SOC 0851 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Fundamental Attribution Error, Social Forces, Radical Feminism
25 May 2018
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Sociological Theories of Gender
Gender and the Sociological Imagination
o C. Wright Mills famously said that sociology lies at the intersection of history
(macroscale) and biography (microscale)
o Sociology seeks to give you the analytical and theoretical tools to turn that kind
of detailed examination onto your own life
o Division between private troubles and public issues
Private troubles – problems we face that have to do with ourselves and
our immediate surrounding; solvable within ourselves individually or
within a limited range of the people around us
Public issues – exist beyond the individual or her own immediate milieu
and located within the larger structures of our societies, such as social
institutions
o What kind of social forces are working on us that are beyond our control?
o Understanding that our free will is somewhat limited is not an easy thing for
many of us to reconcile and it diminishes the sense that our choices are ours
alone to make
o We have to understand where private troubles leave off and public issues begin
o In societies like the US, with a strong emphasis on individualism, we are more
likely to attribute our problems to private troubles
The tendency to explain behavior by invoking person dispositions while
ignoring the roles of social structure and context (public issues) is called
fundamental attribution error
Feminists demanded that these problems begin to be treated as public
issues, or as connected to larger social forces and therefore beyond the
control of just one woman or man
Using sociological imagination to investigate gender means performing
the detailed archaeology of our own biography and learning to identify
the larger structural forces at work in our lives surrounding issues of
gender
Questioning Theories
