SO208: WEEK 7

READING #1: Adams and Coltrane: “Boys and Men in families: The Domestic
Production of Gender. Power and Privilege”

“coming from” “having” families = difficulty in being in them

Idea’s like “family” or “masculinity” are social constructions because they make sense
only in terms of historically and culturally specific shared understandings (Coltrane
1998)

“social constructionist” perspective = a shared understanding of the world that forms

the basis for our reality

It’s not only about “men” or “manhood” – it reaches into the institutional and
economical scope of understanding how “manhood” works structurally e.g. access to
education/jobs – patterns of past and how it affects the future?

FAMILY: a word that is socially constructed

: changes in relation to social, economic and political climate (Coltrane 1998)

MASCULINITY: “variable” (Connell 1995)

Separate Spheres: “Dual Spheres”

‘Men are in the public sphere; women are in the private sphere’ (Bose 1987)
“In a world dominated by men; the world of men is, by definition, is a world of
power” (Kaufman 1999)
A strange combination of power and privilege, pain and powerlessness can cause a
taint for man (Kaufman 1999)

 raising masculine men, we end up with troubled boys

 “The trouble with boys is that they must become men” (Phillips 1994)
 sustained gender inequality
 masculine ideals project boys out of and away from the family, whereas
feminine ideals enmesh girls within it
 Strong dilemma between men facing their ideals of masculinity within their
positions which raises a larger set of problems on a social scale from separate
spheres ideology and structural gender inequality in society at large.

Ideals of Masculinity and Femininity:

 - 19th century assumption that boys and girls are intrinsically and
unalterably different in terms of personality
- Men = strong, independent, powerful, dominant and aggressive “being
in control” (Kaufman 1993)
- Women = passive, weak, powerless, subordinate and nurturing
- gender stratification
- “Masculine is becoming not-feminine” (Maccoby 1998)
- Creation of manly men also renders them to become crippling men
emotionally – husbands and fathers who are destined to feel as
outsiders in their own families

Socialisation – Boys (and Girls) in families

- Socialisation is the process through which we learn the ways of a given
society or social group so we can function in it (Elkin and Handel 1989)
- Individuals can move in and between different social groups in life
- Gender ≠ Sex
- Gender generally groups people into categories based on their
biologically given reproductive equipment
- Sex is their sexual organs which deems their gender
- “doing gender” (Zimmerman 1987) – by acting out cutlure’s perception
of patterns of what it is to be a man/woman: GENDER
PERFORMATIVITY

o Pre-birth = gender discovering procedures via amniocentesis and sonograms

allow parents to discover sex of child to plan ahead; gender-appropriately
o Sinister effect: India/China = bias is towards males.
o Rural Bangladesh = traditional son preference drives the use of contraceptives
by women in child-bearing years (Nosaka 2000)
o patriarchal societies
o prenatal discrimination – widely accepted
o pre-birth privilege and power is assigned
o gender announcements give admirers the change to attach characteristics and
proclaim potential “it’s a girl!” “it’s a boy!”
o institutionalised expectations from gendered adults
o Fathers tend to enforce gender stereotypes more than mothers, mainly in
sons i.e. toy preferences, play styles, chores, disciplines, interaction etc
(Caldera 1989)
o Masculine gender identity is considered to be more fragile than feminine
gender identity (Bem. 1993)
o gender is not something produced in the mind but is reflective of larger
culture (Bem 1983)
o gender-appropriate/gender-inappropriate behaviours
 o indoctrination - the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of
beliefs uncritically.
o Gender schema = Gender schema theory proposes that children begin to
form gender schemas (sometimes termed sex-related schemas) as soon as
they notice that people are organised into categories of male and female

Children’s Agency and the construction of gendered behaviour:

- Boys & Girls play groups = distinctive styles of play
- Important Q: Boys exhibit distancing from adults between 24-36
months of age. Less contact is invited = we don’t know if this is from
the children or mothers who feel too much nurturing is “too much” and
dangerous to a boy’s masculinity (Silverstein 1994): “mother-blaming”
overinvolved, domineering mother who emasculates her son into a
“sissy” (movies, TV, books)
- girls negotiate to maintain interaction whereas boys command and
direct
- “boys will be boys” until it passes the limit

Boyhood Troubles:
- gender scripts
- expectations to pursue our own ideals of masculinity
- pushing boys/men away from families by saying masculinity is
“anything but feminine”
- “problem behaviours” in teenage boys i.e. school suspension, drinking,
sexual activity in heterosexual partners = masculinity ideology
(Christopher 2000)
- danger lies in “normal masculinity” not in dangerous men Hearn (1990)
- fear of feminine hyper-emotionality

Boys into Manhood:

- all-male fraternities, football, sports etc
- “war on terrorism” reinvigorated new images of being a man “real man”

Men’s privileged status in families:

- public and private forms of patriarchy developed by men so they may
have control women’s reproductive power (Hearn 1987)
- women adopting surname of husband – inadvertently wives acting as
husband’s property

Gendered Domestic Division of Labour:

- men benefit from marriage through the unequal and taken-for-granted
division of domestic labour
- women x3 more than men in household labour (Coltrane 2000)
 - recent years men do more housework (Robinson 1999)
- husband’s lack of emotional expression and communication in
marraiges
- all women directly or indirectly experience at least the potential of
domination, violence, coercion and harassment at the hands of men
(Kaufman 1993)

Solution
- use feminism
- nurturing, kindness, caring etc to be ‘real men’

SO208: WEEK 7
READING #2: L Gilmore, “Preface to Paperback Edition,” and “Anita Hill,
Clarence Thomas, and the Search for An Adequate Witness,” in L
Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their
Lives (Paperback edition), New York: Columbia University Press, 2018, p. ix-
xii, and p. 27-58

 he said/she said
 intertwining of racism and sexism
 A man’s sexual conduct, according to this logic, as we shall see,
should remain private no matter where it occurs, sealed within a bubble of
impunity in which he floats from home to office, to government, and court.
 Formal processes restrict what they can say, to whom, and in what language,
but they cannot purge the past of its deep damage.
 The Pin Point strategy: a way for white conservative politicians to brush aside
the history of race entirely

CLASS:

- gendered violence’s = gender is used to normalise and justify violence

- how is it produced in society?
- summary ∆ evidence ∆ opinion
- Week 10: Formative Essay
- Anita Hill: Q) contrasting ways that gender is portrayed in sexual assault
“I had a gender; he had a race”
- Q) detrimental to boys; man; women; girls – what can be done to
reduce this identity?
- Q) influence of celebrities on #MeToo campaign = positive and
negative
- Q) To what extent has #MeToo movement benefited society?
- Founded #MeToo campaign (2006): taken a long time for us to analyse
it
- Wider society isn’t involved as much as privileged group of people
- Picking and choosing of perpetrators i.e. Roman Polanski, James Franco
- Tarana’s TED TALK
-