Unpacking Competitiveness Within and Between Women: Discussion of “With Friends Like These,Who Needs Enemies?”

F. Diane Barth’s paper (this issue) illustrates how a woman’s competitiveness can set her up for significant psychic conflict and interpersonal strife. Achievement strivings are an arena in which “being for oneself” may undermine—in fantasy, but also in reality—one’s ability to “be for the other,” and vice versa. My discussion contextualizes Barth’s thinking in relation to earlier psychoanalytic explorations of the female gender identity and its development. I elaborate on the special challenges involved in the achievement-oriented and competitive urges of women in particular, and I attempt to parse more fully the diverse nature and motivational wellsprings of such strivings. While recognizing the author’s clear helpfulness to the patient, I raise a few questions about her theoretical position and technical approach in the case study she presents. In particular, I address what seems to me to be a dominant-submissive element that to some extent reenacts the competitive dynamic being analyzed.     

Gender,residual deviance,and social control

Focusing on gendered aspects of informal social control, we use a societal reaction approach to examine 15 years of students’ gender norm violation projects. Three predictions regarding differential reaction to women's and men's residual deviance are (a) that there will be no gender differences, (b) that those with less power and status (women) will be sanctioned more or (c) that those with more status resources (men) will be monitored and reacted to more. We discuss methodological advantages of using norm violations to study informal social control. Findings contribute to a more complete theory of how societal reactions to residual deviance are mediated by gender. There were large gender differences in what students chose to do regarding norm violations and little change over time. Male “deviants” were censured more in terms of negativity, strength of reaction, laughter, and homophobia; female “deviants” were censured more as targets of verbal and sexual remarks. We discuss the need for more attention to gender‐specific types of reaction and the role of homophobia in informal social control of men.     

“God is the creator of all life and the energy of this world”: German intersex Christians’ reflection on the image of God and being created in God’s image

ABSTRACT

Intersex individuals are often told they are not human beings because they do not neatly fit into the categories of “female” and “male.” Many are made to feel like monsters. Christianity enforces this model of sexual dimorphism with the notion that to be a human being means to be created clearly “female” or clearly “male” in the image of God. This paper draws on interviews with German intersex Christians to explore their diverse images of God and what it means to be created in God’s image with the goal of creating new “conditions of possibility” that represent the full range of human sex/gender.     

Adult perceptions of the infant as a function of gender labeling and observer gender

Four hundred sixty four adults rated a videotape of the activities of a 22-month-old infant whose gender was labeled differently with different subject groups. One group was told that the infant was male, a second group was told that the infant was female, and a third group was told that the infant was hermaphrodite, i.e., appeared to have the genitals of both sexes. Some subjects rated each activity as being either masculine or feminine (forced-choice method) while other subjects rated each activity with a neutral choice also available (free-choice method). The data indicate that, for both methodological groups, labeling the infant “male” resulted in significantly more activities being rated masculine than feminine, whereas the converse was true when the infant was labeled “female.” A label of “hermaphrodite” resulted in an approximately equal ratio of activities being rated as masculine and as feminine. There were no significant interaction (Gender Label × Observer Gender) for the forced-choice group, but for the free-choice group, significant interaction between child's gender label and observer's gender was found.     

The Overtaking of Undertaking?: Gender Beliefs in a Feminizing Occupation

How gender beliefs are used to explain the division of labor in an occupation can recreate or disrupt inequality. Our study contributes to the growing body of research examining which narratives about gender segregation in male-dominated occupations are more or less oppressive to women. We asked 13 female and 9 male U.S. funeral directors to account for the shifting gender composition of their field. Most funeral directors explained women’s entry into funeral directing and justified gender segregation in the occupation by drawing on gender beliefs about women’s superior nurturing “natures” and men’s “innate” superior physical strength and scientific ability. Our findings demonstrate the strength of cultural gender beliefs for shaping narratives about gender and work and suggest ways individuals grapple in their everyday interactions with “degendering” skills in feminizing occupations.     

