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Gender: A Sociological Reader – Jackon and Scott

Hegemonic Masculinity – Connell

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Hegemonic masculinity different to general masculinity
Cultural idea/ideal does not necessarily correspond to actual personalities of a majority of
men: masculinity as a fantasy, through media; unattainable ideal like athletes (Muhammad
Ali)
“hegemonic masculinity is very public” - needs large numbers of men to support and
collaborate with/consent to
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Signifiers of masculinity and femininity
Femininity comes to mean “the uninhibited intentionality that comes with learning to see
oneself primarily as the object of another's gaze, and the learned sense of fragility that comes
with being female”
In children – bias-confirming (e
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men wearing skirts/dresses)

Drag and Camp – Esther Newton

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Externalization (through dress etc) of inner/outer gender or proclivities, and indications of
them being either a costume (jockey shorts under drag) or revealing inner self
Tension between “reality” and “appearance” - revealed to the audience
“The effect of the drag system is to wrench sex roles loose from that which supposedly
determines them”
Anthropology: behaviour is learnt; drag: it is an appearance, an 'outside' that can be
manipulated at will
“Camp” based on tensions between the styles of the object

Myths of Gender – Fausto-Sterling

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Symons – male and female sexuality are so different that it makes sense to speak of the two
sexes as different species
Nature v nurture has evolved to “genetic basis” or “genetic deep structure”
“The question 'what fraction of our behaviour is biologically based' is impossible – even in
theory – to answer”

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The absence of the second sex seems to have gone unnoticed in theories of sexual
differentiation
Children show – if not total – a great deal of flexibility in the development of a gender selfconcept
Gender as a constantly learnt behaviour: “quite early in human prehistory protohumans could
have learned certain behaviours and taught them to their offspring
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then certain kinds
of behaviour might be universal, yet learned rather than genetically programmed”
“Society incurs the greatest costs from social policy based on biological views about the
origins of political equality, poverty, and equal opportunity and the (im)possibility of social
change”
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studies of menopause – ignore huge differences in women's social realities to those of
men

Unbearable Weight – Bordo

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Gender as a universal unifier? “Feminism may developing a new direction, a new skepticism
about the use of gender as an analytical category”
Feminist gender-skepticism constructed from four currents:

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Union of racial biases of gender theory with more historicist, politically oriented branch of
poststructuralist thought (e
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Foucault) – eschews generalizations about gender
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“The view from nowhere” as a male construction on the possibilities for knowledge –
impartiality impossible
Patterns of gender analysis often reflect a white, middle-class perspective – unconscious
privilege
Gender as just one strand of an individual or self – Fraser and Nicholson – also include class,
race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation
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Gender is
rather the product of social doing
Goffman: People assume, in interactions with others, that they have an essential nature that is
being expressed
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Talks about “gender display” - but as an optional performance that the individual can to some
extent determine for themselves
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Children both learn early what values to internalize based on sex
“'Ambiguous' sex indicators are sex indicators nonetheless”
“Freedom” of decision of transsexuals? All within context of the patriarchy
“If we fail to do gender appropriately, we as individuals might be called to account”
Social change through institutional and cultural level of sex category and at the interactional
level of gender

Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations – Acker

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Organizational structures and processes are not gender-neutral: theorized as such because only
men are present in them, masculine principles dominate them
Class is constructed through gender and class relations are always gendered
Structure and features of the labour market are affected by underlying symbols of gender and
processes of gender identity
In theory, jobs and hierarchies are without occupants, without gender: however, as soon as it
becomes concrete and material it involves a human
*Job contains gender divisions within the word itself: it contains the gender-based division of
labour
“The individual represents one sex and one gender, not a universal being”
Disadvantages of women within workforce – devalued based on reproductive capacities;
sexual harassment; relegating childbearing women to lower levels of the company
→ Connell, hegemonic masculinity

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Male sexuality reinforces these organizational structures: female sexuality is repressed,
inappropriate for work; male sexuality is encouraged as a team-bonding experience?
Gender is institutional

Either/Or and Both/Neither: Discursive Tensions in Transgender Politics - Roen

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Transsexual v transgender
Crossing is considered more politically worthy of merit than passing
Politicized trans people less concerned by passing – seen as a display of false consciousness?
Rejection of gender ambiguity even within transgender communities? (e
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support groups)
Transsexuals must be either/or: those who are both/neither are not accepted
Bornstein 1995: Cult of gender
Does not make sense to depict transsexual and transgender as categories: far too broad
Gendered hierarchy even within trans communities → becomes an issue of race and class as
much as a question of outness
Easier to pass as a male because masculinity is the default option

Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Ethnicity – Kath Woodward

Ch 2: Gender and Identity – Gove and Watt
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Turner: self-categorization theory – we see people as members of social categories; we see
ourselves as members of social categories; we take on characteristics that are appropriate to
the social categories with which we identify
Freud: Development depends on identification with others of the same sex
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Highly stereotyped, rigid categories because of simplistic understandings and can
be fooled
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With man as the primary writer of
history, he has tied women's achievements to that of her reproductive function
But, as there is no eternal feminine, there is no eternal masculine: no essence, only experience,
no shared factors
Females conditioned during life and upbringing to accept passivity, dependence, repetition,
inwardness – deprived of subjectivity and made into an object
Difficulty of breaking free from feminine ideals
“Woman” does not exist as an immense category and men and women alike should be
categorized primarily as human beings; but for now cannot be defined without gender
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”
If the notion of 'femininity' is contradicted by real life women, the prevailing assumption is
that these women are not feminine – not that the concept of femininity is flawed

Concepts of the self – Elliott
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Trans people and 'feeling female' – what does that mean if the female gender is a social
construct?

