Gender and Social Stratification

1
Gender and Social Stratification
2
Gender and Anthropology

• interest in hierarchical relations between men
  and women has been a feature of anthropology
  since its earliest days
• 19th century evolutionists and their explanations
  for the rise of culture
• promiscuous horde gives way to socially organized
  marriage and kinship, for example

3
Gender and Anthropology

• anthropology of gender has been key in
  establishing that sexual inequality is not a
  biological fact but instead and cultural and
  historical one

4
development of the study of sex, sexuality and
gender in anthropology

• Anthropology of Women early 1970's attention to
  the lack of women in standard ethnographies
• Anthropology of Gender challenged the basis for
  understanding social roles of male and female
• Feminist Anthropology challenged the biological
  basis of sex and sexuality
• and the foundations of anthropology as it had
  been done

5
SEX, SEXUALITY, GENDER

• not the same thing
• all societies distinguish between males and
  females
• a very few societies recognize a third, sexually
  intermediate category

6
SEX

• differences in biology
• Socially culturally marked
• the body is "simultaneously a physical and
  symbolic artifact, both naturally and culturally
  produced, anchored in a particular historical
  moment" (Scheper-Hughes Lock)

7
The Four Bodies

• Individual body
• The social body
• The body politic
• The mindful body

8
The Individual Body

• lived experience of the body-self, body, mind,
  matter, psyche, soul

9
The Social Body

• representational uses of the body as a natural
  symbol with which to think about nature, society,
  culture

10
The Body Politic

• regulation, surveillance, control of bodies
  (individual collective) in reproduction
  sexuality, in work leisure, in sickness other
  forms of deviance

11
The Mindful Body

• the most immediate, the proximate terrain where
  social truths and social contradictions are
  played out
• a locus of personal and social resistance,
  creativity, and struggle
• emotions form the mediatrix between the
  individual, social and political body, unified
  through the concept of the 'mindful body.'

12
SEXUALITY (reproduction)

• all societies regulate sexuality
• lots of variation cross-culturally
• degree of restrictiveness not always consistent
  through life span
• adolescence vs. adulthood
• Varieties of normative sexual orientation
• Heterosexual, homosexual, transexual
• Sexuality in societies change over time

13
GENDER

• GENDER - the cultural construction of male
  female characteristics
• vs. the biological nature of men women
• SEX differences are biological - GENDER
  differences are cultural
• behavioral attitudinal differences from social
  cultural rather than biological point of view

14
GENDER ROLES, STEREOTYPES, STRATIFICATION

• gender roles - tasks activities that a culture
  assigns to sexes
• gender stereotypes - oversimplified strongly held
  ideas about the characteristics of men women
  third sex-third gender
• gender stratification - unequal distribution of
  rewards (socially valued resources, power,
  prestige, personal freedom) between men women
  reflecting their position in the social hierarchy

15
universals versus particulars

• universal subordination of women is often cited
  as one of the true cross-cultural universals, a
  pan-cultural fact
• Engels called it the world historical defeat of
  women
• even so the particulars of womens roles,
  statuses, power, and value differ tremendously by
  culture

16
Friedl and Leacock argument

• variation among foragers
• male dominance is based on exchange, public
  exchange
• versus that exchanged privately by women
• Exchange of scarce resources in egalitarian
  societies, gender stratification, and universal
  subordination of women

17
DOMESTIC - PUBLIC DICHOTOMY (M. Rosaldo)

• opposition between domestic (reproduction)
  public (production) provides the basis of a
  framework necessary to identify and explore the
  place of male female in psycho, cultural,
  social and economic aspects of life
• degree to which the contrast between public
  domestic (private) sphere is drawn promotes
  gender stratification-rewards, prestige, power

18
domestic sphere

• clearly drawn in societies where division of
  labor encompasses more than age sex
  differentiation (complex societies)
• inequality in material rewards for labor
• less clearly drawn in societies where division of
  labor beyond age sex is minimal (egalitarian)
• rewards are highly valued social roles with
  prestige rather than material goods

19
Domestic Public Spheres

• mobility gender
• Domestic public dichotomy not only
  distinguishes activities, but culturally encodes
  space

20
M. Rosaldo and the Ilongot of the Philippines

• positive cultural value placed adventure, travel,
  knowledge of experience with the outside world
• Ilongot men as headhunters visited distant
  places, amassed experiences returned to express
  their knowledge-receive acclaim
• Ilongot women - these activities not available to
  them

