Glossary

a reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other (Kristeva, 2010).

consent given for each sex act each time.

social institutions that create and maintain normative expectations for behavior.

a complex competitive economic system of power in which limited resources are subject to private ownership and the accumulation of surplus is rewarded.

describes people who identify as the same gender they were assigned at birth.

refers to political association with those who have differing identities, around shared experiences of oppression (Taylor, 2017).

a social process of recognizing and sharing sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

is a macro-level theory that proposes conflict is a basic fact of social life, which argues that the institutions of society benefit the powerful.

a subfield of sociology that reveals and interrupts the harmful social pressures and social norms of ableism and heteronormativity.

an archaic term to describe men who dressed as women or women who dressed as men.

a group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, and norms. Culture encompasses a group’s way of life, from daily routines and everyday interactions to the most essential aspects of group members’ lives. It includes everything produced by a society, including social rules.

the harmful practice of continuing to call trans people by the name associated with the gender they were assigned at birth rather than the name they ask you to call them. It is closely related to misgendering.

(multiple interrelated meanings) (1) A political process that included a transfer of power back from a colonial government to an indigenous one. For example, when India became independent from the British Empire in 1947. (2) For those who have benefited from colonization, decolonization has also come to mean a personal divestment of colonial power across structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal domains of power. (3) A cultural process of identifying and challenging cultural domains of colonial power so that pre-colonial ways of being and knowing can be reclaimed, recovered, and reimagined.

describes genetic, hormonal, or anatomical variations that produce atypical sex characteristics, including variations in chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals.

a theory that describes the social world as a layered system, in which each layer is a set of social domains that impact the individual. The system moves from the smallest level of the individual to the layer of family, through growing layers until it reaches institutions, society, and even historical context.

refers to the shape of a person’s body, the feeling of a person’s body, and what a person’s body can do (Herbert and Pollatos, 2012)

to describe work that requires managing personal emotions and the emotions of other people (Hochschild, 1983)

expressions of femininity that emphasize women’s subordination by accommodating the interests and desires of men

the expectation that women learn to balance their interest in “masculine” activities and traits with feminine gender expression.

is an interdisciplinary approach to issues of equality and equity based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, sex, and sexuality as understood through social theories and political activism (Eastern Kentucky University, n.d.)

the meanings, attitudes, behaviors, norms, and roles that a society or culture ascribes to sexual differences (Adapted from Conerly et.al. 2021a).

a limited system of gender classification in which gender can only be masculine or feminine. This way of thinking about gender is specific to certain cultures and is not culturally, historically, or biologically universal.

a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender (APA 2022).

the way our gender identity is expressed outwardly through clothing, personal grooming, self-adornment, physical posture and gestures, and other elements of self-presentation.

the gender we experience ourselves to be.

the unequal distribution of power and resources based on gender.

imposing or enforcing normative gender expressions on someone who is perceived to be not adequately performing those gender norms via their appearance or behavior, based on their sex assigned at birth.

the process by which people learn the norms, stereotypes, roles, and scripts related to gender through direct instruction or by exposure and internalization.

an umbrella term that covers gender identity and expression that falls outside the binary/non-normative labels.

the masculine ideal commonly viewed as superior to any other kind of masculinity and any form of femininity (Connell 1987; Connell & Messerschmidt 2005).

the social enforcement of heterosexuality, in which there are only two genders, that these genders are opposites, and that any sexual activity between people of the same gender is deviant or unnatural.

(a merging of the words heterosexual and patriarchy) is a system of power in which cisgender and heterosexual men have authority over everyone else. This term emphasizes that discrimination against women and LGBTQIA+ people is derived from the same sexist social principle (Valdes, 1996).

a process of coming to understand ourselves and differentiate ourselves in relation to our social world.

which refers to organizing politically around the experiences and needs of people who share a particular identity.

people who do not know they are LGBTQIA+ or know but do not come out publicly are said to be in the closet or closeted.

a process of individuals within an oppressed group incorporating and accepting the prejudices of the dominant society (Pheterson, 1986).

describes how multiple social locations overlap and influence each other to create complex hierarchies of power and oppression, and that overlapping social identities produce unique inequities that influence the lives of people and groups (Crenshaw, 1989).

people with differences in sexual development (DSD) sometimes identify as intersex.

an acronym that stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual, Plus a continuously expanding spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations.

studies how systems interact with individuals or with other systems.

a process of social exclusion in which individuals or groups are pushed to the outside of society by denying them economic and political power (Chandler & Munday, 2011).

a hypothetical system of power in which social status is determined by personal effort and merit. (Conerly, et al. 2021).

is the study of small groups and individual interactions.

are statements that indirectly reference stereotypes to assert the dominance of the aggressor.

the harmful practice of referring to people by a gender other than their stated gender identity (Kapusta 2016).

hatred of, aversion to, or prejudice against women (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).

the practice of having one intimate partner at a time.

refers to gender identities beyond binary identifications of man or woman/masculine or feminine.

