SOCI 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Egalitarianism, Judith Butler, Heterosexism
Week 11- transitions and innovations
Transitions later in life & LAT
• Divorce is increasing among Canadians 65 or older
• Remarriage among those aged 50 or older is increasing, along with cohabitation
• Grandparents may take on custodial or near parental role of their grandchildren
• LAT
o People who desire companionship without traditional arrangement or sharing a
home full time
Gay/lesbian families
• Transformative
o Lesbians teaching their daughters not to compete with other women
• Force questioning of heterosexist assumptions and values
• Provide a model for resisting confining gender role expectations
• Gay families challenge assumptions about masculinity
• They are a force of change in family policy
Post structuralism
• People moving away from normative family forms
• Structure itself should be questioned
• Poststructuralists advocate deconstruction
• A study of how knowledge is produced
• Meanings constantly shift in relation to myriad variables
• Families are more unstable than we thought
o People were already cheating from the 1940s
o Already had gay/lesbian couples
• Foucault
o Discourse creates phenomena and therefore has power
o Poststructuralists/postmodernist ideas that discourse structures the way we see
reality
o Gender and sexuality are discursively constructed
o Non-heterosexual realities have been written out of history and are seen as
abnormal
Judith Butler (1999)
• Masculinity and femininity are just socially constructed
• We perform gender from scripts
• There is an exaggeration of masculinity and femininity
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