Chapter 8: Gender

Feminism: consciousness raising movement to get people to understand that gender is an organizing principle of life

Sex: biological differences that distinguish males from females

Sexuality: desire, sexual preference, sexual identity, and behavior

Gender: social position;social arrangements built around normative sex categories

Sex: Process in the Making:

• Gayle Rubin “The Traffic in Women: Notes on Political Economy of Sex” called social construct of gender categories based on natural sex differences “sex/gender system”
• Intersex is medical condition

Essentialism: line of thought that explains social phenomena in terms of natural ones

Biological determinism: line of thought that explains social behavior in terms of who you are in the natural world

Gender: What does it take:

• Gender systems imply social constructions

• 2 Gender Systems: Navajo Tribes (nadle), India (hijras)

Hegemonic masculinity: condition in which men are dominant and privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible

Gender roles: sets of behavioral norms assumed to accompany one’s status as a male or female

The Woman Question

“What explains the nearly universal dominance of men over women”

Patriarchy: a nearly universal system involving the subordination of femininity to masculinity

• Rubin: Sex/Gender System (Biological Sex -> Asymmetric Gender Status)
• Rosaldo: Because women associated with less prestigious private sphere
• Ortner: Because women furthermore identified with nature

Structural functionalism: theoretical tradition claiming that every society has certain structures (the family, the division of labor, or gender) that exist in order to fulfill some set of necessary functions (reproduction of the species, production of goods, etc.).

Early anthropology assumed every society had certain structures (eg family, division of labor).

• Parson’s Sex Role Theory: Talcott Parsons’s theory that men and women perform their sex roles as breadwinners and wives/ mothers, respectively, because the nuclear family is the ideal arrangement in modern societies, fulfilling the function of reproducing workers.
  • Problem: Tautological (things work because they work)
  • Functionalists presume need for function, preexists phenomenom and that other structures couldnt fill in
  • Doesnt explain changing structures over history

Psychoanalytic Theories

• Freudian theorists have provided perhaps an overly individualistic, psychoanalytic account of sex roles
• Sigmund Freud: “Anatomy is destiny” (but also family socialization)
• Kids develop personality structures through parent interactions
• Nancy Chodorow (1978): “Why Women predominantly caregivers?” - Parents’ unequal involvement in child rearing was partial cause. Mothering by woman is reproduced in the cycle of role socialization. Argued that egalitarian relations possible if men shared the mothering.
• Carol Gilligan (1982): Women and men have different ways of thinking. Women make major life decisions based on “ethics of care”. Women view world as relationships vs men as rules.
• Freud assumes a biological reductionist Setting (eg nuclear /w WASP middle class family /w stay@home mother, working father)
• Also many Freud psychoanalysts assume binary sex/gender system

Conflict Theories

• Socialist feminists claimed that the root of all social relations including relations of production stems from unequal gender relations
• Variant of essentialism. Posits world divided into two groups: men women pitted against each other in struggle for resources which women always lose

Microinteractionist theories

• Candace West/Don H Zimmerman “Doing Gender” (1987): Gender is not fixed going into interactions, But a product of those interactions - to be man/woman = perform masculinity/femininity constantly.
• Social constructionists Review generals is having open-ended scripts

Black Feminism

• Black feminists make the case that early liberal feminism was largely by, about, and for white middle-class women
• eg Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique ignored Experiences of thousands of working class and nonwhite women already working, sometimes holding down multiple jobs
• Black women experience motherhood in ways that differ from the white masculinist ideal of the family

Postmodern Theories

• Anthropologist Oyeronke Oy Argues the woman question is a product of uniquely Western thought in cannot be applied African societies; System of categories, distinct males and females, indicates western culture logic: biologic

Middle Range Theories

• Merton called middle range theories: Connect Day-to-day experiences to larger social forces
• Connell in Gender and Power (1987): Middle ground approach to gender. Used Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory to claim that the social and the personal always depend on each other. Extends structures as a kind of feedback loop, weaving individual practice back to social institutions which in turn influence and socialize individuals into gender beings
• Question becomes less to explain universal male dominance and more a matter of attempting to account for help people navigate with instructors like gender

