Gendered Self Research Articles

From Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Identity Creativity: True Gender Self Child Therapy

True gender self child therapy is based on the premise of gender as a web that weaves together nature, nurture, and culture and allows for a myriad of healthy gender outcomes. This article presents concepts of true gender self, false gender self, and gender creativity as they operationalize in clinical work with children who need therapeutic supports to establish an authentic gender self while developing strategies for negotiating an environment resistant to that self. Categories of gender nonconforming children are outlined and excerpts of a treatment of a young transgender child are presented to illustrate true gender self child therapy.

Globalised Girlhood: the teaching of femininity in Cosmopolitan and True Love

A comparison of two South African women's magazines, Cosmopolitan and True Love , via both textual and reader analysis, examines their reception by teenage girls. Do women's magazines serve as cultural developmental markers and informal educational devices in the passage from girlhood to adulthood? The study adopts a poststructuralist view on the gendered self as socially constructed within discourse. Women's magazines give 'feminity'a material form and are discursive sites-of-struggle. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the text analysis, while the concept of interpretive repertoires' is applied to the focus group analysis.

Disowning Dependence: Single Women's Collective Struggle for Independence and Land Rights in Northwestern India

In April 2008 over 2,600 single women marched for three days to Shimla, the state capital of the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to demand rights to land, health care and ration cards for single women. The march was organized by a new social movement called Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, comprising divorced, abandoned, never-married women, widows and wives fleeing domestic violence who are demanding rights from the state in their own names (rather than as wives, daughters or mothers); in so doing they are directly challenging the construct of the ‘dependent woman’ naturalized in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial discourses. The most radical of the demands of this new social movement is the struggle for land rights and the creation of new women-centred family formations. Through an analysis of their collective demands, I argue that the normative, dependent woman is mutually constituted not only at the intersections of gender, kinship and heterosexuality, but also spatially, through denial of rights to land. As single women disown their dependence upon husbands/fathers/brothers and demand land rights, they simultaneously re-imagine gendered selves by envisioning new marital families and re-working the division of labour.

“I'm a Prius”: A Child Case of a Gender/Ethnic Hybrid

This article presents the treatment of a young gender nonconforming boy caught in the cross-fire of a gender and cultural warfare between his divorced parents. D.G., of mixed Mexican/American heritage, went through a course of therapy which is presented to illustrate the fluidity of a child's gender identity and expressions and the need to take a developmental approach that allows for the unfolding of a child's authentic gender self over time. The paper also emphasizes the importance of taking family effects into account as a child attempts to negotiate his or her authentic gender amidst parental responses and pressures.

Empathizing With Oedipus: A Connectedness Perspective

While self psychologists have pondered the theoretical relevance of the Oedipus complex for many years, there has been a dearth of attempts to examine how we clinically respond to “oedipal”-sounding material in the consulting room. In supervising and teaching analytic candidates and therapists, the author found them highly receptive to experience-near explanations when dealing with their patients' archaic selfobject needs, but resistant to relinquishing experience-distant oedipal formulations when treating high-level, more neurotic, patients, particularly when confronted with sexual or aggressive feelings that are directed toward the therapist or material relating to gendered selves. This article attempts to delineate, using verbatim clinical material, aspects of the self psychological treatment of the neuroses from a connectedness sensibility, illustrating how it differs from traditional and relational models, and how (gendered) individuality is strengthened through deeply experienced selfobject connectedness. At the conclusion of this presentation, the participant will be able to reconceptualize the oedipal phase and respond clinically to oedipal themes from a more experience-near, self psychological listening perspective.

