Lecture 6 Race

Aims of the lecture

• introduce the difficulties of distinguishing between race and ethnicity

• offer an account of the contours of racial discrimination historically and in the contemporary global
world

• present a discussion of old (biological) racism in contrast to new (cultural) racism and to explain the
ideas of multiple racisms and institutional racism

• help you understand the specific issues of racialisation; group closure; allocation of resources;
conflict theory, social constructionism; differential racialisation; and ‘critical race theory’.

Conceptual definitions of ‘race’

Initially ‘race’ was not used as a description of biologically distinct human groupings, but rather showed
the homogeneity of the whole group: the ‘human race’ (in writings of A.Smith (1723-1790), J.Bentham
(1748-1832).

However, ideals of the Enlightenment - of human freedom and equality were contradicting the practice of
slavery in the United States and European colonies.

‘Race science’ was supposed to give legitimacy to the race-based divisions in societies. Journalists,
teachers, and preachers popularised these ideas. 

De Gobineau (‘The Inequality of Human Races’, 1855) separated humanity into three groups based on
what he wrote were outwardly observable physical characteristics:

● white (Caucasian),
● black (Negroid) and
● yellow (Mongoloid)

He came to believe that race created culture - the ‘Caucasian’ race was more intelligent, had superior
moral being and greater resolve.

The Caucasians were innately superior, and that they were responsible for civilization in the world, or
to know that inferior races were destined to be overwhelmed or even to disappear.

Francis Galton (1822-1911) 

Early sociological debates around race were largely framed around the distinction between biology and
culture. In the pages of the American Journal of Sociology and the Annals of the American Academy,
eugenicists (Galton 1904) and their critics (Cooley 1897) debated the relative inborn intellectual
capacity of racial groups.

Galton, an English mathematician and Charles Darwin’s cousin, promoted the idea of social Darwinism –
of inborn, immutable racial difference. Charles Cooley (1897), a relative liberal, challenged Galton,
claiming that social factors determined differences between racial groups. Cooley held that all racial groups
were in principle capable of advancing “the social achievement of mankind”.
Galton decided that natural selection does not work in human societies the way it does in nature,
because people interfere with the process. As a result, the fittest do not always survive. So, he set out to
consciously improve the race with the help of ‘national breeding policy’ for improving the ‘national
stock’.

He coined the word ‘eugenics’. It comes from a Greek word meaning ‘good in birth’ or ‘noble in heredity’.
Eugenics is defined by Galton as the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase
the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics (popular for much of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries) – forced sterilization of the ‘unfit’.

In his research, however, Galton stumbled upon two discoveries that might have led to abandon eugenics.

One was the result of a test he devised to measure intelligence. To his dismay, the poor did as well on
the test as ‘the better elements in society’. He concluded that the problem lay in the test rather than his
theory.

His second discovery resulted from his efforts to track successive generations of pea plants. He found that,
no matter how high the quality of the parent strains, some offspring were as good as the parent plant
and some worse, but most were a little worse. This idea is known in statistics as “regression toward
the mean” or middle. Galton suspected it was true for humans as well. If so, it would be impossible to
improve the “race” through eugenics.

Yet neither finding altered Galton’s beliefs. He continued to insist that intelligence is linked to social class
and that “the fittest” parents produce superior offspring.

The Holocaust

(def) the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions
of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Now it is used as synonym of
genocide.

The most notable case of how the ideology of racial superiority influenced the organisation and workings
of a modern nation state is the doctrine of racial supremacy underpinning National Socialism in
Germany under Adolf Hitler.

On July 14, 1933, the new government issued its "Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary
Diseases”. In the six years before World War II, the Nazi doctors sterilized some 400,000 people, mostly
German citizens living in asylums.

In the autumn of 1939, Hitler approved the Aktion T-4 program, which authorized specific doctors and
officials to carry out mercy deaths - euthanasia - of those the state deemed unworthy of life. At first,
in accordance with the T-4 program, the physicians murdered 5000 congenitally deformed children. By
August of 1941, almost 70,000 people had been killed under T-4.

Aktion T-4 program turned out to be nothing less than a 'pilot project' for the extinction of millions in the
concentration camps.

The Nazi Eugenics Programs

A very similar ideology underscores the Klu Klux Klan in the USA and supported the apartheid
government of South Africa for many years.
After the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust the project of ‘race science’ was dropped.
Politically and scientifically, the idea that such a thing as distinct races existed, became untenable.

UNESCO published a Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice (1978), claiming that ‘[a]ll human
beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common stock. They are born equal in dignity
and rights and form an integral part of humanity’.

Most anthropologists reject the concept of biological races!

The idea of race is a cultural rather than biological reality - culture and learning, not genes, determined
human behavior.

Franz Boas (1911) demonstrated that mental aptitude was not determined by heredity, that there was
more variation within races than between them, and that environment accounted for many of the
differences between the races.
However, the issue of discrimination, or stereotyping based on prejudice, is real. Thus ‘race’ may not
be ‘real’ in any biologically meaningful sense, but it is ‘real’ in the lived consequences of people’s beliefs about
it. This is why the word ‘race’ is often placed in inverted commas.

‘Race’ (definition) – symbolisation of social differences based on assumed or perceived natural

(innate) differences derived from differences in physical body appearance (Dillon, 2014).

Race may be a thoroughly discredited scientific concept but the material consequences of people’s belief in
distinct races are a telling illustration of W.I. Thomas’s (1928) famous theorem that, ‘when men [sic] define
situations as real, then they are real in their consequences’. (Giddens and Sutton, 2013, p. 677)

A BIOLOGICAL MYTH — BUT — IT IS A SOCIALY CONSTRUCTED REALITY.

Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the
world of science.

What the genetics shows is that mixture and displacement have happened again and again and that our
pictures of past ‘racial structures’ are almost always wrong,” says David Reich, a Harvard University
paleogeneticist whose new book on the subject is called Who We Are and How We Got Here. 

There are no fixed traits associated with specific geographic locations, because as often as isolation has
created differences among populations, migration and mixing have blurred or erased them.

Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994).

National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY)

The book provided statistical data making the assertion that blacks were, on average, less intelligent than
whites - The Bell Curve could be used to justify genocide and hate crimes.

Critics have leveled attacks on The Bell Curve on numerous fronts, charging the authors with specious
methodology, dubious science, reliance on racist scholars, rejection of contrary evidence, and the
 sanctioning of mean-spirited politics. Despite the overwhelming negative reception to The Bell Curve, such
biological determinist claims about the relationship between race and intelligence continue to reappear.

Racism and racist practice

Racism refers to a variety of practices, beliefs, social relations and phenomena that work to reproduce a
racial hierarchy and social structure that yields superiority and privilege for some, and
discrimination and oppression for others. 

Racialisation is the social process by which certain groups of people are singled out for unique treatment
on the basis of real or imagined physical characteristics. Social construction does not mean unreal!

‘Racial profiling’ -the targeting of particular individuals by law enforcement authorities based not on
their behavior, but rather their personal characteristics.

Even if individuals are not targeted by law enforcement authorities solely because of their race, race is often
a factor—and, indeed, the decisive factor— in guiding law enforcement decisions about who to stop, detain,
question, or subject to other investigative procedures. Selective law enforcement based in part on race is no
less pernicious or offensive to the principle of equal justice than is enforcement based solely on race.

http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/racial-profiling2011/what-is-racial-profiling.html?
referrer=https://www.google.ru/

‘Black people are 26 times more likely than whites to face stop and search’ - Research done by
the London School of Economics and the Open Society Justice Initiative
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/oct/17/stop-and-search-race-figures

Asians were stopped

● 6.3 times more often than whites (in 2008-2009),

● 42 times more often than Whites (data releases in 2011).

The figures relate to stop-and-searches under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order
Act 1994, which was introduced to deal with football hooligans and the threat of serious violence. It
allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion.

