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Deviance, Gender, and the Human Body

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Required readings for this unit include the following:

Introduction

In Unit 4, we build on the sociological principles that we have learned so far in Sociology 1111 and apply them to three specific areas of sociological research: the study of crime and deviance; the study of sexuality and gender; and the study of disabilities, health, and the human body.

One of the principal insights of contemporary sociology is that a focus on the social construction of different social experiences and problems leads to alternative ways of understanding and responding to them. With respect to each of the three topic areas of Unit 4, the sociologist often confronts a legacy of entrenched beliefs concerning innate biological disposition or the individual psychopathology of persons considered abnormal: the criminal personality, the sexual or gender “deviant,” the ill or disabled individual. However, as Ian Hacking observes, even when these beliefs about kinds of persons are products of objective scientific classification, the institutional context of science and expert knowledge is not independent of societal norms, beliefs, and practices (see Ian Hacking [2006] “Making Up People,” which is a supplementary reading for Unit 4). The process of classifying kinds of people is a social process that Hacking calls “making up people” (Hacking, 2006, p. 23) and Howard Becker (1963) calls “labeling.”

Part of the problem of “social problems” is that the social process of labeling some kinds of persons or activities as abnormal or deviant limits the type of social responses available. The major issue is not that labels are arbitrary or that it is possible not to use labels at all, but that the choice of label has consequences. Who gets labeled by whom and the way social labels are applied have social repercussions. Therefore, it is necessary to use the sociological imagination to address the consequences of social labelling at both at the individual and social levels.

Figure 4.1. Commit Sociology T-shirt. Source: Canadian Sociological Association.Figure 4.2. Commit Sociology T-shirt. Source: Canadian Sociological Association.

Unit 4 of Sociology 1111 is divided into three topics:

Topic 4.1: Deviance and Crime

In topic 4.1, we examine the theme that crime and deviance are social constructs that vary according to the definitions of crime, the forms and effectiveness of policing, the social characteristics of criminals, and the relations of power that structure society. It surveys the different approaches that symbolic interactionism, functionalism, and critical sociology take to explain why crime and deviance occur. It also uses the sociological framework to explore current issues concerning why anxiety about violent crime seems to be increasing at the same time that the violent crime rate has decreased, why aboriginal Canadians are overrepresented in Canadian prisons and police arrest statistics, and why prisons continue to be the dominant means of criminal social control despite their well-documented problems and the existence of alternatives.

Topic 4.2: Genders and Sexualities

In topic 4.2, we focus on the themes of gender and sexuality: their diversity and their intersection with relationships of power and stratification. The topic explores the social dimensions of gender and sexuality through the perspectives of functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and critical sociology. Key to the sociological analysis of gender and sexuality is the disentanglement of their biological components from their social components. Gender and sexual norm-breakers like intersexuals, transsexuals, gays, and lesbians provide an invaluable opportunity to study the heteronormative social processes that create gender and sexual “normals.”

Topic 4.3: The Body—Disabilities, Health, and Medical Sociology

In topic 4.3, we examine the human body from a sociological perspective. What is the relationship between society and the human body? How does this relationship influence how we think about health and what it means to be healthy? The key themes in this topic include the study of social variables of health (social epidemiology), the process of medicalization, and who or what gets to be defined as disabled. Disabilities, illness, and mortality are not simply physiological qualities but depend, in important respects, on the social context and parameters in which they are defined as problems.

Learning Objectives

After you successfully complete Unit 4, you will be able to:

Topic 4.1: Deviance and Crime

The sociological study of crime, deviance, and social control is especially important with respect to public policy debates. The political controversies that surround the question of how best to respond to crime are difficult to resolve at the level of political rhetoric. Often, in the news and public discourse, the issue is framed in moral terms and therefore, for example, the policy alternatives get narrowed to the option of either being “tough” on crime or “soft” on crime. “Tough” and “soft” are moral categories that reflect a moral characterization of the issue. A question framed by these types of moral categories is not falsifiable (recall the discussion of falsifiability in Chapter 2) and cannot be resolved by using evidence-based procedures. Posing the debate in these terms narrows the range of options available and undermines the ability to raise questions about what responses to crime actually work.

Unit 4, Topic 4.1 Activities

For Topic 4.1, work through the following activities; as you work through each focus question, make notes and write your answers:

Activity 4.1a: Deviance and Crime

In Introduction to Sociology (2nd Canadian Ed.), read Chapter 7 “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control” and take notes using the following focus questions:

Define the following terms:

Activity 4.1b: Debating Mandatory Minimum Sentences—The Safe Streets and Communities Act

Listen to the CBC “The Current” podcast Re-Evaluating Mandatory Minimums and take notes using the following focus questions:

CBC “The Current” with Anna Maria Tremonti. Re-Evaluating Mandatory Minimums.

