Gender & Society – Flashcards
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What are the political implications of biological essentialism.
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They are generally politically conservative because these arguments tend to postulate that the statue quo of the unchangeable statue of nature.
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What evidence is there for the claim that women's evolutionary "strategy" might be promiscuity
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Women are the only primate females who are potentially sexually receptive even when they are not fertile.
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What are the three areas from which current biological theories of gender difference draw their evidence
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Brain research, endocrinology all research on sex hormones, and evolutionary theory.
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What is a problem with the argument that rape is an evolutionary adaptation designed to ensure maximal reproduction
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Rape is motivated by rage more than lust. Many rape victims are male. Many women are rapes who are outside of reproductive age. All of the above
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What have the studies of testosterone and aggression revealed?
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Testosterone does not cause aggression, but rather amplifies the aggression that is already there.
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What is the "biological determinism" theory of gender?
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The theory that men and women are hard wired to be different.
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What is the interplanetary theory of gender difference?
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Men and women are from two different planets.
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What is the difference between "sex" and "gender"
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"Sex" refers to physiological differences between men and women; "gender" refers to differences that various cultures attach to physiological sexual differences.
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What is wrong with calling the other sex the "opposite" sex?
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It obscures the many ways we are alike
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What is the Oedipal crisis?
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The way the boy comes to heterosexuality by identifying with his father rather than his mother and learning to desire someone like his mother.
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What did terman and Miles's research enable psychologists to do?
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Diagnose individuals with inappropriate gender traits and devise strategies to facilitate the adoption of more appropriate strategies.
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What mistake does sex rolw theory make about it's understanding of the location of gender
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It assumes that only individuals are gendered and ignores the way in which gender organizes the institutions of our lives
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How did talcott parsons shift the emphasis of sex role research?
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By considering the need of society for individuals to fill specific slots rather than the need of the infant to be coming either masculine or feminine
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What are the three stages a child experiences along the way to adult sexuality according to Freud?
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Topographic, structural, and economic
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What does it mean to say that gender identity is socially constructed?
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Our identities are a fluid assemblage of the meanings and behaviors that we construct from the values, images, and prescriptions we find in the world around us.
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What are the four ways gender varies according to a social constructionist perspective?
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By culture over time in history over the course of a life, and within culture based on other axes of difference such as class and race.
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How does power play a part in gender difference?
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It is about the power men as a group have over women as a group, as well as the power some men have over other men.(or women have over other women)
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According to the sociological point of view would we be any safer if women took over powerful roles in political institutions.
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No because the office itself demands a certain type of behavior independent of the gender of the person who holds it.
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What does west and Zimmermans argument mean the gender is something we do?
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Gender is less a component of identity fixed static that we take with us into our interactions Bennett is the product of those interactions
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What is the sexual double standard
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The fact that men stand to gain status and women to lose status from sexual experience
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What is one problem with the studies that easily identify great differences in men's and women's styles of friendship
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They risk ignoring styles of intimacy because feminine expressions of intimacy now define the criteria for evaluation
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What is one implication of transgenderism?
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It suggests the gender is not determined by Biology
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What does the history of friendship show about the gendering of intimacy
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That it was once men not women who were seen as uniquely capable of forming intense emotional bonds with others
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What does it mean to say that sexuality has become masculinized
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The model of appropriate sexual behavior has come to resemble what we label as traditionally masculine models of sexuality
