Gender Theory Flashcards
Andrienne Rich: Patriarchy as a Feminist Critique
[Of Women Born 1976]
“a familial, social, ideological, political system in which men- by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education and the division of labour, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male.”
Allan Johnson: Patriarchy as a Feminist Critique
[The Gender Knot 2005]
“Patriarchy is not simply another way of saying men. Patriarchy is a kind of society, and a society is more than a collection of people. As such patriarchy doesn’t refer to me or any other men or collection of men, but to a kind of society in which men and women participate.”
Allan Johnson: What is Patriarchy
[The Gender Knot 2005]
A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified and male centred.
Judith Bennett: Three Types of Patriarchy [History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism 2006]
1: Ecclesiastical power of men recognised as Christian leaders, particularly within Greek Orthodox tradition
2: Legal powers of a husband/father over his wife, children and other dependents.
3: Feminist critiques of male power.
Gayle Rubin: Political Economy of Sex
[The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex 1975]
The socially imposed division of the sexes: gender as part of the apparatus of patriarchy, a social system, built on the biological foundations of human sexual dimorphism, which allocated different roles, rights and responsibilities to male and female humans
Sylvia Walby: 6 Patriarchal Structures
[Theorising Patriarchy 1990]
1: mode of production
2: paid work
3: the state
4: male violence
5: sexuality
6: culture
Breaks the monolith into analysable units
Judith Bennett: Liberal Feminism
[History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism 2006]
Women’s subordination was not a fundamental feature of modern society but was instead caused by many small accretions and vestigial traditions of the past. Incidental rather than substantial aspect o modern life- women’s status as improving with modernity (Renaissance or industrial rev.) and readily subjected to change.
Judith Bennett: Socialist Feminism
[History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism 2006]
gender inequality linked with the development of private property and capitalism- women’s plight seen as arising from the triumph of capital over labor. Women’s status shifts with changes in economic structures and women’s status declines with modernity.
Judith Bennett: Patriarchal Equilibrium
[History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism 2006]
She posits a “patriarchal equilibrium” whereby, despite many changes in women’s experiences over past centuries, women’s status vis-à-vis that of men has remained remarkably unchanged.
Although, for example, women today find employment in occupations unimaginable to medieval women, medieval and modern women have both encountered the same wage gap, earning on average only three-fourths of the wages earned by men.
Bennett argues that the theoretical challenge posed by this patriarchal equilibrium will be best met by long-term historical perspectives that reach back well before the modern era
John Money: Definition of Gender Role [1955]
“All those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes but is not restricted to sexuality in the sense of eroticism”
Joan Kelly: Historical Development
[Did Women Have a Renaissance 1977]
Events that further the historical development of men, liberating them from natural, social or idealogical constraints, have quite different even opposite, effects upon women
Joan Scott: Gender as an analytic category
[Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis 1986]
Gender as an analytic category resting on two interconnected propositions:
1) gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes
2) gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power
Joan Scott: Four Aspects of Gender Analysis
1) culturally available symbols
2) normative concepts expressed in religious, educational, scientific or legal doctrines
3) political and social institutions
4) Subjective identity
Criticism of Scott: History of Sexual Difference
Retreat from Scott’s methodology, move away from cultural history towards real people. If gender is not equal to sex, should historians not look at bodies?
History of sexual difference rather than history of gender. Move from cultural types to social practices; focus on historically specific mechanisms, techniques, opportunities. Gender not all culture- experienced through bodies.
Connell: Hegemonic Masculinity
[Masculinities 1995]
Hegemonic masculinity can be understood as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subjection of women.
Simon Szerter: Communication Communities and Masculinity
[Fertility, Class and Gender 1995]
Communities defined by the norms they share and the way in which those norms are propagated. Communities not simply a set of shared norms but shared engagement in the mechanisms through which individuals were socialised into particular sets of norms, values and expectations.
Individuals might be members of multiple overlapping communities.
Within each communication community multiple models of masculinity were in circulation: some accorded less prestige or legal status
Lyndal Roper: Historiography on discourses of the body
{Oedipus and the Devil 1994]
The capacity of the body to suffer pain, illness, the process of giving birth, the effects on the body of certain kinds of exercise…all these are bodily experiences which belong to the history of the body and more than discourse.”
John Tosh: Hegemonic Masculinity
[Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender 2004]
The theory of hegemonic masculinity shows how the maintenance of patriarchy actually depends on unequal relations between different masculinities.
Lisa Lindsay
[Working with Gender 2003]
It makes sense to think of gender not necessarily as something people have but as something people do”
Gender norms and ideologies are structural but mutable; individuals work with gender by acting in particular ways for particular reasons, either as part of existing gender ideologies or strategic improvisations
D. Ko: Gender and Sex
[“Gender” in Rublack ed. A Concise Companion to History 2011)
A desire to escape biological determinism has motivated scholars to separate gender from sex and to emphasise gender as social construction.
Judith Butler: Sex as socially constructed
[Gender Trouble 1990]
Sex is a socially constructed category which stems out of social and cultural practices and in the context of a discourse that has a history and its own social and political dynamics
Judith Butler: Gender Performance
[Gender Trouble 1990]
1) Even when gender is acknowledged as the product of social construction, it is still perceived as a manifestation of some core identity and a true sexuality of the self.
2) Butler argues that gender identity does not express some inner truth, but rather the product of “stylish repetitions of actions. Gender is performance- sexual identity is a display we constantly act out. Gender identity is constructed through your own repetitive performance of gender
3) Performativity includes a wide range of behaviours. This performance is what constitutes the meaning of masculine and feminine identities.
4) In criticising gender identity, rendering it as performative, Butler undermines the distinction between gender and sex: gender is a discursive mechanism which produces sex as a natural essence which precedes any discourse.
5) This performance of gender is entirely a social matter with identity manifested in performativity.
Judith Butler Gender Performance Quotes: Gender is…
[Gender Trouble 1990]
Gender is “a stylized repetition of acts…which are internally discontinuous.[so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.”
Gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed”
Natalie Zemon Davis 1975
It seems to me that we should be interested in the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more than an historian of class can focus entirely on peasants. Our goal is to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past.
