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Learning Objectives
• Analyze the role of gender in shaping conceptions and practices of citizenship.
• Examine how gender identities are produced and transformed in association with social programs.
• Define the key characteristics of maternal citizenship.
• Compare different assumptions about the economy and its relationship to maternal citizenship.
This chapter examines how the Mexican antipoverty program, Oportunidades, transformed Indigenous village women’s economic status while promoting a type of “maternal citizenship.” The author discusses how program officials pressured low socioeconomic status mothers to make their income-generating opportunities secondary to their care-work obligations. Yet these women saw income-generating activities to be central to mothering. They contested the ways the program threatened their precarious economic status and their social bonds.
In the late 1990s, Mexican officials launched Oportunidades, a new kind of social program that has greatly transformed the nature of citizenship for economically marginalized Mexican women. The program was originally launched in 1997 by the Ernesto Zedillo administration as Progresa. In 2002 the Vicente Fox administration expanded the program and renamed it Oportunidades. More recently, in 2014, the Enrique Peña Nieto administration renamed the program Prospera. I refer to the program here as Oportunidades because my research focused on the Oportunidades period. Officials launched the program during an extended period of neoliberal reforms. The reforms marked an end to Mexican officials’ efforts to spur economic growth through investment in “priority” economic sectors and a shift toward greater reliance on “the market” and, more specifically, investors’ desires to generate wealth—to drive economic growth (see chapter 1). In this context, officials designed Oportunidades to improve the health and education status (or “human capital”) of youth in economically marginalized families. In doing so, they aimed to equip the next generation to take advantage of the income-generating opportunities that the neoliberal strategy would create. They adopted a multipronged strategy to achieve this goal: first, they designated female household heads as formal Oportunidades beneficiaries, or titulares, in recognition of women’s key roles in caring for their children. Second, they made titulares eligible for small payments (of about \$30 bimonthly in 2004) to help them secure the material resources needed to meet their children’s health and education needs. And third, they made access to these funds contingent on the fulfillment of multiple health- and education-related “co-responsibilities,” including for members of recipient families to attend annual health consults, for school-aged children to attend school, and for mothers to attend monthly health education sessions. Moreover, officials provided additional payments to families with children in the third grade and beyond in order to combat declines in school attendance among older children. They increased the size of these payments for children in higher grades and among girls in an effort to reduce dropout rates among these populations.
Definition: citizenship
the whole range of political, economic, and social rights and duties attached to membership in a nation or community.
At the same time that Mexican officials launched Oportunidades, they implemented a rigorous program of evaluations to measure the program’s effectiveness. Data from these evaluations have consistently demonstrated the success of the “conditional cash transfer” (CCT) approach in achieving key goals, such as improving child nutrition and health outcomes and increasing educational attainment (see Fitzbein and Schady 2009 for an overview). These results have prompted officials to implement versions of the approach in diverse regions across the globe (Peck and Theodore 2010).
With the popularization of CCTs, researchers have begun examining the broader social transformations that these programs engender. In doing so, feminist scholars have directed attention to their role in advancing new conceptions of maternal duty (see, e.g., Molyneux 2006; Cookson 2018). This scholarship builds on a robust body of feminist inquiry on citizenship, which has critically examined the gendered dynamics through which individuals are differentially positioned in relation to the civic, political, and social rights and duties attached to membership in a community. Some of this work has examined the gender biases of Western liberal traditions of citizenship, tracing how the privileges of citizenship were historically bestowed on a “free” (male) public sphere that was premised on the hidden (female) labor and dependency in the private space of the home (Lister 1997; Warby 1994). More recent studies of how CCTs are producing new kinds of maternal citizens—citizens whose rights and duties are based on their maternal status—underscore the importance that state initiatives continue to play in reproducing these gendered forms of citizenship.
Definition: maternal citizenship
a form of citizenship in which women’s rights and duties are based on their maternal status.
In this chapter, I build on this work by examining the economic dimensions of the form of maternal citizenship that officials promoted through Oportunidades. To do so, I draw from observations of the program in a rural, Tu’un Savi (Mixtec)–speaking village in southern Mexico, which I call “Ñuquii.” (I use pseudonyms for the village and the individuals whose experiences I describe here.) Ñuquii means “Green Village” in the Tu’un Savi language. Ñuquii is a village of about twelve hundred residents located in the Mixteca Alta (Mixtec Highlands) region of the state of Oaxaca. At the time I began working in the village in late 2003, the municipality had an average per capita annual income of \$933—a tiny fraction of the national average of \$7,495 (INEGI n.d.). Accordingly, a full three-quarters of Ñuquii’s households had been designated significantly economically marginalized to receive Oportunidades and so were enrolled in the program.
By emphasizing the economic significance of Oportunidades’ positioning of titulares, this chapter captures the important role that gendered assumptions about economic gain played in shaping the program’s conceptions of maternal citizenship. It also facilitates an examination of how particular legacies of nation building shaped the economic realities of maternal citizenship for women. As I show below, the processes through which these legacies intersected with Oportunidades’ form of maternal citizenship had great significance for the experiences of titulares in Ñuquii.
I collected the data that I draw from here primarily during an eighteen-month period of ethnographic research in 2003 and 2004. I returned to Ñuquii in the summer of 2011 to present the findings from the initial period of research and to learn about continuities and changes in the program since my departure. In 2012 I returned again and conducted additional interviews with villagers and health providers and officials. This chapter draws primarily from the 2003 and 2004 data. In doing so, it provides insights into how Oportunidades had transformed the lived dynamics of citizenship for low-income village women in the earliest years of the twenty-first century.
I begin below by tracing how key aspects of twentieth-century Mexican statecraft produced the gendered spaces of marginality that villagers in Ñuquii (and other communities across Mexico’s rural south) inhabited. I then turn to an examination of the positioning of titulares as maternal citizens in Oportunidades, giving particular consideration to the economic dimensions of this positioning. In doing so, I describe important divergences between titulares’ conceptions of maternal duty and those of village women. Finally, I explore the material consequences of this conception of maternal citizenship for the women who were designated Oportunidades beneficiaries in Ñuquii.
ÑUQUII: BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
Mexican officials’ twentieth-century economic development efforts helped shape the context in which villagers struggled to seguir adelante (“get ahead”) in Ñuquii in 2003 and 2004. In the early twentieth century, Mexican leaders envisioned a key role for small-scale agricultural producers in the nation’s economic development. As they began to devote significant investments in key economic sectors in the 1940s and 1950s, however, they largely neglected the agrarian sector. Instead, they prioritized the development of manufacturing along key urban corridors and the northern border and large-scale, industrialized agricultural production in the north. These and other investments (e.g., the development of Mexico’s petroleum industry) produced the so-called Mexican miracle, in which the economy maintained average growth rates of 6 percent per year from the 1940s through the 1960s. This growth was limited to specific regions and sectors of the economy, however, and the south—and especially the rural south—languished.
The legacies of this history were evident in Ñuquii, where a full 91 percent of the villagers that I interviewed indicated that their households carried out some form of milpa production (intercropping corn, beans, and squash on small, mainly rainfed plots). Many villagers received payments (e.g., \$150) from the government-run PROCAMPO program to support this production, but the small size of agricultural plots (typically less than 1 hectare), limited access to irrigation, and poor-quality soils limited the productivity of the milpa. In fact, the harvest usually fell short of meeting even families’ own needs for consumption. Thus, villagers carried out a range of additional activities to generate income, such as producing artisan crafts (either weaving palm or threading silk) (84 percent), working intermittently as mozos (agricultural day laborers) on fellow villagers’ plots (40 percent), planting additional crops for sale in area markets (e.g., a few bundles of cilantro or a basket of tomatoes), and raising a hog or two for sale. In addition, a small but significant population of village women had carved out a place for themselves in the regional economy as full-time market vendors (purchasing goods wholesale and reselling them in area markets).
Definition: milpa
a sustainable system of farming where multiple types of crops are planted together. The crops planted are nutritionally and environmentally complementary such as beans, corn, and squash.
The returns from most of these activities were meager. For example, in 2004, a man could earn about \$5 and a meal for a day’s work as a mozo, while a woman could earn about \$4 and a meal. Among the two forms of artisan craft production, silk production provided better earnings. Silk buyers paid about US\$250 per kilo, which villagers said that they could produce in about three months if they worked consistently. With local income-generating options so limited, villagers had long migrated to take advantage of better opportunities elsewhere, and 38 percent of the villagers that I interviewed in 2004 reported receiving some form of remittance from migrants. Typically, men migrated to destinations such as Mexico City to work in the industrial or construction sectors, or to northern Mexico to work in the agricultural fields. More recently, villagers had also begun migrating to destinations in the United States to work in the agricultural and service sectors. Because of these gendered patterns of migration, women predominated among resident villagers, especially among those of working age. For example, while girls and boys were equally represented among youth aged five to nineteen in the census that I conducted, women were overrepresented among villagers and older. The imbalance was especially pronounced among villagers aged thirty to forty-four, among whom only about half as many men (54) were in residence as women (103).
In Ñuquii, villagers’ struggles to generate a livelihood were further shaped by Mexico’s twentieth-century nation-building efforts. During the 1920s, Mexican leaders claimed modern Mexico as a distinctly mestizo nation, one that would be grounded in the orientations and conventions of the “mixed-blood” descendants of the Spanish colonizers and the Indigenous inhabitants of the land. They launched an Indigenista project to “incorporate” Indigenous populations into this nation-state by providing the training in the Spanish language and mestizo habits and orientations that they deemed necessary (see, e.g., Dawson 2004). As officials extended initiatives to provide this training, mainly through the educational sector, Indigenous populations increasingly gained familiarity with the skills, styles, and orientations needed to navigate mestizo spaces.
Definition: mestizo
literally means “mixed race,” and refers to people of Spanish and Indigenous descent. In the early twentieth century, Mexican officials celebrated Mexico as a mestizo nation. In practice, mestizos are usually defined culturally by markers such as the use of Spanish language and Western (non-Indigenous) dress.
Definition: Indigenista project
the twentieth-century effort by Mexican leaders to promote the Spanish language and Mestizo culture to Indigenous communities in order to facilitate their “integration” into the “modern” nation-state.
Within Indigenous communities, however, this process was uneven. One source of unevenness was the incremental process through which these opportunities were made available. For example, the first villagers to access formal educational training in Ñuquii received just one or two years of study, but local educational opportunities expanded over the second half of the twentieth century to include both primary and secondary schools. Because of this incremental process, age is closely linked to educational status and, therefore, to a facility with the Spanish language and familiarity with Mestizo social conventions in Ñuquii. Historical gender divergences in relation to these initiatives were another important source of unevenness. When educational opportunities first became available in Ñuquii, most families determined that they would best serve men as they navigated mestizo spaces on behalf of their families and the community. Accordingly, these opportunities were often initially limited to men and boys. Although women’s educational status has increased significantly over the second half of the twentieth century, gendered disparities in educational attainment in Ñuquii reflect this legacy. For example, as table 1 shows, while slightly over half of the villagers who were thirty years old or older when I interviewed them in 2004 had no formal educational training, 71 percent (12) were women, while only 29 percent (5) were men. Moreover, all of the men were sixty-four years old or older, while the youngest woman with no formal educational training was twenty-nine years old, and several were in their forties and fifties. Rates of educational attainment were significantly higher among villagers aged fifteen to twenty-nine, but gender divergences remain evident. Most significantly, of the five villagers whose educational training was limited to some degree of primary school training, four were women.
Since economic and political power was (and still remains) concentrated in mestizo spaces, these divergent rates of education had great significance for villagers’ efforts to secure a livelihood. The economic advantages that education conferred were especially evident in the experiences of professionals. Since Mexican officials had failed to invest in productive activities in the region, professional positions associated with the Indigenista project itself were among the few well-paid local income-generating opportunities (i.e., in the educational sector). In more recent years, with the launch of Oportunidades, new professional opportunities have emerged in the health sector. Only those with the most extensive formal educational training could compete for these posts. They typically earned between a thousand and fifteen hundred pesos per week, which was equivalent to about US\$100 to US\$150 at the time. Even those with less extensive educational training benefited from the ability to navigate the Mestizo worlds that existed outside the community in order to access better income-generating opportunities. As a result, in 2003 and 2004, professionals and the most successful migrants comprised the approximately one-quarter of households that had accumulated sufficient wealth to make them ineligible for Oportunidades. They typically invested some of their earnings in local businesses (e.g., variety stores, a corn mill, a pharmacy, a school supplies store), and in doing so further augmented their wealth. They owned the fifty-three cement and brick homes that clinic officials identified in their census of early 2004, nineteen of which comprised five or more rooms. They also owned the few dozen manufactured stoves (41) and refrigerators (42) that the same census located in Ñuquii at the time. And a select few owned automobiles (12), telephones (7), and septic systems (4).
Meanwhile, most households enrolled in Oportunidades in 2004 possessed little material wealth. They lived in one- or two-room residences. Their homes were usually constructed of adobe bricks, but those with the fewest resources lived in residences constructed of drafty wooden planks. Most of these residences had floors made of dirt and roofs made of corrugated tin or asbestos. And while virtually all households possessed a radio, most lacked more expensive manufactured goods such as stoves, televisions, and refrigerators.
Those with minimal or no formal educational training faced formidable barriers to accessing better economic opportunities. In practical terms, lack of familiarity with the Spanish language and mestizo social conventions made navigating the mestizo-dominant social contexts that prevailed outside of the village extremely challenging. Na Martha (Na is an honorific that conveys age and gender status, meaning “Mrs.” or “grandmother”) a monolingual Mixtec-speaking woman who was in her early seventies in 2004, referred to these challenges on multiple occasions during our conversations, exclaiming that she “couldn’t survive” outside of Ñuquii because she “wouldn’t know what to eat” (Na Martha, personal communication). Maria Luisa, a forty-two-year-old bilingual woman conveyed similar sentiments, asserting “I can’t travel because I can’t read and I’m scared to leave!” (Maria Luisa, interview by author)
When villagers did leave the community, those who failed to uphold the conventions of mestizo social engagement were often treated poorly. Indeed, even in the one area where low-income village women had carved out a successful space for themselves in the economy—as merchants in regional markets—they frequently experienced mistreatment while going about their work. For example, villagers complained to me that transport workers often mishandled these women’s goods when they traveled to area markets, carelessly tossing their wares, and that bus drivers sometimes tricked them into paying extra for their fares. In addition, in Tlaxiaco, the site of the region’s largest market, locals referred disparagingly to these women as “Marias” and treated them disrespectfully when they attempted to make their own purchases. And villagers recounted that district officials had harassed the women for taxes that they couldn’t afford and dismantled their stalls when they failed to pay up.
Thus, the gendered dynamics of the twentieth-century Indigenista project left many village women at the bottom of regional social hierarchies. Juana, who was fifty-five years old when I interviewed her in September of 2004, provided a keen reflection on the resulting gendered (and generational) differences in villagers’ positions in relation to these broader inequalities:
Like, the people of my generation, as you see—I say for myself—we still dress dirty. Because I’m always in front of the fire [cooking]. I’m poor, at home … It began to change when [people] started to leave … They dress differently. They travel, get some money, build a house, get more money, and the homes improve. And in my case I don’t go anywhere and—well, things stay the same as before. (Juana, interview by author)
This was the context in which three-quarters of Ñuquii’s households received Oportunidades assistance in 2003 and 2004. Below, I examine how the positioning of titulares as maternal citizens in Oportunidades shaped their experiences in the program.
MATERNAL CITIZENSHIP IN OPORTUNIDADES
Since members of households that received Oportunidades assistance were obliged to attend health consults, and titulares were required to attend monthly health education sessions, the public health sector played a primary role in administering the program. In Ñuquii, villagers received health services from a federally run IMSS-Oportunidades health clinic that officials had established in the village in 1996. A physician presided over the clinic’s health initiative and was assisted by two local health aides and a local rural health assistant. The mestiza physician who presided over the clinic when I initially arrived in Ñuquii in 2003 was replaced by a new mestiza physician in 2004. Meanwhile, Carmen, a village woman who turned twenty-eight in early 2004, had served as the clinic’s full-time health auxiliary since the clinic opened in 1996, while Teresa, who was twenty-seven, served as the part-time health auxiliary. A third village woman, thirty-six-year-old Veronica, held the rural health assistant post. Together, the four shared responsibility for providing the health consults and health education sessions and certifying titulares’ compliance with these requirements. Titulares who failed to fulfill these obligations risked receiving a falta (or absence), and those who accumulated three faltas could lose their economic assistance.
The health officials and providers that I spoke with in 2003 and 2004 viewed their work as a source of empowerment for women like those I came to know in Ñuquii. They claimed that gender inequalities were especially a hindrance for Indigenous women. For example, in an interview in May 2004, Teresa exclaimed, with great frustration, “There is so much machismo, and machismo doesn’t allow women to develop as women!” Shortly thereafter, she elaborated:
They [women] are very submissive. They wait for everything, everything from their husbands, when really they are very capable of making decisions. Whatever action they want to take, or whatever they want to do [realizar], they must decide for themselves! (Teresa, interview by author)
In this context, Teresa and others believed that Oportunidades was empowering village women to overcome this subordinate position so they could determine their futures in line with their own desires and interests.
As I noted above, however, Oportunidades positioned titulares as maternal citizens whose rights and duties were based on their role as mothers (see Molyneux 2006). For example, the creators of the program cited evidence that women invest more of their resources in their children than men do in order to name them beneficiaries (Fitzbein and Schady 2009). By making payments to women, they sought to take advantage of this “maternal altruism” in order to maximize the amount of program funds that were ultimately invested in children. Moreover, the program’s creators built on existing patterns in which women were tasked with overseeing the needs of the family in making them responsible for ensuring that their children attended school and that all family members attended health appointments. Finally, the monthly health education sessions, or pláticas, that titulares were required to attend were primarily aimed at strengthening and shaping their care work. In the abovementioned interview, Teresa aptly summarized the altruistic, care-oriented form of maternal citizenship that the program was aimed to produce as she explained the logic behind the pláticas:
Women are the ones who receive the pláticas because it is understood that the woman is the heart (seno) of the family and she is the one who cares for the children, and it’s her who looks out for the well-being of the family. (Teresa, interview by author)
As Teresa suggests, Oportunidades was not designed to support titulares in foregrounding their own interests but rather to build on their tendency to prioritize the interests of their family members. Thus, in pláticas, providers counseled titulares on the preparation of nutritious meals, strategies for organizing and maintaining the household in order to reduce illness, and personal health management (with a special emphasis on managing their own reproductive capacities in ways that maximize opportunities to “invest” in each child).
In many ways, the emphasis on care work in this conception of maternal duties accorded well with normative accounts of the gendered division of labor in Ñuquii. When I asked villagers about this division of labor, many described a public/private split in which men were responsible for generating wealth outside of the home (including in the milpa) and representing the household in public affairs, while women were responsible for work in the solar, or household compound.
Ta Javier and Na Martha, the seventy-something heads of the household where I lived in 2003 and 2004, approximated this ideal as much as anyone else I came to know in the village. As a younger man, Ta Javier’s primary contribution to the household economy had been cultivating the family’s milpa plot. He had sold any surplus they were lucky enough to produce and traveled intermittently to the coast to sell regional goods, returning with coastal goods to sell in and around Ñuquii. In addition, he had represented the family in the municipal polity by participating in communal work details and taking on leadership positions in the civil hierarchy. In 2003 and 2004, he no longer traveled to the coast but continued to work the milpa, now alongside his son and son-in-law. He also participated in communal work assignments and attended the assemblies through which decisions over how to manage village affairs were made.
Na Martha, for her part, carried out most of her work in the solar, and especially in the center of the solar’s social activity: the kitchen. She devoted a significant part of her days to the work of meal preparation. Each evening, she began the process of preparing the next day’s tortillas by making nixtamal (a mixture of corn boiled with lime to loosen the husks that encase the kernels). Then each morning, she arose early to mold the dough into tortillas and bake them on the comal (a special pan used to bake tortillas over an open fire). She also prepared dishes to accompany the tortillas, which always included black beans and salsa; often included eggs, rice, and potatoes or broccoli; and more occasionally included regional specialties like chicken soup with parsley. While carrying out these tasks, she washed dishes, tidied the kitchen, and looked after the chickens that she raised primarily for household consumption. Na Martha took advantage of any time when she was not involved in these tasks to thread silk from the silkworms she raised for sale to a wholesaler.
Villagers’ accounts of the gendered division of labor in Ñuquii, and Ta Javier and Na Martha’s actual patterns of work, appeared quite compatible with the definition of women’s maternal duties within Oportunidades. The two frameworks diverged, however, in their views of mothers’ income-generating activities. As Na Martha’s example shows, even women who carried out most of their work within the confines of the solar contributed to the household economy. Most produced artisan crafts—either raising silkworms and threading silk, like Na Martha, or weaving palm into straw hats and baskets. Many also sold a few select goods out of the home (e.g., keeping a case of soda or beer on hand to sell individual bottles when opportunities arose). And a few performed domestic chores for the small population of professional households.
Moreover, in practice, few women were as tied to the solar as Na Martha. One force that worked against this ideal was male migration. When male household heads left for work, women often took on their responsibilities in their stead. Women also sought additional income-generating opportunities when remittances from migrant men failed to meet the family’s needs. Another force that worked against this ideal was single motherhood. Most of the single mothers with young children that I met in 2003 and 2004 had been abandoned by their partners. In these contexts, and others, women took on a range of activities to generate much-needed income.
In interviews, women characterized these income-generating activities as aspects of their maternal care duties (see Perez 2007). For example, during an interview in September 2004, Maria Luisa, the forty-two-year-old mother of five children whose concerns about managing life beyond Ñuquii I cited previously, said that she became one of the first village women to work as a market vendor while seeking to provide for her son. She recounted that her husband had been working in Mexico City at the time. The money he had sent was insufficient to meet her and her children’s needs, so she sought out her own income-generating opportunities in regional centers like Tlaxiaco and Chalcatongo:
Yes, like I lived with my son, I tell you, and, well, I go to Tlaxiaco, I go to Chalcatongo to search, to sell, even if it is just [to make enough for] a tortilla or [to make] an exchange [barter]. (Maria Luisa, interview by author)
Rosa, a fifty-five-year-old mother of eight, similarly described her work in the market as part of her maternal duties:
Sometimes I go to sell even though it’s just enough [money] for my children, so they can go to school, so they don’t suffer like we’re suffering. (Rosa, interview by author)
Seen from this perspective, income-generating activities were integral facets of maternal care. This association between income-generating activities and maternal care made sense in Ñuquii, where the exchange of goods was a central part of the processes through which villagers established and maintained social ties (Monaghan 1995). In this context, Gloria, a fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven children who I interviewed in July 2004, asserted that parenthood produces a drive to work:
See now, like people who have more children, they have more money, too, because well, like I say, a person with lots of children (un montón) says, I’m going to work hard [to get] what my child needs. (Gloria, interview by author)
Oportunidades health officials and providers, however, viewed income-generating activities as conflicting with women’s maternal duties. One occasion on which I noted this economic aspect of providers’ conception of maternal duties was during a rabies vaccination campaign that the clinic staff carried out in a neighboring village in March 2004. I traveled to the village with Carmen and Teresa to observe the event, and we were joined by the village’s rural health assistant, Elizabeth, upon our arrival. The three women decided to tackle the work of administering the vaccines in teams: I was assigned to assist Elizabeth by recording the name of each titular/dog owner as she stuck the animal with the needle.
After administering the injections in this manner for a few hours, we broke for lunch. As we chatted, Carmen and Elizabeth criticized the villagers, claiming that they “don’t do anything for their kids.” As a case in point, Carmen asserted that parents of sick children often failed to travel to the capital city of Oaxaca often enough to treat grave illnesses. I interjected that villagers’ limited income likely made this quite challenging. On a previous occasion, Carmen had pointed out to me that Yuquijiin’s economic situation was particularly dire because the village lacked a local water source for milpa production. Nonetheless, on this occasion, she denied that these circumstances posed a significant barrier. On the contrary, she asserted that parents needed to echarle ganas, or apply themselves. Moreover, she claimed that parents needed to learn to prioritize and that they should sell their animals to meet their children’s health needs. Elizabeth agreed, asserting that the village was not that poor and pointed to some families that owned as many as twenty goats as evidence. Further, she recounted that one mother had indeed sold one of her goats to acquire the funds she needed to provide medical care for her sick child. She viewed this as confirmation that parents who failed to do the same were negligent in the care of their children; as the clinic’s physician had lamented on another occasion, they “care[d] more for their animals than for their own children” (Dr. Juana, personal communication).
In this conversation, and others like it, providers construed titulares’ economic pursuits as selfish and therefore a violation of their altruistic maternal duties. The clinic’s providers and their regional supervisors expressed similar concerns about another aspect of titulares’ engagement in the market—their spending. For example, in an informal conversation that I had with Carmen in 2004, she complained that titulares (mis)spent their Oportunidades assistance on beer. A regional supervisor made a similar claim when I sought him out to discuss my observations of the program in summer 2012. I informed him that I had observed providers tack additional conditionalities onto Oportunidades assistance, including a monthly village cleaning (see Dygert 2017). In response, he asked me pointedly whether I supported giving people something for nothing. When I replied that I thought there was great need, he pressed, “But if they spend it on beer?” (Dr. Alejandro, personal communication). The specter of titulares spending Oportunidades funds on beer underscored the potential destructiveness of maternal selfishness and so had become a potent means by which providers asserted the righteousness of pressing titulares to “invest” their limited resources in their children.
These conflicts over titulares’ engagement in the market captured how gendered assumptions about economic gain shaped the positioning of titulares as maternal citizens in Oportunidades. While providers expressed expectations that Oportunidades would empower women to act according to their own decisions, their assumption that economic activities conflicted with titulares’ duty to uphold ideals of maternal altruism made titulares’ participation in the market highly visible, suspect, and subject to critique. Meanwhile, the economic engagements of men and other (nonrecipient) women remained unacknowledged, even when they, too, exploited Oportunidades funds for their own personal gain. In fact, Carmen herself took advantage of the bimonthly bonanza that occurred on Oportunidades paydays: it was by far one of the busiest times for her variety store, as droves of women arrived to buy school supplies, sandwiches, and—indeed—beer, and to square up the debts that they had accumulated in anticipation of the payment. Nonetheless, her exploitation of these opportunities remained unacknowledged by providers.
THE MATERIAL REALITIES OF MATERNAL CITIZENSHIP
When I began working in Ñuquii, I was struck by titulares’ willingness to comply with the demands that the clinic’s providers made on them, particularly since many were not actual program requirements (see Dygert 2017). Titulares did ultimately complain, and their complaints highlighted how providers’ demands pulled them away from their income-generating responsibilities. In underscoring this fact, titulares called attention to the material consequences of these conflicting notions of maternal citizenship, with their divergent assumptions about mothers’ economic engagement. Providers’ demands were especially consequential for titulares because Oportunidades assistance was not sufficient to ameliorate recipient households’ economic marginality. To be sure, in a context in which villagers relied on an average annual income of \$993 per capita, the bimonthly base payments of about \$30 were a significant source of much-needed income. Nonetheless, the funds were insufficient, in and of themselves, to transform villagers’ marginal economic status. This aspect of the program was intentional: in setting the amount of the program’s payments, the creators of Oportunidades deliberately limited their size in order to avoid disincentivizing work (Fitzbein and Schady 2009, 117–120). Meanwhile, officials did not take steps to address the gendered ways that twentieth-century Mexican statecraft limited titulares’ opportunities: they did not redress the abandonment of the rural south by investing in new economic opportunities, nor did they provide educational training to address the legacies that left village women among the least prepared to compete for the economic opportunities that did exist. As a result, titulares continued to rely on the most poorly paid income-generating activities, such as producing artisan crafts, working as day laborers on fellow villagers’ plots, and selling agricultural produce in area markets. This maintained titulares’ economic dependence on male partners.
Maria Luisa’s recollection of how she struggled to meet her family’s needs while her husband was away working in Mexico City—sometimes making just enough for a tortilla—captures the stakes of these gendered dependencies. By 2004 her household’s economy was much more secure. Her husband had returned from Mexico City, and they seeded milpa on three small (under 1 hectare) rainfed parcels. In addition, Maria Luisa used a small portion of her sister’s land to cultivate some cilantro to sell in area markets. They received PROCAMPO support for their agricultural production. They had purchased a donkey to support this work and were raising six sheep and a pig to sell for income. Maria Luisa also wove palm hats and baskets. She sold some to a wholesale purchaser in the region and others at regional markets. Finally, on Maria Luisa’s youngest daughter’s most recent visit, she gifted her mother a collection of goods (e.g., sodas, eggs) to sell to other villagers from her home.
With this livelihood strategy, and support from Oportunidades, Maria Luisa and her husband had secured a small wooden home with dirt floors. Wooden plank structures were usually the draftiest (and even dilapidated) residences in Ñuquii; however, their home had been constructed recently, and though small was neat and well put together. They also possessed a couple of small appliances (i.e., a radio and a blender). Although Maria Luisa and her husband had accumulated few possessions, they had been able to send their children to school—an objective that the mothers I came to know in Ñuquii shared with Oportunidades officials. At the time of the interview, they were covering the costs of sending their thirteen-year-old son to middle school in Ñuquii, which included both school supplies and forgone earnings. They had also supported one of their daughters in pursuing more extensive educational training, and she was completing her final year of studies to become a nurse. Moreover, they appeared comfortable in their ability to meet these needs. In fact, the household economy was stable enough that Maria Luisa was able to replace her previous craftwork of threading silk with the more poorly remunerated palm weaving after she decided that harvesting the leaves needed to feed the silkworms was too dangerous for her son. Thus, while Oportunidades payments were not sufficient to transform Maria Luisa’s marginal economic status—after all, they still lived in a small home with dirt floors and few possessions—it strengthened their economic security.
While Maria Luisa’s experience captures the insecurities that the temporary absence of a male worker could produce, single mothers had among the most precarious economic circumstances that I observed in Ñuquii. One of these was Gudelia, a titular and mother of two daughters who was thirty-six years old when I interviewed her in July 2004. During the interview, she said that she had become pregnant while working in Mexico City, that it had been “a mistake,” and that the father of her children had never provided any support. She lived with her eighty-year-old mother and the youngest of her two daughters in a small, drafty wooden home with dirt floors. They did not possess any appliances—not even the ubiquitous radio.
Gudelia and her mother were the only villagers that I met who only grew corn on her mother’s small (one-fourth of a hectare) milpa plot—they had decided to invest their scant resources in meeting their consumption needs for the most important staple crop of corn. Even so, Gudelia said that the harvest never outpaced their needs, so she never sold goods in area markets. She generated additional income by working as a mozo in others’ fields when opportunities to do so arose and weaving palm. They did not have any animals to augment these earnings, nor did they receive remittances from migrants. During the interview, Gudelia repeatedly emphasized how difficult it was to meet the household’s material needs. In fact, she was the only villager among those I spoke with who denied attending celebrations because she was unable to assemble the goods (e.g., a stack of tortillas or a case of soda) that attendees were expected to contribute for such gatherings. Their experience captures the limited potential of Oportunidades to transform villagers’ economic status, as well as the gendered relations of dependency that anchored household economies.
With such limited resources, Gudelia had found it difficult to care for her children. The expenses had eased when her fourteen-year-old daughter moved in with a man in the community, and, in doing so, became his common-law wife. This pattern replicated one that several older villagers recounted having experienced in the face of economic adversity: they had to marry “for necessity,” in order to reduce the economic burdens on the household. Not long before the interview, Gudelia’s daughter had become a mother herself and so was focused on caring for her newborn infant.
CONCLUSIONS
In examining the positioning of low-income village women as maternal citizens in this chapter, I have emphasized the material dimensions of this form of citizenship. Paradoxically, given providers’ expectations that Oportunidades would empower women, they construed maternal citizenship as a form of citizenship that required prioritizing children’s needs. Moreover, they viewed titulares’ participation in the economy as a violation of this duty. Titulares, by contrast, viewed their income-generating activities as central parts of mothering, and they contested providers’ interference in these activities.
Meanwhile, the economic assistance that Oportunidades provided was not sufficient to ameliorate low-income villagers’ economic marginality. The program failed to address the gendered legacies of twentieth-century Mexican statecraft that limited income-generating opportunities for women. In this context, the program strengthened the economic security of some households, especially those with a male household head, but failed to do so for the most precarious households. In this regard, the program sustained the gendered relations of dependency that twentieth-century statecraft produced. In order to expand low-income village women’s opportunities, future initiatives should also include investment in the regional economy to develop better income-generating opportunities and educational initiatives to ensure that low-income women have the skills they need to access these opportunities.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How did twentieth-century Mexican statecraft shape the struggle of villagers to “seguir adelante” (or get ahead) in Ñuquii?
2. What role did gender play in shaping conceptions and practices of citizenship in Ñuquii?
3. What is maternal citizenship? What are the differences in how Oportunidades officials and titulares in Ñuquii understood maternal citizenship?
4. Do you think that Oportunidades transformed gender identities in Ñuquii? Why or why not?
5. Think about other social programs that you are familiar with. How have they influenced the dynamics of citizenship? Have existing gender relations shaped the impact of these programs? If so, how? How have these programs impacted gender relations?
6. If you were the secretary of Mexican development, what kind of social program would you promote to improve Ñuquii women’s circumstances?
KEY TERMS
citizenship: the whole range of political, economic, and social rights and duties attached to membership in a nation or community.
Indigenista project: the twentieth-century effort by Mexican leaders to promote the Spanish language and Mestizo culture to Indigenous communities in order to facilitate their “integration” into the “modern” nation-state.
maternal citizenship: a form of citizenship in which women’s rights and duties are based on their maternal status.
mestizo: literally means “mixed race,” and refers to people of Spanish and Indigenous descent. In the early twentieth century, Mexican officials celebrated Mexico as a mestizo nation. In practice, mestizos are usually defined culturally by markers such as the use of Spanish language and Western (non-Indigenous) dress.
milpa: a sustainable system of farming where multiple types of crops are planted together. The crops planted are nutritionally and environmentally complementary such as beans, corn, and squash.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on the first draft of this chapter. I would also like to extend my deep appreciation to the people of Ñuquii for welcoming me into their community and their homes and teaching me about their daily experiences. I am grateful to IMSS-Oportunidades officials and providers for supporting my work in the village and also to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Fulbright-IIE/ Garcia Robles program for their generous support for this research. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Laurie Kroshus Medina for her unwavering support in developing the initial project and her guidance through the initial period of fieldwork and analysis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Learning Objectives
• Assess how Indigenous women in Guatemala engage with capitalism to reinforce long-standing Indigenous cultural values.
• Identify the social factors that lead Maya women to get involved with multiple forms of marketing.
• Compare and contrast the motivations for and outcomes of Q’eqchi’ women’s work in traditional subsistence markets and new forms of capitalist exchange, specifically multilevel marketing.
• Explain how participation in economic exchange can play a role in defining one’s social status and gendered identity.
In this chapter, the author explores the intersections between globalization, marketing, kinship, and gender in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. The author discusses how Indigenous Q’eqchi’-Maya women use subsistence and multilevel marketing to challenge local gendered norms, reproduce longstanding Q’eqchi’ notions of family, and honor the legacies of their female ancestors who were also involved in market sales. The author concludes that Chamelco’s Q’eqchi’ market women moderate two distinct cultural realities and systems of value: that of their community’s Indigenous past and that of their town’s ever-increasing incorporation into global capitalism.
During the summer of 2014, an interesting theme emerged on the social media accounts of several of my Q’eqchi’-Maya friends in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. They began to post with increasing frequency about Herbalife, a multilevel marketing corporation new to the region. I watched as friends posted photos of themselves drinking Herbalife shakes, shared statements of admiration for Herbalife, and documented their weight-loss journeys. Many of these newly minted Herbalife distributors were the children or relatives of subsistence vendors in Chamelco’s municipal marketplace, taking their family histories of marketing in new directions. I set out to learn more about their connection to Herbalife and how their work related to the role of Q’eqchi’ women in Chamelco’s market.
In this chapter, I explore the intersections between globalization, marketing, and gender in San Juan Chamelco, a Q’eqchi’-Maya community in Guatemala. Q’eqchi’ is one of twenty-two Indigenous languages spoken in Guatemala and speakers of Q’eqchi’ use their language as an identifying ethnic designation. I examine how Q’eqchi’ women engage with global capitalism, as defined in the introduction to this text, to challenge local gendered norms and reproduce Indigenous values. Participation in local and global markets empowers Indigenous women by giving them a level of prestige and recognition available to few Indigenous women in Chamelco. Through work in the local subsistence marketplace, Q’eqchi’ women in Chamelco become embodiments of local value, recognized as compassionate, hardworking, and intelligent. Community members identify marketing as an ancient and valued occupation, further enhancing market women’s status.
Definition: Q’eqchi’
one of twenty-two Indigenous groups in Guatemala that trace descent from the ancient Maya civilization and who speak a Mayan language.
In addition, some women elevate their visibility through new forms of market exchange, including selling nutritional supplements produced by Herbalife. While involvement with Herbalife represents a new form of marketing outside the bounds of “traditional” market work, women sell Herbalife for many of the same reasons that others engage in subsistence marketing: to challenge local gendered norms and connect the community to long-standing Indigenous values, centered on honoring and remembering Q’eqchi’ ancestors. Here, I explore how Q’eqchi’-Maya women use local market sales and multilevel marketing, a hierarchical business model in which salespeople earn not only what they sell but also a percentage of the sales made by those at lower levels, to reinforce Q’eqchi’ notions of value.
Definition: Herbalife
a company that makes and sells nutritional supplements and whose sales model is a multilevel marketing scheme focused on direct sales.
Definition: multilevel marketing
a hierarchical business model in which salespeople earn not only what they sell but also a percentage of the sales made by those at levels lower than their own.
GENDER, STATUS, AND CAPITALIST EXCHANGE
Around the world, women accrue capital and develop power through exchange (Buechler 1978, 1985, 1997; Kistler 2014; Seligmann 1989, 1993; Sikkink 2001; Weiner 1976). Although capitalism can widen inequities in gendered status (Amadiume 1987; Chaney and Schmink 1976; Chinchilla 1975; Nash 1993; Stephen 1993), women have long used capitalist exchange to define their social identities (Chiñas 1973, 2002; Clark 1994; Elmendorf 1976; Hendrickson 1995; Marti 2001; Nash 1994; Seligmann 1989, 1993, 2001, 2004; Weismantel 2001). Women who work in market sales earn prestige by accruing capital wealth, forming social networks, and achieving leadership positions (Babb 1985, 1986, 1989, 2001; Little 2004; Mintz 1971; Tax 1953).
Women change their status not only through market sales but through other forms of exchange. Multilevel marketing companies (MLMs) like Avon, Amway, Tupperware, Omnilife, and Herbalife have served as a vehicle for garnering status and elevating the sellers’ socioeconomic class (Clarke 1999; Cahn 2008; Moutsatsous 2001). MLMs are “networks of member-distributors whose earnings come both from selling products and recruiting new members” (Sparks and Schenk 2001). Most MLMs engage in direct sales methods, meaning that clients purchase goods only in face-to-face interactions with distributors outside of a set storefront (Peterson and Wotruba 1996). While MLMs gained popularity in the United States decades ago, they have recently entered new markets around the world (Biggart 1989; Cahn 2006, 2008; Dolan and Scott 2009; Fadzillah 2005; Gu 2004; Hall-Clifford 2015; Hedwig 2012; Lan 200; Preston-Werner 2007). Cahn (2008) suggests that MLMs expanded in Latin America in the late 1980s as markets were deregulated.
Definition: direct sales
a marketing strategy in which sales are made in face-to-face interactions with vendors away from a store or formal retail location
The growing body of literature on MLMs reveals that for many distributors have trouble turning a profit through direct sales. In fact, many distributors lose money but find other benefits, including maintaining or enhancing class identity (Cahn 2008), gaining independence and autonomy (Preston-Werner 2007), expanding social networks (Oliveira 2017), and generating status and prestige (Dolan and Scott 2009; Fadzillah 2005; Hall-Clifford 2015; Moutsatsos 2001). These perceived benefits of MLMs are particularly appealing to women, as direct sales work is open to anyone—regardless of age, gender, or education—and offers flexible hours. MLMs are controversial, as distributors are often encouraged to invest large amounts of cash up front to buy in bulk materials that they may not be able to resell and use high-pressure sales tactics to recruit new clients (Partnoy 2014; Peterson and Albaum 2007, Vander Nat and Keep 2002). Most MLM distributors make little, if any, profit and rarely find the economic or social incentives they seek.
Indigenous women challenge gendered norms and elevate their social positions by embodying and reproducing local values through their involvement in markets and MLM sales. I draw on Gregory’s (1997, 13) definition of values as “invisible chains that link relations between things to relations between people.” Value is what underpins social action and motivates people to engage in exchange and other social realms (Graeber 2001; Gregory 1997; Piot 1991). In some societies, more than one system of value shapes local life, as communities move seamlessly between long-standing local values and more recently introduced capitalist ones, such as the pursuit of wealth and resources (Cahn 2006; Fischer 2002; Fischer and Benson 2006; Gregory 1997; Goldín 2009; Kistler 2014; Little 2004; Sahlins 1988; Uzendoski 2005).
LIFE IN COBÁN AND SAN JUAN CHAMELCO, GUATEMALA
My research is based on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in the community of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. Nestled in the mountains of highland Alta Verapaz, San Juan Chamelco has a current population of approximately sixty thousand inhabitants (INE 2014) and consists of an urban municipal center and dozens of affiliated rural villages in the surrounding mountains. The majority of the town’s population identifies as Q’eqchi’, and Spanish and Q’eqchi’ are spoken in government businesses, public celebrations, and educational institutions. While most residents of the municipality live in rural communities and make a living through subsistence farming, others pursue nontraditional forms of employment, including office work, sales, and tourism. There is a marked socioeconomic stratification in Chamelco between those living in the urban center who have more access to capital resources, including land and steady income, and those living in rural communities, most of whom make a living through subsistence agriculture. Indigenous Chamelqueños experience discrimination from Ladinos, or non-Indigenous Guatemalans, in many realms of life, including employment, relationships, education, and pursuit of justice, due to government oppression and persecution of the Maya and resulting historical tensions between the two groups (Carmack 1988; Konefal 2010; Little and Smith 2009; Lovell 2010; Way 2012). I have changed the names of interviewees cited here to protect their identities.
In Chamelco, Q’eqchi’ strive to honor their Indigenous ancestors by preserving, engaging with, and perpetuating the practices that they attribute to them, including wearing Indigenous dress, speaking the Q’eqchi’ language, eating ancestral foods, and participating in ritual ceremonies (Kistler 2010, 2014). Many Q’eqchi’ recall that their ancestors were tough, hardworking, and compassionate individuals who persevered through difficult circumstances. They honor this legacy by embodying these valued characteristics and preserving the practices that they believe that their ancestors left behind.
Reflecting on the value of ancestral practice, one activist in Chamelco told me that these practices “remain in our subconscious. People, despite external pressures or internal pressures, cannot forget their identity” (Rafael, interview by author, 2005). Another local activist similarly stated, “As a community, we have to have a relationship with our history. The past helps us to feel more certain” (Mauricio, interview by author, 2004). Chamelco’s mayor in 2006, a young Q’eqchi’ man, further elaborated on the value of maintaining perceived ancestral practice. He said, “We [our Q’eqchi’ community] have always been very important in the history of Guatemala … for this reason, we have really valued what our ancestors left behind, in this case, the shrines, the churches, the customs and traditions of the town, and we have to conserve them” (Pablo Rax, interview by author, 2006). Another Chamelqueño similarly shared, “We participate in folkloric [activities] to remember the customs and traditions that our Maya ancestors left us. The town, the municipality, the state that doesn’t have its folklore, is a dead community, because having these activities is remembering and living” (Francisco, interview by author, 2005).
Q’eqchi’ also seek to generate good public images so that they will be “taken into consideration” [inpatz’ b’alaq(Q’eqchi’)/tomada en cuenta (Spanish)] by others for participation in prestigious social domains, including leadership positions in political, religious, and ritual organizations; godparenthood; and receiving invitations to important social and cultural events. To do so, one must show herself to be compassionate, hardworking, caring, dedicated, and moral, all qualities that Q’eqchi’ attribute to their Indigenous ancestors (Kistler 2010, 2014). As one market woman explained, “You earn prestige when people say good things about you. There, you leave a good image, good memories behind” (Sara, interview by author, 2005). Another Chamelqueño explained how the Q’eqchi’ define prestige and leadership:
One earns prestige through social relations … to be a leader, people look at it like they do a plant. And this plant is well developed because it was well fertilized. It has to grow, according to how it was prepared. But, if you plant something, and it grows crooked, even if you want it to straighten out, you can’t … this same thing happens with leaders, with people. You give them a lot of respect, because they are going to lead us, because you know how they are. Because they are not going to name you as a [leader], because how are you going to lead if you are a bad person? You have to be an example for the next generation (Francisco, interview by author, 2005).
Being taken into consideration, recognized, and remembered are key values in contemporary Q’eqchi’ life, and these are values that Chamelqueños identify as long-standing ones.
The accumulation of capital and economic wealth plays an increasingly important role in how Q’eqchi’ residents of Alta Verapaz define value. The region’s Indigenous residents have engaged with global economic forces for centuries. By the late 1800s, German coffee growers arrived in the region seeking land on which to cultivate sugar, cardamom, and coffee (Díaz 1996; Henn 1996; King 1974). These European exporters seized lands from Q’eqchi’ and enslaved them to work their fields. This dark era marked the introduction of the Q’eqchi’ community to capitalist production. While Q’eqchi’ residents of Alta Verapaz have been forced to confront global capitalism since this time, they have seen a rapid increase in national and international corporations in their communities over the last several decades. By 2019 international food distributors, chain restaurants, banks, and supermarkets were prevalent in Q’eqchi’ communities. Local residents’ incorporation into global capitalist networks in nearly all aspects of life has led some Q’eqchi’ to expand definitions of value to include the accumulation of capital.
Q’EQCHI’ WOMEN AND GENDERED STATUS
The body of scholarship on Q’eqchi’ life, and my interviews with members of the Q’eqchi’ community, suggest that that according to an idealized perspective, Q’eqchi’ society aspires to gender complementarity, with men and women occupying equal status but with different social functions (Hatse and DeCeuster 2001; Estrada 1990; Adams 1999). Nevertheless, this ideal is not representative of gender dynamics in Chamelco, where most Q’eqchi’ women are subjugated by the norms of machismo, as defined previously in this volume. For example, Q’eqchi’ women are excluded from participation in many ritual events, as they are considered muxuq, or “profane,” and of lower status and importance than men (Adams and Brady 2005). Wilk (1991, 201) argues that historically, the Q’eqchi’ community has excluded women from agricultural production or wage labor as well, meaning that they “have no currency, no ability to motivate production, no power over the ultimate source of all food and wealth.” In other words, a marked division of labor relegates women to perform domestic work in the home, while men have the freedom to work, participate in ritual, and socialize outside of the home (Adams 1999; Ghidinelli 1975, 252).
Definition: gender complementarity
the ideal that men and women have equal status defined by their participation in separate but equally valued social realms (e.g., men earn status by farming; women earn status by completing housework). Gender complementarity is rarely achieved but is often recognized as a social ideal.
This gendered stratification begins at an early age, as Q’eqchi’ parents assign their children simple gendered tasks, in which young boys help their fathers tend to fields, while young girls help their mothers with household work (Estrada 1990, 263–264). This division means that, traditionally, most Q’eqchi’ women have not pursued higher education or employment outside of the home, though this norm has changed as more women continue their education beyond elementary school. In addition, Q’eqchi’ women, as all Maya women in Guatemala, are underrepresented in politics and face sexual harassment and elevated risks of gendered-based violence. Many women in Chamelco reported unhappy marriages, and in some cases, even shared that they must ask their spouse’s permission even to go out of the house. Those women who are vendors in Chamelco’s subsistence market or who serve as distributors for Herbalife, however, rebuke these patriarchal norms by striving to elevate their gendered status and change their social positions through sales.
Q’EQCHI’ WOMEN IN CHAMELCO’S MUNICIPAL MARKET
Recognized by Chamelqueños as an ancient institution, Chamelco’s market stands just off the town’s central park. It is a bustling, vibrant center of social and economic life in Chamelco, marked by a richness of sounds, sights, and smells. The market is alive with constant movement: clients, wholesale distributors, municipal officials, and friends and family members of market vendors flow through the space throughout the day. The market itself is a large, two-story concrete block building with shops around its exterior perimeter and an outward facing balcony on the second floor. The interior market is an open space made up of brightly painted wooden stalls. In 2005 the market housed approximately 130 stalls in its interior space, with another two dozen stalls located along its exterior perimeter. Most stores in the interior market sell daily consumption goods, including rice, dried beans, sugar; juices, dried soups, kakaw (cocoa beans), spices, and produce. The market also has nearly a dozen butcher shops. Other vendors sell Indigenous women’s clothing, men’s dress clothes, children’s clothing, and household goods. Since vendors buy their products from the same sources, the prices of the goods they sell are the same. Clients choose where they buy their goods not according to prices but rather according to their relationships to specific vendors (Kistler 2010, 2014). Residents visit the market on a daily basis, where they purchase household items, catch up on local news, and visit with friends. The markets are one of the few places where women can go and socialize without their husbands’ oversight.
All of the vendors in Chamelco’s municipal market identify ethnically as Q’eqchi’, although they have diverse intersectional identities based on age, socioeconomic class, marital status, educational level, and family histories of market participation, among other factors. They range in age from young adults to women in their eighties and nineties. Nearly 80 percent of the interior market vendors have family histories of market participation, tracing their work in the market matrilineally to female ancestors who taught them to market and who bequeathed them their market stalls. These women have a regular presence in fixed stalls in the market or in the shops on the market’s exterior perimeter, where they sell daily subsistence goods or work in butcher shops. Although the majority of the women have only limited formal education, some of the younger generation of market women graduated from middle or high school. Those who sell daily subsistence goods in the market are, for the most part, of lower socioeconomic standing than those who sell meat, as butcher women make much more through market sales than those that sell other foodstuffs. The history of each vendor in the market and their experience of rebuking local gendered norms to elevate their own status varies is based on their own intersectional identities. The women who sell in the interior market have vastly different statuses and experiences than those who sell as ambulant vendors in Chamelco’s ever-growing open-air market in the street outside of Chamelco’s marketplace. These ambulant vendors offer produce, textiles, and other assorted goods on a semiregular basis. In this chapter, my discussion of Chamelco’s marketers is limited to those who sell in the interior marketplace and does not include the ambulant street vendors.
MOTIVATIONS FOR MARKET WORK
In February 2004, the first time I visited Chamelco’s municipal market, I was greeted immediately by a young girl, Josefina, who was wearing Indigenous dress and a brightly patterned apron. She was selling coffee, tea, and dried goods in her mother’s stall by one of the market’s main entrances. Josefina had come to the market directly from school, as she did each day, to relieve her mother from sales work during the afternoon hours. Like Josefina, many other young women also worked in the market each afternoon, learning the art of marketing, just as their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts had done before them. While some adult marketers attended school as young children, many did not, instead training from a very young age to serve their families’ market businesses.
This family connection is what motivates many of Chamelco’s marketers to continue their market work. The statement of one vendor, Blanca, echoed sentiments I heard many others during my fieldwork in Chamelco’s market. Blanca said that she works in the market because “that is what they [my ancestors] taught me to do. … This is what they taught me, and so I like it more.” She referred to the market stall that she inherited from her mother as “a gift” (Blanca, interview by author, 2005).
During lapses in market sales each afternoon, I observed that many women told tales of their female ancestors to clients and other vendors. As we sat on burlap sacks of flour, beans, or other grains in their wood-framed stalls during the slow afternoon hours in Chamelco’s market, many women told me stories of the women from whom they inherited their market stalls. In between sales, they shared tales of confrontations with municipal authorities, marveled at their ancestors’ endurance as in walking the winding mountain roads from Chamelco to Cobán daily to buy and sell their goods, and recalled assisting their mothers and grandmothers with sales in what was then an open-air market. They fondly remembered working all night over open fires in their families’ small wooden kitchens to make tamales for their mothers to sell. Marketing was not a choice, they said, but rather a necessary and important way to remember and honor these ancestors and ensure that they continue to be remembered as a part of the town’s historical legacy.
Women cited financial need and the desire to build social networks as additional reasons for their work. More than half of the women I interviewed cited financial necessity as a motivating factor for their market work. Many of their husbands did not have steady employment, had abandoned them, or, as some women told me, refused to contribute money toward household expenses or children’s education. Given that most marketers had little formal education, marketing was one of the only ways that they could earn the money needed to support their families. A clothing vendor stated, “What else can I do? I don’t have work, I don’t have an education … I have to do this” (Emilia, interview by author, 2005), while another reflected, “Since we don’t know how to read or write, that is why we must defend ourselves with this, with marketing” (Gloria, interview by author, 2005).
Despite the many claims of financial necessity as a primary factor underpinning women’s work, few women made a reliable profit in the market (Kistler 2010, 2014). Most women remained unaware of how much they made, stating that it was difficult to keep track of what they earned given the outflow of cash they experience on an average market day. One vendor explained:
I don’t know any profit. I only know what I invest. So, on a day like today, where I sold 100 quetzales, I give Q10 to my son who goes to study in [a high school], I give 2 quetzales to [my other son]. Sometimes, we buy tortillas, we take money out of that for dinner, and the rest I save. The next day, it is the same thing. Then, what I save during the week … I use it to buy more products. I do the same thing the next week and all year long (Gloria, interview by author, 2005).
While women make enough to support their families’ needs most of the time, they reinvest what they can into their businesses and see little profit. Women continue to market, however, because they have few economic alternatives and because money is perhaps only one of the significant factors that motivate their work.
Marketing allows these women to be independent and expand their social networks. They manage their own businesses, control their own resources, and make their own schedules. Many women remarked that serving as their own bosses in the market gave them “freedom” and “independence” that they would not otherwise have. Simply put, as one vendor told me, “It is a satisfaction to have a small business” (Sara, interview by author, 2005).
Market women develop close friendships with other vendors and clients alike. The husband of one vendor told me that market women “maintain strong interpersonal relations with other women. Their clients get to know them, and if they are very amicable people, then, of course, they are sought after and appreciated in the market. And this gives them a social position, right?” (Rafael, interview by author, 2005). Vendors build these relationships by talking with clients and providing them access to the goods that they need to maintain their own families. In discussing her friendships with clients, one vendor said, “We make an effort to find products, to be hardworking, [to have] a variety of products so that customers come to us. We worry about others, you see” (Melinda, interview by author, 2005). Another vendor reiterated that through sales, “You put yourself out there to be known by other people” (Teresa, interview by author, 2005). Vendors’ social networks grow as clients recognize them as hardworking and compassionate individuals who work for the good of their community. In 2005, one of Chamelco’s municipal officials explained, “In our town, we all know each other, and give importance to them [market women]. If the market didn’t exist, where would we buy our products, where would we spend our days? Visiting the women in the market, we make friendships with them, and that is why they have an important place in our society” (José, interview by the author, 2005).
Chamelco’s Q’eqchi’ market women value large social networks because it means they have more people on whom they can count in times of need and with whom they share personal successes and failures, joys, and sorrows. For example, Valeria is one of Chamelco’s most prominent and well-connected marketers, as she runs a butcher shop in the interior market, a store on the market’s outer perimeter, and delivers meat to local restaurants. When her son David died suddenly in 2014, she received an outpouring of support from friends and associates from throughout the region. Reportedly, thousands of people attended his wake and funeral and visited Valeria regularly to express their condolences and offer support. The social networks she developed in the market supported her during one of the most difficult times in her life.
MARKETING AND GENDERED STATUS
In addition to developing relationships through marketing, market vendors “enter into the social circle of other vendors,” and clients, as one vendor told me. By entering new social circles in this way, they garner status by connecting to valued social domains, like godparenthood, participation in ritual organizations, and community leadership roles, positions for which not everyone is considered. One marketer explained, “[Participation] is prestigious, it is an honor, really. Because not everyone is sought out to participate. It’s a recognition of how you treat others” (Sara, interview by author, 2005). Women receive invitations to attend social events hosted by clients and other vendors, including family celebrations like baptisms, weddings, funerals, and birthday parties. That they are invited guests at these events highlights the status that they earn through market interactions. In this sense, as Piot (1999) suggests happens through exchange, Chamelco’s marketers do not just “form” relationships through marketing: they become these relationships.
By perpetuating the occupation of their ancestors, showing moral character in interactions with clients, and building extensive social networks, Chamelco’s vendors serve as embodiments of Q’eqchi’ value. This recognition elevates their gendered status, moving them from lower status social positions to higher status ones, defined by their work to honor ancestral tradition and Q’eqchi’ value in the market. They challenge local gendered norms to stand among their community’s most powerful and recognized residents.
FROM THE MARKET TO HERBALIFE
Beginning in 2014, some Q’eqchi’ women, many of whom are family members of (or who were recruited by) Chamelco’s marketers, have become involved in a new form of marketing: selling Herbalife. Herbalife is an MLM that offers nutritional and weight loss supplements, including shakes, vitamins, and teas. Distributors advertise that products help consumers overcome digestive disorders, combat obesity, regulate blood sugar, and improve their overall health. In addition to selling products through direct sales, some distributors run “nutrition clubs,” offering prepared protein shakes to customers with daily, weekly, or monthly memberships. Though Herbalife is controversial due to its questionable business practices, it promises distributors the ability to earn money through sales and by recruiting new distributors.
As Herbalife gained notoriety in the United States for its pyramid-like compensation structure and its potential health risks (Anderson 2018; Braun 2016; FTC 2016; Hiltzik 2016; De Noon 2002; Geller 2008; Partnoy 2014), it expanded its hold in Latin America. By 2014, Herbalife had a prominent presence in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, an extension of the capitalist forces that have shaped the region for centuries. Although a few community members sold Herbalife before two high-level distributors developed an expansion plan for the region, the number of distributors has grown significantly since 2014. Herbalife has a regional headquarters and nutrition clubs in Chamelco and the departmental capital of Cobán.
Q’eqchi’ women’s involvement with Herbalife began with controversial former governor of Alta Verapaz, Dominga Tecún Canil. Tecún began taking Herbalife after she was in a car accident in the spring of 2014 and immediately signed on as a distributor. While she died a few short months later due to a preexisting illness, she used her influence as a prominent figure within the Q’eqchi’ community to recruit others, including her family members and close friends, to sell Herbalife.
MOTIVATIONS FOR SELLING HERBALIFE
Herlinda is a cheerful young mother of two sons and is married to the son of a well-known Q’eqchi’ activist. Born in a rural area of San Pedro Carchá, Herlinda completed only a middle school education. After her marriage and the birth of her children, she tended to her mother-in-law’s stall in Chamelco’s subsistence market before launching her own business as an Herbalife distributor. In the time that Herlinda worked in Chamelco’s market, she was quiet, reserved, and I rarely saw her smile. When I met with her in Herbalife nutrition club in Cobán in the summers of 2017 and 2018, however, she seemed like a different person. She was upbeat, talkative, engaging, and outgoing. She talked and joked with the clients that came to her small, brightly decorated storefront near one of Cobán’s established marketplaces each morning for tea and protein shakes. She shared that she began to consume Herbalife for its health benefits—she was overweight after the birth of her children and felt generally unhealthy. She quickly became involved with Herbalife for the lifestyle it offered her, as she began to run in local races, attend training sessions, and make connections and friendships with other vendors and clients. After she took over her nutrition club, she began to generate her own money and became her own boss, gaining independence and the chance to help others. Herbalife gave her “opportunities for success” that she would not otherwise have, as a young Indigenous woman who faced discrimination in nearly all other aspects of life.
Like Herlinda, a growing number of Q’eqchi’ women sell Herbalife, either through direct sales or in nutrition clubs. Consuming Herbalife helped them to deal with various health problems, including digestive issues and obesity, and they became “enamored” with the products and became distributors because of the financial possibilities Herbalife offers. The reasons they cite for their continued work as distributors generally fall into three categories: helping others, fostering personal development, and achieving independence.
Herlinda told me that selling Herbalife offered a way to help others improve their health. Another stated that she viewed it as her “moral and ethical duty” to help others by introducing them to Herbalife’s products. Having discovered how to improve her own health and financial situation, she said it was her responsibility to help others. This duty to “help others” is a core value for Q’eqchi’, and one that also underlies women’s participation in subsistence marketing, as the husband of one market woman told me. He identified the market as a place where “people sell, buy things, not to take advantage of one another, but rather according to the concept of mutual help” (Rafael, interview by author, 2005). As women do through subsistence marketing, Herbalife distributors use Herbalife to help others not only to become healthier but also because they get personal satisfaction and enjoy the work. One distributor told me that because Herbalife distributors work together as a team for everyone’s mutual benefit, the idea of working together, of helping others, both physically, emotionally, and financially, is what motivates their work.
Personal development emerged as another reason women cited for their work as Herbalife distributors. Each month, Herbalife offers training seminars, lectures, film viewings, and book clubs for distributors in Cobán. Every few months, Herbalife sponsors national events in Guatemala City and hosts annual “extravaganzas” abroad. During these events, invited speakers give testimonials, highlight the health benefits of Herbalife projects, and talk about marketing techniques. For some distributors, these events, and the possibility of continued learning, motivates their work. For example, during our conversation in her nutrition club, Herlinda shared that while she never had the chance to go to college, she is studying at what she called the “university of success” by attending Herbalife training sessions. At these events, she makes friends, socializes, and continues her personal enrichment. Another woman shared that involvement with Herbalife helped her through a difficult personal situation after the death of a loved one that left her feeling frustrated and depressed. “I had to put aside my feelings to talk to clients, serve them in my club, and attend training sessions” (Maria, personal communication, 2018). The friendship and support she found in these events helped her to overcome her personal difficulties. Since there are few opportunities for Indigenous women to socialize outside of the home or continue their educations, these personal enrichment opportunities provide an incentive for continued involvement with sales.
By selling Herbalife, Q’eqchi’ women (who were not already market women) achieved independence that they did not experience before becoming distributors. Olga, an Indigenous distributor from one of Chamelco’s urban neighborhoods, reflected on the fact that Herbalife offered her financial freedom not attainable through other means. Olga had only a sixth-grade education, meaning that her work opportunities were limited. Prior to Herbalife, she told me as we sat in a nutrition club across the street from Chamelco’s Catholic church in July 2018, she ran a small food store from her home. She saw limited profit from this venture, as she sold very little and had to support her children’s educational expenses. Herbalife, however, provided her with an opportunity to generate new income, allowing her the freedom to start a nutrition club in the place where her store had been. In my conversations with Herlinda, she, like Olga, reflected on her nutrition club in Cobán and the financial independence it offered her. She proudly stated that since becoming a distributor, she has paid for her children’s medical and educational expenses without having to ask for her husband’s assistance.
Involvement with Herbalife also offers independence to many Indigenous women distributors. Olga shared that she regularly travels to the town’s rural areas to market her product and speak with residents about the benefits of Herbalife. Herlinda stated that she found freedom in being her own boss and setting her own working hours. She finds her work empowering and said she never would have had such confidence before becoming a distributor. Herbalife affords women distributors the ability to overcome established gendered social norms, which limit women’s freedom to work or socialize outside the home.
Distributors highlighted the inclusive work environment of Herbalife as something that offered them acceptance as well. All of the Indigenous women distributors with whom I spoke remarked that they felt welcomed by Herbalife clients, distributors, and at events, as Herbalife’s philosophy is that it is for all people, regardless of race, gender, or education. One distributor shared, “With Herbalife, they don’t say, ‘You can’t come here with your uuq (Indigenous skirt)’ ” (Maria, interview by author, 2018). Instead, Herbalife offers a community that is accepting of Indigenous vendors and their identities. Indigenous women do not often find this acceptance in other workplaces.
One afternoon in 2018, I talked with an older Herbalife distributor, Imelda, who was visiting Chamelco’s municipal marketplace in a busy aisle of Chamelco’s market. Imelda shared that throughout her life she had dedicated herself to Maya resurgence efforts, working as a land activist, traditional healer with local plants and natural medicine, and serving as a Maya spiritual guide for ritual ceremonies. Since getting involved with Herbalife, Imelda offers clients Herbalife in addition to “natural medicine” when performing healing services. She viewed Herbalife as a compliment to her fight to preserve Q’eqchi’ identity and felt that Herbalife supported this view. While Imelda encountered conflicts with Ladinos in other aspects of her life, there had been no tension within Herbalife. She could express her Indigenous identity in Herbalife sales and felt accepted by the community of distributors and clients, without fear of discrimination. The inclusive community Herbalife offers motivates Imelda’s (and many other women’s) work as Herbalife distributors.
HERBALIFE AND Q’EQCHI’ VALUE
I asked Indigenous distributors how Herbalife’s capitalist model of sales relates to their Indigenous values. One afternoon, I talked with Maria, an Herbalife distributor and the daughter of a prominent Maya activist, over lunch at her home in Cobán. Medals from races in which Maria and her husband competed hung on the wall and from every piece of furniture in her home. Herbalife protein shake containers were scattered on the kitchen counters and throughout the home. Maria stated that Herbalife reinforced her connection to her Indigenous identity, though she imagined that it could perhaps weaken one’s connection with one’s sense of her own Indigenousness if she were “undergoing an identity crisis” already. Maria said that if she had been having an identity crisis, she could wind up losing herself due to Herbalife’s emphasis on exercise, beauty, and weight loss. Nevertheless, in 2018, Herbalife’s regional leader, Suchit de Thiessen, told me that Herbalife does not seek to change the communities it enters but rather “become a part” of them. She explained that Ladino distributors in the region study the Q’eqchi’ language, wear Q’eqchi’ dress, and eat traditional foods. The son of a prominent Maya activist in Chamelco, who was Chamelco’s first Herbalife distributor, affirmed these claims, stating, “Herbalife does not invade one’s culture, it becomes a part of it” (Juan, interview author, 2018)
Q’eqchi’ women also emphasized their desire to connect clients with ancestral practice and value through Herbalife. Because Herbalife promotes healthy nutrition and respects Indigenous identities, some distributors saw it as a way to reconnect with ancestral dietary practices, especially in the face of globalization. Maria told me that “Herbalife helps people to recognize that organic foods are ideal.” She stated that Herbalife helps bring people back to their roots and eat like their ancestors once did. The prevalence of fast foods in the region has caused a health and identity crisis for Q’eqchi’, who have strayed from traditional ways of eating in favor of the convenience of these goods. Herbalife training sessions teach that one should make healthy meal choices in addition to consuming Herbalife’s products. In this respect, in Maria’s view, Herbalife helps people find their way back to ancestral dietary customs. Prior to getting involved with Herbalife, Maria consumed a lot of packaged goods, fast food, and pizza. However, Herbalife inspired her to go to the local market to buy squash, beans, corn, and other plants: foods that served as the staples of the ancestral Q’eqchi’ diet. By promoting the consumption of these “foods that come from the earth,” distributors reconnect consumers with Indigenous dietary practices.
Many distributors report that they use the Q’eqchi’ language in sales meetings and conversations with other Herbalife vendors and prospective clients. Though some words, notably “micronutrients” and “shakes,” have no exact equivalent in Q’eqchi’, some women reported that they had heard others create neologisms to represent these terms, using the existing tools of the Q’eqchi’ language. When I asked them to share these terms, however, they laughed, stating that they could not remember them and that people often made them up on the spot when promoting these products in the Q’eqchi’ language. Nevertheless, by using the Q’eqchi’ language in this way, they continued to honor their ancestors and help maintain the Q’eqchi’ language.
HERBALIFE AND GENDERED STATUS
Just as vendors do in subsistence markets, Herbalife distributors garner recognition through involvement with Herbalife. The sustained interactions they have with Herbalife leaders, distributors, and clients lead them to receive invitations to social events, including Herbalife gatherings, parties, and weddings. Herbalife distributors play leadership roles in their communities, running fitness classes and nonprofit organizations, organizing ritual and athletic celebrations, and serving as godparents to local children.
As individuals working for the good of their community, Herbalife distributors construct themselves as hardworking and compassionate individuals concerned with others’ well-being, showing the personal characteristics that ground Q’eqchi’ value They portray themselves as knowledgeable and intelligent by demonstrating knowledge of nutrition in conversations with clients. The recognition they achieve for working to improve the health of their communities—and, in the eyes of some, connect with ancestral practice—elevates them to prominent social positions, just as it does for Chamelco’s market women, who reveal similar characteristics in their interactions in the market.
CONCLUSION
Market women and Herbalife distributors earn recognition and elevate their status by embodying Q’eqchi’ value. In Q’eqchi’ society, value centers on honoring ancestral practice and demonstrating intelligence, compassion, and a hardworking nature so that one will be invited by others for participation in prestigious social domains in life and remembered in death. Chamelco’s market women work not solely for financial gain but because marketing offers them the chance to highlight these values, build social networks, and honor their ancestors. Herbalife presents new opportunities for Indigenous women to change their social positions through sales. While many women got involved with Herbalife for its alleged health benefits, they stay involved because of the personal development opportunities it offers and the independence they find through their work. It also provides another way for them to reconnect their community with ancestral foods and dietary customs. They, too, embody value through the characteristics they display in interactions with clients and fellow distributors. In these ways, Chamelco’s market women and Q’eqchi’ Herbalife distributors construct themselves as people to be recognized and remembered.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How is life different for Q’eqchi’ women involved in market exchange and the sale of Herbalife products than it is for other Q’eqchi’ women? Why is it different?
2. In what ways are the experiences of Indigenous market women and those of Indigenous women distributors of Herbalife the same? In what ways are they different?
3. In what ways do women embody Q’eqchi’ value in their work in the local subsistence marketplace and in selling Herbalife? In what ways do they incorporate new and changing definitions of value?
4. How do women transform their gendered status through their involvement in these two distinct forms of capitalist exchange?
5. Is it surprising that women use global capitalism to reinforce long-standing Indigenous values? Why or why not?
KEY TERMS
direct sales: a marketing strategy in which sales are made in face-to-face interactions with vendors away from a store or formal retail location
gender complementarity: the ideal that men and women have equal status defined by their participation in separate but equally valued social realms (e.g., men earn status by farming; women earn status by completing housework). Gender complementarity is rarely achieved but is often recognized as a social ideal.
Herbalife: a company that makes and sells nutritional supplements and whose sales model is a multilevel marketing scheme focused on direct sales.
multilevel marketing: a hierarchical business model in which salespeople earn not only what they sell but also a percentage of the sales made by those at levels lower than their own.
Q’eqchi’: one of twenty-two Indigenous groups in Guatemala that trace descent from the ancient Maya civilization and who speak a Mayan language.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My research on Q’eqchi’ market women was generously funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant #0613168 and a Florida State University Dissertation Research Grant. My articles “The House in the Market: How Q’eqchi’ Market Women Convert Money and Commodities to Persons and Personhood” (Global South 2010) and “All in the Junkab’al: The House in Q’eqchi’ Society (The Latin Americanist 2013) as well as my book Maya Market Women (2014) offer more extensive analyses of the material on market women I present here. I also thank Rollins College for the Critchfield grant that funded my research on Herbalife in Guatemala. Finally, I am forever indebted to my friends and family in Guatemala who enabled this research and have supported me throughout my fieldwork journey.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
• Kistler, S. Ashley. 2010. “The House in the Market: How Q’eqchi’ Market Women Convert Money and Commodities to Persons and Personhood.” Global South 4, no. 1: 48–70.
• Kistler, S. Ashley. 2014. Maya Market Women: Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Little, Walter E. 2004. Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Lovell, W. George. 2010. A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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The region takes its name from the Indigenous ethnic group Christopher Columbus encountered there: the Caribs. The native population of the Caribbean is estimated to have been around 750,000 before European contact. In 1492, Columbus landed with his three ships on the island of Hispaniola, now divided into the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Indigenous peoples—such as the Arawak, Tainos, and Caribs—had no immunities to European disease, and through illness, warfare, and enslavement, their populations were virtually wiped out.
It is difficult to know the gender systems of the Indigenous populations of the Caribbean as they were decimated by the colonial conquest of the islands. However, we can glean some knowledge from small-scale hunter-gatherer societies in other parts of the world. In many foraging societies, gender relations tend to be more egalitarian and complementary. Whatever gender ideologies may have been prevalent among the Indigenous Tainos, Arawak, and Carib populations, little to no trace of these remained after conquest.
COLONIAL ERA
Colonialism thrived in the region. The many islands and coastal areas were accessible to European ships, which could easily sail into a cove or bay to make port and claim the island for their home country. After an island or area was claimed, the land was transformed through plantation agriculture. Cash crops—sugarcane, tobacco, cotton, or fruit—were grown for export profits. Most of these crops were not native to the Americas but were imported during colonial times and were planted, tended, and harvested by enslaved Africans.
The resulting trade arrangement is sometimes referred to as the “triangle” trade. Enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas to produce sugar, cotton, and other raw materials, which were shipped to Europe to produce rum, clothing, and other manufactured goods, which were then shipped back to Africa to trade for more enslaved people who were brought to America to produce more sugar and so on. Europe grew rich not simply on its technological superiority but also on the hard labor of enslaved Africans. Over three centuries, twenty-one million enslaved people were transported from Africa to the Americas.
Table 12.1. Destination of enslaved Africans (1519–1867)
Destination Percentage
British mainland North America 3.7%
British Leeward Islands 3.2%
British Windward Islands and Trinidad (British 1797–1867) 3.8%
Jamaica (Spanish 1519–1655, British 1655–1867) 11.2%
Barbados (British) 5.1%
The Guianas (British, Dutch, French) 4.2%
French Windward Islands 3.1%
Saint-Domingue (French) 8.2%
Spanish mainland North and South America 4.4%
Spanish Caribbean islands 8.2%
Dutch Caribbean islands 1.3%
Northeast Brazil (Portuguese) 9.3%
Bahia, Brazil (Portuguese) 10.7%
Southeast Brazil (Portuguese) 21.1%
Elsewhere in the Americas 1.1%
Africa 1.4%
Colonialism in the Caribbean was a deeply gendered institution, and its mark still influences contemporary gender relations in the region (Sanabria 2007). The colonial plantation system brought with it a gendered division of labor that assigned particular tasks as appropriate for men and others that were appropriate for women (Sanabria 2007). Europeans also imposed their ideas about women and sexuality at the time. Namely, women were deemed second-class citizens subject to the rule and control of their fathers and husbands. Rooted in a strongly Christian foundation, colonists and conquistadors were deeply motivated not only by a desire to conquer the “new world” but also to “civilize” and convert the native and enslaved populations to Christianity. This religious perspective denounced any sexual and gender practices that were nonnormative (e.g., premarital sex) or not strictly heterosexual.
Definition: conquistadors
leaders of the Spanish conquest of the Americas during the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries.
The colonial plantation system was particularly concerned with controlling women’s sexuality as a way to maintain racial and class hierarchies (Martínez-Alier 1989). White women produced legitimate heirs to continue family lines of inheritance and privilege. Family honor depended on white women’s chastity before marriage and their fidelity after marriage. The patriarchal (and legal) family was perceived as the essential foundation of a stable society (Sanabria 2007). Men, by contrast, were not subject to the same sexual control, as any children they fathered out of wedlock were “illegitimate” and thus would have no claim or connection to the family wealth.
Under slavery, the imperative to maintain “racial purity” was also a central part of controlling white women’s sexuality. A system of racial subjugation depended on being able to distinguish racial groups. Here we see the intersection of race and class powerfully shaping women’s lives. While racial mixing did occur in the colonial period, it was nearly always between white men and women of color (Indigenous or of African descent). Often these were violent rapes or relations of concubinage between white masters and enslaved women. Their mixed-race offspring born into slavery did not threaten the system: they inherited their mother’s status (free or slave) and as “illegitimate” offspring could not lay claim to their white father’s wealth—although some fathers did recognize and free their mixed-race children (Morrison 2015). On many islands, this type of racial mixing was condoned as it not only increased the population of laborers but also supposedly “improved the race” (adelantar la raza) since the African-descended people were viewed as racially inferior, and “whitening” the population was seen by governments as a way to modernize the nation (Fernandez 2010).
The Spanish were not the only Europeans to take advantage of colonial expansion in the Caribbean. As European powers vied for control of the islands, many of the islands changed hands several times before finally being secured as established colonies (see table 12.2). The cultural traits of each of the European colonizers were injected into the fabric of the islands they colonized; thus, the languages, religions, and economic activities of the colonized islands reflected those of the European colonizers. The four main colonial powers in the Caribbean were the Spanish, English, Dutch, and French. Other countries that held possession of various islands at different times were Portugal, Sweden, and Denmark. The United States became a colonial power when they gained Cuba and Puerto Rico as a result of the Spanish-American War, which ended in 1898. The US Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1918. Sweden controlled the island of St. Barthélemy from 1784 to 1878 before trading it back to the French, who had been the original colonizer. Portugal originally colonized Barbados before abandoning it to the British (University of Minnesota 2016).
The abolition of slavery in the latter half of the 1800s and the cultural revolutions that occurred challenged the plantation system and brought about land reform. Plantations were transformed into either multiple private plots or large corporate farms. Once slavery became illegal, the colonial powers turned to other sources of cheap labor, including indentured laborers from their Asian colonies and immigrants from China. Cuba was the destination for over one hundred thousand Chinese workers (Havana can claim the first Chinatown in the Western Hemisphere). Laborers from the British colonies of India and other parts of South Asia also arrived in the Caribbean. Currently, about 40 percent of the population of Trinidad can claim South Asian heritage, and many follow the Hindu faith. Colonialism and plantation agriculture resulted in the ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious diversity that is the hallmark of the Caribbean today. This legacy has meant that the Caribbean has been a global crossroads for centuries.
Table 12.2. Historical Caribbean Colonizers
Colonizer European colonies
Spain Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico
British Bahamas, Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Antigua, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, Barbados, Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Montserrat, Anguilla, St. Kitts and Nevis
Dutch Curaçao, Bonaire, Aruba, St. Eustatius, Saba and Sint Maarten (southern half)
French Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Martin (northern half), St. Barthélemy
United States Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Cuba
MODERN CONTEXT AND INDEPENDENCE
In the twentieth century, many of the Caribbean islands gained independence, but some remained Crown colonies of their European colonizers with varying degrees of autonomy. For many countries, the road from colony to independent republic has been arduous, at best. Haiti, for example, became the first Black independent republic in the Western Hemisphere after the enslaved population successfully revolted, overthrowing the French in 1804. However, rather than welcoming this new republic, the United States, the French, and other European powers resented Haitians for their uprising and feared it would spark more slave revolts throughout the Caribbean. (Remember, Thomas Jefferson, the US president at the time, was a slave owner.) The United States and other nations refused to recognize Haiti’s sovereignty. They refused to trade with the newly independent nation. The French threatened to attack and forced the Haitians to pay \$21 billion to compensate French slave owners for their “lost property.” It took the Haitians over one hundred years to pay off the debt. So they entered the twentieth century billions of dollars in debt, with no money to fund schools, hospitals, roads, and other essentials of a prosperous nation (Wesch 2018). As a result, even today over 40 percent of the population is illiterate; 25 percent live on less than \$2 per day; 30 percent are food insecure. Almost 8 percent of babies will not live to their fifth birthday (http://uis.unesco.org/en/country/ht).
In the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, the United States implemented the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, designed to deter the former European colonial powers from engaging in continued political activity in the Americas and simultaneously giving the United States the right to intervene in the region. In 1898 the United States fought Spain in the Spanish-American War, which was really Cuba’s war of independence. At the conclusion of the war, Spain lost its colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and others to the United States. Cuba, instead of gaining independence, was then occupied by the United States for several years. Puerto Rico continues to be under US jurisdiction and is neither an independent country nor a US state, though its residents are US citizens. Over the twentieth century, continued US intervention in the region has supported oppressive dictators such as Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, and Batista in Cuba. All of these autocrats stifled democracy and kept most of their populations in poverty while enriching the private coffers of a small elite.
In many Caribbean nations after independence, white or lighter-skinned elites retained power. In many ways, gender roles and the emphasis on male privilege were strengthened as these new nations sought to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the world. Governing elites believed that strong patriarchal families were necessary to build a strong nation-state (Sanabria 2007). Large-scale export agriculture and a strong gendered division of labor continued on many islands after independence, helping to keep women and people of color in subordinate positions. Indeed, we still see the strong patriarchal tendencies as expressed through gender violence in the region. In some countries, such as Haiti, the minority mulatto/mixed-race segment of the population makes up the power base and holds political and economic advantage over the rest of the country; meanwhile, the working poor at the bottom of the pyramid comprise most of the population. Across the Caribbean, the lower economic classes often contain the highest percentage of people of African heritage or those with the darkest skin.
In Cuba, women played an active role in the 1959 revolution that overthrew the US-backed dictator Batista and brought the socialist regime of Fidel Castro to power. Socialist Cuba by no means completely eliminated gender or racial inequality, but social reforms in health care, education, and housing greatly reduced health, educational, and income inequality across the population. After the revolution, the state sought to actively incorporate women into the Communist Party, the workforce, and the state through organizations like the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). Female revolutionary activity was not incompatible with motherhood, nevertheless the Cuban revolution remained “masculine” (Sanabria 2007).
In the twentieth century, independent Caribbean nations continued to be concerned with controlling women’s sexuality, which was tied to morality, “modernity,” and national progress. In Puerto Rico (a US protectorate), there were government campaigns to control poor women’s fertility, which was seen as a social problem; these campaigns included widespread sterilizations from the 1930s to 1970s (Lopez 2008). The government also sought to promote “proper” childrearing and formal (legal) marriages (Sanabria 2007). Nonetheless, attempts by governments and elites to promote a strong patriarchal family were never fully successful (Safa 1995). According to Dore (1997), depending on the country, region, and class position, 25 percent to 50 percent of households in the nineteenth-century Caribbean were matrifocal: that is, headed by women (Dore 1997). Mothers and their children formed the basis of the family unit, and women relied on female relatives to help care for their families (Blank 2013). Thus the “proper” nuclear family for much of Caribbean history was mostly visible in the middle and upper classes. In some cases, this was partly due to the cost of a legal marriage, which in nineteenth-century Cuba, for example, kept some long-term consensual unions from formal matrimony (Morrison 2015).
Today, female-headed households continue to make up a significant portion of families in many Caribbean nations, especially among the poorer, more marginalized segments of the population. While these households often face significant economic hardships, women do have considerable control over resources and decision-making power. State power is rarely absolute, and dominant gender ideologies are never uniformly espoused by all segments of the population. Indeed, we see that stereotypes of “ideal men and women” and the “ideal family” seldom reflect actual people’s gendered, raced, and classed lives.
Despite the strong role of women in the family, Caribbean societies remain predominantly patriarchal. Overall, women hold fewer positions of power and leadership in the highest levels of political, economic, and religious realms (Blank 2013). Women account for over 40 percent of the labor force in many Caribbean nations (Fetterolf 2017). Though often in low-wage jobs, women began replacing men as principal breadwinners in the 1980s (Safa 1995). Women also make up a large percentage of workers in the informal sectors (such as hairdressers, seamstresses, traders, etc.). Some scholars suggest that as a result of this shift, men in the region feel threatened as they can no longer uphold the role of as the financial provider and head of a household (Safa 2001). Some men may be responding to the erosion of their economic power through acts of domestic violence and high rates of substance abuse (Blank 2013).
The economy of the region is no longer based on monocrop export agriculture, which dominated most of the islands from colonial times through the 1970s. Today, the islands vary dramatically in levels of wealth (as measured by GDP per capita). The offshore banking and financial industry has made some countries such as the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, and the Virgin Islands quite wealthy, but many of the more populous countries (e.g., Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica) are markedly poorer (Faure 2018). The economies of all countries in the region are still deeply shaped by global flows of people. Today two flows in particular play key roles in the islands’ economic, social, and political development, namely: tourism and migration.
In most countries across the region, the global tourism industry is now the main economic engine. Technological developments and the rise of air travel birthed this massive international industry capitalizing on the physical beauty of the islands and the tropical weather. The economic benefits of tourism have been mixed for most of the islands. While the mainstay of most island economies, the large cruise ships and pleasure crafts can overtax the environment; and there have been occasions where there were actually more tourists than citizens on an island. An increase in tourist activity brings with it an increase in environmental pollution (University of Minnesota 2016).
Most people in the Caribbean still live below the poverty line, and the investment in tourism infrastructure, such as exclusive hotels and five-star resorts, takes away resources that could be allocated to schools, roads, medical clinics, and housing. However, without the income from tourism, there would be no money for infrastructure. Tourism attracts people who can afford to travel. Most of the jobs in the hotels, ports, and restaurants where wealthy tourists visit employ people from poorer communities at low wages. There is a stark disparity between the rich tourists and the poor workers. Local businesses in the Caribbean do gain income from tourists who spend their money there; however, the big money is in the cruise ship lines and the resort hotels, which are mainly owned by international corporations or the local wealthy elite (University of Minnesota 2016).
Tourism is a powerful force of contemporary globalization, as it greatly accelerates the flow of money, technologies, ideas, and bodies across national borders. International tourists flock to the islands to enjoy the sea and sun but also often to engage in sexual adventures. Here again we see the intersection of race, gender, and class emerge as local populations are eroticized and marketed along with the white sand beaches. Local men and women become involved in sex and romance tourism as a way to better their lives and possibly escape poverty through migration via marriage to a foreigner (Cabezas 2009; Roland 2011; Brennan 2004; Fernandez 2019). Tourism can be seen as a new colonizing force, one that alters both the economic and social relations of the entire region.
While tourism brings millions of foreigners to the islands in the Caribbean as temporary visitors, for decades thousands of islanders themselves have been migrating out of their countries to seek prosperity and security abroad. Emigration has long affected the Caribbean, and we find well-established Caribbean communities in England, Canada, and the United States, such as the Cubans in Miami and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York City. More than 750,000 people of Caribbean origin live in Canada largely from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Haiti (Labelle, Larose, and Piché 2010). Most reside in the cities of Toronto and Montreal.
emigration
the act of leaving one’s home country to permanently settle in another country.
Table 12.3. Caribbean 2017 Statistics
Much of the emigration has followed historical colonial links. As posters in 1970s Britain noted succinctly, “We are here because you were there.” That is, communities of African and Asian descent are in England because the British had colonized their homelands and transported enslaved Africans to their colonies in the Caribbean. Often migrants were recruited to address labor shortages in former colonial powers, such as the Windrush Generation (1948–71) who came to Britain after World War II. The Windrush Generation is named after the ship that brought them to Britain, the Empire Windrush. In 2018 some of these migrants and their children, largely from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados, who have lived and worked for decades in Britain, were wrongly denied rights and benefits and were threatened with deportation in what became known as the “Windrush scandal.”
Migrants emigrating from the Caribbean are often the educated and the young workers. As Faure (2018) notes, “Between 1965 and 2000 about 12% of the labour force of the Caribbean region has emigrated to OECD countries, which is almost twice the rate for Central America (i.e. 7%), and six times the average rate for developing countries (i.e. 2%).” While this can lead to a damaging brain drain depleting the small countries of their most educated and capable workforce, migrants also send money home in the form of remittances, which for some countries (like Haiti) are an important component of the national economy. Many migrants circulate, traveling and living transnational lives while bringing skills and capital from abroad to foster trade and business in the Caribbean. Some migrants also return to their home countries to retire. We also see the gendered aspect of migration, as many Caribbean women migrate to the United States and Europe and find work as nurses, nannies, caregivers, and domestic workers. Women are seen as an inexpensive and docile labor force, and the jobs available to them are insecure and low wage.
Definition: OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an intergovernmental economic organization with thirty-six member countries. Members are developed countries with thriving economies.
Definition: brain drain
the phenomenon of well-educated, skilled workers emigrating from countries in the Global South to countries in the Global North where they have prospects for better pay and living conditions.
Definition: remittances
money or goods sent by migrants back to family and friends in their home country.
Some Caribbean migration flows are the result of natural disasters (e.g., 2010 earthquake in Haiti, 2017 Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico) or political upheavals that have forced millions of people to emigrate to the United States. The Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Mariel boatlift of 1980, and the Cuban rafter crisis of 1994 each brought tens of thousands of Cubans to the United States. People seeking freedom from political oppression and dictatorships in Haiti and the Dominican Republic also came to America. In recent years, natural disasters have devastated countries like Haiti and Puerto Rico, which lack the infrastructure and capital to effectively respond to and recover from the destruction. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, thousands of Puerto Ricans (who are US citizens) relocated to the mainland United States to rebuild their lives.
SEXUAL AND GENDER DIVERSITY
From the colonial legacy, the region has strong patriarchal roots that have contributed to cultures that do not always embrace sexual and gender diversity. Popular cultural expressions such as dancehall music can be deeply misogynistic and homophobic (see chapter 14). In general, societal acceptance of LGBTQ people is rare, and LGBTQ issues are taboo in many Caribbean nations (Human Rights Watch 2017). Most of the former British colonies still have laws that criminalize same-sex relations (known as “buggery or gross indecency laws”) leftover from British colonial rule. While these laws are vaguely worded and do not explicitly mention gender identity or expression, police and law enforcement often conflate gender identity with sexual orientation and, as a result, these laws can at times be used to criminalize gender identity that does not correspond with the norms associated with the sex assigned at birth. However, in recent years a growing movement for LGBTQ rights activism is spreading across the region. In 2016, for example, Trinidad and Tobago repealed “buggery laws.” In other countries including Jamaica, Barbados, and Dominica, activist groups and individuals have launched cases to repeal similar laws in their penal codes (Human Rights Watch 2017).
Cuba has been more progressive in recognizing LGBTQ rights in recent years. While in the early years of the Cuban Revolution gay men (and others deemed socially marginal) were sent to work camps. Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) were agricultural labor camps operated by the Cuban government from November 1965 to July 1968. People sent to the work camps included homosexuals, conscientious objectors to the mandatory military service, Christians and other religious believers, and antirevolutionaries. In the last ten years the country has made a number of important advances to secure LGBTQ rights. For example, the country guarantees free sex-change operations and forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation.
However, support of LGBTQ rights is far from universal in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. In 2019 the Cuban government proposed an amendment to the constitution to legalize same-sex marriage, but evangelical churches on the island, a growing force, protested. The amendment did not pass, but the government vowed to address the issue through changes in the country’s civil code rather than in the constitution. In 2010 the Dominican Republic banned same-sex marriage in its constitution. LGBTQ people in many parts of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean are subject to violence and discrimination based on their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Activists across the Caribbean are working to repeal discriminatory laws and end the marginalization of LGBTQ people.
CONCLUSION
As we learn in other chapters of this book, globalization is not a new phenomenon, and the Caribbean region has been “global” since Columbus arrived in 1492. The centuries of European colonial rule and subsequent US interventions, the plantation agriculture system, and most notably the slave trade have had a profound impact on all aspects of life on the islands today, from the economy to family relations. Large-scale incoming (enslaved Africans) and outgoing migrations (contemporary political, climate, and economic migrants) continue to shape the islands with roughly 22 percent of the Caribbean population living abroad (mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada) (Faure 2018). In the twenty-first century, the island nations continue to struggle with violence against women, gender inequalities, and LBGTQ acceptance with the ongoing dominance of patriarchy.
The chapters in Part IV: The Caribbean present anthropological research that showcases the legacy of the strong patriarchal history of colonialism in the region. Chapter 13 explores the lavish quinceañera (fifteenth) birthday parties for girls in Cuba. These parties, celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, traditionally mark a girl’s eligibility for marriage. Today, the parties provide a stage for the girls to display their physical and sexual (heterosexual) attractiveness, while allowing families to demonstrate their socioeconomic status. Emerging class disparities in Cuba are evident in the money and resources families have available to host these festivities for their daughters. Chapter 14 explores the construction of masculinities among Jamaican men. Displays of heterosexual prowess are a key element of male identity, and men assert their power and status through sexual relations with multiple female partners. These sexual behaviors are enshrined in popular culture through dancehall music whose lyrics celebrate male sexual conquests and at times violence toward women.
KEY TERMS
brain drain: the phenomenon of well-educated, skilled workers emigrating from countries in the Global South to countries in the Global North where they have prospects for better pay and living conditions.
conquistadors: leaders of the Spanish conquest of the Americas during the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries.
emigration: the act of leaving one’s home country to permanently settle in another country.
OECD: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an intergovernmental economic organization with thirty-six member countries. Members are developed countries with thriving economies.
remittances: money or goods sent by migrants back to family and friends in their home country.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
• Alvarez, Julia. 2010. In the Time of the Butterflies. New York: Algonquin.
• Danticat, Edwidge. 2008. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Vintage.
• Farmer, Paul. 1992. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Kincaid, Jamaica. 2000. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Slocum, K., and Thomas, D. A. 2003. Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights from Caribbeanist Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 105: 553–565. doi:10.1525/aa.2003.105.3.553.
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Learning Objectives
• Describe how rituals can reproduce gender as a socially significant category of differentiation.
• Evaluate how global and state-level historical processes and politics shape local gendered ritual practices.
• Articulate how questions of gendered power and agency are embedded in ritual practices.
In this chapter, the author explores the phenomenon of flamboyant girls’ fifteenth birthday parties (quinceañeras) as a gender-specific ritual. The author discusses the ways that this life-cycle ritual celebrates the girl’s entry into sexual adulthood, portrays her as an object of heterosexual desire, while simultaneously granting the girls ritual and exotic agency. The author concludes that contemporary quinceañera rituals also reflect the island’s recent political and economic turn toward a more capitalist society and displays the growing racialized and gendered inequalities on the island.
When Habanera (Havana resident) girls turn fifteen, their birthday is usually celebrated with a lavish fiesta de los quince años that in its most elaborate form includes a dance party with hundreds of guests and food, drink, and entertainment. The festivities typically include the girl dressing up in puffy dresses imitating eighteenth-century European court fashions and dancing a waltz with a male relative in front of her kin, friends, and neighbors. Boys’ fifteenth birthdays are not celebrated in a similarly grandiose way, making the quince a highly gender specific ritual.
A central part of the ritual consists of the photos taken by a professional photographer where the girl poses in diverse outfits ranging from the latest fashion gear to mermaid costumes. Although the photos often portray the quinceañera as a sensual seductress, the rituals’ meanings are more complex than just presenting the girl as a passive sexual object. In Havana, the quince forms a markedly women’s ritual, highlighting simultaneously the girl’s entry into young adulthood in her kin group and in the process, gaining gendered “erotic agency,” which Holly Wardlow (2006, 232) defines as “the power and delight of being desired.”
Definition: quinceañera
a girl celebrating her fifteenth birthday; can also refer to the festivities or to the party connected with a girl’s fifteenth birthday.
Definition: quince
the festivities that mark a girl’s fifteenth birthday, including the party, the photoshoot, and other possible events.
Definition: erotic agency
the ability to act and gain pleasure and even a position of power due to being considered erotically attractive.
Although quinceañeras are celebrated across the Americas, I first encountered the ritual when I was in Havana conducting ethnographic research for my master’s thesis in 2003–2004 (Härkönen 2005). My initial focus was to explore the Catholic confirmation ritual, but I had trouble locating Catholic Cubans who would have undergone confirmation. Although Cuba is historically a Catholic country, its many years as a socialist, officially atheist, society have greatly diminished the role of the Catholic Church on the island. However, Habanera women enthusiastically showed me girls’ quince photos. And as I began to realize how important the ritual was, I shifted my focus to the quince. The quince was a topic that I as a young woman at the time of my initial, relatively brief fieldwork (three months), could easily access. This change of subject exemplifies the unpredictable, frequently improvised character of ethnographic research (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007): instead of strict, preconceived plans, we often need to accommodate our research to locally significant topics. It also shows how our personas—formed by such intersectional (Crenshaw 1989) differences as gender, race, age, and class—shape our research experiences and the information we are able to access (Härkönen 2016b). Our academic selves thus influence the knowledge that we produce, highlighting the importance of reflexivity (Gould and Uusihakala 2016) throughout the research process.
Definition: reflexivity
critically examining one’s own assumptions, motivations, power, conceptualizations, and practices in the research process.
Since my first fieldwork period, I have been back to Havana several times—in 2006, 2007, and 2008—to conduct research on gender, kinship, life cycle, and the state (Härkönen 2014, 2016) and in 2017 and 2019 on well-being and social change. Still, I have always kept an eye on the quince. I have continually worked with the same community of low-income, racially mixed people. However, over the years, I have seen multiple quince photos and videos, spoken with many Habanera girls and women, and participated in quince parties, photoshoots, and dance rehearsals, widening my perspective on the ritual beyond my immediate interlocutors.
I approach the quince as a coming-of-age ritual that is best understood in the context of my interlocutors’ views of kinship and the life course. I define the quince as a coming-of-age ritual because it marks a girl’s transition from childhood into young adulthood. Quince forms part of the larger group of life-cycle rituals that mark important social transitions such as birth, death, and marriage. These rituals have long been of interest to anthropologists (e.g., Richards [1956] 1982; Turner 1969). In a classical study, Arnold van Gennep ([1909] 1960) argues that in these kinds of moments of transition, social categorizations such as gender often become especially visible. Coming-of-age rituals are in many ways similar to initiation rituals, which also typically take place during youth. In initiation rituals, a person is initiated into a new group membership or status (La Fontaine 1985). In initiation rituals, the ritual itself performs the transformation (see La Fontaine 1985); weddings turn lovers into married couples. However, the coming-of-age ritual only marks a change that will occur but may be a more gradual process, such as becoming an adult.
Definition: coming-of-age ritual
rituals that mark a transition from youth to adulthood.
Definition: life course
the lifetime of an individual person from birth to death.
Definition: life-cycle ritual
a ritual that marks or performs life-course transitions such as birth, marriage, and death.
Definition: initiation ritual
a ritual that incorporates a person into a certain group or community.
As the quince marks a specific moment in a girl’s life cycle, to understand the ritual in its context, it is important to explore the quince in its full temporal and social framework (Barraud et al. 1994). I connect the centrality of Habanera girls’ quince ritual to women’s important position as mothers in my interlocutors’ kin relations (Härkönen 2016a). Wider Afro-Caribbean ideas of kinship that highlight women’s role as mothers regardless of legal marriage or the (il)legitimacy of children, and the importance of “blood” relations over marital relations, have for long been central in Havana, especially among low-income, racially mixed people like my Cuban interlocutors (Martinez-Alier 1974). These understandings of kinship and gender differentiate Habanera girls’ experiences from those of girls in many other parts of the Americas.
Cuba is different from other contexts also because of its historical particularities as a socialist society. In prerevolutionary Cuba, racialized inequalities of wealth and status were blatant: a legacy of Spanish colonialism, plantation slavery, and the US-dominated republican period (Martinez-Alier 1974). Material wealth was concentrated in the hands of a white minority, while the Afro-Cuban population suffered multiple forms of discrimination and poverty (de la Fuente 2001). The 1959 Cuban revolution sought to equalize such differences with its policies of social justice, many of which benefited the poorest and darker-skinned segments of the population in particular (Eckstein 1994, 149–157). The revolution’s aim was to create a socialist society that would abolish inequalities of gender, race, class, and wealth. The state would nurture individuals from cradle to grave, providing basic services such as food, housing, jobs, commodities, childcare, education, and health care. Everyone would have state-guaranteed access to goods and services and disparities of wealth would cease to exist. Over the years, though never fully achieved, Cuba made significant advances in creating an egalitarian society. However, everything changed in the 1990s, when Cuba’s closest political and economic ally, the Soviet Union, disintegrated. Cuba lost 70 percent of its foreign trade and fell into a severe crisis, known as the “Special Period in Peacetime” (Eckstein 1994, 88–91). Cuba was forced to cut its earlier state subsidies and supports to individuals, liberalize its economy, and gradually open the island to global tourism and market influences. Since the 1990s, Cuba has once again become divided by racialized inequalities, in particular between those who have access to foreign remittances (mostly white and lighter-skinned Cubans) and those who have to survive on their devalued, local wages. These changes in Cuba’s internal policies, and in its place in the global political and economic order, are reflected in the Habanera girls’ quince parties, as they exemplify the contemporary inequalities of wealth and transnational flows of people, goods, ideas, and fashions. This chapter will focus on how ideas of gender, sexuality, and kinship take shape in the quinces and how Habaneros conceptualize the ritual as a part of Cuba’s global and local history.
Definition: prerevolutionary
the time before the Cuban revolution in 1959.
QUINCE’S HISTORY: A COLONIAL-ERA RITUAL ON A SOCIALIST ISLAND
As quinceañera celebrations are popular across the Americas, many aspects of the ritual are shared across diverse national contexts. However, there are also local particularities. In Havana, the quince is conceptualized as a legacy of Cuba’s historical tradition as a Spanish colony. My interlocutors usually emphasized the island as being a rich mixture of Spanish, African, Indigenous Taíno, Chinese, and Arab influences: “In Cuba, there is not a single drop of pure blood, it is all mixed.” However, they saw the quince as representing a markedly European aspect of this cultural legacy. Oswaldo (this name is a pseudonym, like all the other Cuban interlocutors’ names in this chapter), a Cuban art historian who was also a professional quince party choreographer, described the quince’s origins in the European court celebrations when young girls coming into a marriageable age were presented to the high society for the first time:
During colonialism, many rich families of Spanish origin settled in Havana. Quince comes from the representations of the girl that were made in Spain, and also in the courts in other parts of Europe, when the girl turned into a woman. … These dresses that you see now in the quince photos, it’s the same cut with a lot of lace, a lot of layers. That’s why they dance the waltz, all that is a reflection of those European [practices]. … [In colonial Cuba] the Habanero aristocracy was invited to the celebration. [Later, during the first half of the 20th century] in the more modern form of quince parties, social class was still decisive, it was about who had the most money (Oswaldo, interview by author).
Prerevolutionary Cuban newspapers like El Mundo display photos and announcements featuring wealthy girls’ sophisticated quince parties in Havana. In 2003–2004, one of my interlocutors showed me quince photos taken by her late husband who was a photographer. In the photos, girls can be seen in long, elegant gowns posing with an elaborate cake. However, since the quince (due to its historical roots) was conceptualized as a white, colonialist, and elitist ritual, it was politically incompatible with the 1959 revolution that emphasized an ideology of socialist egalitarianism. The quince also did not mesh well with socialist ideas of gender, which rejected such decorative womanhood as bourgeois, idle vanity (Härkönen 2011). Oswaldo explained to me that during many years in revolutionary Cuba, quince celebrations were toned down:
For a while these parties [quinces] were not celebrated due to certain situations … What were done were activities at home with the quinceañera: a family fiesta or a meal. Later this tradition of dancing the quince parties came back (Oswaldo, interview by author).
While during the ideologically stricter years of the revolution, quinces were celebrated as smaller fiestas, the grandiose parties were revived in the 1990s as a part of the more general political, economic, and sociocultural changes in Cuba. Due to an economic crisis, the Cuban government was forced to make ideological concessions to capitalism: new global consumerism and more contacts with the capitalist world started to shape life on the island. These changes simultaneously introduced intensified monetization and racialized, economic inequalities to Cuba (Eckstein 2004; Fernandez 1999). Foreign remittances and new entrepreneurial and professional possibilities in the lucrative tourist industry brought wealth most importantly to white, historically privileged Cubans who had relatives abroad and were favored in tourism work, while others, such as my low-income, racially mixed Habanero friends, had to struggle to make ends meet (Martinez 2013; Hansing and Hoffman 2019). Before the 1990s, the highest-paid Cuban workers, such as doctors and engineers, earned 4.5 times as much as the lowest-paid workers (Uriarte-Gaston 2004, 109–110). But in 2017, one of my state-employed friends earned only US\$25 per month, while an extremely successful private entrepreneur could earn up to US\$50,000 per month (though that is quite uncommon).
Definition: monetization
when money enters areas of a society where it has previously played a minor role.
Definition: remittances
money or goods sent by migrants back to family and friends in their home country.
Due to increased cultural interaction with the United States, since the 1990s the quince parties have incorporated influences from the Cuban diaspora in Florida and elsewhere in the Americas. Exemplifying important transnational connections, Cuban migrants sometimes return to Cuba for quince celebrations from abroad, and Cubans on the island receive material items, money, and visitors to their parties. Quince photos circulate between Cubans on the island and those elsewhere; they are posted on social media, and fashions are closely followed in terms of the latest styles and poses. This global circulation also comes with a beauty ideal that contradicts Cuba’s earlier socialist efforts to reject narrow Western representations. Since the 1990s, the ritual has become more emphatically a part of a globalized Latina (Alvarez 2007) portrayal of gender differences but with some local specificities.
QUINCE AS A SEXUAL RITUAL
Certain aspects distinguish my Habanero interlocutors’ quince parties from many other Latin American quinces (Napolitano 1997; Davalos 2003; Alvarez 2007): their portrayal of sexuality, the ritual centrality of the mother, and the lack of Christian religiosity. These features are related to the region’s Afro-Caribbean kinship tradition and to Cuba’s history as a socialist country. While in the Mexican quinceañera ritual (Napolitano 1997), the girl is represented in a virginlike, Catholic manner, in Havana the quince ritual celebrates positive, heterosexual femininity in a playful way (see also Pertierra 2015 for eastern Cuba).
The quince is considered a girl’s “moment of beauty” when the whole world is at her feet. Habanera girls stated that the quince marks a transition “from childhood to adolescence” and that “starting from then, you begin to see life differently.” (Yailen, Danaisy, and Odalys, interviews by author). Yadira, a woman who had turned fifteen in the early 1980s, stated: “In my time, before you turned fifteen, you couldn’t shave your legs or pluck your eyebrows or use makeup, that day [of your quince] they dyed your hair, fixed it, and gave you a haircut.” This embodied change marks a girl’s entry into young adulthood, one aspect of which is her becoming a sexual woman. Anaisa, a mother who had recently celebrated her daughter’s quince, reflected on the subject:
They feel themselves a little … like adults, they look different. A little more responsibility is on her because one already has to start telling her that she has to take care [of herself] and all the things that can happen to her starting from then. You know that everybody starts to see her as a bigger person. Men who did not see her as … a woman, start to eye her because she is fifteen, and men start to see her differently. (Anaisa, interview by author)
I interpret Anaisa’s insinuation that due to her daughter’s quince, men approach her sexually and that she should be wary of them, as she could become pregnant. Even though some girls start their sex lives before turning fifteen, not everybody has sexual relations at that age: after turning fifteen, girls are considered to be sexually (quasi) adults and as such, potentially reproductive. Officially, in Cuba, the age of sexual consent is sixteen years, and eighteen years for marriage, but with the consent of their parents, girls can marry at the age of fourteen and boys when they are sixteen. Understandings of sexuality are thereby ambiguously shaped by gender and age.
Female sexuality is displayed in the most salient way in the quince photos, which my interlocutors considered to be the most important part of the ritual. In these photos, girls can pose in a stripper’s outfit, hanging off a dancing pole—or totally nude with just props covering their breasts and genitals. Girls also pose in other outfits, many of which display the ritual’s (supposed) historical aspects and feature big, frilly dresses designated as trajes coloniales (colonial dresses). Other costumes include playful outfits such as that of a Japanese geisha or more modern movie-star imagery. The photos always depict girls as highly feminine and follow heterosexual notions of attractiveness. This portrayal highlights the gendering of female bodies as different from and complementary to male bodies (Härkönen 2014; see also Lundgren 2011). The photos reproduce and affirm both feminine gender and heterosexuality as socially central categorizations in the community (Härkönen 2014; see also Lundgren 2011).
While the prerevolutionary photos were also highlighting gender difference, contemporary photos differ significantly by their heightened sexual portrayal. The photos reflect changes in attitudes toward sexuality over Cuba’s socialist history, especially since the 1970s, when Cuba started to offer sexual education in schools (Hamilton 2012, 36–37). The aim was to reject bourgeois, patriarchal notions of sexuality and to embrace modernist, socialist, egalitarian views (Hamilton 2012: 36). This emphasis on female sexual agency is reflected in the contemporary photos.
As a life-cycle ritual, the quince is in many ways comparable to a wedding, and traditionally, it is conceptualized as a ritual preparing girls for marriage. Juan, a middle-aged man, defined the quince as “a party that is done so that everyone can see that they are ready to get married.” However, many other Habaneros told me that quince is more important than a wedding: “You can divorce and remarry but the quince is just once in a lifetime.” Among my low-income interlocutors, the quinces certainly were a more popular ritual than weddings.
I connect the quince’s importance among my Habanero interlocutors to their kinship relations that conformed in many ways to long-standing Afro-Caribbean ideas that emphasize women’s position as mothers over their position as wives, and the significance of biogenetic, “blood” connections over marital relations (Härkönen 2016; see also Safa 2005). As many Habaneros live in consensual unions, and legal marriage is not a central institution regulating either sexuality or the birth of children, it is more important to mark a girl becoming a sexual, potentially reproductive adult woman/mother than to prepare her for marriage. As a matter of fact, instead of a husband, some of my young interlocutors tended to have a baby in their arms soon after turning fifteen. Cuba has had high numbers of teenage pregnancies since the late 1970s (Catasus Cervera and Gantt 1996), and this same tendency continues (Fariñas Acosta 2018). In 2007–2008, my friends told me that it was “in fashion to give birth at a young age.” Children are loved and wanted, sometimes already during youth (Härkönen 2014; see also Andaya 2014). This tendency supports local ideas of kinship that emphasize the importance of living relational lives surrounded by one’s family members (Härkönen 2016a). The quince thus marks a girl’s change of position within her kin group.
Definition: consensual union
a couple that cohabitates without being legally married.
Definition: relational
surrounded by relationships, differing from an individualist emphasis on personal autonomy.
AGENCY, RACE, AND CLASS: THE QUINCE AS A WOMAN’S RITUAL
The quince is a ritual where women hold the most important ritual agency. My interlocutors described the quince primarily as the mother’s ritual: “My mum did it all.” The quinceañera’s mother bears the primary responsibility for organizing her daughter’s celebration, as one woman described: “In my daughter’s quince party I have full responsibility; the mother is the one who decides.” Mothers may save for years for the festivities, and they often described their daughter’s quince as “exhausting” (acabando). Typically other female kin help in the practical arrangements, and there is an expectation that the girl’s father contributes money, but not all fathers fulfill such expectations.
Even though in the fiesta, the girl traditionally dances the waltz with her father who then gives her away to a male dancing partner (sometimes the girl’s boyfriend), the mother is still ritually central both at the party and during the photo session. She is the one congratulated for having raised such a beautiful young woman.
Sometimes the mother is more eager to celebrate her daughter’s quince than the girl herself. Cuban sociologist Yanelis remarked: “When I ask her (a quinceañera) why you had the photos taken, the girl says: to please my mother, my grandmother. And that’s why they have the party.” Fifteen-year-old Youmara told me that her mother had pushed her to have a formal fiesta, when she would have just preferred to have her photos taken and go to the beach with her friends: “I don’t want to have a fiesta … I want to go out with my friends, it’s better.” However, she ended up having a party when her aunt visited from Miami and helped pay for the fiesta.
As a coming-of-age ritual, the quince is so strongly normative that nearly all the girls I met found it both important and attractive. I did not meet anyone openly challenging the heterosexual imagery of the ritual. Instead, girls stated that they were “happy” and that the day was “special”—something that “all girls dream about.” While the ritual in many ways objectifies girls, this issue has to be explored in the context of wider Habanero understandings of sexuality. My female interlocutors usually saw men’s admiring looks or comments on their bodies as a positive affirmation of their sexually attractive womanhood. Beauty grants them erotic agency. At the same time, they rejected women who in their opinion failed to look feminine: “That woman is horrible. … She is not feminine like us. … She is like a man.” This emphasis on beauty creates inequalities among women, as they are expected to conform to narrow, globalized standards of attractiveness.
These changes in post-Soviet Cuba also relate to heightened inequalities of race and class. During my earlier fieldwork periods, in 2003–2004 and 2007–2008 in Havana, all kinds of girls celebrated their quince, so the ritual was not clearly racialized or differentiated by class as such. However, there were some intersectional differences in the magnitude of the celebration. Girls from a low-income background tended to have more modest parties, such as street fiestas, while wealthier girls could have their parties in private salons or hotels in exclusive, glamorous settings. As differences of wealth are significantly racialized in Cuba, white girls often had the most elaborate quince parties. Still, during my fieldwork in 2007–2008, most girls I met had their quince photos taken in a state “wedding palace” (palacio de los matrimonios or palacio de las novias). By contrast, in contemporary Cuba, the role of private companies has grown. During my most recent fieldwork periods, in 2017 and 2019, the emergence of the quince as a profitable industry seemed to have shaped the racialization of the ritual. As the quince industry currently operates via the internet, I did a search for Cuban quince photography studios when writing this article. In the studios I encountered (see Pérez Hernández; Calás; Mahe), both the (male) photographers and the girls featured in the photos were white. The prices were significantly higher than I witnessed during my earlier fieldwork periods. For example, one photographer advertised quince packets starting at 120 CUC (of equal value to the US dollar) and ranging up to 850 CUC (Mahe); a sizeable sum when a state-employed Cuban’s average monthly salary is currently about US\$39 (ONEI 2020). While it is likely that there are cheaper studios and also Afro-Cuban businesses, it seems that the increasing professionalization and commercialization of quince parties is accompanied by its whitening in terms of both the participants and the ritual actors (see Härkönen 2017 on weddings). The quince appears to be returning to its roots as a white, elitist ritual, as Cuba transforms from a socialist island into a more capitalist society marked by intersectional inequalities.
Definition: racialization
the process of ascribing a racial identity and associated traits to a group. These characteristics are often defined by a dominant group with the aim of discriminating against and excluding the subordinate group.
CONCLUSION
The quinceañera celebration is a girl’s coming-of-age ritual that is popular across the Americas. In Havana, the ritual foregrounds the girl’s sexual attractiveness. As a women’s ritual, the quince celebrates a girl’s entry into sexual adulthood and highlights her mother’s role in bringing up such a beautiful young woman. While the ritual portrays the girl as an object of heterosexual male desire, it simultaneously grants women ritual and erotic agency, which they enjoy.
As a coming-of-age ritual, the quinceañera does not precipitate a change of status in the same way as an initiation ritual; girls become women whether or not they celebrate their quince. However, the ritual still plays a part in highlighting, reproducing, and marking gender as a socially central category in Cuba by emphasizing an image of girls as ultra-feminine, physically attractive, heterosexual agents: thus emphasizing the stark contrast between males and females in Cuba’s complementary gender dynamics.
Life-cycle rituals are connected to larger social worlds through understandings of kinship, gender, and sexuality. I suggest that the centrality of a girls’ coming-of-age ritual in Cuba is best understood in the context of my Habanero friends’ Afro-Caribbean kin relations that emphasized women’s position as mothers. Rituals are also shaped by and reflect historical changes over time. While the quince is rooted in Cuba’s Spanish colonial legacy and high-class practices—ill-fitted for socialist egalitarianism—its resurgence during the 1990s connects it with the more general ritual revival in Cuban society. However, the contemporary quince rituals also reflect the island’s recent political and economic turn toward a more capitalist society. The quince has increasingly become a professional, private, lucrative industry and thus a site for displaying the growing racialized and gendered inequalities on the island.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How do you see gender, racial, and class ideologies reproduced through a ritual like the quince?
2. Why might girls and/or mothers want to participate in the quince?
3. What life-cycle rituals do you encounter in your own context and what kinds of gendered, racialized, or class-related aspects do they display?
KEY TERMS
coming-of-age ritual: rituals that mark a transition from youth to adulthood.
consensual union: a couple that cohabitates without being legally married.
erotic agency: the ability to act and gain pleasure and even a position of power due to being considered erotically attractive.
initiation ritual: a ritual that incorporates a person into a certain group or community.
life course: the lifetime of an individual person from birth to death.
life-cycle ritual: a ritual that marks or performs life-course transitions such as birth, marriage, and death.
monetization: when money enters areas of a society where it has previously played a minor role.
prerevolutionary: the time before the Cuban revolution in 1959.
quince: the festivities that mark a girl’s fifteenth birthday, including the party, the photoshoot, and other possible events.
quinceañera: a girl celebrating her fifteenth birthday; can also refer to the festivities or to the party connected with a girl’s fifteenth birthday.
racialization: the process of ascribing a racial identity and associated traits to a group. These characteristics are often defined by a dominant group with the aim of discriminating against and excluding the subordinate group.
relational: surrounded by relationships, differing from an individualist emphasis on personal autonomy.
reflexivity: critically examining one’s own assumptions, motivations, power, conceptualizations, and practices in the research process.
remittances: money or goods sent by migrants back to family and friends in their home country.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank the Academy of Finland (grants 294662 and 297 957) and the funders of my doctoral research: the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters Eino Jutikkala Fund, The Oskar Öflund Foundation and the Finnish Concordia Fund. Most importantly, many thanks to my Cuban friends: muchísimas gracias por su ayuda y amistad.
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Learning Objectives
• Explain the link between masculinities, sexualities, and the gendered relations of power.
• Situate masculinity studies within feminist scholarship.
• Describe Jamaican realities around manhood and sexualities.
In this chapter, the authors apply a gendered perspective to analyze views of masculinity among men from various socioeconomic groups in Jamaica. Using Michel Foucault’s ideas of sexuality, they explain how the act of sexual intercourse is seen as more than the act itself but an essential part of one’s identity. For Jamaican males, their sexualities are closely tied to their masculinities and what it means to be a Jamaican man. In this context, sexualities are both shaped by and influence power dynamics, not only between men and women but also among various groups of men.
INTRODUCTION
Masculinities scholarship within the Caribbean, and Jamaica specifically, has traditionally centered on family life (Chevannes 2001; Senior 2015), education (Miller 1991; Figueroa 1997), sexual violence, and violent crime (Mortley 2017). Discourse and understanding of male sexuality have been integral to the concept of and research on masculinities; in many ways, the concern with masculinities in the Caribbean has been fueled by the prevalence of sexual violence and the ineffectiveness of strategies to deal with it (Reddock 2004). Our chapter examines Jamaican masculinities and sexualities and seeks both a comprehensive understanding of as well as a move beyond the stereotypical Jamaican male sexuality with aggressive masculinities and issues of violence. This chapter is based on research we conducted in 2016 and 2017. Both studies were qualitative, using interviews and focus group studies with groups of men across various communities in Jamaica. The participants were urban and rural males of different ages and different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. During the course of our research, we explored various identities, diverse expressions of manhood, power dynamics within the private and public spheres, and how these shaped sexualities. We explored how manhood and sexualities and power dynamics play out within gender relations and ask the question: to what extent is male sexuality constructed as a result of various gendered relations of power? Further, by examining Foucault’s thesis on sexuality and its relevance to contemporary realities, we explored perceptions of male sexuality, how male sexualities manifest in various spaces, and the extent to which these perceptions and manifestations are contoured first by gendered power dynamics, as well as broader systems of power within society.
We begin with an overview of the Jamaican sociopolitical landscape, then we discuss how sexualities are situated within masculinities as well as Caribbean feminist scholarship. The key terms masculinities and sexualities have already been defined in the introductory chapter of this book, but we want to emphasize that both notions are embedded in historical, political, and sociocultural conditions of a particular society. In the 1990s scholarship shifted from the term “masculinity” (singular) toward the concept of “masculinities” (Connell 2005), which acknowledges that there are many forms of masculinity and that gender stratification also exists among men, not just between men and women. This shift in scholarship and discourse to acknowledging multiple “masculinities” recognizes that there are men who may or may not aspire to or fulfill local expectations of masculine performance (Connell 2016). Likewise, as it relates to the notion of sexuality, Weeks (1995) contends that sexuality is not given but is rather a product of negotiation, struggle, and human agency. He believes that sexuality only exists through its social forms and social organizations. In keeping with this conceptualization, we are of the view, like Kempadoo (2009), that for sexuality to be a viable springboard for research, its complexities need to be acknowledged, especially as it relates in this instance to Jamaican men’s varied realities. For this reason, and in the same vein that we speak of “masculinities,” we use the term “sexualities” in this paper, reflecting its complexity, diversity, and negotiated nature.
POSITIONALITY: MASCULINITIES AND SEXUALITIES RESEARCH AS PART OF OUR FEMINIST AGENDA
Feminism is not a singular or static notion, and the feminist movement and accompanying feminist research have evolved and expanded to explore wide-ranging issues that both directly and indirectly impact women’s lives. Caribbean feminists today have generally adopted the Gender and Development (GAD) approach and contend that gender is both central and relevant to all social relations, institutions, and processes. They argue further that gender relations are characterized by patterns of domination, inequality, and oppression and that gender relations are the product of sociocultural and historic conditions. This GAD approach, which we apply to both our research and scholarship, has succeeded in improving understanding of gender and identifying new developmental challenges that require urgent attention from a gender perspective. In order for feminist scholarship to be truly feminist it cannot remain confined inside the walls of academia. It must be directed to influencing change as it relates to economic, political, and social developmental issues of the region and be integrated into related policies and programs designed to improve the lives of men and women for the betterment of Caribbean communities.
Definition: Gender and Development (GAD) approach
originated in the 1980s and has been adopted by feminists who place gender at the center of development processes. It focuses on how social roles, reproductive roles, and economic roles are linked to gender inequalities of masculinity and femininity (Mortley 2017).
Masculinities research emerged out of feminist and gender studies in the Caribbean, and as Reddock (2004) reminds us, while some men took the opportunity to simply push back against the women’s movement, for others it signaled a time for reflection on manifestations of manhood and masculinity in the Caribbean. Mohammed (2004) argues further that not only did masculinities studies come out of the feminist movement, but constructions of masculinity are interdependent with constructions of femininity. In keeping with this view posited by Mohammed, we believe that our feminist agenda should not only be concerned with femininities but should also seek to deconstruct masculinities and how these coalesce with and impact women’s lives. Our positionality is that of feminist academics and scholars working within a gendered space. Natasha is a St. Lucian woman who has been residing and working in Jamaica for the past fifteen years, and Keino is a Jamaican man. We both teach and mentor young men and women within the Institute of Gender and Development Studies, and thus our concern is with how masculinities interact with femininities. When studying male sexualities, we seek to engage Jamaican males in order to better understand power relations not only among men but also between men and women. We understand that male sexualities exist within a gender system, which comprises relations between women and men, and men and men. Not only is masculinity part of this gender system, but positive masculinities contribute to better gender systems. As stated in the introductory chapter of this text, rather than focusing on defining masculinity as an object, we want to focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. We agree with Barriteau (2019), who contends that the ongoing narrative on relations between men and women should seek to understand and not blame.
THE JAMAICAN CONTEXT
Jamaica is the largest of the English-speaking Caribbean islands and the third-largest island in the Caribbean. The country is divided into fourteen parishes, and Kingston, the capital, is located on the southeast coast. Jamaica’s population was approximately 2.7 million at the end of 2018 (STATIN 2019). The vast majority of Jamaicans are of African descent (92.1 percent as of the 2011 census). The 2011 census also revealed that the majority of Jamaican males are single or have never been married (over 50 percent), while the second-largest group was married men. While relationship status of males within the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community was not captured in the census, a survey conducted in 2016 among 316 persons from the LGBT community revealed that for males, 45 percent indicated that they were not in a relationship, 33 percent had a visiting partner and 15 percent lived with a partner (McFee and Galbraith 2016).
Jamaica is a patriarchal country where, along with the family, the state is historically and contemporaneously the most crucial purveyor of patriarchy. According to Thame and Thakur (2014) patriarchy of the Jamaican state is most concerned with domination by a specific group of men—that is, middle-class, heterosexual men—over society. They go on to state that “from its inception, the postcolonial state was captured by the Jamaican middle class and brown male, and control over it was later extended to the black middle-class male. In Jamaica, brown and black are used to distinguish between light skin and dark skin persons of African descent. Middle-class masculinity imposed itself as the legitimate power base within the state through symbolic manipulation and violence when it deemed necessary” (Thame and Thakur 2014, 12). This is still prevalent today in Jamaica, as we will discuss later in this chapter.
In 2011 the Jamaican government approved the National Policy for Gender Equality (NPGE). The policy sets a vision for gender equality and equity across all aspects of public and private life. Such policies recognize the unequal socioeconomic status of men and women, which are influenced by notions of masculinity and femininity that sustain patriarchy. Despite a long-standing tradition of activism in Jamaica and the establishment of strong policy frameworks, discussions around human rights and social justice remain controversial because of the lack of political will and a failure to actually implement a mechanism of protection for all. The extent to which policies have overcome or reduced inequalities and injustices in Jamaica thus remains questionable. In order to effectively overcome challenges, policies must be grounded in the specific sociocultural realities of gender in the countries where they are pursued. Studies such as ours are thus critical to providing authentic and contextualized knowledge that can inform planning, policies, and practices.
JAMAICAN MALE SEXUALITIES IN POPULAR CULTURE AND SCHOLARSHIP
Attitudes around sexuality in Jamaica are historically rooted in Victorian ideologies. Suzanne Lafont’s 2001 study is one of the few that examine the colonial history of attitudes toward sexuality as they were expressed in Jamaica. She traces the development of Jamaica’s sexual mores to slavery and British imposed Christianity. This Eurocentric view of sexuality forced an ideology of social respectability upon slaves and the belief that they were immoral and licentious individuals whose sexual appetites had to be tamed. Lafont’s study tackled controversial issues such as attitudes toward female prostitution and male homosexuality in Jamaica, arguing that sexual intolerance in Jamaica is manifested in homophobia and public condemnation of heterosexual sodomy (such as oral sex). This sexual intolerance, she argues, stems from the slave era, which was characterized by a complex dialectic between colonial elites and Afro-Jamaicans. Historically, respectability and rectitude evolved as an Afro-Jamaican response to the slave experience.
McFee and Galbraith (2016) also contend that homophobia today is a legacy of the plantation system and reinforced by Jamaica’s strong Christian faith. Homophobic sentiment persists as a source of national pride while also functioning to distance Afro-Jamaicans from their colonial past (Lafont 2001). The sentiment has been popularized through music and the arts. Scholars have noted that the sexual themes in Jamaican reggae for instance, often reflect homophobic views and identify the genre as a contributor to homophobia (Cooper 1994; Hope 2006; Sharpe and Pinto 2006). The literature has identified certain homophobic slurs such as “batty bwoy” or “chi chi man” and encouragement of violent acts that include murdering and burning gay men. There is no denying that the narrative has been overly negative.
On one hand, Jamaican culture is saturated with sexuality. Jamaican music, dance, and media feature implicit and explicit references to sexual behavior and practices. On the other hand, acceptable sexualities are narrowly defined, and Jamaicans themselves seem intolerant of sexual expressions that fall outside a strictly constructed paradigm of heteronormative activity. Brown middle-class males, who have the highest social status, manifest their masculinity through heterosexuality, respectability, and reproductive sexual activity. The popular dancehall genre of music in Jamaica, which has been one of the main outlets for expressing sexuality, has been characterized as policing the borders of Jamaican masculinity, encouraging heterosexuality and polygamy while discouraging cunnilingus, anal sex, and homosexuality (Sharpe and Pinto 2006).
In this area of scholarship, there has historically been a dearth of studies on Caribbean sexualities. While family dynamics including household and parenting dynamics in the Caribbean and Jamaica (Clarke 1957; Smith 1962) have long received attention from scholars, issues of sexualities (and male sexualities, specifically) have been understudied. Part of the forbidden nature of the subject according to Sharpe and Pinto (2006) had to do with a fear of reproducing the negative stereotyping of Black hypersexuality that emerged from a history of slavery and colonialism.
Recent work on gender roles and Caribbean masculinities has explored issues around sexuality (Chevannes 2001; Lewis 2003; Reddock 2004), and recent scholarship on sexuality has explored a broader range of sexualities (de Moya and Garcia 1996; Kimmel 1996; de Albuquerque 1998; Chin 1999; Phillips 1999; Mohammed 2004). The Spanish and French Caribbean countries have done prominent studies of male sexualities (Chanel 1994; Cabezas 1999). Gray et al. (2015) explored sexuality among fathers of newborns in Jamaica, where they assess sexual behaviors such as intercourse, as well as other facets of sexuality such as sexual desire and sexual satisfaction. They also explore relationship dynamics (e.g., relationship quality and availability of alternative partners) seen as important elements in contextualizing men’s sexuality. Mark Figueroa is currently engaged in an in-depth examination of what sexuality means and how it manifests along a continuum. He contends that there is a need to extend the discussion in a way that considers the full range of what he refers to as the dimensions of human sexuality, thereby giving due regard to the complexity of the phenomenon. This work is important for Jamaica in terms of extending the discussion and analyses of male sexualities beyond the heterosexual mold.
Our work therefore emerges out of this context of burgeoning scholarship and public policy work around sexualities, as well as the need to engage men and give them a space to speak and reflect on their manhood and sexualities. We believe that this can help facilitate healthier relationships, foster better attitudes, and reduce gender-based violence within our communities. Our work aims to give men a space where they feel comfortable to unpack and perhaps unlearn all of those things that have been harmful and damaging to themselves, their families, and others. Our chapter, first and foremost, brings a more comprehensive understanding of masculinities and sexualities but also calls for a more nuanced understanding of Jamaican male realities. Our research goes beyond simple binaries, and we view sexuality on a continuum that recognizes and reflects the different modalities of manhood and masculinities.
FOUCAULT AND THE CONTEXT OF SEXUALITY AND POWER
Michel Foucault was a French historian and philosopher whose academic work came to prominence during the 1960s. We draw on Foucault’s History of Sexuality, first published in 1976, in our analysis. His book’s central argument is that sexuality is closely associated with structures of power in modern society. His work delves into an examination of sexual repression, sexual discourse, and societal power in the context of sexuality. For Foucault (1978) sexuality is not an obscure domain seeking to discover human beings, rather it is constructed historically, where there is an interrelationship between knowledge, power, body, and pleasure. Foucault describes this in his repression hypothesis, which is based on the widely held belief that during the Victorian era sex and sexuality were deliberately and systematically suppressed by unchallenged mechanisms of power within the state. As discussed earlier, the same applied in Jamaica during the slave era, where the planter class, as a matter of economic necessity and influenced by Victorian ideals, used power and force toward this suppression. This legacy continued during the colonial and postcolonial periods in Jamaica, where the elite class used various state machineries of power toward the same end. Foucault’s writing on the repressive hypothesis raises some important questions still relevant today. These included whether power in society is really expressed mainly through repression and secondly whether our contemporary discourse on sexualities is a break with this history of repression or a part of that same history.
By the nineteenth century there was a shift from repression to an exploration of the “truth” of sexuality through confession and scientific inquiry. Part of this shift had to do with political necessity where the “truth” about sexuality had to be unearthed in order to deal with other ills plaguing society at the time. Knowledge of and discourse on sexualities thus remained under state influence, control, and power to the extent that the state exercised power over the construction of sexuality. The same can be said for Jamaica where a growing body of research and scholarship on toxic masculinities and sexualities responded to the need to address social ills such as gender-based violence, alcohol, drug abuse, the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections (Barker and Ricardo 2005). These same issues contribute to male sexualities being situated within gendered relations of power.
The Jamaican situation on male sexualities and power remains much the same as Foucault described it but with more nuance. Jamaican popular culture has never been repressed or silent. The dancehall space, as our respondents reminded us, has always been a space of free expressions of sexuality. The men that we interviewed spoke on the extent to which dancehall culture has been a main agent through which socialization on manhood and male sexualities has taken place in Jamaica. However, this freedom of expression has been related to only certain masculinities and sexualities. While the state has never really been able to police dancehall music and the dancehall space, dancehall culture has had its own internal mechanisms for policing the boundaries of male sexualities. Male sexualities are viewed as part of the everyday reality of being a Jamaican man—heterosexual, with the power to initiate and dictate the terms of sex.
Foucault explores how the idea of sexuality operates and is maintained within a system of power. He describes sexuality as not being a stubborn drive but a “transfer point for relations of power: between men and women” (Foucault 1978, 105). Ramirez (2004) agrees that masculinity is a multidimensional construct where power and sexuality interact in the construction of masculine identities. This means that while men collectively have power, as individuals that power is not experienced in the same way. Though not addressed by Foucault, when it comes to sexualities the Jamaican realities show us that power and the dynamics of power among men as a group can be analyzed through what Foucault terms “power relations.” In our findings some men are powerless compared to other men and thus evaluate themselves differently. Thus, in order to understand how men express masculinities and sexualities, it is necessary to analyze broader inequalities and power dynamics within society. The differential access of men to power also entails hypothesizing in the existence of multiple masculinities, in which the margins of the representations of sexuality and gender identities are constantly being erased and redrawn (Ramirez 2004).
Our focus group discussions with males within the inner city reflected this association between power dynamics among males and their sexualities. The young men spoke about male police officers who had intimate sexual relations with the women who were also involved with them. “Police sleep with women here, these are our women, to find out more about our dealings in the community,” said one male inner-city Kingston resident in his twenties. Our respondents believed that male officers who had positions of power and authority used sex to wield further power over the males and as a form of crime control within the communities. Our respondents thus spoke of feelings of powerlessness because of these sexual relations exercised by other men who represented “the system” and measured their sexual prowess against that of the policemen. This is reminiscent of Beckles (2004) who locates the early construction of Afro-Caribbean masculinity in the competitive and exploitative relationship between European and African males during slavery. He argues that the masculinity of Black slaves was constructed through its interaction with hegemonic structures of white masculinity, where white male power was based on control of property, including Black women.
Our respondents also spoke about the firearm as a symbol of Jamaican masculinities and sexualities. Carrying a firearm is commonplace and desirable among Jamaica men because they believe it gives them greater status. Carrying a firearm was also linked to sexualities because it was believed that women in Jamaica were attracted to men who carried firearms and that a man with a firearm could use it to get more women. “Having a gun, a licensed firearm is a way of displaying power. If you have one you are now elevated to a different level,” said one professional male in his thirties. The firearm thus represented that link between power and sexualities in the Jamaican space.
SEX AND VIOLENCE
Though Foucault seldom delved into the concepts of sex and violence, when he did, he made reference to power and violence, adding that both are connected. For Foucault violence can be a drastic change or resistant to change, depending on historical and political agendas. He adds that violence can be harsh in an attempt to control individuals and their bodies. In Jamaica, men’s sexualities are generally characterized as incorporating sex and violence. Kempadoo points to “stabbing in dancehall songs,” whereby “the penis becomes a metaphorical dagger, stabbing pleasure into and out of the woman” (Cooper 2004, 13). Among Jamaican men, sexuality is perceived as being a site of pleasure for men and danger for women. As Kempadoo (2009) concludes, sexuality is powerful and violent and frequently acts as an economic resource, sustains polygamy, multiple partnerships, and polyamory, and is mediated by constructions of racism and ethnicity.
Hope (2006) indicates that men express their sexuality in dancehall culture within the confines of patriarchal, heterosexist, and elitist restrictions. Pieces of music played in dancehall reduce women to mere body parts, whereas men are celebrated for being promiscuous and aggressive. One of our interviewees, a Jamaican male academic in his forties, indicated that “men would be branded if they do not show aggressive masculinity, even without any proof of being man to avoid being branded as a homosexual.” This is supported by Hope’s (2006) argument that men who are unable to attain these attributes of masculinity are stereotyped as being gay. The Caribbean man still grapples with issues of emasculation he copes with through the medium of violence meted out especially on loved ones and in particular in the form of sexual violence (Marshall and Hallam 1993). During discussions in one of our mixed focus groups, participants indicated that
males [are] always physically beating up the females and the females I guess most of them typically never physically fight back and so other females growing up sort of learned that as a behavior; and there is a thing though that a few females say dem [them] no want a man weh [who is] soft. So that’s something to think about cause even though they are assertive they don’t want a man they can bully. They tell you, if I feel like I can railroad you it’s not going to work out; the typical Jamaican man is seen as bold and confident and aggressive so it is supposed to be one of many challenges. (Anonymous, focus group discussion by author)
The above illustrates that some men feel pressured to demonstrate violent sexuality, first by other men who will brand them as gay if they don’t and secondly by women who will deem them “soft” if they don’t.
One respondent lamented that homosexuality in Jamaica is characterized by “a special type of violence, where the batty man dem beat up and kill each other.” In reference to cases of homosexuals being murdered in Jamaica, some respondents who agreed with the above statement were of the view that they were killed by their male partners who were driven by personal shame and rage brought on by pressures from having to cope with a homophobic sociocultural environment.
SEX AS PLEASURE AND SEX WITH MULTIPLE PARTNERS
Our findings corroborate Foucault’s (1978) explanation that sexuality for men incorporates pleasure, and for our respondents such pleasure meant having multiple sexual partners. Our respondents were of the view that Jamaican males at an early age are pressured into engaging in sexual intercourse. In fact, a boy child is taught that he should have power over his female partner and should have several children to demonstrate his masculinity. Embedded in this, too, is an unwritten sexual and reproductive health law that every young Jamaican male must grapple with: “that he must have a steady girlfriend which makes him a man … and engaging in bareback sex—sex without a condom—is fine.” (Anonymous, Focus group discussion by author). Furthermore, respondents believed that early sexual intercourse for males was influenced by lessons instilled in them as early as five years old. Males are taught from childhood that they are superior to women and should prove their manhood by engaging in sexual intercourse with multiple sexual partners. One respondent stated, “From man a youngster we are told to have plenty girlfriend,” and a second respondent claimed, “the earlier the better:” (Anonymous, focus group discussion by author). These findings support Chevannes and Brown (1998), which concluded that men are expected to demonstrate sexual prowess and have serial or concurrent sexual partners and have several children. Also, our respondents measured their manhood by the number of children they are willing to bring into the world and also the number of women that they have those children with, to provide for their family, and also to ensure that their children are raised in such a way that they will become citizens who will contribute to society.
While our respondents believed this to be the way that young men are generally socialized, some made it clear that they did not subscribe to this behavior and that their personal experiences did not reflect this. One respondent explained: “I came from the ghetto where I saw that kind of behavior, with my father, my grandfather, my uncle … but now I don’t live my life like that, and I don’t want that for my son. Everything mi see mi father do, I try to do the complete opposite” (Anonymous, focus group discussion by author). This, we believe, indicates that not all Jamaican men subscribe to or perform the same masculinities. There are men who will publicly speak out against promiscuity among Jamaican males.
When respondents were asked whether young men generally have multiple sexual partners, one respondent answered, “It is the norm for men to have more than one sex partner, you can have many sex partners.” In the inner city, young men believed that the ideal was seven women to one man: “Yes miss seven is de ideal, but due to economic hardships now it may be reduced to three women per man,” said one inner-city resident in his twenties. Among men of middle to upper socioeconomic status, there was a general perception, even among women from other islands, that the Jamaican male is more promiscuous than men from other islands. This is reinforced through the popular culture, for example, in the dancehall. The lyrics of songs are usually laced with tunes explicitly suggesting that a man must have more than one woman, as this will help to identify him as a real man. This is similar to what Foucault refers to as the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure. This is referred to as the sexual instinct that “is biologically and physically distinct afflictions for which treatments could be sought” (Foucault 1978, 104). For example, one respondent stated that “sex is everything … if you don’t have sex, you are a clown or other men will hate you.” Another respondent stated that “sex is pleasurable, it is how you lose your oil and show a woman you rule.” Yet another respondent stated that “when you have sex, you feel like a super king and you show a woman who is in charge … it makes you feel like a man.” While another stated that “I have to prove that I am a girl’s man … more woman the sweeter the sex is.”
Respondents believed that these sexual acts were not only very pleasurable but also symbolized what makes one a man and forms his masculinity. This for respondents demonstrates strength and the “ability to stick to one’s code of honor.” However, a different view of masculinity surfaced during our group discussions. One respondent believed that “to be a man is not only to portray a masculine nature, homosexual men have strong[er] trait of masculinities than some heterosexual males.” While this was not the shared view of most respondents, they all agreed that masculinity linked to sexuality was a part of their culture and history, which informs them about what is ideal for them as males. Our findings thus revealed that male sexualities with multiple partners represented both pleasure within relationships with women, as well as power vis-à-vis other men.
SEXUALITY AND GENDER RELATIONS
Jamaican men are socialized about sexualities along gender lines, which are rooted in a deeply entrenched gender system. The popular saying “loose the bull and tie the heifer” symbolizes this gender stereotype related to sexuality where boys are socialized differently than girls. All of the male participants irrespective of background subscribed to this view. According to Barriteau (2003) the material system is how the power dynamics between men and women are maintained and accepted socially, which affects how they gain access to material resources. While the nonmaterial system is how the ideological effects of said gender relations impact how women access material resources, status, and power. These paradigms reflect a clear interdependent relationship between ideology and resources of a social system, on the one hand, and sex stratification and status based on differential access to material and nonmaterial rewards on the other. This impacts the power construction of sexualities, directly or indirectly, in Foucault’s (1978) discourse on sexuality and power specifically.
This power is manifested in the ways men are socialized to be protectors of their family, providers, and by extension have control over bodies, including women’s (and other men’s) bodies. Lessons that are instilled from an early age usually translate into sexuality and power in adulthood. Foucault describes sexuality as not being a stubborn drive but a “transfer point for relations of power: between men and women” (Foucault 1978, 103). On the other hand, one aspect of power for Foucault is conceived as performing a negative function, particularly in relation to sex. Jamaican men’s realities corroborate Foucault’s hysterization of women’s bodies. He explains the hysterization of women’s bodies as belonging to men in three relevant ways: medically/socially in the sense that the woman’s body had the potential to produce many children, secondly in a family setting the woman had to play a substantial/main role, and thirdly the female had to be mother to the children that she produced as a matter of biological-moral responsibility (Foucault 1978). Some respondents in the study believed that women were expected to play the role of good mothers, as that was a part of their biology. One male respondent in his forties from rural Jamaica stated that “women are to stay home and take care of the family that is what they were born to do.” These findings support Foucault’s socialization of procreative behavior phenomena. For Foucault, this means treating the body or bodies of couples as somewhat belonging to the state and promoting social responsibility in the form of birth control practices. Not all respondents agreed with this, however. Our respondents in their twenties to late thirties believed that gender roles in Jamaica had changed and that women were no longer expected to be seen in this way. University-educated males particularly stressed this view.
While respondents thought it was wrong to force women to have sex with them, they also stated that they did not expect women to refuse sex with them. One respondent stated clearly that “women [should] not to hold off on a guy when him want sex from her … I don’t mean he is to rape her, but she must just go along with having sex with him” (Anonymous, focus group discussions by author). This is in keeping with Foucault’s belief that sex and sexuality were closely linked to unchallenged power mechanisms of male domination. This also plays out in some spaces in Jamaica as it relates to suppressing homosexuality in response to power mechanisms of male domination.
Our respondents believed that the state supports and reinforces many of the messages related to male sexuality. One respondent stated that “men’s roles and what they do sexually is not only taught in the family, but government and society teach and reward us about what we are to do from a sexuality stance.” This is in keeping with Foucault’s suggestion that sexuality is used as a device of power within broader systems of power within society. The personages that Foucault mentioned as growing out of psychiatry are broad generalizations, some resonating and others a tad questionable, especially in a Jamaican context. Foucault speaks of everything as being about power and power being everywhere; but in a Jamaican context there is not much power in the margins, as heterosexuality is the dominant power construct. One respondent postulated that “sexual freedom is important because you get to express how you feel and what is it that you find pleasurable sexually … I think I have about 45 percent sexual freedom as a heterosexual man, but if me was homosexual I wouldn’t have that freedom.” Yet another respondent echoed similar sentiments that “as a straight male [heterosexual male] I have power and sexual freedom but only to do straight stuff [heterosexual sexual activities].”
TOWARD A CONCLUSION WITHOUT END
Foucault’s writings have been instrumental in creating the atmosphere of intrigue and interest around sex and sexuality and related dynamics of power. Foucault argued that while repression and prohibition of sex prior to the nineteenth century may have been real, discourses around sex were always present, albeit in diverse ways. In Jamaica, while popular culture always spoke about male sexualities, there has been some repression by confining it within certain gendered norms and expectations. It is only in recent years that scholarship and discourse have begun to push beyond those boundaries in exploring different male sexualities. Likewise, men today are more open in voicing alternative views on masculinities and sexualities, as seen through our research.
Foucault expands the development and impact of power from the limited sovereign aspects to more phenomenological application, through “population” synergistic with the spread of social relations. Power, Foucault argues, is not simply concerned with domination by law, but it is also exercised through the social and physical body. This may have been a controversial and considerable shift in thought, and it is the deployment of sexuality, Foucault writes, that was crucial to this modification. Sexuality can be seen as an axis or transfer point of relations of power and one with great agency “useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies” (Foucault 1978, 103). Foucault’s explanation of sexuality makes the act of sexual intercourse into not only the act itself but an essential part of one’s being or identity. For Jamaican males, their sexualities are closely tied to their masculinities and their everyday realities of what it means to be a Jamaican man. Further, sexualities are both shaped by and influence power dynamics, not only between men and women but also among various groups of men.
Foucault’s explanation that sexuality is in every facet of human social existence is useful. However, in the application of Foucault’s thesis to the Jamaican context, it is important to understand the context of his writing, his own race and citizenship (a white French man), and the political, economic, and social biases of his society toward colonized countries like Jamaica. The use of his thesis as a point of reference to Jamaican realities impacts the ways we consciously or unconsciously experience, understand, and explain sexualities. It also provides a reference point for the deconstruction of and reflection on the sexualities of Jamaican males. In our research it helped us to think more fully about constructions of male sexualities and to explore various ways and spaces within which power manifests and contours issues around male sexualities. In this way his work remains relevant today.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
• Anderson, P. 2017. “The Impact of Masculinity Ideologies and Conjugal Involvement on Sexual Risk-Taking among Young Jamaican Males.” American Journal of Men’s Health 16, no. 1: 50–66. doi.org/10.3149/jmh.1601.49.
• Kempadoo, K. 2003. “Sexuality in the Caribbean: Theory and Research (with an Emphasis on the Anglophone Caribbean).” Social and Economic Studies 52, no. 3: 59–88. www.jstor.org/stable/27865341. Accessed July 12, 2021.
• Levtov, R., and Telson, L. 2021. “Man-Box: Males and Masculinity in Jamaica.” Inter American Development Bank (IDB), Gender and Diversity Division. March 2021. https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/Man-Box-Men-and-Masculinity-in-Jamaica.pdf.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What is your understanding of Jamaican masculinities and sexualities?
2. What is the relationship between sexualities and gendered power relations in Jamaica? Can you use an intersectional analysis to think about them?
3. Discuss the ways in which Foucault’s sexuality thesis is or isn’t relevant to realities of Jamaican males today?
KEY TERMS
Gender and Development (GAD) approach: originated in the 1980s and has been adopted by feminists who place gender at the center of development processes. It focuses on how social roles, reproductive roles, and economic roles are linked to gender inequalities of masculinity and femininity (Mortley 2017).
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What is the Global North? The Global North does not refer to a geographic region in any traditional sense but rather to the relative power and wealth of countries in distinct parts of the world (figure 15.1). The chapters in this section explore the construction and complexity of gender within the Global North: particularly, the United States, Canada, and Belgium. To do so, we first consider how the Global North and South divide came to exist in the popular imagination. However, we should note that although the Global North is on the whole powerful and wealthy, it is not monolithic. Societies within it are internally stratified and diverse such that not everyone in the Global North is rich and powerful.
Definition: Global North
does not refer to a geographic region in any traditional sense but rather to the relative power and wealth of countries in distinct parts of the world. The Global North encompasses the rich and powerful regions such as North America, Europe, and Australia.
Attempts to categorize the world order have been based more on politics and economics than geography. These include East and West; developed and developing nations; and the First, Second, and Third Worlds. For example, if East/West were geographic entities, then all nations west of the Prime Meridian (i.e., the United States, Canada, and Latin America nations) would be grouped together, while all nations to the east (i.e., countries of Europe, Africa, and Asia) would be grouped together. But this is not the case. Rather, the “West” is meant to refer to countries—particularly European nations and the United States—that benefited from the exploits of colonialism, achieving a higher quality of life and more power than the East. Similarly, the terminology of “developed” and “developing” nations indexes a power differential along with the ethnocentric assumption that all countries follow a singular idealized trajectory. Anthropologists and social theorists have critiqued this notion, insisting that societies change over time, proceeding along varied developmental paths.
The First, Second, and Third World terminology developed in the mid-twentieth century during the Cold War to categorize nations based on their participation in the conflict between the democratic United States (and its allies) and the Communist Soviet Union (and its allies). The First World was said to include economically developed, high-income, politically stable capitalist nations. The Second World comprised Communist nations that despite stable incomes and decent social conditions were viewed by the First World as economically and politically unstable due to their totalitarian governments. The Third World referred to previously colonized nations (nonaligned) that both the United States and the Soviet Union were trying to incorporate into their respective political-economic orders. Third World leaders have critiqued this schema, asserting that they were not just pawns in the US-Soviet conflict; rather, they were actively engaged in improving their own social conditions, creating stable national identities, and participating in the global community (e.g., in the 1960s, some Third World countries joined the United Nations for the first time).
In the late twentieth century, the Global North and South terminology replaced previous descriptors of the global order. It was generally agreed that the Global North would include the United States, Canada, England, nations of the European Union, as well as Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and even some countries in the southern hemisphere: Australia, and New Zealand. The Global South, on the other hand, would include formerly colonized countries in Africa and Latin America, as well as the Middle East, Brazil, India, and parts of Asia. Many of these countries are still marked by the social, cultural, and economic repercussions of colonialism, even after achieving national independence. The Global South remains home to the majority of the world’s population, but that population is relatively young and resource-poor, living in economically dependent nations.
Like prior attempts to characterize nations, the Global North/South distinction simplifies the world order, ignoring internal variation within both the North and South, while negating commonalities that exist between these large and diverse entities. Further, there are outliers that muddy the attempt to specify a clear North/South divide. For example, where do China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia fit? In terms of their economies and power, they resemble the North, but their political and social organization can also resemble the South. All global terminology systems discussed here are historically situated, politicized attempts to organize nations into a straightforward world order that is, in fact, quite complicated and increasingly interconnected.
THE WORLD ECONOMY
A rapidly globalized economy has highlighted the imagined divide between the North and South. According to Wallerstein’s world systems theory, a global capitalist system separates countries into the core (the North), semiperiphery, and periphery (the South) based primarily on their economic participation (Wallerstein 1974). His theory is largely influenced by Karl Marx, who saw the economy as the foundation of society that determined all cultural phenomena. According to Marx, under capitalism, societies are composed of the bourgeoisie (the owners who control the means of production, e.g., the factories) and the workers (who labor and produce goods in exchange for wages). The owner’s motive to maximize profit is achieved by exploiting the workers, who are paid less than what their labor is worth and who grow alienated from themselves, other people, and their labor. Despite the ideological attempts of the owners to obscure exploitation, Marx believed that the workers would eventually realize the systemic injustices of capitalism, rise up, and replace it with Communism.
Definition: world systems theory
Developed by Emmanuel Wallerstein to describe a global capitalist system that separates countries into the core (the North), semiperiphery, and periphery (the South) based primarily on their economic participation.
For Wallerstein, similar actors and structural inequalities operate within the global capitalist system. The core nations of the Global North act like the owners, controlling multinational corporations that extract raw material and exploit labor from peripheral nations of the Global South. The core nations thereby amass profit that benefits them, hardening the divide between the haves and have-nots. Thus, core nations remain wealthy, politically stable, and culturally dominant, while peripheral nations remain economically dependent, politically unstable, and at the mercy of cultural trends. The semiperipheral nations are said to be in transition from the periphery to the core (see figure 15.2).
Like all binaries, the division of the world into core and periphery, North and South, is overly simplistic and assumes these are fundamentally different and unequal entities. Yet, we are not a world indelibly marked as wealthy or poor, producers or consumers, powerful or powerless. For many anthropologists, the world order is far more complex and interrelated. They consider, for example, the process of glocalization, whereby people around the world alter globalized goods, ideas, and practices to fit their own lived experiences. This is not the passive, wholesale adoption of Global Northern lifeways but the active adaptation of them into culturally relevant forms. Similarly, globalization does not just flow from the North to the South. From food to clothes to music and media, people in the Global North also consume and adapt the cultural products of the Global South.
Definition: glocalization
a combination of the words “globalization” and “localization.” Refers to ways that a cultural product is developed by one culture and adopted by the local culture to accommodate local needs and preferences.
Definition: globalization
the worldwide intensification of social and economic interactions and interdependence between disparate parts of the world.
Arjun Appadurai addresses this complexity by describing several global “scapes”: social and cultural flows that move around the world in multiple directions, affecting nations and people in diverse ways. As he puts it, the “new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order” (Appadurai 1996, 32). This order comprises five “scapes”:
• ethnoscape (the movement of people)
• financescape (the movement of money)
• technoscape (the movement of technologies)
• mediascapes (the movement of media)
• ideoscapes (the movement of ideas)
These globalscapes are interlinked. Take, for example, cell phones: as objects, they are part of the technoscape that people use to access the mediascape through which they engage with the ideoscape. This idea of globalscapes helps us see the dynamic nature of people, things, and ideas that interact to defy any simplistic static division of North and South.
ENGENDERING THE GLOBAL NORTH
While globalization is an interactive process, the Global North has undeniably played a leading role in it. The economic, political, and cultural hegemony of the Global North, hardened by colonialism, has affected many aspects of social life elsewhere, including gender. As anthropologists and gender scholars argue, there is nothing natural or universal about the North’s binary gender system (male/female). There are other options: anthropological studies have described nonbinary gender systems with varied levels of gender inequality. For example, the Two-Spirit category among some Native American societies is a third gender category, one that recognizes that an individual’s gender identity may not be the same as their cisgender embodiment. Two-Spirit individuals possess both male and female qualities that uniquely position them to interact with the supernatural realm. This is not considered to be a transgressive category but rather a transcendent one.
Definition: hegemony
the dominance of one group over another supported by legitimating norms and ideas that normalize dominance. Using collective consent rather than force, dominant social groups maintain power and social inequalities are naturalized.
Definition: cisgender
refers to people whose gender identity corresponds to their sex at birth.
In the Global North, however, there exists a dominant portrayal of gender as a strict binary: male or female, whereby male is privileged over female. This was not always the case: the archaeological record and observations of modern hunting and gathering groups (used as a model for early human societies that were likewise small-scale, family-based, and fairly egalitarian) reveal societies with gender roles but less gender stratification. Such societies cannot afford to exclude half the population—the women—from the daily work of subsistence and survival. Indeed, women, in both ancient and modern hunting and gathering groups, make an essential contribution that complements men’s activities. For example, these women supply the majority of the group’s daily calories through the arduous labor of gathering wild plants and digging up tubers. It was only recently in human history, about ten thousand years ago with the advent of agriculture and permanent settlements, that a strict division of labor emerged that served to lower women’s status. Men began to dominate the public sphere, relegating women to the (devalued) private domestic sphere. We see this gender hierarchy perpetuated within several domains, including philosophy, Christianity, and science.
Early Greek philosophers like Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and Galen (130–210 AD) were convinced of men’s innate dominance over women. As Aristotle (1905, 34) writes: “The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.” This statement asserts a universal inequality between the sexes that justifies women’s subservience to men. The Bible, and texts from other Abrahamic religions, convey similar ideas, as reflected by this famous quote from the Book of Genesis (2: 7):
And the Lord God constructed the rib which He had taken from the earth-creature into a woman and brought her to the earth-man. And the earth-man said, this time is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called wo-man, for from man was she taken.
Throughout the Middle Ages (fourth to fourteenth century), many stories in the Bible were read as reinforcing male superiority. Men were often portrayed as prominent actors, with women making secondary contributions. As people saw the church as a prominent source of authority, they further internalized this gender ideology.
It is not until the Enlightenment (1650–1800), or the so-called Age of Reason, that new sources of authority emerge as people use scientific principles to challenge biblical accounts of the world. Through firsthand investigations of nature and society, people were no longer dependent on religious authority to answer their questions; they could now seek answers via their own empirical observations and rationality. Yet, there was nothing truly “objective” about these scientific inquiries. With respect to gender, a misogynous view of women still influenced the questions and answers of (predominantly male) scientists.
Definition: misogynous/misogyny
refers to the contempt or hatred for women, often expressed as prejudice or discrimination.
Take, for example, the question of whether men are more intelligent than women. In the eighteenth century, “scientific” illustrations of male and female bodies grossly exaggerated their proportions, showing males with extremely large heads and females with small heads but large hips (see figure 15.3) that conveyed their alleged inferior intellect and their fundamental child-bearing function (Biewen 2018).
Later, in the nineteenth century, the gender question was addressed through the then-popular pseudoscience of phrenology: the examination of skull features that allegedly reveal mental qualities and character. Such analyses pointed to women’s “low foreheads” as proof that they lacked the necessary cognitive abilities for participation in intellectual pursuits (Staum 2003, 64). We now explain differences in male and female skull size as due to sexual dimorphism: since male bodies are (on average) slightly larger than female bodies, their skulls must be proportionate to the rest of their bodies. Further, there is no proven correlation between skull size and brain function: skull size does not correlate with intellectual capacity (Gould 1981). Nevertheless, the attempt to scientifically prove men’s worth, like the attempt to theologically prove women’s secondary status, served to affirm a strict binary gender hierarchy. In many parts of the Global North, this hierarchy has had profound social consequences: it justified the disenfranchisement of women in civic life and formal employment and excluded gender minorities from institutions such as marriage and the military.
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL NORTH TODAY
By the end of the twentieth century, most of the claims made by pseudoscience about gender had been corrected. Nevertheless, many of the underlying ideas and assumptions it produced persisted, including those that justified inequality for women and gender minorities. For instance, by the year 2000, women in the United States on average earned seventy-one cents per every dollar that a man earned (Graf et al. 2019). By 2020, that rate rose to eighty-five cents, although, paradoxically, women for the first time also made up more than half the workforce (Omeokwe 2020). Transgendered people in many parts of the Global North face discrimination, violence, anemic legal protections and obstacles accessing health care, among other concerns. While we explore some of these contemporary gender-related issues in the Global North, we also recognize that gender is dynamic and responsive to larger social, cultural, and political forces.
GENDER AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE
The Global North in the twentieth century is marked by a gradual arc of increasing gender equity; however, some countries, and particular groups within these countries, continue to experience high rates of gender-based violence. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, for example, ethnic minorities and Indigenous women tend to experience the highest rates of such violence. The concept of intersectionality allows us to understand the compounding factors of oppression (such as poverty, racism, sexism, social neglect, among others) that contribute to gender violence within some communities in the Global North. For instance, in the United States, murder is the third top cause of death for American Indian women, which is more than twice the rate than for white women (Heron 2018). In Canada, Indigenous women are sixteen times more likely than white women to be murdered or go missing (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 2019). And in Australia, aboriginal women are thirty-two times more likely to be hospitalized as a result of domestic violence and ten times more likely to die from a violent assault than non-Indigenous women (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2018).
Definition: intersectionality
refers to the interconnected nature of social categories such as race, class, and gender that creates overlapping systems of discrimination or disadvantage. The goal of an intersectional analysis is to understand how racism, sexism, and homophobia (for example) interact together to impact our identities and how we live in our society.
Sexual violence continues to plague the Global North, despite some progress overall. These issues received increased attention in the late 2010s. Most notably, the #MeToo movement gained international traction when a series of actresses and celebrities came forward accusing Harvey Weinstein, a US film producer, of rape and sexual assault. The Twitter hashtag #MeToo exploded after actress Alyssa Milano used it in a tweet to highlight her connection to other survivors of sexual assault. Hundreds of thousands of women joined in by disclosing that they, too, had been sexually assaulted or abused. The movement was later criticized for ignoring the origin of the phrase, which was coined by activist Tarana Burke in 2006. Many claimed that Burke’s work to bring awareness to the frequency of sexual assault had been overlooked because as an African American woman her voice was not heard or respected as much as white women’s or celebrities’ voices.
In the United States the #MeToo movement is credited with helping center sexual assault within the national narrative. Nevertheless, US society, like other societies, still struggles with how to talk about and address this problem. Further, awareness of sexual assault within other gendered populations (such as the transgender community) receives even less attention.
TRANSGENDER AND GENDER NONCONFORMING IDENTITIES
Similar to the increasing awareness and sensitivity to sexual assault, societal awareness of the lived experiences of transgender and gender-diverse people has improved in recent years. Transgendered people are those whose biological sex at birth is inconsistent with their gender identity. In addition, some Northern societies are increasingly recognizing people who do not identify as male or female, or whose gender identity is fluid. Languages are adapting to these changes by including new pronouns, verbs, and nouns. For instance, some English-speaking populations are using “they/them” or “xe/xem” instead of “he/she.” In Spanish, words ending with “a” are usually considered feminine, and those ending with “o” are usually considered masculine. However, some Spanish-speaking populations are now using the gender-neutral “x” in place of “a” or “o” at the end of words, as in “Latinx.”
Gender-diverse people are increasingly visible in popular television programs and movies, and some countries have established policies to protect their rights. For instance, in 2014, the Danish parliament passed legislation that allows legal gender recognition for transgender people based solely on their self-determined identity (Transgender Europe 2014). In 2016, a similar law was passed in Norway. However, many countries in Europe do not have such policies or protections, or they require a psychiatric or medical diagnosis for a legal gender change (Transgender Europe 2016). This is compounded by societal stigma and lack of public understanding, which results in widespread discrimination and marginalization of transgender people. For instance, in the United States, 29 percent of transgender people surveyed live in poverty, and 30 percent had been homeless at some point in their lives (according to a 2015 survey conducted by National Center for Transgender Equality). Their unemployment rate was 15 percent—three times the national average (National Center for Transgender Equality 2016). Transgender people are also more likely to avoid seeking medical care because they experience discrimination, disrespect, and even harassment in health-care settings.
In addition, transgender and gender nonconforming people have faced discrimination in bathroom use, particularly in the United States. For instance, 16 American states have considered legislation that would restrict access to multiuser bathrooms (and other sex-segregated facilities) on the basis of one’s sex assigned at birth (Kralik 2019). Although most of these efforts failed or were withdrawn, the issue still remains highly contentious. As anthropologist Robert Myers stated, “Americans match deep convictions about males and females with binary spaces to perform those necessary biological functions. … the bathroom is the central space where beliefs and anxieties about gender, the body, identity, privacy and safety collide. It is a culture war waged over symbolic spaces reinforcing constructions of how we see ourselves privately and publicly” (Myers 2018). While bathrooms remain politically charged gendered spaces, people are becoming aware of gender diversity in ways that are starting to rattle their prior convictions. Many colleges and universities, and a variety of public and private institutions, are designating gender-neutral bathrooms that are available for anyone to use, regardless of their gender identity or expression.
PATRIARCHY
The problems of restrictions on transgender people’s bathroom use, sexual assault, and sexual violence are tied to a lingering system of patriarchy that remains deeply embedded in societies in the Global North. Patriarchy has long been a central structural element of many societies and is characterized by a set of culturally specific symbols, behaviors, and ideas that are male dominated, male identified, and male-centric. This structure normalizes a worldview of binary gender, gender stereotypes, and the limitation of gender roles, among other things. Patriarchy reaches deep into the fabric of societies, which makes its existence difficult to see but profoundly influential. For instance, in the Global North, patriarchy influences inflexible notions of what it means to be “feminine” and “masculine.” These notions are seen in the expectations for cisgender men to serve in the military and for women to be more responsible for domestic work. They are also seen in the paucity of men employed in care services, such as nursing and childcare, and a low number of women in manual labor-intensive work like construction or in political leadership positions.
Definition: patriarchy
a dynamic system of power and inequality that privileges men and boys over women and girls in social interactions and institutions. Patriarchy describes a society with a male-dominated political and authority structure and an ideology that privileges males over females in domestic and public spheres.
Consider another example. You may have heard a popular riddle that goes something like this: “A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon says, ‘I cannot do the surgery because this is my son.’ How is this possible?” The trick (spoiler alert!) is that the surgeon is, of course, the boy’s mother. This riddle is perplexing to many people who have been socialized to associate being a surgeon with being a man. The possibility that a woman (or mother) might be the surgeon seems so unlikely that we unconsciously do not even consider it. These types of associations are embedded within a patriarchal order that influences how people in the Global North see the world and their place in it.
Another manifestation of patriarchy can be seen in hypermasculine gender expressions, sometimes referred to as toxic masculinity. In the Global North, this form of masculinity tends to be characterized by qualities such as a competitive nature, physical strength, emotional suppression, rejection of femininity, risk taking, and violence. In January 2019 the American Psychological Association released a set of new guidelines for psychologists who work with males. The guidelines suggested that being enculturated into a traditional masculine ideology does harm not only to women and people with nonconforming gender identities but also to boys and men. The guidelines highlighted the impact of toxic masculinity on boys and men, which includes poor mental and physical health outcomes (American Psychological Association 2018). For example, toxic masculinity deems anger as the only appropriate emotion men can express, which can lead to the distancing of men from others, resulting in difficulty developing and sustaining close relationships. Further, since toxic masculinity dictates that men should be strong and independent, some men feel they cannot seek help from others for their mental or physical issues.
Definition: toxic masculinity
tends to be characterized by qualities such as a competitive nature, physical strength, emotional suppression, rejection of femininity, risk taking, and violence.
Despite the influence of patriarchy, many of these gendered characteristics have been changing in recent years. More men and women are entering into nontraditional gender employment, and more women are taking on leadership roles. Men are increasingly active in childrearing, and some are even opting to stay home and raise children while their spouse works outside the home. Gender, and the influence of patriarchy, is in flux in the Global North.
CONCLUSION
Just as the Global North/South divide was developed to give order to an increasingly complex interrelated world system, the male/female divide, as rendered in the Global North, was developed to make sense of different yet interrelated sexed bodies. These bodies came to be understood in binary and hierarchical terms: one was either male or female, with male privileged over female. While in other places, males, females, and other genders had been understood in distinctive ways, the value-laden gender hierarchy of the Global North was disseminated widely due to the region’s social, economic, and political power. To denaturalize these value-laden divisions—North/South, male/female—we must see them for what they are: social-historical constructs that are tied to power and carry real consequences for the lives of men, women, and sexual minority communities. And yet gender is dynamic: as we have discussed, gender roles are in flux, women are asserting their rights, members of sexual minority groups are being heard, and masculine ideals are being challenged.
The chapters in Part V: The Global North present anthropological research that showcases some of the gendered experiences of men and women from different places in the social hierarchy in highly unequal and stratified regions. Chapter 16 examines mothers in upper-middle-class households in a large northeast city. In online forums these women compete to perform “proper” motherhood. Their online performances serve as practice for how they will interact with their peers as ideal mothers in real life. Male sex workers are the focus of chapter 17. Here we see how gendered stereotypes of sex workers blind legislators and social service agencies to the violence and vulnerability of young men in the sex trade. In this case, an intersectional approach reveals the subordination and structural violence these men experience. Chapters 18 and 19 explore the gendered lives of migrants living in the Global North. Muslim women in Belgium respond to discrimination and reclaim their agency and resist marginalization. Chapter 19 shows how undocumented migrants from Mexico struggle to redefine their roles as fathers when children are left behind in the home village or parents are deported to Mexico leaving children behind in the United States. In these transnational families, fathers must negotiate different norms and expectations of parenthood on both sides of the border. Finally, the profile at the end of this introduction highlights the work of Kathleen Steinhauer, who fought for the rights and recognition of Indigenous women in Canada.
KEY TERMS
cisgender: refers to people whose gender identity corresponds to their sex at birth.
Global North: does not refer to a geographic region in any traditional sense but rather to the relative power and wealth of countries in distinct parts of the world. The Global North encompasses the rich and powerful regions such as North America, Europe, and Australia.
globalization: the worldwide intensification of social and economic interactions and interdependence between disparate parts of the world.
glocalization: a combination of the words “globalization” and “localization.” Refers to ways that a cultural product is developed by one culture and adopted by the local culture to accommodate local needs and preferences.
hegemony: the dominance of one group over another supported by legitimating norms and ideas that normalize dominance. Using collective consent rather than force, dominant social groups maintain power and social inequalities are naturalized.
intersectionality: refers to the interconnected nature of social categories such as race, class, and gender that creates overlapping systems of discrimination or disadvantage. The goal of an intersectional analysis is to understand how racism, sexism, and homophobia (for example) interact together to impact our identities and how we live in our society.
misogynous/misogyny: refers to the contempt or hatred for women, often expressed as prejudice or discrimination.
patriarchy: a dynamic system of power and inequality that privileges men and boys over women and girls in social interactions and institutions. Patriarchy describes a society with a male-dominated political and authority structure and an ideology that privileges males over females in domestic and public spheres.
toxic masculinity: tends to be characterized by qualities such as a competitive nature, physical strength, emotional suppression, rejection of femininity, risk taking, and violence.
world systems theory: Developed by Emmanuel Wallerstein to describe a global capitalist system that separates countries into the core (the North), semiperiphery, and periphery (the South) based primarily on their economic participation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Psychological Association. 2018. APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Aristotle. 1905. Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford: Clarendon.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. 2018. Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence in Australia, 2018. Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Biewen, John. “Skeleton War.” MEN. Scene on Radio, August 8, 2018. http://www.sceneonradio.org/tag/season-3.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton.
Graf, Nikki, Anna Brown, and Eileen Patten. 2019. “The Narrowing, but Persistent, Gender Gap in Pay.” Fact Tank. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
Heron, Melonie. 2018. Deaths: Leading Causes for 2016. National Vital Statistics Reports 67, no. 6. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics.
Kralik, Joellen. 2019. “ ‘Bathroom Bill’ Legislative Tracking.” Washington, DC: National Conference of State Legislatures.
Myers, Robert. 2018. “That Most Dangerous, Sacred American Space, the Bathroom.” 10, no. 1 Anthropology Now.
National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 2019. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Volume 1a. National Inquiry, Canadian Government.
National Center for Transgender Equality. 2016. The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality.
Omeokwe, Amara. 2020. “Women Overtake Men as Majority of U.S. Workforce.” Washington Post. January 10, 2020.
Staum, Martin. 2003. Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race and Empire, 1815–1848. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Transgender Europe. 2014. “Denmark Goes Argentina!” June 11, 2014. https://tgeu.org/denmark-goes-argentina/.
Transgender Europe. 2016. “34 Countries in Europe Make this Nightmare a Reality.” February 23, 2015. https://tgeu.org/nightmare/.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic Press.
PROFILE: INDIAN RIGHTS FOR INDIAN WOMEN: KATHLEEN STEINHAUER, AN INDIGENOUS ACTIVIST IN CANADA
Sarah L. Quick
Kathleen Steinhauer (1932–2012) was a woman who bridged many worlds, many identities. She identified as First Nations and as Métis; while some assumed she was white. When I knew her she never wore pants, always skirts or dresses; and when she danced her traditional-style jigging in outdoor competitions, she would often wear a signature hat—daintily bobbing in time with the fiddle while her feet executed the steps with precision. She was also an activist but one who worked behind the scenes, collaborating with her more vocal friends on First Nations policy in Canada. It is important to note that after 1985 and Canada’s constitutional reforms, three umbrella groups were recognized as “Aboriginal” or Indigenous—Inuit, First Nations, and Métis. Those who had previously been recognized as Indians via treaty and the Indian Act are now known as First Nations. Métis has complex and contested meanings. It may refer to an affiliation with the Métis Nation that has a specific cultural history stemming from the Red River region of Manitoba or to a broader understanding of individuals and groups with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. In Kathleen’s case, she is Cree (First Nations) and white through her parents, but she also identified with the Métis Nation culturally speaking.
Kathleen initially grew up on Saddle Lake reserve, a Cree First Nations reserve in eastern Alberta, Canada. She then attended a Protestant residential school, the Edmonton Indian Residential School, from age five to eight. Here she and the other children regularly received corporal punishment, especially if they spoke Cree (see Steinhauer and Carlson 2013 for more details). A more positive story from her residential school years was when Kathleen recalled in an interview I conducted with her how she and other girls would secretly dance in the basement through a warning system they developed: one girl would watch and listen near the door, another at the landing to the upstairs, and another at the top of the stairs down to the basement. These girls were not completely passive in how they survived the residential school system. Once her mother realized that the school was mistreating Kathleen and her sisters, she began to homeschool them. Other First Nations and Métis children did not have this luxury, but she had some leeway, since her mother was white and adamant about the conditions there (Steinhauer and Carlson 2013, 16).
See: Kathleen Steinhauer Red River Jigging at the John Arcand Fiddle Fest in Saskatchewan, Canada, https://youtu.be/qqlNZAVhJ9A.
Kathleen continued her schooling by training as a nurse. After she had been a nurse for a number of years, she married her second husband in 1965. With this marriage, she lost her treaty rights because her husband was a “non-status Indian.” She, along with many other First Nations women (over five thousand), were involuntarily “enfranchised” once they married someone who was not registered as an official member of an “Indian band” (Leddy 2016). Canada’s enfranchisement policies promoted assimilation and Canadian citizenship. For example, before 1960, “enfranchised Indians” could vote in federal elections while those who retained their “Indian status” could not (Leslie 2016). In reality, these enfranchisement policies meant disenfranchisement or a loss of Indigenous rights. Those who were “enfranchised” were not allowed to live on the reserve, inherit reserve property, vote in reserve matters, or have access to health or education benefits recognized by treaty (Goyette 2013, xxxiii).
These enfranchisement policies also affected women differently than men. When men married women who were non-Indigenous or “non-status,” their wives then gained access to these Indigenous rights. As Kathleen would remind me, her own white mother had gained access to these rights upon marrying her father, while she was denied them for marrying someone legally “non-status.” The ideology behind these policies was that since women were the dependents, once they married someone non-Indigenous, they no longer needed to depend on the benefits granted by treaty to Indigenous people.
In protest of Canada’s unequal treatment of Indigenous women, Kathleen joined forces in the late 1960s with other women activists from Saddle Lake living in Edmonton—Nellie Carlson, who had also been at the same residential school as Kathleen—Jenny Margetts, as well as more well-known activists from the east, Mary Two-Axe Early, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, and Sandra Lovelace Nicholas. They eventually formed what became the national Indian Rights for Indian Women organization, which sought to overturn the inherently sexist and colonial ideology running through Canada’s policies toward women. They met with politicians, protested at rallies, wrote letters to newspapers, and became legal experts through their many court battles with the Canadian state. They also suffered backlash from the government, the press, from groups like the National Indian Brotherhood (what became the Assembly of First Nations), and even from relatives in their families.
After years protesting their unfair loss of rights, these women finally saw some justice in 1985 when Canada amended these exclusionary policies with what is called Bill C-31. This bill reinstated women and their children’s membership. However, for Kathleen, the struggle did not end here because Canada’s Indian Affairs reinstated her to her first husband’s band. It was not until 1999, thirty-nine years after she had lost her rights and after years of working with lawyers and another court case that Kathleen was reinstated to the Saddle Lake Cree Nation to which she belonged at birth (Steinhauer and Carlson 2013, 100–108).
As one of her granddaughters, Jessie Loyer, recalled in reflecting on Kathleen’s legacy, “Activism was always at the heart of what she did. … She cared so strongly about justice that she worked tirelessly.” Kathleen died in March of 2012, and Jessie thought that she would have appreciated the Idle No More movement that arose later that year in protest of the federal government’s disregard for the environment and Indigenous sovereignty. It saddened Jessie that she could not speak to her grandmother directly about Idle No More nor take her to its rallies. Idle No More was founded by women, and while Kathleen was not a part of its emergence, she and the other activist women in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s laid the groundwork for these twenty-first-century Indigenous activists.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
• Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2015. “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1: 54–74.
• Canadian Encyclopedia online. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca.
• “Disinherited Love: Matrimony and the Indian Act.” 2018. Permanent exhibit at the Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton, Alberta.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Kathleen Steinhauer’s family, especially her daughter Celina Loyer and her granddaughter Jessie Loyer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carlson, Nellie, and Kathleen Steinhauer. 2013. Disinherited Generations: Our Struggle to Reclaim Treaty Rights for First Nations Women and their Descendants. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Goyette, Linda. 2013. “Introduction.” In Disinherited Generations: Our Struggle to Reclaim Treaty Rights for First Nations Women and their Descendants, edited by Nellie Carlson and Kathleen Steinhauer, xxi–xliv. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Leddy, Lianne C. 2016. “Indigenous Women and the Franchise.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indigenous-women-and-the-franchise. Accessed July 27, 2019.
Leslie, John F. 2016. “Indigenous Suffrage.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/indigenous-suffrage. Accessed November 6, 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Gendered_Lives%3A_Global_Issues/05%3A_The_Global_North_(North_America_and_Europe)/5.01%3A_The_Global_North-_Introducing_the_Region.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Identify and analyze gender and parental social roles.
• Distinguish between backstage and front-stage behaviors and impression management using Goffman’s dramaturgical method.
• Interpret the rise of the Mommy Wars as a result of both technological change and unachieved feminist goals.
In this chapter, the author explores the competitive nature of the fishbowl culture in upper-middle-class communities in the northeastern United States and the ways that online forums mediate idealized parenting performances. The author addresses how these sites are used to help mothers with “impression management,” allowing women to practice their performances and improve the impressions they will provide for their real-life audiences in the future.
This chapter discusses research done with upper-middle-class cisgender heterosexual mothers in New York City who participate in the anonymous online discussion boards UrbanBaby.com (UB) and YouBeMom.com (YBM). In the age of “intensive parenting,” the social status of these mothers is inexorably tied to their parenting. Many in this social arena believe that if a mother is unwilling to give up (almost) everything in her previous life, then she should not have children. There are few who achieve this ideal, but many feel pressure to present this image to the world. This creates a tension between the social role of mother and the private reality of wanting to complain and have another identity. A social role is the expected behavior of a person who holds a known status. These boards are where female posters can drop the “perfect” façade and be their more “authentic” selves. These online spaces allow them to express insecurity when they should appear confident, to be rude when they are expected to be polite, and to be clueless when they are looked to for answers. In other words, these boards allow them to be more authentically human. On YBM and UB, it is possible to see some of the social tensions around the role of mother not changing as much as the role of a female employee. This leads to heated debates regarding parenting choices in paid employment versus maternal-only childcare that is part of the “Mommy Wars.”
Definition: social role
the expected behaviors of a person who holds a known status.
DESCRIPTION OF BOARDS
There are many websites with discussion boards devoted to the topics of pregnancy and childhood. Patricia Drentea and Jennifer Moren-Cross (2005) found these parenting boards to be places of both emotional and instrumental support that create and maintain social capital. The 2011 book Motherhood Online, edited by Michelle Moravec, discusses websites where mothers can get support regarding their personal lives. BabyCenter.com is currently the largest and most popular parenting site, serving over forty-five million users (babycenter.com/about). It has usernames and images that identify every post with a user. Those users are expected to be warm and supportive, giving virtual hugs “((((((HUGS))))))” when someone is having trouble.
UB and YBM do not provide this gender-specific comfort and loving support. They are believed to be populated by mean and nasty women. Even asking about how to change one’s eating patterns to more healthy ones can lead to a poster being told: “You sound fat.” John Suler coined the phrase “online disinhibition effect” for how people behave online in ways that might be hurtful to others, while they would not in real life (IRL). People act this way because of anonymity, invisibility (those being attacked cannot be seen), solipsistic introjection (lack of face-to-face cues), dissociative imagination (online is not “real life”), minimization of status and authority, individual differences, and predispositions and shifts among intrapsychic constellations (individuals showing a “true self” that they would typically hide) (Suler 2004). It happens to both genders but is more shocking to the viewer when the verbally abusive posters are female, never mind mothers.
Susan and John Maloney founded urbanbaby.com in August 1999. The site provided articles and information to expectant and new parents across the country. The most popular feature was the message board because it was an anonymous place for parents to speak without negative repercussions IRL. CNET bought the site in 2006 (Benkoil 2013) and is run by CBS. UB was ranked the 63,435th most popular website in global internet engagement in 2008 but fell to 314,048th in 2019 (Alexa.com 2019). This popularity came with notoriety as well. Jen Chung (2004) of Gawker.com said that it is a “must read if you’re about to have a kid in the five bouroughs [sic].” Journalist Emily Nussbaum (2006) called UB “the collective id” of some groups of New York City mothers and a “snake pit.” The site is famous not only for the snark but also as an anonymous and free resource on parenting in the New York area.
UB’s design is currently a relatively straightforward discussion board.
In 2008, UB changed its format to what you see in figure 16.1. Anyone can read the content, but commenting requires a username and password. The “Search Box” is not functional since a second reorganization in 2012. The “Most Popular” posts, listed on the right, are the ones that get the most responses. The gray links underneath the black posts allow a user to reply to a post, click on “watch” to create a personalized list, and “more” for the time stamp and ability to “flag” a post. Flagging is an effort to get CBS.com moderators to delete inappropriate (offensive or spam) posts.
The 2008 changes upset many longtime UB users, claiming the site was slower and less agile. Several New York–based news outlets reported users’ anger; in fact, the New York Times titled their article “Don’t Mess with Mom’s Chat” (Kaufman 2008). The negative fallout indicated how popular the site was in New York City and how UB members are politically and socially well connected. Mondeep Puri and an anonymous other former UB user founded a new website called YouBeMom.com. It has been called “the 4chan for mothers” (O’Conner 2014). The user demographic is similar and overlapping, and some move fluidly from one to the other, as verbatim questions appear within minutes of each other.
On YBM, only the first 180 characters are visible, and a user must click to see the remainder. It became possible to “delete” posts in mid-June 2017, a feature that posters have been using as a hedge against embarrassment. If three other users hit “dislike,” a comment will be “hidden” from view but not deleted. The “hide—like—dislike—reply” buttons are visible when a user clicks on a post. There is a “most liked” category and “most discussed” on the top navigation bar as well as a search box.
GEOGRAPHIC SETTING—VIRTUAL OR NEW YORK CITY?
The research setting is a virtual community. It is a social network of people interacting using technology to pursue shared interests and goals that cross boundaries of geography, time, and politics (Rheingold 1993). The issue with saying UB and YBM are exclusively virtual communities is that it ignores the geographic grounding to the participants and their knowledge bases. These boards are used to communicate about parenting in a geographic location—the stores, schools, playgrounds, activities, etc.—that community members access regularly. Therefore, these virtual communities have a tie to the locations where their participants live. Posters are not looking for someone to tell them that they are insane to spend up to \$50K a year for kindergarten. Instead, they want to know about the admissions process for a particular school. The geographic base of knowledge is small, and some people are only interested in getting recommendations close to their own homes.
Definition: virtual community
a social network of people interacting using technology to pursue shared interests and goals that cross boundaries of geography, time, and politics.
“WHO ARE THESE WOMEN?”
It is virtually impossible to know the exact demographics of the users of these sites because their personal data are not collected. In various articles about the users of these sites, community members are described as rich and mean women with too much time on their hands. Nolan (2012) says the site is “home to some of the most self-loathing, wealthy, haughty, and miserable parents in all of America.” I have a sense of demographics based on personal experience from 2009 to 2012 and official research between 2012 and 2019. YBM and UB populations skew heavily female, parents, geographically in the boroughs (counties) of Manhattan and gentrified Brooklyn with a significant subset of former Manhattanites and residents of the greater Tri-State Area commutable to New York City (meaning southern New York State, northern New Jersey, and much of Connecticut). They also are significantly wealthier than the median income (over \$71,897 in 2018; see datausa.com) college-educated, Democratic political leanings, and white/Caucasian. There are indications of different lengths of tenure on each of the sites, longer on YBM and shorter on UB. One of my interviews was with a woman who said she was a former resident of Manhattan who moved to New Jersey, had two children, and stayed at home with them. She had initially gone to the site (as many informants reported) to find out about New York City’s competitive preschool application process. Although her children were in middle school by the time we talked, she enjoyed the ability to speak her mind and engage in “the drama” from the safety of her own home. In fact, she may enjoy it too much as she said she was “addicted” and had to ask her husband to block the website from their router most of the time in order to have a strict limit on her usage.
MOTHERHOOD AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
Most people can recognize that a job interview is a performance. Job seekers research the organization, get business attire ready in advance, prepare answers to potentially tricky questions, and ensure that they show their best selves at the interview. Parenting has increasingly become a performance as well. Since Sharon Hays reported the rise of “intensive parenting” in 1998, pregnancy, birth, childhood, and parenthood have become part of a carefully executed show requiring parental (read: maternal) supervision. Aspects of this have been true for centuries. The competitive nature of the culture in upscale parts of the northeastern United States shows how UB or YBM can become an invaluable lifeline. One of the primary reasons posters ask questions about UB and YBM is to poll others “like me.” They may ask, “What would you think if—” followed by a variety of parenting (or nonparenting) questions to shield themselves from judgment IRL. The anonymity allows people to give and get advice without harm to an individual’s reputation as a “good mother.”
The boards demonstrate the dramaturgical method, developed by Erving Goffman (1959) in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He suggested that humans interact differently depending on the time, place, and audience present to view that “performance” or action. It indicates that people are actors playing (social) roles during their daily lives. The status that a person has is the part in the play, while the role is the script. The script informs the person of the appropriate words and movements for the part they are playing at this moment. Individuals can present themselves and create an impression in the minds of others (impression management) by changing status and role depending on social interaction. For example, most people present a different “self” to an in-law than to a spouse in terms of behaviors and expressions.
Definition: impression management
the manner in which individuals present themselves and create a perception in the mind of others by changing status and roles depending on social interaction.
Goffman says that daily interactions in which people know there is an audience for his/her status and role are called front-stage behaviors. People are aware that they are performing in the front stage. There is a set of observers for whom a performance is being put on and a series of behaviors that social actors are expected to demonstrate. The performance has a goal of infallibility as “errors and mistakes are often corrected before the performance takes place, while telltale signs that errors have been made and corrected are themselves concealed” (Goffman 1978, 52). Those errors are discussed and fixed in backstage areas with compatriots who want to help you perfect your performance.
Definition: front stage
a social or physical space where people are aware that they are performing a role for observers and a series of behaviors that social actors are expected to demonstrate.
Definition: backstage
a social or physical space where people get help putting together a performance. Others help them perfect their portrayal of a particular role that they will demonstrate at another time or place.
There are several signs to indicate that someone is in a backstage region or engaging in backstage behavior. First, they are among people for whom status does not depend on a positive review, or where one can “let down [their] hair.” Goffman quotes feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir who stated the following:
With other women, a woman is behind the scenes; she is polishing her equipment, but not in battle; she is getting her costume together, preparing her make-up, laying out her tactics; she is lingering in a dressing-gown and slippers in the wings before making her entrance on the stage; she likes this warm, easy, relaxed atmosphere … for some women this warm and frivolous intimacy is dearer than the serious pomp and relations with men. (Goffman 1959, 113, ellipses in original)
This sort of informality and willingness to challenge authority is what Goffman called “backstage language,” which might be taken as disrespectful for people and places considered “front stage.” Posters on UB and YBM use atypical “female” language, including profanity or aggressive, opinionated speech patterns, further indicating that this is a backstage area.
Rebecca Tardy (2000) provided a Goffmanesque analysis of a playgroup of mothers in a college town. Tardy discusses the social pressure put on mothers to prove they are “good” moms. If they meet this standard, they should be able to protect their children from getting sick, which is impossible. She suggests that these mothers have two front stages. The first is in front of the “regular” world of mixed genders and representations of themselves as successful stay-at-home mothers. The next is the playgroup, which on the surface appears to be backstage because they can get information about being a mother, discuss their parenting issues, and talk about the messy biology of motherhood. However, Tardy found that in this backstage, the women were playing the role of a devoted mother. Tandy found that only in the activities associated with “Mom’s Night Out,” where the children were not present, could the women drop the role of mother and engage in less “good mom” impression management.
Drew Ross analyzed the benefits of using anonymous people as backstage resources to achieve goals. He researched an online community of people trying to pass a difficult test to become a London taxi driver. The average applicant spent two to four years studying over three hundred routes on twenty-five thousand streets as well as over twenty thousand landmarks within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross (TheKnowledgeTaxi). As studying for this test is an isolated and competitive situation, a website was created by test takers and those who have passed by test takers and those who have passed the test to assist others. People would post questions before or after they went out to learn one of the routes. Ross’s discussion of expertise pooling shows how these boards are learning networks based on active participation and communication between those who know and those who do not. Both future cabbies and these mothers need a space where more experienced learners mentor those less experienced ones by answering questions.
FEMINISM ON DISPLAY
Gender and gender roles (see introduction) in the United States support the idea that women are viewed primarily as caregivers and that their contribution to the household is valued less than that of males. The idea of these discussion boards being a place for women to communicate about the problems and to assist each other, harkens back to First Wave feminism. Feminism is the idea that there should be economic, social, and political equality between people regardless of sex or gender. Feminist critique in anthropology was defined by Henrietta Moore (1988) as the analysis of gender and how gender is a structuring principle in society. Carol Hanisch (1969) stated that “the personal is political.” The “political” was not referring to elected office but a way to show that women do not have unique problems in society. Women who experience disrespect and discrimination have a set of challenges that can be addressed politically. First-wave feminism focused on earning the right to vote and other legal protections, while second-wave feminism looked at discrimination and equality with the slogan “the personal is political.” The idea behind this slogan is that if all housewives (typically white, middle-class, and heterosexual) discussed their personal issues they would become conscious of their common oppression. Third-wave feminism was to address the class and racial biases of the preceding two movements. In theory, YBM and UB could function as such consciousness-raising environments. There are elements of this where women get help in determining how to manage a tough workplace, “I just reached out to a former boss. Only been here a week and I hate it. How do I phrase it?” Yet when women admit to taking time to themselves, they are flamed (criticized) for maternal neglect. “My child just drew a picture of me sitting on my computer YBMing” resulted in a huge backlash. The pressures of the expectations of female behavior are demonstrated in the various ways that educated and wealthy women bicker and defend their choices. In theory, these backstage spaces should provide a greater awareness of the common problems of a single gender. Instead, there is anger and criticism. The division of women into warring factions rather than as a united whole has been a significant failing of the feminist movement. Nussbaum (2006) said, “If you read UrbanBaby, it’s hard not to be unsettled by the same conclusion that hit Friedan when she surveyed the mothers of America: that what seem like women’s private struggles can be seen as an expression of their shared experience.”
Definition: gender
the set of culturally and historically invented beliefs and expectations about gender that one learns and performs (e.g., masculine, feminine). Gender is an “identity” one can choose in some societies, but there is pressure in all societies to conform to expected gender roles and identities.
Definition: gender roles
the tasks and activities that a specific culture assigns to a gender.
Definition: feminism
the idea that there should be economic, social, and political equality between people regardless of sex or gender.
Definition: first-wave feminism
from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, focusing on earning the right to vote and emancipation of women from fathers and husbands.
Definition: second-wave feminism
focused on gender-based discrimination in the 1960s–1980s
Definition: third-wave feminism
brought up the idea that feminism and gender-based needs and oppressions differ based on class, race/ethnicity, nationality, and religion.
MOMMY WARS
Mommy Wars refers to the idea that choices that women make in their roles as mothers line them up on opposing sides of a battlefield. It starts with the decisions around birth, to have an unmedicated childbirth, an epidural (a shot in the spine to stop the pain) or a cesarean section, continues with circumcising male babies or leaving them “intact,” to co-sleep or put a baby in a separate crib. Breastfeeding or formula feeding, letting a six-month-old baby “learn to sleep” by “crying it out” or if a child is rocked to sleep until he or she learns how to “go to sleep” is worthy of arguments with strangers. Daycare for socialization or a private nanny is not only a status signifier but can be seen as setting a child up for a lifetime of success or failure, depending on the individual’s opinion. One of the most hotly debated topics is that of a mother’s employment status. A woman’s different decision in this arena is taken as a personal affront on another woman’s choice. Here it is important to note that it is not a question of a woman working or not impacting women or the feminist movement as a whole. Instead, it is a questioning of the other woman’s individual choice as being “wrong” or “right” in a grander scheme.
Definition: Mommy Wars
the idea that choices that women make in their roles as mothers line them up on opposing sides of a battlefield.
Historically, two people would meet face to face and talk behind the back of the individual. They were engaging in “gossip” while criticizing another person known to them. It was considered a shameful thing for the other person to know that the busybodies had discussed him or her. With the internet, these conversations are not only more public, but also people are more ready to directly confront another person about the choices that they are making with their children. An example arose in October 2019 when a mother was talking about how “outrageous” she thought it was that her children expected her to provide regular childcare to her grandchildren, calling her daughter-in-law “entitled.” After being flamed (criticized) on one thread in YBM, she started another where she was told, “Don’t tell us. Tell them.” But that is a harder thing to do, particularly with criticism of another woman’s lifestyle.
The Mommy Wars are about a social system that pits women against each other rather than focusing on raising their children to be productive adults. As Steiner said, “Motherhood in America is fraught with defensiveness, infighting, ignorance, and judgment about what’s best for kids, family, and women—a true catfight among women” (2007, x). A 2013 Quester poll stated that 64 percent of mothers believed the Mommy Wars exist, but only 29 percent of them have experienced it. This statistic implies that the Mommy Wars are about stereotypes of different styles of mothering, rather than the reality of mothering. Women appear to only engage in the sort of competitive discussions or direct attacks in situations where the “other” is not personally known to them. It is difficult to criticize one’s sister-in-law to her face for her parenting choices. It is far easier to do it to a close friend one has little to no contact with by saying, “She’s so lazy. My brother works so hard, and she just sits at home.” But even more comfortable is to post comments on UB or YBM where no one can defend this friend (they can only support a stereotype of her). More importantly, no one can trace this criticism back to either her or you.
The Stay at Home/Work Out of the Home [SAH/WOH] debate is almost a daily “Most Discussed/Popular” on UB and YBM. Some posters go online to the boards to argue their side of an issue they have in real life, but others may be genuinely looking to understand the “opposing” points of view better. Many posters believe these choices indicate what sort of a mother you are—kind or cruel, selfish or selfless. The decision for a mother to stay at home with her child(ren) includes her desires, her spouse, as well as gender roles and economics. Many women on the boards suggest that their posttax salaries were not significantly higher than that of the nanny. According to Gold (2018), nannies earned \$17.63 per hour for an average of fifty hours a week totaling just over \$45,000 per annum. This is the take-home salary of a pediatric nurse (Ward 2017). While in college, women are not as strongly encouraged as men to think about the economic impact of their career choices. Also, they are encouraged implicitly or tacitly toward the more “feminine” careers of teaching, social work, or human resources. These are often believed to be more suited to a woman’s interests in relationships and interactions with people or a desire to help. They also pay significantly less than being a professor, psychologist, or accountant. Even if a husband and wife are both on career tracks to be corporate lawyers, the woman’s role as a “litigator” takes a back seat to that of “mother” and often not by choice. Johnston and Swanson’s 2006 research indicates that many mothers must plan their work around their duties as a mother.
Many of these culturally defined choices restrict how mothers can behave in the workplace, much more so than in the case of men. Men are fathers if they have a child, but women are only mothers if they meet specific social standards. Men are rarely judged negatively for their interactions with their children. If they provide financial support for their children, they are considered acceptable fathers, but the reverse is not always true for mothers. Women who work for a salary twelve hours a day may be derided on the boards as “auntie mommy,” implying that they are only partially in their children’s lives. Conversely, fathers can travel to another city for work from Monday through Friday and still be “good fathers” because they are “providing.”
The dynamic of the man earning more than the woman is expected. The economic provision to the family is believed to be biologically male work while child-rearing or home-making is female work. As Enobong Hanna Branch (2016) points out, these dichotomies are not as strong in the African American culture, which is a further indication that members of these boards are culturally Caucasian. In truth, there are no male or female childrearing tasks (other than breastfeeding); there are only tasks around the house and money that needs to be earned.
There is a sizable portion of the UB/YBM population who believe that women are uniquely and biologically destined to be caregivers. These posters not only talk about their own choices as being “natural” and “normal” but also denigrate those women who do not make the same ones. When asking a woman why she chose to go part time, she said “because I want to raise my own children.” This is coded language implying that those mothers who work are no longer the ones raising their kids. Instead, the “mother” role has been transferred to the (often) nonwhite and less educated nanny. This attitude is reflected in the core belief that women are born nurturers and the current cultural obsession of protecting children to the point at which they become “snowflakes.” To call a person a “snowflake” means that they are sheltered and coddled (or they might “melt” easily). To maintain protection of these precious children, a parent (read: mother) is necessary, as a paid help is often not as careful or nurturing.
One of the things that drives many women to quit good jobs and that many posters discuss is that they are expected to take care of the second shift. Hochschild and Machung’s (1989), “second shift” refers to the time spent on household and childrearing tasks that mothers feel constitutes unacknowledged work. It is the time spent on these domestic chores that her social status of “mother” depends on. The second shift of work is unrecognized by the first paid job, as employers do not allow for flexibility regarding family demands on their employees. This means that as long as the idea of “caregiver” remained female, women feel this second shift as being their responsibility. When discussing a poster’s decision to move from a work-at-home job to work in an office, another said, “It’s not as easy as outsourcing and forgetting about it [childcare]. It’s still a lot of work to manage plus a commute and a full-time new job” (UB 2019, errors in original). This reflects a difference in expected “responsibility” for the children. This feeling of responsibility leads to a great deal of mental labor, which M. Blazoned (2014) labeled the “default parent.” This is a gender-neutral term for what most Americans would say is the “mom.” If a woman on YBM or UB tries to complain that her husband “has no idea when our son has to go to his therapies” or “out of town and husband didn’t send our daughter with a packed lunch for her trip. So the teacher called me” instead of receiving support for a common issue, she is often chastised. Typical responses might be, “Well, you married him” a reaction reflective of a patriarchal tone that continues to assign women the primary responsibility for family care, according to economist Nancy Folbre (2012). She suggests that one of the keys to an equal society is to define “family care as a challenging and important achievement for everyone rather than a sacred obligation for women alone.”
Definition: second shift
the time parents spent on household and child-rearing tasks after the paid work has ended.
Women on UB and YBM have the education and means to reject that these stereotypical social roles of mothers are for women only, but they are deeply internalized. If these women accept the social norms of men as financially supporting the family, they are criticized by those on the opposite side, namely those who work. If a woman laments that she cannot afford to buy something, she is told: “Well then get a job.” The most virulent arguments happen when a divorce is on the horizon, and the SAH spouse is told that she has to support herself. The soon-to-be-divorced poster will argue that she and her husband made the decision together, so he should continue to support her and the children financially. The argument against her is that once she became “dependent on a man” that she was running the risk of this happening. One of the advantages of these boards is that your “backstage helpers” can provide clear and actionable advice before women are ready to tell people in real life. This can include the need to collect financial documents, set up a separate bank account, and obtain the names of good local divorce attorneys.
These rigid roles are reflected in discussions of an SAH dad or those husbands who are unemployed. Some posters say that the family decided that the mother’s career was more lucrative, so the father stayed home. This works for them, but their posts are often tinged with defensiveness and guilt, likely representing their experiences going against the cultural norm. The husbands who are out of work often claim that the nanny needs to continue her work because he cannot both care for the children and look for a new job. The reverse is not true because SAH mothers report that they are able to get interviews and are hired before they get a nanny to replace their household labor. The SAH fathers who achieve the female ideal are still not given the same respect expected by the SAH mothers. They are described as “beta” men, meaning that they were SAH because they were not strong enough to dominate with the alphas in the workplace.
DISCUSSION
While YBM and UB can help mothers present better offline impressions, they can also be harsh and accusatory, criticizing these women’s perceived internalized lack of respect for their roles in a family, employment, and society as a whole. As such, the Mommy Wars and the conversations around them provide a critical window into American feminism that has not yet been addressed. Online disinhibition explains the angry backstage behaviors but not the particular virulence that arises when discussing topics that surround the Mommy Wars. Based on the participant observation research, it is possibly due to three potentially interrelated reasons. First, the required changes in social roles have not occurred. Although girls have been taught that they “can be anything,” this related only to the workplace. If they choose to be mothers, that social status of all-encompassing love and protector of children with a father as a provider has not changed. Second is the internet. Online disinhibition and the increased contact through discussion boards (such as UB and YBM), social media (Facebook and Instagram), and the proliferation of online information sources have brought people the means of expressing opinions to people with different points of view. Parents (indeed everyone) can find an echo chamber that reinforces their particular worldview, which leads to hardened opinions and stronger adverse reactions to “the other.” Third, there remains a good deal of internal misogyny that is revealed in these anonymous backstage spaces. Women attack each other’s choices, not only to bolster their own decisions but because there is seemingly no choice a woman can make that is the correct one. Both working outside the home and staying at home with children are “wrong” choices that either hurt the family, the children, or all women. Conversely, fathers can get social support for working hard or finding work/life balance, and they only experience social backlash if they engage in the female task of SAH parenting. This is the paradox of so-called choice feminism being accepted before basic respect for women was achieved. Instead of every choice being a feminist one to be celebrated, none of the options are respected.
Definition: participant observation
A research methodology used in cultural anthropology. It consists of a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What social roles do you play in a typical day?
2. What is your “backstage” and who helps you with your “impression management”?
3. What was your thought process in deciding on your major (or prospective major)? Did gender play a role? Did future career earnings? Why or why not?
4. Why have gender roles in the workplace changed more readily than those of mother and father?
5. The author puts forth several possible reasons for the Mommy Wars. Which is most convincing to you? Why?
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
• Ammari, T., S. Schoenebeck, and D. M. Romero. 2018. “Pseudonymous Parents: Comparing Parenting Roles and Identities on the Mommit and Daddit subreddits.” In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April): 1–13.
• Collett, J. L. 2005. “What Kind of Mother am I? Impression Management and the Social Construction of Motherhood. Symbolic Interaction 28, no. 3: 327–347.
• Marshall, Debra. “Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgy.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTSG6YtaeY.
• Scarborough, W. J., R. Sin, and B. Risman. 2019. “Attitudes and the Stalled Gender Revolution: Egalitarianism, Traditionalism, and Ambivalence from 1977 through 2016.” Gender & Society 33, no. 2: 173–200.
KEY TERMS
backstage: a social or physical space where people get help putting together a performance. Others help them perfect their portrayal of a particular role that they will demonstrate at another time or place.
feminism: the idea that there should be economic, social, and political equality between people regardless of sex or gender.
first-wave feminism: from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, focusing on earning the right to vote and emancipation of women from fathers and husbands.
front stage: a social or physical space where people are aware that they are performing a role for observers and a series of behaviors that social actors are expected to demonstrate.
gender: the set of culturally and historically invented beliefs and expectations about gender that one learns and performs (e.g., masculine, feminine). Gender is an “identity” one can choose in some societies, but there is pressure in all societies to conform to expected gender roles and identities.
gender roles: the tasks and activities that a specific culture assigns to a gender.
impression management: the manner in which individuals present themselves and create a perception in the mind of others by changing status and roles depending on social interaction.
Mommy Wars: the idea that choices that women make in their roles as mothers line them up on opposing sides of a battlefield.
participant observation: A research methodology used in cultural anthropology. It consists of a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.
second-wave feminism: focused on gender-based discrimination in the 1960s–1980s
second shift: the time parents spent on household and child-rearing tasks after the paid work has ended.
social role: the expected behaviors of a person who holds a known status.
third-wave feminism: brought up the idea that feminism and gender-based needs and oppressions differ based on class, race/ethnicity, nationality, and religion.
virtual community: a social network of people interacting using technology to pursue shared interests and goals that cross boundaries of geography, time, and politics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the academic support of Roger Sanjek, Julie Gedro, Cynthia Ward, and Ruth Goldberg and the personal support of my parents (Alan and Irene Warshauer), my husband (Matthew Tratner), children (Ian and Miles) as well as friends and family. I would like to dedicate this work to my mother, a trailblazing woman in the legal profession who found her own way as a wife and mother, and my father, a feminist in word and deed.
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Learning Objectives
• Define and describe the diversity of sex work and sex workers.
• Summarize the gendered nature of sex work law and policy in Canada.
• Articulate how the experiences of male sex workers over the lifespan are shaped by gender and sexuality.
In this chapter, the author explores the experiences of male sex workers in a midsized Canadian city. He critiques the legal and political perspectives that portray prostitution as exploitative, regardless of what sex workers say or feel, (re)producing gendered stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and naturalizing a certain type of heterosexual behavior. This, the author argues, overlooks how intersectionality shapes autonomy and vulnerability. Through their stories, the author addresses the structural violence that these men experience.
INTRODUCTION
For every hundred girls peddling their wares on street corners, there are a hundred unobtrusive male prostitutes, of all ages, offering their services to both heterosexual and homosexual clients. Students, university graduates—some married, some with other jobs—they are almost invisible, and the police hardly know of their existence. (Taylor 1991, 97)
Labor involving “sexual, sensual, and erotic energies and parts of the body” (Truong 1990 as cited in Kempadoo 2001, 38) has been interwoven into the fabric of many societies throughout world history. Nevertheless, sex work and the people involved remain misunderstood, marginalized, and devalued. Between 2014 to 2017, I conducted ethnographic research with forty-three male sex workers in London, Ontario, Canada. Through semistructured interviews they shared their life stories while also giving insight into the sex industry in the region. These stories help inform this text. All names are pseudonyms, and descriptors of occupation, activity, or behavior are self-identified labels. London is a midsized city located two hundred kilometers (125 miles) from Toronto and Detroit along the Quebec City–Windsor transportation corridor. With a metropolitan population of close to a half million people, it is the eleventh most populous municipality in Canada (Statistics Canada 2016). I chose London for study in part because it has served as a historic epicenter of female-centered research and advocacy in Canada since the 1970s and 1980s. This reinforced and created structural violence (Nathanson and Young 2006) with fewer (if any) equivalent services for men, and is linked to the lack of previous research on male sex work.
Definition: structural violence
the systematic ways in which social structures harm or disadvantage individuals and thus create and maintain social inequalities.
Due to the mostly underground nature, contentious legal status, and stigmatization of the sex industry, defining its actual size and scale is problematic. In Canada, like much of the world, policymakers and service providers use statistics from incompatible and biased samples of limited size and inconsistent scope, privileging gender as the essential factor involved in sexual transactions. Declaring that women selling sex to men is the primary form of sex work ignores a spectrum of gendered and sexualized interactions, situational and cultural contexts, historical variability, and the complex socioeconomic conditions that produce sexual relations and desire. This practice and belief, however, does not explain why men (and those of other genders) who sell sex are most often overlooked (Dennis 2008).
WHAT IS SEX WORK?
Generally defined, sex work encompasses activities related to the exchange of intimate services for payment. What counts as intimate (or sexual) and what counts as payment varies from person to person, over time, in law, and by society and other structural conditions (Gozdiak 2016). Sex work occurs in a variety of settings and includes a multitude of behaviors, including escorting, massage, prostitution, erotic dance and stripping, pornographic performances, professional domination (sadomasochism), fetish work, internet cam shows, and phone chatlines (van der Meulen, Durisin, and Love 2013). Informal sexual encounters in exchange for small cash gifts, a meal out or a bar tab, or a place to sleep, as well as relationships that prioritize the economic security of the other partner (sugar relationships), press at the edges of what may be classified as commercial sex (Mitchell 2015).
Sex work and prostitution as terms convey specific cultural histories that are not universal. The Latin root of the term prostitute signifies “to dishonor” or “expose someone to shame and rebuke” (Buschi 2014, 726). This resonates with prostitution as a social category, used to ostracize and stigmatize; to deny women the same rights as average citizens (Pheterson 1989). Resisting this and other discourses that delineated sex workers as diseased, deviant, criminal, or disturbed, American activist Carol Leigh conceived the term “sex work,” redefining prostitution as a type of labor (Bell 1994; Bindman 1997; O’Connell Davidson 1998; Parent and Bruckert 2013; Pateman 1988; Tong 1998). While Marxism depicts all labor as exploitation in capitalist systems, this paradigm helped illustrate that regardless of how they feel about their jobs, people sell sex for the same reason everyone else works: to make money. Meanwhile, some feminists define prostitution as violence against women (symptomatic of patriarchal oppression), which for them means that selling sex could never be “work” (Dennis 2008).
To complicate matters further, some individuals do not define their actions as sex work due to the type of activities involved. This is the sentiment shared by Mike, a gay, twenty-eight-year-old professional companion for men: “I’m not technically a sex worker. I’m more of a companion with benefits technically. The only reason is because it’s not always about the sex” (Mike, interview by author, July 3, 2015). Since there is a hierarchy among sex workers, some people do not want to be lumped together with other people selling sex (Simon 2018). Phil, a forty-three-year-old gay escort for men emphasizes his professional identity: “I’m not a junkie and I’m not a thief and I take my work seriously” (Phil, interview by author, July 20, 2016). Some people, like exotic dancers who do not actually “sell sex” as part of their primary job, do not consider themselves sex workers. Bashir, a twenty-one-year-old straight stripper and former model speaks about one of the two times he escorted: “Because I was at my prime and not completely broke, I got to choose. She looked hot, and she looked clean. I just don’t go after random girls … [she paid me] \$1,500 for a … private dance” (Bashir, interview by author, March 11, 2016). There are also those who do not consider what they did or what they do as sex work due to the frequency of interactions or a change in their relationship with a client. This could include someone who sold sex once out of desperation; someone who does not receive money but receives payment in another form; someone dating a rich man who pays for everything; or those dating former clients.
Despite its political purpose, the term sex work can be problematic because it highlights the taboo part of the job, the sexual act, which is not always a requirement. As workers engage in emotional labor, sometimes there is no physical contact of any kind as they provide companionship, a shoulder to cry on, or paid friendship. Some clients and workers develop long-lasting friendships or relationships, countering stereotypes of exploitation, objectification, and depersonalization. Of course, like other jobs, there are negative aspects of the work and undesirable people a worker must deal with. Depending on a sex worker’s level of financial freedom and ability to choose which clients they will work with, the enjoyment experienced in some sexual encounters can become integral to their nonwork sex lives (Walby 2012). For Phil, attractive clients were a fringe benefit: “Sometimes I’ll get a guy who actually turns me on … I should be paying him for this, I think, but I can’t tell him that. Your personal life crosses into work” (Phil, interview by author, July 20, 2016). When a sex worker does find a client attractive or engages in nonsexual activities such as mutual nonsexual massage, caressing, kissing, cuddling, and hugging, they further complicate the personal and professional, sex and work.
Definition: emotional labor
the process of managing one’s own feelings in order to manage the feelings of others, as described by Hochschild (1983). For example, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, coworkers, and superiors.
OVERVIEW OF SEX WORK LAWS IN CANADA
The government doesn’t care about us. If you’re not a woman and you don’t have problems then we don’t really care.
—Dylan, twenty-three, flexible identity, escort for men and women (interview by author, October 10, 2014).
All forms of sex work have been subject to the changing whims of local, provincial, or federal police forces and lawmakers regardless of time period. The Indian Act of 1879 criminalized Indigenous women engaging in prostitution and barred others from providing these women housing. From about the 1890s to the 1970s prostitutes were depicted as subversives (vagrants), and any woman who was “found in a public place” without a chaperone and did not give “a good account of herself” was deemed arrestable under the Criminal Code (Martin 2002). For the most part, there was a narrow range of acceptable gendered behaviors, and for women “even minor deviance [could] be seen as a substantial challenge to the authority of the family” (Chambers 2007, 58). Under this patriarchal paradigm, prostitution was particularly threatening in that it defied gendered notions of the respectability of monogamous procreative relations where sexuality was consigned to the privacy of the bedroom of married heterosexual couples. Women and children of “good standing” needed to be protected from such public debauchery (Hubbard and Sanders 2003). No law was needed for men who sold sex to men because they fell under laws that criminalized same-sex sexual activity until 1969.
In the early 1970s, the institutionalization of women’s status and rights in the government structures of the Canadian nation-state helped to prioritize the needs of women-as-a-group (Stetson and Mazur 1995). During this period, feminist activism generally focused on issues of equal wages, affordable childcare, food, and housing, as well as access to reproductive health services (McKenna 2019). By the mid-1980s, feminists of color and lesbian feminists had been advocating against the “the dominance of white ‘Western,’ ‘north’ or ‘First World’ assumptions about what it means to be a feminist and what women need to be liberated where race, class and other intersecting positionalities were de-emphasized” (Bunjun 2010, 116; see Bumiller 2008; Heron 2007; Srivastava 2005). During the same period, further debate and fracture occurred over “the effects of commercial sexuality on the representation and treatment of all women” (McKenna 2019). Here stories of (male) violence against (female) sex workers were appropriated and whitewashed to illustrate the vulnerability of women and subsequently taken up in political discourse and policy.
In political response to public pressure to “do something” about the problem of street prostitution and violence against women, Parliament set up committees on pornography and prostitution (Fraser 1985) and on sexual offenses against children and youths (Badgley 1984). Fraser identified prostitution as symptomatic of women’s inequality and recommended partial decriminalization and strategies to reduce social and financial inequities. Badgley labeled young prostitutes as victims of abusive homes but favored criminal law strategies that would “help” fallen women and girls. In both cases no attempt was made to acknowledge or explain why men and boys (or others outside of the binary) sell sex. In the end, all aspects of street prostitution were criminalized and the “systematic murder of poor, racialized, and disproportionately Indigenous, street-based sex workers” was ignored for decades (McKenna 2019).
Between 2007 and 2013, both the province of Ontario Superior Court and the Supreme Court of Canada declared that the criminalization of prostitution had, in fact, violated the constitutional rights of sex workers by creating unsafe work conditions. In cases of violent or abusive clients, workers could not go to the police, hire security, or work in groups for fear of criminal punishment (Pivot Legal Society 2013). While sex worker rights organizations advocated for complete decriminalization, some radical-leaning feminist organizations such as the London Abused Women Centre had extensive political and public influence (Dawthorne 2018). They dominated media coverage declaring that prostitution reinforces gender inequalities “allowing men … paid access to female bodies, thereby demeaning and degrading the human dignity of all women and girls” (Department of Justice 2014).
For those outside of the gender binary, their erasure in antiprostitution arguments is a continuance of systems of cisnormativity. Under the frame of exploitation, sex work is reduced to penetrative (penile-vaginal) sexual intercourse, relegating heterosexual behavior to one assumed form, while heteronormative monogamous families and relationships are deemed universal (Dawthorne 2018). Here men are positioned as always sexually interested in women, and an ideology of hegemonic masculinity is reinforced, where “men are not supposed to be the objects of lust” or pursued as they are socially constructed as dominant, in-control, and virile (De Cecco 1991; Phoenix and Oerton 2005; Satz 1995).
Definition: cisnormativity
the assumption that privileges cisgender as the norm (that is, gender identity that corresponds to a person’s sex at birth).
Definition: hegemonic masculinity
a concept developed by Connell (1995) arguing that there are certain traits, behaviors, and discourses associated with masculinity that are valued and rewarded by dominant social groups and that the performance of hegemonic masculinity helps to legitimize power and inequality.
Combined with the pressure to belong to an international system of antitrafficking states (with Canada ratifying the Palermo protocols in 2002), prostitution laws were harmonized into the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA) by 2014. Instead of targeting sex workers themselves through arrest, the law focused on “ending demand,” arresting and fining male clients, reeducating them in John schools, and criminalizing the means to advertise sexual services (Hua and Nigorizawa 2010). Reflecting this change, police started labeling all incidents of men buying sex from women as sex trafficking, making it seem as if Canada was in a growing crisis.
Definition: Palermo protocols
a group of three international treaties adopted by the United Nations to supplement the 2000 Convention against Transnational Organized Crime Exploitation. One of these protocols described the crime of human trafficking as “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation” (United Nations 2004, iii).
Definition: John schools
forced rehabilitation program for men arrested for solicitation that teaches the negative consequences of prostitution on communities, families, and women (Nathanson and Young 2001).
MEN WHO SELL SEX
If I was a girl, it would be the biggest deal in the world. They’d be worried about my wellbeing and me getting hurt … there’s no such thing as a Jane school.
—Matt, twenty-three, heterosexual, “whore-for-women” (interview by author, May 24, 2016).
Men who sell sex in London are not copies of each other nor do they share any sort of collective activist identity or sense of community. They are a diverse group: at the time of interviews these men were between the ages of eighteen and fifty-one. Approximately 40 percent (n=18) entered the sex trade between fourteen and eighteen (µ=19.78) years of age. While a quarter (n=11) of the men grew up in lower-income families, more than half (n=27) reported coming from the middle class; seven men never completed high school, yet almost thirteen had completed or attended university.
Seventy-five percent (n=33) identified as white Canadian/Caucasian. One man identified as Southwest Asian, another as Cree/Indigenous, one Black/Rwandan, and another Arabic/Muslim from the Horn of Africa. The remainder identified as mixed ancestries of some variation: white, Black, or from an Indigenous community. Although some white men were racialized in their own way (i.e., working-class emotionless heteromasculinity), men of color discussed being fetishized. For nineteen-year-old Blake this extended to “acting black,” using street slang and acting aggressively, or requests for slave and master roleplay. Those few who had immigrated to Canada when they were children described having to deal with the heteromasculine norms and expectations of their parents’ home cultures. As 75 percent of the men identified as gay, queer, flexible, bisexual, Two-Spirit, or nonlabel, this was also common regardless of racial or ethnic background.
Definition: Two-Spirit
an English-language term meant to represent a diverse pan-Indigenous umbrella of gender, sex and sexuality variance, and subsequent ceremonial and social roles; often misunderstood as a term solely for individuals who are both male and female.
Definition: nonlabel sexuality
a nonidentity; can include people who are uncertain about their sexuality, are sexually fluid, or are resistant to the norms of identity labels.
REASONS WHY MEN SELL SEX
Often, experiences fit with normative ideas of causation and the preconceived notions of outsiders. These types of connections illustrate attributional biases, considering the fluidity and complexity of people’s lives and identities. Not all people with negative life experiences partake in the sex industry, and the industry is not solely composed of people with troubled pasts. While the internet facilitated about half of the men’s ability to sell sex, a third were introduced to the sex industry by male or female friends already in it; others had a friend or sibling who served as their broker. Regardless of the method of entry, earning money is the main motive for most when it comes to selling sex.
When faced with unfulfilled needs and impeded financial goals, sex work is one of the few options available for some (Smith and Grov 2011; Vanwesenbeeck 2012). Younger men who leave home for whatever reason can obtain earnings in sex work that they could not get anywhere else. In Canada, rental housing costs alone are higher than a full-time minimum-wage worker makes in any province (Macdonald 2019). Those who receive disability support payments typically only receive half this amount and those on unemployment even less. For postsecondary students in Ontario, campus grants and government student loans also place people in precarious positions. Compared to other jobs, working in the sex industry can mean more pay and fewer hours; the flexibility in working hours provides the freedom to attend to other commitments such as schoolwork. Furthermore, having a criminal background (over a quarter [n=12] of the men did disclose that they had some sort of criminal record), lack of qualifications, or the seasonality of work restrict the job options available.
The lower emotional, social, or cognitive requirements of particular sex work encounters, as well as flexibility and fewer hours also make sex work appealing for those who struggle with or are not accommodated by traditional employment due to substance use disorders, physical health, mental illness, lack of well-being, or mindset (Dawthorne 2018). Jobs in retail and fast-food restaurants (and manual labor) were found to be oppressive or demoralizing; coworkers, employers, and customers were said to be abusive; and the paycheck and hours were exploitative. Matt illustrates the point:
I have a lot of mental barriers, it makes it difficult for me to do certain types of work … not a lot of people are understanding of my different abilities, so it can really become stressful at times and I don’t always perform the best … they make you feel like children … I thought making a sandwich would be a lot less mentally stressful than having to put my dick into something that could potentially disease me, you know? But no, no, it was—it was way harder on my head. I—physically it was easier, it wasn’t a lot of back motion, it was more just standing there all day working with the hands, but mentally, like, when someone’s sitting there watching you make their food, it freaks you out, you know? (Matt, interview by author, May 24, 2016)
Given the discourses that men have available to them about their own sexual agency, the discourse of men’s sexual pleasure in sex work is fairly common (Dawthorne 2018; McLean 2013; Vanwesenbeek 2012). Some men like Doug, twenty-five, who is sexually fluid and escorts for men and women, expressed that sexual pleasure and curiosity were motivators to sell sex, with the breaking of taboos adding to the excitement:
Definition: fluid sexuality
romantic and sexual attraction can change over time, situation, and context.
It was mainly the pleasure of it, but it also was the rush—the adrenaline rush. I even have had sex outside with people. Just when you’re done, your heart’s beating and wow, you feel more alive. Sometimes you do things that you only see in a movie … I was thinking to myself, oh I heard that in a movie once. Now I’m actually doing it. It’s like wow, I never thought I’d be here and now I’m doing this. (Doug, interview by author, July 20, 2016)
Money becomes eroticized, and a worker may derive a sense of value from being admired and feeling desirable (Kort 2017). For a male stripper like Bashir, (hyper)heteromasculinity is vital: in other words, staying in prime physical shape and knowing how to talk to and please women. Moving beyond stripping, these men are often offered large sums of money for “private dances.” Instead of being framed as pursued, the ability to choose a client that he finds desirable and his penetrative act (and climax) serve as the ultimate expression of heteromasculinity (Dawthorne 2018; Montemurro and McClure 2005).
Some like Dylan identified sex work is a part of a significant downward spiral in his life, where he was indeed exploited due to his vulnerabilities and drive to purchase drugs:
My uncle had molested me when I was twelve. And then a year later he did it to me again … my mom stopped like paying attention to me and really giving any care to me. Yeah. So, when I was twelve I attempted suicide twice. She kind of just put up a wall and said, “You’re not mine.” When I was about fourteen she told me that she wished I was adopted and that she’d rather not breathe my air anymore; when I was sixteen she drove me downtown, said that I was going to a meeting for school, and then left. And I was not allowed back in the house after that. (Dylan, interview by author, October 10, 2014)
On the streets, Dylan dropped out of school and was quickly introduced to drugs, partying, and drinking and would wake up in the morning not knowing where he was:
[The clients] were like doing what they wanted to me, and I really wasn’t okay with it, but I was out there selling … so taking advantage of me … because they know I’m young, they know that I’m vulnerable, they know that I’m gullible, and they’re still willing to give me a load of cash so that they can satisfy themselves. (Dylan, interview by author, October 10, 2014)
GROWING UP
I grew up the same way any other person would.
—Bill, twenty-eight, straight, escort for women (interview by author, June 24, 2014)
I don’t know where to start because it’s like a huge chain of reaction—like a huge chain of things that happened.
—Ted, twenty-one, gay, escort-for-men (interview by author, January 22, 2016).
I feel depressed about my past a lot. It actually really bothers me. It haunts me … I actually had a very troubled childhood.
—Grant, twenty-one, gay, sex worker for men (interview by author, September 14, 2016).
We understand the sex industry better when we approach it as highly intersectional, fluid, and subjective, rather than treating people and their experiences as fixed and homogenous (Mitchell 2015). Intersectional analysis moves beyond the essentialist notion that all members of a population are equally and automatically subordinate (or privileged) just because they occupy a particular social position (Berger and Guidroz 2009; Bowleg 2012; Rolin 2006). Just like everyone else, “a sex worker’s work life, personal life, family life, spiritual life, upbringing, and class background all interrelate and shape one another” (Handkivsky 2007; Mitchell 2015, 127). Despite this, we know very little about how family functions in the lives of male sex workers.
This story of a sex worker’s upbringing illustrates perceived degrees of agency. Regardless of class background, these echoed institutionalized (middle-class) notions of how children and parents should act and what children should be allowed or expected to do (Lachman and Weaver 1998). Those from working-class or otherwise less privileged backgrounds like Howie spoke of their hardships and how they adapted to or pushed against interpersonal stressors and structural violence. Howie, twenty-five, sells sex to older women that his brother sets him up with to pay for his addiction and repay his debts, including putting his girlfriend through university. His childhood fits with the mainstream images of the neighborhood he grew up in: one of the largest low-income housing complexes in the city of London (London Community Chaplaincy, 2017). This community consists of row housing built in the 1970s during a period of increased public housing spending by the federal government and is one of London’s seven rent-geared-to-income complexes administered by the city. The average income, as of 2015, is approximately CDN\$15,000 a year, compared to the adjacent suburban community with an average income of about CDN\$110,000 a year. This highlights an inner-city and suburb divide (Smuck 2015). The majority of these inner-city residents face the challenges of living in poverty daily. Many are single parents, working poor, and some are immigrants. Struggles with mental health, substance use, or abuse are common, and lack of food, crime, and financial insecurity are the norm. Howie tells his story:
Definition: agency
the capacity of a person to act independently and make their own choices.
All my uncles and my dad we were … in and out of jail doing dope their whole lives, so. It was inevitable, it’s just in the family … I found out my uncle was selling [hard drugs]. I was getting it dirt cheap, bringing it to school … one thing led to another, got kicked out of school, and. … When I was fifteen my dad got me and my brother our own place where he would pay the rent, but we had to cover groceries … [we started] robbing houses for food. My other cousin lived with us. (Howe, interview by author, July 9, 2014)
While those like Matt, with a lower-class background, felt the issues of his youth would be mediated if he had access to the perceived opportunities and choices available to the middle class:
I think that if I had money, I wouldn’t have been motivated to take [this] path. If I would have had more opportunities. If we weren’t—wouldn’t have been ghetto. If we would have had a house and a car. If I would have gone, like, in sports when I was a kid and been in clubs and made friends, you know, go on vacations and, you know, like that’s what normal kids do. They go on spring break with their parents, or they join like the soccer team and every Wednesday, mom has to take you and watch you not score a goal for an hour. You know, that’s what kids do. That’s what you see in the movies and media all the time, I never had that. I grew up, you know, playing, hanging out by myself, walking around the gulley, getting myself into trouble, you know, drinking and stuff like that. Like when I was a kid, I didn’t have a lot of opportunities or options. I feel like if my family was loaded, that I would have never been that desperate for money; I would have never had to go on welfare at fifteen years old, you know? I wouldn’t have sold sex. (Matt, interview by author, May 24, 2016)
The culture of the Canadian middle class is consistent with ideals of being able to make choices, pave our own paths, and voice our ideas and opinions. For individuals from this background, these norms are often taken for granted, and they had little to say about their pasts. They tend to live in a relatively certain world where their basic needs are met; food and shelter are rarely an issue. Some of these expectations include fulfilling employment, educational opportunities, the supports of family, and recreational pleasures, while clean water, abundant food options, and ample lodging are taken for granted regardless of age (Kohn 1969; Miller, Cho and Bracey 2005).
COMING OUT
Regardless of upbringing, mental illness, sexual abuse, substance use disorders, and coming to terms with one’s sexuality permeated all backgrounds. While London tries to maintain an image that equates certain local industries like the biosciences and education with cosmopolitanism and tolerance (Bradford 2010), other dominant sectors such as finance, manufacturing, and military-industrial have been associated with heteronormative, masculinized, and sometimes homophobic work cultures and environments (Lewis et al. 2015; McDowell et al. 2007). Located within a socially conservative regional Bible Belt, London does act as a magnet for younger, rurally situated LGBT people moving from homophobic environments (Bruce and Harper 2011). Despite this, there is a small LGBT public presence and lack of LGBT-oriented services, so the city serves as a transition to larger cities like Toronto where these supports exist (Lewis et al. 2015).
Definition: heteronormativity
inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault, this term refers to how social institutions and policies reinforce the assumption that heterosexuality is normal and natural, that gender and sex are binary, and reproductive monogamous sex is moral.
Selling sex (and hiring a sex worker) is not unknown among men who have sex with men, and male sex workers have an established (while contentious) place in gay history and culture (Scott, MacPhail, and Minichiello 2014; Koken et al. 2005). One turning point in the life of the nonheterosexual, however, is the coming-out story, which is an essential theme in the narratives of gay and queer men. Coming out is about reclaiming an authentic self in response to discrimination, concealment, and living a double life. With the knowledge that society treats homosexuality a certain way, “being gay” means learning to cope with stigmatization, having the courage to disclose one’s orientation in fear of retribution, and learning to feel good about oneself (Schneider 1997).
Coming out can be uneventful for some like Phil where “nobody was particularly surprised” (Phil, interview by author, July 20, 2016); others suffered from varying degrees of rejection (Padilla et al. 2010). Particularly traumatic were the reactions of extremely conservative and religious families. In the United States and Canada, LGBT youth can be kicked out due to parental disapproval of their sexual orientation or run away from homophobic abuse (Durso and Gates 2012). This is David’s experience. At the time of our interview, he was twenty-three years old, couch surfing with his boyfriend Ted, and trying to pay for his substance use and supplement his Ontario Works income through panhandling and sex work:
My family life was … really … unstable because my parents, my step-mom and my dad were Jehovah’s Witnesses … if you are gay you are basically hated [by] the Jehovah’s Witnesses. You are, like, shunned. Like none wants to talk to you. I’ve known since grade three that I was gay. I just didn’t like come-out or like know what my feelings were … until I was like seventeen or eighteen. So when I came out they [said] there is the door and you can leave. I was like ok I’m surprised you are doing this to your own son but whatever … there’s still some days where [I feel like] my brain is trapped in a cage because of … my upbringing and my parents … I still want to talk to them but they don’t want anything to do with me. (David, interview by author, July 21, 2014)
Youth like David disproportionately make up 25 to 40 percent of Canada’s 40,000 to 150,000 homeless youth (Abramovich and Shelton 2017; Keohane 2016). Such youth report resorting to living on the streets, couch surfing, or turning to survival sex work. In addition to discrimination, isolation, and depression, hostile family reactions to sexual orientation significantly influence teen mental health (Ryan et al. 2009; Steinberg and Duncan 2002); for example, 10 to 40 percent of all LGBT people will attempt suicide once in their lifetimes (Marshal et al. 2011). Child services may intervene if alerted to school truancy after a youth has been kicked out of the home; however, there is often a lack of family welfare accountability in secondary schools. Many of the men I interviewed experienced inappropriate foster placements, homophobic group homes, rejection and discrimination at shelters, and a disproportionate lack of accommodations (Dame 2004; Dawthorne 2018). In this context, sex work is one of the few options left (Cianciotto and Cahill 2003).
Definition: survival sex work
the practice of people who are extremely disadvantaged trading sex for basic necessities; usually denotes those who would not otherwise choose to work in the sex industry if they could.
SEXUAL ABUSE
Regarding gay identity development and experience, there is evidence that gay males are at increased risk for sexual abuse as children, or at least they are more likely to report and recognize abuse (Brady 2008; Dawthorne 2018). Before the age of sixteen, one in six men (irrespective of adult sexuality) has been sexually abused (Gartner 2011). The men who sell sex (at any age) in my study reported similarly, and their stories of survival and victimization predominate their recollections of childhood. Due to shame and the prevailing view (and subsequent institutionalization) that sexual assault is a women’s issue, men rarely speak up (Millard 2016). Men and boys are socialized to experience sexual assault differently, through a form of masculinity that does not allow for victimization, leading to denial and psychological repression (Bera 1995; Bogin 2006; Gartner 1999). These men were never given the space to recover and are further traumatized by a culture of silence, lack of supportive resources, and the shame and humiliation they felt from friends and family. Men like Blake told me how, after telling family members of the abuse at the hands of an older relative, their mother’s boyfriends and siblings, they were neglected, ridiculed, and otherwise emotionally abused. It is this betrayal that dominates recollections and feelings of trauma (see Clancy 2009; Summit 1983).
SUBSTANCE USE DISORDERS
Studies of substance use show correlations between adverse childhood experiences and earlier risk of substance use disorder (Mate 2009). Almost half of the men interviewed had experience using drugs before the age of eighteen, including nearly three-fourths of those who were sexually abused. Regardless of age, other men were introduced to drugs on the streets or from family, and for others, opioid use began after a doctor prescribed it to treat a medical condition. Dylan describes his use of a plethora of substances to self-medicate his mental illness and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse by an uncle:
I think it was an emotional downfall. And I definitely do think it was boredom. I mean when you’re on the streets what is there to do besides sex and drugs and sleeping with god knows who? And I think it also too was like just a longing for something. I have figured out in the last like couple of months that I look like, on the inside, I’ve been really longing for my mother. And I think just like, oh, I could have crack, and it won’t leave me behind. You know, it’s kind of like I replaced my mother with the drugs because it gave me that same feeling. You know? When I had it around it felt really good and I felt really happy. (Dylan, interview by author, October 10, 2014)
Overall, substance use can offer a way of coping with stress, pain, and other issues deemed outside of one’s control, such as grief and loss (Pickard 2017). With a lack of places to turn, the substance and the act of using become a substitute for the relationships men like Dylan do not have and for needs they cannot meet. The combination of hegemonic masculinity and substance use discourages men from help-seeking behaviors, especially for problems considered nonnormative (e.g., sexual abuse) or personally controllable (e.g., mental illness). This creates a vulnerability that encourages the use of numbing and comforting substances as an escape (Addis and Mahalik 2003; Lye and Biblarz 1993).
There does appear to be a connection between selling sex and substance use disorders (Minichiello et al. 2003; de Graaf et al. 1995; Pleak and Meyer-Bahlburg 1990) as more than a quarter of the men I interviewed identified substance use as part of their motivation for selling sex. Tim, twenty-nine, who sells sex to women, confirms this: “[Its] pretty much what kept me in. … Because if I didn’t have sex with someone to make the money then I’d be feeling like shit. You know, I’d just kind of wait it out. Like I’d feel like more shit if I don’t have the external source of endorphins that I’m used to” (Tim, interview by author, July 21, 2014).
HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY
Regardless of background, sexuality, or the gender of one’s clients, most men evaluate the benefits of sex work against the risks. Violating hegemonic masculinity by engaging in a “gender-inappropriate” form of work, a man sells sex at the risk of being shamed by peers, family, and the broader community. Simultaneously, hegemonic masculinity allowed men to shield themselves from shame. Jimmy, twenty-five and straight-identifying, has “prostituted” for men and women. He distances himself from female sex workers and feminized tropes of victimization and vulnerability: “I did this to myself. I’m not a victim. [Clients] didn’t approach me. They didn’t know what I needed the money for. They didn’t take advantage of me. I had no one to answer to. I lived by myself, I was doing whatever I wanted to do. It was easy” (Jimmy, interview by author February 9, 2015).
To “do what a man has got to do” to survive meant taking risks, being adventurous, and remaining resilient, with no help from anyone (including the government). Some also spoke of panhandling, selling drugs, breaking and entering, and stealing to survive in this manner. Emphasizing hypersexuality or sexual voraciousness, discussing attractive clients, and seeking out the taboo pleasures of sex with many different clients reinforced a man’s masculinity, shielding him from shame. This was another strategy to position oneself as in control. The act of making money to support himself, his spouse, and/or children allowed a sex worker to reify his masculinized role as breadwinner and generous provider (McDowell 2014).
For some like Doug, the ability to purchase luxury goods or make more money than people in other jobs symbolized personal empowerment:
I had everything I wanted. Went from wearing some ripped up jeans to like designer stuff like Makaveli and Banana Republic. I was wearing like Prada and Versace, Sean John and everything. I was loaded. I had real diamond earrings. [After I had a client], I’d go down and get my hair done, get piercings, contacts and everything all that. Live life. I kept buying like headphones, scarves and what not. (Doug, interview by author, July 20, 2016)
Lastly, workers took pride in their professional expertise and altruism. Maintaining a sense of professionalism with “disfigured” or otherwise undesirable clients was framed as self-sacrifice. Stuart, thirty-three, sells sex, is a model, and acts in pornographic films: he took pride in creating a safe environment that empowered emotional and sexual positivity, thereby giving his work some social value (Kumar, Scott, and Minichiello 2017). “You’re out there providing a service … everyone needs loving too. It’s all about faking. You’re in it … to make money. They’re in it to get off or the companionship. It’s more, ‘I want you to come home and cook dinner with me and watch a movie,’ and its rarely sex” (Stuart, interview by author, December 15, 2015).
STIGMA
Masculinity can be a valuable tool to understand the experiences of some men but to appeal to masculinity that constructs men as strong and powerful is deceptively simplistic and seriously flawed. Not only does it perpetuate a fantasy that “victims” do not have agency, resilience, or show evidence of resistance, it assumes that those who do have power have not suffered. Stigma is a situation “when a person possesses (or is believed to possess) some attribute or characteristic that conveys a social identity that is devalued in a particular social context” (Crocker, Major, and Steele 1998). Nonheterosexual men discussed issues of homophobia ranging from being bullied, rejected by family, or being victims of hate crime. The intersection of other aspects of their lives along with the stigma of sex work intensifies feelings of shame and experiences of discrimination.
The perception or anticipation that people are not or will not be accepting has negative consequences on personal well-being (Allison 1998). Vulnerability can lead to feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, impairing self-esteem, and social functioning (Crocker, Major, and Steele 1998). Many men like Link, a twenty-four-year-old online escort for men, live double lives to protect themselves, concealing their involvement with the industry in order not to be judged or penalized (echoing those who have to hide their sexuality). “I am afraid to tell [my boyfriend] because I mean … I don’t tell anybody just to save face. I don’t like the lying and I hate lying about myself and about things that you know I feel I should be able to express” (Link, interview by author, November 14, 2014). Other men were reluctant to socialize or start new relationships due to similar fears of rejection. While many men do have strained relationships with family, those who do not were worried about causing them emotional pain. Others wish to avoid moralizing, ridicule, and removal of any form of parental financial support.
The knowledge that an individual has been involved in the sex industry has and can be used to discriminate against them in other work environments. For those who use sex work to supplement their income or are involved due to a desperate situation, the economic need to sell sex means that losing any other job would be devastating. Teachers, bankers, police officers, restaurant workers, and real estate employees are public examples of people who have been fired from their jobs because of their current or former involvement in sex work (Carey 2018; Dickson 2013; McLean 2011; Petro 2012; Schladebeck 2017). Rick, a thirty-four-year-old who describes himself as gay for pay, describes this need for discretion:
Definition: gay for pay
individuals who identify as heterosexual but engage in homosexual behaviors and acts, for money, material goods, or other forms of security (e.g., housing)
Anonymity is [important] because like I do have a day job and family and stuff here that know nothing about what I do … I don’t think I’d get fired over this because that’s illegal, but I do think my boss is the type of person that would really look hard for another excuse to fire me … I work retail for a boss who is heavily religious … If he were to know that I’m like turning tricks, yeah that would be the end of it. (Rick, interview by author, July 7, 2014)
This secrecy is one factor in why myths regarding the number of men in the industry continue.
Some sex workers compared their desire for upward social mobility with their current quality of life. The loss of a middle-class lifestyle, inability to get ahead, or the precarity of their finances brought about feelings of shame. Though there are structural reasons for economic struggle, those from middle-class backgrounds internalized their failures as personal deficits, while those of lower-class upbringings felt they were set up to fail. The sector of the industry, the sexual practices, the types of clients seen, how much is earned, as well as their level of agency: these are all part of a moral hierarchy of more or less acceptable behavior.
Those men dealing with substance use disorders were shamed by peers and the public and some tried to cover up needle marks or otherwise remain discreet; to counter internalized shame some men engaged in downward comparison, separating themselves from being associated with “junkies.” Some nonsubstance users also separated themselves from “crack-whores.” The intersection of sex work and substance use served as a way for some like Steven, a bisexual thirty-eight-year-old man who cruises the downtown area as a “street ho,” to position himself as better off than other street workers. “You might think the odd woman that’s a junkie on the street with all picks and sores all over her face probably will suck their crack dealer’s dick for more drugs, but when you’re ho-ing … you’re walking up to nice people’s houses, and nice cars … it’s not for your next piece of rock” (Steven, interview by author, July 13, 2015).
Male sex workers can be victims of sexual violence as adults (just like everyone else). The trauma of being raped by a female client is exacerbated by stereotypical paradigms that frame men as perpetrators and women as victims; that rape involves penetration, and for men, all sex is welcome (Smith 2012). Matt gave an account of being raped by a female client as an adult and the traumatization and shame he feels. “They say men can’t be raped by women. Which is bullshit, like, it’s happened to me, I know it can happen. I experienced it” (Matt, interview with author, May 24, 2016). The stereotype of female sexual victimization by men reinforces ideas that feminize and stigmatize victims and that female-perpetrated abuse is rare or nonexistent (Mendel 1995); it prioritizes interventions for women and excludes male victims (Stemple and Meyer 2014). Matt continues, “Rape doesn’t have to mean just being penetrated … they’re doing things to you that you don’t want. … When we were done fucking I went to get up, she said, ‘You’re just going to lay there and when we’re done, we’re done, and if you don’t like it, good fucking luck, try getting up,’ and she was like three times my size” (Matt, interview with author, May 24, 2016). His account challenges the assumption that male victims experience less harm and women are disproportionately affected by sexual violence (Scarce 1997). It also undermines the stereotype that men are physically and emotionally stronger than women (Koss et al. 2007). Matt continues, “I couldn’t do nothing man. So I started crying laying there. Like it hurt so bad. She gave me the money and I was like—I just took it and I, like, looked down—I don’t know, but like that broke me man. I didn’t feel tough. I didn’t feel like a hotshot. I didn’t feel cool, I didn’t feel like what I was doing was worth it anymore at that point” (Matt, interview with author, May 24, 2016). Here is where the stigma of selling sex and rape intersect: “At that moment, like, I wanted to quit so bad. If I didn’t need the money, that would have made me quit, but I was still hurting; so … I was scared. Traumatized. I feel like everyone I was with was using me. Like, you know, I wasn’t there because anybody cared. At that point I was a whore” (Matt, interview with author, May 24, 2016). Though his heterosexuality is not questioned here, Matt’s understanding of what happened to him is framed by cultural ideas of heteromasculinity. He no longer felt in control or powerful; he felt the shame of being emasculated and powerless to do anything about it. He also felt that because he had consented initially, no one would take him seriously if he reported it. The concerns of ridicule are echoed when a man’s rapist is a man; institutionalized homophobia, or in the case of a heterosexual victim, internalized homophobia adds to rape stigma; the loss of control and helplessness can exacerbate the trauma.
Despite some men feeling shame for engaging in sex work (especially with undesirable clients), the idea of using social services or receiving any form of social assistance that would reduce the need to or frequency of sex was seen as more shameful. They framed the people who used them with visceral discourses of filth, degradation, and extreme poverty (Halnon 2013). Those who had previous interactions with these services or refused to use them engaged in defensive othering, asserting that they are better than others in some manner. Claiming social benefits conveyed a devalued identity and admission of failure; it also meant increased precarity. Unfortunately, without visibility, these men also fail to challenge the status quo (Koken, Bimbi, and Parsons 2015).
THE MEN LEFT BEHIND
Regardless of age or sexuality, men require safe, nonjudgmental, and accessible services for substance use and mental illness as well as for other vulnerabilities. Also needed: improved accountability through justice, educational, and social support systems to help those youth who have been sexually abused, lack emotional or financial support from family, or have been kicked out because of their sexuality (Dawthorne 2018). Generalizations and competitive statistics—taking a snapshot of reality that ignores the bigger picture, has created hierarchies that inform our decisions on who is important and who is disposable. For many of my informants, I was often the only person they had ever talked to about their sex work experiences. Social policies and laws that pathologize and exclude with the mindset that (only) women are vulnerable, that the sex industry employs only women, and that the industry is inherently harmful, have reinforced hegemonic masculinity and ignored the ways women are implicated (Dawthorne 2018; Whitlock 2018). The existence of male sex workers disrupts gendered binaries of choice and constraint, illustrating that sex work can be freely chosen but also that men are not always in control of their own lives.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Define sex work and identify the factors that should be considered when claims are made about sex work.
2. Why is framing sex work as the exploitation of women by men inaccurate and harmful?
3. In what ways are male sex workers stigmatized? How do ideas of masculinity factor in?
4. What issues does this chapter raise about feminism?
KEY TERMS
agency: the capacity of a person to act independently and make their own choices.
cisnormativity: the assumption that privileges cisgender as the norm (that is, gender identity that corresponds to a person’s sex at birth).
emotional labor: the process of managing one’s own feelings in order to manage the feelings of others, as described by Hochschild (1983). For example, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, coworkers, and superiors.
fluid sexuality: romantic and sexual attraction can change over time, situation, and context.
gay for pay: individuals who identify as heterosexual but engage in homosexual behaviors and acts, for money, material goods, or other forms of security (e.g., housing)
hegemonic masculinity: a concept developed by Connell (1995) arguing that there are certain traits, behaviors, and discourses associated with masculinity that are valued and rewarded by dominant social groups and that the performance of hegemonic masculinity helps to legitimize power and inequality.
heteronormativity: inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault, this term refers to how social institutions and policies reinforce the assumption that heterosexuality is normal and natural, that gender and sex are binary, and reproductive monogamous sex is moral.
John schools: forced rehabilitation program for men arrested for solicitation that teaches the negative consequences of prostitution on communities, families, and women (Nathanson and Young 2001).
nonlabel sexuality: a nonidentity; can include people who are uncertain about their sexuality, are sexually fluid, or are resistant to the norms of identity labels.
Palermo protocols: a group of three international treaties adopted by the United Nations to supplement the 2000 Convention against Transnational Organized Crime Exploitation. One of these protocols described the crime of human trafficking as “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation” (United Nations 2004, iii).
structural violence: the systematic ways in which social structures harm or disadvantage individuals and thus create and maintain social inequalities.
survival sex work: the practice of people who are extremely disadvantaged trading sex for basic necessities; usually denotes those who would not otherwise choose to work in the sex industry if they could.
Two-Spirit: an English-language term meant to represent a diverse pan-Indigenous umbrella of gender, sex and sexuality variance, and subsequent ceremonial and social roles; often misunderstood as a term solely for individuals who are both male and female.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
• Aggleton, Peter, and Richard Parker, eds. 2015. Men Who Sell Sex: Global Perspectives. London: Routledge.
• Dennis, Jeffery. 2008. “Women Are Victims, Men Make Choices: The Invisibility of Men and Boys in the Global Sex Trade.” Gender Issues 25: 11–25.
• Minichiello, Victor, and John Scott, eds. 2014. Male Sex Work and Society. New York: Harrington Park.
• Shoden, Clarisa, and Samantha Majic, eds. 2014. Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Walby, Kevin. 2012. Touching Encounters: Sex, Work, and Male-for-Male Internet Escorting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was partially funded by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
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Learning Objectives
• Define the key concept of intersectionality, including the multiple notions that this approach mobilizes.
• Analyze the processes of discrimination and subordination Muslim women face by highlighting the effect of intersecting identity factors.
• Identify the strategies used by Muslim women to counter discrimination.
In this chapter, the author applies an intersectional lens to discuss the impact of Islamophobia on Muslim women in Belgium. By exploring the stories of some of these women, the author highlights the ways they negotiate their multiple identities to resist marginalization and discrimination, and thus reaffirm their role as active agents in their lives and in Belgium society. (Note: the names of research participants in this chapter are pseudonyms.)
This chapter addresses the intersectional discrimination affecting Muslim women or those perceived as such. Muslim women constitute a diverse group and are often the target of multiple forms of discrimination and subordination. As members of minority groups in Western society, and as migrants or people with a foreign background in most cases, they face difficulties in finding their place in a society that despite its multiculturalism still places obstacles in the path to the fulfillment of their desired professional and social status. The discrimination of Muslims operates in numerous domains, and it targets their religious and racialized belonging. In particular, laws and policies that limit the wearing of religious and cultural symbols and clothing result in the exclusion from employment of those Muslim women who decide to visibly express their religious or cultural belonging. The aim of this chapter is to analyze these facts through recalling concrete life experiences of women and through approaching the discrimination that they live with an intersectional lens. This approach highlights how the combination of different identity markers operates within processes of discrimination. It also stresses the fact that Muslim women are active agents with a set of strategies to confront the difficulties that they encounter. Through a variety of actions ranging from individual resilience to collective resistance, Muslim women manage to capitalize their multiple belongings that are objects of discrimination and to struggle against marginalization, thus reaffirming their role as active players not only in their life experiences but also in the society in which they live.
The chapter begins by introducing the research topic and analytical tools then presents and discusses contextual elements and experiences of a sample of Muslim women. The research is based on both a literature review and extended ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Muslim women and men, as well as with organizations dealing with discrimination issues from 2015 to 2018 in Belgium. Fieldwork included semistructured interviews with key social actors, as well as participant observation of antidiscrimination initiatives (seminars, meetings, sensitization activities, women’s “safe spaces” for discussion, etc.). Through fieldwork, I collected life histories and experiences of Muslim women with different sociocultural and economic profiles. Most were born in Belgium but had a migrant family background with their parents coming, in most cases, from Morocco but also from Turkey or from other Arab countries such as Tunisia or Algeria.
INTERSECTIONALITY AND MUSLIM WOMEN
As already discussed in the introduction of this book, intersectionality is both a complex concept and an approach originally used to study issues of discrimination and subordination affecting women’s life experiences. The concept of intersectionality describes a process of discrimination and subordination that operates at the intersection of race, class, gender, sex, ethnicity, nationality, ability, age, and any other identity markers and that shapes complex social inequalities (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2015). As an analytical approach, intersectionality emerged in a US context to unpack the categories of “women” and “Blacks” in order to study the intersection of different social divisions in women’s life experiences (Yuval-Davis 2006), and intersectionality denounces the tendency to naturalize these divisions (hooks 1981). Intersectionality is an approach attentive to power relations and social inequalities; it is an analytical strategy that provides new perspectives on social phenomena, thus becoming not only a field of study but also a critical praxis (practical-oriented research work) that informs social justice projects (Collins 2015).
Definition: intersectionality
refers to the interconnected nature of social categories such as race, class, and gender that create overlapping systems of discrimination or disadvantage. The goal of an intersectional analysis is to understand how racism, sexism, and homophobia (for example) interact together to impact our identities and how we live in our society.
This approach constitutes an alternative feminist tool that counters the hegemonic discourse about women in Western contexts (Anthias 2002, 279). This means that it provides different views and different claims about gender inequalities than those commonly found in Western mainstream feminist discourse. In fact, the latter, despite its wide adoption, is not necessarily adapted to address particular forms of discrimination experienced by women from minority cultural backgrounds, since it does not take into account elements affecting them in their specific and complex contexts. In particular, the Western feminist approach based on the denunciation of patriarchy and men’s domination is reductive and does not function in every cultural context (Mohanty 1984). Besides shedding light on different and/or additional factors that contribute to gender inequalities, the intersectional approach gives feminist social actors, who are originally excluded from the development of this hegemonic discourse, the possibility to propose new forms of understanding and thus fight against intersectional gendered-based discrimination. With regard to Muslim feminists in particular, the intersectional approach enables them to counter those discourses spread within the Western feminist hegemonic narratives that see Islamic feminism as an “oxymoron,” since this religious tradition is seen as inhibiting the possibility of women’s emancipation. In general, a process of politicization of women’s voices addresses the overall system of domination affecting women beyond the private sphere and helps elaborate new forms of empowerment and social reconstruction (Crenshaw 1991). The socially imposed identity is reversed and becomes an anchor of subjectivity: women adopt a positive discourse of self-identification and actively position themselves within the lived political context.
Definition: hegemonic discourse
a discourse that promotes the dominance of one group over another supported by legitimating norms and ideas that normalize dominance. Using collective consent rather than force, dominant social groups maintain power, and social inequalities are naturalized.
Applying an intersectional lens to the study of the discourses about Muslim women in Europe means, first, to highlight the specific forms of discrimination that they undergo and, second, to describe the particular ways adopted to fight them. Muslim women in the West are often depicted as either dangerous or oppressed others (Mirza 2013, 7), and this occurs through a process of racialization that essentializes (religious gendered) identity. It is a process of “race-making” and “othering” connected to racism, a particularly virulent form of construction of cultural boundaries through discourse and practices aimed at subordinating, excluding, and exploiting racialized individuals on the basis of an assigned origin (Anthias 2016) and skin color (Torrekens and Adam 2015). In Belgium, this process operates in the context of a secularized and Christian-origin state of white European majority, where Muslim people embody the “cultural other,” (i.e., individuals seen as nonwhite and with religious beliefs based in foreign contexts and origins). This process of othering may concretely shape in different forms and engage a variety of discriminating discourses and practices, depending on the specific origins associated with Muslim people such as North African, sub-Saharan, or European descent. Keeping Muslim people outside this majority is a means of perpetuating state sovereignty over its subjects (Fadil 2016), constraining any possible challenge to it. A process of racialization is at the heart of anti-Muslim discrimination and also has a profoundly gendered dimension (Fadil et al. 2014, 226; Bracke 2007; Mescoli 2016, 2019). In fact, discourses on the extent of women’s emancipation are used as “boundary marker[s] of Western civilization” and they aim at depicting Islam as “women-unfriendly” (Fadil et al. 2014, 226). Therefore, Western feminist discourse about Muslim women mainly comprises rescue narratives and politics (Abu-Lughod 2002). As highlighted by Fadil et al., “The question of women’s oppression, neutrality, or the need for an ‘enlightened’ or ‘modern’ Islam” (2014, 242) generates “a sense of discomfort over the headscarf” conceived of as “a sign of a return to tradition or a rejection of Western norms and values” (2014, 226). Antiveiling sentiments (and policies) emerge as parts of anti-immigrant prejudice (Saroglou et al. 2009) and significantly affect Muslim women’s everyday experiences.
Definition: racialization
the process of ascribing a racial identity and associated traits to a group. These characteristics are often defined by a dominant group with the aim of discriminating against and excluding the subordinate group.
Scholars show that these processes generally occur within discursive contexts that are not neutral and, through discriminatory legislation and negative media representation of Muslims, contribute to the emergence of Islamophobic and racist acts (Ameli et al. 2012, 2). Islamophobia is a form of “racialized governmentality” composed of “a series of interventions and classifications that affect the well-being of populations designated as Muslim” (Sayyid 2014, 19). In parallel, Islamophobia results in culturalist discourses and acts that target Muslims’ alleged “unsuitable cultural and religious background as the reason for economic exclusion and marginalisation” (Zemni 2011, 29). Different Belgian actors (scholars, associations and NGOs, state institutions) use or critically address the term of Islamophobia and thus produce knowledge from diverse perspectives. Some also question the appropriateness and efficacy of the notion of Islamophobia, since the etymology of the word—recalling a fear and an irrational rejection—would not appropriately describe the processes of discrimination at stake (Dassetto 2009), making the term counterproductive (Maréchal et al. 2016). Islamophobia is then “a contested concept, both in and outside of academia, which also accounts for the reluctance in its adoption” (Fadil et al. 2014, 251). Despite divergent perspectives on Islamophobia, there is agreement on the spread of discourses that target the presence of immigrants as generating or worsening economic, social, and political problems of a society, thus putting social integration at risk (Martiniello, 1996) and on the fact that in recent years “it is Islam which is more and more often put in the dock” (Martiniello 1995, 80; also see Allievi 2005).
Definition: Islamophobia
fear of, and prejudice against the Islamic faith and Muslims in general
MUSLIM WOMEN IN BELGIUM: BETWEEN UNDERGONE DISCRIMINATION AND EXERTED AGENCY
Belgium is among those territories where Muslims are represented mainly as immigrants (Sayyid 2014, 64–65). The number of Muslims in the country is determined through estimations, since there is no registration of religious or philosophical affiliations (Husson 2015). Estimates range from 250,000 to 400,000 (Torrekens 2005, 56) and up to more than 600,000 Muslim people including converted persons (Hertogen 2008).
In Belgium, the principle of neutrality stipulates that the state does not intervene in the nomination of religious officials and that it ensures equal treatment to the officially recognized religions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Anglicanism, Islam, and Orthodox liturgy). The process of recognition of Islam as official religion in Belgium has led to the creation of an official representative body (the Executive of Muslims in Belgium, EMB) to function as the main interlocutor between the “Muslim community” and the state. However, these assumptions and the existence of this organization do not prevent the shaping of an institutional context that affects Muslims and Muslim women in particular. Indeed, despite alerts about the increase of racist discourse and action against Muslims EMB has made no overt opposition, shifting from neutrality to a widespread laïcité (meant as public and institutional secularism), the state creates forms of structural discrimination in the public sphere and contributes to their emergence in the private one. This process mainly operates with regard to veiling. The face veil ban was created by the law of June 1, 2011, with almost unanimous approval and supported by arguments depicting the wearing of face veils as an extreme form of women’s cultural oppression. This and other regulations based on the principle of neutrality have consequences for Muslim women who wear headscarves. For example, women are usually forbidden to wear headscarves in educational institutions and when working in the public sector. This taken together with recent international decisions provides a sort of institutional legitimization to those employers who restrict the wearing of headscarves in the private sector. For instance, in 2017 the Court of Justice of the European Union allowed employers in the private sector to adopt internal regulations that prohibit wearing visible signs of political, philosophical, or religious convictions (Court of Justice of the European Union Cases). In Brussels, the ban was lifted in July 2019 from high schools, thus leading to an improved situation concerning the access to higher education for Muslim women wearing headscarves. This is not the case in other regions of the country such as Flanders and Wallonia, where bans existing in schools are lifted only in the case of successful lawsuits. This complex situation depends on the fact that in the Belgian federal state, regions are in charge of competences related to education.
Several civil society and antidiscrimination bodies denounce the increased occurrences of religious discrimination, as well as the overrepresentation of Muslims, and Muslim women in particular, in these incidents. Figures and facts are provided by international associations such as Amnesty International but also and mainly by the Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunity (Unia), that is the institutional body in charge of combating discrimination, and by associations such as the Collective against Islamophobia in Belgium (CCIB). The restrictions on wearing the Islamic headscarf influence the educational and professional choices women make, and act as levers for auto-exclusion (Ben Mohamed 2004) from some professional routes. In fact, women frequently evaluate their employment opportunities based on the constraints that they will face as Muslim women, especially if they wear headscarves. The discrimination targeting Muslim women’s religious belonging intersects with other processes of subordination. First, there is the process of ethno-stratification of the job market (Okkerse and Termotte 2004; Tratsaert 2004; Martens and Ouali 2005). This notion describes a socioeconomic process leading to the concentration of workers of certain nationalities or origins in some employment sectors and jobs (Adam 2007, 225–226). People with foreign origins are overrepresented in the most precarious and poorly paid employment sectors, where working times are irregular and tasks are arduous. By contrast, they are underrepresented in public services and cultural institutions, among other sectors (Unia 2017). In parallel, unemployment rates and durations are higher among people of foreign origins than for Belgian people without foreign origin, also because youth, in particular, face difficulties finding and keeping a job (Adam 2007, 226–229). Discrimination (also operating in the domain of education) plays a role in the shaping of these structural constraints. Second, in Belgium as in other European countries, wage and employment gender gaps are persistent and amplified when comparing individuals with non-EU citizenship with Belgians, as highlighted by the research of the Institution for the Equality of Women and Men (Institute 2015, 44). This results in keeping women in a dependent status (EWL 2014, 18), and in orienting them toward limited professional choices. Consequently, the ongoing process of domestication of women, meaning their relegation to the domestic sphere, in terms of household and childcare (Rogers 2005, 18), is reinforced and extended to the work domain, where it results in a gendered stratification of jobs. This means more precisely that women are more often associated and oriented to jobs within the domains of care and education, for example, than toward the broader job market and its possibilities. Muslim women report that employment agencies may contribute to this process when they directly or indirectly orient Muslim women toward jobs that are supposed to be “adapted” to their needs. Many women recount having been asked to apply for housekeeping jobs, despite the fact that this was not necessarily their first aspiration and did not correspond to their professional or educational profile. Moreover, discrimination operates during job interviews with potential employers, where the latter ask women questions aimed at assessing their private experience of faith as Muslims, thus measuring their level of “Muslim-ness” (Mescoli 2016, 2019; Toğuşlu 2015). The aim would be to evaluate whether the interviewed women’s values and practices would be compatible or not to with those of the concerned firm or company. Unlike non-Muslim women, Muslim women have to face questions about their domestic intimacy rooted in the employer’s stereotypical visions of gender relationships within Muslim families. Imane, a Belgian-born woman, converted to Islam and married to a Muslim man, recounted to me discriminatory experiences that she underwent when she was looking for a job. Having a Belgian name, she was not discriminated against in the first selection phase, which often happens to women whose names are associated with a foreign origin. However, when she arrived at the interview wearing a headscarf, employers were often surprised. Moreover, this generated unexpected questions, such as, “Does your husband beat you?” Employers posed other questions concerning individual behaviors that were not related to the job requirements and tasks, such as, “Do you shake hands with men? Do you pray five times a day?” Indeed, answers to these types of questions seem to take priority over assessing the Muslim women’s professional skills, and it can be particularly intense with women wearing headscarves. The consequence, as was the case for this woman, is often to reorient one’s professional ambitions (even if it is not necessarily always connected with dissatisfaction, as we will see later).
Definition: ethno-stratification
In the workplace, this notion describes the socioeconomic process leading to a concentration of workers of certain nationalities or origins in particular sectors and jobs.
Muslim women wearing headscarves also suffer from discrimination when they try to access goods or services. For example, social workers and legal advisors of the Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities have recorded several cases of women whom dentists refuse to treat unless they take off their headscarves and of women who were not served in some shops without being given an explicit reason. In discussion with me during interviews, some Muslim women also reported other episodes of discrimination such as when bus drivers did not stop when they were the only ones waiting at the bus stop, or when they were asked to take off their headscarves when entering the polling station to vote. Moreover, physical aggressions targeting Muslim women are not rare (Unia 2015; CCIB 2015) Furthermore, women face verbal abuse, both face to face and through the media: cyberhate speech appears through different Internet channels, such as email chains, comments on social networks or to online newspapers articles, etc. (see Centre 2009, 14–15). Attacking Muslim women also seeks to blame Islam for gender-oriented violence. Brems et al. report that several women experienced an increase in aggressive reactions starting after the previously mentioned face veil ban and from the debate generated by its mediatization: “The negative image of Islam in general and of the face veil in particular that is projected in the media seems to give people permission to react in an aggressive manner. … Moreover, it appears that many people now refer to the ban in their interventions vis-à-vis women who wear the face veil, acting as a kind of vigilante police” (Brems et al. 2014, 106). The authors report the “refusal of treatment of a veiled woman by hospital staff, refusal of vendors at a curio market to sell their goods to a veiled woman, and refusal by a school director to let a mother pick up her child from school when wearing her face veil” (106). Paradoxically, while in some cases some women abandoned the face veil or limited its use without changing their other habits, many others finally stop going out by themselves, since without the veil they no longer felt free to move or safe from the male gaze.
The multiple dimensions of discrimination toward Muslim women also include the fear of reinforcing stereotypical representations. In fact, some women who have suffered from domestic violence or from sociocultural pressure on gender roles by members of their family, may decide not to complain about the constraints that they live within in order “not to feed to the stigma” concerning gender relationships between Muslim women and men. As Imane explains, Muslim women often “do not want to talk about conflicts. … Maybe they were beaten, maybe they had a nice marriage … but if it was bad and violent, they don’t talk about it” (Imane, interview by author). The representation of Muslim women as either dangerous (allegedly connected to acts of terrorism directly or through their children or husband) or oppressed is hardly challenged in the media because of the absence of Muslim women in this domain, apart from cases where their religiosity is addressed. This is also connected to the fact that, in general, press and other media products are mainly produced by men in Belgium, as in other European countries, and that minority groups and people associated with Islam do not have the same access to public expression. In fact, the recognition of the active role of Muslim women in the social and political sphere is not systematic. Many Muslims affirm that their statements are often discredited through their religious affiliation as alleged prior interest in their claims and reasoning. While interviewing a Muslim woman working as a lawyer and scholar, she told me that for her and other Muslim women occupying similar roles in the society “it is difficult to be considered a valid intellectual, we are never detached from this belonging” (Nour, interview by author). This discrimination is perceived as a reiterated subtle form of microaggression (Solorzano 1998).
