Part 1 Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 and Part 2 Chapters 7 and 8

Question 1

What is symbolic interactionism?

Answer 1

The idea that we relate to each other through language and meanings

Question 2

What does Judith Butler discuss?

Answer 2

She discusses the idea that gender is a performance and that everyone chooses how they are going to present themselves

Question 3

What is Agnes’ sex categorization?

Answer 3

She claims herself to be categorized as female

Question 4

What is Agnes’ gender?

Answer 4

Agnes identifies as a woman and therefore has over-performed her gender as a consequence of being a transexual women

Question 5

What is Agnes’ sex?

Answer 5

Agnes is biologically male though she regards herself as a female, albeit a female with a penis, insisting that it was a “mistake” in need of a remedy

Question 6

What is gender understood to be?

Answer 6

Gender is understood to be the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sext categories. It is essentially a performance of one’s role within society as man or women

Question 7

Can we avoid doing gender?

Answer 7

It is impossible to avoid doing gender as participants within a society hold each other accountable for their performance of gender through interaction and relations

Question 8

What are the feminine disorders that women are victims of?

Answer 8

Historically speaking it was neurasthenia (a condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability) as well as hysteria in the second half of the 19th century. In the 20th century it is agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa and bulimia.

Question 9

What do these illnesses that women have experienced over the decades demonstrate?

Answer 9

They demonstrate the changing expectations of womanly behaviour both on a symbolic and physical level

Question 10

How can the physical transformation of the body through these feminine disorders demonstrate a protest of gender roles?

Answer 10

Agoraphobia: protest against wifey duties
Anorexia: protest against the ideal female figure by essentially destroying the body
Histeria: protest against womanly behaviour

Question 11

What does Foucault argue about gender and sexuality?

Answer 11

He tells us of the primacy of practice over belief as through the organization and regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives are our bodies trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, and femininity

Question 12

What does Bordo argue about the embodied distress that constraints the female gender in different ways?

Answer 12

She demonstrates through a historical explanation of the psychosomatic illnesses experience by women such as hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia that these conditions are not just medical or psychiatric afflictions but are symptoms of gender power relations that pressure women to remain subdued, voiceless, and childlike. Retreating into a private indoor space or starving oneself may seem like an excessive form of conformity to these pressures but Bordo argues that the agoraphobic or anorexic woman is also using her body as a form of protest, drawing attention to the destructive impact of patriarchy, whether she deliberately intends to do so or not.

Question 13

What are the male virtues?

Answer 13

Self-mastery and control

Question 14

How do the male virtues affect the woman in society?

Answer 14

They affect the woman by way of encouraging her to participate in practices of “self-mastery” and “control” by way of going to the gym, dieting, etc. Anorexia is an example of male virtues influencing the woman as, if she will have no control over anything within a patriarchal society, she will have control over her body

Question 15

What is the feminine praxis?

Answer 15

The feminine praxis is essentially the practice of being a woman within society. It is the “trained, shaped, obeys, responds,” socially adapted “useful body”. It is what the woman does in order to fit into the roles and regulations that the female gender applies to the notion of the feminine body.

Question 16

How are sex roles standardized?

Answer 16

Sex roles are standardized by way of categorizing the roles of sex through arbitrary, static notions of gender

Question 17

Doe the male sex role exist?

Answer 17

It does not as it is impossible to isolate a “role” that constructs masculinity or another that constructs femininity because there is no are of social life that is not the arena of sexual differentiation and gender relations, the notion of a sex role necessarily simplifies and abstracts to an impossible degree

Question 18

How can we understand masculinity?

Answer 18

We first need to understand that it is not simply a biologistic or subjective but rather men’s involvement in the social relations that constitute the gender order. Masculinity is a pattern of social relations where men are seen to be in power and women are not

Question 19

How is the subordination of women by men achieved?

Answer 19

Women are subordinated by men within the contemporary capitalist world as men are advantaged by the subordination of women, allowing them to have power over a whole group

Question 20

What is the differentiation of masculinities?

Answer 20

It is psychological as in it bears on the kind of people that men are and become, but is not only psychological. Through the imposition of a particular definition on other kinds of masculinity is part of a hegemonic masculinity that is imposed on society as a whole. It reify’s human behaviour into a “condition” and therefore legitimates and reproduces the social relationships that generate their dominance.

