KA#1 (Ch 1-7) Flashcards
distinction
“describes efforts to differentiate one’s own group from others” (4)
sex
“refers to these physical differences in primary sexual characteristics (the presence of organs directly involved in reproduction) and secondary sexual characteristics (such as patterns of hair growth, the amount of breast tissue, and distribution of body fat)” (5)
assigned sex
“an outcome of the interpretation of known sex-related characteristics before and at birth” (5)
gender
“the symbolism of masculinity and femininity that we connect to bodies assigned male and female at birth” (5)
gendering
“an active process that connects physical bodies, meaningful identities, and symbolic representations and then translates them into distinctions” (5)
culture
“a group’s shared beliefs and the practices and material things that reflect them” (6)
sexual dimorphisms
“refers to typical differences in body type and behavior between males and females of a species” (39)
observed differences
“findings from surveys, experiments, and other types of studies that detect differences between groups” (44)
priming
“reminding study subjects of a stereotype right before the test” (45)
learned differences
“differences that are a result of how we grew up (with certain parents or peers) or our sociocultural environment (like religion, education, or media)” (45)
hormones
“messengers in a chemical communication system” (50)
nature/nurture debate
“the ‘nature’ side is premised on the idea that men and women are born different, and the ‘nurture’ side presupposes that we become different through socialization alone” (55)
naturalism
“the idea that biology affects our behavior independently of our environment” (55)
culturalism
“the idea that we’re ‘blank slates’ who become who we are purely through learning and socialization” (55-56)
deceptive differences
“differences that, by being observed, make it seem like groups are more different than they really are” (59)
normative standard
“the example against which people tend to measure themselves and others” (60)
intersectionality
“the idea that gender is not an isolated social fact about us but instead intersects with our other social positions and identities” (61)
nuclear families
“ones in which a mother and father with children live together without extended kin” (62)
kin groups
“culturally variable collections of people considered family” (62)
forager societies
“societies in which people migrate seasonally, following crops and game across the landscape” (62)
gender rules
“instructions for how to appear and behave as a man or woman” (68)
doing gender
“the ways in which we actively obey and break gender rules” (70)
cultural travelling
“moving from one cultural or subcultural context to another and sometimes back” (74)
learning model of socialization
“posits that socialization is a lifelong process of learning and relearning social expectations as well as how to negotiate them” (77)
gender policing
“negative responses to the violation of gender rules aimed at promoting conformity” (83)
culturally unintelligible
“to fall so outside the symbolic meaning system that people won’t know how to interact with us” (91)
social identities
“culturally available and socially constructed categories of people in which we place ourselves or are placed by others” (96)
privilege
“unearned social and economic advantages based on our location in social hierarchy” (96)
gender strategies
“finding ways to do gender that work for us, given the constraints” (98)
race
“a socially meaningful set of distinctions based on superficial and imagined biological difference (variations of skin color, hair texture, the shape of facial features, and more, that don’t map onto distinct human types)” (99)
racism
“the social arrangements designed to systematically advantage one race over others” (99)
marking
“the act of applying a label meant to highlight an exception” (106)
