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Lecture Nine

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Title: Lecture Nine


1
Lecture Nine
  • Deconstructing Masculinities and Femininities.

2
Introduction.
  • Gendered discourses an important means of
    formulating identities.
  • Practices of 'masculinity' and 'femininity'.
  • Where do sex roles come from?
  • Natural/biological or social/cultural categories?

3
Definitions
  • Sex is a biologically and physiologically
    determined category, assigned at birth on the
    basis of genital appearance and reproductive
    function.
  • Problems.
  • The doctor present arbitrarily assigns people of
    indeterminate sex a sex category at their
    birth. There are some that have chromosomes of a
    female nature but still possess male appendages!
    It used to be felt that you could change gender
    but not sex, this is arguably no longer the case.

4
Gender
  • Gender is a social construct it is conceived of
    as the social roles allocated to men and women in
    society. Gender roles include behavior patterns,
    obligations, and privileges considered
    appropriate for each sex. Some sociologists
    suggest that gender identities, ideas about
    masculinity and femininity are partly constructed
    through the internalisation and acknowledgment of
    gender stereotypes that freely circulate in our
    social environment.
  • Consider Fallacy of internalisation.

5
Sex Roles
  • Women.
  • Expressive.
  • Soft.
  • Empathetic.
  • Gentle.
  • Nurturing.
  • Submissive
  • Emotional.
  • Talkative
  • Anxiety prone.
  • Men.
  • Instrumental
  • Strong
  • Tough/hard
  • Aggressive
  • Ambitious/ provider
  • Dominant
  • Rational
  • Discerning
  • Heroic/ Brave

6
Connell (2002).
  • Gender is the structure of Social relations
    that centres on the reproductive arena, and the
    set of practices (governed by that structure)
    that bring reproductive distinctions between
    bodies into social processes

7
Questions.
  • Are these roles natural or cultural?
  • Is this an ethnocentric model?
  • Cultural and historical specificity of gender
    roles.
  • Is there much deviation globally?

8
The role of social factors
  • 1. language/ discourse (Dale Spender, Foucault)
  • 2. Gender socialization in the home/ family.
  • 3. Gender socialization in schools
  • 4. Peer group.
  • 5. Media/ image/ text.

9
Biological/ neuroscientific / psychological
research.
  • Ethology- study of animals in their natural
    environment- can we extend these findings to
    humans?
  • Men more aggressive.
  • Men have better spatial awareness.
  • Women are better at looking after children.
  • Women are more emotional.
  • Male babies have a preference for systems.
  • Female babies have a preference for faces.

10
Nature or Nurture?
  • Could all of these be framed in terms of cultural
    explanations?
  • Are newborn babies inscribed with culture?
  • Do cultural factors modify us physiologically.
  • Le Doux Plasticity of brain, brain inscribed
    with culture.
  • Reification. Gender becomes thing-like fixed,
    immutable.
  • Social relations seem to be beyond the control of
    humans
  • However reproductive capacities have impact

11
Fox and Tigers 4 biological rules.
  • Question. Are these rules socially or
    biologically determined?
  • Everything can be reduced to biological rules.
  • Four biological rules which govern social
    institutions.
  • 1 Women have children.
  • 2 Men impregnate women so they can have children
  • 3 Close kin practice sexual avoidance.
  • 4 Men control and dominate women.
  • Only 1 and 2 are grounded in biology- 3 and four
    are just assumptions.
  • Arent these rules socially constructed/
    culturally and historically specific.

12
Social constructionism.
  • People actively construct their social world.
  • Marginalises genetic and biological aspects of
    human life.
  • Knowledge and reality are contingent upon social
    relations and are made and re-made out of
    continuing processes such as reification,
    habitualization and sedimentation.
  • Schutzs phenomenology- an analysis of the
    structure of the common sense world of everyday
    life- is an important influence.
  • For symbolic interactionists and
    ethnomethodologists psychological and biological
    factors can be explained by reference to social
    facts.

13
Four main doctrines revisited.
  • How can we apply these to gender?
  • 1 A critical stance towards taken for granted
    knowledge -all concepts are contestable etc
  • 2 Historical and Cultural specificity. Universal
    rules do not exist they are local to particular
    times/places
  • 3 Knowledge sustained by social processes
  • 4 Knowledge and social action go together. How
    you think about something shapes how you act
    towards it. ie gender and sexuality

14
These four doctrines can be reduced to two main
strands.
  • Anti-Realism. Concepts do not always reflect
    something that is real does gender pre-exist the
    social ?
  • Anti-essentialism. There isnt necessarily for any
    one concept a singular essence, is there a
    masculine/ feminine essence?.
  • Essential/real features of things are a product
    of how we as social actors think/feel/act about
    things.

