It analyses women’s experiences of gender subordination and identifies the underlying causes of gender oppression. It closely studies women’s social roles, interests and experiences at both micro and macro level. Feminist perspective uses conflict theory to examine the reinforcement of gender roles and inequalities.
“Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (or artifacts, cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political social and psychological oppression of women” (Tyson 78). The construct of patriarchal society has deemed women as the inferior gender.
Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender. Feminism is said to be the movement to end women's oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia).
In England, P. (Ed.), Theory on gender: Feminism on theory (pp. 225-280). New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Google Scholar Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Google Scholar| Crossref Walker, A. J. (2004). Methods, theory, and the practice of feminist research: A response to Janet Chafetz.
312. 7 . F. eminist and. G. ender. t. heories. Dorothy E. Smith Patricia Hill Collins. Nancy Chodorow. Key Concepts Relations of Ruling Bifurcation of Consciousness
Essay on Feminist Theories on Sexuality Feminist theorists Camille Paglia and Foucault give opposing views on the topic of women and their sexuality as they addressed ...
Women have been suffering since the beginning of the history because of patriarchal order. Feminism is a clash of women against patriarchy. Suffering of women created the concept of feminism as a gender based political and social movement. In public
FEMINIST THEORY INTRODUCTION DEFINITION OF TERMS FEMINIST THEORY According to (Robbins etal, 2012)Feminist theory can be defined as a mode of analysis involving specific ways of thinking aimed at abolishing oppression of women in societies .
The feminist understanding of "doing gender" is a type of perspective within sociology. Feminist theorists have focused on the ways in which gender is created and reinforced through social interaction.
Gender norms discourage intimacy with other men, affecting friendships. b. Conformity to gender norms increases risk-taking behavior that may result in death or injury. c. Gender norms that demand thinness have resulted in men being as diagnosed with eating orders as often as women.
According to the concept of biological determinism. a. the physiology of any person may be manipulated in order to alter that person's sex. b. social behaviors are believed to be caused by physiological characteristics. c. the creation of a male or female occurs as the egg and the sperm meet during human reproduction.
a wide ranging system of ideas about social life and human experiences developed from a woman centered perspective. [woman centered because it examines the situations and experiences of women, tried to describe the social world from the standpoint of women]
comte coined the term sociology, marx weber and durkheim dominated sociology at this time but there were women doing feminist work at this time also, trying to establish a feminist perspective but their work was overlooked. in the last few years, their work was reevaluated and now they are considered among the classical theorists who helped shape soc.
Feminist Criticism. “Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (or artifacts, cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political social and psychological oppression of women” (Tyson 78). The construct of patriarchal society has deemed women as the inferior gender. In literature feminist theory searches ...
Kate Millett argued gender is socially constructed as it is performed, taught and reinforced into the concepts of masculinity and femininity.
West and Fenstermaker (1995) extend West and Zimmerman’s (1987) argument to other forms of difference (and categorical inequalities; Tilly, 1998) by noting that distinctions among groups are not essential but must be created and maintained. Interestingly, they argue that difference is a social doing, a mechanism that helps explain how categorical inequalities are reproduced. Following this logic, both “doing gender” and “doing difference” are themselves not theories, but are mechanisms through which inequalities are reproduced.
A sociological theory is not one that is philosophically oriented that discusses the nature of social life— that would be what Chafetz (2004a) calls social theory. Sociological theory would go beyond description and would be focused on explaining how and why the empirical world operates as it does.
Chafetz (2004a) argues that the goal of social science. is to develop explanations (theories)—that is, attempts to answer questions of why and how—of empirically documentable phenomena concerning human behavior and the structures and processes they create in the present and have created in other times and places. (p.
We have argued that, among other things, the reason men do less housework than do women is because they believe they are being held morally accountable to the sex category of “male.”.
Thus, the use of “sociological theory” as a descriptor for “doing gender” may not be warranted. This distinction is more than semantic, as a large body of scholarship has been published that purports to find support for this theory.
Gender is not a thing that is done, that is, a noun. Instead, “doing gender” is a verb phrase, a process. Other authors have noted that “doing gender” as a theory has been misused. Deutsch (2007) recounts many examples of research that, she argues, utilize “doing gender” as a theory of gender maintenance.
Thus, not doing housework is “doing gender.”. But as we use the language of “doing gender,” we are falling into the trap that West and Zimmerman argue is diametrically opposed to how they had conceived of the concept. Gender is not a thing that is done, that is, a noun. Instead, “doing gender” is a verb phrase, a process.
Radical feminists believe that oppression is rooted in sexuality. According to them, sexism is the oldest form of oppression.
Feminist perspective highlights the social issues that are often overlooked or misidentified by already present social theories. It analyses women’s experiences of gender subordination and identifies the underlying causes of gender oppression. It closely studies women’s social roles, interests and experiences at both micro and macro level.
For instance, he argues that for capitalism to sustain labour must be ‘reproduced’ in two ways. Firstly, the labourer must be fed, clothed, sheltered and remain fit to carry out work. Secondly, the labour class must reproduce itself. Marx neglected that labour class could not be ‘reproduced’ without domestic labour.
Liberal feminists believe that women’s unequal access to social, political and economic institutions causes their oppression. They believe that gender equality can be brought by ‘transforming the division of labour through the repatterning of key institutions- law, work, family, education, and media’ (Ritzer, 1992).
Marxists and Socialist feminists consider capitalism to be the main cause of gender inequality. They believe that capitalist system exploits the reproductive labour of women. Capitalism considers paid occupations to be of supreme importance.
Feminist perspective uses conflict theory to examine the reinforcement of gender roles and inequalities. While conflict theory focuses on the unequal distribution of power and resources, feminist theory, at a more nuanced level, ...
It is only in the 1970s that gender became one of the key concepts in sociology. For most of the part, women were invisible in the sociological analyses. Even the founding fathers of sociology, who were interested in studying the changes brought by the industrial revolution, neglected the issues of gender and sexuality.
Feminism is said to be the movement to end women's oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia).
One way to interpret Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour.
Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism's starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one's social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women's position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:
Butler's normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman's particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertedly created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler's second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism's subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow's view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women's category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.
For one, children's books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children's books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV's Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers' efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.
Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113).
In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history : one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.