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C H A P T E R 4 How Do We Learn Gender? Gender and Socialization What’s the very first thing you remember? How old were you and what were you doing? Can you remember what you were wearing or who you were with? Is gender an important part of your first memory? Did it matter that you were a little boy or a little girl, or do you think that, at that point, you were aware of yourself as a boy or girl—as a gendered human being? Can you remember the first time you thought of yourself as having a gender? Can you remember the first time someone treated you in a way that was obviously related to your gender? Do you remember a time when you didn’t understand what gender was and couldn’t necessarily tell the gender of the people around you? What was the gender makeup of your friends in childhood? In adolescence? Today? What kinds of games did you play on the playground, and were there gender differences in those spaces? Can you remember little boys or little girls who didn’t seem to hang out with others of the same gender or didn’t always act in ways appropriate to their gender? How did other kids and adults treat those children? Were you a “sissy” or a “tom-boy,” or did you know other kids who were? What was the gender of the adults in your life when you were younger, and how did that affect your interactions with them? What lessons did grown-ups seem to teach you about gender? What are other ways in which you learned about gender as a child? Has the shape and form that gender takes in your life changed over the course of your life? Is being masculine different when you’re 13 as compared to when you’re 22? What about when you’re 40, and then 65? Does gender become more or less important throughout the course of your own life? Is there ever a time when you get to stop being gendered? These are the kinds of questions we’ll explore in our examination of how we learn gen- der, or what sociologists call gender socialization. Socialization is a fundamental concept for sociologists in general, and it is defined as the ways in which we learn to become a member of any group, including the very large group we call humanity. The process of socialization begins the moment we are born and continues throughout our lives to the very end, as we constantly learn how to successfully belong to new groups or adjust to changes in the groups to which we already belong. It’s not surprising given the importance of socialization to sociology as a whole that gender socialization is a good place to start in our examination of how gender matters in our everyday lives. In looking at gender
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socialization, we go back to our very beginnings, to the very moment when we were born. But we also consider all the moments since then, and throughout a person’s life. There are many different theories of exactly how gender socialization occurs, each with its own unique perspective on exactly what gender socialization is and how it happens. Nonetheless, we can formulate a general definition of gender socialization as the process through which indi- viduals learn the gender norms of their society and come to develop an internal gender identity. This definition contains two other terms with which we should also become famil- iar, gender norms and gender identity. Gender norms are the sets of rules for what is appro- priate masculine and feminine behavior in a given culture. In the sex role theory we discussed in Chapter 2, collections of gender norms are what make up a sex role, a set of expectations about how someone labeled a man or someone labeled a woman should behave. The way in which being feminine or masculine, a woman or a man, becomes an internalized part of the way we think about ourselves is our gender identity. You might think of gender identity as a way of describing how gender becomes internal—something that becomes an integral part of who we are, a part that many of us would be reluctant to completely abandon. The concept of gender identity is therefore consistent with an indi- vidual approach to gender, focusing on how gender operates from the inside (gender identity) out. Gender socialization begins in all societies from the very moment we are born, but in most societies, gender socialization presumes the ability to look at a new infant and give it a sex. In contemporary Anglo-European society, this means to put an infant into one of two categories, male or female. But before we discuss different ways of thinking about gender socialization as well as explore how this process takes place throughout our lives, let’s begin with the first step of deciding who’s male, who’s female, and who’s something else entirely. SORTING IT ALL OUT: SEX ASSIGNMENT AS THE FIRST STEP IN GENDER SOCIALIZATION Thinking about gender socialization involves thinking about how people began to treat you as a boy or a girl from the very moment you were born. But how would people respond to a baby that is not clearly a boy or a girl? What color would parents use to decorate the baby’s room, and what name would they choose? How would they talk about such a baby when gender is built into the very structure of our language (he/she, his/her)? What kind of toys would relatives and friends give to such a baby, and what would this child do when pre- school teachers first instructed the children to form two lines, one for boys and one for girls? Even worse, which locker room would this child go to and what would happen in the already anxious and insecure world of the locker room? These may seem like hypothetical ques- tions, but they lie at the core of an ongoing controversy about the very real cases of inter- sexed children—individuals who for a variety of reasons do not fit into the contemporary Anglo-European biological sex categories of male and female. These individuals are impor- tant to our discussions of gender socialization because they provide us with insight into a very good sociological question: How can we tell if a baby is male or female? This is a good sociological question because at first glance, it seems like a pretty stupid question. Even a child knows the answer to that question, although you might get some interesting responses depending on the age and upbringing if you try asking some children how you can tell the Theory Alert
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resulting in an XXY pattern. Obviously, these genetic patterns have effects on how other measures of biological sex are expressed, so that those with XO patterns (called Turner syndrome) do not develop ovaries or the secondary sex characteristics (body changes at puberty and menstruation) associated with being female. Those with Klinefelter’s syn- drome are infertile and often develop breasts at puberty despite having male genitalia. Even at the level of our DNA, there is no simple answer to the question of how to tell if a baby is male or female.
