Personal Theory & Reflection ESSAY
prissjimenez
sexismandpolitics.pptxInequality: Women and Femininities
Women have more freedom than men to enjoy both masculine- and feminine-coded parts of life.
Even so, doing femininity is relatively compulsory, where women have to assume gender performances that harm them as individuals and produce group disadvantage.
Although women have more freedom to resist the gender binary in some ways the expectations for men and women are different and unequal.
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Gender for Women
The daily lives of women are much less constrained than those of men.
Unlike men, who face policing when they do gender associated with the feminine, women’s performances of masculinity are often regarded positively, so that women are doing almost everything men do.
Parents are more tolerant of girls doing gender-nonconforming behavior than boys.
Research found that parents actually encourage girls whose behaviors or activities resist the gender binary while policing boys’ gender-nonconforming behavior, and while they felt a need to uncover a reason for their sons’ preference for feminine things, their daughters’ interest in masculine things needed no such explanation. Since masculine activities are highly valued, it made perfect sense that girls would be drawn to them.
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Masculine and Feminine Balance
Presenting oneself as a sex object is one way for women who do masculinity, like Crossfit competitor and weightlifter Christmas Abbott, to balance their gender performance.
Christmas Abbott, a CrossFit competitor, nationally ranked weightlifter, and the first woman to serve in a NASCAR pit, is mentioned as an example of someone who successfully performs the balance between masculine and feminine traits.
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Feminine Apologetic
Feminine Apologetic
Points to how a woman’s performance of femininity can be a way to soothe others’ concerns about her appropriation of masculinity.
Example
Abbott “gets away with” being masculine by also conveying feminine sexual attractiveness.
She, like other women in the West today, is allowed to do what she wants to do as long as she sends clear signals that she wants men’s approval.
Once again, we have to take intersectionality into consideration. Abbott has an advantage in this effort: She was born blond into a society that privileges whiteness, with features that are considered conventionally pretty. It’s easier for her to do the feminine apologetic than it is for women who aren’t at ease with their femininity or who were not granted as much femininity to start with.
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Femininity Is Implicitly White
Women who are ascribed masculinity by American culture—like queer and black women—do not have the same options for mixing in masculinity.
Instead, they may be forced to perform a feminine apologetic.
Femininity is subtly white, so light-colored, long, straight, or gently wavy hair is associated with femininity.
Black women with curly or kinky dark hair have to decide whether to leave it natural, wear wigs, or try to force it to resemble a white aesthetic.
Black women can choose to wear their hair in ways that reflect their own personal values and style, but they must contend with the way others respond to them. The label of the angry black woman is something that black women are constantly trying to avoid.
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Right Balances and Wrong Ones
Women sometimes refuse or fail to perform enough conventional femininity to soothe the concerns of the people around them.
In practice, then, there are wrong ways to be a woman.
Pariah Femininities
Ways of being a woman that, by directly challenging male dominance, are widely and aggressively policed.
The punishments for women who embody pariah femininities reveal that the opportunity to balance masculinity and femininity may not be as they like.
To do them is to risk rejection, verbal attack, violence, & ostracism.
Women who perform pariah femininities don’t defer to men, don’t seem to care if men find them attractive, have or withhold sex without concern for whether men approve, or do not form households with men.
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Androcentrism
Centering a masculine worldview and favoring masculinity which marginalizes femininity.
Ex: “everyman” stories, dislike of “girly” things (by anyone), tennis team vs women’s tennis team
Many traits associated with femininity are actively disparaged in our societies.
Ex: feminized task of raising children is seen as making women boring or unambitious.
Many traits that are associated with femininity are quite actively disparaged in our societies. Can you think of examples from the book or your own experience?
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Kinds of Sexism
Benevolent Sexism
The attribution of positive traits to women that, nonetheless, justify women’s subordination to men.
Benevolent sexism, by making women more dependent on men by virtue of the positive characteristics attributed to femininity, positions women as inferior.
Hostile Sexism
The use of harassment, threats, and violence to enforce women’s subservience to men.
Sometimes androcentric disparagement of people who do femininity is shrouded in what sounds like a compliment, which is an example of benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism can seem like a female-friendly gender order, but that’s not how it works.
