KEY THEORETICAL CONCEPTS

1. Women's Studies:

• “the study of women that places women's own experiences in the center of the process” (WRWC 4).
• “both a complement and correction to established disciplines and a new academic discipline of its own” (WRWC 4).

2. Feminism (see Barbara F. McManus. Classics and Feminism: Gendering the Classics. The Impact of Feminism on the Arts and Sciences. New York: Twayne, 1997).

• modern movement to promote the full equality of women with men and the high valuation of women as human beings
• feminist approach to scholarship characterized by shared theoretical positions:
  • gender is constructed and changeable
  • gender is a crucial category of analysis
• feminist approach to scholarship characterized by shared methods:
  • critique of androcentric norms
  • assumption of female subjectivity
  • openly political stance
• “minimizers” vs. “maximizers” of male-female difference

3. Tendencies within Feminism: these are somewhat artificial classifications that attempt to describe patterns of thought and approaches among feminists.

• Liberal Feminists: focus on individual rights and autonomy; minimize male/female difference; emphasize equality of opportunity and promote strategies that tear down barriers; seek to extend to women the individual rights gained by men
• Social Feminists: focus on material conditions and how these create oppressive societal structures, particularly class; emphasize effort to reform communities and institutions; stress social relations and responsibilities more than individual rights
• Cultural Feminists: maximize male/female difference; stress the positive value of women's “different voice” and emphasize the importance of incorporating this into the legal system; seek to recover and revalue women's culture, especially maternal values
• Radical Feminists: maximize male/female difference but stress disparities in power, especially male dominance (alternate name—“dominance feminists”); focus on sexuality and sexual relations as key to patriarchal oppression; seek to use law to help women “take control of their own bodies”
• Diversity Feminists: emphasize differences among women, including race, ethnicity, class, etc. (alternative name—“multicultural feminists”); focus on coalition building among different groups of women; promote international and global programs of reform

4. Types of Power (see Hilary M. Lips, Women, Men, and Power. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1991).

• Personal
  • control over others
  • capacity to achieve goals
  • strength to resist influence
  • inner strength (ability to endure, not to fall apart in adversity)
• Collective (membership in high-status group)
• Institutional (power conferred by a specific position in an institution)

5. Transgendered Moments vs. Sex-Role Crossovers and Gender-Neutral Behaviors (see Georgia Duerst-Lahti and Rita Mae Kelly. “On governance, leadership, and gender.” Gender Power, Leadership, and Governance, ed. Georgia Duerst-Lahti and Rita Mae Kelly. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. 11- 37). NB: The term “transgendered” is not used here in the sense it has recently acquired—to designate individuals whose gender presentation does not match their bodily sex.

Sex-Role Crossover

• Sex-role crossovers:
  • Individuals operating in “gender inappropriate” arenas are seen as seeking to “become” the other sex. Females in masculine arenas are viewed as potential contaminators of the arena, whereas males in feminine arenas are viewed as potential self-contaminators.
• Gender-neutral arenas:
  • These would be arenas in which gender expectations and evaluations do not come into play at all; few if any such arenas currently exist.
• Transgendered moments:
  • These involve arenas that were formerly identified with one sex or the other but where the presence of either sex is now viewed as acceptable but evaluated differently. Females in traditionally masculine arenas and males in traditionally feminine arenas are viewed in relatively positive fashion, as still feminine or masculine, but also as noteworthy, remarkable, unusual and perhaps required to perform fairly complex gender-balancing acts.

6. Sex vs. Gender (click on the links for graphics illustrating the concepts)

• Sex: a biologically based category that is determined by genetics and hormones and controls the anatomical structure of our bodies. Adjectives “female” and “male.”
• Gender: the meaning that cultures give to biological difference; a set of behaviors that is learned and performed. Gender is something we do, not what we are, and it can change from culture to culture and even in individual attitudes over the course of a lifetime. Adjectives “feminine” and “masculine.”

7. Lenses of Gender (see Sandra Lipsitz Bem. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

• Biological Essentialism
  • Essentialist explanations of sex differences as totally determined by genes, hormones, evolutionary sociobiology
• Gender Polarization (only two, mutually exclusive sexes; see the two genders as opposites)
  • “the cultural requirement that the sex of the body match the gender of the psyche” (Bem 115)
  • “the imposition of a gender-based classification on social reality” (Bem 125)
• Androcentrism (males and male experience presented as a universal, neutral norm; language usage offers a good example)
  • “the definition of a woman in terms of her domestic and reproductive function within a male-dominated household . . . [and] in terms of her departure from a male standard . . . [and] in terms of her ability to stimulate and to satisfy the male sexual appetite” (Bem 62)
  • American equal rights laws “give equality only to those few women who manage to be in the same situation as men while denying equality to those many women who are in a different situation from men” (Bem 73)

8. Interactive, multiplying effect of marginalizing cultural lenses

9. The Gendered Body, created by the intersection of the androcentric and gender-polarizing lenses (see Bem 159-62)

• For males: both lenses push in the same direction (i.e., affirmation of maleness) and build upon (though sometimes to extremes) biological and anatomical predispositions
• For females: the lenses push in opposite directions (gender-polarizing stresses femaleness and difference from male, but androcentric affirms maleness and minimizes femaleness), creating a paralyzing effect that conflicts with biological and anatomical predispositions