# Paperback: 176 pages
# Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (1 Jun 2008)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 041542349X
# ISBN-13: 978-0415423496
# Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13 x 1.3 cm
Product Description
Women and men are more alike than we might think. In this accessible and enthusiastic introduction Mary Holmes explains how sociological approaches to gender can help us understand how and why everyday life is often so different for women and men, despite their similarities.
From the Back Cover
Why are we so insistent that women and men are different? This introduction to gender provides a fascinating and genuinely readable exploration of how society divides people into feminine women and masculine men. It explores gender as a way of seeing women and men as not just biological organisms, but as people shaped by their everyday social world. Examining how gender has been understood and lived in the past; how it is understood and done differently by different cultures and groups within cultures; Mary Holmes considers the strengths and limitations of different ways of thinking and learning to ‘do’ gender.
Key sociological and feminist ideas about gender are covered from Christine Pisan to Mary Wollstonecraft; from symbolic interactionism to second wave feminism through to the work of Judith Butler. The book illustrates gender with a range of familiar and contemporary examples: everything from nineteenth century fashions in China and Britain, to discussions of what Barbie can tell us about gender in America, to the lives of working women in Japan. This book will be of great use and interest to students to gender studies, sociology and feminist theory.
CONTENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii
Introduction: Gender and everyday life 1
1 ed bodies? 15
2 Learning and doing gender in everyday life 34
3 Gendered relationships in everyday life 58
4 Resisting gender in everyday life 81
5 The future of gender 107
Conclusion: Gender, everyday life and degendering 129
REFERENCES 144
INDEX 157
Email: mary.holmes@flinders.edu.au
Phone: (61 8) 8201 3010
Fax: (61 8) 8201 3521
Room: 3116 SSN
Phd (1999) University of Auckland
MA (1991) University of York, England
BA (1987) University of Auckland
Postal Address:
Department of Sociology
Flinders University
GPO Box 2100
Adelaide SA 5001
Australia
Currently
Currently Visiting Scholar in Women's Studies, University of York, UK.
Research Interests
* Gender: feminist social theory, sociology of feminism, and gender issues particularly in relation to my other research interests.
* Emotions and Intimate Relationships: Including work on emotions in politics and empirical work on distance relationships.
* Sociology of Bodies: Especially gendered bodies and their representation
* Political and Cultural Representation: Sociology of culture; political cultures; how processes of political and cultural representation are intertwined.
Mary Holmes' research deals with questions about the balance between structural and cultural factors in the (re)production of inequalities. While gender is usually the focus, inequalities are understood as entangled and therefore the work encompasses issues of class, ethnicity, sexuality and other ways in which differences are embodied and felt within particular social processes and relationships. Her previous writings have centred on how second wave feminist politics challenged the way women have been represented within both political and symbolic
systems. Current empirical work is on distance relationships and explores the extent to which gender is embodied, represented, structured, challenged and/or reproduced within dual-career couples who reside in separate regions. Such relationships challenge assumptions that physical proximity is essential for intimacy and raise important questions about the gendered and relational nature of emotions. This work all feeds efforts to understand how gender and gender inequalities are lived and expressed within contemporary social conditions.
Select Publications
Holmes, M. (2008) The Representation of Feminists as Political Actors: Challenging Liberal Democracy. Saarbrücken: VDM Publishers.
Holmes, M (2008) Gender and Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Holmes, M. (2007) What is Gender? Sociological Approaches, London, Sage.
Holmes, M. (2004) 'An Equal Distance? Individualisation, Gender and Intimacy in Distance Relationships'. The Sociological Review 52(2):180-200.
Holmes, M. (2004) 'Feeling beyond rules: Politicising the Sociology of Emotion and Anger in Feminist Politics' European Journal of Social Theory 7(2): 209-227. 作者: Robot 时间: 2009-5-23 11:59
SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD
‘The New Sociology’ is a Series that takes its cue from massive
social transformations currently sweeping the globe. Globalization,
new information technologies, the techno-industrialization of
warfare and terrorism, the privatization of public resources, the
dominance of consumerist values: these developments involve
major change to the ways people live their personal and social lives
today. Moreover, such developments impact considerably on the
tasks of sociology, and the social sciences more generally. Yet, for
the most part, the ways in which global institutional transformations
are influencing the subject-matter and focus of sociology
have been discussed only in the more advanced, specialized literature
of the discipline. I was prompted to develop this Series, therefore,
in order to introduce students – as well as general readers
who are seeking to come to terms with the practical circumstances
of their daily lives – to the various ways in which sociology reflects
the transformed conditions and axes of our globalizing world.
