Gender

Sociology ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janeen Baxter ◽  
Heidi Hoffmann

The term gender refers to the cultural and social characteristics attributed to men and women on the basis of perceived biological differences. In the 1970s, feminists focused on sex roles, particularly the socialization of men and women into distinct masculine and feminine roles and the apparent universality of patriarchy. More recent work has critiqued the idea of two distinct genders, calling into question the notion of gender dichotomies and focusing attention on gender as a constitutive element of all social relationships. Gender has been described as a social institution that structures the organization of other institutions, such as the labor market, families, and the state, as well as the social relations of everyday life. In addition, scholars have pointed to the ways in which gender is constructed by organizations and individual interactions. Gender not only differentiates men and women into unequal groups, it also structures unequal access to goods and resources, often crosscutting and intersecting with other forms of inequality, such as class, race, and ethnicity.

Author(s):  
Dennis Eversberg

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on ‘societal nature relations’ by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different ‘syndromes’ of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) social space to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people’s positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people’s perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination – both within social space and between society and nature – is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies.


Author(s):  
Alicja Szerląg ◽  
Arkadiusz Urbanek ◽  
Kamila Gandecka

Background: The analysis has involved social interactions in a multicultural environment. The social context has been defined by the Vilnius region (Lithuania), where national, religious, and cultural differences exist across generations (multicultural community). The space of “social relationships”, as one of the modules of the WHO quality of life assessment, has been studied. An innovation of the research has been related to the analysis of the phenomenon of community of nationalities and cultures as a predictor of quality of life (QoL). The social motive of the research has been the historical continuity (for centuries) of the construction of the Vilnius cultural borderland. Here, the local community evolves from a group of many cultures to an intercultural community. Interpreting the data, therefore, requires a long perspective (a few generations) to understand the quality of relationships. We see social interactions and strategies for building them as a potential for social QoL in multicultural environments. Methods: The research has been conducted on a sample of 374 respondents, including Poles (172), Lithuanians (133), and Russians (69). A diagnostic poll has been used. The respondents were adolescents (15–16 years). The research answers the question: What variables form the interaction strategies of adolescents in a multicultural environment? The findings relate to interpreting the social interactions of adolescents within the boundaries of their living environment. The description of the social relations of adolescents provides an opportunity to implement the findings for further research on QoL. Results: An innovative outcome of the research is the analysis of 3 interaction strategies (attachment to national identification, intercultural dialogue, and multicultural community building) as a background for interpreting QoL in a multicultural environment. Their understanding is a useful knowledge for QoL researchers. The data analysis has taken into account cultural and generational (historical) sensitivities. Therefore, the team studying the data has consisted of researchers and residents of the Vilnius region. We used the interaction strategies of adolescents to describe the category of “social relationships” in nationally and culturally diverse settings.


Author(s):  
Irina O. Shevchenko ◽  

The article considers the position of men and women researchers in the labor market in the precarization context. It is revealed that from the viewpoint of formal signs of the work precarity, researchers are in a safe situation. Most of them work under an indefinite contract, having a set of social guarantees secured by the Labor Code, and rarely change jobs. But the social well-being of scientists indicates that the formal description of the situation is at odds with reality. Gender context of science is the following: there are fewer women than men among researchers; there are more men among those holding the academic degrees of doctors, so men occupy positions more preferable in terms of status than women; the average salary of male scientists is higher than the female; men have more opportunities to influence decision-making in their organization. Gender asymmetry in the scientific field persists in Russia.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Y. Okamura

This chapter argues that ethnicity is the dominant organizing principle of social relations in Hawai‘i since the 1970s when it superseded race. This contention is based on the social construction of Hawaii’s constituent groups as ethnic groups rather than races, on the consequent lesser construction and assertion of racial categories and identities commonly invoked in the continental United States, and on the ongoing regulation of differential access to socioeconomic status by ethnicity and not race (or class). The chapter first discusses the conceptual difference between race and ethnicity, outlines the historical transition from race to ethnicity as the foremost structural principle of island society, reviews persisting ethnic inequality evident from 2010 U.S. Census data, and analyzes the racial dimensions of the shooting death in 2011 of a young Native Hawaiian by a U.S. State Department agent in Waikīkī. The argument that ethnicity is more significant than race as the primary principle of social organization in contemporary Hawai‘i is consistent with multiculturalism being the dominant ideology related to race and ethnicity in the islands rather than colorblindness as in the continental United States.


