and laws against it especially in the US 

• Sexual essentialism - the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to social life and shapes institutions 

• Micheal foucault’s the history of sexuality 

• Sex negativity - western cultures view sex to be a dangerous desrtuctive negative force 

• Moral panic - the political moment of sex in which diffuse attitudes are channeled into political action and from there into social change 

• Link between porn and crime and sexual deviance - male privilege

• Most sex law does not distinguish between consensual and coercive behaviour 

• In law consent is a privilege enjoyed only by those who engage in the highest status sexual behvaiour 

Jules Gleeson - Judith Bulter “We need to rethink the category of woman” 

• Meant to be a critique of heterosexual assumptions within feminism 

• Should not be surpised at the inclusion of trans women 

January 22 - Hetero and Cis-Normativity 

Adrienne Rich - Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence 

• Bio. men have one innate orientation a sexual one that draws them to women where women are sexual towards men and reproductive towards children 

• Compulsory heterosexuality 

• Feminist separatism - women choosing to separate from ostensibly male-defined, male-dominated institutions, relationships, roles and activities 

• Motherhood as sa political institution 

• Characteristics of male power 

  • To deny women ones own sexuality or to force male sexuality upon them 

  • To command or exploit their labour to control their produce 

  • To control or rob them of their children 

  • To confine them physically and prevent their movement 

  • To use them as objects in male transactions 

  • To cramp their creativeness 

  • To withhold from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments 

• Porn creates a climate in which sex and violence are interchangeable and widens the range of behaviour considered acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse 

• Lesbian existence (both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuning creation of the meaning of that existence ) and lesbian continuum (a range through each woman’s life and through history of woman-identified experience) 

Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook - Doing Gender, Doing heteronormativity 

• Two case studies that examine how nontransgender people, gender normals, interact with transgender pepole to highlight the connections between doing gender and heteronormativity 

• By contrasting public and private interactions that changed from nonsexual to sexualized to sexual show how gender and sexuality are tied together 

• The criteria for membership in a gender category are significantly different in social versus (hetero) sexual circumstances 

• While gender is presumed to reflect biological sex in all social interactions, the importance of doing gender in a way that represents the shape of one’s genitals is heightened in sexual and sexualized situations 

• Responses to perceived failures to fulfill gender criteria in sexual and sexualized relationships are themselves gendered 

• Theorizing heterosexuality did not become central to feminist sociology rather queer theory 

• Transgender people disrupt cultural expectations that gender identity is an immutable derivation of biology 

• In social situations, transgender people have cultural genitalia that derive from their gender presentation 

• The relationship between heterosexuality and gender oppression remains undertheorized in social science research 

• Researches how “gender normals” refect to transgender people 

• Doing gender in a way that does not reflect biological sex can be perceived as a threat to heterosexuality 

• Cisgender men and women attempt to repair these potential ruptures through the deployment of normatively gendered tactics that reify gender and sexual difference, these simultaneously negate the authenticity of trans people gender and sexual identitiyies and reaffirm heteronormative assumptions 

• Transmen as seen as on eo fthe guys at the workplace - connection between doing gender and maintaining heteronormativity 

Adrienne Rich - Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence 

• questions how heterosexuality has come to be understood as being the most common sexuality (as people believe it is

  • Never questioned

  • Terms get used as if they arent problematic 

  • Why species survival, impregnation, emotional/erotic relationships have become so ridgid 

• heterosexuality is not just an incidental sexual orientation

  • Arguement about women 

  • Needs to be studied as a political institution 

• Heterosexuality is an institution that has to be actively maintained. 

  • It is constantly reinforced as ‘compulsory’, especially for women. 

  • Section II: Rich argues that heterosexuality is an institution maintained by a variety of forces. She believes that these forces wrench women’s erotic and emotional energies from themselves and other women towards men and heterosexuality

  • Like simone debeauvoir theory about becoming a woman 

  • If its so natural why do we work so hard to keep it in place 

• An institution that has to be maintained 

  • The options for social acceptability and stability/safety are presented in terms of heterosexual romantic love, partnership, and nuclear, hetero-normative family

  • Non-coupled women, women in relationships with other women, or women non-dependent on men have often been mocked or more overtly socially sanctioned. 

  • Lesbian, single, communal, etc. lives are made invisible, or appear unlikely, unrealistic, or fraught with difficulty (more than for heterosexual couples)

  • A wide range of forms of violence also maintain men’s sexual access to women and access to women’s labour

• Compulsory heterosexuality is also achieved through a process of male-identification for girls/women:

  • Male perspectives are far more common in popular art

  • Male perspectives have informed our conceptualizations of family, state support, harm and fault/culpability, etc. in law and society 

  • Women come to prioritize the opinions, perspectives, authorities, pleasures, companionship, etc. of men over other women and themselve

• Lesbian existence: the historical and contemporary presence of lesbian life, against the grain of hetero-normativity. 

• Lesbian continuum: includes women’s experiences, not only sexual attraction between women but also other types of bonding: sharing of a rich inner life; giving and receiving support; marriage resistance, etc. 

