Gender and Qualitative Methods

Helmi Järviluoma, Pirkko Moisala, Anni Vilkko

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781446230558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

`The book will be of particular value to those wishing to understand and review the importance of gender within their research studies. It provides a clear and critical view of some of the social theories concerning gender, society and experience? - Nurse Researcher

Gender and Qualitative Methods outlines the practical and philosophical issues of gender in qualitative research. Taking a social constructionist approach to gender, the authors emphasize that the task of the researcher is to investigate how gender/s is/are defined, negotiated and performed by people themselves within specific situations and locations.

Each chapter begins with an introduction to a specific method and/or research subject and then goes on to discuss gender as an analytical category in relation to it. Areas covered include: field work; life story; membership categorisation analysis; and analysis of gender in sound and vision.

Written in a clear and accessible way, each chapter contains practical exercises that will teach the student methods to observe and analyze the effects of gender in various texts and contexts. The book is also packed with examples taken from women and men?s studies as well as from feminist and other gender studies.

1

Performing and Negotiating Gender

Short history of and overview of gender studies

The Study of men and masculinities

Sexuality and gender

Performativity of gender

Masculinity and femininity

Gender identity

Gender produced by research methods

The necessity of positioning

Deconstructing the tie between ‘feminity’ and ‘qualitive’ methodology

Conclusion: towards gender analysis

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This book has grown out of the conviction that gender, the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity, cannot be avoided in any research activity. It is present in all human action and its products, including researchers and their research. Gender is an important criterion in identifying ourselves and is central to the way we perceive and structure the world and events in which we participate. It influences all aspects of our being, of our relationships and of the society and culture around us. Gendered conceptualizations, norms (what is considered to be proper behaviour), values (the personal characteristics that are highly valued) and attitudes (the kinds of prejudices that come into play when we meet a person of a different gender), have a profound effect on both the personal and social, the micro and macro levels of our lives.

Gender must be taken seriously in every kind and at every level of research, from practical choices to methodological questions, as well as at every stage of the research process. This is a conviction which we have formed not only as gendered human beings but also as scholars working in a range of fields, including social politics, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and anthropology. In our opinion, the duty of researchers is not only to explore but also to question the cultural patterns relating to gender in all human actions and its products. Ignoring gender in qualitative research is the same as ignoring one of the most fundamental elements in the natural sciences.

In the analysis of qualitative materials, gender can be identified and analysed at all levels: at the individual/personal level (identifications, subject positions), and in the socially constructed and maintained discourses (‘texts’, ideologies and social institutions). Likewise, of course, in between these levels: how subject positions are negotiated within the prevailing gender systems, and how gender discourses produce individual gender positions.

In research work, gender should be understood as a concept requiring analysis, rather than as something that is already known about. The common-sense understanding of gender should be seriously interrogated. What is our common understanding of gender? How is it represented in cultural action and products? Which kind of power structures does it produce? And what are the mechanisms by which we construct our understanding of gender?

The field of gender studies ranges from radical feminist studies to areas without any overt feminist content. Even though women’s studies and feminist theories have provided the major contribution to this field, gender analysis has also been conducted from various other political positions. Gender has been an issue both for the political interests of feminism and the intellectual interests of sociology and other sciences. Critical engagement with the contemporary social world in terms of the ways in which the usually asymmetric gender differences are produced, maintained and resisted – that is, critical feminist theory – has not been the only driving force of gender studies. Within sociology, for example, gender has also been examined as the social construction of difference, though without necessarily addressing questions of inequality and power, which are central themes of feminist theory. Only those gender studies which are committed to the struggle against sexism and patriarchal power can be regarded as feminist in nature (Moi, 1990: 18–21).

Institutionally, many study programmes which previously were called ‘women’s studies’ are changing their names to ‘gender studies’. While this shift of focus from women to gender might reduce the radical feminist impulses of these programmes, it more comfortably accommodates a broader range of questions regarding gender, such as the construction of masculinity and sexuality, areas of study which have, however, also traditionally belonged to the curriculum of women’s studies.

In this textbook, we take the social constructionist approach to gender while simultaneously examining the mechanisms of power included in these constructions. As Deborah Cameron (1996: 84) has emphasized, gender should not be used as an explanation of things, because it is itself a social construction in need of an explanation. In addition to examining gender roles, we should ask what the mechanisms are which create/construct such roles. Thus, gender studies focus on the exploration of how the categories of men and women, masculinity and femininity, as well as possible other gender categories, are socially constructed. What ideas and judgements are attached to them? What are the mechanisms which maintain, support or challenge the prevailing gender system? How is power negotiated in gender constructions?

The concept of ‘gender’ refers to the social and cultural construction of ‘biological’ sexes. Our understanding of biology is also based on social and cultural knowledge. Gender and sex are ‘created and recreated when practiced and discussed’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 119). They are closely related, although not because one is ‘natural’ while the other represents its transformation into ‘culture’. They are both cultural categories, that is, they are culturally constructed ways of describing and understanding human bodies and human relationships. Gender and sex affect our identities, our understanding of self and our relationships with others (Glover and Kaplan, 2000: xxv–xxvi.)

The categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ may have some biological grounding in visual, aural and otherwise observable features, but these categories are simple homogeneous groups. The number of conceptualized sexes and genders not varies in different cultures. Categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ are not the only possible sexes, and other categories are acknowledged, for example, transsexuals and androgynes. Our cultural categories of gender are even more numerous and varied. The socio-cultural possibilities implied in being a man or a woman, and what is socially expected of each, vary enormously depending on place, period and personal situation.

According to Linda Nicholson (1994: 101) our comprehension of what a woman is evolves from both differences and sameness. A woman is thus a map of intersecting similarities and differences, an internal coalition. The same may be said of men. Many social factors, such as class, race, ethnicity and age, play essential roles in the construction of gender. The gender of an Indian woman is different from that of a British girl and the gender of an old man differs from that of a teenage boy. A study focusing on gender should recognize the variations that are to be found in particular times and places. Gender ‘is more relational rather than essential, structural rather than individual – a property of systems rather than people’ (Marx Ferree and Hess, 1987: 17). Gender is a fluid social category, which is always being negotiated anew.

Stereotypical images of women and men, opinions about purported qualities of masculinity and femininity, as well as all beliefs concerning males and females, can be examined as aspects of a gender belief system (see Deaux and Kite, 1987: 97). A gender belief system – or dominant gender schema, as suggested by Devor (1989) – is working on us from the moment we are born. We learn the prevailing sex roles in the course of enculturation (primary learning of our first cultural surroundings) and socialization (the process of becoming a member of a society).

Psychological studies have questioned if socio-emotional differences between male and female babies are assigned by birth – if they are biological – or cultural. If newborn female babies are more sensitive to aural and social stimulus and more able to maintain eye contact with the carer than male babies, as psychological research (Weinberg et al., 1999) has revealed, is this actually a result of differences in mothers’ behaviour arising from the child’s gender? Lamb et al. (1979: 97) argue that learning to recognize masculine and feminine styles of interaction begins long before a child can conceptualize gender. It also has more impact on their sex-role development than their parents’ attempts to shape their gender behaviour.

Gender stereotypes within a culture are pervasive in a baby’s surroundings. J. Bridges (1993) made a qualitative analysis of 60 randomly chosen congratulatory cards for parents of newly-born male children, and of 60 cards for those of female children. The study revealed that qualities emphasizing activity (pictures of running, building or wrestling boys), were associated with a male child, whereas passive qualities were associated with a female child. Girls were pictured watching the activities of the male children or sitting in the middle of roses and hearths. Similar kinds of stereotypical thinking were observed in the behaviour of those mothers, who more easily accepted shyness in their daughters’ than in the sons’ behaviour (Hinde et al., 1993). Through these kinds of gender stereotypes children learn the prevailing gender system. At the age of two months children can differentiate male and female voices (Leinbach and Fagot, 1993) and, at one year they can connect a male voice with a male face and a female voice with a female face (Poulin-Dubois et al., 1994). We learn to make gendered observations in early childhood, but gendering the world and its events around us continues as one of the central modelling systems throughout our lives.

Case 1.1 Agnes, learning to be a woman

A famous and instructive example of the cultural construction of the institutionalization of gender construction is the study by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1967). He studied Agnes, who was a patient sent, in 1958, to the psychiatric clinic of UCLA. Agnes had been born as a boy with boy’s genitals, and raised as boy until the age of seventeen. However, at the age of twelve she also had started to get a female shape and breasts.

When Agnes came to UCLA she was nineteen and nothing revealed that she wouldn’t ‘really’ be a woman: she had a shapely figure, she was tall, had pretty features and fine fair hair, and she dressed as a girl. She wanted to have a sex-change operation and was very determined to achieve womanhood.

Garfinkel begun to study Agnes as a ‘case’ in order to learn about the ways in which gender-identity is produced and refined through observable but subtle practices, which however, are part of institutionalized social interaction. As John Heritage has said, the result of the study was a profound analysis of gender as a constructed social fact (1996: 181).

Agnes had become a very sensitive ethnographer of gender. She was conscious of the connections between behaviour and gender in all kinds of everyday social situations. The key situations were dressing up and applying make-up, and the problems of ‘proper female behaviour’, i.e. sitting/walking/talking like a woman. It was hard for Agnes to learn not to talk like a man.

Part of the problem was that she had little if any of the same biographical experiences as other girls. She had to achieve womanhood through undetectable, difficult and unending work. Heritage (ibid.: 186) describes Agnes’ situation with a metaphorical question: What is it like to build a ship when it is already sailing? Such was the difficulty that faced Agnes in her attempt to construct gender identity through countless socially ordered micro-practices.

For Garfinkel, the constant differentiation between the cultural specificities of men and women was the outcome of study, not the starting point. The reproduction of these institutionalized genders is supported by processes based on moral accountability, which become actualized in everyday reactions towards people, who deviate from ‘the natural’ gender (see also Kessler and McKenna, 1979).

