February 9, 2005
Social Construction of Gender
“Gender and Identity” – Judith Howard and Ramira Alamilla
Gender identity specifically is one’s inner sense of oneself as female or male. However, the question “Who am I?” is really “”Who am I in relation to others?” Identity is a person’s position, or space in social relationships, social structures and societal institutions. This is the sociological perspective.
From the sociological perspective we are interested in how gender identity contributes to the study of gender stratification.
There are at least two key approaches to identity:
Approaches that emphasize the more stable, internalized aspects of identity and
A processual approach, emphasizing, the less stable, social constructed aspects of identity.
Review of the 4 sociological perspectives to these two approaches:
The first two perspectives (Essentialism and socialization) emphasize stable and internalized aspects of identity.
1. Essentialism: Essential conceptions of gender identity assume everyone is born with a particular sex, this sex is associated with a corresponding gender; and both are fixed from birth. According to this perspective there are innate, and therefore stable differences between the two sexes. Functional for society – men and women serve different and complementary roles in society.
How does this pertain to gender stratification? Stratification is justified then by the belief that these differences are inborn, cannot be changed and are functional for society. But we must ask functional for whom?
Howard and Alamilla remark that early sociological research on race was marked by essentialist assumptions. As was class as well - although class was perceived as more often an achieved status.
2. Socialization – The concept of identity associated with the socialization perspective is only slightly less stable than that of essentialism. Gender identity is a subjective feeling rooted in how one perceives oneself and cannot be determined by external observation.
Socialization is the process by which a society’s values and norms, including those pertaining to gender, are taught and learned. Socialization is a lifelong process –
Research indicates that children as young as 18 months old show preferences for gender-stereotyped toys. By the age of two, they are aware of their own and others’ gender, and between two and three years of age, they begin to identify specific traits and behaviors in gender-stereotyped ways.
How do children come to adopt this information as part of their images of themselves and their understanding of the world around them?
3 major categories of socialization theories: psychoanalytic theories, social learning theories, and cognitive developmental theories.
Psychodynamic, Identification Theory or Object-Relations Theory –
Children pass through a series of stages in their personality development. Until around age four, these developmental experience are similar for girls and boys. At age four, however, children unconsciously begin to model their behavior after that of their same-sex parent, thus learning how to behave in gender-appropriate ways. For boys, the motivation for identification is castration anxiety. For girls it is penis envy.
Around age four to this theory, children become aware both of their own genitals and of the fact that the genitals of boys and girls are different.
It is during the phallic stage that identification takes place.
The boy’s identification with the father is motivated by castration anxiety – he sexually desires his mother – sees his father as the rival (Oedipus complex). His desire is extinguished by the glimpse of the female genitalia, assuming that all girls have been castrated. He might be castrated if the father knows about his desire therefore, he represses his desires for mother. Boys perceive fathers as the castrators (since they have the size and the penis, so instead of competing, they become more like their father. Thus the boy gets to keep his penis and he can have a sexual relationship with his mother vicariously through father.
In contrast, the girl's identification with mother is motivated by penis envy. She witnesses the male’s “far superior equipment”; the little girl thinks she has been castrated. She becomes overwhelmed by her sense of incompleteness, her jealously of boys, and her disdain for her mother and all women since they share her “deformity.” Instead, she shifts her love to their father, who does possess the coveted penis and begins to identify with her mother as a means to win him. Eventually, the girl realizes that she can have a penis in two ways: briefly through intercourse and symbolically by having a baby, especially a baby boy. In other words, her wish for a penis leads her to love and desire men (initially in the person of her father), since they have a penis and can also provide a baby. However, a female never fully overcomes the feeling of inferiority and envy, which leave indelible marks on her personality. According to Freud, narcissism, vanity, shame are a result. He also believed that women had no sense of justice - all a result of the predominance of envy in their mental life.
Modifications to Freudian theory include the notion of womb envy as well as a focus on the mother-child relationship rather than the father-son or father-daughter relationship concentrating around the penis.
Nancy Chodorow – revisionist Freudian theory
The mother-child relationship is thought to be the most fundamental influence on how an infant comes to define herself or himself
Internalizing others is not merely acquiring roles; instead, it creates the basic structure of the psyche - the core self.
We are all mothered by women. For the mother and daughter there is a fundamental likeness, which encourages close identification between them. Mothers generally interact more with daughters and keep them physically and psychologically closer than sons. This intense closeness allows an infant girl to import her mother into herself in so basic a way that her mother becomes quite literally a part of her own self.
The fact that girls typically define their identity within a relationship may account for women’s typical attentiveness to relationships.
