September 24, 2003 –
Early childhood gender socialization and social construction of gender
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.
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 –
Sometimes conscious effort in that expectations are reinforced with explicit rewards and punishments.
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. -
Freud – Unconscious process -
During first two stages – oral and anal stages, boys and girls are fairly similar in their behavior and experiences. For both girls and boys, their mother is the chief object of their emotions since she is their primary caretaker and gratifies most of their needs.
Around age four, divergence. Children become aware both of their own genitals and of the fact that the genitals of boys and girls are different. – The Phallic stage –
It is during the phallic stage that identification takes place.
The boy’s identification 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. Castration might befall him, therefore, 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, ergo the boy gets to keep his penis and he can have a sexual relationship with his mother vicariously through father.
In contrast – girl – 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 tow 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: Freud – narcissism, vanity, shame, … The fact that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt related to the predominance of envy in their mental life.
Criticisms – can’t be verified since subjective –
Observer bias
Gendered behaviors as fixed and stable over time. Little room for personal or social change.
Antifemale bias. Females are defined as inadequate, jealous, passive, and masochistic. Freud defined women as “an inferior departure from the male standard.”
Reinterpretations of Freud’s work:
Karen Horney, Erick Erikson, and Melanie Klein (60s –70s) – too phallocentric - Although each theorist continued to focus on how innate differences between the sexes influenced their respective psychological development.
Horney – womb envy
Erikson – since women have an inner space in which to carry and nurture new life – causes them to develop a psychological commitment to caring for others. In contrast, men’s reproductive organs are external and active, which in turn is reflected in the male psyche with its external focus and action orientation.
Klein argued that the primary relation in the development of gender identity was not the father-son or father-daughter relationship centering around the penis, but rather the mother-child relationship centering around the breast, especially in terms of the emotions and conflicts the breast evokes in children (goodness/plentitude; badness/destructiveness)
Nancy Chodorow
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.
Nancy Chodorow - 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.
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
Social learning theories are more straightforward than psychoanalytic theories in that they focus on observable events and their consequences rather than on unconscious motives and drives.
Based on behaviorism & notion of reinforcement: A behavior consistently followed by a reward will likely occur again, whereas a behavior followed by a punishment will rarely reoccur.
Social learning theory posits that children acquire their respective gender identities by being rewarded for gender-appropriate behavior and 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,ie.,MODELING - Children will be rewarded for imitating some behaviors and punished for imitating others. At the same time, 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
Behavior comes first, identity flows from the behavior. (Important!)
Not without difficulties children do consistently imitate same-sex models more than opposite-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 –
Work of psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg
Unlike social learning theory, however, this approach assumes children play an active role in developing their own identities. Researchers claim that children use others to define themselves, because they are motivated by an internal desire to be competent, which includes knowing how to act feminine or masculine in Western culture.
“I am a girl, therefore, I do girl things.”
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.
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.
2 to 6 – preoperational stage – not yet capable of conserving variance, that is, they cannot understand that even if superficial aspects of an object change (the length of a man’s hair), the basic identity of the object remains unchanged (the person is still a man)
Studies indicate that as children get older and their cognitive systems mature, they appear to become more flexible with regard to the activities that males and females pursue, at least until they reach adolescence.
Critics – the age when children develop their own identities. As young as at2 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 need 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 ding 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.
Cultural/ Social Influences on Gender
Gender Schema 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 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.
Bem begins with the observation that the culture of any society is composed of a set of hidden assumption about how the members of that society should look, think, feel, and act. These assumptions are embedded in cultural discourses, 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 fat 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.
The process of gender acquisition is simply a special case of the process of enculturation or socialization in general. She discusses two processes that she considers critical to “successful” enculturation. First, the institutionalized social practices of a society preprograms individuals’ daily experiences to fit the “default options” of that society’s culture for that particular time and place. At the same time, individuals are constantly bombarded with implicit lessons – what Bem calls metamessages about what is important, what is valued, and what differences between people are significant in that culture. It is through these two processes that the lenses of the culture are transmitted to the consciousness of the individual, and the processes are so thorough and complete, that within a fairly short period to time, the individual who has become a “cultural native”
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 –
Children are not passive receptors.
Bem also extends the cognitive developmental perspective by emphasizing that the lens of androcentrism is superimposed onto the lens of gender polarization.
Growing up Feminine or Masculine
Parents do have different expectations of their baby boy and girls and treat them differently
In their descriptions of their infants
In how they respond - parents verbalize more to girls than boys
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 “forced 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
13 –14 month olds
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 r 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 and gender socialization
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.
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.
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?
A positive note: The concept of role identities within the socialization perspective does recognize the significant 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.
Sociological perspectives such as social constructionism (symbolic interactionism and structuralism) correct the problems of the theory not addressing the fluidity of a role not its embedness in a social structure.
Social Construction (symbolic interactionism) sees gender identity as more of a process than an outcome.
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.
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.
“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 sex 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.
We use gender display to focus us on how to interact in the situation.
Goffman contends that when human beings interact with others in their environment, they assume that each possess an “essential nature” – a nature that can be discerned through the “natural signs given off or expressed by them.”