Source: CBC (2012). http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2012/03/01/re-evaluating-mandatory-minimums. Used with Permission.

Transcript of CBC “The Current”. Re-Evaluating Mandatory Minimums

Activity 4.1c: Public Health Approaches to Drug Control in Canada

In your textbook, read the section on risk management as a mode of social control. Then read the Health Officers Council of British Columbia Backgrounder “A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada.”

Answer the following questions:

Topic 4.2: Genders and Sexualities

What does it mean to have a gender? What does it mean to have a sexuality? These are more difficult questions to answer than it might appear at first glance. To “have” a gender or a sexuality seems to be based in biology—either in the genetic codes that initiate the hormonal sequence that results in the anatomical differences between the sexes or in the more obscure biological and evolutionary processes that produce instinctual sexual desire. However, since the 1970s, sociologists have distinguished between sex as a biologically defined quality that is more or less constant through time and across cultures, and gender and sexuality as socially defined qualities (Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 3). This distinction is key to being able to examine gender and sexuality as social variables rather than biological variables.

Figure 4.3. The Berdache or two spirit people of North American native traditions were recognized and honoured as a separate category of sexuality and gender, one in which the spirits of both masculine and feminine were seen to cohabit in the body.

Source: Historic photo of a Navajo same sex couple, (1866).

With respect to the biology of gender and sexuality, Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) argues that a body’s sex is too complex to fit within the obligatory dual sex system, and ultimately, the decision to label someone male or female is a social decision (p. 4). Her analysis is borne out in the supplementary reading for Topic 4.2 (“The Five Sexes”) and in the discussion of the famous John/Joan case (the life of David Reimer) in your textbook Chapter 12 “Gender, Sex and Sexuality.”

Unit 4, Topic 4.2 Activities

For Topic 4.2, work through the following activities; as you work through each focus question, make notes and write your answers:

Activity 4.2a: Genders and Sexualities

In Introduction to Sociology (2nd Canadian Ed.), read Chapter 12 “Gender, Sex, and Sexuality” and take notes using the following focus questions:

Define the following terms:

Activity 4.2b: The Five Sexes

Read Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough” and take notes on the following focus questions:

Activity 4.2c: The Gender Trap

Listen to the CBC “Ideas” podcast The Gender Trap, Part 1 and take notes on the following focus questions:

Topic 4.3: The Body—Disabilities, Health, and Medical Sociology

Whereas human bodies have not changed radically since the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens 200,000 years ago, our relationship to our bodies has changed. Due to the change in the relationship to our bodies over the last 150 years—in the forms of bio-medical knowledge, nutrition, hygiene, and sanitation, etc.—on average we are healthier, taller, and live longer than our ancestors. Biopolitics is the term used to study the modern concern with administering the life of the population, whether this occurs through macro-level regulatory strategies like the institution of national public health insurance systems or micro-level disciplinary relationships like individual therapies proscribed by doctors. The ways in which the life of the population are administered have had direct consequences for the organization of health practices, the formation of identities, and the life chances of different segments of the population. In sociology, the life of the body is analysed not so much in physiological terms but in terms of the social processes and structures that define how we relate to our bodies.

Figure 4.4. Charles Atlas’s body building ads began to appear in magazines and comic books in the 1930s and 1940s. They became an iconic site through which boys and men were enticed to see their identity in relationship to their bodies.

Source: CHARLES ATLAS, http://www.charlesatlas.com. The Insult That Made A Man Out Of “Mac”. Retrieved from: http://www.charlesatlas.com/classicads.html

Unit 4, Topic 4.3 Activities

For Topic 4.3, work through the following activities: as you work through each focus question, make notes and write your answers:

Activity 4.3a: The Body—Disabilities, Health, and Medical Sociology

In Introduction to Sociology (2nd Canadian Ed.), read Chapter 19 “Health and Medicine” and take notes using the following focus questions:

Define the following terms:

Activity 4.3b: Making Up People

Read Ian Hacking’s “Making Up People” and take notes on the following focus questions:

Activity 4.3c: The Country of the Blind

View the video clip disCover: The Meaning of Disability with Rod Michalko.

In his book The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness, Michalko (1998) begins his chapter “What is Blindness?” by recounting the H. G. Wells story “The Country of the Blind.” In this story, Wells imagines a sighted person who through misfortune arrives in a society of blind people in a remote corner of the Andes who have been cut off from the outside world for generations. The memory of sightedness has become a myth that no one believes in anymore. This society is organized on the basis of blindness, and the sighted man soon finds that his ability to see is an impairment that proves a major impediment to his ability to survive and fit in.

