Oltre 60mila persone contro l’ideologia gender nelle scuole

Cosa facciamo di questa voce dell’Enciclopedia di Sociologia della Wiley-Blackwell
“Both gender ideology and gender role ideology refer to attitudes regarding the appropriate roles, rights, and responsibilities of women and men in society. The concept can reflect these attitudes generally or in a specific domain, such as an economic, familial, legal, political, and/or social domain. Most gender ideology constructs are unidimensional and range from traditional,
conservative, or anti feminist to egalitarian, lib eral, or feminist. Traditional gender ideologies emphasize the value of distinctive roles for women and men. According to a traditional gender ideology about the family, for example, men fulfill their family roles through instru mental, breadwinning activities and women ful fill their roles through nurturant, homemaker,
and parenting activities. Egalitarian ideologies regarding the family, by contrast, endorse and value men’s and women’s equal and shared breadwinning and nurturant family roles.”

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405124331_yr2012_chunk_g978140512433113_ss1-19

Materiale da studiare – Part I, da Handbook of Sociology of Gender:
The Varieties of Gender Theory in Sociology
1. INTRODUCTION
As editor, I have chosen to begin this handbook where I believe all sociology should begin: with a review of the array of theoretical ideas available to, in this case, gender sociologists as they explore the social world, in the United States and elsewhere, looking at both the present and earlier times. Because they constitute the conceptual toolkit that helps gender sociologists make sense of the empirical world, many of the theories discussed in this chapter are developed further in later, substantive ones. In this chapter, I review the major gender/feminist theories in sociology, beginning with a review of what
classical, nineteenth and early twentieth century theorists said about gender, but focusing most attention on theories developed since 1970, when the impact of second wave feminist activism began to be felt in our discipline. I generally confine my discussion to theories developed by sociologists, although the full corpus of feminist theory is far broader in its origins, both activist and academic. Omitted from this chapter are discussions of relatively narrow, substantive theories, which appear in subject-appropriate chapters. Also omitted is Standpoint Theory, the topic of an entire chapter (2), an approach sometimes
considered virtually synonymous with the term “feminist theory.” The current chapter demonstrates the many other types of contemporary feminist theory that emanate from, reflect, and significantly revise the rich variety of theoretical traditions in sociology (see Chafetz, 1988, 1997; England, 1993; Wallace, 1989, on the varieties of contemporary feminist sociological theory).

All theory pertaining to gender is not feminist, although all feminist theory centers much or all of its attention on gender. Three features make a gender theory specifically feminist: (1) a (not necessarily exclusive) focus on the inequities, strains, and contradictions inherent in gender arrangements; (2) an assumption that gender relations are not immutable but rather changeable social creations; and (3) a normative commitment that societies should develop equitable gender arrangements (Alway, 1995, p. 211; Chafetz, 1988, p. 5 ).

2. THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
The nineteenth and early twentieth century founding fathers of sociology lived amidst the international protest of first wave women’s movements, an intellectual, political, and social ferment that compelled most to address the “woman question” in some manner (Kandal, 1988). Regardless of their views concerning feminism, most confined their discussion of women largely to issues of family, emotion, and sexuality, embedded within broader theories that typically stressed the importance of other, male-dominated structures (e.g., social class and the economy; political, legal, and military systems; bureaucracy; religion). Moreover, women and femininity constituted the problem or issue. The effects of culturally defined masculinity on shaping the structures and processes central to their theories were largely unrecognized, males were infrequently examined in terms of gender, and male-dominated social structures/institutions were implicitly defined as if they were gender neutral. With few exceptions, the best that can be said for our classical tradition is that gender issues were peripheral; at worst, some theorists promulgated a crude biological determinism to justify gender inequities. The contemporary version of the sociological theory canon, as exemplified in all but a handful of theory texts, continues this androcentric bias, largely ignoring or short-shrifting both the topic of gender and the contributions of contemporary feminist theories, which remain substantially ghettoized (Alway, 1995; Stacey & Thorne, 1985; Ward & Grant, 1991). Moreover, many contemporary “general” theorists, such as James Coleman, Jeffrey Alexander, Peter Berger, and Anthony Giddens, ignore the topic of gender entirely (Seidman, 1994, p. 304).