Have you ever stopped to think why almost all sports are divided by sex category? Why
do we have the NBA and the WNBA, women’s and men’s World Cup Soccer, baseball
for men and softball for women? Can you think of any sports that aren’t segregated
based on sex category, and then can you explain why? Neither horse racing nor race
car driving are segregated by sex category. Why not? Increasing numbers of girls are
choosing to wrestle in middle school, high school, and college. Why is wrestling
emerging as a sport that doesn’t need to be segregated by sex category? Little league
baseball is often mixed sex until around puberty, when girls are funneled into softball
and boys into baseball. Are there anatomical differences that make it impossible for
women to throw or hit a baseball? The case of a 16-year-old girl recently drafted by a
professional baseball team in Japan seems to suggest the answer is probably no
(“Girl,” 2008). In this world of strictly enforced sex segregation, how do sports officials
go about ensuring that everyone is, in fact, the sex they claim to be? The Olympics
began sex testing in 1968, in response to the masculine appearance of some “female”
athletes, many of whom were pumped up on steroids (Saner, 2008). These tests
involved detailed physical examinations by a series of doctors and were experienced
as humiliating and invasive to the female athletes who had to undergo them. The
International Olympic Committee (IOC) later switched to the presumably more sophis-
ticated and less invasive technique of chromosomal testing. The problem that quickly
emerged was that given that about 1 in 1,000 individuals exhibit some kind of inter-
sex condition, a surprising number of women demonstrated some chromosomal
abnormality that deviated from a strict female, XX. In the 1996 Atlanta games, eight
female athletes failed chromosomal sex tests, but seven were cleared on appeal
because they were found to have an intersex condition (Saner, 2008). The IOC has
abolished universal sex testing, but when challenged, female athletes in the Beijing
Olympics were still called upon to prove their sex category. What about the male
athletes? Is their sex category tested? The sex category of male Olympic athletes
has never been universally tested or challenged. Why? The presumption is that
a biological female competing among biological males would gain no advantage. A
CULTURAL ARTIFACT 1: SEX CATEGORY, SPORTS, AND THE OLYMPICS
CHAPTER 4 How Do We Learn Gender? 123
You might be thinking at this point, that’s all good and fine. But how often do any of these things actually happen? How often do doctors have to measure the size of a baby’s penis/clitoris, examine his/her internal sex organs, or analyze his/her DNA to determine his/her sex? There are many different ways in which individuals can be intersexed, as well as debates about exactly what makes someone intersexed, and these affect the various estimates as to the frequency of intersexuality. In addition, coming up with an exact number for frequency of intersexuality is difficult given that methods of reporting and data collection are hampered by the fact that being intersexed or having an inter- sexed infant is highly stigmatized and would therefore tend toward people hiding their status rather than reporting it. Nonetheless, some of the most reliable estimates put the number of infants who are born with an intersexed condition that merits some kind of surgery for genital reconstruction at 1 or 2 per 2,000 children (Preves, 2003). If you broaden the category to include not just those who require surgery at birth, but those with chromosomal, gonadal (having to do with internal sex organs), genital, or hormonal intersexed features, the prevalence in the population has been estimated as high as 2%. Other reports estimate that between 1% and 4% of the population is intersexed, and in some populations, inheritable types of intersexuality can be as common as 1 in every 300 births (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). To compare to the prevalence of other kinds of conditions, intersexuality is more common by most estimates than albinism, or the condition of lacking any pigment in the hair or skin (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Intersexuality occurs about as often as cystic fibrosis and Down syndrome, two conditions that are more famil- iar to most of us and certainly cause considerable less shame for parents and family members (Preves, 2003). If you go with an estimate as high as 4% of the population, intersexuality in all its forms would be as common as having red hair. Intersexed indi- viduals have occurred throughout history and across many different societies. A more common term you may have heard for intersexed individuals, hermaphrodites , comes from the Greek name for a mythical figure formed from the fusion of a man and a woman. Even though many people may consider intersexed individuals to be abnormal, they are not unnatural any more than any other babies born with any other trait are seen as unnatural; intersexuality can be an inheritable trait, and it appears with some fre- quency in the human population. The existence of intersexed people is only unnatural if you believe that the existence of only two biological sexes itself is natural.