Gender, discourse and the self in literature: issues in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong

As cultural construct, gender is fictional and imagined, but is also real in its ideological and representational effects on the formation of self and identity. What is intriguing is the fiction behind the fictional, which many people accept as truth. Critiquing the fictive nature of socially accepted values about gender, the authors in this volume unravel the strategies adopted by writers and filmmakers in (de)constructing the gendered self in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Remembering Foucault: Queer Theory and Disciplinary Power

Popular post-structural approaches to gender and sexuality take it as axiomatic that disciplinary power constitutes subjectivities, if imperfectly, in an insidious process of domination and social control. While rejecting a project of liberation grounded in the simplistic premise of freedom from power, these formulations nevertheless propose an implicit emancipatory project anchored in the notion that identity discourse is a problem to overcome. In this article I use the sexual and gendered self in the sociological literature as a vehicle to explore more carefully the problem of disciplinary power. My discussion takes two directions. First, I argue that taxonomic discourse may, in some instances, expand upon subjectivities, opening up and empowering, rather than narrowing and setting in stone, the possibilities of self. And second, I argue that late modernity provides the conditions under which some individuals gain reflexive distance from their subject positions to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history. In this context and for these individuals, the multiplicity of available discourses and their often contradictory content come to resemble more a menu of sensitizing options than a regime of social control. Ultimately, I argue that these two observations are not anathema to Foucault’s own research but, are in fact, suggested in his thesis wherein discourse was theorized to establish the limits of self and, under certain conditions, new pathways for self-development. I argue that this more complex conception of disciplinary power is not only more effective in capturing the effects of power but also has the potential to open up important lines of inquiry regarding the sociohistorical conditions that mediate power and its effects.

Spaces that Matter: Gender Performativity and Organizational Space

This paper examines the relationship between gender performativity and organizational space. Specifically, it focuses on some of the ways in which gender is materialized in and through workspace in accordance with the dominant gender norms shaping organizational life, a theme that has been relatively neglected within organization studies to date. Judith Butler’s (1988, 1993, 2000 [1990], 2004) performative analysis of gender draws critical attention to the body as a medium through which the gendered subject is brought into being, or made to ‘matter’, as she puts it. This paper seeks to extend Butler’s analysis of gender performativity, focusing on the evocation and materialization of these norms through the gendered inhabitation of organizational space. Inspired by a piece of work by contemporary video artist Sofia Hulten called Grey Area, it develops Butler’s analysis with reference to data generated in a series of focus groups and interviews with women working in diverse roles within a university setting. The analysis of the findings of this research links Butler’s work on ‘bodies that matter’ to Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of ‘representational spaces’, arguing that an important but relatively neglected aspect of the organizational materialization of the gendered self is the performance of ‘spaces that matter’.

Doing Culture with Girls Like Me: Why Trying on Gender and Intersectionality Matters

AbstractGendering is not a one‐size‐fits‐all process. Girls try on gender. In particular, girls – conditioned to value connections – search their cultural surroundings for ‘girls like me’ to answer the weighty question, Who am I? However, girls are not simply passive beneficiaries of culture, but actively construct their gendered selves by engaging in or ‘doing’ culture; girls activate certain features salient to their experiences. This paper examines how race, ethnicity, and class arbitrate girls’ gendered identities, emphasizing the concept trying on gender to capture the intersectional and experimental character of these processes. As girls try on gender –a local and culturally specific endeavor – they engage in a fluid, multifaceted, and sometimes tentative gendering process. Cross‐over literature by and for girls lends empirical support to how girls accomplish this multi‐constructed sense of self. The article concludes with implications for studies of girls, including a cautionary note about overemphasis on individualistic agency.

One pill makes you boy, one pill makes you girl

AbstractPsychoanalysis has been confronted with the conundrum of integrating the use of psychotropic medications with the talking cure, with understandable concern about the substitution of a pill for working through. This paper addresses a unique situation in which the “pill” constitutes hormone‐blocking drugs or cross‐sex hormones to treat transgender youth. Clinical material of a 16‐year‐old transgender female is presented and followed by a review of several aspects of transgender hormone treatments. Winnicott's construct of the True and False Self is then used to argue that the True Gender Self of transgender youth is not the gender assigned to them at birth but the gender they experience themselves to be. The paper concludes by suggesting that if hormone blockers and cross‐sex hormone therapies facilitate the strengthening of a youth's authentic gender self, the administration of those drugs is in the best interests of the transgender youth's healthy development. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

