Title: Chapter 1 and Book Intro
Course: SOC 210 RTZ

Chapter 1 Introduction

A Few More Inconvenient Truths

The tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 shows how gender appears in surprising and critical ways in our lives. Women represented 75% of the fatalities that resulted from the environmental disaster. Observers have noted that several social factors related to gender—including clothing, division of labor, and play activities, such as swimming and tree climbing—played a role in the gender differences in mortality.

Some Ground Rules for Studying Gender

How should we study gender? This book makes 3 assumptions:

- Sex and gender are the outcomes of social arrangements and social relations. Conventional wisdom may tell us that biology is destiny and that gender (and race ethnicity and sexuality) are part of natural physical bodies. We will challenge these assumptions by showing how biological accounts do not sufficiently explain gender, race, and sex.
- We must take account of intersectionality. Gender is part of a network of social inequalities. Race ethnicity, sexuality, social class, and national divisions create networks of power and inequality that intersect with gender relations.
- The choice of standpoint is a political choice. We cannot study social life as if we were neutral outside observers. Research is political because it must always be from a particular standpoint. Social inequalities generate distinctive standpoints, which form a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “knowledge and truth and the right to be heard are not equally distributed.” Howard Becker provides an example of a hierarchy of credibility. He writes, “Most research on youth is clearly designed to find out why youth are so troublesome for adults, rather than asking the equally interesting sociological question: “Why do adults make so much trouble for youth?” (Howard Becker, “Whose Side Are We On?” Social Problems 14(3), Winter 1967). We must understand the perspectives of subordinated groups, who have their own knowledge of their everyday worlds, knowledge that may contradict official, elite knowledge. There is no one, objective view.

The Overarching Theory of Intersectionality

The text is organized around the theory of intersectionality, a theory developed by many scholars and especially associated in sociology with the work of Patricia Hill Collins.

The theory of intersectionality:

- tells us that the complexity of human life and social experience means that we have to observe and explain it as a system of contradictory and dynamic networks.
- provides a framework for exploring and understanding all the strands of our lives and how they influence each other.
- also provides a framework for uncovering and challenging the power relationships that are central to these networks and their interactions.

Intersectional analysis focuses on the web of power relations that create oppression and privilege and the ways that multiple and sometimes conflicting sources of oppression and power are intertwined.

Hegemonic Masculinities and Emphasized Femininities

This book will emphasize the range of ways gender is experienced and understood. There are always many different masculinities and femininities in a society, but some versions dominate in any particular society or historical period. R.W. Connell has named the dominant forms “hegemonic masculinities” and “emphasized femininities.” It is important to explore both the dominant forms and the more marginalized masculinities and femininities in order to see how gender is challenged and changed.

Making History

While we are constrained by the social arrangements in our lives, some people always challenge and resist these arrangements, seeking to eliminate them, alter them, or get around them. At the same time other people seek to maintain the status quo. These tensions mean that social institutions and societies are continually in flux. Social institutions, laws, and beliefs shape and limit the choices we have. Marx wrote, “People make their own history, but not as they please.” Past histories shape the questions people ask, the possibilities they envision. The past histories of gender shape our lives in profound ways, but gender is the creation of humans interacting with one another and can be recreated or even eliminated through our continuing interactions and practices.

Feminist Scholars Seeking Answers

There were many different women’s movements in the last third of the 20th century in North America, Europe, and Australia, and also in parts of the global South. Most histories of the women’s movement that you may have read start with the North American “second wave” struggles of the 1970s. Black history reveals a different women’s movement among African American women. In the 19th and 20th centuries, black women were active in defending themselves, their families, and their communities through the anti-lynching movement, organizing black domestic workers, participating in the anti-eugenics movement, struggling against sterilization abuse, and taking part in the civil rights movement.

What is often referred to as the “second wave” was actually two largely white movements: the movement for legal/political reform and inclusion spearheaded by NOW and the socialist feminist women’s liberation movement. Radical and lesbian feminists formed their own groups in this period as well. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and First Nations women organized to press for their specific demands.

Feminism in the Universities

Feminist scholars developed new areas of study, new concepts, and new analyses, such as “the social construction of gender,” “doing gender,” “compulsory heterosexuality,” “the feminization of poverty,” “hegemonic and subordinated masculinities,” and “care work.”

Third-Wave Feminism

This term refers to the new generation of feminists that emerged in the United States in the 1990s. These feminists took for granted the privileges won by their mothers’ generation, embraced racial ethnic and global differences among women, and lived feminism in their everyday lives.

Transnational and Global Feminism

Transnational feminism originated in a series of international conferences on women beginning in Mexico in 1975. The UN Decade for Women from 1975 to 1985 began with divergent goals for women of the South and North but developed activities to promote women’s rights within the UN system and beyond. The Platform for Action developed at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 called for action in twelve critical areas of concern.

Women’s Movements: A Broad Look

Some observers of the contemporary women’s movements believe they have capitulated to neoliberal capitalism. Instead of struggling for a new order of economic and political justice, they look to increasing gender equality within the system: they call for more women executives, more equal wages, and so forth. Critics call for feminism to connect with its former critique of capitalism.

Plan of the Book

- Chapter 2 Bodies and Gender

This chapter makes the case for biological sex as a continuum, not a dichotomy of male and female, and explores the interaction of physical and social factors in creating gendered human bodies.

- Chapter 3 Socialization and the Social Construction of Gender

If biology is not destiny, where does it come from? This chapter answers this with three sources: learning gender, doing gender, and gendered social institutions.

- Chapter 4 Sexualities

Sexuality, a complex factor in itself and another social issue often assumed to be biologically determined, intersects with gender (as well as race ethnicity and nation).

- Chapter 5 Education

Education is a gendered institution that is tied to other gendered institutions, some surprising (such as distribution of water) and some not (such as the labor market).

- Chapter 6 Work

Paid and unpaid work is a complex, gendered institution composed of numerous pieces including labor markets, job hierarchies, and international systems of labor exploitation.

- Chapter 7 Families

Exploring several aspects of families, including marriage, balancing paid work and family life, parenting and caregiving, and divorce, reveals differential experiences by gender.

- Chapter 8 Violence

Violence is a feature of our lives, from the most intimate relationships to the most wide-ranging aspects of human existence, such as war. This entire continuum reflects gender and in particular presents the central question of why violence primarily consists of acts by men against women and other men.

- Chapter 9 Health and Illness

Health is a collective good requiring collective action to secure it for all people. The problems and the solutions to health and health care are shaped by gender as well as other systems of social inequality.

- Chapter 10 Politics, Prison, and the Military

Politics includes electoral politics, military, and prison, all of which are highly stratified by gender and pose many questions about gender and power, including the very definition of politics.

- Chapter 11 Media

Media provide a powerful reflection of gender as well as means of creating, challenging, or maintaining the status quo in regard to gender.

- Chapter 12 Sports

Sport is another social institution that is heavily entwined with other media and a sign of gender, closely associating athletics and athleticism with masculinities while frequently excluding women.

- Chapter 13 Religion

Religion takes many forms in the world, but gender plays a central role in the rituals, images, and organization of every form.

- Chapter 14 Globalization, Organizing, and Making the World a Better Place

Gender is a central part of the global forces shaping the contemporary world, and sensitivity to the issue of gender may offer solutions to many of our pressing social problems