Gender Norms and Intersectionality

Connecting Race, Class and Gender

Riki Wilchins

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786610850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

There have been few, if any, attempts to translate the immense library of academic studies on gender norms for a lay audience, or to illustrate practical ways in which their insights could (and should) be applied. Similarly, there have been few attempts to build the case for gender in diverse fields like health, education, and economic security within a single book, one which also uses an intersectional lens to address issues of race and class. This book not only looks at the impact of rigid gender norms on young people who internalize them, but also shows how the health, educational, and criminal justice systems with which young people interact are also highly gendered systems that relentlessly police and sustain very narrow ideas of masculinity and femininity, particularly among youth.

Current treatments of a “gender lens” or “gender analysis” both at home and abroad usually conflate gender with women and/or trans. Gender Norms and Intersectionality shows conclusively how this is both inadequate and wrong-headed. It documents why gender norms must be moved to the center of the discourses aimed at improving life outcomes for at-risk communities. And it does so while acknowledging the insights of queer theorists about bodies, power, and difference.

This book provides a starting point for a long overdue movement to elevate “applied gender studies,” providing both a reference and guide for researchers, students, policymakers, funders, non-profit leaders, and grassroots advocates. It aims to transform readers’ view of a broad array of familiar social problems, such as basic wellness and reproductive health; education; economic security; and partner, male-on-male, and school violence—showing how gender norms are an integral if overlooked key to understanding each.

I

Understanding
Gender Norms

1

A Gender Vacuum

Our grantees and staff get race and class; some are even starting to get sexual orientation. What I want to know is—what happened to gender? Where is the gender analysis?

—Vice president, major US foundation

We’re starting to relate things that were not related before. Eating disorders in girls, obsession with boys . . . the very few women who are running Jewish communities, and very few Jewish female role models for girls. It’s all becoming part of one big story that’s actually undermining our girls and our dreams for our girls.

—Jewish mother in Chicago, Illinois

It’s not safe to be any kind of Black man in America.

—Micah Gilmer, Frontline Solutions

In 1990, as the AIDS epidemic was beginning its long and deadly detonation in the American population, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened forty leading authorities on youth of color and reproductive health for a day-long retreat in El Paso, Texas.

Their task was to review the current state of knowledge and return with concrete recommendations for new steps that the CDC, and indeed the field itself, should take in response. They spent a day and a half in discussion and dialogue.

The speech by Hortensia Amaro that resulted from that meeting was called “Gender and Sexual Risk Reduction: Issues to Consider” (1994). It and the more formal journal paper created from it, “Love, Sex Power: Considering Women’s Realities in HIV Prevention” (1995), have since been cited over a thousand times. In fact, it may be one of the most-cited reproductive-health policy statements ever.

Amaro, a leading researcher, pointed out that, despite the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, HIV rates among youth of color continued to spiral upward, and prevention efforts had largely failed.

Surprisingly, a major reason for this failure was that prevention had focused mainly on providing accurate health information about prevention and consequences to those at risk. Moreover, the prevention models in use were designed as if each young person was an independent, isolated social unit.

Young people are often embedded in dense social networks. Their early sexual encounters can be subject to immense social pressures and expectations from peers, family members, and so on. So knowledge alone, Amaro pointed out, was almost always ineffective in changing behavior, particularly in something that can be as impulsive and emotionally laden as sex.

For young women, having safer sex was inseparable from the inequalities inherent in heterosexual sex, where boys are usually some combination of larger, stronger, older, and more aggressive.

Programs, policies, and funding models took little account of these realities, which can be important to young people engaging in sex for the first time. Operating out of ignorance and a lack of personal experience, their behavior is likely to be defined by attitudes and prejudices they have absorbed from family members, friends, religious institutions, and the media about what girls or boys are supposed to do in sexual encounters. This is true when these beliefs are clearly grounded in outdated gender stereotypes. We think of sex as the most natural of acts. Yet in sex it is gender that determines who does what to whom—when, how, and for what reason.

Who is empowered to “make the first move”; who “gets on top”; who is responsible for preventing conception; what positions or acts are obligatory or forbidden, allowed, or abnormal; who brags afterward; and who is gossiped about and what others might say about them—all of this is gender.

In fact, as we will explore in the chapter on sexual and reproductive health, gender norms affect not only actual foreplay and intercourse, but nearly everything connected to them, including condom negotiation, risk-taking, infidelity, body awareness and pleasure, romance, pregnancy and infant or maternal health, sexual coercion or consent, and intimate partner violence (IPV).

“A Gender Vacuum”

The report from the more than forty experts concluded that the field had been operating “in a gender vacuum.” The most important thing the CDC and other leading agencies could do was to adopt a strong, specific focus on rigid gender norms and the inequalities they cause—because this was the biggest single factor, which continued to be ignored, in improving reproductive health outcomes. This was a pretty stunning conclusion—perhaps especially so because gender had already been the target of so much social and academic attention.

In fact, by the mid-1990s, the United States and many developed countries had seen nearly three decades of social upheaval around gender issues. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of women’s rights and feminism helped instill a new awareness of the distinction between sex and gender in the United States and many other developed countries.

