Sex, Gender and Culture

Believing is Seeing (Judith Lorber)

• Sex is a social construction (like gender)
• there is no definition of female or male that could include all those who are labeled as one of the binary sex categories
• intersexed individuals are illustrative (one) of the fallacy of binary sex categories
• Once we accept this binary, we construct a world which heightens (or even creates) these differences
• the human built environment is designed for male bodies (because of greater male power I culture)
• gym equipment
• desks
• cars

Historically, biological sex has been defined in a variety of ways

• progression from attributing differences to religious demands (god) to the definitions given through science
• anatomy is destiny (wombs, breasts, menstruation, pregnancy)
• except for procreative hormones and organs, men and women have similar bodies (reality)
• When sex is ambiguous we alter infants to conform to binary classification
• based on penis size now/presence of ovaries in the 19th century where to be a full woman you needed to reproduce
• Men's social bodies are the definition of human
• gray's anatomy
• clinical trials

What Ideology and Power Differentials Congealed to Create These Categories?

• Bodies differ in many ways physiologically, BUT they are completely transformed by social practices to fit into the salient categories of a society (male and female/men women)
• women: menstruation, pregnancy, lactation
• men: spermproducers
• Competitive Sports
• have been designed to construct male identity
• a venue for legitimizing violence and aggression
• avenue for upward mobility
• physical competence an important marker for masculinity
• Gymnastic equipment sex differences
• men: adult male bodies/strength
• women:slim pubescent girl bodies/artistry
• media coverage: men 95%/Women 5%
• Seen as "bad"/dangerous for women
• infertility
• injury
• Sports construct men's bodies to be powerful and women's bodies to be sexual
• Dealing with disconnect between femininity and athletics
• athlete on the court/woman off the court
• redefine activity as feminine (bodybuilders and "flex appeal"
• demonstrating physical strength=unfeminine or lesbian
• Physical education (pre Title IX) minimized exertion, maximized a feminine appearance and manner (hygiene and uniform grade)
• included ironed embroidered uniform, white ankle socks, clean and neatly tied sneakers, clean and groomed hair and body (lineup began every class in 1960-1970s).

Hottest women athletes

Sports construct gendered bodies, technology constructs gendered Skills

• Technology
• women not built to use modern technologies
• cars/driving
• computers/tech (not clerical)
• Bathrooms
• the CULTURAL, physiological and demographic combinations of CLOTHING, FREQUENCY OF URINATION, MENSTRUATION, and CHILDCARE add up to generally greater bathroom use for women
• equity would mean more bathroom (not equal #) for women, and/or allowing the use of male restrooms or gender neutral rest rooms

Gendered and Sexed individuals do not arise from physiology but from the needs of the SOCIAL ORDER

• -reliable division of labor, reproduction-
• Religion and other cultural ideologies reinforce these boundaries and communicate what is required and what is taboo. 
• political power, control of resources and force are used to uphold this social order.

The Body, Gender and Sex (Alexandra Howsen)

What Role Does the Body Play in Creating Sex/Gender Differences in Western Culture?

• women nature/men culture (Ortner) Early feminist anthropology
• gendering the body
• one body-two variations
• woman a variation of the male body
• woman body as mysterious/dark continent
• Female body as a site for scrutiny/surgeries/interventions
• gynecology
• women only hospitals
• obstetrics
• female body as deviant (and concomitant medicalization)
• hysterical bodies
• bleeding bodies
• reproductive/birth technologies
• menopause-hormonal deficit
• culture constructs the body so that is is understood as a biological given
• female body is naturally weaker, and less stable=women are inferior
• body=female/mind=male (enlightenment) (nature/culture)

In this light, what role does the body play in the construction/confounding of gender?

• the body is a CULTURAL ARTIFACT, shaped by ideas
• hegemonic heterosexuality
• hegemonic masculinity
• hegemonic male body
• shape bodily conduct and influence self-identity
• to be male is to occupy space
• boys learn and use more bodily awareness (motor skill development)
• active sense of bing-in-the-world (phenomenology)
• physicality and athletics (throw like a girl)
• Race: black male athletes are the object of gaze for white men-reasserts class dominace while controlling the labor potential for the hyper-masculine physique

Looking Glass Self (Charles Horton)

• how we observe ourselves performing (gender) as a bodily self while at the same time measuring the acceptability of this performance from outside (social evaluations of bodily performance)

The Objectified Female Body

• women bodies are the object of gaze (not just male)
• female nudes in art
• women dress
• rape and presentation
• women become hyper-aware of their bodies and how they look

