1/19/2005
Discussion regarding sociological concepts useful in studying sociology of gender.
First we need to understand what we mean by sociology of gender.
Sociology is the study of people in groups. Sociologists pursue questions about people and social structure - the pattern of social relationships and behaviors - in the smallest and most transitory collections, such as strangers in public to the largest and most stable social groups such as institutions and society as a system.
Statuses - every society places its members into a series of categories. It is a simply a position within a social system.
We acquire ours statuses by achievement through our own efforts (Achieved status) or by ascription as we are born into them or assume them involuntarily at some other point in our life. (Ascribed Status). When statuses are ranked, they form a social stratification system.
Role - The expected behavior associated with any given status is referred to as a role. It is behavior that is routinized and mutually oriented to another person
Norms - shared rules of behavior established by society
A social institution is a constellation of roles and ideas that address a major area of human need in a particular society. For example the institution of family addresses primarily sexual activity, reproduction and the physical care of and early socialization of children.
Next – what do we mean by gender? Distinguishing sex and gender:
Sex is a designation based on biology, while gender is socially and psychologically constructed. A human is categorized as male or female based on such physical characteristics as external genitalia, chromosomes, and hormones. Our society only recognizes two categories of sex - male and female.
Gender involves those social, cultural and psychological aspects linked to males and females through particular social contexts. Likewise, we recognize only two genders -
Gender Roles are defined as those expected attitudes and behaviors that a society associates with each sex. Gender roles are relational (femininity and masculinity make sense in relation to each other), culturally and historically time bound.
A biological given sex (i.e. male or female) is used as the basis for constructing a social category that we call gender. This differentiation occurs not only on an interpersonal level between individuals, but also on a structural level within a given society. These prescriptions of how women and men should think and act are embedded in the institutions of the society - in its family, education system, language, religion, economy, etc.
This distinction is confusing sometimes to students because just a few decades, social scientists reduced gender to a set of two "sex" roles. - male/masculine and female/feminine - that they believed were tied to innate personality characteristics and to biological sex characteristics such as hormones and reproductive functions. This definition of masculinity and femininity has been disproved. However, through the course and readings and perhaps your own perceptions, you'll see that it a tenacious viewpoint.
Spade notes that the definition of gender has expanded over the decades because:
Social scientists debunked the notion that biological sex characteristics cause differences in men's and women's behavior.
Social scientific research has demonstrated that men and women are far more physically, cognitively and emotionally alike than different.
Social scientists have documented patterns of gender inequality within the economy, family, religions, and other social institutions that benefit men as a group.
Social scientists have documented that fact that gender is "humanly-made." We see many definitions of what is to be a man or a woman in many cultures. Further, the definitions of masculinity and femininity change over time in even one culture.
If gender varies across cultures, over historical time, among men and women within any one culture, and over the life course, that means we really cannot speak of masculinity or femininity as though they were constant, universal essences. Rather, gender is an ever-changing fluid assemblage of meanings and behaviors. In that sense, we must speak of masculinities and femininities, in recognition of the different definitions of masculinity and femininity that we construct.
The institutionalized pattern of gender differentiation is referred to as a society’s sex/gender system.
Sex/gender systems vary historically and cross-culturally, but each system includes at least 3 interrelated components :
1. The social construction of gender categories on the basis of biological sex.
2. A sexual division of labor in which specific tasks are allocated on the basis of sex
3. The social regulation of sexuality in which particular forms of sexual expression are positively or negatively sanctioned.
Why is the sociology of gender an important topic of inquiry?
All societies categorize members by status and then rank these statuses in some fashion, thereby creating a system of social stratification. Social stratification is the differentiation among categories of people, accompanies by differential access to scarce resources. Gender, race and ethnicity are significant ways in which members of society are identified and combined in various ways to result in unequal treatment.
Stereotypes - oversimplified conceptions that people who belong to the same group or category share certain traits in common. The categories of male and female are stereotyped such that members of the category are assumed to possess certain characteristics by virtue of their biological categories. This results in sexism, the belief that one category, female, is inferior to the other, male.
Joan Spade asks, “So, why does the stereotype continue to exist?” She says, "That part of the answer lies in the fact that culture, defined as the way of life of a group of people, shapes what we experience as reality."
A second question she says we need to ask about gender stereotypes is, "what is their purpose? The answer is that gender stereotypes help to legitimize role and power differences between men and women, among races, etc. This sustains the social stratification system in a society.
Sex/gender systems usually function as a system of social stratification, that is, the extent to which women and men, and the traits and behaviors respectively associated with them, are valued unequally in a society.
Gender is a social creation about the relationship between women and men and thus about the distribution of power. (Dana Vanoy)
Kimmel –“Gender is not simply a system of classification by which biological males and biological females are sorted, separated, and socialized into equivalent sex roles. Gender also expresses the universal inequality between women and men. When we speak about gender we also speak about hierarchy, power, and inequality, not simply difference.”
A patriarchy is a sex/gender system in which men dominate women, and that which is considered masculine is more highly valued than that which is considered feminine.