woman passing herself off as a man in Olympic competition isn’t cheating in the way
a man passing himself off as a woman would be. This is true despite the fact that in
sports like wrestling and boxing, where competitors are sorted by weight class, there
is no advantage that necessarily accrues to men. In long distance running, women’s
times have been consistently catching up to men’s (Lorber, 1994). Do women really
need to be protected from competing with men? Can you imagine a world of sports
that is not structured on segregation by sex category?
CHAPTER 4 How Do We Learn Gender? 125
complex reality; gender creates sex. Another argument in this vein points to the ways in which doctors in contemporary Anglo-European societies focus solely on the functionality of a male penis, as opposed to other criteria from other time periods and cultures. During the late 19th century, when gender ideas were different, biological sex among the sexually ambiguous was also determined differently. The presence or absence of ovaries was the crucial litmus test for sex assignment, rather than the size of any external organ (Lorber, 1994). This was because the gender views of this time period told them that a woman is only a woman if she can procreate. In our more scientific world today, there is no consid- eration given to the presence of ovaries or the status of an intersexed infant’s vagina and its suitability for penetrative intercourse. What might this reveal about our own assump- tions about what makes males and females?
How does using penis length as the criterion for establishing sex reinforce the
idea that to be male is the norm and to be female is to deviate from that
norm? What does that imply about our society, and how would a society in
which being female is seen as the norm be different?
Why is this rather intimate discussion of genitalia and genetics an important starting place for a larger discussion of gender socialization? The study of intersexed individuals has often lain at the crossroads of debates about the relative importance of nature versus nurture in determining what we think of as gender. The current status quo among doctors and the medical profession regarding intersexed infants is to pick a sex and perform sur- gery and other medical interventions to bring the baby’s gender into line with the chosen sex. So if an infant has a vagina and also an oversized clitoris/penis, her clitoris will be surgically shortened and she will be raised as a female. The goal is to not to preserve repro- ductive ability or physical sensation, but to take the path that creates the maximum poten- tial for normal-looking genitalia. Because a functional and cosmetically appropriate penis is more difficult to construct surgically, many intersexed individuals become females. In many of these cases, repeated surgeries may sometimes be necessary over the course of the individual’s life, and sometimes individuals take hormones to induce appropriate sec- ondary sex characteristics when they reach puberty. So an intersexed individual who is being raised as a male and develops breasts at puberty might be given testosterone to cor- rect this problem. Sometimes testes, ovaries, or ovo-testes also need to be surgically removed. We’ll talk about the repercussions for the development of the intersexed person in more detail later, but the process of creating a sex for an intersexed individual can be fairly involved, time-consuming, and painful. But the standard medical protocol for dealing with intersexed infants in the United States assumes that nurture (how a child is raised) can trump nature (the complexities of the sexual biology with which they may have been born).
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Eight-year-old Brandon Simms’s first complete sentence was, “I like your high
heels.” As a toddler, Brandon would search his house for towels, doilies, and ban -
danas to drape over his head, which his mother now imagines was intended to
give him the feeling of having long hair. In toy stores, Brandon would head
straight for the Barbie aisles despite being guided by his mother toward the gen -
der neutral puzzles or building blocks. At two and a half, Brandon’s mother finally
allowed him to take one of his cousin’s Barbie dolls home, and Brandon pro -
ceeded to carry it with him everywhere, even to bed. At three, Brandon’s mother
found him dancing naked in front of the mirror with his penis tucked between his
legs, declaring, “Look, Mom, I’m a girl” (Rosin, 2008). Brandon is one of a growing
number of young children diagnosed with gender identity disorder and identified
as being transgender. In Anglo-European societies, the number of adults diag -
nosed with gender identity disorder has tripled since the 1960s. Those who treat
gender identity disorder have seen the average age of their patients drop dra -
matically in recent years. What exactly does it mean to be transgendered or to
have gender identity disorder, and how should parents deal with children like
Brandon who seem determined that they are living in a body that does not cor -
respond to their gender? For some, the increasing prevalence of gender identity
disorder in young children is evidence that the brain itself is gendered; transgen -
der children’s insistence that their anatomical sex is incorrect is seen as evidence
that gender identity is influenced by some innate or immutable biological factors.
