Fluent Essays

Watch a TED Talk by Tony Porter （）, where he focused on what he calls The Man Box. According to Porter, what is The Man Box? What are its core elements? Why are men afraid of getting outside of The Man Box? When Porter says, my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman, what do you think he means by that? Be sure to reference and integrate ppt materials and readings by West and Zimmerman Doing Gender and Lorbers Night to His Day. The essay must be 500-600 words.Must cite from the document given. Thanks. gender1.pdf gender2.pdf doing_gender_copy.pdf lorbergenderconstruction_copy.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Slide 1 Introduction to Sociology May 20, 2020 Slide 2 Displaying one’s self as men and women What kinds of signs do people “give off ” about their sex category membership? Slide 3 Slide 4 Slide 5 Slide 6 Slide 7 Slide 8 Slide 9 Slide 10 Slide 11 Man or Woman How do you decide? When placing people into a particular sex category (man or woman), what characteristics do you look for? Slide 12 What if you can’t place people in a sex category? How does that change the interaction? Slide 13 Gender “establishes patterns of expectations for individuals, [gender] orders the social processes of daily life, [gender] is built into the major social organizations of society, such as the economy, political ideology, and family” Slide 14 Gender matters for how we organize our daily life, and Gender can have profound consequences for the life chances of any individual. Slide 15 Sex and Gender This is a critical distinction to know and understand Slide 16 Sex “…is a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females or males” Slide 17 Slide 18 Gender “…is the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category. Gender activities emerge from and bolster claims to membership in a sex category.” Slide 19 Gender is a familiar part of our daily lives. It’s taken-forgranted quality is rarely questioned. We perform gender almost automatically, without giving much thought to it. As members of society, we are like actors. We engage in performances for each other. Slide 20 We think about our actions and imagine how they will be interpreted by others. Slide 21 To “do gender” is to align our behavior with normative expectations of masculinity or femininity Slide 22 Gender is the product of a social performance that we put on for one another. Slide 23 Gender is a social interaction strategy. Gender is something we “give off ” about ourselves, so that other people can read the signs and know how to deal with us. Slide 24 Performing gender is optional; Being seen by others as a gendered person is not Slide 25 Doing gender becomes practically unavoidable because sexcategory membership is so dominant in our daily encounters. Slide 26 Doing gender in the morning. Doing gender is a familiar part of everyday life Slide 27 Are we ever not doing gender? Slide 28 How is she conforming to gender expectations? Slide 29 How is he conforming to gender expectations? MEN Slide 30 WOMEN Slide 31 The early formation of a gendered identity Slide 32 A 2014 study in Pediatrics found that mothers interacted vocally more often with their infant daughters than with their infant sons. Researchers also found that mothers were more likely to use emotional words and emotional topics when speaking with their daughters Slide 33 A 2017 study found that fathers sing and smile more to their daughters, and they use language that is more “analytical” with their sons. Slide 34 The Sex Binary Slide 35 The Gender Binary Masculine or Feminine Thinking along the lines of gender (men and women, boys and girls) is one of the basic things we look for when trying to determine who somebody is Slide 36 Masculine Strong Active Rugged Dominant Powerful Independent Feminine Weak Passive Delicate Submissive Vulnerable Dependent Slide 37 Who is more likely…? To wear a skirt To carry a handbag To comment on people’s clothes To cry in public To admit to baking cupcakes To eat a big meal in public To write thank you cards for small favors Slide 38 Who is more likely…? To deal confidently with auto mechanics To pick up slack in dull conversation To walk by themselves at night To be interested in sports To take up a lot of space while sitting To be congratulated for having lots of sex To be the target of street harassment Slide 1 Introduction to Sociology May 18, 2020 Slide 2 What Unites Us? What Divides Us? Slide 3 Class, Race, & Gender Slide 4 Class, Race, Gender What’s the point of studying these things? Slide 5 Why does this matter? There are patterns of advantage and disadvantage that exist in our society, and there are invisible perks that aren’t available to everybody. Slide 6 But, before talking about gender… Let’s start with a song “Walk Like a Man” by The Four Seasons Slide 7 An In-Class Exercise 4 Volunteers Needed Slide 8 Popular Self Help Book in 1990s Belief that men and women are just different organisms; and differences in behavior is rooted fundamentally in biology This offers appeal of easy to grasp generalizations Tends to make intuitive sense at first glance Slide 9 Sex, Sex Category, and Gender What’s the difference? Slide 10 Sex “…is a determination made through the application of agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females or males” Slide 11 Slide 12 Sex Category “…is achieved through application of the sex criteria…categorization is established and sustained by socially required identification displays that proclaim one’s membership in one or the other category.” Can you tell somebody’s sex just by looking at them Slide 13 Slide 14 Displaying one’s self as men and women What kinds of signs do people “give off ” about their sex category membership? Slide 15 Slide 16 Slide 17 Slide 18 Slide 18 Slide 20 Slide 21 Slide 22 Slide 22 Slide 24 Man or Woman How do you decide? When placing people into a particular sex category (man or woman), what characteristics do you look for? Slide 25 Slide 25 Slide 27 Slide 26 Slide 29 Slide 30 Slide 31 Slide 32 Slide 33 What if you can’t place people into a sex