GWS 10 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Social Constructionism, Essentialism, Racialization

• School: Berkeley
• Department: Gender And Women's Studies
• Course: GWS 10
• Professor: Barbara Barnes

Document Summary

Gws 10 the social construction and institutionalization of gender and race glenn. Toward a social constructionist approach to gender and race. By studying gender and race in isolation, each field marginalized major segments of the communities it claimed to represent. Initial attempts to bring race into the same frame as gender treated the two as independent axes. In the absence of a theory of race comparable to a theory of gender, building a comprehensive theory has been elusive. Argument: a synthesis of social constructionist streams within critical race and feminist studies offers a framework for integrated analysis. Social constructionism provides a common vocabulary and set of concepts for looking at how gender and race are mutually constituted. Social constructionism arose as an alternative to biological and essentialist conceptions that rendered gender and race static and ahistorical, but it achieved centrality earlier and has been elaborated in greater detail in feminist scholarship.