The Social Life of Gender

Raka Ray, Jennifer Carlson, Abigail Andrews, Raka R. Ray, Jennifer Dawn Carlson, Abigail L. Andrews

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781452286976
• eBook ISBN: 9781483324425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Social Life of Gender provides a comprehensive approach to gender as an organizing principle of institutions, history, and unequal interpersonal relations. This new title will develop students' capacity to use gender analysis to question social life more broadly, presenting a critical sociology based on the unique insights gleaned from the study of gender. Through bold, concise, and intellectually generative writing, the authors explore culture, geopolitics, and the economy, providing students with a succinct, accessible, and critical grasp of core debates in the sociology of gender.

 

Chapter 1 Power

Abigail Andrews

Chapter 1 examines the relationship between gender and power. First, it shows that gender is implicated in the power arrangements of institutions such as governments, factories, and schools, and that in turn, these institutions reinforce inequalities along gender lines. Second, this chapter emphasizes how the idea of gender difference can be used as a reference point—or a signifier—to legitimate the power of dominant groups. To understand how gender shapes politics, the chapter turns to the concept of hegemony: the set of ideologies that predominate in a particular place and time. In particular, predominant gender ideologies—or gender hegemonies—help justify relations of power. Gender hegemonies are also dynamic. That is, over time and in different societies, different understandings of gender may become dominant, along with different gender relationships. The last part of the chapter addresses the process by which gender hegemonies change by tracing gender relations across five historical periods: feudalism, industrialization, colonialism, the welfare state, and neoliberal globalization. Comparing the dominant gender ideologies at work in these periods challenges contemporary expectations about what is “naturally” masculine or feminine. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how, as gender hegemonies change, so do notions of freedom, liberation, and agency.

Introduction

Gender is tied to power. A traditional understanding of gender and power points out that men can—and often do—dominate women. In the 1970s, feminists in the United States and around the world criticized the ways that men excluded women from the workplace and politics. They questioned men’s status as household heads, demanded an end to rape and domestic abuse, and argued against the idea that men were naturally strong or aggressive and women were naturally weak and nurturing. Still, men continue to exercise direct power over women in much of the world. For instance, this traditional understanding of gender and power suggests that men often use their interpersonal and institutional power to make decisions about women’s bodies (e.g., whether they should have babies or what they should wear) and about their labor (e.g., whether they should work outside the home or whether they should earn as much money as men).

Nevertheless, the relationship between gender and power is also broader and more complex than this traditional understanding might suggest. For one, gender relations have changed dramatically. In the 1950s, an “ideal American woman” was expected to keep her house and herself beautiful. By the 2010s, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief financial officer of Facebook and one of the country’s most high-profile businesswomen, urged women to “lean in” at the workplace and embrace a new business femininity. Once excluded from higher education, U.S. women now earn more bachelor’s degrees than U.S. men. The 2010 United States Census shows that 33% of women versus 32% of men have college degrees. In the labor force, even as men are losing jobs in manufacturing, women work in everything from white-collar businesses around the world to households in the United States to low-wage factories in countries such as Mexico and China. A woman is prime minister of the United Kingdom, and a woman ran for president of the United States as the Democratic Party nominee. Poor women in the Global South—once ignored by development programs or acknowledged only as dependents of men—are now held up as responsible entrepreneurs. It seems there are almost no jobs left that a woman cannot do.

Understandings of masculinity have changed as well. Though women still do a disproportionate share of household tasks, men’s participation in care work is growing. In the United States, men and women do things every day that challenge the separate roles that American men and women once played. Indeed, the very idea that men and women make up two separate groups is no longer taken for granted. In today’s world, people identify with a range of gender categories, from agender to cisgender to genderqueer to transgender and everywhere in between. Does it still make sense to say that, across the family, the workplace, and politics, men call the shots?

The interplay between gender and power goes deeper than the idea that one group labeled men dominates another labeled women. Early feminist scholars focused on analyzing areas considered women’s spaces, such as the family, the home, and beauty. However, Joan Scott (1988), a feminist historian, criticized such scholars for looking for gender only in the places where it was “supposed” to appear. She argued that this focus obscured the importance of gender in areas that were not as obvious. Scott began to look at the roles gendered concepts played throughout society, even in areas that did not appear to be about gender. She argued that gender was important in institutions: places like schools, the economy, and—in particular—politics. This book looks for gender in such unexpected places. Even in arenas that appear neutral, the authors suggest, gendered ideas often reinforce unequal power dynamics. This hidden character is part of what makes gender so important.

