Test Bank Aulette + Chapter 1 Introduction 4e

Teacher’s Manual to Accompany Gendered Worlds, Third Edition

We wrote this manual to assist faculty using the fourth edition of Gendered Worlds (2019). The manual summarizes the text of each chapter to help teachers focus on particular sections and ideas of their choosing. After each chapter summary we offer short- and long-answer questions that faculty can use for discussion or written tests. We also provide critical thinking exercises and multiple-choice questions and answers. Finally, each chapter summary ends with suggested films and videos on the chapter topic. You or your students will be able to locate any of the suggested films by Googling the title.

Chapter 1 Introduction

A Few More Inconvenient Truths

The tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 shows how gender appears in surprising and critical ways in our lives. Women represented 75% of the fatalities that resulted from the environmental disaster. Observers have noted that several social factors related to gender—including clothing, division of labor, and play activities, such as swimming and tree climbing—played a role in the gender differences in mortality.

Some Ground Rules for Studying Gender

How should we study gender? This book makes three assumptions:

• Sex and gender are the outcomes of social arrangements and social relations. Conventional wisdom may tell us that biology is destiny and that gender (and race ethnicity and sexuality) are part of natural physical bodies. We will challenge these assumptions by showing how biological accounts do not sufficiently explain gender, race, and sex.
• We must take account of intersectionality. Gender is part of a network of social inequalities. Race/ethnicity, sexuality, social class, and national divisions create networks of power and inequality that intersect with gender relations.
• The choice of standpoint is a political choice. We cannot study social life as if we were neutral outside observers. Research is political, meaning that it is informed by and influences power relationships, because it must always be from a particular standpoint. Social inequalities generate distinctive standpoints, which form a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “knowledge and truth and the right to be heard are not equally distributed.” Howard Becker provides an example of a hierarchy of credibility. He writes, “Most research on youth is clearly designed to find out why youth are so troublesome for adults, rather than asking the equally interesting sociological question: “Why do adults make so much trouble for youth?” (Howard Becker, “Whose Side Are We On?” Social Problems 14(3), Winter 1967). We must understand the perspectives of subordinated groups, who have their own knowledge of their everyday worlds, knowledge that may contradict official, elite knowledge. There is no one, objective view.

The Overarching Theory of Intersectionality

The text is organized around the theory of intersectionality, a theory developed by many scholars and especially associated in sociology with the work of Patricia Hill Collins.

The theory of intersectionality:

• tells us that the complexity of human life and social experience is the result of a system of contradictory and dynamic networks informed by the multiple social statuses that we occupy, including race/ethnicity, gender, class, age, ability, sexuality, and so on.
• provides a framework for exploring and understanding all the strands of our lives and how they influence each other.
• also provides a framework for uncovering and challenging the power relationships that are central to these networks and their interactions.

Intersectional analysis focuses on the web of power relations that create oppression and privilege and the ways that multiple and sometimes conflicting sources of oppression and power are intertwined.

Hegemonic Masculinities and Emphasized Femininities

This book will emphasize the range of ways gender is experienced and understood. There are always many different masculinities and femininities in a society, but some versions dominate in any particular society or historical period. Raewyn Connell has named the dominant forms “hegemonic masculinities” and “emphasized femininities.” It is important to explore both the dominant forms and the more marginalized masculinities and femininities in order to see how gender is challenged and changed.

Making History

While we are constrained by the social arrangements in our lives, some people challenge and resist these arrangements, seeking to eliminate them, alter them, or get around them. At the same time, other people seek to maintain the status quo. These tensions mean that social institutions and societies are continually in flux. Social institutions, laws, and beliefs shape and limit the choices we have. C. Wright Mills (1959) encourages us to consider our place in history and all of the power structures that shape our opportunities and limitations, thereby applying the sociological imagination to our lives. The past histories of gender shape our lives in profound ways. But just as Mills points out that, “By the fact of [our] living, [we contribute], however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history,” gender is the creation of humans interacting with one another and can be recreated or even eliminated through our continuing interactions and practices.

