A primer to gender

Perhaps it’s aimed too much at historians, but I would have to say Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.”

I might suggest the opening chapter of Susan Okin’s Justice, Gender & The Family. Indeed, for philosophically inclined readers the entire book is a good read as she shows how the neglect of gender disables much of contemporary political thought. Moreover, her prose is straightforward and less jargon-laden than much of what I have read in femist political thought.

In addition to whatever, shouldn’t one also recommend reading a few of Kingsley Amis’s novels?

I second the vote for Okin. Not only is she a good choice for all the reasons noted by Jim, but she is also arguing from a liberal perspective. Her focus on the individual in both her analysis and prescriptions will, I suspect, make it easier for the sceptic you describe to see the importance of analysing gender roles and the persuasiveness of the claim that society is gendered.

However, one problem I have in using Okin’s Justice Gender and the Family is that many students disregard her conclusion’s because they feel the book is dated or only relevant in an American context. I find that I need to complement her argument with current statistics and examples from different countries. Any tips on fairly recent liberal feminist work with Okin’s quality that one could use as an effective introduction into gender analysis?

Some good ones above; for me it would depend partly on the disciplinary background of the person asking the question. I like Doris Weichselbaumer’s

“Is it Sex or Personality? The Impact of Sex-Stereotypes on Discrimination in Applicant Selection” _Eastern Economic Journal_, 30 (2), Spring 2004, 159 – 186
http://www.economics.uni-linz.ac.at/weichsel/work/paper/sexdiscrimination.PDF

because a sex-gender distinction arises in a very obvious way out of the research. It’s far from being a primer, but for the unconvinced it may be better to show examples where gender gives you insight.

To turn in a different direction,

Shelly Errington, “Recasting Sex, Gender, and Power: A Theoretical and Regional Overview.” 1-58. (From Atkinson and Errington, eds., _Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia_. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.)

is great because it gives you a glimpse of a different kind of gender system, with meanings built around brother-sister rather than husband-wife. If one can’t show the variety of possibilities of gender meaning-systems, then gender tends to get reassimilated to “sex” no matter how often one insists on definitional distinctions.

Two book chapters I have used in teaching are

Matthew Gutmann, “Imaginary Fathers, Genuine Fathers.” (Chapter 3 of _The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City._ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.)

Nayan Shah, “Regulating Bodies and Space.” (Chapter 2 of _Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown_ Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

Both examine ways men get gendered.

To Adam: I don’t know of any really compelling intro on the web. There are lots of good online bibliographies and lists of resources, but you may have to read a nonvirtual book or two.

…“both sceptical and ignorant about the whole gender issue”….oh, please, what person with an IQ above room temperature doesn’t see how lame and stupid all of the “victim” studies are, fuel by no empirical science and a political agenda, they are the last refuge of second class minds, the equivalent of junk food on campus. An easy sell to the 18 year olds, then, discarded like Big Macs as you get wiser and older.

None of the garbage spewed out of these “victim” departments holds up with empirical science. There is no science. Period. Just agendas. It’s the provence of hack academia.

For those who can’t find anything online, could you provide a short summary in a comment of what is being talked about. I doubt I’m completely unfamiliar with the thesis, but I just don’t recognize it from the allusions in the post. Also, what do people think about the articles on feminism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Re Peter (comment 12): as an observer, I actually find this sort of discussion fantastically useful.

I’m uneasily aware that I need to be reading something on gender, that it’s one of the Big Issues that ought to inform my research, and that there’s a large and (I assume) politically loaded literature out there on it. I’m also working with a bunch of academics who cheerfully confess that they don’t ‘do’ gender, to whom I cannot turn for advice on this whole field of scholarship. Whether it should be or not, Ingrid’s question is clearly still a real one in the social sciences, and it’s great to have the CT collective mind put out a set of suggestions on where to start.

Adam I think it goes something like this…

Not all of female behavior (that is behavior that we see as typical of women and not men) can be accounted for by variation in their biological make up.
Not all of male behavior (that is behavior that we see as typical of men and not women) can be accounted for by variation in their biological make up.
[In fact, some women even exhibit typically masculine behavior.]
[In fact, some men even exhibit typically feminine behavior.]
These unusual patterns must come into play by some other variable.
Maybe some of it is learned via socialization, or enculturation, or upbringing or whatever.
We decide to call this learned behavior “gender.” – the behavior that can be explained by science we call “sex.”
Thus a distinction is made between gender and sex. Some people think gender is everything, others think sex is, most probably work from a model that includes room for both.

Or…

To anyone that has seriously studied human beings comparatively, it becomes obvious that the differences between men and women, and men and men, and women and women, cannot be accounted for by the kinds of binary thinking that are behind most biological explanations. It seems intuitive that throughout our lives we have learned things from our social upbringing. Perhaps this upbringing can help explain some of these differences. So we decide to distinguish between gender and sex.

Anyways… this is all very brief and I’m fairly sure inadequate. Maybe someone else could expand on this.