Elaborating on the idea of multiple masculinities and femininities, Robert Connell, coined the terms "hegemonic masculinity" and "emphasized femininity" to understand the relations between and among masculinities and femininities in patriarchal societies; that is societies that are dominated by men. According to Connell hegemonic masculinity is the idealized pattern of masculinity in patriarchal societies, while emphasized femininity is the idealized vision of femininity.
Key features of hegemonic masculinity include the subordination of women, the marginzalization of gay men, and the celebration of toughness and competitiveness.
Emphasized femininity is about women's subordination with its key feasutes being sociability, compliance with men's sexual and ego desires and acceptance of marriage and childcare.
Hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity are not necessarily the most common gender patterns in a society. They are however, the versions of manhood and womanhood against which other patterns of masculinity are judged.
We must also recognize that other socially constructed categories such as race, age, physical ability, social class and sexual orientation are also socially constructed categories that impact on gender. Spade reminds us that a major factor associated with multiple masculinities and femininities is the relationship of gender to other social categories of difference and inequality.
What sociological questions might we be interested in studying? Michael Kimmel suggests the following questions to consider when studying gender from a sociological perspective.
· Why is it that virtually every society differentiates people on the basis of gender?
· Why are women and men perceived as different in every known society?
· What are the differences that are perceived?
· Why is gender at least one of – if not the central- basis for the division of labor?
· Why is it that virtually every known society is based on male domination?
· Why does virtually every society divide social, political ad economic resources unequally between women and men? Why is a gendered division of labor also an unequal division of labor?
· Why are women’s tasks and men’s tasks valued differently?
How does one study gender?
Scientists conduct their research within the framework of a particular paradigm. A paradigm is a school of thought that guides the scientist in choosing the problems to be studied, in selecting the methods for studying them and in explaining what is found. So in essence, although scientists attempt to conduct research in a “value-free” manner, There is always a subjective component, a value-laden element to their research.
These paradigms help develop theories to explain how and why gender differentiation and inequality exist in most societies. Theories are not reality. Theories are explanations that help us to make sense of the world and allow us to make predictions and generalizations about human behavior. Spade encourages us to make apply more than one theory to explain the same gender phenomenon.
There are several perspectives or paradigms that inform gender research and result in several theories.
Theoretical Perspectives on Gender
Essentialist Perspective –
One perspective on gender is that gender is somehow essential to being male or female; that is, gender is both innate and unchanging. In this perspective gender refers to characteristics of the individual person, assumed to be biological in origin. (nature)
Essential conceptions of gender 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. The differences between the sexes in turn shape sex differences in social behaviors.
There are essentialist perspectives in both psychological and sociological paradigms (schools of thought). For example, structural functionalism is a paradigm that depicts society as a stable, orderly system in which the majority of members share common values, beliefs, and behavior. The social system is composed of interrelated parts that operate together to keep the society balanced. In relation to gender, it perceives women and men as serving different and complementary roles in society. Essentialist conceptions persist most likely because they are consistent with deeply held cultural beliefs about sex and the relationship between sex and gender (Vannoy). Essentialist perspectives, including structural functionalism starts from the assumption that women and men are different biologically and these biological differences, especially reproductive differences have led to the emergence of different gender roles.
Although fewer theorists support this view, we will see many people operate on this assumption. We see its reemergence at more politically conservative periods of history. Structural functionalism was the dominant perspective during the fifties. Sociobiology had a brief rise in the Reagan era of the 1980s, and lately we have seen sociobiology morph into evolutionary psychology – again during the conservative Bush years. Over the next two weeks, we will discuss biological theories and sociological theories that have intersected with this assumption, for example socio-biology, evolutionary psychology, and structural functionalism. Sometimes the underlying assumptions of social-psychological research are consistent with this view. That is, the assumption that biological sex is the explanation for behavior differences may be implied even though it is not made explicit.
Social-psychological Perspective – Also referred to as Socialization. According to this social-psychological perspective children learn gendered behavior through a variety of learning processed - for example, imitation, modeling, and the use of reward and punishment by others. (nurture). These theories study gender at the individual level by trying to understand how self-identity as female or male emerges in the interaction of significant others.
Examples of the social-psychological perspective include:
Social learning theories maintain that children are not innately gendered or raced rather, they model the behavior of others through observation, imitation, and interaction.
Cognitive schemas are internal mental structures that allow us to organize social information about various concepts, objects, people, groups and situations as well as ourselves.
Form both these socialization theories gender is relatively fixed; it develops during early childhood and once established , is resistant to change.
This cognitive conception also tends to dichotomous thinking – boys are this; girls are that.
From this viewpoint gender is the result of social and cultural forces rather than biology, This view emphasizing learning is better able to account for the diversity of traits and behavioral within both sexes, and it does imply that change in gendered personality characteristics and behaviors is possible if society’s members choose to modify socialization practices. But gender is still something that operates at the level of the individual personality.
Kimmel’s and other’s criticism: Both schools of thought assume that gender domination is the inevitable outcome of gender difference, that difference causes domination.