Sociology in the Bedroom

high level summarized

• Different norms for behavior re: power dynamics in different cultures
• Marxist feminists argue sexuaility in American is an expression of unequal binary gender power balance

… other things

Chapter 7: Stratification

Stratification: structured social inequality / systematic inequalities amonung groups of people that arise as intended or unintended consequencs of social processes and relationships

Views of Inequality:

• Rousseau:
  • Physical (innate)
  • Social/Political (goods/luxuries/ all the things)
  • If you have 1 pizza and someone has 10 slices and you have 0 but you need some to live you might fight them for it
• Scottish Enlightenment + Malthus:
  • Inequality as a means for social progress - people do work
  • Malthusian Poverty Trap: Inequality necessary for prevention of overpopulation/starvation
• Hegel
  • Master-slave dialectic
  • Slave/master dependent on each other
  • Society marching from few master-many slave -> society of more free men/women (equality).

Standards of Equality:

• Ontological Equality: Notion that everyone is created equal at birth
• Equality of Opportunity: Idea that everyone has an equal change to achieve wealth, social prestige, power because same rules of the game (eg Jim Crow laws are not these; stifles meritocracy)
• Bourgeous Society: Society of commerce (modern capitalist eg) in which max of profit is primary benefit incentive.
• Equality of condition: Idea that everyone should have equal starting point (affirmative action)
• Equality of outcome: position that argues each player must end up with the same amount regardless of the fairness of the game (eg Marxist). Eliminates incentives of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers.
• Free Rider Problem (ie Tragedy of the Commons): When more than one person is responsible for getting someone done, the incentive is for each to shirk responsibility and hope others pull weight.

Forms of Stratification: Many forms, eg by age (some tribes determines social prestige + honor, vs in the youth obsessed culture of the US it’s the reverse), birth order (inheritance), gender, race, ethnicity.

• Estate System: politically based, characterized by limited social mobility. Feudal Europe-18th century, American South before Civil War. Political basis. Laws written to enforce eg voting writes only for land owners. eg (clergy,nobility, commoners).
• Caste System: Religion based, no social mobility. Previously in India (varna system).
• Class System:
  • Economically based, characterized by cohesive oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility. Class depends on economic position.
  • Marx: - every means of production has its own social relations, employing class bourgeoisie, working class proletariat. Class is relational.
    • Contradictionary class locations: 2 classes doesnt adequately capture social world and many people fall in between these pure classes (eg self employed, managers).
  • Weber: Class members distinguishe d by similar commercial marketplace value via property/labor - Distinguished by property/lack of property
  • Marx is antagonistic and exploitive vs Weber is gradated and not relational
• Status Hierarchy System: based on social prestige.
  • Status determined by what society thonks of the lifestyle of the community to which you belong. Those without property can belong if they have same lifestyle. eg Professors discuss scholarly issues, teach classes and read. They have a certain status even though income varies. Status groups can be other than work eg leisure kind (skate puns) or membership in exclusive organization but tend to be work.
• Elite-Mass Dichotomy System: System /w Governing Elite, few leaders who broadly hold power.
  • Vilfredo Pareto in Mind and Society thinks +1
  • C Wright Mills thinks -1
  • Pareto:
    • Pareto Principle (small, cause large effect, 80/20)
    • Pareto believes in meritocracy
  • Mills: - Argues negative, neither natural/beneficial
    • 3 major institutional forces: Economic, Political, Military.
  • Pareto views elite status as reward for talent, Mills see unequalpower/rewards as determining position.
  • Pareto likes power centralization, Mills warns of dangers and consolidated decision making
  • Mills: coordination among elite entrenched is self increasing. Revolving door
• Socioeconomic Status: individuals position in stratified social order
• Upper Class, Middle Class, Poor
• Middle Class: nonmanual jobs, pay significantly more than poverty line. Definition Debated and expansive
  • Traditionally white collar workers + working class of individuals who work manually
  • Post WW2 led to enrichment of many manual workers