‘Racial inequality’ - refers to the discrimination based on race in opportunity for socioeconomic
advancement or access to goods and services. http://inequality.org/racial-inequality/

‘Racial segregation’ - the practice of restricting people to certain circumscribed areas of residence or
to separate institutions (e.g., schools, churches) and facilities (parks, playgrounds, restaurants,
restrooms) on the basis of race or alleged race.

‘Racially charged’ – softer version of the term ‘racist’ – linked to the belief that one group is better than
another, based on racialised differences

‘Racial discrimination’ occurs when groups are excluded or treated differently, on the basis of racial
prejudice or stereotyping. In employment, it can take the form of failing to hire, train, mentor or promote a
racialised person. Racialised persons may find themselves subjected to excessive performance
monitoring or may be more seriously blamed for a common mistake. In housing, racialised persons may be
turned away as tenants.
‘Racial justice’ means that all people are equally seen, valued, and respected. In many countries today laws
protect individuals from being discriminated against based on their race.

If scientists and politicians no longer give credence to the theory that there are biological races, why does
race still provide a basis for social stratification in so much of today’s globalised word?

Due to new forms of inequality that involve race are becoming prevalent, especially forms relating to
majority and minority groups, and migration.

‘The old racism’ (biological racism) was replaced by ‘the new racism’ (cultural racism) - it is uses the
notion of cultural differences as a means of exclusion.

Biological racists claim that certain of the crucial moral properties of human beings are genetically
determined: that some are less intelligent, less capable of high moral consciousness, and the like.

Cultural racism substitutes the cultural category for the racial category ‘white’. There is no longer a superior
race; there is, instead, a superior culture. It is ‘European culture’, or ‘Western culture’, ‘the West’.
What counts is culture, not color. White supremacy.

Ethnocentrism - a suspicion of outsiders combined with a tendency to evaluate the culture of others in
terms of one’s own culture. Ethnocentrism involves the judgement of that difference by the standards of
what is familiar: the standards of one’s own culture.

The term 'Eurocentrism' denotes a world-view which, implicitly or explicitly, posits European history and
values as ‘normal’ and superior to others, thereby helping to produce and justify Europe's dominant position
within the global capitalist world system. Classifications of superiority and inferiority derive from the
culture that is of the majority, and groups that are distinct from this are excluded and may be
disparaged for not assimilating.

Xenophobia - people are frightened of strangers. People who are not members of one’s group are seen as
lesser, in moral or other ways. This is a first step towards ethnic violence.

Group closure - a process whereby one social group will set up boundaries around themselves and non-
members. These boundaries can be prohibitions against intermarriage, trade between groups, and other
ways of reducing contact between groups. Extreme examples - ethnic ghettos (Roma groups in Europe).

Differential resource allocation - refers to the entrenchment of the unequal distribution of material
goods and wealth – the excluded group cannot gain access to good positions in the labour market, in
education and in public life more broadly. Members of the groups resort to violence either to maintain the
boundaries or destroy them.

Scapegoating - a scapegoat is person or group that is forced to take the blame for happenings that
are not their fault. Examples: Jews, migrants, racial minorities.

‘Multiple racisms’

this term is useful because it helps illuminate how we live in an era of differently experienced discriminations
across a society (Back, 1995).
Political exclusion – specifically, citizenship – is the main joist in current racism (second class citizenship,
racialised non-citizen labor).

The economic recessions in the northern nations created conditions for the demonisation of immigrant
groups. Economies changed from having labour shortages (and policies designed to attract migrant labour) to
labour surpluses.

Alongside this shift came the targeting of foreign labour as being the cause of widespread joblessness
and as fraudulently claiming benefits. Empirically, these fears have little basis in fact as migrant
labourers take the least favoured jobs and often add skills, and use their earnings for consumption as well as
paying taxes.

Race and class

The term institutional racism dates back to the late 1960s (it was re-emerged in political discourse in the
late 1990s) and refers to the process by which irrespective of individual attitudes, motivations, and behaviour
with respect to racism, all whites benefited from social structures and organizational patterns which
continually disadvantages blacks. The playing field in which blacks and whites competed for living standards
was not level.

Institutional racism occurs when racism permeates the institutions – education, law, economy, health
services and so on.

Institutional racism in police was defined by Macpherson in the 1999 report concerning the death of
Stephen Lawrence (UK). Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack by a gang of youths in Eltham,
south east London in April 1993. Gary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty of murdering Stephen
almost 19 years after his death. Stephen Lawrence murder: A timeline of how the story unfolded

Macpherson defines institutional racism as: ‘the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate
and professional service to people because of their colour, culture of ethnic origin’.

In the 1970s, Native American women reported being sterilized at Indian Health Service hospitals after
going in for routine medical procedures such as appendectomies. Minority women were heavily singled out
for sterilizations because the largely white male medical establishment believed that lowering the birth rate
in minority communities was in society’s best interest.

Survey by Gallup Organization, January 4-February 28, 1997. Reported by Christopher Doob in the
November

19, New York Times, “On Race, Americans Only Talk a Good Game; For Whites, Confusion.”

• In stores, black customers are more likely to be monitored and treated with suspicion by store
employees concerned about shoplifting than are white customers. This is not simply the case for teenagers,
but for middle class, well-dressed African-Americans as well.
• White people walking on city streets frequently cross the street when there is a black man behind
them or to avoid passing a black man.

• Many middle class blacks report the experience of having to wait longer to be served in restaurants
than white customers who arrive after they do.

• In a study of black male college students at elite historically white universities, the participants in the
research reported many incidents of surveillance by campus police in which they treated with suspicion
and asked for their I.D.s

• It takes, on average longer for a black man to get a taxi than for a white man. This can even be an
issue when the man is well dressed and clearly affluent.

The best documented forms of on-going discrimination is traffic stops police for the “offense” that is
ironically called DWB – driving while black:

• Under a federal court consent decree, traffic stops by Maryland Police on Interstate 95 were monitored. In
the two year period from January 1995 to December 1997, 70 percent of the drivers stopped and search
by the police were black, while only 17.5 percent of overall drivers – as well as speeders – were black.

• In Volusia County, Florida, in 1992, nearly 70 percent of those stopped on a particular interstate highway
in Central Florida were black or Hispanic, although only 5 percent of the drivers on that highway were
black or Hispanic. Moreover, minorities were detailed for longer periods of time per stop than whites and
were 80% of the

cars that were searched after being stopped.

https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/ContemporaryAmericanSociety/Chapter%2014%20--%20Racial
%20inequality--Norton%20August.pdf

Racism in Russia

Are we moving towards ‘post-racial’ societies?

Shooting of Trayvon Martin (2012) - black teenager was shot by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood
watch coordinator in Florida. Zimmerman was found innocent of murder for shooting Trayvon Martin.

Barack Obama, was under great public pressure to speak about the event. Obama said that he identified
with Trayvon, that "Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago." He also said that black men
in the United States (himself included, before he became a senator) commonly suffered racial profiling. In his
speech, he is clear that the USA is not beyond structural racism, but he argues that the response to this
should not be in structural measures (transparency policies, etc.) but in non-structural one (the
conversations at church, etc.).

The death of five-month-old child from Tajikistan in St.Petersburg

#WeAreUmar
 A ‘raceless society’? What is the difference between the ‘post-racial society’ that Obama refers to and a
‘raceless society’?

Critical race theory

Conflict theory argues that racism was part of the ideological apparatus that supported capitalist
enterprise, namely, that slavery and colonisation were supported by an ideology of racism (Cox, 1959)

‘Racism is much more than simply a set of oppressive ideas enacted against the non-white population by
powerful elites’ (2013, p.686).

Coming from legal studies in the USA, a new perspective on how to study race emerged in the 1980s called
critical race theory (CRT) (Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Richard Delgado, etc.)

