International Perspectives on Gender, Week 21

 introduce the exam
 provoke thought about your revision strategies
 identify key concepts on the module
 draw connections across the module
 convince you that you already know more than you think
 start thinking what you would need to know about in order to write on some term 1 topics


When? Thursday 6 June, 9.30 am
 Where? Westwood Games Hall
 Duration? 3 hours, answer 3 questions
 Rubric?
Section 1 Essay = 1 section 1 exam ?, 2 section 2
Section 2 Essay = 2 section 1 exam ?s, 1 section 1
No barring
 Section 1: UK (1 question), Soviet Union/Russia (1 question),
China (1 question), Nationalism/Orientalism (1 question), South Africa (1 question)
 Section 2: India (1 question), Hindutva/religious fundamentalism (1 question), Islam (1 question),
Ireland (1 question), Gender and global capitalism
(1 question)

To assess what has been learnt over the academic year
University Regulations – pass year 1 to proceed
Assessing skills of prioritisation
Demonstrate time management skills
Classification
To demonstrate creativity, synthesis, originality
To demonstrate independent thinking

 Write down what you got right in your revision strategy last year (or earlier) and how you achieved it.
 Write down what you want to improve on in your revision strategy this year and how you’re going to do it.

 Sex (biological, fixed); Gender (social and cultural, constructed, mutable)
 Gender divisions of labour, resources, opportunities; gender pay gap; horizontal and vertical gender segregation
 Femininities / Masculinities (plural both within contexts and between them, but with striking commonalities eg what’s expected of men and women in nationalism); crisis in masculinity; patriarchal premium; hyper masculinity; hyper femininity

 Sexuality; heterosexism; essentialism; social constructionism; nuclear family; symmetrical family; reproductive rights
 State Socialism and Post-Socialism; patriarchal socialism; collectivization; collective ownership of means of production; proletariat; bourgeousie; surplus value; socialization of reproductive work; son-preference; one-child policy
 Orientalism - the weaving into ‘knowledge’ of the idea that the west is innately superior to the east –
‘othering’; ‘legitimation’ of colonialism
 Nationalism; nation-building; anti-natalist state; pro-natalist state

 Apartheid and Post-Apartheid - migrant labour system; anti-apartheid movement; institutionalised racism; one person one vote; destabilization; intersections of gender, ‘race; and class
 Colonialism & Imperialism (India, Ireland); welfarism; independence movements; partition
 Religious fundamentalism; hindutva; communalism
 Global capitalism; old international division of labour; new international division of labour; unionization; Fair-trade; Ethical trade; contradictory effects on women’s status

 What follows are 16 module objectives
 Working in pairs, read through them, discuss what you think they mean and identify which module topics they are most associated with (many of them cover more than one).

1. Resisting the idea that there is one ‘female’ point of view, or one ‘male perspective’ on any issue.
2. Recognising that while gender is an important difference
(generating patterns of (in)equality; (lack of) opportunity; status etc.), it is cross-cut by other differences.
3. Generating critical perspectives on any idea that gender relations are ‘natural’, inevitable, outcomes of biological difference etc.
4. Insisting that gender can only be understood in relation to social, cultural and historical processes, ie. that it is contingent.

5. Examining the symbolic importance of gender and extent to which it is at the centre of the religious and political ideologies and state practices that have dominated the last 100 years: colonialism; apartheid; nationalism; socialism/communism; religious fundamentalism
6. Paying attention to the way gender prescriptions (ideas about what gender relations should be like) have been a resource through which to legitimate the present as well as to imagine the future.
7. Examining and critiquing the idea that the level of gender equality is a short-hand marker of ‘civilization’.
8. Appreciating why women (and men) may not speak
‘gender oppression’ - through that their whole society/ethnic group/ class etc. may be judged.

9. Promoting reflexivity, ie. asking where ‘we’ are in the
‘knowing’ process about women and men’s lives around the world. Asking what sort of relations are entailed between us as ‘knowers’ and those we ‘know’ about?
10. Emphasising women’s and men’s agency and capacity for resistance and change, while not ignoring structural barriers to agency.
11. Demonstrating the need to continually disaggregate the categories women and men, through the diversity of their experiences around the world.
12. Contesting universalisms - the idea that there is one type of oppression of women, and one solution to it.