Reactions to discrimination are multiple, and the narratives that women shape are equally based on the intersection of diverse belongings. Muslim women shape a feminist discourse in which they promote women’s rights. Such discourse is also connected with a religious meaning, and it is for this reason that activists and scholars speak of specific forms of Islamic Feminism (see, for example, Hamidi 2015). Femininity is described as multifaceted life experience that includes religiosity without affecting the right of being active agents within society. Thus, Islamic feminists argue for guaranteeing freedom of religion. The actions implemented toward this aim by a variety of social actors including, but not limited to, those who associate with Islamic feminism, function in different ways. First, they promote a description of Muslim women’s life histories as diverse in order to highlight their autonomy and counter the idea that they are victims of patriarchal and misogynist cultural and religious principles. As a consequence, the decision to wear (any form of) headscarf is the result of “plenty of reasons and individual strategies. … There is a multitude of histories, a multitude of experiences, and we have to listen to this diversity,” as explained by Sarah (interview by author), a woman employed as a social worker and local politician. In her opinion, as for many other Muslim women with whom I spoke, wearing a headscarf also has personal meanings. The different existing forms of headscarves and their use testify to the complex rationales that underlie the active choice of wearing one among these head coverings (see, for example, Tarlo 2010). However, all forms of headscarf do not receive the same appraisal in the social and professional environment of women. Another woman, Nabila, working in a local association, recalled her experience of having been asked to wear a “more alternative and fashionable” form of veil than the traditional hijab that she used (Nabila, interview by author).
Definition: Islamic feminism
A feminist movement that seeks freedom of religion on the basis of a multifaceted definition of femininity that recognizes both religiosity and women’s agency within society.
Additionally, several Muslim women can opt not to wear any form of headscarf. This choice can be driven by structural constraints, for example, if women are asked to remove their headscarf or in case they decide by themselves to do it to avoid discrimination in the professional domain. However, this choice may also be determined by the fact that some Muslim women do not consider the headscarf as a relevant element needed to shape and affirm their religious identity or because they do not find it necessary to make this identity visible. Both veiling and unveiling are bodily practices (Fadil 2011) adopted to shape Muslim women as autonomous subjects that embody and perform diverse “ideals of womanhood and of the moral system” and responding to different codes of modesty (Abu-Lughod, 1987: 160). Individual stories can also be publicly narrated, for example during sensitization activities such as intercultural initiatives, or through websites or blogs. During my ethnographic studies I had the occasion to meet Nadia, a young Muslim woman who was among the founders of a blog where everyday life stories are narrated by Muslim women living in Brussels. The aim of this and other similar initiatives is to deconstruct racialized gendered stereotypes that essentialize the religious component of Muslim women’s identity. Sarah narrated to me how important it was to show that Muslim women are engaged in a variety of initiatives: “I study at a music academy … I follow piano courses, I sing, I am in a theatre company and I think that when you see on the stage a person wearing a headscarf, this can also deconstruct prejudices … this puts questions.” (Sarah, interview by author) This woman also contradicts prejudices targeting the religious or racialized belonging of Muslim women by asserting her professional skills, as shown in the following statement:
When I was looking for a [sic] work, they told me: “how would you act tomorrow if in a help care interview you have in front of you a woman, a young girl, that wants an abortion … you with your headscarf, with your beliefs … how would you react?”. I always had the same answer: “I am here to listen to the person, I am here to give her space to speak about whatever problem she encounters, I am not here to judge her, I am not here to decide in her place, I am not there to direct her … I am here to help her, and if her choice is abortion, I will orient her toward those services that could accomodate her.” (Sarah, interview by author).
By this statement, this woman highlights the professional attitude that she takes when facing the requests in her job as a social worker, showing that this attitude is independent of her religious belonging. Similarly, Dounia, another woman working in an association that promotes gender rights, among other activities, stated:
Sometimes people do not imagine an Arab woman, Muslim or not, that is also professionally ambitious, that is interested in having a career … there are plenty of young women that are very engaged, they wear headscarves, they do not wear headscarves, some of them declare to be Muslim, others we do not know” (Dounia, interview by author).
Other ways of reacting to discrimination consist of detecting and denouncing racist and Islamophobic acts. Besides relying on the general antidiscrimination law of May 10, 2007, Muslim women and other social actors supporting their actions, such as the Collective against Islamophobia in Belgium, point to the need for developing specific forms of reporting that could enable women to describe the intersectional character of the discrimination they face. Specific forms of reporting would better account for the extent of the intersectional discrimination affecting Muslim women, as well as for the multiple criteria used to detect it, so to “have voices that speak about this, in order to objectify the phenomenon and make it possible to do advocacy … and to put the issue of Muslim woman on the European agenda,” in the words of a Muslim woman working as an advocacy officer in an NGO dealing with issues of racism (Loubna, interview by author). For Karim, a man engaged in fighting against Islamophobia, reporting includes “listing the factual, the observable and the measurable” so to “categorise and structure [victims’] ideas.” (Karim, interview by author). Legal fights against the undermining of Muslim women’s rights help women in their personal lives and are also effective in addressing the structural discrimination present in public institutions. An example is when a legal action results in the removal of the restriction to wearing headscarves from higher education institutions. Successful case laws and strategic court litigations foster the creation of specific “legal arsenals and coherent juridical arguments,” as stated by a lawyer expert in court cases related to the discrimination of Muslim women wearing headscarves (Safia, interview by author). Another example is the 2015 Actiris (the Brussels public employment service) case, concerning three women who were forbidden to wear headscarves in this service. Its positive outcome marked an important point in combating the discrimination of Muslim women since from that moment on the case could be used to support “lobbying, … advocacy, awareness raising, training,” and it reiterates the right to work as a “source of autonomy and subsistence,” recalled one activist Muslim man (Selma, interview by the author) and many of my research participants.
Other forms of combating the intersectional discrimination of Muslim women consist of various individual and contextual strategies that women use to deal with a professional and life context that is constraining. Some strategies may help women “adjust” to this context, a sort of resilience adopted to keep feeling comfortable with their bodies and with the space they cross and inhabit. Some women recount that they have finally been obliged to give up a professional career since wearing a headscarf was not allowed on the job. They then reoriented themselves professionally to other jobs, and they found reasons and motivations to engage with these new careers. This is the case for example of Louna, a woman that found her passion and vocation in teaching Islamic religion, notwithstanding the fact that this did not correspond to her original professional project. Other adjustments may include the choice of not wearing a headscarf while working, or of finding other types of head covering that are accepted at work. Other women also put in place acts of resistance supported by a sharp awareness of their rights—acquired through experience and study—and by the will of having their rights respected in spite of the difficulties that this implies. For example, Yasmine, a young woman providing for the needs of her two children, insisted on (and finally obtained) her right to wear a headscarf at work, and she did so by leaning on the fact that the social service agency who found her the job did not put restrictions on the wearing of religious symbols. In many cases, resisting social constraints and exercising individual strategies led women to share their expertise with other women. These efforts result in some women forming associations to support (financially, psychologically, and through legal advice) Muslim women victims of discrimination, and some others aimed at coaching and empowering women not to be discouraged by the difficulties they face. These were the choices some of my research participants made, particularly those who were determined to capitalize on their experience of discrimination and to promote actions aimed at reducing the possibility that other women face similar difficulties. Since employers were not willing to hire her, nor even test her professional skills, because she was “visibly” showing her Muslim religion by wearing a headscarf, Imane finally opted to create her own business. One service her firm provided was supporting other Muslim women in their job search, including preparing appropriate ways of answering discriminatory and stereotypical questions that employers might ask during job interviews. The aim of this, and other similar efforts (in the words of the initiators), is to remind Muslim women that they do have valuable skills despite potential employers’ attempts to dismiss them. Other possible actions are boycotting shops that do not allow employees to wear the headscarf, going to exams with witnesses able to record if discrimination takes place, among others. They also consist of more generalized actions of mediation (i.e., attempting first to find a negotiated solution among parties before or instead of resorting to legal procedure). A woman active in an antiracist association stated: “It is more through negotiation that we try to put forward the rights of the parties … we try to remind people that the law allows freedom of religion for everyone … and later [come] the sanctions, we first remind of the principle that is in this case that of the freedom of religion” (Lina, interview by author). Negotiation is aimed at promoting the adoption of inclusive policies that benefit Muslim women and potentially other individuals (e.g., when they help put in place more flexible regulations that comply with a variety of individual needs). Some examples of companies or institutions that implement an “inclusive neutrality” exist in Belgium. For instance, the public social welfare center in Louvain recently adopted an internal regulation allowing Muslim employees to wear headscarves if they desired to. Other organizations create more general “diversity plans” aimed at providing victims of discrimination with appropriate support, as well as to promote diversity within public services or businesses. However, the introduction of an “ethnic” or “diversity” quota that can be included in such policies is strongly criticized by several actors that point out the risks of using a tool that may contribute to the perpetuation of a process of racialization aimed at marginalizing people with migrant backgrounds.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The feminist project of adopting an intersectional approach to the study of women’s subordination and, in particular, of the life experiences of Muslim women, is based on the consideration of women’s multilayered identities operating at “the interplay of different locations relating to gender, ethnicity, race and class (amongst others)” (Anthias 2002, 275). As any other individuals, Muslim women are associated with a set of categories that link to gender (they are women), religious belonging (they are Muslim), cultural or ethnic belonging (they may have foreign origins and they are racialized), socioeconomic and professional status (they are students, workers, unemployed, etc.), and personal status (they are wives, mothers, daughters, etc.). This composite positioning, on the one hand, has to be considered when analyzing the specific and complex forms of discrimination and subordination that Muslim women may undergo and that affect their life experience at the intersection of these categories. Yet this positioning has a political scope that allows women to formulate claims related to each of their identity markers and at their intersection, for example regarding equal access to education, jobs, and social resources. Women’s life histories and narratives of belonging are then forms of social action that operate in a context where institutions attempt to regulate and control the political subjectivities of the members of minority groups. The aim is to contribute to “a process of maintaining and sustaining a cultural and political hegemony within the nation” that responds to a moral “anxiety over the potential loss of hegemony in defining the contours of the nation state” (Fadil 2014, 251; also refer to Appadurai 2006 and Povinelli 1998). Operating in such a context means to challenge and transform hegemonic discourses of race, gender, and religion (Mirza 2002, 6), thus exerting agency (the capacity of action within a given sociopolitical structural context that may constrain individual and collective responses) (see Ahearn 2001, among others). Going beyond the dichotomy between subordination and resistance and “mak[ing] sense” of their religious life experiences (Bilge 2010, 22; Mahmood 2005), contemporary Muslim women enact agency through embodying the intersectional categories of belonging that they are assigned to or that they claim. Their action consists of defining specific forms of feminisms that are anchored in their identities, including their religion, and that are situated in the European context, thus contributing to the constitution of a European intra-Islamic field and its integration into global/worldwide (Muslim) space (Djelloul and Maréchal 2014). By doing this, they assert the need for an institutional recognition of their legitimate inclusion in the sociopolitical and cultural context where they live: that means fulfilling their rights, just as any other citizens, and ensuring the possibility of exerting them.
Definition: agency
the capacity of a person to act independently and make their own choices within the constraints of the social structure; these can conform to or resist cultural expectations.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Describe how intersectionality operates with regard to the discrimination and subordination of Muslim women, by:
1. defining the key notions that you use; and
2. bringing a concrete example in form of life history (not necessarily among those studied in the chapter);
2. What does the notion of “agency” mean and how can it be applied to describe the strategies put in place by Muslim women to counter discrimination and subordination (provide with a concrete example)?
KEY TERMS
agency: the capacity of a person to act independently and make their own choices within the constraints of the social structure; these can conform to or resist cultural expectations.
ethno-stratification: In the workplace, this notion describes the socioeconomic process leading to a concentration of workers of certain nationalities or origins in particular sectors and jobs.
hegemonic discourse: a discourse that promotes the dominance of one group over another supported by legitimating norms and ideas that normalize dominance. Using collective consent rather than force, dominant social groups maintain power, and social inequalities are naturalized.
intersectionality: refers to the interconnected nature of social categories such as race, class, and gender that create overlapping systems of discrimination or disadvantage. The goal of an intersectional analysis is to understand how racism, sexism, and homophobia (for example) interact together to impact our identities and how we live in our society.
Islamic feminism: A feminist movement that seeks freedom of religion on the basis of a multifaceted definition of femininity that recognizes both religiosity and women’s agency within society.
Islamophobia: fear of, and prejudice against the Islamic faith and Muslims in general
racialization: the process of ascribing a racial identity and associated traits to a group. These characteristics are often defined by a dominant group with the aim of discriminating against and excluding the subordinate group.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
The ethnographic material used in this chapter has been collected within the framework of the following research programs, whose publications are of help to deepen some of the topics as well as further contextual elements addressed in this chapter:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks all the Muslim women who have shared their life experiences for this chapter.
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Learning Objectives
• Analyze diverse practices and meanings of fatherhood.
• Identify the key elements in the construction of fatherhood and conjugality among young Indigenous Mexican migrants.
• Discuss how transnationalism affects Indigenous peoples’ lives and how their undocumented condition makes them vulnerable in the United States.
In this chapter, the author explores the experiences of fatherhood among migrant men in the United States and Mexico and demonstrates how they disrupt common models of fatherhood. Through case studies, the author addresses the ways in which these men negotiate roles and create strategies to be present, have authority, and support their relationships with their spouses and children, even in their absence. The author concludes that their migration experiences profoundly shape their practices and identities as fathers.
INTRODUCTION
In some Latin American societies, especially Mexico, fatherhood marks a change of status as men become parents. Through access to economic and symbolic resources as fathers, men consolidate themselves as “complete men,” as long as they comply with family obligations such as providing financial support and using the authority that comes from being male and a parent in a patriarchal environment. However, the experience of fatherhood is not universal but rather informed by socially and culturally specific practices. For example, some scholars suggest that peasant parents from central Mexico are more involved in raising their children than urban parents in Mexico City because “there are a multiplicity of cultural practices and patterns in which paternity is based on the divergence of experiences” (Gutmann 1996, 57). Moreover, according to Luis Bonino, “fatherhood will be diverse as long as the social sector, class, age, and religion are different” (Bonino 2003, 172). Furthermore, fatherhood in the context of transnational migration creates, on the one hand, vulnerable conditions for men, but on the other may also provide financial benefits to support their families in Mexico.
My research disrupts universal models of fatherhood by demonstrating its complexity. I focus on the diverse meanings and practices of fatherhood among Indigenous Coca men from Mezcala, Jalisco, Mexico, who migrated to the United States. The meanings and practices of family for these men are based on Indigenous community experiences. They negotiate and create strategies to be present, have authority, and support their relationships with their spouses and children. In other words, they become parents, not only because they biologically produced children but because they are recognized by their community as upholding their parenting roles even in their physical absence. However, these parenting experiences are shaped by their various migration experiences, which, in turn, transforms their identity as fathers in various ways.
As you read in the introduction of this book, culture is constructed through a myriad of complex social processes. Similarly, gendered identities such as “father” are also social constructions, which for these men are shaped by history, community composition, and the migratory experience. To begin this chapter, I will examine the impact of transnational migration on the concepts of fatherhood and conjugality and their roles in migrant men’s lives.
BACKGROUND
In 2011 I began to study the fatherhood practices of young migrant men (aged eighteen to twenty-six) from the Indigenous Coca community of Mezcala, Jalisco, Mexico, and what these practices reveal about their relationships with their spouses and children. The Coca Indigenous community of Mezcala, Mexico, is located on the north shore of Lake Chapala, Jalisco. It is a town of fishermen, peasants, merchants, and (recently) skilled tradesmen who work in housing construction and electronics assembly. The town is struggling with the Mexican state for recognition of its Indigenous autonomy and ancestral practices. Its Indigenous identity is based on community, religious, and family organization linked to the land and lake territories. For more information on this community see Castillero 2005, Bastos 2012, and Ochoa 2006.
The men I studied migrated to the United States looking for better living conditions. Some were deported to Mexico under President Obama’s Secure Communities program (2008–2017). My research examines how this policy affected the migrants and their family life. Other men in my study (with and without documents) returned voluntarily to Mexico to attend to family issues at home. In this chapter I explore the interconnected realities of “being a father” and “being a husband” in the context of this transnational migration. Through interviews and ethnographic observations in Mezcala, Mexico, and Los Angeles and Sanger in California, I identify the tensions and the strategies these men develop as they parent from a distance. I also suggest that fatherhood is constructed through conceptions and practices of gender, conjugality, and migratory experiences. These men had more education and specialized skills that allowed them to obtain employment in the United States in construction, assembling electronics, and food packaging, which eased their lives as migrants compared to their predecessors who were farmers, fishermen, or bracero migrants. In the three cases I present in this chapter, the young men use their skills to survive in California in a context where harassment and discrimination are ever increasing. All three men lacked the proper documents to work in the United States, which greatly complicated their lives and affected fatherhood practices and relations with their spouses and children. In all of these cases, the names of the interviewees were changed in order to protect their identities.
Definition: Bracero program
a temporary worker program operating from 1942 to 1964 to address the labor shortages in the 1940s caused by World War II. The original objective of the Bracero program was to employ a large, temporary labor force to harvest fruits and vegetables for US consumption.
TRANSNATIONALISM AND FATHERHOOD
To understand the importance of fatherhood to these men, it is important to contextualize their transnational movements and the complexity of their practices of fatherhood at a distance. Scholars have argued that transnationalism indicates a weakening of nation-states, and simultaneously, the strengthening of the contemporary global economy contributing to the formation and continuity of global financial and political institutions. For Jürgen Habermas, the weakening of the state was expressed by the crisis of capitalism and the system of national institutions: that is, the states no longer had the power to regulate the domestic market or the authority to make policy decisions. Rather, these powers were exercised by other institutions such as the World Bank (WB) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which produced what Habermas called the “postnational” era (Habermas 1998). Global institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), IMF, and WB imposed their policies and agendas in many Latin American countries, resulting in conditions of inequality, poverty, and socioeconomic exclusion within their population. With transnationalism, large corporations moved operations around the world searching for countries with, for example, lax environmental regulations that would allow the use of toxic chemicals in the production of fabrics, clothing, and electronics. Corporations also searched for locations with cheap labor and few labor rights, compounding job insecurity and social inequality in these countries.
Scholars (Ong 1999; Kearney 1995) have analyzed the detrimental impacts of transnationalism on the economies and societies in peripheral areas of the globe. These global processes have contributed to the motivations of the people to move between countries producing a visible moment called the “age of migration” (Castles and Miller 2004). These migrations, particularly for undocumented laborers, have been shaped by class, gender, and ethnicity (Alarcón 1999; Alba 1999; Arroyo 1989; Bustamante 1975, 1997; Cornelius 1990; Delgado and Márquez 2007). The men participating in my research from the Coca community are among those undocumented migrants whose lives and movements have been deeply affected by the transnationalization of capital. These individuals are trying to reconfigure their lives, their community, and their gender identity and fatherhood as well. From this perspective, Malkin (1999) suggests that migration must be examined from the construction of gender to differentiate the participation of men and women within the transnational migration circuit because “we run the risk not only of granting priority to the ‘political’ over the ‘domestic’ but not to reinforce duality” (Malkin 1999, 475). Furthermore, migration affects “family dynamics,” which allows us to understand social cohesion, elements of solidarity, and reciprocity but also tension, conflict, and violence in the private sphere of families (Boehm 2008, 21).
Fatherhood in Latin America has emerged as a central topic in scholarship starting in the 2000s. Fuller’s Paternities in Latin America (2000), for example, positioned fatherhood at the center of analysis examining cases from different countries such as Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. Each case shows diverse practices in the context of the global economy, which generates unequal relations based on gender, ethnicity, and migration. Recognizing Mexico as a multicultural country, Bonino (2003) proposes models of fatherhood based on different types of cultures, religions, and societies. Likewise, Alatorre argues that fatherhood is “an interpretation of the subject that places him in relation to sons and daughters and includes a series of practices and meanings, which are not universal or homogeneous, and therefore we will have to observe these men in their particular contexts without losing sight of their ethnic, relational, social, origins etc.” (Alatorre and Luna 2000, 244). Building on this literature, I recognize fatherhood as a shifting identity that includes the idea of being a “good father” and a “good spouse.” It is a social and cultural identity that is built on the relations with spouses and children, whether co-located or living at a distance.
MEZCALA, A VILLAGE OF TRANSNATIONAL INDIGENOUS MIGRANTS
Mezcala is an Indigenous enclave that represents one of the last riverside towns in Jalisco that still preserves their religious practices and identity. Anchored in the territory, they have a long history of struggles to defend their Indigenous Coca autonomy (Bastos 2010; Martínez and Alonso 2009). Although the Cocas no longer speak Nahuatl (their native language), they express their ethnic identity through their strong community organization structure, family, and community ties. In Mezcala, agriculture has been a fundamental part of the local and regional economy. It is a community of farmers and fishermen, which in recent years has changed as access to education has led to other jobs such as in the electronics industry and the building trades. Since the mid-1980s the maquiladoras near Mezcala have created jobs for local residents. Although they offer only minimum wage jobs, workers found these positions attractive as they provided better working and living conditions. Despite these factory jobs, Mezcala is still a poor Indigenous community, not fully benefiting from the global economies nor the Mexican state.
For most of the twentieth century, Mezcala residents have been migrating to the United States, starting with the Bracero program (1942–1964). Due to a labor shortage in the 1940s caused by World War II, the original objective of the Bracero program was to employ a large, temporary labor force to harvest fruits and vegetables for US consumption. Since then, migration from Mezcala (and other parts of Mexico) to the United States has continued virtually unabated. Mezcala has become a transnational community, with the Indigenous Cocas living in both Mexico and in the United States. California is home to a large population of migrants from Mezcala, particularly in the cities of Los Angeles and Sanger. In California, migrants have formed associations and groups that organize community gatherings to share and continue the traditions practiced in their community of origin. For example, Club Mezcala Inc., located in South Central Los Angeles, has been an active hometown association since 2006 with 120 engaged members. The club organizes fundraising events to support the community in Jalisco such as the construction of a community library and other projects. In the city of Sanger, groups of dancers practice for months prior to the December 12 celebration for the Virgin of Guadalupe. In both cities, Mezcala celebrations include dances, music, and special costumes. Migrants also have a soccer team that competes locally and participates in the annual soccer tournament in California (Perez-Marquez 2015).
In the city of Los Angeles, the Cocas reside in the central and southern parts of the city, in neighborhoods that are poor and considered by many to be dangerous. Some arrived between 1963 and 1987 escaping domestic violence, conditions of poverty, and marginalization in Mezcala. Those in Sanger arrived during the last stages of the Bracero program in the 1960s and remained in this city. Others arrived during the 1980s driven by the economic crises in Mexico at the time. There they worked in the harvesting of citrus and other fruits. Sanger is a city of fourteen thousand inhabitants located about fifteen miles east of Fresno, in the Central Valley of California. There the Cocas live in neighborhoods around the periphery of the city, where housing conditions are more precarious and pesticides part of the air they breathe.
The three young migrant fathers I discuss below all arrived in California without documents between 1996 and 2007. They all had support networks in both cities to help pay the costs of migration and settling in their new homes. The Mexican origin population in these cities includes both documented and undocumented people, although the young Indigenous undocumented people who continue the migratory flow from Mezcala are among the most vulnerable in terms of deportation.
The implementation of the Obama administration’s Secure Communities immigration program marked a change in the historic rhythms and cycles of migration from Mezcala. The program implemented a new level of collaboration between federal and state government agencies, local police forces, and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). Through this program, security forces identified foreigners who were detained, had previous arrest histories, or were deemed threats to the security of US citizens and were deported to their country of origin. The efficiency of this program was reflected in the number of people deported to their countries of origin. Under the Obama administration, the United States deported more than three million people, the greatest number in US history (Nowrasteh 2019). One of the cases presented in this study was affected by this policy, and my final analysis includes the impact the Obama administration policies had on the Coca community.
YOUNG MIGRANT PARENTS: BEING FATHERS AND HUSBANDS
In this context of deportation and mass return of Mexicans to Mexico, some young fathers from Mezcala who migrated in the late 1980s and during the early 2000s did not have residence documents in the United States and faced great challenges exercising their fatherhood because of their status. Being undocumented forced them to live in the shadows as they constantly were afraid of being deported. Being undocumented also prohibited them from traveling back and forth across the US border to spend time with their family, forcing them to stay as long as possible in the US and making their stay semipermanent. For these men, all of these experiences generate feelings of guilt, frustration, and remorse regarding their fatherhood because of their absence during the birth of their children or because of the prolonged absence in general. However, from their point of view, they try to remain closely connected to their children and seek to protect their families while they are absent from Mexico by sending remittances and maintaining constant communication. They consider it their responsibility to maintain the family economically.
Definition: remittances
money sent from migrants to their families residing in the country of origin.
A common theme among migrant Cocas fathers who had small children was that they sought to maintain the position of authority they had before migrating. They were “vocal and opinionated” and actively participated in the care of their children, albeit from a distance. Compared to their fathers or grandfathers, they considered themselves to be much less detached and more active fathers.
According to their wives, the migrant fathers changed after returning from the United States. This change was sometimes “for the better” and sometimes not. The wives noted that they became more demanding in terms of caring for their children and improving the conditions of family life. They exercised their presence as fathers by seeking authority, which sometimes involved using some type of violence, as the migrant fathers sought to regain the position they had before migrating. Sometimes they did not succeed, and the couple decided to separate. Javier’s case shows this dynamic.
JAVIER: THE FRUSTRATION AND GUILT
Javier is a thirty-year-old man. His father is a peasant; his mother a housewife. He is the third born among his thirteen brothers and sisters. He finished high school in Mezcala and then worked for a few years in Guadalajara as a merchant in the largest market in the city and in construction work at El Salto, a municipality near Mezcala. He married Paty in 2003, and less than a year later his first son Rafael was born, followed by his son Ramiro the next year. He lived with his family in the city of Guadalajara, the capital of the state of Jalisco.
In 2006, Javier and his wife separated, and they agreed to each take custody of one child. Javier took custody of Rafael, the eldest, and his wife took Ramiro, the youngest. With Rafael, Javier went back to live in his mother’s house in Mezcala. Due to a lack of employment options and the stress of the divorce, Javier decided to go to the United States to find work, leaving Rafael in the care of Javier’s mother. Javier crossed the northern border of Mexico en route to the United States without documents or formal migratory authorization. His brothers, who lived in California helped him pay for the costs of a person (coyote) who helped him cross the border near Nogales, Sonora. The person(s) that provide such services are known as Coyotes; this nickname is usually associated with the animal’s behavior when trying to avoid detection by those who are under his surveillance. Crossing modern state borders without the proper documentation requires a coyote who should have a topographical knowledge and high level of cunning.
This area of Mexico is very dangerous and also closely monitored by organized criminals and the US border patrol, but it was the only viable option he had to get to Los Angeles. It took him several days to arrive, and he walked a few days in the desert. Then one of the coyotes picked him up in Arizona, hid him in the trunk of a car, and drove him to California.
Javier arrived in the city of Compton, south of Los Angeles, thanks to the financial help of his two brothers who already lived here. His brother Rodrigo worked as a supervisor at a fast-food packing house and got Javier a job at the company. Javier then began to work in the maintenance of the food-packing machines. Javier distributed his income between his living expenses (rent, food, gasoline) and sending money to his mother. His remittances varied between \$100 and \$150 a month, which were meant to cover the expenses of his son Rafael in Mezcala. At the age of eight years old, Rafael should have been in the fourth grade; however, after failing the second grade twice, he remained in the second grade. According to Javier’s mother, Rafael had a hard time learning and had behavioral problems (he gets distracted), but Javier’s mother thinks he is sick with sadness for not having his father or mother nearby. For Javier, he felt that leaving Rafael in the care of his grandmother was the only option he had after the divorce. In his words.
I know that the child has many doubts, why did I leave him with his grandmother instead of his mother? Why was I not there when he was little? Why did I leave others in charge? I am getting prepared and will return when the time is right. God will put the moment and the precise words in my mouth. I personally have a lot of guilt for having left him, which is why he does poorly in school. He needs his parents, at minimum his mom, but his mom is now his grandmother. I ask the Lord to enlighten me and let me be together with my son when I return to Mezcala. We will have better living conditions and I will be able to care for him. (Javier, interview by author, August 15, 2012)
Javier expresses his concerns about the neglect of his son because, according to him, every time he sees Rafael in photographs he doesn’t seem well cared for, with old clothes and tattered shoes.
I’m angry that he lives like this, all dirty, disheveled and broken. I am sure, he spends all day in the street … It would be better if I cared for him because his mother never visits him in Mezcala. I know that she gave up her rights to him, but she should at least visit him from time to time. (Javier, interview by author, August 15, 2012)
When talking with Javier about the long-distance relationship he has with his children, he stated, “I am prepared for the questions. I am prepared to answer all their doubts. Why his mother rejected him, why we divorced and why I left him with his grandmother. The main reason I want to return to Mexico is that I want Rafa to feel loved and appreciated at least by me, I am his father; in fact, that is why I want to go back to Mezcala.” In 2013, after living and working in California for seven years, Javier returned voluntarily to Mezcala. He lives permanently in Mezcala and started a new family, and his son Rafael continues to live with his grandparents.
Javier’s experience provides insight into a number of factors that influence fatherhood for these men. First, the vulnerable conditions of being an undocumented immigrant living in California restricted his ability to return more frequently to Mexico to visit his family. This negatively affected his connection and relationship with his son. Second, his identity as a responsible father was disrupted because his mother was caring for his son, and his son was not doing well. In other words, for Javier being a good father required him to be present in his son’s life, to guide him, and participate in his everyday life activities to ensure his well-being. Not being able to do these things negatively affected Javier’s self-identity as a good father, which was further compounded by constraints on his masculinity as an undocumented migrant.
RAUL: VOLUNTARY RETURN AND THE NEGOTIATION OF HIS CONJUGALITY
In another case, the migrant father’s absence and disconnection from his children became the very source of the loss of his parental position. After a long absence, he did not recognize himself as a father despite being the one responsible for supporting the family financially. Raul is a thirty-year-old man who was born in Mezcala. After high school, he left to work for a construction company for a year and a half in a neighboring town. This work allowed him to travel and get to know different parts of Mexico as the company did projects in Cancún, León, Guanajuato, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. When he was nineteen, he met Lilia with whom he then had two children in the next two years: Rosalia and Carlitos. In 2008, when Raul was twenty-one, he went to Los Angeles where four of his brothers live. He did not have a way to get to the United States legally, so his brothers helped him pay for all the costs of crossing the border, which involved hiring a coyote. When Raul arrived, he started working in a tire factory and then later for a fast-food packing house where two of his brothers worked. He stayed in Los Angeles from 2008 until 2010, when he decided to return to Mexico to meet his son Carlitos, who was already a year old.
After his two-year stay in the United States, Raul thought that his experience had changed his perspective on being a man in several ways: “There you are a man and a woman, because there you have to work outside of the house and also wash your clothes, iron and cook. There is no distinction between being male or female” (Raul, interview by author, May 13, 2011).
Raul lived with his brothers in a garage that served as an apartment. This allowed him to save up to buy a van, which was one of the goals of the trip to the United States, in addition to sending money to Lilia to pay for the household expenses back home. While Raul was in the United States, Lilia lived with his parents. In their home, he felt confident that his wife and children would not lack food or necessities; however, he also thought it was important for Lilia to have some money for emergencies, birthday parties, and for medicines if his children got sick.
I sent money to Lilia every time I could, every fifteen days or every month I would send her a little money so she could buy the baby’s milk or buy gasoline to take them to the hospital if they got sick. I also sent her money to have a big birthday party for Rosalia and buy her a princess dress or whatever she wants. I wanted her to buy her a dress and send me pictures. (Raúl, interview by author, May 13, 2011)
Raul returned to Mezcala voluntarily in 2010 because he was not present at the births of either of his two children and felt estranged from his family. Although Raul did not have any work options in Mexico, he decided to stay there permanently. Raul’s experience as an undocumented migrant allowed him to understand and negotiate his identity as a husband and economic responsibility as a father. He reflected that in the United States undocumented migrants, both men and women, have similar working and everyday life experiences. He understood that men and women must work hard to obtain their goals in life. Through the lens of gender, he reflected on his role as a father, his position as man, and his ability to support his family.
PEPE: DEPORTATION AND FAMILY SEPARATION
Pepe was born in Mezcala in 1980, the youngest in a family of seven brothers and sisters. His parents immigrated to the United States in 1988, and although they had already had previous experiences of temporary migration, they secured permanent US residency during the Simpson-Rodino Amnesty or IRCA of 1986. His father had begun migrating in 1975, going back and forth between Mezcala and California. Then his mother began to take the eldest children to the United States. They applied for permits for temporary and then permanent stays through the IRCA Amnesty, which allowed them to stay indefinitely. However Pepe did not have the same fate because his mother did not request identity documents within the required period to process the paperwork, and as a result he became undocumented.
Pepe grew up in the United States, and because he was the youngest of all his brothers, he had more financial resources, which allowed him to finish high school. After high school he worked picking fruit in Sanger. Later he worked in a jam factory in the city of Fresno, California, shortly before he was deported in 2012. At the age of twenty, Pepe married a woman of Mexican origin born in Fresno whom he met in high school. They have four sons aged eight, seven, five, and two years old.
Regarding his relationship with his children, he reflects:
I am very close to them, I am the one who gave them breakfast, and I took them to school. I was the one who took care of them when Ana, my wife, worked many hours … I have been very careful with my children because my parents took care of me because I’m the youngest of my brothers and sisters and I know how important it is to have your mom and dad close to you. That is why I try to take care of my children as much as I can, to tell them how to do things and all that, but now that I am away, they have even told me they are skinny. (Pepe, interview by author, February 20, 2012)
This dynamic changed when in 2012 the police took him to a jail in Fresno for driving without a driver’s license, and later he was deported. He arrived in the city of Mexicali, where he stayed for one year hoping to find a way to return. He finally decided to go to Mezcala and to the house of his only sister. When I interviewed him in Mezcala, he had been here for six months and could not find a job, nor could he return to his family in Fresno. His mother sent him some money every two weeks, money that he shared with his sister Martha in Mezcala and used to buy phone cards to talk to his wife in Fresno and find out about his legal migration situation in the courts. When I spoke with his mother Fernanda in Sanger, she told me that Pepe’s children “are very sad because he was the one who looked after them. Pepe was the one who took care of them, took them to school, made them dinner.” Fernanda showed us photographs of the children and explained that the children have lost weight due to the absence of their father. Pepe feels frustrated and guilty for not being more careful when he was detained on the road.
That event marked his and his family’s life. While at times he feels proud of being a loving father and very close to his children, at other times he feels that he has not done enough to be able to return to them, though he had tried once to cross the border without documents. In June of 2015 I learned that Pepe had decided to cross the northern border of Tijuana-San Diego with the identification documents of one of his brothers. Now he lives in Fresno but not with his wife and children because his wife decided she wanted a divorce. He lives alone in an apartment and works harvesting oranges at the factory where much of his family works. He sees his children every weekend and occasionally picks them up from school to take them to lunch and spend time with them.
In Pepe’s case, three points are clear. First, migration from Mezcala is so complex even within the same families, his brothers were able to obtain the proper documents to reside in the United States, but Pepe remained undocumented. Second, his commitment as a father was unmatched in relation to other cases, but his deportation to Mexico challenged his dedication to his children. Furthermore, it showed the vulnerability of the children due to their father’s undocumented condition. Finally, it shows Pepe’s willingness to return to the United States to be with his children despite the permanent threat of being deported due to harsher migratory laws.
CONCLUSION
The cases presented in this study demonstrate how young fathers who face migration to the United States today realize that fatherhood is a relationship that needs one’s physical presence and requires constant affection, care, and attention to children and spouses. The idea of fatherhood intersects with conjugality in the context of transnational migration and entails: (a) being an economic provider, for example, through remittances but also (b) demonstrating paternal affective presence and care and (c) negotiating marital readjustment, that is, the relationship with their wives. Above all, the experience of migrating marked a significant change in the way they constructed their identity as fathers, as it made them aware of the importance of being close to their children, rather than just supporting them economically.
These issues emerge as constant concerns in these three cases of young fathers, the temporary separation of families generated tense dynamics with their spouses and children and in the cases of Javier and Pepe, their absence has been a real crisis for their children. For migrant parents, it is important to maintain a bond with their families; even at a distance, economic and emotional presence is a relevant issue in their lives.
Despite the distance and complexity of staying in hiding, young migrant parents sought family reunification insofar as it was possible. With the vicissitudes and complexity of fatherhood under physical separation, it is necessary to depend on other people to be present as a parent, for example, grandmothers and of course mothers who take the role of absent fathers. In that sense, the presence of wives or mothers of these men is fundamental to reconstruct the contents of fatherhood, which is based on physical presence and economic support.
Complex and adverse situations arise when people experience migratory vulnerability. Due to these factors, ideals of fatherhood are slowly changing for these men. Vulnerability is experienced daily. It involves uncertainty because one runs the risk of losing one’s work, being separated from the place one is living, and being deported. These men live in a state of constant precarity, which causes them to reconsider their stay in the United States and maximize their resources for the well-being of their families in Mexico.
These experiences of vulnerability as undocumented Indigenous migrants were a recurrent theme during my interviews in their community of origin. Despite this vulnerable condition, these men felt they must continue being responsible fathers by being economic supporters of the family and caring for their children.
These constant concerns about deportation among the migrant fathers of Mezcala also affected their possibility of voluntary return until they had met their goals for migrating. This affected, above all, their children, since they were the ones who lived without their fathers. Migration to the United States results in multiple experiences and produces diverse situations where the identity of these Indigenous men is challenged through universal conceptions about how to be a father, the meaning of family, gender perceptions, and community.
In this way, the complexities in the lives of young migrant fathers are relevant in light of the actions of recent US government policies that separate families.
KEY TERMS
Bracero program: a temporary worker program operating from 1942 to 1964 to address the labor shortages in the 1940s caused by World War II. The original objective of the Bracero program was to employ a large, temporary labor force to harvest fruits and vegetables for US consumption.
remittances: money sent from migrants to their families residing in the country of origin.
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Brenda Anderson
In 2008, a Regina collective of academics, community workers, spiritual leaders, and family members held a conference titled “Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminisms and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico.” The proceedings and reflections were subsequently published as Torn from our Midst: Voices of Grief, Healing and Action from the Missing Indigenous Women Conference, 2008. Ten years have passed to our decision to create a second edition that not only provides updated and new material but is also a retrospective of what, if anything, has changed in the national and global context of violence against Indigenous women. This edition offers a decade-long snapshot of the national timeline of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationships within which the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) was conducted. We are situated at a critical moment in history, a liminal door frame from which we gaze back at the interminable cries for justice and forward to the implementation of the 231 Calls to Justice from the commissioners of the 2019 MMIWG inquiry. Laying our Canadian stories alongside the global phenomenon of femicide[1] in other colonized countries such as Mexico and Guatemala, this book underscores the common and interlocking effects of racism and sexism on Indigenous women. The first report from the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability confirms that the term femicide is every bit as applicable to Canada, where being female and being an Indigenous female makes you vulnerable to violence. “Indigenous women and girls were overrepresented as victims, comprising about five percent of the population in Canada, but 36 percent of those women and girls . . . were killed by violence” (#CallItFemicide, 7). This book provides testimony and evidence that sexualized and racialized violence is not only a product of colonization but continues to be used as a deliberate tool of colonization[2].
The process of redressing violence against Indigenous women begins with a two-pronged approach to education and relationship-building. Such an approach was affirmed by the 300 participants of the 2008 conference and, a decade later, remains the framework of the National Inquiry. In this book, you find everything from personal stories to historic narratives to theoretical positionings to concrete political and public policy changes. In this way, we implore all Canadians to actively engage in knowledgeably redressing the vulnerability of brown-skinned women.
The rapidity of new developments, new stories, or new controversies on MMIWG is not what we can address specifically through the medium of a fixed book. What we can offer, and what we think is important, is the evolutionary, historic meta-narrative of the national discourse within which the specifics arise. Whether it is the documentation and analysis of violence against Indigenous women in northern Saskatchewan or the use of the word femicide rather than genocide[3] in classrooms, the authors are commenting on the issues as they relate to the time of writing. What readers have, then, is a re-creation of the conversation within the framework of a decade or more. The hope of the editing team is that, by lending a decade-long retrospective, one that includes links to the global as well as the national context, we may contribute to the education and growing will of a nation to reconcile its past by committing to a new and safer future. And ultimately, throughout the book runs our desire to make our research matter, done in memory of those torn from our midst and in support of remaining family members.
Our editing team includes women who identify as Indigenous and women who identify as being of white settler descent. We note how our positionality affects our responses to current events, thereby modeling the need for all voices to be included at the table. Without all perspectives, we cannot fully redress colonialism nor hope to decolonize our hearts and institutions. Our hopes for the future reflect our status as women who actively work to eliminate all forms of violence against Indigenous women.
My Hope, ShauneenPete
I am from Little Pine First Nation in Treaty 6 territory. I am the Indigenous Resurgence Coordinator in Indigenous Education at University of Victoria. I was a full professor in the Faculty of Education and served as the Executive Lead: Indigenization at the University of Regina. I was also the Interim President and Vice-President (Academic) at First Nations University of Canada. My research supports the promotion of Indigenization in higher education.
During the closing of the 2008 conference, my youngest daughter Tara, who was 14 at the time, asked to share some of her reflections on the speakers. She called on all of us adults to help Indigenous girls to know security from violence. Her plea resonated deeply in all of us that day. As a survivor myself, as someone who has actively worked to expose patriarchal violence in its many forms (colonization, heteronormativity, sexism, etc.) and as a single mother who attempts to shield my own children from violence, I’ve taken seriously the issues of violence. It became a topic of study in my undergraduate teaching, my informal writing for REZX magazine, and for a video blog for REZX TV. I believe we have a responsibility to use our agency to expose violence, and to do so in a variety of ways to reach a larger audience. Our hope is that this revised edition will serve that purpose.
My Hope, Carrie Bourassa
Building on Dr. Pete’s hope for the future, I too remember Tara’s powerful words. I feel that young women have much to say to us, and we, in turn, much to learn. The Elders and Knowledge Keepers tell us that children are gifts from Creator and are here to teach us. I truly believe this. I have been blessed with two amazing daughters who teach me every day. One is twenty and one is nine and the lessons I receive from each are profoundly different, yet each are vital to my learning and healing journey. Violence became a norm for me growing up and, I think, for many Métis, First Nations, and Inuit families. There are reasons for this, of course, which this collection deftly unpacks. It is, however, important to note that colonization affects First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities in vastly different ways and there is purpose, intent behind it. Yet we are still here, and while we may still be struggling with inter-generational trauma, disease, addictions—we are purposely here. We are resilient, strong, and our generations are behind us and ahead of us. We are still here.
My Hope, Brenda Anderson
Anyone who puts pen to paper understands the potential agony of reading one’s writing from over a decade ago. For me, reading the original introduction to Torn from Our Midst shows a shift in my own thinking; it also represents an important national shift in the conversation about MMIWG. As an ally, it has never been my intention to speak for or on behalf of Indigenous women. In the original introduction, I emphasised two mantras that continue to serve me well: ‘to make space for things to happen,’ and to ‘learn how to stand alongside.’ Yet, it is painfully evident to me that, in that introduction, I continued to unconsciously imagine my readers to be largely a non-Indigenous community. And why wouldn’t I? When I had sought out very few Indigenous professional colleagues or friends, when I had yet to participate in many ceremonial opportunities, when my institution was just barely beginning to understand, let alone acknowledge the ways in which we perpetuate colonialist structures, systems, and ideologies. I was largely operating from a protected ghetto of privilege. The fact that our original editing team was comprised entirely of non-Indigenous researchers speaks volumes, as does the fact that our current team has the wisdom from Shauneen and Carrie to help us see what privilege keeps from us. This slow process of decolonization is being replicated nation wide.
Ten years ago, I wrote of that chilling moment in Fort Qu’Appelle when, after seeing what seemed like the hundredth poster of a missing Indigenous woman, this one asking for help in locating Amber Redman[4], it finally dawned on me that there was a profound dissonance between how I understood Canada and what was really happening. At that time, I did know I had the pleasure of white privilege; on another level, I was still learning how deeply my assumptions are grounded in the very fabric of colonialist privilege. If truth be told, it continues to be my privilege to decide whether, or when, or how to acknowledge the crisis of MMIWG; this privilege is not extended to those who live that ‘high-risk lifestyle’ of being an Indigenous woman. Accepting this uncomfortable reality is the first step towards decolonization and reconciliation. To those who are non-Indigenous and are reading this book, I see this as a first stage before concrete change that will keep Indigenous women safe can occur. The authors in this book bring that awareness forward.
As I write this, I have just watched a white ally speak during a live feed of the National Inquiry commissioners discussing their findings. The audience member described the absolute silence on Indigenous history and colonialism that he experienced throughout his childhood and right through his post-secondary education. He thanked the commissioners for the work that was transforming his life and expressed the hope that he could change certain practices in his field. Head Commissioner Marion Buller thanked him by responding, “Canada will be a great country as long as it has an open mind, an open heart, and an open spirit.”
I believe those from white settler backgrounds have a key role to play as allies, but that role is not so much one of speaking as it is of listening and then acting upon what we hear. In a university course I teach on MMIWG in the Global Context, a student from a white settler background commented on how grateful she was that she lived in Canada where we could trust our police force. She said this after watching the film Senorita Extraviada which details investigations into women disappearing from maquiladoras (sweatshops) in Ciudad Juarez. The student’s comment raised numerous responses from Indigenous students in the classroom who could give detailed accounts of being racially profiled by police simply for walking down the street, while others commented on how terrified they were of the police. In that exchange, it was absolutely clear how imperative it is for allies and Indigenous people to address this issue collaboratively. Non-Indigenous Canadians have not had to remove the very thick blinders put on them since birth, and this has resulted in a framework of genocide of Indigenous peoples, customs, experiences, and spirit. Through these types of conversations that teach and build relationships, allies will be amazed for years to come at the layers of assumptions and ignorance that have built up because our systems—governments, media, education, healthcare, etc.—chose to look away, or did not even know what to look at. Just as the young white student listened carefully and learned from that dissonant moment, I look forward to uncovering more of my colonialist assumptions so that when I read this book ten years from now, I will see yet again what I have missed so far. I will seek that open mind, heart, and spirit of hope for transformation that Indigenous women so justly deserve. I would add a further question to non-Indigenous Canadians: what insights or gifts are we resisting when we ignore the rich teachings from Indigenous Peoples in Canada? I want to thank the Indigenous Elders and Knowledge-Keepers and my friends and colleagues who generously gave me guidance and celebrate the hope that comes from their leadership and the many Indigenous teachings on relationships, the environment, and the spiritual that they have shared with me. Miigwich.
Theorising Our Collective National Trauma
Whether we recognize it or not, all Canadians share a common narrative that is inextricably rooted in our history—trauma. Whether our ancestors instigated the trauma or had it forced on them by colonial policies, we have lived for well over a century in a warped and inaccurate telling of our national story that influences how we respond to issues like MMIWG. We come to the table with pre-conceived notions of “sides.” Whenever sides are drawn, trauma continues[5]. In Canada, that trauma is concentrated on Indigenous Peoples.
“Trauma narratives are deep-seated, intergenerational streams of thoughts and behaviours clustered around experiences of violence and expectations for further violence to occur” (Rosen). Regardless of whether we are Indigenous, settlers, or recent immigrants or refugees, we are shaped by recurring themes of colonialism and immigration—displacement, dislocation, unsafe spaces—juxtaposed with our public image of multicultural acceptance, growth, and success. Two dissonant realities jostling up against one another. As a nation, we cannot escape the narrative of trauma because we are all Treaty people who live on Indigenous lands. Treaties are official documents signed between sovereign nations on behalf of their peoples. Today, we are those people, the inheritors of those treaties and of intentional genocide; in other words, all Canadians live within a national context of trauma. Just as a family is affected by a single member who has experienced trauma so, too, are non-Indigenous Canadians affected by the impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples. The trauma has not remained in the past, as the statistics on MMIWG show us so clearly. But we are often blind to the ongoing, deep colonization of current practices and policies: even when statistics or personal stories confront those who have not experienced the trauma firsthand, they often choose to deny or ignore its reality.
As non-Indigenous allies, it is up to us to move this ubiquitous divide-and-conquer motif of colonization to one of finding the path forward to healing our national family. And we must disrupt the narrative that assumes a sum total of health, that when one “side” is compensated for injustice, the other side somehow loses. Tragically, this discourse of trauma continues because we have not healed, we have not dealt with the root causes of our trauma. In Torn from our Midst, Anglican priest and organizer of the sacred space at the 2008 MMIW conference, Cheryl Toth, reminds us of how difficult it is to heal when the bodies of our loved ones have not been found. She writes, “We need to remind ourselves that they are missing to us but not to the Creator. The One who birthed them to the earth knows where on the earth their bodies lay. Their spirits, too, have a home with the Holy One. It is we who cannot rest” (Torn, 21). In order to heal, we need to understand how current systems—education, health, justice, social services—protect some Canadians and violate others, and we need to understand why Indigenous Peoples and allies frequently run up against a wall of silence or backlash for speaking up.
It is not an intellectual understanding alone that is needed. Healing is heart work. Lori Campbell, a participant and leader in the 2008 MMIW conference, wrote of the courage it took for her to speak about violence in lesbian relationships; her courage was rewarded with understanding nods from the audience (Torn, 234). She wrote of the heart connection that heals, and how her participation as a woman drummer in the Rainwater Singers, led by Elder Betty McKenna, is part of her healing: “Women walk towards the drum. They sit with us . . . the energy is strong . . . it is the powerful, healing energy of the united heartbeat of women connecting with the universal heartbeat—the heartbeat of Mother Earth” (235). Connections between education and relationship-building, understanding, and heart work bring hope and healing.
Hope: A Decade of Connecting the Dots
Since 2008, Canadians are more aware of, and even more accepting of, what the stories and statistics tell us about MMIWG. Slowly, the national discourse is connecting the dots, making the connections between historic realities and current social crises[6]. In broad strokes, we see shifts in universities as more Indigenous scholars are hired, as penetrating scholarship deepens our knowledge base, as meaningful land and treaty acknowledgements are more frequently used in many public spaces, and as the media begins to better represent Indigenous communities and concerns. Admittedly, while there is hope, there is also backlash, but that should not overshadow such shifts. Below are some further examples of the hopeful developments in Canada over the past decade.
• The completion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that listened to and documented over 6,000 survivor’s testimonies of residential schools, resulting in the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action that are actively being implemented across the broad public sector (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada).
• Cindy Blackstock wins her case and secures the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling that the federal government has failed in its responsibilities to children on reserves. The ruling that the government does not provide adequate housing, education, health, water, and more, resulted in the implementation of Jordan’s Principle (First Nations Child & Family Caring Society).
• Four prairie women, three of them Indigenous, create the Idle No More movement as a response to a federal government omnibus bill that threatened Indigenous sovereignty over land and water (Coates, x). The movement has continued to evolve and respond to ever-broadening issues such as the housing crisis on reserves (CBC).
• Increasing emphasis and a deepening discourse in media representation, including APTN’s mini-series First Contact that records the impact of exposing non-Indigenous Canadians to Indigenous realities.
• Growing debates on how we memorialize our national history, including controversies around the removal of the first Prime Minister’s statue from public spaces (CBC).
• The recognition that two-spirit and transgender Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to violence and require attention designed for their needs (Rainbow Health Ontario).
• The completion of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls with its report, Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The Report calls for a National Action Plan, an Ombudsperson, and a Tribunal to continue to respond to new cases of MMIWG (National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls).
From a historic perspective, even though such developments may continue to be ignored or resisted, the fact that such change has occurred within only ten years should not be overlooked.
Academic research has solidified our connections between historic colonizing practices and current colonialist systems and has surely influenced the general population as well in this shift. Of notable mention are James Daschuk’s multi-award winning book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life; Colleen Cardinal’s work on mapping the displacement of Indigenous and Métis children during the ‘60s Scoop; and better educational practices such as Sylvia Smith’s development of Project of Heart. Canadian Roots Exchange, a “community of Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth committed to building honest and equitable relationships” is yet another example of the integration of academic research into frontline advocacy work.
Concurrently, we have witnessed a growth in publications specifically establishing the connection between the crisis of MMIWG and colonialism, past and present. Of particular mention is Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada (Lavell-Harvard and Brant), Violence Against Indigenous women: Literature, Activism, Resistance (Hargreaves), and Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters, (Anderson, Campbell, and Belcourt). Each of these books builds on the last, deepening our knowledge with the stories and perspectives of Indigenous women and families of missing and murdered loved ones. Each emphasises the significance of storytelling and art activism like the Walking with our Sisters exhibit of moccasin vamps that travelled across Canada, and each, repeatedly, seeks action-specific responses from all Canadians.
In certain spaces, particularly where Indigenous journalists are involved, the media’s response to violence against Indigenous women and its reporting on MMIWG has generally improved in the last decade. Connie Walker and her team’s intensive research at the Canadian Broadcasting Company in profiling the individual stories of women who have been murdered or who are still missing from their families and communities is a notable resource (The Current). Journalism students at the University of Regina are encouraged to connect the dots on sexualized and racialized violence (Alwani); they will be able to respond to stories of MMIWG meaningfully in their careers[7].
It is predictable that resistance and backlash will get uglier in response to these incremental shifts. Bronwyn Eyre, the Saskatchewan Party’s Minister of Education, told the Saskatchewan legislature how her son’s education about residential schools was questionable and caused discomfort at the family’s Thanksgiving dinner conversation. In response, Thunderchild First Nation’s Chief, Delbert Wapass, said that Minister Eyre had missed an educational opportunity to contribute to her own son’s education when she “defaulted to misguided ideological tendencies and an easy way out rather than telling the truth” (Wapass).
Sometimes that resistance seems insurmountable. A 2018 survey by Angus Reid suggests “deep fractures” between “divergent yet entrenched attitudes on both symbolic and existential questions” (Hutchins) regarding Indigenization. Fifty-three percent of respondents indicated that enough apologies had been made regarding residential schools, while 47 percent connected the dots between historic colonialism and present-day language, policies, attitudes, and so on. While this MacLean’s article uses these statistics to question the effectiveness of the Liberal government’s efforts towards Indigenization, I would equally argue that a divide of 6 percent between the “entrenched attitudes” would have been significantly larger even ten years ago. Whether your glass is half empty or half full, the fact remains that, because of the work of the TRC, Idle No More, the MMIWG Inquiry, individuals like Cindy Blackstock and Colleen Cardinal, because of the academic research and activism such as is found within the pages of this book, the conversations around the dining room table are taking place in a way I believe they never have before. At least when we converse, we uncover the ugliness through which the hope for reconciliation becomes possible.
Morningstar Mercredi said in her speech at our 2008 conference on MMIW, “Hearing the truths sometimes makes people feel uncomfortable. Well, get uncomfortable.”[8] If Mercredi’s challenge to non-Indigenous people to “get uncomfortable” is taken seriously, reconciliation is not about feeling good about ourselves and our nation. What it might be about is staying hopeful, despite the dissonance, by listening to the stories of resiliency of Indigenous peoples, forming relationships amongst those we don’t know, and eradicating systems and structures that make Indigenous people vulnerable. To do so means a historic shift away from Canada envisioned as a white British project, a project fraught with intergenerational trauma, to a nation that can reconcile its past by changing its trajectory.
Layout of Book
This book began with ceremony. Tobacco and cloth were offered with a request for the blessing of our book and for all its readers. Our guiding Elder, Betty McKenna, First Nation Anishnabae, prayed for the duration of the tobacco and tied the cloth to her prayer bush as she prayed. To begin the book in a spiritual way not only honours traditional Indigenous practices, it reminds us that, without building our relationships between one another, creation, and our spirits, we cannot heal from the pain and loss we suffer when violence occurs.
Section Two, “Epistemic Erasure Rejected,” contextualizes the issue with retrospection and updates. Carrie Bourassa weaves the personal and political together in her story of reclaiming her Métis identity and heritage through her post-secondary education on Indigenous health and governmental policies in Canada. As a stand-alone chapter in a section, this story represents the growing number of Indigenous women who have become thoughtful and inspirational leaders in our midst.
The following section relates the global history of femicide, beginning with a chapter by Amnesty International fieldworkers Crystal Geisbrecht and Gordon Barnes providing us with a national and international perspective on femicide. As the original initiator who brought global attention to the stolen sisters from our nation, Amnesty continues to provide global support to holding people and institutions accountable for their negligence towards Indigenous women. Wendee Kubik and Carrie Bourassa’s following chapter documents the sequence of events that eventually resulted in the Canadian government forming the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. If readers sense some impatience with this timeline, you are not wrong!
An updated chapter on the political realities of Indigenous women in Mexico follows. Cynthia Bejarano captures the tragedy of femicide in Mexico, specifically on the U.S. border in Ciudad Juarez. Now infamous as a place where maquiladora factory workers are most vulnerable to being stolen, Cynthia clearly analyzes the stages of resistance that families and activists have engineered to bring justice for their missing women. Following Bejarano’s chapter, readers receive another update from the original edition from Kim Erno. In Torn from our Midst, Kim Erno explained how direct violence against Indigenous women is used by the Mexican government and police to serve global neoliberal economics in removing Indigenous people from the public space. We include this chapter, accompanied by a timely reflection from Kim on the connection between violence against Indigenous women and violence against our environment and Mother Earth. Similarly, Leonzo Barreno’s chapter shows how women are directly targeted in Guatemala through state violence and drug cartels. Readers might wish to connect this story to the upsurge in refugees from Latin America seeking refuge in the U.S. and Canada and to Canada’s mining companies in countries from this region. The connection demonstrates the vulnerability of women and girls in those caravans of displaced persons as they seek asylum from femicide in their countries of origin.
One of the unique features of the first edition was that we included stories of family members, and we continue this in our Section Four, “Family Stories of Trauma and Resistance.” In 2008, very little time or attention was given to these important stories. Through the work and publications by NWAC and Sisters in Spirit, digital platforms run by family members, and activist events run by Amnesty and innumerable local communities, these voices have created their own public space. The MMIWG Inquiry listened to 2,380 family members, and stories are still being collected (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls). Increasingly, the issue is less one of representation than it is one of national response. That is, best practices now rest with Indigenous consultation and leadership on implementing changes. Wherever there is a victim, there is a story, and it will always be the responsibility of the entire nation to listen, to believe, and to act. In the second section of this edition, we include one new story and one updated one.
Tracey George Hearse speaks from her perspective as a daughter whose mother was stolen from her. She threads her story alongside the stories of her mother and grandmother to create a three-generational perspective of how colonialism catastrophically affects Indigenous women in Canada. Similarly, Paula Flores updates us on the story of her daughter who disappeared in Ciudad Juarez. By placing these stories alongside one another, we hear two things: how global femicide is the result of colonialist practices and beliefs and how the spirit of resistance refuses to allow women to be dehumanized or erased. We especially thank and recognize Tracey and Paula for their courage in sharing their stories in spite of the pain we know it brings. We ask readers to honour these family members by bearing witness to their stories.
Section Five, called “Organizational Resistance: Action from Within” challenges us to think about the systems and institutions within which we work and live. Academic researchers and social fieldworkers from RESOLVE bring sharp attention to the particulars of interpersonal violence and the vulnerability of Indigenous women who lack social safety nets in Northern Saskatchewan. They map our ongoing national failure to provide safety and health for Indigenous women, each of them a citizen of Canada. What it also shows is a clear path forward within social services, one that depends entirely upon the will of governments, both provincially and nationally. Will they meet the challenge?
From the implementation perspective, we read Betty Ann Pottruff and Barbara Tomparowski’s report from Saskatchewan’s Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons. This report shows both the challenges and successes of a governmental body that relies upon the direction of family members, Elders, and community leaders.
Torn from our Midst contained a lengthy section on the role that art activism played in generating interest and providing education in the 2008 conference. We continue in this book to recognize that the heart must be moved before change is possible. Sylvia Smith, creator of an intergenerational, relationship-building, educational, art activism program called Project of Heart provides us with an example of what transformation looks and feels like. It is hopefulness in the context of our national dissonance!
The section “Decolonizing Postsecondary Institutions” focusses on the question of institutional and pedagogical decolonization. The chapters provide numerous examples of how academics are decolonizing their methodologies—who is the expert, how do we teach—as well as their data—what resources can we rely on? Speaking from her experiences as the first Director of Indigenization at the University of Regina, Shauneen Pete uses her administrative perspective to reflect on the challenges and potentiality of Indigenization programs on university campuses. As a storyteller, Shauneen equally brings the matter straight to the heart of individual will.
Brenda Anderson provides reflections from over a decade of teaching a third level Women’s and Gender Studies course on missing and murdered Indigenous women. It is hoped the chapter, along with a sample syllabus in Appendix A, will generate ideas for similar kinds of work in campuses across the country. Jennifer Brant’s chapter documents Indigenous women’s literatures to note how personal stories are used to transform student awareness and build empathy, while Danielle Jeancart’s chapter introduces a newer discourse in Canada on Indigenous masculinities. Each of these chapters illustrates a rich and growing base of information that is being used at the postsecondary level. Increasingly, the resiliency of Indigenous peoples and the leadership of Indigenous women are emphasized in academia over and above the prevalence of victimhood messaging. This is yet another signifier of decolonization as non-Indigenous scholars learn how to stand meaningfully alongside Indigenous peers. In this way, we see shifts and fractures in the mirrors of academia that have for far too long privileged the perspectives of white settler education and European modes of learning. So much more remains to be done, yet the signs of change are clearly there to see.
The two videos below set a context for this book. All films included in this book come from a dvd of videos taken from a dvd that was part of the first edition of Torn from our Midst: Voices of Grief, Healing and Action from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Conference of 2008. Appreciation goes to the conference videographer and creator of the dvd, John Hampton. The first video below is a trailer that contains scenes and voices from the conference, and the second video is a slideshow of pictures. All of these and all other videos that follow in this book are copyright to the editors, and are not to be used outside the context of this book.
References
Alwani, Sumaira. “Song of Survival.” Crow (Fall 2017): 42–52. Accessed May 2019. http://ink.urjschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/Crow/Crow2017.pdf.
Anderson, Kim, Maria Campbell, Christi Belcourt, eds. Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018.
Bryden, Joan. “Majority of Canadians agree Indigenous women victims of ‘genocide,’ new poll suggests. CBC (June 16, 2019), Politics. Accessed September 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/majority-of-canadians-agree-indigenous-women-victims-of-genocide-new-poll-suggests-1.5177675.
The Canadian Press. “Canada’s Treatment of Indigenous women not a ‘genocide,’ says Scheer.” The Star (June 10, 2019), Federal Politics. Accessed June 2019. https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/06/10/canadas-treatment-of-indigenous-women-not-a-genocide-says-andrew-scheer.html.
CBC News. “John A. Macdonald statue removed from Victoria City Hall” (August 11, 2018), British Columbia. Accessed September 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/john-a-macdonald-statue-victoria-city-hall-lisa-helps-1.4782065.
The Current. “MMIW: A special edition of The Current for October 17, 2016.” Accessed September 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2696409298.
Deranger, Eriel Tchekwie. “We can’t talk about reconciliation while we’re still justifying killing Indigenous people.” Briarpatch (February 16, 2018). Accessed September 2019. https://briarpatchmagazine.com/blog/view/reconciliation-justifying-killing-indigenous-people-colten-boushie.
First Nations Child & Family Caring Society website. Accessed September 2019. https://fncaringsociety.com/what-we-do.
Hampton, Mary Rucklos, A. Brenda Anderson, Wendee Kubik. Torn From Our Midst: Voices of the Grief, Healing and Action from the Missing Indigenous Women Conference, 2008.
Hargreaves, Allison. Violence Against Indigenous women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Waterloo, ON: WLU Press, 2017.
Hutchins, Aaron. “On First Nations issues, there’s a giant gap between Trudeau’s rhetoric and what Canadians really think: exclusive poll.” Maclean’s (June 7, 2018), First Nations. Accessed September 2019. https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/on-first-nations-issues-theres-a-giant-gap-between-trudeaus-rhetoric-and-what-canadians-really-think/.
Landriault, Mathieu. “From ‘Aboriginal’ to ‘Indigenous’ in the Justin Trudeau era.” The Conversation (October 22, 2018), Culture & Society. Accessed September 2019. https://theconversation.com/from-aboriginal-to-indigenous-in-the-justin-trudeau-era-105204?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%2023%202018&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%2023%202018+CID_eb7d0732bc602c7b24573aeb41ac8545&utm_source=campaign_monitor_ca&utm_term=changing%20terms.
Lavell-Harvard, Dawn and Jennifer Brant, eds. Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2016.
Munn, Anita. “Tiny house built by Idle No More on way to Saskatchewan. CBC News. January 5, 2016. Accessed September 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/tiny-house-built-by-idle-no-more-on-way-to-saskatchewan-1.3390635.
National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Reclaiming Power and Place: The National Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Volume 1a (June 3, 2019). Accessed September 2019. https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1a.pdf.
Owen, Brenna. “Indigenous-language speakers from around the world gather in Victoria for revitalization conference.” CBC (June 25, 2019), British Columbia. Accessed September 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/indigenous-languages-victoria-bc-conference-1.5188997.
Rainbow Health Ontario. “Two-Spirit and LGBTQ Indigenous Health.” July 2016. Accessed September 2019. https://www.rainbowhealthontario.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2SLGBTQINDIGENOUSHEALTHFactHeet.pdf.
Rosano, Michela. “Interview: Mapping the displacement of 60s Scoop Adoptees.” Canadian Geographic (November 29, 2017). Accessed September 2019. https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/interview-mapping-displacement-60s-scoop-adoptees.
Rosen, Joseph. “The Israel Taboo: Money and sex aren’t the only things Canadians don’t talk about.” The Walrus (April 6, 2017, updated). Accessed September 2019. https://thewalrus.ca/the-israel-taboo/.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action.” 2015. Accessed September 2019. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-our-governments/indigenous-people/aboriginal-peoples-documents/calls_to_action_english2.pdf.
Wapass, Chief Delbert. “Education minister’s ignorance ‘Trump-esque,’ says chief after treaty education comments” CBC (November 9, 2017), Saskatoon. Accessed July 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/thunderchild-first-nation-chief-delbert-wapas-education-minister-1.4394973.
1. The terms femicide and feminicide are used interchangeably in this book by different authors, reflecting the changing nature of new language, as well as the usage of different terms in different countries. The differences have been maintained to reflect how contemporary this issue is, and to honour the choice of the authors in the terms they wish to use. Canadian resources appear to have adopted ‘femicide’ as the preferred term.
2. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women stated that “violence against women in Canada remains a ‘serious, pervasive and systematic problem,’ and that ‘Indigenous women . . . are overtly disadvantaged. . . . (Indigenous women) face marginalization, exclusion and poverty because of institutional, systemic, multiple, intersecting forms of discrimination” (#CallItFemicide, 54). See also Chapter 15 in this book where I identify the common elements of colonialism in Australia, Mexico, Guatemala, and Canada in relation to MMIWG.
3. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls uses the word genocide to describe violence against Indigenous women and girls as deliberate and ongoing tools of colonization. A supplementary report, A Legal Analysis of Genocide, was simultaneously released. Media and politicians immediately latched onto questioning the usage of the term in what can only be seen as rhetoric designed to divert those for whom the facts and evidence are new and seemingly incredulous. Indigenous women’s voices are yet again questioned and risk being lost amongst the voices of the privileged (The Star, June 10, 2019).
4. The poster was seeking information on the disappearance of Amber Redman. Her mother tells her story in “Wicanhpi Duta Win/Red Star Woman: Amber Redman’s Story” (Hampton, Anderson, Kubik 2010, 40).
5. We need only think of the trial of Gerald Stanley, a Saskatchewan farmer who was acquitted for the fatal shooting of a young Indigenous man, Colten Boushie. The trial was followed by a deeply disturbing level of entitled racist comments and actions across the country. Sides were not just drawn; they had long existed (Deranger).
6. A poll taken within a week of the release of the MMIWG Inquiry report showed that 53 percent of Canadians believed the word genocide should be used in relation to MMIWG. What was understood by that word varied: “As to who is responsible for the genocide, 32 percent blamed Canada's British and French founders and 25 percent blamed Catholic and Protestant churches. Another 21 percent said all Canadians share responsibility for the injustice while just one per cent blamed government . . . .71 percent said they're proud of Canada's history, including 53 percent of those who strongly agreed with the finding that Indigenous women have been victims of genocide” (Bryden).
7. Even the language used in reporting news is shifting. Mathieu Landriault documents the impact that politician’s language has on mainstream media’s significant shift from using the term ‘Aboriginal’ to ‘Indigenous’ (Landriault).
8. Torn from our Midst DVD. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/01%3A_Introduction/1.01%3A_Introduction.txt |
Dr. Carrie Bourassa[1]
As a scholar, I write about the construction of Indigenous[2] identity and the effects on the health and wellness of Indigenous Peoples and, in particular, Indigenous women. I was honoured to present at the Missing Women’s Conference hosted by the University of Regina and First Nations University of Canada in August 2008. I was asked to provide a written submission for the conference report, and I do so not only as a scholar, but as a Métis woman who is on her own healing journey. I will speak first-hand about the effects that the social construction of my identity has had on me with the hope that readers will understand that colonization still lingers in our country and that colonial legislation continues to affect the daily lives of Indigenous Peoples and, in particular, Indigenous women.
I will begin with a quote from my Kookum (grandmother), Elder Betty McKenna.
“We are like trees. Our roots are put down very deep. And we take things from the four directions and we take them into our lives. And if you pull us up by the roots, we are lost. We have to go back and find those roots, find those beginnings that are strong so that we can live a good life.”
I believe identity is something that many people take for granted. If you grew up secure in who you are with a strong value system and a sense of pride, then likely you haven’t ever had to examine the concept of identity. However, for Indigenous Peoples and, indeed, for any people who have experienced colonization, identity becomes a very important issue and one that affects our health and well-being. There are reasons that Indigenous Peoples have the highest rates of chronic and infectious disease, the highest levels of poverty, the lowest levels of education and the highest incarceration rates in Canada (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996). The experience of colonization has contributed to the various maladies that we face. One central concept of colonization in Canada was the policy of assimilation. Assimilation was official government policy from 1876 to 1973 (Elias 2002) and the goal was to ensure that Indigenous Peoples and, more specifically, First Nations People would cease to exist. In essence, they would be stripped of their identities.
Canada is the only nation in the world to formally define, in legislation, Aboriginal people (Armitage 1995). The formal definition began originally by defining “Indian” in 1876 via the Indian Act. With its passage in 1876, the Indian Act would become the primary tool of assimilation used by the new Dominion government. The intent was to absorb Indian people into the body politic of Canada so that there would be no “Indian problem” and, in the words of Sir John A. Macdonald, “to wean them by slow degrees from their nomadic habits, which have become almost an instinct, and by slow degrees absorb them on the land” (Wotherspoon and Satzewich 2000).
The Indian Act’s three central goals were to:
1. define who Indians were and were not;
2. manage and protect Indian lands;
3. concentrate authority over Indian people (Indians were to be civilized and Christianized) (Wotherspoon and Satzewich 2000)
A central element of the Act was to advance the government’s assimilation policy through the process of enfranchisement or losing one’s Indian status under the Act. For example, under Section 12(1)(b) of the Act, an Indian woman could lose her status if she married a non-Indian man. Women could not own property, and once a woman left the reserve to marry, she could not return because non-Indians could not reside on the reserve. This also applied to her children. However, if an Indian man married a non-Indian woman, he not only retained his Indian status, but the non-Indian woman would gain status under the Act and so would their children. This legislation stood until 1985, when revisions to the Act occurred as a result of the repatriated Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender. There were other ways for Indian people to lose their status—for example, if they received a university or college education, became clergy, or acquired any professional designation, lived outside of the country for five years or more, or if they wanted to vote (Bourassa, Hampton, McKay-McNabb 2005).
Because of the sexist specification inherent in this legislation, ramifications of the Indian Act were more severe for Indigenous women than men, ramifications that continue to have severe impacts on our life chances today. Bonita Lawrence (2000) notes that the Act ordered how Indigenous Peoples were to think of all things “Indian” and created classifications that have become normalized as “cultural differences.” She argues that the differences between Métis (or other mixed ancestry people), non-status Indians, Inuit, and status Indians were created by the Act, and those differences became accepted in Canada as being cultural in nature when, in fact, they were social constructions imposed by legislation. It should be acknowledged that cultural distinctions did and do exist within and amongst Indigenous Peoples; however, those cultural distinctions were never categorized nor embedded in legislation prior to 1876 and did not have the same impact until commencement of the Act. Indigenous scholars agree that the Indian Act has controlled Indigenous identity by creating legal and non-legal categories that have consequences for rights and privileges both within and beyond Indigenous communities (Lawrence 2000; Mihesuah 1998).
One important consequence of the Indian Act is that status Indian women (hereafter referred to as Indian women) who married non-Indian men lost their Indian status and their band membership under this Act. Prior to 1869, the definition of Indian was fairly broad and generally referred to “all persons of Indian blood, their spouses and their descendents” (Voyageur 2000, 88) After 1869, Indian women who married non-Indians were banished from their communities, since non-Indians were not allowed on reserves; this was true even if a divorce occurred (McIvor 1995). From the government’s perspective, these women had assimilated and had no use for their Indian status. The goal of assimilation was a central element of the Indian Act 1876 because it would advance the government’s policy of genocide through the process of enfranchisement: the removal of Indian status from an individual. Further, Indian women could not own property, and once a woman left the reserve to marry, she could not return to her reserve, so she lost all property rights. This legacy of disenfranchisement was passed on to her children (Wotherspoon and Satzewich 2000). In contrast, an Indian man who married a non-Indian woman not only retained his Indian status, but the non-Indian woman would gain status under the Act, as would their children. Even upon divorce or the death of her husband, a non-Indian woman who gained status under the Act through marriage retained her status and band membership as did her children (Voyageur 2000). In contrast, an Indian woman’s identity was defined by her husband and could be taken away. The imposition of this Eurocentric, sexist ideology on Indigenous families was a direct disruption of traditional Indigenous definitions of family. Under Indian Act legislation, enfranchised Indians were to become Canadian citizens and, as a result, they relinquished their collective ties to their Indian communities (Lawrence 1999). However, Indian women were not granted the benefit of full Canadian citizenship. Lawrence notes that, until 1884, Indian women who had lost their status could not inherit any portion of their husband’s land or assets after his death. After 1884, a widow was allowed to inherit one-third of her husband’s land(s) and assets if she “was living with her husband at his time of death and was determined by the Indian Agent to be ‘of good moral character’” (Lawrence 1999, 56). Furthermore, if a woman married an Indian from another reserve, the Act stated that she must follow her husband and relinquish her band membership to become a member of his band. If her husband died or if she divorced him, she could not return to her reserve, as she was no longer a member. These policies governing marriage and divorce were just a few of several ways that Indigenous women were stripped of their rights and privileges. For example, from 1876 to 1951, women who married Indian men and remained on the reserve were denied the right to vote in band elections, to hold elected office, or to participate in public meetings. However, Indian men were eligible to take part in all these activities (Voyageur 2000). Therefore, colonization was an instrument by which sexism and racism were created and reinforced on and off reserve lands, converging in diminishing power and resources available to Indigenous women in Canada.
The passage of The Charter of Rights and Freedoms made gender discrimination illegal and opened the door for Indigenous women to challenge the Indian Act. In 1967, Indigenous women lobbied both the federal government and Indian bands for an amendment to the Act. Sharon McIvor (1995) notes that in Lavell v. Her Majesty (1974) Indigenous women challenged the government based on the argument that the government had been discriminating against Indian women for over 100 years via the Indian Act. The Supreme Court of Canada, however, ruled that since Canada had jurisdiction over Indians it could decide who was an Indian and that the Act was not discriminatory. Continual lobbying by Indigenous women finally resulted in action and the Act was amended in 1985 through passage of Bill C-31.
However, despite the amendment, long-standing implications of the Indian Act for Indigenous women in Canada are still evident. As Lawrence notes, the government’s “social engineering process” (1999, 58) via the Act ensured that between 1876 and 1985 over 25,000 women lost their status and were forced to leave their communities. Lawrence states: “Taking into account that for every woman who lost status and had to leave her community, all of her descendants also lost status and for the most part were permanently alienated from Native culture, the scale of cultural genocide caused by gender discrimination becomes massive” (Lawrence 1999, 59). She notes that when Bill C-31 was passed in 1985, there were only 350,000 female and male status Indians left in Canada. Bill C-31 allowed individuals who had lost status and their children to apply for reinstatement. Approximately 100,000 individuals had regained status by 1995, but many individuals were unable to regain status. Under Bill C-31, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were not recognized as having Indian status and, in many cases, no longer identified as Indian (Lawrence 1999; Voyageur 2000). In addition, legislative decisions still blocked Indigenous women from full participation in their communities. For example, the Corbiere decision in 1999 (John Corbiere et al. v. the Batchewana Indian Band and Her Majesty the Queen) specified that Indian women living off-reserve could not vote in band elections because the Indian Act stated that Indian members must “ordinarily live on reserve” in order to vote. Thus, reinstated Indian women and their children were still at a disadvantage despite having legal recognition under the Act. In the end, the amendments did not repair the damage of previous legislation. Kinship ties, cultural ties and participation in governance were significantly disrupted. Long-term consequences for these women and their children would include the erosion of connections and rights that may have enabled them to work collectively to address social disparities.
Lawrence’s reference to social engineering is an important one. The construction of Indigenous identity continues based on Bill C-31 and the revisions to the Indian Act. While blatant discrimination based on gender has been removed, identities are still shaped based on who one decides to have children with. Today, there are 6(1) and 6(2) status Indians; 6(1) Indians are those who had status before 1985 and 6(2) Indians are, for the most part, reinstated Indians. Consider the following.
6(1) + Non-status = 6(2) child
6(2) + Non-status = non-status child
6(1) + 6(2) = 6(1)
6(2) + 6(2) = 6(1)
Thus, once again, depending on who you have a child or children with you may or may not retain status within the family. This “contemporary” legislation is clearly still racist and colonial in nature and continues to affect Indigenous people’s everyday lived experiences.
It is ironic that the only recourse Indigenous women have is to appeal to the federal government and judicial system—the same government and system that instituted and upheld the sexist, discriminatory and oppressive legislation for over 100 years. This government holds different principles of justice than traditional Indigenous government, leaving women once again vulnerable to multiple oppressions. As Jan Langford writes, “If First Nations governments are built on the traditional Indigenous way of governing where equity is built into the system, there wouldn’t be a need for the ‘white’ ways of protecting rights” (1995, 35). However, band governing bodies are not working according to the traditional Indigenous way, instead using legislation to exclude women and protect male privilege.
After fighting for the recognition of “Aboriginal rights” as per S. 35 of the Canadian Constitution, 1982, Indigenous women have found themselves at odds with some of their own community leaders. First Nations women and their children have not been welcomed back to their communities. Since the 1980s, when the federal government began the process of devolution of control to Indian bands, band governments have been able to refuse band membership. It should be noted that there has been an influx of status First Nations men and women going to their bands to seek membership. However, the government has consistently refused to increase funding to those bands. Cora Voyageur notes that some bands have not given band membership to people given status by the federal government because they do not have the resources or the land base to do so. Most reserves are already overcrowded, and many indicate that conditions will worsen if a rush of reinstated status First Nations people want to return to the reserve. Some reinstated status First Nations people are referred to as “C-31s,” “paper Indians” or “new Indians” (Voyageur 2000). In addition, many of these individuals may have previously been identifying with Métis or non-status Indian communities and were rejected not only by their First Nations communities but also by the communities with which they had identified. As Lawrence (1999) reports, that resistance to acknowledging the renewed status of those reinstated under Bill C-31 has been expressed throughout the Indigenous press.
Furthermore, women have been formally excluded from constitutional negotiations as a result of patriarchal legislation that was applied in the federal government’s decision to exclude them. The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) has argued that the interests of individual Indigenous women should not be overshadowed by collective social values and operational mandates that may be enshrined in customary law (Jackson 2000). However, Indigenous women find themselves caught between bands who appeal to traditional practices to avoid action and a federal government that avoids involvement in deference to self-governance (Green 2001). In this way, government intrusion has succeeded in ensuring that divisions among Indigenous people are maintained, if not more firmly entrenched.
Finally, as Lawrence (1999) argues, “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” are common questions among what she calls “people of mixed-race Native heritage.” She examines the impact of the Indian Act and Bill C-31 on Métis people in addition to status First Nations people and argues that the Act has externalised mixed-race Indigenous Peoples from “Indian-ness” and that this has implications for Indigenous empowerment. What this discussion reveals is that other Indigenous peoples have also been affected by these policies and this has likely had consequences for identity, empowerment, and quality of life of all Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Indeed, S. 35.1 of the Canadian Constitution (1982) states that “Aboriginal” is defined as “Indian, Inuit and Métis people of Canada.” The term “Aboriginal” or Indigenous that is now being used by some as it includes First Nations, Inuit, Metis and non-status First Nations Peoples in Canada might lead one to think that we are a homogenous group; however, we are very diverse and, as demonstrated above, the construction of our identities through colonial policy and legislation has led many to question their identity.
A review of the post-contact history of Indigenous people in Canada clearly demonstrates that direct practices of genocide have transformed into legislated control of Indigenous identity and colonization-based economic, social, and political disadvantage that disproportionately affects Indigenous women. The government’s definition of who can be called First Nations, who cannot, and who must exist in liminal spaces where they are outsiders both on and off reserve lands clearly has implications for citizenship, but it also has implications for access to health services and for the ability to maintain health and well-being. With this knowledge, we must re-examine data that suggests Indigenous women are excessively vulnerable to cerebrovascular disease, coronary heart disease, diabetes, suicide, cancer, depression, substance use, HIV/AIDS and violence/abuse in light of how colonization and post-colonial processes have conferred risks to the health of Indigenous women, and barriers to accessing quality health care. These risks and barriers contribute to rates of morbidity and mortality that are well above those of the average Canadian woman.
At a fundamental level, we understand that the colonization processes that began many years ago and continue today have material and social consequences that diminish access to social determinants of health for both Indigenous women and men. Yet, as we have discussed, women have been especially marginalized through these processes and their lower social status is reflected in diminished resources and poor health. Health consequences for women have been identified, but largely within a western model of equating health with the absence of disease or illness (Newbold 1998). The wounds that result from the cultural ambiguity imposed on Indigenous women are harder to catalogue. They are perhaps demonstrated to us in the plight of the Indigenous women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This neighbourhood is home to thousands of Indigenous women who have been displaced from their reserve communities and extended families (Benoit, Carroll and Chaudhry 2003). They are socially and culturally isolated; live in poverty; and are often driven to substance use, violent relationships, and the street sex trade to survive and provide for their children (Benoit et al. 2003). Their material circumstances force acts of desperation, but the damage that has been done to their cultural identities can leave them without the foundation to cultivate health and well-being in their lives. Recent initiatives that have arisen out of results from the First Nations and Inuit Regional Health Survey (National Steering Committee) may offer some hope for these women, but they are still disadvantaged in benefiting from them. First, the development of culturally appropriate services will not be useful for women who have been excluded from the definition of that culture and excluded from the decision-making structures that will determine how Indigenous health resources are to be designed and distributed (Benoit et al. 2003; Grace 2003). Second, the research that serves as the foundation of these initiatives has not included many Indigenous women, both because women and children have been overlooked in the work (Young 2003), and because women who do not fit into research-defined categories of “Indian” or First Nations (derived from Federal categories) have not been included in the data collections.
My Personal Healing Journey—Finding My Roots
I began this paper with a quote from my Kookum who tells us to find our roots, our beginnings, so we can live a good life . . . so that we can be well. I have been on that journey since I was a child. The colonial policies and legislation stripped my family of our identity. It has taken me many years to find my roots and, I must admit, I am still on my healing journey. I would like to share what has assisted me to reclaim my identity . . . an identity that was taken, not given willingly. It began in earnest with the beat of a drum . . . ba boom, ba boom, ba boom . . .
Some time ago, my Kookum began talking about different traditional methods of facilitating healing. So many Indigenous people experience ongoing loss and trauma and do not know how to grieve. They don’t know how to heal. I can relate to that. Loss of identity through assimilation policy (a polite term for genocide) remains one of the most difficult issues facing Indigenous Peoples. Like many other families, my family suffered identity loss and dealt with inter-generational pain, trauma and grief through addictions which often led to violence . . . which caused more pain, trauma and grief . . . and so the cycle goes. I have been trying to find a way to deal with trauma I experienced as a child for many years. Although I am proud to say I have reclaimed my identity and my culture, I have not been able to let go of the trauma. I decided that Kookum was right . . . if I didn’t know how to heal, then I had to at least try to learn how, and since what I had been doing wasn’t working, I began to embark on a healing journey with her help. I started to attend sweats and received my traditional name, Morningstar Bear. I earned my first feather and would go out on Mother Earth and pick medicines. One day I was out with Kookum, my eldest daughter, and my friend on the medicine wheel. We were having a great day just observing nature and picking medicine. We were walking up a hill when I heard singing and the beat of a drum. I was excited! I turned to the others and said, “Do you hear that? Where is it coming from?” I was sure that Kookum would lead us over the hill to see people singing at a drum. However, no one else heard it. I stopped and could hear the song— “way hi oh way oh way way oh”—and the drumbeat was strong . . . ba boom ba boom ba boom ba boom—I looked at Kookum in bewilderment. “My girl,” she said, “those are your ancestors calling to you.” It was one of the most profound moments of my life, yet I still didn’t fully understand her meaning . . . though it would become clear in time.
Ba boom ba boom ba boom ba boom . . . you will be a strong child! Kicking your mama so hard . . . I was musing to myself as I let myself feel the vibrations of the drum. I closed my eyes to feel my baby kicking . . . not just kicking randomly but methodically to the beat of the drum. The first song ended . . . my baby stopped kicking. I laughed to myself . . . must be a coincidence . . . the second honour song starts . . . ba boom ba boom ba boom ba boom . . . My unborn child kicking to the beat of the drum.
It was a good day . . . a day of celebration. We had just finished a sweat with Kookum and many of my students were there. Some were graduating and others were just starting out, but it was a good sweat and a beautiful night. My eldest daughter, who had received her name a year before, sweated with us and she sat on my knee as we feasted and visited with our friends and extended family. Then four of the women got out their hand drums and stood in front of the fire. One of them, a wonderful, strong Métis woman, said that they were singing a song in honour of my recent accomplishment . . . obtaining my Ph.D. They sang “Strong Woman” and, although I hadn’t heard it before, when they started singing to their drums it was like I had known it my whole life. I sang it with them, as did my daughter. I felt energy as I had never felt course through my body. My daughter held Kookum’s drum and beat in rhythm with the women as if it were the most natural thing in the world . . . and perhaps it was. She asked if I wanted to drum: “no, my girl, you drum.”
I was blessed with a second daughter, my Lillie, the second miracle. I have lupus and having two children was something that was almost unimaginable. I had two very premature babies on the very same day—January 2nd—eleven years apart. I was in the midst of dealing with some terrible trauma from childhood. Abuse that no child should ever endure, but it was a beautiful distraction to feel my child moving within me. I was so happy but also never so worried as my disease had progressed since I had my eldest Victoria. I was warned that so much could go wrong. But I sought out prayers and my Kookum told me this child, whom we had already named Lillie, would be everything I could not be. Say the things I could not say, do the things I could not do. I reflected on that throughout my pregnancy. You see, I don’t share the details of my trauma often, but having Lillie, who is now nine years old, has helped me speak up. To have a voice and not be ashamed. I was sexually abused and, to be clear, I have not told her. But she has given me the courage to speak my truth and one day I know she will hear the truth, when the time is right. She will also know that it was she who helped me. Kookum was right. Lillie is a strong, feisty, truthful gift from Creator. When I was a child, I was scared all the time. I know I would not be here without my gramps who was my rock and, thankfully my protector until he passed when I was nineteen. I did not disclose that a female relative violated me in the most heinous way until I was thirty-five years old. I did not have a voice as a child. I was not courageous. I was lonely, confused, shy, trusted very few people, and I felt unloved. I yearned for love and affection. I prayed so hard for it. I felt lost and had no sense of identity. I often asked my gramps if I was adopted. I knew I wasn’t, but I asked it because that is how I felt. I didn’t feel part of my family with the one exception—my gramps.
I honestly never thought I would have children. I couldn’t imagine that I had the skills to be a mother. The Elders that have come into my life have taught me that children are gifts and that they teach us. How true this is. Both of my girls have taught me so much. While it is certainly not their job to do so, both of my girls have helped me to heal and continue to do so in many ways because healing is not something that just ends. It will be a lifelong process. It really is a journey. Lillie has been drawn to ceremony from the time she could speak. I can remember her reminding me to put out “bacco” as we were rushing out the door and believe me, even if we were halfway to the babysitter, we were going back to put out prayers. She received her spirit name when she was five years old and fasted the entire day. She has many gifts and I know that she will never have to wonder who she is, and even if she is struggling in the rapids, which is bound to happen, she is being raised in ceremony and has a community of support surrounding her.
Thinking back, I have been called to the drum many times yet was unaware of it . . . or maybe I was. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to let go of the pain. Maybe I was too comfortable with it. When you carry pain around with you your entire life it sometimes becomes so familiar that you wonder how you will feel if it’s gone. So, either consciously or unconsciously, I avoided the repeated calls to the drum until one day not long ago when my Kookum introduced the drum to a group of grieving women. We gather in friendship and we lay our burdens down. I’ve never felt such energy as I do when I am at the drum. This group of women, wounded warriors, gather often, and although we’ve never shared our hurts and loss in words, we share it at the drum as we lay down our burdens. I know that I cannot change history and I also know that I cannot stay in a place of anger and resentment. No one can heal for me . . . it is my responsibility. So, I am thankful for my women warriors, my sisters, my children, and for Kookum and for the strength I get from that drum. The drum is a gift from Creator, and it has allowed me to move forward. I am learning to grieve and that is the first step to being whole.
Miigwetch, Kookum and all my warrior sisters.
1. This essay was originally published in Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada and is published here with the permission of Demeter Press.
2. While there is no generally accepted definition of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, we assert that the term Indigenous Peoples refers to First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples including non-status First Nations Peoples. These are the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, or what is now Canada.
2.02: Video of Keynote Address by Maria Campbell at the 200
Dr. Shauneen Pete, m.c. at the conference, introduces Maria Campbell. She briefly reflects on the impact Maria’s work has had on Indigenous women, the hope and courage it has inspired in so many.
2.03: Video of Keynote Address by Morningstar Mercredi at t
Morningstar Mercredi is introduced by Rev. Carla Blakley, m.c. at the 2008 conference. Carla was also co-chair of the conference along with Brenda Anderson.
Part One
Part Two | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/02%3A_Epistemic_Erasure_Rejected/2.01%3A_The_Construction_of_Indigenous_Identity-_A_Healing_Jo.txt |
Crystal J. Giesbrecht & Gordon Barnes[1]
Amnesty International’s research illustrates the connection between violence against Indigenous women in Canada and in Mexico. In 2003, Amnesty International published Intolerable Killings: 10 Years of Abductions and Murders of Women in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, focusing on a ten-year cycle of abductions and femicides—gender-based murders of girls and women—in northern Mexico. The report documented more than 370 cases of women killed in Ciudad Juárez and the city of Chihuahua. Of those cases, research indicated that at least 137 of the victims suffered some form of sexual violence and at least seventy of the total number of women murdered remained unidentified. At least seventy other women or girls also remained unaccounted for after having been officially reported missing.
At that time, Amnesty International called on representatives of the Mexican federal and state governments for an immediate and decisive intervention to ensure justice in Ciudad Juárez and the city of Chihuahua and for the state and municipal authorities to cooperate fully with these steps. In addition, Amnesty International called for an independent judicial review of the cases investigated by the Chihuahua Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado (PGJE), State Prosecutor’s Office, or brought before the courts. The goals of calling for a review were to:
• correct miscarriages of justice;
• investigate and punish any official responsible for abuses;
• set in motion substantive reform of the system of administration and procuration of justice in the state of Chihuahua;
• demonstrate respect for the dignity of relatives and the organizations working for women’s rights;
• prevent, investigate, and punish intimidation or harassment against relatives and the organizations working for women’s rights; and
• publicly recognize the legitimacy of their struggle.
Soon after beginning work on the issue of missing and murdered women in Mexico, Amnesty International began examining disappearances and killings of Indigenous women in Canada. In 2004, Amnesty International released its research report titled Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada, documenting the thousands of Indigenous women who have been murdered or are missing. A follow-up to this report titled No More Stolen Sisters: The Need for a Comprehensive Response to Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada was issued in 2009.
Stolen Sisters linked high levels of violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls across Canada to deeply rooted patterns of social and economic marginalization and discrimination. This discrimination has put large numbers of Indigenous women and girls in situations of heightened vulnerability to violence, has helped fuel violent acts of hatred against them, and has denied Indigenous women and girls adequate protection under the law and in society as a whole. The report notes that similar concerns have been repeatedly brought to the attention of Canadian officials by Indigenous Peoples’ organizations and by official inquiries.
In 2004, Amnesty International issued the following recommendations for all levels of government in Canada, based on the recommendations made by the families of missing women, frontline organizations working for Indigenous women’s welfare and safety, official government inquiries and commissions, and standard interpretations of the human rights obligations of governments:
• acknowledge the seriousness of the problem;
• support research into the extent and causes of violence against Indigenous women;
• take immediate action to protect women at greatest risk;
• provide training and resources for police to make prevention of violence against women a genuine priority;
• address the social and economic factors that lead to Indigenous women’s extreme vulnerability to violence; and
• end the marginalization of Indigenous women in Canadian society.
In No More Stolen Sisters, Amnesty provided revised recommendations for the federal government including:
• working in partnership with Indigenous women, representative organizations, and provincial and territorial officials to develop a comprehensive, coordinated national plan of action. The plan should include:
• the collection and publication of data on health, social, and economic conditions for Indigenous women in Canada;
• standardized police protocols for investigating missing persons cases including tools for fair and effective risk assessment for missing individuals;
• an improved system of transitioning initial missing persons cases into long-term missing persons cases or unsolved murders involving Indigenous women and other women at risk; and
• adequate, sustained, long-term funding to ensure the provision of culturally relevant services to meet the needs of Indigenous women and girls at risk of violence or who are in contact with the police and justice systems, including emergency shelters, court workers, victim services, and specific programs to assist women who have been trafficked within Canada.
• ensuring that funding for programs for Indigenous women, children, and families is equitable to those available to non-Indigenous people in Canada and is sufficient to ensure effective protection and full enjoyment of their rights, with particular priority being given to eliminating discrimination in funding for Indigenous child welfare;
• fulfilling the commitment set out in the Kelowna Accord to end inequalities in health, housing, education, and other services for Indigenous peoples;
• implementing the recommendations of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the United Nations Human Rights Committee concerning the treatment of women prisoners, including the creation of a new security risk assessment system; and
• implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Over a decade later, most of these recommendations have not been implemented. Data collected by the Canadian government and academic and community-based researchers shows that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women and girls face much higher rates of violence than all other women and girls in Canada combined (Conroy, 2018; Dawson, Sutton, Carrigan, Grand’Maison, 2018). Large gaps in government support for services to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities deny Indigenous women and girls supports they need to escape and recover from this violence. In 2015, newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous Peoples. That renewed relationship must also be firmly rooted in the federal government’s commitment to gender equality for all women in Canada. The federal government has announced increases in funding for violence prevention programs for Indigenous women and girls, but the measures taken to date are not enough to close the gap in safety and support and to achieve equality.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) issued ninety-four Calls to Action, including increasing permanent funding to programs for Indigenous Peoples, addressing the problems within the child welfare system, and opening a national public inquiry into “the causes of, and remedies for, the disproportionate victimization of Aboriginal women and girls” (4). Also in 2015, The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) investigated the situation of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and provided recommendations to address the issue of missing and murdered women as well as the ongoing and systemic violence that Indigenous women in Canada face. Comprehensive recommendations were provided in the areas of combatting violence, improving socioeconomic conditions, overcoming the legacy of colonialism, ending discrimination against Indigenous women, and implementing a national inquiry and plan of action. CEDAW advised that these recommendations “should be considered and implemented as a whole” by the Government of Canada to effectively address the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women (54).
Recognizing the impacts of resource development on Indigenous women and girls, Amnesty conducted research in northeast BC and published Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Gender, Indigenous Rights, and Energy Development in Northeast British Columbia, Canada in 2016. The report explores how resource development benefits some people but further marginalizes and impoverishes others—overwhelmingly Indigenous women and girls. The report found that the industry both fuels violence and increases vulnerability to violence, leading to disproportionately high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls, and a lack of culturally relevant services for Indigenous women and girls experiencing marginalization and violence.
In 2016, the federal government launched the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Amnesty urged the government to immediately take concrete action to implement the many outstanding recommendations from previous inquiries and Parliamentary committee studies to prevent further violence against Indigenous women and girls during the Inquiry. In June 2019, the National Inquiry released its final report which included 231 Calls for Justice to end the severe levels of violence experienced by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women, girls, and two-spirit persons in Canada. The National Inquiry illustrated a clear link between the history of harmful government programs and policies and the ongoing failure to address the continuing legacy of those harms and the pervasive violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit persons. The federal government has committed to developing a National Action Plan to prevent and address the violence, but at this time, details on how this commitment will translate into action are unclear. Following the National Inquiry, Amnesty International and other organizations called on Canada’s Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs to provide a comprehensive response to the Inquiry’s final report before Parliament rose in June. This did not happen, and Amnesty continues to advocate for a coordinated and comprehensive National Action Plan on violence against women involving all levels of government.
In Regina, Amnesty International continues to partner with the Saskatchewan Sisters in Spirit group for an annual vigil on October 4, the National Day of Remembrance of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. At a provincial Amnesty conference in 2014, attendees wrote the names of over 150 Indigenous women and girls from Saskatchewan who have been murdered or gone missing on a large banner. Names were obtained from a list compiled by Maryanne Pearce (2013). This banner continues to be used at public events, and new names continue to be added as ever more Indigenous women and girls lose their lives to violence. At events, Amnesty members are approached by a family member who asks if their loved one’s name is on the banner. At times, it is a name that was not included in the original list (which speaks to the lack of a comprehensive database on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada), and the family member adds their cousin’s or sister’s or daughter’s or mother’s or grandmother’s name to the banner. We continue to add names to honour and remember the women while we await the year that there are no more names to add.
The tragic reality is that Indigenous women and girls continue to be murdered and are missing in communities here in Saskatchewan and in other parts of Canada. We are reminded of the urgent need for a comprehensive response almost daily. No one should suffer the grief of having a sister, mother, daughter, friend, family, or community member suddenly disappear, never to be seen again. No one should have to live in fear that she will be the next woman or girl to go missing. “There is not one cause of violence against Indigenous women and girls, and likewise, there is not one single solution. A comprehensive, coordinated, well-resourced national response, developed with Indigenous women and girls, is needed to end the violence” (Amnesty International Canada 2019). Canadian officials have a clear and inescapable obligation to ensure the safety of Indigenous women and girls, to bring those responsible for violence against them to justice, and to address the deeper systemic issues that have placed so many Indigenous women and girls in harm’s way. Amnesty will continue to echo the calls for justice issued by Indigenous women and girls, Indigenous women’s organizations, and affected families and communities until liberty, security, and the protection of human rights is a reality for all Indigenous women and girls.
1. This chapter is dedicated to the women who have been stolen and to their families and communities. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/03%3A_Global_History_of_Femicide/3.01%3A_A_Message_from_Amnesty_International.txt |
Wendee Kubik and Carrie Bourassa
In 2004, Amnesty International, in partnership with the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), released a report documenting how the economic and social marginalization of Aboriginal women in Canada has led to a significant higher risk of violence against Aboriginal women. Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada told several of the stories of Aboriginal women and girls who had gone missing or were murdered in Canada. This groundbreaking report also documented how the violence was often met with official government indifference and systematic prejudice from various police forces. Prior to the Stolen Sisters report, government commissions and official inquiries such as the Manitoba Justice Inquiry, the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and a number of United Nations human rights bodies had already noted these problems. In addition, many of these previous inquiries and commissions presented concrete recommendations for reforms.
Since Amnesty International’s 2004 report was released, several other investigations have been undertaken. Numerous recommendations have been presented to various governments and government bodies recommending measures to be taken to end these deaths and ameliorate the dire circumstances causing many Aboriginal women to go missing. However, the numbers of missing and murdered women continues to rise (Human Rights Watch, 2013a, 7). In this chapter, we offer a historical timeline relating to missing and murdered women, a critical analysis of why women continue to be victims of violence, and why Canada’s federal Conservative government ignored the issue.
Historical Overview
In March 2004, in tandem with Amnesty’s Stolen Sisters report, the NWAC launched the Sisters in Spirit (SIS) campaign to raise awareness of the extremely high rates of violence perpetrated against Aboriginal women in Canada. In November 2005, the federal government acknowledged the problem of violence against Aboriginal women and signed a five-year contribution agreement with the NWAC to address this racialized and sexualized violence. Sisters in Spirit received \$5 million dollars over five years and used the money for research. They also recommended a number of actions to address some of the causes of violence against Aboriginal women (Hughes, 208). The main goals and objectives of the Sisters in Spirit initiative were to:
1. reduce the risks and increase the safety and security of all Aboriginal women and girls in Canada;
2. address the high incidence of violence against Aboriginal women, particularly racialized, sexualized violence, that is, violence perpetrated against Aboriginal women because of their sex and Aboriginal identity; and
3. increase gender equality and improve the participation of Aboriginal women in the economic, social, cultural, and political realms of Canadian society (209).
Two other events created a significant impact during this time period. The first was the Robert Pickton case in Vancouver, the second was the continuing reports of missing or murdered Aboriginal women and girls along Northern British Columbia’s Highway 16, referred to as the Highway of Tears. Robert Pickton, a Port Coquitlam pig farmer and Canada’s most notorious serial killer, was charged with the murder of women in more than twenty-six cases (although he confessed to an undercover officer that he killed forty-nine women in total). Pickton was convicted of the second-degree murder of only six of the twenty-seven women (twenty of the charges were stayed by the crown), and in 2007 he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years. The Pickton murder case, and the numerous incidents of missing and murdered women along Highway 16, substantially increased public attention to the violence Aboriginal women face. Because of these ghastly occurrences and the resulting media focus, knowledge about missing and murdered women, particularly Aboriginal women, was forefront in the media.
There were numerous calls for action and connections were made to the root causes, the reasons why these murders and disappearances were occurring. The government was criticized, not only about this issue but about a number of other problems facing Aboriginal people (e.g., inadequate housing on reserves, poverty, unemployment, and health issues). The government’s reaction was to point out the funding that was given to the Sisters in Spirit initiative.
However, when the Sisters in Spirit’s five-year funding agreement ended in 2010, the Conservative Government of Canada informed the NWAC that it would no longer fund Sisters In Spirit. The NWAC was also told that the Status of Women’s Community Fund did not fund research, policy development, or advocacy so there would be no further consideration for Sisters In Spirit (Barrera; Jackson). Like Sisters In Spirit, a number of other non-profit women’s and advocacy groups lost funding and many disbanded.
In the March 2010 federal budget, the Conservative government allocated \$10 million dollars to combat violence against Aboriginal women. The money was purportedly to address the disturbingly high number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and to take action so that law enforcement and the justice system would meet the needs of Aboriginal women and their families (Government of Canada). This sounded hopeful; however, the Federal Government subsequently clarified that the \$10 million would be spent over two years, and instead of directing funds to Aboriginal women’s organizations, it would be distributed as follows: \$4 million for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to establish a National Police Support Centre for Missing Persons, \$1.5 million to Public Safety Canada to develop community safety plans to improve the safety of Aboriginal women within Aboriginal communities, \$2.15 million to the Department of Justice Victims Fund, and \$1 million to support the development of school- and community-based pilot projects (FAFIA, 14).
The allocation of funds was decided without consulting the NWAC, and it was not specifically designed to address violence against Aboriginal women, nor would it address the more serious forms of violence, such as murder. The Conservative government felt that there was no need for Sisters in Spirit to continue its research or maintain a database of information on missing and murdered Aboriginal women because the RCMP would receive funds to collect information on all missing persons (not just Aboriginal women). There was no mention of any of the underlying issues that contribute to the high rates of violence against Aboriginal women and girls such as poverty and racism. When the funding for Sisters in Spirit ended, the NWAC established a new program called Evidence to Action. The three-year project would receive \$1.89 million in funding from the Status of Women for violence prevention beginning in February 2011. However, in a clear effort to silence growing criticism on this issue, one of the conditions of this new money was that the NWAC could no longer conduct any research into missing and murdered Indigenous women (Jackson).
In September 2010, the Government of British Columbia established the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry into the facts, decisions, and police investigations involved in the Pickton case. The Attorney General of British Columbia provided funding for one lawyer to represent some of the families of women murdered by Robert Pickton but did not provide funding to any of the civil society groups granted standing by the Commissioner. As a result, many of the groups that could have provided expert testimony on root causes and systemic issues were unable to participate in the inquiry’s fact-finding process because they could not afford to.
In March 2011, the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women (composed of Members of Parliament from all parties) released an interim report on violence against Aboriginal Women. This report recognized the need for a comprehensive approach to eliminating violence against Aboriginal women and girls. The Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA) noted that this report was particularly significant because it recognized that “poverty, racism, Canada’s colonial history and systemic police failures are root causes of the violence and contributing factors to it” (19). Between April 2010 and February 2011, the Committee heard from over 150 witnesses from across Canada and subsequently concluded “that it is impossible to deal with violence against Aboriginal women without dealing with all of the other systems which make women vulnerable to violence and make it difficult for them to escape violence” (17). The Standing Committee found that poverty was repeatedly cited by witnesses as a root cause of the violence against Aboriginal women (18). Meanwhile, parliament was prorogued for the 2011 election, and in April the Conservative Party of Canada was re-elected. The Standing Committee on the Status of Women was reconstituted with only two of the previous members who had heard the testimony of the Aboriginal women and civil society organizations (19).
On December 12, 2011, the newly composed Standing Committee issued a Final Report on violence against Aboriginal women. This report abandoned the root cause approach that had previously identified poverty as one of the main causes of the violence experienced by Aboriginal women. The Conservative government refused to even consider implementing a national action plan to address the disappearances and murders or deal with the underlying causes of the violence against missing and murdered Aboriginal women.
Because of the government’s lack of action, FAFIA an alliance of more than eighty Canadian women’s organizations, took up the case of the murdered and missing women. One of their central goals was to ensure that Canadian governments respect, protect, and fulfill the commitments they have made to women as a signatory to international human rights treaties and agreements, including the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. In December 2011, The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women announced that it was opening an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. In 2008, the committee had called on the government “to examine the reasons for the failure to investigate the cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women and to take the necessary steps to remedy the deficiencies in the system” (Human Rights Watch 2013b).
The Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action submitted that Canada was in violation of Article 2 of the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In January 2011, a submission to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination was prepared by Shelagh Day of FAFIA and Sharon McIvor outlining the case against Canada (Aboriginal Multi-Media Society). In February 2012, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) committee initiated an inquiry under Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against women. “FAFIA and NWAC requested this Inquiry because violence against Aboriginal women and girls is a national tragedy that demands immediate and concerted action,” said Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, then President of NWAC (Aboriginal Multi-Media Society).
During this same time period, Human Rights Watch, the New York based international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights, also began investigating the incidences of missing and murdered women. On February 13, 2013, Human Rights Watch released an eighty-nine page report titled “Those who take us away: Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada.” This report documented not only the ongoing failure of police to protect Indigenous women and girls, but also the violent acts perpetrated by police officers themselves. Human Rights Watch stated that the RCMP failed to properly investigate a series of disappearances and suspected murders of Aboriginal women and called for the Canadian government to establish a national commission of inquiry into the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls, including the examination of the impact of police misconduct in communities along Highway 16, the Highway of Tears. Human Rights Watch stated: “With leadership from indigenous communities, [the government must] develop and implement a national action plan to address violence against indigenous women and girls that addresses the structural roots of the violence as well as the accountability and coordination of government bodies charged with preventing and responding to violence” (15). Human Rights Watch is clear that “unless the systematic problems of poverty, racism and sexism, the underlying social and economic problems, are dealt with we will continue to have missing and murdered women” (2013b). Meghan Rhoad, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, argues that “The threat of domestic and random violence on one side and mistreatment by RCMP officers on the other leaves indigenous women in a constant state of insecurity.” She asks, “Where can they turn for help when the police are known to be unresponsive and, in some cases, abusive” (Human Rights Watch, 2013b).
The UN Secretary General, in combination with the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), said that national action and national strategies are needed worldwide to end violence against Aboriginal women and girls (NWAC media release March 8, 2013). On the same day, NWAC again requested a national inquiry for missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls, and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations renewed their own call for a National Public Commission of Inquiry. Opposition parties and Aboriginal leaders such as Shawn Atleo, then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, called for a public commission inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls in Canada.
In April 2013, Canada’s provincial Aboriginal Affairs minister said they believe a national inquiry is needed to examine why Aboriginal women are seven times more likely to die of violence than other Canadian women (Winnipeg Free Press). On April 17, 2013, nine of Canada’s provinces called for a national inquiry. The provinces also asked that Ottawa consult with them, the territories, and Canada’s five national Aboriginal organizations to set the terms of reference for an inquiry (Paul). Parliament agreed to appoint a special committee on the matter of missing and murdered Aboriginal women but resisted calls for a national inquiry. Then on May 1, 2014, the RCMP released statistics that indicated nearly 1200 Aboriginal women had been murdered or gone missing in Canada in the previous 30 years; about 1000 murder victims, and approximately 186 disappearances (LeBlanc). RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson stated, “I think there’s 4 per cent of aboriginal women in Canada; I think there’s 16 per cent of the murdered women are aboriginal, 12 per cent of the missing women are aboriginal. So clearly an overrepresentation” (LeBlanc).
Conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper in 2014 continued to dismiss the calls for a national inquiry, arguing that the deaths should be viewed as individual crimes and not as a “sociological phenomenon” (Singh), thus denying the links to poverty, racism, the colonial past, lack of housing, and the dire living conditions that Aboriginal people in Canada face every day. In August 2014, the outcome of a meeting between provincial premiers and national Aboriginal groups was the decision to hold a National Roundtable on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Ottawa in February 2015. It included the Assembly of First Nations, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Métis National Council, and the Native Women’s Association of Canada as well as Federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, Status of Women Minister Kellie Leitch, and representatives from each of the provinces and territories. The limited outcome was a commitment to keep talking and begin nationwide prevention and awareness campaigns. There was also an agreement to hold another meeting at the end of 2016 (Smith).
Again, in February 2015, the Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence against Aboriginal Women, a national coalition of advocacy groups including Amnesty International, released a report critical of the RCMP’s report “Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: Operational Overview.” The report concluded that the federal government had ignored most of the more than 700 recommendations contained in fifty-eight reports on violence against Aboriginal women and girls in Canada. Forty of the studies were from the federal government. The study also showed that only a handful of the 700 recommendations had been acted on. Numerous groups continued to call for a national inquiry and the Conservative government steadfastly refused to agree, stating that there had already been numerous reports documenting the issues. Yet, few of those reports had been acted on.
Moreover, while the RCMP’s report factually highlighted that Aboriginal women are a marginalized population who experience higher rates of violence, unemployment, substance abuse, and over-representation in the sex trade, there were concerns with how these facts were reported. In what amounts to clear victim blaming and pointing to supposedly high-risk lifestyles, the often dire circumstances faced by many Aboriginal women were presented as risk factors (Bourgeois, 2018). Similarly, by positioning the homicides as a result of relationship violence, highlighting the fact that Aboriginal women, for the most part, knew their perpetrators, not only are the victims blamed, so too are Aboriginal men and Aboriginal families. The report failed to point out that the risk factors are linked to much deeper systemic issues including the history of colonization and the resulting pervasive poverty in most communities. The Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN) noted that the risk factors raised in the report such as alcoholism/drug abuse, sex trade work, and intimate partner violence are all linked to the lack of safe access to transportation and housing and the continued legacy of settler colonialism, racism, discrimination, and stereotyping (Hodge). Moreover, colonization has not ended and continues in new forms through Indian Act policy and legislation.
In fact, on October 7, 2015, despite several Aboriginal women having gone missing along the Highway of Tears (Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George, BC), Bob Zimmer, the Conservative MP for the region, said that the violence was a result of unemployment: “One of the major drivers of missing and murdered aboriginal women is lack of economic activity or, simply put, a lack of a job” (CBC News). Zimmer went on to say that many women don’t want to leave the reserve and that puts them at risk because little employment can be found on reserve; in essence, again blaming the women for their own victimization.
What is of particular concern is how Indigenous women and men are being stigmatized through the reporting of high rates of intimate partner violence. The 2014 RCMP report indicated that 62 percent of murders of Indigenous women and girls reported by the RCMP were acts of domestic violence committed by a spouse, former spouse, family member, or intimate partner (Amnesty International, 2015). What was not highlighted in the report or in the media was that this rate is significantly lower than the rate of domestic violence reported in the general population: 74 percent of the murders of non-Aboriginal women are committed by intimate partners and family members (Amnesty International, 2015). While the report demonstrates that most female homicide victims had a previous relationship to the perpetrators, Amnesty points out the fact that Aboriginal women were more likely than non-aboriginal women to be murdered by a casual acquaintance (including neighbors, employers, and what police call authority figures) or a total stranger was largely ignored. In the twenty-two-year period covered by the RCMP report, acquaintances were responsible for the murder of 300 Indigenous women and attacks by strangers account for almost 10 percent of homicides—eighty-one murders of Indigenous women or girls (Amnesty International, 2015).
While no one is denying that intimate partner violence (IPV) is an issue in Indigenous communities, these are not unique situations. We know IPV occurs in homes across Canada, yet in the RCMP report, Indigenous women are stigmatized and marginalized. As Amnesty International (2015) notes:
It’s generally understood that the majority of acts of violence against women and girls are committed by someone from the same ethnic group or background. As many commentators have pointed out, the unique significance that the government is attaching to the Indigenous identity of many of the perpetrators of violence against Indigenous women and girls is part of a wider social narrative that places the responsibility for violence against Indigenous women and girls solely on Indigenous communities themselves.
Although the RCMP Commissioner has the ability to release comparative figures so that Indigenous people would not be further stigmatized and marginalized, to date that has not happened.
Underlying Structural Problems to be Addressed
Calls for change and action have been reiterated time and time again since Amnesty’s Stolen Sisters paper was published in 2004. The focus for change has been on the structural components that cause and enable violence against women. In order to help stop violence against Aboriginal women, these factors must be addressed. Amnesty International’s 2009 report, No More Stolen Sisters noted that poverty, racism, Canada’s colonial history, and systemic police failures are both the root causes of the violence and contributing factors to it (2). By ignoring the structural components of violence against women, it is not only allowed to continue but simultaneously encouraged through lack of accountability. Two facets of the problem identified by Aboriginal families and non-government organizations, including NWAC, Amnesty International, and the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action are:
1. the failure of police to protect Aboriginal women and girls from violence and to investigate promptly and thoroughly when they are missing or murdered, and
2. the disadvantaged social and economic conditions in which Aboriginal women and girls live that makes them vulnerable to violence and unable to escape it (Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, 2012).
These two issues were highlighted by United Nations treaty bodies including the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2006 and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2007. Canada accepted the underlying principles in these recommendations; however, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), in reviewing Canada’s compliance, acknowledged that, although a working group had been established, there were still many cases of murdered or missing Aboriginal women that had not been fully investigated (Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action 2012).
CEDAW recommended that Canada “develop a plan for addressing the particular conditions affecting aboriginal women, both on and off reserves,” which include “poverty, poor health, inadequate housing, low school completion rates, low employment rates, low income and high rates of violence” (9). Canada was to report back in 2009 and did so; however, FAFIA, the British Columbia CEDAW group, and Amnesty indicated that Canada had taken no adequate action to address the problems.
Analysis: Colonial, Systematic Racist, and Sexist Attitudes Still Occurring
It has been more than a decade since “Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada” was released by Amnesty International and NWAC. The issue of missing and murdered women has been forefront in the news, and awareness has been raised across Canada. Pressure has been put on governments, agencies and police forces asking them to deal with this national problem. The government of Canada has taken a few steps to address the murders and disappearances, but the persistence of the violence indicates a need for a comprehensive plan of action.
The federal Conservative government did agree to establish a parliamentary committee to study the issue, but Aboriginal women’s lives remain at risk, in part because of the failure of Canadian officials to implement critical measures needed to reduce the marginalization of Aboriginal women in Canada. Economic, social, and health problems caused by systemic poverty among Aboriginal populations have time and again been demonstrated and linked as causes of violence. One of the most recent examples is the poverty and inadequate housing on the Attawapiskat reserve in northern Ontario. This was one of the reasons for Theresa Spence’s hunger strike and the start of the Idle No More Movement. Time and again, Canada’s Conservative government has demonstrated a lack of will to make the changes that would stop these incidents from occurring. Neo-liberal policies have cut funding and curbed the voices calling for action and change. There have been changes in mandates of organizations and government policy so the focus can only be on what the government agenda has deemed acceptable. For example, under the federal Conservative government, strict procedures were put in place delineating how scientists can speak about and publish their research (Manasan). Why was there so much resistance to addressing this problem by the federal Conservatives? It is widely understood that the roots of the on-going patterns of violence experienced by too many Aboriginal women in Canada are to be found in the processes and dynamics of colonialism (Bourgeois). In the case of Canada, there was a dual process of colonialism, first involving European powers and then internally by the Canadian state. The situation of Aboriginal people in these processes varies, in some cases being incorporated into commercial networks only to be cast aside at the whim of unfavourable market conditions. In other cases, they were deemed irrelevant or even problematic to economic development and were treated accordingly (Daschuk; Carter).
A patriarchal gender order accompanied and informed the activities of the European external colonizers and internal colonization by the Canadian state. Patriarchy is a gender hierarchy in which men are dominant and masculinity tends to be esteemed, and in which major social institutions, practices, and ideological frameworks support, legitimize, and facilitate male and masculine domination and the oppression and exploitation of women, many other men and the concomitant devaluation of femininity.
The role of racism in the operation and justification of colonialism has been well documented, as have the intersections of racism and patriarchy. The fact is that, having lost their land, political independence, cultural and social institutions, and entire way of life, many Indigenous people in Canada face increasing rates of poverty, unemployment, inadequate housing, and declining heath statuses. In order to avoid the negative effects inherent in racist patriarchal colonialism, federal governments in Canada would have had to engage in systematic deliberate sustained alliances with First Nations to support mutual actions and policies to address and redress this deleterious impact of the centuries. This did not (and could not have) happen under the federal Conservative government. In order to address the multiple root causes of the high rates of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, they would have needed to spend money to rectify numerous issues. This would not resonate with its traditional base of conservative voters who would not see it as a good investment. The current manifestation of this ideology of extreme individualism is marked by a denigration of the common good and any notion of the commonweal.
In October 2015, a federal election brought the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau to power. Trudeau had campaigned on promises to call an inquiry into missing and murdered women and a promise of more funding to First Nations for health and education. On December 8, 2015, the federal government called for an inquiry and cross-country consultations have been initiated with First Nations groups, organizations, and the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The Federal budget brought down on March 22, 2016 included funding for Aboriginal communities and a renewed relationship with Indigenous Peoples, so there is hope for change.
Conclusions
Over the past years, the political will to implement change and address the structural problems and violence Aboriginal women face in Canada has been lacking. The roots of this violence are inextricably linked to Canada’s colonial past, the racism perpetrated against First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, and the resulting poverty, food insecurity, and sexism and misogyny that women, particularly Aboriginal women, experience. During the Conservative government of Steven Harper, there was a lack of political will to address the problems faced by marginalized groups, particularly Indigenous women because, by conservative logic, it is not up to the government to fight racism, sexism, poverty, health disparities, inadequate housing, or even to support NGOs that might address these issues. Stephen Harper was crass enough to say MMIW were “not on the radar”. The role of the government was seen as supporting and reinforcing the operation of the market and ensuring that private individuals were left free to fend for themselves. This system resulted in over 1200 missing or murdered Aboriginal women.
Canada claims to be a democratic country that values equality and fairness. Clearly, for equality to exist, the persistent underlying causes of inequality need to be addressed. Advocacy and people who advocate for justice need to be allowed to speak. The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) has designated October 4 as a day to remember and honour the lives of the many missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls in Canada as well as to offer support to families who have been tragically touched by the loss of a loved one to violence. In 2014, there were a record breaking 264 Sisters In Spirit Vigils registered across Canada with most major media outlets covering the stories. Walk 4 Justice, which has carried out a walk across Canada each summer since 2006 to talk with Aboriginal families and communities about missing women, believes that there are many cases of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls that have gone undocumented by police or media. The large numbers of missing and murdered women have deep roots in the structures of our society, roots that must be addressed in a systematic manner so justice for Indigenous women and girls can prevail. This call has been echoed by the United Nations and numerous international and global human rights organizations. Until the murders stop, the shame is Canada’s. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/03%3A_Global_History_of_Femicide/3.02%3A_Stolen_Sisters-_The_Politics_Policies_and_Travesty_of.txt |
Introduction: The ‘Great Violence’ and a Community’s Determination to Resist
During moments of grave adversity, communities demonstrate their resilience by engaging in acts of civil disobedience to protect themselves. Extraordinary displays of resistance and courage take place in Juárez every day[1]. Since the 2008 conference, “Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminism, and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico,” at the First Nations University of Canada and the University of Regina, violence has overwhelmed Juárez and forever changed it. Fear, death, and devastation characterized the city and surrounding region from 2006 to roughly 2012, in what journalist Kent Patterson has simply called the ‘Great Violence.’ Although the feminicides[2] that made Juárez infamous continued across the state of Chihuahua, they were overshadowed by this greater violence, as headlines of macabre killings linked to cartel violence made international headlines. The fighting was principally fueled by drug violence as feuding Mexican rivals—the Juárez and Sinaloa cartels—fought for control of the plazas, the lucrative clandestine corridors used to transport drugs across the U.S. border.
Then Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drugs that mirrored the failing war on drugs that the U.S. has fought and defended for over forty years. The U.S. enthusiastically supported Calderón’s drug war in Mexico but failed to take a critical stance, outside of progressive circles, on the colossal U.S. consumer drug market that contributes to an estimated \$426 to \$652 billion worldwide drug industry (Tharook 2017). The appetite for drugs in the U.S. has driven much of the bloodshed that came to broadly depict life in Juárez and across regions of Mexico. It directly led to the now more than 100,000 deaths and over 30,000 disappearances that have resulted from the Mexican war on drugs and its lingering aftermath (www.mileno.com). Many experts argue that the carnage has not dissipated since 2006 and that the above numbers should be doubled to accurately depict the total number of deaths. Since 2006, violence ensued at a feverish pace and government officials responded with an unbridled military and policing force that only exacerbated human rights atrocities, assaults, disappearances, kidnappings, and deaths. Chihuahua state authorities, along with the Mexican military, were accused of large-scale systemic corruption, impunity, and human rights violations. For example, between 2007 and 2009, in an operation called Operativo Conjunto Chihuahua, President Calderón deployed 5,000 troops to fight drug cartels and street violence, such as kidnappings, car jackings, extortion schemes, robberies, and drug cartel murders (Bejarano and Morales 2011).
During the ‘Great Violence,’ people were equally fearful of cartels and corrupt law enforcement at both the federal and state level, and they remained terrified of the rising tide of street level crimes. The uptick in everyday violence that impacted ordinary citizens included narco deaths[3], and the subsequent impunity for criminals whose crimes went unresolved or were not investigated. The Mexican criminal justice system was overwhelmed. Any references to feminicides were ancillary to the anxieties and violence of the everyday. From 2006 to 2012, murder victims were popularly portrayed as active participants in the drug trade. Murdered women were unfairly characterized as drug mules, extortionists, or drug traffickers. Debates as to which murders constituted feminicides erupted with arguments as to the accuracy of the number of deaths, the reason for the deaths, and whose deaths were over- or undervalued. Men’s deaths also suffered from the same judgement; the death toll for men was ten times that of women.
Investigations into feminicides nearly halted when the Mexican criminal justice system, especially its medical examiner’s offices and criminal investigations unit, was saturated with assassination investigations. Bodies arrived at the morgue faster than personnel could work to preserve and/or work to identify corpses or remains. Over this period, approximately 13,000 people were killed in Juárez; 2010 marked the deadliest year with 3,075 murders (Villagran, 2014 as cited in Prieto, Morales, and Bejarano 2014). This number does not include statewide deaths, disappearances or bodily harm suffered across the state of Chihuahua due to Calderón’s drug war. Ordinary people fell victim to extortion, random and targeted kidnappings, and street-level violence.
This violence dramatically altered socio-cultural practices across the city. Juárenses curtailed their evening activities and outings, retreating to their homes before dark and relegating social activities to house parties or other intimate gatherings. Warnings to go home before dark were no longer restricted to young women for fear of feminicide; this message was relayed to all citizens. I remember friends sharing that house parties would at times turn into sleepovers, so that people would not have to return home late at night. Some gatherings were restricted to only small circles of friends or family. When driving, people were on their guard at stop signs and stop lights. Many carried only the minimum amount of cash needed. Others carried only one or no forms of identification for fear of being robbed or later extorted. Some women journalists I know carried a purse with nominal cash and lay it on the passenger seat of their cars. If accosted, they could hand their assailant that purse, while hiding their identification and other items elsewhere in their vehicles or on their bodies. People learned to maneuver themselves strategically. Physical and psychological fears remained stark features of daily life acutely embedded in one’s psyche.
I continued to travel to Juárez and Chihuahua during all but two years (2010 to 2012) of this ‘Great Violence.’[4] In 2008, I remember the arrival of an unparalleled military presence. I was in Chihuahua City during my sabbatical volunteering with the Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres (Center for Women’s Human Rights). Witnessing soldiers atop military vehicles driving down the streets of Chihuahua City was terrifying; people across the city felt a profound change in how everyday life functioned. Soldiers also inundated Juárez, and the number of military checkpoints grew. Bogus checkpoints staged by cartels and other criminal entities appeared throughout Juárez and across Chihuahua. When approaching a checkpoint across the state of Chihuahua, one did not know who they would encounter: military, law enforcement, or narcos. At times, it seemed as if all three were in collusion with each other.
Gunshots were common in some segments of Juárez. For instance, in one account of violence retold to me by a sister of a feminicide victim, she once heard gunshots as someone was executed across the street while she sat in traffic. Her children asked if they were fireworks, and she said ‘yes.’ As they drove down the road, she told them to duck in the backseat because the fireworks were so powerful that they might get hurt; it was midday. Stories like this were common. The same family once called on me to contribute to a monetary collection; an extended family member had been kidnapped in a secuestro express, a common practice at the time, where criminals would kidnap an arbitrary person for ransom. The family desperately worked with the police kidnapping unit to negotiate with kidnappers for their loved one’s safe return. People paid what they could, as kidnapping units instantly sprouted from local police departments because of the proliferation of kidnappings. Virtually anyone could be a target; people with businesses were usually at greater risk. At the time, secuestros express and other forms of extortion and violence were in part due to the greater decay of the city associated with cartel wars and economic recession (Morales, Prieto, Bejarano 2014).
The Exodus from Juárez and the Paso del Norte Region’s Transformation
Over this challenging period, victimization was boundless. The affluent and poor of Juárez received menacing phone calls from mysterious callers demanding a cuota, an extortion fee to protect their businesses or homes. If people did not pay the cuota, they were beaten, kidnapped, or even killed. According to Juárez sociologist Alberto Ochoa-Zezatti, roughly 450,000 people fled Juárez from 2007 to 2011 (Cave 2013 as cited in Prieto, Morales, and Bejarano 2014). By 2008, between 30,000 and 125,000 Juárenses had relocated across the international border to El Paso, Texas, and over 10,000 businesses closed from 2007 to 2011 (Martinez et al. 2011; O’Rourke and Byrd 2011 as cited in Morales, Prieto, and Bejarano 2014). The number of people that returned to Juárez is unknown. At one point, the Juárez mayor had also relocated to El Paso for his safety and crossed into Juárez daily for work. He received sharp criticism by Juárenses who remained in Juárez (Sanchez 2009).
The binational region was transformed with the affluent moving to El Paso and the surrounding area and re-establishing businesses from Juárez like popular restaurants that El Pasoans would frequent when visiting Mexico (Prieto, Morales, and Bejarano 2014). One symbolic development was a mercado, an open-air market akin to the famous mercados of Juárez. It was built in the downtown El Paso district, the Segundo Barrio, only a few city-blocks from one of the international bridges linking the two cities. These popular simulacra of Juárez in El Paso continued for some years. They seemed to indicate to El Pasoans and tourists that it was no longer necessary to cross into Mexico to enjoy the culture and cuisine of Juárez. The simulacra were widespread.
As a border person who has crossed into Juárez throughout my life, I was saddened and dismayed at these changes. At the same time, I sympathized with the Mexican diaspora relocating across the international boundary, often asking myself if I would do the same to safeguard my family. The reverberating message in the region was that safety in Juárez was dubious, and despite efforts to live routine lives, El Pasoans and others curtailed visits to Juárez or visited with trepidation. Some applied the tactics that frequent border crossers used of walking across the international bridge to Juárez rather than driving, or visitors only carried identification with the absolute minimum amount of cash. For people engaged in writing about human rights and social justice as journalists, or who were directly working against narco violence, gender-based violence, and state violence, or the culmination of all three, fleeing Mexico was their only option.
The Activist Diaspora, Political Asylum and Chronic Threats
Some people sought political asylum across the border in the U.S. while seeking refuge with relatives or other potential sponsors[5]. Those with no U.S. contacts were forced into the infamous immigrant detention center in El Paso, popularly known as El Corralon (large yard) to await their asylum hearings. Some activist women and their families, such as Cipriana Jurado and Marisela Ortiz, who were involved in the anti-feminicidio movement and in fighting cartel and military violence, were forced to flee the city.
Cipriana, a well-known labor rights activist turned anti-feminicide activist in the 1990s, fled Juárez in June 2010. Prior to her leaving Juárez, she was apprehended by plainclothesmen claiming to be federal police officers in 2008. She was placed in police custody but was ultimately released the following day after immense local pressure by a well-known Mexican congressman and local activists (Rivas 2011). Cipriana continued to confront tremendous scrutiny and received threats to her life, which led her to make the painful decision of fleeing Mexico during this time and to seek political asylum in the U.S.
Another prominent activist, Marisela Ortiz, a journalist and schoolteacher turned anti-feminicide activist, fled Juárez because she feared for her life after her daughter’s fiancée (and later her brother) were killed in Juárez (Rivas 2011). Marisela began her activist work when her 17-year-old student, Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade, was killed on February 14, 2001. Marisela, Norma Andrade (Lilia Alejandra’s mother) and Maria Luisa Andrade (Lilia Alejandra’s sister) co-founded the well-known Juárez non-profit Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May our Daughters Return Home). All three women fled Juárez after their lives were threatened.
Others, like Mexican journalists and even Mexican law enforcement, sought asylum in the U.S. Journalists have systemically been targeted for their coverage of narco violence, state corruption and impunity, and the feminicides. Journalists with Reporters without Borders claim that Mexico ranked the deadliest country for the news media in the western hemisphere (Borunda 2017). It is safe to say that threats to journalists come from numerous places, and the threat of violence to journalists is ubiquitous. In March 2017, Miroslava Breach Velducea, a Chihuahua City based journalist and editor of the El Norte newspaper in Juárez and a correspondent for the national Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, was gunned down in the driveway of her home as she was taking her son to school. Some accounts of Miroslava’s death claimed that she was reporting on cartel activity in Chihuahua City and was killed because of this. Overwhelmingly, and despite unrelenting violence, most people remained in Juárez, as all of Mexico was ravaged by the drug war.
Fear continued to dominate people’s lives. A life-long activist and key organizer in the anti-feminicide movement in Chihuahua City told me that, “he would leave his house not knowing if he would return home that evening.” He and others made statements like this often. I still cringe when thinking of it. This sentiment was also echoed by activists and ordinary citizens. Local authorities and law enforcement could not, with any great success, protect the citizens of Chihuahua. Justice systems were, and still are, beleaguered with criminal cases or are void of any real ability or resolve to fight crime. Justice remains arbitrary with approximately 93.7 percent of criminal cases in 2015 going unsolvedthroughout Mexico. The Mexican National Institute of Geographic Statistics has referred to this number as “the black statistic,” since few criminal cases are solved; they noted a slight increase in resolved cases in 2015 by less than one percentage point from 92.8 percent in 2014 (INEGI 2016). Citizens justifiably have lost faith in their justice system.
Responding to the ‘Great Violence,’ an Insistence to Resist
Throughout the ‘Great Violence,’ people did not call the police for assistance; instead, they relied on each other for protection as a form of community security. When taken to an extreme, however, this mutual protection was akin to vigilante justice. One unforgettable story is of a small Chihuahua agricultural community named Ascension that took justice into their own hands in 2010. Locals did not typically call police due to their mistrust of authorities, so the people from Ascension took guards’ shifts around their small town.
During a botched kidnapping attempt by local young men operating as a self-made kidnapping unit, violence unfolded. The adolescents attempted to abduct a seventeen-year-old girl from a restaurant where she worked, but they failed when community members chased their get-away vehicles. Police and military personnel and family and friends were called by the girl’s father to search for her. The girl was rescued and several of the kidnappers were arrested by local police; two were apprehended by community members.
Some of the kidnappers were transferred to Juárez, but two of the youth were beaten by community members. Fearful that police would take the kidnappers to Juárez and release them without a trial, people blocked the police and paramedics from reaching the two young assailants. They eventually suffocated inside the police car where temperatures reached 100 degrees with the windows rolled up. Ironically, the police had kept the windows rolled up for the kidnappers’ own safety (Sierra 2010). Although this is an extreme case, for local authorities and the international community, it reinforced that legitimate government involvement was needed to curtail the violence. It also illustrated how people were willing to take matters into their own hands if the police were unwilling to. People were exhausted and outraged from the continuing violence. Their efforts to protect their beloved city and families weighed heavily on everyone.
The family and friends of Juárenses on the northern side of the international line were also perpetually warned about the violence. A local El Paso, Texas news station covering the Paso Del Norte region (Chihuahua, Mexico; Texas; and New Mexico), initiated a daily segment exclusively on the death toll and violence in Juárez. Juárez was represented as a danger zone, with discussions of sending the U.S. National Guard to ‘protect’ the U.S. side of the border in case violence spilled into the States (Estrada, Keck, Rodriguez, and Starr 2009). The issue of spillover violence was perpetually exaggerated in this region, but it gained momentum along major drug routes into the U.S., especially in border regions like Juárez-El Paso and in south Texas/south eastern Mexico’s Laredo-Nuevo Laredo border region. This era personified social fears, scapegoating, and the criminalization of an entire nation, despite the rationale for so much of the violence pointing to U.S. drug demand and consumption.
Families were destroyed, businesses and homes were abandoned, and the traumatic series of deadly events over so many years seemed to continue without end. Still, life went on for Juárenses and people across the state of Chihuahua determined to live ordinary lives, despite the adjustments to regular street routes and routines, and the curtailment of daily schedules. Embedded in this history was a dogged refusal to accept this conflict and carnage. This refusal to succumb to violence is the most significant of narratives.
Reminiscent of the cries for justice that mothers of feminicide victims have demanded for over twenty years, people organized against this large-scale violence. Youth, civic-society, and anti-feminicide groups were at the helm of activist work. Sizeable protests took place early in the ‘Great Violence’ period where thousands of people marched on the streets of Juárez demanding a stop to the random and targeted cartel and street violence. During one protest, Juárez youth lay symbolically on a street in the protest’s path as if they had been assassinated. One impromptu protest took place in May 2009, after the random death of Manual Arroyo Galván, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Júarez. He was shot several times en route to El Paso, Texas, when he refused to surrender his car during a carjacking. His students and others took to the streets, drawing inspiration from the Argentine-based artist, Fernando Traverso, who used a bicycle to “represent the disappeared and missing from Argentina’s Dirty War” (Driver 2015, 41). The region exploded in anger as people fiercely mobilized in response to these acts of violence, determined to take their communities back.
People throughout the U.S. borderlands were similarly outraged since the violence had reverberating effects across the region. Families and friends in the U.S. also lost loved ones to the violence. People in El Paso and southern New Mexico held several protests in solidarity with activists in Juárez. During a protest in 2009 in a desolate, sandy spot in Sunland Park, New Mexico, across from Juárez, people on both sides of the border joined to protest the bloodshed (Figure 1). In this picture, children from Lomas de Poleo, a neighborhood on the edge of Juárez abutting the international border fence, play volleyball with U.S. protestors[6]. While Paula Flores[7] and I visited with each other through the international fence, the U.S. border patrol watched from nearby, as armed Mexican federales on the opposite side of the fence watched the protest unfold (Figure 2).
Figure 1: Paula Flores and I talking through the U.S.–Mexico border fence during an Anti-Violence Protest in 2009. Photo courtesy of Jeff Shepherd.
Figure 2: U.S. Border Patrol watching protestors as Mexican federales surveilled Mexican protestors at the international fence. Photo courtesy of author.
I remember feeling inept and anxious at the thought of Paula, or the other activists I admire and love being arrested, because the border fence barred those of us on the U.S. side from being able to do anything. I imagine Paula and others would have felt the same if the U.S. border patrol would have sprung on us as well. Authorities on both sides warily looked at the peaceful assembly of people as they sat in their SUVs or trucks. Some of them stood near their vehicles closely watching the crowd, more annoyed at the assembly then concerned over children playing volleyball across the fence, or activists demanding action from the uniformed men that represented Mexican and U.S. nation-states.
Mothers of the missing and murdered, anti-feminicide activists, clergy, journalists, and other community members congregated on both sides of the border chanting anti-violence slogans with hopes that our collective voices would be heard. Lucha Castro and Gabino Gomez (Figure 3), two anti-feminicide activists from Chihuahua City and co-founders with others of the Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres (CEDEHM) (Center for Women’s Human Rights), and Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters), stood on the Mexican side of the international fence during this same protest. We visited and talked, touching hands through the fence. Handshakes through the fence had to replace the warm embraces of solidarity that typically accompanied visits. As a member of the Chihuahua based Mujeres de Negro (Women in Black), Lucha was wearing the group’s ubiquitous pink hat that stated, “Ni Una Mas” (Not one More). Both were looking through the international fence with banners and images denouncing the violence.
Figure 3. Lucha Castro and Gabino Gomez looking at U.S. protestors during the Anti-Violence Protest in 2009. Photo courtesy of author.
Lucha and Gabino launched leaflets over the fence to me to distribute to protestors on the U.S. side of the border (Figure 4). The leaflets included information on Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas and statistical information on the violence in Chihuahua. I caught the leaflets as they fell from the sky, like protest messages from heaven. I waited for the U.S. border patrol to confiscate them, but they did not.
Figure 4 Gabino Gomez in Juárez leaning on a ladder propped against the international fence dropping leaflets at me to distribute on the U.S. side. Photo courtesy of author.
Although the visual representations and rallying cries of the many protests were uniquely different, they suggested that the anti-feminicide movement was a constant tide against turbulent political, economic, and social unrest. At the border protest, one activist mother, Olga Esparza, mother of Mónica Janet Alanís Esparza, an eighteen-year-old university student attending the Universidad Autónoma de Juárez, who went missing in 2009, spoke to journalists. Standing on a platform on the Juárez side of the border, Olga spoke into a microphone about her missing daughter and desperately relayed her daughter’s story of disappearance, while hoping to still find her alive.
Since approximately 1993, several women and girls’ bodies have been found. In some instances, three to eight victims were found in the same location (Candia et. al. 1999; Washington Valdez 2006; Fregoso and Bejarano 2010; Staudt and Mendez 2015; Lozano 2019). Some of the geographic locations were near or in the vast desert area close to Juárez: the Lote Bravo, the Cerro del Cristo Negro, the Loma Blanca, the Campo Algodonero, and the Arroyo Navajo in 2012[8]. According to Lozano, in June 2016, eight women’s bodies were found over one week in a river canal near the El Paso/Juárez border (2019). One of the most well-documented cases of feminicide was the finding of eight young women (some only girls) in the Campo Algodonero in 2001, which later helped set legal precedent on the murders of women and girls in Mexico through the inter-American court system.
The Campo Algodoneroas Legal Framework for Future Feminicide Cases
The discovery of the women’s bodies on November 5 and 6, 2001 became an iconic story. Irma Monreal, Josefina González, and Benita Monárrez were the lead petitioners in the case of González et al. (“Campo Algodonero”) v. México, which was decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) on December 10, 2009. The case was admitted to the IACHR in 2007 and tried in Santiago, Chile (Bejarano 2013). The Court’s ruling condemned the Mexican state for human rights violations and ordered various forms of reparation and redress, which have not entirely been fulfilled. Even so, the case was a landmark decision, providing “legal precedent for cases of gender violence in a non-war context and for enumerating feminicide in international law” (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010, 6). It also “establish[ed] a solid framework for legal interpretation with a gender perspective from which further development of the legal doctrine can take place” (Red Mesa and CLADEM 2010, 53 as cited in Bejarano 2013, 2). The case signified critical advances in exposing the impunity, corruption, and apathy that was rampant in criminal investigations. Moreover, it was a historic victory for the victims’ families and their advocates.
The Court’s ruling mandated that the Mexican government make a public apology; hold a memorial service for the women and girls; create a public monument to the girls and young women killed at the Campo Algodonero; establish an electronic database of all missing women; and implement a DNA database; among other demands (Bejarano 2013). It took two years for the state to give the apology, and on November 7, 2011, the Mexican government inaugurated the monument to Laura Berenice (Benita Monárrez’s daughter), Claudia Ivette (Josefina Gonzalez’s daughter), and Brenda Esmeralda (Irma Monreal’s daughter) at the cotton field site, just blocks away from the U.S. Consulate in Mexico.
Today, the area is enclosed by a pink metal fence and a large pink wall that hides it from a busy street intersection and renders it indiscernible from the car traffic. It is also inaccessible to visitors in vehicles, since there are only two or three parking spaces available to park in front of the monument. The transformed campo algodonero which was a popular site of resistance, is rendered ‘visitless’ through its inhospitable design and obtuse vehicle and foot traffic. One could easily argue that the design is intentional. Inside the pink gates, a marbled tile half-circle wall serves as the monument, with a large pink cross at the center. The monument is criticized for its sterilized appearance. It is no longer the sacred space that came to represent the site for incalculable protests and memorials remembering all the feminicide victims.
The discoveries of mass graves did not cease with the Campo Algodonero case, however. Three teenage girls were discovered at the Cerro del Cristo Negro on the outskirts of Juárez near Rancho De Anapra. They were found by girls playing nearby on February 17, 2003. The victims were all girls themselves: Esmeralda Juárez Alarcon (sixteen years old), Juanita Sandoval Reina (seventeen years old), and Violeta Mabel Alvidrez Barrios (eighteen years old). This incomprehensible loss of life remains painful to remember and recount, even though I never knew these families or their young daughters. The citizens of Juárez and the tireless efforts of advocates and families of feminicide victims persist in their vigilance, even moreso that girls, women, and now boys and men continue to disappear as the Arroyo Navajo case exemplifies.
The Arroyo Navajo Case,the Consequence of Unchecked Violence
In 2012, another gruesome discovery was made by passersby who stumbled onto a large group of human remains in the Valle de Juárez in a dry riverbed called the Arroyo Navajo. The remains were tested by several units including the Crime and Forensic Science labs in Juárez, the U.S.–based BODE lab, and the world-renowned Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF) for DNA evidence. Of the remains tested, seventeen girls who had gone missing between 2008 and 2010 were identified; they ranged in age from fifteen to twenty-two. It is unclear how many other missing have been identified—biologically male or female.
Several rastreos[9] have taken place in the Valle de Juárez’s Arroyo Navajo. Several rastreos found more remains, more victims’ clothing, or other pertinent items that offered insight into what happened to the missing. It is still unclear how many remains have been discovered and how many victims identified. The desert’s vastness makes it impossible to know how many bodies are hidden there and how many bodies were swallowed by its infinite sands. One report indicates that fifty-three remains have been found and twenty-three have been identified, although it is uncertain whether all twenty-three victims were women and girls (Figure 1). Some of those victims included girls missing since 2008[10]. These girls were forced into prostitution and eventually killed (Carmona 2017).
Identified Woman/Girl Age Date Missing
Brenda Berenice Castillo García seventeen January 6, 2009
María Guadalupe Pérez Montes seventeen January 31, 2009
Marisela Ávila Hernández twenty-two March 18, 2009
Mónica Alanís Esparza eighteen March 26, 2009
Lizbeth Aviles García seventeen April 22, 2009
Perla Ivonne Aguirre González fifteen October 11, 2009
Idalí Juache Laguna nineteen February 24, 2010
Yasmin Taylen Celis Murillo seventeen April 4, 2010
Beatriz Alejandra Hernández Trejo twenty April 27, 2010
Jessica Leticia Peña García fifteen June 16, 2010
Yanira Frayre Jaquez fifteen June 16, 2010
Deysi Ramírez Muñoz sixteen July 28, 2010
Andrea Guerrero Venzor fifteen August 19, 2010
Jessica Terrazas Ortega eighteen eighteen December 20, 2010
Monica Liliana Delgado Castillo eighteen October 18, 2010
Jazmin Salazar Ponce seventeen December 27, 2010
Figure 5. Women and girls found in the 2012 Arroyo Navajo case.
On July 2015, five men were convicted of murder, drug trafficking, and forced prostitution and were sentenced to 697 years and six months each in prison for the murder of the girls and young women whose names appear above (Frontera Norte Sur 2015). Authorities used this case as putative proof that they were taking feminicides seriously, even though the men would never live long enough to fulfill their almost seven-hundred-year sentences.
I keep thinking about the image of Olga Esparza at the 2009 cross-border protest imploring people to search for her daughter. It was reminiscent of the numerous times I had witnessed other activist mothers plead with authorities, journalists, foreigners, locals, or anyone willing to listen to them to help “bring their daughters back home.” The horrifying discovery at the Arroyo Navajo, like every feminicide, defies reality. The resilience and hope that activists inspire is what reminds us of our humanity and the need for solidarity across borders.
The Teachings and Resiliency of the Anti-Feminicide Movement
The visibility of anti-feminicide activists vigorously participating in and at times, leading protests, or serving as plaintiffs in legal cases, or leading rastreos, demonstrates how significant a role the anti-feminicide movement has played for over twenty years in addressing widespread violence. Their coalition-building demonstrates the strength, continuity, and vitality of the movement that began in 1993, and continued during the ‘Great Violence’ and even beyond. I heard activists, journalists, and family members repeatedly state that if authorities had investigated and put a stop to the feminicides, perhaps the large-scale violence would not have erupted as it did. It is hard to predict whether the death toll would have taken a turn for the better, or if authorities would have or even could have stopped such bloodshed from occurring. Despite it all, efforts to combat the violence continued by civic society and others.
One prominent yet controversial campaign that was launched by government officials, along with some well-known members of Juárense civic society, was called Todos Somos Juárez (We are all Juárez). The campaign aptly promoted the logo “Amor por Juárez” (Love for Juárez), which grew in popularity and was visibly displayed on bumper stickers and t-shirts across the borderlands (Mesa de Seguridad y Justicia 2017). This initiative reminded me of phrases that I had heard in the anti-feminicide movement, like “todas son nuestras hijas” (they are all our daughters) referencing the feminicide victims of Juárez and Chihuahua City. Images dedicated to protesting feminicides had a dual meaning and exemplified the large volume of overall deaths in the city.
Since 2002, an image of a massive cross made of railroad ties sits in one of the most visible and traveled crossing points from El Paso, Texas into Juárez. This iconic image has represented Chihuahua’s feminicides for over fifteen years and was permanently cemented into place by activist mothers, activist groups, and their supporters. At one point, metal nails hammered into the wooden cross held the names of feminicide victims written on white strips of paper tied with ribbon.
During the sweeping violence from 2006 to 2012, the monument not only came to represent feminicides in Chihuahua but also the demise of so many others, as Figures 6 and 7 depict. At some point during the ‘Great Violence,’ a massive black cloth with the word, Justicia written above a blood-stained Mexican flag was draped over the feminicide cross, assumedly by activists. Above the flag, one can still read the popular slogan “Ni Una Mas” that came to personify the feminicides across Chihuahua.
Figure 6. The cross representing feminicide victims at the Juárez Santa Fe Bridge Crossing, circa 2003. (Photo courtesy of author.)
Figure 7. The same cross representing feminicide victims, but with a blood-stained Mexican flag, 2009. (Photo courtesy of author.)
Much of the imagery and phrases of the anti-feminicide movement, I would argue, significantly inspired the larger anti-violence manifestations that gained traction for so long in Chihuahua. For more than twenty years, the anti-feminicide movement and its waves of activism have remained the clarion call for justice by demanding a response from those in positions of power. Staudt and Mendez (2015) have referred to the mothers of the feminicide victims as “game changers,” crediting them for inspiring the struggle against narco violence, disappearances, and the widespread bloodshed that took hold of Mexico.
Mendez and Staudt (2015) describe the first wave of the anti-feminicide movement as stemming from the early 1990s to the early 2000s when a large-scale national and international presence by families of feminicide victims, activist groups, civic-society, academics, legal scholars, and international allies was collectively built. The second wave of the anti-feminicide movement remained less visible than the first, but was part of international coalition-building from 2010 to 2012. Finally, the third wave of the anti-feminicide movement witnessed a lull due to large-scale narco violence, and the threats against activists that resulted in the deaths of prominent figures in the anti-feminicide and anti-militarization movement. All the while, Juárez and Chihuahua City groups remained vigilant in the anti-feminicide movement, protesting the deaths of so many and risking their lives in the process. This third wave, as described by Staudt and Mendez (2015), was coupled with anti-militarization grassroots and civic-society alliances that raised awareness of the role that militarizing Chihuahua and subsequent Mexican states had on the uptick in violence against all citizens. Hector Delgado Padilla poignantly called the militarization advent, the “maquinaria del miedo” (machinery of fear) where “la fuerza habla” (force talks) (2009, 309 as cited in Staudt and Mendez 2015).
Nina Lozano (2019) adds a fourth wave to the anti-femicide movement. Like Staudt and Mendez, Lozano also discusses in her work, “waves of feminicidio” that include four waves. Her discussion is similar to what Staudt and Mendez argue about the over twenty-year movement. However, Lozano expands her analysis to include a fourth wave that covers the years 2015 to the present. Lozano calls this fourth wave, the “Movement and Feminicidio Resurgences” and chronicles a new era of young activists who collectively call themselves, “the daughters of feminicidio” (2019). Similar to Staudt and Mendez (2015), Lozano (2019) points to social media and the larger growth of activist men and fathers, like José Luis Castillo, whose fourteen year-old daughter Esmeralda was killed, as new indicators in the perpetually moving and dynamic evolution of the anti-feminicide movement.
Despite the ongoing fear and violence that continues to plague Mexico, the resilience of people remains intact. The lasting presence in Juárez and Chihuahua of groups like Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, the CEDEHM, the Mesa de Mujeres and the Centro para el Desarollo Integral de la Mujer (CEDIMAC), continue to play significant roles in the anti-feminicide movement by remaining the proverbial ‘pebble in the shoe’ of the Mexican government—always vigilant, visible, and loud. Community observatories on feminicide[11] and the issue of the ‘greater violence’ were established (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010; Staudt and Mendez 2015), and groups’ uses of social technology like Facebook, Twitter and listservs to maintain solidarity ties with international efforts were prominent (Staudt and Mendez 2015). Young people and on the ground activists like, Rosas de Juárez (Roses of Juárez), Frenté Marginal (Marginal Front), Pink Nopál (Pink Cactus), and the Grupo de Acción por los Derechos Hermanos y la Justicia Social (Action Group for Human Rights and Social Justice) (Lozano 2019), use new strategies in the growing anti-militarization/anti-violence movements in protest of the disappearances, killings, and overall calamity occurring.
Countless protests marked these years of struggle. Of those that I attended, one was an anti-feminicide march that took place with mothers from Chihuahua City and Juárez, and activists from the Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres (CEDEHM) called La Campana de Justicia (the Bell of Justice). Families marched or caravanned from Juárez to Mexico City and back, ringing a large bell made of melted donated keys that symbolized the calls for justice by families of the disappeared or feminicide victims. The massive bell sat on the back of Gabino Gomez’s truck, a member of the CEDEHM, as it made its trek from Juárez to Mexico City and back again. La Campana de Justicia stopped in cities, small and large, along the way to Juárez, where activists and families of the murdered gathered together behind the downtown Catedral across the street from the Centro Municipal de las Artes. The activist mothers at the event would ring the bell and say a few words, often denouncing the government’s unreliable investigations into their daughter’s cases.
Figure 8: The Bell of Justice campaign demanding an end to feminicide in 2009 outside the Governor’s Palace in Chihuahua City, the main government offices for the State. Photo courtesy of author.
Just weeks after the Bell for Justice protest, I traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico with Paula Flores (Sagrario Gonzalez’s mother) and Irma Monreal (Esmeralda Hererra’s mother)[12] at the request of U.S. mothers whose daughters were found in 2011 in the west mesa of Albuquerque. The finding of eleven bodies on the west mesa of Albuquerque’s high desert was eerily like the grisly discovery at the Campo Algodonero in 2001. Like Juárez, these women’s remains were found by passersby walking their dog in a newly cleared, empty lot primed for suburban development.
I visited the location of the west mesa murders in 2012. I had flashbacks of walking irrigation canals and a dry cotton field at the Campo Algodonero in Juárez during a rastreo I was involved with in 2002. A few short years after the Campo Algodonero rastreo in 2002, I went to Chihuahua City with Eva Arce, mother of Sylvia Arce who disappeared in 1998 to meet with the human rights attorney, Adriana Carmona and motherist activist, Norma Ledezma. Norma took us to the site where her daughter’s body, Paloma was found in 2002. In Chihuahua City, we walked an arroyo that like the west mesa was at the time being prepared for a neighborhood development in 2005. We walked in the Chihuahua City arroyo, on the edge of the city, still searching for any clue of what happened to Paloma. Each time I searched empty lots or fields where girls’ bodies were discarded, I realized that I was not only chasing mothers’ memories, but I was also chasing my own ghost memories of walking from desert to desert looking for traces of who these girls were, wishing I could recall a memory of knowing them when they were alive, rather than recognizing them from a picture or memory book.
During a 2009 Albuquerque trip with Paula and Irma, Paula was interested in taking la Campana de Justicia across the international border to New Mexico, but we were unable to. Instead, I traveled with Paula and Irma to meet with one New Mexico mother whose sixteen-year-old daughter was found on the west mesa. The three women consoled each other as they shared similar stories of searching for their daughters, pleading with law enforcement to search for their daughters, and ultimately distrusting authorities’ abilities or their veiled interests to investigate their cases.
Figure 9: Irma Monreal and Paula Flores behind Jane Perea, mother of Jamie Barela. The event was organized by the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Center and Amigos de las Mujeres de Juárez (Más New Mexico newspaper).
Maternal Feminicide, the Other Story
Activists and the families of feminicide victims remained extremely vulnerable despite: the advances made through the Inter-American Court ruling in the Campo Algodonero case; the countless developments in making feminicides visible worldwide; and their overall work to end violence. The assassination of Marisela Escobedo, the mother of sixteen-year-old feminicide victim, Rubi Marisol Fraye, on December 10, 2010 proved that violence against women has no end. Marisela Escobedo was one of the most vocal and recognized of activist mothers. She was known for walking daily from her home to the state attorney general’s office in Juárez, wearing only her undergarments and a large placard of her daughter that reached down to her knees. When interests in feminicides waned, her brazen strategy caught the attention of the media and kept her daughter’s case in the spotlight. She was courageous in her actions to make her daughter’s case known widely after a Mexican court found Rubi’s boyfriend, Sergio Rafael Barraza, guilty of the murder. The court subsequently acquitted him after an appeal, so Marisela began her own investigation. She tracked Barraza to Zacatecas, Mexico after he was released, determined to bring him to justice by notifying authorities of his whereabouts, despite the cartel protection that he allegedly had.
Figure 10: A plaque placed at the site of Marisela’s assassination in front of the Governor’s offices in the historic downtown of Chihuahua City, the state’s capitol. Photo courtesy of author.
Demanding that authorities return her daughter’s murderer to Chihuahua for a retrial, Marisela staged a permanent protest in front of the government offices in Chihuahua City, proclaiming that she would remain there until her daughter’s murderer was arrested. Marisela also shared publicly that she feared for her life, stating that if something were to happen to her, then governor Cesar Duarte would be to blame[13]. It was clear that, “The protection racket called the state [would] no longer protect women activists” (Staudt and Mendez 2009, 15). The government seemed slow to investigate Marisela’s case, even though surveillance footage from the governor’s office caught her assassination on camera. Marisela’s murder emboldened activists because it made everyone both fearful and determined to continue their activist work.
Like so many others, Marisela’s loved ones were forced to flee Juárez. Days after Marisela was killed in Chihuahua City, her brother-in-law was murdered in Juárez and his lumber business was burned to the ground; some reports claim extortionists did this pointing to the confluence of the feminicides and overall criminal activity plaguing Chihuahua. Figures 11 and 12 are of her son, Juan Manuel Frayre Escobedo, protesting with others in front of the Mexican Consulate’s office in El Paso, Texas in 2011. He too received death threats, even in the U.S., but remains vocal about the crimes in Juárez and the corruption and cover-up they experienced with his sister and mother’s deaths. Like his mother, he directly attributed his mother’s death to the then Governor. In the images below, he is holding posters of his murdered younger sister, Rubi, and his mother, with the words ‘Crime of the State’ in bold print under Marisela’s photograph.
Figure 10 and 11: Juan Manuel Frayre Escobedo holding posters of Rubi and Marisela in front of the Mexican Consulate’s Office in El Paso, Texas. Photo courtesy of author.
Marisela’s death, like that of anti-feminicide/anti-militarization activist, Josefina Reyes, who was killed in 2010 in Juárez when she protested the presence of the military and her son’s disappearance, are forever entrenched in our memories. Several members of Josefina’s family were killed in 2010 and 2011, while other family members fled to the U.S. Norma Andrade, mother of Lilia Alejandra mentioned earlier, was shot and wounded on December 2, 2011. After her recovery, she fled to Mexico City and remains vocally active from there. During these murderous years, nothing felt sacred. The targeting of mothers that searched for their missing children shook people to their core. Marisela and Josefina are revered as folk heroines, demonstrating tremendous bravery in the face of terror that cost them their life.
The Humanity of Juárez, the Real Story of Survival
In Juárez, courage trumps violence. Juárenses are some of the bravest and most resilient people I know. The will of Juárenses to survive such carnage personifies the strength of its people and communities, and the legacy that the anti-feminicide movement has had in sustaining its momentum. Juárez is as dynamic and complicated as it is vibrant and fearless. A generation of young people have learned of feminicide as part of their collective history, and despite the fears and dangers that they experience or circumvent, they become active in events like the 2009 Marcha del coraje, dolor y desagravio, where young people were lying on the streets of Juárez representing those killed during the ‘Great Violence’ (Claudia Cervantes-Soon 2017). Others have created protest art through murals, like the work of graffiti artist, Maclovio Macias and his partner and fellow activist, Lluvia Rocha who have painted more than twenty murals with twenty-five portraits of the disappeared or confirmed feminicide victims in Juárez (Figure 13) (Villagran 2017).
Figure 13: Juárez artist, Maclovio Macias, began painting murals of feminicide victims across the city. This mural is of Sagrario Flores that Maclovio painted on the façade of Paula Flores’ home. Photo courtesy of author.
Other equally significant activities are exemplified through the work of Claudia Cervantes-Soon whose research explores Juárez girls’ empowerment using autogestión, a “holistic and dialectical approach to humanization and a unique form of agency and self-authorship in which young Juárez women engaged individually and collectively . . . in shaping their identity, agency, and transformative educational practices in Juárez” (2017, 5). Some young women are using social media and a new phone app called No Estoy Sola (I am not alone) created by the city government to notify loved ones if they are in danger by shaking their phones and sending a signal of their location to select contacts (Flores 2017). It is vital to underscore the counternarratives of resistance that undergird much of Juárensen society. Juárenses demonstrate that surviving ongoing feminicides and other abominations is possible, as is living to honor those forcefully disappeared that we mourn.
Activist mothers, like Paula Flores and Eva Arce, continue to dedicate their lives to memorializing their daughters. Eva continues to search for her daughter. They remain involved in the anti-feminicide movement, even after twenty years. Eva continues to write poetry to Sylvia, her daughter, and Paula continues to energize the Fundacion Maria Sagrario when time and funding are possible, along with maintaining her daughter’s love of children through the Jardin de Ninos Maria Sagrario, a kindergarten in Sagrario’s honor where Sagrario’s young sister works as a teacher. Figure 14 is a photograph of one of several Christmas posadas (shelter)[14] that Paula and her family hosted for her community. The food they made and the toys that were collected for hundreds of children from 2004 to 2009 illustrate the resiliency in Juárez that is visible everywhere, despite the ongoing violence. These posadas celebrate Sagrario’s life and, as Paula explains, because of this “Sagrario’s memory lives on.”
Figure 14: Neighborhood children dancing to the Virgen de Guadalupe during a December 2009 posada at Paula Flores’ house. The Fundación Maria Sagrario can be seen in the background. Photo courtesy of author.
Decolonizing Work Across Borders
The “Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminism, and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico” conference in 2008 exposed what setter-colonialism does to Indigenous/Aboriginal and subaltern communities of color. An unforgettable memory from this conference is of watching Paula and Eva meet Indigenous/Aboriginal mothers during the opening prayer given by First Nations Elders from the original territories now known as Saskatchewan. I kept asking myself, how is it possible to have so many women killed and disappeared near this borderland, like those from our own borderlands? I cried quietly to one side as community members enveloped Paula and Eva with warmth, kindness, and solidarity. I watched with reverence as First Nations Elders blessed the opening ceremony and men drummed and sang; later in the conference proceedings, a group of Indigenous women would drum and invite Paula and Eva to join them. Albeit different but familiar, I recalled the drumming of teenage boys at Paula’s house in Juárez, also drumming to the sacred, and the memory of a feminicide victim.
As strangers for only a short while, mothers from two countries embraced each other after sharing their daughters’ stories of disappearance. It was a surreal experience to see a virtual mirror image of the anti-feminicide movement in Mexico as it simultaneously unfolded in Canada. Blatant indications of the racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism plaguing Indigenous/Aboriginal and Mexican women are too familiar, too normalized, and too often eschewed. We are bound to each other in this life beyond walls, borders, and cultures, as the mothers demonstrated during their time together.
We know that women do not just disappear into thin air, so we name out loud, as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991)[15] encourages us to do, the greater structural factors at work that create the social, political, and economic conditions that contribute to feminicide. As Canadian scholar, Amber Dean states, “disappearances have been brought about by numerous complex social forces” (2015, 29). How do we account for our sisters, our neighbors, or people we do not know personally but must care for? Dean’s poignant question asking, “What might it mean to inherit what lives on from the disappearance of so many women, and why should a wider public engage in such practices, even—or perhaps especially—when we did not know the women in life? Simon asserts that “the work of inheritance is an inescapable consequence of the actions of another who has sent you something . . . that implicates you in the necessity of a response (even if that response is ultimately to ignore or destroy the bequest)” (2006, 194 as cited in Dean 2016, 7).
When I was given the privilege of attending this Missing Women’s conference with Paula Flores and Eva Arce, I inherited a responsibility to teach about the forcefully disappeared Indigenous women of Canada as often as I could in the same manner that I teach about the disappeared women of Mexico. It is an axiomatic response to act as a witness-observer who represents “a synergy between seeing, hearing, feeling, and reacting to violence as a secondary witness to an atrocity. Secondary witnessing entails a community pledge to tell the stories, in writing or orally, of our own observations and recollections. Just as important, we disseminate the testimonios of human rights activists and of victims, whose truths are overlooked, dismissed, or silenced. Witness observers commit to bearing witness and demanding justice to right the transgressions done to others” (Bejarano, 196).
My use of terms like witness-observers and feminicide, are acts of witness-observing and using activist, pedagogical, and epistemological approaches to work to end feminicides. Our inheritance of this violence translates to bridging our countries’ borders for solidarity work in efforts to end disappearance and feminicide—subaltern, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Mexican, or otherwise.
I would like to thank Diana Lopez and Zaira Martin for their assistance with this article, and the efforts of so many in Juárez to return the city to its vibrant self, especially those individuals in the anti-feminicide movement.
(All images are copyright protected and are the property of the author. No copying or usage is permitted for purposes other than within the context of this chapter.)
Bejarano, Cynthia. 2013. “Memory of Struggle in Juárez: Las Madres’ Organic Resistance, Transborder Activism and the Campo Algodonero.Aztlan: Journal of Chicana/o Studies, 38 (1): 189-204.
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Carmona, Blanca. 2017. Confirman sentencia por caso de arroyo El Navajo. El Diario.
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Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6 (1241-1299).
Dean, Amber. 2015. Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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1. I will use Juárez instead of Ciudad Juárez throughout this writing.
2. The term femicide, which means “the act of killing women because they are women” (Radford and Russell 1992), is extensively used across the Americas and builds on the work of U.S. based sociologists, Jill Radford and Diana E. Russell, and Mexican cultural anthropologist and former Mexican congresswoman, Marcela Lagarde y de los Rios (1996), as well as the work of Juárez based sociologist, Julia Fragoso Monárrez (1999). For a historical account of the terms femicide and feminicide, see Marcela Lagarde y de los Rios’ explanation of how femicide and feminicide are discussed in the anthology, Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010). After working as on the ground activists and scholars for over twenty years, my colleague Rosa-Linda Fregoso and I have built our definition of feminicide from the works of the aforementioned, influential feminists to further conceptualize the concept. We describe feminicide as, “first, the murders of women and girls founded on a gender power structure and with impunity; second, feminicide is gender-based violence that is both/and public and private, implicating both the state (directly or indirectly) and individual perpetrators (private or state actors); it thus encompasses systematic, widespread and every day, random violence; third, feminicide is systemic violence, rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities . . . our analysis is not just on gender, but also on the intersection of gender dynamics with the cruelties of racism and economic injustices in local as well as global contexts; finally, our framing of feminicide as violence that reinforces a systematic pattern of subordination also advances a critical human rights perspective for countering the murders and disappearances of women, with the language of justice and empowering communities to act on behalf of social change” (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010, 5). Our comprehensive feminicide framework has the potential for wide applicability in most regions across the globe where women are targeted, and where communities stand in defiance of this violence.
3. Narco translates loosely as drug smuggler/drug trafficker, and narco deaths are popularly defined as deaths associated with the drug trade. However, innocent people have also been killed in the crossfire of drug traffickers with rival cartels or with authorities.
4. The violence in Juárez is personal for me. I have lived at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in New Mexico and Arizona my entire life. I grew up in Southern New Mexico, just miles away from Juárez and was raised crossing the border back and forth for dental care, shopping, visiting friends, and now to visit close activist friends that I consider family. I am of Mexican descent; generations ago, my great-grandparents and their parents came from various cities across the state of Chihuahua to settle in New Mexico. My love and admiration for the people of Juárez stems from my involvement with the advocacy group Amigos de las Mujeres de Juárez that worked with several women’s and human rights groups across the state of Chihuahua and the U.S. to address the feminicides in Northern Chihuahua.
5. In extreme cases, Juárenses fled Juárez and the border area altogether, seeking refuge within the interior of Mexico or beyond.
6. This was an emotional event for me because I wanted to be in Juárez, but I stayed in El Paso during an especially tumultuous set of weeks across the border.
7. Paula Flores is the mother of Sagrario Gonzalez killed in 1998. Sagrario’s death served as an impetus for my involvement in the anti-feminicide movement in 1998. Paula was at the University of Regina’s conference on Missing and Indigenous Women with Eva Arce, mother of Sylvia Arce who went missing in 1998, and whose status remains as a missing person. I met both women in 1998. In 2001, our New Mexico based group, Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez, worked closely with Paula and Eva.
8. These locations are on the outskirts of Juárez except for the cotton field, Campo Algodonero.
9. Rastreos are areas where people carefully search for any trace of evidence for the bodies of missing women and girls. This practice has been ongoing for nearly twenty years and is now a common occurrence. During the ‘Great Violence,’ men and boys were also searched for.
10. This list stems from data gathered by a Chihuahua City group Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, which is comprised of mothers of feminicide victims. The list stems from a 2015 presentation given by Laura Aragon, founder of Mukira, a non-profit that works with women and youth in Mexico toward gender equality, transforming Mexico’s culture of legality, violence prevention, human rights, access to justice, and youth leadership and empowerment. The list is not an exhaustive one, nor is it meant to omit other individuals whose remains were found or still missing. It is a list to remember that these people existed, they lived before they were forcefully disappeared and exploited.
11. Comunitarios observatorios are comprised of civic-society groups like women’s rights and human rights organizations, legal defense groups, religious and Indigenous women’s groups, and others that work as a monitoring body on issues of feminicide. The largest observatory in Mexico on feminicide is the Observatorio Ciudadano del Feminicidio (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010, 26). Observatories are practiced widely in Latin America.
12. Esmeralda Herrera was a 14-year-old girl whose body was found in the irrigation canal of a cotton field in 2001. Irma was one of the three lead petitioners in the Campo Algodonero case.
13. Cesar Duarte was notoriously corrupt during his tenure as governor of Chihuahua. In 2017, Interpol released a report with a red notice against Duarte, making him a wanted individual in 190 countries. The state of Chihuahua has issued 10 arrest warrants against him, and he is accused of illicit enrichment and aggravated embezzlement. He is said to be in hiding in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Ortiz 2019, 2).
14. A posada is a religious celebration that is popular throughout Latin America and that marks the pilgrimage of Mary and Joseph seeking refuge for baby Jesus. The posada is traditionally practiced by community members praying the rosary while walking from house to house, hence, reenacting the imagery of Mary and Joseph seeking shelter. Paula celebrates posadas at her home with matachine dancers, children and community members from her neighborhood that venerate the Virgen of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, with Indigenous drumming and dancing to the image of the Guadalupe. The Virgen of Guadalupe’s Catholic saint’s day is December 12. Paula holds this event each year to venerate the Virgen of Guadalupe and to honour Sagrario’s memory.
15. In the U.S., Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, which offers a framework to analyze, “the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of color” (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/03%3A_Global_History_of_Femicide/3.03%3A_Resistance_Resilience_and_Remembering-_Juarenses_Surv.txt |
Kim Erno[1]
I want to begin by expressing my deep appreciation for the privilege of gathering and being present with you to share this time and this space—to give my thanks to the Elders, to the grandmothers, to the grandfathers, to Carla, to Brenda, the coordinators, to this institution, and to all of you who have gathered here with this theme of missing and murdered Indigenous women. If we have gathered here because there are missing and murdered Indigenous women, it is because we are also in a world that has lost its way. And so part of our search, part of our reason for this gathering is trying to recover that way, to pick up the lost stitches, to re-weave the torn fabric, and to struggle and hope for a world that is not only possible, as we say in Latin America, but a new world that is also necessary. So I thank you very, very deeply for the privilege of being in this time and this space with all of you.
As I was reviewing the agenda for today with my colleague, Marta Perez, who will be sharing this podium in a short while, Marta said, “Look, Kim, they are all women in the presentations.” And I said “Well, Marta, not quite.” And so, I asked myself, “What is my particular role, my presence, here; what is my contribution?” In Latin America, we like to dance and I am looking forward to, we are going to have a chance here, too, I understand, to dance together, to sing together, to move together. The dances that we have are salsa and merengue and cumbia. They have a lot of rhythm and a lot of movement. They say that a good male partner realizes that he is simply the frame; that the woman knows the moves and knows the steps. So, a good male dancer knows that he is a frame for the work of art who is the woman. So that’s what I understand is my role and what I will attempt to do here this morning is to set a frame. And I trust my sisters will bring the moves in the steps. And the frame that I have been asked to give is with the theme of globalization.
The first step in addressing globalization is to locate ourselves, because part of what we are seeing in this globalization is an effort to erase who we are—our languages, our cultures, our origins, our roots. As I join you in this land, I am very, very conscious of my homeland. My homeland, according to the original peoples is the Dawn Land. It is the land that stretches from the waters that lie in between the People of the Longhouse and the people of the Dawn Land that stretches to the sea and the rising sun. And so, I bring readings from the Dawn Land. I am also very conscious of my new land to the South: the Cradle of Corn. There are as many varieties of corn as there are original peoples and languages and for that reason the original peoples refer to the people as the Children of Corn. And so I bring readings from the land that is the Cradle of Corn. Also, to locate myself and my perspective on globalization, I need to say that I grew up on a border, on the Vermont/Quebec border. So I grew up moving back and forth between cultures and languages. I grew up on a border line. And while I most certainly can enjoy the privileges, the access, and the power that comes with my white maleness, I am most comfortable on the margins and on the border lines. So I have a perspective that comes both from being able to enter into those centers of power but also from being able to step back from them.
The second step after we have located ourselves in globalization is to imagine this beautiful globe, to imagine her spinning and moving and dancing through space, to imagine her with her multitude of colors—of browns and yellows and whites and blues and reds—to see her valleys and mountains and deserts and waters and rivers and oceans, to see her in all her beauty, and realize that she is a living, breathing being and that she carries scars. She carries scars because she has been sliced and diced, cut into pieces that we refer to as borders. These are barriers that are not natural divisions between peoples and lands, but rather, most often, they are the spoils of war. They are acts of violence that serve the interests of global profiteers.
The US/Mexico border is a case in point. The perspective from the south is much different than the perspective from the north. US history textbooks in this particular period in history most often tell us to remember the Alamo—the holdout of the brave Texas rangers in that mission in Texas called the Alamo—with no mention of how those Texans got there in the first place; crossing the border illegally and breaking Mexican law that had already abolished slavery. So, while US students are challenged to remember the Alamo, Mexicans never ever forget that almost half of the territory of Mexico was lost in what is considered an unjust war of aggression provoked by President Polk and justified by a white supremacist theology called manifest destiny that says that the white race has been ordained by God to rule from sea to shining sea. One more scar on the landscape.
And now we are in this new world order with the dominant economic model that is often referred to as neo-liberal economics—liberal not in a political sense, but rather an economic sense—saying that economics and economic policies and practices are to be liberated; that there are not to be any restraints, particularly any restraints by the state. So, if there are state enterprises, be it transportation and communication and banking, they are to be privatized, sold off to the highest bidder. Neo-liberal economics says that if there are any laws that could interfere with maximizing profits—even if those laws are designed to protect the environment or to set minimum wages—then they are to be relaxed. It says that if there are taxes that are designed to protect national regional economies by taxing imports—what are known as tariffs—they are to be eliminated.
Neo-liberal economics tells us that those borders, those boundaries, are opening up so that we can enjoy this one globe all together as one people. There is both a truth and a lie to that, because there is an opening of borders, but it is a very selective opening. Again, an opening that is designed to benefit global profiteers—raw materials, finished products, capital investment and speculation are free to cross borders in this new world order. But people who inhabit this globe and, for that matter, all beings who might want to move across the lands are restricted and so, in effect, what we have set up is competition in capital production between the labor markets. Factories, investments, and materials are free to move anywhere in the planet based on what’s called “maximizing your competitive advantage.” So, if in Mexico our competitive advantage in the global marketplace is cheap labor, then we need to keep labor cheap, which means that we weaken our unions and that we keep the daily minimum wage to fifty-two pesos (about five dollars). You’ll find that the prices in Mexico compared to the United States and Canada are not that significantly different; try surviving on five dollars a day—but that is our global “competitive advantage.”
As a result of these kind of economic policies, we have achieved the highest concentration of wealth in human history, what some refer to as the champagne glass economy. Some 20 percent who make up the wealthiest sector of this world now control 83 percent of the world’s wealth and resources. As we enter into this new millennium, there are 475 billionaires whose wealth was equal to the combined income of the poorest 50 percent of the world. So, if we are on a planet with six billion inhabitants, we are talking about 475 individuals whose wealth is greater than three billion human beings. In theological terms, there are many sectors that refer to this global system, this neo-liberal system, as idolatry, saying that idolatry has two primary characteristics. First, it is unquestionable and untouchable, it simply justifies itself and exists because it exists; it’s like the law of gravity, it just is. The second characteristic is that it always, always demands human sacrifice.
And so that is where we begin to locate the missing. I would like to lift up four particular categories in which this sacrifice carries down. The first is through exclusion, the next is through exploitation, the third through expulsion, the last through extermination. And I’d like to cite particular communities in Mexico that I’ve come to know. So we’re going to do a little bit of a tour of Mexico, but I guarantee that these are not the ones you’ll find in your guidebooks; these are way off the tourist trails.
So, the first stop is the state of Guerrero, one of the most southern states of Mexico, best known for the tourist city of Acapulco, where the cliff divers make their death-defying leaps into the waves below and where young college students from the north come for their spring break. We don’t even translate in Spanish; we just say, “spring breakers.” So they come to bathe in the sun and guzzle beer. But if we were to go way, way off the tourist path in the state of Guerrero and climb up into the mountains, we would come to an Indigenous village where the people still speak their native language, a language that predates the Spanish conquest and the conquest of the Aztecs.
The village was founded in 1523, two years after the Spanish conquest of 1521. People were afraid for their lives, so they were fleeing into the mountains to escape the onslaught of the Spanish conquest. It still remains a very, very isolated village. There’s barely a road, it just winds and spirals around the mountain, and as you come to the outskirts of the village, as is common to many of the villages, you would pass the village cemetery. And if you were feeling particularly brave that day, you may stop and wander through the tombs. I say “particularly brave” because, in this village, there are not enough resources for the living, so there is nothing left over for the dead. So in a country where there is so much respect and care for our ancestors, this village is unable to care for their ancestors. In this cemetery you will find that some of the tombs have broken open and suddenly you are face to face with human remains. The first time I was in the village was some twenty years ago and I met a grandmother who held her grandson Leonardo in her arms as he took his last breaths. Her major preoccupation was how she was going to feed the grave diggers (as payment) and have enough food left over for all the hungry mouths in her home.
Contaminated water continues to be a major health issue, so much so that cholera has been the major cause of death in that village. Some years ago when the North America Free Trade Agreement—one of the expressions of the neo-liberal economic policies of opening up borders—came into effect, the delegation had visited the village and later had a meeting with an official responsible for economic policy. Very good questions were raised on how this new world order, how these trade agreements, would affect or benefit those who are part of the village. The official—incredibly cold, but perhaps, in his perspective, honest—said, “That’s what cholera is for.” Do you understand? If people cannot produce and cannot consume in this global economy, they count for nothing, they are zeros in this global economic equation. That’s what cholera is for, we’re better off without them. They are the excluded ones.
This village is a village where the major source of income comes from these beautiful baskets that women weave with quick fingers, moving quickly, weaving stories. Right now, Mexico is being inundated with arts and crafts that are being made in China and sold much cheaper. Tourists cannot tell the difference or really don’t care. So if these people in this village were to disappear off the face of the earth, who would miss these baskets? They really are not producers and consumers in the global economy and so they count for nothing, they are the excluded. And the women who care for their households, who wonder if there will be enough food to feed the hungry mouths, women in these Indigenous villages who bring in the water, who collect the firewood, who give birth to life, who breastfeed their babies—none of that shows in the gross national product. They carry out economic activities that are zeros, they are the excluded ones. But there is work, there is work that is paid where you can earn a salary, where you can earn the daily minimum wage of fifty-two pesos, correct? So we move to the next category of exploited.
Detailed work, repetitive work: putting the tiny screws into the sunglasses—3,500 pair per day—until you start to squint to see more clearly; bending steel cables for seat belts to keep the drivers and passengers of Ford and GM safe and buckled up—3500 cables a day—until your hands are tired and so sore that you can’t bend down to tie your shoes. The blue wire goes here, and the yellow wire goes here, and the circuit board goes—God knows where. Stitch after stitch after stitch sewing GAP jeans; thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds sewing Barbie costumes for Toys-R-Us, but they lock us up until we’ve made the quota for the Christmas sales. All of this requires nimble fingers, quick hands, keen vision, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day until the fingers are too bruised, the wrists ache from carpal tunnel syndrome and the vision is too weak, and your three-month contract is not renewed. You’re out of work, you’re not even thirty years old and you feel like you’ve lived three lifetimes.
Neo-liberal profiteers exist for capital production, not for human reproduction. Each woman is given a medical exam before she is hired, which includes a pregnancy test, and if the test is positive, the position is unavailable. During your term of employment, you receive regular checkups, part of the benefits, again including a pregnancy test, the results of which will determine your continued employment. Some factories decided to dispense with the façade of checkups and just demanded to see the used sanitary napkins once a month. It saves time and money, and that’s the bottom line. A woman who is reproductive for human life is not considered productive enough for corporate life; she becomes part of the landscape of capital waste, thrown out with the factory’s toxic waste.
In the community of Tijuana, there is an industrial park, although park is a misnomer—it’s more like an industrial wasteland. The battery recycling factory is long gone, but the eighty-five hundred tons of toxic waste remains. And so it seeps into the ground, it runs into the streams, it collects in puddles where the children like to run, and so they develop skin blisters. Parents sleep with children because they’re afraid that their children might drown in the pools of blood that come from spontaneous nose bleeding in the middle of the night. Women who work in the factories have high rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and have children born with no brain stems. The local school has set the record for the highest levels of lead in their students’ blood.
If the women organize, if they demand rights, if they try to increase the wage or have better working conditions, then the factories like the battery factory in Mexico, we say they just “sprout wings and fly away.” But if factories can sprout wings and fly away, why can’t the workers do the same? And so we go to the next category which is expulsion.
We go to a village somewhere in the desert. The name—Ultar—is derived from a rectangular stone. Some years ago in the eighteenth century there was a missionary who came across this rectangular stone and it reminded him of an altar, and so he would gather people and invite people to come and celebrate the mass at it. Nobody knows where the stone is anymore, it has been buried under the sand, the river bed has been shifted, but the name is stuck. And so it is now an altar of human sacrifice. In Spanish, we say that this is the trampolina, this is the trampoline, this is the staging ground for the migrants getting ready to make their risky crossing through the desert to go north. In the years of 2000, 2001, in the peak months of crossing, which are January through May, some 2,000 migrants per day gathered in Ultar, a village that in its immediate vicinity numbers 5,000 inhabitants. So in a village of 5,000 people, an extra 2,000 arrive per day.
This was once a farming community, but it has also lost its way in this NAFTA, this free trade, this neo-liberal economics that allows the free flow of grains like corn coming in from the US, genetically altered corn that comes in with heavy subsidies so that companies like Cargill can set the prices and sell the low production cars in Mexico and rule the world economy. So, Ultar is no longer a rural village. It is a village that has its entire economy revolving around human trafficking.
Around the plaza you’ll find the prestos, you’ll find the stands where you can buy your new tennis shoes, baseball caps, bottles of water that will never ever be enough to keep you from being dehydrated—you have to carry at least twenty to thirty pounds of water into the deserts. There are vans around the plaza that have the back seats taken out with benches so that you can crowd twenty to twenty-five migrants and make the race two hours up to the line. And then when there is the opening—that window of opportunity—the migrants, or the young men who are the guides, go off into the desert for two days, for three, four, or five days and nights to make the crossover.
So, what we would say is that while we have these borders, they are open to some and closed to others and, in effect, we have filters. So the desert acts as a filter, to select the labor market that the US economy requires. According to the US labor statistics, 53 percent of all agricultural workers in the US are undocumented. In California that goes up to 90 percent. So if you can make it three, four, five, six days and nights through the desert, then you’ve proved your worth and you can pick lettuce in California, apples in Washington, tomatoes in Michigan, blueberries in Maine, cucumbers in North Carolina, and oranges in Florida.
Why this area? When the free trade agreement came into effect in 1994, there was another initiative, called operation gatekeeper by the United States, to shut the border in the places that had been the traditional places of crossing, Tijuana, and urban areas, and so that’s where the barriers, that’s where the walls went up. The walls are made with former helicopter landing pads from the Vietnam war and the first war in Iraq—metallic walls become the first barrier. Stadium lighting, motion detectors, helicopters, all kinds of sophisticated surveillance technology now drive the migrants to the most hostile environment, which is the desert, to make that dangerous crossing, and it becomes the filter.
The desert once had been the flow back and forth primarily of men, going up for seasonal labor and then coming back to be with their families and their homes and their communities. Because of the risks, because of the costs, they now stay in America, so there are more undocumented migrants in the US after NAFTA, after 1994 and Operation Gate Keeper than before. As a result, while males continue to be the higher percentage of those who are crossing, there has been a significant increase in women who are making that risky crossing with their children. Why? Because they want to be re-united with their families, with their husbands, for their children to know their fathers. And so, they are left with a choice to stay behind in the ghost towns or to make the dangerous trek north and to become part of this migrant trail of those who are the expelled in this lonely economy. But you could stay, right? And if you stay, you could fight for change, right? And so we go to the last category of extermination.
We go to the south of Mexico and the southernmost state, which is the state of Chiapas, the state that ethnically and language-wise identifies with the Mayan peoples, where people still speak the traditional language. Mayan languages present a different worldview—there is no word for “I” or “me,” only “we” and “us.” There is no word in Mayan languages for “rich” or “poor” because they don’t exist as social categories. For many, many centuries there was no word for “enemy.” Chiapas is one of the richest states in terms of natural resources, of anything that you could imagine—from water to generate hydroelectric power, which generates over half of the electricity in Mexico, to uranium to timber to coffee to land, whatever you want to imagine, Chiapas sets the record for the greatest wealth of resources in Mexico.
At the same time, it has some of the poorest living standards in all of Mexico. Chiapas is “off the grid”; the land reform carried out in Mexico in the 1930s didn’t quite make it all the way south, but the Indigenous peoples, the farmers, held onto the promise and the hope that someday that communal land would be theirs because it was protected by law in the Mexican constitution under article 27, which would not allow the purchase nor the sale of communal lands. But in anticipation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, under pressure from the United States to pave the way, the Mexican administration in 1992 amended its own constitution to allow for the purchase and sale of this communal land. For Indigenous families that was taken as a death sentence. On January 1, 1994, when NAFTA came into effect and when the power brokers in Mexico City were celebrating and toasting their entry into this new world order, an Indigenous army of Mayan peoples occupied six municipalities in Chiapas as part of a protest. Mayan mathematicians had done some quick calculating and had determined that, based on the infant mortality rate, they had just a few generations left and so they decided to go down in a fight.
Onto the scene appeared the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional). Twelve days of fighting ended in a ceasefire. Civil society in Mexico also rose up and called for negotiations and identified with the cause of the Zapatistas to defend communal lands, to defend cultures and traditions that are part of the Indigenous peoples. So there was a ceasefire, and the Zapatistas have respected that ceasefire since January 12, 1994, without having fired a shot. In the meantime, the Mexican government has continued to carry out a military strategy of counter-insurgency, sometimes described as “in order to kill the fish, you drain the ocean,” which is to say that all life becomes a military target. And so, counter- insurgency policies in the southern state of Chiapas have pushed people out, have cleared areas, only allowing those who agree to collaborate with the government to stay, as a way of trying to remove any popular base and support for the Zapatistas. All of this because of the concerns of the north, including a memo that once came from Chase Bank to the president of Mexico saying, “unless you eliminate those Zapatistas, we can no longer consider Mexico a secure environment for investment.”
So, in a little village in December 1997, people had assembled, Indigenous Peoples who were on the run because they understood that there was a military operation coming into the area. So they gathered. And, while they themselves were not Zapatistas—in fact, they had formed themselves into an organization called the Bees—they shared the causes of Indigenous rights, protection of culture and traditions, land reform, democracy, and human rights, but they did not share the strategy of taking up arms. And so they gathered in the little village with rumors that there was a military operation on the way, and they gathered in the little wooden chapel to pray and to fast for peace.
In the morning of December 22, 1997, trucks started to arrive, young men in uniforms got down armed with high-caliber rifles and they took position around the chapel and high ground, and at 11:00 in the morning they began to open fire. You can still see the bullet holes in the wooden panels that touched them. The people ran, they fled, they dove down the embankments, they gathered their children, they covered them up, they tried to hide in the vegetation. The shooting continued until 5:00 in the afternoon; at 2:00 it reached its peak.
In the end, forty-five lives were lost, the majority women and children. The men had moved out of the area, assuming that they would be the ones targeted for violence, but they were dead wrong. In this strategy, the women were targets. It was gender-directed violence. Among the nineteen women killed, four were pregnant; one died because her abdomen was cut open. Just 200 meters away from the killing spree were public security forces. They blocked the only potential escape route from the village. This is a military strategy called the hammer and the anvil. The anvil holds the escape route, and the hammer comes in to do its work.
The government, in its attempt to cover up its complicity, stated that it was just a dispute between Indigenous Peoples, you know how they are. There was a sand pit and they were just fighting over that. They tried to cover up the gender-specific brutality. Cultural anthropologists who have investigated the case say that this kind of heinous violence has absolutely nothing to do with Indigenous cultures, but has everything to do with a culture of military counter-insurgency training. And so, in this globalized world, this new world order that promises profits and trickle-down economics, there is a system that demands human sacrifice through exclusion, exploitation, expulsion, and extermination.
But the global profiteers do not have the last word. They do not get the last say. There is a cosmic shift that we also feel; our solar calendar shows two serpents coming together head to head. One is the serpent of light, the other is the serpent of shadows. The elders in Mexico tell us that we are now in the shifting of the pendulum, that the serpent of the shadows is now being pushed aside, and the serpent of light is coming into force and power. In Spanish, the way we say “to give birth” is “to give light.” And so, this Earth Mother of ours is not only crying out because of the pain of her lost, murdered and missing sisters, she is also crying out in labor pain. She is giving birth to a new creation, what some refer to as an eco-feminist creation that places food sovereignty above food as a commodity. That places worker cooperation above maximizing our competitive advantage. That places meeting basic human needs above maximizing corporate greed.
And so we are awaiting the birth of a new order, and as those who are here as midwives, we participate by sowing seeds—we start small because we want to concentrate the life force—seeds that are cultivated, that become plots, that thicken, that write a new history and a new story. We start thin with many threads of many colors to weave a new tapestry. And we start slow because we are in it for the long haul. We are in this marathon of life and hope and we will not be stopped. And we are not alone.
Who has called us here? I would say that our missing and murdered sisters have also called us. You can feel them, their presence; they are here. Yesterday when Maria Campbell shared her powerful, moving, eloquent words, and she talked about walking through the cemetery and remembering her sisters who had died such violent deaths, outside, in the window, I saw in the clouds a kite flying. In Guatemala, on the day of the dead, people fly kites in the graveyards to remind them of the spirits that soar and lift them up. We are not alone, our sisters lift us up and they have called us and they have convened us in this marathon of hope.
So I want to close with the words of a sister from Guatemala who reminds us of this marathon of hope in a poem that she wrote called “They have threatened us with resurrection.”[2]
They have threatened us with Resurrection
Because we have felt their inert bodies,
and their souls penetrated ours
doubly fortified,
because in this marathon of Hope,
there are always others to relieve us
who carry the strength
to reach the finish line
which lies beyond death.
They have threatened us with Resurrection
because they will not be able to take away from us
their bodies,
their souls,
their strength,
their spirit,
nor even their death
and least of all their life.
Because they live
today, tomorrow, and always
in the streets baptized with their blood,
in the air that absorbed their cry,
in the jungle that hid their shadows,
in the river that gathered up their laughter,
in the ocean that holds their secrets,
in the craters of the volcanoes,
Pyramids of the New Day,
which swallowed up their ashes.
They have threatened us with Resurrection
because they are more alive than ever before,
because they transform our agonies
and fertilize our struggle,
because they pick us up when we fall,
because they loom like giants
before the crazed gorillas’ fear.
They have threatened us with Resurrection
1. Kim Erno's presentation at the Mission Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminisms and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico conference was translated into English by a conference volunteer, then transcribed and edited for ease of readability by Chelsea Millman.
2. Excerpt from Julia Esquivel, “They Have Threatened Us With Resurrection / Nos han amenazado de Resurrección,” Spiritus 3 (2003): 96–101 © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/03%3A_Global_History_of_Femicide/3.04%3A_Global_Capitalisms_Attack_on_Mother_Earth_and_Her_Ind.txt |
Introduction
Previously, I identified four forms of human sacrifice demanded by the idolatry of global capitalism: exclusion, exploitation, expulsion, and extermination. Exclusion represents those women who are outside of a global economy that only values the potential for monetary production and consumption. Those whose economic means are so limited that they are neither consumers nor producers and who perform tasks such as child rearing, gardening, collecting water, caring for the elderly, etc. without any monetary remuneration, count for nothing in the global economic equation and therefore have no justification to exist. Exploitation represents those who for a limited period of time contribute to the global economy through the tedious labor in sweatshops often in inhumane conditions. Once their production rate declines or they become reproductive, that is, pregnant they are discarded. Expulsion represents those women who live in the villages that are like “ghost towns” where the vast majority of the males have gone north in order to feed their families. These are primarily rural areas since they are the ones that have been most devastated by trade agreements that flood the market with cheap corn and other basic grains. These women risk their lives crossing north through the desert to reunite their families who have been expelled by the global economy’s impact on their hometowns. Extermination represents those women who resist and organize alternative societies with collective decision making, sustainable living styles and gender equality. Such women are a threat to a patriarchal global system that is based on competitive advantages, maximizing profits and converting people and the planet into commodities to be bought and sold or traded for profits through speculation. I cited particular communities in Mexico that are exemplative of each of these sacrifices. In the case of extermination I had described a massacre by paramilitaries carried out in the Indigenous community of Acteal (in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas) in which women, particularly pregnant women, were specifically targeted in order to eliminate “the seed” of resistance to a global economic model designed to generate wealth for a few rather than the well being of all.
Now, at this juncture, I would like to pick up where I left off, namely with extermination. I believe that there is an even greater urgency now to expose how extermination has become so amplified that we are now faced with a convergence of femicide with ecocide. Femicide has reached global proportions by the fact that we as humans are also committing ecocide by killing la Tierra Madre, Mother Earth! The culprit is a global economic system based upon unlimited growth fueled by the endless extraction of limited resources to feed an insatiable consumerism with waste and contamination left in its wake that is heating up the earth at a record rate. Furthermore, anyone who gets in the way must be eliminated so what we are now experiencing is a combination of the killing of the planet with the killing of women who are defenders of the planet. These women are the faithful and valiant daughters fighting to protect their Mother for the sake of their children and the generations to come.
Ecocide: Mother Earth at Risk
In spite of those who deny global warming or anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), the data is readily available. Notably, about 97 percent of active, publishing climate scientists believe in ACD, meaning that they consider human activity to be a major cause of climate change. (Doran and Zimmerman 2009; Anderegg et al. 2010).
There are some places on the planet where denial of ACD is not an option. What do the residents of Tuvalu, an island nation in the South Pacific, and Kivalani, an Inuit village above the Arctic Circle, have in common? They are in a race, not by choice, to see which ones become the first global warming displaced refugees.
Tuvalu is the fourth smallest nation on the planet consisting of a twenty-seven square kilometer land mass with a population of around 11,000. The highest point on the island nation is about four meters above sea level. As the oceans continue to rise, the island nation faces an uncertain future. Storm patterns have also changed from the most severe ones that were once concentrated in the months of November and December to storms with high winds and huge swells that can wash over the island striking virtually any time of the year. Speaking at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference the prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoago, challenged the industrialized world to set even higher goals for combating global warming: “Tuvalu’s future at current warming, is already bleak, any further temperature rises will spell the total demise of Tuvalu. For Small Island Developing Nations, Least Developed Countries and many others, setting a global temperature goal of below 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels is critical. I call on the people of Europe to think carefully about their obsession with 2 degrees. Surely we must aim for the best future we can deliver and not a weak compromise…Let’s do it for Tuvalu, for if we save Tuvalu we save the world.” (Sopoago 2015). Sopoago’s words may prove to be prophetic. While the Paris Agreement calls for holding the global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius for this century, the accord is based upon political motivation for implementation rather than legal mandates. Plus a recent report from the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) states that reduction of emissions under the Paris Agreement will still result in a 3.5 degree Celsius rise in global warming by the end of the century. In the introduction to the report UNEP leaders warn: “Current commitments will reduce emissions by no more than a third of the levels required by 2030 to avert disaster.”(Solheim and McGlade 2016, xi). Furthermore in what is referred to as potentially “the most impactful climate change reality of our time”, a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns that a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could produce an abrupt and catastrophic ten foot rise (about one meter below Tuvalu’s highest point) in sea level between 2050 and 2060. To avert this disaster we must restore ocean temperatures to their pre-industrial state.
Heading north to the Arctic with a warming rate twice as fast as the world average, we enter a region also susceptible to the impact of climate change. The residents of Kivalani live with climate change on a daily basis. The force of the late fall storms were once diminished by the ice pack that formed along the coast as a protective shield. However with warmer temperatures this ice pack does not form until much later in the year often December or later. This leaves the coastal area significantly more vulnerable to erosion. The warmer water also increases the intensity of the storms. Some homes simply fall into the sea. There are no climate change deniers in their midst! City council member Colleen Swan is also a first responder for her village. She describes the exhaustion from the endless struggle to protect her community from being washed into the ocean. When one minor fall storm hit she decided she would try to get some rest.
When we got that storm last fall, I decided I’m just going to go to sleep. I’m tired of worrying, I want to get some rest. The next morning when I woke up I saw the impacts from a minor storm and how quickly the water rose, and I realized that was a very dangerous thing for me to do, to sleep, to not face the reality of that night. I realized this is what climate deniers do not us. Not us who face the reality every day. We wake up to it. We wake up to it every morning. (Wernick 2015)
Indeed global warming is making itself felt in the farthest reaches of the north. During the second half of November 2016, temperatures at the North Pole averaged an alarming 36 degrees above normal! At a time when Arctic sea ice should be freezing it is melting, meaning that storms pounding the coast along Kivalani will be even more destructive and Colleen Swan will have many more sleepless nights.
In both places resettlement is considered the last resort but could soon be the only option. Abandoning the land that represents their traditions and livelihood for centuries means also losing their identity as a people. Maina Talia, secretary of the Tuvalu Climate Action Network and a theologian states:
“Our people continue to experience the dramatic effects of climate change on our islands. Our traditional root crops…are gradually dying because of sea intrusion and frequent droughts. Fish poisoning has become a major issue, due to increased temperature and acidification of sea water…We are losing our lands to the sea as a result of soil erosion, and land defines who we are. Our culture, our life, our heritage, and our language are all rooted in the land…Losing our land literally means life becomes meaningless to us.” (Talia 2014)
Furthermore, like the sea, the cost of relocation continues to rise. In the case of Kivalani the estimate is around \$400 million USD. In a strategy to garner these funds, as well as, to hold accountable those who are some of the biggest contributors to global warming, Kivalani filed a law suit in February, 2008 against twenty-four oil, coal, and utility companies including ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, and Xcel Energy. The law suit claims that the defendants by their volume of green house emissions are exacerbating global warming and the erosion of Kivalani and therefore constitute a “public nuisance” under federal and state common law (Montague 2013, 2). For a time Tuvalu had entertained a similar strategy considering legal action against United States and Australia as the world’s largest and overall highest per capita producers of green house gases on the planet. The law suit filed by Kivalani was subsequently dismissed by the U.S. courts on the grounds that the remedy for their situation must be sought through legislative and executive branches of the government rather than through federal common law (Armstrong 2009).
Those who face “eviction” from their homelands due to climate change are at risk of becoming global castaways since there appears to be no political body willing to take responsibility for their relocation. The UN refugee convention applies only to those fleeing persecution and with the growing number of people in this category of refugees there is little political will to expand refugee status to those forced to move by rising sea waters and droughts. With predictions of an estimated 250 million climate refuges by 2050 we are set for a global migration crisis (Sunjic 2008).
There appears to be no relief in sight as more and more hotspots erupt across the globe. During the summer of 2016 the temperature in Basra, Iraq spiked at 129 degrees Fahrenheit setting the record as the highest temperature ever documented and exceeding the limit of human tolerance (‘State of the Climate: Global Climate Report for Annual 2016’ 2017; Bouchama and Knochel 2002, 1981). Ironically Basra is situated along the Euphrates River by the legendary location of the Garden of Eden. What was once the garden of paradise is becoming a hell on earth! The months of July and August of 2016 also saw temperatures climb to the highest levels ever recorded in the history of human civilization! The most recent report from the World Meteorological Organization predicts that the year 2016 will go down as the hottest year ever on record. This follows the record setting temperature high of the year 2015; which followed the record setting year of 2014. You start to see a pattern?!?
Some of the most recent studies on global warming are the most disturbing. One describes an accelerated melt rate for the ice caps and ice sheets that produces what is known as a stratification in the ocean with the cooler fresh water from the melting ice pooling at the top and the warmer salt water settling below, which leads to even more melting as these warmer waters are melting ice sheets from the bottom up. This in turn will slow down the ocean circulation in the north, while the impact of global warming raises temperatures around the equator so we have a greater north-south temperature differential that will produce more severe tropical storms (Hansen et al. 2016).
While the year 2015 set a record for the hottest year ever (although 2016 is likely to surpass it) it was also a year when a record was set for the number of murders of environmental activists. While Mother Earth is warming up the heat is being turned up on those who fight to defend her. According to a Global Witness report titled “On Dangerous Ground”, the year 2015 “was the worst year on record for killings of land and environmental defenders – people struggling to protect land, forests and rivers through peaceful actions, against mounting odds…” The report continues “The numbers are shocking. We documented 185 killings across 16 countries, a 59% increase on 2014 and the highest annual toll on record. On average, more than three people were killed every week in 2015…” Furthermore those who are most vulnerable to attack are Indigenous populations. “This report sheds light on the acute vulnerability of Indigenous people, whose weak land rights and geographic isolation make them particularly exposed to land grabbing for natural resources exploitation. In 2015, almost 40% of victims were Indigenous” (‘On Dangerous Ground’ 2016, 4). The following is a case in point…
Femicide: The Risk of Defending Mother Earth
In the early morning hours of March 3, 2016, gunmen broke into the home of Berta Cáceres, an internationally recognized Honduran environmental activist, and shot her to death. Also wounded in the attack was Gustavo Castro Soto coordinator of Otros Mundos Chiapas, Friends of the Earth México, and the Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4). Gustavo was a close friend and colleague of Berta and was staying with her as an act of international solidarity to provide some measure of security by his accompaniment. By feigning death Gustavo survived the attack and is the sole witness to Berta’s murder. He was subsequently held for several days in inhumane conditions by Honduran authorities for “questioning”. After his release he was once again detained at the airport and placed into protective custody at the Mexican embassy only to be handed back to the Honduran authorities for further “questioning”. The initial government finding was that the murder occurred during a robbery and there was no political motive. This conclusion could not be further from the truth (‘The Death of the Guardian’ n.d.).
Berta Cáceres grew up in a household with progressive and revolutionary ideals. Her mother, Doña Bertha, served as a role model of female leadership and community service. She was mayor of her town and later became governor of the state at time when women seldom if ever held public office. Doña Bertha was also a midwife for her community and provided refuge in her home for those fleeing from the civil war in El Salvador (Blitzer 2016).With this formation Berta emerged as a powerful Indigenous female leader among her native Lenca people. In 1993, she co-founded the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). COPINH was created to promote indigenous pride as well as political clout among the Lencas, peasant movements, and grassroots organizations of Honduras. Together they took on some very powerful economic and political interests (both national and international) and won some significant victories: reclaiming ancestral lands through communal land titles, blocking mining and logging operations, organizing a boycott of all international financial institutions on their lands, and facilitating 150 local referendums across the country to give people a voice in determining their futures (Barra 2018; Bell 2016).
The latest campaign was to halt the construction of a megaproject which was a hydroelectric dam known as the Agua Zarca to be built on the Gualcarque River that is considered sacred by the Lenca people. The project violated international law because it was initiated without the prior consent of the Indigenous people and would have resulted in the displacement of the COPINH community of Rio Blanco. The dam was slated to be built by the Chinese company SINOHYDRO, the largest global builder of dams, with financing provided by the World Bank and political backing from the Desarollos Energéticos S.A. (DESA), the Honduran energy company. Even in the face of such powerful opposition Berta spoke of hearing the river cry for help and that the call had to be answered. With this “call”, Berta and COPINH confronted these global giants with the shear force of their integrity, communal organization, and courage. The community of Rio Blanco formed a human barricade to block the construction. Everyone participated, the elderly, the young, nursing mothers and men. The blockade lasted an entire year until finally the dam builder and their backers withdrew (Watson 2015; Bird 2013, 7). When the government reinitiated the project with construction across the river from Rio Blanco the protests were renewed and the threats against Berta, her family, and members of COPINH intensified. Berta stated: “I have received direct death threats, threats of kidnapping or disappearance, of lynching, of pummeling the vehicle I use, threats of kidnapping my daughter, persecution, surveillance, sexual harassment, and also campaigns in the national media of powerful sectors.” She identified the threats as coming from various state and corporate agents including Blue Energy, a Canadian transnational corporation, also seeking to partner with the dam construction project at Rio Blanco (La Nueva Televisión Del Sur C.A. 2016).
In spite of efforts by Honduran authorities to pin the blame for Berta’s assassination on leaders of COPINH claiming it was a crime of passion, thus far those arrested include a military officer and two retired military officers as further confirmation of military complicity and state sanctioned violence in collusion with international financial and political interests in Berta’s murder (Lakhani 2018). However, given the atrocious record of the Honduran justice system (with a 90 percent failure rate in criminal case convictions) there is not much hope for a just resolution to Berta’s case, especially now that it has been compounded by the theft of the case files by armed assailants who stole the materials from the car of a judge who claimed she was taking the files home “to study”! For this reason Berta’s family and friends have called for an international investigation into her murder which the Honduran government has refused to do. In August 2016,the UN special rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Michael Forst, visited Honduras and declared: “Honduras is one of the most hostile and dangerous countries in the world for human rights defenders.” He attributes this to an atmosphere of impunity (UNHR Office of the High Commissioner 2019). Additional UN officials warn that the impunity is turning Honduras into “a lawless killing zone” (UNHR Office of the High Commissioner 2016).
Berta’s assassination must be set within the context of the political violence of Honduras; the violence directed toward those who defend land and water in Honduras; the escalating global violence against environmental activists as previously cited; and the particular violence directed against female defenders of the environment and sacred Indigenous spaces.
Honduras is ranked as the most violent country in the world with 96 homicides for each 100,000 inhabitants (Kennedy 2012). While this is often attributed to gang and drug related violence, a major factor is the state sanctioned violence against human rights activists and Indigenous leaders defending their land. The spike in killings occurred following the 2009 military coup that ousted democratically elected Manuel Zelaya. He became unacceptable to the oligarchy and certain foreign powers after he announced his plans to make significant changes in Honduras. The government would: no longer renew mining contracts with Canadian corporations; convert the large U.S. military airbase into an international civilian airport; join the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) that promotes trade and social programs for Latin America; double the minimum wage; and revise the Honduran constitution (Escalera-Flexhaug 2014; Mejía 2009; 2008; Ham 2015, 6; Palencia and Frank 2009). The last proposal was the one used against him to claim that his primary objective was to amend the constitution so that he could serve another term in office. This was blatantly false since even if that change were made it could not have applied to him. Besides, the major reason for the constitutional reform was to protect the natural resources of Honduras, especially from foreign interests, because the constitution had been written back in the days when Honduras was considered a “banana republic” at the mercy of corporations like the United Fruit Company.
The women of Honduras also had a stake in the constitutional reform as a means of advancing their rights and place within Honduran society. Berta spoke of this hope for change: “For the first time we would be able to establish a precedent for the emancipation of women, to begin to break these forms of domination. The current constitution never mentions women, not once, so to establish our human rights, our reproductive, sexual, political, social and economic rights as women would be to really confront this system of domination” (Carlsen 2011). Not surprisingly some of the first to take to the streets in protest of the coup were female activists who spontaneously organized themselves into a movement called Feminists in Resistance. In addition to the beatings by police and security forces that all protestors suffered, the women were also subjected to rape and sexual harassment.
Once Zelaya was removed from power, with the acquiescence of the Obama administration and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (the coup leaders even hired a Washington, D.C. law firm to lobby the U.S. Congress on their behalf, the same firm that represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings), trade was again directed toward the north and concessions for mining and access to land for agribusiness were speedily granted (Beckman 2017). When the affected communities resisted, the killings abounded. Between January 2010 and May 2013 there were 120 reported assassinations of peasant leaders in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras which is one of the most fertile regions of the country and especially well suited for the cultivation of African palm oil trees (OXFAM Briefing Note 2016). What was once an area of the country identified as the “capital of land reform” following government sponsored agrarian reform, is now considered the “poster child of land re-concentration” with over 75 percent of the land controlled by a handful of Honduran oligarchs who are cultivating palm oil trees and exporting the palm oil. Palm oil is considered a “flex crop,” meaning that it is suitable for food, fuel, livestock feed, or industrial material, which makes it even more versatile and valuable as a cash crop. As such it also promotes confiscation of land due to a growing global demand and the land area required for cultivation. About 10,000 acres of land are necessary to supply a single palm oil mill (Conant 2014). Here we have a contradiction in the strategies to reduce global warming and an example of why having Big Business “go green” while measuring its success by maximizing “greenbacks” will not save us! A positive step in the reduction of global warming is to switch from fossil fuels to biofuels. Palm oil can be used for biofuel. However in addition to the significant territory required for cultivation, it also thrives in conditions equivalent to that of rainforests. Not only are these precious areas destroyed, the Indigenous people who live there in harmony with the environment are displaced. If they refuse, the companies have their hired guns to intimidate, evict and kill. In a country where private security forces outnumber the police by a 5:1 ratio (Conant 2014), the UN Working Group on Mercenaries condemned the African palm oil producers of Honduras for recruiting former Colombian paramilitaries notorious for assassinations and massacres directed against peasant populations. These political and economic factors make Honduras both the murder capital of the world and according to Global Witness, the most dangerous country for those who defend their land and the environment (Global Witness 2017). Ironically Honduras is also the nation considered most affected by climate change that produces extreme weather. In a report issued by Germanwatch, Honduras is listed as the number one country to be negatively impacted by climate change during a 20 year period from 1994 to 2013 (Kreft et al. 2015).
While violence against defenders of the environment escalates, with Indigenous peoples being the most vulnerable to attack, female activists are considered most at risk. An OXFAM report issued in October, 2016, “The Risk of Defending Human Rights: The Rising Tide of Attacks against Human Rights Activists in Latin America” describes how the cultural context contributes to this higher risk. “The prevalence of the patriarchal culture that is so predominant in Latin America means that women human rights defenders face specific risks and attacks, since their activities involve challenging cultural, religious and social norms. This means that they are victims of stigmatization, hostility, repression and violence more frequently and to a greater extent than men,” (OXFAM Briefing Note 2016). In Berta Cáceres’ own words:
“I am absolutely convinced that if I were a man, this level of aggression wouldn’t be so violent. There are always campaigns against leaders. But as women we’re not only leading campaigns like the fight against the hydroelectric project, but also against the whole militarization culture that’s involved in our defense of the public good, of nature. We are women who are reclaiming our right to the sovereignty of our bodies and thoughts and political beliefs, to our cultural and spiritual rights – of course the aggression is much greater,” (Andrews 2016).
Within this national context of Honduras returning to a “puppet state” to become the most violent nation on earth and the deadliest for environmental activists together with a global context of ever escalating violence against defenders of the environment with Indigenous people and women as the most at risk; Berta Cáceres, an Indigenous Honduran female environmental activist, was killed.
Conclusion
The mounting violence directed toward Mother Earth and her allies appears like the last throes of a global monster that wants to consume and destroy all that it can before its demise. It carries the seeds of its own collapse within itself. A system that is based on unlimited growth with the endless extraction of limited resources is unsustainable for the long haul and therefore doomed to fail. However this does not mean that we are to stand by idly awaiting its downfall. If the monster is in its last throes of life, then Mother Earth is at the beginning of her labor pains to give birth to a new creation. In this birthing process we are called to be midwives, which means:
• standing alongside those who are on the frontlines of the defense of our lands, air, and water for future generations in defiance of those who exploit any and all resources to reap short term financial gains;
• cultivating sustainable food systems rather than treating food as a commodity to profit large agribusiness enterprises;
• designing local economies to meet basic human needs rather than an imposed global economy driven by corporate greed;
• connecting with renewable energy sources that minimize environmental impact rather than extractive ones that accelerate global warming and contaminate the planet;
• joining social movements that cross borders and issues to globalize justice rather than the globalization of international financial institution policies to benefit transnational corporations and their investors; and
• organizing a participative politics of the people rather than a plutocratic rule by the rich.
In 2015 Berta Cáceres was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of her leadership in defense of her Lenca community and their opposition of the Agua Zarca dam project. In her acceptance speech she issued a call to all of us who continue to walk on this earth which I expect was similar to the call she once heard from the river. “Let us wake up humanity. We’re out of time…Let’s come together and remain hopeful as we defend and care for the blood of this Earth and of its spirits…” (Garcia and Ruiz 2016).In honor of Berta and for the sake our planet and the generations to come we must heed her call.
1. “I dedicate this updated version of “Global Capitalism’s Detrimental Impact on Our Sacred Earth and Indigenous Women” to Iris Janet Figueroa Flores, my life companion and wife, a defender of women’s rights whose Indigenous roots sink deep into la Tierra Madre (the Mother Earth) of México. She was torn from my midst much too soon so now we look for a new way to walk together between life on this side and life on the other side to continue our path toward a world of abundant life for all.” | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/03%3A_Global_History_of_Femicide/3.05%3A_Update-_Global_Capitalisms_Attack_on_Mother_Earth_and.txt |
Activist Marta Perez, introduced by m.c. Rev. Carla Blakley, describes her first-hand experiences at San Salvador Attenco. Rev. Kim Erno translates for us.
The dangers of speaking out about the violence directed toward Indigenous women is real. As such, we send out prayers for safety to those women who speak up, like Marta.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
3.07: From Genocide to Femicide- An Ongoing History of Terr
Leonzo Barreno
Genocide[1]:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s one of the largest genocides in the western hemisphere was taking place: genocide in Guatemala (Chomsky, 28; Falla, 4) that the world knew little about. Only after survivors told their stories to those who dared to listen and to write about them did we learn of the extent of a campaign carried out by “an army blinded by ignorance, hatred [towards the Mayan people], and fear” (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 257). What this campaign of state terrorism created and left in Guatemala, amid the Peace Agreement signed in 1996, was a culture of violence and fear amongst the general population, impunity for those who committed crimes against humanity and apathy among the selected few who continue to govern that Central American country.
Growing up in an urban town of Guatemala in the early 1980s, I recall the news—from clandestine radio stations, from urban foci informants, or from secret discussions with high school and university students’ gatherings—of the daily rural matazones (massacres). Official news on radio and TV minimized the extent of the massacres by telling people that the national army was fighting against the “evil of communism.” One president, General Efraín Ríos Montt, even told Guatemalans in his Sunday speeches that God had chosen him to rule Guatemala and that killing rebels was part of his sacred duty[2]. He was, in fact, ordering the massacres of ten of thousands of Mayan people.
Speaking publicly against the massacres in the urban areas was uncommon due to the fear caused by the several terrorist instruments used by the Guatemalan state: neighbours (orejas) spying on neighbours; selective disappearances and mass killings of university professors and students, unionists, and Catholic leaders; assassination of youth suspected of being guerrillas (rebels); and military surveillance of collective gatherings. In short, the country became a militarized state where dead bodies were left on the streets for the purpose of causing fear among the urban population. There were no political prisoners in Guatemala and until 2012 no single high-ranking officer ever faced justice for all these crimes.
The rural areas of northern and western Guatemala, highly populated by Mayan people, suffered the worst of state terrorism. Entire rural zones were difficult, even “illegal,” to visit. Guatemala became divided not only along social and cultural lines but also by geographic zones. Those in power ruled with an iron fist and with contempt for and “devaluation” of the rural Mayan population. Army generals, since the 1954 CIA orchestrated invasion of Guatemala, took turns as “Presidents” of the country. Generals such as Schell Laugerud, Romeo Lucas, Benedicto Lucas, Efraín Ríos Montt, and Hector Gramajo, as Presidents or Ministers of Defence, were the masterminds of the genocide of more than 200,000 people, mostly Mayan.
Under the Ríos Montt government (March 1982 to August 1983), the army destroyed “some 400 towns and villages, drove 20,000 rural people out of their homes and into [concentration] camps, killed between 50,000 and 75,000 mostly unarmed indigenous farmers and their families, and violently displaced over a million people” (Schlesinger and Kinzer, x). In the Guatemalan army rhetoric, the rural Mayan people were the water keeping the fish (guerrillas) alive; “in order to kill the fish,” they said, it was necessary “to get rid of the water,” literally. Very few people escaped the massacres. In his book Massacres in the Jungle (1994), Jesuit priest and anthropologist Ricardo Falla documented some of the massacres in the Ixcan region. It was through the personal stories of survivors that the world learned about the effectiveness of these military regimes. Guatemalans did not learn until much later because Falla’s book was considered ‘subversive’ and was illegal to read (Beatriz Manz in the foreword of Massacres in the Jungle, xv).
Falla says that although racism was not the main motive for the genocide, it became a trait of it. Foot soldiers in the field and army generals stationed in Guatemala City were influenced by the racism and hate they felt for the Maya, who they only referred to as Indios (Indians)—“a despicable being, whose life is worth less than a normal person’s and whom one can therefore exterminate without scruples to save the country from a great evil such as communism” (Falla, 185). Non-Maya (in the Guatemalan lexicon referred to as Ladino, or people of mixed Spanish and Indigenous blood) killed in the massacres were treated so because they looked like Indians and were “infected” by the Indian way of doing things (Falla, 86).
By 1996, when a “peace agreement” was signed between the Guatemalan government and the rebel forces grouped under the Union of Guatemala’s Revolutionary Forces (URNG), the war was supposed to be over. “Guatemala: Never Again” was the title of a 1998 report led by the Catholic Church that documented the atrocities of both army and rebel forces during the thirty-six years of fighting. The report estimated that “150,000 people had been killed and another 50,000 had disappeared. Eighty percent of the casualties, it asserted, were inflicted by government forces” (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 264). The Catholic Church took on this project after learning that the Historical Clarification Commission (HCC), a commission agreed to by rebels and government, had agreed to impunity for the two sides: nobody was going to be prosecuted for the crimes committed in thirty-six years of “war.” Notwithstanding its limitations, the Commission’s 1999 report concluded that “the conflict had caused more than 200,000 deaths, and blamed the military for 93 percent of them.”[3]
The URNG became an insignificant political party, and former dictator Ríos Montt became President of Congress and died in April 2018 without going to jail for the crimes he committed. Other Generals became politicians or rich entrepreneurs. Terror, hate, and apathy, despite the peace agreement, was far from over. In his final report, the head of the HCC Christian Tomuschat emphasized the “the special brutality directed against Mayan women, who were tortured, raped and murdered” (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 265). This was one of the few occasions in which violence against women began to be acknowledged. However, and despite early hopes for a better society, terror and violence continue to be rampant in Guatemala.
While state terrorism was implemented in Mayan territories, resulting in genocide of four Mayan groups, the current violence is mostly affecting large cities. For example, in 2008, Bismarck Pineda and Lisardo Bolaños found that in the Departamento (province) of Guatemala, where Guatemala City is located, there were 2,433 homicides, or 81.26 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. In large Indigenous territories like the Departamento of Totonicapán 23 killings represented 5.30 homicides per 100,000 people during the same year. Genocide against Indigenous peoples has been replaced by femicide in urban areas. The killing of Guatemalan women did not stop; it continues even more in contemporary times.
Femicide:
Since 1976 femicide has been defined as “the processes to which violence against women becomes socially acceptable and quotidian” (Russell, 1976 in Torres, M., 1). Every year thousands of people, men and women, are killed in Guatemala. While more men die in violent acts the violence against Guatemalan women has a misogyny undertone.
According to a report from the National Committee for the Prevention of Intra-Familiar Violence against Women (CONAPREVI), violence against Guatemalan females include physical, psychological, sexual and economic abuse. Physical violence includes “pinching, slapping in the face, kicking, blows using objects or weapons. Severe physical violence can cause death.” Psychological violence is applied in many forms including “insults, negligence, humiliation, blame, emotional blackmail, degradation, isolation from friends, ridicule, manipulation, threats, exploitation, yelling, and indifference. The result is emotional harm” (CONAPREVI, 17). Sexual violence is when male offenders force their partners to have intimate relations with them or with other men. It also involves sexual harassment, child sexual abuse, incest, and forcing women to watch pornography. Economic violence refers to the selling or destruction of the couple’s patrimony, destruction of the women personal identification documents, and refusing to pay child support (p. 17).
The Observatorio de los Periodistas-CERIGUA, based on a report from the Guatemalan Mutual Support Group (GAM), reported that in 2013 alone, 51,525 women reported to be victims of violence and 755 were killed violently (Observatorio de los Periodistas-CERIGUA, November 22, 214). The National Institute of Statistics reported that between 2000 and 2018 more than 11,255 women died violently (in Torres, M., January 23, 2019).
Who is killing women and young girls and why? Is it gangs or organized crime killing women and young girls who disobey their command to commit illegal acts or who refuse to be sexually exploited? Or is it some police officers, as some gang leaders say, who are in a campaign of social cleansing and thus show their bosses that they are doing “something” against crime? Is it husbands or partners who use violence as a way to ‘punish’ women? Or is it the direct apathy and inaction of the social, economic, and political elites whose women are not victims of femicide? There is no one single answer.
Rarely punished, perpetrators of crime include “Non-state organizations – including the aforementioned gangs, and organized crime syndicates as well as quasi-police forces and even some rural communities – now engage in the quotidian acts of violence to enact social control” (Torres, 3). In an interview with journalist Antonio Ordoñez, lawyer and activist Ana Lucia Moran said, “violence against women is a continuation of the violence that predates the [Guatemalan] armed conflict” (Ordoñez, November 24, 2009). Chilean photojournalist Carlos Reyes Manzo told a group of journalism students at the School of Journalism, University of Regina (March 30, 2009) that gang leaders told him during his visit to Guatemala that it was the National Police killing their women to send them—gang leaders and their “groupies”—a message.
In one of the few public confessions about femicide and killing for money, gang leader Axel Danilo Ramirez (a.k.a. Smiley), who began his criminal career at the age of 10, told journalists that killing gives him pleasure, “especially killing opposing gang members and their women” (Castañón, M., April 16, 2009). Whether it is domestic violence, organized crime (drug cartels and gangs, or the police, or all), the killings continue despite the creation of Decree 22-2008 or Femicide Law (Prensa Libre, 1).
Femicide caused concerns in the United States House of Representatives who, in April 2007, through Resolution 100, attempted to bring an end to femicide in Guatemala and other Central American countries (United States Congress 110th, April 2007). It noted that in 2001 about 300 women were killed and in 2005 it was more than 500 victims. Sponsored by Representative Hilda Solis, this American Congress resolution observed that most victims were young women between 18 and 30 years old. The resolution also mentioned that violence “can include torture, mutilation, and sexual violence.” The new Femicide Law and the American Congress resolution did not result in changing the ever-increasing number of murdered girls and women in Guatemala. As in the 1980s, hundreds, if not thousands, of Guatemalan and other Central American women are choosing to seek refuge in the United States despite the barriers imposed by the American Administration (Torres, M., January 23, 2019).
Conclusion
The root causes of the 36-year Civil War and the causes of the genocide against the Maya are very much alive. Poverty and racism are endemic in Guatemala. The Maya, the majority of the population, and the poor non-Maya, or Ladinos, are mostly remembered during national elections with promises and little change to the corruption, violence, and organized crime identified by most authors that keeps the general population under a constant state of fear.
In this culture of violence and organized crime, femicide has found a fertile ground. Killing women and young girls is endemic in a society whose national authorities have rarely dealt with the crimes against humanity of the recent past (genocide) and who continue to show apathy to the thousands of femicide cases. In one of my recent visits to Guatemala, a local scholar told me that during the Civil War (1960-1996) the state had control of the state security apparatus by repressing its people. Now the state lost control or is not interested in the internal security of its citizens. Although most victims of daily crimes are men, the violence against women shows that physical, psychological, sexual and economic violence against them are rooted in their sexuality and gender. If judges have no education about misogyny and femicide, if no resources are provided to deal with these crimes and no political concern is shown for the lives of women, these crimes against humanity will continue. Justice in Guatemala remains a utopia.
1. “Acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Staub, Ervin, 1993:8)
2. Author’s personal experience
3. Schlesinger and Kinzer, 265. Despite the American ambassador’s attempts to call the report a “Guatemalan internal conflict,” in his visit to Guatemala, former American President Bill Clinton said that the US support “for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not report that mistake.” | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/03%3A_Global_History_of_Femicide/3.06%3A_Video_of_Keynote_Address_by_Marta_Perez_at_the_2008_C.txt |
Leonzo Barreno
When this paper was first published, I argued that femicide (the killing of women or other crimes against women) in Guatemala was rooted in the country’s long history of political violence. I also argued that the oligarchy and the army were unreachable by the justice system for crimes they committed during the country’s 36-year Civil War. Using a media analysis, this brief update shows how the justice system briefly changed in 2012. In November that year, the Public Attorney’s office penetrated the immunity and impunity walls that protected military strongmen. The Public Attorney charged former dictator Efrain Rios Montt with crimes against humanity and a trial ensued. Most media articles were in favour of the trial, but they faced an unorthodox, yet expected, opposition: the oligarchy’s paid media ads.
General Efrain Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983, had, for three decades, enjoyed judicial and constitutional immunity for crimes he committed during his short presidency. On May 10, 2013, following a two-month trial, he was found guilty of committing genocide against the Ixil-Maya people and sentenced to eighty years in prison. However, his conviction was overturned eight days later by the Constitutional Court. Eventually, he was found mentally unfit to stand trial. Although justice for the Ixil-Maya was achieved in a court of law, the trial by media, especially by paid media ads, favored Rios Montt. Despite some journalists’ investigative work in exposing the oligarchy-army partnership and the atrocities they committed during the war, the pro-Rios Montt paid ads showed how far the Guatemalan economic elite was going to go to defend its interests and, above all, help its member to avoid justice.
On one side of the media spectrum, Journalist Martin Rodriguez wrote that some members of Guatemala’s elite participated in the general’s 1982 to 1983 government in various cabinet positions and were directly involved in bombing the Ixil Maya communities (Rodríguez Pellecer). According to Rodriguez, Zury Rios, the general’s daughter, went into a crusade to remind the elite of the imminent legal trouble they could face if her father was found guilty. Further, a friend and former collaborator of Rios Montt, Prensa Libre columnist Alfred Kaltschmitt, confirmed the elite’s participation in the 1980s massacres in his April 2, 2013 column lamenting that such elite abandoned the general during his trial. Zury Rios and Kaltschmitt were on the minority side because most Guatemalan columnists were in favour of the trial.
A survey conducted between April 18 and May 8, 2013, found that fifty-six columnists wrote in favour of the trial against Rios Montt, fifteen were neutral, and eighteen were against the trial and the allegations of genocide. However, the journalists who expected justice for the Ixil Maya to prevail were drowned out by the paid opinions and editorials favoring Rios Montt. For instance, the Alfred Kaltschmitt column and paid pages (campos pagados) ran in all national newspapers on April 8, 2013. The ads not only defended Rios Montt but also warned the public of renewed political violence if he was convicted.
Even more, Rios Montt enjoyed the support of a rare group composed of members of Guatemala’s economic elite and former rebel leaders, “The Group of Twelve,” who bought whole newspaper pages to deny genocide and other crimes attributed to Rios Montt and the state. The piece “Traicionar la Paz y Dividir a Guatemala” (Betraying Peace and Dividing Guatemala), defended the Guatemalan state and warned the population of more political violence if the trial proceeded. A second group paid for an ad published the day after, on April 17. The opinion “Reflexión de la Asociación Amigos del país sobre la verdadera Reconciliación Nacional” (Observations from the Association Friends of the Country about the true National Reconciliation) stated: “The [Rios Montt] genocide trial betrayed peace and the reconciliation spirit of the peace agreement signed by the State and the Guatemalan Revolutionary Unity in 1996.” The ad warned all involved in the massacres that if Rios Montt was found guilty “the state is obliged to prosecute all those who were involved [in the thirty-six-year war]. Their paid media ads did not succeed; at least not at that historical moment. Rios Montt was found guilty by a panel of three judges. After the sentence was read, the Association declared “justice lost!” With the cheers and tears of survivors and their supporters in the background, the general was taken to jail. In a surprising ruling, the Constitutional Court overturned the sentence on May 18, 2013. The general went home and a series of appeals and counter-appeals took place.
These events showed how most media, even though they serve a non-Indigenous audience, were against the decision to free the general. A survey done by the program “Public Opinion” of the private university Rafael Landivar included four different media outlets, all based in Guatemala City: three national newspapers and one online magazine showed support for justice to be done. Despite the majority siding with the Ixil-Maya people, the trial, and the final verdict, the opposition’s paid ads did have a political effect on the Constitutional Court. It is worth mentioning that Guatemalan judges are political appointees.
Rios Montt evaded justice, but Guatemala’s Public Attorney, Thelma Aldana, went after other military men. Aldana and the United Nations Commission Against Impunity (CICIG) continued their investigations, even when facing threats and attempts against their lives. They detained other generals, including General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, former Minister of Defence during his brother Fernando Lucas Garcia’s (1978–1982), term as president. Benedicto Lucas is now in prison for crimes he committed against humanity, including sexual slavery against Kekchi-Maya women.
This updated context shows how difficult is to achieve justice in Guatemala where the oligarchy and the army remain in control of the country. Moreover, they used their economic power to buy media ads to warn the public of more political violence and to influence the Constitutional Court’s decision to favor Rios Montt and other potential war criminals. The current government (2016 to 2020) is headed by comedian James, “Jimmy,” Morales. Under pressure from the oligarchy and the army, they outlawed Thelma Aldana, who now lives in exile, and unilaterally ended CICIG’s work in Guatemala. Morales is also attacking prominent journalists; arrests for political crimes that target male and female community leaders have skyrocketed, and justice for femicide offenses and crimes is taking a back seat.
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19 “Acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Staub, Ervin, 1993:8) 20 Author’s personal experience 21 Schlesinger and Kinzer, 265. Despite the American ambassador’s attempts to call the report a “Guatemalan internal conflict,” in his visit to Guatemala, former American President Bill Clinton said that the US support “for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not report that mistake.” | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/03%3A_Global_History_of_Femicide/3.08%3A_The_Role_of_Government_Policies_and_Drug_Cartels_in_V.txt |
Tracey George Heese (B.Ed.) and Carrie Bourassa (PhD)[1]
okâwîmâ. At the breast of women, the generations are nourished. From the
bodies of women flow the relationships of those generations, both to society
and to the natural world. In this way, our ancestors said, the earth is our mother.
In this way, we as women are the earth (Cook 156).
You will never understand unless you slip my moccasins on. I wanted a life that is mine, creating my own path. In the wrong place in the wrong time with the wrong person. My spirit helpers could not save this flesh. See the historical behavior of the colonial legacy. Is the victim at fault? Was she brutalized with a furious rage, her own fault? It is difficult to hear the stories and have to step back and look at the big picture as “Coroner” to examine how so many of our women are disposable. Thank you to all those families, communities and individuals who share their experiences. Hearing about the blindness of individuals who can SEE the evidence of the Regina City rallies for the families with missing and murdered loved ones, rallies around the murders of our women here in our own PILE OF BONES[2].
Maybe had I done my homework, had I put my heart on the shelf, had I not felt desperate or had been content with what I had. Maybe I could have protected myself, could have shielded myself from my death. Now, wrapped in my mother’s shawl, telling myself if I could protect you from a broken heart, if I could wipe away the tears, if I could take away all your pain, I would. Now a dream dressed in quilled moccasins lifted and wrapped in a warm hide to return to the weaving of the stars.
Winnifred was murdered in Edmonton, Alberta on May 7, 1991 at the age of forty-two. This chapter examines the colonial contexts that have created the stigma, racism, and discrimination facing Indigenous women today by using an Indigenous storytelling methodology. We share Winnifred’s powerful story to reveal systemic discrimination and institutional racism and explore how her daughter Tracey has been able to heal and become an important role model for others who are grieving the loss of our missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.
Sinew for Life, Belly Button Teachings
And this story inside of me has to do with sewing my own book in telling glimpses of my life, my mother’s life, and my grandmother’s life story—our sinew for life —connects us to my daughter and to our granddaughters yet to come. You need to know where you come from. Put your hand on your mid-stomach. There is a sinew that connects you to your hereditary blood to the dressmaker of the universe . . . that rope keeps you connected to the Creator and to your mother. When you first come into this natural world, that cord is tied with a knot to prevent you from falling into the unknown. Your mother’s cord is connected to your grandmother and your grandmother’s cord is connected to your great grandmother all they way back to the beginning of time when the first woman fell onto the turtle’s back. This is the very beginning of the sinew teachings of life.
Long before the Canadian government’s apology and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, my grandparents were rich in many, many ways. We lived from the land and I loved my grandparents very much. But at the age of eight, I was taken into the care of the Saskatchewan foster system during the period presently known as the Sixties Scoop, the Indian adoption project. It was horribly inhumane for my grandmother to have experienced first her children being taken by the Church and RCMP, and then her grandchildren being taken by Saskatchewan’s social services system, all mandated by the Canadian government.
My grandmother did what she had to do. My mother did what she had to do. And, in my life, I did what I had to do. The common thread of sinew in three generations is my grandmother who was seriously encouraged to marry my grandfather because he was considered wealthy and would make a good protector and provider. My grandmother said she was too young to be married and had no interest in starting a family. She thought herself as just a little girl. What would she know about having a family? There were still so many things in life to learn, but her older brother brought both his sisters to grandfather, who chose my grandmothers as his wife. I’m not sure what my grandfather paid to have this arranged marriage, but I do know that my grandmother did not want it. The common thread of sinew is that a woman’s life is worth next to nothing in Canada.
My mother’s life: she was taken from my grandmother by the red coats and sent off to Round Lake residential school. Did my grandmother believe she was being punished for having children? All of her children were swept away by the red coats. Did she even want these children, this life she was forced to live? The sinew between my grandmother and her children was forcibly severed.
My mother Winnie learned to take the beatings from the nuns and sexual abuse from the black robe. She was the oldest of her siblings that attended the school. Her father, my grandfather, hid her older brother in the bush to protect him. At school, my mother was forced into a life that she certainly did not want in carrying the male role of protecting her little brothers and sister. She was strong, undeniably loud, and spoke up. Yes, she was strapped daily, chained, and jailed often. Yes, she was treated as a wild savage, but that unimaginable childhood would serve her as she bloomed into a young woman. Most of our men and women are born to fill the jail system, social services system and, with the odds of diabetes or suicide, likely the health care system. Yes, our babies will give you jobs and make you rich and fat. Your funeral homes and hospitals will profit from the birth and death of our babies, the death of our women, and the death of our people. Many have gotten rich from our mortality.
Violence against women is about power and control over her life and her body (Amnesty, 5). We are First Nations, but we never call ourselves that. We call ourselves “Indian,” not the kind that wears a sari but the kind that wears moccasins. My mother was a part of the generation of children that was hauled off to residential school, and then she grew up to be hauled seasonally in and out of jail.
My mother may have learned how to cook, clean, sew, tend a garden, and speak English at that school. But she had to endure sexual, physical, mental, and spiritual abuse at the will of the minister and nuns ordained by a church and sanctioned by the government to run the Round Lake Residential School.
My grandparents’ never taught my mom to speak Cree, probably to protect me or to decrease the beatings at Round Lake. One good thing about the school is that it was where my mom met my dad, and soon she was free of the Round Lake prison. Both she and her handsome warrior from Pasqua took off to the big city with no money but enough love to change the world. Very soon after, they both knew she was carrying his child.
My mom loved my dad but he made a drunken choice and shot his brother. He was sent to high security lock-up for sixteen or eighteen years for manslaughter. Not the fairy tale that anyone could hope for. Winnie was destined to do it on her own. Being thrown away, she was left to mourn her dream of a happy ending.
My mom went back home to her parents, helped her dad with cutting pickets, really man’s work but even being pregnant did not stop her from doing what needed to be done to survive. With the little money she earned, my mom took a bus up to the Prince Albert jail to see my dad. Something happened to my dad in jail. He pushed my mom away. My dad told my mom to forget about him, that he wasn’t worth it. My mom gave birth to a baby, and she was a girl . . . How? How? How can I be a mother? She checked herself out and left that little girl at the hospital. I was that baby girl and my grandmother claimed me. Winnifred was never able to reconnect to the belly button teachings. She lost the strength of her grandmother’s teachings. The sinew had been cut.
After mom left me, she worked on the streets. Every individual makes choices and research says that you know right from wrong at the age of eight. The Church says, “Give us your children till at least the age of six, and they will be ours for life.”
The Canadian government, Indian agents, and Indian commissioners treated and viewed Indian people /Aboriginal people and Indian women /Aboriginal women as less than human, as merely a way to make their riches from and off of. There are many examples of government officials
debauching Indian women. As proof, Cameron assured the House that he knew of an Indian agent who lived on a western reserve “beneath the shadow of the Methodist mission, in open adultery with two young squaws.” He also cited the case of an Englishman who, although unfit for public service in his country, had been appointed to Indian Services in the Territories where he had been “revelling in the sensual enjoyment of a western harem, plentifully supplied with select cullings from the western prairie flowers. (Cameron, quoted in Barron, 139)
Even though we may have gained the vote in Canada in 1960, we were still yet to be viewed as human in Canadian society.
But it wasn’t only government officials that abused Indigenous women. Even our own men did it. The following story was shared with me by one of Winnie’s closest friends, an Aunty of mine. My mom was chumming with her friends. They always had a great time. They did lots of crazy stuff. This one time one of her girlfriends stood at the corner to get a John” to get a room for an unspoken party of passion. She said, You got anything for us to drink, some Baby Duck or whiskey? And, we will get our party started.As soon as her friend was in the room with this guy, Winnie followed and waited five minutes before banging on the door. She pushed her way in and told him to get the hell out. This “John” was a married chief and had no business trying to have a sex-date with anyone except his wife. Well, this chief, just in his white boxers standing in the hotel hallway, begged to be let back into his room. Winnie tossed his clothes out and said, “You better get out of here or I will call your wife.” He left, unable to call the police for help and unable to explain how the events came to be without incriminating himself. All of my mom’s girlfriends showed up and they partied. Life was good. They partied till the next morning. The chief showed back up begging at the door to be let in. He said, “Look under the mattress. There is five thousand dollars cash. It’s the band’s money. Please! Please! Can I get it back?” So, Winnie checked and holy shit! There was a bag of cash stashed under that queen-sized bed, but they were too drunk to be woken by the lumpy mattress. Winnie took pity on the idiot and gave him the bag of cash. He broke down crying, just so happy he got the cash back. Well, he gave my mom fifty bucks and took the room of girls for breakfast, and they all partied another night together.
I am my mother’s daughter (Figure 1). I am proud to be a pagan squaw. I am her. She is me. The sinew between us is too strong to break forever. She carried me with the feelings of being shunned or shooed away. Did my mother carry my grandmother’s sins or was she paying for all the shame endured at the residential school? All of my grandparents’ children were stolen by the red coats and jailed in residential school. Two of my deceased uncles became sexual abusers. They learned that behaviour from that school. Did all of my aunts and uncles have to suffer because my grandparents did not know how to fight the government or fight the Church or fight the red coats? Or, was my mom destined to pay for that Treaty Four agreement between the Queen and our Red Indians.
Figure 1. Winnifred George
DO SOMETHING . . . I went to Edmonton with hopes of finding where my mother was last seen. Instead, there are many more questions that arose. Was she assaulted before her violent death? She is not “counted” as one of the murdered or missing. I was told that if she was found in Edmonton or the surrounding area that she would have been brought to the hospital whether she was injured or deceased and that it was up to the coroner to decide if it was homicide. How is it possible that our WOMEN can have their skulls crushed in and for it not to be considered homicide? When our Canadian society says nothing or does nothing, we all lose. WE ALL LOSE our “Human-Ness.”
Winnifred George April 8, 1949 – May 7, 1991 (May 31, 1995 is what I believed, but it was incorrect according to the medical examiner). I believe my mother was murdered in a downtown park in Edmonton, Alberta. In her forty-two years, she made many friends in her gypsy-street lifestyle from Vancouver to Winnipeg to Saskatoon to Regina, including Calgary and Edmonton. She had three daughters. As a mother, she did the best she could with what she knew at that time. Many have shared with me that she loved her three girls and missed us. Forgive me Grandmother and Grandfather Spirit Helpers for taking so long to be requesting answers to her blood calling out . . . forgive me for blaming her, the victim, in her death . . . forgive me for feeling shame. Asking the Creator Great Spirit to take pity on our families that are suffering when loved ones go missing and murdered—condolences #MMIW.
I am homesick for heaven and am tired of this hell on earth. This pain is too great for me to carry. The devilish spirit relishes in pleasure over my painful sorrow. My cries are ridiculed and danced to. Every human that has ever walked this earth is destined to endure heartbreak, to have sorrow and obstacles to overcome. This is all normal and natural. The heartless spirits attack, telling you, “You are disposable. It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have worn that outfit. You’re stupid. You asked for it. Nobody will ever love you. You don’t matter!” Just kill me. God please smash me up so I will forget. Give me amnesia. Let me suffer out my breath as a brainless vegetable. I don’t want to care anymore. Please take this pain. The suffering is too long. Forgive me. Yes, I chose this life. I made choices. It is my own fault. Just give me another drink to dull the pain. “Cheers to my death.” This downward spiral to finally sleep, to never wake up crying, forever to be lost in hell on earth. Pastahowin, karma, have I paid this brokenness forward to my daughter or to my granddaughters? Our family cycle continues to let those moniya, wasi’chu say, “Look! They are killing themselves.” Those blind wasi’chu living off of the fat of our mother’s milk. Just suck her dry. Kill her. Let her go missing, and you’ll damn yourself.
Pastahowi when you go against nature or the right way to act and you know it’s wrong and it might come back to you in a bad way later. It’s a teaching but never one of revenge. It’s a teaching that all we do may have consequences for us later in life to ourselves or others we care for. So we should be kind and act with kindness to others. Sometimes people say others who wronged them may have pastahowin but that’s not a good way to think. Even karma is not punishment in eastern philosophy. It’s more about the guilt and suffering you bear when you have purposefully done wrong and that you must live life knowing it.” (Wheaton,
Facebook entry)
Scooped
Note and understand that my experience is only one from the adoption project during the Canadian Sixties Scoop. “The white social worker, following on the heels of the missionary, the priest, and the Indian agent, was convinced that the only hope for the salvation of the Indian people lay in the removal of their children (Fournier and Crey, quoted in Sinclair, 67).
A blue Ford drove onto Ochapowace to my grandparents’ home. A white woman arrived while my grandmother was in the hospital due to a stroke and my grandfather was out snaring rabbits for supper. Us three little girls were outside playing when the lady asked us, “Would you like to come for a ride?” Now, car rides were rare for us little Indian girls and I said, “YES!” with excitement. Being only eight at the time, not understanding or knowing the scope of what this ride meant or what it would cost, we three girls took that car ride and were put into foster care for four years—which meant the end of innocence, the love of childhood memories, and being directly cherished by my grandparents.
We were put up for adoption and an ad was placed in a newspaper. Through the protection of our Creator, we three girls were eventually blessed to be found by the Heese family. Soon after we were adopted, we also found our original family: my grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, and the rest of our natural extended family. In respect and love, I claim both names—George and Heese.
Before we were adopted, my childhood stories are similar to many others who understand a child’s misery. I was choked to silence and beaten: “Speak no lies! Tell no truth!” But in terror, I have consciously and unconsciously reviled the shame that my kin gifted. As a powerless child being called a “tale tail,” a liar, or troublemaker because I tried to get help. I was beaten and pushed down into the dirt basement to prevent me from telling the event of witnessing my Auntie’s rape. Yes, I became the systolic doll silenced. The abuse that was endured came from family and from both men and women, from the families we were forced to live with. We were forced beyond our will to choose where we would live. We were forced to live in poverty. The government since the time of the Indian agent and farm instructor wanted to gain control over the Indians—control over the food rations, annuity money, and the pass system. The Aboriginal Women’s Action Network reports that “80 percent of Aboriginal women surveyed were victims of family violence, sexual assault, and abuse from attending police.”
As a young child of five or six living in Saskatoon, my friend and I had a grand plan of going swimming down at the big pool. We were only allowed to swim there if there were grown-ups with us. On this special day, my friend said for me to wear her bikini while she wore her one piece. I believed that she came from a wealthy family because she had two swimsuits while I didn’t even have one. We went down to the water park to play until her aunty was ready to go over to the big pool. There was a bunch of us kids playing in the water when her aunty showed up. Her aunty was mad that I was wearing this bikini yelling, “That is not yours. You’re too fat to wear that, you thief!” She then yelled at my friend, “I bought that bathing suit for you. She will stink up your suit. Get it back right now.” And, before you know it, I had this grown woman grabbing my ponytail and holding my arms as my friend and her cousins tore the suit from my flesh. There I stood, all scratched up and crying, with my friend and the others laughing. Through blurred vision, I attempted to cover up, hearing them sing, “Fatty! Fatty! Na! Na! Na! Fatty! Fatty! Na! Na! Na! Fatty! Fatty!” That brought out the rabid dogs all foaming at the mouth. Seeing their naked prey, yes, these boys chased me, throwing rocks and dirty names at me. My saving grace was an elderly grandma that came to my rescue with a straw broom and scared them boys away. She gave me clothes and got me to safety. I never told anyone my horrible experience of child’s play until now.
In foster care, witnessing a young girl, a teen, being handcuffed to the bed for she too was in care: it was months of having to listen to her cries, her pleas to be free of her confinement. She may have been fourteen or fifteen years old and not allowed to leave her bed because as soon as the foster father or mother unlocked those cuffs, the young girl fled. This one time she was just in a tank top and panty-style shorts when she was up the flight of stairs from the basement and out the front door in the middle of the winter. She did not want to be there, but social services or her social worker jailed her along with the police’s help in the same home I was put in. I wanted and wished I could help her, but what could I do? I certainly was stuck there too. This was the first home I can remember. This was the family that used lighter fluid to kill the lice in our hair. They also burned my favourite pair of baby blue cords and sent away my fluffy kitten. I wished all the time that I, too, could just run away and take my two younger sisters with me to go find our grandmother.
How can people be so cruel to the helpless, to the young? Where did people learn this? Where did they learn to treat others? Did they go to that school at Round Lake? Had the black robes done this to them? Did they learn this behaviour in Rome or France or from England? Had they learned to hate so much that they no longer saw themselves in others during the violations of being beaten, raped, caged and tortured? You will never understand unless you examine historical behavior of the colonial legacy, which says that the victim is at fault for how they are treated. “Repeated invasions of the child’s territory and body space reinforce his or her self perception as a victim, and an inability to avoid further victimization, be it sexual social or economic.” (Bagley and King, 116)
But some of the sinew between my grandmother and me survived. My grandmother was a soft-spoken woman with the authority to allow me to feel like I was her favourite. Her hands were mostly busy sewing moccasins and beading for an Indian trading post in Saskatoon. I clearly remember she would sew sixty pairs in two weeks. This one time, she only had thirty-five cents to deliver them downtown so she sent me. I was maybe five or six years old and, yes, I delivered them sixty moccasins. Then I returned home, and we went off to eat coconut cream pie in a Chinese restaurant, the one place that welcomed Indians. With a mirrored backsplash to showcase them delicious pies, we sat at counter seats that were chrome vinyl stools. Still today I have echoes of my late Kokum speaking softly, helping me to mend and love my Spirit.
As a shy little girl hanging on my grandma’s dress hem, I was attached to my grandma with that strong sinew that connects us to our mothers, grandmothers, and the Creator. I went everywhere with her. I loved her. She would sit to bead leather vamps and would have me string beads to make loose beads into hanks or necklaces. I would sort out bead colours, just happy to be given this role as her helper. Yes, I have many fond memories of learning from my grandmother. I can’t really remember how old I was when I was shocked to learn that Winnie was my mom only because I had always thought my grandma was my mom. Now, today, I can’t help but think of one of my own son’s books, “Are you my mommy?” Kim Anderson says, “One of the most important teachings shared between grandparents and their grandchildren was the principle of reciprocity in relationships. Youngsters were not simply passive recipients of care and teachings. They were often helpers to their grandparents and were given tasks and responsibilities that facilitated their learning” (Anderson, 73).
Gertie Beaucage of the Ojibway of Nipissing First Nation in Ontario shared her experience of her grandmother tanning hides. “When the hair is all off and all the fleshy parts are all off and it’s nice and clean and it has been doing this soaking business for a while, then you have to take the water out of the hide, and you have to stretch it. Well, there’s nothing more perfect than five little kids, all stretching this hide that she was preparing! (Anderson, 73).
Remembering my home with my grandma when my mom would visit. This one time, my mom had a black satin lace slip and feather boa. I thought and said when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I thought and said, “A hooker.” I had no idea what the word meant but that’s what my mom was, and I wanted to grow up to be my mom because, in my eyes, she was smart, beautiful, and strong. She had the best laugh and the greatest sense of humour. Others were drawn to her. She was magnetic and fun. But, eventually, I was taught to be ashamed of her, to be ashamed of myself, and to be ashamed of all my relations.
Nobody asks to be discarded. How can I love my grandmother when she gave birth to a son who learned and became a pedophile that sexually abused her granddaughters? With so much anger, rage, and hatred, my mother attempted to kill her brother. It took five strong, grown men to hold her down so my broken uncle could escape death. Why did they let him live? Maybe my mother taking revenge would have scarred her, she would have had to dig her own grave, or it may have been considered cowardly. Regardless, I’m forever grateful because my mother believed me and was willing to protect me; for my mother at least stood up in protection of me as a little girl. I will forever love my mothers. God forgive my family. Forgive all my relations.
Is God relishing in human pain, greed for the milk, and lusting after her breasts to graze his livestock? The Creator must be blind. Does the Creator care that I am just another disposable Indian woman? Why did my parents have sex? Why did my grandparents give my mother life? The slash marks on my arms are evidence that life has been severely difficult to live. You think you know me. It may be hard for you to imagine what it takes to want to end the pain. I’m not looking for your pity and, no, I’m not trying to control you. You are wrong! All those that judge my pain may your superiority rape you and rip you and your family to pieces. Understand that I wish you no harm, no pain. I just know no other way to numb “the letting go.” Yes, I was born into a messed up history. I don’t blame my parents nor do I blame my grandparents. Those government policy makers are accountable for my messed-up history. But, please understand why the wolf chews his leg off to escape. Understand why the buffalo stands in front of Van Horne, Sir William forced to offer up her life so you will live. Bury me in this pile of bones so I will turn to dust. Please don’t send my bones to England or China to be made into teacups. Then my spirit will be freed to leave this hell here on earth. I will have escaped to be returned to my right place in the happy hunting grounds.
I was separated from my birth family and community and moved to and from several foster homes. Having to survive those traumatic years of abuse and separation ended at the age of twelve. My two younger sisters and I were adopted by a German Mennonite family who loved and cared for us as their own. My adoptive parents reconnected us with our birth family. I’m forever grateful and love my parents and German family. They helped me while I struggled with identity, battled depression, and searched for a place to belong as a survivor of the Sixties Scoop and the residential school legacy.
As a teen, I wanted to be white, blond, and blue eyed, wanting to hide my heritage because I was ashamed of who I was and where I came from. Yes! Yes! I bleached my hair, which then turned green and then orange in the summer chlorine swimming pools. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ahh! I even had coloured contacts in an attempt to change my Indianness. I learned, or was taught, from the time I was exposed to the extended community from name calling like f’n‘ squaw, wild savage, Pocahontas, and apple to name a few. Then, learning in school and on TV of drunken Indians and Indian givers. All of these stereotypes are negative and damaging to my spirit. Dealing with this information, I needed other women to be my teachers and role models and am grateful to each one of them as they have helped me to learn my history, where I come from, and how to cope with the effects of being an Indian woman. My teachers have also encouraged me to teach and share the knowledge of warrior shirts and the strength of the shawl. In university, I learned about the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman and how she came to help people. I also learned about our creation beginnings, the teaching of Sky Woman being powerful and with a great responsibility for our people to create and nurture. All human beings are first born in the womb of the mother. There are many versions of the White Buffalo Calf Woman but the heart of her teachings hold generosity, humility, honesty, and respect for all things in creation” (St. Pierre and Soldier, 38–41).
A Shift in Perspective
Now, as a grown woman raising my own children, each of my sons and daughter are a blessing. I am grateful to be their mom. It is only in the last ten years that I have become aware that I have raised my children with the fear they too would be taken with me having being taken and also because statistically I, as an Aboriginal mother who was a single parent and a high-school dropout when I had my first son, was under scrutiny. But the sinew between us has not been broken. It continues to connect us to each other, to my mother, to my grandmother. With the help of my parents and my older sister as my support group, I was able to return to school to get my GED then go on to university to become a teacher.
My children are my life, and the work that I do and have done is with the prayer that they will have opportunities to be productive members of the community and family. School has been a struggle for each of my children just as it was for my grandmother, my mother, and me. In truth, it was at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College (SIFC) where I had my very first Aboriginal, Native, and First Nations teachers. Attending this school was a blessing for me. It was a space to reconnect and build my knowledge of Canadian history.
I learned how to piece together the stories of the Treaty Four medal, the Indian Act, and the Indian agent during the pass system era and residential schools, eras that my grandfather told me about. From 1871 to 1930, our lands were secured for the railway and highways to transport goods across the country via the Treaties. Our landscapes were altered for profit, greed, gold, diamonds, uranium, lead, coal, and oil. Digging up our Mother’s resources comes with a human life price tag. Also, clear cutting our forest and contaminating our sacred water sources all comes with a plant, animal, and human life price tag. All of this has carried on for more than a hundred years and, when we stand up in protection of our home lands, our women, or our water, we are considered the “savage Indians,” or it is said that, “The Indians are getting restless.” I challenge the government and the CEOs of corporations to give up food and water for “Lent” for four days and four nights and then consider your own human price tag. Drink from the contaminated water, eat the lead poisoned caribou or fish, and then consider your own human life price tag.
“The code of silence . . . consists of documents dating back to the Doctrine of Discovery. The Doctrine of Discovery was used by the colonial powers of England, Spain, Portugal and France to divide the ‘new world’ they were discovering. Following the Doctrine of Discovery, came the 1830 Detribalization policies of the same colonial powers. Sanderson said these two documents led to the issuing of a Papal Bull by a Pope in the 14th century. The issue gave colonizers the ability to carry out actions as if it were ‘God’s Will.’ The Papal Bull said Indigenous people are not human or Christian. Because Indigenous people are not human, they don’t have sovereignty in government; they don’t have title to land and resources.” (Sanderson, quoted in Eneas)
In healing my spirit, I have sought out Elders, Pipe Carriers, and grandparents and gone to the lodges in prayer and sacrifice. I went because I was lost in my own pitifulness and needed to heal the spirit of the child within me. All of these gathering of family and community have grounded and strengthened my connection to the land. Returning to Ka-Ki-shiwew Ochapowace, Sakimay, Pasqua, and Piapot lands has allowed me to find my family and myself. In my spiritual journey, I also had the interesting privilege of participating in the Nimis Kahpimotate (Sister Journey Canoe Trip) hosted by the Lutheran Church in 2014. It was a 45-kilometre canoe trip up to Grandmother’s Bay. Seven of the thirteen participants were church members who wanted to understand the residential school experience and become part of the reconciliation of the wrong doings. In preparing for the trip, I brought my tithings of tobacco, prayer flags, and a gift to family Elders to ask for prayers for protection of my children while I would be away. Off I went into the wildness with twelve other women whom I had never met and with little-to-no experience canoeing. I was grateful to be part of this circle. Along the way, I kept finding wild strawberries. When I returned home, my Aunty explained that the moccasins she had gifted me for this journey were heart medicine. Her prayer for me was that my heart would be healed or made whole again. That is really what reconciliation means to me.
One is no greater than another. Your life is no more valuable than our seventeen hundred missing and murdered women. Acknowledge that we are all part of the human race. Many people, me included, submitted beaded flower vamps for WWOS for family and community coming together (Figure 2). When I began needing a connection or connecting back to my mother, I needed to know why she was murdered. I wanted to know her life story so that I could learn my life story. I am still learning to be here in this world, moving through the sewing skills of my mother and my grandmother.
Figure 2. Walking with Our Sisters poster.
I believe that my late mother Winnifred George was murdered. Who would care if I went missing? I am raising my adopted granddaughter as my daughter. If anything were to happen to her, would others care? The Canadian message is clear: our seventeen hundred murdered and missing Aboriginal women are just hiding or are hidden. In working with the other women of Walking with Our Sisters, I thought every inch of the red path in the university art gallery was to showcase and encourage all people to stop and think about how behind each moccasin vamp is a woman who was stolen, vanished, or murdered. STOP to think! You have daughters! You have sisters! Acknowledge that we are human!
Who is God? Who is the Trickster? The crow flies from point A to point B in search of the dead following on the coattails of Mr. or Mrs. Reaper. How thankful you will be in the wrong place at the wrong time for the crow to feast. Is that where the Trickster comes in with a wise Bugs Bunny companion? The Trickster lives to join me in a tripping dance over the roots of my mother’s dream, dressed to re-create myself. The murdered and missing in Canada are the fabric of Canada. I cannot understand how our society can turn a blind eye to a lost life, a lost IDENTITY. It’s disheartening how society can look at another with an attitude of superiority. This began with Canada’s birth.
Because I was sexually abused as a small child, I learned to be the world’s greatest secret keeper. In the moment that my little niece of six years old tells me, “Ooh! I go there by myself, but it’s a secret. Don’t tell my dad.” My stomach turned as an instinctual cautioning signal calling out, “Danger! Danger!” And, as we walked down the road, we spoke of never keeping secrets from our mom or our dad because our moms and dads keep us safe. If I went walking all by myself, I could get lost or some big animal could come take me away. We must always tell our mamas and our papas. And, just as we were about home, a long garter snake caught my eye in the grass. I pointed it out to my little niece even though I had been taught to be scared of them. I didn’t need to teach past learned fears forward. When I was a little girl, I learned the game of secrets and now I know that I need to tell my mama and papa and grandma and grandpa of the hidden shames. Please allow me to share my concern. Maybe this is nothing but I am only bringing attention to learning about “secrets.” I don’t wish to tell my own children of the shames I carry as a sexually abused little girl. I don’t wish to tell my own children about the physically abused little girl. But, I will tell you how grateful I am for my mom believing me when I told her what her brother did to me. It started innocently. I loved my uncle. He brought me presents and candy and visited me in the hospital. As a little girl, how did I know that an innocent gift of candy and tickling would lead to great pain and suffering? Thank you for listening and believing the damage of a secret.
The games we play as children: we love to have fun, laugh, sing, and play but the “whole” is balanced by hatred, sadness, crying, pain, suffering, and the loss of childhood innocence. It’s okay to be emotionally vulnerable. It is time for me to detach. There have been and are moments when I was protected from beyond the heavens. Maybe my mother, grandmothers, or one of my protectors has prevented me from being completely destroyed. Thank you! Thank you for all that I am! Having to navigate a lower life expectancy, housing shortages, a lower income, unemployment, high poverty, depression, and family violence has oppressed the health of Aboriginal women. In Canada, 70 percent of all deaths before the age of seventy-five are avoidable mortality. First Nations members were at higher risk of dying prematurely and from avoidable causes, compared with their Aboriginal counterparts. The disparity was particularly evident among women and younger age groups (Statistics Canada, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-003-x/2015008/article/14216-eng.htm).
In the beginning, women, woman carry the sphere of life. If a man understands you, he will protect. He will value and protect his sister, mother, grandmother, and daughter. He will value and protect what it means to hold the spirit of woman. She has magic and she has a direct connection to the Creator and has all authority to create. She is a woman. As women, ee go to other women to nourish each other. We go to them when we’re hungry. We go to them because they wrap us in their arms and listen. Woman is a mother. Woman for her first BIRTH. Thank you. Sing, dance, celebrate to burst into my life, tears of joy, of exhaustion, of pain, and trusting. Mother, she can correct the numerous sadnesses and the shame. Woman is life.
Blood of Our Mothers
Mark (name changed for privacy) became handsome in my vision as he searched for his chance to get my attention. He was charming, funny, and very clever. We began to spend time together in drama class. Yes, he was a senior and I was a junior, very much enamored by his humour and thrilled by his desire to steal me away from others. We would attend youth groups and go for coffee. How we would laugh. The stories he would tell. Yes, I was in complete awe of this boy who was almost a man. Love’s first kiss would scar us both for life. Yes, Christian’s parents planned and financially paid for our “happy un-birthday.” Mrs. Bell spoke directly to me as a filthy whore and certainly wanted to protect their reputation in the community. Yes, descendants of the Scottish community did not want a grandchild to forever connect them to a dirty squaw Indian. It was certainly his older sister’s health card that carried the abortion.
Yes, both Christian and I struggled to carry the burden of our choices. He ended up on the fourth floor of the psychiatric ward because he attempted suicide and was brought in on two separate occasions: once to have his stomach pumped and once for attempting to hang himself. It was repulsively pathetic to look at his face or to be in the same space as him. It was also painful to have his mother blame me for all of it, for her saintly son deserved greater than someone of my nature. Why had I not run or phoned my parents? Why had I taken the “easy way out” that led both of us to the room of suicide as our child was sucked from my womb. Our love became our nightmare. I did the unforgivable. I killed my child that grew within me. As I could not carry the shame, the only relief was to spill my own blood. Slashes are forever reminders of my shame. But this didn’t start with Christian and his parents. It is the legacy of Canada’s genocidal policies.
This thing called life, life in Canada, born as an Indian woman. My hereditary blood, my blood, is also my strength. I’m made of the blood of this land, a custodian of our great lands. Blood of our mothers, of the first woman, and our blood has given us the resilience to survive the last 250 years of Canada’s constitution, policies, laws, acts, Indian Affairs, Indian agents, and the Indian commissioners that administrated and controlled Indian, Indigenous, and Aboriginal people. From King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 to the Crown’s acquisition of Indian lands; the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act introduced by Etienne Paschal-Tache and John A. MacDonald; the 1876 Indian Act passed by Parliament; and the 1885 North-West Rebellion, which was a result of mistreatment by Indian agents, communities were starved. Then, to control the Indians, the pass system was introduced. Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hayter Reed proposed the pass system in the “Memorandum on the Future Management of Indians,” which was approved by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edgar Dewdney and MacDonald who was then Prime Minister of Canada. The provinces gained jurisdiction over Indigenous children under section 88 of the 1951 revision of the Indian Act, thereby beginning the era of the Sixties Scoop. Indian women and Indian lands have been deliberately targeted and marginalized, vulnerable to being and becoming exploited.