The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters on Gender Stereotyping and Female Self-Concept

The present study utilized an experimental design to investigate the short term effects of exposure to sexualized female video game characters on gender stereotyping and female self-concept in emerging adults. Bussey and Bandura’s (1999) social cognitive theory of gender development and differentiation was used to explicate this relationship. Undergraduate students (N?=?328) at a large U.S. Southwestern university participated in the study. Students were randomly assigned to play a “sexualized” heroine, a “non-sexualized” heroine, or no video game; then completed an online questionnaire. Female self-efficacy was negatively affected by game play with the sexualized female character. Results cautiously suggest that playing a sexualized video game heroine unfavorably influenced people’s beliefs about women in the real world.     

Objective Being and “Ofness” in Descartes

It is generally assumed that Descartes invokes “objective being in the intellect” in order to explain or describe an idea’s status as being “of something.” I argue that this assumption is mistaken. As emerges in his discussion of “materially false ideas” in the Fourth Replies, Descartes recognizes two senses of ‘idea of’. One, a theoretical sense, is itself introduced in terms of objective being. Hence Descartes can’t be introducing objective being to explain or describe “ofness” understood in this sense. Descartes also appeals to a pretheoretical sense of ‘idea of’. I will argue that the notion of objective being can’t serve to explain or describe this “ofness” either. I conclude by proposing an alternative explanation of the role of objective being, according to which Descartes introduces this notion to explain the mind’s ability to attain clear and distinct ideas.     

Implicit Science Stereotypes Mediate the Relationship between Gender and Academic Participation

While the gender gap in mathematics and science has narrowed, men pursue these fields at a higher rate than women. In this study, 165 men and women at a university in the northeastern United States completed implicit and explicit measures of science stereotypes (association between male and science, relative to female and humanities), and gender identity (association between the concept “self” and one’s own gender, relative to the concept “other” and the other gender), and reported plans to pursue science-oriented and humanities-oriented academic programs and careers. Although men were more likely than women to plan to pursue science, this gap in students’ intentions was completely accounted for by implicit stereotypes. Moreover, implicit gender identity moderated the relationship between women’s stereotypes and their academic plans, such that implicit stereotypes only predicted plans for women who strongly implicitly identified as female. These findings illustrate how an understanding of implicit cognitions can illuminate between-group disparities as well as within-group variability in science pursuit.     

No country for girly men: High instrumentality men express empathic concern when caring is “manly”

Two studies explored the relationship between men’s gender role identity (as measured by the Bem Sex Role Inventory) and their experience of empathic concern (situational empathy). In both, participants read of a man coping with his friend’s death while being exposed to one of three subliminal primes: “real men care”/“caring is strength,” “girly men care”/“caring is weakness,” or “people are walking.” Congruent with previous research, higher femininity (expressivity) predicted greater empathic concern irrespective of prime. The real men/strength primes tended to: (1) increase empathic concern among high instrumentality men; and (2) link empathic concern to predominantly positive projected coping responses when participants thought of themselves in the survivor’s situation, consistent with the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Thus, subtly framing empathic concern as a positive emotional response that is congruent with an agentic self-appraisal seems to boost traditionally masculine men’s willingness to experience it.     

Killing the father,Parmenides: On Lacan’s anti-philosophy

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj ?i?ek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same.

     

Heidegger,Communal Being,and Politics

There are two critical, but opposite interpretations of Heidegger’s understanding of being as a social ontology. One charges Heidegger with adhering to an anti-social “private irony,” while the other charges him with promoting a “self-canceling” totality. The current essay replies to these two charges with a discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of being as “communal being,” which is implicated both in the early Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world-with-others” and in the later Heidegger’s keyword of Ereignis. It argues that Heidegger’s understanding of being as communal being is neither identical with totalitizing publicness nor the same as voluntaristic egotism. According to Heidegger, both the publicness of das Man and voluntaristic egotism are the real threats to humanity at present. Because of them, we human beings are in danger of being uprooted from the earth upon which we—as communal beings—have already and always dwelled and lived with others from the very beginning of human history.     