Global Inequality:

• globalization commonly cited
• inequalities through colonialism and unequal development
• some explanations geography / strength of social/political institutions

Social Reproduction vs Social Mobility:

• social mobility: movement between different positions iwithin a social stratification system
  • horizontal vs vertical
• structural mobility: inevitable due to changes in the economy
• exchange mobility: if we hold fixed the changing distribution of jobs, individuals trade jobs not 1-1 but in a way that balances out
• status attainment model: approach that ranks individuals by socioeconomic status, incl income and educational attainment and seeks to specify attributes characteristic of people who end up in more desirable occupations.sß

Chapter 6: Deviance + Crime

Sociologists: people either deviate or conform:

“Why do they deviate” group: personality type, differential association, structural strain, anomie, labeling.

“Why do they conform” group: subcultural, control.

social control: attempts by society to regulate people’s thoughts and behaviors in ways that limit or punish deviance ; negative/positive sanctions.

folkways: traditional behaviors (not formally sanctioned) formal sanctions: laws = negative sanctions

biological view (biological essentialist): cesare lombroso (1876) - “criminals are subhuman”. suggested physical characteristics. william sheldon 1940/1950

psych view: personality as a matter of socialization (deviance is failed socialization). 1967 - Dinitz + Reckless. Containment theory - deviance = impulse control

Deviance varies by cultural norms

• strain theory
• (x,y plane) normative theories of suicide

                             altruistic      
                                 |           
   social integration   anomic 		fatalistic    
                                 |           
                             egoistic        
                                               
                           social regulation 
  

• symbolic theories of deviance
  • labeling theory - stigma
  • broken windows theory of deviance

Crime:

• Street Crime
• White-collar
  • Corporate
• Reduction
  • Deterrence Theory of Crime Control
  • Goffman’s Total Institution
  • Foucalt on Punishment (reform the soul) - Panopticon
  • US Criminal Justice: balance b/w rehab + punishment - Rockefeller Drug Laws

L7

Conley Chapter 14

• capitalism is a thing

L6

Conley Chapter 13

• education system reinforces social/economic distinctions

L5

Conley Chapter 5

• dyad,triad. Dyads are most intimate
• Quantiative Aspects of Groups: Georg Simmel
• Triad roles: mediator, tertius gaudens (3rd member who benefits from contact/conflict bw other 2), Divide et impera (intentionally drives wedge)
• larger than a triad? Small groups, parties, large groups.
• Small group: face to face interaction, unifocal perspective, lack of formal arrangements, certain level of equality
• party: multifocal.
• large group: formal structure that mediates structure and status differentiation (eg professor and students)
• Charles Horton Cooley: primary/secondary groups.
• Primary: limited membership. intimate f2f relationships that strongly influence attitudes/ideals (eg family/friends)
• Secondary: impersonal, instrumental relationships. Means to an end. eg labor union
• Group Conformity.
• Solomon Asch experiments (1940s): which line longer
• in group ( powerful usu. majority ) vs out group (stigmatized oft. minority). Significance by ability to define normal vs abnormal
• reference group: “group that helps us understand .. relative position in society to other group”
• social network: set of relations/dyads held tgt by individuals
• tie: content of particular relationship
• narrative: set of stories in a set of ties (eg university)
• Embeddedness: “degree to which ties are reinforced through indirect paths within a social network”
• Strength of weak ties: “notion that relatively weak ties often turn out to be quite valuable because they yield new information”
• Structural hole: “gap between network clusters, or even two individuals, if those individuals (or clusters) have complementary resources”. (possibility of a tie)
• 6 deg of freedom (stanley milgram)
• case study: 4% of amish startups fail. social capital. everyone shops there and taboo on bankruptcy
• high school partner networks. spanning trees. “But the main rule that seemed to govern these relationships was “no cycles of four,” which means you do not date the ex of your ex’s current boyfriend or girlfriend. “.
• Organization: “any social network that is defined by a common purpose and has a boundary between its membership and the rest of the social world”
• Organizational culture: “shared beliefs and behaviors within a social group; often used interchangeably with corporate culture”
• Organizational structure: “the ways in which power and authority are distributed within an organization”
• interlocking directorates: “phenomenon whereby the members of corporate boards often sit on the boards of directors for multiple companies”. can create a power elite.
• Dimaggio + Powell: institutional isomorphism: why businesses that evolve in diff ways have similar org structures
• Isomorphism: “a constraining process that forces one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions”
• new institutionalism school: (of sociology): develop sociological view of institutions (vs economic)