• All heterosexual sex is rape 

• Heteronormativity and hetrosexuality is innately oppressive 

January 27 - Doing Gender - Performativity and Habitus 

Previously in soci. Gender was defined as 

• A set of traits that emanate naturally from biological sex

• The outward expression of an interior self (noting that the interior self may not map onto social expectations associated with biological sex)

• Roles that people are taught (socialized) into playing (much like the role of ‘student’) – a package of expectations (usually taught early in life), that people conform to (or not)

• External, structural, and institutional regulation (e.g., through law, etc.

Structuralist theory 

• Risman and Davis 

  • As sociologist began to specialize in gender, the focus on how individuals internalize gender was problematized. There were two very different theoretical alternatives developed within a sociological framework to move the analysis of gender beyond a focus on individuals : those who worked in an interactionist tradition, a framework which came to be known as doing gender and those who were based in more inequality literatures, the new structuralists 

Doing gender 

• Draws on sociology Irving Goffman 

  • When humans interact with each other, we assume that each person has an ‘essential nature’, which we look for to understand and ‘stabilize’ the interaction

    • To signal to each other and organize the interaction or make it intelligible, we engage in ‘displays’

    • Displays as highly conventionalized behaviors structured as two-part exchanges

    • Gender displays (or signals of masculinity and femininity) are some of the most common and foundational organizing signals that people provide to make an interaction legible

• West and Zimmerman 

  • ‘Doing Gender’ refers to the interactional process of crafting gender identities that are then presumed to reflect and naturally derive from biology.

  • They argue that gender is a set of doings, but importantly, that this is about interaction with other

  •  works because of a three-part sex/gender system: sex, sex category, and gender

  • Sex category: the regular, everyday mental classifications that people make based on assumptions about bodies

  • We are always doing gender, it is unavoidable 

Habitus 

• Sociological term that refers to people’s embodied traits and behaviours 

• We act in a certain way because of our lived experiences and not solely by the force of external social structures 

• We speak, think and act how we do not because of clear rules or punishments but because we slowly developed cultural competency through socialization 

• E.g accents, beliefs, manners, temperament 

Gender performance and drag 

• Ambiguities in performers in drag balls - some are mocking or having fun with gender, many embody these standards aspirationally 

• So, while drag performances do challenge normative gender expectations in some ways, this is not necessarily because the performance intends to be critical of normative gender

• Some of the ways that ‘doing gender’ queers original meanings and creates more social space for less rigid performance may be via ‘failing’ to perfectly replicate. (Butler believes this is true far beyond the drag ball

• All gender is performative 

Critique of west and zimmerman 

• largely confined within the gender binary, neglecting how non-binary (persons who identify with neither male nor female identities) or gender fluid (persons who fluctuate between gender categories or express multiple at once) individuals actively construct their gender identity on a daily basis.

• West and Zimmerman do not appear to imagine a world in which people might wish to conform to a non-binary gender

• Barbee and shrock (2019) “un/gendering social selves”

  • investigates a process they term “un/gendering social selves,” meaning how non-binary people define and present themselves in their daily lives to avoid binary classification from others.

  • participants described manipulating their appearance to neutralize any gender signifiers that could be read on their bodies. For example, participants discussed consciously choosing their clothing, accessories, or makeup so that their appearance does not solely fit into one gender category

  • By identifying how individuals “un/gender” embodiment and discourse, Barbee and Schrock show that individuals still actively construct their gender even when those individuals do not conform to binary gender categories. Like West and Zimmerman originally theorized about men and women, non-binary individuals also “do gender” even in their efforts to neutralize their gender identity

Meaning for social change 

• Social movements like feminism can provide new ideologies and ideas to help question the forces of external regulation

• New social ideas can cause socializing processes to become more flexible and less ideologically normative about gender

• Individuals can reflect on how they ‘do gender’ and challenge expectations

• These changes can make ‘doing gender’ less rigidly ‘accountabl

Candace West and Don Zimmerman - Doing Gender 

• Aims to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction 

• Critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category and gender 

• Recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society 

Judith Butler - Gender is Burning : Question of Appropriation and Subversion 

• Drag, cross dressing and transsexualism place women at the object of hatred and appropriation, nothing in the identification that is respectful or elevating 

• Places drag as misogyny, makes male homosexuality about women 

• Drag is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of women and thus is based in a misogyny 

• Paris is burning about african american and latino men who perfomed in drag balls in harlem in the 80s 

January 29 - conference 

February 3 - Black and Indigenous Feminisms 

Mishuana Goeman - Indigenous Interventions and Feminist Methods 

• Feminists are depicted as promoting agendas that are not important to a majority of indigenous communities 

  • Esp. those who are fighting for self-determiniation and sovereignty 

• Dominant genealogies and etymologies of feminism are a colonial entrapment that helps to sustain mainstream feminist ideologies, feminist colonial practices, white supremacy, and colonial patriarchy 

• Suffragists’ adamant claims to white superiority and indigenous savagery laid the groundwork for their individual advancement as white women into settler regimes of power 

