Introduction to gender 1

Introduction to gender and politics

Celis, K, Kantula, J., Waylon, G., & Weyldon, S. L. (2013). Introduction: Gender and politics: A gendered world, a gendered discipline - Oxford
Handbooks Online. Retrieved from: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199751457.001.0001/oxfordhb-
9780199751457-e-34?print=pdf

Key concepts relevant to the study of gender and politics are described in the succeeding
paragraphs. The discussion of the key terms will be supplemented by the discussions of the same
concepts and of other terms by the resource persons in the two episodes of GENDER TALKS.
After reading this material and watching the two videos, you should be able to:
a. reflect on the application of these concepts in understanding your personal experience of
having been gendered by the society
b. consider the details of a given material for analysis in making one’s opinion

Key Concepts to Understand:

androcentrism gender analysis gender politics intersectionality
patriarchy personal is the political private sphere public sphere sexism
sexuality sexual orientation stereotypes

xxx Virginia Sapiro (1981) suggests, part of the reason for the discipline’s gender blindness lies in the low
numbers of women in the discipline. For her, the structural position of women reproduces the androcentric
biases of the discipline. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the discipline’s categories and methods were
developed by privileged men to consider those issues of concern to them. This domination is reflected in the
very narrow and ideological definitions of what counts as politics on which the Anglo-American disciplines have
traditionally been based.
Politics, narrowly construed, is the activity of government or governing. Indeed, the word
politics in the original Greek was used by Aristotle to connote those questions that pertained to the operation of
the polis, the political community. The distinctive feature of politics is its public or general nature, the way it
affects the community as a whole as distinct from private matters ( Arendt 1958; Wolin 1960). Politics is also seen as
the study of power, and sometimes by extension the study of the powerful. But some broader definitions of
politics have also had a long provenance in political science: Dahl ( 1984, 9–10) defined politics as relating to
power and political systems as “any persistent pattern of human relationships that involves, to a significant
extent, control, influence, power or authority.” Others connect politics fundamentally to distributions, as in “who
gets what, where, when and how” or the authoritative allocation of value (Easton 1953).
The traditional focus on politics as the study of the machinery of government and electoral politics or on
political elites and formal institutions rendered women and gender invisible in spite of their foundational
importance for building the welfare state and for constructing postcolonial nations, for the conduct of war and
terrorism, and for maintaining
social and economic privilege more generally. The roots of these core assumptions about
what constitutes politics in (p. 7) the Anglo-American tradition can be traced to the work of political theorists like
John Locke, who based many of their ideas on the analytical separation of the public and the private spheres.
The Anglo-American disciplines took up this widely accepted (if mistaken) view of the transcultural and
transhistorical universality of the public–private split, namely, that citizens or heads of household (for which one
should read men) were the ones who were active (and who should be active) in the public sphere. This subsumed women
(and also children) into the household or family within a private sphere where “every man’s home is his castle” and
in which he can do as he pleases free from the interference of the state ( Pateman 1983). This analytical exclusion
of women from the public sphere created politics as a male sphere from which women were legitimately
excluded as political subjects. In turn, at least when it came to women, the private sphere was seen as lying
outside the political arena and therefore did not form part of the legitimate subject matter of the discipline. But
regulation of women’s access to abortion, sexuality, and male violence against female relatives in the family
was then, as now, seen as a legitimate area of action for governments, revealing the inconsistency and gender
bias that undergirds the ideology of separate spheres.
The notion of a separation of the public and private spheres persists today. Its reflection
(even if it remains partial and contested ) in many legal systems around the world is remarkable given the range of family
and societal forms that characterize the world’s cultures. In many places, assumptions about women and men
and their respective roles in the public and private spheres still affect issues, from who governs to who decides
intimate matters such as sexuality and childbearing. It affects the ways economies are structured and
economic value—seen as created in the productive public sphere and not in the reproductive private sphere —
is calculated. It also continues to affect what counts as politics and the political, still predominantly high politics
in the public sphere; who is seen as a suitable person to be involved in politics; and what are appropriate
issues—often narrowly defined—that exclude certain activities and actors and embody particular notions of
masculinity and femininity. These ideas have again affected what has been deemed suitable subject matter for
the academic discipline of politics.
 Introduction to gender 2

Even though some of the conventional definitions of politics would seem to allow for the
study of a broader range of phenomena, it was feminists who pushed for a definition of politics that
encompassed the personal and the private. Indeed, a rallying cry for many feminists has been that the
personal is the political. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett (1968, 23) defines politics as “power structured
relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.” Enloe (1996) points out
that study of power must include not only those perceived as the “powerful” but also all those involved in the
realization of power and influence for those at the top. The powerful (whether bureaucratically, economically, or socially
powerful) depend on the everyday, regularized activities of others to make their decisions ( or nondecisions) realities.
And Young (1990) critiques these analytic approaches that focus on distributions, arguing that they obscure the
power dynamics that produce these distributions, thereby depoliticizing them. So feminists brought the
personal and the private into the study of the political, and they have also drawn attention to the politics of
knowledge production (and structures of production and reproduction more generally), meaning, and identity.

