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CHAPTER 5: INTERSECTIONS
Wade & Ferree
INTERSECTIONALITY
We gender everything therefore we have to
understand how gender overlaps with other
statuses to understand human behavior.
Gender is not an
experience.
We all have different experiences based on our
interactions, environments, culture, and our
understanding of the world.
This concept of our identities intersecting is
called
.
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INTERSECTIONALITY
We all have gender rules, but we also have to balance our
gender rules with our cultural rules.
How we follow or break these rules is shaped by what is
possible given our income, marital status, and health.
If we are at risk of discrimination due to our religion, will that
impact how we act within most other realms?
We all try to find a way to do gender that works for us as
unique individuals who are shaped by other parts of our
identity (
).
ECONOMIC CLASS AND PLACE OF RESIDENCE
Economic class and place of residence intersect with
gender, making certain
more available to
some than others.
The “
”: Puts in 50-60 hours per week earning
more than enough money to support his family.
Men in high status occupations invest heavily in their career and identify strongly
with their jobs.
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ECONOMIC CLASS AND PLACE OF RESIDENCE
Strategies continued.
“
” strategies allow people to focus on raising
their children, being a good partner, and keeping a beautiful home.
“
” nurture their own careers alongside their husbands.
Able to pay for help with children, housekeeping, and gardening.
ECONOMIC CLASS AND PLACE OF RESIDENCE
Strategies continued.
Our gender strategies both reflect our personalities and our life
circumstances.
What would make someone adopt the Wonderful Wife and Mother
strategy?
? Husbands with high paying jobs?
Unsatisfying or demanding jobs or just loving parenting can lead to stay-at-home
dads as well.
What would make someone adopt the
Breadwinner strategy?
, workplace success.
Sometimes life doesn’t turnout as planned
leading us places we didn’t intend to go.
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ECONOMIC CLASS AND PLACE OF RESIDENCE
Strategies continued.
Strategies are also contingent on
.
Would any of the previous strategies be an option without sufficient income?
Most men cant afford to support a family alone.
Measuring their masculinity by their ability to do so is self-destructive.
For women, another strategy is
(working
and being a mother full time while supporting their husbands).
This strategy is sometimes the default for single mothers as they don’t have
a choice.
Some men choose to be
families alongside their work.
, prioritizing their
ECONOMIC CLASS AND PLACE OF RESIDENCE
Strategies continued.
Most men try to attain a masculinity (strategy) that both feels
good and is possible give their
.
Working class men see themselves as more masculine than white-collar
men because they do physical labor with risk as opposed to the wimpy
paper-pushers.
This strategy is available to them while allowing them to feel good about themselves
as men.
Arizona forest firefighters identified themselves as country boys.
City boys didn’t understand stuff like fishing, farming, hunting, picking up snakes and
spotting poison ivy
In sum, gender strategies are shaped by constraints and
opportunities afforded by our class.
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RACE
African American Men and Women
Slavery was sustained for 200 years on the false concept that it was a
kindness, a way to support a race that would go extinct out of pure
lack of luck.
Black men were stereotyped as
to care for them.
The stereotype shifted after
, in need of a master
in 1865.
Black men were stereotyped as aggressive, prone to criminality and sexually
violent.
False accusations that these men had raped white women were the most common
excuse for lynching.
These stereotypes were designed to support white power and they still
exist (
).
RACE
African American Men and Women
Today black people are stereotyped as
, more
athletic, meaner, more aggressive, and prone to criminal behavior
and sexual promiscuity.
These are also stereotypes of masculinity.
Being black intensifies expectations based on gender, and being male
intensifies expectations based on race (
).
This begins in school, as white boys are excused for their behavior
while black boys are treated like future criminals.
If black boys wanted to be perceived as “good” they had to act in
ways that that would be considered “sissy” if done by white boys.
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RACE
African American Men and Women
This strategy was considered preparation for adult
racialized survival rituals.
