Unit 1 & 2 Flashcards
1
Q
Thinking About Sociology & Gender
A
- Theory vs. lived
- Gender studies as an ongoing project
- Engaging your own gendered life experiences throughout the course (regardless of your gender)
- Mills and the (public) politics of (private) personal troubles
- Gender identify, attribution, and expression
2
Q
Risman
A
Broadly thinking of gender in social sciences
3
Q
Robinson
A
Considering gender and intersectionality more specifically
4
Q
Ahmed
A
Thinking about feminisms, praxis, the personal and the political
5
Q
Risman & History of Gender Theory
A
- Gender as going beyond personal identity
- History of gender theories
- Biology - science replaces religion as justification to restrict women
- Psychology - gender as personality characteristics?
- “Doing genders” vs. structural theory
- Tying these to waves
- Contemporary themes:
- Frames, cultural logic, and queer theories
6
Q
Gender as a Social Structure
A
- Individual Material
- Interactional Material
- Macro Material
- Individual Cultural
- Interactional Cultural
- Macro Cultural
7
Q
Individual Material
A
The Body
8
Q
Interactional Material
A
- Proportional representation
- Access to social networks
9
Q
Macro Material
A
- Distribution of Resources
- Institutional Rules
10
Q
Individual Cultural
A
- Socialization
- Identities
11
Q
Interactional Cultural
A
- Stereotypes
- Cognitive Bias
- Expectations
12
Q
Macro Cultural
A
- Hegemonic Beliefs
- Institutional Logics
13
Q
1st Wave Feminism
A
- Late 19th, early 20th centuries
- Sex is biological, inherent, fixed
- Primary focus:
- The right to vote; Suffragette movement
- The right to own property
- But who is left behind?
14
Q
2nd Wave
A
- Latter half of the 20th C up to approx. 1980s
- Sex vs. (essential) gender
- The personal is political
- Reproductive rights, “equal” pay for equal work, childcare, violence & law
- Fissures forming
- Who is left behind?
15
Q
3rd Wave
A
- What’s a construction anyways?
- No more binary, no more essentialism, no more stability
- Sex is gendered
- Intersectionality and the matrix of domination
- Expanding the field (globalization, neoliberalism, colonialism, Islamophobia, & more)
16
Q
Looking Beyond the Third Wave
A
- The future of gender (sex/gender); the future of feminism
- Postfeminism and resisting depoliticization
- Coalition building
- Is neoliberalism as killing the sociological imagination? “Consumer” as primary identity?
17
Q
What is gender?
A
- A social construction
- Structural
- Performed
- Performative
- Subjective
- Embodied
- Discursive
- Political
- Personal
- Social/Relation
18
Q
Doing Gender
A
- “Doing Gender” - Kind of a big deal
- Gender as innate vs gender as put on
- Accomplishing gender - sending the right signals
- We have to carefully manage our performances to be accountable in public spaces
19
Q
Critiques of Doing Gender
A
- A big deal, but not perfect
- What about bodies?
- What about intersectionality?
- What about sexualities?
- What about Power?
- What about undoing it?
20
Q
Judith Butler and Performativity
A
- Another big deal
- Flipping sex-gender on its head
- An un-gendered subject
- Acts and repetition
- Becoming a (always, already) historically gendered body
21
Q
Critiques of Butler’s Performativity
A
- Butler - some love her, some hate her
- Inaccessible
- Theory vs praxis
- Disempowered subjectivity
- Un-fixing those who would rather be fixed
- Is it intersectional?
22
Q
Differences between Doing Gender and Gender Performativity
A
A performer is an actor who makes choice about how to product gender scripts vs a subject that is only produced through acts
23
Q
Problems with Doing Gender Today
A
- Contemporary misuses of “doing gender”
1) Lost the heart of the feminist critique
2) Gender is as gender does (moving signposts)
24
Q
Undoing Gender
A
- What might undoing look like
- 3 ways to consider undoing: Opening/widening, transgressing, and transformation
- Bechdel, transitions, and gender non-confirming
25
Q
Undoing or Redoing?
A
- Public celebrity transitions
- A challenge to norms, or reification?
26
Q
Intersectionality
A
- A robust background on gender and racialization
- What is intersectionality?
- “a Black feminist theory of power that recognizes how multiple systems of oppression including racism. patriarchy, capitalism, [and more!] interact to disseminate disadvantage to and institutionally stratify different groups”
- Slippage?
