Gender is a social system that defines relevant categories of people, proscribes appropriate attributes and behaviors to those categories, and regularizes power relations among individuals and between society and individuals. Children are socialized very early to recognize, understand, and enact gender, and adults understand and enact it as well.
Gender matters lots of ways. We’ll focus on two related ways in particular: first, on citizen identities and relationship with the state, and second, on candidates’ and leaders’ identities and the perceptions of them by citizens. Less directly, we will touch on the ways the substance of politics—political issues—take on gender connotations, sometimes explicit, sometimes more subtle.
To do this, we will develop theoretical tools, drawing first from psychology, sociology, anthropology, feminist theory, and beyond, and then from American history. We will consider the theoretical place of gender in American politics. Has politics been constructed as a symbolically masculine realm? What effects does that have on citizens' attitudes and behavior? Is that changing? We will also take up a number of topics, including the unavoidable gender gap, the role of masculinity and femininity in conditioning our perceptions of issues and political candidates, the ways gender, politics, and society have interacted historically, and the ways race and gender (and class) interact in conditioning political behavior.
In addition, this course will emphasize research. We will pay careful attention to the different methods and types of evidence that scholars from diverse fields use to learn about gender and the social and political world. We will explore the ways that science informs our understanding of gender, as well as the reciprocal influence of those ideas on how we understand what the data show. And we will conduct and present research ourselves: in class exercises as well as in the culminating research project.
This course has a prerequisite: you must have taken at least one course either on gender or on political behavior.
PLAP 4140—Gender and American Political Behavior
Semester
n/a
Year offered
2018