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| Gender: Crossing Boundaries (with InfoTrac) (Paperback)
Paperback
Edition: 1
Author: Grace M. Galliano
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing
Release Date: 2002-07-24
ISBN-10: 053435582X
ISBN-13: 9780534355821
List Price: $97.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Designed to engage students with its unique writing style and critical thinking, this text provides an overview to the study of Gender while emphasizing cross cultural/multicultural issues to demonstrate what's truly universal about Gender. Galliano's text has been extensively class-tested at Texas AandM University and has been carefully evaluated against nearly 100 detailed student reviews.
Gender with an Attitude
| Customer Rating: | This book is an introductory textbook about many facets of gender. Topics covered include: the definition of gender, theories of gender, gender and the body, gender and development, gender and relationships, gender as social performance, gender and sexuality, gender and education, gender and work, gender and health, gender and the media, and gender and power. At the beginning of each chapter is an outline of section headings, followed by a list of learning objectives. Immediately before the main text of each chapter is a short anecdote for thought or discussion involving the topic featured in the chapter. Interspersed in the text are boxes with "Critical Thinking Challenges," designed to get readers to stop and ponder claims or issues more deeply. There are also feature boxes with short articles about specific topics in more depth or across cultures. Technical terms appear in bold print in the text and are defined at the bottom of the pages on which they appear. At the end of each chapter is a summary section, with main points listed as bullet statements, and suggestions for using the InfoTrac online subscription resources. The chapters do not have study questions or suggestions for written exercises. End material includes references (50 pages!), a name index, and a subject index. The book is illustrated with numerous graphs, illustrations, and photographs.
The depth and quality of research that went into this book are highly commendable. The author summarizes an enormous quantity of research, providing both a historical perspective and an update on current developments, and synthesizing the varied results into coherent chunks for those who are just beginning to explore the field. Some topics are presented more evenly than others, however, and in the area of development of gendered behavior, Galliano seems to be strongly in the camp of those who claim that such behavior is mostly learned through cultural practices rather than due to genes and hormones. In general, Galliano comes across as having a very strong feminist agenda that drives her manner of presenting the research, rather than striving towards a more objective approach.
I'm glad that I wasn't required to read this book for a course, because Galliano's style, particularly in the opening chapters, is excruciatingly condescending, to a degree that I have never seen before in a textbook. She starts off the text by arguing to readers that they don't know anything about gender, and what they do know is wrong. While that may be true to some extent, a more positive pedagogical approach would be to focus on what the readers actually do know, and build up from there, rather than tearing their self-confidence apart from the beginning. The style of writing is uneven-in some chapters, the text is very matter of fact, simply reporting the research and synthesizing the results in a professional manner. In other chapters, Galliano slips into informality, denigrating both the research and the readers, as for instance, when noting inconsistent experimental results, she writes "Uh-oh! At this point you may need to transform that rigid safety helmet [which she has earlier warned readers that they will need when reading about this research] into a more flexible critical thinking cap." As a mature reader, I find such comments particularly off-putting, and I suspect teenage readers might find them even more so.
In addition to these stylistic problems, the text also contains a number of inaccuracies, or possible typos. For example, the text states, "gonadal development in males is affected whenever an X chromosome is present." Well, that's true, since an X chromosome is virtually always present (except in 0Y males). Perhaps what was meant here was a second X chromosome, but that's not clear from the text. Galliano goes out of her way to include material about cultures beyond American borders for this text, but she is not entirely familiar with the cultures, since she has comments such as "Under Islam, women lost the right to choose their own marriage partner, to manage their own property, and in some societies, the right to obtain divorce." A little more research into the history of Middle Eastern cultures would show that women didn't lose these rights under Islam, since they never had them in that region of the world before Islam. In fact, Islam expanded rights for women living in this region beyond what the pre-Islamic culture allowed them; for example, under Islam, women were given the right to turn down perspective marriage partners, and to inherit at least some property. Hopefully, such mistakes will be corrected in any future editions.
In sum, while the coverage of material in the book is extensive and presented well in some places, in other places, the bias in presentation is inappropriate. If you are looking for a textbook to use for an introductory course on gender, this one might make a potentially good resource to dip from, as long as you avoid the more heavily biased chapters (unless, of course, your intent is to present that bias as fact). And if this book has been assigned reading for a class, take it with a large grain of salt. |
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