The relationship between a mother and son typically departs from that between mother and daughter. Because they do not share a sex, full identification is not possible. Theorists suggest that infant boys recognize in a primitive way that they differ from their mothers. More important, mothers realize the difference, and they reflect it in their interactions with their sons. In general, mothers encourage more and earlier independence in sons than in daughters, and they interact less closely with sons.
To establish his identity, a boy must differentiate himself from his mothers - declare himself unlike her. The idea that a boy must renounce his mother to establish masculine identity underlies the puberty rites in many cultures. She suggests that identification is more difficult for boys since they must psychologically separate from their mothers and model themselves after a parent who is largely absent from home, their fathers. Consequently boys become more emotionally detached and repressed than girls.
Independence becomes an essential component to selfhood and security. This concept is presented in The Smell of Burning Ants.
Chodorow’s work has been criticized since it lacks supporting evidence. Chodorow says it is supported by clinical observations. Reliability?
It is criticized as ethnocentric. – Sexual division of labor in which only women care for infants is not present in all societies, yet children in all societies acquire gender, whatever its specific content.
Some argue that it does not accurately reflect the experiences of most African American mothers and daughters or in Mexican American families which have the presence of multiple mothering figures –grandmothers, godmothers, and aunts
Social learning theory – Albert Bandura
Children acquire gender identity in two ways; through reinforcement, that is being rewarded for gender-appropriate behavior and being punished for gender-inappropriate behavior.
Moreover, children also learn through indirect reinforcement. They may learn about the consequences of certain behaviors just by observing the actions of others, this is called MODELING.
Children will most likely imitate those who positively reinforce their behavior. In fact social learning theorists maintain that children most often model themselves after adults whom they perceive to be warm, friendly and powerful (i.e. in control of resources or privileges that the child values).
Moreover, these theorists predict that children will imitate individuals who are most like themselves.
Children learn by imitating others and continuing to imitate those behaviors that bring them positive communication from others
IMPORTANT POINT!!!! Behavior comes first, identity flows from the behavior.
There are difficulties with this theory. Children do not consistently imitate same-sex models. Girls are more likely to imitate male models than boys are to imitate female models, which may be because females are considered less powerful than males.
Another criticism – children are presented as passive in their learning
Cognitive Development Theories – Two variations. First variation is represented by the work of psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohl berg
According to cognitive developmental theorists, young children accomplish creating order out of disorder by looking for patterns in the physical and social world. Children have a natural predilection for pattern seeking; “once they discover those categories or regularities, they spontaneously construct a self and a set of social rules constant with them.”
The organizing categories that children develop are called schemas. Sex is a very useful schema for young children. Why sex? The answer lies in the second major principle of the cognitive developmental perspective: Children’s interpretations of their world are limited by their level of mental maturity.
Early on in their thinking children tend to be concrete; that is, they rely on simple and obvious cues. In our society (and most others), women and men look different. So sex is a relatively table and easily differentiated category with a variety of obvious physical cues attached to it. Children first use the category to label themselves and to organize their own identities. They then apply the schema to others in an effort to organize traits and behaviors into two classes, masculine or feminine, and they attach values to what they observe – either gender appropriate (“good”) or gender inappropriate (“bad”)
Cognitive developmental theory helps explain young children’s strong preferences for sex-typed toys and activities and for same-sex friends, as well as why they express rigidly stereotyped ideas about gender.
IMPORTANT POINT Developmentally at age 3, a child knows that they are a boy or girl. Gender identity comes first, and then behavior is organized around it. “I am a girl, therefore, I do girl things.”
Schemas can be described as filters of information, interpreting specific instances light of a general category. They can be self-schemas or group schemas. They can be social schemas. Social schemas guide people’s preconceptions of others, and indirectly themselves, through group schemas.
Critics – the age when children develop their own identities. As young as at 2 but cognitive developmental places it between 3 – 5 yrs.
In addition, recent research indicates that not everyone uses sex and gender as fundamental organizing categories or schemas; there are some individuals who may be considered gender “aschematic” although they themselves have developed gender identities.
Girls tend to have more knowledge of gender than boys but are more flexible in their views about cross-gender activities and behaviors.
Thus the process by which a child learns to use sex as an organizing schema and the intervening variables that mediate this learning process needs to be better understood.
Research conducted with white, middle-class children – don’t know how race, ethnicity, social class, family structure might affect using sex/gender as the schema.
Greater criticism – By portraying gender learning as something children basically do themselves, and by presenting the male-female dichotomy as having perceptual and emotional primacy for young children because it is natural and easily recognizable, cognitive developmental theorists downplay the critical role of culture in gender socialization.