• The heteropatriarchical state is the violent actor 

• Early moments of feminism controlled gender and sexuality 

• Critiques 

  • The rhetoric of a nostalgic past that evades the real work and responsibilities it took and takes to maintain healthy communities 

  • The rhetoric of tradition that is used to exclude or discipline bodies 

  • The construction of culture as stagnant and not accounting for continued growth since time immemoiral 

  • The belief of state permanence 

  • Legitimacy and ongoing sustainability of capitalism in its current forms 

  • The rheotic of sovereignty that puts aside rights of some of its citizens and expects compliance even against ones own interests 

Patricia Hill Collins - Learning from the Outsider Within 

• Many black female intellectuals have made creative use of their marginality (outsider within status) to produce Black feminist thought that reflects a special standpoint on self, family, and society 

• Characteristics 

  • Black women’s self-definition and self valuation 

  • The interlocking nature of oppression 

  • The importance of Afro-American women’s culture 

• Suggests that black women might draw upon these key themes as outsiders within to generate a distinctive standpoint on existing sociological paradigms and that other sociologists would also benefit by placing greater trust in the creative potential of their own personal and cultural biographies 

• Inside relationship - black women as domestic workers to white families 

  • affluent white people writing about thier “black mothers” 

  • Stress the sense of self-affirmation they experienced at seeing white power demystified - advantages of racism 

  • Knew they would never belong, remained as outsiders 

• Outsider within 

  • Special standpoint on self, family and society for Afro-American Women 

• Black women’s ideas have been honed at the juncture between movements for racial and sexual equality and contends that afro-american women have been pused by “their marginalization in both arenas” to create black feminism (E. Frances White) 

• Benefits of the outsider within status 

  • Simmel’s definition of “objectivity” as a “peculiar composition of nearness and remoteness, concern and indifference”

  • The tendency for people to confide in a stranger in ways they never would with each other 

  • The ability of the stranger to see patterns that may be more difficult for those immersed in the situation to see 

• Mannheim labels the strangers in academia as marginal intellectuals, arguest that the critical poster may be essential to the creative development of academic disciplines themselves 

• Key themes in Black feminist thought 

  • Definition suggests that its impossible to separate the structure and thematic contents of thought from the historical and material conditions shaping the lives of its producers - black feminist thought produced by black women recorded by others 

  • Definition assumes that black women posses a unqiue standpoint on, or perspective of, their experiences and that there will be certain commonalities of perception shared by black women as a group 

  • Black women may produce certain commonalities of outlook, the diversity of class, region, age and sexual orientation shaping individuals black women’s lives has resulted in different expressions of these common themes 

  • Standpoint exists yet might not be clear to black women 

  • The meaning of self definition and self valuation 

    • Self definition involves challenging the political knowledge-validation process that has resulted in externally-defined, stereotpucal images of afro-american womanhood 

    • Self valuation stresses the contents of Black women’s self definitions - namely, replacing externally-derived images with atuehtntic black female images 

    • The insistence on Black female self-definition reframes the entire dialogue from one of determining the technical accuracy of an image, to one stressing the power dynamics underlying the very process of definition itself 

    • Question what has been said, the credibility and intentions of who possesses the power to define 

    • The theme of Black female self-valutation addresses the actual content of these self-definitions 

    • Deining and valuing one’s consciousness of one’s own self-defined standpoint in the face of images that foster a self-definition as the objectified “other” is an important way of resisting the dehumanization essential to systems of domination 

    • Other than the assumed norm of white male behvaiour (negative other) - virtual antithesis of positive white male images 

    • Their value in allowing afro-american women to reject internalized, psychological oppression 

  • The interlocking nature of oppression 

    • Black feminist have possessed an ideological commitmnet to addressing interlocking oppression yet have been excluded from arenas that would have allowed them to do so 

    • This viewpoint shifts the entire focus of investigation from one aimed at explicating elements of race or gender or class oppression to one whose goal is to determine what links are among these systems 

    • Either or thinking 

    • Shows an alternative humanist vision of societal organization 

  • The importsnace of afro-american women’s culture 

    • Uncovered previously unexplored areas of the Black female experience and identified concrete areas of social relations where Afro-American women create and pass on self-definition and self-valuations essential to coping with the simultaneity of oppression they experience 

    • Connection between 

      • Choices available to Black mothers resulting from their placement in historically specific political economies 

      • Black mothers perceptions of their children’s choice are compared to what mothers thought those choices should be 

      • Actual strategies employed by black mothers both inraising their children and in dealing with institutions that affected their children’s lives 

    • The focus on black womens culture is significant as 

      • Relationship between oppressed people’s consciousness of oppression and the action they take in dealing with oppressive structures may be far more complex than the suggested by existing social theory 

      • Problematic nature of existing conceptualizations of the term activism 

      • An analystical model exploring the relationship between oppression, consciousness, and activism is implicit in the way Black feminists have studied Black women’s culture 

