Sociological Perspectives: Gender, Race, Class, and Environment

Posted on Jan 22, 2025 in Sociology

Gender

  • Social roles
  • Interactions: Heterosexual relationships
  • Goffman: Always on stage
  • Bathroom: Unequal access
  • Career: Role expectations
  • Women as “open persons”
  • Women’s jobs
  • Double consciousness
  • Doing the self through gender
  • Deviance when behaving differently
  • West & Zimmerman (Doing Gender): Quote emergent / Differences between girls and boys / Gender display / Gender accountability
  • Mitchell Duneier & Harvey Molotch: Street people harassment / Civil inattention
  • Thorne & Luria: Preadolescent children doing sexuality
  • Pamela Fisherman: Man controlling conversation / Women being dominant as abnormal.

Sex

  • We are assigned and socialized to it
  • Zimmerman: Sex category. Genitals
  • Sexual behaviors between societies
  • Masters & Johnson: Sex in labs
  • J.M Carrier (Cross-Gender and Homosexual behavior): Cross-cultural perspective / Tight link between gender norms and masculinity / Quote concordance
  • Judith Stacey (Unhitched): Abnormal structures of families / Musuo / Stigmas are socially created / Commentary about our culture.
  • England (Hooking up): Heterosexual encounters / Orgasm gap / Sexism / Double standards / sex culture

Urbanism

  • John Snow: Anesthesiologist. Knew about gases / Map of London / Clustered / Human feces dumped down river / Sociological Imagination
  • Jane Jacobs: Journalist / Disorganized, Chaotic streets / Eyes on the street / Spontaneous public interactions / Shops produce social outcomes like entrepreneurship / 1, 2, 3
  • Molotch (Bathrooms): The way we do gender leads to more time using bathroom / liberal and conservative solutions.

Race and Ethnicity

  • Social category based on physical & biological characteristics
  • Attempts to scientifically prove biological differences
  • Thomas theorem / may not be a strict category of sex
  • Racial labeling
  • Racial discrimination
  • Racism
  • Institutional Racism
  • Collins (Tunnel of Violence): police presence creates a chance for police violence. “Cultural factors like racism are never a sufficient explanation of violence.”
  • Cumulative Disadvantage
  • Feagin (Continuing significance of race): Cross discrimination / “second eye”

Work and Class

  • Incarceration as a factor of unemployment
  • Variables created by incarceration
  • Experiment
  • Variables of study
  • Alice Goffman: Mass imprisonment transmits social and economic disadvantage
  • Feagin: Economic inequality = Racial inequality / Middle class also gets discrimination / they have to expect discrimination / Withdrawal or confrontation.
  • Marx: Capitalism / Means of production / Labor exploitation / surplus value / Commodification

Power Structures

  • Social control
  • Desmond: Individual stories and connecting them to big social problems / Ethnography of families at risk of being homeless / Lamar (sociological imagination) and Arleen
  • Alice Goffman: Lives of residents are organized precisely around fear, the fear of being sent to jail.
  • Phenomenon portrayed: urban deindustrialization (macro)
  • Kids as a risk of being evicted.
  • Molotch: Attacks of 9/11 created a cycle of bureaucratic and policy maneuver.
  • Stenning: Disney visitors are encouraged to participate in the production of Disney.

Stratification Processes

  • Mark Granovetter: Nods and ties / Triads = social networks / Strong ties / weak ties / acquaintances to get networks

Environment

Environment correlates to the economy.

  • Bill McKibben (The end of nature): Human presence has permeated every aspect / Going deep in the ocean / No longer nature vs. artificial / nothing is undisturbed
  • Nature is a free good
  • Capitalism: Exploitation of natural resources
  • Tragedy of the commons
  • Distribution of garbage
  • Following the aesthetic and capitalist idea of loans, we think of them as a perfect way of portraying cleanliness
  • Successful act of collective efficacy is recycling.
  • Humphries: All collective action requires communication. Mutually understood signals.
  • Mike Davis (Ecology of fear): Malibu fires / One road crossing it goes against urbanism / Let it burn for the good of the public welfare.
  • Thomas Beamish: Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes / 38 years, 20 million gallons of petroleum / people didn’t say anything because you would raise an unpleasant point that the people before didn’t say anything (Informal rules) / Agenda setting: Second face of power is saying what we should talk about.
  • Man-made disasters: Accidents can’t be anticipated, disasters can be prevented
  • Kari Norgaad: Norway / Rich because of oil production / don’t deny it but don’t bring it up
  • Unequal distribution of power.