● Activists not pure academics

● A critique of mainstream legal theory that was rooted in a liberal idea of a steady incremental
progress towards equality in the development of the law and legal systems.
● The gains of the 1960s civil rights movements were eroded
● Racism is not a deviation, it is an everyday norm and embedded within legal systems and other
institutions
● Both white elites and white working class stand to benefit materially from it, that is why large
parts of the population have no real interest in working to alter the situation
● Races are not biological facts but social constructions which perpetuate inequality
● During shortages of unskilled or semiskilled labour, black people may be stereotyped as hard-working
and reliable, but when the labour market shifts towards high unemployment, new stereotypes replace these.
Instead, black people may be described as lazy and criminal. Differential racialisation shows that ethnic
relations are influenced by other inequalities and social pressures.
● This group of theorists uses narrative and biographical methods to investigate what racism means
for its victims.
● The ultimate goal is a practical one – to change society to a more equal one.

Construing whiteness

Several sociologists argue that any theorizing about race must also include attention to the construal of
whiteness - white people are “colored white” (Roediger 2002).

The task for the sociologist is to problematize the taken-for-grantedness of whiteness, to investigate how its
meanings change in different social-historical eras and contexts.

David Roediger, using a Marxist-inspired and historical analysis, argues that in the US, whiteness became a
sought-after identity for white working-class European immigrants (e.g., Irish, Italians) in Boston and other
northern industrial cities in the nineteenth century (see also Williams 1990).

Although considered “non-white” – because they were ethnically, culturally, and economically
inferior to the capitalist class of (largely) English, Protestant origin – these low-wage workers affirmed their
whiteness as a way to gain social status by differentiating themselves from and as superior to blacks.
Fearing economic dependence (against the backdrop of a slave-owning society and the relations of black
inferiority it created), the white working class constructed blacks, and not the white capitalist class, as
Other, as a racially inferior out-group. This sowed the seeds of the long and continuing complex history
of racial prejudice among working-class whites (e.g., McDermott 2006).
Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory : Theorists, Concepts, and Their Applicability to the
Twenty-First Century, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hselibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1566387 .

The central idea of otherness lies just on the divide, like normal and abnormal, insiders and
outsiders, and it is generally the issue of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. This division usually leads to stereotyping,
which is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order.

Lecture 8 Ethnicity

The main aims of the lecture are to:

• explain the difference between ethnicity and race

• describe the concepts of ‘new ethnicity’ and ‘situational identity’

• give an account of the recent globalisation of ethnicity and the models of multi-ethnic societies of
industrial nations

• offer a critical portrait of ethnic conflict, assimilation and integration

• examine some of the linkages between ethnicity and health, and global differences in health

‘Ethnicity’ in its full sociological meaning is a very recent term which was not in general use in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and, with the clear exception of Weber, no other classical sociologist
employed this term in their works.

Ethnicity is wholly social and refers to an identity that derives from ‘descent and cultural differences’
that become active in specific social contexts.

Ethnicity versus nationality

‘Ethnos’ versus ‘demos’ -

cultural or linguistic membership versus citizenship.

Ethnic groups may be marked out by a range of features: language, dress, religion, history or ancestry. For
example, the Shiites in Iraq – their ethnicity is based on religious differences
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/prejudice-iraq-shiites-
sunni-and-kurds

Croats- Serbs

Ethnic groups in Belgium

Ethnicity is a preferred term to race for sociologists, because it seems to avoid fixed biological
connotations. However, it is not without problems.
1. Essentialised ethnical identities – the conviction that members of ethnic groups share an
immutable underlying essence – biological ancestry.
2. In the British media, for example, ethnicity will only be used as a reference to minority groups, and
not in relation to the ‘non-ethnic’ majority population of English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish people. This
sort of labelling creates boundaries between an in (non-marked) group as against outsiders (the marked
ethnic) group.
Ethnic differences today are often seen as the cause of conflicts.

Marx, Durkheim, Weber – classical sociological theories and ethnicity

Malesevic, Sinisa. The Sociology of Ethnicity, SAGE Publications, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hselibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=254572 .

Acsriptive and achieved characteristics

1. Ascription means that status is attributed to you by things like birth, kinship, gender, age
2. Achievement means that people are judged on what they have accomplished and on their record.

Ethnic qualities are often considered as ascribed (essentialist view). However, ethnicity has varying
degrees of meaningfulness for individuals’ identities. During times of social stress or conflict, ethnic
identities may become centrally important to people who otherwise had little stake in them. One’s
ethnicity is always “optional” (Waters 1990).

Social construction of ethnicity - individuals with a sense of not only inclusion into one group, but also
exclusion from another group. Inclusion or exclusion is constructed during social interaction.

Essentialism and ethnicity

Essentialism is the idea that there exists some detectible and objective core quality of particular groups of
people that is inherent, eternal, and unalterable; groupings can be categorized according to these
qualities of essence. Essentialism is the idea that things have qualities, attributes, or meanings that
cannot be separated from them.

Counter-essentialism is the polar opposite of essentialism. Social Constructionism argues that nothing

has an inherent, immutable quality to it, but rather the qualities of things are created through social
interaction. Social Constructions are the meanings we attach to symbols, objects, and other things
which are created through an informal process of social negotiation. Or simply put, “it is what we say it is.”

An ethnicity as a socially constructed category - the traits and parameters of which can change depending
on the prevailing social and political context.

Mapping ethnic categories: the importance of situation

A ‘new ethnicity’ (Hall, 1989)

Identity, associated with the older forms of social collectivity (class politics, etc.), has given way to
ethnicity, a more contingent and open-ended process of social location based on the strategic
coalescence of the interests of different individuals.

It happened as a result of the reorganization of capitalism which has undermined the material basis of
personal and national identity due to globalisation.

The decline of the nation-state via the disintegration of a unified sense of national identity. Once firmly
grounded in its sense of ethnic homogeneity, it has given way, under the pressure of contemporary
processes of globalization, including the invasion of the colonial center by its formerly peripheralised
populations, to identities which emerges through language, imagery and other forms of
representation as well as actions.

This more fluid sense of social identity and its formation comes from a view of the social world as
fragmented in the contemporary era. Social identities are seen as multiple, overlapping and mutable.
In this understanding, people can attach and detach from one identity in a more or less adaptable way
depending on the context in which they find themselves. This process of adaptation is described as
‘situational identity’.

One may change clothes, language eye colour, skin and hair colour, the size of body parts or even religion
with reasonable ease.

The ‘new ethnicity’ is opposed to essentialised type of ethnic identity.

Minority ethnic groups

A term that describes those groups outside the majority ethnic group - it is not meant to capture the
numerically smaller groups, but rather it describes the groups that do not hold the majority of
social, political or economic power in a society, the group’s subordinate position in society (for
example, women as a minority).

The members of a minority ethnic group self-identify as members of that group - they have a sense of
social solidarity. This sense of group identity is intensified by the shared experiences of
discrimination.

African-Americans and black British people appear to be clear examples of ‘ethnic minorities’. However,
Australians in the UK will not be described as ethnic minority, whereas recent immigrants from Poland are
forming a new minority identity.

Ethnic diversity: the United Kingdom

Migration has been a factor in the declining proportion of ethnic minority populations in the UK. This is
because there has been a shift from an ‘immigrant population’ to a non-‘white British’ population who
are British citizens.

In 2009, the Office for National Statistics estimated the non-‘white British’ population of England and Wales
was 16.7 per cent.
 Ethnic categories like those used in the UK Census and many other national surveys, present an uneven
mixture. Some categories seem to refer to national or linguistic labels (e.g. Chinese), whereas others
refer to race and nation (such as white British, black African).

‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ need to be seen as limited (and often discriminatory) categories, where it is all too easy
to essentialise based on the identities which people use to categorise themselves and others in
everyday life.

Ethnicity and health: examples in a global world

Ethnicity is related to health outcomes in significant ways. It appears that some illnesses have higher
incidences among specific ethnic groups.

African-Caribbean and Asian populations have higher rates of mortality from liver cancer, tuberculosis and
diabetes. Hypertension and sickle-cell anaemia appear higher among African-Caribbean people and people
from the Indian subcontinent have higher mortality from heart disease.

