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.

Protecting the Australian Commons and privatisation

Recently, I was invited to be a guest on ABC's Nightlife. The discussion was focused on whether, in a modern complex state, the integration between the public sphere and private enterprise can define how we all live.

From transport to telecommunications, governments around the world are struggling to find out which gives us the best standard of living - the market or the ministers? I tried to present the issue of the commons, though we got focused on privatisation, there was still some good points discussed...

Listen to it here...

Cheers, james

Cultural Studies 2: Studying everyday life

Introduction

To begin with, I want to remind you that cultural studies aims, amongst other things, to understand the hidden and secret rules behind our society: that is, our culture. Thought there are many definitions of 'culture', in essence t involves looking at the rules and values that we all follow, most often without even knowing that they are there.

A key definition that I like to use is presented by influential sociologist Anthony Giddens:

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

There are three key points that we should highlight here:

Values: that is, what is important in our society? What do we consider important? What hierarchies exist in things like work or leisure? For example, from the pay scales we can see that we 'value' bankers more than nurses or teachers – despite all the rhetoric of the exact opposite. What does that tell us about the structure of our value system?

The second section to this definition is norms: that is, what are the rules that we follow – what do we consider 'normal'? There are many norms in our society – many of which are changing. Again, despite all the rhetoric of 'family values', it is now normal for people to work on weekends. Only a decade or so ago, most shops were closed Sundays. Again, what does that tell us about who we are?

The third dimension of this definition is the idea of what goods we produce. This may sound somewhat weird at first but let's think it through. Pre-modern societies used to focus on the production of necessities: enough food to eat; enough clothes to wear; shelter and some extras to trade. This told you much about the way that people lived: a lack of technology meant that they could not store food for too long. But today, we produce food but we specialise – selling most and trading. But the biggest focus on our society is the production of luxury good – new phones, a new Ipod, a new Nintendo and so on. We do not really hear what the apple farmers are up to but we are always aware about the new products that Apple is producing. So, the production of certain material goods tells us a great deal about who we are – that is, our culture.

It is within this that we are looking at everyday life: how the rules and values shape our lives, the way we see the world, how power operates and the rituals that we follow. For, as I will discuss in future blogs, it is regular rituals that we do not think about that tell us something about our society. So when we look at a society like Australia, we can ask binds us: language, beliefs, institutions, stories and myths, but also common practices – that is, rituals.


How will we be studying everyday life?

As I have already mentioned in my previous blog, there is no 'one-way' to undertake the study of everyday life so we employ multiple methods. This is known as an 'interdisciplinary approach' and we draw on from the schools of Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies: though it is cultural studies that is our focus here. The main research methodology employed, however, is taken from anthropology and known as 'ethnographic research'. This is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close field observation of social phenomena.

According to Marvin Harris and Orna Johnson (2000-, ethnography literally means "a portrait of a people." It is a written description of a particular culture and its customs, beliefs, and behaviour.

Typically, the researcher – also known as the ethnographer – focuses on a community, selecting informants who are known to have an overview of the activities of the community. Such informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community (this is a process described as 'chain sampling' because of the interlinked nature of the informants).

As part of the ethnographic analysis, and usually after the observation has been undertaken, informants are interviewed (often a multiple times). This process is intended to reveal common cultural understandings related to the phenomena under study.

Such a research process involves two important assumptions that we need to accept. Note that there are others, for the purpose of this overview, the following should are key:

The first is that ethnography assumes the main focus of research is affected by community cultural understandings: This means that if we are studying a group of people, and we watch them greet each other then we can assume that the greeting is the same for all people within that group – not just the process but the meaning also.

Ethnography also assumes that we, as researchers, are capable of understanding the cultural meanings of the population we are studying. This may be easy in some situations, but what if you are studying a group with a different language; use technical jargon; or even undertake certain rituals that you do not recognise?


Ethnography: a case study

In my previous blog I noted four key dimensions to ethnographic research that we need to understand (again there are others but for the purposes of this overview, let's focus on these). I want to apply these four dimensions to some of my own experiences. I worked for a while in a part of PNG called Bougainville as a consultant to the Central Bank. This was a country that was just emerging from conflict and I was interested, as part of another project, to understand how people were attempting to rebuild their lives from the conflict.

• Observing and understanding: that is, you do not ask interviews but observe (at least initially). When I researched squats in Amsterdam and tried to figure out how they worked, I just went and lived there for a while. I did a similar thing in PNG. The point was I did not ask people how they got along or what rules they followed, I just observed and attempted to understand what was happening.
  
  What I did was I went and lived in the community to observe what was going in. I volunteered to undertake and assist the men in their work. This often involved manual labour even though I was an outsider, after a while they begin to just accept me being there.
  
