Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!think!mintaka!bloom-beacon!ora!daemon
From: holstege@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Mary Holstege)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: BOOK REVIEW: _Gender Blending_
Message-ID: <1990Feb8.162125.20758@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 8 Feb 90 16:21:25 GMT
References: <25C26AAE.27180@paris.ics.uci.edu> <922@calmasd.Prime.COM> <25C9FF6C.16128@paris.ics.uci.edu> <22150.25ce9c96@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
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In article <22150.25ce9c96@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>In _Gender:  An Ethnomethodological Approach_, by Suzanne Kessler and
>Wendy McKenna, they discuss this.  Their goal was to determine how
>gender attribution is made, i.e. how a person decides (usually within
>a few seconds) whether the person before them is male or female.  It
>seems that if you have facial hair, or one of a few other cues, you
>are male.  If not, you are female.  Parts of the book are a scream.

What is interesting to me is how often my husband is taken as female *when he
is with me*.  It doesn't happen when he is by himself.  He is not feminine in
his demeanour, and although his hair is fair so that incipient beard does not
show up as well as it might, he does not look like a woman by any stretch of
the imagination.  What I think is going on is that he is somewhat shorter than
the average man, but quite a bit shorter than me, and while he has plenty of
muscles, his build (bones) is quite slight.  I think people see *me*, recognize
a female, and then apply the stereotype -- tall big man + short small woman --
have it fail, and address us as 'ladies'.  It happens surprisingly often, even
at places like the grocery store where we go often enough to be known by sight.

Do they talk in this book about this sort of effect?

                              -- Mary
                                 Holstege@cs.stanford.edu

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