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Click on each question to check your answer.
1. Why do scientists consider it to be problematic to think about sex as a dichotomy?
Answer: As the discussion of the Olympic athlete at the beginning of the chapter demonstrates, thinking about sex as a dichotomy isn’t always biologically accurate due to the genetic diversity of the human species and the unpredictability of human genetics. In addition, middle-sex categories of sex, such as intersex people, are born with the biological characteristics of both sexes.
2. How does Goffman’s dramaturgical theory explain the performance of gender?
Answer: Goffman’s theory explains how gender is performed by relying on the idea of front stage versus back stage. In their day-to-day lives, people perform gender on the front stage when they perform their gender roles in their daily interactions with other individuals in society. When they are back stage, alone, they do not need to perform these gender roles and instead act like themselves free from gender constraints.
3. How did Judith Butler theorize gender?
Answer: Judith Butler theorized that gender was performed in our actions and social interactions. These gendered ways of being and relating weren’t inherent personality characteristics but instead came from cultural norms and practices reinforced through socialization. These norms and practices define the normal way for genders to act and interact and anything outside these norms is marginalized. To be critical of these norms, Butler explains that we should think about gender and sexuality as continuums, along a range of diverse ways of being and relating.
4. Why do some social scientists believe women are not equally represented in politics?
Answer: Social scientists believe there are a variety of reasons why women are not equally represented in politics. Firstly, they believe political parties struggle to nominate women to run for elected positions in their party. Secondly, they believe that women face financial constraints in terms of being able to afford running for political office, an expensive endeavour. Finally, social scientists believe women are underrepresented in politics because the time commitment conflicts with the overwhelming family obligations women have been structurally organized into undertaking.
5. What are the three phases of the feminist movement?
Answer: The feminist movement has been theorized as unfolding in three primary phases. In the first phase, the feminist movement organized for equality in the political economic realm in terms of the right to vote and own property. In the second phase, the feminist movement sought equal rights in the political and economic realm as well as the social realm, organizing for things like rights in the workplace and reproductive rights. In the third phase, the focus of the movement is more in the cultural realm, investigating gender depictions in the media, for example, and is widely regarded as a phase of the movement critical of the white, middle-class nature of the second wave of feminism.