The Short Guide to Gender

Woodward, Kath, Kath Woodward

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781847427632
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447319719
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This accessible guide provides readers with an introduction to the key concepts and main developments in gender studies. Presenting definitions, explanations and policy implications through discussion of case studies, this book shows how gender intersects with different dimensions of diversity and demonstrates the connections between sex and gender. Using a range of pedagogical features and highlighting the importance of gender in the contemporary world, this succinct text provides an ideal overview for students and professionals alike.

3

Different and the same?

Introduction

This chapter takes up some of the issues raised by the discussion of sex and gender in Chapter Two. First, as social and cultural forces are important in the construction of gender, how do these forces relate to other social forces and divisions? Does seeing gender as a social structure mean that people who share a gender identity are a homogeneous group? What about the other differences within the gender group? How strong are the similarities that women or men, as a gender, share? For example, do women have more in common with other women than with men? If they do not, how could gender be the basis of political activism? Also, if everything is socially constructed and hence fluid and changing, how useful is it to hold onto the categories of women and men if there is no fixity? Where does this leave the social movements that have always striven to fight inequality on the grounds that women are a political category and share the experiences of injustice? In this chapter, I focus on what the differences are among women and what an understanding of gender can offer to both explaining what is the same and what is different, but also, most importantly, to suggest how to maintain programmes for political action, policy frameworks and equitable ways of living in the 21st century.

The chapter looks at differences and similarities and picks up on three aspects of gender that were developed in Chapters One and Two:

the links between understanding how gender works, theories of gender and politics and practices that are part of such theorising;

the points of connection and the differences among women;

the interrelationships between personal and social life, and between the intimacies of personal life and relationships and the public arena of paid work and politics, for example as illustrated in the links between sexuality and gender.

These three points are connected because activists in social movements have often highlighted the rights of those who have been denied free expression of their sexuality or whose sexuality has been marginalised or pathologised. Policies to promote and accept diversity recognise a range of different forms of citizenship. Gender studies have put sexual citizenship onto the agenda and promoted its inclusion in discussions of citizenship.

The focus on gender so far in this book has signposted the links between gender and politics, for example the women’s movement has worked to eliminate injustices and gender inequalities. Once you start looking at gender as a social structure you start seeing the unequal nature of gender relations as well as all the ways in which people collaborate and support each other. Social movements and campaigns sought to redress inequalities, many of which were based on gender difference. Identity politics, however, also showed that, although gender was important, there was a whole range of different ways in which it mattered and not all women or all men share the same social positions. Women are more likely to experience inequalities than men as a gender but not all women suffer injustice and many men do. Women and men constitute very diverse groups of human beings. Differences include differences among women, for example of class, ethnicity, race, sexuality and disability, as well as differences between women and men. This chapter focuses on how our understanding of gender and gender politics has been transformed by exploring what is different and what is the same among women. There have been changes in the debates about equality and difference and what has come to be called ‘diversity policies’.

Chapters One and Two noted the binary nature of many discussions of gender, for example the sex–gender dualism where one is seen as biological and the other social and cultural. The other notable dichotomy is that of female and male. In most situations where gender is on the agenda and we are expected to record gender identity, we are asked to tick a box that states either female or male. Things may not be that clear, as Chapter Two suggested. In the dualism, sex is biological and gender is cultural, but gender includes embodied characteristics, and biological make-up and biology are understood through cultural categories and are influenced by social forces; the exclusive male and female categories have difficulty accommodating transgender and intersex.

A major focus of this chapter is the extent to which not everyone in the category of woman are the same. Talking about differences among women means asking questions about which women one means. Just as traditional, class-based politics have asked questions about men in relation to social class, but not other aspects of being men, such as ethnicity, race, disability and generation, so feminism and the women’s movement have had to engage with differences among women, such as those of sexuality, ethnicity, culture, race, location, generation and disability. Ethnicity and race are central to this discussion.

This question about the differences among women is well illustrated by a speech made in 1852 by a black woman, Sojourner Truth, which has been cited within the women’s movement and which continues to have resonance albeit within a different globalised context and time:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and to have the best places … ain’t I a woman? I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me … and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it) … I have born five children and seen most of them sold off into slavery, and when I cried out in grief none but Jesus heard – and ain’t I a woman? (cited in Bhavnani and Coulson, 1986, p 83)

Gender identity may be very important but not all women have the same experiences of disadvantage and discrimination as is so powerfully expressed in this quotation; some women are privileged, for example through their class or ethnic position. How much does the shared experience of being a woman override other differences and distinctions? Are these differences enough to undermine gender politics? This is unlikely, given the evidence of gender inequalities across the globe, which were cited in Chapter One. Gender is a crucial concept in explaining social relations and highlighting how masculinities and femininities are made and remade and how these categories can include and exclude people. This is how sameness and difference operate. Importantly, gender is part of the explanation of the persistence of inequalities and gender permits an understanding of differences among people.

This chapter addresses a range of differences and, in light of Chapter Two’s exploration of the sex–gender binary, looks at another set of relationships, namely between gender and sexuality. The connections and slippages between gender identity and that of sexuality are fruitful areas of discussion, which link the politics and practice of gender to theories through which it is understood. How are gender and sexuality connected? If you have any experience of diversity politics, for example in promoting social inclusion in sport or the arts, or of equal opportunities, for example in employment policies, such as those that are the concern of human resources departments, you will be aware of the categories of people who are included or of the categories that are used in cases of discrimination or harassment. Many relate to gender and sometimes gender and sexuality elide. One of the ways in which this binary of men and women is being challenged and transformed is through the inclusion of categories such as trans or bisexual or queer, for example in the ways in which people are classified by governmental bodies. These categories often merge gender and sexual identity.