  While I worked, had dinner, drank coffee and so on, I observed what was going on. I did not ask any questions like, how do you guys do that, but just attempted to understand from my observing.
  
  See, what had happened was that there was a civil war and many neighbours had turned against each other. The questions I was interested was on how people were rebuilding trust with their neighbours. What I found was that it was happening in small steps: people asked to borrow a hammer or gave a hand at some chores. So what I observed was that trust builds slowly, and the more it builds, the more it feeds itself – kind of like a magic pudding.
  
• Focus on meaning: that is, when we do something we need to look beyond the event and understand the meaning behind it. So, buying a Coke is not just buying a Coke, the process has a bunch of meaning attached (like accepting that you are part of capitalist system, money is a means of exchange and that property rights allow you to own a can of Coke only after paying for it).
  
  Think about being at the pub and buying a shout – you are not just being nice, but there is a reason why you do it: to confirm that you are part of the group; that you are all going to stick around and share the evening; there is meaning behind what you are doing. When studying everyday life, we would not just observe 5 guys standing around drink beer but attempt to understand what it means.

• Ok, this extends the above point then: lending someone a hammer does not seem to mean much but if only a few months ago these same people were at war, then the lending of tools takes on additional meanings. So I looked for the subtle meanings in the practices of the everyday – learnt how there was a separation between groups still but also came to understand how people reached out.
  
  This means that a greeting, the sharing of a tool and a bunch of other things seem have much greater meanings than what we give them credit for.
  
  There are many things that have meaning that we do not think about. As we will see in future blogs, there are a great deal of meanings attached to specific rituals such as birthday parties and also the gifts that we give.

• Insiders' viewpoint: this extends the first point – that we do not rely on someone else's observation but do it ourselves. When it comes to observing our own society, this is part of the making the familiar unfamiliar: that is, seeing ourselves as 'anthropologically strange'. So we look at things and attempt to understand them from an insider's perspective.
  
  In Bougainville, I went and lived within these communities to understand what was going on. Sure, I did not understand everything, but I began to gain insights that would not have been possible if I was just passing through.
  
  But while doing this, it is important to avoid being ethno-centric: this means, we need to accept that there is more than one way of seeing the world and that our own biases will always impact upon what you see – no matter how hard you try to avoid that.

Finally, the truth is that I will only ever be able to gain a specific view – which as biased and coloured by the things that I understand. I came to accept these limitations in the work.

Cultural Studies 1 - Introduction: studying cultural studies through everyday life

This blog is about introducing the discipline of cultural studies through the study of everyday life.

So, what do I by ‘studying everyday life’? I mean, is not the everyday boring and mundane? Nothing happens on an average day and should we not be studying the extraordinary events that occur such as elections, wars, terrorist attacks and so on – things that are unique, happen rarely and we stop and notice?

The answer is yes, we should be studying these events – because they are both important and shape our world. The war in Iraq, for example, will be studied in years to come as a moment in history when the world changed: it may be seen as the beginning of the end of US power, or maybe the beginning of peace and stability in the region… who knows what history holds? We can only speculate.

But the study of the everyday is different: it allows us to turn into anthropologists and look at our own civilisations like zoologists look at elephants. In this way, we learn to look at the way we live by taken-for-granted understandings about the ‘rules’ of everyday life. This gives insights in the power relations in our society, what we consider important, the way we structure our society and a whole lot more.

So, studying the everyday life is both self-evident and puzzling as it is everywhere but invisible. We need to unpack the very things that we take for granted. It involves, not the one-off events, but the everyday patterns and events. To do this, it is necessary to begin the process of ‘unlearning’. That is, the things that we consider normal and natural we need to learn to stop doing them and looking at them like we are looking at them for the first time: unpack the familiar – which is known as ‘deconstruction’.

So, in cultural studies we are less interested in how we structure our society, but more in the logic of things: for example, do we drive rather than take public transport because of convenience, or is there something specific in our culture – the way we see the world – that prioritises cars over public transport? And why does this persist even when we know it is damaging the environment?


Some background

The study of everyday life emerged as academics became interested in the life of ordinary people. Early historians were interested mainly in the lives of the elites – nobility, royalty and generals – but by looking at everyday life, it was possible to gain insights into how our own society is arranged, liveable, understanding why we accept certain things, do not revolt, why we are happy or miserable.

The field emerged as society changed particularly through mass urbanisation and more and more people came to live in cities: the questions that were raised included how do we all get along? What rules do we all accept and follow? How do we learn those rules?

Now, one of the challenges of studying this area is that sometimes things change subtly and we do not even recognise it. Other times there is rapid change. As change happens, we can no longer take everyday interactions for granted: what may seem normal at one point is no longer the case. Likewise, what was once accepted as normal, now seems strange.

