Enactment Of Gender Research Articles

Manning the race: reforming black men in the Jim Crow era

Manning the Race explores how African American men have been marketed, embodied, and imaged for the purposes of racial advancement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Marlon Ross provides an intellectual history of both famous and lesser-known men who have served--controversially--as models and foils for black masculine competence. Ross examines a host of early twentieth-century cultural sites where black masculinity struggles against Jim Crow: the mobilization of the New Negro; the sexual politics of autobiography in the post-emancipation generation; the emergence of black male sociology; sexual rivalry and networking in biracial uplift institutions; Negro Renaissance arts patronage; and the sexual construction of the black urban folk novel. Focusing on the overlooked dynamics of symbolic fraternity, intimate friendship, and erotic bonding within and across gender, Manning the Race is the first book to integrate same-sexuality into the cultural history of black manhood. By approaching black manhood as a culturally contested arena, this important new work reveals the changing meanings and enactments of race, gender, nation, and sexuality in modern America. Manning the Race opens new approaches to the study of black manhood in relation to U.S. culture. Where previous books tended to emphasize how individual black men's identities have been reactively informed by the U.S. regime of race and sexuality, Manning the Race makes the case for understanding how black men themselves have been primary agents and subjects in formulating the identity and practices of black manhood.

Unravelling Woomera: lip sewing, morphology and dystopia

Presents a gendered interpretation of reports of protests in 2000‐2002 among asylum seekers held at Australia's recently closed Woomera Detention Centre, discussing instances of lip sewing that evoked strong reaction from the Australian Government, people and press. Suggests that an Irigarayan gendered reading of lip sewing assists in understanding these examples of self‐harm, supplementing feminist readings of craft, and calling attention to local enactments of gender in both refugee studies and in organizational development and change.

For a Sociology of Transsexualism

The aim of this article is to explore the development of theories on transsexualism with a view to advancing a typology of theories of transsexualism. This typology exposes a general shift from concerns with `authenticity' (the transsexual as a `real' woman or man) to issues of `performativity' (the transsexual as hyperbolic enactment of gender). I will argue it is through a displacement of psychology with sociology as the major lens through which transsexualism is theorized that such a shift from authenticity to performativity is effected. The final typology considers the notion of transgression (rendering the modern two-gender system obsolete). The article argues that whilst transgression may be possible, it is not guaranteed by all forms of transsexualism.

Gender and Group Process: A Developmental Perspective

Until recently, the study of gender development has focused mainly on sex typing as an attribute of the individual. Although this perspective continues to be enlightening, recent work has focused increasingly on children's tendency to congregate in same-sex groups. This self-segregation of the two sexes implies that much of childhood gender enactment occurs in the context of same-sex dyads or larger groups. There are emergent properties of such groups, so that certain sex-distinctive qualities occur at the level of the group rather than at the level of the individual. There is increasing research interest in the distinctive nature of the group structures, activities, and interactions that typify all-male as compared with all-female groups, and in the socialization that occurs within these groups. Next steps in research will surely call for the integration of the individual and group perspectives.

Representing adolescents’ literacies: Case studies of three white males

The purpose of this study was to explore how such social constructions as gender, race, and class were evident in three adolescent boys’ literacy practices. We considered the enactments of three white, teenaged, male, working class boys. Data gathering was orchestrated from a symbolic interactionist, critical ethnographic perspective, including participant observation, in‐depth interviews, and collection of literacy‐related in‐ and out‐of‐school documents, such as schoolwork and journals. These were analyzed with an eye toward answering the questions: In what literacy practices do these adolescents engage? How do they enact gender, race, and class in these practices? Results suggest that each boy enacted his literacies in different ways, suited to his own subjectivities, rather than in a straightforward exercise of traditional male hegemonies (Lesko, 2000). For instance, Nicholas was an immigrant, a speaker of English as a second language in a school culture that discriminated against him despite his perseverence with regard to academic literacies. The slightly built Chris used his oral and written communicative talents to find a place in a rural school culture that revered more athletic types but could not figure out how to transfer these skills to a new setting. Jared loved theater but was a late‐shift maintenance worker in an urban culture that viewed theater as the pursuit of the marginalized and adolescent employment as diversion more than necessity. The complexities of their literate identities suggest that considering individuals’ enactments of gender, race, and class may be useful in some ways and overly simple in others, not reflective of the identity fluidity that must be developed to survive in the postmodern world (Gee, 2000).