Social-constructionist perspective. Also referred to as "symbolic interactionism." In this more sociological approach reality is created through ongoing human action and the understandings shared about those actions. In this view, gender resides neither solely in the person nor the situation but rather in both. These theories emphasize the interactional level.
Social interaction requires some common definition of the situation on the part of the participants in the interaction. This perspective assumes that through all the ways of communicating people agree on a definition of the situation and thus create a shared interpretation of reality.
Men and women “do gender” (Candice West) and in doing gender, they choose certain options for behaving.
Spade says " the point is that … people make gender happen through what they do and don't do in relation to others, and what they think is appropriate for different situations."
According to this perspective, these cumulative performances of gender are what create gendered institutions and sustain the society.
Its emphasis on individual agency tends to minimize social-structural constraints and relationships of power and inequality.
Social-structural Perspective (also referred to Structuralism) -Finally a fourth way to view gender is to see it as built into social institutions or as a form of social structure itself. Gender is a characteristic of the social structure of society and not of the individual. We can look at gender at the institutional level or at the macro-level.
Gender is one basis for the systematic allocation of resources and opportunities. A social-structural approach to gender looks at the gendered distribution of resources and power within social institutions, from families to larger organizations to the entire society, and studies how this distribution is responsible for shaping gendered behaviors.
This perspective emphasizes the profound effects of the pervasive system of male privilege whereby men as a category has systematic advantages over women whether men desire these advantages or not.
Two examples of macro-level theories are functionalism and conflict theory.
Functionalism: Functionalism attempts to understand how all parts of a society fit together to form a smoothly running social system. According to this theoretical paradigm, parts of society tend to complement each other to create social stability. Translated into gender relationships, Talcott Parson and Robert Bales saw distinct and separate gender roles in the heterosexual nuclear family as a functional adaptation to a modern, complex society. Women were thought be more "functional" if they were socialized and aspired to raise children. And men were thought to be more "functional" if thyme were socialized and aspired to support their children and wives. According to Parsons and Bales it is not functional if both women and men perform the same tasks.
Conflict theory (or its early version of Marxism) would be considered a social-structural perspective. Social conflict theorists do not see social systems as functional or benign. Marxists described industrial societies as systems of oppression in which one group, the dominant social class, uses its control of economic resources to oppress the working class. Most early Marxist theories focused on social class oppression. However, Engels wrote about the oppression of women by men as the earliest example of oppression of one group by another.
Spade and Valentine introduce us to do other important perspectives in studying gender.
Postmodernism (Spade and Valentine) - In contrast to the theories above, postmodernism focuses on the way knowledge about gender is constructed, not on explaining gender relationships themselves. To postmodernists, knowledge is never absolute and unchanging. It is always situated in a social reality that is specific to an historical time period. Postmodernism is based on the idea that it is impossible for anyone to see the world without presuppositions. From a postmodernist perspective, gender is socially constructed through discourses, which are the "series of stories" that we use to explain our world. Postmodernists attempt to "deconstruct" the discourse or stories used to support a group's bel8efs about gender. For postmodernists, gender is a product of the discourses within particular social contexts that define and explain gender.
Intersectional Theories - Many theorists feel that many of the gender theories fail to recognize how gender interacts with other social categories, such as race/ethnicity, social class, sexuality, age, etc. They try to incorporate multiple social categories in their research and use intersectional analysis to understand gender.
Lastly, Renzetti and Curran and Spade and Valentine discuss the feminist paradigm in its many permutations. According to Renzetti and Curran, the feminist paradigm is a “school of thought that explains gender in terms of the political and socioeconomic structure in which it is constructed and emphasizes the importance of taking collective action to eradicate sexism in sociology as well as in society, and to reconstruct gender so that it is neither a harmful nor an oppressive social category.”
So unlike other perspectives, it recognizes that is not value-free, but it operates on the scientific research principles.
Briefly, Judith Lorber classified contemporary feminisms as:
Gender-reform feminisms emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between women and men. The goal is for women to have the same opportunities as men. Lorber identifies four feminisms - liberal, Marxist, socialist and development - as gender-reform feminisms.
Gender-resistance feminisms argue that formal legal rights alone can't end gender inequality because male dominance is too ingrained into everyday social relations including heterosexual sexual relations. These perspectives not only focus on how women's ideas and experiences are different from those of men, but also urge women to break away from male dominance by forming separate, women-only organizations and communities. Lorber includes radical feminism, lesbian feminism. psychoanalytic feminism and standpoint feminism which studies the interaction of gender with other social categories, like race.
Gender-rebellion feminisms focus on the interrelationships among inequalities of gender, race and ethnicity, social class and sexual orientation, and gender inequality as one piece of a complex system of social stratification. Multiracial feminism, men's feminism, social construction feminism, postmodern feminism, and queer theory are considered gender-rebellion feminisms. Postmodern feminism and queer theory conceptualize sex and gender as social scripts and then rewrite the parts and alter the props as they see fit for specific situations. Gender, from these perspectives, is fluid.
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