Module 4

Question 1

What are the various perspectives taken by feminists in their efforts to expose the causes and consequences of the social construction of difference?

Answer 1

Judith Butler:

• reform (liberal and social theories)
• resist (radical, cultural, and psychoanalytic theories)
• rebel (postmodern and queer theories)

Ritzer text:

1. ) women’s location in and experience of most situations is different than men’s (cultural feminism. Phenomenological. Institutional. Intersectional/ethnomethodological)
2. ) women’s location in most situations is not only different from but also less privileged than or unequal to that if men (liberal feminism. Rational choice feminism)
3. ) women’s situation has to be understood in terms of direct power relationship. Women are oppressed (psychoanalytic feminism. Radical feminism)
4. ) women’s experiences of difference, inequality, and oppression vary according to their location with structural arrangements of oppression and privilege (socialist feminism. Intersectionality theory)

Question 2

What are the main conflicts within feminist theory?

Answer 2

Biological feminism that sees women as nurturers

Liberal feminism that sees women as being able to change and influence the systems that oppress them

Intersectional feminism that sees white patriarchal society as oppressing different people in intersecting ways

Question 3

What are established theories and assumptions concerning inequalities, gender, race, class and sexuality?

Answer 3

-

Question 4

What are several contributions feminists have made in the area of epistemology?

Answer 4

How women are oppressed by society

The masculinization of society

That white men are central to societal thoughts and ideals

Question 5

What are some of the activities involved in social production?

Answer 5

Housework

Childcare

Family planning

Question 6

Who is mostly responsible for social production?

Answer 6

Women

Question 7

How can paternalism be a relationship if exploitation?

Answer 7

Paternalism sees women as inferior and childlike, less intelligent, and therefore a paternalistic society decides what the roles of women are, and they are lesser than those of men

Question 8

How does the structural function of society that a system of deprecate institutions with distinct though interrelated roles, differ from women’s experiences of those institutions?

Answer 8

-

Question 9

Harriet Martuneau

Answer 9

English sociologist
1830’s
One of the inventors of sociology (along with Comte)
Deaf from early teens - first sociologist to write about illness and stability

Question 10

Cultural feminism

Answer 10

Explores and celebrates social value of women’s distinctive ways of being

Question 11

Existential or phenomological feminism

Answer 11

Sees people born in a world shaped by a culture that reflects male experience and ignores or marginalized women’s experiences

Question 12

Feminist institutional theory

Answer 12

Sees gender differences as resulting from the roles that women and men play within various institutional settings (mother, wife, household worker..)

Question 13

Feminist interactionist theory

Answer 13

Views gender as an accomplishment by skilled actors in interaction with others who hold them accountable for confirming to appropriate gender behaviour

Question 14

Liberal feminism

Answer 14

Women may claim equality with men
Gender inequality is the result of patriarchal and sexist patterning and division of labour
-repatterning if key institutions (law, work, family, education, media)

Question 15

Sexism

Answer 15

System if discriminatory attitudes and practices connected by a theme if privileging make experience and devaluing female experience

Question 16

Jessie Bernard

Answer 16

-life marked by “outgrowths”

Question 17

Rational choice feminism

Answer 17

Women are rational decision makers who labour under more institutional constraints and more pressing opportunity costs than men

Question 18

Domination

Answer 18

Any relationship in which one party (the dominant) succeeds in making the other party (the subordinate) an instrument of the dominant’ will and refuses the subordinate’s independent subjectivity

Question 19

Psychoanalytic feminism

Answer 19

Effort to explain patriarchy through use of reformulations of the theories of Freud and his successors in psychoanalytic theory

Question 20

Patriarchy

Answer 20

A system in which men subjugate women

Question 21

Radical feminism

Answer 21

Theory of social organization, gender oppression and strategies for change that affirms the positive value of women and argues that they are everywhere oppressed by violence or the threat of violence