Yet, no definitive research has established a biological basis for gender identity
disorder or for being transgender in general, and other researchers believe gender
identity disorder can be treated psychologically. For Dr. Kenneth Zucker, gender
identity disorder is the result of instability or traumatic experiences in early
infancy or childhood, and if caught early enough (before the age of 6), it can be
treated through family therapy and intervention. Other parents are choosing to
help their transgender children navigate a potentially traumatic social life by giv -
ing them drugs called puberty blockers. These drugs delay the onset of puberty
with its irreversible effects on biological sex (Adam’s apples or facial and body
hair in boys, or the development of breasts in girls) in order to give children more
time to decide on their actual gender identity. How do we explain the increasing
number of children who are diagnosed with gender identity disorder and become
transgender? Is this a natural phenomenon that Anglo-European societies are just
beginning to recognize? What do our methods for dealing with these children
reveal about our own investment in the gender system?
CULTURAL ARTIFACT 2: TRANGENDER KIDS
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for their typicality or nontypicality, but for the ways in which they help us to ask some interesting questions about this complicated, lifelong process of learning gender. SOME THEORIES OF GENDER SOCIALIZATION Theories of gender socialization help us to understand how the three main approaches we outlined in Chapter 2 are interconnected and overlapping. The three theoretical approaches or levels we laid out are individual, interactional, and institutional. In discussing integrative theories of gender, we talked about how perhaps the best approach to gender is one that acknowledges the importance of all of three of these levels. Gender socialization can be understood at the individual level because it explains the ways in which gender comes to be internalized by individuals. Gender socialization is the story of how gender comes to be located inside individuals. Remember this is the emphasis of an individual approach—how gender operates from the inside out—so you could argue looking at gender socialization is a good example of an individual approach. In fact, many of the theories of gender socializa- tion we’ll examine come from the discipline of psychology, with its emphasis on individu- als as a unit of analysis. But seeing gender socialization solely as individualist leaves out an important part of the equation for how we learn gender. Gender becomes internalized through our interactions with those around us. In socio- logical vocabulary, the person being socialized is the target of socialization. The people, groups, and institutions who are doing the socializing are the agents of socialization. Though the theories we’ll discuss conceive of that interaction in different ways and suggest very different roles for the target of socialization, they all agree that interaction with our society is the central mechanism through which socialization takes place. So gender social- ization can also be examined at an interactional level. What about institutions? Note that in the definition of agents of socialization, we included not just other individuals, but also groups and institutions. Institutions such as the family, school, and religion play important roles in the process of gender socialization. The role of the media as an institution has also become increasingly important in contempo- rary gender socialization. Understanding gender socialization should then employ all three of these levels at which gender operates. As you read about the following theories, think about the extent to which they examine the process of gender socialization at all three of these levels. Social Learning Theory When we talk about theories in a textbook or lecture, we often pretend that theories fit into neat, self-contained boxes. This is what we call radical feminism, and this is liberal feminism, and of course, anyone can tell that the two are nothing alike. Presenting theories in this way is a bit too orderly compared to the messiness of the real world, where very few dedicated academics go around labeling themselves a social learning theorist as opposed to a gender-schema theorist. In the real world, people pick and choose the theory as it suits their needs, so feel free to do the same yourself. In the real world, theories often develop
CHAPTER 4 How Do We Learn Gender? 129
by building on the material of previous theories. So often, the theories we discuss as dis- tinct and separate also have a great deal in common. Perhaps this is yet another symptom of our obsession with differences, whether they are gender differences or theoretical dif- ferences. Regardless, in order to help understand theories, it’s useful to know the ways in which newer theories evolved out of already existing theories. You can choose to think of this process as an evolution toward a final and ultimately better theory. Or you can take more of a queer theory perspective and choose to think of it as a good example of how our ways of seeing and understanding gender shift over time and with historical context, minus the assumption that we’re getting any closer to an ultimate truth. Social learning theory developed in psychology from the legacy of behaviorism. You might be familiar with behaviorism as associated with B. F. Skinner and the ability to shape the behavior of rats based on a system of punishments and rewards. Behaviorism as a theoretical approach pushed psychology in a more scientific direction, or at least in a direc- tion that many psychologists believed was more scientific than the one pointed to by Freud. This meant an emphasis on the collection of observable, empirical data (Siann, 1994). The unconscious drives Freud studied were hard to directly observe, but with behaviorism the emphasis was on what could be directly observed: real human behavior—or sometimes, as with Skinner, the behavior of rats. Behaviorism claimed that behavior in humans was learned; so behaviorists were interested in discovering exactly how we learn those behav- iors. Their primary