By sharing with you, the reader, our Canadian timeline of history and each of the individuals mentioned above, we have to acknowledge this is our—yours and mine—Canadian leadership. Yes, you may not have directly suffered from this leadership but all Aboriginal, Inuit, Métis, and Indian people have. Treaty promises were not kept. Our land base of 100 percent has shrunk to less than 1 percent. Many people were starved into signing those Treaties for your benefit. Our natural food source, the buffalo, was slaughtered to near extinction. Our children were jailed in residential schools because of the Indian Act. Then in 1951, section 88 of the Indian Act gave authority to the Indian adoption project. It was against Canadian law for us to seek council to hire a lawyer, to leave the reservation, or to sell any goods, harvest, or butcher our own livestock without the permission of an Indian agent. Thinking back to Christopher Columbus, a thief and con artist who left his own country of Italy in 1492 in search of India to escape treason charges; thinking of all the ministers and nuns who raped and abused children and who were transferred to new missions by their leadership; thinking of past and present police officers, social workers, and teachers whose bosses or leadership allowed them to abuse their roles and their authority in power; thinking about how our British queen has not been able to protect us just as my own grandmother was not able to protect me. I do believe that people would care if I were to go missing. My family would care. My friends would care. The community I belong to would care. But I wonder if our police chief, mayor, or any of our local MLAs would care, me being no more important than any of our other missing and murdered women here in Canada. Sometimes I have considered what law could protect me or any other Aboriginal woman from marginalization, poverty, racism, and violence.
All these glimpses into my family and me have to do with sharing the truth as painful or shameful as it is. It has to do with having others become aware: violence and oppression has come from both men and women. Both kin and strangers have caused the abuse and violence. As Aboriginal women, there is much more we need to do to keep ourselves safe.
Long ago, we lived on the rez, also in Regina, but mostly in Saskatoon. This one time there was this big powwow for the queen. My grandmother wrapped a shawl around me and told me to go dance. I twirled and skipped around. The whole space was filled with so many dancers. I am in wonder all these years later that I fell, like a cocoon of the butterfly tree, ready to remove the silk robe of protection, ready now to fly back through time to find my grandmother and mother. Finally, now, after all these years, as a grandmother and mother, I have been initiated and accepted into the powwow circle. Forgive me. I was lost for so long. Please forgive my grandmother for not being there to protect me as a little girl. Forgive my grandmother for not being able to protect her children from the damages of Round Lake residential school.
First Nations people, we have expressed our heritage and spirituality through our art, beadwork, and apparel. Here is a small glimpse of the teaching of the shawl. Woman created garments that hold special meaning. It was said that long ago a mother created a shawl for her daughter. The young lady was preparing to leave her family to pursue her life’s dream. The shawl was said to have powers. It was created to protect the teachings that she gained in the early years. Throughout life, she was told, she would hold those teachings in high regard so she would be proud of who she was and of her family. The shawl would also protect her from the unseen hardships of an unknown world. Wrapped around her, it would keep her warm as the warmth of her mother’s arms. Cree Elder Mary Lee explains that “women were named after that fire in the center of the tipi”:
Woman in our language is iskwew . . . We were named after that fire, iskwuptew . . . In our language, for old woman, we say Notegwew. Years ago we used the term Notaygeu, meaning when an old lady covers herself with a shawl. A tipi cover is like that old woman with a shawl. As it comes around the tipi it embraces all those teachings, the values of community that the women hold. (quoted in Anderson, 100)
These values are still inscribed in our shawls of today such as when I created the shawl to be gifted to Her Royal Highness Prince Anne during her naming ceremony in 2007. In my artistic symbolism, I shared Our Grandmother Moon, a true symbol of leadership. She controls the water cycle on Mother Earth. As humans, we are made up in the same water proportion as Mother Earth. Our sacred hope of life for as long as the sun shines is that all nations will be treated equally for thirteen full moons all year around. I adorned her shawl with abalone shells to represent woman and the cycle of thirteen months, a connection to our mothers’ veins and balance of our grandmother. Seven rows of navy ribbon were used, for it is said that when leaders are forging ahead, they need to think seven generations forward. The beaded flowers represented our Little Rainbow, a young woman, and the Thunder Bird Beings gifted to us here on Earth, and the many colourful flowers across our lands so that all of us can enjoy the beauty. The Creator gifted the flowers, the rainbow, and the water to our Mother Earth. Having also learned from my Mennonite family that the rainbow is a promise from God, may you, me, and all of us remember to avoid being wicked or greedy to prevent the earth from becoming flooded again.
The Creator gave women clear responsibilities, and in the twenty-first century women are returning to their original authority. To all of the women in my life: Thank you for bringing me into this world, helping me to be, and to become. Grandmothers have wrapped me in their dress of tradition, respect, and grace. In their eyes, I’m sacred. Our mothers are the carriers of life and have given a wealth of energies. My roots, my sinew are sewn to them. I belong to this land. In her heart, I’m loved. My aunties, sisters, and girlfriends have taught me the language of woman. We have prayed. We have done and we have laughed together as one. Together we are the fabric of the nation. Together we are strong (Figure 3). Miyo-kīsikanisik kahkiyaw.
Figure 3. My late Mom, Winnifred George, attending my Grandmother’s wake and funeral. As a First Nations woman, I thank the women who came before me and passed down our traditions.
Figure 4. Asking Her Royal Highness The Queen, “Am I Next?”
Figure 5. My granddaughter and I dancing forward…
(All images are copyright protected and are the property of the author. No copying or usage is permitted for purposes other than within the context of this chapter.)
1. This chapter weaves the stories of three women, Tracey George Heese, her mother, and her grandmother, with the history of Canada. We have italicized Winnifred’s (Tracey’s mother) words as Tracey reflects on what her mother might have thought. Tracey says, “I am telling my story in the hopes that it will benefit others and help them with their grief. May it help them rebuild when everything has been taken away. I also tell my story to keep my granddaughter safe.”
2. According to the City of Regina’s Historic Facts, Regina was referred to as oskana ka-asastēki, meaning “bone piles,” later translated as Pile of Bones. The city was so known because it became the site for depositing the bones of the bison slaughtered to make way for the “settlement” of the land https://www.regina.ca/about-regina/regina-history-facts/. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/04%3A_Family_Stories_of_Trauma_and_Resistance/4.01%3A_Sinews_Torn_and_Sinews_Strong-_Stories_f.txt |
Paula Flores[1]
Paula Flores’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Claudia, went missing in 1999 on her way home from the factory where she worked. Besides working in a factory, Claudia also helped with catechism lessons in the Catholic school in her neighborhood. She was learning how to play the guitar and she loved to write poetry. Claudia worked the same shift as her father at the factory, but for legal reasons the factory owners changed her shift. After two months of her shift being changed, Claudia disappeared.
When her daughter didn’t return home, Paula knew something bad had happened because her daughter never went anywhere after work without permission. Claudia was missing for two weeks before the authorities found her in a place called “The White Hill” in Juarez. Paula was not informed of this by the police; instead, a reporter told Paula that a woman’s murdered and raped body had been found and that the body was likely Claudia’s.
Paula’s son went to identify the body but was unable to confirm that it was Claudia because the coroner had already begun an autopsy. In September 1999, a DNA test was performed, and the test results indicated that the body was not Claudia. This gave Paula hope that her daughter was still alive. Suspicious events then took place, and Paula’s family asked if the woman’s body could be exhumed and another DNA test performed. The authorities exhumed a body, but it was the wrong body from the wrong grave site. Eventually the authorities did exhume the correct body and confirmed that it was Claudia. To this day, however, Paula constantly wonders if that body was, in fact, her daughter’s or if the authorities had lied to her.
A man has been in jail for three years for Claudia’s murder, but he claims that there were another two people involved. This man said the other two people paid him \$500 to take them to where Claudia worked. He even gave the authorities the names, addresses, and pictures of the people who killed Claudia, but the police have not investigated these leads. Because of this, Paula believes that the authorities and even the governor are complicit in all the murders and disappearances. The authorities, however, are not punished for their involvement, but are instead promoted. Paula says that “the only thing that seems to be important in Juarez to the authorities is that we quit messing up their city with our crosses. They want to kind of sideswipe the issue, all the news and all their concerns are on drug trafficking and all the drug issues that are happening, and they [do not want] to take away the limelight [by investigating] missing women. And so we are just being pushed aside.”
Throughout all this tragedy, however, Paula says, “I ask God to help me to forgive. I want to have the same strength that Gwenda [2] has. I want to have her peace. And we are united, no matter what the distance is, we are united.”
1. Paula Flores’s presentation at the Missing Women Conference was translated into English by a volunteer at the conference, then transcribed and retold in the third person by Chelsea Millman.
2. Gwenda Yuzacappi, the mother of Amber Redman. Her story—“Wicanhpi Duta Win”/Red Star Woman—is found on page 40 of the first edition of Torn from Our Midst.
4.03: Update- The Story of the Disappearance o
Paula Flores[1]
Through this writing I wish to share that it is already nineteen years since the assassination of my daughter Maria Sagrario González Flores and I continue to fight for justice and asking [for the conviction of] the authorities, the main and true killers of my daughter. It is not possible for us to continue to do nothing; the girls in Juárez City continue disappearing and appearing [being found] dead. In the last years already there are more cases of disappearance and mothers looking for their daughters: I ask myself, “When is this going to stop?”
We are physically and emotionally tired, I personally don’t know what we can do, I feel the same courage, the same helplessness, and hopelessness every time I see a girl disappear and the mothers join the protests; thinking that the authorities are going to help find them. But our reality is that they do nothing, or they do everything; because it is not possible that the killers are smarter than they are.
We live in a country without justice and in a city of impunity; because our only crime is being humble migrants—our only purpose when we arrive in Juárez City is getting ahead and finding a better life.
We hope to continue counting on people who are interested in this sad and serious problem; in life they are killing us. How many families are destroyed? In my case, we are a chain of nine links; now we are missing two; Sagrario and my husband, Jesús González.
I say farewell by asking “NOT ONE MORE” and appreciate the opportunity that you give me for my voice to be heard; continue to denounce and make visible those that continue killing our women and girls in Juárez City.
1. The update to Paula Flores’ story was translated by Valerie Leitch. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/04%3A_Family_Stories_of_Trauma_and_Resistance/4.02%3A_The_Story_of_the_Disappearance_of_Claudi.txt |
Darlene Juschka, Mary Hampton, Melissa Wuerch, Carrie Bourassa, and Tracy Knutson
Introduction
In the following case study my effort is to argue for a harm reduction approach to interpersonal violence in northern Saskatchewan. Using a feminist critical theory approach, I engage individual interviews of interpersonal violence service providers collected over a two-year period (2012 to 2014). Telephone interviews of Saskatchewan service providers, ranging from health care, shelter, and victim service workers, and RCMP, were conducted. The data was collected as part of a larger four regional (AB, SK, MB, NWT) SSHRC-CURA funded grant (\$1,000,000) titled “Rural and Northern Community Response to Intimate Partner Violence” conducted over five years (2011 to 2016) and headed by Dr. Mary Hampton (Luther College, University of Regina) and Diane Delaney and then JoAnne Dusel (past and current directors of the Provincial Association of Transition Houses and Services of Saskatchewan). The project operated under the auspices of RESOLVE Saskatchewan, a network of researchers, community experts, and organizations that focus their efforts on interpersonal[1] violence across the three prairie provinces. The study proposed three open-ended questions to individual interview participants: What are the unique needs of victims of interpersonal violence living in rural and northern regions of the Prairie provinces and the North West Territories? What are the gaps that exist in meeting these needs? How do we create non-violent communities in these regions? The same questions were again asked during the face-to-face focus group interviews conducted several months following the individual interviews. In Saskatchewan, a total of twenty-eight telephone interviews, fourteen of which came from service providers from northern locations, and focus groups in a northern and rural location were also conducted.
We authors have drawn on Indigenous and postcolonial scholars to situate our data and study in the white-settler colonial context of Canada. We also have drawn on theories of violence that show the complexity of interpersonal violence. The theoretical lens employed in this chapter is feminist poststructural as it allows for an intersectional analysis that pays attention to how socially constructed categories such as gender, race, indigeneity, sexuality, able-bodiedness, and geopolitical location intersect with power that provides access to limited and valuable resources—however those resources are defined. With power differentials in mind, the analysis examines violence in the context of northern Saskatchewan, asking how past and present colonialisms continue to shape that violence, and how colonialisms intersect with and shape interpersonal violence. Equally, we ask how white-settler gender ideologies, and their accompanying conceptualization of proper masculinity and femininity, come into play in the discursive formation of violence as it plays out in northern Saskatchewan.
Linked to the feminist poststructural analysis is an effort to bring a harm reduction approach to interpersonal violence. A harm reduction approach is the effort to reduce the harm without dismissing or diminishing the harm done. The effort is to recognize the potential for further harms beyond the initial harm and ask how the harm can be reduced (Marlatt, Larimer and Witkiewitz 2012, 5). Moving beyond the discourse of victimizer and victim, a harm reduction approach takes into account the complexity of the event of violence (Stancliff et al. 2015, 207). Aron Shlonsky, Colleen Friend, and Liz Lambert have written that a harm reduction approach to interpersonal violence takes a realistic approach insofar as conditions for, and events of, violence cannot be completely eliminated: “if we cannot hope to stop all forms of abuse, does it make sense to reframe “success” in this area as being the reduction of violence and the minimization of harm” (2007, 356)?
Case Study Issue questions/statements
As violence is at the center of this case study, it is necessary to ask what we are talking about when we use the terms violent and violence, and how then has the understanding and discursive framing of violence shaped responses to it. How has this framing shaped the discourses of intimate partner and family violence (IP/IV)? How has this framing shaped responses to IP/FV? How does introducing a harm reduction model alter IP/FV discourses?
Case Study Research questions/statements
Specific research questions are: What is the historical context of northern Saskatchewan? How has colonialism shaped northern Saskatchewan? How does it intersect with and shape gender ideologies in northern Saskatchewan? How do the above define and shape IP/FV in northern Saskatchewan? And finally, what can a harm reduction approach bring to understanding and responding to the needs of those caught up in interpersonal violence?
Theorizing violence
Violence, wrote Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Phillippe Bourgois, is an unstable concept, one that is “non-linear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy” (2004, 1). They argue that violence is difficult to define as it is multiply manifested being structural, subjective, symbolic, psychic, and depending where one stands, perceived as productive or destructive, legitimate or illegitimate (2004, 2). Understanding that the interpretation of violence can change depending on situatedness, they further argue that violence is often a response to larger social conditions, making violence “seem like the only possible recourse” (2004, 3).
Slavoj Žižek argues that although subjective violence, for example, interpersonal violence, is the most visible form, there are two other “modes of violence” that are often overlooked. These overlooked aspects are “objective violence,” which is systemic, and symbolic violence, which “is embodied in language and all its forms . . . [it is] our ‘house of being’ ” (2008, 1). As an aspect of object violence, symbolic violence is constitutional to the state on all levels of its operation as well as to larger global systems (2008, 2).
The contexts that comprise our very sociality are encoded with symbolic and systemic violence. Furthermore, systemic or state violence, is coded as non-violence, and seen in actions against citizens, actions like the killing of a “suspect” presented as “defence of society” and therefore not violence in and of itself. The violence staged by the state is coded as non-violence so that, for example, the brutal beating of Rodney King in March 1991 was presented as non-violent in the courtroom. Officer Powell, who struck King forty-six times with his baton, claimed he did so in order to “knock him down from the push-up position, back down onto the ground where he would be in a safer position” (Feldman 2004 [1994], 210). Indeed King was repeatedly presented as the site of violence that had to be contained by four members of the Los Angeles police department who repeatedly beat Rodney King (Feldman 2004 [1994], 213).
Žižek argues that part of, but equally separable from objective violence, is symbolic violence, which is performed in our linguistic, representational, and gestural systems and practices. Pierre Bourdieu wrote that symbolic violence “is a form of power that is exerted on bodies, directly and as if by magic, without any physical constraint” (2001, 38). That is, our very being in all aspects is shaped within a habitus wherein we are located and locate ourselves in relation to the ideologies—gender, economic, racial, sexual, age, etc.—that comprise said habitus. It is in the quotidian we learn to exist in accordance with the rules and regulations of our social body, our habitus, and as such “social law is converted into an embodied law” (Bourdieu 2001, 39).
Interpersonal violence[2]
Gendered violence, although having a long history in human relations, came under the purview of Canadian federal and provincial law over the period of 1983 until 1986. The authority given to the white settler male/masculine in the Canadian context has changed over time, and also demonstrates variation with regard to location. For example, with the emergence of women’s/feminist movements and the Indigenous peoples movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the authority of the State based on white settler masculinity and its explicit statement of (proper, that is, hetero, white settler) men as its legitimate heirs and actors was challenged. Federal and provincial governments began to shift away from thinking about the majority of its populations as normatively subordinate to white-settler, heterosexual masculinity. Nonetheless, even as violence against women, female spouses, and girls was problematized, particularly with Canada’s role in and adoption of the 1993 UN’s Convention on the Elimination of violence against women, violence continued as social censure of it was often conflicted and contradictory. Violence against the female/feminine was criminalized, but humans marked as female/feminine were formally and informally held to views that tended to mitigate the application of laws against this kind of violence. For example, although the state of Texas ratified its laws to include violence against women in 1994 and again in 2000, a thirty-year old white man was cleared of murder after the Texas court determined that his actions were justified since the woman he killed took his money (\$150.00) but refused to have sex with him (Moran 2013).
The representation of masculinity as naturally prone to violence influences how intimate partner and family violence are understood. Within a frame of heteronormativity, intimate partner and family violence are instances of the emergence of normative masculine rage that has been provoked into appearance[3]. The provocation of these actions can be many things, but the outcome of violent, masculine rage is taken to be a reasonable response to the situation at hand. The links between masculinity, violence and rage continue to operate normatively as part of current neocolonial gender ideologies. This is not to say that intimate partner and family violence are accepted in Canadian social bodies; rather, intimate partner and family violence are often taken to be normative outcomes because of an implicit understanding that violent rage is naturally—that it is a biological reality—declined in the masculine. Women have abused men (and other women), although in significantly lower numbers (reported spousal violence in Canada 2014, Female 32,205 and Male 8,645) (Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics 2014, 39), and with less deadly outcomes (Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics 2014, 8). Yet, they continue to be viewed as victims and provocateurs rather than perpetrators of violence. However, humans marked as female/feminine are not victims by nature (a synonym for victim is “dupe” which speaks to the negative declension of this category). Rather, their numbers are greater in terms of reports of intimate partner and family violence because of an uneven distribution of power in the social body: folks who have less social power/status depend on the government and its resources, such as the police, to balance out the play of power—or, at least, that’s the hope.
Context
The context of this case study is northern Saskatchewan, a designation of a spatial divide between the developed south and underdeveloped north—underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure that supports and sustains communities. In Saskatchewan the line that marks this divide, running east to west, is just beneath Cumberland House and extends to Green Lake.
Figure 1: North-south divide (map creator Dr. Paul Hart)
The Canadian north is composed of dynamic communities that share some aspects of the prairie south but are also markedly different. Although there are shared aspects between northern and rural communities insofar as they are remote and have fewer services than one would find in an urban location, there are differences as well. These differences need to be accounted for to acknowledge the realities of the challenges northern communities face such as the lack of good housing; affordable healthy food choices; education opportunities; the itinerant work lives of many community members; the harshness of the climate and its social, psychical, and economic demands; and violence—objective, subjective, and symbolic. Ignoring the differences obfuscates these communities and challenges they face.
The history of northern Saskatchewan, as with all of Canada, is one shaped by English and French colonialism. It is a history steeped in the blood of Indigenous peoples whose lands and lives were delimited by the influx of Europeans. Initially, colonialism consisted of tenuous relations of exchange between Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land that would, in time, be called Canada and European newcomers. However, conflict between French and English in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then between Britain and what would become United States in the eighteenth century, brought about numerous divisions and numerous acts of colonial violence perpetuated against Indigenous peoples by both the colonizing British and French (Juschka 2017).
As white-settlers and their governments and armies moved west, Indigenous peoples were pressed to take up white-settler ways or were moved to reserves, while those who persisted in demanding treaty be respected were more often than not ignored, dismissed, and, in some cases, criminalized (Turpel-Lafond 2000, 76–79). Colonialism in Canada took the form of taking Indigenous lands and relocating Indigenous Peoples to reserve lands and of control over individually allotted land that was coercively appropriated by a government seeking the surrendering of Indigenous lands for white-settlers (Turpel-Lafond 2000, 79). In an attempt to eradicate Indigenous cultures and subsequently assimilate Indigenous peoples as an underclass, denomination residential schools were founded in Canada, and Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and deposited in these badly constructed and isolated schools where they too often faced starvation, malnourishment, emotional, sexual, cultural, psychological, linguistic, and physical abuse (Honouring the Truth 2015; Adams 1996; Eigenbrod 2012). Other sites of oppression include the effort to control Indigenous women’s reproduction, often through sterilization (Caprio 2004; Pegoraro 2015) and, linked to this, the abduction of Indigenous children during what was called the “1960s baby-scoop” (Green 2007; Juschka 2017). Further sites of oppression include the criminalization of Indigenous Peoples (Razack 2015), their continued under representation in sites of power in the Canadian socio-political landscape, and their over representation among the impoverished, alienated, disenfranchised, and the marginalized.
If colonialism shaped the landscape of Canada, this was even more marked in the northern areas of the prairie provinces such as Saskatchewan. As urban centres sprang up in the southern regions of Canada, the north became the site of small remote communities, many of which were cut off from southern regions of the provinces. La Ronge, for example, was not connected until 1948 when a gravel road was laid (Bone 2005, 14). But these connections, as limited as they were and remain in 2017, are less concerned with connecting the peoples of the north and the south as they are with the extraction of wood, minerals, and other valuable commodities for the southern-facing white settler provincial and federal governments. As Robert Bone has noted, the tendency is to extract from the north but never settle the north in a sustained fashion (2005, 13–14).
Along with geographical differences, there are demographical variations as well. In northern Saskatchewan, the population is less dense and has a larger and faster growing Indigenous population who are also younger on average than white settler populations in the north and the south (Flanagan 2017, 1). While the south of Saskatchewan grew with the influx of white settlers from eastern Canada, Europe, and the United States, the population in the north grew naturally, particularly among Indigenous peoples. Equally, migration affects population numbers in the North as Indigenous folks moved south to take up waged employment or to access education, health care, and other social amenities available in the south, while resource industries, such as uranium mining or oil sands, for example, rise and fall in relation to the global market affecting people’s livelihood and propelling them toward the south (Bone 2005, 16–22).
Northern Telephone Interview
Figure 2. Incidents and services of Intimate Partner Violence in Saskatchewan
The maps developed for this project charted incidences of violence and interpersonal violence services. The map of Saskatchewan (maps were developed for each region within the study) provides a visual that makes clear how northern (and rural) locations were, in many ways, under siege with some locations having incidences of violence that exceed the population of the community. One participant who works in a remote northern location in Saskatchewan commented that there is “lots of violence. . . . [This is] the first time in two and a half years I’ve seen a reduction in prisoners, we’re just shy of 1300. And the two previous years [2012 – 2011] it was 1500 [and] there’s only 2000 people” (Participant 2).
In Saskatchewan twenty-eight telephone interviews were conducted over approximately six months in 2013, and, of these, seventeen were from service providers working in northern locations. The participants were male (six), female (eleven), white-settler, Black Canadian (one) and Indigenous (five). Six of the participants were RCMP officers, four were shelter directors and/or workers, three were victim services workers, one was a family-based victim service provider, two were health care workers, and one was a registered nurse. Saskatchewan coded interviews according to geographical location keeping west and east in mind. The open codes were identified by researchers and community partners working together. The open codes are too numerous to enumerate but include safety plans; housing needs; partnerships among agencies and case planners; access to child care, transportation, pro-active policing and services, support groups, healing lodges, and elders trained about interpersonal violence; insufficient EIO enforcement; and the need to heal from colonization.
The codes made apparent the difficulties faced by service providers in northern Saskatchewan with two primary codes of “under-resourced” and “overwhelmed”: “You know, ever since when I was small, I saw abuse happening. Ever since I can remember, I’ve seen people, women getting beaten, and there was no place for them to go” (Participant 10). Although there are shelters in northern Saskatchewan, these are few, frequently full, and often well removed from their home community. Removal from the community to a shelter also has its problems, as noted by participant six: “when I look at some of the northern communities . . . these women have nowhere safe to go, and if they do wish to go to a shelter of some sort . . . then they’re displaced from their extended family. They have to pick up the children, and basically live out of their suitcase while the offender gets to stay in that community.”
The problem of alienation links to a broader problem—the model of the patriarchal family with the male/masculine seen and treated as the sole proprietor of the house/home. This view of masculine prerogative is commonly held by the Canadian and Saskatchewan governments and the services they support and, as such, acts as objective systemic violence. The masculine prerogative takes the actions of the male/masculine as proper and normative so that challenging the prerogative requires special pleading on the part of those subjected to the deployment of patriarchal power. From the outset, then, those who do not occupy the default location are subject to its rules of power and must demonstrate that the particular “man” has aberrated from the normative male/masculine. Interestingly, Emergency Intervention Orders (EIOs) ignore the masculine prerogative and instead remove the perpetrator of violence from the home and leave those injured, in this study the female parent and children associated with her (if any), in the home and community. However, as noted by participants the EIO is infrequently used and is not applicable on reserves.
The open codes were subsequently subjected to axial coding. Axial coding requires that researchers abstract the open codes identifying larger categories. The primary axial code designated for Saskatchewan was “safety.” The visual schematic that was developed (see Figure 3), assisted us in visualizing the relationships between our axial code and our open codes. In the Safety schematic, our primary axial code, is at the center around which the open codes are clustered. For example, safety is connected to the open code partnership, and partnership is linked to the open codes of police/legal, mental health, victim, and children services. The diagram is neither explanatory nor does it identify causes; instead, it demonstrates the complexity of interpersonal violence in northern Saskatchewan.
Figure 3. Northern Axial Code Safety
Other axial codes determined by the researchers and service providers were education, perception of intimate partner violence, lack of resources, legal and policing, partnerships, and support. Open codes were organized under each of these axial codes.
The axial codes, open codes, and maps provided researchers with a complex view of the interpersonal violence. Although desiring to keep those victimized by interpersonal violence safe, our data make apparent the difficulty of leaving violent relationships; so difficult that women did not leave or returned as soon as the violent event had ended. “I would say that the victims don’t cooperate because they’re afraid would be the biggest thing, I would think. Yeah, and I know one couple we’ve dealt with repeatedly is she relies on him, financially so she’s, you know, she says ‘how can I testify against him, I need him, he provides for me and my family’ ” (Participant 14).
It’s not unusual to hear the moms say, “You know, I don’t have any food; I’m running out of Pampers, I don’t have any money, and I have no place to go” (Participant 21).
Figure 4. Process of leaving an abusive relationship.
Figure four represents the process of leaving an abusive relationship, beginning with the first reported incident. The diagram represents three routes: one is the Emergency Intervention Order and is the least commonly used; another is returning to the home where violence often escalates and may become deadly; and the third is a “new start.” Represented underneath the process line are constraints that act as obstacles such as fear of poverty. Other constraints are everyday violence that accompanies daily activities such as working, sleeping, eating, and interacting with family and friends, which normalizes the violence. Communities can also act as constraints insofar as they can and do take sides in prosecuted cases of interpersonal violence, which can then leave the community divided. In other instances, the violence is ignored and, as such, erased. Participant 19, a health care worker, commented with regard to the normalization of violence that “It’s normal. Yes. Well, I would say about 90% of the women here within the community have experienced some sort of domestic violence.”
Coding Family Violence
To further code family violence, we organized our open codes into two categories, objective, which includes symbolic, and subjective violence. Objective violence is inherent to the context itself, taking the forms of ideological and systemic violence, both of which are unstable and in flux. Symbolic violence, seen in the representation of interpersonal violence in media, obfuscates objective violence and effectively locates interpersonal violence with persons, making the violence an anomaly. and locating it as bad with State violence enacted against it as good. Subjective violence is violence performed/enacted by a social agent.
Objective violence
The codes that speak to objective violence are cyclical, generational, lack of attention to dating violence, lack of counselling services for children, deracination of those who have suffered violence, and prioritizing the needs of the male/masculine gender. For example, men generally own the home, so the abuser remains in the community and abused women and children must leave. Situated in the community, his narrative is often given credence. A high percentage of victims return home because they miss their homes; experience systemic poverty and must rely on social services; or cannot find a job and so fear homelessness. They also deal with the effects of colonization; the lack of cultural training/understanding of Indigenous and small community kinship systems; a reduced social network, leaving them with no one to call for help because of pressure of the community; mistrust of governmental systems; abused seen to be the problem, “Get women into counselling right away.” Further aggravating their precarious situation, family members are criminalized, that is there is “no alternative to legal action”; and blame and shame which all parties carry in connection to the violent event: the perpetrator risks the shame of being designated a bully and the blame of emotionality, that is he lost control of his emotions (Giordano et al. 2015, 11–12), while the abused person endures the blame and shame attached to “the victim” who is too often situated as a provocateur and/or a “dupe” of violence, while children are perceived as “victims” who may well upon maturation reproduce violence in their own relationships.
Symbolic violence upholds and obscures objective violence insofar as media frequently represent interpersonal violence as always and only subjective. They may at times speak to the significant numbers of “domestic violence” in Saskatchewan, but rarely speak to systemic state mechanisms such as neocolonialism, southward facing politics, the under-resourced and exploited north, patriarchal family relations, the disenfranchisement of abused persons (and children) from their home, or even frontier justice. Again and again, the media assume that interpersonal violence is subjective, involving two (usually heterosexual) people.
Subjective Violence
Subjective violence is violence performed and enacted by individual subjects who are themselves shaped within a context of objective and symbolic violence and who enact this violence in accordance with the normative rules of the larger social body. In a gender ideology wherein the masculine normatively (and naturally, as is often understood within this framework) dominates the feminine, those marked as properly masculine are authoritative, while those others, the victimized, lack such privileging. Intersect Indigeneity with gender and not only is authority of narrative further removed, but it is made impossible as the model of indigenous femininity in white settler masculinity, as found in Canada, is one of an inability to speak the truth (Smith 2003; Stote 2012).
Against such odds, the sufferer of violence must speak their story of the violent event take on both shame and blame in lesser or greater degrees depending on how much her story gains a hearing and is taken to be credible. Partners and families who experience violent events are subject to social shame as their family, that is private, affairs have been exposed to the community at large. Although certainly all homes engage violence of some kind or other, that violence is obfuscated and negated by the exposure of private violence.
Family and intimate partner violence are stigmatized, particularly in small northern communities. Connected to the stigmatization is the threat of the loss of children to the state, along with home and community. Violence in the home can well mean children are removed from the home and the sufferer of violence experiences more loss and further violence, this time by the state. Indigenous women do not trust colonial systems even if advocates and workers in these systems are trying to support them. Too often, support has turned into a situation of further loss for those who have suffered family and intimate partner violence. Subjective violence also entails mental health issues such as attempted suicides, rage, despair, hopelessness, and distrust because the system, legal and otherwise, operates behind closed doors, which can mean the re-victimization of people these social systems are meant to assist.
Conclusion
When asked to identify the gaps in meeting the needs of those in situations of IP/FV, participants came up with a number of clear issues: the persistence in linking male/masculine to property and the subsequent disenfranchisement of female/feminine. For example, Emergency Intervention Orders that remove the violent offender are not the default action and are not applicable on reserves. Participants spoke of a lack of viable and sustained intimate partner and family violence resources and services, in particular, culturally competent services in northern Saskatchewan. Linked to this problem is a lack of commitment on the part of provincial and federal governments to northern communities of Saskatchewan reflected in problems such as the lack of infrastructure, healthy food choices, housing, and a hopeful future.
In asking how we create non-violent communities, we wondered if we had asked a viable question. If non-violent communities do not exist, how do we anticipate such a social formation could be created in northern Saskatchewan? Objective and symbolic violence preclude the possibility of non-violence and indeed provide the rationale for enacting subjective violence in the form of dating, intimate partner, and family violence. With this in mind, we might shift our question: Knowing subjective violence is upheld and justified by objective violence, how can subjective violence be met with a non-violent response in northern Saskatchewan communities?
Seeking a non-violent response operates within the frame of a harm reduction model rather than a criminal justice model. A harm reduction model seeks to reduce harms rather than increase them through criminalization. A harm reduction model requires those harmed to identify the harms and determine how they might be met with a non-violent response. For example, the majority of participants made abundantly clear that the criminalization of those who enact violence created more harm than it reduced. For example, the female recipient of the violence and children lose their home and community, her story is muted, his voluble presence garners community sympathy, her absence from the community creates enmity because she is now an outsider, and the violence becomes her shame and blame. The current model of criminalization deracinates and potentially impoverishes the person(s) most vulnerable, while she and her children are also criminalized insofar as they are moved through the criminal court system and experience further harm. Down the path of poverty that often accompanies women and their children leaving violent relationships can be found further harms such as addictions, self-abuse, lose of children, and homelessness. A harm reduction perspective and a healing approach, then, to intimate partner and family violence might well be a means by which to reduce the harm identified. Resources and support for communities to reduce harm and maintain health need to be properly distributed and sustained to allow for community success to understand and mitigate intimate partner and family violence. Part of the harm reduction approach is also to emphasize education to further reduce harms.
1. I have opted to use the phrase interpersonal violence rather than intimate partner violence as the former includes within its meaning frame, according to the World Health Organization, intimate partner violence, family violence, youth violence, violence against women, child maltreatment, and elder abuse (Butchart and Mikton, 2014, 2). Within this larger category of violence, this chapter examines intimate partner violence and family violence (referred to as IP&FV throughout this chapter).
2. Conceptualizing IP/FV as subcategories of interpersonal violence is useful in the context of northern Saskatchewan since interviews with service providers made apparent there were more than just two people involved in the conflict. In small, remote and/or isolated communities, rarely are only two people involved in the event of violence. With this in mind, then, including family violence along with intimate partner violence allows the researchers to understand that all members of the family are affected by family violence when it occurs, such as children, siblings, older dependent parents, cousins and, other extended family members (see also Lightfoot, et al. 2008, 507).
3. This is so even if enacted by women since intimate partner and family violence are seen to be the prerogative of the masculine. See for example the study of Peggy Giordano et al. wherein a female perpetrator of intimate partner violence commented that she felt like the “incredible hulk” during her rages against her partner (2015, 18). The hulk is a decidedly masculine anti-hero whose rage is generally put into the service of the “good” when properly domesticated, typically by a human marked as female/feminine. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/05%3A_Organizational_Resistance/5.01%3A_Interpersonal_Violence_in_Northern_Saskatchewan_Commun.txt |
Betty Ann Pottruff & Barbara Tomporowski[1]
In 2008, Saskatchewan officials provided information to the Missing Women Conference in Regina regarding the actions of the Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons (PPCMP) to better understand and respond to missing persons cases. This article provides an update about the PPCMP, discusses national developments regarding violence against Indigenous women and girls and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), and describes the work occurring in Saskatchewan to address these issues.
Public concern about missing persons, including cases of missing Indigenous women, led the Saskatchewan government to announce a plan to address the issues in fall 2005. The plan was based on three elements: increased resources to support police investigations, the development of a province-wide policy and protocol to standardize how reports of missing persons are received and investigated, and a strengthened partnership among government, police agencies, Indigenous, and community organizations to support families and communities when identifying and responding to missing persons cases. This led to the establishment of the PPCMP, which is unique to Saskatchewan. The PPCMP was formed in January 2006 with organizations that had a provincial scope and the expertise and perspectives regarding missing persons that would help them come together as a partnership of equals to improve collaboration and the support provided to families and communities when people go missing. While Saskatchewan Ministry of Justice officials have chaired the PPCMP since its inception, each member from participating organizations is responsible for developing and supporting the partnership by sharing the workload and contributing resources and expertise. The mandate established in 2006 is set out in Figure 1.
The PPCMP builds trust and cooperation between government, justice, and non-profit sectors. The original members included Saskatchewan Ministry of Justice (both Policing and Policy areas), Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Women’s Commission, Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women’s Circle Corporation, Child Find Saskatchewan, STOPS To Violence, Alzheimer Society of Saskatchewan, Métis Family and Community Justice Services Inc., Search and Rescue Saskatchewan Association of Volunteers, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police. Over the last decade, membership has grown as more organizations contribute to this important work, including the Saskatchewan Chief Coroners Service, Victims Services, Caring Hearts Inc., municipal police services, and provincial ministries involved with child protection, education, health, and government relations. Each member is ultimately responsible to their organization for their participation and the partnership’s work.
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Vision:
Work towards a future that ensures that when people go missing there is a full response that mobilizes all necessary participants and that recognizes the equal value of every life.
Goals:
• to raise awareness of and support public education around the reasons why people go missing;
• to promote prevention strategies;
• to encourage cooperation and partnerships amongst agencies to better support families and communities where someone goes missing; and
• to enhance capacity to respond to cases of missing persons at the family, community, and provincial level.
Principle:
The Partnership recognizes that people go missing for a variety of reasons and will work to respond specifically to each of these reasons, as brought forward by the members of the Partnership Committee, while addressing the needs of all missing persons.
Key areas where action will be taken or recommended
• Raise awareness of and support public education on the risks to Saskatchewan citizens that lead to persons going missing.
• Recommend, implement or promote prevention strategies.
• Build a network of protective interventions to assist in deterring or responding to missing persons cases.
• Develop supports to help families and communities identify missing persons cases, support their role in responding to these cases and in addressing the families’ immediate and long-term needs.
• Identify best practices in responding to missing persons cases.
• Improve understanding of roles and responsibilities to help agencies network and communicate (could require development of protocols).
• Improve data and information collection and information sharing between agencies in missing persons cases.
• Suggest improvements to police reporting procedures/policies on missing persons cases.
• Suggest ways to work to improve media coverage of missing persons cases.
Figure 1: Mandate of Saskatchewan’s Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons
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The Committee issued an interim report, met with families of missing persons in February and March 2007, and issued a final report containing twenty areas of recommendations to support families, raise awareness, prevent people from going missing, and improve the response by police and other services (Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons, October 2007).
Around the same time the PPCMP was established and was developing its mandate, the Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police (SACP) developed and launched the province-wide missing persons website in spring 2006, which includes cases from 1935 onward. The website, which can be found at www.sacp.ca, contains photos and information about persons who have been missing for more than six months, and about unidentified human remains. It also contains information created by the PPCMP, such as a checklist for families to follow if someone goes missing and other public awareness materials prepared for the annual Missing Persons Week that has been recognized in Saskatchewan every May since 2013.
Characteristics of Missing Persons in Saskatchewan
As part of the initial work to support the PPCMP, Dr. Jeffrey Pfeifer (2006) conducted research that found 4,496 reports to police regarding missing persons in 2005. These reports represented 2,956 individuals, and the majority of missing persons were between the ages of nine and eighteen. The difference between the number of reports and the number of missing people results from individuals going missing multiple times during the year, particularly youth who repeatedly leave home or foster care and who were referred to as “chronic runaways” (8). The data also reveals that there is an equal distribution of missing males and females. The majority of missing persons where ethnicity was reported were Caucasian or First Nations/Aboriginal, but ethnicity was not listed for many individuals. The number of First Nations/Aboriginal persons reported missing was and remains disproportionate to their representation in the population.
While Dr. Pfeifer’s research has not been repeated to date, the available information suggests that the numbers and characteristics of those reported missing has not changed. This includes ongoing concerns about how to reduce the number of youth who repeatedly go missing. This contributed to the development of the 11 and Under Initiative, a collaborative partnership that supports children under the age of twelve who are exhibiting behaviors that put them at risk for criminal involvement or who are at increased risk for victimization. Children are referred to the 11 and Under Initiative through an early identification process, and an integrated case management system links them and their families to human service supports and community partners[2].
Over 99 percent of missing persons cases are resolved, often within a few days. Unfortunately, there are a number of long-term cases in which people have been missing over six months. These cases are profiled on the SACP website. Although long-term police investigations into missing persons reports are sometimes called “cold cases,” they remain open and under investigation until solved. As of the date this article was written in September 2019, the SACP website listed 134 missing persons between 1935 and March 2019 (ninety-seven males and thirty-seven females) in addition to nine cases involving unidentified human remains and twenty-nine located persons.
There has been considerable attention to the issue of missing Indigenous women in Canada. The SACP website uses the terms Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal status where known. As of March 2019, eighteen of the missing women were Caucasian and nineteen were of Aboriginal ethnicity. Since the SACP started recording long-term missing persons in 2006, the number of missing Aboriginal women in Saskatchewan has consistently been about 50 percent of total females missing. In comparison, only 11.3 percent of missing women in Canada were Aboriginal (Royal Canadian Mounted Police 2015, 13; Figure 5). This shows an overrepresentation of Aboriginal women among the missing, particularly when Aboriginal women accounted for only 16 percent of the female population of Saskatchewan (Status of Women Office, 2016). In contrast, the SACP website shows that fifty-three of the missing men in Saskatchewan are Caucasian, two are visible minorities, and forty-two are Aboriginal. Canada’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) doesn’t provide national ethnicity data but does indicate that 57 percent of missing adult reports involve males and 73 percent of missing child reports involve runaways (National Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains 2018).
It is sometimes assumed that people who go missing have fallen victim to violence. While this may be the case, the data and the experience of the PPCMP indicate that people go missing for many reasons.
• Sixty-eight percent of missing person reports in Saskatchewan in 2005 involved children, according to Pfeifer’s research. These missing children were primarily runaways, as less than 1 percent of all missing children cases involve child abduction, usually by a parent based on NCMPUR data (National Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains 2018).
• People with health concerns such as Alzheimer disease are at risk of going missing if they become lost.
• People suffering from mental health issues may be at risk of suicide.
• People can get lost and be reported as missing when engaging in outdoor activities such as hiking, hunting, and boating.
• Foul play or criminal conduct can also cause people to be reported missing. This is a clear concern in the disproportionate number of missing Indigenous women.
Updates on the PPCMP
For the last decade, the PPCMP has been implementing and advocating for the implementation of the recommendations in its 2007 Final Report. The Committee met again with families of missing persons in 2009, which led to further recommendations on topics such as the need to work with jurisdictions outside Saskatchewan, support families financially or through networking, and the importance of continuing to build the partnership (PPCMP 2009). To follow up on these recommendations, in 2011 the PPCMP organized a meeting with officials from Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and other partners to discuss how to work together to address the needs of families. This Regional Forum led to more recommendations for action on supporting families and how to support work within and across jurisdictions (Policy, Planning and Evaluation Branch 2011).
The PPCMP completed a Strategic Business Plan in 2012, which identified key areas of focus for the Partnership Committee regarding working together, raising awareness, and supporting families (Child Find Saskatchewan 2012)[3]. The PPCMP has implemented or made progress on implementing most of the recommendations from 2007, 2009, and the 2012 Strategic Business Plan. Examples include the following.
• Missing Persons Weeks have been proclaimed annually in Saskatchewan since 2013 to promote public awareness and understanding by addressing myths regarding missing persons, profiling different types of cases from across the province, creating a hypothetical case for people to follow, highlighting the range of services for families, and reaffirming that those missing are not forgotten.
• In 2009, Saskatchewan proclaimed The Missing Persons and Presumption of Death Act to assist families to administer assets of missing persons. The Act was amended in 2018 to allow law enforcement agencies access to a wider range of records to help in the search for a missing person.
• The Saskatchewan Police Commission and Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police approved a policy for recording and investigating missing person cases which applies to all municipal police services in the province. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have a similar policy.
• The SACP and Victims Services Branch agreed upon a new policy to ensure all families of missing persons who need support are referred to police-based victim services. In addition, three missing persons liaison workers in Regina, Saskatoon, and Prince Albert are available to support families and assist victim services across the province[4].
• The PPCMP created materials that are posted on the Ministry of Justice website, such as a checklist for families, a media kit, an inventory of agencies, and an Agency Response Guide to assist agencies in supporting the families and friends of missing persons.
• On September 19, 2014, the PPCMP dedicated an oak tree in Wascana Centre in Regina to remember missing persons. In 2016, the Place of Reflection for families at the RCMP Training Academy in Regina was formally dedicated. Members of the PPCMP contributed funds for this location.
• In 2014, the PPCMP also began to focus on supporting families and assisting both service providers and families to understand the impact of trauma when a loved one disappears. That fall, the PPCMP held a series of workshops about how to cope with or support individuals experiencing ambiguous loss, which describes the feelings of those who are caught in a cycle of hope and grieving for a missing person whose fate is unknown (British Columbia Missing Women Commission of Inquiry 2012, 38). These workshops were held in Regina and Saskatoon and were broadcast in northern Saskatchewan via the Telehealth network. Since then, further training for over 6,400 service providers has occurred in partnership with Caring Hearts Inc. regarding trauma-informed practice. Caring Hearts Inc. provides these training sessions to Indigenous communities upon request and involves Elders in the sessions.
National Developments
In addition to its activities in Saskatchewan, the PPCMP’s recommendations have informed national work regarding missing persons and MMIWG. For example, the recommendation to develop a national police database was acted upon by the federal government with the creation of the NCMPUR[5]. The PPCMP’s work also contributed to the national dialogue regarding missing women, informed the report of the Federal-Provincial-Territorial (FPT) Working Group on Missing Women (Coordinating Committee of Senior Officials, 2012), and was cited as a best practice in the British Columbia Missing Women Commission of Inquiry (2012, 160). Moreover, both the PPCMP’s work and the FPT report on missing women contributed to the national dialogue on violence against Indigenous women and girls (VAIWG), including MMIWG.
Over the past several years, there has been growing awareness and concern among Indigenous communities, provincial justice agencies, FPT governments, academics, and the public about the troubling issue of VAIWG. Figure 2 shows a continuum of violence that can result in Indigenous women and girls going missing and being murdered.
Figure 2. Continuum of Violence, Saskatchewan Ministry of Justice.
In January 2012, FPT Ministers Responsible for Justice and Public Safety agreed to continue to collaborate and develop a common approach to VAIWG. They directed their officials to develop a flexible justice framework to coordinate FPT justice actions to address VAIWG. The FPT Working Group on Aboriginal Justice reviewed thirty reports, found similar themes among the findings and recommendations, and prepared a draft justice framework. In November 2013, FPT Ministers agreed to publicly release the draft so jurisdictions could hold dialogues with Indigenous groups and other partners. FPT jurisdictions approached these dialogues in many ways. For example, Saskatchewan held twenty-two meetings with over 700 people, including the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, Métis Family and Community Justice Services, First Nations, Tribal Councils, community justice workers, court workers, victims’ services programs, interpersonal violence and abuse programs, both Saskatchewan universities, and other groups. The Ministry also supported the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women’s Circle Corporation (SAWCC) in holding dialogues with Aboriginal women and in Aboriginal communities, and the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations held dialogues as well.
While feedback was being compiled regarding the draft FPT Justice Framework, FPT Justice Ministers released a progress report in October 2014 with examples of activities already underway to prevent and respond to VAIWG. Next, several national events occurred to discuss VAIWG and MMIWG, such as the 2015 and 2016 National Roundtables and the Justice Practitioners Summit in Manitoba. The National Roundtables included leaders from Indigenous organizations and FPT governments, representatives from Indigenous organizations, families of MMIWG, and many others. Saskatchewan’s delegation to the 2015 National Roundtable included the Minister of Justice, government officials, and representatives from the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Women’s Commission and SAWCC. The Roundtable referred to the draft FPT Justice Framework to Address VAIWG and adopted the following principles.
• Human Rights: VAIWG violates numerous human rights including the right to life, to security, to equality, and to be free of discrimination.
• Shared responsibility: Preventing and addressing violence against Indigenous women and children is a shared responsibility, requiring shared commitments across governments and communities.
• Community-based solutions: Solutions to prevent and end violence against Indigenous women and children must be led and delivered by Indigenous communities, which may need support to build community capacity to prevent and respond to VAIWG.
• A focus on healing: Addressing violence against Indigenous women and children acknowledges the need for improved relationships based on respect and understanding among Indigenous Peoples and non-Indigenous Canadians and the need for holistic approaches in concert with support for the healing of individuals and communities.
• A collaborative focus: Indigenous Peoples must be partners in developing and implementing responses to address VAIWG.
• Bringing about behavioral change: Addressing and preventing VAIWG requires a shift in societal attitudes and behaviours within individuals, institutions, and organizations, including men and boys, who are key agents of that change.
• Changing the discourse: Mobilizing Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities to change how we talk about the issues can help reframe institutional responses, community perspectives, and individual attitudes.
The National Roundtable also led to a commitment to hold the Justice Practitioners Summit in January 2016 to bring together victims’ services agencies , police, prosecutors, and others to discuss the justice system response in cases of MMIWG. Results from the summit and other developments were the focus of discussions at the second National Roundtable in February 2016 in which Saskatchewan’s Minister of Justice also participated, along with the FSIN Women’s Commission, SAWCC, approximately twelve families of MMIWG, and provincial officials. Work continues on commitments from the 2016 National Roundtable, such as cultural competency training and improving communication and coordination between the justice system and Indigenous communities.
The FPT Justice Framework to Address VAIWG was finalized and publicly released by FPT Ministers Responsible for Justice and Public Safety in January 2016[6]. Its purpose is to assist FPT Ministers of Justice and Public Safety in taking a coordinated approach to working with Indigenous Peoples to stop the violence. Since it will be up to each FPT jurisdiction to work with Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners on responses that are effective and appropriate for their communities, the FPT Justice Framework provides principles and priorities rather than detailed recommendations. The principles include elements such as reconciliation and building trust, a shared responsibility for preventing and addressing violence, community-based solutions, and the importance of changing attitudes and behaviours. The priorities include:
• improving the relationship between justice sector professionals (including police) and Indigenous people;
• supporting Indigenous communities in the development of individual and community safety initiatives that respond to their unique cultural, traditional, and socioeconomic needs and realities;
• engaging the whole community, including government departments, non-government agencies, families, and community-based organizations in prevention, intervention, and assistance for victims and offenders;
• improving responses to violence within intimate relationships and families;
• supporting alternatives to mainstream court where appropriate and effective;
• identifying strategies within the existing justice system to support Indigenous women who are victims of violence and their children;
• addressing the safety and healing of individuals (victims, offenders, witnesses), families, and communities; and
• improving coordination across government departments and among provinces, territories, the federal government, and Indigenous communities.
While these inter-jurisdictional events were occurring in 2015 and 2016, Saskatchewan Justice officials continued to work with Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners including police, to discuss how the province could develop an inclusive approach to address VAIWG in families and communities. The principles approved at the National Roundtable in 2015 were reviewed, and the partners agreed to adapt these principles to the Saskatchewan context.
In summer 2016, the federal government announced the establishment of the National Inquiry into MMIWG, which was originally intended to operate from September 1, 2016 to December 31, 2018. The Commission was mandated to examine and report on the systemic causes of the violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls, “including underlying social, economic, cultural, institutional and historical causes” and “institutional policies and practices implemented in response to violence.”[7] To create a truly national inquiry, all provincial and territorial governments were asked to authorize the Commission to review matters within the jurisdiction’s area of responsibility. This had never been done before, and it took time to work out the technical and legal requirements for each jurisdiction. Saskatchewan publicly supported the National Inquiry in September 2016 by passing an Order in Council mirroring the federal terms of reference.
The Commission met with families and survivors of violence and held a number of events across the country. This included fifteen community hearings, statement taking events with families of MMIWG and survivors of violence, institutional hearings, and Knowledge Keeper and Expert Hearings. According to the National Inquiry website, as of April 20, 2018, the Commission had heard 1,484 testimonies from families and survivors. The Expert Hearings considered topics such as Indigenous laws, decolonizing perspectives, human rights, racism, and international law. There were hearings about the criminal justice system, the child protection system, and sexual exploitation, in addition to a number of guided dialogues to gather perspectives from two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersexual, and asexual (2SLGBTQQIA) people, the Métis and Inuit, and those in Québec. The Institutional Hearings, which examined the systemic causes of VAIWG and violence against 2SLGBTQQIA people, covered matters such as policing and government services. The Commission heard testimony about the PPCMP during the Institutional Hearing into Government Services from May 28 to June 1, 2018.
Provincial officials worked throughout the National Inquiry’s term to support this important national process, to respond to Commission requests, and to support families by establishing a Family Information Liaison Unit (FILU). The FILU is funded by the federal government to assist families in accessing information regarding a family member who may be missing or murdered. Several Saskatchewan Indigenous groups also played vital roles in supporting families during the National Inquiry, such as SAWCC, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Family Information Liaison Office, Regina Treaty/Status Indian Services, Iskwewuk Ewichiwitochik (Women Walking Together), and the Prince Albert Grand Council Women’s Commission.
The National Inquiry’s Final Report, Reclaiming Power and Place, was released at a ceremony in Gatineau, Quebec, on June 3, 2019. It contains 231 Calls for Justice directed at governments, institutions, industries, the media, and all Canadians. The Calls for Justice address a wide range of topics, including health and wellness, education, social services, housing, justice, and governance. The release of the Final Report was attended by the Prime Minister of Canada, provincial and territorial ministers, Elders and Knowledge Keepers, families of MMIWG, representatives from Indigenous organizations, victims and survivors of violence, representatives from justice agencies, and many other groups.
The Commission found that a “significant, persistent, and deliberate pattern of systemic racial and gendered human rights and Indigenous rights violations and abuses . . . is the cause of the disappearances, murders, and violence experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.” The Final Report calls for “an absolute paradigm shift . . . to dismantle colonialism within Canadian society, and from all levels of government and public institutions” (National Inquiry, “Executive Summary” 2019, 60). This will require work to address four pathways that have sustained colonialism: historical, multigenerational, and intergenerational trauma; the social and economic marginalization of Indigenous people; institutional lack of will; and ignoring the agency and expertise of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people (National Inquiry, “Executive Summary” 2019, 11).
Indigenous groups, community-based agencies, governments, institutions, professionals, academics, and members of the public are analyzing the Final Report and considering how to make progress on these and other important issues. Many of the Calls for Justice relate to VAIWG, and two focus specifically on missing persons. Call for Justice 5.6 is, “We call upon provincial and territorial governments to develop an enhanced, holistic, comprehensive approach for the provision of support to Indigenous victims of crime and families and friends of Indigenous murdered or missing persons.” Call for Justice 5.8 is, “We call upon all provincial and territorial governments to enact missing persons legislation.” As previously discussed, Saskatchewan has some responses that are consistent with these calls, such as The Missing Persons and Presumption of Death Act, access to victims services for families, and the missing person liaison positions. There may be other things that could be done to address the needs and concerns of families of MMIWG and victims and survivors of violence. The Final Report mentions the importance of trusting relationships with Indigenous people as one vital step for Indigenous women and 2SLGTBQQIA people to experience justice[8].
Final Thoughts and Next Steps
The PPCMP recognized its tenth anniversary in 2017 and released a ten-year progress report in 2018 regarding how the original twenty recommendations from 2007 were implemented. The PPCMP reviewed the actions taken over its ten-year history in order to reflect on the good work that has occurred, take stock of current issues, and develop further actions. The resulting progress report indicates that fourteen of the twenty recommendations had been completely or substantially implemented, such as enacting legislation, standardizing police practices in missing persons cases, developing supports for families, and the establishment of a national database (Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons 2018). The progress report also highlights the need to continue raising public awareness about matters related to missing persons and indicates that four recommendations are ongoing. The ongoing recommendations include matters related to search and rescue and increasing the capacity of Indigenous communities to respond when someone goes missing. Additionally, two of the original twenty recommendations were considered outside the scope of the PPCMP to significantly influence. One of these two recommendations relates to media sensitivity when reporting about missing persons. The other concerns the role of school-community councils in educating people about these topics.
The process of reviewing its history and progress led the PPCMP to consider new initiatives. The Committee is currently reviewing its mandate and developing a new work plan with additional ways to enhance communications and public education.
The National Inquiry into MMIWG will undoubtedly lead to more attention regarding the reasons why Indigenous women and girls are disproportionately reported missing and become the victims of violence, including homicide. The Commission’s findings will help inform the future work of the PPCMP and many organizations in striving to support individuals, families and communities to live in safe communities that reflect the PPCMP’s mandate of “the equal value of every life”.
1. The authors were co-chair and chair of what was originally named the Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons, but which at the time of this publication is now named the Saskatchewan Missing Persons Partnership. Although one of the authors is employed with the Government of Saskatchewan, this article solely reflects her personal views. It does not reflect the views of the Government of Saskatchewan, Ministry of Justice and Attorney General, or Ministry of Corrections, Policing and Public Safety.
2. The 11 and Under Initiative can be found at http://11andunderinitiative.ca/.
3. These and the previously referenced documents can be found on the Ministry of Justice website at https://www.saskatchewan.ca/residents/family-and-social-support/help-for-families-of-missing-or-murdered-persons.
4. Information about victim services for the families of missing persons can be found at: http://www.saskatchewan.ca/residents/justice-crime-and-the-law/victims-of-crime-and-abuse.
5. Can be found at http://www.canadasmissing.ca/.
6. The framework, which is designed to be flexible so it can evolve over time, is available at http://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/law-crime-and-justice/about-bc-justice-system/publications/fpt-justice-framework-english.pdf.
7. See the terms of reference at https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/terms-of-reference.pdf.
8. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (June 2019). Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Vol. 1, 715. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/05%3A_Organizational_Resistance/5.02%3A_Saskatchewan_Response_and_National_Developments_regard.txt |
Shauneen Pete[1]
The issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is largely misunderstood in Canada. As educators it is incumbent upon us to better prepare our learners to respond to emergent societal issues. How do faculty and staff in one prairie university work together to ensure that our learners gain a greater understanding of Indigenous peoples broadly; especially those experiences that contribute to the higher rates of violence directed toward Indigenous women?
In 2015, during a series of campus engagement sessions organized through the Office of Indigenization, information was gathered about how and where students are learning about MMIW issues; and how faculty are designing courses to address this topic in their own teaching. This case study summarizes one of the approaches that a group of concerned faculty and staff undertook to expand discussions about MMIW issues across the curriculum areas on our campus. As we trouble notions of curricula, we work toward academic decolonization and Indigenization.
Universities in Canada have been more actively engaging in decolonizing and Indigenizing practices. Our university, like many other Canadian universities and colleges, had entrenched Indigenization into our strategic plan. The work of Indigenization was operationalized through an Office of Indigenization; and led by an Executive Lead: Indigenization. Part of the work plan of the Lead was to inspire curriculum reform throughout the university. As faculty and instructors on our campus, we troubled dominant curriculum norms about what was worth knowing, and thus what was worth teaching and learning.
This chapter broadly addresses the question, “As faculty working to support deeper levels of Indigenization on our campus, how do we take up Indigenous worldviews and experiences in our curricular practices?” More specifically, this chapter is designed to respond to the question, “How can teaching about Missing and Murdered Indigenous women be practiced in ways that enhances learning about Indigenous experience, and engages learners in the practice of critical social justice?”
In this chapter, I explore one Canadian university’s commitment toward correcting the lack of Indigenous content available to learners; and, more specifically, the lack of opportunities to learn about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). For us, the absence of content in university courses about the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples meant that few people understood why violence directed toward Indigenous peoples was important to know. A group of like-minded faculty from several disciplines came together to explore our collective concerns for the curricular holes we identified. We agreed to facilitate a symposium to engage other members of the academic community (students, colleagues, community members, and alumni) in conversations about Indigenous peoples, and more specifically about Missing and Murdered Indigenous women. Symposium participants engaged in a series of discussions over the course of the week-long symposium. At the conclusion of the symposium, participants indicated that faculty must engage in a critical examination of the colonial curriculum and begin to embrace a practice of academic Indigenization and decolonization.
As discussed elsewhere in the book, terminology regarding Aboriginal and Indigenous identities have continued to shift since Torn from Our Midst was published in 2008. Scholars, including myself, use Indigenous when referring to First Nations, Metis and Inuit; and I use Indigenous when referring to the original peoples within an international context. Where a reference to Aboriginal is used in a quotation or referenced in a text or participant comment, I will privilege the original word choice.
I begin this chapter by addressing my own positionality as a First Nations woman and scholar. Then I present the context and describe a series of exercises that were designed to engage students and faculty in conversations about MMIW; lastly, I connect the voices of the participants to recommendations meant to guide faculty toward academic programming reform.
Situating Myself
My name is Dr. Shauneen Pete. I am from Little Pine First Nation in Treaty 6 territory (Saskatchewan). I served as the Executive Lead: Indigenization at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, from 2013 to 2016. During those three years I was responsible for animating the priorities set forth in the University Strategic Plan, and the Indigenization Plan. I provided leadership to encourage greater levels of Indigenization in every administrative and academic unit; this included building our capacity to engage in academic Indigenization.
As an educator, I have worked for nearly three decades to confront the colonial constructions of knowledge, and our ideas about schooling and education. During that time, I have worked as a high school teacher, educational consultant, curriculum writer, faculty member, and university administrator. I’ve taught education courses that focus on anti-oppression, anti-racism, social justice, and Indigenous education. I’ve taught Indigenous Studies courses including a course on Native Women in Canada. In the Women’s and Gender Studies department, I taught a class entitled, Indigenous Women and Feminism. My curricular choices aim to expose my learners (mostly white and female; often middle-class and Christian) toward a more accurate understanding of settler-Indigenous relationships in Canada. My courses include inquiry into topics associated with racism, the social construction of difference, power, and hegemony. I draw my learners toward an awareness of their own privilege, and white identity development. In these courses we critically examine the ways their social positioning often denies them access to an awareness of the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples.
Regardless of what course or what level I’ve taught, I have worked diligently to re-center the voices and experiences of Indigenous women because I believed that if I didn’t do so, learners would not gain those understandings anywhere else. Upon coming to learn (for the first time) the history of systemic inequality my learners often wonder, “Why didn’t we learn this before?” In my view, most Canadians have been structurally denied the opportunity to learn about Indigenous peoples. While some provinces have mandated the inclusion of Indigenous content in the K-12 curriculum, this work is often perceived as optional by white educators. Canadian higher education also reflects the marginalization and omission of Indigenous ways of knowing, experiences and pedagogies. As a result, the inclusion of Indigenous content is usually the responsibility of Indigenous educators, and we are under-represented in Canadian higher education: therefore, Indigenous content is marginalized or largely absent in the academy.
This limited access to Indigenous content is problematic not only for the Indigenous students who seek to see their experiences reflected in their areas of study, it is also detrimental for members of the dominant group, visible minority students, and new and visiting students who tend to then adopt dominant ways of knowing and learning. These ways of knowing ill prepare all learners for the intercultural demands that an ever-increasingly diverse society offers; in particular, they limit the possibilities for new relationships with the rising Indigenous population of this prairie province. Many of my learners express that they were raised with very narrow and limiting views of Indigenous peoples, that they rarely interact with Indigenous peoples, and that what they learned in school about Indigenous peoples was mostly rooted in the past. It should be no surprise that our campus, like many others in Canada, has experienced various forms of ignorance, racial bias, and racism in our many years.
Campus Context
The University of Regina is located in Treaty 4 and Treaty 6 lands in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada. It has a federated relationship with First Nations University of Canada (FNUniv) which offers academic programming in Indigenous Education, Business, Fine Arts, and Indigenous Studies, among others. First Nations University offers many U of R students an introduction to Indigenous perspectives, worldviews, and scholarship that is not generally offered at the U of R.
Under the leadership of President Vianne Timmons, the U of R has been actively working toward indigenization as outlined in the university strategic plan. The members of the Indigenous Advisory Circle to the President define indigenization as the transformation of the existing academy by including Indigenous knowledges, voices, critiques, scholars, students, and materials as well as the establishment of physical and epistemic spaces that facilitate the ethical stewardship of a plurality of Indigenous knowledges and practices so thoroughly as to constitute an essential element of the University. It is not limited to Indigenous people, but encompasses all students and faculty, for the benefit of our academic integrity and our social viability. (Indigenous Advisory Circle 2012)
In 2013, when I became Executive Lead of Indigenization, there were several academic programs that had already developed courses that introduced learners to Indigenous experiences (Social Work, Fine Arts, and Education, to name a few). However, at that time only one course (offered infrequently) through Women’s and Gender Studies exclusively taught about the issues of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. As I began in this leadership role, I couldn’t help but wonder, how learners are ever to gain a deeper understanding of our histories and contemporary issue if Indigenous experiences are not included in the curriculum. At the same time, I was conscious that our campus was still recovering from the violent harassment and active resistance directed toward a visionary Indigenous undergraduate student who had called for mandatory Indigenous Studies on our campus. I understood that leading our faculty and students to higher levels of academic Indigenization would illuminate the racism that always was on our campus.
The Challenge of Cognitive Imperialism
Cognitive Imperialism insists on “one language, one culture and one frame of reference” (Battiste 2000, 198) at the expense of all other ways of knowing. Canadian’s embrace dominant ways of thinking. This dominant way of thinking extends to the vision and narrative we prefer to tell about ourselves – that we are a kinder, peace making nation, we are multicultural and fair. This narrative so permeates dominant thinking, that in 2009, Prime Minister Harper declared that there was no history of colonialism in Canada! The problem with these dominant ways of knowing is they are not true: dominance masks the violence of colonization; and cognitive imperialism masks anything that doesn’t fit into that frame of reference. I believe that cognitive imperialism results in what Kuokkanen refers to as “epistemic ignorance”: the inability of educational institutions to teach what they don’t know. In the absence of other than dominant ways of knowing, dominance is replicated. Therefore, higher education is a system that denies all people the opportunity to learn anything but the dominant ways of knowing . . . except in marginalized spaces: for example, courses on Indigenous women offered through Women’s and Gender Studies and / or Indigenous Studies but not elsewhere. The marginalization of academic programming about Indigenous experience leaves most learners unaware and, therefore, unconcerned about the experiences of Indigenous peoples—often resulting in a “blame the victim” response when topics of inequality are explored.
My former colleague, Dr. Mike Cappello, often says, “We are steeped in racism, it’s the air we breathe.” White dominance in the academy often goes unexamined, and members of the dominant group often see departmental structures, majors and minors, course content, and instructional strategy choices as “normal” and “the way things are supposed to be” in the academy. Instructors and learners alike often replicate dominant worldviews in course design and assignment choices because that is what they know to be “truth.” For example, in her book, Unsettling the Settler Within, Paulette Reagan (2010) reminds us that one part of the residential school history in Canada “is the story about well-meaning paternalistic educators, government and church officials who sought to educate and assimilate Indigenous children into mainstream Canadian society “for their own good”’ (5). When the dominant narrative of a benevolent education is retold in higher education, it makes invisible the violence in which this process was enforced. Children were removed from their families . . . children were punished for speaking their language . . . children were sexually, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually abused. Not until we begin to examine the social construction of dominance can we begin to see how colonization itself is a violent, racialized, and sexualized act. Epistemic ignorance replayed in the academy allows the violence of colonization to be masked. Epistemic ignorance replayed in the academy has very real effects on our learners. I offer three examples from our own campus.
The Murder of Pamela George
In 1995, Alex Ternowetsky and Steven Kummerfield, both university students, were found guilty of killing Pamela George. The two men were celebrating the end of term when they decided to pick up a prostitute and, “after failing to persuade one Aboriginal woman working as a prostitute to join the two of them in the car, one man hid in the truck. Approaching the woman twice, and being refused twice, they finally succeeded in persuading another Aboriginal woman, Pamela George, to enter the car” (Razack 2002). The court would hear how, following oral sex, the men took turns beating her. Razack explains, “In their everyday life, they would have had almost no chance of encountering an Aboriginal person” (136). Razack asks, “How do young men such as Alex Ternowetsky and Steven Kummerfield come to know themselves as beings for whom the definition of a good time is to travel to the parts of the city inhabited by poor and mostly Aboriginal peoples and there to purchase sexual services from an Aboriginal woman?” (136). This story reminds us that our learner’s attitudes are shaped by the larger colonial and racist attitudes that we all live with. As an educator, working within the very institution that these two men attended, I can’t help but wonder, had the university taken a more active role in decolonizing academic programs prior to 1995, would these two men have justified their actions all in the name of a good time?
Playing Indian
In March 2014, I awoke to a phone call from a senior university administrator. The night before, the U of R Cheer Team dressed like cowboys and Indians for an end of season practice. During the practice, they took photos of themselves, which they posted on Instagram and Facebook, in a mock battle scene . . . imagine, the “cowboys” with guns (fingers) pointed toward the “Indians” who are crouched animal-like with their claws and knives ready for battle. Or, in the other photo of the group, one “Indian” with fingers overhead signalling feathers, hand over her mouth in a gesture akin to “whooping.” I was informed that in response to their now very public actions, I would offer the team cultural sensitivity training. In preparation for meeting the team, I asked my colleague Dr. Mike Cappello to work with me to deliver the training. I did so because, like Mike, I had years of experience in teaching anti-racism courses and understood that white learners “hear” me differently than they do my white colleagues. We began the cultural sensitivity training by asking them, “How did you learn about Indigenous people in your home, school, and community?” Through their story sharing they came to see that their own experiences as white women were very similar: they learned about Indigenous people from watching the Disney movie Pocahontas; some expressed how they cherished their Pocahontas costume as children and later into young adulthood. They reiterated that they didn’t intend to do any harm—that they were just having a fun evening together. Mike drew the women’s attention to the book I Thought Pocahontas Was a Movie, edited by our colleagues, Dr. Carol Schick and Dr. James McNinch. The book explores the 2001 Tisdale rape case involving Dean Edmondson (age 24), Jeffrey Brown (age 25), and Jeffrey Kindrat (age 20). The victim was a twelve-year-old First Nations girl. Like Kummerfield and Ternowetsky before them, these men were out drinking and driving . . . having a good time. They picked up the girl, offered her beer and then took turns sexually assaulting her. Upon first seeing her, one of them said, “I thought Pocahontas was a movie.”
Mike and I explained to the cheer team how their actions, playing Indian, allowed them to, firstly, replicate the savage Indian imagery through their gestures and dress, and, secondly, engage in the romanticism of Pocahontas without ever having to pay the price for her sexualized and racialized identity. Mike and I drew the team’s attention to the uncomfortable parallels between Pocahontas and the young rape victim: here, some of the team members were surprised to learn that the real Pocahontas was a girl of eleven or twelve while John Smith was a man of twenty-eight. They came to realize that the case of Pocahontas—treated as a romantic equal in the Disney movie; was really not all that different from the way the media and the justice system made the young rape victim both womanly and wanton, and therefore consenting to the sexualized activity (gang rape). In the case of Edmondson, Brown, and Kindrat all were referred to as boys by the media and the legal system, even when they were all in their 20s and several years older than the girl. As “boys”, these men, like John Smith from the movie, were helpless in their response to the sexualized identity of the girl.
To go further, Dr. Cappello and I shifted the focus back to the Cheer Team members “playing Indian” in an overly sexualized and “animalistic” way and the how problematic that choice was. We explained that the choice was not all that different from the way in which Edmondson, Brown, Kindrat, Ternawetsky, and Kummerfield interacted with Indigenous girls and women: as sexualized objects. The cheer team members adopted the dominant narrative of the “sexy squaw” when they donned the short, fringed skirts and braided their hair. One of the privileges that these young women had that actual Indigenous women did not have, was that they could take off the costumes at the end of the evening. Real Indigenous women did not share in the ability to shirk the markings of their brown woman’s bodies: they are ever cast as wonton, promiscuous, sexually available for those out to have a good time.
I didn’t know this was wrong. In the weeks that followed the cheer team incident, Mike and I spoke to these issues in our own classes and we were invited to a couple of classes to discuss the interconnecting issues of cultural appropriation, MMIW, and violence directed toward Indigenous Peoples. Often, the learners would comment that “the matter was blown out of proportion”; “these were just girls having fun” (referencing the cheer team); and in some cases, we heard “I didn’t know this was wrong.” We were not surprised by these responses; in fact, the level of ignorance expressed by these learners is reflective of the norms of Canadian society. As educator’s we are committed to correcting absences in the curriculum.
The Violent Rejection of Indigenous Content
Not long ago, a Facebook post was circulated on the university page called UofR Confessions. The post referenced the mandated Treaty Education requirement in our provincial curriculum. The author wrote: “In response to the teacher who wants Treaty Education integrated, you really think that it will work? No. Just do what I do. Don’t teach it all. . .. It’s a farce. Nobody cares about treaties. . .. I’m not teaching that crap.”
In our province, the inclusion of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit content has been a required component for over thirty years and mandatory Treaty Education has been provincial policy since 2007. Yet, in the case of this educator (and many more like her/him), as a member of the dominant group, violent rejection of Indigenous content is justified . . . and there are no repercussions for not fulfilling the provincial mandate. The exclusion of Indigenous content helps no one—not the Indigenous learners who don’t see positive reflections of their histories and contemporary experiences; nor the non-Indigenous learners who maintain socially constructed ideas of dominance.
Clearly there is a need for our university and community to proactively address race and racism, and to tell a more accurate history of Indigenous/(white)settler relations in Canada. In our work in the Faculty of Education, my colleagues and I have learned that confronting white dominance is to trouble curricula. We name whiteness in the curriculum, and we engage our learners in an examination of the experiences of marginalized peoples in the face of colonial dominance. As my students learn, often for the first time, about residential schools, the pass and permit system, or Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, they often are overcome with anger, guilt, and shame. They express anger toward a system of education that didn’t teach them about these topics; they feel guilt and shame as they come to recognize that the “luxury of ignorance” (Howard 2006) is a privilege that members of the dominant group share. I remind them that anger, guilt and shame often dis-able learners from moving forward in their understanding, but it also can serve to motivate them to a deeper practice of social justice education. This deeper practice would ensure that learners are able to move beyond denial, dismissal, minimization, and, in some cases, violent rejection of the experiences of Indigenous Peoples. The point is not simply to discomfort white-settler learners, but to help them grow their stamina for the ambiguity of knowing this uncomfortable knowledge—knowledge that is common sense for those more marginalized in society and invisible to members of the dominant group. In my teaching work with mostly white students I’ve learned that feeling guilt (and shame and anger) is the price of a legacy of privilege and the luxury of ignorance (Howard 2006) that dominant group members experience. I recognize that these learners can, and will learn to overcome these feelings when educators practice pedagogy in ways that facilitate them coming into the space of race-based stress and moving through it. Building their stamina for ambiguity and thus their resilience offers members of the dominant group (and those that align with them) a starting point for reconciling relationships with Indigenous peoples.
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: A Symposium
In December 2014, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated that the issue of Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women “wasn’t high on his radar.” In response, a number of faculty and administrators at the U of R and First Nations University of Canada proposed to work together to development a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Forum. The purpose of the forum was to foster discussions around the topic with an aim of informing public policy.
The committee members included Dr. David Malloy (VP Research), Dr. Brenda Anderson (Luther College), Dr. Lynn Wells (VP Academic, FNUniv), Dr. Mary Hampton (Psychology Department), Dr. Kathy McNutt (Executive Director, Johnson Shoyama School of Public Policy), Steve Palmer (The Collaborative Centre for Justice and Safety), the late, Dr. Jo-Ann Episkenew (Indigenous Peoples Health Research Centre), Dr. Judy White (Dean, Social Work), Dr. Kim McKay-McNabb (Sessional Lecturer, Women’s and Gender Studies), Hirsch Greenberg (Justice Studies), and I. The committee purposefully engaged faculty and staff from a broad range of affiliations: we understood that MMIW issues have interdisciplinary implications. Additionally, we invited diverse faculty and staff to participate in planning the symposium in order to reduce potential duplication with other events we were involved in, namely the 2015 Canadian Criminal Justice Association Meeting and RESOLVE 2015 events.
The committee members agreed that we would offer a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Symposium (March 24 to 27, 2015). The symposium included three round-table discussions and a World Café event. The round-table discussions were meant to provoke discussions with faculty colleagues, undergraduate and graduate students, and community/alumni members, on how we are taking up the issue in our curricular practice. In my role as Executive Lead, I wrote field notes based on each roundtable discussion; Moses Gordon made field notes during the World Café event; and I compiled and analyzed our notes, wrote and submitted a final report to the VP Research and committee members. I present the format and findings from each of the round-table sessions and the World-Café in the sections below.
MMIW in the Liberal Arts
The first roundtable discussion was held at First Nations University of Canada. Three presenters discussed how the topic of MMIW was taught in the liberal arts, particularly in English Literature, Native Studies, and Indigenous Health Studies. The three presenters included Holly MacKenzie (Doctoral Candidate at UBC), Dr. Jesse Archibald-Barber (First Nations University of Canada, English Department), and Johannah Bird (Briercrest College, Native Studies). There were approximately twenty participants, including one of the Indigenous Studies classes from FNUniv.
The presenters explained the methods they use to re-center MMIW issues in their classes. They cited using literature as one example of how to raise the topic. They also use contemporary issues presented in media as a catalyst for directing learning toward MMIW, issues of colonization, social inequality, gendered violence, and the daily lived experiences of Indigenous women and girls.
Some of the teaching resources included April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton; Maria Campbell’s book, Halfbreed; and the poetry of several Indigenous authors. These instructors identified how they invited Elders and community members to serve as guest speakers. They talked about the importance of talking circles to support students in responding to trauma that arose because of the content. They also spoke to how they must anticipate racism and prepare their response to it.
MMIW and Professional Programs
The second roundtable featured Dr. JoLee Sasakamoose, Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education (U of R). She explained that, in anticipation of revising her graduate course (Counselling Girls and Women), she wrestled with the foundational questions of teaching and trauma in the classroom. She knew she wanted to include topics associated with racialized violence and MMIW. She was also cautious: she explained that the faculty member must respect that teaching in this way had the potential to trigger learners, and faculty members had to anticipate the need to address the trauma as it arose in the classroom. Dr. Sasakamoose relayed that she opted to slowly introduce these topics and that she drew purposefully from the foundational documents developed by the Native Women’s Association of Canada. She was mindful of her pedagogical choices and decided that her learners would develop their own “gendered autobiography” whereby they would explore the intersections of race, class, and gender in their own lived experience. A second assignment included a review of a book about the life of one missing or murdered Indigenous woman. This book review would offer the learner the background information necessary to track the lack of action on the part of justice, child welfare, and social services agencies. Her learners gained a deeper understanding of how interconnecting differences compound access to services and fair and equitable treatment by service providers. Her intention was to offer her learners an opportunity to reconsider their own identities, their identities within their chosen profession, and as service providers working toward social justice.
Several faculty members were in attendance, including faculty from the Saskatchewan Urban Teacher Education Program, the School of Business and Luther College. Dr. Sasakamoose responded to questions about accessing and reviewing teaching resources and about how she planned on addressing racism, anti-racism and responding to racist comments in class.
Learning about MMIW: Student’s Voices
In hindsight, it would have been more appropriate to start the week of MMIW roundtables with the student roundtable. This discussion was led by three students who were in a course on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (Women’s and Gender Studies) taught by Dr. Brenda Anderson. These learners identified a clear gap in access to content about Indigenous Peoples in their experience on our campus. All three speakers stated that they had gained little access to content about Indigenous peoples in their Kindergarten to Grade 12 schooling experiences and that access to this content did not improve once they became university students. One student stated, “In my five years here, these issues were never introduced”.
The panelists were asked to identify how effectively the topic of MMIW was portrayed in their university classes. The students spoke to what they viewed as systemic ignorance within the entire system of formal education. They noted that their teachers and professors knew very little about Indigenous experiences and did not teach about it. Audience members reiterated that they found access to Indigenous content very limited, even with access to courses offered through First Nations University of Canada.
The students explained that they went out of their way to find courses about Indigenous experiences. They chose to audit classes and took additional courses beyond their formal academic program of study to learn about Indigenous Peoples. A participant from the audience added that, in her experience, the severely limited number of approved electives that she could take as an engineering student meant that she (and her classmates) could not learn about MMIW, let alone anything else to do with Indigenous experiences. In her case, she took courses beyond her program in order to address her individual learning needs.
The participants on the panel agreed that more attention to academic Indigenization was needed on our campus. They confirmed that the system failed to offer them even a basic understanding of anything related to social justice, let alone the specific content that would have helped them to better understand MMIW issues. One student noted that had she seen Indigenous Studies or Women’s and Gender Studies listed in the course catalogue under the Electives options, she probably would have taken one of those courses sooner in her program. As it turned out, she, like many of her classmates, read the electives list and saw “English, Sociology . . .” and chose English because it was first of the options. She explained that it wasn’t until her final year that she realized other options were available. The student voices panel served to remind participants about the priority for curricular reform on our campus.
At the conclusion of the three days of roundtable discussions, I illustrated the presenter narratives and the participant responses together into one large drawing. The image was intended to provide World Café participants (many who were not involved in the earlier roundtables) to quickly review the discussions held earlier in the week.
What emerged from the drawings was a clear need on the part of learners to have a re-centering of Indigenous content in the curriculum offered by our university. On the part of faculty, there was a desire to continue to ensure that Indigenous literature, issues, and pedagogies are practiced in our teaching work. I also understood that faculty and instructional staff required practical supports to help strengthen academic Indigenization including establishing a data base of teaching resources, developing workshops to support faculty on addressing racism in courses with Indigenous content, and the need for faculties to re-examine the selected elective choices and the order in which they are presented in the course catalogue. World Café participants understood from reviewing the image that students desired and needed academic programs that offered greater access to Indigenous content.
World Café Event
On March 27, we concluded the week-long MMIW symposium with a day-long event that was designed to further encourage discussion, creativity, and action planning with individuals committed to social justice. The organizing committee decided to use a World Café approach to facilitate community engagement.
The World Café approach is designed to encourage small group discussions (four to six people). The approach allows for a progressive series of conversations (approximately twenty minutes per round), with some participants changing tables between rounds to encourage a broad conversation. At the end, participants are encouraged to share discoveries and insights from all of their conversations. Participants are encouraged to draw, doodle, play, and link comments and ideas on paper provided. The vision for the World Café approach was not realized due to the smaller than anticipated number of participants. As a result, we modified the event to engage two groups in a facilitated session. The ultimate goal remained the same: to pool together the collective knowledge of the attendees with the aim of promoting a serious and open discussion regarding potential resolutions that may affect future policy changes and generate effective solutions to the current social epidemic of violence against Indigenous women.
To better reach a community-oriented audience, we decided to hold the World Café off campus. We recognized that the costs of parking on campus could be a deterrent for some members of the community. We were pleased that a local church community offered their kitchen and communal space for our purposes. The minister supported our request to begin and end our gathering in a smudge ceremony. Kokum Brenda Dubois was offered tobacco to begin the final day of the symposium in a good way; she offered participants an opportunity to smudge and she was invited to begin our discussions in prayer.
The communications strategy for this event included inviting members of First Nations and Métis organizations from Regina and beyond. Invitations were also sent to local organizations engaged in providing supports to families of MMIW (Newo Yotina Friendship Centre, Circle Project, Women of the Dawn Counselling Centre, All Nations Hope, Regina Alternative Measures Program, Regina Tribal Services, the YWCA, and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations – Women’s Commission). Several government representatives attended, as did members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), and members of the media, a bus driver, local police services, and the RCMP. This group included a mix of settler and Indigenous peoples as well as queer and straight peoples. Due to the number of participants, we restructured our event so that we had two table with six to ten people per table. Each table had a facilitator who was responsible for guiding the participants toward the questions and documenting their responses. I served as facilitator for the whole event.
Following introductions, I reviewed the roundtable discussions that had happened earlier in the week. In preparation, I had utilized visual facilitation methods to communicate the emerging themes from the round-tables. The visual images offered to World Café participants gave them an opportunity to see and hear how discussions on campus unfolded. Some participants commented that they were not surprised that so little is taught about MMIW on campus as in their experience the university offered very little content about Indigenous people either. Participants were able to identify terms they wanted to know more about, and they were invited to engage in deeper examinations of pre-professional training, the need for in-service training and proposed policy needs for each organization. Once the format of the World Café was explained to the larger group, the facilitators guided participants to refocus to their small group discussions.
During the facilitated discussion with the groups we began by identifying the root causes of the ongoing crisis of MMIW. The colonial and patriarchal nature of Canadian society was central to this first part of the discussion. Respondents identified a clear connection between colonization and its impact on education and the general lack of understanding between settler people and other more marginalized groups.
Questions to Guide the World Café Activity
To focus the discussions for the World Café activity, we identified broad questions that encouraged participants to respond from their various roles and lived experiences. In this case, I asked each group: Why are the rates of MMIW so high?
In response to the questions, participants shared stories about their understandings with one another. It was clear that their diversity allowed for a deeper examination of MMIW that included a recognition of intersectionality, understanding the matrix of oppressions, and a deep knowing about the effects of colonialism.
As participants spoke, group facilitators documented the findings on chart paper. One respondent began with a discussion about how Neoliberal policies including global issues of poverty, power, and the economy contribute to violence directed toward Indigenous women. Another participant added, that patriarchal systems of power, including legal systems, make violence socially acceptable. Within that patriarchal system Individualism is privileged at the expense of a community of care. This allows for greater levels of isolation, vulnerability, and violence, which are compounded by a lack of support networks. Individualism combined with social mobility is not attainable for all peoples and the myth of meritocracy.
In the second group, the discussion began with a conversation about the dehumanization of Indigenous women since colonization. They explored the evolution of stereotypes that devalue Indigenous women. Both groups addressed settler willful ignorance about colonialism and its effects; including, racism, stereotypes, and discrimination. To go further, participants also addressed the naivety of young people who often believe that violence won’t happen to them.
Both groups spoke in overlapping ways about patriarchy and colonialism. They wove together a story of how the interconnecting systemic issues of poverty, urbanization, over-representation of Indigenous peoples in the justice system, residential school impacts and the child welfare system all tie to lateral violence, and intergenerational trauma. At the same time, given that context, they wondered how when the “good life” is made unattainable, how do Indigenous people rise above. Participants reflected on how the messiness of colonialism and capitalism combined shift our focus to both individualism and meritocracy—ideals that only deepen the perception that victims of violence are responsible for their own troubles.
At various points in the conversation, participants refocused their attention toward an examination of white masculinity. They reminded one another that the issue of MMIW was not only a story about Indigenous women, but more importantly and often invisible in the discussion is the troubling ways in which white-settler masculinity has been created. The examples of Ternawetsky and Kummerfield were offered up for discussion. One participant relayed what she understood about this case. She described how the two students who killed Pamela George were described as boys by media and how they were simply looking to blow off some steam during the end of term.
Participants were also quick to note that not including queer and other ways of being a man also limited our examination of white-settler masculinity. Participants returned again and again to the question—how do we teach our boys to be men in ways that don’t center on violence?
Participants were invited to take a short refreshment break. When they returned the facilitators asked them to consider the following question: What are the first steps that individuals and families need to take when a person goes missing? Participants said, trust your instincts—you know your family members best; if it feels wrong it probably is wrong and don’t hesitate to begin to plan a response. This should include calling family and friends so that you can begin to document a timeline of sightings and a description of what the person was wearing. They suggested that you should check social media feeds to add depth to the timeline; begin to use social media to spread the word of a disappearance. Participants identified that concerned family members should also review the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) and the Sisters in Spirit website. Participants identified the need to work with families to establish a communications strategy. They recommended that families identify community agencies to contact such as public health outreach nurses and police services. They suggested that the local Street Worker Advocacy programs should be contacted if that applied to the situation. They wondered if any of the community agencies had developed a check-list of actions to take in response to a missing family member. They suggested that before families contacted media, they should establish a system for communicating updates. For example, they suggested that the family have one family representative be responsible for speaking with police and media.
They also noted that talking about prevention in your families was necessary. They suggested that individuals be encouraged to check on family members and friends regularly and to encourage young people to use the Find A Friend Apps and GPS on their phones.
After the lunch break, participants were asked: Who are the stakeholder groups and what are their roles in addressing MMIW in Regina and area? Participants identified the justice system, provincial government ministries and local community agencies as important to preventing and responding to incidences of violence directed toward Indigenous women. They concluded that the justice system must challenge the status quo and move more quickly toward significant policy and procedural changes. They stated that the Minister of Social Services needs to prioritize sufficient staffing levels and address staff burnout rates. The Ministry of Social Services needs to increase funding to support families, aligned with the well-documented needs in the province, and offer consistency in file transfers so families don’t have to continue to repeat themselves because of the lack of internal communication systems.
Participants suggested that Addictions and Counselling Services required more facilities for treatment, and different forms of addiction and trauma services. They need to ensure culturally responsive care and an increase in ethnic minority and Indigenous counsellors. Participants suggested that new access pathways to service and care that were designed with families and working people in mind would enhance service delivery.
One group suggested that there needs to be a community service hub to encourage inter-agency intervention planning with individuals and families in imminent danger. The other group suggested that while established governments, community agencies, and police services need to demonstrate commitment toward addressing this issue, they didn’t want the general public and advocacy groups to feel that they played no role. They suggested that individuals use social media and a unified voice to re-educate other members of society about the prevalence of violence directed toward Indigenous women. Participants pointed out that we need to mobilize to convince governments to spend the money now on prevention and education; and keep up constant pressure for policy reform.
As our day together drew to a close, facilitators redirected the participants to the final question: What actions are necessary to reduce the rates of violence directed toward Indigenous Women? Respondents reminded one another that change takes time. They called on one another to be dedicated, patient, and persistent. They said that we must work together to redefine notions of masculinity. They suggested that as individuals we needed to break down the dominant notion of individualism and move toward collective responsibility for all people and that we needed to reclaim empathy in our daily lives. Additionally, they suggested that settlers begin from an understanding of Indigenous traditional knowledges to disrupt colonial dominance and that, as Indigenous Peoples, we needed to reclaim, reaffirm, and recreate cultural identities.
Participants said we all have a responsibility to break down stereotypes in public education by liberating the positive stories of Indigenous peoples. They called on one another to establish long-term educational goals that included anti-racism and decolonization. They stated that we needed to educate about violence to transform all of our approaches to physical and sexual abuse; educate within professional programs. They suggested that all learners in K-12 as well as higher education be offered the opportunity to learn in northern, First Nation, and inner-city communities. The participants stated that youth need to be engaged in defining a way forward; one participant suggested that the Canadian Roots Exchange program could be one way of developing youth leaders. Another suggested that all learners should be introduced to diverse Elders; transformative curriculum practices; and should engage members of the dominant group in responding to the question: “What’s in it for us?” Participants did not shy away from challenging dominant colonial knowledges in education. They insisted that we transform the story of Canada to a more honest understanding of our collective colonial history and the resulting contemporary issues. They would like to see us engage in imagining a better Canada by reimagining what it means to be Canadian. Doing so would include a more honest examination of our racist past, white superiority, and ongoing colonialism.
Participants suggested that we utilize social media to tell different stories about Indigenous peoples and to challenge dominant ideas about them. They want us to transform media by telling a variety of stories and to re-centre stories of Indigenous women. They suggested that we could all play a role toward strengthening Indigenous identities and sense of worth and reform the dominant narrative about the lived experiences of Indigenous women.
As well, the participants were informed about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work and the long-awaited final report. The participants suggested that the path forward has to be framed by reconciliation. They suggested that all Canadians need to advocate to close the funding gap for Indigenous programs and to insist on poverty reduction among Indigenous Peoples.
As we drew closure to the day, we called both groups together. We created a circle and they were asked: What is the final message you want policy makers and others to hear? Each participant spoke in turn. One participant stated, “We need to decolonize our minds! We need to stop exoticizing the Indian. We need to teach about contemporary Indigenous lives.” Another affirmed the idea that MMIW were not just an individual issue and that this was a social societal problem. This idea was affirmed by another participant who stated that we have to work together, to create and sustain ally relationships. Someone said, “We need systemic change now,” and another person suggested that we needed resources allocated to redress violence, while the next person suggested we needed policies to address femicide and the institutional supports to entrench those policies.
As the day drew to a close, participants were asked to share one last reflection on the day and to make commitment for a take-away task. Kokum Brenda was asked to close the day with a prayer. As folks left the church, my administrative assistant (Moses Gordon) and I gathered the data together and reflected on the week. In the days that followed, we developed a final report for the Vice-President (Research); this chapter expands on that final report.
I found that the responses offered by the panelists and World Café participants provided helpful approaches to considering how to reform my own curriculum practice. As a professor actively engaged in enhancing our practice of academic Indigenization at the university, I feel that there is much we could be doing differently in relation to academic programming. I offer some suggestions that may be adopted by other universities and colleges.
Decolonizing Universities & Colleges
Universities and colleges need to ensure that academic Indigenization is respectfully resourced, not only financially but also through the creation of positions to drive these reforms. I recommend that faculties provide annual funding to Women’s and Gender Studies programs to develop and deliver MMIW courses. I suggest that university teaching centres promote anti-oppression and anti-racism teaching approaches to build the capacity of faculty to take up troubling dominant curricula and then require faculty to report on courses that include a critical examination of colonialism in Canada. Teaching centres can promote workshops, events, and activities that support informal learning about Indigenous issues, experiences, and pedagogies.
A quick way to implement structural changes in the university is to ensure that Women’s and Gender Studies and Indigenous Studies courses are privileged through naming them first in course catalogue elective offerings. We need to also encourage cross-referencing of courses across discipline to offer greater access and acceptance of Indigenous courses.
A longer term decolonial action would be to reframe the liberal arts to support interdisciplinary inquiry into large issues such as Indigenous land/water rights and on-going settler colonialism. These suggested approaches offer some approaches that could reform higher education in Canada, and they would allow for deeper levels of academic decolonization.
Troubling Curricula through Decolonization
I suggest that, in order for more systemic changes to be achieved, faculty must confront epistemic ignorance and cognitive imperialism through decolonizing practices that include the following: (1) Ensure that courses that address settling Canada also address the systemic racism that underpinned colonization, (2) explore the violence of settlement, and (3) unpack the colonial myth that we are a country founded on multiculturalism. Courses also need to introduce Indigenous worldviews as taught by local Elders and with traditional Knowledge Keepers and should model the use of Indigenous languages to describe concepts and experiences, recognize place names, and explore theory.
In order for faculty to take up decolonial work well, they must be prepared to respond to racisms as it emerges in the classroom. They will also need to be prepared to critique colonial constructions of masculinity and sexual orientation. Building faculty capacity to teach in this way means they will have to compile resource lists that support MMIW teaching and learning. They must also be prepared to seek out new relationships with Indigenous colleagues, guest speakers, public intellectuals/scholars/elders who may help them to continue to grow personally and professionally. Faculty may have to explore alternative pedagogies including arts-based, and Indigenous pedagogy in their own teaching work to reduce trauma and inspire a community of care. These new orientations toward teaching work may lay the groundwork for reforming teaching practices.
Indigenizing Teaching Practices
Indigenizing teaching practice should begin with re-centering Indigenous scholars and scholarship with an emphasis on the voices of women, youth, and members of gender diverse communities. By re-centering these voices, we cannot help but address the issues of gendered violence. Indigenizing teaching practices can also be informed by land-based learning experiences and by interacting with local community organizations, elders, and community members as sources of knowledge.
Conclusion
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Symposium responded to Prime Minister Harper’s comment that MMIW issues were “not high on [his government’s] radar.” Since then, Canadians have seen a change in government, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) release of their Calls to Action (2015), and the completion of a national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. With so much attention on these issues nationally, we, as educators, must play our part to correct systemic ignorance by actively participating in both institutional decolonization and Indigenization. We must engage in troubling curriculum. To not do so means we fail not only Indigenous Peoples but also fail members of the dominant group who do not understand their roles and responsibilities toward reconciliation.
1. Author Note: The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Symposium (2015) would not have been possible without the generous support from the Vice-President (Research) at the University of Regina. The chapter is informed by the final report presented to the Symposium planning committee by the author. The author acknowledges the support provided by Moses Gordon (term administrative assistant) and Mike Dubois (events planner). Moses was instrumental in collating the data gathered during the World Café event.Correspondence concerning this chapter should be addressed to Shauneen Pete, Indigenous Resurgence Coordinator, Indigenous Education Department, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/07%3A_Decolonizing_Postsecondary_Institutions/7.01%3A_Troubling_Curricula-_Teaching_and_Learni.txt |
Brenda Anderson[1]
As a non-Indigenous person who has directly benefitted from the colonization of prairie soil into white settler farmland, I am confronted with the question of what roles and responsibilities I now have in my privileged position as a white feminist academic choosing to be a witness to the past and an ally for the future. The issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) was the catalyst for turning my questions into action. The repeated horror of listening to news stories and reading posters on pharmacy windows asking, “Have you seen . . . Please call . . .” led me to ask Indigenous women—Elders, activists, mothers and daughters—what key lessons a non-Indigenous ally needs to learn about standing alongside, and how those with social privilege can make space for things to happen.
This chapter is a practical reflection on my experiences since 2008 of teaching a university course on MMIW with an emphasis on Indigenous and feminist methodologies and pedagogies. I write in the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation process, which has challenged all Canadians to locate themselves in the narrative of colonialism and commit to the full acknowledgement of our joint history, no matter how painful, as a means of beginning reconciliation. I write mainly for those who may wish to teach in this area, as I move back and forth between theoretical questions and personal observations from the classroom. I challenge readers, as I challenge students, to consider whether Canada needs to name our historic and current treatment of Indigenous women as femicide, as has been done in countries like Guatemala and Mexico, in order to acknowledge not only the violence but the complicit acceptance of this phenomenon within our social and legal fabric.
Three ethical questions guide my teaching: what are effective steps that can be taught to non-Indigenous allies to facilitate movement through the inevitable but immobilizing “white guilt” to a more productive and accountable position of witnessing or standing alongside; how do we teach about trauma without further traumatizing, particularly for Indigenous students for whom this has tragically become a personal journey or, to put another way, how do we equip our future activists with concrete tools for self-care to prepare them to redress violence and inequity; what theoretical feminist and Indigenous methodologies work well in bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous students together in community-engaged research. These themes are reflected throughout this chapter as I discuss content and pedagogy. I conclude by offering a sample syllabus for a third-year Women’s and Gender Studies course called MMIW: A Global Perspective.
The course is designed to teach students about the history of colonialism in Canada and its effects on all Canadians in general, but Indigenous Canadians in particular and Indigenous women and girls specifically. A theoretical emphasis on the intersections of racism, sexism, capitalism, and neo-liberalism, among many other layers of oppression, demands that the students and I recognize our own personal location in the oppression or experiences of oppression. The majority of students are females from white settler backgrounds, along with a number of self-identified Indigenous and Métis students, and one or two from more recent immigrant backgrounds. We usually number about thirty students, which is ideal for table-talk exercises designed to blend analysis with personal debriefing opportunities.
From the Local to the Global and Back Again
The course is modelled after the goals and principles that guided a 2008 conference held in Regina, SK on missing and murdered Indigenous women. The conference created a forum for voices to be heard from a variety of social locations and professional perspectives that address this issue with their particular lens; to formulate a global analysis of colonialist gender violence from which we can recognize patterns of violence that occur in Canada; and to care for the whole person in this painful recognition that the problem goes far further and deeper than the individual acts of a few violent men. I bring those principles into the classroom with the 2008 MMIW conference proceedings, Torn from our Midst: Voices of Grief, Healing and Action from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Conference, 2008 (Anderson, Kubik, and Hampton 2010). To move forward, we cannot afford to scapegoat any one group in Canada (e.g., police, media, government), lest it mollify our own complicity in a colonialist country. In fact, perspectives from all areas are needed to grasp the full complexity of how a colonialist and sexist nation was originally created and is currently perpetuated. The global nature of colonialist violence against Indigenous women and the subsequent resistance movements clarifies what happens in our own backyard and offers paths forward on redressing the problems.
We begin the semester by locating the history of Indigenous women within Canada’s pioneering history through showing their relationship to white settlers. We discuss the Pocahontas-squaw motif described by Janice Acoose in IskwewakKah’ Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princesses Nor Easy Squaws to illustrate how and why the fantastical Native is framed in our national imagination as either the noble, exotic savage to be conquered or as the beast of burden to be despised or pitied (49). We move to current media representations of Indigenous women, particularly the stories of victimized women, and pay attention to the language used and the assumptions made. These representations are juxtaposed with personal stories shared by family members who visit the classroom. Journalists also talk with us, and one in particular recounts how her representation of the issue has changed as she became more aware of Canada’s history and of the personal stories from families. Journalism students accept the challenge to change the narrative when they enter the workforce. Resisting the historic pattern of blaming the victim is possible when white settler language and assumptions become recognizable and students see the opportunities they have to shape the national narrative of MMIW.
Although I begin the course with Canadian history, I frame violence against Indigenous women in the global context, examining Mexico, Guatemala, and Australia. Moving outside our own frame of reference illustrates that colonialism survives off violence against brown-skinned women everywhere, for even though each country has its own unique history, the violence is replicated in similar ways. For instance, the effects of neo-liberal trade agreements connect misogyny with economics. Activists in Mexico and Canada bring attention to the decline of local artisan’s sales, particularly detrimental to Indigenous women, when multinational companies are allowed to become monopolies (Erno 2010, 57). They attest to the governmental and military violence perpetrated in Mexican towns, such as San Salvador Attenco where attempts to remove Indigenous people from their land in preparation for free trade plans, including premeditated kidnapping and raping women (Perez 2010). Pastor Kim Erno’s analysis of the effects of neo-liberal economics on Indigenous women pinpoints their vulnerability for “exclusion, exploitation, expulsion, (and finally) extermination” (60). Students are asked to locate if, and where, these stages occur for Canadian Indigenous women.
Mexican gender roles were shaped by eighteenth-century wars between the Spanish, by Catholic conquerors, by the manifest destiny that gave “permission” for American frontiersman to expand and conquer the continental United States (M. Anderson 2007, 22), and by the Mexican revolutionaries. Continuing today as the hegemonic masculine ideal, the caudillo (military strong man) became “rooted in the family” as the independent breadwinner in contrast to the idealised feminine of domestic production (Healy 2008, 5). When neo-liberal economics no longer support traditional livelihoods, instead favouring young, easily coerced women as workers in sweatshops (Portillo), traditional machismo roles are displaced and increased domestic violence makes women vulnerable at home as well as at work (Healy 2008, 154). Women’s deaths in the maquiladoras (sweatshops) in northern frontier cities, such as Ciudad Juarez, have been linked to the lethal blend of frustrated misogyny, neoliberal economics, political corruption, and drug cartels (Bowden 1998).
Recent works on Canadian Indigenous masculinities, such as Sam McKegney’s (2014) MASCULINIDIANS: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood, mark a similar pattern for Indigenous men. The class discusses displacement of traditional male roles from an economic, social and spiritual perspective. The systemic exclusion, exploitation, expulsion and extermination of Indigenous people through Canada’s reserve system, residential “schools,”[2] the 60s scoop, increased foster care and incarceration, and the resulting rise in gangs and exploitative forms of the sex trade and sex-trafficking reads like a global manual on colonialism.
Identifying global patterns of dislocation and alienation from traditional social values encourages students to see Canada’s history differently. But distant stories aren’t enough, so I invite professionals who work with MMIW to tell about their experiences and tell the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Police officers from the missing persons unit discuss local cases; hearing about the lack of necessary resources and support for family members allow students to see how individuals often struggle within the systems purportedly designed to provide assistance. In contrast, government policymakers from the Saskatchewan Provincial Partnership on Missing Persons have shown what is possible when things are done differently, when all voices, including government official, representative from social organizations, and victims’ families, are present at the table (Pottruff 2010). Speakers from local activist groups, such as Sisters in Spirit or Amnesty International, ensure we hear firsthand how systems of governance replicate the oppression against First Peoples generally and Indigenous women specifically. In one three-hour class, students see a PowerPoint presentation with the faces of Indigenous women from Saskatchewan who have gone missing or been murdered, listen to police and provincial government responses, and write names of those who have most recently been taken onto an Amnesty banner. It becomes not just a question of the need for correct information and education, but shows students the measure of power, or lack of power, those who work within government have. The students begin to ask what challenges they will face if they find themselves working in police, judicial, or social work capacities.
What I have observed over the years of teaching this class is the increasing number of Indigenous people employed in the professions who are able to bring their stories of what it is like working within a white-dominated profession on issues that may be near to their own experiences. How it changes the messages and perceptions when an Indigenous journalist or police officer tells the story! That problematic perception of white settlers “helping” Indigenous people dissipates when everyone is understood as an active and essential agent for change. The balance of power is slowly but incrementally shifting, and students take note of that change.
Moving beyond Canada again, the familiar pattern of British colonialism in Australia mirrors the historic violence against Indigenous women here. The racist notion of “breeding out” Indigenous blood inspired the creation of the half-caste system in Australia. It is a jolting reminder of the intentions and consequences of Canada’s Indian Act and Bill C-31, particularly in its implications for Indigenous women who experience the double burden of sexist and racist ideologies (2010, 75). My class examines the Australian half-caste “school”[3] system through the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence because it opens up space to speak about the potential of re-traumatizing people when their stories are told by outsiders (Noyce 2002). Is it helpful, harmful, or both to recount stories of girls being torn away from their mother’s and auntie’s arms and driven away to the school when the actors themselves experienced that very trauma when they were girls? Is it okay for a white male director, no matter how sympathetic, to direct Aboriginal girls to “get in touch with the pain” of trying to return to their families when they may suffer from intergenerational trauma?
In the Canadian context, the film The Healing Circle describes Canada’s residential schools and the complicity of the churches in carrying out the government’s program of cultural genocide. The film was created by the Anglican Church of Canada as one of their earlier reconciliation projects. It portrays the history of the schools and their lasting effects on the children and on the adults from whose arms the children were torn, who experienced such a massive cultural disruption in terms of family norms, cultural values, spirituality, languages, governance structures and land-based knowledge. The class discusses intergenerational trauma and connects today’s increased domestic violence within Indigenous communities to the unaddressed trauma of the residential school system. The intentionality behind the deliberate actions of the residential school system is stark, and Canadians can no longer wilfully think of the present as an unfortunate and unintended consequence of centuries-old practices.
What students find most disturbing about the film, perhaps, are comments made by the teachers. Although most of the teachers in the film express considerable confusion over why they felt it was the right thing to do at the time, some say it was, and would still be, an appropriate response to “the Indian problem.” Naturally, this raises the youthful ire of the classroom. However, it is not as simple as blaming people from the past. Anglican priest Cheryl Toth speaks to this response. She calmly notes to the class,
While I understand you being upset at those types of comments, as am I, I’d like to suggest that many of us in this room, compelled to be here because of our sense of justice and wanting to make this a better world, might in fact have been amongst those who taught and worked in the residential schools. The sad and frightening fact is that many of those well-intentioned people genuinely felt they were helping those children.
This is met with silence because the next logical question is, “what am I doing right now that I think is helpful that might be looked at decades from now with similar horror?” Perhaps this is the strongest message to non-Indigenous students: the best role of an ally is to learn to stand alongside the efforts of those who have experienced the abuse and to ask what they need in order to reconcile the past and move forward.
The compelling notion of deep healing helps move students forward to a new narrative in Canada. To begin helping students discover that narrative, I first contrast it to the concept of deep colonizing as the covert “practices . . . embedded in the institutions that are meant to reverse processes of colonisation” (Rose 1996, 1), which Deborah Bird Rose raises in the Australian context of land claims procedures. She describes Aboriginal peoples’ gendered relationships to the land and how deep colonizing continues to erase Aboriginal women when this relationship is ignored in modern land claims court challenges (3). Differentiated sacred spaces traditionally demand women’s voices be present at the negotiating table, yet court practice has been to exclude them (4), which neglects knowledge to be gained from understanding which spaces, with their associated rituals, are, indeed, sacred to Indigenous women. Deep colonizing is the erasure of women’s presence in sacred rituals and court systems alike under the guise of land claims talks. The questions students can pose in the Canadian context are, what form does deep colonizing take in Canadian legal treaty contestations and environmental challenges? And what does the absence or presence of women at our highest courts say about our national views on Indigenous women?
In contrast, deep healing becomes a form of active witnessing associated with everything from sacred rituals to legal procedures. Family members of the missing and murdered, Elders, and Indigenous leaders require intentional, deep listening from the rest of Canada. How do students imagine deep healing could happen in Canada’s court systems during trials relating to missing and murdered women? How will deep colonizing be replaced by deep healing in the Canadian context? Considering the original narrative, and how that can lead to important questions about systemic erasure of Indigenous women, helps students understand their role in changing harmful practices.
With this wealth of global and national stories interwoven throughout the semester, we arrive at a point where the class debates whether the word femicide fits our national context. My colleague, Leonzo Barreno, originally from Guatemala, describes that country’s struggle with drug cartels and female mules (drug couriers who often don’t know they are carrying drugs) who disappear along the drug routes to North America. He shows how activists in Guatemala and Mexico define femicide in terms of not only enculturated violence against Indigenous women and girls but also in the nation’s complicity with its denial of any systemic problem (2010, 71). A national inquiry in Canada—particularly when led by family members and the findings and recommendations of Sisters in Spirit researchers and backed by legislative deep healing across the country—can redress Canada’s femicide. Acknowledging its existence is the first step towards prevents it.
Weaving the local and global contexts together throughout the semester allows students to recognize patterns, reorganize their perspectives and priorities, learn about global efforts to end violence against Indigenous women, and commit to effective decolonizing and deep healing in Canada. The commitment is crucial for the well-being of all who call this land home—Indigenous Peoples, newcomers, settlers, and my students.
Accountability and Belonging in a Classroom Community
Locating ourselves in this issue is a thread throughout the course. I relate my story of growing up in a farming community that did not acknowledge its white privilege. Racism was assumed, rarely challenged. In its best light, this at least affords me an awareness of what white guilt and tears of shame are all about and how, as the late Elder Ken Goodwill advised me, they are neither required nor wanted. I learned that my heritage as the grandchild of a white Scottish settler from Prince Edward Island gives me certain insights into the task of reconciliation. I can tell where other’s white privilege turns to white guilt. The class discusses those terms, and how neither can be the default position of an ally. When we learn about a history that has been withheld from us, despite twelve years of grade school and university classes, and learn of its direct consequences in every Canadian life, we often feel rage and shed tears. Tempered, that realization becomes motivational. Untempered, it can lead to dissociation, as evidenced in rhetorical questions like, “how could they have done that to other human beings?” Carol Schick and Verna St. Davis note the essential task of pressing students to realize the they is them, today, now (57). Just as men need to stand alongside feminists, non-Indigenous allies need to move from the historical to the present and from the “tsk tsk” to a personal awareness of, and accountability for, their own white privilege. That transforms pity into deep healing.
White guilt is often accompanied by its fellow traveller, trauma. The potential for triggering students who themselves have suffered from abuse is real. I am not a psychologist, nor should a professor assume a counselling role. What I can provide is a number of ways to become aware of our own trauma. I tell the students I am concerned about the effects that studying trauma has on our classroom community, including myself. I bring in a psychologist to talk about the symptoms of, and responses to, post-traumatic stress disorder. I ask students to carefully consider whether this class is suitable for them given their own experiences. It is not uncommon to have students in the class who have had a family member stolen from them. Students are asked to talk about what they already do in terms of self-care. What are the simple habits we do but usually forget at the peak of semester deadlines? When do we know that we need a break from the topic? We share our simple stories and ways, discuss the efficacies of friendship, support groups, spending time in nature, and, if necessary, speaking with counsellors available at the university. Students are required to continue to assess their own capacity to respond to trauma as part of their journal reflections.
I have to be comfortable with how making space for things to happen means relinquishing control. I don’t know what the guest speakers are going to say or how the students will respond. Students tell me that they go home to “have a good cry.” Sometimes what they hear is upsetting because they don’t agree with the speaker—what a wonderful opportunity to analyze the problems! It makes a difference to the students to point out that the fact they are in this class means they are already contributing towards the reconciliation process.
The notions of accountability and belonging within the classroom are often new constructs for students. One transformative learning tool is the interactive “blanket exercise.” This was developed by KAIROS to involve people in re-enacting the history and effects of colonialism on First Peoples and can be led by anyone who is comfortable working with groups and with sensitive material. My college has partnered with the Canadian Roots Exchange Program to form a reconciliation team of young adult leaders made up of Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth. The effect of students sitting on blankets, only to be moved or removed from this Turtle Island of blankets as the history is recounted, including a narrative on MMIW, is profound. When followed by a talking circle, the experience and learning time lead to a very personal accountability. The movement of the body engages and commits the whole person to the story. As one student noted to me, it made her feel physically connected to Canada’s history.
This can be a painful experience for Indigenous participants. One student told me that, although his family was affected by the residential schools, he had been kept largely in the dark about the stories. This was the first time he had “felt” the history. Although it is a sobering exercise, it shows what educational decolonization looks like. Acknowledging the past moves the nation forward; the blanket exercise creates witnesses who are now accountable to the decolonizing process. A relationship is established between the past and the present, not to mention between the participants.
Recognizing the intersections of sexism and racism for Indigenous women is heavy work. Intersectional feminist and Indigenous practices both emphasise that the personal is political. Melding the two into Indigenous feminism combines principles of individual rights with social accountability and the theoretical understandings of the intersections of oppression and privilege. Indigenous feminism echoes traditional Indigenous practices, such as the talking circle and the teaching of balancing personal rights with social accountabilities. What has been particularly appreciated by students is my adaptation of Kim Anderson’s work from Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine. Anderson uses the teachings from Elders to counsel inner city youth about how the four stages in life—birth, childhood, adult, and elder—bring membership and ownership to the whole community. In each stage, a balance is struck between personal accountability and the reciprocal knowledge that one belongs to a caring community. As babies bring joy, they require safety and nurturance. As youth bring energy and new questions, they require teachings and guidance. As the middle-aged provide material wealth, they require their children to be guided and sustained by Elders. Elders bring their time and knowledge; they require care and respect. Feminist? Indigenous? The labels matter not, but the teaching means a blending of the individualist and the collectivist with the aim of a healthy community. This portrayal of the ideal community is offered not to romanticize and locate Indigenous teachings in the past, nor is it to be understood as essentialist or normative. It is offered as non-gendered guiding principles that identify needs and gifts throughout our life journeys. Balancing notions of individual rights with accountability and social duty underscores what powerful decisions students can make in their lives.
An Indigenous feminist approach that redresses issues of violence against Indigenous women is found in Lina Sunseri’s book Being Again of One Mind: Oneida Women and the Struggle for Decolonization. Laying the personal stories of women—mothers, daughters, Elders, activists—alongside the history of the Haudenosaunee nation, the book illustrates how Oneida women have negotiated the meanings of traditional womanhood as the drummers of the nation (2011, 16) and by “mothering a nation” (126), with the feminist commitment to non-essentialist gender roles. This understanding is not linked to reproduction but to all who “sustain the community and (support) women’s achievement of self-empowerment” (131). The process of students evaluating methods of decolonization situated in women’s self-empowerment speaks directly to redressing the vulnerability of Indigenous women and girls in Canada. Who are our nation’s drummers and mothers?
In her work on “de-centering damage,” Indigenous theorist Eve Tuck calls attention to the damage that is done when the focus remains on the victimization of Indigenous people. Not only does it maintain the hegemonic meta-narrative of settler culture as the source of liberation from colonialist policies, language and systems, it instills and perpetuates the victim imagery in its language and very focus. For me, it even raises the question of whether it is appropriate or legitimate for an ally, a non-Indigenous person, to teach this class. Currently, I continue my commitment in the belief that it models a way of moving forward together, but to do this, I have to reiterate my commitment for making space for things to happen. Like Tuck, I believe the answer rests in showing the power within Indigenous knowledge systems and the roles of Indigenous female leaders both historically and currently. Readings, films and guest speakers can bring that forward every single class. Literature by Indigenous authors such as Teresa Marie Mailhot in her 2018 book Heartberries: A Memoir resonates with students, as do taped lectures on land and treaty rights by Mi’kmaw lawyer Pam Palmater (Woodrow Lloyd) or videos of the Algonquin Water Song (Jerome). Perhaps most importantly, finding ways for students to become involved in local and global Indigenous communities, spiritual ceremonies and activist work inscribes new ways of knowing and might prevent prescriptive colonialist practices. In ways such as these, change does not “rely upon the benevolence of the state or of the dominant in society” (Tuck Toward 17). Ultimately, it is my belief that the next person to teach this class must be herself Indigenous. This isn’t merely a question of representation, it is about ensuring that we are not content with the consciousness-raising or educational phase of change, but rather, as Tuck again reminds us, be willing to radically question what “change” even means (I Do Not Want to Haunt You).
Conclusion
This is the most difficult course that I teach. The reconciliation process that academics can engage in—must engage in—makes us all vulnerable, as a nation, as a community, as an individual. But vulnerable to what? To painful and often unresolved stories, certainly, but also vulnerable to change. A national inquiry on MMIW, the gifts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the growing leadership from within Indigenous women’s circles, means the nation’s deep healing work can begin. There is hope. The students who, of their own initiative, bring the REDress Project to campus, who hold awareness nights on MMIW, who faithfully attend the Sisters in Spirit annual vigils, and who demonstrate, ring bells and say, “Not One More! Ni Una Mas!” show that each and every one of us has an integral part to play in countering and ending our nation’s legacy of femicide. This is no fairy tale with a guaranteed happy ending, but we are capable of unwinding ourselves from the colonial project, and we are capable of weaving a new future. The evidence is already before us in the writing of this book.
1. This essay was originally published in Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada and is published here with the permission of Demeter Press.
2. I use quotation marks around school as a form of literary decolonization to raise the question of whether this term should continue to be used given the overall lack of education received by children. For more information on adult's experiences in trying to obtain jobs with their diploma, see Topahedewin: The Gladys Cook Story. For ease of reading, subsequent uses will not use quotation marks, but they are implied throughout.
3. Mission schools in Australia, much like residential schools in Canada, were ways to manipulate and control Aboriginal adults and children. They were political, rather than educational institutions that were open from 1864 to 1964. Successive governments characterized Aboriginal people as “helpless children” who needed to be protected from themselves and integrated into white Australian society (McCallum 2017). | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/07%3A_Decolonizing_Postsecondary_Institutions/7.02%3A_Pedagogical_Considerations_on_Teaching_M.txt |
Jennifer Brant
Woman’s body found beaten beyond recognition.
You sip your coffee
Taking a drag of your smoke
Turning the page
Taking a bite of your toast
Just another day
Just another death
Just one more thing you easily forget
You and your soft, sheltered life
Just go on and on
For nobody special from your world is gone
(Sarah de Vries, shared in Maggie de Vries 2003, 233)
The above words are shared in “a poem that resonates with particular force now that [Sarah] is gone” (233). Missing Sarah: A memoir of loss honours the story of Sarah de Vries, one of the women who went missing from the downtown East side of Vancouver. Her sister wrote the memoir describing it as a “collaboration between two sisters, one living and one dead” (268). By drawing on Sarah’s journals, Maggie brings forth a powerful message; one that Sarah wanted people to hear. For as Maggie writes “throughout her journals, she addresses a readership. When she wrote, she imagined readers. She imagined you” (xv).
Sarah’s words express the lack of value placed on Indigenous women but also serve as a profound call for action. Indigenous women have been actively working to bring the issue of racialized and sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls to the forefront. They have been doing so through creative acts of resistance such as poetry, literature, artwork, craft, and film. Their work not only raises awareness, demands action, and invokes compassion; it also serves as a counternarrative to the victim-blaming stories often presented about Indigenous women. Within a society that devalues Indigenous women, Sarah’s poem demands that Indigenous women and girls are valued. Her poem also addresses an important truth—that too many people turn a blind eye to this crisis.
This chapter prompts readers to delve into the Indigenous women’s literature that shares the hard truths expressed in Sarah de Vries’ poem. I will reflect on my own experiences teaching Indigenous women’s literature courses and offer a glimpse into the literatures that students are called on to theorize. My intent is to share the power and truth of Indigenous women’s words and call upon readers to consider the lessons that are embedded throughout their stories. As we work to put an end to the racialized and sexualized violence that threatens Indigenous women and girls, Indigenous literatures must become part of the informed national dialogue.
I first became aware of the extent and severity of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls during my last year as an undergraduate student at Brock University in 2006. Later that same year, our community was planning a twenty-four-hour drum feast to bring awareness to Amnesty International’s Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to the Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada and ultimately to honour our stolen sisters, their families, and promote community healing. Two years later, I began working for student services at the local college where I noticed a poster on the wall of a missing woman from Six Nations of the Grand River, my family’s home reserve. I did not know who Tashina General was at the time but coming from the small and close-knit community of Six Nations, I would soon learn that she was well known to family and friends from the Six Nations community.
I completed my master’s degree and became more involved in the Indigenous academic community and attending academic conferences. There are many differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous conferences. For example, ceremony and the presence of Elders and Traditional Knowledge Holders tend to be prominent at Indigenous conferences and the events are opened in a traditional manner to bring attendees together, establish relationship building, and honour the good mind teachings that are important to a successful gathering. A common occurrence during these traditional openings is a moment of silence to honour a young woman or girl who is missing from the local community or the community of an attendee. In these moments, we stand in solidarity and offer our support for the families who have lost a loved one. This is a disheartening reminder of the violence surrounding Indigenous women and girls. The moment of silence is also a constant reminder of the racialized and sexualized violence that all Indigenous women in the room are faced with. The shared threat of violence became strikingly clear as I pursued my research on Indigenous women’s educational experiences.
My research involved revealing the barriers that Indigenous women face within university institutions and promoting both access and success. I learned general statistics on Indigenous women in education, and I quickly realized that the statistics I was using in my research mirrored the statistics of both Indigenous women in prison as outlined by the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies as well as Indigenous women who are missing and murdered as documented by Amnesty International. As I did my research, I developed a statement that reflects my reality as an Indigenous woman in Canada.
As an Indigenous woman in Canada, I can anticipate a life-expectancy rate that is ten years less than that of other women in Canada (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996). Data from the Canadian Population Health Initiative tell me that I belong to the unhealthiest group in the country. As an Indigenous woman, I am likely to earn 30 percent less than non-Aboriginal women. I am three times more likely to contact HIV, and I am five times more likely to die as a result of violence (Amnesty International 2009).
In addition to the above statistics, I can reasonably expect to face racism from police officers, health care professionals, and the children’s aid society. In fact, it is reasonable to fear that family and children’s services will intervene in my life at some point; as a younger mom this fear was constant. The threat of state apprehension is common among Indigenous women regardless of our credentials as shared by the late Patricia Monture-Angus, lawyer and professor, in her work Thunder in my Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (1995). In her book, Patricia shares her own experiences with the child welfare system, describing the time she took her infant son to the hospital for a broken arm, later found to be the result of a bone disorder. Noting that the doctors at the hospital “vigorously pursued the abuse allegation” and “laughed when they heard [her] professional credentials,” she described her experience as being “of layer upon layer of racist treatment” (208). Her son was taken from her for eight days. Monture-Angus notes the fear of taking her children to the doctors knowing how easy another allegation of abuse can occur. In a country where Indigenous women are flown into a hospital to have their babies delivered and leave with tubal litigations as a result of being coerced into a procedure following birth, often during moments of vulnerability, the connection between fear and ongoing violence in the places we should feel safe is clear. I understand this threat as an extension of settler colonial violence as I will describe later.
As I moved forward with my research, the continued examples of violence haunted me. I was completing my master’s thesis and in my first year as a sessional instructor teaching Indigenous women’s literature when I found out that Loretta Saunders, an Inuk woman, was missing. Loretta had been working on her undergraduate thesis on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls when she went missing. Her disappearance brought a new lens to the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls for the approximately twenty Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in my class. The class was delivered through a seminar style that allowed for engaged discussion and personal connections to course material.
The Indigenous women’s literature course highlights the connection between stereotypes in mainstream literature, media and film to the high rates of sexualized and racialized violence against Indigenous women and girls. Extending this, I share the work Indigenous women are doing by counteracting these stereotypes and presenting positive images of Indigenous womanhood. The stories highlight the bravery, the warriorship, and the resilience of our women who overcome extensive tragedy and are still standing tall and sharing beautiful stories of cultural transmission. I have now taught Indigenous women’s literature for seven years and other Indigenous-focused courses that cover the topic of violence against Indigenous women and girls. I teach to raise awareness and bring honour to the stories of the women and girls and their families and to position Indigenous women’s literature as a counternarrative to racialized, sexualized and colonial violence.
In my first five years of teaching, I would survey the class to find out how many students were aware of the topic. In most classes, only one or two students would raise their hand to indicate they were aware of the extent of the violence. The students who were aware were among the Indigenous students in my class. In my sixth year of teaching, this changed; half of the class, Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, raised their hands. For the most part this was because the launch of the National Public Inquiry had been all over the news. Finally a different kind of media coverage, or so I thought.
In August 2014, fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine disappeared. Her body was later found in Winnipeg’s Red River while police were searching for a missing man whose disappearance was unrelated to Tina’s. I will not repeat all of the insensitive headlines of the news reports that were released when Tina’s body was found, but I would like to highlight the words of Winnipeg’s Police Sgt. John O’Donovan who declared, “She’s a child. This is a child that has been murdered . . . Society should be horrified” (National Post). Tina’s case became part of the push for immediate action as Indigenous women and allies across the country demanded action from the federal government of Canada. On December 8, 2015, the Government of Canada announced plans for the launch of an independent national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The government pledged \$53.86 million over the course of two years for the inquiry and held a “pre-inquiry” to seek input from stakeholders across Canada.
In some ways, when I consider that over fifty reports with 700 recommendations have already been put forth, I am reluctant to put my faith in the inquiry. Moreover, we have seen a significant number of commissioners and other staff resign from the commission as it appears this is not the inquiry that Indigenous communities have asked for; Indigenous people and allies have a deep-layered understanding of why Indigenous women and girls remain the target of violence. Indigenous women’s narratives echo this understanding, and, through literature, have been calling for attention to the misrepresentations of Indigenous women and girls for well over a hundred years, as I will elaborate below.
The legacy of Tina Fontaine also highlights this deep-layered understanding. Tina was failed by a number of people leading up to her disappearance. For one, she was a child who was in the care of Winnipeg’s Family and Children’s Services and she was being housed in a hotel with minimal supervision. For a moment, consider the word ‘care’ and remember that she was, in fact, a child left alone in a hotel room by child protection services. As a mother of a fifteen-year-old, I am horrified and heartbroken when I think about the lack of care for her safety and well-being. Tina was in contact with hospital staff only hours before her disappearance and was a passenger in a vehicle that was pulled over by two officers who let the vehicle go after asking a few questions. The officers allowed this man to drive off with Tina even though she was listed as a missing person.
Earlier this year, the Globe and Mail released a victim-blaming report titled: “Toxicologist testifies Tina Fontaine had drugs, alcohol in system when she died.” This report, published on January 30, 2018, is only one more insensitive and shameful response to the death of an Indigenous child. As the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs noted, the article “helps shape the discourse on the bigger issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.” Moreover, as Grand Chief Arlen Dumas wrote, “it isn’t until the fourth paragraph that the reporter reveals that the alcohol and THC levels could be artificially high.” Further, Arlen Dumas pointed out that “most readers do not read that far into a story. . . . the public opinion has already been formed. It was formed with the headline” (Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Open Letter).
As an educator on these issues, I am far too familiar with the kind of public opinion that demonstrates the effects of victim-blaming headlines when it comes to issues of racialized and sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada. Intertwined within the grand narratives that racialize and sexualize Indigenous women and girls are a slew of other ideas that manifest in the multiple stereotypes reflected in normalized experiences of racism. In #NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women, stories of the effects of these stereotypes are expressed by Indigenous women. Co-editor Lisa Charleyboy dedicates the collection to “every Indigenous woman who has ever been called ‘Pocahontas.’ ” I have personally been referenced by the name numerous times and, like the contributors of #NotYourPrincess, have been on the receiving end of seemingly harmless comments.
Similar stereotypes are initially held by students when they enter my courses. Now, with a distinct shift in the number of students who have heard of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, from one or two to nearly the entire class, I better understand the perceptions they hold about the reasons for violence against Indigenous women and girls in this country. One of the questions that I am often asked is why so many Indigenous women are involved in the sex trade. Yes, some women are involved in the sex trade at the time they go missing; this does not make their lives any less valuable than the lives of other women. The opening poem by Sarah de Vries makes this point clear. However, contrary to what media reporting has led the public to believe, only a percentage of Indigenous women are involved in the sex trade when they go missing. Others are children in state care and some are university students. Making assumptions that perpetuate victim-blaming narratives further removes settlers from the violence, which they believe exists in particular areas from which they are far removed. Perhaps this notion of being far removed allows others to remain untroubled and undisturbed; to completely ignore the violence and easily digest what is happening along with their morning toast as the opening poem by Sarah de Vries points out.
Surely such perceptions are, in part, informed by the prevalent victim-blaming headlines along with a long history of harmful stereotypes against Indigenous Peoples. Some students express their belief that Indigenous men are the perpetrators of the majority of violence against Indigenous women and make remarks about the consequences of the high-risk lifestyles that Indigenous people lead, akin to the “Indian Problem” narrative. Sarah Hunt articulates the connection between the media reports and the “Indian Problem” narrative by asking: “Why are we so hesitant to name white male violence as a root cause, yet so comfortable naming all the “risk factors” associated with the lives of Indigenous girls who have died? Why are we not looking more closely at the “risk factors” that lead to violence in the lives of the perpetrators?”
As a counternarrative to the “Indian Problem” narrative and the associated stereotypes, I draw on the stories presented within Indigenous women’s literature as a pedagogy of humanity and compassion. As Hillsburg (2015) expresses, Indigenous women writers have contributed to a particular kind of literature that brings “their experiences back into focus” while refuting “a long-standing pattern of policies and societal beliefs that naturalize racial segregation, reify the legacy of colonization and ultimately blame Aboriginal women for the violence they confront” (300). Moreover, as Hillsburg explains, settler responses to Indigenous women’s writing involves a recognition of the “invisible and unearned privilege that many Canadians enjoy.” Indeed, this recognition is certainly part of the counternarrative of Indigenous women’s literature.
The Power of Indigenous Women’s Words
I position Indigenous women’s literature as a counternarrative to the stereotypical representations that continue to be propagated about Indigenous women. I do, however, acknowledge that Indigenous women’s literature cannot simply be reduced to a counternarrative as it draws from something much deeper and exists as something much more powerful. Alongside themes of resistance and stories of survival are testimonies of resilience, cultural continuity, rebirth, and renewal. Some writings extend the Indigenous storytelling tradition. Moreover, the contemporary realities of Indigenous women, communities, and families shape Indigenous women’s writing in moving and profound ways. The racialization and sexualization and the violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls is expressed in numerous stories that bring back the honour and humanity that is dismissed by the insensitive victim blaming reports. As Lisa Charleyboy expresses in #NotYourPrincess: “Too often I’ve seen, we’ve all seen, those headlines that send shivers down spines, spin stereotypes to soaring heights, and ultimately shame Indigenous women. Yet when I look around me, I see so many bright, talented, ambitious Indigenous women and girls, full of light, laughter, and love (Foreword).
Other stories do not speak of this violence but present the beauty of Indigenous cultures and the “light, laughter, and love” noted above. Some share memoirs of motherhood, stories of the land, voices of resurgence, and present “a recognition of being” (Anderson 2000) and a strong sense of Indigenous identities that are significantly different from the words that have been written about Indigenous women by others. For Indigenous women, as the late Beth Brant (1994) says, literature becomes a source of power: “Pauline Johnson’s physical body died in 1913, but her spirit still communicates to us who are Native women writers. She walked the writing path clearing the brush for us to follow. And the road gets wider and clearer each time a Native woman picks up her pen and puts her mark on paper” (7–8).
The following quotations are from an Anthology titled Reinventing The Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Women’s Writings Of North America. I share them here to express the depth of Indigenous women’s literature and to highlight the shared realities that call Indigenous women to write; the anger, the passion, and the wisdom:
“The purpose of my writing has always been to tell a better story than is being told about us. To give that to the people and to the next generations. The voices of the grandmothers and grandfathers compel me to speak of the worth of our people and the beauty all around us, to banish the profaning of ourselves, and to ease the pain. I carry the language of the voice of the land and the valiance of the people and I will not be silenced by a language of tyranny.” Jeannette Armstrong, Okanagan
“I write for the same reason that mountain climbers do what they do: because it’s there. As a younger woman, I remember a few dreadful weeks when I wept and raged because all I did was write when there were so many ills to correct, so much to be done. Eventually, I came to understand that the pen is mightier than the law books, and that the image is where the action is begotten.” Paula Gunn Allen, Laguna Sioux
“Ultimately, writing is a process of confronting what is human in oneself as well as in others. Good, honest writing makes us tell the truth about the oppressor and the oppressed in us all. This is also why we must write about “all our relations.” Emma LaRocque, Cree and Métis
“I write about the issues that trouble me, stories of my family and my people and myself that keep me awake at night, the stories that call me to drive dark roads at midnight, to return again to the small lakes and streams that are lit by moonlight. I write to find understanding, to find peace. I write in the hope that I will give voice to those who have never had an opportunity to tell their stories. I write to give voice to myself.” Debra Earling, Flathead
To further express the depth of Indigenous literature, I draw on the following passage shared in 1994 by Beth Brant:
“The amount of books and written material by Native people is relatively small. Yet, to us, these are precious treasures carefully nurtured by our communities. And the number of Native women who are writing and publishing is growing. Like all growing things, there is a need and desire to ensure the flowering of this growth. You see, these fruits feed our communities. These flowers give us survival tools. I would say Native women’s writing is the Good Medicine that can heal us as a human people.” (9)
Since these words were shared in 1994, the number of books and written material by Indigenous women has certainly grown and continues to fill our bookshelves and feed our spirits. As Maria Campbell writes in the Foreword to Kim Anderson’s (2016) A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood:
When I published Halfbreed in 1973 there were very few books about Native people and even less written by Native authors. I could walk into any bookstore and buy all the titles— and I did—saving money, going without so I could buy native authors’ works. I did this because I was hungry to see myself and my people. Today I cannot go into a bookstore and buy all the books written by Native authors, as there are so many. Thousands in fact, and it is those books that have given me strength and inspiration to continue my work. (xi)
Campbell’s work draws attention to the empowerment that comes through Indigenous literature. As she wrote, “recognition is powerful.” Her work documents and positions Indigenous women’s literature within a long history of confronting the colonizers and moving Indigenous women to action by organizing and marching. Campbell recalls the feelings that were stirred during a reading of nineteenth-century Mohawk poet Tekahionwake’s (E. Pauline Johnson) The Cattle Thief at a 1990 women’s gathering in Edmonton, AB. Campbell describes being “woken up” by the keynote speaker Maryanne LaValley who shared stories of Indigenous women, the aunties, the grandmothers, and the songs they shared. As Campbell noted, by the end of the day, they were so moved that they had organized a march to the legislature building. This is the power of Indigenous women’s literature. It propels us into action by naming injustices and presenting or reawakening a strong “recognition of being.” I have witnessed students in my class become propelled to action upon learning about the shared experiences of violence Indigenous women and girls face and organizing events on campus to spread awareness. Other students have now published work including academic essays and poetry to continue to spread that awareness.
Deconstructing the Squaw/Princess Binary
“Her ears stung and she shook, fearful of the other words
like fists that would follow. For a moment, her spirit drained like
water from a basin. But she breathed and drew inside her fierce
face and screamed until the image disappeared like vapour
(Marilyn Dumont cited in An anthology of Native Canadian Literature, 436–437).
The above words are part of Marilyn Dumont’s Squaw Poems, a poem in which she writes “Indian women know all too well the power of the word squaw” (437).
The princess/squaw binary that reduces Indigenous women’s humanity through racialized and sexualized objectification is certainly not part of our own recognition of being but rather something imagined by the colonizer’s gaze. However, this gaze filters into the everyday threat of violence against Indigenous women and girls. Within this context we understand what Beth Brant meant by the “survival tools” of Indigenous women’s literature. The extent of the princess/squaw binary is the tragic and disheartening reality of the horrific numbers of Indigenous women who go missing. E. Pauline Johnson wrote about these stereotypes 125 years ago. In an essay titled “A Strong Race Opinion: On The Indian Girl in Modern Fiction,” which was originally published in the Toronto Sunday Globe on May, 22 1892, Johnson spoke out about the images of the “Indian squaw” that were presented in mainstream literature and called on writers to move beyond their fantasies of Indigenous women: “Above all things let the Indian girl of fiction develop from the ‘doglike,’ ‘fawnlike’ ‘deer- footed’ ‘fire-eyed’ ‘crouching,’ ‘submissive’ book heroine into something of the quiet, sweet womanly, woman she is, if wild, or the everyday, natural, laughing girl she is, if cultivated and educated; let her be natural, even if the author is not competent to give her tribal characteristics (163) as cited in Fee and Nason).
Similarly, in her book, Iskwewak Kah’Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws (1995), author Janice Acoose also draws attention to the racialized and sexualized legacy of settler colonialism that has led to an acceptance of violence. As Acoose wrote, these colonial attitudes have justified many of the legally sanctioned policies that have targeted Indigenous women and families, such as the Indian Act and residential schools. Indigenous women’s literature bring the effects of Canada’s deep history of settler colonialism on Indigenous families and communities to the forefront to shape understandings of the pervasive mindset that fosters violence against Indigenous women and girls.
Indigenous women’s literature—including autobiographies, short stories, and poetry—expresses the social, historical, colonial, and political contexts of Indigenous women’s identities. The literature also includes Indigenous maternal identities, contemporary realities, and connections between the two. Powerful autobiographies include Maria Campbell’s (1973, restored edition 2019) Half-Breed and Morningstar Mercredi’s (2006) Morningstar: A Warrior’s Spirit, which showcase the life stories of the authors who overcame oppressive forces that led them to prostitution and addictions and of their journeys toward recovery that brought them to their vocations as writers, mentors, and frontline workers. Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree (1983) and Come Walk With Me (2009) offer powerful narratives that highlight hardships to which many Indigenous women can relate and also inspire hopes and dreams through examples of perseverance. The short stories of Lee Maracle and Beth Brant weave in cultural and historical memory and connect it with contemporary realities. Poetry, from the earlier works of Pauline Johnson to the works of Chrystos, Marcie Rendon, and Marilyn Dumont to the recent works of Lesley Belleau, Katherena Vermette, and Sara General present cultural teachings that connect past, present, and future. Indigenous women’s literature also provides a space for presenting queer Indigenous theory by drawing on the work of scholars such as Beth Brant (1988) and Chrystos (1988). For me, this body of Indigenous women’s literature has become a teaching tool that inspires cultural identity development while also complicating the patriarchal influences that have suppressed the variations of gender performativity within Indigenous communities. Indigenous women’s literature also offers a space to consider the threat of settler colonial violence, specifically a particular kind of hyper-masculinity that is rampant throughout society. Unfortunately, it is still not a recognized part of the threat by reporters and politicians as Sarah Hunt points out: “It seems that while reporters and politicians feel entitled to weigh in on what First Nations should do to address this issue, they are unwilling to name what is right in front of them. They are unable to see the culture of whiteness that excuses violence against Indigenous women and girls by blaming Native people for the violence they face” (2014).
A hyper-masculinity is now being confronted by Indigenous scholars who consider the ways in which it implicates Indigenous wellbeing (for example, see Innes and Anderson 2015). Through such work, Indigenous literatures help bring wholistic understandings of settler violence against Indigenous women and girls to the forefront. The power of Indigenous women’s literature is such that it not only moves us to action but it unravels deeply ingrained misperceptions about our daily lives and serves as a pedagogy of humanity and compassion.
Indigenous Women’s Literature: A Pedagogy of Humanity and Compassion
“To begin to understand the severity of the tragedy facing Indigenous women today you must first understand the history.” Nick Printup, Director and Producer of “Our Sisters in Spirit.”
The issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada is as old as the development of Canada itself and must be understood within the historical context of settler colonialism that has led to the ongoing racialization and sexualization of Indigenous women. Historically, Indigenous women were sexualized and held against dangerous cultural attitudes that defined them as promiscuous and dangerous. Today, these stereotypes permeate many facets of Canadian society and Indigenous women and girls continue to be sexualized. My Indigenous women’s literature course begins with reading Janice Acoose’s (1995) Iskwewak Kah’Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws, providing an opportunity for the students to learn about White-Euro-Canadian-Christian-Patriarchy (WECCP) institutions and their associated ideological forces that have interfered with the lives of Indigenous women. Acoose writes about her points of contact with WECCP institutions throughout her life and connects the authority of WECCP institutions to the negative images of Indigenous women that have been expressed and maintained throughout mainstream Canadian literature. According to Acoose, literary representations describing Indigenous women as lewd, licentious, dissolute, dangerous, or promiscuous, along with those that lean more towards the polar opposite Indian Princess representation, trap Aboriginal women within a Squaw/Princess binary; one that simultaneously renders Indigenous women’s identities highly visible and invisible. Indeed, such ideologies continue to inform public notions of Indigeneity through the troubling headlines noted earlier. As Acoose writes: “Indigenous women are misrepresented in images that perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes. . . . [T]hose images foster cultural attitudes that encourage sexual, physical, verbal, or psychological violence against Indigenous women. Stereotypic images also function as sentinels that guard and protect the white eurocanadian-christian-partriarchy against any threatening disturbances that might upset the status quo” (55).
Acoose explicitly connects the derogatory images of Indigenous women presented in mainstream literature to the racialized and sexualized violence we continue to face. To explain this further she notes, “In much of canadian literature, the images of Indigenous women that are constructed perpetuate unrealistic and derogatory ideas, which consequently foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other kinds of violence against us” (71). This is further clarified through the story of Helen Betty Osbourne who was a nineteen-year-old student when she was abducted by four white men and killed in 1971. As Acoose explains, the young men who killed her were influenced by particular cultural attitudes and she draws on the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba that notes: “the attackers seemed to be operating on the assumption that Aboriginal women were promiscuous and open to enticement through alcohol or violence. It is evident that the men who abducted Osbourne believed that young Aboriginal women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification” (70). It took sixteen years for any charges to be laid in the death of Helen Betty Osbourne and only one of the four men who abducted her was charged. As Holly McKenzie (2010) points out, such cases set a dangerous precedence as “these men may also choose to attack Indigenous women based on the assumption that they will not be held accountable by the justice system because of the indifference of white-settler society to the well-being and safety of Aboriginal women” (144). McKenzie’s work connects this to Indigenous women’s exclusion from Canadian society that has pushed women into vulnerable situations such as homelessness, poverty, and sex work.
The Violent Erasure of Indigenous Women and Girls
“Indian women ‘disappear’ because they have been deemed killable, able to be raped without repercussion, expendable. Their bodies have historically been rendered less valuable because of what they are taken to represent: land, reproduction, Indigenous kinship and governance, an alternative to heteronormative and Victorian rules of descent. Theirs are bodies that carry a symbolic load because they have been conflated with land and are thus contaminating to a white, settler social order.” (Audra Simpson 2014, 156)
As Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, Cree lawyer and honourary doctorate expresses, “It is women who give birth both in the physical and spiritual sense to the social, political and cultural life of the community” (cited in Anderson 2007, 774). Her words describe the power of matrilineal and egalitarian societies that honour the role of Indigenous women. Consider this statement in light of the well-known Cheyenne Proverb: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors nor how strong its weapons.” These two statements on their own tell of the vulnerability of Indigenous Peoples when women are targets of violence; together they illuminate the intentions of settler colonialism and the multiple attacks on Indigenous women through both legislated policy and the dangerous ideologies that have governed the development of “Canada.” Indeed, the ennoblement of the stereotypical beliefs and the associated policies that control Indigenous women’s bodies have a long history rooted in assimilation and dispossession of land.
I familiarize students with the work of Sarah Carter (2008) who documented the increasing segregation of Indigenous peoples and settlers and described the 1880s as a time when there was a “sharpening of racial boundaries and categories” and “an intensification of racial discrimination in the Canadian West” (146). As Carter points out, assimilationist policies were justified by images of Indigenous women as “dissolute, dangerous, and sinister” (147) and these negative images were promoted by government officials, political leaders, and the national press. Students learn that these representations are not only upheld by WECCP institutions, but they have been used to justify many of the legally sanctioned policies that have targeted Indigenous women. If Indigenous women were deemed dangerous and promiscuous, the policies designed to control them were welcomed by settler society. I raise these conversations in the classroom to identify this particular form of racism and structural violence as ongoing and position it as a platform for understanding contemporary realities that continue to target Indigenous women and girls today. Indeed, as the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded in a supplementary report: “Genocide is a root cause of the violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls, not only because of the genocidal acts that were and still are perpetrated against them, but also because of all the societal vulnerabilities it fosters, which leads to deaths and disappearances and which permeates all aspects of Canadian society today” (8).
Students learn about the gender discrimination embedded in The Indian Act of 1876, with emphasis on Section 12(1)(b)—the removal of status upon marriage to a non-status man; repealed in 1985 under Bill C-31 and they come to understand the ongoing forms of gender discrimination that still exist in the Indian Act today. Students learn about the eugenics movement, which involved the forced sterilization of women deemed unfit to have children. They learn that Indigenous women were specifically vulnerable to these racist and sexist procedures and often deemed unfit to have children. The Sexual Sterilization Legislation in Canada was repealed in 1973, however cases of forced and coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada continues today (Boyer and Bartlett 2017). Students learn that the pass system of 1882 to 1935 was created to control Indigenous movement off the reserve. Without a pass from the Indian Agent, Indigenous men and women could not leave their reserve. This severely limited their access to resources and employment opportunities and left them in positions that further justified intervention from family and children’s services. Students also learn that the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop were attacks on the very rights of Indigenous women to mother their own children. Policies against Indigenous women were deeply entrenched in gender discrimination in the Indian Act. This continued through the pass system, residential schools, and the Sixties Scoop. They were the result of deliberate and forceful efforts to assimilate Indigenous Peoples by restricting their movement to reserve lands so that development and settlement could quickly take place by non-Indigenous settlers across Turtle Island. This is a form of structural violence described as a deliberate “tool of genocide” (Leanne Simpson 2017). Many years later, the trend of targeting Indigenous women and girls continues and is reflected in the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in child protective services, the lack of protection for Indigenous women and girls, and the disproportionate rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. Thus, as Acoose expressed, the dangerous ideologies embedded in mainstream literature media and film serve a purpose, one that is indeed connected to the racialized and sexualized violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls today.
The stories shared in Indigenous women’s literature expose the everyday experiences of racism that are deeply rooted in the aforementioned history of Indigenous and settler relationships. As an example of what I mean by everyday experiences of racism, Francine Cunningham (2017) shares her experience in a poem entitled “A Conversation with a Massage Therapist,” noting some of the comments that I think many Indigenous women have heard on multiple occasions. Her entire poem resonates with my own personal experiences in numerous settings. The poem describes a conversation with a massage therapist where a woman is asked about her identity, told she does not really look “Native,” asked if she lives on a reserve and then told she is not a real “Native.” When the woman explains she is pursuing a master’s degree the response is “good thing you got the taxpayers to pay for it” and then told, “you’re not a drunk or anything, good for you” (59). It is important to understand that these kind of offensive interactions take place so often and are not isolated incidents. Offensive comments similar to those noted above are made by educators, officers of the law, and health care professionals and reflect a grand narrative about the racialized and sexualized perceptions of Indigenous women. . This deep-seeded narrative remains rooted in the dominant colonial mindset and has existed for many generations. Keep in mind, this is the mindset that exists among the very people who Indigenous women and girls are expected to trust and turn to for safety This is evident in a 2012 interview with an RCMP officer and an Indigenous girl who was reporting a sexual assault. A video of the troubling two-and-a-half-hour interrogation was released in 2019 showing an RCMP officer asking the young girl if she was turned on by the rape and questioning the truth of her story.
As Maria Campbell declared during her opening address at the 2008 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Conference held in Regina, SK, “Patriarchy and misogyny are so ingrained in our society, and our silence makes them normal.” These words describe the society we live in today: A society where women disappear and nobody seems to have seen or heard anything. The aforementioned Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba made this silence evident as it took 16 years for anyone to be charged with the death of Helen Betty Osbourne who was killed in 1971. In the same province today, Indigenous communities call for justice into the death of Tina Fontaine. There is a deafening silence that perpetuates the violence against Indigenous women and girls. The numbers of students I have taught over the years who had not heard of the Stolen Sisters report or the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls awareness are testament to this silence.
The slogan “Silence is Violence,” highlighted on Amnesty International’s 2004 Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to the Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada, takes on a deeper meaning for students who are urged to reflect on the silencing of Indigenous women in spite of their powerful roles in matriarchal and egalitarian societies. I urge students to think critically about the Indigenous leaders written about or documented more widely throughout history. Names like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse usually come to mind. The erasure of Indigenous women from dominant Canadian narratives is evident in the words of Marcie Rendon, Anishinaabe: “My own grandmothers have no names, their heroic actions erased from history’s page. Freedom stories left untold . . . shared only in the deepest dreams. In lessons to the world, the enemy has recorded our greatest warriors’ names: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Cochise. Resistance fighters all . . . yet my own grandmothers have no names, their heroic actions erased from history’s page.”
I ask my students to consider the names of Indigenous women throughout history and the students usually name Pocahontas but no one else comes to mind even though they many played valuable and very powerful roles in traditional societies; there are few stories known to my students of Indigenous women leaders throughout history. To extend my argument and connect it to the binary described earlier, the story of Pocahontas that is most familiar to my students is one in which she is presented as the young highly sexualized virginal princess. By drawing on the squaw/princess binary that imprisons Indigenous women, I express the importance of literature written by Indigenous women as expressions of traditional and contemporary identities that provide true representations of Indigenous womanhood. With the story of Pocahontas, for example, Beth Brant (1994) offers a different version in “Grandmothers of a New World” where Pocahontas is described as a woman of authority who fought for her Nation until her final days. By deconstructing mainstream literature, Indigenous women can find liberation from the false images perpetuated by the squaw/princess binary (Acoose 1995) and today more and more Indigenous women writers take on this role.
Prevailing Attitudes toward Indigenous Women
In July 2015, two paintings appeared on a storefront window during the Hospitality Days cultural festival in Bathurst, New Brunswick. One painting depicted two Indigenous women with their hands tied behind their backs, their ankles tied and their mouths forced shut with what appeared to be duct tape. These images appeared during the height of the push for a National Public Inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In response, social media backlash prompted the removal of the images. In an article published by The Halifax Media Co-op Miles Howe documented the reaction of Patty Musgrave, one of the hosts of the local annual Sisters in Spirit Vigil and Indigenous Student Advisor for New Brunswick Community College. Musgrave wrote a letter to city council “to address the appalling disregard to First Nation people in [New Brunswick] and across the country” and expressed that the paintings trivialized violence against Indigenous women. According to Musgrave, after an apology that links readers to the legend of the phantom ship, a sincere and suitable apology should be made as well as further action including consultation with Indigenous communities prior to such images being presented. President of the Bathurst Art Society, Rita May Gates expressed “We just didn’t think at the time that the images would be painful and upsetting and of course we do respect their culture and stories very much. This depiction does open thought and dialogue regarding the plight of Aboriginal women, the abuse and femicide they have suffered over the centuries. We just send prayers for hope and healing going out to First Nations’ people. It was never our intention to hurt anyone” (Howe 2015).
The issue of the paintings, especially at the height of the push for the national public inquiry demonstrate that there is much work to be done in many facets of society as prevailing attitudes have not changed much since the time when E. Pauline Johnson published “A Strong Race Opinion: On The Indian Girl in Modern Fiction,” in May 1892. Nor have we seen an answer to the calls for justice into the death of Helen Betty Osbourne in 1971 that prompted the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba. Today, families across the country call for justice for Tina Fontaine and the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing since contact.
Conclusion
A mother that wakes and finds her babies gone
A young girl with blood down her thighs
A grandmother without any daughters left
And a lone woman under a man that she loves
Breathing to the drum of one heart
And giving themselves to morning
To wash this all away and return to a place like home
Where these things never happen
Where men don’t take these women
(Belleau, 55)
In IndianLand Lesley Belleau shares poems of home, of memory, and of missing Indigenous women and girls. Lesley’s poetry is a profound expression of the home that Indigenous women and girls have always called Turtle Island and her words are testament to the memories that echo throughout the land and reverberate within our waters. In her poem Niibinabe she asks, “how many missing and murdered Indigenous women are there? . . . [f]amilies and memories speak thousands and thousands until our lips are closed.” She asks readers to “Imagine a woman. Your mother. Imagine a woman that created your first stories. And then she is gone” (47).
For Indigenous women, Belleau’s poetry resonates all too well. The extent to which stories of settler violence against Indigenous women are deeply rooted within Indigenous literatures tells us that these are not isolated incidents. Rather, they are powerful expressions of the violence that threatens all Indigenous women and girls. Settler violence is indeed a sociological phenomenon that has taken place on these lands since contact because theft of Indigenous lands has become intertwined with theft of Indigenous women’s bodies.
Beth Brant’s (1994) description of Indigenous women’s writing as “recovery writing” against repeated attempts of “cultural annihilation” at the hands of the “State” (18), highlights Indigenous women’s literature as a “survival tool” that serves as a weapon against colonial violence. In a recent class, a student furthered this sentiment by describing Indigenous women’s literature as a powerful source of protection and spiritual medicine against the collective threat of violence. By serving as both a pedagogy of humanity and compassion, and a weapon of protection, Indigenous women’s literature calls attention to this ongoing and pervasive threat of settler violence and reawakens us to a time when “Turtle island women had no reason to fear other humans” as shared by Lee Maracle in Daughters are Forever.
I will end by drawing attention to the Haudenosaunee narrative “Thunder Woman Destroys the Horned Serpent” as described to me by Alyssa M. General and the stories of Jikonsaseh as shared by Sara General in Spirit and Intent: A collection of short stories and other writings. Inspired by Alyssa’s artwork that covers the front of Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, I consider the Haudenosaunee story of Thunder Woman to be a story of strength, determination, and protection. Thunder woman destroyed the horned serpent, offering a profound lesson about the threat of patriarchal violence and the strength and power of Indigenous women to call an end to colonial violence. Not only does the story of Thunder Woman teach us that we are survivors and we carry the strength to overcome the forces that bring danger into our lives, but it also teaches us that this is a collective strength. I was reminded of this vision of a collective strength when I read Sara General’s short stories about Jikonsaseh who is referred to as the Peace Queen. As Sara eloquently expresses, in the work that Indigenous women are doing to collectively bring us back to a time of peace, safety, and love when we can freely write our stories, create our art, sing our songs, dance our dances, and speak our languages, perhaps Jikonsaseh is a part of all of us. Her legacy lives through us and, like Thunder Woman, our literatures will help us to destroy the horned serpent. Through connections of the past, present, and future, Indigenous women’s literature shares deep-layered understandings of a long history of colonial violence through stories that bring humanity and compassion and honour the legacies of our missing women and girls. I dedicate this chapter to the spirit of Tina Fontaine and all of our missing sisters, daughters, aunties, and mothers. Their stories leave us with a powerful legacy of hope as we continue to do this work by destroying the horned serpents, naming the genocide we continue to face, and collectively calling for justice. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/07%3A_Decolonizing_Postsecondary_Institutions/7.03%3A_Indigenous_Womens_Literature-_The_Power_.txt |
Danielle Jeancart
“You can’t understand the world without telling a story . . . there isn’t any centre to the world but story. . . . The thing I remember mostly about stories—whoever was telling them: my grandmother, my uncles, the kids, even my mother—the thing that I remember most vividly is the idea of being set free.”
-Gerald Vizenor
Tanshi, I am a Metis/Cree-Ukrainian woman originally from Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. I work as the Coordinator of ê-sihtoskâtoyahk Indigenous Students’ Centre at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, Saskatoon Campus, but I have also developed and delivered a university course on Indigenous masculinities at Luther College, University of Regina. My course examines the ways that historical and contemporary constructions (or stereotypes) of Indigenous masculinity in popular culture have shaped Canadian society’s understanding of what it means to act as and be an Indigenous male in this country, particularly in the west. Students engage with and deconstruct colonial history, examining events and ideas like Indigenous autonomy, the settlement of the West, the construction of isinamowin (the Cree term for “Whiteman’s Indian”) in literature and film, and the ways Indigenous resistance movements over the past two hundred years have been framed by media discourse.
When I was invited to create a reflection piece about this course and my thoughts on Indigenous masculinities, I thought, “Easy enough, right? I can simply look at my syllabus and course notes, and it will all come together in some sort of coherent and eloquent way.” But months went by with little progress; finally, I decided to go and talk to the person who normally can help me through my writer’s block: my father, Gerald. I asked him, “How do I write about this? It all feels too technical and I don’t know what to say.”
He looked over my outline and agreed with me. He told me, “It looks like you’re missing the most important thing: how did you get here? Why did you do all this in the first place? You need to tell the story.”
The Story[1]
Growing up in Northern Saskatchewan in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I didn’t want to be Indigenous. Like in many small towns, racism towards First Nations and Métis Peoples was alive and well, and as a child I tried to hide the fact that my father, his siblings, and my grandparents were not white. Cultural days at school involved my toting a large picture of my Ukrainian great-grandparents to class or chatting about my French ancestry. And because I had fair skin, I only really had to confront the reality of my ethnicity when I was around my father or when we visited relatives in Prince Albert and Edmonton. Coming home from these visits, I always felt a great deal of shame—not because I didn’t love my family, but because I had come to associate being Indigenous with poverty, mental illness, alcoholism, and stories of violence. And while that was neither fair nor true, try telling that to a ten-year old who desperately wanted to live in the suburbs.
By the time I was a teenager, I realized that The Brady Bunch wasn’t really a thing and that people in the suburbs were dysfunctional too. I started identifying as ‘Aboriginal’ because that’s how my father identified, but there was a disconnection between what I said I was, and what that actually meant. I knew that my ancestors were originally from Red River and later settled in Green Lake, but that’s all I knew. My family seemed not to know why or how they came to be there, and if they did know, they weren’t talking. This included my grandfather, John Jeancart, who later became a focal point in my research on Indigenous masculinities. I remember, as a child, visiting his small cabin in St. Cyr. He would often speak French to me even though I didn’t understand him. But what I did comprehend, even at a young age, was his emphatic rejection of his own Indigeneity, often expressed in viewpoints that were prejudiced and bigoted towards First Nations and Métis peoples. His ideas about the world made for a strained family relationship, and over time my family grew increasingly estranged from my grandfather. This dynamic, coupled with an almost non-existent Indigenous curriculum in elementary and high school, only served to deepen my sense of how much I didn’t know.
It wasn’t until I began my undergraduate studies at the University of Regina that I first learned about colonization—oddly enough in an English literature course that focused on anti-colonial narratives and taught by a professor who had a profound impact on my academic life, Dr. Florence Stratton. From there, I gravitated towards Indigenous Studies, taking as many courses as I could. And while I learned a great deal, I found myself frustrated at times with some of the course content because I didn’t understand how my family’s history fit into the larger narrative of colonization. Much of the history and many of the works that I read didn’t speak to the urban Indigenous experience or account for the stories of those who had become disenfranchised. This left me at times feeling exasperated: I wanted more than anything to be able to explain to my family why things were the way they were.
Looking for a deeper perspective on these issues, I started to consume works written by Indigenous women, particularly writers like Maria Campbell, Kim Anderson, Emma LaRocque, and Dawn Martin Hill. It was their writing that inspired me to pursue a graduate degree in Indigenous Studies at Trent University, with the goal of exploring Indigenous feminism and literature. But a course specifically looking at Indigenous women’s issues actually provided the idea to shift the focus of my research to Indigenous masculinities. We had just finished reading Brendan Hokowhitu’s article “Tackling Māori Masculinity: A Colonial Genealogy of Savagery and Sport,” in which Hokowhitu “deconstruct[s] one of the dominant discourses surrounding Māori men—a discourse that was constructed to limit, homogenize, and reproduce an acceptable and imagined Māori masculinity” (Hokowhitu 2004, 262). Hokowhitu’s discussion examines not only the ways in which many Māori men internalized such social and cultural constructions as a hyper-masculine physicality and “natural” Māori athleticism, but also how these constructions of masculinity become normalized by wider society. I had so many questions: how could this analysis relate to the construction of gender and sexuality in Canada? How have educational and governmental policies, as well as media discourse, contributed to creating notions of Indigenous male identity right here at home? Back in 2009, not a great deal of study had been performed in this area. I decided to switch the focus of my graduate work to masculinities, and while my professor, Dr. Paula Sherman, thought it was a great idea, she advised me that I needed to go about it in the right way, so as not to appropriate the stories of Indigenous men. With advice from my graduate advisor and my father, I decided that the most ethical way to pursue this area of study was to ground the research in my own familial narrative—how did negative portrayals of Indigenous men impact my family’s ideas of masculinity?
In the summer of 2009, my parents, my brother, and I hopped in the car to do field research. We drove to Glen Mary, pêhonân, Winnipeg, St. Boniface, and Edmonton, exploring archives and cemeteries along the way. I spoke with my grandmother, Theresa Jeancart (nee Umpherville), and interviewed family members about their views on masculinity. They shared with me their thoughts, any genealogy or documents they had, and their stories from the past. I couldn’t speak to my grandfather, as he had passed away in 2005. But he left behind numerous journals and manuscripts—including fiction that he wrote between the 1950s and the 1970s. From all of this shared knowledge and my grandfather’s writing, I pieced together a narrative—one that unearthed a rich family history that had been deeply impacted by colonization.
My grandmother, Theresa, was originally from pêhonân. Her grandfathers were at the signing of Treaty 6 and took part in the Northwest Resistance. In the 1940s, however, her immediate family was relocated under the aegis of the provincial government’s “rehabilitation” program, where they moved Métis peoples—those the government deemed destitute—to a newly formed colony at Green Lake. This was a program designed to get rid of the ‘Indian problem’ down south, in hopes that northern living would somehow ‘civilize’ the Métis peoples.
My grandfather, John, was originally from Jackfish, later moving to Green Lake when his father Fernand, a Belgian immigrant, was looking for work. He married Agnes Louisa Nolin, and I was told that all of their six children could speak Cree and French before they learned English. They were, however, sent to Catholic school where they stopped speaking Cree and were taught Latin instead. Fernand was not a kind man, and although he was married to a Cree/Métis woman, he would often make negative comments and perpetuate stereotypes about Indigenous peoples, further making harmful distinctions between “half-breeds” and the French Métis. Agnes’ family was from Red River. Her ancestors were fur traders who settled at Red River Colony around 1815. They were active members of the community throughout the 1800s, from education and politics, to acting as interpreters and participating in the buffalo hunt.
By the 1950s, my family’s stories of resistance and our connection to the land had faded due to the impacts of colonization and the inherent racism in the educational and political systems in which my family found themselves. Their stories of resilience were not captured by historians of the past, and that, coupled with the commodification of negative portrayals of First Nations and Métis peoples in popular culture, caused many Indigenous peoples, including members of my family, to feel disconnected from and/or ashamed of their past, culture, and stories.
This experience became integral to my research on Indigenous masculinities and culminated in my masters thesis, Imposed Identities: The Colonial Construction of Indigenous Masculinity that I defended in 2012. In 2013, I was back living in Saskatchewan and was asked by Luther College to create and develop a course on my thesis work. This was an opportunity for me to not only teach Indigenous history but to also tell a story that spoke to the disconnection and disenfranchisement in the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples—what I had felt was lacking in my own student experience.
The course I ended up creating discusses those shared experiences and further examines how and why detrimental stereotypes regarding Indigenous men have prevailed in Canadian society, even after such discriminatory ideas have been exposed as false. As such, I chose texts and reading materials that highlighted the lived experiences of Indigenous men (from Indigenous perspectives) as well as works that analyzed depictions of Indigeneity in popular culture throughout the last two hundred years. For this, I used a host of supplementary materials—articles, films, videos, art, etc., with the two main texts being Sam McKegney’s Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood and Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers by Carmen Robertson and Mark Cronlund Anderson. The course includes themes such as the establishment of Indigenous autonomy; theoretical considerations in Indigenous masculinities; the settlement of the west and early image makers; resistance movements (the Red River Resistance, Northwest Resistance/ ê-mâyahkamikahk— “where it went wrong.” Anishinaabe Park Occupation, Oka, etc.); representations of Indigenous men in popular culture from 1890 to present; Indigenous men in the global context; and Indigenous women.
Learning about how my family story connects to the larger historical narrative has not only had a deep impact on the way I teach, but reclaiming that story has anchored me to a place—a place from which I can better understand the legacy of colonization and engage with, and be proud of, the stories of resistance and resiliency that have often been marginalized in the interpretation of Canada’s past. I am intensely grateful for the opportunity to introduce students to these themes as well as for the chance to teach Indigenous history, to help students engage with a narrative that has been often neglected by historians. My goal is for ê-sihtoskâtoyahk Indigenous Students’ Centre to continue as an environment where students can come to a deeper understanding of their world through discussion of their own lived experiences, telling stories, and learning from each other.
1. Excerpts have been taken from my graduate thesis, Imposed Identities: The Colonial Construction of Indigenous Masculinity, p 2-3, 2012. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/07%3A_Decolonizing_Postsecondary_Institutions/7.04%3A_Indigenous_Masculinities-_A_Reflection.txt |
Brenda Anderson
As at the start of this book, we find ourselves teetering between hope and despair. This book has been about looking back to mark progress and obstacles. The media continues to highlight the racism within our institutions. Before her death in October, 2020 at a Quebec hospital, Joyce Echaquan filmed the racial slurs hurled at her by hospital staff, revealing the systemic racism that had been documented in a provincial inquiry about the hospital less than a year earlier. The Chief of the Conseil des Atikamekw de Manawan, said, “The racism problems at the hospital did not start yesterday” (Shingler). That statement reflects the larger societal problem in Canada, and if left with this story alone, we would all have just cause to despair.
Yet, Indigenous leaders continue to move forward in hope. Our final words are reserved for one such leader, Judy Hughes. As President of the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women’s Circle Corporation (SAWCC), Judy works alongside the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) and has devoted her career to supporting family members who have had a loved one torn from their midst.
Judy and I began our conversation by noting that readers will come to this work having experienced a global pandemic, something none of the authors had even thought about let alone written on. The obvious question is what impact such a life-changing phenomenon has had on Indigenous women. The obvious answer has been noting a significant increase in intimate partner violence. Women vulnerable from systemic poverty and the stresses of intergenerational trauma oftentimes have less capacity for multiple stresses that a pandemic presents. Support systems like shelters and counselling may weaken or be shut down altogether when governments and healthcare turn their attention to coping with Covid-19. For instance, Amnesty International released an urgent action memo stating that the Mexican government suspended funding for the CAMIs (Amnesty). The Casas de la Mujer Indígena y Afromexicana are a network of Indigenous women’s community organizations which operate nationally throughout Mexico. Common services include the provision of sexual reproductive healthcare, traditional midwifery, broader healthcare provision and referrals, psychological support, the prevention and elimination of gender-based violence, trauma-informed support and the provision of legal services. They are also often engaged in the wider promotion of women’s and Indigenous rights as well as Indigenous culture in Mexico.
In Canada, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls jostles for the federal government’s attention amidst health and economic demands created by the pandemic. Yet the work of Indigenous women and organizations has actively and relentlessly pursued the first of the 231 Imperatives from the final report:
1.1 We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, municipal, and Indigenous governments (hereinafter “all governments”), in partnership with Indigenous Peoples, to develop and implement a National Action Plan to address violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people, as recommended in our Interim Report and in support of existing recommendations by other bodies of inquiry and other reports.6 As part of the National Action Plan, we call upon all governments to ensure that equitable access to basic rights such as employment, housing, education, safety, and health care is recognized as a fundamental means of protecting Indigenous and human rights, resourced and supported as rights-based programs founded on substantive equality. All programs must be no-barrier, and must apply regardless of Status or location.
Governments should:
• Table and implement a National Action Plan that is flexible and distinctions-based, and that includes regionally specific plans with devoted funding and timetables for implementation that are rooted in the local cultures and communities of diverse Indigenous identities, with measurable goals and necessary resources dedicated to capacity building, sustainability, and long-term solutions.
• Make publicly available on an annual basis reports of ongoing actions and developments in measurable goals related to the National Action Plan.
In 2020, no government plan exists. Instead of presenting the National Action Plan as promised in June 2019, the Federal Government only began to form committees in August 2020, to help develop the National Action Plan as stated in 1.1 above. In contrast, while Canada ‘continues talking’, NWAC has acted on the 231 Calls for Justice by producing a ten-point Action Plan and by establishing an unique first of its kind in Canada holistic healing lodge. For context, the Native Women’s Association of Canada advocates for and defends the rights of Indigenous women across the country. “Much like a ‘Grandmother’s Lodge, we as aunties, mothers, sisters, brothers and relatives collectively recognize, respect, promote, defend and enhance our Indigenous Ancestral laws, spiritual beliefs, language and traditions given to us by the Creator” (nwac.ca).
After giving a failing grade to the federal government’s inaction on a national action plan, NWAC proceeded with its own ten point action plan, while calling for the following immediate steps to take place:
• A call for an independent national task force to open up unresolved files of missing and murdered women
• Ongoing work for a national data base to track the numbers of missing and murdered women
• Provision of funds for NWAC to establish its own MMIWG Oversight Unit to ensure implementation of the 231 Calls for Justice
On a broader scale, NWAC envisions a multi-language report on genocide as well as an anti-racism and anti-sexism national action plan. All of these recommendations are offers from NWAC to work with the federal, provincial, territorial and Indigenous governments to ensure that any actions taken have been planned in consultation with the largest national body comprised of Indigenous women and gender diverse people.
Judy notes that NWAC has consistently undertaken international work to raise awareness of the genocide committed by Canada as concluded in the Supplementary Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – “A Legal Analysis of Genocide”. The organization envisions a “Best Practices Summit” where people from around the globe learn what works and why.
Such global learnings are evident in the most significant of NWAC’s initiatives, the opening of its unique distinctions-based Resiliency Lodge. Situated on the traditional land of the Algonquin people in Chelsea, Quebec, the Resiliency Lodge combines on-the-land programming, Indigenous cultures, languages and spirituality to support Indigenous women and gender-diverse people to promote and foster wellness and resilience. The programs and services are accessible and culturally safe to survivors of trauma and violence. The workshops are developed to enhance the spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, social, and economic well-being of Indigenous women and gender-diverse people. Each person’s resiliency journey is built on the concept of healing: Elder-guided healing, land-based healing, culture-based healing and holistic person-centred care. The lodge provides a safe space for women and gender-diverse people to engage in Indigenous ceremonies, languages, food, medicine baths, expressive art and learn how to navigate all the social services. It also has a safe space dedicated to commemorating and honouring all the missing and murdered women and girls on this land. The resiliency support and training continues year long with an in-person four session resiliency and wellness journey and virtual online services with access to Elders and ceremonial support. Such community-based and culturally distinct lodges are planned to be made available across Canada to meet these needs. Through these actions, intentional community leans into a future of strong Indigenous female leadership.
The concept of these lodges, Judy recounts, shows what can be done when global communities unite. The resiliency lodges parallel the CAMIS – Casas de la Mujer Indígena y Afromexicana (Houses of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican Women). For Mexican women, the CAMIS provide a safe refuge from violent circumstances, again by providing culturally distinct counselling and support around gender violence. Lynne Groulx, NWAC’s Chief Executive Officer, explains “It is notable that the positive experience of the CAMI experiment in Mexico has prompted other countries in Latin America to emulate their practices and to put in place similar structures with a view to more effectively providing Indigenous women and girls with an array of indispensable services. There are unquestionably multiple lessons and best practices which can be drawn from the Mexican CAMI model and be applied to the Canadian context, such as NWAC’s Resiliency Lodge” (NWAC).
So, we conclude this book holding the urgency of despair and the power of hopefulness in each hand. When leaders like Judy Hughes and so many others cannot rest while “there are still bodies lying out there, and families still searching for their loved ones,” as Judy powerfully notes, then there will be change. It is the collective will of individuals that generates the most healing and transformative hope. There could be no more fitting conclusion to this retrospective of a past decade than the commitment expressed in the Vision Statement for the Resiliency Lodge. May all readers worldwide grow into this statement:
“We envision a world where Indigenous women and gender-diverse people live a good life free of violence, and where our strength and healing grow from our culture and our connection to the land” (NWAC Resiliency Lodge Programme Guide). | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Femicide%3A_Indigenous_Women_and_Girls_Torn_from_Our_Midst_(Anderson_Pete_Kubik_and_Rucklos-Hampton)/07%3A_Decolonizing_Postsecondary_Institutions/7.05%3A_Afterword.txt |
Chapter 1: Women and Poverty
Chapter Summary
Chapter 1 discusses the link between gender and poverty. Women are the majority of the poor due to cultural norms and values, gendered division of assets, and power dynamics between men and women. Indeed, women and girls bear an unequal burden of unpaid domestic responsibilities and are overrepresented in informal and precarious jobs. Women also possess inherent agency and knowledge that is overlooked by policy-makers as they form and implement poverty reduction plans. Development interventions continue to be based on the idea that men are breadwinners and women are dependents.
The chapter positions poverty as the root cause of gender inequality and discusses social entrepreneurship as a path toward women’s economic and social empowerment. The author introduces two approaches to addressing poverty among women: microcredit and small business cooperatives. The microfinance approach is exemplified by the Kashf Microfinance bank, founded by Roshaneh Zafar in Pakistan in 1996. By 2009, Kashf included 14,192 active borrowers, deposits of 3.8 million, and 42,073 depositors. COMUCAP, an organization based in the region of La Paz, Honduras, is representative of the cooperative approach. The program trained women to grow and sell coffee beans as a means to gain economic independence and escape domestic violence. Both case studies emphasize that helping women increase their economic agency gives them footing to combat poverty and achieve independence.
Key Terms
• Cooperative
• Domestic labour
• Dulce Marlen Contreras
• Economic empowerment
• Kashf Foundation
• La Coordinadora de Mujeres Campesinas de la Paz (COMUCAP)
• Microfinance
• Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
• Roshaneh Zafar
• Social entrepreneurship
• World Bank
Overview
By Geeta Rao Gupta
Figure 1.1: Women constitute a majority of the poor and are often poorest of the poor. A woman hugs her granddaughter in their shack near Castelli, Chaco, Argentina.
Women constitute a majority of the poor and are often the poorest of the poor. The societal disadvantage and inequality they face because they are women shapes their experience of poverty differently from that of men, increases their vulnerability, and makes it more challenging for them to climb out of poverty. In other words, poverty is a gendered experience — addressing it requires a gender analysis of norms and values, the division of assets, work and responsibility, and the dynamics of power and control between women and men in poor households.
In most societies, gender norms define women’s role as largely relegated to the home, as mother and caretaker, and men’s role as responsible for productive activities outside the home. These norms influence institutional policies and laws that define women’s and men’s access to productive resources such as education, employment, land and credit. There is overwhelming evidence from around the world to show that girls and women are more disadvantaged than boys and men in their access to these valued productive resources. There is also ample evidence to show that the responsibilities of women and the challenges they face within poor households and communities are different from those of men. Persistent gender inequality and differences in women’s and men’s roles greatly influence the causes, experiences and consequences of women’s poverty. Policies and programs to alleviate poverty must, therefore, take account of gender inequality and gender differences to effectively address the needs and constraints of both poor women and men.
Figure 1.2: Pakistani women are paid about US\$2 for every 1,000 bricks they make at this brick kiln in Multan, Pakistan.
Figure 1.3: Women in Gadabeji, Niger, cope with a food crisis created by drought. Worldwide, women are driven further into poverty by inflated food prices.
Women’s Experience of Poverty
Girls and women in poor households bear a disproportionate share of the work and responsibility of feeding and caring for family members through unpaid household work. In poor rural households, for example, women’s work is dominated by activities such as firewood, water and fodder collection, care of livestock and subsistence agriculture. The drudgery of women’s work and its time-intensive demands contribute to women’s “time poverty” and greatly limit poor women’s choice of other, more productive income-earning opportunities.
Faced with difficult time-allocation choices, women in poor households will often sacrifice their own health and nutrition, or the education of their daughters, by recruiting them to take care of siblings or share in other household tasks. This is just one piece of a pattern of gendered discrimination in the allocation of resources in poor households. Evidence shows that the gender gaps in nutrition, education and health are greater in poorer households. This lack of investment in the human capital of girls perpetuates a vicious, intergenerational cycle of poverty and disadvantage that is partly responsible for the intractable nature of poverty.
Why Focus on Women in Poverty?
A focus on poor women as distinct from men in efforts to reduce poverty is justified because women’s paid and unpaid work is crucial for the survival of poor households.
Women are economic actors: They produce and process food for the family; they are the primary caretakers of children, the elderly and the sick; and their income and labor are directed toward children’s education, health and well-being. In fact, there is incontrovertible evidence from a number of studies conducted during the 1980s that mothers typically spend their income on food and health care for children, which is in sharp contrast to men, who spend a higher proportion of their income for personal needs. A study conducted in Brazil, for example, found that the positive effect on the probability that a child will survive in urban Brazil is almost 20 times greater when the household income is controlled by a woman rather than by a man (Quisumbing et al., 1995).
Yet women face significant constraints in maximizing their productivity. They often do not have equal access to productive inputs or to markets for their goods. They own only 15 percent of the land worldwide, work longer hours than men and earn lower wages. They are overrepresented among workers in the informal labor market, in jobs that are seasonal, more precarious and not protected by labor standards.
Despite this, policies and programs that are based on notions of a typical household as consisting of a male bread-winner and dependent women and children often target men for the provision of productive resources and services. Such an approach widens the gender-based productivity gap, negatively affects women’s economic status, and does little to reduce poverty. Addressing these gender biases and inequalities by intentionally investing in women as economic agents, and doing so within a framework of rights that ensures that women’s access to and control over productive resources is a part of their entitlement as citizens, is an effective and efficient poverty reduction strategy.
Ways to Reduce Women’s Poverty
Over the years there have been many efforts to reduce women’s poverty. Investments to increase agricultural productivity, improve livestock management and provide livelihood opportunities are key ways to address the needs of poor rural women. Another, more popular and effective intervention that currently reaches millions of women worldwide is microfinance — small loans and other financial services for poor women who have no access to the formal banking system. Microfinance programs have succeeded in increasing the incomes of poor households and protecting them against complete destitution.
Yet another strategy to improve the economic status of poor women has been to increase women’s access to and control of land. Women who own or control land can use the land to produce food or generate income, or as collateral for credit.
These strategies are promising and offer potential for meeting the international community’s commitment to gender equality as demonstrated most recently through the inclusion of Goal 3 in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). All that remains now is for that commitment to be transformed into action.
Geeta Rao Gupta is a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program and an internationally recognized expert on gender and development issues, including women’s health, economic empowerment, poverty alleviation and gender equality. Prior to joining the foundation, Rao Gupta was president of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). She also serves on the Steering Committee of aids2031, an international initiative commissioned by UNAIDS, USAID’s Advisory Committee for Voluntary Foreign Aid and the boards of the Moriah Fund, the Nike Foundation, the MAC AIDS Fund and the Rural Development Institute.
PROFILE: Roshaneh Zafar – Social Entrepreneur Empowers Women
By Shafqat Munir
Figure 1.4: A young Pakistani woman turns social entrepreneur, establishes Kashf Foundation, and through microfinancing enables impoverished Pakistani women to improve their lives.
“You feel really great when you enable poor families to transform, change their mindset and bring up their children with a concept of financial management at the grass-roots level. This can ensure a decent living for them,” says Pakistani entrepreneur Roshaneh Zafar.
Since 1996, Zafar’s small microfinance initiative at Kashf Foundation, the first of its kind in Pakistan, has changed the lives of more than a million people in 26 districts in Pakistan by extending small credits worth a total of U.S. \$202 million currently, according to the Kashf Foundation website (www.kashf.org). Zafar successfully runs a fully chartered bank, the Kashf Microfinance Bank, with 31 branches in three provinces, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh. MIX Market (www.MIXMarket.org), a microfinance information data and analysis service, reports that in 2009 Kashf Microfinance Bank had 14,192 active borrowers, a gross loan portfolio of U.S. \$5 million, with deposits of \$3.8 million by 42,073 depositors. The average balance per borrower is \$350. This grass-roots bank, like the foundation, is called “Kashf” — “miracle” or “revelation” in Urdu — to evoke the process of self-discovery.
Zafar, who attended Yale University and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, has the required financial knowledge and skills. She was a specialist on women in development and community for the U.N. Development Programme and the World Bank. She has the passion of a women’s rights activist. An early endeavor was co-founding Bedari, a women’s crisis intervention center in Islamabad. The daughter of a renowned jurist and constitutional expert, S.M. Zafar, Roshaneh Zafar started from a one-room office next to her father’s law offices 15 years ago. She sees social entrepreneurship as her lifetime mission.
“I am proud of building an institution. I am passionate about transforming the lives of families, bringing them out of poverty,” she says. She believes that economic well-being leads to policies that favor women’s development, and without giving economic opportunities to women, social development and empowerment are hardly possible.
Both men and women must work together to increase family incomes and contribute to development of the community and the country: Only then can Pakistani society become gender-sensitive, she says.
“Economic empowerment of women working through families can guarantee a change in lives and livelihoods of the poor. Microfinancing women-led families is a sustainable way to ensure women’s development,” Zafar says.
The realities of the poverty-ridden and resource-constrained women in villages in remote parts of Pakistan, and a will to help change their fate, prompted Zafar to quit her World Bank job in 1995 and enter social entrepreneurship: “While working with the World Bank, I realized that until we involve women and give them ownership in water and sanitation and other infrastructure projects, we cannot ensure implementation and success in these projects, as women are the ones who take care of water-fetching for rural families and those on the periphery of urban centers.”
Figure 1.5: Zafar and her mentor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, attend a microcredit conference.
It was a turning point in Zafar’s career when she heard a 70-year-old woman in Kalat, Balochistan, saying the villagers knew that clean drinking water is healthy for their families but they needed money to buy it. Zafar decided to help them get that money and build better lives. She met Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, the microfinance pioneer and founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, and expressed her desire to start a microfinance scheme to help the Pakistani poor gain sustainable economic stability. Her meeting with Yunus prompted her visit to Bangladesh, to learn from the Grameen Bank experience. Zafar studied the methods with Yunus for two years, and visited other successful projects in Nepal and India. In Pakistan she also benefited from the experiences of Abbottabad-based Sungi Development Foundation, founded by the late Omar Asghar Khan, and the Balochistan Rural Support Programme. She was inspired by the late Pakistani community development pioneer Akhter Hameed Khan and Shoaib Sultan Khan, a founder of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme.
“After having varied experiences, I set up Kashf Foundation and I hired 1,800 young staff from local communities because I believed that enabling the young to earn their livelihoods is important, as they dominate the unemployed population of Pakistan,” Zafar recalls. Her success received recognition early when, in 1997, she was awarded a fellowship from the U.S.-based Ashoka Foundation, which supports innovative social entrepreneurs.
Kashf operates primarily in Pakistan’s suburbs: 70 percent of its work is on the urban periphery and 30 percent in rural areas. Most microfinance credits go to small traders: a cobbler’s shop, a small-scale jewelry business, a tea stall or restaurant. Families get loans to fund a business of their choice and for which they have skills.
Zafar’s clients have succeeded in a variety of ways. Zafar relates the story of 42-year-old Nasim Baji with pride. Nasim Baji runs a costume jewelry business with microfinancing provided by Kashf. She borrowed Rs. 1,000 (U.S. \$10) 12 years ago to start her own bead jewelry enterprise, after weaving beads as a daily wage worker for a jewelry firm. She later diversified and today owns two molding machines to manufacture metal jewelry. She employs 30 women workers. Her husband works for her now. Her jewelry is sold in several cities. Nasim Baji inspires other women to set up small businesses to generate income.
“Microfinance is not all about giving loans to individuals, but it is meant to change mindsets of communities to enhance their ability to earn their livelihood and live with dignity. With families [working] together, microfinance-led trading produced sustainable dividends,” says Zafar. She explains that Kashf has expanded from working only with women to working with families. To increase access to capital, Zafar founded the Kashf Microfinance Bank. Zafar says that from the original 15 clients who were lent a total of \$1,500 in 1996, Kashf has provided loans of \$225 million to more than one million families. Kashf was among the first such institutions to offer insurance for clients, at a minimal premium, to assist in debt payment when the head of household dies.
Apart from Kashf, Zafar is a founding member of the Pakistan Microfinance Network and is a member of the U.N. Advisory Group on Inclusive Financial Services. In 2007, she was named a Skoll Foundation social entrepreneur, and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious international awards, including Pakistan’s highest civilian honor, the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz. Kashf Foundation was ranked 34 out of the top 50 microfinance institutions by Forbes magazine in 2007, and was honored in 2009 with the OneWoman Initiative Award by the U.S. State Department. More recently Roshaneh Zafar was a delegate to the U.S. Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship held in Washington in April 2010 and is the recipient of the Vital Voices 2010 Global Leadership Award for Economic Empowerment.
Shafqat Munir is a journalist, researcher and communications specialist in Pakistan. He is the founder editor of Infochange News and Features Network (INFN), www.infochangepakistan.net, a leading Pakistani development and investigative news agency.
PROJECT: Honduran Women Fight Poverty One Coffee Bean at a Time
By Ritu Sharma
Honduran Dulce Marlen Contreras knew that poverty was the source of domestic violence and other problems afflicting women in her community, so she began an organization to educate women about their rights. It soon evolved into an agricultural cooperative that has given its members economic stability.
In 1993, Dulce Marlen Contreras founded La Coordinadora de Mujeres Campesinas de La Paz, or COMUCAP, to raise awareness about women’s rights in Honduras. A daughter of farmers in the rural region of La Paz, Honduras, Marlen was tired of watching the women of her community endure widespread alcoholism and domestic violence. Along with seven of her friends, Marlen began COMUCAP in order to educate local women about their rights, how to stand up for themselves and eventually become economically independent. Workshops and women’s shelters were critical to the mission, but Marlen soon realized that to reduce domestic violence for the long term, COMUCAP must attack the root problem, poverty.
Understanding the relationship between poverty and social ills, COMUCAP changed its approach. In addition to the consciousness-raising workshops, the organization started training women to grow and sell organic coffee and aloe plants. Traditionally, the women of La Paz looked after the children and relied on men for economic support. Growing coffee and aloe vera, selling the crops and developing products to sell not only enabled women to earn additional income for their families, but gave them economic independence and stability.
The initial reaction from the community was hostile. Women’s empowerment was seen as a threat to families and traditional family values. But as COMUCAP’s programs grew, Marlen and her friends started seeing results that altered family relationships: The more money the women made, the more power they were able to assert in the household. The community began to view the women of COMUCAP as economic contributors. More and more women now made decisions jointly with their husbands. The women could more effectively resist domestic abuse. Economic stability and equality within family structures dramatically decreased household violence and improved quality of life within COMUCAP families. All of these women’s children attend school.
Figure 1.6: COMUCAP founder Dulce Marlen Contreras sits in the cooperative’s coffee storeroom. Coffee and aloe vera are COMUCAP’s main products.
Today COMUCAP provides employment and income to more than 225 women in rural Honduras through an expanding array of programs. Most programs focus on agricultural production: cultivation of oranges to make orange wine, aloe vera plants for a variety of products, organic coffee, organic fertilizers. COMUCAP programs offer technical advice in organic agriculture and support agricultural lending programs. Literacy political advocacy, grant proposal and fundraising workshops are available to COMUCAP-affiliated groups. There is now training and support for women to start their own businesses. Some women have purchased their own plots of land through loans from COMUCAP.
A cooperative agriculture program helps members form groups ranging in size from five to 25 women. They rent or own small pieces of land where they collectively grow coffee and aloe vera plants. The aloe vera plants are used to produce Wala Organic Aloe products such as shampoo, juices and desserts. In the COMUCAP business model, co-op members grow their own crops, refine and prepare them for use and manufacture products which are distributed in local, regional, national and international markets. The profits are then evenly divided among co-op members. A conscious decision was made to grow organic crops to make all organic products, which makes entry into international markets easier and causes less harm to the environment. COMUCAP’s coffee is USDA organic and Fair Trade certified. As of November 2009, COMUCAP was exporting more than 10,000 pounds of fair trade coffee to Europe each year and employing more than 100 women.
Figure 1.7: COMUCAP members sell their produce and other products at a local market. Their organic products are entering the international market.
Juana Suazo, a 55-year-old mother of six, is a prime example of why COMUCAP works. After separating from her abusive husband, Juana was suddenly faced with raising her children alone. At first she struggled to make ends meet by working multiple jobs. Then COMUCAP provided the means for her to create a sustainable future for her family. With the organization’s help, Juana started her own wine-producing business, which eventually allowed her to buy a home and five acres of land where she now grows coffee and vegetables. Today, she pays for two daughters to attend college and supports two sons living in the United States. Besides helping her escape domestic abuse and gain economic stability so her family can thrive, COMUCAP inspired Juana to give back to her community by studying law. She now dedicates her spare time to defending the rights of other women in need.
Greater economic opportunity and earning capacity allow women to escape violent situations, adequately care for their families and educate their children, thereby strengthening their communities. A woman’s economic independence increases her stature within and outside her household. Community-based organizations such as COMUCAP empower women to overcome poverty and regain dignity and peace in their lives — one coffee bean at a time.
Ritu Sharma is co-founder and president of Women Thrive Worldwide, a leading U.S. nonprofit organization that advocates for policies that provide economic assistance and capacity building for women living in poverty.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. The Kashf Microfinance Bank was founded by…
1. Roshaneh Zafar
2. Shafqat Munir
3. Dulce Marlen Contreras
4. Emma Watson
2. The way microfinance intends to achieve its desired outcomes is to…
1. Provide grants to rural women in the global South
2. Provide low-cost health insurance to women working in the informal sector
3. Provide small-scale and low-interest loans to women with no access to formal banking services
4. Improve the economic status of women by increasing access to land and property
3. According to the text, why do women in particular spend a higher portion of income on their children’s education and health than on their own personal needs?
1. Women are naturally better caregivers than men
2. Social and political norms have relegated women to domestic and care responsibilities
3. Men have been deemed suitable for formal labour outside the home
4. Both B and C
4. Roshaneh Zafar stated that it is imperative to involve women in water and sanitation infrastructure projects because…
1. The donor organizations have specific gender quotas that must be met
2. Women are the ones who take care of water-fetching and other infrastructure needs for rural families
3. Inclusion of women is necessary to ensure implementation and success of the project
4. Both B and C
5. In public policy, the implications of viewing the household as run exclusively by men include…
1. The gap between women’s and men’s productivity increases
2. Women’s economic status decreases
3. Policies created under this assumption have little impact on poverty
4. All of the above
6. COMUCAP is…
1. A microfinance initiative
2. A bilateral women’s education program created and implemented by USAID
3. A program initiated by the government of Honduras
4. An agricultural cooperative
7. Dulce Marlen Contreras, founder of COMUCAP, realized that the root problem of domestic violence was…
1. Alcohol
2. Insufficient access to education
3. Inadequate legal rights
4. Poverty
8. Once COMUCAP had a foothold in the community…
1. The community became hostile
2. Women started to assert their power and made joint household decisions with their husbands
3. Instances of domestic violence and alcoholism became more rampant
4. None of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is A. Shafqat Munir (answer B) is a journalist based in Pakistan and Emma Watson (answer D) is a British actor and the UN Goodwill Ambassador for the HeforShe campaign. Dulce Marlen Contreras (answer C) founded La Coordinadora de Mujeres Campesinas de La Paz (COMUCAP), but it was Roshaneh Zafar who founded the Kashf Microfinance Bank.
2. The correct answer is C. The purpose of microfinance is to provide small-scale and low-interest loans to women with no access to formal banking services. Microfinance generally involves loans (lending money) instead of grants (giving money), making answer A incorrect. Microinsurance (answer B) provides small-scale health insurance accessible to those working in the informal sector. Answer D is a long-term desired outcome of microfinance.
3. The correct answer is D. Both B and C are correct. Women’s distribution of income spending results from social and political norms which place women’s responsibilities within the home and men’s within the formal workforce. The textbook does not state that the association between women and family responsibilities is natural or inherent (answer A); rather that men and women’s differing family responsibilities are formed through a series of norms and institutional policies.
4. The correct answer is D; both B and C are correct. It is necessary to include women in the development of infrastructure projects because they are the ones who are taking care of the needs of their families and are thus crucial in successful project implementation. Some organizations may have gender quotas for project involvement, but that is not the primary reason for including women (answer A).
5. Answer D is correct.
6. The correct answer is D. COMUCAP is a community-based agricultural cooperative that trains women to grow and sell organic coffee and aloe plants. COMUCAP is not a microfinance initiative (answer A). It is also not a bilateral initiative funded by USAID (answer B), and is not a government program (answer C).
7. The correct answer is D. Alcohol (answer A) was identified as a significant contributor to domestic violence, but not the root cause. Legal rights (answer C) and education (answer B) were both part of COMUCAP’s original advocacy plan, but Marlen realized that the root problem to address was poverty.
8. The correct answer is B. The hostility among the community was an initial reaction (answer A), but the chapter mentions that it faded as women became seen as economic contributors. Instances of domestic violence did not increase (answer C). They decreased as women and men began making joint decisions as a result of women’s increased financial power.
Discussion Questions
1. Why is it important for international organizations and governments to include a focus on women as they seek to combat poverty?
2. According to the chapter, what are some ways that women’s poverty can be reduced? What approaches are most effective? Why?
3. What is the function and purpose of microfinance?
4. Briefly describe how business cooperatives, such as COMUCAP, are organized.
5. Why is it important that development programs address women as individuals with economic potential?
6. What are the commonalities and differences between the Kashf Foundation and COMUCAP? How do both programs address gender inequality?
7. What are the benefits, challenges, and limitations of microfinance as an approach to women’s economic empowerment?
Essay Questions
1. To what extent is economic disempowerment the root cause of gender-based violence and poverty among women? Is the market the most effective means of addressing economic empowerment?
2. The chapter highlights two poverty-reduction projects in the non-profit sector. What should be the role of non-profits as compared with the state in pursuing gender equality? What does the focus on non-state actors instead of government programming suggest about the connections between entrepreneurship as an approach to women’s empowerment and neoliberalism?
3. The chapter discusses the importance of involving women in infrastructure projects. If women are key stakeholders in poverty reduction, should they be included in the implementation of infrastructure projects, their formation, or both? Why or why not?
Additional Resources
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). “World Factbook.” (2016).
Frequently updated country profiles, comparisons, and information on history, government, economy, military, and numerous transnational issues.
Chowdhury, A. “Microfinance as a Poverty Reduction Tool: A Critical Assessment.” UNDESA Working Paper (2009).
Critical analysis of the effectiveness of microfinance as a universal poverty reduction tool.
Davidson, J. & Strickland, R. “Leveling the Playing Field: Promoting Women’s Economic Capabilities and Human Rights.” International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW). (2000).
Expands on the microfinance movement and provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges and opportunities experienced by microfinance organizations through a feminist lens.
www.icrw.org/sites/default/files/publications/Leveling-the-Playing-Field-Promoting-Womens-Economic-Capabilities-and-Human-Rights.pdf
Garikipati, S., Johnson, S. Guérin, I. Szafarz, A. “Microfinance and Gender: Issues, Challenges and the Road Ahead.” Journal of Development Studies. 1 – 8. (2016).
Kabeer, N. “Gender, Poverty, and Inequality: A Brief History of Feminist Contributions in the Field of International Development.” Gender & Development 23(2), 189 – 205. (2015).
Nanda, P. et al. Making Change with Cash? “Impact of Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Girls’ Education and Age of Marriage in India.” International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW). (2016).
Evaluates the impact of conditional cash transfers in addressing gender inequality.
www.icrw.org/sites/default/files/publications/IMPACCT_OnePager_Webready.pdf
Razavi, S. The 2030 Agenda: Challenges of Implementation to Attain Gender Equality and Women’s Rights. Gender & Development 24(1), 25 – 41. (2016).
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The SDGs succeeded the MDGs as the global targets for poverty reduction as of 2015.
World Bank. Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs). (2009).
CCT programs are another mechanism of economic empowerment towards poverty reduction.
The World’s Women 2015. Poverty. (2015).
Annually updated global data and analysis on gender disparities in poverty.
University of California Atlas of Inequality
Combines GIS and database technology with Internet multimedia to provide online resources that enable users to examine global change.
ccrec.ucsc.edu/news_item/uc-atlas-global-inequality-0 | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.01%3A_Women_and_Poverty.txt |
Chapter 2: Women and Education
Chapter Summary
This chapter discusses the right to education and provides several examples of non-profit organizations that are working towards enhancing education among women. Education escalated as a global priority during the 1990s, featured at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and the 2000 Millennium Summit. Prior to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), evidence of the economic and social benefits resulting from educating women and girls began to accumulate. The links were clear: educated women are more likely to have fewer, healthier, and better-educated children that will survive into adulthood and ultimately contribute to economic growth. According to UNESCO, in 2008 there were 96 and 95 girls per 100 boys in primary and secondary school, respectively. While the chapter does not discuss tertiary education, additional resources below will fill in statistics on gender gaps in post-secondary, which continue to vary at national and regional levels; women outnumber men in the post-secondary environment of developed countries by a significant margin, yet are still underrepresented in high-paying disciplines such as science and engineering and constitute only 30 percent of researchers.
The chapter examines several organizations working to improve women’s education from the standpoints of both community organizing and technology education. Bahia Street was founded by Rita Conceição in the informal communities of Salvador, Brazil. It began as a lunch program and evolved into a community centre conducting social-justice education among black women and girls on racism, gender-based violence, and reproductive rights. In rural Senegal, the international organization Tostan formed the Community Empowerment Program (CEP) to integrate mobile technology into writing and literacy programs. This initiative was developed in Wolof, the local language, and the program’s exercises in learning to use mobile phones are carried out using culturally appropriate and recognizable symbols. Tostan also initiated the Rural Energy Foundation, a community-based project to provide solar-powered charging stations for mobile phones.
Key Terms
• Bahia Street
• Community Empowerment Program (CEP)
• Democracy
• Education
• Gender-based violence
• Gender
• Health
• International non-governmental organization (INGO)
• Literacy
• Jokko Initiative
• Non-formal education
• Non-governmental organization (NGO)
• Non-profit organization
• Race
• Reproduction
• Rights
• Sexual violence
• SMS
• Rita Conceição
• Rural Energy Foundation
• United Nations Children’s Rights and Emergency Relief Organization (UNICEF)
• United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)
• United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
• United Nations Millennium Summit
• United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
• 1994 International Conference on Population and Development
• 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing
Figure 2.1: Few investments have as large a payoff as girls’ education. Educated women are more likely to ensure health care for their families, educate their children and become income earners. The Zarghuna Girls School in Kabul, Afghanistan, depicted here, is supported by the United Nations Children’s’ Fund (UNICEF).
Overview
By Lori S. Ashford
The right to education for all has been an international goal for decades, but since the 1990s, women’s education and empowerment have come into sharp focus. Several landmark conferences, including the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, placed these issues at the center of development efforts.
The Millennium Development Goals — agreed to by world leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit in 2000 — call for universal primary education and for closing the gender gap in secondary and higher education. These high-level agreements spawned initiatives around the world to increase girls’ school enrollments. Changes since 1990 have been remarkable, considering the barriers that had to be overcome in developing countries.
In many traditional societies, girls are prevented from attaining their full potential because of lower priority placed on educating daughters (who marry and leave the family) and the lower status of girls and women in general. Families may also have concerns about the school fees, girls being taught by male teachers and girls’ safety away from home. Governments and communities have begun to break down these barriers, however, because of overwhelming evidence of the benefits of educating girls.
Figure 2.2: A woman in Bangladesh studies in an adult literacy class in a rural village. The teacher is from the village and trained at a college nearby.
Why educating girls matters
Few investments have as large a payoff as girls’ education. Household surveys in developing countries have consistently shown that women with more education have smaller, healthier and better-educated families. The linkages are clear: Educated women are more likely to take care of their health, desire fewer children and educate them well, which, in turn, makes it more likely their children will survive and thrive into adulthood.
Research by the World Bank and other organizations has shown that increasing girls’ schooling boosts women’s wages and leads to faster economic growth than educating only boys. Moreover, when women earn more money, they are more likely to invest it in their children and households, enhancing family wealth and well-being. Other benefits of women’s education captured in studies include lower levels of HIV infection, domestic violence and harmful practices toward women, such as female genital cutting and bride burning.
Figure 2.3: Corporate support of girls’ education is exemplified by Motorola’s “Introduce a Girl to Engineering” event, part of the company’s initiative to attract U.S. children to science and foster innovation early. Here Motorola engineer Deb Matteo conducts a light and color experiment with two young participants.
How girls and women have fared since Beijing
Advances in girls’ education worldwide have been a success story in development. According to UNESCO, 96 girls were enrolled in primary school for every 100 boys in 2008, up from 84 girls per 100 boys in 1995. The ratio for secondary school is close behind, at 95 girls to 100 boys in 2008. By 2005, nearly two-thirds of countries had closed the gap between girls’ and boys’ school enrollments. Girls still lag behind boys in university-level education worldwide, but the gap is closing over time.
Girls lag farthest behind in the poorest countries, such as Afghanistan, Chad, Central African Republic and Mali, where overall school enrollments are low. In Somalia, only half as many girls are enrolled in school as boys: 23 percent of girls compared to 42 percent of boys in 2008, according to UNESCO. Girls’ schooling and literacy lag well behind boys in much of sub-Saharan Africa and Western and Southern Asia, where much work remains to be done.
At the other end of the spectrum, in countries with high levels of school enrollment, girls often fare better than boys. In much of Latin America, Europe, East Asia and in the United States, girls’ enrollments in secondary and higher education have surpassed those of their male peers, demonstrating what girls and women can achieve once the barriers to education have been overcome.
Still, women account for two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults, because older women are less likely to have attended school than their younger counterparts. They are also much more likely to be illiterate if they are poor and live in rural areas. Literacy programs and continuing education exist, but the efforts are not systematically reported across countries. In addition, girls and women are disadvantaged when it comes to technical and vocational education, in fields such as science and technology that have long been dominated by men.
What can we learn from successful efforts?
Many gains in women’s education can be attributed to special interventions such as the elimination of school fees, scholarships, community schools for girls and the training of women teachers. Such targeted efforts have translated into higher girls’ school enrollments in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Yemen, Morocco, Uganda and Brazil. Political commitment is essential for raising the profile of the issue and increasing girls’ access to schooling. Mexico pioneered a major social program — now replicated in impoverished communities in the United States and other countries — that pays families to keep their children, particularly girls, in school.
Because the gender gap is wider at higher levels of education, it will not be enough for girls to merely sign up for school; they need to stay in school. Governments, educators and communities must address issues such as gender stereotypes that reinforce women’s lower status, poor school quality, and early marriage and childbearing, which often cut short women’s education. Also, the mismatch between education and the skills needed for today’s workforce must be corrected. These steps may ensure that girls reap the greatest benefits from education. Countries that are committed to gender equality will not only see better report cards in education, they’ll be healthier and wealthier as well.
Lori S. Ashford, a freelance consultant, has written about global population, health and women’s issues for 20 years. Formerly with the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), she authored the widely disseminated PRB “Women of Our World” data sheets and “New Population Policies: Advancing Women’s Health and Rights” for the Population Bulletin, among other publications.
PROFILE: Rita Conceição – Bahia Street
By Margaret Willson
Figure 2.4: After growing up poor in Brazil, Rita Conceição saw education as the path out of poverty. Her determination got her to university, and her desire to help other women led her to found Bahia Street.
Born in one of the vast shantytowns of Salvador, Brazil, Rita Conceição knew at an early age the realities of violence, poverty and death. She also knew she wanted something different.
“My mother had lots of children and a hard life. She died young, so I brought up my brothers and sisters. I knew I didn’t want that life.”
With great determination, Rita traveled more than an hour each way by public bus to a school where she could learn to read and write. She loved the arts and took up photography. While still a teenager, Rita took courageous photos of protests against the then-ruling Brazilian military dictatorship.
“I didn’t think of a black or gender consciousness,” she says. “People never talked about racism then.” But all around her she saw women like herself working as maids for slave wages, the only job (except prostitution) open to them.
Rita decided she wanted to go to university, an almost impossible dream for someone from the shantytowns. While working a full-time job, she tried the difficult university entrance exam three times and failed. Refusing to give up, she took it a fourth time and passed, gaining entrance into the Federal University of Bahia, the best in her state.
When I first met Rita in 1991, she had earned her university degree in sociology. Once she had a chance to leave the shantytown where she was born, Rita, unlike any other person I ever met there, decided instead to stay and fight the inequality she knew so well. So in 1996, when she invited me to join her in working for equality for the people of her communities, I committed to help in any way I could. From this partnership the nonprofit Bahia Street was born.
Listening to what the people in her community told her answered their dire need for expression and opened a strong avenue for change. Rita initiated a quality education program for girls that would allow them to enter university and change their futures. Rita drew on her own struggles, using the strengths that propelled her from a shantytown to university. She incorporated race and gender consciousness into the Bahia Street classes. Seeing that the girls could not study because they were half starving, she began a lunch program, cooking and buying the food herself until she could find someone to help her. She knew that most girls from these shantytowns get pregnant by age 14, so she began teaching the girls about reproduction, sexual violence and self-esteem.
“As I was growing up,” she says, “the girls in my family were never valued as much as the boys. This still exists in our society, but I say to the girls that their roots are their reality. I pass on to them the importance of ethics, self-respect and the solidarity of women. They see in me the difference it makes — what choices you make in your life — and also the strength it takes. If women are to become equal, these qualities and knowledge are vital.”
After years of renting or borrowing tiny rooms for its classes, Bahia Street was finally able to buy a building. The only problem was that the building was falling down. Rita saw this as no problem at all. She employed local men and oversaw its complete reconstruction. To save money, the men mixed the cement in wheelbarrows and poured it by hand. Rita roamed the city, looking for sales; she negotiated with merchants to donate materials that she then brought back on public bus, since she had no car. Slowly, the building took shape. When the first floor was mostly finished, Rita, her staff and the girls moved in.
Figure 2.5: Conceição poses with some of the students at Bahia Street.
The five-story Bahia Street Center is now complete, with classrooms, kitchen, library, computer lab and much more. In addition to education and support programs for the girls, Bahia Street now offers classes for the girls’ caregivers and other community members. It has become a haven for the girls and a community gathering place.
“We teach the girls to take care of others in their lives as well. Women take care of the children, and in that is the future of our society. The work we do is a form of black resistance. We are working for the survival of the black people in Bahia, showing that as black women, we can have equality and shape the future. In Bahia Street, we are giving girls the chance my mother never had.”
When people talk with her about her remarkable achievements, Rita is humble and realistic. “In Bahia Street,” she says, “I really found my identity. Managing to create Bahia Street continues to be an amazing process, and I have learned a consciousness myself through this process.”
Recently, Bahia Street graduate Daza completed university with a journalism degree. In Daza, shantytown residents have a voice they never had before. And the long-term Bahia Street vision of fostering equality for shantytown women is becoming a reality.
Rita laughs with a smile that, in its brightness, knows suffering, love and strength. “And the work continues. That is the way for all of us. If we are to make a better world, the work is what we do.”
Margaret Willson is co-founder and international director of Bahia Street. She is affiliate assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Washington. Her most recent book is Dance Lest We All Fall Down: Breaking Cycles of Poverty in Brazil and Beyond (University of Washington Press, 2010).
PROJECT: Educating Women About Technology
By Renee Ho
Mobile technology is improving the lives of illiterate women and girls in rural Senegal, and educating them in the process, thanks to an organization that teaches them to use mobile phones.
Astou watches as the photographer raises his camera to capture the crowded village classroom. She adjusts her nursing infant and turns her own camera on him — only hers is a mobile phone. For the past few weeks, Astou has been participating in a community-led mobile technology course taught in her local language of Wolof. She and hundreds of other women and girls throughout rural Senegal have learned how to make and receive calls, compose and send SMS messages and use phone functions such as calculators, alarms and, yes, sometimes even cameras.
Astou is a bright 24-year-old mother of four children. She had seen her husband use a mobile phone, but prior to this class she had never touched one herself. “Before, he would not let me use the phone because he feared I would waste the credit,” she laughs, “but now he asks me to teach him and we are saving to buy another for me.”
Two years ago, Astou was not only unfamiliar with how to use a mobile phone, but she was illiterate. Composing or reading an SMS text message would have been impossible for her. Like most of the women and girls in her village in the region of Vélingara, Senegal, Astou never attended school. Household responsibilities and the cost of schooling prevented her from receiving a formal education. She married at 16 years of age — the average age for girls in rural Senegal.
In a country with a 41.9 percent literacy rate, Astou is breaking norms and the cyclical trap of poverty. In 2008, Tostan, an international nongovernmental development organization, started the Community Empowerment Program (CEP) — a 30-month human rights-based, nonformal education program — in her village. More than 80 percent of CEP participants are women and girls. They begin the program with sessions on human rights, democracy, health and hygiene and problem-solving. Later, they continue with lessons on literacy, numeracy and project management.
Once participants have achieved basic literacy, however, they often lack a practical means of maintaining it. As a solution, Tostan partnered with UNICEF to launch the Jokko Initiative in 2009 (jokko means “communication” in Wolof). The initiative incorporates mobile technology into CEP as way to reinforce reading and writing skills. The Jokko module teaches participants how to use basic mobile phone functions and SMS texting. It uses interactive visuals and skits that focus on relevant applications and the relative affordability of texting. “I text messages better [than my husband] and that saves us money on expensive calls,” explains Astou.
Figure 2.6: The Tostan Jokko community empowerment program teaches women to use mobile phones.
Outside of the classroom, students circle around a strange arrangement of sticks. With a little explanation, the sticks come to represent a mango tree. Khady, age 52, walks along the “tree branches” and stops at each fork where signs are placed: Contacts, Search, Add Contact. This activity teaches participants how to navigate the phone’s main menu. It is just one example of what makes Tostan’s educational model work: adapting lessons to cultural contexts and using appropriate local references.
“Before, if I wanted to send a text message, I had to ask for help,” Khady says, “but now I am much more independent. Now people come to me and I’m happy to teach them.” When mobile phone technology reaches women and girls, it amplifies their voices and influence in community decisionmaking. They become agents of their own change. Khady continues to explain how the CEP provided her with basic math and management skills. With several boys and girls huddled around, she demonstrates how the phone’s calculator helps her manage her peanut-selling business.
Mobile phone technology has connected women and girls to market information and opportunities, family in the diaspora and, perhaps most fundamentally, to each other. The phones have been critical for community organization and social mobilization. Tostan’s Jokko Initiative has developed a unique social networking platform that allows participants to send an SMS message to a central server, where it is then sent out to an entire community of other users. One participant explains, “It’s when you send multiple messages at once — a cheaper method of communication.” The platform is used for community advocacy campaigns. Women send, for example, reminders of vaccination and school enrollment dates.
The Jokko Initiative has reached 350 villages and continues to grow. Tostan has directly trained about 23,585 people, but the high demand for knowledge and the eagerness of participants to share information suggests that thousands more have benefited.
In the project’s next phase, Tostan will partner with the Rural Energy Foundation (ruralenergy.nl/), a nonprofit organization that helps rural communities gain access to renewable energy. Currently, about 80 percent of rural Senegal lacks electricity, so charging phones often involves risky and inconvenient trips into the nearest small town. To alleviate this, Tostan will pilot community-led, solar-powered charging stations. These telecenters will provide electricity for mobile phones, and the income generated by these microenterprises will be reinvested in other community-led development projects.
Figure 2.7: Women, some of them illiterate, learn to navigate the main menu of a mobile phone through an arrangement of branches on the ground.
Mobile phone use in Africa is growing twice as fast as in any other region in the world. In Senegal, the number of SIM card purchases nearly doubled from 2007 to 2009, up to 6.9 million. But as Tostan has found, absolute numbers alone do not empower communities. Success in low-income countries requires bridging the gender gap. Putting knowledge and technology in the hands of women — literally— is critical to achieving lasting development.
Renee Ho is a volunteer at Tostan International in Dakar, Senegal. Her interests include women and the technology divide in lower-income countries. More information is online at http://www.tostan.org.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. According to the chapter, the _______________ established the call for universal primary education and the closing of the gender gap as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
1. 1994 International Conference on Population and Development
2. 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing
3. 2000 Millennium Development Summit
4. None of the above
2. Educated women are more likely to…
1. Take care of their health
2. Desire fewer children
3. Educate their children well
4. All of the above
3. Literacy and education rates are among the farthest behind in… [Select all that apply].
1. Chad
2. Morocco
3. Bangladesh
4. Afghanistan
4. The gender gap is the widest at which level of education?
1. Primary
2. Secondary
3. Tertiary
4. None of the above
5. Barriers to women’s empowerment through education include…
1. Older women are less likely to have attended school than their younger counterparts
2. High-paying majors such as science and technology remain dominated by men
3. Women living in rural areas have less access to educational services
4. All of the above
6. Bahia Street….
1. Engages in community building, gender and race consciousness work.
2. Provides small-interest loans to allow women in the shantytowns of Salvador to become entrepreneurs
3. Teaches women to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) more efficiently
4. Helps rural communities gain access to renewable energy
7. Bahia Street was founded by…
1. Margaret Wilson
2. Renee Ho
3. Sheryl Sandberg
4. Rita Conceição
8. The Community Empowerment Program (CEP) does NOT teach women and girls about….
1. The importance of domestic and household responsibilities
2. Literacy
3. Numeracy
4. Project management
9. The initiative that developed a social networking platform via SMS messages for women and girls in Senegal is…
1. UNICEF
2. The Community Empowerment Program (CEP)
3. Free the Children
4. The Jokko Initiative
10. The Jokko Initiative…
1. Incorporates mobile technology into CEP as a way to reinforce reading and writing skills
2. Teaches participants how to use SMS functions
3. Connects women and girls to market information opportunities
4. All the above
11. Tostan’s educational model works because it…
1. Was developed in partnership with the UNICEF
2. Focuses on rights-based empowerment rather than economic and entrepreneurial capacity building
3. Adapts lessons to cultural contexts and uses appropriate cultural references
4. Held focus groups with local government officials instead of community stakeholders
12. The Rural Energy Foundation will…
1. Fund an increase in the amount of mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa
2. Pilot community-led solar-power charging stations for mobile phones
3. Fund a the construction and operation of a solar-energy plant in Vélingara, Senegal
4. Construct several powerlines to provide energy to rural Senegalese communities
13. The outcomes of the Rural Energy Foundation project will include…
1. Putting knowledge and technology in the hands of women
2. More efficient mechanisms to send text messages
3. More affordable mobile phones for women and children
4. All of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is C. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (answer A) and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (answer B) were both milestones in placing women’s empowerment on the global agenda. However, it was the 2000 Millennium Development Summit (answer C) where world leaders agreed on the target of universal primary education as part of the MDGs.
2. The correct answer is D (all of the above).
3. Answers A and D are correct. Morocco (answer B) and Bangladesh (answer C) are both countries where governments have committed to action and have seen higher enrollment among women and girls in education.
4. Answer C is correct. The gender ratio is the most equal for primary school enrollment (answer A) with 96 girls for every 100 boys, and the ratio for secondary school (answer B) is similar, at 95 girls per 100 boys. The education gap is the widest at the post-secondary, or tertiary, level (answer C).
5. Answer D (all of the above) is correct.
6. Answer A is correct. Bahia Street works to builds solidarity and facilitates consciousness around gender and race among black communities in Salvador, Brazil. The organization is not a microfinance institution (answer B). The Community Empowerment Program (CEP) in Velingara, Senegal, provides capacity building for women to use ICTs (answer C), and the Rural Energy Foundation (answer D) is a non-profit that helps rural communities gain access to renewable energy.
7. The correct answer is D. Bahia Street was founded by Rita Conceição, who grew up in the shantytowns of Salvador and wanted to build community and raise political consciousness among young black girls living in the community. Renee Ho (answer B) was the writer of the chapter on the Community Empowerment Program. Margaret Wilson (answer A) is the co-founder of Bahia Street. Sheryl Sandberg (answer C) is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook and the author of the book Lean In.
8. The correct answer is A. The CEP does NOT teach girls about the importance of domestic responsibilities. The program recognizes that unpaid domestic labour among women can prevent them from progressing in formal education and instead teaches skills in literacy (answer B), numeracy (answer C), and project management (answer D).
9. The correct answer is D (the Jokko Initiative). UNICEF (answer A) is a partner in the Jokko project. The CEP (answer B) is also implemented by Tostan but is a rights-based education program.
10. The correct answer is D. (all the above).
11. The correct answer is C. Tostan’s educational model works because it adapts lessons to cultural contexts and uses appropriate cultural references. The CEP focuses on rights-based empowerment (answer B). The Jokko Initiative was developed in partnership with UNICEF (answer A) but was not emphasized by the textbook as the primary reason for the project’s success. Tostan’s model was developed in close consultation with the community, so answer D is incorrect.
12. Answer B is correct. The Rural Energy Foundation will pilot the development of community-led solar-power charging stations for mobile phones in Senegal. Mobile phone ownership rates are rapidly increasing across Africa, but the Foundation will be making this trend more sustainable, rather than simply contributing to the volume of phones (answer A). The Foundation is not supporting the construction of a solar energy plant (answer C) or powerlines (answer D).
13. Answer A is correct. The Rural Energy Foundation will put knowledge and technology in the hands of women as means to achieve long-lasting development. More efficient and affordable text messages (answers B and C) are a product of the Jokko Foundation.
Discussion Questions
1. Rita Conceição names a number of values she incorporates into advice she gives to girls who are a part of Bahia Street. What are some of these values and why do you think they are important to her?
2. Describe some methods Jokko Initiative uses to educate women about technology. Compare and contrast Bahia Street with the Jokko Initiative.
3. Use external research to find the most recent gender ratio for tertiary education. How does this ratio change at national, regional, and global levels?
4. What are the risks of grouping different countries into categories of most and least educated? What trends are included and overlooked when using this approach?
5. How did the emphasis on education from the Millennial Development Goals transfer over to the Sustainable Development Goals? What kind of presence do education, gender, and technology have in the Sustainable Development Goals?
6. What are some examples of the role of technology in political change? Is there a connection between the use of technology for education and its use for broader social movements?
7. What are some examples of how social media has influenced women’s political, social, or economic empowerment?
Essay Questions
1. The textbook notes that “mobile phone use is increasing twice as fast in Africa as in any other region in the world” (p. 37). What are the benefits of having a mobile phone on an individual, organizational, or community level? Are mobile phones or other pieces of information and communication technology simply neutral devices or tools of political influence?
2. What does the Jokko Initiative demonstrate about the benefits of incorporating local knowledge into development programs? What are some ways of ensuring that local symbols, values, and perspectives are integrated into education and capacity-building projects?
3. Rita Conceição, founder of Bahia Street, was quoted saying “we teach the girls to take care of others in their lives as well. Women take care of the children, and that is the future of our society.” What are the implications of this statement in the context of gender norms, care, and domestic labour?
Additional Resources
EdTechWomen. “About ETW.” (2016). New York, NY.
A New York-based organization that supports the leadership and capacity of women in education technology.
Cornwall, A. “Women’s Empowerment: What Works?” Journal of International Development 28(3), 342 – 359. (2016).
Draws on a multi-country research study to examine women’s individual journeys towards empowerment.
Foster, D. & Fitzgerald, M. “Is Capitalism Destroying Feminism? An Interview with Dawn Foster.” OpenDemocracy. (2016).
An interview with Dawn Foster, a journalist who writes on gender, politics and social affairs. Her book Lean Out is a response to Sandberg’s Lean In, and takes a more institutional approach to discussing women in the workplace through a lens of not only gender, but also class, race, and empire.
Perryman, L. & de los Artocs, B. “Women’s Empowerment Through Openness: OER, OEP and the Sustainable Development Goals.” Open Praxis 8(2), April – June 2016, 163 – 180. (2016).
Based on survey responses from 7,700 educators from 175 countries, this paper explores the ability of Open Education Resources (OERs) to increase women’s voices in education.
Rice, C. et al. “Pedagogical Possibilities for Unruly Bodies.” Gender and Education. 1 – 20. (2016).
Paper on the use of digital art to tell untold narratives of activism by people with disabilities.
Sandberg, S. “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders.” TED. (2010).
TEDTalk by Sheryl Sandberg based on her widely acclaimed book Lean In, on navigating the male-dominated business world as a woman.
Rossatto, C.
“Global Activism and Social Transformation vis-à-vis Dominant Forms of Economic Organization: Critical Education within Afro-Brazilian and Transnational Pedagogical Praxis.” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 2(3), 228 – 260. (2015).
Discusses grassroots social movements across race and gender divisions and national borders to challenge notions of market competition within education.
The World’s Women 2015. “Education.” (2015).
Annually updated global data and analysis on gender disparities in educational access with indicators including primary and secondary school enrollment rates as well as illiteracy.
UN Statistics. “Millennium Development Goal Indicators.” (2016).
Updated statistics and baseline indicators on the progress made in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, with data available in national, regional and global contexts. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.02%3A_Women_and_Education.txt |
Chapter 3: Women and Health
Chapter Summary
This chapter discusses women’s health as an indicator of a nation’s political, social, and economic development. As women are half of any given nation’s population, productivity is lowered when women’s health is poor. Women’s health is important from human rights and economics perspectives. Nearly 380,000 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy each year. The majority of maternal deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. However, maternal deaths declined by one-third globally between 1990 and 2008. Also, while women are marrying later throughout the developing world, large unmet family planning needs remain.
The chapter examines two cases of women and organizations who have been breaking down barriers in health. Salwa Al-Najjab is a Palestinian activist who was the only female student in her medical school and went on to provide crucial health services for women in Palestinian refugee camps. Najjab’s work led her to become cognizant of the economic, social, and environmental determinants of health. She founded the Women’s Social and Legal Guidance Center in Ramallah. The second case study concerns the mothers2mothers (M2M) program, which operates 680 sites across sub-Saharan Africa, reaching 85,000 new and expecting mothers per month. M2M provides treatment and testing for HIV-positive pregnant women and ensures access to medication. The program provides employment and community engagement opportunities for women who are HIV-positive, and participants can become empowered members of the community.
Key Words
• Abortion
• Antiretroviral (ARV) medication
• Elton John AIDS Foundation
• Global Information and Advice on HIV & AIDS (AVERT)
• Guttmacher Institute
• Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment (HAART)
• HIV/AIDS
• Johnson & Johnson
• Juzoor Foundation for Health and Social Development
• Mother-to-child transmission
• Mothers2mothers
• Prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT)
• Salwa Al-Najjab
• Stigma
• United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)
• United Nations Population Fund (UNPF)
• United States Department of State
• U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC)
• U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)
• Women’s Social and Legal Center
• World Health Organization (WHO)
Figure 3.1: Healthy women are an asset to their families and society. They remain fit to care for their families, earn income and contribute to their communities. A woman and child in Botswana.
Overview
By Lori S. Ashford
Women’s health can be a barometer of a nation’s progress. Countries afflicted by poverty, corruption, war or weak governance often neglect their most vulnerable citizens. Frequently these are women. When women are unhealthy, their productivity is lowered and their children and families are less secure. This has an economic impact. So investing in women’s health makes sense from both an economic and a human rights perspective.
Unequal in Health
Women live longer than men, statistics show, but they may spend a greater proportion of their lives in poor health for a variety of reasons, attributable less to biological differences than to poverty and gender discrimination. Poor families may invest less in their daughters, giving them less nutrition, health care and education than their sons. Such disadvantages early in life have long-term consequences for girls’ health and well-being. For example, adolescent childbearing, common in countries and communities that condone child marriage, poses health risks and limits life prospects for the teen mothers and their children. If women are undernourished they risk having low birth-weight babies who, in turn, face a higher risk of early death and poor health. An added threat to the health of women and girls exists in countries where there is a cultural preference for sons, such as China and India. Sex-selective abortions and female infanticide are responsible for millions of “missing girls.” The resulting shortage of women relative to men can have alarming social repercussions. An April 2011 report in The Economist cited evidence that a skewed sex ratio in India has led to increased trafficking of girls, among other abuses. Data from U.N. Population Fund studies also support this (UNFPA, 2004).
Pregnancy and childbirth take a heavy toll on women’s health in the developing world. According to 2010 estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), 358,000 women die of preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth every year; 99 percent of these deaths are in developing countries. In contrast, in developed countries where women deliver their babies in hospitals and have access to care for pregnancy complications, maternal deaths are extremely rare.
Figure 3.2: Two Afghan doctors examine a patient’s x-ray at Rabia Balkhi Women’s Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The vast majority of the world’s maternal deaths occur in the two poorest regions: sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, where high fertility multiplies the dangers that mothers face over a lifetime, one in 31 women is likely to die as a consequence of pregnancy or childbirth (WHO, 2010). In developed countries, that chance is one in 4,300. Outside of Africa, Afghanistan is the riskiest place on earth to become pregnant and bear children, with a one in 11 lifetime chance of dying from pregnancy-related causes.
Millions of women suffer physical injuries or long-term disabilities, such as incontinence or ruptured organs, resulting from lack of proper care during pregnancy and childbirth. Many of these disabilities go unreported because women in developing countries consider them normal. The technology and knowledge to prevent needless deaths and injuries has long been available, but geography, substandard health systems, gender bias and political inertia all create barriers to making motherhood safer.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic also threatens women’s health in poor countries and communities. Where the virus is spread through heterosexual contact, women are more vulnerable to infection than men for physiological and social reasons, such as women’s economic dependence on men, their lack of power to ask male partners to practice safer sex and — too often — coerced sex. According to a 2009 UNAIDS report, “An estimated 50 million women in Asia are at risk of becoming infected with HIV from their intimate partners … men who engage in high-risk sexual behaviours.”
Recent Trends Encouraging
The good news is that today women are marrying later throughout the developing world. They are delaying first births and having fewer children than their mothers did. These trends reflect the fact that more girls are staying in school and more women and couples are practicing family planning. But there still is a large unmet need for family planning: According to a 2009 report from the Guttmacher Institute, more than 200 million women worldwide who want to avoid pregnancy do not use modern contraception. This contributes to tens of millions of unplanned births and unsafe abortions annually, often among the poorest women, who are least able to obtain and use the health services they need.
Estimates from WHO in 2010 revealed that maternal deaths dropped by about one-third globally from 1990 to 2008, thanks to a number of factors such as increased availability of contraception, prenatal care and skilled assistance during childbirth. Countries as diverse as Bolivia, China, Eritrea, Iran, Romania and Vietnam have made remarkable progress. Much more work remains to be done, however, for all countries to meet the Millennium Development Goal to reduce maternal deaths by three-fourths (compared with 1990 levels) by 2015.
More to be Done
Where countries have prioritized women’s health in national policy, great progress has been made. Women should be encouraged to recognize and speak out about their health care needs, so policymakers may learn and take action. Concern about women’s issues, including health care, prompted President Obama to appoint Melanne Verveer the first ambassador-at-large for women’s issues, to help address such problems. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has made global women’s issues a high priority of the U.S. State Department. In 2009 President Obama designated \$63 million — to be spent over six years — for the Global Health Initiative, a partnership among U.S. agencies to boost health care in the developing world, particularly for women and children. HIV/AIDS treatment projects such as mothers2mothers, which is highlighted in this chapter, are funded by the U. S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
Figure 3.3: Partnerships between local groups and international organizations provide health care and counseling for pregnant women and new mothers in Madagascar
Improving women’s health starts by recognizing that women have different needs from men and unequal access to health care. Focusing a “gender lens” on health services is necessary to reveal and address the inequalities between men’s and women’s care. This means paying more attention to girls, adolescents and marginalized women who suffer from poverty and powerlessness and changing the attitudes and practices that harm women’s health. Also, men should be partners in promoting women’s health, in ensuring that sex and childbearing are safe and healthy and in rearing the next generation of young leaders — both girls and boys.
Lori S. Ashford, a freelance consultant, has written about global population, health and women’s issues for 20 years. Formerly with the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), she authored the widely disseminated PRB “Women of Our World” data sheets and “New Population Policies: Advancing Women’s Health and Rights” for the Population Bulletin, among other publications.
PROFILE: Salwa Al-Najjab – Palestinian Health Care Activist
By Naela Khalil
Figure 3.4: Overcoming gender bias in male-dominated hospitals wasn’t easy for Salwa Al-Najjab, but her success has inspired other Arab women. Her Juzoor Foundation brings medicine to poor and underserved communities.
Salwa Al-Najjab was the best female math student in her class, and her passion for mathematics would have led her to study at the College of Engineering, but for her Russian math teacher’s advice to study medicine: “With your intelligence and your strong personality, you will be of more benefit to the women of Palestine as a doctor than as an engineer,” the teacher said. Salwa Al-Najjab followed her teacher’s advice, and today she is changing medical care in the Palestinian Territories.
The hospital environment stirred Al-Najjab’s curiosity and her love of knowledge. She hadn’t realized that her medical career also would show her that many women lived in very different circumstances from her own. Al-Najjab admits: “The hospital and the medical profession opened my eyes wide to conditions which I hadn’t realized were as bad and as difficult as they were.” Her lifelong professional and personal battle to support women’s rights and to help provide better health care for women started when she began practicing medicine in 1979 at Al-Maqasid Hospital in Jerusalem.
She expanded her efforts to create better conditions for women in the mid-1980s. Carrying her physician’s bag and instrument case, Al-Najjab visited Palestinian villages and refugee camps to give women medical check-ups and treatment. She volunteered her time under the most difficult and complex conditions. She was creating change on the ground.
Today, after more than 30 years of work in hospitals and clinics in different parts of the Palestinian Territories, Al-Najjab heads the Juzoor (Roots) Foundation for Health and Social Development, based in Jerusalem. She continues to enthusiastically pursue her dream, although now, she says, it is more difficult “to influence health care policy decisionmakers to improve and develop the level of health care services provided to women, and to bridge the gap between service providers and recipients.”
Al-Najjab’s optimism is infectious. She maintains her smile despite the challenges she has faced in her life. During her early school years, she attended eight different schools in Ramallah, Hebron and Jordan. Her father worked first at the Jordanian Ministry of Education, then at UNESCO, so her family moved frequently. This meant she and her three siblings often changed schools, making it difficult to maintain long-term friendships. However, it was always easy for her to maintain her academic excellence.
Al-Najjab traveled to Russia to attend Moscow University in 1971. After one year of Russian language study, she enrolled at Kuban Medical School in Krasdnada. Dealing with her fellow students was more difficult than learning a new language or other demanding subjects. Some Arab students looked at her disapprovingly; others underestimated her ability to succeed because she was a woman. She persevered in her studies, defying those who doubted her, and became a model of academic success. She became a mentor to Palestinian women studying abroad.
Her first job at Al-Maqasid Hospital presented her with major challenges. She was the only female resident doctor, and she began working in the obstetrics and gynecology section. It was difficult for the male doctors to accept a female colleague and professional competitor. The hardest thing for Al-Najjab was that the female nurses did not accept her either, because they were accustomed to dealing with male doctors. They believed that a male doctor was more competent and professional than his female counterpart. The atmosphere at the hospital reflected this masculine bias in the way they divided the work: Al-Najjab would do routine examinations of female patients at the hospital clinic, while the male doctors would perform surgical operations and circumcisions. They did not expect that this quiet, beautiful young woman would resist this arrangement, nor that the section head would support her.
Al-Najjab says: “I refused to accept their masculine [-biased] division of labor, and I stuck to my position: ‘I will participate in surgical operations, and I will perform circumcisions on boys.’ This didn’t please them, and they nicknamed me ‘the rooster.’”
Al-Najjab says that the first time she experienced discrimination against women was at the hospital: “I grew up in a family that offered the same opportunities to both sexes. Even my grandfather, back in the 1960s, allowed my aunts to study in Britain, to work outside of the house and to spend the night away from home. Therefore, the attitude that I faced from my colleagues at the hospital astonished me.”
Figure 3.5: A nurse in a West Bank community clinic examines patients. The clinic is part of USAID’s Health Flagship Project to improve community health care.
Al-Najjab also learned about the unequal status of women. She says, “I felt that I was getting to know my society for the first time. I would feel distraught when I delivered the baby of a girl who was no older than 15, or when I heard women affirming to me, unprompted, that men had a monopoly over decisions regarding who their daughters would marry, whether or not to use contraceptives or how many children they would have.” Al-Najjab adds, “Women don’t have the right to defend their own right to an education … It’s a cycle that must be broken.”
Al-Najjab’s family valued knowledge. Her father defied convention by sending her to study in Russia. Although her mother hadn’t completed her studies, she encouraged her four children, girls and boys alike, to continue their education. All of them graduated from college.
“Unlike other mothers, mine never talked to me about marriage. Instead, she would always talk to me about the importance of education for a woman’s life,” Al-Najjab recalls.
After seven years at Al-Maqasid Hospital, during which time she helped establish several high-quality clinics in Jerusalem and its suburbs, Al-Najjab left the hospital to work in the field. “I discovered that only a small number of people go to hospitals, either due to poverty or ignorance,” she says. “If I wanted to provide health care to women, I had to go to them, wherever they were.”
In 1985, Al-Najjab and a group of health professionals began visiting villages and refugee camps to provide health care. People’s reactions were positive, but some doctors criticized her for damaging doctors’ “prestige” by going to the patients rather than insisting that people come to the doctor.
By breaking this rule of prestige, Al-Najjab and her colleagues found conditions that they did not encounter in well-organized clinics equipped with winter heating and summer fans. They met people in far-flung places who suffered from a severe lack of health care compounded by the complex political conditions resulting from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Al-Najjab says, “I treated women who had no bathrooms in their homes and others living in homes unfit for human habitation. I came into contact with a bitter reality that overturned all of my convictions regarding the concept of health: I realized that it wasn’t only a question of physical well-being, but that health is also related to economic, social and psychological conditions, and to the environment.”
She has fought many battles and continues to do so. Her convictions and her decisions are sometimes contrary to social traditions that limit women’s rights. Al-Najjab is an activist who gets things done. She co-founded the Women’s Social and Legal Guidance Center in Ramallah. The center shelters women who are victims of violence, offers them legal assistance, refers their cases to the police and refers them to a safe house for their protection.
“I used to believe that as the years went by, change for the better would take place. But what I am noticing today is the opposite. In this social environment of political frustration and poverty, fundamentalist movements have strengthened and are actively working to move society backwards at every level. Women and women’s rights are the most prominent victims,” she says.
Besides leading the Juzoor Foundation, which seeks to influence health care policies, Al-Najjab heads the Middle East and North Africa Health Policy Forum, where she continues to strive for change. She was nominated by the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem for the U.S. Department of State’s 2010 International Women of Courage award.
With a husband and three children, in addition to her medical practice and activism, Dr. Salwa Al-Najjab has a full life. Her prescription for success is this: “We cannot but be optimistic about life.”
Naela Khalil is a Palestinian journalist. She won the 2008 Samir Kassir Award for freedom of the press.
PROJECT: Mothers2mothers – Help for HIV-Positive Women
By Maya Kulycky
HIV/AIDS is the scourge of Africa, but in Kenya, the nongovernmental organization mothers2mothers enables HIV-positive women and their families to live full lives despite the disease.
Teresa Njeri, a single mother in Kiambu, a northern suburb of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, has a dream. She wants to build a home for herself and her six-year-old son. Recently, Teresa bought a plot of land. When she looks out over it she pictures the house she plans to build, with three bedrooms, a “big kitchen” and a yard where her son can play. Teresa is confident and optimistic. But planning for a bright future, and having the means to make it a reality, is a big change for her. Ten years ago Teresa was convinced that she and her son were going to die.
In 2001, Teresa was diagnosed as HIV-positive when she was five months pregnant. “The first thing that came to my mind was death,” says Teresa. “All of my hopes were shattered.” The nurse at the clinic told Teresa she could protect her baby from HIV, but the nurse “wasn’t convincing, she was not very sure.” Regardless, Teresa joined a prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) program. Meanwhile, she disclosed her status to her husband, who also tested HIV-positive. Like others who were afraid of the stigma associated with HIV, the couple hid their status. They separated shortly after the birth of their son, who is HIV-negative.
A few months later, Teresa was hospitalized and told she had AIDS. When her father discovered her status from the hospital staff, he told her family, who isolated her and took her son away to live in the family’s village. “So I was left alone, all alone in the world,” Teresa remembers.
Teresa fled, sought treatment and volunteered to speak to others with AIDS. But she says she still “didn’t have any focus in life. I didn’t have any hope. I didn’t know what to do.” Then Teresa found mothers2mothers, thanks to nurses in the hospital where she volunteered. They told her that mothers2mothers was seeking to hire women trained in PMTCT. Teresa applied and became a mothers2mothers mentor mother.
Figure 3.6: Mathakane Metsing carries her daughter at their home in Khatleng, Lesotho. She was helped by — and now works for — mothers2mothers as a peer educator.
Figure 3.7: Ntsiuoa Ralefifi (center) at a mothers2mothers support group at Mafeteng hospital in Lesotho. When she learned she was HIV positive, she enrolled in the transmission prevention program.
International Partnerships
Mothers2mothers — funded by USAID, PEPFAR (U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control), the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Johnson & Johnson and other corporate and foundation partners — trains and employs HIV-positive mothers to be “mentor mothers” to provide counseling, education and support to newly diagnosed HIV-positive pregnant women and new mothers. It is an innovative, sustainable model of care at the forefront of prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission. Mothers2-mothers operates 680 sites in nine sub-Saharan African countries, reaching about 85,000 new pregnant women and new mothers a month.
The African continent is struggling under the burden of HIV/AIDS. Of the 33 million people carrying HIV worldwide, 22 million live in sub-Saharan Africa. Ninety percent of HIV-infected babies are born in the region and 75 percent of the world’s HIV-positive pregnant women live in 12 African countries, according to studies done by AVERT (www.avert.org), the UNAIDS Regional Support Team for Eastern and Southern Africa (www.unaidsrstesa.org/unaids-priority/2-preventing-mothers-dying-and-babies-becoming-infected-h) and the World Health Organization Universal Access Report 2010. Meanwhile, the region is desperately short of doctors and nurses.
Mothers2mothers fills a gap by enlisting HIV-positive mothers to counsel pregnant women about how testing and treatment can ensure their babies are born healthy and that, if necessary, they can get medication. Mentor mothers work beside doctors and nurses in health care facilities, helping patients understand, accept and adhere to the interventions that are prescribed. They are paid members of the medical team.
Empowering Women, Protecting Children
The results are clear. In Lesotho, data collected by mothers2mothers show that 92 percent of pregnant women who attended the organization’s instruction sessions three or more times took antiretroviral (ARV) medication during pregnancy, compared to 71 percent of those who attended once. Adhering to the ARV regime is critical to decreasing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Furthermore, 97 percent of frequently-attending mothers2mothers clients get CD4 tests, which determine the number of T-helper cells with which the body combats infections. A CD4 test shows how advanced an HIV infection is and is a first step toward receiving the life-saving highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART).
Women are empowered by the support they receive in mothers2mothers programs. They become peer educators who are role models in their communities, while earning a salary and gaining valuable work experience.
Teresa credits mothers2mothers with giving her a sense of purpose. Her mothers2mothers colleagues encouraged her to pursue her college degree. She is studying community health and development. “I feel like God created me … to talk to these women, and help them, empower them, encourage them,” she says.
Teresa points to her success in helping a pregnant woman from the traditional African religion of Wakorino, whose adherents often eschew professional medical care. “I saw her when I was coming to work,” she says. She gave the woman her telephone number, and “the following day she called me and said, ‘I am here at the [hospital] gate.’” The woman tested HIV-positive. “I told her, ‘Don’t worry, because you are going to live a very long time.’ I disclosed my status to her.” Teresa convinced her to adhere to PMTCT treatment and deliver in the hospital. The woman gave birth to an HIV-negative child. “I feel like a star,” Teresa laughs.
Mothers2mothers is working to expand its reach to women in more countries and in countries where it currently operates. The impact is clear and the method is simple — a woman talking to another woman can help prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Maya Kulycky is the global communications manager at mothers2mothers. She also lectures in political journalism at University of Cape Town, South Africa. She previously reported for ABC News and CNBC. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, she received a master’s degree from the University of London, Goldsmith’s College, and a law degree from Yale Law School.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. The following factors are major contributions to gender inequalities in health…
1. Biological differences (Women are unhealthier by nature)
2. Poverty and gender discrimination
3. Adolescent marriage and childbearing
4. Cultural preferences for sons over daughters
5. All except for A
2. The vast majority of the world’s maternal deaths occur in….
1. South Asia
2. Sub-Saharan Africa
3. South-East Asia
4. Latin America
5. Both A and B
3. The riskiest country on earth to become pregnant is…
1. Malawi
2. Cambodia
3. Lesotho
4. Afghanistan
5. None of the above
4. Existing technologies and knowledge that make pregnancy and childbirth safer do not reach some populations due to…
1. Geography
2. Sub-standard health systems
3. Gender bias
4. Political inertia
5. All of the above
5. The WHO estimates that maternal deaths dropped one-third globally from 1990 to 2008 thanks to…
1. Contraception
2. Prenatal care
3. Skilled assistance during childbirth
4. Abstinence
5. Answers A, B, and C.
6. President Obama designated \$63 million towards global health through…
1. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
2. Mothers2mothers
3. The Global Health Initiative
4. U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)
5. None of the above
7. Encouraging recent trends in women’s health globally DO NOT include:
1. More girls are staying in school longer
2. Girls are delaying their first births
3. More women and couples are practicing family planning
4. Many women have insufficient access to contraception
5. All of the above
8. _____________ founded the Women’s Social and Legal Guidance Center in Ramallah, Palestine.
1. Maya Kulycky
2. Teresa Njeri
3. Salwa Al-Najjab
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
9. Salwa Al-Najjab started which Jerusalem-based institution?
1. Juzoor (Roots) Foundation for Health and Social Development
2. Kuban Medical School
3. Al-Maqasid Hospital
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
10. The most difficult aspect of practicing medicine for Al-Najjab was:
1. Performing circumcisions on boys
2. Being the only female doctor
3. Male doctors not accepting a female colleague
4. Not being accepted by female nurses, who were used to working with male doctors.
5. None of the above
11. Al-Najjab stated that she first experienced discrimination…
1. Growing up at home with her family
2. At Kuban Medical School in Russia
3. When she began practicing at Al-Maqasid Hospital in Jerusalem
4. Working in Palestinian refugee camps
5. None of the above
12. The factors of Al-Najjab’s upbringing that empowered her to pursue a career in medicine include…
1. Her family valued knowledge
2. Her family included boys and girls to go to school alike
3. Her mother never spoke about marriage
4. She observed her aunts moving abroad to study
5. All of the above
13. By seeing patients within conflict zones, rather than being confined to the hospital, Al-Najjab realized…
1. The importance of the economic, social, and psychological determinants of health
2. The value of privatized pharmaceutical research
3. The importance of technology in treating neglected tropical diseases
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
14. The Women’s Social and Legal Guidance Centre performs the following functions…
1. Shelters women who are victims of violence
2. Offers them legal assistance
3. Refers their cases to the police
4. Refers them to a safe house for their protection
5. All of the above
15. Mothers2mother is NOT funded by…
1. USAID
2. PEPFAR
3. Centre for Disease Control (CDC)
4. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
5. Elton John AIDS Foundation
16. Of the 33 million people carrying HIV worldwide, how many live in sub-Saharan Africa?
1. 10 million
2. 25 million
3. 22 million
4. 15 million
5. 30 million
17. Mothers2mother’s service provision includes…
1. Enlisting only nurses who are mothers
2. Recruiting only female doctors
3. Enlisting HIV-positive mothers to counsel pregnant women about how testing and medication can ensure that babies are born healthy
4. Providing foreign women health practitioners to carry out capacity-building workshops
5. All of the above
18. Mothers2mothers program participants experience the following outcomes:
1. Experience a sense of purpose
2. Participate in a community with other HIV-positive mothers
3. Assume leadership roles amongst their peers
4. Earn a salary and work experience
5. All of the above
19. What percentage of women who attend mothers2mothers instruction sessions over three times per week begin antiretroviral treatment?
1. 82%
2. 75%
3. 99%
4. 92%
5. 63%
20. What percentage of mothers frequently attending mothers2mothers trainings decide to receive CD4 tests?
1. 60%
2. 70%
3. 100%
4. 97%
5. 90%
Answers
1. Answer E (all except for A) is correct. The chapter states that biological differences (answer A) are lesser determinants of health inequalities. Instead, poverty and gender discrimination (B), adolescent marriage and childbearing (answer C), and cultural preferences for sons (D) are listed as factors that exacerbate gender inequality in health.
2. The correct answer is E. The vast majority of the world’s maternal deaths take place in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (both A and B are correct).
3. The correct answer is Afghanistan (answer D).
4. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
5. The correct answer is E (answers A, B, and C).
6. The correct answer is the Global Health Initiative (answer C). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a private foundation (answer A), and mothers2mothers (answer B) was funded by the Global Health Initiative. PEPFAR (answer D) was the response to HIV/AIDS initiated by President George W. Bush in the year 2000.
7. The correct answer is D (insufficient access to contraception). While staying in school (answer A), delaying first births (answer B), and practicing family planning (answer C) all illustrate progress in women’s health, many women still do not have access to contraceptives (answer D).
8. The correct answer Salwa Al-Najjab (answer C). Maya Kulycky (answer A) is the global communications manager at mothers2mothers and Teresa Njeri (answer B) was a participant in the mothers2mothers program.
9. The correct answer is the Juzoor (Roots) Foundation for Health and Social Development (answer A). The Kuban Medical School (answer B) is where Al-Najjab earned her medical education in Russia and the Al-Maqasid Hospital (answer C) is a Jerusalem-based hospital where she began practicing medicine.
10. According to Al-Najjab, the hardest thing about practicing medicine at Al-Maqasid hospital was also not being accepted by female nurses who were used to dealing with male doctors (answer D). Discrimination experienced by being the only female doctor (answer B) and being seen as less professional by her male colleagues (answer C) were also significant challenges, but not having the support of female nurses was especially difficult.
11. Al-Najjab first experienced discrimination when she began practicing at the Al-Maqasid Hospital (answer B).
12. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
13. Al-Najjab realized the importance of the economic, social and psychological determinants of health (answer A).
14. The correct answer all of the above (answer E).
15. Answer D is correct. Mothers2mothers is not funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The funders for the mothers2mothers program include USAID (answer A), PEPFAR (answer B), the CDC (answer C), and the Elton John Aids Foundation (answer E).
16. 22 million is correct (answer C).
17. Mothers2mothers enlists HIV-positive mothers to counsel pregnant women about how testing and medication can ensure that babies are born healthy (answer C). The program does not enlist only nurses who are mothers (answer A), recruit only female doctors (answer B), or recruit international women health practitioners to run capacity-building workshops (answer D).
18. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
19. The correct answer is 92% (answer D).
20. The correct answer is 97% (answer D).
Discussion Questions
1. What are some of the structural health factors influencing the differing levels of poor health among men and women? How is women’s health issues affected by politics and culture?
2. How do gender norms influence the way health is viewed and discussed?
3. What encouraged Salwa Al-Najjab to pursue a career in medicine?
4. What did Salwa Al-Najjab realize about health during her tenure at the Al-Maqasid Hospital?
5. How does the mothers2mothers campaign build community and support among HIV-positive women?
6. What are the connections between health and economic growth? What are the benefits and drawbacks of using economics and rights-based perspectives in the context of women and health?
7. If technologies and knowledge to treat and prevent maternal deaths and injuries are available, why are they not reaching certain populations?
8. Scholars and practitioners in the public health field have begun using the term “vertical transmission” instead of “mother-to-child transmission.” What could be the reasons for this evolution in terminology?
9. Salwa Al-Najjab stated that it was “difficult to influence health policy decision makers” while she was providing medical services in Jerusalem. What does this statement demonstrate about the differences between service provision and policy advocacy? Further, what are some challenges in influencing policy change that are particular to the Palestinian context?
10. The chapter states that while 75% of the world’s HIV-positive pregnant women live in 12 African countries, sub-Saharan Africa is desperately short of doctors and nurses. What are the reasons for this? (You will have to look outside of the text.)
Essay Questions
1. To what extent should health fall under the responsibility of the individual, and to what extent should it be under the purview of the state?
2. Under which presidency was the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) implemented? (You will have to look outside of the text.) What, if any, were some challenges or oversights of the program and what were their implications in terms of gender and sexual orientation?
Additional Resources
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
More information about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Courtenay, W.H. “Constructions of Masculinity and their Influence on Men’s Well-Being: A Theory of Gender and Health.” Sco Sci Med. (2000). 50(10): 1385 – 1401.
Paper on the linkages between masculinity, social status, economics, and sexual orientation influence men’s health outcomes.
Diaz-Tello, F. Invisible Wounds: Obstetric Violence in the United States. Reproductive Health matters 24(47), 56 – 64. (2016).
Contributes to the growing attention to coercion of pregnant women by health care personnel in the USA.
Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation. “Global Health Data Visualizations.”
Database with graphics and visualizations allowing the user to compare illnesses, causes, and demographics across states, regions, and globally.
Hickel, J. “Neoliberal Plague: AIDS and Global Capitalism.” Al Jazeera. (2012).
A critical piece on the impact of structural adjustment policies, privatization, and border security on global health, particularly the HIV & AIDS crisis.
Ramjee, G. & Daniels, B. “Women and HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa.” AIDS Research & Therapy10(30): (2013).
Article expanding on the particular vulnerabilities of women to HIV & AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The World’s Women 2015. “Health.” (2015).
Annually updated data and analysis on the gendered dimension of health, with indicators including HIV rates, STIs, access to information, antenatal care, and non-communicable diseases.
Wood, S. Abracinskas, L. Correa, S. & Pecheny, M. Reform in Abortion Law in Uruguay: Context, Process and Lessons Learned. Issues in Current Policy: (2016).
Examines the strategies and actors that led to passing Uruguay’s “Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy” bill through a feminist lens. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.03%3A_Women_and_Health.txt |
Chapter 4: Violence Against Women
Chapter Summary
The chapter discusses the breadth and severity of violence against women with case studies of organizing and resistance against sexualized and domestic violence from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Peoples’ Republic of China. Globally, it is estimated that one-third of women have been beaten, raped or abused. Factors influencing violence against women include female genital mutilation (FGM), child-marriage, forced marriages, and various forms of labour exploitation. However, communities are currently addressing violence against women through awareness campaigns, shelters and victim support services, demands for enhanced criminal justice responses, and advocacy for more robust laws regulating offenders and protecting victims.
Two case studies of both grassroots and policy-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working to address violence against women. Chouchou Namegabe is a prolific journalist, producer and activist who founded the Association de Femmes des Médias de Sud Kivu (AFEM). The organization provides a space for women to speak and be heard about the gender-based violence they have experienced and engages in policy advocacy on an international scale. The Anti-Violence Network of the China Law Association (ADVN) has also been active in influencing progress on legislation, investigation, prosecution of crimes, social support, and public awareness on violence against women. The ADVN has a collaborative relationship with government and takes a long-term approach that they believe is necessary to influence legislative changes and implementation of the law.
Key Words
• Anti-Domestic Violence Network of China Law Association (ADVN)
• Association des Femmes des Médias de Sud Kivu (AFEM)
• China Law Association
• China Women’s University
• Chouchou Namegabe
• Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women
• Human Rights Centre of the University of Oslo
• Honour killings
• Female genital mutilation (FGM)
• Ford Foundation
• Oxfam Novib
• Radio Maendeleo
• Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA)
• Trafficking
• World Health Organization (WHO)
• Zeng Guohua
Figure 4.1: Violence against women is a serious and common problem worldwide. Women and children, trafficked for sex and slave labor, are particularly vulnerable in conflict zones. This woman was among hundreds raped when rebels attacked a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Overview
By Robin N. Haarr
Violence against women is a serious human rights violation and a public health problem of global proportions. The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993, defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”
A Serious and Common Problem
Figure 4.2: Women holding portraits of victims protest violence against women in Milan, Italy.
International research, conducted over the past two decades by the World Health Organization and others, reveals that violence against women is a much more serious and common problem than previously suspected. It is estimated that one out of three women worldwide has been raped, beaten or abused. While violence against women occurs in all cultures and societies, its frequency varies across countries. Societies that stress the importance of traditional patriarchal practices which reinforce unequal power relations between men and women and keep women in a subordinate position tend to have higher rates of violence against women. Rates tend to be higher in societies in which women are socially regulated or secluded in the home, excluded from participation in the economic labor market and restricted from owning and inheriting property. It is more prevalent where there are restrictive divorce laws, a lack of victim support services and no legislation that effectively protects female victims and punishes offenders. Violence against women is a consequence of gender inequality, and it prevents women from fully advancing in society.
Two of the most common and universal forms of violence against women are intimate partner violence and sexual violence. Intimate partner violence by a current or former male partner or spouse is a serious, but preventable form of violence that affects millions of women worldwide. The violence can be emotional, economic, psychological or physical, including sexual abuse and murder. In countries where reliable, large-scale studies have been conducted, between 10 percent and 71 percent of women report they have been physically or sexually abused, or both, by an intimate partner (WHO). Intimate partner violence is so deeply embedded in many cultures and societies that millions of women consider it an inevitable part of life and marriage. Many battered women suffer in silence because they fear retribution and negative repercussions and stigmatization for speaking out.
Sexual violence includes harassment, assault and rape. It is a common misperception that women are at greater risk of sexual violence from strangers; in reality, women are most likely to experience sexual violence from men they are intimate with or know. During times of war and armed conflict, rape and sexual violence perpetrated upon women are systematically used as a tactic of war by militaries and enemy groups to further their political objectives.
Cultural Factors and Domestic Violence
In many parts of the world, violence against women and girls is based upon cultural and historical practices. In some parts of the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, female genital mutilation is a common form of violence against women. There are also forms of violence against women and girls related to marriage — child marriage, forced arranged marriages, bride kidnappings, and dowry-related deaths and violence. Child marriage and forced marriages are common in Africa, South and Central Asia, and the Middle East. South Asia reportedly has some of the highest rates of child marriages in the world. In South Asia, young women are murdered or driven to suicide as a result of continuous harassment and torture by husbands and in-laws trying to extort more dowry from the bride and her family. In other parts of the world, such as Central Asia, the Caucasus region and parts of Africa, women are at risk of bride kidnappings or marriage by capture, in which a man abducts the woman he wishes to marry. Honor killings — the killing of females by male relatives to restore family honor — are deeply rooted in some cultures where women are considered the property of male relatives and are responsible for upholding family honor. This is the case particularly in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Honor killings have even occurred in immigrant communities in Europe and North America. A woman can be killed for talking to a male who is not a relative, consensual sexual relations outside of marriage, being raped, refusing to marry the man of her family’s choice, disrespecting her husband or seeking a divorce.
Finally, trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation, marriage, domestic servitude and labor is another form of violence against women. Women are deceived and coerced by traffickers who promise jobs and the opportunity for a better life. Parents sell their daughters for small sums of money or promises of remittances for the child’s labor. Traffickers often target poor and vulnerable communities, but young women seeking to study or work abroad can also be at risk. Trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that affects millions of women and girls worldwide.
Concerted Efforts Needed
Every year millions of women require medical attention as a result of violence. Victims suffer disfigurement, disability and death. Physical and mental health problems often continue long after the violence ends. Some women commit suicide to escape the violence in their lives. Across the globe, women are addressing violence in different ways, including awareness-raising campaigns, crisis centers and shelters for female victims, victim support services (medical care, counseling and legal services) and demanding enhanced criminal justice responses and laws that effectively protect female victims of violence and punish offenders. Violence against women is preventable, but it requires the political will of governments, collaboration with international and civil society organizations and legal and civil action in all sectors of society.
Robin Haarr is a professor of criminal justice at Eastern Kentucky University whose research focuses on violence against women and children and human trafficking, nationally and internationally. She does research and policy work for the United Nations and U.S. embassies, and has received several awards for her work, including induction into the Wall of Fame at Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice and the CoraMae Richey Mann “Inconvenient Woman of the Year” Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Women and Crime.
PROFILE: Chouchou Namegabe – A Fierce Voice Against Sexual Violence
By Solange Lusiku
Journalist, radio broadcast producer and co-founder of the South Kivu Women’s Media Association, which she currently heads, activist Chouchou Namegabe is fiercely dedicated to fighting violence against women. She focuses on eradicating sexual violence used as a weapon of war, a practice that has afflicted the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than a decade.
Born on March 30, 1978, Namegabe took up the fight for women’s rights early. Her secondary school education and experience in community radio spurred her interest in the struggle that now defines her. Namegabe began her broadcasting career in 1997 as a trainee at Radio Maendeleo, a popular local radio station. She continued to volunteer, and eventually became a permanent staff member. As violence intensified in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), she focused her reporting on women, health and human rights, and on exposing government corruption. AFEM (Association des Femmes des Médias de Sud Kivu) was founded in 2003, and she became its president in 2005. She has used the association and her role as a broadcaster as effective vehicles to disseminate the voices of women — especially rural women — who are victims of the conflict.
Figure 4.3: Namegabe and Ridelphine Katabesha lead the AFEM journalists at a parade marking International Women’s Day 2010. AFEM trains women journalists and advocates free speech.
“Listening Clubs” Break the Silence
Namegabe works with other women throughout the DRC to set up “listening clubs” where abused women may share their stories. Convincing women who have been raped and tortured to break their silence and speak about their horrific experiences has been a major achievement for Namegabe and AFEM. Residents of Bukavu and all eight territories of South Kivu Province can hear firsthand the tragic stories of these women on local radio, thanks to her efforts. Talking about sexual abuse and murder is no longer forbidden, but has become a weapon against this devastating scourge in the eastern DRC. Namegabe recognized that rape was so prevalent in the region that the stories must be told to bring about change. She promoted this idea on the radio and among her female journalist coworkers. A practical woman, she backed her words with action. In 2007, despite odds against success, Namegabe organized a campaign in Bukavu she called “Break the Silence: Media Against Sexual Violence.” This campaign was universally well-received among peace-loving women, who value the physical integrity of human beings.
Figure 4.4 Namegabe and Ridelphine Katabesha lead the AFEM journalists at a parade marking International Women’s Day 2010. AFEM trains women journalists and advocates free speech.
Women’s rights activist Chouchou Namegabe testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009 about rape and other forms of violence against women in conflict zones. She stands on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Although they live in turbulent areas that suffer sporadic incursions by rebels and other armed militia, many rural women have regained their self-confidence and have overcome the shame of sharing their tragedy with their friends and family. They gradually are moving past their trauma through speaking out:
“I was raped, and my genitals were mutilated.”
“They came with these horrible beards. They ordered me to lie down on the ground. They took off my clothes and raped me in front of my husband and children. There were seven of them, eight. After that I don’t remember because I was unconscious.”
Ending Abuse and Rape as Weapons of War
The people of South Kivu heard such statements during different on-site radio broadcasts hosted by AFEM members. Under Chouchou Namegabe’s leadership, AFEM developed contacts with women everywhere they went in South Kivu. The results are encouraging. Slowly but surely, women are becoming more comfortable talking about violent sexual abuse and the taboos related to openly discussing sex are disappearing as a result of AFEM’s work in South Kivu to raise awareness about the problem. Women have dared to challenge not only rape, but other abusive and discriminatory practices.
Namegabe and her AFEM colleagues have expanded their campaign to reach international audiences. They have attended hearings at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, where they have convinced other journalists to join their fight to save women in South Kivu from rape and torture as a weapon of war.
Namegabe also appeared before the U.S. Senate to testify about the atrocities committed against Congolese women. She told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May 2009, “Rape and sexual violence [are] used as a weapon and tactic of war to destroy the community. The rapes are targeted and intentional, and are meant to remove the people from their mineral-rich land through fear, shame, violence, and the intentional spread of HIV throughout entire families and villages.” Her voice choked with tears, she continued: “We have interviewed over 400 women in South Kivu, and their stories are terrifying. In fact, the word rape fails to truly describe what is happening, because it is not only rape that occurs, but atrocities also accompany the rapes.” A mother was taken with her five children to the forest, Namegabe said, “As each day passed the rebels killed one of her children and forced her to eat her child’s flesh. She begged to be killed but they refused and said ‘No, we can’t give you a good death.’” In other cases women’s genitals were set on fire “not to kill them but to let them suffer.”
Chouchou Namegabe wants to ensure that these brutalities are recognized in the DRC as crimes against humanity, and the perpetrators prosecuted. She has called for impunity on rape and sexual violence to end, for governments and corporations to “end the profitability of blood minerals” and mandate that Congolese minerals are “conflict free.” She also helps rehabilitate the victims of violence. “Economic recovery is part of the total recovery of the women and their communities,” she told the U.S. senators.
The visible results that this fighter for justice facilitated earned her international recognition, including the prestigious Vital Voices Global Leadership award and the Knight International Journalism award from the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C. Namegabe continues to raise awareness about the plight of Congolese women and encourages female victims of sexual violence to break their silence, because there is power in truth.
Solange Lusiku, a journalist in the Democratic Republic of Congo, edits the only newspaper in Bukavu, South Kivu. She worked more than a decade in broadcasting, is married and the mother of five children.
PROJECT: Gender Equality and Combating Domestic Violence
By Qin Liwen
In China, a nongovernment organization called the Anti-Domestic Violence Network has worked to end domestic violence for 10 years through education, social support and advocacy for legislation that protects women.
Zheng Guohua, a 51-year-old survivor of domestic violence, speaks in a cheerful voice that belies the two decades of abuse she is describing. In one 1998 incident, Zheng was so severely beaten by her husband that her spleen was ruptured and had to be removed. She says her father, devastated by her mistreatment, died from a brain hemorrhage. “I knelt at my father’s grave, crying and laughing. I told him, ‘Dad, I promise you, I will [have] revenge!’” says Zheng. “I think I was [awakened] by my father’s death. And I realized that this bad guy (her ex-husband) must be punished. I can’t let him harm people anymore!”
An often bruised and terrified Zheng sought help from family members, neighbors, village cadres, county police and the county Women’s Federation. People in her village repeatedly warned her husband and once beat him up, but that didn’t stop his abuse. Police ignored her because “meddling with domestic affairs” was not their duty — and was even considered inappropriate. The poorly-funded local Women’s Federation couldn’t do anything to help; no one took the organization seriously.
Shaken by the death of her father and determined to do something, in 1999 Zheng ran away from her village home to Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital. Finally, she found help. A letter issued by the Women’s Federation of Hebei Province spurred the local police into action. Her then-husband was arrested and sentenced to four years in jail.
Zheng was lucky. She was supported by an organization that is part of a strong anti-domestic violence movement in China, headed by the Anti-Domestic Violence Network of China Law Association (ADVN). In 2001, a new clause of the Marriage Law made domestic violence illegal. The ADVN played an important role in the adoption of that clause. Today, Zheng is remarried, farming on a piece of rented land in her village.
Inspired by the international gender equality movement and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, a group of Chinese women activists set up the ADVN in June 2000. The ADVN is dedicated to achieving gender equality in China. It was the first — and remains the largest — anti-domestic violence organization in China, and it is responsible for significant progress in legislation, investigation and prosecution of crimes, social support and public awareness. “Ten years ago nobody would even think that beating up wives is a crime. Now many people know about it,” says ADVN co-founder, Li Hongtao, who is director of the Library of China Women’s University. “And more and more police, judges and procurators (prosecutors and investigators) are learning that they should take actions against it.”
Figure 4.5: ADVN helped Zheng Guohua when she left her abusive husband. Here she poses with her mother and niece.
Figure 4.6: Chen Mingxia is co-founder of the China Anti-Domestic Violence Network Law Association (ADVN) which helps women escape abusive relationships.