Barely a decade later, the gay rights movement of the early 1970s exploded in the United States, with gay theorists and academics questioning nearly every aspect of heterosexuality and man/woman relationships.

It was Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist theorist, who famously declared that, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one.”

What she meant was that the behaviors, attitudes, appearance, and privilege that went with being a woman were not a result of the biological facts of being born female, but were learned and imposed, and thus socially determined.

In 1971, pioneering researcher Sandra Bem even developed her Sex-Role Inventory to measure how well individuals fit with common gender stereotypes: for example, I am . . . tender, aggressive, competitive, and so on. But it really wasn’t until the mid-1990s, with the advent of “queer theory”—the child of the intellectual marriage among feminism, gay rights, and transgender rights—that a full-throated critique and “deconstruction” of gender roles and norms finally took hold.

Academics and researchers began excavating the myriad ways that gendered attitudes and beliefs shaped nearly every aspect of our appearance, feelings, and behavior. This was an important breakthrough, but it also raised an interesting question. Was there any practical, real-world value to such knowledge?

Fortunately, an innovative social science researcher named Joseph Pleck at the University of Illinois had been examining exactly this issue.

Measuring Manhood, Measuring Health

Building on the groundbreaking work of Sandra Bem, an early (and as it turned out prescient) pioneer on gender roles and norms, Pleck developed and refined a survey that measured the strength of men’s belief in key facets of traditional masculinity, such as strength, dominance, and aggression. He named this amalgam of beliefs and attitudes Masculinity Ideology, and his new inventory, the Male Role Norms Scale (MRNS).

This alone would have been a huge advance. But what he did next really changed our understanding of gender and helped reinvent the field of gender study.

Pleck wanted to do more than simply measure normative gender beliefs; he wanted to map these beliefs directly onto real-world health outcomes. What he needed was a large, truly random sample of young people on which to test his ideas. But these are difficult to find, and expensive to recruit. Luckily, Pleck had the ideal partner.

Working in close partnership with the Urban Institute, Pleck developed the National Survey of Adolescent Males, a highly randomized sample of two thousand young men. It was used to investigate young men’s behavior and attitudes on a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors, including health and sexuality. Beginning in 1988, Pleck decided to test a version of his MRNS on the National Survey sample to see whether it would enable him to relate belief in traditional masculinity with actual sexual and reproductive health and risk-taking. (He has since run this test every ten years, and the original boys are now in their thirties.)

What Pleck found changed—or perhaps more accurately, helped create—the science of gender norms research. Stronger belief in traditional masculinity was linked to a host of key outcomes, including:

• less-intimate sexual relationships;

• more sexual partners;

• more unsafe sex;

• stronger belief in sex as adversarial;

• stronger belief in pregnancy as validating manhood;

• weaker belief in male responsibility to help prevent pregnancy; and

• less likelihood of seeking medical care.

In effect, he found, a checklist for lower reproductive and sexual health outcomes among young, straight males—a list that was not just for revealing for them, but for their female partners as well.

Since then, Pleck’s work has been validated and extended many times. And the map of impacts from rigid masculine norms has proven to be surprisingly extensive and robust.

It would not be until 2000 that another leading academic—Deborah Tolman of Hunter College in New York City—would coin the symmetrical term “Femininity Ideology,” and begin the work of devising what she termed an Adolescent Femininity Ideology Scale (AFIS) to measure aspects of feminine norms.

Exhaustive Research

Amaro’s and Pleck’s groundbreaking work is now almost a quarter century old. Since then, a wave of studies, books, and scholarly articles have confirmed their key finding: that when young women and men buy into narrow codes of masculinity or femininity, they have markedly lower life outcomes. To illustrate, below are studies returned in 2018 from Google Scholar searches on masculinity and:

• HIV	23,500;
• Violence Against Women	20,200;
• Teen Pregnancy	1,920.

And searches on femininity and:

• HIV	13,900;
• Violence Against Women	13,800;
• Teen Pregnancy	1,370.

In each case, over a thousand and, in some cases, tens of thousands of articles are returned. To be fair, this is completely unscientific: Google Scholar is an extremely blunt instrument, returning references to studies that only mention a given search term, but may be otherwise be off point.

Despite that, perhaps these numbers provide at least an extremely rough sense of just how broadly ideas of gender have permeated the field of research and been touched upon by researchers. In fact, the field of gender norms study is by now so well-tilled that many of the original researchers consider it settled and have moved on to other subjects where there are still new things to uncover.

Last time I spoke with her, Amaro was studying substance abuse among women of color; and Pleck—even while planning to analyze his fourth decade of Urban Institute data—had moved on to studying fatherhood.

The Disconnect

With more than two decades of research showing gender norms as the original “mother lode” of unaddressed vectors for worse health outcomes, you would expect them to be at the very center of funding and policy making. And to a large degree you would be right—just not so much in the United States. As Loren Harris, surely among the United States’ most insightful and deliberate program officers when it comes to racial justice, has noted: “Gender impacts every issue US fu...