Question 22

Socialist feminism

Answer 22

An effort to develop a unified theory that focuses on the role of capitalism and patriarchy in creating a large-scale structure that oppressed women

Question 23

Capitalist patriarchy

Answer 23

Oppression or women is traceable to a combination of capitalism and patriarchy

Question 24

Historical materialism

Answer 24

MARX - Material conditions of human life, inclusive of the activities and relationships that produce those conditions, are the key factors that pattern human experience, personality, ideas, and social arrangements; that those conditions change over time because of dynamics immanent with them; and that history is a record if the changes in the material conditions if a group’s life and if the correlative changes in experiences, personality, ideas, and social arrangements.

Question 25

Intersectionality theory

Answer 25

Women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity because if the intersections is other arrangements of social inequality

Question 26

Vectors of oppression and privilege

Answer 26

The varied intersections of a number of arrangements of social inequality (gender, class, race, global location, sexual preference, and age) that serve to oppress women differently. Variation in these intersections qualitatively alters the experience of being woman

Question 27

Patricia hill Collins

Answer 27

Experiences of being first or only African American in various social settings
M

Question 28

Standpoint

Answer 28

Perspective of embodied actors within groups that are differentially located in the social structure

Question 29

Outsider within

Answer 29

Rile frequently experienced by group members when they move from the home group into the larger society.

Question 30

Relations of ruling

Answer 30

Complex, no monolithic but intricately connected social activities that attempt to control human social production

Question 31

Local attitudes of lived experience

Answer 31

The places where actual people act and live their lives

Question 32

Texts

Answer 32

Written documents, chatterboxes by their essential anonymity, generality, or authority, that are designed to pattern and translate real-life, specific, individualized experience into a language firm acceptable to the relations of ruling

Question 33

Dorothy E Smith

Answer 33

Ideas are foundational to feminist macro theory, integrated feminist theory, and socialist feminism

Question 34

Bifurcated consciousness

Answer 34

A type of consciousness characteristic of women that reflects the fact that for them, everyday life is divided into two realities: the reality of their actual, lived l, reflected on experience and the reality of social typifications

Question 35

What does Dorothy Smith mean by sisterhood?

Answer 35

• giving other women and ourselves authority

- leaning the relate to one another

Question 36

In Bannerji, how is multiculturalism a tool of racialization?

Answer 36

• “others”
• Indigenous peoples live within a nations state, like the Palestinians
• multiculturalism others anyone who is non-white while promoting white maleness as the standard

Question 37

Patriarchy

Answer 37

The Dictionary of Critical Sociology defines patriarchy as “A system in which gender relations are highly stratified; males are given a monopoly over economic power, social power, moral power and the use of physical force. Women are held to be inferior in intellect and in moral capacities; thus in need of control and guidance by putatively superior males.”21 However, as Moghadam suggests in her article Patriarchy in Transition: women and the changing family in the Middle East,22 the concept of patriarchy has many facets, from the ‘private’ patriarchy we are most familiar with, where the rule of the father guides the family, to ‘public’ patriarchy where the state participates in the subordination of women through social policies which make women’s financial independence difficult if not impossible.

Question 38

Ideology

Answer 38

“An ideology is a set of ideas that structure a group’s notions of reality, a system of representations or a code of meanings governing how individual and groups see the world.”23 This set of ideas is so ‘taken-for-granted,’ that individuals and social groups cannot even consider that other sets of ideas have any validity. Dillman has an excellent section on ideology at:
http://www.rdillman.com/HFCL/TUTOR

Question 39

Bifurcated consciousness

Answer 39

this concept denotes “an “uneasiness” that results as women attempt to negotiate two mismatched worlds (dominant knowledge concepts verses lived experience), represents the unique standpoint of women, of the oppressed. This unique standpoint, or perspective, holds the potential for viewing a more inclusive, or complete, picture of what is going on from the position below, an awareness of both worlds, not limited to one.”24