Feminist Scholars Seeking Answers

There were many different women’s movements in the last third of the 20th century in North America, Europe, and Australia, and also in parts of the global South. Most histories of the women’s movement that you may have read start with the North American “second wave” struggles of the 1970s. Black history reveals a different women’s movement among black American women. In the 19th and 20th centuries, black women were active in defending themselves, their families, and their communities through the anti-lynching movement, organizing black domestic workers, participating in the anti-eugenics movement, struggling against sterilization abuse, and taking part in the civil rights movement.

What is often referred to as the “second wave” was actually two largely white movements: a movement for legal/political reform and inclusion spearheaded by the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a socialist feminist women’s liberation movement often associated with younger women on college campuses. Radical and lesbian feminists formed their own groups in this period as well. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and First Nations women organized to press for their specific demands.

Feminism in the Universities

Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, feminist scholars developed new areas of study, new concepts, and new analyses. Important concepts in gender studies today include “the social construction of gender,” “doing gender,” “compulsory heterosexuality,” “the feminization of poverty,” “hegemonic and subordinated masculinities,” and “care work.”

Third-Wave Feminism

This term refers to the new generation of feminists that emerged in the United States in the 1990s. These feminists took for granted the privileges won by their mothers’ generation, embraced racial ethnic and global differences among women, and lived feminism in their everyday lives.

Transnational and Global Feminism

Transnational feminism originated in a series of international conferences on women beginning in Mexico in 1975. The UN Decade for Women from 1975 to 1985 began with divergent goals for women of the South and North but developed activities to promote women’s rights within the UN system and beyond. The Platform for Action developed at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 called for action in twelve critical areas of concern: poverty, education, health, violence, armed conflict, the economy, power and decision making, the media, the environment, and the girl child.

Women’s Movements: A Broad Look

Some observers of the contemporary women’s movements believe they have capitulated to neoliberal capitalism. Instead of struggling for a new order of economic and political justice, they look to increasing gender equality within a capitalist system which emphasizes individual responsibility and accomplishment and offers little assistance to groups disadvantaged by the free market. Critics observe that, rather than offering critiques of capitalism, contemporary feminism is today more often characterized by calls for more women executives, more equal wages, and so forth.

Plan of the Book

• Chapter 2 Bodies and Gender

This chapter makes the case for biological sex as a continuum, not a dichotomy of male and female, and explores the interaction of physical and social factors in creating gendered human bodies.

• Chapter 3 Socialization and the Social Construction of Gender

If biology is not destiny, where does it come from? This chapter answers this question with three sources: learning gender, doing gender, and gendered social institutions.

• Chapter 4 Sexualities

Sexuality a complex factor in and is another social issue often assumed to be biologically determined. This chapter explores its intersections with gender, race ethnicity, and nation.

• Chapter 5 Education

Education is a gendered institution that is tied to other gendered institutions, some surprising (such as distribution of water) and some not (such as the labor market).

• Chapter 6 Work

Paid and unpaid work is a complex, gendered institution composed of numerous pieces including labor markets, job hierarchies, and international systems of labor exploitation.

• Chapter 7 Families

This chapter explores several aspects of family life, including marriage, balancing paid work and family life, parenting and caregiving, and divorce. Each of these aspects reveals differential experiences by gender.

• Chapter 8 Violence

Violence is a feature of our lives, from the most intimate relationships to the most wide-ranging aspects of human existence, such as war. This entire continuum reflects gender and, in particular, presents the central question of why acts of violence are primarily committed by men against women and other men.

• Chapter 9 Health and Illness

Health is a collective good requiring collective action to secure it for all people. The problems and the solutions to health and health care are shaped by gender as well as other systems of social inequality.

• Chapter 10 Politics, Prison, and the Military

Politics includes electoral politics, military, and prison. All of these are highly stratified by gender and pose many questions about gender and power, including the very definition of politics.

• Chapter 11 Media

Media provide a powerful reflection of gender as well as means of creating, challenging, or maintaining the status quo in regard to gender.

• Chapter 12 Sports

Sport is another social institution that is heavily gendered. Sports, along with media, promote associations of athleticism with hegemonic masculinity while frequently misrepresenting and excluding women.