Institutions are social arrangements that follow established rules and practices, such as the state, the legal system, and the family. Many institutions are organized around a gendered division of labor in which men and women take distinct roles. These institutions also help create the relations between men and women. They reinforce inequalities along gendered lines, limiting women’s participation in spheres of power and helping produce dominance for some men (usually those who are wealthy and racially privileged). In addition, institutions shape—and reshape—gendered ideas about what is natural and desirable. For instance, welfare policies in the mid-20th-century United States enabled men but not women to earn a family wage, reinforcing the breadwinner model and the idea that women were naturally housewives. In the 2000s, meanwhile, the rise of the technology industry in Silicon Valley, California, helped inaugurate a new brand of masculinity. While images in the 1970s had portrayed “nerdy” men as soft and effeminate, corporations such as Google tied technological savvy to masculinity (Cooper 2000). The representation of technological skills as masculine now helps reinforce such workers’ influence over today’s growing—and increasingly important—information superhighways.

The example of the newly masculinized Google workers illustrates how ideas about gender help naturalize relations of domination. Describing individuals and actions in terms of feminine or masculine helps people represent, legitimate, and—at times—criticize political power. While these symbols may portray the dominant as masculine and the subordinate as feminine, they can also be more complex. Think back to the example of U.S. immigration enforcement described in the Introduction. On the surface, immigration control is not gendered. Nevertheless, the U.S. government has used gendered images of both feminine “breeders” and masculine “criminals” to justify deportation.

Analyzing how gender relates to power requires a historical understanding of the assumed differences between men and women. The history of gender reveals changing patterns that defy a linear narrative of progress that starts with men and women around the world being less equal and moves toward them being more equal. Two examples illustrate this complexity. First, as described in more detail in Chapter 10, many people today frame female genital surgeries (the cutting and shaping of the clitoris and the labia) as antiquated practices lingering only in “backward” areas of the Global South. When these surgeries are performed in places such as Sudan, U.S. feminists often denounce the practice as genital mutilation. At the same time, growing numbers of women in the United States, especially young women, are also seeking out plastic surgery called labioplasty to “improve” the appearance of their labia (Rabin 2016).

A second example is the issue of gender identity: Even though many people in the U.S. look at the acceptance of multiple gender identities (e.g., trans men) as unprecedented progress toward gender equality, nonconforming gender identities have been a long-standing practice in many parts of the world, from indigenous Zapotec communities in Southern Mexico to the hijras (or third gender) of India. In such areas, Spanish and British colonial officials objected to non-binary expressions of gender and pushed them underground, moving in a direction that people in the U.S. today might see as backward.

These two examples indicate how gendered logics of power can shift over time and across place in ways that do not always increase equality. Rather, the meanings people make of masculinity and femininity are tied to broader social relations through processes including capitalism, colonialism, and globalization. Specific relations of power shape the predominant gender norms in each historical period. In turn, the ways people talk and think about gender often help legitimate the power of those who are in charge. But power is never simply fixed. At any given historical moment, people contest the rule of those in power. Relations of domination change, and the changes introduce new ideas and arrangements of gender.

Therefore, as this chapter will show, gender is political. The chapter starts by examining the relationship between gender and institutions. It then considers the gendered arrangements that have predominated in five periods in recent history: preindustrialism, industrialization, colonialism, the welfare state, and neoliberal globalization. The chapter concludes by exploring how dominant notions of masculinity and femininity change, both in the U.S. and across the globe.

The Gender Orders of Institutions

To understand how gender works in areas such as politics or the economy, scholars analyze institutions. Every institution has its own particular set of gender practices and norms that govern its operation. For example, in workplaces, gender shapes recruitment, social divisions, and job mobility (Connell 2009). Take industrial agriculture: Farm workers who are men often do heavy lifting, while farm workers who are women (and racially subordinated groups) are expected to bend down low to the ground to pick or sort produce for packing. Similarly, in white-collar offices in the United States, the majority of managers and technological workers are men, while women tend to work in marketing, sales, human service, or clerical jobs. Gender not only shapes who does what, but it also affects how people understand the character of different occupations. For example, managers are expected to act “masculine”—tough, decisive, and sometimes ruthless—regardless of whether they are men or not. By contrast, clerical workers are expected to act “feminine”—deferential and caring, no matter their gender identities. Treating some jobs as masculine and others as feminine establishes gendered expectations for workers’ behaviors. These arrangements also separate those who identify as men and women into different positions. You will learn more about gender and work in Chapter 8.