I hope this doesn’t set the cat among the pigeons, Anthony, but “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual” (Differences 13(1): 14-44, Spring 2002) is pretty accessible and I see someone has put a copy here:
http://www.hartza.com/butler2.pdf
Normally though I wouldn’t suggest Butler as an intro reading here because Ingrid’s request assumes a reader who is unfamiliar with the mainstream feminist sex/gender distinction that Butler is critiquing. I’m old-fashioned enough to want to learn the doctrine before I learn the critique of the doctrine, though when I was a young feller I usually reversed the order.

I’m a historian, so I often send students in the direction of the ‘Introduction’ to Bob Shoemaker’s _Gender in English Society, 1650-1850_ and to the first chapter, ‘Ideas about gender’ which traces the changes in these ideas over the course of the C17th – C19th.

For the specific purpose at hand, addressing those who “agree that there are sexual differences, but believe that all differences between men and women can be reduced to these sexual differences,” I don’t think the Okin quite works– she assumes rather than shows that the inequities in outcomes she documents and the power relations she describes are constructs rather than being ultimately reducible in this way. I’d recommend Young, Throwing Like A Girl.

Jacob:

What kind of sceptics are we talking about here? If they really are ignorant about “the whole gender issue” I have a hard time believing that Young is good choice.

The point of using something along the lines of Okin (note I agree with the noted empirical weaknesses in her book) is that her analysis examines something that feminist sceptics are familiar with, families. Furthermore, she bases her arguments on facts that sceptics, both men and women, will accept from the outset. These are that women do a greater share of childrearing and other unpaid work in the home, they command less of society’s economic resources, and they are a minority in positions of power in society (i.e. in both the political and economic realms). These facts are true in all countries and from this starting point there is at least some common experience from which to argue that culture plays a central role in power relations between men and women (and engaging the sceptic in this way seems to be one of Okin’s aims).

Compare this with Young’s empirical starting point in the essay you suggest:

“The culture and society in which the female person dwells defines woman as Other, as the inessential correlate to man, as mere object and immanence. Woman is thereby both culturally and socially denied by the subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity which are definitive of being human and which in patriarchal society are accorded the man. At the same time, however because she is a human existence, the female person necessarily is a subjectivity and transcendence and she knows herself to be. The female person who enacts the existence of women in patriarchal society must therefore live a contradiction: as human she is a free subject who participates in transcendence, but her situation as a woman denies her that subjectivity and transcendence. My suggestion is that the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality exhibit this same tension between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object.” (Young p. 141)

One can hardly describe Young as engaging the sceptic here!

David, by “gobbledygook” I take it you mean “long words I don’t normally use and have to take a moment’s effort to comprehend”? One can agree with Aaron’s point about the appropriateness of this kind of argument for convincing a hostile skeptic (I think your position is evidence in point), without saying that the only *legitimate* way of writing about this is whatever brand of common-sense dialect you happen to prefer.

I think, Ingrid, some of the replies to your question show that we’re dealing with a. sex differences b. sex roles c. gendered attitudes and behaviour, which are IMO distinct. Okin (e.g.) does talk about gendered attitudes and behaviour (I’d say) but the inequalities she documents stem from socially allocated sex roles. I basically agree with Jacob but as I think Young’s piece will put some people off, I’d suggest Deborah Tannen (some of whose work is on the web), ideally, a piece where she makes it clear she doesn’t think the differences she discusses are are biological.

On using Okin – part of the point is simply to avoid theory-speak of the sort that Young, Butler, et. al. wallow in. (The passge cited at #28 is representative.) If you are trying to speak to folks who are not already persuaded, who have some passing familiarity with political thought, and who are open-minded, then I would opt for someone writing in straightforward prose.

If the objection is that there is little or no empirical foundaiton in Okin, that is hardly unique to her. But I think Jacob’s remark is beside the point. She, it seems to me, is trying to say “Look what happens if we approach theories of justice as though Gender mattered.” And then she shows the consequences. So, we are dealing here in conceptual starting points.

One of the major weakensses in American political theory these days is that it acts as though empirical evidence is somehow sullying.
I would add the names of two feminist theorists who resist this tendency: Ann Phillips and Debra Satz. Debra wrote a nice commentary a few years back in Dissent decrying the fact that feminist theorists almost wholly neglect empirical and analytical work in the soical sciences – especially economics.

I agree that Okin’s prose is a lot more accessible, and that Young’s may be off-putting if it’s not a style that the reader’s familiar with. I’m certainly generally more comfortable in Okin’s Anglo-American-liberal style than with postmodern and phenomenological stuff. But, even as someone who’s predisposed to think that gender is fundamental, I find Okin too often question-begging, and that book very specific to political theory of a certain vintage. (Ingrid’s question didn’t assume that the reader was a political theorist, and not everyone in the social sciences knows or cares about Nozick interpretation.) Whereas, even as someone who’s predisposed to think that gender is fundamental, I find that Young essay unsettling, and convincing me that gender structures are much more pervasive than I was inclined to realize.

Okin’s writing about distributive outcomes that are messy and complicated and multicausal. Young’s writing about how one walks down the street, how one lives in one’s own body. It’s more steps removed from any policy conclusions, but, I think, a more powerful statement to a gender skeptic, and of more general interest to those outside political theory. Yes, the language is a barrier– but the substance of the piece is actually less narrow. It’s about gender in life, not gender in theories of distributive justice.