(re)Imagining the global, rethinking gender in education

This paper develops new lines of analysis for understanding the relationships between globalisation, the imagination and emergent models of the ‘girl-citizen’. It begins by outlining a new critical framework for studying globalisation that takes as its object of study not what globalisation is, but what globalisation does. Making use of Foucault's analytics of governmentality, it argues that globalisation can be usefully understood as a complex and contradictory set of movements that establish new modes of regulation over the conduct of individual citizens. It further argues that within the current global milieu, the imagination operates as part of a broader neo-liberal project of government that situates the global citizen in the role of entrepreneur of the self. For girls and young women the imagination becomes a tool for constructing and governing their gendered selves alongside idealised models of global citizenship and cosmopolitan identity. Finally, it is proposed that examining the role and effects of the imagination in ‘making’ and ‘managing’ global citizenship-subjects is vital to understanding the emergent models of girl-citizenship both within and outside schooling contexts.

Reconceptualizing reflexivity and dissonance in professional and personal domains

Debates around 'reflexivity' and the construction of the gendered self within late modernity have occupied the attention of both 'reflexive modernization' theorists (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1996; Giddens 1991, 1992) as well as gender and feminist theorists. While theorists such as Beck and Giddens have been preoccupied with establishing the connection between reflexivity and the construction of the 'non-gendered' self, gender and feminist theorists have sought to amplify the debate by exploring the intersecting nexus of contemporary theorizing, more fully within this context. This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of these debates and their application to specific professional and personal domains. I consider three case studies to assess these issues as outlined in my own work, Brooks 2006, and in the work of Wajcman and Martin 2002, and McDowell 1997, which draw on empirical research and explore changes to gender identity within professional and personal domains. I conclude that there is little evidence in the research presented here of any systematic reconfiguring of gender identities leading to a detraditionalization of gender as suggested by the 'reflexive modernization' theorists.

Gender Discrimination and Self Concept : A Research Report

Gender Discrimination and Self Concept : A Research Report

Drs. Bostwick and Martin Reply

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Letters to the EditorFull AccessDrs. Bostwick and Martin ReplyJ. MICHAEL BOSTWICK M.D.,KARI A. MARTIN M.D.,J. MICHAEL BOSTWICK M.D.Search for more papers by this author,KARI A. MARTIN M.D.Search for more papers by this author,Published Online:1 Feb 2008https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2007.07101555rAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail To The Editor: We welcome Dr. Karkazis’ calling to attention two recent and important publications that modernize and standardize an approach to the management of what is now being called “disorders of sexual development.” While Dr. Karkazis purports that the new disorders of sexual development nomenclature—with subcategories for particular developmental aberrations—will reduce stigma and confusion, we feel that the umbrella term “intersex” will remain useful, as it has been in our patient’s case.After decades of feeling neither fully male nor female, she found the intersex label comforting as well as descriptive of the intermediate position on the sex spectrum at which she locates herself in a resolutely bipolar male-female society. In her case, moreover, she was not diagnosed at birth, but made with surgery and hormones into an approximation of a “normal” woman, her “makeover” a mystery to her until she became an adult. By the time she learned at age 48 that the correct tissue diagnosis was mixed-gonadal dysgenesis, her issues were not with having mixed-gonadal dysgenesis but rather with understanding and reconciling her core gender identity. It will probably never be clear whether she is a hermaphrodite or a pseudohermaphrodite because the medical records that could elucidate that question are lost. She finds common cause with individuals who are united not by their specific disorder of sexual development but by their residence in the intersex hinterland between male and female.In the small Midwestern city where our patient came to a new understanding of her sexual and gendered self, the mixed-gonadal dysgenesis diagnosis would have created even fewer opportunities for common cause with other intersex people with whom she desperately wanted to connect. For her and other patients with whom we have worked, the specific diagnosis is not the key issue; the feeling of being neither fully male nor female is. Our patient is able to connect with other intersex people—regardless of their diagnoses—around what they share, which is a potentially profound estrangement from either/or male/female culture. She is also able to represent herself more readily to members of the majority culture with the blanket descriptor “intersex” than the technically correct but abstruse mixed-gonadal dysgenesis.Nonetheless, Dr. Karkazis reminds us that the state of the art for patients with disorders of sexual development has transcended the “optimal gender” approach that imposed such heartache and suffering on intersex individuals in the latter decades of the 20th century. Just as our patient found personal liberation via intersex web sites on the Internet, resources detailing the enlightened contemporary clinical approach Dr. Karkazis espouses are only a computer keystroke away.Rochester, Minn.Scottsdale, Ariz.The authors’ disclosures accompany the original article.This letter (doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2007.07101555r) was accepted for publication in November 2007.Reprints are not available; however, Letters to the Editor can be downloaded at http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 165Issue 2 February, 2008Pages 266-266THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY February 2008 Volume 165 Number 2 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 February 2008 Published in print 1 February 2008