category? Slide 34 How does that change the interaction? Does it change the social interaction with a person if there aren’t clear-cut signs about the person’s sex category membership? Doing Gender Author(s): Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman Reviewed work(s): Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 125-151 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/189945 . Accessed: 03/01/2013 11:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Gender and Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Thu, 3 Jan 2013 11:59:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DOING GENDER CANDACE WEST University of California, Santa Cruz DON H. ZIMMERMAN University of California, Santa Barbara The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation. In the beginning, there was sex and there was gender. Those of us who taught courses in the area in the late 1960s and early 1970s were careful to distinguish one from the other. Sex, we told students, was what was ascribed by biology: anatomy, hormones, and physiology. Gender, we said, was an achieved status: that which is constructed through psychological, cultural, and social means. To introduce the difference between the two, we drew on singular case studies of hermaphrodites (Money 1968, 1974; Money and Ehrhardt 1972) and anthropological investigations of strange and exotic tribes (Mead 1963, 1968). Inevitably (and understandably), in the ensuing weeks of each term, our students became confused. Sex hardly seemed a given in AUTHORS NOTE: This article is based in part on a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, September 1977. For their helpful suggestions and encouragement, we thank Lynda Ames, Bettina Aptheker, Steven Clayman, Judith Gerson, the late Erving Goffman, Marilyn Lester, Judith Lorber, Robin Lloyd, Wayne Mellinger, Beth E. Schneider, Barrie Thorne, Thomas P. Wilson, and most especially, Sarah Fenstermaker Berk. GENDER&SOCIETY,Vol. 1 No. 2, June 1987125-151 0 1987Sociologistsfor Womenin Society 125 This content downloaded on Thu, 3 Jan 2013 11:59:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 126 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 1987 the context of research that illustrated the sometimes ambiguous and often conflicting criteria for its ascription. And gender seemed much less an achievement in the context of the anthropological, psychological, and social imperatives we studied-the division of labor, the formation of gender identities, and the social subordination of women by men. Moreover, the received doctrine of gender socialization theories conveyed the strong message that while gender may be achieved, by about age five it was certainly fixed, unvarying, and static-much like sex. Since about 1975, the confusion has intensified and spread far beyond our individual classrooms. For one thing, we learned that the relationship between biological and cultural processes was far more complex-and reflexive-than we previously had supposed (Rossi 1984, especially pp. 10-14). For another, we discovered that certain structural arrangements, for example, between work and family, actually produce or enable some capacities, such as to mother, that we formerly associated with biology (Chodorow 1978 versus Firestone 1970). In the midst of all this, the notion of gender as a recurring achievement somehow fell by the wayside. Our purpose in this article is to propose an ethnomethodologically informed, and therefore distinctively sociological, understanding of gender as a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment. We contend that the doing of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine natures. When we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional and, ultimately, institutional arenas. In one sense, of course, it is individuals who do gender. But it is a situated doing, carried out in the virtual or real presence of others who are presumed to be oriented to its production. Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society. To advance our argument, we undertake a critical examination of what sociologists have meant by gender, including its treatment as a role enactment in the conventional sense and as a display in Goffmans (1976) terminology. Both gender role and gender display This content downloaded on Thu, 3 Jan 2013 11:59:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions West, Zimmerman / DOING GENDER 127 focus on behavioral aspects of being a woman or a man (as opposed, for example, to biological differences between the two). However, we contend that the notion of gender as a role obscures the work that is involved in producing gender in everyday activities, while the notion of gender as a display relegates it to the periphery of interaction. We argue instead that participants in interaction organize their various and manifold activities to reflect or express gender, and they are disposed to perceive the behavior of others in a similar light. To elaborate our proposal, we suggest at the outset that important but often overlooked distinctions be observed among sex, sex category, and gender. Sex is a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females or males. The criteria for classification can be genitalia at birth or chromosomal typing before birth, and they do not necessarily agree with one another. Placement in a sex category is achieved through application of the sex criteria, but in everyday life, categorization is established and sustained by the socially required identificatory displays that proclaim ones membership in one or the other category. In this sense, ones sex category presumes ones sex and stands as proxy for it in many situations, but sex and sex category can vary independently; that is, it is possible to claim membership in a sex category even when the sex criteria are lacking. Gender, in contrast, is the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for ones sex category. Gender activities emerge from and bolster claims to membership in a sex category. We contend that recognition of the analytical