Gender: A taken-for-granted example of socialization

HW:  CJ Pascoe's Dude You're a Fag, background info is here.
      
As you enter, please answer this question in as many ways as you can (brainstorm):
 
Individual Student Reflection - Besides being different physically, how would your life be different if you were born a different sex?




What is gender and why is it confusing? 

Often times, gender is confused and misunderstood because we are limited by our language.  We use the terms "male" and "female" to refer to sex and gender.  Then to add to the confusion, oftentimes sexuality is genderized.  Many people use the term "gay" or other pejoratives to mean that someone or something is not masculine.  So all three of these terms are confused with each other.  But, sex, sexuality and gender are different terms that technically refer to different aspects of who we are as individuals.   Professionals like doctors, psychologists, sociologists, social workers and others who study people have written and researched about the differences of these terms extensively.  Sex is the biology that someone is born with.  Most often, a person's sex is assigned based on their reproductive parts.  People are also born with an aptitude for a sexuality.  As they get older, the sexuality becomes sexual attraction such as heterosexual or homosexual attraction.  These are part of our biological makeup, our nature. Most researchers have concluded that these can't be changed.  "Gender" however, is not biological.  It is a social construction that we learn from an early age and we often take it for granted.  In sum:

• Sex is the biology individuals are born with and often assigned at birth.
• Sexuality is the biological aptitude an individual is born with for attraction.
• Gender is how an individual reacts to these two.  This is not biological but instead a social construct.  Gender can be an inner identity/feeling or an outward expression.

One example of how our language uses male to refer to both sex and gender is gender reveal parties - do they really revealing a child's gender?  Will the child be masculine?  How do we know?  Another example of the confusion is a shirt for sale on Amazon that shows the mixing of the concepts:

What does it mean that gender is a social construction?

Sex and Sexuality are determined by our nature, but gender is a social construction.   Think about how you answered that question at the top of this post.  Most of the ways your life would have been different are examples of society treating people differently based on their sex (and sexuality).  This constructs a certain way of being.  So, for example, if I am a heterosexual male, how should I act?  What colors should I like?  What clothes should I wear?  How should I talk?   What sports should I play?  Is it okay for me to cry?  To be rough?  To like violence?   To be sensitive?  And so on... These are all our gender and they are all learned reactions.

"Nature has no edges.  It is not binary."

What is a binary and how does it contribute to the confusion?

Humans tend to be dualistic in their understanding of the world (and thus, their language).  So much of our understanding is oversimplified into dualism: light and dark, wet and dry, tall and short, etc...  But the reality is that there is so much in between these concepts.  The same is true in terms of "gender".  Our culture pushes people to the edges of the continuum above.  This creates a duality for sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.  This duality is often referred to as a "gender" binary.

A socially constructed binary

Our culture boxes people into two very narrow, opposite ways of being.  It doesn't allow for any expression of sex, sexuality, or gender along the continuum.

However, in actuality, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity are all fluid on a continuum:

Evidence for the continuum

• Sex - Scientific American explains the continuum here.  And they provide a useful graphic here or here.
• Sex - One example of the spectrum of sex is the IAAF's 2018 proposal of new rules that would exclude some female runners from competing in women's Olympic events.  Guardian article here.
• Gender - The Gender Spectrum website also provides resources and an explanation.
• Here is a terrific program about gender from National Geographic called The Gender Revolution.  It has an in-depth explanation of transgender as well as some of the latest science about sex and gender.
• Here is a Guardian article about shattering the myth of the gendered brain.
• For more info, this is a great blog from Dr. Zevallos, an Australian sociologist from a Latin-Australian background.
• Some cultures have acknowledged a non-binary gender for centuries such as India's Hijra and two-spirit people from American Indians.

What is the evidence for gender changing over time?

Because gender is a social construct, it can be examined with a sociological imagination to show that it is different depending on where or when you examine it.

Checkout this post, called "The Manly Origins of Cheerleading" that shows how gender is a construct and because of that, our perception of gender changes over time.





And from the Smithonian, checkout this article about pink becoming genderized.

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

A third example of the changing social construct is heels for men.  

