Socio-logic with James - FBi Radio (19 Nov 2009): feminism and slavery

Hey everyone

The last couple of weeks have been crazy so I have not had a chance to post my blog with the usual enthusiasm, but I am back this week.

This week on FBI Radio (94.5 fm), I covered 2 broad areas: feminism (yes, the ‘f’-word) and modern day slavery.

The feminism story was inspired from the news the week before of the some of the degrading rituals that some Sydney Uni residential colleges follow. Alex and I discussed this on air but alas, no blog. For a great read, however, check out the article by Carina Garland.

So let’s look at this week’s issues...

Is Feminism still relevant?

For some background on gender, sex and feminism check out my blog below.

To begin with, we should understand that feminism simply means the push for political, cultural or economic rights and legal protection for women. (See, it is not a scary word!)

We can look at the challenges facing women both in Australia and internationally. These are different challenges and should not be simply grouped together. What is important however, is that challenges still on exist both on the economic and social front (again, see below for some evidence I provide) as well as check out the figures provided by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Feminism is about confronting these challenges with the goal of equality: and I think remains relevant today though the challenges, in Australia, have changed.

I call myself a feminist – and believe that it is just as relevant today as ever.

Modern day slavery

Slavery ‘officially ended over 200 years ago, but unfortunately, it persists today. Though exact figures are almost impossible to come by, it is estimated that that there are 27 million people around the world today are being held in slavery. To think about the size of that, it is the Australian population plus another 7 million! Figures indicate that this illegal industry generates up to US$100 billion per year.

One organisation working to stop slavery is Free the Slaves, which was founded in 2001 as well as its UK sister organisation Anti-Slavery International (which is the world's oldest human rights group).

Slavery is essentially the ownership of a person: they become like any other commodity (like a pair of shoes: unfortunate example, but this is something that we need to be brutally honest about).

Free the Slaves draws an important distinction between slavery and extremely exploitative labour, though they also admit that this is a very thin line.

Sweatshop workers are exploited by being forced to work long hours under difficult and abusive conditions with little pay. Slaves face the same conditions, but additionally they cannot walk away – having lost all their rights and free will.

Further, most slaves are paid nothing at all, and the physical and psychological violence used against them is so complete that they cannot escape their slavery.

Both Free the Slave and organisations like Oxfam Australia and also many organisations like Apheda which are associated with labour unions work on these issues.

What is important here is that we can all do something about this – our everyday actions can break down slavery and overcome sweatshop conditions.

Follow the hot-links to find out how you can help (as well as get more information).

Cheers, james

Understanding where gender relationships come from in everyday life

Introduction

This blog is focussed on the idea of performance: the way we perform of ‘gender’. As I will explain below, there is an important difference between sex and gender.

Before I get into such descriptions though, I want to mention an important cultural studies theorist, Irving Goffman. Goffman studied the rituals and practices of everyday life – something that may not sound exciting, but if you think about it, it is. Think about how we behave everyday: from shaking hands to standing in queues, we follow these invisible rule. What Goffman argued was that our experiences of everyday life are all based on performance. Life is like we are living on a stage and we perform accordingly. Like any performance, much of what we perform is based on the actors around us.

So, for example, when I am hanging out with students, I take the role of a lecturer. But when I am hanging out with my big brother, take the role of little brother. In other words, our performance is always changing.

How does this translate to gender? Well, as I will argue, there are daily rituals and routines that we follow and perform that give rise to gender identity. In others words, we are going to understand what makes us a man, what makes us a woman, and how we learn to behave in the appropriate way.

By unfolding this, we learn how power is shaped in our society and why for centuries women were though of as the 'inferior sex.' Even today in wealthy nations like Australia, these gendered roles persist and create uneven power relations. To overcome these, we must understand why they come about. So, let's begin…


Sex and gender

The starting point of this blog is to understand the difference between sex and gender.
The simplest way to keep the difference in mind is to think of sex as our biological make-up. That is, there are certain biological aspects that allow us to be defined as men and women: yes, our bits! This is not always clear-cut however, as there are many who are born as what can be described as inter-sex. That is, with biological features of both men and women: never clearly defined. Our society is not used to dealing with this group of people and I would love to write more but this is not the blog to do this.