Key Concepts:
xxx, statuses and roles allow us to organize our lives in consistent, predictable ways. In combination
with established norms, they prescribe our behavior and ease interaction with people who occupy different
social statuses, whether we know these people or not. xxx: When normative role behavior becomes too rigidly
defined, our freedom of action is often compromised. These rigid definitions are associated with the
development of stereotypes —oversimplified conceptions that people who occupy the same status group
share certain traits they have in common.
Although stereotypes can include positive traits, they most often consist of negative ones that are then
used to justify discrimination against members of a given group. The statuses of male and female are often
stereotyped according to the traits they are assumed to possess by virtue of their biological makeup. Women
are stereotyped as flighty and unreliable because they possess uncontrollable raging hormones that fuel
unpredictable emotional outbursts. The assignment of negative stereotypes can result in sexism, the belief
that the status of female is inferior to the status of male. Males are not immune to the negative consequences
of sexism, but females are more likely to experience it because the status sets they occupy are more
stigmatized than those occupied by males. Compared to males, for example, females are more likely to occupy
statuses inside and outside their homes that are associated with less power, less prestige, and less pay or no
pay. Beliefs about inferiority due to biology are reinforced and then used to justify discrimination directed
toward females.
Sexism is perpetuated by systems of patriarchy, male-dominated social structures leading to the
oppression of women. Patriarchy, by definition, exhibits androcentrism — male-centered norms operating
throughout all social institutions that become the standard to which all persons adhere. Sexism is reinforced
when patriarchy and androcentrism combine to perpetuate beliefs that gender roles are biologically determined
and therefore unalterable. For example, throughout the developing world, beliefs about a woman’s biological
unsuitability for other than domestic roles have restricted opportunities for education and literacy. These
restrictions have made men the guardians of what has been written, disseminated, and interpreted regarding
gender and the placement of men and women in society.
Until recently, history has been recorded from an androcentric perspective that ignored the other half of
humanity xxx. This perspective has perpetuated the belief that because patriarchy is an inevitable, inescapable
fact of history, struggles for gender equality are doomed to failure. xxx

Distinguishing Sex and Gender

xxx. In sociology, these terms are now fairly standardized to refer to different content areas. Sex refers
to the biological characteristics distinguishing male and female. This definition emphasizes male and female
differences in chromosomes, anatomy, hormones, reproductive systems, and other physiological components.
Gender refers to those social, cultural, and psychological traits linked to males and females through particular
social contexts. Sex makes us male or female; gender makes us masculine or feminine. Sex is an ascribed
status because a person is born with it, but gender is an achieved status because it must be learned.
This relatively simple distinction masks a number of problems associated with its usage. It implies that
all people can be conveniently placed into unambiguous either-or categories. Certainly, the ascribed status of
sex is less likely to be altered than the achieved status of gender. Some people believe, however, that they
were born with the “wrong” body and are willing to undergo major surgery to make their gender identity
consistent with their biological sex.
Sexual orientation, the preference for sexual partners of one gender (sex) or
the other, also varies. People who experience sexual pleasure with members of their own sex are likely to
consider themselves masculine or feminine according to gender norms. Others are born with ambiguous sex
characteristics and may be assigned one sex at birth but develop a different identity related to gender. Some
cultures allow people to move freely between genders, regardless of their biological sex.

(Handbook%20of%20the%20Sociology%20of%20Gender%20by%20Barbara%20J.%20Risman,%20Carissa%20M.%20Froyum,%20William
%20J.%20Scarborough%20(z-lib.org).pdf)
Lorber’s (1994) theory of gender as an institution provided a comprehensive overview of how gender is
socially constructed through social structures, interactional processes, and patterns in the distribution of
rewards and constraints.
 Introduction to gender 3

Intersectionality as a conceptual framework was introduced to mainstream social

sciences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Legal scholar Crenshaw (1989) coined the term “intersectionality” to
describe how the forms of discrimination experienced by black women
were not reducible to either gender or race discrimination, but of a different type characterized
by their interrelation. For sociologists, however, the most influential introduction to intersectionality was Patricia
Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought originally published in 1990.
In this book, Collins illustrated how the perspectives of black women have been shaped by
their diverse positions at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. By virtue of
experiencing multiple oppressions, a black feminist standpoint is able to observe how multiple
systems of inequality, such as race and gender, constitute a matrix of domination. Within the
matrix, inequalities are interrelated and co-construct one another to maintain broad patterns of opportunity and
disadvantage.
A Filipino explanation of this concept can be accessed in this podcast at:
https://networks.upou.edu.ph/27772/ano-ang-intersectionality/

In summary, watch the two films listed below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLT9DbJcelc GENDER TALKS | Episode 01: Kahulugan ng

Kasarian (46:41). The panel talks about the meaning of gender, gender quota vis-à-vis gender equality, gender-
based discrimination, gender-based violence, institutions (e.g. church, media) that strengthen gender bias,
gender gaps in employment as well as in sports, sexualization of the body, among others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V-fEOzKwmI GENDER TALKS | Episode 02: Kahulugan ng

Seksuwalidad (45:34). The resource persons talk about the meaning and fluidity (performativity or agency) of
sexuality, heteronormativity and heterosexuality, metrosexual, LGBTQ vs. SOGEI, intersectionality, sexual
harassment, and gender norms.

Enhancement Activity: After reading the material and watching the videos,
you canDifferentiate:
now do a self-evaluation of what you understood. This self-evaluation
is not graded and is not required to be submitted. You are doing it for yourself
to check11.
howSexwell yougender
from understood the material. And if there are parts that are
not clear to you, you can always go back to the material or browse the web
12. Sexism
for additional from sexuality
information.

13. Public sphere from private sphere

Define the following terms:

1. Sexism

2. Patriarchy

3. Stereotype

4. Androcentrism

5. Gender politics

6. Intersectionality

7. Gender analysis

8. Heteronormativity

9. Fluidity of sexuality

10. Gender-based discrimination

Introduction to gender 4