Perhaps the central claim of the Series is that sociology is
fundamentally linked to the practical and moral concerns of
everyday life. The authors in this Series – examining topics all the
way from the body to globalization, from self-identity to consumption
– seek to demonstrate the complex, contradictory ways
in which sociology is a necessary and very practical aspect of our
personal and public lives. From one angle, this may seem
uncontroversial. After all, many classical sociological analysts as
well as those associated with the classics of social theory
emphasized the practical basis of human knowledge, notably
Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and
George Simmel, among many others. And yet there are major
respects in which the professionalization of academic sociology
during the latter period of the twentieth century led to a retreat
from the everyday issues and moral basis of sociology itself. (For an
excellent discussion of the changing relations between practical
and professional sociologies see Charles Lemert, Sociology After the
Crisis, second edition, Boulder: Paradigm, 2004.) As worrying
as such a retreat from the practical and moral grounds of the
discipline is, one of the main consequences of recent global transformations
in the field of sociology has been a renewed emphasis
on the mediation of everyday events and experiences by distant
social forces, the intermeshing of the local and global in the production
of social practices, and on ethics and moral responsibility
at both the individual and collective levels. ‘The New Sociology’
Series traces out these concerns across the terrain of various themes
and thematics, situating everyday social practices in the broader
context of life in a globalizing world.
Without doubt, nowhere today do we see the impact of global
institutional changes restructuring the terrain of everyday lived
experience, as well as the intellectual preoccupations of disciplinary
sociology, than in society’s surging anxieties about gender. For
some conservative critics, dramatic change in routine gender practice
is the chief source of today’s social ills; for others – including
political progressives of various persuasions – gender lies at the
core of current transformations of intimacy as well as alternative
sexualities and lifestyles. In Gender and Everyday Life, Mary
Holmes explores the peculiar place – troubled and troubling – of
gender in contemporary society and culture. In this marvellously
clear and compelling introduction to the key theoretical and
political disputes over gender in sociology, Holmes develops a
powerful overview of both classical and contemporary scholarship
on gender categories.
Social theories of gender have been at the forefront of the most
important debates in the social sciences and humanities over the
last 25 years, and one of Mary Holmes’ critical aims in this book is
to unravel the wider cultural and social meanings attributed to
gender – in both practical social life and professional sociology –
over the years. In shining a light on the powers of gender in our
everyday lives, Holmes deftly traces a number of social differences
that structure, organize and solicit gendered and sexual identities.
All these differences in body politics and social relations, socialized
learning and cultural resistance, turn out to be fundamental to
both our gendered lives and bodily investments – with every
chapter offering a distinctive perspective on the paradoxes of
gender. Gender, for Holmes, generates plenty of heat, framing
how we move in and out of the identifications, pleasures and
troubles of identities, structures of action and agency, and the
management of sexual differences and bodily capabilities.
The liquid application of gender concepts, variously traced by
Holmes through the sociological deployment of historical, comparative
and critical perspectives, is responsible in our own time
for many of the conflicts and tensions of sexed identities and their
relation to forms of social exclusion. In this connection, Holmes’
erudite analysis of gender sharpens our thinking, and indeed is
itself good to think along with. If sex refers to biology and gender
to sociology, what are the connections between the two? Is gender
really just a supplement to anatomical sexual differences, or does it
have a life of its own? Is gender autonomy possible, or are we
forever subject and subordinate to sexual differences and gender
norms? Does gender need to be updated, through a kind of
theoretical ‘extreme makeover’, to better fit with the times and our
lives in these times? How do gender belongings and exclusions
interweave with social reproduction, power and hierarchy? What
gender futures might we face? How significant is gender in shaping
the direction of society and culture? Holmes proves an erudite
guide to all these issues and more besides.
Gender, as Holmes makes clear, is central to social regulation in
almost all societies. Gender is fundamental to our very existence,
and for that reason societies solicit gendered rules and expectations
around sexuality. In our own time of the early 2000s, these rules
have been subject to considerable upheaval: from the so-called
‘liberation of gender’ through either commercial possibilities or
postmodern sexual fluidities to the impact of queer theory and
radical theorizing on gender categories. Certainly the growth
of consumer culture, the acceleration of globalization and new
patterns of work (principally short term and contract based) have
tended to create transformed social conditions in which gender
becomes a renewed political site for thinking about the pressures
and compulsions of our lives today. In Holmes’ synthetic vision of
the variety of gender scenarios currently before us, and likely to
come before us in the near future, the configuration of gender
practice is up for grabs in novel and perhaps alarming ways.
Holmes’ Gender and Everyday Life is indeed a superb introduction
to the sociological stakes of gender in our fast globalizing world.
