Unit II: Challenging Binary Systems and Constructions of DIfference

multiple masculinities

Connell suggests that there is more than one kind of masculinity and what is considered "masculine" differs by race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. ex. being knowledgeable about computers might be understood as masculine because it can help a person accumulate income and wealth, and we consider wealth to be masculine. However, computer knowledge only translates into "masculinity" for certain men. While an Asian-American, middle-class man might get a boost in "masculinity points" (as it were) for his high-paying job with computers, the same might not be true for a working-class white man whose white-collar desk job may be seen as a weakness to his masculinity by other working-class men. Expectations for masculinity differ by age; what it means to be a man at 19 is very different than what it means to be a man at 70. Therefore, masculinity intersects with other identities and expectations change accordingly.

What are stereotypical or idealized images that allow an elite group power over those portrayed in these representations?

Controlling Images

In which country do fast-food workers make a minimum wage the equivalent of $20.00 per hour?

Denmark

Female Masculinity

Expression/embodiment of masculinity in female body. Halberstam defines masculinity as the connection between maleness and power, which female-assigned people access through drag-king performances, butch identity (where female-assigned people appear and act masculine and may or may not identify as women), or trans identity.

LGBTQ Youth are less likely to attempt suicide then their heterosexual peers

False

The phrase "sex/gender system," or "sex/gender/sexuality system" was coined by

Gayle Rubin

Which one of the following groups makes the lowest wage earnings on average in America?

Hispanic women

Transsexuals are

Individuals born to one sex but identify with the other

What does the letter "I" stand for in the term LGBTQIA?

Intersex

Which one of these following ethnic groups is not associated with the bamboo ceiling?

Italian-Americans

This social scientist defines masculinity as the connection between maleness and power.

Judith (Jack) Halberstam

A Gender theorist challenged the notion that there is an underlying "sex" to a person. Sex is socially constructed

Judith Butler

Who used the terms "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" for the first time in history?

Károly Mária Kertbeny

Who was first academic to coin the term "heteronormativity"?

Michael Warner

Example of Social Construct

Money, where we live, people that surround us or community

Where did the Stonewall Riots take place?

New York

How many colors were in the original Pride flag design?

8

Heteronormative

A societal construction where everyone is assumed to be heterosexual

What does Queer mean?

A way of referencing the LGBTQ+ community An umbrella term for the LGBTQ+ community

race

Abby Ferber More than just descriptive of skin color or physical attributes, in biologized constructions of race, race determines intelligence, sexuality, strength, motivation, and "culture."

What best describes the era of women the 1920s?

Age of the Boyish Flapper

Which protest group is well known for publicly demanding an immediate end to police violence and injustice?

Black Lives Matter (BLM)

Name two countries that are associated with the Bamboo Ceiling?

China, Philippines, Vietnam, Korea

What is an example associated with phenotypical traits?

Cleft in chin, skin tone, hair curl

white assimilation

Over time, Irish immigrants and their children and grandchildren assimilated into the category of "white" by strategically distancing themselves from Black Americans and other non-whites in labor disputes and participating in white supremacist racial practices and ideologies. In this way, the Irish in America became white. A similar process took place for Italian-Americans, and, later, Jewish American immigrants from multiple European countries after the Second World War. Similar to Irish Americans, both groups became white after first being seen as non-white. These cases show how socially constructed race is and how this labeling process still operates today. For instance, are Asian Americans, considered the "model minority," the next group to be integrated into the white category, or will they continue to be regarded as foreign threats? Only time will tell.

Cultural capital is a term coined to address non-monetary class differences such as tastes in food, music or knowledge

Pierre Bourdieu

What characteristic remains a persistent problem for most Native American communities in the United States?

Poverty

Which LGBT activist groups first shouted the expression, "We're here, we're queer. Get used to it!" during street demonstrations?

Queer Nation

What descriptions best defines the meaning of the letter "Q" in the term LGBTQIA?

Questioning or Queer

Which event represents a violent response to discrimination against LGBTQ people before 1970?

Riot at Compton's Café in San Francisco in 1966

Which one of the following countries has the highest percentage of women elected to parliament?

