Gender, Sexuality and Emotion

1. Gender, Sexuality and Emotion

2. The Genderbread Person

3. Hochschild: Emotion Work • Emotion Work: the management of one’s own feelings in an effort to maintain the well being of a relationship. Also involves the orientation of self to others to fit with accepted norms of emotional expression. • Types • Evoking emotion • Suppressing emotion • Techniques • Cognitive • Bodily • Emotion • Emotion Labor: The same as emotional labor but rather emotions are regulated by workers because of expectations to display certain emotions as part of their job • Feeling Rules: • “fake it till you make it” • Men need to be strong, brave and macho • Women need to be happy and perky • You know you have the correct or incorrect emotions by how others react to you

4. Hochschild: Emotion Work What types of emotion work do these represent?

5. Goffman: Gender Display • Main Ideas • Gender is a collective performance • “Gender Advertisements” • The outward depiction of gender is maintained through the way it is expressed • Argued advertisements do not look strange to us when they should. They take something that exists already in the world and change it, forming a distorted reflection • Gendered relations and roles of femininity and masculinity are learned through advertisements* • “The Arrangement between the Sexes” • Often gender performances are framed as coming from within an individual but Goffman believed: • Social spaces and relations are gendered in ways that produce gendered performance (not the other way around) • Social interactions, spaces and institutions have been constructed in ways that highlight gender differences • What is the problem with with learning gender through advertisements?

6. Heterosexism vs. Heteronormativity • Heterosexism: the belief that heterosexuality is normal and the norm • Often considered the norm and thus superior • Heteronormativity: the social setting that normalizes heterosexuality • Popularized in 1991 when the term was used in one of the first major queer theory publications • Involves the alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity gender roles and gendered expression • What ways are heterosexuality displayed to others? If these displays don’t mesh with what observers perceive their gender to be, how could this be perceived as disturbing?

7. Homophobia • Homophobia: the negative attitudes and feelings toward individuals who identify or are perceived as being homosexual, bisexual or transgendered • Overt • Hate crimes / violence • Covert • Discrimination through hiring practices* • Internalized homophobia: negative stereotypes, beliefs, stigmas and prejudices about homosexuality that people with same-sex attractions turn inward toward themselves • Feels the need to promote or confirm to cultural expectations of heteronormativity or heterosexism • Repression of emotions • Forced outward displays of heteronormative behavior to appear “normal” and be “accepted” • Making assumptions about a persons romantic partner or gender role

8. Queer Theory • Queer Theory: “Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded by now in an indescribably wide range of social intuitions, and is embedded in the most standard accounts of the world, queer struggles aim not just at toleration of equal status but at challenging those intuitions and accounts. The drawing realization that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost any document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how widespread those intuitions and accounts are” – Michael Warner* • Views gender categories as not fixed, unable to be categorized and labeled • Focuses on a critique of social boundaries and the mechanisms that produce them • Normative vs. deviant behavior

9. Kinsey’s Sexual Spectrum • The Kinsey Scale • Developed in 1948 to account for research showing that people did not fit into neat and exclusive heterosexual and homosexual categories – many individuals reported their sexual behavior and attractions somewhere in between • The spectrum • 0 - exclusively heterosexual with no experience or desire for sexual activity with the same sex • 6 - exclusively homosexual with no experience with or desire for sexual activity with those of the opposite sex • 1-5 - identify themselves with varying levels of desire or sexual activity

10. Kinsey’s Sexual Spectrum • Data • Men: • Nearly 46% of the male population has engaged in both heterosexual and homosexual activities, or “reacted to” persons of both sexes in the course of their adult lives • 0% American males were more or less exclusively homosexual for at least 3 years between the ages of 16 and 55 (range of 5-6) • Women: • Kinsey found only a very small portion of females with exclusively homosexual histories • 14% of females aged 20-35 had more than incidental homosexual experiences in their histories • 7% of single females aged 20-35 and 4% of previously married females aged 20-35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives* • 2-5% of females aged 20-35 were given a rating of 5 • 1-3% of unmarried females aged 20-35 were rated as 6 • Hardly anyone scores a 0 on the Kinsey Sexual spectrum

11. Behaviors • How are each of these behaviors related to our discussion on gender, sexuality and emotion? • Sexting • Phone calls when dating • Hardcore female sports fans • Male and female friendship sans sexual attraction • Men publicly crying • A customer service representative dealing with returns after the holidays • A same sex couple visiting family for the holidays under the guise of best friends • _______________________________________________________________________ • Key concepts to consider: • Moral panic • Emotion work • Emotion labor • Feeling rules • Heterosexism • Heteronormativity • Homophobia