As taught in: Fall 2010
A mother and her child hold hands. (Image courtesy of Wilson X on Flickr.)
Instructors:
Prof. Heather Paxson
MIT Course Number:
21A.232J / WGS.172
Level:
Undergraduate
Course Features
Course Description
Through investigating cross-cultural case studies, this course introduces students to the anthropological study of the social institutions and symbolic meanings of family, household, gender, and sexuality. We will explore the myriad forms that families and households take and evaluate their social, emotional, and economic dynamics.
Classes will integrate lecture and discussion. Each class is keyed to a set of readings, and it is crucial that students keep up with the readings and be prepared to discuss them in class. Class participation — in terms of regular attendance and participation in discussion — will count strongly towards the final grade. Occasionally we will break into small groups for more concentrated discussion. Some lectures will directly engage our readings while others will integrate background historical and theoretical information.
Hansen, Karen V. Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. Rutgers University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780813535012.
Wardlow, Holly. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in New Guinea Society. University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780520245600.
Paxson, Heather. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece. University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780520223714.
Hansen, Karen V. Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. Rutgers University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780813535012.
[Wayward]= Wardlow, Holly. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in New Guinea Society. University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780520245600.
[MMM]= Paxson, Heather. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece. University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780520223714.
Develop a thesis around one of the following topics:
1. Gender Acquisition
Individuals learn gender - to identify as a girl or boy/ woman or man, to be able to act in gender appropriate ways, and to look like either a woman or man. But children (and adults) do not always conform to these lessons completely, or consistently. Drawing from our readings — and also, perhaps, from your own culturally situated observations — formulate and develop an argumentative thesis having to do with the acquisition and practice of gendered attributes and identities. For example, which means of gender acquisition (emulation, elicitation, ritual) seem to you to be most powerful, and why? What can we learn from concrete examples about the relationship between culture and biology more generally? In your paper, link the specific (empirical) to the big picture (theoretical).
2. Gender and Labor
Write an essay discussing how gender relations are, in part, formed, reproduced, and contested in labor relations. Possible theses to develop could begin with — but are not restricted to — the following: a contrast between how gender and labor are organized in agrarian versus wage labor societies, and with what social and ideological repercussions; a discussion of the gaps between ideologies and social realities (lived experiences) concerning gender and labor in agrarian and/or wage labor societies; how gender and labor relations have historically been informed by — and have reproduced — ideologies about race/ethnicity.
1. Gay Marriage
Write a paper analyzing the gay marriage debate in the contemporary U.S. Drawing on news stories, popular magazine articles, op-ed pieces, and/or legal decisions, characterize briefly the key positions taken on the issue. The majority of your paper will be devoted to your interpretation and analysis of these positions: why do Americans (and possibly others) debate the issue in the particular ways that you've discerned? Your analysis should begin by explaining some of the cultural, historical, and structural (i.e., economic, legal) elements that have come together to make possible the very question of gay marriage/parenting. Why has this topic has become an issue of social concern now, at this historical moment (i.e., what other social changes have occurred to allow gay marriage to be thinkable, let alone potentially politically viable)? And what is at stake symbolically, materially, and institutionally in these debates or negotiations concerning gender and sexuality: what are the real and/or perceived repercussions for individuals and for a society? Conclude with a brief discussion of what your analysis leads you to advocate on the issue — this might be a specific legal or political action, a line of scholarly inquiry, an education policy, etc.
2. Is There a Family?
Our task as anthropologists is not only to recognize cultural variation among the ideological forms that ideal families take, but also to consider the gaps between people's ideals and the reality of their lived experience. Here we encounter questions of agency and resistance, as well as the role of unequal economic conditions and power relations that ideologies of family may cover over. Real families only rarely, if ever, conform to ideological expectation — and yet, those ideals are only occasionally and gradually revised. In order to investigate both ideological constructs and lived experience — and what we find in the gaps between — write a paper comparing some aspect of family relations in two or more cultures we have read about. Focus your discussion either on issues related to marriage and sexuality or to parenting and parent-child relations. Either way, you must frame and analyze what you describe by making use of the theoretical arguments forwarded by authors we have read.
Syllabus
Course Meeting Times
Lectures/Seminars: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / sessionPrerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course.Complete Course Description
Through investigating cross-cultural case studies, this course introduces students to the anthropological study of the social institutions and symbolic meanings of family, household, gender, and sexuality. We will explore the myriad forms that families and households take and evaluate their social, emotional, and economic dynamics. In particular, we will analyze how people's expectations for, and experiences of, family life are rooted in or challenged by particular conceptions of gender and sexuality. What does it mean and entail to be a "man" or a "woman" — as well as a "good" father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, in-law, grandparent, etc. — in different cultural, religious, and political contexts?Classes will integrate lecture and discussion. Each class is keyed to a set of readings, and it is crucial that students keep up with the readings and be prepared to discuss them in class. Class participation — in terms of regular attendance and participation in discussion — will count strongly towards the final grade. Occasionally we will break into small groups for more concentrated discussion. Some lectures will directly engage our readings while others will integrate background historical and theoretical information.