    • Researchers stress the interdependent relationship between the interlocking oppression that has shaped Black women’s choices and Black women’s actions in the context of those choices 

    • Researchers rarely describe Black women’s behaviour without attention to the opportunity structures shaping their subject’s lives 

    • Black women’s consciousness becomes a critical part of the relationship between the working of oppression and Black women’s actions 

    • Dialectical relationship 

• The sociological significance of Black feminist thought 

  • The content of Black women’s ideas has been influenced by and contributes to on-going dialogues in a variety of sociological specialities 

  • The process by which these specific ideas were produced by this specific group of individuals 

• Two elements of sociological paradigms 

  • Consists of the thought itself and its producers and practitioners 

  • Sociology as a paradigm 

  • Systems of knowledge are never complete 

  • Important fact/theory relationship 

  • Group insiders have similar worldviews 

  • Process of becoming an insider 

• Black women and the outsider within status 

  • To become sociological insiders, black women must assimilate a standpoint that is quite different than their own 

  • Black women would have to accept certain fundamental and self-devaluing assumptions 

    • White males are more worthy of study because they are more fully human than everyone else 

    • Dichotomous oppositional thinking is natural and normal 

    • Would have to act in accordance with their place in a white male worldview 

  • Two types of anomalies 

    • Black female sociologists typically report the omission of facts or observations about afro-american women in the sociological paradigms they encounter 

    • Afro-american women in academia are frequently struck by the differences between their own experiences and sociological descriptions of the same phenomena

Black feminism Lecture 

• Emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in response to both second wave feminism and the civil rights and black power movements 

  • But with roots in earlier anti-slavery and labour movements 

• Held close connections to lesbian feminism 

• Retained close, but at times contentious, relationships with other movements 

  • Other feminists 

  • Civil rights leaders 

  • Anti colonial freedom struggles 

Outsider within : connection to standpoint theory 

• Standpoint theory is the idea that all science is embedded in a particular time and place and influenced by politics 

• Partitica hill holdings 

• Hill collins 

  • Benefits 

    • Simmel's definition of "objectivity" as "a peculiar composition of nearness and remoteness, concern and indifference"

    • the tendency for people to confide in a "stranger" in ways they never would with each other;

    • the ability of the "stranger" to see patterns that may be more difficult for those immersed in the situation to see.”

• Representing the role of an outsider 

Value neutrality, diversity and strong objectivity 

• Strong Objectivity: Diversity (applied to various aspects of the research or knowledge development process) can help us ‘maximize objectivity’ – holding objectivity to a higher standard – without reference to a ‘value-free’ ideal. 

• Diversity (in this usage) means we recognize we cannot see things neutrally and can only mitigate this problem by seeking a range of views, influences, collaborators, critics, et

Self definition and self valuation 

• Against and aiming to counter “controlling images”

The interlocking nautre of oppression 

• Aware of/rooted in theorizing and thinking through the ways that different forms of oppression interact 

The importance of black women’s culture 

• Focused thematically on studying, defining and understanding the influence of black women’s culture 

Too focused on (white) middle class issues 

• Many black women did not relate easily to the second wave feminist focus on the problems of middle class suburban life 

• They critiqued this vision for being classist, heteronormative and generated by white solipism 

Assumed greatest struggle was enforced domesticity 

• Second wave feminism created a vision of women who were all full time housewives and stay at home mothers 

• Often assumed that the greatest need of women was to break out of the private and enter the public 

• Resistance against compulsory housewife-ization was not central to black women’s feminist agenda 

Saw traditional family as largely oppressive 

• White feminists often saw home/traditional family as oppressive, and something to be escaped 

• Black feminists tended to 

  • Have a less nuclear vision of family in the first place 

  • See black family and kinship relations as under threat from a state that was bent on criminalizing its members and breaking it apart. Family was to be fought for, not solely against 

Did not properly address pay gap and working conditions 

• Due to assumptions about women as largely unpaid (non-breadwinners) and financially dependent on mne, second wave feminism did not initially focus on working conditions 

• A singular focus on bringing women out of the private sphere missed the point about the oppressive nature of the underpaid/exploited work many Black women experienced 

Focused on legal solutions - viewed the state as a largely positive force 

• For white women, having the state take a more active role in protecting them inside their homes and in family law was a key solution (e.g addressing domestic violence and child custody issues) 

• Many black women experienced the state as largely predatory and wanted less state surveillance and monitoring of their families 

  • For example, they feared the strengthened domestic violence laws and more assertive policing of family spaces  could be another excuse to over police black men 

Combahee river collective 

• Black feminist lesbian organization that was active between 1974 and 1980. 

