Without Gender, Without Self

Abstract

In this chapter, I address the model from the perspective of gender. Gender is not a part of Baltes’s theory, and yet it nevertheless enters it because scientific narratives, in narrating the human condition, involve implicit assumptions about the role of gender in such cognitive and emotional aspects of development. Drawing on my previous theoretical work, I distinguish between two gendered narratives. One presents an essentially “masculine” view of the life course with an emphasis on the rise, growth, and decline of logos, activity, and internal, conscious control. The second presents an essentially “feminine” view with an emphasis on the suppression and eventual liberation of mythos—the intuitive, emotional, relational, and experiential. As do many cognitively based theories, Baltes’s version of lifespan theory exemplifies a “masculine” prototype with its emphasis on autonomy and internal control, its technical rather than social-interactional view of culture, and its failure to integrate a consistent theory of emotion into his view of development across the lifespan.