Gender And Sexuality In Society

Debates Regarding the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality

In recent times, it can be seen that many couples are raising their babies without any pronouns because of the complexes in society (Joseph et al. 2017). Such terms are adopted to remove any form of bias in society. Gender alludes to the culturally created qualities of females, males, women, and men. Gender as a cultural concept differs from one society to the next and can change from time to time. Gender and sexuality are frequently seen as correlations in Gender-Based Sexuality (Kokkonen 2019). Therefore, can be stated that gender and sexuality are related concepts. The views of gender and sexuality have changed a lot from the past as such ideologies were limited in the past. Such issues are solved by the change in the mindset of the people. This paper would shed light on the topic of gender and sexuality. The paper explains the three current debates regarding the sociology of gender and sexuality. Further, the paper highlight three theories related to gender and sexuality seen in the present world and the issues that are seen in the day today. It also critically evaluates academic arguments in order to build an understanding of gender and sexuality in society.

The current issues and debates regarding the sociology of gender and sexuality are as follows,

Women have been overlooked by sociologists: Many sociological studies have focused on the experiences of men and boys while ignoring the perspectives of women and young girls (Valentine et al. 2019). Study results based on all-male populations account for a large portion of what constitutes sociological knowledge (Jones 2020). Some other way of putting it is that, notwithstanding its pretence to scientific impartiality, sociology has typically focused on men's lives rather than women's lives. One explanation, according to feminists, is that sociologists do not regard issues that are important and important to women as significant or relevant. To put it another way, it's not just that women have been left out of the sample population; it's also that sociological theories don't raise specific questions. Sociologists have focused their research on the public realm, specifically employment, which is linked with masculinity. Men have such a tendency to overlook the domestic world, which is linked with women. Sociological perspectives have frequently assumed that it was inevitable for women to stay at home, that women's rights as husbands and mothers were defined by biology rather than social forces in the personal sphere (Epstein 2020). This also explains why sociologists have been unable to pose specific questions or conduct research in various fields of female's interest. For instance, why raise the question? Women bear children for a variety of reasons. If you believe that all females' maternal instinct stems from a natural, biological mother drive, then the individual is a sociologist. A viewpoint that has previously dominated sociology. 2) Biases in the society: As a consequence, sociologists have developed social theories that are partially male-biased and insufficient (Raffield, Price and Collard 2017). Sociologists have a tendency to extrapolate findings from studies on men to the entire community when constructing ideas. For instance, concepts of retiring have typically relied on male-only studies, despite the fact that they aren't called "Male Retirement studies". There's been little acknowledgement earlier that experiences of women may differ from men's, and that would include females in research and addressing problems that impact women. 3) Gender inequality has never been adequately theorized in sociology: Sociologists have a history of neglecting gender inequities in society, in addition to ignoring women as research subjects (Scarborough and Risman 2020). This is due in part to the influence of functionalist philosophy, which recognized without question that men and women had different and unique tasks to play, and saw these roles as functional to both the person and community. Regardless of the fact that traditional functionalist descriptions of the household are still widespread in sociological investigations, one crucial feature of functionalist philosophy is the assumption that women and men are distinct but equivalent only within the family. There is no room to analyse inequity among females and males in this paradigm; it simply vanishes. The supremacy of class identification seems to be another factor why sociologists have defaulted enough attention to gender inequality. In sociology, the basic notion used to conceptualize social disparity is class (Grusky 2019). Class analysis has traditionally disregarded gender issues, and only recently has it attempted to explain ignoring the gender-class divide. Most feminists, on the other hand, say that female's subjugation cannot be seen as less fundamental than class oppression, and they have questioned the notion that class is society's basic division. Sociologists need to come up with hypotheses that may appropriately describe sexual identity divisions affect overall interpretations and hypotheses developed (McMunn et al. 2020). Hence to summarise the points Women have been overlooked by sociologists, biases in society and gender inequality has never been adequately theorized in sociology are the three current issues that are put forward in the paper.

