sex gender
March 9 lecture -Introduction: Gender: Can be understood as the meanings that a particular society gives to the physical or biological traits that differentiate males and females. ... Gender constructs and expectations can be unlearned and modified, although the process can be quite difficult. ... Sex is biologically determined. March 16 lecture: Gender, Sex & Anthropology: a brief history Roots of North American Women’s Movements as an example of how feminist anthropology contributed to sex and gender theories -narrow gender expectations were the rules well into the 1970s. ... -Freidan identified narrow societal definitions of gender roles that confined women to be the home as the reason behind many women’s dissatisfaction. ... For the first time, disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and history, which traditionally had ignored the importance of gender, began to recognize the inattention given women in traditional social science investigations. ... -When similar insights about gender roles and inequality emerged in the 1970s due to influences from the women’s movement, the sub-discipline of feminist anthropology was born. It arose as a special sub-field within anthropology, one committed to understanding systems of gender oppression, to analyzing forces of exclusion, and to working for social change. ... -Women anthropologists, such as Phyllis Kaberry, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Margaret Mead contributed to the study of gender in anthropology. In particular, Mead popularized anthropology and made significant contributions to the study of gender. She was the first to debunk simplistic claims about the biological causes of sex differences with ethnographies such as Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Cultures (1935). -While the work of some of these women was well regarded by many of their colleagues, it was not considered central to anthropology until feminist anthropologists of the 1970s established gender as pivotal to anthropological concerns and reclaimed the writing of these foremothers as significants. ... -In doing so, they began to uncover a wide range of variation in gender roles, in the value placed on activities performed by men and women, and in men’s and women’s access to important societal resources. -They began to question the assumption about gender differences that underpinned women’s social inequality in their own society. ... -Feminist anthropologists used the new cross-cultural data they were producing not only to correct the ethnographic record but also to question biological determinist accounts of gender. They argued that variation in the roles and status of men and women uncovered by their studies suggested that gender might not be determined by biology. -The focus on gender as a cultural construct rather than as a biological certainty did not mean, however, there was agreement among all feminist anthropologists about how best to conceptualize and understand gender roles and inequality. ... -Despite differences among researchers, early feminist anthropologists did agree on one thing: that it was essential to take gender into account when attempting to understand how a society operates or how an individual identity and life experiences are shaped. -This commitment to gender as a category of analysis has been complicated somewhat by recent studies in feminist anthropology. March 23 Spring Break March 30: Sex & Gender: Is it Nature, Nurture, Neither, or Both? Defining gender as a cultural construct suggests that gender is largely due to nurture or cultural practices and ideas, not to nature or biological causes. This nurture position is, however, somewhat controversial in everyday North American society and also within some academic fields because of the widespread belief that gender behaviors are inborn. When you hear clichés like “boys will be boys” or “she does that just like a woman,” that assumption is usually that gender behaviors are the result of innate causes, not the result of cultural interpretations that are learned by members of a society. ... Today, it is not brain size but the way men and women use their brains that supposedly explains gender differences in capabilities and behavior. ... Furthermore, the brain researchers admit that they do not know what the gender difference in neural firing in the brain mean. ... Acceptance of untested assumptions about gender is particularly appealing today because of the confusing and contradictory messages about gender with which the media bombarded us daily. Are women sex objects or competent members of the workplace? ... April 6: Gender Difference & Inequality: Universal or not? ... This interest in difference is so deeply embedded in North American society that suggesting that gender similarities might be as significant and interesting an area of research as gender differences tends to strike most people as absurd.