Ideal beauty is likely the pursuit of an illusion

ideal beauty is likely the pursuit of an illusion
 Dominant or “emphasized” definitions of femininity—as embodied by looks—are always
undergoing change, from the hysterical Victorian housewife to the sporty working girl of
the 1980s to today’s heroically perfect-in-all-ways supermom
 In addition to a dominant image of femininity, some theorists argue that today there exists
a hegemonic masculinity as well
o Hegemonic masculinity is the condition in which men are dominant and
privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible
 Hegemonic masculinity is so dominant that it easily escapes our attention and is regarded
as the norm against which all others are judged
 Ideal masculinity in the 1700s went hand in hand with kindness and intellect, and
preferably a little poetry, a very different image from the modern-day ideal of the “man’s
man”
 Gender roles are sets of behavioral norms assumed to accompany one’s status as a male
or female
 Many of the differences we observe between men and women do not have much to do
with gender differences at all; instead, the behaviors arise as a result of the different
positions men and women occupy
 To say that gender is a social construct is to say that it isn’t a given
 Gender is a phenomenon that shapes reality and organizes our lives even if we don’t
realize it, and even when we wish it didn’t
R V
CHAPTER 8: GENDER

The Woman Question
Rubin’s Sex/Gender Question
 The “woman question”: What explains the nearly universal dominance of men over
women?
 What is the root of the patriarchy ?
o DEF: a nearly universal system involving the subordination of femininity to
masculinity
 In the field of anthropology, most scholars studying societies around the world had
previously assumed that women’s subordination was a given
o If such subordination occurred everywhere, it must be fulfilling some function,
and it could just as well be passed over in favor of more novel research questions
 Rubin challenged this notion and proposed the “sex/gender system” in which, she argued,
every society participates in some form or another
o She used the structural perspective of Claude Levi-Strauss, a French
anthropologist, to suggest that because of the universal taboo against incest—
fathers and brothers cannot sleep with their daughters and sisters—women who
start out belonging to one man (their father or their brother if dad dies) must leave
their families of origin and go belong to another man (their husband)
o Women are treated like valuable property whose trade partners strengthen
relations between families headed by men
o The resulting sex/gender system, she argued, was not a given; it was the result of
human interaction
 Feminist thinkers widely agreed that the task at hand was to explain universal male
dominance
 Because women give birth and then rear children, they become identified with domestic