WOMAN, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

DAY 1 – BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM VS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

DAY 2- GENDER THEORIES
Discussion questions from Week 1: (1) What micro or macro level social structure
played the strongest role in socialization process relating to your own self-
identification of your ‘Gender identity’ or (2) speak to what social structure you can
identify are strong socializing agents in your overall understanding of gender identity?

 Macro level - religion > rituals or practices > sacrament of marriage (traditional
gender roles)
 Family unit (micro) > parenting (traditional parenting styles informed by gender
of children > extracurricular informed by traditional gender roles
*HETERNORMATIVE*
 EDUCATIONAL/SCHOOL (MICRO AND MACRO) - THINK SYMBOLIC
INTERACTIONIST) STRUCTURA LEVEL SUCH AS IDENTIFY DURING ENROLLMENT
(MACRO VS (DYNAMICS IN CLASSROOM (MICRO)
 MASS MEDIA (MACRO) - SOCIAL MEDIA (MICRO) REPRESENTATION OF GENDER
- INFORMS HOW WE UNDERSTOOD OUR OWN IDENTITY AND OTHERS
DAY 3 – SOCIOLOGY THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
->Funcionalist (Durkheim, Parsons…)

 Organized functional gender roles

 Parsons: separated gender roles that complemented themselves, woman and
men complement each other. He is based on the nuclear family and the division
of labor of midclass white America from the 1940 and 50s
->Conflict (Marx, Dahrendorf)

 Patriarchy
 Imbalance of power linked to gender
->Symbolic Interactionist (Mead, Cooley…)

 Conception of “doing gender” instead of “having gender”

 Concept of the “gender identity”
 Focus on macro level
->Postmodernist (Foucault, Butler…)
->Other paradigms related to gender
->Liberal Feminism
->Socialist Feminism
->Radical Feminism
->Chapter 1. Review
->Confirmation bias (understanding of gender due to our ideological preconceptions)
Echo chamber / epistemic bubble (by algorithms) -> our theories of gender can help to
remove this biases / blinders points
->Sociological Imagination: transform a personal issue to a public issue (understand the
personal as political or the microlevel issues as connected to the macrolevel) ->
emergency of consciousness groups of the 60s and 70s)

 Biography
 History
 Current social context

->Simone de Beauvoir. Examples of the Women as the Otherness of Men

CLASS 09/14
Cross-culturally

 Women are secondary in relation to man -> thus “other” or “objectification”

o Politics of the eye (perception: examples in films)
 “To become a woman, not to be born one”
 Symbolic interactionism: The eye (social expectation) vs the me (self-agency)
o Glassing cell (?): my identity is dependent upon me and upon how the
others see me, which actually shapes how I see myself
Dubois: doble consciousness, the “veil”: it seems that I can know that people is looking
/ speaking at me through one veil (gender, race…). Ex: if you are black, they see you
only like that

Research Question:

 Independent variable
 Dependent variable
 Target Population
 Geographic location and time period

CLASS 19/09
Stonewall (1968) – Personal is political
De-stigma (demedicalize, Foucault)
Theory: challenges / changes meanings and ideas -> social change
Postmodernism (Foucault and Butler): decentralized power, intersectional, multiple
“truths”
Queer Theory (José Muñoz – The Queer Utopia (need of new language etc), Butler)

CLASS 10/17
->Rape Culture: environment / context where sexual violence is prevalent and
normalized (microaggressions, public discourses)

CLASS 10/19
->Gender neutral clothing (tries to dismantle the binary) vs binary reversal (reinforces
the binary but reverse it, femmes use masc clothes, ex: female pants suit)
->How does “dress” or fashion serve to encourage self-agency? You can decide if you
comply or not with the social norms, in the regards of clothing, which affects how we
communicate our gender (fashion as gender expression)
->la JOSEFA ha explicado lo que es CAMP lol