One example is multiculturalism. For at least two generations it has been an acceptable and it would have appeared permanent part of Australian life. Previously, however, we had the White Australia Policy. The change from white Australia to multiculturalism was both subtle and dramatic. We had a department of multicultural affairs and a dedicated minister. Now this has changed dramatically and the current government has removed references about the term from its departments and renamed the department to Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

So we study everyday life to understand both the subtle dimensions and major changes of our lives.


Why study everyday Life?

So the question is, why do we study everyday life? Is it not the major events that define us and is everyday life not mundane, obvious, and ‘natural’? I have kind of answered this question already, but I think the following quote sums it up well:

‘It is one of the most fundamental paradoxes of our social life that when we are at our most natural, our most everyday, we are also at our most cultural; that when we are in roles that look the most obvious and given, we are actually in roles that are constructed, learned and far from inevitable’ (Willis, 1979: 184 – my emphasis).

That is, everyday life often masks social power, social order and process of socialisation. And it is often with the ordinary and mundane that we can get amazing insights into our culture. As one famous theorist, LeFebvre, noted, we must ‘look for the extraordinary in the ordinary’: in other words, behind what we consider ordinary there is a great deal happening that we should analyse and challenge.

So we have relations of power that come to feel normal – but they are not – we construct them. All dimensions of life are socially acquired even things such as sitting on a bus or food hall. The rules of dealing with the stranger is to act indifferently towards them.

Irving Goffman, a major theorist, presented the concept of civil indifference and dealing with the unfamiliar. That is, when you see something or someone unfamiliar, you act indifferently. For Goffman, this was one reason that we all got along. So acting politely indifferently is one rule of life.


Aspects of Everyday Life

When we are looking at everyday life, we need to recognise that the events of our lives are historically specific and situated. That is, if we were studying the lives of your parents 20 years ago, or say any children that we might produce in 20 years time, it would be different. The rules we follow within our daily lives are specifically situated. As I said, some changes have been subtle and others dramatic.

Compare how we would organise someone’s birthday party a few years ago. You would write invitations and send them out. Today, we organise parties through MySpace and Facebook where once people relied on phones and even physical invitations! What does it tell us about the way we communicate? What does it tell us about our culture?

Ok… so let us look at the cultural meaning behind some things that we do without even thinking about it – cultural meanings that we actually accept. Let me give you an example, when you go to a shop and buy a can of Coke, the process of pulling money out and paying the dude at a convenience store is pretty simple. But think about all the associated meanings:

• In the process of paying for something you are accepting the fact that cash is a mechanism of exchange.
• You are saying that we live in a capitalist society and there are property rights – the store owns the Coke until you pay for it and then it is yours.
• You are saying that like it or not, this is normal and you buy into that system.
• You buy a Coke… this is not a random decision but because you feel like a Coke. You know about this because of advertising – a walking down the street drinking a Coke has meaning behind it (say compared to walking down the street and drinking a beer or Bicardi Breezer or milk)

No one really explained to us these rules, but they are there. Most of us will never just walk into a shop and take things without paying for it or refuse to pay for it for revolutionary reasons – just as most of us will never think about the cultural meaning associated with buying a Coke.

Saying that, if in such a simple there exist so many rules and it carries so much meanings, what happens if you took them away? How would we shop?

It is such interactions that are embedded in everything we do and never really think about it.


Some important definitions

Ok, I want to look at some definitions for terms that you will come across in this subject:

• Ideology: a more or less coherent set of beliefs and values that serves to mask or legitimate relations of domination and subordination: think of capitalism and the class system
• Agency: is the ability of the individual to act autonomously. To have ‘agency’ is to be able to act with choice.
• Structures: are the social institutions and social practices that constrain our choices, and that shape our attitudes and beliefs. Structures can influence agency
• Culture: there are many definitions of culture – and is impossible to really define simply or even explain it. I have a bunch listed in the notes but I will explain a couple of these here. But when we talk of culture we are not talking of ‘high culture’ such as the theatre, but talking about the culture of our society. It is the way we see the world, understanding and make sense of what is going on around us and what are the rules of our lives.

Anyway, here are two definitions I like and I think summarise the concept well:

‘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).

‘Culture is the ensemble of social processes by which meanings are produced, circulated and exchanged.’ (Thwaites, Davis & Mules, 1994:1).

Culture is something that affects us all and shapes our lives – and it is constantly changing. And importantly, no one culture shapes us: there is our Australian culture, whatever that is, but also the culture of ethnicity, sexuality etc. so we are influenced by multiple cultures and thus have multiple identities.