We may agree that children actively seek to organize their social world, but that they use the concept of sex as a primary means for doing so probably has more to do with the gender-polarizing culture of the society in which they live than with their level of mental maturity.
Sandra Bem tries to address this criticism of gender schema.
Cultural/ Social Influences on Gender
Gender Schema Theory/Enculturated Lens Theory (Sandra Bem) Once the child learns appropriate cultural definitions of gender, this becomes the key structure around which all other information is organized. This is compatible with cognitive development theory in two major ways. First, a schema is a cognitive structure, which helps to interpret percents of the world, and second, before a schema can be formulated and gender-related information process appropriately, children must be at the cognitive level to accurately identify gender. When a girl learns that the cultural prescriptions for femininity include politeness and kindness, these are incorporated into her emerging gender schema, and she adjusts her behavior accordingly.
In the enculturated lens theory of gender formation, which also incorporates elements of social learning theory, children are socialized to accept their society’s gender lenses or assumptions about masculinity and femininity. This enculturation occurs through institutionalized social practices as well as implicit lessons or “meta messages “ about values and significant differences, which organize children’s daily lives from birth.
Bem begins with the observation that the culture of any society is composed of a set of hidden assumptions about how the members of that society should look, think, feel, and act. These assumptions are embedded in our culture, social institutions, and individual psyches, so that in generation after generation, specific patterns of thought, behavior are invisibly, but systematically reproduced.
Bem calls these assumptions lenses.
There are 3 gender lenses
Gender Polarization – refers to the fact that not only are males and females in the society considered fundamentally different from one another, but also these differences constitute a central organizing principle for the social life of the society.
Androcentrism – refer to both the notion that males are superior to females, and to the persistent idea that males and the male experiences are the normative standard against which women are judged.
Biological Essentialism – the lens that serves to rationalize and legitimate the first two by portraying them as the natural and inevitable products of the inherent biological differences between the sexes.
Bem’s theory has both aspects of the social learning perspective as well as cognitive developmental perspective.
Gender socialization may be explicit – but Bem focuses on the metamessage –
Growing up Feminine or Masculine - Agents of Socialization
Clothing plays a significant role in labeling – also certain types of clothing encourages or discourage particular behaviors or activities – frilly dresses
Parent-child Interactions
Parents report that male infants and toddlers are “fussier” than female infants and toddlers.
Boys are more active and anger more easily
Girls are better behaved – more easy going.
Adults tended to respond to boys when they “force attention” by being aggressive, or by crying, whining and screaming
Whereas similar attempts girls were usually ignored – instead when they used gestures or gentle touching or when the girls talked, more attention was given.
More talking to daughters – sadness, emotion boys they talk more about anger with sons.
Mothers engage more often with daughters than sons.
Parents tend to engage in rougher, more physical play with infant sons than with infant daughters. Fathers usually play more intense games with infant and toddler sons and also encourage more visual, fine-motor, and locomotor exploration with them, whereas they promote vocal interaction with their daughters. At the same time fathers of toddler daughters appear to encourage close parent-child physical proximity than fathers of toddler sons.
Gender – stereotypical behavior is still promoted even when parents professed not to adhere to gender stereotypes.
Available data also show that Black children, regardless of sex, are at an early age imbued with a sense of financial responsibility toward their families and with racial pride and strategies for dealing with racism Poussaint
Toys
Bedrooms
Catalogs
- Toys for boys tend to encourage exploration, manipulation, invention, construction, competition, and aggression.
Gendered Images in Children’s Literature – 1997 Kathleen Odean – although over four thousand children’s books are published each year, she compiled just 600 books about girls who take risks and face challenges without having to be rescued by a male, girls who solve problems rather than having the solution given to them.
Books depicted by African American artists and written by African American authors seem less stereotypical.
Early Peer Group Socialization – Same-sex peer play develops between the ages of two and three and grows stronger as children move from early to middle childhood. Moreover, when compared with girls, boys tend to interact in larger groups, be more aggressive and competitive, and engage in more organized games and activities.
(we see the power of peers in The Smell of Burning Ants.)
Barrie Thorne is critical of much of this research for focusing solely on sex differences and ignoring sex similarities and cross-sex interaction. She gives a number of examples in which young children work cooperatively and amiably in sex-integrated groups. She also points out that children frequently engage in “borderwork”, that is, they attempt to cross over into the world of the other sex and participate in cross-gender activities.
Critique of the concept of Socialization. – The concept of gender associated with the socialization perspective is only slightly less stable than that of perspective of essentialism
Socialization perspectives tend to emphasize the processes of learning, however, rather than the expectations to which children are socialized. (Think about the birth congratulations cards).
