GSWS 122 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Intersectionality, Escalator, Trans Man

• School: UPenn
• Department: Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies
• Course: GSWS 122
• Professor: Professor

Document Summary

Glenn"s social construction of gender argues against: essentialism, biological determinism , gender as an individual attribute, primacy of individual choice, separable from other systems of inequality. Organising principles of social life = cultural meanings/material conditions. Built into social institutions: enduring patterns of social relations. Differences in experiences of men/women/people of diff race are just a matter of individual choice/what people want (need to realise the range of choice available) Black women were not employed because they didn"t fit black men or white women . Could not go forward in court because they were addressing two overlapping matters (aka not all blacks were unemployed and not all women were discriminated), and people thought that they would get preferential treatment if this was passed through. White women could represent all women (regardless of experiences of discrimination), black men could represent black people. Draws attention to black women"s discrimination was buried under white women/black men. They experience sexism/racism differently, oppressed in different ways.