Requirements
| ACTIVITIES | PERCENTAGES |
|---|---|
| Participation/reader responses | 25% |
| Argumentative essay 1 | 25% |
| Argumentative essay 2 | 25% |
| Argumentative essay 3 | 25% |
Participation
You must attend class and participate in discussions; this part of the course (including reader responses) will account for 25% of the final grade. Writing reader responses will help you feel prepared to speak up in class; if a student does not volunteer, she or he may be called upon to speak. Students who miss more than three classes will lose credit.Reader Responses
These responses consist of a couple paragraphs describing your reaction to one or more of the readings for that session. Do not summarize, but rather give us your response to the reading. These should take no more than 30 minutes to write. While reader responses are not individually graded, they will be factored into the overall evaluation of your performance. You will write 4 over the course of the term.Argumentative Essays
You will write three papers, each counting for 25% of your final grade. The first paper will address the relationship between families, households and political economy. The second paper will discuss how gender/sexuality are formed both within and despite kinship and family relations. The third paper on a topic of the student's choosing may include personal reflection and/or interviews.Required Books
Hansen, Karen V. Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. Rutgers University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780813535012. Wardlow, Holly. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in New Guinea Society. University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780520245600. Paxson, Heather. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece. University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780520223714.Calendar
| SES # | TOPICS | KEY DATES |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction to the study of family, sexuality and gender | |
| Part I: Concepts and Themes | ||
| 2 | Is sex to gender as nature is to culture? | Reader response 1 due |
| 3 | Cultural acquisition of gender as learned behavior | |
| Part II: Family, Sex, and Gender as Social Institutions | ||
| 4 | Ascribed status, arranged marriage, inheritance and gendered divisions of labor in pastoral and agrarian societies | |
| 5 | Achieved status, wage labor, and gendered divisions of labor in capitalist societies | Paper 1 topics handed out |
| 6 | Gender, agency, and virtue Film: Beauty Academy of Kabul | |
| 7 | Social reproduction: Reproducing formal and informal class relations | Reader response 2 due |
| 8 | The racial economy of social reproduction | |
| 9 | Household dependencies | |
| 10 | Doing, undoing, redoing the gendered division of labor | Paper 1 due |
| 11 | The invention of sexuality-based identities | |
| Part III: Family and Kinship as Cultural Systems | ||
| 12 | Kinship | |
| 13 | De-essentializing the family | Reader response 3 due |
| 14 | Do Western sexual identities travel? | |
| 15 | Violence and agency | |
| 16 | De-essentializing motherhood | Paper 2 topics handed out |
| 17 | Circulation of children | |
| 18 | Implications of gender and kinship for conception and birth | |
| 19 | Implications of gender and kinship for conception and birth and for family planning | Paper 2 due |
| 20 | Viewing of the film The Pill | |
| 21 | Nationalism and gendered citizenship | Reader response 4 due Paper proposal for final paper due |
| 22 | Reproductive technologies | |
| 23 | Rethinking relatedness | |
| 24 | Student presentations | |
| 25 | Student presentations (cont.) | Final paper due |
Readings
Required Books
[Nuclear]= Hansen, Karen V. Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. Rutgers University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780813535012.[Wayward]=
Wardlow, Holly. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in New Guinea Society. University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780520245600.[MMM]=
Paxson, Heather. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece. University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780520223714.| SES # | TOPICS | READINGS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction to the study of family, sexuality and gender | No readings |
| Part I: Concepts and Themes | ||
| 2 | Is sex to gender as nature is to culture? | Hubbard, Ruth. "Rethinking Women's Biology." In The Politics of Women's Biology. Rutgers University Press, 1990. ISBN: 9780813514901. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. "The Five Sexes." The Sciences (March/April 1993): 20-24. |
| 3 | Cultural acquisition of gender as learned behavior | Thorne, Barrie. "Children and Gender: Constructions of Difference." In Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference. Edited by Deborah L. Rhode. Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 100-113. ISBN: 9780300052251. Le, Huynh-Nhu. "Never Leave Your Little One Alone: Raising an Ifaluk Child." In A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies. Edited by Judy S. DeLoache and Alma Gottlieb. Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 199-222. ISBN: 9780521664752. Diener, Marissa. "A Gift from the Gods: A Balinese Guide to Early Child Rearing." In A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies. Edited by Judy S. DeLoache and Alma Gottlieb. Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 91-116. ISBN: 9780521664752. |
| Part II: Family, Sex, and Gender as Social Institutions | ||
| 4 | Ascribed status, arranged marriage, inheritance and gendered divisions of labor in pastoral and agrarian societies | Abu-Lughod, Lila. "Preface" and "Polygyny." In Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories. University of California Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780520256514. Kandiyoti, Deniz. "Bargaining with Patriarchy." Gender and Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274-290. (  PDF - 4.1MB) |
