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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Foreword -- Contents -- I. MEDICAL MEN -- Medical Men as Professionals -- 1. Doctors and Lawyers: A Comment on the Theory of the Professions -- 2. Professionals and Unions in Israel -- 3. The Professionalization of Ayurvedic and Unani Medicine -- 4. Incomplete Professionalization: The Case of Pharmacy -- 5. "Socialized Medicine" in Practice -- Medical Men in Practice -- 6. A Brief History of Medical Practice -- 7. Changing Attitudes of the Medical Profession to Specialization -- 8. Pathology: A Study of Social Movements Within a Profession -- 9. A Sociology of Psychiatry: A Perspective and some Organizing Foci -- 10. Military Psychiatry: The Emergence of a Subspecialty -- 11. Ethnic and Class Differences Among Hospitals as Contingencies in Medical Careers -- 12. Authority and Decision-Making in a Hospital: A Comparative Analysis -- 13. Processes of Control in a Company of Equals -- II. MEDICAL WORK -- Managing Patients -- 14. The Everyday Life of Institutionalized "Idiots" -- 15. Institutionalized Practices of Information Control -- 16. Uncertainty in Medical Prognosis, Clinical and Functional -- 17. Equalitarian and Hierarchical Patients: An Investigation Among Hadassah Hospital Patients -- 18. Professionalism and the Poor-Structural Effects and Professional Behavior -- Defining and Diagnosing Illness -- 19. The Criminal and the Sick -- 20. Decision Rules, Types of Error, and Their Consequences in Medical Diagnosis -- 21. The Art and Science of Nondisease -- 22. Disability as Social Deviance -- 23. Malingering: "Diagnosis" or Social Condemnation? -- 24. A Conceptual Analysis of the Accident Phenomenon -- Producing Medical Knowledge -- 25. Culture and Symptoms- An Analysis of Patients' Presenting Complaints -- 26. Deviance as Performance: The Case of Illness

In this pathbreaking book, a well-known feminist and sociologist-who is also the Founding Editor of Gender & Society-challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber views gender as wholly a product of socialization subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation. In her new paradigm, gender is an institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences.Drawing on many schools of feminist scholarship and on research from anthropology, history, sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, Lorber explores different paradoxes of gender:-why we speak of only two "opposite sexes" when there is such a variety of sexual behaviors and relationships;-why transvestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites do not affect the conceptualization of two genders and two sexes in Western societies;-why most of our cultural images of women are the way men see them and not the way women see themselves;-why all women in modern society are expected to have children and be the primary caretaker;-why domestic work is almost always the sole responsibility of wives, even when they earn more than half the family income;-why there are so few women in positions of authority, when women can be found in substantial numbers in many occupations and professions;-why women have not benefited from major social revolutions.Lorber argues that the whole point of the gender system today is to maintain structured gender inequality-to produce a subordinate class (women) that can be exploited as workers, sexual partners, childbearers, and emotional nurturers. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize economic, educational, and cultural resources or the positions of power

Mit den Gender-Paradoxien erscheint das wichtigste Buch der in New York lebenden Feministin und Soziologin Judith Lorber in deutscher Sprache. Auf der Grundlage eines sozial-konstruktivistischen Ansatzes zeigt Lorber, wie die Unterschiede zwischen Frauen und Männern ebenso wie die Unterschiede zwischen Hetero- und Homosexuellen in der sozialen Praxis hergestellt und institutionalisiert werden. Dabei wird Gender als soziale Basis-Institution konzeptualisiert, die - vergleichbar den Institutionen Familie, Ökonomie und Religion - das soziale Leben in allen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen grundlegend strukturiert und prägt. Darüber hinaus nimmt Judith Lorber eine kategoriale Differenzierung zwischen Sex, Sexualität und Gender vor. Jede dieser Kategorien ist sozial konstruiert, und jede entzieht sich bei genauerer Betrachtung einer binären Ordnung.Zielsetzung des Buches ist ein Beitrag zur Beseitigung der Ungleichheiten zwischen Männern und Frauen. "Wenn die gender-Ungleichheit abgeschafft werden soll, müssen die gender entweder in jeder Hinsicht völlig gleichgestellt werden oder gender darf nicht länger eine zentrale soziale Kategorie sein, die bestimmt, welcher soziale Status einem Menschen zugewiesen wird

Degenderung - "Entgeschlechtlichung" - gehört in ein Kontinuum von Ansätzen, bei denen Feministinnen Gender nutzen, um Forschungsfragen zu formulieren und politische Aktionen auf den Begriff zu bringen. Richtet man den Blick auf die Menschen und die soziale Interaktion in den modernen Industriegesellschaften, tritt Gender zurück. Richtet man jedoch den Blick auf die sozial strukturierenden und organisierenden Praktiken, tritt Gender wieder hervor. Ein tiefgreifender Wandel setzt dabei voraus, dass Degendering sowohl auf der strukturellen und organisatorischen als auch auf der persönlichen und interaktiven Ebene stattfindet. Die Autorin stellt einige Thesen aus ihrem neuen Buch "Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change" vor und thematisiert folgende Ziele von Degendering im Rahmen feministischer Theorie: (1) Beseitigung von Geschlechterdifferenzierungen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt und in der Familie; (2) Streben nach Vielfalt innerhalb der Geschlechterregime; (3) multidimensionale Politik in Koalitionen mit Frauen und Männern; (4) Entwicklung von Vorstellungen für eine Gesellschaftsordnung ohne Einteilungen nach Geschlecht. (ICI2)

Women's status in the Western world has improved enormously, but the revolution that would make women and men truly equal has not yet occurred. I argue that the reason is that gender divisions still deeply bifurcate the structure of modern society. Feminists want women and men to be equal, but few talk about doing away with gender divisions altogether. From a social constructionist structural gender perspective, it is the ubiquitous division of people into two unequally valued categories that undergirds the continually reappearing instances of gender inequality. I argue that it is this gendering that needs to be challenged by feminists, with the long-term goal of doing away with binary gender divisions altogether. To this end, I call for a feminist degendering movement.

Most sociological research designs assume that each person has one sex. one sexuality, and one gender, congruent with each other and fixed for life. Postmodern feminists and queer theorists have been interrogating bodies, desires, and genders, but sociology has not. Deconstructing sex, sexuality, and gender reveals many possible categories embedded in social experiences and social practices. As researchers, as theorists, and as activists, sociologists have to go beyond paying lip service to the diversity of bodies, sexualities, genders. The sociologist's task should be to deconstruct the conventional categories of sex, sexuality, and gender and build new complex, cross‐cutting constructs into research designs. There are revolutionary possibilities inherent in rethinking the categories of gender, sexuality, and physiological sex. Sociological data that challenge conventional knowledge by reframing the questions could provide legitimacy for new ways of thinking. Data that undermine the supposed natural dichotomies on which the social orders of most modern societies are still based could radically alter political discourses that valorize biological causes, essential heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles in families and workplaces.

This paper explores the reasons why women who are themselves fertile might consent to undergo in vitro fertilization (1VF) with an infertile male partner. The reasons often given are desire to have that particular man's child, or altruism, giving a gift to the partner. Although ethically, the decision should be completely woman's prerogative, because IVF programs usually treat the couple as a unit, she may be offered few other options by the medical staff. In social terms, whether the woman is or is not infertile may be immaterial because in either situation, if she wants to try to have a biological child and maintain the relationship, she may have to make a patriarchal bargain and undergo in vitro fertilization.