answer is that we learn through a process of rewards and punishments, or through a carrot and stick approach. When an infant smiles at her parent for the first time, she receives rewards in the form of verbal praise, attention, and affection. The behav- ior is rewarded, and chances are the baby will try smiling again in the very near future. When a toddler knocks his plate of food off the table, he may or may not get scolded, but at the very least, he doesn’t get verbal praise and affection. According to social learning theory, this is basically how we learn, through the selective rewarding, withholding of rewards, or punishing of behavior. If you’ve been around infants, you’ve probably noticed that they can learn some fairly interesting behaviors from within a limited repertoire of what they’re capable of at that age through this process. It’s fairly easy to see how these basic ideas apply to the specific process of gender social- ization. Social learning theorists identified specific sex-typed behaviors (Mischel, 1970). A behavior is sex-typed when it is more expected and therefore seen as appropriate when performed by one sex, but less expected and therefore seen as inappropriate when per- formed by the other sex. Making a list of sex-typed behaviors results in the articulation of a gender or sex role, which we’ve already discussed, so sex-typed behaviors are also similar to the concept of gender norms. The idea of sex-typed behaviors adds the idea, not neces- sarily contained in the idea of gender norms, that we very purposefully categorize behaviors as appropriate to one sex but not the other. Gender socialization works, according to social learning theorists, by rewarding children for engaging in sex-typed behavior that is consis- tent with their assigned sex category. The classic example is crying; while a little girl may be soothed when she cries, a little boy may be told that boys don’t cry. Crying is a sex-typed behavior, seen as OK for girls and therefore not a punishable behavior. But because it is not seen as an appropriate behavior for boys, the little boy may be punished or corrected for his crying behavior. Through these kinds of interactions, gender socialization occurs.
CHAPTER 4 How Do We Learn Gender? 131
passive recipients of socialization. In addition, Piaget brought to the psychological study of socialization an emphasis on the stages of children’s cognitive development. This was a somewhat radical approach to child development because it implied that children were not “little adults,” but were fundamentally different in the way they think, feel, and under- stand the world around them. Kohlberg (1966) used Piaget’s models of child development to create a new psychological theory of gender socialization, commonly called cognitive- development theory. This theory seeks to explain the ways in which children acquire a sense of a gender identity and the ability to gender-type themselves and others. We’ve already discussed gender identity as the internalized sense of yourself as male or female. Gender typing is another term for sex-typing, for identifying behaviors that are seen as appropriate for one sex or gender but not the other. Children acquire gender identity and learn to gender-type as they progress through a series of discrete, fixed developmental stages. The emphasis throughout is on how children actively develop an understanding of gender, and then, based on that understanding, they actively socialize themselves, rather than serving as passive objects of socialization. The first stage happens between the ages of two and a half and three, when children acquire a gender identity. Children of this age should be able to correctly identify their own gender as well as identifying the gender of others around them. If you’ve been around small children, you may have noticed that we’re certainly not born with the ability to distinguish gender—it is something that has to be learned. Hence, the two year old who points to people on TV or, sometimes more embarrassingly (though it’s interesting to think about why it’s embarrassing when a child cannot correctly identify someone’s gender), a friend or relative and asks, “Is he a boy or a girl?” By the age of five, children have acquired gender stability, according to cognitive development theory. With gender stability, children know that their gender is permanent, and that it is the gender they will be for the rest of their lives. This seems fairly obvious to us, but, interestingly, not to children. The son of one of my students is pretty typical in having expressed the desire at one point to grow up and become a mommy, implying that he would be able to change his gender at some point in the future. Once a little boy has achieved gender stability, he understands that by and large he cannot become a mommy. It is not until the age of seven, according to cognitive-development theory, that children reach the final phase of gender understanding: gender constancy. With gender constancy, children develop the complicated understanding that even a male wearing a dress, a wig, or makeup is still fundamentally a male. Gender constancy brings an understanding that even changing the outward physical appearance of a person does not change their underlying sex category. Up until this stage, children’s understanding of gender is still limited and based on very concrete rules (e.g., girls have long hair, boys have beards) (Siann, 1994). Though the process of gender socialization for cognitive developmentalists begins when children develop a gender identity, at the age of two and a half to three years, actual gender- typing does not begin until children achieve gender constancy at age seven. At that point, children begin to actively select from their environment the behaviors that they see as consistent with their gender identity. The basic idea is that once a little girl begins to see herself and others as gendered, she will be self-motivated to engage in feminine behaviors and to model herself on the other people she identifies as women in her environment. This is driven in part by children’s need for cognitive consistency; if children know what their gender is, then what they do and think should line up with that gender (Bem, 1983).