The ADVN now boasts 118 individual members and 75 group members such as women’s federations, research institutes and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Every three years the ADVN identifies a number of projects and selects the most suitable organizational members to conduct the work. Each project is strictly monitored and evaluated. Most concern education and advocacy about domestic violence.
A co-founder and chief coordinator of the early ADVN project management committee, Chen Mingxia, explains its success. “From the very beginning we chose to associate with the China Law Society, an NGO within the [political] system. First because we thought legislation is fundamental for the anti-domestic violence movement. Second, the China Law Association has ready access to the essential, relevant government branches like legislative, juridical and public security offices and is trusted by them.” In China, NGOs are strictly regulated by the government’s civil affairs office and are often mistrusted by officials if they are not connected with government. So NGOs such as ADVN use creative, non-confrontational ways of persuading male officials to accept their ideas. “But we also keep the independent identity and operation as an NGO, so that the prospects and goals of ADVN can be reached relatively smoothly step by step,” says Chen.
The other strategic advantage of the ADVN is its open and democratic structure. It is open to any individual or organization that wants to contribute to the shared goal of stopping domestic abuse of women. Strategic goals are set and big decisions are made democratically among representatives across the network, no matter how much debate surrounds issues. This keeps ADVN members active and committed to implementing plans.
“I am happy to work here, because people in this organization are all so kind and idealistic. Everyone believes in what they are doing,” says Dong Yige, a young graduate from Chicago University who has worked for ADVN for a year. “The democratic atmosphere is invigorating.”
Born in August 1940, Chen Mingxia thinks her generation was well educated in gender equality by the Communist government founded in 1949. Chen became a researcher at the Institute for Legal Research of the China Academy of Social Sciences, specializing in marriage laws and women’s rights, and she was the former Deputy Director of the Marriage Law Association within the China Law Association. Many ADVN co-founders were scholars, government officials, teachers — elite women of Chen’s generation or one generation later.
ADVN activists still see much work ahead. “We have all these extremely successful cases in different regions: community actions against domestic violence in You’anmen, Beijing; or the training program for public security bureau chiefs in Hunan Province,” says Chen. “But these are not enough. We should urge the government to take up the responsibility of anti-domestic violence.”
Meanwhile, the ADVN’s long-time sponsors, Ford Foundation (United States), the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) and the Human Rights Center of the University of Oslo (Norway), are changing their sponsorship levels. That means ADVN must learn how to raise funds for its projects — and it is doing so.
“Legislation takes time, and it takes even longer to implement a new law under completely different situations across China. Changing ideas is a gradual process. Too many gaps [need] to be filled. We knew it from the beginning, and we’re patient. We will march forward,” Chen promises.
Qin Liwen is the Director of News Center, Modern Media Group, China. She has worked for several major print and online publications in Singapore and China since 2000 and is the author of several books, including News Is Cruel (2003) and The Adventure of Ideas (2004).
Multiple Choice Quiz
Questions
1. The World Health Organization estimates that _________ women worldwide have been raped, beaten, or abused.
1. One out of ten
2. One out of fifteen
3. One out of three
4. One out of five
5. None of the above
2. The following factor(s) increase(s) a society’s level of violence against women….
1. Equal power relations between men and women
2. Higher employment rates for women
3. Restrictions on women owning and inheriting property
4. Socially restricting women to the home
5. Both C and D
3. According to the chapter, two of the most common forms of violence against women are…
1. Psychological violence and physical violence
2. Sexual violence and non-sexual violence
3. Structural violence and systemic violence
4. Intimate partner violence and sexual violence
5. None of the above
4. Sexual violence includes…
1. Harassment
2. Sexual assault
3. Rape
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
5. The chapter does NOT discuss at length examples of cultural factors that exacerbate violence against women in…
1. Africa
2. South and Central Asia
3. The Middle East
4. North America
5. All of the above
6. The notion of honour killings includes instances where a woman is killed for…
1. Talking to a man who is not her relative
2. Consensual sexual relations outside of marriage
3. Being raped
4. Refusing to marry the man of her family’s choice
5. All of the above
7. According to the chapter, trafficking includes…
1. Forced deportations of women and girls to their countries of origin by governments
2. Detention by state or government bodies
3. The sale of daughters by parents into forced labour for remittances
4. Restrictive labour conditions imposed by temporary labour visas
5. None of the above
8. The chapter conceptualizes the ‘victims’ of trafficking as…
1. Potentially women, men and children of any gender
2. Women and girls
3. Migrant workers in exploitative situations
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
9. Chouchou Namegabe became president of….
1. Radio Maendeleo
2. Association des Femmes des Médias de Sud Kivu (AFEM)
3. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
4. South Kivu Province
5. None of the above
10. AFEM empowers women that have experienced violence by…
1. Encouraging them to break their silence and speak about their experiences
2. Pursuing direct legal action against their perpetrators
3. Meeting individually with the authorities to file police reports
4. Actively intervening in situations where women are being harassed
5. All of the above
11. The results of the AFEM program include…
1. Women feel increasingly comfortable discussing sexualized violence
2. Taboos surrounding the discussion of sex are disappearing
3. Stigma is increasing around rape and harassment
4. The prevalence of sexual assault is decreasing
5. Both A and B
12. According to Namegabe, what is the fundamental cause of the violence against women in the DRC specifically?
1. Patriarchy
2. The process of population removal to access Congolese minerals
3. Fear and shame
4. The intentional spread of HIV throughout families and villages
5. None of the above
13. According to the chapter, which women’s organization was inspired by the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing?
1. China Law Society
2. Marriage Law Association
3. Modern Media Group
4. Anti-Domestic Violence Network (ADVN)
5. The Chinese Law Association
14. The ADVN, as the first and largest anti-domestic violence organization in China, is responsible for significant progress in…
1. Legislation
2. Prosecution of crimes
3. Social support
4. Public awareness
5. All of the above
15. Which statement does NOT reflect the relationship between the ADVN and the Chinese government?
1. Through the Chinese Law Association, the ADVN has ready access to government branches
2. ADVN, like all NGOs in China, are strictly regulated by the government’s civil affairs office
3. ADVN uses confrontational and radical strategies to pursue immediate and drastic policy changes
4. ADVN uses non-confrontational ways of persuading male officials to accept their ideas
5. All of the above
16. According to the chapter, changing legislation…
1. Takes time and requires extra resources to implement legislative changes
2. Happens quickly
3. Does not require a conciliatory relationship with government
4. Is not resource intensive
5. None of the above
17. ADVN’s long-time sponsors do NOT include…
1. Ford Foundation
2. Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA)
3. Oxfam Novib
4. Open Society Foundations
5. Human Rights Centre at the University of Norway
Answers
1. The correct answer is one out of three (answer C).
2. The correct answer is E. Restrictions on women for owning and inheriting property (answer C) and socially regulating women to the home (answer D) increase a society’s level of violence against women.
3. The correct answer is intimate partner violence and sexual violence (answer D). Psychological violence and physical violence (answer A) are both named as types of intimate partner violence. Non-sexual violence (answer B) is not a category mentioned in the book. Structural violence and systemic violence (answer C) refer to institutionalized patterns of discrimination within society, but are not mentioned in the chapter.
4. The correct answer is all of the above (answer D).
5. The correct answer is North America (answer D). The textbook does discuss instances of violence against women in Africa (answer A), South and Central Asia (answer B) and the Middle East (answer C). North America is mentioned in two contexts: the assertion that women in the U.S. can escape domestic violence through social programs, and the location of honor killings in immigrant communities.
6. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
7. The correct answer is the sale of daughters by parents into forced labour for remittances (answer C). The chapter does not discuss forced deportations (answer A), detention of women and children by state bodies (answer B) or restrictive temporary foreign worker visas (answer D). These forms of trafficking are discussed in the external source from the Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women.
8. The correct answer is women and girls (answer B). The chapter does not mention that trafficking can include women, men, and children of any gender (answer A) or migrant workers in exploitative situations (answer C).
9. The correct answer is the Association des Femmes des Médias de Sud Kivu (AFEM) (answer B). Radio Maendeleo (answer A) is the radio station where Chouchou Namegabe began her career. South Kivu Province (answer D) is the province where she lives and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (answer C) is the country.
10. The correct answer is that AFEM encourages women to break their silence and speak about their experience (answer A).
11. Both answers A and B are correct. The AFEM program led to women becoming more comfortable discussing sexualized violence, and taboos around talking about sex in general are also weakening.
12. The correct answer is the process of population removal to access Congolese minerals (answer B). Patriarchy (answer A) is another underlying factor but not specific to the Congolese context; fear and shame (answer C), as well as the intentional spread of HIV were tactics used by militia groups (answer D).
13. The correct answer is the Anti-Domestic Violence Network (ADVN) (answer D). The China Law Society (answer A) is another NGO within the political system. The Chinese Law Association (answer E) is the umbrella organization, of which the ADVN is a member. The Marriage Law Association (answer D) is another agency within the Chinese Law Association, separate from the ADVN. The Modern Media Group (answer C) is the firm where Qin Liwen, one of the chapter’s authors, formerly worked.
14. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
15. The correct answer is C. The ADVN does NOT use confrontational or radical strategies in their advocacy work. The ADVN has ready access to government branches (answer A), is strictly regulated by the civil affairs office (answer B), and uses non-confrontational ways of persuading officials to accept their ideas (answer D).
16. The correct answer is A. The chapter explains that changing legislation is time-intensive and organizations require additional resources to urge the implementation of new laws.
17. The correct answer is D. Open Society Foundations is not a sponsor of ADVN.
Discussion Questions
1. To what extent is violence towards women a “cultural” problem? Explain using examples from the chapter and other resources.
2. What instances of violence against women are prevalent in your own community?
3. Namegabe discusses the use of rape as a systemic weapon of war and population displacement. What are the economic activities surrounding these conflicts, and how do they link to international supply chains?
4. What is the relationship between the “local” and the “global” in terms of activism and violence against women?
5. How does the work of the ADVN relate to the Beijing Platform for Action?
6. What does Chouchou Namegabe’s involvement with AFEM demonstrate about the power of women in the global South to address gender-based violence?
Essay Questions
1. The chapter mentioned that ADVN’s sponsors, including the Ford Foundation, SIDA and Oxfam, began changing their sponsorship levels, so ADVN needed to learn how to raise funds for its own projects – and that it is doing so. How would an NGO go about raising funds? What challenges would this place on the organization’s advocacy work?
2. As an NGO, the ADVN is tightly regulated by China’s civil affairs office and remains highly connected with government. How can a close relationship with government be a benefit and a hindrance to the advocacy work of an NGO? Does this depend on the political climate of the country in which the NGO operates?
3. Page 56 discusses “trafficking” as a form of violence against women. Drawing from the additional learning resources below on the Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women, what is trafficking and what are some of its root causes? Is there anything problematic about the trafficking framework?
Additional Resources
Alwis, R. & Klugman, J. “Freedom From Violence and the Law: A Global Perspective in Light of Chinese Domestic Violence Law, 2015. University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 37(1): (2015).
Reviews the draft Chinese Domestic Violence Law and its relationship to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda.
Amnesty International. “No More Stolen Sisters.”
Amnesty International’s campaign with key statistics, information, and analysis relating to missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada.
Borrows, J. “Aboriginal and Treaty Rights and Violence Against Women.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 50(3): (2013), 699 – 736.
Suggests that section 35 of the Constitution can play a role in ensuring that different levels of government are responsible for addressing violence against women.
Coker, D. “Domestic Violence and Social Justice: A Structural Intersectional Framework for Teaching About Domestic Violence.” Violence Against Women 22(12) 1426 – 1437: (2016).
Describes a course that challenges the neoliberal idea of individual responsibility in the context of abuse.
Everyday Feminism.
An educational platform working to deconstruct everyday violence, discrimination and marginalization by hosting discussion pieces on intersectional feminism.
Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women (GAATW).
A network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work from a rights-based perspective to address the diverse issues that rise from trafficking-in-persons, including forced labour within the informal and formal economies.
Hayes, R. M., Abbott, R. L., & Cook, S. “It’s Her Fault: Student Acceptance of Rape Myths on Two College Campuses.” Violence Against Women 22(13): 1540 – 1555 (2016).
Examines factors that lead to acceptance of rape myths on two college campuses in the USA.
National Association of Friendship Centres. “Action for Indigenous Women.”
Contains information and resources to engage individuals, families, and communities to work together to end violence.
nafc.ca/en/action-for-indigenous-women/
TEDXABQ Women. “Violence against Aboriginal Women is not Traditional.” (2013).
A slam poem about the legacies of colonialism and impacts on violence against Indigenous women in the United States.
The World’s Women 2015. “Violence Against Women.”
Annually updated data and analysis on violence against women in its physical, sexual, psychological and economic forms.
True, J. “The Political Economy of Violence Against Women in Africa.” Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. (2015).
Argues that the impacts of violence against women in Africa remain hidden due to notions of privacy, acceptance as a cultural norm, and insufficient institutional responses.
www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/political-economy-violence-against-women-africa | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.04%3A_Violence_Against_Women.txt |
Chapter 5: Women, Girls and Armed Conflict
Chapter Summary
This chapter discusses the impacts of armed conflict on women and girls, including the renewed social vulnerabilities these conflicts cause. These vulnerabilities include rape, forced marriage, forced impregnation, indentured labour, sexual servitude, and the intentional spread of HIV/AIDS. During times of armed conflict, women are exploited in ways that relate to their reproductive responsibilities or gendered expectations of womanhood. However, women and girls are not merely victims in situations of inter- or intra-state violence. They can have critical perspectives on their position, make choices, and organize collectively. Women can take active roles in violence, such as joining the conflict, or participate in peace processes. The participation of women in formal peace processes is vital for a society to move forward during post-conflict periods, as indicated by the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. For example, the chapter mentions that women organized peace campaigns during the 1991 Balkan wars and the 2000 coup d’état in Fiji.
The chapter provides two case studies of women’s engagement in peace processes, one from a non-governmental perspective and another from a state perspective. Women for Women International was founded by Zainab Salbi and aims to help women survivors of war recover from their experiences. The organization has raised over \$80 million throughout 17 years and has worked with over 250,000 women and girls. The chapter also discusses the increasing role of female peacekeeping forces. Since 2007, India has sent four Female Formed Police Units (FFPU) to Liberia, which has inspired women to join the national police force. Further, India’s FFPU has inspired Bangladesh and Nigeria to create their own.
Key Terms
• Blue Ribbon Campaign
• Female Formed Police Unit (FFPU)
• United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325
• Women in Black
• Zainab Salbi
Figure 5.1: Armed conflict disrupts families and has significant negative consequences for women. Although they are victims of war, they may also be agents of peace. Displaced Sudanese women, driven from their villages by Janjaweed militia, shelter at the Abu Shouk refugee camp in Darfur, Sudan.
Overview
By Dyan Mazurana
Women and girls experience armed conflict much the same way men and boys do. They are killed, injured, disabled and tortured. They are targeted with weapons and suffer social and economic dislocation. They suffer the psychosocial impact as loved ones die or they witness violence against their families and neighbors. They suffer the effects of violence before, during and after flight from a combat zone. They are at heightened risk of diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV/AIDS. They are affected by the resource depletion resulting from armed conflict. They join, or are forced to join, armed forces or insurgency movements. They care for the wounded, sick, despairing and displaced, and may be among the most outspoken advocates for peace.
Significant and Lasting Harm
There is a growing body of evidence (ICRC 2001, UNIFEM 2002) that the long-term impact of armed conflict on women and girls may be exacerbated by their social vulnerability. The harm done to women and girls during and after armed conflict is significant, and often exposes them to further harm and violence. Gender-based and sexual violence such as rape, forced marriage, forced impregnation, forced abortion, torture, trafficking, sexual slavery and the intentional spread of STDs, including HIV/AIDS, are weapons of warfare integral to many of today’s conflicts. Women are victims of genocide and enslaved for labor. Women and girls are often viewed as culture bearers and reproducers of “the enemy” and thus become prime targets. Women are exploited because of their maternal responsibilities and attachments, which heighten their vulnerability to abuse.
Figure 5.2: Somalian women gather with their children at the Dadaab refugee camp in Eastern Kenya.
Armed conflicts also have indirect negative consequences that affect agriculture, livelihoods, infrastructure, public health and welfare provision, gravely disrupting the social order. Research shows that these repercussions affect women more adversely than men. As noted by Plümper and Neumayer (2006), while women typically live longer than men in peacetime, armed conflict decreases the gap between female and male life expectancy. Heavily ethnicized conflicts or wars within “failed states” are significantly more damaging to women’s health and life expectancy than other civil wars.
Women as Agents of War and Peace
Women and girls are not merely victims of armed conflict. They are active agents. They make choices, possess critical perspectives on their situations and organize collectively in response to those situations. Women and girls can perpetrate violence and can support violence perpetrated by others. They become active members of conflict because they are committed to the political, religious or economic goals of those involved in violence. This can mean, and has meant, taking up arms in liberation struggles, resistance to occupation or participation in struggles against inequality on race, ethnic, religious or class/caste lines.
Women and girls are also often active in peace processes before, during and after conflicts. Many women know the importance of peace processes and join a variety of grass-roots peace-building efforts aimed at rebuilding the economic, political, social and cultural fabric of their societies. In 1991, as the war in the Balkans was gaining momentum, Women in Black launched an antiwar campaign in the Balkans. In Fiji, as the tensions between Indo-Fijians and indigenous peoples were getting worse, leading to the coup d’état that occurred in 2000, women from both ethnic groups created the Blue Ribbon Campaign peace movement (Anderlini, 2007).
However, formalized processes of peace, including negotiations, accords and reconstruction plans, frequently exclude women’s and girls’ meaningful participation. Too often, women and girls actively involved in rebuilding local economies and civil society are pushed into the background when formal peace processes begin.
Post-Conflict Gains in Gender Relations
Finally, women and girls may gain from the changed gender relations that result from armed conflict. They sometimes acquire new status, skills and power that result from taking on new responsibilities when male heads of household are absent or deceased. These changes in women’s roles can challenge existing social norms. Women’s participation in household decisionmaking, civil society and the local economy and their ownership of land or goods may be altered, sometimes — although not always — to their benefit.
Figure 5.3: Bosnian Muslim women grieve among coffins of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. The remains were unearthed in 2010. The massacre shattered lives of widows and families of the 8,000 killed by Bosnian Serb troops in 1995.
The specific experience of women and girls in armed conflicts greatly depends upon their status in societies before armed conflict breaks out. Where cultures of violence and discrimination against women and girls exist prior to conflict, these abuses are likely to be exacerbated during conflict. Similarly, if women are not allowed to be part of decisionmaking before conflict, it is usually extremely difficult for them to become involved in decisions during the conflict itself or the peace process and post-conflict period. Thus, gender relations in pre-conflict situations as shaped by ethnicity, class, caste and age often set the stage for women’s and girls’ experiences and options during and after armed conflict.
The international community is increasingly aware of and responsive to the impact of armed conflict on women and girls (as shown, for instance, by the unanimous adoption in October 2001 of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which included the special needs of women and girls during repatriation and resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration and post-conflict reconstruction) and the importance of their participation in peace processes and the post-conflict period. Of paramount importance in any strategy to promote and attain women’s and girls’ rights during and after conflict is a context-specific, grounded understanding of how the conflict has affected different groups of women and their families.
Dyan Mazurana is a research director and associate professor at the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University, where she lectures on women’s and children’s human rights, war-affected civilian populations, armed opposition groups, armed conflict and peacekeeping at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Author of four books, numerous articles and reports, she consults for governments, human rights and child protection organizations and U.N. agencies to improve efforts to assist youth and women affected by armed conflict. She has worked in South Asia, the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa.
PROFILE: Zainab Salbi – Helping Women Recover from War
By Joanna L. Krotz
Figure 5.4: Zainab Salbi saw first-hand women suffering in war-torn Bosnia. She responded by founding Women for Women International, which has brought hope to thousands of women in conflict zones around the world.
Charismatic and forthright, Zainab Salbi instantly grabs your attention. And that’s even before you see her resume or hear her compelling personal story.
At age 41, she is recognized around the world as the founder and chief executive officer of Women for Women International, a nongovernmental organization that helps women survivors of war to rebuild their lives. Over its 17-year history, Women for Women has distributed nearly \$80 million in direct aid, microcredit loans and programs serving more than 250,000 women worldwide. Known as a fierce and effective champion, Salbi travels constantly, working with local groups to secure women’s safety and economic prosperity in some of the world’s most devastated regions, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan. Yet little in Zainab Salbi’s fairytale childhood could have foretold such a calling.
Figure 5.5: Zainab Salbi meets with women in Rwanda.
Growing up in the privileged precincts of Baghdad, she was the cherished daughter of an elite Iraqi family. Her early years were an idyllic blur of school and family outings, with lessons in piano and ballet. In her best-selling memoir, Between Two Worlds, published in 2005, Salbi describes sunlit days of driving around in the family car alongside her mother, shopping, running errands, paying social calls: “As we drove … along the boulevards lined with palm trees heavy with dates … I took in my city through the passenger-side window — old Baghdad with its dark arcaded souk [market] where men hammered out copper and politics, and the new Baghdad with its cafes and Al-Mansour boutiques.” Most everything Salbi learned in her early years, she writes, came through her adored mother.
Life changed when she turned 11, although it would be years before she could pinpoint the shift. Saddam Hussein assumed power and soon anointed Salbi’s father, a commercial aviator, as the ruler’s personal pilot. Increasingly, through Salbi’s teenage years, the family felt the effects of Saddam’s regime, both his patronage and his oppressive heel. She recalls halcyon weekends at Saddam’s compound, calling him “Amo” or “Uncle,” playing with his kids around the pool and, as she was constantly cautioned, willfully ignoring the fear and violence rising around her. Later, living in the United States, particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, that intimacy with Saddam would haunt her. “I kept it a secret and told no one,” she says. “I was afraid if I told people I knew Saddam, my face would be erased and all anyone would see in me was Saddam.”
When Salbi was 19, her progressive mother suddenly announced that she’d arranged a marriage for Salbi to a much older Iraqi banker living in America. “It was very painful,” says Salbi. “My mother had always told me not to depend on any man. She was passionate, adamant about it. Then all of a sudden I was being whisked away from home. I had no idea what she was talking about.” Twenty years on, you still hear the hurt, the loss and indignation in Salbi’s voice. Dutifully, Salbi went off to be a bride in Chicago.
And she landed in a nightmare. “The man who was my husband turned out to be abusive,” she says. When Salbi proved unbowed, he raped her. She walked out after three months. “I had \$7 in my pocket, some designer clothes on my back and about \$20 a week from family funds to survive,” she says.
It was 1990 and Saddam had just invaded Kuwait. After Operation Desert Storm was launched, there was no going home to Iraq for Salbi.
Over time, she built a life in the United States. It was years before she saw her family again. And years after that, when her mother was ill and dying, that Salbi finally found the voice to ask why she’d been sent away. Saddam had his eye on you, her mother told her. The only escape route from becoming Saddam’s plaything was an arranged marriage on another continent.
In 1993, Salbi was living in Washington, remarried to a Palestinian student named Amjad Atallah, when she read a news story about the Bosnian war and rape camps where some 20,000 women were raped. The couple decided to travel to Bosnia to help.
Salbi and Atallah returned to Washington determined to find a group that would provide aid for Bosnian rape victims. But none existed. So, still on a student budget, the couple founded their own organization, Women for Women, and began to help the women in the Balkans.
By 2004, Salbi, now divorced, had expanded Women for Women to its international mission. Appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show, which draws millions of viewers, boosted both her profile and the organization as donations climbed. In the 15 years since arriving in the United States, Salbi became a prominent humanitarian and an award-winning women’s rights advocate, honored by President Bill Clinton for her work in Bosnia. What hadn’t changed were her secrets about Saddam and her first marriage.
On a trip to the eastern Congo that year, Salbi was interviewing a woman named Nabito, then age 52. Rebels had raped Nabito and her three daughters. “There were so many she said she couldn’t tell how many were around and how many had raped her,” says Salbi, remembering. Salbi asked Nabito whether she wanted her story kept quiet. Instead, says Salbi, “she said, ‘If I could tell my story to the whole world, I would, so other women would not have to go through what I’ve gone through. So you go and tell my story.’”
Nabito’s courage — and her resilient conviction — pushed Salbi into breaking her own silence. Owning her past also has changed the way Zainab Salbi works. “Before, I’d be the humanitarian worker with connections and aid interviewing other women. Now, I am their equal. I’m not there to save anyone. I actually am one of the women I’m trying to help.”
Joanna L. Krotz is a multimedia journalist and speaker whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Worth, Money and Town & Country and on MSN and Entrepreneurship.org. She is the author of The Guide to Intelligent Giving and founder of the Women’s Giving Institute, an organization that educates donors about strategic philanthropy.
PROJECT: Liberia – Female Peacekeepers Smash Stereotypes
By Bonnie Allan
Since its groundbreaking deployment in 2007, India has sent four all-female police units to Liberia, each serving a one-year rotation. Their success in the postwar country has inspired other nations to defy tradition and deploy more female troops in U.N. peacekeeping roles.
Five days after an elaborate marriage ceremony in southern India, 28-year-old Rewti Arjunan traded her red silk sari for a blue camouflage police uniform and flew to the West African country of Liberia.
The young bride is serving in one of the world’s few all-female police units deployed to a United Nations peacekeeping mission.
“In India, we are quite traditional with these things. My husband, he was against it,” admits Arjunan, who had never before traveled outside India. The trained police officer gave her future husband an ultimatum.
“I told him, ‘If you permit me to go on this mission, I will marry you.’”
Now, Arjunan’s life is anything but traditional. She is helping to change the face of international policing in a post-conflict country.
Since its groundbreaking deployment in 2007, India has sent four Female Formed Police Units (FFPU) to Liberia, each serving a one-year rotation. More than 100 female police officers trained in crowd control and conflict resolution make up the FFPU at any one time. They are supported by about two dozen men who serve as drivers, cooks and logistical coordinators.
The FFPU is primed for rapid response to any violence that might erupt in this country of 3.8 million, which still lacks a strong army or armed police force.
Two bloody civil wars, between 1989 and 1996, and again from 1999 to 2006, killed about 250,000 Liberians, displaced hundreds of thousands more, traumatized women with rampant sexual violence, destroyed infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and roads, and corrupted the justice system.
Eight years after the war ended, almost 9,500 U.N. peacekeepers help maintain the fragile peace.
“The greatest deed is to protect humanity. I got this chance, and I thought, ‘I want to live this,’” says Arjunan.
The Female Formed Police Unit is a symbol of progress for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, which stipulates that peacekeeping missions support women’s participation in post-conflict peace building.
Figure 5.6: A member of the United Nations first all-female peacekeeping force stands guard with fellow officers after arriving at the Monrovia, Liberia, airport.
The United Nations’ ultimate goal is gender parity in the civilian, military and police sectors, but, globally, women make up just 8.2 percent of roughly 13,000 U.N. police and only two percent of military police.
India has scored high marks for pioneering an all-female police unit, serving alongside other female officers from Nigeria and elsewhere, in a country that boasts Africa’s first female head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
By day, the Indian police officers stand in the hot sun guarding the president’s office, and, by night, they patrol crime-ridden areas of the capital, Monrovia.
As the rain trickles down on the dark streets of Monrovia’s Congo Town, Arjunan sits in the back seat of a U.N. police vehicle with her hair tucked inside a blue beret and a pistol strapped to her waist. Beside her, 25-year-old Pratiksha Parab holds an AK-47 rifle and peers out the window.
Their job is to protect Liberia National Police (LNP) officers, who are not armed, as they patrol to deter armed robberies and rape. “Most of the violent crimes are at night, and the criminals use weapons,” says LNP Commander Gus Hallie. “So, with our FFPU counterparts on our side, with arms, we feel we can battle with criminals.”
As they patrol, the U.N. police observer and the LNP officer joke that “Indian women are tough.” Arjunan smiles, pleased, but she explains why she is a good peacekeeper.
“Women are not aggressive. We come in a polite way. This presence can maintain the peace. We are loving by nature.”
There are many stereotypes attached to female peacekeepers: more nurturing, more communicative, less intimidating. The label that makes Contingent Commander Usher Kiran cringe, though, is “soft.”
“I don’t think there is a difference between female and male,” says Kiran, a 22-year police veteran, as she sits under a poster of Mahatma Gandhi.
“If you are putting on the same uniform, you are doing the same duty, you are having the same authority as the males.”
“Where we found a difference [between male and female peacekeepers] is in their perceptions of their role,” explains the U.N.’s gender adviser in Liberia, Carole Doucet. “The women see themselves as more broadly involved in the community.”
Doucet says the U.N.’s female police, known as “blue helmettes,” have inspired Liberian women to join the national police force. In 2007, only six percent of Liberia’s police were women. Today, that proportion has risen to 15 percent, with roughly 600 female officers.
The Indian women also sponsor an orphanage, teach self-defense and computer classes to local women, and — despite limited English — reach out to survivors of sexual abuse.
“I can be scared to talk to a man,” whispers a 16-year-old rape victim, who cannot be identified, at a safe home for girls in Monrovia. “A woman is better. She is like an auntie or mother.”
Figure 5.7: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton greets a U.N. peacekeeper in Monrovia. Clinton has strongly supported Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in promoting democracy and development. In 2010 USAID invested more than \$11 million in programs for women’s empowerment.
India’s all-female unit has inspired Bangladesh and Nigeria to create their own, while countries such as Rwanda and Ghana also are ramping up their female troop contributions to U.N. missions. Back at the Indian headquarters in Monrovia, Arjunan talks to her new husband over the Internet, using a webcam, for at least an hour every day. Although she’s a little homesick, Arjunan says she is proud to follow in the footsteps of other courageous women in India’s history.
“Many freedom fighters were ladies … fighting for justice. Fighting for good things.”
Bonnie Allan is a freelance journalist working in Liberia, West Africa. She worked as a journalist in Canada for more than a decade and holds a master’s degree in international human rights law from the University of Oxford.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. Examples of violence against women during armed conflict include…
1. Rape
2. Forced marriage
3. Forced impregnation
4. Torture
5. All of the above
2. Reasons for women’s vulnerability during armed conflict mentioned in the chapter include…
1. Women may be viewed as reproducers of the ‘enemy’ due to their maternal responsibilities
2. Indirect negative consequences on agriculture, welfare provision, and infrastructure, which research shows has disproportionate impacts on the lives of women
3. Many women lose their high-level government positions as the state disintegrates
4. The gap between male and female expectancy increases
5. Both A and B
3. Women may also be active agents in conflict through actions such as…
1. Taking up arms in struggles
2. Involvement in decision-making mechanisms during peace processes
3. Occupying a higher position of power in post-conflict periods
4. Working to ensure that their social and household roles are not changed by periods of conflict
5. All of the above
4. Which United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC) included the importance of women’s participation in peace processes and the post-conflict period?
1. UNSC Resolution 1333
2. UNSC Resolution 1325
3. UNSC Resolution 589
4. UNSC Resolution 1034
5. None of the above
5. Women for Women International was founded by…
1. Angelia Jolie Pitt
2. Hillary Clinton
3. Vandana Shiva
4. Zainab Salbi
5. None of the above
6. Salbi was motivated by which conflict to create Women for Women International?
1. Bosnian War
2. Rwandan Civil War
3. Gulf War
4. Somali Civil War
5. None of the above
7. The first Female Formed Peacekeeping Unit (FFPU) was assembled by…
1. Canada
2. United States
3. Germany
4. India
5. South Africa
8. Some stereotypes of female peacekeepers include…
1. More nurturing
2. More communicative
3. Less intimidating
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
9. The country that produced Africa’s first female head of state is…
1. Namibia
2. Botswana
3. Liberia
4. Lesotho
5. None of the above
10. According to the chapter, which is an accurate difference between male and female peacekeepers?
1. Female peacekeepers are less intimidating
2. Male peacekeepers have more physical strength
3. Female peacekeepers are likely to view their role as more community oriented
4. Male peacekeepers are less nurturing
5. All of the above
11. In 2007, what percentage of Liberian peacekeepers were women?
1. 6%
2. 5%
3. 20%
4. 15%
5. 10%
12. What other countries formed FFPUs or increased their female presence in peacekeeping missions after India’s first delegation?
1. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Portugal
2. Bangladesh, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Ghana
3. Brazil, Russia, Argentina, and Britain
4. China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore
5. None of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is E (all of the above).
2. Both answers A and B are correct. Women may be viewed as producers of the ‘enemy’ due to their maternal responsibilities (answer A) and are indirectly affected by damages to agriculture, welfare provision, and infrastructure (answer B). The chapter does not mention that women lose high-level government positions (answer C), and because women on average live longer than men , the gap between male and female life expectancy decreases when women are adversely affected by armed conflict, rather than increasing (answer D).
3. The correct answer is E. All the answers are attested as ways women assert agency in periods of conflict, although none are universal. Women may commit violence during conflict for various reasons, although in other situations they may avoid armed conflict (answer A). Women are sometimes involved in peace processes (answer B), but are too often pushed to the side. Women may occupy higher positions of power in post-conflict situations, but this depends on many factors, notably their position of power prior to when the conflict began (answer C). The role of women in their societies may change during conflict, or remain relatively similar, but neither is guaranteed (answer D).
4. The correct answer is UNSC Resolution 1325 (answer B). UNSC 1333 called for a ban on all military assistance to the Taliban and closure of its camps in the year 2000 (answer A). UNSC 589 condemned the oppressive politics of South Africa’s apartheid system in the year 1985 (answer C). UNSC Resolution 1034 discussed violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia (1995) (answer D).
5. The correct answer is Zainab Salbi (answer D). Angelina Jolie Pitt (answer A) is an American actress who was appointed UNHCR Special Envoy in 2012. Hillary Clinton was the 2009 – 2013 U.S. Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate for the Democratic Party (answer B). Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, anti-globalization activist, and all around environmentalist (answer C).
6. The correct answer is Bosnian War (answer A).
7. The correct answer is India (answer D).
8. The correct answer is all of the above (answer D).
9. The correct answer is Liberia (answer C).
10. Answer C is correct. Carle Doucet, the UN’s gender adviser in Liberia, stated that the women involved saw their role as more broadly involved in the community.
11. The correct answer is 6% (answer A).
12. The correct answer is B. India’s all-female unit has inspired Bangladesh and Nigeria to create their own, while countries such as Rwanda and Ghana have ramped up their female troop contributions.
Discussion Questions
1. How are women specifically vulnerable during periods of armed conflict?
2. What is the connection between armed conflict, failed states, and violence against women? Is a strong state needed to ensure that women’s rights are protected?
3. Look beyond the chapter to find some examples of women’s active involvement in combating violence against women. Please use examples from both the global South and the global North.
4. Are there any challenges posed by the global influence of Western or American women’s rights organization?
5. What are the strengths and limitations of Resolution 1325 in increasing the role of women in peacekeeping?
6. Please offer an example of when and where Resolution 1325 was used. (Outside research)
7. What would be some explanations for why a peace process did not lead to a post-conflict situation which improved the status of women?
Essay Questions
1. How are women specifically vulnerable during periods of armed conflict?
2. What is the connection between armed conflict, failed states, and violence against women? Is a strong state needed to ensure that women’s rights are protected?
3. Look beyond the chapter to find some examples of women’s active involvement in combating violence against women. Please use examples from both the global South and the global North.
4. Are there any challenges posed by the global influence of Western or American women’s rights organization?
5. What are the strengths and limitations of Resolution 1325 in increasing the role of women in peacekeeping?
6. Please offer an example of when and where Resolution 1325 was used. (Outside research)
7. What would be some explanations for why a peace process did not lead to a post-conflict situation which improved the status of women?
Additional Resources
Bacon, L. “Reform: Improving Representation and Responsiveness in a Post-Conflict Setting.” Journal of International Peacekeeping 4, 372 – 397: (2015).
Explores efforts by the Liberian National Police to enhance training to address sexual and gender-based violence and increasing female officers.
Gaestel, A. & Shelly, A. Female UN Peacekeepers: an all-too-rare sight. Guardian. (2015).
Re-examines the progress made on realizing the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325.
Gogali, L. TEDXUbud. “Indonesian Women’s Empowerment in a Post-Conflict Society.” (2011).
TED Talk about women’s active protection of the family, organizing across ethnic and religious lines, and grassroots involvement in the peace process in post-conflict Indonesia.
Hansson, J. & Hendriksson, Malin. “Western NGOs Representation of “Third World Women: A Comparative Study of Kvinna till Kvinna (Sweden) and Women for Women International (USA).” University West. (2016).
Heathcote, G. “Lecture: The Protection of Civilians and Protection of Peacekeeping Mandates: Gender and Ethics in Collective Security.” Feminists @ Law 5(2): (2015).
Critiques the UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security to illustrate how feminist ethics are used to justify new methods of violence.
Noisi, C. O. & Farrugia, M. “A Long Road Ahead: Integrating Gender Perspectives into Peacekeeping Operations.” OpenDemocracy. (2014).
Examines gender norms and perspectives that have led to gaps implementing UN Resolution 1325.
Restrepo, E. M. “Leaders Against All Odds: Women Victims of Conflict in Colombia.” Palgrave Communications 2, 1 – 11: (2016).
Highlights the capacity of women who have been victims of violence to be agents of peace and reconciliation.
Prenzler, T. & Sinclair, G. The Status of Women Police Officers: An International Review. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 41(2), 115 – 131: (2013).
Reports on a survey on the status of women police officers from 23 locations globally.
United Nations Peacekeeping. “Gender and Peacekeeping.”
Main United Nations resource with further information on gender and peacekeeping.
www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/issues/women/ | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.05%3A_Women_Girls_and_Armed_Conflict.txt |
Chapter 6: Women in the Economy
Chapter Summary
This chapter discusses the gains and gaps in women’s engagement in the global economy. Around the world, women perform two-thirds of the work for 10 percent of the income and only 1 percent of the assets. Women also constitute 70 percent of the world’s poor. Women’s earning still lags behind that of men’s; they earn on average 30 percent of men’s wages in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region and between 60 and 70 percent in East Asia. A priority among women’s rights organizations is creating environments where women can interact with one another, share concerns, and address public resistance. There are hopeful signs, as the World Economic Forum revealed that two-thirds of 115 countries posted gains in overall gender gap scores.
The chapter includes two detailed examples of women in the business world who have taken up leadership roles in paving the way for others. Lubna Olayan, chief executive of the Olayan Financing Company, established a female-specific recruitment program to increase the number of women in the Saudi workforce. In a similar vein, the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership organizes networking events among select rising women professionals to meet with influential women in business, academia, and government.
Key Terms
• Arab Thought Foundation
• Global Gender Gap Report
• InterAction
• International Business Council
• International Centre for Advancement of Women in Business
• International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW)
• International Labour Organization
• Lubna Olayan
• Olayan Financing Company
• Olayan National Women’s Action for Recruitment and Development (ONWARD)
• United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing
• U.S. State Department of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA)
• U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership
• Women’s Committee for Legal Change
• World Economic Forum
• 12-Point Platform for Action
Figure 6.1: A small loan allowed this woman to go into business selling spices in a Tbilisi neighborhood market.
Overview
By Susanne E. Jalbert
In 1995, activists from 189 countries pondered gender equity at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and the parallel nongovernmental organization conference in Huairou. They developed a plan to ensure a more equitable future for women with passion, foresight and intensive focus. Today we scrutinize how far we have progressed toward gender parity since the 12-point Platform for Action was introduced in Beijing. And we ask what can be done now to more efficiently promote women’s economic potential and equalize their opportunities with those of men. There has been progress, but not enough.
More equitable economic engagement for women remains elusive. Women perform two-thirds of the world’s work, especially in agriculture, for 10 percent of the income (InterAction, 2009); own only 1 percent of the assets (www.onlinewomeninpolitics.org); and constitute 70 percent of the world’s poor (International Labor Organization). “Whether women are working in industrialized nations or developing countries, in rural or urban settings, most women still carry the triple burden of raising children, performing household chores and earning an income for their family,” was the finding of the 2010 Soroptimist International white paper “Women at Work.”
Figure 6.2: A designer at the Leather and Shoe Research Institute in Hanoi, Vietnam, works to improve Vietnamese shoemakers’ product lines and competitive edge.
Women’s Earnings Still Lag Behind Men’s
Women’s earnings linger below men’s worldwide. In Middle Eastern and North African countries, women’s wages are around 30 percent of men’s; 40 percent in Latin America and South Asia; 50 percent in sub-Saharan Africa; and 60-70 percent in East Asia and developed countries. In 2009, 134 countries were evaluated on five economic performance indicators which show that the Middle East has the widest gender gap in economic opportunity (The Global Gender Gap Report 2009).
Evidence from developed countries substantiates the possibility for fair economic expectations. According to Building Gender Balanced Business, in the United States, women make 80 percent of consumer goods purchasing decisions; in Canada, women start 70 percent of new small businesses; in the UK, women will own 60 percent of all personal wealth by 2025; worldwide today there are more female millionaires between the age of 18 and 44 than male. But current data gathered by the United Nations from developing, transitioning and conflict-torn economies indicate that women are still marginalized. They are either absent or poorly represented in economic decisions and policymaking.
Formulation of appropriate gender-neutral policy acts as a framework to support balanced, effective and good governance. It functions as a catalyst for healthy economic growth and cogent interaction of societies’ three sectors: public, private and business. Most women have no equitable access to assets, credit, capital or property rights (International Center for Research on Women). Therefore, effective gender-neutral policies are needed.
In Chisinau, Moldova, founder and director of the International Center for Advancement of Women in Business Tatiana Batushkina has many policy concerns. They include creating an environment where women can interact with one another, know their full rights in society, share ecological concerns, solve economic obstacles and eliminate public resistance to women in business. In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, founder and director of the Women’s Committee for Legal Change Bayan Mahmoud Zahran’s Number 1 policy concern is to answer the question, “How can one enhance economic literacy and legal awareness to reach an apex of justice?” As a business owner in Ukraine, Elena Baryshnikova focuses on loosening the reign of restrictive commercial regulations. She is founder and director of Lex-Service Audit in Sevastopol, Ukraine, and Business Education Alliance (www.bea.com.ua) in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Progress in Closing Gender Gap
There are hopeful signs. Out of the 115 countries covered in the 2009 World Economic Forum’s report, since 2006 more than two-thirds have posted gains in overall gender gap index scores, indicating that the world, in general, has made progress toward lessening inequities (The Global Gender Gap Report 2009).
Female participation in the private sector in large and small, formal and informal enterprises is a crucial economic driver for societies — anywhere in the world. “What should economic self-sufficiency look like?” pondered Nino Elizbarashvili, president of the Georgian Association of Women in Business in Tbilisi, Georgia, during an interview. Economic security can beneficially touch every facet of a woman’s life and can manifest in a myriad of ways, including positive impact on the health, education and vitality of families, freedom to consume and produce and the ability to more fully contribute to civic and political transformation.
In Kurdistan Suzan Aref, director of the Women’s Empowerment Organization (www.womenempowerment-iraq.com/index.htm), wondered, “Could we, as women, break more barriers? How can we better promote security, women’s rights as human rights, gender equity, political participation and economic engagement?” One specific step is to bridge the gender gap with women’s economic empowerment and education by promoting inclusion of women in economic activities in elementary school. Other solutions are these: laws must be reformed, land allocation practices changed, access to justice enhanced and market entry obstructions eradicated. The economic benefits of scaling back barriers to women’s engagement in the workforce are substantial; as observed in the Global Gender Gap Report, between 2006 and 2009, of 115 countries surveyed, 98 (85 percent) improved performance. When women acquire access to and control over economic resources, they increase productivity and their incomes. Their ability to feed, clothe and educate their families thereby increases.
Women’s economic questions are wide-ranging, and the list of policy hurdles to be resolved is long. If we truly desire to live in equitable societies, we must act in this moment. At this moment, policy is top priority. Whether policy is decided publicly or in some secluded government chamber, the point is that policy is essential to determining the direction of our world. Women’s voices must be heard to transform and improve current economic conditions. To promote progress, public, private and business sectors worldwide must unite in actionable policy agendas to ensure an equitable future.
Susanne E. Jalbert is a leading economic activist and the architect of the Iraqi Small Business Development Centers program. She champions women’s business association capacity building worldwide. She publishes and speaks frequently on the role and impact of business associations, women entrepreneurs, anti-trafficking campaigns and entrepreneurial expansion programs.
PROFILE: Lubna Olayan – Saudi Businesswoman Strengthens Communities
By Scott Bortot
Figure 6.3: As head of the Olayan Financing Company, Lubna Olayan oversees the operations of dozens of international firms. But what many people don’t know is that the Cornell University graduate is dedicated to building her society by working with grassroots organizations throughout the Arab world.
Lubna Olayan is known in Saudi Arabia and around the world for her business acumen. The chief executive of the Olayan Financing Company, Olayan oversees the workings of more than three dozen companies with operations both inside and outside the kingdom. But Olayan, selected by Time magazine in 2005 as one of its top 100 most influential people, has a side to her that goes beyond business. When she is not running companies, she empowers communities by working with and supporting nongovernmental organizations.
“Grass-roots organizations can touch on social issues, taboo issues, in ways that are impossible for businesses to do,” Olayan said. “That’s their role and they don’t have the same stakes as businesses have. They also have time and energy to focus on key issues which businesses can only address marginally.”
Since 2002, Olayan has been a member of the board of trustees of the Arab Thought Foundation, which honors “[Arab] pioneers, supporting the innovators and sponsoring the talented from among the Arab nations.” But her community work doesn’t stop there. In 2006, she joined the board of directors for Alfanar, an organization that supports grass-roots organizations in the Arab world.
Lubna Olayan was born in Saudi Arabia in 1955. Her father, Suliman Olayan, was a powerful business leader who founded the Olayan Group in 1947. Early in her career at the Olayan Group, she worked closely with her father. Even though they had a warm relationship, at work it was all business. Olayan and her father made a deal that at the office they were no longer father and daughter but boss and employee.
Education a Key to Success
Olayan, who holds a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Cornell University and a master’s degree in business administration from Indiana University, understands the value of education. In turn, educational institutions have honored her. Cornell named the 1977 graduate as its 2010 “Entrepreneur of the Year.” David Skorton, president of Cornell University, said Olayan has “aspired to leadership roles in the business world, and she has received enormous recognition for her business skills.”
Delivering a speech at Cornell to accept the honor, Olayan recalled the role played by the university in forming her character. “It is important to encourage our people to come up with ideas, and to allow people to make mistakes,” she said, adding that she learned this lesson at Cornell. “I very much enjoyed the diversity of the student body.”
Olayan is active in developing Saudi education. As an advisory member of the board of Effat University, an educational institution for women in Saudi Arabia, she especially understands the meaning of education to women in her country. “Education is the single most important driver in improving society, in Saudi Arabia but also anywhere in the world,” Olayan said.
Bringing More Women to the Workplace
A member of the board of directors of INSEAD, an international, multicampus graduate business school, Olayan has a lot to say about the advancement of Saudi women in business. For starters, men and women working together is a recipe for success. “You need two hands to clap,” Olayan said. “It is a natural progression and a natural fit of the building of a society.”
At a certain level, the segregation of some business practices empowered Saudi women. “Initially, yes, female-only services opened the door to women for greater participation in the economic life of the country,” Olayan said. “Going forward though, one can hope that segregation will not continue.”
To raise the number of female professionals, who currently make up only six percent of the Saudi workforce, she established the Olayan National Women’s Action for Recruitment and Development (ONWARD) in 2004. The program accepts recruits and trains them in skills that can be used in a range of professions. While most of the recruits are fresh university graduates, the goal is to prepare them for executive leadership positions in the future.
The end of workplace segregation may not be too far off, judging from recent moves by the Saudi government. Olayan said a government decree greatly improved the situation for Saudi women seeking access to employment opportunities. The move opened up most of the job market to women beyond the traditional sectors of health care and education. “One of the major keys to a woman’s business success in Saudi Arabia is ensuring that she gets the equal opportunity to contribute and participate in the country’s economic development,” Olayan said.
When women began working in the offices of Olayan’s companies, she remembers a change took place. “I think it did make it a little different. We were all men until women came over and for one, in my opinion, it made a lot of the younger Saudis be alert that there is competition,” Olayan said. “There is an alternative if you don’t come in on time.”
Despite the government decree, workplace challenges still remain for Saudi women. “The implementation has been quite slow as there are still large organizations that have not opened their doors to Saudi women yet,” Olayan said.
Keep the Goal in Sight
Olayan, a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum, said Saudi men and women interested in opening a business in Saudi Arabia — or anywhere else — should first do their homework. “You have to have a goal and you measure your progression. You better have all the ingredients required and know all of the ingredients to achieve your plan,” she said. “You should measure it regularly in case you get sidetracked. Bring yourself back … and get focused.”
Keeping on her career course, from the time she joined Morgan Guaranty in New York in 1983 until today, is a hallmark of Olayan’s success. “When you are passionate about something, you have to make it a success and be proud of the success that you have achieved with it,” she said.
Through it all, what makes Olayan most happy is much closer to her heart. “The bottom line, although I’m proud of many things, I am most proud of my three daughters above anything.”
Scott Bortot is a staff writer for the International Information Programs bureau of the State Department.
PROJECT: Women’s Work: Paying It Forward
By Joanna L. Krotz
A one-to-one mentoring program set up by Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit and the U.S. State Department connects America’s top businesswomen with young women leaders around the world to strengthen careers and communities.
It’s easy to get things done with women,” says Ilham Zhiri, sipping a latte and nibbling a muffin early one morning at a bustling Starbucks café in New York City. “Women connect right away and they seem to have this instinct to help each other. You feel that everywhere you go,” she says, waving a hand to embrace the world. “In the States, you feel it. Back home, you feel it. You even feel it on a diplomatic level.”
Zhiri knows a thing or two about how women accomplish things. For the past 15 years, she’s been running a family printing and publishing company in her hometown of Rabat, Morocco, while devoting time to support younger women in business across the Middle East. “In the beginning, as a freshly graduated MBA, it was very hard for me,” says Zhiri, explaining why she reaches out to other women. “At home, because of the cultural context, a woman has to put in double effort and energy to prove herself — to other women as well as to men. But once you do, that’s it. Recognition is there.”
That clear-eyed passion for spearheading social and economic change and the desire to expand her own skills motivated Zhiri to apply to the unique program that returned her to the United States. Years before, she had studied at American University in Washington. Now, Zhiri was in New York for the finale of the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership. Each year, this public/private program selects 30 to 35 up-and-coming women professionals from around the world, pairing them with 50 senior American women from business, academia and government.
Public-Private Partnership Networks Empower New Leaders
The month-long program creatively leverages the resources and expertise of an unusual three-part alliance: an elite roster of American women from companies such as Avon, Wal-Mart, American Express and ExxonMobil who participate in Fortune magazine’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit, chaired by Editor-at-Large Pattie Sellers; the international nongovernmental organization Vital Voices, whose mission is to empower emerging women leaders worldwide; and the U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).
Figure 6.4: Josephine Kairaba (Rwanda), Anna Grishchenkova (Russia) and Hussan-Bano Burki (Pakistan) interact with Ambassador Melanne Verveer at the Global Mentoring Partnership meeting.
The idea was born in 2006 during a meeting between Sellers and then-Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Dina Powell in Washington. The Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership was soon launched. It debuted as a three-phase program for 17 women. They received orientation in Washington, individual mentorship around the United States and evaluation in New York. It was an immediate success. Today the program boasts nearly 150 graduates from about 50 countries. Powell, now head of corporate engagement at Goldman Sachs and director of its sister initiative, 10,000 Women, remains a key sponsor.
“The Mentoring Partnership offers women a transformative model of leadership,” explains Alyse Nelson, president and CEO of Vital Voices, which is awarded ECA grants — about \$190,000 in 2010 — to manage on-the-ground logistics. Typically, the women are first-generation professionals who lack role models at home. So the firsthand coaching is an enormous boost, emotionally and practically. Just as importantly, says Nelson, “participants know that top women in Fortune 500 companies don’t need to take time and effort for mentoring, but they do. The younger women see the ripple effect of doing well and also doing good. They understand the investment being made in them and their responsibility to give back.”
Now in its fifth year, the program is well established. “We cable our embassies and regional bureaus, which identify and nominate local women for the program,” says ECA managing director of cultural programs Chris Miner, who oversees thousands of State Department exchange programs. “Obviously, they must have a good command of English,” says Miner. “But the women must also be emerging leaders who participate to take their skills, career or business to the next level. These women are destined for success.” Pattie Sellers invites high-level American businesswomen to volunteer. Their companies cover one participant’s travel and expenses, about \$8,000 each. Working with a Fortune team, Sellers then customizes each match.
“We learn from each other,” says Susan Whiting, a four-time mentor and vice chair of the Nielsen Company, the global marketing and media information firm. “For me, it’s especially valuable to see the U.S. through their eyes.” Paired with Ilham Zhiri this year, Whiting has noticed a pattern among the mentees. “Younger women on their way to success often feel they have to put some parts of themselves aside, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing in the long term,” she says. “To succeed, you need to be true to yourself.”
Destined for Success
Reviewing her experience at Nielsen, Zhiri says she’s returning to Morocco with two objectives. “First, I’ve learned … that I can leverage business opportunities in the North Africa region.” The second goal, managing a clear work/life balance, surprised her. “There’s a wonderful phrase I learned here — about ‘repotting’ yourself,” says Zhiri. “You need to grow your personal life in order to grow your business. I learned that I don’t have to be so tough on myself.”
The final, fast-paced week in New York was a high-octane mix of media training sessions, entrepreneurship workshops, panel discussions and networking events, hosted by industry leaders.
“I applied to the program because I wanted to see how I measure up compared to leaders in the U.S.,” says Hussan-Bano Burki, a senior manager for USAID in Islamabad.
She works to facilitate trade and develop online marketing tools. “In Pakistan, I’m already known as a good leader and my skills are pretty much there.”
Teamed with Ernst & Young’s Beth A. Brooke, Burki said, “Here, I saw mentors who went beyond professional duties to build networks and pay it forward.” The revelation, for Burki, was seeing how Brooke used her contacts to approach unfamiliar sources and facilitate policy. “Within the first few days at E&Y, I recognized that I’d been missing the idea of using networks as assets and how I need to be less bashful about asking for help. Beth connected to so many institutions and people relevant to things I’ve done. The practical power of that was a great lesson.” All in all, Burki adds, “I learned what’s important to rise up professionally.”
Joanna L. Krotz is a multimedia journalist and speaker whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Worth, Money, and Town & Country and on MSN and Entrepreneurship.org. She is the author of The Guide to Intelligent Giving and founder of the Women’s Giving Institute, an organization that educates donors about strategic philanthropy.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. Barriers to equitable economic engagement include…
1. Women perform two-thirds of the world’s work for 10 percent of the income
2. Women constitute 40 percent of the world’s poor
3. Young men constitute 70 percent of the world’s poor
4. Women constitute a minority of the world’s precarious workforce
5. None of the above
2. Women’s wages are 30 percent of men’s wages in…
1. Sub-Saharan Africa
2. East Asia
3. Middle East/North Africa (MENA)
4. Latin America
5. North America
3. In the United States, women make up ________ percent of consumer goods purchasing decisions.
1. 70
2. 60
3. 90
4. 80
5. None of the above
4. According to the chapter, key areas of concern for women’s economic empowerment include…
1. Equitable access to assets, credit, capital and property rights
2. Addressing urban/rural divides
3. Drone strikes in Pakistan
4. The prison-industrial complex
5. None of the above
5. The Olayan Group’s support of grassroots organization is an example of which organizational practice?
1. Private-public partnerships
2. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
3. Alternative Service Delivery (ASD)
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
6. According to the chapter, what does Lubna Olayan identify as the most important driver for improving society in Saudi Arabia?
1. Agricultur
2. Petroleum
3. Wealth
4. Education
5. None of the above
7. The Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Woman’s Mentoring Partnership is a demonstration of
1. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
2. Public-private partnerships
3. Alternative Service Delivery (ASD)
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
8. The Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership was initiated in which year?
1. 2000
2. 1995
3. 2008
4. 2006
5. None of the above
9. Representatives at the Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership come from which private sector companies?
1. Avon
2. Walmart
3. American Express
4. ExxonMobil
5. All of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is A. Women perform two thirds of the world’s work for 10 percent of the income. Women constitute 70 percent of the world’s poor, so answers B and C are incorrect.
2. The correct answer is Middle East/North Africa (MENA) (answer C). Women’s wages are 50 percent of men’s in Sub-Saharan Africa (answer A), 40 percent in Latin America and South Asia (answer D), and 60 – 70 percent in East Asia and North America (answers B and E).
3. The correct answer is 80 percent (answer D).
4. The correct answer is equitable access to assets, credit, capital and property rights (answer A) The text states that in both urban and rural areas, women are carrying the triple burden of raising children, doing household chores, and earning family incomes, so answer B is not correct. The chapter does not discuss drone strikes (answer C) or the prison industrial complex (answer D).
5. The correct answer is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) (answer B).
6. The correct answer is education (answer D).
7. The correct answer is public-private partnerships (answer B).
8. The correct answer is 2006 (answer D).
9. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
Discussion Questions
1. What are the specific steps to bridging the economic gender gap? How might these steps conflict with local cultures?
2. What has been the impact of privatization and globalization on women in developing countries?
3. Aside from advocating for a more equal gender balance in the workplace, what are other approaches that governments and employers can take to decrease the gender bias to support female workers?
4. Draw on the chapter’s discussion of women’s entrepreneurship in the Middle East to compare the types of challenges women in the workplace face in Morocco and those they face in the United States. How different are the barriers to women’s full participation in business within each context? Explain.
5. The chapter explains that the Middle East hosts the world’s widest gender gap, with women making 40% of men’s wages. Draw from the further resources section to suggest some reasons for this divide.
6. How are Arab and Middle Eastern women commonly represented in Western news and media? How does this vary in the MENA media?
Essay Questions
1. What challenges are specific to women who work in the informal sector or within the home? Why is formal work considered productive but informal work considered unproductive?
2. What is the value of corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Do multi-national corporations’ CSR policies make a difference? Are there women-specific issues that private companies are unlikely to address?
3. What economic barriers are specific to immigrant women? Consider factors such as credential regimes, restrictive work visas, and temporary and precarious employment. Further, what are some short-term policy changes that can be made to increase the economic empowerment of migrant women?
Additional Resources
Awo, M. A., & Anaman, K. A. “Political Economy Analysis of the Production and Marketing of Shea Nut Products by Women in the Northern Region of Ghana.” Research in World Economy 6(4), 1 – 17: (2015).
Research suggesting that farmer’s satisfaction for prices is linked to their membership in collective framer-based organizations.
Erin, K. & Leppert, A. “Selfhood, Citizenship… and all things Kardashian: Neoliberal and Postfeminist Ideals in Reality Television.” Media and Communication Studies Summer Fellows, Paper 2: (2015).
Discusses the influence of reality television in mainstreaming and reinforcing cultures of individualism, market logic and competition.
Deodda. M., Di Liberto, A., Foddi, M. & Sulis, G. “Employment Subsidies, Informal Economy and Women’s Transition into Work in a Depressed Area: Evidence from a Matching Approach.” IZA Journal of Labor Policy 4(7): (2015).
Italian study conducted on the positive effects of employment subsidies and labour outcomes for low-income and older women.
Harquail, CV. “’Add Women and Stir’ Won’t Keep Women in Tech.” Authentic Organizations: Aligning Identity, Action and Purpose. (2016).
Critiques the ‘add women and stir’ approach, and advocates for businesses to adopt participatory, explicitly pro-women and anti-gender bias approaches, rather than simply increasing the gender-balance of the workforce.
Madzwamuse, M. “Economic Justice as a Site for Women’s Empowerment.” Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. (2015).
Challenges optimism on the impact of economic growth for women in Africa, arguing that neoliberal development models have failed to address structural inequality.
www.osisa.org/buwa/economic-justice/regional/economic-justice-site-women%E2%80%99s-empowerment
Momani, B. “Arab Dawn: Arab Youth and the Demographic Dividend They Will Bring.” Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). (2016).
Video that challenges negative assumptions in the Middle East and surrounding region, focusing on the positive economic and political changes that will come from youth.
Momani, B. “Saudi Suffragists: Women’s Rights Come to the Most Unlikely Place.” Globe and Mail. (2016).
Discusses the recent women’s rights movement in Saudi Arabia, as a bottom-up movement in a kingdom that remains conservative.
Neumayer, E. & De Soysa, I. “Globalization, Women’s Economic Rights and Forced Labour.” The World Economy 30(10), 1510 – 1535: (2007).
Article suggesting that increased trade cam help promote and realize two core International Labour Organization (ILO) standards.
Schwartz, A. “Orientalism and the Representation of Middle Eastern Women.” Sociological Images. (2011).
Questions the dominant representations of Middle Eastern as infantilized or silenced by their religion and culture.
Muylaert, A., director. “The Second Mother.”
Portuguese film directed by Anna Muylaert on domestic work that dissects unspoken but entrenched class barriers that are present in the home.
UN Women Asia Pacific. “Domestic Work and Migration in Asia.”
Fact sheet on the challenges and legal protections for women and men in domestic work.
Women Who Tech
.
Recognizing that 93% of investor money goes to startups founded by men, this platform aims to connect women in tech and increase the amount of women in Sciences Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) and startups.
Kreitmeyr-Kosa, N.
2016. “Neoliberal Networks and Authoritarian Renewal: A Diverse Case Study of Egypt, Jordan & Morocco.” Dissertation. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.06%3A_Women_in_the_Economy.txt |
Chapter 7: Women in Power and Decisionmaking
Chapter Summary
This chapter discusses the lack of women’s participation in high level legislative in executive decision making bodies and reviews current top-down initiatives to address gender gaps in the political and policy arenas. While the United Nations in 1990 called for women to hold 30 percent of parliamentary seats, only 26 out of 189 countries reached this mark by 2010. Furthermore, democracy on its own does not promote women’s participation; two of the world’s oldest democracies, the United States and France, have lower-than-average female representation in executive bodies. Affirmative action programs such as gender quotas and women-specific training programs are necessary to open up opportunities for women to engage in politics.
The chapter brings in examples of state-led progress in gender inclusion. Michelle Bachelet became the first democratically elected president of Chile and was appointed as the first head of UN Women in 2010 by Ban Ki-Moon. The Council of Women leaders was formed by Madeline Albright, first U.S. Female Secretary of State, and fosters dialogue among female democratically elected officials globally. The council also administers a fellowship program for mentoring emerging leaders in the fields of Gender and Public Policy, Environmental Policy, and Public Health.
Key Terms
• Angela Merkel
• Ban Ki-moon
• Council of Women World Leaders
• Ellen Johnson
• Inter-American Defense College
• International Parliamentary Union
• Kim Campbell
• Madeline Albright
• Madeline K. Albright Women’s Voices at the Aspin Institute Series
• Michelle Bachelet
• Ministerial Initiative on the Environment
• National Academy for Strategic and Policy Studies (Chile)
• Socialist Youth Movement (Chile)
• UN Women
• Women in National Parliaments
Figure 7.1: Women make significant contributions to civil society, yet around the world their representation in government is limited. Here a Kuwaiti woman flashes the victory sign in Kuwait City after their parliament, in May 2005, passed a historic law that allows women to participate actively in politics.
Overview
By Lori S. Ashford
Around the world, women’s lack of representation in government, especially in high-level executive and legislative bodies, limits their influence over governance and public policies. Arguably, women’s participation in decisionmaking is essential for ensuring their equality and rights. Where women have participated actively in public policy, they have been able to raise the visibility of women’s issues and work toward ending gender discrimination. But women have made slow progress in the political arena, even while making impressive gains in other areas such as education, employment and health.
Women’s Political Participation: Facts and Figures
Women’s representation in legislative bodies has increased in most parts of the world, but it is still at a low level. In 1990, the United Nations called for women to hold a “critical mass” of 30 percent of parliamentary seats — a level believed to be sufficient to bring about change in national politics. Twenty years later, only 26 countries out of 186 reached or exceeded the 30 percent mark of women’s representation in the single or lower house of parliament, according to the International Parliamentary Union. In the United States, women held 16.8 percent of seats in the House of Representatives in 2010, slightly lower than the world average of 19 percent of lawmakers in the lower houses worldwide. (Women in National Parliaments: http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm)
These global figures conceal large regional disparities: Women make up 42 percent of parliament in Scandinavian nations but just 12 percent of Arab assemblies. A few African countries top the list: In Rwanda and South Africa, women hold 56 percent and 45 percent of seats, respectively. In Sweden, women occupy 45 percent of parliamentary seats.
Progress in women’s representation in the executive branches of government is even slower. In 2010, just 11 of 192 heads of government were women. Globally, women hold only 16 percent of ministerial posts. Finland stands out in this category, with 63 percent of Cabinet-level posts held by women.
Why Women Lack Political Power
The low proportion of women in political decisionmaking positions reflects men’s historical advantages in electoral systems and long-standing inequalities between men and women in society. At home, school, the workplace and elsewhere, girls and women typically have fewer opportunities than their male counterparts to acquire policy and leadership skills. The political arena may be least amenable to increased diversity and gender equality because it is often informal and subject to the rules of the “old-boy network.”
Democracy on its own does not create a path for women to become leaders. In fact, two of the oldest democracies, the United States and France, have low percentages of women in elected office. In most societies, women have limited access to the conventional avenues of power such as political parties, business organizations and labor unions. Lacking connections and clout, they find it harder to raise money for political campaigns. Thus, women often enter public life through alternative routes such as charities and women’s organizations.
Overcoming the Odds
Many of the political inroads women have made are due to gender quotas designed to seat more women in legislative bodies, from national parliaments to local village councils. About 50 countries have established such quotas — the Nordic countries were the earliest to put these in place — and 30 to 40 more have voluntary quotas, according to the International Parliamentary Union. In addition to quotas, women need to be trained to run for and hold office. Recruitment systems for legislative and executive positions must be more transparent.
Rwanda and South Africa saw historic jumps in the proportion of women in parliament after their national constitutions were rewritten with quotas in place for women’s representation. In other countries, such as Kyrgyzstan in 2007, 30-percent quotas have been adopted as part of election reform. In Kuwait in 2005, the all-male parliament granted women full political rights — a small but significant step in the Arab world. Many other countries have reserved seats for women on local village councils and governing bodies. In India in recent years, some states have increased the quota for women in these bodies from 30 percent to 50 percent.
Figure 7.2: Women in rural El Quiché, Guatemala, display their inked fingers, proof they voted.
The Power of Measurement
Monitoring women’s participation in political life is critical even if the metrics used are imperfect. Women’s share of seats in national parliaments is a reliable measure because these bodies are relatively stable over time and the headcount is easily compared among countries. Granted, the percentage of seats or offices held by women reveals nothing about how fully they participate or how much power they wield. Nevertheless, establishing benchmarks for women’s progress draws attention to the issue and to ensuring that affirmative action is working. These measures wouldn’t be necessary if there was gender equality, but until that is achieved and quotas are no longer necessary, women must continue to participate actively and fight for their share of representation.
Lori S. Ashford, a freelance consultant, has written about global population, health and women’s issues for 20 years. Formerly with the Population Reference Bureau, she authored the widely disseminated Women of Our World data sheets and the Population Bulletin “New Population Policies: Advancing Women’s Health and Rights,” among other publications.
PROFILE: Michelle Bachelet – Physician, Military Strategist, Head of State
By Karen Calabria
Figure 7.3: Courage, commitment and circumstance propelled this physician turned politician into becoming the first woman president of Chile. Now she works for international gender equality.
Self-professed agnostic. Divorced mother of three. Amateur folksinger. That’s hardly a recipe for political success in a country as devoutly religious and socially conservative as Chile.
But the South American nation’s first democratically elected female president, Dr. Michelle Bachelet, has never shied away from contradictions. If anything, she has created her legacy from them.
“We’ve opened the windows and doors to let ordinary people in, to encourage them to participate,” Bachelet told The New York Times, reflecting on the fractured aspects of her past that coalesced to win her the Chilean presidency.
She’s a political prisoner turned public servant who, as a government minister and Chile’s president, worked to establish a stable democracy during the transition from the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
She’s a physician — an epidemiologist and pediatrician — with a facility for healing equal to, if not surpassed by, her adeptness as a military strategist. She studied military strategy at the National Academy for Strategic and Policy Studies in Chile and at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington. In her first attempt to gain the highest political office, she emerged from the race as president, the first woman elected president of Chile.
And, at just 59 years of age, Bachelet is nowhere near finished. Recently appointed as the first head of the new United Nations agency U.N. Women, she continues to build her legacy — this time as one of the world’s most prominent activists for gender equality.
“In my family, I learned that all people should be equal in opportunities, and that justice was essential, dignity was essential. So it is in my DNA to believe in peoples’ rights and to believe we are all different and that it is great because that makes this world more interesting,” she said in an interview with Barbara Crossette that appeared in The Nation.
Those ideals experienced their first — and most trying — test during the 1973 ouster of then-President Salvador Allende by military strongman Pinochet. Her father, an Air Force general with a prominent position in Allende’s government, was taken into military custody for treason. He was tortured, and subsequently died from a heart attack as a result.
Bachelet didn’t let this deter her own political participation. Instead, she stepped up her commitment as a member of the Socialist Youth Movement. But her activities were curtailed when both she and her mother were detained at torture centers by the Pinochet regime before they fled the country for Australia in 1975.
Figure 7.4: President Bachelet speaks with a family affected by the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Constitución, Chile.
In spite of what she endured in her early years of political engagement, Bachelet made a concerted effort to address inequities in Chilean society. As minister of health, which she became in 2000, under President Ricardo Lagos, she improved access to public health care. In 2002 she was the first woman in Latin America to be appointed defense minister. During her tenure she promoted reconciliation between the military and civilian society, reforming and modernizing the Chilean military.
“Because I was a victim of hate, I’ve consecrated my life to turning hate into understanding, tolerance and, why not say it — love,” she said in her victory speech after the 2006 presidential election.
Although she began her career as a physician, quickly moving up the ladder to become health minister, she couldn’t shake the lasting influence of her father’s military background.
“I noticed that one of the barriers to full democracy was the [lack] of understanding between the military world and the civilian world. They spoke different languages. I wanted to help with that. I could be a bridge between those two worlds,” she told The Guardian of the graduate studies she undertook in military science that led to her eventual appointment as Chile’s first female defense minister in 2002.
Despite all her successes, Bachelet’s been no stranger to criticism. She’s been roundly criticized for her administration’s education policy, the failure of an ambitious public transportation plan and a series of endless labor disputes. But her approval rating is the highest of any president in Chile’s history, topping off at 84 percent when she left office in March 2010.
Yet no amount of success seems to diminish her determination to press forward with the next task. In July 2010, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed her as the first head of the organization’s newly created agency, U.N. Women.
Shortly after her appointment, U.N. Radio aired an interview in which Bachelet did not hesitate to outline some of the difficulties she faces in her new role. “In many regions of the world, women have a very difficult situation. They don’t have the same opportunities as men regarding the most essential human rights; women are discriminated [against], their rights are violated. There are still some places where women are mutilated. And so I am convinced that we need to work very hard to improve their condition, and I know it’s … very challenging work.”
And despite the legacy she’s already created for herself as one of the world’s female heads of state, Bachelet remains as committed to her vision of a better future as the youthful idealist that stood up to the same oppressive regime that had killed her father.
As she told The New York Times, “What I am mostly interested in, what I remain committed to, is less dwelling on the past than creating a better future.”
Karen Calabria is a freelance writer based in New York City.
PROJECT: Council of Women World Leaders
By Laura Liswood
At the Aspen Institute, the Council of Women World Leaders is a forum where women who serve or have served as world leaders confer to develop strategies for gender equality.
Trickle-down may be a controversial theory in any debate about the economy, but it can be a powerful approach when the goal is to promote gender equality.
That’s the high-minded end game for the Council of Women World Leaders, a top-down juggernaut of female government leaders that is using its influence to increase opportunities for women across the globe. Its mission: to mobilize the highest-level women leaders globally for collective action on issues of critical importance to women.
“Studies have shown that by the time children start school, they already have a deeply imbued sense of what it means to be male and female in their society,” says Kim Campbell, Canada’s first female prime minister, in a recent Newsweek article. “If these views support traditional gender roles, education will be hard-pressed to supplant them with something more conducive to gender equality. If we want to open up opportunities for women in public life, we have to address the landscape from which people derive their ideas of the way the world works.”
The council was conceived as one way to move that goal along. Established in 1997, it is not just another venue for high-profile officials to pose on a public stage. These aren’t the women’s networking groups of the ’80s and ’90s, but power gatherings with all the prerogatives that come with holding high office. This network of elite women aims to leverage its influence, change attitudes and eliminate hurdles to women’s progress. For example, through its Ministerial Initiative, the council provides a vehicle for a collective female voice on nettlesome global issues, shaping the agendas for multilateral policymaking gatherings to focus squarely on gender aspects.
The Ministerial Initiative on the Environment was created to address the critical need to foster sustainable development policies. The council noted in 2009 that women have primary responsibility for raising children and for securing sufficient resources for their families’ nutrition and health. So logic dictates that women’s involvement in environmental issues should increase. Given the variety of their daily interactions with the environment, women are the most keenly affected by its degradation. Yet women are severely underrepresented at decisionmaking tables on development and the environment.
Figure 7.5: Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was instrumental in founding the Ministerial Initiative of the Council of Women World Leaders.
Figure 7.6: Women leaders pose to mark the Council of World Women Leaders’ first summit in May 1998, at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Seated from left: Violeta B. de Chamorro, former president, Nicaragua; Vigdís Finnbógadottir, former president, Iceland; Laura Liswood, executive director. Standing from left: Tansu Çiller, former prime minister, Turkey; Hanna Suchocka, former prime minister, Poland; Kazimiera Prunskien˙e, former prime minister, Lithuania; the late Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister, Pakistan; Dame Eugenia Charles, former prime minster, Dominica; and Kim Campbell, former prime minister, Canada.
Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. secretary of state, was founding chair of the Ministerial Initiative and an Aspen Institute trustee. To honor her contributions, a series of round-table discussions bears her name.
The council’s Madeleine K. Albright Women’s Voices at the Aspen Institute Series hosts global leaders and internationally acclaimed experts from various disciplines, who discuss and debate specific policy issues and suggest future actions for change — with emphasis on the gender dimension of the topic. Security, environmental and social matters are all seen through a gendered lens.
A winter 2010 panel, for example, featured two notable political scientists, Erika Falk of the Annenberg School of Communication and Elisabeth Gidengil of McGill University. They discussed their recent findings on female political candidates, which show it is still typically a slippery climb to the top. They found that reporters focus substantially more on men’s policy positions than on women’s, talk more about women’s physical appearance than men’s and cover the male candidates’ campaigns twice as much.
In 1996, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, Iceland’s first democratically elected female head of state, who served from 1980 to 1996, collaborated with this author to convene women heads of government. The Council of Women World Leaders was created in 1997. Finnbogadóttir was the first chairperson. Housed at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government until 2004, the council is now a policy program of the Aspen Institute, a Washington-based international nonprofit organization that fosters enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue.
Tarja Halonen, the president of Finland since 2000, currently serves as chair. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland (1990-1997) and Campbell, former prime minister of Canada (1993), also have held the position. Democratically elected women presidents and prime ministers are eligible to join the 45-member council by invitation. Today it includes former President Michelle Bachelet of Chile, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and former Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand, among others.
In 1998, the council expanded to include women Cabinet members. The Ministerial Initiative advances democracy, gender equality and good governance through exchanges at ministerial meetings on global issues such as health, education, environment, finance, economy and development.
The council also fosters emerging leaders through its graduate fellowship programs, which place promising graduate students in the offices of council members, international organizations and ministerial offices around the globe. Through the three branches of the program, Gender and Public Policy, Environmental Policy and Public Health Policy, fellows are provided with an opportunity to observe firsthand the ways in which leadership is manifested at the highest levels. To date, more than 160 fellows have served in 52 offices worldwide. Students from top-tier graduate schools of public health and environmental studies are placed in relevant ministries of council members and in international organizations.
The council is a unique space for dialogue on the role of women at the highest levels of decisionmaking and for the promotion of women’s issues and women in government. It offers a network of resources for high-level women leaders and facilitates a forum for a diverse group of seasoned policymakers to recommend viable solutions to inequities that afflict women today. The council’s diversity of perspective reflects the multifaceted challenges faced by women in various parts of the world.
Laura Liswood is secretary-general of the Council of Women World Leaders, which she co-founded with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, former president of Iceland, to provide a global network for such women to share their unique experiences and learn from each other in a cooperative environment. She is a senior adviser for the global investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Multiple Choice Questions
1. According to the chapter, in which sector have women made the least progress toward gender equality?
1. Education
2. Employment
3. Health
4. Politics
5. None of the above
2. In 2010, what proportion of UN member states had increased their share of women representatives in parliament?
1. 26 out of 186
2. 50 out of 186
3. 70 out of 186
4. 20 out of 186
5. None of the above
3. In 2010, what proportion of heads of government were women?
1. 20 out of 192
2. 15 out of 192
3. 13 out of 192
4. 11 out of 192
5. None of the above
4. Countries in which region were the earliest to issue gender quotas for national parliaments and local councils?
1. North America
2. Nordic countries
3. Latin America
4. Central Europe
5. The United States and France both have low percentages of women in elected office, demonstrating that…
1. Democracy on its own will not create opportunities for women to become leaders
2. Republics are less effective at promoting gender equality than constitutional monarchies
3. Commonwealth countries have higher levels of women in elected positions
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
6. The “old-boys network” creates barriers to women entering politics through most formal political organizations EXCEPT
1. Political parties
2. Labour unions
3. Business organizations
4. Charities
5. None of the above
7. Which of the below describes a trickle-down approach to promoting gender equality?
1. Mobilizing high-level women leaders to act on issues of importance to women
2. Recruiting men for roles in sectors that are feminized
3. Labour unions working to organize low-wage women workers
4. Increasing the social value of household and domestic labour
8. Which sub-Saharan African countries saw historic jumps in the proportion of women elected representatives?
1. Ethiopia and South Africa
2. Ethiopia and Rwanda
3. Rwanda and South Africa
4. Namibia and Zambia
5. None of the above
9. Immediately after the 1973 Chilean coup, in which Pinochet assumed power, Michelle Bachelet became a member of which organization?
1. World Federation of Democratic Youth
2. Socialist Youth Movement
3. Communist Youth of Chile
4. Socialist Party of Chile
5. None of the above
10. Which is a limitation of measuring women’s participation in politics?
1. The percentage of seats held do not reveal details about positions of power or levels of participation
2. Affirmative action may harm efficiency
3. Quotas can lead to animosity among colleagues
4. Affirmative action programs give women and other minorities unfair advantages
5. None of the above
11. The first female U.S. secretary of state was…
1. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
2. Madeleine Albright
3. Kim Campbell
4. Helen Clark
12. Political scientists Erika Falk and Elisabeth Gidengil wrote on what findings about women politicians in the media?
1. The media pays more attention to women’s personality traits
2. The media focuses on men’s policy positions and women’s physical appearances
3. The media covers men’s campaigns twice as much as women’s campaigns
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
13. The International Council of Women Leaders…
1. Uses its influence to increase opportunities for women across the globe
2. Fosters enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue
3. Administers a graduate fellowship program for emerging leaders in the public policy field
4. Includes democratically elected women by invitation
5. All of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is politics (answer D). The text states that women have made gains in education (answer A), employment (answer B), and health (answer C), but have yet to make the same progress in the political arena.
2. The correct answer is 26 out of 186 (answer A).
3. The correct answer is 11 out of 192 (answer D).
4. The correct answer is the Nordic countries (answer B).
5. The correct answer is A. Despite the fact that the U.S. and France are two of the world’s oldest democracies, they don’t display higher gender equality in politics. There is also no evidence of causation in the relationship between a country’s republic or commonwealth status and its gender equality (answers B and C).
6. The correct answer is charities (answer D). Political parties (answer A), labour unions (answer B), and business organizations (answer C), are described as subject to the “old-boys network” of formal organizations, and can be difficult for women to gain access.
7. Mobilizing high-level women leaders to act on issues of importance to women (answer A) is correct.
8. The correct answer is Rwanda and South Africa (answer C).
9. The correct answer is the Socialist Youth Movement (answer B). The World Federation of Democratic Youth (answer A) is incorrect. Michelle Bachelet’s current affiliation is with the Socialist Party of Chile (answer D). The Communist Youth of Chile is another prominent youth movement (answer C), though Michelle Bachelet was not a member.
10. The correct answer is that the percentage of seats held by women do not reveal their position of power or their levels of participation (answer A). Consensus in political science is that affirmative action programs and quotas do not harm efficiency (answer B), lead to animosity among colleagues (answer C), or give women and other minorities unfair advantages (answer D). These measures are necessary because gender equality has yet to be achieved.
11. The correct answer is Madeleine Albright (answer B). Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the president of Liberia and Africa’s first female head of state(answer A), Kim Campbell was Canada’s first female prime minister (answer C), and Helen Clark is the former prime minister of New Zealand (answer D).
12. The correct answer is D (all of the above). All of the answers were part of Falk and Gidengil’s findings on women politician’s media representations.
13. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E). Each of the options are important aspects of the International Council of Women Leaders.
Discussion Questions
1. In what ways would a liberal democracy be more conducive to increasing gender equality among elective representatives? How can democracy pose barriers to gender equality?
2. Select a national or international context and do external research to discover what programs or systems exist to increase women’s representation in government or the private sector in that context. Are they effective? Are there any challenges?
3. Is adding women to existing policies and programs all that is necessary to create gender equality?
4. What are the benefits and limits of gender-equality efforts focusing on women who are in leadership roles?
5. What are some myths that prevent women from accessing leadership roles? How can they be addressed?
Essay Questions
1. The chapter mentions that ‘trickle-down feminism’ is a controversial topic. Using the resources provided, summarize the debate surrounding trickle-down feminism and consider alternative approaches.
2. Is it a commonly accepted idea that women have different leadership styles than men? Research on your own to make a case for whether these different styles result from biological differences or socialization through gender-specific experiences, and offer concrete examples.
3. Do the problems associated with a lack of women in leadership reside more with the inadequate number of women in leadership or the fundamental structure of organizations?
Additional Resources
ABC News. “Gillard Labels Abbot a Misogynist.” (2012).
Gillard speaks to the challenges facing women in politics in Australia and exposes misogyny among colleagues.
Albright, M.TED-Ed. “On Being a Woman and a Diplomat – Madeleine Albright.” (2013).
TED Talk by Madeline Albright, the first female U.S. Secretary of State on her experiences in the diplomatic world through a gender lens.
Al Maaitah, R. Oweis, A. Olimat, H. Altarawneh, I. & Al Maaitah, H. “Barriers Hindering Jordanian Women’s Advancement to Higher Political and Leadership Positions.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13(5), 101 – 122.
Draws from a cross sectional survey of 500 Jordanian women to identify obstacles to advancement and discrimination within institutions among a variety of sectors.
Amin, M. & Islam, A. “Women Managers and the Gender-Based Gap in Access to Education: Evidence from Firm-Level Data in Developing Countries.” World Bank. (2015).
Firm-level study finding that countries with a higher proportion of female managers have higher female enrollment rates in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education.
O’Neil, D. & Hopkins, M. “The Impact of Gendered Organizational Systems on Women’s Career Advancement.” Frontiers in Psychology, 1 – 4: (2015).
Pays attention to systemic gendered norms and structures that impact women in workplaces.
Ditchburn, J. “’Because it’s 2015: Trudeau Forms Canada’s First Gender Balanced Cabinet.” CBC News. (2015).
Commentary on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to form Canada’s first gender-balanced cabinet.
Farnsworth, N. “Gender Responsive Budgeting.” TEDxPristinaWomen. (2015).
Explains the meaning, procedures and impacts of gender-responsive budgeting.
Jaffe, S. “Trickle-Down Feminism.” Dissent. (2013).
Discusses the dangers of focusing exclusively on women in high-level leadership positions, remembering that women are also overrepresented in minimum wage and informal sectors.
Saadin, I. Ramli, K. Johari, H. & Harin, N. H. “Women and Barriers for Upward Career Advancement – A Survey at Perak State Secretariat, Ipoh, Perak.” Procedia Economics and Finance 35, 574 – 581: (2016).
Examines the relationship between work-life balance and gender stereotypes of women in the public sector.
Westervelt, W. “Having It All Actually Kinda Sucks for Women.” Everyday Feminism. (2016).
Analyzes the domestic and care burdens that have persisted even though women have moved into the formal and paid sector.
The World’s Women 2015. “Power and Decision-Making.” (2015).
Annually updated data and analysis on women in leadership, within the public sector, private sector, and media. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.07%3A_Women_in_Power_and_Decisionmaking.txt |
Chapter 8: Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women
Chapter Summary
Chapter 8 discusses the advancement of women through public sector institutions, providing case studies from both Uruguay and the Ukraine. At first, most mechanisms for women’s advancement focused on equality between men and women, like giving women the right to vote. The next step was recognizing that distinct policies for women were necessary to achieve gender equality. The final stage was gender mainstreaming, meaning the assessment of policy implications for both men and women as a path toward gender parity. Women-specific institutions have been established throughout various ministries around the world at varying political positions of power and influence within governments.
Kateryna Levchenko challenged the patriarchal politics of the Ukraine and worked to hold the Ukraine accountable to its own national laws and its obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Levchenko now heads La Strada, a multi-national NGO that provides support to women affected by forced labour and migration. In Uruguay, senator Susana Dalmás organized a joint parliamentary committee across party lines to form a women’s caucus, providing a stronger platform to discuss women’s issues.
Key Terms
• Centre for the Promotion of Human Dignity
• Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)
• Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW)
• International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW)
• Inter-Parliamentary Union
• Kateryna Levchenko
• Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI)
• Organization of American States
• Special Commission on Gender and Equity
• Susana Dalmás
• UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
Figure 8.1: The International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde is among the dynamic women who lead the way for women in traditionally male-dominated institutions. Government and nongovernment agencies can promote the achievement of mainstream gender equality.
Overview
By Mona Lena Krook
National institutions for the advancement of women have been established in nearly every country around the world. They include offices, commissions, agencies and ministries on the status of women. The first offices of this nature were endorsed early in the 20th century by the League of Nations and the International Alliance of Women, which was formed during the women’s suffrage movement. One early example is the Women’s Bureau in the United States, created in 1920 as part of the Department of Labor to promote the welfare of female workers by formulating standards and policies to improve their working conditions, efficiency and opportunities for employment. However, most government agencies were established following the United Nations First World Conference on Women in 1975. The initial mandate of these offices was to increase women’s participation in education, politics and the economy. Examples of these offices worldwide include the National Women’s Service in Chile, the Government Equalities Office in the United Kingdom, the Commission on Gender Equality in South Africa and the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development in Malaysia.
In addition to government institutions, several regional and international organizations set up agencies to promote gender equality. The oldest regional agency of this type is the Inter-American Commission of Women, a specialized unit of the Organization of American States, which was established in 1928 as a forum for generating policy to advance women’s civil and political rights in the Western Hemisphere. More recent is the European Institute for Gender Equality, established in 2006 to assist European Union institutions and member states in promoting gender equality through public policy.
In the U.N. system, four different offices deal with issues of gender equality: the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) and the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI). They exist alongside the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), created by the U.N. Economic and Social Council in 1946, whose annual meetings define and elaborate on U.N. policy on women and gender. In 2010, the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously to create the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (U.N. Women) to merge the efforts of DAW, UNIFEM, INSTRAW and OSAGI to accelerate progress toward the achievement of women’s human rights in all areas. This step was justified on the grounds that gender equality is not only a basic human right, but also spurs economic growth.
Figure 8.2: Iraqi women deputies converse at a session of parliament in Baghdad. Women’s presence in government can help empower women generally.
Equal Rights to Gender Mainstreaming
The shared concern of these offices, both national and international, is to further gender equality and women’s empowerment. Approaches for achieving these goals, however, have evolved over time. Initially, most “mechanisms for advancement” focused on enacting and enforcing policies that ensured equal treatment of men and women, seeking to gain for women the same rights already enjoyed by men. This strategy was later criticized for simply assimilating females to a male standard that may not be appropriate for women and girls. A second approach then emerged that recognized that distinct policies for women and men may be required to achieve gender parity.
Dissatisfaction with this strategy led to a third approach, known as “gender mainstreaming,” popularized around the globe through the Beijing Platform for Action. The mainstreaming approach involves evaluating every prospective policy: (1) with a gendered lens, that is, assessing a policy’s different implications for women and men; (2) with the goal of promoting equality between women and men. This differs from prior strategies in seeking to apply a gender perspective across all policy areas, including those where a gender dimension is not readily apparent. Gender mainstreaming is reflected in the mission of the White House Council for Women and Girls, created by U.S. President Obama in 2009 expressly to ensure that each government agency “takes into account the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, the legislation they support.”
Only the Beginning
The widespread presence of women’s policy mechanisms belies important variations in the strength and status of these agencies, whose resources are often vulnerable to changes in government and donor funding priorities. These offices may diverge greatly in terms of their budgets and staff, the length of their mandate, their closeness to the executive, the backgrounds of their agency heads, and their policy priorities. In some countries, for example, agencies have ministerial rank, while in others they are housed in the office of the president or under the auspices of another ministry, such as justice or social development. Few such mechanisms have the power to negotiate their own budgets, and many have only a handful of staff members. In addition, their existence and status may depend closely upon the will of the president or prime minister, who may fundamentally reorganize their mandate, for example, by adding a focus on family and children or by combining the unit with other offices focused on race, disability and sexual orientation. An ongoing concern is whether these agencies are endowed with sufficient power and resources to truly advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. The articles in this chapter consider ways in which some women are working through institutions to give women more voice through legislation and government and nongovernment advocacy.
Mona Lena Krook is assistant professor of political science and women, gender and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Quotas for Women in Politics (2009) and co-editor of Women, Gender, and Politics: A Reader (2010).
PROFILE: Kateryna Levchenko – Challenging Patriarchal Politics
By Yevhen Hlibovytsky and Oksana Forostyna
Figure 8.3: Kateryna Levchenko became a feminist early in her career as an academic and has spent her life challenging traditional patriarchal stereotypes of women from within government and through nongovernmental organizations.
Ukrainian human rights advocate Kateryna Levchenko looks much too inspired for a person who just lost a lawsuit. “We’re done here. Now it is time to appeal to international community!” Levchenko sued Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov over his March 2010 statement that “conducting reforms is not women’s business,” which he made when asked why there are no female ministers in his Cabinet. All of the judicial institutions where Levchenko filed a case against him found that Azarov was free to express his views, and did not fault him for the discriminatory nature of his words. Levchenko wants to challenge this acceptance of a disparaging patriarchal attitude. It is so common that during the 2009 election campaign Viktor Yanukovych, soon to be elected president of Ukraine, publicly stated that his rival, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, would do better in the kitchen. Levchenko does not take such words lightly, and has devoted her career to safeguarding human and women’s rights.
Despite ingrained traditional attitudes about women’s place, Ukraine does offer women opportunities for achievement. According to the WomanStats Database (http://www.womanstats.org), Ukraine is among those countries where the laws are consistent with the recommendations of the U.N. Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, but enforcement can be inconsistent. The government may or may not support women’s advancement, but women can succeed in Ukraine’s businesses, government agencies, science and academia. Yet few women participate in power politics. Women make up only seven percent of the Ukrainian Parliament — 34 out of 441 members of parliament as of February 2010 — and none hold significant positions in the current government. Kateryna Levchenko thinks the reason for this is the nature of power in Ukraine, which is rough-and-tumble and requires often ruthless toughness: “That’s why there are a lot of women in the middle and junior positions in public administration and so few are on top.”
Levchenko had her first real experience of gender discrimination at the age of 26, as a young, successful university lecturer and mother-to-be. She was pregnant for the first time and was obliged to register in a state clinic. After waiting for three hours at the clinic, she tried to change her appointment time to accommodate her teaching schedule, but the doctor yelled at her: “What lectures? No one cares, lady, you’re pregnant here, not a professor!” Two decades later she recalls, “Then I understood how discrimination works,” adding that a man would not have received such treatment.
Levchenko’s path to feminism and human rights is typical for the first generation of Ukrainian feminists, who became public persons in the mid-1990s. She describes her family as “democratic, egalitarian.” Her parents were both academics in Kharkiv, which is one of the major scientific and educational centers of Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. She says she never faced gender problems in her early years in the department of philosophy and scientific communism at the Kharkiv Institute of Railway Engineering. Levchenko recalls: “Those were the times we became familiar with modern Western philosophy [after decades of intellectual isolation], and people were very open-minded.” Like many of her peers in the academic community, Levchenko turned to feminism after reading works by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Betty Friedan. Levchenko explains this post-Soviet trend as natural: “Self-identification is a rather complicated process. That’s why academic circles were the first to embrace feminist and human rights ideas.” She launched the course “Introduction to Gender Theory” in 1996, one of the first academic courses of this sort in Ukraine. Very soon Levchenko would use this successful experience in her work with state institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). She began working for NGOs, first in Kharkiv, then in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, coordinating programs for prevention of human trafficking.
Figure 8.4: An activist from the Ukrainian women’s organization FEMEN in Kyiv protests the all-male government formed in 2010. The posters read “Give a portfolio!”
In 2004 Levchenko was invited to become adviser on human rights and gender issues to the interior minister of Ukraine. It was a challenging time, both inside and outside the ministry. Her new government colleagues hardly understood the concept of gender and were skeptical about human rights, while many activists were surprised at her decision to be a part of law enforcement. In the fall of 2004 an aroused civil society took to the streets to confront the Ukrainian government. The protest lasted two months and became the “Orange Revolution,” so named for the color adopted by the political opposition. Levchenko had to navigate between international organizations and the ministry, which was accused of persecuting political opponents.
Levchenko says the real work began in spring 2005 when Yuriy Lutsenko, who was known for coordinating street protests before the revolution, took the position of interior minister. Levchenko says she held the first meeting with police patrolwomen, top-level ministry investigators and other female ministry staff. “Few knew that we had about 17 percent women in 2005, and 19 percent in 2009. Some of them administrated organized crime divisions and even served in ‘Cobra’ [a special Ukrainian police unit],” Levchenko says.
Human rights activist Taras Hataliak was in prison when Levchenko began her work at the Interior Ministry. Released just few weeks before the Orange Revolution, Hataliak began working with Levchenko. Taras Hataliak was the assistant interior minister in Lviv region (Western Ukraine) where he tracked abuses of human rights in police departments and prisons. “Levchenko was the policymaker and the messenger of human rights activists inside the ministry. She knew what the grass-roots organizations knew, and made sure that the agenda of civil society soon became part of the minister’s agenda,” he recalls. Hataliak also gives her credit for launching the human rights monitoring system in police departments. Mobile groups for preventing human rights abuses were deployed. Public councils on human rights were established in every region. Legislation to protect human rights was adopted. In 2008 a special department to monitor human rights in law enforcement agencies was created. Levchenko is proud that human rights activists made up 40 percent of the ministry staff. The rest were retired policemen who knew the system and supported human rights reforms.
However, good intentions to reform the police always depend on the political situation in the country. As the governments changed, policies changed. Levchenko served in the Interior Ministry twice: from September 2004 to May 2006, and from January 2008 to April 2010. The department to monitor human rights was dissolved by the Yanukovych government. The former members of the team continue to work on human rights issues through NGOs such as La Strada — Ukraine, which Levchenko heads.
La Strada is a multinational NGO that helps primarily female victims of trafficking and domestic violence in Central and Eastern Europe. Levchenko says that people from all social groups ask La Strada for help. Calls come mostly from women, but men also request assistance. She expects La Strada’s work to increase as people become better informed about trafficking in persons and as Ukraine’s social services continue to improve.
Kateryna Levchenko’s lawsuit over Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov’s disparagement of women was one more strategy in her campaign to bring women into the conversation, equal in status with men. She continues her efforts to reform law enforcement and human rights abuses in whatever way she can, through institutions within and outside of the government.
Yevhen Hlibovytsky is managing partner of pro.mova, a strategic communications consultancy based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Formerly a journalist, he was one of the leaders of the journalist resistance movement against censorship in Ukraine.
Oksana Forostyna is an investigative journalist based in Lviv, Ukraine. She is known for her stories on corruption, gender issues and human rights in Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic and other transition countries.
PROJECT: Women’s Caucus Boosts Uruguayan Democracy
By Eric Green
Female legislators in Uruguay set aside party differences to promote gender equality in parliament and in society. The bipartisan Uruguayan Women’s Caucus is making a difference for women in that country, but legislators agree that more must be done to ensure gender parity.
It remains a work in progress, but increased participation by Uruguayan women in their country’s political life is expanding democracy in the South American nation. Reflecting that progress, female legislators in Uruguay’s two houses of parliament united across political party lines by forming a Bicameral Women’s Caucus that promotes gender equality and a stronger feminine voice in public policy decisions. The caucus was created in 2000 through the initiative of three lawmakers in the Uruguayan parliament who belonged to different political parties.
Uruguayan senator and caucus member Susana Dalmás said in an interview that even if they might differ on certain national issues, the group has reached consensus on legislation pivotal to women’s well-being, such as prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace and giving women access to a retirement pension.
The caucus’ biggest obstacle, said Dalmás, is that it has “no place in parliament institutionally.” This means, she said, that the caucus is not formally recognized as an official body of the Uruguayan legislature. The caucus, Dalmás said, represents “the will” of women members of parliament (MPs) “to come together to try to agree on certain matters” that they believe should be considered in the legislature.
Gaining Recognition in Parliament Through Unity
One of the caucus’ first actions in 2000 was to create the Special Commission on Gender and Equity. The commission’s president, Uruguayan Representative Daniela Payssé, said at an April 2011 forum at the Organization of American States in Washington that female legislators in Uruguay formed their caucus because of a critical need to give women’s issues a higher profile in parliament.
Payssé said at the forum on “Women’s Leadership for a Citizens’ Democracy” that Uruguayan women legislators face the challenge of balancing their desire to address gender equality with the need to confront issues not specifically related to women’s advancement.
Another caucus member, Senator Monica Xavier, said in an interview with a United Nations-backed website called “iKNOW Politics” that the caucus emphasizes “the things that unite us.” Xavier said “when citizens see that we can rise above ideological differences … and work on other issues on which we agree, then we have strength.”
Many men, said Xavier, do not “need to be convinced” about promoting gender equality and electing women lawmakers. “They understand very clearly that we women don’t want involvement for the sake of involvement, but because democracies are stronger when women” are included in the political process.
Figure 8.5: Daniela Payssé is president of the Special Commission for Gender and Equity, Uruguay.
Uruguayan Women Show Strength in Numbers
The numbers show that women have slowly gained better political representation in Uruguay since the mid-1980s, when no female lawmakers were in the country’s legislature, formally known as the General Assembly. For its 2010-2015 term, 19 female MPs are in the 130-seat parliament, which is composed of the Chamber of Senators and the Chamber of Deputies. The Geneva, Switzerland-based Inter-Parliamentary Union, the international organization of parliaments, ranked Uruguay 73rd of 141 countries (as of March 31, 2011) in the percentage of women in national legislatures.
Figure 8.6: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with Uruguayan women legislators in Montevideo, Uruguay in 2010.
In an interview with iKNOW Politics, former Uruguayan representative Carmen Beramendi cited more positive developments for Uruguay’s women. At the start of former Uruguayan President Tabaré Vásquez’s administration in 2005, she said, four out of 13 of his government’s ministers were women, which was “unprecedented” in that he placed women ministers in “positions that were usually not given to us.” Those positions included women heading the defense and interior ministries, the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Public Health.
“This had a double effect,” said Beramendi, who served in parliament from 1990 to 1995. “First, we women had a much greater presence in the public sphere. Second, holding these kinds of offices largely helped prove that women can effectively hold these positions in society.”
Efforts of Uruguayan Women Leaders Lauded
The United States has made advancing women a pillar of its foreign policy. In March 2011, a State Department international exchange program called “Women’s Leadership: The Next Hundred Years” brought Adriana Lourdes Abraham Pérez from Uruguay and other women leaders from 92 countries to the United States.
Abraham Pérez, director of a nonprofit association in Uruguay called the Center for the Promotion of Human Dignity (known by the Spanish acronym CEPRODIH) that helps disadvantaged women, children and elders, said in an email exchange that in the last 20 years, female participation in Uruguayan political life has undergone a “positive evolution, although much more needs to be done.”
Abraham Pérez said one of the most significant political events in her country was the 2010 election of Ana Olivera as the first female mayor of Uruguay’s capital of Montevideo. Other women had been elected mayor across the country, but not, until then, in the capital. Abraham Pérez said Uruguayan women still face numerous social and economic injustices, such as gaining access to credit and increasing domestic violence, which she pointed out was also a problem in many other countries besides Uruguay.
The U.S. Embassy in Montevideo hosted more than 15 women leaders of Uruguay to honor International Women’s Day in March 2011. Speakers included Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female U.S. Supreme Court justice (now retired), who is a leader in promoting global women’s issues.
Also speaking was U.S. Ambassador to Uruguay David Nelson, who said the United States is “committed to the empowerment of women not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is the smart thing to do. And when women make progress, countries make progress. Everywhere, but especially here in Uruguay, you are making a difference and changing the world for the better.”
Eric Green is a freelance writer based in Washington. He has covered international issues for the U.S. State Department and the United States Information Agency, and has been a Senate press aide and a newspaper reporter for the Washington Post and other newspapers.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. The four different offices dedicated to gender issues within the UN system were consolidated into…
1. UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
2. International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW)
3. Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues for the Advancement of Women (OSAGI)
4. Commission on the Status of Women
5. UN Women
2. Which of these factors influences the variance between the success of women’s policy mechanisms in different contexts?
1. Limited budgets and staffing
2. Length of mandate
3. Relationship to government executives
4. The will of the governing prime minister or president
5. All of the above
3. Kateryna Levchenko described the gender composition of Ukrainian politics as…
1. There are lots of women in the middle and junior positions, but few on top
2. There are a relatively equal amount of men and women in politics
3. The number of women in top government positions is increasing
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
4. Susana Dalmás was able to form a Bicameral Women’s Caucus across party lines because…
1. The two parties in parliament formed a coalition
2. Women in the House reached consensus on issues pivotal to women’s well-being, such as sexual harassment in the workplace and access to pensions for women
3. They did not differ on national issues
4. They were considered a formal body within the legislature
5. None of the above
5. According to Susana Dalmás, women want involvement in politics…
1. For the sake of involvement
2. Because including women in political processes makes democracies stronger
3. To introduce a female perspective to policymaking
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is UN Women (answer E). UNIFEM, INSTRAW and OSAGI were merged into UN Women. The Commission on the Status of Women or CSW (answer D) is a body within UN Women that has annual meetings to review policy.
2. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
3. The correct answer is that there are many women in middle and junior positions, but few in high-level positions (answer A). Answer B is incorrect, as it does not fully capture the gendered situation of Ukrainian politics and bureaucracy. Answer C is incorrect because Levchenko did not state that the number of women in government in the Ukraine is increasing.
4. The correct answer is B. Female representatives reached consensus on pivotal issues for women’s well-being despite differing on national issues, so answer C is correct. The parties did not form a coalition (answer A) and the Women’s Caucus was not recognized as a formal body within the legislature (answer D).
5. The correct answer is because including women’s involvement in political processes makes democracies stronger (answer B). Dalmás stated that the purpose was not to be involved for the sake of involvement, so answer A is incorrect. The chapter does not mention a female perspective to policymaking (answer C).
Discussion Questions
1. Which positions of an organization hold the most influence? What is the typical gender balance of those positions?
2. What approach will more likely lead to global gender equality: gender mainstreaming or equal treatment for men and women?
3. Explain the shift in approach from focusing on policies toward enhancing the equality between men and women to ‘gender mainstreaming.’
4. What does it mean for an institution to successfully mainstream gender? What are the indicators that would be used to measure the outcomes of this approach?
5. Chose one of the institutions below and use external research to expand upon its characteristics and role within the history and global governance of gender equality.
• UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
• International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW)
• Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues for the Advancement of Women (OSAGI)
• Commission on the Status of Women
• UN Women
Essay Questions
1. What is the relationship between gender and human rights?
2. Provide an example of how a society or government has institutionalized a gender vision. How has this division been resisted, and what was the outcome?
3. Are inadequate economic resources a valid excuse for governments to not implement the rights contained within the conventions that they ratify? What mechanisms and processes are available if signatory states are unable to implement UN conventions in the immediate or short-term future?
Additional Resources
Altius, A. & Raveloharimisy, J. “Women’s Access to Political Leadership in Madagascar: The Value of History and Social Political Activism.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 17(4), 132 – 142: (2016).
Highlights the role of activism in forming women’s access to leadership roles, rather than quotas or kinship.
Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development.
Regional network of NGOs doing community-based research and policy advocacy on climate justice, labour migration, rural and indigenous women, and other initiatives throughout the Asia-Pacific.
European Institute for Gender Equality. “An Essential Guide to Gender Mainstreaming.” (2016).
User-friendly instructional video on the goals, processes, and outcomes of gender-mainstreaming.
International Knowledge Network for Women in Politics (iKNOW Politics).
Interactive network of women in politics who share experiences, resources and collaborative on shared problems.
UN Women. “Gender Mainstreaming.”
Homepage containing UN Women publications, guidelines, and policies on successful gender-mainstreaming.
Jackson, S. “Feminism in the Global South Has not Come from the Global North.” Guardian. (2011).
Commentary on the power and organizing of women in the global South.
Kang, A. “The Effect of Gender Quota Laws on the Election of Women: Lessons from Niger.” Women’s Studies International Forum 41(2), 94 – 102: (2013).
Study identifying three effects on the impact of quotas: design of the law, institutional context, and agency of activists.
Okumo, O. O., & Asfaw, M. “Assessment of Gender Equality in Ethiopia: The Position of Ethiopian Women’s Political Representation from the World, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Africa Ethiopian Civil Service University.” Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization 28, 2224 – 3259: (2014).
Examines gender mainstreaming in the Ethiopian context.
Schwanke, D. “Barriers for Women to Positions of Power: How Societal and Corporate Structures, Perceptions of Leadership and Discrimination Restrict Women’s Advancement to Authority.” Earth Common Journal 3(2): (2013).
Discusses barriers to women’s empowerment within institutions and the systems that perpetuate them.
Wade, C. L. “Gender Diversity on Corporate Boards: How Racial Politics Impedes Progress in the United States.” Pace International Law Review 26(1): (2014). Focuses on discrimination and gender parity, noting that corporate boards have largely not moved beyond tokenism.
WomanKind Worldwide.UK-based organization working to enhance women’s participatory leadership, and collaborates with partner organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa, South/Central-Asia, and Latin-America.
Women Stats Project.
Compiles international statistical data on women in security and state stability. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.08%3A_Institutional_Mechanisms_for_the_Advancement_of_Women.txt |
Chapter 9: Human Rights of Women
Chapter Summary
Chapter 9 discusses the intersection of human rights and women’s rights. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1971, during the UN Decade for Women. It is a binding international instrument that mandates signatory parties to take all appropriate measures to facilitate the advancement of women and the upholding of their human rights. The Beijing Declaration of Action, an outcome of the 1995 Beijing Conference, set forth three objectives relating to the human rights of women: protecting women’s human rights through implementing rights-based instruments, ensuring quality and nondiscrimination through the rule of law, and achieving legal literacy as a means to women’s political empowerment.
The text highlights two very different case studies, one within the Cambodian rescue industry and one in the context of participatory urban development. Sina Vann, a former victim of sexual servitude, runs a rehabilitation and education program called “Voices for Change” in Cambodia, where she works with women and girls that have been subject to forced labour and sexualized violence. Montreal-based urban planning organization Women in Cities International (WICI) collaborates with community-based organizations in urban spaces around the world to make cities safer for women.
Key Terms
• Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (AFESIP) Cambodia
• Centro de Intercambino y Servicios Cono Sur Argentina (CISCSA)
• Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
• Gender Inclusive Cities Program (CIGP)
• International Centre and Network for Information on Crime
• Sina Vann
• Somaly Mam
• United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women
• Women in Cities International (WICI)
Figure 9.1: Some countries still fail to accord human rights to women. Afghan women are among those to whom nongovernmental organizations offer assistance because of widespread abuse.
Overview
By Robin N. Haarr
Human rights and fundamental freedoms should be birthrights, but across the globe some countries fail to accord human rights to women. Moreover, women are often victims of human rights abuses. Women’s human rights are abused when they cannot participate in decisions that affect their lives and are denied political participation and fair representation, when they are prevented from going to school or receiving health care, when they face discrimination in employment, when they are denied equal rights to own land and property, when they suffer from violence within their homes and when they are subjected to harmful traditional practices such as genital mutilation and honor killings.
Recognition of women’s rights began in some countries as they evolved from feudal into more representative forms of government. In the United States, awareness of women’s rights came with the ideals of the American Revolution. Strong and intelligent women such as Abigail Adams, wife of the second U.S. president, John Adams, demanded fair and equal treatment, and warned presciently, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” She also advocated equal access to education for girls, writing to her husband, who then represented the new American republic in Paris: “I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of the females of my own country.” Women’s suffrage movements began in the United States and Great Britain in the mid-19th century and in a few European countries in the early 20th century.
Women’s human rights only emerged as a global movement during the United Nations Decade for Women (1976-1985), when women from many different geographic, cultural, religious, racial and class backgrounds came together and organized to improve the status of women. It was during this decade that the United Nations sponsored several women’s conferences — Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985 — to evaluate the status of women and to formulate strategies for women’s advancement.
An International Women’s Bill of Rights
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a key international agreement on women’s human rights, was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979. CEDAW is often described as an international bill of rights for women. Its preamble and 30 articles aim to eliminate gender discrimination and promote gender equality. The convention defines discrimination against women as “any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex” that impedes women’s “human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.” It sets an agenda for national action to end such discrimination, requiring all parties to the convention to take “all appropriate measures, including legislation, to ensure the full development and advancement of women” and guarantee their fundamental freedoms “on a basis of equality with men.”
Figure 9.2: A mural near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, commemorates hundreds of women who were murdered and left in the desert near that city.
As of 2009, 186 United Nations member states had ratified CEDAW. The Obama administration strongly supports this treaty and is committed to U.S. ratification. State parties to CEDAW agree to incorporate principles of gender equality into their national constitutions or other appropriate legislation; to adopt appropriate legislation and other measures that prohibit discrimination against women; and to establish legal protections of their rights on an equal basis with men.
Women’s human rights apply to both the “public” and “private” spheres of women’s lives. For many governments, however, addressing women’s rights in the “private” sphere is challenging because the private sphere is often thought to be beyond the purview of the state, exempt from governmental scrutiny and intervention (UNIFEM [now UN Women], About the Convention). As a result, in many countries, discrimination and violence against women and girls that occur in the family and under the guise of religious and cultural traditions and practices continue to remain hidden in the private sphere, where perpetrators of such human rights abuses typically enjoy impunity for their actions.
Women’s Rights as Human Rights
Since the 1980s, women around the world have come together in networks and coalitions to raise awareness about problems of discrimination, inequality and violence. They have used a human rights framework to fight for women’s rights in the family, social, economic and political arenas. An important outcome of the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women was the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. These documents embody the international community’s commitment to advance and empower women and remove obstacles in the public and private spheres that have historically limited women’s full participation. The Platform for Action sets forth three strategic objectives related to the human rights of women: to promote and protect women’s human rights through the full implementation of all human rights instruments (especially CEDAW), to ensure equality and nondiscrimination under the law and in practice, and to achieve legal literacy. Governments bear the main responsibility, but persons, organizations and enterprises are important in taking concrete actions to improve women’s lives.
Then-U.S. first lady Hillary Clinton famously declared at the 1995 Beijing conference that “human rights are women’s rights,” adding, “Women must enjoy the right to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries if we want freedom and democracy to thrive and endure.”
CEDAW and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action signaled the successful mainstreaming of women’s rights as human rights. Although the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action are not legally binding, they do carry ethical and political weight and can be used to pursue local, regional and national efforts to address women’s human rights. CEDAW is a treaty that is binding on its parties.
The principles and practices related to women’s human rights are continuously evolving. The large body of international covenants, agreements and commitments to women’s human rights developed over the past several decades provides women with an alternative vision and vocabulary to confront violations to their human rights. Such guidelines are important tools for political activism and a framework for developing concrete strategies for change.
Robin N. Haarr is a professor of criminal justice at Eastern Kentucky University whose research focuses on violence against women and children and human trafficking, nationally and internationally. She does research and policy work for the United Nations and U.S. embassies, and has received several awards for her work, including induction into the Wall of Fame at Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice, and the CoraMae Richey Mann “Inconvenient Woman of the Year” Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Women and Crime.
PROFILE: Ex-Child “Slave” Sina Vann Helps Others Escape the Darkness
By Eric Green
Figure 9.3: Sina Vann, a child sex slave for two years in Cambodia, now uses her traumatic past to save other young women and girls entrapped in the same situation. Vann leads the Voices for Change program for a Cambodian foundation that offers compassion, empathy and a chance for rehabilitation into society for those victimized by sexual predators.
It would be understandable if Sina Vann tried to forget her real-life nightmare: being enslaved as a 13-year-old and forced into prostitution for two years in Cambodia. Girls in Vann’s former predicament, trapped as sex slaves, never know the difference between night and day. They are imprisoned in underground cages until brought into a room where they are forced to have sex with one customer after another.
Though her childhood innocence was stolen from her, Vann, now 25, returns often to the scene of the crime to save other girls dehumanized by the sex trade industry. The girls can be as young as 4 years old.
“When I go to the brothels, I always say things to the girls to motivate them,” says Vann. “I share my personal background of how I lived in a brothel too. I tell them you’re not alone, there are many other victims and survivors who are living in rehabilitation centers and that there are people who care and are always thinking about you. We offer them warmth and love.”
As she speaks in a phone interview from Cambodia, the English language Vann has been learning comes across softly but in determined and confident tones. She describes how her life has turned around since she was ensnared for two years as a sex slave.
Vann was rescued during a 1998 raid organized by anti-sex slavery activist Somaly Mam. Mam is also a sex slave survivor who documented her experience in an autobiography, The Road to Lost Innocence. The nongovernmental foundation she created in 1996, called AFESIP Cambodia (Acting for Women in Distressing Situations), has rescued more than 6,000 young women and girls since its founding. It runs large shelters in Southeast Asia for the girls’ rehabilitation and return to normal lives.
Vann now leads Somaly Mam’s “Voices for Change” program, where she speaks out for sex slaves unable to speak for themselves. “We work directly with the victims to build warm relationships and listen to their experiences,” she says.
At the brothels, Vann educates young women about the dangers of contracting HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases when they are forced to have unprotected sex with clients. Many women are unaware they can die from HIV/AIDS, Vann says, “so I tell them the importance of the clients using condoms.”
Vann finds it difficult to explain how she overcame the trauma of being trapped in the prostitution industry. But it’s easier for her to say where her motivation to help others comes from: “Somaly Mam and the AFESIP staff did so much to change me while I lived at the [organization’s] rehabilitation center. And I get much motivation from the young residents who live there. These girls are so lovely — their smiling faces make me feel strong to be able to help them.”
Somaly Mam says she has seen a remarkable positive transformation in Vann since Mam helped police authorities rescue the Vietnamese native, then 14, from the brothels. “Sina has changed completely since the first time I met her at the rehabilitation center,” says Mam. “She was so broken. She didn’t speak to me and was destructive, trying to break everything in the center. I put my hand in hers and didn’t say a word, but let her know I understood what she was feeling.”
Figure 9.4: Somaly Mam, former Cambodian sex slave and founder of a rescue organization, works at a dressmaker’s shop that employs rescued girls.
Now the mentee motivates the mentor. “Sina is so strong and brave. I admire her. She inspires me every day. She gives her heart to all the other” victims at the center, Mam says.
She adds that the former victims learn how to become independent: “The girls go to school and do homework” and gain job skills that include how to sew and style hair. “For me, I enjoy seeing the girls be happy again. They’re like my family.”
Mam’s foundation said Vann’s story is instructive in the global fight against sex slavery — for people unaware that sex slavery is happening, for those who want to end it, for women still trapped in brothels and for “the survivors who are emerging from the darkness and need inspiration to rebuild their lives.”
Vann says she has learned the laws on human trafficking and has become familiar with basic counseling and psychology as part of her training with AFESIP. She also does the grueling and sometimes dangerous groundwork of documenting abuses and preparing complaints for police investigative and legal teams to issue arrest warrants to brothel operators. She recalls a frightening and “rewarding” experience of rescuing a sex slave victim who was only 4 years old that involved a violent confrontation with brothel owners to free the child from a cage.
Vann won the 2009 Frederick Douglass \$10,000 prize, which is awarded by the Washington-based nongovernmental organization Free the Slaves. It is presented to those who have survived a form of slavery and help others find purpose in their lives. The award, named for a U.S. statesman who escaped from bondage in 1838 to become a leader in the movement to abolish slavery, emphasizes that many survivors of modern-day slavery go on to help others to freedom.
Vann says the award is important “for all the victims and survivors” of sex slavery who live around the world. She uses the award to explain that “we are strong to fight” the sex predators, she says.
Free the Slaves maintains that “widespread impoverishment of people and their resulting vulnerability and government corruption” that does not protect women from the “violence of enslavement” drive 21st-century slavery. The group says slavery occurs “when one person completely controls another person, using violence to maintain that control, exploits them economically, pays them nothing and they cannot walk away.”
Vann says young sex slaves include those “trafficked by their own families for money,” while the traffickers are “thinking of their own profits and not the happiness of others.”
Though she suffered an unspeakable childhood horror, Vann has not allowed it to destroy her. “I am very happy because the world is concerned” about fighting the sex slave industry. Former sex slaves, she says, are being “given a chance to return to society with honor and dignity.”
Eric Green is a freelance writer based in Washington. He has covered international issues for the U.S. State Department and the United States Information Agency and has been a Senate press aide and a newspaper reporter for the Washington Post and other newspapers.
PROJECT: Making Cities Safe for Women
By Maria Jain and Suhgenie Kim
Women and girls are the keys to building safer cities. So say members of a unique organization that gives women tools to protect themselves and function effectively in urban environments.
Women in Cities International (WICI) is a groundbreaking program that promotes women’s safety in four of the world’s major cities. Responding to the challenges of urbanization, the organization works with women and girls to fulfill their rights to the city, defined as the right to live, move around and work.
“A girl is waiting for the bus, but it arrives full and doesn’t even stop. A man invites her for a coffee and she says no. He tells her that it doesn’t matter; she has to go with him anyway. The girl threatens to call the police but the man drags her away and rapes her.” This is the safety concern expressed by a 13-year-old girl from Rosario, Argentina.
Across the world’s cities, women and girls too often feel unsafe. Targeted simply because they are women, they are exposed to daily harassment and sexual violence in public spaces. But a growing network of organizations has successfully brought safety for women in urban environments around the world.
In 2009, the Montreal-based nonprofit organization Women in Cities International launched the Gender Inclusive Cities Programme (GICP), an innovative program designed to engage women and girls in creating safer cities. The program is implemented by partner organizations in four cities: Jagori in New Delhi, India; the International Centre and Network for Information on Crime — Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; CISCSA (Centro de Intercambio y Servicios Cono Sur Argentina) — the Women and Habitat Network in Rosario, Argentina; and the Information Centre of the Independent Women’s Forum in Petrozavodsk, Russia. The program targets circumstances that make women and girls vulnerable to urban violence and engages local communities in making public spaces safer.
GICP is supported by the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women, a leading global grant-maker exclusively dedicated to addressing violence against women and girls. With a strong track record of nurturing innovation and catalyzing change, the U.N. Trust Fund provides the project with vital leverage to make a significant contribution to women’s rights in cities.
Figure 9.5: Women and girls conduct a “safety audit” walk to identify dangerous areas in their Rosario, Argentina, neighborhood.
Figure 9.6: Women identified the lack of pavement as severely restricting their mobility and adding to their fear of violence in this area of New Delhi.
“In all the cities, women face fear. They are fearful of sexual harassment, of sexual assault. Across the cities, women say they try to avoid getting out at night. The moment it becomes dark, the city becomes a more hostile place for women. Women say using public transport is a problem,” states Dr. Kalpana Viswanath, project coordinator. “This clearly indicates that women are not equal citizens of the city, they are not able to equally access what the city can offer.”
WICI and its partners engage women and girls in participatory research activities such as street surveys, neighborhood safety audits and group discussions to gather their knowledge on key safety concerns in their communities. Poor street lighting, broken pavements and lack of signage, along with the presence of drug dealers and youth gangs, are some of the main reasons women feel afraid outside their homes. Using the critical input from women and girls, WICI and its partners develop intervention plans and engage with governments and other organizations to build more gender-inclusive urban spaces.
While reforming physical infrastructure is central to gender-equitable urban development, transforming attitudes toward women in society is equally important. A foundation for a truly safe city for all depends on positive changes in public perception of gender norms and behaviors among individuals, families and communities.
Halfway through the three-year project, WICI has already made significant progress. In Petrozavodsk, Russia, a landmark agreement with local police chiefs will develop data on crimes based on information from women and girls. The creation of such quantitative data is unprecedented in Russia and makes women’s safety concerns visible to policymakers.
Local officials in a low-income community in Dar es Salaam have begun a community policing intervention. Neighborhood watch groups monitor the area and work with the police to address security concerns. As a result, residents report improved safety in public areas. Muggings have decreased from a minimum of 10 per day to three per week. In the words of one woman from the community, “I feel confident when I walk the streets. I know for sure that I have right to walk without feeling afraid and I appreciate myself more and can talk about issues on our safety in public meetings.”
In New Delhi, the Indian lead of GICP was invited by the city’s Municipal Corporation to provide inputs into a road redesign project. This is the first time that women’s safety concerns are included in urban planning in the country.
The secretary of community security for Santa Fe Province in Rosario has committed to enhancing women’s inclusion in urban space development in the target locality of the city. For the girl at the bus stop, such commitment promises to create a city where she can wait without fear in a well-illuminated area among male passengers who respect her right to move around the city.
Maria Jain and Suhgenie Kim are program analysts at the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women in New York. They work closely with the fund’s grantees, who develop and implement approaches that protect women’s rights worldwide.
Multiple Chocie Questions
Questions
1. Which international instrument is legally binding?
1. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
2. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action
3. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against women
4. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
5. None of the above
2. The strategic objectives of the Beijing Platform for Action include:
1. Promoting and protecting women’s human rights through the full implementation of human rights instruments
2. Ensuring equality and non-discrimination in both law and practice
3. Achieving legal literacy
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
3. The responsibility for implementing international human rights instruments falls to…
1. Governments only
2. Civil society and enterprise only through advocacy and implementation
3. Primarily governments; civil society and business by way of advocacy
4. Primarily civil society; limited responsibility on the part of governments
5. None of the above
4. According to the chapter, AFESIP Cambodia…
1. Engages in rescue missions to save girls who are entrapped as sex slaves in Cambodia
2. Works to address political and economic insecurity that drives people into situations of labour exploitation
3. Organizes women and girls in low-wage industries to lobby for their own human rights
4. Runs education programs among sex slaves in Cambodia
5. According to the chapter, concerns particularly prevalent among women in urban spaces include…
1. Fears of sexual harassment
2. Sexual assault
3. Fear of going out at night
4. Using public transport
5. All of the above
6. The end goal of planning a truly safe city is…
1. Only changes in physical infrastructure (including improved lighting in public spaces)
2. Reforming physical infrastructure as well as social attitudes towards women
3. Only changing attitudes towards women and girls
4. Conducting advocacy work around gender equality and access to public spaces
5. None of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is CEDAW (answer A). States that have ratified the convention must submit status reports to the committee on their implementation every four years. Declarations are generally non-binding (so answers B and C are incorrect). The MDGs are also not legally binding, so answer D is incorrect.
2. The correct answer is D (all of the above). There are three strategic objectives of the Beijing Platform for Action, which include promoting and protecting women’s human rights through the full implementation of human rights instruments, ensuring equality and non-discrimination in both law and practice, and achieving legal literacy.
3. The correct answer is C. Governments have the primary responsibility to implement human rights conventions, and civil society has an important role to play in taking actions to keep government accountable as duty bearers as well as in the context of implementation and service provision.
4. The correct answer is A. AFESIP Cambodia partakes in rescue missions to save girls that it deems as entrapped as sex slaves. The organization does not direct its energy to addressing political and economic insecurities that may lead to forced labour, so answer B is incorrect. AFESIP claims to speak for women who ‘cannot speak for themselves,’ so they do not organize women to lobby for their own human rights, so answer C is incorrect. Answer D is correct, as the chapter clearly noted that education programs are run in Cambodia for girls who are exploited as sex slaves.
5. The correct answer is E (all of the above).
6. The correct answer is B. Creating a safe city for men and women requires both reforming physical infrastructure and social attitudes toward women.
Discussion Questions
1. What are some key factors that might render someone vulnerable to forced labour or sexual servitude? Examine the case study on sex trafficking and slavery in Cambodia for ideas.
2. How is trafficking perpetuated in the media and in popular discourse? Who are most commonly portrayed as the victims of trafficking, and who are portrayed as the perpetrators?
3. Do you consider the community you live in – urban or rural – safe for women? What instances of danger for women, including violence against women, harassment in the workplace, or sexual assault, are prevalent in your community? Are there any local initiatives that are underway to address these problems?
4. Why is quantitative data considered valuable when trying to persuade policymakers? What are the limitations of relying on quantitative data when working to advance gender equality?
5. How have women participated in the urban design field? Are their influences and achievements recognized? Why or why not?
Essay Questions
1. Discuss the implementation of CEDAW. Is the convention legally binding? What are mechanisms that the United Nations uses to enforce international human rights instruments? Why have some countries chosen to night sign or support CEDAW?
2. Do you think it is accurate to compare forced labour in the 21st century to transatlantic or chattel slavery? Look at external sources to find some similarities and differences.
3. Does the inadequate representation of women in urban planning impact the material design of infrastructure? If more women were involved in city planning, would urban landscapes be different?
Additional Resources
Al Jazeera. “Truth or Lies: Somaly Mam.”
Video on Al Jazeera’s investigation into the story of Cambodian anti-trafficking crusader Somaly Mam.
Agustín, L. The Naked Anthropologist.
Blog by Dr. Laura Agustín on migration, sex work, trafficking, and the rescue industry.
Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. OpenDemocracy.
A series that combines scholarship, journalism and evidence-based policy to uncover the political, economic, and social root causes of labour exploitation.
Cojocaru, C. “My Experience is Mine to Tell: Challenging the Abolitionist Victimhood Framework.” Anti-Trafficking Review 7(2016).
Written by a formerly trafficked person and introduces the concept of ‘secondary exploitation.’
Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner.
Homepage of CEDAW, the body of independent experts that monitors states’ implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women.
Hoefinger, H. “Neoliberal Sexual Humanitarianism and Story-Telling: The Case of Somaly Mam.” Anti-Trafficking Review 7, 56 – 78: (2016).
Outlines the story of Somaly Mam and the ability of trafficking narratives to muster deep emotions among audiences and cause harm to already marginalized populations.
International Labour Organization (ILO). “Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Slavery.”
ILO webpage on forced labour and trafficking with key facts, labour standards, and reports.
International Union of Sex Workers.Website for the International Union of Sex Workers, containing campaign updates and publications.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Frequently Asked Questions about a Human Rights Based Approach to Development Cooperation.”
Information on the objectives and processes of the human rights-based approach.
Small, A. “How to Design a City for Women.” CityLab.
Article on successful gender mainstreaming planning in Vienna during the 1990s.
Rustin, Susanna. “If Women Built Cities, What Would Our Urban Landscape Look Like?” Guardian.Analysis of women’s historical and current role in urban planning and urban design.
Women in Cities International (WICI).
Website for WICI, a network of non-profits focusing on gender equality and the participation of women in urban development.
Yeoh, B. “Migration and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia.” Migration, Mobility & Displacement 2(1), 74 – 88: (2016).
Contains an analysis of the micropolitics reproduced by men and women both partaking in and resisting cultural shifts and economic development.
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Chapter 10: Women and the Media
Chapter Summary
Chapter 10 discusses the progress that women have made in organizing against exclusion in media. Women who demanded coverage from media outlets were originally categorized as misfits or insane, as they were perceived as departing from their traditional domestic roles. Throughout the 1970s, media outlets and journals covering a range of feminist issues emerged around the world, including Isis International Bulletin in Italy and the Philippines and Manushi in India. Women have been gaining influence in media both within the United States and across the world. Ann S. Moore was the CEO of Time Inc., the largest publisher in the U.S., and steered the business from the print age to the media age during the 2000s. The Women’s Edition program brings together women journalists across the global South to report on various issues from their respective regions and countries.
Key Terms
• Ann S. Moore
• Gender and Media Diversity Journal
• International Federation of Journalists
• International Women’s Media Foundation
• Isis International Bulletin
• Manushi
• Ms. Magazine
• Population Reference Bureau (PRB)
• Revolution
• Women’s Edition
• Woodhull & Clafin’s Weekly
• World Association of Christian Communicators (WACC)
Figure 10.1: Long excluded from serious news reportage, women today have risen to the top in media organizations worldwide. Young Navajo Indian filmmaker Camille Manybeads Tso draws inspiration from her ancestor, a warrior named Yellow Woman.
Overview
By Carolyn M. Byerly
Women brought a gendered analysis of the mass media to the global stage in the 1970s when a multipart critique was first presented at the 1976 Mexico City conference, which opened the U.N. Decade for Women. Much of the substance of that critique remains relevant today. But women’s fight for equal representation in the media began much earlier.
History of Exclusion and Stereotypes
Women’s exclusion from the serious news of the day was raised as early as the 18th century by women suffragists and women’s rights activists in Europe and North America. The early suffrage leaders needed the attention of the news media to carry their ideas and activities to wider publics, but male-run newspapers and magazines largely ignored the women activists. The news outlets that did cover women frequently trivialized their goals. Women who departed from the social norms of passivity and deference to male authority, and the traditional roles of wife and mother, risked being characterized as inappropriate, insane or misfits. If they demanded equality with men, the media depicted them either as curiosities or as loud, militant and aggressive. Such characterizations would continue into the early days of modern feminism (Epstein, 1978).
Not only were women’s issues and leaders excluded from the media, but bias against women was practiced in reporting women’s issues and leaders. Such treatment inspired women in many countries to establish their own magazines, newspapers and book publishing houses during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The post-Civil War Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly had as its aim to make Victoria Woodhull the first woman president, while the Lily had a broad women’s rights agenda, and the Una championed the rights of immigrant and poor women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s short-lived but important newspaper the Revolution addressed a spectrum of issues related to women’s discrimination, including low wages of working women and the right to vote.
A New Era of Women’s Rights
By the late 20th century, women across the globe focused on enacting political and legal reforms to extend women’s equality and access to social institutions and to ensure protection of their rights. It was a new era for women’s rights. Many women became politicized during independence movements, as countries broke from colonial powers. The legacy of that activism carried over into women’s media like Ms. magazine, founded by U.S. feminists in the early 1970s; Manushi, an Indian feminist journal founded in the mid-1970s; and Isis International Bulletin, published first in Rome, then later in Manila.
Some feminist leaders were motivated by the enduring problems of exclusion and misogynistic representation in mainstream media to establish their own publishing houses, today numbering many dozens (see www.wifp.org/DWM/publishers.html). Women’s organizations like the South African group Gender Links have assumed dual missions of establishing their own journals, like Gender and Media Diversity Journal, as well as undertaking training for journalists in order to address persistent patriarchal messages in news, advertising, films and television programs (Gender Links, www.genderlinks.org.za/page/publications).
Another modern media concern was women’s lack of access to media professions. Women were severely underrepresented in newsrooms, television and radio stations, film production and ownership of media outlets. More women on the inside, it was argued, would help resolve many of women’s other problems with the media. Women such as Ann S. Moore (Time Inc.), profiled in this chapter, acknowledge the importance of women in their media operations.
Figure 10.2: Radio journalist Firtia Mataniah hosts her program on women and management for Jakarta, Indonesia, radio station KBR68H. The station was launched by post-Suharto activists as a voice of democracy in 1999.
Underrepresentation in news production arose through the U.N. Decade for Women (1976-1985), with leaders pushing the United Nations to fund women’s news and feature services in the 1970s and 1980s to increase global news flow from progressive women’s perspectives. They also gained funding for research on women and media and generated their own research. Two examples are the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists and the World Association of Christian Communicators (WACC). The latter of these is among advocacy groups that sponsor research aimed at enabling strategy-building for women’s equality in the media. WACC’s (Canada) periodic study Who Makes the News? focuses on women’s representation in news worldwide, while the International Women’s Media Foundation (United States) conducts research on women’s status in news organizations. IWMF also recognizes women journalists for courage in reporting with an annual “Courage in Journalism” award.
Figure 10.3: Ukrainian reporter Lesya Alexeyenko holds a copy of her newspaper, Vilne Slovo. She received journalism training through a USAID program.
Such groups offer workshops to teach media professionals how to include gender angles in news. Women have made slower progress in communications governance and policymaking, at national and international levels, so these remain important areas for critique and action. Programs such as USAID-funded Women’s Edition have given women strong foundations for journalism careers.
Carolyn M. Byerly is a professor in the Department of Journalism, School of Communications, Howard University, in Washington, D.C. She researches communications policy related to women and minority ownership, media and gender, race, sexuality and nationality. She is the co-editor of Women and Media: Global Perspectives (Blackwell, 2004), co-author of Women and Media: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2006) and principal investigator for the study Global Report on the Status of Women in News Media, a 59-nation study sponsored by the International Women’s Media Foundation (2011).
PROFILE: Ann Moore – Leveraging the Value of Women
Women who have achieved top management positions in media corporations are few. Ann S. Moore rose to the top of one of the world’s most influential news organizations, Time Inc., through perseverance, a willingness to take calculated risks and a canny perception of the future of media.
The impressive thing about Ann S. Moore, who ran Time Inc. from 2002 to 2010, is not her global profile as the first woman to head the legendary company that boasts 115 international magazine titles and some 137 million monthly readers. It’s not even her down-to-earth, straight-talking style, the friendships with influential policymakers and A-list celebrities or her habitual appearance on every Most Powerful Woman list ever devised. Rather, the impressive thing, as you listen to Moore review her rise to the top, is the out-and-out glee with which she did the job.
Revamping Time Inc. for the Digital Age
It was far from easy. As chair and CEO, Moore arguably led Time Inc. through its greatest trials and transformations — and emerged victorious. She successfully steered the largest magazine publisher in the United States out of its fierce attachment to print and straight into the digital age. She streamlined its multilayered, old-boy centralized structure into more nimble brand clusters, making managers diverse and more accountable. “We were facing a crisis,” she acknowledges today. “It was not easy to completely transform an industry and drag everybody, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.”
Then again, Moore could draw on deep experience in setting goals and tackling the challenges. A keen observer and an unabashed fan of Time Inc.’s unique role in the media landscape — the company has influence that streams from Main Street to Wall Street and from Pennsylvania Avenue to Hollywood and Vine — Moore enjoyed a career at the company that spanned 32 years. “I know every inch of this business,” she declares, not particularly bragging, but merely stating the facts.
At a meeting just before her departure is officially announced, Moore is comfortably settled into a plump armchair in the spacious, thickly carpeted executive suite on the 34th floor of Rockefeller Center’s landmark Time-Life Building. The sweeping views of midtown Manhattan highlight her success. Moore, at 60, looks back with pride and gusto. Clearly, she has thrived on the risks as much as the wins. “I work with really smart people and we produce really amazing products,” she says. “It’s easy to stay working somewhere for 32 years when you’re not bored.”
Born in Biloxi, Mississippi, the oldest of five kids, Moore spent her formative years on a series of military bases. “My father was in the Air Force until I was in about sixth grade,” she says. “I moved all the time when I was young and I have nothing but fabulous memories of every move.” She credits her dad, who was a pilot, with shaping her attitudes toward work. “I always knew I could do the job of CEO, but it wasn’t my lifelong ambition,” Moore explains. “My father retired from the military and went on to a whole second career in aviation. So I had a model growing up that said, ‘Hey, you don’t have to just do one thing. And you don’t necessarily have to aspire to being the CEO to be successful.’” That outlook served her well as she climbed the ladder. “I always had a lot of confidence,” she says. “You have to not fear failure.”
Figure 10.4: Ann S. Moore was appointed chairwoman and chief executive of Time Inc. in 2002, becoming its first female executive.
Drawn to Sports and Publishing
After high school in McLean, Virginia, Moore went on to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1978. While her classmates headed for Wall Street, Moore wasn’t interested — “I always wondered exactly what they do there,” she says, jokingly. Instead, Moore went to Time Inc. “I was a big sports fan and that’s why I joined the company,” she says. “I turned my hobby of reading Sports Illustrated into my career.”
Through the 1980s, after starting at Sports Illustrated, Moore put in stints at Fortune, Money and Discover, moving up with every jump. By the early ’90s, back at Sports Illustrated as associate publisher, she began to make her mark on the company. Fittingly, Moore earned her claim to fame by tutoring Time Inc. about the value of women.
“I changed the equation at the company because I’m the one who began diversifying into women’s and children’s magazines,” says Moore. She launched Sports Illustrated Kids in 1989. “It was the first kid magazine and we hadn’t launched anything successful since 1974.” At the time, she says, “we thought you couldn’t make money targeting women, so even when I moved to People in 1991, we thought it was a dual-audience magazine.”
People and InStyle: Women as an Important Market
Moore was working with then-editor Lanny Jones. The pair transformed People into a newsmagazine for women, first moving from black and white to color pages. Next, they changed delivery from Monday to Friday. “News is like bread. The fresher it is, the more exciting it is.” Moore also inaugurated People special issues, such as its now-famous “Sexiest Man Alive,” “Best Dressed, Worst Dressed” and others. “It was a license to steal,” she laughs, looking back. “Once you determined this is really a woman’s magazine, you could see what you needed to do with People to unleash its potential.” Nowadays, as it has been for years, People is the company’s most profitable title and, as Moore likes to point out, People.com leads in online entertainment news, with 13 million unique visitors monthly.
The rest remains Moore’s groundbreaking history. She launched InStyle in 1991, which is, today, the nation’s largest-circulation fashion and beauty magazine — “ahead of Vogue,” says Moore. InStyle is Time Inc.’s third-most-profitable title (Sports Illustrated is second). Real Simple came next, in 2000. “We had a little piece of research that I couldn’t get out of my mind,” says Moore, which said that the average American woman spends 55 minutes a day just looking for things. “Time is the single most precious commodity to American consumers, especially for a woman,” she says. “So that was the whole idea behind Real Simple. We would get you organized and you would have an extra hour a day.”
Moore smiles, leaning back in her comfortable chair, and confides her secret to launching successful magazines. “It was such a simple concept, but it solved a problem. That’s where you find holes in the marketplace, and that’s what Time Inc. was particularly good at. We invented most of the categories we publish in.”
What’s in store for Moore as she moves on? She’s not saying. With her 26-year-old son, Brendan, enrolled at Harvard Business School and her husband, Donovan Moore, continuing work as a private wealth manager at Bessemer Trust, her horizon looks wide open, especially considering her dad’s second-act role model.
And what advice would she give young women who’d like to shadow her dramatic footsteps? True to form, Moore speaks forthrightly: “I think it’s all about self-assessment. Who are you? What are you good at? What do you like to do? Then use that to find a match. Turn your hobby into your occupation. You have to take responsibility for your career. I also say to young women, learn how to fill out your dance card. I’m the chairman of Time Inc. because I filled out my dance card better than anyone else. I’m the chairman because I’ve been here for 32 years and I’ve launched more magazines than [Time Inc. founder] Henry Luce. That’s why I’m in Luce’s office.”
“And I was very patient.”
Joanna L. Krotz is a multimedia journalist and speaker whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Worth, Money and Town & Country and on MSN and Entrepreneurship.org. She is the author of The Guide to Intelligent Giving and founder of the Women’s Giving Institute, an organization that educates donors about strategic philanthropy.
PROJECT: Women’s Edition
By Deborah Mesce
Funding for women’s news and feature services opened the door to journalism careers for many women worldwide in recent decades. The Women’s Edition program shows how women may fruitfully collaborate to gain global perspectives on women’s issues, and bring that knowledge to their writing.
Around the table sat 12 women journalists from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe, discussing the status of women in their cultures. The Africans said women in their countries have many babies, often too many to care for adequately. Reporters from India, the Philippines and Peru said families were somewhat smaller in their countries. Then the Romanian journalist surprised them all: “You know, in my country the government pays women to have children,” she said, explaining Romania’s strategy to reverse its population decline.
This conversation took place at Women’s Edition, a program that brings together small groups of veteran women journalists from influential media houses across the developing world to examine and report on a range of issues related to women’s health and development. They gain a global perspective on these issues by learning how countries both similar and different from theirs handle the same issues. As a Nepali reporter put it after several years in the program, “Now I think globally and write locally.”
Women’s Edition, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, takes a long-term view of working with journalists. Since 1994 when the program began, 62 journalists have participated. There was little turnover in the early years, but later a two-year participation limit was set. During their tenure in the program, the journalists attend weeklong seminars twice a year in locations around the world. Seminars focus on health and development issues. Each journalist takes away new data and research on specific topics, the insights of experts and memorable experiences from field visits that illuminate the issues. Following each seminar, each journalist prepares a special supplement, a series of articles or a broadcast program for her media house on the seminar topic in the context of her country.
The Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a nongovernmental organization in Washington that runs the project, solicits applications from women editors, reporters and producers every two years. Journalists hear about this from national and international journalism associations, schools and websites. As many as 200 candidates apply. PRB invites around 12 to participate. PRB looks for seasoned journalists who demonstrate a strong interest in women’s health and development issues and who have editorial influence in their newsrooms. To maintain geographic diversity, usually just one journalist is selected from a country.
Figure 10.5: In India, two Women’s Edition journalists photograph a village potter.
Women’s Edition grew from an earlier PRB project, Global Edition, which brought together senior editors from the developing world to focus and write on population and the environment. Similarly, Women’s Edition’s mission is to strengthen and increase reporting on women’s health and development and, in doing so, stimulate discussion on these issues among the public and policymakers in developing countries.
In organizing the seminars, PRB seeks input from the journalists in selecting a topic and then links the topic with a relevant venue. For example, a seminar on trafficking was held in New Delhi, where the journalists visited a brothel in the city’s largest red-light district and talked to Nepali sex workers there who had been trafficked years before. For a seminar on violence against women, Women’s Edition met in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest rates of rape but also some of the most innovative programs to deal with the problem. Some seminars have been held in conjunction with international conferences and other events, such as the biennial AIDS conferences and special U.N. sessions. Other seminar themes have included links between gender and the environment, women’s empowerment and women’s reproductive health.
Figure 10.6: Three Women’s Edition journalists accompany an activist doing HIV/AIDS outreach in a Johannesburg, South Africa, market as part of a project to stop violence against women.
Sometimes a journalist’s report prompts action. After a magazine cover story on the health and social problems child brides face in India, the Tamil Nadu state government launched awareness campaigns in villages where child marriage is common. More often, the journalists receive calls from ministry officials, parliamentarians and NGO leaders who want more information. A Malawian journalist wrote about an innovative rape crisis center her Women’s Edition group visited in Johannesburg. She received a call from the Malawian president’s daughter, who wanted to become involved in local efforts to replicate it. Sometimes journalists take action on their own: A seminar visit to a rape crisis center in New York so inspired an Indian journalist that she persuaded a physician friend to open such a center in Mumbai.
Women’s Edition has a lasting impact on the journalists themselves. They become the experts in their newsrooms on women’s issues. They gain confidence in their knowledge and abilities, which helps them to lobby for coverage of women’s issues. They receive job promotions and gain more influence over what issues are considered newsworthy. “Gone are the days when health and women’s issues were a once-a-week affair,” said Ropa Mapimhidze of Zimbabwe, who was assistant editor at the Herald when she participated in Women’s Edition. She is now features editor at Newsday, a new independent newspaper.
Deborah Mesce is program director for international media training at the Population Reference Bureau and has been coordinator of Women’s Edition since 2001. Before joining PRB, she worked for more than 20 years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press in the Connecticut state bureau and on the national staff in Washington.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. Which factors inspired women in many countries to establish their own magazines?
1. Male-run publications largely ignored women activists
2. The news outlets that did cover women trivialized their goals
3. Women that departed from the norms of domesticity and passivity were labelled as misfits or insane
4. Women who demanded equality with men were depicted as militant and aggressive
5. All of the above
2. The first woman to lead Time Inc. was….
1. Ann Moore
2. Ariana Huffington
3. Jane Fonda
4. Diane Sawyer
3. People and InStyle demonstrated that…
1. Women consumers are mostly interested in fashion and celebrity news
2. Women are an important demographic market in news media
3. Women were already influential in traditional media networks
4. There was no need to develop women-specific media
5. None of the above
4. Women’s Edition serves the following purpose(s)…
1. Brings together groups of women journalists
2. Examines and reports on a range of women’s issues
3. Enables participants to gain a global perspective
4. Enables participants to learn from each other in handling similar issues
5. All of the above
5. The objective of Women’s Edition is to…
1. Advance the political interests of women at the cost of men
2. Increase reporting on women’s health and development
3. Begin discussion among the public and policy-makers in developing countries
4. Organize with influential celebrities and policy-makers on issues of gender and development
5. None of the above
Answers
1. The correct answer is E (all of the above).
2. The correct answer is Ann Moore (answer A). Ariana Huffington is the co-founder of the Huffington Post, so answer B is incorrect. Jane Fonda is an American actress and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center (answer C). Diane Sawyer is an American television journalist and co-anchor of ABC News’ morning news program.
3. The correct answer is that women are an important market in the news media (answer B). The fact that the first Time magazines that publicists deemed “women-targeted” were fashion and celebrity news does not indicate that women consumers are most interested in fashion and celebrity news (answer A). Women were not yet influential in news networks, so Time Inc. and its subsidiaries were an anomaly (answer C). Answer D is incorrect because there was a clear need to develop women-specific media.
4. The correct answer is E (all of the above).
5. The correct answer is both B and C. Women’s Edition aims to increase reporting on women’s health and development (answer B) and begin discussions among the public and policymakers in developing countries (answer C). The objective is not to advance the interests of women at the cost of men, as gender equality is not zero-sum (answer A). The mission is not to simply engage with celebrities and policymakers, so answer D is incorrect.
Discussion Questions
1. How are women and men depicted differently in media? Has the history of women’s exclusion from media influenced these representations? Why or why not?
2. What are some impacts of the portrayal of women in media on women’s success?
3. Select an election in a jurisdiction of your choice. What were the genders of the candidates? How were they represented by media?
4. Do you think that social media provides a greater platform than traditional media for women’s representation and influence? Why or why not?
5. How are transgender women portrayed in media?
6. Use the additional resources, your experiences, or the experiences of people you know to reflect on how transgender people experience portrayals of gender and transgender people in media in a designated case study. For instance, you might choose Canadian media, American Media or French Canadian media for your examples.
Essay Questions
1. Review the “2015 Status of Women in U.S. Media” report. Identify areas where there has been progress and where equal representation along lines of gender and race have fallen behind.
2. What are the most common stereotypes of women perpetuated in media? In what ways are these representations dependent on race and class? Will having more women in media play a role in decreasing reliance on stereotypes of women?
3. How has the use of social media influenced women’s social and political movements?
Additional Resources
Billingsley, A. “Technology and Narratives of Continuity in Transgender Experiences.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 1(1), 1 – 24: (2015).
Explores transgender narratives in media, social science disciplines, and among the family.
Glantz, J. “Women in Popular Music Media: Empowered or Exploited?” The Spectrum: A Scholars Day Journal 2(5), 3 – 38: (2011).
Investigates women’s attitude toward women in media and popular music through a feminist theoretical lens.
Jia, S. Lansdall-Welfare, T. Sudahar, S. Carter, C. & Cristianini, N. “Women Are Seen More than Heard in Online Newspapers.” PLOS One 11(2: (2016).
Quantitative analysis of the representation of gender and women’s views in online newspapers.
Kamerick, M. “Women Should Represent Women in Media.” TEDxABQ. (2011).
TED Talk on the representation of women as victims; and victim blaming culture in media.
Lang, N. “AfterEllen and the Digital Media Bust: Queer Spaces for Women are Disappearing, Even on the Internet.” Salon. (2016).
Suggests that the lower buying power of queer women is influencing the reduction of media platforms dedicated to queer women’s issues and lived experiences.
Truitt, J. “Laverne Cox’s Actress Emmy Nod Puts Trans People in Bigot’s Living Rooms.” Guardian (2014).
Analysis of Laverne Cox’s influence in pop culture in the wake of her role in the Netflix original series, “Orange is the New Black.”
Truitt, J. “On Jill Soloway, Caitlyn Jenner, and the Trans Representation the Media Wants.” Feministing. (2015).
A critique of the media’s representation of transgender people, focusing on the discourse surrounding Caitlyn Jenner and her position in terms of race and class.
Women’s Media Center. “Status of Women in the U.S. Media.” (2015).
Features research on the gender gap in broadcast news, internet, print journalism and wire services.
www.womensmediacenter.com/pages/2015-statistics
Sandberg, S. “So We Leaned In… Now What?” TED Talks. (2014).
Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Office of Facebook, discusses the reactions to “Lean In” and the ways in which women continue to struggle with success.
Striphas, S. “A Dialectic with the Everyday: Communication and Cultural Politics on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, 295 – 316: (2010).
Examines the gendered communication strategies within Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.
Yasmin, M., Sohail, A. & Mangrio, R. A. Myths Broken or Sustained: Representation of Women Victims in Pakistani Media. Open Journal of Social Sciences 3(7), 209 – 219: (2015).
Highlights asymmetry in Pakistani media of descriptions of female and male victims and perpetrators of violence (female victims described with their marital status, male victims and perpetrators described using their profession.) | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.10%3A_Women_and_the_Media.txt |
Chapter 11: Women and the Environment
Chapter Summary
Women play a critical role in managing natural resources on family and community levels and are most affected by environmental degradation. In communities around the world, women manage water, sources for fuel, and food, as well as both forests and agricultural terrain. Women produce 60 to 80 percent of food in developing countries, while inheritance laws and local customs often prevent them from owning or leasing land and securing loans or insurance. From the high level to the grassroots, the 1992 UN Earth Summit, India’s Chipko movement and Kenya’s Green Belt Movement all highlighted the role of women’s voices and perspectives in sustainable development.
Aleksandra Koroleva worked both within government and as a community organizer with Ecodefense! where she coordinated acts of civil disobedience to raise awareness around pollution of water resources, nuclear waste, and creating protected nature reserves. The Barefoot College trains women in Tilonia, Rajasthan, in solar engineering in ways that ensure that this scientific knowledge remains, grows, and circulates within the community. The solar engineering projects have provided pathways for women to partake in solar electrification initiatives. Not only is building solar cookers traditionally seen as ‘men’s work’ so that instructing women in this skill breaks down gender barriers, but the power source lowers family lighting costs and reduces levels of indoor pollution.
• s
Key Terms
• Barefoot College
• Barefoot Solar Engineer (BSE)
• Chipko Movement
• Ecodefense!
• Greenbelt Movement
• Solar Warriors
• United Nations Earth Summit (1992)
Figure 11.1: Because of women’s relationship with the environment, they can be critical agents of environmental conservation, sustainable development and adaptation to climate change. In Darfur, Sudan, women carry firewood to the Abbu Shouk refugee camp.
Overview
By Cate Owren
The world’s women are the key to sustainable development, peace and security,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told participants at the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet meeting at Columbia University, in New York City, in March 2010. Because women are the chief resource managers for their families in many parts of the world, their engagement in remedies for and adaptation to climate change is essential.
Across the regions and cultures of the world, women play critical roles in relation to their natural environment. Often deeply dependent on available natural resources for food, fuel and shelter, women can be particularly vulnerable to environmental changes or threats. Because women’s workload is often centered on managing natural resources, biodiversity and ecosystems, their experiences and perspectives are essential to sustainable development policymaking and actions at every level, for a healthy planet for generations to come.
Resource Managers
Women in the developing world are predominantly responsible for management and conservation of resources for their families. Women spend vast amounts of time collecting and storing water, securing sources of fuel, food and fodder, and managing land — be it forest, wetlands or agricultural terrain. As women are primary caregivers to children, the elderly and the sick, whole communities rely on them. Their traditional and generational knowledge of biodiversity, for example, supplies communities with medicines, nutritional balance and crop rotation methods. When drought, erratic rainfall or severe storms affect access to these basic resources, women’s lives — and their families’ lives — can be intensely affected. In fact, studies have shown that natural disasters disproportionately hit women, lowering female life expectancy rates and killing more women than men, especially where levels of gender equality are low.
Figure 11.2: Locally built energy-efficient cookstoves help women manage resources sustainably and preserve Virunga Park forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo. USAID partners with WWF to support such ventures.
Women constitute just over half the world’s population, but women are responsible for feeding much of it — especially in rural regions of developing countries. Women produce between 60 and 80 percent of food in developing countries — and yet they officially own only 2 percent of land worldwide, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Historical inheritance laws and customs often prohibit or limit women’s direct control over land; even when women are able to own and lease land, they may not be able to secure loans or insurance to keep their resources safe. The lack of equitable land rights remains a major obstacle to women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation.
International Agreements
International agreements have made crucial links between women and the environment; the challenge is to take action. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979), an international “bill of rights” for women, addresses a host of environmental issues. Likewise, the Beijing Platform for Action, an outcome of the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), includes an entire chapter on women and the environment. It foreshadowed the different impacts global warming would have on women and men, which are now evident across the globe.
Major sustainable development treaties, also, have acknowledged the specific need for women’s participation and for a mainstreamed gender perspective. The 1992 United Nations Earth Summit (UNCED) produced two key conventions — on biological diversity and on combating desertification — that have served as guides for implementation of environmental actions from a gender perspective. The overall UNCED document, Agenda 21, included a specific chapter on gender, which highlighted the important role women play in industrialized countries as sustainable consumers. Indeed, the links between women and environment are not solely concentrated in the global South (i.e., developing countries). Studies have shown that women in the North (i.e., developed countries) have a smaller carbon footprint than men, making the majority of “green” decisions at the household level and for travel according to a 2007 Swedish government report.
Figure 11.3: A woman in Tsetan, Tibetan Autonomous Region, China, uses a home-made solar cooker to boil water.
These international agreements indicate that, worldwide, women must be equal participants in all decisions related to their environment. Demonstrating great capacity as leaders, experts, educators and innovators, women and women’s movements have made great strides in preserving and protecting the resources around them. Women took the lead in the grass-roots Chipko Movement of India in the 1970s, where activists stopped the felling of trees by physically surrounding — literally hugging — the trees. They also protected water sources from corporate control. Similarly, the Green Belt Movement, the conservation and forestry movement which originated in Kenya on Earth Day in 1977, is another famous effort initiated by women. Women around the world continue the fight against climate change, making sustainable consumption choices, and improving access to, control over and conservation of resources. Their voices must continue to be comprehensively integrated into policy and implementation efforts at every stage for the well-being of future generations.
Cate Owren is executive director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), a women’s global advocacy organization working to empower women as decisionmakers to achieve economic and social justice. Founded specifically to influence the 1992 Earth Summit (UNCED), WEDO strives to integrate gender perspectives and women’s direct participation internationally. Most recently, WEDO’s advocacy efforts contributed to securing the first-ever gender text in the U.N. negotiations on climate change.
PROFILE: Aleksandra Koroleva – A Passion for Environmental Protection
By Alexey Milovanov
Russian environmental activist Aleksandra Koroleva’s efforts to preserve the environment and protect people from environmental pollution are tireless, and her unorthodox approach is often successful.
Environmental activist Aleksandra Koroleva has devoted much of her life to protecting the pristine environment in the Kaliningrad region in the Russian Federation, on the Baltic Sea. The unique and complex habitats there include wetlands, forests, rivers and marshes. It is home to diverse ecosystems and migratory birds. She has worked within and outside of the government not only to preserve precious natural resources but to protect citizens from dangerous environmental pollution.
Koroleva was a member of a newly formed state environmental protection committee after the Soviet Union fell apart. She says that at the time it seemed the committee could significantly help to responsibly conserve the environment. Prior to this, Koroleva worked at a university, a school and a regional history museum where she dealt with environmental issues. In her new position her task was to raise public awareness, primarily through the mass media. The work was not going badly; she had even created the first radio program in the Kaliningrad region devoted wholly to environmental problems. The program aired for several years. But soon the legacy of the Soviet years, the bureaucracy, stalled her efforts.
Because of her upbringing she couldn’t bring herself to accept defeat. She is like her mother, renowned botanist and dendrologist Galina Kucheneva. “She had some kind of tremendous inner drive, she didn’t just study trees as a botanist but sought to preserve them for the future,” Koroleva recalls. “I, of course, inherited only a tiny bit of her confidence, but I have that drive, too, and it won’t let me take things lying down.”
Russian society was in a very turbulent state in the early 1990s. The disappearance of the authoritarian Communist regime and the sudden ability to freely express opinions gave rise to many new movements and organizations. One of them was the group Ecodefense! [Ekozashchita! in Russian]. It was founded by young people determined to effectively address environmental issues by following the Western environmental activist model. They chose as their slogan the high-flown but honest “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!” A meeting with Ecodefense! activist Vladimir Slivyak led Koroleva to make a 180-degree turn, leave government service and begin a new stage in life. Koroleva recalls, “He said, ‘Let’s do something and not wait until the government permits us to write an article and conduct an environmental study.’ He showed you can simply do what you think is necessary and important.”
The list of “necessary and important” items is so long that it could occupy a dozen full-scale organizations. Yet Ecodefense! functioned admirably during its first 15 years, without any legal status. Among other endeavors, it agitated against pollution of the region’s water resources by harmful substances such as dioxins. It also opposed importation of foreign nuclear waste materials into the country. It protected the nature reserves of the Curonian Spit, a long, narrow sandbar that stretches across the Curonian Lagoon between the Kaliningrad region and Lithuania, from dangerous oil-extraction projects on the Baltic shelf. Ecodefense! fought to preserve trees in downtown Kaliningrad. And, of course, it promoted environmental education with all available means. The top priority was always to make people aware of environmental issues and how to solve the problems. Ecodefense! held press conferences and issued reports and press releases in years when this was a novelty in Russia, even for businesses. Ecodefense! successfully used the media to convey an independent environmental message. “Even now, when our work is not as intensive, journalists call me almost every day,” says Koroleva.
Ecodefense! used dramatic methods to attract media attention, so journalists would write about “those ecofreaks” and the public would read about them. When trees were cut down in the city of Kaliningrad, activists under Koroleva’s leadership carried a log in a coffin to the doors of the city hall and stood around it with votive candles. When analyses carried out at the initiative of the environmentalists revealed the presence of dioxins in the waste water of the local paper factory, young people strolled downtown wearing the masks of mutants in order to draw attention to possible consequences. Koroleva describes another effort she led: “We brought to the district government building a huge mock-up of a nuclear power plant, with a pipe emitting acrid orange smoke. And we handcuffed ourselves to the entrance of that building, dressed in the costumes of oil-spattered pigs, in order to show the danger of the Lukoil Company’s plans to extract petroleum 22 kilometers from the reserves on the Curonian Spit. Oh, those were good times, and I sometimes regret that Ecodefense! and I have gone our separate ways.”
Figure 11.4: Aleksandra Koroleva works with other activists at the Curonian Spit, Kaliningrad Region, Russian Federation.
Such outré behavior was shocking and aroused suspicions which still persist among Koroleva’s numerous detractors. Many times Aleksandra Koroleva and her colleagues were accused of being in the pay of business competitors of the people they fought against or foreign intelligence services, from the CIA to Mossad. Koroleva routinely had to counter false media reports.
Teaching is as necessary as breathing to Koroleva, but her dynamism often frightens people unprepared for her zeal. For 10 years Ecodefense! conducted a project to observe nature in the Baltic region in which children participated. Thousands of schoolchildren learned about the Baltic ecosystem in theory and in practice through this program. They cleared refuse from the coast, took eco-tours and networked with their peers from other countries in international nature camps.
Under Aleksandra Koroleva’s leadership the first environmental referendum in Kaliningrad was held on the construction of an oil terminal in the port of Svetly. Her books helped stop dangerous projects and prevent tree clearing, and gave people confidence in their power to defend their right to clean air and water. She encouraged them to change what they do not agree with and control the often harmful activity of officials — new ideas to citizens of the former Soviet Union. Koroleva also educated officials by participating in numerous public councils, drafting new laws and criticizing officials who closed their eyes to environmental crimes. “In the end, the authorities acknowledged the existence and importance of the third sector [nongovernmental organizations], whether it was us or someone else,” says Koroleva. “We were striving precisely for that acknowledgment, and it was a victory. The doors we opened are now accessible for many other activists.”
Koroleva urges everyone — children, teachers, officials, activists — not only to think but to do something concrete. For several years she organized the “Environmental Landing Force on the Curonian Spit” to strengthen dunes and clear away refuse in the national park, recruiting not only students and activists, but high-ranking officials, politicians and diplomats. She transformed conservation of the national park into a genuine mass movement.
History has a way of repeating itself. Twenty years later Koroleva joined a government agency again, as deputy director of the Curonian Spit National Park. Although she recently resigned to protest new policies — the same inner drive causing her to reject the bureaucratic approach — Koroleva plans to continue her environmental work with Ecodefense! “I’m ready again to go back to my roots,” she says.
Alexey Milovanov worked with Aleksandra Koroleva as a press officer and campaigner for the Ecodefense! environmental group for five years. He has been a freelance journalist and photographer since 2005 and is currently chief editor at the local online news agency www.NewKaliningrad.Ru.
PROJECT: Barefoot Solar Engineers
By Anu Saxena
A revolution is happening in Barefoot College in rural Rajasthan, India. It is a quiet revolution that brings solar energy and clean technology to the poorest rural communities, changing the face of rural development. At the forefront of this revolution are semiliterate or illiterate rural women from Asia, Africa and Latin America, many of them grandmothers, who are trained to work as skilled solar engineers.
Barefoot College was founded in 1972 in Tilonia, Rajasthan, India, by social activist and educator Bunker Roy. Its purpose is to find simple, sustainable solutions to basic quality of life problems in rural communities: clean water, renewable energy, education and health care. Stable livelihoods and women’s empowerment are also among Barefoot College’s goals. Solar energy is an important “barefoot solution,” and women — especially grandmothers — are preferred candidates for solar engineer training. As Bunker Roy puts it, “We have trained men, and found that they took their training and knowledge to go work in the cities. [Women] feel responsible for their village.” Rural grandmothers have a longer history in the community and have less incentive to migrate. This keeps the knowledge and technology in the community. Their expertise is shared with others, ensuring project sustainability.
Treating the community members as partners and letting them manage and own their resources and technology are unique features of the Barefoot program. The trainees all hail from remote communities that have never known conventional electricity and where literacy rates are low, especially for women and girls. They are selected by community consensus and, upon their return, are paid by the community to install, maintain and repair the solar units at a percentage of the monthly energy costs that would otherwise have been spent on the alternatives — fuels, candles and batteries.
Since 2005, 250 of these village women from 29 countries have brought solar electrification to around 10,000 houses, in regions as diverse as the hot desert plains of Rajasthan and rural hamlets tucked in the cold, mountainous, windswept plateaus of Ladakh, in India; Timbuktu, Mali, in Africa; and Soloja, Bolivia, high in the Andes. Most poor rural households that Barefoot College has helped in Africa and Latin America use approximately 1.5-2 gallons of kerosene per month for their lighting and cooking needs, according to the Barefoot College experience with rural households. It is estimated that this consumption emits an estimated 14.74-19.65 kilograms of CO2 (Richard J. Komp, 2002). Switching to solar power has reduced environmental pollution and forest degradation in these communities by decreasing their use of firewood, diesel and kerosene. Using solar power has lowered rural families’ lighting costs and reduced the levels of indoor pollutants and the fire hazards of kerosene use. The study conditions for schoolchildren are improved and women can engage in income-generating activities, such as handicrafts, after sundown.
Figure 11.5: Rural grandmothers are being trained as solar engineers at a Barefoot College workshop session.
The extraordinary results achieved by Barefoot College began with its six-month, hands-on solar engineering training program. The guiding principle of the college, that solutions to rural problems lie within the community, is nowhere more evident than at a solar engineering training classroom, where 30 participants, from various countries, sit side by side on benches, working with concentration to connect wires on a circuit board, assemble a solar lantern or draw what they have just created in a small notebook. Since there is no one common language among the trainees or instructors, the women learn to identify parts by color and use hand gestures liberally. Waves, smiles and greetings in a variety of languages welcome the visitor to this Barefoot united nations of women, collaborating to bring light and hope to their communities.
Figure 11.6: Sita Bai, a solar cooker mechanic, stands beside one of the devices she is trained to assemble and repair.
The same enthusiasm and entrepreneurial activities pervade the Barefoot College campus. A short distance from the classroom, two impressive-looking 2.5-square-meter parabolic solar cookers glisten in the sunlight. The cookers are attended by Shahnaz and Sita, two Barefoot solar engineers (BSEs). They went through the basic solar program before specializing in the fabrication of cookers — a task traditionally associated with men, as it involves metal work and welding. As they explain some of the intricacies of constructing and calibrating the cooker, their pride in their work is evident. They now train other women to make the cookers. Sita has even found a way to reach a broader audience by composing a song with her colleagues on the benefits of using solar cookers, which they sing for community education programs. The story of their personal journey from conservative families, where they were limited to socially prescribed tasks, to their roles as educators, skillful mechanics and wage-earners is a powerful narrative of change.
As women’s participation in environmental management has increased, they have become more visible. Women now have a voice in local politics. Examples are the Solar Warriors of Bhutan and the BSEs of Ethiopia, who petitioned their governments to start local BSE women’s associations. Women enjoy an improved status in their communities because of their valuable contribution. Referring to their local BSE, a male village elder in Bolivia says admiringly, “She is better at this than I am … and I am a car mechanic!”
By enrolling women and their communities as partners, Barefoot College has increased community awareness of sustainable practices while supporting traditional knowledge. Workshops on how to dispose of plastic responsibly, use solar cookers, improve management of water resources, including rain water harvesting, and other good practices that are kinder to the environment enhance the quality of rural life.
Anu Saxena has been involved with international development programs in marginalized communities, with a focus on gender issues, for more than 20 years. She earned her doctorate in social anthropology from Boston University and did her fieldwork in Colombia. She is currently the Latin America adviser to the Barefoot College (India) Solar Engineering program.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. Which option describes women’s relationship with the environment?
1. Women produce between 60 – 80 percent of the world’s food
2. Women are the chief resource managers for many families across the world
3. Women are most vulnerable to environmental threats because they are often more dependent on natural resources for food, fuel, and shelter.
4. Women, at least in the global North, have a smaller environmental footprint
5. All of the above
2. Which option demonstrates a rights-based reason for including women in sustainable development policy making?
1. Women’s work is often closely connected to the environment, so they are most vulnerable to environmental threats
2. Women produce between 60 and 80 percent of the world’s food
3. Women are the chief resource managers for many families across the world
4. International treaties on gender and the environment have acknowledged the need for women’s participation and for a mainstreamed gender perspective
3. Aleksandra Koroleva used which methods to push for changes in environmental policy?
1. Working for a state environmental protection committee
2. Creating a radio station to discuss environmental problems
3. Organizing protests and engaging in civil disobedience
4. Running environmental education programs
5. All of the above
4. Which case demonstrates a mainstreaming of women’s voices into policy change?
1. A single woman on a steering committee
2. A woman’s wing of a political party
3. A woman’s section of a conference delegation
4. A committee where women represent 15 of 25 seats
5. None of the above
5. The sociopolitical effects of the Barefoot College solar cooker program on women include…
1. Women identify parts of the solar panel through different colors and hand gestures
2. Women have a longer history in the community and less incentive to migrate into the city
3. 250 women in 29 countries have brought solar electrification to around 10,000 houses
4. Women become more involved in environmental management and raise their voices within politics
5. None of the above
6. The guiding principle of the Barefoot College is…
1. The more solar cookers, the better
2. Solutions to rural problems lie within the community
3. Solar cookers will give women a voice in local politics
4. Women should be taught to use solar cookers and improve water management
Answers
1. The correct answer is all of the above (answer E).
2. The correct answer is that international conventions and treaties on gender and the environment, such as the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) call for a gender-mainstreamed approach to sustainable development. These tools signal a rights-based approach because they demonstrate that states have a legal obligation to consult and include women in policy development, and women have the right to participate. Answers A, B, and C are not rights-based; B and C state that women should be included because of their responsibilities in producing food, and A highlights women’s vulnerability to environmental change as the reason for their involvement.
3. The correct answer is E (all of the above).
4. The correct answer is a committee where women represent 15 of 25 seats. Introducing a single woman onto a steering committee to satisfy a bare-minimum diversity requirement is tokenization, so answer A is incorrect. Women’s wings and sections of organizations can be effective in terms of ensuring that there is a space for women and that there are women’s perspectives represented, but they do not represent a mainstreaming of women’s voices.
5. The correct answer is that women become more involved and vocal in environment management (D). The identification of parts of the solar panel with colours and hand gestures is an educational strategy, and not a sociopolitical outcome (answer A). The number of households to which women have installed solar electricity is a useful statistic, but not a sociopolitical outcome.
6. The chapter states that Barefoot College’s guiding principle is that solutions to rural problems lie within the community (answer B). Constructing solar cookers is one of the strategies used by Barefoot College, but it is a means and not an end, so answer A is incorrect. Giving women a voice in local politics is an outcome of the College programs but was not mentioned as the organization’s guiding principle (answer C). Teaching women to use solar cookers and improve water management is a strategy toward giving women a voice in politics but is not a guiding principle.
Discussion Questions
1. What is the value of women participating fully and equally in addressing climate change?
2. Why should climate change be addressed through a gender lens?
3. What are the gender-specific barriers to the participation of women in environmental movements?
4. Using the additional resources provided, discuss the connections between violence against women and the environment.
5. In what ways are Indigenous peoples particularly vulnerable to climate change? Describe the role of Indigenous women in addressing the impacts of climate change.
6. How does access to water affect girls and women differently than boys and men? (Outside research)
Essay Questions
1. To push for environmental policy change, is it more effective to work within government or outside of the system through civil disobedience? Drawing on the Aleksandra Koroleva profile and any relevant additional resources, discuss the advantages and drawbacks of advocating for the environment through acts of protest.
2. Through the additional perspectives provided, discuss the role of Indigenous perspectives in preserving the environment. Is it possible to substantively address climate change through Western methods, or should be it addressed through traditional protocols? Are these perspectives mutually exclusive?
3. What is the relationship between policymaking, patriarchy, and climate change?
4. Select a jurisdiction, whether at the national, provincial, or municipal level. How has gender been integrated into the environmental policy of the jurisdiction that you have chosen? Could gender be integrated into this policy more effectively? If so, how?
Additional Resources
United Nations Development Program (UNDP). “Africa Adaption Program (AAP) Experiences: Gender and Climate Change.” (2011).
Discussion paper on key challenges to reducing gender-based vulnerability, gender sensitive approaches to AAP, and continuing efforts.
La Via Campesina.
An international peasants’ organization with campaigns to promote food sovereignty and biodiversity and to stop violence against women.
Tebtebba Foundation. “Indigenous Women, Climate Change and Forests.” (2011).
Publication of findings from research projects on the differentiated impacts of climate change on Indigenous women and their roles in traditional forest ecosystems and resource management.
Nobel Women’s Initiative. “Stories from the Road – Activist Harsha Walia Makes Connections Between Displaced Women & Oil Sands.”
Activist Harsha Walia sheds light on the relationship between violence against Indigenous women and the environment.
Perch, L. & Tandon, N. “Farming, Mining and Caring for the Land: Why a Critical Feminist Gender Discourse on Rights and Resources is More Important Now than Ever Before.” Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. (2015).
Reflects on women’s experiences in the agriculture and mining sectors and sustainable development through a feminist critique.
www.osisa.org/buwa/economic-justice/regional/farming-mining-and-caring-land-why-critical-feminist-gender-discourse
Singh, K. “Women and their Role in Natural Resources: A Study in Western Himalayas.” International Journal of Research – Granthaalayah 3(1) 128 – 138: (2015).
Highlights the role of women and traditional activities in natural resource conservation.
The World’s Women 2015. “Environment.” (2015).
Chapter with annually updated qualitative and quantitative information and analysis on the particular vulnerabilities of women to climate change.
UN WomenWatch. “Fact Sheet: Women, Gender Equality and Climate Change.” (2009).
Links the socio-economic and political barriers to women’s empowerment to the gendered vulnerabilities of climate change.
Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resources (WOCAN).
WOCAN is a women-led international membership network with the objective to address gaps in knowledge and experience in sustainable development. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.11%3A_Women_and_the_Environment.txt |
Chapter 12: Rights of the Girl Child
Chapter Summary
“The girl child” is one of the critical areas of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action; girls’ rights are codified within the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and include non-discrimination, protection from harm and abuse, and full participation in family, social, and cultural life. Barriers to realizing these rights include practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM), sex-selective abortions, and child marriage, each of which is common in geographically specific areas.
Dr. Bogaletch Gebre founded the organization Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma-Tope (KMG) to support education and economic opportunity for young women in Ethiopia through fundraising, protest, and community-based research. The Yemeni Women’s Union (YWU) focuses on reproductive health and family planning by running education workshops on the harms of child marriage and pregnancy and engages with families on the risks and long-term implications of these practices. The YWU is one of several organizations which work using different approaches, including media campaigns, advocacy, lobbying, and sharing knowledge through network building, to enhance the effectiveness of strategies to improve the situation of girls worldwide.
Key Terms
• Bogaletch Gebre
• Child marriage
• Female genital mutilation (FGM)
• International Ethiopia-Development through Education
• Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma-Tope (KMG)
• Marriage Without Risks Network (MWRN)
• Safe Age of Marriage Project (SAWP)
• United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)
• Yemeni Women’s Union (YWU)
Figure 12.1: Girl children are denied their human rights in many countries. This girl in a Bangalore, India, slum may face not only economic hardship but discrimination and exploitation because of her sex.
The Girl Child
By Robin N. Haarr
In many cultures and societies, the girl child is denied her human rights and sometimes her basic needs. She is at increased risk of sexual abuse and exploitation and other harmful practices that negatively affect her survival, development and ability to achieve to her fullest potential. Because girls are particularly vulnerable, they require additional protections. The girl child is one of the 12 critical areas in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, which recommends elimination of all forms of discrimination and abuse of girls and protection of their rights.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, sets forth the basic human rights of children, usually those under 18 years of age. These rights include nondiscrimination; the right to survival and development of potential; protection from harmful influences, abuses and exploitation; and full participation in family, cultural and social life. The convention also spells out some human rights violations that are unique to the girl child, including discrimination based upon sex, prenatal sex selection, female genital mutilation and early marriage.
Cultural Influences on Treatment of Girl Children
Discrimination and harmful practices against the girl child vary depending upon cultural context. For instance, intentional abortion of female fetuses and female infanticide are common practices in East and South Asian countries where sons are strongly preferred. India and China have a significant sex-ratio imbalance in their populations as a result of these practices, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA, 2005). In India such practices are reinforced by the perception that daughters are an economic burden on the family. They do not significantly contribute to the family income and large dowries may be expected by in-laws when the girl marries. In China, sex selectivity and abandonment of infant girls have increased dramatically since the enactment of the one-child policy in 1989. Prenatal sex selection is more common where modern medical technology is readily accessible and open to misuse. According to the UNFPA 2004 report, sex-selective abortion and female infanticide have resulted in at least 60 million “missing” girls in Asia. The shortage of females in some Asian countries has led to other problems, such as increased trafficking in women for marriage and sex work. Despite government programs and efforts to end such practices with education, financial incentives and threat of punishment, sex-selective abortion and female infanticide continue.
The status of girls is significantly less than that of boys in some countries. This makes girls more vulnerable to discrimination and neglect. Available indicators reveal that girls are discriminated against from the earliest stages of life in the areas of nutrition, health care, education, family care and protection. Girls are often fed less, particularly when there are diminished food resources. A diet low in calories, protein and nutrients negatively affects girls’ growth and development. Less likely to receive basic health care, they are at increased risk of childhood mortality.
Figure 12.2: Turkish authorities discourage the traditional practice of child marriage in rural towns such as Acarlar, where this young woman walks with a baby.
Girls are more likely to be denied education. In 2007, an estimated 101 million children worldwide — the majority of whom were girls — did not attend primary schools (UNICEF, 2010). Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have the largest gender gaps in education. Girls from poor and rural households are especially likely to be denied education. Knowledge and skills needed for employment, empowerment and advancement in status often are withheld because of customary attitudes about educating boys over girls. Girls are more likely to be used as child labor inside and outside of the home. Yet there are many benefits of investing in girls’ education. Healthier families, lower fertility rates, improved economic performance and poverty reduction are among them. Educating girls in a supportive, gender-sensitive environment is critical to achieving gender equality.
The United Nations Population Fund estimates that 100 million to 140 million girls and women have undergone genital mutilation and at least 3 million girls are at risk of the practice every year. Most cases occur in regions of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. In Egypt, it is estimated that 75 percent of girls between 15 and 17 years of age have undergone genital mutilation, a practice which has immediate and long-term negative consequences on girls and women’s health and well-being, and complications can be fatal. Some countries in Africa, Europe and North America have banned genital mutilation; nevertheless, the practice continues.
Child marriage is another human rights violation that occurs in Africa, South and Central Asia and the Middle East. The highest rates are in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where girls are married as early as 7 years of age, but often before 15 or 18 years of age. According to UNICEF statistics, in Bangladesh, the Central African Republic, Chad, Guinea, Mali and Niger more than 60 percent of women married before 18 years of age. In India, 47 percent of women married before 18 years of age. In Yemen, more than 25 percent of girls marry before 15 years of age. Child marriage is a form of sexual abuse that separates girls from family and friends, isolates them socially, restricts education and leaves them vulnerable to violence from husbands and in-laws. Child brides face health risks and even death related to premature forced sex — often with a significantly older husband — and early pregnancies. They are also at increased risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
However, grass-roots movements can implement change successfully. An example is the Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma–Tope, spearheaded by Dr. Bogaletch Gebre in Ethiopia to stop genital mutilation. Or the Marriage Without Risk Network in Yemen, which links several NGOs that educate communities and advocate to curb child marriage.
Besides eliminating abuse and discrimination, the Beijing Platform for Action recommends enhanced development and training to improve girl’s status and eliminate their economic exploitation. Awareness of girls’ needs and potential should be improved in society and among the girls themselves so they may participate fully in social, economic and political life. Progress has been made, but much remains to be done to protect girls’ rights and assure them a future in which they may benefit themselves and their communities.
Robin Haarr is a professor of criminal justice at Eastern Kentucky University whose research focuses on violence against women and children and human trafficking, nationally and internationally. She does research and policy work for the United Nations and U.S. embassies and has received several awards for her work, including induction into the Wall of Fame at Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice and the Coramae Richey Mann “Inconvenient Woman of the Year” Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Women and Crime.
PROFILE: Bogaletch Gebre – Trading New Traditions for Old
By Julia Rosenbaum
Fueled by a dream, Dr. Bogaletch Gebre worked hard with dedication to obtain an education. She became a physician. Ever since, she has worked to empower women in her native Ethiopia, replacing harmful practices with healthy ones — one village at a time.
No mother, no family would intentionally harm their child,” explains Dr. Bogaletch Gebre, founder of the Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma–Tope (KMG), which means “women of Kembatta working together,” a women’s self-help center in southern Ethiopia. Gebre is a champion of women’s development. She has also worked hard to end female genital mutilation, a traditional practice in Africa.
Boge, as she is called, comes from a farming family in Kembatta, southern Ethiopia. Her father protected the weak, widowed and orphaned in their community, giving to those whose harvest was not enough. She describes her mother as a wise, generous and loving woman who believed people do wrong out of ignorance, “because,” their mother told them, “when one wrongs the other, it hurts oneself more than the one who was wronged.” Like all young women of her day, Boge looked forward to her circumcision ceremony, when, she said, “People would start seeing me differently; looking at me in a new and better light.”
Figure 12.3: Bogaletch Gebre speaks to villagers in a remote area of Ethiopia’s southern Kembatta Tembaro zone to raise awareness about the danger of female genital mutilation.
Growing up in a family of 14, she and her younger sister Fikirte were inseparable. They were the first girls in their village to have higher education. Boge attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a full scholarship. Later the sisters went to the United States. Boge was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Massachusetts, where she studied epidemiology and public health. News of the 1984-87 famine in their homeland prompted the sisters to help. Fikirte focused on improving access to clean water for her village. She started a business brewing up tasty sauces and donated part of the profits to her water project. Boge tackled education and livelihood for young women by founding Parents International Ethiopia–Development through Education. She rallied U.S. supporters to end a “book famine” as pervasive as the food famine. She ran fundraising marathons which sent more than 300,000 books on science, medicine and law to Ethiopia.
Boge’s own awakening about genital mutilation grew from the rage and horror over what was done to her as a young woman, what was done to all the girls of her village. “I understood that the purpose of female genital excision was to excise my mind, excise my ability to live my life with all my senses intact,” she said. “I was never meant to be educated, to think for myself, because I am a woman born in a small village in Ethiopia. It’s a system that looks at a woman as an object of servitude. She starts serving her family at the age of 6 — before she even knows who she is. When she marries she is literally sold to the highest bidder. From one servitude to another, we are exploited.”
Boge returned home in 1997 with \$5,000 and a vision. With her sister she founded KMG in 1999. The self-help center now includes a skills training center, library, heritage house, a health care center and a guest house and hosts a women’s discussion group. At first they were uncertain about how to realize their vision to break the cycle of violence against women and provide development opportunities.
Boge started with a baseline survey about women’s conditions: health and HIV/AIDS; men’s and women’s education; economic opportunities for women; and female genital mutilation. The results were presented in a community forum where the discussion lit a spark. “Women started speaking out … crying. … Everyone knew the pain and risk of cutting, but perpetuated the practice because they thought it was God-given and was essential if a woman was to be considered marriageable.”
Momentum was building. In June 2002, 78 young schoolgirls marched with placards that read: “I refuse to be circumcised, learn from me.” Two young sweethearts boldly defied tradition, to marry without genital mutilation. They appealed to the local priest, who was already sensitized through KMG outreach. He agreed to support them. At their wedding the bride wore a placard declaring that she was not circumcised, and the groom wore a sign stating his happiness to marry “an uncircumcised, whole girl.” Similar marriages followed, in which couples publicly rejected female genital mutilation. Support groups were formed; there was peer outreach education. “They’ve become our foot soldiers, a social force in their communities,” says Boge. “Girls rally together, singing songs and wearing signs, ‘We are your daughters! Do not harm us.’” A new event introduced in 2004, “Whole Body, Healthy Life — Freedom from Female Genital Excision,” which aims to replace harmful mutilation rituals with life celebrations, has been very well attended. The day is recognized as a freedom day, a new tradition that is celebrated every year.
Figure 12.4: An Ethiopian couple celebrates their wedding wearing signs declaring their opposition to female genital mutilation.
Today, female genital mutilation has been largely eliminated in KMG’s outreach area of 1.5 million people. A 2008 UNICEF study documents the transformation after a decade of intervention in which female circumcision has dramatically decreased to less than 3 percent. This has been accomplished by law and through education of communities about the harm of the practice.
Boge says that support from KMG has helped communities “to trust and unleash their collective wisdom, thereby recognizing their own capacity to effect measurable and sustainable change. We just need to give them the space.”
Community representatives — students and teachers, boys, girls, literate and illiterate, women and men, midwives, religious leaders, and elders — all meet regularly to discuss concerns, build relationships, share learning and reach consensus. Boge says, “Solutions lie within.” KMG facilitates and encourages discussion. “Once they make their commitments, they abide by them.”
It is a holistic approach, Boge says, that recognizes “the indivisibility of social, cultural, economic and political dynamics that affect societies and women in particular … linking ecology, economy and society.” She adds, “In Kembatta, as in other rural regions, social turmoil, environmental degradation and loss of the traditional income base all reinforce attitudes which victimize women and perpetuate violence against women.”
The success of Bogaletch Gebre has meant broader influence of the KMG model in other regions and countries and in policymaking. “We don’t need miracles,” she says. “We need commitment to action, creativity and hard work. And, of course, we need to support each other, as people who share this one world.”
“My dream for African women? That the world realizes that women’s suppression is no good for business, for the economy, nor for human development. We must end gender apartheid,” she says.
Julia Rosenbaum is senior program officer, Health, Population and Nutrition Group, for the Washington-based Academy for Educational Development. She provides technical input and management to global maternal and child health programs. She has worked in Ethiopia for the past six years through USAID’s Hygiene Improvement Project on community-led approaches for hygiene and sanitation improvement and related HIV care and support programs.
PROJECT: Changing Hearts and Minds – Averting Child Marriage in Yemen
By Dalia Al-Eryani and Laurel Lundstrom
Child marriage is one of the biggest threats to young girls in Yemen. It often prevents them from getting an education and following their dreams. It can be devastating physically, psychologically, economically and socially. Local organizations work to improve the prospects of girls by ensuring that they remain unmarried and in school.
She speaks from the heart, like a typical 8-year-old. “I want to be a doctor,” says Arwa (not her real name), revealing a gap in her smile from a missing baby tooth. But her future is not her own.
“I want to work with all sick people,” she quietly insists. “I don’t want to get married at all. I want to stay with my mother.” Despite her dreams, Arwa already understands that the desires of her grandfather will more likely dictate her future.
And her grandfather has different plans. He has already betrothed Arwa to her cousin. Like most child brides, she will not continue with her education. She will be taken from her mother, forced out of school and required to abandon any aspirations of a medical career.
“The greatest problem facing Yemeni women today is child marriages,” says Wafa Ahmad Ali of the Yemeni Women’s Union (YWU), one of several local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) trying to change the prospects of young girls like Arwa by ensuring they remain unmarried and in school until they are at least 18. The YWU is reaching out to Arwa’s grandfather, hoping he will allow her to live out her dreams. The YWU has helped avert the marriages of 79 children in 2009-2010, through an initiative called the “Safe Age of Marriage” Project.
The YWU works with the Extending Service Delivery Project, which focuses on reproductive health and family planning, and the Basic Health Services Project to transform the opinions of religious leaders, community leaders and families to value girls’ education over early marriage. It’s not an easy task. The YWU faces resistance from community members who think the organization is “meddling with local norms and traditions,” says Wafa Ali. Poverty and conservative views about the role of women are also problems.
Coordinators from the YWU oversee a team of 40 volunteer community educators — 20 men and 20 women — concentrated in Amran governorate’s Al Sawd and Al Soodah districts, where 59 percent of families marry off their daughters before the age of 18. The governorate’s capital city, Amran, an ancient trading center, is located about 50 kilometers north of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. Only 1 percent of women in Amran governorate have attended school, according to a baseline assessment conducted by the Safe Age of Marriage Project.
Figure 12.5: Yemeni schoolgirls in Sana’a carry signs denouncing child marriage, a practice still common in Yemen.
The volunteers raise awareness about the social and health consequences of child marriage through lively discussions, film screenings, plays, writing competitions, poetry readings, debates and literacy classes. One of their main lessons is about the healthy timing and spacing of pregnancy. The messages about family planning are tailored to be appropriate for Islamic communities, and encourage girls not to get pregnant for the first time until they are at least 18.
Safia, one of YWU’s community educators, frequently hears about the consequences of child marriage and early pregnancy. “My 16-year-old daughter is cursed,” says a woman at one of Safia’s sessions. She adds that each time the girl has tried to bring a new life into the world, she has failed. “The babies always die,” she says. “But my 20-year-old daughter, she is not cursed. She has healthy babies.” Safia advised the woman that because her daughter had married early, she and her babies were at an increased risk of death. The mother’s reaction: “My daughter isn’t cursed after all!”
By delaying marriage, the project aims to slow maternal, newborn and infant deaths and associated conditions such as obstetric fistula, childhood deformities, mental illness, depression and domestic violence. Other organizations around the country with similar goals include the Marriage Without Risks Network, a group of five local NGOs funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative. Each NGO approaches child marriage from a different angle: some focus on grass-roots awareness campaigns, classroom workshops or media campaigns; others conduct studies to determine the prevalence and effects of early marriage on girls and their families; and others advocate for change by engaging decisionmakers such as parliamentarians and religious leaders. The network outreach allows the groups to connect with other like-minded organizations throughout Yemen, from international organizations to community groups to Islamic foundations, that work to eliminate child marriage. By sharing successful approaches, members of the network enhance its effectiveness.
Figure 12.6: Cooperation of men in the community is essential. Here Sheikh Yahya Ahmed Abdulrahman Al-Naggar engages other Yemeni religious leaders and men as he sensitizes them to the importance of reproductive health and family planning.
Cooperation of men in the community is essential. Here Sheikh Yahya Ahmed Abdulrahman Al-Naggar engages other Yemeni religious leaders and men as he sensitizes them to the importance of reproductive health and family planning.
“Fistula!” shouts a young girl in response to a question about the health risks of early marriage. The girl, who wears a white scarf, speaks confidently to the audience, describing how this injury, caused by complications during childbirth, can ruin a woman’s life. Girls whose bodies are not fully developed are particularly at risk for fistula. Community educators explain such risks to impress upon the girls and their families the importance of marriage at a safe age.
By attending a similar session, Ali, another community member, changed from being an advocate for child marriage into a strong advocate for delaying marriage. In fact, when he met a father whose daughter, at age 13, was about to be married, he argued so passionately to stop the marriage that he convinced the father to break off the engagement — and he paid the father back part of the dowry already sacrificed to the groom-to-be. There was no wedding, and the daughter is back in school.
The Safe Age of Marriage Project has reached nearly 41,000 people, and child marriage for girls between 10 and 17 has decreased in both districts. In Al Soodah, the community is trying to pass a local law dictating a “safe age of marriage.”
The intervention is now being spread to two neighboring districts, with plans to expand it nationally in the future.
Ali says that the YWU will spread the intervention to seven to eight more governorates. “Part of the strategic plan for the YWU is to do advocacy with local authorities and decisionmakers and ask them to take measures to guarantee girls get married at a safe age,” he says.
Dalia Al-Eryani is the project coordinator of the Safe Age of Marriage Project in Yemen, which educates communities on the risks of early marriage. A Fulbright Fellow, she works with Yemen’s Basic Health Services Project.
Laurel Lundstrom served as the communications officer for the Extending Service Delivery Project, USAID’s flagship reproductive health and family planning project. She has written for the United Nations, Global Health magazine and the World Health Organization, and co-produced a short documentary on maternal and newborn health in Yemen.
Multiple Choice Questions
Questions
1. Perceptions that lead to a preference for sons include:
1. Daughters are an economic burden on the family
2. Daughters do not contribute to family income
3. Girls are less likely to receive proteins and nutrients necessary for growth and development
4. Girls are more likely to be denied education
5. All of the above
2. According to the chapter, many girls in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are married…
1. As young as 7 years old, but often below 15 – 18 years
2. Between 10 – 15 years
3. Between 20 – 22 years
4. Between 10 – 20 years
5. None of the above
3. According to the text, what percentage of girls in Egypt have undergone FGM?
1. 20%
2. 80%
3. 75%
4. 5 – 10%
5. None of the above
4. Which factors reinforces attitudes which perpetuate violence against women and girls?
1. Social turmoil
2. Environmental degradation
3. Loss of traditional income
4. All of the above
5. Bogaletch Gebre’s dream for African women is…
1. That societies value all genders equally
2. That people realize that suppression of women is bad for business, the economy, and human development
3. That women are paid the same as men and achieve full political and economic participation
4. All of the above
5. None of the above
6. According to the chapter, the YWU has received resistance on what basis?
1. The organization is meddling with local traditions
2. The medical concerns of early marriages are unfounded
3. Girls and families are unharmed by early marriages
4. The emotional impact on girls is not a concern
5. None of the above
7. The YWU engages in which activities to raise awareness of the harms of early marriage?
1. Discussions
2. Film screenings
3. Writing competitions
4. Poetry readings
5. All of the above
Answers
1. The correct answers are A and B. The perceptions that lead to a preference for sons over daughters are that daughters are an economic burden on the family and do not contribute to family income. Answers C and D are both forms of discrimination against girls, not perceptions of daughters.
2. The correct answer is A (as young as 7 years old, but often below 15 – 18 years).
3. The correct answer is C (75 percent).
4. The correct answer is d. (all of the above).
5. The correct answer is for people to realize that suppression of women is bad for business, the economy, and human development (answer B).
6. The correct answer is A (that the organization is meddling with local traditions by working to stop early childhood marriage). While there may be individual proponents of early and child marriage that believe the medical concerns of the practice are unfounded (answer B), that girls and families are unharmed by early marriages (answer C), and that the emotional impact on girls is not a concern (answer D), these objections were not mentioned in the text.
7. The correct answer is E (all of the above).
Discussion Quetsions
1. How are the risks of early and child marriage represented in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)? What about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? What progress has the international community made in reducing this practice?
2. What types of programs are discussed in the chapter that aim to prevent early and child marriage? Are they effective? Why or why not?
3. Why should combatting child marriage be a priority for governments and the international community?
4. What are the economic, social, and institutional root causes that lead to rights violations against girls, such as child marriage?
5. Reviewing both the chapter and additional resources provided, consider how the perspective given on FGM in the chapter contrasts with the perspective given by Lisa Wade in her article.
6. Why does early/child marriage happen in states where it is illegal? What are the ways in which a robust nation-state and civil society can counteract such practices?
Essay Questions
1. Why should child marriage and FGM be concerns of the U.S. government when these practices are largely happening on separate continents? More broadly, what should be the role of the United States in intervening in the familial customs of sovereign countries?
2. Review the post-colonial critiques of the anti-FGM movement provided in the additional resources section. How can one address the practice of FGM in a way that is consistent with these critiques?
3. Discuss the role that culture and religion determine in setting one’s values in relation to female genital mutilation and early/child marriage, as well as in forming policies to address them.
4. What is the relationship between economics, poverty, and child marriage? Assuming that poverty and child marriage are linked, is it more effective to stop child marriage itself or to address the poverty that surrounds the practice?
Additional Resources
Al-Jazeera. “Too Young to Marry: Child Marriage in Bangladesh.”
Documentary on the illegal practice of child marriage in Bangladesh.
Blackstock, C. “Jordan & Shannen: First Nations Children Demand that the Canadian Government Stop Racially Discriminating Against Them.” First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. 2011.
Shadow Report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child on Canada’s implementation of the convention in the context of services for Indigenous children.
Frohmader, C. “The Sexual and Reproductive Rights of Women and Girls with Disabilities.” International Conference on Human Rights.” (2014).
Examines sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls with disabilities as it relates to the post-2015 development agenda.
Nirantar Trust. “Early and Child Marriage in India: A Landscape Analysis.” Nirantar Trust.
Comprehensive report on the root causes of child marriage in India, including the compounding of patriarchy, class, caste, religion and sexuality.
Santhya, K. G. & Jejeebhoy, S. “Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Adolescent Girls: Evidence from Low and Middle-Income Countries.” Global Public Health 10(15), 189 – 221: (2015).
Proposes increased sexual education, health services, and safe spaces programs for vulnerable girls.
UNICEF. “Child Friendly Resources.” UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in Child Friendly Language.
Accessible version of the rights contained within the UNCRC.
UNICEF Jordan. “A Study on Early Marriage in Jordan 2014.” (2014).
Findings of a qualitative and quantitative study on early marriages in Jordan, as well as Palestinians and Syrian communities within the country in the wake of the Syrian civil war and resulting refugee crisis.
www.unicef.org/mena/UNICEFJordan_EarlyMarriageStudy2014(1).pdf
Wade, L. “The Trouble with American Views of Female Genital Cutting.” Sociological Images. (2015).
Critique of American discourse on Female Genital Cutting, which suggests that it has alienated the women it seeks to support. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Global_Women's_Issues_-_Women_in_the_World_Today/1.12%3A_Rights_of_the_Girl_Child.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
1. Define sociological theory.
2. Differentiate between various theoretical frameworks.
3. Describe the three waves of feminism.
01: Introduction
Sociology’s roots are in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, from where founding fathers Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel hail. Sociology waxed and waned in popularity outside of the U.S. over its short history. Today, sociology has become a United States-centered scientific discipline with most sociologists living in the U.S.. There is significant sociological work being done in various countries of the world, but most of the 14,000 members of the American Sociological Association (the world’s largest professional sociology organization) live in the U.S
Sociology is a relatively new discipline in comparison to chemistry, math, biology, philosophy and other disciplines that trace back thousands of years. Sociology began as an intellectual/philosophical effort by a French man named Auguste Comte who coined the term “Sociology.” Sociology is the science of society and of human behavior when influenced by society.
Social integration is the degree to which people are connected to their social groups. Emile Durkheim suggested that religion was a powerful source of social solidarity, or unity in society, because it reinforced collective bonds and shared moral values. However, since the power of the collective over the individual could also take secular forms (e.g., the workplace, family, political groups, or schools), he recognized that traditional religious beliefs were not the only source of social stability.
1.02: Sociological Imagination
The sociological imagination by C. Wright Mills provides a framework for understanding our social world that far surpasses any common sense notion we might derive from our limited social experiences. Mills (1916-1962) was a contemporary sociologist who brought tremendous insight into the daily lives of society’s members. Mills stated: “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”1
The sociological imagination allows one to make the connection between personal challenges and larger social issues. Mills identified “troubles” (personal challenges) and “issues” (larger social challenges), also known as biography, and history, respectively. Mills’ conceptualization of the sociological imagination allows individuals to see the relationships between events in their personal lives, biography, and events in their society, history. In other words, this mindset provides the ability for individuals to realize the relationship between personal experiences and the larger society.
Mills taught we live much of our lives on the personal level, while much of society happens at the larger social level. Without a knowledge of the larger social and personal levels of social experience, we live in what Mills called a false social consciousness which is an ignorance of social facts and the larger social picture.
Personal troubles are private problems experienced within the character of the individual and the range of their immediate relation to others. Mills identified the fact that we function in our personal lives as actors and actresses who make choices about our friends, family, groups, work, school, and other issues within our control. We have a degree of influence in the outcome of matters within the personal level. A college student who parties 4 nights out of 7, who rarely attends class, and who never does his homework has a personal trouble that interferes with his odds of success in college. However, when 50% of all college students in the United States never graduate, we label it as being a larger social issue.
Larger social issues are those that lie beyond one’s personal control and the range of one’s inner life. These pertain to society’s organizations and processes; further, these are rooted in society rather than in the individual. Nationwide students come to college as freshmen ill-prepared to understand the rigors of college life. They haven’t often been challenged enough in high school to make the necessary adjustments required to succeed as college students. Nationwide, the average teenager text messages, surfs the Net, plays video or online games, hangs out at the mall, watches TV and movies, spends hours each day with friends, and works at least part-time. Where and when would he or she get experience focusing attention on college studies and the rigorous self-discipline required to transition into college credits, a quarter or a semester, study, papers, projects, field trips, group work, or test taking?
The real power of the sociological imagination is found in how we learn to distinguish between the personal and social levels in our own lives. Once we do, we can make personal choices that serve us best, given the larger social forces that we face.
1 Mills, C. W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination page ii; Oxford U. Press. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/01%3A_Introduction/1.01%3A_What_is_Sociology.txt |
A sociological theory is a set of interrelated concepts used to describe, explain, and predict how society and its parts are related to each other. Let’s use eyeglasses as a metaphor to illustrate the usefulness of a theory. Glasses can serve to magnify, enlarge, clarify, or expand our view of the thing we are looking at. You can even have multiple pairs of glasses to help you see near or far or in sunlight or darkness. Unlike eyeglasses, you can’t see or touch a theory, but it is a framework to help you “see” the world sociologically. And we can use and change our “theory lenses” depending on what we’re trying to clarify, describe, or predict. “Some things need the lens of Conflict Theory, while others need a Structural Functionalist or Symbolic Interactionist lenses. Some social phenomena can be viewed using each of the three frameworks, although each will give you a slightly different view of the topic under investigation.”2
Conflict Theory
Conflict theory is a macro-level theory founded by Karl Marx. Marx was a witness to oppression perpetrated by society’s elite members against the masses of poor during the industrial revolution. Conflict Theory describes society as being defined by a struggle for dominance among social groups competing for scarce or valuable resources. Valuable resources in contemporary U.S. society include things like jobs, housing, safety, education, and health care. According to Conflict Theory, social actors are in a state of perpetual conflict competing for these valuable resources. Conflict Theory seeks to explain who might be benefitting and who might be exploited in a given social situation. Conflict Theory assumes that those who “have”, perpetually try to increase their wealth at the expense and suffering of those who “have-not.” It is a power struggle that is most often won by the wealthy elite.
In the context of gender, some conflict theorists argue that gender is best understood as men (as a large group) attempting to maintain (masculine) power and privilege to the detriment of women (femininity). How might Conflict Theory help us describe or explain sex inequality? The traditional gendered division of labor and the social inequality it produces contributes to unnecessary social conflict and can be seen in wage disparity, the metaphorical “glass ceiling,” and the bread-winner still being traditionally thought of as being male.
Functionalism
Functionalists focus on questions related to order and stability in society. According to functionalists, society is a system of interrelated, interdependent parts. The Functionalist Theory perspective claims that society is in a state of balance and kept that way through the function of society’s component parts. Society can be studied the same way that the human body can be studied: analyzing what specific systems are working or not working, diagnosing problems, and devising solutions to restore balance. The economy, religious involvement, friendship, schools, health care, peace, war, justice and injustice, population growth or decline, community, sexuality, marriage, and divorce are just a few of the evidences of functional processes in our society. To be clear, the functionalist approach does not condone functions or inequalities; rather the perspective identifies functions of such? For example, crime is considered to be a social problem, right? What are some functions of crime in contemporary society? Well, crime creates jobs. Police officers, detectives, social workers, judges, lawyers, insurance companies, self-defense companies, support groups, prison guards and staff, therapists, and burglar alarm manufacturers have jobs because we have crime. This is not a comprehensive list, of course, but it should serve as an example of the function crime is serving to create or maintain jobs.
Arguing that all parts (even the undesirable parts) contribute in some way the overall stability of the larger system has become the most controversial part of functionalist theory. Herbert Gans argued this point in a functionalist analysis of poverty. He asked, “Why does poverty exist?” in other words, he was attempting to explain the functions of poverty. He concluded poverty had at least fifteen functions. A few of those functions included:
1. Occupations (such as social workers or police officers) exist to serve the needs or to monitor the behavior of poor people. Therefore, poverty creates jobs.
2. Affluent people hire poor people for many time-consuming activities such as house cleaning, child care, and yard work and pay them lower wages to give them more time for more “important” things.
3. The poor buy goods others do not want, thereby prolonging their economic usefulness.
Gans concluded that poverty—even though it is perceived as problematic—remains in tact because it contributes to the stability of the overall system.
Functionalists maintain that for much of human history women’s reproductive role has dictated that their gender role be a domestic one. Given that women bear and nurse children, it makes sense for them to remain at home to rear them. Then, if women are already at home taking care of children, they will assume other domestic duties. Functionalist also argue women’s work is functional. Women reproduce society: by giving birth, socializing kids to accept traditional gender roles, and by providing others with affection and physical sustenance.
A Structural Functionalist view of gender inequality applies the division of labor to view predefined gender roles as complementary: women take care of the home while men provide for the family. Thus gender, like other social institutions, contributes to the stability of society as a whole. While functionalist theory was the dominant theory used to describe gender roles and gender inequality in the early to mid-1900s, the theory falls short in explaining why or how gender roles and inequality are maintained. With widespread social protest and activism in the 1960s (Civil Rights, campus unrest, women’s movements) functionalism was unable to explain or keep up with the progressive, unfolding events.
Symbolic Interactionism
In contrast to Functionalists (who ask how parts of society contribute to the overall stability of the larger system) and conflict theorists (who ask who is benefitting from a particular social arrangement) symbolic interactionists focus on how people make sense of the world, how people interpret what they and others are doing, and how they influence and are influenced by others. A symbol is any kind of physical phenomenon—such as a word, an object, or a feeling—to which people assign a label, a name, a meaning, or a value. According to symbolic interactionists, these symbols play a central role in our ability to interact with one another. Think about it: Have you ever tried communicating with someone who does not speak the same language as you? What do we (almost instinctively) do? That’s right, we almost always begin relying on non-verbal commination such as hand gestures, body language, etc. It becomes an impromptu game of charades! Consider some other non-verbal ways we communicate: A ring is just a ring, but if one wear’s a ring on the left “ring finger” we interpret that person is married. And usually we assume that person is married to someone of the opposite sex. That means that ring that was “just a ring” became a symbol of marital status and sexual orientation based on where it is worn. That’s a lot of information gathered from one little piece of jewelry.
Symbolic Interactionism claims that society is composed of ever-present interactions among individuals who share symbols and their meanings. Symbolic interactionists argue people must share a symbol system if they are to communicate with one another (verbally or non-verbally). Without mutual understanding, interactions would be confusing. This is a very useful theory for understanding other people, improving communication, and in understanding cross-cultural relations. Symbolic interactionist theories of gender focus on gender roles, gender expectations, and gender values. Symbolic interactionist theories of gender inequality focus on how inequality is perpetuated by the transmission of traditional cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity from generation to generation. Learning these definitions influences people's expectations about the statuses that women and men are capable of occupying and the roles they are capable of performing.
Feminist Theory
Feminist theory acknowledges the significance of both nature and nurture in the attainment of gender. However, because gender socialization begins even before birth (choosing names, buying baby clothes, decorating the nursery) drawing a line between the two can be difficult. While gender is socially constructed and learned and produced through social learning, the fact remains that gender is largely assigned to people based on their biological sex category and often justified using biological components like hormones.
Feminist theory is a theoretical perspective that is couched primarily in Conflict Theory assumptions, but has added the dimension of sex or gender to the study of society. Feminist theorists are interested in the inequalities in opportunities between men and women. To be clear, males are not always the beneficiaries of gender inequality. For example, think for a moment about how females might benefit from current gender roles in the form of gender expression, itself. Women are socially permitted to wear just about anything with very little to no social repercussions. Tube tops, crop tops, spaghetti tops, tank tops, t-shirts (form-fitting or loose), sweaters, sweatshirts, v-necks, scoop necks, turtle necks, booty shorts, low-rise shorts, high-waist shorts, short shorts, Bermuda shorts, mid-length shorts, coolotts, skirts (short, midi, long), gowns, dresses (form-fitting, smock, shift), high-heels, sandals, sneakers, slip- ons, wedges, knee-high boots, booties, whatever we want! And let’s not get started on the possibilities for self-expression through make-up, hair, or nails. Now, think for a moment what males are expected to wear to represent their masculinity in society. Masculinity has become a much more confining, restricting gender representation than femininity. Not to say the feminine ideal is easier to achieve, but there is much more room for self-expression within the structure of femininity than in the structure of masculinity. Unless a couple of gals want to play a game of shirts v. skins, that would still be a masculine form of expression and gender representation.
Before the feminist perspective and through the mid 1900s, sociology was largely the male study of male society. Most sociological studies had been conducted by men and used male subjects, even though findings were generalized to all people. When women were studied, their behaviors and attitudes were analyzed in terms of a male standard of normalcy.
Intersectional Theory
Intersectional approaches arose from feminist scholarship, which recognized that there were important differences among women and men rather than simply between them. One critique intersectional theory offers of others theories is that others typically only explore one variable at a time. Feminist scholars argued that gender, race and class are interconnected as “intersecting oppressions.”3 Race, class and gender, have been the traditional triumvirate of intersectional studies, but we took a broad approach and also included studies that examine the intersections of any social statuses including sexuality, religion, ethnicity, and age. Intersectionality is practiced in a variety of ways by sociologists, but Patricia Hill Collins is largely considered the foremost theorist of intersectionality within sociology.
Collins’ intersectional work begins with her own experiences as an African American female. Collins argues Black Feminism creates and validates knowledge in ways that are very different form the American educational system, which has been historically dominated by elite White men. Because Black women were long denied access to formal academic pursuits, their collective knowledge is less likely to be found in scholarly texts. Collins encourages us to find this knowledge elsewhere: poetry, music, oral histories, etc. Collins states, and this may be obvious for some readers, that in order to produce Black feminist theory, one would have to be a Black feminist. But she also stresses that does not mean that those of us who are not Black feminists cannot learn from these ideas. While the study of Black feminist thought puts Black women at the center of analysis of study, intersectionality is a broader and more general theoretical approach that can be used to examine any group or community by placing them at the center of study.
2 Hammond, R. and Cheney, P, et all. Introduction to Sociology. 2012. Social Theories. Page 1.
3 | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/01%3A_Introduction/1.03%3A_Sociological_Theory.txt |
The first wave of feminism took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emerging out of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. While the major goal of this movement was to win women the right to vote, these women (and men) were addressing numerous dimensions of gender inequality, it just became popularized when these activists fought the right to vote. By gaining political power with the right to vote, the leaders of this movement realized they could then gain political momentum concerning issues such as sexual, reproductive, and economic matters. Women had been systematically excluded from history-making because men had the power to define what history was and what (and whom) was important. While often taken for granted, this first wave is largely credited for fueling the feminist fire.4 The first wave of feminism is credited with the development of the feminist consciousness: a recognition by women that they were treated unequally as a group and that their subordination is socially created and maintained by a system that can be replaced through collective action.
In 1920 women won the right to vote. However, once the vote was won, women did not turn out to the polls as often as men, and when they went, they often voted similarly to men (maybe as they had been told to by men). Many women withdrew from the movement, believing that once the vote was won, there was no more work to do. Young women especially neglected to see the necessity of the movement by depicting feminists as lonely, unmarried women who unnecessarily antagonized and provoked men.
Coming off the heels of World War II, the second wave of feminism focused on the workplace, sexuality, family, and reproductive rights.5 Betty Freidan’s book The Feminine Mystique is credited with stoking the fire for the second wave. Freidan exposed a voice of unhappiness and boredom of white, educated, middle-class housewives. She even referred to the suburbs as “comfortable concentration camps.” She named the depression, loneliness, and empty feeling experienced by so many housewives as “the problem that has no name.” Freidan reveled that this was not an individual problem, but rather it was a social problem. Freidan and 27 others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. It has since become the largest feminist grassroots organization in the U.S., with hundreds of chapters in all 50 states and hundreds of thousands of contributing members and supporters, focusing on a broad range of women’s rights issues, including economic justice, pay equity, racial discrimination, women’s health and body image, women with disabilities, reproductive rights and justice, family law, marriage and family formation rights of same-sex couples, representation of women in the media, and global feminist issues.
The second wave began in the 1960s and continued into the 90s. Prior to the spark of the second wave of feminism, it was largely perceived that women had met their equality goals. This wave unfolded in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of a variety of minority groups. Much of the movement was focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing social equality regardless of sex. While the first wave of feminism was largely driven by middle class, Western, cisgender, white women, the second wave of feminism drew in women of color and developing nations, seeking solidarity, claiming, “Women's struggle is class struggle.” However, the feminists group at that time attracted mainly women who felt a personal sting of gender discrimination, including many lesbians. An eventual split between homo- and heterosexual activists resulted after the heterosexual feminists largely felt the lesbian presence would hurt the movement by devaluing or delegitimizing it.
The third wave of feminism began in the mid-90's, and in this phase many constructs were destabilized, including the notions of body, gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity.6 There are three major themes in the third wave of feminism:
1. there is a greater focus on women’s issues in less developed nations;
2. criticizing values that dominate work and society, such as challenging competition, toughness, and independence as ideal qualities (traditionally thought of as “male” qualities) and arguing to replace them with cooperation, connection, and interdependence as being ideal qualities; and
3. there has been an emphasis placed on women’s sexual pleasure.
There has been debate whether or not we are experiencing a fourth wave of feminism. Some contest the fourth wave can be seen in terms of participants’ rising concern with intersectionality, whereby women’s suppression can only fully be understood in a context of the marginalization of other groups and genders. In other words, feminism is part of a larger consciousness of oppression along with racism, ageism, classism, abelism, and sexual orientation.
4 Bailey, C. (1997). Making waves and drawing lines: The politics of defining the vicissitudes of feminism. Hypatia, 12(3), 17-28.
5 Ibid
6 Snyder, R. (2008). What Is Third‐Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay. Signs, 34(1), 175-196. doi:10.1086/588436 | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/01%3A_Introduction/1.04%3A_Waves_of_Feminism.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
1. Define sex and gender.
2. Differentiate between sex and gender.
3. Explore cultural variations of sex and gender.
02: Sex and Gender- What's the Difference
Did that subtitle catch your attention? Good! But in this section we won’t be discussing intercourse, or sexual activity; rather, we’ll be talking about sex ( as a biological category) and gender. People often use the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangeably; however, these terms are two separate entities. Sex is one’s biological classification and characteristics as male or female.7 A person’s sex is determined as soon as the sperm reaches the egg. Every egg is an X chromosome, and sperm can be either X or Y chromosome. Therefore, if an X sperm reaches the egg, the individual will have XX chromosomes (female), and if a Y sperm reaches the egg, the individual will have XY chromosomes (male). The term “sex” refers to biology and should be used when biological distinctions are emphasized. For example, “There are sex differences in hormone production”.
The main differences between sexes are reproductive body parts, which develop in reaction to hormone levels introduced when the embryo is only about nine weeks. At this point in the pregnancy, the embryo will develop the gonads, or reproductive glands. They are the tiny beginnings of either testes or ovaries. However, hormonal anomalies can (and do) occur during those early stages of development. These anomalies can result in external genitalia not being easily discernable as either male or female. In these cases, the individual will likely be identified as intersexed.
Males and females have far more in common than they have differences. For example, think about our organs, hair, skin, limbs, nervous systems, endocrine systems, etc. The similarities in these things far outweigh the differences in males and females. However, we pay a lot of social attention to the differences between sexes, often even looking to those physiological differences to explain behavioral differences.
Gender, on the other hand, serves as a cultural indicator of a person’s personal and social identity.8 Gender, for the individual, starts with sex assignment, and sex is assigned on the basis of the observable genitalia at birth. In other words, sex is nature, and gender is nurture. Sex is predetermined, and gender is learned through socialization. Gender is something we do.9 Therefore, gender is a psychologically ingrained social construct that actively surfaces in everyday human interaction and behaviors. We learn masculinity; we learn femininity. Then we do masculinity, and we do femininity. And how about all those behaviors we don’t describe as either strictly masculine or feminine? Enter androgyny! Androgynous behaviors are all behaviors that do not fit neatly into our constructions of masculine or feminine. Therefore, our behaviors can be described as masculine, feminine, or androgynous. And just like walking or talking are learned behaviors, so are our interpretations of labeling our behaviors as masculine, feminine, or androgynous.
Gender refers to the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex. Behavior that is compatible with cultural expectations is referred to as gender-normative; behaviors that are viewed as incompatible with these expectations constitute gender non-conformity.10 Gender expression is the presentation of an individual, including physical appearance, clothing choice and accessories, and behaviors that express aspects of gender identity or role. Gender expression may or may not conform to a person’s gender identity. Gender identity refers to one’s sense of oneself as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or transgender.11 Gender dysphoria refers to discomfort or distress that is associated with a discrepancy between a person's gender identity and that person's sex assigned at birth.12 Transgenderis an umbrella term used to describe the full range of people whose gender identity and/or gender role do not conform to what is typically associated with their sex assigned at birth.13
Gender is shaped through our learning process, and is influenced by all kinds of things outside of the individual, such as family, friends, television, social media, teachers, politicians, legislation, institutions, and culture. Western gender conceptualization reflects a bipolar construction, recognizing two major gender categories (masculinity and femininity) as being dominant. Western construction of gender also reinforces the idea that males are masculine while females are feminine, and often this idea is taken further with the western interpretation of gender suggesting people are born a specific gender. Constricting? Yes. Over-simplified? Absolutely. Completely inaccurate? You betcha’! This interpretation of gender is narrowly fashioned by a traditional European perpesctive. Take, for instance, many of the Plains Indians’ interpretation of gender wherein people can be two-spirited, known as berdache.14 Berdache was not recognized as a third category; instead, the term was used to describe the continuum of human behavior that didn’t fit neatly into European notions of what it meant to be male or female. In fact, the term berdache has a history deflecting its Eurocentric origins and ethnocentrism of most 17th, 18th, and 19th century European and European American observers of Native American cultures.
Identical male twins, Bruce and Brian Reimer, were born in 1963 to parents Janet and Ron Reimer. During a routine circumcision, Bruce had his penis nearly burned off. Dr. John Money was a psychologist, sexologist, and author, specializing in research into sexual identity and biology of gender. Janet Reimer wrote to Dr. John Money seeking help for her son who she feared would not have a sex or gender identity because his genitalia had been mutilated. At the strong encouragement of Dr. Money, the boy’s parents opted for sex reassignment surgery for their 17-month-old baby. The boy was sexually reassigned to a female with lifelong hormone therapy. Dr. Money declared the surgery and reassignment a total success in 1973. From a young age, Bruce (who had been renamed Brenda) demonstrated behaviors indicating she did not want to wear dresses, play with dolls, or help with traditionally feminine household chores. At age 12 (many years earlier) Brenda began experiencing severe emotional problems because, even though she was receiving estrogen regularly, she appeared very masculine and was the brunt of a lot of joking and bullying in school and from her peers. At 14 years old, the child refused any more hormone therapy or genital surgeries, and her father finally told her the truth about her medical history. She was reportedly relieved and started male hormone therapy, underwent genital reconstruction surgery to create a penis, and had a mastectomy, and changed his name to David. Researchers concluded a person could be “successfully” socialized as a female because essentially his brain “knew otherwise.”
In addition to his difficult lifelong relationship with his parents and peers and his own identity, Reimer had to deal with unemployment and the death of his brother Brian from an overdose of antidepressants in 2002. In 2004, his wife Jane told him she wanted to separate. On the morning of May 4, 2004, Reimer drove to a grocery store's parking lot and took his own life by shooting himself in the head with a sawed- off shotgun. He was 38 years old.
David Reimer taught us a lot about sex category and gender attainment. While gender is learned through a socialization process, we cannot socialize or train someone into their sex identity. In other words, a boy can be socialized to “act like a girl” or a girl can be socialized to “act like a boy,” but you cannot socialize someone into believing they are the opposite sex. He also taught us our brains develop as being either male or female. And most often time, our genital development with align with our brain’s development, but sometimes not. David Reimer reported that from a young age he “just knew” he wasn’t a girl, even though he never knew he had been born a male.
Testosterone and Gender
Males and females produce the same hormones, but in different amounts. Females secrete more estrogen and males secrete more testosterone. Studies conducted have, in fact, concluded more testosterone does lead to more aggressive behavior. However most of these studies have been done in animals, wherein the animal will be injected with high levels of testosterone and aggressive behavior will ensue. Many people feel these findings are indicative of male behaviors, sometimes been excusing overly aggressive behavior with excuses like, “Boys will be boys.” But maybe a more appropriate response would be “boys will be a\$\$h*les” when we see overly aggressive behavior. Because people need to be cautious when interpreting results from the previously mentioned studies, as there is tremendous variation in behavior among animal species.
In research in human, higher levels of testosterone have been linked to higher levels of edginess, competitiveness, and anger—in females and males. Also, hormone levels fluctuate throughout the day and are influenced by environment. Think about it: What do you think your hormone levels look like when you’re about to jump out of a plane versus sitting on the couch watching TV? Therefore, biology itself is influenced and affected by environment. The myth that testosterone alone affects men’s behavior has been debunked.
In addition, hormones do not dictate behavior. Hormones may affect mood, but they do not dictate behavior. Consider a time when you felt like you were unable to demonstrate your desired behaviors because of the social context in which you were engaged. Maybe you were in a classroom or a workplace or whatever, and when you were feeling aggressive, upset, or angry you were able to control your emotions and behaviors because of the social context. So while hormones were affecting mood, they did not dictate your behavior. You were able to control your behavior because of the setting you were in. Therefore, behavior is highly governed, not by hormone, but by the situation or context in which it occurs.
Further, research indicates women can be just as aggressive as men when they’re either rewarded for their behaviors (athletes) or when they think it is safe to do so while avoiding social sanctions. Think about people like Ronda Rousey, Serena Williams, Hillary Clinton, Pink, or Chyna. All of these women have in common being rewarded for what have traditionally been described as masculine behaviors. Is there something wrong with them? No. Are they biologically less female than other females? No.
Women, Hormones, and Behaviors
Jokes about women’s hormone levels are old ones. Seriously, very old. Like, we need some new material. How are people even still laughing at PMS jokes? I don’t know, but women’s hormone levels (especially testosterone) do not fluctuate as much as men’s throughout the day. I’m going to say that again to make sure you really read that last sentence. Women’s hormone levels (especially testosterone) do not fluctuate as much as men’s throughout the day. Rather female hormone production is influenced by the monthly reproductive cycles as well as the cessation of the reproductive capacity (menopause) during the life course. So, really, instead of accusing women of getting crazy once a month, women could accuse men of getting crazy every day! No, no, I’m kidding, and that is not the kind of equality sociologists are fighting for.
Both girls and boys learn negative attitudes toward menstruation at early ages. These negative beliefs at influence women’s experiences with PMS symptoms. Meaning, if women are taught PMS id horrible, women may expect the horridness, and then produce behaviors reflective of that horridness. While many women report mood wings, research shows that negative chance in mood as well as physical changes mat nave more to do with stressful external events than with the phase of PMS. So, women might be reacting to PMS and excusing our sometimes horrid behavior by blaming it on this occurring phase. Kind of like that whole “boys will be boys” thing, huh?
In studies where both men and women participated, men were equally likely to express mood swings, problems at work, and physical discomfort. Men are actually subject to a daily hormone cycle in which testosterone levels peak at about 4am and are lowest at 8pm. “When people say women can’t be trusted because they cycle every month, my response is that men cycle every day, so they should only be allowed to negotiate peace treaties in the evening.” -- June Reinisch.
7 Young, R. (20090401). Sex/Gender. AMA Manual of Style. Retrieved 17 Oct. 2016, from
http://www.amamanualofstyle.com/view /10.1093/jama/9780195176339.001.0001/med-9780195176339-div2-350.
8 Ibid
9 Doing Gender. Candace West; Don H. Zimmerman. Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 125-151.
10 American Psychological Association. (2012). Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual
Clients. American Psychologist, 67(1), 10–42. doi: 10.1037/a0024659
11 Ibid
12 American Psychological Association & National Association of School Psychologists. (2015). Resolution on gender and
sexual orientation diversity in children and adolescents in schools. Retrieved from
http://www.apa.org/about/policy/orie...diversity.aspx
13 American Psychological Association. (2015). Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Transgender and Gender
Nonconforming People. American Psychologist, 70(9), 832-864.
14 Estrada, Gabriel S. 2011. "Two Spirits, Nádleeh, and LGBTQ2 Navajo Gaze." American Indian Culture and Research
Journal
35(4):167-190. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/02%3A_Sex_and_Gender-_What's_the_Difference/2.01%3A_Let%27s_talk_about_sex.txt |
In the mid-1900s anthropologist Margaret Mead observed gender in three tribes uninfluenced by Westernized culture and tradition: Arapesh, Mundugamor, and Tchambuli. Her observations of gender behaviors in these tribes created a national discussion which lead many to reconsider the traditional and established sex=gender assumption. In these tribes she found the following:
• Arapesh: both men and women displayed what we typically call the feminine traits of sensitivity, cooperation, and low levels of aggression.
• Mundugamor: both men and women were insensitive, uncooperative, and very aggressive. These were typical masculine traits at the time.
• Tchambuli: women were aggressive, rational, and capable and were also socially dominant. Men were passive, assuming artistic and leisure roles.
In her observations, gender definitions were varied and unique among peoples less influenced by Westernized cultures. She reached the conclusion that tradition (culture) was the stronger social force over biology in determining one’s gendered behavioral output, as well as their interpretations and valuing of gender. Mead’s work and her public influence helped to establish the belief that biology is only a part of the sex and gender question. Therefore, Mead established that $\text { sex} \neq \text {gender}$. She discovered gender and social constructs of gender were really very plastic. Not too shabby for a woman in the mid-1900s who began her research merely trying to explore and question traditional gender roles!
2.03: Cultural Diversity and Gender Norms
Figure \(2.3.1\): Mojave group. Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
There is some variation in cultural gender-role standards both within the United States and across cultures; however, within the United States, for example, standards vary depending on ethnicity, age, education, and occupation. These variables will be discussed more fully in coming chapters. But now that we’ve explored the definitions and constructions of sex and gender, let’s more closely examine some traditional gendered norms from cultures that don’t totally reflect Eurocentric, Westernized ways of doing gender.
Mojave Native Americans
First we’ll talk about the Mojave in North America. This culture taught and reinforced parallel institutional structures for males and females.15 For example, the Mojave husbands and wives worked together to farm their fields. Men planted and watered the crops, and women harvested them. Both sexes took part in storytelling, music and artwork, and traditional medicine.16
In Mohave society, pregnant women believed they had dreams predicting the anatomic sex of their children. These dreams also sometimes included hints of their child’s future gender variant status. A boy who “acted strangely” before he participated in the boy’s puberty ceremonies in the Mohave tribe would be considered for the transvestite ceremony. The ceremony itself was meant to surprise the boy. Other nearby settlements would receive word to come and watch. A circle of onlookers would sing special songs. If the boy danced like a woman, it confirmed his status as an alyha. He was then taken to a river to bathe, and was given a skirt to wear. The ceremony would permanently change his gender status within the tribe. He then took up a female name. The alyha would imitate many aspects of female life, including menstruation, puberty observations, pregnancy, and birth. The alyha were considered great healers, especially in curing sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis.
Oaxaca, Mexico
Figure \(2.3.2\) Muxe: Mexican men who take on the traditional dress and gender roles of Mexican women within their communities.
The Juchitán in Oaxaca, Mexico, practice gender norms that do not comply with traditional Western practices. For example, the women traditionally run businesses, wear colorfully bold traditional clothing, and hold their heads firmly high. The women are regarded as being empowered and the tolerance of homosexuality and transgender individuals has been part of their cultural tradition. men who take on the traditional roles of women, referred to as “Muxes,” are not only accepted, but cherished as symbols of good luck. This community exemplifies an alternative gender system unlike the binary gender categories that have been established throughout many parts of the world.
Indian Hijras
Figure \(2.3.4\) Hijra
In Indian Hindu culture, when compared to the native North Americans, the gender system is essentially binary, but the ideas themselves are quite different from Western thoughts. These ideas often come from religious contexts. Some Hindu origin myths feature androgynous or hermaphroditic ancestors. Ancient poets often showed this idea by presenting images with mixed physical attributes between the two sexes. These themes still exist in the culture, and are even still institutionalized. The most prominent group are the hijras.17 Hijras, today, are not seen either male or female, but rather are typically identified as “hijra.” “Being a hijra means making a commitment that gives social support and some economic security, as well as a cultural meaning, linking them to the larger world.”18
Brazil
As in Indian culture, Brazilian culture does follow a gender binary, just not the traditional western one. Rather than men and women, certain areas of Brazil have men and not-men. Men are masculine, and anyone who displays feminine qualities falls under the category of “not-man.” This concept is a result of sexual penetration as the deciding factor of gender. Any one who is penetrated is not-male. Everyone else, regardless of sexual preference, remains a male in Brazilian society.19
The most commonly discussed group of people when discussing gender in Brazil are the travestí, or transgender prostitutes. Unlike in native North America and India, the existence of the travestí is not from a religious context. It is an individual’s choice to become a travestí. Born as males, they go to extensive measures to try to appear female. The travestí recognize they are not female, and that they cannot ever become female. Instead, their culture is based on this man/not-man premise.20
Thailand
Figure \(2.3.5\) A Kathoey. Photo Source: https://maytermthailand.org/2015/04/27/the- third-gender-in-thailand-kathoey/
In Thailand the term kathoey is used by both males and females and allows and refers to cross-dressing and adopting masculine and feminine identities opposite their assigned birth gender. Up until the 1970s cross-dressing men and women could all come under the term kathoey, however the term has been dropped for the cross-dressing masculine females who are now referred to as tom.21 As a result of the shifts, kathoey today is most commonly understood as a male transgender category, and these people are now sometimes referred to as “lady-boys.” Kathoey is derived from the Buddhist myth that describes three original human sex/genders, male, female, and a biological hermaphrodite or kathoey.22 Kathoey is not defined as merely being a variant between male or female but as an independently existing third sex.
Nigeria
The Nigerian Yoruba social life and gender roles do not duplicate those found in the West. Instead of focusing on gender distinctions, this culture typically focuses on age distinctions. In addition, men who choose to wear women’s clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics will be labeled as “wife of the god,” as only women can be wives of mortal men.
Waria, Indonesia
Waria is a term used for the third gender in Indonesia outside of the masculine and feminine ideals in this Islamic nation. The waria are born male but live along a continuum of gender identity not constrained to the traditional Western interpretation of the masculinity. The term “waria” includes individuals who continue to identify as male but who imitate certain femi nine mannerisms, and can occasionally wear makeup, jewelry, and women’s clothing. Others identify so closely as female that they are able to pass as female in their daily interactions in society.
Sistergirls and Brotherboys, Australia
In Australia, indigenous transgendered people are known as "sistergirls" and "brotherboys". As in some other native cultures, there is evidence that transgender and intersex people were much more accepted in their society before colonization. Therefore, the Eurocentric tendencies that shaped Western gender ideals have also played a huge part in the contemporary view of the sistergirls and brotherboys in Australia today. For example, today there are more stigmas attached to these individuals. But through an increasing number of support groups specifically aimed at sistergirls and brotherboys, perhaps times will change again. If there’s anything we’ve learned from gender so far, it’s that it is constantly being constructed and re-constructed.
Mahu, Hawaii
In traditional Hawaiian culture, creative expression of gender and sexuality was celebrated as an authentic part of the human experience. Throughout Hawaiian history, “mahu” appear as individuals who identify their gender between male and female. A multiple gender tradition existed among the Kanaka Maoli indigenous people. The mahu could be biological males or females inhabiting a gender role somewhere between or encompassing both the masculine and feminine. Their social role is sacred as educators and conservators of ancient traditions and rituals. The arrival of Europeans and the colonization of Hawaii nearly eliminated the native culture, and today mahu face discrimination in a culture dominated by white Eurocentric ideology.
Suggested Articles for Further Reading:
Candace West; Don H. Zimmerman. (1987). Doing Gender. Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 125-151.
Patricia A. Adler, Steven J. Kless and Peter Adler. (1992). Socialization to Gender Roles: Popularity among Elementary School Boys and Girls. Sociology of Education. Vol. 65, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 169-187.
Suggested Films:
Middle Sexes: Refining He and She (2005)
Examines the diversity of human sexual and gender variance around the globe, with commentary by scientific experts and first-handaccounts of people who do not conform to a simple male/female binary.
Two Spirits (2009)
Filmmaker Lydia Nibley explores the cultural context behind a tragic and senseless murder. Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition -the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits. Through telling Fred's story, Nibley reminds us of the values that America's indigenous peoples have long embraced. - Written by Outfest
Half the Sky (2012)
This documentary—filmed in 10 countries with narrations from celebrities such as Olivia Wilde, Eva Mendes and Meg Ryan—tellsuplifting stories of women around the world who are fighting back against systemic oppression. The film presents gender equality as the unfinished business of the our time and highlights women who are working to improve everything from healthcare to education.
15 Hill, W. W. (1935). The status of the hermaphrodite and transvestite in Navaho culture. American Anthropologist, 37,
273-279.
16 Nanda, Serena. Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations. Waveland Press, 1999. Print. Pages 21-23
17 Nanda, Serena. Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations. Waveland Press, 1999. Print.pg. 27,28
18 Ibid
19 Kulick, D. "The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes." American Anthropologist 99.3 (1997): 574-85. Page
578
20 Ibid
21 Nanda, Serena. Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations. Waveland Press, 1999. Print. Page 73
22 Ibid | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/02%3A_Sex_and_Gender-_What's_the_Difference/2.02%3A_Gender_Views_Revisited.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
1. Define gender roles.
2. Compare and contrast traditional and contemporary gender roles.
3. Examine some effects of traditional and contemporary gender roles.
03: Know your Role An Exploration into Gender Roles
In Chapter 1, we learned that gender is achieved, rather than ascribed. We discussed gender is something we do rather than something we are. So, if gender is something we learn, how do we learn it? This can be achieved through gender socialization, or the shaping of individual behavior and perceptions in such a way that the individual conforms to socially prescribed expectations for males and females.23 In other words, our gender roles are socially proscribed expectations and attitudes assigned to and associated with one's biological sex. A gender role is a set of societal norms dictating the types of behaviors that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their actual or perceived sex.
Gender is so taken for granted, that we don’t often recognize our gendered behaviors. Since we do gender every day, it’s not something we challenge or question very often. Until, that is, someone or something challenges our assumptions and taken for granted positions on the topic. In fact, it’s so taken for granted, most people believe (and reinforce) the idea that gender is something we are born with, rather than something we create and recreate. Therefore, gender is a human production that exists only when people do it.24
Think about this for a moment: How many people do you know who want to know the sex of a fetus? Why? Does the parents knowing their baby’s sex affect the health of the baby? No. Does knowing the baby’s sex have any correlation with the happiness of the baby? No. Does knowing the baby’s sex before birth help improve its development? No. Then why? So we know what color to paint the nursery, of course! I mean, how could we possibly put a female baby in a blue nursery? That would be insanity!
According to a study conducted in 2001 by a team of doctors at Harvard Medical School in Boston with over 1,300 participants, about 58% of parents-to-be wanted to know the sex of the fetus before the birth.25 So sex is a pretty important variable for most parents-to-be. But why? So they can start planning, of course! Boy or girl, pink or blue? How should they decorate the nursery? What toys should they play with? What books should they read? Historically, and even today, a lot of the answers to these questions will be mostly shaped by the sex of the baby. Does the baby know its sex? Or that it’s in pink or blue? Of course not! So who cares? Many parents form gendered expectations for their child before it is even born, after determining the child's sex. The child thus arrives to gender-specific clothes, games, and even ambitions. And, enter gender socialization: Our primary caregivers will be the most influential in our gender socialization in our primary years (we’ll discuss other influences later on). While various socializing agents—parents, teachers, peers, movies, television, music, books, and religion—teach and reinforce gender roles throughout the lifespan, parents probably exert the greatest influence, especially on their very young offspring.
Figure \(3.1.1\). Bar Graph of “Parents Who Want to Know the Sex of Their Baby”
Adults perceive and treat female and male infants differently. Parents and guardians probably do this in response to their having been recipients of gender expectations as young children. Sociologists have found that in the U.S., traditionally, fathers teach boys how to fix and build things; mothers teach girls how to cook, sew, and keep house.26 Sound old-fashioned and out of date? I hope so! And certainly sociologists accept and acknowledge exceptions, but the truth is, today children still receive parental approval more often for conforming to gender expectations and adopting culturally accepted and conventional roles. Despite social revelations that girls are not too fragile to play sports and boys can benefit from learning to manage household responsibilities, we still find ourselves surrounded by limited gender expectations and persistent gender inequalities. Additional socializing agents, such as media, peers, siblings, etc, reinforce all of this. In other words, learning gender roles occurs within a social context, the values of the parents and society being passed along to the children. This results in children adopting a gender identity early in life, resulting in them also developing gender-role preferences.27 Gender identity is one’s concept of self as female, male, or neither. Gender-role preference is one’s preference for the culturally prescribed roles associated with gender identity.
Gender roles adopted during childhood normally continue into adulthood. People have certain presumptions about decision‐making, child‐rearing practices, financial responsibilities, and so forth. At work, people also have presumptions about power, the division of labor, and organizational structures. None of this is meant to imply that gender roles are good or bad; rather, this is an acknowledgement that they exist and shape our perceptions of reality. Gender roles are realities in almost everyone's life, but since they are not biologically determined, our “realities” surrounding gender can differ from generation to generation, from group to group, even from individual to individual.
Gendered social arrangements also dictate or create external means of control of how females and males should act, and they are often justified by religion and cultural morés. In Western culture, alternatives to our constructed gendered norms has largely been virtually unthinkable.28 While there is no “essential” gender for human beings, society and culture holds the individual responsible for reproducing the expected gendered norms assigned to them. The individual is expected to recreate the already prescribed gendered behaviors laid out for them, and, in turn, they themselves become the re- creators of what it means to be a women or a man in their society. “If we fail to do gender appropriately, we as individuals may be called to account (for our character, motives, and predispositions).”29
23 Hammond, Ron, Cheney, Paul. Introduction to Sociology.
24 Doing Gender. Candace West; Don H. Zimmerman. Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 125-151.
25 Shipp, T. D., Shipp, D. Z., Bromley, B., Sheahan, R., Cohen, A., Lieberman, E. and Benacerraf, B. (2004), What Factors Are Associated with Parents’ Desire To Know the Sex of Their Unborn Child?. Birth, 31: 272–279. doi:10.1111/j.0730- 7659.2004.00319.x
26 The Social Construction of Gender, Margaret L. Andersen and Dana Hysock, Thinking about Women, Allyn & Bacon, 2009
27 Ibid
28 Foucault, Michael. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. NY, New York. Pantheon.
29 Doing Gender. Candace West; Don H. Zimmerman. Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 146. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/03%3A_Know_your_Role_An_Exploration_into_Gender_Roles/3.01%3A_Gender_Socialization.txt |
Of the many presumed differences between the behaviors of males and females, some are real, some are found only inconsistently, and some are wholly mythical. Girls are more physically and neurologically advanced at birth. Boys have more mature muscular development but are more vulnerable to disease and hereditary anomalies. Girls excel early in verbal skills, but boys excel in visual-spatial and math skills. Boys’ superior mathematic abilities, however, reflect only a better grasp of geometry, which depends on visual-spatial abilities. In the early years, there are no major gender differences in sociability, conformity, achievement, self-esteem, or verbal hostility.
3.03: Piaget's and Kohlberg's Cognitive Developmental Theory (Psychology)
Piaget and Kohlberg studies the mental process children use to understand their observations and experiences. Children develop organizing categories called schemas. Sex is a very important schema for young children. Their interpretations of the world, of interactions, and of others are limited by their mental maturity. Early on children’s thinking tends to rely on simple (often visual) cues. Females and males look differently in Western culture. Think of how women and men often dress or are often represented in popular culture. What are some of the common characteristics of female/maleness on TV or in movies or children’s books? So children often rely on those “obvious” physical cues to differentiate between men and women.
Cognitive factors in children's understanding of gender and gender stereotypes may contribute to their acquisition of gender roles. Kohlberg's three-stage cognitive developmental theory of gender typing suggests that children begin by categorizing themselves as male or females with reinforcement from outsiders such parents, and then feel rewarded by behaving in gender-consistent ways from external means. 30 According to Kohlberg, children acquire gender roles after she/he has gained an understanding and awareness that her/his sex is permanent, constant, and will never change. Children who are highly gender schematic often have parents or caregivers, especially fathers, who give them a lot of positive and negative reinforcement when it comes to gender-related activities. This teaches children gender-type behaviors as encourages them to pay more attention to gender as a social organizing category. Gender constancy emerges somewhere between 3-7 years of age.31
30 Martin, C. L., Ruble, D. N., & Szkrykablo, J. (2002). Cognitive theories of early gender development. American
psychological association. 4(23), 544–557
31 Ruble DN, Martin C. Gender development. In: Damon W, Eisenberg N, editors. Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 3,
Social, emotional, and personality development. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley; 1998. pp. 933–1016.
3.04: Social Learning Theory (Sociology)
Social Learning Theory regards gender identity and roles as a set of behaviors that are learned from the environment. Environmental influences include parents, peers, images in the media, toys, books, etc. The main way that gender behaviors are learned is through the process of observational learning wherein children observe the people (or images of people) around them behaving in various ways. During these observations of behaviors, they’re internalizing what it means (culturally) to be a female or male in society. They observe these people and mimic their behaviors. As their skills for parroting behavior increase, so does their ability to imitate behavior at times later than when they first observed it. They are also able to observe sanctions assigned to those for acting out unexpected behaviors, and, in an attempt to avoid those same sanctions, will interpret some of those behaviors as being more or less appropriate for females or for males. Reinforcement is the process of encouraging or establishing a belief or pattern of behavior, especially by encouragement or reward. Punishment is the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense. A behavior followed by a reward will likely reoccur, whereas a behavior followed by a punishment will less likely reoccur. Reinforcement can come in many forms: smiles, verbal praise, gifts, etc. And Puishments also come in many forms, such as displeased looks, frowns, verbal sanctions, etc. Children who do gender “appropriately” often receive rewards in the forms of praise and are more likely to act it out again. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/03%3A_Know_your_Role_An_Exploration_into_Gender_Roles/3.02%3A_Gender_Differences_and_Theories_of_Development.txt |
The strongest influence on a child’s gender development often occurs in the family, with parents or guardians passing on, both overtly and covertly, to their children, their own beliefs about gender. One study indicates that parents have differential expectations of sons and daughters as early as 24 hours after birth.32 In addition, girls and boys are viewed and treated differently by their parents, particularly their fathers. Boys are thought to be stronger and are treated more roughly and played with more actively than girls as early as birth. As children get older, girls are typically protected more (physically and emotionally) and allowed less autonomy than boys, and girls are not expected to achieve as much in the areas of mathematics and careers as are boys.33
Further, research has indicated that many parents attempt to define gender for their sons in a manner that distances the sons from femininity. Emily Kane, professor of Sociology and author of The Gender Trap, found “the parental boundary maintenance work evident for sons represents a crucial obstacle limiting boys’ options, separating boys from girls, devaluing activities marked as feminine for both boys and girls, and thus bolstering gender inequality and hetero-normativity.”34 Parents provide messages regarding gender and what is acceptable for children’s gendered selves based on their sex category-- messages that are internalized by the developing child and translate into adolescence and adulthood. However, their sex role stereotypes will be well established early in their childhood.35
Books
Many influences outside of the family affect gender-role socialization. Male and female roles are portrayed in ways that might be described as being “gender-stereotypic” in television and many children's books. For example, males are more likely than females to be portrayed as aggressive, competent, rational, and powerful in the workforce. Females are more likely than males to be portrayed as involved primarily in housework or caring for children.
Typical themes for books aimed at boys include robots, dinosaurs, astronauts, vehicles, football and pirates; while girls are more often allowed princesses, fairies, make-up, flowers, butterflies, fashion, and cute animals. There’s nothing wrong with these things, but it is wrong when they are repeatedly presented as only for one gender (really, only for one sex since we promote constructed gender normativity for specific sex categories). Girls can like pirates and adventure, and boys can like cute animals and dressing up. Why tell them otherwise? What do we have to gain from telling kids what their personal interests should be based on their sex category and subsequent prescribed gender? These points will also be discussed further in the chapter “Language and Media.”
Television
Former Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson once said “All television is educational; the only question is: what is it teaching?”36 Children start watching television from a very early age, about 18 months.37 And television is perhaps the most influential form of media.38 Since very young children often have difficulty telling fantasy from reality, they are particularly susceptible to the portrayals of gender types on television, especially cartoons, which make up the majority of children's television viewing between the ages of two and eleven.39 Therefore, it can be assumed that children might use the portrayals of males and females in cartoon format as a model for performance of their own genders, in order to assimilate into the norms of their culture. Researchers coded and analyzed 175 episodes of 41 different cartoons, showing large discrepancies between prominence and portrayal of male and female characters.40 They noted that, compared to female characters, males were given much more prominence, appeared more frequently, and talked significantly more.
“Traditional gender roles, wherein men are encouraged to be decisive and to show leadership qualities while women are encouraged to be deferential and dependent, do not benefit anyone, particularly women. Traditional gender roles discourage the full range of expression and accomplishment. Children should be allowed to develop a sense of self in a gender-fair environment that encourages everyone to fully feel a part of society.”
– Susan D. Witt is Assistant Professor, School of Family and Consumer Sciences, The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio.
Toys
Parents and guardians are who most often provide children with toys. Meaning, rarely do very small children have any autonomy in what’s purchased and brought into the home. How could they, right? However this also results in parents choosing gender-specific (and gender-differentiated) toys and rewarding play behavior that is gender stereotyped.41 “A study of children's rooms has shown that girls' rooms have more pink, dolls, and manipulative toys; boys' rooms have more blue, sports equipment, tools, and vehicles.”42
Females are less likely to be leading characters on television, and male characters are over-represented in children's books. We have seen some shifts to more equal gender role representation between the sexes in shows in recent years.
Peers, Gender Roles, and Self-Esteem
Peers also serve as a significant influence on a child’s gender-role socialization. For example, children are likely to react when other children violate expected gender-role behaviors. In addition, boys are more likely to receive negative sanctions from peers for acting out “gender-bending” behaviors than are females. Think for a moment: What do we often call a little girl who likes to wear boys’ clothes? That’s right, a “tomboy.” But what are some of the names given to little boys who feel more confortable wearing feminine-looking clothes? In Dude: You’re A Fag C. J. Pascoe argues the "specter of the fag" has become a disciplinary mechanism for regulating boys and how the "fag discourse" is even more focused on gender than to sexuality.43 Reactions from peers, especially negative reactions, typically result in changes in behavior, particularly if the feedback is from a child of the same sex. This pattern of responsiveness reinforces traditional gender roles in children who might otherwise exercise more freedom in their gender expression.
Schools and Teachers
Teachers also treat girls and boys differently. Let’s make clear teachers are not bad people or people who should be blamed for reinforcing gender norms during the socialization process. Rather, they are just another piece to a huge puzzle! Due to the emphasis in school on typically feminine characteristics such as quietness, obedience, and passivity, girls tend to like school better and perform better than boys in the early grades. Even in preschool, boys receive more criticism from teachers, who often react to children in gender-stereotypic ways. The lack of public awareness of research findings, such as that in most areas of math, girls do as well as boys, may prevent parents and others from encouraging girls to excel in these areas. We will also be looking further into these points in the chapter “Gender and Schools.”
Western Tradition and Gender Roles
More often times than not, the “masculine” is treated as the default human experience by social norms. Masculine behaviors are typically rewarded over and above feminine ones. Because we often devalue qualities we construct and label as “feminine,” we see social reproductions such as men (in general) being paid better than women, enjoying more sexual and social freedom, and having other benefits that women do not by virtue of their socially prescribed gender. While there are variations across race, class, education, sexuality, religion, and other socio-economic measures, the human capabilities labeled as “masculine” still remain more valued than the human capabilities labeled as “feminine.”
In Western societies, gender power is held by White, highly educated, middle-class, able-bodied heterosexual men whose gender represents hegemonic masculinity – the ideal to which other masculinities must interact with, conform to, and challenge. It is not enforced through direct violence; instead, it exists as a cultural “script” that we’re taught throughout our socialization processes.
In his book Dude You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, sociologist C.J. Pascoe argues young working-class American boys enforce the masculine ideal by using jokes exemplified by the phrase, “Dude, you’re a fag.” Boys are called “fags” (a derogative and homophobic slur, at it’s best) not because they are homosexual, but when they engage in behavior considered to be “un-masculine”. This might include dancing, taking “too much” care with their appearance, being too expressive with their emotions, or being perceived as incompetent. So in this case, boys who are exhibiting behaviors labeled as “feminine” by Western culture become vulnerable to being harassed. This not only reinforces the ultra-constricting masculine ideal in boys, but it also reinforces the devaluing of anything labeled as “feminine” in the culture.
This leads us to another point: Because Western culture is largely indoctrinated with patriarchal ideals and traditions, femininity in Western culture is constructed to be inferior to masculinity. As a result, women often lack the same level of cultural, political, and economic power as men. However women are typically afforded more agency to resist their prescribed gender ideals than are men. Meaning, femininity and feminine roles have developed to include more variation in expression than has masculinity in recent decades. Men, then, typically endure harsher social punishments more often for exercising behaviors thought to be “feminine” by the culture than are women who exercise behaviors thought to be “masculine.” Women are also more socially permitted to actively challenge gender norms by refusing to let patriarchy define how they portray and reconstruct their femininity. However, this becomes a double-edged sword, because more often than not, some social problems will then be labeled as women’s problems. For example:
• Rejecting the double standard assigned to sexual behaviors for males and females
• Fighting rape culture
• Fighting sexual harassment
• Fighting for equal pay and permission to enter male-dominated fields
• Representation of women as sexual object in advertising and other forms of popular culture
• Bringing attention to the issue and combatting domestic violence
Gender Over the Life Span
Gender experiences will evolve over a person’s lifetime. Gender is therefore always in flux; it’s fluid. It changes as our likes/dislikes, morals, values, interpretations, and constructions change. We see this through generational and intergenerational changes within families, as social, legal, and technological changes influence social values on gender.
Suggested articles:
The Social Construction of Gender, Margaret L. Andersen and Dana Hysock, Thinking about Women, 2009
Suggested books:
Pascoe, C. J. (2012). Dude, you're a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press
Vincent, Norah. 2009. Self Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man. Penguin Publishing.
32 Rubin, J., Provenzano, F., & Luria, Z. (1974). The eye of the beholder: Parents' views on sex of newborns. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 44, 512-519.
33 Eccles, J. S., Jacobs, J. E., & Harold, R. D. (1990). Gender role stereotypes, expectancy effects, and parents' socialization of gender differences. Journal of Social Issues, 46, 186-201.
34 Spade, Joan. The Kaleidoscope of Gender. London: SAGE. pp. 177–184.
35 Arliss, L. P. (1991). Gender communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
36 Thompson, Teresa L. and Zebrinos, Eugenia. (1995). Gender Roles in Animated Cartoons: Has the Picture Changed In 20 Years? Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. 32: 651 - 674.
37 Thompson, Teresa L. and Zebrinos, Eugenia. (1997). Television Cartoons: Do Children
38 Lauer, R. H., & Lauer, J. C. (1994). Marriage and family: The quest for intimacy. Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark.
39 Witt, Susan D. (1997) Parental Influence on Children's Socialization to Gender Roles.
40 Thompson, Teresa L. and Zebrinos, Eugenia. (1997). Television Cartoons: Do Children
41 Etaugh, C. & Liss, M. B. (1992). Home, school, and playroom: Training grounds for adult gender roles. Sex Roles, 26, 129-147.
42 Witt, Susan D. 1997. Parental Influence on Children's Socialization to Gender Roles. Adolescence.
43 Pascoe, C. J. (2012). Dude, you're a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/03%3A_Know_your_Role_An_Exploration_into_Gender_Roles/3.05%3A_Parental_Behavior_towards_Girls_and_Boys.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
1. Define women as a minority.
2. Explore violent traditions disproportionately affecting women globally.
3. Explore forms of oppression affecting women in the United States.
04: Gender Inequality
Gender can be a primary division for different groups around the world. Societies often separate people by sex category and prescribe behaviors for them based on those sex categories; however, those behaviors (considered masculine or feminine) change depending on the culture in which they are practiced. No matter how gendered behaviors are labeled and assigned, the outcome remains the same: Women and men will have different access to power, prestige, and life chances. These divisions typically favor males, as most societies still assign males to be the standard and females to be a deviation from that standard. Consequently, sociologists identify females as being a minority group. This might seem odd, since women outnumber men. But a minority group is not determined by numbers of people making up a group. Rather, a minority group is a term referring to a category of people differentiated from the social majority; i.e., those who hold the majority of positions of social power in a society. A minority group is a group discriminated against based on characteristics such as sex, race, age, class, religion, sexual orientation, etc., regardless of their numbers. In this chapter, we’re going to focus on gender discrimination, and women’s struggle against gender discrimination around the world.
4.02: How did females become a Minority
Some studies indicate that in hunting and gathering societies, females and males were seen as equal.44 In addition, horticultural societies are thought to have had more egalitarian roles in their social structures.45 In these groups, women may have contributed to as much as 60 percent of the food supply. Yet today, sex and gender have become a basis for discrimination.
So, how did women become a minority? The main theory proposed to explain the origin of patriarchy— male dominated society—centers on human reproduction.46 In early human history, life was short. Among traditional hunter-gatherers, the average life expectancy at birth varied from 21 to 37 years, but longer than their “cavemen” ancestors who lived to about 25 years of age in the Paleolithic Era. Because life was short, if groups were to survive, women needed to give birth...a lot! An infant needed a nursing mother; without one it would die. This brought about severe social consequences for women. With children to carry, birth, nurse, and care for, women were not able to stay away from camp as long as men. When they did leave camp, they often had to move slower to accommodate the infants and children. When hunting large animals, men were able to leave for longer periods and move faster. Women around the world began taking on roles and tasks associates with the home and childcare.
This led to men being seen as dominant in tribes and groups around the world. While they were hunting and leaving their camps, they were also meeting people from other tribes. They communicated with them, traded with them, and waged war with them. Women’s work began to be devalued, as they were keeping fires going and caring for the home and children. They were not seen as risking their lives for the group. They were not bringing food for the tribe. Rather, they were preparing it. Their work was often dull, routine, and taken for granted. But without their work, their giving and sustaining the lives of the children, the groups would have died out.
These gender roles allowed for men to take control of society. Their sources of power included their items from trade, their triumphs in war, and the knowledge they gained from interacting with other groups. Women become second-class citizens, subject to men’s control and decisions.
44 Leacock, Eleanor. Myths of Male Dominance. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981
45 Collins, Randall, et all. “Toward an integrated Theory of Gender Stratification.” Sociological Perspectives, 36, 3, 1993:185-216.
46 Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford. 1986. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/04%3A_Gender_Inequality/4.01%3A_Females_as_a_Minority.txt |
Female Genital Mutilation
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is the traditional cutting, circumcision, and removal of most or all external genitalia from women with the end result of closing off some or part of the vagina until such time as the woman is married and cut open. Female genital mutilation is often performed in order to preserve the purity of females before marriage—a cultural ideal in some societies. In some traditions, there are religious underpinnings. In others, there are customs and rituals that have been passed down. In no way does the main body of any world religion condone or mandate this practice. Many countries where this takes place are predominantly Muslim; yet local traditions have corrupted the purer form of the religion and its beliefs. Female genital mutilation predates Islam.47
There are no medical or therapeutic benefits from female genital mutilation. Quite the contrary, there are many adverse medical consequences that result from it, ranging from pain, difficulty in childbirth, illness, and even death. Many human rights groups, the United Nations, scientists, advocates, the United States, the World Health Organization, and others have made aggressive efforts to effect the cessation of this practice worldwide, but progress has come very slowly. Part of the problem is that women often perform the ritual and carry on the tradition as it was perpetrated upon them.
Foot Binding
A small foot in China, no different from a tiny waist in Victorian England, once represented the height of female refinement. For families with marriageable daughters, foot size translated into its own form of currency and a means of achieving upward mobility. Tiny feet were a symbol of wealth, as women whose feet were bound were unable to work in the fields or on their feet for a long period of time. This economic symbol eventually translated into a sexually desirable symbol for possible suitors. The most desirable bride possessed a three-inch foot, known as a “golden lotus.” It was respectable to have four- inch feet—a silver lotus—but feet five inches or longer were seen as too large and named “iron lotuses.” The marriage prospects for a girl with feet five inches or larger were slim.
Do you have an iPhone? If so, hold it up. Your iPhone (doesn’t matter the model) is close to five inches long. So feet the size of your iPhone were seen as unattractive, minimizing a women’s opportunity for marriage to someone with high social worth. In fact, women with feet one inch shorter than that iPhone were still not allotted the same worth as women whose feet were two inches shorter than that phone.
How does foot binding work?
First, beginning at the age of two or three, her feet were plunged into hot water and her toenails clipped short. Then the feet were massaged and oiled before all the toes, except the big toe, were broken and bound flat against the sole, making a triangle shape. Next, her arch was strained as the foot was bent double. Finally, the feet were bound in place using a silk strip measuring ten feet long and two inches wide. These wrappings were briefly removed every two days to prevent blood and pus from infecting the foot. Sometimes “excess” flesh was cut away or encouraged to rot. The girls were forced to walk long distances in order to hasten the breaking of their arches. Over time the wrappings became tighter and the shoes smaller as the heel and sole were crushed together. After two years the process was complete, creating a deep cleft that could hold a coin in place. Once a foot had been crushed and bound, the shape could not be reversed without a woman undergoing the same pain all over again.48
The truth, no matter how unbelievable, is foot-binding was experienced and enforced by women. Though the practice is rejected in China today—the last shoe factory making lotus shoes did not close until 1999—it survived for a thousand years in part because of women’s social investment in the practice.
Child Marriage
Child marriage, defined as a formal marriage or informal union before age 18, is a reality for both boys and girls, although girls are disproportionately affected. Today, about a third of women aged 20-24 years old in the developing world are married as children. Children who are married before the age of 18 are more at risk for domestic violence, rape from their husbands, and even murder. Some 10 million girls a year are married off before the age of 18 across the world, according to a UNICEF report released this year. While the majority of child marriages in any singular region are performed in Sub-Sarah Africa, India is responsible for a disproportionate amount of these underage unions, as well.
Figure \(4.3.1\) Chart of “The Highest Rates of Child Marriage are Found in sub-Saharan Africa” graph depicting the highest rates of child marriage are found in sub-Saharan Africa.
Child marriages are illegal in India, and are punishable with a fine and two years in prison for anyone who performs, conducts, or negligently fails to prevent a child marriage. But this tradition is so ingrained in Indian culture that, especially in remote villages, child marriage is usually fully supported by the entire community, and it is rare for someone to inform the police so these marriages can be stopped.
In many communities girls are seen as an economic burden, and marriage transfers the responsibility to a girl’s new husband. Poverty and marriage expenses such as the dowry may lead a family to marry off a daughter at a young age to reduce these expenses.
Patriarchy, class, and caste also influence the norms and expectations around the role of women and girls in India. In many communities restrictive norms limit girls to the roles of daughter, wife, and mother. Girls are seen as the property of their father and then of their husband. Poor educational opportunities for girls, especially in rural areas, also increase girls’ vulnerability to child marriage.
Rape
Rape is another violent act of oppression disproportionately geared toward women. Rape is not the same as sex. Rape is violence, motivated primarily by men and primarily for power. Rape is dangerous and destructive and more likely to happen in the United States than in most other countries of the world. There are 195 countries in the world today. The U.S. typically is among the top five percent in terms of rape. Consecutive studies performed by the United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems confirm that South Africa is the most dangerous, crime-ridden nation on the planet in all crimes including rape.49
The United Nations reported, according to World Bank data, women aged 15 to 44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, motor accidents, war, or malaria.50
A 1997 study on the non-institutionalized, non-military population by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, which defines rape as forced penetration by the offender,51 found that 91% of reported rape victims are female and 9% are male.52
The majority of rapes in the United States go unreported.53 According to the American Medical Association (1995), sexual violence, and rape in particular, is considered the most under- reported violent crime.54 Some of the most common reasons given by victims for not reporting rape are fear of retaliation, shame, and blaming themselves for the occurrence of the act itself. Under-reporting affects the accuracy of this data.
Other Forms of Oppressions
Veiling
The mandatory covering of females’ bodies from head to toe has been opposed by some and applauded by others. Christians, Hindus, and many other religious groups have the practice of covering or veiling in their histories. Yet, over the last 30 years, fundamentalist Muslim nations and cultures have returned to their much more traditional way of life. Hijab is the Arabic word that means to cover or veil and has become more common in recent years (ħijāb or حجاب .(,Often Hijab means modest and private in the day-to-day interpretations of the practice. For some countries it is a personal choice, while for others it becomes a crime not to comply. The former Taliban punished such a crime with death (they also punished formal schooling of females and the use of makeup by death). Many women’s rights groups have brought public attention to this trend, not so much because the mandated covering of females is that oppressive, but because the veiling and covering is symbolic of the religious, traditional, and labor- forced patterns of oppression that have caused so many problems for women and continue to do so today.
Misogynistic Language
The public demeaning of women has been acceptable throughout various cultures because publicly demeaning members of society who are privately devalued and or considered flawed, fits the reality of most day-to-day interactions. Misogyny is the hatred of women often manifested as physical or verbal abuse and oppressive mistreatment of women. Verbal misogyny is unacceptable in public in most Western Nations today. With the ever-present technology found in cell phones, video cameras, and security devices, a person’s private and public misogynistic language can be easily recorded and shared. Can you think of any examples of public figures privately demeaning women, only to be shared in a public forum later?
Perhaps this fear of being found out as a woman-hater is not the ideal motivation for creating cultural values of respect and even admiration of women and men. As was mentioned above, most of the world historical leaders assumed that women were not as valuable as men. Women were treated as the totality of their reproductive role, as breeders of the species, rather than the valued human beings they are throughout the world today.
47 See Obermeyer, C.M. March 1999, Female Genital Surgeries: The Known and the Unknowable. Medical Anthropology Quaterly13, pages 79-106;p retrieved 5 December from http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/...q.1999.13.1.79
48 Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...na-millennium-
49 See http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-a...me-Trends-and- the-
Operations-of-Criminal-Justice-Systems.html
50 Retrieved 5 December, 2008 from http://www.un.org/women/endviolence/docs/VAW.pdf, Unite To End Violence Against Women, Feb. 2008
51 Retrieved 2016-11-19 from http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=317#terms_def
52 Retrieved 2016-11-19 from http://www.bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov. Pages 5 and 8.
53 "Reporting of Sexual Violence Incidents". National Institute of Justice. Retrieved June 7, 2016.
54 American Medical Association (1995) Sexual Assault in America. AMA. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/04%3A_Gender_Inequality/4.03%3A_Traditional_and_Contemporary_Violence_against_Women.txt |
Wage Disparity
Wage disparities between males and females are often justified as labor-based economic supply and demand. Statistics show past and current discrepancies in lower pay for women. Diane White, during a 1997 presentation to the United Nations General Assembly, stated that, “Today the wage disparity gap cost American women \$250,000 over the course of their lives.”55
Figure \(4.4.1\) Graph of "The Gender Pay Gap: Annual Earnings
Nationally, the median annual pay for a woman who holds a full-time, year- round job is \$40,742 while the median annual pay for a man who holds a full-time, year-round job is \$51,212.This means that, overall, women in the United States are paid 80 cents for every dollar paid to men, amounting to an annual gender wage gap of \$10,470.56
The wage gap can be even larger for women of color. For example, among women who hold full-time, year-round jobs in the United States, African American women are typically paid 63 cents and Latinas are paid just 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.57 Asian women are paid 85 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, although some ethnic subgroups of Asian women fare much worse.
Why the lower wages for women? The traditional definition of the reproductive roles of women as being “broken, diseased, or flawed” is part of the answer of wage disparity. The idea that reproductive roles interfere with the continuity of the workplace play heavily into wage disparity. The argument can be made that (outdated) traditional and economic factors have led to the existing patterns of paying women less for work requiring their same education, experience, and efforts compared to men.
Wage disparity will be discussed further in the Women and Work chapter.
Politics
Women have had to fight for equal treatment in American politics, from fighting for the right to vote to fighting for a seat at the political table. Women are still fighting to break the highest political glass ceiling of all--the presidency. While the United States has legislation mandating gender equality, gender discrimination occurs regularly in politics. It wasn’t until 1981 that the first female Supreme Court Justice (Sandra Day O’Connor) was appointed. She was later joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and has been succeeded by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Currently, three of the nine sitting justices are women. In 1996, President Bill Clinton appointed Madeline Albright to be the first female Secretary of State, a post later given to Condoleezza Rice by President George W. Bush in 2005, and later held by Hillary Clinton under President Obama.