The story illustrates how blindness typically is defined as a problem in the context of the meeting of blindness and sightedness. Since blindness usually is perceived from the point of view of the sighted world in which the loss of vision would be a tragedy, it is characterized as a trouble, problem, or adversity that needs to be fixed or coped with. This is the basis of a kind of discrimination called ableism. According to Michalko (1998), “The expression ‘sighted world’ reminds blind persons that they are living in the country of the sighted and that they must learn its language, customs, and folkways. There is no ‘multiculturalism’ in this country when it comes to blindness” (p. 27). The sighted and the blind do not coexist on equal footing.

However, in the video clip disCover: The Meaning of Disability with Rod Michalko, he also describes this problematization of disability as an occasion for the “normals” to look at themselves.

Take notes on the following focus questions:

Critical Disability Services (2011). Rod Michalko: The Meaning of Disability. CDSMMU.

Source: https://cdsmmu.wordpress.com/media/. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvPsShRIcS8.

Transcript of Rod Michalko: The Meaning of Disability

Activity 4.3d: Obesity and Social Networks

In your textbook, review the section on “Social Networks” in Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations” and then the section “Obesity: The Last Acceptable Prejudice” in Chapter 19. Recall also the Christakis and Fowler reading, “In the Thick of It” in Activity 3.2b: Network Analysis in Unit 3.

View the video clip The Spread of Obesity in Social Networks and then view the video clip Obesity and Social Networks. Take notes on the following focus questions:

The Spread of Obesity in Social Networks.

Source: Christakis, N. (2010). Used with permission. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJfq-o5nZQ4.

To view a version with transcript, please see the original source.

References

Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Michalko, Rod. 1988. The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Assignment 4 (Weight 15%) – Instructions and Submission

Assignment 4 covers material presented in Unit 4 of the course and is worth 15% of your total course mark. In Part A, you must write two short paragraph answers of 150–250 words each and, in Part B, you must write one short essay of 400–600 words. In Part C, you will participate in two Discussion forums. You can contribute at any time throughout the course, but please complete the discussion posts for Part C before submitting Assignment 4 to your Open Learning Faculty Member. Each discussion has two activities. To be eligible for marks, you must complete both the activities in each discussion forum. Refer to the “Getting Started in Moodle” link at the top of the Course Guide tab if you are unsure of how to use Moodle’s discussion forum tool.

Part A contributes 20% of your mark for Assignment 4 (2 x 10%); Part B contributes 40%; and Part C contributes 40% (4 x 10%).

Before you begin, under the Assignments Overview tab, review the Assessment Criteria and Submission Instructions for Parts A & B.

Part A: Short Answer Questions

Answer two of the following questions in short paragraph answers of 150–250 words each. (10 marks each)

  1. Contrast three modes of social control: penal social control, discipline, and risk management. Which of these modes applies to the Health Officers Council of British Columbia Backgrounder “A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada”? (Note: See Activity 4.1c “Public Health Approaches to Drug Control in Canada” in Unit 4.)
  2. Why are aboriginal Canadians overrepresented in Canadian prisons and police arrest statistics? (Hint: In your answer, define overrepresentation and cite the statistics that show the degree of aboriginal overrepresentation.)
  3. What is the difference between sex and gender? Explain the importance of this distinction for understanding the dominant gender schema as an ideology.
  4. What are the main characteristics and causes of gender inequality in wage earnings in Canada?
  5. What is medicalization? Why is it an issue? Provide an example to illustrate your answer.
  6. To what degree is obesity a social rather than a physiological phenomenon? (Note: See “Making Connections–Obesity: The Last Acceptable Prejudice” in your textbook and Activity 4.3d: “Obesity and Social Networks” in Unit 4.)
  7. What are the basic distinctions between the functionalist, critical sociology, and symbolic interactionist approaches to health, illness, and medicine? Provide an example of each to illustrate.

Part B: Short Essay

Answer one of the following questions in an essay of about 400–600 words. (40 marks)

  1. At a time when the rate of violent crime has decreased, why has the anxiety about violent crime increased? What are the repercussions of this anxiety for contemporary debates about being “tough on crime”? In your answer, please explain the reasons why violent crime has decreased in Canada. (Note: In addition to the information in your textbook, see the debate about mandatory minimum sentences in Activity 4.1b “Debating Mandatory Minimum Sentences—The Safe Streets and Communities Act” in Unit 4.)
  2. What do sex and gender nonconformists like transsexuals and intersexed people reveal about the relationship between sex and gender? (Note: On intersexed people and the “five sexes,” see Fausto-Sterling’s article in Activity 4.2b “The Five Sexes” in Unit 4. In your essay, make sure to clearly define sex and gender.)
  3. Are there biological limits to equality between the genders? (Note: In addition to the information in your textbook, see the discussion of the research on the biology of gender differences in Activity 4.2c “The Gender Trap” in Unit 4).
  4. Why are autism, blindness, and health more than just biological phenomena? (Note: On autism and blindness—in addition to the information in your textbook—see Activities 4.3b “Making Up People” and 4.3c “The Country of the Blind” in Unit 4.)

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