Gender, on the other hand, are the social and cultural characteristics and personality traits that we assign different the sexes. In other words, what are the characteristics that make us men and women. These are not biological, but the social dimensions assigned to men and women – such as masculine and feminine..

So, if we think about it, we can think about the characteristics that make women feminine and what makes women beautiful. We think of the ideal women and the specific characteristics she is assigned. In our society, the feminine may include things such as thin, demure, polite, sexy but not dominating. You can see how these are social characteristics assigned to women.

We can contrast this to the masculine – or the social characteristics that makes the ideal male: strong, some level of aggression but not too much, fit, the breadwinner, sexually active, the leader and stronger parent.

As we can see, there are social and cultural attributes, not just physical, that we assign to the different sexes – and this is what we define as gender.

'Male' and 'female', then, are biological terms: they point to anatomical, primarily genital difference. "'Man' and 'woman', however, are gendered terms, and signify social, that is behavioural and experiential difference. They are categories with certain coded behaviours which we as young males or females must learn in order to become men or women. Masculinity and femininity thus are not inherent characteristics" (Buchbinder, 1994: 3).

Now, the concept of gender is relatively new and only emerged in the 1970s. Up until this time, it was assumed that your gender was attributed to your sex. That is, your personality was essentially determined by your sex: culture was seen as not really being a factor.

So this brings us to the link between sex, gender and identifying who we are.


Gender, rituals and routines

The question for us to consider is, what role do routines and rituals play in our everyday lives that confirm and enforce these idealised gendered roles. If we all think of what we did in the last 24 hours, we can think of routines and rituals that we have followed and how these are gendered.

Possible examples are:

• Putting on make up? Feminine
• Tuning the car? Masculine
• Doing the ironing? Feminine
• Preparing the children for school? Feminine
• Fixing a leaky tap? Masculine
• Sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching footy with mates, eating pizza and yelling at the television? Masculine
• Shaving your legs? Feminine

Ok, you can hopefully see that there are some specific roles rituals and routines that are assigned to genders. These are not natural or ‘innate’ but my point is about the role we assign to certain tasks.

Let's now try and ground this a little further. Think of a family roast and assign the following roles:

• Who does the inviting?
  
• Who does the cooking?
• Who sets the table?
• Who watches the footy while this is happening?
• Who serves the food?
• Who cleans the table?
• Where do the different men and women congregate during the preparation?
  
  

My point here is that the process of performing gender and what is accepted as appropriate 'gendered' behaviour is learnt and culturally specific. And the way we learn most of this information is not that someone sits down and tells us: this is how men behave and this is how women should act. Rather, we learn it in the rituals and routines of everyday life – and usually by just observing what others do and following.

Importantly, these rituals and routines tell us a great deal about our culture. And we can hopefully see from the examples above, how they shape power relations in our society.

The beauty myth

So where does this take us? When I say culture, I am drawing on the following definition provided by Anthony Giddens:

'Culture consists of the values the members of a given group hold, the norms they follow, and the material goods they create' (Giddens, 1989, Sociology, 31).

Let's think about gender and beauty, and what insights this provides us about our culture and power relations in our society.

Some important economics around the beauty industry:

• Australians spend $2.5 billion on cosmetics, skin care and fragrances each year;
• This has been increasing by about 10% per year; and
• This is part of a $50 billion industry around the world that focuses on skin care alone. (I am not sure about cosmetics and fragrances.)
  

We also have the rise of Botox parties and the increasing acceptance of cosmetic surgery for younger and younger girls, time spent at the gym, dieting and diet fads as well as all the focus on celebrities and what is happening on their bodies.

In other words it is not possible to actually determine how much money is spent in this area. What we produce tells us a great deal about our culture – so what does the production of the beauty industry tell us about our culture?

