Study Guide for the Midterm: Men and Masculinities

Be prepared to know each author’s name, the title of the materials we read, and the theories and concepts she or he produced.

 

Long Essay Questions (40 points)

You and your friends get into an argument about men and manhood and nature versus nurture. Your friends argue that men have always been providers and leaders of the family, and the leaders in politics and economics because they are by nature more aggressive and more competitive. In fact, they argue, it is the male y chromosome and the male genes on it that make men aggressive and dominant. You just took a class on men and masculinities and are happy to have found an opportunity to teach your friends a lesson. Telling them about Connell, Fausto-Sterling, Sapolsky and Beeman, and the video Sex Unknown, you try to convince them that they are totally mistaken.

 

Short Answer Questions: 1-3 sentences maximum,

Urrea: “Whores”

  1. Why does the narrator try to get even with the Bull? How is he getting his revenge?
  2. Describe the facets of hegemonic masculinity described in this short story? Does the narrator display a commitment to the hegemonic masculinity in this context? Are there more than one code of masculinity at work?

                                                    

Peter Bacho:

  1. What best describes the relationship of the narrator with Uncle Leo?
  2. How is Uncle Leo failing to be good at being a man?
  3. How does the hegemonic masculinity described in Peter Bacho’s short story “the Wedding” and in Urrea’s short story “Whores” differ from the hegemonic masculinity of our society?

 

Robert Connell: “Gender”

Define the following terms used by Connell, and provide an example from the readings to illustrate it:

 

  • Gender order
  • Gender regime
  • Four dimensions of gender
    • Power relations
    • Symbolic relations
    • Emotional relations
    • Reproductive
  • Crisis tendency and resistance
  • Masculinities
  • Hegemonic masculinity
  • Impermanence of gender categories
  • Intersexed
  • Gender politics
  • Patriarchal dividend, patriarchal cost

 

 

Introduction:

  1. How did the example of Barrie Thorne’s study about children’s behavior in school challenge long-held beliefs about gender and childhood? What does that teach us about gender?
  2. What did the example about the South African men working in mines reveal about masculinity?
  3. What did Dossett’s study of Harriet show about the consistency and permanence of a specific sexual or gender identity throughout his life?
  4. According to Connell, how is looking only for gender “differences” going to cloud our understanding of gender?
    1. Why does he think it is better to think about “gender relations”?

 

Connell Chapter 4:

  1. Briefly define “gender regime” and “gender order”
  2. Connell offers four dimensions of understanding gender: provide a brief description of each and an example:
    1. Power relations
    2. Production relations
    3. Emotional relations
    4. Symbolic relations
  3. Since gender relations are to a large extent made through culture, gender relations can change. Name the two ways in which gender relations can change, according to Connell. (crisis tendencies versus resistance)

 

Connell Chapter 6: Gender on the large scale

  1. Name 2 examples of how gender/masculinity plays a role in
    1. corporations (from Connell or other readings)
    2. the state
    3. global processes and institutions
  2. What is an example of patriarchal dividend? What one of patriarchal cost?
  3. Do all men benefit from hegemonic masculinity, and do all women suffer from hegemonic masculinity?

 

Connell Chapter 8: Gender and Politics

15. How does he define gender politics?

16. Why is this concept much broader than whether or not a party has a female candidate?

17. What does Connell learn from his wife’s experience with breast cancer about gender politics?

 

C. Cohn: Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

  1. What was the language Carol Cohn learnt doing research among Defense Intellectuals? Give 3 examples of the language used by Defense Intellectuals and show how it enables them “to think the impossible”! (look for subheadings)
  2. What arenas of meaning are used to think the impossible, and which explanation does Cohn offer for their use? For example, she finds that there is the arena of metaphors around “domestic bliss”. What are these phrases, and how do they help to think the impossible? 
  3. “patting the missile” – how does she interpret that metaphor?
  4. How did defense intellectuals respond to her when she did not use their lingo when talking with them.
  5. What was her experience when she addressed the defense intellectuals in their own language?
  6. What is so “terrifying” about the incompatibility of these two languages?
  7. What does this have to do with masculinity? What did our attempt to come up with an equivalent language of nuclear wars using metaphors of feminine sexuality fail for the most part? And what does that tell us about the way how language entraps us in a certain gender order?
  8. What do swear words teach us about the asymmetry of masculinity and femininity? Why does the expression “I’ll tear you a new one” work, even when a woman is saying it? What is the image evoked here, and what does this reveal about our language as a symbolic system, the “rabbit hole” and our difficulty to get out of this rabbit hole?

 

Beeman: “What are you? Herm, Merm, Ferm, or Female?”

  1. Define “intersexed”
  2. How many different genders are there according to Beeman?
  3. What does that mean for anti-gay marriage legislation?
  4. Name three ways to determine gender?

 

Fausto Sterling: “How to Build a Man”

1.      What is the female as default principle versus the Adam principle in developmental biology, and what does it reveal about the objectivity of the scientists operating with those principles?

2.       What guidelines do doctors use to determine whether an intersexed child should be surgically reassigned. What seems to be most important to doctors, and which concerns seem secondary to them? What does that reveal about their bias?

3.      Show the heterosexual bias that developmental psychologists display when treating sexually ambiguous social characteristics of individuals that are not behaving in a strictly heterosexual way?

4.      In short: what are the biases Fausto Sterling describes in the fields of biology and gender?

 

Fausto Sterling: “From Genes to Genitals”

Describe the main developmental sequence of sexual organs in the unborn child. Why are babies sometimes born intersexed?

5.      Explain the two examples of hermaphrodites in Genes and Genitals: Why can a child that is according to her phenotype a boy have two x chromosomes and the internal organs of a female? (Explain AGS syndrome)

6.      Explain the reverse case: why can a child that is phenotypically a girl grow a penis and a scrotum and a beard in adolescence?

7.      What does Fausto-Sterling mean when she writes that “reading biology is always a socio-cultural act”? (DHT Syndrome)

8.      According to Fausto-Sterling, what are the medical guidelines for a child born with ambiguous genitalia?

9.      What theory of gender is implied in this guideline?

 

Video: “Sex Unknown”

  1. What happened to the individual in this film? What does it say about the brain sex and genital/hormonal sex?
  2. What was Money’s position, what was Diamond’s position? Who was right in the end?
  3. What conclusion does the documentary suggest in the end in regards to nature vs. nurture?

 

Sapolsky “Boys will be Boys”

  1. What is commonly thought about the testosterone and aggression, and on what observations is this belief based?
  2. Do testosterone levels tell us how aggressive an individual will be?
  3. To what extent can we observe that aggression causes the rise of testosterone in the body?
  4. How much testosterone does it take to normalize the level of aggression of a castrated bull?
  5. How does the aggression of a rhesus monkey on rank 3 of behave towards those ranking above him (ranked 1 and 2) and those below him (ranked 4 and 5), when he gets injected with large amounts of testosterone.
  6. What accounts for the relative tame hyenas in the Berkeley zoological institute when compared to their sisters in the wild?
  7. To what extent is it wrong to say that testosterones cause aggression? (Sapolsky?)
  8. Describe the relationship between testosterone and aggression in your own words.