• Chapter 13 Religion

Religion takes many forms in the world. Gender plays a central role in the rituals, images, and organization of every form.

• Chapter 14 Globalization, Organizing, and Making the World a Better Place

Gender is a central part of the global forces shaping the contemporary world, and sensitivity to the issue of gender may offer solutions to many of our pressing social problems.

Short-Answer Essay Questions

1. What is hegemonic masculinity? What type of masculinity do you think is dominant today, and how has it different from earlier eras?

2. What type of femininity to emphasized, or preferred today? How is this ideal different from earlier eras?

3. Describe the three waves of the American feminist movement.

3. Describe the three waves of the African feminist movement.

4. What is intersectional analysis?

Long-Answer Essay Questions

1. Sociologist C. Wright Mills writes: “By the fact of his living he [each individual in society] contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.” What do you think this means in regard to gender?
2. We learn in this chapter that “At the core of sociology is the idea that although individuals make choices about their destinies, they make them within the limits of the society in which they live.” Considering this sociological stance on individualism and choice, make a claim about the place of intersectional analysis in sociological scholarship.
3. Siyanda is an online database of gender and development materials from around the world. It is also an interactive space where gender practitioners can share ideas, experiences, and resources. http://www.siyanda.org/index.htm. One of the key issues discussed on this site is climate change and gender. Your text opens with a description of one way gender played an important role in one devastating result of climate change. Siyanda has articles on many different ways that gender is a critical aspect of our understanding and experience of climate change and our efforts to stop climate change and address the problems caused by it. Go to the site and find information on gender and climate change. Imagine you are a journalist who is writing an article on gender and climate change. Based on your findings, write an article. Be sure to choose a specific focus.
4. Intersectionality is a theoretical framework and a way of looking at the world that will help us to understand many issues introduced in this text. The Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) is a research/political organization that often uses intersectionality in their work. Go to the website http://www.cawn.org/11/index.htm for reports on intersectionality and how it might be used. Choose one of the topics on the site (Key Concepts, Putting Intersectional Analysis into Practice, Globalisation and the feminisation of poverty, Globalising women's poverty and migration, Violence Against Women at the crossroads of identity and discrimination, Diversity and Social Exclusion, Maculinities and Patriarchy in context, Religion, Violences and Justice, Legitimising and Tolerating Violence, and Solidarity in Action). Imagine that you have been asked to summarize this material for your classmates. Write a summary of intersectionality, outlining what it is and how it is useful for understanding gender injustice.
5. Look at the definition of the three waves of American feminism that are commonly used to describe the women’s movement. Find a website that provides examples of each of the waves. For example, you might look at the National Organization for Women’s website to see if you can find evidence of the second and third waves. And you might look at a women’s history website to see if you can find examples and illustrations of the first wave. Using the images you have found, create a short visual presentation that illustrates the three waves.
6. Now do the same thing for the three waves of African feminism. For information on the African Union and gender mainstreaming, check out the PowerPoint presentation at http://www.honvedelem.hu/files/9/8008/kemi_ogunsanya_-_au.ppt#367,10,Gender Mainstreaming in the AU. Assemble your visual images for the American and African waves and think about how the two sets of images compare and contrast.

Critical Thinking Exercises

1. This chapter introduces several key assumptions the book makes: “social life is socially based and politically structured, gender is part of a network of social inequalities, and scholarship is political.” Consider ways you are accustomed to understanding gender. What changes when you move from thinking about gender through a biological lens to thinking about it through a social and political lens?
2. The authors of Gendered Worlds “seek to replace the ‘view from above’ with the ‘view from below’” in the book’s political stance. What would the “view from above” look like, and what changes when the outlook comes “from below”? To get started, look to this chapter’s discussion of Raewyn Connell’s study of well-known theorists of the global North versus theorists from the global South.
3. Individually or in groups, reflect on the different orders of oppression in your community or communities of origin. What are some examples of ways that gender, sexuality, class, and race ethnicity intersect from your own experience?

