A study of gender identity: monograph ‒ 9786010435346

Table of contents :
B. N. KYLYSHBAYEVA
«Kazakh university»
2018
UDC 316. 3/4
LBC 60.54
K 99
Recommended for publication by the Academic Council (Protocol No.10, 28.05.2018) and the Editorial Committee
of al-Farabi KazNU (Protocol No.7, 05.07.2018)
Reviewers:
Kylyshbayeva B.N.
A study of gender identity: monograph / B.N. Kylyshbayeva. – Almaty: Kazakh university, 2018. ‒ 156 p.
ISBN 978-601-04-3534-6
UDC 316.3/4
LBC 60.54
© Kylyshbayeva B.N., 2018
ISBN 978-601-04-3534-6 © Al-Farabi KazNU, 2018
C. Cooley was the first to stress the importance of the subjectively interpreted feedback that we receive from other people, as the main source of data about our own self: «what do they think about me». He proposed this in the form of the «looking gla...
In C. H. Cooley’s «looking glass self» theory, society and the individual have a common genesis. Personality, from its point of view, is determined by social conditions [8]. The reference point for the self-concept is the self of another person, that ...
E. Fromm analyzed modern features of the relationship between the person and society. In particular, he considered the existence of the person as being in a hostile social structure [16]. E. Fromm developed a scheme for the development of the person’s...
Thus, gender identity is a sense of self-identity, awareness of belonging to a certain sex through categorization of masculinity and femininity, development of appropriate forms of behavior and the formation of personal characteristics. It is derived ...
78 Habermas J. Democracy. Mind. Morality. – M.: Academia,, 1995. – 256 с.
79 Bauman Z. The Individualized Society /translated from English /eds. V. L. Inozemtsev. – M.: Logos, 2005. – 390 p.
Kylyshbayeva Bibigul Nauryzovna

Citation preview

AL-FARABI KAZAKH NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

B. N. KYLYSHBAYEVA

A STUDY OF GENDER IDENTITY Monograph

Almaty «Kazakh university» 2018

UDC 316. 3/4 LBC 60.54 K 99 Recommended for publication by the Academic Council (Protocol No.10, 28.05.2018) and the Editorial Committee of al-Farabi KazNU (Protocol No.7, 05.07.2018) Reviewers: Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology and Social Work of Faculty of Philosophy and Political Science Al-Farabi KazNU N.U. Shedenova The candidate of sociological sciences, assistant professor KazNMU them. SD Asfendiyarov Z.A. Nagaibaeva

К 99

Kylyshbayeva B.N. A study of gender identity: monograph / B.N. Kylyshbayeva. – Almaty: Kazakh university, 2018. ‒ 156 p.

ISBN 978-601-04-3534-6 The monograph about sociological concepts of designing of gender identity under the influence of social factors in the conditions of changes in Kazakhstan society. New tendencies in gender sphere is typical for modern society in Kazakhstan: liberalization of gender and social norms and increasing power of ideology leading back to traditionalism. On the one hand, globalization, market conditions stimulate consolidation of traditional gender hierarchy in society, on the other hand it leads to reconsideration of standards of masculinity and femininity. The monograph can be used by scientists, teachers and students, all who are interested in gender studies, identity problems. Theoretical and empirical research materials can be used in the development of training courses on gender sociology, general psychology of personality, etc.

UDC 316.3/4 LBC 60.54 © Kylyshbayeva B.N., 2018 © Al-Farabi KazNU, 2018

ISBN 978-601-04-3534-6

2

INTRODUCTION In recent years, identity problems have been of great research interest in such sciences as sociology, philosophy and psychology. Transformation of identity as a subject of scientific analysis in recent years has increasingly attracted attention. The search for self and their role is paid more and more attention by people. This does not mean that we are more than our ancestors interested in who we are, it is more difficult for us to establish and maintain our identity satisfactorily within our life and to achieve its recognition by others. It also means that in conditions of multifacetedness and multidimensionality of modern social life, it has become impossible to create universal comprehensive descriptions and explanatory models of understanding identity. According to A. Giddens, modern society is characterized not by the replacement of certain traditions and habits by others, equally stable, reliable and rational, but by a state of constant doubt, the multiplicity of sources of knowledge, which makes the self more volatile and requires constant reflection. In a rapidly changing society, the instability and plasticity of social and personal identity becomes consistent and natural [1]. In today's Kazakhstani society, as elsewhere in the world, fundamental social changes related to global processes are taking place. At present, the combination of the influence of globalization and national civilization development leads to a change in the structure of personal development, including the crisis of social identity. Openness of the society, excess of information changes the direction and manifestations of gender identity, changing gender stereotypes, ideas about masculinity and femininity, legitimizing transgender practices. In this regard, the problem of gender identity formation requires a comprehensive study through the identification of mechanisms and factors of gender identity. Formation of new models of relationships between the society members also updates the forms through which the hidden reserves of individuals can be mobilized and implemented. Gender identity is an important component of social identity, influenced by socio-cultural, socio-political and economic transformations that occur in the country and in the world as a whole. The relevance of the theme of the monograph is attributed to several circumstances. 3

Firstly, the deep transformation of modern Kazakhstan society has led to significant changes in people's minds and behavior. Secondly, the further development of gender relations in the context of transformation and modernization of Kazakhstan's society has intensified the full participation of women and men in political, family, economic and other types of social activities. Thirdly, changing gender roles today goes beyond traditional gender stereotypes. This process is accompanied by the ambiguous adoption of new roles, namely, the masculinization of women and the feminization of men. A new, androgynous type of personality becomes more and more widespread, combining both feminine and masculine qualities, which meets the requirements of comfortable existence in modern conditions. The scientific interest of the author is not so much in describing the leveling of gender differences, but rather in considering the correspondence between the transformation of external social processes of changing the gender order to the inner experiences of the individual. Men and women are experiencing an internal gender conflict, experiencing equal pressure from both traditional and modernization expectations. Fourthly, the sociological study of changes in the formation of gender identity in the context of socio-cultural transformation is important for understanding the problem and finding specific mechanisms for effective implementation of gender policy in modern Kazakhstan. The study of gender identity can serve as a theoretical justification for the adoption of certain political decisions, since gender policy is the integral basis of the internal, social policy of the state. The concept of family and gender policy until 2030 defined the main directions of gender policy in our country – achieving balanced participation of men and women in power structures, ensuring equal opportunities for women's economic independence, developing their business and promotion, creating conditions for equal implementation rights and responsibilities in the family, freedom from violence on the grounds of sex. The strategy of gender equality in the Republic of Kazakhstan is a fundamental document of the state gender policy, an instrument for its implementation and monitoring by the state and civil society. Implementation of the policy of gender equality can not go against the setting of a person for a comfortable self-awareness within a gender group, self-acceptance in the category of the person’s own psychological sex. 4

1 THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE STUDY OF GENDER IDENTITY

1.1. Basics of theoretical concepts of the phenomenon of identity Significant changes taking place in our society in recent times make research of the identity problem relevant. In scientific literature, the term «identity» increasingly finds its use, thoroughly pushing back frequently used familiar terms like «self-consciousness» and «self-determination». Identity analysis is a complex and interesting process due to the multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach to studying this phenomenon. In addition to the sociological and psychological concept, socio-humanistic sciences also study the political, ethnic, civil, professional and other types of identity at different levels of its manifestation – individual, group, local and global. In a traditional society, social processes were rather slow, and a sense of stability was based on the immutability of the social structure and cultural codes through which the individual comprehended his or her life. The individuals fully identified themselves with their community, their family. The norms of the community rigidly defined the way of life and even thought. Division of labor, development of science, secularization led to individualization, development of self-knowledge, and, as a consequence, to development and complication of identification. The sense of cultural and historical disunity, development of mass communication led to the fact that the person ceased to perceive himor herself as an autonomous being. The person lives in constant interaction with other people, in a constant process of recognizing his or her self, the world and the surrounding. He or she is in the process of constant construction of social, national, confessional, psychological, gender identity. One of them can be suppressed, the other can come to the fore and become dominant in the complex of variants of identity. These variants can co-exist, since they determine a person from different sides. For example, «the construction of the 5

sex-role and social aspects of identity go hand in hand. In gender manifestations, social necessity, as it was incorporated from early childhood, social conditions of existence «here and now», as well as «biological coercion» are simultaneously combined [2]. Identity is a broad concept that includes all the qualities of personal combinations, due to a large array of biological, psychological, social and cultural factors. Etymologically, the root «iden» refers to the Latin «idem», which means something that remains the same for a long enough time. According to the researchers (Stoller, O. Kernberg, Ph. Greenacre, etc.), identity is seen as something dual. On the one hand, it is what reaches its culmination in its development and acquires some integrity and completeness in the puberty period, on the other hand, we can see identity as constantly changing till the very end of life, which never remains unchanged. S. Freud used the term identity for the first time, considering identity as an essential and inalienable «component», which is in close interrelation and interaction with other mental structures: Ego, Super Ego, Id. Identity is the core that holds the personality together and around which it unites. According to S. Freud, identification with the community, the group is associated with the need for patronage. The community or group performs the function of «father», a function of social rationing, thereby developing «superego». «Id», in turn, is not capable of reacting rationally to external prescriptions, as a result of which there is an increase in aggression or depression. K. Jaspers identifies identity as one of the four signs of consciousness. The first sign is the sense of activity, the perception of oneself as an active subject, the second is the consciousness of one's own unity, the third is the consciousness of identity in space and time, the fourth is the awareness of difference from the others. As an example of the crisis of identity in time, Jaspers gives an example of schizophrenic patients who claimed about their lives before the onset of psychosis, that they were not themselves, but someone else [3]. In the middle of the 20th century, other works appeared that, in their own way, influenced the development of the identity problem. For example, the phenomenalistic or humanistic approach (J. Bruner, C. Rogers, etc.), which, like the theory of social identity, is based on several grounds, in particular, cognitive and personal one, and 6

