Exam 1 Flashcards
(38 cards)
Opposite sex
*We tend to use the word “opposite” when describing the relationship between men and women.
*Without distinguishing males from females, there would be no basis for difference or inequality.
*Seventeenth-century Europeans and early Americans believed in superior and inferior versions of personhood.
*They believed females were inferior, “males turned outside in.”
*Today we know that female and male bodies are neither the same nor absolute opposites
Foundational concepts
*Sex refers to the biological differences in primary and secondary sexual characteristics.
*Gender refers to the primary way we naturalize and justify inequality.
*Describing people as male-bodied or female-bodied helps capture the fact that the shape of a body may not extend to how a person feels or acts
The gender binary
The gender binary argues that there are only two types of people, male-bodied people, who are masculine, and female-bodied people, who are feminine.
The personal expectation theory
- Many of us don’t believe we, personally, conform to a stereotype; we are personal exceptions. It applies to others
Gender ideologies
- Some societies or cultures believe there are more than just two genders, or they see gender as more fluid.
*The Navajo have a fifth, gender-fluid category for a person whose gender is constantly changing, a nádleehì.
*Feminine men are a third gender in some cultures
Sex switching
- In Afghanistan where biological girls (and women) are not allowed to leave their homes without a male family escort sex-switched children are accepted.
Gender Ideologies Differ by Culture
- In Albania, girls can live as boys and grow up to be socially recognized men.
*The Dutch don’t teach children that men have “male” hormones and women have “female” hormones, but that hormone levels vary among men and among women and that these levels rise and fall in response to different situations and as people of both sexes age.
Gendering examples
- Associative memory: the way cells in our brains process and transmit information to make literal connections so that some ideas are associated with other ideas in our minds.
*This makes the gender binary seem more real than it is. - We constantly overlook, misremember, or forget any exceptions to the gender binary.
Managing gender expectations
- Gender rules: culturally specific instructions for how a male or female of a certain social status should appear and behave.
Doing gender
- This term describes the ways in which we actively obey, and actively break gender rules of our society.
Socialization
- Kids absorb gender rules while they’re busy learning all the other rules life teaches. The way kids do gender is more rigid and binary than adults because they’re still learning the rules in all their complexity.
Injection Socialization
The “injection” idea of socialization fails on these fronts:
* The model suggests that socialization is finished by the time we’re adults.
* It leaves no room for the possibility that we actively consider and resist gender rules.
* It fails to acknowledge that people resist and change gender rules.
*It ignores how the gender rules change, not only as children grown up but as societies change. There is not one coherent set of gender rules children learn and apply throughout their lives.
* It suggests that socialization is provided in greater or lesser doses, and we must live with what we’ve been
Learning Model of Socialization
of socialization suggests that socialization is a lifelong process of learning and relearning gendered expectations and how to negotiate them.
Pleasure
- Following gender rules can be quite pleasurable.
Gender policing
- Sociologists use the term gender policing to describe responses to the violation of gender rules aimed at promoting conformity.
How to break the rules
- People don’t usually defy gender rules outright because confronting them head-on can cause conflict.
*Instead, if the rule breaker affirms the legitimacy of the rule, the one asking for an account will usually be satisfied, and thus conflict will be avoided. In fact, rule breaking will only be understood as rebellion if the rule breaker doesn’t provide accounts for breaking the rules.
Intersectionality
- Gender is not an isolated social fact but instead intersects all our social locations to make up our identity. People are complicated and have unique and multi-layered identities.
- Intersectionality is a concept that acknowledges that people are often disadvantaged by various social locations, which can result in inequality or oppression.
Gender Designations and Strategies
- Some gender designations or strategies based on income and class are:
*Breadwinner
*Wonderful Wife and Mother
*Career Woman
*Supermom
*Super Dad
*Blue Collar Guy
Country Boys
Economic Class and Place of Residence
The people with more money and class status have more gender strategies available to them.
*Wonderful Wife and Mother gender strategy is more likely for women who have limited job opportunities who are married to men with high-paying jobs.
*Breadwinner gender strategy is more likely for men in high-paying work who have wives losing their jobs.
African American men
- This Gentle Black Man gender (and racial) strategy is used to avoid being stereotyped as a Dangerous Black Man.
African American men doing feminity
- Since femininity is seen as implicitly white, doing femininity can feel like doing whiteness.
- This makes the Girly Girl strategy seem like embracing white standards of beauty and speech and internalizing racist views of blackness. Using this strategy might lead to being regarded as “sellouts” and feel like performing whiteness.
Asian American men
- men have a model American stereotype, who is hardworking and smart, attached to them, but it is also a de-masculinized stereotype.
- In the 1800s, Chinese men lived together without wives and performed domestic tasks for themselves.
Gender strategies for white Americans
- The All-American Girl strategy is available to many attractive middle-class white women (while not easily available to black and Asian women, based mostly on how people look)
Sexual orientation terms
- Compulsory heterosexuality: feeling on the part of some sexual minorities that they must hide their sexual orientation because this rule says that only sexual attraction and relationships between one man and one woman are normal and anything else is deviant