Rwanda

Her ____ roles were used to measure masculinity or femininity?

Sandra Bem

Who created the term "the second sex"?

Simone de Beauvoir

Who wrote, "One was not born, but rather becomes, a woman."?

Simone de Beauvoir

Which nation decrees that homosexuality is punishable by death?

Sudan

Which ethnic groups was regarded as a different "racial" group than Anglo-Saxons in nineteenth-century America?

The Irish

Who owned and where did the Stonewall Bar riots take place?

The New York City Mafia

Which of the following statements, best describes the term "part-time pay penalty"?

The notion that woman are not serious about work and less pay

Scientific Racism

The practice of using science in an attempt to support ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. ex. studies that suggested African American skulls had a smaller cranial capacity, contained smaller brains, and, thus, less intelligence. ex. the Moynihan Report, also known as "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action" (1965) was an infamous document that claimed the non-nuclear family structure found among poor and working-class African American populations, characterized by an absent father and matriarchal mother, would hinder the entire race's economic and social progress. While the actual argument was much more nuanced, politicians picked up on this report to propose an essentialist argument about race and the "culture of poverty." They played upon stereotypes from the era of African-American slavery that justified treating Black Americans as less than human. ex. One of these stereotypes is the assumption that Black men and women are hypersexual; these images have been best analyzed by Patricia Hill Collins (2004) in her work on "controlling images" of African Americans— images such as the "Jezebel" image of Black women and the "Buck" image of Black men discussed earlier. Slave owners were financially invested in the reproduction of slave children since children born of mothers in bondage would also become the property of owners, so much so that they did not wait for women to get pregnant of their own accord but institutionalized practices of rape against slave women to get them pregnant (Collins, 2004). It was not a crime to rape a slave—and this kind of rape was not seen as rape—since slaves were seen as property. But, since many people recognized African American slaves as human beings, they had to be framed as fundamentally different in other ways to justify enslavement. The notion that Black people are "naturally" more sexual and that Black women were therefore "unrapable" (Collins 2004) served this purpose. Black men were framed as hypersexual "Bucks" uninterested in monogamy and family; this idea justified splitting up slave families and using Black men to impregnate Black women. Conclusion: The underlying perspectives in the Moynihan Report—that Black families are composed of overbearing (in both senses of the word: over-birthing and overcontrolling) mothers and disinterested fathers and that if only they could form more stable nuclear families and mirror the white middle-class they would be lifted from poverty—reflect assumptions of natural difference found in the ideology supporting American slavery. The structural causes of racialized economic inequality— particularly, the undue impoverishment of Blacks and the undue enrichment of whites during slavery and decades of unequal laws and blocked access to employment opportunities (Feagin 2006)—are ignored in this line of argument in order to claim fundamental biological differences in the realms of gender, sexuality and family or racial "culture." Furthermore, this line of thinking disparages alternative family forms as dysfunctional rather than recognizing them as adaptations that enabled survival in difficult and even intolerable conditions.

basketball/baseball/football

There are few "out" gay athletes in the top three men's professional sports despite the fact that, statistically, there are very likely to be many.

What are the Hijras and where are they from?

They are Indian men or third sex that takes female names and wears female clothing

How are African American males depicted in more modern advertising campaigns?

They are portrayed as highly sexualized and attractive.

In which African country has there been the recent passage of anti-gay laws to brutally repress the LGBTQ communities?

Uganda

Which one of the following descriptions best pertain to the term "occupational feminization"?

Women move into a career field in larger numbers, relative pay diminishes

mertiocracy

anyone who works hard enough will succeed, and those who do not succeed must not have worked hard enough. ex. American Dream; succeeding at the American Dream means something akin to having a great job, making a lot of money, and owning a car, a house, and all the most-recent gadgets. These are markers of material, that is, economic, wealth. Wealth is not only captured in personal income, but other assets as well (house, car, stocks, inheritances), not all of which are necessarily earned by hard work alone, but can come from inheritance, marriage, or luck.