: a way of doing
masculinity that some black men use to avoid being
stereotyped as a Dangerous Black Man.
Brent Staples
Never raise their voice, wear glasses, whistle classical
music.
These behaviors disrupt stereotypes because they invoke
ideas of wealth and intelligence.
Staples is essentially “doing” upper class in the essay.
This is both a gender strategy and a survival strategy.
TRAYVON MARTIN
Juries are most likely to find self-defense arguments
believable when the victim is identified as black and the
person who used lethal force appears white.
We see similar disparities by race throughout the criminal
justice system.
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RACE
African American Men and Women
Black women were also imagined to be more
white women.
than
Black women were required to do hard labor, suffer harsh punishments, and
sometimes raped in order to produce children.
Assuming masculinity(hypersexual and physically tough) rationalized the
treatment of black women.
After slavery this served the purpose of defining only white women as
vulnerable to rape.
Black women are still stereotyped as unfeminine today.
A black woman’s race interferes with people perception of her as a feminine
person.
The
strategy is more difficult for some black women….
RACE
African
Women
Girly American
Girl and Men
Blackand
Is Beautiful
Because femininity is implicitly white, doing
strategies
costs.
femininity
can come
feel likewith
doing
whiteness.
Some black women feel like the Girly Girl
strategy
is a submission
to
or an
Black
women
who
straighten
internalization of racism.
their
hair some
mayblack
be judged
as
In
response,
women embrace
the
Black Is Beautiful
strategy which
rejects
“sellouts”
while natural
hair may
the idealization of white femininity in favor
be seen as unattractive or
of reframing characteristically black
unprofessional.
features
as both feminine and beautiful.
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RACE
Asian American Men and Women
Asians experience stereotypes about both males and females as
feminine.
Asians are assumed to be
and are
often portrayed as passive and reserved.
Women are taken to be extremely shy and deferential, and men less
masculine and asexual.
When Asians lost their jobs in farming, mining, and manufacturing
they became servants or opened businesses offering domestic
services.
By virtue of doing “women’s work” Asian men were stereotyped as
feminized.
RACE
Asian American Men and Women
Some Asian men will compensate by acting more
aggressively.
Asian women were brought to the United States as sex slaves
resulting in the hyperfeminized stereotype of being demure,
passive, and sexually available (“
” strategy).
Asians have to continually prove to others that they are not
passive people as the stereotype would lead people to
believe(“
” strategy).
Some Asian women use different strategies for different
audiences (submissive vs equal).
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RACE
White American Men and Women
When we say American we automatically think
“white” because white Americans are racially
unmarked.
Based on
, white people are never
too masculine or feminine based on race alone.
All-American Girl and All-American Guy are
strategies available to those born in the “right”
social class with the “right” body-type or athletic
skill and “right” race.
RACE
White American Men and Women
Because white seems “
”, being white
an middle class can also carry the stigma of being
“regular,” “plain,” and “uninteresting.”
Vanilla sex, white bread, white lie….
The nerd, librarian, and soccer mom are implicitly white because
they are the opposite of cool, exciting, or dangerous.
Attempts to differentiate from this bland image could
include being Goth among many others.
Being marginal isn’t an option when race interacts with
socioeconomic status.
Poor women adopt the fashion, mannerisms, and language of
their neighbors of color (
strategy).
The cost is being labeled a “wannabe”, which to most is better
than White Trash.
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SEXUAL ORIENTATION
SEXUAL ORIENTATION
Sexual Minorities are anyone who is not
.
Gay men are stereotyped as effeminate and lesbians as
masculine.
When people say “you can just tell” they are looking for stereotypical
gender
, not
.
LGBTQIA people do gender in a variety of ways just like
heterosexual people.
How one does gender depends on whether or not they want to “pass”.
impacts doing gender.
is a rule that all men must be attracted to
women and all women to men.
