Write a cohesive argument regarding each question.
1.Explain how the social production of gender relations works to reproduce the conditions of production in contemporary times. Doing that you might explain how and when the ‘self-desiring subject’ as a concept was produced in western societies and how that was aligned with different modes of production/consumption in these societies.
2.How can we understand the raising of standard national language(s) in line with Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatuses? Drawing on Anderson (1997) Explain how and when the ‘nation’ as a social concept grew in Europe, why and in what meaning it is ‘imagined’!
3.From the short ethnographic text by Alsultany “Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves”, Specify and explain at least one structures of inequality that demonstrate throughout the text. In your answer demonstrates how race is a socially and historically constructed concept?
4.Candace West and Don Zimmerman, in a famous article called “doing gender” (1987), analyze the way in which gender is constituted in routine interaction. People engaging in everyday conduct – across the spectrum from conversation and housework to interaction styles and economic behavior – are held accountable in terms of their presumed ‘sex category’ as a man or woman. The conduct produced in the light of this accountability is not a product of gender, it is gender itself. We make our own gender, but we are not free to make it however we like. Our gender practice is powerfully shaped by the gender order in which we find ourselves. That is what West and Zimmerman imply when they say we are ‘held accountable’ for our gendered conduct.” [Connell, Raewyn. 2009. Gender in World Perspective. Malden, Mass: Polity Press. 73-74]
adding in these two questions when answering number 4 (
How do your ideas about gender change if you think of it as something that people do instead of something that they are?
How are people “held accountable” for gendered conduct? Who or what holds them accountable and what are the results of this?)
5.According to Emily Martin: ‘gender biases shape the way biological scientists represent male and female reproductive systems in medical textbooks and popular texts.’
– In what ways biological scientific discourse is culturally conditioned. In your answer, you should also bring to the discussion Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’.
Incorporating Karl Marx
