SOC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: East Los Angeles College, Essentialism, Social Constructionism
Document Summary
Sex: the biological differences that distinguish male from female (from intersex) Sexuality: refers to sexual desire, sexual preference, sexual identity, and/or sexual behavior. Gender: socially learned expectations and behavior pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Essentialism: equates sex with gender and argues that gender differences are. Essential to biological sex (that they are natural and complementary) Social construction: a social phenomenon that is constructed through social contexts, and then often taken for objective, fixed reality . Difference between genders are the product of social experience, not biology. Implies that the social construct is fictional, trivial, unimportant, or not real because it is socially constructed. Thomas - thomas theorem: if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Implies that social constructions are easily changeable. Race, gender are not easily changeable, yet are social constructs.
