Lecturer: Proshant Chakraborty

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Today's PowerPoint slides: gender-culture-social-construction (pc)-2.pptx

Welcome to our lecture, “Gender, culture, and social construction.”

In our session today, we will work toward understanding “gender” as a social construct, while also paying attention to the ways that gender and gender relations are grounded in material, political, and historical relationships. To do so, we will mainly look feminist anthropological and historical perspectives.

We will address and engage with the following questions:

How is gender socially constructed?
How have gender relationships shifted, transformed, and been contested, throughout history and across the cultures?
What do we mean by “culture”? How have notions of culture, or cultural relativism, been important in discussions over gender relations and gender roles?
Why is it important to study and account for power and power relations when we talk about gender?

Readings:

Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? In Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louis Lamphere, pp. 67–87. Stanford University Press.

Scott, Joan W. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American Historical Review 91 (5). https://doi-org.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/10.2307/1864376. (Pages to read: 1053-59, 1066-70, 1073-75)

Buther, Judith. 1988/2017. “42. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Feminist Theory Reader. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1286222&site=ehost-live&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_481.

Additional reading:

Butler, Judith. 2011. Speaking Up, Talking Back: Joan Scott’s Critical Feminism. In Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism, edited by Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed, pp. 11–28. Indiana University Press. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/lib/gu/reader.action?docID=713687&ppg=18.

[Note: You can loan the digital copy of the text from the library, or read it on ProQuest itself, where you can also highlight and add comments to the text].

Additional reference:

Cara Ocobock and Sara Lacy. 2023. The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong - Scientific American.

The Judith Butler Guardian interview that was censored:

https://jezebel.com/the-guardian-says-edited-judith-butler-interview-was-re-1847636842

https://web.archive.org/web/20210907113914/https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/07/judith-butler-interview-gender