2.1. The Biological Approach: Apologists for the Status Quo
Several early founders of sociology assumed that men and women are innately different and unequal in their intellectual, emotional, and moral capacities. Herbert Spencer, the founder of British sociological theory, began as a liberal feminist, as reflected in his book Social Statics, in which he devoted a chapter to “The Rights of Women.” He argued that men and women deserve equal rights, inasmuch as there are only “trifling mental variations” between them (Kandal, 1988, p. 32). Within 4 years he had embarked on Social Darwinism and decided that biology (not culture) produced profound (no longer trivial) sex differences. Women, whose brains are smaller, are deficient in the sense of justice and reasoning ability required of all life beyond the care of husband and children. Moreover, women naturally prefer to be protected by a powerful man. Permitting women to enter public life would therefore be antithetical to human progress (Kandal, 1988, pp. 32-46). The founder of French sociology, Auguste Comte, echoed these sentiments. Because of their emotional and spiritual “superiority,” women are perfectly fit for family and domes tic life, but their state of “perpetual infancy” and intellectual inferiority to men render them unfit for anything else (Kandal, 1988, pp. 46-77). Similar stereotypes about the innate natures of women and men, and conclusions about the appropriate roles and status of each, were repeated by founders of German (Ferdinand Toennes) and Italian (Vilfredo Pareto) sociology (Kandal, 1988, pp. 177-182 and 193-201). The most famous early French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, also resorted to a biological explanation of what he recognized as women’s social subordination (Kandal, 1988, pp. 77-88, especially 85; Lehmann, 1990, 1994). In Suicide, his statistics demonstrated that marriage produces opposite effects for men, for whom it lowers the suicide rate, and women, among whom the rate is higher among the married. He concluded that marriage ought some day to be reformed but, in the interim, men must be protected from suicide through the maintenance of a form of marriage that produces more stress and disadvantage for women (Kandal, 1988, p. 88). His justification was that the increase in suicide for married women is less than that for unmarried men because women have fewer “sociability needs,” are more “instinctive,” have a less developed “mental life,” and therefore are more easily satisfied. Men are more “complex,” and their psychological balance is more precarious and in need of the constraining protections afforded by existing marital arrangements (Kandal, 1988, pp. 83-85). Feminism supported divorce and, therefore, Durkheim opposed it as rooted in “unscientific” thinking (Lehmann, 1990). Durkheim also referred to the topic of gender in The Division of Labor in Society, where he argued that increasing physical and cultural differentiation have evolved over time between the sexes, allowing for increasing specialization of labor between them and, therefore, “conjugal solidarity.” A state of gender similarity and equality is a “primitive” one associated with unstable marital unions (Lehmann, 1990, pp. 164-165; Kandal, 1988, pp. 80-81).

p88 – 92
BIOLOGICAL THEORIES
energy on the part of males. In contrast, producing eggs and (for humans) gestating, breastfeeding, and rearing offspring requires a huge amount of time, nutrition, energy, and wear and tear on one’s body (Trivers, 1972).

There is another fundamental difference between female and male reproduction. Compared to men, women are much more limited—both theoretically and practically—in the number of offspring they can produce. At birth, woman have millions of ova (eggs), but only a small number of these will ripen each month, once menstruation and ovulation starts. Most others will decay or be reabsorbed by the body. Because of the extended periods of time required for gestation and lactation and because of the bodily demands of pregnancy and childrearing, women can have only so many offspring over the course of their lifetimes. In contrast, men produce millions of sperm every day and, theoretically, at least, they can have dozens of offspring. Evolutionary theorists suggest that all of these differences between female and male reproduction have led men and women to evolve different reproductive strategies (Buss, 1999).