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. Why is there such a high gender disparity in mortality rates in environmental disasters?
   1. Women are taught fewer survival skills, such as swimming and tree climbing.
   2. Taking responsibility for others, especially children, prevented women from escaping floods.
   3. Female clothing can inhibit movement.
   4. The division of labor puts women in more dangerous places.
   5. All of the above
2. What does “race ethnicity” refer to in this book?
   1. The idea that race and ethnicity are both biological factors, and it is incorrect to separate them
   2. The idea that race is biological and ethnicity is social, so they need to be considered together
   3. The idea that race and ethnicity are both social factors that are intertwined
   4. A combination of cultural heritage, skin color, and birthplace
3. What are the highest-ranking nations in gender equality?
   1. Scandinavian and European nations
   2. Spain and Italy
   3. Eastern European nations
   4. The USA and Canada
4. What is intersectional analysis?
   1. A type of scholarship that takes the “view from below” by considering the point of view people marginalized by gender
   2. A form of analysis that looks at the crosscutting inequalities that complicate gendered differences, such as race ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nation
   3. A way of deconstructing differences by considering the binaries at their foundation
   4. A form of critique that dissects the genealogy of the subject
5. What does the term “hegemonic masculinity” refer to?
   1. The culturally exalted form of masculinity that is linked to institutional power
   2. Male styles of being that are marginalized by existing power structures
   3. A way that men can inhabit their masculinity so it is respectful of women
   4. A type of masculinity that refuses patriarchal privilege
6. What does the term “emphasized femininity” refer to?
   1. The idea that gender is a cultural performance
   2. The idea that there is a biological aspect to gender as well as a cultural aspect
   3. The media version of womanhood that is “organized, financed, and supervised by men”
   4. Radical feminism that combats gender oppression at the institutional level
7. What was the first wave of the American women’s movement?
   1. The movement that began in the 19th century and focused on suffrage
   2. The movement that began in the late 18th century and focused on the rights of women working in factories
   3. The way in which the women’s movement shifted its focus in the 1960s from suffrage to sexual freedom
   4. This refers to the first time the women’s movement acknowledged race ethnicity and intersectionality.
8. What commonality do the first and second waves of the American women’s movement share?
   1. They both occurred in the 1970s.
   2. Both were rooted in lesbian-feminism.
   3. They both involved the fight for universal suffrage.
   4. They were both originated in movements against racism.
9. What was the focus of the transnational feminist platform at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing?
   1. Women and poverty
   2. Education and training
   3. Women’s health
   4. Violence against women
   5. All of the above
10. What is neoliberalism?
    1. The idea that all humans in a free nation deserve certain basic rights, such as education and health care
    2. The economic policy that supports free (unregulated) markets and the privatization of state welfare provisions
    3. The political position of the far left in the post-millennial age
    4. This refers to all liberation movements that occurred after 1960, including women’s liberation, black liberation, and rebellions against colonial powers.
11. What is third wave feminism?
    1. A feminist philosophy that emerged in the 1990s
    2. A movement for gender equality that reflected the legal, political, and social gains won by the previous generation
    3. A feminist movement that was more inclusive of women of all backgrounds and identities than the movement that came before.
    4. All of the above.
12. The World Economic Forum (WEF) assigns gender equality scores to nations based on four criteria. Which is NOT one of them?
    1. Economic opportunity and participation
    2. Maternal age and birthrate
    3. Educational attainment
    4. Political participation
13. What is second wave feminism?
    1. The 1960s and 70s feminist women’s rights movement which emphasized women’s legal equality and rights to public sphere opportunities
    2. Early 20^th century feminism focused on gender equality goals like voting rights
    3. The feminist movement of the 1990s which sought to address the shortcomings of the previous generation’s feminist movements
    4. The feminist movement of the 2010s which has expanded its focus to include the experiences of transgender people and men.
14. Second wave feminism had two branches. Who comprised the older branch?
    1. Activists working for the liberation of both enslaved people and women
    2. Women promoting legal equality through new organizations like NOW
    3. Racist white feminists who believed white women should be able to vote to counter the votes of Black men
    4. Socialist feminists who were sometimes also associated with the anti-war movement