Women in politics took center stage in the 2008 election. In the primary season, New York Senator Hillary Clinton ran against future President Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. Although Clinton was the twenty-fifth woman to run for U.S. President, she was the first female candidate to have a significant chance of winning the nomination of a major party and the general election. Comments about Clinton's body, cleavage, choice of pantsuit, and speculation about cosmetic surgery popped up over airwaves. Many wondered if the same fixation on a candidate's body and style would happen to a male candidate. Clinton would later become the first woman to win the nomination of a major party in 2016. Good news for women, right? Well, it wasn’t until 2016, and only one woman has accomplished this feat, making Hillary Clinton an exception rather than indicative of the bigger gender picture in American politics.
Despite the increasing presence of women in American politics, gender stereotypes still exist. Data from the 2006 American National Election Studies Pilot Study confirmed that both male and female voters, regardless of their political persuasions, expected men to perform better as politicians than women.
Out of the 100 senate seat positions, women occupy only 20. Making only 20% of the senate female. Women occupy only 104 of the 535 Congress seats. And women hold only 24% of statewide executive positions.
Education
In the United States most females and males complete some form of formal education. After high school, many go to college. Even though the U.S. population of 18 to 24-year-old males is higher than that of women, women are more likely to attend college based on percentages (57%).58
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in fall 2016, some 20.5 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities, constituting an increase of about 5.2 million since fall 2000.59 Females are expected to account for the majority of college students. About 11.7 million females will attend in Fall, 2016, compared with 8.8 million males. Also, more students are expected to attend full-time than part-time (an estimated 12.7 million, compared with about 7.9 million).60
About 7.2 million students will attend two-year institutions, and 13.3 million will attend four- year institutions in Fall, 2016. Some 17.5 million students are expected to enroll in undergraduate programs, and about 3.0 million will enroll in post-baccalaureate programs.
However, even while making the gains women have by entering college at higher rates than men, they have not achieved equality in the classroom. Today’s college classrooms still contain subtle, and not so subtle, gender biases. A large body of research shows that instructors.
1. Call on male students more frequently than female students;
2. are more likely to use male students’ names when calling upon students and in attributing ideas advanced in discussion;
3. ask male students more abstract questions and female students more factual questions; and
4. are less likely to elaborate upon points made by female students.61
There is, however, a notable gender segregation in degree choice, correlated with lower incomes for graduates with "feminine" degrees, such as education or nursing, and higher incomes for those with "masculine" degrees, such as engineering.62 The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—have traditionally had more males than females. For example, men dominate the tech industry, and for women, the numbers aren’t growing. A 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce found only one in seven engineers is female. Additionally, women have seen no employment growth in STEM jobs since 2000. The problem starts as early as grade school. Young girls are rarely encouraged to pursue math and science, which is problematic considering studies show a lack of belief in intellectual growth can actually inhibit it. In addition, there exists an unconscious bias that science and math are typically “male” fields, while humanities and arts are primarily “female” fields. These stereotypes further inhibit girls’ likelihood of cultivating an interest in math and science.
Transphobia
Between 0.3% and 0.5% of Americans— nearly 1 million people — identify as transgender, according to a recent report, Understanding Issues Facing Transgender Americans, written by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), the Transgender Law Center (TLC), NCTE and GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). Another widely cited study, from the Williams Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimated the number at about 700,000 Americans.
Transgender women of color are the most common targets of transphobic hate crimes. During the first two months of 2015, a transgender woman of color was murdered almost once a week, according to the Southern Policy Law Center.63 One man charged with attempted murder of a trans woman said the woman and her friend were deceiving him by dressing as women, even though they weren't even talking to him. Perhaps this reflects one reason trans women tend to be targeted: In addition to hating trans people in general, some men behave as if women are property. Transphobia and misogyny are a deadly combination.
Violence
On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men. Overall data suggests 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have been victims of (some form of) physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime. Further, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. 1 in 7 women and 1 in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime to the point in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed.
Intimate partner violence accounts for 15% of all violent crime. Physical, mental, and sexual and reproductive health effects have been linked with intimate partner violence including adolescent pregnancy, unintended pregnancy in general, miscarriage, stillbirth, intrauterine hemorrhage, nutritional deficiency, abdominal pain and other gastrointestinal problems, neurological disorders, chronic pain, disability, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Victims of domestic violence are also at higher risk for developing addictions to alcohol, tobacco, or drugs.64
Rape and Sexual Assault
The United States Justice Bureau defines rape as “forced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion as well as physical force. Forced sexual intercourse means penetration by the offender(s). Includes attempted rapes, male as well as female victims, and both heterosexual and same sex rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.”65 One in five women and one in 71 men in the United States has been raped in their lifetime. Almost half of female (46.7%) and male (44.9%) victims of rape in the United States were raped by an acquaintance. Of these, 45.4% of female rape victims and 29% of male rape victims were raped by an intimate partner. From 1995 to 2010, the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations declined 58%, from five victimizations per 1,000 females age 12 or older to 2.1 per 1,000. In 2005-10, females who were age 34 or younger, who lived in lower income households, and who lived in rural areas experienced some of the highest rates of sexual violence. In 2005-10, 78% of sexual violence involved an offender who was a family member, intimate partner, friend, or acquaintance.
The United States Justice Bureau defines sexual assault as a “wide range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted rape. These crimes include attacks or attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and offender. Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or fondling. It also includes verbal threats.”66 One in 5 women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college. While rape remains the most under-reported crime; 63% of sexual assaults are not reported to police. 46.4% lesbians, 74.9% bisexual women and 43.3% heterosexual women reported sexual violence other than rape during their lifetimes, while 40.2% gay men, 47.4% bisexual men and 20.8% heterosexual men reported sexual violence other than rape during their lifetimes.67
55 Retrieved 5 December from http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/s...ne%20White.pdf
56 U.S. Census Bureau. (2016). Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement: Table PINC- 05: Work Experience in 2015 –People 15 Years Old and Over by Total Money Earnings in 2015, Age, Race, Hispanic Origin, Sex, and Disability Status. Retrieved 12 October 2016, from http://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-05.html (Unpublished calculation based on the median annual pay for all women and men who worked full time, year-round in 2015)
57 Ibid
58 USA Today 19 October, 2005, College Gender Gap Widens: 57% are Women, retrieved 8 December 2008 from http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...ege-cover_xhtm
59 http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/t ables /dt15_105.20.asp?current=yes
60 Ibid
61 Gender Issues in the College Classroom. Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Teaching Center. Columbia University. New York.
62 Jacobs, Jerry A. (1996). "Gender inequality and higher education". Annual Review of Sociology. 22: 153–185
63 Retrevied on 18 November, 2016 form https://medium.com/hatewatch-blog/in-the-crosshairs- 3700fbf2203d#.v67ddiplq
64 World Health Organization. 2013. Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/1...5_eng.pdf?ua=1.
65 Bureau of Justice Statistics. Rape and Sexual Assaults. http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=317
66 Ibid
67 Walters, M.L., Chen J., & Breiding, M.J. (2013). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation. Retrieved from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISV S_SOfindings.pd | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/04%3A_Gender_Inequality/4.04%3A_Gender_Inequality_in_the_United_States.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
1. Define linguistic sexism.
2. Describe examples of linguistic sexism.
3. Examine some effects of gender-stereotyping in media.
05: Gender Language and Media
In previous chapters, we’ve explored the differences between sex and gender as well as the importance of socialization in our prescribed gender roles. In this chapter, we’ll be exploring how language and the media often reinforce or exacerbate the gap in the United States. For example, one could ask, “What are gender differences?” But consider for a moment the question, “What differences does gender make?” While the questions might seem very similar to one another, the first question is evoking a description of the concept of gender, while the second question is evoking an exploratory descriptive of inequality resulting from gender construction.
5.02: What the English Language is Made Of
Many people run into trouble when trying to choose “appropriate” words in their everyday discourses. For example, imagine you’re getting pulled over for speeding. The policeman walks up to the side of your vehicle to request your license and registration. The policeman is female. Now her status has changed from policeman to police officer. While police officer is more inclusive to both sexes, policeman remains the standard in our culture, and we have yet to culturally adopt the term policewoman. Either way, you’re getting a ticket for speeding, but how will your interpretation of the citation change based on the sex of the officer? How will you describe the officer in your recounts to your friends or family?
Now you’re getting ready for a meeting, and the chairman of the board walks in. Until you see she’s a female--and now the chairperson has arrived. The English language is full of linguistic sexism, language that intentionally (or unintentionally) excludes or privileges one sex over the other. More often than not, linguistic sexism is excluding or trivializing women and what they do, while maintaining the sex status quo from which men are currently benefitting. Creating inclusive language for underrepresented bodies--specifically, the feminine and other “unmarked” gender categories--creates a reality more inclusive of all sexes and genders.68 Anne Pauwels, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of London, identifies one of the major motivations for language change as “a desire to amend the present language system to achieve a symmetrical and equitable representation of women and men.”69 Using inclusive language can shape our social realities and dialect. While this is not an exhaustive list, here are a few examples of using more inclusive language:
Table \(5.2.1\) Pronouns. Source: University of Wisconsin https://www.uwec.edu/usenate/.../130...veExamples.pdf.
Example of Sexist/Gendered Usage Explanation Alternatives
The generic 'he' Every student must have
a pencil, and he should
always bring it to class.
Defines student as exclusively male. Every student must have a pencil and they should always bring it to class.
Man as a verb I have four students to
man the internship table.
Implies that persons referred to are exclusively male. I have four students attend the internship table.
Man used to mean humankind Is man inherently
capitalistic?
The human race is interpreted then as male-centric, linguistically placing non- males on the outside of the species. Is humankind inherently capitalistic? Other alternatives: human race, human beings.
Gendered words in titles and work positions Chairman
Freshman
Fireman
Policeman
Postman
Assumes male dominance in these fields.
Chair or Chairperson
First Year
Firefighter
Police officer
Postal worker
Stereotyping Using gender/sex qualifiers for certain occupations, such as: lady doctor or male nurse. This assumes that a particular sex/gender is fit for only a particular set of jobs
Refrain from using gender markers, and refer to a female doctor simply as a doctor or a male nurse simply as a nurse.
To avoid stereotyping occupations, vary pronoun usuage or use the singular they.
Referring to a married woman through her husband's name. Mrs. John Smith Defines a woman in terms of a man. Jane Smith or with the appropriate honorific (such as doctor or captian)
68 Frank, Francine Wattman and Paula A. Treichler. 1989. Language, Gender, and Professional Writing: Theoretical
Approaches and Guidelines for Nonsexist Language Usage. New York: The Modern Language Association of America | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/05%3A_Gender_Language_and_Media/5.01%3A_Gender_Socialization.txt |
There has been extensive research on what is known for linguists as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Linguists and other social scientists,use this hypothesis to analyze the complex relations between language and culture. In short, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explains that language shapes or influences the culture in which it is spoken.70 In other words, the languages we speak shape our social and cultural realities. So if we are speaking English, English (and all of the linguistic sexism found in it) would shape our cultural realities. Going by this hypothesis, one might argue labeling people as “female” or “male” shapes the idea of who the default individual would be. In that sense English can indeed be perceived as sexist, as it conveys intuitive notions that might shape the speaker’s and listener’s point of view. Take, for instance, the examples below:
In addition to language creating “defaults” in our standards for normalcy (and thereby creating deviations from those standards) we also create (or recreate) degradations of the female noun. For example, hound keeping its canine meaning, but bitch gaining another meaning entirely. Mistress and master used to be equal in meaning; now master evokes power, excellence, and ownership, whereas mistress is someone with whom you can cheat on your spouse. Incidentally, you cannot use master in the same way. Consider this old riddle that goes something like this: A father and son go out for a camping trip. On the way home from the camping trip the father and son get into a terrible car accident where the father is killed immediately upon impact. The son promptly gets rushed to the emergency room where the doctor inside prepares to save the boy’s life. Until, the doctor walks over to the critically injured boy and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.’ This is the end of the riddle. The question then becomes; who is the doctor? If you are like many people you’ll be puzzled at first thinking, “Uh, but you said the father died. How could he be in the emergency room if he is dead?” To which, of course, he cannot be (though, I’ve heard variations on the ghost dad / zombie dad theme numerous times!). That leaves only one option: the boy’s mother is the doctor. “Ahhhhhh, duh!” Yes, duh. But why was this obvious answer not immediately apparent? The answer has to do with the theme of this section: language has ways of seeing and understanding the world built into it that both reflect and reconstruct our social structures through our use of them. Since the word ‘doctor’ connotes a position of power, it is often understood to be held by a man. Though we now know full well women can and are doctors, the cultural and linguistic vestige from the past, the legacy of the power in Western culture, predisposes us to thinking the doctor must be a man, blinding us from the obvious fact that most people have two parents (and often a mother and a father)!
So who do we blame? English, right? Grab the pitchforks! Not quite. We cannot blame language; linguistic sexism is abstract and draws on human experiences to give it shape and meaning. And yet there is something in our heads that associates feminine with ‘pretty’ and masculine with ‘strong’. While language isn’t to blame, language does reflect and reinforce the culture of its users. Us!
Is language sexist? Only as much as the user is. Is sexism linguistic? Not only linguistic, but yes, the evidence in grammar is enough to draw conclusions pointing to sexism. How can we fight linguistic sexism and sexist language? Language is a reflection of us and does not exist without us, and our realities are shaped by language. So it’s almost like looking in a mirror and becoming frustrated when the image won’t change without us changing it. We would have to reconstruct sexism in thought before we could eliminate sexism in speech. Then, eliminating it in speech would reinforce eliminating it in thought. (However, going back to the examples provide earlier on using inclusive language can help the process of reconstruction our thoughts on sexism and gender standards.)
70 Deutscher, G. (2011). Through the language glass. Why the world looks different in other languages, Arrow Books,
London | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/05%3A_Gender_Language_and_Media/5.03%3A_Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis.txt |
We often speak of ‘the media’ as some amorphous social institution that is foisted upon us. In some ways this is true of all institutions and the mass media are no exception. But in other ways, this view glosses over the real people and social processes that create one of the biggest shapers of our worldview and outlook on life. Therefore, it is important to note who specifically makes the media content we all consumer. It may not be surprising at this point, but especially behind the scenes, the majority of the cultural gatekeepers; producers, directors and screenwriters are men. This creates a distortion of reality when it comes to whose stories are being told and becoming a part of the culture. For example, “a study, by sociologist Stacy L. Smith, analyzed 11,927 speaking roles on prime-time television programs aired in spring 2012, children's TV shows aired in 2011 and family films (rated G, PG, or PG-13) released between 2006 and 2011. Smith's team looked at female characters' occupations, attire, body size and whether they spoke or not.”71 Their analysis showed, regarding women employed in key behind the scenes roles for movies, only 18% of these positions were held by women from 1998 – 2012. The study also revealed similar results in primetime television. Although progress has been made, it has been slow. Children’s television programming follows a similar pattern as well with males about twice as likely as female characters. And when there are female characters they are more likely to be shown in sexy attire (in children’s programming!)72. Another study of G-rated films from 1990-2005 showed that only 28 percent of the speaking characters (both live and animated) were female and more than four out of five of the narrators were male. Finally, eighty-five percent of the characters were white73. What kinds of stories are being told? And what message might children take away from these stories presenting a ‘normal’ view of the world so heavily skewed?
Much of a child’s socialization is indirect, coming to them through observation, observation in their real- world experiences and observation of the media. Television, film, video games, social media, and other forms are involved in selecting, constructing and representing “reality.” In doing so, the media tend to emphasize and reinforce the values and images of those who create the messages and own the means of distribution. Thus, media play a large role in creating social norms, because various forms of media are present almost everywhere in current culture. In addition, the owners of distribution also take into account commercial (selling) considerations. As a result, the viewpoints and experiences of other people are often left out, or shown in negative ways. In Gendered Media: The Influence of Media on Views of Gender, Julia Woods explains:
“Three themes describe how media represent gender. First, women are underrepresented, which falsely implies that men are the cultural standard and women are unimportant or invisible. Second, men and women are portrayed in stereotypical ways that reflect and sustain socially endorsed views of gender. Third, depictions of relationships between men and women emphasize traditional roles and normalize violence against women.”
The underrepresentation of women has a two-pronged effect:
1. We are tempted to believe there really are more men than women, and
2. Men are the cultural standard.
In general, media continue to present both women and men in stereotyped ways that limit our perceptions of human capabilities. Typically men are portrayed as active, adventurous, powerful, sexually aggressive, and largely devoid of emotion. Women are often portrayed as sex objects who are usually young, thin, passive, dependent, and often incompetent or dumb. Female characters devote their primary energies to improving their appearances and taking care of homes and people and “landing” the perfect guy. And as far as stereotyping relationships for males and females in media, homosexuality is barely recognized and representations of bisexuality and asexuality are practically non-existent. Sex is a driving force behind advertising, because after all, sex sells...everything. But not just sex, heterocentric representations of sex. Women are often seen as dependent in sexual relationships while men are depicted as being independent and emotionally empty. And men are still portrayed (overwhelmingly) as breadwinners while women are typically awarded the roles of caregivers. Lastly, within the relationship sphere, women are typically represented as objects for men’s pleasure while men are still depicted most often as sexual aggressors. According to the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey (1975), this phenomenon is known as the male gaze. The male gaze is the idea that, within popular culture generally, women are portrayed as objects for men’s pleasure. The vast majority of media consumed in the United States depicts women from men’s point of view. An interesting case study in the male gaze happened in 2015 when Caitlyn Jenner first appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine as a transgender woman she was immediately praised for her good looks. However, when she was known still known as Bruce Jenner she was praised for her athletic accomplishments and competition in the Olympics.
In order to create a medium which is universal, understandable, and acceptable for diverse recipients, senders very often use stereotypes, which fill the social life and evoke certain associations. For example, when you think of family, what do you see? When you think of a criminal or a victim, what do you see? When you think of a CEO or an assistant, what do you see? Maybe race, age, religion, or class came to mind, but almost certainly sex and gender played roles in all of the images. What sex and gender roles did you see when prompted to imagine a family? When I asked you to imagine a criminal and a victim, what sexes and genders were they? Almost always (and of course there are exceptions) people will imagine a nuclear heterosexual family structure with traditional gender roles. When prompted to imagine a criminal, people almost always imagine a male, and often people will see a victim as female. And when asked to imagine a CEO and an assistant, people will often imagine a male and female. But where did these images come from? Or at the very least, are they still being reinforced in popular imagery?
Another mechanism by which popular culture defines reality has come to be known as the smurfette principle. Coined by Katha Pollitt’s 1991 New York Times article,
"Contemporary shows are either essentially all-male, like "Garfield," or are organized on what I call the Smurfette principle: a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined... The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys."
We see this phenomenon in classics like Miss Piggy in the Muppets, Penny in the first three seasons of The Big Bang Theory, Princess Leia in Star Wars, April in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elaine Benes in Seinfeld, Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy, and Black Widow in The Avengers. The messages portrayed by this trope contribute to the symbolic disempowerment by defining girls’ and women’s stories as unworthy of being told. The Hunger Games’ producer Nina Jacobson has spoken about the difficulty in convincing Hollywood studio executives that a female fronted film would be financially viable by appealing to more than just girls at the box office.74
However, mass media not only provides people information and entertainment, but, it also affects people’s lives by shaping their opinions, attitudes, values, beliefs, norms, and realities. So, how might media affect our interpretations of gender roles? In various forms of media, women and girls are more likely to be shown: in the home, performing domestic chores such as laundry or cooking; as sex objects who exist primarily to service men; as victims who can't protect themselves; and as the “natural” recipients of beatings, harassment, sexual assault or murder.
Men and boys are not exempt from being stereotyped in the media. From Don Draper to Jason Born to the Terminator, masculinity is often associated with economic success, competition, independence, emotional detachment, aggression, and violence. Despite the fact that men have considerably more economic and political power in society than women, these trends are very damaging to boys. Think for a moment how most disagreements between men are dealt with in popular culture: a fight, a car race, something to demonstrate whom the “better man” is through physical assertion.
Research tells us that the more television children watch, the more likely they are to hold sexist notions about traditional male and female roles. The problem arises when the traditional gender roles represented on in the media are so tightly constricting of the human potential, turning women into objects of men’s pleasure or care-takers and turning men into aggressors.
Advertisements are arguably the most pervasive form of media in our construction of reality. It’s estimated we are exposed to as many as 5,000 advertisements per day (and this is compared to about 2,000 ads per day just thirty years ago).75 This includes commercials, print ads, Brand labels, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, ads on your phone, or anything a business can produce to get your attention and compel you to buy. Some researchers estimate we are exposed to up to 20,000 ads per day, but those higher numbers not only include ads, but also include every time you pass by a label in a grocery store, all the ads in your mailbox whether you see them or not, the label on everything you wear, the condiments in your fringe, the cars on the highway, etc. However, just because we are in close proximity to an ad, doesn’t mean we saw it.
Figure \(5.4.1\) Bar Graph of "Average Adult's Daily Media & Ad Exposure"76
Consider the work of highly influential sociologist Erving Goffman. Specifically, his work on advertising and gender presentation and what he calls commercial realism. For Goffman, this is the way advertising portrays a world, which without critical reflection appears normal to us but is anything but (and should not appear normal or natural to us). This is one of the ways in which mass media influences how we see ourselves and learn to present ourselves in highly gendered manners. Advertisements in which women are portrayed as subordinate, weak, docile, delicate and fanciful contribute to what he calls ‘the ritualization of subordination’. This process helps to create (and recreate) a world in which to be feminine is to be less than and subordinate to a man. One that relies on the ‘benign-ness of the surround’ where women are perpetually at a disadvantage vis-a-vie men, blithely unaware of the world around them and men are showed in an opposite manner; poised, aware and ready to react. Consider this example Goffman outlines: body clowning. He says, “The use of entire body as a playful gesticulative device, a sort of “body clowning” is commonly used in advertisements to indicate lack of seriousness struck by a childlike pose (p. 50). It helps to present women in a manner that is not meant to be taken seriously (see: the blog “Women Laughing Alone With Salad”77). One way to notice the silliness of these sorts of images is to ‘flip the script’ by imagining the reverse image: men laughing alone with salad, for instance! If we monitor our reaction and are startled, we know a gender norm reinforced through advertising and commercial realism has been breached.
Perpetual discontent is a two-pronged advertising scheme, which emphasizes
1. how broken and flawed we are, and
2. how we can buy hope in the form of a product being sold.
Women in the U.S. are bombarded daily with advertising images that point out their flaws. They are constantly having it brought to their attention how they are too: thin, fat, short, tall, round, wrinkled, blond, brunette, red, dark, light, pale, freckled, flat, busty, etc. This trend is exceptionally cruel for teen and young adult women, but men are not exempt from the abuse of perpetual discontent. However, the media has created an unrealistic feminine ideal resulting in the desire to fulfill this impossible standard. This has resulted in women comparing their real selves to phony, made-up, photo-shopped images of women, and it also allows for men to judge real women against those constructed photos. This is not imply all men are sexually interested in women, or all women are concerned with how men are viewing them, but these are still two major themes sprouting from the media’s creation of gender and physical ideals. This media-created ideal has also commonly been blamed for the skyrocketing numbers of eating disorders as well as the rising numbers of cosmetic surgical procedures in the U.S. (especially among young women). At least 30 million Americans suffer from an eating disorder in their lifetime, and eating disorders are the 3rd most common chronic illness among adolescent females.78
Plastic Surgery Timelines
Figure \(5.4.2\) Numbers in Millions of Plastic Surgery Procedures between 1997-2015.
Not only has the media created an unrealistic feminine ideal that no one (and I mean no one!) can achieve, but media most often portray as being endlessly preoccupied by their appearance, and fascinated primarily by improving their appearance for the purpose of becoming sexually desirable to men. When children, specifically, are exposed to these messages, they internalize them and make them part of their own reality.
Furthermore, children are increasingly being exposed to messages about gender that are really intended for adult eyes only. Girls as young as six years old wanted to be more like dolls who were dressed in a sexy way and showing more skin than dolls who were dressed stylishly, but covered up.79 These young girls associated being sexy with being the way they wanted to look, being popular in school, and with whom they wanted to play. According to the American Psychological Association, girls who are exposed to sexual messages in popular culture are more likely to have low self-esteem and depression, and suffer from eating disorders.80
The media is perhaps one of the most underestimated elements of society. At the personal level people think of it in terms of convenience and entertainment rather than political influence, power, and control. However, advertising, in particular, has a slow cumulative affect on our perceptions of reality.
According to Debra Pryor and Nancy Nelson Knupfer, “If we become aware of the stereotypes and teach critical viewing skills to our children, perhaps we will become informed viewers instead of manipulatednconsumers.”81 Moreover, the commercials evolve along with the development of a society and are the answer to many social and political changes, such as emancipation of women, growing role of individualism, the dismantling of current gender roles reinforcing inequality. More and more advertising specialists produce non-stereotypical commercials, depicting people in non-traditional gender roles.nHowever, the attempts to break down the stereotypes threaten to reject the message; they challenge well-established “common sense”. Hence, a society has to achieve an adequate level of social readiness, so that messages breaking gender stereotypes could be effective.
Suggested Activities (adapted from Video and workbook, Minding the Set--Making Television Work for You)
Images - Using TV or video clips and magazine or newspaper pictures, chart similarities and differences in appearance and body size for the good and bad characters. Look again at the clips and make note of the type of camera shots used for the good and bad guys or gals. Compare the characters with self and peers and family members.
Working women - List the jobs that TV mothers have such as teacher, doctor. Do we ever see them working at their jobs? Does your mother have a job? If she works outside the home do you ever visit her there? Why or why not?
I'd rather be me - Form two groups - one of males, the other of females. From various media have the boys list female traits and interests that are most commonly featured, while the girls do the same for male characteristics and concerns. Form new mixed groupings and discuss how males and females feel about the stereotypes by which their sex category and gender have come to be represented. Is there anything artificial about these stereotypes?
Jobs - Examine the media to determine how certain occupations are portrayed, and then interview people in those occupations to ascertain how realistic portrayals are. Count the number of women or men portrayed in jobs. List the types of jobs for women and men portrayed. How do these findings compare to the jobs held by the parents of students?
Posed photos - Select pictures from magazines ads that show the difference between posed photographs of females and males (this can include children, as well). Describe what is emphasized for each.
Twisted tales - Rewrite a fairly tale from the point of view of the opposite sex.
Video games - Design a video game for girls and boys that is not stereotypical or violent.
71 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_2121979.html
72 www.now.org/issues/media/women_in_media_facts.html
73 www.now.org/issues/media/women_in_media_facts.html
74 http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/sho...games-producer
75 Papazian, Ed. TV Now and Then: How We Use It; How It Uses Us. January, 2016. Media Dynamics, Inc. http://www.mediadynamicsinc.com/prod....YYd2J5FB.dpuf
76 Media Dynamics, Inc. retrieved from TV Now and Then: How We Use It; How It Uses Us.
77 http://womenlaughingalonewithsalad.tumblr.com/
78 Hudson, J. I., Hiripi, E., Pope, H. G., & Kessler, R. C. (2007). The prevalence and correlates of eating disorders in the
national comorbidity survey replication. Biological Psychiatry, 61(3), 348–358.
79 Jennifer Abbasi. 2012. Why 6-Year-Old Girls Want To Be Sexy. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/17/6-year-
old-girls-sexy_n_1679088.html. Retrieved 30 November 2016.
80 American Psychological Association,Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. (2007).Report of the APA Task Force on
the Sexualization of Girls. Retrieved fromhttp://www.apa.org/pi/women/prog...eport-full.pdf
81 Pryor, Debra; Knupfer, Nancy Nelson, 1997 Gender Stereotypes and Selling Techniques in Television Advertising:
Effects on Society.http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/16/c4/8c.pdf,
retrieved 10 November 2016. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/05%3A_Gender_Language_and_Media/5.04%3A_Media.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
1. Describe gender trends as they relate to emotions.
2. Identify trends pertaining to gender and friendships.
3. Identify gender trends in dating.
4. Apply theories to the study of families and intimate relationships.
06: Gender Emotions and Relationships
Girls cry and boys don’t, right? I mean, girls are just naturally more emotional than boys, right? Hold on to your hats: Males and females are not victims of biological processes dictating their emotional stability or strength based on sex category. In fact, scientific research reveals culture and environment, rather than biology, is a greater indicator for emotional experience.
Western culture often maintains the idea of a binary opposition between reason and emotion, with reason widely believed to be a masculine behavior and emotion being a feminine behavior. This stereotype has become a power social force in constructing and reinforcing the false belief that it is sex category that will determine whether a person is more reasonable or emotional. Once established, we see this pattern replicate throughout most, if not all, of society’s institutions effectively structuring the world we inhabit and appearing ‘normal’ (a process called reification).
The stereotype of the emotional women and the rational man was created and maintained in response to the industrial revolution which produced segregation in the workplace. Prior to the industrial revolution, as discussed in earlier chapters, women were relegated to housework and family obligations as a result of reproduction needs for the culture to multiply and survive. After the industrial revolution, women largely remained in those domestic roles, as the roles had become a cultural norm. As will become more evident as we proceed, this change had made reverberations with how we date, fall in love, and structure our families. Notably, the norm of the breadwinner husband and the stay-at-home housewife that took root around this time and was born out of capitalism’s need for a reliable workforce.
Today, the rationale for the “emotional woman” helps maintain sex segregation in the work force. It has been argued women could be too emotional for some occupations like police officers, fire fighters, legislatures, or even the President of the United States. In fact, in the most recent presidential race, some (including women) argued women shouldn’t be president because her hormones “could start a war in a second.”82 (And this is when I reflect on how many wars have actually been started by women and how many have been started by men.)
So, what are the differences in emotions between sexes? Well, none, really. But research indicates a difference in emotions between genders (most research focuses on the emotional experience between the binary feminine and masculine as gender categories). In Western culture, women and men differ more in emotional expression than in emotional experience.83 Meaning, emotions are a human capability, not a feminine or female one. Therefore, men and women experience emotions similarly, but women and men express them differently. Why?
As part of our socialization process, we learn how to express our emotions socially appropriately. Women are taught it is more acceptable (or even encouraged) for them to show their emotions than it is for men. Furthermore, women are more encouraged to demonstrate prosocial emotions like empathy, compromise, and nurturance. And women are also more likely than men to demonstrate emotions that imply powerlessness, like fear or shame.84 Again, these emotions are all human capabilities, but women have been more socially permitted to demonstrate these human potentials than men. However, the latter emotions are seen as a contradiction to Western construction of masculinity, and thus have been named as feminine emotions and typically more permissible for women. So engrained in fact are these gendered performances and displays of emotions that they become the very identifiers of one’s gender (e.g. cried like a girl when a boy does it and simply cried if done by a girl).
According to dominant Western culture, masculine emotions include, but are not limited to, powerful emotions like anger, pride, and competition.85 These emotions are more in line with the Western masculine ideal because they are seen as being more these types of emotions tend to enhance or confirm one’s social or contextual power. So while women are more likely to express prosocial and emotions that imply powerlessness, and men are more likely to demonstrate powerful emotions, men and women do not experience those emotions differently based on sex, rather their expression of those emotion are heavily dictated by social norms and constructions.
Culture adheres to collective rather than individualistic belief systems and behavioral norms. Therefore, the stereotype that women are more emotional than men has maintained through cultural constructs found in every realm of culture. It is especially important to understand the stereotypes of gendered emotions because they shape how we view and value (or devalue) others and ourselves.
82 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Zdx97A63s
83 Fischer, Agneta. Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives.” 200. Cambridge University Press.
84 Ibid
85 Ibid | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/06%3A_Gender_Emotions_and_Relationships/6.01%3A_Sex_Gender_and_Emotions.txt |
Friendships take many forms: close, family-like, acquaintance, or based on task or leisure activities or even on social media like Facebook. How many people have you heard describe someone as being a “Facebook friend?” Homogenous friends tend to be similar in sex, ethnicity, intelligence, economic status, and sexual orientation. However, homogeneous friends are not more “successful” friendships, nor is there any scientific data supporting the idea that homogeneous friends outlast heterogamous friends.
Children as young as 3 or 4 years old develop and demonstrate preferences for particular playmates. As children grow and continue into their primary socialization, their concepts of friendship become increasingly complex and focus on themes of satisfying interaction. Most children prefer same-sex friendships because of their similar interest in activities. Often, boys okay in larger groups and describe their friendships in terms of loyalty, helping, shared activities, and awareness of each others’ needs, but without overt affection. Girls tend to emphasize themes of closeness, verbal sharing, acceptance, and emotional sharing. A children age, the differences in friendships between the sexes becomes more distinct, with girls sharing information and communication with friends and boy sharing activities with friends.86 In many ways, boys tend to view friendship as something that is instrumental and girls view friendship as something emotional.
Boys same-sex friendships also tend to be less intimate than that of girls same-sex relationships. “Research of high school boys has shown that there are several characteristics of upholding masculinity during adolescence that have implications for male friendship.” Vicki Helgesen explains three reasons for this87:
1. Boys’ interactions are often fashioned through and characterized by mocking, teasing, and taunting. Boys are excited to tease each other and stand up to the teasing, as well.
2. Boys’ identities are largely defined by heterosexism. They are expected to be heterosexual and masculine, totally unfeminine.
3. Boys are expected to be “tough” by hiding their emotions. Often other boys will cut off another boy’s attempt to share emotion in order to maintain their demonstrated masculinity.
One thing sexes have in common in friendship trends is the rate of homosocial relationships. Homosocial relationships are relationships between people of the same sex within society. This term essentially describes the social bonds between people of the same sex within a society. Of course, there are a variety of social bonds experienced by people in society, but we continue to observe the majority of lasting friendships being homosocial friendships. Think about it: Homosocial relationships can include teammates in a sex-segregated sport, a bachelorette party, or a “guys’ night out.” Think back to your adolescent friendships. How many of them were homosocial rather than heterosocial?
In adult friendships, we see some of those trends resume. Some researchers tend to emphasize the idea than men prefer to have “side-by side” friendships while women tend to prefer “face-to-face” friendships.88 Women’s friendships tend to emphasize reciprocity, whereas men’s friendships tend to be associative rather than reciprocal. However, men often self-disclose in their friendships and women often pursue specific activities with specific friends. So, men’s and women’s friendships may have more overlapping themes than they do differences.
The intimacy level of men’s long-term friendships tend to resemble those of women’s. While most research on adult long-term friendships has focused primarily on women’s friendships, even fewer studies have been conducted on minority men’s long-term friendships. So the intersectional approach to studying men’s long-term friendships is relatively uncharted territory.
Recent research by sociologist Tristan Bridges into so-called “man caves” demonstrates that in addition to being respites from the “feminine domain” of the rest of the house and specifically marked as a “man’s domain,” it is also a place where men plan to hang out with their male friends. While they understand this to be a place where “men can be men,” watch sports, curse, and talk openly with one another, it is also a place understood to be primarily used for homosocial bonding.89 Sadly, most of the men Bridges spoke to didn’t actually use their man caves for anything, as they had no time with work and family responsibilities!
More research has emerged in the past decade on cross-sex adult friendships as more egalitarian relationships and sex roles have become more accepted and practiced. For women, benefits of being friends with men tend include knowing how men think and access to men’s greater resources and status. For men, some benefits of cross-sex friendships tend to include relief from rivalry within male friendships and enjoying more nurturing and emotional support.90 Cross-sex friendships are often more emotionally satisfying for men than for women.91
86 McNelles, L & Connolly, J. (1999). Intimacy between adolescent friends: Age and gender differences in intimate affect
and intimate behaviors. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 9(2), 143-159
87 Helgeson, V. 2012. Psychology of Gender. Fourth Edition, Carnegie Mellon University: Pearson.
88 Wright, P. 1998. Toward an Expanded Orientation to the Study of Sex Differences in Friendship. Sex Roles.
89 https://melmagazine.com/this-guy-stu...dcc#.h8fso6gic
90 McWillaims, S. & Howard, J. (1993). Solidarity and hierarchy in cross-sex friendships, Journal of Social Issues, 49(3),
191-202.
91 Werking, K. (1997). We’re just good friends: Women and men in nonromantic relationships. New York: Guilford. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/06%3A_Gender_Emotions_and_Relationships/6.02%3A_Sex_Gender_and_Friendship.txt |
Ahhh, dating. What is dating? Filtering through the eligible pool of partners for the purpose of mate selection, right? Maybe. But here are far more reasons to date than to merely select a mate. Some people date for excitement, revenge, attention, access to resources, recreation, sexual activity, or status. Prior to dating, courting was common in the United States. Courting, which involved strong rules and customs and was often supervised by parents, evolved into dating due to wide-spread use of the automobile after the Industrial Revolution. Automobiles enabled young people to have more freedom (including new found opportunities to explore intimacy without their parents’ watchful eyes).
In the United States there are millions of people between the ages of 18-24 (18-24 is considered prime dating and mate selection ages). The U.S. Statistical Abstracts estimates that 9.5% of the U.S. population or about 15,675,000 males and 15,037,000 females are in this age group.92
Today, men are much more likely to date and have multiple dating partners than are women. Yep, there’s that double-standard rearing its ugly head again. However, for both men and women, homogamy remains the overriding principle for selecting dating partners. When we see people we filter them as either being in or out of our pool of eligibles (the people we could theoretically meet and have relationships with). Filtering is the process of identifying those we interact with as either being in or out of our pool of people we might consider to be a date or mate. There are many filters we use. One is physical appearance. We might include some because of tattoos and piercing or exclude some of the exact same physical traits.
There are a lot of gendered rituals assigned to dating. Like our sexual scripts, blueprints and guidelines for what we define as our role in sexual expression, sexual orientation, sexual behaviors, sexual desires, and the sexual component of our self-definition, we having dating scripts. These scripts are filled with those gendered rituals. We are not just born with sexual or gendered scripts in place; they are learned. Dating and gender trends are learned via culture and socialization (think about movies aimed at young adults). There are as many unique dating scripts as there are people, yet some of these scripts have common themes and can be viewed as a collective pattern or trend in the larger social level. For example, while there are exceptions, who do we typically expect to “make the first move” in heterosexual dating experiences? Most of would agree: men. (Sigh).
Teens often have mutually self-serving motivations in dating that often make their experiences (often love) feel real and powerful at the time (see Table \(6.3.1\)). For many teens who form heterosexual romantic relationships, the girls are often seeking social status and maturity by having a complex relationship with a boy and by demonstrating to her female friends her social capabilities. Typically teen girls seek love, closeness, intimacy, and the status of being a girlfriend, steady, or even engaged. That works conveniently for boys who are often seeking physical affection and social status.93
Table \(6.3.1\) Adolescent Intimacy-Sex and Love Matrix
Plays at Really wants
Boys Love Sex
Girls Sex Love
This pattern in Table \(6.3.1\) has not been found to apply to adults and has not been found to apply to all teen romances. Adults tend to report more sexual and relational satisfaction when intimacy and friendship are part of the overall relationship. Men typically have more power in initial dating situations, and women often see their actions as being dependent on men’s. Most research on dating trends have been conducted within heterosexual dating patterns, and so far, this has been a very heterocentric perspective of dating, but we will explore same- sex dating trends and the problems with heterosexual focus in a moment.
In general, people engaging in heterosexual dating practices typically identify potential partners exhibiting traditional feminine and masculine traits as being the most attractive as potential partners. In other words, we tend to filter our dating prospects through gendered lenses. That is, how well does the person conform to or violate genders norms. However, and this is when it gets really exciting, marital relationships between such people tend to have lower satisfaction rates, particularly for women. Think about that! While traditional gender roles might be attractive in dating prospects, they often do not sustain or maintain interpersonal satisfaction in a marriage. Calling Freidan! Remember that little book a lady named Betty wrote back in the 1960s called The Feminine Mystique we discussed in the opening chapter? Well, over fifty years ago Freidan revealed the restlessness, loneliness, and dissatisfaction experienced by so many suburban wives living out the outlined gendered scripts in the privacy of their middle- and upper-class homes. Turns out, that trend persists. Androgynous individuals and people in egalitarian partnerships and marriages report higher levels in interpersonal satisfaction.
Speaking of changing dating patterns, the single largest method for spouses to meet now is online. Between 2005-2012, more than one-third of couples who got married in the US met through an online dating site. In the past it was said that people would only look as far as they needed to to find a partner. In fact, in 1932, one third of couples who got married had lived within a five-block radius of each other before they got married! As far as they need to go but no further!94 This method of mate selection worked insofar as it allowed you to meet an eligible as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Since marriage was understood to be the marker of adulthood it was an urgent matter to find a partner swiftly (to say nothing of the social pressure and ever present fear of becoming a ‘spinster’ or an ‘old maid’!). Potential spouses were filtered primarily through gender roles; could this man be a provider to a wife and children? Could this woman bear and raise children and keep a home? Today, the explicit gender role filtration may have lessened, but it still dominates in our profile pictures. One study even found 90% of your dating success depends on it!95 The most effective profile pictures encapsulated crucial gendered themes; for men, avoiding looking at the camera, not smiling, and doing something interesting were most effective. For women, a flirtatious and coy straightforward selfie shot with visible cleavage would do the trick.
Most of us tend to think of personal or psychological characteristics when explaining our dating and spousal choices. As we have seen throughout this chapter however, that is a simplified and incomplete explanation. Instead, we must look to sociology to explain the rest. When asked why we choose our partner we might reply with ‘chemistry’ or something similar. But, as we’ve seen before society is often stacking the odds. Isn’t it uncanny how many of our own parents married heterogamously on most attributes (e.g. race/ethnicity, class, age, religion and even level of attractiveness)? Well, it turns out, society organized our lives to make this outcome likely for most. We tend to live in neighborhoods grouped by race and class. When we meet people in the real world it is often at work or school. The people we run into in either location are also likely to have similar backgrounds to us. In other words, the field of availables is stratified into class and racial groups before we meet anyone! By the way, have you ever noticed how much you have in common with people of similar backgrounds to your own? You have similar socialization experiences, similar cultural understandings and lo and behold, you click! You hit it off with that person, becoming fast friends or dating partners. Sounds a lot like that mysterious ‘chemistry’ we spoke of earlier, doesn’t it?
Much has been made of the ‘hook up’ in recent years, particularly among college students. While its meaning isn’t always clear (does kissing count? Any sexual contact?), it is understood to be occurring more frequently. This is facilitated technologically as well as face to face. Not just dating apps however, sociologist Lisa Wade has documented that young people today use many apps, like social media ones, to facilitate hookups. Additionally, Wade has found that hookups resulting in sex are less enjoyable for women than they are for men and this has everything to do with social forces that privilege men’s pleasure at women’s expense.96
92 United States Census Bureau. Age and Sex Composition in the United States: 2012
https://www.census.gov/population/ag.../2012comp.html
93 Hammon and Cheney. Intimate Relationship and Family. “Love and Intimacy.” 2012. Creative Commons License.
94 Ansari, Aziz. Modern Romance. Penguin Press. ISBN 978-1-59420-627-6.
95 Christian Rudder, Dataclysm, 2014
96 http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-rela...-reason-women- get-less-often-men- and-how-fix-it | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/06%3A_Gender_Emotions_and_Relationships/6.03%3A_Sex_Gender_and_Dating.txt |
To what extent do marriage and family therapy journals address gay, lesbian, and bisexual issues such as dating, marriage, divorce, and adoption? Wanda Clark and Julianne Serovich conducted one of the largest studies of its kind to answer these questions. Of the 13,217 articles examined in 17 journals, only 77 (.006%) focused on gay, lesbian, and/or bisexual issues or used sexual orientation as a variable.97 Their findings support the claim that LGBTQ+ family issues are largely ignored by marriage and family therapy researchers and most scholars. This poses a bit of a problem for people seeking information on the subjects.
However, we do know many gender normative behaviors in heterosexual relationships are the same for homosexual relationships. For example, people engaging in homosexual dating practices typically identify potential partners exhibiting traditional feminine and masculine traits as being the most attractive as potential partners.
One distinction within homosexual dating relationships are he increased risk youth are for dating violence. Media attention and the literature on LGTBQ+ youth overwhelmingly focus on violence involving hate crimes and bullying (when acknowledged at all). This makes it more difficult to bring to light the increased risk these young people face for dating violence. One study found:
“A total of 5,647 youth (51 % female, 74 % White) from 10 schools participated in a cross-sectional anonymous survey, of which 3,745 reported currently being in a dating relationship or having been in one during the prior year. Results indicated that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are at higher risk for all types of dating violence victimization (and nearly all types of dating violence perpetration), compared to heterosexual youth.”98
Dating and relationships for people in the LGBTQQI community can be more socially difficult sue to oppressive factors within dominant Western culture. This may be particularly true given that lesbians and gay men are stigmatized both on an individual level and a couple level. The effects of oppression and internalized homophobia may create a strain on those dating relationships that are formed, factors that many heterosexual couples do not have to endure. Higher levels of internalized homophobia and discrimination were associated with less positive perceptions of relationship quality among their gay and lesbian participants.99
97 Calrk and Serovich. Twenty years Later and Still in the Dark?. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. Volume 23, Issue
3. July, 1997. Pages 239–253
98 Dank, M., Lachman, P., Zweig, J.M. et al. J Youth Adolescence (2014) 43: 846. doi:10.1007/s10964-013-9975-8
99 Otis, M. D., Rostosky, S. S., Riggle, E. D. B., & Hamrin, R. (2006). Stress and relationship quality in same-sex couples.
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 23(1), 81-99.
6.05: Cohabitation
Cohabiting is living together without marriage. While the legality of cohabiting and married couples differ, the gender variables affecting satisfaction do not differ greatly. However, compared to married couples, a more egalitarian sharing of the household seems to be even more desirable. And there is really very little difference in the level of desire for egalitarian household between homosexual and heterosexual couples. However, among lesbian couples, living together is more likely to have a marital meaning than among gay men.
Some researchers have suggested divorce is more likely among couples who cohabit prior to marriage. However, researchers have found it is not cohabitation that likely enhances divorce rates. What leads to divorce is when people cohabit before they have the maturity and experience to choose compatible partners and to sustain a long-term relationship. Early entry into marriage or cohabitation, especially prior to age 23, is the critical risk factor for divorce. Sometimes people who cohabit get married due to social pressure or out of a feeling of needing to “take the next step” (marriage) and without said pressure may not have otherwise married when they weren’t ready to or their partner wasn’t a long term fit. However getting married out of necessity or pressure are also huge risk factors for divorce. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/06%3A_Gender_Emotions_and_Relationships/6.04%3A_Same-sex_Dating_Trends.txt |
A family is a social group where the adults cooperate for the well-being of the group; it can include those related by blood, marriage, or adoption, and also those who live together in an intimate relationship. The family structures that were very common a century ago are not nearly as common today. A family of orientation is the family into which an individual is born. Most people grow up and start their own families. The family of procreation is the family an individual forms by marriage and or having children. In the U.S. around the year 1900, most families had three generations living in one home (e.g., children, parents, and uncles, aunts, or grandparents) and most participated in the manual labor that maintained the household. Today, many families fall into one of two types: the first is a nuclear family or a family group consisting of a mother and or a father, or both, and their children; the second most common family form is the blended family, or the family created by a marriage of two adults where one or both of them has one or more children from a prior relationship. The rest are many variations of family types including single parent households (somewhere around 41% of births are to ‘single parents’ [though, this includes cohabiting partners]). Very few families are multiple generational beyond parents and their children. All the family relations past the nuclear or blended family we call extended family (e.g., cousins, aunts and uncles, and grand and great-grandparents).100
Family households predominated in 1970, when they made up 81 percent of all households. This proportion dropped to around 66 percent by 2012. The most noticeable trend is the decline of married- couple households with their own children, from 40 percent of households in 1970 to 20 percent in 2012. Indeed, the number of married couples without children has grown in recent years, from 28 percent of households in 2005 to 29 percent in 2012. This change is likely related to the aging of householders and delays in childbearing.
Figure \(6.6.1\) Households by Type, 1970-2012
Researchers in the sociology of family today often point out the path to marriage and family is varied and nonlinear for many. While many of us learn the song as children about “so-and-so and so-and-so sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g” as a children’s song (and socialization technique into the appropriate path towards marriage and children) not all of us will take that path (at least not in that order). Today’s family landscape is multifaceted and filled with options (especially notable in that this now includes women). Several trends have been identified enabling these options: with the change in the economy toward an information based service economy, young people of all genders require more schooling. This pushes back marriage into the late twenties. Since it is now far more acceptable and easier for young people to engage in premarital sex and there is less rush to have children, we’re doing so later and later. With the aid of reproductive technologies childbearing can be pushed back as well. While it used to be that women needed to be married to effectively begin adulthood, now women can choose other routes to adulthood.101
In studying the family, Functional Theorists have identified some common and nearly universal family functions. That means almost all families in all countries around the world have at least some of these functions in common. Table \(6.6.2\) shows many of the global functions of the family.
Table \(6.6.2\) Functions of the Family.
Function What it provides
Economic support food, clothing, shelter
Emotional support intimacy, companionship, belonging
Socialization of children raising children, parenting
Control of sexuality defines and controls when and with whom (e.g., marriage)
Control of reproduction the types of relationships where children should be born
Ascribed status contexts of race, socioeconomic tatus, religion, kinship
By far, economic support is the most common function of today’s families. When your parents let you raid their pantry, wash clothes in their laundry, or pay for health insurance, that’s economic support.
Emotional relationships are also very common, but there is a tremendous amount of cultural diversity in how intimacy is experienced in various families around the world. Intimacy is the social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical trust that is mutually shared between family members. Family members share confidences, advice, trust, secrets, and ongoing mutual concern. Many family scientists believe that intimacy in family relationships functions as a strong buffer to the ongoing stresses experienced by family members outside of the home.
Socialization of children is important so that they grow up to be fully functioning members of society. Children are born with the potential to be raised as humans. They will realize this potential if older family members or friends take the time to protect and nurture them into their cultural and societal roles. Today the family is the core of primary socialization, but many other societal institutions contribute to the socialization process as well.
Controlling sexuality and reproduction has traditionally been sanctioned within the context of a family. In some cultures, the father and mother selected the spouse of their children in many countries although it has never been that common in the U.S. Older family members tend to encourage pregnancy and childbirth within marriage or long-term relationships.
The instrumental family roles include leadership and decision-making responsibilities. The expressive family role sees to it that the emotional needs of the family are met. In traditional families among societies throughout the world the husband is more likely to provide material support and primary leadership authority within the family and the wife is more likely to provide affection and moral support. Although this general role pattern has been historically true, these roles are undergoing some degree of change today, particularly as more women enter the labor force and as family types are changing.
100 Hammond, R & Cheney, P. (2011). Introduction to Sociology.
101 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/ma...d-t.html?pagew anted=all | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/06%3A_Gender_Emotions_and_Relationships/6.06%3A_Sociology_of_the_Family.txt |
It’s an exciting time for us in the United States! Why? Because we have hit an all-time high for adults who have never been married. One in five adults aged 25 and older have never been married. Men are more likely than women to have never been married (23% vs. 17% in 2012). “And this gender gap has widened since 1960, when 10% of men ages 25 and older and 8% of women of the same age had never married.”102
Figure \(6.7.1\) Rising Share of never-married adults, growing gender gap.
The median age at the time of the first marriage is now 27 for women and 29 for men. This is up from 20 for women and 23 for men in 1960, and about a quarter (24%) of never-married young adults ages 25 to 34 are living with a partner.103 This trend cuts across all major racial groups but has been more pronounced among African Americans, wherein African Americans went from 9% to 36% and Whites went from 8% to about 16%.
Married people (43% very happy) are a good bit happier than unmarrieds (24%). This trend has been consistent in research over several decades. In fact, marriage is one of the biggest indicators for self- satisfaction and happiness in adults’ lives. It holds up for men as well as for women, for homosexual and heterosexual, and for the old as well as the young. So, marriage is more than “just a piece of paper” and not all marriages are created (or interpreted) as equal. For example, if you were a visitor from another planet and attempted to explain marriage to beings where you were from originally by looking at popular culture, you’d probably have to conclude that marriage is almost exclusively sold, bought, and desired by women. What do I mean by that? Wedding magazines are aimed almost exclusively at brides, not grooms. Reality TV shows highlight Bridezillas, not Groomzillas and “Saying yes to the Dress” instead of the tuxedo. “If you like it, then you should have put a ring on it.”—Queen B. Meanwhile, men are often depicted as being commitment-phobic, uninterested (or uninvited) in planning a wedding, or as thought hey are making the “ultimate sacrifice” (their singlehood) for someone. Marriage is depicted as being natural for women, but stifling for men.
These images in popular culture are not completely fiction, as our interpretations of our ender roles are largely shaped by popular culture. For example, research shows women tend to find marriage more appealing than do men. Nearly two-thirds of married same-sex couples are lesbians, and only about a third are gay men.104 Women tend to be more marriage-focused, be they homosexual or heterosexual.
But while women tend to be more wedding-focused, what about some of those benefits of marriage mentioned earlier? Do women and men enjoy those equally? In fact, the answer is no. Research has shown the “marriage benefits”—the increases in health, wealth, and happiness—are disproportionately enjoyed by men. Married men are better off than single men in these categories. Married women, on the other hand, are not better off than unmarried women. In fact, in the one area where men were traditionally the beneficiaries in different-sex marriages (wealth) men are actually benefitting economically more from marriage today than are women. “In the past, relatively few wives worked, so marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women.”105 Since folks with higher incomes are more than those with lower incomes to marry instead of cohabit, and we tend to marry endogamously (so upper class people with upper class people) people higher up the class ladder tend to retain privileges or even increase them through marriage. Households where there are two high income earners are also more likely to be in the upper middle class, cementing further the class divide and the accompanying resources.
Figure \(6.7.2\) The Rise of Wives, 1970 to 2007
102 Pew Research Report. 2014. Record Share of Americans Have Never Married.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/...-americans-hav e-never-married/
103 U.S. Census Bureau table MS-2. (http://www.census.gov/hhes/families/data/marital.ht ml).
104 Badgett, M.V., Herman, J. 2011. Patterns of Relationship Recognition by Same-Sex Couples in the United States. The
Williams Institute.
105 Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn. 2010. “Women, Men and the New Economics of Marriage”. Pew Research Center.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files...f-marriage.pdf | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/06%3A_Gender_Emotions_and_Relationships/6.07%3A_Sex_Gender_and_Marital_Trends.txt |
About 1% of the total number of currently-married or registered same-sex couples get divorced each year, in comparison to about 2% of the total number of married straight couples. Note that the percentage of couples that get divorced eventually is close to 50%, but only 1% or 2% of them get divorced in any particular year. Finally, divorce is less likely for those who marry the first time after the age of 25.
Many people believe cheating to be the leading cause of divorce, however communication problems are the number one reason marriages fail in America today. Another strong factor influencing divorce is getting married for reasons other than love and commitment, such as marrying out of obligation, pregnancy, or for money. And speaking of money, finances (or being on different financial pages) can cause a huge strain on a marriage. “Opposites can attract but when two people are opposites in the financial department, divorce often ensues.”106
A survey of over 2000 heterosexual couples, found that women initiated nearly 70% of all divorces. Yet there was no significant difference between the percentage of breakups initiated by women and men in non-marriage relationships.107 Some argue women initiate most divorces because they might be more sensitive to relationship difficulties. However if this were true, women would initiate the breakup of both marriages and non-marital relationships at equal rates. Instead, “married women reported lower levels of relationship quality than married men. In contrast, women and men in non-marital relationships reported equal levels of relationship quality.”108
Some social scientists argue this might be true because marriage comes with the historical baggage of patriarchal ideology, whereas non-marriage relationships are often free from (or least less affected by) the ideas that within heterosexual marriages women are still expected to take on the bulk of the housework and childcare responsibilities. Heck, women are still expected to take the man’s surname! So while society and culture are moving toward more egalitarian relationship goals, the traditional institution of marriage just hasn’t caught up, making non-marital relationships more adaptable to contemporary expectations and ideals.
An Indiana University study shows that men and women cheat at the same rate.109 Surprised? Most of us probably would be, especially since the images we often see of the “wondering spouse” is a man on a business trip or a man who is unhappy I his marriage, picking up a woman in a bar or a club. While men and women cheat at about the same rate, the motives between the sexes are often different. Women are more likely to cheat for emotional satisfaction. Often times, when women cheat, there is no physical contact, but becoming emotionally invested in another person means one has likely checked out of their marriage. For men, cheating often takes the form of physical connection. Therefore social scientists often recognize men’s cheating habits being less about having an emotional connection with someone and more about experiencing a physical pleasure. In fact, most men who cheat on their wives claim they are still in love with them and that their infidelities were “hurtful mistakes” rather than an attempt to leave or find someone new.110
Whether or not marriages are disrupted by separation or divorce is explained by a number of factors, such as gender roles adopted by women and men within the family unit. For example, men who are more flexible in their gender roles and identities are more likely to be able to sustain a marriage than are men who are stricterin traditional gender roles.111
When people do end a heterosexual marriage arrangement, women are far more likely to retain custody of children than men. About 83% of custodial parents are women.112 However, aside form the financial strain of being a single parent, numerous court visits to receive payments can also be a costly venture. Mothers who are custodial parents are also less likely to retain full-time employment than are fathers who are custodial parents. This can, in turn, cause women to be more financially dependent on child support and/or public assistance. Close to 31.2% of custodial mothers live below the official poverty line, whereas 17.2% of custodial fathers are living below the poverty line. 45.6% of women who are owed child support are paid the full amount, 28% receive partial the amount due, and about 20% receive no payment at all.113
106 The Huffington Post. “The 10 Most Common Reasons People Get Divorced.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yourta...b_8086312.html
107 American Sociological Association. (2015, August 22). Women more likely than men to initiate divorces, but not non-
marital breakups. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 29, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150822154900.htm
108 Ibid
109 Kristen P. Mark, Erick Janssen, Robin R. Milhausen. Infidelity in Heterosexual Couples: Demographic, Interpersonal,
and Personality-Related Predictors of Extradyadic Sex. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011.
110 Ibid
111 Sherman, Jennifer. 2009. “Bend to Avoid Breaking: Job Loss, Gender Norms, and Family Stability in rural America.”
Social Problems 56 (November): 599-620.
112 U.S. Census Bureau. 2013. Statistical Abstract of the United Sates. 2013. Washington D.C.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/C...mo/P60-255.pdf
113 Ibid | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/06%3A_Gender_Emotions_and_Relationships/6.08%3A_Disruption_in_Marriage.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
1. Define the double standard.
2. Describe the double bind.
3. Describe the binary model for sexuality and its shortcomings.
07: Gender Sex and Sexuality
Excerpt from: Coleman, K. Alienation through Social Construction: A Call for the Re-humanization of Sexuality. Journal of Positive Sexuality, Vol. 1, June 2015, page 25-30.
Sexuality is a topic that comes with a great deal of controversy. The debate over whether sexuality is ascribed or achieved is an old and a loaded one. Often the same people (newscasters, elected officials, religious leaders, etc.) generating discussion on the topic misuse the proper terminology surrounding the subject, resulting in misleading and fallacious constructs being deployed and socially reinforced. While sexual orientation is ascribed,114 sexuality is a social representation of sexual orientation. So to argue whether one is born “gay” or “straight” is a loaded debate without the possibility of a solution because: People cannot be “gay” or “straight”; rather, only behaviors can be categorized in these binary constructs. However, sexual behaviors, social definitions, and interpretations of “gay” and “straight” as descriptors of human sexuality are constantly evolving. Thus, “gay” or “straight” can only be applied as descriptors to individual sexual actions rather than to people as a categorical approach to identity.
The American Sociological Association (ASA), American Medical Association (AMA), American Psychological Association, and American Pediatric Association all recognize sexuality as being experienced by the actor on a continuum and based on a personal sense of identity reflective of sexual attractions. The ASA, AMA, and American Psychological Association recognize that while there is no absolute consensus as to what determines one’s sexual orientation, most people experience little or no sense of choice pertaining to their orientations, leading researchers to conclude, historically, that sexual orientation is biologically determined. “Although we can choose whether to act on our feelings, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.”115
In addition, actors often portray sexual orientation through behaviors socially interpreted as indicative of that predetermined characteristic; however, sexual behavior may or may not reflect sexual orientation. In other words, the social actor has a choice whether to exercise behaviors indicative of current social definition of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or asexuality. The sexual behavior in which an individual engages does not necessarily reflect sexual orientation or desire; rather, sexual behavior is often indicative of the social construction of reality possessed by the social actor and of the motivations for specific sexual activity.116
Despite behaviors exercised by the social actor, sexual orientation remains the same. So, while a social actor might have strong sexual urges for someone of the same sex category, they may never act on it. Conversely, someone having sexual attraction for others of the different sex may exercise behaviors indicative of current cultural definitions descriptive of homosexuality. Thus, behaviors often (mistakenly) become the catalyst for identifying others’ sexual orientation. In addition, social actors’ sexual behaviors are a product of socialization, not biology. For example, we learn (explicitly from parents, teachers, politicians, religious leaders, and other significant figures in our lives, or implicitly from images, themes, or messages in popular culture) how to have sex, with whom to have sex, with what motivations to have sex. We learn there are certain rules, social regulations, and even legislation controlling our interpretations of valuing our own and others’ sexual behaviors. Sexual behaviors—focusing only on behaviors that are products of consensus from both (or all) parties—are behaviors (like all others) that are learned through socialization. They develop and progress as we develop and progress. Consequently, sexual behaviors are not always in response to sexual desire because of two central explanations:
1. Motivations for sexual behavior vary; and
2. The current social construction of normative sexual behavior
is reflective of ultra-conservative (prudish) ideals and saturated with religious underpinnings—or at least the most current culturally valued behaviors are. Nevertheless sexual orientation remains inherent in individuals and, thus, unchanging.
Common terms pertaining to sexuality (sexual orientation, desire, and behavior) are constantly presented in the media as being interchangeable. However, they are not. Subsequently, much of the population is left uneducated (or inaccurately educated) due mainly to this misrepresentation in popular culture and media and to the lack of passable education in the public school system on this topic. Currently, there is no curriculum mandate for teaching human sexuality (vastly different from “sex ed”). This is in combination with the content of sex education most often resulting in the over-emphasis given to abstinence-only education.117 Such restriction on students’ access to fair and adequate education on human sexuality only adds to the distortion of sexuality commonly presented as “normative” in popular culture.
The inconsistency surrounding the use of the mentioned terminology (sexual orientation, sexual desire, and sexual behavior), the lack of education in our public schools, and limited interpretations of sexuality presented in the media have contributed to a poorly informed public. The incapacity to recognize the differences between these terms outside of the individual only enhances the risk of not being able to identify them correctly within the individual’s experiences and the inability for one to fully understand their own complex sexuality. At risk is our ability to understand sexuality as one part of the human experience, instead of focusing on categories created in an attempt to indicate one’s full social identity. The ability to separately define behaviors from orientation will allow actors to recognize sexuality as a continuum within the human experience with room for biological variation. After all, biology loves variation; it is we humans who tend to struggle with it.
114 American Psychological Association. (2011). Sexual orientation. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from:
www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/orientation.aspx
115 Ibid
116 Katz, J. (2007). The invention of heterosexuality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
117 Landry, D. J., Darroch, J., E., Singh, S., Higgins, J., & Donovan, P. (2003). Factors associated with the content of sex
education in U.S. public secondary schools. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 35, 261-269. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/07%3A_Gender_Sex_and_Sexuality/7.01%3A_The_Social_Construction_of_Sexuality.txt |
Contemporary society defines sex as either male or female, as discussed in earlier chapters. However, we know intersexed people challenge this widely-held and reinforced sex myth. Sexuality, though, is also largely defined in binary terms. The word heterosexuality didn’t appear until 1890s, and it was only in response to the rise of nonprocreative sex. At the time, sex for pleasure was seen as abnormal and even perverted. The word heterosexuality was actually created in response to people engaging in sexual acts with people of the same sex, and these came to known as homosexual behaviors.118 In other words, the word heterosexual didn’t exist until there was a need to differentiate people based on their sexual behaviors, depending on whether they were engaging sexually with people of the same sex or a different sex. However these words were created to set the standard for “normal” sexuality (heterosexuality) and “deviant” sexuality (homosexuality). This is an old tune with new lyrics, much like Whiteness, wealth, youth, and masculinity have been set as the standards and much les scrutinized than other variations in those categories, now heterosexuality has been granted the same social beneficiary status pertaining to sexuality. In other words, when sexuality is viewed from a binary perspective, homosexuality is overwhelmingly underappreciated and underrepresented in popular culture and in our collective conscious.
While sociologists have challenged the legitimacy of the binary construction of sexuality, so too have they challenged the idea of heterosexuality being the “normal” of the two. In addition to this social injustice, the binary viewpoint does even more harm. It allows for the dismissal of people who don’t identify as being either hetero- or homosexual. Bisexuals are often described as being a combination of the two mutually exclusive categories for sexuality. Nope. Bisexuality is its own sexual category as recognized by the AMA, APA, and ASA, among others.
In addition, the idea that sexuality is binary assumes that homosexual or heterosexual desires exclude one another. Sexuality is, in fact, more fluid than a binary exploration would allow. Asexuality, not having sexual attracted to either male or female, does not align with either the heterosexual or homosexual definitions, and yet there is nearly 1% of the world’s population identifying as asexual.119 So the binary exploration of sexuality doesn’t make sense socially, biologically, or politically.
118 Katz, J. (2007). The invention of heterosexuality. CHicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
119 Anthony F. Bogaert. 2004. Asexuality: prevalence and associated factors in a national probability sample, Journal of Sex Research, August, 2004.
7.03: LGTBQ Identities
Give me an L! L! you got your L, you got your L! Give me a G! G! you got your G, you got your G! Okay, that’s enough, because if we really finished that little cheer, we’d have to spell out LGBTQQIAA. Yep, we’d be here a while. However, these are also the sexual identities we’re going to explore in this chapter, as we just discussed why the binary approach to sexuality is no longer social or scientifically valid.
L=Lesbian
A lesbian is a women is is attracted to other women The word “attracted” doesn’t necessarily imply a sexual attraction. Rather, this can include sexual attraction, sexual activity, sexual fantasies, emotional preference for females, or lesbian identification.
G=Gay
The G represents gay males. While the word gay is an umbrella term that can describe homosexual men and women, typically the word gay is used to represent homosexual males, thus making it necessary to allow a separate identity for homosexual females (lesbians).
B=Bisexual
Bisexual people have sexual desires or behaviors for both men and women, and those desires or behaviors are more than just incidental or occasional. This definition would exclude heterosexual people who “experimented” with homosexual behavior but engaged in only heterosexual behaviors for the rest of their lives, and it would exclude homosexual people who experimented with heterosexual behaviors but exercised homosexual behaviors for the rest of their lives. Bisexuality is NOT a combination of heterosexuality and homosexuality, as previously thought in the sciences only a couple of decades ago.
T=Transgender
Transgender is an umbrella term, encompassing most identities for people who do not conform to traditional gender norms based on their assigned sex category. Some people also refer to being transgender as being gender nonconforming or gender variant. These are all acceptable descriptors for people who “cross gender barriers” but do not change their sex. So women who wear men’s clothes or men who wear women’s clothes might identify as being transgender. The word transgender is becoming more accepted than the word transvestite, because the word transvestite has an association with the medical community and sometimes has a derogatory meaning.
Transexuality refers to those who have undergone sex reassignment hormone therapy and/or surgery (gender affirming surgery). People who identify as being transsexual experience gender identity inconsistent with the culturally constructed gender assumptions based on their assigned sex category. While some people who are transsexual reject the label of transgender, transsexual is not an umbrella term like transgender.
Q=Queer
The word queer actually means “strange” or “odd.” However, in recent decades the word was used to denigrate people who identified as homosexual. The University of Michigan describes the word as such:
Queer:
1. An umbrella term sometimes used by LGBTQA people to refer to the entire LGBT community.
2. An alternative that some people use to "queer" the idea of the labels and categories such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, etc.
Similar to the concept of genderqueer. It is important to note that the word queer is an in-group term, and a word that can be considered offensive to some people, depending on their generation, geographic location, and relationship with the word.120
Queer theory challenges either/or, essentialist notions sexuality within the mainstream dialogue, and instead suggests an understanding of sexuality that emphasizes blurring boundaries and cultural constructions that change depending on historical and cultural context.
Q=Questioning
The second Q stands for questioning. This second Q represents people who may not feel like they fit nicely and neatly into one of these constructed boxes. While we are seeing some shift toward progress of understanding sexuality as a spectrum, we continue to create labels and identities that ultimately constrict people’s identities, behaviors, relationships, and social interpretations of sexuality. So we are seeing progress with more terms and categories than the traditional homosexual or heterosexual binary, but some people (even with the additional contemporary categories) don’t identify as strictly one of those. Often people who identify as “questioning” are exploring their identification.
I=Intersex
People who are intersexed have characteristics that are different than the prevalent notions of female and male. Sometimes the I is omitted form the LGBTQQIAA because they argue being intersexed is not part of or affect sexuality or sexual identity, and this does not belong in this string of letters. In other words, intersexuality is not about sexuality, it’s about sex category. Others argue intersexuality falls under the transgender umbrella and, therefore, belongs in this string of letters. What most sociologists agree on is that expanding our understanding of sexuality, sex, and gender is imperative for the health of our culture and the individuals within. Yes, our understanding is still imperfect and limited, but we are moving in a more enlightened direction.
A=Asexual
Asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a persistent lack of sexual attraction toward any gender or sex.121 At least 1% of people are believed to be asexual. People who are asexual are not genderless people or people with hormone imbalance or people who have a fear or phobia of sexual relationships. Instead, someone who is asexual simply does not experience sexual attraction for others. However, it is important t note, people engage in sexual behaviors for motives other than sexual attraction all the time. So, people who are asexual often date, have sex, masturbate, fall in love, get married, or have children.
A=Ally
Simply put, ally refers to people who are not LGBTQQIA but who support the rights of people who are LGBTQQIA. Empathy, understanding, and respecting the diverse human experience of sexuality will help lower health risks, hate crimes, discrimination, substance abuse, homelessness, and suicide and will improve social solidarity and the overall health of society. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/07%3A_Gender_Sex_and_Sexuality/7.02%3A_Binaries_More_Like_BYE-naries.txt |
Sexism is discrimination based on sex. Heterosexism is the discrimination or prejudice based on not being heterosexual. In other words, heterosexism described the predominant thinking that there is an inherent superiority in being heterosexual, thereby limiting social acceptance, tolerance, and empathy for people who do not identify as being heterosexual. Sometimes this can come in the form of overt bigotry, but sometimes heterosexism can be harder to identify. For example, as a women, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been asked if I have a boyfriend or husband. However, I can’t recall an instance where someone used more inclusive language to gain perspective into my relationship status. Something like, “Do you have a partner?” And I don’t think I’ve ever been asked if I have a girlfriend or wife. Now, this is not to say that all those people are bigots or mean or intending to be exclusive, but we can see how heterosexism has become the normative presumption while other sexual identities have taken a backseat.
Heterocentrism is the belief that heterosexuality is central and normal in contrast to other sexual orientations. This leads to other sexual orientations being viewed as inferior, abnormal, or even unacknowledged. Heterocentrism can be a fueling force behind homophobia, both at individual and societal levels. Homophobia is ideology that disadvantages sexual minority groups. Homophobia can take many forms: violence perpetrated against sexual minorities, failure to allow same-sex marriage, criminalizing homosexual behaviors (it wasn’t until 2003 the Supreme Court reversed the decision with Lawrence v. Texas, invalidating sodomy laws the criminalization of numerous sexual acts between people of the same sex), or discrimination in the workplace. However, homophobia is often overlooked (except in the occasional headline—events such as the brutal murders of Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena, and Gwen Araujo). 92% of LGBTQ+ students report hearing homophobic slurs in school regularly, 84% of LGBTQ+ student report being threatened because of their sexual orientation, 39% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual students and 55% of transgender students reported having been shoved or pushed, and 64% percent of GLBTQ students reported feeling unsafe at school.122
Where does much of the homophobia come from? Heterocentrism can lead to heterosexism, and of left unchecked, heterosexism will allow homophobia to flourish. Researcher, author, and professor of psychology at the University of Rochester explained:
“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves. In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward. Sometimes people are threatened by gays and lesbians because they are fearing their own impulses, in a sense they ‘doth protest too much.’ In addition, it appears that sometimes those who would oppress others have been oppressed themselves, and we can have some compassion for them too, they may be unaccepting of others because they cannot be accepting of themselves.”123
Reinforcing the focus on heterosexuality as being the normative or standard sexuality enhances anti- LBGT+ attitudes. Although those attitudes are declining in the United States, the minority still expressing these negative attitudes has a significant impact on LGBTQ+ people, their supporters, and society as a whole. Homonegativity and homophobia differ depending on the perpetrator or provocateur and the person on the receiving end of the negativity.
122 Advocates for Youth. 2016. How the Homophobic Climate in the United States Affects GLBTQ Youth. http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/pub...ophobic-climat e-in-the-unit ed-states-affects-glbtq-
youth
123 Homophobia is More Pronounced in Individuals Who Have Internal Conflict Regarding Their Own Sexual Identity.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. April, 2012. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/07%3A_Gender_Sex_and_Sexuality/7.04%3A_Problems_with_Heterosexual_Focus.txt |
The body is the place where ascribed sex, achieved gender, and constructed sexuality come together. Sexual behaviors and attitude vary from culture to culture. While examining sex as a social fact, whether or not we are actually born with a sexual nature, sociologists acknowledge it’s social factors organizing our thoughts, behaviors, values, and acts pertaining to sex. Sexuality has become such a significant part of our social lives that it has actually come to be interpreted as identity. Today, many people take for granted that sexuality is, like gender, an identity. Individuals don’t just identify ourselves, but we identify others in terms of sexuality as well. And it doesn’t stop there! We have become preoccupied with our own and others’ identities because many of us view our own sexuality as a core of our identity. And we’re still not done! We often associate and even interchange our gender identities with our sexual identities, making it even more confusing for those trying to understand the human potential in categorical terms rather than in fluid terms.
Sexuality, like gender, is fluid. To try to categorize a human potential like sexuality is like trying to categorize human potentials like happiness. Could you imagine if we grouped people and their potentials by color of their skin? Oh, wait! We do that too! We create the categories because we’re comfortable with the categories, but it’s the categories themselves that allow for stratification and inequality between the categories.
Our sexuality will take on different forms and degrees of significance over the life course. Furthermore, men and women do not experience sexuality or even sexual behaviors the same way. Women are often challenged with two major themes pertaining to sexuality: 1) the double standard, and 2) the double- bind.
Double Standard
American contemporary society still dictates that females and males are held to difference (and unequal) standards pertaining to sexual practice. According to the sexual double standard, “boys and men are rewarded and praised for heterosexual sexual contacts, whereas girls and women are derogated and stigmatized for similar behaviors.”124
Try something for a moment. Take out a piece of paper and draw a line down the center of the page, creating two columns. Label the first column “men” and the second column “women.” Then in 20 seconds write down every word, label, or slang term used to describe males with multiple sexual partners in the “men’s” column. Then go to the women’s column, and give yourself 20 seconds to do the same. What do you see? Nearly every person who tries this exercise will have several more terms in women’s column, and not in a positive way. He’s a stud, but she’s a slut, right? And this is not to imply you think this way, after all you didn’t create those terms. But it shows our ability to mimic, translate, or at least identify the interpretations of the larger collective.
The relevance of this double standard for sexual development and gender inequality has prompted substantial research on the topic along with the publication of several popular books with titles such as Slut!125 and Fast Girls126. Aside from the sociological implications of the sexual double standard, the slut/stud problem has always been my favorite because I can’t understand how so many people have bought into this. And for so long! Why is a woman “a slut” or "dirty," because she has sex? Does a penis have some bizarre dirty-making power that I'm unaware of? Every time a woman has sex with a man, has his penis dirtied her more? And what is a slut? I mean, literally, what is a slut? I know what the dictionary says (yes, it’s in Webster’s Dictionary):
Slut:
1. a slovenly woman
1. a promiscuous woman; especially : prostitute
2. a saucy girl : minx
But, really, what s a slut? Do we have a quantifiable amount of people with whom the harlot must have intercourse? No. Do we have a comprehensive list of sexual behaviors a woman must engage in before being labeled a slut? No. Does a woman even need to have sex before becoming vulnerable to being labeled a slut? No. But we use this word constantly to degrade and shame women about their sexual behaviors and their selves. And let’s be clear on a few other points:
1. this is not a “man-on-woman” crime, overwhelmingly women are more likely to use the word slut than men when referring to a female;
2. the word slut is typically reserved for heterosexual behaviors, (and this ideology still evades my comprehension) females engaging in sexual behaviors with other females are less likely to be labeled a slut.
Maybe lesbian sex isn’t “real”? Or maybe because there was no dirty penis to dirty her up? I mean, think about it, if women engaging in homosexual behaviors are somehow less dirty than women engaging heterosexual behaviors, then that leaves the penis as the variable causing the dirtiness. Who knows, the point is we need to start questioning these labels and acknowledge the harm they cause, not only to the recipients, but to our collective understanding of gender and sexuality.
And the word slut isn’t just harmful to our reputations or interpretations of others’ reputations. How many times has a woman’s claim of having been raped been dismissed because she’s a slut? How often are women or girls afraid to obtain birth control for fear of being called a slut? How often are women who are victims of domestic violence are called a slut or whore by their partner? How often are women expected to recount their sexual history in rape, assault, or harassment cases?
Like activists such as Jean Kilbourne and Jackson Katz have proclaimed, it’s okay to stand up for women, whether you are male, female, both, or neither. And it’s okay to speak out against the double-standard imposed on women.
Double Bind
A double bind is a situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action. “Women have long since been categorized as either virgins or whores, but for the first time we are expected to embody both at the same time.”127 Turn on the TV or open a magazine, and you’ll see endless images of women using their sexuality to sell something.
Sandwiches, drinks, cars, clothes, whatever. There has been a standard set for how women should present themselves as being sexually desirable and mature. However, with this whole double-standard thing still looming, women are still expected to be sexually reserved in order to maintain purity. So, women are then faced with the challenge of being sexually available and experienced while maintaining purity. Sound impossible? Because it is. But, it is a reality for women today.
The contradictory narratives of the double bind make an impossible situation for females in the United States. If having sex is bad and not having sex is bad, then women are in a lose-lose position. And men, of course, are not exempt from this inequity. Men are often shamed for not having sex (or enough of it) while others may shame the women they are having intercourse with—at least for those engaging in heterosexual activities.
If we can undo our thinking of intercourse as the social jackpot (as often shown in popular culture) and start considering other methods of expressing sexuality, we could see a healthy attitudinal shift toward sex pervading the culture: one that doesn't hurt both men and women in its antiquated rigidity.
Autonomous Sexuality
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States saw its “sexual revolution.” This “revolution” was in part due to the introduction and mass availability of contraception. A woman “on the pill” could be sexually active with a man without the same fears of unplanned pregnancy as in the past. Many feminists argue the “sexual revolution” was less a victory for women because it was still on men’s terms.128 129 However, today we are seeing a bit of a progressive shift. There has been an increasing discussion on women’s sexual preferences, desires, and needs. One example in popular culture is women’s magazines that have allowed for a very public forum for celebrities like Beyoncé and Britney Spears to reveal their sexuality in public. And if you were an adult in 2008, then you probably remember just how much of her sexuality Spears shared with her audience.
So what is sexually empowering for women? To answer this question, women would need to experience sexuality in a world where they don’t feel shamed or dirtied by sexual behaviors, where they are not worries about how they look, and where they can be sexually active without fear of unplanned pregnancy or transmitted STDs. Women would need information and education of what “safe” sex really is, accessible contraception, open and honest communication with sexual partners, stronger policies regarding sexual offenses, and the ability to critique and even reject the feminine ideal represented in popular culture.
For many young people, sex has become a “rite of passage,” thrusting them from adolescence to adulthood and into a role ready for a “mature relationship.” However, many young people (many people in general, really) don’t define sex the same way. For example, many teens don’t consider oral sex to be “sex.” Further, we have systematically deprived our young people of comprehensive education about sex and sexuality. For schools to qualify for federal funding, a program must teach “abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems” and that a “mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity.”130 About 35% of U.S. sex education programs teach abstinence only, about 51% teach abstinence as the preferred option, and about 14% teach abstinence as one option in broader curriculum for sex education.131
So, we are essentially creating the perfect storm for high rates of unplanned pregnancy, high rates of STD transmission, and anxiety about sexuality. We are provided—not just providing but saturating—our youth with images of sexuality: how good it looks, how desirable it will make us, how enjoyable and exciting it is, and how we should look when we’re experiencing a sexual act. However, we’re simultaneously depriving our young people of access to adequate education on the topic of sexuality. This relates to sexual agency: With little formal education and popular culture dictating what sexuality should be, can sexuality be empowering for women?
Most sociologists agree that, yes, sexuality can be empowering for women, but there are some requisites that need to be met. First, women would need to be able to dismantle their thinking that their worth is based on the ability to abide by the constructed double standard or double bind. For now, men (at least heterosexual men) are the social beneficiaries of the double standard, wherein men are not judged so harshly for sexual activity, rather they are often celebrated and encouraged to engage in sexual activity. Second, women (and men) can challenge the Western ideal for marriage being a prerequisite for “the right way” to be sexually active. Third, being in an egalitarian relationship, wherein partners are intentionally and regularly maintaining equity in a relationship, is empowering for both partners. Egalitarian relationships tend to be better at providing romance and respect between partners over longer periods of time.
Much like the majority of socially normative behaviors, our sexual behaviors are constantly under scrutiny. As social actors, we are subject to a range of potential sanctions, both positive and negative, in response to our sexual behaviors. These sanctions, or the fear of such sanctions, are what stand in the way of real social change. Our social construction of sexuality and the inequalities bred from such construction, will not change without some serious social education and confrontation of current ignorant ideas surrounding sexual creed.
Perhaps the most effective approach to begin to reach these goals should target our educational institutions in an attempt to change sexually exclusive culture narratives. Allowing inclusive sex education in public schools (including curriculum focusing on the difference between sexual drive, desire, behaviors, and including positive role models for diversity in sexuality) will help “normalize” currently stigmatized sexual behaviors and people practicing those behaviors. Comprehensive sex education should include physical, psychological, and social aspects of sexuality, not simply focusing on disease and pregnancy prevention.
By implementing improved sex education in our schools, we will likely discover that the social and personal benefits of acceptable sex education outweigh the costs of lack of education. In American culture, we also generally agree that stigmatization and inflicting harm to others is unacceptable. A serious lack of formal sex education only allows these problems to flourish in our culture narrative.
Sex education does not necessarily require teaching certain values relating to particular sexual behaviors or current constructions of them. However, sex education should move beyond teaching anatomy, reproduction, and disease or pregnancy prevention132 and also include discussions pertaining to gender role socialization, interpersonal behavior, stigmatization, and acceptance.
By not creating such a shift, we risk the permission to accept and value ourselves, as a collective people, for our diverse human experiences in contrast to an ability to mimic antiquated methods of discrimination through heteronormativity and patriarchal ideals that are creating a degrading effect.
124 Derek A. Kreager, Jeremy Staff. June 2009. Social Pychology Quarterly. Volume: 72 issue: 2, page(s): 143-164
125 Tanenbaum Leora. Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation. New York: Seven Stories Press; 1999.
126 White Emily. Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut. New York: Scribner; 2002.
127 Kilbourne, J. 2012. Killing Us Softly 4.
128 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. 2005. Our bodies ourselves: A new edition a new era. New York: Simon and Schuster.
129 Rose, T. 2003. Longing to tell: Black women talk about sexuality and intimacy. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
130 Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, “Guidance Regarding Curriculum Content (Required for CBAE grantees as of FY 2006.),” January 2006.
131 Alan Guttmacher Institute. 2004. Sex education: Needs, programs and policies. New York and Washington D.C.: Alan Guttmacher Insitution.
132 Haffner, D.W. (1992). Foreword: Sexuality education in policy and practice. In J. T. Sears (Ed.), Sexuality and the
curriculum: The politics and practices of sexuality education (pp. vi-viii). New York: Teachers College Press. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/07%3A_Gender_Sex_and_Sexuality/7.05%3A_Gender_and_Sexuality.txt |
Contraception and Abortion
Many cultures around the world still teach that the responsibilities of birth control lies with women. Even in contemporary Western ideology, women are still assigned the burden of birth control efforts. In the United States, this thinking led to social movements being led primarily by women for access to resources such as Planned Parenthood, contraception, and abortion services.
Abortion (and certain forms of contraception) remained illegal in the United States until the 1970s when the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that made the decision to bear a child part of an individual’s constitutionally protected right to privacy. The most significant (and popular) of these rulings was Roe vs. Wade, which stated women have a constitutional right to choose abortion and that the state cannot unduly interfere with or prohibit that right. As a result of Roe, during the first trimester, the decision to abort was strictly private in all 50 states. Then states had varying legislation on the right to abortion in the second and third trimester. In the second trimester, some states imposed restrictions, but only to safeguard women’s health. And in the third trimester, some states prohibited abortions because of the viability of the fetus (the ability of the fetus to live outside the female’s body).
However, there have been recent efforts by some politicians to curtail or repeal rights which disproportionately affect women pertaining to access to reproductive health services. Some examples include attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, repeal women’s rights to choose abortion or criminalize abortion, and creating barriers to access to contraception. Some refer to this phenomenon as the War on Women. War on Women is a political catchphrase in United States politics used to describe certain policies and legislation as a wide-scale effort to restrict women's rights, especially reproductive rights.
A few examples of recent legislative efforts include: In March 2020, Arizona passed the “Tell Your Boss Why You’re on the Pill” bill. House Bill 2625 “permits employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.”212 In 2020, the Supreme Court upheld a Trump Administration mandate allowing employers to opt out of the 2010 Affordable Care Act mandate guaranteeing no-cost contraceptive services for women.213
Legislators in various states introduced a wide array of laws designed to either outlaw abortion or to discourage it by making sometimes humiliating or even painful requirements of women who might consider having a pregnancy terminated. As of October, 2021, 1,336 abortion restrictions had been enacted since Roe v. Wade went into effect and before it was overturned in June 2022.214 Some states mandated ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. Since many women's pregnancies are not far enough along to get an image via a traditional ultrasound (a little jelly on the belly with a camera on the stomach), transvaginal ultrasounds, which involve the physician inserting a probe into the woman's vagina, may be required. Critics have questioned the value of having a medically unnecessary procedure, and characterized it as similar to some states' legal definition of rape. Several states have ultrasound laws on the books even though routine ultrasounds are not medically necessary in first-trimester abortions.
Today, the majority of Americans support allowing individuals to access evidence-based health care services and to make decisions about their own care in consultation with their medical team. According to a recent PEW research report, "about six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all (29%) or most (33%) cases. Around a third of the public (36%) says abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases."215 It's important to mentioned here that one can be anti-abortion and pro-choice at the same time. Pro-choice ≠ pro-abortion.
However, even with more people identifying as pro-choice, laws and policies on abortion have been changing rapidly across the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion (Roe v. Wade) in late June in Dobbs v. Jackson. But, as of August 2022:216
• 27 states regulate the provision of ultrasound by abortion providers.
• 6 states mandate that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound on each person seeking an abortion and require the provider to show and describe the image.
• 10 states mandate that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound on each person seeking an abortion, and 8 of these require the provider to offer the patient the opportunity to view the image.
• 8 states require that a patient be provided with the opportunity to view an ultrasound image if their provider performs the procedure as part of preparation for an abortion.
• 6 states require that a patient be provided with the opportunity to view an ultrasound image.
Many argue body autonomy is a human right, and the right to choose when and with whom to have children is part of that fundamental right. Support for this right is found in a number of human rights instruments, which contain provisions that ensure freedom in decision-making about private matters. The rights to sex equality and gender equality are fundamental principles of human rights law.
Sociologists often focus on the systems or institutions that hold power and/or control and how those systems or institutions exercise, propagate, maintain, and enforce that power. While research will be conducted for years to come on the social consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade, many are predicting this legislation will disproportionately affect already vulnerable or marginalized groups: women & gender minorities, low-income communities, survivors of domestic & sexual violence, refugees & asylum seekers, communities of color, and many others who are affected by systemic oppression and who rely upon rights not explicitly granted in the Constitution.217 Some have already pointed to the access to contraception, marriage equality, and gay and trans rights as being vulnerable to reconsideration for legal protection, as these are also not as not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution.218
Others argue the lack of access to safe abortions in the U.S. will have a range of health and financial ramifications, compounding factors like poverty and systemic racism.219 While the actual figure on how many abortions are performed each year in the United States vary, it is well established that the majority of people seeking a legal abortion are low-income and the rate of abortion for people of color is significantly higher than for white people.220 Poverty, access to healthcare, and education are disproportionately racialized. In some circumstances, carrying a pregnancy to term can endanger the pregnant person’s life, disrupt educational plans, and change someone’s career trajectory, compounding disadvantages for already marginalized groups.
Sociologists can evaluate likely consequences of social policies.221 On abortion, for example, they can estimate how a policy might affect the birthrate, population growth, expenditures for welfare and education, the disparate impacts on various groups, or impacts on family structure in the U.S. Access to contraception and abortion opened doors to changes in trends in the family structure. "The gradual control over reproduction liberated time for further female education, more female tertiary sector employment, etc."222 This, in turn, resulted in other societal shifts away from the traditional nuclear family: cohabitation and (optional) marriage at later ages, legal divorce with less stigma, childbearing without marriage, and substantial movement toward gender equality in families. Sociologist Philip Cohen writes, "Reproductive rights are a prerequisite for the changes in family life that underlie all progress toward gender equality."223
212 House Bill 2635. State of Arizona. http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/50leg/2...ls/hb2625c.pdf
213 Supreme Court Ruling. (2019). Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinion...9-431_5i36.pdf
214 Guttmacher Institute. (2021). U.S. states have enacted 1,336 abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. https://www.guttmacher.org/infograph...1336-abortion- restrictions-roe-v-wade-was-decided-1973
215 “Majority of Public Disapproves of Supreme Court’s Decision To Overturn Roe v. Wade.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2022). https://www.pewresearch.org/politics...isapproves-of- supreme-courts-decision-to-overturn-roe-v-wade/
216 Guttmacher Institute. (2022). Requirements for Ultrasound. https://www.guttmacher.org/state- policy/explore/requirements-ultrasound#
217 Pan, D. (May 4, 2022). 'Everyone who is vulnerable in some way' will bear the brunt if court overturns Roe, specialists say. Boston Globe.
218 Cohen, P. (2022). Overturning Roe is an attack on the modern family. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/1662...-modern-family
219 Dehlendorf C, Harris LH, Weitz TA. Disparities in abortion rates: a public health approach. Am J Public Health. 2013 Oct;103(10):1772-9.
220 Kortsmit K, Mandel MG, Reeves JA, et al. Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2019. MMWR Surveill Summ 2021;70(No. SS-9):1–29. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss7009a1
221 Becker, H. (1996). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York : The Free Press.
222 Lesthaeghe, R. (2014). The second demographic transition: A concise overview of its development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 111, No. 51.
223 Cohen, P. (2022). Overturning Roe is an attack on the modern family. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/1662...-modern-family | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/07%3A_Gender_Sex_and_Sexuality/7.06%3A_Reproductive_Freedom.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
• Define gender roles.
• Compare and contrast traditional and contemporary gender roles.
• Examine some effects of traditional and contemporary gender roles.
Decades of sociological research has been dedicated to educational attainment and differences in educational attainment. With the believed correlation between educational attainment and occupational attainment (and with it, so many other opportunities for social mobility), connections between other statuses that produce differential social capital, like sex and race, and education have inspired sociological research. The spread of mass education in the 19th and 20th centuries offered opportunities for social mobility that were previously unavailable to many groups. However, especially in its earliest years, the spread of mass education also presented the spread of unequal access to adequate education. Historically and today, race, class, and gender remain influential factors on access to education and educational attainment.
08: Gender and Education
By 1850, all 50 states had established government-funded schools in which White children (of any social class) could attend. Black children were formally excluded from public education opportunities until after the Civil War; and even after the Civil War, schools remained segregated. In 1867 the Department of Education was established, and its primary role was to collect information on schools and teaching that would help the States establish effective school systems.224 By 1870, public schools were present in every state with secondary public schools outnumbering private schools. However, three years later in 1873, an economic depression hurt formal education. Many schools closed because they lacked the funds to staff the school with teachers and supplies.
During this time, public schools remained racially segregated. Native American Boarding Schools (also known as Indian Boarding Schools) were established by the U.S. government in the late 19th century, using a model based off an education program designed in Fort Marion Prison in St. Augustine, Florida experimenting with Native American assimilation education on imprisoned and captive Indigenous people. In 1886 Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt opened one of the most well-known of these schools, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Attendance to the boarding schools was made mandatory by the U.S. Government regardless of whether or not Indigenous families gave their consent. Pratt's educational goal for American Indians was to “civilize them” through total and forced cultural assimilation - an attempt to eliminate entire cultures and peoples. This philosophy meant administrators forced students to speak English, were assigned Anglo-American names, had their hair cut or buzzed, and forced to wear military-style uniforms in exchange of their traditional clothing. As Pratt put it in an 1892 speech: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”225 Carlisle was one of 357 Indigenous boarding schools that operated throughout the country.
Figure \(8.1.1\): Photo Source: John N. Choate. Boys and girls pose outdoors at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pa., after their arrival at the boarding school from For Marion, Fla.226
Figure \(8.1.2\): Photo Source: John N. Choate. The same INdian students (from the previous image) are shown four months after arriving at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.227
In 1896, the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson established separate public schools for black and white students. The decision also deprived African American children of equivalent educational advantages. Schools for Black children had to make do with scant financial support and negligible resources. There were typically far too few teachers, too many students, and students of all ages (from toddler to teen) in one schoolhouse (which is really one school room). Often times, schools for Black children were so underfunded (or not funded at all) that building these centers for learning were privately founded by Black women. Teaching was an attractive career for Black women for economic reasons, but also because it was an alternative to working in a White family’s house in a domestic role.
It was not until 1832 that women were allowed to attend college with men. Oberlin College in Ohio was the first co-ed college in the U.S., and it was also the first White college to admit Black students. Progressive? Maybe. But are you ready for this?! Female students were expected to remain silent in lecture halls ad during public assembly. AND they were required to care for themselves as well as do the laundry for male students, clean the male students’ rooms, and serve male students their meals. Can you imagine?! Think about some of the students in your class. If you are a female, imagine having to do the laundry of some of your male classmates to be able to learn at the same university. And if you’re male, imagine expecting your female classmates having to do your laundry and serve you meals. Hopefully (and maybe I am being too hopeful here) we can all agree the inequality was apparent and disturbing, at best.
In addition to having to accomplish domestic roles to serve male students, female students were often channeled into areas of study including home economics, elementary education, and nursing; whereas male students were often encouraged to enter areas of study such as engineering, physical and natural sciences, business, law, and medicine. We will discuss how some of these trends persist today later in the chapter.
In 1896, the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson established separate public schools for Black and White students. The decision also deprived African American children of equivalent educational advantages. Schools for Black children had to make do with scant financial support and negligible resources. There were typically far too few teachers, too many students, and students of all ages (from toddler to teen) in one schoolhouse (which is really one school room). Often times, schools for Black children were so underfunded (or not funded at all) that building these centers for learning were privately founded by Black women. Teaching was an attractive career for Black women for economic reasons, but also because it was an alternative to working in a White family’s house in a domestic role.
The government funded schools available to White children had to two major outcomes:
1. White female literacy raised to meet the rate of White male literacy; and
2. The increase in elementary schools across the country
allowed for more career opportunities for woman as school teachers. Because of the proliferation of schools in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s, teaching became a full-time job, and largely dominated by women. However, this job paid far too little to support a family, so as a result, school administrators employed women in large numbers as cheap and efficient means to implement mass education.
As far as college education, it was not until 1832 that women were allowed to attend college with men. Oberlin College in Ohio was the first co-ed college in the U.S., and it was also the first racially segregated college to admit Black students. Progressive? Maybe. But are you ready for this? Female students were expected to remain silent in lecture halls and during public assembly. AND they were required to care for themselves as well as do the laundry for male students, clean the male students’ rooms, and serve male students their meals. In fact, female students were excused from class on Mondays to fulfill their domestic responsibilities at the college. Can you imagine?! Think about some of the students in your class. If you are a female, imagine having to do the laundry of some of your male classmates to be able to learn at the same university. And if you’re male, imagine expecting your female classmates having to do your laundry and serve you meals. Hopefully (and maybe I am being too hopeful here) the inequality is apparent and disturbing, at best.
In addition to having to accomplish domestic roles to serve male students, female students were often channeled into areas of study including home economics, elementary education, and nursing; whereas male students were often encouraged to enter areas of study such as engineering, physical and natural sciences, business, law, and medicine. We will discuss how some of these trends persist today later in the chapter.
The Progressive Era (18902-1930s) was notable for a dramatic expansion in the number of schools and students served, especially in the fast-growing metropolitan cities. After 1910, smaller cities also began building high schools. By 1940, 50% of young adults had earned a high school diploma.228 The Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s helped publicize the inequities of segregation. In 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education unanimously declared that separate facilities were inherently unequal and unconstitutional.
By the 1970s segregated districts had practically vanished in the South. Although required by court order, integrating the first Black students in the South was met with intense opposition. In 1972 Title IX was passed, making discrimination against any person based on their sex in any federally funded educational program(s) in America illegal.229
By 1980, women were enrolled in American colleges at the same rate as men, and by 1982 women actually earned more bachelor’s degrees than men. It wasn’t until 1987 that women began earning more Master’s degrees than men. Were you alive in 2005? Because it wasn’t until that year that women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in the United States.230
Although full equity in education has still yet to be achieved, technical equality in education had been achieved by the early 1970s.
224 U.S. Department of Education. The Federal Role in Education. Revised 6/2021. https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/f...hool%20systems.
225 Churchill, W. (2004). Kill the Indian, save the man: The genocidal impact of American Indian residential schools. San Francisco: City Lights.
226 Photo by John N. Choate is in the public domain
227 Photo by John N. Choate is in the public domain
228 US Census Bureau. (2017). High School Completion Rate Is Highest in U.S. History. Revised October 2021. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/pres...ics%20division.
229 U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Reviewed October 2021. https://www.hhs.gov/civil-rights/for...l%20assistance.
230 Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, Women Can’t Win: Despite Making Educational Gains and Pursuing High-Wage Majors, Women Still Earn Less than Men, 2018 | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/08%3A_Gender_and_Education/8.01%3A_A_Very_Brief_History_of_Education_in_the_United_States.txt |
Today, school settings are a key site of gender socialization. The messages children receive about appropriate behavior, attitudes, and appearance for their gender are both explicit and implicit, and come from school policies, teachers, fellow students, as well as the curriculum.
Elementary School
Student/Teacher Interactions
Male and female students typically have very different experiences in elementary schools. One notable example is the interactions between teachers and their students. Male students tend to interact with their teachers more often, and males receive more instructional attention from their teachers. This is more likely a result of male students being more demanding of attention from their teachers than female students rather than teachers intentionally investing more time into their male students’ education. For example, male students are more likely to call out answers in class, resulting in either punishment or reinforcement (both interactive) from the teacher.
There are other trends worth mentioning, as well. Teachers tend to spend more time problem solving with boys and posed more academic challenges to them. Boys were praised more often for the intellectual quality of their work, whereas girls are more often praised for being neat and polite.231 232 Sound unfair? I hope so! But boys are not always the beneficiaries of sex inequalities in elementary school. Boys are more likely to incur formal and informal punishments from the teacher, and their punishments are usually harsher and publicly handed out, whereas girls are awarded more “warnings” and more often afforded privacy in disciplinary actions.233
Curricula
During the elementary school years, girls often show lower self-esteem rates and earlier than their male peers. Some of this is attributed to the interactions between the teacher and pupil, but another major factor is women (and minorities) are widely underrepresented (and sometimes totally overlooked) in textbooks. Textbooks are powerful and authoritative because teachers, administrators, government, and other authorities approve them. As a result, elementary school children are likely to consider the way women and men are portrayed in textbooks as unquestionable and truthful. When women (or any group of people) are portrayed as unimportant or incapable by leaving them out, this sends powerful messages to kids about men and women and their roles in contemporary society.
Sex Segregation Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes
A common practice in elementary school is separating groups or participants by sex category, I.E.: boys in one line, girls in the other. Or, how many times were you separated by your sex category to play a sport in school? Or, maybe for the purpose of jobs in the classrooms? Boys lift the chairs on the desks and girls dust or water plants? Sex separation can reinforce gender stereotypes, particularly when it involved a division of labor in the classroom. In addition, separating children by sex prevents girls and boys from working together, cooperatively. This denies children the opportunity to learn about and sample one another’s interests or abilities.
Children also receive messages about sex and gender in the way adult jobs are distributed in their schools. About 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers are female, and about 80% of elementary and middle school teachers are female.234 Women remain underrepresented in administrative and upper management positions in these schools and their districts. In 2018, 68 percent of elementary school principals were women, in public middle schools only 40 percent were women, and in public high schools only 33 percent were women.235 This shows that while women are the majority in principal positions in elementary schools, they are still largely concentrated or relegated to elementary schools. As the schools progress in age and curriculum, men still dominate the principal positions.
Secondary Schools
Dress Codes
Dress codes are one example of formal policies in schools directly shaping gender roles and ideals. Common themes in dress codes often focus on traditional examples of feminine dress, like forbidding short skirts or bra straps showing or specific body parts like no showing knees, thighs, shoulders, cleavage, or midriffs. This means body parts are being outlined as "violations". In addition, a clothing item could be a violation on one body but not on another based-on how the clothing fits. This then punishes a person based on their body not based on the specific clothing items. Some compare this kind of restriction being focused primarily on feminine dress and (assumed) girls who wear them that their bodies are objects of attraction and therefore can become distracting when even partially exposed. These rules punish the person who is being sexualized rather than the engaging in conversations with the person who is “being distracted” about respect and bodily autonomy.236 Some of these dress codes can also have the effect of regulating the dress and appearance of trans* students, as when a dress code prohibits long hair for boys, or stipulates that only (cisgender) boys may wear tuxedos to prom, and only (cisgender) girls may wear dresses.
Gender Norms and Attitudes about Academic Achievement
Research indicates girls tend to feel embarrassed or uneasy about academic success. And some girls avoid subjects considered to be “masculine” because they fear rejection from their peers. For example, girls tend to take fewer advanced mathematical and scientific courses.237 Girl’s low participation in these domains has been explained by in terms of discriminatory barriers that block girls’ paths and facilitate boys’ success. There is biased advisement in course selection in high school, and some teachers still reinforce gender stereotypes in the classroom by lending their style to “boys can, and girls can sometimes” pedagogy.238
A 2013 article by sociologist Michael Kimmel, outlines the correlations between expectations about gender norms for boys to attitudes about school. Kimmel argues that “[h]ow little they care about school, about studying, about succeeding—these are markers of manhood in peer groups of middle and high school boys across the country.”239 Kimmel then further argues part of boys' masculine display includes demonstrating a lack of interest in academic achievement. The article concludes with a call to change the messages boys receive about academic success and masculinity by making academic engagement as sign in manhood.
Sports
School sports can also allow for the maintenance of gender stereotyping and inequality. Girls are often sent the message in high school that to be athletic is to be unfeminine. And school officials reinforce this by underfunding or totally ignoring girls’ sports. I’ve had some students say, “Well, football makes money for the school!” Sometimes this is true. But why is football only for boys? And think about what the baseball field looked like compared to the softball field (another example of sex segregation). Was there a softball field? What did the baseball uniforms versus the softball uniforms look like? You might even be unable to answer this question, because maybe you never went to a softball game? Or maybe you didn’t go to either, but if you did, how often did school officials or administrators attend girls’ sports events at your school?
According to a new state-by-state ranking by the National Women's Law Center, 28% of co-ed public high schools with interscholastic sports programs have what are considered to be “large” gender disparities in access to team sports. Nearly 4,500 public high schools across the United States have large gender inequality in sports and could be in violation of Title IX. These campuses account for well over a fourth—28 percent—of the country’s public high schools.240
The problem of underfunding girls’ sports does not exist only within the confines of the school itself. Rather it seeps into communities, as well. Take for instance outside sponsorships for high school teams. Sponsorships affects funding for teams greatly. Teams can sell sponsorship spots during big games or receive goods from various sponsors. In the clip below, Coach John Olive explains how the majority of funding for the boys’ team at Torrey Pines High School comes from corporate sponsors and one fundraiser.241 In fact, they’re able to raise about 2/3 of their annual budget in only a few days in their Holiday Classic tournament and they have a major sponsorship from Under Armor. Olive goes on to explain the girls’ basketball team has had to rely heavily on contributions from players’ parents. This trend is not uncommon across high school sports. The clip can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPdxnHItAcA.
The problem does not only lie in school sports; there is a huge gap remaining in professional women’s and men’s sports as well. This serves as an example for young people that women’s sports are less important than men’s sports. In a segment on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler took a Sports Illustrated NFL writer to task after he tweeted that women's sports are “not worth watching.” “Really?!” the comic duo repeatedly said, bringing up the power of tennis champ Serena Williams and winning goals in the women's World Cup. Poehler ridiculed Sports Illustrated for how its annual swimsuit edition is dedicated entirely to women who are not in sports. “Unless you think it's a sport to cover both boobs with one arm,” said Amy Poehler.
Figure \(8.2.1\): Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers. To watch the entire of this conversation with Amy Poehler click here.
College and Graduate Schools
Enrollment
College enrollment has been steadily rising in the past few decades, but recently women have outpaced men in enrollment. According to a PEW research report, in 2012 the share of women enrolled in college immediately after high school had increased to 71% from 63% in 1994. Men who enrolled immediately after high school was at 61% in 1994, and in 2012 it remained at 61%.242 The graph below demonstrates differences in enrollment by sex and race. In 1994 nearly half of Hispanic males and females who graduated high school enrolled in college. Nearly two decades later, college enrollments for both groups improved, but females outpaced males. However, there is a different trend among Black high school graduates. In 1994, Black men outpaced Black women in college enrollment just after graduating from high school. But by 2012 the share of young Black men enrolled in college remained about the same, while the share of young Black women enrolled in college increased to 69%, creating a 12% gap from males.
Figure \(8.2.2\): Diagram of "Women Outpace Men in College Enrollment"243
Among Asian Americans, the share of high school graduates going to college immediately after graduation also grew during this time period for both young men and young women, but the gap is much smaller than that amoug other groups.
Degrees Conferred
The highest percentage of bachelor's degrees conferred to women in the U.S., by major are:244
1. Health Professions (85% women): nursing assistant, veterinary assistant, dental assistant, etc.
2. Public Administration (82%): social work, public policy, etc.
3. Education (79%): pre-K, K-12, higher education, etc.
4. Psychology (77%): cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, etc.
40-45% of the degrees in Math, Statistics, and the Physical Sciences were conferred to women in 2012, and a majority of Biology degrees in 2012 (58%) were earned by women. The largest gender gap in majors in U.S. college remains in Computer Sciences and Engineering. Computer Science and Engineering majors have stagnated at less than 10% of all degrees conferred in the U.S (with less than 20% of all of those will being awarded to women) for the past decade, while positions with programming or engineering skills remain unfilled each year.
Figure \(8.2.3\): Graph of Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women in the U.S.A., by major (1970-2012)"245
Reviewing the graph above, you can see dramatic increases in Psychology, Physical Sciences, Journalism, and Communication Studies since the 1970. Perhaps the most dramatic increase is in Agriculture. With only 4% of degrees conferred to women in Agrculture in 1970 and grew to an even 50% by 2012
Faculty and Administration
In addition to the gender gap in some majors, there remains a significant gap among college faculty. While women held nearly 47% of all full-time faculty positions in 2018, they held just 43% of tenured or tenure-track positions,246 and women were more likely to be found in lower- ranking academic positions.247
Woman are also overrepresented among the ranks of temporary, part-time, and adjunct faculty, they are also underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. For example, according to the Society for Women in Engineering, as of 2019, “Only 17.4% of tenure/tenure-track faculty in colleges of engineering in the U.S. are women.”248
In 2018-19, women made up just 43% full-time professor positions,249 but also held 55.7% of all instructor positions, among the lowest ranking positions in academia.250
In addition, raising a family more negatively impacts women’s academic career than men’s.251 Among tenured faculty, only 44% of women were married with children, compared to 70% of men.252
Further, an analysis of 106 tenure-track positions at the University of Southern California revealed a promotion gap.253 Between 1998 and 2012, 92% of white male faculty were awarded tenure, while the same was true of only 55% of women and minority faculty.254
Women of color are even more underrepresented in higher academia. Asian women held 4.4% of full-time tenured and tenure-track positions, while Black women held about 3%, Hispanic women held just over 2%, and American Indian/Alaska Native women held less than 0.5% of all full-time tenured or tenure-track positions.255
Women have made great progress in academic leadership (even though there is still a lot of work to do to achieve equality). From 1986 to 2011 the number of women college and university presidents jumped from 10% to 26%.256 Women are more likely to lead two-year institutions than four-year institutions with about 33% of community college presidents being women compared to 23% of four-year instituations.257 During the academic year 2013-2014, 42% of new deans were women.258
231 Golombok, S. & Fivush, R. (1994). Gender development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
232 Delamont, S. (1996). Women’s place in education. Brookfield, MA: Avebury Publishers
233 Golombok, S. & Fivush, R. (1994). Gender development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
234 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor. 2019. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.” https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm.
235 Taie, S., and Goldring, R. (2020). Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary and Secondary School Teachers in the United States: Results From the 2017–18 National Teacher and Principal Survey First Look (NCES 2020- 142rev). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved [date] from https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsin...bid=2020142rev.
236 Thomas, A. (2019). The Sexualized Messages Dress Codes are Sending to Students. The Pudding.
237 Pearson, Jennifer. “Gender, Education and.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Ritzer, George (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Blackwell Reference Online. 31 March 200
238 Kahle, J. B., Parker, L. H., Rennie, L. J., & Riley, D. (1993). Gender differences in science education: Building a model. Educational Psychologist, 28(4), 379–404.
239 Kimmel, Michael. “Solving the ‘Boy Crisis’ in Schools.” Huffington Post, 30 April 2013. www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kimmel/solving-the-boy-crisis-in_b_3126379.html
240 Wong, A. (2015). Where Girls Are Missing Out on High-School Sports. The Atlantic. June 26. https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...uality/396782/
241 YouTube. (2014). John Olive explains how boys raise money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPdxnHItAcA
242 Lopez, M and Gonzalez-Barrera, A. (2014). Women’s college enrollment gains leave men behind. PEW Research Report. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...ins-leave-men- behind/
243 Lopez, Mark Hugo and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. (2014). Women’s college enrollment gains leave men behind. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...t-gains-leave- men-behind/
244 Olson, R. (2014). Percentage of Bachelor’s degrees conferred to women in the U.S.A., by major (1970-2012). https://randalolson.com/2014/06/14/p...jor-1970-2012/
245 Graph by Randy Olson is in the public domain
246 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), “Full-Time Instructional Staff, by Faculty and Tenure Status, Academic Rank, Race/Ethnicity, and Gender (Degree-granting institutions): Fall 2018,” Fall Staff 2018 Survey (2018). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/...t19_315.20.asp
247 Ibid
248 Society for Women in Engineering. “Tenure/Tenure-Track Faculty Levels.” https://research.swe.org/2016/08/ten...aculty-levels/.
249 Ibid
250 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), “Full-Time Instructional Staff, by Faculty and Tenure Status, Academic Rank, Race/Ethnicity, and Gender (Degree-granting institutions): Fall 2018,” Fall Staff 2018 Survey (2018). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/...t19_315.20.asp
251 Ward, K., & Wolf-Wendel, L. (2012). Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family. Rutgers University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hjfsw
252 Ibid
253 Jane Junn, “Analysis of Data on Tenure at USC Dornsife” (October 19, 2012).
254 Ibid
255 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), “Full-Time Instructional Staff, by Faculty and Tenure Status, Academic Rank, Race/Ethnicity, and Gender (Degree-granting institutions): Fall 2018,” Fall Staff 2018 Survey (2018). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/...t19_315.20.asp
256 Bryan J. Cook, “The American College President Study: Key Findings and Takeaways,” American Council on Education, Spring Supplement 2012.
257 Audrey Williams June, “Despite Progress, Only 1 in 4 College Presidents Are Women,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 16, 2015.
258 “Almanac of Higher Education 2014: Background of Newly Appointed Provosts, 2013-14,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2014; “Almanac of Higher Education 2014: Background of Newly Appointed Deans, 2013- 14,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2014. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/08%3A_Gender_and_Education/8.02%3A_Contemporary_Education.txt |
Education remains a critical domain in which sex and gender inequities can be dismantled or modified. From the early years in k-12, teachers, curriculum, textbook, and administrators can adopt more inclusive pedagogical approaches. This would allow students to feel acknowledged, important, and capable. It may also leave students without the internalization of varying jobs or talents being reserved for specific sex categories. When respect in the classroom is mutual between teacher and student (despite sex, gender, sexuality, race, or learning level), a productive classroom can be formed.
More and more schools and districts are recognizing the need for equity as a foundation, mindset, and approach. Culturally responsive teaching practices and curricula in the classrooms is a large piece to modernizing of mass education in the United States. While the type of institutionalized change that is needed to make lessons culturally responsive (and sustaining) cannot occur through a single initiative or concrete practice, the emphasis in these efforts are making huge strides in administrative and professional development opportunities, as well as formal changes in legislative codes to support these efforts and serve historically underrepresented groups.259
One example of promoting equity in the classroom is evaluating how current curriculum might be unintentionally promoting gender disparities. Instructional materials, including textbooks, handouts or workbooks, can be studied to determine whether they are gender-biased, gender- neutral or gender-responsive. In k-12 and in colleges, curricula should include elements that recognize gender equality-related issues in learning materials, and how those issues can be faced by teachers once they take up the profession and start to use these materials in their classes.260
As discussed earlier, school dress codes that unfairly target young girls and trans* students are common. But some high schools are beginning to rethink antiquated dress codes and rewrite them with student inclusivity and equity in mind. For example, the Oregon chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) created a mock model for school dress codes wherein self-expression is embraced and working to get rid of gender bias and sexism is emphasized. Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Illinois, adopted the Oregon NOW model its revised 2017/18 dress code policy. According to the school, the new dress code was created to support "our goal of inspiring our students to learn while leaving primary decisions around student clothing and style to students and their parent(s)/Guardian(s)."261
The current socialization of gender trends within our schools assures students are made aware that girls are unequal to boys. Every time students are seated or lined up by sex category, teachers are affirming that girls and boys should be treated differently. When an administrator ignores an act of sexual harassment, they are allowing the degradation of that pupil. When different behaviors are tolerated for boys than for girls because “boys will be boys,” schools are perpetuating the oppression of females and reinforcing unwanted behavior in male students. We can ensure girls and boys are not socialized in ways that work against gender equity by emphasize attitudes and values that promote gender equality and removing gender-based stereotypes that contribute towards perpetuating gender inequalities. In the United States, the Second Step program emphasizes the importance of social emotional learning in schools and teaches skills such as communication, coping and decision-making with the objective to help young people navigate peer pressure, substance abuse and in person and online bullying and has been suggested as a possible teaching and learning strategy for addressing or preventing school-related gender-based violence.262
What happens when we grade all students "the same"? As discussed earlier, gender stereotypes affect grades in school, i.e.: gender stereotypes are negatively affecting girls’ math grades and positively affecting boys’.263 "The long-term effects are amplified by socioeconomic factors and family structure—girls from families where fathers were better educated than mothers and who are from lower socioeconomic communities were the most negatively affected."264 Studies have suggested similar implicit biases in delivery of instruction have unconsciously undermined boys’ interest in the arts and language, enabling gender gaps interest and formal study in these areas. What can we do? We have to grade, right? Enter "ungrading"! Ungrading is a newer, modern take on assessment in the classroom. Ungrading does not mean "not grading"; rather, this term described a pedagogical approach which emphasizes thoughtful feedback and resubmission over than traditional (and unfair) "marks" meant to symbolize students' understanding of material. Ungrading can also relive some of the vulnerability for implicit biases to seep into the grading process and to engage student work rather than evaluate it. While ungrading is gaining some momentum on college campuses, many of its credited pioneers are in k-12 education, and much of its movement was rooted in a deep dissatisfaction of the status quo and gaps in achievement.
“Until educational sexism is eradicated, more than half our children will be shortchanged and their gifts lost to society.”265
259 U.S. Department of Education. 2022 Agency Equity Plan related to Executive Order 13985. https://www2.ed.gov/documents/equity...quity-plan.pdf
260 McCombs, E. (2017). Sexist School Dress Codes Are A Problem, And Oregon May Have The Answer. Huffington post. Sep 6, 2017
261 McCombs, E. (2017). Sexist School Dress Codes Are A Problem, And Oregon May Have The Answer. Huffington post. Sep 6, 2017
262 UNESCO and UN Women (2016). Global guidance on addressing school-related gender-based violence (PDF). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/4822...0000246651_eng
263 Victor Lavy & Edith Sand, 2018. "On the origins of gender gaps in human capital: Short- and long-term consequences of teachers' biases," Journal of Public Economics, vol 167, pages 263-279.
264 Chemaly, S. (2015). All Teachers Should Be Trained To Overcome Their Hidden Biases. Time Magazine.
265 Sadker, D., Sadker, M. (1994) Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls. Toronto, ON: Simon & Schuster Inc. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/08%3A_Gender_and_Education/8.03%3A_Positive_Progress.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
• Define "productive" and "unproductive" work.
• Identify discriminatory practices specific to gender often face in the workforce.
• Define sexual harassment
• Describe inequalities between people in the workforce.
09: Gender and Work
Occupational sex segregation refers to the degree in which men and women are concentrated in occupations in which workers of one sex predominate. For example, we will discuss in this chapter how women continue to dominate nursing and elementary school teaching. Gender stereotypes have been used as justifications for hiring women for secretarial, domestic, clerical, and health services professions. One instance of this stereotype is illustrated in the idea that women’s natural dexterity and compliant personalities made the ideal for office work.
Industry sex segregation occurs when women and men hold the same job title in a particular field or industry, but actually perform different jobs. More often than not, women are placed in the lower paying and less prestigious occupations. For example, women being hired in the mining industry are usually concentrated in the laboring jobs, which is the lowest level of mining, typically involving mine maintenance.
Establishment sex segregation occurs when women and men hold the same job title at an individual establishment or company, but actually do different jobs. Women’s jobs are usually lower paid and less prestigious. It is not uncommon for women at a law firm to be concentrated in the family law division while men dominate more lucrative corporate and commercial law department.
More than fifty years after the second wave of feminism, we have seen huge strides toward gender equality. Women are working in nearly all occupations that once were exclusively the reserved for men, and many are in prominent leadership roles in business and government. Yet, sex segregation in the workplace remains a problem as social norms continue to restrict occupational choices for women and men.
Despite the early gains of women in professional and service jobs that require a college education, many such occupations remain disproportionately male, particularly at the highest levels. Furthermore, most technical and manual "blue-collar" jobs have undergone little to no integration since the 1970s.
Traditional economic theory explained occupational segregation by sex or gender as an inevitable consequence of “natural differences” in skills between women and men, but contemporary economists have refocused the explanation on gender discrimination by employers, coworkers, and other actors. Despite a decline in explicit sexism, gender discrimination today, whether in the form of stereotypes or social pressures, is perpetuated by a new, “egalitarian” form of gender essentialismthe belief that women and men’s social, economic, and familial roles are and should be fundamentally different. While most people now support women’s access to all economic opportunities, they simultaneously expect men and women to pursue traditionally “male” and “female” jobs and regard parenting as the primary responsibility of mothers.
9.02: Work
Essentially all women work. Some are artists, politicians, assistants, farmers, soldiers, teachers, parents, spouses, architects, or dishwashers. Some find their work enjoyable, and some are working out of necessity. Economists today separate paid and unpaid work with the terms “productive” and “unproductive” work. This distinction is essential when we’re exploring many women’s everyday struggle to balance their daily lives. With this definition, anyone who spends their days making meals, doing dishes, folding laundry, ironing, carpooling, feeding the dogs, cleaning the cat box, helping with homework, setting up play dates, getting kids to soccer practice, and grocery shopping is not involved in “productive work.”
In recent decades, women have entered the workforce and obtained jobs that were once reserved for men. However, most paid jobs in the United States are still divided by gender lines. In 2019, 57.4 percent of all women participated in the labor force while the labor force participation rate for men was 69.2 percent. Women accounted for 51.8 percent of all workers employed in management, professional, and related occupations in 2019, somewhat more than their share of total employment (47.0 percent). By industry, women accounted for more than half of all workers within several sectors in 2019: education and health services (74.8 percent), financial activities (52.6 percent), and leisure and hospitality (51.2 percent). However, women were substantially underrepresented (relative to their share of total employment) in manufacturing (29.4 percent), agriculture (26.2 percent), transportation and utilities (24.1 percent), mining (15.8 percent), and construction (10.3 percent).266
Women continue to dominate in positions in supportive or service areas. These types of jobs would include being secretaries, assistants, health aids, servers, day-care workers, elderly caregivers, and in other people’s homes. In these types of positions, women are often treated as expendable and replaceable in their positions. This treatment also places the people in these occupations are greater risk for labor and wage exploitation. In her book Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu- Sotelo shares the voices, experiences, and views of Mexican and Central American women who care for other people's children and homes. In it, she describes how paid domestic work has largely become the domain of disenfranchised immigrant women of color. Many of these workers were not earning a living wage, and some employers even exercise great pains not to flaunt their affluence. In one telling moment, Hondagneu-Sotelo writes:
Some employers try to snip off the price tags on new clothing and home furnishings before the Latina domestic workers read them because they fear the women will compare the prices of those items with their wages - which they invariably do. While some employers often feel guilty about 'having so much' around someone who 'has so little,' the women who do the work resent not their affluence but the job arrangements, which generally afford the workers little in the way of respect and living wages.267
Women in professional jobs tend to dominate occupations like teaching (76%),268 social work (83%),269 and nursing (89%).270 There is a definite emphasis on care-giving or serving others in women’s professions. But there is another difference between women’s and men’s work, and that comes in the form of their wages. “You don’t have to look to Venus or Mars to find the difference in men and women. Just look at their paychecks.”271
266 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (2021). Women in the labor force: a databook. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/wom.../2020/home.htm
267 Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2007). Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. University of California Press. Pg 11-12.
268 National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Characteristics of Public School Teachers. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved [August 2022], from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr.
269 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
270 Jennifer Cheeseman Day and Cheridan Christnacht, “Your Health Care is in Women’s Hands,” US Census Bureau, August 14, 2019.
271 Tucker, Cynthia. 1996. Women’s practical vote for Clinton. Chicago Tribune. Page 3
9.03: Gender Work and Wages in the U.S.
Corporations are constantly trying to find new ways to cut the costs of their production—no matter the product being produced—and maximize their production and profits. One way to achieve this goal is to hire low-wage workers or replace them entirely! Think about it, why do we have salad bars, ATM machines, online bill pay, or self-check-out at the grocery store? With salad bars, we don’t need a server, and with ATMs and online bill pay we don’t need bankers, and with self-check-out at the grocery we don’t a checker.
One result of the idea of minimizing cost of production has been the income inequality between people with college degrees and high school education and people in professional and technical positions. We are able to economically justify why one’s labor power is worth more than others’. And with globalization allowing for more and more outsourcing of goods being produced outside of the United States, it has become increasing difficult for families to economically thrive. This has made it imperative for more and more women to become “productive workers.”
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau (2019) 57.4% of women participated in the labor force and 72.3% of women with kids under 18 are in the workforce.272 Today, women make up nearly half of our workforce, and many women are the primary breadwinners for their families. In fact, for single, widowed or divorced moms, the rate was 77.6%.273
In 2021 the 20 occupations with the highest median weekly earnings among women who were full-time wage and salary workers were:274
1. Physicians, \$2,283
2. Pharmacists, \$2,087
3. Lawyers, \$1,912
4. Computer and information systems managers, \$1908
5. Nurse practitioners, \$1,903
6. Chief executives, \$1904
7. Physician assistants, \$1,855
8. Software developers, \$1,840
9. Computer programmers, \$1,677
10. Public relations and fundraising managers, \$1,659
11. Public relations specialists, \$1,615
12. Financial and investment analysts \$1,607
13. Industrial engineers, including health and safety, \$1,571
14. Human resources managers, \$1,545
15. Civil engineers, \$1,531
16. Physical scientists, \$1,500
17. Marketing managers, \$1,490
18. Postsecondary teachers, \$1,483
19. Physical therapists, \$1,478
20. Occupational therapists, \$1,470
Women’s notable progress over the years is reflected in their increased educational attainment, higher earnings, and a larger presence in leadership positions and entrepreneurial fields. So, our work is done, right? Not quite.
272 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Employment characteristics of families. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
273 Ibid
274 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/09%3A_Gender_and_Work/9.01%3A_Segregation_in_the_Workplace.txt |
Millions of women in the United States are more likely to live in poverty than men and still face significant structural barriers to economic security and stability, including: occupational segregation; barriers to moving into higher-level positions; low wages and unequal pay; inadequate workplace flexibility; and pregnancy and sex discrimination. Author and historian Stephanie Coontz described some structural impediments influencing and maintaining the barriers in place including the gender wage gap, the relative absence of family-friendly workplace policies, and the lack of high-quality affordable and accessible childcare.275
The Pay Gap
Women continue to earn less than men, and almost twice as many women as men earn minimum wage or less each year. In 2021, the uncontrolled gender pay gap was \$0.82 for every \$1 that men made. The uncontrolled gender pay gap measures the median salary for all men and women regardless of job type or worker seniority. The controlled gender pay gap was \$0.99 for every \$1 men make, which is one cent closer to equal but still not equal. "The controlled gender pay gap tells us what women earn compared to men when all compensable factors are accounted for — such as job title, education, experience, industry, job level, and hours worked. This is equal pay for equal work. The gap should be zero. It’s not zero."276
Both the uncontrolled gender pay gap and the controlled gender pay gap measurements are important for understanding how society values women and women's work. The uncontrolled gender pay gap is an indication of what types of jobs — and the associated earnings and value of that work — are occupied by women overall versus men overall. Remember the list of jobs dominated by women discussed earlier in the chapter? We will discuss occupational segregation later in the chapter, but jobs and careers where women are overrepresented tend to pay less are less likely to include benefits, like employer-provided health insurance and retirement plans compared to jobs held by men. The differences in valuing of work in measurable occupational segregation allows us to explore how wealth and power is gendered and the value that women have compared to men within our society.
The wage gap results in significant lost wages that continue to add up over a woman’s lifetime. This number has narrowed in the last few decades, because women’s wages have risen, but also because men’s wages have fallen. Women of color, who are already disproportionately affected by the gender gap also experienced unemployment at higher rates in recent years, affecting the data around the gender pay gap:
"Due to the economic turmoil of COVID-19, women — especially women of color — have disproportionately faced unemployment at higher rates than in typical years. When women with lower wages leave the workplace, it moves the median pay for women up — slightly closing the gap between men and women’s pay overall. When unemployed women return to work, they could face a disproportionate wage penalty from being unemployed compared to men, suggesting that the gender pay gap could widen again in subsequent years. However, this depends on the market and the pay women receive after unemployment."277
When broken down in different ways—by race, age, education, physical ability, migration status, sexual orientation and so on—the wage gap varies dramatically. But in each group, women earn less money than their male counterparts. Intersecting racial, ethnic, and gender biases reflect a disproportionate outcome in the pursuit of economic stability, as the gender pay gap is wider for women of color. In 2020 for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men working full-time year around: Asian American women were paid 87 cents; white, non-Hispanic women 79 cents; Black women 63 cents; Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women 63 cents; Native American women 60 cents; and Latina/Hispanic women 55 cents.278
Education
The higher a person’s educational attainment, the more likely they will be a labor force participant (working or looking for work) and the less likely they will be unemployed.279 For people age 25 and over with less than a high school diploma, 46.2 percent were labor force participants; high school diploma, no college, 56.1 percent; some college, or associate degree, 62.6 percent; and bachelor’s degree or higher, 73 percent. So, education pays off! But, it is important to remember not all educational opportunities or access to adequate education are equal.
Census Bureau figures show that the typical worker (ages 25 and older) earned \$59,371 in 2020, but a worker with at least a bachelor’s degree earned \$71,283 and worker with a high school diploma but no college earned \$42,417.280 In the Gender and Education chapter, we discussed women's advancements in college education, surpassing men in enrollment and completion. While women have been a majority of college-educated adults for more than a decade, they are only recently matching men in the college-educated workforce participation. Women’s growing representation among the college-educated labor force has important economic implications for individual workers and the economy.
One study found that the average earnings of transgender women workers fall by nearly one- third after transition. "While transgender people have the same human capital after their transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically. We estimate that average earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increase slightly following their gender transitions, while average earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fall by nearly 1/3."281 The findings in this study align with other gender trends in the workplace pertaining to differences in power, authority, and value.
Family/Work/Home Balance
The U.S. workforce is still largely structured on the presumption that men are the breadwinners in a family unit, despite the rising number of single-parent families and women entering the workforce in higher numbers than ever before. Trying to balance (or more appropriately “juggle”) home and work life, can be a huge challenge for women especially. While the workforce is still largely structured and fashioned through a patriarchal design, home maintenance and care are still often thought to be "women’s responsibilities". Social and policy structures send strong reinforcing messages about the responsibility for home and childcare as women’s work.
Inequality in the workforce is more significant for mothers than for fathers. Often, women who leave the workforce for maternity leave are looked over for promotional opportunities, affecting retirement, hours, income, and pensions. In addition, mothers who work full-time, year-round typically have lower earnings than fathers (\$42,000 compared to \$60,000): mothers are paid about 70 cents for every dollar paid to fathers.282 Mothers of every race are typically paid less than white, non-Hispanic fathers.283
Employers’ negative stereotypes about mothers can also have negative effects on mothers’ job and salary prospects. In comparing equally qualified women candidates, one sociological study revealed that mothers were recommended for significantly lower starting salaries, were perceived as less competent, and were less likely to be recommended for hire than nonmothers in what they called the "motherhood penalty". The study also revealed the effects for fathers were just the opposite — fathers were recommended for significantly higher pay and were perceived as more committed to their jobs than men without children.284
Some mothers look for jobs compatible with children’s school hours (for those with kids who are school-age), as the rising cost of childcare has affected the cost of parents working outside of the home. Childcare is the fourth highest cost for a family after housing, food, and taxes. That means for some women who want to work, the cost of childcare can be prohibitive, as childcare is still seen predominantly as women’s responsibilities. The high cost of child care and a lack of paid leave make it less likely that women with caregiving responsibilities are able to stay in the workforce.285 Relatedly, increased access to contraception is one reason the gender wage gap began to shrink in the last few decades. This access allowed women more opportunities to control their fertility, another social responsibility assigned to women.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March and April of 2020, when large segments ofeconomy were shut down, many people were laid off or permanently lost their jobs. However, many other women, mostly married, heterosexual women in two-earner households, "voluntarily" left the labor force because the responsibilities for virtual schooling and childcare fell disproportionately on them.286 The pandemic shed a harsh light on the outdated (but maintained) gender gap in unpaid household and care work in the United States.
In addition, many have suggested reimagining and redefining how we value and pay "productive" and "unproductive" work, as they heavily influence not only likelihood of remining in the workforce, but also can have effects on salary and income. Women perform unpaid household and care work amounting, on average, to 5.7 hours per day compared with 3.6 hours for men. This means that on an average day, women in the United States spend 37 percent more time on unpaid household and care work than men.287
275 Coontz, Stephanie. “Why Gender Equality Stalled.” New York Times, 16 February 2013.
276 Payscale.2022 State of the Gender Pay Gap Report. https://www.payscale.com/research-an...ender-pay-gap/
277 Ibid
278 U.S. Census Bureau. (2021). Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement: Table PINC-05: Work Experience in 2020 – People 15 Years Old and Over by Total Money Earnings in 2020, Age, Race, Hispanic Origin, Sex, and Disability Status. Retrieved 14 August 2022, from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/t...c/pinc-05.html
279 U.S. Department of Labor. (2022) Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved 10 August 2022. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm
280 U.S. Census Bureau. (2021). Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement: Table PINC-05: Work Experience in 2020 – People 15 Years Old and Over by Total Money Earnings in 2020, Age, Race, Hispanic Origin, Sex, and Disability Status. Retrieved 14 August 2022, from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/t...c/pinc-05.html
281 Schilt, K., & Wiswall, M. (2008). Before and after: Gender transitions, human capital, and workplace experiences. B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, 8(1), [39].
282 NWLC. (2020). Motherhood Wage gap for mothers overall. https://nwlc.org/resources/motherhood-wage-gap- for-mothers-overall/.
283 NWLC. (2020). The wage gap for mothers by race, state by state. https://nwlc.org/resources/the-wage-gap-for- mothers-state-by-state-2017/.
284 Shelley J. Correll, Stephan Benard, & In Paik. (2007). Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty. American Journal of Sociology.
285 Schochet, L. (2019).Child Care Crisis Is Keeping Women Out of the Workforce. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/iss...88/child-care- crisis-keeping-women-workforce/
286 Ewing-Nelson, Claire. “Nearly 2.2 Million Women Have Left the Labor Force Since February.” National Women’s Law Center Fact Sheet. https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/...r-Jobs-Day.pdf.
287 Hess, C., Tanima Ahmed, and Jeff Hayes. (2021). “Providing Unpaid Household and Care Work in the United States: Uncovering Inequality.” Institute for Women’s Policy Research Briefing Paper. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/09%3A_Gender_and_Work/9.04%3A_Structural_Forces.txt |
Sexual Harassment
Sexual harassment is a serious problem disproportionately affecting women in the workplace. It is defined by the federal Equal Opportunity Commission guidelines as:
It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.
Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.288
However, sexual harassment varies widely, and there are often misconceptions of what actually does constitute as being harassment. In 1986 the first case concerning sexual harassment reached the Supreme Court with Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson. The Court established that sexual harassment incudes the creation of an abusive or hostile work environment and the victim identifying the harassments as “unwelcome advances.”
People of all sexes and genders can (and do) experience sexual harassment in the workplace. However, women outnumber men in these experiences; many working women will experience sexual harassment at some point in their careers. While some report this harassment, some leave their jobs to escape the harassing environment, which can have lasting effects on career attainment and create financial stress.289
LGBTQ+ Employees, Workplace Discrimination and Harassment
8.1 million LGBTQ+ workers (16 and over) live in the U.S.290 In recent years, there have been increased efforts for the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights at work in the United States. For example, 2020 saw a landmark Supreme Court ruling that protected LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination stating 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. However, there has also been some pushback. For example, some states have filed lawsuits seeking to overturn directives allowing transgender workers and students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
According to a report from UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, almost 30% LGBTQ+ employees reported experiencing at least one form of employment discrimination (being fired or not hired) because of their sexual orientation or gender identity at some point in their lives. And LGBTQ+ employees of color report this form of discrimination at a slightly higher rate than White LGBTQ+ employees.291 The study states:
Transgender employees were also significantly more likely to experience discrimination based on their LGBT status than cisgender LGB employees: Nearly half (48.8%) of transgender employees reported experiencing discrimination (being fired or not hired) based on their LGBT status compared to 27.8% of cisgender LGB employees. More specifically, over twice as many transgender employees reported not being hired (43.9%) because of their LGBT status compared to LGB employees (21.5%).292
In addition, LGBTQ+ employees reported having experienced harassment at a higher rate than non-LBGTQ+ employees with almost 38% reporting they had experiences either physical, verbal, or sexual harassment in the workplace.
There have been some efforts to dismantle systemic barriers to employment, work performance, and career progression for trans* employees. In Being Transgender at Work the authors suggest employers and businesses offer LGBTQ+ affirming benefits, craft inclusive policies or programs (i.e.: HR reviewing policies and removing gender-specific language from things like dress codes), foster inclusive environments through normalizing the use of pronouns (i.e.: in emails or zoom screens), and providing gender neutral bathrooms.293
Age Discrimination
61% of U.S. workers at or over the age of 45 reported witnessing or experiencing ageism in the workplace.294 72% of women say they have experienced age discrimination in the workplace, compared to 57% of men.295 Ageism is prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age, and it can occur in subtle ways like being removed from projects, replaced by younger coworkers, or not offered professional development opportunities. The impact of age discrimination (like other forms) can have harsh effects in a person's career. Gendered ageism refers to differences in ageism faced by women and men.296
From 1990 to 2017, there was a 15% increase in the number of Age Discrimination in Employment Act charges by women at or over the age of 40, and charges by men within the same age bracket decreased by 18%.297 Older women face marginalization based on gendered youthful (and literally impossible for any aging person to maintain) beauty ideals in addition to the unfounded societal biases that older employees are less innovative, dedicated, capable, adaptive, or generally less qualified. Here, the intersectional marginalizing factors of age and gender merge.
When searching for employment, older women experience more employment rejections than older men.298 A study found that younger women (under age 45) are more likely to be called back for another interview (almost double the rate for older women).299
The wage gap between men and women actually increases with age. One effect of corporate downsizing is the increased number of older, more experienced workers being laid off. Often times, this group is seen as too young to retire but too old or too experienced (expensive) to hire. For women over 40, age can complicate securing a job. Women over 40 typically earn even less than the average of the wage disparity between men and women, and if they are returning to the workforce after an absence, they often return to lower paying or part-time jobs.
Gendered Discrimination against People with (Dis)abilities
Women with disabilities are often labeled as being too dependent, passive, incapable, or incompetent. Work disabilities are more common among older women than young women. At the same time, many women who are unable to participate in the workforce continue to do their own cooking, cleaning, and home maintenance (“unproductive work”). Women with disabilities, in general, have lower educational attainment than do women who do not report having disabilities, which often times can exclude them from applying for higher paying jobs. There is a lengthy list of reasons why women with disabilities have lower educational attainment: being too ill to complete school, missing a lot of school, not having fair access to adequate educational programs, etc.
Added to these challenges is discrimination from the prejudices of employers. Women with disabilities often have to make special (and costly) arrangements to be able to participate in the workforce, having sometimes to arrange transportation, or extra support in the home or with childcare.
288 United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment
289 McLaughlin, H., Uggen, C., & Blackstone, A. (2017). The Economic and Career Effects of Sexual Harassment on Working Women. Gender & Society, 31(3), 333–358.
290 Kerith J. Conron & Shoshana K. Goldberg, Williams Inst. (2020). LGBT People in the US Not Protected by State Non-Discrimination Statutes.
291 Sears, B., Mallory, C., Flores, A. R, & Conron, K. J. (2021). LGBT People’s Experiences of Workplace Discrimination and Harassment. UCLA: The Williams Institute.
292 Ibid
293 Baboolall, D., Sarah Greenberg, Maurice Obeid, and Jill Zucker. (2021). Being Transgender at Work. McKinsey Quarterly, McKinsey & Company.
294 Rebecca Perron, The Value of Experience: Age Discrimination Against Older Workers Persist (AARP, 2018).
295 (2017). 10 Things You Should Know About Age Discrimination. AARP. https://www.aarp.org/work/age- discrimination/facts-in-the-workplace/
296 Sophie Beaton, Gendered Ageism in the Canadian Workforce (Samuel Center for Social Connectedness, 2019).
297 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Chart Data for the State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S. 50 Years After the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA);” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Age Discrimination.”
298 Noah Higgins-Dunn, “Older Workers Are America’s Fastest-growing Labor Pool—And the Least Protected from Workplace Discrimination,” CNBC, April 13, 2019
299 David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button, “Age Discrimination and Hiring of Older Workers,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, February 27, 2017.
9.06: U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau
The Women’s Bureau has outlined three major strategies to create more equity between sexes in the workforce:
• Improve Workplace Practices and Supports:
The Women’s Bureau identifies, fosters, and promotes policies and efforts that enable women to succeed in their work and personal lives. Today’s labor force comprises an increasing number of working mothers and women who care for disabled or elderly family members. Many low-paying occupations that tend to employ large shares of women lack adequate flexibility, benefits, and supports.
• Promote Greater Access to and Preparation for Better Jobs for Women:
The Women’s Bureau aims to help women prepare for, participate and advance in, and retain non-traditional, high-growth, and higher-paying jobs. Female-dominated occupations have been found to pay less than male-dominated occupations with the same skill levels, and women have relatively low shares of employment in high-paying jobs such as those in transportation, construction, and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.
• Promote Fair Compensation and Equal Pay:
The Women’s Bureau seeks to educate workers on their rights and employers on their legal obligations to ensure fair compensation. Although women earn less than men for reasons such as the lower-paying jobs they traditionally perform, around 40% of the difference in wages remains unexplained. The Bureau conducts research to identify additional factors that contribute to the wage gap and how to overcome them, as well as look for ways to improve compensation for lower-wage jobs that employ large numbers of women.300
300 U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau. Updated 2016. https://www.dol.gov/wb/overview_14.htm. Retrieved 10 October 2016. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/09%3A_Gender_and_Work/9.05%3A_Discrimination_in_the_Workforce.txt |
Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
• Define deviance and crime.
• Describe various theories pertaining to criminal behavior
• Describe how crime and punishment are gendered.
10: Gender Deviance Crime and Punishment
In sum, deviance is a violation of a norm. Any unexpected behavior or behavior that violates social norms can be seen as deviant. A social actor exercising deviant behaviors runs the risk of being labeled a deviant. But what is the difference in conformity, deviance, and crime? Is all crime deviant? Is all deviance criminal? In Table \(10.1.1\), Robert K. Merton’s matrix combining group norms and legal code behaviors illustrates how deviant and criminal behaviors differ.
Table \(10.1.1\): Robert Merton's Deviant and Criminal Behaviors301
Actor complies with legal code Actor violates legal code
Actor complies with group norms Conforming behaviors Criminal behaviors
Actor violates gorup norms Deviant behaviors Deviant and criminal behaviors
When an actor complies with group norms and the law it’s called conformity, or an adherence to the normative and legal standards of a group in society. An example might be the clothes you wore to class today, assuming you wore clothes to class and they are normative. When an actor violates group norms but complies with the law, it is deviance. An example might be if you wore your Halloween costume to class in July. If an actor complies with group norms yet breaks violates legal code, it’s called criminal. Crime is behavior which violates laws and to which governments can apply negative sanctions. An example of this might be when one drives 10 miles over the speed limit on the freeway. In this case, while speeding is against the law, if everybody is speeding and you do too, it could be seen as normative crime (although you may still receive a negative formal sanction in the form of a speeding ticket). Over–reporting deductions and under-reporting income on your income tax return can be seen as a normative crime (but, again, negative formal sanctions may still be applied in the form of an audit or paying penalties, etc.). When an actor violates group norms and legal codes, these are deviant and criminal behaviors.
301 Merton, Robert K. 1938. “Social Structure and Anomie.” American Sociological Review 3:672–82.
10.02: Biological Theories of Criminality
Biological theories of crime, which date back to the 19th century, argue that whether or not people commit crimes depends on their biological nature. In other words, some individuals would be predisposed to crime because of genetic, hormonal or neurological factors which are inherited (present at birth) or acquired (through accident or illness). Most criminal biologists have abandoned the idea that delinquency can be explained only by biological deviations in the "offender", preferring approaches that combine biology and sociology.
Lombroso's Atavism
In the 1800s, an Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, published L’Uomo delinquente (“Criminal Man”). In it, he described criminals as atavistic beings, or people who were less developed as humans. While examining the skulls of criminals, he noticed a series of features that were common. For example, Lombroso found similarities in the sizes and shapes of jaws, ears, and chins. Lombroso referred to criminally-labeled people as “evolutionary throwbacks” whose behaviors were more "apelike" than human and this imputed inferiority of the criminal permits treating them without moral or ethical considerations.302 Lombroso’s criminal anthropology presumed you could identify a member of the criminal race by certain visual signs or stigmas (like the visual physical characteristics listed above).
However, the studies carried out by Lombroso lacked the scientific rigor expected today, and, more importantly, some of the features described by Lombroso are linked to skin color and other traits often associated with the concept of race. Lombroso’s theories provided a significant ideological basis for systemic and institutionalized and racism. In sum, Lombroso’s biological theory of criminality was full of biased ideology and has since been largely dismissed by most of the scientific community and is often referred to as "scientific racism".303 In fact, “throughout his writings are clear and appalling passages with overt racist and sexist overtones that are consistent with a eugenics perspective of the human population.”304 However, even while much of the scientific world has discounted Lombroso’s findings, his findings have had lasting impacts on social views and consequences of crime and "the criminal."
XYY "Supermale" Syndrome
Another biological theory attempting to explain sex and gender differentials in criminal behavior was known as the XYY Syndrome theory. XYY syndrome is a genetic condition in which a human male has an extra male (Y) chromosome, giving a total of 47 chromosomes instead of the more usual 46. This produces a 47,XYY karyotype, which occurs every 1 in 1,000 male births. The presence of the extra Y chromosome in XYY males does not in and of itself produce aggressive behavior in those affected; dealing with aspects of the condition during adolescence is a more likely explanation for any delinquency or criminal behavior exercised by XYY males.
As early as 1974, prominent geneticists Jon Beckwith and Jonathan King called the notion of a dangerous XYY “Supermale” Syndrome a dangerous myth. This idea was primarily based on assumptions about the tendency of males to be more aggressive than females and early studies of XYY males in prisons.305 However, while males with an extra Y chromosome are still widely believed to show more signs of aggression, not all aggression is dangerous or violent. Meaning, aggression can be demonstrated on the soccer field or in the classroom or boardroom. Thus the theory of the extra Y chromosome creating a predisposition for violent or criminal behavior has fallen short.
302 Lombroso, Cesare. 2006a. “Criminal man: Edition 1.” In Criminal man. Edited and translated by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter, 39–96. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
303 Regoli, R. M., Hewitt, J. D., & Delisi, M. (2010). Delinquency in society (8th ed.), Boston: Jones and Bartlett.
304 DeLisi, Matt (2013). Cesare Lombroso. obo in Criminology. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780195396607-0165
305 Gotz, M. J., et al. "Criminality and Antisocial Behavior in Unselected Men with Sex Chromosome Abnormalities." Psychological Medicine 29 (July 1999): 953-62. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/10%3A_Gender_Deviance_Crime_and_Punishment/10.01%3A_Deviance_and_Crime.txt |
Cultural Deviance Theory
In the early 20th century Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay investigated the migration of southern African Americans and eastern European Americans to Chicago and other cities. Most of these immigrants were poorly educated and many did not speak English. Then cities expanded to accommodate this influx of people and many of the more affluent citizens moved out to the suburbs. The poor citizens were left in the run-down cities. Shaw and McKay thought that social conditions in neighborhoods caused delinquency (Cultural Deviance Theory). They found that in Chicago crime was at its worst in the center of the city and the area immediately surrounding it. It decreased as they looked further away from the city center. Thirty years later, the same findings occurred even though most of the residents from 30 years ago had moved, but the poverty remained.
Based on their findings, Shaw and McKay made four assumptions:
1. Run down areas create social disorganization. The diversity of cultures and languages fosters frictions based on these differences;
2. Social disorganization fosters cultural conflict. Rapid social change creates normative ambiguity (anomie);
3. Cultural conflict allows delinquency to flourish; children observe both conventional and criminal values. Criminals who are successful pass their knowledge on to their children, who then pass it along to others;
4. Allowed to flourish, delinquency becomes a career.
When social disorganization manifests, communities deteriorate, and residents become frightened to leave their homes in fear of potential victimization. This trepidation advances the cycle of crime as the “eyes on the street” (Jacobs 1961:44), so central to the informal social control present in urban areas, disappear and residents become afraid to involve themselves in their communities for fear of victimization.306
Differential Association Theory
Differential Association Theory looks at the process of learning deviance from others with
whom they have close relationships, who provide role models of and opportunities for deviance.
Edwin Sutherland conducted his work during the 1930s to the 1970s. His assumptions are:
1. Delinquent behavior is learned, and biology has no role in this behavior
2. Delinquent behavior is learned through verbal and non-verbal communication (watching your dad steal a TV, your peers congratulating you on stealing a bicycle)
3. Children learn these behaviors in small groups (primary social groups)
4. Learning involves techniques to commit crime, as well as attitudes about crime
5. Learning also involves attitudes about the targets of crime
6. If definitions that favor criminal behavior outnumber definitions that favor conforming to laws, children will learn to be deviant
7. The frequency, duration, and intensity of the learning experiences determines the learning. Children who are exposed frequently, at a young age, and by someone they respect, are more likely to learn delinquent behavior
8. Learning criminal behavior occurs in the same way as learning other behaviors
9. The goals of criminals and non-criminals are the same; the means to achieving those goals are what is different.307
Feminist Theory
Feminist theories maintain that gender is a central organizing component of social life, including criminal offending, victimization, and criminal justice processing. This theoretical framework holds that because of patriarchal sexism women and girls have been systematically excluded or marginalized in criminology, both as professionals and as subjects of study.
Feminist theories, though, do not treat women or men as homogenous groups but rather recognize that gender privilege varies across different groups of women and men. Therefore, a fundamental principle of feminist theory is to examine criminal offending, victimization, and criminal justice processing in the context of multiple intersecting social factors, including gender, race, and ethnicity, social class, age, ability, and sexual orientation.
Liberal feminists contend that women are discriminated against on the basis of their sex, so that they are denied access to the same political, financial, career and personal opportunities as men. This can be eliminated by removing all obstacles to women’s access to education, paid employment and political activity, by enabling women to participate equally with men in the public sphere and by enacting legal change. There is a strong relationship between women’s emancipation and the increase in female crime rates. As women become more liberated and gain more experiences outside of the home, they have more opportunities to engage in criminal behaviors. See? Give us the chance and we’ll always catch up!
Figure \(10.3.1\): Graph of Women Arrested vs. Women in the labor force.308
Marxist theory argues that a society’s economic structure is the primary determinant of other social relations, such as gender. Marxist feminism emerged in the late 1960’s in response to the masculine bias in the Marxist social theory. Marxist feminism aligns with liberal feminism in that women are prevented from full participation in all aspects of society with men remaining dominant. The gender division of labor is viewed as the product of the class division of labor. Because women are seen as being primarily dominated by capital and secondarily by men, the main strategy for change is the transformation from a capitalist to a democratic socialist society.
Radical feminism has dominated feminist perspectives on gender violence and abuse. Radical feminist theory describes male power and privilege as the root cause of all social relations, inequality and crime. The main causes of gender inequality are
1. the needs of men to control women’s sexuality and reproductive potential; and
2. patriarchy.
This theoretical lens often focuses on female victims/survivors of male violence. Radical feminist theory contends that the motive for men to physically, sexually, and/or psychologically victimize women is mainly due to their need or desire to control them.
Socialist feminism views class and gender relations as equally important. To understand class, we must recognize how it is structured by gender, conversely to understand gender requires an examination of how it is structured by class. In sum, socialist feminists argue that we are influenced by both gender and class relations. Crime is mainly seen as the product of patriarchal capitalism.
Sex Role Theory
Sex role theory (this is an early sociological theory which attempts to explain gender differences in crime – it’s not a feminist theory) argues that because boys and girls are socialized differently boys are more likely to become criminal than girls. Sociologist Edwin Sutherland identifies how girls are socialized in a manner, which is far more supervisory and controlled; this limits the number of opportunities to be deviant. In contrast boys are socialized to be rougher, tougher and aggressive which makes deviance more likely. And if deviance is permitted to flourish, criminal behavior will be a likely result.309
Sociologist Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales argued that because females carry out the “expressive role” in the family which involved them caring for their children and looking after the emotional needs of their husbands, that girls grew up to internalize such values as caring and empathy, both of which reduce the likelihood of someone committing crime simply because a caring and empathetic attitude towards others means you are less likely to harm others.310
306 Wonser, R. and Boyns, D. (2016). The Caped Crusader What Batman Films Tell Us about Crime and Deviance. Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film, 214-27
307 Sutherland, E. H., Cressey, D. R., & Luckenbill, D. F. (1992). Principles of criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott
308 Graph by the US Census Bureau is in the public domain
309 Sutherland, E. H., & Cressey, D. R. (1960). Principles of criminology. Chicago: Lippincott.
310 Bales, R.F., & Parsons, T. (1956). Family: Socialization and Interaction Process (1st ed.). Routledge. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/10%3A_Gender_Deviance_Crime_and_Punishment/10.03%3A_Sociological_Theories_of_Criminality.txt |
Female criminal behavior has been commonly perceived as a less serious problem than male criminal behavior. This is largely due to crime itself being characterized as a “masculine behavior,” making it more likely to be acted out by a male. Historically, women have been more likely to commit minor offenses while men a more likely to commit serious or violent offenses. Although women remain a relatively small number of the United States inmate population, they have become the fastest growing population in our jails and prisons. Since 1990 the number of female defendants convicted of felonies in State courts has grown at more than two times the rate of increase in male defendants. While men still commit more felonies and violent crimes than women, women’s rates are rising faster than men’s. The number of incarcerated women was nearly five times higher in 2020 than in 1980.311
There is a sex gap in types of crimes committed. The percentage of women in prison for drug and property crimes is considerably higher than for men in prison. However, it is important to mention that these figures demonstrate incarceration rates for offenses rather than arrest rates for the same offenses. For all persons arrested for property crime in 2019, 62.3 were men.312 So while more men committed (or were arrested for) property offenses more often than women, the percentage of women incaracerated for this offense outweighs the percentage of men incarcerated for the offense.
Figure \(10.4.1\): Graph of Offense Type by Gender in State Prisons, 2019313
Women primarily commit petty property crimes, such as shoplifting, fraudulent checks, and
welfare fraud. The sex gap in these types of offenses are often explained through the increasing
feminization of poverty. The femininization of poverty refers to the sex gap in living standards
due to the gender gap in poverty.314 Women and children are disproportionately represented
within the lower socioeconomic status community in comparison to men.315 It's interesting to
point out here that women’s crime trends tend to follow the traditional feminine roles in
society as shoppers, consumers, and health care providers within the family. So, what does this
mean? Are women just naturally more prone to steal? Do their biological make-up,
evolutionary process, and hormone levels preprogram them for theft? No. Remember from
previous chapters:
• Femininity, like masculinity, is socially constructed and not simply ‘natural.’
• Femininity is a product of socialization, not estrogen.
• Femininity, like masculinity, is a series of learned behaviors.
• There are systemic factors contributing to the sex gap in larceny offenses, such as the feminization of poverty, wage gap, gender imbalance in parental duties affecting schooling and jobs, etc.
Women are consistently less likely commit violent offenses. In 2019, about 17% people arrests for a violent offense was a woman. In addition, women accounted for 12% of arrests in murder in anon-negligent manslaughter, 3.4% in arrests for rape, 16% in arrests for robbery, 23.5% for arrests in aggravated assault, 21% in arrests for violent arson, and 29% in arrests for "other assaults".316 Here we can see the disproportionate amount of men committing violent crimes in each of the typologies. So, what does this mean? Are men just naturally more violent? Do their biological make-up, evolutionary process, and hormone levels preprogram them for violence? No. Remember from previous chapters:
• Masculinity, like femininity, is socially constructed and not simply ‘natural.’
• Masculinity is a product of socialization, not testosterone.
• Masculinity, like femininity, is a series of learned behaviors.
• There are systemic factors contributing to the sex gap in violent offenses such as Western masculine ideals requiring boys and men to confront violence and be skilled in the use of violence in those confrontations.
• Most boys and men who are not accomplished fighters are often viewed as being more vulnerable by those who are.
• Masculinity is a performance. One aspect of the performance of masculinity is being tough and/or violent (or at least willing to be).317
More than half of female violent offenders were white, and just over a third were black. About 1 in 10 were described as belonging to another race (Asian, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, American Indian, Aleut, or Eskimo). Black and white offenders accounted for nearly equal proportions of women committing robbery and aggravated assault; however, simple assault offenders were more likely to be white.
311 Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2021). Prisoners Series (1980-2020). Washington, DC.
312 FBI: UCR. 2019 Crime in the United States. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s...rsons-arrested
313 Graph by E. Ann Carson, BJS, is in the public domain
314 Schaffner Goldberg, G. (2009). 'Feminization of Poverty in The United States: Any Surprises?', Poor Women in Rich Countries: The Feminization of Poverty Over the Life Course (New York; online edn, Oxford Academic).
315 Christensen, M., et. al. (2019). "Feminization of Poverty: Causes and Implications", Gender Equality, Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1–10.
316 FBI: UCR. (2019). Table 42: Arrests by Sex, 2019. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s...e-in-the-u.s.- 2019/topic-pages/tables/table-42
317 Earp, J., Katz, J., Young, J. T., Jhally, S., Rabinovitz, D., & Media Education Foundation. (2013). Tough guise 2: Violence, manhood & American culture. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/10%3A_Gender_Deviance_Crime_and_Punishment/10.04%3A_Sex_Gender_and_Crime.txt |
The United States is home to about five percent of the world’s total population and twenty-five
percent of the world’s prison population.318 An increasing use of prisons to control crime and a
vast rate of prison growth has occurred in the past thirty years. During this time, the U.S.
population rose 40 percent while the U.S. prison population rose 400 percent. This issue is
urgent to study since more than two million people are currently incarcerated in over 5,000
facilities in the U.S.; these facilities include prisons, jails, youth centers, and immigrant detention centers.
• 99% of prisoners are poor (financial ghosts)
• Between 72 and 75% of prisoners did not complete high school
• 2/3 of people in prison are people of color
• Close to 80% of people in prison are convicted of nonviolent crimes
• 51.8% of prisoners are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses
• Men make up about 95% of the overall prisoner population
• Women represent the fastest growth rate in prison
• 40% of women in prison earn less than \$600/month prior to incarceration
Figure \(10.5.1\): Graph of US and Prison Populations by race, 2017319
The number of incarcerated women increased from 26,326 to 152,854 from 1980 to 2020, according to the Justice Department. That is an increase of 475% percent, compared with a 140 percent rise in the male prison population.320 What on Earth could have happened in only 40 years that we’d see 475 percent increase in women in prison? Maybe more women started committing more crimes? Not enough to explain a 475 percent increase. Maybe the divorce rate increase caused more women to commit crimes? Nope. Maybe a bunch more women went out while they were PMSing and had finally had enough and started committing crimes in unprecedented numbers? No way (and the PMS defense doesn’t make sense, so don’t use it). The main contributing factor to the increase in female inmates is the war on drugs. Even the second wave of feminism (which fizzled out in the early 70s) couldn’t explain that kind of inmate increase. Drug laws in the 80s (which were simultaneously passed when the market became saturated with crack cocaine) made it easier for masses to be incarcerated for non- violent drug offenses. The proportion of imprisoned women convicted of a drug offense, alone, has increased from 12% in 1986 to 26% in 2019.321
Figure \(10.5.2\): Pie Chart of numbers and percentages of inmates by gender322
In 2020, the imprisonment rate for Black women (65 per 100,000) was 1.7 times the rate of imprisonment for White women (38 per 100,000), and the rate for Hispanic/Latinx women were imprisoned at 1.3 times the rate of White women (48 vs. 38 per 100,000).
Figure \(10.5.3\): Inmates Rates by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity per 100,000: 2000 vs. 2020323
And while the growing number of women who work helps to explain why they are committing more forgery and embezzlement, the great majority of women in prison are poor and unemployed and not models of newly empowered, liberated women. While the fact that people released from prison have difficulties finding employment is well-documented, there is much less information on the role that poverty and opportunity play in who ends up behind bars in the first place. However, this table from the United States Justice Bureau shows the inequality between men and women’s earnings as well as the lower income incarcerated people were earning prior to their incarceration. Pie Chart of numbers and percentages of inmates by gender.
Figure \(10.5.4\): Median annual incomes for incarcerated people prior to incarceration and non-incarcerated people, 2014, by race, ethnicity, and gender324
As discussed in previous chapters, there is a wage gap between men and women and between racial adn ethnic groups. While the gap in income is most dramatic for White men, as White men already have the highest incomes outside of the incarcerated population. By contrast, the income gap is smallest for Hispanic women, but Hispanic women have the lowest incomes to begin with. Both the cycles of poverty and incarceration are racialized and gendered.
319 Gramlich, John. (2019). The gap between the number of blacks and whites in prison is shrinking. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/
320 Bureau of Justice Statistics: Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States 1850-1984 (1986); Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear Series (1997-2020), Prisoners Series (1980-2020). Washington, DC
321 Carson, E.A. (2021). Prisoners in 2020 – Statistical Tables. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics
322 Graph by the Federal Bureau of Prisons is in the public domain | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/10%3A_Gender_Deviance_Crime_and_Punishment/10.05%3A_United_States_Prison_Population.txt |
Prisons are not fun. People do not want to be in prison (despite what some few and far between news stories might claim). The free meals, health care, and rooms are not luxurious; in fact, in most institutions human rights are violated with spoiled food, lack of yard time, deprivation of family visitations or phone calls, lack of safety or privacy, medical experimentation, deprivation of rehabilitative services, and outright abuse and sexual assault.
Sociologist Gresham Sykes (1958) noted that prison inmates suffer through a variety of serious hardships, which he referred to as the “pains of imprisonment.”325 Pains of imprisonment include loss of freedom and independence, loss of important familial, personal, romantic, and/or sexual relationships, inability to access normal goods or services, and loss of personal security. Collectively, these hardships can lead inmates into depression and may make them more susceptible to what sociologist Erving Goffman called “mortification.”
One example of deprivation of protection within prison can be seen in the habitual occurrence of rape—including prison staff as well as inmates—within the confines of prison. Prison staff includes security staff, teachers and counselors, medical workers, contractors and even religious volunteers. Struckman-Johnson conducted the most comprehensive research to date on prisoner rape.326 After surveying 1,800 inmates in Midwestern prisons, they found that one in five male prisoners have been coerced or pressured into sex, and one in ten has been raped. In one women's prison, more than a quarter of the inmates said they had been pressured into sex by guards.
Political activist, professor, academic, and author Angela Davis argues that while men constitute the vast majority of prisoners in the world, important aspects of the state punishment system are missed if it is assumed that women are marginal and thus undeserving of attention.327 Further, according to Davis, because women make up a relatively small proportion of the whole prison population, the inattention given to female prisoners is frequently justified. Due to the late twentieth-century reforms which relied on a “separate but equal” model, demands for more repressive conditions in order to render women’s facilities “equal” to men’s resulted in harsher punishments and disciplinary actions in women’s prisons than were previously implemented. Women of color in particular are subject to regimes of punishment that differ significantly from those experiences by white women, including assigned chores, manual labor, and frequent unnecessary strip searches. “Sexual abuse, especially among women of color, has become an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls.”328
Conditions of improper touching by persons of authority, sanctioned sexual harassment, and unnecessary strip searches exist in numerous women’s prisons across the country. In addition, psychological coercion and/or threats of sexual assault by persons in authority create a constant, unending and intense pressure on many incarcerated women. Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as formerly incarcerated, have documented these abuses.329 As part of a 2004 civil rights case brought against the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) alleging a guard’s rape of a female inmate, two Chicago attorneys sent surveys about sexual assault and harassment to women incarcerated in Illinois.330 Almost 15% of the survey’s respondents said that IDOC staff had forced sexual activities on them—that is, they were raped or sexually assaulted. Two noted that IDOC staff had sexually assaulted them more than ten times. About 23% of the respondents stated that IDOC staff had offered money, food or privileges in exchange for sexual favors, and almost 10% noted that staff had done this to them on more than three occasions. About one in seven reported that IDOC staff had threatened loss of privileges, physical attack, or placement in isolation if the woman refused sex with the staff.
The violent sexualization of prison life within women’s institutions exposes ideologies of sexuality—and the intersection of race and sexuality—which have had a profound effect on the representations of and treatment received by women of color both within and upon release from prison.331 Men of color experience a perilous continuity in the way they are treated in prison, where they are more likely to experience harsher forms of punishment such as solitary confinement whereas women of color are more likely than white women to experience sexual abuse within prison.332
The state itself is directly implicated in the routinization of sexual abuse in women’s prisons and other forms of physical and mental abuse such as solitary confinement in men’s prisons, both in permitting such conditions that render individuals (especially those of color) vulnerable to explicit abuse carried out by guards and other prison staff and by incorporating into routine policy such practices as the strip search and solitary confinement. Being victimized will likely result in further social-psychological damage for the inhabitants experiencing the institutionalized racism and sexism. This results in their adjustment to society upon release being even further hindered, with one likely consequence being a return to crime and recidivating back into the prison structure.333 334 335
While nearly 5,000 transgender people are incarcerated in state prisons, it's estimated only 15 cases (people) in which these prisoners were housed according to their lived gender.336 Based on the available records (many records remain sealed depending on states' privacy laws) obtained from 45 states, just 13 transgender women are housed with women and two transgender men are housed with men. Thirty-five percent of transgender people who had spent time in prison in the previous year reported being sexually assaulted by staff or other inmates, according to a 2015 report by the Department of Justice.337 When asked about the experiences surrounding their victimization by other inmates, 72% said they experienced force or threat of force and 29% said they were physically injured.
325 Sykes, G.M. 1958. The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
326 Struckman-Johnson, Cindy. 2006. National Prison Rape Elimination. University Press. South Dakota.
327 Davis, Angela Y. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? Page 77. New York: Seven Stories Press.
328 Ibid.
329 Human Rights Watch Report. 2001. “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons.” Retrieved October 2, 2008 (http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/prison/)
330 Mills, Alan, Margaret Byrne. 2004. Rape Crisis in Women's Prison. Chicago Press: Chicago.
331 Davis, Angela Y. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.
332 Poole, Eric and Robert Regoli. 1980. “Race, Institutional Rule Breaking, and Disciplinary Response.” Law and Society Review, 14:4, 931-946.
333 Bonta, J., P. Gendreau. 1990. “Reexaming the Cruel and Unusal Punishment of Prison Life.” Law and Human Behavior, 347-366.
334 Cohen, S., L. Taylor. 1972. Psychological Survival. Hammondsworth: Penguin
335 Day, Susie. 2001. “Cruel But Not Unusual: The Punishment of Women in U.S. Prisons.” Monthly Review. Retrieved April 29, 2006 (http://www.monthlyreview.org/0701day.htm)
336 Sosin, K. (2020). Trans, imprisoned — and trapped. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc- out/transgender-women-are-nearly-always-incarcerated-men-s-putting-many-n1142436
337 Beck, A. (2015). PREA Data Collection Activities, 2015. U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/pdca15.pdf
10.07: Suggestions for Positive Social Change
Economic, social, and cultural factors likely contribute to this crime gap. Women have been shown to participate less in the crime market than men because they face different benefits and costs from committing crimes. They face different incentives: overall, women are found to be less able to commit crimes than men are and to be more risk-averse.
Policymakers should consider the possibility that positive changes that narrow gender gaps in the labor market and positive changes in social roles might result in less women participating in crime. Policies that help reduce wage disparity across skilled and unskilled female workers, such as incentivizing female education, might deter disadvantaged women from engaging in criminal activities. Eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and/or cutting back on excessively lengthy sentences should be considered at every level in every state for offenses that pose little to no threat to public safety, helping not to over-criminalize certain behaviors. Shifting resources to community-based prevention and treatment for substance abuse would alleviate some of the pressure on overcrowded prisons and lessen the recidivism rate for people living with decency issues. Examining for systemic racism, sexism, and classism influence incarceration rates in the justice system and redesigning approaches with an equity-focus is also imperative in healthier and more sustainable future for social policy and procedure.
In addition, with the (few) reports and data we have on gendered abuse forms people suffer during incarceration, a gender-responsive approach to meet the needs of justice-involved people - wherein "correctional agency programming and staff training should also be 'trauma- informed', doing no harm at a minimum, and recognizing that most of the women in their care are victims as well as 'offenders'"338 - would improve conditions for those who are incarcerated as well as lessen trauma for people upon release.
Decades of neglect have denied vulnerable communities access to good jobs, reliable transportation, safe housing, accessible healthcare, and adequate schools. All of these things contribute to life chances (and likelihood of incarceration). Closing the wage gap, ending occupational segregation, and centralizing equity in education, gender roles, family, will help us turn a corner in mass incarceration in the U.S.
338 Sawyer, W. (2018). The Gender Divide: Tracking Women's State Prison Growth. Prison policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports..._overtime.html | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Gender_Studies_(Coleman)/10%3A_Gender_Deviance_Crime_and_Punishment/10.06%3A_Gendered_Prison_Experience.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Distinguish between terms related to sex, sexual behavior, gender, sexual orientation and other basic terms for this course
• Understand how the media can shape peoples’ perception
• Explore the role of intersecting identities and culture in shaping peoples’ perceptions and experiences of the world, including their perspective on sexuality and gender specifically
• Analyze the impacts of microaggressions and discuss ways to combat them
Introduction
Human sexuality is a broad and complex topic that we are still in the early stages of understanding. Language to describe the experiences of people continues to be developed, and the nature of society is to change with time. Sexuality is often not stagnant as well and individuals may experience shifts in identity across their lifespan. Labels can be freeing in some ways yet they can also place barriers around what is believed to be possible. Binary systems and oversimplifying humanity prevent the full story from being told. Gender and sexuality are separate yet interconnected with other identities we hold and are influenced by the concert that exists when all parts of ourselves mix together. The society in which we live, our family backgrounds, the education we have access to, and our own mental processes and behaviors lay the foundation to analyzing sexuality. Allyship and community uplifting occurs as we critically explore sexuality from a biopsychosocial perspective and are humble and curious about what we do not know rather than making assumptions without all the information. Within this chapter, we will go over community agreements and explore some basic terminology that we will continue to expand upon or refer back to throughout this course.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=5#oembed-1
A Case for Learning About Sexuality
Do you remember how you first learned about sex and/or reproduction? About gender? Perhaps you were one of the many American students who received information about puberty sometime around 5th to 8th grade. Or you may have been a student who attended a school who refused to teach anything health/sexuality related. In many cases, folks have found their education about sex and sexuality to be more experiential versus formal. No matter where you land in terms of education and experience, it can be a useful process to reflect on the ways in which your learning has occurred. In the Unites States, we have a ways to go in terms of pervasive, comprehensive sex education.
In a recent meta-analysis of sexuality education research, Goldfarb and Lieberman (2020) concluded: “Review of the literature of the past three decades provides strong support for comprehensive sex education across a range of topics and grade levels. Results provide evidence for the effectiveness of approaches that address a broad definition of sexual health and take positive, affirming, inclusive approaches to human sexuality. Findings strengthen justification for the widespread adoption of the National Sex Education Standards.”
There is much to do when it comes to building a national response for sexuality education. In some ways, you are becoming a default ambassador of the benefits just in taking this class. From this course, you are combining your previous knowledge, skills, and experiences with additional academic information that will build your sexual intelligence in critical ways. Thank you!
An Important Start: Community Agreements
Community Agreements are used in many settings to clarify boundaries and set expectations for communications amongst participants in a group dynamic, whether that be in the classroom, in a therapy group, education committee, etc. This is a living document that can be further developed with specific groups and catered to what will make the participants feel most comfortable. Here are some agreements that past students have found to be most helpful:
1. Confidentiality/Vegas Rule–what happens in this class stays here; we are not to share what other students share outside of this class without their direct prior approval
2. Check your assumptions–everything is actually much more complex than what we may realize at first
3. Utilize curiosity–ask questions of yourself and about the world around you
4. Lean into discomfort–some topics may make you feel uncomfortable and it can be helpful to further analyze this; be open to new perspectives even if they seem different from your own previous understandings
5. Respect personal boundaries–treat others how they’d like to be treated; ask, don’t assume!
6. Be open to feedback; check your defensiveness
7. Be open to others’ questions and mistakes–we are all coming into this class with different understandings and levels of comfort regarding these topics
8. Approach topics with an open mind
9. Use “I” statements rather than “you” statements–refrain from offering advice and speak from your own perspective instead
10. Respecting disagreement/respectfully disagreeing
11. Be encouraging and offer words of affirmation and validation in your communications (fully online, in-person, or remote) with others
12. No outing of others–people may share their identities in this course but it is inappropriate, and in some cases even dangerous, for us to tell others about their identity; let people share their own stories on their own terms
13. Don’t yuck my yum–if I were to say, “I really love chocolate!” and someone responded, “Yuck! Chocolate is gross,” I would feel very upset and looked down upon for this. People have a broad range of likes in terms of sexuality and it is not our place to judge others. We will not disparage the likes or perspectives of others.
14. Make space, take space; be mindful to not monopolize and invite in others to share their experiences
Basic Terminology
As we explore these topics, keep these questions in mind:
1. For the purpose of this course, what two ways might the term “sex” be used and how is “sex” (in terms of sexual anatomy) different than “gender”?
2. How might the media influence peoples’ views about sexuality?
3. How might someone’s particular intersecting identities influence their perspective on gender or sexuality?
4. What are microaggressions, and, in the video by Derald Wing Sue, what are some ways we can combat them?
5. What are some terms within the 2SMLGBTQIA+ umbrella that relate to gender identity and some that relate to sexual orientation?
What Does “Sex” Even Mean?
Sex can mean sexual anatomy and sexual behavior
To further complicate matters: Some people argue that certain sexual behaviors do not count as sex, such as oral sex.
President Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Sexual Behavior
To avoid this obstacle in terminology, sexual behavior for the sake of this course will be defined as “behavior that produces arousal and increases the chance of orgasm” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 3). To be clear- that doesn’t mean orgasm needs to happen- the focus is really on behavior that causes sensory arousal.
Gender
Sex and gender are also often used interchangeably; however, they mean very different things.
Sex refers to anatomical and genetic characteristics, such as genitals, sex chromosomes, bodyweight distributions, hormones, etc., and sex is often assigned to individuals by doctors at birth based on the way their genitals look.
Gender is a social construct that includes certain expectations of gender roles and gendered behaviors based on a given society. Each individual person has their own understanding of gender based on other factors as well such as family upbringing, peers, media, religion, personal preferences, etc.
• Gender expression is the way that people dress, walk, talk, alter their natural physical appearance (i.e. shave, wear makeup, etc.), and more to fit in with stereotypical or traditional perspectives on how men or women are meant to present themselves based on a given dominant culture within a society. Individuals may also challenge these dominant cultural norms by aligning more closely with subcultures or marginalized communities who develop alternative norms or flexibility around the way that gender is expressed. In what ways do you perform your gender by the clothing you wear, the way you cut your hair, the mannerisms you use, the way you talk, etc.? People are constantly altering themselves to fit in with these social constructs. Pay attention to this as we are all playing a part based on the safety we feel in our communities to either conform to tradition or move toward more flexibility.
• Gender perception–how other people perceive our gender regardless of the way we identify. This is often a huge cause of dysphoria, not just for transgender or gender-expansive individuals, making people feel like others are judging or viewing them poorly based on how well they are able to conform to the stereotypes and cultural traditions within a society.
• Gender identity is the way individuals make sense of gender for themselves. This a personal exploration which may fit in with traditional perspectives on maleness/masculinity or femaleness/femininity, combinations of these, something else entirely, additional options outside a gender binary system based on one’s culture, none of these, etc. Since gender is a social construct, stereotypes and early learning often influence the way people think about their gender and those of others subconsciously even when they themselves do not fit perfectly into one gender category. People tend to overestimate how much they fit in with a given gender and ignore information that does not align with this internalized narrative.
• Gender binary–the idea that there are only two genders-male and female.
• Gender spectrum–researchers studying human sexuality are moving more toward the belief that gender exists on a continuum with an endless range of personal possibilities.
Throughout previous terms, students have continued to confuse sex and gender, so make sure you understand the difference.
More on this as we go through the term!
Media Influences
In many instances, the media impacts our understanding of sexuality more than scientific research. On the positive side, when information is accurate and up-to-date, this can be a useful mechanism to share information. Unfortunately, widespread consumption of media also means that misinformation can run rampant. In a recent analysis, researchers found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the disposition to spread false information or rumors is directly linked to the development of anxiety in a variety of of different age populations (Rocha, de Moura, Desidério, et al., 2021).
Cultivation
People begin to think what they see in the media reflects mainstream cultural views on sexuality.
Agenda Setting
News broadcasting companies, such as MSNBC, Fox, etc. choose what news to report on and what to ignore, which shapes what we view as important. Certainly an issue of our time is polarized content and exposure to fake news (and misinformation more broadly). Importantly misinformation is not equally distributed across all users (Pennycook & Rand, 2021).
Social Learning
Behavior is learned through reinforcement, punishment, and imitation. Subconsciously we can start to imitate what we see in the media.
Culture
How would you define culture?
Common Culture Definition
• Where you’re from
• A group of people with a standard way of thinking amongst each other
• Ritual or practices you partake in
• Ideas or values passed down from generation to generation
• Religion
• Current times
Dominant Cultures and Co-cultures/Subcultures
• Operate off of power and privilege (dominant cultures) or oppression and marginalization (subcultures or co-cultures) based on the structure of society.
Intersectional View of Culture
Intersecting identities–race, ethnicity, age, health status and/or disability (neurological, mental and/or physical), gender, sexuality, spirituality/religion, body size/body image, education, family wealth/resources, family background, geographical location, immigration status, marital status, parenthood, language, and MORE come together to form our cultural identities. Some of these identities may be privileged within society while others may be oppressed or marginalized. Understanding our totality and the combinations of privilege and marginalization help us to understand the ways these may show up in our interactions with others and create specific power dynamics (Bolding, 2020).
Intersectionality–Term developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain the ways that systems of marginalization interconnect to create particular compounding barriers within society. Originally developed to address the ways that race, gender and class intersect in historical and structural ways to impact the lives of Black cisgender women with less access to financial resources in particular, this term has now been expanded to address many forms of interpersonal and systemic oppressions based on the way that society has marginalized certain identities (Bolding, 2020; CTLT Indigenous Initiatives, 2018).
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=5#oembed-2
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=5#oembed-3
Positionality–The way that privileged identities can lead to unintentional (and in some cases intentional) othering of people with marginalized identities. Oftentimes, our oppressed identities are more present in our mind because of the discriminations we face; however, understanding the ways in which we are privileged are necessary to call out our biases and prevent harms from occurring (CTLT Indigenous Initiatives, 2018).
Culture is also constantly changing and evolving, so it is important to remain culturally humble–recognize that it is not possible to know everything about every identity, but we can work to center the experiences of others rather than making assumptions about their experiences from our own outside perspective.
Ethnocentrism–viewing our own cultural backgrounds as superior to others’ and from which others should be viewed and judged; an automatic way of thinking in many situations and something to be aware of.
Ethnorelativism–understanding that many perspectives exist and that everything is relative depending on peoples’ unique cultural backgrounds; this is thoughtful and reflective which is the better way.
Microaggressions
Microaggressions are subtle insults often done unconsciously that are directed at minorities, such as people of color, women, people who are LGBTQIA+, people who are differently-abled (or disabled), etc.
Watch the following video by Derald Wing Sue who is the leading researcher studying cross-cultural issues in our society and their psychological implications:
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Make sure to reflect on the ways we can combat these microaggressions.
Check out this article by the American Psychological Association (APA) on ways to confront microaggressions: Clay (2017): Did you really just say that? Here’s advice on how to confront microaggressions, whether you’re a target, bystander or perpetrator.
LGBTQ Umbrella
Many of you have probably heard of LGBT, LGBTQ, or even LGBTQIA+. These are actually a shortened version of a much longer acronym that is constantly expanding as new terms are developed to more accurately represent how people feel about their gender and sexuality. An issue with this acronym is that people often start to confuse gender identity with sexual orientation because terms relating to both are added together here. To help clarify this confusion, an expanded view of this acronym will be explored and the different terms will be sorted based on how they relate to either gender identity or sexual orientation. One term will also relate specifically to biological sex.
Expanded Acronym: 2SMLGGBBTQQIAAPF
While this is an expanded acronym, remember this still does not include all the possible identities.
Terms Relating to Sexual Orientation
LGBQQAPF
• lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, asexual, pansexual and fluid
Terms Relating to Gender Identity
2SMGBTQQ2
• two-spirit, māhū, genderqueer, bigender, transgender, queer, and questioning
• transgender is often used as unmbrella term that contains other terms like genderqueer, nonbinary, gendernonconforming, gender expansive, etc. (APA, 2022)
• intersex
Queer and Questioning
Queer and questioning are the only repeat terms for both sexual orientation and gender identity because queer is an umbrella term that can be used for sexuality and/or gender. Also, people can question either their sexuality and gender identity at times.
Why is knowing this important? In order to be inclusive of individuals within human sexuality research, we need to know these terms in order to not accidentally leave people out through the use of non-inclusive language on surveys, forms collecting demographic information, etc. The next section will expand upon terminology further to reflect the most current and respectful terms.
2SMLGBTQIA+
2SMLGBTQIA+ will be used for this text because it centers the experiences of indigenous communities by listing them first–two-spirit (recognized as an umbrella term for those who are members of Alaska Native and Native American communities) and māhū (Native Hawaiian). A common misconception is that gender and sexual fluidity are new when, in reality, this perspective predates binary and rigid views.
Changing Societies, Changing Perspectives
“Homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “transsexual,” and “hermaphrodite” are viewed by some as outdated and especially the last two are viewed as derogatory and offensive by many (APA, 2022). Terms such as “gay”/”lesbian,” “straight,” “transgender”/”gender nonbinary”/”gender expansive,” and “intersex” are viewed now as the more respectful terms (APA, 2022). There may be a generational divide, however, with people who are a part of the older generations still preferring the terms first mentioned (APA, 2022).
Make sure to use the language a person uses to describe themselves or ask what terms they would like you to use to clarify. Some researchers may also use these terms first mentioned in the medical field (i.e. transsexual or hermaphrodite), but the use of such terms may indicate that the study was conducted by people who are not aware of the more respectful language (APA, 2022; Intersex Society of North America, 2008). The most used medical term now to refer to an intersex person’s medical diagnosis is disorder/differences of sex development (DSD) (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2015).
Remember, our language to describe human experience is constantly evolving. An example is how some people within younger generations are reclaiming the word “queer”. Queer means strange, odd, different and was used as an insult toward people in the LGBTQ community from older generations, which may result in them not feeling as comfortable to use this terminology (APA, 2022). Many younger people now use this to identify themselves because they view being different in the eyes of society to be a good thing and are proud of their minoritized identity.
Some people of color may not feel as comfortable using the terms “gay” or “lesbian” because the gay and lesbian liberation movements were often led by white individuals who purposefully excluded people of color. For instance, the early feminists were often white and were specifically fighting for white women’s equality to white men, excluding black women in particular. Thus, QPOC (queer person of color), same gender loving, down low (DL), etc. are some terms that might be used instead (Inman, 2019; Bufanda, n.d.).
Additionally, social movements change our society and lead to progressions over time. For example, the #MeToo Movement is changing how sexual assault and harassment are being discussed compared to the past. This collective discourse around what is considered normative and permissable behavior is shifting from a rape culture more toward a consent culture. The media can be used for good in this way to spread messages and to take a stand against problematic and hurtful behaviors that have long been normalized and accepted.
Consent
Consent will be a central topic of discussion throughout this textbook because we cannot engage in healthy sexual behaviors without consent.
FRIES–freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, specific (Planned Parenthood, 2022)
Planned Parenthood is a helpful resource for more information on consent along with RAINN.
Watch the video provided on the Planned Parenthood website to be able to identify what consent looks like within relationships. If you were presented with different scenarios between people, would you be able to determine if consent is present or not?
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Circles of Sexuality
Sexuality is the total expression of who we are as human beings. It is the most complex human attribute and encompasses our whole psychosocial development—our values, attitudes, physical appearance, beliefs, emotions, attractions, our likes/dislikes, our spiritual selves. This is all influenced by our values, culture, socialization, politics, and laws. One conceptual model of sexuality as developed by Dennis Daily is the “Circles of Sexuality” model.
Often represented as the “top circle” is sensuality, which covers the ways our bodies feel pleasure through all of our senses. Sensuality also includes the need we humans have for touch, otherwise referred to as skin hunger. As we age, our desire for sex may diminish, but our need for caring, comforting and intimate touch is as strong as ever. There are incredible emotional and physical health benefits that come from touch, suggesting that touch is truly fundamental to human communication, bonding, and health. Even if you (or your partner) are ill or have physical disabilities, you can engage in touch and/or intimate acts and thereby benefit from closeness with another person. The sensuality circle tends to represent closeness in physiological terms.
Next to sensuality, is the circle of intimacy, which encompasses our emotional behaviors and needs, such as trust, respect, and loving or liking someone. The need for intimacy is ageless. We never outgrow our need for affection, emotional closeness and intimacy though aging does change our perspectives on sex and sexuality. Intimacy tends to represent closeness in emotional and affectionate terms and for seniors can mean companionship, affection and enduring tenderness and concern.
A third circle is titled sexual identity, which contains gender identity, gender roles and sexual orientation. At the very heart of the search for sexual identity is the more general but profound question of, “Who Am I?” Also included in this circle is sexual orientation—who we are attracted to…physically, emotionally, sexually, spiritually.
Then is the sexual health and reproduction circle, which many people think of as “sex”. Indeed it is important to address our sex behaviors and to talk about risk reduction messages such as using condoms, not forgetting the lube, body positioning, playing with sex toys, etc., which are important to STI/HIV prevention.
Finally, there is the circle of sexualization. Sexualization includes things like harassment, rape, misuse of power, and withholding sex. It can include unrealistic portrayals of sexuality in order to sell products, including movies and TV shows.
In summary, the ability to express and enjoy one’s sexuality leads to feelings of pleasure and well being, feelings that are essential at any age if our human needs for intimacy and belonging are to be satisfied, and we are to age successfully (think Maslow and his hierarchy of human needs).
Inviting In
Instead of asking others to “come out” and share parts of themselves when they may not feel comfortable or safe to do so, what can we do to create a more accepting and affirming environment for others to be able to be themselves? The responsibility lies on the shoulders of each one of us to indicate that we are supportive and that we value equity and inclusion. “Invite in” others to be their full selves in the way that you express yourself and create spaces that are safe havens from hatred and shame.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=5#oembed-6
Licenses and Attribution
The Circles of Sexuality section is from Cooper, S. (2019). The circles of sexuality and aging. Hostos Community College. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
The following videos are Licensed: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
Last Week Tonight. (2015). Sex education: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0jQz6jqQS0
TED. (2016). The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o
Hopkins, P. (2018). What is intersectionality? Newcastle University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1islM0ytkE
The Root. (2020). Why some Black LGBTQIA+ folks are done ‘coming out.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdCKe0QBuwQ&t=1s
Wiley. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJL2P0JsAS4
hashtagNYU. (2014). Let’s talk about consent. New York University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBFCeGDVAdQ&t=1s
License
Introduction to Human Sexuality by Ericka Goerling & Emerson Wolfe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.01%3A_Chapter_1_-_Community_Agreements_and_Terminology.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Explain the differences between bonobos and chimpanzees
• Analyze how social stratification within hunter-gatherer, herding and agricultural societies occurs
• Compare and contrast ancient perspectives regarding gender and sexuality to modern-day perspectives
• Understand the main aspects of various theories that influence the study of human sexuality
Introduction
Societies and individuals across time periods and around the world have long been interested in making sense of human sexuality. From freedom of expression to forced repression, sex and gender continue to be much debated and highly polarizing subjects. To begin to make sense of human sexuality, we will explore our closest primate ancestors regarding their social structure and sexual behaviors, analyze how subsistence strategies may influence social structure, address some ancient perspectives and historical changes influencing social acceptance of sexual behaviors and gender variance, then end by discussing more contemporary psychological theories as we try to understand the evolutionary, historical, political, religious, and other influences that shape our current understanding of gender and sexuality.
Primate Ancestors: Bonobos and Chimpanzees
Bonobos and chimpanzees are both African apes believed to be our closest relatives. To learn about human behavior, researchers often turn to analyzing their social structures and their sexual behaviors to gain insight into those of humans. However, bonobos and chimpanzees differ very much from each other in both of these patterns. One question remains for evolutionary psychologists: How can we be so similar to both bonobos and chimpanzees when they vary so much from each other?
Bonobos
The Hominoid Psychology Research Group at Duke University (2020) explains that bonobos “are female dominant, with females forming tight bonds against males through same-sex socio-sexual contact that is thought to limit aggression” (para. 4). Bonobos also show less sexual dimorphism, meaning that the body sizes, genitals, and overall appearances of female and male bodies are more similar. They tend to band together in larger party sizes than those of chimpanzees. A clear hierarchy amongst the females is not typically present and they work together. A male is never the “alpha” or highest ranking in the group. Bonobos do not engage in lethal aggression and engage in frequent non-reproductive sexual behavior between all partner types and ages. Sexual behaviors are utilized to reduce group tensions and create more secure bonds and are found during greetings as well as times of conflict resolution. Homosexual sexual behaviors are frequent, especially between females.
Chimpanzees
The Hominoid Psychology Research Group at Duke University (2020) then describes how chimpanzees differ from bonobos in that they “are male dominant, with intense aggression between different groups that can be lethal” (para. 5). Chimpanzees show greater sexual dimorphism, meaning that males tend to be larger than females and there are marked differences between the males and females in terms of genital appearance as well as overall body appearance. Male-male bonds are strong while female-female bonds are weak. There is typically an alpha male or a coalition of males leading the group. Chimpanzees are incredibly territorial and patrol boundaries, resulting in the killing of neighboring chimpanzees. They will also sometimes eat the offspring of neighboring chimpanzee groups during hunting excursions. Chimpanzees do not engage in sexual behaviors outside of mating for reproduction contexts mostly and alpha males will guard females who are ovulating, or during the times they are most fertile, in order to prevent other males from reproducing with them.
So, as asked earlier: How can we be so similar to both bonobos and chimpanzees when they vary so much from each other? What do you think?
Changing Environments, Changing Societies
Anthropologists have spent the better part of the last 100 years studying tribal societies around the world that have remained apart from the technological advances that shape so much of our lives today. What they have found is that there are striking differences between hunter and gatherer societies that tend to be nomadic as they move with changing seasons to find food and hunt wild animals compared to herding and agricultural societies who tend to remain in one general area. What many anthropologists have concluded is that hunter-gatherers tend to be more egalitarian, meaning there are less social divides, especially along gendered lines–the best hunter and the best gatherer would take on these roles regardless. On the other hand, societies that tend to remain in one general location place greater emphasis on property–who do the herds of animals belong to and who will get the land when someone dies? This focus on property is believed to be connected to the greater emphasis on social stratification and divisions of wealth in societies. Rather than being egalitarian, matriarchal and patriarchal societies allowed for property to be passed down based on family connections to the women (matriarchal) or men (patriarchal) in a society. The most common being patriarchal but some examples of matriarchal societies exist currently. Studies based on current tribes and archaeological digs have shown that hunter-gathers and herding/agricultural groups displayed some of these social differences. Archaeological digs uncovering burial sites often provide clues as to what the social structure was like. Questions existed, like were men buried with more objects or were the women buried with more objects? What was the placement of the bodies and what remnants of clothing were found? What kind of art or relics were also found?
As with everything in life, we also must be careful in overgeneralizing some of these things, such as “all hunter and gatherer societies are like this” and “all agricultural societies are like this.” In more recent studies, the idea of a spectrum of subsistence strategies has emerged in which the two distinct categories of hunters-gatherers and herding/agriculture are being questioned because many societies actually display characteristics of both, complicating this oversimplified model (Arnold et al., 2016). However, what can be seen is that in societies that shared wealth and resources more fluidly, they also tended to be more egalitarian. In others that passed land and belongings down family lines, social stratification and gender roles became more prevalent (Arnold et al., 2016).
Ancient Perspectives
Keep in mind that it is difficult to truly understand the thought processes and perspectives of these ancient civilizations and that archeologists and anthropologists can only make guesses about the materials they have uncovered. Art and writings are the most commonly preserved items that are used to make assumptions about these time periods. A problem that often arises is that we try to use today’s perspective regarding gender and sexuality which biases the way we make sense of the past. In reality, unless we develop time travel, we will never know the full realities of what gender and sexuality looked like in antiquity. When we look back across time, the term HIStory is very fitting as well because the public and private lives of men dominate, and the perspectives of women are often not focused upon as much (Carroll, 2017). If men are the main artists and writers in a society, which is often the case and elements of this are still present in our society today, this shapes the narratives being told and passed down. Additionally, many societies relied on oral traditions that have been lost through the process of colonization because the stories have faded with the erasure of people and their cultures.
The following information is based on Carroll (2017).
Egypt (approx. 1100 B.C.): Erotic images found on carvings and papyrus. Temple prostitutes would have sex with pagan worshippers as sex was seen as a connection to the spiritual. Some depictions of possible gay sexual relationships between men have been found, such as a tomb uncovered featuring two males in close contact similar to how straight relationships were depicted. Early archaeologists and anthropologists said they were probably brothers, but this has been an area recently reviewed and perceived differently.
Greeks (1000-200 B.C.): Pedastery was commonly practiced, which is when an older man would mentor a postpubescent boy in his studies and in his sexual development. This was seen as a rite of passage. Sexual relations between soldiers were also normalized as it was believed that males with close relationships would fight harder for each other in battle. The male body was idolized and Plato is attributed with exploring how nonsexual love between two men was viewed as the ideal love. This is where we get the current day term for “platonic love,” or love without a sexual element. The female Greek poet Sappho, who lived on the Isle of Lesbos, wrote erotic poetry about women. This is where we get the term “lesbian” from.
The Hebrews (1000-200 B.C.): The Hebrew Bible outlines the rules around sexual behavior. Adultery and homosexuality between men (women are not mentioned) were both viewed as being wrong. Some scholars think this was because women were viewed as property, so the idea of a man having sex with another man would reduce one of them to the position of the other’s property. Others, however, believe this is meant to be taken literally and that it should now include lesbianism and other non-heterosexual acts. Marital sexuality was grounded in a focus on procreation rather than pleasure and this stance was adopted by Christianity which would go on to form the groundwork for sexual attitudes in the West, such as the current-day United States.
India (400 B.C.): The Kamasutra is an erotic text that is a detailed manual meticulously containing information about any imaginable sexual position, love, family life, and moral frameworks. Sexuality and spirituality were viewed as connected. While there are stories of powerful women rulers, the society was mostly patriarchal with male lives being valued more than female lives. Female infanticide was not uncommon and killing a woman was not regarded as a serious crime. Hijras, or a third gender in which a person originally designated a male at birth takes on a feminine role in society which often included castration, were also mentioned in the Kamasutra and were given central roles in many religious ceremonies. Marginalization and stigma for these individuals are believed to have become more prevalent through the British colonization of India in the early 1500s.
China (200 B.C.): Balance and harmony between all parts of nature are at the core of Toaist and Confucian thought. Yin (female essence) was viewed as endless whereas yang (male essence contained in semen) needed to be controlled and maintained through prolonged contact with yin. Sex manuals were common teaching men how to experience orgasm without ejaculation to preserve their sperm, while brides were given texts on how to pleasure their husbands. Female orgasm was viewed as important in order to receive the maximum benefit from yin essence. Even though a balance between yin and yang was valued within each individual, yin was viewed as more passive and subservient and, since women were believed to have more of this essence naturally, they were expected to be subservient to the men in their lives–fathers, husbands and sons. Polygamy, a male with multiple wives and concubines, was commonly practiced.
Optional additional resources if you would like to explore these topics further:
Hufnail, M. (2014). History of sex. Eastern world. New York, NY: A & E Television Networks. video permalink
McClure, L. (2002). Sexuality and gender in the classical world : Readings and sources . Oxford, UK ; Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell. eBook permalink
Younger, J. (2005). Sex in the ancient world from A to Z. London; New York: Routledge. eBook permalink
Voss, B., & Casella, E. C. (eds.) (2012). The archaeology of colonialism intimate encounters and sexual effects. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. eBook permalink
Psychological Theories
As we begin to explore these different perspectives, begin thinking which theories seem to make the most sense to you. Analyze what has occurred in your life to make certain explanations click with you more and why others do not seem quite right. If you were a researcher and theorist, what gaps in these might you try to fill?
Evolutionary Theories
Both sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are based on the initial work of Charles Darwin
Sociobiology–“the application of evolutionary biology to understanding the social behavior of animals, including humans” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 23)
Evolutionary Psychology–“the study of psychological mechanisms that have been shaped by natural selection” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 25)
Evolution–subtle changes occur over generations that influence how all livings things were in the past, are in the present and will become in the future, as genes are past down from parents to offspring.
Natural selection–evolution occurs through this process; plants and animals that are better suited for their particular environment have the greatest chance of passing on their genes.
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology assert the following (specific to attraction and sexual behavior):
• We are attracted to what signifies producing healthy offspring
• Parents bond emotionally because, if they stay together, their children have higher rates of survival
• Sexual selection–differences in males and females to increase competition; males will compete with other males and females will provide preferential treatment to whom they deem the most genetically fit to reproduce with
Western Psychological Theories from Freud to Now
Psychoanalytic Theory
Developed by Sigmund Freud
Libido–“sex energy or sex drive” which Freud believed to be one of the two motivating factors to behavior (the second being death) (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 26)
The parts of our personality are divided into three parts:
Id–contains libido and operates off of the pleasure principle; if unchecked, would give in to all temptations and desires imaginable
Ego–reality principle; navigates between the id and superego to help us decide our final course of action
Superego–“contains the values and ideals of society that we learn” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 26)
Erogenous zones–areas of the body that are a focus for our libidinal energy will cause us to become aroused when they are touched in certain ways
Stages of Psychosexual Development–oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital (this will be covered in PSY 232 in greater detail as we explore sexual development across the lifespan)
Oedipus and Electra Complexes–we have an innate competition with our same-sex parent and have a sexual attraction to our opposite-sex parent through adolescence
• For boys (Oedipus Complex), castration anxiety, or a fear of having their penis cut off by their father causes them to shift from competing to identifying with their father and taking on his gender role in society.
• For girls (Electra Complex), they experience penis envy in that they wish that they too could have a penis. In this realization that they cannot have a penis, they begin to desire to be impregnated by their father. Since girls have already lost their penis, women will live their lives stunted and less developed than men.
Keep in mind, Freud lived during the Victorian Era, and I encourage you to do a little research on what this time period was like, especially for women. A fun little fact: doctors at this time began helping “hysterical” women achieve orgasm as a cure to this “mental disorder” and this is how the vibrator was invented–the doctors’ hands got too tired to keep up with all the demands.
Learning Theory
While evolutionary theories attempt to answer the “nature” behind sexuality, learning theory seeks to answer the “nurture” part of the puzzle.
Classical Conditioning–a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus in order to produce an unconditioned response. Think of Pavlov’s dogs in which the bell (neutral stimulus) is paired with food (an unconditioned stimulus) to produce salivating (unconditioned response). This is done so often that the food (unconditioned stimulus) can now be removed and a once neutral stimulus (the bell) can produce the unconditioned response (salivating) on its own. In terms of sexual behaviors, women’s underwear (neutral stimulus) is paired with porn (unconditioned stimulus) producing arousal (unconditioned response) enough times that now the women’s underwear produces arousal on its own without porn.
Operant Conditioning–certain behaviors can be “reinforced” to support that they continue or “punished” to try to make them stop
Behavior Modification–utilizing operant conditioning techniques to influence someone’s behavior
Social Learning Theory–imitation and identification are the two main processes to this; in other words, we seek to imitate those who we identify with. For instance, if a child sees a character in a movie who they identify with then they will seek to imitate the behaviors of that character. This is particularly helpful in understanding the internalization of gender roles.
Self-Efficacy–a feeling of competence when engaging in a certain behavior; we are more likely to engage in behaviors we have seen others practice and that we have practiced ourselves
We will discuss many parts of Learning Theory in PSY 232 in greater depth as they relate to the development of fetishes and paraphilias.
Social Exchange Theory
This theory believes that people are hedonistic, meaning they are pleasure-seeking. Humans engage in activities that produce rewards and minimize costs.
Relationships are maintained only when the benefits outweigh the costs.
Matching hypothesis (we will discuss this when we explore the theories on love in greater depth in a few weeks).
Cognitive Theory
Our perception becomes our reality–the way we think about sexuality influences the way we behave sexually.
Schema–think of this as a general blueprint, framework or map that you have for some general concept
Sandra Bem, whose notable research was published in the 1980s, would be considered a cognitive theorist. She conducted her research attempting to understand the development of gender roles. She believed that all of us have gender schemas which are “a cognitive structure comprising the set of attributes (behaviors, personality, appearance) that we associate with males and females” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 33). These gender schemas are based on stereotypes and influence us to label certain behaviors as “male” or “female.” Stereotype-consistent behaviors are accepted while stereotype-inconsistent behaviors are viewed as a fluke or a rare occasion, causing us to believe the stereotypes despite many examples in our lives to disprove the stereotypes. You will take the Bem Sex-Role Inventory during Week 4 developed by Sandra Bem.
The takeaway: Stereotypes are a trap that we often get stuck in because society operates off of them and upholds them. In order to combat this, question everything, especially your own beliefs. Schemas save us time to have everything set aside in our minds in neat little boxes, but life is actually quite messy and disorganized.
Current Critical Theories
Both Feminist Theory and Queer Theory are social constructionist perspectives in which they believe that gender and sexuality are constructed and given meaning by society.
Feminist Theory
• Seeks to call attention and analyze the inequality of power in society regarding gender, especially challenge patriarchical bias.
• Asserts that male control over female sexuality leads to repression and depression amongst people in these types of societies.
• Analyzes the development and continuation of restrictive gender roles
• Intersectionality, as was mentioned during the week 2 reading, has gained particular usage in which gender as it connects with other identities, such as race and ethnicity, is explored and analyzed
Queer Theory
• Challenges binaries, such as in sexuality and gender
• Challenges heteronormativity, which is the belief that being straight (or heterosexual) is what is normative and natural
Sociological Theories
Symbolic interaction theory–“human nature and the social order are the products of communication among people” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 35)
• Role taking–viewing ourselves from the perspectives of others in order to predict and meet their needs and achieve our goals
• Sexual scripts–think of this as a script you were asked to perform in a theater play, except this is a script that you believe is how you should behave sexually in your real life based on the messages you have received from the directors of the play (your parents, society, media, peers, teachers, religion, culture, politics, law, medical field, etc.)
• Sexual fields–context is important; invisible social boundaries exist that influence our behavior
• Social institutions–religion, economy, family, medicine (medicalization of sexuality), and law; these institutions then regulate our sexuality in various ways to uphold the norms in a given society
Takeaway: Society and culture shape and control our sexual expression in very profound, yet often unrealized ways. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.02%3A_Chapter_2_-_Human_Sexuality_Theories.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Explore how sexology has developed over time, and analyze the contributions of some notable sex researchers and studies that have been conducted
• Describe and give examples of various research methods employed in conducting sex research, and demonstrate an understanding of the strengths and limitations of each of these methods
• Identify criteria that would be helpful in evaluating various kinds of sex research, and apply this knowledge in evaluating current research published in professional journals as well as the popular press
• Discuss possible biases and ethical concerns with research
• Describe the role of Institutional Review Boards
Sexology
Sexology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of human sexuality, including sexual behaviors, interests and function. A sexologist is a trained professional who specializes in human sexuality.
There are many different ways a sexologist may work, and many different areas they may work in – in clinical settings, in education, and in research. Sexologists are specialists in human sexuality and hold specific knowledge and skills. They study people’s sexual behaviors, feelings and interactions, and assist them to reconcile any issues they have about their sexual experiences, with the aim of improving their lives (Tilley, 2015).
Over the discipline’s history, there have been many obstacles. Few sciences have a similarly stuttered development as sexology. Thought by some to be purely scientific, others as prurient verging on the putrid, still others as key to the renewal of the nation and the people, sexology has had as varied a history and reception as the activities it has analyzed and recorded.
The History of Scientific Investigations of Sex
An image on an ancient Greek drinking cup of two lovers kissing. ca. 480 BC [Image: Marie-Lan Nguyen, https://goo.gl/uCPpNy, Public Domain]
The history of human sexuality is as long as human history itself—200,000+ years and counting (Antón & Swisher, 2004). For almost as long as we have been having sex, we have been creating art, writing, and talking about it. Some of the earliest recovered artifacts from ancient cultures are thought to be fertility totems. The Hindu Kama Sutra (400 BCE to 200 CE)—an ancient text discussing love, desire, and pleasure—includes a how-to manual for having sexual intercourse. Rules, advice, and stories about sex are also contained in the Muslim Qur’an, Jewish Torah, and Christian Bible. Books on sexuality and love, such as the Kama Sutra, the Ars Amatoria, and The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, have been around for centuries. But they’re not framed within a formal field of scientific or medical research.
People have been scientifically investigating sex for only about 125 years. During the late 1800s – despite the social attitudes of sexual repression in the Victorian era – more liberal attitudes towards sexuality began to be presented in England and Germany. In 1886, for instance, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) published Psychopathia Sexualis, which is considered to be the leading work that established sexology as a scientific discipline.
Havelock Ellis challenged the sexual taboos of his era. Stefano Bolognini/Wikimedia Commons
Within a decade or so, English medical doctor and sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) challenged the sexual taboos of his era, specifically regarding masturbation and homosexuality. His 1897 book Sexual Inversion, described the sexual relations of homosexual males and is considered to be the first objective study of homosexuality. He actually coined this term and, despite the prevailing social attitudes of the time, did not consider homosexuality as a disease, as immoral, or as a crime. From 1897 to 1923, his findings were published in a seven-volume set of books titled Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Among his most noteworthy findings is that transgender people are distinct from homosexual people. Ellis’s studies led him to be an advocate of equal rights for women and comprehensive human sexuality education in public schools (Tilley, 2015).
Using case studies, the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is credited with being the first scientist to link sex to healthy development and to recognize humans as being sexual throughout their lifespans, including childhood (Freud, 1905). Freud (1923) argued that people progress through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital. According to Freud, each of these stages could be passed through in a healthy or unhealthy manner. In unhealthy manners, people might develop psychological problems, such as frigidity, impotence, or anal-retentiveness.
The American biologist Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) is commonly referred to as the father of human sexuality research. Kinsey was a world-renowned expert on wasps but later changed his focus to the study of humans. This shift happened because he wanted to teach a course on marriage but found data on human sexual behavior lacking. He believed that sexual knowledge was the product of guesswork and had never really been studied systematically or in an unbiased way. He decided to collect information himself using the survey method, and set a goal of interviewing 100 thousand people about their sexual histories. Although he fell short of his goal, he still managed to collect 18 thousand interviews! Many “behind closed doors” behaviors investigated by contemporary scientists are based on Kinsey’s seminal work.
Unlocking the secrets of the chastity belt. Science Museum / Science and Society Picture Library
KINSEY’S RESEARCH
Before the late 1940s, access to reliable, empirically-based information on sex was limited. Physicians were considered authorities on all issues related to sex, despite the fact that they had little to no training in these issues, and it is likely that most of what people knew about sex had been learned either through their own experiences or by talking with their peers. Convinced that people would benefit from a more open dialogue on issues related to human sexuality, Dr. Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University initiated large-scale survey research on the topic. The results of some of these efforts were published in two books—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female—which were published in 1948 and 1953, respectively (Bullough, 1998).
In 1947, Alfred Kinsey established The Kinsey Institute for Research, Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, shown here in 2011. The Kinsey Institute has continued as a research site of important psychological studies for decades.
At the time, the Kinsey reports were quite sensational. Never before had the American public seen its private sexual behavior become the focus of scientific scrutiny on such a large scale. The books, which were filled with statistics and scientific lingo, sold remarkably well to the general public, and people began to engage in open conversations about human sexuality. As you might imagine, not everyone was happy that this information was being published. In fact, these books were banned in some countries. Ultimately, the controversy resulted in Kinsey losing funding that he had secured from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue his research efforts (Bancroft, 2004).
Although Kinsey’s research has been widely criticized as being riddled with sampling and statistical errors (Jenkins, 2010), there is little doubt that this research was very influential in shaping future research on human sexual behavior and motivation. Kinsey described a remarkably diverse range of sexual behaviors and experiences reported by the volunteers participating in his research. Behaviors that had once been considered exceedingly rare or problematic were demonstrated to be much more common and innocuous than previously imagined (Bancroft, 2004; Bullough, 1998).
Watch this trailer from the 2004 film Kinsey that depicts Alfred Kinsey’s life and research.
Among the results of Kinsey’s research were the findings that women are as interested and experienced in sex as their male counterparts, that both males and females masturbate without adverse health consequences, and that homosexual acts are fairly common (Bancroft, 2004). Kinsey also developed a continuum known as the Kinsey scale that is still commonly used today to categorize an individual’s sexual orientation (Jenkins, 2010). Sexual orientation is an individual’s emotional and erotic attractions to same-sexed individuals (homosexual), opposite-sexed individuals (heterosexual), or both (bisexual).
MASTERS AND JOHNSON’S RESEARCH
William Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia Johnson (1925-2013) formed a research team in 1957 that expanded studies of sexuality from merely asking people about their sex lives to measuring people’s anatomy and physiology while they were actually having sex. Masters was a former Navy lieutenant, married father of two, and trained gynecologist with an interest in studying prostitutes. Johnson was a former country music singer, single mother of two, three-time divorcee, and two-time college dropout with an interest in studying sociology. And yes, if it piques your curiosity, Masters and Johnson were lovers (when Masters was still married); they eventually married each other, but later divorced. Despite their colorful private lives they were dedicated researchers with an interest in understanding sex from a scientific perspective.
In 1966, William Masters and Virginia Johnson published a book detailing the results of their observations of nearly 700 people who agreed to participate in their study of physiological responses during sexual behavior. Unlike Kinsey, who used personal interviews and surveys to collect data, Masters and Johnson observed people having intercourse in a variety of positions, and they observed people masturbating, manually or with the aid of a device. While this was occurring, researchers recorded measurements of physiological variables, such as blood pressure and respiration rate, as well as measurements of sexual arousal, such as vaginal lubrication and penile tumescence (swelling associated with an erection). In total, Masters and Johnson observed nearly 10,000 sexual acts as a part of their research (Hock, 2008).
Based on these observations, Masters and Johnson divided the sexual response cycle into four phases that are fairly similar in men and women: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
This graph illustrates the different phases of the sexual response cycle as described by Masters and Johnson.
In addition to the insights that their research provided with regards to the sexual response cycle and the multi-orgasmic potential of women, Masters and Johnson also collected important information about reproductive anatomy. Their research demonstrated the oft-cited statistic of the average size of a flaccid and an erect penis (3 and 6 inches, respectively) as well as dispelling long-held beliefs about relationships between the size of a man’s erect penis and his ability to provide sexual pleasure to his female partner. Furthermore, they determined that the vagina is a very elastic structure that can conform to penises of various sizes (Hock, 2008).
Contemporary Sex Research: Methods & Ethics
Now that we have covered a great expanse of time, let us center ourselves in the present moment in which you take on the role of becoming a researcher and theorist yourself. It is your turn to create your own research and theories! Well, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s explore current-day human sexuality research methods as well as ways to combat our ever-present biases.
Research Methods: How Should I Conduct My Research?
Psychologists and sexologists test research questions using a variety of methods. Most research relies on either experiments or correlations. In an experiment, researchers manipulate, or cause changes, in the independent variable, and observe or measure any impact of those changes in the dependent variable. The independent variable is the one under the experimenter’s control, or the variable that is intentionally altered between groups. The dependent variable is the variable that is not manipulated at all, or the one where the effect happens. One way to help remember this is that the dependent variable “depends” on what happens to the independent variable. The most important thing about experiments is random assignment. Participants don’t get to pick which condition they are in (e.g., participants didn’t choose whether they were supposed to spend the money on themselves versus others). The experimenter assigns them to a particular condition based on the flip of a coin or the roll of a die or any other random method.
When scientists passively observe and measure phenomena it is called correlational research. Here, we do not intervene and change behavior, as we do in experiments. In correlational research, we identify patterns of relationships, but we usually cannot infer what causes what. Importantly, with correlational research, you can examine only two variables at a time, no more and no less.
Self-Report Measurements
These are the most common of the techniques used by sex researchers because they can be conducted through paper questionnaires, in interviews and online. The researcher will ask questions and record the responses in order to be compiled and compared with all participants in the study to reach conclusions. The questions can be open-ended, yes/no response, or use a Likert Scale. Have you ever completed an end-of-the term review for an instructor while at PCC? If so, these utilize a Likert Scale–a question is asked and you are then meant to choose from a range of options, such as Strongly Disagree, Somewhat Disagree, Neither Disagree Nor Agree, Somewhat Agree, Strongly Agree.
Surveys
A survey is a way of gathering information, using old-fashioned questionnaires or the Internet. Compared to a study conducted in a psychology laboratory, surveys can reach a larger number of participants at a much lower cost. Although surveys are typically used for correlational research, this is not always the case. An experiment can be carried out using surveys as well. Surveys provide researchers with some significant advantages in gathering data. They make it possible to reach large numbers of people while keeping costs to the researchers and the time commitments of participants relatively low.
Important Surveys in Modern Sexology
The National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS), conducted in 1991, was the first nationally representative survey of U.S. sexual behavior, providing population estimates of a limited range of sexual behaviors. The NHSLS answered some of these important questions (particularly those related to the prevalence of masturbation, vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, oral sex, and the appeal of a range of sexual experiences), yet the survey was also limited to younger adults (ages 18–59).
In addition to the NSHLS, there have been several important U.S. national studies that have addressed sexual behavior, though each has focused on a narrow range of ages and/or sexual behaviors. The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) survey younger age groups and have mostly asked about sexual behaviors related to risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STI). The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) addresses a limited scope of relational and sexual issues for older Americans.
The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) is the largest nationally representative probability survey focused on understanding sex in the United States. Conducted by researchers at, or affiliated with, the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at the Indiana University School of Public Health, the NSSHB is an ongoing multi-wave study with data collected in 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. More than 20,000 people between the ages of 14 and 102 have participated in the NSSHB.
The NSSHB has resulted in dozens of research publications and presentations. Here is a small sampling of some key findings:
• There is enormous variability in the sexual repertoires of U.S. adults, with more than 40 combinations of sexual activity described at adults’ most recent sexual event. (2009 NSSHB)
• Many older adults continue to have active pleasurable sex lives, reporting a range of different behaviors and partner types, however adults over the age of 40 have the lowest rates of condom use. Although these individuals may not be as concerned about pregnancy, this suggests the need to enhance education efforts for older individuals regarding STI risks and prevention. (2009 NSSHB)
• Men are more likely to orgasm when sex includes vaginal intercourse; women are more likely to orgasm when they engage in a variety of sex acts and when oral sex or vaginal intercourse is included. (2009 NSSHB)
• Gender plays a critical role in understanding attitudes toward bisexual individuals among heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and other-identified adults. In general, women are more likely to report positive attitudes toward bisexual individuals than men. Additionally, attitudes toward bisexual women are more positive than attitudes toward bisexual men (2015 NSSHB – see Dodge et al.)
• Gay, lesbian and bisexual self-identified participants were less likely to report monogamy and more likely to report both open relationships and non-consensual non-monogamy. (2012 NSSHB – see Levine et al.)
U.S. data on diverse sexual behaviors are needed to improve clinicians’, educators’, policymakers’ and the general public’s understanding of human sexual expression. Consequently, human sexual expression can be more richly and accurately described which may also help people to feel “seen” or better represented in terms of their sexualities. In addition to these nation-wide surveys, there are sexual surveys conducted by sex toy manufacturers, colleges and universities, as well as individual sexological researchers.
Behavioral Measurements
• Direct observation–watching an individual or individuals engaged in a particular behavior (are there any ethical considerations on this?).
• Eye-tracking–a device that measures where a participant is looking.
Biological Measurements
The brain and genitals can be measured during sexual activity to understand how the body responds. MRIs can be used to look internally at the size, structure, and shape of the genitals and brain regions while fMRIs actually map the brain activity by measuring the blood flow to certain areas. One particular difficulty with MRIs and fMRIs is that the participant must remain still in order to capture effective images.
Some additional methods:
• Pupil dilation–changes in pupils can indicate arousal, interest or cognitive strain
• Penile plethysmography–placing a band around the penis that can measure blood flow
• Vaginal photoplethysmography–placing a measuring device inside the vagina that uses light to detect changes in blood flow
• Thermology–studying changes to body temperature because arousal creates heat
Do you think any of these techniques might change your sexual responses? How about trying to have an orgasm in an fMRI machine (all for the sake of science)?
Here you can see a brief clip examining EEG responses to orgasm: Inside the Orgasm Lab | Sex.Right.Now.
Media Content Analysis
Researchers develop a system to make inferences about some form of media. Intercoder reliability is very important in that the researcher will train the individuals compiling the data on how to code for the same things accurately. The coders are often given examples of media and they continue to be trained until all of them match each other’s responses. Then, they can move on to actually conducting the research.
Qualitative Methods
Just as correlational research allows us to study topics we can’t experimentally manipulate (e. g., whether you have a large or small income), there are other types of research designs that allow us to investigate these harder-to-study topics. Qualitative designs, including participant observation, case studies, and narrative analysis are examples of such methodologies. Although something as simple as “observation” may seem like it would be a part of all research methods, participant observation is a distinct methodology that involves the researcher embedding him- or herself into a group in order to study its dynamics.
Meta-Analysis
This involves combining all previous studies on a particular topic to analyze the results altogether. This allows for an enormous sample size and a greater understanding of a particular research question. This also allows the researcher to include results from many different types of research methods that individual studies within the meta-analysis used.
Possible Biases in Research
Did you know that about 90% of all sex research comes from countries in the Global North, such as the United States? This skews data taken from sex research because culture and society influence gender and sexuality in many ways. When most of the research is coming from a small portion of the world, many of the findings will be non-generalizable to individuals outside of that area, and researchers need to be more inclusive of the Global South, which includes Asia, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East (Dworkin et al., 2016). This is the overarching issue with sex research–there is a geographical and cultural bias. Additionally, we will look at some researcher mistakes as well as respondent mistakes that can influence outcomes.
Issues in Research: Researcher
• Too small of a sample size–the fewer number of participants in a study the less generalizable the research can be
• Convenience sample–comprising a sample of participants who are easy to include, such as volunteers at the Queer Resource Center where you work. It may be faster and easier to use this group of individuals, but the results will not reflect the general public within that particular population you are seeking to understand.
• If interviewing someone in person, the researchers’ biases about someone based on gender, race, age, etc. may influence the way they ask a question even when sticking to a script. Changes in tone or asking questions in a slightly different way can influence results.
• Direct observations are incredibly beneficial, but lab settings are often not reflective of peoples’ natural environments.
Best practices: utilize random or probability sampling so that a greater range of people have the chance of being included in the research and, if conducting an experiment, make it as naturalistic as possible (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017).
Issues in Research: Participants
• Nonresponse to certain parts of a survey or interview making the response rate across the sample inconsistent
• Purposeful distortion–people may exaggerate or minimize the truth related to their sexual thoughts and behaviors
• Volunteer bias–people who are willing to participate in sex research may not share the qualities of the general public
• People are often not good at recalling details or recognizing their own thoughts and physiological responses; self-report is sometimes not reliable
• When being interviewed in person, the participants’ biases about the researcher in terms of gender, race, age, etc. can cause them to answer differently. These are considered extraneous factors (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017).
Ways to Reduce Issues
• Test-retest reliability–interview participants twice to see if their responses are the same both times
• Interrater reliability–check for reliability by conducting the interview twice using different interviewers
• Utilize a computer system to read questions to participants and record their responses
• Conduct research using several different methods. For instance, use a self-report survey while participants watch some form of media while also using an eye-tracking device at the same time.
Ethical Concerns with Sex Research
Research involving human subjects must follow certain ethical standards to make sure the subjects are not harmed. Such harm can be quite severe in medical research unless certain precautions are taken. For example, in 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service began studying several hundred poor, illiterate African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama. The men had syphilis, for which no cure then existed, and were studied to determine its effects. After scientists found a decade later that penicillin could cure this disease, the government scientists decided not to give penicillin to the Tuskegee men because doing so would end their research. As a result, several of the men died from their disease, and some of their wives and children came down with it. The study did not end until the early 1970s, when the press finally disclosed the experiment. Several observers likened it to experiments conducted by Nazi scientists. If the subjects had been white and middle class, they said, the government would have ended the study once it learned that penicillin could cure syphilis (Jones, 1981).
In a study that began in 1932 of syphilis among African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama, government physicians decided not to give penicillin to the men after it was found that this drug would cure syphilis. Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
Fortunately, most sex research does not have this potential for causing death or serious illness, but it still can cause other kinds of harm and thus must follow ethical standards. The federal government has an extensive set of standards for research on human subjects, as do the fields of psychology, sociology and social work.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=29#oembed-1
One of the most important ethical guidelines in sexology and other human-subject research concerns privacy and confidentiality. Researchers should protect the privacy and confidentiality of their subjects. When a survey is used, the data must be coded (prepared for computer analysis) anonymously, and in no way should it be possible for any answers to be connected with the respondent who gave them. In field research, anonymity must also be maintained, and aliases (fake names) should normally be used when the researcher reports what she or he has been observing.
In 1970 a sociology student conducted a study, which ultimately led much debate among social science researchers when it came to light. Laud Humphreys studied male homosexual sex that took place in public bathrooms. He did so by acting as the lookout in several encounters where two men had sex; the men did not know Humphreys was a researcher. He also wrote down their license plates and obtained their addresses and a year later disguised himself and interviewed the men at their homes. Many sociologists and other observers later criticized Humphreys for acting so secretly and for violating his subjects’ privacy. Humphreys responded that he protected the men’s names and that their behavior was not private, as it was conducted in a public setting (Humphreys, 1975).
These and other studies (Reverby, 2009) led to increasing public awareness and concern regarding research on human subjects. In 1974, the US Congress enacted the National Research Act, which created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The commission produced The Belmont Report, a document outlining basic ethical principles for research on human subjects (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979). The National Research Act (1974) also required that all institutions receiving federal support establish institutional review boards (IRBs) to protect the rights of human research subjects. Since that time, many private research organizations that do not receive federal support have also established their own review boards to evaluate the ethics of the research that they conduct.
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)
Institutional Review Boards, or IRBs, are tasked with ensuring that the rights and welfare of human research subjects will be protected at all institutions, including universities, hospitals, nonprofit research institutions, and other organizations that receive federal support for research. IRBs typically consist of members from a variety of disciplines, such as sociology, economics, education, social work, and communications. Most IRBs also include representatives from the community in which they reside. For example, representatives from nearby prisons, hospitals, or treatment centers might sit on the IRBs of university campuses near them. The diversity of membership ensures that the complex ethical issues of human subjects research will be considered fully by a knowledgeable, experienced panel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fme1boEbE
Many sexological research projects involve the voluntary participation of all human subjects. In other words, we cannot force anyone to participate in our research without their knowledge and consent. Researchers must therefore design procedures to obtain subjects’ informed consent to participate in their research. Informed consent is defined as a subject’s voluntary agreement to participate in research based on a full understanding of the research and of the possible risks and benefits involved. Although it sounds simple, ensuring that one has actually obtained informed consent is a much more complex process than you might initially presume.
The informed consent process requires researchers to outline how they will protect the identities of subjects. This aspect of the process, however, is one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of research. In protecting subjects’ identities, researchers typically promise to maintain either the anonymity or confidentiality of their research subjects. Anonymity is the more stringent of the two. When a researcher promises anonymity to participants, not even the researcher is able to link participants’ data with their identities. Face-to-face interviewing means that subjects will be visible to researchers and will hold a conversation, making anonymity impossible. In other cases, the researcher may have a signed consent form or obtain personal information on a survey and will therefore know the identities of their research participants. In these cases, a researcher should be able to at least promise confidentiality to participants.
Offering confidentiality means that some of the subjects’ identifying information is known and may be kept, but only the researcher can link identity to data with the promise to keep this information private. Confidentiality in research and clinical practice are similar in that you know who your clients are, but others do not, and you promise to keep their information and identity private. This may be difficult if the data collection takes place in public or in the presence of other research participants, like in a focus group study. Researchers also cannot promise confidentiality in cases where research participants pose an imminent danger to themselves or others, or if they disclose abuse of children or other vulnerable populations. These situations fall under a social worker’s duty to report, which requires the researcher to prioritize their legal obligations over participant confidentiality.
As you now know, researchers must consider their own ethical principles and follow those of their institution, discipline, and community. We’ve already considered many of the ways that researchers strive to ensure the ethical practice of research, such as informing and protecting subjects, but the practice of ethical research doesn’t end once subjects have been identified and data have been collected. Researchers must also fully disclose their research procedures and findings. This means being honest about subject identification and recruitment, data collection and analyzation, as well as being transparent with the study’s ultimate findings.
The Future of Sex Research
Understanding the history of sexology may be helpful in paving the way forward. In particular, note the progress with which cultural shifts curate a much different understanding of sex. For example, Kinsey’s finding that masturbation occurs among many people AND that it seems to benefit the experience of an individual’s sexual awareness within their future sexual relationships was shocking when it was first presented. Now, it’s not just completely acceptable, masturbation as a form of self awareness is encouraged by psychologists, sexologists, and medical providers. So cultural shifts matter when it comes to what we consider acceptable in terms of research and sexual data.
This, combined with an ongoing conversation around ethics, becomes important when we consider the future of sex/sexuality research. How do we ethically continue and expand the map of neurological responses to pleasure? How do technologies such as augmented reality fit our paradigm? What does it mean to have sex with robots?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRv70r5F_Ok
For more, check out Sex With Robots – Kate Devlin TEDx Talk
These questions are at the very tip of the iceberg, so to speak. What other considerations might be at play when it comes to research on all things sex?
Licenses and Attribution
Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Psychology by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
The section on The History of Scientific Investigations of Sex was taken from the Psychology of Human Sexuality by Don Lucas and Jennifer Fox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
UPEI Introduction to Psychology 1 by Philip Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
The following videos have this license: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
Crash Course. (2018). Henrietta Lacks, the Tuskegee Experiment, and ethical data collection: Crash course statistics #12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzNANZnoiRs
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2018). How IRBs protect human research participants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fme1boEbE
Love & Sex with Robots. (2016). Would you have sex with a robot? | Goldsmiths research questions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRv70r5F_Ok
References
Hyde, J. S., & DeLamater, J. D. (2017). Understanding human sexuality. McGraw-Hill.
Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Psychology by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
The Psychology of Human Sexuality by Don Lucas and Jennifer Fox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
Tilley, M. (2015). Happy endings: the ins and outs of clinical sexology. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/happy-endings-the-ins-and-outs-of-clinical-sexology-36820
UPEI Introduction to Psychology 1 by Philip Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Introduction to Human Sexuality by Ericka Goerling & Emerson Wolfe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.03%3A_Chapter_3_-_Sexology_through_Time_and_Contemporary_Sex_Research.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Distinguish between female, male, and intersex anatomy and recognize the differences and similarities between them
• Identify hormones that influence sex development and sexual behavior
• Explain how bipotential tissues are directed to develop into male or female sex organs
• Name the rudimentary duct systems in the embryo that are precursors to male or female internal sex organs
• Describe the hormonal changes that bring about puberty, and the secondary sex characteristics of men and women
• Analyze the complexity of sex development and gain an understanding of the experiences of intersex and transgender individuals
• Describe the sexual response cycle
• Evaluate theories explaining the sexual arousal and response processes, such as Masters and Johnson, the 4 stages of physiological arousal, etc.
• Distinguish between pleasure and reproduction as motives behind sexuality
Every body is different. But many things about our bodies are the same.
Humans come in a variety of shades, sizes and proportions, yet in total, our bodies are more similar to each other than they are different. In fact the human body shares similarities with bodies across the diversity of life. We share aspects of our reproductive system with all mammals, aspects of our basic physiology with all vertebrates, and aspects of our cell structure, biochemistry and genetics with all living things. In this chapter, we will look at the human body specifically, not because the human body, in terms of reproduction, is very distinct from that of a 3-toed sloth, or because the basic structure is very different from a Galápagos tortoise, or because our cellular biology varies much from that of the fungus that inhabits bleu cheese. Instead, we focus on the human body because the authors and readers of this text presumably each have a human body, and reading about ourselves is interesting.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Some of the language in this chapter is still held in the binary; that is girl/boy or male/female. This is concurrent with a lot of medical literature. Importantly, however, even biological sex is found on a continuum so there are variations of genital structure and presentation that defies the binary, which is critical to note.
Sex Differentiation
Sex differentiation, also referred to as sexual differentiation, is the process in which genitals and reproductive organs develop within the womb as a result of complex hormonal processes altering neutral tissues to develop along female and male lines and in which varying combinations are possible as well. Secondary sex characteristics begin to develop further as part of the sex differentiation process during puberty. Therefore, prenatal development, as well as changes that further occur during puberty, create a cascade of events that results in physical changes to the body. Chromosomes, genes, gonads, hormones, and hormone receptor sites play key roles within the endocrine system that influence sex development. Sex is both a genetic and environmental experience in which epigenetic factors can alter the way that genes function, resulting in changes to hormone production and hormone receptor sites at different points across the lifespan.
Prenatal
Commonalities between male and female reproductive anatomy
During embryonic development the male and female fetus are indistinguishable before about 10 weeks of pregnancy. Fetal tissues begin in an undifferentiated state, and based on genetic signals and the interuterine environment the reproductive organs usually differentiate into structures typical of males and females. This means that for most of the reproductive parts there is an analogous part in the other sex that arose from the same original tissues. For example, testes and ovaries develop from the same tissue – originally located in the abdomen. In males the testes move down and outside the abdomen as they develop; in female they remain internal. Some structures (such as the oviducts) have a structure that was common in early development, but completely or partially disappears in later development; other structures (such as the uterus) have analogues that are very subtle structures in the male. See the following table for a list of analogous structures in male and female anatomy.
Commonalities between male and female reproductive signaling
Much of the reproductive physiology we will address is regulated by hormonal signals that arise in the brain and much of this signaling is shared between males and females.
Within the brain is a region called the hypothalamus (see figure below). This portion of the brain sends signals to the pituitary gland located beneath it. In particular, the hypothalamus sends a hormonal signal called gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GRH) to the pituitary gland. In response to the GRH signal, the pituitary gland releases two hormones that circulate in the blood: luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). These hormones travel throughout the body, triggering further hormone releases and physiological changes (discussed further below). There are feedback loops that tightly regulate the levels of circulating hormones. In addition to GRH, LH, and FSH, the hormones testosterone, estrogen and progesterone are important in reproductive signaling. While we will focus on the effects of testosterone in males and estrogen and progesterone in females, all of these hormones are present and important in both males and females.
Further Sexual Development Occurs at Puberty
Puberty is the stage of development at which individuals become sexually mature. Though the outcomes of puberty for boys and girls are very different, the hormonal control of the process is very similar. In addition, though the timing of these events varies between individuals, the sequence of changes that occur is predictable for male and female adolescents. As shown in the figure below, a concerted release of hormones from the hypothalamus (GnRH), the anterior pituitary (LH and FSH), and the gonads (either testosterone or estrogen) is responsible for the maturation of the reproductive systems and the development of secondary sex characteristics, which are physical changes that serve auxiliary roles in reproduction.
The first changes begin around the age of eight or nine when the production of LH becomes detectable. The release of LH occurs primarily at night during sleep and precedes the physical changes of puberty by several years. In pre-pubertal children, the sensitivity of the negative feedback system in the hypothalamus and pituitary is very high. This means that very low concentrations of androgens or estrogens will negatively feed back onto the hypothalamus and pituitary, keeping the production of GnRH, LH, and FSH low.
As an individual approaches puberty, two changes in sensitivity occur. The first is a decrease of sensitivity in the hypothalamus and pituitary to negative feedback, meaning that it takes increasingly larger concentrations of sex steroid hormones to stop the production of LH and FSH. The second change in sensitivity is an increase in sensitivity of the gonads to the FSH and LH signals, meaning the gonads of adults are more responsive to gonadotropins than are the gonads of children. As a result of these two changes, the levels of LH and FSH slowly increase and lead to the enlargement and maturation of the gonads, which in turn leads to secretion of higher levels of sex hormones and the initiation of spermatogenesis and folliculogenesis.
In addition to age, multiple factors can affect the age of onset of puberty, including genetics, environment, and psychological stress. One of the more important influences may be nutrition; historical data demonstrate the effect of better and more consistent nutrition on the age of menarche in girls in the United States, which decreased from an average age of approximately 17 years of age in 1860 to the current age of approximately 12.75 years in 1960, as it remains today. Some studies indicate a link between puberty onset and the amount of stored fat in an individual. This effect is more pronounced in girls, but has been documented in boys as well. Body fat, corresponding with secretion of the hormone leptin by adipose cells, appears to have a strong role in determining menarche. This may reflect to some extent the high metabolic costs of gestation and lactation. In girls who are lean and highly active, such as gymnasts, there is often a delay in the onset of puberty.
Hormones of Puberty During puberty, the release of LH and FSH from the anterior pituitary stimulates the gonads to produce sex hormones in both male and female adolescents.
Signs of Puberty
Different sex steroid hormone concentrations between the sexes in general and within each individual uniquely also contribute to the development and function of secondary sexual characteristics. Examples of secondary sexual characteristics are listed in Table 1. Each individual’s hormone concentrations will depend upon genetics, diet, stress, and more; thus, secondary sex characteristics will progress along a continuum of possibilities based on these nature multiplied by nurture combinations.
Development of the Secondary Sexual Characteristics
Male Female
Increased larynx size and deepening of the voice Deposition of fat, predominantly in breasts and hips
Increased muscular development Breast development
Growth of facial, axillary, and pubic hair, and increased growth of body hair Broadening of the pelvis and growth of axillary, pubic and body hair
Something to keep in mind as well is that people can experience varying degrees of muscular, breast and hair development depending upon their genetic and environmental makeup. For instance, some boys at the beginning of puberty may see breast tissue growth as well as other body fat increases, and some girls may have facial and body hair growth. One example in this complex process is how unused testosterone is converted to estrogen, for instance, making it not about how much testosterone is present and rather how that testosterone is being used or unused. Also, hormone receptor sites in female cells are often more reactive to lower levels of testosterone. Intersex individuals, females and males all have estrogen and testosterone impacting the changing body during puberty, and it is incorrect to view testosterone as a strictly “male” hormone and estrogen as a strictly “female” hormone. To understand this process, individuals will need to analyze their specific hormone levels, the functionality of genes involved in sex differentiation, and environmental stressors and nutrition that may have epigenetic effects on their genes.
As a girl reaches puberty, typically the first change that is visible is the development of the breast tissue. This is followed by the growth of axillary and pubic hair. A growth spurt normally starts at approximately age 9 to 11, and may last two years or more. During this time, a girl’s height can increase 3 inches a year. The next step in puberty is menarche, the start of menstruation.
In boys, the growth of the testes is typically the first physical sign of the beginning of puberty, which is followed by growth and pigmentation of the scrotum and growth of the penis. The next step is the growth of hair, including armpit, pubic, chest, and facial hair. Testosterone stimulates the growth of the larynx and thickening and lengthening of the vocal folds, which causes the voice to drop in pitch. The first fertile ejaculations typically appear at approximately 15 years of age, but this age can vary widely across individual boys. Unlike the early growth spurt observed in females, the male growth spurt occurs toward the end of puberty, at approximately age 11 to 13, and a boy’s height can increase as much as 4 inches a year. In some males, pubertal development can continue through the early 20s.
Hormone blockers for transgender individuals are helpful during puberty to prevent the development of inappropriate secondary sex characteristics that may evoke dysphoria. A concern around hormone blockers is that the parent(s) or guardian(s) are consenting to this treatment on their youth’s behalf, and some caretakers may not feel comfortable with this process. An ongoing debate exists around whether adolescents are mature and aware enough to advocate for themselves. Pediatricians and advocates who are supportive of prescribing hormone blockers and starting hormone replacement therapy express that transgender identities are often expressed during early childhood and remain consistent across the lifespan, whereas others who are against this process tend to express concern over the weight of this decision due to the epigenetic effects of hormone medications that will permanently alter the body and cannot be undone if an individual were to no longer identify as transgender.
Chromosomes and Hormones, Oh My!
Watch these two videos to gain more insight into the X chromosome and hormones.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=42#oembed-1
And
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=42#oembed-2
Epigenetics, Surgery, and Medications
Epigenetics
Epigenetics is the way in which environmental factors influence the expression of genes. First, let’s look at reptilian and mammalian studies to explore some epigenetic factors that can influence differences between sexes. According to Forger (2016), “In many reptiles and some fish the ambient temperature during incubation determines the sex of the individual. In other words, perfectly good male or female brains and bodies can develop from an identical genome, based on differences in the epigenetic regulation of that genome. Similarly, although there are genetic differences between male and female mammals, many of the sex differences in mammalian brains and behavior are likely epigenetic in origin” (p. 1). In studies conducted on rodents, such as mice, rats, and guinea pigs who share similarities with human males regarding olfactory cues and some sexual behaviors, researchers have found that the development of the brain is influenced by environmental factors at birth that alter cell death in the brain and the way that sex hormones are processed based on activation or inactivation of key genes depending on the presence of certain histones (Forger, 2016).
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=42#oembed-3
Surgeries
The removal of organs, such as gonads, can alter the production of hormones and require an individual to take synthetically produced hormones. Hysterectomy (surgical removal of the uterus), orchiectomy (surgical removal of one or both testes), and other procedures that alter the reproductive organs or other endocrine glands will alter the natural production of hormones and cause changes to the body. Medications can be prescribed to stand in for the lost hormones that can no longer be created, but medications will require adjusting and tweaking over time which may never completely compare to the original levels previously maintained.
Medications
Many people associate medically prescribed hormones with transgender individuals who are physically transitioning; however, hormone replacement therapy was first developed to help cisgender women with symptoms related to menopause (Cagnacci & Venier, 2019). Additionally, testosterone injections and pills are often advertised to cisgender men under the premise that they will provide them with a confidence boost, higher sex drive, more muscle mass, etc. (Harvard Health Publishing, 2020). Hormones are present in birth control pills, and narcotics and prescribed substances, such as steroids, antihypertensive drugs, chemotherapy and more, can impact the endocrine system in numerous ways which will then impact the way that sex hormones are produced and processed. Thus, these medications beyond hormone replacement therapies can have impacts upon sexual functioning, fat distribution, mood, body hair production and more. Some changes, such as body hair production, may remain even after the medication is stopped.
Female Anatomy
Some of the organs involved in female reproduction are diagrammed in the Figure below.
The reproductive structures of the human female are shown.
(credit a: modification of work by Gray’s Anatomy; credit b: modification of work by CDC)
Female reproductive anatomy includes external structures (the clitoris and vulva), structures involved in the production of eggs and in fetal development (ovaries corpus luteum, and uterus), and structures involved in the transport of sperm, eggs, and babies (vagina, cervix and oviduct).
For a useful 3-D interactive, check out Pussypedia’s 3-D Interactive Pussy.*
Pussy*
*We propose a new gender-and-organ-inclusive use of the word. ~Pussypedia
Egg production and fetal development
• Ovary: females have two ovaries that are the site of egg production, and, if an egg is fertilized, the site of the corpus luteum. The ovary produces hormones estrogen and progesterone and testosterone.
• Corpus luteum: the site of egg maturation within the ovary. After ovulation (release of the egg) the corpus luteum produces progesterone to maintain a possible pregnancy.
• Uterus: this muscle-lined, triangular organ is where a fertilized egg implants and develops. This organ develops a thick blood lining and sheds this lining on a monthly cycle.
Transport of eggs, sperm, and embryos
• Vagina: a highly expandable pouch structure that serves as the opening of the female reproductive tract to outside the body. The vagina is the point of sperm entry, and the point of exit for unfertilized eggs, menstrual discharge and for babies, if pregnant and having a vaginal delivery.
• Cervix: the opening between the vagina and the uterus. The size of this opening varies from tightly closed – to open for the passage of sperm, to open enough for a baby to pass through.
• Oviducts (sometimes called fallopian tubes): these ducts transport mature eggs from the ovary toward the uterus. If a sperm and egg are in the oviduct at the same time, the egg can be fertilized by a sperm.
Exterior structures
• Vulva: a general term for the exterior parts surrounding the vagina, including the labia majora and labia minora, which are the folds of skin on either side of the clitoris, urethra, and vagina. Often this term is overlooked, with folks referring to the vulva as “vagina,” which is the internal structure. It’s OK and more accurate to say vulva when referring to the external structure. Importantly, the structure and appearance of the vulva may vary widely. There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to the vulva and diversity in appearance needs to be celebrated.
• Clitoris: the sensitive nerve-rich organ that is analogous to the head of the penis. The part of the clitoris that is visible outside the body is dorsal to (closer to the belly) the urethra and the vagina). The interior part of the clitoris extends internally along either side of the vagina.
Unfortunately, the structure of the clitoris is not well known by many people, including to those folks with a clitoris. Historically (and even in some contemporary settings), this feature of anatomy has been muted or correlated with antiquated notions of female sexuality such as hysteria or neurosis.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=42#oembed-4
Female reproductive physiology
Female reproductive anatomy and physiology has many similarities to that of the male. As described earlier, females also use LH and FSH secretion from the pituitary triggered by GRH from the hypothalamus to stimulate hormone production by the gonads. There is also negative feedback to regulate hormone production. However, in females, the interplay among the hormonal signals is more complicated than in males. While male hormonal feedbacks and signaling provide a relatively steady level of the sex hormone testosterone, for females there is a monthly cycle over which the circulating hormone levels go up and down at the same time as changes occur in the ovaries and the uterus. This surging of hormones along with the changes in the ovaries and uterus require the more complicated physiological controls described below.
Menstruation
Sometimes a Taboo Topic
The banner in the picture below was carried in a 2014 march in Uganda as part of the celebration of Menstrual Hygiene Day. Menstrual Hygiene Day is an awareness day on May 28 of each year that aims to raise awareness worldwide about menstruation and menstrual hygiene. Maintaining good menstrual hygiene is difficult in developing countries like Uganda because of taboos on discussing menstruation and lack of availability of menstrual hygiene products. Poor menstrual hygiene, in turn, can lead to embarrassment, degradation, and reproductive health problems in females. May 28 was chosen as Menstrual Hygiene Day because of its symbolism. May is the fifth month of the year, and most women average five days of menstrual bleeding each month. The 28th day was chosen because the menstrual cycle averages about 28 days.
The monthly female reproductive cycle can be divided into three phases, the follicular phase, ovulation, and the luteal phase. For each of these phases, there are concurrent changes happening in the uterus and in the ovaries. See the figure below for a diagram of the phases of the female reproductive cycle and what is happening in the ovary, the uterus, and circulating hormone levels.
Female hormone cycle.
The Follicular Phase
The name “follicular phase” is in reference to the egg-containing follicle in the ovary that matures during this phase (note the ovarian histology shown in Figure 7). This phase begins on day one of a female’s reproductive cycle. Day one is defined as the first day of menstruation (the first day of a period). Menstruation occurs for about the first 5 days of the follicular phase. During these days, if a female is not pregnant, low circulating levels of the hormone progesterone trigger the breakdown of the endometrium (the lining of the uterus). This blood-rich tissue exits the uterus through the cervix and then leaves the body out the vagina. During menstruation, low circulating levels of estrogen and progesterone stimulate GRH production (from the hypothalamus in the brain), which leads to LH and FSH secretion by the pituitary gland. FSH signals the maturation of several follicles within the ovaries. These follicle cells produce a steadily increasing amount of estrogen (note the estradiol (a type of estrogen) increases from day 1-12 in Figure 4.5).
Ovulation
Ovulation refers to the rupture of a mature follicle within the ovary; this ruptured follicle releases an oocyte (an unfertilized egg) into the abdominal space. Because this rupture is an actual breakage, some females will feel a twinge or slight pain during ovulation. Ovulation generally happens around day 14 of the reproductive cycle in one ovary.
Luteal phase
During the luteal phase, the now empty follicle within the ovary collapses. This collapsed mass of cells is called a corpus luteum. The corpus luteum produces progesterone that enters the blood circulation. Progesterone signals the hypothalamus to signal the pituitary to reduce FSH and LH production, which prevents other follicles from maturing. If the oocyte in the oviduct is not fertilized, the corpus luteum degrades, causing a drop in progesterone, which triggers the beginning of menstruation and the return to the follicular phase of the reproductive cycle (back to day 1 after about a 28-day cycle). If the oocyte IS fertilized, then that begins the cellular process of fetal development (pregnancy).
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Menopause
Female fertility (the ability to conceive) peaks when women are in their twenties, and is slowly reduced until a women reaches 35 years of age. After that time, fertility declines more rapidly, until it ends completely at the end of menopause. Menopause is the cessation of the menstrual cycle that occurs as a result of the loss of ovarian follicles and the hormones that they produce. A woman is considered to have completed menopause if she has not menstruated in a full year. After that point, she is considered postmenopausal. The average age for this change is consistent worldwide at between 50 and 52 years of age, but it can normally occur in a woman’s forties, or later in her fifties. Poor health, including smoking, can lead to earlier loss of fertility and earlier menopause.
Intersex Anatomy
About 1 in 1,000-1,500 people will be born noticeably intersex, such as having partial elements of both a penis and vulva. However, other intersex conditions may not show up until later, such as during puberty or when trying to conceive children, making this number higher in actuality. Some estimates show that some intersex conditions can be as high as 1 in 66. Taken altogether, some researchers, such as Anne Fausto-Sterling, argue that the number of intersex people is actually closer to about 1 in 100 (Intersex Society of North America, 2008b). Here is a video of 4 individuals sharing some of their experiences:
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The term intersex is an umbrella term that encompasses many different variations to sex. Some intersex individuals have variations to their sex chromosomes or that the SRY gene on the Y chromosome is not present or was translocated onto an X chromosome. Thus, in some instances, a male can have XX chromosomes and a female can have XY chromosomes. Other variations are possible as well (X0, XXY, XYY, XXX). According to Dr. Charmian Quigley with the Intersex Society of North America (2008a), “The last time I counted, there were at least 30 genes that have been found to have important roles in the development of sex in either humans or mice. Of these 30 or so genes 3 are located on the X chromosome, 1 on the Y chromosome and the rest are on other chromosomes, called autosomes (on chromosomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 19). In light of this, sex should be considered not a product of our chromosomes, but rather, a product of our total genetic makeup, and of the functions of these genes during development” (para. 11-12). Therefore, we need to be careful when we oversimplify this process and relate sex to XX or XY chromosomes only.
Male Anatomy
Some of the organs involved with male reproduction are diagrammed below.
Male reproductive anatomy
Male reproductive anatomy involves the organs and glands that produce sperm, create semen to transport sperm, and conduct this liquid semen out of the body. Semen production involves the work of accessory glands, each responsible for the production of one or more key ingredients of semen. Male anatomical structures can be broken down into the following:
Sperm production
• Testis: males typically have two testes (also called testicles), which, in humans, descend from the abdomen during fetal development and are enclosed outside the abdomen in the scrotum. Each testis houses many tube-like structures (the seminiferous tubules) in which sperm are made. Specialized cells (the Leydig cells) in the testes produce testosterone.
• Scrotum: a pouch of skin that holds the testes that contracts or expands to adjust the distance the testes are from the body to regulate their temperature.
• Seminiferous tubules: these structures within the testes are the actual sites of sperm production (discussed further below)
• Epididymis: this rubbery device sits astride the testis. Sperm mature here and are stored prior to ejaculation (when sperm-bearing semen leaves the body, typically during orgasm)
Semen production
• Seminal vesicles: these two glands produce an alkaline (basic) fluid that can neutralize the acidity of the vagina. This fluid contains fructose and other nutrients to provide energy for the sperm.
• Bulbourethral (or Cowper’s) glands: these two glands provide a mucus-rich alkaline fluid that lubricates the inside of the urethra to allow for easier passage of sperm and neutralizes the urethra (urine residue is acidic). Some of this fluid exits the penis prior to ejaculation (this pre-ejaculate fluid can also contain sperm). The remainder of the fluid combines with the semen ejaculate.
• Prostate gland: this organ wraps around the urethra and provides muscular contractions that help propel semen during ejaculation and block urine flow from the bladder during ejaculation. It also provides fluid in the ejaculate that contains enzymes and zinc that aid in sperm motility.
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Sperm/semen transport:
• Ductus (or vas) deferens: this pair of muscle-lined tubes carry sperm from the epididymis of each testis into the abdominal cavity where they loop over the bladder and join with the ducts from the seminal vesicles to form the ejaculatory ducts. The muscles that line the ductus deferens contract to propel semen during ejaculation.
• Ejaculatory ducts: these ducts are formed by the joining of the vas deference with the duct from the seminal vesicle. Each ejaculatory duct empties into the urethra.
• Penis: the organ that encircles the urethra as the urethra exits the abdomen. This organ changes from flaccid (soft and limp) to erect (rigid and standing away from the body) during sexual arousal or spontaneously. In uncircumcised men the penis has a fold of skin called a foreskin that during the flaccid state, covers the head of the penis, and during the erect state retracts behind the glans (or head) of the penis.
• Urethra: the tube that runs from the bladder through the penis through which urine and semen exit the body.
Transgender Anatomy
Further neurobiological research has been conducted to explain why many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, which is an intense feeling that one’s sex assigned at birth based on genital presentation does not match the way they feel about themselves. The contrast between the genital-based presentation of sex and the brain’s sex can be explained from a neurobiology perspective by taking a closer look at sex differentiation when we are still in the womb. During prenatal development, sex differentiation of the genitals takes place during the first two months of pregnancy while sex differentiation of the brain occurs around 4 months of pregnancy (Swaab & Garcia-Falgueras, 2009). This discrepancy between the development of the genitals and the brain has led biological researchers to believe this may be the reason why some individuals are transgender or experience gender dysphoria. Something to keep in mind: Humans actually show a lot less sex dimorphism than many other species, which means that there are actually a lot of similarities between men and women, making this type of research rather difficult as differences are often very subtle if present at all.
Due to the positive results found with treating some transgender individuals using hormone replacement therapy and hormone blockers in order to bring about desirable changes to the physical body, this adds merit to the perspective that there may be some biological reasons and solutions for people experiencing gender dysphoria from a biopsycho perspective. Transgender men: testosterone therapy will result in enlargement of the clitoris leading to resembling a small penis, facial hair and increased body hair similar to other males in the family, redistribution of body fat and increased muscle mass, deepening of the voice due to testosterone thickening the vocal cords, breast tissue will begin to atrophy, more oily skin, etc. Transgender women: Hormone blockers and estrogen hormone therapy will cause breast tissue growth, redistribution of body fat and reduced muscle mass, body hair will thin and grow less fast, penial tissue (if not having regular sex or masturbating) will begin to atrophy, the skin will become drier, etc. Electrolysis for hair removal may be desired and voice lessons can help train the individual to speak in a more socially expected female register.
Hormone blockers prior to puberty are especially beneficial to prevent these long-lasting impacts and aid the transition process for transgender individuals. Many parents feel conflicted about this, however, and may not consent on their children’s behalf to receive these medical services. Surgeries may also be used by some transgender individuals, commonly referred to within these communities as “top surgery” relating to surgery to either remove or enhance breast tissue or “bottom surgery” on the genitals. Creating a vagina can be done by utilizing the existing tissue and has promising results for many individuals allowing them to experience sensation, but this will depend on scar tissue. Creating a penis will require the addition of testicular implants and a penial pump for erection purposes.
Every transgender person will have to decide what steps they want to take to help them feel as comfortable as possible in their bodies. If someone does not use hormones or have surgeries, it does not make them any less transgender than someone who does. Also, keep in mind that access to healthcare is a privilege and not a right in our country, which can be a barrier for many individuals in receiving the care they need. Family, culture, society, etc. also act as barriers in this process. It is never appropriate to question a transgender person about their genitals, surgeries or hormones, and doing so would be examples of microaggressions. This is othering and dehumanizing and reduces transgender individuals to their genitals and body rather than seeing them as a whole person with feelings and the right to privacy. Create a space where someone feels comfortable to share their experiences with you on their own instead rather than questioning them. We will talk more about allyship next week. Until then, here are some resources:
Additional resources for your reference: If you or someone you know is interested in learning more about how hormone replacement therapy impacts the body, check out the links provided by the University of California San Francisco Transgender Care. UCSF Transgender Care also has more information on the types of surgeries that are available for transgender individuals.
What about when nonbinary individuals, such as those who identify as agender, bigender, genderqueer, etc., and experience gender dysphoria as well? Or, what about when transgender individuals don’t experience gender dysphoria? What might be some biological explanations? We need more research! A question to think about further: If gender is a social construct, then does biology even really matter anyway and are researchers trying too hard to find biological answers? This goes back to the nature/nurture debate once again. We will discuss gender as a social and cultural phenomenon next week to explore this question further from other perspectives.
To hear personal stories and experiences of transgender individuals, watch this video:
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Bodies are Beautiful and Vary So Much
The authors of this text (Ericka Goerling and Emerson Wolfe) could not find images that represent transgender bodies, apart from images depicting surgeries, in a respectful way. If you know a transgender, non-binary, or gender expansive artist who would like to see their work featuring beautiful bodies added to this resource, please share your instructor’s email with them to reach out for more information on this project.
The Medicalization of Gender: The Development of “Sex”
Why do we label different anatomical parts as “female anatomy” and “male anatomy”? Our understanding of the body is usually through the lens of long deceased researchers and doctors who believed in strict gender binary systems with males having “normal” bodies and with women being framed as having less capable bodies. The existence of intersex people indicates that the process of sex differentiation is very complex, yet our understanding today even is misguided by an oversimplification of this process that is shaped by our cultural definition of gender and our gender schema (aka a cognitive blueprint based on your experiences). Think to your own upraising and explore how this has shaped your concept of sex and gender even today. We will discuss cross-cultural perspectives on gender and how this impacts our idea of biological sex next week. Until then, explore the following questions: Do you know your hormone levels? Do you know your sex chromosomes? Take this moment to normalize the way your genitals looked at birth and how they look currently and recognize that everyone’s bodies are different and beautiful.
Conclusion
As you reach the end of this reading, the hope is that you have more questions than answers about the vast possibilities that contribute to your present bodily form and physiological functioning. Human experiences are genetic and environmental, and sex differentiation further showcases how this process is often oversimplified and discussed from within binary systems of “female” and “male” when the reality lends itself more toward spectrums and continuums from the moment we begin in the womb to how we undergo many changes throughout our life’s course. Use this knowledge to understand your body’s functioning, and harness this information as you explore what brings you and others sexual pleasure if this connection is something you seek. Use scientific advancements to be allies to the human experience and also recognize the limitations to scientific study. We do not have all the answers and may never, so continue to ask questions about human sexual development, anatomy, and physiology.
Licenses and Attributions
Betts, J. G., Young, K. A., Wise, J. A., Johnson, E., Poe, B., Kruse, D. H., Korol, O., Johnson, J. E., Womble, M., & DeSaix, P. (2013). Anatomy and physiology. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/anatomy-and-physiology/pages/27-3-development-of-the-male-and-female-reproductive-systems#fig-ch28_03_01 (Adapted for the section on Puberty). Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Cotner, S. & Wassenberg, D. (2018). The evolution and biology of sex. PressBooks.https://open.lib.umn.edu/evolutionbiology/ (for sections on Female Anatomy and Male Anatomy). Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Miller, C. (2016). Human biology. PressBooks. https://humanbiology.pressbooks.tru.ca/. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
OpenStax College. (2013). Anatomy & physiology. OpenStax. http://cnx.org/content/col11496/latest/. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
The following videos have this license: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
TED-Ed. (2017). Secrets of the X chromosome – Robin Ball. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veB31XmUQm8
TED-Ed. (2018). How do your hormones work? – Emma Bryce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SPRPkLoKp8
TED-Ed. (2016). What is epigenetics? – Carlos Guerrero-Bosagna. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aAhcNjmvhc
Lori Malépart-Traversy. (2017). Le clitoris – Animated documentary (2016) by Lori Malépart-Traversy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_3OA_VZVkY&t=1s
Glamour. (2016). This is your period in 2 minutes | Glamour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOi2Bwvp6hw
As/Is. (2015). What it’s like to be intersex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAUDKEI4QKI
BuzzFeedVideo. (2016). Trans people talk to their younger selves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FDkeZdPjuw
References
Betts, J. G., Young, K. A., Wise, J. A., Johnson, E., Poe, B., Kruse, D. H., Korol, O., Johnson, J. E., Womble, M., & DeSaix, P. (2013). Anatomy and physiology. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/anatomy-and-physiology/pages/27-3-development-of-the-male-and-female-reproductive-systems#fig-ch28_03_01 (Adapted for the section on Puberty)
Cagnacci, A., & Venier, M. (2019). The controversial history of hormone replacement therapy. Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania), 55(9), 602. https://doi.org/10.3390/medicina55090602. Retrieved from permalink.
Cotner, S. & Wassenberg, D. (2018). The evolution and biology of sex. PressBooks.https://open.lib.umn.edu/evolutionbiology/ (for sections on Female Anatomy and Male Anatomy)
Forger, N. G. (2016). Epigenetic mechanisms in sexual differentiation of the brain and behaviour. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 371(1688), 20150114. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0114. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4785900/.
Harvard Health Publishing. (2020). Is testosterone therapy safe? Take a breath before you take the plunge. Harvard Men’s Health Watch. Retrieved from website link.
Intersex Society of North America. (2008a). Does having a Y chromosome make someone a man? https://isna.org/faq/y_chromosome/.
Intersex Society of North America. (2008b). How common is intersex? https://isna.org/faq/frequency/.
Kabotyanski K and Somerville L (2021) Puberty: Your Brain on Hormones. Front. Young Minds. 9:554380. doi: 10.3389/frym.2020.554380
Miller, C. (2016). Human biology. PressBooks. https://humanbiology.pressbooks.tru.ca/
OpenStax College. (2013). Anatomy & physiology. OpenStax. http://cnx.org/content/col11496/latest/
Swaab, D. F., & Garcia-Falgueras, A. (2009). Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation. Functional Neurology, 24(1), 17-28. Here is the article permalink if you’d like to read more.
License
Introduction to Human Sexuality by Ericka Goerling & Emerson Wolfe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.04%3A_Chapter_4_-_Sex_Differentiation_Anatomy_and_Physiology.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Analyze the impact of colonization upon indigenous traditional practices regarding gender and social structures
• Discuss decolonization and current activism that seek to return to pre-colonial understandings of gender as a basis for intergenerational healing
• Explore gender as a social construct by looking at many perspectives around the world
• Describe gender variations
• Explain how various socialization agents (e.g., parents, peers, schools, textbooks, television and religion) contribute to the formation of gender roles
• Compare psychological theories on gender
• Create a plan to be an ally to others to promote individual and community well-being
Introduction
Sex and gender are often confused for one another and are used interchangeably in many circumstances; however, these are distinct concepts. Sex, like we explored last week, depends on chromosomes, genetics, hormones, hormone receptors, gonads, and epigenetic factors, and secondary sex characteristics continue to unfold during puberty and throughout our lifespans impacting the way that our physical bodies look and feel. Female, intersex, and male bodies exist on a continuum of possibilities. Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct based on gender roles, expectations around behavior, stereotypes concerning vague concepts like femininity and masculinity, and personal internalization of what gender means to each individual person. All of these factors, through socialization, work to influence the way each individual person internalizes concepts around gender.
Some people will conform to what is socially expected of them based on the way others have labeled their gender while others will identify differently and carve out a different path. Additionally, humans do not remain stagnant and gender can also change throughout a person’s lifetime depending on life experiences, education, exposure to differing perspectives, religious upbringing, family background, peer interactions, media, and more. Before we can delve into this topic more globally, let’s first look at gender in the United States. Then, we will analyze multicultural perspectives to highlight how gender can take on different meanings based on culture and society, we will explore theories around gender, and we will analyze the way in which this culminates in the unique way each person will come to perceive gender and behave based on the internalization of gendered concepts. In order to explore where to go from here, we will discuss ways to be allies to all genders in order to build a healthy and sustainable future.
Gender and the United States
Gender expansive ideas are not new. Many indigenous communities in the United States have long held places of high esteem for those who can move more fluidly between roles. Being able to walk between the worlds of gender also holds spiritual significance and strength. Creating a binary system for gender has always been about power and control, and this is a tool utilized to uphold white supremacy, the patriarchy, and further colonial domination. Religion, namely Christianity and Catholicism, were wielded as swords, not of justice but of genocide and apartheid. In order to understand the ways in which gender is a social construct, let’s take a deep dive into US colonization to lead us to this present moment in time. The past is still present in many ways. Decolonizing and indigenizing views on gender can be sources of healing and empowerment.
Indigenous Perspectives
Native Americans and Alaskan Natives
The Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UN Forum) (2010) explains that, prior to colonization, indigenous women, men, and intersex individuals held equitable social statuses and were stewards of the land and resources in partnership with each other. The UN Forum (2010) discusses how many indigenous communities thrived off of the concept of generalized reciprocity in which repayment was not expected and rather a sense of generosity and the continual sharing of resources was expected instead. Thus, the concept of property and ownership rights were not present to reinforce gender segregation or differences. Many indigenous communities also relied on symbiotic complementarily which is a means of producing resources in a way that recognizes the need for differentiation in the labor force without one type of role dominating the other or taking on more social importance than another (UN Forum, 2010).
Two-spirit and gender-expansive perspectives have also been documented within many traditional tribal societies. According to Indian Health Service (n.d.), Native American and Alaskan Native tribes, in general, had a more gender-expansive view with many tribes denoting a third or even fourth gender category in which individuals were respected and valued as they took on activities for both women and men and even had specialized roles as spiritual guides, healers, shamans, artists, and more. Some two-spirit individuals would take on a traditional male or female style of dress depending on how they identified while others developed their own ways of self-expression (Indian Health Service, n.d.).
More than 500 indigenous cultures have survived cultural genocide in the United States (Indian Health Service, n.d.) with some preferring the use of specific terms within their language rather than the use of the recently developed term of two-spirit. Two-spirit is a term in English or referred to as a “pan-Indian” word created in the 1990s by an international gathering of indigenous tribes to replace the colonizer word “berdache” which has a harmful connotation and is related to sex acts rather than gender (Matthews-Hartwell, 2014). Many tribes prefer to use the terms in their language rather than using the term two-spirit. Here are some examples of tribal terms (Matthews-Hartwell, 2014):
• Navajo: Nádleehí and Dilbaa’
• Lakota: Winkte
• Zuni: Lhamana
• Osage: Mixu’ga
• Ojibwa: Agokwa and Ogichidaakwe
Native American and Alaskan Native cultures are not monolithic and contain many nuances and differences in practices as well. Thus, it is important to not generalize the concept of two-spirit to all tribal communities by understanding the diverse cultural practices and customs of individual tribes as well as individual people who are tribal members.
Further firsthand accounts by tribal members:
Native Hawaiian Perspective
Māhū is a Native Hawaiian third gender that indicates someone who has qualities of both kāne (man) and wahine (woman) (University of Hawai’i, Manoa, 2021). Māhūkāne is another variation of the term māhū which means a wahine who lives his life as a kāne, and māhūwahine which means a kāne who lives her life as a wahine (University of Hawai’i, Manoa, 2021). These terms are not exactly comparable to terms such as transgender or nonbinary because they are specific within Native Hawaiian culture, and individuals with these identities held significant spiritual and cultural importance within pre-colonial life. These identities were nearly erased through colonization and religious demonization but have begun to regain a place of prominence and respect as kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiians) are seeking to reconnect with traditional cultural practices and heal their communities.
