Final (Until April 28th) Flashcards
Define sex
A biological identity that is based on physical or biological differences and that can be divided into the main categories of male and female.
*based on perceived physical differences
Define gender
A social concept that includes all social patterns associated with being male or female and that ranges from masculine to feminine.
**based on differences that are social and cultural, not biological.
What is meant by “Two-Spirited” people, according to Indigenous people?
people who have both a masculine and feminine spirit.
What does the term: transgender (or trans) umbrella mean?
A term used to encompass the variety of different sexual expressions in modern society.
What are “middle-sex categories”?
The existence of middle-sex categories challenges the male/female binary.
Ex. - “Two-Spirited” people in some Indigenous groups who have both a masculine and feminine spirit.
- Some other societies also have three genders—men, women, and a third group that is variously named.
What are gender roles?
The behaviours and mannerisms that people learn as being appropriate to their respective genders and that are reinforced by cultural norms.
Define the term performativity. Who coined it?
Judith Butler coined it.
A term to describe the repeated rituals that create and sustain gender through performance.
Butler is essentially arguing that we create gender through our ACTIONS and INTERACTIONS.
What are some general claims from Judith Butler?
- that labelling a person as male or female is overly restrictive
- that the accepted and “natural” binary composition of two sexes (the only options being male or female) encourages us to see other dichotomies in categorizing people.
What does the term “costs of masculinity” mean? Who came up with it?
Michael Messner coined this.
The concept that there are rules to masculinity and what men can be and do.
For example:
- masculinity is defined by external success
- men must avoid everything feminine
- expected to be aggressive and show little emotion.
What major institution do we learn to perform gender?
In the education system
Education is highly gendered. For example, we see this:
- through the curriculum
- in the ways that male and female students are differentially streamed and rewarded
- the employment and income results of our degrees.
What does Jessica Streeter argue about gender?
That what we drink reinforces gender norms and practices.
She also claims that women are offered light styles of beer compared to men being offered more “complex” beer.
Takeaways from Michela Musto’s reading on how education influences gender
MAIN TAKEAWAY = that educators’ differential enforcement of school rules by course level contributed to gender-based differences in students’ perceptions of intelligence.
- School processes associate wealthy White boys with exceptionalism, thereby reproducing social inequalities in early adolescence.
^^ brings race and class into question - Teachers are often quicker to discipline girls than boys for running, talking loudly, interrupting, and violating dress codes –> therefore encourages students to dress, speak, and move in differently gendered ways.
- As boys’ behaviour at play is usually unaddressed, playing has an important role in confirming beliefs that boys are inherently stronger, louder, and more authoritative than girls.
In Musto’s study, what did she notice between high-level and lower-level courses in terms of the perceptions of who is smarter in those courses?
- In higher-level courses: students came to perceive boys as exceptionally intelligent
- In lower-level courses: students came to perceive girls as smarter than boys, but not as exceptional. (perceptions were also RACIALIZED with perceiving white students as smarter)
Define feminism in general
The various movements and ideologies that seek to define, confirm, and protect equal political, economic, and social rights for women.
Feminism is sometimes understood as occurring over three waves of activism.
What does feminist theory focus on?
how gender inequality comes about in society and how men and women’s gender roles are created and recreated in society.
What are the 3 waves of feminism?
1st WAVE:
- began in the 19th century mostly countries such as Canada, the US, and the UK
- Was focused on “de jure inequalities” = inequalities that are part of the legal and political system
- EX. for women’s rights to vote & hold property
2nd WAVE:
- began in the US in the early 1960s and spread throughout Europe and Canada.
- this wave broadened the movement beyond legal rights and sought change on a wide range of issues (equality in the workplace and reproductive rights)
- women expanded into new professions like media, sports and military.
- Concerned with violence against women (sexual violence and spousal abuse)
- Successful at making these issues mainstream, getting marital rape laws passed, and establishing rape crisis centres and shelters for women who had been victims of abuse.
3rd WAVE:
- began in the early 1990s and continues to the present day
- Arose as a critique to the previous wave, and this time included a more diverse group of women.
