Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Stevi Jackson
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Управление, подбор персонала
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509555253
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number of feminist academics began focusing our attention on the social status of women as a social group, though it is important to note that there was some feminist sociological work on sex roles well before this time (see Ch. 3.4). There were two particularly influential contributions that established gender as a critical concept. The first of these was Ann Oakley’s book Sex, Gender and Society (1972), in which she argued strongly for gender to be understood as a matter of culture – with historical and cultural variations – rather than as a simple matter of biology. Following this, Gayle Rubin’s essay ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’ (1975) drew upon anthropological studies to describe how the social organization of marriage, kinship and reproduction gave rise to ‘sex/gender systems’, again making it plain that the social position of men and women, and their hierarchical relationship, could not be reduced to biological sex.

      Other sociologists at that time began to produce research and theory on women’s social situation, addressing such issues as housework, employment, sexual exploitation, as well as the overall structure of male- dominated or patriarchal society. Central to all such work was the development of the idea of gender as a sociological concept. Moreover, linked to this conceptualization of gender was an identification of sexuality as a key dimension of gender inequalities, and an increasing awareness that the essentialist sex–gender system privileges heterosexuality over homosexuality and other nonreproductive behaviours.

      2.1 The Feminine Mystique and Liberal Feminism

      Although liberal or equal rights feminism had a long tradition of seeking legal reforms to promote equal opportunities for women, in this period it began to be more sociological in its framing. For example, in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan put forward a radical argument that middle- class women were ensnared in an ideological construction of femininity which had nothing to do with their biology or innate ‘natures’, and everything to do with subordinating women as domestic servants. So the post- Second World War advent of domestic labour- saving devices (like the vacuum cleaner and dishwasher) were not helping women to expand their role beyond domesticity, but rather enshrining this position by marketing the goods to women as routes to more leisure time for them, rather than opportunities for them to enter education and the labour market. Friedan’s text became an early classic of second wave feminism, in large part because she provides a wide- ranging analysis of how the ideology of the ‘feminine mystique’ is sustained by social institutions such as the media, churches and the family (though she did not use the term ‘gender’). Thus, even liberal feminists were acknowledging and contributing to a more sociological analysis of why and how women are subordinated by widening their gaze to include economic and educational resources and the beliefs that sustained particular definitions of masculinity and femininity. Friedan was a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), America’s most prominent liberal feminist political action group (see note 8). Their ‘Bill of Rights’, which was adopted at NOW’s first national conference, in Washington, DC, in 1967, focused primarily on equal rights measures:

      1 Equal Rights Constitutional Amendment.

      2 Enforce Law Banning Sex Discrimination in Employment.

      3 Maternity Leave Rights in Employment and in Social Security Benefits.

      4 Tax Deduction for Home and Child Care Expenses for Working Parents.

      5 Child Day Care Centers.

      6 Equal and Unsegregated Education.

      7 Equal Job Training Opportunities and Allowances for Women in Poverty.

      8 The Right of Women to Control Their Reproductive Lives.

      (Morgan, 1970: 512)

      First and foremost, this manifesto discusses how laws can provide equal rights to redress gender discrimination. But, crucially, discrimination is seen as social; as a general set of beliefs and ideas about women which have become institutionalized – through education, the tax system, medical systems and in family structures. Furthermore, this Bill of Rights also acknowledges the importance of other social bases of gender inequality, such as women’s economic position, racial identities and child- care responsibilities. Indeed, this Bill of Rights makes it plain that both ideological beliefs in women’s inferiority and other social bases of inequality, such as class, need to be challenged.

      Your World: What are the contemporary expectations of femininity, masculinity and domesticity in your culture?

      Going several steps further than liberal feminism, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1971) detailed the multi- dimensional social aspects of male domination, or what she termed ‘patriarchy’. Millett’s was a theoretical argument developed from her analysis of literature, focusing on contemporary American male novelists’ depictions of sex. She took the broad position that literature reflected the wider cultural meanings circulating in the society of its time, and her argument was that these literary examples illustrated women’s subordination through the stories that the authors created and the language they used. For example, she says of the ‘four- letter’ ‘c’ word that reduces a woman to her vagina:

      Two ideas strike me – that the four- letter word derives from a puritanical tradition which is vigorously anti- sexual, seeing the act as dirty, etc. This in turn derives from a conviction that the female is sex and therefore both dirty and inferior to the intellectual and rational, and therefore masculine, ‘higher nature’ of humanity. The error is not a matter of language but of attitude … the study of meaning leads us to understand the motives language institutionalizes. (Millett, 1971: 325)