Parental investment in offspring is particularly high in human mothers, who invest more in their offspring than do the mothers of virtually any other species (Hrdy, 1999). Human mothers not only carry their offspring internally for 9 months and breastfeed them for many months but also carry around their helpless infants for many months more. Then they must rear their children into well-socialized adults who learn to speak language fluently and to understand cultural rules, rituals, and technologies. This process may take as long as two decades. Although men invest in childrearing too, women traditionally invest much more, both physically (gestation, childbirth, lactation) and in terms of time and energy (childrearing, child care, and instruction). The wear-and-tear of childbearing is captured by the German proverb, Ein Kind, ein Zahn (“one child, one tooth”). In terms of the calcium a mother loses through bearing and breastfeeding a baby, this may not be far off the mark (Hrdy, 1999).

According to evolutionary arguments, then, women must guarantee that at least some of the relatively few, high-investment offspring they bear will survive. In contrast, men (who may father an indefinite number of offspring and don’t necessarily invest much in some individual offspring) are more likely to “sow their wild oats.” Women have evolved more of a quality of offspring strategy, whereas men have evolved more of a quantity of offspring strategy. As a result, men have evolved to be more sexually aggressive, competitive, and promiscuous, whereas women have evolved to be more sexually selective and desirous of committed
relationships, which provide them and their children with protection and stable resources.

It is important to note that when evolutionary theorists talk about men and women’s evolved mating strategies, they are not necessarily describing conscious strategies. Rather, they are referring to dispositions, sometimes unconscious, that have evolved over many generations even millennia. Men do not necessarily walk around in everyday life thinking, “How can I best maximize my transmission of genes to future generations? Oh, I know—I can impregnate as many women as possible!” They don’t need to have such conscious thoughts if evolution has produced, on average, higher male sex drives and less committed male attitudes toward sexual intimacy.

Modern technological advances may sometimes short-circuit the original evolutionary purpose of a behavior. Although some men may be promiscuous, for example, the use of contraception cancels the evolutionary advantage of their behavior. Nonetheless, the dispositions persist even though their fitness has changed in modern environments. The human preference for fatty and sweet foods provides a similar example. It may have been adaptive in our prehistoric past to show such preferences, when fatty and sweet foods were rare and people required many calories to fuel their energetic hunter-gatherer lives; but in today’s food-rich and sedentary world, human preferences for sugar and fat bring diabetes and cardiac arrests rather than increased survival.

Darwin (1871) distinguished between two kinds of natural selection, and these have implications for the evolution of sex differences. The first kind of natural selection produces traits adapted to animals’ natural environments. Examples of such traits are the long necks of giraffes (which allow giraffes to eat succulent leaves on high branches), the thick fur of
polar bears (which provides warmth in frigid environments), and the fibrous, prickly, skins of cacti (which conserve water in arid settings and protect against animals that might want to eat juicy cactus flesh). Darwin described a second, more specialized form of natural selection, which he termed sexual selection. Sexual selection occurs when traits evolve because they help animals attract mates, drive off same-sex rivals, and reproduce.

In a rough sense, the first kind of natural selection favors traits that are adaptive in natural environments. The second kind—sexual selection— favors traits that help animals to compete for mates with same-sex members of their own species and to attract mates from opposite-sex members of their own species. The environment in the first kind of natural selection is almost everything: food supplies, climate, radiation, predators, and so on. The environment in sexual selection, however, consists of members of your own species, the same-sex members with whom you must compete and opposite-sex members whom you must entice as mates.