independence of sex, sex category, and gender is essential for understanding the relationships among these elements and the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. While our primary aim is theoretical, there will be occasion to discuss fruitful directions for empirical research following from the formulation of gender that we propose. We begin with an assessment of the received meaning of gender, particularly in relation to the roots of this notion in presumed biological differences between women and men. PERSPECTIVES ON SEX AND GENDER In Western societies, the accepted cultural perspective on gender views women and men as naturally and unequivocally defined This content downloaded on Thu, 3 Jan 2013 11:59:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 128 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 1987 categories of being (Garfinkel 1967, pp. 116-18) with distinctive psychological and behavioral propensities that can be predicted from their reproductive functions. Competent adult members of these societies see differences between the two as fundamental and enduringdifferences seemingly supported by the division of labor into womens and mens work and an often elaborate differentiation of feminine and masculine attitudes and behaviors that are prominent features of social organization. Things are the way they are by virtue of the fact that men are men and women are women-a division perceived to be natural and rooted in biology, producing in turn profound psychological, behavioral, and social consequences. The structural arrangements of a society are presumed to be responsive to these differences. Analyses of sex and gender in the social sciences, though less likely to accept uncritically the naive biological determinism of the view just presented, often retain a conception of sex-linked behaviors and traits as essential properties of individuals (for good reviews, see Hochschild 1973; Tresemer 1975; Thorne 1980; Henley 1985). The sex differences approach (Thore 1980) is more commonly attributed to psychologists than to sociologists, but the survey researcher who determines the gender of respondents on the basis of the sound of their voices over the telephone is also making trait-oriented assumptions. Reducing gender to a fixed set of psychological traits or to a unitary variable precludes serious consideration of the ways it is used to structure distinct domains of social experience (Stacey and Thorne 1985, pp. 307-8). Taking a different tack, role theory has attended to the social construction of gender categories, called sex roles or, more recently, gender roles and has analyzed how these are learned and enacted. Beginning with Linton (1936) and continuing through the works of Parsons (Parsons 1951; Parsons and Bales 1955) and Komarovsky (1946, 1950), role theory has emphasized the social and dynamic aspect of role construction and enactment (Thorne 1980; Connell 1983). But at the level of face-to-face interaction, the application of role theory to gender poses problems of its own (for good reviews and critiques, see Connell 1983, 1985; Kessler, Ashendon, Connell, and Dowsett 1985; Lopata and Thorne 1978; Thorne 1980; Stacey and Thorne 1985). Roles are situated identities-assumed and relinquished as the situation demands-rather than master identities (Hughes 1945), such as sex category, that cut across situations. Unlike most roles, such as nurse, doctor, and patient or professor and student, gender has no specific site or organizational context. This content downloaded on Thu, 3 Jan 2013 11:59:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions West, Zimmerman / DOING GENDER 129 Moreover, many roles are already gender marked, so that special qualifiers-such as female doctor or male nurse-must be added to exceptions to the rule. Thorne (1980) observes that conceptualizing gender as a role makes it difficult to assess its influence on other roles and reduces its explanatory usefulness in discussions of power and inequality. Drawing on Rubin (1975), Thorne calls for a reconceptualization of women and men as distinct social groups, constituted in concrete, historically changing-and generally unequal-social relationships (Thorne 1980, p. 11). We argue that gender is not a set of traits, nor a variable, nor a role, but the product of social doings of some sort. What then is the social doing of gender? It is more than the continuous creation of the meaning of gender through human actions (Gerson and Peiss 1985). We claim that gender itself is constituted through interaction.2 To develop the implications of our claim, we turn to Goffmans (1976) account of gender display. Our object here is to explore how gender might be exhibited or portrayed through interaction, and thus be seen as natural, while it is being produced as a socially organized achievement. GENDER DISPLAY Goffman contends that when human beings interact with others in their environment, they assume that each possesses an essential nature-a nature that can be discerned through the natural signs given off or expressed by them (1976, p. 75). Femininity and masculinity are regarded as prototypes of essential expressionsomething that can be conveyed fleetingly in any social situation and yet something that strikes at the most basic characterization of the individual (1976, p. 75). The means through which we provide such expressions are perfunctory, conventionalized acts (1976, p. 69), which convey to others our regard for them, indicate our alignment in an encounter, and tentatively establish the terms of contact for that social situation. But they are also regarded as expressive behavior, testimony to our essential natures. Goffman (1976, pp. 69-70) sees displays as highly conventionalized behaviors structured as two-part exchanges of the statement-reply type, in which the presence or absence of symmetry can establish deference or dominance. These rituals are viewed as distinct from but articulated with more consequential activities, such as performing tasks or engaging in discour ... Purchase answer to see full attachment