Feminist Theory as a Form of Conflict Perspective

The theories related to gender and sexuality which can be enlightened to highlight the everyday experience are as follows,

Theory of Feminists: Feminist theory is a form of conflict perspective that explains the gender inequality (Aggestam, Bergman Rosamond and Kronsell 2019). Specifically, feminist theory analyses the importance of the family dominating male viewpoints. In this society, men's efforts are highly placed than women's. The patriarchal approaches and structures are always assumed. As a consequence, the voices of the women always overlooked and ridiculed. Patriarchy is a collection of institutional institutions such as rights of the property, acquiring a high positions of authority, and relationships to sources of wealth founded on the assumption that men and women are two distinct and unequal groups (Suliman 2019). The belief that biological significant gender disparities among females and males are tied to inequalities in their personality, personality, and abilities is at the heart of patriarchal i.e., their gender. All this type of difference is employed to mitigate gender separation of social obligations as well as disparities in access to benefits, authority, and prestige. Feminists argue, then, how does the differentiation among females and males, as well as the identification of various attributes to each, help to arrange the organizations and perpetuate gender inequality? "The subjective is political," has been one of the profound sociological discoveries that arose from second-wave feminism (Molony 2017). Marxist Theory: Unlike radical feminism, Marxist theory considers gender inequality to be a result of capitalism. Barrett is an example of a Marxist feminist account (1980) (Lussier and Backer 2020). Women's oppression in British society is considered as capitalistic exploitation of workers, which subjugates women especially as a result of their restriction from salaried employment and their position in the private realm caring for the labour force and raising the next generation of workers. The structure of male and female relationships is seen to be determined by class conflict, which is considered a key characteristic of social structure (Chodorow 2018). Theory of Standpoint: Several of life's fundamental basic and direct events, from birth to who washes away the plates to the response to sexual abuse, had been largely ignored or dismissed politically or socially. Dorothy Smith's theory perspective theory enabled to learn and understood such issues by monitoring the situation of a life of an individual acted as a breakthrough in sociology (Rankin 2017). She noticed that such concerns voiced by women the most depending on their everyday situations had a similarity of topics, all because of the feminists' conscious experience activities and interaction organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Smith claimed that instead of starting sociological perspective with institutions or systems in the theoretical, it would be more efficient to start with the "actual reality" of women's personal experiences in the proximate local contexts of "every day now" living. "What are the common characteristics of women's daily lives?" she inquired. Smith further commented that the position of the women in the contemporary society is deeply subjected to the perception of dual awareness (Hartsock 2017). As females transitioned from "particularizing employment in connection to youngsters, husband, and residence" to the institutionalized world of text-mediated, impersonal issues at work, or in contacts with institutions, health care systems, or government agencies, they crossed a palpable dividing line. It can be summarized how biased the society was previously and now with the introduction to such theories, it improved by many folds in terms of gender equality.

Marxist Theory and Gender Inequality

The rise of feminist theory to fight the gender and sexuality issues in society. Feminism in the United Kingdom is not a single movement or idea; there are numerous perspectives (Tobias 2018). All maintain that females are disadvantaged in British society, although feminists disagree in their theories of why women are underprivileged in comparison to males, as well as their recommendations for how to reform women's social status. There seem to be four primary approaches within the spectrum of feminist concepts that already have made significant contributions to British social science: “The liberal feminism”, “ The radical feminism”, “ The Marxist feminism”, and “ The socialist feminism”. The  liberal feminism is interested in identifying discrimination and prejudice against women in the United Kingdom, as well as efforts to modify the legislation and education to offer women the same rights as men (Herouach 2019). But instead of social structural explanations, the point appears to be on analysing women's subordination in terms of discrimination and sexist views. The goal of accomplishing social transformation is to provide equal opportunity for men and women. The problems, according to radical feminists, are caused by a societal structure that benefits from women's subjugation. They examine gender disparity in terms of how males as a group rule women as a group, arguing that men are the primary benefactors of women's subjugation. Females are a socioeconomic status in competition with men, who constitute a different social class. Patriarchy, the institution of male dominance over women, is considered distinct from other forms of social inequalities, such as capitalist society. Radical feminists argue that female's subjugation transcends economics to prove their case (Guerram and Dib 2020). As a result, women's persecution cannot be considered subsidiary to or inferior to class oppression. Gender discrimination is not considered as a result of capitalism, yet it is acknowledged that women's persecution will assume a specific form within capitalist society. To put it another way, there is a strong link between class and status, as well as between gender inequality and class inequality. However, radical feminists emphasize the role of gender in class conflict within capitalism. Extreme feminists have looked into how men as a group oppress women in all aspects of their lives, including intimate relations. Radical feminists view sexuality in particular as a primary location of male dominance over women. In some ways, feminist theory and Marxist feminism are two different things. Marxist feminists emphasize the importance of capitalism in explaining women's oppression, whereas socialist feminists say that patriarchy and capitalism work together to women are subjected (Gimenez 2018). Researchers disagree on whether patriarchy and capitalism are regarded as one system, capitalist-patriarchy, or two different systems that interact. This viewpoint is known as the 'dual systems' hypothesis because it accords an appropriate amount to the economic, sexuality, and gender structures in describing women's positions in contemporary British society. Unlike radical feminists, who have mostly focused on sexual orientation and aggression, feminist theorists have tended to analyse household chores and paid work.