• Created as there was a sense that both the feminist movement and the civil rights movement didnt reflect the particular needs of black women and lesbians 

• The collective joined together to develop the collective statement, which was a key document in developing contemporary black feminism 

• The main argument is that black lesbian women have been forced to choose movements that then often erased them - the civil rights movement wsa often male-oriented and heteronormative, while the feminist movement was driven by straight, white women and centered their perspective 

• Statement is well known as it carefully articulated this problem 

Black feminist contribution to feminism 

• Criticism made the movement stronger 

• Working toward an anti-racist mass feminism 

Links to indigenous feminism 

• Argue that the way we talk about feminism is euro-centric and tends to de-center work done by non-white people 

• Organzied around a “politics of refusal” including 

  • Refusing rights via citizenship/state protection 

  • Refusing invasive research and surveillance via academic study 

  • Resfusing “controlling images” of pathology 

February 5 - Intersectionality 

• Intersectionality 

  • The interconnected nature of social categorization such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, understood as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of privilege, discrimination or disadvanage 

    • Emerged as a critic of white solipsism and heteronormativity in feminism and male domiance in racial equality movement 

  • The development of intersectionality theory 

    • Patricia Hill Collins (1990), Angela Davis (1981), the women of the Combahee River Collective (1977) (origin of some of the core ideas) , Audre Lorde (1984), and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) all theorized how race, gender, class, and sexuality shape social experiences. 

    • Hill Collins (1990) and Crenshaw (1989, 1991), in particular, theorized how these dimensions worked together. 

    • Hill Collins outlined what she called a ‘matrix of domination’ (1990, 18) and spoke of ‘interlocking institutions’ (277), while Crenshaw developed theory using the term ‘intersectionality’ (1991, 149) 

• KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW 

  • interacting axes of identity might co-produce new oppressions that are more than the sum of their parts, and 

  • part of this oppression is rooted in the illegibility of this position to others and therefore the inability of systems to recognize or address these forms of harm

• Patricia Hill Collins 

  • Matrix of Domination 

    • Structural domian of power 

      • Social institutions that produce the laws and policies we live under 

      •  organizes oppression in society. Collins argues that the organization of interlocking, large-scale social institutions reproduce the subordination of Black women 

    • Hegemonic domain of power 

      • Ideology and culture which produce the narratives that shape how we view people 

      • refers to the system of ideas developed by a dominant group that justifies their practices. Through ideology, culture, and consciousness, the beliefs of the dominant group get normalized as common sense ideas that support their position 

    • Disciplinary Domain of power 

      • Bureaucratic organizations and authority figures that enforce the laws and policies 

      • manages oppression. The organizational practices of social institutions manage power relations and control certain subpopulation

    • Interpresonal domain of power 

      • Individuals who decide how to act with others in everyday social interaction 

      • routinized daily practices of interaction at the microlevel of social organization, through which individuals uphold the subordination of othe

  • Patricia Hill Collins 

    • Since its development, gender theorists working in this tradition have most commonly begun with the concept of intersectionality more or less as proposed by Crenshaw 

    • Alternative conceptualizations are often simply understood as less popular synonyms 

    • However, Hill Collins’ concept of the matrix of domination is notably different from Crenshaw’s intersectionality 

    • Intersectionality focuses on how oppressions work together to produce specific injustices, while the concept of the matrix domination 

• Benefits of intersectionality 

  • Four analytic benefits of intersectionality as a research / analysis paradigm 

    • Simultaneity 

    • Complexity 

    • Irreducibility 

    • Inclusivity 

• Critiques of Intersectionality theory 

  • Used to take a snapshot rather than a history 

    • Early visual metaphors of a matrix, a traffic junction, or a nexus may have enabled static usages, since these metaphors do not conjure notions of history or change 

    • The popularizing of intersectionality theory within legal studies may also have contributed to a practice of reading “scenarios” or “cases rather than histories 

    • Consequently, intersectionality theory is often applied to a snapshot rather than tracing an emergence over time in a specific context - can result in a “thin” or misleading analysis 

  • The attraction and risk of simple metaphors 

    • Intersectionality’s popularity may rest on its accessible but at times over-simplified metaphors.

    • This at times appears to make it ‘too portable’, and ironically, perhaps not as good at dealing with complexity as some have claimed

  • The Pitfalls of Popularity 

    • The use of intersectionality has crowded out other useful concepts in gender theory, including those that produce powerful historical analyses (for example, patriarchy

  • The tendency to prioritize an acis of difference / produce a reference category 

    • While often not doing so explicitly, the laundry list of axes of difference imagined by intersectionality theory often leads to intersectionality theorists prioritizing a category to be the focus of analysis, while simultaneously relying on an (often unspoken) reference category. 

    • The reference or ‘unmarked’ category is left unanalyzed, in effect using intersectionality to explain how nondominant groups are ‘different’ from ‘normal’. 

    • This practice reproduces the problematic understanding of the dominant group as the normative standard.

  • The Pitfalls of Portability 

    • his is becoming increasingly salient as people lead more transnational lives, in which both within-country and between-country structures shape a person’s social positioning. They may have majority status and significant privilege in one context and minority status and far less privilege in another(60 – 1). 

    • The tendency for intersectionality to be used to analyze a set of ‘diversity categories’ based on imported metaphors can result in scholars applying a framework that is effectively pre-populated with content on how difference works, and which axes of difference most significantly structure oppression

  • Harder in practice than in theory 

  • Potential to reify categories 

    • Tendency to assume the internal stability of the categories being used (key differences are between categories, not within, and categories stay the same). 