How to explain? Ethnicity or class?

● the lifestyles of groups connected to religious beliefs or cultural beliefs that affect diet, marriage
choices (intermarriage) and physical exercise
● the structural discrimination that occurs through the healthcare system
● material factors - housing conditions, lack of employment or employment in hazardous occupations
Take the effects of class away from the equation and ethnicity becomes a very weak causal variable in the
differences seen between groups. There have been studies that found that in the UK institutionalised
racism was present throughout the healthcare system. Ethnic groups may be unable to get access to
services or encounter language barriers. Culturally sensitive issues that involve the interplay of gender
or religious elements also affect access to services.

Williams, D. R., & Sternthal, M. (2010). Understanding Racial/ethnic Disparities in Health

Multi-ethnic societies

Globally, more nation-states are multi-ethnic than are not. The emergence of a multi-ethnic population
within a nation-state can be the result of conquests, migration, trade, moving borders, colonialism or
imperialism, international migration. Simultaneously, conflict surrounding ethnicity and the splintering of
multi-ethnic states has also been increasing.

Three main models of how multi-ethnic societies can handle heterogeneous populations:

● Assimilation is when newcomers in place of the values and behaviours of their country of origin, take
on the lifestyle, dress, norms and mores of the majority culture they moved into. Integration is seen as
possible only on the basis of all members of the society becoming like the majority culture. France.

● The melting pot - the traditions and mores of immigrants’ first culture are absorbed and woven into
a new set of cultural patterns. A constantly transforming society. USA - Although ‘Anglo’ culture
remains the majority culture, parts of it reflect the many new cultures that have been mixed into US society
● Muticulturalism is cultural pluralism where each culture is seen as equally valid and offered a
protected status, within a larger cultural ‘mosaic’. Canada
Olga Jubany (2019) Multiculturalism in crisis?, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42:8, 1341-
1345, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2019.1588342

Ethnic conflict

Multi-ethnic societies, while the norm in the global world, are not always harmonious. Antagonisms may
emerge over differences between ethnic groups, whether linguistic, religious or cultural.

Conflicts in the Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Darfur, as well as in Israel,

the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, are among the best-known and deadliest examples from the late 20th
and early 21st centuries. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethnic-conflict

Yugoslavia - after a long period as a multi-ethnic society resulting from centuries of migration and
intermixing, hostilities exploded to genocidal levels in the 1990s between Serbs (Eastern Orthodox), Croats
(Catholic), Bosniaks and Kosovars (Muslims).

Studying ethnicity in a global world: focus on migration

Migration - the large-scale shifting of groups of people from one place to another.

Why do people move en masse from one place to another?

● Push factors involve internal reasons such as political or economic pressures, violent conflict, political
repression, drought or famine.
● Pull factors relate to the draw from the destinations, such as the promise of better labour
opportunities, more prosperous overall economies, higher living standards or freedom from political
repression.
● Large-scale phenomena involve the national-level political situation, including laws that control
where people settle, or the state of the economy.
● Small-scale phenomena involve the capacities, skills and knowledge of the people who are moving
Example - the UK’s Polish migrant community - the third-largest foreign-born group in Britain (after those of
Irish and Indian descent).

Diaspora - ethnic groups whose sizable parts have lived outside their country of origin for at least several
generations, while maintaining some ties (even if purely symbolic or sentimental) to the historic homeland.
Cohen (1997) recounts how there are five different types of diaspora: victim, labour, trade, imperial and
cultural.

For a diaspora to exist, there needs to be

● a shared memory of the homeland as well as a belief in the eventual return to it.
● an ethnic identity strong enough to be shared over time and across wide distances.
● a sense of community within that ethnic group and friction with the society in which the group lives.
● some basis for contributions of value to pluralistic societies.
In contemporary sociology calls have been made to use the term with greater precision by applying it not to
groups of people, but instead to their ‘projects’ or practices.

Mobilities research - social scientists are developing a new research field called mobilities research, of
which global migration is one highly significant element. Mobilities scholars study movement of
goods, peoples, information and money.

Migrants today need not form such strong diasporas because their homelands may not seem (or
actually be) as out of reach as they once were. Travel is cheaper and technological innovations, such
as social media and internet telephony make homelands less ‘distant’.

Nevertheless, the ethnic conflicts that are erupting in many places, the rise in hostility towards immigration
in much of Europe, and the resistance to multiculturalism as policy by many current governments
suggest that the trends are towards less fluidity and mobility.

The Sociologist of Mobility: John Urry, 1946-2016 https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2016/03/the-

sociologist-of-mobility-john-urry-1946-2016/

Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and planning A, 38(2), 207-226.

https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/122109/mod_resource/content/1/The%20new%20mobilities
%20paradigm%20Sheller%20-%20Urry.pdf

Lecture 8.1 Gender

Chris got up and went to the bathroom. Leaving pyjamas on the floor and turning on the shower, Chris
stepped into the water. It was not a hair-washing day, so after a quick rub with the soap it was time to get
out and dry off. After towelling and applying hair putty to the new short haircut, Chris dabbed on some
moisturising lotion and went to get dressed. Nothing special was happening today so jeans and a T-shirt
would be fine. The only choice really to be made was between basketball boots or sandals.

Is Chris a man or a woman? Why do you think so?

From Mary Holmes What is Gender? Sociological Approaches (2007) p.1

The aims of this lecture are to:

• enable you to distinguish between sex and gender

• introduce the fields of gender roles and gender socialisation
• present a background on gender inequality and the history of feminisms
• describe the concept of gender order and its relationships to other fields of social practice.
Essentialism

What is essentialism in general? Essentialism is the idea that there exists some detectible and objective
core quality of particular groups of people that is inherent, eternal, and unalterable; groupings can be
categorized according to these qualities of essence.
Examples of essentialist views on race, ethnicity, gender, class
Major criticism of essentialist explanations for group differences is that they can be used to justify and
legitimise existing social hierarchies/inequalities.
For example, if high-status individual feels that his or her privilege results from natural ability, he or she may
take this as evidence that the status quo is just.
If the colour of skin reflects differences in natural abilities, racial inequality is just as well.
Gender Essentialism
Do men and women act differently because of biological differences?
Gender essentialism is the idea that women and men are intrinsically (biologically) different.
In everyday life and some branches of psychology, the argument that differences between women
and men are attributable to hormones or chromosomes is widely held.
For example, hormones, brain size, genetics may be seen as causes why men and women behave differently
from each other. In evolution theory (Charles Darwin) women are biologically and intellectually
inferior to men, since men were exposed to far greater selective pressures than women, especially in war
and competition for mates, food, and clothing.
As the title of the best selling self-help book put it, ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’.
Example of gender essentialism: Men are naturally better leaders or women are naturally more nurturing.
In a widely-reported address to an economic conference (Summers, 2005), Harvard University President (at
that time) Lawrence Summers, an American economist, former Chief Economist of the World Bank
(1991–93), former US Secretary of the Treasury (1999–2001), raised the possibility that innate differences
between the genders are a significant contributor to women’s under-representation in science
and engineering at top
universities. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.genderissues
An argument against gender essentialism
For either essentialism or biological determinism to be correct men and women would have had to be
behaving as masculine and feminine in the exact same ways from the dawn of time. This is obviously not
the case, despite the popularity of these ideas.
Oakley (1972) argued that different cultures have different ideas about gender but that each society
believes that their understandings of gender ‘correspond to the duality of sex’.
Sociologists - the large amount of evidence suggesting that gender differences are the product of social,
rather than biological or physiological, factors.