- Many felt that the 2nd wave was controlled by a small group of white middle-class women and that it did not represent the diverse experiences of women from different racial, ethnic, religious, class, and sexual groups
- Moved away from political rights, instead focuses in cultural arenas (ex. challenging gender depictions in the media, sexist language, etc.)
What is liberal feminism?
These feminists argued that discriminatory beliefs limited women’s ability to work outside of the home or to acquire education.
They challenged these types of beliefs specifically in politics and the law –> right to vote, laws to prevent sexual harassment in workplace.
LIBERAL FEMINISTS WORK TO CHANGE THE EXISTING INSTITUTIONAL SYSTEMS TO PROMOTE EQUALITY FOR THE SEXES
What are radical feminists?
They viewed current social institutions as so flawed that they COULD NOT BE REFORMED and, instead, should be ELIMINATED.
They specifically targeted the institutions of the family and church and ideologies that support traditional understandings of sexuality and reproduction.
^^ Ex. they want to decouple sex from marriage (specifically between a man and a woman) and challenge restrictive norms around sexual behaviour.
What are Marxist-socialist feminists?
they question BOTH liberal and radical feminism.
They believe that women cannot experience true liberation in existing institutions (liberal feminism) or through changes in cultural understandings of sex and sexuality alone (radical feminism).
According to Marxist-socialist feminism, the main obstacle for woman’s rights is a CLASS-BASED SOCIETY where the powerful few absorb the wealth created by the many.
CLAIM THAT IT IS CAPITALISM THAT PREVENTS WOMAN’S LIBERATION AND OVERTHROWING CAPITALISM IS THE ONLY SOLUTION.
Liberal, radical and Marxist-socialist feminism have all been critiqued for portraying an image of ____________________.
UNIVERSAL WOMANHOOD
Because not all woman are the same!
Intersectional feminism comes into play that recognizes the different experiences of woman and their rights (characterises the 3rd wave movement)
Who coined the term intersectionality? Describe it.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term in 1989
the study of how various dimensions of inequality can combine.
Along with most other classical theorists, ____________ has been criticized for being “gender blind”
Karl Marx.
From Marx’s perspective, working-class men and women are both EQUALLY victimized by capitalists and the capitalist system that exploits their labour
^^when of course woman would have very different experiences.
Women (as mothers and wives) keep all family earners (men) and earners-to-be (children) healthy and cared for. They do so at no cost to the capitalist, who later benefits from the surplus value the workers produce.
WOMAN ARE EXPLOITED AT WORK AND AT HOME BY CAPITALISM.
In what ways are sports highly gendered?
- language used in sports is gendered (ex. defencemen or “he throws like a girl.”)
- There are very little top earning athletes in the world (only 2 women on the top 100 sports earner list 2020)
- vast gender inequality even within the same sport in terms of pay
- sports media are still dominated by coverage of male sports
In what ways is the workplace highly gendered?
- gender wage gap (the biggest reason for this is because women tend to work in the 5 C’s, aka lower paying “motherly” jobs)
^^ Ex. construction jobs (more often performed by men) pay better than sales jobs (more often performed by women).
What is feminization?
- A particular job, profession, or industry being dominated by or predominantly associated with women (ex. nurses, secretaries, teachers, and family doctors).
- Feminized jobs tend to lose prestige, wages, required skill levels, and opportunities for promotion.
**Such feminized jobs are referred to as “PINK COLLAR”
Wage differences between women and men are no longer shrinking. If we continue to progress at this slower rate, the gender gap in Canadian society will take between ______ and ______ years to eliminate!
30 and 180 years.
What is the double shift?
Hochschild’s concept that women in heterosexual dual-income households often spend way more time on household tasks and caring work than their partners do in addition to their work in the paid workforce.
*also known as second shift
What is the consistent trend of men with childcare over a lot of research?
men tend to overestimate time spent on child care
Research has shown that in both print and broadcast media, women’s sports receive only ____% of the news coverage
4%
What is sexuality?