is a form of social stratification in the labor market in which one group is more likely to do certain types of work than other groups. Gender-based occupational segregation describes situations in which women are more likely to do certain jobs and men do others.

literally the rule of fathers. A patriarchal society is one where characteristics associated with masculinity signify more power and status than those associated with femininity.

a process in which researchers evaluate one another’s work to assess the validity and quality of proposed or completed research.

an emerging term that refers to people who identify as Asian, Black, African, Indigenous, Latinx, and other racial and ethnic groups who are not White (Campbell-Stephens 2020).

the practice of having multiple intimate partners.

the practice of one woman having multiple intimate partners at the same time.

the practice of one man having multiple intimate partners at the same time.

de-centers dominant perspectives to decolonize ideas of culture and societal structures.

originated with scholars from former European colonies in the global south whose global south. Postcolonial theory explores how colonization disrupts social arrangements, including gender relations of the people who lived in colonized places. Gender-based differences in work and pay for women of the global south are an example of the ongoing results of colonialism.

a right or immunity granted as a benefit, advantage, or favor. While privileges can be earned in some systems, privileges can also be unearned and based on social location. For the purpose of describing unequal power arrangements in systems of power we will be referring to those privileges that are “unearned advantages, exclusive to a particular group or social category, and socially conferred by others” (Johnson, 2001).

a framework for understanding gender and sexual practices outside of heterosexuality.

the practice of one man having multiple intimate partners at the same time.

a practice of self-reflection to examine how personal biases, feelings, reactions, and motives influence research.

a systematic approach that involves asking questions, identifying possible answers to your question, collecting, and evaluating evidence—not always in that order—before drawing logical, testable conclusions based on the best available evidence.

is an unequal system of power that relies on white supremacy to justify removing established indigenous residents of colonized territory so that the land can be occupied by settlers and its resources used for the benefit of the occupying power.

the assignment and classification of people as male, female, intersex, or another sex based on a combination of anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes.

adults who receive money or goods in exchange for consensual sexual services or erotic performances, either regularly or occasionally (Open Society Foundations 2019).

a broad category of non-consensual sexual contact that includes various forms of rape and other illegal sexual contact.

emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to other people; often used to signify the relationship between a person’s gender identity and the gender identities to which a person is most attracted (Learning for Justice 2018).

socially constructed blueprints for sexual expression, sexual orientation, sexual behaviors, and sexual desires that guide our performance of sexuality.

any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, or other act directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion by any person, regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting (WHO 2022).

refers to a person’s personal and interpersonal expression of sexual desire, behavior, and identity.

variations within a species, including secondary sex characteristics, that indicate sexual differences but are not necessarily related to reproduction.

shared meaning that is created, accepted, and reproduced by social interactions between people within a society.

consists of the combination of social characteristics, roles, and group memberships with which a person identifies. Social identity can be described as “the sum total of who we think we are in relation to other people and social systems” (Johnson, 2014, p. 178).

a large-scale social arrangement that is stable and predictable, created and maintained to serve the needs of society (Bell 2013).

describes the relationship between social identity and social power.

purposeful, organized groups that strive to work toward a common social goal.

a social condition or pattern of behavior that has negative consequences for individuals, our social world, or our physical world (Guerrero 20164).

a set of processes in which people are sorted, or layered, into ranked social categories based on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and status.

the process of learning culture through social interactions.

a group of people who live in a defined geographic area, who interact with one another, and who share a common culture (Conerly et al. 2021).

individual or group’s place within a system of social stratification. SES can be influenced by race, social class, religion, and other socially constructed categories or human differences, including gender.

an awareness of the relationship between a person’s behavior, experience, and the wider culture that shapes the person’s choices and perceptions. (Mills 1959)

applies the tools of sociology to explore how gender, including sexuality, gender expression, and identity, is socially constructed, imposed, enforced, reproduced, and negotiated.

an archaic legal term to describe oral or anal sex, generally between men.

argues that knowledge is socially situated and that the dominant standpoint of social and natural sciences has been based on “rampant sexism and androcentrism (centering men)” (Harding, 1992).

also called functionalism, a macro-level theory concerned with large-scale processes and large-scale social systems that order, stabilize, and destabilize societies.

is a micro-level theory concerned with how meanings are constructed through interactions with others and is associated with the Chicago School of Sociology.

socially constructed beliefs, practices, and cultural norms that produce and normalize power arrangements in social institutions.

a theoretical framework developed by Patricia Hill Collins (she/her) to describe how power is socially constructed. Hill Collins identifies four domains of socially constructed power, which arrange power and work together to create systems of power (Hill Collins, 1990).

the practice of making only a superficial or symbolic effort to diversify an organization by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups to give the appearance of equality.

describes people who identify as a gender that is different from the gender they were assigned at birth.

is a body of theory and activism that highlights the connections between sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism.

a complex system of racist power that is based on discredited racist enlightenment-era social science and constructed through policies and practices that privileged white people over people of other races, based on the racist ideas that that there are meaningful differences between people in different racial categories, that White people are physically and culturally superior, and that they are therefore entitled to dominate other people in other racial categories.