considers the behavior of the individual a result of the perception of the situation. It is the perception that acts as the central concept. The main idea of supporters of this direction is that a person can not influence real events (one can only avoid or join the situation, but not change what has already happened or is happening to us). It is more possible for a person to change the perception of these events and rethink what is happening. The phenomenalistic principle of subjectivity of perception is located closely to what is meant by identity and manifests itself in the understanding of the personal self, which is an internal mechanism in which reflections of reality refracted in the course of perception are embodied. It is formed under the influence of evaluative and affective attitudes and therefore can be good or bad. The quality of evaluation is determined by the impact of culture, other people and the person himself. The works of A. Waterman emphasize the value-based and volitional aspect of the development of identity. He assumed that the formed identity includes the choice of goals, values and beliefs [4]. This choice is actualized during the period of identity crisis and is the basis for further definition of the meaning of life. While the Freud's theory is focused on the biological and sexual factors of identity formation in childhood, where four phases are distinguished (oral, anal, phallic and latent), Erikson's theory focuses on social identity factors that have a huge impact throughout the life of a person. Erikson emphasizes the ability to overcome, correct negative consequences of children's conflicts and achieve a positive identity and readiness to overcome the next crisis. Previous identifications are integrated and contribute to further selfdetermination and choice. The thesis about the ability of conscious control and correction runs counter to Freud's ideas about the determinism of childhood experiences. The feeling of identity is preceded by recognition, empathy and the child's trust in the mother. As E. Erikson writes, «The process «begins» somewhere in the first true «meeting» of mother and baby as two persons who can touch and recognize each other, and it does not «end» until a man's power of mutual affirmation wanes» [5]. The construction of identity begins with the image of the body, then on the basis of the set of previous identifications this foundation is transformed into a conscious sense of identity, which includes the integration of different self-concepts and personal roles related to others. Identification is the process of 7

permanent categorization, perception of oneself in comparison with other people, significant for the person. Notably, the range of significant people extends from the mother to all of mankind. As the consciousness develops, the child forms an image of himself, others, «himself» through the eyes of others. Gradually, the sense of identity includes the feeling of oneself in the past, present and future, i.e. continuity of one’s existence in space and time. Socialization forms an identity that may not change much and be realized by the child. Expectations become a part of identity and are reinforced by psychosocial experience. Childhood ends with the formation of a configuration of significant identities. E. Erikson presented the entire psychological development of the individual as successive stages in age-related identity crises, which are associated with the acceptance of oneself and one's surrounding in a new quality in each specific period of life [5]. E. Erikson believed that the category of «identity» would later become one of the central ones in science. V. S. Malakhov rightly points out that the American scientist first gave the theory of identity the status of interdisciplinary knowledge [6]. Erickson showed that identity is changeable throughout life. The first most detailed examination of the category of «identity» was made by him in his work «Childhood and Society», and by the beginning of the 1970s the largest representative of the cultural and anthropological school C. Levi-Strauss claimed that the identity crisis would be a new disaster of the century and predicted a change in the status of this problem from the socio-philosophical to the interdisciplinary. In France, in 1977, a collective monograph «Identity» was published based on the results of the seminar devoted to «identity» and bringing together representatives from a wide range of fields of knowledge – from ethnology and linguistics to literary criticism. In Germany, in 1979, a collection of works was published, which collected reports and articles by philosophers, historians, sociologists, literary critics and art theorists on the same topic. Since that time, the number of works devoted to this problem has been growing exponentially. E. Erikson was the first, in the full sense of the word, to explore identity using various approaches: psychoanalytic and sociological, and studying it from various angles. All subsequent studies necessarily correlated with his concept. E. Erikson understood identity as a whole as a process of «organizing life experiences into 8

the individual self», which implies its dynamics throughout the life of a person. Social identity is experienced by a person as «a sense of continuous self-identity», based on the acceptance by the individual of a holistic image of himself in unity with his diverse social ties. A change in the sociocultural conditions of the person’s existence leads to the loss of the previous identity and the need to form a new one. Personal difficulties emerging at this stage can lead to a severe neurosis – «losing oneself». Therefore, the main function of social identity is adaptation in the broadest sense: according to E. Erikson, the process of formation and development of identity «protects the integrity and individuality of the person’s experience... gives him the opportunity to foresee both internal and external dangers and balance his abilities with the social opportunities provided by society». Identity is «a subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image» [5]. E. Erikson understands identity as a multi-level entity that has three main components: individual, personal and social. At the individual level, identity is the result of a person's awareness of his own temporal extent. This is the idea of his physical appearance, temperament, having its past and aspirations for the future. From a personal point of view, identity is defined as the feeling of a person's own distinctness, the uniqueness of his life experience, which sets some identity to himself. At the social level, identity is understood by E. Erikson as that personal construct that reflects the inner solidarity of a person with social, group ideals and standards, and thereby helps the process of self-categorization: these are our qualities through which we interpret, divide the world into similar and not similar to ourselves. Erikson identifies eight psychosocial stages of personality development and in each a crisis occurs, which requires a solution, because the physical and social environment creates new situations of challenge. A person resolves the conflict in two ways: adaptive or non-adaptive. Having solved a crisis situation, a person changes and is ready to overcome a new crisis. E. Erikson calls the person's life cycle the epigenesis of identity. These eight stages, forming identities, are determined by the achieved dualistic feeling: creation – feeling of inferiority; trust – distrust; autonomy – doubt; initiative – sense of guilt; identity – confused identity; intimacy – isolation; integrity – hopelessness. 9

The first four stages repeat the stages of S. Freud: oral, anal, phallic and latent, in which Erikson accentuates not biological and sexual factors, but social ones. The last four stages proposed by Erikson include the stages from childhood to old age. All stages can have a positive result if a person manages to solve them in an adaptive way, but if the crisis is not resolved in an adaptive way, the result can still be corrected if the resolution in the next stage is adaptive. Thus, Erikson envisioned the ability of conscious control as opposed to Freud's thesis about the determinative significance of children's complexes in the development of personality. Erikson was confident that the person is able to monitor and correct the negative consequences of children's conflicts and achieve identity. The search for identity is determined by the external environment. Constant external and internal transformations inevitably lead to identity crises. Therefore, identity can be presented as a permanent process of its formation and reformation. A person repeatedly tries to make decisions in a new way, to join a new group of identification. Therefore, identity «can be represented as a process analogous to the process of mastering a foreign language (in contrast to the native language)» [2]. Change in identity is also associated with age. Consciousness and psychology of the individual change with time and it can be quite difficult to articulate the requirement for identity. In the process of identification, resistance from the external environment that impedes the reproduction of identification canons is possible, since the identification process is based on existing knowledge. In an effort to avoid a crisis of identity, young people jump to self-determination, or put up with predetermination and, as a result, do not fully reveal their potential. In other cases, the identity crisis stretches indefinitely, increasing doubts about self-determination, or «negative identity» is formed when a person takes a socially undesirable or dangerous role. While young, any individual experiences a crisis associated with social and personal choices and identities, and for the majority it ends up positively, and an inadequate identity is formed in the minority. Despite the fact that the aggravation of the identity crisis often occurs in youth, people can face it at any age. Erikson uses the concept of «identity crisis» for the first time in the treatment of World War II veterans, later he observed similar confusion of identity in people who lost their landmarks, and came to the conclusion that the identity crisis is a 10

part of normal development. In addition, his own immigrant’s experience allowed Erikson to assume that even if a person managed to solve the youth identity crisis, subsequent difficult life situations can cause a recurrence of the crisis. When studying identity, it is necessary to pay attention to the environment, not only the external one, surrounding the individual, but also the internal one, that is why Erikson chose sociology as a tool for knowledge of identity, for «identity is checked by psychosocial experience». In sociology, determinant in identity is reflection. A.Y. Shemanov defines identity as «existential self-determination, which underlies any act of thinking» [7]. The further development of the sociological approach in the study of identity is associated with symbolic interactionism and stems from the self-theory developed by William James, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Horton Cooley. The subject of symbolic interactionism was the ways of building identity and the process of identification, analysis of the structure of identification, dependence of identification on social space and time and the system of social institutions. Interactionists turned to the human «self», personal self-determination. The starting point is the consideration of behavior as a socially oriented position, as an external manifestation of person’s inner world in the process of interaction – intercommunion. Both the individual and society are the product of interaction. Society itself was considered as the sum of self-sufficient interpersonal interactions of «I» and «You», «I» and «Others». Self-consciousness «mirrors» the reactions to it of surrounding people. Thus, the individual perceives himself as such indirectly, through the private points of view of the members of the reference groups. One of the first people engaged in the study of identity was W. James, professor at Harvard University, who at the end of the last century developed a concept of comprehension by the individual of his identity, his borders and place in the world. James showed that a person thinks of himself in two planes, namely, in the personal (I), where personal self-identity is created, and other (Me), where the diversity of the individual's social self is formed. These two planes are the sides of one complete formation (self). Self-respect of the individual is determined by the ratio of our actual abilities, really achieved success and claims, manifested in the desire to occupy a certain position in society and to become someone 11

through a combination of two parameters: identification and selfrespect. Identification determines not only the goals of the person, but also the level of his self-respect and self-esteem. In James's concept, social identity is one of the personal grounds that help the person to maintain self-respect and integrity of his self. So for William James, identity is a subjective sense of self-correspondence, continuity, creative power, resistance of «ego» in relation to the surrounding world. C. Cooley was the first to stress the importance of the subjectively interpreted feedback that we receive from other people, as the main source of data about our own self: «what do they think about me». He proposed this in the form of the «looking glass self» theory, which arises on the basis of the symbolic interaction of the individual with the various primary groups of which he is a member. C. H. Cooley perceives human nature not as a kind of unique quality, but as a product of communication [8]. A person, first of all, becomes a human person, develops his Self through a process of interaction with other people. That is why Cooley denied the assumption of an autonomous, rational individual and advocated the social genesis of the Self. The individual and the society for Cooley are two expressions of the same object, which complement each other, but do not dominate one another. The social exists as a process of interaction and behavior of individuals. Human identity is always at the same time both individual and social, it is «group nature». And each individual is the product of a specific combination of interaction relationships to other specific individuals and groups. Thus, the dynamic aspect of the Self is also implied, identity is formed during the processes of interaction; this is the content of what is considered to be the socialization of the individual. In the theory of C. H. Cooley, the possibility of combining micro- and macro perspectives, which is characteristic of American sociology, is laid. The social genesis of the Self shows that the activity of the individual, along with individuality and subjectivity, still has the ability to somehow represent the group goals and interests, that is, to perform functions for the whole, which are distinct from the purposeful intentions of individual behavior. In the process of communication, human relations are exercised and developed, communications are an instrument and mechanism for the socialization of the individual. In the process of communication, there is an exchange of ideas that people have about 12