Malta

became the first country to implement a law to make these kinds of surgeries illegal and protect people with sex variations as well as gender variations in 2015.

social constructionist argument

believe that many things we typically leave unquestioned as conventional ways of life actually reflect historically- and culturally-rooted power relationships between groups of people, which are reproduced in part through socialization processes.

black and white, masculine and feminine, rich and poor, straight and gay, able-bodied and disabled.

binary systems

alternatives to binary systems

binary thinking works strategically such that the dominant groups in society are associated with more valued traits, while the subordinate groups, defined as their opposites, are always associated with less valued traits. Thus, the poles in a binary system define each other and only make sense in the presence of their opposites.

Adrienne Rich (1980)

called heterosexuality "compulsory," meaning that in our culture all people are assumed to be heterosexual and society is full of both formal and informal enforcements that encourage heterosexuality and penalize sexual variation. Compulsory heterosexuality plays an important role in reproducing inequality in the lives of sexual

sex/gender system or sex/gender/sexuality system

coined by Gayle Rubin (1984) to describe, "the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity." Rubin proposed that the links between biological sex, social gender, and sexual attraction are products of culture. ex. gender is the "social product" that we attach to notions of biological sex.

When and where did the term "glass ceiling" first appear publicly?

in the Wall Street Journal in 1986

What is LGBTQIA?

includes the Queer,Intersex and asexual communities

transgender people

individuals who do not identify with the gender they were assigned with at birth and challenges the very idea of a single sex/gender identity.

a sapiosexual

is attracted to intelligence

Lambda Legal

joint adoptions are illegal for gay men and lesbians. ex. Indiana

glass escalator

men working in female-dominated occupations actually earn more and gain promotions faster than women. this example illustrates how, as social constructionist Abby Ferber (2009) argues, social systems produces differences between men and women, and not the reverse.

What do you call a young, wealthy, urban male professional that loves shopping and can accessorize?

metrosexual

What is it called in the workplace, when working mothers face consistent inequities in salary, perceived competence, and benefits relative to childless women.

motherhood penalty

What is it called when some men may express anxiety at being caught between traditional perspectives about their roles as breadwinners and emerging gender roles that encourage them to participate in family life?

new male mystique

the poor/welfare recipients

often faceless but framed as undeserving of assistance since they are assumed to be cheating the system, addicted to alcohol or drugs, and have only themselves to blame for their poverty (Mantsios, 2007). Welfare recipients are the implied counterparts to the middle-class everymen that populate political speeches and radio rants. Thus, in the United States, socioeconomic class has been constructed as a binary between the middle-class and the poor.

gender identity

one's sense of being male or female.

Homophobia

the fear, hatred, or prejudice against gay people.

What term for women at work was coined in the Wall Street Journal in 1986?

the glass ceiling

Accord Alliance

the most prominent intersex focused organization in the U.S.; they offer information and recommendations to physicians and families, but they focus primarily on improving standards of care rather than advocating for legal change.

What is discrimination?

the unjust treatment of different categories of people

Gender expression refers to

the way a person shows their gender through clothes/hair/etc

In India and Native American Culture, there are individuals who are classified as neither male or female. They are

third gender

The Intersex Society of North America estimated that some 1.5% of people have sex variations—that is 2,000 births a year

true

The following groups were combined together and not considered white, Irish, Spanish, Italians, and Jews

true

Define gender roles

vary from culture to culture are learned through socialization change overtime within cultures

Christine Volling

was the first person in the world to successfully sue the surgeon who removed her internal reproductive organs without her knowledge or consent in Germany in 2008.