The concept of ho’okipa, translated roughly to hospitality, was an important part of traditional Hawaiian culture that was exploited by sailors, missionaries, and businessmen, and continues to be used as justification for overtourism today (Sustainable Tourism Study Native Hawaiian Advisory Group, 2003, p. I-2). “The patriarchal sexualization of islands and their peoples provides justification for continued colonial protection” in the form of economic and governmental control by those who are not kānaka maoli (Na’puti & Rohrer, 2017, p. 543). The Hawaiian islands and people remain exotified today through tourism which reduces women specifically to sexualized, beautiful objects to be consumed by outside visitors (Na’puti & Rohrer, 2017). Over-tourism taxes the people and the land, leading to further marginalization of kānaka maoli (Sustainable Tourism Study Native Hawaiian Advisory Group, 2003, p. I-1).
Videos from the Kumu Hina Project which seek to increase awareness of pre-colonial Native Hawaiian culture and recenter individuals who are māhū as vital to the community:
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One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=58#oembed-3
Influence of Colonization on Indigenous Peoples
Cultural genocide was inflicted upon Native communities through the death of tribal members as a result of violence and disease (Indian Health Service, n.d.). Native children were placed in boarding schools controlled by white settlers, missionaries, and governmental agencies, which resulted in the loss of Native cultural traditions and perspectives regarding gender (Indian Health Service, n.d.). The UN Forum (2010) explains how colonization imposed gender segregation and unequal power by dictating that men would control resources and thereby reduced the social status of tribal women which worked to deprive them of access to resources and land rights that they previously held equally. This also fractured the stability of communities and worked to erase indigenous traditions to further weaken the interconnectivity of tribal members (UN Forum, 2010). Two-spirit identities were targeted with particular violence and malice, which has resulted in the erasure of many gender-variant traditions that descendants of tribal communities are still trying to uncover, retrace and decolonize today (Indian Health Service, n.d.).
Spillett (2021) explains that the forceful internment of Native peoples by colonizers who imposed a gender binary and heteronormative relationship norms was leveled as a specific means to dislocate people from their tribal lands and take control over tribal resources. Gendered physical and sexual violence is a particular tool repeatedly used during colonization to target indigenous women and individuals with gender-expansive identities to tear apart their social support networks, sense of self, and cultural power in order to gain control (Spillett, 2021). This demoralization process is at the heart of taking over the land (Spillett, 2021). Puritanical or Catholic ideas around what constituted sin, impropriety, impurity, and sickness were used to further glorify and support the subjugation of traditional indigenous cultures and to impose religious perspectives. Manifest Destiny, the idea that it was God’s will for man to rule the Earth and dominate nature, connected colonization with furthering the patriarchy and male settler rule over Native communities who they othered and viewed as part of nature (Spillett, 2021).
Foundations of Gendered Violence Lie within White Supremacy
African people engaged in diverse relational and social practices prior to being stolen from their homeland and brought to the Americas (Amadiume, 2001). Some communities held more patriarchal social stratification while a majority were more matriarchal with the women being highly respected and looked to as leaders of their family units and communities (Amadiume, 2001). European analyses of African culture utilized an ethnocentric perspective that prescribed patriarchy as a means of salvation when in reality it sought to destroy the social relations and strength found within family units (Amadiume, 2001). The slavery of African people in the United States furthered the impact of colonization and displaced people from their homelands, families, and cultural traditions. Families were separated and violence was commonplace in order to maintain systems of power that favored white settlers as masters over Black people.
African men were often displaced and separated from their families with mothers and children remaining together until the children reached a certain age to be sold for their labor as well. Women often faced additional sexual violence and their reproductive freedoms were taken away from them as well as their ability to be in romantic relationships without the say of their masters. Castration was a means of punishment for some enslaved men and a preoccupation with Black male masculinity and sexuality was viewed from behind the lens of impurity and criminality (Mack & McCann, 2018). Black women were viewed as overly sexual in order to blame them for the sexual violence that was inflicted upon them (Mack & McCann, 2018).
As slavery was outlawed and slaves were freed, the Ku Klux Klan still terrorized Black people and sought to criminalize male bodies and further disenfranchise Black women and separate family units from one another (Mack & McCann, 2018). Labeling Black men as hypersexual and sexual aggressors allowed white men to justify their violence as a means of protecting white women (Mach & McCann, 2018). Thus, gendered violence and the intersection of race and gender shaped the experiences of Black people and still do to this day as Black men face being labeled criminals and sexual deviants facing harsher prison sentences while Black women are labeled as hypersexual with their sexuality needing to be limited and controlled within the modern-day white supremacist, patriarchal and colonial society (Mack & McCann, 2018). Black transgender women face violence and discrimination at even higher rates than Black cisgender women; thus, intersectionality is key to understanding these interlocking systems impacting the lives of individuals.
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Roles of Systems: Two Examples
Boarding Schools (Education System)
The boarding school system in the United States was first developed to assimilate and endoctriante Native American children into Christian, white supremacist, and patriarchal systems and to rid them of their culture. A binary system of gender was imposed and two-spirit cultural practices and beliefs were attempted to be destroyed. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant; thus, terrorism as a tool of colonization was inflicted upon Indigenous children and families within these schools.
Police Departments and the Origins of “Policing” (Legal System)
Modern police departments in many Southern states started out as “slave patrols.” For a more detailed look at the history of policing in the United States, review the information provided by Potter (2013). Race-based violence was sanctioned by the government in Southern states in order to maintain a racial and economic caste system with white people clinging to power through the use of violence and targeted attempts to destroy communities, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Anti-masquerading laws, prohibitions and ordinances were passed in the 1800s with some remaining on the books even until recently in some states, such as New York until 2011 (PBS, 2015). In order to attract more middle class white residents to frontier towns, police would use these legal measures to target individuals labeled as cross-dressers (Tagawa, 2015). “In Columbus, Ohio, where one of the earliest ordinances was instituted, an 1848 law forbade a person from appearing in public ‘in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.’ In the decades that followed, more than 40 U.S. cities created similar laws limiting the clothing people were allowed to wear in public” (PBS, 2015, para. 5). Up until 1974 in San Francisco, the city’s anti-masquerading law was used to target men who dressed as women (Tagawa, 2015). The police would also enforce the measures inconsistently, specifically targeting communities deemed more problematic for the city or to use the legal cover to harass specific nonbinary and transgender communities (Tagawa, 2015). In thinking about intersectionality, BIPOC individuals who are also gender nonconforming, transgender and gender expansive receive additional scrunity from police at the intersection of race and gender.
Conformity as a Trauma Response to Systemic Isms
Conformity happens all the time and is used by people subconsciously in order to better fit in with the crowd. When we are cast out, this leads to further marginalization and stigmatization. Humans are social creatures, so we will sometimes sacrifice parts of ourselves in order to more easily fit in with others, especially when the harms to not conform are so great. Terrorism and forced assimilation have long been tactics used by colonizers, and this remains a tool used today by the powerful in various ways. Trauma is tied to nonconformity (religion, race, gender, etc.) within a Christian, white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalistic society, and people may begin to have prejudices that go against their own cultural and ancestral knowledge in order to conform to these systems. Therefore, these traumatic experiences around identities based on social constructs and caste systems work to speed up assimilation and conformity by fragmenting the spiritual, emotional, and physical parts of a person in order to break them apart from their sense of community and interconnection with others.
Intersectionality and Resiliency
In a white supremacist society, being BIPOC (Black, Biracial, Indigenous, or a Person of Color) alone as an identity causes the individual to face potentially daily microaggressions. In a white supremacist and patriarchal society, being BIPOC and a cisgender female adds another layer to the systemic and social barriers faced. Adding on now again, being BIPOC and a transgender female will lead to even more specfic social struggles that are incurred by not conforming. Therefore, nonconforming should be viewed as a testament to the human spirit and the desire of people to remain whole and not ripped apart from their identities. In the face of trauma and terror, communities continue to rise. Solidarity and being co-conspirators in the liberation of each other leads to community wellbeing and healing.
Decolonization and Intergenerational Healing
Many people of Indigenous and African ancestry are seeking to reconnect and reclaim identities and cultural perspectives that were attempted to be erased through colonization and land displacement. Oral traditions and the sharing of knowledge amongst families and friends passed down for generations have allowed for the current decolonization of gender to take place as a means of healing. Looking at how BIPOC identities intersect with gender specifically allows for an intersectional perspective to reconstruct a new path forward. Additionally, with social movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the Indigenous Peoples Movement to name a few, social discourse is changing around gender and moving more toward women’s rights to live without sexual harassment and assault as well as looking at gender as existing within a spectrum of possibilities rather than within binary systems. Social structures are shifting as activists and scholars are identifying the negative impacts of patriarchal, binary, and heteronormative perspectives.
Indigenous communities starting in Canada and now in the United States are urging both governments to conduct reports and issue formal statements about the abuse in general at the boarding schools and the ways in which this abuse caused the death of Indigenous children and adults. As of May 8th, 2022, the U.S. Department of the Interior released an investigative report and next steps related to the boarding schools. The following is taken directly from the report:
The investigation found that from 1819 to 1969, the federal Indian boarding school
system consisted of 408 federal schools across 37 states or then territories, including 21
schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii. The investigation identified marked or
unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 different schools across the school system.
As the investigation continues, the Department expects the number of identified burial
sites to increase.
“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies—including the
intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication
inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old—are heartbreaking and
undeniable,” said Secretary Haaland. “We continue to see the evidence of this attempt
to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face. It is my
priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding
school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous
peoples can continue to grow and heal.”
Intergenerational Healing: Research Snapshots from Within Communities
Reclaiming Our Voices
In the interviews conducted with two-spirit Native individuals, Frazer and Pruden (2010) found that many expressed the desire for cultural programming that affirmed both their Native and two-spirit identities. Substance use was of great concern regarding engaging in queer nightlife that could affirm their gender expansive identity because many either had personal or familial struggles with addiction while cultural programming and events often excluded two-spirit self-expression–they did not feel like they could be their full selves in either environment. A majority of the participants expressed experiencing bullying and harassment from other tribal members and explained that informing people of pre-colonial practices around gender would be helpful in reducing the stigma and shame (Frazer & Pruden, 2010). Mental health and substance use programs that affirmed both their Native culture and two-spirit identities were identified as lacking and needed.
Emotional Emancipation Circles
Intergenerational trauma, in which harms of the past are passed down from generation to generation in the form of trauma stories, reactivity to environmental stressors, and the compounding impacts of minority stress leading to trauma symptoms in caregivers that is modeled for younger individuals within a family unit, has long been the focus of researchers (Fishbane, 2019). However, recently, a shift toward exploring the healing process has begun in order to center and honor the work that is being done within families and communities to create a new path forward (Fishbane, 2019). The injustices, genocide, and cultural erasure of colonization are called out and addressed while new systems and interconnections are created anew.
Barlow (2018) explores how her use of Emotional Emancipation Circles (EECs) is designed to be a strengths-based and culturally responsive approach to healing. Barlow (2018) explains how she used (EECs) with college students:
“This approach does not represent neoliberal frameworks of a thriving individual. Instead, it harmonizes and coordinates the well-being of people of African descent who are living with the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy in the US. With learning modules, called keys, dedicated to African culture, history and movements, and imperatives and ethics, this social support group offered my students an opportunity to unpack personal stories and to begin to address the root issues of healing Black communities.
For example, students shared their struggles with colorism, the social rules of dating, navigating social media, thriving in the classroom, and managing challenges at home while in college. (p. 900)
By sharing these stories and supporting each other, they were able to develop social support as a protective factor (Barlow, 2018). Barlow (2018) also discusses how increasing self-care in the form of “meditation, breathing exercises, and physical activity such as walking, dancing, running, and gardening” are beneficial to physical and mental health (p. 901). Engaging in self-care and developing social support systems were encouraged. Barlow (2018) also encouraged her students to share their experiences of intergenerational trauma and healing through social media. By sharing their experiences, further connections were made and students developed skills on how to mobilize their communities and be leaders promoting social change within organizations (Barlow, 2018). Thus, individuals engaging in their own healing are able to model this for others, creating community-based healing that expands onward.
Multicultural Perspectives on Gender
Make sure to sign out of your PCC email before reviewing this Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures from PBS. Scroll down to where it says, “Explore the Map,” to click on the interactive dots across the world map to read about specific places. As you review this map, keep in mind that direct translations are often not possible and the exact meaning may not be as it is loosely written. An ethnorelativistic perspective aids the further understanding of gender.
Role of colonization internationally:
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=58#oembed-5
The Psychology of Gender
Introduction
Though typically considered synonyms by many, sex and gender have distinct meanings that become important when collecting data and engaging in research. First, sex refers to the biological aspects of a person due to their anatomy. This includes the individual’s hormones, chromosomes, body parts such as the sexual organs, and how they all interact. When we say sex, we are generally describing whether the person is male or female and this is assigned at birth.
In contrast, gender is socially constructed (presumed after a sex is assigned) and leads to labels such as masculinity or femininity and their related behaviors. People may declare themselves to be a man or woman, as having no gender, or falling on a continuum somewhere between man and woman. How so? According to genderspectrum.org, gender results from the complex interrelationship of three dimensions – body, identity, and social.
First, body, concerns our physical body, how we experience it, how society genders bodies, and the way in which others interact with us based on our body. The website states, “Bodies themselves are also gendered in the context of cultural expectations. Masculinity and femininity are equated with certain physical attributes, labeling us as more or less a man/woman based on the degree to which those attributes are present. This gendering of our bodies affects how we feel about ourselves and how others perceive and interact with us.”
Next is gender identity or our internal perception and expression of who we are as a person. It includes naming our gender, though this gender category may not match the sex we are assigned at birth. Gender identities can take on several forms from the traditional binary man-woman, to non-binary such as genderqueer or genderfluid, and ungendered or agender (i.e. genderless). Though gaining an understanding of what gender we are occurs by age four, naming it is complex and can evolve over time. As genderspectrum.org says, “Because we are provided with limited language for gender, it may take a person quite some time to discover, or create, the language that best communicates their internal experience. Likewise, as language evolves, a person’s name for their gender may also evolve. This does not mean their gender has changed, but rather that the words for it are shifting.”
Finally, we have a social gender or the manner in which we present our gender in the world, but also how other people, society, and culture affect our concept of gender. In terms of the former, we communicate our gender through our clothes, hairstyles, and behavior called gender expression. In terms of the latter, children are socialized as to what gender means from the day they are born and through toys, colors, and clothes. Who does this socialization? Anyone outside the child can to include parents, grandparents, siblings, teachers, the media, religious figures, friends, and the community. Generally, the binary male-female view of gender is communicated for which there are specific gender expectations and roles. According to genderspectrum.org, “Kids who don’t express themselves along binary gender lines are often rendered invisible or steered into a more binary gender presentation. Pressures to conform at home, mistreatment by peers in school, and condemnation by the broader society are just some of the struggles facing a child whose expression does not fall in line with the binary gender system.” The good news is that gender norms do change over time such as our culture’s acceptance of men wearing earrings and women getting tattoos.
Here is a resource that is used within counseling and group therapy sessions to help people explore their experiences and identities. People are meant to mark themselves on every single line within each category. The first three categories relate to what we have been discussing so far while the last two relate to sexual orientation which we will discuss next week. Check out the developer’s website to see an explanation of relevant terms and how to fill out the Gender Unicorn worksheet.
Gender Congruence
When we feel a sense of harmony in our gender, we are said to have gender congruence. It takes the form of naming our gender such that it matches our internal sense of who we are, expressing ourselves through our clothing and activities, and being seen consistently by other people as we see ourselves. Congruence does not happen overnight but occurs throughout life as we explore, grow, and gain insight into ourselves. It is a simple process for some and complex for others, though all of us have a fundamental need to obtain gender congruence.
When a person moves from the traditional binary view of gender to transgender, agender, or non-binary, they are said to “transition” and find congruence in their gender. Genderspectrum.org adds, “What people see as a “Transition” is actually an alignment in one or more dimensions of the individual’s gender as they seek congruence across those dimensions. A transition is taking place, but it is often other people (parents and other family members, support professionals, employers, etc.) who are transitioning in how they see the individual’s gender, and not the person themselves. For the person, these changes are often less of a transition and more of an evolution.” Harmony is sought in various ways to include:
• Social – Changing one’s clothes, hairstyle, and name and/or pronouns
• Hormonal – Using hormone blockers or hormone therapy to bring about physical, mental, and/or emotional alignment
• Surgical – When gender-related physical traits are added, removed, or modified
• Legal – Changing one’s birth certificate or driver’s license
The website states that the transition experience is often a significant event in the person’s life. “A public declaration of some kind where an individual communicates to others that aspects of themselves are different than others have assumed, and that they are now living consistently with who they know themselves to be, can be an empowering and liberating experience (and moving to those who get to share that moment with them).”
Gender and Sexual Orientation
As gender was shown to be different from sex, so too we must distinguish it from sexual orientation which concerns who we are physically, emotionally, and/or romantically attracted to. Hence, sexual orientation is interpersonal while gender is personal. We would be mistaken to state that a boy who plays princess is gay or that a girl who wears boy’s clothing and has short hair is necessarily lesbian. The root of such errors comes from our confusing gender and sexual orientation. The way someone dresses or acts concerns gender expression and we cannot know what their sexual orientation is from these behaviors.
The Language of Gender
• Agender – When someone does not identify with a gender
• Cisgender – When a person’s gender identity matches their assigned sex at birth
• FtM – When a person is assigned a female sex at birth but whose gender identity is boy/man
• Gender dysphoria – When a person is unhappy or dissatisfied with their gender and can occur in relation to any dimension of gender. The person may experience mild discomfort to unbearable distress. This is classified as a mental health diagnosis and this diagnosis must be given to an individual in most states if they wish to receive hormone and other gender-affirming treatments. Not all transgender or nonbinary people may experience gender dysphoria and some cisgender people may experience this.
• Genderfluid – When a person’s gender changes over time; they view gender as dynamic and changing
• Gender role – All the activities, functions, and behaviors that are expected of males and females in a gender binary society
• Genderqueer – Someone who may not identify with conventional gender identities, roles, expectations, or expressions.
• MtF – When a person is assigned a male sex at birth but whose gender identity is girl/woman
• Non–binary – When a gender identity is not exclusively masculine or feminine
• Transgender – An umbrella term that denotes when a person’s gender identity differs from their assigned sex
To learn more about gender, we encourage you to explore the https://www.genderspectrum.org/ website.
The World Health Organization also identifies two more key concepts in relation to gender. Gender equality is “the absence of discrimination on the basis of a person’s sex in opportunities, the allocation of resources and benefits, or access to services” while gender equity refers to “the fairness and justice in the distribution of benefits and responsibilities between women and men.” Keep in mind, this language still caters to the gender binary and leaves out transgender and gender-expansive identities.
Gender Through a Developmental Psychology Lens
Psychoanalytical Theories
We have already previously discussed Freud, so let’s continue forward with Karen Horney’s Neo-Freudian theory.
Horney developed a Neo-Freudian theory of personality that recognized some points of Freud’s theory as acceptable, but also criticized his theory as being overly bias toward the male. There is truth in this if you think about Freud’s theory. Ultimately, to really develop fully, one must have a penis – according to Freud’s theory. A female can never “fully” resolve penis envy, and thus, she is never fully able to resolve the conflict. As such, according to Freud’s theory, if taken literally, a female can never fully resolve the core conflict of the Phallic Stage and will always have some fixation and thus, some maladaptive development. Horney disputed this (Harris, 2016). In fact, she went as far as to counter Freud’s penis envy with womb envy (a man envying a woman’s ability to have children). She theorized that men looked to compensate for their lack of ability to carry a child by succeeding in other areas of life (Psychodynamic and neo-Freudian theories, n.d.)
The center of Horney’s theory is that individuals need a safe and nurturing environment. If they are provided such, they will develop appropriately. However, if they are not, and experience an unsafe environment, or lack of love and caring, they will experience maladaptive development which will result in anxiety (Harris, 2016). An environment that is unsafe and results in abuse, neglect, stressful family dynamics, etc. is termed by Horney as basic evil. As mentioned, these types of experiences (basic evil) lead to maladaptive development which was theorized to occur because the individual began to believe that, if their parent did not love them then no one could love them. The pain that was produced from basic evil then led to basic hostility. Basic hostility was defined as the individual’s anger at their parents while experiencing high frustration that they must still rely on them and were dependent on them (Harris, 2016).
This basic evil and basic hostility ultimately led to anxiety. Anxiety resulted in an individual developing interpersonal strategies of defense (ways a person relates to others). These strategies are considered to fall in three categories (informed by Harris, 2016):
Interpersonal Strategies
Interpersonal Strategy Key Direction Actions the Person Takes How This Presents in Their Personalities
Compliant Solution Toward The individual moves toward people. They seek out another person’s attention. This is the people pleaser and dependent person. The person that avoids failure and always takes the “safe” option.
Detachment Solution Away These individuals move away from others and attempt to protect themselves by eluding connection and contact with others. These individuals want independence and struggle with commitment. They often try to hide flaws
Expansive Solution Against These individuals move against others. They seek interaction with others, not to connect with them, rather to gain something from them. They seek power and admiration from others, as well as being seen as highly attention-seeking. This category is further split into three types of individuals:
1. The Narcissist.
2. The Perfectionist.
3. The Arrogant-Vindictive person.
Although Horney disputed much of Freud’s male biased theories, she recognized that females are born into a society dominated by males. As such, she recognized that females may be limited due to this, which then leads to developing a masculinity complex. This is the feeling of inferiority due to one’s sex. She noted that one’s family can strongly influence one’s development (or lack thereof) of this complex. She described that if a female was disappointed by males in her family (such as their father or brother, etc.), or if they were overly threatened by females in their family (especially their mothers), they may actually develop contempt for their own gender. She also indicated that if females perceived that they had lost the love of their father to another woman (often to the mother) then the individual may become more insecure. This insecurity then would lead to either (1) withdrawal from competing or (2) becoming more competitive (Harris, 2016). The need for the male attention was referred to as the overvaluation of love (Harris, 2016).
Gender Socialization Theory
It’s clear that even very early theories of gender development recognized the importance of environmental or familial influence, at least to some degree. As theories have expanded, it has become clearer that socialization of gender occurs. However, each theory has a slightly different perspective on how that may occur. We will discuss a few of those in brief detail, but will focus more on major concepts and generally accepted processes.
Before we get started, I want you to ask yourself a few questions – When do we begin to recognize and label ourselves as boy or girl, and why? Do you think it happens very young? Is it the same across countries? Let’s answer some of those questions.
Theories that suggest that gender identity development is universal across countries and cultures (e.g., Eastern versus Western cultures, etc.) have been scrutinized. Critics suggest that, although biology may play some role in gender identity development, the environmental and social factors are perhaps more powerful in most developmental areas, and gender identity development is no different. It is the same “nature versus nurture” debate that falls on the common response of both nature and nurture playing important roles and to ignore one is a misunderstanding of the developmental process (Magnusson & Marecek, 2012). In this section, we are going to focus on the social, environmental, and cultural aspects of gender identity development
Early Life
Infants do not prefer gendered toys (Bussey, 2014). However, by age 2, they show preferences. (Servin, Bhlin, & Berlin, 1999). Did you know that infants can differentiate between male and female faces and voices in their first year of life (typically between 6-12 months of age; Fagan, 1976; Miller, 1983)? Not only that, they can pair male and female voices with male and female faces (known as intermodal gender knowledge; Poulin-Dubois, Serbin, Kenyon, & Derbyshire, 1994). Think about that for a moment – infants are recognizing and matching gender before they can ever talk! Further, 18-month old babies associated bears, hammers, and trees with males. By age 2, children use words like “boy” and “girl” correctly (Leinbach & Fagot, 1986) and can accurately point to a male or female when hearing a gender label given. It appears that children first learn to label others’ gender, then their own. The next step is learning that there are shared qualities and behaviors for each gender (Bussey, 2014).
By a child’s second year of life, children begin to display knowledge of gender stereotypes. Research has found this to be true in preverbal children (Fagot, 1974), which is really incredible, if you think about it. After an infant has been shown a gendered item (doll versus a truck) they will then stare at a photograph of the “matching gender” longer. So, if shown a doll, they will then look at a photograph of a girl, rather than a boy, for longer (when shown photographs of both a boy and girl side by side). This is specifically true for girls as young as 18-24 months; however, boys do not show this quite as early (Serbin,Poulin-Dubois, Colburne, Sen, & Eichstedt, 2001). Although interpretations and adherence to gender stereotypes is very rigid, initially, as children get older, they learn more about stereotypes and that gender stereotypes are flexible and varied. We actually notice a curved pattern in how rigid children are to stereotyped gender behaviors and expectations (Bussey, 2014). Initially, children are very rigid in stereotypes and stereotyped play. As they reach middle childhood, they become more flexible. However, in adolescents, they become more rigid again. And, generally, boys are more rigid and girls are more flexible with gender stereotypes, comparatively (Blakemore et al., 2009).
There are many factors that may lead to the patterns we see in gender socialization. Let’s look at a few of those factors and influencers.
Parents
Parents begin to socialize children to gender long before they can label their own. Think about the first moment someone says they are pregnant. One of the first questions is “How far along are you?” and then “Are you going to find out the sex of the baby?” We begin to socialize children to gender before they are even born! We pick out boy and girl names, we choose particular colors for nurseries, types of clothing, and decor, all based on a child’s gender, often before they are ever born (Bussey, 2014). The infant is born into a gendered world! We don’t really give infants a chance to develop their own preferences – parents and the caregivers in their life do that for them, immediately. Parents even respond to a child differently, based on their gender. For example, in a study in which adults observed an infant that was crying, adults described the infant to be scared or afraid when they were told the infant was a girl. However, they described the baby as angry or irritable when told the infant was a boy. Moreover, parents tend to reinforce independence in boys, but dependence in girls. They also overestimate their sons’ abilities and underestimate their daughters’ abilities. Research has also revealed that prosocial behaviors are encouraged more in girls, than boys (Garcia & Guzman, 2017).
Parents label gender even when not required. When observing a parent reading a book to their child, Gelman, Taylor, & Nguyen (2004) noted that parents used generic expressions that generalized one outcome/trait to all individuals of a gender, during the story. For example, “Most girls don’t like trucks.” Essentially, parents provided extra commentary in the story, and that commentary tended to include vast generalizations about gender. Initially, mothers engaged in this behavior more than the children did; however, as children aged, children began displaying this behavior more than their mothers did. Essentially, mothers modeled this behavior, and children later began to enact the same behavior. Further, as children got older, mothers then affirmed children’s gender generalization statements when made.
Boys are more gender-typed and fathers place more focus on this (Bvunzawabaya, 2017). As children develop, parents tend to also continue gender-norm expectations. For example, boys are encouraged to play outside (cars, sports, balls) and build (Legos, blocks), etc. and girls are encouraged to play in ways that develop housekeeping skills (dolls, kitchen sets; Bussey, 2014). What parents talk to their children about is different based on gender as well. For example, they may talk to daughters more about emotions and have more empathic conversations, whereas they may have more knowledge and science-based conversations with boys (Bussey, 2014).
Parental expectations can have significant impacts on a child’s own beliefs and outcomes including psychological adjustment, educational achievement, and financial success (Bvunzawabaya, 2017). When parents approach more gender-equal or neutral interactions, research shows positive outcomes (Bussey, 2014). For example, girls did better academically if their parents took this approach versus very gender-traditional families.
Peers
Peers are strong influences regarding gender and how children play. As children get older, peers become increasingly influential. In early childhood, peers are pretty direct about guiding gender-typical behaviors. As children get older, their corrective feedback becomes subtler. So how do peers socialize gender? Well, non-conforming gender behavior (e.g., boys playing with dolls, girls playing with trucks) is often ridiculed by peers and children may even be actively excluded. This then influences the child to conform more to gender-traditional expectations (e.g., boy stops playing with a doll and picks up the truck).
We begin to see boys and girls segregate in their play, based on gender, in very early years. Children tend to play in sex-segregated peer groups. We notice that girls prefer to play in pairs while boys prefer larger group play. Boys also tend to use more threats and physical force whereas girls do not prefer this type of play. Thus, there are natural reasons to not intertwine and to instead segregate (Bussey, 2014). The more a child plays with same-gender peers, the more their behavior becomes gender-stereotyped. By age 3, peers will reinforce one another for engaging in what is considered to be gender-typed or gender-expected play. Likewise, they will criticize, and perhaps even reject a peer, when a peer engages in play that is inconsistent with gender expectations. Moreover, boys tend to be very unforgiving and intolerant of nonconforming gender play (Fagot, 1984).
Media and Advertising
Media includes movies, television, cartoons, commercials, and print media (e.g., newspapers, magazines). In general, media tends to portray males as more direct, assertive, muscular, in authority roles, and employed, whereas women tend to be portrayed as dependent, emotional, low in status, in the home rather than employed, and their appearance is often a focus. Even Disney movies tend to portray stereotyped roles for gender, often having a female in distress that needs to be saved by a male hero; although Disney has made some attempts to show women as more independent and assertive in more characters. We have seen a slight shift in this in many media forms, although it is still very prevalent, that began to occur in the mid to late 1980s and 1990s (Stever, 2017; Torino, 2017). This is important, because we know that the more children watch TV, the more gender stereotypical beliefs they have (Durkin & Nugent, 1998; Kimball 1986).
Moreover, when considering print media, we know that there tends to be a focus on appearance, body image, and relationships for teenage girls, whereas print media tends to focus on occupations and hobbies for boys. Even video games have gender stereotyped focuses. Females in video games tend to be sexualized and males are portrayed as aggressive (Stever, 2017; Torino, 2017).
School Influences
Research tends to indicate that teachers place a heavier focus, in general, on males – this means they not only get more praise, they also receive more correction and criticism (Simpson & Erickson, 1983). Teachers also tend to praise boys and girls for different behaviors. For example, boys are praised more for their educational successes (e.g., grades, skill acquisition) whereas girls are acknowledged for more domesticate-related qualities such as having a tidy work area (Eccles, 1987). Overall, teachers place less emphasis on girls’ academic accomplishments and focus more on their cooperation, cleanliness, obedience, and quiet/passive play. Boys, however, are encouraged to be more active, and there is certainly more of a focus on academic achievements (Torino, 2017).
The focus teachers and educators have on different qualities may have a lasting impact on children. For example, in adolescence, boys tend to be more career focused whereas girls are focused on relationships (again, this aligns with the emphasis we see placed by educators on children based on their gender). Girls may also be oriented toward relationships and their appearance rather than careers and academic goals, if they are very closely identifying with traditional gender roles. They are more likely to avoid STEM-focused classes, whereas boys seek out STEM classes (more frequently than girls). This may then impact major choices if girls go to college, as they may not have experiences in STEM to foster STEM related majors (Torino, 2017). As such, the focus educators place on children can have lasting impacts. Although we are focusing on the negative, think about what could happen if we saw a shift in that focus!
Okay, so we talked above about how children are socialized to gender – but how? Well there are a few areas we should discuss. We will cover social theories, cognitive theories, social cognitive theories, and biological theories.
Social Theories
Social Learning Theory
Do you remember Albert Bandura from Introduction to Psychology? He’s the guy that had children watch others act aggressively toward a doll (the BoBo doll), and then observed children’s behaviors with the same doll. Children that watched aggressive acts then engaged in aggression with the doll. Essentially, a behavior was modeled, and then they displayed the behavior. Here is a video with Albert Bandura and footage from his experiment:
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=58#oembed-6
Let’s think about this in a current-life example. You walk into a gym for the first time. It is full of equipment you aren’t sure how to use. What do you do if you want to know how to use it (let’s assume the nice little instructions with pictures are not posted on the equipment)? The most likely thing, if there is no trainer/employee around to ask, is to watch what someone does on the machine. You watch what how they set it up, what they do, etc. You then go to the equipment and do the same exact thing! This is modeling. You modeled the behavior the person ahead of you did. The same thing can happen with gender – modeling applies to gender socialization.
We receive much of our information about gender from models in our environment (think about all the factors we just learned about – parents, media, school, peers). If a little girl is playing with a truck and looks over and sees three girls playing with dolls, she may put the truck down and play with the dolls. If a boy sees his dad always doing lawn work, he may too try to mimic this, in the immediacy. Here is the interesting part: modeling does just stop after the immediate moment is over. The more we see it, the more it becomes a part of our socialization. We begin to learn rules of how we are to act and what behavior is accepted and desired by others, what is not, etc. Then we engage in those behaviors. We then become models for others as well! Now, some theories question modeling; although, further research has shown that modeling appears to be imperative in development, but the level of specificity or rigidity to gender norms of the behavior being modeled is also important (Perry & Bussey, 1979). Other’s incorporate modeling into their theory with some caveats. Kohlberg is one of those theorists, and we will learn about later.
Social Cognitive Theory
Another theory combines the theory of social learning with cognitive theories (we will discuss cognitive theories below). While modeling in social learning explains some things, it does not explain everything. This is because we don’t just model behavior, we also monitor how others react to our behaviors. For example, if a little girl is playing with a truck her peers laugh at her, that is feedback that her behavior is not gender-normative and she then may change the behavior she engages in. We also get direct instruction on how to behave as well. Again, girls don’t sit with their legs open, boys don’t play with dolls, girls don’t get muddy and dirty, boys don’t cry – you get the point. When peers or adults directly instruct another on what a girl or boy is or is not to do, although not modeling, is a heavily influential socializing factor. To explain this, social cognitive theory posits that one has enactive experiences (this is essentially when a person receives reactions to gendered behavior), direct instruction (this is when someone is taught knowledge of expected gendered behavior), and modeling (this is when others show someone gendered behavior and expectations). This theory posits that these social influences impact children’s development of gender understanding and identity (Bussey, 2014). Social cognitive theories of gender development explain and theorize that development is dually influenced by (1) biology and (2) the environment. Moreover, the theory suggests that these things impact and interact with various factors (Bussey & Bandura, 2005). This theory also accounts for the entire lifespan when considering development, which is drastically different than earlier theories, such as psychodynamic theories.
Cognitive Theories
Kohlberg’s Cognitive Developmental Theory
Lawrence Kohlberg theorized the first cognitive developmental theory. He theorized that children actively seek out information about their environment. This is important because it places children as an active agent in their socialization. According to cognitive developmental theory, a major component of gender socialization occurs by children recognizing that gender is constant and does not change which is referred to this as “gender constancy”. Kohlberg indicated that children choose various behaviors that align with their gender and match cultural stereotypes and expectations. Gender constancy includes multiple parts. One must have an ability to label their own identity which is known as gender identity. Moreover, an individual must recognize that gender remains constant over time which is gender stability and across settings which is gender consistency. Gender identity appears to be established by around age three and gender constancy appears to be established somewhere between the ages of five and seven. Although Kohlberg’s theory captures important aspects, it fails to recognize things such as how gender identity regulates gender conduct and how much one adheres to gender roles through their life (Bussey, 2014).
Although Kohlberg indicated that modeling was important and relevant, he posited that it was only relevant once gender constancy is achieved. He theorized that constancy happens first, which then allows for modeling to occur later (although the opposite is considered true in social cognitive theory). The problem with his theory is children begin to recognize gender and model gender behaviors before they have cognitive capacities for gender constancy (remember all that we learned about how infants show gender-based knowledge?!).
Gender Schema Theory
Gender schema theory, although largely a cognitive theory, does incorporate some elements of social learning as well. Schemas are essentially outlines – cognitive templates that we follow, if you will. Thus, a gender schema is an outline about genders – a template to follow regarding gender. The idea is that we use schemas about gender to guide our behaviors and actions. Within this theory, it is assumed that children actively create their schemas about gender by keeping or discarding information obtained through their experiences in their environment (Dinella, 2017).
Interestingly, there are two variations of gender schema theory. Bem created one theory while Martin and Halverson created another. Sandra Bem, whose notable research was published in the 1980s, conducted her research attempting to understand the development of gender roles. She believed that all of us have gender schemas which are “a cognitive structure comprising the set of attributes (behaviors, personality, appearance) that we associate with males and females” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 33). These gender schemas are based on stereotypes and influence us to label certain behaviors as “male” or “female.” Stereotype-consistent behaviors are accepted while stereotype-inconsistent behaviors are viewed as a fluke or a rare occasion, causing us to believe the stereotypes despite many examples in our lives to disprove the stereotypes.
Overall, it is widely accepted that there are two types of schemas that are relevant in gender schema theory – superordinate schemas and own-sex schemas. Essentially, superordinate schemas guide information for gender groups whereas own-sex schemas guide information about one’s own behaviors as it relates to their own gender group (Dinella, 2017).
So why have schemas? Well, it’s a cheat sheet that makes things easier and quicker, essentially. Think about it, if you have an outline for a test that told you that the shortest answer is always the right answer, you wouldn’t even have to study. Heck, you don’t even have to ‘read’ the question options. You can simply find the choice that has the least amount of words, pick it, and you’ll ace the test (wouldn’t that be nice?!). So, gender schemas make it easier to make decisions in the moment, regarding gendered behavior. Here is an example. If a child has created a schema that says boys play with trucks, when the boy is handed a truck, he will quickly choose to play with it. However, if the truck is handed to a girl, she may quickly reject it (Dinella, 2017)
So how do children develop schemas? Well, it likely occurs in three different phases. First, children start recognizing their own gender groups and begin to build schemas. Then, a rigid phase occurs in which things are very black or white, (or, girl or boy, if you will). Things can only be one or the other, and there is very little flexibility in schemas. This occurs somewhere between ages five and seven. Lastly, a phase in which children begin to recognize that schemas are flexible and allow for a bit more of a “gray” area occurs (Dinella, 2017).
Let’s think of how schemas are used to begin to interpret one’s world. Once a child can label gender of themselves, they begin to apply schemas to themselves. So, if a schema is “Only girls cook”, then a boy may apply that to themselves and learn he cannot cook. This then guides his behavior. Martin, Eisenbud, and Rose (1995) conducted a study in which they had groups of boy toys, girl toys, and neutral toys. Children used gender schemas and gravitated to gender-normed toys. For example, boys preferred toys that an adult labeled as boy toys. If a toy was attractive (meaning a highly desired toy) but was label for girls, boys would reject the toy. They also used this reasoning to predict what other children would like. For example, if a girl did not like a block, she would indicate “Only boys like blocks” (Berk, 2004; Liben & Bigler, 2002).
Biological Theories
In regard to biological theories, there tends to be four areas of focus. Before we get into those areas, let’s remember that we are talking about gender development. That means we are not focusing on the anatomical/biological sex development of an individual, rather, we are focusing on how biological factors may impact gender development and gendered behavior. So, back to ‘there are four main areas of focus.’ The four areas of focus include (1) evolutionary theories, (2) genetic theories, (3) epigenetic theories, and (4) learning theories (don’t worry, we’ll explain how this is biology related, rather than cognitively or socially related).
Evolution Theories
Within evolution-based theories, there are three schools of thought: sex-based explanations, kinship-based explanations, and socio-cognitive explanations. Sex-based explanations explain that gendered behaviors have occurred as a way to adapt and increase the chances of reproduction. Ultimately, gender roles get divided into females focusing on rearing children and gathering food close to home, whereas males go out and hunt and protect the family. To carry out the required tasks, males needed higher androgens/testosterone to allow for higher muscle capacity as well as aggression. Similarly, females need higher levels of estrogen as well as oxytocin, which encourages socialization and bonding (Bevan, 2017). Although this may seem logical at surface level, it does not account for what we see in more egalitarian homes and cultures.
Then, there is kinship-based explanations that rationalize that very early on, we lived in groups as a means of protection and survival. As such, the groups that formed tended to be kin and shared similar DNA. Essentially, the groups with the strongest DNA that allowed for the best traits for survival, survived. Further, given that this came down to “survival of the fittest” it made sense to divvy up tasks and important behaviors. Interestingly, this was less based on sex and more on qualities of an individual, essentially using people’s strengths to the group’s advantage. This theory tends to be more supported, than sex-based theories (Bevan, 2017).
Lastly, socio-cognitive explanations explain that we have changed our environment, and that, thus, we have changed in the environment in which natural selection occurs. Essentially, when we use our cognitive abilities to create things, such as tools, we thus change our environment. We are then changing the environment that defined what behaviors/assets were necessary to survive. For example, if we can now use tools to hunt more effectively, the traditional needs of a male (as explained in sex-based theories) may be less critical in this task (Bevan, 2017).
Genetic-based Theories
We can be “genetically predisposed” to many things, mental illness, cancer, heart conditions, etc. It is theorized that we also are predisposed to gendered behavior and identification. This theory is most obvious when individuals are predisposed to a gender that does not align with biological sex, also referred to as transgender. Research has actually revealed that there is some initial evidence that gender involves somewhat of a genetic predisposition. Specifically, twin studies have shown that nonconforming gender traits, or transgender, is linked to genetic gender predispositions. More specifically, when one twin is transgender, it is more likely that the other twin is transgender as well. This phenomenon is not evidenced in fraternal twins or non-twin siblings to the same degree (Bevan, 2017).
Genetic gender predisposition theorists further reference case studies in which males with damaged genitalia undergo plastic surgery as infants to modify their genitalia to be more female aligned. These infants are then raised as girls, but often seek out transitioning back to being boys or become gender nonconforming. David Reimer is an example of one of these cases (Bevan, 2017). To learn more about this case, you can read his book, As Nature Made Him. He is given the name Joan/John in many research studies and was surgically altered by doctors to present as a female after an accident during circumcision that resulted in his castration.
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John Money, a psychologist and sexologist, was the one who encouraged David’s family to surgically alter David’s body and continued to conduct studies on the child. You can read an account of the unethical and sexual abuse that David explained he faced while participating in Money’s research. David committed suicide in 2004 after facing lifelong depression as a result of the trauma he endured.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal ideation/thoughts, there is free, confidential and 24/7 accessible assistance via 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You can dial 988 or access information at https://988lifeline.org/. You are not alone.
Epigenetics
This area of focus does not look at DNA, but rather things that may impact DNA mutations or the expression of DNA. Really, this area falls into two subcategories: prenatal hormonal exposure and prenatal toxin exposure.
Let’s quickly recap basic biology. It is thought that gender, from a biological theory stance, begins in the fetal stage. This occurs due to varying levels of exposure to testosterone. Shortly after birth, boys experience an increase in testosterone, whereas girls experience an increase in estrogen. This difference has actually been linked to variations in social, language, and visual development between sexes. Testosterone levels have been linked to sex-typed toy play and activity levels in young children. Moreover, when females are exposed to higher levels of testosterone, they are noted to engage in more male-typical play (e.g., preference for trucks over dolls, active play over quiet), rather than female-typical play compared to their counterparts (Hines et al., 2002; Klubeck, Fuentes, Kim-Prieto, 2017; Pasterski et al., 2005). Although this has been found to be true predominantly utilizing only animal research, it is a rather simplified theory. What we have learned is that, truthfully, things are pretty complicated and other hormones and chemicals are at play (Bevan, 2017).
Prenatal toxin exposure appears to be relevant when examining diethylstilbestrol (DES), specifically. DES was prescribed to pregnant women in late 1940’s through the early 1970’s. DES was designed to mimic estrogen, and it does; however, it has many negative side effects that estrogen does not. One of the negative side-effects is that it mutates DNA and alters its expression. The reason it was finally taken off the market was because females were showing higher rates of cancer. In fact, they found that this drug had cancer-related impacts out to three generations! While there was significant research done on females, less research was done on males. However, recent studies suggest that 10% of registrants (in a national study) that were exposed to DES reported identifying as transgender or transsexual. For comparison, only 1% of the general population identifies as transgender or transsexual. Thus, it is theorized that gender development in those exposed to DES, particularly biological males, were impacted (Bevan, 2017).
Conclusion and Tips for Allyship
In reading through the ways in which gender is a social construct and varies between and within cultures, we explored BIPOC perspectives and the role of colonization in the United States from an intersectional perspective. We questioned the foundation of gender itself from an ethnorelativistic lens by looking at varying social and cultural labelings of gender around the world. While exploring psychological theories, the hope is that you have gained a better understanding of yourself and others. Gender socialization and the ways we have internalized aspects of gender shape our behavior and the way we engage with others. We may take on certain gender roles while rejecting others. Gender stereotypes and biases are present and we must analyze them to promote individual and community healing. Gender is as vast and deep as the ocean with many parts still unknown. The self is unfolding over time and it is okay to not have all the answers regarding what gender means. Moving forward, review the references and documentary below to develop skills on how to be an ally to others in order to support them along their own gender journey.
Licenses and Attribution
Brown, C. S., Jewell, J. A., & Tam, M. J. (2020). Gender. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from https://nobaproject.com/modules/gender. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Washington State University. (n.d.). The psychology of gender. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. https://opentext.wsu.edu/psychology-of-gender/chapter/chapter-1/
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
The following videos have this license: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
BBC World Service. (2020). Gender identity: ‘How colonialism killed my culture’s gender fluidity.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqEgsHGiK-s
The Kumu Hina Project. (2015). The meaning of Mahu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pCThN5y46Q
Jennie-Laure Sully. (2018). bell hooks on interlocking systems of domination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUpY8PZlgV8
Everywhere Psychology. (2012). Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmBqwWlJg8U
PBS. (2021). 2021 PBS Short Film Festival | Kapaemahu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO29QQm1-zM
OurStories eTextbook. (2018). Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juzpocOX5ik
OWN. (2018). Why the boy who was raised as a girl forgave his mother | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQJHPQpf6mI&t=1s | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.05%3A_Chapter_5_-_Gender.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Define sexual orientation, heterosexuality, homosexuality, asexuality, bisexuality, and pansexuality
• Explain what scientists mean when they say “sexual orientation is not binary”
• Defend, using examples, the statement: “homosexuality is widespread in nature”
• Cite evidence for a genetic basis of homosexuality, as well as evidence that homosexuality is environmentally influenced
• Understand that homosexuality is widespread in nature—in human and non-human animals
• Appreciate that our understanding of same-sex sexual preferences is part of an emerging field of study, thus, many of the scientific studies we’ll mention are relatively recent and, like all science, subject to revision
• Consider homophobia, the challenges of hate crimes and the importance of being an ally.
Introduction
Which one of these penguins is male?
There are known to be gay penguins couples all over the world.
Both of the penguins are male. In fact, they are a relatively famous couple of zoo penguins; in their desire to become fathers, they actually have attempted to steal eggs from other penguin couples, apparently going so far as to attempt deceit by leaving rocks in the place of the stolen eggs.
A related story involves the internationally renowned penguin dads, Jumbs and Kermit. If you’re not familiar with their story, check out: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-27405652
Similarly, a same-sex penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo raised the now-famous Tango, star of the children’s book, And Tango Makes Three.
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Clearly, there is something compelling about same-sex penguin couples. Our attraction (or aversion) to these stories is itself interesting, and leads to a lot of biologically relevant questions about sexual attraction.
What do we mean by “Sexual Orientation?”
Sexual Orientation is an umbrella term that is used to refer to patterns of attraction—sexual, romantic, or both. Under this umbrella, individuals may assort themselves into categories such as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual.
“Queer,” “Bisexual,” “Pansexual,” “Polyamorous,” “Asexual,”
Queer as an identity term refers to a non-categorical sexual identity; it is also used as a catch-all term for all LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) individuals. The term was historically used in a derogatory way, but was reclaimed as a self-referential term in the 1990s United States. Although many individuals identify as queer today, some still feel personally insulted by it and disapprove of its use.
Bisexual is typically defined as a sexual orientation marked by attraction to either men or women. This has been problematized as a binary approach to sexuality, which excludes individuals who do not identify as men or women. Pansexual is a sexual identity marked by sexual attraction to people of any gender or sexuality.
Polyamorous (poly, for short) or non-monogamous relationships are open or non-exclusive; individuals may have multiple consensual and individually-negotiated sexual and/or romantic relationships at once (Klesse 2006).
Asexual is an identity marked by a lack of or rare sexual attraction, or low or absent interest in sexual activity, abbreviated to “ace” (Decker 2014). Asexuals distinguish between sexual and romantic attraction, delineating various sub-identities included under an ace umbrella. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/268096211.pdf
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Read More
You’ll find an excellent overview of terms at: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/sexual-orientation-gender/sexual-orientation
You’ll note from the definitions the use of qualifiers such as “may,” and “often.” This pattern should serve as a clue that sexual orientation is COMPLICATED, and our understanding of the diversity of presentations is quickly changing.
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You can also check out this helpful Ally’s Guide to Terminology here.
Sexual preference is not binary
You may have heard things like “most people are bisexual,” and “sexual preferences exist on a continuum,” but are such claims scientific? That is, do we have evidence to justify such statements?
The Kinsey Scale
Some key work on sexuality was conducted in the 1940’s and 1950’s by the biologist Alfred Kinsey. Alfred Kinsey pioneered research in human sexuality through thousands of interviews and the development of “The Kinsey Scale” of human sexual preferences. The Kinsey Scale is a 7-point metric that categorizes individuals from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual), and includes the midpoint 3 (equally homosexual and heterosexual).
Kinsey’s main contributions were to (1) reveal that many people have preferences that aren’t “0” or “6”—in other words, sexual preferences do exist on a continuum; and (2) revolutionize how we view female sexuality—that is, women are not just recipients of sex, women have sexual desires, and women cheat, fantasize, and masturbate. For many people, these ideas may be obvious, but at the time they were shocking and revolutionary.
Above: distribution of Kinsey scores for 147 men and 238 women (who were not exclusively heterosexual) in an Australian sample from 2000.
More recent work has investigated the “continuum” concept of sexuality, with a focus on the prevalence of bisexuality. For example, an analysis of several reports revealed the presence of bisexuality in from ~2% to ~6% of individuals who identified as heterosexual, and from ~18% to ~88% in self-identified homosexuals. In the latter example, far more women, on average, expressed bisexual tendencies than did male homosexuals. In sum, bisexuality is fairly common, and sexual preference is not binary.
Social Constructionism
Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge that holds that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological—such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality—are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts (Subramaniam 2010).
The Social Construction of Heterosexuality
What does it mean to be “heterosexual” in contemporary US society? Did it mean the same thing in the late 19th century? As historian of human sexuality Jonathon Ned Katz shows in The Invention of Heterosexuality (1999), the word “heterosexual” was originally coined by Dr. James Kiernan in 1892, but its meaning and usage differed drastically from contemporary understandings of the term. Kiernan thought of “hetero-sexuals” as not defined by their attraction to the opposite sex, but by their “inclinations to both sexes.” Furthermore, Kiernan thought of the heterosexual as someone who “betrayed inclinations to ‘abnormal methods of gratification’” (Katz 1995). In other words, heterosexuals were those who were attracted to both sexes and engaged in sex for pleasure, not for reproduction. Katz further points out that this definition of the heterosexual lasted within middle-class cultures in the United States until the 1920s, and then went through various radical reformulations up to the current usage.
Looking at this historical example makes visible the process of the social construction of heterosexuality. First of all, the example shows how social construction occurs within institutions—in this case, a medical doctor created a new category to describe a particular type of sexuality, based on existing medical knowledge at the time. “Hetero-sexuality” was initially a medical term that defined a deviant type of sexuality. Second, by seeing how Kiernan—and middle class culture, more broadly—defined “hetero-sexuality” in the 19th century, it is possible to see how drastically the meanings of the concept have changed over time. Typically, in the United States in contemporary usage, “heterosexuality” is thought to mean “normal” or “good”—it is usually the invisible term defined by what is thought to be its opposite, homosexuality. However, in its initial usage, “hetero-sexuality” was thought to counter the norm of reproductive sexuality and be, therefore, deviant. This gets to the third aspect of social constructionism. That is, cultural and historical contexts shape our definition and understanding of concepts. In this case, the norm of reproductive sexuality—having sex not for pleasure, but to have children—defines what types of sexuality are regarded as “normal” or “deviant.” Fourth, this case illustrates how categorization shapes human experience, behavior, and interpretation of reality. To be a “heterosexual” in middle class culture in the US in the early 1900s was not something desirable to be—it was not an identity that most people would have wanted to inhabit. The very definition of “heterosexual” as deviant, because it violated reproductive sexuality, defined “proper” sexual behavior as that which was reproductive and not pleasure-centered.
Social constructionist approaches to understanding the world challenge the essentialist or biological determinist understandings that typically underpin the “common sense” ways in which we think about race, gender, and sexuality. Essentialism is the idea that the characteristics of persons or groups are significantly influenced by biological factors, and are therefore largely similar in all human cultures and historical periods.
Essentialism typically relies on a biological determinist theory of identity. Biological determinism can be defined as a general theory, which holds that a group’s biological or genetic makeup shapes its social, political, and economic destiny (Subramaniam 2014). For example, “sex” is typically thought to be a biological “fact,” where bodies are classified into two categories, male and female. Bodies in these categories are assumed to have “sex”-distinct chromosomes, reproductive systems, hormones, and sex characteristics. However, “sex” has been defined in many different ways, depending on the context within which it is defined. For example, feminist law professor Julie Greenberg (2002) writes that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, “when reproductive function was considered one of a woman’s essential characteristics, the medical community decided that the presence or absence of ovaries was the ultimate criterion of sex” (Greenberg 2002: 113). Thus, sexual difference was produced through the heteronormative assumption that women are defined by their ability to have children. Instead of assigning sex based on the presence or absence of ovaries, medical practitioners in the contemporary US typically assign sex based on the appearance of genitalia.
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Differential definitions of sex point to two other primary aspects of the social construction of reality. First, it makes apparent how even the things commonly thought to be “natural” or “essential” in the world are socially constructed. Understandings of “nature” change through history and across place according to systems of human knowledge. Second, the social construction of difference occurs within relations of power and privilege. Social constructionist analyses seek to better understand the processes through which racialized, gendered, or sexualized differentiations occur, in order to untangle the power relations within them.
Exploring heteronormativity, you may want to look at this Straight Questionaire, which flips the script on the questions commonly asked of sexual minorities. If you think it’s uncomfortable for a straight person to get asked these questions, then you will understand how problematic it is to ask LGB+ individuals these questions. Think back to when we explored microaggressions during the second week of class. Any questions on this list asked of a person who is perceived to be a sexual minority would be considered a microaggression. Be aware of this for yourself and educate others who may ask similar questions of others.
This takes us to our next section, which- given the lens of social constructionism, can be a bit challenging. Researchers have been inquiring about the origins of sexual orientation for quite some time and it’s still a point of examination. But challenges emerge in these areas. How does one investigate this area of sexuality without endorsing heteronormative structures?
Is sexual orientation genetic?
Asking this question is a bit like asking, “Are we born gay? Or straight?” This question can be problematic for some, because the motivation for asking the question may not be scientific. For example, individuals who have a social problem with homosexuality may be motivated to see sexual orientation as a choice, making homosexuality a characteristic one could choose not to exhibit. And in recent history, eugenicists (individuals who promote selective reproduction among “favored” types of humans) used a presumed genetic basis for homosexuality as an argument in favor of sterilizing gay people. The question can also be problematic because the stated or implied focus is typically on the cause of homosexuality, rather than heterosexuality. (We’ll say more about that in a bit.)
But, for now, let’s focus on the biology of homosexuality’s origins. While no serious scientist is claiming that same-sex mating preferences arise in a simple Mendelian fashion, or that there is a single “gay gene,” many have found evidence of a possible genetic basis. Some intriguing data are from the literature on twins. For example, researchers discovered that identical twins (who arise from the same sperm and egg, and have nearly 100% identical genetics) are more alike with respect to sexual orientation than are non-identical twins (who arise from different eggs and sperm). However, identical twins don’t overlap completely in sexual preferences, a finding that suggests other factors—besides genetics—may be at work.
Is sexual orientation influenced by the environment?
Several studies have found correlations between same-sex sexual preferences and environmental conditions. In this case the “environment” can be the uterine environment, and refer to conditions during fetal development, or the environment can refer to conditions after birth.
The literature on post-birth experiences, and their impacts on sexual orientation, is challenging for many reasons, but largely because it is so difficult to disentangle the impact of a tolerant environment on someone’s inclination to express their homosexuality. For example, there has been work suggesting that children of gay parents are more likely to grow up expressing same-sex sexual preferences. Is this because growing up in a gay family actually influences an individual’s sexuality, or because a family that is accepting of homosexuality creates a safe space for a gay or bisexual individual to express their sexuality?
Similarly, work in Denmark has shown that growing up in an urban environment is associated with the choice to marry a person of the same sex later in life. Diverse metropolitan areas are typically associated with greater tolerance towards gays and lesbians, so is it simply that this tolerance supports the expression of an existing characteristic, or is there something else about cities that promotes homosexuality? A summary from the Danish study includes the following statements: “For men, homosexual marriage was associated with having older mothers, divorced parents, absent fathers, and being the youngest child. For women, maternal death during adolescence and being the only or youngest child or the only girl in the family increased the likelihood of homosexual marriage.”
Somewhat more compelling is the work on the prenatal environment and homosexuality. According to many of these studies, differential exposure to prenatal hormones, specifically testosterone, influences sexuality later in life.
Several studies have found evidence, through the development of certain body parts (e.g., fingers, ears) that lesbians were exposed to more testosterone in utero than were straight women. Finger (or “digit”) lengths, especially the ratio between the second (2D) and fourth (4D) fingers, seems to vary as a function of exposure to testosterone in the womb. In one study of identical twins, researchers found that, on average, the 2D:4D ratio is larger in lesbian women than men (Watts, Holmes, Raines, et al, 2018). It’s important to note that these differences are rarely noticeable without doing precise measurements of an individual’s finger lengths. It’s also critical to mention that a subsequent, more recent study (Holmes, Watts-Overall, Slettevold, et al, 2022) found no evidence that increased prenatal androgen exposure influenced masculinity in homosexual women. Critically, while there is some evidence correlating androgen exposure with sexual orientation, there is no causal explanation.
Fraternal birth order and the uterine environment
What is the fraternal birth order effect?
In males, it appears to be that number of older brothers alters the likelihood of same-sex preferences later in life. Specifically, more older brothers (not sisters) is associated with homosexuality in men (not women). This is called the fraternal birth-order (FBO) effect in the scientific literature, and the evidence for the FBO effect is compelling. Simply, homosexual men, on average, have more older brothers than do heterosexual men, a difference that is not seen in homosexual versus heterosexual women.
A logical response to this finding would be to wonder whether growing up with older brothers somehow led more men to develop with same-sex sexual preferences, or if there was something about the uterine environment that favored homosexuality in successive male offspring.
Anthony Bogaert was interested in the FBO effect and whether it was due to exposures in the uterus during fetal development, or somehow due to the impact of growing up with older brothers. He tested this by analyzing data on sexual preferences in several groups of men, including one sample of men raised in step- or adoptive families. That is, he was able to compare homosexuality in men raised with their older brothers, and those raised apart from their older, biological brothers. He found that only biological older brothers were associated with male homosexuality, regardless of the amount of time spent with those older brothers. Bogaert used these data to suggest that it is uterine conditions, not how a person is raised, that is associated with same-sex sexual preferences in men.
For an accessible summary of the FBO effect, read: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1502267/pdf/zpq10531.pdf
Caution: These differences in uterine influences on male and female homosexuality also illustrate a key point: male homosexuality and female homosexuality appear to have different causes, thus we should be careful not to transfer the findings of research on men to the reality of sexuality in women. Further, male and female homosexuality are likely influenced by multiple factors.
Evolutionary Approach
Some biologists have referred to the evolutionary problem with homosexuality, because same-sex sexual behavior is non-reproductive, yet homosexuality occurs in relatively high numbers—enough to support an adaptive function for homosexuality. So the big question is: how can natural selection work on a trait that seems unable to increase an individual’s fitness?
The literature on the evolution and occurrence of homosexuality has focused on several hypotheses, including some that are adaptive (fitness-enhancing) explanations and several that are non-adaptive explanations.
Suggested adaptive explanations include (but are not limited to),
1. Social glue: according to the social glue hypothesis, same-sex sexual interactions help to form bonds, reduce tension, repair relationships after conflict, and prevent future conflicts from occurring
2. Kin selection: this hypothesis centers on the idea that individuals can increase their fitness either by direct mechanisms (having their own offspring) or by indirect mechanisms (investing in, or somehow providing a benefit to, the offspring of their relatives. A homosexual individual might forego having his or her own direct offspring, but could benefit the family (and help get their own genes into the next generation) by investing in siblings, nieces, nephews, etc.
3. Alliance formation: similar to social glue, the alliance formation hypothesis posits that bonds forged during sex lead individuals to greater acts of bravery or sacrifice, to benefit those with whom they’ve been intimate. If same-sex sexual relationships lead to stronger alliances, and these alliances make better warriors or soldiers who are more likely to survive conflicts, that would lend support for the alliance formation.
4. Practice: according to the practice hypothesis, same-sex activities during immature stages make an individual more adept at courtship and copulation, with opposite-sex partners, as an adult.
5. Enhanced family fertility: according to the enhanced fertility hypothesis, some of the genetic components that can lead to homosexuality are also associated with enhanced fertility or success in getting mates. From this hypothesis we would predict that individuals who share genetic information with homosexual individuals would have greater reproductive success than those who do not.
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You can probably imagine ways to test all of the above explanations, as well as potential problems associated with each suggestion.
There’s Just No ONE Factor (aka- Reasons We Love Psychology)
Remember “And Tango Makes Three”, the children’s book about two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who adopted an egg? That book became notorious, making the American Library Associations top-ten list of “most challenged [or banned] books” during the most recent decade: http://www.ala.org/bbooks/top-100-bannedchallenged-books-2000-2009
Soon after the book’s publication, and after a six-year partnership, Silo left Roy for a female penguin named Scrappy. Reactions to the split were mixed but, as Roberta Sklar, a spokeswoman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said: “There’s almost an obsession with questions such as, ‘Is sexual orientation a birthright or a choice?’ And looking at the behavior of two penguins in captivity is not a way to answer that question.” She continued by noting that the public outcry (over the book, the penguin pair, and then their split) “is a little ridiculous. Or maybe a lot ridiculous.”
As we’ve discussed, the ‘why’ of sexual orientation is complicated, non-binary, and often fluid. In humans and in penguins. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/nyregion/new-love-breaks-up-a-6year-relationship-at-the-zoo.html?_r=0
LGBTQ Brief U.S. Historical Sketch
As discussed in the section on social construction, heterosexuality is no more and no less natural than gay sexuality or bisexuality, for instance. As was shown, people—particularly sexologists and medical doctors—defined heterosexuality and its boundaries. This definition of the parameters of heterosexuality is an expression of power that constructs what types of sexuality are considered “normal” and which types of sexuality are considered “deviant.”
LGBTQ history has developed through four stages Gerda Lerner first identified for women’s history: compensation, contributions, revision, and social construction (Lerner, 1975). LGBTQ historians first compensated for heterosexism and cissexism by finding LGBTQ people to reinsert into historical narratives, then determined how LGBTQ people contributed to history. As they analyzed primary sources, they slowly revised historical narratives through testing generalizations and periodization against evidence by and about LGBTQ people. Finally, the field understood that sexual orientation and gender themselves are social constructions.
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Political organizing by oppressed Americans in the 1970s helped create U.S. lesbian, gay, bi/pansexual, trans, and queer history as a field. Why would people’s struggles for rights and freedom include wanting to be represented in historical accounts? Inclusive histories reflect the diversity of people in the U.S., expose institutional discrimination against minoritized people, trace how minorities have contributed, and outline their work toward the American democratic experiment.
Stonewall Riots
In 1969, the Stonewall Inn riot broke out due to a New York City police raid. This Mafia-run dive bar blackmailed gay Wall Street patrons and used those funds to pay off police. In return, police gave the Stonewall advanced warning of raids. Raids targeted those in full drag and trans sex workers like Sylvia Rivera. But raids could also ruin lives of white, Black, and Latino gay and lesbian customers; newspaper exposure led to being fired or evicted. On June 28, 1969 there was no tip off. Trans and lesbian patrons resisted—refusing to produce identification or to follow a female officer to the bathroom to verify their sex for arrest. They also objected to officers groping them (Carter, 2004, pp. 68, 80, 96-103, 124-5, 141, 156; Duberman, 1993, pp. 181-193). A growing crowd outside spontaneously responded to police violence by hurling coins and cans at officers who retreated into the bar. Rioting resumed a second and third night. Gay poet Allen Ginsberg heard slogans and crowed, “Gay power! Isn’t that great! We’re one of the largest minorities in the country – 10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves” (Truscott, 1969, p. 18).
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The Stonewall Riot also did not stop police raids, but mainstream and gay coverage and leafleting spurred the creation of new, more militant gay organizing than previous homophile groups. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) sought to combine freedom from homophobia with a broader political platform that denounced racism and opposed capitalism. The Gay Activists Alliance rose from the GLF with confrontational “zaps” where they surprised politicians in public to force them to acknowledge gay and lesbian rights (Carter, 2004, pp. 245-246). Gay liberationists like Carl Wittman drew on past New Left anti-war student activism and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Wittman’s “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto” (1970) rails against homophobia, imploring gays to free themselves by coming out while also acknowledging that will be too dangerous for some yet. Gay men must discard male chauvinism as antigay. Rather than “mimic” “straight society,” gay liberation should reject gender roles and marriage and embrace queens as having gutsily stood out. Wittman was attuned to the rise of lesbian feminism, which tied sexism together with homophobia. Lesbian feminists emphasized their focus on women’s autonomy and well-being rather than identification as mothers, wives, and daughters who indirectly gained from what benefitted men (Jay and Young, 1992; Pomerleau, 2010).
Gay liberationists demonstrated against the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Activists and gay counselors knew they were not sick. They marshaled psychological research homophile ally, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, created from 1957 on, that demonstrated gay men were equally stable as heterosexual men based on personality tests and sometimes showed more resilience (Minton, 2002, pp. 219-236). In 1973 the APA voted unanimously to define homosexuality in their diagnostic manual as “one form of sexual behavior, like other forms of sexual behavior which are not by themselves psychiatric disorders” (Eaklor, 2008, pp. 150-151). This was a major win on the long road to discrediting conversion therapies. Simultaneously, though, the APA’s third manual introduced “gender identity disorder of childhood” and “transsexualism” in 1980, preserving a concern about variety in gendered behavior and sustaining forced conversion programs for children and adolescents without increasing access to medical services some trans adults wanted. Despite the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) removal of the term “transexualism” in 1994, issues like conversion therapy on children still exist.
The AIDS Epidemic
In 1981 the New York Times stated that a rare, aggressive skin cancer had struck forty-one recently healthy homosexuals (Andriote, 1999, p. 49; Shilts, 1987, pp. 37, 54-66). By late 1982 related immunosuppression cases existed among infants, women, heterosexual men, intravenous drug users and hemophiliacs. The mortality rate of the original patients was 100%. Panic spread. Media, many government officials, and the gay community asked what linked the affected gay men. Connecting deadly disease to gay male sexuality provided a new rationale for discriminatory laws and harassment as the political power of the Christian Right continued to ascend (Bronski, 2011, p. 225; Eaklor, 2008, p. 176; Stein, 2012, pp. 143-144).
In response to AIDS, LGBTQ Americans organized new institutions and created new methods to get needed resources, which furthered lively debates over tactics. A major contributor to the AIDS epidemic was willful neglect from the federal government. For the first five years of the epidemic, President Reagan remained silent about it. In 1986 he and governors from both parties proposed cutting government spending on AIDS. That year the Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that gay adults did not have constitutional privacy rights that would protect them from prosecution for private, consensual sex. The Justice Department announced that federal law allowed employment discrimination based on HIV/AIDS.
This spurred high-impact radical organizing. Larry Kramer and cofounders formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power or ACT UP in 1987. It further publicized the NYC slogan “Silence = Death” in demonstrations. ACT UP dramatically disrupted Wall Street, the Food and Drug Administration, the Center for Disease Control, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the high cost of AZT (the first drug treatment).
In tandem with responses to AIDS, often overlooked portions of LGBT Americans organized. Bisexuals started forming social groups and then National Bisexual Liberation Group in 1972 based on N.Y., S.F.’s Bisexual Center in 1976, and the national BiPOL in San Francisco in 1983. Although the 1987 March on Washington organizers would not include bi or trans in the march title of demands, both constituents argued “gay and lesbian” was not inclusive (Garber, 1991; Garber, 1995; Queen, 1995; Queen, 1997; Queen and Schimel, 1997).
Over the 1990s and 2000s, new drug therapies prolonged the lives of people living with AIDS. Although radical, multi-community AIDS activism continued, work for mainstream legal protections and rights dominated activism. LGBT Americans and supporters sought inclusion in the military, antidiscrimination law, and marriage equality.
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State legislatures and popular ballots featured both anti-discrimination and antigay measures, creating grassroots organizing for and against protecting LGBT Americans from being rejected from jobs, fired or excluded from housing and public accommodations. Cultural conservatives lamented gradually increasing acceptance of LGBT people as celebrity musicians and television stars slowly started to come out and weathered backlash to continue their careers. Meanwhile, the Hawai’i state supreme court win, Baehr v. Miike, temporarily legalized same-sex marriage there in 1996. National LGBT organizations pushed to extend marriage equality nationwide. Over the next decade states split on whether to ban or legalize marriage equality. Popular support steadily grew over the 2000s, reaching sixty percent in 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the fourteenth Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry.
As sexologists categorized sexuality into normal or pathological identities, heteronormativity developed that added psychology and medical science to the church and state as anti-LGBT institutions. Communities of gay and bi men, lesbian and bi women, and trans people multiplied in the 1950s despite heightened repression, and a portion of these minorities organized for equal rights. Even an epidemic blamed on and falsely identified with gays could not stop LGBT organizing. Activists further developed radical tactics from the 1970s to call for liberation from heteronormativity. Arduous legal gains have been easier than rooting out the foundational power imbalances by race, class, gender, ability, and citizenship, but both legal and cultural changes continue to transform society.
Anti LGBTQ Hate Crimes in the United States
On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed and 53 wounded in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. It was the deadliest single person mass shooting and the largest documented anti-LGBTQ attack in United States history. The attack on a gay nightclub on Latin night resulted in over ninety percent of the victims being Latinx and the majority being LGBTQIA-identified. This act focused on an iconic public space that provided LGBTQIA adults an opportunity to explore and claim their sexual and gender identities. The violence at Pulse echoed the 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire attack in New Orleans that killed thirty two people. These mass killings are part of a broader picture of violence that LGBTQIA people experience, from the disproportionate killings of transgender women of color to domestic violence and bullying within schools. There are different perspectives within the LGBTQIA community about responses to hate-motivated violence. These debates concern whether the use of punitive measures through the criminal legal system supports or harms the LGBTQIA community, and whether there is a need for more radical approaches to address the root causes of anti-LGBTQIA violence. This research profile explores hate crimes as both a legal category and broader social phenomenon.
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What are Hate Crimes?
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes have had a simultaneously spectacular and invisible role in U.S. society. Today, hate crimes are defined as criminal acts motivated by bias towards victims’ real or perceived identity groups (Blazak 2011, 245). Hate crimes are informal social control mechanisms utilized in stratified societies as they are part of what Barbara Perry calls a “contemporary arsenal of oppression” used to police identity boundaries (Perry 2009, 56). Hate crimes occur within social dynamics of oppression, where othered groups are vulnerable to systemic violence, pushing marginalized groups further into the political and social edges of society. It is theorized that hate crimes are driven by conflicts over cultural, political and economic resources, bias and hostility towards relatively powerless groups, and the failure of authorities address hate in society (Turpin-Petrosino 2009, 34).
The 1998 beating and torture death of college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming became a rallying point to address hate crimes more fully in the late 1990s. His murder received substantial media coverage and inspired artistic works as well as political action. As an affluent, white gay young man, Shepard became a symbol of anti-gay violence. His attackers were accused of attacking him because of anti-gay bias, but were not charged with committing a hate crime as Wyoming had no laws that covered anti-LGBT crimes.
While federal laws address constitutional rights violations, each state has or does not have its own specific hate crime laws (Levin and McDevitt 2002). Today, there are a wide range of laws regarding hate crime protections across states, and they vary in regards to protected groups, criminal and/or civil approaches, crimes covered, complete or limited data collection, and law enforcement training (Shively 2005, ii). As of 2019, 19 states did not have any LGBT hate crime laws, and 12 states had laws that covered sexual orientation but did not address gender identity and expression (Movement Advancement Project 2009). Twenty states included both sexual orientation and gender identity in their hate crimes laws (Movement Advancement Project 2009). The majority of these laws were created in the early 2000s, with the inclusion of gender identity and expression following in recent decades.
Hate crime laws require law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute crimes committed with bias against LGBTQ people. Some state laws also require collection of data on anti-LGBTQ hate crimes.
The federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act allows the federal government to prosecute hate crimes, including those based on sexual orientation and gender identity. State laws may also allow for state or local prosecution of certain hate crimes, depending on what, if any, protections the state law offers. Read the State-by-State Statutes.
Movement Advancement Project. “Equality Maps: Hate Crime Laws.” https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/hate_crime_laws.
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is a federal law that amended federal hate crime law to include gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. Several states have hate crime laws that require data collection for sexual orientation or gender identity and expression, but do not impose additional penalties: Indiana (sexual orientation), Michigan (sexual orientation) and Rhode Island (gender identity or expression). For additional information, check out the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, the National Center for Transgender Equality, or the Equality Federation.
Hate crime laws are intended to deter bias-motivated crimes, but there is no consensus around the efficacy of these laws in preventing hate crimes against LGBTQ people. Additionally, some advocates argue that hate crime laws may be counterproductive to that goal. Research further suggests that the enforcement of hate crime laws disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, particularly communities of color. Read more about how criminalization impacts people of color here.
Contemporarily, there is no universal consensus about the role of hate crime laws in furthering the acceptance and inclusion of LGBTQ people in American society. For many people such laws carry with them an emphasis on the value of their lives and help to further their sense of belonging. Others, particularly LGBTQ activists engaged in broader social justice struggles, argue that such laws shore up a broken criminal justice system that is predicated on a violent logic that cannot truly benefit the LGBTQ community.
Coming Out
The gay liberation movement of the 1970s advocated for “coming out” as an LGBTQ person as an important strategy of political change and personal fulfilment. This concept is illustrated in this now famous quote by the late San Francisco Supervisor, and hero of the LGBTQ rights movement, Harvey Milk:
Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all. And once you do, you will feel so much better.”
The benefit and buffering effects of coming out have been well established in the literature (Stirratt, Meyer, Ouellette, Gara, 2007; Cass, 1984; Troiden, 1989). Meyer’s LGBTQ Minority Stress model (see Frost, click here for more) connects minority identification with positive outcomes in terms of coping and social support resources necessary to address minority stress, but it also highlights how minority identification is related to minority stressors within the individual such as expectations of rejection, concealment, and internalized homophobia. In addition, identification and community connectedness can increase visibility, which may increase vulnerability to things like employment discrimination, harassment, and violence (Meyer, 2003).
Review this resource on the coming out process by the University of Washington.
Realize that it may not always be safe to come out to others due to concerns around physical or emotional safety, loss of housing, unsafe living situations, etc. Every individual must weigh the pros and cons of coming out because the people around us may not always react in supportive ways.
Also, keep in mind the role of an ally is to not out someone to others. It is up to the individual to tell others about their identity, and we could even cause them physical or emotional harm if we out them to others. Do not do this without the person’s express and direct permission beforehand.
Inviting In
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Historians and other social scientists have also suggested that the increased visibility of LGBTQ people was a critical element in the formation of LGBTQ communities and the progress of the LGBTQ rights movements (D’Emilio, 1983; Chauncey, 1995). Herek’s and Allport’s contact hypothesis (Herek & Capitanio, 1996; Allport, 1956), Harvey Milk’s rallying cry of “Come on out!” (Shiltz, 1982), and research that highlights the importance of role models and positive representatives in various forms of media (GLAAD, 2016; Craig, McInroy, McCready, Alaggia, 2015; Forenza, 2017), all suggest that coming out, and increasing the visibility of LGBTQ people, is an important and often positive strategy for improving social attitudes (Levina, Waldo, Fitzgerald, 2000). As stated earlier, increased visibility does come with risks. However, positive contact between heterosexuals and LGBTQ people has been found to result not only in positive attitude change, but also in the possibility of increasing the dominant group’s identification with the marginalized, creating the possibility of allyship—the mobilization of heterosexuals to work toward change benefiting the LGBTQ community (Reimer et al., 2017).
Review these tips from the University of Southern California on how to be an ally to someone who is coming out and check out the video below:
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APA Guidelines for Writing about Sexual Orientation without Bias
• Review this resource in order to be up-to-date on current requirements for writing about sexual orientation in psychological research
American Psychological Association. (2020). APA style: Sexual orientation. Retrieved from https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/sexual-orientation.
Conclusion
This section provided an introduction to sexual orientation, defining several key terms and providing a brief overview of LQBTQ+ history in the United States. Additionally, we explored social constructionism and the challenges of research related to sexual orientation. Finally – we discussed some of the ongoing challenges to the safety and well-being for sexual minority folks, coming out processes and ways to be allies.
Licenses and Attributions
The Evolution and Biology of Sex by Sehoya Cotner and Deena Wassenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Harvey Milk. Provided by: Wikimedia Commons. Located at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harvey_Milk_at_Gay_Pride_San_Jose,_June_1978_(cropped).jpg. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies by Miliann Kang, Donovan Lessard, Laura Heston, Sonny Nordmarken is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Massey, S. G., Young, S. R. & Merriwether, A. (2020). The Benefits and Risks of Coming Out. License: CC BY: Attribution
U.S. LGBTQ History. Authored by: Clark A. Pomerleau. Provided by: University of North Texas. Project: LGBTQ Studies. License: CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
The following videos have this license: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
J.M. (2009). And Tango Makes Three. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyPjUa908hM
Tinder. (2019). 5 asexual people explain what “asexual” means to them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMhix4nr_0g
AMAZE Org. (2016). Sexual orientations explained: Lesbian, gay, heterosexual and bisexual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5x5Fo7rMvY
NBC News. (2016). The problem with heteronormativity | Queer 2.0 | NBC Out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ3K_oS6ZmU
them. (2018). Billy Porter gives a brief history of queer political action | them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoXH-Yqwyb0
The New York Times. (2019). The Stonewall you know is a myth. And that’s O.K. | NYT Celebrating Pride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7jnzOMxb14
NBC New York. (2019). Pride 2019: Did the AIDS crisis accelerate LGBTQ rights in America? | NBC New York. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcqVXSL15X4
CGTN America. (2016). History of hate crimes against the LGBT community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4GBT5NVbrs
The Root. (2020). Why some Black LGBTQIA+ folks are done ‘coming out.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdCKe0QBuwQ
chescaleigh. (2014). 5 tips for being an ally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dg86g-QlM0
The following video is licensed with a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International).
TEDx Talks. (2016). Homosexuality: It’s about survival – not sex | James O’Keefe | TEDxTallaght. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Khn_z9FPmU | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.06%3A_Chapter_6_-_Sexual_Orientation.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Summarize the variables that lead to initial attraction between people.
• Outline the variables that lead us to perceive someone as physically attractive, and explain why physical attractiveness is so important in liking.
• Describe the ways that similarity and complementarity influence our liking for others.
• Define the concept of mere exposure, and explain how proximity influences liking.
• Provide a very brief overview of evolutionary research into attraction.
Introduction
As we’ve discussed in class, and in our overview of sexology, studying attraction can be challenging. Attraction between two (or more) people can be difficult to predict, determine, or cause. Can you imagine compelling yourself or others to be attracted to someone? It’s typically not an experience that someone can force. So what are elements that optimize attraction? What are the variables present when attraction does occur? Where does the attraction come from? Is it biological or learned? The study of attraction covers a huge range of topics. It can begin with first impressions, then extend to courtship and commitment. It involves the concepts of beauty, sex, and evolution. Attraction researchers might study stalking behavior. They might research divorce or remarriage. They might study changing standards of beauty across decades.
When we say that we like or love someone, we are experiencing interpersonal attraction—the strength of our liking or loving for another person. Although interpersonal attraction occurs between friends, family members, and other people in general, and although our analysis can apply to these relationships as well, our primary focus in this section will be on romantic attraction. There is a large literature on the variables that lead us to like others in our initial interactions with them, and we’ll review the most important findings here (Sprecher, Wenzel, & Harvey, 2008).
Physical Attractiveness
Although it may seem inappropriate or shallow to admit it, and although it is certainly not the only determinant of liking, people are strongly influenced, at least in initial encounters, by the physical attractiveness of their partners (Swami & Furnham, 2008). Elaine Walster and her colleagues (Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman, 1966) arranged a field study in which college boys and girls were randomly paired with one another at a “computer dance.” After the partners had danced and talked for a couple of hours, they were interviewed separately about their own preferences and characteristics as well as about their perceptions of their date. Walster and her colleagues found that the only important determinant of participants’ liking for their date was his or her physical attractiveness. None of the other characteristics—even the perceived intelligence of the partner—mattered.
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Perhaps this finding doesn’t surprise you too much, given the importance of physical attractiveness in our culture. Movies and TV shows feature attractive people, TV ads use attractive people to promote their products, and we spend millions of dollars each year to make ourselves look more attractive. Even infants who are only a year old prefer to look at faces that adults consider attractive rather than at unattractive faces (Langlois, Ritter, Roggman, & Vaughn 1991).
People who are attractive are also seen as having a variety of positive characteristics, and these traits are activated quickly and spontaneously when we see their faces (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005; van Leeuwen & Macrae, 2004). Attractive people are seen as more sociable, altruistic, and intelligent than their unattractive counterparts (Griffin & Langlois, 2006). Attractive people also have more choices of sex partners (Epstein, Klinkenberg, Scandell, Faulkner, & Claus, 2007), are more likely to be offered jobs (Dubois & Pansu, 2004), and may even live longer (Henderson & Anglin, 2003).
Although it is sometimes said that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” (i.e., that each person has his or her own idea about what is beautiful), this is not completely true. There is good agreement among people, including children, and within and across cultures, about which people are most physically attractive (Berry, 2000; Ramsey, Langlois, Hoss, Rubenstein, & Griffin, 2004). If your instructor asked the students in your class to rate each other on their attractiveness, there would be general agreement among them on which students are most and least attractive. This agreement is in part due to shared norms within cultures about what is attractive, but it is also due to evolutionary predispositions to attend to and be influenced by specific characteristics of others.
Leslie Zebrowitz and her colleagues have extensively studied the tendency for both men and women to prefer facial features that have youthful characteristics (Zebrowitz, 1996). These features include large, round, and widely spaced eyes, a small nose and chin, prominent cheekbones, and a large forehead. Zebrowitz has found that individuals who have youthful-looking faces are more liked, are judged as warmer and more honest, and also receive other positive outcomes. Parents give baby-faced children fewer chores and punishments, and people with young-looking faces are also required to pay lower monetary awards in courtroom trials (Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991). On the other hand, baby-faced individuals are also seen as less competent than their more mature-looking counterparts (Zebrowitz & Montpare, 2005).
The preference for youth is found in our perceptions of both men and women but is somewhat stronger for our perceptions of women (Wade, 2000). This is because for men, although we do prefer youthful faces, we also prefer masculine faces—those with low, broad jaws and with pronounced bone ridges and cheekbones—and these men tend to look somewhat older (Rhodes, 2006). We may like baby-faced people because they remind us of babies, or perhaps because we respond to baby-faced people positively, they may act more positively to us.
Some faces are more symmetrical than others. People are more attracted to faces that are more symmetrical in comparison with those that are less symmetrical. This may be in part because of the perception that people with symmetrical faces are more healthy and thus make better reproductive mates (Rhodes, 2006; Rhodes et al., 2001) and in part because symmetrical faces seem more familiar and thus less threatening to us (Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001). The attraction to symmetry is not limited to face perception. Body symmetry is also a likely indicator of good genes, and women favor more symmetrical men as sexual partners (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1997).
Although you might think that we would prefer faces that are unusual or unique, in fact the opposite is true (Langlois, Roggman, & Musselman, 1994). Langlois and Rodman (1990) showed college students the faces of men and women. The faces were composites made up of the average of 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 faces. The researchers found that the more faces that were averaged into the stimulus, the more attractive it was judged (see Figure 7.1 “Facial Averageness”). As with the findings for facial symmetry, one possible explanation for our liking of average faces is that because they are more similar to the ones that we have frequently seen, they are thus more familiar to us (Grammer, Fink, Juette, Ronzal, & Thornhill, 2002).
Other determinants of perceived attractiveness are healthy skin, good teeth, a smiling expression, and good grooming (Jones et al., 2004; Rhodes, 2006; Willis, Esqueda, & Schacht, 2008). These features may also have evolutionary significance—people with these characteristics probably appear to be healthy.
Although the preferences for youth, symmetry, and averageness appear to be universal, at least some differences in perceived attractiveness are due to social factors. What is seen as attractive in one culture may not be seen as attractive in another, and what is attractive in a culture at one time may not be attractive at another time. To consider one example, in modern Western cultures, “thin is in,” and people prefer those who have little excess fat and who look physically fit (Crandall, Merman, & Hebl, 2009; Hönekopp, Rudolph, Beier, Liebert, & Müller, 2007; Weeden & Sabini, 2005).
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However, the norm of thinness has not always been in place. The preference for women with slender, masculine, and athletic looks has become stronger over the past 50 years in Western cultures, and this can be seen by comparing the figures of female movie stars from the 1940s and 1950s with those of today. In contrast to the relatively universal preferences for youth, symmetry, and averageness, other cultures do not show such a strong propensity for thinness (Anderson, Crawford, Nadeau, & Lindberg, 1992).
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Gender Differences in Perceived Attractiveness
You might wonder whether men and women find different mates attractive. The answer is yes, although as in most cases with research on binary gender differences, the differences are outweighed by overall similarities. Overall, both men and women value physical attractiveness, as well as certain personality characteristics, such as kindness, humor, dependability, intelligence, and sociability; this is true across many different cultures (Berry, 2000; Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002). For men, however, the physical attractiveness of women is most important; women, although also interested in the attractiveness of men, are relatively more interested in the social status of a potential partner. When they are forced to choose one or the other, women from many different cultures have been found to prioritize a man’s status over his physical attractiveness, whereas men prioritize a woman’s attractiveness over her status (Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002).
Age also matters, such that the preference for youthful partners is more important for men than for women. Women have been found to be more likely to respond to personal ads placed by relatively older men, whereas men tend to respond to ads placed by younger women—men of all ages (even teenagers) are most attracted to women who are in their 20s. Younger people (and particularly younger women) are more fertile than older people, and research suggests that men may be evolutionarily predisposed to like them for this reason (Buunk, Dijstra, Kenrick, & Warntjes, 2001; Dunn, Brinton, & Clark, 2010; Kenrick & Li, 2000).
Another research finding consistent with the idea that men are looking for cues to fertility in their partners is that across many cultures, men have a preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio (i.e., large hips and a small waist), a shape that is likely to indicate fertility. On the other hand, women prefer men with a more masculine-appearing waist to hip ratio (similar waist and hip size; Singh, 1995; Swami, 2006). Recent research, however, has suggested that these preferences, too, may be in part due to a preference for averageness, rather than to a specific preference for a particular waist-to-hip ratio (Donohoe, von Hippel, & Brooks, 2009).
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But gender differences in mate preferences may also be accounted for in terms of social norms and expectations. Overall, women have lower status than men, and as a result, they may find it important to attempt to raise their status by marrying men who have more of it. Men who, on average, already have higher status may be less concerned in this regard, allowing them to focus relatively more on physical attractiveness. Some studies show that women’s preference for men of high status, rather than for physically attractive men, is greatest in cultures in which women are less well educated, poorer, and have less control over conception and family size (Petersen & Hyde, 2010).
Why Is Physical Attractiveness So Important?
You might find yourself wondering why people find physical attractiveness so important when it seems to say so little about what the person is really like as a person. If beauty is really only “skin deep,” as the proverb goes, why are we so concerned with it?
One reason that we like attractive people is because they are rewarding. We like being around attractive people because they are enjoyable to look at and because being with them makes us feel good about ourselves. Attractiveness implies high status, and we naturally like being around people who have it. Furthermore, the positive features of attractive people tend to “rub off” on those around them as a result of associational learning (Sigall & Landy, 1973).
We may also like attractive people because they are seen as, and in fact may actually be, better friends and partners. The physical attractiveness stereotype (or attractiveness halo effect) refers to the tendency to perceive attractive people as having positive characteristics, such as sociability and competence, and meta-analyses have found substantial support for it (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). Physically attractive people are seen as more dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, intelligent, and socially skilled than are physically unattractive people (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991). One outcome of the physical attractiveness stereotype is that attractive people receive many social benefits from others. Attractive people are given better grades on essay exams, are more successful on job interviews, and receive lighter sentences in court judgments in comparison with their less attractive counterparts (Hosoda, Stone-Romero, & Coats, 2003). We are all of course aware of the physical attractiveness stereotype and make use of it when we can. We try to look our best on dates, at job interviews, and (not necessary, we hope!) for court appearances.
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Research has found at least some evidence for the idea that attractive people are actually more sociable, more popular, and less lonely in comparison with less attractive individuals (Diener, Wolsic, & Fujita, 1995; Langlois et al., 2000). These results are probably the result of self-fulfilling prophecies. Because people expect attractive others to be friendly and warm, and because they want to be around them, they treat attractive people more positively than they do unattractive people. In the end, this may lead attractive people to develop these positive characteristics (Zebrowitz, Andreoletti, Collins, Lee, & Blumenthal, 1998). However, as with most stereotypes, our expectations about the different characteristics of attractive and unattractive individuals are much stronger than the real differences between them.
Similarity: We Like Those Who Are Like Us
Although it is a very important variable, finding someone physically attractive is of course only the first stage in developing a close relationship with another person. If we find someone attractive, we may want to pursue the relationship. And if we are lucky, that person will also find us attractive and be interested in the possibility of developing a closer relationship. At this point, we will begin to communicate, sharing our values, beliefs, and interests, and begin to determine whether we are compatible in a way that leads to increased liking. Couples, whether same-sex or heterosexual, tend to fall within similar ranges of size, education, religious beliefs, values, and socioeconomic status.
Relationships are more likely to develop and be maintained to the extent that the partners share values and beliefs. Research has found that people tend to like and associate with others who share their age, education, race, religion, level of intelligence, and socioeconomic status. It has even been found that taller people tend to like other tall people, that happy people tend to like other happy people, and that people particularly enjoy others who have the same birthday and a similar sense of humor (Jones, Pelham, Carvallo, & Mirenberg, 2004; Pinel, Long, Landau, Alexander, & Pyszczynski, 2006). One classic study (Newcomb, 1961) arranged for male undergraduates, all strangers, to live together in a house while they were going to school. The men whose attitudes were similar during the first week ended up being friends, whereas those who did not initially share attitudes were significantly less likely to become friends.
Why Does Similarity Matter?
Similarity leads to attraction for a variety of reasons. For one, similarity makes things easier. You can imagine that if you only liked to go to action movies but your girlfriend or boyfriend only liked to go to foreign films, this would create difficulties in choosing an evening activity. Things would be even more problematic if the dissimilarity involved something even more important, such as your attitudes toward the relationship itself. Perhaps you want to have sex but your partner doesn’t, or perhaps your partner wants to get married but you don’t. These dissimilarities may go on to create real problems. Romantic relationships in which the partners hold different religious and political orientations or different attitudes toward important issues such as premarital sex, marriage, and child rearing are of course not impossible—but they are more complicated and take more effort to maintain.
In addition to being easier, relationships with those who are similar to us are also reinforcing. Imagine you are going to a movie with your very best friend. The movie begins, and you realize that you are starting to like it a lot. At this point, you might look over at your friend and wonder how they are reacting to it. One of the great benefits of sharing beliefs and values with others is that those others tend to react the same way to events as you do. Wouldn’t it be painful if every time you liked a movie, your best friend hated it, and every time they liked it, you hated it? But you probably don’t need to worry too much about this, because your friend is probably your friend in good part because they likes the same things you like. Sharing our values with others and having others share their values with us help us validate the worthiness of our self-concepts. Finding similarities with another makes us feel good and makes us feel that the other person will reciprocate our liking for them (Singh, Yeo, Lin, & Tan, 2007).
Status Similarity
We all naturally want to have friends and form relationships with people who have high status. We prefer to be with people who are healthy, attractive, wealthy, fun, and friendly. But our ability to attract such high-status partners is limited by the principles of social exchange. It is no accident that attractive people are more able to get dates with other attractive people, or that men with more money can attract more attractive women. The basic principles of social exchange and equity dictate that there will be general similarity in status among people in close relationships because attractiveness is a resource that allows people to attract other people with resources (Kalick & Hamilton, 1986; Lee, Loewenstein, Ariely, Hong, & Young, 2008). You can do the test for yourself. Go to a movie or a concert, and watch the couples who are together. You’ll find that the attractive people are together, as are the less attractive ones. It seems surprising to us when one partner appears much more attractive than the other, and we may well assume that the less attractive partner is offering some type of (perhaps less visible) social status in return (this appears to be true no matter what sexual orientation folks adhere to).
There is still one other type of similarity that is important in determining whether a relationship will grow and continue, and it is also based on the principles of social exchange and equity. The finding is rather simple—we tend to prefer people who seem to like us about as much as we like them. Imagine, for instance, that you have met someone and you are hoping to pursue a relationship with them. You begin to give yourself to the relationship by opening up to the other person, telling them about yourself and making it clear that you would like to pursue a closer relationship. You make yourself available to spend time with the person and contact them regularly. You naturally expect the same type of behaviors in return, and if the partner does not return the openness and giving, the relationship is not going to go very far.
There is a clear moral to the importance of liking similarity, and it pays to remember it in everyday life. If we act toward others in a positive way, this expresses liking and respect for them, and the others will likely return the compliment. Being liked, praised, and even flattered by others is rewarding, and (unless it is too blatant and thus ingratiating) we can expect that others will enjoy it.
In sum, similarity is probably the most important single determinant of liking. Although we may sometimes prefer people who have different interests and skills from ours (Beach, Whitaker, Jones, & Tesser, 2001; Tiedens & Jimenez, 2003), when it comes to personality traits, it is similarity that matters—complementarity (being different from the other) just does not have much influence on liking.
Proximity
If I were to ask you who you might end up in a long-term relationship with (assuming you are not with someones already), I would guess that you’d respond with a list of the preferred personality traits or an image of your desired mate. You’d probably say something about being attractive, rich, creative, fun, caring, and so forth. And there is no question that such individual characteristics matter. But social psychologists realize that there are other aspects that are perhaps even more important. Consider this: You’ll never be with someone that you never meet!
Although that seems obvious, it’s also really important. There are about 7 billion people in the world, and you are only going to have the opportunity to meet a tiny fraction of those people before you choose a partner. This also means that you are likely to date someone who’s pretty similar to you because, unless you travel widely, most of the people you meet are going to share your cultural background and therefore have some of the values that you hold. In fact, the person you partner with probably will live in the same city as you, attend the same college, take similar classes, and be pretty similar to you in most respects (Kubitschek & Hallinan, 1998).
Although meeting someone is an essential first step, simply being around another person also increases liking. People tend to become better acquainted with, and more fond of, each other when the social situation brings them into repeated contact. This is the basic principle of proximity liking. For instance, research has found that students who sit next to each other in class are more likely to become friends, and this is true even when the seating is assigned by the instructor (Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, 2008). Festinger, Schachter, and Back (1950) studied friendship formation in people who had recently moved into a large housing complex. They found not only that people became friends with those who lived near them but that people who lived nearer the mailboxes and at the foot of the stairway in the building (where they were more likely to come into contact with others) were able to make more friends than those who lived at the ends of the corridors in the building and thus had fewer social encounters with others.
Mere exposure refers to the tendency to prefer stimuli (including, but not limited to, people) that we have seen frequently. Consider the research findings presented in Figure 7.2 “Mere Exposure in the Classroom”. In this study, Moreland and Beach (1992) had female confederates attend a large lecture class of over 100 students 5, 10, or 15 times or not at all during a semester. At the end of the term, the students were shown pictures of the confederates and asked to indicate if they recognized them and also how much they liked them. The number of times the confederates had attended class didn’t influence the other students’ recognition of them, but it did influence their liking for them. As predicted by the mere-exposure hypothesis, students who had attended more often were liked more.
Figure 7.2 “Mere Exposure in the Classroom”: Richard Moreland and Scott Beach had female confederates visit a class 5, 10, or 15 times or not at all over the course of a semester. Then the students rated their liking of the confederates. The mere-exposure effect is clear. Data are from Moreland and Beach (1992).
The effect of mere exposure is powerful and occurs in a wide variety of situations (Bornstein, 1989). Infants tend to smile at a photograph of someone they have seen before more than they smile at someone they are seeing for the first time (Brooks-Gunn & Lewis, 1981). And people have been found to prefer left-to-right reversed images of their own faces over their normal (nonreversed) face, whereas their friends prefer their regular face over the reversed one (Mita, Dermer, & Knight, 1977). This also is expected on the basis of mere exposure, since people see their own faces primarily in mirrors and thus are exposed to the reversed face more often.
Mere exposure may well have an evolutionary basis. Many people have an initial and potentially protective fear of the unknown, but as things become more familiar, they produce more positive feelings and seem safer (Freitas, Azizian, Travers, & Berry, 2005; Harmon-Jones & Allen, 2001). When the stimuli are people, there may well be an added effect—familiar people are more likely to be seen as part of the ingroup rather than the outgroup, and this may lead us to like them even more. Leslie Zebrowitz and her colleagues showed that we like people of our own race in part because they are perceived as familiar to us (Zebrowitz, Bronstad, & Lee, 2007).
It should be kept in mind that mere exposure only applies to the change that occurs when one is completely unfamiliar with another person (or object) and subsequently becomes more familiar with them. Thus mere exposure applies only in the early stages of attraction. Later, when we are more familiar with someone, that person may become too familiar and thus boring (some are experiencing this through the pandemic if they’re with their partner 24/7!). You may have experienced this effect when you first bought some new songs and began to listen to them. Perhaps you didn’t really like all the songs at first, but you found yourself liking them more and more as you played them more often. If this has happened to you, you have experienced mere exposure. But perhaps one day you discovered that you were really tired of the songs—they had become too familiar. You put the songs away for a while, only bringing them out later, when you found that liked them more again (they were now less familiar). People prefer things that have an optimal level of familiarity—neither too strange nor too well-known (Bornstein, 1989).
Affect and Attraction
Because our relationships with others are based in large part on emotional responses, it will come as no surprise to you to hear that affect is particularly important in interpersonal relationships. The relationship between mood and liking is pretty straightforward. We tend to like people more when we are in good moods and to like them less when we are in bad moods. This prediction follows directly from the expectation that affective states provide us with information about the social context—in this case, the people around us. Positive affect signals that it is safe and desirable to approach the other person, whereas negative affect is more likely to indicate danger and to suggest avoidance.
Moods are particularly important and informative when they are created by the person we are interacting with. When we find someone attractive, for instance, we experience positive affect, and we end up liking the person even more. However, mood that is created by causes other than the other person can also influence liking. Alice Isen and her colleagues (Isen & Levin, 1972) created a variety of situations designed to put people in good moods. They had participants unexpectedly find a coin in a phone booth, played them some soothing music, or provided them a snack of milk and cookies at an experimental session. In each of these cases, the participants who had been provided with the pleasant experience indicated more positive mood in comparison with other participants who had not received the positive experience—and they also expressed more liking for other things and other people. The moral of the story is clear—if you want to get someone to like you, put them in a good mood. Furthermore, it is pretty easy to do so—simply bringing flowers, looking your best, or telling a funny joke might well be enough to be effective.
Arousal and Attraction
Although the relationship between mood and liking is very simple, the relationship between our current state of physiological arousal and liking is more complex. Consider an experiment by Gregory White and his colleagues (White, Fishbein, & Rutsein, 1981) in which the participants, male college students, were asked to complete a number of different tasks in a laboratory setting. In one part of the study, the men were asked to run in place for either a short time (15 seconds) or a longer time (120 seconds). Then the men viewed a videotape of either an attractive or an unattractive woman who was supposedly a sophomore at the college. In the video, she talked about her hobbies and career interests and indicated that she was interested in meeting people and did not have a boyfriend. The men, who thought that they would soon be meeting the woman, rated how romantically attracted they were to her.
Confirming that the experimental manipulation had created high and low levels of arousal, White and his colleagues found that the heart rate and other signs of physiological arousal were higher for the participants who had exercised longer. They did not find that the arousal created by running in place for 2 minutes increased or decreased liking directly, but they did find an interaction between arousal level and the attractiveness of the woman being judged. As you can see in the following figure, the men who had been aroused by running in place liked the attractive woman more and the unattractive woman less than the men who were less aroused.
Figure 8.4: Arousal polarizes judgments. In this experiment, male college students rated an attractive or an unattractive woman after they had run in place for 15 seconds (low arousal) or for 120 seconds (high arousal). The judgments under arousal are polarized. Data are from White, Fishbein, and Rutstein (1981).
In another interesting field study, Dutton and Aron (1974) had an attractive young woman approach individual young men as they crossed a long, wobbly suspension bridge hanging over 200 feet above the Capilano River in British Columbia. The woman asked each man to help her fill out a questionnaire for a class project. When he had finished, she wrote her name and phone number on a piece of paper and invited him to call if he wanted to hear more about the project. Over half of the men who had been interviewed on the bridge later called her. In contrast, men who were approached on a low solid bridge by the same experimenter or who were interviewed on the suspension bridge by men called the woman significantly less frequently. One interpretation of this finding is that the men who were interviewed on the bridge were experiencing arousal as a result of being on the bridge but that they misattributed their arousal as liking the interviewer.
What these studies and many others like them demonstrate is that arousal polarizes liking (Foster, Witcher, Campbell, & Green, 1998). When we are aroused, everything seems more extreme. This effect is not unexpected because the function of arousal in emotion is to increase the strength of an emotional response. Love that is accompanied by arousal (sexual or otherwise) is stronger love than love that has a lower level of arousal. And our feelings of anger, dislike, or disgust are also stronger when they are accompanied by high arousal.
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As with mood states, arousal may sometimes come directly from the partner. Both very attractive and very unattractive people are likely to be more arousing than are people who are more average in attractiveness, and this arousal may create strong feelings of like or dislike. In other cases, the arousal may come from another source, such as from exercising, walking across a high bridge, or a roller-coaster ride.
The strong feelings that we experience toward another person that are accompanied by increases in arousal and sexual attraction are called passion, and the emotionally intense love that is based on passion is known as passionate love—the kind of love that we experience when we are first getting to know a romantic partner. Again, there is a clear take-home for you: If you like a person and think that the person likes you in return, and if you want to get that person to like you more, then it will be helpful to create some extra arousal in that person, perhaps by going to a scary movie, doing in-line skating, or even meeting for a workout at the gym. On the other hand, you need to be sure that the other person is initially positively inclined toward you. If not, arousing experiences could make matters even worse.
The Science of Attraction
Evidence for human mating preferences is, by its very nature, complicated. Who we choose for mates is affected by factors such as appearance, grooming, education, class, dancing ability and preferred sports team. However there is evidence that human mate choice might be linked to MHC genes. A number of experiments have suggested that human females prefer the scent of males who are dissimilar to them in MHC (Box 4). Moreover, women rank a man’s scent as the most important factor (more important than sight, sound and feel) in mate choice. In a fascinating twist, one study has shown that people who share MHC genotypes choose similar perfumes, suggesting that perfume preferences might serve to amplify your MHC display.
The Stinky T-shirt Experiments
Human mate choices are complicated! Recent work has attempted to isolate females’ preferences for male scents. In a typical experiment, men are asked to refrain, from smoking, sex, spicy foods, and from using any scented products during the study period. In addition, the men are asked to sleep in the same t-shirt for two or three days. Female participants then smell the t-shirts that have been stored in sealed plastic bags and rate the attractiveness of the smell.
On average, women rate the smell of the t-shirts of men whose MHC genotype was distinct from their own as significantly more pleasant than those with a similar MHC genotype. Interestingly, this trend only held up for women not taking oral contraceptives. A recent phenomenon is the interest in scent parties, in which people can rate the attractiveness of each other’s t-shirts and then meet the person whose scent is interesting to them.
Hormones and Attraction
Because liking and loving are so central to human experience, they are determined in large part by fundamental human biological mechanisms. And one important determinant of our responses to others is the release of hormones. The one that is most directly involved in interpersonal attraction is oxytocin, a hormone that is important in female reproduction and that also influences social behaviors, including the development of long-term romantic attachments. Levels of oxytocin increase when mothers nurse their infants, and its presence helps mothers and infants bond (Feldman, Weller, Zagoory-Sharon, & Levine, 2007; Penton-Voak et al., 2003; Pedersen, 2006). But oxytocin also binds us to others in adult close relationships (Floyd, 2006). Oxytocin leads us to trust and cooperate with others (Kirsch et al., 2005; Kosfeld, Heinriches, Zak, Fischbacker, & Fehr, 2005) and, particularly, to respond positively to others who are members of our ingroups. The experience of romantic love is also associated with the release of oxytocin (Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, Campos, & Altemus, 2006).
The hormones that are released during the female menstrual cycle influence women’s attraction to men. Women become more attracted to men, especially to those with symmetrical and particularly masculine characteristics, during the times in their menstrual cycles when they are most likely to become pregnant (Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver-Apgar, 2005; Pillsworth & Haselton, 2006). It is likely that these preferences were selected evolutionarily because the men who have these characteristics are also more genetically fit (Johnston, Hagel, Franklin, Fink, & Grammer, 2001; Pawlowski & Jasienska, 2005).
The male sex hormone testosterone also relates to liking, but particularly for passionate love. Testosterone is related to an increased sex drive in both men and women. However, over the long term, testosterone does not help people stay together. In comparison with men who are in short-term sexual relationships, those in long-term relationships have relatively lower levels of testosterone, and people who are married have lower levels of testosterone in comparison with people who are single (Dabbs & Dabbs, 2000; Gray et al., 2004).
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Key Takeaways
• Particularly in initial encounters, people are strongly influenced by the physical attractiveness of the other person.
• We prefer people who are young, who have symmetrical facial features and bodies, and who appear average. These preferences may be because these features suggest to us that the person is healthy.
• Although men and women agree on many aspects of what they find attractive, women are relatively more focused on the social status of their romantic partners, whereas men are more focused on the youth and attractiveness of their partners.
• We tend to like people who share our values and beliefs, both because similarity makes things easier and because similarity reinforces our own values and beliefs.
• Proximity and the principle of mere exposure are two important determinants of interpersonal attraction.
• We tend to like people more when we are in good moods.
• Our current state of physiological arousal tends to polarize our liking.
• Science sheds some insights into attraction, but there’s still a lot more to learn.
Licenses and Attributions
Principles of Social Psychology by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
The Evolution and Biology of Sex by Sehoya Cotner and Deena Wassenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
The following videos have this license: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
BuzzFeedVideo. (2016). What actually makes a man attractive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU0uNGUxdyo
BuzzFeedVideo. (2015). Men’s standards of beauty around the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tneKwarw1Yk
As/Is. (2014). Beauty standards around the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9FmDBrewA
BuzzFeedVideo. (2015). Women’s ideal body types throughout history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrp0zJZu0a4
Discovery. (2009). Science of sex: Sexy walk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfdXhwYdQUE
HeroicImaginationTV. (2011). The Halo Effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEho_4ejkNw
SciShow Psych. (2017). Misattribution: How we mistake fear for love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqhXH2TsN9U
TED-Ed. (2014).The science of attraction – Dawn Maslar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=169N81xAffQ
License
Introduction to Human Sexuality by Ericka Goerling & Emerson Wolfe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.07%3A_Chapter_7_-_Attraction.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Consider intersectionality as it applies to individual’s sexual responses
• Explore the role of brain and hormonal mechanisms in sexual response, as well as sensation & perception
• Distinguish between hormones and pheromones
• Describe the seminal work of Master’s & Johnson’s EPOR model of sexual response
• Compare other theories of sexual response, including Kaplan, Basson & the Dual Control approach
• Analyze the concept of love with emerging research on evolution & physiology
• Explore the importance of oxytocin in social interactions
Introduction
If you remember (or go back and revisit) the “Circles of Sexuality” model from Chapter 1, you will see that sensuality plays a key role in our sexuality. Sensuality is also interconnected with intimacy, sexual identity, sexual health and reproduction, and sexualization. Let’s take a closer look at the sensual aspect of sexuality by analyzing physiological responses while also seeing the whole picture in which many interlocking parts are influencing the way individuals make meaning out of their physical, bodily experiences. The changes to brain chemistry, the hormones that rush through the bloodstream, the sensory neurons behind that electric and tingling feeling of intimate touch, the role of erogenous zones in enhancing pleasure, and the pheromones that we put off that are picked up without conscious awareness by others will be explored. The psychological interpretation of the physical changes that are happening during arousal and orgasm are also influenced by society, culture, and personal perspective that can alter the way that meaning is made out of these experiences. The biochemistry of love will be discussed in which heartbreak and the epigenetic and healing effects of oxytocin will be explored.
Sexual Response
Sexual response is both biological and based on socialization factors. Each individual person has a natural degree to which they become aroused in response to sexual stimuli similar to how some people react more intensely to loud sounds or have a low to high pain tolerance. Life experiences across the lifespan continue to influence and change these as well. Individual differences in how sexual stimuli are experienced will influence the degree of desire to engage in certain sexual behaviors. Social factors, such as shame and stigma around certain sexual behaviors, can also influence this process by reworking the way that touch and sexual contact are perceived. In this section, we will look at different aspects of the nervous system that are implicated in this process, explore the groundbreaking Masters and Johnson research on the sexual response cycle, and discuss additional theories that have been developed over time that explore the ways the social environment interacts with sensory experiences.
Sex on the Brain
Figure 3: Some of the many regions of the brain and brainstem activated during pleasure experiences. [Image: Frank Gaillard, https://goo.gl/yCKuQ2, CC-BY-SA 3.0. Identifying marks added]
At first glance—or touch for that matter—the clitoris and penis are the parts of our anatomies that seem to bring the most pleasure. However, these two organs pale in comparison to our central nervous system’s capacity for pleasure. Extensive regions of the brain and brainstem are activated when a person experiences pleasure, including: the insula, temporal cortex, limbic system, nucleus accumbens, basal ganglia, superior parietal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and cerebellum (see Figure 3, Ortigue et al., 2007). Neuroimaging techniques show that these regions of the brain are active when patients have spontaneous orgasms involving no direct stimulation of the skin (e.g., Fadul et al., 2005) and when experimental participants self-stimulate erogenous zones (e.g., Komisaruk et al., 2011). Erogenous zones are sensitive areas of skin that are connected, via the nervous system, to the somatosensory cortex in the brain.
Figure 4: Erogenous Zones Mapped on the Somatosensory Cortex.
The somatosensory cortex (SC) is the part of the brain primarily responsible for processing sensory information from the skin. The more sensitive an area of your skin is (e.g., your lips), the larger the corresponding area of the SC will be; the less sensitive an area of your skin is (e.g., your trunk), the smaller the corresponding area of the SC will be (see Figure 4, Penfield & Boldrey, 1937). When a sensitive area of a person’s body is touched, it is typically interpreted by the brain in one of three ways: “That tickles!” “That hurts!” or, “That…you need to do again!” Thus, the more sensitive areas of our bodies have greater potential to evoke pleasure. A study by Nummenmaa and his colleagues (2016) used a unique method to test this hypothesis. The Nummenmaa research team showed experimental participants images of same- and opposite-sex bodies. They then asked the participants to color the regions of the body that, when touched, they or members of the opposite sex would experience as sexually arousing while masturbating or having sex with a partner. Nummenmaa found the expected “hotspot” erogenous zones around the external sex organs, breasts, and anus, but also reported areas of the skin beyond these hotspots: “[T]actile stimulation of practically all bodily regions trigger sexual arousal….” Moreover, he concluded, “[H]aving sex with a partner…”—beyond the hotspots—“…reflects the role of touching in the maintenance of…pair bonds.”
Sensation and Perception
Sensation is the way the nervous system, such as different areas of the brain, processes sensory information from the environment, such as light, sound, smell, and touch/pain. Let’s take a look at touch in the context of sensual contact by explaining the process of transduction–receptors in the skin relay the message of being touched to transmitters in the spinal cord that converts this to neural signals interpreted by the brain which then allows effectors, neurons within muscles, to signal a response to the stimuli, such as by jerking away the hand when something is hot. Perception is how an individual associates meaning with what they are sensing. For instance, masturbation will cause the genital’s skin receptor sites and nervous system to respond to this sensation producing arousal; however, the self-talk regarding the morality of masturbation will impact the way the person perceives the arousal. Pay attention to the way that stigma and shame around pleasure and sensuality have influenced the way you attach meaning to your physiological experiences.
Exploring your erogenous zones: What areas of your body feel particularly pleasurable to the touch? Some common areas, apart from the genitals, are the lower back, inner thighs, lips, nipples, feet, hands, and more! Each individual will have specific areas so explore this question with your sexual partners as well.
Sensate focus is sometimes utilized within sex therapy to increase control over physiological responses and to provide insight into sexual partners’ pleasure points in addition to one’s own without touching or stimulating the genitals. Anxiety is experienced by many individuals as being sensual can feel very vulnerable and scary. Sensate focus uses aspects of cognitive-behavioral therapy and behavioral modification to focus on the senses and alter the meaning that has been associated with sexual interactions. Check out this article on sensate focus techniques from Cornell University (2019). These techniques can be utilized by anyone who is interested and can enhance sexual pleasure through increasing self-awareness and communication focused on pleasure with partners.
Hormones and Pheromones
Androgens, estrogen, and progestin bind to hormone receptor sites that allow the synthesis of neurochemicals (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017). During excitement and arousal, dopamine, oxytocin, and norepinephrine are released into the bloodstream, and during orgasm, opioids and endocannabinoids are released (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017). Hormones have activating effects in which they can activate and deactivate sexual arousal. Testosterone is particularly implicated in increasing desire for sex. Too high or too low of testosterone reduces desire. Intense emotions increase sexual arousal such as happiness, anger, anxiety, sadness, etc. because of their physiological impacts on our endocrine and nervous systems. For instance, sex and aggression both involve the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine (which are also neurotransmitters) as they invoke a sense of excitement then resolution. This connection between emotions and our physiological reactions is a growing focus within research (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017).
While hormones are typically released within the bloodstream and influence sexual arousal, pheromones are biochemicals secreted outside the body that communicate to others on a chemical level about hormonal levels and ovulation which subconsciously attracts us to them based on our own body’s chemistry (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017). Researchers are still trying to understand the role of pheromones in sexual responses, but what is known is that when people are presented with the scent of others they are typically more attracted to the smell of someone in a way that matches with their sexual orientation even without any other information provided (Savic, 2014). Additionally, the scent of people who are biologically related is rated as less attractive and possibly connects to evolution protecting against unintentional incest (Savic, 2014). Animal studies on male monkeys indicate that they experience increases in testosterone when exposed to an ovulating female’s urine (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017). Pheromones are believed to influence the hormones in others and this can be seen by women’s menstrual cycles syncing up when they spend a lot of time with each other as well. This further showcases how interconnected humans are with one another biologically in addition to socially.
Theories and Models Regarding Sexual Response
Masters and Johnson
Although people have always had sex, the scientific study of it has remained taboo until relatively recently. In fact, the study of sexual anatomy, physiology, and behavior wasn’t formally undertaken until the late 19th century, and only began to be taken seriously as recently as the 1950’s. Notably, William Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia Johnson (1925-2013) formed a research team in 1957 that expanded studies of sexuality from merely asking people about their sex lives to measuring people’s anatomy and physiology while they were actually having sex. Masters was a former Navy lieutenant, married father of two, and trained gynecologist with an interest in studying prostitutes. Johnson was a former country music singer, single mother of two, three-time divorcee, and two-time college dropout with an interest in studying sociology. And yes, if it piques your curiosity, Masters and Johnson were lovers (when Masters was still married); they eventually married each other, but later divorced. Despite their colorful private lives they were dedicated researchers with an interest in understanding sex from a scientific perspective.
Masters and Johnson used primarily plethysmography (the measuring of changes in blood- or airflow to organs) to determine sexual responses in a wide range of body parts—breasts, skin, various muscle structures, bladder, rectum, external sex organs, and lungs—as well as measurements of people’s pulse and blood pressure. They measured more than 10,000 orgasms in 700 individuals (18 to 89 years of age), during sex with partners or alone. Masters and Johnson’s findings were initially published in two best-selling books: Human Sexual Response, 1966, and Human Sexual Inadequacy, 1970. Their initial experimental techniques and data form the bases of our contemporary understanding of sexual anatomy and physiology.
Physiology and the Sexual Response Cycle
The brain and other sex organs respond to sexual stimuli in a universal fashion known as the sexual response cycle (SRC; Masters & Johnson, 1966). The SRC is composed of four phases:
1. Excitement: Activation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system defines the excitement phase; heart rate and breathing accelerates, along with increased blood flow to the penis, vaginal walls, clitoris, and nipples (vasocongestion). Involuntary muscular movements (myotonia), such as facial grimaces, also occur during this phase.
2. Plateau: Blood flow, heart rate, and breathing intensify during the plateau phase. During this phase, often referred to as “foreplay,” females experience an orgasmic platform—the outer third of the vaginal walls tightening—and males experience a release of pre-seminal fluid containing healthy sperm cells (Killick et al., 2011). This early release of fluid makes penile withdrawal a relatively ineffective form of birth control (Aisch & Marsh, 2014). (Question: What do you call a couple who use the withdrawal method of birth control? Answer: Parents.)
3. Orgasm: The shortest but most pleasurable phase is the orgasm phase. After reaching its climax, neuromuscular tension is released and the hormone oxytocin floods the bloodstream—facilitating emotional bonding. Although the rhythmic muscular contractions of an orgasm are temporally associated with ejaculation, this association is not necessary because orgasm and ejaculation are two separate physiological processes.
4. Resolution: The body returns to a pre-aroused state in the resolution phase. Most males enter a refractory period of being unresponsive to sexual stimuli. The length of this period depends on age, frequency of recent sexual relations, level of intimacy with a partner, and novelty. Because most females do not have a refractory period, they have a greater potential—physiologically—of having multiple orgasms.
Of interest to note, the SRC occurs regardless of the type of sexual behavior—whether the behavior is masturbation; romantic kissing; or oral, vaginal, or anal sex (Masters & Johnson, 1966). Further, a partner or environmental object is sufficient, but not necessary, for the SRC to occur.
Kaplan’s Triphasic Model
Helen Singer Kaplan was a sex therapist seeking a model that would aid her in explaining the sexual response cycle to her clients. Kaplan adjusted Masters and Johnsons’ model by adding the desire phase and reduced excitement and plateau to just the excitement phase in which she focused on vasocongestion occurring. By focusing on the psychological and physiological processes more than trying to separate these experiences, her model became:
1. Desire: Desire activates excitement and excitement can cause desire, motivating a person toward sexual activity. This phase is psychological while the next two are physiological.
2. Arousal: Vasocongestion causes blood to flow to the genitals and increase in blood pressure and is controlled by the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 191)
3. Orgasm: Reflex muscular contractions also involve anatomical structures and are connected to the nervous system. The ejaculation reflex can be controlled whereas the erection reflex typically cannot. Ejaculation and orgasm are controlled by the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system in order to return the body to homeostasis.
Unfortunately, Kaplan’s model did not seem to reflect women’s experience (Lieblum, 2000). Many women never experience spontaneous desire and for those who do, it does not always lead to sexual engagement or arousal. Furthermore, for many people, arousal occurs before desire. Finally, Kaplan’s model didn’t address sexual satisfaction (though her clinical work was built on that).
Basson’s Nonlinear Approach to Sexual Response
In response to to Masters & Johnson, linear model (where there is a start, a middle, and a finish line) and Kaplan’s incomplete model, Rosemary Basson articulated a more complex, circular model of sexual response. Basson’s circular diagram shows how sex is cyclical: desire often comes in response to something else, like a touch or an erotic conversation. If the sex is hot, even the fading memory of it could become motivation for more sex/arousal later on. Finally, sexual encounters don’t have to end with a mutual orgasm. They end with satisfaction, however a couple defines that, whether that’s five orgasms or none.
While this model was first conceptualized with female sexuality in mind, it’s applicable to all.
The Dual Control Model
This model was developed by former Kinsey Institute director Dr. John Bancroft and Dr. Erick Janssen in the late 1990s. It “proposes that two basic processes underlie human sexual response: excitation (responding with arousal to sexual stimuli) and inhibition (inhibiting sexual arousal)” (Hyde & DeLamater, 2017, p. 191). We have evolutionarily developed an inhibition aspect to the sexual response process to protect us from dying. Imagine you are in the middle of having sex and a dinosaur begins to run at you. Survival requires the ability to inhibit sexual arousal to focus on getting away to safety. Or, perhaps a more realistic example could be masturbating in the privacy of a bedroom when there is a sudden knock on the door and mom saying she is coming in. Mom is not a dinosaur but she is going to have that same inhibiting impact.
This perspective also explores the reason why some people may be more easily aroused by sexual stimuli while others may be less impacted. Every person has their own degree of excitation and inhibition similar to how each person has different tolerances for loud sounds or pain. If a person has high excitation and low inhibition, it may be easier for them to become aroused and take more time to return to homeostasis. Touch and sensations may be heightened and they may require less stimulation to reach orgasm. On the other hand, if someone has low excitation and high inhibition, sexual stimuli may be less arousing and they may require a broader range of sensual stimulation to achieve orgasm. Excitation and inhibition are negatively correlated with one another because as one increases the other decreases.
We are genetically predisposed to having a certain combination of sexual excitation and inhibition. However, the dual control model also recognizes that there are cognitive factors shaping this process. Our experiences impact the interpretation of the senses and can cause heightened distress or increased tolerance. Early learning and culture can then drastically shape someone’s excitation and inhibition combination. Many researchers liken it to having both a gas pedal (excitation or SES) and a brake pedal (inhibition or SIS) in a car – people will often engage one or both pedals to a differing degree in any particular sexual situation, depending on their unique sexual physiology, history, and personality.
In thinking about intersecting identities, how could generation, physical health, mental health, religion, education, family background, financial resources, body image, and more influence excitation and inhibition? What messages about various sexual behaviors have you internalized, and how might this influence your neurological sexual response? Having a conversation with your partners about their degree of excitation and inhibition can be helpful to know in relation to your own as well.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=78#oembed-1
The Biochemistry of Love
Love is deeply biological. It pervades every aspect of our lives and has inspired countless works of art. Love also has a profound effect on our mental and physical state. A “broken heart” or a failed relationship can have disastrous effects; bereavement disrupts human physiology and may even precipitate death. Without loving relationships, humans fail to flourish, even if all of their other basic needs are met. As such, love is clearly not “just” an emotion; it is a biological process that is both dynamic and bidirectional in several dimensions. Social interactions between individuals, for example, trigger cognitive and physiological processes that influence emotional and mental states. In turn, these changes influence future social interactions. Similarly, the maintenance of loving relationships requires constant feedback through sensory and cognitive systems; the body seeks love and responds constantly to interactions with loved ones or to the absence of such interactions. The evolutionary principles and ancient hormonal and neural systems that support the beneficial and healing effects of loving relationships are described here.
Introduction to the Study of Love
Although evidence exists for the healing power of love, only recently has science turned its attention to providing a physiological explanation for love. The study of love in this context offers insight into many important topics, including the biological basis of interpersonal relationships and why and how disruptions in social bonds have such pervasive consequences for behavior and physiology. Some of the answers will be found in our growing knowledge of the neurobiological and endocrinological mechanisms of social behavior and interpersonal engagement.
The evolution of social behavior
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Life on earth is fundamentally social: The ability to dynamically interact with other living organisms to support mutual homeostasis, growth, and reproduction evolved very early. Social interactions are present in primitive invertebrates and even among prokaryotes: Bacteria recognize and approach members of their own species. Bacteria also reproduce more successfully in the presence of their own kind and are able to form communities with physical and chemical characteristics that go far beyond the capabilities of the individual cell (Ingham & Ben-Jacob, 2008).
The evolutionary pathways that led from reptiles to mammals allowed the emergence of the unique anatomical systems and biochemical mechanisms that enable social engagement and selectively reciprocal sociality. Reptiles show minimal parental investment in offspring and form nonselective relationships between individuals. Pet owners may become emotionally attached to their turtle or snake, but this relationship is not reciprocal. In contrast, most mammals show intense parental investment in offspring and form lasting bonds with their children. Many mammalian species—including humans, wolves, and prairie voles—also develop long-lasting, reciprocal, and selective relationships between adults, with several features of what humans experience as “love.” In turn, these reciprocal interactions trigger dynamic feedback mechanisms that foster growth and health.
What is love? An evolutionary and physiological perspective
Human love is more complex than simple feedback mechanisms. Love may create its own reality. The biology of love originates in the primitive parts of the brain—the emotional core of the human nervous system—which evolved long before the cerebral cortex. The brain “in love” is flooded with vague sensations, often transmitted by the vagus nerve, and creating much of what we experience as emotion. The modern cortex struggles to interpret love’s messages, and weaves a narrative around incoming visceral experiences, potentially reacting to that narrative rather than to reality. It also is helpful to realize that mammalian social behavior is supported by biological components that were repurposed or co-opted over the course of mammalian evolution, eventually permitting lasting relationships between adults.
Stress and love
Emotional bonds can form during periods of extreme duress, especially when the survival of one individual depends on the presence and support of another. There also is evidence that oxytocin is released in response to acutely stressful experiences, perhaps serving as hormonal “insurance” against overwhelming stress. Oxytocin may help to ensure that parents and others will engage with and care for infants; develop stable, loving relationships; and seek out and receive support from others in times of need.
The absence of love in early life can be detrimental to mental and physical health
During early life in particular, trauma or neglect may produce behaviors and emotional states in humans that are socially pathological. Because the processes involved in creating social behaviors and social emotions are delicately balanced, these be may be triggered in inappropriate contexts, leading to aggression toward friends or family. Alternatively, bonds may be formed with prospective partners who fail to provide social support or protection.
Loving relationships in early life can have epigenetic consequences
Love is “epigenetic.” That is, positive experiences in early life can act upon and alter the expression of specific genes. These changes in gene expression may have behavioral consequences through simple biochemical changes, such as adding a methyl group to a particular site within the genome (Zhang & Meaney, 2010). It is possible that these changes in the genome may even be passed to the next generation.
Although we are all born with a finite set of genes, experiences in childhood will cause some genes to express themselves (e.g., encourage certain personality traits), while other genes will remain dormant.
Social behaviors, emotional attachment to others, and long-lasting reciprocal relationships also are both plastic and adaptive, and so is the biology upon which they are based. For example, infants of traumatized or highly stressed parents might be chronically exposed to vasopressin, either through their own increased production of the peptide, or through higher levels of vasopressin in maternal milk. Such increased exposure could sensitize the infant to defensive behaviors or create a lifelong tendency to overreact to threat. Based on research in rats, it seems that in response to adverse early experiences of chronic isolation, the genes for vasopressin receptors can become upregulated (Zhang et al., 2012), leading to an increased sensitivity to acute stressors or anxiety that may persist throughout life.
Epigenetic programming triggered by early life experiences is adaptive in allowing neuroendocrine systems to project and plan for future behavioral demands. But epigenetic changes that are long-lasting also can create atypical social or emotional behaviors (Zhang & Meaney, 2010) that may be especially likely to surface in later life, and in the face of social or emotional challenges.
Exposure to exogenous hormones in early life also may be epigenetic. For example, prairie voles treated postnatally with vasopressin (especially males) were later more aggressive, whereas those exposed to a vasopressin antagonist showed less aggression in adulthood. Conversely, in voles the exposure of infants to slightly increased levels of oxytocin during development increased the tendency to show a pair bond. However, these studies also showed that a single exposure to a higher level of oxytocin in early life could disrupt the later capacity to pair bond (Carter et al., 2009).
There is little doubt that either early social experiences or the effects of developmental exposure to these neuropeptides holds the potential to have long-lasting effects on behavior. Both parental care and exposure to oxytocin in early life can permanently modify hormonal systems, altering the capacity to form relationships and influence the expression of love across the life span. Our preliminary findings in voles further suggest that early life experiences affect the methylation of the oxytocin receptor gene and its expression (Connelly, Kenkel, Erickson, & Carter, 2011). Thus, we can plausibly argue that love is epigenetic.
The absence of social behavior or isolation also has consequences for the oxytocin system
Given the power of positive social experiences, it is not surprising that a lack of social relationships also may lead to alterations in behavior as well as changes in oxytocin and vasopressin pathways. We have found that social isolation reduced the expression of the gene for the oxytocin receptor, and at the same time increased the expression of genes for the vasopressin peptide. In female prairie voles, isolation also was accompanied by an increase in blood levels of oxytocin, possibly as a coping mechanism. However, over time, isolated prairie voles of both sexes showed increases in measures of depression, anxiety, and physiological arousal, and these changes were observed even when endogenous oxytocin was elevated. Thus, even the hormonal insurance provided by endogenous oxytocin in face of the chronic stress of isolation was not sufficient to dampen the consequences of living alone. Predictably, when isolated voles were given additional exogenous oxytocin, this treatment did restore many of these functions to normal (Grippo, Trahanas, Zimmerman, Porges, & Carter, 2009).
In modern societies, humans can survive, at least after childhood, with little or no human contact. Communication technology, social media, electronic parenting, and many other recent technological advances may reduce social behaviors, placing both children and adults at risk for social isolation and disorders of the autonomic nervous system, including deficits in their capacity for social engagement and love (Porges, 2011).
Social engagement actually helps us to cope with stress. The same hormones and areas of the brain that increase the capacity of the body to survive stress also enable us to better adapt to an ever-changing social and physical environment. Individuals with strong emotional support and relationships are more resilient in the face of stressors than those who feel isolated or lonely. Lesions in various bodily tissues, including the brain, heal more quickly in animals that are living socially versus in isolation (Karelina & DeVries, 2011). The protective effects of positive sociality seem to rely on the same cocktail of hormones that carries a biological message of “love” throughout the body.
Can love—or perhaps oxytocin—be a medicine?
Although research has only begun to examine the physiological effects of these peptides beyond social behavior, there is a wealth of new evidence showing that oxytocin can influence physiological responses to stress and injury. As only one example, the molecules associated with love have restorative properties, including the ability to literally heal a “broken heart.” Oxytocin receptors are expressed in the heart, and precursors for oxytocin appear to be critical for the development of the fetal heart (Danalache, Gutkowska, Slusarz, Berezowska, & Jankowski, 2010). Oxytocin exerts protective and restorative effects in part through its capacity to convert undifferentiated stem cells into cardiomyocytes. Oxytocin can facilitate adult neurogenesis and tissue repair, especially after a stressful experience. We now know that oxytocin has direct anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties in in vitro models of atherosclerosis (Szeto et al., 2008). The heart seems to rely on oxytocin as part of a normal process of protection and self-healing. Researchers are interested in the medical/therapeutic potential of oxytocin.
Thus, oxytocin exposure early in life not only regulates our ability to love and form social bonds, it also affects our health and well-being. Oxytocin modulates the hypothalamic–pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis, especially in response to disruptions in homeostasis (Carter, 1998), and coordinates demands on the immune system and energy balance. Long-term, secure relationships provide emotional support and down-regulate reactivity of the HPA axis, whereas intense stressors, including birth, trigger activation of the HPA axis and sympathetic nervous system. The ability of oxytocin to regulate these systems probably explains the exceptional capacity of most women to cope with the challenges of childbirth and childrearing.
Dozens of ongoing clinical trials are currently attempting to examine the therapeutic potential of oxytocin in disorders ranging from autism to heart disease. Of course, as in hormonal studies in voles, the effects are likely to depend on the history of the individual and the context, and to be dose-dependent. As this research is emerging, a variety of individual differences and apparent discrepancies in the effects of exogenous oxytocin are being reported. Most of these studies do not include any information on the endogenous hormones, or on the oxytocin or vasopressin receptors, which are likely to affect the outcome of such treatments.
Research in this field is new and there is much left to understand. However, it is already clear that both love and oxytocin are powerful. Of course, with power comes responsibility. Although research into mechanisms through which love—or hormones such as oxytocin—may protect us against stress and disease is in its infancy, this knowledge will ultimately increase our understanding of the way that our emotions impact upon health and disease. The same molecules that allow us to give and receive love also link our need for others with health and well-being.
Conclusion
In this section, we’ve discussed historical and emerging approaches to sexual response. An important take-away to this section is that sexual responsiveness isn’t simply physiological: Psychological factors are also present. At the same time, biology matters and consideration for hormonal and neurological information can be important in our sexual experiences. Keeping an intersectional lens can be a helpful way of learning, evaluating and growing in your own sexual responses.
Licenses and Attributions
Carter, S. & Porges, S. (2021). Biochemistry of love. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from http://noba.to/3629qu8v. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
Lucas, D. & Fox, J. (2021). Human sexual anatomy and physiology. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from http://noba.to/m28zt7ds. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
TED’s videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International)
TEDx Talks. (2016). Confidence and joy are the keys to a great sex life | Emily Nagoski | TEDxUniversityofNevada. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HILY0wWBlBM
License
Introduction to Human Sexuality by Ericka Goerling & Emerson Wolfe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.08%3A_Chapter_8_-Sexual_Response_and_the_Biochemistry_of_Love.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Demonstrate an understanding of the range of options for sexual expression
• Analyze relationship boundaries in order to express wants, desires, limits, and consent
• Summarize how people might appraise (make sense of) sexual behaviors differently (i.e. some may perceive negative associations whereas others may experience positive associations)
• Explore the benefits of sexual behaviors physically, emotionally and socially as well as understand how sexual behavior influences identity development
Introduction to Sexual Behavior
When we first discussed research and human sexuality, you may remember reading about the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB), which is the largest nationally representative survey focused on understanding sex in the United States. With more than 20,000 respondents, ranging in age from 14 to 102, the NSSHB yields incredible data regarding American sexual behaviors. In one of the initial data collections (data has been collected in 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018), Americans reported 41 different combinations of sex acts during their most recent sexual encounter (Herbernick, et al., 2010). That’s a fair amount of sexual behavior happening!
While we have a lot of unique types of sexual behavior happening, actually defining sex is a bit daunting. When researchers asked college students what constituted as sex, their replies were varied (Lehmiller, 2016).
https://www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/2016/1/10/infographic-how-do-college-students-define-sex/
A subsequent follow-up study asked medical students what constituted sex and the findings were similar (though, thankfully, both penile-vagina penetration AND anal sex were considered sex; Talley, Cho, Strassberg, & Rullo, 2016, as cited in Lehmiller, 2021). Perhaps the biggest take-away from both of these studies is that definitions of what is sex vary. Additionally, sexual variation is very much a part of the human, sexual experience.
Just as we may wonder what characterizes particular gender or sexual orientations as “normal,” we might have similar questions about sexual behaviors. What is considered sexually “normal” likely depends on culture. Some cultures are sexually-restrictive—such as one extreme example off the coast of Ireland, studied in the mid-20th century, known as the island of Inis Beag. The inhabitants of Inis Beag detested nudity and viewed sex as a necessary evil for the sole purpose of reproduction. They wore clothes when they bathed and even while having sex. Further, sex education was nonexistent, as was breast feeding (Messenger, 1989). By contrast, Mangaians, of the South Pacific island of A’ua’u, are an example of a highly sexually-permissive culture. Young Mangaian boys are encouraged to masturbate. By age 13, they’re instructed by older males on how to sexually perform and maximize orgasms for themselves and their partners. When the boys are a bit older, this formal instruction is replaced with hands-on coaching by older females. Young girls are also expected to explore their sexuality and develop a breadth of sexual knowledge before marriage (Marshall & Suggs, 1971). These cultures make clear that what are considered sexually normal behaviors depends on time and place.
With cultural context in mind, how do you think American culture impacts your own definition of sexual behavior?
Sexual Scripts
A script is what actors read or study and what guides their behavior in a certain role. A script is a blueprint for what we “should do” in our roles. Sexual scripts are blueprints and guidelines for what we define as our role in sexual expression, sexual orientation, sexual behaviors, sexual desires, and the sexual component of our self-definition. All of us are sexual beings, yet none of us is exactly identical to another in our sexual definitions and script expectations. Having said that, keep in mind that we are not just born with sexual scripts in place; they are learned. Sexual socialization is the process by which we learn how, when, where, with whom, why, and with which motivations we are sexual beings.
We are all born with drives, which are biological needs that demand our attention and behavioral responses to them. The most powerful drives are circulation, breathing, voiding our urine and other waste, eating, drinking, sleeping, and sexual involvement. Sexual drives are biological urges to participate in sexual activity and in certain sexual roles. Sexual scripts, once learned, will shape how that drive is answered. Sexuality is learned via culture and socialization. There are as many unique sexual scripts as there are people, yet some of these scripts have common themes and can be viewed as a collective pattern or trend in the larger social level.
Many of us learn our sexual scripts in a passive way. In other words, we don’t learn from experience, but from a synthesis of concepts, images, ideals, and sometimes misconceptions. For example, the commonly held belief that men and women are two different creatures, perhaps even from different planets, was a very successful fad in recent years that led an entire generation to believe that men might be from “Mars” while women might be from “Venus.”
Today more and more people living in the U.S. have less religious values and more diverse experiences with sexuality. Further, much of the younger generations’ focus on sex is on the orgasm. An orgasm is the sexual climax that accompanies sexual intercourse and includes muscle tightening in the genital area, electrical sensations radiating from the genitals, and a surge of a variety of pleasure-producing hormones throughout the body. Many cultures have records of sexual expression and some even have records of sexual pleasure maximization.
Some traditional sexual scripts that have been studied include a number of problematic assumptions. Some of these assumptions include but are not limited to: the man must be in charge, the woman must not enjoy (or let on that she enjoys) the sexual experience, the man is a performer whose skills are proven effective upon arrival of his partner’s orgasm, men are sexual while women are not, women can’t talk about it and turn to men for sexual interests and direction, and finally sex always leads to a female orgasm (her orgasm being proof of his sexual capacity). Numerous studies have shown that most of these traditional scripts are not realistic, healthy, conducive to open communication, nor negotiation of sexual needs and desires for couples. In sum, rather, these traditional notions can be an undermining influence in a couple’s intimacy. Scripts that are more contemporary include these simple ideas:
1. Both partners need to learn to take ownership of the couple’s sexual experiences.
2. Both partners need to learn to communicate openly and honestly about their feelings.
3. Both partners need to learn to meet one another’s desires, needs, and wishes while making sure that their own needs are being met.
Solitary Activities
Fantasies
Sexual behaviors are linked to, but distinct from, fantasies. And, while this category is classified as a “solitary” activity (something you may do or use alone), it’s also typical for people’s fantasies to join them when they’re engaged with partnered sexual contact. Still, ultimately, you are the arbiter of your sexual fantasies and get to choose to keep them private or share them.
Leitenberg and Henning (1995) define sexual fantasies as “any mental imagery that is sexually arousing.” One of the more common fantasies is the replacement fantasy—fantasizing about someone other than one’s current partner (Hicks & Leitenberg, 2001). In addition, more than 50% of people have forced-sex fantasies (Critelli & Bivona, 2008). However, this does not mean most of us want to be cheating on our partners or be involved in sexual assault. Sexual fantasies are not equal to sexual behaviors.
It’s important to note that sexual fantasies can also be different from sexual desire. Sex researcher Justin Lehmiller surveyed over 4,000 Americans about their sex fantasies and collected detailed information on their personalities, sexual histories, and demographics for his book, Tell Me What You Want (2018). Lehmiller describes sexual fantasy as a sexually arousing thought or mental picture that we have while awake (i.e., it’s not a dream). Fantasies can be spontaneous, or you can deliberately call a fantasy to mind for various purposes, such as becoming or staying aroused, dealing with boredom, or relaxing. On the other hand, sexual desire is something that you actually want to do. It’s a future plan or goal for your sex life—something that you’d like to try at some point.
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The distinction between sexual fantasy and sexual desire is important. Let’s consider a top sexual fantasy for many people- the idea of group sex or, more distinctively, gangbangs. While someone may have a fantasy about engaging in group sex (with desire and intent to match), their fantasy about being in a gangbang may remain simply that: a fantasy. While it may be exciting to consider, the actual act could, in fact, be deeply disturbing and not something someone wants to try. Indeed, there’s many types of sexual fantasies that remain distinctively in that category.
Sometimes our sexual fantasies are therapeutic. They don’t just help us to experience sexual pleasure, but also to cope with the psychological needs that we have at a given moment. And because our psychological needs change over the course of our lives, our fantasies, it seems, often adjust to correspond with those needs—and that may help to explain why the things that turn you on now may be very different from the things that turned you on in the past (Lehmiller, 2018).
Lehmiller (2021) writes that in some cases, fantasy and desire can prompt sexual behavior—some people make the decision to act things out. He discovered that about 1 in 5 people have acted on their favorite fantasy before. Note that this means that most people tend to have unrealized fantasies and desires. In some cases, sexual behavior can can occur and you didn’t even know it was something you liked or desired. For instance, your partner may suggest trying something completely new that you agree to, despite the fact that you’ve never thought about it or wanted to try it before. And, if you enjoyed engaging in that behavior, it could potentially become a future fantasy and/or desire (Lehmiller, 2021).
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It’s helpful to understand that fantasy, desire, and behavior are all separate, but overlapping concepts. This is especially useful when talking about fantasies with your partner(s). Importantly, when sharing fantasies, it’s usually a good idea to clarify whether these are fantasies that you have vs. desires that you’d like to try. If people automatically assume that all fantasies their partner shares are things they actually want to try, this can cause confusion or lead to avoidable conflict. So when sharing fantasies, it’s worth getting on the same page about what this is and isn’t. Are you sharing fantasies to enhance intimacy, learn about each other, and/or turn each other on? Or are you sharing ideas for things you want to try together (Lehmiller, 2021)? For a useful tool that may help sharing preferences of sexual activities with a partner(s), check out this guide from HERE or Sexapalooza
Masturbation
Sexual fantasies are often a context for the sexual behavior of masturbation—tactile (physical) stimulation of the body for sexual pleasure. Historically, masturbation has earned a bad reputation; it’s been described as “self-abuse,” and falsely associated with causing adverse side effects, such as hairy palms, acne, blindness, insanity, and even death (Kellogg, 1888). Cultural values may still influence the way that masturbation is perceived. For instance, can you think of any common sayings you have heard shaming masturbation? One phrase might be: “You’ll grow hair on your palms” indicating that others will know you have masturbated and it will be viewed as shameful by others. It is important to reflect on your own perspective on this topic.
Figure: A United States patent drawing of an early 20th century anti-masturbation chastity belt. [Image: unknown, https://goo.gl/D15Lnw, Public Domain]
Sex research pioneer, Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), was among the first to ask questions about Americans’ sexual behavior, including masturbation. In sum, Kinsey surveyed approximately 18,000 participants. Among the results of Kinsey’s research were the findings that women are as interested and experienced in sex as their male counterparts, and that both males and females masturbate without adverse health consequences (Bancroft, 2004). These findings were not well-received but certainly launched further inquiry into the advantages of masturbatory behaviors.
Some people view masturbation as beneficial, and it is linked with lower stress levels, reduced risky sexual behaviors, and greater levels of knowledge about one’s own body functioning, which some view as empowering and reclaiming their sexuality. It’s not uncommon for clinical providers to recommend masturbation as a tool in physical and sensual exploration, as well as challenges with sexual functioning (Coleman, 2003). Indeed, empirical evidence links masturbation to increased levels of sexual and marital satisfaction, and physical and psychological health (Hurlburt & Whitaker, 1991; Levin, 2007). There is even evidence that masturbation significantly decreases the risk of developing prostate cancer among males over the age of 50 (Dimitropoulou et al., 2009).
Masturbation is common among males and females in the United States. Robbins et al. (2011) found that 74% of males and 48% of females reported masturbating. However, frequency of masturbation is affected by culture. An Australian study found that only 65% of males and 35% of females reported masturbating. And in the UK, 86%of men and 57% of women ages 16–44 reported masturbating within the past year (Regenerus, Price, & Gordon, 2017). Further, rates of reported masturbation by males and females in India are even lower, at 46% and 13%, respectively (Ramadugu et al., 2011). For many people masturbation is shrouded with shame and guilt. Again, characteristics of culture, family upbringing, and faith can factor into one’s experience of solitary sexual behavior. Importantly, however, Kinsey was onto something – there are little to no adverse consequences for masturbating (except in cases where one feels guilt and shame).
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For helpful information, check out local feminist and queer friendly resource, SheBop’s Blog Entry, How to Become Comfortable With Masturbation.
Solitary & Partnered Considerations
Erogenous Zones
People often think of sexual behaviors as the act of sex itself usually focusing on what is happening with the genitals; however, the whole body can be implicated in the process of being sexual. Some common erogenous zones are the neck, inner thighs, lower back, and lips. Each person is different and additional areas on the body may also be utilized to enhance sexual arousal and pleasure. Exploring areas of your body that seem to have enhanced sensitivity in a pleasurable way and exploring these areas with partners can be beneficial. Also, asking partners about the areas of their body that they like touched can be beneficial to their sexual experience as well.
Sex Toys
Sex toys are material objects selected, created, and used to generate or enhance sexual arousal and pleasure in both individual and partnered sex acts (Döring, 2021). When it comes to the history of sex toys, archaeological have found phallus-shaped artifacts seemingly used for sexual stimulation that date back 30,000 years. Prehistoric dildo-shaped objects made of jade, stone, copper, leather, or bones are now exhibited in museums all over the world. Drawings, paintings, and novels from early recorded times, the Middle Ages to the modern era document the existence and use of sexual aids in many different cultures (Döring, 2021).
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images [email protected]://wellcomeimages.org Various sex aids, including dildos, artificial vulva, penis supports etc. Colour woodcut, ca. 1830. Published: [ca. 1830]
Toys can be used to enhance sexual experiences. Some examples are:
• Strap-ons–special underwear or straps designed to hold a dildo in place for penetrative sex.
• Dildos–mimic the shape of a penis but range in terms of realism; some are flesh-colored and look like an actual penis whereas some are bright pink, rainbow, etc.
• vibrators–these toys vibrate and are used because the human hand can only do so much before getting tired and some people benefit from direct, consistent stimulation. For a lovely history of the vibrator, check out Jen Bell’s Brief History of the Vibrator.
• Anal play items–anal beads, butt plugs, anal stimulators similar to a vibrator and small dildo combined, or dildos can also be used (please remember that the rectum can act like a vacuum and suck objects inside so be sure to use something with a flared bottom, pull cord or ring to prevent anal toys from getting lost inside you).
• Penis extenders–fit over a penis; looks like a dildo with a hole inside the base.
• Penis sleeve or “fleshlight”–mimics penetrative sex and is used during masturbation.
• and so many more!
• Important considerations…
• Safe sex using all these items involves thoroughly cleaning them with hot water or soap after and before using and between use on another person.
• Some dildos can be boiled in hot water or placed on the top rack of the dishwasher, but read the cleaning instructions upon purchase to avoid melting them.
• Also, some lubricants (commonly referred to as lube) are oil-based which are not compatible with toys made from silicone; water-based lubes are better for most toys to prevent them from becoming sticky overtime.
• SheBop in Portland has sex-positive experts as staff, so they can provide assistance for any of your questions
• Sex dolls, which can be defined as material representations of the human body for sexual use have been used by approximately 2% of women and 9% of men (Döring & Pöschl, 2018).
• Sex robots coming soon–Sex robots can be defined as humanoid robots that are designed for sexual use (Levy, 2007; as cited in Döring & Pöschl, 2018). They look like sex dolls but are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI).
Viceland’s Slutever: Meet Harmony the Sex Robot:
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Technology affords some exciting opportunities in terms of sexual expression. However, with all innovation there are some complex considerations to be made. Of import- how does technology enhance someone’s sexual experiences? Does technology like sex robots have the potential to enhance or subdue human connection? There are no clear answers to these questions but the emergence of these technologies do require further conversations regarding these issues.
Partnered Activities
Coital sex is the term for vaginal-penile intercourse, which occurs for about 3 to 13 minutes on average—though its duration and frequency decrease with age (Corty & Guardiani, 2008; Smith et al., 2012). Traditionally, people are known as “virgins” before they engage in coital sex, and have “lost” their virginity afterwards. Durex (2005) found the average age of first coital experiences across 41 different countries to be 17 years, with a low of 16 (Iceland), and a high of 20 (India). There is tremendous variation regarding frequency of coital sex. For example, the average number of times per year a person in Greece (138) or France (120) engages in coital sex is between 1.6 and 3 times greater than in India (75) or Japan (45; Durex, 2005).
Oral sex includes cunnilingus—oral stimulation of the female’s external sex organs, and fellatio—oral stimulation of the male’s external sex organs. Sixty-nining – mutual oral sex at the same time. The prevalence of oral sex widely differs between cultures—with Western cultures, such as the U.S., Canada, and Austria, reporting higher rates (greater than 75%); and Eastern and African cultures, such as Japan and Nigeria, reporting lower rates (less than 10%; Copen, Chandra, & Febo-Vazquez, 2016; Malacad & Hess, 2010; Wylie, 2009).
Not only are there differences between cultures regarding how many people engage in oral sex, there are differences in its very definition. For example, most college students in the U.S. do not believe cunnilingus or fellatio are sexual behaviors—and more than a third of college students believe oral sex is a form of abstinence (Barnett et al., 2017; Horan, Phillips, & Hagan, 1998; Sanders & Reinisch, 1999).
Anal sex refers to penetration of the anus by an object. Anal sex is not exclusively a “homosexual behavior.” The anus has extensive sensory-nerve innervation and is often experienced as an erogenous zone, no matter where a person is on the Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale (Cordeau et al., 2014). When heterosexual people are asked about their sexual behaviors, more than a third (about 40%) of both males and females report having had anal sex at some time during their life (Chandra, Mosher, & Copen, 2011; Copen, Chandra, & Febo-Vazquez, 2016). Comparatively, when homosexual men are asked about their most recent sexual behaviors, more than a third (37%) report having had anal sex (Rosenberger et al., 2011).
Like straight-identifying people, gay-identifying people engage in a variety of sexual behaviors, the most frequent being masturbation, romantic kissing, and oral sex (Rosenberger et al., 2011). The prevalence of anal sex widely differs between cultures. For example, people in Greece and Italy report high rates of anal sex (greater than 50%), whereas people in China and India report low rates of anal sex (less than 15%; Durex, 2005).
In contrast to “more common” sexual behaviors, there is a vast array of alternative sexual behaviors. Some of these behaviors, such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, and pedophilia are classified in the DSM as paraphilic disorders—behaviors that victimize and cause harm to others or one’s self (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Sadism—inflicting pain upon another person to experience pleasure for one’s self—and masochism—receiving pain from another person to experience pleasure for one’s self—are also classified in the DSM as paraphilic disorders. However, if an individual consensually engages in these behaviors, the term “disorder” is replaced with the term “interest.” Janus and Janus (1993) found that 14% of males and 11% of females have engaged in some form of sadism and/or masochism.
Kink is defined by clinicians Yates and Neuer-Colburn (2019) as “a culture or lifestyle outside of the social norm centered around consensual non-egalitarian relationship practices, concepts of monogamy, sexual interactions, sexual activities and/or fantasies as a means for heightened intimacy between partners” (p. 15). They go on to define BDSM as “the overlapping acronym for bondage and discipline (BD – the use of physical or psychological restraints), dominance and submission (DS or D/s – active participation in the consensual and negotiated exchange or handing over of power or authority to another), sadism and masochism or sadomasochism (SM or S&M – engaging in activities that involve intense or strong sensation and/or stimuli”; Yates & Neuer-Colburn, 2019, p. 15). Members of the Kink community engage in a variety of behaviors. In some cases, there’s an understanding that BDSM is a large part of identifying as Kink for the majority of members, and so the terms Kink and BDSM can be interchangeable as well as exclusive terms in community terminology.
https://www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/2017/8/16/how-many-americans-have-had-a-bdsm-experience-infographic/
Sexual Behavior, Consent, & Safer Sex Practices
Clearly, people engage in a multitude of behaviors whose variety is limited only by our own imaginations. Further, our standards for what’s normal differs substantially from culture to culture. However, there is one aspect of sexual behavior that is universally acceptable—indeed, fundamental and necessary. At the heart of what qualifies as sexually “normal” is the concept of consent. Sexual consent refers to the voluntary, conscious, and empathic participation in a sexual act, which can be withdrawn at any time (Jozkowski & Peterson, 2013). Sexual consent is the baseline for what are considered normal—acceptable and healthy—behaviors; whereas, nonconsensual sex—i.e., forced, pressured or unconscious participation—is unacceptable and unhealthy. When engaging in sexual behaviors with a partner, a clear and explicit understanding of your boundaries, as well as your partner’s boundaries, is essential. We recommend safer-sex practices, such as condoms, honesty, and communication, whenever you engage in a sexual act. Discussing likes, dislikes, and limits prior to sexual exploration reduces the likelihood of miscommunication and misjudging nonverbal cues. In the heat of the moment, things are not always what they seem. For example, Kristen Jozkowski and her colleagues (2014) found that females tend to use verbal strategies of consent, whereas males tend to rely on nonverbal indications of consent. Awareness of this basic mismatch between heterosexual couples’ exchanges of consent may proactively reduce miscommunication and unwanted sexual advances.
The universal principles of pleasure, sexual behaviors, and consent are intertwined. Consent is the foundation on which sexual activity needs to be built. Understanding and practicing empathic consent requires sexual literacy and an ability to effectively communicate desires and limits, as well as to respect others’ parameters.
Sexual Positions and Safer Sex Recommendations
Coitus
Penis-in-vagina; can be: face-to-face, from behind, man on top, woman on top, side-to-side; condom used for safer sex
Cunnilingus
Oral sex to stimulate the vulva, especially the clitoris; dental dam for safer sex or a condom cut with clean scissors to act as a dental dam
Fellatio
Oral sex to stimulate the penis; condom for safer sex
Sixty-nining
Mutual oral sex at the same time; condom/dental dam for safer sex
Anal intercourse
Penis-to-anus; condom for safer sex
Anilingus
Oral stimulation of the anus; dental dam for safer sex
Hand stimulation
Mutual (at the same time) or turn-taking (one partner is touched first then the other is touched next)
Mutual masturbation
Partners pleasuring themselves in front of each other at the same time
Interfemoral intercourse
Thrusting of the penis between the thighs of a partner
Tribadism
Lesbian sex in which one partner humps the other causing stimulation in both partners
Concerns with These Terms
• Please note how some of these terms leave out language to be more inclusive of transgender and intersex bodies and are heteronormative
• The word “tribadism” has origins from a Greek word that implies a woman is trying to behave like a male in a lesbian dynamic; this is problematic because this sex is between two women and not one who is trying to be a man
• What about other practices that people commonly engage in that aren’t on this list?
One Last Note on Safer Sex
Having sex with people who can ejaculate directly into the body of another person is the riskiest of sex practices because viruses and bacteria have a greater chance of surviving. As they come into contact with air, they cannot survive. Precum (small amounts of ejaculate that comes out throughout the process of being aroused) is also a factor to consider in safer sex. This is the reason the “pull-out method” is ineffective for preventing pregnancy and the spread of illnesses.
Additional Readings:
Diversify Your Sex Practices
If you are feeling unsatisfied with the sex you are having, say something and explore your desires to see what feels good. Explore your body and that of others in a safe place to try new positions and toys and remember you can revoke consent at any time if it turns out you or your partners don’t like something. Check egos throughout as well because adding toys does not mean you are lacking and aren’t good at sex. Sex toys have been around for a long time (archaeological digs of ancient societies can attest to this) and serve the purpose of increasing pleasure for many individuals. For some, adding sex toys has been a game-changer in the quality of sex they experience.
Conclusion
There are many variations in human sexual behavior. Many of the solitary sexual behaviors people have are linked to enhanced pleasure, greater personal awareness, and increased sexual functioning. In terms of partnered sexual behavior, consent is key. Experiences matter, personality, age, and other elements. Finally, culture and socialization are important factors when considering norms and attitudes about diverse sexual activities.
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Licenses and Attributions
Lucas, D. & Fox, J. (2021). The psychology of human sexuality. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from http://noba.to/9gsqhd6v. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Adaptations: Reformatted. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion.
The following videos have this license: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
Justin Lehmiller. (2018). The 7 most common sexual fantasies – From Tell Me What You Want by Dr. Justin Lehmiller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ64JYmCpkQ
Justin Lehmiller. (2018). How men’s and women’s sex fantasies compare – From Tell Me What You Want by Dr. Justin Lehmiller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXPn7VXU8R0
AsapSCIENCE. (2015). Is masturbation good for you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU3JqoUDkjA
VICE TV. (2018). Meet Harmony the sex robot | Slutever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orBH_Qnw3eY
Justin Lehmiller. (2020). How COVID-19 is changing sex and relationships – Dr. Justin Lehmiller, sex and psychology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iymb-tIsWQw&t=1s
The next video uses a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International).
TEDx Talks. (2015). Masturbation myths | Teesha Morgan | TEDxStanleyPark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRkPU1fKchI
License
Introduction to Human Sexuality by Ericka Goerling & Emerson Wolfe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.09%3A_Chapter_9_-_Sexual_Behaviors_%28and_Safer_Sex%29.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Summarize and analyze evolutionary, biological, social, and psychological perspectives on love and the development of long-term intimate relationships
• Demonstrate an understanding of how various writers and researchers have attempted to define, describe and measure love
• Explore the benefits and challenges of consensual non-monogamous relationships
• Discuss ways to be an ally within romantic relationships and analyze the ways that intersecting identities of partners can be acknowledged in order to address and prevent harm related to imbalances of social power
Introduction
As we discussed previously, humans are the descendants of a common relatives shared by both chimpanzees and bonobos and, while these two apes differ significantly from one another, humans share many relational and sexual behaviors common in both apes (Prüfer et al., 2012). In terms of mating and relational behaviors, some human males are more protective and aggressive of perceived sexual conquests while others are not and respect the strong women in their lives. Some human societies are more rigid regarding sexuality and believe engaging in sexual behaviors should only be allowed for procreation purposes only while others are accepting and acknowledging of sexual fluidity for pleasure, connection and community. Thus, humans exhibit characteristics of both chimpanzees and bonobos based on evolution, the structure of the given society, and social norms present that shape the development of relationships. As we explore the driving factors that cause humans to seek out long-term intimate relationships with others, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, current evidence-based research on healthy relationships, and the critical theories with a focus on intersectionality will be utilized to help us understand the many perspectives regarding this topic.
Evolutionary Theories
The passing of genes to the next generation and having children might be a factor in what drives certain people to enter into intimate relationships. In a heterosexual/straight dynamic between cisgender individuals, certain behaviors have been developed over time and through behavioral evolution to increase the chances of producing healthy offspring. One critique is that this theoretical perspective can often leave out sexual minorities and gender-diverse perspectives. As you read the following on sexual selection theory and sexual strategies theory, you will see the term “sex” rather than “gender.” Keep in mind that the evolutionary theories are focusing on the binary differences in anatomy and functionality as this relates to sexual behavior.
Sexual Selection Theory
Darwin noticed that there were many traits and behaviors of organisms that could not be explained by “survival selection.” For example, the brilliant plumage of peacocks should actually lower their rates of survival. That is, the peacocks’ feathers act like a neon sign to predators, advertising “Easy, delicious dinner here!” But if these bright feathers only lower peacocks’ chances at survival, why do they have them? The same can be asked of similar characteristics of other animals, such as the large antlers of male stags or the wattles of roosters, which also seem to be unfavorable to survival. Again, if these traits only make the animals less likely to survive, why did they develop in the first place? And how have these animals continued to survive with these traits over thousands and thousands of years? Darwin’s answer to this conundrum was the theory of sexual selection: the evolution of characteristics, not because of survival advantage, but because of mating advantage.
Modern sports like boxing can be seen as modified/stylized versions of the evolutionary behavior of intrasexual competition. [Image: Dave Hogg, https://goo.gl/fL5U2Z, CC BY 2.0, https://goo.gl/9uSnqN]
Sexual selection occurs through two processes. The first, intrasexual competition, occurs when members of one sex compete against each other, and the winner gets to mate with a member of the opposite sex. Male stags, for example, battle with their antlers, and the winner (often the stronger one with larger antlers) gains mating access to the female. That is, even though large antlers make it harder for the stags to run through the forest and evade predators (which lowers their survival success), they provide the stags with a better chance of attracting a mate (which increases their reproductive success). Similarly, human males sometimes also compete against each other in physical contests: boxing, wrestling, karate, or group-on-group sports, such as football. Even though engaging in these activities poses a “threat” to their survival success, as with the stag, the victors are often more attractive to potential mates, increasing their reproductive success. Thus, whatever qualities lead to success in intrasexual competition are then passed on with greater frequency due to their association with greater mating success.
The second process of sexual selection is preferential mate choice, also called intersexual competition. In this process, if members of one sex are attracted to certain qualities in mates—such as brilliant plumage, signs of good health, or even intelligence—those desired qualities get passed on in greater numbers, simply because their possessors mate more often. For example, the colorful plumage of peacocks exists due to a long evolutionary history of peahens’ (the term for female peacocks) attraction to males with brilliantly colored feathers.
In all sexually-reproducing species, adaptations in males and females exist due to survival selection and sexual selection. However, unlike other animals where one sex has dominant control over mate choice, humans have “mutual mate choice.” That is, all partners typically have a say in choosing their mates. And mates value qualities such as kindness, intelligence, and dependability that are beneficial to long-term relationships—qualities that make good partners and good parents.
Sexual Strategies Theory
Sexual strategies theory is based on sexual selection theory. It proposes that humans have evolved a list of different mating strategies, both short-term and long-term, that vary depending on culture, social context, parental influence, and personal mate value (desirability in the “mating market”).
In its initial formulation, sexual strategies theory focused on the differences between men and women in mating preferences and strategies (Buss & Schmitt, 1993). It started by looking at the minimum parental investment needed to produce a child. For women, even the minimum investment is significant: after becoming pregnant, they have to carry that child for nine months inside of them. For men, on the other hand, the minimum investment to produce the same child is considerably smaller—simply the act of sex.
These differences in parental investment have an enormous impact on sexual strategies. For a woman, the risks associated with making a poor mating choice are high. She might get pregnant by a man who will not help to support her and her children, or who might have poor-quality genes. And because the stakes are higher for a woman, wise mating decisions for her are much more valuable. For men, on the other hand, the need to focus on making wise mating decisions isn’t as important. That is, unlike women, men 1) don’t biologically have the child growing inside of them for nine months, and 2) do not have as high a cultural expectation to raise the child. This logic leads to a powerful set of predictions: In short-term mating, women will likely be choosier than men (because the costs of getting pregnant are so high), while men, on average, will likely engage in more casual sexual activities (because this cost is greatly lessened). Due to this, men will sometimes deceive women about their long-term intentions for the benefit of short-term sex, and men are more likely than women to lower their mating standards for short-term mating situations.
An extensive body of empirical evidence supports these and related predictions (Buss & Schmitt, 2011). Men express a desire for a larger number of sex partners than women do. They let less time elapse before seeking sex. They are more willing to consent to sex with strangers and are less likely to require emotional involvement with their sex partners. They have more frequent sexual fantasies and fantasize about a larger variety of sex partners. They are more likely to regret missed sexual opportunities. And they lower their standards in short-term mating, showing a willingness to mate with a larger variety of women as long as the costs and risks are low.
However, in situations where both the man and woman are interested in long-term mating, both sexes tend to invest substantially in the relationship and in their children. In these cases, the theory predicts that both sexes will be extremely choosy when pursuing a long-term mating strategy. Much empirical research supports this prediction, as well. In fact, the qualities women and men generally look for when choosing long-term mates are very similar: both want mates who are intelligent, kind, understanding, healthy, dependable, honest, loyal, loving, and adaptable.
Nonetheless, women and men do differ in their preferences for a few key qualities in long-term mating, because of somewhat distinct adaptive problems. Modern women have inherited the evolutionary trait to desire mates who possess resources, have qualities linked with acquiring resources (e.g., ambition, wealth, industriousness), and are willing to share those resources with them. On the other hand, men more strongly desire youth and health in women, as both are cues to fertility. These male and female differences initially appeared to be universal in humans. They were first documented in 37 different cultures, from Australia to Zambia (Buss, 1989), and have been replicated by dozens of researchers in dozens of additional cultures (for summaries, see (Perilloux, Easton, & Buss, 2012). Still- there is evidence emerging that these trends are shifting, especially in industrialized western cultures.
As we know, though, just because we have these mating preferences (e.g., men with resources; fertile women), people don’t always get what they want. There are countless other factors which influence who people ultimately select as their mate. For example, the sex ratio (the percentage of men to women in the mating pool), cultural practices (such as arranged marriages, which inhibit individuals’ freedom to act on their preferred mating strategies), the strategies of others (e.g., if everyone else is pursuing short-term sex, it’s more difficult to pursue a long-term mating strategy), and many others all influence who we select as our mates.
Sexual strategies theory—anchored in sexual selection theory— predicts specific similarities and differences in men’s and women’s mating preferences and strategies. Whether we seek short-term or long-term relationships, many personality, social, cultural, and ecological factors will all influence who our partners will be.
Social Psychology: Liking and Loving Over the Long-Term
Previously, we have focused upon the attraction that occurs between people who are initially getting to know one another. But the basic principles of social psychology can also be applied to help us understand relationships that last longer. When good friendships develop, when people get married and plan to spend the rest of their lives together, and when families grow closer over time, the relationships take on new dimensions and must be understood in somewhat different ways. Yet the principles of social psychology can still be applied to help us understand what makes these relationships last.
The factors that keep people liking and loving each other in long-term relationships are at least in part the same as the factors that lead to initial attraction. For instance, regardless of how long they have been together, people remain interested in the physical attractiveness of their partners, although it is relatively less important than for initial encounters. And similarity remains essential. Relationships are also more satisfactory and more likely to continue when the individuals develop and maintain similar interests and continue to share their important values and beliefs over time (Davis & Rusbult, 2001). Both actual and assumed similarity between partners tend to grow in long-term relationships and are related to satisfaction in opposite-sex marriages (Schul & Vinokur, 2000). Some aspects of similarity, including that in terms of positive and negative affectivity, have also been linked to relationship satisfaction in same-sex marriages (Todosijevic, Rothblum, & Solomon, 2005). However, some demographic factors like education and income similarity seem to relate less to satisfaction in same-sex partnerships than they do in opposite sex ones (Todosijevic, Rothblum, & Solomon, 2005).
Proximity also remains important—relationships that undergo the strain of the partners being apart from each other for very long are more at risk for breakup.
But what about passion? Does it still matter over time? Yes and no. People in long-term relationships who are most satisfied with their partners report that they still feel passion for their partners—they still want to be around them as much as possible, and they enjoy making love with them (Simpson, 1987; Sprecher, 2006). And they report that the more they love their partners, the more attractive they find them (Simpson, Gangestad, & Lerma, 1990). On the other hand, the high levels of passionate love that are experienced in initial encounters are not likely to be maintained throughout the course of a long-term relationship (Acker & Davis, 1992). Recall, though, that physical intimacy continues to be important.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=96#oembed-1
Over time, cognition becomes relatively more important than emotion, and close relationships are more likely to be based on companionate love, defined as love that is based on friendship, mutual attraction, common interests, mutual respect, and concern for each other’s welfare. This does not mean that enduring love is less strong—rather, it may sometimes have a different underlying structure than initial love based more on passion.
Closeness and Intimacy
Although it is safe to say that many of the variables that influence initial attraction remain important in longer-term relationships, other variables also come into play over time. One important change is that as a relationship progresses, the partners come to know each other more fully and care about each other to a greater degree. In successful relationships, the partners feel increasingly close to each other over time, whereas in unsuccessful relationships, closeness does not increase and may even decrease. The closeness experienced in these relationships is marked in part by reciprocal self-disclosure—the tendency to communicate frequently, without fear of reprisal, and in an accepting and empathetic manner.
When the partners in a relationship feel that they are close, and when they indicate that the relationship is based on caring, warmth, acceptance, and social support, we can say that the relationship is intimate (Sternberg, 1986). Partners in intimate relationships are likely to think of the couple as “we” rather than as two separate individuals. People who have a sense of closeness with their partner are better able to maintain positive feelings about the relationship while at the same time are able to express negative feelings and to have accurate (although sometimes less than positive) judgments of the other (Neff & Karney, 2002). People may also use their close partner’s positive characteristics to feel better about themselves (Lockwood, Dolderman, Sadler, & Gerchak, 2004).
Arthur Aron and his colleagues (Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992) have assessed the role of closeness in relationships directly, using the simple measure shown in Figure 10.1, “Measuring Relationship Closeness.” You might try completing the measure yourself for some different people that you know—for instance, your family members, your friends, your spouse, or your girlfriend or boyfriend. The measure is simple to use and to interpret. If a person chooses a circle that represents the self and the other as more overlapping, this means that the relationship is close. But if they choose a circle that is less overlapping, then the relationship is less so.
Figure 10.1 Measuring Relationship Closeness
This measure is used to determine how close two partners feel to each other. The respondent simply circles which of the figures he or she feels characterizes the relationship. From Aron, Aron, and Smollan (1992).
Although the closeness measure is simple, it has been found to be highly predictive of people’s satisfaction with their close relationships and of the tendency for couples to stay together. In fact, the perceived closeness between romantic partners can be a better predictor of how long a relationship will last than is the number of positive feelings that the partners indicate having for each other. In successful close relationships, cognitive representations of the self and the other tend to merge together into one, and it is this tie—based on acceptance, caring, and social support—that is so important (Aron, Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991).
Aron and his colleagues (Aron, Melinat, Aron, & Vallone, 1997) used an experimental design to test whether self-disclosure of intimate thoughts to others would increase closeness. In a laboratory, they paired college students with another student, one whom they did not know. Some of the students were asked to share some intimate thoughts with each other by asking and answering questions such as “When did you last cry in front of another person?” In comparison with control participants who only engaged in small talk with their partners (answering questions such as “What is your favorite holiday?”), the students who disclosed more intimate experiences reported feeling significantly closer to each other at the end of the conversation.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=96#oembed-2
Communal and Exchange Relationships
In intimate close relationships, the partners can become highly attuned to each other’s needs, such that the desires and goals of the other become as important as, or more important than, one’s own needs. When people are attentive to the needs of others—for instance, parents’ attentiveness to the needs of their children or the attentiveness of partners in a romantic relationship—and when they help the other person meet his or her needs without explicitly keeping track of what they are giving or expecting to get in return, we say that the partners have a communal relationship. Communal relationships are close relationships in which partners suspend their need for equity and exchange, giving support to the partner in order to meet his or her needs, and without consideration of the costs to themselves. Communal relationships are contrasted with exchange relationships, relationships in which each of the partners keeps track of his or her contributions to the partnership.
Research suggests that communal relationships can be beneficial, with findings showing that happier couples are less likely to “keep score” of their respective contributions (Buunk, Van Yperen, Taylor, & Collins, 1991). And when people are reminded of the external benefits that their partners provide them, they may experience decreased feelings of love for them (Seligman, Fazio, & Zanna, 1980).
Although partners in long-term relationships are frequently willing and ready to help each other meet their needs, and although they will in some cases forgo the need for exchange and reciprocity, this does not mean that they always or continually give to the relationship without expecting anything in return. Partners often do keep track of their contributions and received benefits. If one or both of the partners feel that they are unfairly contributing more than their fair share, and if this inequity continues over a period of time, the relationship will suffer. Partners who feel that they are contributing more will naturally become upset because they will feel that they are being taken advantage of. But the partners who feel that they are receiving more than they deserve might feel guilty about their lack of contribution to the partnership.
Members of long-term relationships focus to a large extent on maintaining equity, and marriages are happiest when both members perceive that they contribute relatively equally (Van Yperen & Buunk, 1990). Interestingly, it is not just our perception of the equity of the ratio of rewards and costs we have in our relationships that is important. It also matters how we see this ratio in comparison to those that we perceive people of the same sex as us receiving in the relationships around us. Buunk and Van Yperen (1991), for example, found that people who saw themselves as getting a better deal than those around them were particularly satisfied with their relationships. From the perspective of social comparison theory, which we discussed in chapter 3 in relation to the self, this makes perfect sense. When we contrast our own situation with that of similar others and we perceive ourselves as better off, then this means we are making a downward social comparison, which will tend to make us feel better about ourselves and our lot in life. There are also some individual differences in the extent to which perceptions of equity are important. Buunk and Van Yperen, for example, found that the relationship between perceptions of equity and relationship satisfaction only held for people who were high in exchange orientation. In contrast, those low in exchange orientation did not show an association between equity and satisfaction, and, perhaps even more tellingly, were more satisfied with their relationships than those high in exchange orientation.
People generally stay in relationships longer when they feel that they are being rewarded by them (Margolin & Wampold, 1981). In short, in relationships that last, the partners are aware of the needs of the other person and attempt to meet them equitably. But partners in the best relationships are also able to look beyond the rewards themselves and to think of the relationship in a communal way.
Interdependence and Commitment
Another factor that makes long-term relationships different from short-term ones is that they are more complex. When a couple begins to take care of a household together, has children, and perhaps has to care for elderly parents, the requirements of the relationship become correspondingly bigger. As a result of this complexity, the partners in close relationships increasingly turn to each other not only for social support but also for help in coordinating activities, remembering dates and appointments, and accomplishing tasks (Wegner, Erber, & Raymond, 1991). The members of a close relationship are highly interdependent, relying to a great degree on each other to meet their goals.
It takes a long time for partners in a relationship to develop the ability to understand the other person’s needs and to form positive patterns of interdependence in which each person’s needs are adequately met. The social representation of a significant other is a rich, complex, and detailed one because we know and care so much about him or her and because we have spent so much time in his or her company (Andersen & Cole, 1990). Because a lot of energy has been invested in creating the relationship, particularly when the relationship includes children, breaking off the partnership becomes more and more costly with time. After spending a long time with one person, it may also become more and more difficult to imagine ourselves with anyone else.
In relationships in which a positive rapport between the partners is developed and maintained over a period of time, the partners are naturally happy with the relationship and they become committed to it. Commitment refers to the feelings and actions that keep partners working together to maintain the relationship. In comparison with those who are less committed, partners who are more committed to the relationship see their mates as more attractive than others, are less able to imagine themselves with another partner, express less interest in other potential mates, are less aggressive toward each other, and are less likely to break up (Simpson, 1987; Slotter et al., 2011).
Commitment may in some cases lead individuals to stay in relationships that they could leave, even though the costs of remaining in the relationship are very high. On the surface, this seems puzzling because people are expected to attempt to maximize their rewards in relationships and would be expected to leave them if they are not rewarding. But in addition to evaluating the outcomes that one gains from a given relationship, the individual also evaluates the potential costs of moving to another relationship or not having any relationship at all. We might stay in a romantic relationship, even if the benefits of that relationship are not high, because the costs of being in no relationship at all are perceived as even higher. We may also remain in relationships that have become dysfunctional in part because we recognize just how much time and effort we have invested in them over the years. When we choose to stay in situations largely because we feel we have put too much effort in to be able to leave them behind, this is known as the sunk costs bias (Eisenberg, Harvey, Moore, Gazelle, & Pandharipande, 2012). In short, when considering whether to stay or leave, we must consider both the costs and benefits of the current relationship and the costs and benefits of the alternatives to it (Rusbult, Olsen, Davis, & Hannon, 2001).
Although the good news about interdependence and commitment is clear—they help relationships last longer—they also have a potential downside. Breaking up, should it happen, is more difficult in relationships that are interdependent and committed. The closer and more committed a relationship has been, the more devastating a breakup will be.
What Is Love?
Although we have talked about it indirectly, we have not yet tried to define love itself—and yet it is obviously the case that love is an important part of many close relationships. Social psychologists have studied the function and characteristics of romantic love, finding that it has cognitive, affective, and behavioral components and that it occurs cross-culturally, although how it is experienced may vary.
Robert Sternberg and others (Arriaga & Agnew, 2001; Sternberg, 1986) have proposed a triangular model of love, an approach that suggests that there are different types of love and that each is made up of different combinations of cognitive and affective variables, specified in terms of passion, intimacy, and commitment. The model, suggests that only consummate love has all three of the components (and is probably experienced only in the very best romantic relationships), whereas the other types of love are made up of only one or two of the three components. For instance, people who are good friends may have liking (intimacy) only or may have known each other so long that they also share commitment to each other (companionate love). Similarly, partners who are initially dating might simply be infatuated with each other (passion only) or may be experiencing romantic love (both passion and liking but not commitment).
The triangular model of love, proposed by Robert Sternberg (1986). Note that there are seven types of love, which are defined by the combinations of the underlying factors of intimacy, passion, and commitment.
Image credit: Lnesa (2006)
Research into Sternberg’s theory has revealed that the relative strength of the different components of love does tend to shift over time. Lemieux and Hale (2002) gathered data on the three components of the theory from couples who were either casually dating, engaged, or married. They found that while passion and intimacy were negatively related to relationship length, that commitment was positively correlated with duration. Reported intimacy and passion scores were highest for the engaged couples.
As well as these differences in what love tends to look like in close relationships over time, there are some interesting gender and cultural differences here. Contrary to some stereotypes, men, on average, tend to endorse beliefs indicating that true love lasts forever, and to report falling in love more quickly than women (Sprecher & Metts, 1989). In regards to cultural differences, on average, people from collectivistic backgrounds tend to put less emphasis on romantic love than people from more individualistic countries. Consequently, they may place more emphasis on the companionate aspects of love, and relatively less on those based on passion (Dion & Dion, 1993).
Individual Differences in Loving: Attachment Styles
One of the important determinants of the quality of close relationships is the way that the partners relate to each other. These approaches can be described in terms of attachment style—individual differences in how people relate to others in close relationships. We display our attachment styles when we interact with our parents, our friends, and our romantic partners (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008).
Attachment styles are learned in childhood, as children develop either a healthy or an unhealthy attachment style with their parents (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Cassidy & Shaver, 1999). Most children develop a healthy or secure attachment style, where they perceive their parents as safe, available, and responsive caregivers and are able to relate easily to them. For these children, the parents successfully create appropriate feelings of affiliation and provide a secure base from which the child feels free to explore and then to return to. However, for children with unhealthy attachment styles, the family does not provide these needs. Some children develop an insecure attachment pattern known as the anxious/ambivalent attachment style, where they become overly dependent on the parents and continually seek more affection from them than they can give. These children are anxious about whether the parents will reciprocate closeness. Still other children become unable to relate to the parents at all, becoming distant, fearful, and cold (the avoidant attachment style).
These three attachment styles that we develop in childhood remain to a large extent stable into adulthood (Caspi, 2000; Collins, Cooper, Albino, & Allard, 2002; Rholes, Simpson, Tran, Martin, & Friedman, 2007). Fraley (2002) conducted a meta-analysis of 27 studies that had looked at the relationship between attachment behavior in infants and in adults over 17 years of age and found a significant correlation between the two measures. A fourth infant attachment style has been identified more recently, the disorganized attachment style, which is a blend of the other two insecure styles. This style also shows some links to adulthood patterns, in this case an avoidant-fearful attachment style.
The consistency of attachment styles over the life span means that children who develop secure attachments with their parents as infants are better able to create stable, healthy interpersonal relationships with other individuals, including romantic partners, as adults (Hazan & Diamond, 2000). They stay in relationships longer and are less likely to feel jealousy about their partners. But the relationships of anxious and avoidant partners can be more problematic. Insecurely attached men and women tend to be less warm with their partners, are more likely to get angry at them, and have more difficulty expressing their feelings (Collins & Feeney, 2000). They also tend to worry about their partner’s love and commitment for them, and they interpret their partner’s behaviors more negatively (Collins & Feeney, 2004; Pierce & Lydon, 2001). Anxious partners also see more conflict in their relationships and experience the conflicts more negatively (Campbell, Simpson, Boldry, & Kashy, 2005).
In addition, people with avoidant and fearful attachment styles can often have trouble even creating close relationships in the first place (Gabriel, Carvallo, Dean, Tippin, & Renaud, 2005). They have difficulty expressing emotions, and experience more negative affect in their interactions (Tidwell, Reis, & Shaver, 1996). They also have trouble understanding the emotions of others (Fraley, Garner, & Shaver, 2000) and show a relative lack of interest in learning about their romantic partner’s thoughts and feelings (Rholes, Simpson, Tran, Martin, & Friedman, 2007).
One way to think about attachment styles, shown in Table 10.1, “Attachment as Self-Concern and Other-Concern,” is in terms of the extent to which the individual is able to successfully meet the important goals of self-concern and other-concern in his or her close relationships. People with a secure attachment style have positive feelings about themselves and also about others. People with avoidant attachment styles feel good about themselves (the goal of self-concern is being met), but they do not have particularly good relations with others. People with anxious/ambivalent attachment styles are primarily other-concerned. They want to be liked, but they do not have a very positive opinion of themselves; this lack of self-esteem hurts their ability to form good relationships. The fourth cell in the table, lower right, represents the avoidant-fearful style, which describes people who are not meeting goals of either self-concern or other-concern.
This way of thinking about attachment shows, again, the importance of both self-concern and other-concern in successful social interaction. People who cannot connect have difficulties being effective partners. But people who do not feel good about themselves also have challenges in relationships—self-concern goals must be met before we can successfully meet the goals of other-concern.
Because attachment styles have such an important influence on relationships, you should think carefully about your potential partner’s interactions with the other people in his or her life. The quality of the relationships that people have with their parents and close friends will predict the quality of their romantic relationships. But although they are very important, attachment styles do not predict everything. People have many experiences as adults, and these interactions can influence, both positively and negatively, their ability to develop close relationships (Baldwin & Fehr, 1995; Scharfe & Bartholomew, 1994). There is also some diversity in the distribution of attachment styles across different groups. For example, in a multicultural sample including people from over 50 different countries of origin, Agishtein and Brumbaugh (2013) found that attachment style varied as a function of ethnicity, religion, individualism-collectivism, and acculturation. For instance, anxious attachment was found to be significantly higher in those whose countries of origin were in East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, compared with those from nations in South America, the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, and South Asia. These types of findings clearly remind us of the need to consider cultural diversity when we are reviewing the research on attachment. They also raise the interesting possibility that some types of attachment may be more normative and adaptive in some cultures than others.
As well as showing some cross-cultural diversity, attachment styles within individuals may be more diverse over time and across situations than previously thought. Some evidence suggests that overall attachment style in adults may not always predict their attachment style in specific relationships. For instance, people’s attachment styles in particular relationships, for example those with their mothers, brothers, and partners, although often correlated, can also be somewhat distinct (Pierce & Lydon, 2001; Ross & Spinner, 2001). As well as showing this variability across relationships, attachment styles can also shift over time and with changing relationship experiences. For example, there are some age-related trends in attachment, with younger adults higher in anxious attachment than middle-aged and older adults, and middle-aged adults higher in avoidant attachment than the other two groups (Chopik, Edelstein, & Fralay, 2013). In regards to changing experiences, people with an anxious style who find a very trusting and nurturing romantic relationship may, over time, come to feel better about themselves and their own needs, and shift toward a more secure style (Davila & Cobb, 2003). These findings have many potential psychotherapeutic settings. For example, couples who are attending therapy to address relationship issues can benefit from this process in part by developing more secure attachments to each other (Solomon, 2009). Therapists can also try to help their clients to develop a more secure attachment style, by creating a trusting and supportive relationship with them (Obegi, 2008).
Social Psychology in the Public Interest
Internet Relationships
As we saw in the chapter on Self, many of us are spending more time than ever connecting with others electronically. Online close relationships are also becoming more popular. But you might wonder whether meeting and interacting with others online can create the same sense of closeness and caring that we experience through face-to-face encounters. And you might wonder whether people who spend more time on Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet might end up finding less time to engage in activities with the friends and loved ones who are physically close by (Kraut et al., 1998).
Despite these potential concerns, research shows that using the Internet can relate to positive outcomes in our close relationships (Bargh, 2002; Bargh & McKenna, 2004). In one study, Kraut et al. (2002) found that people who reported using the Internet more frequently also reported spending more time with their family and friends and indicated having better psychological health.
The Internet also seems to be useful for helping people develop new relationships, and the quality of those relationships can be as good as or better than those formed face-to-face (Parks & Floyd, 1996). McKenna, Green, and Gleason (2002) found that many people who participated in news and user groups online reported having formed a close relationship with someone they had originally met on the Internet. Over half of the participants said that they had developed a real-life relationship with people they had first met online, and almost a quarter reported that they had married, had become engaged to, or were living with someone they initially met on the Internet.
McKenna, Green, and Gleason (2002) studied how relationships developed online using laboratory studies. In their research, a previously unacquainted male and female college student met each other for the first time either in what they thought was an Internet chat room or face-to-face. Those who met first on the Internet reported liking each other more than those who met first face-to-face—even when it was the same partner that they had met both times. People also report being better able to express their own emotions and experiences to their partners online than in face-to-face meetings (Bargh, McKenna, & Fitzsimons, 2002).
There are probably a number of reasons why Internet relationships can be so successful. For one, relationships grow to the extent that the partners self-disclose by sharing personal information with each other, and the relative anonymity of Internet interactions may allow people to self-disclose more readily. Another characteristic of Internet relationships is the relative lack of physical cues to a person’s attractiveness. When physical attractiveness is taken out of the picture, people may be more likely to form relationships on the basis of other more important characteristics, such as similarity in values and beliefs. Another advantage of the Internet is that it allows people to stay in touch with friends and family who are not nearby and to maintain better long-distance relationships (Wellman, Quan Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001). The Internet also may be helpful in finding others with shared interests and values. Finally, the major purpose of many Internet activities is to make new friends. In contrast, most face-to-face interactions are less conducive to starting new conversations and friendships.
Online interactions can also help to strengthen offline relationships. A recent study by Fox, Warber, & Makstaller (2013) explored the effects of publically posting one’s relationship status to Facebook, or going “Facebook official” (FBO) on romantic relationships between college students. They found that offline discussions between partners often preceded going FBO, and, that once couples had gone FBO, they reported more perceived relationship commitment and stability.
Overall, then, the evidence suggests that rather than being an isolating activity, interacting with others over the Internet helps us maintain close ties with our family and friends and in many cases helps us form intimate and rewarding relationships.
Making Relationships Last
Now that you have a better idea of the variables that lead to interpersonal attraction and that are important in close relationships, you should be getting a pretty good idea of the things that partners need to do to help them stay together. It is true that many marriages end in divorce, and this number is higher in individualistic cultures, where the focus is on the individual, than it is in collectivistic cultures, where the focus is on maintaining group togetherness. But even in many Western countries, for instance, the United States, the number of divorces is falling, at least for the most educated segments of society (Kreider & Fields, 2001). Successful relationships take work, but the work is worth it. People who are happily married are also happier overall and have better psychological and physical health. And at least for men, marriage leads to a longer life (Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001).
Let’s look at some of the things that enduring couples seem to have done and compare them with what we might expect on the basis of social psychological research.
• Be prepared for squabbles. Every relationship has conflict. This is not unexpected or always bad. Working through minor conflicts can help you and your partner improve your social skills and make the relationship stronger (Pickett & Gardner, 2005).
• Don’t be negative. Negative cognitions and emotions have an extremely harmful influence on relationships (Gottman, 1994). Don’t let a spiral of negative thinking and negative behaviors get started. Do whatever you can to think positively.
• Be fair in how you evaluate behaviors. Many people in close relationships, as do most people in their everyday lives, tend to inflate their own self-worth. They rate their own positive behaviors as better than their partner’s, and rate their partner’s negative behaviors as worse than their own. Try to give your partner the benefit of the doubt—remember that you are not perfect either.
• Do things that please your partner. The principles of social exchange make it clear that being nice to others leads them to be nice in return.
• Have fun. Relationships in which the partners have positive moods and in which the partners are not bored tend to last longer (Tsapelas, Aron, & Orbuch, 2009).
Partners who are able to remain similar in their values and other beliefs are going to be more successful. Partners must also display positive affect toward each other. Happy couples are in positive moods when they are around each other—they laugh together, and they express approval rather than criticism of each other’s behaviors. Partners are happier when they view the other person in a positive or even “idealized” sense rather than in a more realistic and perhaps more negative one (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996).
Next, the partners must share, in the sense that they are willing to express their thoughts about each other. Successful relationships involve individuals self-disclosing their own needs and desires, which allows their partners to become aware of their needs and attempt to meet them if possible. If the partners are not able to express their concerns, then the relationship cannot become more intimate. Successful relationships have successful communication patterns.
Finally, but not least important, are sexual behaviors. Compatibility of sexual preferences and attitudes are an important predictor of relationship success. For instance, it is very important that partners are on the same page about how they feel about pursuing sex outside of the relationship, as infidelity in relationships is linked to increased risk of divorce (Wiederman, 1997).
Even if a partner does not actually have sex with someone else, his or her partner may still be jealous, and jealously can harm relationships. Jealousy is a powerful emotion that has been evolutionarily selected to help maintain close relationships. Both men and women experience jealousy, although they experience it to different extents and in different ways. Men are more jealous than women overall. And men are more concerned than women about sexual infidelities of their partners, whereas women are relatively more concerned about emotional infidelities of their partners (Buss, Larsen, Westen, & Semmelroth, 1992). Men’s concern with sexual cheating is probably due in part to evolutionary factors related to kin selection: men need to be particularly sure that their partners are sexually faithful to them to ensure that the time they spend raising children is spent on raising their own children, not those of others. And women’s concern with emotional fidelity fits with a focus on maintaining the relationship intact. Flirting suggests that the man is not really committed to the relationship and may leave it.
Resources
Healthy Communication and Conflict Resolution:
Relationship Growth:
Abuse
Abuse can occur in multiple forms and across all family relationships. Breiding, Basile, Smith, Black, & Mahendra (2015) define the forms of abuse as:
• Physical abuse, the use of intentional physical force to cause harm. Scratching, pushing, shoving, throwing, grabbing, biting, choking, shaking, slapping, punching, and hitting are common forms of physical abuse;
• Sexual abuse, the act of forcing someone to participate in a sex act against his or her will. Such abuse is often referred to as sexual assault or rape. A marital relationship does not grant anyone the right to demand sex or sexual activity from anyone, even a spouse;
• Psychological abuse or aggression is the use of verbal and non-verbal communication with the intent to harm another person mentally or emotionally and/or to exert control over another person.
• Stalking is a pattern of repeated, unwanted attention and contact by a partner that causes fear or concern for one’s own safety or the safety of someone close to the victim.
Abuse between partners is referred to as intimate partner violence (IPV); however, such abuse can also occur between a parent and child (child abuse), adult children and their aging parents (elder abuse), and even between siblings (family violence).
IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:
• About 1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 10 men have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported some form of IPV-related impact.
• Over 43 million women and 38 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
IPV starts early and continues throughout the lifespan. When IPV occurs in adolescence, it is called teen dating violence (TDV). TDV affects millions of U.S. teens each year. About 11 million women and 5 million men who reported experiencing contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime said that they first experienced these forms of violence before the age of 18.
Image credit: CDC (2021)
What are the consequences?
IPV is a significant public health issue that has many individual and societal costs. About 35% of female IPV survivors and more than 11% of male IPV survivors experience some form of physical injury related to IPV. IPV can also result in death. Data from U.S. crime reports suggest that about 1 in 5 homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner. The reports also found that over half of female homicide victims in the U.S. are killed by a current or former male intimate partner.
There are also many other negative health outcomes associated with IPV. These include a range of conditions affecting the heart, digestive, reproduction, muscle and bones, and nervous systems, many of which are chronic. Survivors can experience mental health problems such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. They are at higher risk for engaging in behaviors such as smoking, binge drinking, and sexual risk behaviors.
Although the personal consequences of IPV are devastating, there are also many costs to society. The lifetime economic cost associated with medical services for IPV-related injuries, lost productivity from paid work, criminal justice and other costs, was \$3.6 trillion. The cost of IPV over a victim’s lifetime was \$103,767 for women and \$23,414 for men.
How can we stop it before it starts?
Promoting healthy, respectful, and nonviolent relationships and communities can help reduce the occurrence of IPV. It also can prevent the harmful and long-lasting effects of IPV on individuals, families, and communities. CDC developed a technical package, Preventing Intimate Partner Violence Across the Lifespan: A Technical Package of Programs, Policies, and Practices, that includes multiple strategies and approaches to prevent IPV. It also includes approaches that provide support to survivors and lessen harms. The strategies and approaches are meant to be used in combination with each other at many levels of society to prevent IPV.
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=96#oembed-3
When Relationships End
Inevitably, some relationships do break up, and these separations may cause substantial pain. When the partners have been together for a long time, particularly in a relationship characterized by interdependence and commitment, the pain is even greater (Simpson, 1987). The pain of a breakup is in part due to the loneliness that results from it. People who lose someone they care about also lose a substantial amount of social support, and it takes time to recover and develop new social connections. Lonely people sleep more poorly, take longer to recover from stress, and show poorer health overall (Cacioppo et al., 2002).
The pain of a loss may be magnified when people feel that they have been rejected by the other. The experience of rejection makes people sad, angry, more likely to break social norms, and more focused on self-concern. The ability to effectively self-regulate is lowered, and people are more likely to act on their impulses (Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Twenge, 2005). But people who have been rejected are also more motivated by other-concern; they are particularly likely to try to make new friends to help make up for the rejection (Gardner, Pickett, & Brewer, 2000). Although people who have been rejected are particularly hurt, people who have rejected others may feel guilty about it.
Breaking up is painful, but people do recover from it, and they usually move on to find new relationships. Margaret Stroebe and her colleagues (Stroebe, Hansson, Schut, & Stroebe, 2008) found that people adjusted to the loss of a partner, even one with whom they had been with for a long time, although many did have increased psychological difficulties, at least in the short term.
Monogamy Alternatives
While 90% of people in Western cultures will marry by age 50, the divorce rate in the United States ranges between 40% and 50% of all first marriages (APA, 2021). Serial monogamy, engaging in a series of monogamous sexual relationships, is often very common. Cheating, also known as non-consensual non-monogamy, is when someone within an agreed-upon closed sexual and romantic relationship engages in sexual and romantic behavior with a person outside the relationship without the permission of the partner. Kruger et al. (2013) discuss how certain behaviors are viewed as more clearly cheating, such as engaging in sexual intercourse, whereas romantic and emotional connections were rated as more ambiguous and unclear by most participants. Women, on average, rated infidelity on the basis of dating and spending time with another while keeping secrets about it while men, overall, gauged that it was infidelity based on if the partner was engaging in sexual behaviors with someone else (Kruger et al., 2013). Mark et al. (2011) found that almost 25% of men and 20% of women had perceived their own behaviors as cheating within their current heterosexual/straight relationship.
The idea of “true love” or finding our “soul mate” places a lot of pressure on one person to meet all of our needs emotionally, sexually, romantically, spiritually, intellectually, etc. With friends, we can recognize that we go to certain people when we want to have deep intellectual conversations and someone else perhaps when we want to get advice or support when we are upset. Consensual non-monogamy (CNM) is an umbrella term that encompasses relational flexibility in which sexual and romantic behaviors involving others are permitted and agreed upon by people within primary relationships. Boundaries are established and each relationship will have particular rules around what is permitted and what is not permitted. If behaviors break what is agreed-upon, then this would be considered non-consensual. Thus, effective and healthy communication around boundaries, needs, wants, and limits are of the greatest importance. As with any relationship, feelings of jealousy and self-esteem can evoke strong emotions, but navigating this space with compassion and openness allows for resolution and transformation. As with monogamy, open relationships require work and dedication to maintaining the relationships. If you are considering being in a CNM relationship, review Is Consensual Non-Monogamy for You? by the American Counseling Association (2019). Consensual non-monogamy is becoming more accepted within American culture, but stigma and shame can still lead to minority stress and stigma (Schechinger, 2017). 20% of Americans surveyed indicated that have participated in CNM relationships at some time in their life while 5% indicated they are currently in CNM relationships. A growing body of research is also exploring how animals and humans are more non-monogamous by nature and are seeing evolutionary benefits to increased relational and mating opportunities (Orion, 2018).
Intersecting Identities and Power Dynamics
“I am not racist because I am married to a Black man.” This quote reflects the view that merely being in a relationship with someone means that love can transgress all socialization, internalization of stereotypes, and power inequalities within a society. The reality is that loving someone with differing intersecting identities involves intentionality and mindfulness around hierarchies of power that exist within the greater society and how that can influence power dynamics within relationships. Some examples of dominant identities would be white, male, cisgender, straight, Christian, etc. “Systemically non-dominant refers to membership outside of the dominant group within systems of oppression. Systems of oppression are created to provide benefits and assets for members of specific groups. The recipient groups are referred to as dominant groups because such advantages grant impacting levels of power, privilege, and status within social, economic, and political infrastructures of a society” (Jenkins, 2015). When a romantic partner, or even a friend, is of the dominant group in terms of one identity and the other partner or friend is of a systemically non-dominant group, then microaggressions can intentionally or unintentionally be inflicted upon the person from the non-dominant group. Thus, the greatest amount of work must be done by the person of the dominant group to not inflict harm upon the other.
Gender, race, and class are just a few identities that intersect to create power imbalances within relationships (Viveros Vigoya, 2015). Through colonization in many parts of the world, modernity has been associated with whiteness and patriarchy which invades relationships by privileging the voices of the members of families and the community that more closely resemble whiteness and maleness (Viveros Vigoya, 2015). This is then internalized and comes out within interpersonal dynamics between romantic partners. The biggest amount of strain is then inflicted upon sexual minorities, gender non-conforming people and cisgender women, especially when they are BIPOC and have access to fewer available financial resources because of additional social constructs acting as barriers (Viveros Vigoya, 2015).
Relationships as a Protective Factor
Relationships can shield partners from the destructiveness of marginalization through social support and countering the dominant narrative. Intersecting identities exist in a way in which one partner may have a privileged and dominant identity in one context but a different marginalized and oppressed identity in another context or partners may both have marginalized identities but in different ways. If a partner, who is a member of the dominant culture, uses this power differential against a partner with a marginalized culture, then the relationship will not serve as a protective factor against the harms incurred by the larger society.
Queering Straight Relationships
Ober (2020) argues that all relationships can benefit from utilizing the tools found within queer (LGB+) relationships from a queer critical theory lens. For instance, within many queer relationships, gender roles are questioned and more egalitarian practices between partners are utilized, leading to healthier relationships (Ober, 2020). Within heterosexual/straight dynamics, some men can value their status and seek sexual conquests because of the way other males will perceive them, which devalues the pleasure of women and relegates them to objects (Ober, 2020). This causes women within these straight relationships to be unhappy and unsatisfied, which is normalized within a patriarchal and heteronormative society (Ober, 2020). Thus, straight people, especially straight men, can learn a lot from queer relationships from this perspective. “This does not necessarily mean embracing common queer practices such as nonmonogamy, kink, or chosen families. It means straight people can learn to desire, objectify, satisfy, and respect their partners all at the same time, as well as have hot sex and equitable relationships in the way that most queer couples strive to do” (Ober, 2020).
Being an Ally within Romantic Relationships
While intersecting identities are incredibly complex and cause shifting power dynamics within relationships, returning once again to the concept of allyship can help to alleviate the minority stress and strain experienced by partners. By practicing allyship in general and within relationships, community change and developing dynamics that are protective rather than harmful are possible. Here are some tips on ways to be an ally and think about how you can incorporate these techniques within intimate, romantic relationships as well as with friends and acquaintances:
Final Remarks: Out of Complexity Comes Simplicity
As Part 1 of the textbook comes to an end, we want to highlight once again that human sexuality is incredibly complex and each person has a unique perspective based on the way their multiple identities come together and shape their development. Human experience exists on continuums of possibilities and even labels can mean different things to different people. However, out of all this complexity comes simplicity–humanity is about connection.
If you are ever stuck in understanding something, simply ask questions and explore with curiosity and humility. We do not know all of the answers, and that is okay and beautiful. By educating ourselves and constantly researching the world around us while also creating space for people to share their perspectives and identities, we let the complexity of human experience unfold without putting pressure on ourselves to find predetermined labels or operate off of our assumptions. At the end of the day, creating safe environments through our actions and statements, listening to and honoring the experiences of others, and sharing our life’s stories with others are all that matters.
Licenses & Attributions
Sexual Selection Theory and Sexual Strategies Theory were taken from Evolutionary Theories in Psychology by David M. Buss is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
The Social Psychology: Liking and Loving Over the Long-Term section was taken from the Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International Edition by Rajiv Jhangiani & Hammond Tarry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
Hood, K. (2019, April). The difference between healthy and unhealthy love [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_hood_the_difference_between_healthy_and_unhealthy_love Creative Commons BY–NC–ND 4.0 International.
Perel, E. (2013, February). The secret to desire in a long-term relationship [Video]. TEDSalonNY. https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship. Creative Commons BY–NC–ND 4.0 International.
Seafret (2015, December 18). Wildfire: Official video [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHhkd2B87Q8. License: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
The Family by Joel A. Muraco is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
Adaptations: Reformatted. Added learning objectives. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion. Updated sources. Added links to resources for further enagement.
License
Introduction to Human Sexuality by Ericka Goerling & Emerson Wolfe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/01%3A_Part_I_-_Reflections_and_Explorations_in_Human_Sexuality/1.10%3A_Chapter_10_-_Intimate_Relationships.txt |
Part 2 of this human sexuality textbook contains 10 chapters oriented toward professional and clinical topics within human sexuality.
02: Part II - Professional and Clinical Topics in Human Sexuality
The following reading is to introduce you to some basic concepts we will be covering in greater depth throughout the quarter. Some terminology overlaps and will be a review for those who took PSY 231, but overall much of this information will be new. Re-read Chapter 1 if you would like a refresher on the terminology and safe space rules from 231 that will be utilized for this course as well. The rest of the definitions and topics covered below will be specific to this course as it is more clinical in perspective with many overlaps to health psychology, nursing, medicine, public health, community health, and more.
Health Psychology and Human Sexuality
Health psychology is a subfield that seeks to understand the health-seeking and risk-taking behaviors of people. Self-efficacy, feeling competent to engage in certain behaviors, plays a central role in determining the actions people will take based on a number of social, interpersonal, personal, and structural factors. Health psychology explores ways that public health workers and medical providers can communicate effectively to not reproduce social stigma and shame and ways that educational materials can be developed utilizing health communication techniques to make them more relevant and representative of the target audience. Take for instance the Covid-19 pandemic, to outreach to community members, public health departments needed to make sure testing and vaccination information was available in the languages spoken by the populations who needed the information and that the testing and vaccination sites had staff who were able to communicate with the public effectively. In many cases, partnering with local agencies, such as local chapters of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) or LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens), was vital to the success of the public outreach campaign. The intersecting identities of the target audiences of health information need to be represented in the outreach materials, and centering the voices of those who identify as members of the target audience is a priority.
Relating this to human sexuality, health psychology is utilized to attempt to predict risky sexual behaviors and develop interventions to alter behaviors toward being safer. Sex education in high school as well as public service announcements are ways to educate the public. More specific campaigns can be utilized when there is an outbreak of certain STIs within communities or when therapists are creating brochures for their offices to normalize sexual dysfunctions and inform the public about possible treatments. This course will be focused on developing community-based educational tools for specific populations with intersecting identities in mind to make the messages more relevant and representative in order to address gaps in human sexuality outreach.
Differently-Abled/Disabled
While definitions were previously provided in Chapter 1 related to gender, LGBTQIA+ identities, and intersecting identities as a whole, differently-abled/disabled were not previously defined. This course will pay special attention to the way that being differently-abled or disabled may impact sexual functioning and relationships and are defined in the following ways:
• Differently-abled is an umbrella term that many individuals now prefer
• Some individuals still prefer the term disabled
• Can be visible or invisible
• Could be constant or flare up at different times
• May be mental (intellectual, cognitive, information processing, mental health, etc.) or physical
• Have genetic or environmental causes
• Chronic pain may be a factor
Most people will become differently-abled at some point in their life; some permanently, some only for a period of time.
Disorder versus Atypical
Sexual disorders, dysfunctions, paraphilias, and fetishes will be explored from a mental health and psychopharmacological clinical perspective. We will also explore atypical sexual behaviors that others often label using similar terms to clinical diagnoses but are not related to mental health concerns. Keep this in mind:
• Atypical means less common; this is not a mental health diagnosis
• Disorder means that it causes an individual distress, impairment in daily functioning, relationships, work, or schooling, or causes the self or others (including animals) harm; a mental health practitioner can provide a diagnosis
Did you know that homosexuality used to be classified as a disorder by the American Psychological Association until 1973 (Drescher, 2015)? Conversion Therapy is still practiced in many states even today. 20 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. have banned the practice with Virginia becoming the most recent state to ban this practice as of March 2nd, 2020 (Weir, 2020).
Two highly debated disorders remain: transvestic fetishism and gender dysphoria.
Interesting Statistics
LGB people make up about 3.5% (The Williams Institute, 2011)-4.5% (Newport, 2018) of the general population; highest amongst younger generations–Millennials come in at 8.2% (Newport, 2018).
BDSM or kink–How many people are into it? Check out this interesting read from Magliano (2015).
Sexual Disorders
Divided into two categories (Comer, 2016):
1. Sexual dysfunctions–problems with sexual responses
2. Paraphilias–repeated and intense sexual urges and fantasies in response to socially inappropriate objects or situations
*Again, must meet the threshold for distress, impairment or harm to be diagnosed
Sex Work
Sex work is an umbrella term that encompasses many roles within the sex industry in which an individual receives compensation for their role. Sex work includes:
• Those who provide direct sexual services, even through the phone or online
• Staff members at all levels within the sex industry
• Talent managers
In ideal situations, sex workers are freely consenting at all times, but, due to the underground and unregulated nature of much of the sex industry, exploitation and harm are still possible.
The World Health Organization (2021) states that decriminalizing sex work will benefit health outcomes.
Sex Trafficking
• Sex traffickers target vulnerable populations, particularly foster care youth, sexual minorities, transgender women, racial minorities, and undocumented immigrants–if any of these identities intersect, then the person becomes even more vulnerable to exploitation due to social, structural and systemic barriers.
• Psychological and physical abuse are used as tools by sex traffickers.
• Sometimes the individuals being trafficked can begin to believe their captors and even help them in recruiting others.
• The individuals being trafficked are always victims and consent is not possible due to many factors.
Trauma-Informed Care
Trauma-informed care means interacting with others in a safe and sensitive way that prevents retraumatization and promotes the development of healthy coping skills. Many individuals will experience trauma, specifically a trauma of sexual nature, so it is important to develop skills to promote healing. Important competencies:
• Recognize trauma symptoms and address behaviors rather than further blame the individual (re-victimizing)
• Develop interpersonal, community-based, and institutional levels of intervention and support
Resources:
Overview of trauma and what being trauma-informed looks like with the mental health field (SAMHSA, 2014) and the medical field (Tello, 2018)
Questions and Empowerment
Questions: Society
1. What is the role of shame and stigma in influencing sexuality? How can we work to promote consent, healthy communication, and community-based change?
2. What are some ways that society might influence people in developing harmful sexual behaviors?
3. What is the role of isms (sexism, racism, ableism, classism, etc.) in promoting sexual violence?
4. How has colonialism contributed to the shaming and spread of disinformation regarding sexuality?
5. What changes need to be made in order to make our society better?
Questions: Allyship
1. What can we do in our interactions with others to be supportive rather than further add to the shame and stigma people may feel?
2. What can we actively do to counter isms both intrapersonally (within ourselves in the form of bias, stereotyping, cognitive schemas, etc.) and interpersonally (in our communication and interactions with other people)?
3. What can we do to support victims of sexual violence?
4. How can we support people who are at risk of harming others, and how can we support perpetrators of sexual violence in their change process?
Empowerment
This will be a recurring theme throughout this course in order to:
1. Analyze and heal from society-based harms related to sexuality
2. Understand our rights and the resources available
3. Advocate for ourselves and others
4. Maintain a sex-positive and consent-based perspective and be able to recognize when our own or others’ behaviors are harmful
5. Develop a sense of community and support
6. Utilize skills to be a changemaker in our relationships, workplace, community, and society | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/02%3A_Part_II_-_Professional_and_Clinical_Topics_in_Human_Sexuality/2.01%3A_Chapter_11_-_Part_2_Terminology_Review.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Acquire knowledge about the biological, psychological and cultural milestones in human sexual development.
• Critically differentiate between theoretical perspectives of childhood sexual development.
• Demonstrate an understanding of childhood and adolescent sexual growth and development from biological, psychological, social and cultural perspectives, and reflect on this process from a personal perspective.
• Explain how sexual values, attitudes and behavior may be expressed during the adult years within different contexts including: single living, cohabitation, marriage, consensual and non-consensual extramarital relationships, divorce, aging, widowhood.
Introduction
While sex and sexuality are often linked to late adolescence/early adulthood, this week’s topic explores sexuality throughout the entire lifespan. From neonatal observations to the experience of octogenarians, elements of sexuality are present throughout most of life. Although the context is surely different based on age and experience, there are still considerable domains to explore in terms of sensate experiences, genital awareness, maturation and individual and/or partnered sexual interactions. Using a biopsychosocial approach, including aspects of psychodynamic theory, we will explore elements of sex and sexuality that may occur throughout one’s lifetime. Sexual education is often taught in middle school or high school, unless an abstinence-only program is in place, but could there be benefits to openly talking about sex and being a lifelong learner when it comes to relationships and sexual satisfaction?
One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/introtohumansexuality/?p=133#oembed-1
Theoretical Approaches
Using both a historical lens, as well as a more contemporary approach we want to first examine influential theories applied to sexuality through the lifespan. If you’ve taken any other psychology courses, you may find the following section a bit of a review since we are going to primarily discuss and apply Freud’s psychosexual stages of development as well as Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development. As you read, consider- how do their ideas still show up in modern understanding of sexual development, including language, cultural norms, and/or values? Can you see any aspects of these theories as applied to your own experiences?
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development
Freud believed that personality develops during early childhood: Childhood experiences shape our personalities as well as our behavior as adults. He asserted that we develop via a series of stages during childhood. Each of us must pass through these childhood stages, and if we do not have the proper nurturing and parenting during a stage, we will be stuck, or fixated, in that stage, even as adults.
In each psychosexual stage of development, the child’s pleasure-seeking urges, coming from the id, are focused on a different area of the body, called an erogenous zone. The stages are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.
Freud’s psychosexual development theory is quite controversial. To understand the origins of the theory, it is helpful to be familiar with the political, social, and cultural influences of Freud’s day in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. During this era, a climate of sexual repression, combined with limited understanding and education surrounding human sexuality, heavily influenced Freud’s perspective. Given that sex was a taboo topic, Freud assumed that negative emotional states (neuroses) stemmed from suppression of unconscious sexual and aggressive urges. For Freud, his own recollections and interpretations of patients’ experiences and dreams were sufficient proof that psychosexual stages were universal events in early childhood.
Stage Age (years) Erogenous Zone Major Conflict Adult Fixation Example
Oral 0–1 Mouth Weaning off breast or bottle Smoking, overeating
Anal 1–3 Anus Toilet training Neatness, messiness
Phallic 3–6 Genitals Oedipus/Electra complex Vanity, overambition
Latency 6–12 None None None
Genital 12+ Genitals None None
Oral Stage
In the oral stage (birth to 1 year), pleasure is focused on the mouth. Eating and the pleasure derived from sucking (nipples, pacifiers, and thumbs) play a large part in a baby’s first year of life. At around 1 year of age, babies are weaned from the bottle or breast, and this process can create conflict if not handled properly by caregivers. According to Freud, an adult who smokes, drinks, overeats, or bites her nails is fixated in the oral stage of her psychosexual development; she may have been weaned too early or too late, resulting in these fixation tendencies, all of which seek to ease anxiety.
Anal Stage
After passing through the oral stage, children enter what Freud termed the anal stage (1–3 years). In this stage, children experience pleasure in their bowel and bladder movements, so it makes sense that the conflict in this stage is over toilet training. Freud suggested that success at the anal stage depended on how parents handled toilet training. Parents who offer praise and rewards encourage positive results and can help children feel competent. Parents who are harsh in toilet training can cause a child to become fixated at the anal stage, leading to the development of an anal-retentive personality. The anal-retentive personality is stingy and stubborn, has a compulsive need for order and neatness, and might be considered a perfectionist. If parents are too lenient in toilet training, the child might also become fixated and display an anal-expulsive personality. The anal-expulsive personality is messy, careless, disorganized, and prone to emotional outbursts.
Phallic Stage
Freud’s third stage of psychosexual development is the phallic stage (3–6 years), corresponding to the age when children become aware of their bodies and recognize the differences between boys and girls. The erogenous zone in this stage is the genitals. Conflict arises when the child feels a desire for the opposite-sex parent, and jealousy and hatred toward the same-sex parent. For boys, this is called the Oedipus complex, involving a boy’s desire for his mother and his urge to replace his father who is seen as a rival for the mother’s attention. At the same time, the boy is afraid his father will punish him for his feelings, so he experiences castration anxiety. The Oedipus complex is successfully resolved when the boy begins to identify with his father as an indirect way to have the mother. Failure to resolve the Oedipus complex may result in fixation and development of a personality that might be described as vain and overly ambitious.
Girls experience a comparable conflict in the phallic stage—the Electra complex. The Electra complex, while often attributed to Freud, was actually proposed by Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung (Jung & Kerenyi, 1963). A girl desires the attention of her father and wishes to take her mother’s place. Jung also said that girls are angry with the mother for not providing them with a penis—hence the term penis envy. While Freud initially embraced the Electra complex as a parallel to the Oedipus complex, he later rejected it, yet it remains as a cornerstone of Freudian theory, thanks in part to academics in the field (Freud, 1931/1968; Scott, 2005).
Perhaps one of the most important take-aways from this aspect of Freud’s theory, is the unfortunate application of sexualizing children’s genital curiosity and sensate process. Children are inherently curious about their bodies at this stage of development, which is something that Freud observed. However, it’s critical to note that curiosity and even some aspects of individual or social physical exploration isn’t inherently sexual like what mature folks experience. Part of the reason this is still covered in human sexuality is to address the cultural legacy of aspects of over-sexualizing children, as well as victim-blaming (creating culpability for sexual offenses where none exists).
Latency Period
Following the phallic stage of psychosexual development is a period known as the latency period (6 years to puberty). This period is not considered a stage, because sexual feelings are dormant as children focus on other pursuits, such as school, friendships, hobbies, and sports. Children generally engage in activities with peers of the same sex, which serves to consolidate a child’s gender-role identity.
Genital Stage
The final stage is the genital stage (from puberty on). In this stage, there is a sexual reawakening as the incestuous urges resurface. The young person redirects these urges to other, more socially acceptable partners (who often resemble the other-sex parent). People in this stage have mature sexual interests, which for Freud meant a strong desire for the opposite sex. Individuals who successfully completed the previous stages, reaching the genital stage with no fixations, are said to be well-balanced, healthy adults.
While most of Freud’s ideas have not found support in modern research, we cannot discount the contributions that Freud has made to the field of psychology. It was Freud who pointed out that a large part of our mental life is influenced by the experiences of early childhood and takes place outside of our conscious awareness; his theories paved the way for others. Most importantly, the notion that early attachment matters in terms of our future personal relationships (including romantic and sexual) are domains of important modern research and application.
Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory of Development
Erik Erikson (1902–1994), another stage theorist, took Freud’s theory and modified it as psychosocial theory. Erikson’s psychosocial development theory emphasizes the social nature of our development rather than its sexual nature. While Freud believed that personality is shaped only in childhood, Erikson proposed that personality development takes place all through the lifespan. Erikson suggested that how we interact with others is what affects our sense of self, or what he called the ego identity.
In each stage of Erikson’s theory, there is a psychosocial task that we must master in order to feel a sense of competence.
Erikson proposed that we are motivated by a need to achieve competence in certain areas of our lives. According to psychosocial theory, we experience eight stages of development over our lifespan, from infancy through late adulthood. At each stage there is a conflict, or task, that we need to resolve. Successful completion of each developmental task results in a sense of competence and a healthy personality. Failure to master these tasks leads to feelings of inadequacy.
Although Erikson’s theory is still subject to controversies, it does have modern application to lifespan development, especially when one considers that, unlike Freud, Erikson sought to describe the entirety of a person’s life. Each of his psychosocial stages will be applied as we discuss each phase of development below. The chart below highlights Erikson’s original ideas around age and timing of developmental tasks. With advances in our understanding of brain maturation, as well as our increased lifespan, these ages may be adjusted in our discussion.
Stage Age (years) Developmental Task Description
1 0–1 Trust vs. mistrust Trust (or mistrust) that basic needs, such as nourishment and affection, will be met
2 1–3 Autonomy vs. shame/doubt Develop a sense of independence in many tasks
3 3–6 Initiative vs. guilt Take initiative on some activities—may develop guilt when unsuccessful or boundaries overstepped
4 7–11 Industry vs. inferiority Develop self-confidence in abilities when competent or sense of inferiority when not
5 12–18 Identity vs. confusion Experiment with and develop identity and roles
6 19–29 Intimacy vs. isolation Establish intimacy and relationships with others
7 30–64 Generativity vs. stagnation Contribute to society and be part of a family
8 65– Integrity vs. despair Assess and make sense of life and meaning of contributions
Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development
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Sexual Development in Early Childhood
Historically, children have been thought of as innocent or incapable of sexual arousal (Aries, 1962). Yet, the physical dimension of sexual arousal is present from birth. However, to associate the elements of seduction, power, love, or lust that are part of the adult meanings of sexuality would be inappropriate. Sexuality begins in childhood as a response to physical states and sensation and cannot be interpreted as similar to that of adults in any way (Carroll, 2007).
Infancy
Boys and girls are capable of erections and vaginal lubrication even before birth (Martinson, 1981). Arousal can signal overall physical contentment and stimulation that accompanies feeding or warmth. Infants begin to explore their bodies and touch their genitals as soon as they have the sufficient motor skills. This stimulation is for comfort or to relieve tension rather than to reach orgasm (Carroll, 2007).
According to Erikson (1963), trust is the basis of our development during infancy (birth to 12 months). Therefore, the primary task of this stage is trust versus mistrust. Infants are dependent upon their caregivers, so caregivers who are responsive and sensitive to their infant’s needs help their baby to develop a sense of trust; their baby will see the world as a safe, predictable place. Unresponsive caregivers who do not meet their baby’s needs can engender feelings of anxiety, fear, and mistrust; their baby may see the world as unpredictable.
Early Childhood
Self-stimulation is common in early childhood for both boys and girls. Curiosity about the body and about others’ bodies is a natural part of early childhood. As children grow, they are more likely to show their genitals to siblings or peers, and to take off their clothes and touch each other (Okami, Olmstead, & Abramson, 1997). As toddlers (ages 1–3 years) begin to explore their world, they learn that they can control their actions and act on the environment to get results. They begin to show clear preferences for certain elements of the environment, such as food, toys, and clothing. A toddler’s main task is to resolve the issue of autonomy versus shame and doubt, by working to establish independence. This is the “me do it” stage. For example, we might observe a budding sense of autonomy in a 2-year-old child who wants to choose her clothes and dress herself. Although her outfits might not be appropriate for the situation, her input in such basic decisions has an effect on her sense of independence. If denied the opportunity to act on her environment, she may begin to doubt her abilities, which could lead to low self-esteem and feelings of shame.
Once children reach the preschool stage (ages 3–6 years), they are capable of initiating activities and asserting control over their world through social interactions and play. According to Erikson, preschool children must resolve the task of initiative versus guilt. By learning to plan and achieve goals while interacting with others, preschool children can master this task. Those who do will develop self-confidence and feel a sense of purpose. Those who are unsuccessful at this stage—with their initiative misfiring or stifled—may develop feelings of guilt.
During the preschool years, children may become increasingly aware of their bodies, which can lead to individual and peer-to-peer sexual play. Indeed physical exploration games are very common between young children, with 50 to 85 percent of kids engaging in some sort of game play that involves fantasy sexual play, exposure or stimulation of genitals (O’Donovan, 2010). How adult caregivers respond to this play can be critically important to later, mature sexual experiences.
Middle Childhood Sexual Development
Although Freud determined that middle childhood was simply a time of latency, that it’s a time when children’s sexual interests are dormant, modern understanding of sexuality tells a different story. Even Erikson noted that this stage of development is significant and that the objective is to move through industry vs. inferiority. In other words, kids are intent on gaining a sense of self and ability, of competency in their tasks and relationships. If not, Erikson argued that they may experience inferiority. With regard to sexual development, children this age may not experience the wide-eyed curiosity of their earlier years, but they also may not have entered puberty yet. Interestingly, in one survey men and women, regardless of sexual orientation, reported that the average age of their first sexual attraction was around 10 years old (Lehmiller, 2018), which reflects that there are more factors impacting school-aged children than early theory suggests.
In many western societies, school-aged children are often given their first set of educational information about their upcoming changing bodies, puberty and reproduction. For trans youth, this time can be challenging based on concerns around physical changes at the onset of puberty. Early messages about bodies, sex and sexuality can have important effects on later attitudes and behavior. There is ongoing evidence that comprehensive sex education before young people become sexually active results in a delay in the onset of sexual activity AND an increase in sexual well being (O’Donovan, 2010). Additionally, support for trans youth in terms of available health options is imperative for their ongoing physical and mental health outcomes (Turban, King, Carswell, & Keuroghlian, 2020).
Sexual Development in Adolescence
Adolescent Sexual Development
Typically, the growth spurt is followed by the development of sexual maturity. Sexual changes are divided into two categories: Primary sexual characteristics and secondary sexual characteristics. Primary sexual characteristics are changes in the reproductive organs. For males, this includes growth of the testes, penis, scrotum, and spermarche or first ejaculation of semen. This occurs around 9-14 years old (Breehl & Caban, 2020). For females, primary characteristics include growth of the uterus and menarche or the first menstrual period. The female gametes, which are stored in the ovaries, are present at birth, but are immature. Each ovary contains about 400,000 gametes, but only 500 will become mature eggs (Crooks & Baur, 2007). Beginning at puberty, one ovum ripens and is released about every 28 days during the menstrual cycle. Stress and a higher percentage of body fat can bring menstruation at younger ages. According to Breehl & Caban (2020), puberty begins on average for girls around 8-13 years old with African American girls starting puberty earlier at around 6 years old.
Stress and elevated levels of cortisol are associated with earlier puberty, especially in girls (Belsky et al., 2015). Racial microaggressions and minority stress take a toll on the body and influence mental and physical health at the intersection of race and gender (Lewis et al., 2017). In addition to most research being conducted on White girls and when they reach puberty, other health outcomes that disproportionately impact Black girls have not been researched enough (Salsbury et al., 2009). While puberty for girls of all races and ethnicities has been decreasing over the past several years, Black girls “have the lowest median age of menarche and the highest rate of childhood obesity” (Salsbury et al., 2009, p. 2). Latina youth also start puberty earlier due to similar impacts of stress and higher body mass indexes (BMIs) at a younger age (Jean et al., 2009). Something to keep in mind, research based on race and ethnic differences in pubertal timing are still very limited and it is important to question the notion of what constitutes normative BMI, especially when studies are conducted on mostly White populations. Additionally, while the timing of puberty has significant social implications which then impacts self-esteem, this interaction is also context-dependent and based on many intersecting and complex factors. Every single person may have a different experience related to puberty due to the way peers treat them and the messages they receive from the media, teachers, family, religious institutions, and more about this process.
Precocious and Delayed Puberty
If a girl begins puberty before age 8 and boys before age 9, then they would be considered to have precocious (or early) puberty (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2016). Some children may experience psychological and social problems related to feeling different than their peers (NICHD, 2016). Boys are less likely to experience negative consequences, such as bullying, if they develop earlier. Individuals who develop earlier may be perceived by others as more mature and older than they are developmentally. Thus, girls may face greater levels of sexualization earlier and boys may experience reduced levels of bullying due to their size and increased body mass.
Delayed puberty is when a girl experiences a lack of breast growth by age 13 or the lack of a period (menarche) by age 16 (Tang et al., 2020). For boys, this is when testicular enlargement has not occurred by age 14 (Tang et al., 2020). Girls and boys may experience bullying from peers due to their smaller and more child-like appearance. Boys in particular may face heightened levels of bullying and negative self-esteem consequences.
Context is Important
According to the literature review conducted by Seaton & Carter (2018), “Given ethnic/racial variations in standards of physical attractiveness, being a member of a racial group can influence body image norms. African American girls tend to describe their beauty ideals in terms of personality characteristics such as style, attitude, pride, and confidence; whereas White girls tend to describe their beauty ideals in terms of fixed physical attributes such as tall, thin, and high cheekbones… Researchers have speculated that adolescent girls who adopt body ideals in terms of personality characteristics are less vulnerable to the distress generated by puberty” (p. 42). Seaton & Carter (2018) found in their research that Black girls who view their racial identity as more central to their sense of self will experience more distress if they enter puberty later, especially if they attend a school that is predominately White. Late developing Black girls also may be further bullied by peers, so earlier puberty could act as a protection against racialized microaggressions since early maturing girls are perceived as more mature and advanced by peers within the school context (Seaton & Carter, 2018).
Jean et al. (2009) explored family dynamics and differences in acculturation between younger and older generations of Mexican Americans. The researchers found that mothers who immigrated to the United States in adulthood viewed their body size more favorably compared to their daughters who grew up attending school in the United States. Fathers were also generally very supportive of their daughters’ weight and size. Based on interviews with the girls compared to their parents, acculturation caused internalized beauty ideals that favored thinness and height more than that of their mothers and fathers. The length of time in the United States was associated with peer influence shaping standards of beauty more than family. Therefore, generational differences and acculturation can also influence body image and self-esteem. The girls who resisted acculturation actually showed more body satisfaction as their bodies began to change due to puberty when compared to the girls who internalized more American beauty standards (Jean et al., 2009).
Hormone Blockers for Transgender Individuals
An area of debate is whether transgender youth should be able to take hormone blockers prior to and during puberty in conjunction with hormone therapy in order to prevent unwanted changes during puberty and to bring about a puberty that more closely matches that of their gender identity because our society heavily correlates physical features with gender. For example, testosterone acts on the vocal cords to deepen the voice and body mass begins to redistribute which can be distressing to some transgender girls. Hormone blockers would prevent this process from occurring. However, some people argue that children cannot make such serious decisions for themselves and legally parents or guardians are the ones who consent to medical care on their youths’ behalf. This commonly results in a person needing to wait until they can consent to medical care for themselves before they can receive hormone therapy. At this point, puberty has already made lasting changes to the body that will take greater levels of medical intervention to alter.
Turban et al. (2020) and Achille et al. (2020) found that transgender youth who wanted and were provided with pubertal suppression hormones experienced a significant decrease in suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety and reported improved overall mental health. According to Turban et al. (2020), the Endocrine Society guidelines and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care both recommend that transgender adolescents be offered puberty blockers, which are formally called gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues (GnRHas).
Adolescent Sexual Activity
By about age ten or eleven, most children experience increased sexual attraction to others that affects social life, both in school and out (McClintock & Herdt, 1996). By the end of high school, more than half of boys and girls report having experienced sexual intercourse at least once, though it is hard to be certain of the proportion because of the sensitivity and privacy of the information. (Center for Disease Control, 2004; Rosenbaum, 2006). The birth rate for teenagers has declined by 58% since 2007 and 72% since 1991, the most recent peak (Hamilton, Joyce, Martin, & Osterman, 2019). It appears that adolescents seem to be less sexually active than in previous years, and those who are sexually active seem to be using birth control (CDC, 2016).
Romantic Relationships
Adolescence is the developmental period during which romantic relationships typically first emerge. By the end of adolescence, most American teens have had at least one romantic relationship (Dolgin, 2011). However, culture does play a role as Asian Americans and Latinas are less likely to date than other ethnic groups (Connolly, Craig, Goldberg, & Pepler, 2004). Dating serves many purposes for teens, including having fun, companionship, status, socialization, sexual experimentation, intimacy, and partner selection for those in late adolescence (Dolgin, 2011). There are several stages in the dating process beginning with engaging in mixed-sex group activities in early adolescence (Dolgin, 2011). The same-sex peer groups that were common during childhood expand into mixed-sex peer groups that are more characteristic of adolescence. Straight romantic relationships often form in the context of these mixed-sex peer groups (Connolly, Furman, & Konarski, 2000). Interacting in mixed-sex groups is easier for teens as they are among a supportive group of friends, can observe others interacting, and are kept safe from a too early intimate relationship.
By middle adolescence, teens are engaging in brief, casual dating or in group dating with established couples (Dolgin, 2011). Then, in late adolescence, dating involves exclusive, intense relationships. These relationships tend to be long-lasting and continue for a year or longer, however, they may also interfere with friendships.
Although romantic relationships during adolescence are often short-lived rather than long-term committed partnerships, their importance should not be minimized. Adolescents spend a great deal of time focused on romantic relationships, and their positive and negative emotions are more tied to romantic relationships, or lack thereof, than to friendships, family relationships, or school (Furman & Shaffer, 2003).
According to the Pew Research Center (2013), individuals who identify as gay, lesbian and bisexual first realized they may not be straight around age 12, knew for sure they weren’t straight by about 17, and first told someone at about age 20. LGB+ individuals may face discrimination and bullying if they date openly depending on the specific culture and acceptance found at their school site. The prevalence of Gay-Straight Alliances and other types of supportive clubs at school sites mixed with administration and teacher support can serve as protective forces. Younger generations are also coming out much sooner compared to older generations due to society becoming more accepting overall.
Romantic relationships contribute to adolescents’ identity formation, changes in family and peer relationships, and emotional and behavioral adjustment. Furthermore, romantic relationships are centrally connected to adolescents’ emerging sexuality. Parents, policymakers, and researchers have devoted a great deal of attention to adolescents’ sexuality, in large part because of concerns related to sexual intercourse, contraception, and preventing teen pregnancies. However, sexuality involves more than this narrow focus. For example, adolescence is often when individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender come to perceive themselves as such (Russell, Clarke, & Clary, 2009).
Thus, romantic relationships are a domain in which adolescents’ experiment with new behaviors and identities. However, a negative dating relationship can adversely affect an adolescent’s development. Soller (2014) explored the link between relationship inauthenticity and mental health. Relationship inauthenticity refers to an incongruence between thoughts/feelings and actions within a relationship. Desires to gain partner approval and demands in the relationship may negatively affect an adolescent’s sense of authenticity. Soller found that relationship inauthenticity was positively correlated with poor mental health, including depression, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, especially for females.
Sexual Attraction and Sexual Identity Development
In Erikson’s terms, the time during adolescence is marked by the formation of identity versus role confusion. According to Carroll (2016), by age 14 most adolescents become interested in intimate relationships, and they may begin sexual experimentation. Many adolescents feel pressure to express interest in opposite-sex relationships, even if they are not ready to do so. This pressure can be especially stressful for those adolescents who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or questioning their sexual identity. Many adolescents who are LGB+ struggle with negative peer and family reactions during their exploration. A lack of parental acceptance especially can adversely affect the gay, lesbian or bisexual adolescent’s emerging sexual identity and can result in feelings of depression. In contrast, adolescents whose families support their sexual identity have better health outcomes.
In terms of sexual exploration with their peers, there is a fairly typical progression of behavior patterns that exists. Among Americans, the average of kissing is between 12-14, heavy petting and genital fondling occurs between 15 and 16 and average of first intercourse typically occurring between ages 16 and 18 (Lehmiller, 2018). Of course, there are numerous factors that may vary these averages (biopsychosocial factors, such as onset of puberty, physical abilities, sense of identity and/or acceptance of sexual engagement, social standing, safety, etc). Research demonstrates that the earlier teens engage in penile-vagina sex, the less likely they are to use contraception, more likely to contract a sexually transmitted infection (STI) or experience unplanned, teen pregnancy (Lehmiller, 2018). Two important notes here: First, early sexual debut doesn’t always result in negative health consequences (especially when comprehensive sex education is available). And, secondly, one of the challenges of translating sexual behaviors among all teens is that research has often limited its’ scope of inquiry to penile-vagina intercourse. Certainly, this information is relevant, yet more research into LGB+ sexual behavior, as well as cultural and societal influences in teen attitudes, are important considerations.
Sexual Development During Emerging and Early Adulthood
Emerging adulthood is the period between the late teens and early twenties; ages 18-25, although some researchers have included up to age 29 in the definition (Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood, 2016). Jeffrey Arnett (2000) argues that emerging adulthood is neither adolescence nor is it young adulthood. Individuals in this age period have left behind the relative dependency of childhood and adolescence but have not yet taken on the responsibilities of adulthood. “Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little about the future is decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course” (Arnett, 2000, p. 469).
Erikson’s (1950, 1968) sixth stage, intimacy versus isolation, focuses on establishing intimate relationships or risking social isolation. Intimate relationships are more difficult if one is still struggling with identity. Achieving a sense of identity is a life-long process, as there are periods of identity crisis and stability. However, once identity is established intimate relationships can be pursued. These intimate relationships include acquaintanceships and friendships, but also the more important close relationships, which are the long-term romantic relationships that we develop with another person, for instance, in a marriage (Hendrick & Hendrick, 2000).
Hooking Up
United States demographic changes have significantly affected the romantic relationships among emerging and early adults. As previously described, the age for puberty has declined, while the times for one’s first marriage and first child have been pushed to older ages. This results in a “historically unprecedented time gap where young adults are physiologically able to reproduce, but not psychologically or socially ready to settle down and begin a family and child rearing,” (Garcia, Reiber, Massey, & Merriwether, 2012, p. 172). Consequently, according to Bogle (2007, 2008) traditional forms of dating have shifted to more casual hookups that involve uncommitted sexual encounters. Table 7.6 Reasons for Staying Single Have not met the right person 30% Do not have financial stability 27% Not ready to settle down 22% Too young to marry 22% Based on Data from Wang & Parker (2014) Pew Research Center Figure 7.26 Source 284 Even though most research on hooking up involves college students, 70% of sexually active 12- 21 year olds reported having had uncommitted sex during the past year (Grello, Welsh, Harper, & Dickson, 2003). Additionally, Manning, Giordano and Longmore (2006) found that 61% of sexually active seventh, ninth, and eleventh graders reported being involved in a sexual encounter outside of a dating relationship.
Hooking up Gender Differences
When asked about their motivation for hooking up, both males and females indicated physical gratification, emotional gratification, and a desire to initiate a romantic relationship as reasons (Garcia & Reiber, 2008). Although males and females are more similar than different in their sexual behaviors, a consistent finding among the research is that males demonstrate a greater permissiveness to casual sex (Oliver & Hyde, 1993). In another study involving 16,288 individuals across 52 nations, males reported a greater desire of sexual partner variety than females, regardless of relationship status or sexual orientation (Schmitt et al., 2003). This difference can be attributed to gender role expectations for both males and females regarding sexual promiscuity. Additionally, the risks of sexual behavior are higher for females and include unplanned pregnancy, increased sexually transmitted diseases, and susceptibility to sexual violence (Garcia et al., 2012). Although hooking up relationships have become normalized for emerging adults, some research indicates that the majority of both sexes would prefer a more traditional romantic relationship (Garcia et al., 2012). Additionally, Owen and Fincham (2011) surveyed 500 college students with experience with hookups, and 65% of women and 45% of men reported that they hoped their hookup encounter would turn into a committed relationship. Further, 51% of women and 42% of men reported that they tried to discuss the possibility of starting a relationship with their hookup partner. Casual sex has also been reported to be the norm among gay men, but they too indicate a desire for romantic and companionate relationships (Clarke & Nichols, 1972).
The Physiological Peak – Early Adulthood
People in their mid-twenties to mid-forties are considered to be in early adulthood. By the time we reach early adulthood, our physical maturation is complete, although our height and weight may increase slightly. Those in their early twenties are probably at the peak of their physiological development, including muscle strength, reaction time, sensory abilities, and cardiac functioning. The reproductive system, motor skills, strength, and lung capacity are all operating at their best. Most professional athletes are at the top of their game during this stage, and many women have children in the early-adulthood years (Boundless, 2016).
The aging process actually begins during early adulthood. Around the age of 30, many changes begin to occur in different parts of the body. For example, the lens of the eye starts to stiffen and thicken, resulting in changes in vision (usually affecting the ability to focus on close objects). Sensitivity to sound decreases; this happens twice as quickly for men as for women. Hair can start to thin and become gray around the age of 35, although this may happen earlier for some individuals and later for others. The skin becomes drier and wrinkles start to appear by the end of early adulthood. This includes a decline in response time and the ability to recover quickly from physical exertion. The immune system also becomes less adept at fighting off illness, and reproductive capacity starts to decline (Boundless, 2016).
Sexual Development in Middle Adulthood
Erikson’s notion of middle adulthood placed this age range between 30 and 65, though many argue that that middle aged impacts people aged 45 to 69. The psychosocial conflict, per Erikson, is generativity versus stagnation. In other words, are people experiencing a sense of continued growth and contribution or are they resigned to their lives as-is?
Sexuality is an important part of people’s lives at any age, and many middle aged and older adults are very interested in staying sexually active (Dimah & Dimah, 2004). According to the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) (Center for Sexual Health Promotion, 2010), 74% of males and 70% of females aged 40-49 engaged in vaginal intercourse during the previous year, while 58% of males and 51% of females aged 50-59 did so.
Despite these percentages indicating that middle adults are sexually active, age-related physical changes can affect sexual functioning. For women, decreased sexual desire and pain during vaginal intercourse because of menopausal changes have been identified (Schick et al., 2010). A woman may also notice less vaginal lubrication during arousal which can affect overall pleasure (Carroll, 2016). Men may require more direct stimulation for an erection and the erection may be delayed or less firm (Carroll, 2016). Men may experience erectile dysfunction or experience a medical conditions (such as diabetes or heart disease) that impact sexual functioning.
Couples can continue to enjoy physical intimacy and may engage in more foreplay, oral sex, and other forms of sexual expression rather than focusing as much on sexual intercourse. Risk of pregnancy continues until a woman has been without menstruation for at least 12 months, however, and couples should continue to use contraception. People continue to be at risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, such as genital herpes, chlamydia, and genital warts. In 2014, 16.7% of the country’s new HIV diagnoses (7,391 of 44,071) were among people 50 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2014e). This was an increase from 15.4% in 2005. Practicing safe sex is important at any age, but unfortunately adults over the age of 40 have the lowest rates of condom use (Center for Sexual Health Promotion, 2010). This low rate of condom use suggests the need to enhance education efforts for older individuals regarding STI risks and prevention. Hopefully, when partners understand how aging affects sexual expression, they will be less likely to misinterpret these changes as a lack of sexual interest or displeasure in the partner and more able to continue to have satisfying and safe sexual relationships.
Sexuality in the Elderly
In Erikson’s final psychosocial stage for people 70 and over, the major conflict exists with integrity versus despair. Through living life, are elderly adults able to reflect on their lives with a sense of meaning or do they feel that their regrets in life cancel out its’ importance. Indeed- this is also a time in which, based one’s physical health and well-being, where a person may still feel a genuine sense of engagement and purpose in their activities (integrity).
According to Kane (2008), older men and women are often viewed as genderless and asexual. There is a stereotype that elderly individuals no longer engage in sexual activity and when they do, they are perceived to have committed some kind of offense. These ageist myths can become internalized, and older people have a more difficult time accepting their sexuality (Gosney, 2011). Physicians rarely inquire after elderly patients’ sexual health, lending to further challenges of sexual functioning conversations and/or STI prevention (Lehmiller, 2018).
In reality, many older couples find greater satisfaction in their sex life than they did when they were younger. They have fewer distractions, more time and privacy, no worries about getting pregnant, and greater intimacy with a lifelong partner (NIA, 2013). Results from the National Social Life Health, and Aging Project indicated that 72% of men and 45.5% of women aged 52 to 72 reported being sexually active (Karraker, DeLamater, & Schwarz, 2011). Additionally, the National Survey of Sexual Health data indicated that 20%-30% of individuals remain sexually active well into their 80s (Schick et al., 2010). Indeed, no matter what a person’s sexual orientation, the single biggest factor on whether someone maintains a healthy sex life in their senior years is their – and/or their partner’s – health and well-being (Lehmiller, 2018). Finally, some studies indicate that sexual satisfaction declines with age. Interestingly, what seems to be the more consistent attribute to sexuality in later life, is that how sexual satisfaction gets defined shifts. Where early adults might find that frequency matters in terms of sexual activity, older adults determine that the quality of engagement is what matters (in other words, quality not quantity is most important).
Conclusion
Sexuality influences all of us. Throughout our lifetime, the relationship with ourselves and others may shift, sexually speaking, making the understanding of development all the more important. In this section, we’ve discussed sensate experiences from in-utero development to elderly experiences with sexuality in a way that barely covers the tip of the iceberg. Indeed – much more can be written to include the importance of social shifts in conversations around sexuality here in the US, moving from non-heteronormative research modalities (a slow work-in-progress), and how culture, race, gender and other identifications matter in our developmental processes and sexuality. Whether it’s the influence of media and technology on our sex lives or how to manage the sexual experiences of dementia patients in appropriate ways, we are still unraveling vital areas of sexual functioning. To do this adequately, we need to consistently apply biopsychosocial approaches, as well as stay curious about the many domains of sexual development.
Licenses & Attributions
Lally, M. & Valentine-French, S. (2019). Lifespan development: A psychological perspective. This textbook can be found at: http://dept.clcillinois.edu/psy/LifespanDevelopment.pdf Publication is under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
The content around Freud and Erikson were derived from the following OER textbook: Freud and the Psychodynamic Perspective: Psychosocial Theory of Development Created by July 31, 2018 https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/15352 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
Adaptations: Reformatted. Added learning objectives. Modified content for language, application to subject and cohesion. Updated sources.
All Rights Reserved
Mahambrey, M. (2020). Birds and bees: Rethinking relationship and sexuality education. TEDxColumbus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE0jKANd_Po. License: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
Sprouts Learning Co. (2017, April 23). 8 stages of development by Erik Erikson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYCBdZLCDBQ&t=72s. Licence: Published under a Creative Commons license directly on YouTube. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/02%3A_Part_II_-_Professional_and_Clinical_Topics_in_Human_Sexuality/2.02%3A_Chapter_12_-_Sexual_Development_Through_the_Lifespan.txt |
Learning Objectives
• Analyze psychosocial and cultural factors impacting contraception use.
• Discuss best practices to promote equity within healthcare systems and regarding access to resources.
• Be able to demonstrate the following in regard to contraception:
• ways in which sexual participants or partners can share responsibility for it;
• how various methods work as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each method;
• and finally, the effectiveness of various hormone-based contraceptives, barrier methods, intrauterine devices, emergency contraception, methods based on the menstrual cycle, and sterilization.
Introduction
One could argue that as long as humankind has had an awareness of how conception occurs, there have been steps taken to thwart that process. The history of contraception (the deliberate use of techniques to prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections) is long and varied. In the United States, contraception is fraught with complexities. On one hand, there have been remarkable innovations, but on the other hand, there’s a sordid history of the mistreatment and forced sterilization of marginalized folks. This week’s reading attempts to highlight historical features of contraception, describe different types of contraception and how they work, and illuminate intersectional imbalances in access and delivery of contraceptive services.
Early History of Contraception – An Overview
As the old adage goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention” and, indeed, contraception is no exception to this rule. The first known record of contraception dates back to 3000 BCE and was the brainchild of Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos of Crete. Fearing that his semen had “serpents and scorpions” in it, she inserted a goat bladder into her vagina before having sex with her husband (Khan, Mukhtar, Dickinson, & Sriprasad, 2013). There’s also evidence in support of Ancient Greeks and Egyptians using a diaphragm made out of crocodile dung, honey, and sodium carbonate (Lehmiller, 2019; Tye, 2020) to prevent pregnancy. The Ancient Egyptians were one of the first civilizations to use barrier methods in the form of sheaths, often made out of linen while Chinese civilizations utilized silk paper applied with oil. Early Japanese civilization used a shell to cover the glans of the penis and the Djukas tribe of New Guinea are on record for using an internal condom made out of a specific plant, which prevented conception (Khan, et al, 2013; Lehmiller, 2019).
By the Renaissance, contraception was regarded as being both a safeguard from disease, as well as unintended pregnancy with condoms emerging with greater use (most were made from linen or animal intestines or bladders of goats, sheep, cattle, or fish). From Ancient cultures to the Renaissance and forward, the wisdom of herbs, teas and tinctures were also passed down from woman to woman. The popular ballad, “Scarborough Fair” was thought to hold the secret to avoiding pregnancy through the use of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme and pennyroyal tea was commonly used as an abortifacient (Bilger, 1998). By the middle to late 19th century condoms and investigations to hormonal contraceptives were underway, paving the way for 20th and 21st century innovation and use.
Types of Contraceptives
Behavioral Methods
In early lore, behavioral techniques to prevent pregnancy were often based on superstition or storytelling. For example, women were often instructed to jump up and down to get rid of the semen in their vagina or to sneeze or cough heartily (Lehmiller, 2019). Unsurprisingly, these methods weren’t very effective. Perhaps the most successful form of contraception is abstinence and, indeed, its virtue has been touted for generations. Although, theoretically, abstinence emerges as the most cost effective and reliable form of contraception, it’s not always the most attainable or realistic. In cases where sexual intercourse is likely to occur but where accessibility to contraception is limited or religiosity forbids certain forms of protection, behavioral methods are often employed. These methods are typically designed to reduce the chance of conception versus STI prevention.
In the United States, there are over 61 million women who fall within reproductive age (15-44) and about 70% of them are at risk for unintended pregnancy (Guttmacher Institute, 2020). Importantly, 99% of women within this age group disclosed using at least one contraceptive method with over 10% using a behavioral method (Guttmacher Institute, 2020). One of the most commonly known behavioral methods of contraception is the withdrawal method in which the penis is withdrawn from the vagina before ejaculating. Unfortunately, this method is the least effective form of birth control since sperm may be released in pre-ejaculate, it can enter via contact with labia or clitoris, and/or because timing of the withdrawal isn’t done before ejaculation. Indeed, research notes that over a quarter of women (27%) using this method will become pregnant within a year (Tye, 2020).
Timed abstinence, or the rhythm method, is another common behavioral strategy. This approach utilizes reliance of menstrual cycle tracking with avoidance of sex during ovulation. Again, its efficacy is compromised when there are variation of implementation. Additionally, even with more technological advances in tracking menstrual cycles (period apps, ease of temperature recording, etc), physiological variations (like irregular periods) can reduce this method’s efficacy.
Finally, another behavioral contraceptive method that is very specific to certain situations involves breastfeeding. Indeed, intensive breast-feeding (6-8 times per day) can aid in suppressing ovulation. This results in a physiologically based contraception, with only 2% of women becoming pregnant within the year. There are contrary data regarding how long this method is effective with some research supporting six months while other supports nine months postpartum (Tye, 2020).
One behavioral method that isn’t often discussed, in part because of continued taboos about the behavior, is sex during menstruation. It’s actually more common than one may realize (some like the additional lubrication and/or the spike in arousal), while others may be averse to the idea. To be clear, sex during menstruation is completely safe (do watch for STI prevention, however). Importantly, sex on your period in NOT a contraceptive strategy. Indeed, because some sperm can live up to a week and because some menstrual cycles are irregular, pregnancy can still occur so additional contraception may be needed (Tye, 2020).
Barrier Methods
Earlier we discussed how evidence of barrier methods, be it a condom or a diaphragm, appeared in ancient civilizations. By the time we reach mid-late 19th century, significant advances were made, and in 1860, condoms were produced on a large scale. In part, this was because the vulcanized rubber introduced by Charles Goodyear (yep- the tire guy) changed the ability to mass produce condoms (versus relying on animal products). Originally, rubber condoms were made to scale and were reusable (Khan, et al, 2013). Unfortunately, U.S. Postal Inspector and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, lobbied for the prohibition of any type of advertising or print materials involving contraception. In 1873, the Comstock Act was passed, making it a federal offense to disseminate contraceptive information and, ultimately, a series of “Comstock Laws” were implemented nationwide, resulting in the criminalization of contraceptive use (Bailey, 2010).
In 1920, the invention of latex reshaped condom production. During World Wars I and II, rates of STIs among American soldiers skyrocketed and distribution of condoms finally appeared on scene during WW II. Post-war attitudes toward contraception started to shift in the late 1940s (Khan, et al, 2013). Still, it wasn’t until 1965, in the Supreme Court decision on Griswold vs. Connecticut that attitudes and accessibility of contraception takes a dramatic shift toward legality and acceptance (Bailey, 2010).
The most commonly used barrier method in the United States is the male condom (Copen, 2017; Daniels & Abma, 2018). According to the Guttmacher Institute (2020), 5.5 million women rely on male condoms for their contraception needs, making it the most common among 15 to 19 year olds, those born outside of the U.S. and uninsured college graduates (and a few others). While condom use is the most efficacious in the prevention of STIs, its use in pregnancy prevention yields more variable results.
With perfect use, condoms have a 98% efficacy rate in preventing pregnancy. However, that number declines to 82% when human error is factored in (Lehmiller, 2019). The most common mistakes with condom use is not using them correctly, not using them each time intercourse occurs, and breakage (Tye, 2020). Other issues include failing to withdraw promptly after ejaculation, using latex-incompatible lubricant (remember not to mix oil-based lube with latex), and reusing condoms (Lehmiller, 2019).
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Other barrier methods include the internal condom (sometimes called the female condom) and cervical barriers, such as the diaphragm and cervical cap. The internal condom is typically made out of polyurethane (versus latex) and is a hollow closed cylinder with an outer and an inner ring. The inner ring fits close to the cervix, while the out ring remains outside the labia (some report enjoying the extra clitoral stimulation). If the inner ring is removed, it can also be used for anal sex. Available widely throughout Europe, the internal condom can be obtained in the US by prescription, online, or through some reproductive health clinics (Lehmiller, 2019; Tye, 2020). When it’s used as a female condom and barring any errors, the internal condom is believed to be as effective as the male condom in preventing pregnancy and STIs. Unfortunately, the internal condom is a bit more complicated, resulting in less efficacy (Tye, 2020).
The diaphragm and cervical cap are both designed to be inserted into the vagina before sexual intercourse (and typically with the addition of spermicide). Once quite popular in the United States, this is one of the least common forms of contraception today. Still, it is cost-effective (a diaphragm or cervical cap can last up to a year) but it does require fitting it to your particular cervix and a comfort in insertion before sex. Additionally, they need to be left in the body six hours post intercourse to ensure protection. When used without error, the effectiveness of preventing pregnancy is up to 96%, though 88% effective with typical use (Lehmiller, 2019). For more information comparing and contrasting barrier methods of contraception, check out the Center for Disease Control or Planned Parenthood website.
Hormonal Contraception
Historical Notes
Similar to barrier methods, the history of hormonal contraception has a complex and varied background. As previously discussed, there was a range of contraceptive practices used by people for hundreds of years. Despite some informational and technological advances, the Comstock Act of 1873 reduced access and knowledge regarding contraception throughout the United States. One of the most critical opponents of Comstock laws was Margaret H. Sanger (1879 – 1966). A suffragette and advocate for social reform, Sanger argued that a woman’s right to control her body was a fundamental human right and that every person should be able to decide when and whether they should have a child. As a nurse she began speaking and writing about women’s reproductive health, ultimately being held in contempt for violating the Comstock Act in 1912.
In attending poverty-stricken patients from the Lower East Side of New York, she was overwhelmed with the lack of options for women desperate to limit their pregnancies. Following the tragic loss of one mother who died from a self-induced abortion, Sanger left nursing to advocate for women’s birth control later that year. A constant target of law enforcement officials keen on prosecuting Sanger for her work, she consistently moved forward with advocacy and education, ultimately creating the American Birth Control League in 1921 (which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America). Ultimately, Sanger’s work helped bring about the reversal of federal and state ‘Comstock laws’ and pioneered the medical efforts of the birth control pill (Nunez-Eddy & Malladi, 2016; 2018; Planned Parenthood, 2016; Tye, 2020).
As pioneering and innovative as Margaret Sanger was, there were also racist and ableist attitudes of the time that impacted her advocacy. A number of sources have noted her alignment with eugenicist thinking (the notion of selective ‘breeding’ to reinforce more favorable traits). Indeed, the birth control pill was created in response to difficulties with family planning and population control. After the Great Depression, when poverty was a serious problem throughout the nation, smaller families were seen as an affordable way to tackle poverty.
Since eugenics promoted the reproduction of only the healthiest (and let’s face it… the whitest) offspring, the implications of prejudice are abhorrent. Unfortunately, during the time the eugenics movement was popularized, it influenced Sanger and the ideas of birth control (Buttar & Seward, 2009; 2018). To her credit, she never reinforced the notion of sterilization, as did other eugenicists (Nunez-Eddy & Malladi, 2016), but it’s critical to evaluate all aspects of this notable figure versus glamorizing or ignoring elements of her advocacy that may have been problematic. Because, there is no question that aspects of ableism and racism are to be repudiated. For a more thorough response to criticism of Sanger’s perspective, please read Planned Parenthood’s statement on this.
Image from Liberty Magazine, circa 1939
Because of Sanger’s advocacy and the efforts of many other individuals, groups, and corporations, the first commercial birth control pill, Enovid, was introduced, publicly, in 1960 (Bailey, 2010; Buttar & Seward, 2009; 2018). Marketed specifically for married couples, some states still banned the sale of contraception due to the last hold of Comstock provisions throughout the country. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold vs. Connecticut that married couples had the right to privacy in terms of contraception (opening up the sale and distribution of contraceptive items, including the pill; Bailey, 2010; Tye, 2020). In 1972, a second Supreme Court case, Eisenstadt vs. Baird extended contraceptive protections to unmarried women (Tye, 2020). The accessibility of birth control, combined with various cultural shifts, were instrumental in moving women’s rights forward in remarkable ways (Bailey, 2010; Tye, 2020).
Oral Contraceptives
There are several forms of hormonal contraception to discuss. Importantly, these interventions are primarily used for menstrual cycle care and/or to prevent unintended pregnancies (defined as mistimed and/or unwanted pregnancies; Jackson, Wang, & Morse, 2017). The birth control pill (also known as oral contraceptives) is the second most common form of contraception globally (Guttmacher Institute, 2020) and the most commonly prescribed contraceptive in the United States (Cooper & Mahdy, 2020). Approximately four out of five sexually active women have used the pill (though numbers are shifting based on availability of other hormonal options; Guttmacher Institute, 2020).
There are three different oral contraceptive options; combined estrogen-progesterone (most commonly prescribed), progesterone only and the continuous or extended use pill (Cooper & Mahdy, 2020; Lehmiller, 2019; Tye, 2020). When used perfectly, that is taken at the same time, everyday, with no deviation, the efficacy of the pill is 98-99%. However, typical use, which accounts for human error, failure rate for oral contraception is 9% (Cooper & Mahdy, 2020). For more on the types of oral contraceptive options, please check out the CDC and Planned Parenthood.
As revolutionary as the birth control pill has been, it is not without its challenges, as many users can attest to. There are wide-range of side-effects of taking oral contraceptives that have been reported in the 60+ years of its existence. In addition to changes in menstrual cycle, potential for spotting between periods, cramping, nausea, vomiting, weight loss, weight gain, sleep change and shifts in bone density, evidence also supports changes in mood, changes in sexual attraction and libido, increase in anxiety symptoms, shifts in emotion regulation and detection, stress response changes, and mixed data about both increased and decreased levels of cognitive functioning Cooper & Mahdy, 2020; de Wit, Booij, Giltay, Joffe, Schoevers, & Oldehinkel, 2020; Hill, 2020; Lehmiller, 2019; Lewis, Kimmig, Zsido, Jank, Derntl, & Sacher, 2019; Pahnke, Mau-Moeller, Junge, Wendt, Weymar, Hamm, & Lischke, 2019). These are all areas for continued exploration, elaboration, and intervention, especially as symptoms may affect marginalized communities differently and deleteriously.
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Other Hormonal Contraceptive Options
There are two other types of hormonal contraceptives to be aware of. First, there are hormonal interventions that have various compositions similar to the variety of oral contraceptives. The primary difference is the form of modality since these hormonal contraceptives are delivered through injection (e.g. Depo-Provera, administered once every three months), transdermal patches (e.g. Ortho Evra, administered once a month) or a vaginal ring (e.g. NuvaRing, placed vaginally once a month; Lehmiller, 2019; Planned Parenthood, 2020, Tye, 2020).
The other hormonal contraceptive category is long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC). One of these options is administered through an implant (administered under the skin of the upper arm), lasts for five years and has an efficacy rate of 99%. There’s also the placement of an intrauterine device (IUD), which once placed can last for 3 to 12 years, making it one of the most convenient options for long-term pregnancy prevention.
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Perhaps the biggest change in the use of hormonal contraceptives is the increase in the use of LARCs. The new options available to women has seen widespread adoption among all ages and races. LARC use was highest among women aged 25-34 (as compared to other age ranges from 15 to 49; Daniels & Abma, 2018; Guttmacher Institute, 2020). The proportion of women who have used the injectable method increased from 5% in 1995 to 23% in 2006–2010 (Guttmacher Institute, 2020). Approximately 9% of Latina women are using LARC methods as compared to 7% of white and 5% of black users (Jackson, Wang, & Morse, 2017).
Important Considerations
Gaining access to hormonal contraception remains a significant issue, negatively impacting marginalized communities (minorities, economically disadvantaged, immigrants, disabled, etc). Indeed, the majority of oral contraceptive users are white, young, childless, and college educated (Guttmacher Institute, 2020). White women use the pill more often (19%) compared to Latina and black women (11% and 10% respectively). Although there has been a decline of unintended pregnancies across all racial groups, 45% in 2011 compared to 51% in 2008, the racial differences have remained fixed with blacks and Latinas experiencing higher rates than white women (even when stratified by income; Jackson, Wang, & Morse, 2017; Rocca & Harper, 2012; Wright, 2020).
Many of the disparities rooted in structural racism, which impacts minority women also impact women with disabilities. Among American women who fall within the reproductive age range, 12 to 18 percent have a disability related to mobility, vision, hearing, cognitive functioning and/or independent living. Unfortunately, women with disabilities are often subjected to healthcare bias and deemed asexual, which is not rooted in the experience of many these women. Multiple studies have shown that disabled women are less likely to receive gynecological exams and/or contraceptive counseling (Horner-Johnson, Akobirshoev, Amutah-Onukagha, Slaughter-Acey, & Mitra, 2021).
An additional area of consideration for contraceptive counseling, access, and patient-centered care is in the responsiveness to transgender and gender-diverse people. With approximately one in 200 adults identifying as transgender, this domain of care is essential to update. In one study of 26 transgender men, half were at risk for unintended pregnancy (Cipres, Seidman, Cloniger, Nova, O’Shea, & Obedin-Maliver, 2017). Importantly, evidenced-based care, which includes a patient-centered approach, is of paramount importance since each transmasculine or gender diverse patient has their own unique set of goals and concerns in terms of their reproductive health (Bonnington, Dianat, Kerns, Hastings, Hawkins, De Haan, & Obedin-Maliver, 2020).
In the examination of intersectional identities and contraceptive use, a few important findings come to light. First – there is consistent evidence that Black, Latina, Native American, Pan-Asian, disabled, gender diverse and poor women experience barriers to contraceptive access, have higher rates of contraceptive failure, and increased risks of adverse outcomes (Horner-Johnson, et al, 2021; Jackson, Wang, & Morse, 2017; Wright, 2020).
Secondly, practitioners of all types should acknowledge the history of inequity and structural racism, generally and as it pertains to contraceptive access since it still has a residual impact on women to this day.
Finally, there is an increased need to address women’s intersectional identities in response to their contraceptive needs, taking into account historical injustices and current, systemic inequities. As Kelsey Wright contends in her paper refuting the idea that contraception is a panacea for poverty reduction, “…contraceptive services should be offered to women in ways that ensure access to reproductive justice without obscuring the need for social changes in the institutions that create disadvantages and shape contraceptive use itself” (Wright, 2020, p. 1).
Sterilization
The final form of contraception to discuss is sterilization, an irreversible form of birth control that is the most commonly used in the United States and globally (Daniels & Abma, 2018; Guttmacher Institute, 2020). Typically applied to folks on the older end of the reproductive spectrum (ages 35-44) who have already had children, there are two kinds of sterilization to know. Female sterilization, or tubal ligation (tubectomy), is the process of clamping or severing the fallopian tubes so that any eggs released cannot meet sperm for fertilization. Male sterilization occurs in the form of a vasectomy, which involves the sealing or severing of the vas deferens so that sperm can no longer be in the ejaculate. Note that sperm is only a tiny fraction of seminal fluid so the difference in ejaculate is typically undetectable. Both of these procedures are considered low risk, 99% effective and cause no impairment in sexual functioning (Lehmiller, 2019; Tye, 2020).
Forced Sterilization as a Form of Racism
Although sterilization is a sound and viable option for many people in terms of contraception, there are some inequities in terms of who receives sterilization, which is born from a sordid history of coerced and forced sterilization. Summarized in Guttmacher Institute (2020) report, sterilization “is most common among blacks and Hispanics, women aged 35 or older, ever-married women, women with two or more children, women living below 150% of the federal poverty level, women with less than a college education, women living outside of a metropolitan area, and those with public or no health insurance” (p. 2). When considering issues of contraceptive decision making with minority and underrepresented women, listening and understanding their potential distrust in medical systems is essential (Horner-Johnson, et al, 2021; Jackson, Wang, & Morse, 2017; Wright, 2020).
In the mid-19th century, the eugenics movement, spearheaded by Sir Francis Galton, advocated for the advancement of promising heritability. By the late 1800s this campaign endorsed the elimination of hereditary “blights” such as non-whiteness, ‘feeble-mindedness,’ physical impairments or criminality. The United States was the first nation to enact laws of forced sterilization and in 1907, the state of Indiana allowed and/or required the sterilization of criminals, the intellectually disabled (ID) and institutionalized people with other mental and physical impairments. Other states soon followed and in 1927, the case Buck vs. Bell was struck down by the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), ensuring the constitutionality of forced sterilization. The lawsuit had been filed by Virginia woman, Carrie Buck, who was forcibly sterilized and deemed unfit due to her ‘feeble-mindedness.’ The SCOTUS ruling all but ensured the continuation of negative eugenics throughout the country for decades to come (Amy & Rowlands, 2018; Asbury, 2015; Stern, 2005).
Films on Demand Video Clip: ‘Ann Cooper Hewitt’ – From Title:The Eugenics Crusade
When World War II came to an end, there was a collective, global outrage at the atrocities committed by the Nazis (who were well-documented to have learned a great deal from American eugenics). The presence of eugenics in the United States was no longer as heartily supported. Unfortunately, there was little to no change in the legality and practice of eugenics; simply a shift in the framing of the practice. Indeed, by the mid-20th century, tens of thousands of forced sterilizations had occurred in at least 32 states (with a third of those coming from California, alone; predominantly on poor black and Latina women; Stern, 2005). The states of Virginia and North Carolina had alarmingly high rates, dramatically impacting poor, black women (Amy & Rowlands, 2018; Asbury, 2015).
By the 1960s, forced sterilization started to take a different shape, shifting from the public health concerns of heritability issues to a form of public welfare. With the rise of contraceptive availability, sterilizations were seemingly ‘voluntary,’ however, frequently women did not have all of the information, were required to agree to sterilization in order to receive federal benefits, were coerced or simply lied to about the nature of the procedure. A devastating example of this emerged in the late 60s when it was publicized that 35% of all Puerto Rican women (ages 20-49) were sterilized (Krase, 2014).
