Chapter 4: How Do We Learn Gender?

A fundamental concept for sociologists in general, and it is defined as the ways in which we learn to become a member of any group, including the very large group we call humanity.

The process through which individuals learn the gender norms of their society and come to develop an internal gender identity.

The sets of rules for what is appropriate masculine and feminine behavior in a given culture.

The way in which being feminine or masculine, a woman or a man, becomes an internalized part of the way we think about ourselves.

Individuals who for a variety of reasons do not fit into the contemporary Anglo-European biological sex categories of male and female.

Penises in males and clitorises in females develop from the same undifferentiated organ in embryos, called a _______ ________.

The common term for intersexed individuals; comes from the Greek name for a mythical figure formed from the fusion of a man and a woman.

In sociological vocabulary, this is the person being socialized.

The people, groups, and institutions who are doing the socializing.

This theory developed in psychology from the legacy of behaviorism; it involves the concept of rewards and punishments.

A behavior fits this concept when it is more expected and therefore seen as appropriate when performed by one sex, but less expected and therefore seen as inappropriate hen performed by the other sex.

Where a child copies whole patterns of behavior without necessarily being trained or rewarded for doing so.

This theory is based off of Piaget's models of child development and seeks to explain the ways in which children acquire a sense of gender identity and the ability to gender-type themselves and others.

With this, children know that their gender is permanent, and that is the gender they will be for the rest of their lives.

This brings an understanding that even changing the outward physical appearance of a person does not change their underlying sex category.

Children work to achieve this, and in the process, achieve gender socialization.

This builds on the frameworks of both cognitive development and social learning theory to formulate an explanation that is specific to gender socialization, rather than to socialization as a more general process. This theory was developed by Sandra Bem, and one of her critiques of cognitive development theory was that it provided no explanation for why children socialized themselves based on sex as a category in particular.

A cognitive structure and network of associations that helps to organize an individual's perception of the world.

A cognitive structure that enables us to sort characteristics and behaviors into masculine and feminine categories and then creates various other associations with those categories.

The belief that masculinity and what men do in our culture is superior to femininity and what women do.

The second important part of how we perceive gender in Anglo-European society, describes the way in which behaviors and attitudes that are viewed as appropriate for men are seen as inappropriate for women and vice versa.

How culture comes to reside inside individuals.

This theory begins with the importance of women's status as mothers and uses principles from Freud and others in the psychoanalytic tradition to explain the ways in which gender becomes deeply embedded in the psychic structure of our personalities.

The way in which a child modifies her own sense of self in order to incorporate some ability, attribute, or power she sees in others (usually a parent) around them.

A term, borrowed from Freud, which describes the sense of personal psychological division between ourselves and the world around us.

The initial process of learning the ways of a society or group that occurs in infancy and childhood and is transmitted through the primary groups to which we belong.

Characterized by intimate, enduring, unspecialized relationships among small groups who generally spend a great deal of time together.

Under this policy in China, which began in 1979, couples were limited to having only one child per family.

It is not literally one physical space, but rather any activities or behaviors that have the potential to be seen as violating gender norms in some way.

A concept that comes from R.W.

Connell's exploration of how our dominant ideas about what it means to be a man influence the behaviors of actual men in any given society.

These groups are generally larger, more temporary, more impersonal, and more specialized than primary groups.

The learning process that takes place each time we join one of these new secondary groups.

Adopting some of the qualities of the opposite gender.

A way in which the structure and vocabulary of a language reflects and helps to re-create the social inequalities of the culture in which it exists.

Inequalities that persist between women and men over the whole course of their lives become intensified in old age and result in this.

A Hindu practice of ritual self-immolation (setting oneself on fire), which has been illegal in India since 1829, though cases have occurred as recently as 1987.

There are few set expectations and rules about exactly what widows should do or how they should behave, and this has led some researchers to describe being a widow as this.