DUMAS Midterm 2 (SOCI 303: Chapters 5-7) exam The Definitive Document: Positively Evaluated and Expert-Endorsed 2024

Who coined the phrase "the sociological imagination"? Why? C. Wright Mills he did this in order to truly appreciate that people shape their lives within both historical and social contexts. An example of this can be seen through different generations: larger social issues impact the behavior of people within those environments. We are not merely animals carrying out our instincts or biological imperatives. Not surprisingly, sociologists begin with the social origins of our patterns of development. Explain in detail the first two elements of a Social constructionist perspective 1. Definitions of masculinity and femininity vary from culture to culture 2. Definitions of masculinity and femininity vary in any one culture over time Social constructionists rely on the work of anthropologists and historians to identify the commonalities and the differences in the meanings of masculinity and femininity from one culture to another and how those differences change over time. Explain the third element of the social constructionist perspective. 3. Gender definitions vary over the course of one's life. Personal development The issues con-fronting women when they are younger—in both the workplace and intimate relation-ships, for example—will often be very different from the issues they face at menopause or retirement. In addition, our behaviours and attitudes change too. For example, today men often report a "softening" when they become grandfathers—developing a greater interest in caregiving and nurturing than when they became fathers. Explain the final element of the social constructionist perspectives 4. Gender definitions vary within any one culture at any one time- race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, education, and region. Intersexuality (Crenshaw) discusses how different aspects of identity will impact societal treatment. How does social constructionism add dimensions to the exploration of gender? This approach acknowledges difference, how power affects gender expression, and how institutions impact the construction of gender. What constructionism contributes are the elements that the social psychology of sex roles cannot explain adequately: difference, power, and the institutional dimensions of gender. To explain difference, social constructionism offers an analysis of the plurality of gender definitions; to explain power, it emphasizes the ways in which some definitions become normative through the struggles of different groups for power—including the power to define. Finally, to explain the institutional dimension, social constructionism moves beyond socialization of gendered individuals who occupy gender-neutral sites to the study of the interplay between gendered individuals and gendered institutions. Name the 6 issues with sex role theory minimizes the importance of gender 2. sex role theory posits a singular normative definition of masculinity and femininity 3. it assumes a wide gulf between the sexes 4. it ignores the fact that much gendered behaviour is relational 5. sex role theory depoliticizes gender making it the result of individual attributes rather than the result of social structures 6. sex-role theory does not incorporate change discuss how sex role theory minimizes the importance of gender It uses drama as a metaphor- we learn roles through socialization and then perform them for other. However, to speak of a gender role makes it sound easily changeable. Cecilia Ridgway agrees that "role" obscures the fixity of gender but also adds that gender is less a role than a category. It is not a role such as teacher and student. But it is about categories of people that effect their relations with one another and the world. discuss how sex role theory posits a singular normative definition of masculinity and femininity If the meanings of masculinity and femininity vary across cultures, over historical time, among men within any one culture, and over the life course, we cannot speak of masculinity or femininity as though each were a constant, singular, universal essence. By positing this false universalism, sex-role theory assumes what needs to be explained—how the normative definition is established and reproduced—and explains away all the differences among men and among women. Yet differences—race, class, ethnicity, sexual-ity, age, region—all inform, shape, and modify our definitions of gender. Therefore, social constructionists speak of masculinities and femininities. discuss how sex role theory assumes that there is a wide gulf between genders There is an exaggerated difference between gender; "the opposite gender". Nevertheless, sex-role theory posits two separate spheres, as if sex-role differentiation were a matter of sorting a herd of cattle into two appropriate pens for branding. Such a static model also suggests that the two corrals have virtually nothing to do with one another. "The result of using the role framework is an abstract view of the differences between the sexes and their situations, not a concrete one of the relations be-tween them."4 However, what surveys indicate is that men construct their ideas of what it means to be men in constant reference to definitions of femininity. What it means to be a man is to be "notawoman," as Robert McElvaine claims. Indeed, social psychologists have emphasized that although different groups of men may disagree about other traits and their significance in gender definitions, the "anti-femininity" component of masculinity is perhaps the dominant and universal characteristic. Discuss how sex role theory ignores the fact that gendered behavior is plural, relational and situational . Those different institutional contexts demand and produce different forms of masculinity and femininity. "Boys may be boys," comments feminist legal theorist Deborah Rhode, "but they express that identity differently in fraternity parties than in job interviews with a female manager."6 Gender is therefore not a property of individuals, some "thing" one has, but rather a specific set of behaviours that is produced in specific social situations. Gender changes as the situation changes. Sex-role theory cannot adequately account for either the differences among women and men or their different definitions of masculinity and femininity in different situations without implicitly assuming some theory of deviance. Nor can it express the relational character of those definitions. In addition, sex-role theory cannot fully account for the power relationships between women and men and among different groups of women and different groups of men. Discuss how sex role theory depoliticizes gender, making it a result of individual attributes rather than social structures. "The notion of 'role' focuses attention more on indi-viduals than on social structure, and implies that 'the female role' and 'the male role' are complementary (i.e., separate or different, but equal)," write sociologists Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne. "The terms are depoliticizing; they strip experience from its historical and political context and neglect questions of power and conflict."7 How can one speak of gender without speaking of power? As pointed out in the introduction, a pluralistic and relational theory of gender cannot pretend that all mascu-linities