For more information:

Scene On Radio did an excellent 10-part series podcast is about gender from the 
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University distributed by PRX. The series attempts to answer:  What’s up with this male-dominated world? How did we get sexism, patriarchy, misogyny in the first place? How can we get better at seeing it, and what can we do about it? Co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee explore those questions and more.

This is an excellent podcast about the social construction of gender:
This 2018 episode of Hidden Brain explains how the differences between men and women are created by society.  For more info. see Ferris and Stein pgs 243-247

Just Mercy and Socialization/Gender

Review:
For the test, review the first two pages of the notes packet:

Unit 3: Social Structure:  (Chapter 4-8)

67 how institutions reproduce culture.

68 how institutions like Supreme Court can change culture.

70 culture of death penalty in AL and the institution of politics

71 cultural values (usefulness, practicality, self-help, individualism) create norms of intolerance

77-79 real culture vs. ideal culture

pg 90-91 “…we would never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse.  Yet we are comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would.  I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”

74-75 (chapter 4) How does war act as an agent of socialization? 

89-90 Herbert’s socialization from childhood through his return from war.

How do parents of poor black kids socialize their children?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coryt8IZ-DE

Here is a link to Marsha Colbey.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/inside-the-heartbreaking-talk-black-parents-must-have-with-their-kids_us_581ca092e4b0d9ce6fbb465b

101 W.E.B. Dubois

Chapter VIII Of The Coming of John

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm

A whole community was invested in John (like Stevenson) but John was lynched and it devastated the community similar to how Walter’s conviction had.

Background on Dubois:  https://contexts.org/articles/scholar-denied/

Chapter 6

115 “Only a handful of countries permitted the death penalty for children-and the United States was one of them….Many states had changed their laws to make it easier o prosecute children as adults, and my clients were getting younger and younger.  Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state – or any other country in the world.”

How does Charlie’s story exemplify what we learned about socialization?

“If we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”

Peers/Friends as an Agent of Socialization

Friends/Peer Groups

Peer influence starts especially because of school and cohort groups, and becomes significant by adolescence, possibly more intense and more influential than family.  Adolescents spend more time with each other than with parents or anyone else. This leads to adolescent subculture.  Studies have shown that the most important factor in statistically predicting whether a teen will take up a particular deviant behavior is the presence or absence of peers who also engage in that behavior.

Here is some evidence for the importance of peers as agents of socialization:

This article from Contexts called "Friends with Academic Benefits" is about how the social network structure that you have can affect your academic achievement.

• Can you identify your own social network structure based on the models in the article?

This article from the Journal of Health and Behavior examines whether college roommates will influence each other to be more aggressive, smoke, or be sexually active.

• Read the abstract and discussion/conclusion.  How did the researchers conduct their research?  What did the researchers conclude?

This article from the journal Sociology of Education shows that your friends will influence the likelihood of you being in STEM classes or not.

• Read the abstract and discussion/conclusion.  How did the researchers conduct their research?  What did the researchers conclude?  
• Are you in STEM?  Are your friends? Is this article's conclusion true for you?

Patricia and Peter Adler are very well-published in the area of adolescent peer socialization.   

Their book called Peer Power is an extensive exploration into the world of adolescents and their affect on each other.  From Google books, 

 Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children's community, Peter and Patti Adler discuss the vital components of the lives of preadolescents, popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities. They describe how friendships shift and change, how people are drawn into groups and excluded from them, how clique leaders maintain their power and popularity, and how individuals' social experiences and feelings about themselves differ from the top of the pecking order to the bottom. In so doing, the Adlers focus their attention on the peer culture of the children themselves and the way this culture extracts and modifies elements from adult culture. Children's peer culture, as it is nourished in those spaces where grown ups cannot penetrate, stands between individual children and the larger adult society.  As such, it is a mediator and shaper, influencing the way children collectively interpret their surroundings and deal with the common problems they face.


Friend Sources
Where do Americans find their friends?

School As Agent of Socialization

Sociologists publishing about school show research that details how schools teach manifest lessons like reading and writing and latent lessons like patriotism, obedience and consumption.