each other, cognition of themselves through a dramatic perception of the attitude of others. Self, or its cognition, is something that is acquired in interaction with others; it is based on the organization of perceived representations in consciousness (the «looking glass self»). Cooley does not mean the process of organizing of one’s self, but the reciprocity of the ideas that people have about each other. In C. H. Cooley’s «looking glass self» theory, society and the individual have a common genesis. Personality, from its point of view, is determined by social conditions [8]. The reference point for the self-concept is the self of another person, that is, the individual’s image of what others think of him. G. Mead defines identity as the person's ability to perceive his behavior and life as a connected and unified whole and is understood as not given from birth, but formed in the course of social intercommunion, interaction. Mead distinguishes between two types of identity: the conscious one and the unconscious one. Unconscious identity is based on unconsciously accepted norms, habits [9]. This is a person's set of expectations coming from the social group to which he belongs. A conscious identity arises when a person begins to reflect on himself and his behavior. However, a conscious identity does not mean the autonomy of the individual from the society, because it is formed with the help of the categories developed in the social interaction, developed in the language. At the same time, the presence of a conscious identity means a moment of relative freedom of the individual, as the person ceases to follow the ritualized deployment of actions and begins to think about the purpose and tactics of his behavior. He claimed that, on the one hand, society determines the identity of the individual, setting norms, laws of existence, on the other hand, the individual himself sets his own definition in the choice of goals and values. Thus he distinguishes between the Me and the I: the first is the result of the internalization of social roles and expectations, the second is an active instance through which an individual can not only be identified with internalized roles, but also distance himself from them [9, p. 105]. G. Mead believed that identity arises as a result of his social experience, interaction with other people. Thus, the emphasis is on the social conditioning of identity: it arises only if the individual is included in the social group, in communion with members of this group. In Mead's opinion, the world with its spacetime relations is based on intersubjective perception and is included 13

in the process of our practice. The identity of individuals, as well as that of things, arises in the process of action, and in it they acquire instrumental significance. In the very name of Mead's theory of «symbolic interactionism» the meaning of the symbols that cause actions and reactions is highlighted. Any symbol-mediated interaction is at the same time an element in the construction or change of the identity of the Self. While Cooley assumed that the perception of others' ideas about us serves as a measure of the social self, Mead believed that a person can develop his Self only when he is able to know himself as an object. He is capable of this, because he adopts the attitude of others to himself, that is, taking the perspective of the other. A huge role is played by culture, through which the individual begins to understand the behavior of others. As a result, the Me is formed in the consciousness of the individual as a generalized evaluation by others. Me is what «Me as an object» looks like in the eyes of others. Continually reflecting ourselves the way others see us, we become competent in the production and expression of social symbols [9, p. 12]. According to Mead, society and the individual are not opposed to each other. Society is a conversation between people, the mind is the internalization of this conversation and the self is between them. The self is understood by the author as the primary social identity, to which subsequent identities are layered. Society is a universal process of erecting meanings, meanings, experienced and interpreted by people in their daily lives. People acquire values that make it possible to create a predictable and understandable world. According to the researcher, identification is a necessary prerequisite for social life. Individual identity does not exist in isolation from the social worlds of other people. The self is constructed socially – in the process of primary and subsequent socialization and in the ongoing processes of social interactions in which individuals define and redefine themselves and others throughout their life. The emergence of the Self is a process of learning, during which the individual must constantly adopt the attitudes of others. This objective cognition of oneself occurs in every interactive situation with others, but it is by no means limited to this, but finds its continuation in the individual's thinking, which, for Mead, is the continuation of social communication, an inner dialogue with others. These others can be «significant others», specific individuals of our immediate environment, or «generalized others», others as 14

representatives of certain functions, bearers of roles that embody institutions, organizations, or groups for us. So, our identity is a dramatic structure that includes the past, as we borrow from the memory the role of others, their attitude towards us, and we react in our imagination. Only gradually does the child achieve the identity of his «Self». First, the child reproduces what Mead describes as the «play stage», the reactions of those around him, and the child assumes the roles of all the actors in the world of his ideas; at the same time, he is still strongly associated with individuals with whom he has a close emotional relationship. Gradually, he also learns to anticipate the behavior of any person and adopt their point of view. In situations which Mead calls the «game stage», the child is already consciously playing a very definite role in the group, but it also means that he can anticipate the behavior of many others who also represent quite definite functions, and adopt this role in their totality, that is, the prospect of the group. Mead calls the third stage that of «generalized others», it consists of the rules of the game of the game group, norms and values of the family, preschool class, school class, etc. Despite the fact that people are all peculiar and unique, the self, the identity is social, it is constructed in the process of socialization and social interaction throughout life. In identity, internal selfdetermination of the person and external definitions, expectations of other people result. The individual will not «see» himself, unless he «sees» what others see in him. Identity is formed in the process of interpersonal interaction, in the process of an inner dialogue between the I and the ME J. G. Mead, while sharing the «looking glass self» theory, believed that the emergence of the human self, its identity as a holistic psychic phenomenon is a social process occurring within the individual. Within its framework, the I and the Me identified by James appear. But according to Mead it looks a little different. He believed that the I was an unconscious, impulsive disordered tendency of mental life. The Me is the attitudes of others, i.e. it is formed by human values. The Me directs the I into certain frames, and their totality forms the Self, the identity. Since symbolic interactionism is characterized by a procedural vision of the social world, where it represents a continuous process of adapting participants' behavior to the behavior of others on the basis of understanding the subjective states of these others, the 15

search for identity also represents the process of evaluating oneself in accordance with those characteristics and values that are attributed to him by others. Personality becomes for itself what it is in itself, but through what it presents to others in the social life space. Thus, according to symbolic interactionism, the identity of a person is determined by the structure of his personality, the perception of the «generalized other» and the social role. The person, for Mead, is not an isolated being in the power of the unconscious, but a social being, it is society that determines the form and content of the process of identity formation. Within the framework of cognitive orientation, identity problems were actively developed in such social and psychological concepts as H. Tajfel's social identity theory [10] and J. Turner's selfcategorization theory [11]. In these concepts, special attention was paid to the analysis of the correlation of personal and social identities in the structure of the self-concept of the individual. In the theories of H. Tajfel and J. Turner, personal and social identity are considered as mutually exclusive categories. Thus, in the H. Tajfel's theory it is asserted that, depending on the situation, either personal or social identity can be actualized. The main mechanism that initiates the process of actualization of a particular identity is represented by a motivational structure oriented towards the achievement of a positive self-esteem by the individual. The person will resort to intergroup behavior forms (actualizing social identity), if this is the shortest path to achieving positive self-esteem [11]. If the person can reach it at the level of interpersonal communication (actualizing personal identity), he does not need to go to the opposite forms of behavior. J. Turner passed from the motivational-cognitive foundations of the social identity theory to the actual cognitive basis in his theory of self-categorization (grouping himself with some class of identical objects). One of the basic postulates of his theory is the distinguishing of three levels of self-categorization: – self-categorization of a human being (human identity); – group self-categorization (social identity); – personal self-categorization (personal identity). In H. Tajfel's theory, social and personal identity are contrasted through the illustration of a social-behavioral continuum, on one side of which interpersonal interaction takes place, and on the other side – social [10]. The main idea of this theory is the achievement of positive self-esteem, and if it is necessary to use intergroup forms of 16

behavior for quick achievement of the goal (positive self-esteem), then the social identity of this individual is actualized. If there is an opportunity to reach the goal at the level of interpersonal communication, then personal identity is actualized. The operationalization of the identity category was carried out by J. Marcia [12]. He put forward the hypothesis that this hypothetical structure manifests itself phenomenologically through the observable «problem solving» patterns, i.e. is actualized in a situation of social choice. So, for example, a teenager needs to solve problems such as: to go to work or study, what kind of work or school to choose, whether to continue to communicate with peers whom his parents do not like or not, and so on. The solution of each life problem, even a minor one, contributes to the achievement of identity. The idea of the existence of two aspects of identity – oriented toward the social environment and the uniqueness of human manifestations – was reflected in the works of many representatives of various theoretical trends. In the modern system of knowledge, dominant is the point of view about the existence of two types of identity – socially defined identity and identity reflecting the individual in the person, i.e. social identity and personal (personal) identity. Identity formation includes two components: a) role development – acquisition of experience through role training and b) socioemotional development – acquisition of ability for interpersonal relationships. Mead's opinion agrees with the Laing's idea of complementary identity, which requires a «significant other». With the help of the other and through the relationship with him, the identity of the person is realized. The other complements the identity, but can also contribute to the formation of undesirable identity. The author points out that the position of the other, the «senior» means that he introduces the action, and the other follows this action, having the opportunity to criticize the «senior». Laing in his book «The Divided Self», in the work «The Self and Others» carries out his own development of the E. Erikson's idea of identity, and focuses on complementarity, as on the factor that determines the main functional identity of the identity from his point of view [5]. Laing says that a woman can not be a mother without a child. She needs a child to give her the mother's identity. All identities require a «significant other». With the help of the other and through the relationship with him, the identity of the person is realized. But the 17

