Glossary

abstinence-only sex education	Sex education curricula written from the perspective that less information about sex will reduce teenagers' curiosity about sex.
ageism	Practices or preferences that afford unearned advantages to people in particular age groups.
AIDS	Acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, a life-threatening, sexually-transmitted disease that has claimed the lives of millions of people across the globe.
androcentrism	A system of evaluation that uses male experience as the normative standard by which to assess all behavior.
affirmative action	A public-policy approach designed to eliminate the current effects of past discrimination by supporting the increased inclusion of historically disadvantaged groups, including women, in employment and education.
anti-racist values/policies	A philosophical approach that advocates policy-making and community organizing towards the construction of a racially just society.
biographical-level analysis	An approach to analyzing the social world that focuses on the experience of the individual in the context of wider social structures and cultural patterns.
bisexual	A sexual-identity category centered on an individual's experience of desire for members of both sexes.
black feminist thought	A theoretical model elaborated by Patricia Hill Collins that centers on the lived experience of black women in the context of a society structured on racial and sexual oppression.
class	A sociological concept used to differentiate between social groups (e.g., "upper class," "middle class," and "working class") stratified by differing amounts of wealth, prestige, and power.
closeted	A term used to refer to a person who masks his or her sexual identity for the sake of conforming to a social norm.
collective action	Spontaneous or planned group behavior designed to create social change or disruption.
comprehensive sex education	An approach to sex education centered on the philosophy that more information about sex allows individuals to make better-informed decisions about their sexuality.
compulsory heterosexuality	Coined by Adrienne Rich, this term refers to the widespread cultural and institutional pressure on individuals to behave in ways that reproduce dominant patterns of heterosexuality (e.g., cross-sex dating and marriage, gender conformity, male dominance, and female subordination).
conservative	An approach to social or political issues that advocates the maintenance of the status quo.
culture	The language, norms, values, habits, and material goods that constitute the life-way of a society.
discrimination	The practice of favoring members of one group over another without reference to an individual group member's unique qualities or qualifications.
domestic labor	The work required to maintain households, including childcare.
domestic violence	Physical abuse within the context of an intimate relationship, including dating, cohabiting, and marital situations.
ethics	Philosophical standards for determining fair or moral behavior.
ethnicity	An identity founded on the traditions of a particular racialized or nationally-oriented social group.
ethnocentrism	The practice of using one's own culture as a reference point for evaluating the values, beliefs, and habits of members of another culture.
essentialism	The belief that social differences between groups are a result of biological differences between them.
exploitation	The practice of taking advantage of the labor, resources, or bodies of groups or individuals.
family	A group bound by ties of affection, interdependence, biology, or legal standards.
femininity	The social traits considered typical for biological females in any given culture.
feminism	The philosophical commitment to the end of sexual inequality and to the full empowerment of women.
feminist research	Research that locates women and women's experiences at the center of discovery and analysis; research that aims to empower both women researchers and women and children who serve as the center of feminist research.
First-wave feminism	Late 19th- and early 20th-century social movement that focused on winning suffrage for women in the United States.
fundamentalism	An ideological commitment to preserving texts understood to be foundational in any particular religion.
gay	A term used to refer to men attracted to men; sometimes used generically to refer to lesbians and bisexuals of both sexes as well.
gender	The social characteristics associated with biological femaleness or maleness in any particular society; a set of social arrangements, patterns, structures, and institutions designed to produce and reinforce social differences between men and women.
gendered division of labor	The expectation that a society's work is divided along the lines of gender; the division of household labor into men's tasks and women's tasks.
gender inequality	Socially structured differences in the wealth, privileges, resources, opportunities, prestige, and power granted to men and women in any particular society.
gender performance	Concept popularized by the work of philosopher Judith Butler, who argues that individuals' "performances" of gender are situated in social contexts and subject to the influence of will, desire, and social control.
gender socialization	The process through which individuals come to recognize themselves as male and female and to identify the social standards of gendered behavior for their sex.
glass ceiling	An artificially imposed upper limit on women's advancement in business and educational settings.
health	A state of social, physical, and psychological well-being.
hegemonic masculinity	Sociologist R.W. Connell coined this phrase to describe the pervasiveness and privileging of masculine norms, values, and agendas in Western societies.
heterosexual	A sexual-identity category centered on attraction to members of the "opposite sex"; a term used to describe cross-sex sexual behavior.
heterosexism	A form of psychological or institutional prejudice, bias, or favoritism that treats heterosexuality and the institutions with which it is associated (i.e., marriage, the nuclear family, etc.) as superior to other forms of relationships and families.
homophobia	Literally, a fear of homosexuality, gay and lesbian people, and the cultural patterns and institutions with which they are associated.
homosexual	An archaic term developed by medical psychiatry to pathologize individuals, particularly men, who are attracted to members of the same sex. Most professions have replaced this term with the more respectful terms "gay," "lesbian," and "bisexual" favored by the LGBT rights movement.
hysterectomy	A surgical procedure to remove part or all of a woman's reproductive system.
inequality	The unequal distribution of goods, resources, privilege, and power among social groups.
intersexed	The status of having both male and female genitalia or reproductive organs.
lesbian	A sexual identity category that refers to women attracted to women.
lesbian-bashing	Violence against women based on real or perceived lesbian identity.
liberal	A political commitment to the idea that social change is best effected by working within existing legal, political, and social structures.
male dominance	A social pattern that allows men to control the legal, social, and political systems that, in turn, control women's lives.
man ("mankind")	A term historically used as a generic reference to humanity, "man" has been displaced by more accurate constructions, including "men and women" and "people."
masculinity	The social characteristics associated with holding the status of biological maleness.
men	A social category to which adult males are assigned.
menopause	The cessation of menstruation, signaling the end of a woman's reproductive years.
