Imagining Gender: The social construction of Gender

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Lecture 3

• Imagining Gender The social construction of
  Gender

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Gender is a Power Relationship

• Not This
• Gender Differences
• ?
• Inequality

• But this
• Inequality
• ?
• Gender Differences

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The Social Construction of Gender

• Social constructs classifications of reality
  that are agreed upon or accepted
• Gender Ideology a set of beliefs about the
  definition, roles, status, and relationships of
  males and females
• We are socialized into a gender system (culture)
  that tells us how to act.
• And, through our actions, whereby we accept,
  reject, and/or modify these ideas were recreate
  gender.

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Gendered Society
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The same, but different?

• Gender means sameness and gender means
  difference?
• How does gender create differences between men
  and women?
• How does gender create sameness among all women
  and among all men?

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Thinking Beyond Gender Roles

• Social Roles behavior expected from a status
  position
• Gender is present in all social roles, NOT a
  social role in itself
• As a master status position, gender affects how
  we are expected to perform roles and how our
  actions are judged
• Master Status Position status positions that
  affect all other social positions in society

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Just What are Women Lacking?

• A 2006, study surveyed 935 alumni of the
  International Institute for Management
  Development in Switzerland found that while the
  view of an ideal leader varied from place to
  place in some regions the ideal leader was a
  team builder, in others the most valued skill was
  problem-solving
• But whatever was most valued, women were seen as
  lacking it.
• Respondents in the United States and England, for
  instance, listed inspiring others as a most
  important leadership quality, and then rated
  women as less adept at this than men.
• In Nordic countries, women were seen as perfectly
  inspirational, but it was delegating that was
  of higher value there, and women were not seen as
  good delegators.

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Our multiple social roles

• Role Strain the stress or strain experienced by
  an individual when incompatible behavior,
  expectations, or obligations are associated with
  a single social role
• CEO and Woman
• Role Conflict a situation in which a person is
  expected to play two incompatible roles
• CEO and Mother
• Homemaker and Father

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Interacting with Gender

• Our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not
  express some authentic inner "core" self but are
  the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of
  our actions and behavior
• Gender identities arise out of social interaction
  
• We organize our behavior and activities in the
  context of social life to become gendered

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Doing Gender

• Gender is accomplished by managing our behavior
  in relation to normative conceptions of
  appropriate attitudes and activities for
  particular sex categories
• appears to be the natural
• reproduce social structure

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Gender Accomplishment depends on

• Where we are
• Context/Social environment
• Who we are with
• Status positions
• Social roles
• What we are doing
• What is the goal of the social interaction?

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The Hot Chick

• How is gender (male/female) accomplished (or not)
  in this film clip?

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How would gender be accomplished in these
situations

• A young man on a date?
• A mother at a family dinner?
• Two guys watching a football game?
• What is important in these examples?
• Context
• Participants
• Roles

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Can you think of some ways that you do gender?
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Doing Gender with Language

• The dominant social status of men in our society
  is reflected in language
• Man as an indefinite pronoun
• Exclusion of women in visualization
• Pronoun usage perpetuates male/female roles
• Status positions
• Sex ascription to non-human objects
• Nurture, owned, small/dependent VS. decisive,
  strong, controlling

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Optional Performances

• We ALL perform gender traditional or not
• Not a question of whether to DO a gender, but
  what form that performance will take.
• Gender norms and the binary understanding of
  Masculine/Feminine can be changed by our behavior