Gender and Identity

Paper Summary:

This paper contends that entire fields of sociology and psychology have arisen to address the question of gender's impact and influence over individual identity and how this shapes society. The paper discusses three main theories that dominate the field, each with many facets and even occasionally overlapping claims: The existentialist who claims that biological sex contributes specific and perhaps universal elements to identity formation; the socializationist who claims that it is society which forces gender upon the identity of the individual; and the post-modernist position which, in its purest form, denies that in the face of human freedom there can be a coherent and consistent meaning either to gender or to group identification.
Outline
Introduction
The Theories
Major Theory Critiques
Renovation of the Theories and Conclusion

From the Paper:

"Perhaps the most important question facing any human, be they male or female, is that of the discovery of their own identity. The majority of child development theories, from Freud onward, have dealt with the way in which children must learn to disengage their own identity from that of their parents (mothers in particular) and discover who they are as adults. Yet this process is far from over when one reaches physical maturity, and one may even see many other psychological theories, from Maslow to the existentialists, as exploring the stages through which one continues to define one's true identity as distinct not only from one's parents but also from one's biological and social circumstances. It is somewhat ironic that the word identity which was originally used to note categories of same-ness and unity (Connell 2002) is now so vitally bound up with defining distinctness. At the risk of making a rather sweeping generalization, it may not be inappropriate to say that the search for individual identity is one of the hallmarks of modern Western civilization. In the quest for individual identity, which has become increasingly politicized and psychologically centralized as wider social or class-based unities have decayed, one's individual identification becomes a new basis for political and social activism. (Connell 2002) "

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