School Values, From Sociology of Education

Teacher socialize students to embrace certain values and behaviors.  Brint, Contreras and Matthews (2001, Sociology of Education) observed elementary school teachers and they coded the messages that teachers relayed to students.  They observed over 1000 interactions between teachers and students.

For student discussion:

What do you think the messages were that teachers relayed?


After we discuss the messages.



This research highlights what socialization messages elementary school teachers convey to students.



Obedience
Obedience is illustrated in this rhetorical piece called Beavis vs. Barbie, also available here:
https://mathprojectsjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/beavisandbarbie.pdf


Consumption
Consumption in schools is illustrated by Murray J. Milner, in his book,  Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids.  The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture explains that Milner,

...argues that the teenage behaviors that annoy adults do not arise from hormones, bad parenting, poor teaching, or the media, but from adolescents’ lack of power over the central features of their lives: they must attend school; they have no control over the curriculum; they can’t choose who their classmates are. What teenagers do have is the power to create status systems and symbols that not only exasperate adults, but also impede learning and maturing. Ironically, parents, educators, and businesses are inadvertently major contributors to these outcomes.
An absorbing journey that stirs up a mixture of nostalgia and dismay, Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids shows how high school distills the worst features of American consumer society and shapes how we relate to our neighbors, partners, and coworkers. It also provides insight into how our schools and the lives of teenagers might be transformed.

School Culture Socializes the Students Within it

Lisa Nunn researched how school cultures shape the students that attend each school.  Her findings are published in her book, Defining Student Success.


Read a preview from Google books here.


And a detailed review from Dr. Judson Everitt of Loyola University Chicago, available on JSTOR here or from U of Chicago Press here.



From Rutgers University Press, also available through JSTOR here.

The key to success, our culture tells us, is a combination of talent and hard work. Why then, do high schools that supposedly subscribe to this view send students to college at such dramatically different rates? Why do students from one school succeed while students from another struggle? To the usual answer—an imbalance in resources—this book adds a far more subtle and complicated explanation. Defining Student Success shows how different schools foster dissimilar and sometimes conflicting ideas about what it takes to succeed—ideas that do more to preserve the status quo than to promote upward mobility.
Lisa Nunn’s study of three public high schools reveals how students’ beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment and reinforced by curriculum and teaching practices. While American culture broadly defines success as a product of hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way—reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students’ college-going futures. Some schools’ definitions of success match seamlessly with elite college admissions’ definition of the ideal college applicant, while others more closely align with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education.
With its insights into the transmission of ideas of success from society to school to student, this provocative work should prompt a reevaluation of the culture of secondary education. Only with a thorough understanding of this process will we ever find more consistent means of inculcating success, by any measure.

Religion and School
Success in school is also shaped by religious affiliation.

DC reg. SVS, and JM

Last chance for dual credit registration.  

Here is a message from the Loyola Dual Credit program director Brigid Schulz, available at bschul1@luc.edu:

I have created a late registration window for any student who may have forgotten to register or faced challenges when registering. The final registration deadline will be Monday, October 21st. Please share this with your students.

Please check the roster to the right.   If you feel that you should be on the roster, but tyou are not listed, please contact the Loyola Dual Credit program director Brigid Schulz, available at bschul1@luc.edu.

For paying tuition, students will not see their tuition posted until the 15th of the month.

To pay tuition see this post.




Student Voice Survey

Today, you are being asked to reflect on yourself. To do this, we ask you to fill out a survey that focuses on helping you and your teachers learn more about your social, emotional, and academic experiences.

You may be asked to complete this survey in several classes over the course of the next two weeks. This survey will ask about your skills in life and in school, which are critical aspects of your high school education. Please be as honest as possible, as we will review the feedback to continually assess how we can continually improve and learn from your listening to your perspective..

The information collected in the survey will not be graded and your responses will be reported back to us anonymously, so teachers will not be able to see your names attached to your responses. So, please answer honestly.

Please raise your hand if you need any help, or if you have any questions. I can help you with any words or directions you don’t understand. 

Are there any questions?

Just Mercy

Please be reading Just Mercy chapters 4-8.  You should be ready to discuss it by Thursday.  As you read, look for examples of how the people in the book are shaped by culture and their socialization, especially from family and community but also school, media, peers.