Sex is a biological categorization based primarily on reproductive potential, whereas gender is social.
Nurture versus nature. ‘Gender’ as a concept started to be used in Sociology (to distinguish biological sex
from gender) in the 1970s (Ann Oakley, 1972)

Sex is considered to be an ascribed status – it is beyond an individual's control. It is not earned, but rather
is something people are either born with or had no control over.
While gender is an achieved status - that is acquired on the basis of merit; it is a position that is earned or
chosen and reflects a person's skills, abilities, and efforts.
Marx, Weber and Durkheim are not noted for their insights into ‘sex’ inequality (the word gender was not
known to them in its present usage) and in fact tended mostly to consider women’s subordinate social role
as a natural ‘given’ (Sydie, R.A. (1987) Natural Women/Cultured Men: A Feminist Perspective on Sociological
Theory). A short summary of Sydie’s ideas http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/o28f99.htm
Simone de Beauvoir
Recent understandings of gender are often seen as beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s (1988/1949)
philosophically based treatise, The Second Sex.

In her famous statement that ‘[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir,
1988/1949: 295), she established a core principle of most subsequent efforts to understand gender. It was
not nature but society or ‘culture’ that made women (and men) what they were. From Mary
Holmes What is Gender? Sociological Approaches (2007) p.3
In The Second Sex de Beauvoir argued for the abolition of what she called the myth of the ‘eternal
feminine’.
De Beauvoir argues that man declares himself the ‘One’ or ‘Self’, and woman Other. The One is the
standard, the norm. Any deviation from the standard marks you out as Other. Women are the only
oppressed social group. Blacks are oppressed in relation to whites, and the poor are oppressed in relation
to the rich. Here whites and the rich become the norm and blacks and the poor deviate from the norm and
become the subordinate Other.
But in addition to the fact that women have always been oppressed there is another important difference
between the oppression of women and oppression based on class or race. Women are complicit in their
own oppression. In existentialist terms, women internalize the male gaze, and with it the
expectations of the gender. They are conscious of how they are observed, and womens’ own thinking
assimilates this awareness. Women then strive to live up to this model of the ‘eternal feminine’.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/The_Second_Sex

Durkheim
With respect to suicide rates, Durkheim examine male-female differences in suicide rates, and rates for
married, divorced, widowed, single, etc. In general, he finds that women have lower suicide rates than
do men, although there are different rates associated with different marital statuses and in different
countries.
Single males and male divorcees are particularly subject to suicide. Sydie argues that this is based on
Durkheim's view that marriage is better for men than for women. For men, marriage provides moral
calmness and tranquillity, and in order to reduce the suicide rate of men, the institution of marriage should
be strengthened.
In contrast, women tend to be negatively affected by marriage. Stronger marriage institutions would
increase the female suicide rate and reduce the male rate.

Kposowa AJ Marital status and suicide in the National Longitudinal Mortality Study

Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health  2000;54:254-261.

https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/54/4/254.full.pdf

Data source: The National Longitudinal Mortality Study (US), 1979–1989

Conclusion: Increased risks of suicide were observed among divorced and separated men, but not
among women.

Marxism
Marx and Engels provided a general conceptual framework for understanding oppression which impacted
feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State (1884), Friedrich Engels located the roots of women’s oppression in the sociohistorical developments
instead of biology. 
Following Engels, Marxist feminists focused on revealing women’s exploitation by examining the sexual
division of labor inherent to capitalism. Marxist feminists focused on topics such as women’s work in
domestic and public spheres, women’s roles in marriage, women’s sexual practices, and the sexual
reproduction of labor power.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was one of the precursors of Marxist feminism in the first-wave
feminist movement.
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837–1930) and Alexandra Kollonti (1872–1952) were also among the first-
wave Marxist feminists. Jones and Kollonti were labor organizers who focused on the situation of working
class and poor women. Alexandra Kollonti was a Marxist feminist and an important figure in the Russian
revolution. Kollonti proposed the development of policies such as protective labor legislation for pregnant
women, maternity insurance, and state-subsidized child care.
Marxist feminists gave primacy to class in their analysis of women’s oppression. Women: Caste, Class or
Oppressed Sex? (1970) by Evelyn Reed is a classic example of Marxist feminist writing, holding class
inequality as a root cause of women’s oppression. 
The class analysis of women’s lives is still important in understanding their subordinate position in today’s
societies. Women perform most of the world’s socially necessary labor and yet they are far more
vulnerable to poverty comparing to men (Hennesy & Ingraham, 1997). On average, full-time working
women earn about 75–65 % of men’s annual income in countries such as USA, Canada, Great Britain,
Switzerland, and Germany (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2010). This gap is even larger in Japan, where
women earn 50 % of men’s pay (Matlin, 2012).
According to Weipking and Maas (2005), the gender difference in poverty is higher for women in 16
out of 22 industrialized countries, with United States having the largest gender difference in poverty followed
by Australia, Spain, and Italy. 
From Sheivari R. (2014) Marxist Feminism. In: Teo T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer,
New York, NY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_682

Structural Functionalism (Parsons)

Before the concept of ‘gender’ came into sociological usage in the 1970s, mid-century functionalists talked
about ‘sex role differences’. Their argument could be summarized as claiming that sex role differences
continue to exist because they function to promote social stability - the ‘complementary roles’
performed by women and men.
The modern organization of work needs someone to stay home to care for young children and perform the
important early socialization of human infants. This emotional ‘expressive’ role is assigned to women
and the rational and ‘instrumental’ (goal-focused) role of paid work is associated with men.
‘Sex roles’ are the social norms and children are socialised into them.
Parsons implies that this is the best way of organizing family life in response to modern social conditions.
However, for whom is it best? The idea that ‘stability’ may not be beneficial to women constrained
within traditional roles did not seem to occur to the functionalists.
Parsons’ socialisation theory accepts that there are biological differences between women and men,
however gender differences are learned social roles built upon these biological differences.
Critical assessment of functionalist approach - functionalism does not explain why instrumental roles are
more highly regarded within modern western society. The need for social stability was seen as
justification of the continuance of such sex roles, and though changes in those roles were explored they
were often construed as threatening that stability.

From Mary Holmes What is Gender? Sociological Approaches (2007)

Social constructionism (Butler)

Gender ≠ sex

Gender as a socially constructed phenomenon.

What does it mean that something is socially constructed?
The term ‘social construction’ formally entered the sociological vocabulary through Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann 's book ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ published in 1966.
They argued that social reality is produced by social action, but appears to the individual as separate and
independent from him or her – i.e. objective.
Judith Butler questions the belief that certain gendered behaviors are natural – she thinks that they are
imposed upon us by normative heterosexuality. Gender is taken for granted and ‘essentialised’.
We cannot even see how we participate in creating it. Biology does not determine gender differences,
culture does.

Sex is one’s biological classification as male or female which is biologically determined. Sex
difference seen as given in nature, it is relatively fixed and permanent.
Gender is based primarily on cultural values (females are associated with femininity and males with
masculinity). Masculinity (what society deems appropriate behaviour for a “man”) and femininity (what
society deems appropriate behaviour for a “woman”.

https://www.sexandgenderhealth.org/images/project_summary.jpg?crc=4091852394
Gender Binary

Sex: Male/Female (dichotomy)

Gender: Masculine----------------------------------Feminine (continuum)

The idea that there are only two distinct opposite and disconnected forms of masculine and
feminine is called a Gender Binary.

Gender binary: Masculine/Feminine (dichotomy)

Many societies have more than two genders - gender is viewed as fluid.
The term "gender binary" became part of the mainstream feminist lexicon during the second wave feminist
movement of the 1960s through 1980s, and has continued to be part of feminist and sociological discourse
throughout the 21st century
Gender performativity
Gender is never a stable descriptor of an individual, but an individual is always ‘doing’ gender (Judith
Batler ‘Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity’, 1990). Doing gender is not just about
acting in a particular way. It is about embodying and believing certain gender norms and engaging
in practices that map on to those norms.