and femininities are created equal. discuss how sex role theory is incapable of considering change. Movements for social change, like feminism or gay liberation, become movements to expand role definitions and to change role expectations. Their goal is to expand role options for individual women and men, whose lives are constrained by stereotypes. However, social and political movements are not about only expanding the opportunities for individuals to break free of the constraints of inhibiting sex roles, to allow their "true" selves to emerge; they are also about the redistribution of power in society. They demand the reallocation of resources and an end to forms of inequality that are embedded in social institutions as well as sex-role stereotypes. Only a perspec-tive that begins with an analysis of power can adequately understand those social move-ments. Kimmel and Holler explain the victim blaming of race of gender to be a result of this theory. Sex role theory: it is a role that one chooses. What is "sambo theory of oppression" and who created it? his is what R. Stephen Warner and his colleagues call the "Sambo theory of oppression." "[T]he victims internalize the maladaptive set of values of the oppressive system. Thus behaviour that appears incompetent, deferential, and self-degrading is assumed to reflect the crippled capabilities of the personality."10 In this worldview, social change must be left to the future, when a more egalitarian form of childhood socialization can produce children better able to function according to hegemonic standards. Social change comes about when the oppressed learn better the ways of their oppressors. If they refuse, and no progress is made—well, whose fault is that? Discuss Kimmel and Holler's argument of Gender and Power. One of the central themes of this book is that gender is about difference as well as about inequality (that is, power). At the level of gender relations, gender is about the power that men as a group have over women as a group as well (or that some men have over other men, and women have over other women). It is impossible to explain gender without ad-equately understanding power—not because power is the consequence of gender differ-ence, but rather because power is what produces those gender differences in the first place. Like gender, power is not the property of individuals—a possession that one has or does not have—but rather a property of group life, of social life. Power is. It can neither be willed away nor ignored. Here is how the philosopher Hannah Arendt put it: Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is "in power" we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment the group, from which the power origi-nated to begin with . . . disappears, "his power" also vanishes.11 To a social constructionist, power is not an attitude or a possession; it's not really a "thing" at all. It cannot be "given up" like an ideology that's been outgrown. Power creates as well as destroys. It is deeply woven into the fabric of our lives—it is the warp of our interactions and the weft of our institutions. Explain how happiness is U-shaped 5 After all, there is increasing evidence that human happiness—in North America and globally—follows a "U-shaped" pattern. That is, happiness is high in early life, declines to its lowest levels somewhere around the early forties, and then climbs to high levels again as we age Explain how gendered people shape institutions, but those institutions also posses their own logic he gendered identity of individuals shapes those gendered institutions, and the gendered institutions express and reproduce the inequalities that compose gender identity. —the recognition that the institutions themselves express a logic—a dynamic—that reproduces gender relations between women and men and the gender order of hierarchy and power. We can see this by looking at politics. Men and women have to express certain traits to occupy a political office, and their failure to do so will make the officeholder seem ineffective and incompetent.. Per-haps, but to argue that institutions are gendered is only the other half of the story. It's as simplistic to argue that the individuals who occupy those positions are genderless as it is to argue that the positions they occupy are gender-neutral. Gendered individuals occupy places within gendered institutions. Accordingly, it is possible that if all positions were filled with the gender that has been raised to avoid conflict instead of the gender that is ac-customed to drawing lines in the sand, the gendered mandates of those institutions would be affected, modified, and moderately transformed Discuss Erving Goffman's ideas of gendered washrooms . In a clever essay on the "arrangement between the sexes," the late sociologist Erving Goffman playfully suggested the ways in which these public institutions produce the very gender differences they are supposed to reflect. Though men and women are "somewhat similar in the question of waste products and their elimination," Goffman observes, in public, men and women use sex-segregated washrooms, clearly marked "gentlemen" and "ladies." These rooms have very different spatial arrangements, such as urinals for men and more elaborate "vanity tables" and other grooming facilities for women. We think of these as justifiably "separate but equal." Nevertheless, in the privacy of our own homes, we use the same bathrooms and feel no need for separate space. What is more, virtually no private homes have urinals for men, and few have separate and private vanity tables for women. (Of course, in some cultures, these functions are performed publicly, with no privacy at all.) If these needs are biologically based, Goffman asks, why are they so different in public and in private? The functioning of sex differentiated organs is involved, but there is nothing in this functioning that biologically recommends segregation; that arrangement is a totally cultural matter. . . . Toilet segregation is presented as a natural conse-quence of the difference between the sex-classes when in fact it is a means of honouring, if not producing, this difference. n other words, by using separate facilities, we "become" the "gentlemen" and "ladies" who are supposed to use those separate facilities. That means we are not just "gentlemen" who stand up or "ladies" who powder their noses; washrooms imply much more about who the "standard" human being is. Men's washrooms seldom contain diaper changing tables, as many frustrated fathers can attest; this both re Discuss Joan Acker and the interplay of structure and gender It's through our experiences in the workplace, Acker maintains, that the differences between women and men are re-produced and through which the inequality between women and men is legitimated. In-stitutions are like factories, and what they produce is gender difference. Institutions accomplish the creation of gender difference and the reproduction of the gender order, Acker argues, through several "gendered processes." These gendered pro-cesses mean that "advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emo-tion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine." She observes five of these processes. What is Acker's first process? production of gender divisions: —the ways in which "ordinary organizational practices produce the gender patterning of jobs, wages, and hierarchi