The gaudy tail feathers of peacocks provide a textbook example of sexual selection (Hamilton &Zuk, 1982; Petrie, Halliday, & Sanders, 1991; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). Peacock tails are costly, requiring a lot of food and energy to grow. Furthermore, they are cumbersome, making peacocks less nimble and more vulnerable to predators. Why then did they evolve? The simple answer is, because they are alluring to peahens. Peacock tails are not simply a frivolous display, however. Rather, they provide an honest signal of fitness. Well formed, beautiful tail feathers tell a peahen that the peacock displaying them has good genes, good
health, and good nutrition—in short, that he would make a good mate. Such a signal cannot be easily faked. Peacocks with bad genes, infectious diseases, and poor nutrition tend to produce shabby, stunted, asymmetrical tail feathers

Once a process of sexual selection gets started (and this may initially occur by chance), runaway sexual selection may commence. A positive feedback loop is created, causing the sexy trait to become more and more exaggerated. Peacocks evolve larger and larger tails until the overwhelming costs of such tails (in terms of nutrition, vulnerability to predators, interference with flight) eventually stops the process.

Can sexual selection explain human sex differences? Evolutionary theorists have recently argued that some physical traits of human males and females (men’s large penis size compared with that of other primates, women’s large protruding breasts, and exaggerated hip-to-waist ratios in fecund human females) may result from sexual selection (Barber, 1995). These physical traits may be comparable to peacocks’ tails; they are sexy, honest signs of fitness we display to one another to show our youth, fertility, and good prospects as mates

Even more intriguing are recent speculations that human brain size, language development, psychological astuteness, and artistic creativity may have evolved through sexual selection (G. F. Miller, 2000). Perhaps humans evolved to entrance and seduce desirable mates through the use of language, storytelling, dance, and humor. Does this theory relate to sex differences? Miller proposed that men use language and artistic creativity more as a kind of status and sexual display than women do, and this may account for greater levels of male productivity in certain kinds of artistic and creative endeavors.

In general, evolutionary theories of gender focus most of their attention on sex differences in human mate choices and sexual behavior. Men prefer youth and beauty in a mate more than women do (youth and beauty are presumed to be signals of health and high fertility), whereas women prefer status and monetary resources in a mate more than men do (because such resources are presumed to ensure that their few offspring will flourish; see Chapter 1). Females are seen as the choosier of the two sexes. Because women produce relatively few offspring in which they invest considerable bodily resources and time, they must carefully choose mates who contribute good genes and sufficient resources to their offspring. Good genes ensure that a woman’s offspring will survive and grow into successful, sexy adults who in turn survive and reproduce. Good resources (food, money, status, enduring commitment from a mate) ensure that a woman will be able to protect and rear her children successfully over the long haul. Because males can produce many offspring and because they may invest little in some of them, evolutionary theorists argue that men have evolved to be more promiscuous and indiscriminate, at least in their short-term mate choices, than are women (Buss, 1999).

Although some men produce many offspring (e.g., Indian maharajas with large harems), others may fail altogether in the mating game and end up with no offspring. Consistent with this observation, evolutionary theorists propose that there is more variability in men’s mating success than in women’s. One implication of this asymmetry is that fertile women become the limiting resource for male reproduction. Women can be relatively picky and try to choose the best mate, in terms of his genes and resources. Women can also trade mating privileges for other goods (gifts, food, money, nice homes, stocks and bonds) (Symons, 1979). Because women are a limited resource, men must actively court and compete with other men for desirable mates. And because of their greater chances of failure, men often take greater risks to attract or acquire a mate. (Think of the swagger and risk-taking of young males, who often put on a show of prowess for admiring young women: on the football field, in sportscars, or on the battlefield. Literally, young men are dying to impress attractive women.)

1) Lo sai che hai appena fatto un esempio di costruzione sociale del sesso? Intervenendo sugli intersessuali, costruendo un sesso dove prima non c’era oppure era che impossibile da determinare, gli scienziati hanno negli utlimi 100 anni più hanno compiuto la cosiddetta costruzione sociale del sesso.

2) Per quanto riguarda il caso David Reimer concordo che la causa del suo suicidio possa essere data da come la sua identità di genere sia stata negata fin dalla sua nascita. Però non sappiamo se effettivamente sia stata la sola causa a portarlo a questa terribile scelta. Sappiamo ad esempio che la moglie l’aveva lasciato, mentre il fratello gemello si era già suicidato.

