Gender Vertigo by Barbara Risman
Just as every society has an economic and political structure, so too every society has a gender structure. Barbara Risman’s original research on single fathers, married baby boom mothers, and heterosexual egalitarian couples and their children, reported in this intriguing book, weaves together qualitative and quantitative data from surveys, interviews, and observation. Risman shows how gender as a social structure affects individuals, organizes expectations attached to social positions, and becomes an integral part of social institutions. She provides empirical evidence that human beings are capable of enduring and affective intimate relationships without gender as the central organizing mechanism. The data also strongly indicate that men and women are capable of changing gendered ways of being throughout their lives. In her analysis of nontraditional families, Risman finds that gender expectations can be overcome if couples are willing to flout society and risk "gender vertigo." Most children of such families adopt their parents’ beliefs about gender, but they do struggle with the contradictions between parental ideology and folk knowledge and expectations in peer relationships. The author argues that we can create a just society only by creating a society in which gender is an irrelevant category for social life—a post-gender society.
Barbara J. Risman is currently a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 2018, she is a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham University, U.K. She was previously Alumni Distinguished Research Professor at North Carolina State University. Professor Risman is mostly recently the author of Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford University Press, 2018) and with Virginia Rutter, Families As They Really Are (Norton, 2010, 2015). Professor Risman has served the profession in a variety of roles, as President of the Southern Sociological Society, Vice-President of the American Sociological Association, President of the Board of Directors for the Council on Contemporary Families, and President of Sociologists for Women in Society. In 2005, Dr. Risman received the Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. In 2011, Dr. Risman received the American Sociological Association's Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. She has also received mentoring awards from Sociologists for Women in Society and from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Carissa Froyum is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Northern Iowa. She is co-editor of Inside Social Life (Oxford) and Creating and Contesting Inequalities (Oxford) and former deputy editor of The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her work on how identities and emotions reproduce inequality appears in Qualitative Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, and is forthcoming in Symbolic Interaction.
William J. Scarborough is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the economic and cultural determinants of gender wage gaps across labor markets in the U.S. He has published multiple journal articles and book chapters on issues related to gender and race inequality.
Carissa Froyum is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Northern Iowa. She is co-editor of Inside Social Life (Oxford) and Creating and Contesting Inequalities (Oxford) and former deputy editor of The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her work on how identities and emotions reproduce inequality appears in Qualitative Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, and is forthcoming in Symbolic Interaction.
William J. Scarborough is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the economic and cultural determinants of gender wage gaps across labor markets in the U.S. He has published multiple journal articles and book chapters on issues related to gender and race inequality.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780300080834 |
| ISBN 10 | 0300080832 |
| Title | Gender Vertigo |
| Author | Barbara Risman |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Yale University Press |
| Year published | 1999-09-10 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |