Gender Flashcards
Armstrong and Hamilton 2013 – Paying for the Party
Authors conduct ethnography and interviews in an all-girl dorm. College maintains inequality by offering three pathways: party, mobility, and professionalization. They argue that big state schools (Midwest University) are focusing on the party pathway because of the type of students it offers: socially oriented, tuition-paying, okay academic students. These students enhance the trio of requirements that universities have been pushed to seek (competing imperatives): equity, solvency, and prestige maximization. Then, there are various ideal types that correspond with the pathways. Socialites and wannabes follow the party pathway. Strivers fall into the mobility pathway. Achievers and underachievers follow the professional pathway. Social class typically predicts the ideal type people fall into, after controlling for the pathway people follow.
Bettie 2014 – Women Without Class
Author conduct ethnography in a high school and interviews students along the way. Girls develop unique gender performances that intersect with other identities (race and class) and these performances are oftentimes in references to the hegemonic group: white, middle-class girls. Think of the race debate and how that overpowered class identities.
Buchmann, DiPrete, and McDaniel 2008 – Gender Inequalities in Education
Gender achievement gap has grown since 1980. Women have been more successful and the trend is similar for all OECD countries. They also discuss some of the societal features which could be causing the education trajectories to change so much: delayed marriage/ birth control, military, occupational opportunities opening for women. Boys whose fathers aren’t around tend to do worse in school. Girls tend to perform better at reading early in their education, while boys continue to perform better in math and science.
Connell and Messerschmidt 2005 – Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept
Hegemonic masculinity refers to the configuration of practice organized in relation to the structure of gender relations that supports the patriarchy. HM can be studied locally, regionally, globally, and across time. It is relational and hegemonic to the “extent that it provides a solution to (gender) tensions, tending to stabilize patriarchal power or reconstitute it in new conditions.”
Deutsch 2007 – Undoing Gender
Researchers should focus on how to undo gender and dismantle the structures, rather than how gender is performed.
Frye 2017 – Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Action
Author uses cultural theory to show a disconnect between the causal processes of expectations and outcomes. Using recursive mixed-methods approach, she argues that Malawi girls are penalized if in romantic relationships while attempting to go to school because cultural beliefs lead to their failures rather than the assumed mechanisms that lead people to believe in certain outcomes. Her theory has three components: 1. Cultural understandings influence how we intervene into the lives of others. 2. Cultural schemas lead people to act preemptively before contradictions can be observed, as these understandings involve an axiomatic association between cause and outcome. 3. Narrative accounts often hinge on a moral model of causality, which obscures the consequences of these preemptive actions. She differentiates between cultural schemas and cultural narratives. Schemas are abstract mental representations that “provide default assumptions . . . Under conditions of incomplete information” (DiMaggio 1997:267). Collective narratives put flesh around the bones of cultural schemas, specifying symbolic events or character traits that elucidate schematic associations between attributes and outcomes. Frye’s findings confirm that a cultural schema exists which renders education and romantic relationships incompatible. Qualitative interviews to flesh out the cultural narratives leading women to drop out after beginning a relationship. Using the quantitative data, she disproves 2/3 of the narratives, while showing that the pregnancy (the only one with a significant showing) doesn’t explain the majority of dropouts. Disciplinary punishments caused by these cultural narratives lead to the detrimental effects they expect to see.
Geist, Reynolds, and Gatán 2017 – Disentangling Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Sociological research
Binary classification schemas eliminate the presence of non-binary folks. They also overlook important theoretical points in their call to arms. Specifically, lesbian women earn more than their heterosexual counterparts. THERE’S AN OBVIOUS GENDER+SEXUALITY THEORY SOLUTION TO THIS, but they fail to discuss it because they’re more interested in highlighting how sexual minority experiences are lost in current sociological research.
Gorman, Denney, Dowdy, and Medeiros 2015 – Sexual Orientation and Health Outcomes
Using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the authors run a regression model predicting health outcomes by sexual and gender identities. Bi men and women report the worst health outcomes because that group tends to earn less, have worse health habits and healthcare, and have small, unsupportive networks.
Hart, Saperstein, Magliozzi, and Westbrook 2019 – Gender and Health: Beyond Binary Categories
Test self-reported health by sex and gender. Gender is measured in two ways: traditionally (from 1-5) and categorically. They also measure “reflected appraisal”. They conduct survey using MTurk. Gender, controlling for sex, predicts health differences. Highly masculine men report better health. Highly feminine women do too. For women, reflected appraisals are a stronger predictor of health than self-reported gender. Women reflect more on their performances than men, or appraisals mean more. Gender conformity is associated with better health.
Hochschild 2012 – The Second Shift
The author conducts ethnography in homes with married couples. They find people ascribe to a gender ideology which dictates performances within the households. The ideologies include traditional, egalitarian, and transitioning. People create narratives (upstairs-downstairs, incapable/sick) that support their gender ideology, although women oftentimes take on more responsibility. Men who shared housework oftentimes has someone in their lives they did not want to be like or had lower pay than their wives (over-compensation theory). Women feared confronting men for divorce.
Ingraham 1994 – Heterosexual Imaginary
Heterosexuality undergirds gender inequality. Heterogender refers to the expectations that people who perform their gender “appropriately” must concede to heteronormative ideologies.
Lagos 2019 – Hearing Gender
Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2014 and 2015 to test whether gender misclassification impacts health. Transgender men who were classified as women have significantly worse self-reported health. Transgender women who were classified as men did not have significantly worse outcomes. Misclassification is not the greatest predictor, but rather it depends on the categories. Femininity is associated with worse health outcomes and this is particularly salient for transgender men. Black transgender men are more likely to be associated as women than other transgender men.
Martin 2004 – Gender as a Social Institution
Gender is a social institution. The requirements are: 1. profoundly social and characteristic of groups; 2. Endure/persist across time and space; 3. distinct social practices that recur, recycle or are repeated by group members; 4. Constrain and facilitate behavior/actions done by members; 5. social positions and relations that are characterized by expectations, norms, and procedures; 6. constituted and re… by embodied agents; 7. internalized by group members as identities and selves and they are displayed as personalities; 8. legitimating ideology; 9. inconsistent, contradictory, and rife with conflict; 10. continuously change; 11. organized in accord with and permeated by power; 12. institutions and individuals mutually constitute each other, not separable into macro and micro.
Meadow 2018 – Trans Kids
Relational ethnography on families with a gender-nonconforming child. Includes various trans support groups, medical professionals, and interviews with families/parents. Rather than undoing gender, kids actively produce new gender categories. They use gendered symbols to reflect their identities in more complex ways than the binary typically allows. The efficacy of this performance lies in the observer (Butler, West and Zimmerman; relational).
Moore 2008 – Gendered Power Relations among Women
Surveys, interviews, and ethnographic notes with same-sex partnered women in the NYC area. When households consist of children from previous relationships, bio moms take on more authority surrounding finances and do more housework. Gender patterns of household labor – female identifying do more and masculine do trash and repairs.