2020 ◽  
pp. 114-150
Author(s):  
Mona Sue Weissmark

This chapter outlines key issues in scientific literature concerning how evolutionary processes have shaped the human mind. To that end, psychologists have drawn on Charles Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis, or how males compete for reproduction and the role of female choice in the process. Darwin argued that evolution hinged on the diversity resulting from sexual reproduction. Evolutionary psychologists posit that heterosexual men and women evolved powerful, highly patterned, and universal desires for particular characteristics in a mate. Critics, however, contend that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection was erroneous, in part because his ideas about sexual identity and gender were influenced by the social mores of his elite Victorian upper class. Despite this critique, some researchers argue similarly to Darwin that love is part of human biological makeup. According to their hypotheses, cooperation is the centerpiece of human daily life and social relations. This makes the emotion of love, both romantic and maternal love, a requirement not just for cooperation, but also for the preservation and perpetuation of the species. That said, researchers speculate that encounters with unfamiliar people, coincident with activated neural mechanisms associated with negative judgments, likely inspire avoidance behavior and contribute to emotional barriers. This suggests the need to further study the social, psychological, and clinical consequences of the link between positive and negative emotions.


2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (10) ◽  
pp. 1348-1378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piet Bracke ◽  
Wendy Christiaens ◽  
Naomi Wauterickx

Supporting and caring for each other are crucial parts of the social tissue that binds people together. In these networks, men and women hold different positions: Women more often care more for others, listen more to the problems of others, and, as kin keepers, hold families together. Is this true for all life stages? And are social conditions, among other things bound to the organization of work and family, an essential explanation of these differences? Data from the sixth wave (1997) of the Panel Study of Belgian Households allow us to answer these questions. The results show that women are the glue holding social relations together. They play a central role as friends, daughters, sisters, mothers, and grandmothers throughout all stages of the life course. Similar life commitments do not reduce these gender differences but instead emphasize them even further.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 215-255
Author(s):  
Lucie Ryzova

This essay looks at a little studied genre of photographic albums—‘peer albums’—created by young Egyptian men and women through the middle decades of the twentieth century. These strongly gendered albums are characterized by the visual exclusion of social seniors, and were typically kept hidden from them. As photographic objects embedded in particular social relationships and contexts, these albums speak of how a classed and gendered self emerged in early- to mid-twentieth-century Egypt through a range of practices, of which photography-making (and album-making) was part. But photography also had its own agency in engendering new practices. The social efficacy of vernacular photographs was predicated on a combination of photographic indexicality and performativity. Through the making of such albums, young modernity-claiming Egyptians were asserting, performing and negotiating the parameters of their middle-class urbanity, their emerging positions as modern gendered subjects and as adolescents. Together with the range of peer activities in which they were embedded, these albums represented zones of autonomy free from patriarchal control, but still nested within larger patriarchal structures. Ultimately these albums show how particular historical subjects come to be through engagements with objects; and how patriarchy and individualism construct each other.


1983 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tutino

This essay explores the social relations within a landed elite—the dominant class in eighteenth-century Mexico. It aims to outline the nature of the powers that sustained that elite, to determine who directly exercised those powers, and to detail the relations between those pivotal powerholders and the remaining majority of elite class members. My primary concern, then, is the relationship between elite power and class membership.That, in turn, brings atttention to the roles of elite men and women, and the relations between them. Powerholders were usually men while class membership was shared equally between men and women. Was the internal structure of the elite thus based on sexual stratification? Were men able to be powerful and thus wealthy, while women could be wealthy only through subordination to a powerful man? To a great extent, that was true. But the majority of men within the Mexican elite were also wealthy while subordinate to a powerful man. And in a few notable cases, elite women exercised great power while men and women lived as their dependents. Sex was not the only principle of stratification among late colonial Mexican elites. Rather, sexual differentiation interacted with inequalities primarily based on economic power. This essay attempts to study the relations between economic power and sexual differentiation to approach an understanding of life within the late colonial landed elite in Mexico.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-110
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Chmielewska ◽  
Mariusz Z. Jędrzejko

Abstract Polish pedagogical and psychological literature as well as mass media more and more often inform about disorders of competences and social relations of teenagers, as a result of abuse of digital technologies, especially smartphones. The authors analysed 31 cases of patients with cyberabuse and addictions at the Social Prevention Centre in terms of the occurrence, intensity and character of the disappearance of their real social contacts, as well as their behaviour in small natural peer groups. The obtained results were compared with 49 groups of adults and parents of patients. Research based on participatory observation and in-depth interviews showed that teenagers devote over 62% less time to personal social relations than their parents, their time of real social relations with parents is about 38 minutes per day, create atomistic attitudes towards family (e.g. refusal to participate in common meals), have shallow and narrow groups of friends, and prefer borrowed contacts (through social media). The average declared number of teenagers’ friends in social media exceeds 540, while their parents use smartphones in less than 140. Young respondents use smartphones in almost every social and life context (e.g. in toilets, in church, at school, during meals). The research confirmed the occurrence of digital technology abuse. The article ends with preventive delegations.


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