Leinaweaver Child Circulation Summary

Though women have played an integral part in the history of the discipline of anthropology, it was not until the early 1970’s that the field of anthropology and gender, or feminist anthropology emerged. Sex and gender roles have always been a vital part of any ethnographic study, but the contributors of this theory began to address the androcentric nature of anthropology itself. The substantial gap in information concerning the study of women was perceived as a male bias, a prejudice made more apparent because what little women-centered fieldwork was done received insufficient attention from the academic community. While anthropology was considered one of the more egalitarian fields of study, it was dominated by white, Western males who

This large disparity in pay encourages the discerning idea that children living in the Third World might be better off without a mother physically with them. Survival is dependent on funds for necessities rather than love and affection. When mothers can’t provide both money and affection for their family simultaneously, they face reality and choose one. And while it may be sad, the obvious choice is that which will nourish their family more effectively, money. While these mothers choose to move to First world countries, no other wants to abandon their children, Hochschild says, “most [mothers] feel the separation acutely, expressing guilt and remorse to the researchers who interview them” (Hochschild 21). However, economic predicaments coerce these choices. Hochschild depicts these economically coerced choices by sharing the story Rowena Bautista a Filipino mother who left her own children to nanny two new children in the United States. By choosing to provide for her family Rowena has consequently missed watching her children grow up. She has even missed holidays with her children, and in turn, the bond between her and her children suffers. While First World mothers are returning to work to provide for their children, Third World immigrant caregivers are filling

Due to primary socialisation, the children in the family would then be socialised into their gender roles so then when their time comes to marry and have children, this family structure will continue: the male has the instrumental role and the woman has the expressive role. To contradict with this view from Parsons’, the feminist theory would challenge this view when considering the inequality which comes of this. One argument made by feminists is to do with the oppression which women have dealt with for many years due to their somewhat, ascribed role of being inferior to men, up until around the 1960’s.

One photo of a man holding a baby sparked this whole debate about Mexican fathers. The impression of Mexican men was that they were not active in their children’s lives. They were thought of as those who “shun those kinds of duties” such as caring for their children (Murray 311). When showed the photo, different people had different reactions. Some thought the man holding the baby looked tender; while others believed the photo looked forced and unrealistic. The people of Mexican culture saw nothing odd about the photo. The ones who questioned it were people from other areas of the world and anthropologists.

Lila Abu-Lughod also writes about feminism in regard to culture. “ It has been important for most feminists to locate sex differences in culture, not biology or nature,” (Abu-Lughod, p. 144). There have been many cultural differences between women and men, “ a different voice” perhaps from Anglo-American feminist Gilligan and her followers, (Abu-Lughod, p. 145), as well as an explanation of the differences, “ whether through a socially informed psychoanalytic theory, a Marxist-derived theory of the effects of the division of labour and women’s role in social reproduction, an analysis of maternal practice or even a theory of sexual exploitation,” (Abu-Lughod, p. 145).

In order to better comprehend the issues in which I will be examining, it is important to have an understanding of the difference between sex and gender, the role and definition of a 'patriarchal society',

Female to Male as Nature is to Culture Gender relations form an integral part of human social interactions and are of great interest to anthropologists. Since the feminist movement in the late 1960s, one question that has been discussed is to what extent the opposition between women and men can be thought of in terms of the dichotomy between nature and culture and what implications this has for the position of women in society. This structuralist perspective was first formulated by Ortner (1974), drawing on Levi-Strauss and de Beauvoir, but has since been criticised for being simplistic and ethnocentric. I will delineate Ortner’s argument and look at its application to male and female roles in

“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.

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).

In fact, man is seen as the universal norm whereas woman is “defined and differentiated with reference to man” (ibid.). Thus, man is defined as the One which entails the submission of woman as the Other (xxiv). This submission, however, is a result of natural condition rather than historical events or social change (xxiv-xxv). Moreover, it is due to the fact that woman do not form an independent unit as they do not have a past or history of their own which differentiates them from men. Hence, woman is the Other in a duality in which both elements - man and woman - are essential, as the division of the sexes is a biological fact not a historical event

Social differences are the characteristics that define humans as social beings these include race, age, gender and socioeconomic status. The impact of these social differences in society is it can create divides between different people based on these characteristics. An example of this is described by Anne Larme (1998) who discusses the characteristics of Andean ethnomedicine. Larme describes the view of women as having negatives impacts on the roles women hold in Cuyo Cuyo. The impact can be observed in society is that the Andean beliefs about the added vulnerability of women due to the sacredness of blood and how women lose blood regularly through menstruation. The cultural control within Andean society over women adds to the restriction

In this essay I discuss that "doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men...." (West & Zimmerman 2002:13) I am concentrating on the female perspective, how societyputs forth expectations of what is 'natural' or biological even though, in some cases, it can be quite demeaning and degrading. I am using some examples from the local media and also a few childhoodexperiences that have helped me to now strongly suspect that the quote from Simone Beauvoir (1972) "One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one" most likely has quite a bit of truth to it.

The second chapter discussed the international division of reproductive labour and the reasons why women may choose to become migrant workers. Often times the common answer of why these Filipina women made the decision to enter the reproductive labour force is one based on both economic and gender inequality reasoning. Gender is now seen as the hidden cause of migration, where women are taking on the role of the income provider and it is a strategy that can “relieve women of their unequal division of labour with men in the family.” (Parreñas, 2015 – pg. 32) Through the three tier system there is honestly no gender-egalitarian way that the division occurs, because their own responsibilities are given to those who are less privileged for less benefits.

Feminist theory analyzes the gender inequality that women have faced throughout the years due to a patriarchal society. Women were expected to fit the traditional female and conform to the gender norms that society has constructed. According to A Brief Introduction to Critical Theory, “Feminism embodies a way of reading that investigates the text’s investment in or reaction to the patriarchal power structures that have dominated Western culture” (227). Patriarchal power has oppressed women economically, socially, and politically. Women were associated more with domesticity than with politics and financial situations. They were not provided the same educational opportunities as men. These issues have been addressed by people, such as Mary