Lecture 2/13/02
Social construction of gender -
Social agency - we respond to the world we encounter - shaping, modifying, and creating our identities through those encounters with other people and within social institutions.
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.
Social constructionism builds on the other social and behavioral sciences adding specific dimensions to the exploration of gender. What sociology contributes are the elements that the social psychology of sex roles cannot explain adequately: difference, power, and the institutional dimensions of gender.
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.
Criticisms of sex role theory
First the use of the idea of role has the curious effect of actually minimizing the importance of gender. To make gender a role like any other role is to diminish its power in structuring our lives.
Second, sex role theory posits singular normative definitions of masculinity and femininity.
Third - gender is not only plural, it also is relational. Men construct their ideas of what it means to be men in constant reference to definitions of femininity.
Fourth because gender is plural and relational, it is also situational. What it means to be a man or a woman varies in different contexts.
Fifth Sex role theory depoliticizes gender, making gender a set of individual attributes and not an aspect of social structure.
Sixth – its inadequacy in comprehending the dynamics of change.
In sex role theory movements for social change, like feminism or gay liberation become movements to expand role definitions and to change role expectations. Their goal is to expand role options for individual women and men whose lives are constrained by stereotypes. But social and political movements are not only about expanding the opportunities for individuals , they are about the redistribution of power in society. They demand the reallocation of resources and end to forms of inequality that are embedded in social institutions as well as sex role stereotypes.
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.
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. 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.
Different structured experiences produce the gender differences that we often attribute to people. Gives Goffman's example of public sex-segregated rest rooms.
"Doing Gender"
Candace West and Don Zimmerman - gender is less a component of identity - fixed, static...but rather the product of those interactions.
If our sex role identity were inherent, what are the criteria by which we sort people into those sex roles to begin with? Typically, our answer returns us to biology, and more specifically, to the primary sex characteristics that we believe determines which gender one will become. Biological sex – 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. 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.
Most of the time, we carry around these types of commonsense understandings. We see primary sex characteristics (those present at birth) as far more decisive than secondary sex characteristics (those present at birth) as far more decisive than secondary sex characteristics (those that develop at puberty) for the assignment of gender role identity. But how do we know? 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.
Understanding how we do gender, then, requires that we make visible the performative elements of identity, and also the audience for those performances. In saying that we “do” gender we are saying that gender is more than something that is done to us. We create and re-create our own gendered identities within the contexts of our interactions with others and within the institutions we inhabit.
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.
Gender – role enactment and as a display in Goffman’s terminology. Both gender role and gender display focus on behavioral aspects of being a woman or a man. However, we contend that the notion of gender as a role obscures the work that is involved in producing gender in everyday activities, while the notion of gender as a display relegates it to the periphery of interaction. We argue instead that participants in interaction organize their various and manifold activities to reflect or express gender, and they are disposed to perceive the behavior of others in a similar light.
Sex – is a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females or males. The criteria for classification can be genitalia at birth or chromosomal typing before birth, and they do not necessarily agree with one another.
Placement in a sex category is achieved through application of the sex criteria, but in everyday life, categorization is established and sustained by the socially required identifcatory displays that proclaim one’s membership in on or the other category;
Gender in contrast, is the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category. Gender activities emerge from and bolster claims to membership in a sex category.
Roles are situated identities, assumed and relinquished as the situation demands – rather than master identities, such as se category that cuts across situations. Unlike most roles, such as “nurse,” “doctor,” and “patient” or “professor” and “student” gender has no specific site or organizational context.
Gender displayGoffman 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. These rituals are viewed as distinct from but articulated with more consequential activities, such as performing tasks or engaging in discourse. Hence, we have what he terms the “scheduling” of displays at junctures in activities, such as the beginning or end, to avoid interfering with the activities themselves.
Upon first inspection, it would appear that Goffman’s formulation offers an engaging sociological corrective to existing formulations of gender. In his view 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. To continue the metaphor, there are scheduled performances presented in special locations, and like plays, they constitute introductions to or time out from more serious activities.
Gender is not merely something that happens in the nooks and crannies of interaction, fitted in here and there and not interfering with the serious business if life,
Uses 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.
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.
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.
Individuals have many social identities that may be donned or shed, muted or made more salient, depending on the situation. But we are always women or men – unless we shift into another sex category.
If an individual identified as a member of one sex category engages in behavior usually associated with the other category, this routinization is challenged.
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”.
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.
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. If we fail to do gender appropriately, we as individuals – not the institutional arrangement s – may be called to account (for our character, motives, and predispositions).
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.
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