Читать книгу Contemporary Sociological Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 20

Contemporary sociological theories of gender raise many of the same questions as those focused on race. Gender inequality has been shaped by sexism as race has been shaped by racism. Gender is embedded in inequality but is to it. It has been transformed by collective struggle. And, it is commonly essentialized – as men (and sometimes women) make remarks on the lines of “you know what women are like.” Gender also has a biological basis – more substantial than that of race – though this is often held to determine characteristics it does not. Again, like race, how we think about gender influences sociological research on other themes – notably family and sexuality but also society in general.

Material inequality was and is basic. Women were long denied voting rights and subjected to unequal laws. They are still paid less than men and blocked from promotions. They carry disproportionate burdens for childcare. Women’s struggles for social equality entered a new phase of growth in the 1960s. This was contentious in sociology as in the rest of society. In 1969, several hundred women sociologists gathered in a “counterconvention” at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church rather than being marginalized in the nearby convention of the American Sociological Association. But, sociology was transformed. Sociologists claimed agency in the field’s self-transformation – forming organizations like Sociologists for Women in Society and seeking to broaden participation and perspectives through efforts like the ASA’s Minority Fellowship Program. And, having more women in sociology was basic to seeing things men did not notice and thinking differently.

The rise of feminist sociological theory was an important part of this struggle. This reflected in part the need to explain – simultaneously – why gender inequality was as pervasive as it was and why this was not inevitable (as popular beliefs and some functionalist theories suggested) but open to change. The Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith (excerpted here) showed the implicitly masculine standpoint of most existing theory and the potential power of complementing this with theory written from the standpoint of women. She drew on both ethnomethodology and Marxism to construct a theory of the “conceptual practices of power.” ²⁶ Work like this drew attention to the ways in which seemingly neutral classifications such as those of law courts and welfare agencies, censuses, and indeed sociological surveys reproduced and helped to enforce certain normative understandings of how the world should work. These normative understandings commonly benefited men at the expense of women – for example by associating housework “naturally” with childbearing.

Feminist theory argued that material equality would be hard to achieve so long as cultural categories remained biased against women. This left open a major question, though. Did the elimination of bias necessarily mean seeing men and women as essentially the same? Or could it mean recognizing gender differences but valuing men and women equally? The issue was similar to that of whether the elimination of ethnic and racial discrimination necessarily depended on the assimilation of immigrants into host cultures – or, in the case of US race relations, on making blacks more like whites. An influential strand of theory in both racial and gender studies argued that such assimilationist thinking was a further reflection of inequality and power, not a way around it. Why should women need to become more like men in order to gain equivalent political or economic rights? While much of the empirical research in sociology continued to focus on material dimensions of gender inequality – in workplaces, political institutions, and families – a major strand of feminist theory focused more on questions of the cultural construction of difference. This was influenced by both the critical theory tradition and French poststructuralist theory. Feminist theory of this sort also influenced the development of critical theories of sexuality. Linking these theories was a concern to avoid assuming that there was one correct model for human identity or social life. Rather, theorists suggested that theory needed to address the ways in which differences could be recognized without unjust discrimination.