Sociology terms

1. Gendered Socialization is the process in which one learns the “correct” way to live according to their gender. I learned at a very young age what is socially acceptable and expected from a man. When I was younger I had a friend named Dylan Baldwin. Like most kids our age, Dylan was very emotional. One day, I was over at his house after school and Dylan was having a very rough day. The kids at school had been teasing him as usual and when he opened the refrigerator only to find out that his favorite yogurt was finished he finally cracked. Dylan began crying hysterically and his father rushed to his side only to yell remarks such as, “Men don’t cry Dylan! Stop that! Be a man!” I was shocked because whenever I started crying my parents would comfort me and tell me everything would be okay. I had no idea that men weren’t supposed to cry. I thought everyone cried and that it was a part of human nature to express how you feel. This is an example of men being taught to suppress their emotions in an attempt to seem “manly” and “macho” because in today’s society emotions are made out to be feminine and weak.
2. In Scheper Hughes’ passage, “Death without Weeping” she perceives “indifference” to be the mother’s of Alto do Cruzeiro nonchalant attitude towards the death of their children. In a town where “the average woman experiences 9.5 pregnancies, 3.5 child deaths, 1.5 still births” and not to mention “seventy percent of all children deaths occur within the first six months of life” it is not hard to see why a mother would start to have a “Why even bother?” type of attitude. The mother’s attribute a version of life to the babies. If a baby is born prematurely or is born with a sickness the mother’s are told by the doctors, “This baby does not want to live. This baby it not strong enough”. The mothers’ indifference to the baby deaths is linked to the indifference that the Church and State has on the issue. Hughes believes that the mothers are forced to become desensitized to the deaths because the Church and State doesn’t care and makes no effort to alleviate it. The mother’s have adapted their mindset of the high child birth rates to correlate with that of the Church and States’.
3. In William J. Wilson’s writing, “Jobless Ghettos”, he argues there is a “lack of coherent organization of the present” in America today. The absence of no structured work creates unemployment problems in the inner city. Instead of people getting up in the morning and going to work they stay in their communities with their time not being organized at all. There are no dependable role models within the ghettos. Kids don’t grow up seeing their parents go to work and be responsible, so this leads to patterns of behavior. It can be described as a never-ending cycle that almost guarantees the carrying on of unemployment in the future.
4.There are two different stories about Rosa parks’ heroic act of refusing her seat on the bus. There is the standard story, which is written about in children’s books and has been passed down from generation to generation, and the real story. The standard story presents Parks as an elderly African-American seamstress that after a long day of work refused to give her seat to a white man. The standard story makes out the incident to be completely spontaneous and in the moment. The truth is that Rosa Parks was a well-known middle-aged civil rights activist in her Montgomery, Alabama community. The incident was actually a planned event amongst her and the other activists. Why did the activists promote the standard story instead of the real story? The activists wanted the incident to have a big impact and not to just be dismissed as “another civil rights episode”. The activists knew it wasn’t accurate but they were strategically motivated. They knew that if people thought she was an innocent elderly woman minding her business that refused her seat in the spur of the moment after a long day of work, they would take her side and she would seem more heroic. They knew that if people found out that she was a civil rights activist and the even has been planned prior, people would think that she was just looking to cause trouble. Activists framed it this way in an attempt to try to put a greater impact on the dilemma.
5.In Robert Granfield’s “Making it by Faking it” explains the importance of cultural and social capital when making the transition from the working class to a prestigious law school. Cultural capital are the non-materialistic things that such as verbal skills, table etiquette, and style of dress that the upper class possesses. Social capital is also known as networking, the upper class limits their networking to each other. When students from the working class go to prestigious law schools where most of the students are from the upper middle class and the upper class they find themselves experiencing culture shock. At first, first year working class students have a great sense of pride for making it there despite their class. However, they eventually face a great deal of stigma, or undesired differentness due to them feeling out of place. They feel out of place due to the undesired difference of their class background. They often handle class stigma by changing and concealing their class backgrounds. The upper class professors and students at the prestigious law schools often don’t recognize that people with different backgrounds than them may be amidst them, and this makes it that much more challenging to the working class students. The paradox that the working class students face is that they feel out of place in an elite cultural and social context because of their lack of the appropriate social and cultural capital.