SOC100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter SP: CH 7, RS: CH 24, 27, 34: Homosociality, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sexual Capital
SP Chapter 7: Gender Relations and Sexuality
●Introduction: Have men become the “second sex?”
○Hanna Rosin recently predicted the “end of men” and triumph of women
○The difference between sex roles and gender roles
■Sex: the biological characteristics that define a person as male or female
■Gender: social expectations of behavior and appearance that we identify with
being “masculine” or “feminine”
●Gender is a product of social construction
○The expectations of what it means to be male or female are
defined by the society in which we live in
●Sexuality --the expression of sexual desire--is also socially constructed,
the result of a complex interaction between biological, chemical,
psychological, cultural, and social factors
○Sexism and gender inequality
■Sexism: the perceived superiority of one sex (most often men) over the other
(usually women)
■Judith Butler
●Work centers on the idea that gender is not innate but is derived from a
narrative heavily influenced by the cultural practice of patriarchy, or
male dominance
○Gender consists of signs imposed and internalized via the
psyche
●Butler's Gender Trouble (1990” aims to separate identify from the notion
that human gender is binary--that people are either categorically male or
categorically female, with no room for variance or middle ground
○Explains gender in terms of performativity, which is the notion
that a person’s gender is continually performed, not given as a
fact, and that this performance shapes an individual’s sexuality
●Queer theory: people’s identities are not fixed and do not determine who
they are
●Gender does not cause performance, but performance defines gender
●The way gender, sex, and sexuality are performed is not entirely up to
choice, since only certain structured possibilities of sex, gender, and
sexuality are socially allowed to appear as coherent or “natural”
○Regular discourse (foucault): includes disciplinary techniques
that force subjects to perform specific stylized actions that
preserve the appearance of the “core” gender, sex, and sexuality
the discourse itself produces
●Ways of looking at Gender and Sexuality
○Functionalist (starting with Talcott Parsons)
■Argued that social gendering is universal and inevitable: the most effective and
efficient way to carry out the tasks necessary to reproduction and socialization
(on the other hand) and material support (on the other hand)
■The gendering of social roles may have evolutionary survival value for the human
race
●A mother, by her biological attachment to her child, is in the more
favorable position to raise the family’s children. Once she is at home with
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her children anyway, she is also well suite to caring for the household,
which frees her husband to work outside the home
■Sexual deviations test the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior, and help
promote social cohesion
●As long as sexual conformity and sexual deviance are isolated from one
another, by space and secrecy, tension does not arise between the two
○Conflict theory
■Recognizes that capitalism demands the low-cost social reproduction of a
workforce from one generation to the next
■Families are the best and cheapest way to raise new workers, and women
provide the cheapest family “labor”
●Mothers have the job of keeping all the family earners and earners-to-be
healthy, at no cost to employers, who benefit from the surplus value their
workers produce
■Marxist approach assumes that working-class men and women are on the same
side, both equal victims of the capitalist class
■The theory of patriarchy is compatible with Marxist analyses that view working-
class women as victims of both class and gender oppression
■The standpoint theory cautions that we cannot universalize about oppression: it
calls on us to recognize that everyone’s experience of oppression is different,
depending on their race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, etc
■Argue that the dominant groups in our society dictate what kinds of sexual
activities are defined as “normal”
■Ex: prostitution reflects gender inequality because it permits men to gain income
or pleasure by exploiting women
●Prostitution is usually a result of poverty
○Symbolic interactionism
■Concerned with the ways that gender differences become stable gender
inequalities
●Ex: how young women become “commodified” as sex “objects”
■Also want to understand how the sexual double standard, which has allowed
men more sexual freedom than women, has been “negotiated” so that many
women go along with an agenda that benefits men over women
●Ex: defining of sexual freedom as men’s free access of women
■Interested in the social construction of gendered concepts like “femininity” and
“masculinity” and with the role of families, schools, and mass media in the
propagation of thes ideas
■Hegemonic masculinity: the dominant or ideal masculine role
●Encourages men to compete for power against other males; to
subordinate women; to control their own fears and gentler emotions; to
be rigorously heterosexual
■Notions of femininity and masculinity are related to sexual norms and values,
which change over time with a rewriting of rules and restrictions on sexual
behavior, known as sexual scripts
●One of the dominant sexual scripts in our society is that of the sexually
assertive man and the passive or resistant woman who is expected to
desire sex much less than her partner
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■A symbolic-interactionist study of prostitution would focus on the socialization of
prostitutes, their entry into this line of work, and how they develop strategies to
deal with customers and pimps (managers)
●Prostitution has its own language, professional ethics, ways of exercising
control and working around formal authority, etc
■Frames social problems surrounding sexual activity as social constructions
●Ex: sociologists in this tradition would be interested in tracking public
discourse around changes in prostitution or pornography, including
increased demands for policing and prosecution
●Also interested in studying public views about changes in the age of
initiation into sexuality
○Feminism
■Argue that most gender differences are socially constructed, however, not all
feminists agree about the causes of gender inequality
■Intersectionality theory
●Proposes that we cannot assume that any dimension of inequality
inevitably and universally causes disadvantage
●Also suggests that we cannot predict the disadvantage suffered by a
particular individual simply by summing up his or her statuses
●Disadvantage is a result of the intersection (or interaction) of multiple
types of vulnerability
○Gendered disadvantage is also conditional in the sense that a
woman will suffer different amounts and types of inequality
depending on her race, class, age, disability, and other features
statistically associated with vulnerability
●Sociologists should study particular combinations of vulnerability, in their
particular social locations, to understand how and why gendered
disadvantage occurs
■Sexuality studies
●How men and women experience sex differently, noting that sexual
behavior can reflect gender inequality
●Sexual encounters may have different consequences for a man and
women, and may be interpreted in different ways by other members of
their society
○Postmodernism
■Questions our thinking of “normality”--what we think is normal, and how we came
to think that
■Foucault's discussion of sexuality is about the way sexual selfhood is achieved
through discursive and bodily practices
●Argued ideas about sexuality --regardless of whether they are wielded by
figures of authority or by sexual rebels--are produced discursively
(through discourse) and socially
●The supposed sciences of sexuality exercise control via their supposed
knowledge of individuals, they even try to tell people what to think about
themselves as sexual beings
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SOC100H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Introduction: have men become the second sex? . Hanna rosin recently predicted the end of men and triumph of women. The difference between sex roles and gender roles. Sex: the biological characteristics that define a person as male or female. Gender: social expectations of behavior and appearance that we identify with being masculine or feminine . Gender is a product of social construction. The expectations of what it means to be male or female are defined by the society in which we live in. Sexuality --the expression of sexual desire--is also socially constructed, the result of a complex interaction between biological, chemical, psychological, cultural, and social factors. Sexism: the perceived superiority of one sex (most often men) over the other (usually women) Work centers on the idea that gender is not innate but is derived from a narrative heavily influenced by the cultural practice of patriarchy, or male dominance. Gender consists of signs imposed and internalized via the psyche.
