Judith Lorber
City University of New York
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Gender & Society | 1993
Judith Lorber
Western ideology takes biology as the cause, and behavior and social statuses as the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the “naturalness” of gendered behavior and gendered social statuses. What we believe is what we see—two sexes producing two genders. The process, however, goes the other way: gender constructs social bodies to be different and unequal. The content of the two sets of constructed social categories, “females and males” and “women and men,” is so varied that their use in research without further specification renders the results spurious.
Feminist Theory | 2000
Judith Lorber
Women’s status in the Western world has improved enormously, but the revolution that would make women and men truly equal has not yet occurred. I argue that the reason is that gender divisions still deeply bifurcate the structure of modern society. Feminists want women and men to be equal, but few talk about doing away with gender divisions altogether. From a social constructionist structural gender perspective, it is the ubiquitous division of people into two unequally valued categories that undergirds the continually reappearing instances of gender inequality. I argue that it is this gendering that needs to be challenged by feminists, with the long-term goal of doing away with binary gender divisions altogether. To this end, I call for a feminist degendering movement.
Sex Roles | 1986
Judith Lorber
Feminist theory and research have shown us that gender is a linchpin of social orders, but they have not seriously envisaged a social order without gender. Examination of the various bases of gender demonstrates that gender is essentially a social construction, and the relations between women and men are essentially social relations. What is socially constructed can be reconstructed, and social relations can be rearranged. A social order is possible without gender as an organizing principle. This paper takes forward tendencies and policies in postindustrial societies to show how, if carried through, they could be used to construct a nongendered social order.
Gender & Society | 1993
Judith Lorber; Lakshmi Bandlamudi
This article provides empirical data on the dynamics of marital bargaining in the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in male infertility and the extent of the womans agency in trying to resolve the situation, using interview data from nine married couples and three additional wives. Although there were too few cases for demographic variation among the categories, the research did indicate that choice and altruism entailed dynamics distinguishable from patriarchal bargains, and, if there was subtle coercion, it was exerted in ways quite different from that experienced by the wives who felt openly pressured.
Sociological focus | 1999
Judith Lorber
Abstract This paper explores the problems and dilemmas of creating and crossing identity borders and boundaries. The identities discussed are those of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. When these identities fragment or cross-cut each other, a unified politics becomes problematic. If stigmatized identities remain primarily personal, identity-based groups provide support and resources, but do not affect systemic injustices or status inequalities. The paper ends with a proposal for a politics of transformation and a description of some current programs that offer possibilities for structural change. Some of these programs are identity-based and maintain conventional categories; others deliberately integrate categories.
Archive | 2002
Judith Lorber
My presidential address looked back at the gendered imagery of American heroes and warriors, Muslim terrorists, and oppressed Islamic women as they appeared in comparatively sophisticated media sources in the first 6 months after September 11. The imagery was conventionally gendered, but the actions of women and men reported in the same sources showed multiple gendering—heterogeneity within homogeneity. Making this multiplicity of gendering visible blurs and undermines gender lines and the inequities built on them. The social constructions of heroism, masculinity, and Islamic womanhood are core parts of the gender politics of September 11, a politics deeply embedded in the current debates over the causes and consequences of terrorism and war.
Work And Occupations | 1977
Judith Lorber; Roberta Satow
This study of a hospital-based community mental health center in an urban ghetto found that the dominance of the psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists and residents over the social workers and paraprofessionals was the result of and was maintained by both negotiative processes and traditional role structures, backed up by bureaucratic rules. The psychiatrists and residents got the best cases, the social workers the average cases, and the minimally trained paraprofessionals the problem cases. The results of this stratification system on therapists and patients are described, and the authors conclude that autonomous clinics are necessary if professionals are to be rewarded for developing modes of treatment appropriate to ghetto patients. However, it is predicted that after the role negotiation process settles down, new stratification systems will emerge.
Archive | 1990
Judith Lorber; Dorothy A. Greenfeld
This paper reports on couples1 experiences with in vitro fertilization from a phenomenological perspective.1 It discusses how the couples created the reality of the experience for themselves—how they shaped what they went through, and what the meaning of the experience was for them. It presents the results of separate telephone interviews with 20 husbands and wives who went through the IVF/ET Program, successfully and unsuccessfully, at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut in 1983-84.,The questions addressed by this study were: First, what is the social meaning of IVF as a medical experience; and second, what is the social usefulness or latent function of IVF for couples who want a child?
Contemporary Sociology | 2001
Judith Lorber; Londa Schiebinger
Do women do science differently? This is a history of women in science and a frank assessment of the role of gender in shaping scientific knowledge. Science is both a profession and a body of knowledge, and Londa Schiebinger looks at how women have fared and performed in both instances. Shoe first considers the lives of women scientists, past and present. Schiebinger debunks the myth that women scientists - because they are women - are somehow more holistic and integrative and create more cooperative scientific communities. However, have feminist perspectives brought any positive change to scientific knowledge? Schiebinger provides a nuanced gender analysis of the physical sciences, medicine, archaeology, evolutionary biology, primatology, and developmental biology. She also shows that feminist scientists have developed new theories, asked new questions, and opened new fields in many of these areas.
Gender & Society | 2011
Judith Lorber
When I became the first editor of Gender & Society, Mitch Allen, then an editor at Sage, told me that the journal would be successful if we got close to 1,000 library subscriptions in the first year (I think we got more than 900). What he was saying was that we needed to become part of the academic establishment. We were easily able to do that because Gender & Society filled a niche, empty at the time, 1987. Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, had started in 1975, and was eclectic regarding social science and cultural studies at the beginning, but it was more and more focusing on culture rather than on society. Sex Roles, also established in 1975, published mostly small-group psychology studies—it called itself A Journal of Research. There was also a lot of work being pub lished in different journals devoted to womens studies—research on women, by women, for women, from a womans standpoint. What was missing was a sociological perspective and a way of conceptualizing gender as societal, not just individual. The intent was for Gender & Society to be a sociology of gender journal with a feminist theoretical perspective. This innovation was turned down by ASA—their argument being that ASA journals already published the sociology of gender—but it was quantitative, comparing women versus men on various parameters, scattered over many journals, and atheoretical. As editor, I was determined to be theoretical, which meant to define gender and to analyze genders relationship with society. I saw my mission as bring ing the new feminist perspective of the social construction of gender to sociological research and theory. My vision was spelled out in my initial From the Editor.