When women don’t subordinate themselves to men, it can feel to some men like an assault on their rights and can lead to hostile sexism. The “benevolent” nature has been flipped, showing the other side of the coin.
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Subordination
Because power is gendered, the requirement to do femininity is also the requirement to do subordination.
Women, it is believed, are better suited than men to forgo their leisure time, educations, and career aspirations in order to help others.
The icons of femininity—mother, wife, nurse, secretary, teacher—are supportive, not leading roles, and ones that leave women less intellectually developed, accomplished, and impressive than men.
Subordination is about never bothering others with one’s own discomfort or concerns. Putting others first, even when it is difficult or dangerous to do so, is the very definition of subordination. This is all really about power. To do femininity is to do deference, and to do deference is to do femininity.
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When Being a Woman Gets Dangerous
When women refuse to do subordination by offering a pleasant countenance for men, or deferring to male authority—they stray into pariah territory.
Aggrieved entitlement:
Anger about something that men believe they own or deserve is being unjustly taken or withheld from them.
Misogyny:
Refers to men’s fear and hatred of women with power.
Transgender women in particular are vulnerable; they are estimated to be four times more likely than other women to be killed.
Whether or not women strike a balance that pleases others, both doing—and not doing—femininity can be dangerous.
When aggrieved entitlement leads to murder, the crime can be described as a misogynistic murder. Misogynistic murder is the killing of women by men who are motivated to punish women for (attempting to) exercise that power. such murders are disturbingly common.
The book provided several examples of men committing violence motivated by an aggrieved entitlement to women. This stems from a belief that females and femininity are subordinate to men and masculinity.
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Conventional femininity:
choice between victim or pariah
women find it difficult to claim a strategy of self-assertion that is effective, feels good, and is tolerated by the people around them.
Women (like men) make patriarchal bargains to maximize autonomy, safety, and well-being in the face of sexism, androcentrism, and subordination.
One bargain involves trading one’s power for the protection and support of a man.
This bargain involves performing emphasized femininity, an exaggerated form of conventional femininity “oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men.”
Bargaining with Patriarchy
With this strategy, a woman attempts to perfect a performance of femininity in exchange for the support of a man who will share his privilege with her.
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Women with ambitions to enter male-dominated professions may make a patriarchal bargain that involves being “just one of the guys,” a strategy sociologist Michael Kimmel refers to as emphatic sameness.
By embracing androcentrism, they hope to avoid both benevolent and hostile sexism.
Emphatic sameness is a bad bargain because it involves the denigration of femininity. The majority of women who adopt emphatic sameness reject femininity but are still female.
Emphatic Sameness
Many women do emphatic sameness, which involves downplaying the feminine in themselves in exchange for the right to do some masculinity.
Doing emphatic sameness is a way for some women to gain power as individuals in a society that values masculinity.
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Emphasized Sameness
An emphasized sameness approach allows this woman to blend in with male recruits to the New York Police department.
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Double Bind
A situation in which cultural expectations are contradictory, making success unattainable.
For women in Western societies, the double bind means that to be powerful is to fail as a woman and to succeed as a woman is to give up power.
South African Olympian sprinter Caster Semenya is an example of a woman who was attacked for doing too little femininity on and off the track.
On the other hand tennis player Anna Kournikova is an example of an athlete who did too much.
Double Bind
Kournikova’s successful embodiment of femininity pushed her out of her tennis career and into modeling. Today she is often ridiculed as one of the worst athletes of all time; the fact that she was once ranked eighth in the world is eclipsed by her sexualization.
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Doing Too Little
Caster Semenya’s astonishingly fast times on the track and disinterest in performing gender while she raced prompted the international association of athletics to investigate her biological sex.
Her makeover for You magazine (right) was an effort to assure others of her femininity.
Semenya’s muscularity, fast races, and refusal to do femininity both on and off the track resulting in an investigation of her biological sex that threatened her career. Under this pressure, she submitted to a public makeover—an attempt at an apologetic. Backlash against female politicians also often reflects the double bind. Can you think of examples from Hillary Clinton’s and Sarah Palin’s runs for office?
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The Big Picture
Feminism, is the belief that all men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.