Women and games: technologies of the gendered self

This study examines how individual differences in the consumption of computer games intersect with gender and how games and gender mutually constitute each other. The study focused on adult women with particular attention to differences in level of play, as well as genre preferences. Three levels of game consumption were identified. For power gamers, technology and gender are most highly integrated. These women enjoy multiple pleasures from the gaming experience, including mastery of game-based skills and competition. Moderate gamers play games in order to cope with their real lives. These women reported taking pleasure in controlling the gaming environment, or alternately that games provide a needed distraction from the pressures of their daily lives. Finally, the non-gamers who participated in the study expressed strong criticisms about game-playing and gaming culture. For these women, games are a waste of time, a limited commodity better spent on other activities.

"An Insuperable Repugnance to Hearing Vice Called by Its Proper Name": Englishness, Gender, and the Performed Identities of Rebecca and Amelia in Thackeray's Vanity Fair

"An Insuperable Repugnance to Hearing Vice Called by Its Proper Name": Englishness, Gender, and the Performed Identities ofRebecca and Amelia in Thackeray's Vanity Fair Kit Dobson Identities in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair: A Novel Withouta Hero are at every turn constituted through performances, but these performances are only sustained with difficulty. The successful social acceptance ofcharacters among the "geneteel society" ofthe novel is predicated, I believe, upon the at-times active misrecognition ofsuch performed identities as being somehow "natural ."1 That is, characters perform what they deem to be roles that are socially "appropriate" according to what they have learned, but this performance is only recognized as appropriate as long as it is publicly construed as natural. Eventually, however, in the gossiping world that makes up Vanity Fair, the characters who attempt to perform what they perceive as an acceptable identity are undercut by others who recognize and denounce their performances as such, and thereby negate their supposed naturalness. The circulation ofinformation and gossip is thus invested with the power to make or unmake characters ' social standing, and controlling its flows thus becomes crucial to those in less secure positions. I want to explore the criticisms that the narrator and characters make of one another to undermine their posited-as-natural identities, focusing on Amelia Sedley and Rebecca Sharp, two characters with shifting and unstable social positions. Critically, Amelia and Rebecca have long been read as opposing figures, but, while it is not unfair to do so — there is much in the text to support such a reading — examining the two in terms of their performed identities reveals a less sharply differentiated and binaristic Victorian Review (2006) K. Dobson perspective. While Rebecca's identity is often viewed explicitly as a performance, Amelia's "appropriately" feminine and English identity, consciously or not, remains a naturalized performance — it is simply performed with far greater success. In contrast to Rebecca's less appropriate actions, which are often interpreted by others as being "artful" or deceptive, Amelia is usually effective at having her performance of what Elizabeth Langland calls the "passive virtues" ofEnglish femininity (116) misrecognized as being authentic, rendering less apparent the points at which her performance can be recognized as artificial. By focusing especially upon William Dobbin's final disillusionment and reconciliation with Amelia, I want to explore the operations ofperformance in the text, examining its construction ofboth Rebecca and Amelia's identities as performed and, as a result, somehow lacking. In this exploration, I see the deployment ofperformed roles as potentially liberating, as enabling a disruption ofthe norms ofnaturalized identities and pointing towards a possible proliferation ofalternative identity categories; simultaneously, I see the social rejection of performed identities as an operation ofrepressive social structures that seek to maintain naturalized categories. An analysis ofthe more obvious performativity ofRebecca and its more subtle naturalization in Amelia - and ofits repression in both cases - thus points towards an unrealized liberatory potential. Though unrealized, this potential remains. Performed Identities: Gender and Nationality The concept ofperformativity in this essay is informed by the writing ofthe psychoanalytic gender theorist Judith Butler. Butler uses the concept ofperformativity in order to undermine the supposed naturalness ofgender categories, as she suggests that gender is constituted through nothing more than a repetition ofspecific acts and that, as a result, gender identities might be reconceived as a personal / cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion ofa primary and interior gendered self volume 32 number 2 "An Insuperable Repugnance" or parody the mechanism ofthat construction. (Gender Trouble 176) Gender identity, for Butler, is constituted through an imitation ofan original that proves to be, ultimately, absent, as gender maintains no strictly identifiable essence; it consists ofeither "illusion" or "parody." For Butler, gender is imitative, but it is "an imitation for which there is no original" ("Imitation and Gender Insubordination" 21). Gender is thus constituted through repeated and sustained performances ofa gender identity that is presented as being stable through the concealing ofthe discrepancies between these repetitions: that gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions ofan essential sex and a...