132 PART II^ HOW ARE OUR LIVES FILLED WITH GENDER?
Children work to achieve gender congruency and, in the process, achieve gender social- ization. Children do not become fully sex-typed until they have achieved the final stage of gender constancy at around age seven. Cognitive development theory does not completely dismiss the importance of the external environment, or of society itself. Society obviously provides the material from which children pick and choose to achieve gender-congruency. But it does locate much more of the power in the process of socialization with the targets (children) rather than with the agents of socialization. Both social learning theory and cognitive development theory largely predate the broad influence of second wave feminism on academic disciplines like psychology. Both theories are general theories of socialization that can be applied to the specific question of gender socialization. Given that these theories developed before feminists’ entrance into psychol- ogy, it’s probably not surprising that one of the critiques of cognitive-development theory is its male bias. Kohlberg (1966) focused his theory mostly on the case of young boys, and you can see how the theory can work better for little boys than little girls. From this perspective, children are self-motivated to gender themselves, without the need for much external pres- sure. It makes sense in a male-dominated world that boys would be motivated to adopt a masculine gender identity. Being masculine brings with it power and privilege. But if children are savvy enough to work on developing gender congruency, they’re probably also smart enough to work out that being feminine is not quite as valued in our society as being mas- culine. Cognitive development theory had difficulties explaining this differential dynamic between little girls and little boys. Other critiques based in empirical research point out that children begin to demonstrate preferences for objects and activities based on gender by the age of three (Unger & Crawford, 1992). This contradicts the predictions of cognitive develop- ment theory that children will not begin to engage in gender-typing until gender constancy is achieved at age seven. If you’ve been around children younger than age seven, you might have noticed that as a group they’re fairly invested in gender. Generally, cognitive develop- ment theory seems to place the process of gender development fairly late in childhood. Gender Schema Theory The next two theories emerge from the specific context of an increasing influence of feminism in psychology and of feminist psychologists bringing their own perspective to the topic of gender socialization. The first is gender schema theory, which builds on the frameworks of both cognitive development and social learning theory to formulate an explanation that is specific to gender socialization, rather than to socialization as a more general process. This theory was developed by Sandra Bem, and one of her critiques of cognitive development theory was that it provided no explanation for why children social- ized themselves based on sex as a category in particular. Bem (1983, 1993) questioned why sex became the important organizing principle around which children built their identities, rather than other readily available categories such as race, religion, or even eye color. Bem called this the “why sex?” question; why is it that sex becomes such an important differ- ence in the lives of very young children. Because the theory of cognitive development does not provide an answer or address how its theory might address these other categories of difference as well, Bem (1983) argued there’s a presumption that sex differences are “natu- rally and inevitably” (p. 602) more important to children than other differences. This is
134 PART II^ HOW ARE OUR LIVES FILLED WITH GENDER?
Gender in particular becomes an important organizing category because it is seen by almost all cultures as functionally important to society. Gender schemas exist because cultures are structured in such a way as to convince us that society cannot function without the existence of sex and gender categories. Because of the importance placed on gender by most cultures, a very broad set of associations between the categories masculine and feminine and many other attributes, behaviors, and categories come to exist. In other words, gender pervades the way we think about the world and crosscuts many other categories. An example Bem (1983) pro- vided was that people are perfectly and consistently capable in experiments of sorting seem- ingly gender neutral terms and objects into masculine and feminine categories. In experiments, people will spontaneously sort tender and nightingale as feminine and assertive and eagle as masculine, despite the fact that these terms have no clearly gendered content. Gender schemas are particularly important, then, because culture creates and enforces that importance.
Does it make sense to think of objects and feelings (like tender, assertive,
eagle. and nightingale ) as gendered (masculine or feminine)? In some lan-
guages, even words like cat and dog have a gender. Is this true in a more
subtle way for English, which no longer has gendered forms for many nouns?