15
Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology
  • Ethnomethodology- approach associated with
    Garfinkel.
  • Unspoken rules of social interaction.
  • Asks where do we get our notions of sexuality and
    gender.
  • He claims that all our thoughts on sexuality are
    social.
  • We have what Garfinkel calls a Natural idea of
    Sexuality

16
4 part model of the Natural Idea of Sexuality.
  • 1 There are 2 sexes- male and female.
  • 2 Everybody has one or the other.
  • 3 They are invariant
  • 4 Sexual organs determine what sex you are.

17
Gender as Performance
  • For Garfinkel sexuality is a game of presentation
    and convincing by role playing.
  • Notions of masculinity and femininity change
    overtime.
  • The notion of the sexes is socially constructed-
    Garfinkel uses the notion of transexualism to
    test our ides of the natural body.
  • Garfinkel says you can change your sex but only
    by becoming other
  • Yes! 2 sexes but they are not invariant.

18
Reproducing Orderliness in Everyday life
  • Garfinkel identifies a series of practices
    through which we continually reproduce
    orderliness in our day to day lives.
  • Indexicality, context dependant
    language/statements/utterances/actions. We become
    experts in documentary interpretation as we
    constantly re-interpret and unpick what people
    actually mean.
  • Accountability. We constantly give accounts of
    what we do and why. Accounts are always situated,
    they are glossing practices, they mobilise
    attitude, make sense of action, help us to order
    the world. Accounts are never neutral
  • Naïve Realism. Also called a natural attitude.
    The statement/ view Its only natural is for
    Garfinkel naïve realism.

19
Reproducing Orderliness in Everyday life 2
  • Reflexivity. We make the world fit our naïve
    realist expectations through constant verbal and
    symbolic affirmation and expectation. The
    stability of the social world is not based on
    laws and rules but mutual expectation and a
    reciprocal exchange of that expectation. Gender
    not all about rules but reciprocal expectations.
  • Passing. A term originally used in deep south usa
    for Black men and women trying to behave as if
    white, by inventing false histories etc. Gs use
    misleading as orig means passing as what you are
    not. For G it is about passing as what you are.
    Behaving in certain ways commensurate with your
    role- as male, female, mother, lover, husband,
    child, manager, teacher etc, etc

20
Ian Hacking- The Social construction of What?
  • Examines the social construction thesis.
  • Because concepts are socially constructed does it
    really follow that the thing that the concept
    refers to is also?
  • Are we dealing with the social construction of
    ideas or practices?
  • How far do we take this thesis?

21
Difference and Otherness.
  • Focus on difference
  • Emphasis on measuring difference
  • For biologists difference natural
  • For social constructionists difference mostly
    social.
  • One femininity/ One masculinity?
  • Gendering an othering process.
  • Binary models with femininity negatively valued.

22
Hegemonic Masculinity
  • A Dominant Masculinity
  • White/ heterosexual/ misogynistic/ intuitional
    and personal/ performance.
  • But not performed by all men.
  • Ideal of Masculinity
  • Is this masculine ideal attainable or desirable?
  • Other masculinities subordinated (Homosexual,
    black etc)
  • Vietnamese boys in schools
  • Resistance
  • Masculinity needs to be proved.
  • Man is forever at war. (Norman Mailer in Segal
    1990)
  • masculinity is in a state of uncertainty it
    continually has to be proved
  • Butlers Queer Theory celebrates the symbolic
    disruptions of gender categories like 'man',
    'woman' and 'gay' (Connell, 1995)
  • Foucault -there is no essential masculine quality
    because the body and every other aspect of
    masculinity is subject to re-interpretation.
  • Men can be masculine in different ways.

23
Femininity.
  • Can it be hegemonic?
  • No subordination of an other.
  • More femininities that masculinities- De Beauvoir
    many femininities.
  • Limited scope to construct institionalised power
    (Connell 1987)
  • Feminine qualities devalued.
  • Discursive construction of femininity
    subordinates.
  • Mens collective power over women
  • Gendered economy.
  • Women subordinated through language. (Dale
    Spender Invisible women)
  • Sign, signifier, signified- link to de Saussure.

24
Doing Gender.
  • Subversion of gendered categories
  • Butch dykes/ drag queens/ Trans
  • Transgressing boundaries.
  • Donna Haraways cyborgs.
  • Butler (1990) emphasizes performance of gender
  • Gender fluid.
  • More or less male or female in different
    contexts.
  • Gender fluid.
  • Sue Lees- Slags and drags- oppression and
    transgression.
  • Do we have identity choices?

25
Conclusion.
  • Gender as performance.
  • More choices in contemporary world?
  • Only within certain parameters.
  • Many possibilities but historical, spatial and
    cultural factors exert considerable influence.
  • Postmodern play not available to all.
  • Many models of fluid gender profoundly
    ethnocentric.
  • Gender/ sexual identity embodied.
  • Some aspects more fixed than others- sex/ gender
    distinction.
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