Gender and work: representations of femininities and masculinities in the view of women Brazilian executives.

Autorde Padua Carrieri, Alexandre
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Introduction

The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze social representations of femininity and masculinity as reported by women business executives in Brazil. Hence, the aim is to list this particular social group's characteristics and attributes, to determine those that are more or less valued in the corporate world, and to consider the consequences of such representations to the subjects involved, both women and men. The analysis of representations regarding certain subjects and objects can reveal the construction of femininities and masculinities through certain strategies and tactics within a political management model, while exposing social constructions around which a given social order lies.

Since the goal of this work relates to the representations of femininities and masculinities, it is worth clarifying what a representation means in this particular context. Representations are not simply descriptions that reflect workers' practices, but rather constitute and produce the workers' very practices (Louro, 2008). They are not a reflection of reality, but instead act as constructors of such: "From this perspective it should not be questioned whether a representation 'matches' reality or not, but since representations produce meanings, what should be asked what the effects of representations on individuals are and how they construct reality itself (Louro, 2008, p. 99). Finally, as Louro (2008) emphasizes, representations are presentations; i.e., they are cultural means of categorizing, naming, and showing a group or individual. Louro (2008) makes clear that there is no such thing as pure world or reality that can be described or viewed through images that act as a true--or distorted--reflection of reality itself: there are always several representations and they all make sense.

Thus, the possibility that has been opened to women executives who stand out in a work environment clearly ruled by men indicates the construction of social representations of what a woman business person is. However, is there just a single representation? In this study, other representations of femininity and masculinity were sought, which might arise to resist and to counteract the hegemonic representation of women created and recreated by both men and women.

It is noteworthy that in this research femininity is not understood as merely a synonym for a woman (or women), neither is masculinity a synonym of man (or men). Instead, the two concepts relate to the historic, social, cultural, and spatial-temporal aspects involved and that, therefore, may present women and men as hegemonic (Gilligan, 1982; Halberstam, 1998). Research into gender helps understanding this issue, specifically in relation to Brazilian culture and labor conditions. In fact, it helps comprehend the Brazilian reality as a whole, since most research and authors on gender come from the northern hemisphere.

This research is organized in sections. The next section provides the theoretical framework and explores the following themes: a brief history of the discussions on gender and work, focused on the insertion of women in the work environments and the possibilities and limitations that this group has come across, including an overview of studies that focus on aspects of gender, femininity and labor in Brazil. This is followed by research methodology, analysis and conclusions.

Gender and Women: a Social Construction

Beauvoir's renowned work (2009) is used a starting point for this study, which expands upon the idea that women are constructed as the other in society. This concept implies, from a social standpoint, that the role of women is regarded as secondary and not as mere spectators, but as supporting figures behind great men who became part of human history. While great importance and even veneration have been given to motherhood at some moments in history, women have never been given an equal place or privilege compared to men. To Beauvoir (2009), men believe that humankind comes from their own image and women are perceived as the others. In other words, men represent the universal. Following Beauvoir's concepts (as cited in Braidotti, 2002) Braidotti's explanation that the price paid by men to represent universality is their very disembodiment, or the loss of gendered specificities to phallic masculine abstraction.

To understand how this social hierarchy is still operating in relationships between men and women, one can rely on the relational analysis of gender. This includes scholars such as Joan Scott (1986), who considered gender as a historical and relational category. From that perspective, the concept of gender brings the ability to give meanings to power relationships. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the influence of those categories--gender and power relations--has been increasing the quest for meanings related to sex/gender as a social construction, which in fact has become one of the main currents in feminist research.

Gardiner (2004) states that the most important accomplishment of feminist theory in the last century was the development of gender as a social construction. For the author, "masculinity and femininity are loosely defined, historically variable, and interrelated social ascriptions to persons with certain kinds of bodies--not the natural, necessary, or ideal characteristics of people with similar genitals" (Gardiner, 2004, p. 35). This accomplishment altered beliefs about the inherent characteristics of men and women. "The traditional sexes are now seen as cultural groupings rather than as facts of nature based on a static division between two different kinds of people who have both opposed and complementary characteristics, desires and interests" (Gardiner, 2004, p. 35).

In spite of the fact that contemporary feminist theory does not consider gender as a biological attribute, many gender authors still hold a binary concept of gender. For example, Irigaray (1985), when trying to counterpoint the binary gender view contained in Freudian psychoanalysis (which assigns superiority to men as a privileged social power visualized in the anatomy of males' sexual organ), states that Freud's phallogocentric concept of women's penis envy (castration anxiety) is a man's vulnerability and weakness. In fact, this is an ironic mirroring of Freudian ideas of women lacking genital equipment. In short, while trying to reverse the phallogocentric concept, Irigaray (1985) ends up reaffirming gender binarism. The poststructuralist approach intends to break with such a binary conception of gender.

Butler (2003) does not believe that sex belongs to the scope of biology and gender to the cultural one. The distinction between biological sex and cultural gender could suggest a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Butler (2003) states that genders cannot be conceived only as a cultural record in a previously defined sex (a body), for gender must also designate the production mechanisms by which sexes themselves are established. Gender is something an individual becomes, but can never be, hence gender itself is a kind of process or activity. It should not be conceived as a noun or as a matter of substantive or cultural static label, but instead as an incessant and repeated action. If gender is not tied to sex, it is something that can grow beyond any binary limits.

Rubin (1984) has demonstrated the expression of masculinity in women's bodies, not only in men. For example, among lesbian individuals there are two categories, butch and femme, which establish an alternative genre system, for these are not the conventional imitation of female and male genres. Halberstam (1998) analyzed different varieties of masculinity in female individuals, defined by the author as masculinity without men, among them: the androgynous, the butcher, and the Drag King. Sedgwick (2008) clarifies that women are also consumers, producers and performers of masculinity. Thus, masculinity is not directly related to male individuals only. When masculinity is understood as a socio-historical construction, it leads one to a broader view of it, not limited to men studies; i.e., the biological sex. Women, men, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals, among others, are consumers, producers, reproducers and performers of these cultural products known as masculinity and femininity.

The hierarchical, unequal and asymmetric relationships between men and women have been justified by several instances that emerged from discursive practices, power structures, and symbols within a given organizational environment (Cramer, 2009). It is in the discussion on power that several studies find the origins of oppression in the socially constructed categories of male and female. Several studies show that within the construction process of power relations, gender relations are established and articulated. That is present in studies carried out in North America (Butler, 2003; Calas & Smircich, 1999; Scott, 1992, 1998), Europe (Beauvoir, 2009; Bourdieu, 2007) and Brazil (Alonso, 2002; Cramer, Brito, & Cappelle, 2004; Hirata, 2002; Louro, 1997, 2000; Nogueira, 2001; Z. L. C. Oliveira, 2005).

For Wittig (1985) gender is neither invariant nor natural, but a specifically political use of the category of nature, which serves the purposes of sexual reproduction. Anyway, for Wittig there is no reason to divide the human bodies into male and female and that division is appropriate for the economic needs of heterosexuality, for they attribute a naturalistic sense to its institution. Thus, for Wittig (1985) there is no such distinction between sex and gender, for the very category of sex brings along gender labels, is politically invested and naturalized, but not natural at all. For example, to Wittig (1985) lesbians are not women, for a woman is just a term that stabilizes and fosters the binary relation between men and women, when this relation is heterosexual...

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