SEX, GENDER, AND SOCIETY - Social and cultural processes make them different.

–Social
Sex-gender System
- Women and men relate to each other in culturally specified
ways.
- Defines how males and females become men and women
- Allocates specific tasks and roles to women and men on the basis
of their gender
- Fixes the parameters of approved sexual procreative behavior
- Sets the tone of gender-based social relations and social worlds
- Composed of many related parts with a fundamental coherence
- Contains within it dissidence and contradiction
Social Systems
- Neither static nor unchanging
- Engaged in an ongoing interaction with other systems
Structures
- Shape people’s existence as member s of institutions, as
articulators of culture, as groups differentiated by sex, age, color
and ethnicity and as active participants of social collectives and
nations.
- Shape people’s lives
Sex vs. gender
- Differ in biology, psychological dispositions, social behavior.
- Except for biological differences between women and men are
social constructs
o Created by women and men themselves
o Matter of culture
o Gender
- Social construction of gender
 Interplay of biology and culture
 Biological females and male become women and
men, feminine and masculine through culture
- Gender differences are natural and inherent --- this belief is fake
sciences
- Belief in differences in social roles and social efficiency ---
biological sex as the necessary and sole cause of behavioral
variations between women and men
- Women and men --- believed to perform roles and carry out tasks
A search for origins
- History – shows the variability of sex-gender systems in time
and space.
- Social relations between women and men have not been equal
- Men – had greater and more direct access to social resources
- Social transformation --- always situated in a specified time and
space
o Three prominent
 Characteristics of gender organization in early
human society
 Formation of the state
 Origins and effects of modern capitalism
 Colonization
 + the 2nd and 3rd were mediated for many
countries by the fourth conjuncture
Early Human society
- Flexibility of gender roles – social organization of foraging
societies
- Male dominance may have emerged from the first social
division of labor.
- Women’s reproductive role --- responsible for the daily
subsistence of both women and men, young and old.
- Female productivity – precondition for male productivity
- Men’s appropriation of nature – closely linked to the invention
and control of certain technology.
- Women provided the daily staple food through agriculture and
agricultural tools.
 - Men provided food (meat) through hunting and use of hunting - Capitalism – built upon the diverse roots of sexual hierarchy
technology - Capitalist process in underdeveloped countries – fundamentally
- Ecological-technological explanation --- gender hierarchy shaped by colonization and imperialism.
appears to have developed from the division between gathering
Perspective
and hunting.
- May have originated from nature of hunting itself --- aggressive - The position of women in political economy is structured by a
act double set of relations
- Production argument – traces the origins of the subjection of o Relationship to men
women to be the transition to sedentary agriculture and the o Position in the economic organization of society
production of surplus, made possible by a regular cultivation, - Gender-shifts in the allocation of work responsibilities are
which led to the formation of social classes. connected to changes in property relations and women and
- Women as food gatherers to primitive agriculturalist men’s position in the economy.
o bearers of next generation - Three domains of social and economic life: ideology, sexuality,
o principal producers of food material world
- political reorganization – precipitated the subordination of - Conscious keeps together economic, political, and social life.
women
State societies and colonization
- Formalization of the state --- crystallization of class and gender
differentiation.
- Politics and gender in kin-based groups
o It was within kinship-based groups that women’s
subordination already seemed to occur.
- Cosmological organization
o Kin based political organization were legitimate by
religious and cosmological systems
- Intensive warfare
o Kinship structures were deeply affected as men were
conscripted under conditions of intensive and continued
warfare.
- Trading system
o Marriage systems are rearrange in order to reproduce
trading and political alliances.

The effects of capitalism


Wittig: One is not born a woman
- A material feminist approach to women’s oppression destroys
the ideas that women are a natural group.
o A racial group of special kind, a group perceived as
natural, a group of men considered as materially specific
in their bodies.
- Lesbian society – destroys pragmatically reveals that the
division from men of which women have been the object is a
political one and shows that we have been ideologically rebuilt
into a natural group.
- Feminists and lesbian-feminists still believe that the basis of
women’s oppression in biological as well as historical.
- Simone de Beauvoir --- One is not born, but becomes a woman.
No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the
figure that the human female presents in society: is civilization
as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between
male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
- Matriarchy is no less heterosexual than patriarchy: it is only the
sex of oppressor that changes.
- Female oppression holds onto the idea that the capacity to give
birth (biology) is what defines a woman.
- Men and women have always existed.
- A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the
cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the marks imposed
by oppressor: the “myth of woman,” plus its material effects and
manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of
women.
- Colette Guillaumin --- before the socioeconomic reality of black
slavery, the concept of race did not exist.
- Race --- now considered as immediate give, sensible given,
physical features, belonging to a natural order.
- Tweedledum and Tweedledee
- The refusal to become or remain heterosexual always meant to
refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not.
- Feminist --- “femme,” “woman,” and means: someone whi
fights for women.
o To affirm that our movement had a history and to
emphasize the political link with the old feminist
movement.
- Women scholars scientifically destroyed this theory (female
oppressions).
- Once the class “men” disappears, “women” as a class will also
disappear.
- Woman --- not each of us, but the political and ideological
formation which negates “women” (the products of relation of
exploitation).
o The term is there to confuse us, to the reality of women.
- Marxist theory --- does not allow women any more than other
classes of oppresses people to constitute themselves as historical
subjects, because Marxism does not take into account the act that
a class also consist of individuals one by one.
- Consciousness of oppression is not only a reaction to fight
against oppression.
o Also the whole conceptual reevaluation of the social
world, its whole reorganization with new concepts from
point of view of oppression.
- Materialism and subjectivity have always been mutually
exclusive.
- What makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a
relation that we have previously called, servitude, a relation
which implies personal and physical obligation as well as
economic obligation, a relation which lesbians escape by
refusing to become or to stay heterosexual.
- Destruction of the class of women can be accomplished only by
the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is
based on the oppression of women by men and which produces
the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this
oppression.