Introduction to gender and politics

Celis, K, Kantula, J., Waylon, G., &Weyldon, S. L. (2013). Introduction: Gender and politics: A gendered world, a gendered
discipline - Oxford Handbooks Online. Retrieved from:
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199751457.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199751457-e-34?print=pdf

Key concepts relevant to the study of gender and politics are described in the succeeding
paragraphs. The discussion of the key terms will be supplemented by the discussions of the same
concepts and of other terms by the resource persons in the two episodes of GENDER TALKS.
After reading this material and watching the two videos, you should be able to:
a. reflect on the application of these concepts in understanding your personal
experience of having been gendered by the society
b. consider the details of a given material for analysis in making one’s opinion

Key Concepts to Understand:

androcentrism gender analysis gender politics intersectionality
patriarchy personal is the political private sphere public sphere sexism
sexualitysexual orientation stereotypes

xxx Virginia Sapiro (1981) suggests, part of the reason for the discipline’s gender blindness lies in
the low numbers of womenin the discipline. For her, the structural position of women reproduces
the androcentric biases of the discipline. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the discipline’s
categoriesand methods were developed by privileged men to consider those issues of concern
tothem. This domination is reflected in the very narrow and ideological definitions of whatcounts
as politics on which the Anglo-American disciplines have traditionally been based.

Politics, narrowly construed, is the activity of government or governing. Indeed, the word
politics in the original Greek was used by Aristotle to connote those questions that pertained to
the operation of the polis, the political community. The distinctive feature of politics is its public
or general nature, the way it affects the community as a whole as distinct from private matters
(Arendt 1958; Wolin 1960). Politics is also seen as the study of power, and sometimes by extension
the study of the powerful. But some broader definitions of politics have also had a long
provenance in political science: Dahl (1984, 9–10)defined politics as relating to power and political
systems as “any persistent pattern ofhuman relationships that involves, to a significant extent,
control, influence, power or authority.” Others connect politics fundamentally to distributions, as
in “who gets what, where, when and how” or the authoritative allocation of value (Easton 1953).

The traditional focus on politics as the study of the machinery of government and
electoral politics or on political elites and formal institutions rendered women and gender
invisible in spite of their foundational importance for building the welfare state and for
constructing postcolonial nations, for the conduct of war and terrorism, and for maintaining
social and economic privilege more generally. The roots of these core assumptions about what
constitutes politics in (p. 7) the Anglo-American tradition can be traced to the workof political
theorists like John Locke, who based many of their ideas on the analytical separation of the
public and the private spheres. The Anglo-American disciplines took up thiswidely accepted (if
mistaken) view of the transcultural and transhistorical universality ofthe public–private split,
namely, that citizens or heads of household (for which one should read men) were the ones who were
active(and who should be active)in the public sphere. This subsumed women (and also children) into the
household or family within aprivate sphere where “every man’s home is his castle” and in which
he can do as hepleases free from the interference of the state (Pateman 1983). This analytical
exclusionof women from the public sphere created politics as a male sphere from which women
were legitimately excluded as political subjects. In turn, at least when it came to women,the
private sphere was seen as lying outside the political arena and therefore did not form part of
the legitimate subject matter of the discipline. But regulation of women’s access to abortion,
sexuality, and male violence against female relatives in the family wasthen, as now, seen as a
legitimate area of action for governments, revealing the inconsistency and gender bias that
undergirds the ideology of separate spheres.

The notion of a separation of the public and private spheres persists today. Its reflection
(even if it remains partial and contested) in many legal systems around the world is remarkable given the
range of family and societal forms that characterize the world’s cultures. In many places,
assumptions about women and men and their respective roles inthe public and private spheres
still affect issues, from who governs to who decides intimate matters such as sexuality and
childbearing. It affects the ways economies are structured and economic value—seen as
created in the productive public sphere and not in the reproductive private sphere—is
calculated. It also continues to affect what counts as politics and the political, still predominantly
high politics in the public sphere; who is seen asa suitable person to be involved in politics; and
what are appropriate issues—often narrowly defined—that exclude certain activities and actors
and embody particular notions ofmasculinity and femininity. These ideas have again affected
what has been deemed suitable subject matter for the academic discipline of politics.

Even though some of the conventional definitions of politics would seem to allow for the
study of a broader range of phenomena, it was feminists who pushed for a definition ofpolitics
that encompassed the personal and the private. Indeed, a rallying cry for manyfeminists has
been that the personal is the political. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett (1968, 23) defines politics
as “power structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by
another.” Enloe (1996) points out that study of power must include not only those perceived as
the “powerful” but also all those involved in the realization of power and influence for those at
the top. The powerful (whether bureaucratically, economically, or socially powerful) depend on the everyday,
regularized activities of others to make their decisions (or nondecisions) realities. And Young (1990)
critiquesthese analytic approaches that focus on distributions, arguing that they obscure the
power dynamics that produce these distributions, thereby depoliticizing them. So
feministsbrought the personal and the private into the study of the political, and they have also
drawn attention to the politics of knowledge production(and structures of production andreproduction more
generally),meaning, and identity.