Ferguson: Colvin, Descent Into Madness

• The New Mexico State Prison Riot
• inmate on inmate killings
• Changes 3/4 yr before riot
• turnover of state leadership; unaccountable administrators
• inconsistencies in security + discipline
• growing inmate violence
• new inmates: submit, snitch, or fight
• anglo vs chicano fights + fragmented society

Videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wFZ5Dbj8DA

• social group: collection of people who have something in common and who believe what they have in common is significant
• aggregate: people @ same place @ same time (eg central park at 3pm
• categories: particular kind of person across time and space. share characteristics ( eg race )
• primary (strong ties; group exists to be group eg family) vs secondary group (shared goal, eg company)
• group dynamics: how affect each other (indiv <-> groups)
• leadership types: instrumental (achieve goals) vs expressive (minimize conflict)
• leadership styles: authoritarian (orders), democratic (consensus), laisse faire (leave to function on own)
• group conformity:
• Milgram experiment: teacher and participant. keep administering shocks (even to deadly). Direct telling = non compliance but appeals to shared science group value = compliance.
• Group compliance: narrowing of thought, one right answer
• reference groups: groups you compare to
• groups vs size: bigger = more stable, less intimate. Coalitions also.
• homogenous group: better inward connections, heterogeneous group: better external connections

L4 - Exam

L3

Ferguson: Granfield, MAKING IT BY FAKING IT: Working-Class Students in an Elite Academic Environment

• they threw away previous things and adapted to environment in addition to forsaking previous beliefs about wanting to help their like kin. Also emphasizing their diverse background did not help in interviews - conformity was key here.

Conley Chapter 4

Socialization

• socialization: process by which you learn how to become a functioning member of society
• socialization: the process by which individuals internalize the values, beliefs, and norms of a given society and learn to function as members of that society.
  • limits of socializations when you’re in a new social situation (e.g. diff kind of party)
  • primary unit: family

Human Nature

• You need to bathroom but not where you can bathroom
• “Anna” Case Study: Socialization cannot happen after such long isolation; Theories of socialization inapplicable

Theories of Socialization

• Self: the individual identity of a person as perceived by that same person
  • Concept of self is a social process;
• I: one’s sense of agency, action, or powe
• Me: self as perceived as an object by the “I”; the self as one imagines others perceive one
• Cooley: Self emerges from being able to see ourselves as others do
• Mead: developed on Cooley; me is distinct
• Theory of social behavior: how others are likely to react to different situations
• Generalized other: internalized sense of the total expectations of others in a variety of settings

Agents of Socialization

• Generally families; not always parents -> children sometimes reverse
  • Family social class impacts how their children socialized
  • middle-class parents are more likely to engage in concerted cultivation with formal activities and reason with them over decisions to foster talents
  • Kids in less well-off families pend more time hanging out
  • Middle class kids are able to use logic and reason to support choices by mirroring parents explanations
  • Middle class kids discover confidence that comes achievements
• School
  • Teachers properly socialize you
  • All schools are not created equal
  • Prep schools link students into elite social networks
• Peers
  • Peer pressure
  • Adolescents are more open to friends advise them to parents
• Media
  • ongoing debate; e.g. sesame street: Educational programming for children who don’t have day care or preschool
• Adult Socialization
  • Ways in which or socialize as an adult. For example working at a restaurant you learn your responsibilities
  • Resocialization: The process by which one’s sense of social values and beliefs and norms are reengineered often deliberately through on intense social process that may take place in a total institution - e.g. living in a new country; or a coed college from a single sex high school; or if you lost completely your memory
• Total Institution
  • An institution in her 20s totally immersed in that controls all the basics of day-to-day life; No barriers exist between usual spheres of daily life and all activity that occurs in same place and under same single authority; e.g. prisons, boarding schools, college, army
  • Works by placing an immense physical and mental pressure and isolating them