In 1973, the Relf sisters gained notoriety among activists because at the ages of 12 and 14 they were forcibly sterilized in the state of Alabama. Their mother thought she was consenting to a reversible procedure and was threatened with the loss of her public benefits if she did not sign. In the federal lawsuit, the judge ruled in their favor, noting that “an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that variously supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted” (as cited in Stern, 2015, p. 7).
Similar experiences for other minority groups were going on throughout the country. During the 60s and 70s, Native American women were especially at risk. About 40% (60,000–70,000) of all Native American women alive at that time, and 10% of Native American men underwent sterilization during the 1970s (Amy & Rowlands, 2018, p. 126; Blakemore, 2016). In 1979, Mexican American women in California filed a federal lawsuit, Madrigal v Quilligan, due to the forcible, coercive “consent” to sterilization. Almost all of the victims were in the midst of a painful, complex birthing process and were only given medication if they consented to the sterilization procedure. Unfortunately, they did not win their case, as the federal judge ruled in favor of the attending physicians (since they meant no harm). Still – the case garnered attention and effected changes in the formulation of sterilization stipulations (e.g. need to provide bilingual consent forms; Stern, 2015).
Under the guise of family planning, coercive sterilization was still an issue in the late 20th century, still predominantly affecting minority women. By 1983, forty-three percent of women sterilized in federally funded family planning programs were black (when blacks only made up 12% of the general population; Asbury, 2015). In the 90s, linking more experimental contraceptive options, like Norplant, were also connected to benefits for disadvantaged women. As Asbury (2015) wrote, “What is here worth noting is that the targeting of coercive contraception to poor, black women is antithetical to promoting their reproductive freedom and should be understood as a modern manifestation of historical eugenic efforts seeking to discourage reproduction by marginalized populations” (p. 13).
Current Issues
Unfortunately, coercive and forced sterilization in the United States is still happening. In September 2020 (just a few months ago), whistleblower and nurse Dawn Wooten, who worked at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, shared that ICE detained women were being transferred to a physician who sterilized them without proper informed consent. In her complaint, Wooten also described multiple forms of medical abuse, from failures to protect patients against COVID-19, to forced hysterectomies (Manian, 2020).
Is it any wonder that, based on rampant, systemic injustice against many marginalized bodies that underrepresented folks are still cautious about contraceptive counseling? Indeed, there’s so much to rectify in terms of reproductive healthcare. Recognizing and reconciling the United States’ abhorrent practices is part of the process. Providing restitution and remedy for those deeply impacted, presently and historically, can certainly serve as another part of the solution. Finally, enacting, implementing, and enforcing reproductive rights policy that protects our most vulnerable citizens is certainly an essential feature, as well.
Conclusion
The innovation and use of contraceptive devices have a long, complex history. On one hand, our creative ingenuity can empower options to care for reproductive processes in really responsive ways. On the other hand, certain contraceptive practices are marred with abuse and exploitation, which has continued implications in reproductive justice. Thankfully, modern processes can afford us continued opportunities to correct past mistakes, ensure present accessibility and accountability, and innovate for diverse, responsive future options.
Licenses & Attributions
All Rights Reserved
Hill, S. E. (2019, December 2). The surprising link between women’s brains and the birth control pill. TEDxVienna. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdwLAyWHBVs. License: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
Planned Parenthood (2019, July 19). What is an IUD? Learn about IUD effectiveness [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aomv80RexVo&t=2s. License: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.
Vlog Brothers (2017, July 21). On condom failure. [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4dO_K_DufQ. License: Published under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license directly on YouTube. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_Human_Sexuality_(Goerling_and_Wolfe)/02%3A_Part_II_-_Professional_and_Clinical_Topics_in_Human_Sexuality/2.03%3A_Chapter_13_-_Contraception.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Identify key approaches and debates within the field of queer theory.
• Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality.
• Describe the relationship among LGBTQ+ history, political activism, and LGBTQ+ studies.
• Summarize the personal, theoretical, and political differences of the homophile, gay liberation, radical feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and queer movements.
Introduction
It is a challenge to create an origin story about a field of study, in this instance queer theory, because ideas are not birthed in a moment, a day, or even a year. They build on what has come before, reflect on it, challenge it, seek to bend or break it, and only eventually, and only sometimes, become an identifiable entity with a name given to them. The story of queer theory’s emergence is entwined with queer activism. Queer theory and queer activism are products of their historical moment as well as transformative forces changing how gender and sexuality are understood in multiple academic disciplines and, increasingly, outside academia. Additionally, both queer theory and activism introduced ways of thinking and acting through politics that went beyond normalizing demands for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in existing social institutions.
The 1970s and 1980s saw a rapid increase in lesbian and gay activism and scholarship. A police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969 ignited demonstrations. Following the Stonewall rebellion, lesbian and gay liberation groups started to fight for equal rights, and some scholars started to study the history and culture of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Then, in 1987, Larry Kramer, Vito Russo, and others founded the direct-action group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) to demand that politicians, the medical community, drug manufacturers, and the public acknowledge the AIDS epidemic. The group’s motto was, and remains, “Silence = Death.”[1] An offshoot of ACT UP, Queer Nation, was founded in 1990 to fight the escalating violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.
At roughly the same time, the term queer theory began to circulate and quickly gained momentum within academic circles. The film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (figure 1.1) coined the term at a University of California, Santa Cruz, conference about lesbian and gay sexualities in February 1990. The conference proceedings were later collected in a 1991 special issue of Differences: A Journalof Feminist Cultural Studies. In her introduction to the special issue, de Lauretis outlines the central features of queer theory, sketching the field in broad strokes that have held up remarkably well.[2]
De Lauretis suggested gay and lesbian sexualities should be studied, not as deviations of heterosexuality, but on their own terms. She went on to claim gay and lesbian sexualities should be “understood and imagined as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses.”[3] According to de Lauretis, and queer theorists more generally, lesbian and gay sexualities enact nonnormative intimate and social modes of relating; they put new things in the world, and those new things have transformative potential.
From its earliest iterations, queer theory challenged norms that reproduced inequalities and, at its best, sought to understand how sexuality intersected with gender, race, class, and other social identities to maintain social hierarchies. In fact, de Lauretis used the term queer to create critical distance from lesbian and gay studies. Lesbian and gay studies courses began to appear in the 1970s, and programs slowly emerged in the 1980s. De Lauretis claimed that differences were collapsed within lesbian and gay studies and the experience of white middle-class gay men was privileged. She notes that although it became standard to refer to lesbians and gays in the 1980s, the “and” obscured differences instead of revealing them.[4] In addition to sexuality, de Lauretis hoped queer theory would identify and trouble other “constructed silences”—for instance, those of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.[5] She wanted to break with the past and transform the future by developing new ways of conceptualizing sexual identities in the present of the 1990s.
Watch
In a video in the InQueery series by them, Tyler Ford explains the history behind the word queer (https://youtu.be/UpE0u9Dx_24).
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• What are the key events that Ford identifies as defining the broad outlines of the history of the word queer in the English language?
• What is your own history with the word queer? Where did you first hear it, and how was it used? Do you consider it an insult, a fierce statement of resistance, or something else? Do you self-identify as queer?
• How does your history with the word relate to the broader history described by Ford in the video? What connections between the two do you find?
Gay and lesbian activism has a complex history in the United States and even more so globally. Activist demands that have been most palatable to cisgender heterosexuals are those that foreground the right to privacy, individual autonomy, and equal access to social institutions like marriage and the military. However, queer activism and scholarship reject mainstream liberal ideals of privacy, the goal of formal equality under the law, and the desirability of assimilation into existing social institutions. Instead, queer theory and activism demand publicness, reject civility, and challenge the legitimacy, naturalness, and intrinsic value of institutions—whether marriage or the military—that regulate gender and sexuality.[6] Of course, this very critical, very radical relationship to the normative appears in times before the late 1980s and in places other than the United States, but it is then and there that queer activism and queer theory are named and begin to be, however hesitantly, defined.
This chapter explores the development of queer theory from the 1990s to the present. It begins by elaborating on distinctions between gay and lesbian studies and queer studies before identifying important trends in queer theory.
The Constructionist Turn in Sexuality and Gender Studies
Lesbian and gay studies assumed clear subjects of analysis—lesbians and gays—who were studied as historical, cultural, or literary figures of significance to reclaim a forgotten past and create a sense of collective identity and continuity in the present. Some would argue that lesbian and gay studies took an essentialist view of sexuality that assumed individuals possessed a fixed and innate sexual identity that was both universal and transhistorical.[7]
Queer theorists take a very different approach to understanding identity, which can be understood as constructionist. Constructionists see identity as a sociocultural construct that changes. To assert that identities are sociocultural constructs assumes that in different times and places different meanings and values dominate and influence identity. These meanings and values are transmitted through cultural texts like television, music, or film and are produced within social institutions like schools, museums, and families. As a result, meanings and values change across space and time.
In the mid-1970s, the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault published The History of Sexuality, which describes the origin of modern homosexual identity. In this sweeping history of sexuality, Foucault creates an influential theory of sexual-identity formation. For Foucault, “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.”[8] By rejecting the idea that something called sexuality exists in all of us, waiting to be liberated, Foucault’s work challenged not only how sexuality was understood in popular and scholarly discourses but also how power was understood. For Foucault, power does not repress a preexisting sexual identity; it provides the conditions needed for sexual identities to multiply. Here it is important to distinguish between sexual identities and sexual practices. Sexual practices have existed in multiple forms across time and space, but only in particular moments do practices congeal into identities that can be named and managed.
According to Foucault, power is everywhere, although it is not evenly dispersed. He argues that medical discourse, particularly the field of sexology, which applies scientific principles to the study of sexuality, intersected with legal discourse to simultaneously create the need and the means to identify and produce knowledge about sexual identity, particularly “the homosexual.” Power in this instance belonged to medical and legal authorities. However, naming the homosexual had unforeseen consequences. Those identified as homosexual in medical discourse appropriated the discourse to revise what the category might mean, identify one another, build a community, and make political demands. This can be seen in the early homophile movement, which refers to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century homosexual rights activism that emerged in tandem and entwined with sexology and anti-sodomy laws.
Watch
A video from the School of Life series discusses Michel Foucault, a philosopher of history who explored different institutions—medicine, crime and punishment, and homosexuality—with the goal of radically disrupting our understanding of them (https://youtu.be/BBJTeNTZtGU).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=38
• What was Foucault’s personal background, and how do you imagine it might have influenced his academic career?
• Do you see progress or instead a lack of spontaneity and imagination in the way the West has treated people with mental health issues, criminals, and homosexuals?
• Did Foucault want us to become nostalgic, or did he want us to learn from the past about better ways of doing things now?
Foucault’s work influenced a new wave of historians committed to studying the construction of modern homosexuality. David Halperin, a historian of classical Greek culture, provided volumes’ worth of historical evidence to support Foucault’s more theoretical claims.[9] Halperin argues that using modern identity frameworks to understand culturally and historically specific expressions of desire is poor scholarship. He interprets sexual histories through a queer lens that does not assume that identities and experiences are universal. John D’Emilio, another queer historian, connects the development of modern gay identity to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization.[10] Jonathan Ned Katz, also a historian, focuses a critically queer lens on heterosexuality, arguing that it is also a social construct.[11] By demonstrating that heterosexuality, like homosexuality, is a modern invention, Katz seeks to strip the category of its normalizing power.
Foucault, Halperin, D’Emilio, and Katz contribute to a critical understanding of the social construction of homosexuality and heterosexuality. This does important political and intellectual work in troubling the idea of heterosexuality as normal and natural, a claim that has been used to marginalize homosexuals.
Eve Sedgwick, a literary theorist, continues the project of troubling both homosexuality and heterosexuality in her 1990 publication Epistemology of the Closet, which is widely recognized as a foundational queer theory text (figure 1.2). Sedgwick argues that by the twentieth century, in Western culture, every person was assigned a sexual identity.[12] For Sedgwick, the history of homosexuality is not a minority history—it is the history of modern Western culture. According to Sedgwick, homosexual and heterosexual definition is central to the construction of the modern nation-state, because it informs modern modes of population management. She introduces the terms minoritizing and universalizing to describe competing and coexisting understandings of homosexuality that shape how we imagine sexuality.
The minoritizing view sees homosexuality as relevant only to homosexuals. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. This can have its uses—for instance, in creating a discernible community able to make demands of the state, as seen in the homophile movement as well as in current gay (and lesbian) rights activism. The universalizing view, in contrast, sees sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone. This is the position Sedgwick takes in her book when she claims that sexual definition is central to social organization and identity formation.
Social constructionism also influenced understandings of gender. For instance, the cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” sought to identify the origin of women’s oppression across cultures.[13] It is a constructivist account of gender identity that connects the binary construction of gender (man or woman) to heterosexual kinship and by extension to women’s oppression within heterosexual patriarchal cultures (figure 1.3).
Rubin uses the phrase sex-gender system to describe the process by which social relations produce women as oppressed beings. According to Rubin, “One begins to have a sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw material and fashions domesticated women as products.”[14] Rubin writes, “As a preliminary definition, a ‘ sex-gender system’ is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”[15]
Although Rubin’s work is very influential in feminist and queer theory, one of her basic assumptions, that sex is raw material and thus lacks the influence of social norms, has been challenged by other queer theorists.
The queer feminist science scholar Anne Fausto-Sterling’s early 1990s work on intersex categories contends that although social institutions are invested in maintaining a dyadic sex system, this system does not map onto nature (figure 1.4). She argues that sex exists as a spectrum between female and male with a minimum of five distinct categories. Fausto-Sterling introduces the terms “herms,” “ferms,” and “merms” to categorize anatomical, hormonal, and chromosomal differences that fall outside a male-female sex dyad.[16] Like Rubin, Fausto-Sterling’s early provocation about sex categories sees sex as biological, natural, and unchangeable; it is raw material that culture transforms into gender. Both Rubin’s work and Fausto-Sterling’s early work leave a nature-nurture binary in place and suggest that sex correlates with nature and gender correlates with nurture.
Fausto-Sterling’s work was soon challenged for focusing too much attention on genitals. For instance, the social psychologist Suzanne Kessler was critical of Fausto-Sterling’s attachment to reading genitals for the truth of sex, insisting that the performance of gender on the body rather than on genitalia was more often used to gender bodies.[17] Fausto-Sterling has since conceded Kessler’s point.[18] Most queer theoretical engagements with gender deprivilege the body, particularly genitals, as a site of truth by suggesting that the appearance of binary sexed bodies is actually an effect of binary gender discourse and, as discussed in the next section, binary performances of gender. In other words, a binary sex-gender system that assumes a correlation between sex and gender is an effect of power, not nature.
Gender Performativity
The cultural anthropologist Esther Newton published Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, a groundbreaking ethnography of drag culture in 1972. Newton uses the term drag queen to describe a “homosexual male who often, or habitually, dresses in female attire.”[19] Newton separated the sexed body from the gender expressed on it, suggesting that there is no natural link between the two, as discussed in the previous section, but in 1972 the link between sex and gender remained tightly clamped. Newton writes, “The effect of the drag system is to wrench sex roles loose from that which supposedly determines them, that is, genital sex. Gay people know that sex-typed behavior can be achieved, contrary to what is popularly believed. They know that the possession of one type of genital equipment by no means guarantees the ‘naturally appropriate’ behavior.”[20]
Like Rubin, Newton was writing before the 1990 birth of queer theory. Also like Rubin, her intellectual investments and theoretical findings were harbingers of things to come. In fact, Judith Butler, who is often identified as an early and formative player in the creation of queer theory, cites both theorists as influential to her work on performativity.
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, originally published in 1990, introduces the term performativity to suggest that gender identity is not natural and does not emanate from an essential truth that can be located on or in the body (figure 1.5). For Butler, gender is established as consistent and cohesive through its repeated performance.[21] Importantly, for Butler, because gender must be constantly reperformed, it can be intentionally or unintentionally troubled, revealing it as an ongoing project with no origin. This is similar to Newton’s observation of drag, particularly her suggestion that drag reveals gender as a performance.
Gender Trouble was critiqued for ignoring the materiality of the body and real sex differences. In a follow-up publication, Butler argues that sex is a regulatory ideal that forces many bodies into a two-part system.[22] This is likely reminiscent of Fausto-Sterling’s provocation that there are five discernible sexes. Butler responded to critique by arguing that, although discourse does not produce material sex differences, it organizes these differences, gives them meaning, and renders them legible.[23]
Watch
Judith Butler describes the social construction of gender, and the policing of gender, by social institutions in this video in the Big Think series. Clearly a social constructionist, Butler emphasizes that she considers gender an important site of freedom and pleasure. Full video transcript available in the appendix.
• Butler states that there is a difference between saying that gender is performed as opposed to saying gender is performative. Describe that difference in your own words. What examples of different kinds of behavior help you understand that difference? And if you disagree with this idea, explain why you do not see an important difference between the two.
• Butler names institutional powers, like psychologists and psychiatrists, and informal practices, like bullying, that try to keep us in our place. Has someone you know had their gender presentation challenged or censored? Was there any way for the person to resist that challenge? How would you respond to that challenge today?
In Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam continues the work of disentangling gender from genitals through a series of interpretive readings of literary, filmic, and historical representations (figure 1.6). Halberstam argues that female masculinity “actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity.”[24] In other words, women and especially lesbians who are masculine reveal masculinity as a construct, in much the same way that drag queen performances reveal femininity as a construct. Halberstam convincingly claims, “Masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects.”[25] Like many queer theorists engaging gender, Halberstam deemphasizes genitals, refocusing on gender expressions. In other words, much as Newton observes about drag performances of femininity, anybody can put on a gender expression.
Queer theories of gender have influenced scholars across disciplines, radically transforming how we think about gender. For Butler, there is no natural and essential gender or sexuality that queers deviate from. For Newton, femininity is not the property of women, just as for Halberstam masculinity is not the property of men. Instead, we are all citing, at times contesting, at others complying with, existing ideas about gender and sexuality. Additionally, these ideas, and the value hierarchies that adhere to them, are maintained only by their reproduction.
The work discussed in this chapter dissipates some of the power that coheres around the idea of natural gender and sexuality, an idea that has often been used to mark queer genders and sexualities as unnatural and by extension inferior to heterosexuality.
Transgender Studies
Transgender studies is an interdisciplinary field of knowledge production that, like queer theory, challenges discursive and institutional regimes of normativity. However, whereas queer theory is sometimes guilty of the “privileging of homosexual ways of differing from heterosexual norms,” transgender studies challenges naturalized links between the material body, psychic structures, and gendered social roles.[26] Transgender studies emerged in activist and academic circles around the same time as queer activism and theory. The anthropologist David Valentine attributes the term’s early emergence to activist communities in the United States and the United Kingdom, noting that “it was seen as a way of organizing a politics of gender variance that differentiated it from homosexuality.”[27]
Susan Stryker provides an even more specific periodization, finding that the term transgender emerged in the 1980s but didn’t take on its current meaning until 1992 when Leslie Feinberg published Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come.[28] At this point transgender began to be used broadly to refer to “discomfort with role expectations, being queer, occasional or more frequent cross-dressing, permanent cross-dressing and cross-gender living, through to accessing major health interventions such as hormonal therapy and surgical reassignment procedures.”[29] Before the 1990s, transgender referred specifically to persons who socially transitioned to a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth without using hormones or surgery to medically transition.
By refusing to accept that there is a right way to be transgender and encouraging coalition building under the newly flexible term transgender, Feinberg hoped transgender persons could build a transformative activism-oriented community.[30] Feinberg’s 1993 publication, Stone Butch Blues, is a fictionalized personal account of negotiating New York City as a butch lesbian in the 1970s.[31] Feinberg experienced harassment and brutality at the hands of police, and the vivid descriptions of violence in the book illustrate the consequences of not embodying a socially sanctioned gender expression. Work like this and work published by other trans scholars demonstrates the importance of thinking gender and sexuality queerly.
Another example is Kate Bornstein, whose 1995 publication, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, humorously and accessibly describes her experiences with gender and sexuality.[32] Bornstein writes, “I identify as neither male nor female, and now that my lover is going through his gender change, it turns out I’m neither straight nor gay.”[33] She matter-of-factly expresses her feelings of shame at not fitting into normative gender identities and a corresponding sense of relief with intellectual work coming out in the 1990s that made it possible to understand gender as a social construct.[34]
Watch
The Advocate interviews Kate Bornstein, and she explains the gender revolution (https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2018/11/20/iconic-kate-bornstein-explains-gender-revolution).
• Restate, in your own words, what Kate Bornstein means when she talks about gender in four dimensions.
• What are some examples of what Bornstein calls the “multiplicity of gender truths” discussed in this chapter so far?
• Bornstein describes how she sees the future of gender. What hopes do you have for the future of gender? What fears? Why?
Against Normativity
In the first years of the 2000s, groups like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which takes a formal rights approach to securing legal protections for LGBTQ+ persons, experienced many successes.[35] For instance, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy of forced silence about sexuality for gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members instituted by the Bill Clinton administration in 1993, was repealed in 2011. Additionally, as of June 26, 2015, same-sex marriage is legal in the United States. Although inclusion in these institutions is contingent, precarious, and not evenly distributed among all members of the LGBTQ+ community, these two shifts in policy secured access and rights for some LGBTQ+ persons—specifically, white middle-class gay men for whom marriage equality has often been a primary political concern.
Queer critics of the HRC maintain that the organization has a limited vision of human rights, is procapitalist, and supports bills that fail to include transgender persons—for example, the proposed 2007 Employment Non-discrimination Act. For queers invested in transformative justice-oriented politics, the assimilationist strategies employed by liberal LGBTQ+ organizations typified by the HRC stand in the way of meaningful social change. Many queer theorists and activists are concerned that emphasizing single issues (marriage or the military) and centering LGBTQ+ politics on inclusion into existing institutions diminishes the radical potential of queer thought and action. The desire for radical social change that is central to the queer theoretical project is discussed further in the next section.
Lisa Duggan coined the term homonormativity to describe the activist work of groups like the HRC.[36]. According to Duggan, groups like the HRC represent the interests of white middle-class gay men whose privilege provides them cover to access social institutions and benefit from assimilation in ways unavailable or undesirable to other members of the LGBTQ+ community. For instance, a primary benefit of marriage is access to health insurance, but one partner must have health insurance for marriage to help a couple in this way. Job discrimination, housing discrimination, street harassment, and access to identification documents are central to the politics of queers of color as well as women and lower-income members of the LGBTQ+ community. Many express criticism that groups like the HRC have become representative voices of the LGBTQ+ community and are failing to represent its most vulnerable members.
Explore
Visit the website of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC; https://www.hrc.org/), and explore.
• What issues and whose interests does the HRC most seem to represent?
• Is diversity present in the HRC?
• Is there a place for organizations like the HRC in queer politics?
Published only a few years after Duggan’s work on homonormativity and neoliberalism, Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times confirms that some queer subjects have been incorporated into U.S. national life as valued citizens. However, according to Puar, “This benevolence towards sexual others is contingent upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normativity, and bodily integrity.”[37] Puar further argues that welcoming some queers into national life requires queerness to be projected onto other bodies. She suggests that the deviancy and abjection previously associated with gay and lesbian sexualities is redirected to brown Muslim bodies and instrumentalized to justify the war on terror. That is, the United States appeals to its tolerance of some queers to construct itself as civil and progressive. It then attaches sexual backwardness and violent homophobia to Islamic nations.
Duggan and Puar are critical of activist initiatives that are based on inclusion into existing social institutions, because they see these institutions themselves as damaging. Furthermore, they argue that capitalism and militarism do harm and can only contingently benefit individual LGBTQ+ persons.
Read
In an article for Afropunk, “Growing Up Queer: A Brief Lesson on Hetero- and Homonormativity,” Justin Allen talks about the social consequences of heteronormativity (https://afropunk.com/2013/03/growing-up-queer-a-brief-lesson-on-hetero-and-homonormativity/).
• Using your own words, define heteronormativity and homonormativity. Then explain the relationship between the terms.
• Do you think challenging homonormativity is important? Why or why not?
• In the article, Allen states that “one purpose of this post is to create a conversation about the complexities of the contradictions many people’s identities present to preconceived societal ideas.” Have you ever felt that your identity challenged accepted social norms? If so, describe how, and if not, explain why that might be the case.
Queer Politics, Transformative Politics
Queer theorists like Duggan and Puar are critical of assimilationist politics, but neither offers tangible suggestions for what a socially just and queer-inclusive world might look like. Other queer theorists, particularly queer of color theorists, are doing the important work of imagining politics and society radically differently. Their scholarship gestures toward what a queerly transformed world might look like.
José Esteban Muñoz’s hope-affirming work claims the future for queers (figure 1.7). He writes, “The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”[38] For Muñoz, conditions of everyday life are simply not viable for queer people of color, which prompts many to imagine a transformed world. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muñoz explores “the critical imagination,” which he refers to as transformative thought that can prompt and shape social change. This idea, along with Muñoz’s intersectional theorization of oppression and social transformation, resonates with many other queer theorists.[39]
The activist Charlene A. Carruthers’s Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements foregrounds the importance of intersectional thinking. She introduces a “Black queer feminist lens,” which she describes as a lens “through which people and groups see to bring their full selves into the process of dismantling all systems of oppression.”[40] Whereas libertarian, conservative, and even liberal lesbian and gay groups seek to diminish the importance of sexual (and other) differences, Carruthers suggests that bringing a Black queer feminist lens to political thought and praxis renounces the middle-class notion of the public sphere as a place where identity should be abandoned to maintain the myth of universality.[41] Even more, her vision of activism decenters queerness; she demands that multiple types of oppression, types that will not be experienced the same way or even at all by the entire LGBTQ+ community, must be acknowledged to imagine and enact a truly transformed, justice-oriented social world.
Watch
Charlene Carruthers (figure 1.8) describes the Black queer feminist lens in this video.
• What is Carruthers referring to when she talks about telling “more complete stories”?
• Carruthers states that “unless we move the margins into the center, none of us will be free.” What does she mean by that statement?
• Carruthers presents an intersectional analysis in the video. For example, she says, “You cannot talk about racial justice without talking about economic justice.” Describe and define more fully Carruthers’s intersectional analysis, and be sure to cite specific statements she makes in the video as evidence.
Like Muñoz, Carruthers emphasizes the importance of the Black imagination, specifically the ability to imagine “alternative economics, alternative family structures, or something else entirely.”[42] This work cannot be accomplished if groups like the HRC, which has a clear procapitalist agenda, shape public discourse about LGBTQ+ issues.
In After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, Joshua Chambers-Letson explores the affect music and art can have on audiences in an attempt to theorize the conditions necessary to envision collective change. He suggests that creative work can expand imaginative possibilities and prompt new modes of being together in the world. His project explores “the ways minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to survive the present, improvise new worlds, and sustain new ways of being in the world.”[43]
Similar to Muñoz and Carruthers, he argues that radical transformation is the only way forward for queers of color. Instead of asking, How can we include queers in the existing social world, he asks, How can we queer the existing social world to make it habitable by queers?
Additionally, like Carruthers, Chambers-Letson decenters the queer sexual subject and queer theory to explore intersectional possibilities for speculative world making and practical activism. For him, experiencing performance allows audiences to rehearse new ways of seeing and being in the world together, which is why he emphasizes the importance of art and music. Importantly, Chambers-Letson does not see art and performance as able to fulfill the promise of revolutionary transformative change; instead, it is a site where possible worlds are imagined, but they must still be materially enacted.[44]
Conclusion
This chapter maps the emergence of queer theory, over time and across disciplines, out of the lived experiences of diverse LGBTQ+ people. Both activism and theory are historically and geographically contingent, tethered to time, space, and the material body in its specificity. Queer theory is flexible enough to account for differences of race, class, gender, and nation, although it does not always do so. It does, however, have at its founding, and through the twists and turns of its development, an investment in radical social change tethered to a belief that, because gender, sexual, and other forms of social hierarchy are reproduced and regulated through discourse and social institutions, those institutions can and must be changed for the better.
Key Questions
• What are the differences between essentialist and constructionist theories of identity? Which perspective views identity as fixed, or innate, and which perspective argues that identity is produced through social processes? What evidence does each perspective use to support its argument?
• What do we mean when we talk about gender performativity and the implications of the constructionist turn?
• What are the similarities and differences between transgender studies and queer studies? Who are some of the key thinkers and activists who have contributed to these movements?
• What do we mean when we talk about intersectional analyses, and how have they contributed to queer theory? Who are some important queer of color theorists we should know about?
Research Resources
Compiled by Rachel Wexelbaum
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about queer theory.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or creating a short video in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: With a partner or split into groups, choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the chapter’s research resources to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
“Gender Critical,” by ContraPoints
ContraPoints is an irreverent video essayist who explores gender identity and queer theory while using her extensive background in academic philosophy. In “Gender Critical” she addresses transphobic feminists (https://youtu.be/1pTPuoGjQsI). Other videos by the same essayist are at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNvsIonJdJ5E4EXMa65VYpA.
My Genderation
An independent documentary series, My Genderation explores gender variance in short films (https://www.youtube.com/user/MyGenderation/videos).
Queer Nation NY
Queer Nation was the first national activist group to employ the term queer in its name. The group was founded by veterans from ACT UP, and the group’s activism enacted and enabled queer theory. Read about the group’s history at https://queernationny.org/history.
“Queer Theory and Gender Performativity,” by Paul Fry
In this lecture at Yale University, the professor Paul Fry introduces Judith Butler’s and Michel Foucault’s works on sexuality and gender (https://youtu.be/7bkFlJfxyF0).
“Queer Theory Reading List,” from Brown University
This living list of queer scholarship includes many important intersectional texts (https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/lgbtq/graduate-student-resources/queer-theory-reading-list).
Deep Dive: Books and Articles
Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, by Roderick A. Ferguson
Roderick A. Ferguson analyzes how sociologists articulate theories of racial difference by using theories of sexuality. Ferguson demonstrates that predominantly white sociologists have used works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and other African American writers to construct theories about Black sexualities and therefore Black people (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer, by Kathryn Bond Stockton
In this Lambda Literary Award finalist and Modern Language Association’s Crompton-Noll Award winner for best essay in gay and lesbian studies, Stockton analyzes the embracing of shame among Black and queer people and the role of shame in fostering attraction, the arts, storytelling and recording of history, and camp (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible, by Malik Gaines
Malik Gaines expands on Butler’s theory of performativity by depicting how artists, musicians, playwrights, and actors perform race, Black political ideas, and resistance politics to disrupt mainstream views of race, gender, and sexuality. Because queer theory focuses on the interruption, disruption, and decentering of whiteness and on patriarchy, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and cisnormativity, this is a must read (New York: New York University Press, 2017).
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer
Robert McRuer is one of the founders of queer disability studies and a major contributor to the fields of transnational queer theory and disability theory. In this book he coins “crip theory” to describe the intersection of disability, gender, and sexuality and an interdisciplinary approach to critical disability theory, which encompasses queer theory. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal physical and sexual identities are constructed, and he demonstrates through popular culture, politics, and higher education how disabilities and queerness disrupt and transform those identities (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, by Viviane K. Namaste
Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center / Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Award, this book provides the first scholarly study of trans people. In it, Namaste argues that trans people are erased rather than produced in a wide variety of institutional and cultural settings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Also, Namaste talks about the book and the struggles of transgender people in society in an interview (http://newsocialist.org/old_mag/magazine/39/article04.html).
Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics, by Urvashi Vaid
Urvashi Vaid is a frequently cited attorney and leader of LGBTQ+ social justice movements. She applies queer theory to her activism and advocacy, pursuing the notion that LGBTQ+ equality will be achieved once heteronormativity and homonormativity within the institutions of family, society, and government are interrupted, disrupted, and decentered to become more inclusive of racial, gender, and economic diversity (New York: Magnus Books, 2012).
My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity, by Kate Bornstein
Kate Bornstein is a famous author, playwright, performance artist, actress, and gender theorist. She was one of the first people to publicly identify as transgender, then later as nonbinary and gender nonconforming. Her updated version of the classic My Gender Workbook (1997) is an accessible, humorous, and interactive introduction to contemporary gender theory, as well as the intersection of gender, sexuality, and power (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
This anthology of essays explores the concept and act of passing, critiquing the visible and invisible systems of power involved in this performance (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press. 2006). Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is also the author of the influential Thats Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004) and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012).
“The Normalization of Queer Theory,” by David Halperin
David Halperin traces the origin of the term queer theory to Teresa de Lauretis in 1990 in this 2003 article in the Journal of Homosexuality (volume 45, numbers 2–4; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8980528_The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory). He identifies major contributors to a canon of works that built up the theory. Halperin is cofounder of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Queer: A Graphic History, by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele
Meg-John Barker, an academic and activist, teamed up with the cartoonist Jules Scheele in this nonfiction graphic novel to illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action (London: Icon Books, 2016).
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini
This book is the first compilation of essays to address the intersection of queer theory with Jewish identity, homophobia, and anti-Semitism and the invention of the homosexual and the modern Jew. The book includes essays written by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The editors are scholars and authors of Jewish studies, queer theory, and religious studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
“Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” by Sharon Marcus
This 2005 article in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (volume 31, number 1; https://doi.org/10.1086/432743) covers the history of queer theory and gives an overview of its origins. It explains the problematic and complicated histories of library classification of queer texts and includes an excellent bibliography of queer theorists.
Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, by Riki Wilchins
The influential transgender activist Riki Wilchins wrote this classic work to make queer theory and gender theory accessible to a nonacademic audience. It is a starting point for first-year undergraduates (New York: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2014).
“Queer Theory Revisited,” by Michael Hames-García
This frequently cited essay challenges queer theorists to apply the theory to address the oppression, policing, and marginalization of people of color, the poor, and the colonized. Hames-García is the first to identify two schools of queer theory: the separatist, which keeps race, class, and gender outside descriptions of sexuality, and the integrationist, which blurs these categories and may abandon the concept of identity altogether. His essay is included in Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by M. Hames-García and E. J. Martínez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 19–45, which won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology.
Sexual Futures, Queer Futures, and Other Latina Longings, by Juana Maria Rodríguez
Rodríguez deconstructs the archetype of the gesturing emotional Latina femme to discuss how gestures and types of bodies inform sexual pleasures and practices, as well as racialized sexual and gender identities (New York: New York University Press, 2014). This book won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize presented by the Gay Lesbian Queer Caucus of the Modern Language Association and was finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Foundation LGBT Studies Award. Rodríguez is also author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, by Tan Hoang Nguyen
Tan Hoang Nguyen reassesses male effeminacy and how it is racialized in cinema, art, and pornography. Nguyen challenges the concept of bottom as passive and shameful, transforming it into a sexual position, a social alliance, a romantic bond, and an art form. According to Nguyen, this reinvention of the term bottom has the potential to interrupt, disrupt, and transform sexual, gender, and racial norms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
Glossary
assimilationist. A strategy or one who enacts such strategy to gain access to, or assimilate into, existing social structures, like monogamous marriage or serving in the U.S. military.
Charlene A. Carruthers. A Black queer feminist activist and organizer. Her work aims to create young leaders in marginalized communities to fight for community interests and liberation.
constructionist. The view that identity is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation.
discourses. An institutionalized way of thinking and speaking, which creates a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The U.S. military’s policy on gays, bisexuals, and lesbians serving in the military, introduced in 1994 by Bill Clinton’s administration. The policy required gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons to remain closeted while in the military. In exchange, it prohibited the discrimination of closeted service persons.
drag. Refers to the performance of femininity or masculinity, and is most frequently used to describe the performance of gender expressions that differ from those associated with the performer’s natal sex assignment.
drag queen. Most often someone who identifies as a man who behaves in an exaggerated performance of femininity. Drag queens are often associated with gay culture.
essentialist. The view of sexuality that assumes individuals possess a fixed and innate sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical.
homonormativity. Academics and activists use the term to discuss attempts by LGBTQ+ persons to assimilate into institutions like marriage and the military that reproduce hierarchy and are associated with oppression.
homophile movement. Emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the movement was a concerted effort to demand equal rights for homosexuals.
Human Rights Campaign. The largest U.S.-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group. It works for legal protections for LGBTQ+ persons, such as promoting legislation to prevent discrimination and hate crimes.
intersectional. Overlapping or intersecting social identities, such as race, class, and gender, that are produced by social structures of inequality.
intersex. Persons who do not have chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that meet medical expectations and definitions of sex within a binary system.
Jack Halberstam. A gender and queer theorist and author, perhaps best known for work on tomboys and female masculinity.
José Esteban Muñoz. An academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. His book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) uses performance studies to investigate the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color.
minoritizing. A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe the view of homosexuality as relevant only to homosexuals. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world.
neoliberalism. A political ideology that espouses economic liberalism, such as trade liberalization and financial deregulation, and small government. It accepts greater economic inequality and disfavors unionization.
performativity. The capacity of language and expressive actions to produce a type of being.
public sphere. Where identity should be abandoned to maintain the myth of universality.
same-sex marriage. The marriage of two people of the same sex or gender in a civil or religious ceremony.
sex-gender system. A phrase coined by Gayle Rubin to describe the social apparatus that oppresses women.
sexology. The scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions.
Susan Stryker. An American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality, and a founder of Transgender Studies.
universalizing. A term introduced by Eve Sedgwick to describe viewing sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone, rather than focusing on homosexuals as a distinct group.
1. ACT UP New York (website), accessed March 8, 2021, https://actupny.com/.
2. T. de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” in special issue, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1991): iii.
3. De Lauretis, iii.
4. De Lauretis, vi.
5. De Lauretis, iv.
6. L. Duggan, “Making It Perfectly Queer,” in Theorizing Feminism Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ed. Anne C. Herrmann and Abigail J. Stewart (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 219.
7. A. Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 8; Duggan, “Making It Perfectly Queer,” 225.
8. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 23.
9. D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love, illustrated edition (New York: Routledge, 1989); David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
10. J. D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, ed. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 169–178.
11. J. Ned Katz, “The Invention of Heterosexuality,” Socialist Review 20 (March 1990): 7–34.
12. E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1.
13. G. Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination, ed. Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 74–112.
14. Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” 78.
15. Rubin, 79.
16. A. Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” Sciences 33, no. 2 (March–April 1993): 20–24.
17. S. J. Kessler, Lessons from the Intersexed (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
18. A. Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes, Revisited,” Sciences 40, no. 4 (July–August 2000): 18–23.
19. E. Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 100.
20. Newton, Mother Camp, 103.
21. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006).
22. J. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
23. Butler, Bodies That Matter.
24. J. “Jack” Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1.
25. Halberstam, 1.
26. S. Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker (London: Routledge, 2006), 7.
27. D. Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 33.
28. L. Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come,” in Stryker, The Transgender Studies Reader, 4.
29. S. Whittle, foreword to Stryker, The Transgender Studies Reader, xi.
30. Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation.”
31. L. Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Books, 1993).
32. K. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage, 1995).
33. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, 4.
34. Bornstein, 12.
35. “About,” Human Rights Campaign, accessed May 12, 2021, https://www.hrc.org/about.
36. L. Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–193.
37. J. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), xii.
38. J. Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
39. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
40. C. Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018), 10.
41. Carruthers, 10.
42. Carruthers, 39.
43. J. Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 4–5.
44. Chambers-Letson, 33. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/01%3A_Theoretical_Foundations/1.01%3A_Chapter_1-_Thirty_Years_of_Queer_Theory.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Identify key approaches used in LGBTQ+ studies, including anthropology.
• Define key terms relevant to particular methods of interpreting LGBTQ+ people and issues, such as anthropology and ethnography.
• Identify cross-cultural examples of same-sex desire and contemporary LGBTQ+ lives.
• Describe the connections between identities and embodied experiences.
• Describe intersectionality from an LGBTQ+ perspective.
• Analyze how key social institutions shape, define, and enforce structures of inequality.
• Describe how people struggle for social justice within historical contexts of inequality.
• Identify forms of LGBTQ+ activism globally.
Introduction
Sexuality has long been an interest of sociocultural anthropological research. When anthropologists study sexuality, they examine how the values of a culture are expressed through sexuality practices by analyzing things like kinship systems, hierarchy, and social roles. Anthropologists are interested in not only categories of sexuality but also the purpose or function sexuality serves within a particular culture, as well as across cultures. Heterosexuality was the presumed norm in sexuality studies until the mid-twentieth century. Because of its widespread practice and its association with the reproduction of human life, heterosexuality has also been connected to the sustainment of human culture. Although widespread, heterosexuality varies across cultures, and anthropology has significantly contributed to understanding these differences.
This chapter discusses anthropological studies of non-Western and Indigenous sexualities that question the status of heteronormativity as a global model of social organization. Questioning the status of heteronormativity, however, does not mean that heterosexual kinship and the reproductive unit are not prominent features of nearly all cultures. Rather, this study of global sexualities shows the pertinence of questioning the imperative to be heterosexual. An understanding of sexual difference is enriched by putting sexuality practices in conversation with concepts of gender, race, and class and even with capital, industry, colonialism, and statecraft.[1] Instead of dismissing nonheteronormative sexuality as an outlier or anomaly, this chapter pursues culturally and historically specific data on different cultures across the globe to examine how LGBTQ+ anthropology posits the integral social function of these other sexualities.
Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures. One of its subfields is sociocultural anthropology, which explores cultural variation, norms, and values. This subfield is the focus of this chapter, with an emphasis on sociocultural ethnographic studies of gender and sexuality. Ethnography is the systematic study of human cultures and is the primary qualitative research method used by anthropologists. Sociocultural anthropologists use ethnography’s immersive, experiential techniques to glean valuable knowledge about human behavior. For instance, they usually live in the communities they study, among the people who reside there, for a significant length of time, to understand life from the point of view of those being studied.
Previous distinctions between sexuality and gender and previous understandings of gender as a binary system do not stand up to scrutiny. The anthropology of sexualities explores the intertwining of gender and sexuality in a culture and the variations among cultures. Studies have found several ways that sex, sexuality, and gender relate to one another in different global cultures. They can form discrete yet related categories, have closely interwoven qualities, and even have qualities that directly inform one another and are occasionally interchangeable or confluent. Gender refers to the characteristics of femininity and masculinity that emerge as social norms and manifest in sociocultural practices and identities. Some theorists maintain that there are boundaries between gender identity and sexuality, but boundaries are not evident in all cultures and throughout all historical periods. Further, defining sexuality and gender as identity formations is not a universal practice. Some cultural conceptions of sexuality and gender see them as a collection of practices or functions.
Additionally, the commonly held belief in a gender binary is not a universal belief. Many cultures have a third gender, a fourth gender, and even a fifth gender. Other cultures understand certain individuals as neither male nor female, either because they embody both genders, moving between gender embodiments (gender fluidity), or they embody neither (gender neutrality). Most research on nonheteronormative gender and sexuality practices focuses on third-gender individuals who were assigned male at birth, but attention to other genders and sexualities is growing. Some other examples are third-gender individuals who were assigned female at birth and queer sexualities, such as female two spirit, gender-fluid queerness, and lesbianism. As discussed later, Native studies have traced this oversight to colonization and the effort of the colonizer to eradicate Native sexualities.[2] Under colonialism, the Native body was seen as sexually deviant. This belief helped justify the elimination and disappearance of Native people and was part of the systematic oppression inherent in colonialism.
Edward Carpenter was an outspoken socialist, philosopher, and activist early in the struggle for rights for homosexuals. His pioneering work Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, published in 1914, explores the integral social function of nonheteronormative sexualities and gender practices.[3] This work is a combination of archival historical research and armchair ethnography that compiles field notes, travel writings, and anecdotes of settlers, explorers, and missionaries in their encounters with nonheteronormative sexuality and gender practices around the world. In the book, Carpenter developed the theory of intermediacy, which repositions nonheteronormative subjects (previously referred to as inverts or Uranians) to an ambiguously gendered middle ground. They occupy special positions, such as ritual practitioners or creators of arts and crafts. Carpenter includes in his account the samurai code of Japan and military practices in ancient Greece. Military histories from previous eras record same-sex pair bonds and sex acts between warriors. These were often societally enforced sexual and romantic bonds between men in mentorship and initiation, although the reasoning behind such activities and the way societies treated them is still a matter of debate. Carpenter calls these “intermediates,” an umbrella term for any person who falls outside the normative definitions of sexuality or gender practices.
During the mid-twentieth century, LGBTQ+ visibility and political organization in Europe and the United States increased, leading to a deeper engagement with Western LGBTQ+ culture by anthropologists. Esther Newton’s 1972 Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America is often cited as the first U.S. ethnography on nonheteronormative sexuality and gender. Its subject is drag performance by drag queens (called female impersonators at the time) in the mid-twentieth-century United States.[4] Newton’s work encouraged other LGBTQ+ anthropologists to pursue ethnographic research of LGBTQ+ sexualities in the United States and around the world. Evelyn Blackwood’s pioneering edited volume The Many Faces of Homosexuality: Anthropological Approaches to Homosexual Behavior presented in 1986 a global ethnography of forms of homosexuality.[5] Feminist and gender theory, as well as the rise of queer theory, added complexity to some anthropological concepts. These theories continue to challenge the field today to address ethnographic research that supports LGBTQ+ people and feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist and decolonizing perspectives. For example, one of anthropology’s main theories in studies on global sexualities is the adverse effects European colonialism has had—and continues to have—on the textures and conceptions of Indigenous sexualities and gender embodiments worldwide. These violent, homogenizing colonial encounters were rooted in racist, heteronormative religious orthodoxies that sought to erase Indigenous lifeways.[6]
Explore
Read about the history of the Association for Queer Anthropology and explore the association’s website (http://queeranthro.org/business/aqa-history/).
• Why did it take eight years from the introduction of the resolution on homosexuality to the first official meeting of the Anthropology Research Group on Homosexuality?
• On the “Resources” page, members share syllabi for classes on LGBTQ+ anthropology. Which class would you most like to take, and why?
• On the “Awards” page is a link to the Ruth Benedict Prize, which is awarded annually for a “scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic.” Choose one of the books that have won the prize and determine the author’s main argument in the book. How does its central idea expand or challenge your understanding of sexuality, gender, or both?
Will Roscoe’s study of two-spirit Zuni people and the development of two-spirit activism in North America brought an Indigenous perspective to the idea of the erotic.[7] This reframing of the erotic accounted for sexuality on its own terms rather than in constant comparison to a norm from which sexual and gender practices deviate. Some queer Indigenous scholars developed the initialism GLBTQ2—that is, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, two spirit[8]—to describe the spectrum of sexualities and gender embodiments included in Indigenous conceptualizations of sex and gender. Embracing the terms queer and two spirit, these scholars argue for the decolonization of Indigenous sexualities, and they critique heteronormativity, finding it a product of colonialism. In so doing, these scholars insist on the autonomy of Indigenous people in controlling and contributing to knowledge production about themselves.
Anthropologists study nonheteronormative sexuality and sexual practices, both today’s globalization of Western LGBTQ+ sexualities and community and precolonial global sexuality and gender nonnormativity. The encounter of non-Western cultures with Western models of LGBTQ+ identity has had far-flung effects on identity politics and rights-based notions of identity and community. Governments and organizations even use pinkwashing, or LGBTQ+ people’s presence or themes, to simultaneously downplay or distract from other unethical or illegal, oppressive, and violent behavior.
Henry Abelove and John D’Emilio have suggested that so-called modern sexual identities such as heteronormativity and LGBTQ+ identity (specifically addressing gay male and lesbian identity and community formation) coincide with the rise of industry and capitalism of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries in the West.[9] D’Emilio connects the rise of lesbian and gay identities to the reduced centrality of the heteronormative family unit as a productive labor force necessary for self-sufficiency and survival. A thread in historical studies and cultural critique traces the now relatively common presence of LGBTQ+ communities globally through capitalism and industry, largely in urban centers. Anthropological contributions to this theory describe and document local, regional, and cultural variations, noting that queerness as such (individuals engaging in nonheteronormative sexual practices and gender embodiments) precedes these modern historical developments, often back to ancient periods.
Anthropological work emphasizes that Indigenous concepts and terminology more accurately describe the nuanced differences of Indigenous gender and sexuality than do Western LGBTQ+ neocolonial models. For instance, the Maori word for a same-sex partner is takatapui and is used as an identifier for LGBTQ+ identity in modern Maori culture. However, the term has a meaning beyond the mainstream Western definition of LGBTQ+ identity. It describes nonheterosexual identity generally as well as men who have sex with men but do not identify as LGBTQ+.[10] In Hawaiian culture, aikane is another culturally specific term that describes men and women who have same-sex relationships. Historically, this was a socially accepted role in Hawaiian culture. LGBTQ+ people may describe someone as aikane today, but the term retains nuances that the English-language lesbian or gay might not capture. Both terms were common in precolonial usage. Takatapui has become repopularized in today’s society and is used as a marker to create a distinction between Indigenous Maori modes of queerness and mainstream settler-colonialist LGBTQ+ models of identity.
The Americas
North America
North American Indigenous conceptions of nonheteronormative sexuality and gender practices were documented by settlers, missionaries, and explorers. The individuals engaging in these practices traditionally held integral social roles that fulfilled particular social and ceremonial functions within their respective tribes. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century white French settlers and missionaries labeled such a person a berdache (the term, denoting a passive homosexual partner or slave, is now usually rejected as a slur) (figure 2.2). Settler colonialists eventually discouraged these roles and violently eliminated those in them. Indigenous groups in the 1990s adopted the term two spirit to emphasize an individual’s experience of dual gender and spiritual embodiments. Two-spirit embodiment, while holding specific meaning and terminology intratribally, commonly signifies a religious or healer role. In Cherokee, the two-spirit term asegi translates to “strange” and is used by some as the modern connotation of queer.
The origin of the berdache role is unclear, and various reasons for the presence of two-spirit individuals have been offered. Some scholars interpret historical material as showing that communities probably assigned this social role, possibly foisting it on a feminine boy or extraneous son to be a passive sex partner, to bolster and reinforce a hierarchy.[11] However, this interpretation is largely rejected by the two-spirit community and is contradicted by the firsthand accounts of two-spirit individuals, such as Osh-Tisch. Also known as Finds Them and Kills Them, Osh-Tisch was a Crow badé (or baté; a male-bodied person who performs some of the social and ceremonial roles usually filled by women) who lived from 1854 to 1929 and famously fought in the Battle of the Rosebud. The story of Osh-Tisch suggests two major points about agency in Crow two-spirit social roles: (1) the role was a cultural institution and chosen by individuals who exhibited exemplary traits, such as excelling at women’s work, and (2) two-spirit individuals could also perform the roles of traditionally gendered males or females, as Osh-Tisch’s part in the Battle of the Rosebud suggests. Similarly, the idea that demographic necessity dictated who would be a two-spirit person is not sufficient to explain female two spirits. Many Crow women took on the traditionally male warrior role, making it difficult to classify two spirits as a response to a shortage of men. A well-known instance is Bíawacheeitchish (Woman Chief) of the Crow, 1806–1858.
Watch
Learn more about the history of the word two spirit from Geo Neptune on this episode in the InQueery series (https://youtu.be/A4lBibGzUnE).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=54
• Describe the history of the term two spirit. Why was it important for Native American activists to create this umbrella term?
• In what ways is the meaning of two spirit similar to, and different from, gay and queer?
• Were there elements of the history of the development of the term two spirit that surprised you? What were they, and why were you surprised?
Two-spirit presence has been noted in more than 130 Native American tribes. Among the Great Plains Indians alone are instances in the Arapahos, Arikaras, Assiniboines, Blackfoot, Cheyennes, Comanches, Plains Crees, Crows, Gros Ventres, Hidatsas, Kansas, Kiowas, Mandans, Plains Ojibwas, Omahas, Osages, Otoes, Pawnees, Poncas, Potawatomis, Quapaws, Winnebagos, and the Siouan tribes (Lakota or Dakota). Female two spirits, although documented among the Cheyennes, were more widespread among western North American tribes.[12] These practices were often, but not always, associated with nonheteronormative sexuality as well as nonbinary gender. Some two-spirit people engaged in same-sex or queer sexual or romantic and marriage relations.
The most common explanation for two-spirit embodiment suggests that the person prefers avocations traditionally associated with the opposite sex, experiences cosmological dreams and visions, or both. The conception of gender as a binary is challenged by two-spirit notions of being neither male nor female or being both male and female. Further, Inuit (culturally similar Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar North, Arctic Canada, Alaska, and Greenland) conceptions of nonheteronormative gender and sexuality were often connected to the Inuit shamanic role of an angakkuq. Although an angakkuq is not always or even usually nonheteronormative, inclusion of nonheteronormative people in its traditional social role shows an association with LGBTQ+ ways of being. Two-spirit people have also been noted in other Arctic cultural contexts, such as among the Aleutians, in Western Canada, and in Greenland.[13]
Latin America and Central America
The Zapotec in Mexico call themselves Ben ’Zaa, “cloud people.” They are Indigenous peoples concentrated in southern Mexico and especially in Oaxaca. Third-gender Zapotec roles such as muxe or muxhe in Oaxaca and biza’ah in Teotitlán del Valle receive more respect in regions where the Catholic faith has less influence than elsewhere and are believed to bring good luck to their communities. They are often thought of as caretakers of the community and of their families (figure 2.4). The Western notion of gender dysphoria does not describe the third-gender experience. Muxes are culturally accepted as not being in an either-or position. They are not placed on only one side of the male-female gender binary. Muxes have various sexualities that are not necessarily determined by their gender variance, which has local categories based on dress, including vestidas (wearing women’s clothing) and pintadas (wearing men’s clothing, sometimes wearing makeup). Also, if a muxe chooses a male partner (called a mayate), neither is necessarily thought of as a gay man or homosexual male.
South America
In South America, travestis are a well-studied LGBTQ+ group. The term is shared among Peruvian, Argentinian, and Brazilian cultures. Travestis are assigned-male-at-birth individuals who use female pronouns and self-identify on a gender spectrum. This spectrum runs the gamut from transgender to a type of third-gender role that is distinct from transgender identity. Travestis are often working-class sex workers. Their societal positions are precarious but also openly recognized. They are open to body modification and transitional surgeries and tend to favor black-market industrial silicone enhancements and intensive hormone therapies. Don Kulick’s study of Brazilian travestis, however, found that they had generally negative attitudes about gender-affirming surgery, preferring to retain their penises for their sex work. They also view transness itself as abnormal to some extent.[14] For these urban Brazilian travestis, gender was a men–not men binary, in which the not-men category encompassed women, homosexuals, and travestis. The travesti category describes a wide spectrum of self-identifying gender-nonnormative individuals,[15] a spectrum that often shifts with changes in politics, legislation, gender, medical science, and cultural conceptions of self.
Asia and Polynesia
South Asia
The Indian subcontinent’s transgender or third-gender category, hijra (referred to in different regions as aravani, aruvani, chhakka, and jagappa), is perhaps one of the more well-documented (by anthropology) nonheteronormative gender embodiments. Hijra is a social category that has been mobilized for political organizing, advocacy, and debate. Hijra people refer to themselves as kinnar or kinner—a reference to the Hindu celestial dance of the hybrid horse-human figure. From Indian antiquity to now, hijra people have been considered closer to third-gender categories than to modern Western binary notions of transgender.[16] In recent political developments, India and Bangladesh have legally recognized hijras as third-gender individuals. Interestingly, the word hijra derives from a Hindustani word that translates to “eunuch” and is used to designate actual eunuchs (people throughout history—most commonly men—whose genitals were mutilated or removed, often for social functions such as guarding women, singing, or religious purposes) and intersex people (those born with bodies that appear neither completely male nor female). Therefore, many third-gender people in India find the term offensive and have created more accurate and appropriate self-identifiers such as kinnar. In India and Pakistan, hijra people usually are employed in sex work. In this precarious and often violent occupation, they experience higher rates of violence, higher rates of HIV infection, and higher rates of homelessness, displacement, and depression.
Watch
What does wearing a sari mean to hijras? Find out in the video “India’s Transgender Community: The Hijra,” by Refinery29 (https://youtu.be/mgw7M-JABMg).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=54
• Why is it so important for hijras to be able to wear a sari? What does the Ritu Kala Samskara ceremony symbolize for them?
• The host of the video states, “Fashion is our most ready means available to us to express in a visual statement our identity.” How do you see this play out in your own society?
• What similarities and differences do you see between the hijra identity and two-spirit people?
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asian third-gender embodiments have also been influenced by globalization and capitalism. Third-gender individuals are popularly associated with industries that value their distinct cultural traits. In the Philippines, third-gender embodiments are referred to as bakla (in the Tagalog language), bayot (Cebuano and Bisaya), or agi (Hiligaynon and Ilonggo). Third-gender individuals are incorporated into the social and cultural structures of Filipino life and often work in the beauty and entertainment industries. Anthropologists such as Martin Manalansan have documented how modern bakla life is lived in the context of the diaspora, immigration, globalization, and community, noting that bakla presence challenges Western notions of gay identity and the assumed connection between LGBTQ+ people and progressive politics.[17]
In Indonesia, Evelyn Blackwood has explored tomboi identity among women who identify more closely with masculine cultural traits and enact masculinity in particular ways, thereby blurring the distinctions between male and female social roles.[18] In Thailand, third-gender and third-sex embodiments are described by the identifying term kathoey (or ladyboy).[19] These are distinctive identities, often understood as contrasting with trans identity in Thailand, but not exclusively. Scholars have noted that kathoey can describe a spectrum of gender and sexualities, ranging from trans woman to effeminate gay man, and opinions on what constitutes kathoey identity differ (figure 2.5). The historical connotation of kathoey was much wider; before the 1960s, it referred to anyone falling outside heteronormative sexuality or gender categories. The English translation of kathoey as “ladyboy” has been adopted across other Southeast Asian countries as well.
Polynesia and Pacific Islands
Polynesian language and culture have specific terms for LGBTQ+ identities and for third-gender or nonbinary assigned-male-at-birth individuals. These individuals are understood as embodying characteristics that lead them to self-select or to be socialized as women. In Samoa, the fa’afafine (meaning “in the manner of a woman” in Samoan) third-gender or nonbinary role,[20] similar to the muxe, has cultural associations with the family and hard work (figure 2.6). Fa’afafine is distinct from fa’afatama (male-to-female trans individuals), and the designation’s origin is disputed. The term may have been introduced in the nineteenth century with the advent of British colonialism and the introduction of Bibles translated into Samoan.[21] This suggests that before the introduction of Christianity, gender-variant individuals may have simply been referred to as fafine (women). Fa’afafine sexualities express along a spectrum, from male to female partners, although literature has suggested that fa’afafine do not form sexual relationships with one another. As in other cultures with nonbinary or third-gender individuals, fa’afafine celebrate their cultural heritage and gender variance in pageantry.
The word fa’afafine is cognate with other Polynesian language words in Tongan, Cook Islands Maori, Maori, Niuean, Tokelauan, Tuvaluan, Gilbertese, and Wallisian describing third-gender and nonbinary roles. In Hawaiian and Tahitian, the word is mahu. Third-gender or nonbinary assigned-female-at-birth individuals in Samoa can be referred to also as fa’atane. Dan Taulapapa McMullin, a fa’afafine scholar, argues that the shared history of the words fa’afafine and fa’atane and those individuals’ integral role in society demonstrate that Samoan culture lacks heteropatriarchal structures. He further observes that daughterless Samoan families choosing a son to become a fa’afafine is an anthropological myth.[22] McMullin notes that Western anthropological work on Samoan culture that is seen as authoritative conflates gender and sexual categories in order to make false statements about the status of fa’afafine.[23] Further, the suppression of gender variance in the Samoa Islands in the nineteenth century was a direct and violent result of British colonialism and missionary work. Third-gender identities of Samoan migrants to the United States and Europe were also repressed.
Watch
Watch this video about fa’afafine in New Zealand, “What Is a Fa’afafine?,” by Pacific Beat St. A full video transcript is available in the appendix.
• How would you describe what it means to be fa’afafine after watching the video?
• Phylesha talks about the difference between tolerance and acceptance. What are some examples of the difference between these attitudes?
• Phylesha uses both fa’afafine and transgender to describe herself, but she also describes her gender identity as being neither male nor female. Does her explanation of her identity change how you understand what it means to be transgender? Why or why not?
East Asia
Japanese cultural norms around nonheteronormative sexuality and gender practices have shifted over time. Historians have focused on the homosexualities of men. These are traced through ancient homoerotic military and warrior practices of samurai and gender embodiments used in ancient times for sacred and erotic purposes. For example, adolescent boys dressed as traditional geishas in the third-gender wakashu role (figure 2.7). Male homosexuality in ancient and premodern Japan is generally separated into the categories of nanshoku (translating to “male colors” and referring to practices of sex between men) and of shudo and wakashudo (translating to “the ways of teenage and adolescent boys”). The decline of these terms’ use and the discouragement of these practices began with the rise of sexology in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Meiji period), when Western notions of sex and sexuality started to replace traditional Japanese norms. Homosexual practices were relegated to areas of Japanese society in which certain transgressions were tolerated, such as among Kabuki performers, some of whom dressed as women. Kabuki and Noh theater barred women from performing, and males played female roles.
Today, homosexuality practices in Japan are similar to the Western model, with culturally specific variations. Homosexuality is not illegal, but as of 2022, same-sex marriage was still not legal at the national level. Same-sex partnerships are recognized in some cities, and antidiscrimination laws vary according to region, much as in the United States and Europe. The LGBTQ+ community is especially visible in urban centers like Tokyo and Osaka, and modern terms for gay and lesbian identities exist. Also, nonnormative gender categories exist, such as the genderless danshi. These are generally young men who adopt third-gender and androgynous elements (e.g., makeup) but who often define themselves using cisgender and heterosexual markers. Danshi are often public performers—for example, musicians—whose fan base is mostly adolescent girls. Some gay erotica and media in Japan, such as the yaoi genre, typically depict adolescent boys in romantic or erotic relationships. Yaoi is generally authored by women and read by adolescent females. Conversely, bara, another form of gay erotica, is made primarily by gay men and has a majority-gay male audience. Among the audience are men who love men (MLM) and men who have sex with men (MSM); both types may or may not self-identify as gay.
Africa
African formations of sexuality and gender include culturally specific norms of Indigenous groups in urban, rural, and religious contexts. Rudolf Gaudio’s work on ‘yan daudu (or “effeminate men” in the Hausa language) in the northern Nigeria city of Kano finds differences between sexual identity and sexual practices. Yan daudu are thought of, by themselves and by the public at large, as effeminate male sex workers who are not necessarily homosexual, even though they regularly have sex with men. They also occupy a socially ambiguous space with regard to their Islamic faith.[24] Regine Oboler studied female husbands among the Nandi of Kenya. She describes a cultural position occupied by older, childless (or more specifically, without a son) women who marry other women. They take on wives, receive bridewealth, and perform male duties, while not necessarily making their position part of their sexualities or gender embodiments. Oboler argues that maleness and the woman-woman marriage bond is understood as a matter of necessity and function in Nandi patrilineal societies.[25] Some authors argue that Oboler did not sufficiently explore the possibilities of a sexual relationship between the women.[26] Ifi Amadiume similarly explores female husbands in Igbo culture, as does Kenneth Chukwuemeka Nwoko.[27] Among the Tanala, a Malagasy ethnic group in Madagascar, third-gender-embodied individuals are referred to as sarombavy. They have been described as occupying a cultural position like that of Native American two spirits. The Swahili on the East African coast also have third- or alternative-gender identities (figure 2.8).
In the late twentieth century, leaders of new African states typically derided homosexuality as un-African, and they supported the persecution of lesbians and gay men. Nonetheless, after decades of struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the new South African constitution in 1996 enshrined protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The increase in studies on postcolonial LGBTQ+ rights and gender nonconformity and sexual minorities in Africa constitutes a relatively recent pan-African political movement. In postcolonial African cities, sexual violence against lesbians in South Africa and gender- or sexuality-based oppression and violence have occurred.[28] Scholars have focused on a variety of topics, including sexual violence against lesbians in South Africa and knowing women, a term for working-class women in southern Ghana who share friendship and intimacy.[29] The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of activism by gender and sexual minorities across Africa. This activism promotes both Indigenous terms and histories of sexuality and gender. It also draws on international LGBTQ+ culture and activism in creating identities that resist and critique colonial and neocolonial heteronormativity.
Europe
Binary formations of sexuality and gender are widely characterized as Western, European, Euro-American, or American. European cultures, however, also have multiple instances of third-gender or nonbinary gender formations. For example, Italy’s traditional Neapolitan culture has the femminiello (the plural form is femminielli), an assigned-male-at-birth homosexual with gender-variant expression (figure 2.9). Members of this group play prominent roles in cultural festivities. These individuals have specific roles in religious parades, are often asked to hold newborn infants, and participate in games such as bingo and raffles (tombolas). Moreover, recent studies suggest that today’s Neapolitan culture is more accepting of femminielli than mainstream LGBTQ+ notions of sexuality and gender.[30] This assignation as femminiello is associated with the long-standing references to gender ambiguity (androgyny) and intersex individuals in Italian custom, going back to ancient myths about Hermaphroditus (the intersex son of Aphrodite and Hermes) and Tiresias. The cult of Hermaphroditus traces back to ancient Cypriot rites in which men and women exchanged clothing before the statue of a bearded Aphrodite.
Rictor Norton chronicles eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England’s molly houses, meeting places for gay men, or mollies—although it is unclear whether this term was a pejorative one or used as a self-designator.[31] Socializing, romancing, and same-sex sexual encounters took place there, as well as cross-dressing activities such as faux-wedding rituals between men and mock births (figure 2.10). These venues were illegal, and homosexuality of any kind was a capital offense in England until the late nineteenth century. Police regularly raided molly houses, and the homosexuals who frequented them were recognizable social types. This complicates Michel Foucault’s suggestion that the public categorizing and punishment of homosexuals and homosexuality did not begin until later.[32]
View
On the BBC’s Travel gallery, “Naples’ Beloved ‘Third Sex’ Wedding” (http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20190624-naples-beloved-third-sex-wedding) explores a play, a local ritual, that takes place in the Italian town of Pagani. Although the ritual dates back to the seventeenth century, it is kept alive today by the gay community. The play, The Wedding of Zeza, features a marriage between a femminielloand a straight man. Don’t miss the video on page 5 of the slideshow.
• What does The Wedding of Zeza show us about this region in Italy’s past, present, and future?
• Why do you think the gay community keeps this tradition alive?
• Discuss why the tradition of the characters taking off their costumes at the end of the play is an integral part of this celebration.
Conclusion
Throughout history and all around the world, many peoples engaged in same-sex relations. In many societies these practices were accepted and even celebrated. Christianity and colonialism were two key forces that brought homophobia to many societies and influenced local social constructions of gender and sexuality. The study of global sexualities is an ever-evolving discipline. This chapter describes the range of gender and sexual practices that have existed in different places and times and that continue to evolve. In the twenty-first century, globalization continues to spread Western notions of LGBTQ+ liberation, and in turn, local and regional cultural practices affect contemporary Western expressions and struggles over gender and sexuality.
Read
The article “In Han Dynasty China, Bisexuality Was the Norm,” by Sarah Prager, explores studies that document China’s “long history of dynastic homosexuality.”
• What are some catchphrases that refer to love between men in ancient China? Where do they come from?
• What evidence does the author present that bisexuality (and not heterosexuality or homosexuality) was the norm in China’s Han dynasty? Do you agree or disagree with this characterization?
• What is one of the only references to love between women in ancient China? Why isn’t there more documentation of women’s sexuality?
Profile: Lukas Avendaño: Reflections from Muxeidad
Rita Palacios
Lukas Avendaño (1977–) is a muxe artist and anthropologist from the Tehuantepec isthmus in Oaxaca, Mexico. In his work, he explores notions of sexual, gender, and ethnic identity through muxeidad. Avendaño describes muxeidad as “un hecho social total,” a total social fact, performed by people born as men who fulfill roles that are not typically considered masculine. Though it would be easy to make an equivalency between gay and muxe or between transgender and muxe, it can best be described as a third gender specific to Be’ena’ Za’a (Zapotec) culture. Muxes are a community of Indigenous people who are assigned male at birth and take on traditional women’s roles, presenting not as women but as muxes. Avendaño’s work is a reflection on muxeidad, sexuality, eroticism, and the tensions that exist around it. Though muxeidad is understood and generally accepted as part of Be’ena’ Za’a society, it exists within a structure that privileges fixed roles for men and women, respectively. It is important to note that his work provides a reflection on muxeidad from within rather than without—that is, he critically explores what it means to be muxe as muxe himself, providing an alternative to academic analyses that can exoticize.
In Réquiem para un alcaraván, Avendaño reflects on traditional women’s roles, particularly in rites and ceremonies of the Tehuantepec region (a wedding, mourning, a funeral), many of which are denied to muxes. For the wedding ceremony, the artist prepares the stage by decorating for the occasion and then, blindfolded, selects a member of the audience who presents as male to marry him. Such a union would not be well regarded in traditional Be’ena’ Za’a society, even though same-sex marriage was recently legalized in Oaxaca, an initiative spearheaded by a muxe scholar and activist, Amaranta Gómez Regalado, in August 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/02%3A_Global_Histories/2.01%3A_Chapter_2-_Global_Sexualities.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Define LGBTQ+ studies and queer theory, and explain why queer theory matters in the field of archaeology.
• Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality in both the present and the ancient past.
• Define key terms such as heteronormativity, gender performativity, and binary oppositions, and explain how they influence interpretations of the past.
• Describe intersectionality from an LGBTQ+ perspective.
• Discuss archaeology as a key subfield within LGBTQ+ anthropology.
Introduction
The word archaeology is derived from the Greek words arkhaios, which means “ancient,” and logos, or “study.” Archaeology is generally defined as the study of the human past using material evidence (i.e., physical things as diverse as pottery or pollen). In North America, archaeology is typically a subdiscipline of anthropology, along with cultural anthropology, linguistics, and bioanthropology. Archaeologists focus on the prehistoric, or preliterate, past, whereas historians study the literate past. These fields overlap, however, because historical records are sometimes used in archeology. The origins of archaeology are themselves archaeological because we know that ancient people across the world collected artifacts from periods that preceded them. For example, the Aztecs of Mexico collected objects from the earlier site of Teotihuacan, and officials in the Chinese Song Empire excavated, cataloged, and studied ancient artifacts from their own culture.
The current discipline of archaeology developed out of antiquarianism, an interest in ancient Rome, which has roots among Europeans as early as the fifteenth century but is most closely associated with the collection of ancient objects in the nineteenth century. These include objects related to sex and sexuality, many of which were placed in collections of erotica like the Secretum at the British Museum and, for objects from Pompeii and Herculaneum, in the Gabinetto Segreto of the Naples Archaeological Museum. Until relatively recently these sorts of collections were typically privately owned or restricted from public view, showing the discomfort that scholars and the public have had in addressing issues of gender and sexuality in open and systematic ways.
The use of physical evidence to reconstruct the past is challenging because things can have multiple meanings to different people or mean different things in different contexts. In 1917, the artist Marcel Duchamp placed an ordinary, mass-produced urinal in an art exhibit, and that new context changed its meaning from a functional, everyday object to a work of art (figure 3.1). Similarly, cows are ordinary animals in North America and Europe, but in India they are sacred. Thus, to understand artifacts, archaeologists must interpret them according to the cultural contexts the artifacts came from. This can be difficult because the context may be unknown (as in the case of looted artifacts), inadequately excavated (e.g., constraints of time or funding), or drastically changed by time (e.g., weather, erosion). Even when we have texts that relate to the artifacts, those texts may not address the issues with which we’re concerned. For example, ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing describes politics and ritual but not sex and sexuality. We also cannot ask the people who made or used archaeological objects what they meant. Although we can ask their descendants, their cultures may have changed enough that the original meanings are lost. The use of objects to understand complex and culturally varied concepts like gender and sexuality is especially challenging.
In this chapter, I identify some LGBTQ+ themes in the archaeology of Mesoamerica and the Andes. I show that many of these new interests and observations have been inspired by feminist and queer theory. Although some aspects of queer theory have become almost mainstream in archaeology, the topics of sex, gender, and sexuality remain challenging ones for archaeologists.
Watch
View “Queer Archaeology: Some Basics,” by James Aimers, a companion introduction to this chapter. A full video transcript can be found in the appendix.
• What are some examples of categories and classifications in our study of the past that show how hard it is to be neutral?
• In Western culture, homosexual behavior didn’t have a fixed definition or identity until the late 1800s. Why is it important to understand this type of context when studying ancient cultures and artifacts?
Queer Theory and Archaeology
Queer theory is often considered an aspect of critical theory with roots in feminism. It is counterhegemonic and challenges archaeological normativity of all sorts—most notably heteronormativity.[1] But critiques of queer theory are not limited to sexuality, and some people argue that queer theory is not a theory (or set of theories) that explains the world but rather a way of looking critically at normative assumptions about the world.[2]
Archaeological engagement with queer theory came mainly through the influence of feminism.[3] The growing influence of feminism in the twentieth century led to critiques of existing norms around gender, sex, and sexuality in many fields, and by the late 1970s these critiques began to inform archaeological studies. Nevertheless, many archaeological studies implicitly assumed that the norms and institutions that we take for granted today were present and important in the distant past. Thus, archaeologists often assumed that the Western sex and gender binary oppositions (male versus female and man versus woman) were normative across all cultures or that institutions such as the nuclear family and monogamy also applied to ancient cultures.[4]
During the 1980s and 1990s feminist ideas became mainstream in archaeology, as shown in the many works about and by women in those decades. An important development was the entry of queer theory into the archaeological mainstream in the first years of the 2000s with two seminal collections: a thematic issue of World Archaeology and the proceedings from a 2004 conference titled Que(e)rying Archaeology.[5] Since then, archaeologists have increasingly investigated assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality, and queer theory has been used to challenge normative assumptions of all sorts.
Although potentially any topic can be examined through a queer theory lens, the most influential uses of queer theory in archaeology have been in relation to gender, sex, and sexuality. This is in part because queer theory challenges essentialist and sociobiological ideas about these issues in popular discourse and in some scholarship. If we think of queer as being fundamentally disruptive, then a lot of early work that challenged fundamental assumptions could be called queer, even if those works were not labeled as such by their authors.[6] These studies express a queer emphasis on the “instability of the subject” and the “fluidity of identity,” as well as the inclusivity characteristic of queer theory.[7]
Queer theory has questioned universals, essentialisms, and especially, the categorizations we use in archaeology.[8] In archaeology, binary oppositions related to sex, gender, and sexuality like man versus woman and homosexual versus heterosexual have been the most heavily critiqued. A “truly queer archaeology” will question “received categories of present-day sexual politics and seek to develop archaeological methodologies that do not depend on these problematic sexual taxonomies.”[9] My work with the classification of ancient Maya pottery reminds me that all classifications are created to answer particular questions and that not every question can be addressed with a single classification. So the idea that there is one, transhistorical, all-purpose classification of bodies or gender or sexuality is no more reasonable than the belief that one really great way of classifying pottery could answer all our questions.
The Constructedness of Sex
One classification that most people probably consider unchallengeable is that of the two sexes, male and female. But about 2 percent of humans are born intersexed, and Anne Fausto-Sterling and others have drawn attention to the range of variability in the sexual characteristics of human bodies.[10] Biological sex is multifaceted, potentially designated in reference to chromosomes or DNA, hormones, breasts, genitals, reproductive abilities, or in archaeology, skeletal characteristics. As Fausto-Sterling notes, “Labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision.”[11]
These complexities have been acknowledged by bioarchaeologists, who study human remains. In a discussion of ancient Maya human remains, Pamela Geller remarks that “femaleness and maleness reside at opposite ends of a continuum with ambiguity situated in the middle. Thus, it would appear that a strict binary opposition of female and male is supplanted by a continuum of sexual difference.”[12] Indeed, Rebecca Storey may have identified an intersex person in a royal Maya tomb at Copán, Honduras.[13]
Some suggest approaching sex in a similar way to race, as a social construct: “The ways in which race is described as a social construct may be translatable to sex: what we understand to be a biological sex is composed of a diverse set of variables that may not invariably pattern out into what we socially comprehend as male and female.”[14] In a 2016 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory dedicated to challenging “binary binds,” the editors heralded recent attempts “to resist predetermining the types of persons we expect to see” in the archaeological record.[15] “Many scholars now approach sex and gender as a continuum . . . , emergent in practice. . . , and potentially variable throughout the life course.”[16] Some archaeologists now prefer to see identity in general as fluid and changeable—that is, a phenomenon that is processual and not a taxonomy, or “a set of taxonomic specificities.”[17]
Furthermore, we cannot assume that physical sex differences were as important to people in the past as they are to us and that they were given as much weight in identifying people. Even contemporary ideas about sex turn out to be, from the perspective of archaeology, relatively new. In his book Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur shows that perceptions of the sexed body changed radically from antiquity until the twentieth century.[18] Up until the eighteenth century,
anatomical and physiological representations of male and female bodies in Western and Eastern medicine relied on a common, androgynous body with differently positioned but homologous reproductive organs in each sex, the vagina being an inverted and internalized penis and so forth. Physiological differences were explained by relative humoral balances, heat, or measures of yin or yang.[19]
Even when the physical differences between the sexes were recognized, they were not important until the end of the 1700s, when they became useful in arguments for or against the role of women in education and public life.[20] It bears repeating that classifications are not neutral—they are created in specific cultural contexts in relation to specific questions.
Queering Sex and Gender Binaries
The distinction between sex as biologically determined and gender as socially learned was popularized by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt and is now a standard view in academia and beyond.[21] But even the sex-gender binary has been problematized by queer theory. Judith Butler influentially argued that our biology is not a neutral base on which gender is culturally constructed.[22] As shown by Laqueur and others, even our bodies are culturally constructed in that they are understood in culturally specific ways.[23] According to Butler, “Perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”[24]
Although some bioarchaeologists remind us that “sex has a material reality” and that the conceptual separation of sex from gender has been generally productive, others have followed Butler in arguing that our now-standard sex-gender model often reduces gender to sex and tends to create normative and nonnormative gender categories that risk being as simplistic as racial categories. [25]
For example, in studies of women buried with weapons, like the famous Moche Señora de Cao burial in Peru, normative approaches to sex and gender may lead to the creation of “an exotic ‘gender type’ . . . instead of simply a woman, probably taking part in war-like activities during her life.”[26] A replica of Señora de Cao can be seen in figure 3.2. We don’t expect to find women warriors, so we are surprised when we do, and this prompts us to treat them as anomalies in need of explanation. Taken at face value, however, imagery from the past often does not present what we might consider nonnormative gender expression as nonnormative at all. One of the roles of the Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, also known as Itzpapalotl, was as a “primordial warrior,” and she is depicted with warrior imagery.[27] In Maya art, women warriors are depicted similarly to their male counterparts. A female warrior “occupies a position of authority on the central axis” of a prominent relief at the Maya site of Chichen Itza, Mexico, “wearing a high-status feathered headdress and snake skirt and carrying weapons typical of an Itza warrior. . . . Clearly defined bare breasts signal that she is a woman.”[28] Like male rulers, female rulers at several other Maya sites are depicted on carved stone stelae as warriors with subjugated captives—on which they literally stand (figure 3.3).[29]
As early as 1990, some recommended we consider both sex and gender in terms of intensity or as existing on a spectrum, with some cultures allowing more freedom and flexibility in gender expression than others.[30] Evidence for gender fluidity has been cited by archaeologists for decades and is often interpreted as symbolic of power rather than deviance.[31] For example, mixed-gender imagery on figurines from the Gulf Coast of Mexico could be an expression of supernatural power.[32] In one case, a female figure wearing a high belt that is atypical for women “may be assuming a certain status or role, or even a level of power, that is usually, but not exclusively, associated with men.”[33] A study of Oaxacan figurines from the Early Formative period (1400 BC–850 BC) suggests that “the lack of attention to genitalia on figurines tracks with observations from throughout Mesoamerican groups that primary sexual characteristics often are not the focus of gender differentiation and identity.”[34]
Back in 1977, the gender fluidity of deities was associated with cycles, such as the maize god and the moon god.[35] In this century, the major Aztec god Tezcatlipoca was found to have bisexual and transgender qualities (figure 3.4).[36] In studies of the so-called great goddess imagery on the Tepantitla murals at the huge central-Mexico city-state of Teotihuacan, researchers have suggested that the murals referred to a mixed-gender deity, and this fits a broader pattern in which binary gender is not clearly represented at the site (figure 3.5).[37] Analogies to historically known and living Indigenous two-spirit people have been used to explain cross-dressing or mixed-gender imagery in Maya art.[38] Male bloodletting from the penis arguably “conceptually transformed the male genitalia into a doubly potent agent of fertility, capable of shedding two life-giving fluids: semen and blood.”[39]
Images like Stela H at the Maya site of Copán, Honduras (figure 3.6), in which a man is depicted in a net skirt, have also been interpreted as female-associated characteristics expressing power.[40] The use of powerful feminine imagery by a man may be exemplified in the colonial United States by Edward Hyde, or Lord Cornbury (whose purported portrait is shown in figure 3.7), who as the governor of New York and New Jersey between 1701 and 1708, was Queen Anne’s representative. When he was criticized for reportedly opening the assembly dressed in women’s clothing, he is said to have answered, “You are very stupid not to see the propriety of it. In this place and particularly on this occasion I represent a woman and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can.”[41]
Read
Kristina Killgrove points out the mistakes that contemporary assumptions may lead to when interpreting the past in “Is That Skeleton Gay? The Problem with Projecting Modern Ideas onto the Past,” published in Forbes, April 8, 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2017/04/08/is-that-skeleton-gay-the-problem-with-projecting-modern-ideas-onto-the-past).
• What does Killgrove want readers to take away from the discussion of the three examples of skeletons or burials that don’t fit within our understanding of gender and sexuality in the past?
• Killgrove highlights a remark by Geller: “Discoveries of decedents whose bodies have been identified as romantically entangled, compulsorily reproductive, or occupationally divided say more about our present state of socio-sexual affairs than they do about past interactions and intimacies.” What is said about our culture’s current views on same-sex relationships by the media coverage of the same-sex skeletons found together?
Colonial New Yorkers may have thought of Lord Cornbury as a trans person or cross-dresser, but Hyde’s own words suggest a less essentialized, more contextual identity. Many questions remain about the Lord Cornbury story, but it reminds us that trans behavior in other times and places may have symbolic resonance beyond simply deviance. Further complicating interpretation is a warning about projecting our notions of fixed, public identities—including trans identities—on ancient Mesoamerica: “Maya imaginations presented transsexuality as a strategy for understanding cosmic power. For other elements of transsexuality to fall completely outside of that context would have been unimaginable.”[42]
Abjection and Normativity
How does the reevaluation of gender and sex relate to sexuality? The historian Michel Foucault influentially argues that sex and sexuality are embedded in discourses shaped by power.[43] More recently, the historian David Halperin’s book How to Do the History of Homosexuality describes the problems inherent in applying our contemporary concept of sexuality to other places and times.[44] This attention to categorizations and binaries is a hallmark of queer theory because categorizations of people and their actions depend on ideas about what is normal and what is deviant.[45] In other words, culturally varied meanings of abjection and who is abject help define and maintain the normative. Yet there is good evidence that what we define as abject sexualities (e.g., homosexuality, transsexuality) would not have been considered so deviant in many places and times in prehistory.
For Mesoamerica, the “domain of the abject” involved concerns about being incompletely human or physically unusual (e.g., human-animal hybrids, dwarfs).[46] Intersex people (known as hermaphrodites in earlier times) fall in this context.[47] But the ancient Maya may not have been concerned so much with homosexual sex as with sex—or anything else—taken to excess.[48] The “sexuality of young men in Postclassic and Classic Maya society may itself have been more fluid than any normative heterosexual model would allow. In art, young men were routinely represented as the objects of the gaze of older men and adult women.”[49] Carved stone reliefs at a possible public building for young men at the Maya site of San Diego depict “enema insertion, erratic (probably drunken) dances, disheveled hair, and what may be autoerotic asphyxiation,”[50] and many depictions are “with a decided undertone of homoeroticism.”[51] Dichotomies like normal or deviant and man or woman implicitly define heterosexual sexuality as normal and same-sex desire as deviant. This often occurs without adequate consideration of how people in other times and places have framed sexuality differently. Our contemporary social norms lead us to believe that homosexuality and same-sex desire are deviant. However, people in other times and places may have framed sexuality differently, and in fact the contemporary Western focus on sexual practice as a fundamental aspect of social identity is itself historically unusual. Ingrid Fuglestvedt concludes that “there is nothing wrong with studying sexuality when this is relevant; what is argued is rather that the sex/gender paradigm insists on the enduring and absolute relevance of sexuality.”[52]
Intersectionality
Intersectionality, Performance, and Performativity
The diversity of gender in the ancient world has drawn attention to our assumptions about gender hierarchy—that is, the ranking of men above women. Gender complementarity (sometimes called gender parallelism) is an alternative to gender hierarchy in Mesoamerica.[53] However, both gender hierarchy and gender complementarity have been critiqued as binary oppositions that downplay variability and difference. “While these models have most certainly been useful in structuring our analyses, . . . they rely on binary understandings of the relationship between biological sex and gender and tend to obscure variability in ways we should not ignore.”[54] This variability is captured by the concepts of intersectionality and positionality that are characteristic of third-wave feminism and queer approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality.[55] Both are related to the idea that people have multiple aspects to their identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, class) that they emphasize or downplay in different contexts and that take on different importance in different contexts.[56] Many societies take pains to gender individuals with objects, tasks, and food, yet we repeatedly see that gender is not as important in the very young and the very old and that gender is often most strongly marked when people are of reproductive age.[57] Similar criticisms can be made about the (often implicit) assumption that sexuality was as important in the creation of identity in the past as it is now. Fuglestvedt suggests that we consider a scale of intensity for societal interest in sex, gender, and sexuality.[58] In these terms, many contemporary people live in societies with unusually high-intensity attitudes to gender, sex, and sexuality.
For the Maya, “the data suggest not only that Maya gender ideologies may not have been founded on a belief that binary biological sexes translate into binary gendered identities, but also that other aspects of social identity such as age or class may have played a more prominent part in determining gender roles.”[59] Ethnographic and colonial sources suggest that the aging moon may have changed gender over the course of the month—did a similar model apply to aging people? Lunar and related deities (e.g., the pulque god[60]) are typically bisexual and multigendered.[61] Likewise, Maya and Aztec carnivalesque gender blending occurred near the ends of temporal cycles.[62]
As noted previously, in Butler’s writing even the sexed body is performed rather than existing as a pregiven: in a performative approach, “the body . . . gains legibility through cultural interaction rather than as an ontologically prior reality.”[63] Gender and sexuality can be compared to style in that they are ways of doing as much as ways of being, an ongoing performance rather than inborn, static states. “The repeated stylizations of the body—everyday acts and gestures—are themselves performatives, producing the gendered identity of which they are thought to be the expressions.”[64]
Intersectional Approaches to Ancient Identity: Some Examples
The deconstruction of received (often binary) categorizations, a focus on individuals and variation over groups and norms, and Butler’s concept of performativity have led to more contextual, localized, diachronic (changing over time) approaches. Some have called for more contextual, intersectional, from-the-ground-up studies in some cases focused on individuals, not groups, thus “effectively deconstructing gender as an ontological category.”[65] In this view,
prehistoric identities do not rely on the notion of a core, stable self that remains unchanged throughout the life-course. . . . Instead, identity is context-dependent and enacted or “embodied” in ways that capture the “lived experiences” of past peoples.[66]
Because “we enact exclusionary practices on our data through the analytical categories we deploy to make the past known to us,” many scholars now advocate intersectional approaches that allow variation along more than one or two axes.[67] The following are some New World examples.
Gender, Sexuality, Age, and Occupation
A study of the early historical Chumash of California argues that undertakers were either men who engaged in homosexual acts or postmenopausal women. They were categorized together because their sexual activity did “not result in conception and birth.”[68] In this case, occupation, age, and reproductive potential intersected with gender and sexual behavior in a classification system that differs greatly from familiar contemporary ones.
Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Status
Like gender, “sexuality may be thought about, experienced and acted on differently according to age, class, ethnicity, physical ability, sexual orientation and preference, religion, and region.”[69] Recognition of this is apparent in the concept of “ethnosexual conflict” used in a study of Spanish colonialism “to refer to the clash between incompatible cultural beliefs and practices related to sexuality.”[70] Pete Sigal cites evidence for an institutionalized availability of “passives” (the xochihuas mentioned later) for elite men in precontact Aztec society. Sigal has also drawn broad comparisons between Greek and Maya pederasty in the training of elite boys.[71] “The discourse [‘language of Zuyua’] showed that nobles were allowed to engage in intergenerational erotic games that stressed the power of the elder noble over the younger.”[72]
Religion, Status, and Sexuality
The Moche of Peru (ca. AD 100–700) produced a huge number of sexually explicit pottery vessels that were often placed in high-status burials (figures 3.8 and 3.9). Researchers linked the sexual imagery not to sexual identity but to politics and power, including dependent relationships with dead ancestors.[73] One researcher has described “the religious use of male same-sex sexuality” in the Andes, and others have done the same for Mesoamerica.[74] For example, among the Aztecs, the effeminate xochihuas “provided warriors with a variety of services, including sex. At other times, the xochihuas, some of whom were housed in the temples, were available for sexual favors and other chores to priests and other members of the high nobility.”[75] Sigal asserts that “sodomy in the period immediately preceding the [Aztec] conquest was related to the gods, sacrifice, and ritual, and closely associated with disease and woe,”[76] and he notes that the ancient Maya “forcibly sodomized their gods in order to masculinize themselves and gain power from the gods.”[77] Indeed, Sigal concludes that concepts like the “transsexual penis” and “floating phallus” are “almost incomprehensible to a Western imagination. For the Maya, sexual desire and fantasy went beyond the field delineated by Freud and the sexologists. Sexual behavior did not exist as a discernible category of sexuality but rather as an element of ritual.”[78]
Read
Read the article “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America,” by Mary Weismantel in the September 2004 issue of American Anthropologist (http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/dcrawford/weismantel.pdf).
• When you look at the Moche phallic pottery vessel in figure 3.8, what do you see, and what do you think it means?
• How does factoring in general knowledge about Moche religion and politics alter our interpretation of the pottery vessel?
• What is an example of an object or imagery from the present time and culture that shows the intersection of religion, status, and sexuality?
Gender, Sexuality, and Colonialism
Gender and status were intimately linked in both Indigenous and colonial Latin America. Some Indigenous cultures (e.g., the Maya and Aztec) shared with the Spanish the idea that people conquered in war were gendered feminine, and sodomy was a metaphor for conquest: “Elites among the Maya considered passivity in males feminine and viewed the vanquished warrior as symbolically if not actually passive.”[79] Nevertheless, many authors have argued that the intersection of gender, sexuality, and status intensified during the Spanish invasion and subsequent colonial period, leading to the increased oppression of women and Others of all sorts.
Europeans in the New World sought to eliminate—often brutally—expressions of gender and sexuality that did not correspond with their Inquisition-era ideas. An infamous print (figure 3.10) depicts Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer, conquistador, and governor, as he “throws some Indians, who had committed the terrible sin of sodomy, to the dogs to be torn apart.”[80] Indeed, one of the insidious legacies of colonialism is the widespread idea that Indigenous cultures have always been conservative and restrictive around issues of gender, sex, and sexuality when in many cases that conservatism was imposed on them during colonization. Archaeologists and our colleagues in cultural anthropology and history are showing instead that the many pre-Columbian cultures of the New World held diverse ideas about these issues and that this evidence must be understood on its own terms, not on ours.
Conclusion
Academics in many fields now challenge normative classifications of people and behavior. Just as anthropologists long ago abandoned terms like savage and the application of racial classifications, so in archaeology we are gradually abandoning the uncritical use of terms like heterosexual and homosexual and ethnocentric assumptions about gender, sexuality, and their centrality to identity. Foucault wrote about the role of experts in medicine and science in the creation of normative categories.[81] Archaeologists are some of those experts, and we have become more self-critical about our interpretations of issues around sex, gender, and sexuality. The heteronormativity of museum dioramas that present a timeless view of the nuclear family has been criticized.[82] Even as recently as 2013 a study of seventy years of reconstructions of ancient life in National Geographic concluded that “women and women’s work are significantly underrepresented and undervalued” and that a “vigorous archaeology of gender has had little impact on the magazine’s imagined past.”[83] Clearly, we have more to do. Archaeologists who engage with these issues are not just trying to dig up LGBTQ+ people; we are trying to challenge normativity in all its forms.
Key Questions
• Why is an understanding of queer theory important in studying ancient gender and sexuality through archaeology?
• What are three examples of the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality in either the present or the ancient past?
• How do heteronormativity, gender performativity, and binary oppositions influence interpretations of the past?
• How would you define intersectionality, and why is it important to queer archaeology?
• How has the study of sex and gender changed over the years in archaeology?
Research Resources
Compiled by Rosalinda Linares
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about queer archaeology.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or editing a photograph in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: Find a partner or split into groups, and choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the resources in this chapter to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
“More Sex: Studying Sexuality and Gendered Roles in Archaeology,” from Rosemary A. Joyce
Rosemary A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a preeminent scholar in sex and sexuality in archaeology. Joseph Schuldenrein, in his podcast Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality and 21st Century Archaeology, interviewed Joyce (https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/83272/more-sex-studying-sexuality-and-gendered-roles-in-archaeology). She discusses the evolution of research in the archaeology of gender and sex as a subdiscipline beginning in the 1980s, when archaeologists began to more directly explore and interrogate gender roles, labor, and societal structures of the past. In the latter half of the interview, Joyce describes the emergence of feminist and queer archaeology in the 1990s as a rejection of archaeological practices that naturalized gender and sex as heteronormative and binaristic. Joyce discusses many detailed examples from the Paleolithic, Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, medieval, and Mesoamerican time periods and up to modern ethnographies to illustrate the varied methods and interpretations used in the study of gender, sex, and sexuality in the archaeological record.
“Queer Archaeology,” from Chelsea Blackmore and Megan Springate
Chelsea Blackmore is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Megan Springate is a historical archaeologist who edited and contributed to LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History for the National Park Foundation and the National Park Service. In this interview, on the podcast Go Dig a Hole, hosted by Christopher Sims (https://player.fm/series/go-dig-a-hole/queer-archaeology-episode-16), they provide a broader view of queer archaeology, including not only theory and site-based scholarship but also how queering the field is present in other types of professional work. Blackmore discusses definitions of queer archaeology in relation to queer theory and feminist theory, underscoring contributions by eminent figures in the field. Springate introduces the LGBTQ Heritage project within the National Park Service, which preserves important LGBTQ+ sites on the National Register of Historic Places of the National Historic Landmarks program. They describe what queering archaeology and building inclusive archaeology means to them in academic and professional spaces. They also give advice to early career archaeologists and undergraduates on how to acquire knowledge and skills in queer theory and archaeology.
SAA Queer Archaeology Interest Group
The first meeting of the Queer Archaeology Interest Group occurred at the eightieth annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in 2015. The group focuses on queer experience in the field, and its interests lie in supporting professional archaeologists who identify as LGBTQ+. They advocate for establishing a network of scholars interested in sexuality studies and other forms of queer research; work to develop a support and mentorship program for LGBTQ+ archaeologists as a means to connect senior, junior, and student archaeologists; and facilitate the involvement of LGBTQ+ archaeologists in all aspects of the SAA. See https://www.saa.org/quick-nav/about-saa/interest-groups.
“What Knowers Know Well: Why Feminism Matters to Archaeology,” by Alison Wylie
Alison Wylie is a professor of philosophy and anthropology at the University of Washington and professor of philosophy at Durham University in the United Kingdom. In 2016, Wylie gave the Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities as the opening keynote for the conference Feminism and Classics 7: Visions, held in Seattle, Washington. Wylie’s work advocates for a further infusion of feminist theory into archaeology as a whole. In the speech, Wylie focuses on interrogating the rejection of feminist standpoint theory and the influence of feminist politics in some circles of gender archaeology research and argues that social constructivist analyses within archaeological methodologies bring richness to empirical study in a way that calls into question the notion of value-free research. Wylie introduces social constructionism and strategies and grades of constructionist analysis, talks about situated knowledge and its value to empirical research, and ends with feminist contributions and challenges to gender archaeology rooted in standpoint theory. See https://youtu.be/ucEM1t3Drek.
Deep Dive: Books and Articles
Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology, by Rosemary A. Joyce
In this book, Rosemary Joyce explores the variety of ways in which social life has been organized by sex. She considers how ancient Greeks thought of men and women as different expressions of a single sexual potential and how Native American societies understood sexual identity. The book explains how archaeologists use the material remains of ancient cultures to learn about gender and sexuality. Joyce asks us to think about how these understandings might challenge us to think differently about our lives now (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008).
Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past, by Roberta Gilchrist
In this book, Roberta Gilchrist provides a thorough overview of the definitions, interests, and methods of gender archaeology and evaluates the ever-expanding role of gender studies in archaeology. Gilchrist draws from the previous decade of research, and thus this work represents the midpoint in the twenty-year span of interest in gender and queer archaeology in the twenty-first century. Gilchrist begins in the first chapter by situating growth in gender archaeology within the progression of feminism and continues in the next chapter to interrogate how archaeological knowledge is gendered. The following chapters consider the relationship between, on one hand, production and social processes of gender in the archaeology of labor and technology and, on the other, representations of gender identity, sexuality, and the body in art, space, and grave goods. The book concludes with a case study of a medieval English castle, putting into practice concepts discussed in the previous chapters (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica, by Rosemary A. Joyce
Rosemary Joyce, who has made significant contributions to the materiality and archaeology of gender, sex, and sexuality, invokes Judith Butler’s theoretical work on gender performance to situate this volume on gender in Mesoamerica. Joyce analyzes material evidence and gender depictions and roles dating from the formative Mesoamerica, Classic and Postclassic Maya, and then the Aztec periods. In this important work on gender and archaeology, Joyce reexamines the material record to reveal the contrasts between European and Mesoamerican gender ideologies in order to find alternative ways of understanding our material past (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality, by David M. Halperin
Halperin takes a social constructionist or historicist approach to human sexuality, stressing the contextual variation of sexuality across time and space. The book challenges the use of current, taken-for-granted ideas about sexuality in historical interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
“Queer Archaeologies,” edited by Thomas A. Dowson
In this 2000 issue of World Archaeology(volume 32, number 2), issue editor Thomas A. Dowson introduces queer archaeology as a challenge to the normative ideas and practices entrenched in current archaeology. This peer-reviewed journal was the first in the field of archaeology to devote an entire issue to defining and discussing queer archaeologies, and this issue is frequently cited as representative of the origins of queer studies in archaeology. Dowson is a pioneer in the subfield of queer archaeologies. The articles include an anonymous autobiographical statement on the influence of sex and sexuality on a practicing archaeologist, homophobia and women in archaeology, queer theory and its relation to the study of the material past, an exploration of autoarchaeology and neo-shamanism, and biotechnology as a site of queer archaeology. Notably, several articles focus on the interpretation, or in some cases reinterpretation, of the material record as inclusive of same-sex relationships and the nonnormative. The issue as a whole gives the reader a rounded perspective of the shape of queer archaeology in the field at the end of the twentieth century.
“Sexuality Studies in Archaeology,” by Barbara L. Voss
In this article, Voss offers a comprehensive review of the state of sexuality studies as of 2008. A well-known scholar who focuses on sexuality studies in archaeology, Voss examines five areas: reproduction management, sexual representations, sexual identities, prostitution, and the sexual politics of institutions. Of note is a section at the end of the article on queer archaeologies, where Voss draws a distinction between sexuality research in archaeology and applying queer theory to archaeology, because Voss affirms the increasing influence and possibilities of queer theory in archaeological methods regarding sexuality and its wider applications to social identity. The article appears in Annual Review of Anthropology (volume 37, number 1; https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085238).
“Towards an Inclusive Queer Archaeology,” by Dawn M. Rutecki and Chelsea Blackmore
The authors explore the challenges and opportunities faced by LGBTQ+ archaeologists in this short introduction to a 2016 special issue of SAA Archaeological Record (volume 16, number 1; http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=287180) from the Society for American Archaeology.
Glossary
abjection. The state of being cast off. Poststructural explorations find the term’s use inherently disturbing to conventional identity and cultural concepts. One who is abject has been rejected.
Andes. The longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America.
antiquarianism. The study of history with particular attention to ancient artifacts and archaeological and historical sites.
binary oppositions. Words and concepts that are considered to be direct opposites, such as man and woman, male and female.
bioanthropology. A scientific discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related nonhuman primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective.
bioarchaeologists. Those who study human remains in archaeological sites. First coined by British archaeologist Grahame Clark in 1972 as a reference to zooarchaeology, the study of animal bones from archaeological sites.
counterhegemonic. A confrontation or opposition to a status quo or hegemonic power and its legitimacy in politics, but also appears in other spheres of life, such as history, media, and music.
critical theory. The reflective assessment and critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities to reveal and challenge power structures. Critical theory has origins in sociology and also in literary criticism.
ethnocentric. A term used in social sciences and anthropology to describe the act of judging another culture by the values and standards of one’s own culture in the belief that one’s culture is superior, especially with respect to language, behavior, customs, and religion.
feminism. A range of social movements, political movements, and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes.
gender complementarity. Men and women (and other genders, if they are recognized) play similarly important roles but in different areas of social life. Gender complementarity more accurately describes gender relations than gender hierarchy in some times and places.
gender fluidity. Cultural ideas about gender frequently imply that one’s gender identity is fixed and unchanging. Gender fluidity describes situations in which a person’s gender identity may change throughout the life cycle or in different contexts.
gender hierarchy. How genders are ranked. Men are typically ranked higher than women, having more power, prestige, and so on.
gender parallelism. Men and women (and other genders, if culturally recognized) have similar levels of power and prestige but in different areas of social life. Often used interchangeably with gender complementarity and as an alternative to gender hierarchy in some times and places (e.g., in the Inca empire).
heteronormativity. The belief that heterosexuality, predicated on the gender binary, is the norm or default sexual orientation.
intersectionality. Social identities, such as race, class, and gender, that overlap or intersect and the related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination.
looted artifact. An artifact that has been removed from its original archaeological context, usually illegally, by nonarchaeologists who do not record contextual information. Looted artifacts are often sold on the art market away from their place of origin. Archaeologists despise looting because an artifact without context is much less informative about the culture that produced it than an artifact with contextual information.
Mesoamerica. An archaeological region defined by precontact cultural traits such as a distinctive calendar system, maize agriculture, and state-level political organization. It extended from northern Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. Within this region pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
normativity. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good or desirable or permissible and others as bad or undesirable or impermissible.
performative. A linguistics term referring to utterances that do not just describe the world but change it (e.g., “I pronounce you husband and wife”).
performativity. Popularized by the scholar Judith Butler in gender studies, the term highlights the idea that gender is not a given but must be continually demonstrated through word, action, dress, and so on. The concept derives from the linguistics term performative.
positionality. The contexts that make up an individual’s identity, such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, and how these affect the person’s view of the world.
processual. The methodological study of cultural change and variability in archaeology.
taxonomy. The practice and science of classification of things or concepts, including the principles that underlie such classification.
xochihuas. Effeminate men who had a range of institutional roles in Aztec society.
1. B. L. Voss, “Sexuality Studies in Archaeology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008): 317–336. See also this volume’s chapter 1.
2. E.g., A. Praetzellis, “Queer Theory,” in Archaeological Theory in a Nutshell (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015), chap. 7.
3. J. McLaughlin, M. E. Casey, and D. Richardson, “Introduction: At the Intersections of Feminist and Queer Debates,” in Intersections between Feminist and Queer Theory, ed. D. Richardson, J. McLaughlin, and M. E. Casey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–18.
4. A. C. Roosevelt, “Gender in Human Evolution: Sociobiology Revisited and Revised,” in In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches, ed. S. M. Nelson and M. Rosen-Ayalon (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002), 355–376.
5. T. A. Dowson, “Why Queer Archaeology? An Introduction,” in Queer Archaeologies,” World Archaeology 32, no. 2 (2000): 161–165; S. Terendy and N. Lyons, eds., Que(e)rying Archaeology: Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Chacmool Conference (Calgary, AB: Archaeological Association, University of Calgary, 2009).
6. E.g., C. F. Klein, “None of the Above: Gender Ambiguity in Nahua Ideology,” in Gender in Pre-Hispanic America, ed. C. F. Klein and J. Quilter (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001), 183–253; I. Silverblatt, “Andean Women in the Inca Empire,” Feminist Studies 4, no. 3 (1978): 37–61; I. Silverblatt, Moon, Sun and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); I. Silverblatt, “Lessons of Gender and Ethnohistory in Mesoamerica,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 4 (1995): 639–650.
7. T. D. Bulger and R. A. Joyce, “Archaeology of Embodied Subjectivities,” in A Companion to Gender Prehistory, ed. D. Bolger (New York: Wiley and Sons, 2013), 68–85.
8. For universals, see e.g., P. L. Geller, “Identity and Difference: Complicating Gender in Archaeology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 65; and for categorization, see C. Blackmore, “How to Queer the Past Without Sex: Queer Theory, Feminisms and the Archaeology of Identity,” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 7, no. 12 (2011): 79.
9. B. L. Voss, “Looking for Gender, Finding Sexuality: A Queer Politic of Archaeology, Fifteen Years Later,” in Terendy and Lyons, Que(e)rying Archaeology, 34.
10. E.g., A. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
11. Fausto-Sterling, 7.
12. P. L. Geller, “Skeletal Analysis and Theoretical Complications,” World Archaeology 37 (2005): 598.
13. R. Storey, “Health and Lifestyle (before and after Death) among the Copán Elite,” in Copán: The History of an Ancient Maya Kingdom, ed. E. W. Andrews and W. L. Fash (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2005), 315–344.
14. E. M. Perry and J. M. Potter, “Materiality and Social Change in the Practice of Feminist Anthropology,” in Feminist Anthropology: Past Present and Future, ed. P. L. Geller and M. K. Stockett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 118.
15. L. Ghisleni, A. M. Jordan, and E. Fioccoprile, “Introduction to ‘Binary Binds’: Deconstructing Sex and Gender Dichotomies in Archaeological Practice,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 23, no. 3 (2016): 779.
16. Ghisleni, Jordan, and Fioccoprile, 771.
17. L. Meskell and R. W. Preucel, “Identities,” in A Companion to Social Archaeology, ed. L. Meskell and R. W. Preucel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 122.
18. T. W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
19. R. A. Nye, “Sexuality,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. T. A. Meade and M. E. Wiesner (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 16.
20. R. Gilchrist, “Experiencing Gender: Identity, Sexuality and the Body,” Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past (London: Routledge, 1999), 55.
21. J. Money and A. A. Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). See also A. Oakley, Sex, Gender, and Society (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1972); and R. J. Stoller, Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (New York: Science House, 1968).
22. J. Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990); J. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
23. Laqueur, Making Sex.
24. Butler, Gender Trouble, 10.
25. J. Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 97. Butler’s followers include I. Fuglestvedt, “Declaration on Behalf of an Archaeology of Sexe,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 21, no. 1 (2014): 52; R. Schmidt, “The Contribution of Gender to Personal Identity in the Southern Scandinavian Mesolithic,” in The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities: Beyond Identification, ed. E. Casella and C. Fowler (New York: Springer, 2004), 79–108; and T. Ardren, “Studies of Gender in the Prehispanic Americas,” Journal of Archaeological Research 16 (2008): 1.
26. Fuglestvedt, “Declaration on Behalf of an Archaeology of Sexe,” 58.
27. G. G. McCafferty and S. D. McCafferty, “The Metamorphosis of Xochiquetzal,” in Manifesting Power: Gender and the Interpretation of Power in Archaeology, ed. T. L. Sweely (New York: Routledge, 1999), 117.
28. L. H. Wren, K. Spencer, and T. Nygard, “To Face or to Flee from the Foe: Women in Warfare at Chichen Itza,” in Landscapes of the Itza: Archaeology and Art History at Chichen Itza and Neighboring Sites, ed. L. H. Wren, C. Kristan-Graham, T. Nygard, and K. Spencer (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 260–261.
29. K. Reese-Taylor, P. Mathews, J. Guernsey, and M. Fritzler, “Warrior Queens among the Ancient Maya,” in Blood and Beauty: Organized Violence in the Art and Archaeology of Mesoamerica and Central America, ed. H. Orr and R. Koontz (Los Angeles, CA: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2009), 39–72.
30. J. Nordbladh and T. Yates, “This Perfect Body, This Virgin Text,” in Archaeology after Structuralism: Post-structuralism and the Practice of Archaeology, ed. I. Bapty and T. Yates (New York: Routledge, 1990), 222–239.
31. For an overview, see E. M. Brumfiel, “The Archaeology of Gender in Mesoamerica: Moving beyond Gender Complementarity,” in A Companion to Gender Prehistory, ed. D. Bolger (Malden, MA: John Wiley, 2013), 574–575.
32. M. G. Looper, “Women-Men (and Men-Women): Classic Maya Rulers and the Third Gender,” in Ancient Maya Women, ed. T. Ardren (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001), 171–202; B. J. A. Follensbee, “Unsexed Images, Gender-Neutral Costume, and Gender-Ambiguous Costume in Formative Period Gulf Coast Cultures,” in Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America, ed. H. S. Orr and M. G. Looper (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 226.
33. Follensbee, “Unsexed Images,” 217.
34. J. P. Blomster, “The Naked and the Ornamental: Embodiment and Fluid Identities in Early Formative Oaxaca,” in Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America, ed. H. S. Orr and M. G. Looper (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 107.
35. E. Hunt, The Transformation of the Hummingbird (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 95–109; for an expansion of this research, see K. Bassie-Sweet, “Corn Deities and the Male/Female Principle,” in Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations, ed. L. S. Gustafson and A. M. Trevelyan (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2002), 169–190; and S. Milbrath, “Gender and the Roles of Lunar Deities in Postclassic Central Mexico and Their Correlations with the Maya Area,” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 39 (1995): 45–93.
36. Klein, “None of the Above,” 219–221.
37. Milbrath, “Gender and the Roles of Lunar Deities in Postclassic Central Mexico and Their Correlations with the Maya Area”; E. C. Mandell, “A New Analysis of the Gender Attribution of the ‘Great Goddess’ of Teotihuacan,” Ancient Mesoamerica 26, no. 1 (2015): 43.
38. F. K. Reilly, “Female and Male: The Ideology of Balance and Renewal in Elite Costuming among the Ancient Maya,” in Gustafson and Trevelyan, Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations, 319–328; Looper, “Women-Men (and Men-Women).”
39. A. J. Stone, “Sacrifice and Sexuality: Some Structural Relationships in Classic Maya Art,” in The Role of Gender in Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture, ed. V. E. Miller (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 75–76.
40. R. A. Joyce, “Dimensiones Simbolicas del Traje en Monumentos Clasicos Mayas: La Construccion del Genero a Traves del Vestido,” in La Indumentaria y El Tejido Mayas a Traves del Tiempo, Monograph 8, ed. L. Asturias and D. Fernandez (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Museo Ixchel del Traje Indigena, 1992). Rosemary A. Joyce, “The Construction of Gender in Classic Maya Monuments,” in Gender and Archaeology, ed. R. P. Wright (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 166–195.
41. P. U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 15.
42. P. Sigal, “Gendered Power, the Hybrid Self, and Homosexual Desire in Late Colonial Yucatan,” in Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America, ed. P. Sigal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 115.
43. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Allen Lane, 1978).
44. D. M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
45. See B. L. Voss, “Feminisms, Queer Theories, and the Archaeological Study of Past Sexualities,” World Archaeology 32, no. 2 (2000): 184.
46. E. M. Perry and R. A. Joyce, “Interdisciplinary Applications: Providing a Past for ‘Bodies That Matter’: Judith Butler’s Impact on the Archaeology of Gender,” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 6, nos. 1–2 (2001): 74.
47. R. A. Joyce, “Performance and Inscription: Human Nature in Prehispanic Mesoamerica,” in Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica, ed. R. Joyce (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 191.
48. P. Sigal, From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 224.
49. R. A. Joyce, “Gender and Mesoamerican Archaeology,” in Handbook of Gender in Archaeology, ed. S. M. Nelson (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 800.
50. J. J. Aimers, “The Sexual Colonization of the Ancient Maya,” Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 11 (2014): 157.
51. S. D. Houston and T. Inomata, The Classic Maya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 55.
52. Fuglestvedt, “Declaration on Behalf of an Archaeology of Sexe,” 69.
53. S. D. McCafferty, and G. G. McCafferty, “Powerful Women and the Myth of Male Dominance in Aztec Society,” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 7 (1988): 45–59. For gender parallelism, see Rosemary A. Joyce, “Archaeology of Gender in Mesoamerican Societies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology, ed. D. L. Nichols and C. A. Pool (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 663–672.
54. M. K. Stockett, “On the Importance of Difference: Re-envisioning Sex and Gender in Ancient Mesoamerica,” World Archaeology 37, no. 4 (2005): 568.
55. Blackmore, “How to Queer the Past Without Sex,” 77; Voss, “Looking for Gender, Finding Sexuality.”
56. Blackmore, “How to Queer the Past Without Sex,” 77.
57. R. Gilchrist, “Archaeology and the Life Course: A Time and Age for Gender,” in A Companion to Social Archaeology, ed. L. Meskell and R. W. Preucel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 142–160.
58. Fuglestvedt, “Declaration on Behalf of an Archaeology of Sexe,” 66; Fuglestvedt drew on Schmidt, “The Contribution of Gender to Personal Identity.”
59. Stockett, “On the Importance of Difference,” 571–572.
60. Pulque is a lightly fermented beverage made from the agave plant. It was a common pre-Columbian beverage that also had ritual importance.
61. Milbrath, “Gender and the Roles of Lunar Deities,” 46.
62. Klein, “None of the Above,” 195.
63. Ghisleni, Jordan, and Fioccoprile, “Introduction to ‘Binary Binds,’” 770.
64. Alberti, “Queer Prehistory,” 95. See also Joyce, “Performance and Inscription.”
65. Gilchrist, “Experiencing Gender,” 73. See also L. Meskell, “Re-Em(bed)ding Sex: Domesticity, Sexuality, and Ritual in New Kingdom Egypt,” in Archaeologies of Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2000), 253–262; and Meskell and Preucel, “Identities.”
66. Alberti, “Queer Prehistory,” 94.
67. Ghisleni, Jordan, and Fioccoprile, “Introduction to ‘Binary Binds,’” 777.
68. S. E. Hollimon, “The Third Gender in Native California: Two-Spirit Undertakers among the Chumash and Their Neighbors,” in Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica, ed. C. Claassen and R. A. Joyce (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 183.
69. C. A. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston, MA: Routledge, 1984), 17.
70. For the study of Spanish colonialism, see B. L. Voss, “Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of Empire,” American Anthropologist 110, no. 2 (2008): 196; and for ethnosexual conflict, see J. Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
71. Sigal, “Gendered Power,” 104, 108.
72. Sigal, 109.
73. For sexual imagery linked to politics and power, see M. Weismantel, “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3 (2004): 495–505; J. M. Gero, “Sex Pots of Ancient Peru: Post-gender Reflections,” in Combining the Past and the Present: Archaeological Perspectives on Society, ed. R. Haaland, T. Oestigaard, N. Anfinset, and T. Saetersdal (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004), 3–22; and S. Bourget, Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). See also Voss, “Sexuality Studies in Archaeology,” 322.
74. M. J. Horswell, “Toward an Andean Theory of Ritual Same-Sex Sexuality and Third-Gender Subjectivity,” in Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America, ed. P. Sigal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 43.
75. P. Sigal, “Queer Nahuatl: Sahagún’s Faggots and Sodomites, Lesbians and Hermaphrodites,” Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (2007): 23.
76. P. Sigal, “The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society,” Hispanic American Historical Review 85 (2005): 577.
77. Sigal, “Gendered Power, the Hybrid Self,” 123.
78. Sigal, From Moon Goddesses to Virgins, 249.
79. P. Sigal, “Gender, Male Homosexuality, and Power in Colonial Yucatan,” Latin American Perspectives 29, no. 2 (2002): 25.
80. Theodor de Bry’s America, University of Houston Libraries Digital Collections, https://id.lib.uh.edu/ark:/84475/do5460qt16k.
81. Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
82. T. A. Dowson, “Archaeologists, Feminists, and Queers: Sexual Politics in the Construction of the Past,” in Feminist Anthropology: Past, Present, and Future, ed. P. L. Geller and M. K. Stockett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 89–102.
83. J. Solometo and J. Moss, “Picturing the Past: Gender in National Geographic Reconstructions of Prehistoric Life,” American Antiquity 78, no. 1 (2013): 123. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/02%3A_Global_Histories/2.02%3A_Chapter_3-_Queer_New_World.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality.
• Summarize the history of nonnormative genders and sexualities, including homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity, as well as queer identity and activism.
• Describe intersectionality from an LGBTQ+ perspective.
• Analyze how key social institutions shape, define, and enforce structures of inequality.
• Describe how people struggle for social justice within historical contexts of inequality.
• Describe several examples of LGBTQ+ activism, particularly in relation to other struggles for civil rights.
• Identify key approaches used in LGBTQ+ studies, including the study of LGBTQ+ history.
• Define key terms relevant to particular methods of interpreting LGBTQ+ people and issues, such as history and primary sources.
• Describe the relationship between LGBTQ+ history, political activism, and LGBTQ+ studies.
• Summarize the personal, theoretical, and political differences of the homophile, gay liberation, radical feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and queer movements.
Introduction
Political organizing by oppressed Americans in the 1970s helped create lesbian, gay, bisexual or pansexual, trans, and queer history as a field of study. Why would people’s struggles for rights and freedom include wanting to be represented in historical accounts? Inclusive histories reflect the diversity of people in the United States, expose institutional discrimination against minorities, and outline their contributions toward the American democratic experiment. Like women’s history, LGBTQ+ history has developed through four stages that Gerda Lerner first identified: compensation, contributions, revision, and social construction.[1] LGBTQ+ historians first compensated for heterosexism and cissexism by finding LGBTQ+ people to reinsert into historical narratives, then determined how LGBTQ+ people contributed to history. As they analyzed primary sources, they slowly revised historical narratives through testing generalizations and periodization against evidence found by and about LGBTQ+ people. Finally, the field understood that sexual orientation and gender themselves are social constructions.
By the mid-1970s Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel had founded the Lesbian Herstory Archive (figure 4.1), collecting evidence of lesbian existence for the public, and Jonathan Ned Katz published a thick book of primary sources, Gay American History.[2] Stages one and two included uncovering the gender identity or sexual orientation of known figures like civil rights leaders Pauli Murray and Bayard Rustin. For stages two and three, scholars have debated how best to tell LGBTQ+ history—what counts as a first, who and what historians should emphasize, what places to highlight. Stage-four scholars stopped declaring that anyone who wrote intimately about someone of the same gender was “gay” or “lesbian” (why not bisexual?) and instead questioned how time-bound those terms are and debated how to identify people from time periods before society widely considered sexual orientation an identity.
This chapter takes the approach that LGBTQ+ history hinges on how concepts of sexuality and gender have changed to produce today’s identities, how queer Americans have formed community, and how these minority groups have forged movements using different tactics to gain rights and freedoms amid resistance and backlash. The chapter synthesizes formative, respected scholarship and includes some primary sources and recent research. It discusses the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality; how LGBTQ+ intersects with other structures of inequality that social institutions have enforced; and how LGBTQ+ people have struggled for social justice despite resistance and setbacks.
Ideas about sexuality and gender have changed historically. This basic premise is one of the ways that we know that sex, gender, and sexuality are social constructs—that is, they are ideas that emerge from society and are changed through social action. Queer Americans have formed different types of communities in different historical eras, and LGBTQ+ people have struggled for social justice. The political struggles of LGBTQ+ people intersect with and have been influenced by other struggles for social justice, like civil rights and women’s rights.
Norms in Colonial America through the Late 1800s
White Settler Colonial Norms
Colonial Europeans established norms of marital reproduction and a sexual double standard within gender roles, which rendered what fell outside these two ideals unacceptable.[3] The Europeans’ encounters with nearly six hundred indigenous nations and all the ways these societies constructed gender and allowed varied sexual practices challenged European essentialist beliefs. Europeans tended to believe their Christian God created two fixed genders through sex assignment, set gender-divided duties, and made reproduction the purpose of sex. Thus, sex acts for purposes other than reproduction were signs of sin rather than any fixed identity. Yet European and, later, North American records give evidence that over 130 tribes recognized some individuals as women whom Europeans considered male or acknowledged some persons as men whom Europeans sexed female.[4]
The Spaniard Pedro Fages, for example, reported from his 1770 California expedition, “I have submitted substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing and character of women—there being two or three such in each village—pass as sodomites by profession. . . . They are called joyas, and are held in great esteem.”[5] Colonizers’ descriptions forced what later became known as two-spirit people into inadequate Western models, such as calling the joyas men and sodomites.[6] White settlers gradually amassed power through irregular warfare to impose their norms by murdering and dispossessing civilians. An indirect effect was queering indigenous genders by labeling variation sinful, criminal, and subject to punishment.[7]
The intersections of race and sexuality are foundational to colonial history. Consolidation of English power included writing white supremacy into Virginia law. By the 1690s colonialists divided people into categories of white, Negro, mulatto, and Indian and decreed enslaved status heritable through the mother. Many colonies enacted laws against interracial sexual relationships, but judicial systems prosecuted enslaved Black, free Black, and sometimes poor white people and not the plantation owners, ensuring that slaveholders’ power included the ability to rape without legal consequences.[8] Meanwhile, church and colonial laws drew on the dominant universalizing view of sexuality as simply behavior and not a basis for majority and minority social identities. Legal statutes deemed sodomy(oral or anal sex) unnatural, a sin and a crime.[9]
An English servant’s case illustrates how class also intersected with gender and sexuality in colonial America. Thomasine Hall lived as a girl, woman, and man before migrating to Virginia in 1627 as a male indentured servant, Thomas. There Hall’s sewing skills and sporadic dress in women’s clothes led neighbor women to question Hall’s gender. A group of women physically examined Hall three times. Amid rumors that Hall fornicated with a serving woman, the General Court assessed Hall’s gender. Examiners declared Hall had male genitalia. Hall’s response according to the court records was “hee had not the use of the mans parte” and “I have a peece of an hole [vulva].”[10] After townswomen refused the official ruling that Hall was female, the court decreed Hall must wear a combination of men’s and women’s clothing. We will never know whether Hall was intersex or what to call Hall’s sexual desire. Evidence suggests that, like other colonists, Hall enjoyed sex for pleasure outside of marriage. Anglo society was more bothered by fluidity than hybridity in wanting to fix Hall in place as both woman and man.[11]
Gender, racial, and class hierarchies established by the eighteenth century all helped shape twentieth-century LGBTQ+ organizing, but first people had to start forming communities based on their same-sex relationships.
Passionless Women, Romantic Friendships, and Vanguard Communities
From the American Revolution through the Civil War, defining sex as acts rather than as the basis for social identity continued. New gender norms, however, affected attitudes toward same-gender attraction. Americans in the early republic rejected previous colonial-era views of women as sexual beings. Instead, in the late 1700s, society considered Protestant, middle-class women less lustful and more spiritually moral than men. Idealizing women as passionless and sexually self-controlled compared with men’s “natural” sex drive constrained women’s public (though not private) behavior. Women reformers, whose organizing started in churches, asserted that society needed women’s input because of their Christian virtues.[12] The perception that women’s and men’s temperaments and desires were distinctly different facilitated wide acceptance of emotionally intense same-gender relationships alongside traditional marriage.[13] Occasionally, women who could support themselves lived together in so-called Boston marriages. Contemporaries were more likely to attribute a sexual component to romantic friendships between men, like the poet Walt Whitman’s with Peter Doyle, than to women’s relationships because of society’s continued belief that a penis was necessary for sex.[14]
Industrialization through the 1800s also played a role in forming communities based on sexual orientation. As industries spread, more people migrated to larger urban centers for factory and related jobs and into places for raw production that had extreme gender imbalances. Despite the prevalent view that same-sex affection was behavior anyone might show, rather than an identity, communities based on same-sex attraction formed. By the late 1800s, New York City had developed a subculture with identity terms like fairy for effeminate working-class men and queer for gender normative men who loved men.[15] New Orleans was another hub. An array of woman-woman relationships also existed, usually divided by class and race. Lesbians sometimes patronized bars, dance halls, and other public spaces where queer men congregated in the early 1900s.[16] Police from Los Angeles to New York might arrest women wearing pants and sporting short hair on charges of masquerading as men.[17] Same-sex relationships also occurred among men doing the physical labor that produced resources for industrial production—mining in California, Pacific Northwest logging, Seattle dock work, and railroad labor transporting goods—despite anti-sodomy laws that penalized these behaviors.[18]
How Sexology Pathologized Identity and Led to Solidifying the Straight State
Near the same time that communities developed self-definitions, European sexology repackaged marital reproduction and widespread views on sin and crime in the language of medical science. These sexologists articulated the concepts of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality”.[19] The earliest sexologists campaigned against sodomy laws by asserting that same-sex attraction constituted a form of benign variation among humans—that is, harmless identities differing from those focused on reproducing. Most sexologists, though, argued same-sex attraction correlated with gender transgression as a pathological identity.[20] Newspapers had recurring exposés on working-class women passing as men for work and freedom. By 1892 the pathology model played a role in a Memphis insanity inquisition. This case exposed the plans of two women, whom relatives had thought to be romantic friends, to marry each other by having one assume a male identity. But when family members broke up this middle-class relationship, the distraught “masculine” half of the couple murdered her lover, and the defense lawyer her father hired used sexology to argue insanity.[21]
With the emergence of sexology, gender nonnormativity and same-sex attraction were now mental illness, in addition to being violations of religious ideas about sin and criminal laws. Although queer communities continued to spread, society’s validation of romantic friendships declined, and antivice campaigns arose by the 1920s and punished queer public expression. After Prohibition ended, federal and state officials enacted laws to control alcoholic beverages, to police respectability in bars. State agents held authority to revoke alcohol licenses if bar owners allowed the presence of undesirables like prostitutes, gamblers, gays, or lesbians (terms in the popular culture by the 1920s), who according to these laws, made establishments disorderly.[22] From the 1930s through the 1960s police freely busted bar patrons on suspicion of homosexuality.[23]
During World War II the military spread the normalization of heterosexuality and negative perceptions of “the homosexual.” Psychologists convinced military officials that homosexuality was a mental disorder that threatened morale and discipline. As eighteen million men moved through draft boards and induction stations, staffers asked questions designed to exclude gay men from service. Such questions heightened recognition that homosexuality existed even while pathologizing it. Officials feared that straight men would claim to be gay to avoid the draft; to deter this, they labeled anyone rejected for homosexuality as a “sexual psychopath” and gave employers the right to review draft records. Women’s auxiliary units started in World War II, but because criminal law usually ignored lesbian sex acts, the military did not similarly screen women recruits. Gay service members caught having sex or suspected of it faced humiliating expulsion after systematic inquisitions, which left several thousand men and dozens of women with undesirable discharges on their records.[24]
Gay and lesbian communities proliferated during and after the war, especially in cities with a military presence.[25] During the Cold War, federal, state, and local authorities redoubled efforts to achieve a straight state, including congressional laws and a presidential executive order against employing homosexuals in federal jobs.[26] Recent scholars have argued that the 1950s McCarthy Red Scare most victimized gay men and lesbians.[27] George Harris was among thousands fired. When the Central Intelligence Agency did a background check, they asked people from his Mississippi hometown about his sexual orientation. Suddenly jobless and homeless, Harris got a ride to Texas. He met Jack Evans soon afterward at a Dallas gay bar. As they dated, fell in love, and then lived together, they steered clear of bars to avoid arrest, and—fifty-nine years later—they became the first gay couple to marry legally in Dallas County.[28]
Watch
George Harris and Jack Evans are married in Dallas June 26, 2015, in this video. They were both in their eighties, having lived together for fifty-five years. A full video transcription can be found in the appendix.
• Describe what you witness in the video. What do you think is the relationship between the videographer and the couple? What terms, items, or actions featured in the video are you unfamiliar with?
• Given the history you learned in this chapter, why was this occasion so publicized and celebrated?
• Conduct a bit more research on George and Jack; how did their lives together reflect larger historical events from the 1960s to 2015?
From Homophile Movement to Gay Liberation
In the face of Cold War hostility and McCarthyism, gay and lesbian communities further institutionalized and began organizing a homophile movement for civil rights. Los Angeles gay men formed the Mattachine Society in 1951. Its founders, Harry Hay, Bob Hull, and Chuck Rowland, had organizing experience as U.S. Communist Party members. They structured Mattachine into secret cells to survive government infiltration.[29] The founders blended Marxist theory—that injustice and oppression were deeply embedded in societal structures—with inspiring tactics from the African American civil rights movement. They argued that repressive norms based in heterosexuality left homosexuals “‘largely unaware’ that they in fact constituted ‘a social minority imprisoned within a dominant culture.’” The founders sought to mobilize a large gay constituency through meetings and by creating homophile journals to produce a “new pride—a pride in belonging, a pride in participating in the cultural growth and the social achievements of . . . the homosexual minority.”[30]
Soon Mattachine grew to include many politically mainstream members who were anticommunist. The founders stepped down in favor of leaders who argued that the mostly white, middle-class, gay members were the same as heterosexual citizens, aside from the private sphere of love. They focused on gaining allies among heterosexual psychologists, clergymen, and public officials. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Del Martin, Phillis Lyons, and their group, Daughters of Bilitis, also “were fighting the church, the couch, and the courts” for equality. Like the more male-run Mattachine Review and One magazine, Daughters of Bilitis’s journal, The Ladder(figure 4.2), consistently assured lesbians of their worth as respectable middle-class people deserving treatment equal to heterosexuals.[31] Chapters of both organizations spread to the East Coast and Midwest, forming a web of advocates for homosexual civil rights by the mid-1960s who published, lobbied, and picketed the White House and city governments for equality.
Watch
This 1983 interview by Vito Russo features Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay and Barbara Gittings, a founder of the Daughters of Bilitis and editor of The Ladder (https://youtu.be/RSO5Y8fGac4 and https://youtu.be/6nRJhce0xe0).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=81
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=81
• What are some similarities and differences between Hay’s and Gittings’s experiences with political activism?
• What does Barbara Gittings mean when she states that “the very first gay pickets had maybe ten, fifteen, at the most twenty people who could afford to get out in public and do this”?
• What does Harry Hay mean when he argues it was important to “quit imitating the heterosexuals as much as we do”?
By the 1960s, various social movements were developing tactics to fight discrimination and inequality. Black civil rights legal work and direct action produced court-ordered desegregation, antidiscrimination law, and voting rights, although centuries of housing segregation, education, and job discrimination continued to racialize poverty. Frustrations rose in poor communities of color over police brutality and the dearth of economic opportunities. In 1965, gay and lesbian street youth organized in San Francisco. They and trans women often gathered at Compton’s Cafeteria, one of few places where they could meet. When Compton’s management called the police to deter drag queens’ and trans women’s patronage, a riot erupted. The next night, trans hustlers and street people picketed Compton’s and protested police brutality. Although the protest did not end abuse, a new collective militant queer resistance pushed the city to address queer and trans people’s rights as citizens.[32]
Three years later the Stonewall rebellion broke out after a New York City police raid. Stonewall Inn was a Mafia-run dive that blackmailed gay Wall Street patrons and used those funds to pay off police. In return, police gave the Stonewall advance warning of raids. Raids targeted those in full drag and trans sex workers like Sylvia Rivera. But raids could also ruin the lives of white, Black, and Latinx gay and lesbian customers; newspaper exposure often led to their being fired from jobs or evicted from housing. On June 28, 1969, there was no tip-off for the police raid. Trans and lesbian patrons resisted—refusing to produce identification or to follow a female officer to the bathroom to verify their sex for arrest. They also objected to officers groping them.[33] A growing crowd outside spontaneously responded to police violence by hurling coins and cans at officers, who retreated into the bar. Rioting resumed a second and third night. The gay poet Allen Ginsberg heard slogans being chanted and crowed, “Gay power! Isn’t that great! We’re one of the largest minorities in the country—10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.”[34]
The Stonewall rebellion also did not stop police raids, but mainstream and gay coverage and leafleting spurred the creation of gay organizing that was more militant than previous homophile groups. The Gay Liberation Front sought to combine freedom from homophobia with a broader political platform that denounced racism and opposed capitalism. From the Gay Liberation Front arose the Gay Activists Alliance and its “zaps,” or surprise public confrontations with politicians to force them to acknowledge gay and lesbian rights.[35] Gay liberationists like Carl Wittman drew on past New Left antiwar student activism and the women’s liberation movement. Wittman’s “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto” (1970) rails against homophobia, imploring gays to free themselves by coming out while also acknowledging it will be too dangerous for some. Wittman was attuned to the rise of lesbian feminism, which linked sexism and homophobia. Lesbian feminists emphasized women’s autonomy and well-being rather than identification as mothers, wives, and daughters who indirectly gained from what benefited men. Wittman deemed male chauvinism antigay and urged gay men to stop being sexist. Rather than mimic straight society, gay liberation should reject gender roles and marriage and should embrace queens as having gutsily stood out.[36]
Gay liberationists continued the fight to overturn homophobia in religion, psychology, and law. Gay Catholics formed Dignity in 1969.[37] The Unitarian Universalist Association urged an end to legal and social expressions of antigay discrimination in 1970, and the United Church of Christ ordained the first openly gay person in 1972. Episcopalians started Integrity in 1974. Mainstream Protestant denominations like the Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodist Church, and Lutheran Church in America endorsed decriminalization but still disapproved of homosexuality. Fundamentalist evangelicals became increasingly vocal among denominations opposed to same-sex relationships and gender nonconformity. They began conservative religious organizing in response to progressive changes, propelling to celebrity status some ministers on the right such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim and Tammy Bakker. Some LGBTQ+ Christians flocked to the Pentecostal minister Rev. Troy Perry. He founded the Metropolitan Community Church denomination from a house-based service in 1968. Meanwhile, gay Jews in Los Angeles created the first gay synagogue in 1972.[38] Gay-friendly or gay-run houses of worship proliferated over the decade, but the majority of LGBTQ+ Americans faced discrimination in unwelcoming religious congregations.
In addition to trying to integrate religious spaces, gay liberationists demonstrated for the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association list of mental disorders. Activists and gay counselors knew people were not sick for being queer. They used the research findings of their ally, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker; she had demonstrated, on the basis of personality tests she had conducted since 1957, that gay men were equally stable as heterosexual men and sometimes showed more resilience.[39] In 1973 the association voted unanimously to define homosexuality in its diagnostic manual as “one form of sexual behavior, like other forms of sexual behavior which are not by themselves psychiatric disorders.”[40] This was a major win on the long road to discrediting claims that homosexuality was a mental illness and the conversion therapies designed to “cure” homosexuals. However, in 1980 the American Psychiatric Association’s third manual introduced “gender identity disorder of childhood” and “transsexualism” as disorders, indicating it preserved a concern about variety in gendered behavior, which sustained forced conversion programs for children and adolescents without increasing access to medical services that some trans adults wanted.[41]
Politically, in the 1970s efforts to gain equal rights ordinances and to elect lesbian and gay politicians became fruitful. Elaine Noble joined the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1974, and Harvey Milk won a seat in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors election in 1977.[42] The conservative campaign of Anita Bryant that overturned Florida’s Miami-Dade County gay rights ordinance in 1977 galvanized conservatives on the Christian right and gay activists nationwide against or for, respectively, extending equal rights regardless of sexual orientation. The next year activists managed to prevent California from passing an initiative that would have barred gay teachers from working in public schools. But cities with antigay campaigns experienced increased violence against gay and lesbian people and their businesses, centers, and churches, culminating in the murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by a former board of supervisors member and ex-policeman, Dan White, in 1978. White was convicted of manslaughter and served five years.[43]
Amid the volatile cultural battles of the 1970s, there were some victories. By the end of the decade, activists had decriminalized themselves in just under half the nation by overturning twenty-two state sodomy statutes, had countered antigay city initiatives, and had convinced the Democratic Party to include a plank against sexual orientation–based discrimination in its 1980 platform.[44] They would have to wait until 2003 for the Supreme Court decision on Lawrence v. Texas to strike down sodomy laws nationwide.[45]
The 1970s also saw a cultural renaissance of LGBTQ+ institution building and cultural productions through publishing and music. More Americans came out despite the real hazards of family rejection, violence, and legal discrimination. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson survived such dangers to start Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970. STAR, the first organization led by trans women of color, created the first homeless queer youth and sex worker shelter in North America. By recognizing links among homophobia, transphobia, racism, and classism, STAR filled needs other early gay liberation groups were not considering. More often gays and lesbians organized safe spaces through bars, gay baths, bookstores, discos, sports leagues, and musical ensembles.[46] As the 1970s continued, feminist lesbians of color took the lead in advocating for “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”[47] This important way of analyzing the world would become known as intersectionality.
Watch
Billy Porter provides a brief history of queer political actions that predate the Stonewall rebellion (https://youtu.be/XoXH-Yqwyb0).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=81
• What surprised you about this video? What did not surprise you? What LGBTQ+ organization or historical event described in this video was new to you? Conduct some more research to better understand that organization’s or event’s goals and accomplishments.
• What LGBTQ+ organizations or movements are active now, and how are they similar to or different from the movements discussed earlier?
Responding to AIDS
In the 1980s, the emergence of a deadly epidemic marked a crossroads for LGBTQ+ activism and institution building. A 1981 newsletter from the Centers for Disease Control reported five Los Angeles gay men had contracted an unusual pneumonia typically found in immune-compromised people. Then the New York Times stated that a rare, aggressive skin cancer had struck forty-one recently healthy homosexuals.[48] By late 1982, related immunosuppression cases existed among infants, women, heterosexual men, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs. The mortality rate of the original patients was 100 percent. Panic spread as media, many government officials, and the gay community asked what linked the affected gay men. Connecting a deadly disease, ultimately called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) to gay male sexuality provided a new rationale for discriminatory laws and harassment as the political power of the Christian Right continued to ascend.[49]
In response to AIDS, LGBTQ+ Americans organized new institutions and created new methods to get needed resources, which furthered lively debates over political tactics. Because the health care system failed to address the epidemic’s causes and consequences, New York City gay men founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982. It became a model for AIDS service organizations that offered information and support to prevent or treat the disease.[50] Lesbians contributed experience from the women’s health movement, where they had countered male-dominated medicine with their own research and support networks. Black Panther–sponsored free breakfasts and community health clinics became a model for AIDS service organizations.[51] By 1983 the group People With AIDS had mobilized nationally to demand control over decisions about their care and to draw attention to scapegoating that resulted in job loss and refusal of hospital treatment. They released “The Denver Principles,” which asserted their responsibility to use “low-risk sexual behaviors” without denying their right to “satisfying sexual and emotional lives.”[52] The gay community split on whether to blame casual sex with multiple partners for the crisis and how to contain the spread of the disease. As city public health officials sought to shut down bathhouses and bars that had spaces for sex, some gay activists agreed with the precaution, but others saw the campaign as more antigay harassment. Those opposed to closures argued that instead of driving gay sex further underground, public sites like bathhouses should become education centers for safer sex practices. Meeting spaces were places where the community organized efficiently to respond to AIDS.[53]
A major contributor to the AIDS epidemic was willful neglect by the federal government. For the first five years of the epidemic, President Ronald Reagan remained silent about it. In 1986 he and governors from both parties proposed cutting government spending on AIDS. That year the Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that gay adults did not have constitutional privacy rights that would protect them from prosecution for private, consensual sex.[54] The Justice Department announced that federal law allowed employment discrimination based on HIV/AIDS status. When Reagan spoke briefly at the Third International Conference on AIDS in 1987 in favor of testing, over twenty thousand of the thirty-six thousand Americans diagnosed with AIDS had died. Congress prohibited using federal funds for AIDS education that condoned same-sex behavior but mandated testing of federal prisoners and immigrants to bar entry to those with HIV.[55]
This spurred high-impact radical organizing. Larry Kramer and cofounders formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987. It further publicized the New York City slogan “Silence = Death” in demonstrations. ACT UP dramatically disrupted Wall Street, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the high cost of AZT (the first drug treatment) and the appointment of a loudly homophobic Catholic cardinal to the Presidential HIV Commission. ACT UP chapters spread to other cities; the groups became known for their insistence on action and their reclaiming of the term queer.[56] Keith Haring’s graffiti art spread the message. Cleve Jones created a memorial for people lost to AIDS, inviting loved ones to create three-by-six-foot panels for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (figure 4.4). During the second March on Washington in October 1987, volunteers laid out 1,920 panels on the National Mall.[57]
In tandem with responses to AIDS, often-overlooked portions of LGBTQ+ Americans organized. Trans people were disproportionately poor owing to job discrimination and devastating budget cuts to AIDS programs, welfare, and health programs. For-profit centers sold medical procedures for gender transition at high costs. Bisexuals started forming social and then political rights groups, including the National Bisexual Liberation Group in 1972 based in New York City, San Francisco’s Bisexual Center in 1976, and the national BiPOL in San Francisco in 1983. When the 1987 March on Washington organizers would not include “bi” or “trans” in the march’s title or list of demands, both constituencies argued that the category “gay and lesbian” was not inclusive.[58] New trans groups arose with transnational scope, including FTM International (advocating for the female-to-male trans community) and International Foundation for Gender Education, along with periodicals like Metamorphosis and Tapestry.[59]
With the development of intersectional theories and activism, gay, lesbian, and bi Americans who also held other minority statuses founded organizations in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Gay American Indians was founded in San Francisco in 1975, and in 1987 the group joined American Indian Gays and Lesbians. Conferences of the American Indian Gays and Lesbians produced the consensus that two spirit was the preferred term for gender-expansive Natives.[60] The National Rainbow Society of the Deaf (1977) grew from its Florida origins to hold annual conventions around the country as Rainbow Alliance of the Deaf (1982) and to become a force for advocacy. The national Asian Pacific Lesbian Network was founded when organizing for the 1987 march. African American gays and lesbians created religious community with Unity Fellowship Church (1985) and secular groups. When gay men formed the National Association of Black and White Men Together (1981), with local affiliates across the country, they ushered in a new form of interracial organizing. Some queer people of color joined with white gays and lesbians for antidiscrimination and AIDS work and criticized white-dominated queer communities for their racism. Queer people of color worked with other people of color for civil rights, poverty issues, and anti-imperialism while objecting to those communities’ homophobia, sexism, and transphobia. Queer people of color needed their own queer groups by race as respites from coalition work.[61]
Listen
In a 1989 Making Gay History interview (https://go.geneseo.edu/larrykramer), ACT UP founder Larry Kramer describes being a student at Yale University in the 1950s, before the Stonewall rebellion, and then how he tried to organize gay men to fight the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
• What were some of the challenges that Kramer had to overcome in his lifetime, whether at college or in the fight against AIDS?
• Queer theory emerged during a very turbulent period in U.S. history, with AIDS decimating gay male communities. The anger at the apathy of the U.S. government, in the face of tens of thousands of men dying, drove the radical activism of ACT UP. Describe some of the tactics they used. What do you think of them?
• In the interview, Kramer says there had been “a lot of change and no change” between when he was in college in the 1950s and the late 1980s. What do you think he meant by that? If he were interviewed today, do you think he’d say the same thing, and why?
Mainstream and Queer Goals
Beginning in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, new drug therapies prolonged the lives of people living with AIDS. Although radical, multicommunity AIDS activism continued, work for mainstream legal protections and rights dominated LGBTQ+ activism. LGBTQ+ Americans and supporters sought inclusion in the military, the passage of antidiscrimination laws, and marriage equality. After a campaign promise to end military exclusion, President Bill Clinton responded to pushback from military leaders with a compromise. He supported a congressional law that instructed LGBTQ+ service members to remain closeted and military officials not to pursue people for discharge (figure 4.5). Ironically, this “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy increased discharges of gay service members and continued violence against them until its repeal by President Barack Obama in 2010 ended discrimination based on sexual orientation (but not gender identity).[62] President Clinton was more effective with his executive order to end antigay discrimination in federal government in 1998 than with his military policy.[63]
Violence against LGBTQ+ Americans continued, including the rural murders of Brandon Teena and then Matthew Shepard. Both murders gained so much media coverage that they eventually became movies. Outrage against antigay violence and prejudice led New York ACT UP members to form Queer Nation in 1990 and inspired groups like the Pink Panthers (1990) and Lesbian Avengers (1992). Their direct actions to liberate sexuality and gender from heteronormativity were defiantly queer. A particularly controversial tactic was exposing the closeted homosexuality of antigay politicians and pundits. New federal hate-crime tracking confirmed the scope of anti-LGBTQ+ violence, indicating that over 10 percent of violent crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s identity were based on sexual orientation, putting that category behind only race and religion. Congressional passage of the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act (1994) included gay bashing as a federal crime to ensure fairer trials.[64]
Read
Read Dignity & Respect: A Training Guide on Homosexual Conduct Policy, a pamphlet published by the U.S. Army in 2001 that explains to soldiers the new homosexual conduct policy that would become known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (https://archive.org/details/DignityRespectADepartmentOfDefenseTrainingGuideOnHomosexualConductPolicy).
• Does this pamphlet help you better understand the army’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy? Why or why not?
• According to the pamphlet, the army’s goal was to fairly enforce this new policy, to promote unit cohesiveness and readiness. Do you think this pamphlet would have helped achieve that goal?
• What is or isn’t in the policy that might explain why harassment and violence against gay service members continued while it was in effect?
State legislatures and popular ballots featured both antidiscrimination and antigay measures, creating grassroots organizing for and against protecting LGBTQ+ Americans from being fired or excluded from jobs, housing, and public accommodations. Cultural conservatives lamented the gradually increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ people as celebrity musicians and television and film stars slowly started to come out and weathered backlash to continue their careers. Meanwhile, the Hawaii state supreme court win Baehr v. Miike temporarily legalized same-sex marriage there in 1996.[65] National LGBTQ+ organizations pushed to extend marriage equality nationwide. Over the next decade states split on whether to ban or legalize marriage equality. Popular support steadily grew in the first years of the 2000s, reaching 60 percent in 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry (figure 4.6).[66]
Groups that centered young, trans, poor, and minority people warned in the early 2000s that hate-crime legislation and nondiscrimination laws connected to it would further hurt the most marginalized Americans. Dean Spade cautioned that sentences mandatorily extended for hate crimes strengthened “the criminal punishment system” that targets poor (and trans) people of color.[67] Likewise, some feminist and queer activists opposed the costly push for marriage equality because it supported only heteronormative relationships.[68] Paula Ettelbrick, among the first, argued in 1989 against endorsing one family form instead of destigmatizing unconventional relationships and sexual expression. Lisa Duggan has argued for broad coalitions to gain universal benefits instead of tying needs like health coverage to employment and marriage.[69]
Conclusion
LGBTQ+ history in the United States has witnessed profound transformations in meanings, the social construction of identities, and how LGBTQ+ people have used collective action to fight for rights and equality. For centuries laws touted marriage as the place for reproductive sex but allowed some men sex for pleasure across race and class. When sex was considered simply a form of behavior and society believed women and men were fundamentally different, same-gender intimacy that was not obviously sodomy was deemed unremarkable. But as sexologists categorized sexuality into normal or pathological identities, psychology and medical science joined the church and state as key social institutions that demonized LGBTQ+ people. Communities of gay and bisexual men, lesbian and bisexual women, and trans people multiplied in the 1950s despite heightened repression, and a portion of these minorities organized for equal rights. Even the HIV/AIDS epidemic, blamed on and falsely identified with gays, could not stop LGBTQ+ organizing. Activists further developed radical tactics from the 1970s to call for liberation from heteronormativity. Legal gains have been arduously won, but foundational power imbalances based on race, class, gender, ability, and citizenship persist. Nonetheless, both legal and cultural changes continue to transform society.
Profile: Institutionalizing Sexuality: Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and the Law
Jennifer Miller and Clark A. Pomerleau
Sexology, Civil Rights, and Criminalization
European scientists and social scientists developed the social science known as sexology to understand human sexuality. They used biology, medicine, psychology, and anthropology to support beliefs that privileged binary gender identities (man or woman) and reproductive sex while trying to account for gender and sexual diversity. What was at stake for the men who created sexology varied: some felt same-sex attraction, some were sympathetic to those who did, others opposed same-sex behaviors. Their findings became arguments for and against criminalizing same-sex behavior. This profile’s history of sexology prioritizes primary sources to consider how sexologists explained diversity in gender and sexuality and how the field’s spokespersons shifted from an initial focus on social justice to creating oppressive, pathologizing diagnoses. Knowing this history helps us understand sexology’s long-reaching implications as a method by which people worldwide have been taught about queer and trans people.
The earliest form of sexology combatted legal discrimination. The German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (figure 4.7) drew on Plato’s Symposium for his 1860s theory that male-male love was biologically inborn and therefore natural.[70] Ulrichs used the term urning for a man who desired men and believed the urning’s desire reflected an internal female psyche. After telling his family he was an urning, Ulrichs—freed from his secret—lobbied to repeal sodomy laws. He maintained that consenting adult men who were not being publicly indecent had a civil right to express their love without state persecution. Ulrichs hoped to influence national legal reform as German states unified, so he published “Araxes: Appeal for the Liberation of the Urning’s Nature from Penal Law. To the Imperial Assemblies of North Germany and Austria” in 1870.[71] The next year, Germany’s assembly refused change and retained a sodomy law in the new law code. Paragraph 175 of the German Imperial Penal Code stated, “Unnatural vice committed by two persons of the male sex or by people with animals is to be punished by imprisonment; the verdict may also include the loss of civil rights.”[72] Germany would not decriminalize homosexuality until 1969.
Although his argument was unsuccessful, Ulrich’s work influenced other sexologists and became part of a growing field. His contemporary, the Austro-Hungarian human rights journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny, coined the words heterosexual and homosexual in 1868 as two forms of strong sex drive apart from those that pursued reproductive goals. Out of compassion for a friend who killed himself after being blackmailed for same-sex attraction, Kertbeny argued that sodomy laws violated human rights.[73] The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing adopted Kertbeny’s terminology and Ulrichs’s view that men who loved men had womanly desire (figure 4.8). Krafft-Ebing, however, considered anything outside reproductive sex to be an inferior, immoral deviation, which he called degeneracy. His Psychopathia Sexualis, Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study (1894) provided an elaborate taxonomy of “pathological manifestations of the sexual life.” The taxonomy included sexualizing an object (fetishism), sexually enjoying pain (masochism, which Krafft-Ebing considered natural for women), and sexually enjoying inflicting pain (sadism, which Krafft-Ebing considered natural for men). Krafft-Ebing claimed same-sex attraction was usually innate but could sometimes be produced as a result of exposure to other forms of “sexual deviance” like masturbation.[74] Like Ulrichs and Kertbeny, Krafft-Ebing hoped to influence jurisprudence with psychological claims, but to him, “The laws of all civilized nations punish those who commit perverse sex acts. Inasmuch as the preservation of chastity and morals is one of the most important reasons for the existence of the commonwealth, the state cannot be too careful, as a protector of morality, in the struggle against sensuality.”[75] Sexology’s language has continued to aid the power to police sexuality legally and has contributed to critiques of that power. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/03%3A_U.S._Histories/3.01%3A_Chapter_4-_U.S._LGBTQ_History.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Describe how people struggle for social justice within historical contexts of inequality.
• Recognize that progress faces resistance and does not follow a linear path.
• Identify key approaches within LGBTQ+ studies, and discuss at least the legal history approach in detail.
Introduction
Historians often face the difficult task of determining how and when to tell the story of certain events, ideas, or people. This is no less true in telling the history of LGBTQ+ law in the United States. It may be surprising to many, but LGBTQ+ laws have a long, storied past and have existed as long as the United States itself. Laws enacted at local and state levels have long been used to regulate acceptable sex and gender norms. For example, in Arresting Dress, Clare Sears writes about the nineteenth-century San Francisco laws that outlawed cross-dressing.[1] These laws and resistance to them tell important stories about how LGBTQ+ practices were regulated. This chapter focuses on some of the key legal doctrines that have been crucial in determining the overall landscape of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and its application to protecting members of LGBTQ+ communities.
Throughout this chapter it is important to remember that our system of constitutional law is premised on the rights enumerated in the federal constitution being natural rights—that is, rights that are inalienable and preexist our government. What this means is that the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, does not grant any rights. Rather, each amendment represents a mandate for the government to not interfere with individual rights or to not prevent others from doing so. For example, the First Amendment right to free speech does not mean that the government has to give you the means to speak, but it cannot interfere with your inalienable right to do so.[2] Crucial to any claim to protected rights is that one must be recognized as human. As anyone who is familiar with U.S. history knows, enslaved African and African Americans were deemed to be chattel (property) and not human, which served to deny them protections as enumerated by these rights. In addition, women, particularly married women, were not recognized as independent citizens and also lacked many of the Constitution’s enumerated rights. Though this egregious thinking would begin to be overturned in the latter half of the nineteenth century, keep it in mind as we survey the rights that eventually applied to members of the LGBTQ+ communities.
Ironically, sexuality, so basic to the human experience, was never mentioned in the original federal constitution or by James Madison, the principal architect of the Bill of Rights. This chapter provides an understanding of the constitutionally based issues that have influenced recent outcomes of the protected rights of LGBTQ+ communities. We begin with a closer look at the tenets that paved the way for recognition of sexual rights. Next we examine the process that eventually led the Supreme Court to extend these rights to include lesbian and gay sexualities. After that extension, the next large hurdle confronting the Court was the question of marriage equality. Finally, we briefly consider recent issues before the Court that go beyond sexual rights but strike at core understandings of LGBTQ+ equality.
Explore
The Supreme Court website (https://www.supremecourt.gov/) has more information about the Supreme Court, how it works, and its history and traditions.
• Find a case discussed in this chapter, and read or listen to the oral arguments presented for the case. Do these materials help you understand the case better?
• How does the Supreme Court work, and what are some of its traditions?
• Read about the court and constitutional interpretation; why is the Supreme Court considered a unique institution by world standards? What role does the U.S. Constitution play in this history?
Sexual Rights and the Constitution
The U.S. Constitution approved by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention did not include the protection of rights that were enumerated in the ten constitutional amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, that were eventually ratified in 1791. These amendments included guarantees such as the right to free speech, the right to due process, and the right to a speedy trial.[3] What was not enumerated or made explicit was a right to sexual liberty. How, then, would “we the people” come to expect the Constitution to protect such rights, particularly with respect to same-sex sexualities? An answer to this question begins with the Ninth Amendment’s statement that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The inclusion of this amendment makes clear that the rights explicitly stated were not exclusive of those that were unenumerated and those that could not be anticipated. As the authors of Sexual Rights in America write, “As the guardian of fundamental rights unanticipated or underappreciated two centuries past, the Ninth Amendment transforms the Constitution from a static record of our forebears’ political and moral understandings into a dynamic and evolving expression of our basic rights.”[4] To be clear, the Ninth Amendment was not intended to protect the rights of all. As noted earlier, rights were explicitly denied to the enslaved Africans and African Americans who were considered to be not human but chattel, “the name given to things which in law are deemed personal property.”[5] Nor was the full range of rights available to women, particularly married women, who essentially merged their individuality into that of their husbands under the law of coverture. This meant that women were not only denied the vote but, when married, could not sign contracts or conduct other business independent from their husbands.[6]
Nevertheless, the inclusion of the Ninth Amendment in the Bill of Rights provides a basis for protecting those rights considered to be natural and thus fundamental to liberty. As some have argued, this includes basic sexual rights, although the range and extent of these rights remains a source of great division among legal scholars and advocates.[7] This was precisely the point made by Justice Arthur Goldberg (figure 5.1) in his concurring opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Supreme Court found that a married couple had the fundamental right to privacy within marriage.[8] Arguing that the Ninth Amendment provided a constitutional basis for recognizing this fundamental right, Goldberg stated,
To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment, and to give it no effect whatsoever.[9]
Despite what might appear to be an easy way to expand on the rights protected by the Ninth Amendment, the court has rarely addressed its meaning or expanded the list of unenumerated rights it might imply.
The amendment that would provide the basis for sexual rights was the Fourteenth Amendment, one of the three amendments ratified in the post–Civil War period, which states in part,
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.[10]
One interesting point to consider is that this amendment was ratified in response to the scourge of slavery’s system of racism. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, states could no longer deny some of its residents, particularly formerly enslaved people, their rights protected by the federal constitution. The least influential clause, the privileges and immunities clause, was significantly limited in scope by the Supreme Court in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873).[11] However, the equal protection and due process clauses have played significant roles in the development of sexual rights.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause does not specify what liberties it is meant to protect. The Court answered this question in Palko v. Connecticut (1937).[12] Writing for the Supreme Court, Justice Benjamin Cardozo found that this clause protected only those liberties that were “of the very essence of a scheme of ordered liberty.”[13] As a result of this decision, the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights were gradually applied to the states as well.
The Griswold case, in which the Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether a married couple had a right to birth control, took the Palko decision further and looked at whether such a right emanated from those enumerated within the Bill of Rights. In his Griswold majority opinion, Justice William Douglas wrote that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” He noted that a number of these guarantees create “zones of privacy” that suggest the framers certainly understood the existence of a fundamental right to privacy. Once this fundamental right was recognized, Douglas aptly applied it to intimate decisions between married couples.[14] As is well known, this fundamental right to privacy became the basis for Justice Harry Blackmun’s (figure 5.2) majority opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973), which found that Texas did not have enough of an interest in interfering with a woman’s fundamental right to privacy in choosing whether to have an abortion during the first trimester.[15] The trimester-based right to privacy was altered by the court’s subsequent decision in Planned Parenthoodv. Casey (1992), so that the question of the state’s interest in preventing women from exercising their fundamental right to privacy came to be measured against fetal viability: the more viable, the more the state had an interest in protecting the fetus.[16] Some have suggested that the Casey decision limited the fundamental quality of women’s right to privacy and is indicative of the Court’s willingness to limit the liberties protected under this Fourteenth Amendment right. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s decisions in the reproductive rights cases created the legal doctrine of the fundamental right to privacy that would eventually become useful in expanding the sexual rights extended to lesbian, gays, and bisexuals.
The Supreme Court first considered whether the right to privacy applied to same-sex sexuality in Bowers v. Hardwick.[17] In this decision, made in 1986 as the AIDS epidemic was ravaging members of LGBTQ+ communities, the Supreme Court demonstrated that it was unwilling to extend the fundamental right to privacy protections to gay men. The Bowers case arose from a challenge to Georgia’s laws criminalizing sodomy. A remarkable fact in Bowers was that the acts in question occurred in the privacy of Michael Hardwick’s bedroom. An Atlanta police officer went to serve what turned out to be an invalid arrest warrant on Hardwick for his failure to appear in court on a citation for alleged public drinking. Hardwick’s roommate allowed the officer to enter, whereupon he opened the bedroom door to find Hardwick and another man having sex. The officer arrested both men, charging them with homosexual sodomy, a felony under Georgia law.[18] From a legal advocacy perspective, this made the fact pattern in Bowers ideal to challenge Georgia’s sodomy law under the fundamental right to privacy. However, writing for the court, Justice Byron White did not find constitutional protection for homosexual sodomy. White noted the court’s previous review of fundamental rights surrounding heterosexual reproductive rights and found that homosexual sodomy was not “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” such that “neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed.” He also dismissed the idea that the right to engage in homosexual sodomy was “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”[19] This idea, that somehow homosexuality was not a part of U.S. history, inspired historians to produce a range of scholarship that would become instrumental in the Court’s decision to overturn Bowers.
It took the Court seventeen years to overturn its Bowers decision, during which several states continued to criminalize same-sex sexuality. It is notable, however, that in terms of the history of overturned precedents this period was brief. For instance, the court’s seminal Brown v. Board of Education decision, ending race-based segregation in education, was issued nearly sixty years after the separate-but-equal doctrine was set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson, allowing states to impose legally sanctioned racial segregation.[20] The Bowers decision, however, held sway in the midst of the AIDS crisis and fostered an environment in which untold numbers of gay men would forgo early medical intervention in addressing the virus for fear of facing criminal charges.[21]
By 2003 the cultural landscape had shifted enough for the court to reconsider the question of the fundamental right to privacy protections afforded to homosexual sex in the case of Lawrence v. Texas (2003).[22] Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy (figure 5.3) noted that the facts in Lawrence were similar to Bowers in that Lawrence and Garner were arrested for committing sodomy in the privacy of John Lawrence’s home when a police officer entered in response to a call about a weapons disturbance.[23] The law in Texas criminalized homosexual but not heterosexual sodomy. While advocates offered equal protection arguments in addition to the Fourteenth’s due process protection of the fundamental right to privacy, Justice Kennedy wrote that the case “should be resolved by determining whether the petitioners were free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.”[24] Kennedy wrote that the sodomy laws sought to control behavior that was within
the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals. . . . It suffices for us to acknowledge that adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons. When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.[25]
Kennedy’s opinion specifically challenged the historical framework previously set forth in Bowers and, in so doing, established the rootedness of homosexual intimacy as a liberty protected by the fundamental right to privacy. It is noteworthy that Kennedy did not embrace the equal protection clause in his decision, noting that “were we to hold the statute invalid under the Equal Protection Clause some might question whether a prohibition would be valid if drawn differently, say, to prohibit the conduct both between same-sex and different-sex participants.”[26] Kennedy did acknowledge that decriminalizing homosexual sodomy would lead to destigmatizing homosexuality itself, removing an unequal burden previously placed on homosexuals for their sexual intimacies.
Visit
Oyez (pronounced “Oh-yay”) is a multimedia archive devoted to making Supreme Court decisions available to all. It is a collaboration between Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, Justia, and Chicago-Kent College of Law.
• Visit the web page for the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1985/85-140. Listen to the oral argument; what surprised you the most about this exchange?
• Visit the web page for the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-102. Listen to the oral argument for Lawrence; how does it compare with the oral arguments made in Bowers v. Hardwick?
One cannot overstate the impact of the Lawrence decision on the lives of LGB people whose intimate practices finally had protection as a fundamental liberty. That being said, some question the dependency of this liberty on a fundamental right to privacy because this emphasis on private sexual activities runs counter to practices within homosexual communities.[27] They suggest that for gay men cruising and sex in public spaces has been an important, integral part of their identities. Within this context, the private sex that the fundamental right is based on is viewed as assimilationist because it continues to marginalize homosexuals or even outright erase components of their sexualities.[28]
Marriage Equality
Having achieved the decriminalization of homosexuality in Lawrence, the question of the legal status of same-sex marriage became a focus of LGBTQ+ activism. This was due, in part, to the increase in anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment that resulted from the notion that the Lawrence decision had gone too far in normalizing homosexuality. Justice Antonin Scalia iterated this concern when he noted that after the court’s ruling, limiting marriage to heterosexuals was on “pretty shaky grounds.”[29] The focus on marriage equality was also due to LGB couples being denied basic protections during the AIDS epidemic, ranging from partners being denied input into medical decision-making to the eviction of surviving partners from their apartments.[30]
As advocates conducted a state-by-state effort to gain marriage equality, Hawaii became the first state in which its court ruled on the issue. In the 1996 case of Baehr v. Miike (originally known as Baehr v. Lewin when it was brought to court in 1993), the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was legal given the state constitution’s equal rights amendment.[31] However, the impact of this decision was curtailed by the state legislature in 1998 when, after a statewide referendum, it amended the state constitution to define marriage to be legal only for opposite-sex couples. This constitutional change reflected the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 (DOMA), which defined marriage as a “legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”[32] During the ensuing period, several states took up the question of whether state laws would allow or ban same-sex marriage. In 2004 Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the question of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, thirty-seven states had legalized same-sex marriage.[33]
Same-sex marriage was not wholly embraced within LGBTQ+ communities. Some, like the LGBTQ+ attorney Paula Ettelbrick, argued that marriage was a patriarchal institution that would not liberate lesbians and gay men but would “force our assimilation into the mainstream and undermine the goals of gay liberation.”[34] Others maintained that same-sex marriage was misdirecting the LGBTQ+ movement’s attention away from more important efforts, including the kind of legal reform that would overturn laws targeting LGBTQ+ people.[35] Despite these objections, the main LGBTQ+ advocacy groups focused the bulk of their efforts on achieving marriage equality for same-sex couples.
The widespread disagreement between state laws and DOMA finally led the Supreme Court to address same-sex marriage in Windsor in 2013. That case involved the surviving partner of a same-sex marriage, Edith Windsor, who sought a refund from the Internal Revenue Service for taxes she was forced to pay on the estate of her spouse, Thea Spyer. Normally, spouses were exempt from paying taxes on their partner’s estate, but the IRS determined that irrespective of whether Windsor’s marriage was legal under New York state law, DOMA meant that it was not legal under federal law. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy concluded that DOMA’s “principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.” He therefore declared DOMA as a violation of equal protection.[36]
Windsor was a significant victory for same-sex marriage proponents because it declared DOMA unconstitutional. However, the question of whether states were allowed to prohibit same-sex marriages within their jurisdictions would not be resolved until 2015, two years after the Windsor decision, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges (figure 5.5). Again writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy found that there was no justification for making a distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex marriages: “The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.”[37] Kennedy looked at the fundamental nature of marriage itself and determined that four guiding principles warranted constitutional protection for same-sex couples. First, he noted that the Court consistently found that the personal decision to marry was inherent to the idea of individual liberty. Second, Kennedy acknowledged that the Court had previously determined marriage to be a union unlike any other and that went to the heart of individual liberty. Third, he found that “by giving recognition and legal structure to their parents’ relationship, marriage allows children ‘to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.’” Fourth, Kennedy stated that “this Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of our social order.”[38]
Through this analysis Kennedy found that the fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. He went further to note that there was a synergy between this clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. He wrote, “The Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause are connected in a profound way, though they set forth independent principles. . . . In any particular case one Clause may be thought to capture the essence of the right in a more accurate and comprehensive way, even as the two Clauses may converge in the identification and definition of the right.”[39] The legal scholar Lawrence Tribe has argued that, by linking equal protection to due process, Kennedy gives centrality and meaning to the legal doctrine of “equal dignity.”[40] Tribe suggests that equal dignity means all individuals deserve personal autonomy and freedom to define their own identity or existence. However, Kennedy’s focus on the tradition and sanctity of marriage in our social order enveloped the issue of LGBTQ+ rights under the cover of conservative notions of family values.[41] Certainly, intimacy plays a significant role in the way many LGBTQ+ people live their lives, but as others have suggested, this alone is not the sole basis for what it means to be queer.
Explore
Lambda Legal is the oldest and largest national legal organization devoted to fighting for the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and people living with HIV. They engage in litigation, education, and policy work. Visit their website at https://www.lambdalegal.org/about-us, and learn about the history of Lambda Legal at https://www.lambdalegal.org/about-us/history.
• Describe how the history of Lambda Legal reflects the broader struggle for LGBTQ+ liberation; what key issues are being litigated, and what were key watershed moments?
• What is the history of the legal fight for marriage equality, at both the state and the national levels?
• What range of work does Lambda Legal engage in? Pick one particular focus; what is a recent court decision relevant to that area of work?
LGBTQ+ and Equality
Before its Obergefell decision, the Supreme Court confronted the question of whether the equal protection clause protected against discrimination toward LGBTQ+ people. In 1996 the Court heard the case of Romer v. Evans, in which it was faced with the decision of whether Colorado’s Amendment 2 violated the equal protection clause. Amendment 2 was adopted in response to several municipal laws that banned discrimination in housing, employment, education, and public accommodation against LGBTQ+ people. The amendment prohibited any law designed to protect the status of people on the basis of their “homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships.”[42] The state essentially argued that Amendment 2 did nothing more than put LGBTQ+ people on the same footing as all other Colorado residents who weren’t afforded the specific protections of the various laws within the state. However, in a decision authored by Justice Kennedy, the Court found that Amendment 2 violated the equal protection clause and was unconstitutional. Kennedy explained,
The Fourteenth Amendment’s promise that no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws must co exist [sic] with the practical necessity that most legislation classifies for one purpose or another, with resulting disadvantage to various groups or persons. . . . We have attempted to reconcile the principle with the reality by stating that, if a law neither burdens a fundamental right nor targets a suspect class, we will uphold the legislative classification so long as it bears a rational relation to some legitimate end. . . . Amendment 2 fails, indeed defies, even this conventional inquiry.[43]
Kennedy found that Amendment 2’s exclusion of LGBTQ+ people from receiving legal protections already afforded to others failed to have a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose, and as a result, it violated the minimal standard of review for equal protection cases.[44] This outcome was significant, especially coming after the Bowers decision, but it did not offer the kind of more rigid review given to laws that discriminate on the basis of race or gender. Some suggest that Kennedy’s use of the rational basis test meant that laws targeting LGBTQ+ people for unequal treatment might survive because legislation that could be rationalized would not violate the equal protection clause.[45] For instance, in the case of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) the court found that the Boy Scouts of America could revoke the adult membership of James Dale, who was a former Eagle Scout and assistant scoutmaster at the time of his ouster. The Boy Scouts claimed that their freedom of expressive association rights would be violated if forced to include Dale, who was a known homosexual and gay rights activist. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist found,
We are not, as we must not be, guided by our views of whether the Boy Scouts’ teachings with respect to homosexual conduct are right or wrong; public or judicial disapproval of a tenet of an organization’s expression does not justify the State’s effort to compel the organization to accept members where such acceptance would derogate from the organization’s expressive message.[46]
Rehnquist’s opinion read much more into the “expressive” association than was evidenced by the Boy Scouts’ mission, oath, and handbook. Indeed, none of the written records Rehnquist relied on explicitly mentioned how the values the organization purportedly espoused were directly challenged by the inclusion of Dale. This case has not been overturned, although the Boy Scouts themselves have, in recent years, opened their doors to gay men and lesbians.
If a heightened review of LGBTQ+ equal protection had been implemented in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), that might have influenced its outcome. In that case the Court was faced with the question of whether a Colorado baker’s religious freedom protected his right to not make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding (figure 5.6). The couple in this case brought a complaint to Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission, which found in their favor, citing the state’s antidiscrimination law. Justice Kennedy wrote for the court, “While it is unexceptional that Colorado law can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.”[47] However, this case was narrowly decided in that the Court’s ruling was not so much about religious freedom as it was about the obvious hostility toward the baker’s religious beliefs as expressed by the state’s civil rights commission. In this way the Court left open the door of whether religious freedom protections outweigh the right for LGBTQ+ people to live free from discrimination. As the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund amicus brief argued, allowing religious beliefs to serve as a basis for discrimination puts in jeopardy groups like African Americans who historically endured discrimination because of the religious beliefs held by some that whites were naturally superior to nonwhites.[48] Applying heightened scrutiny to laws and acts that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people might tip the balance of such cases in favor of equal protection over religious freedom in the future.
The previous cases look at issues related to the Constitution’s protection against sexuality discrimination. The Court decided in 2020 that legal protections extend to those who are gender nonconforming. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the Court held that gay and gender-nonconforming people are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, national origin, and religion.[49]
Indeed, the United States has a long history of discriminating against gender-nonconforming people. Several cities, including San Francisco and New York, had laws that criminalized those who wore clothing not deemed appropriate to their sex.[50] Today, discrimination against gender-nonconforming people is fairly common. New York allows individuals to change their gender on their driver’s licenses and other official documents, but few other states do. As is often discussed, the grouping of gender-nonconforming people under the LGBTQ+ umbrella has often meant specific gender-based issues are overshadowed by those that are sexuality based. Nevertheless, in the case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989), the Court determined that sex stereotyping was a form of prohibited sex discrimination, which might open the door for greater protections for those who are gender nonconforming. In that case, Ann Hopkins was denied partnership in an accounting firm because several of the review partners found that she was not feminine enough. The Court found that this was a form of sex stereotyping, which it defined as “a person’s nonconformity to social or other expectations of that person’s gender.”[51] In its conclusion the Court found that the sex-based actions would be permissible if the employer could prove that Hopkins would not have been promoted in any event, but it was unable to do so in the subsequent court hearings. Though this precedent provides some hope to those advocating on behalf of LGBTQ+ people, it remains to be seen whether the Court will go so far as to afford protections against workplace discrimination in a way that expands the current scope of its previous decisions and current federal laws.
Profile: Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Crimes in the United States: Histories and Debates
Ariella Rotramel
On June 12, 2016, forty-nine people were killed and fifty-three wounded in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. It was the deadliest single-person mass shooting and the largest documented anti-LGBTQ+ attack in U.S. history. Attacking a gay nightclub on Latin night resulted in over 90 percent of the victims being Latinx and the majority being LGBTQ+ identified. This act focused on an iconic public space that provided LGBTQ+ adults an opportunity to explore and claim their sexual and gender identities. The violence at Pulse echoed the 1973 UpStairs Lounge arson attack in New Orleans that killed thirty-two people. These mass killings are part of a broader picture of violence that LGBTQ+ people experience, from the disproportionate killings of transgender women of color to domestic violence and bullying in schools. There are different perspectives within the LGBTQ+ community about responses to hate-motivated violence. These debates concern whether the use of punitive measures through the criminal legal system supports or harms the LGBTQ+ community and whether more radical approaches are needed to address the root causes of anti-LGBTQ+ violence. This profile explores hate crimes as both a legal category and a broader social phenomenon.
What Are Hate Crimes?
Anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes have had a simultaneously spectacular and invisible role in U.S. society. Today, hate crimes are defined as criminal acts motivated by bias toward victims’ real or perceived identity groups.[52] Hate crimes are informal social control mechanisms used in stratified societies as part of what Barbara Perry calls a “contemporary arsenal of oppression” for policing identity boundaries.[53] Hate crimes occur within social dynamics of oppression, in which othered groups are vulnerable to systemic violence, pushing marginalized groups further into the political and social edges of society. It is theorized that hate crimes are driven by conflicts over cultural, political, and economic resources; bias and hostility toward relatively powerless groups; and the failure of authorities to address hate in society.[54]
Since the colonial period, violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community has been documented in the Western Hemisphere. Colonists drew on an interpretation of Judeo-Christian theology that viewed nonprocreative sex and gender nonconformity as sinful. Thus, violence toward people who did not conform to the colonists’ gender and sexual norms, along with social exclusion, was viewed as permissible.[55]
With the advent of sexual identities such as the “homosexual” in the late 1800s, anti-sodomy and related laws became increasingly used to target LGBTQ+ people in North America and Europe during the twentieth century. These same laws were also imposed on indigenous peoples throughout the world as a result of colonialism. Yet incidents such as the 1960s Compton’s Cafeteria riot and Stonewall rebellion demonstrated that LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans women of color, were no longer willing to tolerate police harassment that resulted in arrests and violence because of who they were (figure 5.7).[56] As the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement emerged, activists challenged the idea that they deserved to be targeted for violence because of their identities. Despite the long history of bias-based crimes, it took centuries for this to become understood and labeled as hate crimes.[57]
Prejudicial cultural norms perpetuate otherness, promoting prejudice and normalizing and rewarding hate, as well as punishing those who respect and embrace difference.[58] Cultures of hate identify marginalized groups as enemies through dehumanization and perpetuate group violence.[59] Perpetrators’ actions thus reflect an understanding and navigation of overarching social structures that separate the othered from the accepted. In the case of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, heterosexism is an oppressive ideology that rejects, degrades, and others “any non-heterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship or community.” It provides a complementary bias to cissexism, the oppressive ideology that denigrates transgender, gender nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender-nonconforming people.[60] Anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes are based in a view of the LGBTQ+ community as a suitable target for violence.[61] Such crimes are often identified as hate based by such factors as that “the perpetrator [was] making homophobic comments; that the incident had occurred in or near a gay-identified venue; that the victim had a ‘hunch’ that the incident was homophobic; that the victim was holding hands with their same-sex partner in public, or other contextual clues.”[62] Importantly, anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes intersect with hate crimes against gender, racial and ethnic, and other marginalized people.[63]
State-enacted or state-sanctioned violence against LGBTQ+ people has not been deemed a form of hate crime, though it draws on hatred toward a group of people. The hate-crime framework has focused largely on the acts of private individuals rather than addressing larger institutionalized forms of hate-motivated violence such as forced conversion therapy or abuse within the criminal and military systems. One estimate attributes almost one-quarter of hate crimes to police officers.[64] Anti-LGBTQ+ violence committed by police officers undermines LGBTQ+ victims’ willingness to report crimes, particularly after experiencing police violence firsthand or having communal knowledge that police officers may not view LGBTQ+ victims as deserving of appropriate services. Even when victims are willing to take the risk of reporting a hate crime, they can be unsuccessful. For example, despite a Minnesota state law requiring police to note in initial reports any victims’ belief that they have experienced a bias-motivated incident, responding officers fulfilled less than half of hate-crime filing requests between 1996 and 2000.[65] Because of bias, lack of training, and limited application, significant underreporting of sexual orientation and gender-motivated hate crimes at the state and federal levels occurs.
Criminalizing Hate
The Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, addressed rampant anti-Black violence and marked the first effort at the federal level to criminalize hate crimes.[66] However, the Supreme Court’s United States v. Harris decision in 1883 greatly weakened the act and the ability of the federal government to intervene when states refused to prosecute hate crimes.[67] In the wake of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement and violence against activists, the 1968 Civil Rights Law covering federally protected activities was signed into law. It gave federal authorities the power to investigate and prosecute crimes motivated by actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin while a victim was engaged in a federally protected activity—for example, voting, accessing a public accommodation such as a hotel or restaurant, or attending school. The categories of identity named by the law were the key social categories of concern during this period and followed the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, the law excluded sex, reflecting an unwillingness to address gender-based discrimination fully rather than piecemeal through laws such as Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972.
In 1978, California enacted the first state law enhancing penalties for murders based on prejudice against the protected statuses of race, religion, color, and national origin. State lawmakers took the lead in developing explicit hate-crime laws, and federal legislators followed suit in the mid-1980s.[68] The emergent LGBTQ+ movement gained traction in the 1980s as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, its toll on the community, and intolerance toward its victims galvanized activists. For example, New York’s Anti-Violence Project (AVP) was founded in 1980 to respond to violent attacks against gay men in the Chelsea neighborhood. A major concern for these groups was the lack of documentation of such crimes; without evidence that these incidents were part of a broader picture of violence, it was difficult to push efforts to address hate crimes. As a lead member of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, AVP has coordinated many hate-violence reports since the late 1990s.[69] Such groups also have pushed for governmental efforts to collect data and criminalize hate crimes.
In 1985, U.S. Representative John Conyers proposed the Hate Crime Statistics Act to ensure the federal collection and publishing annually of statistics on crimes motivated by racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice.[70] It took five years for the Hate Crimes Statistics Act to become law, in 1990, and it did so only after sexual orientation was explicitly excluded from the legislation. The text of the law emphasizes that nothing in the act (1) “creates a cause of action or a right to bring an action, including an action based on discrimination due to sexual orientation” and (2) “shall be construed, nor shall any funds appropriated to carry out the purpose of the Act be used, to promote or encourage homosexuality.”[71]
Congress took great pains to emphasize that the legislation did not prevent discrimination against LGBTQ+ people nor did it support that community. The law reinforces that Congress was not treating sexual orientation as it did other social identities that were already protected under civil rights laws. The law resulted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation collecting data from local and state authorities about hate crimes, but there are major challenges to collecting accurate data. Police are not consistently trained at the local and state levels to address anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, and there continues to be stigma and risk associated with identifying as LGBTQ+ to such authorities. Reporting practices thus vary dramatically across contexts, but the law has assisted antiviolence groups in gaining official data to document violence.
The 1998 beating and torture death of college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, became a rallying point to address hate crimes more fully in the late 1990s. His murder received substantial media coverage and inspired political action as well as artistic works. As an affluent, white, gay young man, Shepard became a symbol of antigay violence. His attackers were accused of attacking him because of antigay bias but were not charged with committing a hate crime because Wyoming had no laws that covered anti-LGBTQ+ crimes. The attention to his death contrasted with the lesser attention given to Brandon Teena’s sexual assault and murder, which was immortalized in the film Boys Don’t Cry (1999), and to the untold number of murders of trans women, particularly women of color.[72]
Although the particularities of the case have been debated, Shepard’s murder became iconic and served as a means of challenging U.S. lawmakers and society at large to address hate-motivated violence. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on October 8, 2009, and the U.S. Senate on October 22, 2009.[73] James Byrd Jr., a Black man, was attacked, chained to a truck, and dragged to his death for over two miles in Jasper, Texas. Both crimes received national attention, and there was public outrage that neither Texas nor Wyoming could enhance the punishment for these bias-motivated murders.[74] The act expanded protections to victims of bias crimes that were “motivated by the actual or perceived gender, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity of any person,” becoming the first federal criminal prosecution statute addressing sexual orientation and gender-identity-based hate crimes.[75] It also increased the punishment for hate-crime perpetrators and allows the Department of Justice to assist in investigations and prosecutions of these crimes. On October 28, 2009, in advance of signing the act into law, President Barack Obama stated, “We must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones, but to break spirits, not only to inflict harm, but to inflict fear.” His words emphasized the broader social context of hate crimes, experienced as attacks on marginalized communities.[76]
Federal laws address constitutional rights violations, but states have—or don’t have—their own specific hate-crime laws.[77] Today, there are a wide range of laws regarding hate-crime protections across states, and they vary regarding protected groups, criminal or civil approaches, crimes covered, complete or limited data collection, and law enforcement training.[78] As of 2019, nineteen states did not have any LGBT hate-crime laws, and twelve states had laws that covered sexual orientation but did not address gender identity and expression. Twenty states included both sexual orientation and gender identity in their hate-crime laws.[79] The majority of these laws were created in the first years of the 2000s, gender identity and expression were included in following years.
Debating Hate-Crime Laws
The arguments supporting hate-crime laws note that offenders’ acts promote the unequal treatment of not only individuals but also the broader communities that victims belong to, cause long-term psychological consequences for victims, and violate victims’ ability to freely express themselves.[80] The creation of laws serves to “form a consensus about the rights of stigmatized groups to be protected from hateful speech and physical violence.”[81] This approach, however, centers on the perpetrator perspective and avoids a structural approach to oppression that acknowledges the numerous forms of bias and the overarching perpetuation of bias in society. Many scholars have criticized the term hate crime for its erasure of the broader structures that support hate violence and instead placing the blame for such acts solely on individuals assumed to be pathological and acting out of emotion.[82] Moreover, hate-crime laws primarily function at the symbolic level; crimes are reported at low rates, and statutes are not applied to such crimes by authorities.[83] Such laws focus not on prevention of crimes but rather on punitive measures to punish particular crimes.
With the existing high incarceration rates of LGBTQ+ people as well as people of color, hate-crime laws support rather than challenge mass incarceration.[84] Some activists argue for efforts to “build community relationships and infrastructure to support the healing and transformation of people who have been impacted by interpersonal and intergenerational violence; [and efforts to] join with movements addressing root causes of queer and trans premature death, including police violence, imprisonment, poverty, immigration policies, and lack of healthcare and housing.”[85]
No universal consensus about the role of hate-crime laws in furthering the acceptance and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in American society currently exists (figure 5.8). For many people such laws carry with them an emphasis on the value of their lives and help further their sense of belonging. Others, particularly LGBTQ+ activists engaged in broader social justice struggles, argue that such laws shore up a broken criminal justice system that is predicated on a violent logic that cannot truly benefit the LGBTQ+ community.
Key Questions
• Historically, the U.S. Constitution protected the rights of only certain groups of people. Why and how were married women, enslaved Africans, and sexual minorities deprived of rights that others enjoyed? How did LGBTQ+ people struggle to gain those rights?
• What is an example of a legal victory in the struggle for LGBTQ+ equality that was later challenged? What historical and cultural events led to overcoming that challenge?
• What was the basis for the expectation that the U.S. Constitution protected a right to sexual liberty, particularly with respect to same-sex sexualities? What role did the Ninth Amendment play in that process and in the idea of a fundamental right to privacy?
• How was the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick a setback for LGBTQ+ equality before the law? What was the response of LGBTQ+ activists and academics to the decision? What Supreme Court decision overturned Bowers?
• How does legal history contribute to our understanding of the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States? What role did marriage equality play in that struggle, and what advances and setbacks did activists encounter during that struggle?
Research Resources
Compiled by Rachel Wexelbaum
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about LGBTQ+ legal history.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then, locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or editing a photograph in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: Find a partner or split into groups, and choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the resources in this chapter to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
Anti-Violence Project
The Anti-Violence Project of New York City (https://avp.org/) works to end violence against LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected communities. It offers free counseling, performs advocacy and community organizing, and provides legal support and education. Visit its Twitter profile, https://twitter.com/antiviolence.
“Gay and Lesbian Immigrants,” by Robert B. Ridinger
This overview of the laws that have regulated LGBTQ+ immigration to the United States also provides a reading list (https://immigrationequality.org ).
“Gay Marriage Timeline: History of the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” by ProCon.org
Designed for students writing persuasive essays and issue papers, ProCon.org provides an extensive timeline of events related to same-sex marriage legislation around the world cited from news articles and other resources. See https://gaymarriage.procon.org/gay-marriage-timeline/.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resources in Law and Public Policy, by Stephanie Anayah
This extensive, frequently updated subject guide lists the many types of media, digital and physical, from the Williams Institute Reading Room. Resources include domestic and international laws and public policies affecting LGBTQ+ individuals and communities. The guide has links to libraries, archives, and organizations that can provide more information on these topics. See the table of contents at https://libguides.law.ucla.edu/williamsreadingroom.
National Center for Transgender Equality
Founded in 2003 by trans activists, the National Center for Transgender Equality advocates for policy change to advance transgender equality. Its website (https://transequality.org/) includes information about transgender people and issues they face, a resource that explains transgender people’s rights, and a series of self-help guides. It has several “action centers” where you can join the battle for transgender rights.
“Trans Rights and Bathroom Access Laws,” by Jey Ehrenhalt
This resource, written in 2018, outlines the rise and fall of “bathroom bills” in K–12 schools and other public spaces in different states from 2016 to 2018. It also explains why bathrooms matter to trans people, and it provides links to other resources for trans and LGBQ+ students. See https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/transgender-bathroom-laws-history.
“A Very Brief History of LGBTQ Parenting,” by Dana Rudolph
A historical narrative of LGBTQ+ parenting in the United States from World War II to 2017, complete with links to news articles about laws and court cases. See https://www.familyequality.org/2017/10/20/a-very-brief-history-of-lgbtq-parenting/.
Deep Dive: Books and Articles
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith
This was the first book to address the legal challenges of incarcerated transgender and genderqueer people in the prison-industrial complex. Its second edition contains a foreword by CeCe McDonald and an essay by Chelsea Manning (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015).
Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, edited by John D’Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid
Documenting the history and impact of the gay and lesbian movement since Stonewall, this volume is edited by two pioneers in LGBT studies (D’Emilio and Turner) and a pioneer in LGBT public policy and activism (Vaid) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
Evolution of Government Policy towards Homosexuality in the US Military: The Rise and Fall of DADT, edited by David A. Levy and James E. Parco
Originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, this book reviews the history, culture, attitudes, and impacts of policy evolution from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century by tracing the rise and fall of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) (New York: Routledge, 2014).
From the Closet to the Courtroom: Five LGBT Rights Lawsuits That Have Changed Our Nation, by Carlos A. Ball and Michael Bronski
Carlos A. Ball, a national LGBTQ+ rights expert, and Michael Bronski, an award-winning LGBTQ+ studies Harvard professor, provide a play-by-play account of the five pivotal LGBTQ+ rights lawsuits that overturned sodomy laws, legalized same-sex marriage, allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, and challenged harassment in educational environments and discrimination on the athletic field. Each case is explored in its sociohistorical context and the implications of each court decision discussed. It is the fourth book in the Queer Ideas/Queer Actions series (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2010).
HIV Criminalization in the United States: A Sourcebook on State and Federal HIV Criminal Law and Practice, from the Center for HIV Law and Policy
This sourcebook outlines punitive laws, policies, and cases affecting those living with HIV and other infectious diseases in U.S. states, the military, federal prisons, and U.S. territories. Frequently updated, the most recent version is at https://www.hivlawandpolicy.org/sourcebook.
“Homosexuals and the Death Penalty in Colonial America,” by Louis Crompton
This 1976 article from the Journal of Homosexuality (volume 1, number 3; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/60/) is the first documentation of “sodomites” in colonial America and the laws based on Catholic and Protestant teachings to mark and punish them. The references and appendix will prove valuable to history and law students.
Judging the Epidemic: A Judicial Handbook on HIV, Human Rights and the Law, from Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
This 2013 handbook covers the science and medicine of HIV; legal decisions that promote human rights in the context of HIV; criminal law and HIV disclosure, exposure, or transmission; sexual assault; drug laws and harm reduction and the rights of people who use drugs; women’s rights with respect to family and property law; HIV treatment and health care; human rights; and the criminalization of high-risk populations. It includes multiple international court cases and primary source documents (https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/201305_Judging-epidemic_en_0.pdf.
The Legal Status of Intersex Persons, edited by Jens M. Scherpe, Anatol Dutta, and Tobias Helms
This comprehensive interdisciplinary volume covers all legal aspects of intersex people. Contributions include medical, psychological, and theological perspectives and national legal perspectives from Australia, Sweden, India, the Netherlands, France, Colombia, the United States, Malta, and Germany (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2018).
Protection of Sexual Minorities since Stonewall: Progress and Stalemate in Developed and Developing Countries, edited by Phil C. W. Chan
Previously published as a special double issue of The International Journal of Human Rights, this book examines the legal successes and challenges in countries on five continents concerning LGBTQ+ civil rights locally and internationally (New York: Routledge, 2010).
Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock
Winner of the 2011 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the authors discuss the criminal legal system from a queer perspective, in which LGBTQ+ people are “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and victims. The essays in this book argue that the policing of sexual orientation and gender reinforces racial and gender inequalities, as well as LGBTQ+ criminal stereotypes. The book is one of the Queer Ideas/Queer Action series. For an interview with the authors about the book, a free chapter, and additional LGBTQ+ criminal justice resources, visit https://clags.org/articles/uncovering-queer-injustice/ (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012).
Queer Mobilizations: LGBT Activists Confront the Law, edited by Scott Barclay, Mary Bernstein, and Anna-Maria Marshall
Essays depict the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement and its impact on politics and organizing, legal studies, and public policy (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, by Margot Canaday
The award-winning Princeton University history professor Margot Canaday uses materials from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration to show the progression of federal enforcement of sexual norms in immigration, the military, and welfare in the twentieth century that has rendered LGBTQ+ individuals as second-class citizens to this day (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Transgender Employment Experiences: Gendered Perceptions and the Law, by Kyla Bender-Baird
Worker protections under the federal Civil Rights Act do not always apply for transgender people. From Bender-Baird’s interviews of twenty transgender people and analysis of legal case studies of employment discrimination, she recommends federal protections for gender expression in all policy decisions and legislative efforts and a multistep approach for tackling gender-based workplace discrimination for transgender employees. Students in management and human resource management, LGBTQ+ studies, and gender and women’s studies will find this book useful (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
Transgender Rights, edited by Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter
Three decades of the transgender rights movement is captured in this compact but well-researched volume. Legal scholars, policy experts, transgender activists and advocates analyze and evaluate the successes, challenges, and opportunities for future mobilization and legal battles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Glossary
Anti-Violence Project (AVP). A national organization dedicated to reducing violence and its impacts on LGBTQ+ individuals in the United States.
assimilationist. A political approach that focuses on fixing the system from within, trying hard to fit into the status quo; integrating.
Bill of Rights. The first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution containing specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights, clear limitations on the government’s power in judicial and other proceedings, and explicit declarations that all powers not specifically granted to the U.S. Congress by the Constitution are reserved for the states or the people.
chattel. Property that is movable; in terms of slavery, people are treated as the personal property of the person who claims to own them and are bought and sold as commodities.
Compton’s Cafeteria riot. The Compton’s Cafeteria riot occurred in August 1966 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The incident was one of the first riots concerning LGBTQ+ people in U.S. history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall rebellion in New York City. It marked the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco.
coverture. A legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman’s legal rights and obligations are subsumed by those of her husband.
Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. A U.S. federal law passed by the 104th Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, defining marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman. The law allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted under the laws of other states. However, the provisions were ruled unconstitutional or left effectively unenforceable by Supreme Court decisions in the cases of United States v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
Enforcement Act of 1871. An act of the U.S. Congress that empowered the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations. Also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.
federally protected activities. The portion of Section 245 of Title 18 that makes it unlawful to willfully injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person, or to attempt to do so, by force or threat of force, because of that other person’s race, color, religion, or national origin and because of their activity as a student at a public school or college, participant in a state or local government program, job applicant, juror, traveler, or patron of a public place.
Fourteenth Amendment. Adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments, this amendment to the U.S. Constitution addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws and is one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution.
Ninth Amendment. A part of the Bill of Rights, this amendment addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.
Stonewall rebellion. A series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the LGBT community against a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.
United States v. Harris. In this case, also known as the Ku Klux Case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to penalize crimes such as assault and murder. It declared that the local governments have the power to penalize these crimes.
1. C. Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
2. C. Mackinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
3. U.S. Const. amends. I, V, and VI.
4. P. Abramson, S. D. Pinkerton, and M. Huppin, Sexual Rights in America: The Ninth Amendment and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 2.
5. The Law Dictionary, s.v. “What Is Chattel,” accessed March 14, 2022, https://thelawdictionary.org/chattel/.
6. The Law Dictionary, s.v. “What Is Coverture,” accessed March 14, 2022, https://thelawdictionary.org/coverture/.
7. Abramson, Pinkerton, and Huppin, Sexual Rights in America.
8. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
9. Griswold, 381 U.S. at 492.
10. U.S. Const. amend. XVI.
11. Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873).
12. Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937).
13. Palko, 302 U.S. at 325.
14. Griswold, 381 U.S. at 484, 486.
15. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
16. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
17. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
18. W. N. Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861–2003 (New York: Penguin, 2008), 232–234.
19. Bowers 478 U.S. at 192 (quoting) Palko 302 U.S. at 326.
20. Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896); Bowers, 478 U.S. at 192 (quoting) Griswold, 381 U.S. at 506.
21. S. McGuigan, “The AIDS Dilemma: Public Health v. Criminal Law,” Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 4, no. 3 (1986): 545–577.
22. Several have advocated for the case being known as Lawrence and Garner v. Texas because Tyrone Garner was a copetitioner on the case and a man of color, and not including his name continues the practice of erasing people of color from history. M. Spindelman, “Tyrone Garner’s Lawrence v. Texas,” Michigan Law Review 111, no. 6 (2013), https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=mlr.
23. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
24. Lawrence, 539 U.S. 564.
25. Lawrence, 539 U.S. 567.
26. Lawrence, 539 U.S. 575.
27. D. Bell, J. Binnie, R. Holiday, R. Longhurst, and R. Peace, Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). See also “Getting Rid of Sodomy Laws: History and Strategy That Led to the Lawrence Decision,” ACLU, accessed April 21, 2021, https://www.aclu.org/other/getting-rid-sodomy-laws-history-and-strategy-led-lawrence-decision.
28. J. E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
29. Lawrence, 539 U.S. 601.
30. J. D’Emilio, “Will the Courts Set Us Free? Reflections on the Campaign for Same-Sex Marriage,” in The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, ed. C. Wilcox and C. A. Rimmerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 39–64.
31. Baehr v. Miike 910 P.2d 112 (1996); Baehr v. Lewin 74 Haw. 530, 852 P.2d 44 (1993).
32. Defense of Marriage Act, H.R. 3396, 104th Cong. (1996), § 3.
33. United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013); W. N. Eskridge, “How Government Unintentionally Influences Culture (the Case of Same-Sex Marriage),” Northwestern University Law Review 102 (2008): 495–498.
34. P. Ettelbrick, “Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?,” Out/Look: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly 6 (1989): 14.
35. L. Duggan, “Beyond Marriage: Democracy, Equality, and Kinship for a New Century,” Scholar and Feminist Online 10, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2011–Spring 2012), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/beyond-marriage-democracy-equality-and-kinship-for-a-new-century/.
36. Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 at 646 (quoting) U.S. v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 at 759.
37. Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 659.
38. Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 672.
39. Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 681.
40. L. H. Tribe, “Equal Dignity: Speaking Its Name,” Harvard Law Review Forum 129 (2015): 16–32.
41. E. J. Baia, “Akin to Madmen: A Queer Critique of the Gay Rights Cases,” Virginia Law Review 104 (2018): 1021–1063.
42. Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996).
43. Romer, 517 U.S. at 631–632.
44. Romer, 517 U.S. at 635.
45. J. B. Smith, “The Flaws of Rational Basis with Bite: Why the Supreme Court Should Acknowledge Its Application of Heightened Scrutiny to Classifications Based on Sexual Orientation,” Fordham Law Review 73 (2005): 2769–2814.
46. Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640, 661 (2000).
47. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. 2 (2018).
48. S. Ifill, “Symposium: The First Amendment Protects Speech and Religion, Not Discrimination in Public Spaces,” SCOTUSblog, June 5, 2018, https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/symposium-the-first-amendment-protects-speech-and-religion-not-discrimination-in-public-spaces/.
49. Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, No. 17-1618 (2020).
50. Sears, Arresting Dress
51. Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228, 251 (1989).
52. R. Blazak, “Isn’t Every Crime a Hate Crime? The Case for Hate Crime Laws,” Sociology Compass 5, no. 4 (2011): 245.
53. B. Perry, “The Sociology of Hate: Theoretical Approaches,” Hate Crimes, vol. 1, Understanding and Defining Hate Crime, ed. B. Perry et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009), 56.
54. C. Turpin-Petrosino, “Historical Lessons: What’s Past May Be Prologue,” in Hate Crimes, vol. 2, ed. B. Perry et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009), 34.
55. See chapter 3.
56. S. Levin, “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot: A Historic Act of Trans Resistance, Three Years before Stonewall,” Guardian, June 21, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/21/stonewall-san-francisco-riot-tenderloin-neighborhood-trans-women; Meredith Worthen, “The Stonewall Inn: The People, Place and Lasting Significance of ‘Where Pride Began,’” in Biography, June 21, 2017; updated June 26, 2020, https://www.biography.com/news/stonewall-riots-history-leaders.
57. Turpin-Petrosino, “Historical Lessons.”
58. J. Levin and G. Rabrenovic, “Hate as Cultural Justification for Violence,” in Perry et al., Hate Crimes, 1:41–53; B. Perry, “Where Do We Go from Here? Researching Hate Crime,” Internet Journal of Criminology 3 (2003): 45–47.
59. Levin and Rabrenovic, “Hate as Cultural Justification for Violence”; Perry, “The Sociology of Hate.”
60. G. M. Herek, “The Social Context of Hate Crimes: Notes on Cultural Heterosexism,” in Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence against Lesbians and Gay Men, ed. Gregory M. Herek and Kevin T. Berrill (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1992), 89.
61. Perry, “The Sociology of Hate”; H. J. Alden and K. F. Parker, “Gender Role Ideology, Homophobia and Hate Crime: Linking Attitudes to Macro-Level Anti-gay and Lesbian Hate Crimes,” Deviant Behavior 26 (2005): 321–343; D. P. Green, L. H. McFalls, and J. K. Smith, “Hate Crime: An Emergent Research Agenda,” Annual Review of Sociology 27, no. 1 (2001): 479–504; Herek, “The Social Context of Hate Crimes.”
62. N. Chakraborti and J. Garland, Hate Crime: Impact, Causes and Responses (London: Sage, 2009), 57–58.
63. E. Dunbar, “Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in Hate Crime Victimization: Identity Politics or Identity Risk?,” Violence and Victims 21, no. 3 (2006): 323–327.
64. K. T. Berrill, “Anti-gay Violence and Victimization in the United States: An Overview,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 5, no. 3 (1990): 274–294.
65. K. B. Wolff and C. L. Cokely, “‘To Protect and to Serve?’: An Exploration of Police Conduct in Relation to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community,” Sexuality and Culture 11, no. 2 (2007): 15.
66. J. Lurie and S. P. Chase, The Chase Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 140.
67. United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883).
68. V. Jenness and R. Grattet, Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).
69. “Reports: Hate Violence Reports,” Anti-Violence Project, accessed December 29, 2021, https://avp.org/reports/.
70. Perry, “Where Do We Go from Here?”; Hate Crimes Statistics Act:Hearing before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary, 99th Cong., 1st sess. (1985), https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2013/09/06/hear-137-1985.pdf.
71. Hate Crime Statistics Act, H.R.1048, 101st Cong. (1989–1990), https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/house-bill/1048/text.
72. For an incomplete list of such murders, see Wikipedia, s.v. “List of People Killed for Being Transgender,” last modified April 18, 2021, 07:00, https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_transgender_people.
73. A. L. Bessel, “Preventing Hate Crimes Without Restricting Constitutionally Protected Speech: Evaluating the Impact of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act on First Amendment Free Speech Rights,” Journal of Public Law and Policy 31 (2010): 735–775.
74. B. A. McPhail, “Hating Hate: Policy Implications of Hate Crime Legislation,” Social Service Review 74, no. 4 (2000): 635–653.
75. Department of Justice, “The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009,” updated October 18, 2018, http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/matthewshepard.php.
76. Office of the Press Secretary, White House, “Remarks by the President at Reception Commemorating the Enactment of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act,” press release, October 28, 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-reception-commemorating-enactment-matthew-shepard-and-james-byrd-.
77. J. Levin and J. McDevitt, Hate Crimes Revisited: American’s War against Those Who Are Different (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).
78. M. Shively, Study of Literature and Legislation on Hate Crime in America (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 2005), ii, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/210300.pdf.
79. Movement Advancement Project, “Equality Maps: Hate Crime Laws,” accessed April 22, 2021, https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/hate_crime_laws.
80. R. J. Cramer, A. Kehn, C. R. Pennington, H. J. Wechsler, J. W. Clark III, and J. Nagle, “An Examination of Sexual Orientation- and Transgender-Based Hate Crimes in the Post-Matthew Shepard Era,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 19, no. 3 (2013): 355–368; Bessel, “Preventing Hate Crimes”; J. Glaser, “Intergroup Bias and Inequity: Legitimizing Beliefs and Policy Attitudes,” Social Justice Research 18 (2005): 257–282; M. Sullaway, “Psychological Perspectives on Hate Crime Laws,” Psychology, Public Policy, and the Law 10 (2004): 250–292.
81. J. Spade and C. Willse, “Confronting the Limits of Gay Hate Crimes Activism: A Radical Critique,” Chicano-Latino Law Review 21 (2000): 41.
82. L. Ray and D. Smith, “Racist Offenders and the Politics of ‘Hate Crime,’” Law and Critique 12 (2001): 203–221; G. Mason, “Body Maps: Envisaging Homophobia, Violence and Safety,” Social and Legal Studies 10, no. 1 (2001): 23–44; Perry, “Where Do We Go from Here?”; F. M. Lawrence, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes under American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
83. McPhail, “Hating Hate,” 637, 645.
84. I. Meyer, A. Flores, L. Stemple, A. Romero, B. Wilson, and J. Herman, “Incarceration Rates and Traits of Sexual Minorities in the United States: National Inmate Survey, 2011–2012,” American Journal of Public Health 107, no. 2 (2017): 267–273; Center for American Progress and Movement Advancement Project, “Unjust: How the Broken Criminal Justice System Fails LGBT People of Color,” https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/lgbt-criminal-justice-poc.pdf.
85. M. Bassichis, A. Lee, and D. Spade, “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got,” in Captive Gender: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. E. Stanley and N. Smith (Baltimore: AK Press, 2011), 17. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/03%3A_U.S._Histories/3.02%3A_Chapter_5-_LGBTQ_Legal_History.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Describe the connections between identities and embodied experiences.
• Analyze how key social institutions shape, define, and enforce structures of inequality.
• Describe how people struggle for social justice within historical contexts of inequality.
• Explain how different understandings of sexuality and gender affect self- and community-understanding of LGBTQ+ people.
Introduction
In the decades since the 1969 Stonewall rebellion provided a symbolic turning point in the critical and community consciousness of LGBTQ+ people, a great many things have changed: a number of states have passed antidiscrimination and hate-crime legislation, openly LGBTQ+ people have been elected to public office, and marriage equality has become law in the United States and in many countries around the world. Representations of LGBTQ+ people have expanded because of community organizing, including activism in response to the AIDS epidemic, increasing popular interest in LGBTQ+ lives, the proliferation and widespread use of the internet and social media, and the emergence of an LGBTQ+ consumer market. National rights organizations focused on LGBTQ+ lives have become more visible and have piqued the interest of social scientists and educators.
However, these years have also witnessed ongoing anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice, discrimination, and violence. According to findings from the survey “Discrimination in America: Experiences and Views of LGBTQ Americans,” a majority of LGBTQ+ people have at some point been the target of homophobic slurs and negative comments about their sexuality and gender identity, and most have been threatened or harassed or have experienced violence at some point because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.[1] This chapter is an overview of the prevalence and trends of anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice in the United States and the attempts to define and measure it. The chapter describes what is known about the nature, origins, and consequences of this prejudice and reviews the variables that have been found to increase or reduce its impact on the lives of LGBTQ+ people. The chapter discusses the resistance and resilience shown by the LGBTQ+ community in response to anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice and discrimination.
Prejudice and Discrimination
In his book The Nature of Prejudice (1954), the psychologist Gordon Allport describes prejudice as “antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group.”[2] Put simply, prejudice is felt when someone holds a negative view of a person without having any reason or experience that justifies that negative view. Discrimination occurs when someone acts on prejudice by harming or disadvantaging a person or group or when someone favors their own group at the expense of the other group.[3] Prejudice toward LGBTQ+ people has been found to result in discrimination, including anti-LGBTQ+ violence, bullying and harassment in schools, employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and limited access to health care and other social goods.
Violence against LGBTQ+ People
In 1998, Gwendolyn Ann Smith (figure 6.1) established November 20 as Trans Day of Remembrance as a time to speak the names of all the transgender individuals who were killed in antitrans violence over the previous year. In 2016, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 1,036 incidents of LGBTQ+ hate violence were reported by survivors. Of those targeted by this violence, 47 percent identified as gay, 17 percent as lesbian, 14 percent as heterosexual, 8 percent as queer, and 8 percent as bisexual. Over half those targeted in these incidents identified as transgender, and 61 percent identified as a person of color. That same year, 77 hate-violence-related homicides against LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected people were reported. Of these homicides, 49 occurred during the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. Even without considering the Pulse shootings, 2016 saw a 17 percent increase in anti-LGBTQ+ homicides from 2015. Of these homicides, 79 percent of the victims were people of color, and 68 percent were transgender or gender nonconforming.[4]
This violence isn’t isolated to a particular part of the county. The Anti-Defamation League has tracked the incidence of hate crimes across the country and provides an interactive map showing hate crimes involving both sexual orientation and gender identity. A quick glance at the map shows hate crimes against LGBTQ+ folks happen everywhere, in all fifty states.[5] Unfortunately, these statistics are likely an underrepresentation of the crimes that actually occur. Many victims of hate crimes are hesitant to come forward—because of fear of retaliation if they do; fear of being outed to family, friends, and coworkers; or the belief that coming forward won’t result in positive change.[6]
Bullying, Teasing, and Harassment
Anti-LGBT prejudice also affects LGBTQ+ youth in schools and online. The harassment, bullying, and victimization they experience contributes to lower self-esteem, poorer academic performance, and increased truancy among LGBTQ+ youth. In addition, it leads to feeling less connected to school and having lower achievement goals, and it correlates with higher levels of depression, more suicidal thoughts and attempts, increased substance use, and more sexual risk-taking.[7]
Some states have passed laws to protect LGBTQ+ students from this harassment, bullying, and violence in their schools. One example is New York State’s Dignity for All Students Act of 2012. The goal was to provide students with school environments that are free from discrimination and harassment based on gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity.[8] The legislation provides guidelines for students, teachers, and schools, and it institutes a zero-tolerance policy regarding bullying in schools (see chapter 9). Unfortunately, many schools have failed to implement key components of the act, lack staff with adequate knowledge about its requirements, or have failed to adequately track and report incidents of harassment and bullying that fall within the guidelines.[9]
Another resource for LGBTQ+ youth is the It Gets Better Project, founded in 2010 by Dan Savage (figure 6.2) and his partner, Terry Miller. This nonprofit organization attempts to “uplift, empower, and connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer . . . youth around the globe” by educating about the negative effects of bullying and harassment and working to build self-esteem for LGBTQ+ youth.[10]
Employment Discrimination
Anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice can also lead to employment discrimination. According to the “Discrimination in America” survey of LGBTQ+ Americans, 20 percent of respondents reported experiencing employment discrimination when applying for a job and in terms of compensation and promotions.[11] These results are even worse for LGBTQ+ people of color. Starting in the 1980s and continuing into the twenty-first century, some states passed employment nondiscrimination laws that offered some protections for LGBTQ+ people, although many of these laws applied only to sexual orientation, leaving out protections for gender expression and identity.
Legislative efforts at the federal level to provide protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression were largely unsuccessful. The Employment Non-discrimination Act, a bill that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from employment discrimination, was introduced in Congress every year from 1994 to 2013. The bill came close to passing on at least one occasion, but the inclusion of transgender rights created divisions among both supporters and opponents. Moreover, as support for the bill increased, so too did the claims that these protections would violate the religious freedom of those who see homosexuality as a sin, resulting in the addition of religious-exemption language in versions of the bill. These exemptions concern many longtime advocates for LGBTQ+ rights, who argue that they effectively allow religious organizations to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals. Some groups, like Lambda Legal, have even pulled their support for the legislation for this reason.
From 2015 on, LGBTQ+ rights advocates moved to support the Equality Act, a bill with a range of broader protections than the proposed Employment Non-discrimination Act, including protections related to gender identity. The Equality Act would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity not only in employment but also in housing, public accommodations, public education, federal funding, credit, and jury service. However, this bill was referred to committee and never passed.
In the absence of federal legislation, LGBTQ+ activists continued to press for justice through the courts. In June of 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which determined that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity was a form of sex discrimination and was a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[12] The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment based on sex, race, color, national origin, and religion. According to the legal advocacy group Lambda Legal, this ruling “swept away all the contrary precedent and protected all LGBT workers nationwide.”[13] It remains to be seen whether this decision will survive scrutiny of future, possibly more conservative, courts.
Access to Health Care
Prejudice can also have a negative impact on the quality of and access to health care for LGBTQ+ people. This can happen in several ways. The first way relates to access to employment, because a frequent benefit of employment is access to health insurance. Some states have passed laws that protect LGBTQ+ people from health insurance discrimination, which can result in denial of certain services or coverage altogether. According to the Movement Advancement Project, as of 2021 sixteen states offer protections for both sexual orientation and gender identity; twenty-four states prohibit transgender exclusions in health insurance coverage; six states offer health insurance protections for only gender identity, and twenty-eight states offer no protections for LGBTQ+ health insurance.[14]
Explore
The Movement Advancement Project has a map of laws and policies related to LGBTQ+ equality (https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/healthcare_laws_and_policies). Choose a state or territory, yours or another you are familiar with or interested in. Review first the state’s equality profile, including the quick facts about the state’s LGBTQ+ population, and then the range of issues identified on the website and the corresponding laws.
• What key issues lack supportive policies and laws or have negative laws?
• What key issues are covered by supportive policies and laws in this state?
• Are any local laws relevant to these issues?
• How does this state compare with the country as a whole or to other states?
• Have you had a personal experience in relation to one of these issues or laws?
Beyond access to health care, prejudice can also affect the quality of health care a person receives. For example, in a 2017 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, 8 percent of gay, lesbian, and bisexual respondents reported being denied service by a doctor or health care provider; 7 percent reported that doctors had refused to recognize their family, such as a child or same-sex partner; 9 percent reported that providers had used abusive language; and 7 percent experienced unwanted physical contact by a doctor or health care provider. A significantly larger percentage of transgender respondents reported being denied service (29 percent), had doctors refuse to provide care related to gender transition (12 percent), were intentionally misgendered by a doctor (23 percent), experienced abusive language (21 percent), or had unwanted physical contact (29 percent).[15]
Efforts to reform the views and practices of the psychological and medical communities have a long history and are an ongoing project (see chapters 4 and 7). For example, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses documented in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973, and the American Psychological Association has taken a affirmative stance toward LGBTQ+ people since 1975. Additionally, the American Academy of Pediatricians published a statement in 2013 saying that LGB adolescents need health care that is “teen-friendly and welcoming to sexual minority youth.”[16] Nevertheless some mental and physical health practitioners still believe that homosexuality is a disorder, as do some members of the general public.[17]
Public Opinion Polls
According to U.S. public opinion polls from the last few decades, attitudes toward gay men and lesbians have become progressively more favorable. Although attitudes toward transgender individuals have not been surveyed for the same amount of time, results from the 2017 Global Attitudes toward Transgender People survey suggest that a majority of Americans hold positive opinions toward transgender people. Questions that reflect egalitarianism tend to reveal more dramatic pro-LGBTQ+ shifts and suggest that the majority of U.S. residents see gay men and lesbians as deserving of equal and fair (egalitarian) treatment and are generally opposed to discrimination in employment, education, and housing. For example, in 1976, when Gallup asked respondents how they felt about protecting “homosexuals” against employment discrimination in general, only a small majority (56 percent) supported protections, but when they asked again in 2008, the percentage supporting protections increased to 89 percent. Similarly, when Gallup asked respondents in 1979 if they thought homosexual relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal, only 43 percent said they should be legal. When a similar question was asked in 2018, 75 percent said yes, these relations should be legal, and only 23 percent said no. And when asked in 1973 if “it was wrong for same-sex adults to have sexual relationships,” 70 percent said it was always wrong. However, in 2018 that number dropped to 31 percent.[18]
Although the overall pro-LGBTQ+ direction of these public opinion polls since the 1970s is undeniable, they should still be viewed with some caution. Public opinion is not entirely stable from year to year, shifting in an affirming direction for one or two years, then falling back, reflecting shifts in the cultural and political landscapes. In addition, the variety of factors that shape public opinion can result in inconsistent or ambivalent viewpoints. Although egalitarianism continues to have a favorable influence on heterosexuals’ overall evaluations of LGBTQ+ people, many anti-LGBTQ+ values, negative stereotypes, and ego-defensive reactions continue to exert a negative influence. For example, participants’ responses to questions about their comfort in “employing homosexuals” can vary significantly depending on whether the question focuses on the fair treatment of LGBTQ+ people or the moral acceptance of homosexuality.[19] Similarly, attitudes can vary on the basis of the job’s potential for influencing beliefs and the social values of others (e.g., clergy are defenders of morality, elementary school teachers shape the development of children, and service members may symbolize U.S. strength). Finally, the duties associated with the job may trigger antigay stereotypes (e.g., the belief that gay men are all pedophiles and therefore shouldn’t be around children).
Visit
Gallup shows historical support of LGBTQ+ rights in public opinion polls over the course of time; see https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx.
• The first graph depicts the historical trend for answers to a question about same-sex marriage. What does it tell us about public opinion in the U.S. over the years?
• Two different questions focus on whether lesbian and gay sexual relations should be legal, and whether lesbian and gay sexual relations are morally acceptable or morally wrong. Compare the two charts; why might the results be different?
• Did anything in answers to the poll over the years surprise you? What was the topic, and why were you surprised?
Measuring Anti-LGBTQ+ Prejudice
Homophobia
The clinical psychologist George Weinberg is credited with coining the term homophobia.[20] He defined homophobia as the “dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals” and suggested that it was a consequence of several factors, including religion, fear of being homosexual, repressed envy of the freedom from tradition that gay people seem to have, a threat to values, and fear of death.[21] According to Weinberg, some heterosexuals seek symbolic immortality through their children. Their belief that gay people don’t want or can’t have children, and are thereby rejecting this route to immortality, leads to existential anxiety or fear of death. In his highly influential book Society and the Healthy Homosexual (published in 1972), as well as in later interviews, he acknowledged the influence of the gay liberation movement on his thinking.[22] Essays that eventually became chapters of Society and the Healthy Homosexual were published in Gay, a gay liberationist magazine edited by the gay liberation pioneers Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke. Positioning himself solidly within gay liberationist philosophy, Weinberg suggested that he “would never consider a patient healthy unless he had overcome his prejudice of homosexuality.”[23] The psychoanalyst Wainwright Churchill was also influential to scholarly thinking about sexual prejudice at the time. In his book Homosexual Behavior among Males (1967), he describes “homoerotophobia,” a concept similar to homophobia, as the psychological consequence of living in an “erotophobic” society, or one that is afraid of the erotic.[24]
After Weinberg introduced a word for homophobia, research into the study of attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people expanded considerably. Kenneth Smith conducted the first-ever study attempting to measure heterosexuals’ attitudes toward gay men. His work questioned the nature of the homophobic individual. Smith’s homophobia scale, or H scale, was an attempt to measure heterosexuals’ “negative or fearful responding to homosexuality.” Smith found that homophobic people were more “status conscious, authoritarian, and sexually rigid” than nonhomophobic people and concluded that homophobic people may not see homosexuals as belonging to a legitimate minority group that is deserving of rights.[25] Most of the items in the H scale were ego-defensive in nature, assessing participants’ levels of discomfort with being near a homosexual. Items like “It would be upsetting for me to find out I was alone with a homosexual,” “I find the thought of homosexual acts disgusting,” and “If a homosexual sat next to me on a bus I would get nervous” all imply an aversive and affective response possibly due to repressed fear.[26]
Heterosexism and Heteronormativity
According to the lesbian feminist writer and theorist Adrienne Rich (figure 6.3), compulsory heterosexuality—the assumption that everyone is heterosexual and that heterosexuality is natural for men and women—is maintained and reinforced by the patriarchy.[27] This social and political system of male dominance is reinforced by heterosexism, which Gregory Herek describes as “an ideological system that denies and stigmatizes any non-heterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship, or community.”[28] What results is heteronormativity, an attitude and practice that centers the world around heterosexuality, privileging only that which conforms to the norms, practices, and institutions of heterosexuality.[29] Queer theory expands on the implications of heteronormativity. Combined, heterosexism and heteronormativity shape the world in which LGBTQ+ people live, creating an everyday environment where they are ignored, invalidated, and sometimes punished for not living up to the standards of heterosexuality.
Many of the traditional milestones of everyday life are influenced by heterosexism and heteronormativity. Think about gender roles and their corresponding attitudes and behaviors, body image, gendered attire and comportment, as well as developmental milestones such as dating, marriage, career, and parenthood. All these norms and events are influenced by heterosexism and a corresponding set of heteronormative sexual scripts. These scripts are mental constructions, shaped by culture, that guide individual understanding of relationships and sexual situations.[30] As LGBTQ+ people attempt to navigate these standards and expectations, they frequently encounter challenges to their well-being. It is also important to point out that, although the challenges are intense, many are able to meet these challenges successfully.
Heterosexism and heteronormativity have cast LGBTQ+ individuals as morally vacuous, criminal threats, and mentally ill. Social sanctions existed in most institutions, denying LGBTQ+ people access to faith communities, education institutions, and even families. Discrimination in employment was the norm, resulting in the need for LGBTQ+ people to deny or dissemble in places of employment, when seeking housing, or in public. And although the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that LGBTQ+ people cannot be discriminated against in employment, efforts are underway to limit the scope of this ruling through the pursuit of religious exemptions. Same-sex marriages were not recognized in the United States until 2015, and that change occurred through the courts and not through legislation. In addition, marriage equality continues to be challenged, with legislative and judicial efforts to limit the extent to which same-sex unions must be recognized as valid. The rights of LGBTQ+ people to become or remain parents to children has also seen progress but remains under siege. For example, in 2018, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin signed a bill that allows private adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ+ couples, allowing them to refuse to place children in LGBTQ+ families if it “would violate the agency’s written religious or moral convictions or policies.”[31]
Microaggressions
Not all acts of discrimination are overt and easily identified, either by the person who is targeted or by witnesses. The mental health of people who are marginalized because of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality can also be affected by microaggressions—”brief, daily assaults on minority individuals, which can be social or environmental, verbal or nonverbal, as well as intentional or unintentional.”[32] Because microaggressions are slight, somewhat indirect, and sometimes dismissible, they can be pernicious and difficult to address directly.
Microaggressions have been found to negatively affect mental health, likelihood of accessing health care, and satisfaction with a workplace or educational setting. There are different kinds of microaggressions. Microassaults occur when someone makes a joke or makes a stereotypical generalization about a person based on their group membership. Microinsults refer to rude and insensitive words and behavior that devalue or demean someone’s group. Finally, microinvalidations take place when someone is excluded because of their group or because their experience as the member of a group is invalidated.[33]
LGBTQ+ Minority Stress
Although most people deal effectively with the stress of everyday life, sometimes negative life events can be so severe (what psychologists call major life stressors) or continue for so long (chronic stressors) that they can negatively affect mental and physical health. Members of racial, sexual, and other minority groups who experience stressors as a result of prejudice and discrimination experience what psychologists call minority stress.[34]
LGBTQ+ minority stress extends beyond the regular stress of everyday life or the stress that comes from unexpected life events. It is particularly related to the external experiences that LGBTQ+ people encounter going through life in a heterosexist world, such as discrimination, anti-LGBTQ+ violence, and microaggressions. Research on minority stress also explores the implication of those stressors on LGBTQ+ peoples’ sense of self and psychological well-being, such as self-esteem, depression, and guilt. Research documents how anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice produces negative stressors such as isolation, lack of family acceptance, ostracization by peers, lack of resources and opportunities in schools, less attention from teachers, and less validation of LGBTQ+ peoples’ lives.[35] These stressors add up and negatively affect the mental and physical health of LGBTQ+ people.
Internalized Homophobia and Heterosexism
Because most LGBTQ+ people grow up in environments that are to some degree heterosexist, most are also likely to internalize some of the anti-LGBTQ+ messages they encounter along the way. This internalized homophobia can have mental health consequences, and addressing it is considered an important step in the coming out process. Variables such as community connectedness have been found to help in addressing internalized homophobia. A survey of 1,093 transgender individuals found that stigma relating to participants’ gender identity and expression contributed to their psychological distress, and that trans community and social support helped moderate the distress. A survey of 484 LGB adults found that parental support of a child’s authentic self was associated with lower internalized homophobia and shame as well as better overall psychological health in adults.[36]
Modern and Aversive Prejudice
New conceptualizations and approaches in the measurement of racism (e.g., symbolic prejudice, modern prejudice, and aversive prejudice) and attitudes toward women (e.g., ambivalent sexism) were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s. These approaches explained that, as it became more socially unacceptable to express prejudice, those old-fashioned forms didn’t disappear entirely but went underground and were replaced by more subtle or indirect forms of prejudice. Similarly, in the face of growing social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice is also often expressed subtly, indirectly, and in ways that avoid direct social condemnation. For example, a study of attitudes toward LGBTQ+ parenting found that people who score high on a measure of modern anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice will evaluate the parenting of same-sex and opposite-sex parents similarly when both sets of parents are engaged in the same positive parenting behaviors. However, when both sets of parents engage in the same negative parenting behaviors (e.g., losing their temper, slapping their child’s hand, and yelling), those same participants will evaluate the parenting of the same-sex couple more negatively than the opposite-sex parents, suggesting that condemnation of the parents’ negative conduct provides a subtle and socially acceptable way to express existing anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice.[37]
Predicting Anti-LGBTQ+ Prejudice
Anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice has been found to highly correlate with other variables, including age, education, location, religiosity, political party and ideology, and sexual conservatism. Personality has also been found to correlate with anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice. People who score higher on measures of right-wing authoritarianism tend to be more deferential to authority figures, see the world in moral absolutes, and be punitive toward those who transgress social norms. These people also tend to hold more negative attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people. In addition, gender and gender-role beliefs have been found to predict attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people. People who support more traditional gender roles and traditional values concerning sexual behavior and family structure tend to express more anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice. Similar correlates have been tied to antitrans attitudes.[38]
Similarly, a national probability sample of heterosexual adults found that more negative attitudes toward transgender people were associated with authoritarianism, political conservatism, religiosity (only for women), rigid views about gender, and lack of contact with transgender people. They also noted that participants’ attitudes toward transgender people were more negative than their attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people.[39]
The contact hypothesis is the idea that contact between groups can improve group relations and reduce prejudice; it was introduced by Allport in 1954. Allport argued that this contact needed to take place in particular situational contexts in which the groups have equal status, that the groups share a set of common goals, are working cooperatively, and have the opportunity to develop emotional connections and empathy.[40] Allport also suggested that there should be support for cooperation and acceptance from authorities or powers that be; the contact must counter the negative beliefs about the group with information that is frequent, consistent, and can be generalized; and the contact should discourage rationalizing the new information as being a special case or subtype of the group.[41] Although prejudice and the threat of discrimination can reduce the possibility of contact between heterosexuals and members of the LGBTQ+ community, heterosexuals with more contact with LGBTQ+ people have been found to hold more favorable attitudes.[42]
The Benefits and Risks of Coming Out
The gay liberation movement of the 1970s advocated for coming out as an LGB person as an important strategy of political change and personal fulfillment. This concept is illustrated in this now famous 1978 quote by the late San Francisco supervisor, and hero of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, Harvey Milk (figure 6.5):
Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell your neighbors. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all. And once you do, you will feel so much better.[43]
The benefit and buffering effects of coming out have been well established in the literature. Ilan Meyer’s LGBTQ+ minority stress model connects minority identification with positive outcomes in terms of coping and having access to the social support resources necessary to address minority stress. The model also highlights how minority identification is related to minority stressors within the individual such as expectations of rejection, concealment, and internalized homophobia. In addition, identification and community connectedness can increase visibility, which may increase vulnerability to things like employment discrimination, harassment, and violence.[44]
Historians and other social scientists have also suggested that the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ people was a critical element in the formation of LGBTQ+ communities and the progress of the LGBTQ+ rights movements. The contact hypothesis, Harvey Milk’s rallying cry of “Come on out!” and research that highlights the importance of role models and positive representatives in various forms of media all suggest that coming out and increasing the visibility of LGBTQ+ people is an important and often positive strategy for improving social attitudes. As we stated earlier in this chapter, increased visibility does come with risks. However, positive contact between heterosexuals and LGBTQ+ people has been found to result not only in positive attitude change but also in the possibility of increasing the dominant group’s identification with the marginalized group, creating the possibility of allyship—the mobilization of heterosexuals to work toward change benefiting the LGBTQ+ community. As intergroup and interpersonal contact, as well as subsequent social networks, continues to expand into the virtual world through online communities, social networking, and hookup and dating apps, these forms of social interaction will likely continue to shape beliefs about and attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people, create new contexts for minority stress, and expand possibilities for social support and the resources available to LGBTQ+ people.[45]
Watch
A TED-Ed lesson, by Lillian Faderman, “Harvey Milk’s Radical Vision of Equality,” introduces Milk and his life (https://www.ted.com/talks/lillian_faderman_harvey_milk_s_radical_vision_of_equality).
Visit the SFO Museum’s virtual exhibition about Harvey Milk (https://www.sfomuseum.org/exhibitions/harvey-milk-messenger-hope).
• What was the historical context within which Harvey Milk advocated coming out to family, friends, neighbors, and others?
• What are the hallmarks of Milk’s political philosophy?
• How does the research discussed in this chapter help us understand why Milk was right in believing that coming out was important for gay rights?
Conclusion
Although progress in LGBTQ+ rights has been made and attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people have changed in the last few decades, the implications of anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice and discrimination remain serious. It is critical that efforts to change these attitudes continue and that LGBTQ+ affirmative social scientists, educators, and practitioners continue to develop a robust knowledge base to guide these efforts. In addition, a related literature highlights the strength and resilience found in the LGBTQ+ community, even in the face of this adversity.
LGBTQ+ historians and anthropologists like George Chauncey, John D’Emilio, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, and Susan Stryker have helped make visible the courage and perseverance of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities who faced legal risks, social stigma, overt discrimination, and violence across the twentieth century.[46] These are the voices and struggles of a resilient community: the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, which organized and built networks of LGBTQ+ people in the shadow of McCarthyism and anti-homosexual witch hunts; the transwomen and transmen, drag queens, queer youth of color, street hustlers, butch dykes, and gay men who took a stand at the Stonewall Inn; the LGBTQ+ people who, amid unimaginable death and sadness brought about by the AIDS epidemic, built organizations, took care of each other, acted up, and fought back against government disdain and neglect; and the people with AIDS, many in the midst of the ravages of the disease, who still found meaning in helping others. These stories of resilience aren’t meant to minimize the dangers or potential for harm. In the words of Harvey Milk, they are simply stories of hope: “Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be alright . . . and you and you and you, you have to give people hope.”[47]
Profile: Minority Stress and Same-Sex Couples
David Frost
Sexual minority individuals continue to experience prejudice and discrimination as a result of the social stigma that most societies place on sexual behavior and sexual identities outside heteronormative ideals. This stigma persists across many domains of life, including education and the workplace, but is arguably most pronounced in the domain of intimacy and romantic relationships. In this profile, I provide an overview of several studies my colleagues and I have conducted aimed at understanding how sexual minority individuals and members of same-sex relationships experience stigma in the context of their intimate relationships. I demonstrate how experiences of stigma can lead to negative outcomes for members of same-sex relationships in terms of their mental health and in the quality of their relationships. This research illustrates how theories of minority stress can be used to understand how social stigma can be detrimental to the health and relationships of sexual minority individuals and same-sex couples.
The Minority Stress Model
The minority stress model, as proposed by Ilan Meyer, attempts to explain why sexual minority individuals, on average, experience higher rates of mental health problems relative to their straight peers. Noting that these inequalities in mental health are not likely to be caused by sexual orientation itself, the minority stress model contends that the reason for poorer mental health outcomes among sexual minority populations lies in sexual minority individuals having a disadvantaged status in society relative to their straight peers. This disadvantaged social status is created by the stigma that societies place on same-sex sexual behavior and sexual minority identities, which does not apply to straight individuals given the privileging of heterosexuality as normative.[48]
As a result of this disadvantaged social status, sexual minority individuals are exposed to social stress that straight individuals are not. Social stressors include being fired from your job because you are lesbian (i.e., prejudice), being called names because you are bisexual (i.e., harassment), being socially avoided because you are gay (i.e., everyday discrimination), having to worry about when it is safe to disclose your sexual orientation (i.e., stigma concealment), and thinking you are not valued as a person as much as others are because of your sexual orientation (i.e., internalized stigma). These are all examples of social stress that sexual minorities experience that their straight peers do not. As a result of excess exposure to these and other forms of minority stress, sexual minorities are more likely to experience mental health problems like elevated rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, and suicidal ideation. Thus, the minority stress model contends that sexual minority individuals experience higher rates of mental health problems than their straight peers because of excess exposure to social stress stemming from their stigmatized and disadvantaged social status.[49]
Stigma and Minority Stress in Same-Sex Relationships
As of 2020, same-sex marriage is either performed or recognized in thirty-two countries throughout the world, and attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex marriage are dramatically improved according to opinion polls in most Western countries.[50] However, it is important to recognize that the vast majority of countries across the globe do not legally recognize same-sex couples, and in some countries same-sex sexual behavior continues to be criminalized. Even in countries with equal marriage laws, many same-sex couples experience stigma and discrimination from coworkers, peers, and family. Thus, the domain of intimacy and romantic relationships remains a significant part of sexual minority individuals’ lives in which they continue to experience social stigma.
Minority Stress as a Barrier to Achieving Relationship Goals
To understand how experiences of minority stress in the relational domain might explain inequalities in mental health between sexual minority individuals and their straight peers, my colleagues and I conducted a survey of 431 lesbian, gay, and bisexual (55 percent) individuals and straight-identified (45 percent) individuals living in the United States and Canada. We specifically wanted to examine the extent to which participants felt stress related to experiencing barriers to achieving their goals in romantic relationships (e.g., getting married, buying a house, planning to have children, moving in together) compared with other areas such as the workplace and education. Participants were asked to complete the Personal Project Inventory on the goals they were pursuing across these life domains and the intensity of perceived barriers to the achievement of these goals, which served as our measure of stress. We also asked participants to complete previously validated measures of depression and psychological well-being.[51]
We found that sexual minority individuals reported significantly more depressive symptoms and lower levels of psychological well-being than their straight peers. Sexual minorities also reported more barriers to goal pursuit than straight participants. People who reported more stress in the form of frustrated goal pursuit scored significantly poorer on mental health and well-being outcomes, and their inclusion in models attenuated sexual orientation differences in mental health. Importantly, when we held constant the differences in the stress related to frustrated goal pursuit, differences between sexual minorities and straight individuals in mental health and well-being were much less pronounced. Thus, our research demonstrates that this frustrated goal pursuit is the critical factor explaining sexual minority differences in mental health and well-being. These barriers to relationship projects came from interpersonal sources, like family, friends, and neighbors.
These findings suggest that stigma in intimacy and relationships may prevent sexual minorities from achieving their goals for intimacy and relationships and in doing so contributes to mental health inequalities observed between sexual minority and straight individuals. These findings have relevance to the changing social context regarding marriage equality. Interpersonal attitudes may affect the everyday relationship activities of sexual minority individuals in ways that are detrimental to their health and well-being.
The Persistence of Minority Stress in a Post–marriage Equality Context
To examine whether minority stress continues to affect the mental health of same-sex couples in the United States after access to equal marriage became available, my colleagues and I examined the degree to which the perception of unequal recognition—as a minority stressor—explained variation in mental health above and beyond legal relationship recognition. We predicted that members of same-sex couples with legal marital status would report more positive mental health outcomes compared with members of same-sex couples who were not legally married. We also predicted that perceiving the social climate as not affording equal recognition to same-sex couples would be related to worse mental health for members of same-sex couples, regardless of legal marital status. Dyadic data from both members of 106 same-sex couples—diverse in terms of couple gender, length of relationship, location in the United States, and race/ethnicity—were collected and analyzed. The survey contained measures of legal marital status, perceived unequal social recognition, and mental health outcomes (e.g., depressive symptoms, nonspecific psychological distress, and problematic drinking behavior).[52]
The results demonstrated that perceived unequal relationship recognition predicted poorer mental health, whether or not members of same-sex couples were in a legally recognized relationship. Focusing on potential differences in mental health by levels of legal relationship recognition, the study found that members of same-sex couples recognized as registered domestic partners or civil unions, but not as legal marriages, demonstrated significantly lower levels of mental health compared with those with legal marriages and those with no legal relationship status. Those who were legally married reported the most positive mental health outcomes but were not statistically distinguishable from those with no legal recognition for their relationship.
These findings illustrate a consistent and robust pattern of associations with multiple indicators of mental health, suggesting that the degree to which members of same-sex couples perceive their relationship to have unequal recognition is a meaningful factor underlying mental health outcomes. In other words, although institutionalized forms of discrimination, such as unequal access to legal marriage, have documented associations with mental health in sexual minority populations, the lived experience of perceived inequality likely represents a more proximal form of minority stress. This form of minority stress is one that potentially exists as shared lived experience at the couple level “and may even persist in contexts where structural stigma has been reduced or eliminated.”[53] These findings also highlight how equal access to legal marriage is an important social change but is not sufficient to eliminate long-standing social stigma as a risk for mental health problems faced by sexual minority individuals and members of same-sex couples. The constantly shifting social and policy climate facing sexual minorities and same-sex couples continues to warrant attention from social scientists, public health scholars, and policy makers in light of its potential impact on mental health.
Resilience and Resistance to Minority Stress in Same-Sex Relationships
It is important to qualify that the research findings discussed up to this point pertain to groups of sexual minority individuals and same-sex couples and reflect the average experience of the participants. Not all sexual minority individuals and members of same-sex couples experience minority stress and not all who do are affected by it in the same way. In fact, many sexual minority individuals and members of same-sex couples live healthy lives in rewarding relationships. Recognizing this variability in individual experience highlights how sexual minority individuals and members of same-sex relationships are resilient in the face of minority stress.
An example of this resilience can be seen in a study of the meaning-making processes same-sex couples use in negotiating minority stress in their relationships.[54] To explore how members of same-sex couples potentially exercise resilience in the face of minority stress, I asked ninety-nine people in same-sex relationships to write about their relational high points, low points, decisions, and goals, as well as their experiences of stigma directly related to their relationships. Narrative analysis of these stories revealed that participants had several psychological strategies for making meaning of their experiences of stigma. Some strategies emphasized a negative, delimiting, and contaminating effect of stigma on relationships, as is commonly found in existing research. However, other strategies emphasized how stigma can be made sense of in ways that allow individuals to overcome its negative effects.
For example, some same-sex couples who participated in this research constructed meanings of stigma-related stressors as challenges that reaffirmed their commitment to and bond with their partners. Others saw stigma as providing an opportunity to redefine notions of commitment and relational legitimacy. These narrative strategies for making meaning of stigma-related stressors represent more than simply coping strategies for minority stress. They represent attempts to reclaim experiences of being stigmatized in ways that allow individuals to resist and even thrive in the face of social stigma. Thus, through individual and group-level meaning-making processes of minority stressors, social stigma can, indirectly, result in positive outcomes for sexual minorities’ well-being and same-sex relationships.
Summary
My colleagues and I have conducted studies that collectively demonstrate how social stigma can affect the health and relationships of sexual minority individuals and same-sex couples. These are by no means the only studies on this topic.[55] It is my hope that the details of these studies illustrate the potential utility of minority stress theory to highlight that the continued stigmatization of same-sex couples, even in areas that have progressive laws and policies, puts sexual minority individuals and same-sex couples at risk for negative health and relationship outcomes. This research has been useful for efforts to change laws and policies to be more inclusive of same-sex couples’ rights and to eliminate discrimination against same-sex couples, efforts that are by no means complete and will continue for years to come. However, research on minority stress can also be useful in informing the work of community health workers, counselors, and clinicians working with sexual minority communities to help them cope with, overcome, and resist the potential negative impact of social stigma.[56]
Key Questions
• What prejudices do LGBTQ+ people face, and how does prejudice affect their lives and experiences?
• What other structures of inequality, such as race, shape the experience of violence and prejudice toward LGBTQ+ people?
• How does the history of research on homophobia and prejudice against LGBTQ+ people relate to political struggles for LGBTQ+ equality?
• How does the minority stress model help us understand both the negative impacts and the more positive outcomes of prejudice on LGBTQ+ people?
Research Resources
Compiled by Jessica Szempruch and Rachel Wexelbaum
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about discrimination, prejudice, and minority stress as it affects LGBTQ+ people.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or editing a photograph in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: Find a partner or split into groups, and choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the resources in this chapter to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
Discrimination in America: Experiences and Views of LGBTQ Americans
Discrimination in America is a series developed by National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and based on a 2017 survey of 3,453 adults living in the United States. The survey captured the wide range of personal experiences that Americans have had with discrimination based on age, race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and other factors. Data and analysis of the data from this report are authoritative evidence for research papers or other research projects about discrimination. View the report at https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/94/2017/11/NPR-RWJF-HSPH-Discrimination-LGBTQ-Final-Report.pdf.
Equaldex
Equaldex (https://www.equaldex.com/) is a collaborative knowledge base, similar to Wikipedia, for LGBTQ+ rights around the world. Information maps provide legal status of LGBTQ+ discrimination, homosexual activity, marriage, changing gender, adoption, employment, housing, military service, age of consent, donating blood, and conversion therapy in every country around the world. One can review each map, locate a country-specific map, or compare two or more different regions. This extremely useful resource for basic, up-to-date information about LGBTQ+ laws in any country includes a growing list of LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations from around the world.
Equality Maps, from the Movement Advancement Project
The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) is an independent, nonprofit organization that provides research reports and data to organizations, journalists, and lawmakers fighting for equal rights. MAP’s LGBTQ+ equality maps (http://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps) display LGBTQ+ policies and laws in the United States. Researchers can click on a state to review research, laws, and data on nondiscrimination laws; religious exemptions; relationship and parental recognition of LGBTQ+ youth; health care for LGBTQ+ people; criminal justice systems and LGBTQ+ people; and the corrections to identity documents that are allowed.
Human Rights Campaign
Founded in 1980, the Human Rights Campaign is the best-known LGBTQ+ political advocacy group in the United States. Its website (https://www.hrc.org/) includes annual reports of the group’s activities, articles focused on sixteen LGBTQ+ advocacy topics, a link to professional resources developed by the allied Human Rights Foundation, and information on how to get involved with the Human Rights Campaign to promote particular issues.
Lambda Legal
Lambda Legal (https://www.lambdalegal.org/) is a national organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and those with HIV through impact litigation, education, and public policy work.
National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs
This national coalition of local programs, affiliate organizations, and individuals works to prevent, respond to, and end all forms of violence against and within LGBTQ+ communities. The coalition (https://avp.org/ncavp/) is coordinated by the Anti-Violence Project, founded in New York City in 1980.
OutRight International
OutRight International is a leading international LGBTQ+ human rights organization focused on LGBTQ+ rights advocacy around the world. It fights for legal equality, freedom of assembly, privacy, personal security, online safety, and transgender and nonbinary rights. Its representatives work with the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and local and national LGBTQ+ support organizations to advance its work (https://outrightinternational.org/how-we-work). The “Where We Work” page has a link to a global overview of legal and societal situations of LGBTQ+ people.
Sylvia Rivera Law Project
The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (https://srlp.org/) works to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence. The project provides legal help, training, and advocacy tools.
Deep Dive: Books and Film
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith
The first book to address trans people, and the intersection of race and gender identity, in the prison-industrial complex contains twenty-six chapters contributed by trans people who are currently incarcerated, academics, legal experts, and activists. They present clear evidence that the criminal justice system discriminates against, penalizes, and endangers transgender and nonbinary people through unequal, unsafe incarceration practices. The “Tools/Resources” section provides talking points and organizing strategies to abolish the prison-industrial complex. It was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and winner of the CLAGS Sylvia Rivera Award for Transgender Studies. Originally published in 2011, the 2015 edition of this book includes a foreword by CeCe McDonald (Oakland, CA: AK Press).
Intersexuality and the Law: Why Sex Matters, by Julie A. Greenberg
Internationally acclaimed LGBTQ+ rights lawyer Julie A. Greenberg provides a thorough survey of discrimination against intersex people, which often begins at birth; the state and federal laws that affect their rights; and how legal institutions can collaborate with disability rights advocates, feminist groups, LGBTQ+ organizations, and other groups to fight intersex discrimination in health care, marriage rights, employment, and other environments. The book won the 2013 Bullough Award, presented by the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
The Nature of Prejudice, by Gordon Allport
Published in 1954, this book was the first landmark study on the origins of prejudice and discrimination. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition is unabridged and goes into great detail about how prejudice and discrimination become institutionalized. A frequently cited theoretical work applicable to all nations and cultures, it has provided the foundations for future studies on the topic (New York: Perseus Books, 1979).
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde
Fifteen essays and speeches from the poet-philosopher Audre Lorde about the way women—particularly Black women and women of color—build resilience and overcome racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and class discrimination are gathered in this volume. First published in 1984, the 2007 edition includes a foreword written by world-famous Black community activist and Lorde scholar Cheryl Clarke. This classic collection is a frequently cited, foundational resource that built theories of Black feminism, postcolonial feminism, LGBTQ+ studies, and critical psychology (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press).
Thats So Gay! Microaggressions and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community, by Kevin Nadal
Each chapter in this review of the scholarly literature on microaggressions and prejudice shown toward LGBTQ+ people includes case examples with corresponding analysis and discussion questions. The book also includes guidance and best practices for students, educators, mental health practitioners, health care workers, and organizational leaders who want to build welcoming, inclusive spaces (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2013).
Glossary
allyship. Building a supportive relationship with a marginalized or mistreated group of people that one is not a part of, an effort that continues even when that relationship threatens one’s comfort, status, or relationships with one’s group.
attitudes. The positive and negative emotions, beliefs, and behaviors that a person holds or exhibits toward another person, group, object, or event.
aversive prejudice. A theory of prejudice, originally proposed in the 1980s in the context of aversive racism, that suggests that negative attitudes toward marginalized groups are sometimes manifested indirectly through feelings of discomfort and the avoidance of members of those groups.
coming out. Also known as coming out of the closet; a process in the lives of LGBTQ+ people of disclosing one’s sexual orientation or gender identity to others.
compulsory heterosexuality. An idea, proposed by the feminist writer and scholar Adrienne Rich in 1980, that patriarchy and heteronormativity cause society to assume and mandate heterosexuality in everyone.
contact hypothesis. A theory, introduced by the psychologist Gordon Allport in the 1950s, suggesting that, under the right conditions, prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination can be reduced or eliminated by encouraging interaction between members of the majority and the minority groups.
Dignity for All Students Act. A law in New York State passed in 2010 that seeks to eliminate discrimination and bullying (based on race, physical size, national origin, ethnicity, religion, ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex) in schools through education, modification of district codes of conduct, and the mandated collection and reporting of incident data.
disadvantaged social status. A lower place within the social hierarchy of a society, often defined by a lower level of power, lower social value, and exclusion from full and equal access to material and symbolic forms of citizenship.
discrimination. The unjust or prejudicial treatment of an individual or group based on their actual or perceived membership in a particular group or class of people (e.g., race, gender identity, or sexual orientation).
egalitarianism. The political philosophy of believing in the equality of all and in the elimination of inequality.
ego-defensive reaction. A response to another person or group that is motivated by the unconscious need to avoid disturbing or threatening thoughts, such as feelings of guilt.
hate crimes. Crimes, such as assault, bullying, harassment, vandalism, and abuse, that are motivated by prejudice toward a certain group and that in some jurisdictions incur harsher penalties.
heteronormativity. A societal belief that makes heterosexuality the default and assumes that everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise; a belief normalizing heterosexuality and othering any other identity or experience apart from heterosexuality.
heterosexism. An attitude and belief based on the idea that everyone is heterosexual or that heterosexuality is the only acceptable sexual orientation.
homophobia. Negative or hostile attitudes toward people who identify as, or are perceived to be, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Biphobia and transphobia are also used to describe negative or hostile attitudes toward people who identify, or are perceived to be, bisexual or transgender.
internalized homophobia. The acceptance or incorporation of anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice or stereotypes by LGBTQ+ people.
microaggressions. Common verbal, behavioral, or environmental insults, indignities, and slights that cause harm by communicating, intentionally or unintentionally, hostility and prejudice toward members of a marginalized group.
minority stress. Social stress resulting from being a member of a social group or having a social identity that is stigmatized by society.
modern prejudice. Prejudice that is expressed toward an individual through subtle discriminatory behaviors, denial that ongoing discrimination against that group continues, or the suggestion that the marginalized group is trying to advance too far, too fast.
patriarchy. A society, or belief system, that favors or privileges men at the expense of women, in which men hold most of the power and control most of the wealth, and in which women are marginalized.
prejudice. Negative emotions, beliefs, or behaviors toward an individual, based on the person’s group membership and not based on prior knowledge or experience with that individual.
public opinion polls. Surveys to measure the views, attitudes, or opinions of the general public on topics, issues, or social problems.
resilience. An individual’s ability to recover, or bounce back, from a stressful or traumatic experience.
resistance. The effort of a social group or social movement to challenge or struggle against another group, policy, or government that is oppressing them.
right-wing authoritarianism. A personality characteristic of individuals who easily submit and defer to leaders, or authority figures, they perceive as strong and legitimate; they tend to adhere to social norms and hold negative attitudes toward anyone who challenges those norms, and they support the use of force to preserve norms and bring social order.
same-sex relationships. Sexual or romantic relationships involving two partners who share the sex assigned at birth and gender identity.
sexual minority individuals. People who have sexual identities that are not straight, including but not limited to lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and pansexual.
social stress. Stress that emanates from a person’s relationships with other people, other communities, and the general social environment.
symbolic prejudice. A subtle and indirect form of prejudice toward a group that can manifest as the rejection of the policies and initiatives that are designed to help that group achieve equality while also expressing support for the equality of that group.
1. NPR, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, “Discrimination in America: Experiences and Views of LGBTQ Americans,” 2017, https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/94/2017/11/NPR-RWJF-HSPH-Discrimination-LGBTQ-Final-Report.pdf.
2. G. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Addison Wesley, 1954), 9.
3. J. Dovidio, M. Hewstone, P. Glick, and V. Esses, “Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination: Theoretical and Empirical Overview,” in The SAGE Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping andDiscrimination, ed. J. F. Dovidio, M. Hewstone, and P. Glick (London: SAGE, 2010), 3–28, http://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/54590_dovido,_chapter_1.pdf.
4. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and HIV-Affected Hate Violence in 2016 (New York: NCAVP, 2016).
5. “ADL Hate Crime Map,” n.d., https://www.adl.org/adl-hate-crime-map.
6. F. S. Pezzella, M. D. Fetzer, and T. Keller, “The Dark Figure of Hate Crime Underreporting,” American Behavioral Scientist, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218823844; M. M. Wilson, “Hate Crime Victimization, 2004–2012: Statistical Tables,” 2014, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4883.
7. For lower self-esteem, etc., see J. G. Kosciw, N. A. Palmer, R. M. Kull, and E. A. Greytak, “The Effect of Negative School Climate on Academic Outcomes for LGBT Youth and the Role of In-School Supports,” Journal of School Violence 12, no. 1 (2013): 45–63; for feeling less connection, see J. Pearson, C. Muller, and L. Wilkinson, “Adolescent Same-Sex Attraction and Academic Outcomes: The Role of School Attachment and Engagement,” Social Problems 54 (2007): 523–542; and for mental health, see R. B. Toomey, C. Ryan, R. M. Diaz, N. A. Card, and S. T. Russell, “Gender-Nonconforming Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth: School Victimization and Young Adult Psychosocial Adjustment,” Developmental Psychology 46 (2010): 1580–1589.
8. New York State Department of Education, “The Dignity Act,” updated July 20, 2020, http://www.p12.nysed.gov/dignityact/.
9. New York State Comptroller, “Some NY Schools Not Reporting Bullying or Harassment,” news release, October 13, 2017, https://www.osc.state.ny.us/press/releases/oct17/101317.htm.
10. It Gets Better Project (website), accessed April 24, 2021, https://itgetsbetter.org.
11. NPR et al., “Discrimination in America.”
12. Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. ___ (2020).
13. Lambda Legal, “Bostock v. Clayton County, GA / Zarda v. Altitude Express / RG & GR Harris Funeral Homes Inc v. EEOC,” accessed November 21, 2021, https://www.lambdalegal.org/in-court/cases/bostock-zarda-harris.
14. Movement Advancement Project, “Equality Maps: Healthcare Laws and Policies,” accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/healthcare_laws_and_policies.
15. S. A. Mirza and C. Rooney, “Discrimination Prevents LGBTQ People from Accessing Health Care,” Center for American Progress, January 18, 2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2018/01/18/445130/discrimination-prevents-lgbtq-people-accessing-health-care/.
16. For removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association list of mental illnesses, see R. Bayer. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); for the American Psychological Association LGBTQ+ stance, see American Psychological Association, Sexual Orientation and Homosexuality (Washington, DC: APA, 2008), https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/orientation; and for the American Academy of Pediatricians statement, see Committee on Adolescence, “Policy Statement: Office-Based Care for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth,” Pediatrics 132, no. 1 (2013): 198–203.
17. Institutes of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Patients: Building a Foundation for a Better Understanding (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011).
18. For attitudes toward gay men and lesbians and survey answers about employment discrimination, see Gallup, “Gay and Lesbian Rights,” accessed April 24, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx; for attitudes toward transgender people, see W. Luhur, T. N. T. Brown, and A. Flores, Public Opinion of Transgender Rights in the US (Los Angeles, CA: Williams Institute, 2017), https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/public-opinion-trans-rights-us/. Note that in the 1970s, at the time of the survey, homosexual was widely used to describe gay and lesbian people. However, because of its origins in medical and psychiatric discourse, it is today considered by many to be offensive.
19. Gallup, “Gay and Lesbian Rights.”
20. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1991), s.v. “homophobia.”
21. G. Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 4.
22. R. Ayyar, “George Weinberg: Love Is Conspiratorial, Deviant, and Magical,” GayToday, November 1, 2002, http://gaytoday.com/interview/110102in.asp.
23. Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual, 1.
24. W. Churchill, Homosexual Behavior among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967).
25. K. T. Smith, “Homophobia: A Tentative Personality Profile,” Psychological Reports 29 (1971): 1089, 1093.
26. Smith, 1094.
27. A. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (1980): 631–660.
28. G. M. Herek, “The Context of Anti-gay Violence: Notes on Cultural and Psychological Heterosexism,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 5, no. 3 (1990): 316.
29. C. J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queen: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. P. Johnson and M. G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); M. Warner, “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet” Social Text 29 (1991): 3–17, http://www.jstor.org/stable/466295.
30. J. H. Gagnon, “The Explicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research,” Annual Review of Sex Research 1, no. 1 (1990): 1–43; W. Simon and J. H. Gagnon, “Sexual Scripts,” in Culture, Society and Sexuality, ed. R. Parker and P. Aggleton (New York: Routledge, 1984), 31–40.
31. J. Fortin, “Oklahoma Passes Adoption Law That L.G.B.T. Groups Call Discriminatory,” New York Times, May 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/us/oklahoma-gay-adoption-bill.html.
32. K. F. Balsam, Y. Molina, B. Beadnell, J. Simoni, and K. Walters, “Measuring Multiple Minority Stress: The LGBT People of Color Microaggressions Scale,” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 17, no. 2 (2011): 163, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023244.
33. D. W. Sue, C. M. Capodilupo, G. C. Torino, J. M. Bucceri, A. M. B. Holder, K. L. Nadal, and M. Esquilin, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical Practice,” American Psychologist 62, no. 4 (2007): 271–286.
34. For general negative life events, see B. P. Dohrenwend, Adversity, Stress, and Psychopathology (New York: Oxford University Press); and B. P. Dohrenwend, “The Role of Adversity and Stress in Psychopathology: Some Evidence and Its Implications for Theory and Research,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 41 (2000): 1–19; and for minority stress, see I. H. Meyer, “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: Conceptual Issues and Research Evidence,” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 5 (2003): 674–697.
35. S. G. Massey, “Valued Differences or Benevolent Stereotypes? Exploring the Influence of Positive Beliefs on Anti-gay and Anti-lesbian Attitudes,” Psychology and Sexuality 1, no. 2 (2010): 115–130.
36. For internalized homophobia, see I. H. Meyer and L. Dean, “Internalized Homophobia, Intimacy, and Sexual Behavior among Gay and Bisexual Men,” in Stigma and Sexual Orientation: Understanding Prejudice against Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1998), 160–186; for community connectedness, see D. M. Frost and I. H. Meyer, “Measuring Community Connectedness among Diverse Sexual Minority Populations,” Journal of Sex Research 49, no. 1 (2012): 36–49; for the transgender survey, see W. O. Bockting, M. H. Miner, R. E. S. Romine, A. Hamilton, and E. Coleman, “Stigma, Mental Health, and Resilience in an Online Sample of the US Transgender Population,” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 5 (2013): 943–951; and for the survey of LGB adults, see N. Legate, N. Weinstein, W. S. Ryan, C. R. DeHaan, and R. M. Ryan, “Parental Autonomy Support Predicts Lower Internalized Homophobia and Better Psychological Health Indirectly through Lower Shame in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Adults,” Stigma and Health 4, no. 4 (2019): 367–376.
37. For aversive racism, see S. L. Gaertner and J. F. Dovidio, “The Aversive Form of Racism,” in Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism, ed. J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986), 61–89; for new conceptualizations and approaches, see S. L. Gaertner and J. F. Dovidio, “The Subtlety of White Racism, Arousal, and Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, no. 10 (1977): 691–707; P. Glick and S. T. Fiske, “The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating Hostile and Benevolent Sexism,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 3 (1996): 491–512; I. Katz and R. G. Hass, “Racial Ambivalence and American Value Conflict: Correlational and Priming Studies of Dual Cognitive Structures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55 (1988): 893–905; J. B. McConahay, “Modern Racism, Ambivalence, and the Modern Racism Scale,” Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986); D. O. Sears, “Symbolic Racism,” in Eliminating Racism: Profiles in Controversy, ed. I. Katz and S. Taylor (New York: Plenum Press, 1988); J. K. Swim, K. J. Aikin, W. S. Hall, and B. A. Hunter, “Sexism and Racism: Old-Fashioned and Modern Prejudices,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 2 (1995): 199–214; and F. Tougas, R. Brown, A. M. Beaton, and S. Joly, “Neosexism: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, no. 8 (1995): 842–849; and for attitudes on LGBTQ+ parenting, see S. G. Massey, A. Merriwether, and J. Garcia, “Modern Prejudice and Same-Sex Parenting: Shifting Judgments in Positive and Negative Parenting Situations,” Journal of GLBT Family Studies 9, no. 2 (2013) 129–151.
38. For anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice correlations and predicted attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people, see G. M. Herek, “Confronting Sexual Stigma and Prejudice: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Social Issues 63, no. 4 (2007): 905–925; for right-wing authoritarianism scores, see B. E. Whitley and S. E. Lee, “The Relationship of Authoritarianism and Related Constructs to Attitudes toward Homosexuality,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 30, no. 1 (2000): 144–170; for supporters of traditional gender roles and values, see G. Herek and K. A. McLemore, “Sexual Prejudice,” Annual Review of Psychology 64 (2013): 309–333; M. P. Callahan and T. K. Vescio, “Core American Values and the Structure of Antigay Prejudice,” Journal of Homosexuality 58 (2011): 248–262; and M. B. Goodman and B. Moradi, “Attitudes and Behaviors toward Lesbian and Gay Persons: Critical Correlates and Mediated Relations,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 55 (2008): 371–384; and for antitrans attitudes, see A. T. Norton and G. M. Herek, “Heterosexuals’ Attitudes toward Transgender People: Findings from a National Probability Sample of US Adults,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 68, nos. 11–12 (2013): 738–753.
39. Norton and Herek, “Heterosexuals’ Attitudes toward Transgender People.”
40. T. Pettigrew, “Intergroup Contact Theory,” Annual Review of Psychology 49 (1998): 65–85; P. Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
41. Pettigrew, “Intergroup Contact Theory”; M. Rothbart and O. P. John, “Social Categorization and Behavioral Episodes: A Cognitive Analysis of the Effects of Intergroup Contact,” Journal of Social Issues 41, no. 3 (1985): 81–104.
42. T. F. Pettigrew and L. R. Tropp, “A Meta-analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (2006): 751–783; Herek and McLemore, “Sexual Prejudice.”
43. J. Capehart, “From Harvey Milk to 58 Percent,” Washington Post, March 18, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/03/18/from-harvey-milk-to-58-percent/.
44. For the beneficial effects of coming out, see Michael J. Stirratt, I. H. Meyer, S. C. Ouellette, and M. A. Gara, “Measuring Identity Multiplicity and Intersectionality: Hierarchical Classes Analysis (HICLAS) of Sexual, Racial, and Gender Identities,” Self and Identity 7, no. 1 (2007): 89–111; V. C. Cass, “Homosexual Identity Formation: Testing a Theoretical Model,” Journal of Sex Research 20, no. 2 (1984): 143–167; and R. R. Troiden, “The Formation of Homosexual Identities,” in Gay and Lesbian Youth, ed. G. Herdt (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989), 43–73; and for the LGBTQ+ minority stress model, see Meyer, “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations.”
45. For formation of LGBTQ+ rights movements, see J. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and G. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995); for the contact hypothesis, see G. M. Herek and J. P. Capitanio, “‘Some of My Best Friends’: Intergroup Contact, Concealable Stigma, and Heterosexuals’ Attitudes toward Gay Men and Lesbians,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22, no. 4 (1996): 412–424; and Allport, Nature of Prejudice; for Harvey Milk, see R. Shiltz, The Mayor of Castro Street (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); for role models and positive representatives in media, see GLAAD, GLAAD Media Reference Guide, 10th ed. (New York: GLAAD, 2016), https://www.glaad.org/reference; S. L. Craig, L. McInroy, L. T. McCready, and R. Alaggia, “Media: A Catalyst for Resilience in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth,” Journal of LGBT Youth 12, no. 3 (2015): 254–275; and B. Forenza, “Exploring the Affirmative Role of Gay Icons in Coming Out,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 6, no. 4 (2017): 338–347; for improving social attitudes, see M. Levina, C. R. Waldo, L. F. Fitzgerald, “We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re on TV: The Effects of Visual Media on Heterosexuals’ Attitudes toward Gay Men and Lesbians,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 30, no. 4 (2000): 738–758; and for allyship, see N. K. Reimer, J. C. Becker, A. Benz, O. Christ, K. Dhont, U. Klocke, S. Neji, et al., “Intergroup Contact and Social Change: Implications of Negative and Positive Contact for Collective Action in Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43, no. 1 (2017): 121–136, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216676478.
46. Chauncey, Gay New York; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; E. L. Kennedy and M. D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1993); S. Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008).
47. H. Milk, “The Hope Speech,” June 25, 1978, https://www.speech.almeida.co.uk/harvey-milk.
48. Meyer, “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations.”
49. For social stress, see I. H. Meyer, S. Schwartz, and D. M. Frost, “Social Patterning of Stress and Coping: Does Disadvantaged Social Statuses Confer More Stress and Fewer Coping Resources?,” Social Science and Medicine 67, no. 3 (2008): 368–379; and for minority stress, see Meyer, “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations.”
50. P. M. Ayoub and J. Garretson, “Getting the Message Out: Media Context and Global Changes in Attitudes toward Homosexuality,” Comparative Political Studies 50, no. 8 (2017): 1055–1085; T. Fetner, “US Attitudes toward Lesbian and Gay People Are Better than Ever,” Contexts 15, no. 2 (2016): 20–27.
51. D. M. Frost and A. J. LeBlanc, “Nonevent Stress Contributes to Mental Health Disparities Based on Sexual Orientation: Evidence from a Personal Projects Analysis,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 84 (2014): 557–566.
52. A. J. LeBlanc, D. M. Frost, and K. Bowen, “Legal Marriage, Unequal Recognition, and Mental Health among Same‐Sex Couples,” Journal of Marriage and Family 80, no. 2 (2018): 397–408.
53. LeBlanc, Frost, and Bowen, “Legal Marriage, Unequal Recognition, and Mental Health among Same‐Sex Couples,” 405; for minority stress, see Meyer, “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations.”
54. D. M. Frost, “Stigma and Intimacy in Same-Sex Relationships: A Narrative Approach,” Journal of Family Psychology 25, no. 1 (2011): 1–10.
55. For a review, see S. S. Rostosky and E. D. Riggle, “Same-Sex Relationships and Minority Stress,” Current Opinion in Psychology 13 (2017): 29–38; and for a meta-analysis, see D. M. Doyle and L. Molix, “Social Stigma and Sexual Minorities’ Romantic Relationship Functioning: A Meta-analytic Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41, no. 10 (2015): 1363–1381.
56. I. H. Meyer and D. M. Frost, “Minority Stress and the Health of Sexual Minorities,” in Handbook of Psychology and Sexual Orientation, ed. C. J. Patterson and A. R. D’Augelli (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 252–266. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/04%3A_Prejudice_and_Health/4.01%3A_Chapter_6-_Prejudice_and_Discrimination_against_LGBTQ_People.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Summarize the history of nonnormative genders and sexualities, including homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity, as well as queer identity and activism.
• Describe the connections between identities and embodied experiences.
• Describe intersectionality from an LGBTQ+ perspective.
• Analyze how key social institutions shape, define, and enforce structures of inequality.