Feelings of sexual attraction and behaviours related to them.
What is sexual orientation?
A person’s sexual identity, expressed in terms of whom a person desires, wants to have sex with, and feels a sense of connectedness with.
Who conducted the first systematic study of sex and sexuality?
Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s
His initial study was interviewing 18,000 adults about their sexual behaviours, interests, and thoughts.
What are the Kinsey Reports?
The name given to Kinsey’s two books on human sexuality:
1. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual 2. Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
What is Kinsey’s Heterosexual–Homosexual Rating Scale?
A seven-point scale of sexual inclinations.
Instead of thinking of people as either gay or straight, Kinsey argued that they simply have life histories that express different desires.
He claimed that ppl can have more or less homosexual or heterosexual desires and more or less homosexual or heterosexual experiences, but these things are not always related.
**essentially argued that ppl are not just “gay or “straight”, it’s a spectrum
What are some social contexts that shaped sexual desire and behaviours in Kinsey’s studies?
- that men’s sexual behaviours differed by their social class—men of higher social class tended to be more experimental than those of lower social class.
- Women’s behaviour differed by their age and their view of gender equality. Those who were older and who had a more liberal view of women’s role in society were much more likely to experiment sexually and have more partners.
** What people do sexually is, at least in part, shaped by their characteristics, such as social class and age.
What does it mean that we live in a heteronormative society?
social institutions, practices, and norms that support the assumption that people are or should be heterosexual.
What type of study did Martin conduct with heteronormativity? What did she find?
Conducted a study of how mothers help to perpetuate heteronormative ideals.
When asking mothers to consider the possibility that their child might be gay, she found that 2/3 would “wait to see” what happened or prepare for the possibility while 1/3 actively tried to “prevent” their child from developing or expressing a gay identity.
What does Jonathan Ned Katz outline in “The Invention of Heterosexuality”?
Outlines how our modern ideas about heterosexuality and homosexuality are socially constructed and how they have changed:
- We think that heterosexuality is unchanging and universal; however, we create the categories of sexuality and then forget that we made them and see them as unchanging.
- Norms about sexuality are tied to larger social, historical, economic, and political processes.
**Heterosexuality is a modern invention and simply one way of perceiving and categorizing the social relations between the sexes.
In Canada, describe the shift that has occurred over the last few decades in terms of what classes people identify with?
In the early 2000s, a majority of Canadians (70%) identified as middle class. But now, this number has dropped to 47% as more Canadians begin to consider themselves as part of the poor or working class
Karl Marx is the founder of what sociological theory?
CONFLICT THEORY: that society is in a state of perpetual conflict because of competition for limited resources. Conflict theory holds that social order is maintained by domination and power, rather than by consensus and conformity.
Marx argued that the core struggle in all societies is ______________.
CLASS STRUGGLE
The conflict between those who own the means of production (bourgeoisie) and those who own only their labour power (workers).
Define the bourgeoisie
One of the two primary classes in Marx’s theory; the owners of the means of production.
Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually be replaced by ____________.
SOCIALISM: an alternative economic system featuring collective ownership of the means of production.
^^Power is held by the working class.
Marx also theorized that socialism would be eventually replaced by ____________, a completely classless society
COMMUNISM
What social system did Marx call the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or a “workers’ democracy.”?
The social structure of SOCIALISM
What is the definition of classes according to Marx?
Groups of people who play different roles in the productive system
Define property using Marxist theory
In Marxist theory, property is owned by the capitalist.
Property is any resource that can be used to produce things of value and to generate wealth.
Describe surplus value in Marxist theory
The new value created by workers that is in excess of their own labour-cost and is available to be appropriated by the capitalist.
AKA. the amount of money that the capitalist keeps after paying the workers’ wages.
What do capitalists do to maximize their surplus value?
- keeping wages low
- having workers work quickly
- setting long work hours
What sociologist said:
“the rate of surplus value is … an exact expression of the degree of exploitation of labour power by capital, or of the labourer by the capitalist.”