other can also contribute to the formation of undesirable identity. Complementarity – the interdependence of identity – is the function of personal relationships whereby the «other» fills or complements identity. But complementarity is viewed not in the sense of competition, where two people are in unequal statuses, in which one is in a privileged position, and the second one is in a secondary position, subordinate to the first. Laing's complementarity means that the position of the «senior» person means that he introduces the action, and the other follows this action, he can also criticize the «senior» and the «senior» accept criticism, the «senior» advises and the other perceives it, and so on. This complimentation is culturally conditioned and perceived in terms of role behavior. One can consider identity as complimentary to another identity corresponding to it. Each person belongs simultaneously to several groups, which leads to a collision of the value-normative standards of these groups. Constructing and reconstructing identities becomes especially relevant in critical periods, because belonging to a group gives a sense of stability. The person has the need for solidarity, group protection, maintaining self-respect. Adaptation to a new social environment involves not just identification, but reconstruction, transformation of social identity. The formation of identity is determined by the degree of the individual's need for group protection, for recognition from the reference community. Identification with communities is a consequence of reflection on interpersonal and intergroup interaction. With the help of categorization and identification with the group, the individual seeks to simplify the system of interrelations in an unstable environment and at the same time he is engaged in the search and realization of self-expression. The individual categorizes himself at the personal level as I – the Others, at the group level – as We – They. This is a complex process of not only identification, but also differentiation, social comparison. Identification with the group is considered in three planes: cognitive – the knowledge of my belonging to the group, the value – the presence of positive or negative connotations of belonging to this group, and emotional – the acceptance of either «ingroup» or «outgroup» on the basis of the first two indicators» [13, 5, p. 181]. It can be said that the individual's desire to change the social environment or his place in it is not so much the strengthening or 18

confirmation of a positive identity, but rather the maintenance of a stable personal identity. Any group tends to differentiate itself from other, relatively close groups. Members of the group accentuate group differences in order to achieve or maintain the difference of their group or their social identity. This desire can especially be manifested in groups that exist, but do not have a formal social status. But social identity depends not only on intergroup differences, but also on group homogeneity. Besides the fact that the group may differ from the others, the members of the group should be as similar as possible to each other. The perception of the group as homogeneous increases the social difference of the group and thus enhances the social identity of its members. If the results of social comparison are unfavorable (and social identity is negative), the person will tend to leave the group and join a higher rated group. If for some reason this is not possible, the individual will strive to ensure that his group becomes positively different, and if this is not possible, he will change his evaluation criteria. If identity is the self-construction of the self in a social space, then their ordering will depend on the domination of groups among themselves. At the same time, construction of group solidarity has a lesser or greater degree of rigidity. Social behavior of an individual depends on the comprehension of his belonging to a particular group. Belonging to one or another group can be clearly perceived and unconscious. Unconsciousness of identity can be a consequence of the mismatch of the cognitive and emotive structure, which is manifested in non-participation in united group behavior. Group behavior is also attributed to the depth of identity, its place in the structure of other identities, group or role pressure. Social identity comes from inclusion in any social category, membership in the group. It, in turn, also includes two points: ingroup similarity and intergroup differentiation. In-group similarity means social identification and similarity with members of one group, and intergroup differentiation means difference from the outgroup. These are interrelated moments: the stronger the in-group similarity, the identification with the group, the stronger (more important) the intergroup differentiation of the given group from another groups. Personal identity is a set of individual characteristics, characterized by a certain constancy in time and space, allowing to distinguish a given person from others. This set of characteristics makes the individual similar to himself and different 19

from others. Personal identity can be considered as a subsystem of knowledge about oneself, comparing oneself with members of the group. Social identity is formed in the course of social comparison of representatives of the group and outgroup. Comparison of similarities and differences coexist both at the level of personal identity and at the level of social identity. Personal identity can be seen as a social representation in the system of symbolic interactions. The interdependence of personal and social identity is determined by the presence in society of certain perceptions of personal identity, which contain the principles that determine the individual position. But not everything is so simple in contrasting social and personal identities. American researcher G. Breakwell claims that these concepts are very close. Each social category (professor, woman, American) includes certain content (what it means to be a professor, a woman, an American) and reveals this category through the same characteristics that are associated with this category. In addition, personal characteristics contain common properties. When a person describes himself as being sociable, it means that he identifies himself with a group of sociable and outgoing people and distances himself from those who do not possess these qualities. Thus, it turns out that social and personal identity act as two sides of one process. Personal identity is the result of social identity, or social representation. Personal identity is organized socially, because social norms have a huge impact on self-description and self-identification. Identification should always be viewed not as something rigid, but as a process. In his work «Social Identity», published in 1996, R. Jenkins regards this process as classification, categorization of people, events, etc. and as identifying someone with someone or something. This is possible only within the framework of communication, practice and cannot be understood outside the person’s activity. R. Jenkins sees the difference between social and personal identity only in the fact that in the case of individual identity, the distinctive, special characteristics of individuals are emphasized, and in the case of collective identity similar ones are emphasized. Personal identity, embodied in the self, does not exist in isolation from the social sphere. The self is constructed socially – in the process of primary and subsequent socialization and in the ongoing processes of social interactions in which individuals define and redefine themselves and others throughout their life. The Self is a synthesis of both internal self-determinations and external 20

determination of oneself by others, this is the process by which all identities, individual and collective, are constructed [14]. Differentiation between groups does not always lead to group homogeneity. Conversely, intragroup similarity does not always enhance intergroup differences. The more the individual identifies with the group, the more important the interpersonal differentiation within the groups, the more he perceives himself as different from the other members of the group in the sense that it is important for him to believe that he is more consistent with its norms and standards than the other members of the group. Individual uniqueness and collective separation can be understood as something very close, as two sides of the same process. The difference between them is that in the case of an individual identity, the distinctive characteristics of individuals are emphasized, and in the case of a collective identity, it is the similar ones. The processes in which they are formed or transformed are similar. And both of them by origin are social and do not exist without each other. According to R. Jenkins, identification is a condition of social life, and vice versa. Individual identity does not exist in isolation from the social worlds of other people. The self is constructed socially – in the process of socialization and interaction, where people define and redefine themselves and others throughout their life. The mechanism of identity clearly shows the model of interpersonal-intergroup differentiation: the stronger the identification with the group, the more significant is interpersonal differentiation within groups. The phenomenon of «selfoverconformity» is expressed in the fact that the more the individual identifies himself with a group, the more he expresses the tendency to perceive himself as different from other members of the group in the sense that it is important for him to believe that he is more consistent with its norms and standards than the other members of the group. In this case, both in-group favoritism or intergroup differentiation (socio-centrism), and auto-favoritism or differentiation between themselves and others (egocentrism) will simultaneously increase. Among contemporary researchers of identity, mention should be made of N. Holland, who identifies three components in identity: agency, consequence and representation. Identity is the statements of 21

the subject «I see», «I remember» or «I suppress». As an agency, identity is the initiation of actions, creating the very identity. This is a feedback processing system in its interaction with the world. In this case, it acts as a consequence, constantly supplemented by new experience. In this aspect, identity is, in the end, not only the resulting image of «I see», «I remember» or «I suppress», but also the comparative way of life embodied in the representation. The processes of establishing the identification of a person with a group are demonstrated by the theory of self-categorization. The process of social categorization or the process of distributing social events or objects into groups is necessary for the person to systematize his social experience and to orient himself in his social environment. Intergroup and interpersonal forms of interaction are viewed as a continuum, at one pole of which there are variants of the person's social behavior, completely conditioned by the fact of his group membership, and on the other – forms of social interaction that are completely determined by the individual characteristics of participants. Group consent acts on a member of the group so that he remains in the group, through the attractiveness of the group and its members. Social identity is the result of self-identifications of a person with different groups and, along with personal identity, it is an important regulator of social behavior. In accordance with this theory, the process of formation of social identity contains two processes. First, the individual is selfdetermined as a member of a certain group (his or her idea of himself or herself as a man or woman of a certain social status, nationality, religion, etc.). Secondly, not only does the inclusion of the selfimage of the individual in the general characteristics of the group happen, but also the assimilation of norms, values and behaviors characteristic of the group. The process of formation of social identity is completed by internalization, norms, values and stereotypes of the group become internal regulators of his social behavior. At the same time, it should be noted that any society assesses different social groups in different ways, which is confirmed by the existing types of discrimination. Since membership in groups is associated with positive or negative social assessment, then the very social identity of the person can be positive or negative. Since any individual aims at a positive image of himself, then in the dynamics 22

of social identity there will be the desire of the individual to achieve positive social identity. Thus, identity is formed as a result of interaction between people and is conditioned by three aspects: the sense of identity and integrity of existence, intrapsychic structure and process. Identity as a process never reaches its completeness, its formation continues throughout life, although some integrity is achieved in the puberty period and its further development appears as reformation of what already exists. Identity is meant to perform important social and socio-psychological functions: to ensure the subordination of the individual to the social group, and at the same time – group protection and the criterion of self-esteem. Identity is a form of manifestation and ensuring the stability of the individual in society, in the social, cultural, ethnic whole. In modern sociology, identity is seen as a mechanism of socialization of the individual, reflecting the process of selfidentification of the individual with another person, group, model. Identification is social in its origin; identity is formed as a result of interaction between people. Transformation of identity is associated with the transformation of the social environment. In the Collins Dictionary of Sociology by David and Julia Jary, identity is defined as the meaning and continuity of the Self, which develops as the child separates from parents and family and takes a place in society [15]. The difference in the comprehension of identity in sociology and psychology can be traced either in the context of the individual or in the context of society. E. Fromm analyzed modern features of the relationship between the person and society. In particular, he considered the existence of the person as being in a hostile social structure [16]. E. Fromm developed a scheme for the development of the person’s selfalienation through total robotization, mechanization and computerization. In his work «Escape from Freedom» E. Fromm defines personal identity as the result of individualization of the person, where individualization is characterized by the isolation of the person from the forces of nature and from other people. At the same time, «one of the leading human needs, making the essence of human life» is the need for communication with the outside world, the need to avoid loneliness, which is achieved through selfidentification with any values, ideas, standards, that is, through the formation of social identity. 23

