The Cultural Constitution of Gender by Henrietta Moore - Assignment Example

Reaction Paper The Question of Gender by R.W. Connell Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? By Sherry B. Ortner The Cultural Constitution of Gender by Henrietta Moore George H. W. Bush was once quoted as saying, “But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You’re looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues” (Gender Quotes, 2010). The opening statement of R.W. Connell’s book Gender mentions George W. Bush, the son, who was elected to the U.S. presidency in the year 2000. This was mentioned to highlight that 93 per cent of the world’s leaders are men. The words of George H. W. Bush, the father, only further emphasized Connell’s message, even as they outwardly appear to refute it. After all, it is not usual for men to “talk about serious issues” with women while sitting as equals. The fact that it should occur as remarkable to a US president that he should deal with a woman head-of-state only reflects society’s lower regard for women. However, in this particular reading (Connell, 2002a), Connell did not choose the best arguments to prove his point. In page 4 he argues, “But if having sex with another man is unnatural, why have a law against it?” The question poses a false premise in logic. Connell himself stated that the (Tasmanian) law is a new development. Therefore, in the past, that society did not feel the need for the law, because only in today’s permissive, more liberal global culture was the law passed. In nature, therefore, men having sex with men was naturally understood to be taboo – at least, that is what the reasoning points to. Another fallacy was introduced by Connell’s description of children’s games (Connell, 2002b, p. 12) where teams were demarcated along the gender line, describing the players’ addressing each other’s team as “the girls” or “the boys” as indicative of societal conditioning. The author fails to consider that, if the teams were formed according to nationality, then the players would have referred to themselves as “Americans” and “Brits”, or if according to academic levels, they could have been the “sixth graders” and the “fifth graders”. Divided into females on one side and males on the other, there will naturally be reference to the “girls” and the “boys”, because this is how they have been categorized. This artificial universal distinction between the sexes is further discussed by the author as “operating at every level of human experience” in a global scale in a subsequent article (Connell, 2005). While Connell’s discussion appears to center on the distinction between males and females being artificial, for which he therefore tries to redefine what gender is, Ortner’s treatise is not that the distinctions are made at all, but that they are made in prejudice of women. At the time Ortner wrote this particular article (Ortner, 1974), she admitted: “I don’t know anything about gender; I don’t know anything about women, I’ve never studied this!” (Lopez & Rodriguez, 2006, p. 1). She admitted in this 2006 interview that in her follow up article written more than thirty years after the 1974 paper, she admitted that her claim of universal male dominance was without empirical proof, that it “was just too strong”, and that she “basically took back the universal claim” in the second article (Lopez et al., 2006, p. 2). Unfortunately, this article which the author herself described as extreme and which she had herself modified, “still continues to give the reader much intellectual fodder” (Fortier, 1997), despite acknowledged admission that there are “gendered egalitarian features” (that is, equality among men and women) in other societies in the world such as in Southeast Asia and South Asia. Having missed these societies the first time, would Ortner not find other such societies if she conducted a more thorough study before having written statements she thereafter admitted as sweeping? The same is true of Moore’s discussion on how gender is constituted or incorporated into culture. Moore’s discussion delved on how power relations were intertwined with gender roles, and how men had the dominant claim to power when roles were clearly delineated. While it may have been true in the seventies that the roles of gender were clearly distinguished, this is no longer true in the 21st century, admits Moore (Moore, 2000). Connell bases his discussions on stereotypes in the contemporary Western culture which were not proven to be common in all, or majority of the world’s cultures to be deemed “natural”. Ortner and Moore admitted as much, that their early writings are no longer the prevailing condition. If such claims as Connell, Ortner and Moore originally put forward are particular and not universal, how could such sweeping generalizations be made out of such arguments? The simple truth is, they could not. Observations are valid only within specific time and space contexts. Cultures and societies are just too complex to be generalized into one pattern. WORDCOUNT = 800, excluding title References Brainy Media.com 2010 Gender Quotes. Available from: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/gender.html [14 October 2010] Connell, R W 2002a “The Question of Gender”, Gender¸ Polity Press/ Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., Malden, MA, pp. 1-11 Connell, R W 2002b “Schools, Mines, Sex and War”, Gender¸ Polity Press/ Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., Malden, MA, pp. 12-27 Connell, R W 2005 “Change among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculinities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena” Signs, vol. 30, no. 3, Spring 2005, pp. 1801-1825 Fortier, J 1997 “Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture”, Anthropological Quarterly, July 1997, Vol. 70, Issue 3 Lopez, S D & Cuevas, L R 2006 “Sherry Ortner: An Interview”, Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana, Vol. 1 Num. 1, Enero-Febrero 2006. Madrid: Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red. ISSN: 1578-9705. Available from: http://www.aibr.org/antropologia/01v01/entrevistas/010106b.pdf [10 October 2010] Moore, H 1994 “The Cultural Constitution of Gender,” Chapter 1 in The Polity Reader in Gender Studies, Polity Press, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. Moore, H L 2000 “Whatever Happened to Men and Women? Gender and Other Crises in Anthropology.” In Anthropological Theory Today. Moore, H L (ed.) Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 151-171. Ortner, S B 1974 “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Rosaldo, M Z & Lamphere, L (eds.), Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 67-87 Read More