Doing Gender Flashcards
Describe the video of Dr. Money and the boy with no penis
- medical procedure gone wrong
- boy raised as girl
- nurture > nature
- went horribly wrong - caused a lot of emotional and psychological distress
- Money published countless books that his theory was proven real
- reality was complete opposite
- only time David was truly happy was when he was a boy
Describe Money’s conceptualization of gender
- sex dimorphism
- dichotomous view of the world
- essentialist view of sex which justifies having to ‘fix’ intersex
- the link between sex and gender is looser than biosocial, more similar to role
What were Money’s assumptions?
- genitals are naturally dimorphic: there is nothing socially constructed about the two categories
- those genitals that blur the dimorphism belonging to the occasional intersexed person can be and should be successfully altered by surgery
- gender is necessarily dichotomous because genital’s are naturally dimorphic
- dimorphic genitals are the essential markers of dichotomous gender
- physicians and psychologists have legitimate authority to define the relationship between gender and genitals
What did Harold Garfinkles natural attitude toward gender?
- the natural attitude toward gender encompasses a series of unquestionable axioms about gender including:
- the beliefs that there are two and only two genders
- gender is invariant
- genitals are the essential sighs of gender
- being masculine and feminine is natural and not a choice
- all individuals can be classified as masculine or feminine
What is Hausmans idea of narrative’s
- narrative is a particular organization of discourse, an ordered telling whose logic is plot
- narratives suggest sequence and causality: they provide knowledge by being a form of understanding and explanation
- narratives convey; they convey information and in a metaphorical sense, carry the subject from childhood to adulthood by providing a medium for self representation
- narratives make sense literally by producing the patterns through which we learn to understand the world around us, patterns which become models for how sense is made
What are the three components of narratives?
1) Fabula: events causally or logically related (the real of what happened)
2) story: aspects of the fabula presented in an organized fashion (the plot)
3) text: what has been written down (finite structured whole composed of linguistic signs)
Describe ontology vs. epistemology
- gender ontologies take the form of narratives that justify or shore up a fundamental understanding of gender as a thing that acts as a force, generally an innate one
- epistemological approaches to gender, use gender as a mode of understanding, a way of interpreting gender ontologies
What is symbolic interactionism and who came up with the term
- sociologists Erving Goffman developed symbolic interactionist approaches to social interaction
- symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective that views social reality as a product of the meaning-making of individuals during interaction with others
Describe what Dramaturgical analysis tool is developed by Erving Goffman
- one way to examine the connection between self and others
- used to analogy of the theatre to explore the ways people interact
What does it mean by front stage and back stage?
- our status is like a part in a theatrical performance, and our role is like a script
- Goffman suggests that when we interact with others we are on front stage
- we may be engaged in an activity called impression management: performing for those around us, showing them what we want them to see
- when we are back stage, we no longer need to perform the public role
Describe the video of pageant babies. What shows front stage? what shows back stage?
What are three components of the sociological drama that we perform?
- ones setting
- ones appearance
- ones manner
What are gender displays?
- gender is expressed during social interaction through a form of interactive performance that Goffman terms gender displays
- Gender displays help define what will occur during a social interaction and how the interaction will be organized
- Goffman likens gender displays between women and men to the roles of domination - subordination characterized by the parent-child relationship
What is ethnomethodology?
- is a type of sociology that seeks to understand how individuals create social life as meaningful through interaction with other’s
Define sex, sex category and gender
Sex: a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females and males
sex category: achieved through application of the sex criteria, but in everyday life, categorization is established and sustained by the socially required identificatory displays that proclaim one’s membership in one of the other category
Gender: is the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitude and activities appropriate for one’s sex category, gender activities emerge from and bolster claims membership in a sex category
