Expanding the Human in Human Rights

Toward a Sociology of Human Rights

Brian Gran, David L. Brunsma, Keri E. Iyall Smith, David L. Brunsma, Keri E. Iyall Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781612057767
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317259947
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2016. The global struggle for human rights has been, fundamentally, a struggle by oppressed groups against the structures of their oppression. As such, sociological work into the experiences of women, racial and ethnic minorities, children, LGBTQ communities, the mentally ill, and others helps us understand the promises and challenges of pursuing human rights. This book presents the fundamental insights gleaned from the scholarship on groups in society for the study of, understanding of, and, ultimately, realization of human rights.

Chapter One SEX AND GENDER

Barbara Gurr and Nancy A. Naples

DOI: 10.4324/9781315634746-1

The intellectual history and topics of interest in the sociology of sex and gender are tied intimately to human rights scholarship and activism. The field was generated through the advocacy of activists inside and outside the discipline inspired by the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Fox 1995). Recognizing that women’s knowledge and experience had been either erased or diminished in importance by a discipline dominated by men and fueled by patriarchal assumptions of what counts as knowledge and who should be the primary conveyers of sociological insights, women sociologists challenged the gendered assumptions of the field (Smith 1987). In 1969, Alice Rossi, who would become one of the first women presidents of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1983, presented data at a business meeting demonstrating the underrepresentation of women and the discrimination they faced in the discipline. As a consequence, in 1971, feminist sociologists formed their own association, Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), and produced a separate journal, Gender & Society, which is now one of the leading journals in interdisciplinary gender studies. SWS dedicated itself to establishing the importance of sex and gender research for sociology; ensuring that women’s contributions to knowledge and other aspects of social, economic, political, and cultural life were acknowledged in academic literature; challenging sexist language in sociology journals; and increasing women’s visibility in the ASA (Fox 1995). The ASA’s Sex and Gender Section was formed in 1973 and is now one of the largest sections of the ASA. SWS members hold prominent leadership positions in the ASA, including the presidency. Since the Sex and Gender Section’s founding, three new ASA sections have been added that developed directly from the feminist scholarship on sex and gender.

The topics that are prominent in the field of sex and gender are also at the heart of human rights scholarship. They include processes of discrimination and economic inequalities, the roles of social activism and law in challenging gender inequality, the sources of violence against women, and the role of culture in shaping gendered understandings and practices. Sociologists of sex and gender also address the gendered processes of economic development and migration as well as militarization and global capitalism, among other social structural and historical processes (Fukumura and Matsuoka 2002; Mendez 2005; Salzinger 2005). In this regard, sociologists of sex and gender argue that a gender lens offers a powerful tool for uncovering the social dynamics shaping all major institutions (Brush 2003; Coltraine and Adams 2008; Lorber 2002). To capture the diversity of these experiences, sociologists of sex and gender frequently approach their work from an intersectional perspective (Baca Zinn and Dill 1996; Collins 1990; Naples 2009), paying attention to the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, culture, and other factors that differentially shape social life rather than concentrating on a single dimension.

The Sociology of Sex and Gender

Examining Processes of Discrimination and Economic Inequalities

Sociologists of sex and gender focus attention on how sex and gender shape structures of inequality and power. Their research addresses structural factors that derive from gender inequality, including the wage gaps between men and women and other forms of discrimination in the labor force (Britton 2003; England 2005); the gender gap in electoral politics (Rossi 1983); and sexist and heteronormative assumptions embedded in law and social policy (Bernstein and Reimann 2001; Naples 1991).

Another dimension of this scholarship relates to understanding the contribution of global economic restructuring for gender dynamics and economic inequalities. Sociologists of sex and gender highlight the fact that globalization is a result of particular actions taken by identifiable actors and that globalization lands in particular places (Sassen 2006, 2007). Rather than view globalization as a process that occurs at a distance from the everyday lives and activities of particular actors, they demonstrate that global economic and political change is manifest in the daily lives and struggles of women and other members of communities in different parts of the world in ways that are often hidden from view in analyses of globalization that start from the perspective of multinational corporations, transnational organizations, and international political institutions (Naples and Desai 2002, vii).

Understanding the Role of Social Activism and Law for Challenging Gender Inequality

Until sociologists of sex and gender focused attention on women’s political activism, especially the important roles they play in their communities, the extent and variety of women’s political participation were ignored or unexamined (Naples 1998). Women’s community work and activism, when noticed at all by academics, were understood primarily as a natural extension of their caretaking roles and as part of a maternalist politics in which women’s engagement in the public sphere was justified through their identities as mothers (Koven and Michel 1993). In contrast to these assessments, women as community activists contribute countless hours of unpaid labor to campaigns to enhance the physical and environmental quality of their communities while tending to the emotional and social needs of other community members. Their approach to community development and leadership often involves collective and empowering strategies that encourage other women and other residents frequently left out of decision-making roles in formal voluntary associations and political parties to increase their political participation (Naples 2011). This scholarship also explores the role of transnational women’s, LGBT, and social justice movements that challenge gender oppression, sexual violence, and other human rights violations (Adam, Duyvendak, and Krouwel 1999; Naples and Desai 2002; Tripp and Ferree 2006).

Analyzing the Sources of Violence against Women in Public and Private Spheres

One of the most important issues addressed by sociologists of sex and gender involves analyzing the many ways that women, minority men, and sexually nonconforming men become targets of violence. Studies of domestic violence were noticeably missing in early sociological literature on the family. With the recognition of the ways power inequalities in marital relations contribute to women’s risk of violence in the family, as well as how women become targets of sexual harassment at work and in public spaces, sociologists of sex and gender revealed the daily costs associated with gender and sexual inequalities (Baker 2007).