(Jim Johnson: “One of the major weakensses in American political theory these days is that it acts as though empirical evidence is somehow sullying.” I entriely agree, and try to resist that tendency myself, and appreciate work that does resist it– but am not convinced that doubt that that’s what’s at stake here, partly because I don’t think “a primer to gender” is necessarily something within political theory.)

You could always get them to read Anne Fine’s children’s novel “Bill’s New Frock”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/140520060X/junius-21 .

I am confused about one point on this gender/sex difference issue.

It makes sense to me that gender roles are distinct from sex differences. But it still seems that most assignment of gender is very highly correlated with “biological” sex.

Are there cultural “gender” examples where there are say 17 different genders or where gender assignment is not highly correlated with biological sex?

oh dear, thats a lot of reading. Can some enlightened person just give me [pretend I’m Dubya] a list telling me when to emphasize gender and when to downplay it? For simpleton’s like me its maddening that a mind informed by a well stocked feminist’s bookshelf will be agile at BOTH in the right contexts. Most like me can’t even pass for PC at a cocktail party.

David, #42: fair enough – I can’t disagree with your readings. The passage is hardly to be held up as a model of lucidity or precision, and I’ve actually no great ax to grind in its favor. But it’s hardly total gobbledygook either. Her points overall are reasonably clear, albeit badly phrased, and go further than “nature vs. nurture”. What annoyed me was your rush to dismiss and disqualify it entirely: we’re all familiar by now with the gesture of declaring-something-unreadable-in-order-to-avoid-having-to-read-it, usually in the name of reactionary philistinism and/or dogmatic quantitative-fetishism (there must be a better way of putting that last one, but I can’t think of it right now). Maybe I was wrong to read you as either, but I think you exaggerated a little, and a little quickly, too.

Use of a few unnecessary 10 cent words and a few clunky sentences doesn’t make something indecipherable. I find undergraduates do pretty well with Young in general and Throwing Like Girl in particular. What she’s saying goes well beyond political theory, even if how she says it doesn’t. In her case, patience pays off.

Bryan asks,

Is anyone really skeptical of the proposition that in different times and places and among different groups there have existed different (in some cases very different) ideas and norms about men, women and their relationships?

I am, to some degree. I think that there seems to be a “deep structure” of ideas/norms that is relatively constant in all successful societies (in other words, if you die out after 2 generations like the Shakers, your ideas/norms don’t really count); how that deep structure works out depends on environment, but the structure (man as protector/woman as nurturer) seems to stay the same all the way back to the primates.

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions — there were many good ones, and I agree with the views that such a ‘primer’ should be different depending on the person who’s asking. I had entirely forgotten about Doris Weichselbaumer’s research which is fascinating and very powerful indeed. And I will check out COlin Danby’s other suggestiosn, which are looking very interesting.

Is it feasible to introduce sceptics to gender with just a single article? I don’t know whether it will work for the concept of gender, which is a complex phenomenon, but I do know that one article can do miracles in educating people who deny the existnce of certain phenomena. In the past I’ve been able to convince some economists about the existence of gender labour market discrimination by having them read a very short article — the article on discrimination against female post-doc applicants which was published around 1997 by Wenneras and Wold in Nature. But while their study clearly demonstrates discrimination against women (without any other explanations possible thanks to the exceptional quality of the data, as in the earlier mentioned Goldin-Rouse paper), some responded that this might be an outlier. In that respect it is a open question indeed how much you can gain with one article. Moreover, this was an article about gender discrimination, not about what gender precisely constitutes; perhaps that is more difficult in one article, and it is much less a case of demonstrating whether something exists (yes or no), but rather about making sense of what gender is, and how it works.

For sociologists, perhaps the first chapter of Michael Kimmel’s book _The gendered society_ may induce them to read the whole book (OUP 2000).

reacting to chuk’s ABC in 18:
“Not all of female behavior (that is behavior that we see as typical of women and not men) can be accounted for by variation in their biological make up.
Not all of male behavior (that is behavior that we see as typical of men and not women) can be accounted for by variation in their biological make up. [In fact, some women even exhibit typically masculine behavior.] [In fact, some men even exhibit typically feminine behavior.] These unusual patterns must come into play by some other variable. Maybe some of it is learned via socialization, or enculturation, or upbringing or whatever.”

What “we see as typical” is not the main fact to be explained. There are certainly many objective differences in what human males and females do, but these are strongly overlapping probability distributions in modern societies, except for physiological reproduction. It’s interesting and important to investigate these distributions, trends in them, and possible social and biological explanations.

Second, you have expectations about these differences, which are one of the likely causal factors of the objective differences in behaviour. They are also highly variable. It’s also interesting, though less important as it’s only part of the story, to investigate the distributions of these expectations, trends in them and possible causes.
If that’s what gender theory is about, I’m all for it. Show us the regressions, please. If it assumes that these expectations are uniform and binary, it’s a load of rent-seeking piffle.