A stylized act is one that is traditional. Which of the following is a stylized act whose gender association has evolved?

wearing earrings

Societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in Western countries is called

white privilege

Men working in female-dominated occupations actually earn more and gain promotions faster than women.

glass escalator

gender binary is

idea that there are only two genders

bigender

identifying with two genders

one-drop rule

if you had even one drop of African "blood," you would have been considered Black.

cultural capital

coined by the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) to address non-monetary class differences such as tastes in food and music or knowledge of high culture. Bourdieu explained that even when a formerly poor individual experiences economic mobility and becomes middle-class, there are still markers of her former status in the way she carries herself and the things she knows. ex. When someone goes from rags to riches, they often use the wrong utensils at a dinner party, call something by the wrong name, cannot tell the difference between a Chardonnay and a Merlot (wines ), or spend their money in a showy way. Thus, someone can have high cultural capital and not be wealthy, or have low cultural capital and be a millionaire. For instance, in the popular (and very campy) movie Showgirls (Verhoeven, 1995), the main character, Nomi Malone, goes from homeless and unemployed to a well paid Las Vegas showgirl at record speed. Along the way, she buys an expensive Versace dress and brags about it. Unfortunately, she reveals her lack of cultural capital, and thus her former status as poor, by mispronouncing the brand (saying 'Verse-ACE' instead of 'Vers-a-Chee') and is humiliated by some rather mean bystanders. In sum, the concept of cultural capital highlights the ways in which social class is not just about wealth and income, but that social classes develop class cultures.

What do you call the act of turning something into or treating something as an object that can be bought, sold, and traded?

commodification

Welfare Queen Stereotype

conjures images of poor, black, sexually-promiscuous women, contrary to the fact that white women as a group are the largest recipients of welfare.

Intersex

describes variation in sex characteristics, such as chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals. refers to biological variation. "hermaphrodite" is inappropriate for referring to intersex and is also degrading.

gender assignment

doctors place on infants (and fetuses) based on the appearance of genitalia.

What is androgynous?

dress a mix in-between girly and manly

what is social justice?

everyone has a right to have their voice respected Everyone has the right to contribute to society

heteronormative culture

everyone is assumed to be heterosexual (attracted to men if you are a woman, attracted to women if you are a man) until stated otherwise.

Compulsory Monogamy

exclusive romantic and sexual relationships and marriage are expected and valued over other kinds of relationships.

What is it called when fathers are rated favorably as more committed to their jobs and offered much higher salaries than non-fathers.

fatherhood premium

what is gender fluidity?

gender identity best described as a dynamic mix of boy/girl

personal responsibility/work opportunities reconciliation act (PRWORA)

passed by bill clinton in 1996, which fundamentally rewrote prior US welfare policy. limits lifetime receipt of welfare to a maximum of 60 months, or 5 years, and requires that able-bodied recipients work or jobtrain for low-skill jobs while receiving checks. Under PRWORA, recent immigrants cannot receive welfare for their first five years of legal residence, and undocumented immigrants can never receive welfare benefits. People experiencing poverty can face tough choices; for instance, working more hours or getting a slightly better paying job can cause one to fail the "means test" (an income level above which people are ineligible for welfare benefits) for food stamps or Medicaid. The poor are increasingly forced to decide between paying for rent versus food and other bills, as the cost of living has risen dramatically in the past few decades while working-class wages have not risen comparably.

non-binary/genderfluid/genderqueer

people who do not identify as men or women.

cisgender (or "cis")

people who identify in accordance with their gender assignment.

What is coveture?

property of women given to their husbands

Binary systems

reflect the integration of these oppositional ideas into our culture.

middle class

represents more than what people have in their bank accounts—it reflects a political ideology. When politicians run for election or argue over legislation they often employ the term "middle-class" to stand in for "average," "tax-paying," "morally upstanding" constituents and argue for their collective voice and prosperity. Rhetorically, the "middle class" is not compared to the super rich (since, in the US, you can never be too rich or too thin), but rather the poor. So, when people talk about the middle class they are also often implying that they are NOT those "deviant," "tax-swindling," "immoral," poor people.

Binaries

social constructs composed of two parts that are framed as absolute and unchanging opposites.

biological determinist argument

suggests that all people assigned female will identify as women and be attracted to me. "biology is destiny"

Heteronormativity

the belief that heterosexuality is and should be the norm. ex. sociologist Karen Martin studied what parents say to their children about sexuality and reproduction, and found that with children as young as three and five years old, parents routinely assumed their children were heterosexual, told them they would get (heterosexually) married, and interpreted cross-gender interactions between children as "signs" of heterosexuality.