First Revision Workshop

1. First Revision Workshop International Perspectives on Gender, Week 21

2. Workshop Aims • introduce the exam • provoke thought about your revision strategies • identify key concepts on the module • draw connections across the module • convince you that you already know more than you think • start thinking what you would need to know about in order to write on some term 1 topics

3. The Exam • When? Wednesday 4 June, 9.30am • Where? F107, Engineering • Duration? 3 hours, answer 3 questions • Rubric? Answer at least 1 question from each section No barring • Section 1: UK (1 question), Soviet Union/Russia (1 question), China (1 question), South Africa (1 question) • Section 2: India (1 question), Islam (1 question), Ireland (1 question), Gender and global capitalism (1 question)

4. Why do you do exams? To demonstrate what you know University regulations To demonstrate capacity to work under pressure To demonstrate time management skills To demonstrate skills of privileging To demonstrate independent thinking To demonstrate creativity, synthesis, originality To bring everything together In order to be classified

5. Revision Strategies • Write down what you got right in your revision strategy last year (or earlier) and how you achieved it. • Write down what you want to improve on in your revision strategy this year and how you’re going to do it.

6. Key Module Concepts • Sex (biological, fixed); Gender (social and cultural, constructed, mutable/ changeable/transformable); Gender Equality/Inequality • Feminisms; Post-feminism; women’s movement; agency; resistance • Gender divisions of labour, resources, opportunities, status; gender pay gap; horizontal and vertical gender segregation, double burden, triple shift, sexual harassment; labour market discrimination; beauty premium; symbolic gender roles - material gender roles; dominant discourses/narratives • Gendered identities/ subjectivities; performing gender identities; femininities / masculinities (plural both within contexts and between them, but with striking commonalities eg what’s expected of men and women in nationalism); crisis in masculinity; patriarchal premium; hyper masculinity; hyper femininity • Hidden curriculum; self-worth theory; laddishness; new sexual contract; post-feminist masquerade • Sexuality; heterosexism; compulsory heterosexuality; essentialism; social constructionism; nuclear family; diversity of family forms; symmetrical family; sexualisation of work; homophobia; sexual violence; gendered double standards   • State Socialism and Post-Socialism; patriarchal socialism; Soviet Union/USSR and Russian Federation; People’s Republic of China; collectivization; communes; collective ownership of means of production; proletariat; bourgeoisie; surplus value; socialization of reproductive work; son-preference; one-child policy, reproductive rights; sexual rights; perestroika; glasnost; Maoism; Confucianism; male-dominated peasantry; state propaganda; capitalism

7. Key Module Concepts Cont… • Orientalism - the weaving into ‘knowledge’ of the idea that the west is innately superior to the east – ‘othering’; ‘legitimation’ of colonialism • Nationalism; nation-building; anti-natalist state; pro-natalist state; biological and cultural reproduction of nation; public sphere - private sphere/domestic sphere • Apartheid and Post-Apartheid; migrant labour system; anti-apartheid movement; institutionalised racism; one person one vote; intersections of gender, ‘race; and class; pass laws; bantustans; anti-apartheid movement; ANC; PAC; COSATU; UDF; Nationalist Party; white separatist; petty apartheid; sexual violence; gender-based violence; feminization of poverty • Colonialism & Imperialism (India, Ireland); welfarism; independence movements; partition; modernity/modernisation • Religious fundamentalism; hindutva; communalism; Islamic fundamentalism; Catholic fundamentalism?; unveiling; reveiling; Islamic Revolution; feminist theology; religious/secular feminism; • Global capitalism; old international division of labour; new international division of labour; ISI; EOI; unionization; labour movement; runaway shops; NICs; Fair-trade; Ethical trade; contradictory effects on women’s status; nimble fingers; labour behind the label; codes of conduct; fairwashing

8. Key Module Objectives • What follows are 16 module objectives • Working in pairs, read through them, discuss what you think they mean and identify which module topics they are most associated with (many of them cover more than one).

9. Key Module Objectives 1. Resisting the idea that there is one ‘female’ point of view, or one ‘male perspective’ on any issue. 2. Recognising that while gender is an important difference (generating patterns of (in)equality; (lack of) opportunity; status etc.), it is cross-cut by other differences. 3. Generating critical perspectives on any idea that gender relations are ‘natural’, inevitable, outcomes of biological difference etc.  4. Insisting that gender can only be understood in relation to social, cultural and historical processes, ie. that it is contingent.

10. 5. Examining the symbolic importance of gender and extent to which it is at the centre of the religious and political ideologies and state practices that have dominated the last 100 years: colonialism; apartheid; nationalism; socialism/communism; fundamentalism; globalization 6. Paying attention to the way gender prescriptions (ideas about what gender relations should be like) have been a resource through which to legitimate the present as well as to imagine the future. 7. Examining and critiquing the idea that the level of gender equality is a short-hand marker of ‘civilization’. 8. Appreciating why women (and men) may not speak ‘gender oppression’ - through that their whole society/ethnic group/ class etc. may be judged.

11. 9. Promoting reflexivity, ie. asking where ‘we’ are in the ‘knowing’ process about women and men’s lives around the world. Asking what sort of relations are entailed between us as ‘knowers’ and those we ‘know’ about? 10. Emphasising women’s and men’s agency and capacity for resistance and change, while not ignoring structural barriers to agency. 11. Demonstrating the need to continually disaggregate the categories women and men, through the diversity of their experiences around the world. 12. Contesting universalisms - the idea that there is one type of oppression of women, and one solution to it.