Gender Categories as Dual-Character Concepts?

Seminal work by Knobe, Prasada, and Newman (2013) distinguished a set of concepts, which they named “dual-character concepts.” Unlike traditional concepts, they require two distinct criteria for determining category membership. For example, the prototypical dual-character concept “artist” has both a concrete dimension of artistic skills, and an abstract dimension of aesthetic sensibility and values. Therefore, someone can be a good artist on the concrete dimension but not truly an artist on the abstract dimension. Does this analysis capture people's understanding of cornerstone social categories, such as gender, around which society and everyday life have traditionally been organized? Gender, too, may be conceived as having not only a concrete dimension but also a distinct dimension of abstract norms and values. As with dual-character concepts, violations of abstract norms and values may result in someone being judged as not truly a man/woman. Here, we provide the first empirical assessment of applying the dual-character framework to people's conception of gender. We found that, on some measures that primarily relied on metalinguistic cues, gender concepts did indeed resemble dual-character concepts. However, on other measures that depicted transgressions of traditional gender norms, neither “man” nor “woman” appeared dual-character-like, in that participants did not disqualify people from being truly a man or truly a woman. In a series of follow-up studies, we examined whether moral norms have come to replace gender role norms for the abstract dimension. Implications for the evolution of concepts and categories are explored.     

Adolescent Bullying,Relationships, Psychological Well-Being,and Gender-Atypical Behavior: A Gender Diagnosticity Approach

In this study we used a gender diagnostic (GD) approach to examine the associations between gender-atypical behavior and gender role (masculinity—M and femininity—F), bullying, peer relationships, and psychological well-being in a large community sample of 15-year-olds. GD showed little relationship with gender role. Irrespective of sex, M was positively, and F negatively associated with being a bully. “Gender atypical” boys reported more victimization, more loneliness, fewer male friends, and greater distress than their “gender typical” peers. After accounting for M and F, “femaleness” (“gender atypical” boys and “extremely gender-typed” girls) was associated with psychological distress. GD is an effective and unobtrusive method to identify a group whose vulnerability should be recognized by psychology, health, and education professionals.     

Contextual Influences on Gender Segregation in Emerging Adulthood

To better understand contextual influences on gender segregation in emerging adulthood, we examined the extent to which college students (N?=?285; 178 females, 107 males) from the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. nominated same-gender peers when listing their close friends, preferred workmates for projects in English and math classes, and preferred partners for “hanging out.” We used an established, self-report measure to examine the relation between preferences to affiliate with same-gender peers and students’ gender-typed activity involvement (i.e., involvement in activities stereotypically associated with one’s own gender). The majority of close friends nominated by both women and men were same-gender peers, but men nominated relatively more same-gender friends than did women. Workmate nominations for class projects followed gender stereotypes. Women were least likely to nominate same-gender workmates for a math project compared to an English project or to “hang out.” Men were least likely to nominate same-gender workmates for a project in English compared to a math project or to “hang out.” For both women and men, nominating more same-gender friends and workmates was associated with less involvement in activities stereotypically associated with the other gender. The stability of emerging adults’ preferences for same-gender peers across contexts is discussed.     

Gender Differences in Single Parents’ Living Arrangements and Child Care Time

Although seemingly identical in their circumstances, research has found single fathers to engage less in child care than single mothers. Guided by both a structuralist and a “doing gender” perspective, we examine gender differences in single parents’ child care time and whether the presence and gender of coresident adult kin moderate this association. Our sample drawn from the 2003–2013 American Time Use Survey (N?=?10,985) consists of non-cohabiting single parents aged 18 to 64 who live with at least one own child under age 18. We first found that single fathers spent slightly less time in all types of child care except play than single mothers. Either coresident adult female kin or adult male kin, or both predicted single parents’ spending less time in child care activities, particularly management. Living only with adult male kin also predicted single parents’ lower time spent in teaching. Lastly, gender differences in single parents’ child care time were larger in any child care, play, and teaching when living with both adult female kin and male kin than when living without any kin. The presence of both female kin and male kin may relieve the parent of tasks gender-appropriate to the related household members. Additional research about the contexts of gender differences in single parents’ child care enriches our understanding of parenting by men and women.     