E. Fromm, working in line with neo-Freudianism, came very close to the problem of social identity. E. Fromm began writing about the problem of identity after emigration from Nazi Germany to America in 1933. The reaction to this event was several of his publications, in which he describes the influence of totalitarian systems (fascism, Stalinism) on human personality. The first reference to the problem of identity was done in the work «Escape from Freedom», where he, in fact, introduced the notion of identity, and also described the motives for the emergence of a particular identity. Identity appears in the course of development and means a sense of belonging to some integral structure, a person's awareness that he is part of this structure and occupies a certain indisputable position in it. Identity helps the person realize his basic need and find his social niche, which will allow him to avoid the worst suffering – total loneliness and doubt. Fromm showed a complex relationship of identity with specific historical conditions, as well as the connection between a sense of freedom and a sense of loneliness, a certain balance between which is established in the process of identification. He sees it in expansion through self-realization, the potential variability of the social choice that became possible with the emergence of capitalist relations, on the one hand, and the unwillingness of a person to accept such free solitude, on the other. All this leads to the search for such links with the world, which inevitably destroy the individuality. «The individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are... The discrepancy between «I» and the world disappears» «But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.» [16, p. 7]. J. Habermas understands personal and social identity as two dimensions in which balancing self-identity is realized. The vertical dimension – personal identity – ensures the coherence of the history of human life. The horizontal dimension – social identity – provides an opportunity to fulfill the various requirements of all role systems to which the person belongs. Self-identity arises in the balance between personal and social identity. Establishment and maintenance of this balance takes place through the use of interaction techniques, among which an exceptional value is given to the language. In interaction, the person clarifies his identity, striving to meet the 24

partner's normative expectations. At the same time, the person tends to express his own uniqueness. [17] The problem of identity transforms a problem in which new aspects and perspectives are discovered. The category of «identity» gained wide popularity in the 1950s in North America thanks to the book «The Lonely Crowd» by Riesman, in which he articulates the social nature of identity, considering the problem of the correlation between the person and society, individual alienation and group identification. E. Goffman, G. Gorfinkel systematized the Meade’s ideas and reinterpreted the original situations of interindividual communication in microsociology, focusing on the diversity of identities and the ability to preserve and manage them (identity politics). E. Goffman synthesized the approaches of social phenomenology and symbolic internationalism and developed a method that allows analyzing the processes of constructing identities. The Goffman’s concept is built on the ideas of the conflict of the I (self) and the ME (social limitations in the self). This conflict lies in the difference between the expectation of others and our actions. The individual constantly faces the requirement to do what we are expected to do. To maintain his image, the individual speaks to a social audience. Goffman understood the Self, identity not as an actor's property, but as a result of social interaction between the public and the performer. The Self, the identity acts as a theatrical effect, generated by the scene being played. Therefore, it can collapse or pass successfully. In his dramatic theory, Goffman uses the term behind the scenes, foreground, personal foreground, decor, appearance and manners. The foreground tends to be institutionalized, because representations become collective, and already established roles and foreground rules are used. As a result, the foregrounds are selected, not created. In the process of interaction, people construct their identity, and it must be understood by others. But in this process there is always a risk of misunderstanding. The actors try to control the audience, this endeavor Goffman described as «impression management». Impression management always contains a certain concealment. These include hidden secret pleasures, mistakes, resources spent on training («dirty work»), disregard for norms, etc. In impression management, great importance is given to distancing and identification with the role. According to Goffman, 25

role-playing distance is a function of social status. To understand the function, he uses the concept of stigma, which is the interaction between norms and stigmatized people. Branded Goffman understands any person torn between what a person should be («actual identity») and what he really is («a real social identity»). The I – ME relation is explained by Goffman as a splitting of human identity and is considered as the basic existential condition of human existence. Between the pathological split personality and the normality there are only «gradual» differences, which leads to the fact that the behavior of the mentally ill reflects normal behavior in an extreme form. Staging the stigma problem in Goffman's dramaturgy places its emphasis in discussions about the norm and deviation. The plurality of identities, the struggle for the recognition of various types of it, was precisely aimed at overcoming all kinds of stigmatization. The concept of stigma allows you to divide the nominal and real identity. Nominal identity is a marking by which the person attributes himself to a particular group. In the process of marking, when others respond to the stigma and form a real identity. Goffman calls this the strategy of balancing between uniqueness and normality. The rich palette of our experience reflects our Self and makes it vulnerable. Thus, the Self is not an essence, half hidden behind the events, but a changeable formula with which the events are approached. Just as the momentary situation prescribes the official veil behind which we hide, so does it care that we in certain places are shown in a certain way, and the culture itself prescribes to us, what kind of beings we must consider ourselves in order to enlighten anything» [19]. For Goffman, the mechanism of representing and coordinating the actions of people in social situations is of interest. For the Self there is a need to control and organize self-image to protect identity. Goffman's main interest is directed toward the identity of the individual in society; social interaction is a risky process for the individual, the sign of which is uncertainty due to situational relativity of norms and possible actions of others. The individual tries to justify expectations and at the same time insist on his definition of the situation. This implies a certain consensus, an unstable state of mutual recognition, a temporarily accepted introsubjective definition of the situation. An important role in this is played by a mutual attribution of characteristics and their difference from actual individual attributes. It is this difference that determines 26

the stigmatization of the individual. In dramatic theory, the interactive process is a kind of bargaining, at the center of which there is preservation and affirmation of one's own identity, and the whole play is designed for this purpose. In this case, the role loses its structural importance and becomes a situational concept. Since a number of expectations are placed on a person in different situations, then by differentiating the public, he delimits different roles from each other. Goffman emphasized the relationship between the self-image and the public image. Performance transforms the person into an actor, which is watched by other people, the audience. Situations are determined by the developed procedural knowledge that Goffman calls frames. Frames, most often not realized by individuals, actually determine situations, based on involvement in events. People construct their identities using interactive competencies within the framework of situational habits (frames), they represent the images of themselves for acceptance by others. Identity arises as a balance between the public image and the self-image. In other words, there is constant «framing» or constructing reality taking place. Goffman in this connection speaks of «keys» and «keyings» of frames – the correlation of the perceived event with its ideal semantic horizon, or universality. The key denotes the tonality of interpersonal communication, the keying – the transposition of a theme from one key to another. Goffman's contribution to social theory lies in description of everyday behavior as a collection of supra-individual «social orders» or rituals of interaction. The analysis of the «dramaturgy» of how individuals in social interaction represent themselves to others brought Goffman to the practices of constructing collective identities, or what he calls impression management strategies. Thus, individuals assert their identities within the framework of the order of interaction. Mobilizing interactive competencies within the framework of situational habits (frames), they represent the images of themselves for acceptance by others. Identity arises in relationships which develop between one’s self and the public image. As you can see, in the various versions of the interpretation of collective identity presented here, the central question is the real social mechanisms of attributing values to some identities or other, 27

i.e. mechanisms of constructing horizons of universality for a set of interacting particularities. In sociological concepts of identity, the question of social mechanisms of attributing the meaning of identity is important. Such a mechanism, according to P. Bourdieu, is the habitus, the rules and mechanism for the formation and preservation of identity in various situations. They are used not consciously, but reproduce the algorithm of social life. The habitus is the qualities that the individual acquires, the dispositions he possesses, or, in other words, knowledge, properties, and accumulated social experience. «A product of history, habitus produces practices, individual and collective, hence history, according to the schemes generated by history; it ensures the active presence of past experiences that, deposited in any organism in the form of perception, thought and action schemes, more certain than all formal rules and explicit rules, tend to guarantee the conformity of practices and their consistency over time» [20]. Habitus is the past that continues in the present and the future. The forms of the habitus change only to the extent that the conditions for the existence of a class or group change. Identity contains the habitus and, unlike the latter, implicitly contains reflectivity. In simple communities, the habitus and identity coincided, but with the complication of society both the habitus and the identity become more complex, multilayered. The habitus allows us to distinguish between collective identities, attributing meanings to them. Bourdieu writes: «The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them» [20, p. 20]. «The habitus, he notes elsewhere, entertains with the social world that has produced it, a real ontological complicity, the source of cognition without consciousness, intentionality without intention, and a practical mastery of the world's regularities which allows one to anticipate the future, without even needing to posit it as such» [20, p. 21]. It is very important to understand that the habitus is formed by experience, which just shows us the historicity, and not the natural 28

predetermination of identity. This means that past experience exists in the present in the form of universal schemes of perception, thinking and action, reproduced in the process of interaction between individuals that make up a certain community and construct its meaning. They are the basis of the functioning of any community. «Habitus as an acquired system of generative schemes, Bourdieu notices, makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production – and only those.» There is a dialectical combination of external and internal identification that can «enable the external forces to exert themselves, but in accordance with the specific logic of the organisms in which they are incorporated, i.e. in a durable, systematic and non-mechanical way» [20, p. 20]. On the role of the other in the process of constructing an identity, one should use the concept of the «reference group» introduced by Robert Merton, meaning copying of the behavior, the standards of the group, the other, close to the desire to resemble them as much as possible. The identity of the individual is formed as a result of his self-attribution with a group, a collective that is significant for the given individual. In the context of globalization processes, identity has become the subject of detailed study in Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration. Giddens denotes as structuration the duality of structure: the individual uses rules and resources (that is, the structure) and reproduces, in turn, the structure. On the one hand, the individual's behavior is determined by structures, on the other, the structure, experiencing the reverse influence, changes itself. Individual action and structure are combined in a single process – practice. The structure exists in space and time and consists of rules and resources. «Rule» is defined by Giddens as generalized procedures, a certain algorithm of action. Rules can be normative (rights and obligations) and interpretative (unwritten, informal). Rules are used spontaneously, in everyday life, they are informal, rarely reflected in interpersonal interaction. Resources are considered by Giddens as an opportunity to act as a source of power. Resources can be of two types: authoritative (arising as a consequence of the coordination of human activity) and distributed (derivatives of control over material products). The basis for the classification of rules and resources are three criteria: dominance, legitimation, signification. Resources form 29