21
Mobility, Public Domestic (Private), and Gender
Straitification

• mobility not just through geographic space but
  social space (forms of association)
• veiling Islamic women
• factory women in Malaysia
• US Canada - WW2 factory women for war effort
• 1960s, 70s, 80s - changing gender composition of
  economy

22
persistence of dualisms in ideologies of gender

• a particular view of men and women as opposite
  kinds of creatures both biologically and
  culturally
• nature/culture
• domestic/public
• reproduction/production

23
Reproduction and Social Roles

• roles - those minimal institutions and modes of
  activity that are organized immediately around
  one or more mothers and their children
• women everywhere lactate give birth to children
• likely to be associated with child rearing
  responsibilities of the home

24
Production and Social Roles

• roles - activities, institutions, and forms of
  association that link, rank, organize, or subsume
  particular mother-child groups

25
a long running controversy in anthropology

• Sherry Ortners famous article Is Female to Male
  as Nature is to Culture
• argument is that across cultures, women are more
  often associated with nature and the natural and
  are therefore denigrated
• Ortner - in reality women are no further nor
  closer to nature than men - cultural valuations
  make women appear closer to nature than men

26
The Third Gender

• essentialism of western ideas of sexual
  dimorphism - dichotomized into natural then
  moral entities of male female that are given to
  all persons, one or the other
• committed western view of sex and gender as
  dichotomous, ascribed, unchanging
• other categories - every society including our
  own is at some time or other faced with people
  who do not fit into its sex gender categories

27
The Third Gender

• a significant number of people are born with
  genitalia that is neither clearly male or female
• Hermaphrodites
• persons who change their biological sex
• persons who exhibit behavior deemed appropriate
  for the opposite sex
• persons who take on other gender roles other than
  those indicated by their genitals

28
Third Gender Western Bias

• multiple cultural historical worlds in which
  people of divergent gender sexual desire exist
• margins or borders of society
• may pass as normal to remain hidden in the
  official ideology everyday commerce of social
  life
• when discovered - iconic matter out of place -
  "monsters of the cultural imagination
• third gender as sexual deviance a common theme in
  US
• evolution religious doctrine
• heterosexuality the highest form, the most moral
  way of life, its natural

29
Third Gender Cross-Culturally

• provokes us to reexamine our own assumptions
  regarding our gender system
• emphasizes gender role alternatives as
  adaptations to economic and political conditions
  rather than as "deviant" and idiosyncratic
  behavior
• rigid dichotomozation of genders is a means of
  perpetuating the domination of females by males
  and patriarchal institutions.

30
THEORIES OF GENDER INEQUALITY
31
F. Engels

• theory of the origin of female subordination
• tied to the male control of wealth
• built on 19th cent. assumption of communal
  societies as matrilineal
• men overthrew matrilineality formed patriarchal
  family leading to monogamous family
• differential ownership of wealth led to
  inequality within the family thus between the
  sexes
• gender differences arose from technological
  developments that led to changes in relations of
  production

32
E. Leacock - (expands on Engels)

• subjugation of women due to breakdown of communal
  ownership of property isolation of individual
  family as economic unit
• transformation of relations of production
• Association of female labor with domestic unit or
  private sphere
• male production directed towards distribution
  outside the domestic group (public sphere)
• occurs with development of private property
  class society

33
K. Sacks

• political power that results from the ability to
  give receive goods in exchange (redistribution)
• allows for sexual stratification in non-class
  societies

34
Sanday Reeves

• female status dependent on degree to which men
  women participate in activities of reproduction,
  warfare, subsistence

35
Friedl and Leacock

• not rights control over production but rights
  of distribution control over channels of
  distribution critical for gender stratification

36
RETHINKING SUBORDINATION

• Ardener - muted models that underlie male
  discourse
• diversity of one life or many lives
• gender roles, stereotypes, stratification
• changes over time
• changes with position in lifecycle
• status of men women i.e. in male dominant
  societies
• decision making roles belong to men but as women
  reach menopause change with marriage status,
  virgins, wives, widows (and men)

37
RETHINKING SUBORDINATION

• women, like men, are social actors who work in
  structured ways to achieve desired ends
• formal authority structure of a society may
  declare that women are impotent irrelevant
• but attention to women's strategies motives,
  sorts of choices, relationships established, ends
  achieved indicates women have good deal of power
• strategies appear deviant disruptive
• actual components of how social life proceeds