“Stroppy Bitches Who Just Need to Learn How to Settle”? Young Single Women and Norms of Femininity and Heterosexuality

The (older) single woman has evoked numerous negative sociocultural stereotypes in recent (Western) history, with “being single” a fraught position for (heterosexual) women. Have shifts toward gendered equality changed this stereotype? We interviewed 21 young heterosexual women in Aotearoa (New Zealand) about their experiences of being single. We focused on young adulthood (ages 25–35), a time when having children might be a particularly salient concern. Women’s experiences of being single were inextricable from their wider experiences of heterosexuality and pressures to enact a “desirable” femininity. A thematic analysis identified four patterned sets of pressures, which we conceptualised as rules that govern hetero-relating: (a) pressures and expectations surrounding beauty standards, (b) (allowing for) aspects of male control and superiority, (c) acceptable/unacceptable gendered standards of sexuality, and (d) eventual and mandatory (heterosexual) coupling (by a “certain” age). Participants remained largely subject to traditional ideas around heterosexual gender roles, with identifiable punishments for “unfeminine” behaviour. Many women did articulate resistance and critique, even as most also expressed complicity. In this context, singledom was constructed as a “defective’ state,” even if desired, suggesting it remains a complex and precarious position to occupy.     

Contextual Effects on the Gendered Division of Housework: A Cross-Country and Cross-Time Analysis

Individuals who espouse an egalitarian gender ideology as well as economically independent women benefit from a more egalitarian division of housework. Although these two individual-level characteristics affect the gender division of housework, each suggests a different mechanism; the former is anchored within an economic logic and the latter within a cultural one. Using data of 25 countries from the 2002 and 2012 “Family and Changing Gender Roles” modules of the International Social Survey Program, we examine whether a country’s mean gender ideology and women’s labor force participation (WLFP) rate have a distinct contextual effect beyond these individual-level effects. We predict that the division of housework between married or cohabitating partners will be more egalitarian in countries with higher WLFP rates and in countries with more egalitarian attitudes, even after controlling for the two variables at the individual level. Given the cross-country convergence in WLFP, but not in gender ideology, we expect the effect of WLFP to decline over time and the effect of gender ideology to remain salient. Indeed, our multi-level analysis indicates that the net effect of WLFP, which was evident in 2002, had disappeared by 2012. By contrast, the net contextual effect of gender ideology, which was not significant in 2002, had become an important determinant of housework division by 2012. We conclude that further changes will depend on a country’s prevalent gender ideology because the equalizing effect of WLFP on the division of housework may have reached its limit.

     

The perception of face gender: The role of stimulus structure in recognition and classification

The perception of face gender was examined in the context of extending “face space” models of human face representations to include the perceptual categories defined by male and female faces. We collected data on the recognizability, gender classifiability (reaction time to classify a face as male/female), attractiveness, and masculinity/femininity of individual male and female faces. Factor analyses applied separately to the data for male and female faces yielded the following results. First, for both male and female faces, the recognizability and gender classifiability of faces were independent—a result inconsistent with the hypothesis that both recognizability and gender classifiability depend on a face’s “distance” from the subcategory gender prototype. Instead, caricatured aspects of gender (femininity/masculinity ratings) related to the gender classifiability of the faces. Second, facial attractiveness related inversely to face recognizability for male, but not for female, faces—a result that resolves inconsistencies in previous studies. Third, attractiveness and femininity for female faces were nearly equivalent, but attractiveness and masculinity for male faces were not equivalent. Finally, we applied principal component analysis to the pixel-coded face images with the aim of extracting measures related to the gender classifiability and recognizability of individual faces. We incorporated these model-derived measures into the factor analysis with the human rating and performance measures.