In other words, by doing gender, we reinforce the notion that there are only two mutually exclusive
categories of gender. The internalised belief that men and women are essentially different is what makes men
and women behave in ways that appear essentially different. Displays of gender - the ways in which
individuals act in a gender appropriate manner (Goffman, 1976)
Source: Boundless. “The Social Construction of Gender.” Boundless Sociology. Boundless, 26 May. 2016.
Retrieved 04 Dec. 2016 from https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociology-
textbook/gender-stratification-and-inequality-11/gender-and-socialization-86/the-social-construction-of-
gender-496-8675/

Boys and girls dressed exactly up until the 1940s

Being a man or a woman seems to be a learned experience, and the choices for how this is shaped being
given by the specific culture one is raised in.
For example, in many cultures men wear skirts as men, not as transgenders.
Gender Roles (i.e. gender expectations)

The attitudes and behaviors we commonly associate with males or females. Today we associate masculinity
with males and femininity with females.
These associations become expectations, those who don’t conform with these expectations may be the
targets of ridicule and/or violence.
Gender non-conformity is sanctioned by peers, family, etc., but male gender non-conformity is often more
heavily sanctioned and frequently with violence.
What is Masculinity?
Masculinity is defined primarily by its opposition to femininity. That is, masculinity is the absence of
femininity.
In this sense masculinity is a set of rules for how to act, talk, dress, etc. that other men and women expect
a male to follow or they will be emasculated. To be emasculated is to have your masculinity taken away, to
be seen as weak, and to be shamed.
Both masculinity and femininity are parts of what it means to be human. Each of us has masculine and
feminine qualities (Bem 1993). For example, if femininity is defined as weakness, emotional sensitivity, and
being dependent on others, then every single one of us experiences these aspects of life at one point or
another.
However, the worst thing you can call a man is a woman.
The language we use to emasculate or hurt men are the words used to refer to women’s genitalia or we
literally address them by women’s names (i.e. being a nancy/sally/sissy).
What does this tell us about the value we place on femininity, women, and young girls if this is
the worst thing a man can be?
Sexism is the belief that there are innate psychological, behavioral, and/or intellectual differences
between women and men and that these differences connote the superiority of one group and the
inferiority of the other.
Gender inequality
Gender differences – gender inequality - there is no country in the world in which women and men have
equal status - The Global Gender Gap Report 2016 http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf
The highest possible score is 100 (gender parity) and the lowest possible score is 0 (imparity), thus binding
the scores between inequality and equality benchmarks.

Structural Functionalism suggests that pre-industrial society required a division of labor based on
gender. Women nursed and cared for children. Men were responsible for material needs. Industrialization
made traditional division of labor less functional, belief system remains.
Feminist approaches reject the idea that gender inequality is natural. 
How we understand women and men today is deeply indebted to the social rights movements of feminism.
First-wave feminist movements came about as industrialisation spread across Western countries at the
end of the 19th century. Women organised to fight for the right to vote, and be able to exercise full
rights of citizenship, under the banner of the ‘suffragettes’.

Second-wave feminism related to the social activism of other groups − namely, the black rights
movement, students’ groups, gay and lesbian movements and disabled people’s movements − in the 1960s
and 1970s in Western countries. This feminism championed the specific ideas of women’s liberation and
empowerment.
Second-wave feminism has been described as radical, in contrast to the first wave which was influenced
by the political ideologies of socialism and liberalism. The idea that women made up a group unified in
their oppression by men and male-dominated institutions.
One of the main slogans around which women rallied was ‘The personal is political’, which meant that the
domestic organisation of life was seen as the first place that needed transforming.

The sorts of protests that feminists engaged in included demonstrating against beauty pageants, sexist
language, male violence (domestically and in political life) and for payment for housework.

Second-wave feminists regarded women as a single, relatively homogeneous group, similarly to

the idea of a class in Marxist thought. This group was held together by their common interests,
notably in emancipation.

Luce Irigaray argued that patriarchy, a system of male rule, was a suprahistorical system that was the
prototype of all other forms of oppression.

However, black feminists, lesbian feminists and working class feminists, pointed to the different lives led by
women in different situations – the idea that women formed a relatively similar group was challenged.

Third-wave feminists have campaigned about specific issues such as body image, self or female mutilation,
human trafficking, body surgery and the increasing ‘pornification’ in the media. Global.
Studying gender: the gender order in global world
Raewyn Connell on masculinities in ‘Gender and power’ (1987), ‘The men and the boys’ (2001) and
‘Masculinities’ (2005).
The focus of Connell’s writings is on how gender inequality is supported by the social power that men
hold. The evidence on gender inequality from across the globe shows that there is an ‘organized field of
human practice and social relations’ in which men are dominant over women (Connell, 1987).
Gender as a social structure – a higher order category that society uses to organise itself.
In the developed industrial nations, the social relations of gender continue to be shaped by patriarchal
power.
‘Hegemonic masculinity’ refers to the dominant form of masculinity within the gender hierarchy.
Although hegemonic masculinity subordinates other masculinities and femininities, it can be challenged by
them. In most Western societies today, hegemonic masculinity is associated with whiteness,
heterosexuality, marriage, authority and physical toughness.
Boys are called “fags” (derogative word for homosexual) not because they are gay, but when they
engage in behaviour outside the gender norm (“un-masculine”). This includes dancing; taking “too
much” care with their appearance; being too expressive with their emotions; or being perceived as
incompetent. Being gay was more acceptable than being a man who did not fit with the hegemonic
ideal – but being gay and “unmasculine” was completely unacceptable. Dude, You're a Fag:
Masculinity and Sexuality in High School is a 2007 book by C. J. Pascoe.

Pascoe's research suggests that hegemonic masculinity has a racial component in the context of

the American high school. Not only was masculinity defined differently for whites and people of
color, but homophobia manifested itself quite differently among the school's nonwhite population.
 For black students, achieving masculinity required activities such as caring about clothing and
dancing, which would be labeled as fag activities if enacted by white students. Pascoe asserts
that, in order to combat stereotypes about black people as being poor and "ghetto," black
students paid close attention to clothing, accessories, and cleanliness. Dancing was also
understood to be an important aspect of achieving black masculinity, as it was associated with
hip-hop culture.

Societies have a gender order, which Connell asserts have three interconnected aspects: labour, power
and cathexis (personal relations, marriage, sexuality and raising children). Gender relations are enacted in
these three overlapping realms, and take on an ordered form at the societal level.
Gender regime is the term that Connell uses to describe less broad fields than gender order. A gender
regime may be the form that gender takes on in neighbourhoods, for example.

A debate about whether Western societies are undergoing a tendency toward a gender crisis:
● divorce, domestic violence and rape legislation are weakening the legitimacy of men’s power over
women,
● a crisis of sexuality wherein the model of heterosexuality is being called into question,
● a crisis of interest formation - married women’s rights, the gay rights movement and the rise of ‘anti-
sexist’ attitudes among men, demonstrate new foundations for interest.
However, the transformation in the gender order can open up new opportunities and freedoms for
both men and women - the new ‘caring’ image of masculinity has helped some families to change the
balance in the domestic division of labour.
Men can be ‘house-husbands’ and women the primary household earners without facing the stigma that
would have been attached to their decision in earlier decades.

