10/02/02 – Social Construction of Gender –
Think Gerth and Mills diagram
“Gender and Identity” – Judith Howard and Ramira Alamilla
Gender identity specifically is one’s inner sense of oneself as female or male. However, the question “Who am I?” is really “”Who am I in relation to others?” Identity is a person’s position, or space in social relationships, social structures and societal institutions. This is the sociological perspective.
From the sociological perspective we are interested in how gender identity contributes to the study of gender stratification.
There are at least two key approaches to identity: approaches that emphasize the more stable, internalized aspects of identity and a processual approach, emphasizing, the less stable, social constructed aspects of identity.
Review of the 4 perspectives:
The first two perspectives (Essentialism and socialization) emphasize stable and internalized aspects of identity.
Essentialism: Essential conceptions of gender identity assume everyone is born with a particular sex, this sex is associated with a corresponding gender; and both are fixed from birth. According to this perspective there are innate, and therefore stable differences between the two sexes. Functional for society – men and women serve different and complementary roles in society.
How does this pertain to gender stratification? Stratification is justified then by the belief that these differences are inborn, cannot be changed and are functional for society. But we must ask functional for whom?
Howard and Alamilla remark that early sociological research on race was marked by essentialist assumptions. As was class as well - although class was perceived as more often an achieved status.
Socialization. – The concept of identity associated with the socialization perspective is only slightly less stable than that of essentialism. Gender identity is a subjective feeling rooted in how one perceives oneself and cannot be determined by external observation.
A person’s gender identity may or may not correspond with the person’s sex or gender, and it is unrelated to sexual orientation.
Social learning and cognitive development theories assert that we learn what behavior is appropriate to our gender, race, class, from our environment through various learning processes.
How does this pertain to gender stratification?
In leading people to rely on group characteristics rather than paying attention to individual differences, categorization contributes to the formation of stereotypes. In addition to personality traits polarized into femininity and masculinity gender stereotypes also include prescriptions for social behaviors, physical characteristics, occupations, types of dress and bodily adornment and codes of sexual behavior.
Socialization explains how people are taught and learn these stereotypes and behaviors. Socialization perspectives tend to emphasize the processes of learning, however, rather than the expectations to which children are socialized. This distinction is significant because the analysis of cultural and structural factors can inform us about how principles of stratification may be internalized. Thus explaining to some extent how Western society’s expectations about gender may form part of our own identities.
The cultural context is necessarily shaped by systems of social stratification. It should be noted, however, that social institutions such as families, education, religion, many occupations, and so forth could not operate effectively without an available pool of well-socialized actors who know the accepted cultural conventions and perform appropriately. In other words, gender class, age, race, and nationality, sexuality and other meaningful social systems serve as the “organizing principles” by which the content of socialization is defined.
Roles provided a repertoire of expectations for appropriate behavior associated with particular social positions. But they lack an attention to the power and inequality associated with particular roles and its failure to ask: Functional for whom?
The very concept of role schemas legitimizes the perceived differences between women and men and ignores the differences within, and the overlap between genders.
There are no parallel concepts of class roles or race roles presumably implying that it is unacceptable to suggest that the social order depends on class-based and race-based social inequalities. In contrast the issue of gender roles, prescribing the allocation of women and men to different types of tasks, implies that gender inequalities are an acceptable foundation for the social order.
A positive note: The concept of role identities within the socialization perspective does recognize the significant of interaction. It does recognize the concept of social agency,that is we respond to the world we encounter – shaping, modifying and creating our identities through interactions with other people and within social institutions. In doing so, it forms a bridge to the social constructionist perspective that emphasizes interactional processes.
Criticisms of sex role theory (gender role, identity roles, etc) - Kimmel
Minimizes the importance of gender – it is not like other roles, such as teacher and student.
It suggests that there is 1 normative definition of femininity and 1 normative definition of of masculinity.
It does not recognize that gender is relational. Men construct their ideas of what it means to be men in constant reference to definitions of femininity.
It does not recognize that because gender is plural and relational, it is also situational. What it means to be a man or a woman varies in different contexts.
Sex role theory depoliticizes gender, making gender a set of individual attributes and not an aspect of social structure.
It cannot explain the dynamics of change; it is a historical.
The sociological perspective corrects these problems.
Social Construction
The third perspective on gender identity is markedly more processual, conceptually identities as more fluid and less stable, and thus is located the opposite pole of the continuum of identity.
Meanings and agreement about social reality are created by the process of negotiating a common interpretation of a situation through the interactions between and among people.