MARX
What significant changes occurred with the rise of the bourgeoisie class?
- established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
- Society as a whole split into only 2 great classes: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
- Subjected the country to the rule of the towns -created enormous cities
- Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government.
- has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together
What was the final stage proposed by Marx and Engels?
communist society without classes
What is one of the main reasons, outlined by Marx, for the lack of revolution for fighting capitalism/classism?
One of the main reasons that workers do not join together is the role of IDEOLOGY.
Examples of an ideology:
- meritocracy
- individualism
What are ideologies?
A system of conscious and unconscious ideas that shape a person’s or group’s objectives, expectations, and actions.
**Marx argues that a society’s dominant ideologies come from the dominant class and serve to perpetuate the capitalist system
Canadian society has a strong belief in ____________________.
MERITOCRACY: The idea that people will achieve based on their own merit.
Through a Marxist lens, who benefits from the ideology of meritocracy?
Benefits the bourgeoisie - because they have money, we think of the hard work and intelligence it must have took to get there.
^^ now the proletariat buys into the system of capitalism because it promotes the belief that we too can become rich and successful if we work hard enough.
Obvi, this ideology ignores the many other factors that determine one’s social position.
What did Marx claim that workers in capitalism develop?
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: willingness among the working class to support ideologies that are advantageous to the ruling class but disadvantageous to working-class interests.
Marx argues that is this partly why the working class does not unite and overthrow the capitalist system
What is the main criticism of Marx’s arguments?
Many people argue that there are no longer simply two classes, and they criticize him for seeing the economic world as such a sharp distinction between capitalists and workers.
What are petite bourgeoisies?
Small-scale capitalists, such as shopkeepers and managers.
EX:
- a petite bourgeoisie who owns a small coffee shop might, like her employees, make coffee. However, the owner of Starbucks, a large bourgeoisie, would not.
What did Marx predict about the petite bourgesoisies?
Marx said that the petite bourgeoisie would disappear over time, mostly because they would eventually fall into the proletariat class.
What’s the lumpenproletariat?
The lowest layer of the working class, according to Marx, including criminals and the chronically unemployed.
***Marx largely dismissed this group bc he felt that its members were highly unlikely to join a workers’ revolution.
Marx wrote in an era of industrial capitalism, when most individuals working in the formal labour market were employed in manufacturing. In Canada today, are most individuals employed in manufacturing jobs still?
No, not as much.
Today, most people work in other industries. In 2020, 79 per cent of Canadians had service jobs (ex. retail, health, and education), with only 19 per cent working in the manufacturing sector.
What is “The Secret”?
A best-selling self-help book by Rhonda Byrne based on “the law of attraction.”
Claims that positive thinking can create life-changing results, such as increased wealth, health, and happiness.
Ex. Speak, act, and think from the mindset of being wealthy now. Eliminate thoughts and words of lack such as “I can’t afford it,” “It is too expensive.”
**this advice can be extremely problematic
What did Marx argue is the core struggle in all societies?
Overall CLASS STRUGGLE.
Marx understood society as being based on the conflict between social classes—class struggle, particularly the clash between individuals who own the means of production (capitalists) and those who do not (workers).
Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually be replaced by an alternative economic system featuring collective ownership of the means of production called __________.
SOCIALISM - an alternative economic system featuring collective ownership of the means of production where power is held by the working class.
Marx referred to this system as the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or a “workers’ democracy.”
What is class conciousness?
is a term used in Marxist theory:
An awareness of what is in the best interests of one’s class - basically people’s beliefs regarding their social class
Marx argued that this awareness is an important precondition for organizing into a “class for itself ” and advocating for class interests.
Class consciousness has been important in many capitalist societies, such as Canada, in leading to the rise of ________________.
UNIONS
Organizations of employees who work together to negotiate a variety of common matters, including pay, benefits, hiring and firing practices, and working conditions.
Define Trade Union Density
the percentage of wage earners in a population who are part of a union.
Ex. 26% of Canadian workers are part of a union (in 2018)