In considering factors that contribute to violence against women, sociologists and other feminist scholars of sex and gender also brought attention to the roles of militarization and global capitalism in increasing risks of violence against women—for example, through the development of coercive sexual labor in military zones and gendered constructions of violence in armed conflict (Enloe 1990, 2000, 2007; Fukumura and Matsuoka 2002); the use of rape as a tool of war (Allen 1996); and the international crisis of sex trafficking and forced marriage, both of which have been centralized by international human rights groups (Gill and Sundari 2011; Zheng 2010).

Assessing the Role of Culture and Difference in Shaping Gendered Understandings and Practices

A main topic in the sociology of gender focuses on examining how cultural understandings of gender shape the norms of how a feminine or a masculine body should look and act (Connell 2002; Hughs and Witz 1997; Messner 1992; Witz 2000). This contributes to the attention that feminist sociologists have paid to standards of femininity and masculinity as they apply to evaluations of appropriate body size and shape for women and men, stigma attached to those who do not adhere to these standards, and the ways in which early childhood socialization and media serve to enforce these norms (Hesse-Biber and Nagy 2006). Sociologists of sex and gender also use an intersectional approach to explore the power dynamics between women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds (Becker 1994; Kang 2003) and with different abilities (Shakespeare 2006; Zitzelsberger 2005). Feminist scholars also analyze the role of the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies, and new technologies for providing the means by which women and men can reshape their bodies to fit into narrow definitions of appropriate gender and sexuality (Haiken 1999; Loe 2006).

Feminist sociologists of science are especially interested in new reproductive technologies and their ability to challenge the notion of the “natural” mother and father as older, infertile, or same-sex couples access alternative forms of reproduction (Mamo 2007). They point out the inequities in who can access new technologies and the expansion of “reproductive tourism,” where wealthy couples travel to poorer countries to purchase reproductive services, including surrogacy arrangements (Purdy 1989). The new field of transgender studies further complicates analysis of the social construction and production of gender as well as the myriad of ways that gender shapes social policy—for example, by challenging hegemonic understandings of gender as a binary system that maps onto bodies that are understood as “male” or “female” (Currah, Juang, and Miner 2007; Valentine 2007).

Sociologists of sex and gender draw insights from postcolonial and third world feminist analysts who emphasize the ways that cultural diversity and other differences, including class, race, ethnicity, country of origin, age, ability, and sexuality, contour the lives of women and men, thus contributing to their different gendered expectations and experiences (Grewal and Caplan 1994, 2000; Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991). These complexities are particularly salient, for example, when we examine the lives of poor women, who are disproportionately women of color and disproportionately shoulder the burden of the economic and social dislocation resulting from gendered, racialized, and internationalized processes (Buvinic 1998; Sanford 2003; Women’s Refugee Commission 2011). This insight relates to an approach that is at the heart of contemporary feminist sociological analyses, namely, intersectionality.

The call for intersectional analyses was first heard from feminists of color who critiqued approaches that constructed women’s concerns without attention to the ways that race, class, and sexuality shaped the experiences of women (Baca Zinn and Dill 1996; Collins 1990). The most powerful approaches to intersectionality also include attention to the ways in which these interactions produce contradictions and tensions across these different levels of analysis and dimensions of difference (McCall 2001, 2005; Maynard 1994).

Research Methods for the Study of Sex and Gender

Prior to the intervention of feminist sociologists, when included at all, sex was merely considered as a variable in sociological studies. Feminists first argued for a distinction between the biological category of sex and the social construction of gender, then recognized that the biological category is also socially constructed (Lorber and Moore 2007). Beginning in the 1970s, researchers informed by a feminist call to describe women’s experiences and perspectives in their own words began to make women’s lives central in ethnographic and other qualitative accounts (Smith 1987). A gendered lens on men’s lives and the development of men’s studies was inspired by a growing sensitivity to the ways in which femininities and masculinities are coconstituted (Connell 1987, 2005; Kimmel 2005; Pascoe 2007). Since the 1980s, feminist sociologists who are influenced by postmodern analyses of power and knowledge have become particularly concerned with the role of discourse and the myriad of ways power shapes women’s lives (Ferguson 1991). Differences in feminist epistemologies of knowledge influence what counts as data and how data should be analyzed; therefore, a postmodern feminist researcher would approach the collection and analysis of interviews differently from a scholar who draws on positivist or symbolic interactionist perspectives (Naples 2003).

Feminist sociologists have been particularly effective in identifying the processes by which power and “relations of ruling” are inherent in disciplinary practices (Smith 1990). Feminist sociologists have raised questions about the ethics of social research, especially as relates to power imbalances in fieldwork and interviewing (Stacey 1991; Wolf 1996). As one strategy, sociologists of sex and gender recommend addressing these inequalities through reflexive practice designed to interrogate how personal and situational factors contribute to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Sex and Gender
• 2 Aging and the Life Course
• 3 Mental Health and Human Rights
• 4 Racial and Ethnic Minorities
• 5 Asia and Asian America
• 6 Latina/o Sociology
• 7 Children and Youth
• 8 Race, Class, and Gender
• 9 Sexualities
• 10 Animals and Society
• 11 Disability and Society
• Discussion Questions and Additional Resources
• Acronyms
• References
• About the Editors