Femininity and masculinity are regarded as “prototypes of essential expression – something that can be conveyed fleetingly in any social situation and yet something that shrikes at the most basic characterization of the individual.”
Goffman sees displays as highly conventionalized behaviors structured as two-part exchanges of the statement-reply type, in which the presence or absence of symmetry can establish deference or dominance. Gender is a socially scripted dramatization of the culture’s idealization of feminine and masculine natures, played for an audience that is well schooled in the presentational idiom.
West and Zimmerman use the case of “Agnes” to illustrate sex, sex category and gender
Neither initial sex assignment (pronouncement at birth as of female or male) nor the actual existence of essential criteria for that assignment (possession of a clitoris and vagina or penis and testicles) has much – if anything – to do with the identification of sex category in everyday life.
Sex categorization – Agne’s claim to the categorical status of female, which she sustained by appropriate identicatory displays and other characteristics, could be discredited before her transsexual operation if her possession of a penis became known and after by her surgically constructed genitalia. In this regard, Agnes had to be continually alert to actual or potential threats to the security of her sex category. … If people can be seen as members of relevant categories, then categorize them that way. That is, use the category that seems appropriate, except in the presence of discrepant information or obvious features that would rule out its use.
She could have overdone her performance. Doing gender consists of managing such occasions so that, whatever the particulars, the outcome is seen and seeable in context as gender-appropriate or as the case may be gender-inappropriate that is accountable.
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
West and Zimmerman criticize Goffman because they believe he see gender as an optional performance.
Criticism of the social constructionist perspective. Social constructionism emphasizes the processes of interaction and the characteristics of the situation as they shape interactional possibilities for individuals. In its emphasis on individual agency, however, this perspective tends to minimize social structural constraints and relationships of power and inequality.
Social constructionism contributes an explanation of how individual agents in situations perpetrate or resist institutional and interpersonal constraints. Further elaboration is necessary, however, of how social structures and institutions constrain interactional possibilities and also of how the accumulation of specific social interactions contributes to the maintenance and definition of various institutions and structures.
Structuralism
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.
As a macro-level theory, the structural perspective does not refer directly to social identities. It should be noted explicitly, however that social structures rely on and create the conditions within which identities are enacted. It is social structures that locate people within repeated situations, situations that become habitual and institutionalized – work situations, family situations and so forth. For social institutions such as families to endure in their culturally recognized forms, the actors who perform within those institutions must have developed and be competent to perform, identities suitable for those institutions and their cultural definitions.
Social identities are produced by active human beings but always within prevailing normative and structural circumstances.
To explain differences constructionism offers an analysis of the plurality of gender definitions; to explain power, it emphasizes the ways in which some definitions become normative through the struggles of different groups for power, including the power to define. Finally, to explain the institutional dimension, social constructionism moves beyond socialization of gendered individuals who occupy gender-neutral sites, to the study of the interplay between gendered individuals and gendered institutions.
Gendered individuals occupy places within gendered institutions. (Michael Kimmel)
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 Messner “Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender”
Messner observes the soccer teams using three levels of analysis:
The interactional level: How do children “do gender,” and what are the contributions and limits of theories of performativity in understanding these interactions? Interactionalist theoretical frameworks are useful in describing how groups of people actively create (or at times disrupt) the boundaries that delineate seemingly categorical differences between male persons and female persons.
The level of structural context: How does the gender regime, particularly the larger organizational level of normal sex segregation of the American Youth Soccer Organization. Structural theoretical frameworks emphasize the ways that gender is built into institutions through hierarchical sexual divisions of labor. They are most useful in explaining under what conditions social agent mobilize variously to disrupt or to affirm gender differences and inequalities. Messner notes that the sexual division of labor among parent volunteers as a result of their own histories in the gender regime of sport, the formal sex segregation of the children’s leagues and the structured context of the opening ceremony crated conditions for possible interactions between girls’ teams and boys’ teams.
The level of cultural symbol – How does the children’s shared immersion in popular culture (and their differently gendered locations in this immersion) provide symbolic resources for the creation. Cultural theoretical perspectives that examine how popular symbols that are injected into circulation by the culture industry are variously taken up by differently situated people are mot useful in analyzing how the meanings of cultural symbols, in a given intuitional context, might trigger or be taken up by social agents and used as resources to reproduce, disrupt or contest binary conceptions of sex difference and gendered relations of power.
At the level of performance, Messner tells us “ Lacking an analysis of structural and cultural context, performances of gender can all too easily be interpreted as free agents’ acting out the inevitable surface manifestations of a natural inner essence of sex difference.”
Summary – Messner tells us the important to questions to ask are not why boys and girls are so different but rather to ask how and under what conditions boys and girls constitute themselves as separate, oppositional groups.”
For Messner he wants to know when gender is activated as a key organizing principle in interaction and under what conditions is it less salient.
“In the Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters moment, the performance of gendered boundaries and the construction of boys’ and girls’ groups as categorically different occurred in the context of a situation systematically structured by sex segregation, sparked by the imposing presence of a shared cultural symbol that is saturated with gendered meanings, and actively supported and applauded by adults who basked in the pleasure of difference, reaffirmed.”
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