3) Concordo poi con te che agli intersessuali dovrebbe essere lasciata la possiblità di decidere. E puoi leggere la posizione dell’ISNA (Intersex Society of North America) su questa tema così delicato.

http://www.isna.org/faq/patient-centered

4) Prendo un pezzo del tuo commento:
“Negare l’esistenza dei due sessi distinti, elevando al rango di genere ogni situazione marginale che si distaccasse da questo modello, apre non solo il “vaso di Pandora” di una moltiplicazione virtualmente infinita di possibili “generi, ma, secondo me, anche ad una conseguente catastrofica crisi di identita’ per l’intera umanita’.”

Io non nego:
1) che esistano due sessi
2) che esistano differenze tra i due sessi

Quello di cui tu stai parlando è la famosa distinzione tra sesso e genere. Quando John Money riprese il termine gender per poi coniare l’espressione gender role (ruolo di genere), negli anni ’50, non aveva l’intenzione di operare una distinzione. Gender doveva essere un termine che finalmente poteva parlare di tutti gli esseri umani, visto che gli ermafroditi sfidavano le “leggi del sesso” (i cinque marcatori sessuali di cui ho parlato). Tralatro la parola sesso diceva già altro: 1) la divisione tra maschi e femmine; 2) sesso anche come “fare sesso”, cioè gli atti e i comportamenti erotici; sesso come identità sessuale, identificarsi come maschi e femmine; e come ultimo come ruolo sessuale, espressione introdotta dal sociologo Parsons, per parlare dei comportamenti appropriati per i due sessi. E da proprio quest’ultima espressione che deriva l’altra espressione che è “gender role” (Quando Parsons insegnava ad Harvard, Money ci studiava per il suo dottorato di ricerca).

La distinzione tra sesso e genere è invece dovuta allo psicanalista Robert Stoller nel 1963 alla 23° Conferenza psiconalitica di Stoccolma. Questa ditinzione venne presto fatta propria dalle femministe negli anni ’70 e negli anni ’80, come racconta Jernnifer in Germon in Gender: A Genealogy od an Idea, le femministe persino a attribuirsi l’invenzione della parola gender e della sua distinzione con la parola sesso.

John Money fu sconvolto. Sentenziò: “Sex was ceded to biology. Gender was ceded to psychology and social science. The ancient regime was restored!”

La Germon invece scrive, pag 82-83:
Robert Stoller’s interventions had a direct effect on the way in which gender came to be used outside of sexology. While his conceptual turn opened up what could be done with gender theoretically (and indeed what was done with it), at the same time the sex/gender split constrained how to think about gender. Once stripped of all connotations to sex and the flesh, gender was ready to be harnessed for its political utility by the women’s movement in the early 1970s. Stoller’s work proved to be especially appealing to an emergent second-wave feminism. Its appeal was twofold: first it recovered a nonconflictual feminine identity from psychoanalytic precepts, and second, gender as a sphere separate from sex allowed physical differences between men and women to be set aside in the fight for equality. Theorizing gender as a purely social artifact was designed to avoid the pitfalls of the reductive biological analyses that had historically been invoked to justify Othering, whether through racism, homophobia, or the subordination of women.

When the category of sex became the point of departure, the sexed body was deemed to be somehow above (or beyond) critique. Subsequently one of the central concerns in feminist theory has been to try to chart a space between sex and gender. This has served to reinforce the idea that sex represents the raw material for gender to work upon while the latter represents the “more fully elaborated—andrigidly dichotomized—social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors.” The gender identity paradigm ultimately locked feminist debates into a binary logic that theorists continue to try to wrest free of to this day. At the same time, the (apparent) discovery of the problems inherent in the split served to energize an entire industry within feminist theorizing of the body and (dimorphic) sexual difference.