Gender Analysis Notes

08/24/2016

Social analysis of gender

19th Century
Victorian Evolutionary Anthropology (Primitive vs. civilized)
Savagery-Barbarism- civilization
Margaret Mead
Uses of Anthropology
Evolution of man.
Movement from traditional skulls to more ancient ones
20th century Anthropology
Claude Levi-Strauss defined anthropology as the science of culture
as seen fro the outside.
How does Mead break with the tenets of evolutionary anthropology?
Title: Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive
Youth for Western Civilization
Differences diagnosed between Samoan and American Society
Family segregates them from society (Samoan)
There are more adults and children and many different roles.
(Samoan)
The exposure to gender roles is a fabricated one.(Samoan)
Separation of genders within family.
Children involved in Household labor
American children is playing with toys and enjoying life while in
Samoa the children work and do labor.
No real confrontation between the people.

 Americans are more casual

Americans also grow gradually while Samoans are more rapid
Conclusion: Birth, Death sex
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
Papa New Guinea-Three tribes-Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli
Standardization of Temperament by sex
19th and 20th Century Anthropology to 20th and 21st Century sociology
of modern, industrial and post-industrial societies.
Social Scientists debate:
Power of social structure, hegemony(dominance sections or
sections which have advantages) , ideology (popular culture,
cultural ideologies, social institutions-subjects are forming within
these socio-cultural environments)
VS
Individual agency, meaning-making, pleasure, reception-content
(an important tension)
MEAD: spoke in terms of sex, temperament and culture
Now: gender, socialization
Judith Butlers Gender Trouble (1990): gender as not what we have
but what we do
Situationally - constructed by active agents
Fluid/varied/conservative/transgressive
Which social site does Messner study?
AYSO soccer. His kid is playing in an opening ceremony. The kids
are bing cheered on and etc.
How does he describe the episode he witnesses?

The girls team(Barbie dolls) are having fun and expressing

themselves in a feminine way and the boys (Sea Monsters) are
chanting and being rowdy. There is resistance between the two
groups. Tone: It is like magnified moment. It captures something
that is at play during ordinary time, but this play makes it visible.
Read Messner page 766. (magnified moments)
Epiphany: a moment of realizations. Intensity of a certain moment
Messners multi-level analysis: Interactional institutional cultural
self-fulfilling prophecy
gender-attribution
Barbie as Cultural Symbol: paradoxical encoding
AUG 31, 2016
Judith Butler Gender Trouble
Gender as not what we have but what we do
Repeated iterations and repudiations in performances of the self
(i.e.. repeated doing and not doing of particular gestures)
These performances create the appearance of a stable, coherent
identity-of an inner essence
Is Situationally- constructed by active agents
Is fluid, varied, conservative/transgressive
It regulates our self-presentation, social behavior
How do the Musto and Pascoe readings illustrate these aspects of
Gender?
Pascoe-We have to do it everyday and not only once.
o The gender difference is not apparent; less aggressive
Musto- separating the genders, such as in the locker rooms

Every identity has a constitutive outside/constitutive other.

How is the gender of an individual being determined here?
Ted Cruz on the Bathroom Bills/Public Facilities Privacy and
Security Act/HB2
Grown adult menstrangersshould not be alone in a bathroom
with little girls. And thats no conservative. Thats not Republican or
Democrat. Thats basic common sense.
Two competing cultural ideologies about how an individuals gender
may be assessed by others:
Identity-based gender ideology: attribution by cultural actors within
everyday, public-private interactions.
Biology-based gender ideology: constituted of external and internal
genitalia, hormones, chromosomes
o Which comes into paly where?
Audre Lorde: correcting the distortion of difference
Racial discursive structure for Black women?
How the structure distorts their strengths:
sassy
Sapphires
Adrienne Rich
Objectivity is the name men give to their subjectivity
(seemingly gender-free, race-free, class-free: speaking from
mythical norm)
false universalization of experiences of White, middle and upper
class women
critical lens of multi-racial feminism much to learn situated
knowledge
According to Stone and Shriver Report, what are the primary hurdles
in women full and equal participation in the US labor force
US-longest work week

 Single
Norms pertaining to our jobs
Historical framework for understanding the problem in the present?
1964->1967->2000->2007
glass ceiling vs. glass escalator
glass ceiling-women employment blocked by ceiling-cant move up
in ranks
glass escalator-when men are in women dominated professions and
men rise faster in the company than women do
How does class and marital/relationship status determine the outcome
of the work-care trade-off?
Women had to work part-time and from home
Not being able to be committed enough or available enough
Being pushed out of the profession
Being shutout of the profession
Cycle of oppression continues
How do voices relate to each other? Reading for and against the grain

Terminology:
Hegemony/hegemonic-The people that have authority or dominance
in certain beliefs in society; acceptance of norms on a global level; cultural;
societies norms; what is common sense?; Everyone consented to a certain
belief.

Discourse-conversation between two different views; debate;

language; dogmatism
Gender Salience-how prominent one gender is; important
Abject/performative-extremely bad, unpleasant, and degrading
3 levels for essay
1. interactional/performative(doing gender)
presentation
how some chosen to dress themselves
how you are perceived
situational-conscious choices
how you interact with other people
2. Structural
institutional structure
3. Cultural
symbols
ideas
touchstones
pop culture
national discourse

Example:
1.
Nail polish and avoiding restrooms
2.
bathrooms are structured gendered
women bathrooms are more fraught
women go groups
3.
rape culture
gender bathroom laws