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SEXUAL ORIENTATION
Many people are more tolerant of sexual minorities who are gender
conforming.
Some lesbians adopt the
strategy (lipstick lesbian)
Some do it because they feel feminine and others do so because there are
rewards when your gender identity matches your sex.
Gay athletes usually find the All but Heterosexual strategy appealing.
One challenge is recognizability, gender conformity may make same-sex sexual
orientation invisible.
Homonormativity is a term used to describe sexual minorities who try to
be as “
” as possible.
Those who want to be visible challenge this and favor a
Queer strategy.
or
SEXUAL ORIENTATION
Race matters here too.
Asian lesbians may not need to work as hard to seem “normal,”
but they may have a harder time being recognizably lesbian or
bi.
Black lesbians and bisexuals have to overcome stereotypes
applied to both black people and lesbians, both of which
masculinize them.
strategies carry serious consequences for
heterosexual men and women who want to attract the romantic or
sexual attention of the other sex.
Gender strategies that push the boundaries of gender conformity
have different consequences depending on sexual orientation.
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SEXUAL ORIENTATION
The All but Heterosexual and Recognizably Queer or Butch
gender strategies are specific to societies in which “gay “
and “lesbian” are
.
In China most men over the age of 40 do not recognize a “gay”
identity.
Younger men may adopt a Western-style gay identity, but feel that respecting
Chinese culture is more important than acknowledgement.
In France, making a big deal about coming out as gay is seen as
overly theatrical.
Being gay is suppose to be only a small part of someone's identity, eclipsed
by ones Frenchness.
Many African American and rural white men experience same-sex
attraction as a desire, but not an identity.
IMMIGRATION
Reconfigured Families
Many immigrants experience
:a
decline in their socioeconomic position.
Privileges do not translate the same and they experience
discrimination, lack of social networks, and language barriers.
This requires that some immigrants adjust their ideas of
masculinity and femininity and establish economic
interdependence (partners depend on each other to pay bills).
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ABILITY AND DISABILITY
Disability and Masculinity
Newly disabled men may have to adjust to
a sudden inability to be physically and
sexually assertive.
The
strategy is a
hypermasculine way to remind others that
they still have a distinctly masculine
sexuality.
Men are able to assert their athletic
prowess and masculinity through sports
such as wheelchair rugby.
ABILITY AND DISABILITY
Disability and Masculinity
Class-privileged men with disabilities can use money to preserve
their sense of themselves as men.
Regaining independence in an
strategy that
preserves and even enhances a sense of masculinity, given that
one must overcome such great obstacles to have what other men
may take for granted.
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ABILITY AND DISABILITY
Disability and Femininity
Women’s identities are often tied up with their
ability to be
.
Stereotypes about disabled women paint them as
unsexy, even asexual.
Because of this, the Girly Girl strategy is denied to
disabled women.
Sexual harassment is less of an issue.
Because being seen as a woman is a struggle, some
women conform to gendered expectations as rigidly as
possible.
Others see this as permission to resist cultural definitions
of femininity.
AGE AND ATTRACTIVENESS
As we grow older, our appearance and
physiology no longer support certain
strategies and society has strict rules that
pressure us to “
.”
How do the following differ by age?
Staying up all night at clubs, becoming a parent, learning to snowboard,
high heels
These age related rules are gendered.
We can expect to age into rules but we also must except to age
back out again.
As soon as a woman's body is defined as unattractive, the rules
change requiring a strategy of invisibility and minimized
sexuality.
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AGE AND ATTRACTIVENESS
Prejudice based on a preference for the young and
the equating of signs of aging with decreased social
value (
) impact men and women differently.
Women lose more esteem because of the emphasis on
physical attractiveness.
Men experience a second standard that embraces aging
(heavier, rougher, more thickly built) exchanging one
attractiveness for another.
Women must continue trying to have the face and body of
their youth.
Women with financial means can afford to look younger
longer.
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