Much of the discussion about sameness and difference that has had an impact on more recent equality legislation in Western neoliberal regimes in late modernity arises from the ‘new’ social movements of the 1970s and 1980s.

Social movements and identity politics

The social movements that came out of the civil rights activism of the late 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s challenged some of the traditional theories and practices of politics and highlighted differences among people that were not based only on social class. Race and ethnicity were some of the main aspects of exclusion from public life as well as achievement in education and employment. The labour movement and socialist politics were criticised for failing to accommodate the demands of those who had suffered racism as well as misogyny. Socialist politics in the West had not taken on board the kind of oppression that women were experiencing in the family either. Family life, although a source of mutual support, love and care, was not quite as rosy as some sociologists who wrote about shared conjugal roles and mutuality claimed. Families were a key site for the operation of patriarchal power, with women’s free domestic labour, childcare and emotional labour freeing men to engage actively in paid work and public life. The privacy of the family might have offered a safe haven from the competition of the capitalist labour market but it has also been the main site of domestic violence, especially against women. Domestic violence has only recently been recognised as violence in the same way as acts of aggression against the person are in the public arena such as in the street. The women’s movement asserted that the personal was political and gay and lesbian rights put sexuality on the political agenda. There is some dispute about whether the women’s movement can be called a new social movement (Richardson and Robinson, 2007) but what was then called the women’s liberation movement made the demands shown in the box below, which illustrate the main areas of gender discrimination.

Case study

How is difference being constructed here? How far is each demand based on some assumptions about what women and men have in common with their own sex?

• Equal pay

• Equal education and job opportunities

• Free contraception and abortion on demand

• Free 24-hour nurseries

• Financial and legal independence

• An end to all discrimination against lesbians

• A woman’s right to define her own sexuality

• Freedom from intimidation by threat or use of violence or sexual coercion regardless of marital status (rape within marriage was not an offence in the UK until 1992 and marital or spousal rape was not recognised in most US states until the 1990s)

• An end to all laws, assumptions and institutions that perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression towards women.

Comment

These demands are largely based on a definition of women as a homogeneous group of people who are different from men; men are named as the source of many of the inequalities that are identified here. The evidence does support the preponderance of male aggression, for example in the form of domestic violence, but there are questions that could be asked about the specific needs of groups of women who are not recognised here. By the end of the 1970s, differences among women, for example on grounds of ethnicity, race, disability and sexuality, were clear; black women, older women and working-class women all argued that the women’s movement seemed to be based on the particular identity of white, young, educated, middle-class women and did not sufficiently recognise their interests. The demands of the movement were more specific to this group and did not acknowledge the shared concerns, for example, of working-class women with working-class men or of the women and men who experienced racism and racist violence and exclusion. Even on the matter of reproductive health, while some women might have prioritised access to contraception and abortion on demand, some black, minority ethnic and migrant women and those with special needs were more concerned with the right to have children and to resist an imposed limitation of these rights through the pressured use of hormonal contraceptive injections such as depo-provera.

Making gender politics visible and the critiques and debates that ensued were most productive and led to global recognition of gender inequalities, for example in the UN decade of women 1975-85, which raised women’s integration into the development process and provided the impetus for the growth of thousands of women’s organisations, political parties and higher education. Women also participated in trades unions, including shared activity with men such as in the miners’ strike in the UK in 1984-85, when working-class women fought alongside men to protect their communities and fight the pit closures imposed by the government led by Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Many of the women involved in the women’s movement took their commitment and ideas into the academy and the 1980s saw the growth of women’s and then gender and queer studies and more recently men’s studies. Masculinities increasingly became the focus of scholarly investigation and debate. Thus, the impact of new social movements was to put cultural change onto the agenda for political action as well as the political and economic change that had been stressed by the traditional politics, for example of the labour movement and its politics of redistribution. The women’s movement, like other activist social movements, sought to gain public recognition and to put its concerns onto the public agenda. Both sorts of politics involve a critique of power but whereas traditional class-based politics stressed the redistribution of wealth, the new social movements were particularly concerned with the visibility and recognition of social and cultural identities that had been silenced or marginalised. One such category of person in which gender differences were not recognised was the citizen.

Citizenship

Who is a citizen? A citizen is a person with civil, political and social rights under the state. Citizenship rights have been struggled over by those denied them, as current debates about asylum seekers and refugees demonstrate. Citizenship is not simply a legal category of person, although rights in law are crucial to the role; to be a citizen of the state means having rights to safety and protection and rights of residence. In the increasingly mobile globalised world of the 21st century, citizenship is based largely on place of birth but includes the right to live in the state that one has chosen under certain circumstances that are recognised in law, such as those of asylum seekers (Woodward, 2009a). Citizens of the world also have human rights. Such rights, however, are not portable or transferrable, whatever the aspirations of the UN. There are exceptions as is evident in the case of migrants and trafficked people, for example (Gutiérrez-Rodriguez, 2010).

Citizenship has more dimensions than are included in T.H. Marshall’s (1964) definitio...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• one: Putting gender on the agenda
• two: Sex and gender; sex/gender
• three: Different and the same?
• four: Gendered bodies: gendered representations
• five: Post gender? Does gender still matter?
• six: Conclusion
• Glossary
• References