Introduction
The health and wellness of LGBTQ+ and other sexual minority people in the United States is influenced by many factors: access to health care and health insurance; ability for open self-disclosure with a queer-affirming health professional; knowledge about the unique health challenges of LGBTQ+ people, including disease prevention and health promotion; and a sense of self-efficacy about their health, or the confidence that they know how to live a healthy life, along with the intention, necessary knowledge, and resources to do so. According to the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, LGBTQ+ health can be understood through four lenses:
• Minority stress modelchronic stress that sexual and gender minorities routinely experience can contribute to physical and mental health problems.
• Life-course perspectiveevents at each stage of life influence subsequent stages, with LGBTQ+ people being particularly vulnerable in adolescence and young adulthood.
• Intersectionality perspectivean individual’s multiple identities and the ways they interact may compromise health so that gender and sexual identity may be complicated, for example, by racial or ethnic identity or economic status. Health disparities are already amplified among racial and ethnic minority populations, which queer sexual orientation is likely to intensify further.
• Social ecologyindividuals are surrounded by spheres of influence and support, including families, friends, communities, and society, that shape self-efficacy and health.[1]
In this chapter we keep in mind these four overlapping dimensions while exploring the following topics:
• LGBTQ+ people and the history and culture of medicine.
• Vulnerabilities of LGBTQ+ people across the lifespan and across intersectional identities (including race and ethnicity).
• Transgender people’s health.
• Guidelines for being a smart patient and health care consumer.
History and Culture of Medicine and LGBTQ+ People
LGBTQ+ people often have complicated relationships with medicine, and these relationships have histories that extend back to the 1800s. The philosopher Michel Foucault famously (and controversially) suggested that queer sexualities in the ancient and medieval worlds were judged in an exclusively legal or religious category but that in the 1800s sexualities became medicalized.[2] From this perspective, in historical terms, LGBTQ+ people in Western society went from being criminal or immoral to being mentally ill.
Viewed as a pathology rather than just a moral failing or legal violation, queer sexuality became the object of medicine’s study: What is its cause, and if it is a pathology or disease, how might it be cured? This moment occurred in the second half of the 1800s when medical research and practice had absorbed enormous cultural power and authority through its first modern groundbreaking discoveries, including the development of germ theory, surgical antisepsis, and anesthesia. All things seemed possible to medicine.
Developing Terminology
The term homosexual appears to have been coined by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny (1824–1882) (figure 7.1) in an 1869 pamphlet criticizing a German anti-sodomy law.[3] The term was taken up by the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) in his Psychopathia Sexualis [Mental illnesses related to sex] (1886).[4] The term entered English through a translation of Krafft-Ebing’s work and through the advocacy writing of John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis in England. The term bisexual, in contrast, had been used in botany since the 1700s to denote plants with both male and female anatomy (also referred to as hermaphrodite), but was adapted in the late 1800s to denote a person with roughly equivalent attraction to men and women. The term intersex, used as a synonym for homosexual, was adapted in the early twentieth century from biology, where it indicated the possession of both female and male anatomical features, and it is now the term frequently used by people born with ambiguous genitalia.
Theories of Sexual Variation
These attempts to name this unique species of human beings and diagnose what they viewed as sexual pathology, or disease, led physicians, sexologists, and psychiatrists to a search for causality and treatment. David F. Greenberg identifies five explanatory categories that emerged over time: homosexuality as innate, degeneracy theory, Darwinian theory, psychoanalytic theory, and behaviorism.[5]
Nineteenth-century advances in embryology and genetics may have influenced what had often been an assumption since Greco-Roman antiquity that sexuality was innate, leading to a theory of the third sex, which was also encouraged by movements for social tolerance and legal reform. In contrast, proponents of degeneracy theory viewed homosexuality and bisexuality as akin to criminality, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Degeneracy suggests that the gene pool had become exhausted as a result of modern life or personal vice and indulgence inherited from a previous generation. Similarly, the application of Darwinian theory evaluated people and behavior, characterizing homosexual and bisexual people as evolutionary throwbacks, akin to “primitive” peoples whom Europeans had colonized throughout the world and whose sexual mores were at odds with Western notions of morality.
Perhaps no theories of sexual identity have been more influential than psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism. Although various psychodynamic theories were espoused in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Sigmund Freud, often called the father of modern psychoanalysis, postulated that infants are “polymorphous perverse,” deriving pleasure from many parts of their body and regardless of gender. The function of society, for Freud, was to channel pleasure into an acceptable, productive heterosexuality. However, traumas or inner conflicts could arrest a child’s psychosexual development or cause a young adult to regress into homosexuality (for example, an overly attentive mother and distant father for boys). The role of psychotherapy was to expose the trauma or conflict and allow growth toward heterosexuality to resume. Nonetheless, Freud was less inclined to view homosexuality as a sickness than as a form of psychosexual immaturity. Behaviorism, in contrast, has been inclined to view sexual orientation generally as a learned behavior, which means that homosexuality can be unlearned.[6] Whereas psychoanalytic theory prefers talk therapy, behaviorism has tended to employ rewards and punishments to “reprogram” sexual behavior, including electroshocks and hormone injections. So-called gay conversion therapy, the subject of increasing legal rejection by states today, has a decades-old history.
Emerging Self-Care
Throughout the twentieth century the medical establishment in the United States generally considered queer sexualities as mental illnesses. However, early descriptive research by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues disclosed both a surprising number of self-identified LGB persons and a fluid spectrum of human sexual response. What they called a “heterosexual-homosexual rating scale” identified a range from exclusively heterosexual (0) to equally heterosexual and homosexual (3), otherwise known as bisexual, to exclusively homosexual (6). This scale was applied to each individual according to the participants’ sexual behavior and psychic reactions—that is, thoughts, feelings, and fantasies.[7]
It is no wonder, then, that by the 1960s and the emergence of the gay rights movement, many LGBTQ+ people had come to distrust the medical establishment. Health care providers often either exhibited hostility or acknowledged ignorance about the unique health concerns of LGBTQ+ people.[8] Many gay men and lesbians in particular had come to reject the notion of their sexual orientation as a pathology and had begun to seek the rare health care providers who were affirming of their sexualities. Feminists and the women’s movement had shown how this might be done with health collectives, like the one in Boston that produced the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, part of a movement in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s for homegrown self-published self-help books.[9] One groundbreaking book for queer people included chapters on alcohol safety, venereal diseases (now called sexually transmitted infections), and other health topics, many of which had been previously published in local queer newspapers and magazines.[10] In major urban areas, health clinics for LGBTQ+ people formed to serve this vulnerable population.[11]
When the first published reports of an infectious epidemic that would come to be called acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) appeared in 1981, queer communities were wary of uncertain medical explanations and advice, aware of the stigmatization of their sexualities that was now exacerbated by AIDS, but also more prepared for community organizing around health concerns. Grassroots organizations at least in large or midsize metropolitan areas—like New York’s GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) and Tidewater AIDS Crisis Taskforce of Norfolk, Virginia—advocated, educated, and cared for people infected with HIV. Chapters of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) blossomed in cities, particularly New York and San Francisco, bringing direct-action demonstrations against government and medical inaction. AIDS activists changed the ways that the U.S. medical establishment conducted research and delivered care by insisting on the participation of people living with AIDS in decisions about drug approvals and treatment.[12]
Read
The Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health. Its article “The Shocking ‘Treatment’ to Make Lesbians Straight” (https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XhWjZhAAACUAOpV2) describes the efforts of two researchers to uncover whether and how women were treated for lesbianism in England in the 1960s and 1970s.
• What were some of the challenges that the authors faced in conducting their research?
• How did the beliefs of the health care community at the time affect the treatments designed to “cure” their patients?
• A former patient pointed out that “[lesbians] were being tested against heteronormative ideas of sexual attraction—a significant flaw!” What did she mean by this?
Medicine and the History of Transgender Care
The celebrity of Christine Jorgensen (figure 7.2), who began her physical transition from male to female in the early 1950s and who led a bold public life as a writer, lecturer, and entertainer, brought the transgender experience to wide attention.[13] Beginning in 1965, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was the first American medical school to study and perform what was called sex reassignment surgery (now more aptly known as gender-affirming surgery), or in popular parlance, sex change operations. However, despite this pioneering role, the Johns Hopkins clinic ended the practice in 1978, in part because of flawed transphobic follow-up research. Only recently has it resumed its transgender and gender-affirming care.[14] In the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, almost forty thousand patients sought transgender care, with 11 percent of them seeking gender-affirming surgery and an increasing percentage using health insurance rather than out-of-pocket payments as had been typical in the past.[15]
Medicine’s relationship to LGBTQ+ people has been complicated enough over the last century and a half, but considering a person’s place in the human lifespan and intersectional identities makes it even more so. We explore these considerations next.
Vulnerabilities across the Lifespan and across Intersectional Identities
Decades of research have indicated that LGBTQ+ populations face a disproportionate burden of health problems and stigma, including higher levels of depression, lower self-esteem, compromised academic achievement, and more substance use.[16] These disparities are documented across the lifespan, from childhood to young adulthood and even into late adulthood.[17] Researchers have identified minority stress, or sexuality- and gender-related stressors, as the mechanism through which these health problems can be explained.[18]
Minority Stress Model
Being a marginalized or minority person in a society produces personal and group stress, sometimes invisible but always with both psychological and physiological effects. The Institute of Medicine report proposed the minority stress model as a strong framework to understand health disparities among LGBTQ+ populations. In particular, the report highlights how minority stress has been found to affect the day-to-day lives and health of LGBTQ+ individuals across the lifespan.[19] This minority stress can be distal (e.g., victimization from others because of a sexual minority identity) or proximal (e.g., concealment of sexual identity, internalized homophobia). Therefore, strategies to promote health and well-being should consider multiple types of stressors.
Intersecting Identities
In addition to minority stress, the Institute of Medicine recommended a focus on intersectionality as an imperative consideration for researchers, clinicians, and other stakeholders invested in LGBTQ+ health.[20] Intersectionality at its broadest meaning proposes that race, ethnicity, ability status, and other oppressed identities can amplify LGBTQ+ health issues.[21] In addition to being aware how oppressed and intersecting identities can compound health outcomes, researchers are increasingly measuring and considering all demographic characteristics among LGBTQ+ youth to better understand how multiple identities (e.g., being Black, gay, and residing in the U.S. South) might be related to the holistic LGBTQ+ experience. For example, a study collected data from 17,112 LGBTQ+ youth across the United States and documented twenty-six distinct sexual and gender identities.[22] Additionally, youth who were transgender and nonbinary were more likely than cisgender youth to identify with an “emerging sexual identity label,” such as pansexual (figure 7.3). These patterns also differed by ethnoracial identity, suggesting that youth of color are using different terms, compared with their white counterparts, to describe their sexual attractions and gender identities. The next step is to better understand how intersecting identities may be uniquely associated with health outcomes, given that a large focus of research has focused on disease prevention and health promotion among LGBTQ+ populations. The Institute of Medicine also points out that LGBTQ+ couples and their children are less likely to have adequate health insurance, which is usually provided through employers, especially when they are unemployed or underemployed.[23]
Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
Recent research on health disparities finds that the gap in disparities between some LGBTQ+ and heterosexual youth continues to grow across a number of outcomes.[24] Emerging research has moved beyond documenting these disparities to examining the risk and protective factors that may help prevent disease and promote health among LGBTQ+ people.
With respect to LGBTQ+ youth, research has consistently documented family and parent support to be the strongest buffer against negative health experiences, above and beyond other support systems. In addition to families, a number of other support systems are known to protect against negative health (and thus disease later in life), such as school-based clubs, supportive peers, and supportive policies and laws.[25] The protective role of these support systems extends into young adulthood and across a lifespan, but the magnitude by which certain supports (e.g., school peers) affect LGBTQ+ health may change.
Among older LGBTQ+ adults, there has been a strong focus on sexually transmitted disease and HIV prevention. Given HIV’s disproportionate burdens on the LGBTQ+ community, and in particular the disproportionate impact on African American men who have sex with men, research funding and attention have focused on reducing this stark disparity (figure 7.4). Medical advancements in preventing HIV have proliferated in the recent past, and one method in particular, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), has been the focus of many studies. However, a vexing dilemma exists: although there is a drug that can prevent HIV infection, why aren’t more men who have sex with men (and LGBTQ+ individuals) taking the drug? After all, Tony Kirby and Michelle Thornber-Dunwell find that the rates of HIV acquisition in the United States are still high and similar to the rates in other countries. Researchers continue to consider how stigma, a history of medical mistrust, and other factors might thwart the uptake of lifesaving drugs that prevent HIV among LGBTQ+ populations.[26]
See table 7.1 for a summary of the critical health concerns over the life course.
Table 7.1 Health concerns across the lifespan
Life stage Health concerns
Adolescence HIV infection, particularly among Black or Latino men who have sex with men; depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts; smoking, alcohol, substance use; homelessness; violence, bullying, harassment
Early to midadulthood Mood and anxiety disorders; using preventive health resources less frequently; smoking, alcohol, substance use
Later adulthood Long-term hormone use among transgender people; HIV infection; stigma, discrimination, violence in health care institutions (e.g., nursing homes). The research literature also suggests that older LGBTQ+ adults may possess a high degree of resilience, having weathered the difficulties of adolescence and earlier adulthood
Source: Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011).
A long history of health professionals’ insensitivity or even hostility to LGBTQ+ people, as described in the beginning of this chapter, continues to have real-life consequences. Disparities are particularly evident among transgender people, who are a uniquely vulnerable population and whose health and wellness concerns we discuss next.
Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Health Care
The transgender and gender-nonconforming community has suffered, often in silence. Numerous studies have depicted the barriers these patients face with respect to health care, which include mistreatment by health care providers and providers’ discomfort or inexperience regarding patient’s health care needs, as well as patients’ lack of adequate insurance coverage for health care services.[27] Owing to these barriers, transgender and gender-nonconforming patients are often left to navigate health care on their own.
For example, the National Center for Transgender Equality reported that 33 percent of respondents who had seen a health care provider in the preceding year suffered at least one negative experience related to being transgender, and 23 percent of respondents did not even seek a medical provider when they needed one for fear of being mistreated. Additionally, a staggering 39 percent of respondents experienced psychological distress, and 40 percent have attempted suicide in their lifetimes, which is nearly nine times the 4.6 percent rate of the general population.[28] Seeking routine or preventive physical and mental health care, let alone transition-related services for those who seek to transition, is difficult.
Incidence and Prevalence
Several attempts have been made to determine how many Americans identify as transgender.[29] A 2016 estimate postulates that 0.6 percent of the population, or 1.4 million Americans, are transgender.[30] However, the gender construct is complex, and more rigorous epidemiological studies are needed on a global scale to delineate the incidence (percentage of the population) and prevalence (total number of people) of this experience. Historically, transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals have been marginalized, and the disparities discussed earlier in this chapter may instill a sense of fear within the community, thus leading to greater difficulty in obtaining an accurate estimate. Additionally, cultural differences among societies shape the behavioral expressions of gender identities, masking gender dysphoria.[31] For instance, certain cultures may revere and consider as sacred such gender-nonbinary behaviors, leading to less stigmatization.[32]
Watch
In a video in the InQueery series, Angelica Ross maps out the history of the word transgender, tracing its origins from the words transvestite and transsexual to the contemporary term transgender (https://www.them.us/video/watch/angelica-ross-explains-the-history-of-the-word-transgender).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=107
• Why is understanding the difference between sex and gender important when learning about the history of the word transgender?
• What different identities fall under the transgender umbrella? Why is there debate about whether some identities do or do not belong?
• What information was new or surprising to you in the video? How does it affect your understanding of transgender needs in health care?
Moreover, as the literature suggests, the prevalence of gender dysphoria is unknown. There has been great controversy within the transgender and gender-nonconforming community regarding this diagnosis because in earlier years the phenomenon was deemed psychopathological.[33] On the one hand, gender nonconformity refers to “the extent to which a person’s gender identity, expression, or role differs from the cultural norms that designate for people of a particular sex.”[34] On the other hand, gender dysphoria, first described by N. M. Fisk in 1974, is the “discomfort or distress that is caused by a discrepancy or incongruence with a person’s gender identity and that very same person’s sex that was assigned at birth.”[35] Therefore, not every transgender and gender-nonconforming individual experiences gender dysphoria. As a result, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health released a statement in 2010 that urged the depsychopathologization of gender nonconformity worldwide.[36] The goal of the health care professional is thus to assist transgender and gender-nonconforming patients who suffer from gender dysphoria by affirming their gender identity and collaboratively investigating the array of options that are at their disposal for expression of their gender identity.
Therapeutic Options for Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Patients
An array of therapeutic options must be considered when collaboratively working with transgender and gender-nonconforming patients. Transition, for those who seek it, does not follow a linear model but is, rather, an individualized process based on the patient’s specific needs. Interventions and their sequence differ from person to person. A collaborative approach between the health care professional and patient is of the utmost importance. Additionally, a multidisciplinary approach, one that encompasses primary care providers, mental health clinicians, surgeons, and speech pathologists, results in the best outcomes. The following lists therapeutic options that a transgender and gender-nonconforming patient may undertake:
• Changing gender expression or role, whether living full-time or part-time in the gender expression that aligns with the current gender identity. This may involve chest binding to create a flat chest contour, padding of the hips and buttocks, genital tucking, wearing gaff underwear, or wearing a prosthesis.
• Changing a name and gender marker on identity documents.
• Seeking psychotherapy to understand and investigate the constructs of gender, such as gender identity, gender role, gender attribution, and gender expression. Psychotherapy may also address the positive or negative impacts of such feelings as stigma and address internalized transphobia, if present.
• Undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy to either feminize or masculinize the patient’s body.
• Choosing gender-affirming surgeries to alter primary or secondary sex characteristics.
• Finding peer-support groups and community organizations that provide social support, as well as advocacy.
• Attending speech or voice and communication therapy that facilitates comfort with gender identity or expression and ameliorates the stress associated with developing verbal and nonverbal behaviors or cues when interacting with others.
• Removing hair through laser treatments, electrolysis, waxing, epilating, or shaving.
The options may seem overwhelming to review, but it is the goal of the health care professional to assist the patient through the journey, regardless of what therapeutic options the patient ultimately chooses. Access to those services requires that the transgender person live in an area where they are available and have adequate health insurance, which is usually provided by employers. Transgender people, particularly trans people of color, however, are less likely to be employed than cisgender LGB people, thus are often deprived of the health insurance that they need.
Criteria for Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy
Gender-affirming hormone therapy consists of the administration of exogenous endocrine agents to elicit feminizing or masculinizing changes. While some transgender and gender-nonconforming patients may seek maximum changes, others may be content with a more androgynous presentation. The fluidity of this construct should not be minimized, because hormonal therapy must be individualized on the basis of a patient’s goals and thorough understanding of the risks and benefits of medications and an in-depth review of a patient’s other existing medical conditions. Furthermore, initiation of hormonal therapy may
be undertaken after a psychosocial assessment has been conducted and informed consent has been obtained by a qualified health professional. . . . The criteria for gender-affirming hormone therapy are as follows:
1. Persistent, well-documented gender dysphoria;
2. Capacity to make a fully informed decision and to consent for treatment;
3. Age of majority in a given country . . . ;
4. If significant medical or mental health concerns are present, they must be reasonably well-controlled.[37]
Common agents used for feminization regimens are estrogen and antiandrogens, and the common agent used for masculinization regimens is testosterone. Progestins are controversial in feminizing regimens, and clinicians can cite only anecdotal evidence for the hormone’s use in full breast development. A clinical comparison of feminizing regimens with and without the use of progestins found that these agents did not enhance breast growth or reduce serum levels of free testosterone.[38] Additionally, progestins’ adverse effects outweigh their benefits because depression, weight gain, and lipid changes have been seen with these agents.[39] However, progestins do play a role in masculinizing regimens and when used in early stages of hormonal therapy assist in the cessation of menses.
Physical Effects of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy
A thorough discussion regarding the physical effects of gender-affirming hormone therapy between the health care professional and the patient is warranted. Using endocrine agents to achieve congruency with a patient’s gender identity will induce physical changes, which may be reversible or irreversible. Most physical changes occur within two years, with several studies estimating the process to span five years. The length of time attributed to such changes is unique to each individual. Tables 7.2 and 7.3 outline the estimated effects and the course of such changes.
Table 7.2 Effects of gender-affirming hormone therapy with masculinizing agents
Effect Onset (months)
Acne 1–6
Facial and body hair growth 6–12
Scalp hair loss 6–12
Increased muscle mass 6–12
Fat redistribution 1–6
Cessation of menses 1–6
Clitoral enlargement 1–6
Vaginal atrophy 1–6
Deepening of voice 6–12
Table 7.3 Effects of gender-affirming hormone therapy with feminizing agents
Effect Onset (months)
Softening of the skin 3–6
Decreased libido 1–3
Decreased spontaneous erections 1–3
Decreased muscle mass 3–6
Decreased testicular volume 6–12
Decreased terminal hair growth 6–12
Breast growth 3–6
Fat redistribution 3–6
Voice changes None
Because of the masculinizing or feminizing effects of endocrine agents used in transitioning, the coming out process for someone who identifies as transgender or gender nonconforming may be challenging and may differ from the coming out process of LGB individuals. LGB individuals may keep their sexual orientation concealed, but the effects of hormonal agents on the transgender person are noticeable to others. Transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals may have to come out during social interactions, unless they wish to relocate to a new area, where they may choose not to disclose their transgender identity, often referred to in the community as “living stealth.”
The coming out process may seem daunting to endure and may encompass numerous challenges. Those lacking support or who have been “mistreated, harassed, marginalized, defined by surgical status, or repeatedly asked probing personal questions may . . . [experience] significant distress.”[40] Additionally, the persistent and chronic nature of these microaggressions have led some researchers to apply the minority stress model to transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals.[41] Such experiences create a potential for increase in the rate of certain health care conditions, such as clinical depression and anxiety and their somatization, or conversion to physical symptoms.[42]
Transgender people, like all other LGBTQ+ people, need to learn how to become informed consumers of health care services and make informed choices about their physical and mental well-being. The next section explains how to become such a knowledgeable patient.
Watch
A video from the Montgomery College, Maryland, nursing program provides a case study that focuses on culturally competent health care for trans and gender-nonconforming people. It captures many of the challenges that a trans patient might face during initial interactions with staff and providers at a health care clinic. A full video transcript can be found in the appendix.
• What challenges does Joe face in terms of accessing health care?
• What are some of the mistakes made by staff at the health care clinic?
• How does Nurse Rachel address those mistakes, both in that initial visit to the clinic and afterward?
Being a Smart Patient and Health Care Consumer
As noted throughout this chapter, LGBTQ+ individuals encounter more discrimination in health care compared with the heterosexual population. While some evidence shows that negative experiences for some LGBTQ+ persons are decreasing, discrimination continues. Lack of health care provider education in culturally inclusive LGBTQ+ communication and care is frequently noted as a contributing factor for health professionals’ discrimination. The shortage of educated practitioners and amount of practitioner bias have caused many LGBTQ+ persons to either delay or avoid seeking health care services. A primary reason attributed for this delay or avoidance is that LGBTQ+ individuals often feel invisible to their providers and have experienced discrimination in previous encounters.[43]
Other factors also contribute to the negative health care experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals. A provider whose value system, religious beliefs, and political party affiliation are hostile to LGBTQ+ people may have difficulty providing the respectful and affirming care that LGBTQ+ persons are entitled to. For LGBTQ+ people to receive respectful and culturally inclusive, patient-centered care from their providers, they must take it on themselves to be informed health care consumers, practice self-advocacy, and shop wisely for providers who are LGBTQ+ affirming. Self-advocacy is essential to optimizing access to quality health services.
Health Care Providers
The teaching of medical and nursing students about health issues unique to the LGBTQ+ population is inconsistent among education programs for health care providers. An emerging body of research finds a need for more education to better meet the requirements of LGBTQ+ patients. In one study, for example, U.S. medical schools were found to provide only an average of five hours of LGBTQ+ education throughout the curriculum. Baccalaureate nursing programs in another study spent only an average of a little over two hours teaching content about LGBTQ+ health topics. Less is known about the extent to which other health provider education programs cover this content. During a health care clinical experience, LGBTQ+ individuals often encounter health care providers who lack a basic understanding of LGBTQ+ cultures, terminology, and culturally inclusive care.[44]
Locating a health care facility that affirms LGBTQ+ people can be difficult but is not impossible. Some national organizations provide resources for LGBTQ+ persons and health care providers. For example, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national LGBTQ+ civil rights organization with over three million members, has a benchmarking tool, the Healthcare Equality Index, to recognize the health care facilities with policies and procedures for equity and inclusion of LGBTQ+ patients, visitors, and employees. Health care facilities evaluated by the index are available in its directory. An agency must reapply every year to demonstrate that it meets the current standards outlined by the Human Rights Campaign.[45]
Another organization, GLMA (Gay and Lesbian Medical Association), advances health care equality for LGBTQ+ people and has an extensive directory of health care providers across the United States that are LGBTQ+ affirming. The GLMA published guidelines that offer recommendations for practitioners to consider when caring for LGBTQ+ clients. The National LGBT Health Education Center, a program of the Fenway Institute, also has excellent resources to help educate providers.[46] Both organizations provide valuable resources and are worth mentioning to a provider who lacks sufficient knowledge to provide culturally inclusive care for LGBTQ+ persons. Organizations and coalitions that support LGBTQ+ health are listed in table 7.4. All provide free publications and resources for the LGBTQ+ person and health care providers.
Table 7.4 LGBTQ+ education and advocacy organizations
GLMA Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality http://www.glma.org/
Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Addiction Professionals and Their Allies http://www.nalgap.org/
World Professional Association for Transgender Health https://www.wpath.org/
Center of Excellence for Transgender Health http://transhealth.ucsf.edu/
National LGBT Cancer Network https://cancer-network.org/
Trevor Project https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
CenterLink: Community of LGBT Centers https://www.lgbtcenters.org/
Fenway Health https://fenwayhealth.org/the-fenway-institute/
Howard Brown Health https://howardbrown.org/
Los Angeles LGBT Center https://lalgbtcenter.org/
Mazzoni Center LGBTQ Health and Well-Being https://www.mazzonicenter.org/
Callen-Lorde https://callen-lorde.org/
LGBT Health Link https://www.lgbthealthlink.org/
Informed Health Care Consumers
When navigating a system in which not all providers understand or practice care that includes LGBTQ+ people, LGBTQ+ individuals need to know what questions to ask when visiting their provider. Although it is important to be true to yourself and disclose your sexual identity to your provider so you can receive the most holistic care possible, not all LGBTQ+ persons feel comfortable disclosing this information, particularly to a new health care provider with whom they have not yet established a trusting relationship. The Institute of Medicine has recommended including sexual orientation and gender identity data in electronic health records so that more health care facilities will ask patients for this information.[47] Ultimately, however, LGBTQ+ persons must decide for themselves when and to whom to disclose their LGBTQ+ identity.
Before visiting a provider, consider calling the office to ask if they provide inclusive care for LGBTQ+ patients. Bring a friend or partner to the visit for support if you are uncomfortable meeting with the health care provider. Health care providers must adhere to laws, policies, and ethical codes to keep your information private. Although a health care provider may ask about sexual orientation and gender identity, LGBTQ+ persons also have the right to request that the provider not enter their sexual orientation and gender identity into the medical record.
Paying Attention to Special Health Issues
Providers must understand health care issues common in the LGBTQ+ population and explore whether their patients have any of these risk factors. GLMA has created ten resource sheets for LGBTQ+ persons, each one addressing one of the top health concerns to discuss with a health care provider. Although not all these health issues apply to every person, it is essential to be aware that these health topics are more common among LGBTQ+ people. Several health topics are relevant to all LGBTQ+ groups, and others pertain more to one group. For example, research has identified that depression, tobacco and alcohol use, sexually transmitted diseases (including human papillomavirus and HIV/AIDS), and certain cancers are greater health risks in the LGBTQ+ population. Moreover, the risk of illicit use of injectable silicone is a more significant concern among transgender women. Other health issues are more common within certain groups, such as breast and gynecological cancers among lesbians and male-to-female transgender persons. In addition to the risk of HIV/AIDS among men who have sex with men, they also have a higher incidence of and mortality from prostate, anal, and colon cancer.[48]
Minimizing risk factors for these acute and chronic illnesses is essential to maintaining health. The LGBT Health Link is a network for health equity and offers very practical advice for things that LGBTQ+ people can do to improve their wellness. Recommendations include how to search for insurance options, practice preventive care, seek mental health support, adopt a healthier lifestyle, and practice safer sex.[49]
The resources provided in this section support LGBTQ+ individuals to advocate for themselves when seeking health care services, particularly from providers who are not well educated about LGBTQ+ health issues or who do not demonstrate culturally inclusive and affirming behaviors. Although health care providers are responsible for establishing a trusting relationship with their patients, this does not consistently occur in every health care setting. When a health care provider demonstrates genuine concern and respect for an LGBTQ+ individual in a practice not restricted to a fifteen-minute office visit, then there is greater opportunity for individualized, holistic, patient-centered care.
Becoming a smarter LGBTQ+ health consumer requires being aware of the community’s complex history with medicine, understanding the unique health issues involved, and recognizing health risks and changes that occur over the course of life.
Key Questions
• How has Western medicine shaped the history of nonnormative genders and sexualities in Europe and the United States?
• How has LGBTQ+ activism influenced health care systems and medical practice?
• What connections do you see between people’s sexual or gender identities and their experiences in Western health care settings?
• Why would it be important for a health care professional to understand a patient’s identity from an intersectional perspective?
• Why would some argue that Western medicine is a key social institution that has helped to define and enforce structures of inequality for LGBTQ+ people?
Research Resources
Compiled by Stephen Stratton
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about LGBTQ+ health and wellness.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then, create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or editing a photograph in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: Find a partner or split into groups, and choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the resources in this chapter to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
“Accessing Sexual Health Information Online: Use, Motivations, and Consequences for Youth with Different Sexual Orientations,” by Kimberly J. Mitchell, Michele L. Ybarra, Josephine D. Korchmaros, and Joseph G. Kosciw
Nearly 80 percent of LGBTQ+ youth in an extensive 2014 survey published in Health Education Research (volume 29; https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyt071) said they seek sexual information online, compared with less than 20 percent for their heterosexual counterparts. Discussions about how youth use the information and accuracy of the information received add to the article’s value.
Agenda 2030 for LGBTI Health and Well-Being, by the Global Forum on MSM and HIV and OutRight Action International
Agenda 2030 is the United Nations global effort on sustainability, including health and preventive education. The Global Forum on MSM and OutRight Action International wrote an excellent report in 2017 of how countries and governments can meet these 2030 goals through specific attention to LGBTQ+ people and their needs while addressing the marginalization they face based on sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics. See https://msmgf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Agenda-2030-for-LGBTI-Health_July-2017.pdf.
“Health Care for Lesbians and Bisexual Women,” by Committee on Health Care for Underserved Women
This well-written opinion from practitioners, written in 2012 and reaffirmed in 2021, on gynecologic issues for women who have sex with women covers recommendations for the standards of care for women seeking care in physician’s offices, from mental health considerations to social concerns. It is the standard all ob-gyn physicians need to adhere to for their sexual and gender minority patients. See https://www.acog.org/Clinical-Guidance-and-Publications/Committee-Opinions/Committee-on-Health-Care-for-Underserved-Women/Health-Care-for-Lesbians-and-Bisexual-Women.
“HIV/AIDS,” from World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the United Nations organization concerned with public health issues worldwide and is both a health monitoring and data collection agency. Its “HIV/AIDS” web page (https://www.who.int/hiv/en/) provides HIV and AIDS information, and data sets, maps, reports, and charts available on the website highlight the work individual countries are doing to increase access to HIV medications and their prevention efforts.
“Improving the Health Care of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) People: Understanding and Eliminating Health Disparities,” by Kevin L. Ard and Harvey J. Makadon
This brief 2012 report covers the disparities in health services and outcomes seen in the LGBTQ+ community, as well as specific areas of concern in the population. It provides basic education for understanding LGBTQ+ communities and specific concerns within those populations, discusses differences in health care among LGBTQ+ people of color, and lists steps for clinicians and health care providers to take to provide culturally competent care. The report is cited by numerous authors and used as a reference link from many governmental websites about LGBTQ+ health care. See https://www.lgbthealtheducation.org/wp-content/uploads/Improving-the-Health-of-LGBT-People.pdf.
“Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Health Services in the United States: Origins, Evolution, and Contemporary Landscape,” by Alexander J. Martos, Patrick A. Wilson, and Ilan H. Meyer
Covering the history of community-based health services within the LGBTQ+ community, this article provides insight into the future success or failure of such clinics, which have played a huge role in the field of LGBTQ+ health. The 2017 article in PLoS One (volume 12, number 7; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180544) was funded as part of a long-term study from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. government’s primary biomedical and public health agency.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health, from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides a website highlighting health issues among the LGBTQ+ populations (https://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/). It links to publications, statistics, data sets, and news from a wide variety of journals, government agencies, and other sources. The CDC is the preeminent U.S. government agency on illness and health.
LGBT Mental Health Syllabus, from Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry
This educational website (http://www.aglp.org/gap/) is for people training in psychology and psychiatry and a source of information for any mental health trainee or practitioner on issues surrounding service to LGBTQ+ individuals. It includes a history of treatment of LGBTQ+ people and primers on transgender and intersex patients.
National LGBT Health Education Center, from Fenway Institute
This website (https://www.lgbthealtheducation.org/) provides free access to numerous publications highlighting health care concerns and issues of the LGBTQ+ population for health care organizations and service providers. Translations of their publications in Spanish and other languages are also available. The Fenway Institute is the world’s largest LGBTQ+ health care, research, and education organization.
“Sexual and Gender Minority Health: What We Know and What Needs to Be Done,” by Kenneth H. Mayer, Judith B. Bradford, Harvey J. Makadon, Ron Stall, Hilary Goldhammer, and Stewart Landers
This 2008 article in the American Journal of Public Health (volume 98, number 6; https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2007.127811) offers a strong summary of known disparities in health outcomes in the LGBTQ+ health field, research into specific health topics, and a discussion of what directions LGBTQ+ health care needs to move in to meet the needs of clients. The authors, well-known experts in LGBTQ+ health care, are among the authors of the Fenway Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and TransgenderHealth.
State-Sponsored Homophobia, from International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association
This annual report on the laws criminalizing gender and sexuality around the world also has articles focusing on particular countries and regions. Data sets used to generate the report can be accessed at the report’s website (https://ilga.org/state-sponsored-homophobia-report). The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association is the world’s foremost LGBTQ+ metaorganization and holds special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
Deep Dive: Books and Film
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, by Randy Shilts
Told from a variety of viewpoints, this book on the AIDS epidemic is an exposé of the failures of the medical establishment, public health, federal government, and research scientists that led to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Written by a journalist from San Francisco, it is a foundational text for the examination of how politics plays a role in disease outbreaks, and it exposes both society and government as partners in allowing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ people. The book won the American Library Association Stonewall Award (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).
Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation, edited by Lourdes Dolores Follins and Jonathan Mathias Lassiter
This book for both health consumers and health workers looks at the intersections of being Black and a same-gender-loving person. Chapters cover sexual identity, women, incarceration, HIV, and much more. Some authors use the cultural signifying term same-gender-loving, rather than the standard Eurocentric term LGB. The book is for anyone interested in intersections of sexual and gender identity with race in the United States and focuses on positive steps for individuals and communities, not on statistics and pathologies. The book received the 2017 Achievement Award from the GLMA: Health Professionals for LGBT Equality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).
Fenway Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health, edited by Harvey J. Makadon, Kenneth H. Mayer, Jennifer Potter, and Hilary Goldhammer
Written by public health professionals, researchers, and clinicians, this book (second edition) provides information on health concerns specific to LGBTQ+ populations such as health care across the life continuum, disease prevention, understanding LGBTQ+ health care needs, health promotion, and gender identity. The Fenway Institute in Boston is a community-based research, education, and care center. It works with LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected populations and is well-respected in the field (Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 2015).
Gen Silent, directed by Stu Maddux
This documentary is about older LGBTQ+ people who are going back into the closet as they age in order to survive societal discrimination. The film discusses the aging process, depression and loneliness, and problems with assisted living facing older LGBTQ+ people. It includes the stories of a transgender senior and an interracial couple. The film won jury and audience awards for best documentary at the Sacramento Film and Music Festival in 2010 and the audience award for best documentary at the Frameline Film Festival in 2011 (United States: Interrobang Productions).
“Gynecologic Issues for Lesbians,” by Susan R. Johnson
This chapter (https://www.glowm.com/section-view/heading/Gynecologic%20Issues%20for%20Lesbians/item/430#.Yq8MdrnMK3I) is part of an online encyclopedia (GLOWM: Global Library of Women’s Medicine) of women’s health issues containing over four hundred chapters written by medical specialists in their respective fields. The chapter covers issues of special interest to all women who have sex with women, including more than simply gynecologic issues and a variety of life experiences, not simply Eurocentric studies.
Preventive Health Measures for Lesbian and Bisexual Women, by Robin Mathy and Shelly Kerr
This solid discussion of the similarities and differences of preventive health care in women who have sex with women and minorities within that community also includes descriptions of possible outcomes from physicians who treat patients with discrimination and stigmatization (Milton Park, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2007).
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth
Written in the style and tone of Our Bodies, Our Selves, this book is a resource for both professionals and nonprofessionals on mental, emotional, and physical health and other topics. It places the trans individual in charge of their life and health. The book received the 2015 Achievement Award from the GLMA: Health Professionals for LGBT Equality, and it was listed as one of the top ten transgender nonfiction books of 2014 by Advocate magazine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Unequal Opportunity: Health Disparities Affecting Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States, edited by Richard J. Wolitski, Ron Stall, and Ronald O. Valdiserri
The health of men who have sex with men (MSM) has numerous disparities with health of the broader male population. The editors feature research and analysis that demonstrates not only general disparities but also those that affect older men, people of color, low-income MSM, and others. A highly recommended book that can serve both researchers and general readers, it contains numerous ideas for health promotion and public health intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Glossary
bisexual. Romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior toward both males and females or toward more than one sex or gender.
degeneracy. Also known as degeneration theory; nineteenth-century theory that homosexuality and bisexuality were akin to criminality, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
gender-affirming hormone therapy. Hormone therapy in which sex hormones and other hormonal medications are administered to transgender or gender-nonconforming individuals to more closely align their secondary sexual characteristics with their gender identity.
gender-affirming surgery. Also known as sex reassignment surgery; surgical procedures by which a transgender person’s physical appearance and function of their existing sexual characteristics are altered to resemble those socially associated with their identified gender.
gender dysphoria. The distress a person can feel because of a mismatch between their gender identity and their sex assigned at birth.
gender expression. A person’s behavior, mannerisms, interests, and appearance that are associated with gender in a particular cultural context, specifically with the categories of femininity or masculinity.
gender identity. The personal sense of one’s gender, which can correlate with assigned sex at birth or can differ from it.
gender nonconformity. A behavior or gender expression by an individual that does not match masculine or feminine gender norms.
hermaphrodite. Biologically, an organism that has complete or partial reproductive organs and produces gametes normally associated with both male and female sexes.
homosexual. A person with a romantic attraction to, sexual attraction to, or sexual behavior with others of the same sex or gender.
incidence. A measure of the probability of occurrence of a given medical condition in a population within a specified period of time.
intersectionality. Overlapping or intersecting social identities, such as race, class, and gender, and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination.
intersex. People born with any of several variations in sex characteristics, including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals.
minority stress model. A sociological model, as proposed by Ilan Meyer, explaining why sexual minority individuals, on average, experience higher rates of mental health problems relative to their straight peers.
pansexual. The sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction toward people regardless of their sex or gender identity.
prevalence. The proportion of a particular population affected by a condition (typically a disease or a risk factor such as smoking or seat belt use).
sex reassignment surgery. Also known as gender-affirming surgery; surgical procedures by which a transgender person’s physical appearance and function of their existing sexual characteristics are altered to resemble those socially associated with their identified gender.
sexually transmitted infections. Pathogens that are commonly spread by sexual activity, especially vaginal intercourse, anal sex, and oral sex.
third sex. A concept in which individuals are categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither man nor woman.
1. Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011).
2. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 43.
3. J.-C. Feray, M. Herzer, and G. W. Peppel, “Homosexual Studies and Politics in the 19th Century: Karl Maria Kertbeny,” Journal of Homosexuality 19 (2010): 23–48.
4. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. Eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Stuttgart, Germany: Ferdinand Enke, 1886).
5. D. F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
6. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality.
7. A. C. Kinsey, W. B. Pomeroy, and C. E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 638.
8. K. Batza, Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
9. K. Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
10. K. Jay and A. Young, eds., After You’re Out: Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbian Women (New York: Links, 1975).
11. A. J. Martos, P. A. Wilson, and I. H. Meyer, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Health Services in the United States: Origins, Evolution, and Contemporary Landscape,” PloS One 12, no. 7 (2017): e0180544. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180544.
12. J.-M. Andriote, Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
13. J. J. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); J. Meyerowitz, “Transforming Sex: Christine Jorgensen in the Postwar U.S.,” OAH Magazine of History 20, no. 2 (2006): 16–20.
14. Z. Ford, “Johns Hopkins to Resume Gender-Affirming Surgeries after Nearly 40 Years,” Think Progress, October 18, 2016, https://thinkprogress.org/johns-hopkins-transgender-surgery-5c9c428184c1/.
15. C. Tantibanchachai, “Study Suggests Gender-Affirming Surgeries Are on the Rise, Along with Insurance Coverage,” Hub (Johns Hopkins University), February 28, 2018, https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/02/28/gender-affirming-reassignment-surgeries-increase/.
16. K. I. Fredriksen-Goldsen, H. J. Kim, S. E. Barkan, A. Muraco, and C. P. Hoy-Ellis, “Health Disparities among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Older Adults: Results from a Population-Based Study,” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 10 (2013): 1802–1809; Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People; S. L. Reisner, J. M. White, J. B. Bradford, and M. J. Mimiaga, “Transgender Health Disparities: Comparing Full Cohort and Nested Matched-Pair Study Designs in a Community Health Center,” LGBT Health 1, no. 3 (2014): 177–184; S. T. Russell and J. N. Fish, “Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Youth,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 12 (2016): 465–487.
17. For childhood, see J. G. Kosciw, N. A. Palmer, and R. M. Kull, “Reflecting Resiliency: Openness about Sexual Orientation and/or Gender Identity and Its Relationship to Well-Being and Educational Outcomes for LGBT Students,” American Journal of Community Psychology 55, nos. 1–2 (2015): 167–178; for young adulthood, see C. Ryan, S. T. Russell, D. Huebner, R. Diaz, and J. Sanchez, “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults,” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 23, no. 4 (2010): 205–213; and R. J. Watson, J. Veale, and E. Saewyc, “Disordered Eating among Transgender Youth: Probability Profiles from Risk and Protective Factors,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 50 (2017): 512–522, https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.22627; and for late adulthood, see K. I. Fredriksen-Goldsen, “Promoting Health Equity among LGBT Mid-Life and Older Adults: Revealing How LGBT Mid-Life and Older Adults Can Attain Their Full Health Potential,” Generations 38, no. 4 (2014): 86–92.
18. I. H. Meyer, “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: Conceptual Issues and Research Evidence,” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 5 (2003): 674–679.
19. Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People.
20. Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People.
21. M. C. Parent, C. DeBlaere, and B. Moradi, “Approaches to Research on Intersectionality: Perspectives on Gender, LGBT, and Racial/Ethnic Identities,” Sex Roles 68, nos. 11–12 (2013): 639–645.
22. R. J. Watson, C. Wheldon, and R. M. Puhl, “Evidence of Diverse Identities in a Large National Sample of Sexual and Gender Minority Adolescents,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 30 (2020): 431–442, https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12488.
23. Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People.
24. See, e.g., R. J. Watson, N. Lewis, J. Fish, C. Goodenow, “Sexual Minority Youth Continue to Smoke Cigarettes Earlier and More Often than Heterosexual Peers: Findings from Population-Based Data,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 183 (2018): 64–70, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2017.11.025.
25. For family and parent support, see S. Snapp, R. J. Watson, S. T. Russell, R. Diaz, and C. Ryan, “Social Support Networks for LGBT Young Adults: Low Cost Strategies for Positive Adjustment,” Family Relations 64, no. 3 (2015): 420–430, https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12124; for school-based clubs, see V. P. Poteat, J. R. Scheer, R. A. Marx, J. P. Calzo, and H. Yoshikawa, “Gay-Straight Alliances Vary on Dimensions of Youth Socializing and Advocacy: Factors Accounting for Individual and Setting-Level Differences,” American Journal of Community Psychology 55, nos. 3–4 (2015): 422–432; for supportive peers, see R. J. Watson, A. H. Grossman, and S. T. Russell, “Sources of Social Support and Mental Health among LGB Youth,” Youth and Society 51 (2019): 30–48, https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118X16660110; and for supportive policies and laws, see M. L. Hatzenbuehler, K. M. Keyes, and D. S. Hasin, “State-Level Policies and Psychiatric Morbidity in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations,” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 12 (2009): 2275–2281.
26. For African American men, see V. M. Mays, S. D. Cochran, and A. Zamudio, “HIV Prevention Research: Are We Meeting the Needs of African American Men Who Have Sex with Men?,” Journal of Black Psychology 30, no. 1 (2004): 78–105; for PrEP, see S. A. Golub, K. E. Gamarel, H. J. Rendina, A. Surace, and C. L. Lelutiu-Weinberger, “From Efficacy to Effectiveness: Facilitators and Barriers to PrEP Acceptability and Motivations for Adherence among MSM and Transgender Women in New York City,” AIDS Patient Care and STDs 27, no. 4 (2013): 248–254; for U.S. rates of HIV acquisition, see T. Kirby and M. Thornber-Dunwell, “Uptake of PrEP for HIV Slow among MSM,” Lancet 383, no. 9915 (2014): 399–400; and for other factors, see J. T. Parsons, H. J. Rendina, J. M. Lassiter, T. H. Whitfield, T. J. Starks, and C. Grov, “Uptake of HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in a National Cohort of Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States: The Motivational PrEP Cascade,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes 74, no. 3 (2017): 285–292.
27. K. Konsenko, L. Rintamaki, S. Raney, and K. Maness, “Transgender Patient Perceptions of Stigma in Health Care Contexts,” Medical Care 46 (2013): 647–653; T. Poteat, D. German, and D. Kerrigan, “Managing Uncertainty: A Grounded Theory of Stigma in Transgender Health Encounters,” Social Science and Medicine 84 (2013): 22–29; A. Radix, C. Lelutiu-Weinberger, and K. Gamarel, “Satisfaction and Healthcare Utilization of Transgender and Gender Non-conforming Individuals in NYC: A Community-Based Participatory Study,” LGBT Health 103, no. 10 (2014): 1820–1829; C. G. Roller, C. Sedlak, and C. B. Drauker, “Navigating the System: How Transgender Individuals Engage in Health Care Services,” Journal of Nursing Scholarship 47 (2015): 417–424; N. Sanchez, J. Sanchez, and A. Danoff, “Health Care Utilization, Barriers to Care, and Hormone Usage among Male-to-Female Transgender Persons in New York City,” American Journal of Public Health 99 (2009): 713–719; J. M. Sevelius, E. Patouhas, J. G. Keatley, and M. O. Johnson, “Barriers and Facilitators to Engagement and Retention in Care among Transgender Women Living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 47, no. 1 (2014): 5–16.
28. S. E. James, J. L. Herman, S. Rankin, M. Keisling, L. Mottet, and M. Ana, The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016).
29. Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People; K. J. Zucker and A. A. Lawrence, “Epidemiology of Gender Identity Disorder: Recommendations for the Standards of Care of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health,” International Journal of Transgenderism 11 (2009): 8–18.
30. A. R. Flores, J. L. Herman, G. J. Gates, and T. N. T. Brown, How Many Adults Identify as Transgender in the United States? (Los Angeles, CA: Williams Institute, 2016), https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/How-Many-Adults-Identify-as-Transgender-in-the-United-States.pdf.
31. E. Coleman, W. Bockting, M. Botzer, P. Cohen-Kettenis, G. DeCuypere, J. Feldman, L. Fraser, et al., “Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming People, Version 7,” International Journal of Transgenderism 13, no. 4 (2012): 165–232.
32. E. Coleman, P. Colgan, and L. Gooren, “Male Cross-Gender Behavior in Myanmar (Burma): A Description of the Acault,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 21, no. 3 (1992): 313–321; S. J. Kessler and W. McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (New York: Wiley, 1978); A. Wilson, “How We Find Ourselves: Identity Development and Two-Spirit People,” Harvard Educational Review 66 (1996): 303–317.
33. P. R. McHugh, “Psychiatric Misadventures,” American Scholar 61 (1992): 497–510.
34. Coleman et al., “Standards of Care,” 168.
35. N. M. Fisk, “Gender Dysphoria Syndrome—the Conceptualization That Liberalizes Indications for Total Gender Reorientation and Implies a Broadly Based Multi-dimensional Rehabilitative Regimen,” Western Journal of Medicine 120 (1974): 386–391; American Psychological Association, Definitions Related to Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/sexuality-definitions.pdf.
36. WPATH Board of Directors, “WPATH De-Psychopathologisation Statement,” released May 26, 2010, https://www.wpath.org/policies.
37. Coleman et al., “Standards of Care,” 187.
38. W. Meyer, A. Webb, C. Stuart, J. Finkelstein, B. Lawrence, and P. Walker, “Physical and Hormonal Evaluation of Transsexual Patients: A Longitudinal Study,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 15, no. 2 (1986): 121–138.
39. W. J. Meyer III, A. Webb, C. A. Stuart, J. W. Finkelstein, B. Lawrence, and P. A. Walker, “Physical and Hormonal Evaluation of Transsexual Patients: A Longitudinal Study,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 15 (1986): 121–138; V. Tangpricha, S. H. Ducharme, T. W. Barber, and S. R. Chipkin, “Endocrinologic Treatment of Gender Identity Disorders,” Endocrine Practice 9 (2003): 12–21.
40. l. m. dickey, D. H. Karasic, and N. G. Sharon, “Mental Health Considerations with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Clients,” in Guidelines for the Primary and Gender-Affirming Care of Transgender and Gender Nonbinary People, ed. M. B. Deutsch (San Francisco, CA: Center of Excellence for Transgender Health, 2016), https://transcare.ucsf.edu/guidelines/mental-health.
41. M. L. Hendricks and R. J. Testa, “A Conceptual Framework for Clinical Work with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Clients: An Adaptation of the Minority Stress Model,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 43 (2012): 460–467; Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People.
42. W. O. Bockting, M. H. Miner, R. E. Swinburne Romine, A. Hamilton, and E. Coleman, “Stigma, Mental Health, and Resilience in an Online Sample of the US Transgender Population,” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 5 (2013): 943–951.
43. For continuing discrimination, see C. Dorsen, “An Integrative Review of Nurse Attitudes towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Patients,” Canadian Journal of Nursing Research 44 (2012): 18–43; for lack of culturally inclusive LGBTQ+ communication and care, see K. L. Eckstrand and J. M. Ehrenfeld, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Healthcare: A Clinical Guide to Preventive, Primary, and Specialist Care (New York: Springer, 2016); M. J. Eliason and P. L. Chinn, LGBTQ Cultures: What Health Care Professionals Need to Know about Sexual and Gender Diversity, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer, 2018); J. Landry, “Delivering Culturally Sensitive Care to LGBTQI Patients,” Journal for Nurse Practitioners 13, no. 5 (2017): 342–347; A. S. Keuroghlian, K. L. Ard, and H. J. Makadon, “Advancing Health Equity for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBTQ) People through Sexual Health Education and LGBTQ-Affirming Healthcare Environments,” Sexual Health 14 (2017): 119; F. A. Lim, D. V. Brown, and S. M. Kim, “Addressing Health Care Disparities in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Population: A Review of Best Practices,” AmericanJournal of Nursing 114 (2014): 24–34, https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NAJ.0000450423.89759.36; and Joint Commission, Advancing Effective Communication, Cultural Competence, and Family- and Patient-Centered Care for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Community: A Field Guide (Oak Brook, IL: Joint Commission, 2011); and for being invisible and experiencing discrimination, see R. Carabez, M. Pellegrini, A. Mankovitz, M. Eliason, M. Ciano, and M. Scott, “‘Never in All My Years . . .’: Nurses’ Education about LGBT Health,” Journal of Professional Nursing 31 (2015): 323–329; Eckstrand and Ehrenfeld, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Healthcare; and Eliason and Chinn, LGBTQ Cultures.
44. For the need for more education, see M. Eliason, S. Dibble, and J. De Joseph, “Nursing’s Silence on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues: The Need for Emancipatory Efforts,” Advances in Nursing Science 33 (2010): 206–218, https://doi.org/10.1097/ANS.0b013e3181e63e49; and F. Lim, M. Johnson, and M. J. Eliason, “A National Survey of Faculty Knowledge, Experience, and Readiness for Teaching Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health in Baccalaureate Nursing Programs,” Nursing Education Perspectives 36, no. 3 (2015): 144–152, https://doi.org/10.5480/14-1355; for the study of U.S. medical school hours on LGBTQ+ education, see J. Obedin-Maliver, E. S. Goldsmith, L. Stewart, W. White, E. Tran, S. Brenman, M. Wells, et al., “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender-Related Content in Undergraduate Medical Education,” Journal of the American Medical Association 306 (2011): 971–977, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2011.1255; for other health provider education programs, see Lim, Johnson, and Eliason, “A National Survey of Faculty Knowledge”; and for lack of understanding of LGBTQ+ inclusive care, see Landry, “Delivering Culturally Sensitive Care to LGBTQI Patients.”
45. For the 2022 index, see Human Rights Campaign, “Healthcare Equality Index 2020,” https://www.hrc.org/resources/healthcare-equality-index.
46. For the provider directory, see GLMA, “For Patients,” accessed April 26, 2021, http://glma.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=939&grandparentID=534&parentID=938&nodeID=1; practitioners can see GLMA, “For Providers and Researchers,” accessed April 26, 2021, http://www.glma.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=940&grandparentID=534&parentID=534; and for the guidelines, see GLMA, Guidelines for Care of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Patients (San Francisco: GLMA, 2006), http://glma.org/_data/n_0001/resources/live/GLMA%20guidelines%202006%20FINAL.pdf. See also National LGBT Health Education Center, Ten Things: Creating Inclusive Health Care Environments for LGBT People (Boston, MA: Fenway Institute, 2016), https://www.lgbtqiahealtheducation.org/publication/ten-things/; and “LGBTQIA+ Glossary of terms for Health Care Teams,” published 3 February 2020, https://www.lgbtqiahealtheducation.org/publication/lgbtqia-glossary-of-terms-for-health-care-teams/”.
47. Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People.
48. For health risks, including cancers, see Institute of Medicine, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People; and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Health Considerations for LGBTQ Youth,” updated December 20, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/disparities/smy.htm; for silicone use, see C. Bertin, R. Abbas, V. Andrieu, F. Michard, C. Rioux, V. Descamps, Y. Yazdanpanah, et al., “Illicit Massive Silicone Injections Always Induce Chronic and Definitive Silicone Blood Diffusion with Dermatologic Complications,” Medicine 98, no. 4 (2019), e14143. https://doi.org/10.1097/MD.0000000000014143; and for prostate, anal, and colon cancer, see U. Boehmer, A. Ozonoff, and M. Xiaopeng, “An Ecological Analysis of Colorectal Cancer Incidence and Mortality: Differences by Sexual Orientation,” BMC Cancer 11 (2011): 400.
49. F. O. Buchting, L. Margolies, M. G. Bare, D. Bruessow, E. C. Díaz-Toro, C. Kamen, L. S. Ka‘opua, et al., “LGBT Best and Promising Practices throughout the Cancer Continuum,” 2016, https://moqc.org/wp-content/uploads/LGBT-HealthLink-Best-and-Promising-Practices-Throught-the-Cancer-Contiuum.pdf. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/04%3A_Prejudice_and_Health/4.02%3A_Chapter_7-_LGBTQ_Health_and_Wellness.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Explain the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality.
• Describe the ways that LGBTQ+ people form relationships and the configurations of LGBTQ+ relationships.
• Describe the myths that exist regarding the quality of LGBTQ+ relationships and the research that refutes those myths.
• Describe how people struggle for social justice within historical contexts of inequality.
• Describe some of the negative consequences of homophobia, heterosexism, and minority stress and the ways LGBTQ+ people manage those consequences.
• Identify different types of LGBTQ+ family formations, including challenges to family formation and family building.
• Describe sources of stress and buffers for LGBTQ+ families and for LGBTQ+ individuals within their families of origin.
• Analyze how key social institutions shape, define, and enforce structures of inequality.
• Describe challenges that some LGBTQ+ families have in interacting with public and private systems, including legal, health care and human services, and educational systems.
• Describe the relationship between LGBTQ+ history, political activism, and LGBTQ+ studies.
• Articulate the queer viewpoint on LGBTQ+ relationships and families.
Introduction
This chapter provides an overview of research and practice relating to LGBTQ+ families, relationships, and parenting. It describes the definitions LGBTQ+ people have for family and the relationships LGBTQ+ individuals have with their families of origin. It investigates how minority stress, family acceptance, and rejection affect these relationships. The chapter discusses how LGBTQ+ people form intimate relationships, how people in these relationships navigate established (often discriminatory) social and legal systems, and how recent social and legal changes (e.g., marriage equality) affect these relationships. It talks about the nature and prevalence of families headed by LGBTQ+ people that include children and the ways that LGBTQ+ people become parents. It reviews the changing legal landscape as it relates to same-sex parenting and family building and delineates some of the challenges these families face when interacting with legal systems, health care and human services providers, and educators. The final section considers what it means to come out as LGBTQ+ to one’s children. Each section also critically explores the relevant scientific literatures, challenges existing anti-LGBTQ+ myths, and identifies resources and organizations that support LGBTQ+ families.
It is difficult to quantify how many people in the United States are in LGBTQ+ relationships. U.S. census data give us some idea, although the numbers are likely underreported. The U.S. census counted approximately 10.7 million adults (4.3 percent of the U.S. adult population) who identify as LGBTQ+ and 1.4 million adults (0.6 percent of the U.S. adult population) who identify as transgender. Of those, approximately 1.1 million are in same-sex marriages (totaling 547,000 couples),[1] and 1.2 million are part of an unmarried same-sex relationship (totaling 600,000 couples).[2]
What Is a Relationship?
The word relationship can refer to many types of social interactions. Relationship research typically focuses on interpersonal relationships, which are deep, close relationships between two or more people. These relationships are sometimes described in other ways, as a friendship, a couple, or a marriage. Research exploring LGBTQ+ interpersonal relationships is often centered on intimate or sexual relationships that are described as a partnership, a couple, a marriage, or just a relationship.
How Do LGBTQ+ Relationships Form?
Relationships vary in the internal and external resources that strengthen the relationship, contributing to the well-being of the members in the relationship, and that help them cope with the stressors they have to confront both as individuals and as a couple. The availability of external resources is a changing landscape for same-sex couples.[3]
For example, research has demonstrated that gay men, lesbians, and middle-aged heterosexualsthose looking for mates in what they term “a thin market”are more likely to rely on the internet to find a partner.[4] A nationally representative longitudinal survey, “How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST),” of over four thousand adults found that, on average, although heterosexual and same-sex couples reported meeting primarily through friends, trends since 2009 suggest that the number of couples meeting online from both groups is increasing, but same-sex couples are significantly more likely to meet online than heterosexual couples.[5]
Queer Resistance
Some same-sex relationships, with or without children, follow the expected norms regarding monogamy and exclusivity. Some relationships “queer,” or stray from, traditional heteronormative relationship norms, to include polyamorous relationships (three or more committed partners), multiparent families (often two women partners raising children with a male platonic friend who is the biological father), or platonic partnering (often a queer man and woman who are friends and partner to raise a child).[6] Queering these relationships can certainly lead to burdens, including negative judgment and discrimination from external sources. On the other hand, they can also bring strengths, including freedom, creativity, and a family or relationship that is tailor-made to the people involved (figure 8.1).
A study of a thousand gay men in Britain found that approximately 40 percent were or had been in an open relationship. In a study of gay male couples in the San Francisco Bay Area, agreements guiding open relationships varied considerably among gay male couples, with most having rules or conditions regarding extrarelational sex. A related study found that about equal numbers reported having agreements to allow sex with people outside the relationship (47 percent) and agreements to be monogamous (45 percent), with some (8 percent) reporting disagreements. Other studies have found slightly higher levels of monogamy (52.8 percent) and fewer couples reporting open relationships (13.0 percent), and some find “monogamish” relationships (14.9 percent) or discrepant relationships (in which partners do not agree on whether they are in an open or monogamous relationship; 19.3 percent). One study reported even higher rates of agreement to be monogamous (74 percent).[7]
Interestingly, most people maintain a strong bias in favor of monogamous relationships, viewing them more favorably than consensual nonmonogamous relationships in terms of their potential for providing relationship and sexual satisfaction. Monogamous relationships are also seen as more likely to preserve sexual health. However, little evidence exists to support these views. Most couples have little assurance that their partners remain faithful forever, and there is little evidence that nonmonogamists are less likely to practice safer sex. These widespread biases reflect negative media representations and the views of mental health providers and politicians.[8]
The AIDS epidemic fueled the study of sex among men who have sex with men, but there are significantly fewer studies of the sexual agreements of lesbian and bisexual female couples. “The Ultimate Lesbian Sex Survey,” conducted by the online magazine Autostraddle, asked “lady-types who sleep with lady-types” about their relationship agreements. Of the over 8,500 people who completed the survey, 56 percent reported being in a monogamous relationship, 15 percent in a nonmonogamous relationship, and 29 percent reported not being in a relationship. When asked about their preferred type of relationship, 62 percent said monogamy, 22 percent said mostly monogamy, 6 percent said open relationship, 5 percent polyamory, and the rest a range of other configurations, such as “triad,” “polyfidelity,” and “don’t ask, don’t tell.”[9]
Relationship Quality
The field of relationship studies is an interdisciplinary field that includes but is not limited to psychology, social psychology, social work, and marriage and family therapy. Before 2015 this field was not uniformly open to the study of same-sex couples, but it now is an important site of inquiry about LGBTQ+ relationship quality, longevity, and impact. Much of the literature on same-sex relationship quality focuses on comparing LGBTQ+ people’s dating, cohabitation, and marriage pathways and experiences with heterosexual people. This work has repeatedly found that LGBTQ+ relationships experience the same level of satisfaction compared with non-LGBTQ+ relationships and that similar variables predict stability and overall satisfaction in these relationships.[10] The outcome of this research has shown repeatedly that LGBTQ+ relationships are just as well adjusted as their heterosexual counterparts and experience similar stressors.
However, LGBTQ+ people, as stigmatized minorities, experience higher rates of mental and physical health challenges, such as mood and anxiety disorders, compared with heterosexual and cisgender people.[11] This unique stress, called minority stress, affects those in LGBTQ+ relationships both internally (internalized heterosexism) and externally (experiences of discrimination) and has a negative effect on relationship quality and satisfaction (figure 8.3). One way to explain the connection is that internalized stigma increases the likelihood for experiencing depression, and depression produces stress on a relationship.[12] In one sample of 142 gay men, trust in relationships was influenced by experiences of discrimination when measuring overall relationship satisfaction. In this same sample, those with lower internalized heterosexism had a greater sense of commitment and higher levels of relationship satisfaction.[13]
This stress provides unique challenges for LGBTQ+ couples and families, compared with their straight and cisgender counterparts. LGBTQ+ couples often have to navigate judgment and rejection from their families of origin and in systems, including employment and faith communities. As mentioned earlier, nonheteronormative couples (e.g., polyamorous LGBTQ+ couples) may face even more relationship scrutiny from others, although the impact of such scrutiny remains underexplored in the research.
Additional factors that affect heterosexual and cisgender relationships also affect LGBTQ+ relationships, including dating violence and divorce. Prevalence of dating violence among LGBTQ+ adolescents, although not as robust a line of inquiry as for heterosexual youth and adults, is higher than national averages for all adolescents. In addition, dating violence in adolescence appears to predict its perpetuation into college years, as well as other behaviors (such as not using condoms) that put these youth at risk as they enter adulthood. Thus the recognition and prevention of relationship and dating violence with LGBTQ+ communities is important. Some researchers and practitioners theorize that the lack of consistent and positive role models and inclusion of healthy LGBTQ+ relationships in sex education curricula and from parents and mentors creates a vacuum of information on negotiating healthy relationships, particularly for adolescents.[14] Thus, one way to improve relationship quality for LGBTQ+ couples and families is to ensure an inclusive curriculum and access to information that includes queer couples and families across the lifespan.
Explore
Do a Google Images search (https://images.google.com/) for LGBTQ+ relationships. Take note of what you see in the results.
• What types of LGBTQ+ relationships are represented? What types of relationships or identities discussed in this section are not represented?
• What types of issues that are important to LGBTQ+ relationships are identified in the images?
• What image would you design for your ideal LGBTQ+ relationship?
Those who enter the normative relationship of legal marriage may later opt to seek a legal divorce. Although the process of initiating a divorce has become a fairly equal process between same-sex and different-sex couples, rates of divorce may be different. In several studies in the United Kingdom, lesbians were twice as likely to seek a divorce compared with gay men. In reporting on these statistics, one sociologist theorized that higher rates of divorce among queer and lesbian women can be explained by women entering commitment sooner and having higher standards for the relationship overall.[15]
What Is a Family?
For some, family refers specifically to a social unit of two people, most often a man and a woman, who live together, share resources, and are raising children (or plan to reproduce and raise children) (figure 8.4). However, family actually describes many types of social organizations. It can refer to groups of people organized by kinship and biology—with designations like parents, siblings, cousins, and aunts or uncles—as well as those, regardless of kinship, who live together, share resources, or care for each other.[16] Nuclear family, single-parent family, extended family, family of choice, and blended family are terms used to describe different types of families. Indeed, the effort to understand the meaning and function of family is a central goal of many of the social sciences.
Families serve varied functions, including reproducing and providing for children, regulating sexuality and gender by communicating and reinforcing social norms, and transmitting cultural knowledge. However, the particular functions and purpose of family also vary across cultures and can change over time. For example, the Western notion of family changed significantly as populations moved from farm- and household-based economies to industrial factories and into cities. Whereas farming relied on the family to create the labor necessary for maintenance of land, the production of necessary goods, and ultimately the survival of its collective members, the family in the cities that blossomed under industrial capitalism became a more affective or intimate relational unit that can also serve as a source of individual happiness.[17]
Heteronormativity in Families
Like heterosexual relationships, same-sex relationships form within the culturally defined social norms that organize sexuality and pair bonding in a society in a particular historical context. Modern same-sex relationships, however, exist within a heteronormative context that privileges heterosexual relationships, organizes gender-role expectations in a way that reinforces those expectations, and marginalizes nonheterosexual desire, love, and pair bonding. Additionally, heteronormativity also reinforces the ideal (although not always the practice) of sexual and romantic monogamy, links family authenticity with the presence of children, and implies the need to adhere to patriarchal ideals for the division of domestic labor, sex roles, and often even the vows and covenants made between partners.
What Are LGBTQ+ Families?
These contested definitions of family vary considerably across time and cultural context but have always influenced understanding of LGBTQ+ families (figure 8.5).[18] Researchers investigating the definitions of family for people in the United States found that definitions included a broad range of understandings. They describe an inclusionary model, defining family quite broadly as “same-sex and hetero-sexual couples with or without children, regardless of marital status.” A moderate model defines family as “all households with children, including same-sex households.” Finally is the exclusionary view, defining family as a “heterosexual married couple with children.”[19] Other important aspects of family are the functional characteristics it serves, such as relationship quality, commitment, care, love, or in the case of inclusionists, “whatever it means to them.”[20]
Research has also explored the boundaries of family, proposing the idea of “fictive” and “voluntary” kin.[21] Chosen families are defined as “non-blood related friends who [exist] somewhere between the realm of friends and kin . . . [who] perform a surrogate role, often filling in for family members who are missing due to distance, abandonment or death.”[22] It has been suggested that chosen families are more common among marginalized groups.[23] However, use of the term chosen family may vary by class and race. White middle-class LGBTQ+ people are more likely to use the term, and lower-income LGBTQ+ people of color are less likely to use it but also less likely to use exclusionary definitions of family in general.[24]
Family Support and Rejection
Family support and acceptance is an important psychological resource that can influence an individual’s well-being in a number of ways (figure 8.6). It improves one’s sense of self-worth, increasing optimism and positive affect.[25] Unfortunately, supportive and nurturing family is not the reality for all LGBTQ+ people. Most families exist within a social context defined by heterosexism and anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice. Some families are able to resist heterosexism and embrace LGBTQ+ family members, and some, although initially challenged by the idea that a family member is LGBTQ+, are able to resist or overcome their prejudices and accept those LGBTQ+ members. For others, heterosexism and anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice are too pernicious and may manifest as hostility, rejection, and even violence.
Family Stressors
Rejection by family members of one’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression can affect the health and wellness of people who identify as LGBTQ+. According to Dr. Caitlyn Ryan at the Family Acceptance Project, this rejection can include violence like “hitting, slapping, or physically hurting the youth because of his or her LGBT identity,” “excluding LGBT youth from family events and family activities,” and “pressuring the youth to be more (or less) masculine or feminine.”[26] LGBTQ+ people whose families reject their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression have higher rates of suicide across their lifetime, higher rates of depression, and greater risk of HIV infection compared with those who report higher levels of acceptance by their families.[27]
Family Buffers
Family acceptance lessens some aspects of LGBTQ+ minority stress—such as the distress and negative feelings that may be associated with sexual orientation. LGBTQ+ youth with accepting families report greater acceptance of their own sexual identity, less internalized homophobia, higher self-esteem, more social support, better overall physical and mental health, less substance abuse, and lower risk of suicide. Support from one’s family may also contribute to individual resilience and thriving. Many of these effects continue across the lifespan.[28]
Increasing the acceptance by families, decreasing their rejecting behaviors, and assisting family members of LGBTQ+ people to understand the root causes of their reactions to their queer children will improve the health of LGBTQ+ people. Acceptance includes behaviors that “support [a] youth’s LGBT identity even though you may feel uncomfortable,” “connect youth with an LGBT adult role model,” and “work to make your religious congregation supporting of LGBT members or find a faith community that welcomes your family and LGBT child.”[29] Much of this research has focused on the role of parents in demonstrating acceptance, and less is known about the role of siblings, grandparents, and other extended family. Promising research is showing the importance of siblings and grandparents in the lives of LGBTQ+ people.[30]
Some families experience feelings of loss, grief, and shame, among others, when they find they have LGBTQ+ family members. Loss and grief may result from feeling that they have to give up more heteronormative ideals of marriage or grandchildren for their child. Shame may be related to either latent or blatant anti-LGBTQ+ bias and the fear of being judged by others for having an LGBTQ+ family member. Outside resources may allow families to process their feelings separate from their family members. An important organization supporting the experiences of families with LGBTQ+ family members is PFLAG (formerly known as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). PFLAG was started in the United States in 1973 by “a mother publicly supporting her gay son” and has expanded to over two hundred thousand members in four hundred locations.[31] Using a three-pronged approach of advocacy, education, and support, PFLAG’s chapters across the United States function largely as support groups for families and friends to process their feelings and to shift to becoming advocates for their loved ones (figure 8.7).
Explore
PFLAG is one of the oldest and best-known national (and now international) organizations devoted to supporting LGBTQ+ people and their families. Explore the PFLAG website (https://pflag.org/) and the support, education, and advocacy available there for LGBTQ+ people, their families, and their allies.
• Pick one resource and describe it in detail. Why do you think this would be an important resource?
• What is the history of PFLAG, and how has it made a difference for LGBTQ+ people? What is its basic philosophy?
• How do PFLAG resources help you better understand the different types of LGBTQ+ family formations and strategies to build LGBTQ+ families?
Research with LGBTQ+ Families
Researchers interested in better understanding LGBTQ+ families and relationships face challenges, such as identifying those who are in same-sex relationships or couples, recruiting samples of adequate size, and adequately representing racial, gender, and sexuality diversity within the population. Because LGBTQ+ people continue to face discrimination from their birth families, places of employment, and communities and ongoing threats from social and legal institutions, some may be hesitant to reveal their identities or relationships. Because same-sex marriage has been legal in the United States only since 2015 and the means of relationship formation have been actively shifting, records available to researchers are limited or incomplete.[32]
Also, a great deal of research that is affirming to LGBTQ+ people relies on exclusionary heteronormative definitions of family that limit LGBTQ+ families to those conforming to a traditional heterosexual model or that suggest ideal LGBTQ+ families are those that attempt to conform to those exclusionary models. These definitions may result in the additional marginalization of families that fail to conform to these definitions (e.g., chosen families, families without children, nonmonogamous families, or polyamorous families). In addition, such research often focuses on white families, neglecting queer families of color, working-class queer families, and other families situated at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression.[33]
LGBTQ+ Families with Children
Although not all families include children, becoming parents can be an important goal for many. Research has suggested that a wide range of motivations push people to become parents, including emotional bonding, personal fulfillment, giving and receiving love, continuing the family line, and not being alone later in life. Other reasons include one’s partner wanting to become a parent or a need to feel complete. Lesbian mothers and gay fathers have reported many of the same motivations for becoming parents, but these motivations may be shaped by the unique context of LGBTQ+ parenthood. For example, a study of the parenting motivations of gay fathers found that some were motivated by the desire to instill tolerance in their children, thereby creating a more tolerant world.[34]
Approximately 48 percent of LGBTQ+ women and 20 percent of LGBTQ+ men under age fifty are raising children.[35] Some are doing so as part of a couple and some as single parents. In addition, approximately 3.7 million children in the United States have a parent who is LGBTQ+, and approximately 200,000 have parents who are part of a same-sex relationship (as either couples or single parents) (figure 8.8).[36]
How Are LGBTQ+ Families with Children Formed?
LGBTQ+ families with children are created several ways. Some may become parents while in a heterosexual relationship, and they come out later in life. Some may be in a relationship with a member of the other sex, but identify as bisexual or nonheterosexual. Others may identify as LGBTQ+, be in a same-sex relationship, and become parents through the use of assisted reproductive technology, surrogacy, adoption, or foster care.[37]
Parents Coming Out as LGBTQ+
Because of societal pressure and expectations, LGB people of older generations may have entered relationships with a different sex partner to avoid admitting their sexual orientation, to avoid stigma and be accepted, or to have children at a time when family-building options for LGB people were unimaginable for most. Children’s reactions to parents’ coming out as LGB range from disbelief and shock to blaming the other parent for the LGB person’s “changed” identity, to feelings of acceptance and love.[38] Some adult children report feeling closer to their parent now that they know.[39] Many of these reactions are mediated by the child’s age and developmental stage at the time of disclosure. In fact, some experts on family communication now suggest that coming out to one’s children is about strengthening and “deepening” the relationship, not divulging a dark secret.[40]
Parents who come out as transgender face experiences similar to those of their cisgender LGB counterparts (e.g., challenges disclosing their sexuality and gaining acceptance from children, ex- and current partners, and extended family members) but also different. First, the child’s age may influence reaction to the disclosure. The younger the children are, the more flexible their thinking and the easier they adapt to the news. Second, finding those who have a similar experience coming out as transgender to their children may be difficult. A transgender parent often needs to connect with other transgender parents in similar circumstances to find support. Third, many transgender parents report that their relationships with their children were “the same or better” after disclosing their identity than they were before disclosure.[41]
Gay and lesbian stepfamilies may also have needs and challenges distinct from either straight families or gay and lesbian families with children.[42] In addition to the challenges of forming a stepfamily, gay and lesbian individuals often have to negotiate whether, how, and whom to come out to and assess the impact of coming out on both the individual and the family. Coparenting with a different-sex ex-spouse or partner can range from supportive to antagonistic and can acknowledge or ignore the person’s new same-sex partner or spouse.
Myths about Same-Sex Parenting and Children in LGBTQ+ Families
Myths associated with same-sex parenting and the experiences of children raised by same-sex parents have negatively influenced the decisions of LGBTQ+ parents and interactions with legal and social services professionals.[43] These myths include concerns that children raised by same-sex parents or in LGBTQ+ households will experience disruptions in their gender identity development or in their gender role behaviors or that they will become gay or lesbian themselves. Other myths suggest these children will have more mental health and behavioral problems; will experience problems in their social relationships and experience more stigmatization, teasing, and bullying; and are more likely to be sexually abused by their parents or parent’s friends. Research has soundly refuted all these myths.
The psychologist Charlotte Patterson conducted some of most cited research debunking the negative myths about same-sex parenting. Her research has explored the behavioral adjustment, self-concepts, and sex role behaviors of children raised in same-sex households, concluding that “more than two decades of research has failed to reveal important differences in the adjustment or development of children or adolescents reared by same-sex couples compared to those reared by other-sex couples.”[44] She points out that the quality of family relationships is the most important predictor of healthy child development. A review exploring the implications and fitness of same-sex parenting for children found that, across twenty-three studies, the most common myths about impaired emotional functioning, greater likelihood of a homosexual sexual orientation, greater stigmatization by peers, nonconforming-gender role behavior and identity, poor behavioral adjustment, and impaired cognitive functioning were simply not true. Children raised by lesbian moms and gay dads were no more likely to experience negative outcomes than children raised by heterosexual parents (figure 8.9).[45]
Both the myths about LGBTQ+ parents and their children and the research refuting the myths have found their way into the family courts. Prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes describing unfit lesbian moms and irresponsible gay dads have historically been used in custody cases to justify punitive court decisions. Research that establishes the fitness of LGBTQ+ parents has been influential in custody cases, and Patterson herself has served as an expert witness in numerous custody and other court cases.[46] LGBTQ+ families’ lives are shaped by the powerful social forces of heterosexism and cissexism. These forces can influence policy and law, including family court cases, so there is a continuing need for unbiased and scientifically rigorous studies on LGBTQ+ family formation and the developmental and social outcomes for children in these families.
Navigating and Changing Systems and Institutions
Some LGBTQ+ people and their allies have seized the moment of societal change by trying to change systems from within, finding private sector corporations to be much more open and agile in response to their needs than public institutions. To not lose customers or employees because of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, many corporations are opting to strengthen LGBTQ+ workplace policies and affinity groups.[47] Such policies include equal spousal and partner health care benefits, affirmative transgender health care benefits, gender-neutral bathrooms, and nondiscrimination policies that provide protections for sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression (figure 8.10). To capture the progress being made in the private sector, the Human Rights Campaign rates corporations in their annual Corporate Equality Index. Described as a “benchmarking tool on corporate policies and practices pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees,” these ratings are often used by corporations to demonstrate openness and inclusion.[48]
These corporate workplace gains haven’t come without criticism, however. Some have voiced concerns that private sector openness to LGBTQ+ communities is really just a way of manipulating workers into complacency by “keeping employees happy” and exploiting their need to “seek meaning through their job.” These policies can mask labor violations and exploitative practices, thereby creating the perfect marriage of capitalism and personal identity.[49] These corporate policies and practices are often described as assimilationist—that is, a strategy “that strives for access to those in power [and] is rooted in an interest-group and legislative-lobbying approach to political change.”[50]
Other institutional change from within has occurred in health care and human services agencies. The National Association of Social Workers expressed its support in 2002 for allowing same-sex couples to foster and adopt and has repeatedly issued professional support for same-sex marriage—for example, in 2013 and 2015 in relation to Supreme Court rulings.[51] In 2004, the American Medical Association issued a similar statement supporting adoption, and in 2012, issued support for same-sex civil marriage. In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatricians expressed its support for allowing same-sex couples to marry and to become foster and adoptive parents. Other professional groups (for example, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Counseling Association) have followed suit. Collectively, these statements recognize that combating discrimination against LGBTQ+ families is important, discrimination is itself a public health issue, and families should receive professional and unbiased care and services.
Parenting and Family Building
Family and adoption rights are one way that LGBTQ+ parents are discriminated against if they have biological children, want to adopt, or want access to infertility treatment. Only five states actively ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity for foster and adoptive parents, an additional three states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and ten states have laws that allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ prospective foster parents. Most states are largely silent on the topic, opening up a range of treatment toward same-sex adopting families, from active discrimination that is based in law to indifference.[52] Little change has been made to recognize same-sex parents despite the overwhelming evidence that being raised in an LGBTQ+ family is not inherently harmful or destructive to the children.[53]
Watch
Watch “5 Positive Things to Say to a Queer Family [Trying to Conceive]” (https://youtu.be/7nXTz1eN0Ko). A doula based in Brooklyn, New York, Morgane Richardson advises viewers how to positively interact with a queer family that is trying to conceive.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=121
• What is your biggest takeaway from this advice? Was there anything that surprised you or made you curious to learn more?
• Explore one of the resources that Richardson identifies; how does it deepen your understanding of the issues?
• How does Richardson define allyship? What advice about allyship did you find helpful?
Numerous studies have, however, documented the health and stress impacts of unequal laws on families that are headed by same-sex couples. For instance, should a child fall ill, a parent who is not legally recognized may be excluded from making medical decisions or may be separated from their child during an emergency because they are not recognized by medical staff as a parent or guardian. Unnecessary legal hurdles and simultaneous societal discrimination against same-sex households appear to be the root of stress, not the LGBTQ+ parents themselves.[54]
Legal Systems
Same-sex couples report navigating many legal challenges that vary depending on how the couple structures their family life. Interviews with fifty-one LGB parents in California found that the law affected their lives and decisions in three dominant arenas: (1) how to have children, (2) where to live, and (3) how their family was (or wasn’t) recognized.[55] Although some legal protections exist nationally, legal protections for LGBTQ+ families vary widely by state, highlighting the need to carefully consider the three arenas when determining how to best protect one’s family.
LGBTQ+ polyamorous couples who wish to have their entire family recognized and legally protected face numerous challenges, the biggest being that in almost all states and countries you may designate only one spouse in a legal marriage. These designations often mean that polyamorous couples cannot obtain health insurance for all their spouses or partners.[56]
Health Care and Human Services Providers
Same-sex couples, with or without children, report unequal treatment in health care and human services care compared with their heterosexual and cisgender peers. For same-sex couples seeking health care for their children, invisibility, or not being recognized by health care providers as a family unit, is one barrier to quality health care. A survey of nursing and medical students found that 69 percent did not directly ask about the relationship among family members or were unsure if they should directly ask if the two same-sex adults were a couple responsible for the child receiving care.[57] Not being seen and legitimized as a family unit is stressful to the couple and can also complicate care if one parent is not recognized as a guardian or is left out of decision-making processes.
Supportive and affirming policies, practices, and professionals are particularly needed to serve the aging LGBTQ+ community. The aging LGBTQ+ population is underserved and experiences higher risk of medical issues compared with their heterosexual peers.[58] Having higher need, combined with stigma from health care providers, leads to unsatisfactory and unequal treatment in out-of-home care. Couples who are aging and require out-of-home care often report anxiety about how they will be treated by staff and whether they will be seen, treated, and respected as a couple.[59] One study found that over half of elder LGBTQ+ adults were opposed to assisted living, and 80 percent were opposed to out-of-home care because of fear of discrimination, including how their partner would be treated and whether their advance directives for health care would be recognized and respected.[60]
Discrimination from human services providers in care and decision-making has long been of concern. For example, LGBTQ+ people in general and same-sex couples in particular face bias and outright discrimination when trying to adopt a child from foster care or through a social services agency. A survey of 169 diverse gay and lesbian parents found that over one-third were not emotionally supported when they were seeking to adopt (their adoption worker did not express support for them), in contrast to the experience of straight adopting couples, and nearly 15 percent felt very stressed when coming out as lesbian or gay to their adoption worker, fearing that it would limit their chances of having a child placed in their home.[61]
Schools and Educators
LGBTQ+ families with children interact with education systems with varying degrees of support for their families and identities. Challenges may include being treated differently from straight and cisgender parents, not having their family structures represented in the curriculum, and not having both same-sex parents respected as equal parents when decisions need to be made about their child. In addition, some LGBTQ+ parents have described trying to help their children explain their family structure (e.g., “I have two dads”) to other children at school, which is especially difficult when the classroom lacks LGBTQ+ cultural competency. These challenges can have a negative effect on the well-being of LGBTQ+ families and their children. College teaching and education programs need to place greater emphasis on training future educators, before they enter the classroom, in how to demonstrate cultural competence when working with LGBTQ+ families.[62]
Trends and Changes in the Legal Landscape
As Patterson and colleagues have pointed out, today’s quickly shifting legal landscapes regarding LGBTQ+ relationships, marriage equality, reproductive technologies, and foster parenting and adoption by LGBTQ+ individuals have brought challenges but also promise for improving the lives of LGBTQ+ families. However, these advances remain vulnerable to changing attitudes and political majorities. After marriage equality became law through the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, state legislatures began considering legislation to limit its influence, and court cases based on the right to religious freedom try to reverse gains. The future legal landscape for LGBTQ+ people appears uncertain.[63]
Strategies for Change: Queer Cautions and Resistance
LGBTQ+ communities, and the families that form within the community, are not monolithic. Therefore, any discussion of family within such a diverse and intersectional community will be a complicated one. For some LGBTQ+ people, the LGBTQ+ movement’s recent emphasis on assimilationist approaches to social change, such as fighting for access to heteronormative institutions like marriage, is misguided and actually privilege heterosexuality over queer lives. Some highlight the diverse and creative ways that LGBTQ+ people create families, emphasizing the importance of choosing families and raising concerns about laws and legally sanctioned institutions that often place limitations on what counts as family.
Some LGBTQ+ people are concerned that vital and limited resources in the fight for things like a national nondiscrimination law have been reallocated to the fight for marriage equality. Thus, ironically, a lesbian living in a state like Texas can now marry her wife but be unable to order a wedding cake if the local baker opposes LGBTQ+ families or marriage. Others look beyond the argument that marriage provides a way to gain access to important resources and benefits (e.g., health insurance, inheritance and property rights, visitation rights in hospitals and jails, adoption rights), instead asking why these benefits must be tied to marriage in the first place. Some scholars suggest that queer communities should reject all notions of family building altogether. They point out that rather than making these benefits available to all, marriage equality has created a new set of boundaries that define who has access to certain privileges that remain inaccessible for others in the broader LGBTQ+ community.[64]
Profile: LGBTQ+ Family Building: Challenges and Opportunity
Christa Craven
Queer people have a long history of creating family in many different ways, including creating chosen families among adults (and sometimes children) who may not be biologically related. Yet with the enhancement of legal rights in recent years, such as same-sex marriage, many LGBTQ+ people are feeling more pressure than ever to form families that include biological or adopted children or both. People have said to me, “After we got married, the next logical question from our families and friends was, ‘When will you have kids?’” With greater access to reproductive technologies and adoption for same-sex parents over the last few decades, LGBTQ+ people have significant opportunities to build families. However, experts estimate that a quarter of all pregnancies end in loss, and a similar number of adoptions fall through; 12 percent of U.S. women are diagnosed with infertility; and transgender people are often faced with difficult reproductive decisions relating to transition. With the rise in LGBTQ+ family making—the “gayby boom”—the numbers of reproductive losses through miscarriage, stillbirth, failed adoptions, infertility, and sterility have also increased.
In addition to heteronormative assumptions about who should have children, LGBTQ+ intended parents face another layer of invisibility and isolation as they combat the well-documented cultural silence surrounding reproductive loss. Even among those who support LGBTQ+ families, there is often political silencing of queer family-making narratives when they do not produce a happy ending. Moreover, the reproductive challenges LGBTQ+ families continue to face have received little attention and have been exacerbated by increasingly restrictive laws regarding LGBTQ+ adoption and family recognition following the 2016 U.S. elections. LGBTQ+ family making is politicized even within queer communities by progressive efforts to create a seamless narrative of progress toward enhanced marital and familial rights. These contentious political battles often eclipse the challenges and barriers LGBTQ+ parents face in establishing and gaining recognition as families.
Physicians and public health experts estimate that 10–20 percent of all recognized pregnancies in the United States and 30–40 percent of all conceptions end in pregnancy loss. Estimates for other countries vary substantially. The knowledge that a pregnancy has ended is likely higher for LGBTQ+ people, who are often more intentional in planning their families than their straight peers and thus more likely to be doing early home pregnancy tests. Public perception regarding pregnancy loss differs substantially from public health estimates. A 2015 survey of over a thousand U.S. adults showed that 55 percent thought miscarriage was rare (occurring in 5 percent or less of pregnancies).[65] In addition, 12 percent of U.S. women are diagnosed with infertility, and fertility preservation options are not always made available to transgender people considering hormones or surgery. Likewise, a review of U.S. studies among different populations estimates adoption failure rates, or what adoption agencies euphemistically refer to as “disruptions,” of 10–25 percent.[66] Statistics on adoption are not kept in most countries.
I interviewed over fifty LGBTQ+ people to understand how they experience loss, grief, and mourning. They included those who carried pregnancies, nongestational and adoptive parents, and families from a broad range of racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious backgrounds. I found that stories of loss, death, and reproductive challenges that accompany queer family making are often ignored or silenced both inside and outside LGBTQ+ communities, resulting in personal and political isolation. Three examples drawn from my study highlight the need for more inclusive support resources.[67]
Alex and Nora’s Story
When I spoke with Alex and Nora, they had experienced a second-trimester loss less than a year before. Nora, a cisgender lesbian, had physically carried their first daughter, but she had developed health complications that made another pregnancy dangerous for her health. The couple agreed that Alex, who had previously identified as a female-to-male transman, would carry their next child. Alex had adopted a genderqueer lesbian identity after becoming pregnant and was pregnant at the time of our interview. Nora explained how her experience of their loss was not only a physical and emotional one but also personally and legally complex.
In losing our daughter . . . , I lost not only a biological and a physical connection. . . . I also lost the ability to have legal rights [to our future children], to have my name on this child’s birth certificate. . . . I’m not even going to be able to petition for that [where we live].
In 2011, Nora would have had no legal rights to their child borne by Alex because the couple lived in a state where nongestational queer parents were denied access to second-parent adoption of their children. But to Nora, having to formally adopt in any jurisdiction and be evaluated on her fitness as a parent was devastating.
Nonetheless, the couple continued to consider pursuing legal adoption in another state or country and then returning to their home state to request a reissued birth certificate that would recognize them both as legal parents. Unlike same-sex marriages or civil unions, which were not recognized in much of the United States before 2015 and not recognized in countries where laws do not permit same-sex unions, adoptions are recognized across jurisdictions. However, financial instability—Nora was a full-time graduate student and Alex an administrative assistant—put this option for giving both of them legal parental status out of the couple’s reach.
Although the couple lived in a liberal midwestern town, the homophobic state and federal laws that governed Nora’s relationship—or lack of legal relationship—with the child borne by her partner heightened her experience of loss. They encountered silencing within queer communities following their loss, which resulted in feelings of isolation. As Alex explained, LGBTQ+ reproductive loss “complicates the political rhetoric. It’s the same reason you don’t hear about gay divorce, because it complicates the political rhetoric of trying to get marriage equality.”
Significant changes in the legal landscape for LGBTQ+ couples and families have occurred in the 2010s, in the United States and throughout the world. After the national recognition of same-sex marriage in 2015 following the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court case, many LGBTQ+ parents assumed that the presumption of parenthood (that both individuals in a marital union are legal parents to any child born within that union) would be extended to lesbian and gay married couples, as it is for heterosexual couples. However, legal precedent on this issue has been inconsistent, which can leave LGBTQ+ families—even those formed within legal marriages—vulnerable in ways that heterosexual married couples are not. Additionally, any children born to same-sex parents outside a legal marriage must still be formally adopted by the same-sex second parent. In the case that the couple legally marries (or the marriage becomes legally recognized) after the child is born, a stepparent adoption is required.
As of April 2019, only fifteen states allow unmarried parents to petition for second-parent adoption. Laws also exist in some states that allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ parents by adoption agencies that cite religious beliefs against same-sex parenting. In 2019, U.S. legal experts in the American Bar Association acknowledged that, despite the federal recognition of same-sex marriage in 2015, “state-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT individuals who wish to raise children has dramatically increased in recent years.”[68] Many adoptive parents also expressed the fear that homophobia and heterosexism within adoption agencies and among birth families meant they had a higher likelihood of adoption disruption than heterosexual couples.
Mike’s Story
Mike’s particularly heartbreaking story concerned suffering the loss of twins in an adoption. He and his partner, Arnold, had traveled to Vermont to get a civil union during the 1990s and began the adoption process shortly afterward in their home state, which didn’t legally recognize their relationship. With their stable jobs and multiracial family—Mike is a white pediatrician and Arnold an African American high school teacher—the adoption agency they worked with thought they were an ideal family to place biracial twins, whose eighteen-year-old mother had two children already and was living in a battered women’s shelter. They moved forward with an open adoption, meeting with the birth mother on multiple occasions and attending all doctor appointments. When the twins were born, the names that Mike and Arnold gave them appeared on their birth certificates. They spent ten days at home with the twins, but on the tenth day—the last day that birth mothers in their state could legally reclaim their children—at thirty minutes to midnight, the call came.
Mike and Arnold later spoke with staff from their adoption agency, who explained that the birth mother had contacted the biological father of the twins, whom she had been estranged from for months, to tell him that she had put them up for adoption to a gay male couple. He did not approve of having a gay couple raise the twins and convinced her to reclaim them. Despite the birth mother desperately trying to reverse that decision to reclaim the twins and making several calls to Mike and Arnold pleading with them to take the children, the adoption was never formalized. Arnold had struggled with depression previously, and after losing the twins, he began to abuse drugs and alcohol and was unable to return to work. Ultimately, after two years, his addiction led to the end of their relationship.
When we spoke, Mike had recently begun the adoption process again as a single man. This time, however, he was pursuing the adoption of an older child. He said,
[This adoption is] in the foster system, with parents whose parental rights had already been terminated. . . . I don’t want the chance of a birth parent reclaiming again. There’s no way I could do that again. . . . It was like they [the twins] had suddenly died. One minute they were here and the next hour they weren’t here. It was horrible.
Yet as many adoptive parents told me, what was sometimes most difficult about their losses was that the child had not died and that their heartache couldn’t be “a pure sense of grief or loss” that one might experience mourning the death of a loved one. Rather, the child they had come to know and love was “out there somewhere,” and that knowledge created ongoing questions and multilayered grief.
Mike’s story is one of multiple interlocking losses and demonstrates how reproductive losses do not always involve the death of a child, nor are they centered solely around the absence of that child (or children) in one’s life. LGBTQ+ adoptive parents, as well as those who experienced pregnancy loss, infertility, and sterility frequently spoke about the “loss of innocence” that shattered their initial expectations of linear progress surrounding reproduction. Reproductive losses can also result in the loss of dreams for particular kinds of family, as Vero’s story highlights.
Vero’s Story
When Vero came out in the late 1970s, she initially thought she didn’t want to have kids. She explained when we connected over Skype, “I waited longer than I should have . . . being gay, being raised in a Hispanic Catholic family, I didn’t even see it as a reality.” Coming out before the 1990s gayby boom and then leaving home as a teen to serve in the U.S. Army for ten years, like many other LGBTQ+ people who grew up during this time, she felt that forming a family would not be an option for her. But as she found a more supportive community, and many of her LGBTQ+ friends began having kids, “it started to feel like a reality.” Although she didn’t initially wish to carry a child, when she desired children with a long-term partner who was unable to carry, she decided to begin monitoring her ovulation. A year and a half later, that relationship had ended.
But I kept thinking about it and . . . thinking about it and decided that that was something I really wanted with or without that relationship. So, I went on with the process. I had a donor. Everything was good to go. . . . And so, I went to get a physical and during that physical was when they found my cancer. And so, it quickly became—I was staged pretty high and so that quickly became the focus. Even though it [having a baby] was sitting in the back of my head, it was more about getting it [the cancer] staged, having biopsies, and starting treatment, blah blah blah. So, all of that kind of consumed me. . . . I didn’t have to think about it [losing my ability to conceive] right away. But then that came. [Fighting back tears.] I still get emotional about it.
At the time, Vero’s doctors estimated that the advanced stage of her cancer gave her between three months and ten years to live. Although well-meaning friends suggested she consider adoption after initial chemotherapy treatment seemed successful, Vero felt that would not be fair to the child because of the uncertainty about her future health. When I asked Vero how she did cope once she was able to focus on her experience beyond the immediacy of her cancer treatment, she spoke about struggling because, she said, “some people don’t even see my experience as a loss, because I never conceived.” She also had complex feelings that others seemed not to understand:
Once all of the dust settled [after three years of chemotherapy and experimental treatment], I felt very grateful. I mean, if it hadn’t been for this child that I had already named but that I never had, I wouldn’t even be here. [Through tears.] I think what helped me find peace in it all was the gratitude that I was still here and in the last sixteen years that my life would have been completely different. It took a really different turn . . . not a 180, but at least a 45-degree angle [laughing]. It gave me more time to be with all of my friends’ kids. . . . If I’d waited any longer than I did to get my physical, I probably wouldn’t have made it, period. It kind of gave me a different gift. It hit me in a bunch of different ways, and it still hits me every once in a while. I was thinking about it just yesterday: that kid would probably have been fourteen or fifteen by now, and how different my life would be . . . just completely different.
Vero’s experience underscores not only the depth and complexities of losing one’s dream of family but also how grief can shift and evolve over time. As others have frequently said, “It never leaves you.”
Together, Alex and Nora’s, Mike’s, and Vero’s stories paint a vivid picture of the multiple interlocking losses that frequently accompany the loss of a child or dreams of a child. LGBTQ+ parents face general social taboos about discussing reproductive loss, but these expectations are frequently magnified by the legal and political barriers they face in gaining recognition as families. Additionally, they face pressures within LGBTQ+ communities where stories of loss are often silenced in efforts to present a political vision for LGBTQ+ progress.
More inclusive support resources that embrace the diverse realities and challenges of forming LGBTQ+ families are necessary for bereaved LGBTQ+ individuals and families. A notable finding of my study was that over half the participants faced financial struggles in their efforts to expand their families. For most, the urgency to become pregnant or adopt again after a loss drove them to invest more (both financially and emotionally) in those efforts. Yet many discussed this financial investment with a great deal of ambivalence, for fear that it would detract from the emotional loss they experienced. Their stories challenge the assumed affluence of LGBTQ+ individuals who seek to expand their families, even among those who do so via expensive assisted reproductive technology and adoption.
As a queer parent who found few resources after my own second-trimester loss and who bore witness to the ways that my partner was further isolated as a nongestational parent, I have always given this project a public focus. When I published Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making, I launched a companion website—http://www.lgbtqreproductiveloss.org—an interactive and expanding resource for LGBTQ+ individuals and families. Readers can access an archive of commemorative photos and stories, as well as advice to LGBTQ+ parents experiencing loss and those who support them. But there is far more work to be done to overcome the silencing and isolation surrounding reproductive loss; create opportunities for sustained dialogue among LGBTQ+ intended parents, medical and adoption professionals, and other support professionals; and acknowledge that grappling with grief and mourning—particularly in a moment of legal and political uncertainty—is inescapable for many queer people.
Key Questions
• What are some of the negative consequences of homophobia, heterosexism, and minority stress for LGBTQ+ people in terms of relationship building, and creating families?
• What myths have you heard regarding the quality of LGBTQ+ relationships? What does research say about those myths?
• Why is it challenging to research LGBTQ+ families and relationships?
• What are some of the challenges that LGBTQ+ families face as they interact with legal systems?
Research Resources
Compiled by Jessica Szempruch and Rachel Wexelbaum
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about LGBTQ+ relationships and families.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or editing a photograph in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: Find a partner or split into groups, and choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the resources in this chapter to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
COLAGE
COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere; https://www.colage.org/) is a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more LGBTQ+ parents. COLAGE builds community and works toward social justice through youth empowerment, leadership development, education, and advocacy. This is the only national organization in North America focused on the needs of children of LGBTQ+ parents.
Family Acceptance Project
For nearly twenty years, the Family Acceptance Project (http://familyproject.sfsu.edu/) has provided evidence-based family education information and resource materials on how families can best support LGBTQ+ children. Its website includes links to its publications and research.
Family Equality Council
The Family Equality Council (https://www.familyequality.org/) is a national organization that provides advocacy and support for LGBTQ+ parents and families.
Gender Odyssey
The annual Gender Odyssey conference (http://www.genderodyssey.org/) addresses the needs and interests of children of all ages who are transgender and gender diverse, their families, and the professionals who serve them.
Gender Spectrum
Gender Spectrum (https://www.genderspectrum.org) informs interactions with all youth, especially in family, parent, or caregiver gender-sensitive and gender-inclusive environments. Resource lists, trainings, support groups, and research are all available via the website.
“GLBT Resources for Children: A Bibliography,” by the Rainbow Round Table
Two librarians, Nancy Silverrod in San Francisco and Dana Giusti in Philadelphia, began compiling in 2004 the first annotated bibliography of children’s and young adult books about children with LGBTQ+ parents (http://www.ala.org/rt/glbtrt/popularresources/children). These titles have become classics, and most remain in print, even as resources for children continue to increase. See, for example, GoodRead’s Same Sex Parents Book Lists at https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/same-sex-parents.
Lesbian and Gay Parenting, from the American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association published a review in 2005 of the scholarly literature and court cases related to gay and lesbian parents and their children (https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting). This resource, designed for students, researchers, lawyers, mental health care professionals, and parents, comprises three sections: a summary of the research findings on gay fathers and lesbian mothers, an annotated bibliography of those resources, and a series of amicus briefs and professional association policies related to gay and lesbian parents. This resource provides frequently cited, authoritative foundational research that has served as the basis for further research.
LGBTQ Youth and Schools Resource Library
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) curates a resource list for middle school, high school, and college LGBTQ+ students on their rights related to free speech, assembly, forming gay-straight alliances, attending the prom, accessing online information in school libraries, mental health support, privacy, and seeking LGBTQ+ support on college campuses. See https://www.aclu.org/library-lgbt-youth-schools-resources-and-links.
Movement Advancement Project (MAP)
The Movement Advancement Project provides reports and videos with an overview of laws and policies affecting LGBTQ+ families in the United States such as laws and policies related to fostering and adopting LGBTQ+ children, the child welfare system, transgender rights, medical decision-making policies, and discriminatory tax laws for LGBTQ+ families. See https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps.
Obergefell v. Hodges
See the full text of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015’s Obergefell, a landmark civil rights case in which the court ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the due process clause and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf).
Resolution on Marriage Equality for Same-Sex Couples, from the American Psychological Association
The APA Council of Representatives adopted this resolution on August 3–5, 2011. See https://www.apa.org/about/policy/same-sex.
SAGE
SAGE is a premier organization providing services and advocacy for LGBTQ+ elders. Its website (https://www.sageusa.org/) provides robust resources regarding elder rights and issues of concern.
Trevor Project
The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ+ youth. The project’s website (https://www.thetrevorproject.org) features resources, educational tools, advocacy, and ways to get involved. The Trevor Project is especially well known for its crisis phone, chat, and text lines.
Deep Dive: Books
Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, by Kath Weston
This classic book was first published in 1991 by the anthropologist Kath Weston. On the basis of interviews and participant observation with lesbians and gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area, the book articulated for the first time how LGBTQ+ people were creating families of their own. The book was revised and updated in 1997 (New York: Columbia University Press).
Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America, by Ellen Lewin
This ethnography, written by an anthropologist, tells the story of how gay men in America have chosen to become fathers and the issues they confront during this journey. The book explores the decision to become a parent for gay men; how that decision affects their relationships with extended families and religious, racial, and ethnic communities; and how they reconcile their gay identity with their daily lives as parents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women, by M.C. Moore
The first book focused on African American lesbians and the families they create, this book gives visibility to families headed by Black lesbians and has provided the research design, survey instrument, and interview questions to conduct future research on Black and non-Black LGBTQ+ families of color (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
The Kids: The Children of LGBTQ Parents in the USA, by Gabriela Herman
One in a groundbreaking series supported by the Arcus Foundation about LGBTQ+ communities around the world, this book displays images by an award-winning photographer and recounts personal experiences of over fifty children of LGBTQ+ parents. These children describe the impact of having LGBTQ+ parents on their lives and value systems. Excerpts from the book are available at https://thekids.gabrielaherman.com/ (New York: New Press, 2017).
Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, by Amy Brainer
Brainer is an anthropologist who investigated the experiences of Taiwanese families from the perspective of queer and trans informants, as well as their siblings, parents, and other family members. She analyzes the strategies that families use to navigate their internal differences and the broader social, cultural, and political contexts within which these struggles and celebrations occur. This book is an important contribution to the literature on queer kinship from an anthropological perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019).
The Right to Be Parents: LGBT Families and the Transformation of Parenthood, by Carlos A. Ball
Ball is the first author with a legal background to describe court cases involving gay and lesbian parents and custody of their biological or adopted children. Using research from sociologists and psychologists that lawyers use in court, Ball defends the right to parenthood for LGBTQ+ people (New York: New York University Press. 2014).
To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre
Transgender and nonbinary older adults in this visual exhibit, from 2018 with a second edition in 2019, they share their stories about the role that their gender identity played while growing up, forming intimate relationships, and choosing to create families of their own or not. Because the population of older LGBTQ+ people is often overlooked when discussing family and relationships, this is a valuable resource for those engaged in gerontology studies as well as in child and family studies. Visit the companion website at https://www.tosurviveonthisshore.com/portraits (Heidelberg, Germany: Kehrer Verlag).
Transgender Parenting: A Review of Existing Research, by Rebecca L. Stotzer, Jody L. Herman, and Amira Hasenbush
This first comprehensive analysis of research studies on transgender parents contains fifty-one studies that focus on LGBTQ+ civil rights and legal representation. Although more research is needed on the many facets of transgender and nonbinary parenting, this is a solid starting point for anyone doing academic research on the topic (Los Angeles, CA: Williams Institute, 2014; https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rp0v7qv).
Glossary
AIDS. The acronym formed from acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a chronic disease caused by the HIV virus that has disproportionately affected the LGBTQ+ community (particularly gay men, bisexual men, trans women, and men who have sex with men).
assimilationist. Fixing the system from within, trying to fit into the status quo; integrating.
attitudes. Positive or negative affective evaluations of someone or something.
blended family. A couple with children from previous relationships.
extended family. The kin or relatives outside the nuclear or single-parent family; may include aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, or others related by blood or marriage.
family. In the context of human society, a group of people related by either consanguinity (by recognized birth), affinity (by marriage or other relationship), coresidence (as implied by the word’s etymology, from the Latin familia), or some combination of these.
family of choice. A deliberately chosen group of people that satisfies the typical role of family as a support system. These people may or may not be related to the person who chose them.
heteronormative. A societal belief that makes heterosexuality the default and assumes that everyone is heterosexual until proved otherwise; normalizing heterosexuality and othering any other identity or experience apart from heterosexuality.
heterosexism. Bias that suggests that heterosexuality, or heterosexual relationships, are superior to any other relationships (e.g., queer, gay, lesbian).
internalized heterosexism. Heterosexism that an individual believes and therefore replicates and incorporates internally.
marriage equality. The recognition of same-sex marriage as a human and civil right, as well as recognition by law and support of societal institutions.
minority stress. Health disparities often found in minority groups can be explained in part by the discrimination they endure, and this discrimination causes stress and illness; Ilan Meyer developed this sociobehavioral theory.
nonmonogamous families. Couples who have children and who engage consensually in sexual activities with other adults outside each couple.
nonmonogamous relationships. Deep, close, relationships between two or more people who may engage consensually in sexual activities with others outside the relationship.
nuclear family. A couple and their dependent children; typically assumed to be a heterosexual couple.
polyamorous. The practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the consent of all partners involved. A polyamorous family is one made up of more than two sexual or romantic partners and their dependent children.
resilience. An individual’s ability to recover, or bounce back, from a stressful or traumatic experience.
single-parent family. A one-parent-headed family (typically one parent with a dependent child or children).
stereotypes. Negative, positive, or neutral beliefs about the members of a group that are often unsubstantiated.
thriving. The condition of individuals who experience a stressful or traumatic event and who not only bounce back but flourish as a result of the event.
1. A. P. Romero, “1.1 Million LGBT Adults Are Married to Someone of the Same Sex at the Two-Year Anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges,” Williams Institute,June 23, 2017, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Obergefell-2-Year-Marriages-Jun-2017.pdf; see also A. R. Flores, J. Herman, G. J. Gates, and T. N. T. Brown, How Many Adults Identify as Transgender in the United States? (Los Angeles, CA: Williams Institute, 2016), https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/How-Many-Adults-Identify-as-Transgender-in-the-United-States.pdf.
2. G. J. Gates and F. Newport, “An Estimated 780,000 Americans in Same-Sex Marriages,” Gallup, April 2015, https://news.gallup.com/poll/182837/estimated-780-000-americans-sex-marriages.aspx.
3. For resources that strengthen relationships, see F. D. Fincham and S. R. H. Beach, “Marriage in the New Millennium: A Decade in Review,” Journal of Marriage and Family 72, no. 3 (2010): 630–649; and for availability of external resources, see S. S. Rostosky and E. D. B. Riggle, “Same-Sex Couple Relationship Strengths: A Review and Synthesis of the Empirical Literature (2000–2016),” Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity 4, no. 1 (2017): 1–13.
4. M. J. Rosenfeld and R. J. Thomas, “Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary,” American Sociological Review 77, no. 4 (2012): 523–547.
5. M. J. Rosenfeld, R. J. Thomas, and M. Falcon, “How Couples Meet and Stay Together,” waves 1, 2, and 3: Public version 3.04, plus wave 4 supplement version 1.02 (computer files), Stanford University Libraries, accessed January 6, 2022, https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst.
6. D. Adams, “What Polyamorous and Multi-parent Families Should Do to Protect Their Rights,” Prima Facie (blog), LGBT Bar, December 11, 2018, https://lgbtbar.org/bar-news/what-polyamorous-multi-parent-families-should-do-to-protect-their-rights/.
7. For the study of gay men in Britain, see G. Gremore, “‘Bro-Jobs’ Author Talks Straight Man-on-Man Sex and ‘Repressed Homosexual Desire,’” Queerty, August 6, 2015, https://www.queerty.com/bro-jobs-author-talks-straight-man-on-man-sex-and-repressed-homosexual-desire-20150806; for the study of gay male couples in the Bay Area, see C. C. Hoff and S. C. Beougher, “Sexual Agreements among Gay Male Couples,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 39, no. 3 (2010): 774–787; for the related study showing equal numbers, see C. C. Hoff, S. C. Beougher, D. Chakravarty, L. A. Darbes, and T. B. Neilands, “Relationship Characteristics and Motivations behind Agreements among Gay Male Couples: Differences by Agreement Type and Couple Serostatus,” AIDS Care 22, no. 7 (2010): 827–835; for a study finding different levels, see J. T. Parsons, T. J. Starks, K. E. Gamarel, and C. Grov, “Non-monogamy and Sexual Relationship Quality among Same-Sex Male Couples,” Journal of Family Psychology 26, no. 5 (2012): 669–677, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029561; and for higher rates of agreement to be monogamous, see S. W. Whitton, E. M. Weitbrecht, and A. D. Kuryluk, “Monogamy Agreements in Male Same-Sex Couples: Associations with Relationship Quality and Individual Well-Being,” Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy 14 (2015): 39–63. “The term ‘monogamish’ was first coined a few years ago by relationship and sex columnist Dan Savage, who shared that the arrangement he has with his long-term partner, in which they’re committed to each other but can have sex with others, is not just a phenomenon for gay men.” A. Syrtash, “What It Really Means to Be Monogamish,” Glamour, May 9, 2016, https://www.glamour.com/story/what-is-monogamish.
8. T. D. Conley, A. C. Moors, J. L. Matsick, and A. Ziegler, “The Fewer the Merrier? Assessing Stigma Surrounding Consensually Non-monogamous Romantic Relationships,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 13, no. 1 (2012): 1–29.
9. Riese, “Here’s the Salacious Sex Statistics on Queer Women in Non-monogamous vs. Monogamous Relationships,” Autostraddle,June 9, 2015, https://www.autostraddle.com/heres-the-salacious-sex-statistics-on-queer-women-in-non-monogamous-vs-monogamous-relationships-290347/.
10. C. Kamen, M. Burns, and S. R. H. Beach, “Minority Stress in Same-Sex Male Relationships: When Does It Impact Relationship Satisfaction?,” Journal of Homosexuality 58,no. 10 (2011): 1372–1390; D. M. Frost and I. H. Meyer, “Internalized Homophobia and Relationship Quality among Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 56 (2009): 97–109; D. M. Frost and I. H. Meyer, “Internalized Homophobia and Relationship Quality among Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 56 (2009): 97–109; E. A. Payne, D. Umberson, and C. Reczek, “Sex in Midlife: Sexual Experiences in Lesbian and Straight Marriages,” Journal of Marriage and Family 81 (2019): 7–23, https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12508.
11. I. H. Meyer, “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: Conceptual Issues and Research Evidence,” Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003): 674–697.
12. Frost and Meyer, “Internalized Homophobia.”
13. Kamen, Burns, and Beach, “Minority Stress in Same-Sex Male Relationships.”
14. M. Dank, P. Lachman, J. M. Zweig, and J. Yahner, “Dating Violence Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 43 (2014): 846–857, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-013-9975-8; T. Gillum, “Adolescent Dating Violence Experiences among Sexual Minority Youth and Implications for Subsequent Relationship Quality,” Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 34, no. 2 (2017): 137–145, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-016-0451-7; D. R. Marrow, “Social Work Practice with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Adolescents,” Family in Societies 85, no. 1 (2004): 91–99.
15. M. Bulman, “Lesbian Couples Two and a Half Times More Likely to Get Divorced than Male Same-Sex Couples, ONS Figures Reveal,” Independent, October 18, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/lesbian-couples-more-likely-divorced-male-same-sex-marriages-uk-ons-figures-a8006741.html.
16. For family as kinship and biology, see L. Steel, W. Kidd, and A. Brown, The Family, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); for family regardless of kinship, see A. P. Edwards, and E. E. Graham, “The Relationship between Individuals’ Definitions of Family and Implicit Personal Theories of Communication,” Journal of Family Communication 9, no. 4 (2009): 191–208, https://doi.org/10.1080/15267430903070147.
17. J. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
18. A. B. Becker and M. E. Todd, “A New American Family? Public Opinion toward Family Status and Perceptions of the Challenges Faced by Children of Same-Sex Parents,” Journal of GLBT Family Studies 9, no. 5 (2013): 425–448.
19. B. Powell, C. Bolzendahl, C. Geist, and L. C. Steelman, Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and Americans’ Definitions of Family (New York: Russell Sage, 2010), 26.
20. K. E. Hull and T. A. Ortyl, “Conventional and Cutting-Edge: Definitions of Family in LGBT Communities,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 16 (2019): 33; for family and its functional characteristics, see Powell et al., Counted Out.
21. M. K. Nelson, “Whither Fictive Kin? Or, What’s in a Name?,” Journal of Family Issues 35, no. 2 (2014): 201–222; D. Braithwaite, B. W. Bach, L. Baxter, R. DiVerniero, J. Hammonds, A. Hosek, E. Willer, et al., “Constructing Family: A Typology of Voluntary Kin,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27, no. 3 (2010): 388–407. See also P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).
22. K. L. Blair and C. F. Pukall. “Family Matters, but Sometimes Chosen Family Matters More: Perceived Social Network Influence in the Dating Decisions of Same- and Mixed-Sex Couples,” Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 24 (2015), https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&u=nysl_oweb&id=GALE|A441585157&v=2.1&it=r&sid=googleScholar&asid=f32e263b.
23. Nelson, “Whither Fictive Kin?”; Braithwaite et al., “Constructing Family.”
24. A. Stein, “What’s the Matter with Newark? Race, Class, Marriage Politics, and the Limits of Queer Liberalism,” in The Marrying Kind? Debating Same-Sex Marriage within the Gay and Lesbian Movement, ed. M. Bernstein and V. Taylor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 39–65. For more on chosen families, see K. Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
25. P. A. Thomas, H. Liu, and D. Umberson, “Family Relationships and Well-Being,” Innovation in Aging 1, no. 3 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igx025; P. Symister, and R. Friend, “The Influence of Social Support and Problematic Support on Optimism and Depression in Chronic Illness: A Prospective Study Evaluating Self-Esteem as a Mediator,” Health Psychology 22, no. 2 (2003): 123–129.
26. C. Ryan, D. Huebner, R. M. Diaz, and J. Sanchez, “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults,” Pediatrics 123, no. 1 (2009): 346–352.
27. C. Ryan, S. T. Russell, D. Huebner, R. Diaz, and J. Sanchez, “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults,” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 23, no. 4 (2010): 205–213.
28. For negative feelings associated with sexual orientation, see B. A. Feinstein, L. Wadsworth, J. Davila, and M. R. Goldfried, “Do Parental Acceptance and Family Support Moderate Associations between Dimensions of Minority Stress and Depressive Symptoms among Lesbians and Gay Men?,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 45, no. 4 (2014): 239–246, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035393; for accepting families of LGBTQ+ youth, see H. R. Bregman, N. M. Malik, M. J. L. Page, E. Makynen, and K. M. Lindahl, “Identity Profiles in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth: The Role of Family Influences,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 42, no. 3 (2013): 417–430, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-012-9798-z; for less internalized homophobia, see A. R. D’Augelli, A. H. Grossman, M. T. Starks, and K. O. Sinclair, “Factors Associated with Parents’ Knowledge of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Youths’ Sexual Orientation,” Journal of GLBT Family Studies 6, no. 2 (2010): 178–198; for higher self-esteem and so on, see Ryan et al., “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults”; for support from family, see S. L. Katz-Wise, M. Rosario, and M. Tsappis, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth and Family Acceptance,” Pediatric Clinics of North America 63, no. 6 (2016): 1011–1025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pcl.2016.07.005; and for effects across the lifespan, see E.-M. Merz, N. S. Consedine, H.-J. Schulze, and C. Schuengel, “Well-Being of Adult Children and Ageing Parents: Associations with Intergenerational Support and Relationship Quality,” Ageing and Society 29 (2009): 783–802, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x09008514.
29. Ryan et al., “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults.”
30. For the importance of siblings, see K. R. Allen and K. A. Roberto, “Family Relationships of Older LGBT Adults,” in Handbook of LGBT Elders, ed. D. Harley and P. Teaster (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016); and for grandparents, see K. S. Sherrer, “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Grandchildren’s Disclosure Process with Grandparents,” Journal of Family Issues 37, no. 6 (2016): 739–764.
31. “About PFLAG,” PFLAG, accessed April 26, 2021, https://pflag.org/about.
32. For challenges to researchers, see D. Umberson, M. B. Thomeer, R. A. Kroeger, A. C. Lodge, and M. Xu, “Challenges and Opportunities for Research on Same-Sex Relationships,” Journal of Marriage and Family 77 (2015): 96–111, https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12155; for the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, see Obergefell v. Hodges (No. 14-556) (U.S. June 26, 2015); and for shifting relationship formation, see L. A. Peplau and A. W. Fingerhut, “The Close Relationships of Lesbians and Gay Men,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 405–424.
33. K. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Policies,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1 (1989): 139–167.
34. For motivations, see D. Langdridge, P. Sheeran, and K. Connolly, “Understanding the Reasons for Parenthood,” Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 23, no. 2 (2005): 121–133; and W. B. Miller, “Childbearing Motivations, Desires, and Intentions: A Theoretical Framework,” Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 120, no. 2 (1994): 223–258, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8045374; for a need to feel complete, see C. R. Newton, M. T. Hearn, A. A. Yuzpe, and M. Houle, “Motives for Parenthood and Response to Failed In Vitro Fertilization: Implications for Counseling,” Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics 9, no. 1 (1992): 24–31; and for gay fathers’ motivations, see A. E. Goldberg, J. B. Downing, and A. M. Moyer, “Why Parenthood, and Why Now? Gay Men’s Motivations for Pursuing Parenthood,” Family Relations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies 61, no. 1 (2012): 157–174.
35. G. J. Gates, Demographics of Married and Unmarried Same-Sex Couples: Analyses of the 2013 American Community Survey (Los Angeles, CA: Williams Institute, 2015), https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Demographics-Same-Sex-Couples-ACS2013-March-2015.pdf.
36. G. J. Gates, “Marriage and Family: LGBT Individuals and Same-Sex Couples,” Future of Children 25, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 67–87, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43581973.
37. Gates, “Marriage and Family.”
38. K. Davies, “Adult Daughters Whose Mothers Come Out Later in Life: What Is the Psychosocial Impact?,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 12, nos. 2–3 (2008): 255–263, https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160802161422; L. Rowello, “How LGBTQ Parents Can Handle Coming Out to Their Children,” Washington Post, October 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/10/09/parents-come-out/.
39. Davies, “Adult Daughters Whose Mothers Come Out Later in Life.”
40. Rowello, “How LGBTQ Parents Can Handle Coming Out.”
41. Lambda Legal, “FAQ about Transgender Parenting,” accessed April 26, 2021, https://www.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/trans-parenting-faq.
42. C. Bergeson, A. Bermea, J. Bible, K. Matera, B. van Eeden-Moorfield, and M. Jushak, “Pathways to Successful Queer Stepfamily Formation,” Journal of GLBT Family Studies 16, no. 4 (2020): 368–384, https://doi.org/10.1080/1550428X.2019.1673866; A. M. Bermea, B. van Eeden-Moorefield, J. Bible, and R. E. Petren, “Undoing Normativities and Creating Family: A Queer Stepfamily Experience,” Journal of GLBT Family Studies 15, no. 4 (2019): 357–372; J. M. Lynch and K. Murray, “For the Love of the Children: The Coming Out Process for Lesbian and Gay Parents and Stepparents,” Journal of Homosexuality 39, no. 1 (2000): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v39n01_01; M. R. Moore, “Gendered Power Relations among Women: A Study of Household Decision Making in Black, Lesbian Families,” American Sociological Review 73, no. 2 (2008): 335–356.
43. C. J. Patterson and R. E. Redding, “Lesbian and Gay Families with Children: Implications of Social Science Research for Policy,” Journal of Social Issues 52, no. 3 (1996): 29–43.
44. C. J. Patterson, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15 (2006): 241, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2006.00444.x. See also C. J. Patterson and J. L. Wainright, “Adolescents with Same-Sex Parents: Findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health,” in Adoption by Lesbians and Gay Men: A New Dimension in Family Diversity, ed. D. Brodzinsky and A. Pertman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 85–110; C. J. Patterson, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” Child Development 63 (1992): 1025–1042; and C. J. Patterson, “Children of the Lesbian Baby Boom: Behavioral Adjustment, Self-Concepts, and Sex-Role Identity,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Psychology: Theory, Research and Application, ed. B. Greene and G. Herek (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE, 1994), 156–175.
45. N. Anderssen, C. Amlie, and E. A. Ytteroy, “Outcomes for Children with Lesbian or Gay Parents: A Review of Studies from 1978 to 2000,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 43 (2002): 335–351.
46. For prejudice influencing court decisions, see Patterson and Redding, “Lesbian and Gay Families with Children”; for research establishing the fitness of LGBTQ+ parents, see C. J. Patterson, “Parental Sexual Orientation, Social Science Research, and Child Custody Decisions,” in The Scientific Basis of Child Custody Decisions, 2nd ed., ed. R. M. Galatzer-Levy, L. Kraus, and J. Galatzer-Levy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009); and for Patterson as expert witness, see Shelby Frame, “Charlotte Patterson, at the Forefront of LGBTQ Family Studies,” June 26, 2017, American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/members/content/patterson-lgbtq-research.
47. R. Githens, “Capitalism, Identity Politics, and Queerness Converge: LGBT Employee Resource Groups,” New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development 23, no. 3 (2009): 18–31.
48. For the most recent index, see Human Rights Campaign, “Corporate Equality Index,” https://www.hrc.org/campaigns/corporate-equality-index.
49. Githens, “Capitalism, Identity Politics, and Queerness Converge,” 18.
50. C. A. Rimmerman, The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation? (New York: Routledge, 2015), 12.
51. United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013); Obergefell (2015).
52. Movement Advancement Project, 2019, https://www.lgbtmap.org/.
53. A. E. Goldberg, Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children: Research on the Family Life Cycle (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010); S. Golombok and S. Badger, “Children Raised in Mother-Headed Families from Infancy: A Follow-Up of Children of Lesbian and Single Heterosexual Mothers, at Early Adulthood,” Human Reproduction 25(2010): 150–157; J. G. Pawelski, E. C. Perrin, J. M. Foy, et al., “The Effects of Marriage, Civil Union, and Domestic Partnership Laws on the Health and Well-Being of Children,” Pediatrics 118, no. 1 (2006): 349–364.
54. E. C. Perrin, B. S. Siegel, and Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Promoting the Well-Being of Children Whose Parents Are Gay or Lesbian, Pediatrics 131 (2013): 1374–1383.
55. N. K. Park, E. Kazyak, and K. Slauson-Blevins, “How Law Shapes Experiences of Parenthood for Same-Sex Couples,” Journal of GLBT Family Studies 12 (2016): 115–137.
56. A. L. Johnson, “Counseling the Polyamorous Client: Implications for Competent Practice,” VISTAS Online, American Counseling Association Professional Information/Library, article 50.
57. R. Chapman, R. Watkins, T. Zappia, P. Nicol, and L. Shields, “Nursing and Medical Students’ Attitude, Knowledge and Beliefs Regarding Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Parents Seeking Health Care for Their Children,” Journal of Clinical Nursing 21 (2012): 938–945.
58. S. Morrison and S. Dinkel, “Heterosexism and Health Care: A Concept Analysis,” Nursing Forum 47 (2012): 123–130.
59. S. D. Erdley, D. D. Anklam, and C. Reardon, “Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges: Understanding the Pervasive Needs of Older LGBT Adults and the Value of Social Work in Health Care,” Journal of Gerontological Social Work 57, nos. 2–4 (2014): 362–385, https://doi.org/10.1080/01634372.2013.871381.
60. K. M. Hash and F. E. Netting, “Long-Term Planning and Decision-Making among Midlife and Older Gay Men,” Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care 3 (2007): 59–77.
61. S. Brown, S. Smalling, V. Groza, and S. Ryan, “The Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbians in Becoming and Being Adoptive Parents,” Adoption Quarterly 12, nos. 3/4 (2009): 229–246.
62. Brown et al., “The Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbians in Becoming and Being Adoptive Parents.”
63. C. J. Patterson, R. G. Riskind, and S. L. Tornello, “Sexual Orientation and Parenting: A Global Perspective,” in Contemporary Issues in Family Studies: Global Perspectives on Partnerships, Parenting, and Support in a Changing World, ed. A. Abela and J. Walker (New York: Wiley/Blackwell, 2014), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118320990.ch13; for the uncertain legal landscape, see E. Kazyakand and M. Stange, “Backlash or a Positive Response? Public Opinion of LGB Issues after Obergefell v. Hodges,” Journal of Homosexuality 65, no. 14 (2018): 2028–2052; and S. Miller, “3 Years after Same-Sex Marriage Ruling, Protections for LGBT Families Undermined,” USA Today, June 4, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/06/04/same-sex-marriage-ruling-undermined-gay-parents/650112002/.
64. See, e.g., L. Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
65. J. Bardos, D. Hercz, J. Friedenthal, S. A. Missmer, and Z. Williams, “A National Survey on Public Perceptions of Miscarriage,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 125, no. 6 (June 2015): 1313–1320, https://doi.org/10.1097/AOG.0000000000000859.
66. Child Welfare Information Gateway, Adoption Disruption and Dissolution (Washington, DC: Children’s Bureau, June 2012), https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/s_disrup.pdf.
67. These stories are based on interviews Craven conducted between 2011 and 2014 and are adapted from Christa Craven, Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making (New York: Routledge, 2019); Christa Craven and Elizabeth Peel, “Stories of Grief and Hope: Queer Experiences of Reproductive Loss,” in Queering Maternity and Motherhood: Narrative and Theoretical Perspectives on Queer Conception, Birth and Parenting, ed. M. F. Gibson (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2014), 97–110; and Christa Craven and Elizabeth Peel, “Queering Reproductive Loss: Exploring Grief and Memorialization,” in Interrogating Pregnancy Loss: Feminist Writings on Abortion, Miscarriage, and Stillbirth, ed. Emma R. M. Lind and Angie Deveau (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2017), 225–245. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
68. National LGBT Bar Association Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, “Report to the House of Delegates” (Washington, DC: American Bar Association, 2019), https://nacmnet.org/wp-content/uploads/ABA-Resolution-113-002.pdf. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/05%3A_Relationships_Families_and_Youth/5.01%3A_Chapter_8-_LGBTQ_Relationships_and_Families.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Describe the connections between identities and embodied experiences.
• Recognize the steps of coming out and the range of responses for gender and sexuality identities.
• Describe how people struggle for social justice within historical contexts of inequality.
• Differentiate between the components making schools supportive and inclusive and those needing improvements.
• Assess resources for LGBTQ+ youth facing discrimination, oppression, and marginalization.
• Describe intersectionality from an LGBTQ+ perspective.
• Analyze how key social institutions shape, define, and enforce structures of inequality.
• Identify health and education disparities for minoritized gender and sexuality identities.
Education and LGBTQ+ Youth Development
Youth spend the majority of their lives involved in schools and associated activities. Concurrent with social and emotional development, LGBTQ+ youths’ sexual and gender identities are evolving. Some LGBTQ+ youth face challenges with underrepresentation in school curricula; lack of educational programming; and discrimination, harassment, and oppression by peers, teachers, and parents. However, with the changing cultural narrative toward acceptance, LGBTQ+ youth are finding more than ever before environments that are accepting, access to services tailored to LGBTQ+ youth, and opportunities to connect with other youth through clubs, organizations, and other youth programming. This chapter focuses on the current social and educational barriers to healthy LGBTQ+ youth development, such as inequities and injustice, on LGBTQ+ youths’ resiliency and on the role of supportive adults in facilitating positive youth development.
LGBTQ+ persons experience significant growth and development through youth and adolescence. Many of the important milestones, including identity recognition, coming out, and transitioning, can occur during these years. Positive family, educator, and peer responses toward LGBTQ+ youth can set the framework for healthy development, whereas rejection can lead to negative mental, emotional, and physical health and educational outcomes. This chapter describes identity development for LGBTQ+ individuals, family response, the impact of educational establishments on development, inclusive school practices, and other important aspects of the lives of youth and adolescents (figure 9.1). Each aspect of development and each environmental and social system within the lives of LGBTQ+ youth can become a protective factor at a time when acceptance is still evolving throughout the United States.
Identity Disclosure
Youth are socialized from a young age through the lens of heteronormativity and cisnormativity, or the view that everyone is heterosexual and straight, which creates difficult conditions for LGBTQ+ students. From as early as elementary school, youth are taught that anything outside heterosexuality equates to being bad and that the romantic relationships LGBTQ+ youth have are abnormal.[1] Because society makes the presumption that all youth are cisgender and heterosexual, youth are often burdened with having to disclose their identities to others, historically referred to as coming out. Identity disclosure is different for sexual minority, transgender, and gender-nonconforming youth; their evolution of identity and disclosure of it can be a vastly different experience from that of others. Sexual- and gender-minority development and disclosure are described later in the chapter.
LGBTQ+ Demographics
Youth and adolescents acknowledge their sexual orientation and disclose it to others earlier than ever before. Youth initially recognize they are attracted to another person of the same gender at about age 10. Estimates show some understanding their identities as young as 7, with the average age at around 13.4. With increased visibility of LGBTQ+ persons in mainstream culture, it is likely these ages are becoming younger.[2]
Approximately 2 percent of youth identify as gay or lesbian, 6 percent as bisexual, 3 percent as not sure of their sexual identity, and 2–3 percent as transgender or gender nonconforming. These labels stay consistent into early adulthood. Approximately 3 percent of young adults ages eighteen to twenty-six describe themselves as exclusively or mostly homosexual or bisexual, with more females (3.4 percent) than males (2.6 percent) identifying as LGBTQ+. Conservative estimates report 3.5 percent of adults, or approximately nine million people, in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.[3]
Two studies have been conducted on the rates of identity disclosure to parents of LGBTQ+ youth in the United States. Both studies reported more than half (56 percent and 59 percent) of the LGBTQ+ youth studied were out to their families. Coming out can be challenging for LGBTQ+ youth. Many sexual minority youth who have not come out (30 percent) report that the most frequent obstacle to coming out is fear that their family may not be accepting of them or even that their family has been openly discriminatory. A small proportion (19 percent) state that they are not sure how their families would react, and 10 percent state that they are not ready to come out. Some youth, however, resist identity-based labels and perceive disclosing their sexuality as unimportant.[4]
Transgender or Nonbinary Identity Disclosure and Demographics
As of 2022, an estimated 300,00, or 1.4 percent, of U.S. youth ages thirteen to seventeen identify as transgender. Youth in this age group were significantly more likely to identify as transgender than adults age 65 or older, and constitute 18% of the national transgender-identified population. The study found that young people identify as transgender at different rates in different states; estimates ranged from 3.0% in New York to 0.6% in Wyoming. The study also found that White people were less likely to identify as transgender than Latinx people, American Indian or Alaska Native, and biracial/multiracial groups. [5]
A 2018 report by the Human Rights Campaign found only 21 percent of transgender and gender-expansive youth to be out to their parents, and 33 percent of youth were considering whom to disclose to in their family and how to manage these relationships after disclosure (figure 9.2). In 2018, nearly half (41 percent) of all transgender and gender-expansive youth had at least one parent to whom they have come out. Research suggests concern over family response is a barrier to coming out. Although both mothers and fathers were anticipated by their child to act negatively to a disclosure at least half the time, fathers are more likely to respond negatively than mothers (63 percent vs. 54 percent).[6]
Research has found that youth begin to understand the concept of gender identity as early as ages one and two. In these earlier stages, youth start to internalize the physical differences (penis, vulva, breasts) between genders. At these ages, children do not necessarily have a full grasp of their own identity or what it means to identify as a certain gender, but they begin to understand what those parts of a body symbolize. By age three, children can label their own gender, and by four they feel quite certain about their gender identity. All children during these years before puberty explore their gender presentation and expression and experiment with toys typical to their gender or of the “opposite” gender. By the time youth reach five to six years of age, they adopt rules about what it means to be a certain gender and what will be accepted by others. By age seven, youth feel a sense of gender constancy and may begin fantasizing about being another gender or having different physical characteristics to align with their identity.[7]
Gender-nonconforming youth may then try to reconcile the differences between their sex assigned at birth and their gender identity by making subtle changes to their dress and social appearance. They may alter styles, wearing more masculine or feminine clothing, and use different names or pronouns. Allowing youth to socially transition, or begin to live according to their true gender identity, can have very positive effects. It can reduce their distress and dysphoria, and it can reduce the likelihood of developing depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation and attempts, self-harm, isolation, homelessness, and incarceration.[8]
Read
In 2013, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of 1,197 LGBTQ+ adults about their perceptions of society’s acceptance of LGBTQ+ issues and about their experiences of prejudice and discrimination. The study focuses on lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, but it also contains important information on transgender Americans and LGBTQ+ people of color. Read through the overview of the report at https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/.
• What are three of your main takeaways from the survey? What surprised you, and what did not surprise you?
• Why is it important for parents and educators to understand the ages at which children and youth begin to understand their own sexuality and gender?
• What are some of the differences among the experiences of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals? What about LGBTQ+ people of color versus white LGBTQ+ people? What social structures might help explain those differences?
Family Support or Rejection
Family Support
LGBTQ+ youth whose families have supported them (e.g., showing warmth, enjoying time together, having closeness) have a greater likelihood of positive health outcomes, including healthy self-esteem, general good health, and social support (figure 9.3). Family support is also a protective factor against negative health outcomes in early adulthood, such as depression, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. Family support has been demonstrated to have a lifelong impact on adult development, quality of life, and reduction of victimization and to improve physical and mental health, including in older adults. Trans youth have also reported long-lasting positive effects from family support; 72 percent of trans youth with parental support reported being more satisfied with their lives than those without (33 percent). These same youth reported more consistent (70 percent) positive mental health outcomes than those whose parents were not supportive (15 percent).[9]
Family Rejection
A majority of research on LGBTQ+ youth and their families, however, has emphasized the negative outcomes of family rejection. Rejection is associated with higher levels of emotional distress, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. In fact, LGBTQ+ youth whose parents were frequently rejecting during adolescence reported a rate of suicide attempts that was more than eight times that of those with accepting parents. Research also suggests the adolescent and young adult LGBTQ+ community experiences increased homelessness as a result of family rejection, particularly for youth of color. Upon disclosure of sexual orientation, some parents decide to eject their children from the house, forcing them to live with other family members, in friends’ homes, in foster care, in homeless shelters, or on the streets. Of the two million homeless youth in 2014 in the United States, 20–40 percent identify as LGBTQ+. Homeless LGBTQ+ youth may suffer even more negative health outcomes than those not displaced from home.[10]
PFLAG
PFLAG is a national organization begun in 1973 by Jeanne Manford to support parents and loved ones of LGBTQ+ people. Formerly called Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, PFLAG has evolved over time to be inclusive of all LGBTQ+ persons and families. It advocates on behalf of all LGBTQ+ people and also provides a space for loved ones and youth to come together to talk about challenges associated with coming out, affirmatively raising LGBTQ+ children, and respecting and valuing all.[11]
LGBTQ+ Youth and Education
Youth spend more than 50 percent of their waking hours in schools. Schools play an important part in the development of youths’ social skills, educational growth, and cognitive development. The climate of schools can shape the experiences that LGBTQ+ students have throughout their lives and contribute to the overall well-being of their mental health. The experiences and outcomes of LGBTQ+ students from supportive schools show stark differences from those students from schools that are neutral or rejecting (figure 9.4).
Visit
Representatives from twenty-one U.S. federal agencies that support programs and services focusing on youth created the website Youth.gov. Read about the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth in schools across the United States, and explore some of the resources provided on the “Schools” page at https://youth.gov/youth-topics/lgbtq-youth/school-experiences.
• Think about your experiences in kindergarten through twelfth grade or the experiences of a young person you know well. How would you describe the atmosphere for LGBTQ+ students in that school?
• The website reports high levels of harassment of LGBTQ+ students in schools. Was that your experience too?
• Did your school use any of the strategies discussed? If so, which of the strategies worked the best? If not, which do you think would have helped?
History of LGBTQ+ Inclusivity in Education
In 1984, Project 10, the first support group for LGBTQ+ students in a formal educational system, was started in a Los Angeles high school by Virginia Uribe, a teacher and counselor. Uribe experienced significant backlash from community members. Project 10’s mission was to create supportive, welcoming, and safe campuses for sexual minority youth. It helped establish the first safe zones and developed training for schools on implementing policy changes to protect youth. Similar efforts began on the East Coast several years later. GLSEN, formerly the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, was founded in 1990 by a group of teachers in Massachusetts with a passion for improving the quality of education for LGBTQ+ youth. GLSEN has become a leading national organization for ensuring safe and affirming educational systems for LGBTQ+ youth. Also during the 1990s, the first gay-straight alliance (GSA) was established in Salt Lake City, Utah. Despite resistance that continues today from the community, administration, and parents, the Salt Lake City GSA persevered, and schools all across the nation slowly began implementing similar support efforts. As of 2015, nearly 60 percent of students reported having GSAs at their school.[12]
GLSEN has been conducting the National School Climate Survey every year since 2001, and LGBTQ+ content and resources in schools have been gradually increasing every year. Out of almost eighteen thousand LGBTQ+ students sampled by GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey, about 20 percent reported positive inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues in curricula, most (61.6%) reported that their school had a Gay-Straight Alliance, Gender-Sexuality Alliance (GSA), or Queer-Straight Alliance (QSA) or similar club, and 48.9 percent reported access to library materials with information on LGBTQ+ issues (figure 9.5).[13]
State legislation shapes the experience of students in schools. According to a comprehensive survey published in the Columbia Law Review, twenty states maintain statutes that “prohibit or restrict the discussion of homosexuality in public schools.” Some laws prohibit teachers from “promoting” homosexuality or suggesting that there are safe ways to practice homosexual sex. Others demand that teachers disseminate misinformation, such as “homosexual conduct is a criminal offense” and “homosexual activity [is] primarily responsible for contact with the AIDS virus.” This argument has been present in sex education since the 1980s. Policies such as these promote peer discrimination, harassment, and assault of LGBTQ+ youth.[14]
Sex Education
Since the 1980s, sexual health education has focused on an abstinence-based, or abstinence-only until marriage, approach. This approach to sex education promotes sex as an act that occurs between two heterosexual cisgender persons after getting married. Further, same-sex attraction is feared and gender stereotypes are reinforced. Public health organizations and most parents agree that sex education should include discussions of LGBTQ+ identities. Eight-five percent of parents of high schoolers reported wanting sexual orientation discussed in sex education, and 78 percent of middle school parents wanted sexual orientation discussed in sex education.[15]
In reality, less than 4 percent of LGBTQ+ youth reported any mention of sexual or gender orientation in their health classes, and only 12 percent were told about same-gender relationships. The routine omission of LGBTQ+ issues from sex education curricula constitutes a violation of adolescent human rights.[16] It is a violation because it “robs youth of sexual agency by withholding information that is critical to health and well-being.”[17] Whether habitual or deliberate, the omission of LGBTQ+ topics from health curricula implies that sexual and gender fluidity are not part of the natural biological order and are by default unnatural or perverse.[18]
When discussions of LGBTQ+ issues do appear in health textbooks, the language clearly shifts toward LGBTQ+ persons as the Other and makes it seem as though the sexual experiences of LGBTQ+ youth are vastly different from those of heterosexual and cisgender youth.[19] Although LGBTQ+ youth do have some differences in sexual experiences, including information tailored to their needs can help reduce the risk of sexually transmitted infections. Sex education that affirms LGBTQ+ youth delays the age of first sexual intercourse and reduces
• unintended teen pregnancy;
• rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections;
• overall number of sexual partners; and
• unprotected sex while increasing condom and contraception use.[20]
Neutral and Negative Schools
As of 2020, only seventeen states and the District of Columbia had laws specifically addressing the discrimination, harassment, and bullying of students based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Lack of legislation means interpretation of policies is variable and leaves policy development up to individual districts and schools. Students in schools without policies are at a greater likelihood of experiencing discriminatory practices and are more likely to fear discrimination and bullying in the future. Even more troubling for LGBTQ+ students, five states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas) prohibit presenting any content on LGBTQ+ issues.[21]
Heteronormative socialization becomes more intense as youth age, and earlier exposure to discrimination has been shown to increase the likelihood of victimization for LGBTQ+ youth.[22] A 2015 analysis of the Youth Behavior Risk Surveillance Survey found high rates of peer bullying behavior toward LGBTQ+ youth. Of LGBTQ+ students experiencing discriminatory behaviors,
• 10 percent were threatened or injured with a weapon on school property;
• 34 percent were bullied on school property;
• 28 percent were bullied electronically through social media or other sites;
• 23 percent experienced sexual dating violence in the prior year;
• 18 percent experienced physical dating violence; and
• 18 percent were raped at some point in their lives.[23]
A study of transgender youth found even higher rates of discrimination and violence in several areas:
• 25 percent experienced physical bullying;
• 52 percent experienced dating bullying;
• 35 percent experienced bullying specifically due to gender; and
• 47 percent experienced bullying specifically due to gender expression.[24]
School bullying has long-term effects on the mental health and quality of life of LGBTQ+ students. Bullying has been shown to be associated with increased depression, anxiety, and suicidality and decreased self-esteem. Bullying can also affect school outcomes by increasing negative attitudes toward school, truancy, and disciplinary problems while lowering GPAs and decreasing interest in pursuing further education (figure 9.6).[25]
Educators confirm witnessing discriminatory and violent behavior toward LGBTQ+ students in schools, even as early as elementary school. An alarming 70 percent of LGBTQ+ youth heard antigay speech at school (e.g., “That’s so gay, gay; you’re so gay”), 60 percent heard another type of homophobic remark (e.g., “fag” or “dyke”), and 56 percent heard homophobic remarks from their teachers. Additionally, youth heard comments about gender expression from peers at least 60 percent of the time and from teachers and school staff 71 percent of the time. Many of these behaviors go unnoticed and undocumented. In fact, some educators (between 31 and 42 percent) fail to recognize harassment by other students, such as the use of the word “fag” or the phrase “that’s so gay,” and do not intervene appropriately when it arises. Forty-seven percent of LGBTQ+ students who reported homophobic harassment to a teacher or support staff and over 90 percent of students who heard gender expression discrimination never saw the school staff intervene. Fifty-seven percent of LGBTQ+ youth never reported harassment and assault, because of fear of inaction by the school. Bullying isn’t exclusive to fellow students in schools. Forty-four percent of educators reported hearing other school staff make derogatory comments about or toward LGBTQ+ students, with the highest prevalence of educator bullying and harassment occurring in middle school.[26]
Explore
GLSEN’s policy maps (https://www.glsen.org/policy-maps) provide a comprehensive overview of state laws that affirm nondiscrimination or protect transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming students.
• Find the state where you live or where you grew up on each of the maps; what kinds of protections does this state offer for kindergarten through grade twelve students?
• What are the differences between how states treat sexual orientation and gender identity? What trends do you see?
• Explore other parts of the GLSEN website and pick one resource you find most compelling. Why is this important to you?
Michigan, Maine, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have ruled that discriminating against transgender students is a violation of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in schools.[27]
Supportive Movements in LGBTQ+ Education
Laws in some states enforce inclusivity of LGBTQ+ issues across the curriculum. California, for instance, has implemented new legislation supporting inclusion of LGBTQ+ themes in the classroom. The Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act was enacted in early 2012. It mandates an inclusive and nondiscriminatory curriculum, including LGBTQ+ historical events (such as the Stonewall rebellion). The act was passed to curb LGBTQ+ suicides and alleviate bullying.[28]
Other states shortly followed suit. New York and Washington adopted more inclusive laws for their school districts that took effect July 2012.[29] The Dignity for All Students Act requires public school boards in both states to include language regarding sexual orientation and gender expression in their curricula and school policies. A similar law passed in early 2019 requires all New Jersey schools to teach LGBTQ+ history and achievements across the curriculum.
An additional level of protection exists for transgender students that is based on federal law. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits schools from disclosing a student’s transgender status. Additionally, the law allows youth to amend school records if information is “inaccurate, misleading, or in violation of the student’s rights of privacy,” which enables students to change their name and gender marker on their transcripts.[30] The Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services can investigate complaints made by students and parents. In cases of discrimination, the Department of Education can sue the school district and deny federal funding.[31]
Supportive Schools
Over the last several decades, with sociocultural changes across the United States toward greater LGBTQ+ acceptance, schools have increasingly become more positive spaces for youth, some more than others. Positive schools typically have several key assets, including an environment where youth interact with caring and accepting educators and staff. Other assets include supportive school groups, inclusive curricula, and comprehensive policies to reduce school harassment and bullying. Supportive schools make it a standard policy for all youth to be more accepting and inclusive of LGBTQ+ students and are less likely to tolerate discriminatory and violent behavior between students. LBGTQ+ students in more supportive environments are less likely to have depression and suicidal ideation, use drugs, and be truant.[32]
The Role of Educators and Other Support Staff
Educators play an integral role in healthy youth development and increase feelings of safety for LGBTQ+ students. When cisgender and heterosexual teachers become allies of LGBTQ+ students and advocate for and support them, these students increase their academic achievement and their quality of life. Some educators even advance their allyship further and mentor students, sponsor LGBTQ+ student organizations, connect LGBTQ+ students to community resources, and openly advocate for inclusion despite consequences imposed by employers (e.g., probation or loss of employment). Studies on transgender youth have found that when school staff are more supportive, trans youth feel safer because the teachers are more likely to stop harassment when they see it. Including material on LGBTQ+ lives in course content, such as sex education, can have a large impact on the mental and emotional well-being of LGBTQ+ youth.[33]
Watch
Virginia Uribe, a retired teacher and counselor in the Los Angeles Unified School District, started Project 10, the first LGBTQ+ support program for students. On a 2015 episode of the MSNBC web series Fearless (https://youtu.be/-QFEL5rh4UQ), she describes the obstacles she faced when she founded the program in 1984 and some of the lessons she learned. Uribe has earned numerous awards for her work on behalf of LGBTQ+ youth.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=132
• Why was Project 10 such an important organization?
• Who were her early allies and advocates, and who was unable to support the project—or even attacked it? Why?
• What can we learn from comparing the environment that Uribe worked in during the late 1980s and early 1990s with the environment for LGBTQ+ youth now?
LGBTQ+ Clubs
LGBTQ+ clubs, originally known as gay-straight alliances, are school-based organizations that enhance the school community for LGBTQ+ youth and their allies and are often advised by an allied or self-identifying teacher at the school. LGBTQ+ clubs promote advocacy, encourage youth leadership, and allow youths to socialize in a supportive and nondiscriminatory environment. Developed in Massachusetts during the 1980s, LGBTQ+ clubs originally focused on the needs of sexual minority youth. National organizations, such as the GSA Network and GLSEN, and several state-focused organizations were influential in spreading LGBTQ+ clubs to more schools across the United States (figure 9.8). More recently, with the increasing emphasis on the needs of transgender youth, groups have been adjusting their focus to include the needs and rights of gender minority students in their missions. Some groups, for example, have altered their names to Gender-Sexuality Alliance or even Queer Student Alliance to encompass a broad spectrum of identities.[34]
Having LGBTQ+ clubs in school is one of the largest protective factors for LGBTQ+ youth. Research on victimization, drug use, and mental health found reduced instances of victimization and harassment and increased feelings of support and connectivity, leading to reductions in anxiety and depression. Students felt more connected, empowered, and supported by their schools and other adults, and they were less inclined to feel marginalized and victimized by peers and school-based adults.[35]
Whereas most LGBTQ+ clubs are embraced and supported in schools, some receive pushback from the administration, community, school boards, and parents fearing the club may encourage homosexuality. In the most extreme cases, some opponents have gone as far as banning all school clubs. Unfortunately, resistance occurs most often in school districts where LGBTQ+ students need these services the most. For example, in 2003, in an effort to eliminate controversy after approving a LGBTQ+ student group at a high school in Boyd County, Kentucky, a principal banned all noncurricular clubs at the school for the remainder of the year.[36]
Bathrooms and Locker Rooms
Beginning in the 2010s, controversy about the use of bathrooms and locker rooms for gender minority youth increased. As of 2016, over half the states in the United States were suing over the rights of transgender students to use the bathroom aligned with their gender. LGBTQ+ youth perceive bathrooms as the most unsafe spaces within their school building. Although not all schools can undergo a full renovation to include a new gender-neutral restroom, schools can take a current restroom and relabel it as gender neutral for all students to use (see an example in figure 9.9). Gender-neutral or single-stall bathrooms increase the sense of security of LGBTQ+ youth. They provide a safe space for youth to use the restroom without having to choose between which bathroom to use or anticipate the negative backlash if someone who is unaccepting is inside. Unfortunately, gender minority youth are often the main advocates for bathrooms accommodating the needs of transgender persons. Having other supportive systems in place, such as educators who are accepting or LGBTQ+ clubs, often encourages gender minority youth to speak up and advocate for their needs.[37]
Physical education courses are particularly difficult aspects of school for LGBTQ+ students. A study found that more than half of LGBTQ+ youth had been assaulted or harassed in physical education classes at least once because of their sexual orientation (52.8 percent) or gender expression (50.9 percent). Often this mistreatment is due to gender socialization about how masculine or feminine one should be and can often lead to difficulties for gender minority youth when using locker rooms and other facilities aligned with their gender identity.[38]
Contrary to media presentations about the danger from transgender people using bathrooms aligned with their gender, it is gender minority youth who are at significantly greater risk for experiencing trauma and violence in these public spaces. Eleven percent of LGBTQ+ youth never feel safe in a locker room, with discomfort steeply increasing for transgender and nonbinary youth in these spaces. Forty-one percent of transgender boys, 34 percent of transgender girls, and 31 percent of nonbinary youth never feel safe in locker rooms. Slightly more than half (51 percent) of transgender youth have never used the locker room aligned with their gender identity, instead either using the locker room aligned with their sex assigned at birth or not participating in physical education activities. A national study conducted by the Human Rights Campaign found that one-third of all LGBTQ+ students do not attend physical education courses, 39 percent avoid locker rooms, and 23 percent avoid all school athletic facilities and fields, all of which can lead to further isolation and ostracization.[39]
Challenges of Educators
Educators face several challenges when addressing the needs of LGBTQ+ students. A study found that diversity courses for preservice teachers, school counselors, and school psychologists covered race, class, and (dis)ability but failed to mention the needs of LGBTQ+ students. Ultimately, this leads to educators feeling unprepared to work with LGBTQ+ students, being unable to adjust their interactions, and wondering how to advocate for students on these issues. Even after getting licensed, many education professionals are not able to access comprehensive professional development opportunities and training, despite their interest. Many professionals have to find the appropriate resources for themselves.[40]
Community opposition can also significantly influence educators’ willingness to support youth. Despite personal acceptance of LGBTQ+ youth, some educators are reluctant to indicate their support of LGBTQ+ students out of fear of negative parental response, administrative backlash, and possible loss of employment. In particularly conservative areas, and in religiously affiliated schools, teachers may not have permission from the administration to demonstrate their support. Evaluations of teacher-candidate training found that, despite research stating the importance of inclusion and school safety for LGBTQ+ students, many teachers would be unwilling to advocate for the needs of LGBTQ+ students or were unwilling to discuss sexual and gender minority identities publicly in the classroom. Although the culture of schools has been improving, schools still remain politically and religiously charged institutions and a battleground for the rights of LGBTQ+ students.[41]
Conclusion
LGBTQ+ youth have several means of support and affirmation that can lead to positive health outcomes into their adulthood. Childhood through adolescence is a critical stage of development for all youth, but for LGBTQ+ youth the failure of any one support system (family, school, peers, sports, etc.) can have lifelong consequences. With national trends across all youth systems moving toward greater levels of acceptance and with the power of resilience, LGBTQ+ youth are equipped now more than ever to have positive and productive lives. All adults can be advocates for the rights and needs of LGBTQ+ youth.
Profile: LGBTQ+ Inclusion in PreK–12 Teaching and Learning
Sabia Prescott
Historically, prekindergarten–twelfth-grade schools in the United States have not been designed to serve students of gender or sexual minorities. From laws regulating bathrooms and sports to severe restrictions on instruction, policies in many states do not support LGBTQ+ students or teachers. According to a 2019 national survey of LGBTQ+ students from GLSEN, these barriers often translate to lower educational outcomes and graduation rates and to higher rates of anxiety and depression among LGBTQ+ youth.[42]
When polled in the GLSEN survey, only one in five LGBTQ+ students reported that they were taught positive representations of LGBTQ+ people, history, or events in their classes. Well more than half (67 percent) of students reported that they did not have access to information about topics related to LGBTQ+ issues in their school library, through the internet on school computers, or in their textbooks or other assigned readings. At the same time, less than half of students (42 percent) said their administration was supportive of LGBTQ+ students, and 48 percent said they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable talking with a teacher. Because the National Center for Education Statistics does not report on gender and sexuality in schools, self-reported data from the GLSEN survey is the most robust information available.
Compounding general trends, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened mental health of LGBTQ+ students and seen a drastic rise in politicization of inclusive education efforts. A record amount of legislation has been introduced in states across the country that would prohibit or severely limit representation and discussions of LGBTQ+ identities in kindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula and classrooms. In a majority of U.S. states, bills have been proposed that aim to restrict discussions of LGBTQ+ people and their history or create privacy policies that would jeopardize queer students’ well-being, such as in Florida, Georgia, and Texas.[43]
At the same time, a handful of states maintain affirmative laws, requiring kindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula to include accurate LGBTQ+ history. By the end of 2019, four states—California, New Jersey, Colorado, and Illinois—had mandates requiring LGBTQ+ inclusion in prekindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula. The state legislature in New York has recently moved in the same direction. On the opposite end of the spectrum, five states—Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Louisiana—maintain education laws forbidding teachers from portraying LGBTQ+ people or identities in a positive light, if at all. These laws, known as “no promo homo” laws, act in stark contrast with the states working toward statutorily mandated inclusion. Teachers in states with “no promo homo” laws may still work toward engaging and supporting their queer and trans students, but their work necessarily looks different from that in states with supportive legislation.[44]
Stories of this harmful legislation have recently dominated headlines, but LGBTQ+ inclusion is happening and not only at the state level. Just a few years ago, a majority of education leaders were not thinking or talking about queer and trans students. Today, in part because of the steep politicization, school leaders, parents, librarians, media specialists, and more, have taken up the public fight for LGBTQ+ inclusion. Districts in states with restrictive laws are fighting these laws at the local level, through school board elections, local advocacy groups, and even mayoral races. If resistance toward LGBTQ+ inclusion is becoming louder, so too is support from allies, educators, and students. Though these laws affect what educators can and can’t teach, teachers can do many things to facilitate inclusive learning in a variety of political and social settings. The remainder of this profile explores how inclusive teaching and learning look in practice and what barriers exist for teachers doing this work.
Inclusive Student Learning
Inclusion as an approach, although crucial, presents a unique challenge for queer students. To create an inclusive classroom that meets the needs of all students, schools must be able to identify and quantify those students’ needs. To do that, those students must be visible. If schools can’t identify the students they’re trying to serve, they likely can’t identify the supports they need. But queer students are often not public about the process of coming to terms with their identities, especially at a young age. What’s more, they exist across all other human demographics and therefore can’t be lumped together under one group that looks or sounds the same. Because of difficulties in data collection of LGBTQ+ folks—including safety concerns when self-reporting, changing identities, and institutional bias—many queer students are unaccounted for in student data.
For these reasons, much of the existing data on LGBTQ+ students, such as GLSEN’s, are self-reported. Its survey of twenty-three thousand students ages thirteen to twenty-one found that 95 percent of students reported hearing discriminatory remarks frequently at school, 63 percent reported hearing those remarks from teachers or staff, and 17 percent of students were prohibited from discussing or writing about LGBTQ+ topics in school assignments.[45] Students are not only, then, told the challenges queer people face are invalid but hear this message from the school policies that govern them, the teachers who educate them, and the material they’re taught.
Recognizing the power of inclusive learning materials to address this problem, some states are exploring solutions through gender-inclusive history and social science curricula. Gender inclusive, in this sense, broadly describes curricula and other learning materials that teach about the lived experiences of a wide range of LGBTQ+ people and identities. This can be content focused specifically on LGBTQ+ people and identities or content not focused on them, such as biology and English language arts. For example, an inclusive biology class might use nongendered language or examine the assumptions that we make when classifying genetic phenomena into categories such as natural and unnatural. A biology course that goes beyond simple inclusion to affirming and validating might explore the bias behind what are often regarded as objective, scientific discoveries, a bias that shapes the ways we conceptualize DNA and genetic makeup. A common misconception about queer and trans inclusion is that it is reserved for only certain academic areas and not others. In reality, every subject, topic, and conversation can be made inclusive and affirming. Indeed, all subject matter is shaped by gender and sexuality biases, regardless of whether we are aware of it.
When California passed its inclusive history–social science framework in 2016, it was the first state to make an attempt to guide creation of textbooks that cover LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. The vote came five years after the state’s passage of the FAIR Education Act, in 2011, and textbooks using the framework were implemented for the first time during the 2019–2020 school year. Not only was the publishing process arduous, but the content creation itself required multiple committees of history experts, educators, and advocates to debate the exact content and wording that ultimately went to a vote. The resulting content is groundbreakingly comprehensive and now published in textbooks used throughout the state. Unfortunately, the materials in California are proprietary and therefore not available to other states looking to implement a similar curriculum.
To be inclusive of gender and sexual minorities, student-facing materials must incorporate LGBTQ+ characters, identities, and histories. They should present accurate and impartial information to students about not only what queer and transgender identities are but how they determine privilege and oppression, in addition to describing the implicit biases that help sustain this oppression. Inclusive content can be specifically about LGBTQ+ people or not, but it always includes queer and gender-diverse examples, names, stories, and images.
Teachers and school administrators can take specific steps to intentionally create more inclusive learning environments. As more states move toward inclusive curricula, the need for comparable educator support is growing rapidly. Three of the biggest challenges to inclusion in schools is preparing teachers to teach inclusive content and create inclusive learning environments, providing them the resources to do so, and supporting them in these efforts.
Inclusive Teaching Practices
In recent years there has been a growing push among prekindergarten–twelfth-grade educators toward culturally responsive teaching, or teaching that recognizes students’ particular strengths in the classroom and leverages them to make learning experiences more relevant and effective. Countering the notion that teachers should cover only what is in the assigned texts regardless of students or context, culturally responsive teaching explores narratives beyond those that have historically been told in textbooks. Not to be confused with the current battle over what has been dubbed critical race theory, cultural responsiveness aims to offer a variety of perspectives, experiences, and lenses to students for understanding content.
With the push toward culturally responsive teaching has come a wider understanding of the value of representation among educators, in the classroom and in the curriculum, as well as a growing popularity of the concept of windows and mirrors. Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita of education at the Ohio State University, first developed this idea in 1990.[46] She suggested that curricula should offer students both a window to lives and experiences different from theirs and a mirror so they can see themselves reflected in the material. The latter is particularly important for students who belong to one or more minority groups: by no coincidence, students of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ students seldom see themselves reflected or represented in prekindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula.
The growing support for cultural competence and representation is situated between this single-narrative paradigm—in which existing curricula teach through the lens of only one identity—and current knowledge of what it takes for students to succeed. We know that students must feel a sense of safety, respect, and belonging in schools in order to learn. We know validation from teachers and space for students to develop inquiry into their own identities are critical to their social-emotional development. And yet many schools are falling short of meeting these needs, either by failing to address them or by addressing basic safety instead of pedagogy, rather than both.
The Northwestern University professor Sally Nuamah argues in her book How Girls Achieve that educating young girls takes more than simply forging paths in schools that are not designed for them. Rather, it takes active and intentional unteaching of harmful lessons ingrained in them long before they ever arrived in the classroom. It takes teaching specific skills—such as strategy and transgression—to prepare them to navigate a world that relies on their lack of these skills. This idea should also be applied to teaching and learning for LGBTQ+ students. Queer students as a group face similar challenges in regard to the lack of representation they see in curricula and the unconscious bias with which they are often taught. Teaching and engaging them requires teachers and school leaders alike to actively unlearn tired stereotypes and interrogate their own understanding of what is normal and given.[47]
The term inclusive learning environments has grown more popular in recent years alongside the push for LGBTQ+ acceptance in schools and the movement toward culturally responsive teaching. Inclusive, in this sense, refers to classrooms or other learning environments in which educators, librarians, and school staff recognize their own privilege as starting points for difficult conversations. It also requires that educators be willing and prepared to use affirming language and that they support a variety of narratives that challenge students to open lines of inquiry into cultural assumptions.
When it comes to queer and trans students specifically, an inclusive learning environment is one in which educators take steps to understand straight and cisgender privilege, how it overlaps with other types of privilege, and what dynamic it creates in a classroom. It is one in which educators are open to learning about different identities, so they have context and language to talk about them. It is also one in which educators have the time, space, and school support to understand LGBTQ+ history, at least at a basic level, and how it informs current understandings of queer identities.
Although this all might sound like a heavy load to put on teachers who are already notoriously short on time and resources, the barrier of entry to inclusion work is low. For example, educators can start by making small but intentional changes to the way they address groups of students, by using gender-neutral phrases such as “folks,” “everyone,” or “y’all” instead of “boys and girls,” “ladies and gentlemen,” or “you guys.” This type of change is minimal but meaningful, and it signals to students who do not identify as male or female or are questioning their gender identity that they belong. It also models and normalizes inclusive language for all students, regardless of identity. For smaller content changes such as this, having editable materials, rather than textbooks, can be especially useful.
Inclusive professional learning materials are those that prepare educators to create learning environments in which inclusion is normal and expected. Such resources could be texts on relevant and contextual queer history, an explanation of some of the challenges that queer and trans people face more broadly, or simply information on language, pronouns, and why they matter. Ideally, these resources recognize nuance and diversity within queer communities and engage teachers around intentionally anti-racist queer inclusion. For early and elementary educators, this might be resources that explain the importance of including Black and brown same-sex families in a lesson on family trees. For secondary teachers, it might be adding to the class library foundational writings by Black and brown authors, such as Audre Lorde or Gloria Anzaldúa. Exposure to a diversity of queer ideas and narratives is critical for students, those who may see themselves represented in these stories and those who do not, to disrupt the single-story narrative.
Summary
The disproportionate educational outcomes that LGBTQ+ students face are the result of many compounding factors, such as a lack of representation and support in school, politicization of their existence, and systemic bias. Inclusive materials remain a critical part of the effort to address these challenges and are the focus of an increasing number of efforts. Although teaching and learning are intrinsically tied, it is important to recognize the different needs between student- and teacher-facing materials. Instituting inclusive curriculum laws and policies calls for inclusive professional learning, because if teachers are not adequately prepared, inclusive content will do very little to create more inclusive learning environments.
Key Questions
• What does research tell us about the process of coming out in terms of both gender and sexual identity?
• What is the range of responses to LGBTQ+ youth if they choose to disclose their gender or sexuality identities to family members? How do these responses affect LGBTQ+ peoples’ lives?
• What are the differences between supportive and inclusive schools and those needing improvements?
• What are some health and education disparities for minoritized gender and sexuality identities, and why do they exist?
Research Resources
Compiled by Rae-Anne Montague and Melody Scagnelli-Townley
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about education and LGBTQ+ youth.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or editing a photograph in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: Find a partner or split into groups, and choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the resources in this chapter to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
“Chosen Family: Stories of Queer Resilience,” by Tyler Oakley
Tyler Oakley shares people’s stories of their LGBTQ+ experience in a series of videos at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL29MYs08TJ6NiejALGuz-eIDQoLoJkxVi.
Curricula Inclusive of LGBTQ+ People, from GLSEN
GLSEN is an educational organization that conducts research and partners with decision makers to ensure inclusive, safe school policies, empower student leaders via activities like Day of Silence and Ally Week, and create developmentally appropriate resources and curricula for educators. For its resources, see https://www.glsen.org/educate/resources/curriculum.
GALE, the Global Alliance for LGBT Education
This international organization is a learning community that promotes full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people by “identifying, enhancing and sharing educational expertise.” See https://www.gale.info/en.
“The Genderbread Person,” from Hues, a Global Justice Collective
Using a gingerbread image, this genderbread person is a teaching tool that helps explain the differences among gender identity, gender expression, anatomical sex, gender, and sexual orientation. The site also includes lesson plans, activities, and essays. All content on the site, https://www.genderbread.org, is free for others to use.
GSA Network
This national organization for LGBTQ+ racial and gender justice trains youth to organize gay-straight alliances, mobilize, and advocate for an intersectional movement for healthier communities and safer schools. It provides assistance for teachers and advisors starting an alliance, registering an alliance, and beginning a campaign. See https://gsanetwork.org.
Journal of LGBT Youth
This quarterly journal presents peer-reviewed scholarly articles, practitioner-based essays, policy analyses, and revealing narratives from LGBTQ+ young people. For the most current issue, see https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wjly20/current.
LGBTQ Writers in Schools, from Lambda Literary
Since 2015, Lambda Literary has joined with the New York City Department of Education to bring award-winning LGBTQ+ writers into schools to discuss their books and lives. Every participating student receives a free copy of the book discussed. To learn more, visit https://lambdaliterary.org/2021/09/announcing-the-expansion-of-lgbtq-writers-in-schools/
“Movies with LGBTQ+ Characters for Teens,” from Common Sense Media
From goofy rom-coms and musicals to powerful documentaries and dramas, the picks in this list celebrate love, perseverance, and real-life icons. Other lists are available for TV, games, books, music, and more, from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/lgbtq-movies-for-teens.
PFLAG
This national organization advocates on behalf of all LGBTQ+ people and is where loved ones and youth can talk about coming out, affirmatively raising LGBTQ+ children, and other relevant matters; visit https://pflag.org for more information.
“Rainbow Book List,” from American Library Association.
The “Rainbow Book List” presents an annual bibliography of quality books with significant and authentic LGBTQ+ content. Titles on this list are for people from birth to eighteen years old. For the latest list, see https://glbtrt.ala.org/rainbowbooks/archives/1331.
Trevor Project
The Trevor Project provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ+ young people under age twenty-five. In the United States, dial 1-866-488-7386, or visit its website, https://www.thetrevorproject.org.
Welcoming Schools, of the HRC Foundation
The Welcoming Schools program sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) provides lesson plans, resources, and trainers to work with schools and districts across the United States to improve school climate with gender and LGBTQ+ inclusive training. See http://www.welcomingschools.org.
We Need Diverse Books
We Need Diverse Books is a grassroots organization that strives for change in the publishing industry leading to literature that reflects the lives of all young people. See https://diversebooks.org.
Deep Dive: Books and Film
Its Still Elementary: Reexamining LGBT Issues in Schools, directed by Debra Chasnoff
This film takes a look back at the controversial and revolutionary 1996 film Its Elementary: Talking about Gay Issues in School. The original documentary provided practical advice about how to talk with elementary school students about gay issues. After it aired on PBS, the film and the filmmakers came under attack by the religious right. Its Still Elementary documents that controversy and follows up with the students and teachers from the first film to see how learning about gay issues in a positive environment affected their lives (United States: New Day Films, 2007).
A Place in the Middle, written by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, directed by Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson
In this true story, an eleven-year-old girl in Hawaii yearns to join the boys-only hula group at her school. A friendly teacher empowers her through traditional culture. This educational film encourages students to think about diversity and inclusion and discusses how to prevent bullying (United States: Pacific Islanders in Communications, Independent Television Service, and the Ford Foundation, 2015, https://aplaceinthemiddle.org).
Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World, by Sarah Prager
This collection of true stories is aimed at teen readers and uncovers a rich queer heritage that encompasses diverse cultures and eras (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).
Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism, edited by Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
Personal narratives from fourteen Latinx LGBTQ+ activists illuminate a history that has received little attention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).
Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son, by Lori Duron
The author discusses raising a gender-nonconforming child, its effect on family dynamics, the perceptions by others, and her son’s reception in public education (New York: Broadway Books, 2013).
The Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Americas Public Schools, by Stuart Biegel
The second edition, updated in 2018, reviews the legal developments concerning curricula and pedagogy, transgender issues in educational environments, LGBTQ+ student participation in school sports, policy development on school bullying, and the right to be out for LGBTQ+ kindergarten–twelfth-grade educators. Biegel explains the social, political, and personal tensions of being out in school in the contexts of First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights and that LGBTQ+ issues in educational environments affect all people. Biegel recommends strategies to provide safe environments for LGBTQ+ students and educators to thrive. The first edition provides valuable case studies of how the courts addressed bullying and workplace discrimination in kindergarten–twelfth-grade environments, and how school administrators responded to the court decisions. Both editions are must reads for students in all education programs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Top 250 LGBTQ Books for Teens: Coming Out, Being Out, and the Search for Community, by Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins
This book identifies and summarizes titles that address important topics like coming out, being out, and community. The authors cover fiction, graphic novels, and general nonfiction aimed at readers in middle school and high school. Recent publications as well as classics are included (Chicago: Huron Street Press, 2015).
Glossary
cisnormativity. Viewing all people as cisgender, or those whose gender aligns with the sex assigned at birth.
coming out. Also known as coming out of the closet; a process in the lives of LGBTQ+ people of disclosing one’s sexual orientation or gender identity to others.
gay-straight alliances. School-based organizations of LGBTQ+ youth and allies who meet to support LGBTQ+ students. This can involve advocacy and activism, as well as a social component.
heteronormativity. Viewing all people as heterosexual, or those who feel attraction to the “opposite” sex.
identity recognition. When LGBTQ+ individuals first identify their sexual or gender identity.
PFLAG. Formerly known as Parents, Family, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; an organization that supports the family and friends of LGBTQ+ people as they seek to understand and affirm their LGBTQ+ loved ones.
Title IX. A federal law banning discrimination based on sex at schools receiving federal funding. This includes harassment and discrimination for failing to conform to gender expectations and is interpreted to often include LGBTQ+ persons.
transitioning. The process—social, legal, and/or medical—one goes through to affirm one’s gender identity.
1. D. L. Espelage and S. M. Swearer, “Addressing Research Gaps in the Intersection between Homophobia and Bullying,” School Psychology Review 37 (2008): 155–159.
2. C. Ryan, D. Huebner, R. Diaz, and J. Sanchez, “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults,” Pediatrics 123 (2009): 346–352; C. Ryan, S. Russell, D. Huebner, R. Diaz, and J. Sanchez, “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults,” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 23 (2010): 205–219.
3. For percentages of youth identifying as LGBTQ+, see M. E. Eisenberg, A. L. Gower, B. J. McMorris, G. N. Rider, G. Shea, and E. Coleman, “Risk and Protective Factors in the Lives of Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescent Health 61 (2017): 521–526; and M. M. Johns, R. Lowry, J. Andrzejewski, L. C. Barrios, Z. Demissie, T. McManus, C. N. Rasberry, et al., “Transgender Identity and Experiences of Violence Victimization, Substance Use, Suicide Risk, and Sexual Risk Behaviors among High School Students—19 States and Large Urban School Districts, 2017,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 68, no. 3 (2017): 67, https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6803a3; for labels staying consistent, see V. M. Silenzio, J. B. Pena, P. R. Duberstein, J. Cerel, and K. L. Knox, “Sexual Orientation and Risk Factors for Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempts among Adolescents and Young Adults,” American Journal of Public Health 97 (2007): 2017–2019; and for estimates of those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, see G. Gates, “How Many People Are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender?,” 2011, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-How-Many-People-LGBT-Apr-2011.pdf.
4. Human Rights Campaign, Growing Up LGBT in America: HRC Youth Survey Report Key Findings (Washington, DC: Human Rights Campaign, 2013); Pew Research Center, ASurvey of LGBT Americans: Attitudes, Experiences, andValues in Changing Times (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2013); for youth who resist identity-based labels, see R. C. Savin-Williams, The New Gay Teenager (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and M. A. Wagaman, “Self-Definition as Resistance: Understanding Identities among LGBTQ Emerging Adults,” Journal of LGBT Youth 13, no. 3 (2016): 207–230.
5. J. L. Herman, A. R. Flores, and K. K. O'Neill, “How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?,” 2022, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf.
6. Human Rights Campaign, “2018 LGBTQ Youth Report,” 2018, https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/2018-YouthReport-NoVid.pdf; for mothers’ and fathers’ responses, see A. H. Grossman, A. R. D’Augelli, T. J. Howell, and S. Hubbard, “Parent Reactions to Transgender Youth Gender Nonconforming Expression and Identity,” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services 18, no. 1 (2005): 3–16.
7. C. L. Martin and D. N. Ruble, “Patterns of Gender Development,” Annual Review of Psychology 61 (2010): 353–381.
8. For reducing distress and dysphoria, see K. R. Olson, L. Durwood, and K. A. McLaughlin, “Mental Health of Transgender Children Who Are Supported in Their Identities,” Pediatrics 137 (2018), e20181436; for reducing the likelihood of depression and so on, see A. D’Augelli, A. Grossman, and M. Starks, “Parents’ Awareness of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths’ Sexual Orientation,” Journal of Marriage and Family 67 (2005): 474–482; R. Garofalo, J. Deleon, E. Osmer, M. Doll, and G. W. Harper, “Overlooked, Misunderstood and at Risk: Exploring the Lives and HIV Risk of Ethnic Minority Male-to-Female Transgender Youth,” Journal of Adolescent Health 38 (2006): 230–236; A. L. Roberts, M. Rosario, H. L. Corliss, K. C. Koenen, and S. Bryn Austin, “Childhood Gender Nonconformity: A Risk Indicator for Childhood Abuse and Posttraumatic Stress in Youth,” Pediatrics 129 (2012): 410–417; W. C. Skidmore, J. A. W. Linsenmeier, and J. M. Bailey, “Gender Nonconformity and Psychological Distress in Lesbians and Gay Men,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 35 (2006): 685–697; R. Toomey, C. Ryan, R. Diaz, N. Card, and S. Russell, “Gender-Nonconforming Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth: School Victimization and Young Adult Psychosocial Adjustment,” Developmental Psychology 46 (2010): 1580–1589; and R. Travers, G. Bauer, J. Pyne, K. Bradley, L. Gale, and M. Papadimitriou, Impacts of Strong Parental Support for Trans Youth: A Report Prepared for Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and Delisle Youth Services, https://transpulseproject.ca/research/impacts-of-strong-parental-support-for-trans-youth/ .
9. For family as protection against negative health outcomes in early adulthood, see B. L. Needham and E. L. Austin, “Sexual Orientation, Parental Support, and Health during the Transition to Young Adulthood,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 39, no. 10 (2010): 1189–1198, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-010-9533-6; and Ryan et al., “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults”; for family support as a lifelong impact, see P. Zaninotto, E. Falaschetti, and A. Sacker, “Age Trajectories of Quality of Life among Older Adults: Results from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing,” Quality of Life Research 18 (2009): 1301–1309, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-009-9543-6; and Y. Luo, J. Xu, E. Granberg, and W. M. Wentworth, “A Longitudinal Study of Social Status, Perceived Discrimination, and Physical and Emotional Health among Older Adults,” Research on Aging 34 (2012): 275–301, https://doi.org/10.1177/0164027511426151; and for trans youth and family support, see Travers et al., Impacts of Strong Parental Support for Trans Youth.
10. For negative outcomes after family rejection, see D. Bontempo and A. D’Augelli, “Effects of At-School Victimization and Sexual Orientation on Lesbian, Gay, or Bisexual Youths’ Health Risk Behavior,” Journal of Adolescent Health 30 (2002): 364–374; A. H. Grossman, A. R. D’Augelli, and T. S. O’Connell, “Being Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and 60 or Older in North America,” Journal of Lesbian and Gay Social Services 13 (2001): 23–40, https://doi.org/10.1300/J041v13n04_05; Pew Research Center, ASurvey of LGBT Americans; Ryan et al., “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes”; and Toomey et al., “Gender-Nonconforming Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth”; for rejection being associated with emotional distress, see D’Augelli, Grossman, and Starks, “Parents’ Awareness of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths’ Sexual Orientation”; A. D’Augelli, S. Hershberger, and N. Pilkington, “Suicidality Patterns and Sexual Orientation-Related Factors among Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Youths,” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 31 (2001): 250–264; G. Remafedi, “Suicidality in a Venue-Based Sample of Young Men Who Have Sex with Men,” Journal of Adolescent Health 31 (2002): 305–310; and Ryan et al., “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes”; for suicidal ideation, see D’Augelli, Grossman, and Starks, “Parents’ Awareness of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths’ Sexual Orientation”; D’Augelli, Hershberger, and Pilkington, “Suicidality Patterns and Sexual Orientation-Related Factors among Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Youths”; and Remafedi, “Suicidality in a Venue-Based Sample of Young Men Who Have Sex with Men”; for suicide attempts, see Ryan et al., “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes”; for homelessness, see N. Ray, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness (New York: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and the National Coalition for the Homeless, 2006); and for percentage of homeless youth, see S. K. Choi, B. D. M. Wilson, J. Shelton, and G. Gates, Serving Our Youth 2015: The Needs and Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth Experiencing Homelessness (Los Angeles, CA: Williams Institute / True Colors Fund, 2015), https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Serving-Our-Youth-June-2015.pdf.
11. “Our Story,” PFLAG, accessed April 28, 2021, https://pflag.org/our-story.
12. GLSEN, “Policy Maps,” accessed 2015, https://maps.glsen.org.
13. J. G. Kosciw, E.A. Greytak, N. M. Giga, C. Villenas, and D. J. Danischewski, The 2015 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools (New York: GLSEN, 2016), https://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/2020-01/GLSEN%202015%20National%20School%20Climate%20Survey%20%28NSCS%29%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf.
14. C. Rosky, “Anti-Gay Curriculum Laws,” Columbia Law Review 117 (2017): 1461–1541, https://columbialawreview.org/content/anti-gay-curriculum-laws/; for these policies’ effects, see GLSEN, “Laws Prohibiting ‘Promotion of Homosexuality’ in Schools: Impacts and Implications,” research brief (New York: GLSEN, 2018), https://www.glsen.org/research/laws-prohibit-promotion-homosexuality-impacts-and-implicatio.
15. For an abstinence-based approach, see J. S. Santelli, L. M. Kantor, S. A. Grilo, I. S. Speizer, L. D. Lindberg, J. Heitel, A. T. Shalet, et al., “Abstinence-Only-until-Marriage: An Updated Review of U.S. Policies and Programs and Their Impact,” Journal of Adolescent Health 61 (2017): 273–280; for reinforcement of gender stereotypes, see Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, “Pride or Prejudice: How Fear-Based Abstinence-Only-until-Marriage Curricula Present Sexual Orientation,” 2008, http://hrp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/sexlies_stereotypes2008.pdf; and for percentages of parents who favor sex education, see “Parents and Teens Talk about Sexuality: A National Poll” (New York: Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health, 2015).
16. For mentions in health classes, see L. K. Gowen and N. Winges-Yanez, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning Youths’ Perspectives of Inclusive School-Based Sexuality Education," Journal of Sex Research 51 (2014): 788–800, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2013.806648; for same-gender relationships, see R. P. Jones and D. Cox, How Race and Religion Shape Millennial Attitudes on Sexuality and Reproductive Health: Findings from the 2015 Millennials, Sexuality, and Reproductive Health Survey (Washington, DC: Public Religion Research Institute, 2015); and for omission from sex education curricula, see A. M. Miller and R. A. Schleifer, “Through the Looking Glass: Abstinence-Only-until-Marriage Programs and Their Impact on Adolescent Human Rights,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 5 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.3.28.
17. J. P. Elia and M. J. Eliason, “Dangerous Omissions: Abstinence-Only-until-Marriage School-Based Sexuality Education and the Betrayal of LGBTQ Youth,” American Journal of Sexuality Education 5 (2010): 17–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/15546121003748848.
18. L. Y. Bay-Cheng, “The Trouble of Teen Sex: The Construction of Adolescent Sexuality through School-Based Sexuality Education,” Sex Education: Sexuality, Society, and Learning 3, no. 1 (2003): 61–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/1468181032000052162.
19. M. H. Whatley, “Keeping Adolescents in the Picture: Construction of Adolescent Sexuality in Textbook Images and Popular Films,” in Sexual Cultures and the Construction of Adolescent Identities, ed. J. M. Irvine (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 183–205.
20. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Human Rights Campaign Foundation, et al., “A Call to Action: LGBTQ+ Youth Need Inclusive Sex Education,” May 2021, https://hrc-prod-requests.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Call-to-Action-LGBTQ-Sex-Ed-Report-2021.pdf.
21. GLSEN, “Policy Maps,” updated August 2020, https://maps.glsen.org.
22. D. L. Espelage, S. R. Aragon, and M. Birkett, “Homophobic Teasing, Psychological Outcomes, and Sexual Orientation among HS Students: What Influences Do Parents and Schools Have?,” School Psychology Review 37 (2008): 202–216; D. L. Espelage and S. M. Swearer, “Addressing Research Gaps in the Intersection between Homophobia and Bullying,” School Psychology Review 37 (2008): 155–159; S. Horn, “Adolescents’ Reasoning about Exclusion from Social Groups,” Developmental Psychology 39 (2007): 71–84.
23. L. Kann, E. O. Olsen, T. McManus, W. A. Harris, S. L. Shanklin, K. H. Flint, B. Queen, et al., “Sexual Identity, Sex of Sexual Contacts, and Health-Related Behaviors among Students in Grades 9–12—United States and Selected Sites, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, surveillance summaries, 65, no. 9 (2016): 1–202, http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss6509a1.
24. M. E. Eisenberg, A. L. Gower, B. J. McMorris, G. N. Rider, G. Shea, and E. Coleman, “Risk and Protective Factors in the Lives of Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescent Health 61, no. 4 (2017): 521–526.
25. For mental health, see D’Augelli, Grossman, and Starks, “Parents’ Awareness of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths’ Sexual Orientation”; and Espelage, Aragon, and Birkett, “Homophobic Teasing”; for bullying, mental health, and school outcomes, see J. G. Kosciw, E. A. Greytak, N. A. Palmer, and M. J. Boesen, The 2013 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools (New York: GLSEN, 2014); for bullying’s effect on school outcomes, see C. Goodenow, L. A. Szalacha, and K. Westheimer, “School Support Groups, Other School Factors, and the Safety of Sexual Minority Adolescents,” Psychology in the Schools 43 (2006): 573–589; T. B. Murdock and M. B. Bolch, “Risk and Protective Factors for Poor School Adjustment in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) High School Youth: Variable and Person-Centered Analyses,” Psychology in the Schools 42 (2005): 159–172; and S. M. Swearer, R. K. Turner, J. E. Givens, and W. S. Pollack, “‘You’re So Gay!’: Do Different Forms of Bullying Matter for Adolescent Males?,” School Psychology Review 37 (2008): 221–227.
26. For discriminatory and violent behavior, see E. A. Dragowski, C. P. McCabe, and F. Rubinson, “Educators’ Reports on Incidence of Harassment and Advocacy toward LGBTQ Students,” Psychology in the Schools 53 (2016): 127–142; for anti-gay and homophobic speech at school, comments about gender expression, and staff nonintervention, see J. G. Kosciw, E. A. Greytak, A. D. Zongrone, C. M. Clark, and N. L. Truong, “The 2017 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth in Our Nation’s Schools (New York: GLSEN, 2018); for educators not recognizing harassment, see S. Z. Athanases and T. G. Larrabee, “Toward a Consistent Stance in Teaching for Equity: Learning to Advocate for Lesbian- and Gay-Identified Youth,” Teaching and Teacher Education 19 (2003): 237–261; P. C. McCabe, E. A. Dragowski, and F. Rubinson, “What Is Homophobic Bias Anyway? Defining and Recognizing Microaggressions and Harassment of LGBTQ Youth,” Journal of School Violence 12 (2013): 7–26; and R. Mudrey and A. Medina-Adams, “Attitudes, Perceptions, and Knowledge of Pre-service Teachers regarding the Educational Isolation of Sexual Minority Youth,” Journal of Homosexuality 51 (2006): 63–90; and for youth not reporting harassment and assault, see Kosciw et al., The 2013 National School Climate Survey; and for educator bullying, see Dragowski et al., “Reports on Incidence of Harassment and Advocacy toward LGBTQ Students.”
27. National Center for Transgender Equality, “Know Your Rights,” accessed April 28, 2021, https://transequality.org/know-your-rights/schools.
28. T. Kushner, “News for Educational Workers,” Radical Teacher 92 (2011): 74–78.
29. For New York’s and Washington’s laws, see P. DeWitt, Dignity for All: Safeguarding LGBT Students (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012).
30. 34 C.F.R. § 99.7(a)(2)(ii).
31. National Center for Transgender Equality, “Know Your Rights.”
32. For schools as positive spaces for youth, see W. W. Black, A. L. Fedewa, and K. A. Gonzalez, “Effects of ‘Safe School’ Programs and Policies on the Social Climate for Sexual-Minority Youth: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of LGBT Youth 9 (2012): 321–339; for positive schools, see Aragon and Birkett, “Homophobic Teasing”; for supportive school groups, see Black, Fedewa, and Gonzalez, “Effects of ‘Safe School’ Programs”; and Goodenow, Szalacha, and Westheimer, “School Support Groups”; for policies to reduce harassment and bullying, see Kosciw et al., The 2013 National School Climate Survey; and for supportive schools, see M. Birkett, D. L. Espelage, and B. Koenig, “LGB and Questioning Students in Schools: The Moderating Effects of Homophobic Bullying and School Climate on Negative Outcomes,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 38 (2009): 989–1000; and Goodenow, Szalacha, and Westheimer, “School Support Groups.”
33. For student achievement and quality of life, see J. K. McGuire, C. R. Anderson, R. B. Toomey, and S. T. Russell, “School Climate for Transgender Youth: A Mixed Method Investigation of Student Experiences and School Responses,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 39 (2010): 1175–1188; for educator allyship, see L. Carroll and P. J. Gilroy, “Transgender Issues in Counselor Preparation,” Counselor Education and Supervision 41 (2002): 233–243, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6978.2002.tb01286.x; M. Gonzalez and J. McNulty, “Achieving Competency with Transgender Youth: School Counselors as Collaborative Advocates,” Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling 4 (2010): 176–186, https://doi.org/10.1080/15538605.2010.524841; and McGuire et al., “School Climate for Transgender Youth”; and for supportive school staff making trans youth feel safer, see M. O’Shaughnessy, S. Russell, K. Heck, C. Calhoun, and C. Laub, Safe Place to Learn: Consequences of Harassment Based on Actual or Perceived Sexual Orientation and Gender Nonconformity and Steps for Making Schools Safer (San Francisco: California Safe Schools Coalition, 2004); and S. T. Russell, J. K. McGuire, S. A. Lee, and J. C. Larriva, “Adolescent Perceptions of School Safety for Students with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Parents,” Journal of LGBT Youth 5 (2008): 11–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/19361650802222880.
34. For gay-straight alliances, see P. Griffin, C. Lee, J. Waugh, and C. Beyer, “Describing Roles That Gay-Straight Alliances Play in Schools: From Individual Support to School Change,” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education 1 (2004): 7–22; and S. T. Russell, A. Muraco, A. Subramaniam, and C. Laub, “Youth Empowerment and High School Gay-Straight Alliances,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 38 (2009): 891–903; and for LGBTQ+ clubs in schools, see J. E. Schindel, “Gender 101—beyond the Binary: Gay-Straight Alliances and Gender Activism,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 5 (2008): 56–70.
35. For LGBTQ+ clubs as protective factors, see N. C. Heck, A. Flentje, and B. N. Cochran, “Offsetting Risks: High School Gay-Straight Alliances and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Youth,” School ofPsychology Quarterly 26 (2011): 161–174; V. P. Poteat, K. O. Sinclair, C. D. DiGiovanni, B. W. Koenig, and S. T. Russell, “Gay-Straight Alliances Are Associated with Student Health: A Multischool Comparison of LGBTQ and Heterosexual Youth,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 23 (2013): 319–330; C. M. Porta, E. Singer, C. J. Mehus, A. L. Gower, E. Saewyc, W. Fredkove, and M. E. Eisenberg, “LGBTQ Youth’s Views on Gay-Straight Alliances: Building Community, Providing Gateways, and Representing Safety and Support,” Journal of School Health 87 (2017): 489–497; and E. Saewyc, C. Konishi, H. Rose, and Y. Homma, “School-Based Strategies to Reduce Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempts and Discrimination among Sexual Minority and Heterosexual Adolescents in Western Canada,” International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies 5 (2014): 89–112; for research on victimization, see G. A. Portnoy, “Perceptions of School Climate, Psychological Sense of Community, and Gay-Straight Alliances: A Mixed Method Examination” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2012); R. Toomey, J. K. McGuire, and S. T. Russell, “Heteronormativity, School Climates, and Perceived Safety for Gender Nonconforming Peers,” Journal of Adolescence 35 (2012): 187–196; and N. E. Walls, S. B. Kane, and H. Wisneski, “Gay-Straight Alliances and School Experiences of Sexual Minority Youth,” Youth and Society 41 (2010): 307–332; for drug use, see N. C. Heck, N. A. Livingston, A. Flentje, K. Oost, B. T. Stewart, and B. N. Cochran, “Reducing Risk for Illicit Drug Use and Prescription Drug Misuse: High School Gay-Straight Alliances and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth,” Addictive Behaviors 39 (2014): 824–828; for mental health, see Poteat et al., “Gay-Straight Alliances”; and Walls, Kane, and Wisneski, “Gay-Straight Alliances”; and for youth feeling empowered, see Griffin et al., “Describing Roles That Gay-Straight Alliances Play in Schools”; M. Mayberry, T. Chenneville, and S. Currie, “Challenging the Sounds of Silence: A Qualitative Study of Gay-Straight Alliances and School Reform Efforts,” Education and Urban Society 45 (2013): 307–339; and J. B. Mayo Jr., “Expanding the Meaning of Social Education: What the Social Studies Can Learn from Gay Straight Alliances,” Theory and Research in Social Education 41 (2013): 352–381.
36. For banning school clubs, see Mayberry, Chenneville, and Currie, “Challenging the Sounds of Silence”; Mayo, “Expanding the Meaning of Social Education”; and Boyd County High School Gay Straight Alliance et al. v. Board of Education of Boyd County, KY, 03-17-DLB (2003).
37. For states suing over bathroom rights, see C. Emma, “10 More States Sue Obama Administration over Transgender Bathroom Directive,” Politico, July 8, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/obama-transgender-bathrooms-states-sue-225303; and for bathrooms as unsafe spaces, see Porta et al., “Kicked Out.”
38. S. M. Lee, C. R. Burgeson, J. E. Fulton, and C. G. Spain, “Physical Education and Physical Activity: Results from the School Health Policies and Programs Study 2006,” Journal of School Health 77 (2007): 435–463.
39. Human Rights Campaign, “Play to Win: Improving the Lives of LGBTQ Youth in Sports,” 2017, https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/PlayToWin-FINAL.pdf.
40. For preservice training, see P. C. McCabe and F. Rubinson, “Committing to Social Justice: The Behavioral Intention of School Psychology and Education Trainees to Advocate for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Youth,” School Psychology Review 37 (2008): 469–486; and for unavailability of professional development, see T. Israel and G. Hackett, “Counselor Education on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Issues: Comparing Information and Attitude Exploration,” Counselor Education and Supervision 43 (2004): 179–191; and J. S. Whitman, S. S. Horn, and C. J. Boyd, “Activism in the Schools: Providing LGBTQ Affirmative Training to School Counselors,” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy 11 (2007): 143–154.
41. For community opposition, see A. B. Dessel, “Effects of Intergroup Dialogue: Public School Teachers and Sexual Orientation Prejudice,” Small Group Research 41 (2010): 556–592; for research on the importance of inclusion and school safety for LGBTQ+ students, see Athanases and Larrabee, “Toward a Consistent Stance in Teaching for Equity”; for teachers unwilling to advocate, see T. G. Larrabee and P. Morehead, “Broadening Views of Social Justice and Teacher Leadership: Addressing LGB Issues in Teacher Education,” Issues in Teacher Education 19 (2010): 37–52; and for teachers unwilling to discuss sexual and gender minority identities in the classroom, see K. K. Kumashiro, “Uncertain Beginnings: Learning to Teach Paradoxically,” Theory intoPractice 43 (2004): 111–115.
42. J. G. Kosciw, C. M. Clark, N. L. Truong, and A. D. Zongrone, “The 2019 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth in Our Nation’s Schools” (New York: GLSEN, 2020).
43. For the COVID-19 pandemic worsening mental health, see Trevor Project, “Issues Impacting LGBTQ Youth,” January 2022, https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/TrevorProject_Public1.pdf; and for state legislation that limits discussions of LGBTQ+ identities, see Wyatt Ronan, “2021 Officially Becomes Worst Year in Recent History for LGBTQ State Legislative Attacks as Unprecedented Number of States Enact Record-Shattering Number of Anti-LGBTQ Measures into Law,” Human Rights Campaign, press release, May 7, 2021, https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/2021-officially-becomes-worst-year-in-recent-history-for-lgbtq-state-legislative-attacks-as-unprecedented-number-of-states-enact-record-shattering-number-of-anti-lgbtq-measures-into-law.
44. In 2020 a U.S. district court judge found that South Carolina’s “no promo homo” laws violated the rights of LGBTQ+ students. John Riley, “Federal Court Declares South Carolina’s “No Promo Homo” Law Unconstitutional,” Metroweekly, March 11, 2020, https://www.metroweekly.com/2020/03/federal-court-declares-south-carolinas-no-promo-homo-law-unconstitutional/.
45. Kosciw et al., “The 2017 National School Climate Survey.”
46. R. S. Bishop, “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors,” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom 6, no. 3 (Summer 1990).
47. S. A. Nuamah, How Girls Achieve (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/05%3A_Relationships_Families_and_Youth/5.02%3A_Chapter_9-_Education_and_LGBTQ_Youth.txt |
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
• Summarize the cinematic history of nonnormative genders and sexualities, including homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity.
• Summarize the history of film censorship as it relates to nonnormative genders and sexualities, including homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity.
• Identify key approaches to critiquing explicit and coded LGBTQ+ identities and themes in film.
• Discuss at least one approach in detail and apply it to an original interpretation of queer film.
What Is LGBTQ+ Film and Media?
What do Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own, and David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) have in common? According to film news website IndieWire, they’re all among “the best queer films you didn’t know were queer.”[1] The IndieWire reviewer reads homoerotic valences in Fight Club’s plot, which revolves around illicit male-male contact shrouded in secrecy. But if homosexuality never crosses the viewer’s mind, is the film still queer? The question of what counts as LGBTQ+ film and media is anything but straightforward. Many have debated what makes a gay film gay, a queer film queer, and so on. Must the plot revolve around someone’s emergent sexuality, as in Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) or Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985)? Does an LGBTQ+ character suffice? How do we know a character’s sexuality unless it is explicitly stated? Must we assume all film characters are straight until proved queer? What about Charles Herman-Wurmfeld’s Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), in which the title character dates a woman and comes out before finally finding the right man? Are films made by queer-identified directors intrinsically queer?
A range of scholars have explored these questions. In a book on the early lesbian filmmaker Dorothy Arzner, for example, Judith Mayne writes that, though Arzner’s films contain no overtly lesbian characters or plots, they devote “constant and deliberate attention to how women dress and act and perform, as much for each other as for the male figures.”[2] Alexander Doty, meanwhile, suggests that in many popular texts, queerness is “less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered property than the result of acts of production or reception. This does not mean the queerness one attributes to mass culture texts is any less real than the straightness others would claim for these same texts. As with the constructing of sexual identities, constructing the sexualities of texts results in some ‘real thing.’”[3] In other words, queerness may emanate from the viewer as much as from a same-sex kiss onscreen. As Richard Dyer notes, “In the process of investigation, the by, for, and about category frays at the edges.”[4] With these concerns in mind, this chapter outlines the history of queer representations in screen media and considers the ways both texts and audiences produce queerness in the face of legal and cultural restrictions on overtly queer content.
Representation is important for marginalized groups, but applying labels to individuals and content raises ethical issues. With the aim of advocacy and comprehensibility, this chapter makes provisional use of categories such as gay and trans while remaining sensitive to historical contexts. Elsewhere, queer operates as a catch-all for nonnormative sexual identities, behaviors, and aesthetics.
Similarly, the sections of this chapter are makeshift, a subjective organizing tool to render the content more easily digestible. Part of the work of queer theory is to scrutinize and deconstruct categories, and the taxonomies of film genre and textbook chapter applied here are no exceptions.
Finally, this chapter critiques many of the texts it describes. Critique does not necessarily indicate that the texts in question are unworthy of watching. Rather, recognizing their flaws as symptoms of the sociopolitical systems in which they are produced and consumed is essential to the viewing process. Helping readers learn to identify and analyze these systems is, I believe, a textbook’s core responsibility.
Form and Content
Although the thoughts and feelings they generate are real things, remember that media texts never present objective realities. From Madeleine Olnek’s outrageously campy Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (2011) to hard-hitting documentaries such as David France’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), films are representations (figure 10.1). They’re created through subjective human processes such as writing, casting, acting, costuming, editing, and more. However realistic and emotionally affecting, characters are works of art and artifice whose lives stop where the film does. Likewise, documentaries are based on real events but are always interpretations of those events—they’re never fully objective.
Analyzing screen media means considering not just what stories are told but also the techniques and processes—cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, casting, and so on—used to tell them and how those elements work alongside the content to construct meaning. In literary contexts, form refers to the way a story is told, and content refers to the events, plotline, and characters of which it consists. Content might be thought of as the what of a text; form as how it’s depicted. Making a film or a TV episode entails many decisions beyond plot and dialogue, ranging from camera angles to casting, to wardrobe, to sound mixing, and they all produce certain effects. The language of film form offers a means for examining these decisions and their effects.
A trope, meanwhile, is a “common or overused theme or device.”[5] When overused, it becomes a cliché; tropes are discussed further later in the chapter. The frequent trope of dramatic death in LGBTQ+ film, commonly called Bury Your Gays, includes suicide (William Wyler’s 1961 The Childrens Hour, Lea Pool’s 2001 Lost and Delirious, Atom Egoyan’s 2009 Chloe), homicide (Anthony Minghella’s 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley, Kimberley Peirce’s 1999 Boys Dont Cry, Ang Lee’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain, Patty Jenks’s 2003 Monster), and HIV/AIDS (Jonathan Demme’s 1993 Philadelphia, Ryan Murphy’s 2014 The Normal Heart, Bryan Singer’s 2018 Bohemian Rhapsody). These tragic plotlines are so ubiquitous that B. Ruby Rich wryly noted that, in 1999, film’s “only lesbian happy ending involve[d] a portal into John Malkovich’s brain.”[6]
Films involving a queer character’s tragic death aren’t necessarily bad or homophobic, but the persistent, minimally varying association of queerness with unnatural death is reductive and harmful in much the same way that the automatic association of HIV/AIDS with male homosexuality is reductive and harmful. Historically, moreover, these tropes have been cultural or legal requisites for representation to exist at all. To understand the reasons why the definition, production, and consumption of LGBTQ+ film and media remain so complicated today, this chapter devotes significant attention to sociohistorical contexts. Because such context is essential to understanding the contemporary conditions and manifestations of LGBTQ+ film and media, the chapter focuses almost exclusively on the United States.
Watch
For LGBTQ+ Pride Month in 2018, them. collaborated with Joey Soloway on a short film series called Queeroes, in which filmmakers created films that deliberately queered the Hollywood narrative. One short, “Kiki and the MXfits: A Short about Being Trans in High School,” makes fun of the Hollywood high school comedy (https://youtu.be/3Zwi-Nceuzs).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=151
• What tropes from teenage comedies can you identify in this short film?
• In what ways have these tropes been queered and reflected through a Latinx lens?
• What techniques does the filmmaker use to tell the story? Do you find them effective?
Historical and Legal Contexts
As this chapter’s title suggests, the history of LGBTQ+ film and media is bound up with social and political constraints that have consistently limited the expression and representation of nonnormative genders and sexualities. Restrictions notwithstanding, all sorts of gender and sexual diversity have found ways to make themselves visible and identifiable since cinema’s early days.
Film’s Beginnings through the Hays Code
In the 1930s, the Motion Picture Production Code, often called the Hays Code, established moral guidelines that films produced for public consumption had to follow. These guidelines prohibited or restricted the depiction of subject matter such as profanity, drug trafficking, religious effrontery, and childbirth scenes; a motion picture was not to “lower the moral standards of those who see it.”[7] But before the Code was imposed, films featured more homosexual content than one might expect. See, for example, Harry Beaumont’s The Broadway Melody (1929) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932).
Pre-Code depictions of gay and lesbian characters were often caricatured and insulting: mincing, dissolute men and unflatteringly mannish women. These stereotyped conceptions of homosexuality reflect the era’s prevailing notions of inversion—the idea that queerness equated to femininity in a male body or vice versa. In sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s words, an invert possessed “the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom.”[8] Though these stereotypes persist today and have been explored in such venues as David Thorpe’s Do I Sound Gay? (2014), queer and feminist theory have helped dispel the assumption that biological sex (male or female) is inherently connected to gender (masculine or feminine), or indeed that there are only two sexes or two genders.
Poverty stopped many from attending movies when the Great Depression hit, so filmmakers tried shock-value tactics to lure audiences. These tactics encompassed controversial material ranging from unprecedented violence to sexual “perversion,” including homosexual characters.[9] Partially in response to this trend, Will Hays, then president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (now Motion Picture Association of America) banned all gay male characters in film in 1933.[10] Representations of homosexuality were barred under this ban on the basis of representing “sex perversion or any inference of it”; depictions of interracial relationships were also forbidden.[11]
Just because the Hays Code forbade queer content doesn’t mean none existed, however. Think of the pink elephant game, in which the objective is not to think about pink elephants. Knowing something is not supposed to be present often seems to make the possibility of its presence more acute. For this reason, censorship is notoriously ineffective for enforcing silence on a topic. Further, censorship often begets interpretive tendencies that seek out subtexts whose direct expression has been foreclosed—tendencies Chon Noriega has called “reading against the grain.”[12]
McCarthyism and Onward
The Hays Code’s later years dovetailed with the Red Scare of the 1950s and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist smear campaigns. Josh Howard’s documentary The Lavender Scare (2017) explores the wave of homophobia that arose in conjunction with the Red Scare. The 1950s were a time of extreme scrutiny for gay men and lesbians, leading to firings and other forms of discrimination against individuals suspected of same-sex inclinations. Homosexuality was viewed as dangerously subversive and associated with communist activity—a huge stigma during the Cold War years.
Still, film depictions of queer men and occasionally women proliferated during this time. Partly because of the Hays Code’s proscription on positive portrayals of “perversion,” these characters were often villainous or mentally ill. Indeed, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual listed homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973 and renamed “gender identity disorder” as gender dysphoria only in 2013. It’s unsurprising that depictions of queer characters have frequently conformed to prevailing popular and medical opinion. Queerness and psychological disturbance remain linked in productions such as Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), Sonny Mallhi’s The Roommate (2011), and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve (2018–).
Post–Hays Code Film and Television
The 1960s saw pushes for civil rights and freedom of expression in many walks of life. Uncoincidentally, the Hays Code was finally laid to rest in 1968. Having proved unpopular and largely unenforceable, it was replaced by the precursor to the current rating system, again from the Motion Picture Association of America: G (general audiences), M (mature), R (restricted), and X (under 16 not admitted). The ratings of PG (parental guidance suggested), PG-13 (parental-guidance suggested for those under 13), and NC-17 (under 17 not admitted, replacing X) were added later.
As Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet (adapted into a 1995 documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman) points out, same-sex representations historically have a much lower threshold for obscenity than do those of heterosexual relations (figure 10.2). That is, a scene where a man kisses another man has been treated as much more obscene—likelier to incur an R rating—than a man kissing a woman.[13]
Free Expression: Then and Now
The first U.S. Supreme Court case to address homosexuality in terms of free speech was One, Inc. v. Olesen in 1958. In it, the court ruled that neutral or positive homosexual content was not inherently obscene. The case had major implications for the media industry, because productions with LGBTQ+ content or themes could not be instantly labeled as pornography even if they flouted the constrictions of the Comstock laws, which blocked content considered obscene from being distributed by mail, or other moral strictures that had historically mandated content considered obscene.
Progressive changes in the portrayal of LGBTQ+ individuals, communities, and issues across media owe much to the continued activism of many groups, from local to international, and changes in public opinion. In 1985, Vito Russo and Jewelle Gomez, among others, founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (now simply called GLAAD so as not to erase those who identify in ways other than gay or lesbian) in response to negative media coverage of the AIDS crisis. GLAAD promotes inclusive language that does not pathologize. For example, it successfully lobbied the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other outlets to drop “homosexual” in favor of “gay” in 1987. GLAAD also hosts a media awards ceremony each year, compiles indexes related to LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream film, and publishes an annual report addressing the inclusion of LGBTQ+ elements in television.[14]
Underground and Experimental Film
In spite of these legal and cultural restrictions, a gay underground cinema arose with iconoclastic independent filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. Warhol’s Blow Job (1964) consists of a single long take—implicitly of the face of a man on whom another man is performing oral sex. Anger, who worked with the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, made experimental films with homoerotic undertones (and sometimes overtones). Fireworks (1947), which features a group of muscular male sailors and sexually suggestive imagery, led to obscenity charges against a distributor who screened it. A theater manager who screened Anger’s Scorpio Rising in 1963 faced similar charges. In both cases, the charges were dismissed.
Though born in Hollywood, the lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer spurned the mainstream (figure 10.3). She directed the groundbreaking Dyketactics in 1973—a four-minute short that consists primarily of fragmented, nonlinear images of naked women walking around outdoors. The later Nitrate Kisses (1992), funded partially by the National Endowment for the Arts, features intimate footage of “deviant” couples, a thread related to the author Willa Cather and her rumored lesbianism, and the victimization of lesbians in Nazi Germany. Unprecedented and avant-garde as Hammer’s style was, she has met criticism from within the feminist community for her association of female bodies with fruit, trees, and other natural images that some view as complicit with the heteropatriarchal construction of women as passive, flowery, and fertile.
Movements, Aesthetics, and Sensibilities
Camp
Amid the post–World War II baby boom, 1940s–1950s suburban America projected an idyllic image of the nuclear family: suburban homes with white picket fences, father as breadwinner, stay-at-home mom. This image and its performative American-ness became the target of parody and critique by dissidents, filmmakers prime among them. One manifestation of such dissent came to be known as camp.
Camp is an aesthetic that privileges poor taste, shock value, and irony, intentionally challenging the traditional attributes of high art. It is often characterized by showiness, extreme artifice, and tackiness—such as the popular pink flamingo lawn ornaments from which John Waters’s iconic film takes its name. Although largely ironic, camp can also devolve from earnestness gone awry, as in attempts at profundity that fall absurdly short of their targets. Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995) and Steven Antin’s Burlesque (2010) exemplify the latter. In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the cultural critic Susan Sontag suggests that nothing in nature can be campy (figure 10.4).[15]
Since the 1960s, the camp cinema of John Waters has delighted some audiences while repulsing others. Pink Flamingos (1972), Polyester (1981), and Hairspray (1988) lampoon the strictures and hypocrisies of the suburban United States, featuring the drag queen Divine and innumerable acts of subversion. Divine’s influence went far beyond Waters’s films, too. Legend holds Divine to be the inspiration for the villainous sea witch Ursula in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1992). More recently, Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch’s comedy series GLOW (2017–) has embraced the campy 1980s phenomenon of the same name, giving fictional life to the erstwhile women’s wrestling venture full of caricatured personae and self-consciously over-the-top storylines.
New Queer Cinema
The rise of independent film festivals such as Sundance and Telluride in the 1970s and 1980s spotlighted smaller productions that lacked the financial backing of major studios, from avant-garde work to indie narrative cinema. Following the liberation-oriented activism of the 1970s–1980s and then the HIV/AIDS crisis, a movement of unconventional, experimental, and unapologetic films emerged in the early 1990s. Rich termed this movement “New Queer Cinema,” describing it as one “favoring pastiche and appropriation, influenced by art, activism, and such new entities as music video. . . . It reinterpreted the link between the personal and the political envisioned by feminism [and] restaged the defiant activism pioneered at Stonewall.”[16]
New queer cinema films such as Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) featured overtly queer content, often focalized through outsider characters. Many also engaged with or alluded to the AIDS crisis, including Richard Fung’s 1991 Chinese Characters, Marlon Riggs’s 1989 Tongues Untied, Todd Haynes’s 1991 Poison and 1995 Safe, and Gregg Araki’s 1992 The Living End.
Cheryl Dunye’s (figure 10.5) mockumentary The Watermelon Woman (1996) calls out the erasure of Black lesbians in Hollywood and the persistence of racist film tropes over the years. The film follows Dunye’s character as she stages interviews with both fictitious and real-life lesbian activists, including Sarah Schulman and Camille Paglia. Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) documents New York City ball culture, foregrounding Black and Latinx lives and communities involved in the dance vogue scene. Iconic as it has become, scholars including bell hooks and Judith Butler have questioned the film’s racial politics. Livingston, who is white and from a privileged background, arguably profits off a marginalized community and the unambivalent celebration of drag as a means of subversion and liberation. Critiques notwithstanding, Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk, and Ryan Murphy joined forces to create Pose (2018–), an FX series that draws from Paris Is Burning in its fictionalized representation of the same ballroom culture. Livingston has contributed in directorial and production roles to that production as well.
Mainstream Gay?
Whereas new queer cinema was defined largely by the queer-identified directors, writers, and producers creating its films, LGBTQ+ films began to enter bigger markets in the early years of the 2000s. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), for example, featured the (straight) A-list stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as covert lovers. Subsequently, films such as Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002), Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right (2010), Ryan Murphy’s The Normal Heart (2014), Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2014), and Barry Jenkins’s (figure 10.6) Moonlight (2016) have all featured well-known (and disproportionately straight) actors and achieved mainstream prominence, including major award nominations.
Television and Streaming Media
LGBTQ+ TV
Actress, comedian, and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres (figure 10.7) is now an internationally recognizable figure who regularly appears on the Forbes annual World’s 100 Most Powerful Women lists, but her success required the resuscitation of a career that went virtually comatose from 1997 to 2003. DeGeneres came out publicly as a lesbian on her sitcom, Ellen (1994–1998), in 1997. The show returned for one more season but was subsequently canceled. Many speculate that the final season’s poor ratings owed to network ABC’s refusal to risk alienating conservative audiences by promoting it.
Thanks largely to Ellen’s milestone pronouncement, late-1990s and early-2000s television saw a spate of LGBTQ+ characters, personalities, and plotlines. Long-running NBC sitcom Will & Grace premiered in 1998, ended in 2006, and rebooted in 2017. It features a gay male lead as well as a prominent gay supporting character. Although the show was groundbreaking and put (some) gay issues on a national stage, its characters played into many stereotypes and offered an almost exclusively white, cisgender, and normative representation of homosexuality.
Ron Becker contextualizes the 1990s spike in LGBTQ+ (mostly “G” and “L”) programming in terms of increasingly segmented markets.[17] The representation of certain safe forms of nonheterosexuality appealed to straight audiences among growing discourses of liberal tolerance. As commercial productions, the existence—or at least distribution—of film and TV shows is always to some extent a business decision. Media studios and companies are unlikely to take a chance on something they don’t believe will prove profitable. The 1990s marked a point at which many companies began to view sexual identity groups and queer-friendly audiences as viable marketing demographics. This trend continues in various venues, such as corporate Pride sponsorships, mass-market rainbow merchandise, and lifestyle networks such as LOGOtv and Here TV.
Showtime’s Queer as Folk (2000–2005) made a splash in 2000, a groundbreaking Americanization of a British series that had premiered the year before. The show, shot chiefly in Toronto, Canada, followed a group of friends and lovers through their lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Even though it was predominantly white, middle-class, and cismale, Queer as Folk was pioneering in terms of promoting safe sex and portraying healthful, happy characters living with HIV. The show also thematized prominent issues often associated with gay male communities, for better or for worse, such as polyamory, body dysmorphia, drug and alcohol use, and homophobic discrimination in the workplace and beyond. The L Word (2004–2009), considered by many the female version of Queer as Folk, premiered on Showtime in 2004. It achieved slightly greater diversity than its predecessor, featuring several characters of color, interracial relationships, a trans character, and a deaf character.
With a racially diverse cast, ABC’s The Fosters (2013–2018) has established long-term success among a mainstream audience for which shows such as Glee (2009–2015) and Modern Family (2009–2020) helped pave the way. The Fosters explores an array of issues specific to LGBTQ+ people, such as transitioning and bullying, as well as more universal themes related to relationships, family, and the challenges of puberty (figure 10.8). More recently, the animated series Bojack Horseman (2014–2020) broke ground with its portrayal of asexual Todd Chavez, including his coming out and navigation of ace relationships.
Artist and Activist Spotlight: RuPaul Charles
A major contemporary queer icon, RuPaul Charles (figure 10.9) gained fame in the early 1990s as a drag performer, actor, supermodel, musician, and all-around entertainer.[18] He has appeared in iconic LGBTQ+ films including Jamie Babbitt’s But Im a Cheerleader (1999) and Beeban Kidron’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!, Julie Newmar (1995). RuPaul also produces, hosts, and judges the hit reality series RuPauls Drag Race, in which he mentors competitors pursuing a cash prize and the coveted title of America’s Next Drag Superstar. Although massively popular, the show’s use of offensive terms and RuPaul’s suggestion—for which he later apologized—that trans contestants possessed an unfair advantage over cis contestants have drawn criticism.
Streaming Services
Some lament the fall of the brick-and-mortar video rental store with the rise of digital video services, but the latter has proved a boon to LGBTQ+ film and television and many consumers who search for that content. The impersonality—not to say anonymity—of these platforms removed the stigma, perceived or real, that might prevent interested audiences from renting or purchasing queer movies in person. These new delivery options (and, later, streaming, a service Netflix began offering in 2007) opened veritable floodgates of viewership, especially in conservative cities, rural areas, and other environs where queer media was difficult to come by. Digital platforms such as Prime Video, Hulu, Hoopla, and Kanopy have further extended the reach of mainstream, indie, and international film, often at little or no direct cost to viewers.
Streaming and Visibility
Retail giant Amazon broke ground with Jill (now Joey) Soloway’s Transparent (2014–2019), the first show produced through Amazon Studios and aired on its streaming platform, Prime Video. Transparent follows Maura, newly out, and her family through their lives in Los Angeles. Cis actor Jeffrey Tambor won a Golden Globe for his performance in a show that presents many challenges trans populations face in society, including bathroom policing, transphobic violence, and trans-exclusionary versions of so-called feminism.
Breaking through in Jenji Kohan’s Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019), which explores the experiences of a diverse group of women in prison, Laverne Cox (figure 10.10) has emerged as among the most prominent trans performers in the world. Her role as Sophia Burset sheds light on the particular barriers and forms of dehumanization that trans individuals face in prison, because—in addition to transphobic harassment from guards and inmates alike—their access to medically necessary materials may be curtailed.
Also on Netflix, Lena Waithe cowrote and starred in an episode, “Thanksgiving,” of Aziz Ansari’s comedy series Master of None (2015–2018, 2021). The episode, which depicts the seldom-represented experience of a Black lesbian coming out to her family, won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series.
Comedy Specials
Streaming video has also benefited comedians, providing ready access to audiences who live far from—or can’t afford—urban-centric standup circuits. The vibrancy of queer women in comedy has been a revelation for many in recent years. In addition to performers with established reputations (Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes, and Margaret Cho), a new set has taken viewers by storm, thanks largely to streaming platforms. As with film and television, some LGBTQ+ comedy content expressly addresses aspects of queer identity—for example, Cameron Esposito’s viral clip about her so-called lesbian side mullet.[19] Some, such as Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special Nanette (2018), upend the genre, critiquing misogyny and homophobia and the bound-up ways the two structure the art world, comedy, and everyday life.
Watch
Hannah Gadsby gave a TED Talk in the wake of her groundbreaking Netflix comedy special Nanette (https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_gadsby_three_ideas_three_contradictions_or_not?language=en).
A TED element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=151
• What do you think Gadsby meant when she said that with Nanette she wanted to “break comedy”?
• How do you think streaming media contributed to Gadsby’s career skyrocketing after she claimed to “quit”?
Tig Notaro became famous for her standup in the mid-2010s, including a filmed set in which she lifts her shirt to reveal a chest that has undergone, as part of her breast cancer treatment, a double mastectomy. She would later write, produce, and star in One Mississippi (2015–2017), an autobiographical comedy that aired on Amazon Prime and costarred Notaro’s real-life spouse, the writer and actor Stephanie Allynne.
Other Web Content
Since the proliferation of cable options in the 1990s, the screen media market has fragmented further with the advent of the internet and the means to reach millions instantly with relatively little overhead, experience, or equipment. In 2011, the lesbian Hannah Hart (figure 10.11) broke out with My Drunk Kitchen, a YouTube comedy series whose short films parody cooking show conventions and feature Hart’s inebriated culinary ventures. Around the same time, Jazz Jennings became perhaps the youngest out trans individual to achieve national prominence in the United States. She began making media appearances at age six and later created the YouTube series I Am Jazz.[20] TLC and the Oprah Winfrey Network have produced, respectively, a reality series and a documentary about Jazz.
Multitalented queer figures such as Jes Tom (Soojung Dreams of Fiji), Fortune Feimster (Chelsea), and Sampson McCormick (A Tough Act to Follow) have been able to get around gatekeepers by producing short films available on YouTube. They gained massive followings through a combination of recorded and live performances and their social media presence. Indeed, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have created unprecedented reach and a sense of connectedness—for better or worse—for celebrities and the public. YouTube has also become a popular medium for coming out via emotionally affecting videos that sometimes accrue millions of views.
Watch
YouTuber Eugene Lee Yang, best known for his work at Buzzfeed and with the Try Guys, comes out in a music video (https://youtu.be/qpipLfMiaYU) that he directed himself and that expresses artistically his experience as a gay Asian man. The video had garnered nineteen million views by 2021.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/lgbtq/?p=151
• How does this music video express the challenges and complexities of coming out?
• How do you think using YouTube shaped the impact of this video?
LGBTQ+ Film and Media Studies: Critical Conversations
The LGBTQ+ community is anything but monolithic, and perspectives on LGBTQ+ film and media are accordingly myriad. This section highlights some points of particular contention within the field.
Coming Out
One of the predominant tropes in LGBTQ+ film and media is the Coming Out Story, exemplified in John Sayles’s Lianna (1983), Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004), Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011), and Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon (2018). These films focus primarily on the protagonist’s realization or disclosure of their queerness. Sexuality is framed as a confession or disclosure, something that a closeted character hides or denies until a dramatic outing scene, often the plot’s climax. Coming out stories are important, but it is also important to challenge the status of heterosexuality as the assumed default until a different orientation is declared.
Homonormativity
Homonormativity (see chapter 1) establishes the bounds of acceptable queerness and that which deviates from it, often replicating other dominant social norms with regard to race, sex, class, and ability. For example, ABC’s popular Modern Family presents gay men (a married couple played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet) positively, but they are rendered respectable through other aspects of their identity: white, wealthy, monogamous, and constituents of a more or less traditionally structured nuclear family. The show’s message about queerness may therefore be read as “Look, we’re just like heterosexuals,” overriding rather than embracing difference.
Debates over homonormativity in film and television abound. For example, Glee provides numerous queer characters and storylines. Yet as Frederik Dhaenens notes, they ultimately “consolidate the heterosexual matrix” by portraying queer characters who are routinely victimized yet nonetheless overarchingly happy and conformist, as though simply rolling with the punches eventually yields contentment.[21] Moreover, LGBTQ+ people of color are still dramatically underrepresented. Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce’s web series One Day at a Time (2017–2019, 2020) follows a Latinx family and presents much-needed diversity in terms of both characters and tropes.
Bisexual Erasure
Maria San Filippo and others have critiqued bisexual erasure or invisibility within LGBTQ+ cinema. Even when bisexual themes, characters, and storylines are present in film, San Filippo observes, they are typically referred to as gay, queer, or lesbian, terms that fail to acknowledge bisexuality as its own entity.[22] Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997), Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001), David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), Charles Herman-Wurmfeld’s Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) all unambiguously depict both same-sex and different-sex relationships, yet they are seldom framed in terms of bisexual identity or desire.
Ciswashing
Trans people are often excluded from mainstream (and independent) media, even from narratives specifically about trans lives. Among the films focused on trans individuals that have found commercial and critical success, many feature cisgender actors exclusively: Hilary Swank in Kimberley Peirce’s Boys Dont Cry (1999), Felicity Huffman in Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica (2005), Jared Leto in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and Eddie Redmayne in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015).
Laura Horak observes, too, that much writing on trans media focuses on representations of trans individuals rather than on trans authorship.[23] Because being out in Hollywood has always posed professional and personal risks—from pigeonholing and blacklisting to physical violence—it’s impossible to know the full extent of sexual and gender diversity that has existed among filmmakers, performers, writers, and others.
Artist and Activist Spotlight: The Wachowskis
The Wachowski siblings (figure 10.12) made history in announcing their respective transitions—Lana in 2012 and Lilly in 2016. Lana is widely considered the first major trans film director. Though most famous for their futuristic action franchise that began with The Matrix, the Wachowskis have made significant contributions in terms of queer content. Crime thriller Bound (1996) features two women who conspire in a romance-cum-heist. Wishing to avoid the cliché, pornographized, or insultingly diluted depictions of lesbian sex in film, the Wachowskis hired the sex educator and activist Susie Bright as a consultant for the sex scenes. Beyond critical success and Emmy nominations, the Wachowskis’ Netflix sci-fi series Sense8 (2015–2018) was a milestone in trans media. Created primarily by trans filmmakers and featuring a trans character played by the actress Jamie Clayton, who is trans, Sense8 offers a nuanced representation of trans lives and issues.
It Gets Better?
In 2010, the writer and activist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, founded the It Gets Better Project in response to a rash of suicides by children and teenagers subjected to homophobic bullying and harassment. The campaign entailed the launch of a YouTube channel and viral video ad featuring Savage and his family along with the message that, however tough things are at present, they will improve with time. Although the campaign brought much-needed attention to homophobia and its consequences, it also drew criticism from within the LGBTQ+ community. Many queer activists and scholars, particularly individuals of color including Jasbir Puar (2010) and Tavia Nyong’o (2010), have pointed out that Savage’s promise is predicated on a narrative of upward mobility and affluence that is unavailable to many of the most vulnerable queer populations.[24] It has also been critiqued for its failure to recognize the extent to which its makers’ racial, economic, gender-based, and physical privilege has helped clear their path. Activism and action are essential—and careful thought and reflection equally so.
Conclusion
This chapter is only a brief introduction to the wonders, shortcomings, and manifold complexities of LGBTQ+ film and media. Like raw film, it has been sliced, diced, and rearranged to fit into the narrow confines of its container. Readers who wish for more can avail themselves of the links and suggested readings and viewings that offer helpful paths to further, deeper exploration.
Profile: Giving Voice to Black Gay Men through Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied
Marquis Bey
Marlon Riggs, a Black gay documentarian and activist whose work was most prominent during the 1980s and early 1990s, released his classic film Tongues Untied in 1989. Riggs notes that it is a film “specifically for black gay men,” though its reception and praise has far exceeded this demographic.[25] Tongues Untied is a canonical film in the archive of Black queer cinema, along with Riggs’s other work—Ethnic Notions (1986), Color Adjustment (1991), and Black Is. . . Black Aint (1994). Ethnic Notions looks at racist stereotypes and caricatures of Black people in the United States; Color Adjustments surveys forty years of Black people in television; and Black Is. . . Black Aint explores how multifaceted Black identity is. Tongues Untied was a vanguard film because it was one of the first to explore the specificity of Black gay identity. This profile analyzes Tongues Untied as a film explicitly about Black gay identity and culture. It also meditates on Riggs’s biography and relationship to the content, marginalized voices, Black gay cultural practices, and the politics of sexuality within Black communities.
Riggs himself was in many ways the subject of his films. He was born in 1957 in Texas and grew up during the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. Part of a loving family in a tight-knit Black community, Riggs was a smart, athletic, articulate child. When he graduated from high school and began college at Harvard University, he dated women while constantly trying to deny his attraction to men. For a while he tried to convince himself that men were ugly and disgusting and that loving men was vile. But eventually he conceded his sexual attractions and began living life as a Black gay man.[26] After entering into a long-term partnership with another man, he was compelled to bring his filmic talents to bear on his and others’ lives. Ultimately, Riggs felt the imperative to no longer remain silent about the plights and lives of Black gay male identity, so he took to the reel. Unlike many documentary directors at the time, he put himself in front of the camera. His films center the lives of Black people, and it was Tongues Untied that brought gay Black people to the forefront.
He brings all this to his films, and Tongues Untied can be understood as in part a representation of many things Riggs himself experienced throughout his life. Riggs was quite hesitant to make the film, remarking in an interview that
everything within me was saying, “No, no don’t do it. Find somebody else who will talk about being HIV positive. Find somebody else who will talk about being an Uncle Tom. Find somebody else who will talk about being called nigger and punk and faggot and so forth.”[27]
Amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, when many people were dying from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses (and were disproportionately Black gay men), Black queer film at the time sought to answer the questions of how to speak in the face of death and how to give voice to the dying. Even when not afflicted with deadly diseases, Black gay men lived in social conditions that were not hospitable to their flourishing. They were marked as pariahs who, even if they were HIV negative, were seen as always capable of infecting “innocent” (read: non-Black and nongay) people with their “deviant” lifestyles. The act of calling someone a faggot or nigger is an attempt to silence that person, which often worked. Many Black gay men remained fearful of expressing their sexualities because of the verbal and physical violence they could be met with. This has been occurring for too long; for too long has a racist and homophobic society disallowed Black gay men from simply living as Black gay men. So Riggs thought it absolutely necessary to break this silence.
As a film, Tongues Untied was one of the first to speak explicitly about Black gay life in ways that were not denigrating. The film features a wide range of other cultural producers of Black art, featuring the music of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and poetry by Essex Hemphill (who also appears in the film) and Joseph Beam. It also defied categorization in its time—melding documentary, experimental filmography, poetry, and interview. Tongues Untied represented Black gay men in unconventional ways in both content and form. It depicted more than a one-dimensional image of Black gay life and conveyed not only the Black man refused entry into the gay bar because of his Blackness or the violent attack that left the gay man bleeding on the sidewalk; it also demonstrated the resilience of Black gay men, from their public protest marches in solidarity with other struggles to their intimate community, to their humorous musicology and vogue dancing (figure 10.13). All this is groundbreaking, rarely depicted filmography.
The vast majority of the film is dark. Its background is pitch black as it faces Black men speaking about their experiences. Many of the images shown are in black and white, muting colors that might have existed. The darkness of the film is symbolic of not only the Blackness of the Black men discussed but also the profound void that the imposed silence on Black gay men creates. It symbolizes isolation, loneliness, the lack of voice.
So often it is remarked that giving voice to the marginalized is important. But what does this mean? For Riggs and Tongues Untied it means “loosening the tongue,” as noted in the film. The tongue is a part of the body integral to speech, and its loosening marks a shift from voicelessness to being able to speak one’s truths. Racism and homophobia, or homophobic racism and racist homophobia, have shackled the voices of Black gay men. And their silence is and has been killing them, disallowing them to ask for things they need or to express their desires or to convey the aspects of their lives. As the Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde famously said, “Your silence will not protect you.”[28] It is a silence imposed on them, so to actualize liberation it is necessary for Black gay men to reclaim their voices.
Moreover, the tongue is an instrument of pleasure and sexuality. It is used to lick, it is a key component in sucking, and it is integral to vocalizing lust and yearning. Nonheterosexual sex has been pathologized, and thus, to loosen the tongues of Black gay men gives them a voice and also allows them to express their sexual desires more freely. Riggs, in the title of his film, breaks the silence of Black gay men around sexuality and actual sexual acts.
Another prominent theme throughout is the complex culture of Black gay men. This rich complexity is showcased primarily through three practices: voguing, snapping, and responses to homophobia. Voguing is a stylized dance originating in the late 1980s and finding roots in underground ballroom scenes in the 1960s that were almost entirely queer people of color. It is inspired by the style of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and model poses in Vogue magazine. Voguers strike model-like poses in quick succession, integrating angular movement and holds with the arms and legs. The dance acts as a cultural site of expression in a world that routinely denies the unapologetic expression of Black and queer livelihood, thus serving as a site of catharsis among these marginalized people.
In turn, snapping is, of course, snapping one’s fingers. But this practice takes on a larger meaning in Black gay communities. Snapping is a sly yet profound retort to a number of things. The snap communicates in diverse languages and with varying connotations. It must, because Black gay men have so long been silenced. Snapping acts as a way to speak beyond conventional means; snapping is a vital communication tool for Black gay men who have been disallowed from speaking. There are a variety of different snaps, named in ways that describe their movement and purpose (e.g., classic snap, point snap). For a demographic so violently silenced, it is imperative that new forms of voice be created. Deprived of verbal voice, Black gay men can snap and say just as many things.
Encompassing these practices and the many others of Black gay communities is how the broader world treats people who are Black and gay. Riggs encapsulates this at one point in the film: a medley of different voices spew various epithets used to foreshadow and do harm to Black gay men—”punk,” “homo,” “faggot,” “motherfucking coon,” and “freak.” These are terms solely for denigrating Black and gay identity. Racist and homophobic terms such as these do more than speak badly of Black and gay people; they are themselves forms of violence. As such, these terms negatively influence how Black gay men in particular feel and behave in the world. For instance, especially in the 1980s—and still in the twenty-first century—gay men had to often hide their sexualities for fear of homophobic violence (yet still were subject to racist violence). If outed as gay, they would often be met with physical and verbal forms of harm. These violent practices led many Black gay men, and sexual minorities on the whole, to face a constant fear for their lives, unable to live publicly in affirmation of their gay identities.
To live in such constant fear necessitated an outlet. Quite often the only solace Black gay men could find during the 1980s was other Black gay men. Often, communing with other Black gay men was the only time each could be his full self. Viewers see an example of this in Tongues Untied when a group of Black gay men are sharing a meal together, sharing anecdotes about their lives. They converse about encountering homophobic vitriol, about confronting that vitriol, and about strategies used to survive in its aftermath. Such moments are life sustaining, and such moments allow for the tiny accumulation of boldness, acceptance, and love that constitute revolutionary acts.
What also weighed on Black gay men, especially during the 1980s, was how other people in the Black community forced an impossible choice, a choice described in the film as “Come the final throw-down, what is he first: Black or gay?” This is an impossible choice for Black gay men because it is impossible to separate the two identities—they are always, at the same time, Black and gay. Recognition of this is perhaps the primary lesson learned by intersectionality: that the various aspects of our identities and oppressions converge and make up one another rather than being separable into discrete categories. For example, one is Black and woman and faces bias on both of those grounds together, not one at a time. So when the revolution comes, they will be Black and gay first, because it could be no other way.
Black gay life is circumscribed by these violences, indeed, but it is not determined by them. In other words, Black gay men have a rich social life despite these violences and in the face of these violences. Riggs finds the perfect consolidation of this tension in Black gay men’s lives. Tongues Untied is, then, a film showcasing one possible way of holding on to the pain and the joy and how holding on to these two things is revolutionary. Consider what Riggs says in an interview titled “Tongues Untied Lets Loose Angry, Loving Words”:
I really spoke of black men loving black men being not just a revolutionary act, but within the context of black male dynamics, the revolutionary act. It’s not the overthrow of whitey. It’s learning to love within all the conditioning of learning to hate ourselves. To me that’s truly a radical break from our past.[29]
Revolution happens when we radically depart from the current state of things, a state of things that rests on the foundation of white supremacist and homophobic violence. In this context, Riggs is arguing that Black men loving one another is not just one revolutionary act among many others of equal weight; it is the revolutionary act. Because so much of Riggs’s world was structured by racism and homophobia, to love Black men marked a way of inhabiting the world in a profoundly revolutionary way.
It cannot be overstated how profound Black men loving Black men is, especially amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s when there was an underground culture of cruising—men looking for illicit, often unprotected sex with other men—during a sexual crisis. This practice affirms denigrated life. To clarify: for two Black gay men to choose one another for unprotected sex, for pure pleasure and sexual autonomy, amid the HIV/AIDS crisis is not to be reduced simply to sexual irresponsibility or, even worse, ignorance. No, it is, rather, a commitment to living one’s sexual life as fully as possible despite how much one’s very identity has been pathologized. For two Black gay men to have sex during this epidemic is an affirmation of closeness, of touch; of disregard for the various ways they have been told that their bodies and desires are disgusting and literally illegal. “I will not do what they have done to us,” the act says. “I will love every inch of you, every crevice.” And this is an unwavering love for those who have been said to be unlovable. Riggs, in giving voice to Black gay men, is voicing precisely this sentiment.
Tongues Untied remains relevant today because there is still a lack of Black gay male representation in film and media. Love between Black gay men is still a taboo topic for films, only starting to change with the acclaim a film like Moonlight (2016) received. That Tongues Untied is still one of only a few films that explicitly take up Black gay male life shows that there is still a lack of representation, which signals a larger silencing of Black gay male experience in social life. Returning to this film could reassert the importance of Black gay identity, could usher in a shift in the cultural imaginary.
All in all, the radical, revolutionary act is love, loving those who have been said to be unlovable. Tongues Untied is an ode to how breaking the silence and giving voice to the oppressed is revolutionary. So often in the 1970s Black identity and liberation was understood as one thing, by the masculinist revolutionary calls of Black Power and Black Nationalism. But Riggs’s revolution is one focused on more than just “the overthrow of whitey”; it is focused on how Black men can learn to love one another. Real transformation, at least for Riggs, is in the ending of the silence Black gay men have been forced to keep. When the silence—what is called in Tongues Untied “the deadliest weapon”—ends, perhaps Black gay men can come together and love unapologetically and openly. And as said in the opening minutes of the film, through coming together—the coming together of “BGAs: Black gay activists”—”we can make a serious revolution together.”
Profile: How One Day at a Time Avoids Negative Queer Tropes
Shyla Saltzman
Popular media, for better or worse, helps teach audiences what is valued and what is possible. Inclusive representation, or portrayals of people with diverse bodies and identities in the media, can influence how we see ourselves and feel and behave toward other people. In a Washington Post article, Amber Leventry explains that “coverage of topics and people that have historically been considered taboo can take the emotional burden off LGBTQ+ people by educating people about gender, pronouns, gender expression and sexual orientation.”[30] Studies have shown that when we see sympathetic depictions of marginalized groups, our opinions of those groups improve.[31] One study found that people are more accepting of transgender individuals after seeing them depicted onscreen, which could have positive implications for persuading the public to support policies that combat transgender discrimination.[32] Representation aids in educating, familiarizing, and also developing empathy for people we may otherwise be biased toward.
Representation is important in itself, but it needs to be handled responsibly. Reliance on reductive stereotypes or tropes can reinforce harmful messages despite the best intentions. There is more queer representation on television and in media today than ever before, which is an incredible achievement. GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are on TV” report found a larger than ever percentage of not only queer characters on network, cable, and streaming television but also queer characters of color: for the 2018–2019 TV season, 8.8 percent of regular series characters were LGBTQ+ (up from 6.4 percent), and queer characters of color outnumbered white queer characters for the first time.[33] But sometimes we celebrate too soon. LGBTQ+ visibility is important, but it is not always an advancement in and of itself. There are more queer television characters, but they are often limited to a few categories: “safe” and celibate, deeply pathologized, or otherwise preoccupied with homophobia to the detriment of their mental health and development. To consider contemporary examples of LGBTQ+ representation in media, this profile explores how the Netflix series One Day at a Time showcases nuanced queer characters in a way that offers drama, empowers queer youth, and provides learning opportunities and positive depictions for queer viewers, allies, and allies to be.
One Day at a Time focuses on a Latinx family that faces multifaceted issues and challenges. The grandmother is a devout Catholic from Cuba, and part of her narrative arc is becoming a U.S. citizen at a time when Latin American immigration is a painfully charged topic in the United States. Her daughter, Penelope Alvarez, is a single mother, as well as a war veteran who suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Penelope struggles to become a nurse practitioner and often deals with racism and sexism in the doctor’s office where she works. Most importantly for this chapter, Penelope’s daughter, Elena, is a lesbian teenager (figure 10.14). To explain why Elena is a noteworthy lesbian character on television, we need to discuss a trope that is regularly featured in queer narratives: plot arcs that center homophobia and the calling out of bigotry.
Most shows that explore homophobia or transphobia resort to calling out for dealing with discrimination. To call someone out is to expose their problematic behavior, often in a stern way that allows onlookers to also judge them. In “Speaking Up Without Tearing Down,” Loretta J. Ross writes, “Calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender. In calling out, a person or group uses tactics like humiliation, shunning, scapegoating, or gossip to dominate others.”[34] The TV network Freeform has perfected the call-out scene. In their hit show Pretty Little Liars, the teenager Emily Fields has a relatively conservative mother who is horrified to learn that her daughter is lesbian. Pam Fields’s journey to acceptance begins when her husband, who fights in the U.S. military, gently chides her for judging their daughter so harshly: “I don’t like this, but [Emily] is struggling with this; I can see it. . . . She is alive and healthy, and after everything I’ve seen, alive and healthy counts for a lot, believe me.”[35] The turning point for Pam comes at an even more severe calling-out session, when multiple members of Emily’s high school English faculty confront a belligerent father who insists that Emily only won her spot on the swim team because of the school’s “gay agenda.” Pam’s moment of redemption is not, as we might hope, an embracing of Emily on her own terms or a realization that nothing has changed or broken about her daughter or their relationship; instead we get a moment of protective instinct that pits Pam against this other parent’s even more egregious form of homophobia: “My daughter never got anything she didn’t earn. That’s how we raised her. That is who she is. So you drop this . . . or I’ll show you what a real agenda is.”[36] The audience does not get to witness a substantial transformation by Pam—instead, at best, we see her realize that her daughter is subjected to a lot of pain and anger in the outside world, and she does not want to add anymore: “Emily—I still don’t understand, but I love you. You are my child, and nobody hurts my child.”[37] Before she can apologize specifically for her prejudice, Emily stops her with a hug. The gesture suggests that Pam has done enough hard work for the day and that Emily should acknowledge her for that alone.
Pam and Emily have a very moving relationship throughout the series, but Pretty Little Liars erases the discord in the family about Emily’s lesbian identity by contrasting Pam’s tortured religious homophobia with the privileged white man’s supposedly much worse homophobia. Pam saying, essentially, “My love for you and desire to protect you matters more to me than my misgivings about your sexuality,” is not the same as saying, “I am sorry that I had an unhealthy reaction that made you feel unsafe and less loved. I am your mother, and I love you the same now as I did when you were born.”
When the message is always and only “I love you more than I hate queerness,” the bar for compassion and acceptance remains very low. It magically lets family members and friends off the hook for problematic core beliefs, and it reinforces the idea that an LGBTQ+ teen’s happiness rests entirely on the benevolent epiphanies of the prejudiced people in her life. It necessitates that bigots come around before the character can have a happy ending. It also often makes the LGBTQ+ teen character take responsibility for or accept the homophobia of adults.
One Day at a Time moves away from the calling-out narrative in favor of calling in. Calling in usually involves a more sympathetic way of addressing problematic behavior: “Call-ins are agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize our requirements for growth, to admit our mistakes and to commit to doing better.”[38] The emphasis is on educating and changing an individual, rather than shaming them. Elena’s mother, Penelope, is not on board when she first comes out as a lesbian (figure 10.15). The first refreshing and positive aspect is that the calling in is not Elena’s responsibility. In season 1, episode 11, “Pride and Prejudice,” Penelope makes every effort to support her daughter’s coming out. The audience realizes that Penelope is battling her own homophobia, but at no point does she make that Elena’s problem. Penelope notices that out of everyone in their life—her other child, a close family friend, her own mother—she is the only one struggling with Elena’s news: “I feel really weird about this Elena stuff. . . . I hate that I feel weird about it but I do.”
While Penelope is figuring out her hang-ups about her daughter’s sexuality, she knows to put on a supportive face because her “reaction could affect Elena for the rest of her life.” She turns to trustworthy adults for help. She meets with a friend, Ramona, who is an out lesbian, to talk about her reservations: “I’m a monster. My daughter came out to me and I am not totally okay with it. And I hate myself for it.” Often this sort of conversation could turn into Ramona making Penelope feel ashamed of herself or guilting her into magically getting over her homophobia because she wants to prove she is a good person. Instead, Ramona fields Penelope’s questions—“How do I know if a girl coming over is a friend or more? Does she all of a sudden think men are disgusting?”—and validates her process of coming to terms with the loss of heteronormativity in her life: “You’re just not there yet. It’s a complete adjustment in how you see your daughter. Your heart is okay; you just need a little time waiting for your [mind] to catch up.”
Aside from the inclusive coming-out narrative, Elena serves to educate audiences about queer identity and the gender binary. The first season of One Day at a Time focuses heavily on Elena’s upcoming quinceañera and how or if the occasion will reflect that she is gay. According to the website My Quince, “This coming-of-age ceremony plays an important part in preserving the heritage and cultures of the individual. Similar to the process of planning a wedding, the [quinceañera] requires the same amount of effort, time, and proper preparation in order to make the person’s birthday a memorable event.”[39] The event traditionally celebrates a teenage girl’s entering womanhood and marriageability at age fifteen—but now the family also has to reckon with Elena’s expression of womanhood not matching the underlying message and expectations of a traditional quinceañera. According to Marybel Gonzalez, “The quinceañera marks an important milestone in a girl’s life. Part birthday party, part rite of passage, it symbolizes a girl’s entrance into womanhood when turning 15, traditionally showcasing her purity and readiness for marriage.”[40] It is similar to debutante balls, a tradition of upper-class Southern white society in the United States, which signify that a teen girl has reached the age thought suitable to be married to a man. Elena’s resistance to the event’s heteronormativity manifests as concern about her dress and about the role of her relatively absent father, who is supposed to close the event with a father-daughter dance.
Elena’s grandmother happens to be a skilled seamstress and insists on making Elena’s dress; however, the grandmother’s best design does not appeal to Elena. In season 1, episode 13, “Quinces,” the grandmother confronts Elena about why she is not yet excited about her ensemble. Elena suggests, “What you’re picking up on is that I’m not really comfortable wearing a dress. . . . What about instead of heels I wear my Doc Martens?” Elena confirms that she wants a “feminist quinces” that undoes some of the heterosexist traditions. Ultimately, the grandmother redesigns the dress and reveals it to Elena the night before the quinces. The audience does not see it yet, but we know she did something important to the dress that is truer to Elena’s gender expression. When she is finally revealed at the event, we see that the grandmother eliminated the skirt portion entirely, so that now the glamorous glittering bodice of the gown is a top paired with a white suit. She is wearing masculine pants but with a generous amount of feminine sparkle.
One concession Elena makes is that she dances with a boy, presumably for the benefit of her father, who is still unhappy with Elena coming out as well as the unconventional interpretations of her quinceañera. Dancing with a boy while being dressed similarly to him actually highlights Elena’s queerness, and it is at this point that the father decides to leave the quinces and not participate in the father-daughter dance. Note that during this episode, the father’s homophobia is not centered. Beyond Penelope entreating him to show up at the quinces, no undue amount of energy is spent trying to gui -41">[41]
One Day at a Time does not present a utopia where everyone is accepted without conflict. It instead refuses to pathologize queerness or to divide the world between people who love you and people who hate you. It educates viewers on the dilemmas surrounding queer brown immigrant youth and demonstrates an alternative possibility, in which adults recognize that their bigotry is their own problem and that the happiness of a young LGBTQ+ person does not rest entirely on the acceptance of their family.
Key Questions
• One controversy this chapter discusses is the question of what exactly an LGBTQ+ film or television show is. Must it have explicitly queer characters, or is a queer aesthetic such as camp enough to qualify it?
• Discuss the tropes this chapter outlines. Are stereotyped depictions always negative? What about when their creators are themselves queer? Are stereotypical representations better or worse than no representations at all?
• Diversity of all kinds has been a historic weak point for the film and media industries. How do different elements of identity (race, sexuality, class, age, ability, etc.) interact with one another in LGBTQ+ film and media? List five to ten films or TV shows that you believe fall under the LGBTQ+ heading. How do or don’t they represent diverse voices?
Research Resources
Compiled by Susan Wood
• Discuss: Choose one or two resources listed in this chapter, and discuss them in relation to what you have learned about queer film.
• Present: Choose a key topic or event found in this chapter. Then locate one or two resources from the “Quick Dip” and “Deep Dive” sections and develop a presentation for the class. Explain the significance of the topic, and provide additional details that support your explanation.
• Create: What idea, person, or event from this chapter really moved you? Do more research on that idea, person, or event based on the resources in this chapter. Then create your own artistic response. Consider writing a poem, drawing a picture, or editing a photograph in a way that demonstrates both what you have learned and how you feel about the issue or person.
• Debate: Find a partner or split into groups, and choose a topic, idea, or controversy from this chapter. Have each partner or group present an opposing perspective on it. Use at least two of the resources in this chapter to support your argument.
Quick Dip: Online Resources
Advocate
The Advocate (https://www.advocate.com) is an online, LGBTQ+ magazine (also available in print). Its print version was established in 1967, making it the oldest continuously published LGBTQ+ periodical in the United States. Its website provides commentary and news about the LGBTQ+ spectrum of experiences and subcultures, including news, politics, and arts and culture. Its “Art and Entertainment” page has film and television sections that cover Hollywood, indie, and arthouse cinema and reviews, news, and interviews about current TV.
AfterEllen
AfterEllen (https://afterellen.com/) is a website established in 2002 to provide feminist and queer perspectives on pop culture and media. Its name refers to the historical significance and lasting impact on media and culture of the coming out of the character Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) in 1997 in the fourth season of the ABC network TV sitcom Ellen. The “Movies” and “TV” sections on the website provide reviews of lesbian and bisexual films and TV.
@AllAboutTrans
With thirty-one thousand followers as of 2021, the Twitter account of the UK-based organization All About Trans is a useful source for commentary on trans voices in popular media of all kinds. The organization’s goal is to foster dialogue between the trans community and media professionals in order to promote visibility and accurate portrayals of trans people in media.
Autostraddle
Established in 2009 by Riese Bernard and Alexandra Vega, Autostraddle (https://www.autostraddle.com) provides a platform for commentary on news and popular culture from feminist and queer perspectives. Autostraddle has won numerous awards since its inception, notably the 2015 GLAAD Media Award, and it has been been nominated for many others, including the GLAAD Digital Journalism Award. Its arts, pop culture, film, and TV sections provide reviews, news, and analysis of recent films and films in production, as well as for TV series.
Critical Media Project
Created by educators associated with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Media and Communication, the Critical Media Project provides material for use by students from ages eight through college. Its website (http://criticalmediaproject.org/) includes an overview of LGBTQ+ representation in the media and a lesson plan with activities geared to teaching critical thinking and empathy, and there is a focus on teaching students to read media texts. It includes many media examples, from commercials to movies to TV series and news clips and has an all-in-one, common core–aligned format. The Critical Media Project is a free, online resource, but some materials have copyrights.
Frameline
Frameline is a San Francisco–based organization established in 1977 to promote and showcase queer cinema (https://www.frameline.org/). The annual Frameline International LGBTQ+ Film Festival is a showcase for new works and new artists and takes place during LGBTQ+ Pride Month with screenings in the Castro District, the historic San Francisco gay neighborhood. Frameline Distribution was established in 1981 and is the only distributor focusing solely on LGBTQ+ films.
Kanopy Streaming Media
Kanopy is a major streaming media platform available only through academic and public libraries (https://www.kanopy.com/). Its catalog of over thirty thousand films includes both classic and recent LGBTQ+ films, including major award winners like Moonlight, lesser-known cult and indie films, LGBTQ+ world cinema in all genres, and documentaries. As of 2021 its “LGBTQ Cinema” page provides access to 226 narrative films from 1950 to the present, including works by key LGBTQ+ directors such as Cheryl Dunye and films from the prestigious LGBTQ+ Film Festivals Frameline and Outfest. This platform also includes more than 265 LGBTQ+ documentaries in “LGBTQ Stories” collection. A handful of these focus on media representation, such as Homo Promo: Vintage LGBT Movie Trailers, Lavender Limelight: Spotlight on Lesbian Filmmakers, and A Bit of Scarlet: Gay Characters in Post-War British Cinema. Kanopy enables fast turnaround times for closed captioning on demand for films not already captioned.
NewFest
The New York City–based NewFest organization (https://newfest.org/) has offered screenings of LGBTQ+ films and educational programs for young filmmakers for thirty years, including the widely known annual New York LGBT+ Film Festival. This festival was established in 1988 and is one of the most prestigious and comprehensive queer film festivals in the world. NewFest also sponsors queer cinema screenings year-round in the New York City area.
Outfest
Outfest is an advocacy organization established in 1982 by UCLA students with a mission of using cinematic storytelling to promote equality for sexual and gender minorities. In partnership with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the organization works to protect historic and archival LGBTQ+ films. The annual Outfest Film Festival showcases queer cinema from around the world. In addition to screenings, the organization offers mentoring programs for young filmmakers.
Rowan Ellis
Ellis is a YouTuber and a speaker and activist for women’s and LGBTQ+ issues. Her YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/c/RowanEllisVideos) offer analysis and criticism of popular culture and media from a feminist and queer perspective. Ellis is on the Autostraddle list of top one hundred LGBTQ+ YouTubers and in 2021 was nearing 150,000 subscribers. On Twitter, she is @HeyRowanEllis.
@ValerieComplex
Complex is among the leading queer of color film critics with almost thirty thousand Twitter followers (https://twitter.com/ValerieComplex) in 2021. She tweets regularly about issues beyond LGBTQ+ media representation but maintains an overall focus on inclusivity relating to sexuality and race/ethnicity in media. Beyond Twitter, she reviews films and provides critical commentary on entertainment media for Black Girl Nerds, Harpers Bazaar, the Playlist, /Film, Rotten Tomatoes, and other media reviews and criticism sources.
“Where We Are on TV,” by the GLAAD Media Institute
The GLAAD Media Institute was founded in 1985 to highlight media’s role in providing visibility to the LGBTQ+ community and shed light on negative representations. The GLAAD Research arm regularly publishes useful analysis of LGBTQ+ media representations. This resource offers a detailed look and executive summary of the number and type of LGBTQ+ characters and the level of diversity on TV series from multiple platforms, including streaming, cable, and network. Chapters include numbers of characters by race/ethnicity, by sexual orientation, and by gender identity, and Spanish-language series are included. The “Where We Are on TV” report has been published every year since 2005, allowing quantitative comparisons, year to year and longer range, of some of the key changes of LGBTQ+ representation in the media landscape. There is no other consistently published resource that provides this type of data. See the most recent report at https://www.glaad.org/whereweareontv.
Deep Dive: Books and Film
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies
Established in 1976, this peer-reviewed journal is a mainstay for scholarship in the areas of media studies and audiovisual culture examined from feminist and queer perspectives. It is published by Duke University Press. Camera Obscura has published or republished groundbreaking articles. B. Ruby Rich, an influential LGBTQ+ film studies theorist, serves on its editorial advisory board. Browse the journal at https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura.
The Celluloid Closet, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
This film is based on the LGBTQ+ activist and film historian Vito Russo’s classic 1981 (revised edition 1987) book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. It provides an overview of LGBTQ+ depictions from the silent era to films of the early 1990s. Including footage from over 120 films, as well as interviews with directors and actors, this documentary was the first of its kind in examining LGBTQ+ representations in popular, mainstream film with such scope. Like the book on which it is based, it uncovers sometimes surprising early depictions of homosexuality in film and analyzes the historical development of queer representations in relation to motion picture industry censorship known as the Hays Code and the Production Code (United States: Sony Pictures Classics, 1995).
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, by Vito Russo
This classic work in LGBTQ+ film studies was first published in 1981. Russo, a prominent LGBTQ+ activist and film historian, covers the visibility of LGBTQ+ characters and themes in Hollywood cinema from the silent era to the 1980s. In 1995, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman directed a now-classic documentary film of the same title based on his work. This documentary picks up where Russo left off and includes early-1990s films such as Thelma and Louise (rev. ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema, directed by Lisa Ades and Lesli Klainberg
Covering mainstream and indie cinema’s LGBTQ+ landmarks, such as Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991) and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), this 2006 documentary provides analysis and interviews of the depictions and representations of LGBTQ+ experiences and communities in the United States. Fabulous! is often described as the descendant of the classic documentary The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies but with a focus on queer cinema rather than on LGBTQ+ representations in mainstream, mostly heteronormative cinema. Though not unanimously well reviewed, it provides a look that is hard to find elsewhere at late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century popular queer cinema (United States: Orchard Films and Independent Film Company, 2006).
New Queer Cinema: The Directors Cut, by B. Ruby Rich
Rich, a professor in the Film and Digital Media Department and director of the Social Documentation Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a key scholar in the field of LGBTQ+ media criticism. She created the genre term new queer cinema in 1992 to describe the directions LGBTQ+ cinema was moving and how it differed from the past aesthetically and politically. This work provides access to many of her seminal past publications and to newer material. She covers LGBTQ+ film festivals, the landscape of queer cinema, and important contributors to the genre, including Todd Haynes, Derek Jarman, Julián Hernández, and Ang Lee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
Queer Cinema and Visual Culture, by K. J. Surkan
This MIT OpenCourseWare offering from 2017 includes readings, films, and assignments and analyzes post–World War II cinema through the lens of queer theory (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/womens-and-gender-studies/wgs-181-queer-cinema-and-visual-culture-fall-2017/).
The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom, by Tison Pugh
Pugh, professor of English at the University of Central Florida, investigates heteronormative sitcoms, such as Leave It to Beaver, and contemporary sitcoms featuring LGBTQ+ characters, such as Modern Family. He analyzes homophobia, the sexualization of girls, and gay stereotypes. This is an open-access text (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017, https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/33010).
Transgender Cinema, by Rebecca Bell-Metereau
Bell-Metereau provides a history of depictions of transgender people from the silent era through the present in documentaries, classic and cult feature films, television, and world cinema. She examines these representations and their effects on both popular understandings of transgender people and transgender people’s self-image. There are few recent, book-length, scholarly treatments of transgender cinema with this scope. This work fills a gap in LGBTQ+ media criticism, which often focuses on sexual orientation more than on gender identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019).
Glossary
ace relationships. An asexual person is known as ace, and they have asexual relationships.
bigotry. Intolerance or bias toward an identity or group of people.
calling in. Approaching problematic behavior or language with sympathy; asking why the behavior occurred, explaining why it is oppressive, and devising a new course of action collaboratively.
calling out. Approaching problematic behavior or language combatively; striving to shame a group or individual for their behavior to serve as a warning to others.
camp. An aesthetic that privileges poor taste, shock value, and irony and poses an intentional challenge to the traditional attributes of high art. It is often characterized by showiness, extreme artifice, and tackiness.
content. The substance of a story, typically entailing narrative, characters, and dialogue.
form. The way a story is told, including choices such as editing, cinematography, wardrobe, and framing.
gender binary. The idea that there are only two genders, male and female, and that everyone should and will identify accordingly.
gender expression. The external presentation of gender, through body language, pronoun choice, and style of dress.
heteronormativity. Policies, beliefs, and behaviors that assume everyone adheres to the gender binary, or that everyone is heterosexual.
heterosexist. Policies, beliefs, or behaviors enacted by straight people that discriminate against queer people.
homonormativity. A political and sometimes narrative approach that works to establish LGBTQ+ lives as no different from straight lives beyond the genders one is attracted to. It is an assimilation-based approach that invokes the rhetoric of sameness in appeals for civil rights and social acceptance.
homophobia. Fear or hatred for queerness and queer people.
marginalized. To be rendered less important, less powerful, and less visible than what is considered the norm or mainstream.
nuanced. Containing layers of meaning, having subtle differences.
pathologize. Representing a trait, behavior, or identity as a sickness or inevitable tragedy.
prejudice. A preconceived positive or (usually) negative feeling toward someone or something.
privileged. Receiving advantages that are not available to everyone.
queer. Pertaining to a person or group that does not fall within the gender binary of heterosexuality.
representation. Portrayal of a person or group by a representative who acts for them or in their interests.
trope. A pattern, phrase, rhetorical device, or plot point that has been used so often it can be categorized and anticipated.
1. J. Dry, “5 Queer Films You Didn’t Know Were Queer, from Fight Club to Showgirls,” IndieWire, July 7, 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/best-lgbt-films-you-didnt-know-were-queer-fight-club-gay-lesbian-movies-showgirls-1201851309/.
2. J. Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 63.
3. A. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xi.
4. R. Dyer, Now You See It (New York: Routledge, 2013), 23.
5. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “trope (noun),” accessed April 14, 2019, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trope.
6. B. R. Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), xxv.
7. L. J. Leff and J. L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 270.
8. R. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct; a Medico-forensic Study (New York: Rebman, 1906), 399.
9. H. M. Benshoff and S. Griffin, Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
10. T. Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
11. J. Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 304.
12. C. A. Noriega, “‘Something’s Missing Here!’: Homosexuality and Film Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934–1962,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58 (2018): 20, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2018.0089.
13. V. Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (1981; New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
14. GLAAD Media Institute, “Where We Are on TV,” https://www.glaad.org/whereweareontv.
15. S. Sontag, Notes on “Camp” (London: Penguin, 2018).
16. Rich, New Queer Cinema, xv.
17. R. Becker, “Prime-Time Television in the Gay Nineties: Network Television, Quality Audiences, and Gay Politics,” Velvet Light Trap 42 (1998): 36–47.
18. RuPaul, Lettin’ It All Hang Out (New York: Hyperion, 1995).
19. C. Esposito, “Cameron Esposito—Woman Who Doesn’t Sleep with Men (from Same Sex Symbol),” April 6, 2014, https://youtu.be/TSJGaVuJJn8.
20. I Am Jazz, TLC, https://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/i-am-jazz/.
21. F. Dhaenens, “Teenage Queerness: Negotiating Heteronormativity in the Representation of Gay Teenagers in Glee,” Journal of Youth Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 304–317, https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2012.718435.
22. M. San Filippo, The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
23. L. Horak, “Tracing the History of Trans and Gender Variant Filmmakers,” Spectator 37, no. 2 (2017): 9–20.
24. J. Puar, “In the Wake of It Gets Better,” Guardian, November 16, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/16/wake-it-gets-better-campaign; T. Nyong’o, “School Daze,” October 1, 2010, Bully Bloggers, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/school-daze/.
25. M. Riggs, “An Interview with Marlon Riggs: Tongues Untied Lets Loose Angry, Loving Words,” interview by Robert Anbian, March 1990, http://newsreel.org/guides/Riggs-Guide/Release-Print-Riggs-Interview-1990.pdf.
26. I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs, directed by Karen Everett, 1996.
27. POV, “Tongues Untied: Filmmaker Interview with Marlon Riggs,” season 4, episode 5, PBS, July 15, 1991, https://www.pbs.org/video/pov-tongues-untied-filmmaker-interview/.
28. A. Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” paper delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, December 28, 1977, https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf.
29. Riggs, “An Interview with Marlon Riggs.”
30. A. Leventry, “The Importance of Social Media When It Comes to LGBTQ Kids Feeling Seen,” Washington Post, September 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/09/20/importance-social-media-when-it-comes-lgbtq-kids-feeling-seen/.
31. See, for example, E. Schiappa, P. B. Gregg, and D. E. Hewes, “The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis,” Communication Monographs 72, no. 1 (2005): 92–115.
32. A. R. Flores, D. P. Haider-Markel, D. C. Lewis, P. R. Miller, B. L. Tadlock, and J. K. Taylor, “Transgender Prejudice Reduction and Opinions on Transgender Rights: Results from a Mediation Analysis on Experimental Data,” Research and Politics 5, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168018764945.
33. R. Deerwater, “Color of Change, Women’s Media Center, RespectAbility, NHMC React to GLAAD’s ‘Where We Are on TV’ Findings,” GLAAD, October 30, 2018, https://www.glaad.org/blog/color-change-women%E2%80%99s-media-center-respectability-nhmc-react-glaad%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98where-we-are-tv%E2%80%99-findings.
34. L. J. Ross, “Speaking Up Without Tearing Down,” Teaching Tolerance, no. 61 (2019), https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/spring-2019/speaking-up-without-tearing-down.
35. N. Buckley, dir., “Moments Later,” season 1, episode 11, Pretty Little Liars, January 3, 2011.
36. M. Grossman, dir., “The New Normal,” season 1, episode 17, Pretty Little Liars, February 14, 2011.
37. Grossman, “The New Normal.”
38. Ross, “Speaking Up Without Tearing Down.”
39. “What Is a Quinceañera and Why Is It So Important?,” My Quince, accessed July 23, 2015, https://www.myquincemagazine.com/what-is-a-quinceanera-and-why-is-it-so-important/.
40. M. Gonzalez, “The Quinceañera, a Rite of Passage in Transition,” New York Times, June 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/nyregion/the-quinceanera-a-rite-of-passage-in-transition.html.
41. P. Fryman, dir., “Quinces,” season 1, episode 13, One Day at a Time, June 4, 2016. | textbooks/socialsci/Gender_Studies/Introduction_to_LGBTQ__Studies%3A_A_Cross-Disciplinary_Approach_(Amory_Massey_Miller_and_Brown)/06%3A_Culture/6.01%3A_Chapter_10-_Screening_LGBTQ.txt |
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