Question 40

Standpoint

Answer 40

this is a perspective, a location in time and space from which to examine and reflect on the world around us and as Lengermann and Niebrugge state that, it is the product of a group of people who, through their shared experiences and knowledge over time, have developed a similar conception of their social world and of others in that world. As Smith explains, “We must remember that as we begin from the world as we actually experience it, we are located and that what we know of the world, of the ‘other,’ is conditional upon that location as part of a relation comprehending the other’s location also.”25 Em Griffin illustrates standpoint by referring to E. B. Du Bois’s famous notion of “double consciousness” from The Souls of Black Folk, originally published in 1903, suggesting that black people not only know their own standpoint, but also the standpoint of the dominant group. He quotes Du Bois: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (New York: Penguin, 1989, p. 5). Griffin also quotes James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, originally published in 1912, “I believe it to be a fact that the coloured people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them” (New York: Vintage-Random, 1989, p.20).26

Question 41

Standpoint Theory

Answer 41

an approach that suggests that knowledge grounded in the standpoints of women and other marginalized groups is more complete than knowledge based merely on the perspectives of the dominant group, even though this knowledge is thought to be abstract and objective. “Feminist standpoint theory derives from the Marxist position that the socially oppressed class can access knowledge unavailable to the socially privileged, particularly knowledge of social relations. As feminist standpoint theory has developed, it has focused more on the political nature of the standpoint (for example a “feminist” standpoint rather than a “women’s” standpoint), and it has attempted to attend to the diversity of women by incorporating the standpoints of other marginalized groups. Extremely influential in feminist approaches to social science (particularly sociology), standpoint theory remains as controversial as it is insightful.”27 Despite the controversy, it is difficult to argue with the conclusion that taking the perspective of the marginalized person gives the researcher the possibility of asking new kinds of questions and reaching different kinds of conclusions than research that is done from the dominant group’s point of view.

Question 42

Institutional ethnography

Answer 42

Devault and McCoy (2001) describe institutional ethnography as ‘the empirical investigation of linkages among local settings of everyday life, organizations, and translocal processes of administration,”28 in other words, a process of gathering knowledge that attempts to join micro-social and macro-social levels of investigation. Drawing on the work of ethnomethodologists, institutional ethnography tries to understand how people’s everyday experiences are organized around the practices of work, education, health care, etc. and also how people participate in producing these. For example, what is the impact on a visible minority female worker that all or most management positions are held by white males, or that all the organization’s regulations are written in a language that she does not understand, in words that are not part of her vocabulary? Dorothy Smith also gives the example of the building of a dam, whose hydro electric power is part of the province’s economic long term economic plan, but whose impact on the everyday lives of First Nations people is often not recorded.29 Institutional ethnography relies on a broad notion of work, a critique of ideological practices, and the notion of social relations to link local investigations to more translocal relations. Institutional ethnography relies on concepts such as relations of ruling (including how these relations are organized through laws, social policies, organizational regulations and other generalized, impersonal texts), and depends on the recording of the local actualities of lived experience, the authentic activities of real people.

Question 43

Hegemony

Answer 43

“A concept of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) which refers to the way that the political and social domination of the bourgeois class in capitalist society is pervasively expressed not only in ideologies but in all realms of culture and social organization. Gramsci brings together the manufacturing of consent and coercion in the social organization of ruling. The comprehensive expression of the values of class-divided society in social life lends this form of society an appearance of naturalness and inevitability that removes it from examination, criticism, and challenge. While arising in the analysis of a class-divided society the term is also used in discussion of a patriarchal society or a colonial society.”

Question 44

Discourse

Answer 44

this term refers to how people talk about the world around them; a basic assumption is that the way people talk about their world merely reflects the success of some social group in promoting their ways of thinking and seeing the world.

Question 45

Private sphere

Answer 45

the private sphere refers to that area of space and time that is occupied by the individual and the family. It contrasts with the public sphere which occupies public interactions, such as education, business, government, and community activities.