| 5 | Achieved status, wage labor, and gendered divisions of labor in capitalist societies | Collier, Jane. "From Mary to Modern Woman." American Ethnologist 13, no. 1 (1986): 100-107. Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. London, 1861. Excerpted from pp. iii, 1-9. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. "Introduction: The Romantic Solution." In For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Experts' Advice to Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1989, pp. 1-29. ISBN: 9780385126519. |
| 6 | Gender, agency, and virtue Film: Beauty Academy of Kabul | [MMM] pp. 1-101. Abu-Lughod, Lila. "The Romance of Resistance." American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41-55. |
| 7 | Social reproduction: Reproducing formal and informal class relations | Rapp, Rayna. "Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes Toward an Understanding of Ideology." In Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. Edited by Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalolm. Northeastern, 1992, pp. 25-39. ISBN: 9781555531454. Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. "From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor." In Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in US Women's History. Edited by Vicki Ruiz. Routledge, 2007, pp. 436-459. ISBN: 9780415958400. |
| 8 | The racial economy of social reproduction | Hondagneu-Sotelo, Perrette. "Maid in L.A." and "Tell Me What, But Not How." In Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadow of Affluence. University of California Press, 2007, pp. 29-60 and 137-170. ISBN: 9780520251717. Flannigan, Caitlin. "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement: Dispatches from the Nanny Wars." The Atlantic Monthly, March 2004. |
| 9 | Household dependencies | [Nuclear] pp. 1-22, 2 of the case studies (chapters 2-5), and pp. 155-181. |
| 10 | Doing, undoing, redoing the gendered division of labor | DeVault, Marjorie. "Conflict and Deference." In Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780226143606. Sullivan, Maureen. "Undoing the Gender Division of Labor." In The Family of Woman: Lesbian Mothers, Their Children, and the Undoing of Gender. University of California Press, 2004, pp. 93-123. ISBN: 9780520239647. |
| 11 | The invention of sexuality-based identities | Katz, Jonathan Ned. "The Invention of Heterosexuality." Socialist Review 20, no. 1 (1990): 7-33. (PDF) Davis, Maxine. "The Importance of Sexual Harmony." In The Sexual Responsibility of Women. 1966, pp. 22-36. Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Continuum." In Women—Sex and Sexuality. Edited by Catharine Stimpson. University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 62-91. ISBN: 9780226774770. |
| Part III: Family and Kinship as Cultural Systems | ||
| 12 | Kinship | Hart, C. W. M. "Tiwi Marriage." In The Tiwi of North Australia. Harcourt College Pub, 1987, pp. 11-33. ISBN: 9780030120190. Schneider, David. "Relatives" and "The Family." In American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 21-54. ISBN: 9780226739304. |
| 13 | De-essentializing the family | Collier, Jane, Michelle Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako. "Is there a Family? New Anthropological Views." In Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. Edited by Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalolm. Northeastern, 1992, pp. 25-39. ISBN: 9781555531454. |
| 14 | Do Western sexual identities travel? | [Wayward] pp. 1-98. |
| 15 | Violence and agency | [Wayward] pp. 99-238. |
| 16 | De-essentializing motherhood | Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. "Lifeboat Ethics." In The Gender/Sexuality Reader. Edited by Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo. Routledge, 1997, pp. 82-88. ISBN: 9780415910057. Tsing, Anna. "Monster Stories: Women Charged with Perinatal Endangerment." In Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture. Edited by Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, pp. 282-299. ISBN: 9780807046135. Landsman, Gail Landsman. "'Real Motherhood', Class, and Children with Disabilities." In Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. Edited by France Winndance Twine and Helena Ragoné. Routledge, 2000, pp. 169-187. ISBN: 9780415921107. |
| 17 | Circulation of children | Howell, Signe. "Kinning: The Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (2003): 465-484. Leinaweaver, Jessica B. "On Moving Children: The Social Implications of Andean Child Circulation." American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 163-180. |
| 18 | Implications of gender and kinship for conception and birth | Inhorne, Marcia. "Missing Motherhood: Infertility, Technology, and Poverty in Egyptian Women's Lives." Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. Edited by France Winndance Twine and Helena Ragoné. Routledge, 2000, pp. 139-168. ISBN: 9780415921107. Van Hollen, Cecilia. "Invoking Vali: Painful Technologies of Modern Birth in South India." Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17, no. 1 (2003): 49-77. |
| 19 | Implications of gender and kinship for conception and birth and for family planning | Ginsburg, Faye Ginsburg. "Procreation Stories: Reproduction, Nurturance, and Procreation in Life Narratives of Abortion Activists." American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 623-636. [MMM] Chapter 3. |
| 20 | Viewing of the film The Pill | No readings |
| 21 | Nationalism and gendered citizenship | [MMM] Chapter 4. |
| 22 | Reproductive technologies | [MMM] Chapter 5. Teman, Elly. "Embodying Surrogate Motherhood: Pregnancy as a Dyadic Body-Project." Body and Society 15, no. 3 (2009): 47-69. |