12. 13. Recognizing and critiquing gender stereotypes, eg. the Muslim woman. 14. Recognising that some women can oppress other women, that some women can oppress men, and that men can work for gender equality and women’s empowerment. 15. Emphasising the need for specific, historical analysis on a case by case basis, at the same time as recognising patterns (eg. the gendered ‘scripts’ of nationalist movements; gendered work). 16. Recognising the need to ask gendered questions about social change, eg. globalization.

13. Topic by Topic Revision • Work in small groups • From what you can recall about each topic, try to come up with three or four bullet points that reflect the major learning points UK – Education and Work UK – Family and Sexuality Marxism and Soviet Union Post-communist Russia Confucianism and Maoist China Contemporary China • You won’t remember everything – don’t worry

14. Sex and Gender • Sex = biological marker of sexual difference • Gender = socio-cultural content/meaning attached to this biological marker • We read (and present) gender continually in everyday life in order to define people as male or female • Where sex is privileged in analysis, the differences between men and women’s status/skills/character etc. are generally put down to biology and are seen as fixed, natural and inevitable • Where gender is privileged in analysis these differences are seen as variable, products of society and culture and capable of transformation • IPG seeks to disaggregate gender, recognise resistance and emphasise importance of context

15. UK - Education and Work • Girls disadvantaged by education system in relation to boys in past - now claimed boys are losing out • Are boys discriminated against? Or is hegemonic masculinity partly incompatible with educational success? • Women’s labour market participation risen dramatically since 1970s, but concentrated in part-time, low-paid services • Gender pay gap endures, but growing differences between women • Women’s lower status and prioritisation of reproductive work is carried into labour market • Workplace identities are central to performance of masculinities, in relation to women and other men

16. UK – Family and Sexuality • Nuclear family vs. diversity of family forms (single parents, recombinant families, gay and lesbian families) • Family values lobby: nuclear is best, diversity = crisis • Sociology: diversity is here to stay, the crisis is ideological • Gendered power relations in marriage • Young and Willmott’s Symmetrical Family: has it arrived? • What explains the diversity of family forms today? • Is sexuality a natural drive (essentialist view) or a social product (social constructionist view)? • Heterosexism - unconscious or explicit assumption that heterosexuality is only normal form of sexual relations.

17. Marxism and Soviet Union • Marxism: Proletariat need revolution to end class oppression (bourgeoisie exploiting surplus value) • Engels: gender oppression akin to class oppression & should: - abolish private property and collectivize - incorporate women into paid work-force - socialize reproductive work (house-work and child-care) - bring women fully into revolutionary politics • 1917 Russian Revolution delivered new legal rights for women and entry into full-time paid work but failed to fully socialize reproductive work and politics was state-controlled only • Communist state only allowed heterosexuality, to produce children and meet men’s ‘natural’ needs  •  Under Stalin some rights eroded – divorce made more difficult, abortion prohibited, state overtly pro-natalist

18. Post-Communist Russia • 1989: Berlin wall falls and beginning of end of USSR • Today’s (shrunken) Russia largely capitalist • New freedoms – to buy western goods, travel – but inflation, unemployment, loss of state support, growing inequalities • Under Communism women had duty to work; under Capitalism disproportionately unemployed at first • Some women retreat in domesticity, celebrate hyper-femininity • Crisis among some urban working class Russian men – unemployed, marginalized from work and home •  Is rise of prostitution/pornography a liberation of sexuality or women’s objectification & commodification? • Heterosexual relations still bound by gender stereotypes • Russian feminisms and gender studies well developed but face serious constraints from increasingly authoritarian state

19. Confucianism Gender & Communism: Maoist China • ‘correct’ behaviours/roles for different genders • Relationships seen as naturally and strongly hierarchical • Chinese family was patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal • 1949 Revolution: women’s legal rights improved quickly • Socialism was patriarchal – patriarchy accommodated to safeguard revolution, food supplies, women’s reproductive work not fully socialized, leaving double burden  • With collectivization from late 1950s women earned own wages • Great Leap Forward – rapid development of agricultural and industrial sectors. Population forced into communes, famine • Cultural Revolution – Mao’s attempt to tackle feudal ideology • (Some) women entered new spheres of employment, gained mobility, wages in own right but no political freedom

20. Contemporary China • Implementation of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ • One-child policy – (dependent on several factors) a rational strategy or an abuse of women’s reproductive rights? Has fuelled son-preference and population imbalance • Rapid development has been uneven – great disparity between rich and poor, urban and rural • Rapid urbanisation means depopulated villages – older women left to tend to farm and care for grandchildren • Women’s labour market discrimination - beauty premium, loss of state-run childcare facilities, expelled from ‘male’ jobs • Non-marriage seen as abnormal, state is heterosexist • Political involvement is state controlled, protesting difficult - one party state, state controlled press, restricted internet access • Propaganda that women’s equality achieved is critiqued

21. Week after next… • Continue topic by topic • Making links between topics • Tips on survival in the exam room In seminars this week… • Further discuss key concepts, module objectives, key points within topics • Further discuss revision strategies • Choose topic to revise ready for mock paper in week 4 seminar