dominance, rules are transformed into legitimation and are used for signification. People reflexively control their own and others' behavior. Noting the contribution of Freudianism, ethnomethodology, A. Giddens especially notes the role of practical consciousness, calling it the foundation of his theory. The author distinguishes two levels of consciousness: – Discursive consciousness (ability to explain actions, that is, to rationalize); – Practical consciousness (a set of knowledge that is implicitly used to interpret actions, subconsciously) [25, p. 46]. In the process of interaction, the agent interprets the context of the action, while the relationship between the motive and the action is ambiguous. Discursive consciousness removes this barrier, making relations unambiguous. That is, it helps to answer the question: «Why is this action exactly like this?» Very often, the causes of action lie beyond the limits of reflection, as a result of which many actions are unconscious, a certain reaction to the impact of the environment. Giddens considers actions from two sides: as a motivated, and as an action that does not involve motives, as a reaction to the environment. The latter kind of activity involves the unconscious desire for security, which is achieved through routinization and is provided through institutionalized forms (rituals). Routinization is the process of ensuring the sustainability of patterns of behavior over time, provided by institutions and structure. It makes the actions predictable to a certain extent, ensures security and sporadic character. Routine ensures the integrity of the individual in daily activities. Routine establishes «everyday models» in critical situations as well.» Giddens cites Bruno Bettelheim's «The Informed Heart» as an example, which describes the experience of the author himself and former prisoners of the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. This example demonstrates resocialization, as the consequences of an elevated level of anxiety are accompanied by a change in typical patterns of behavior, by routinization. Giddens, using Goffman's theory, distinguishes the following ways of maintaining routine: - Rituals of the beginning and the end of interaction. Interaction is seen as a certain sequence of actions, where there are some 30

markers of the beginning and the end of the interaction, such as interpersonal (words, gestures), physical (buildings, rooms, etc.). – Ways of conducting conversation, speech turns. They contribute to understanding how, to whom and about what the person may and should speak, how to react to the turn of speech. – Tact. The main mechanism that maintains security for a long time. Tact is a kind of contract between the participants in the interaction with respect to the permitted and the unlawful. – Position. It is often understood as a social status and role. In the process of communication individuals permanently bring a position, sameness, identity and all this imposes certain duties and expectations. – Frames. They depend on coherence of interaction and an adequate understanding of the situation. They signal about what needs to be done in this or that context. The whole social life is essentially routinized: we have a definite idea of those regular ways of doing things that we are repeating day by day and that shape our individual lives, as well as reproduce larger institutions into which our own behavior also contributes. Any institutional pattern exists in a regionalized and routinized context (space and time). In these contexts, interactions occur where the individual uses rules and resources, thereby reproducing structures. This process means rationalization, interpretation, identification. Regionalization is the crossing of space and time and it is defined by the concept of locality. To denote space as a receptacle of interaction, Giddens introduces the notion of «locus». Locality (location) implies the use of space in order to provide the interaction environment necessary to determine its contextuality. Giddens classifies localitites on the basis of the mode of existence: physical and symbolic boundaries, duration in time, extent in physical space, ways of connecting this space with other localities, the extent to which these localities force the agent to maintain a public presence or to retreat into the background. Regionalization and routinization support each other, the action must be repeated in the same place, and the place determines the requirements for action. A. Gidden’s theory of structuration is a modern paradigm in the study of the social identity phenomenon. The author claims that «the 31

self is subject to deciphering» and introduces the concept of institutional reflexivity, which is in a constant movement. It is institutional, because it is the basic structural element of social activity in the contemporary situation. It is reflexive in the sense that the concept introduced to describe social life routinely enters and transforms it – not as a mechanical process, not necessarily a controlled way, but, primarily because they are part of the patterns of action chosen by individuals or groups. Consideration of the formation of identity through the prism of the theory of structuration allows us to consider identification as a process of entering into structures. The individual from the moment of birth exists in an environment filled with cultural artifacts, which are a value for a social group. As he grows up, he begins to reflect, a huge number of agents and institutions of socialization (family, school, friends, religion, the media, etc.) are involved in the process of his socialization. In the process of socialization, the actor assimilates normative and interpretative rules, the value-normative base for the formation of identity, and uses resources. Since the process of socialization is a two-way process, a person can accept values, or may not accept them. The person takes a direct part in the formation of his identity, if the structure of values and value orientations offered by socialization institutions are not assimilated in the proposed form, they are distanced and rejected. At this stage, the mechanisms of personification of values, or their rejection, are switched on. In the course of communications, the agent interprets the context of the action, participates in routinization, thereby reproducing the structures. It must be borne in mind that the structure exists before, during and after interaction with the individual. Before the agent begins to affect the structure, he interacts with an existing structure: the structure precedes the action that transforms it. Thus, social systems exist only because of their continuous structuring over time, which builds a history of interaction between the structure and subjective intentions of the individual, his identity. Selfidentification in the life of modern society becomes especially problematic, particularly in the most recent years. A fundamental feature of a society with high reflectivity is the «open» nature of selfidentity. Today, for everyone, the self is a reflexive project, a more or less lengthy study of the past, present and future [25, p. 160]. Thus, identity is the result of the initial impact of the symbolic structure space on the individual. Further formation of identity is 32

based on the intentions of the actor. Agents are affected by the social structure, but they transform it by their daily practices. Reproduction of the social as the interaction of structure and agent can be represented as rewriting the exposition of the self. The self, identity is the earliest and most enduring social identity onto which subsequent identities are layered. A. Giddens acts as a follower of the Mead’s tradition when he relies upon cultural patterns. He takes into account all the complexities of the formation of the self and departs from classical universalism and assumes the existence of an «ideal» that is sharply contrasted with real life. In contrast, another group of theorists who also turn to the self use this concept through the prism of qualitative research, they simply tell stories about some personal experience of the self. This is clearly reflected in the literature describing the positions of ethnic, racial or sexual minorities, as well as gender experiences. This allows them to record the experience of self-formation more clearly and accurately. That is why in our research we will rely on qualitative research methods. E. Giddens explores identity in connection with the institutionnalization of reflection. He argues that the Self in the «modern» era becomes a reflexive project, which is based on three factors: division of space and time, «liberating» mechanisms and institutionalization of reflection. In the era of capitalism, the division of labor changes the organization of space and time, which from now on are divided into working and leisure, and ultimately lose their organic connection with human life. In the process of joint labor, people come into personal contact less and are more and more bound by occasional leisure circumstances. Money and systems of expertise act as the «liberating» mechanisms. The latter replace traditions and beliefs that have disintegrated under the influence of modernity. These mechanisms act as «ploughing» the traditional «soil», which in turn leads to the emergence of a new collectivity, where there is a place for individualization and reflection. According to Giddens, a person deprived of the traditional forms of identity is constantly in a situation of choice of behavior and awareness of himself in different situations. This leads to the emergence of special institutions that help the person make this choice – the reflection institutions (moral, social knowledge). Absolute incompleteness of reflection, relativity of expert assessments, all possible social contexts of life make the reflexive project of the self impossible. In addition, the abstractness 33

of expert knowledge, called upon to help in reflection, tears the individual away from traditional assessments of behavior. The study of identity is the object of many socio-humanistic sciences, where, according to I. S. Kon, this concept has three main modalities. Psychophysiological identity means the unity and continuity of the physiological and mental processes and properties of the organism, through which it distinguishes its cells from foreign ones, which is clearly manifested in immunology. Social identity is an experience and awareness of one's belonging to one or another social group and community. Identification with certain social communities turns a person from a biological individual into a social individual and personality, allows him to evaluate his social connections and accessories in terms of «Us» and «Them». Personal identity or self-identity is the unity and continuity of life activity, goals, motives and meaningful attitudes of the individual, aware of himself as the subject of activity. This is not some special trait or set of traits that an individual has, but his self, reflected in terms of his own biography. It is found not so much in the behavior of the subject and the reactions of other people to him than as in his ability to maintain and continue a certain narrative, the history of his own self, preserving its integrity, despite the change in its individual components [26]. The importance of group identification is determined by at least three basic psychological needs of the individual: the need for security and protection; the need for belonging to the community and the need for the uniqueness of his Self. The need for belonging to the community, to the group is exacerbated in the period of acute social crisis, disintegration of traditional communities and atomization of society, and the individual is ready to exchange the newfound freedom for a feeling (sometimes imaginary) of security and belonging to the group. That is why the need for identity is behind people's striving for acquiring a social status and conformism. The need for identity, uniqueness of one's self, self-confidence means the existence of the person as an individual, his absolute dissimilarity to the others. Psychosocial experience implies the consideration of identity from a binary position: personal and social, but, ultimately, these are two sides of the same coin. Personal identity implies awareness of its distinctness and uniqueness, social identity is based on belonging to a small/large group and solidarity with its ideals. Group identity is 34

the inclusion of the individual in various communities, reinforced by the subjective feeling of inner unity with his social environment. There is no impassable border between personal and group identities, since personal identity is a kind of group identity existing in the head of an individual, and a group identity is the sum of generally accepted norms and patterns originating in the behavior of individual people. The association of the individual with another individual or group occurs on the basis of emotional connection, as well as introjection. The association can be with a large group (ethnic, religious, professional) which is mediated by the system of relations between the individual and his reference environment, as well as the peculiarities of this environment. Identification is a process of emotional and other self-identification of an individual, a social group with another person, a group or a pattern, internalization of occupied social statuses and the development of significant social roles. Social identity is rendered in terms of group membership, inclusion in any social category. The common point for most modern studies is the opposition of personal and social identity. There are contradictions between the personal and social substructures of identity. Achieving a balance between these substructures is indicative of the successful development of the personality, unresolved contradictions and conflicts contribute to the emergence of an identity crisis. Social identity is the basis for the formation of any social groups and their social connections, a strong catalyst for mass behavior. Adoption of a particular identity mediates the relationship of identification (the process of formation, functioning and development of identity) to signification, understood as the process of realizing this identity in the public practice of a person or group. The individual finds his own «social self» only in group action, as if trying on the role of «generalized others». «Ideology» can act as an intermediary identification tool. The social crisis is characterized, as a rule, by violation of the «ideological wholeness» of society, by shaking of its former value system and by constant search for identity. The process of identity formation implicitly contains a crisis, a conflict of identity associated with a change in the social, physical environment. In principle, the crisis of identity is resolved by adaptation, by a change in personality and by the accumulation of psychosocial experience. Negative resolution of the crisis, non-adaptation can be expressed in the rejection of the former 35

