Gender & Identity

Gender & Identity

• Gender & sexuality

• Gender schema theory

• Readings: how did they challenge or change their views?

Gender & Sexuality

• femininity : masculinity

• binary opposition (way of ordering the world)

• Gender = cultural differentiation of male from female

Gender & Sexuality

MASCULINITY: FEMININITY

OUTDOORS:INDOORS

PUBLIC:PRIVATE

SOCIAL:PERSONAL

PRODUCTION:CONSUMPTION

MEN:WOMEN

Gender & Sexuality

• binary oppositions are related to one another; they provide a logic that can be used to structure stories and these stories are also hard to escape

• they produce ideological meanings: there is nothing natural about them

• what does not fit into any of the opposites is anomalous (monster categories)

Gender & Sexuality

• Gender = cultural differentiation of male from female

• Whenever sexual differences are taken as meaningful, we are in the presence not of sex but of gender

Gender & SexualityGender is all culture and no nature!

• the only natural aspect of gender is sexual differentiation - a bio/psysiological difference upon which is balanced an elaborate cultural structure of differences used to classify and make meaningful the social relations of the human species

Gender & SexualityGender is a human and a signifying division;

its ‘source’ in nature is neither here nor there!

• What is ‘essentially’ male or female, or ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ often justify gender differences as being ‘only natural’ but this justification is ‘only ideological’

Gender & Sexualitysex / gender

• Distinction useful because culture can be transformed (unlike human physiology)

Gender schema theory (sum.)

• Phenomenon of sex typing derives from gender-based schematic processing, on the basis of sex-linked associations that constitute the gender schema

• Sex typing results from the fact that the self-concept itself gets assimilated to the gender schema

Gender schema theory (sum.)• Sex-typed individuals have a greater

readiness to process information in terms of the gender schema

• Gender-based schematic processing derives, in part, from the society’s insistence on the functional importance of the gender dichotomy

• Political implications; implications for the concept of androgyny

Gender schema theory (sum.)• Male and female distinction is basic

organizing principle for every human culture

• Adult roles allocated on the basis of sex (anticipate this allocation in the socialization of children)

Gender schema theory (sum.)• Boys & girls expected to acquire sex-

specific self-concepts and personality attributes to the masculine or feminine as defined by that particular culture

• Male & female transmuted to masculine and feminine is known as the process of sex typing

Gender schema theory (sum.)• Psychological theories of development

elucidate how the developing child learns the appropriate repertoire

• Psychoanalytic theory: identification with the same-sex parent

• Social learning theory: rewards and punishments for behaving in sex-appropriate ways ; learning through observation and modeling

Gender schema theory (sum.)• Psychological theories of development

elucidate how the developing child learns the appropriate repertoire

• Cognitive-developmental theory: how children socialize themselves once they have labeled themselves as male or female

Gender schema theory (sum.)• Attributes to be linked with sex: anatomy,

reproductive function, division of labor, personality attributes, features metaphorically related to sex (angularity or roundedness of an abstract shape, periodicity of the moon)

• No other dichotomy in human experience as many entities assimilated to it as the distinction between male / female

Gender schema theory (sum.)• Heterogeneous network of sex-related

associations used also to process information in terms of an evolving gender-schema

Gender schema theory

• Schema is a cognitive structure, network of associations that organizes and guides an individual’s perception (anticipatory structure, readiness to search for and assimilate incoming information in schema-relevant terms)

• Schematic processing is highly selective

Gender schema theory

• Schema theory construes perception as a constructive process wherein what is perceived is a product of the interaction bw the incoming information and the perceiver’s preexisting schema

Gender schema theory • Schematic processing* manifests itself by:

• Readiness of individual to encode schema-consistent information quickly

• They organize information in schema-relevant categories

• They make highly differentiated judgments along schema-relevant dimensions

• When given a choice, they spontaneously choose to make discriminations along those same dimensions

*in individuals who have a generalized readiness to process information in terms of a particular schema

Gender schema theory • Overall, in schema processing, perceptions and

actions of individuals reflect the kinds of biases that schema-directed selectivity would produce

• Phenomenon of sex-typing derives in part from gender-based schematic processing (readiness to process information on the basis of sex-linked associations that constitute the gender schema

Gender schema theory • Self-concept itself gets assimilated into the

gender schema

• as children learn the contents of the society’s gender schema, they learn which attributes are to be linked with their own sex and therefore with themselves

Gender schema theory

• strong-weak dimension absent to the schema applied to girls, dimension of nurturance omitted from schema applied to boys

::adults rarely remark how strong a little girl is

becoming, or how nurturant a little boy is

becoming) but readiness to note precisely the

attributes in the ‘appropriate’ sex

Gender schema theory • The child learns to apply the same schematic

selectivity to self, choosing among the many possible dimensions of human personality only that subset defined as applicable to his or her own sex and eligible for organizing the diverse contents of the self-concept

::self-concept becomes sex-typed

Gender schema theory ::two sexes become not only different in degree

but different in kind

::child learns to evaluate his or her adequacy as a person in terms of the gender schema, matching his or her preferences, attitudes, behaviors, and personal attributes against the prototypes stored within the schema

::gender schema becomes prescriptive standard or guide and self-esteem becomes its hostage

Gender schema theory ::cultural myths become self-fulfilling

prophecies

serious political implications of gender schema effect and sex-typing

Gender schema theory • Sex-typed individuals vs. non-sex-typed

individuals• When non-sex-typed individuals describe

themselves as dominant or nurturant without implicating the concepts of masculinity or femininity is different from when sex-typed individuals describe themselves like that (for them, gender connotations of attributes and behaviors are important)

Gender schema theory The heterosexuality subschema

• In our society, exclusively heterosexual orientation is the sine qua non of adequate masculinity or femininity

• Violation of the prescription to be exclusively heterosexual is sufficient to call into question the individual’s adequacy as man or woman

Gender schema theory The heterosexuality subschema

• Sex-typed individuals more likely to invoke the heterosexuality subschema in their social interactions and in particular to respond differentially to the physical attractiveness of members of the opposite sex with whom they are interacting

• Cf. Study by Andersen and Bem (sex-typed and androgynous subjects of both sexes evaluated their partners in telephone interactions)

Gender schema theory Concept of androgyny

• Androgynous individuals potentially have two sources of inadequacy around both masculinity and femininity

• Feminist theory prefers gender-schema based processing as explanation

Gender schema theory • Even if society is aware of negative images

based on particular attributes of f / m, it continue to exaggerate sexual distinctions and the functional importance of the gender dichotomy

• Ideal: • to accept that we are male or female as unconsciously as

the fact that we are human• gender distinctions would be perceived but not

functioning as imperialist schemata for organizing everything else

Gender schema theory solutions

• To realize that gender has come to have cognitive primacy over many other social categories because culture has made it so

• gender schematic associative network is reinforced by: toys, clothing, occupations, hobbies, domestic division of labor, all vary as a function of sex

Gender schema theory solutions

• Children would be far less likely to become gender schematic and hence sex typed if the society were to limit the associative network linked to sex and to temper its insistence on the functional importance of the gender dichotomy

Readings

• Female identity?

• Male identity?