According to Deborah Tannen (1990: 8), who studied conversational practices of American men and women, gender socialization is so strong that girls and boys grow up in what are essentially different cultures. Even if one declines to adopt these roles and, instead, contests them, this also takes place in relation to the socially acknowledged gender roles. However, all boys and girls do not become socialized in the same way even though they may live in the same environment. This has been strongly confirmed by the so-called constructionist approach to learning (among others Leinbach et al., 1997). A girl growing up primarily among boys may develop physical skills that require strength and speed, whereas another girl in the same kind of male environment might emphasize qualities which usually are called feminine. In opposition to earlier psychological studies, which explored the differences between the genders and assumed homogeneity within each, more recent studies look for differences within genders.

Gender is also a fundamental principle of the organization of social arrangements and action. Almost everything in our surroundings is gendered in one way or another. For instance, we speak of Mother Earth, and das Vaterland (the fatherland, patria); various cultural practices are taken for granted as being gendered, so that, for example, heavy metal music associates more with masculinity than with femininity. In addition, most often our gendered understandings of the world and its phenomena are hierarchically ordered; certain qualities are accorded more value and respect than others because of the nature of their gendering. Gender, with the power attached to it, is a subject of constant negotiation in our daily social lives. In addition, today’s representations of gender in the Western world are often, as Theresa de Lauretis (1987: x) has asserted, produced by a number of distinct ‘technologies of gender’ such as cinema or advertising. The impact of these mediated images of gender on people’s gender beliefs and gender performance cannot be underestimated.

Case 1.2 Masculinity in heavy metal music

Robert Walser (1993) studied gender constructions in heavy metal music demonstrating how it reproduces and inflects patriarchal ideologies and assumptions. To him, ‘heavy metal is, as much as anything else, an arena of gender, where spectacular gladiators compete to register and affect ideas of masculinity, sexuality and gender relations’ (ibid.: 111). Notions of gender are represented in the texts, sounds, images, and practices of heavy metal. In addition, fans of heavy metal experience confirmation and alteration of their gendered identities through their involvement with the music (ibid.: 109).

Simultaneously when heavy metal replicates the dominant sexism of contemporary society it also is a space in which female fans and female performers can experience power, dominance, rebellion and flirting with the dark side of life, usually designated as male prerogatives (ibid.: 131–2).

Case 1.3 Gendered theory of classical music

In Western classical music, the main theme or melody which is repeated throughout a symphony or other kind of work, is regarded as the masculine theme, whereas, the second theme, the role of which is to challenge the main theme but which, however, remains secondary and doomed to ‘lose the game’ to the main theme, is called the feminine theme (see, for example, McClary, 1991).

The negotiation of power is part of gender. The feminist branches of gender studies (see, for example, Marshall, 2000: 155) remind us that even though gender can be approached as a discourse, an ideological phenomenon, a fiction or a construction, it also has practical and material consequences for both women and men. Gender is not an ‘innocent’ social category or an unimportant aspect of our identity. Instead, it may open or close doors in our lives, limit or broaden our possibilities to live our lives to the fullest.

Gender studies is a wide field, which takes as its points of departure various methodological understandings of the term ‘gender’. Gender can be regarded as (1) a social variable (what do men do, what do women do); (2) a system (gender order and gender hierarchy; that is, what kind of system do genders create in relation to each other, how genders are hierarchically ordered); (3) a social construction (how gender/s are socially and culturally produced in language, social action and cultural products); or (4) a political tool (how gender ideologies can be reconstructed and changed). Thus, gender analysis is not simply interested in examining what men/women are or do. It examines how the world surrounding us is gendered and how it affects us, our identity, everyday activities, as well as all other products of human behaviour. It studies how gender is taken up, regularized, institutionalized, resisted, contested and transformed.

In this book we introduce different methods for recognizing gender/ing in qualitative research. We show ways in which gender can be analysed in different kinds of research materials, in life stories, interviews and conversations, in sound, music, film and video. We also discuss the roles it plays in fieldwork and research reporting. Our approach to gender is to examine it as a social construction, which involves the whole of the research process. The discussion is supported mostly by feminist theories and studies although we also acknowledge gender studies which are not feminist in nature. However, the driving force behind most gender studies – women’s studies, men’s studies, the study of masculinities, gay, lesbian, and queer studies – is anti-sexism, the political objective of resisting asymmetrical relationships between and within genders.

Case 1.4 Finnish gender order represented in music

Even though Finland was among the very first countries in the world where women were allowed to vote (in 1907), and despite the fact that women’s work outside the home is more a rule than an exception and that the present legislation and social security system attempt to advance gender equality, gendered practices as well as ways of behaving and thinking in Finland are far from representing gender equality (see Anttonen et al., 1994). This obvious contradiction between policies of gender equality and practices of gender inequality creates a particular cultural climate based on the tension of negative gender difference. Negative gender difference is embedded in all aspects of Finnish culture. Even though the state school system (there are few private schools in Finland) gives equal opp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Performing and Negotiating Gender
• 2 Gender and Fieldwork
• 3 Gender and Life Stories
• 4 Gender in Membership Categorization Analysis Helmi Jarviluoma and Irene Roivainen
• 5 Not only Vision - Analysing Sound and Music from the Perspective of Gender
• 6 Research Reporting and Gender
• Bibliography
• Index