Social constructionism sees interaction as crucial to the construction of identity, not only in childhood by beyond it in every interaction. Impression management or the presentation of self in interaction, refers to those process by which individuals present particular selves to particular others for particular reasons.
Actors engaged in mutual impression management develop an working consensus, or agreement, about the type of situation they are in and which roles or identities they are playing,
This publicly agreed upon, negotiated definition of the situation thus guides subsequent interaction with the expectation that actors are obliged to behave in accordance with this working consensus and treat each other according.
Cultural expectations and social hierarchies also shape which definitions of situations prevail.
Social constructionism maintains that gender identity is accomplished by individual in every day behavior and display, and that this what sustains the social reality of gender.
“Doing gender “ (West and Zimmerman) means behaving so that whatever the situation, whoever the other actors, one’s behavior is seen as gender-appropriate for that context.
Candace West and Don Zimmerman maintain that women and men “choose” Gender -appropriate behavior because in almost every activity they will be called to account for actions that may contradict norms for their gender.
Gender and accountability
If sex category is omnirelevant (or even approaches being so), then a person engaged in virtually any activity may be held accountable for performance of that activity as a woman or a man, and their incumbency in one or the other sex category can be used to legitimate or discredit their other activities
Everett Hughes – these contradictions may be countered by managing interactions n a very narrow basis.
In this context “role conflict” can be viewed as a dynamic aspect of our current “arrangement between the sexes”.
How do we sort people into sex roles to begin with? We sort on biological manifestations. Externally manifested genitalia – becomes socialized gender role. Those with male genitalia are classified in one way; those with female genitalia are classified in another way. At birth we sort by primary sex characterisitcs. These two sexes become different genders, which are assumed to have different personalities and require different institutional and social arrangements to accommodate their natural – and now, socially acquired – differences.
Thereafter we sort by secondary sex characteristics - When we see someone on the street, it is his or her secondary sex characteristics that we observe – breast development, facial hair, and musculature. Even more than that, it is through the behavioral presentation of self – how he or she dresses, moves, talks – that signals for us whether that someone is a man or a woman.
We use gender display to focus us on how to interact in the situation.
Goffman contends that when human beings interact with others in their environment, they assume that each possess an “essential nature” – a nature that can be discerned through the “natural signs given off or expressed by them.”
Femininity and masculinity are regarded as “prototypes of essential expression – something that can be conveyed fleetingly in any social situation and yet something that shrikes at the most basic characterization of the individual.”
Goffman sees displays as highly conventionalized behaviors structured as two-part exchanges of the statement-reply type, in which the presence or absence of symmetry can establish deference or dominance. Gender is a socially scripted dramatization of the culture’s idealization of feminine and masculine natures, played for an audience that is well schooled in the presentational idiom.
West and Zimmerman use the case of “Agnes” to illustrate sex, sex category and gender
Neither initial sex assignment (pronouncement at birth as of female or male) nor the actual existence of essential criteria for that assignment (possession of a clitoris and vagina or penis and testicles) has much – if anything – to do with the identification of sex category in everyday life.
Sex categorization – Agne’s claim to the categorical status of female, which she sustained by appropriate identifcatory displays and other characteristics, could be discredited before her transsexual operation if her possession of a penis became known and after by her surgically constructed genitalia. In this regard, Agnes had to be continually alert to actual or potential threats to the security of her sex category. … If people can be seen as members of relevant categories, then categorize them that way. That is, use the category that seems appropriate, except in the presence of discrepant information or obvious features that would rule out its use.
She could have overdone her performance. Doing gender consists of managing such occasions so that, whatever the particulars, the outcome is seen and seeable in context as gender-appropriate or as the case may be gender-inappropriate that is accountable.
Resources for doing gender
Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological.
Environmental settings – Goffman – public bathroom
Standardized social occasions also provide stages for evocations of the “essential female and male natures.” – organized sports as expression of manliness
Assortative mating practices – men bigger, stronger and older – supposedly wiser.
Any social encounter can be pressed into service in the interests of doing gender. Fishman – women have to fill in the silences and use more attention-getting beginnings in order to be heard.
Recruitment to Gender Identities
Cahill – It is the children’s concern with being seen as socially competent that evokes their initial claims to gender identities.
Baby – not good – want to lose the baby appellation.
Both classes of children learn that the recognition and use of sex categorization in interaction are not optional, but mandatory.
In this way, new members of society come to be involved in a self-regulating process as they begin to monitor their own and others’ conduct with regard to its gender implications. The “recruitment” process involves not only the appropriate of gender ideals (by the valuation of those ideals as proper ways of being and behaving) but also gender identities that are important to individuals and that they strive to maintain. Thus gender differences, or the socicultural shaping of “essential female and male natures,” achieve the status of objective facts. They are rendered normal, natural features of personas and provide the tacit rationale for differing fates of women and men within the social order.