identity, psychological problems, including pathology, inability to make a choice, loss of social relations and connections. The identity crisis cannot be avoided, the person faces an expected and unexpected crisis. The first include situations determined by the course of life: travel, changing jobs, retirement, etc. The second can include situations that are not compulsory, but possible: obtaining disability, death of close people, sudden death of old family members, loss of strong ties, changes in social status, etc. The first identity crisis comes in the pubertal period. This diffusion is associated not only with sexual maturity, but also with the social formation of the individual. As the child matures, his identities are exposed and colored by cultural and social influences. Identity is formed by the configuration of new identities, and rejection of the old one. Family, neighbors and school provide a trial identification, as a result the child has a lot of successful trial identifications, there are expectations about what it means to be older, and what it means to be younger, expectations that become part of identity as they are gradually checked by psychosocial experience. The identity crisis causes similar reactions both in the individual and in the group – frustration, depression, aggressiveness, internal conflict. The identity crisis is directly linked to social development crises, as the identity crisis usually occurs when (under the influence of the social crisis) the disintegration of the ideals and values that underlie the previously dominant culture forces people to seek new spiritual guidelines to realize their place in the changing society. The identity crisis as a phenomenon of modernity is the result of the destruction of the traditional social order. Industrialization changed the social structure of society, which in turn contributed to the self-determination of the individual. The dynamics of social mobility within one generation has revealed the problem of selfidentification. Since then, the identity crisis has acquired a permanent character, as it is associated with constant changes in the pace and patterns of life, the unstable dynamics of change. Domestic scientists, in particular, Maulsharif M., give the following definition: social identity is the result of a process that is purposeful, fully or partially realized, social – professional, cultural, mental, political, moral, value, behavioral, ethnic identification by the personality of itself with its social environment, group, community [27]. In the work it is noted that identity as a whole can be represented as the representation and the result. Identity as 36

representation is acts, actions, deeds that create the very identity in the process of interaction with the outside world. This is a feedback processing system, a joint activity between people. Identity is the construction of not only yourself, but also new things, into which one introduces a specific way of doing them, therefore, identity is the result. Identifying the other and presenting yourself to others, i.e. knowledge of each other lies at the heart of every interpersonal interaction. In modern conditions, presentation and identification have some kind of uncertainty and are presented to the individual as a problem. He has a feeling of incompatibility with his image, for there is no natural and obvious image of himself. In addition to dividing identity into personal and social components, it is possible to classify this personal formation on other grounds. So, depending on the scope or type of socialization, one can talk about the formation of a gender, ethnic, professional, religious identity of the individual. Given the age patterns of the formation and development of identity, a mature (formed) identity and an immature, forming identity are distinguished. Depending on the degree of self-acceptance of the person, it can be a positive or negative identity. Depending on the depth of the experience of the process of transformation of self-determination, one can speak of an identity crisis or its absence (crisis or non-crisis identity). Otherwise, the following types of identity can be distinguished: confused, diffused, blurred, unpaid, delayed, achieved. Personal identity is treated as a sense of identity or continuity of the Self, which remains independent of changes in the environment. Personal memories of the past, connected with the future of hope and aspiration, indicate the existence of such a sense of identity in the present. Personal identity is treated as a set of traits, characterized by a certain constancy or, at least, continuity in time and space, allowing to differentiate this individual from other people. In other words, personal identity means a set of characteristics that makes a person similar to himself and different from others. Negative identity is «an identity perversely based on all those identifications and roles which, at critical stages of development, had been presented to them as most undesirable or dangerous and yet also as most real.» [28] It is an attempt to master a situation where a positive identity can not be established because its various elements suppress each other. 37

Confusion of identity is significant violations in «deeply disturbed young people», a certain crisis that occurs in some life situations [28, p. 26]. Its reasons may include the need for physical and psychological intimacy, rivalry, the final professional choice and psychosocial self-determination. A diffused, blurred identity is a situation where a person has not yet made a choice, which makes his Self blurred and vague. Diffused identity is sometimes expressed in «negative identity», in accepting a socially undesirable role. Diffusion of identity is associated with inability to make decisions, confusion in problems, difficulties in work and low ability to concentrate. Unpaid identity is a state where an individual has assumed a certain identity without experiencing a complex process of introspection, he is already included in the system of defined relations, but this choice was not made consciously, but under the influence from outside or by ready standards. Delayed identity, or identity moratorium, is a state where a person is in search of the self, self-determination, but postpones the final choice for a certain time. Achieved identity is a state where the individual has already found himself, self-determined and entered into the process of self-realization. The typology of personal identity has been developed in the theory of J. Marcia, where the «general identity formation» serves as a criterion. The author describes four types of identity: 1) Identity achievement – a state when a teenager has passed a critical period, moved away from the parents' attitudes and evaluates his future based on his own ideas. He is in the process of professional, sexual self-determination, which the author considers the main «lines» for the formation of identity. 2) Identity moratorium – a critical condition in the formation of adolescent identity. This is a confrontation between the person and the range of opportunities offered to him by society. Clear ideas are not yet formed or they are contradictory, the person can swing from one extreme to another, which manifests itself not only in behavior, but also in the inner world. 3) Identity diffusion – the lack of preference for any sexual, ideological and professional patterns of behavior. The 38

problems of choice do not worry the person yet, he has not yet realized himself as the author of his own destiny. 4) Identity Foreclosure is a state where a person is more or less oriented toward choice, but is guided solely by parental attitudes, becoming what people want to see [12]. Other grounds for typology were proposed by H. RodriguezTome, where in the structure of adolescent identity three main opposable dimensions are distinguished: – firstly, the definition of oneself through a state or activity («I am like this or belong to this group» is contrasted with the position «I like doing this»); – secondly, the «official social status – personality traits» opposition; – thirdly, the «socially approved» and «socially disapproved» self-characteristics opposition [29]. Social identity as a result of self-identification of the person with different groups, is an important regulator of social behavior. The formation of social identity contains two processes. Firstly, the individual is self-determined as a member of a certain group. Secondly, he assimilates the norms and stereotypes of behavior peculiar to them. The process of formation of social identity is completed by the fact that a person ascribes to himself the acquired norms and stereotypes of his social groups, they become internal regulators of his social behavior. Summarizing the foregoing, one can conclude that identity is a system of social constructs of the subject that is constantly being reconstructed in the process of interaction with the surrounding world and which influences his consciousness and behavior. Identity can be considered from the following positions. Firstly, the sense of identity of a person is a subjective sensation of the identity, continuity and integrity of its existence in time and space and the recognition of this identity by surrounding «significant others». Secondly, identity is a process, as a result of which an intrapsychic structure is formed. It can be said that identity is a dynamic structure, its development is in a permanent state. Identity is a certain combination of the identities and capabilities of the individual, as they are perceived by him on the basis of experience of interaction with the outside world, as well as knowledge about how others react to him. Identity as a process never reaches its completeness, the 39

construction and change of identity structures lasts for a lifetime until the death of the individual. As the main functions of identity, the following are distinguished: the definition of the boundaries between the self and non-self, the provision of internal consistency, the development of the individual, the interpretation of social experience, the regulation of behavior and activities. Identity is formed in the process of internalization, consistently including: introjection, identification and identity formation. Identity is a constant sense of self-identity, of one's own truth, of fullness, of belonging to the world and to other people. Identity is the defining component of the internal structure of the personality, which develops throughout life, passes through overcoming crises, can change in a progressive or regressive direction, that is, be «successful» or «unsuccessful». Identity is a condition for ensuring the stability of a person in the dynamics of his formation as a person. Formation of identity in modern conditions is not only a means of adaptation and development, but a condition of existence, the basis for interaction. 1.2. Gender identity as a subject of sociological analysis Interest in gender as an analytical category emerged only in the second half of the twentieth century. The word gender came into use at the time of the great epistemological disorder, which in some cases takes the form of transition among social scientists from scientific to literary paradigms (in the transition from the emphasis on reason to the emphasis on meaning, the blurring of research areas, according to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz), and in other cases – a form of debate about the theory between those who accept the evidence of facts and those who insist that reality is constructed or interpreted, between those who defend and those who question the idea that the person is a rational master of his destiny. An illustrative example of this approach is the analysis of the destiny of the concept of «gender» in Russia, conducted by S. Ushakin [31]. This analysis shows how the expansion of the sex/gender opposition in Russian humanitarian knowledge leads to the «blurring» of its analytical value. This is due to a kind of «substantialization» of gender, to the transformation of this category from the characteristics of the method into the characteristic of the 40

