Here's a review of a new book-length critique of pop "scientific" accounts of neurobiological pseudo-theories purporting to legitimate gender hierarchies. Of course, this has been a point emphasized by dozens of feminist theorists and activists already. But its refreshing to see some sharp push-back in the pop non-fiction genre against the proliferation of bullshit like this.
Showing posts with label gender differences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender differences. Show all posts
Monday, August 23, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Nice summary of sex/gender distinction
The following is adapted from Alison Stone's excellent An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy. I thought it was a particularly succinct and clear account of the matters discussed below.
Accept for the moment that there is some biologically specifiable notion of "sex", although we note this notion of "sex" would not be binary, but clustered or continuous. Gender, in contrast, would be precisely that set of "social expectations and norms governing what behaviors and traits are appropriate for male and female individuals."
These social expectations, or norms, "are conveyed to individuals by other people and by being embodied in institutions and in cultural artifacts, such as films and novels. Institutions are humanly created organizations that shape social life, such as the state, law, the family, the health service [haha... not in the USA! -t] and the media. These expectations or norms specify which behaviors are masculine and which are feminine. People and institutions enforce expectations by applying rewards and punishments. For example, if girls are expected to be deferential, then they will be punished or receive negative responses when they behave assertively".
Stone continues: "Masculinity and femininity are social position or roles. According to sociologists, a role is a position within society (e.g. the position of teacher, the position of parent). Each role is defined by a set of norms about how those occupying this role should behave. Each role is defined in relation to other roles: what is expected of teachers depends on what is expected of pupils and vice versa."
Importantly, "individuals are not only expected to perform the actions appropriate to their gender, they are also expected to identify, or understand, themselves as members of that gender."
We may expand upon this provisional definition of gender as follows. Gender "consists of (1) norms which are embodied in social practices and which regulate masculine and feminine behavior, (2) the habitual ways of acting that people acquire because of those norms, and (3) the bodily features that people acquire because of these ways of acting."
The claims above may seem obvious and innocent to many of us, but they are material for forming some pretty radical political inferences.
Stone also explores prominent criticisms of the sex/gender distinction from, for example, Butler and Gatens, but concludes that a suitably revised version of the concept of sex is defensible. (Compare with Butler, who argues that any claim about sex necessarily entails a claim about gender). The conception that Stone has in mind is one that is thin (rather than expansive and deterministic), continuous (rather than discrete, binary), and one that picks out clusters of biological features of bodies because those very features reinforce one another biologically. Here conception thus avoids the sexist error of subsuming bodily features under a purportedly discrete "sex" on the basis of social expectations (rather than biology). Anyway- I'm not going to dwell on these interesting debates (although, incidentally, I'm disposed to agree with Stone) at the moment- I just wanted to share a bit from this excellent introduction to feminist philosophy.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Are men really better athletes?
Read Sherry Wolf's review of McDonagh and Pappano's Playing With the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal here.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Nice Critique of New Tampax 'Man Pads' ads
(Via Bitch magazine's blog): here's an excerpt:
"Tampax quietly unveiled a viral ad campaign in June that I stumbled on a few weeks ago and my feelings about it remain complicated. Despite the hours spent turning it over in my mind, my conclusion is that the campaign--documented entirely on one site, zack16.com, and chronicling the adventures of a sixteen-year-old boy who wakes up one day with a vagina--is many things in turn: edgy, challenging, steeped in stereotypes, possibly transphobic, and potentially subversive in its exploration of gender. ALL AT THE SAME TIME."See the blogpost for an interestingly ambivalent critique of this complicated phenomenon.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Dave Zirin on Caster Semenya and "Sex Testing"
Read Zirin's article here. He was on MSNBC a couple of days ago, viewable here.
Excerpt:
The sports world has been buzzing for some time over the rumor that Semenya may be a man, or more specifically, not "entirely female." According to the newspaper The Age, her "physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she may not be entirely female." From all accounts an arduous process of "gender testing" on Semenya has already begun. The idea that an 18-year-old who has just experienced the greatest athletic victory of her life is being subjecting to this very public humiliation is shameful to say the least.
[...]The people with something to hide are the powers that be in track and field, as well as in international sport. As long as there have been women's sports, the characterization of the best female athletes as "looking like men" or "mannish" has consistently been used to degrade them. When Martina Navratilova dominated women's tennis and proudly exposed her chiseled biceps years before Hollywood gave its imprimatur to gals with "guns," players complained that she "must have a chromosome loose somewhere."
This minefield of sexism and homophobia has long pushed female athletes into magazines like Maxim to prove their "hotness"--and implicitly their heterosexuality.
[...]
Friday, March 13, 2009
Gender norms start in the womb.
I work with small children. Despite this fact, I regularly get pangs of baby-lust. I am well aware that said baby is many years in the future, but I still get excited. So I sometimes peruse blogs about motherhood, so that I can learn weird obscure facts about breastfeeding, baby slings, and look at pictures of cute little booties with funny sayings on them. So sue me.
But many white, upper middle class motherhood bloggers are obsessed with strict, traditional, pink/blue, princess/pirate, mars/venus, mommy/daddy gender roles. They really, really like them. And they'll never let them go. Ever. And it's kinda terrifying.
And so, I give you a potpourri of genderstrict ridiculousness. After which I will enter the phrase "radical feminist motherhood" into google and pray that something comes up.
These are all direct quotes, which link to the blogs from which they came:
We have crescent rolls on hand because J. bought them. That's what happens when men do the grocery shopping.
