Title: Gender and Social Movements - Sociology of Gender - iResearchNet
Headings: Gender and Social Movements
Gender and Social Movements
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Content: Initial works focused on documenting women’s movements, including feminist and non-feminist movements, and explaining their emergence and development. A second phase of work began to analyze gender in social movements more broadly, including masculinity, and to analyze the intersections between gender, race, class, and nationality in social movements. Most recently, numerous scholars have begun to examine the ways that movements are gendered in their origins, collective identities, frames and discourses, organizational structures, tactics, and political and cultural opportunities. In doing so, they contribute to a rethinking of the basic concepts of the field of social movements. These phases are similar to those for scholarship on gender more broadly, which initially focused on documenting women’s experiences and remedying male bias, next on gender as an institution and the intersections between gender and other major forms of social inequality, and lastly on reformulating basic sociological knowledge and theory based on a perspective that makes gender central. Sociological work on gender and social movements thus reflects the influence of the feminist movement on the academy. Many social movements have targeted the social structures, culture, and interactional norms around gender. These include feminist movements, which in many countries focused first on gaining basic political rights such as the vote and the right to own property, and then progressed in later waves to addressing other forms of inequality between women and men ranging from responsibility for child raising and household labor, discrimination in paid employment, sexuality, reproductive rights, health care, stereotyping in the arts and popular culture, election to public office, and so on. Parallel to these movements are anti-feminist movements, which tend to emerge in response to feminist movements and also target gender directly in an attempt to forestall or roll back changes. Other movements have been organized around gender, without taking gender as a central or explicit target.