Gender also operates differently across different institutions. For example, policing and public school teaching share many similarities. Both are interactive jobs managed by government agencies. Yet police are expected to be masculine (tough, physical, and assertive), while elementary school teachers are thought of as more feminine (nurturing and concerned).

The gender arrangements across different institutions are also related to each other. For example, the gendering of paid jobs, which determine people’s wages and working hours, affects people’s gendered responsibilities at home. In the United States, the institution of the family relies on longstanding expectations that women make childrearing their primary responsibility, while men focus on providing resources for the family to consume. Chapter 7 will explore the family in more detail. For now, suffice it to say that even though many families vary from this model, shared gender practices and expectations shape the institution as a whole.

In a given society, the predominant pattern of gender arrangements—that is, the combination of institutional norms and practices—is called the gender order. Thus, while individual jobs may be marked feminine or masculine, the gender order sorts the relationship between jobs, such as by marking physical and high-status work as masculine while marking emotional or service work as feminine. Different gender orders entail distinct combinations of household production, paid work, and cultural ways of talking and thinking about gender.

Since understandings of masculinity and femininity are historically constructed and specific to particular places, gender orders change over time (Connell 1987). In the 1950s United States, the gender order positioned “good” middle and upper-class women to refrain from working outside the home, though many poor women and women of color worked for wages to support their families. A half-century later, it was considered normal for women to find paid jobs. Many white and middle- to upper-class women occupied professional jobs. During that same half-century, industrial jobs long considered to be male declined, the feminized position of secretary began to disappear, and the principle of equal opportunity grew increasingly important in the workplace.

These changes do not mean that there is no longer a gender order; they only mean that the gender order has changed. For instance, even as most women work for pay, the expectation remains that schoolteachers will act feminine and that police officers will act masculine—regardless of the gender identity of the individual worker. Women still predominate in jobs in the service sector and education, while men remain predominant in work such as construction and information technology. The gender order shifted to absorb women into the workforce while maintaining the gendering of jobs.

How Institutions Reinforce Inequalities

Institutions not only rely on gendered terms; they also have gendered effects. For instance, sociologist Joan Acker (1990) has shown that male power is built into corporate workplaces. Corporations often treat workers as if their jobs are their only concerns, assuming that workers are breadwinning men whose wives take care of family responsibilities. This expectation that workers will show dedication to employers by spending a substantial amount of time at work makes it difficult for people with caregiving responsibilities—particularly women—to succeed. The effects are gendered: For example, in the 2000s, women quit their jobs at Google at much higher rates than men, creating a workforce that was 70% male.

The government is also an institution with gendered effects. In the 1970s, many feminists looked to the state to protect them from men’s discrimination, violence, and oppressions within the nuclear family, the workplace, and elsewhere. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars pointed out that the state could also reinforce gender inequities, at times even co-opting feminist discourse as it did so. They argued that far from being neutral, the government and laws described the world from a masculine perspective and distributed greater influence to men than to women. Thus, the state reproduced the power of elite men and the subordination of women.

Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon was one of these critics. In 1982 and 1983, in a series of essays called “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State,” MacKinnon questioned the supposed neutrality of the government by scrutinizing laws regarding rape and sexual consent. She showed that these laws defined rape in relation to men, framing the violation of women as the transgression of a man’s property by another man. Rather than treating women as persons with independent rights over their own bodies, these laws reflected women’s value only as wives and mothers to men. These laws reinforced women’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author Biographies
• Introduction: Conceptualizing Gender
• Chapter 1 Power
• Chapter 2 Position
• Chapter 3 Representation
• Chapter 4 Practice
• Chapter 5 Gendering Sexuality
• Chapter 6 Gendering Crime and Justice
• Chapter 7 Gendering Social Reproduction
• Chapter 8 Gendering Exploitation
• Chapter 9 Politicizing Gender
• Chapter 10
• References