Download Slide 1

Lecture Nine
Deconstructing
Masculinities
and
Femininities.
Introduction.
 Gendered
discourses an important
means of formulating identities.
 Practices of 'masculinity' and
'femininity'.
 Where do ‘sex roles’ come from?
 Natural/biological or social/cultural
categories?
Definitions
Sex is a biologically and physiologically
determined category, assigned at birth on the
basis of genital appearance and reproductive
function.
Problems.
 The doctor present arbitrarily assigns people of
indeterminate sex a ‘sex category’ at their birth.
There are some that have chromosomes of a
female nature but still possess male appendages!
It used to be felt that you could change gender
but not sex, this is arguably no longer the case.

Gender


Gender is a social construct it is conceived of as
the social roles allocated to men and women in
society. Gender roles include behavior patterns,
obligations, and privileges considered appropriate
for each sex. Some sociologists suggest that
gender identities, ideas about masculinity and
femininity are partly constructed through the
internalisation and acknowledgment of gender
stereotypes that freely circulate in our social
environment.
Consider ‘Fallacy of internalisation’.
‘Sex Roles’










Women.
Expressive.
Soft.
Empathetic.
Gentle.
Nurturing.
Submissive
Emotional.
Talkative
Anxiety prone.










Men.
Instrumental
Strong
Tough/hard
Aggressive
Ambitious/ provider
Dominant
Rational
Discerning
Heroic/ Brave
Connell (2002).
‘
Gender is the structure of Social
relations that centres on the
reproductive arena, and the set of
practices (governed by that
structure) that bring reproductive
distinctions between bodies into
social processes’
Questions.
 Are
these roles natural or cultural?
 Is this an ethnocentric model?
 Cultural and historical specificity of
gender roles.
 Is there much deviation globally?
The role of social factors
1. language/ discourse (Dale Spender,
Foucault)
2. Gender socialization in the home/
family.
3. Gender socialization in schools
4. Peer group.
5. Media/ image/ text.
Biological/ neuroscientific /
psychological research.







Ethology- study of animals in their natural
environment- can we extend these findings to
humans?
Men more aggressive.
Men have better spatial awareness.
Women are better at looking after children.
Women are more emotional.
Male babies have a preference for ‘systems’.
Female babies have a preference for faces.
Nature or Nurture?







Could all of these be framed in terms of cultural
explanations?
Are newborn babies inscribed with culture?
Do cultural factors modify us physiologically.
Le Doux – Plasticity of brain, brain inscribed with
culture.
Reification. Gender becomes ‘thing-like’ fixed,
immutable.
Social relations seem to be beyond the control of
humans
However reproductive capacities have impact
Fox and Tiger’s 4 biological
rules.
Question. Are these rules socially or biologically
determined?
 Everything can be reduced to biological rules.
 Four biological rules which govern social
institutions.
1 Women have children.
2 Men impregnate women so they can have
children
3 Close kin practice sexual avoidance.
4 Men control and dominate women.
 Only 1 and 2 are grounded in biology- 3 and four
are just assumptions.
 Aren’t these rules socially constructed/ culturally
and historically specific.

Social constructionism.





People actively construct their social world.
Marginalises genetic and biological aspects of
human life.
Knowledge and reality are contingent upon social
relations and are made and re-made out of
continuing processes such as reification,
habitualization and sedimentation.
Schutz’s phenomenology- an analysis of the
structure of the common sense world of everyday
life- is an important influence.
For symbolic interactionists and
ethnomethodologists psychological and biological
factors can be explained by reference to social
facts.
Four main doctrines revisited.

1
2
3
4
How can we apply these to gender?
A critical stance towards taken for granted
knowledge -all concepts are contestable
etc
Historical and Cultural specificity.
Universal rules do not exist they are local
to particular times/places
Knowledge sustained by social processes
Knowledge and social action go together.
How you think about something shapes
how you act towards it. ie gender and
sexuality
These four doctrines can be
reduced to two main strands.
Anti-Realism. Concepts do not always
reflect something that is real does gender
pre-exist the social ?
 Anti-essentialism. There isnt necessarily
for any one concept a singular essence, is
there a masculine/ feminine essence?.
 Essential/real features of things are a
product of how we as social actors
think/feel/act about things.

Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology
 Ethnomethodology-
approach
associated with Garfinkel.
 Unspoken rules of social interaction.
 Asks where do we get our notions of
sexuality and gender.
 He claims that all our thoughts on
sexuality are social.
 We have what Garfinkel calls a
‘Natural idea of Sexuality’
4 part model of the Natural Idea
of Sexuality.
1 There are 2 sexes- male and
female.
2 Everybody has one or the other.
3 They are invariant
4 Sexual organs determine what
sex you are.
Gender as Performance
For Garfinkel sexuality is a game of
presentation and convincing by role
playing.
 Notions of masculinity and femininity
change overtime.
 The notion of the sexes is socially
constructed- Garfinkel uses the notion of
transexualism to test our ides of the
natural body.
 Garfinkel says you can change your sex
but only by becoming ‘other’
 Yes! 2 sexes but they are not invariant.

Reproducing Orderliness in
Everyday life




Garfinkel identifies a series of practices through which
we continually reproduce orderliness in our day to day
lives.
Indexicality, context dependant
language/statements/utterances/actions. We become
experts in documentary interpretation as we
constantly re-interpret and unpick what people
actually mean.
Accountability. We constantly give accounts of what
we do and why. Accounts are always situated, they
are glossing practices, they mobilise attitude, make
sense of action, help us to order the world. Accounts
are never neutral
Naïve Realism. Also called a natural attitude. The
statement/ view “Its only natural” is for Garfinkel
naïve realism.
Reproducing Orderliness in
Everyday life 2


Reflexivity. We make the world fit our naïve
realist expectations through constant verbal and
symbolic affirmation and expectation. The
stability of the social world is not based on laws
and rules but mutual expectation and a reciprocal
exchange of that expectation. Gender not all
about rules but reciprocal expectations.
Passing. A term originally used in deep south
usa for Black men and women trying to behave
as if white, by inventing false histories etc. G’s
use misleading as orig means passing as what
you are not. For G it is about passing as what you
are. Behaving in certain ways commensurate with
your role- as male, female, mother, lover,
husband, child, manager, teacher etc, etc
Ian Hacking- ‘The Social
construction of What?’
 Examines
the social construction
thesis.
 Because concepts are socially
constructed does it really follow that
the thing that the concept refers to is
also?
 Are we dealing with the social
construction of ideas or practices?
 How far do we take this thesis?
Difference and Otherness.
Focus on difference
 Emphasis on measuring difference
 For biologists difference natural
 For social constructionists difference
mostly social.
 One femininity/ One masculinity?
 Gendering an othering process.
 Binary models with femininity negatively
valued.

Hegemonic Masculinity














A Dominant Masculinity
White/ heterosexual/ misogynistic/ intuitional and personal/ performance.
But not performed by all men.
‘Ideal of Masculinity’
Is this masculine ideal attainable or desirable?
Other masculinities subordinated (Homosexual, black etc)
Vietnamese boys in schools
Resistance
Masculinity needs to be proved.
Man is forever at war. (Norman Mailer in Segal 1990)
masculinity is in a state of uncertainty; it continually has to be proved
Butlers ‘Queer Theory’ celebrates the symbolic disruptions of gender
categories like 'man', 'woman' and 'gay' (Connell, 1995)
Foucault -there is no essential masculine quality because the body and
every other aspect of masculinity is subject to re-interpretation.
Men can be masculine in different ways.
Femininity.










Can it be hegemonic?
No subordination of an ‘other’.
More femininities that masculinities- De Beauvoir many
femininities.
Limited scope to construct institionalised power (Connell
1987)
Feminine qualities devalued.
Discursive construction of femininity subordinates.
Mens collective power over women
Gendered economy.
Women subordinated through language. (Dale Spender
Invisible women)
Sign, signifier, signified- link to de Saussure.
Doing Gender.










Subversion of gendered categories
Butch dykes/ drag queens/ Trans
Transgressing boundaries.
Donna Haraways cyborgs.
Butler (1990) emphasizes performance of gender
Gender fluid.
More or less male or female in different contexts.
Gender fluid.
Sue Lees- ‘Slags and drags’- oppression and
transgression.
Do we have identity choices?
Conclusion.








Gender as performance.
More choices in contemporary world?
Only within certain parameters.
Many possibilities but historical, spatial and
cultural factors exert considerable influence.
Postmodern ‘play’ not available to all.
Many models of fluid gender profoundly
ethnocentric.
Gender/ sexual identity embodied.
Some aspects more fixed than others- sex/
gender distinction.