Social Interaction

• Status: Recognizable social position that a individual occupies
• Role: Duties and behaviors expected to someone who holds a particular status
• Role Strain: Incompatibility among roles corresponding to a single status
• Role conflict: tension caused by competing demands between two or more rules pertaining to different statuses
• Status set: all the statuses one holds simultaneously
• Ascribed status: status into which one is born; involuntary status
• Achieved status: status into which one enters; voluntary status
• Master status: Status within a set that stands out
• Merton’s Role Theory: Acting within roles/people have roles.
  • Six types of role conflict (from Merton Sociological Ambivalence, pp. 8 - 12)
    1. Conflict within an individual’s status set
    2. Conflict within the role set
    3. Conflict of the multi-cultural
    4. Cultural conflict, i.e., between cultural values a. This is conflict within the cultural system
    5. Conflict between aspirations and opportunity (i.e., no chance to do what you have been taught you ought to)
    6. Conflict inherent within the role itself

Gender Roles

• Gender Roles: Behavioral norms assumes to accompany status as male or female
• West/Dimmerman argue gender status has power/significance Not captured by real theory
• Gender can constitute a master status
• Studies show people interact with babies differently depending on gender
• Larger world socializes boys and girls differently
• Socialization continues in high schools such as insults; Gender boundary policing can cause catastrophic effects

Social Construction of Reality

• Something is real meaningful or valuable when society tells us it is
• Childhood is the developmental stage was not always so and came after industrial times
• Teenagers became a Discrete social category after the extension of education during the 1950s
• Symbolic interactionism: Micro level theory and with shared meanings orientations and assumptions formed the basic motivations behind peoples actions
• Symbolic interactionism: How Things are socially constructed ( suggests how We interact with others have symbolic meaning meanings)
  • Three Basic Tenets
  • 1. Human beings act towards ideas concepts and values on the basis of meaning that they have for them
  • 1. Meetings are the products of social interactions in human society
  • 1. Meanings are modified and filtered through an interpretive process that each individual uses in dealing with outward signs
  • Useful for Understanding cultural differences and styles of social interaction

Dramaturgical Theory

• Erving Goffman: Language of theater as a paradigm to formally describe the ways in which we interact to maintain social order
• Dramaturgical Theory: View of social life as a theatrical performance in which we are all actors on metaphorical stages with roles scripts costumes and sets
• Morals are depression management
• Role as a student; professor handed out syllabus (prop) and give an outline of the class ( script) and lecture (performance). Talking about Batman would deviate from the script
• Important distinction between front stage and backstage
• Face: The esteem in which an individual is held by others
• Opening the start of an encounter; Closing: The end of any interaction; Civic inattention: Refraining from directly interacting with someone till an opening; Given gestures can signal a closing; Giving off gestures can unconsciously signal true feelings.
• In Breaches people work hard to repair the mistake so everyone can move forward
• Goal of social interaction is to Make a good impressionAnd works to ensure that others believe they’re also making a good impression

Ethnomethodology

• Harold Garfinkel (1950/60)
• Literally “the methods of the people”; approach to studying human interaction focusing on the ways we make sense of our World, Convey this understanding to others and produce a shared social order
• Famous for breaching experiments: what happens when breaching social norms.

New Technologies: What How’s the Internet Done to interaction?