    • Can become a way of ‘reifying’ categories – making them appear more solid than they are.

  • Drift away from a focus on how power works 

    • Intersectionality theory tends to produce analyses that document what oppression looks like. 

    • While Hill Collins originally incorporated four domains (or mechanisms) of power into her matrix of domination, this is not the version of intersectionality theory that has been widely embraced. 

    • While some theorists argue that intersectionality theory remains inextricably linked to analysis of power, in practice it is often more focused on analyzing the hybridization of categories of identity

  • Re-claiming intersectionality 

    • Some of the tools to address these problems exist within intersectionality theory: 

      • Hill Collins developed a power-attentive matrix of domination.

      • She also made strong claims about the situatedness of her theories in the lives and histories of Black American women (Hill Collins 1990). 

      • It may be that if intersectionality theory were consistently re-embedded in its origins as a power-conscious framework derived from deep attention to situated knowledge, it could yet address at least some of these issue

The concept of intersectionality in feminist theory - Anna Carastathis 

• Intersectionalist has become the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between system of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and priviledge 

• Aims to clarify the origins of intersectionality as a metaphor, and its theorization as a provisional concept in Kimberle Williams Crenshaw’s work followed by its uptake and mainstreaming as a paradigm by feminist theorists in a period marked by its widespread and rather unquestioned - if, at times, superficial and inattentive - usage 

• Four analytic benefits of intersectionality as a research paradigm : simultaneity, complexity, irreducibility and inclusivity 

• Common feminist theory to claim that oppression is not a singular process or a binary political relation, but multiple, converging, or interwoven systems - cant be captured through an analysis of gender alone 

• Intersectionality theory has been celebrated as the most important contribution that women’s studies has made so far 

• Origins in black feminist thought, by lesbian women of colour 

• Anti discirminatory laws for black women only relate to things that are also affected by black men or white women 

• Crenshaw - monistic definition of discrimination (excluse cat of sex and race) render the simultaenous experience of gendered racism invisible and legal claims of “compound” discrimination inadmissible 

  • Legal concepts of discrimination must be revised 

  • Discrimination must be reconceptualized in terms of the concrete experiences of black women 

• Hill collins 

  • Intersectionality can be used to study micro, meso and macro level social phenomena 

Intersectionality in a Transnational World - Bandana Purkayastha 

• Individuals and groups maintain connections across countries so that social lives are constructed in transnational spaces 

• Transnational spaces are composed of tangible geographic spaces that exist across multiple nation-states and virtual spaces 

Feburary 10 : Masculinities Theory and Contributions to Gender Studies 

R.W Connell Masculinities Ch 3 - The Social Organization of Masculinity 

• Three difficulties of defining masculinity 

  • No description without a standpoint 

  • To list what men and women do requires that people be already sorted into the categories of men and women 

  • To define masculinity as what men empirically are is to rule out the usage in what we call some women masculine and some men feminine 

• Masculinity is always liable to internal contradiction and historical disruption 

• Three hold model of the structure of gender distinguishing relations of 

  • Power relations 

  • Production relations 

    • Gender divisions of labour (the economic consequences) 

  • Cathexis (emotional attachment) 

    • Emotional energy being attacked to an object (freudian terms) 

    • The practices that shape and realize desire are thus an aspect of the gender order 

• Hegemony 

  • Antonio gramsci’s analysis of class relations 

  • Refers to the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social lie 

  • Masculinity : can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guaratees/is taken to guarantee the dominant position of men and the subordination of women 

  • Relates to cultural dominance in the society as a whole 

Men, Masculinity and Manhood Acts - Douglas Schrock and Micheal Schwalbe 

• In the 1980s research on men shifted from studying the male sex role and masculinity as a singular trait to studying how men enact diverse masculinities 

• Examines men’s behaviour as gendered beings in many contexts, from intimate relationships to the workplace to global politics 

• As kids children are called baby when they are being immature and boy/girl when being rewarded affirming gender and approval from others with doing gender properly 

• Transmen of colour are less likely to be respected and more likel to face harassment 

Feburary 12 : Contemporary debates in masculinities studies 

Hybrid Masculinities : New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities - Tristan Bridges and C.J Pascoe 

• Hybrid masculinity - men’s selective incorporation of performances and identity elements associated with marginalized and subordinated masculinities and feminities 

• Three distinct consequences associated with recent changes in performances and politics of masculinitiy that works to obscure the tenacity of gendered inequality 

  • Symbolically distance men from hegemonic masculinity 

  • Situate the masculinities available to young, white, heterosexual men as somehow less meaningful than the masculinities associated with various marginalized and subordinate others 

  • Fortify existing social and symbolic boundaries in ways that often work to conceal systems of power and inequality in historically new ways 

• Hybrid masculinity as a way to look at the contemporary changes 

• Hybrid masculinity have at least three distinct consequences that shape, reflect and mask inequalities 

  • May place discursive (not meaningful) distance between certain groups of men and hegemonic masculinity 