- Intersectionality as power theory, (alt) gender theory, & methodology
27
Q
Feminist and Killing Joy
A
- Ahmed - public scholar in the UK
- Feminism and affects (feelings)
- Happiness, joy & joylessness, anger, disappointment
- A reaction to feminist killjoy as pejorative
- Feminist, black feminist, and queer feminist scholarship
28
Q
Feminist Beginnings
A
- Feminism as a way of making sense of how we relate to the world
- The intense ritual of the family dinner table
- Disrupting “bliss” and becoming problematic
29
Q
What can we talk about, what can we feel?
A
- “Only certain things can be brought up”
- The normalized silencing of dissent, disruption
- What happens when we speak the unspeakable?
- The expectation/responsibility to preserve happiness
- “Inappropriate affects” - Feeling wrong
30
Q
The Beginnings of Activism and Affect Aliens
A
- The gap between how we feel and how we’re supposed to feel
- Affect Aliens
- Self doubt, rage, confused
- Threatning happiness; our own and others’
- Saying yes - Becoming the Killjoy
31
Q
Happiness is Good, and All Political Activists Struggle Against It
A
- Happiness is good, so others want us to be happy
- Political activists will experience reactions for disrupting happiness
- Collective efforts are key
- Feminism demonstrates that happiness is sustained by erasing “the signs of not getting along”
- An expectation of happiness is oppression, to refuse happiness is to be outside
32
Q
To Be Difficult
A
- Being feminist is to be difficult - to be seen as difficult is to have consequences
- Are feminist joyless? Are they taking others down with them?
- The loss of the argument in the reception of the affect
- The contagion of the wretch
- Seeing problems and killing our own joy
33
Q
Feminist Tables and Emotions
A
- The challenges of feminist emotions
- Being angry and being framed as angry
- Reflecting and working through emotions as “sites of struggle”
- The fictive Angry Black Woman, when gender and race intersect with affect
34
Q
Getting in the Way and Refusing to Let Go
A
- Killing joy as willfulness
- Willfully pushing against the crowd
- Finding collectives at new tables
- Consciousness-raising matters (still)
- Strategizing movement through oppressive spaces
- Dealing with backlash, staying sore, and finding joy again
35
Q
Unit 2: Gender & Power
A
- How/why has this way of thinking come to be?
- What are the implications of this way of thinking?
- How is this (re)produced?
36
Q
Background on Hegemonic Masculinity
A
- Gender, gender everywhere (but not always the same!)
- Latter half of the 20th C, research on masculinity grows
- Multiple, unequal masculinities and feminists
- Raewyn Connell & hegemonic masculinity
37
Q
Hegemony & Gender
A
- Hegemony - “Predominance obtained by consent”
- Antonion Gramsci - how powerful groups (capitalist bourgeois) used cultural hegemony to legitimize their positions of power by developing the consent of those in subordinate social positions
- Hegemonic gender - taken for granted relations of powder and domination of men over women that people accept and understand as natural and normal
38
Q
Hegemonic (and other) Masculinities
A
- Hegemonic masculinity - one ring to rule them all
- Connell’s 7 insights:
- Multiple masculinities which are hierarchical and hegemonic
- Collectively produced and actively constructed
- Body as a key site of production
- Internal tensions and contradictions, but change is possible
39
Q
Hegemonic (and other) Masculinities
A
- Hegemonic masculinity
- Marginalized masculinity
- Subordinate masculinity
- Complicit masculinity
- Emphasized femininity
- Serving men & masculinity
- Dominant masculinity?
- Positive/personalized masculinities?
- Feminine masculinities?
40
Q
Hegemonic (and Other) Femininities
A
- Hegemonic femininity
- Pariah femininities, male femininities
- Understanding legitimation
- Heterosexual matrix (Butler)
- It all comes down to penetration
41
Q
Schipper’s Questions
A
- What characteristics or practices are understood as manly in the setting?
- What are characteristics or practices are understood as womanly?
- Of those practices and characteristics, which situate femininity as complementary and inferior to masculinity?
- What characteristics or practices of women are defined as feminine, contaminating, or disruptive?
- What characteristics or practices of men are defined as feminine, contaminating, or disruptive?
42
Q
Fisk & Ridgeway and Framing
A
- The centrality of gender: “A primary frame for organizing social relations”
- Instantaneous and unconscious sex categorization
- Social interactions shaped by gendered discourse
- To make sense of others and ourselves
- Disruption requires conscious effort
43
Q
Humour and Hegemonic Gender
A
- Taking humour seriously
- Gender humour shaping policing of gender and creating self-regulating gendered subjects
- Protecting the gender order with butts (or self-deprecating our own butts)
- “Unlaughter”
44
Q
Breaking Comedy & Hannah Gadsby
A
- Nannette (2017)
- “Quitting” comedy
- Humility vs humiliation (being the butt)
- “Breaking comedy” and centring trauma
- Hegemonic gender?
