Collage Assignment/ Sociology of Gender
Pe0512
Lecture5-HowCultureConstructsGenderDifference.pptxHow Culture Constructs Gender Difference
Biological models assume that biological sex determines gender,
That biological differences lead to behavior differences, which lead to social arrangements.
By this account, social inequalities are encoded into our physiological composition.
That biological anomalies alone account for variation.
Biological researchers always assumed that gender difference implied gender inequality because western notions of difference do usually lead to and justify inequality.
However, some anthropologists argue that biological models projected their western values onto other cultures.
That these models ignore the role of colonialism and the roles of women in establishing gender differences in traditional cultures.
Anthropological evidence offers a world of amazing diversity of the cultural constructions of gender.
Yet some themes remain constant:
Virtually all societies manifest some amount of difference between men and women.
Virtually all cultures exhibit some form of male domination, despite variations in gender definitions.
Variations in Gender Definitions
Anthropologists have found far more variability in the definitions of masculinity and femininity than any biologist would have predicted.
Men possessed of similar levels of testosterone, with similar brain structure and lateralization, seem to exhibit dramatically different levels of aggression, violence, and, especially, violence toward women.
Women with similar brains, hormones, and evolutionary imperatives have widely different experiences of passivity, PMS, and spatial coordination.
Margaret Meade’s Work
Meade examined three very different cultures in New Guinea.
In the Arapesh culture, all members were passive, gentle, and emotionally warm.
Males and females were equally happy, trustful, and confident.
Men and women shared child rearing, both were “maternal” and both discouraged aggression in boys and girls.
Both men and women were thought to be relatively equally sexual.
In the Mundugamor culture (a tribe of head hunters and cannibals), citizens viewed men and women as similar but expected persons of both sexes to be violent and aggressive.
Women showed little “maternal instinct,” detested pregnancy and nursing and could hardly wait to return to the serious business of work.
There was violent rivalry between fathers and sons.
All people feared that they were being wronged by others.
In the Tchambuli culture (as in the US) men and women were seen as very different.
It was a patrilineal culture and polygyny was accepted.
One sex was comprised primarily of nurturing and gossipy consumers who spent their days dressing up and going shopping.
These were the men
The women were dominant, energetic, economic providers.
They fished (activity on which the entire culture depended).
They had real positions of power in the society.
Completely unadorned, they were business- like, controlled all commerce and diplomacy of the culture, and were the initiators of sexual relations.
Each culture believed that women and men were the way they were because their biological sex determined their personality.
None of them believed women and men were the outcomes of economic scarcity, military success, or cultural arrangements.
The Gendered Division of Labor
In almost every society, labor is divided by gender.
Functionalism maintains that sex-based division of labor arose for the preservation of society: as society became increasingly complex, there arose the need for 2 kinds of labor: hunting and gathering.
This model assumes that because the sex-based division of labor arose to meet social needs at one time, its preservation is an evolutionary imperative and therefore necessary.
Today, the biological bases for sex-based division of labor have been eroded.
In place of these foundations, though, lie centuries of social customs and traditions that contribute to our gender ideologies about what is appropriate for one sex and not the other.
Today’s gender-based division of labor is part of our culture, not our biological constitutions.
Today, sex-based division of labor has outlived it social usefulness and its physical imperatives, so it must be held in place by something else: the power of one sex over another.
Theories of Gender Differentiation and Male Domination
Private Property and the Materialism of Male Domination
Engels assigned private property as the central factor in determining division of labor by sex.
He suggested that 3 major institutions of modern society emerged at roughly the same time-and all as a result of the development of private property.
The birth of the capitalist economy created wealth that was mobile and transferable. Capitalism meant private property, which required the establishment of clear lines of inheritance.
This led to the new problem of sexual fidelity. If men were to pass on their property to sons, they had to be sure their sons were actually theirs.
The need to transmit inheritance across generations of men led to the emergence of the traditional nuclear family, with monogamous marriage and the sexual control of women.
To assure inheritance, patriarchs needed clear, binding laws that were vigorously enforced. This required a centralized political apparatus (the nation-state) to exercise sovereignty over local and regional powers that might challenge these laws.
Warfare, Bonding, and Inequality
How does a culture create warriors who are fierce and strong?
Harris suggested the most effective answer is to reward virtually all men with the services of women, excluding only the most inadequate or cowardly men.
Warrior societies tend to practice female infanticide.
Harris suggests that keeping the female population significantly lower than the male population increases competition among males.
Warrior societies also tend to exclude women from the fighting force (because their presence would reduce motivation and upset the sexual hierarchy).
In this way, warfare leads to female subordination as well as patrilinearity because the culture will need a resident core of fathers and sons to carry out its military tasks.
Males controls the society’s resources and, as justification for this, develop patriarchal religion as an ideology that legitimates domination of men over women.
Descent theorists contribute that men, lacking the tie mothers have with their children, seek to achieve connection (to the next generation, to society, to their history) through hunting (or fighting) with other men in groups.
Alliance theorists Levi-Strauss suggests that men turn women into sex objects whose exchange (as wives) cements alliances among men.
Determinants of Women’s Status
Under what conditions is women’s status improved and under what conditions is it minimized?
The division of labor around child care.
The more that men participate in child care and the freer women are from child rearing responsibility, the higher women’s status tends to be.
Relationships between children and parents.
In cultures where fathers are relatively uninvolved, boys define themselves in opposition to their mothers and other women and are therefore prone to exhibitions of hyper masculinity, and to fear and denigrate women as a way to display masculinity.
The more mothers and fathers share child rearing, the less men belittle women.
Women’s control over property.
Women’s status is higher when they retain control over property, both outside and after marriage.
All forms of spatial segregation between men and women are associated with gender inequality.
Daphne Spain found that the cultures in which men developed the most elaborate sex-segregated rituals were the cultures in which women’s status was the lowest.
Sanday found that women have the highest levels of equality, and the least frequency of rape when both genders contribute about the same amounts to the food supply.
When men and women contribute about equally, men are more involved in child care.
Ironically, when women contribute a lot or very little, their status is also low.
Male dominance is lower when women and men work together.
Sex segregation of work is the strongest predictor of women’s status.
Male dominance is more pronounced when men control the political and ideological resources necessary to achieve the goals of the culture.
Male dominance is “exacerbated by colonization”
The higher the percentage of marriageable men to marriageable women, the lower women’s status.
All of these variables are also determinants of violence against women.
The lower women’s status in a society, the higher the likelihood of rape and other violence against women.
