Socio Cultural Construction Of Gender Identity

The Socio-Cultural Construction of Gender Identity
I. Introduction
Gender Identity is one of the most intriguing and intricately challenging topics among developmental scientists today. However, it is only recently that this topic became of interest to research and studies. Such studies go on to analyze and experiment with infants, children as well as adolescents and adults to find the root of this social-cultural ‘handicap.’ Where do these types of associations come from? Why do they exist? These are the kinds of questions scientist try to answer. Gender identity has been associated to both cultural and social motives; what is accepted in a culture and what society deems as suitable are strong incentives towards the development of a gender identity. But the study of the socio-cultural impact on gender identity aims to find out why certain behaviors and objects are suitable for one sex and not the other and when and how those impacts start develop. As mentioned above gender identity can be somewhat of a handicap; to further explain this idea, this ‘handicap’ goes on to establish cultural and social norms prescribed to sex (male/female) which in turn facilitate rules as to what a male/female can do and how …show more content…
Some of these characteristics among different cultures remain the same. For example, across many cultures women are identified with similar if not the same characteristics and traits. Women are seen most of the time, in almost all cultures as inferior to men, women are seen as more gentle, care-takers, sensitive, and yielding when compared to their male counterparts, while men are categorized as being strong, unemotional, and rough. Because of this categorization across cultures, what makes a man manly and what makes a woman womanly attributes to the identity given to individuals based on their