Gender And Sexuality As A Category For Historical Analysis

Gender defined roles are continuously adapting to the new societal norms of the era. There is a surplus of historical events that have reimagined the traditional expectations of a man or women.

Gender derives its formative meaning from culture and societal values, it is not a universal entity as there are various cultures, societal values, beliefs, and preferred ways of organizing collective life across the globe and even within a single culture the meaning of gender varies over time. Chapters three and four of Gendered Lives by Julia T. Wood helps to insightfully look at those views, and rhetorical movements (women and men’s movements) that have overtime influenced, defined and given various meanings to gender (masculinity and femininity).

The paper written by Kennedy and Davis, which was called The Reproduction of Butch-Fem Roles: A Social Constructionist Approach, provides further evidence that the history of sexuality is young and

In Joan Scott’s article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, she analyzes the root of gender and its relation to power. Gender is assumed to be directly linked with sex, but Scott asserts that sex and gender are quite distinct; while sex is a biological phenomenon, gender is a socially constructed power hierarchy and it is not biologically predetermined. Gender is used to create and enforce hierarchical relations of power between men and women, and as a result, women become subordinate to men. The hierarchies tend to be accepted as natural, but in actuality, they are socially determined relations that have no relation with sexuality. For Scott (1986), there are four important components of defining gender: 1) culturally common

Drawing on Joan Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" and on Alice Kessler-Harris's "Just price, Free Market and the Value of Women", the following questions will be answered, How has the 'equality' of women and men been expressed according to both Scott and Kessler-Harris? Why 'gender' has become a "useful category of historical analysis" for historians? How different (other) historians view 'gender'? What are Kessler-Harris's views on the "equality," "comparable worth" and "equal pay?" Lastly, the importance of the two articles will be highlighted as it relates to the contribution to gender studies.

This module's primary sources engage the always-changing ideas of gender how we understand masculinity and feminity. How were notions of gender in the end of the Gilded Age/beginning of Progressive Era different than previous ideas? How have these ideas changed in the last century? How have they stayed the same?

The biggest main idea of this article was that women are not remembered in history. As said by Ulrich, “Many people think women are less visible in history than men because their bodies impel them to nurture” (658). Although, women were

“The social construction of gender comes out of the general school of thought entitled social constructionism. Social constructionism proposes that everything people "know" or see as "reality" is partially, if not entirely, socially situated. To say that something is socially constructed does not mitigate the power of the concept. These basic theories of social constructionism can be applied to any issue of study pertaining to human life, including gender. This is

The history of the world is a complex arrangement of happenings and occurrences that have shaped the current state of civilization. At a fundamental level, history is the driving force behind every element of society that exists today. Within history, there are several factors that have and continue to determine the way in which our society functions. One of the most significant of these factors is gender. Today, conceptions, viewpoints and ideas surrounding gender are always changing. It is this fluidity of thought that ultimately allows society to progress forward and create change. However, gender has not always been as openly discussed. Tracing back through history, gender has consistently been a point of identity among humans.

Throughout history, definitions of sexuality within a culture are created and then changed time after time. During these changes, we have seen the impact and power one individual or group can have over others. In the Late Nineteenth Century into the Early Twentieth Century, we see multiple groups of people and or authorities taking control over the idea of sex and how they believe society is being impacted by sex. At this point in time, society had groups of people who believed they had the power to control how society as whole viewed and acted upon sex. Those particular groups and ideas changed many lives and the overall definition of sexuality within that culture.

The term gender refers to the characteristics of a person despite the person’s biological sex. Gender role, which is the focus of sociologists, is the anticipated attitude and behavior that a certain society connects with each sex. With this definition, gender is placed evenly in the sociocultural context. Events that previously occurred had a vital impact on gender roles. Due to this, the study of gender emerged as one of the significant disciplines in the field of sociology in the twentieth century. The gender issues were studied using various research and theory. The research on gender issues provided a testament that all social interactions that occur, and the institutions where they occur, are gendered in one way or the other. Sociologists explain gender roles with respect to various theoretical perspectives. The perspectives are the ways of perceiving social reality that guide the process of research and provide a method for understanding the data. The sociological perspectives on gender roles include functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interaction, and feminist sociological theory (pearsonhighered.com).

Known as the Two Sex theory, devised by historian Thomas Laqueur, female sexuality would be characterized purely by a woman’s reproductive potential, where the concept of an innate maternal instinct would become the new prioritized ideal. The female orgasm was renounced by a new essence of masculine superiority. This notion can be asserted with the Phallocentric inclination of the late 18th century, examined by historian Tim Hitchcock, as period characterized by penetration and precedence of the phallus. This “both encouraged and made possible the denigration of female sexuality and perceived passivity.” Consequently this caused the de-emphasis of female sexual pleasure and desire. However, female sexual identity would reemerge with potency, attributed to social flux, the emerging field of sexology and disposition of the interwar years.

Throughout history it is evident that human sexuality changes do to religious, governmental and societal influences. The perception of human sexuality has gone through many changes such as being very open and unlabeled activity; to being very “conservative” and a topic that shouldn’t be talked about in public or at all. In any case, human sexuality has always been a topic of interest because humans are sexual beings who want to understand the consciousness of themselves as male or female and see their personal response when encountered in erotic experiences with other individuals. Unlike many other species whose sexual force is strictly for reproduction, human’s sexual drive seems to be driven by many factors that intertwine with each other which leads to very different outcomes. Do to these obscure human emotions and personal gratification, sex is always shown every culture’s art, literature, social norms, and laws.

When I read the chapter heading, I didn 't really know what to expect. I knew it was going to discuss gender and sexuality, but didn 't realize it would dig deeper into different perspectives of gender identity, theories behind gender inequality, and homosexuality. In the closing comments, a review of the chapter, it mentions being able to see cultural and environmental influences from a sociological perspective. I believe this whole chapter of gender and sexuality can be summed up by that comment. Besides historical events and stereotypes, gender and sexuality is heavily influenced by different cultures and the environment. The environment includes sexual and gender crimes, poverty, and health. Culture includes language, family history, and influence from the media. This chapter did so much more than just discuss gender and sexuality, It also created new perspectives and ideas.

The lens of gender history is a very important part in historical research. I would support Scott?s suggestion that a detailed look at the history of genders, and specifically women?s history, not only changes our view of history but also has modified research and changed the future.[footnoteRef:1] Ref 1054. Besides the obvious effects of women?s rights, changes in class structure, and social structure, I would add a very important example of where adding the lens of gender history changed the course of medical history. Outside the medical discipline of obstetrics, the research in medicine and the practice of medicine was dominated by the disease process and treatment of men and to lesser extent children. The research of disease was the research of disease in men. The classic