  • Fortify social and symbolic boundaries and inequalities 

• The emergence of hybrid masculinities indicate that normative constraints are shifting but that these shifts have largely taken place in ways that have sustained existing ideologies and systems of power and inequality 

• Weather and how they are perpetuating and or challenging systems of gender and sexual inequality 

  • Some are skeptical of whether hybrid masculinities represent anything beyond local variation 

  • Others argue that hybrid masculinities are both culturally pervasive and indicate that inequality is lessening and possibly no longer structures men’s identities and relationships 

  • The majority of the research and theory supports the notion that hybrid masculinities are widespread but signs of increasing levels of gender and sexual equality - hybrid masculine forms illustrate the flexibility of systems of inequality - represent significant changes in the expression of systems of power and inequality through fall short of challenging them 

• Inclusive masculinities 

  • Anderson 2009 

  • Contemporary transformations in men’s behaviours and beliefs are widespread and are best understood as challenging systems of gender and sexual inequality 

• Homohysteria is decrsing 

  • Concerns three issues 

    • Popular awareness of gay identity 

    • Cultural disapproval of homosexuality 

    • The cultural association of masculinity with heterosexuality 

• Dialectical pragmatism 

  • Theorize the consequences of the changes Messner described 

  • The ability of hegemonic masculinities to appropriate elements of subordinate and marginalized others in ways that work to recuperate existing systems of power and inequality 

• Kindergarten commando 

  • A masculinity foreground muscle, toughness and the threat of violence followed with situationally appropraite symbolic displays of compassion 

Hegemonic Femininities and Intersextional Domination - Laura T Hamilton, Elizabeth A Armstrong, J. Lotus Seeley and Elizabeth M Armstrong 

• The masculinities tradition theorizes gender as an independent structure of domination; consequently, feminities that complement hegemonic masculinities are treated as passively compliant in the reproduction of gender 

• Patricia Hill Collins views cultural ideals of hegemonic femininity as simultaneously raced, classed and gendered 

• Women striving to approximate hegemonic cultural ideals of femininity as actively complicit in reproducing a matrix of domination 

• Hegemonic feminities reference a powerful location in the matrix from which some women draw considerable individual benefits while shoring up collective benefits along dimensions of advantage 

• In the process, they engage in intersectional domination of other women and even some men 

• Our analysis re-enforces the utility of analyzing femininities and masculinities from within an intersectional feminist framework 

• Becky / Miss Ann - white woman priviledge personified 

• Masculinities tradition (Connell) – sees femininity as passive and complementary to masculinity.

• Intersectional feminism (Collins) – argues that femininities are actively complicit in reinforcing racial, class, and gender inequalities.

• Proposes the concept of hegemonic femininities, which allow privileged women to gain benefits while sustaining oppression of marginalized women (and some men).

• The “femininity premium” describes the individual advantages women can obtain by performing hegemonic femininities.

• Women in hegemonic positions also participate in intersectional domination, reinforcing racial, class, and sexual hierarchies.

• Contrasts gender order (Connell) with matrix of domination (Collins), arguing the latter provides a better framework for understanding power.

• Masculinities Theory (Connell)

  • Gender relations are structured around male dominance.

  • Introduced the concept of “emphasized femininity”, which:

  • Is passive, subordinate, and compliant.

  • Exists to complement and sustain hegemonic masculinity.

  • Fails to account for women’s active role in sustaining other forms of oppression.

• Intersectional Feminism (Collins)

  • Gender, race, class, and sexuality are interlocking systems of oppression.

  • Hegemonic femininities reinforce multiple axes of domination simultaneously.

• Collins argues hegemonic femininity is:

  • Actively complicit in social inequality.

  • Tied to racial, class, and sexual privilege (e.g., white, affluent, heterosexual women benefit the most).

• A key mechanism for reinforcing power structures.

• Hegemonic Femininity vs. Emphasized Femininity

  • Feature Emphasized Femininity (Connell) Hegemonic Femininity (Collins)

  • Agency Passive, compliant Active, complicit

  • Role in Domination Supports masculinity indirectly Directly enforces oppression across race, class, and gender

  • Intersectionality Ignores race/class differences Recognizes racialized/classed femininities

  • Power Exists only in relation to men Grants women power over other women and marginalized men

• Hegemonic femininity allows privileged women to benefit from gendered expectations while reinforcing racial and class inequalities.

• Hegemonic Femininity and Social Power

  • Some women perform hegemonic femininities to gain power.

  • This benefits them individually but oppresses other groups.

  • The “femininity premium” refers to the personal gains from adhering to hegemonic femininity:

  • Better treatment by men (marriage prospects, job opportunities).

  • Social protection (law enforcement favors white women, e.g., Emmett Till case).

  • Higher social status (beauty, respectability, wealth).

  • However, there is also a “femininity tax”:

  • Restricts women’s autonomy (sexuality, careers).

  • Upholds male dominance, limiting women’s collective power.