Question 21

When did intersectionality emerge?

Answer 21

It emerged in the early twenty-first century

Question 22

What is the interpersonal domain of power?

Answer 22

The intersectionality of varying combinations of class, gender, race, sexuality and citizenship categories differentially positions each individual and so, regardless of the love of soccer, these axes of social division work together and influence one another to shape each individual biography. Therefore the interpersonal domain of power is the power of relationships

Question 23

What is the disciplinary domain of power?

Answer 23

It is how different people find themselves encountering different treatment regarding which rules apply to them and how those rules will be implemented.

Question 24

What is the cultural domain of power?

Answer 24

The cultural domain of power is essentially the knowledge that is passed down from those who have power within a given culture to those who do not. It is the ability to define and create knowledge that keeps those in power in power and those who do not have power to continue to have none

Question 25

What is the structural domain of power?

Answer 25

The structural domain of power is essentially how a certain cultural aspect is organized or structured

Question 26

What is the Latinidades movement?

Answer 26

The Latinidades movement is a movement that promotes racial equality and tackling racism and sexism through the avenue of a festival atmosphere

Question 27

How does the Latinidades movement use relationality in order to promote its message?

Answer 27

The Latinidades festival utilizes the festival space to make everyone feel included by way of having a wide range of activities for all. It allowed create a common relationships and therefore create a common identity categories that later allowed them to develop a collective identity politic

Question 28

How does gender operate as cultural capital?

Answer 28

Gender operates as cultural capital by way of defining it as accumulated labor that enable agents to acquire power and produce profit.

Question 29

What kind of cultural capital does gender represent?

Answer 29

The embodied state i.e. in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body

Question 30

What is the task of Somali immigrants?

Answer 30

Their task is to align ethnicity and religion with Canadian customs

Question 31

Who are the main focus of study within the Somali immigrant study?

Answer 31

Second generation Somali Canadians

Question 32

What is the issue that second gen Somali immigrants face?

Answer 32

They have to battle with how they conduct themselves in order to align not only within Canadian society but their parent’s beliefs as well

Question 33

How is “doing gender” a part of cultural capital?

Answer 33

It is a part of cultural capital in the sense that the idea of how much power you have is a part of your ability to perform your gender well enough to gain recognition and status

Question 34

How do the views of the Somali immigrant community change as each generation is born?

Answer 34

There is a lessening of ties to one’s community as each generation goes on to change how they do things, inevitably integrating themselves into the culture of their country of birth therefore allowing them to accumulate cultural capital through gender egalitarian idenitites

Question 35

How has a change in religiosity affected Somali immigrants?

Answer 35

Changing religiosity and decline in community commitments has loosened the restrictive role of social networks on gender identities

Question 36

How do participants in the Somali immigration identify themselves?

Answer 36

It is a spectrum that is dependent on their level of comfortability with identifying themselves with their Somali heritage and the Canadian culture they have adopted since bing born and growing up in Canadian society

Question 37

What are microaggressions?

Answer 37

Microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal behavioural and environmental indignities whether intentional or unintentional that communicate hostile derogatory or negative slights to the target person or group that is part of the everyday fabric of racism

Question 38

What are the academic norms of racialized individuals within academia?

Answer 38

Some of the academic cultural norms we see are institutional and epistemological racism which has affected their experiences within the profession

Question 39

What is epistemological racism?

Answer 39

It is racism that renders the ways of knowledge of some groups as lesser and un-authoritative

Question 40

What is the kind of everyday racism that academics experience?

Answer 40

This kind of racism manifests in a multitude of subtle ways, including behaviours, humour, ways of speaking, and body language

Question 41

What is the experience of indigenous and radicalized faculty?

Answer 41

Many of these individuals are usually the only people of their culture and race within their department. This leads to “institutional isolation” where many feel isolated and alienated by their peers therefore causing them to lack the important information networks without which they are less able to participate in decisions and policy making

Question 42

What are the results of looking at people of colour within academia in the way of the study?

Answer 42

It demonstrates lack of representations, tokenism (being asked to speak on behalf of your whole group as a consequence of being the only representative), not belonging, over racism, loss of positive evaluations and the denial that they ever existed, accent, etc.