While feminism is concerned with gender inequality, intersectionality has become central to the conversation.
Today many feminists, target the matrix of domination, a structure in which multiple hierarchies intersect to create a pyramid of privilege, leaving on top those people who are advantaged in every hierarchy.
Therefore, when someone identifies themselves as feminist today, they often mean they are part of a network of activists targeting a range of injustices.
This new gender order hurts both men and women, but in different ways; men suffer more as individuals, while women are harmed more as a group.
Men are harmed as individuals because hegemonic masculinity pushes them to obey its imperatives. Women as a group pay more of the costs of the hierarchical gender binary, measured by the economic vulnerability and physical danger they face; as a result, women are more likely to name and resist the unfairness of these costs.
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Feminist Politics
Feminist politics are politics involving efforts to make society’s gender order less hierarchical and more supportive of the full development of human capacities for everyone.
Feminists have disagreed about what a feminist utopia, or a perfectly gender-egalitarian society, might look like.
Anti-feminist politics is committed to the value of gender difference and hierarchy and aims to prevent feminist change.
In the discussion of feminist politics, you should note that not all feminists agree with one another. Feminists are not only wrestling with stubborn governments and anti-feminists, but also with each other. Feminists have disagreed upon what a feminist utopia might look like.
What is an example of feminist politics in today’s society? Anti-feminist politics? What would a feminist utopia look like to you?
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The Governance of Gender
The governance of gender is how the gender of residents shapes the way they are regulated.
At the most basic level, states enforce gender ideologies in deciding how many and which gender categories to recognize.
States also decide whether to require the gender binary in spaces (like public restrooms); enforce gendered roles in marriage; and allow trans men and women to modify their names, bodies, and documents.
The gender of residents shapes the way people are regulated. In the United States, the federal government and nearly all states require individuals to identify as male or female on birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and passports. In India and Bangladesh, though, a person can formally identify as hijra instead.
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Theorizing Gender Equality
Equal access is an approach to ending sexism focused on dismantling legal barriers and reducing sex discrimination.
The United States is a good example of a society that uses this approach.
An equal value model is designed to tackle the problem of androcentrism by raising the value of the feminine to match the masculine.
The equal sharing approach targets subordination by attempting to ensure that men and women participate equally in positions that are conventionally understood as masculine and feminine.
Gender-aware policymaking, doesn’t necessarily help us know what to do. Feminists disagree on what a feminist utopia might look like, and there are roughly three approaches that correspond to the three types of inequality: sexism, androcentrism, and subordination. As a result, it’s helpful to think of feminism as a conversation instead of a set of positions.
Which approach do you find the most likely to achieve gender equality? Why?
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Gender and the American Presidency
The United States still has yet to elect a woman president.
Since 1960, more than fifty women have served as head of state around the world.
Scholars argue that the U.S. presidency is possibly the most masculine job in the nation.
Candidates’ masculinity has long been a central feature in presidential campaigns.
Donald Trump in 2016 performed an “unapologetic masculinity” that at its core was about dominating others.
What have we learned about gender and the American presidency in the 2016 election?
Instructor Note: Give examples of the masculinity on display; for example, Rick Perry challenged Donald Trump to a pull-up contest while Marco Rubio suggested that Donald Trump had a small penis. Hillary Clinton even invoked masculinity when asking what kind of man Donald Trump was.
Regardless of the candidate in question, it was always their masculinity that was being questioned.
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Social Movements
Social movements are collective, nongovernmental efforts to change societies.
Feminists have had to fight for rights individually.
They have done so through “regular” politics like voting, supporting legislation, and lobbying.
They have also done so through social movements like protest campaigns, public marches, and demonstrations.
Much change has been enacted through social movements.
Historically, women have used social movement tactics to secure rights for women, and today they continue to do so.
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Intersectional Feminist Activism
Intersectional feminist activism is one that attends to the lived experiences of different kinds of women and men.
Currently younger generations show strongest support for gender equality.
More diverse than those in previous generations.
The third wave really embraces intersectional feminism. Young feminists of color are among the leading innovators of “hashtag” movements, which are decentralized, less hierarchical, and more intersectionally inclusive, including #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName.
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