| 23 | Rethinking relatedness | Thompson, Charis. "Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic." In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 175-202. ISBN: 9780822327967. Lewin, Ellen. "Something Inside Me: Gay Fathers and Nature." In Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America. University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 76-97. ISBN: 9780226476582. Becker, Gay. "Deciding Whether to Tell Children about Donor Insemination: An Unresolved Question in the United States." In Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies. Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 119-133. ISBN: 9780520231375. |
Assignments
Reader Responses
These responses consist of a couple paragraphs describing your reaction to one or more of the readings for that session. Do not summarize, but rather give us your response to the reading. These should take no more than 30 minutes to write. While reader responses are not individually graded, they will be factored into the overall evaluation of your performance. You will write 4 over the course of the term.Topics for First Argumentative Essay
The aim of this paper is to develop an original thesis and to argue for it with reference to theoretical and case study materials from our readings. Six to seven double-spaced pages (roughly 2,000 words). Be sure to engage the arguments of and quote at least three of our authors. Be thorough in your citation practice.Develop a thesis around one of the following topics:
1. Gender Acquisition
Individuals learn gender - to identify as a girl or boy/ woman or man, to be able to act in gender appropriate ways, and to look like either a woman or man. But children (and adults) do not always conform to these lessons completely, or consistently. Drawing from our readings — and also, perhaps, from your own culturally situated observations — formulate and develop an argumentative thesis having to do with the acquisition and practice of gendered attributes and identities. For example, which means of gender acquisition (emulation, elicitation, ritual) seem to you to be most powerful, and why? What can we learn from concrete examples about the relationship between culture and biology more generally? In your paper, link the specific (empirical) to the big picture (theoretical).
2. Gender and Labor
Write an essay discussing how gender relations are, in part, formed, reproduced, and contested in labor relations. Possible theses to develop could begin with — but are not restricted to — the following: a contrast between how gender and labor are organized in agrarian versus wage labor societies, and with what social and ideological repercussions; a discussion of the gaps between ideologies and social realities (lived experiences) concerning gender and labor in agrarian and/or wage labor societies; how gender and labor relations have historically been informed by — and have reproduced — ideologies about race/ethnicity.
Topics for Second Argumentative Essay
Six to seven double-spaced pages, regular font (roughly 2,000 words). These are argumentative papers — develop a thesis and argue it by marshalling evidence from our readings and class discussions. Be sure to engage the arguments of and quote at least three of our authors. Be thorough in your citation practice.1. Gay Marriage
Write a paper analyzing the gay marriage debate in the contemporary U.S. Drawing on news stories, popular magazine articles, op-ed pieces, and/or legal decisions, characterize briefly the key positions taken on the issue. The majority of your paper will be devoted to your interpretation and analysis of these positions: why do Americans (and possibly others) debate the issue in the particular ways that you've discerned? Your analysis should begin by explaining some of the cultural, historical, and structural (i.e., economic, legal) elements that have come together to make possible the very question of gay marriage/parenting. Why has this topic has become an issue of social concern now, at this historical moment (i.e., what other social changes have occurred to allow gay marriage to be thinkable, let alone potentially politically viable)? And what is at stake symbolically, materially, and institutionally in these debates or negotiations concerning gender and sexuality: what are the real and/or perceived repercussions for individuals and for a society? Conclude with a brief discussion of what your analysis leads you to advocate on the issue — this might be a specific legal or political action, a line of scholarly inquiry, an education policy, etc.
2. Is There a Family?
Our task as anthropologists is not only to recognize cultural variation among the ideological forms that ideal families take, but also to consider the gaps between people's ideals and the reality of their lived experience. Here we encounter questions of agency and resistance, as well as the role of unequal economic conditions and power relations that ideologies of family may cover over. Real families only rarely, if ever, conform to ideological expectation — and yet, those ideals are only occasionally and gradually revised. In order to investigate both ideological constructs and lived experience — and what we find in the gaps between — write a paper comparing some aspect of family relations in two or more cultures we have read about. Focus your discussion either on issues related to marriage and sexuality or to parenting and parent-child relations. Either way, you must frame and analyze what you describe by making use of the theoretical arguments forwarded by authors we have read.
Topics for Third Argumentative Essay
The third paper on a topic of the student's choosing may include personal reflection and/or interviews.Download Course Materials
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