According to Naomi Wolf in her very important book, our culture has produced a 'beauty myth.' That is, that our culture has established the myth that there is only one understanding of beauty and this is being universalised. The beauty myth, according to Wolf, is something that we are all expected to work towards it. For Wolf, this beauty is something that is manufactured by the advertising industry and is an important component of the global economy.

While Wolf focuses on the feminine, we also see similar patterns for the masculine. Despite this, Wolf also argues that this confirms the dominance of men over women: there are many more beauty rituals that are demanded from women than men. Think of the following routines that are mainly feminine and reflect the beautiful:

• Makeup: women spent a great deal of their time buying and using makeup. Wolf argues that this is to attract the male gaze;
• Shaving: while men shave their facial hair, women are expected to keep all their body hair in check. If we think about the pain of waxing and the frustration of shaving legs, armpits and plucking facial hair, what use is it to women? As far as I know, there is no use except making women more feminine.
• Grooming: while men are expected to groom, more pressure is placed on women to look attractive. A man can look un-kept and still be attractive. The same does not apply to women.
• Cosmetic surgery: most cosmetic surgery is undertaken by women rather than men. This involves Botox to look younger, breast augmentation and cellulite – which are three of the most popular procedures undertaken.
• Anti-aging treatments: most again are directed to women. Men, as they get older and get grey, are said to look sophisticated. It is hardly the case for women. (Look at news readers: most women on TV are young while men are older.)
  

We do not have to look far to see images around us: what we expect men and women to be like. The point of Naomi Wolf's work is to highlight how the beauty myth is specifically targeted towards women.

Authors such as Arthur Brittan undertake similar work when it comes to male masculinities. We can see pressures placed on the male identity: though this is a very different pressure that exists. For Brittan, masculinity is used as a way to measure men: to pressure them to fit into an ideal. So men are pushed towards certain professions and sports because these are the masculine. Everyday experiences of masculinities that have their own rituals and routines include the breadwinner ethic, alcohol consumption and also exposure to violence.

Why feminism is cool

In today's society, the word 'feminism' is given a bad wrap: it has been labelled as something that is from the past and is no longer relevant. I want to emphasise the point however, that the word feminism is another way to describe demands for gender justice and equal rights.

The question that I am often asked is, 'is this still relevant today?' Here are some statistics that we should note:

• Average total weekly earnings according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004) where: $756.50. For Men: $897.50 but for Women: $611.50;
• Only 8% of board positions in publically listed companies are taken by women; and
• On a daily basis, men spend 2.5 hours a day on work around the house, and women spend almost 4 hours.
  

If we combine this with the concept of the beauty myth, you can see that women still have a battle on their hand to achieve equality: and this is why feminism is still important – and this is why feminism is cool.

Concluding comments

The main issue I want to emphasise here is that there is an important difference between sex and gender – and we are socialised through certain rituals and routines to follow emphasise gender roles. The question is, do we simply pass them on without question and reflect existing power relationships, or do we attempt to confront them.

According to Frye, we often accept gender roles as natural or innate, but this is not the case. This has implications for power, which Frye notes as follows:

'For efficient subordination, what's wanted is that the structure not appear to be a cultural artefact kept in place by human decision or custom, but that it appear natural – that it appear to be quite a direct consequence of facts about the beast which are beyond the scope of human manipulation' (Frye quoted in Lorber & Farrel, 1991: 33).

Sources:
Billington, R. et al (1991) Culture and Society Macmillan, London.
Brittan, A. (1989) Masculinity and power, Basil Blackwell
Buchbinder, D. (1994) Masculinities and Identities Melbourne Uni. Press, Melbourne.
Connell, B. (1987) Gender and Power Polity, Cambridge.
Connell, B. (1995) Masculinities Polity, Cambridge.
Dunecki, L. (2006) 'Peddling the beauty myth', 14 October 2006, The Age
Wolf, N. (1991) The Beauty Myth, Vintage Books, Sydney.