In later work, Bem (1993) outlined some of the specific content of gender schemas as they existed in Anglo-European societies, including a history of their cultural evolution. She identified androcentrism and gender polarization as two important lenses that shape the way we see and understand gender in many parts of the developed world. Androcentrism (which we also discussed in Chapter 3) is the belief that masculinity and what men do in our culture is superior to femininity and what women do. Femininity and all it entails are seen as deviations from the universal standard of masculinity. Bem traced a long history of androcentrism in Anglo-European culture, some examples of which are already familiar to us. Freud’s theory of gender development is a good example, where having a penis was seen as the norm and women’s development was seen as inferior and abnormal due to women’s lack of a penis. Androcentrism is also a useful concept for explaining the many ways in which it is sometimes more acceptable for women to engage in masculine behav- ior than it is for men to engage in feminine behavior. In the United States, most men will get a lot more flack for wearing a skirt or makeup than a woman will receive for wearing men’s pants or a man’s hat. We will see below how psychoanalytic theory, another theory of gender socialization, has a different explanation for the same types of behaviors.
Can you think of other examples of androcentrism in society, or ways in which
it’s more OK for women to act masculine or do masculine things than it is for
men to act feminine or do feminine things? Can you think of examples that
don’t fit this pattern, or examples of times when it’s seen as OK for men to
act feminine, but not OK for women to act masculine?
CHAPTER 4 How Do We Learn Gender? 135
Gender polarization, the second important part of how we perceive gender in Anglo- European society, describes the way in which behaviors and attitudes that are viewed as appropriate for men are seen as inappropriate for women and vice versa. Bem (1993) argued that gender polarization operates in two ways. First, it creates two mutually exclusive scripts for being female and male. This means that the script that is appropriate for males is only ever appropriate for males, and no script can ever be appropriate for both males and females. Second, gender polarization problematizes any person who deviates from these mutually exclusive scripts as unnatural, immoral, abnormal, or pathological, depending on the particular system of thought being used. Gender polarization is an important way in which the strong link between sex (as biology), gender, and sexuality is maintained. To be female is to be heterosexual and to be attracted to males, and so lesbian women would be an example of a person who is seen as unnatural, immoral, abnormal, or pathological due to gender polarization. In this later work on the lenses of androcentrism and gender polar- ization, Bem focused even more attention on the question of enculturation, or on how culture comes to reside inside individuals. This shift in gender schema theory brings us back to a balance between the importance of external agents of socialization and active targets shaping their own process of learning gender through the mechanism of gender schemas.
Can you think of other types of individuals or groups of people who would be
problematic according to the system of gender polarization?
Psychoanalytic Theory The final theory of gender socialization we will explore also draws on psychology as a discipline, but a very different kind of psychology. We discussed Nancy Chodorow in Chapter 3 as an example of a feminist theorist attempting to provide an explanation for women’s universal subordination that is based on a social, rather than a biological, explanation. Chodorow (1978) laid out her answer to this question in her book The Reproduction of Mothering , and you should be able to guess from the title where she locates her explanation for women’s universal subordination. Like gender schema theory, psychoanalytic theory is an explanation specific to the process of gender socialization, rather than beginning as an exploration of the process of socialization more generally. Rather than drawing on cognitive or behaviorist theory, Chodorow began with Freud’s legacy of psychoanalysis as important to explaining the key causal factor in women’s subordinate position: their status as mothers. Psychoanalytic theory begins with the importance of women’s status as mothers and uses principles from Freud and others in the psychoanalytic tradition to explain the ways in which gender becomes deeply embedded in the psychic structure of our personalities. This is important to distinguishing psychoanalytic theory from other theories of gender socialization in which gender is a behavioral acquisition, something children pick up in the process of socialization. For psychoanalysts, gender is something that becomes
CHAPTER 4 How Do We Learn Gender? 137
Male infants have the task before them of acquiring a masculine gender identity, despite the fact that their primary identification is with their mother, who represents feminine gender identity. How do boys acquire this masculine identity in the absence of an initial masculine identification? According to Chodorow, this is a problematic dynamic for mas- culine development as boys learn masculinity in the absence of an ongoing relationship with a male figure. In addition, to become masculine, boys must sever their sense of con- nection to and identification with their mothers. Due to these underlying dynamics, mas- culine personality structure emerges with a much more well-developed sense of their separation from others. Men have stronger ego boundaries than do women. Masculinity is learned by boys in part as a rejection of what is feminine, including their identification with their mother. In the absence of this kind of strong relationship with other men, masculinity is learned by boys through the use of cultural stereotypes, rather than through the kind of direct observation that girls