15. Who comprised the younger branch of second wave feminism?
    1. Feminists who emphasized intersectionality and the need for greater inclusion of mothers, women of color, and Lesbians
    2. Women promoting legal equality through new organizations like NOW
    3. Racist white feminists who believed white women should be able to vote to counter the votes of Black men
    4. Socialist feminists who were sometimes also associated with the anti-war movement
16. What is standpoint epistemology?
    1. The idea that research should be objective
    2. The idea that all opinions are valid
    3. The idea that researchers cannot be objective and should not claim to be
    4. The idea that research can only be valid if we avoid applying our personal perspectives
17. Which of the following guidelines best summarizes a feminist approach to research?
    1. Researchers should acknowledge the fact that their political opinions and interests shape their studies and identify what those opinions and interests are.
    2. People of all genders can conduct feminist research but only if they are studying women.
    3. Not all research is feminist, but all feminist research is conducted by women.
    4. Researchers should do their best to put their political opinions and interests aside when conducting research.
18. This book takes the position that gender and race/ethnicity of social and political constructs. What does this mean?
    1. They are categories that are socially constructed, meaning that human communities have created and defined them.
    2. They are ideas used to support unequal power relations.
    3. They are not stable and objective categories but ones whose meanings fluctuate over time and place.
    4. All of the above.
19. This book is based on three core assumptions informing the study of gender. Which of the following is NOT one of them?
    1. Gender is socially based and politically structured.
    2. Gender inequality is based on physical differences between male and female bodies.
    3. Gender is part of a network of social inequalities.
    4. Research is political.
20. The terms first world, second world and third world are today considered outdated and ethnocentric. This book instead uses different terminology for the same regions. What does the term global North refer to?
    1. nations and regions of the world that are the most economically developed, such as the United States, Japan, and Europe
    2. nations and regions of the world that are poorer and less powerful than others, such as Africa and South America.
    3. The former Soviet Union and its allies
    4. Northern Europe
21. What does the term global South refer to?
    1. nations and regions of the world that are the most economically developed, such as the United States, Japan, and Europe
    2. nations and regions of the world that are poorer and less powerful than others, such as Africa and South America
    3. The former Soviet Union and its allies
    4. Southern Europe
22. Raewyn Connell identifies additional types of masculinity beyond the hegemonic or dominant ideal. What is the best definition of subordinated masculinities?
    1. Masculinities that are seen as contrary to hegemonic masculinity, such as gay men, “mother’s boys,” and “sissies”
    2. Invisible masculinities, or those that do not reap the rewards of white patriarchy because of lower status in the racial order and economic order
    3. Masculinities that are positioned somewhere in between the most dominant and the least dominate masculinities, such as drill sergeants who only have power over the soldiers beneath them
    4. Ways in which women adopt traits that are seen as masculine in order to succeed in traditionally male activities
23. What is the best definition of marginalized masculinities?
    1. Masculinities that are seen as contrary to hegemonic masculinity, such as gay men, “mother’s boys,” and “sissies”
    2. Invisible masculinities, or those that do not reap the rewards of white patriarchy because of lower status in the racial order and economic order
    3. Masculinities that are positioned somewhere in between the most dominant and the least dominate masculinities, such as drill sergeants who only have power over the soldiers beneath them
    4. Ways in which women adopt traits that are seen as masculine in order to succeed in traditionally male activities
24. Connell says that men who are not hegemonically masculine but still benefit from and do not disrupt sexism are demonstrating what type of masculinity?
    1. Accidental
    2. Incidental
    3. Complicit
    4. Compulsory
25. Feminists like Fraser believe that modern feminism has not done enough to critique transnational capitalism and instead works for reform within wage labor. What solution to this problem does Fraser suggest?
    1. Feminists should work to improve the wages and work conditions of women around the globe and not just in their own countries.
    2. Feminists should work to improve the wage and work conditions of people of all genders, in their own countries and around the globe.
    3. Feminists should return to the principles of Marxist feminism and work to establish a new world order beyond capitalism.
    4. None of the above.