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theses

This dissertation investigates gender definition in recently published peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of sociology. I use content analysis to examine various aspects of gender definition in 37 analytic categories, most notably explicit definition and references to “sex,” “female,” and/or “male.” I apply these codes to two samples of articles about gender. The first sample represents the field of sociology as a whole; it includes 100 randomly selected articles with “gender” in their title, published between 2006 and 2010 in 49 sociology journals with the highest 2010 five-year impact factor scores. The second sample represents the sociological subfield of sociology of gender and comprises 68 articles that include all of those with the word “gender” in their title published in Gender & Society between 2006 and 2010. I found that gender is relatively infrequently defined explicitly and that the terms “sex,” “female,” and “male” are used frequently. In the general sociology sample, 12% of the articles include an explicit definition of gender and 76% of the articles include references to “sex,” “female,” and/or “male.” In the sociology of gender sample, 26.5% of the articles include an explicit definition of gender and 57.4% include references to “sex,” “female,” and/or “male.” Taken together these findings suggest that both sociologists who write about gender in non-gender specific journals and sociologists who publish in the subfield of sociology of gender do not explicitly define gender and often use “sex,” “female,” and “male” as identifiers without any intention to invoke biological or reproductive essentialism. My results can be explained primarily by the pervasive, variable, embedded, and taken-for-granted character of gender in the empirical social world that appears to make it difficult for scholars to “see” it clearly. The differences between samples reflect the general orientation of sociology of gender as a subfield towards gender not only as its principal area of study but also as an analytic problem that requires conceptual investigation and explanation. I conclude that gender scholars in sociology might benefit from insights from the concepts literature, gender theory, and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields where gender is conceptualized more explicitly.

ETD_5512

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Anna Mary Harewood

doi:10.7282/T3QV3JTR

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.