13. Recognizing and critiquing gender stereotypes, eg. the Muslim woman.
14. Recognising that some women can oppress other women, that some women can oppress men, and that men can work for gender equality and women’s empowerment.
15. Emphasising the need for specific, historical analysis on a case by case basis, at the same time as recognising patterns (eg. the gendered ‘scripts’ of nationalist movements; gendered work).
16. Recognising the need to ask gendered questions about social change, eg. globalization.

 Work in small groups of 3/4
 From what you can recall about each topic, try to come up with three bullet points that reflect the major learning points for those weeks. What are the three key points (e.g. the conclusions from the lecture) that you would need to think about when revising this topic?
 You won’t remember everything – don’t worry, it’s not a test. It’s a starting point for your revision (and you know more already than you might feel like you do).

 Sex = biological marker of sexual difference
 Gender = socio-cultural content/meaning attached to this biological marker.
 Where sex is privileged in analysis, the differences between men and women’s status/skills/character etc. are generally put down to biology and are seen as fixed, natural and inevitable.
 Where gender is privileged in analysis these differences are seen as variable, products of society and culture and capable of transformation.

 Girls disadvantaged by education system in relation to boys in past - now claimed boys are losing out
 Are boys discriminated against? Or is hegemonic masculinity partly incompatible with educational success?
 Women’s labour market participation risen dramatically since 1970s, but concentrated in part-time, low-paid services
 Gender pay gap endures, but growing differences between women
 Women’s lower status and prioritisation of reproductive work is carried into labour market
 Workplace identities are central to performance of masculinities, in relation to women and other men

 Nuclear family vs. diversity of family forms (single parents, recombinant families, gay and lesbian families)
 Family values lobby: nuclear is best, diversity = crisis
 Sociology: diversity is here to stay, the crisis is ideological
 Gendered power relations in marriage
 Young and Willmott’s Symmetrical Family: has it arrived?
 What explains the diversity of family forms today?
 Is sexuality a natural drive (essentialist view) or a social product (social constructionist view)?
 Heterosexism - unconscious or explicit assumption that heterosexuality is only normal form of sexual relations.

•
Marxism: Proletariat need revolution to end class oppression
(bourgeoisie exploiting surplus value)
 Engels: gender oppression akin to class oppression & should: abolish private property and collectivize
- incorporate women into the paid work-force
- socialize reproductive work (house-work and child
- bring women fully into revolutionary politics
 1917 Russian Revolution delivered new legal rights for women and entry into full-time paid work but failed to fully socialize reproductive work and politics was state-controlled only
 Communist state only allowed heterosexuality, to produce children and meet men’s ‘natural’ needs
 Under Stalin some rights eroded – divorce made more difficult, abortion prohibited, state overtly pronatalist

 1989: Berlin wall falls and beginning of end of USSR
 Today’s (shrunken) Russia largely capitalist
 New freedoms – to buy western goods, travel – but unemployment, high inflation, loss of state support
 Growing income inequalities
 Women disproportionately unemployed at first
(motherhood seen as their primary identity)
 Today talk of crisis among urban working class Russian men – unemployed, marginalized from work and home
 Is rise of prostitution/pornography a liberation of sexuality or women’s objectification & commodification?
 Heterosexual relations still bound by gender stereotypes

 1949 Revolution: women’s legal rights improved quickly
 Agricultural co-ops still based on family units – with collectivization from late 1950s women earned own wages
 Socialization of reproductive work partial and resisted
 Socialism was patriarchal – patriarchy accommodated to safeguard revolution, food supplies
 Cultural Revolution = doomed attempt to crush peasant farm
 One-child policy: a rational strategy or an abuse of women’s reproductive rights? Has fuelled son-preference
 Non-marriage seen as abnormal and state heterosexist
 Rural women doubly hit by population control & land reform
 Urban women better off but labour market discrimination
 Women’s political involvement is state controlled

 Edward Said’s Orientalism: weaving into knowledge idea that West is innately superior to east
 Used to ‘legitimate’ colonialism and imperial expansion
 Treatment of women is one of markers of supposed
Western civilisation and Eastern barbarity
 Accounts of gender inequalities can be orientalist, ignoring history, ignoring women’s resistance . How to avoid?
 Nationalism: political movement to establish or re-establish nationhood; narrative about who belongs to a nation
 Women are central as biological and cultural reproducers of the nation and ‘protecting’ them can legitimate militarism
 Symbolically women’s roles=conservative; in practice less so
 Men expected to do nationalism, to fight, strategize, exibit hyper masculinity

 Continue topic by topic
 Making links between topics
 Tips on survival in the exam room