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Situating usage
Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Sun, 8 Jan 1995 11:35:00 PST
McCreery writes;
" While passing through the [military] Academy, both men and women are
trained to take orders from members of other races and genders.
Is gender a non-issue? No. Gender is marked..."
and also writes:
"While men are free to form close friendships and hang around each others'
rooms shooting the bull, a man and woman who display the same
behavior will be called down for violating (1). Add (2) and it's hard
indeed for a woman to become just one of the 'guys.' "
It seems that two models of equality are involved here. One assumes that
equality does not require denial of maleness and femaleness and
differences in maleness and femaleness (e.g., different number of pushups
required as a response to biological differences in muscularity of females
and males) and that equality is measured through the whole command
system being independent of sex and 'race'. The other model assumes that
equality requires that females be able to suppress their "femaleness" and
become one of the 'guys' else they will be excluded from informal networks
created in non-formal interactions. The latter is not, however, simply a
female/male conflict, but the nature of informal interactions which serve to
define who is included and who is excluded; i.e., some males are also
excluded in such interactions.
What conceivably might occur in the longer
run is a redefinition of who is to be included in and who is to be excluded
from these informal networks which transcend sex differences (i.e., with
women taking on high ranking positions the reason for such networks as means
of access to persons in power and authority can no longer afford to be based
on exclusively male members of networks), hence the kind of informal
interactions in which these networks are created may evolve in their form as
it becomes more and more 'costly' to exclude precisely those persons whose
future positions of power are the raison d'etre for putting the time and
effort into the creation of these networks.
D. Read
READ@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU
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