Much feminist research over the past five decades has yielded studies of how much inequality really
existed between men and women.
● Early research focused almost exclusively on the subordinate position of women and how
ideological representations of women helped entrench the dominant position of men.
● Current research - what are the current representations of masculinity and femininity, and how
powerful are these in determining individuals’ identities and lived experiences?
Male Gender Role Identity
● No Sissy Stuff: A stigma is attached to feminine characteristics.
● The Big Wheel: Men need success and status.
● The Sturdy Oak: Men should have toughness, confidence, and self-reliance.
● Give ’Em Hell: Men should have an aura of aggression, daring, and violence.
Pleck (1981, 1995) proposed a new model, which he called Sex Role Strain (now Gender Role Strain),
which departs in many ways from the Male Gender Role Identity.
 Role strain - experienced by an individual when incompatible behavior, expectations, or obligations are
associated with a single social role.
Pleck argued that during the 1960s and 1970s, both men and women started to make significant departures
from their traditional roles as men began to behave in ways that violated the Male Gender Role.
Even men who succeed feel the strain in doing so, and the toxic components of the role present problems
even for the successful. Masculinity and Femininity as gender stereotypes.
New agenda for research - how globalisation is affecting the gender order? Is there a global gender order
emerging?
Lecture 8.2. Sexuality

The aims of this lecture are:

● To introduce and critique biologically determinist understandings of sexuality

● To examine the interrelationship between sex, sexuality and gender through consideration of
heteronormativity

● To examine the history of the construction of sexuality

The explicit sociological theorizing of sexuality has a relatively short history, dating back to the late
1960s. It is not that sociologists had nothing to say about sexuality before that time: however,
sexuality itself was rarely questioned; indeed, it was treated largely as a given, something that
could be regulated by social institutions and conventions, but was itself a pre-social fact.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) 

Psychoanalysis introduced concepts such as repression, sexual drives and the libido which filtered
into everyday language, and continue to reinforce the taken-for-granted assumption that sexuality is
a natural force, albeit one constrained by social norms (a tension between the biological and the
cultural).
 Alfred Kinsey (1894 –1956)

Kinsley’s reports:

● Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

● Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953)

While Kinsey (graduated with a B.S. in biology and psychology) still held to the conviction that
sexuality was at root natural, he emphasized the diversity of sexual practices and argued that
much of what is seen as abnormal in human sexuality is actually quite common and therefore
cannot, in scientific terms, reasonably be seen as deviant.
From his research: 37% of US-men ever had homosexual experiences and 4% exclusively and
lifelong while 50% had at some point same-sex fantasies. He stressed repeatedly that the large
majority of the citizens would have to go to prison if the US-laws were applied rigorously,
indicating that it was a better idea to change the laws.

Nearly 69% of white males in the United States had sex with prostitutes and said “it is probably
safe to suggest that about half of all married males have intercourse with women other than their
wives, at some time while they are married” (Kinsey, 1948). He claimed 10% of all males are
exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 – 55, and 4% of males
are exclusively homosexual throughout the entirety of their lives. (Kinsey, 1948)

He did much to normalise taboo acts such as homosexuality, masturbation, premarital sex, adultery
and prostitution which made him known as the “father” of the Sexual Revolution.
The Institute for Sex Research (since 1947) renamed as The Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in
1981

https://kinseyinstitute.org/research/publications/index.php

Criticism of biological explanations of sexuality

The idea that female fidelity and male promiscuity are biologically determined and functional is a
widely-held belief which is based on biological explanations.

Most social scientists failed to challenge the assumption that sexuality was part of human nature
until the 1960s, anthropologists had for some time been gathering a wealth of evidence on the
wide variety of sexual beliefs, attitudes and practices existing in diverse cultural settings.

Rethinking sexuality as a social rather than a natural or psychological phenomenon emerged in the
1960s from social constructionist perspectives with their roots in phenomenological and
interactionist sociology.
The emergent feminist and gay movements in the West created a climate in which social theories
of sexuality became politically significant. The idea that sexuality was socially constructed undercut
much of the ideology that legitimised women’s subordination and defined homosexuality as illness
or perversion.

Heterosexuality versus homosexuality – nurture or nature?

The word ‘homosexual‘ only emerged during the Victorian era in the late 1800s. Queen Victoria
wanted to stop male aristocrats from having sex with other men, something that was not openly
talked about, but still practiced.

Freud did not envisage the sexual instinct as innately oriented towards heterosexuality, but rather
towards polymorphous pleasures - and this is what is often now seen as a potentially radical view.
A constant theme in his work is the tension between this pre-social sexuality and the
requirements of civilization: our drives must be contained and channeled for civilization to exist,
but this entails costs in the form of unhappiness and neurosis (see especially Freud, Civilization
and its Discontents, 1930). This conception of what is necessary for civilization underpins his
account of what must happen to a child to transform him or her into a functioning adult member
of society.

Heterosexuality became normalised and homosexuality became medicalised - doctors were charged
with “curing” it, or outlawed (criminalised).

What you need to know about LGBT rights in 11 maps

Theoretical perspectives in sociology towards sexuality

Structural Functionalism
 Regulation of sexual behavior ensures marital cohesion and family stability. Families give offsprings
the best possible chance for appropriate socialisation and the provision of basic resources. The
regulation of sexual activity is an important function of the family (T. Parsons).

Thus, homosexuality, if occurring predominantly within the population, is dysfunctional to society.

One example is Kingsley Davis’s functionalist account of prostitution. Davis (1937) assumes that
the demand for prostitution is ‘the result of a simple biological appetite’ by which he clearly
means men’s appetite. He suggests that prostitution also provides for the gratification of perverse
desires, which might be denied in marriage.

Conflict Theory

Sexuality is an area in which power differentials are present and where dominant groups actively
work to promote their worldview as well as their economic interests. 

● Dominant groups (in this instance, heterosexuals) wish for their worldview—which embraces
traditional marriage and the nuclear family.
● Activists in favor of same-sex marriage point out that legal marriage brings with it certain
entitlements, many of which are financial in nature, like Social Security benefits and medical
insurance. Denial of these benefits to gay couples is wrong.

Symbolic Interactionism

Interactionists focus on the meanings associated with sexuality and with sexual orientation. Since
femininity is devalued in American society, those who adopt such traits are subject to ridicule; this
is especially true for boys or men. Just as masculinity is the symbolic norm, so too has
heterosexuality come to signify normalcy.

Cooley’s ‘looking-glass self’, which suggests that self develops because of one’s interpretation and
evaluation of the responses of others (Cooley 1902). Constant exposure to derogatory labels,
jokes, and pervasive homophobia would lead to a negative self-image, or worse, self-hate. The
CDC (Centers for Disease Control) report that homosexual youths who experience high levels of
social rejection are six times more likely to have high levels of depression and eight times more
likely to have attempted suicide.

Social constructionism

Berger and Luckmann (1966) use sexuality to demonstrate the plasticity of human conduct and
culture, to suggest that “man constructs his own nature”.

Interactionism and phenomenology provided the theoretical foundations for the ‘new deviancy
theories’ that emerged in the 1960s, in which deviance as seen as a matter of social definition
rather than a quality of particular acts or actors. Becoming and being deviant were conceived as
interactional processes, an outcome of labelling (Becker 1963). From showing how social norms
constrain and shape the sexual impulse (in structural functionalism), to showing how individuals, as
active agents, negotiate sexual conduct through social interaction (in constructionist approach).

John Gagnon and William Simon were truly the first sociologists to radically question the biologism,
the naturalism and the essentialism that pervaded most existing research and study. They published
a number of articles in the 1960s, brought together in the path-breaking text, Sexual Conduct, first
published in the USA in 1973 and in Britain a year later. They questioned the concept of
repression they allowed for a positive conceptualisation of the social – as producing sexuality
rather than negatively moulding or modifying inborn drives.

From https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sociology/chapter/sex-and-sexuality/

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) - post-structuralist theory

Sexuality was one of his topics of interest, not the only one.

Foucault challenged what we tend to think of as the ‘natural’ order of things; how, for example,
societal definitions of sexuality are not natural categories but human-social creations, and thus
social constructions.

His works aimed at uncovering how the body came to have several disciplinary practices imposed
upon it, so as to make control and regulation of the body.

The “birth” of the prison, of madness, the clinic, the asylum, and sexuality – all these topics
converge in underscoring Foucault’s interest, namely, how society develops ways of regulating and
controlling, i.e., disciplining, the body/ bodies.

Foucault used the Panopticon, a model of a prison proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th
century, to illustrate how disciplinary power works.