misogyny	The hatred of women.
new reproductive technologies	Reproductive strategies that depend upon scientific or technological elements to achieve conception, pregnancy, or birth.
norms	Social standards for behavior in any given culture.
objectivity	Philosophical position that people may perceive reality in ways that do not reflect their social interests; modern science values the assumption that knowledge may be objectively generated.
oppression	The condition of living without meaningful choices or prospects as a result of externally-imposed limitations on one's freedoms.
pink-collar jobs	Those segments of the labor market to which women have historically been assigned, and which focus on providing services to those in white-collar positions (e.g., secretarial support).
postmodernism	"Postmodernity" refers to the current historical era and its spirit of skepticism toward the Enlightenment concepts of perpetual progress, absolute truth, and the superiority of science to other ways of knowing, as well as an attitude of openness toward global cultural integration, new technologies, and social ambiguity.
poverty	Sociologists conceptualize poverty as absolute and relative; absolute poverty refers to the absence of essential food, housing, and resources; relative poverty refers to a relative lack of resources among some groups or individuals compared to others in a given society; it is possible to experience relative poverty without living in absolute poverty.
power	Sociologists traditionally define power as an individual's ability to accomplish one's will despite the resistance or objections of others.
privilege	A set of benefits that accrues to individuals or groups which allows them easier access to resources and greater assumptions of propriety.
protest	Collective behavior designed to communicate dissatisfaction with a set of circumstances or conditions.
queer	A term used to refer to a wide range of phenomena associated with transgressive gender and sexuality.
race	A group of people defined by biological traits that are defined as socially significant.
radical	A political orientation toward social change that emphasizes building institutions, structures, norms, and values outside of those already in existence (unlike liberal approaches, which emphasize producing change by working within existing structures).
rape	Non-consensual sexual penetration.
reliability	A standard used in evaluating research results by determining whether the same outcomes could be observed by other researchers in other settings or by the same researchers in repeated trials or observations; the quality of consistency in findings.
religion	A system of beliefs and practices oriented toward the sacred.
same-sex sexuality	Sexual contact between members of the same-sex; a term sometimes used by historians and sociologists to describe such behavior by people who may not have identified themselves-or been identified by others-as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Second-wave feminism	Associated with the women's liberation/women's rights movement that began in the United States in the late 1960s, Second-wave feminism included among its objectives women's right to sexual autonomy and safety, women's right to reproductive freedom, and women's right to workplace and educational equality.
sex	Sociologists use the term "sex" to refer to the biological statuses "male," "female," and "intersexed" and to differentiate sex from gender, as a system of social organization that influences how we occupy the social categories "men" and "women."
sexual dimorphism	A species-level differentiation into two distinct reproductive categories.
sexual harassment	Unwanted attention to one's sex, gender, or sexuality.
sexism	The belief that one sex is naturally superior to another; a set of practices designed to ensure that privileges are unequally distributed between the two sexes.
sex segregation	The socially imposed system of organization based on sex.
social constructionism	The philosophical or theoretical perspective that our common realities are produced through processes of collective negotiation, rather than existing beyond the influence of our interpretation or definition.
social institution	A feature of social structure (e.g., religion, education, institutionalized medicine) that addresses one of the basic needs of members of a society.
social change	The processes through which historical events, collectives, individuals, and institutions modify the norms, values, and patterns of a given society.
social movements	Organized efforts to change or maintain particular patterns, systems, or conditions in society.
socialization	The process through which individuals communicate to others-usually neophytes or children-the norms, values, rules, and codes of conduct for a particular group; the process through which individuals internalize a society's norms and values.
social structure	A stable pattern of social organization or behavior.
society	Individuals and groups that share a common culture within a well-defined geographic territory.
socioeconomic status	The location an individual or group occupies in the system of social organization shaped by the distribution of economic resources.
standpoint theory	An understanding, derived from feminist and black feminist thought, that our understandings of the world are shaped by the social locations we occupy, rather than existing independently from our social experience.
status	A position within society; individuals occupy statuses that carry with them behavioral expectations called "roles."
sticky floor	A metaphor used to communicate how sexism makes it difficult for women to rise above entry-level jobs in the labor market.
straight	A colloquialism referring to heterosexual identity or sexuality.
stratification	A system of social hierarchy that may be organized around differences in wealth or power, as well as around ascribed statuses such as race or sex.
structural-level analysis	Social analysis that explains individuals' experiences by situating them within the context of broader social patterns, institutions, and power relations.
suffrage	The right to vote; the women's suffrage movement in the United States resulted in the legalization of women's right to vote in 1919.
theory	A set of propositions or analyses designed to show the relationships between any number of variables or phenomena; feminist theory seeks to explicate the relationships among gender, sexuality, and power as these create male dominance and maintain women's subordination.
Third-wave feminism	A set of philosophical positions associated with contemporary young feminists, including a rejection of rigid gender roles and sexual identity categories and continuing support for long-held feminist goals of empowering women, ending misogynist violence, and achieving workplace equality.
transgendered	Presenting the social characteristics of the sex opposite one's assigned sex at birth or presenting social characteristics of both sexes, sometimes with the support of hormonal therapy.
transnational economies	Economic systems that transcend national boundaries.
transsexual	A person who uses surgery and/or hormonal therapy to change his or her sexual status (i.e., from female to male or vice versa).
validity	A measure of veracity in empirical research used to indicate whether a study actually describes the phenomenon it claims to describe.
wage-gap	The difference between the average earnings of men and women in the labor market.
white-collar employment	Occupations associated with managerial or supervisory responsibilities; occupations that involve more intellectual skill than manual labor.
womanist	A term in black feminist thought used to describe a perspective informed by both feminism and racial consciousness or to describe a person who uses this perspective to analyze the social world.