experience with their mothers. This results in two important features of masculine gender identity: it is less stable than feminine gender identity, and it contains, as a basic element, a devaluation of all things feminine. There are two important features to highlight about psychoanalytic theory. First, it explains not just how gender socialization occurs, but how the same process of gender socialization recreates itself across generations. Girls who emerge from this developmental process more empathetic and with less of a sense of ego boundaries are predisposed to seek out the kind of nurturing involved in mothering, therefore reproducing the same personal- ity structure in their children. These processes of gender development don’t just produce generic gender differences; they produce a new generation of women whose personalities lead them to want to mother, and to therefore reproduce again in their own sons and daugh- ters the same inevitable process. In Chapter 8, we will discuss the persistence of women’s roles as primary caregivers to children, even in families who consciously attempt a more equitable division of labor. Chodorow’s (1978) theory helps explain this persistence because the desire to mother is a fundamental part of feminine personalities. The second feature to note in psychoanalytic theory is that it also helps to explain the subordination of women through the development of masculine personality. Masculinity has a devalua- tion of women and therefore of the feminine built into its very structure. This neatly explains why women seem to be universally subordinate to men. Seeing women as inferior is an essential part of what it means to be masculine, according to identification theory. Psychoanalytic theory has had widespread influence and has inspired many studies to explore these dimensions of masculine and feminine personality (Belenky, Clincy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1997; Gilligan, 1982; Williams, 1991). Carol Gilligan (1982) used iden- tification theory to argue for a uniquely feminine approach to issues of justice and moral- ity. You might remember from our earlier discussion of Freud that he predicted women would have a much less developed sense of justice and morality. Gilligan used identifica- tion theory to argue that women’s morality is structured by the fact that they experience less of a sense of separation between themselves and others in their environment. So while traditional ideas of justice assume that right and wrong must be determined by an objective devaluation of empathy and compassion, a more feminine sense of justice is deeply entwined with the idea of being able to take the position of others. Masculine ideas of jus- tice are blind and assume that one can only determine what is just by ignoring the particu- lars of a person’s situation. Feminine justice assumes that the unique set of particulars must
138 PART II^ HOW ARE OUR LIVES FILLED WITH GENDER?
be considered. Other studies have used psychoanalytic theory to explain the experiences of men in predominately female occupations, the attraction of young boys to sports, and gender differences in how women and men learn (Belenky et al., 1997; Messner, 1990; Williams, 1991). Psychoanalytic theory is a good example of the unique perspective feminist theory can bring to preexisting and gender-biased modes of thinking. Chodorow (1978) took Freudian theory’s emphasis on women’s problematic development and flipped it on its head, arguing that in some ways, women’s psychological development is less fraught with difficulties than that of men. Both feminine and masculine personalities have their difficulties, but psychoanalytic theory reverses the tendency of Freudian theory to normalize masculinity while problematizing femininity. But by drawing on Freud and psychonanalysis as a model, psychoanalytic theory is subject to some of the same critiques. In psychoanalytic theory, most of the important events of gender socialization happen at a very early age, resulting in a relatively fixed gender identity by the time we are about two to three years of age. In addition, though psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the importance of social factors, namely the structure of the family, in its emphasis on unconscious processes that occur so early in our development, it can be seen as an essentialist theory in its implications. That is, psychoanalytic theory implies that because gender differences become deeply embed- ded in the structure of our personalities, they are part of our essential natures and difficult to change. Other critics point out the difficulty of verifying the assumptions and predictions of psychoanalytic theory using empirical research. How do you prove that an infant expe- riences no sense of separation between him or herself and his or her mother? How do you demonstrate the inherent instability of masculinity? Though some of the studies discussed attempt to demonstrate this in adults, proving the initial dynamics described in psycho- analytic theory is a difficult task.
How are gender schema theory and psychoanalytic theory, which are theories
influenced by feminism, different from social learning theory and cognitive
development theory, which were not developed with the influence of femi-
nism? What questions do the latter two theories ask that seem consistent
with what you’ve learned about feminism so far?
THE EARLY YEARS: PRIMARY SOCIALIZATION INTO GENDER Now that we have a familiarity with some of the more important theories of how gender socialization should happen according to these theories, we can begin to explore accounts of how gender socialization actually does happen in a variety of different settings. We’ll start at the beginning, with what sociologists call primary socialization. Primary socialization is simply the initial process of learning the ways of a society or group that occurs in infancy and childhood and is transmitted through the primary groups to which we belong. Primary groups are characterized by intimate, enduring, unspecialized relationships among small
