Global Gender Issues: Social Construction, Hierarchy, and World Politics

Posted on Sep 7, 2024 in Social sciences

Global Gender Issues (V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan)

Gender is social. Gender roles are learned through social experiences.

Gender should not rest on biological sex differences, but on interpretations of behavior that are culturally associated with sex differences.

Make distinction between:

  1. BIOLOGICAL categories of male and female.
  2. SOCIALLY constructed models of masculine and feminine.
  3. POLITICAL POSITION of masculinist and feminist.

—> All of these construct gender identity, closely related to how cultures organize work, power, and pleasure along gender lines.

– Men > women in most cultures.

-> Inequality through social hierarchies through direct violence, structural discrimination, and psychological mechanisms.

– Inequality is “justified” by:

-> Focusing on physical differences and exaggerating their importance.

MASCULINISM (Arthur Brittain): serves to justify and “naturalize” male dominance.

FEMINISM: many different forms, seek an end to the social construction of gender inequality.

Social Construction of Gender and Hierarchy

– Formation of gender identities:

  1. Socialization = how individuals are taught culturally appropriate attitudes and behaviors. Family, school, religious institutions, and media are all sources of socialization.
  2. Reproduction of gendered social structures
    • Systemic and structural control – generate conformity and compliance.
    • Moral and intellectual control – through belief systems.
    • Social control – through the job market, law, governance, physical coercion.

***Different treatment based on gender from birth.

Stereotypes and Dichotomies

– “No women in politics because women don’t like politics…”

– Can be political, reproduce and naturalize unequal power relations.

Gender Dichotomy = binary nature of models of gender.

  • Women as weak, men as strong.
  • No aspect of life is free from these dichotomies. They have status and authority because they “map onto” accepted differences in gender, gaining their giveness by mistaken association with biological sex differences.
  • Reproduces gender hierarchy and relations of domination.
  • Dichotomy is not only thought, but also action.
  • There are only 2 mutually exclusive images to keep us locked into specific choices and actions.
  • Polarization of right X wrong choices.

– As humans, men and women are more equal than unequal. With gender dichotomy, we are more unequal than equal.

– Reproductive X Productive labor

*SCIENCE IN WESTERN CULTURE = leads to Western thought being singular in the extent to which binarism is privileged.

  • In the West, everything is either masculine or feminine.
  • Dichotomies = hierarchical, androcentric (men on top)

*Manly characteristics are privileged and valued. Feminine characteristics are less important, unworthy, undesirable.

Gender Ideology

  • Orders not only how we see but also create differential access to power.
  • Stereotypes and ideologies shape our beliefs about the nature of social systems.

*Dominant Gender Ideology in the US: men are aggressive, women are passive = legitimizes systematic sexual abuse.

  • Some men that are not white, rich, straight, etc. can be targeted, BUT ALL WOMEN ARE TARGETED.

*Ideology appears TIMELESS, but in history, it was used to favor those in power:

  • Slave women.
  • WW2, women working in men’s jobs.

The Gendered Who, What, How of World Politics

– The resurgent women’s movements – EFFECTS:

  • Raised popular attention to the politics of gendered relations.
  • Placed gender on agendas like humanities, political science, sociology, etc. BUT NOT ON I.R.
  • IR is male-dominated, women don’t hold a stake.
  • But as it includes more peace and development studies, that is changing, challenging conventional definitions of society + economic growth and power.
  • Permits articulation for peace, economic justice, global equality.

* POLITICS CHANGED:

  • No longer about governmental officials and elite influence peddlers.
  • It’s about differential access to resources both material and symbolic, and how power relations and structures are sustained, created, and reconfigured.

*Gender inequality = recognized as a global phenomenon, IR is changing because of that, challenging traditional definitions.

SARAH BROWN: “The proper objective and purpose of the study of IR is the identification and explanation of social stratification and of inequality as structured at the level of global relations.”

Gendered Division of World Politics

– Politics has been more exclusively limited to men than any other realm.

  • Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, etc. privilege man’s capacity for reason.

SECURITY = claim that men’s strength makes them superior.

  • Misleading, it varies culturally, many women are stronger than men.
  • We have technology today, no need for violence.
  • MILITARIZATION.
  • Escalate arms race and sexual violence.

WORK = stereotypes generate patterns of work for men and women.

  • Salary is secondary, only support.
  • Women have a serving nature and are unpaid for housework, “double work day”.

*FREE MARKET is seen as the most efficient, desirable approach in IR economic relations.

  • Just as women are deemed feminine by their dependence within the family, the 3rd world is “UNMANNED” by its position of dependence on the global economy.

GENDER DIVISIONS = they are played out in terms of who has access to what resources.

  • Who controls resources and to what ends.
  • And who suffers most from environmental degradation.

-> IRRESPONSIBLE RESOURCE USE = “man” dominion over nature, unlimited resources for own ends.

  • Objectification of nature = seen as exploitable, no intelligence or feelings.