The cultural context is necessarily shaped by systems of social stratification. It should be noted, however, that social institutions such as families, education, religion, many occupations, and so forth could not operate effectively without an available pool of well-socialized actors who know the accepted cultural conventions and perform appropriately. In other words, gender class, age, race, and nationality, sexuality and other meaningful social systems serve as the “organizing principles” by which the content of socialization is defined.
Roles provide a repertoire of expectations for appropriate behavior associated with particular social positions. But they lack an attention to the power and inequality associated with particular roles and its failure to ask: Functional for whom?
How does this pertain to gender stratification?
In leading people to rely on group characteristics rather than paying attention to individual differences, categorization contributes to the formation of stereotypes. In addition to personality traits polarized into femininity and masculinity gender stereotypes also include prescriptions for social behaviors, physical characteristics, occupations, types of dress and bodily adornment and codes of sexual behavior.
Socialization explains how people are taught and learn these stereotypes and behaviors. Socialization perspectives tend to emphasize the processes of learning, however, rather than the expectations to which children are socialized. This distinction is significant because the analysis of cultural and structural factors can inform us about how principles of stratification may be internalized. Thus explaining to some extent how Western society’s expectations about gender may form part of our own identities.
The very concept of role schemas legitimizes the perceived differences between women and men and ignores the differences within, and the overlap between genders.
There are no parallel concepts of class roles or race roles presumably implying that it is unacceptable to suggest that the social order depends on class-based and race-based social inequalities. In contrast the issue of gender roles, prescribing the allocation of women and men to different types of tasks, implies that gender inequalities are an acceptable foundation for the social order.
A positive note: The concept of role identities within the socialization perspective does recognize the significance of interaction. It does recognize the concept of social agency, that is we respond to the world we encounter – shaping, modifying and creating our identities through interactions with other people and within social institutions.
In doing so, it forms a bridge to the social constructionist perspective that emphasizes interactional processes.
3. Social Construction
The third perspective on gender identity is markedly more processual, conceptually identities as more fluid and less stable, and thus is located the opposite pole of the continuum of identity.
Meanings and agreement about social reality are created by the process of negotiating a common interpretation of a situation through the interactions between and among people.
Social constructionism sees interaction as crucial to the construction of identity, not only in childhood by beyond it in every interaction.
Impression management or the presentation of self in interaction, refers to those process by which individuals present particular selves to particular others for particular reasons.
Actors engaged in mutual impression management develop an working consensus, or agreement, about the type of situation they are in and which roles or identities they are playing,
This publicly agreed upon, negotiated definition of the situation thus guides subsequent interaction with the expectation that actors are obliged to behave in accordance with this working consensus and treat each other according. (The Smell of Burning Ants)
Cultural expectations and social hierarchies also shape which definitions of situations prevail.
Social constructionism maintains that gender identity is accomplished by individual in every day behavior and display, and that this what sustains the social reality of gender.
Sociological perspectives such as social constructionism (symbolic interactionism and structuralism) correct the problems of not addressing the fluidity of a role and the role being embedded in a social structure.
“Doing gender “ (West and Zimmerman) means behaving so that whatever the situation, whoever the other actors, one’s behavior is seen as gender-appropriate for that context.
Candace West and Don Zimmerman maintain that women and men “choose” gender -appropriate behavior because in almost every activity they will be called to account for actions that may contradict norms for their gender.
Gender and accountability
If sex category is always present, then a person engaged in virtually any activity may be held accountable for performance of that activity as a woman or a man, and their incumbency in one or the other sex category can be used to legitimate or discredit their other activities
How do we sort people into gender roles to begin with? We sort on biological manifestations. Externally manifested genitalia – becomes socialized gender role. Those with male genitalia are classified in one way; those with female genitalia are classified in another way. At birth we sort by primary sex characteristics. These two sexes become different genders, which are assumed to have different personalities and require different institutional and social arrangements to accommodate their natural – and now, socially acquired – differences.
Thereafter we sort by secondary sex characteristics - When we see someone on the street, it is his or her secondary sex characteristics that we observe – breast development, facial hair, and musculature. Even more than that, it is through the behavioral presentation of self – how he or she dresses, moves, talks – that signals for us whether that someone is a man or a woman.
Resources for doing gender
Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological.
Environmental settings – Goffman – public bathroom
Standardized social occasions also provide stages for evocations of the “essential female and male natures.” – organized sports as expression of manliness.
Positive point of social constructionism contributes an explanation of how individuals in situations perpetrate or resist institutional and interpersonal constraints. Social constructionism emphasizes the processes of interaction . It emphasizes that agency of an individual.