The authors Morgenroth and Ryan (2018), in their paper, explain in detail the work of butler. The authors explain Judith Butler (1990) urged society to cause "gender problems" by challenging the binary perspective of sexuality, sex or race, and sexual orientation. Sexuality is not an intrinsic, scientifically established trait or an intrinsic personality, but something that is continuously enacted, dependent on, and encouraged by, society conventions. The widely held belief is that sexual identity is binary (male vs. female), necessary, and fundamental, which is seen as social and cultural impacts of sexuality. Furthermore, there seems to be a perception that a newborn conceived with a vagina would develop up to investigate and act as a female, and will be particularly attracted to males as a result of this particular gender. Butler in her studies claimed that few factors such as sex, masculinity, and sexual attraction are the only "comprehensible" identities in contemporary culture. Gender difficulty, as defined by Judith Butler (1990), could've been incorporated into evolutionary developmental psychology and neuroscience interpretive framework, gender disparity, and discrimination against women. Another research is conducted by the author's Hyde et al. (2019) to understand the future concepts of gender and sexuality. The authors explained that the belief that humans are divided into just two sorts of creatures, men and women, a paradigm known as the "binary gender," has had a significant influence on the development of psychology and neuroscience. Conventional wisdom on sexuality as a physical process and its interactions with the other organizations is based on two essential assumptions: (a) believing sexuality is a dimorphic mechanism that can only adopt one form, and (b) the impacts of sexuality on others processes are also dimorphic. Dimorphism can be seen at the degree of a single system member, such as the reproductive organs, which are commonly dimorphic. There are huge costs to sustaining the gender binary, in order to understand the challenges posed by scientific knowledge. The numerous harmful outcomes of sexual discrimination and prejudice are included in these expenses. For such primary motivations, the sexual identity binary needs to be replaced with a gender/sex fundamental idea that emphasizes multitude and diversification, such as several category frameworks with classifications that are not interdependently exclusionary, fluid and enable for the possible consequence that sexual identity is perceived as pointless to the individuality.

Standpoint Theory: Understanding Gender and Sexuality through Personal Experience

From the above analysis, it can be concluded that In recent times it can be seen that many couples are raising their babies without any pronouns because of the complexes in the society. Such concepts arose due to the change in viewpoints in the past and the present. Many sociological studies have focused on the experiences of men and boys while ignoring the perspectives of women and young girls. Study results based on all-male populations account for a large portion of what constitutes sociological knowledge. Sociologists have focused their research on the public realm, specifically employment, which is linked with masculinity. Men have such a tendency to overlook the domestic world, which is linked with women. Sociologists need to come up with hypotheses that may appropriately describe sexual identity divisions affect overall interpretations and hypotheses developed. There are several theories related to gender and sexuality the Feminist theory develops conflict perspective that explains the ill-effects of gender inequality. The Marxist theory considers gender inequality to be a result of capitalism. Women's oppression in British society is considered as capitalistic exploitation of workers, which subjugates women especially as a result of their restriction from salaried employment and their position in the private realm caring for the labour force and raising the next generation of workers. Theory of Standpoint which explains that several of life's fundamental basic and direct events, from birth to who washes away the plates to the response to sexual abuse, had been largely ignored or dismissed politically or socially. The goal of accomplishing social transformation is to provide equal opportunity for men and women. 

Reference

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