In today’s world, the reach of technological and electronic surveillance – the various uses of video
and GPS tracking technology and the electronic monitoring of blogs, email, and Facebook (as we
discussed in chapter 5) – might be seen as the new Panopticon. Technology is perhaps even
more controlling, how- ever, not just because of its unprecedented local and global reach but also
because of its structural invisibility (Dillon, 2013)

Disciplinary power vs. Sovereign power - transition from extraordinarily brutal to more “civilized”
forms of punishment - may appear more humane, but Foucault questions it.

Sovereign power is a top down form of social control in the form of social coercion. It is
periodic and is evident at public displays and executions. It only has limited effectiveness
because most of one’s life is beyond the control of the sovereign.
 Disciplinary power is all pervasive and is constant. It is a more insidious form of social
surveillance than sovereign power and is typified by the PANOPTICON – a type of institutional
building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th
century.

It is arranged so that the guards can see all the prisoners, but the prisoners cannot see that
they are being watched. The prisoners start policing themselves.

“The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”

Modern punishment intended to “cure” rather than kill.

Instruments of disciplinary power:

1. Hierarchical observation - watching people provides a great way to control them

2. Normalising judgment

● workshop, school etc. subject to micro-penalty of time, speech, activity, and the body - every
departure from correct behavior might be punished

● there is always a gap towards the required level

● disciplinary punishment has function of reducing gaps, it’s corrective

● gratification-punishment, possibility to define behavior on the basis of opposed values of

good/evil, can hierarchise ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects in relation to one another – differentiation not
of acts, but of individuals

● double effect: distributes individuals according to aptitude or conduct; exercises pressure to

conform to same model. In short it normalizes.

Examination

● situates individuals in a network of writing - each individual becomes object of descriptions

and biographical accounts

● made possible to integrate individual data into cumulative systems in such a way that… an
individual could be located in the general register

● inversion of visibility = in sovereign power, the sovereign was seen; in disciplinary power,
subjects are seen

● this is how individuals are ‘made’: what makes us an individual is what distinguishes us
from others, and examination is process by which we observe and mark that distinction.
 Sex and the confessing society

Foucault argues that confession as a technique of truth/power subsequently expanded beyond the
religious sphere, Since the Middle Ages torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported
it when it could go no further: the dark twins. The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest
of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

It is body practices, moreover, that still comprise confessional discourse. Politicians, Hollywood
celebrities, sports stars, and even national governments (e.g., Australia, canada, South Africa for
their treatment of minority populations) engage in ritualistic confessions. (Dillon, 2013).

Foucault - The History of Sexuality (1976)

Sexuality came into being as an object of discourse, as an apparatus that ordered bodies and
pleasures into what we know as ‘sexual behaviour’.

For Foucault, a discourse is an institutionalised way of speaking or writing about reality that
defines what can be intelligibly thought and said about the world and what cannot. ‘Regime of
truth’.

For example, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that a new discourse of ‘sexuality’ had
fundamentally changed the way we think about desire, pleasure, and our innermost selves. In
Foucault’s argument, discourses about sexuality did not discover some pre-existing, core truth about
human identity, but rather created it through particular practices of power/knowledge.

Foucault understood power/knowledge as productive as well as constraining. Power/knowledge not

only limits what we can do, but also opens up new ways of acting and thinking about ourselves.

Discourse creates phenomena – discourse structures the way we see reality - and therefore has
power. Gender and sexuality are discursively constructed.

The difference between social constructionist and Foucaudian approaches - what is being
constructed, for Foucault, is not individual sexual subjectivity. His contribution has been to sensitise
us to the discursive constitution of sexuality itself.

Bio-power (Foucault) - the linking of biological processes (or body practices) to economic and
political power.
• The internalisation of scientific concepts of health and normality
• Which are administered by professional groups on the basis of their claim to scientific
knowledge (biopolitics)
• Linking the human body to organised knowledge
• To achieve social control – the link between the individual and social structures (the body),
normal and the pathological, normalisation
In The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault was concerned with emerging discourses about infant
(children’s) sexuality and homosexuality. Foucault argues, bio-politics, through its various
technologies (its methods, categories, and procedures), invented sexuality.
For Foucault, by constantly writing about infant sexuality or homosexuality as a disease, as
abnormal, etc., in fact, the medical discourse created an infant sexual identity and it created a
homosexual identity (as well as a heterosexual one). Until the 19th century, homosexuality was
considered to be an act that a person might engage in the course of his/her life. Although it was
condemned, homosexuality was not considered to be an identity. But the medical discourse
created a homosexual identity. This opened the way for the creation of a subjectivity around
homosexuality, of homosexual desire, etc. Later, in the second half of the 20th century,
homosexual identity became the starting point for “resistance”, namely, the gay rights movement in
the West.

The birth of obesity

Amidst today’s bio-politics (seen in public debates over abortion, stem-cell research, sex education,
physician-assisted suicide, etc.), we are witnessing “the birth of obesity,” as the government,
working in tandem with the medical profession, researchers, and the health insurance industry, is
imposing a new body category, obesity, one that is (and must be) institutionally monitored, tracked,
and controlled.

In 1998, the US government-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) created guidelines defining
and regulating obesity. Individuals whose Body Mass Index (BMI) rating is between 18.5 and 24.9
are categorized as “normal,” a rating between 25 and 29.9 makes you “overweight,” and you are
considered “obese” if your BMI is 30 or higher.

Bodies are also highly regulated today by everyday advertising, the fashion and cosmetology
industries, and mass media content reminding us that particular kinds of bodies are better and
more attractive than others. (Dillon, 2013)

Queer Theory

Foucault’s influence on studies of sexuality has arguably had its greatest impact through the
development of queer theory, which has set much of the theoretical agenda in the field since the
1990s.

Queer theory is not a unified perspective and not easy to define since most of its founding
canonical texts do not identify them- selves as queer. Queer Theory is a perspective that
problematises the manner in which we have been taught to think about sexual orientation. By
calling their discipline ‘queer’ (deviating from what is expected or normal, strange) these scholars
are rejecting the effects of labeling. Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities
that are not heterosexual or cisgender (having a gender the same as one's sex).
Queer theory de-essentializes identity and destabilises the binary divide of heterosexuality and
homosexuality – and the gender binary. This perspective highlights the need for a more flexible
and fluid conceptualization of sexuality—one that allows for change, negotiation, and freedom. The
current schema used to classify individuals as either “heterosexual” or “homosexual” pits one
orientation against the other. This mirrors other oppressive schemas in our culture, especially those
surrounding gender and race (black versus white, male versus female).

Judith Butler Gender trouble (1990)

Gender is performative: gender is what you do, not what you are.

Butler’s deconstruction of ‘the compulsory order of sex/gender/desire’ that constitutes the

‘heterosexual matrix’ established her as one of the key theorists within both feminism and queer.
For Butler, sexual differentiation is not a universal fixed structure, rather it is a product of
normative heterosexual reiteration.

Judging gender and sexuality according to heterosexual norms is known as heteronormativity – the
expectation that heterosexuality is “natural” and therefore needs no explanation. It makes non-
heterosexual people as Other.

Sex work

(def) the exchange of sexual services for money between consenting adults.
However, many children (and adults) have been forced into sex work. The ‘industry’ includes: nude
modelling, acting in pornography, stripping, lap dancing, live sex show workers, phone sex workers,
providers of erotic massage and ‘webcam’ sex for money.

The idea of renaming prostitutes and others involved in these types of work as ‘sex workers’ was
intended to destigmatise those involved in these industries.

As long as the freely consenting adults are involved in this work, their labour should be treated
as any other form of labour and, more specifically, it should be legalized.

Sex work has become increasingly diverse, historically prostitutes were from the poorest groups,
although there have been some changes to this recently. Middle-class women have begun to
engage in a number of types of sex work, in larger numbers. Lap dancing has been one field
populated by young middle-class women.

One study found that a high percentage of lap dancers were educated to further education levels,
and a sizable portion either had or were pursuing university degrees (Sanders and Hardy, 2011)
Some feminists argue that nevertheless prostitution specifically and sex work generally reinforce the
idea that women are objects of men.