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GENDER AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM SOC 1101-A: INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY SPRING 2020
ANNOUNCEMENTS
• QUESTIONS REGARDING SOCIOLOGY AT BOWDOIN PAPER 2?
• Extra Office Hours This Week:
• Tomorrow: 9:30 am - 5 pm
• EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNITIES
• Email sent out this morning. More EC opportunities to come as they arise.
PREVIOUSLY . . .
• Racism — an ideology or set of beliefs about the claimed superiority of one racial or ethnic group over another.
• institutional racism (housing)
• prejudice vs. discrimination (Merton’s Chart of Prejudice and Discrimination)
• The New Racism
• implicit bias (aversive racism; colorblind racism)
• white privilege
• microaggressions (microassaults; microinsults; microinvalidations)
• The White Space vs. The Iconic Ghetto
• Cultural Appropriation
• Group Responses to Domination (withdrawal; passing; acceptance (as a strategy of resistance) ; resistance)
CLARIFICATIONS
• Cultural Appropriation: why the emphasis on the dominant group?
• Racism in other contexts?
• Koreans and Black Panther
• Colorblind racism in France
What qualifies a man? What qualifies a woman?
SEX VS. GENDER
• sex: the natural or biological differences that distinguishes males from females.
• rigid, two-sex system.
• binary: a system of classification with only two distinct and opposing categories.
• the crisis of the “third sex.”
• intersex: term used to describe a person whose chromosomes or sex characteristics are neither exclusively male nor exclusively female (f.k.a. “hermaphroditism”).
SEX
• Can biology dictate behavior?
• essentialism: a line of thought that explains social phenomena in terms of natural ones.
• gender as immutable and biological
• biological determinism: a line of thought that explains social behavior in terms of who you are in the natural world.
• human sexual dimorphism: the extent to which inherent physical differences define the two sexes.
• Evidence suggests a need to embrace a more expansive definition of sex that goes beyond two distinct categories.
GENDER
• gender: a social construct that consists of social arrangements built and organized around sex.
• gender is constructed around biological (sex) differences between men and women (essentialism).
• gender roles: sets of behavioral norms assumed to accompany one’s status as male or female.
• gender identity: an individual’s self-definition or sense of gender.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GENDER
AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION?
• David Reimer (1965 - 2004)
• Dr. John Money: Is gender exclusively learned through socialization?
WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY GENDER IS SOCIALLY
CONSTRUCTED? • Gender, unlike sex, is understood to be fluid.
• Gayle Rubin: sex/gender system
• social construction of gender based on biological differences between men and women.
• a division of labor emerges within every society, where men perform the tasks accorded higher value than those assumed by women.
• images of femininity
• hegemonic masculinity: the condition which men are dominant and privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible.
GENDER IS FLUID
• cisgender: descriptor for those whose experiences of their own gender align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
GENDER IS FLUID . . .
• transgender: an umbrella term for a wide variety of “differently gendered” identities.
• includes those who identify as transsexual, transvestites, transmen and transwomen.
• genderqueer: individuals blending elements of masculinity and femininity — with or without physical body modifications.
OUR UNDERSTANDINGS OF
GENDER ARE CHANGING . . .
• “Transgender” is a contested concept.
• Many choose to go stealth, opting not to disclose themselves as transgender (vs. “passing”, which implies deceit and fraud).
• Many who transition believe in and reinforce the gender binary.
• Many who identify as “transgender” mobilize a political identity.
WHY DOES THAT MATTER?
• Gender as unmoored from sexual characteristics.
• Some men have a uterus.
• Some men menstruate.
• Some women have a penis.
• Presenting and performing gender is more important.