  • Intersectional Domination: How Hegemonic Femininities Enforce Inequality

  • Privileged women use femininity as a tool to dominate others:

  • Race: White femininity reinforces racism (e.g., Carolyn Bryant in the Emmett Till case).

  • Class: Wealthy women police social boundaries (e.g., excluding working-class and racialized women from elite spaces).

  • Sexuality: Heterosexual femininity reinforces heteronormativity (e.g., stigma against queer women).

• Jordan Peele’s Get Out as an example:

  • Character Rose Armitage weaponizes her white femininity to lure Black men into danger.

  • Shows how white femininity is used to manipulate and oppress.

• Tactics and Trades: How Women Navigate the Matrix of Domination

  • Women in privileged positions engage in “patriarchal bargains”:

  • They trade gender equality for racial/class privilege.

  • Aligning with hegemonic masculinity allows them to gain power over marginalized groups.

• Key Intersectional Tactics:

  • Performing beauty norms → Gains femininity premium but reinforces white beauty standards.

  • Claiming victimhood (e.g., white women’s tears) → Invokes protection from white men but harms marginalized groups.

  • Policing other women → Rich white women gatekeep social status (e.g., controlling who is “respectable”).

• Femininity is not passive – it is a tool of power and domination.

• Hegemonic femininities are intersectional – they uphold racial, class, and gender inequalities simultaneously.

• The femininity premium motivates complicity – women who approximate ideal femininity gain social benefits at the expense of others.

• Privileged women use femininity as a weapon – e.g., white women using racism for personal advantage.

• Understanding femininities within the matrix of domination provides a better framework than a gender-only analysis.

February 17 : Gender and Work 

Stability and transformation in gender, work, and family : insights from the second shift for the next quarter century - Mary Blair - Loy and Joan Williams 

• Arlie Hochschild’s The second shift: working families and the revolution at home argued that the revolution towards gender equality in the US has been stalled due to 

  • Women continue to do most of the second shift 

    • Primarily focuses on this 

  • Insufficient flexibility in the workplace for accommodating family caregiving needs 

  • A deficit of public sector benefits (paid parental leave) 

  • Since publication issues remain 

  • Leisure gap at home 

  • Studied 50 heterosexual married couples with full time jobs and young children 

• Areas of stability in the gender structure and areas of transformation in the past quarter center 

• Deepseated cultural understanding of gender infuse all levels of analysis : macro-level policies, family and work institutions and personal experiences of gender, intimacy and moral commitments 

• Show the paths forward for new research on how new economic developments (economic insecurity, flexibilization {increasingly reliance on temporary and contract labour} and the widening social class divide continue to affect intimacy at home 

• Housework as viewed as less of a burden for women 

• Economy of gratitude - wives evaluate fairness of housework spilt based on experiences of other wives, and husbands with husbands 

• The article explores changes and continuities in these issues over the past 25 years.

• Creates a leisure gap where women work significantly more total hours (paid + unpaid) than men.

• Good jobs assume an ‘ideal worker’ model: full-time, continuous employment without family responsibilities.

• Couples develop narratives to justify inequality in domestic labor (e.g., splitting tasks unevenly but calling it ‘equal’).

• Gender norms still influence career paths and division of labor at home.

• In 1950: 33% of working-age women in paid work, 1980: 52% → 2013: 57%.

• Mothers’ participation rose significantly (e.g., 47% of mothers with children under 6 worked in 1980 vs. 64% in 2013).

• Gender wage gap decreased: 1970 (62.3 cents per male dollar) → 1989 (70.1 cents) → 2013 (82.1 cents).

• ‘Work devotion schema’ persists, rewarding long hours and commitment over work-life balance.

• Lower-income men disengaging from family roles, leaving single mothers financially strained.

• Unstable, low-wage work creates economic precarity for families.

• Increasing reliance on contract and temporary labor reduces job security.

• Low-income workers face unpredictable schedules, making caregiving difficult.

• Workers using work-life balance policies (e.g., parental leave, reduced hours) are penalized in their careers.

• Particularly affects men who take caregiving roles, as workplace culture equates flexibility with lack of commitment.

• Long hours associated with masculinity and career success.

• Professional men feel pressure to overwork, impacting family life.

• Social expectations shape perceptions of fairness in relationships (e.g., women feel ‘grateful’ if their husband helps at home, even if unequally distributed).

• Higher-income couples can outsource household labor (e.g., hiring domestic workers), whereas lower-income women bear the full burden of paid and unpaid work.

Women at Work - Bell Hooks 

• Feminist movement and entrance of women in the work force 

• Criticsm of the notion that women entering the work force would liberate them from male domination 

  • Saying to working class women that feminism isnt for them 

  • Working for low wages did not liberate poor and working class women 

• Wage gap / women still dont get equal pay 

  • 73 cents to the dollar 

• Work has benefits on self esteen and positive participation in community compared to stay at home work

  • Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present 

  • Spends time tending to others, home is a workplace 

• Poverty as a central woman issue 

  • Dismantling the welfare system deprives indigent women 

  • Return to patriarchal male-dominated households