Engendering Identity(s) in a Rural Arkansas Ozark Community

Abstract

The negotiation of gendered identity is a contextualized dialogic practice in which the construction of concrete individuals as females and males may be questioned, contested, assumed, subjective, and shifting. Here, as elsewhere, the meaning of gender is located in everyday discursive, interpretive social practices. The social/symbolic representation of gender is a public sign system that dialectically reflects and produces a local epistemology, a system of ideas, of and about gender. In Rock County in the Ozark Mountains meanings of gender are located in stories of hardworking/lazy husbands and wives, back-talking boys, dirty politics, and supportive (but not subservient) women. Gender is symbolically represented in the silences of subjective girls and women, the dearth of in positions of authority, overstepping women and watered-down men. These mediating cultural forms are the infrastructure of a fragmented and multifaceted epistemology of gender. It is within this social space that gendered identity(s) are represented, contested, constructed, and negotiated. [gender, identity, discourse, Ozarks, rural communities]