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Summary Lectures: Gender and Social Inequality in Latin America, 2020/2021
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This document consists of the lectures on Gender and Social Inequality in Latin America by Julienne Weegels. The year 2020/2021!
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Colleges gender and social inequality in Latin AmericaCollege 1
Juliette Weegels
Inequality is more than only gender. Mostly at gender expressions of inequality, differences
between men and women, also among men and women. But also, other inequalities in relation
to gender.
To give you the tools to know what social and gender inequalities are. How can you analyze
them? Gender analysis.
Feminism, gender and social inequality in Latin America
Introduction to what is feminist theory, what are we doing with it in this course? How can we
look at LA through feminist theories?
British suffragettes: women who were fighting for voting rights. People who were allowed to
vote for political candidates. 1920s, not any woman was allowed to elect or to vote. Key
theme for the first feminist wave. What is modern day democracy? Possibility to be elected,
and to elect.
Simone de Beauvoir: the second sex
White women in the European and western world were allowed to vote. Second feminist vote:
evolves around analyzing more deeply why women are being excluded from so many parts of
the society. The woman is the other, there is an absolute human type, the masculine type.
Humanity is male. She is the subject; he is the absolute. She is the other.
Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique
Women as always subordinate to men. First critiques of patriarchy as a system.
De Beauvoir philosophical point. Which existentialism, they started to question what was
normal in society. Friedan and de Beauvoir. Mostly made up from white male professors,
doing research on other white male people. Anthropologists doing research abroad on POC
male, everything was focused on the male. We produced thinking to tendencies that feminist
scholars really pointed their fingers at. The founders of women studies. Female intellectuals
of the 40s-60s. The need to look at women in society. Analyze women’s positions. They
critique these:
, - Ethnocentrism: considering the norms and values of one’s own society as good and as
a moral point of departure in the study/analysis of other societies and cultural groups
- Androcentrism: arguing or analyzing from a male perspective and social position.
Ethno- and androcentric ideas about gender relations in social theory:
- The nuclear family household based on a heterosexual couple as a natural fact (other
types of households are seen as unnatural, exotic, backward, amoral, deviant)
- In all societies, women are subordinate to men (patriarchy)
- Family households are headed by a male breadwinner, the female partner’s main
responsibilities are childcare and household chores. The double burden.
- Men are active, women are passive and subordinate. Very clear tendency in politics.
- Men’s knowledge and capabilities are important for society (and worth studying),
women’s knowledge and capabilities are not important for society (and not interesting)
- Men are the standard; women are a deviation from the norm.
Sex/gender system – Gayle Rubin
Changes the male studies, to gender studies.
- Sex: biological differences between women and men
- Gender: cultural meanings attached to those biological differences, i.e., cultural
construction of femininity and masculinity
- Gayle Rubin (1975) criticized by Judith Butler
Black feminist critique
Feminism is a Western, White, Middle-class movement. They were searching and wanting
rights that men had, and they did not have. In the US. In the US, work was not only for men,
it was also for black women. The first issue. They were obliged to work. In relation to women
and female emancipation, they have to emancipate as black women. Related to the racial
struggle. Black feminists feel like they have a double struggle. They have to in the black
liberation movement, but also as women. They also have a voice. The movements were
mostly only led by men. White feminism. Differences in feminism. Black women were
already working. Class differences within feminism, not only were black women forced to
work. But lower-class women had minder rights.
, Gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, and class all play important roles within systems of
oppression and processes of social exclusion. Systems of oppression we can identify, global
capitalism, patriarchy, racism. These systems of oppression work in different ways on
different bodies.
Angela Davis: Women, race and class
Founding voice of feminism, Angela Davis.
1981
Intersectionality
Analytical approach. Introduced by Kimberly Crenshaw. Black feminist scholars
The awareness that different axes of social inequalities exist and may re-enforce each other.
This course focuses on gender, poverty and race/ethnicity.
Not additive, but constitutive.
Not adding on of inequality to analyze a social problem, it is about people were constituted. It
is not about: a white middle class woman but disabled. What does that add up on her power
position? What does that say about white middle class disabled women? We miss out on the
constitutive, real, full body experience of people if we only look at the added-up factors.
People have different full identities, not only adding things to the mix and stirring. Not only
adding women to the mix. Let’s look at what women experiences really are. Trying to grasp
what these experiences really are.
Judith Butler: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
New York, 1990
Malleability. It is something we continuously do and perform. We do these things
consciously, unconsciously. Can be normative. Can be style. There is the possibility to
subvert categories. Especially for queer studies, her work is very important in how these
subversions place.
Development in feminist theory
- Women’s studies (60’s, 70’s)
- Gender studies (80’s onward). It pushes beyond women’s studies. They were
arranged, pushed for. Achieved. It is able to build on that second wave and constitutes
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