For Women, Breadwinning Can Be Dangerous: Gendered Resource Theory and Wife Abuse

To explain wife abuse, we offer a refinement of relative resource theory, gendered resource theory, which argues that the effect of relative resources is contingent upon husbands’ gender ideologies. We use data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (N =4,296) to test three theories of wife abuse. Resource theory receives no support. Relative resource theory receives limited support. Gendered resource theory receives strong support. Wives’ share of relative incomes is positively related to likelihood of abuse only for traditional husbands. The findings suggest that both cultural and structural forces must be considered to understand marriage as a context for social interactions in which we create our gendered selves.

'One Was a Woman, the Other a Man'

This paper explores the links between sexuality and subjectivity in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Paradise. The theories of Jacques Lacan and Nancy Chodorow are employed to examine the anatomical and social / symbolic factors that lead Morrison's subjects to adopt a gendered self. Chodorow's argument that the mother's gender and preoedipal relationship with her child have a profound bearing on the child's gender identity and subsequent sense of self is cited in addressing gender formation and male-female relationships in Morrison's novels. Lacan's view of gender formation as positioning the gendered subject in a particular position in relation to language / the Symbolic system is also considered. Lacan's and Chodorow's concepts are applied in a study of a number of issues pertaining to sexuality and identity, including: homosexuality and 'deviant' sexuality as perceived threats to normative patriarchal gender systems in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; the discord apparent in male-female relationships in Morrison's novels; and the marginalisation of mothers and women as 'other.'

To Keep Me Safe from Harm? Transgender Prisoners and the Experience of Imprisonment

The experience of imprisonment for a transgender person is often a terrifying one. He or she is extremely vulnerable in such an environment from sexual violence from other prisoners. In addition, he or she may be exposed to inadequate or inappropriate medical care. Consequently transgender prisoners are often denied the protection offered by rule of law. A significant reason for this treatment is the erasure of the transgender experience in informing the nature of the prison regime. In particular, the failure to give sufficient weight to gender self identification by transgender prisoners exposes them to risks which other prisoners do not have to en- dure. It is suggested that the only way to reduce such harm is through the cultivation of a prison regime based upon the lives of transgender prisoners.

Gender Enactments in Immigrants' Discursive Practices: Bringing Bakht into the Dialogue

Drawing on the narratives of four East European couples, this article offers a discourse-centered analysis of their gendered experiences in the second language (L2). The analysis of the data integrates critical feminist perspectives with a Bakhtinian lens to language and the self. Espousing Bakhtin's concepts of dialogue, answerability, and emotional-volitional tone, the article illustrates how the participants in this study enact their positional identities on two planes of L2 use: relative to native speakers of English and within the couples. It shows the discourses these men and women voice in responding to their everyday realities with a particular focus on discourses of emotions and linguistic expertise. It also stresses that these responses are created on the boundary between the self and the Other. The article suggests that a Bakhtinian approach would allow us to add another dimension to viewing the gendered self: that of the ever-shifting relations between the self and the Other which, uniquely to Bakhtin, are fused with a sense of dialogic responsibility.