Kimmel summarizes the 4 elements of a social constuctionist perspective on gender.
Definitions of masculinity and femininity vary, first from culture to culture.
Second, in any one culture over historical time.
Third gender definitions also vary over the course of a person's life.
Finally, definitions of masculinity and femininity will vary within any one culture at any one time - by race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, education, region of the country.
Criticism of the social constructionist perspective. Social constructionism emphasizes the processes of interaction and the characteristics of the situation as they shape interactional possibilities for individuals. In its emphasis on individual agency, however, this perspective tends to minimize social structural constraints and relationships of power and inequality.
Social constructionism contributes an explanation of how individual agents in situations perpetrate or resist institutional and interpersonal constraints. Further elaboration is necessary, however, of how social structures and institutions constrain interactional possibilities and also of how the accumulation of specific social interactions contributes to the maintenance and definition of various institutions and structures.
Structuralism
The structural perspective on social identities addresses macro-level patterns organized in terms of gender race, age, class sexuality and other significant social positions. This perspective addresses questions of power and inequality in the institutions and structures of society that govern the allocation of resources.
The structural perspective emphasizes how a pervasive system of male dominance affects these allocations for women as a category and for men as a category.
As a macro-level theory, the structural perspective does not refer directly to social identities. It should be noted explicitly, however that social structures rely on and create the conditions within which identities are enacted. It is social structures that locate people within repeated situations, situations that become habitual and institutionalized – work situations, family situations and so forth. For social institutions such as families to endure in their culturally recognized forms, the actors who perform within those institutions must have developed and be competent to perform, identities suitable for those institutions and their cultural definitions.
Social identities are produced by active human beings but always within prevailing normative and structural circumstances.
To explain differences constructionism offers an analysis of the plurality of gender definitions; to explain power, it emphasizes the ways in which some definitions become normative through the struggles of different groups for power, including the power to define. Finally, to explain the institutional dimension, social constructionism moves beyond socialization of gendered individuals who occupy gender-neutral sites, to the study of the interplay between gendered individuals and gendered institutions.
Gendered individuals occupy places within gendered institutions.
To say then, that gender is socially constructed requires that we locate individual identity within a historically and socially specific and equally gendered place and time and that we situate the individual within the complex matrix of our lives, our bodies, and our social and cultural environments.
Different structured experiences produce the gender differences that we often attribute to people. Gives Goffman's example of public sex-segregated rest rooms.
Gender , Power and Social Change
If in doing gender, men are also doing dominance and women are doing deference, the resultant social order, which supposedly reflects “natural difference,” is a powerful reinforcer and legitimator of hierarchical arrangements.
If we do gender appropriately, we simultaneously sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional arrangements that are based on sex category.
Social change, then , must be pursed both at the institutional and cultural level of sex category and at the interact ional level of gender. Reconceptualizing gender not a as a simple property of individuals but an integral dynamic of social order implies a new perspective on the entire network of gender relations.
Power is what produces gender differences. To say that gender is a power relation - the power of men over women and the power of some men or women over other men and women is among the more controversial arguments of the social constructionist perspective.
Women are neither in power nor do they feel powerful.
Men as a group are in power (when compared with women) but do not feel powerful. The feeling of powerlessness is one reason why so many men believe that they are the victims of reverse discrimination and oppose affirmative action.
Like gender, power is not the property of individuals - a possession that one has or does not have - but a property of group life, of social life.
Gives the example of the politician - doesn't matter if male or female. This observation is the beginning of a sociological perspective - the recognition that the institutions themselves express logic, a dynamic that reproduces gender relations between women and men and the gender order of hierarchy and power. Men and women have to express certain traits to occupy a political office.
Summary: A sociological perspective examines the ways in which gendered individuals interact with other gendered individuals in gendered institutions.
Gender revolves around these themes: identity, interaction, and institution - in the production of gender difference and the reproduction of gender inequality.
Toward an explanation of the social construction of gender relations:
1 identity.
2. Interaction
3 institutions
First we understand that gender is not a "thing" that one possesses, but a set of activities that one does. When we "do gender, we do it in front of other people, it is validated and legitimated by the evaluations of others. Gender is less a property of the individual than it is a product of our interactions with others.
Second, we understand that we do gender in every interaction, in every situation, in every institution in which we find ourselves.
Nor do we do gender in a genderless vacuum, but, rather, in a gendered world, in gendered institutions.
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