Troubled Body

• fetishized/fantasy/spectacle
• perfection: eating disorders and plastic surgery
• black women: breeders/sexualized
• power of embodied (or the lack of)

Embodiment and gendered Modalities 

• the self is projected in and through action (Merleau-Ponty)
• the awareness of ones body as object emerges as a form of alienation (Merleau-Ponty)-similar to the sick body of the patient.
• the awareness of being watched: makes women comporting themselves in smaller and more contained ways
• BODY IDIOM (the shared vocabulary of comportment) in this case/male/female
• alienation: woman does not know she is pregnant/anorexia-body dysphoria/excessive plastic surgery

Challenging Gender Boundaries

• ones phenomenological experience of being male or female is informed and reinforced through bodily conduct-ways of moving the body in gendered ways
• moving, gesturing, using space
• emerge as the outcome of anatomical form and physiological features
• everyday bodily conduct reinforces normative conceptions of gender
• disruptions to this conduct allow us to see that this dichotomy of gender exists
• women who dressed as men to pass for them and do male activities (travel, play jazz music (Billy Tipton, etc.)
• cross-gendering to pass as women (transvestism) failure results in stigma
• Gender Performativity
• drag: exaggeration of conventional displays of gender which are overtly performed
• virtual worlds: gender binaries are constantly transgressed-a space where gender can be enacted and performed in new ways
• Butler's analysis reduces the body to discourse and deconstruction (critique)
• Changing Bodies
• physiological reconfiguration
• reconciling the body one inhabits with the self they believe to be
• the display/performance of femininity is independent of sex assigned
• requires competent performance of gender to be believed. (But what about what River said about his dysphoric performances?)
• medical model of "gender dysphoria"

Dueling Dualisms (Anne Fausto Sterling)

• The entire enterprise of science, and knowledge in general is culture bound
• sex is just as difficult to define as gender because it is a cultural construct which has emerged historically
• there are shades of difference rather than dualities

Foucault's Bio-Power (Power over living bodies)

• Individual Body
• bio politics of the population
• normal takes precedence over natural (constrains choices)

What is homosexual (defining homo- and heterosexual-sexual)

• is sexuality a fundamental reality
• who you have sex with (or not part of a particular act or setting)
• who you are attracted to (this may vary over the course of ones life)
• is sexuality dualistic?
• can homosexual even capture the range and variability of same-sex desire?
• Kinsey Scale as limiting since it only has one axis
• bound to historical contexts
• QUEER: sexuality is a social construction
• homosexual and heterosexual built on the two sex model of male and female
• How is the body connected to sexuality?
• institutionalized homosexuality
• Sambia/Greek felatio
• circle jerk
• I kissed a girl/porn
• men in prison?
• is there an inborn sex drive or impulse?
• raised in isolation (no language or sex drive)
• do women enjoy, want sex?
• is sex important in a relationship?
• What constitutes sexual behavior?
• oral sex? anal sex? kissing? clothes off? Cuddling? Spooning? Inter-course? No intercourse?

Social Constructionists and Anthropology of Sexuality

• age-structured homosexuality
• gender-reversed homosexuality
• role-specialized homosexuality 
• modern gay movement

Third Genders

• institutional homosexuality

The importance of the body emerging in sexuality

• physiologies set the ground on which sexual experience is enacted
• physical variation profoundly affects the experience of gender and sexuality
• bodily functions are organized and given meaning by culture in the development of sexuality
• we constantly readjust our identity based on changes in our bodies and our understanding or perception of them
• Feelings (Grosz)
• the mind translates physiology into an interior sense of self
• innate drives become organized by physical experience into SOMATIC FEELINGS, which translate into what we call emotions
• physical activities and experiences CREATE the body
• the brain is trained and retrained and all brains are different

Becoming a Gendered Body (Karin Martin)

• preschools are places where children learn bodily discipline
• preschools are one place where children learn early on to perform gender through subtle and not so subtle cues
• gender becomes embodied early on, which makes gendered differences seem natural
• social life depends on the successful presenting, monitoring and interpreting of bodies
• a disciplined body creates a context for social relations
• signal manage and negotiate information about power and status
• our bodies are the site of gender
• gender rests not only on the surface of the body, in performance and doing, but. BECOMES EMBODIED-who we are physically and psychologically
• body postures, musculature, tensions in our bodies are created through embodied gender
• bodies are often a source of power for men
• women bodies are often a source of tentativeness and anxiety-can not use ones body to its fullest extent
• teachers constantly monitor children's bodily movements, comportment and practices
• produces docile bodies, prepared for the larger social world, and gendered bodies, prepared for adult gendered behavior
• dressing up:
• wearing a dress limited girls physicality (literally and socially) and made them subject to clothing interventions by teachers
• girls play dress up more, and gendered differences increased from ages 3-5
• relaxed behaviors:
• boys exhibited more relaxed behaviors than girls (increased 3-5)
• boys were encouraged to exhibit more relaxed behaviors
• girls are encouraged to pursue more formal behaviors (disciplined more for relaxed behaviors.
• boys often ignored disciplining of their behaviors
• children self-sort themselves and are sorted into appropriate behaviors
• boys take up more room because of this, even in formal settings
• voice:
• girls are more often told to be quiet or repeat themselves in a quieter, nicer, voice-girls voices are disciplined to be softer and less physical
• limiting girls voices also limited their activities (which accompanied the louder voice-jumping, running, etc)-bodies are supposed to be quiet
• limit girls ability to counter mistreatment
• Bodily Instruction
• boys are bodily instructed more often than girls, but ignore teachers 50% of the time
• boys receive much more of teachers loud reprimands audible to the whole group
• teachers bodily requests were less substantive than those to girls. They directed girls bodies.
• boys: DON'T do that
• girls: DO this
• Physical interaction teacher/child
• 94% directed at boys
• restrain or remove boys that have gone "too far" or could cause harm
• boys: more likely to associate physicality with struggle (with someone more powerful or angry)
• physical interactions between children
• girls and boys teach their same sex peers about their bodies
• imitate the physical behavior of the same sex
• more rough play and fighting among 3 than 5 year old girls (learn not to be too rough)
• boys physical engagement and rough play is considered enjoyable/not negative
• cross gender interactions were more likely to be negative than same sex interactions

Free But Still Walking the Yard (Liam Martin)

• Prison rituals repeated after release are a reminder that people are changed in deep and lasting ways by twenty-four-hour-a-day, year-in-and-year-out prison environments. 
• Crossing over to very different conditions outside, these changes linger not just in habits and routines, but in physical marks, like jailhouse tattoos (Phillips 2001) and missing teeth (Moran 2012), and basic traits, like aversion to small talk or sensitivity to intrusions in personal space (Caputo-Levine 2013). 
• Prisonization is a transformation of the habitus (Bourdieu 1977), in which the contingencies of life in prison are inscribed in the convict body as lasting dispositions, motor schemes, and bodily automatisms.
• For Bourdieu, social life leaves deep marks on individuals as they fit their practices to institutional expectations. 
• Actions that are socially sanctioned—even informally with sideways stares or strange looks—tend to be phased out, while those that get rewarded are repeated over and over, becoming a set of unconscious habits and routines. 
• As people adapt basic elements of embodiment (i.e., accent, posture, body language) to the often unwritten rules of different environments, social knowledge becomes inscribed in the body as habitus, durable dispositions to think and act in particular ways. 
• These imprints of experience remain with people and guide their practice as they enter new institutional arenas.
• Most often, people move in settings similar to those that formed their habitus, so understand intuitively what counts as appropriate practice—they carry this knowledge in their bodies. 
• Because of the built-in lag between the time a habitus is forged and the moment it gets activated, there is always a chance that people confront situations quite different from those that formed their dispositions. Where this distance becomes too wide, the habitus will produce practices that are inappropriate or out of place.
• After release, former prisoners carry prisonized dispositions into social spaces that put very different demands on their practice. At a reentry employment program
• former prisoners struggling to shake traits developed navigating prison violence, such as hypersensitivity to intrusions on personal space and an unwillingness to smile or make small talk. 
• Inside prison, these ways of presenting the body and engaging in social interaction provided a measure of safety, but on the outside, became a barrier to entering the labor market. 
• tattooing fulfils important functions for prisoners: providing an artistic outlet in drab and monotonous environments, connecting a person to groups and neighborhoods outside, and asserting individual identity in confronting institutions that replace names with numbers and clothes with uniforms. 
• After release, these tattoos become lasting marks of prison history that can leave former prisoners branded dangerous or threatening. 
• anxiety often accompanies release for these reasons
• reentering prisoners use clothing as a tool of impression management to create an identity conducive to acceptance outside prison. Practices such as these and others are likely to produce further changes in the habitus and gradual adjustment.
• Habitus of imprisionment
• fixation on cleanliness
• eat standing up, one foot on a chair, reproducing his readiness among a crowd in the prison chow hall. 
• People moving behind made him uneasy. 
• Taking a shower, they always wore sandals
• see inanimate objects as potential weapons
• Being around cars was now disorienting, crossing the road dangerous. 
• stand patiently in front of doors, waiting for them to be opened. 
• wash socks and underwear in the shower
• get up early in the morning
• routinely write letters. 
• put a spoon in his pocket after eating
• feeling awkward with people behind you 
• put paper on the toilet seat
• taking staunch body postures without reason
• lingering taste for prison food
• hyper-vigilance
• reentry as culture shock
• develop formal ways to shed prison habitus and readjust

