Womens Gender 1110 Midterm Guide

WGSS 1110 Midterm One

1- Sex: One’s physical aspects including: hormones, genitalia, and chromosomes. We tend to categorize sex as a dichotomy: male and female.

2- Intersex: Any physical manifestation of traits that is not distinctly male or female.

3- Gender: Ones psychological and sociological aspects; one’s expressions of identity; gender identity (psychological sense of self), gender expression (how one presents themselves) and gender roles (societal role in society).

4- Gender Schemas: Collections of associations or implicit hypothesis about sex differences.

5- Gender Socialization: Much variation between individuals as between sexes. Individuals are “androgynous”; widespread existence of gender socializations in societies.

6- Intersectionality: A concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia..) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. Third wave feminism thrived on the concept of intersectionality in order to redefine feminism as inclusive.

7- Three levels of identity:
1) Micro Level: where we define ourselves and structure our daily lives based on our own needs and preferences. Involved naming and understanding specific forces and events that shape our identities. Home, family, individual, inter-personal…

2) Meso Level: involves the answers to organizing and categorizing questions like “who you are?” or “where are you from?”. Visible signifiers are how we look. (Community: not a single defined thing, generally a bunch of shared values)

3) Macro Level: classifying and labeling human beings, often according to real or assumed physical, biological or genetic differences is a way to distinguish who is included and who is excluded from a group to ascribe particular characteristic, to prescribe social roles and to assign status power and privilege.

8- Patriarchy: The systemic organization of male supremacy. Structural thing that has been embedded.

9- Essentialism: A process by which complex identities get reduced to specific qualities deemed to be essential for membership of a particular group.
10- Ideology: Organized collection of ideas applied to public issues. Dominant (neutral) and alternative (radical).

11- Epistemology: A theory about knowledge, which can know and under what circumstances.

12- Subjugated Knowledge: Kind of knowledge created in a subjugated environment (hidden knowledge).

13- Social Location: A persons place in society through their race, gender, and sex. It is a better way in understanding a person and who they are.

14- Three waves of feminism:
First Wave: Took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. The goal of this wave was to open up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage. The wave formally began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 when 300 men and women rallied to the cause of equality for women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (d.1902) drafted the Seneca Falls Declaration outlining the new movement's ideology and political strategies. In its early stages, feminism was interrelated with the temperance and abolitionist movements, and gave voice to now-famous activists like the African-American Sojourner Truth (d. 1883), who demanded: "Aren’t I a woman?” Generally propelled by middle class white women
Lucy Stone and Julia Ward were among the first women who started the American Women Suffrage Association. Wyoming was the first state that gave women the right to vote. 19th amendment in the 1920’s -> passed, it barred states from denying women the right to vote. Liberal Feminism: explains the oppression of women in terms of unequal access to existing political, economic and social institutions. Concerned with equal rights for women and men, and aim for women to have equal access to opportunities within existing economic and social structures. Many people had liberal feminist opinions though they may not realize it. White supremacy was known as systems of power in the US. Alice Paul took 50 years to have the amendment of “women and men should have equal rights throughout the US”.

Second Wave: Began in the 1960s and continued into the 90's. This wave unfolded in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of a variety of minority groups around the world. The voice of the second wave was increasingly radical. In this phase, sexuality and reproductive rights were dominant issues, and much of the movement's energy was focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing social equality regardless of sex. This phase began with protests against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968 and 1969. Feminists parodied what they held to be a degrading "cattle parade" that reduced women to objects of beauty dominated by a patriarchy that sought to keep them in the home or in dull, low-paying jobs. The radical New York group called the ‘Redstockings’ staged a counter pageant in which they crowned a sheep as Miss America and threw "oppressive" feminine artifacts such as bras, girdles, high-heels, makeup and false eyelashes into the trashcan. the second phase drew in women of color and developing nations, seeking sisterhood and solidarity and claiming "Women's struggle is class struggle." Feminists spoke of women as a social class and coined phrases such as "the personal is political" and "identity politics" in an effort to demonstrate that race, class, and gender oppression are all related. They initiated a concentrated effort to rid society top-to-bottom of sexism, from children's cartoons to the highest levels of government.

Third Wave: began in the mid-90's and is informed by post-colonial and post-modern thinking. In this phase many constructs have been destabilized, including the notions of "universal womanhood," body, gender, sexuality and hetreronormativity. An aspect of third phase feminism that mystifies the mothers of the earlier feminist movement is the re-adoption by young feminists of the very lip-stick, high-heals, and cleavage proudly exposed by low cut necklines that the first two phases of the movement identified with male oppression. Pink floor expressed this new position when she said; "It's possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time.”

Readings:

“I’m not a feminist, but…”: Popular Myths About Feminism (1998) by Penny A. Weiss.
-96.8% support gender equality but only 38.2% consider themselves a feminist in poll
-Feminists considered:
Radical,
Outcasts,
Lesbians,
Masculine,
Male hating and,
Aggressive.
-Antifeminism is more heard about than feminism.

“Theories and Theorizing: Integrative Frameworks for Understanding”
Theories: ideological purposes.
Sandra Harding: 3 elements basic to the process of creating knowledge (epistemology, methodology and method).
Charlotte Bunch: 4 step way to think about theory:
Describing what exists
Determining what should exist
Hypothesizing how to change what is to what should be
Knowledge is not neutral, it is rather value laden, biased and reflects and serves the interests of the culture that produces it – the dominant culture.

“Night to his day: The Social Construction of Gender” by Judith Lorber
Gender organizes our social relations and our basic institutions (religion, education, work and the state).
“Gentler construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basic of what the genitalia a look like at births”
Gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives.
“The building blocks of gender are socially constructed statuses”.
Genders are not attached to a biological subtraction -> gender boundaries are breachable and individual and socially organized shifts from one gender to another call attention to “cultural, social or aesthetic dissonance”.
Bending gender rules and passing between genders does not erode but rather preserves gender boundaries.
Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine or feminine.

“La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness” by Gloria Anzaldúa
Mestiza: means to be one of multiple races, not belonging to a single category; these many categories intertwine.
No definitive place to call home. ‘She’ is trying to figure out who she is, and where exactly she can call home.
Mestiza is not accepted in society, not traditionally accepted.
We have to conform to society, whereas a mestiza breaks all rules.
‘A product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another’.
‘Mixed races’
The mestiza faces many struggles and difficulties concerning identity and her very being