Well we just hosted Bear’s Third Birthday Party and it was all out PRINCESS. (actually it was Princess & Pirates – so her little boyfriends didn’t feel weird coming to a costume party).
Since I knew I was having a girl the first time around, everything I received was pink. Pink blankets, pink washcloths, pink burp cloths, pink bibs. So, if this baby is a boy, I need some blue stuff, or this little guy will be the best dressed “pink princess.” And I need new boy crib bedding too (of course!!).
And, just for good measure, some mom as cook/servant banter:
My son is a very picky eater (more about that later). I’m open to any innovative methods that might get my son to eat new food. My husband is just as picky as my son. I wonder if this will work on him, too.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Angela Davis & Global Gender Gaps
The quasi-libertarian climate change skeptic John Tierney has ventured into the territory of Our Innate Differences, and it’s a doozy. His recent New York Times column is a roundup of some recent academic studies demonstrating the pesky persistence of personality and achievement differences between men and women in developed countries.
But the real can of worms has been opened by David Schmitt et al in their article, “Why Can’t A Man Be More Like a Woman?: Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures”. Schmitt and his colleagues summarize their conclusions in the following way:
Overall, higher levels of human development – including long and healthy life,So. What they’ve found is that gender personality differences in rich, developed countries are actually more pronounced than in poor, developing countries. That’s fascinating enough as it is. The real whopper is, they attribute this difference to the fact that in countries like the U.S., men and women’s personalities are “less constrained and more able to naturally diverge.”
equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth – were the main
nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality ... It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.
That’s right ... they went there.
They’re proposing that in a historically patriarchal, racist country like the United States, in which women could not vote until well into the 20th century, in which women still do not receive equal pay for equal work, and in which women are routinely killed by their domestic partners – to name a few issues – women and men’s personalities are “less constrained and more able to naturally diverge” than in, say, a historically patriarchal, racist, post-colonial developing country like Tanzania, in which boys are often sent to school instead of their sisters, in which women perform almost all of the country’s domestic work unpaid, and in which many girls still undergo genital mutilation as a tribal rite of passage – to name a few issues.
Having lived in both countries, I won’t deny that the opportunities provided to most girls and women in the U.S. are infinitely greater than opportunities provided to girls and women in Tanzania. But I don’t think for a second that’s because the United States is a fully enlightened, post-sexist culture in which men can develop freely into breadwinning protectors, and women into nurturing, sensitive caretakers. I’d venture that patriarchy, oppressive gender norms and expectations remain extremely pervasive and powerful here in the Land of the Free.
I believe Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class (1981) has an important contribution to make on this subject. Davis’s discussion of the gender norms of slaves, compared to the gender norms of middle-class and wealthy whites, is one of the most fascinating I have read. These excerpts come from the first chapter of the book.
The slave system defined Black people as chattel. Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned ... Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies. (p. 5)So it was the utter economic oppression of slavery – in a capitalist United States – which creates the canvas of “genderlessness” on which Black gender equality will be based. Gender relations in this case – in all cases – are directly linked to the economic conditions in which they occur.
Women were not too “feminine” to work in coal mines, in iron foundries or to be lumberjacks and ditch diggers ... Required by their masters’ demands to be as “masculine” in the performance of their work as their men, Black women must have been profoundly affected by their experiences during slavery. Some, no doubt, were broken and destroyed, yet the majority survived and, in the process, acquired qualities considered taboo by the nineteenth-century ideology of womanhood. (pp. 10, 11)Again, given the right economic conditions (in this case, violently coerced labor), there is apparently no limit to the physical strength and endurance of a woman. For white women, though, the prevailing wisdom was quite different.
As the ideology of femininity – a byproduct of industrialization – was popularizedOf course, later, when Black people in the U.S. were no longer slaves, our own government attributed Black social problems to the fact that their women hadn’t yet been subordinated to male authority! Go figure:
and disseminated through the new ladies’ magazines and romantic novels, white women came to be seen as inhabitants of a sphere totally severed from the realm of productive work ... “Woman” became synonymous with “mother” and “housewife,” and both bore the fatal mark of inferiority. But among Black female slaves, this vocabulary was nowhere to be found. (p. 12)
The “Moynihan Report” directly linked the contemporary problems of the Black community to the putatively matriarchal family structure ... According to the report’s thesis, the source of [continued Black] oppression was ... a “tangle of pathology” created by the absence of male authortity among Black people! The controversial finale of the Moynihan Report was a call to introduce male authority (meaning male supremacy of course!) into the Black family and the community at large.So what’s all this got to do with present-day Tanzania, present-day America, and Dr. Schmitt’s study?
Listen, y’all. The nurturing, agreeable personalities of first world women living in present-day global capitalism are no more “natural” than the personalities of 19th century women who stayed inside knitting doilies because their ladies’ magazine said so. The physically powerful, “genderless,” enduring female slave is no more a “natural” phenomenon than the uncomplaining Tanzanian woman who rises at five to begin her housework, and collapses back into bed at eleven.
All these things aren’t equal. These women didn’t, and don’t, lead lives of equal freedom and fairness. There is nothing that compared to the violent exploitation of slavery.
But: We must get away from this idea of “natural” personality traits. Calling one woman’s personality natural, and another woman’s personality “constrained,” is a gross oversimplification of the history and politics that govern their existences. It's an all-too-effective way of obscuring the economic and social forces that are actually shaping their lives, their work, their wages, and yes, their goddamn personalities.
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