Habitus and Sports: Skateboarding Culture and Gender Norms (Becky Beal and Charlene Wilson)

Letitia Bufoni

• various social fields such as ‘skateboarding media’, ‘D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) culture’, and ‘lifestyle/action sports’ overlapped and worked to maintain gendered divisions within street skateboarding based upon the logics of individualism and embodiment.
• Masculine habituses were most closely associated with risk‐taking behaviors and technical prowess; they became significantly rewarded with social and cultural capital. Conversely, women’s habituses were considered as lacking in skill and aversive to risk‐taking. 
• Women thus came to be positioned as inauthentic participants in the street skateboarding social field and were largely excluded from accessing symbolic capital. 
• Corporate‐sponsored and supervised skate events which were explicitly set up to be gender inclusive provided a strong counter to ‘street’ practices. These ‘All Girl’ events were considered ‘positive’ and ‘empowering’ spaces by the women in our study. 
• the concept of social field to refer to various social contexts that have currency within street skateboarding including ‘skateboarding media’, ‘lifestyle/action sports’ and ‘D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) culture’.
• The ways in which individuals come to be valued within a particular social field and across the range of social fields is determined by the recognition of their embodied attributes. 
• These embodied attributes are defined as the habitus- ‘a subconscious manifestation of social structure that includes social habits, values, ways of being, thinking and moving, which are collectively generated by social actors while being reinforced in others’  
• Those individuals whose habitus most closely matches the idealized practices and taste distinctions which operate within a particular social field can access material, social and cultural benefits. 
• The habitus represents a form of physical capital that can be translated into economic capital (e.g. money, services, property), social capital (e.g. power and status) and cultural capital (e.g. educational and professional opportunities). 
• Street skateboarders explicitly enact an urban identity that invokes freedom, non‐conformity and engagement with risk.
• Walk (2006) describes skateboarding as a masculine‐oriented culture that involves voluntary ‘self‐mutilation’ and ‘risk taking in which the definitive measure of social life made vital is the life routinely and systematically nearly ended’
• Authentic status is bestowed upon those individuals who are able to exemplify the core values of risk taking and D.I.Y. through their social interactions, way of speaking and dressing and use of urban spaces 
• supported by unequal representations in the skateboarding media (street skating is particularly masculinized and women are portrayed as sexual figures)
• the risk‐oriented version of ‘street’ masculinity found in the specialty media as anarchic, ‘unkempt’, ‘rebellious’ and gangster‐like. -heroic ‘outlaw’ masculinity represents ‘heterosexist adventure’; 
• the specialty skate texts chronicle the young men’s ‘predatory pursuits of girls and women’ along with concomitant narratives ‘of sexual conquests and defeats’ 
• Desired Habitus:
• risk taking
• dangerous
• oblivious to pain
• physical prowess
• technical know-how
• lower class (street wise masculinity)-despite their actual white, middleclass identities
• women skaters were described by male skaters as sexually promiscuous, unskilled and afraid to take risks-the men positioned the women as being outsiders to street skateboarding. 
• Media analysis
• men’s avid consumption of media representations led to them implementing exclusionary and marginalizing gendered practices themselves. 
• The women’s comments directly implicated the men’s role in reproducing these practices within various social contexts. 
• At a local level, the women noted that they were often harassed, intimidated, or chased away from street spaces. Many ended up quitting skateboarding altogether
• women in our study who were able to consistently access street spaces were usually allowed to do so only after being mentored by a male ‘insider’
• the ‘All Girl Skate Jam’ event became an important social context for women to skate without fear of being intimidated, excluded and harassed by men
• Conclusions
• action sports industry promotes and rewards a traditional version of heterosexual femininity that is linked with self‐responsibility, personal choice, and health and happiness. As a result, women from alternative backgrounds are seen as peripheral participants in the context of action/lifestyle sports culture
• women make significant inroads into snowboarding culture, they are still primarily showcased when they represent heterosexual attractiveness
• the widespread practice of foregrounding heterosexually attractive women tends to symbolically erase women who appear lesbian, bisexual, queer, or “unfeminine”