Key Concepts:

xxx, statuses and roles allow us to organizeour lives in consistent, predictable ways. In
combination with established norms,they prescribe our behavior and ease interaction with
people who occupy different social statuses, whether we know these people or not. xxx: When
normative role behavior becomes toorigidly defined, our freedom of action is often
compromised. These rigid definitionsare associated with the development of stereotypes—
oversimplified conceptions that people who occupy the same status group share certain traits
they have in common.

Although stereotypes can include positive traits, they most often consistof negative ones
that are then used to justify discrimination against members of agiven group. The statuses of
male and female are often stereotyped according tothe traits they are assumed to possess by
virtue of their biological makeup. Womenare stereotyped as flighty and unreliable because they
possess uncontrollable raginghormones that fuel unpredictable emotional outbursts. The
assignment of negativestereotypes can result in sexism, the belief that the status of female is
inferior to the status of male. Males are not immune to the negative consequences of sexism,but
females are more likely to experience it because the status sets they occupy aremore
stigmatized than those occupied by males. Compared to males, for example,females are more
likely to occupy statuses inside and outside their homes that areassociated with less power, less
prestige, and less pay or no pay. Beliefs about inferiority due to biology are reinforced and then
used to justify discrimination directed toward females.

Sexism is perpetuated by systems of patriarchy, male-dominated social structures

leading to the oppression of women. Patriarchy, by definition, exhibitsandrocentrism—male-
centered norms operating throughout all social institutions that become the standard to which all
persons adhere. Sexism is reinforced whenpatriarchy and androcentrism combine to perpetuate
beliefs that gender roles are biologically determined and therefore unalterable. For example,
throughout thedeveloping world, beliefs about a woman’s biological unsuitability for other
thandomestic roles have restricted opportunities for education and literacy. These restrictions
have made men the guardians of what has been written, disseminated,and interpreted
regarding gender and the placement of men and women in society.

Until recently, history has been recorded from an androcentric perspective that ignored
the other half of humanity xxx. This perspective has perpetuated thebelief that because
patriarchy is an inevitable, inescapable fact of history, strugglesfor gender equality are doomed
to failure. xxx

Distinguishing Sex and Gender

xxx. In sociology, these terms are now fairly standardized to refer to different content
areas. Sexrefers to the biological characteristics distinguishing male and female. This definition
emphasizes male and female differences in chromosomes, anatomy, hormones,reproductive
systems, and other physiological components. Gender refers to thosesocial, cultural, and
psychological traits linked to males and females through particular social contexts. Sex makes
us male or female; gender makes us masculine orfeminine. Sex is an ascribed status because a
person is born with it, but gender is an achieved status because it must be learned.

This relatively simple distinction masks a number of problems associatedwith its usage.
It implies that all people can be conveniently placed into unambiguous either-or categories.
Certainly, the ascribed status of sex is lesslikely to be altered than the achieved status of
gender. Some people believe,however, that they were born with the “wrong” body and are
willing to undergomajor surgery to make their gender identity consistent with their biological sex.

Sexual orientation, the preference for sexual partners of one gender (sex) or the other,
also varies. People who experience sexual pleasure with members oftheir own sex are likely to
consider themselves masculine or feminine accordingto gender norms. Others are born with
ambiguous sex characteristics and maybe assigned one sex at birth but develop a different
identity related to gender.Some cultures allow people to move freely between genders,
regardless of theirbiological sex.

(Handbook%20of%20the%20Sociology%20of%20Gender%20by%20Barbara%20J.%20Risman,%20Carissa%20M.%20F
royum,%20William%20J.%20Scarborough%20(z-lib.org).pdf)

Lorber’s (1994) theory ofgender as an institution provided a comprehensive overview of

how gender is socially constructed through social structures, interactional processes, and
patterns in the distribution of rewards and constraints.
 Intersectionality as a conceptualframework was introduced to mainstream social
sciences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Legalscholar Crenshaw (1989) coined the term
“intersectionality” to describe how the forms ofdiscrimination experienced by black women were
not reducible to either gender or race discrimination, but of a different type characterized by
their interrelation. For sociologists, however,the most influential introduction tointersectionality
was Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought originally published in 1990.

In this book, Collins illustrated how the perspectives of black women have been shaped by
their diverse positions at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. By virtue
ofexperiencing multiple oppressions, a black feminist standpoint is able to observe how multiple
systems of inequality, such as race and gender, constitute a matrix of domination. Within the
matrix, inequalities are interrelated and co-construct one another to maintain broad patterns of
opportunity and disadvantage.

A Filipino explanation of this concept can be accessed in this podcast at:

https://networks.upou.edu.ph/27772/ano-ang-intersectionality/

In summary, watch the two films listed below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLT9DbJcelcGENDER TALKS | Episode 01:

Kahulugan ng Kasarian(46:41). The panel talks about the meaning of gender, gender quota vis-à-
vis gender equality, gender-based discrimination, gender-based violence, institutions (e.g.
church, media) that strengthen gender bias, gender gaps in employment as well as in sports,
sexualization of the body, among others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V-fEOzKwmIGENDER TALKS | Episode 02:

Kahulugan ng Seksuwalidad(45:34). The resource persons talk about the meaning and fluidity
(performativity or agency) of sexuality, heteronormativity and heterosexuality, metrosexual,
LGBTQ vs. SOGEI, intersectionality, sexual harassment, and gender norms.