Criticism of the social constructionist perspective: This perspective tends to minimize social structural constraints and relationships of power and inequality.
There needs to be an understanding how social structures and institutions constrain interactional possibilities and how the accumulation of specific social interactions contributes to the maintenance and definition of various institutions and structures. Howard and Alamilla
Therefore we need to turn to
4. Structuralism as a way to fully understand gender.
The structural perspective on social identities addresses macro-level patterns organized in terms of gender race, age, class sexuality and other significant social positions. This perspective addresses questions of power and inequality in the institutions and structures of society that govern the allocation of resources.
The structural perspective emphasizes how a pervasive system of male dominance affects these allocations for women as a category and for men as a category.
Gendered individuals occupy places within gendered institutions. (Michael Kimmel)
IMPORTANT To say then, that gender is socially constructed requires that we locate individual identity within a historically and socially specific and equally gendered place and time and that we situate the individual within the complex matrix of our lives, our bodies, and our social and cultural environments. Michael Kimmel
Summary: A sociological perspective examines the ways in which gendered individuals interact with other gendered individuals in gendered institutions.
Gender revolves around these themes: identity, interaction, and institution - in the production of gender difference and the reproduction of gender inequality.
First we understand that gender is not a "thing" that one possesses, but a set of activities that one does. When we "do gender, we do it in front of other people, it is validated and legitimated by the evaluations of others. Gender is less a property of the individual than it is a product of our interactions with others.
Second, we understand that we do gender in every interaction, in every situation, in every institution in which we find ourselves.
Adie Nelson’s article, “ The Pink Dragon. Halloween Costumes and Gender Markers.” Nelson could have analyzed costumes at the level of identity (the individual), and the level of interaction or social constructionist level (how children and parents interact) in the selection of costumes. Instead, she analyzes costumes as gender markers at the structural level. She is studying how an institution – in this case, an economic institution constrains and influences gender display. It is a study that looks at the potential contribution of marketing to the maintenance of gender stereotypes. She looked at both commercially made costumes and sewing patterns.
She coded all costumes as masculine, feminine or neutral depending on whether boys, girls or both were featured as the models on the packaging. Labeling costumes as feminine, masculine or neutral was achieved by looking at whether there were recognizable genderism, boy or girl, length of hair, hair ornaments. by the type of shoes worn in the photo when the gender was not readily known, and sometimes by the accompanying stance of the model. Costumes designated as neutral were those in which both boys and girls were features or it was impossible to detect the sex of the wear.
She found that of the 469 costumes coded; 195 were coded masculine, 233 feminine and 41 or 8.7% of the group as gender neutral. She further points out that by and large, few costumes for older children were presented as gender-neutral, for example Emergency room doctors and scarecrows.
Gender dichotomization was promoted by gender-distinctive marketing devices employed by the manufactures of both commercially made costumes and sewing patterns.
Examples of gender markers – the addition or deletion of decorative trim or the use of specific colors or costume names served to distinguish masculine from feminine. Structurally identical costumes modeled by both boys and girls would be distinguished through the use of distinct colors or patterns of materials. She gives the example of the peanut M&Ms. Girls were featured clad in red or green; boys in blue, brown or yellow. Female clowns were featured in pastels; male clowns in primary colors.
They also classified costumes into three themes as to the emotion that were suppose to evoke : hero (evoking gory, admiration) , villain (evoking, fear, disgust), or fool (evocating amusement).
Masculine costumes contained a higher percentage of villain costumes, and feminine costumes more fool costumes, particularly those of nonhuman/inanimate objects.
Hero costumes for girls were clustered into a narrow ranger than boys. Heroes were relegated to some cartoon figures which were active and to a larger number of passive-type heroes, beauty queens, princesses, brides.
Masculine costumes were also more likely than feminine costumes to depict a wider range of villainous characters. In contrast, for girls, many of the names of costume for the female villains appeared to emphasize the erotic side of their villainy (Enchantra, Sexy Devil) or to neutralize the fear “Pretty Little Witch.”
Within the category of fools, feminine costumes were more likely than masculine costumes to depict nonhuman/inanimate objects (33.1% vs 17.4%)
Words on the packaging were important. Policeman vs. Beautiful Bride. Sex-marked suffixes as .. Pretty Waitress and the –ette (Majorette) set apart male and female costumes.
It is notable that, when male children were presented modeling female garments, the depicted character was effectively desexed by age, “hag” or nun.
Nelson is illustrating that even before children select with the interaction of their parents, the display of gender has been constrained by the marketing of an economic institution.
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