Lecture notes:

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Flax 1993: Gender as “asymmetric power relations rather than 'natural differences'”
Judith Butler: Compulsory heterosexuality (how true today?)
When compulsory performance breached, violence, ostracism
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Identity linked to recognition
Structures in place reinforce gender and gender hierarchies – e
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sexual harassment reinforces
woman as weak?
Categories of butch v femme women demonstrate how masculinity/femininity is constructed

Bodies That Matter

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Does the possibility of 'doing' gender allow for reworking of gender norms?
Against the materiality of sex – sex as a regulatory practice and a norm
We have the agency to subvert gender norms – but how is not explained
“Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original”
Oppressiveness of language that materializes bodies by labeling them
- where do hermaphrodites/trans people fit in? Should they have to? Why label?

Gender Trouble

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Definition of 'woman' as identity – little agreement on what constitutes it
“Is there a commonality among 'women' that pre-exists their oppression, or do 'women' have a
bond by virtue of their oppression alone?”
Do we have or are gender?
People are only intelligible through gender display

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Seeming separation of body and self; abstract theorizing with a lack of interaction in focus
Neglect of social issues like gender relations, the patriarchal family, the female body, 'material
basis of women's opposition' – explains that gender is a hierarchy but not how it was created
as such
McNay 1999: Great exploration of resistance, not enough about creative or productive action

Female Genesis – Nicole Ward Jouve

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It is POWER that goes wrong, not the need for difference: the gender binary is only negative
when employed as a hierarchy
How can a body not precede discourse?

Masculinities – R Connell

Ch 3: The Social Organization of Masculinity

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Masculinity exists only in contrast with femininity
Before the 18th century, women were seen with the same faculties as men, just inferior – no
specific qualities divided by gender
Masculine and feminine describe the way women differ amongst themselves, and so do men:
if we spoke only of differences between 'men' and 'women' would not need such terms
Normative: Masculinity is what men ought to be, but few people meet the over-exaggerated
and idealized versions of masculinity
“The state is a masculine institution
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'don't ask don't tell' policy in the military – fear of an untraditional masculinity entering

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Model of gender through (a) power relations: subordination of women to dominance of men in
the general model of the 'patriarchy' (b) production relations: division of labour, wage gap,
gendered nature of capital and (c) cathexis: *practices that shape and realize desire are
products of the gender order
Feminist analyses of the connection between heterosexuality and men's structural and social
dominance
Overlap of masculinity with class as well as gender politics
Main patterns of masculinity in the current Western gender order:
- Hegemony: Its establishment necessitates some correspondence between cultural ideas and
institutional power; can evolve or change over time – other men or can be challenged by
women
- Subordination: most important in Western society being homosexuals by heterosexual men
Because of low status of gay males in hierarchy, often equated with femininity
- Complicity: Although a small number of men meet standards of hegemonic masculinity,
majority of men gain from it – are complicit with the patriarchal structure

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Importance of masculinity in a milieu; protest masculinity involves going overboard, putting
on a face
Homosexual as 'the other', heterosexuality as a taken for granted part of manliness

Gender: A Sociological Reader – Jackson and Scott
Introduction: The gendering of Sociology
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Gender – in sociology since 1970s

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Gender as a hierarchical division between women and men embedded in social
institutions and practices – a social structural phenomenon that is reproduced
at the level of everyday interaction
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No gender discussed

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Weber: contributed concept of patriarchy – limited impact

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Durkenheim: Everyone has their place in society – women’s place fixed in
the home, leading to ‘complementary relationship’, natural biological
differences

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Simmel: Differences between women and men natural but acknowledged that
masculinity/male sex was taken as the human universal – can forget that they
are men

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Margaret Mead: Studies of New Guinea societies – suggested differences are
constructed

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Komarovsky: 1946 – showed that college educated girls would let their
boyfriends explain things they already knew to them to preserve his ego and
her femininity

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Dominant ideal of femininity is that of the white middle classes? – esp 19th c
(response of Ain’t I a Woman – Sojourner Truth)

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Concept of the patriarchy – needed to be expanded; disguises differences of
class, race, sexuality amongst women and men; are black men afforded the
same rights as white men within the patriarchy; how is it sustained – through
exploitation of labour, sexuality, or primarily ideologically?

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Easier to make headway within sociology than within other fields

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Assumptions underpinning sex/gender distinction called into question –
‘sexual difference’ feminists reject sex/gender disassociation; the other way is
that it did no go further enough and is fixed on an assumed biological root

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Garfinkel: Case study of Agnes concludes that the production of a sexed
persona is always a performance- Agnes just makes visible, has to learn at an
older age what others are brought up with the expectations of
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The process of gender construction and reading is andocentric – male and
female classified in relation to one another

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Material feminism – France, 1970s, in response to ‘sexual difference’
feminism: radical feminists but used a Marxist method of analysis
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Gender as performative rather than part of inner
essence
Linguistic materiality – ‘it’s a girl’ or ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’:
Ramazanoglu 1995: where these norms come from or why they “so often
produce ‘heterosexual hegemony’, male dominance or any other imbalance of
power does not appear to be an appropriate question to be asked within the
logic of her theory”

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Butler does not address WHY gender is hierarchical

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What is needed is not a sociology of gender but a gendered sociology

Doing Gender – West and Zimmerman
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The ability to perform or do gender is determinative of competence as
members of a society

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Sex (biology), sex category (defined as man/woman based on sex) and gender

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Agnes (Garfinkel) – had to display and learn how to be a woman
simultaneously – was not faking but learning what others had learnt years
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Kessler and McKenna: We make assumptions about sex based on portrayed
sex category – presumption that essential criteria exist, taken for granted that
sex and sex category are congruent

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Agnes’ conceptualization as female/male did not depend on a concept of
femininity – women can be seen as unfeminine without being unfemale

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