• new social situations without established social norms
• eg online chat rooms: new lexicon but difficult to deploy closing brackets
• Redefining the term stealing

Conclusion

• nature versus nurture, generally sociologists: nurture
• Socialization helps understand how babies become people who attend college

L2

Ferguson: Haunani-Kay Trask, Lovely Hula Hands

“Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture”

• Haiwaiians have less rights than American Indians
• American’s don’t know where Hawaii is but feel entitled to use it and the destruction of Hawaiian land is by MNCs
• Prostitution is used as an analytic category/metaphor to convey the degradation of Hawaiian culture and people under tourism

Author will examine: 1) homeland incl lands,fisheries,sea,skies 2) language and dance 3) familial relationships 4) women

• In Hawaii there is a younger sibling/elder sibling + chief<-> villagers symbiosism.
• Aloha is a cultural feeling and practice that works b/w the people and their land
• Hawaiian language was banned by Americans and only now is making a resurgency (and dance).
• Hawaiian values are different than those of the traditional west and that annoys many visitors (e.g. shared property and children and open relationships).
• In contrast the American relationship of people to land is exploitative
• Tourism is the only job propoganda is spread;
• “Our language, dance, young poeple and customs of eating are used to ensnare tourists … for $39.95”.
• Hawaiians are required to be complicit or face unemployment and are frequently forced to leave Hawaii as a result.

Chapter 3 Conley Reading

3 Culture and Media

• Does culture or media come first?
• Culture = Human – Nature, Culture = (Superior) Man – (Inferior) Man, Culture = Man – Machine
  • Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) redefined culture as the pursuit of perfection and broad knowledge of the world in contrast to narrow self-centeredness and material gain.

< partly done >

Videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGrVhM_Gi8k

• culture: non-material objects (thoughts,action,language,values…) + objects to form way of life
  • material culture: syntactic things around you (e.g. street signs)
  • nonmaterial culture: semantic meaning assigned + intangibles. e.g. red = stop
• Societal Sanctions: folkways, mores, taboos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV50AV7-Iwc

• Social Class: Low vs High Culture.
  • Low/Popular Culture: Behaviors/Ideas that are Popular
  • High Culture: Culture popular with society elite
  • Mainstream Culture: cultural patterns broadly aligned with society’s cultural ideas + values - Subculture: cultural patterns that set apart of population segment; e.g. hipsters
  • Counterculture: Pushback on mainstream to change how society functions
  • Cultural Lag: some things take time; e.g. summer vacation (from summer harvest origins)
  • Cultural Diffusion: culture spreads
• Ethnocentrism: judging one culture by the standards of another (e.g. euro/afrocentrism vs multiculturialism)
  • Structural Functionalist: melting pot of culture forms structure -> good
  • Conflict Theorist: prioritizing a culture = inequalities + disenfranchisement -> bad
  • Symbolic Interactionists: society is about shared reality/culture created

L1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbTt_ySTjaY

• Theoretical Paradigms:
  • Structural Functionalism (Emilie Durkheim): Parts (social structures) work together
  • Conflict Theory: Struggle over scarcity - 1st one: Class conflict (Karl Marx): Means of Production vs Labor; Marx thought central conflict and source of inequality
    • Race-Conflict (WEB DuBois): Conflict b/w difference racial + ethnic groups
    • Gender-Conflic Theory: Social inequalities b/w women + men
  • Symbolic Interactionism (Max Weber): Verstehen (understanding); Focus on individual social situations + their meaning
• Social Functions: manifest (obvious) + latent (unintended) functions
• Social Dysfunction: disrupts society (e.g. technology)
• Macro vs Micro
• 3 Major Paradigms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnCJU6PaCio

• See the strange in the familiar, study society, how sociology differentiates itself, what sociology can do

Quotes/Paraphrases from Conley Book: https://www.amazon.com/You-May-Ask-Yourself-Introduction-dp-039391299X/dp/039391299X & Ferguson Reader: https://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Social-Landscape-Readings-Sociology/dp/150636828X