Feminization of the Clergy in America: Occupational and Organizational Perspectives

Spanning more than 70 years, Nesbitt's study of feminization concentrates on the Episcopal Church and the Unitarian Universalist Association, utilizing both statistical results and interviews to compare occupational patterns prior and subsequent to the large influx of women clergy. Among her findings, the author discovers that a decline in men's opportunities is evident before the 1970s, preceding the great influx of women over the last two decades. She also finds that increases in the number of women ordained reduced occupational prospects for other women, but enhanced those for men, thus contradicting the popular myth that women in the workplace are responsible for occupational decline. Nesbitt also examines career prospects for increasing numbers of second-career clergy, the decline in young men, backlash against the increasing presence of ordained women, overall shifts in how denominations are utilizing clergy, and how women's careers have become disproportionately caught in these changes. Her analysis opens and concludes with an overview of potential change in religious understanding, expression, and tradition that women clergy represent, and the interplay between gender enactment and religious authority to legitimate and maintain dominance in social relations. This provocative work should be of great interest to administrators and clergy in a range of denominations, and will contribute to the sociological study of gender stratification.

Conformity Pressures and Gender Resistance among Transgendered Individuals

Research on transgendered individuals has tended to come from medical, psychiatric, or deviance perspectives, with little attention to the social context in which these individuals exist or their efforts to resist normative expectations of sex and gender. Based upon in-depth interviews with 65 masculine-to-feminine transgendered individuals, this research examines gender as a social institution. Focusing on the pressures experienced by individuals to maintain binary enactments of gender, we demonstrate how the institution of gender is taken for granted as a presumably natural aspect of social life. Social pressures to conform, experienced as desires for relationship maintenance and self-preservation, as well as the overwhelming need to actualize an identity that does not fit within the binary system of sex and gender, illuminate the gender resistance and conformity exhibited among the individuals in our sample. Our analysis is rooted in an expanded Foucauldian perspective incorporating the theoretical insights of contemporary feminists who consider social actors as active agents in the development and enactment of everyday resistance. Transgenderism is a discursive act that both challenges and reifies the binary gender system. As such, it provides important lessons about the power dynamics of gender and how such systems may and may not be resisted.

Women's Experiences of Victimizing Sexualization, Part 11: Community and Longer Term Personal Impacts

This is the second of a two-part article describing the results of a qualitative study on women's experiences of victimizing sexualization. Ten adult women described their experiences of harmful learning about themselves as female and sexual. A four-part thematic description of women's experiences of victimizing sexualization was derived. This article reports on two of the major categories: community and cultural characteristics and longer term personal impacts. Findings of the study support the feminist position that the enactment of gender itself at social and cultural levels sometimes places women at risk for victimization.

Reflections on the researcher-researched relationship : A woman interviewing men

The enactment of gender in interviews with the men in my recent study of divorced fathers is the focus of this paper. Neither the role of gender in the qualitative research process nor its influence on research products has been given much descriptive or analytical attention, especially with respect to studies of men by women. While contextually situated, the relationships which evolve during the research process are influenced by the identities and histories of those involved, including those of gender. Such questions about the researcher-researched relationship and interactional dynamics which emerge during interviewing are ones of reflexivity. This paper, then, retrospectively examines men's assertions of gender identities and the gender hierarchy during interviews with me, and suggests that the negotiation of gender in research warrants much more attention.