object of research («gender models», «gender consciousness», etc.). With this usage, the term «gender» loses its (de)constructivist meaning, proving to be an instrument for describing the relationship between the sexes, and the sex in its turn appears as something stable and unchanging. Exposing such a non-reflexive «terminological import» of the «gender» category as a «symptom of colonial consciousness... with its disbelief in the creative abilities of its language, with its distrust of its own history and its own reporting systems», S. Ushakin defines the current situation as «gender deadlock» [31]. In this case, it is not about abandoning the «gender» category as a methodological marker, but about assessing the possibilities of the language means – those of the «import» ones and those of «ours» – to express the relevant content and preserve the analytical potential of the gender approach. He argues that gender does not bring anything new to understanding/ sexual issues, gender is the same social sex. «Sex has a history... which is hardly worth replacing with the history of notions and concepts that do not have adequate symbolic forms in the Russian language.» Sophia Babloian explains gender as follows: «It seems to us that something that is now being put into the term «gender» goes back to another meaning of this English word found in the American Heritage Dictionary: «gender» is a display, a presentation. This is precisely the representation of the individual (male/female) in the totality of his or her physiological and social essence with an emphasis on the social. Gender is a cultural concept. The ideal image of a woman or a man of a given chronological and geographical cut is nestled with national traditions, ethnopsychology, the degree of civilization of the society, religion, history, national mentality, etc.» It should be noted that the epistemological confrontation between the concept of gender and the concept of sex differences is well placed in the context of our socio-political realities. There were repeated appeals of feminists of the CIS to save the face, and in Asian cultures – to counterpose their Eastern spirit to Western rationality. S. Babloian writes: «Firstly, in the English language itself, just like in Armenian, there is no grammatical category of genus – neither at the level of nouns, nor at the level of words that are in concord with them. Secondly, even in languages where this category works (for example, in Russian), it generally has no motivation. The attribution of words to a particular genus is based only on 41

morphemic indicators – type of ending, suffix, presence/absence of endings, etc. Referring to the word «pen» as feminine, and the word «pencil» as masculine does not mean more or less femininity. The motivation appears only at the level of animate nouns, where the grammatical gender is adequate to the genus-sex category of the individual (boy-girl, schoolboy-schoolgirl). These arguments lead to the following two conclusions, respectively: 1) A category irrelevant for the source language (English) can not be the basis for conceptual generalizations and terminological nominations. 2) If, however, we admit that the term «gender» goes back to the meaning «grammatical genus», we again slide to the biological level, because the grammatical category of genus receives its motivation only at the level of animation – and this is the biological delimitation of the male and female individuals [32]. It is extremely important to understand the tracing of transformations in the understanding of the term «gender». Initially, its content was opposed to the term «sex» and only supplemented the essentialist understanding of masculine and feminine. However, in the 1980 s, the recognition of the variability of the «masculine»/»feminine» criteria themselves and the conventionality of division into men and women according to morphological features led to the fact that biological sex was understood as included in the socio-cultural sex, the gender. Social-constructivist understanding of gender as knowledge, which creates values for bodily differences, has become dominant. Studies in the 1990s showed that a number of factors (type of society, social norms and expectations) are involved in its design, hence gender is one of the necessary characteristics among others (class, race, ethnicity, age and sexual orientation) in the social study. Thus, gender, moving away from direct connotation with the concept of «biological sex», becomes an indicator of the research position, a methodological approach. Overcoming the dichotomy led to a socially constructed understanding of sex, then to understanding it as a social institution, more broadly – a network of power relations, then more specific – an ideological system that supports compulsory heterosexuality. Postmodernism introduced a new understanding of gender as a technology, representation or composite effect of discursive and visual representations, and finally, gender is understood as a performance that is not associated with either the biological or the social sex. 42

Gender is usually used to refer to the meanings and roles that society attributes to sex differences. Gender is into what society turns physical, anatomical and psychological differences of people. The concepts of male and female behavior, masculine and feminine manners, actions, speech are gender constructs, because they embody social expectations about the characteristics of a «real man» or a «real woman». These are not biological facts, but cultural-specific beliefs that organize social practice in this way, and not otherwise. Ethnographic and anthropologic studies have demonstrated that universal gender roles for men or women simply do not exist. As early as 50 years ago, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, on the basis of her observations carried out in expeditions, stated that «although each culture has to some extent institutionalized the roles of women and men, the character that we consider inherent in one sex can be simply one of the variants of a human character, which different individuals can be trained or accustomed to with greater or less success» [33]. The concept of «gender» in modern social science is interpreted in different ways. The following definition seems the most complete for us: gender is the sociocultural construct of sex, which is a set of prescribed characteristics of male and female behavior, lifestyle, way of thinking, norms, preferences, life aspirations, etc. Unlike the biological sex, which is a set of genetically assigned anatomical and physiological characteristics of a person, gender is constructed in a specific socio-cultural context, in a certain historical period and, therefore, is different in time and space. Gender is a system characteristic of the social order, which cannot be got rid of, which cannot be abandoned – it is constantly reproduced in the structures of consciousness, and in the structures of action and interaction. The task of the researcher is to find out how the masculine and the female is created in interaction, in which spheres and in what way it is maintained and reproduced. The unchanging and unambiguous nature of the sex began to be subject to doubt. The first challenge was thrown by homosexuality and changing the discourse about same-sex love. The second challenge is discussion of the problem of transsexuals. The third challenge is connected with the comprehension of the newest biological research, according to which unambiguous attribution of sex on chromosomal and genetic grounds is difficult. All phenomena previously considered as anomalies, illnesses, in postmodern 43

discourse have found a place as variants of the norm, as manifestations of the diversity of life. New discursive facts lead to the conclusion that not only roles, but also the very belonging to a certain sex is attributed to individuals in the process of interaction. The new thesis is that sex is a social construct. The notion of social construction of gender differs significantly from the classical gender model. In the center of the sex-role theory of socialization is the process of learning and internalizing cultural and regulatory standards that stabilize the society. Teaching involves the assimilation and reproduction of existing norms. The background of this concept is the idea of a person as a relatively passive entity that perceives, assimilates the cultural given, but does not create it itself. The difference between gender models is the emphasis on the activity of the taught individual. The idea of designing emphasizes the activity character of learning experience. The subject not only assimilates and reproduces gender rules and gender relations, but creates them. He can reproduce them, but, on the other hand, he is able to destroy them. The very idea of creation implies the possibility of changing the social structure. That is, on the one hand, gender relations are objective, because the individual perceives them as an extra givenness, but, on the other hand, they are subjective as socially constructed every day, every minute, here and now. The next difference is that gender relations are understood not just as a difference-complement, but as a constructed ratio of inequality, in which men occupy dominant positions. It is not just that in the family and in society, men perform instrumental role and women perform expressive role, but that the fulfillment of prescribed and assimilated roles implies inequality of opportunity, the advantages of men in the public sphere, and the extrusion of women into the private one. At the same time, the private sphere itself turns out to be less significant, less prestigious and even repressed in Western society of the modernity period. In general, the differences can be represented as follows: The fundamental principles of the classical gender model: 1) Determination and consistency of sex. Sex is given from birth, the body structure automatically assumes a certain model of consciousness and behavior, any doubts about gender identity, particularly the psyche and behavior not corresponding to the gender role are regarded as anomaly or pathology, subject to ostracism and repression. 44

2) Constant opposition of the masculine and the feminine. The masculine and the feminine worlds are understood as opposites, mutually conditioning and mutually denying each other. 3) The constant superiority of the masculine over the feminine, which is expressed in the following: the superiority of the male body over the female, insufficiency, inferiority of female corporeality; the superiority of the male mind; the superiority of male virtues. 4) The woman's sphere of activity is secondary and less significant than the world-transforming activity of the man. Women must create what men cannot create. A woman in the traditional cultural paradigm is identified exclusively with the body and its functions – childbearing or sexual functions. The only form of a woman's spiritual life is love, and the only important sphere of activity is family. 5) In the social and professional sphere and in power structures, the relations between men and women are built along the vertical lines, which emphasizes the role of men as leaders, as creators, as a supreme being, as an object of worship and service. The fundamental principles of the non-classical gender model: 1) Sex as a personal quality is still constant, but not predetermined anymore. A biologically defined sex does not automatically make a newborn a man or a woman. Sexual identity is formed gradually as a result of social practice. 2) The opposition of the masculine and the feminine persists, but is expressed through the principle of complementarity. This means that the masculine and the feminine worlds are understood as different, equal, and mutually complementary in the process of social interaction. In modern terms, this is defined as «equality in different». Adherents of this model, widespread in the 19th century, believe that it is no longer possible to talk about gender inequality, because they are incomparable» [56, p. 165]. This means that women do not have access to male territory, that they can only implement women's behavioral scenarios in women-specific spaces: home, children, and sex. 3) The socio-professional division of labor loses sex determination. With the exception of the household, equal rights and equal opportunities for men and women in public and private life are declared. In the sphere of power, the preservation of gender 45

asymmetry is recognized as natural due to the characteristics of the male intellect and character. 4) The main form of representation of sex in culture and everyday life is sexuality. The mechanisms of its regulation and suppression reveal the essence of consciousness, behavior and relationships between men and women. The fundamental principles of the modern gender model: 1) Sex ceases to be definite and constant. The multiplicity of gender identity is manifested through the difference in consciousness and behavior in roles and situations. Biological man and woman in a public, intimate sphere choose a suitable gender role in accordance with their psyche and the individual characteristics of personal development. A person can act as «any creature» not only in the sphere of choice of citizenship, residence, nationality, age certainty, but also in the field of sex. 2) Opposition of the masculine and the feminine disappears. Interaction and mutual transition of the masculine and feminine in any segment of the cultural space is not only inevitable, but also desirable. 3) The emergence and cultivation of the «unisex» model in the socio-professional, cultural, mental and behavioral spheres. 4) In the social and professional sphere, as well as in power relations, the inequality of men and women appears as a result of free competition in the political struggle, in the labor market and services, and not as a consequence of gender policy and social stereotypes. So, when carrying out a comparative analysis of the three models, it is not difficult to see their main differences. According to the first model: the sex is clearly fixed and does not accept any deviations, the man is the master, clever, talented, everything he does deserves recognition and worship, the woman exists as a «mechanism» for reproduction and nothing more. According to the second model: the sex is constant, but the constructibility of sex identity is recognized, men and women are recognized as equal, but their parity does not imply comparative characteristics in view of their different bases. In other words, he and she are equal, but each has its own purpose: the man fulfills only his inherent roles, the woman fulfills only the roles inherent to women. According to the third model, sex is not constant, man and women are equal, everyone has the right to decide whether to be a man or a woman, or maybe both at the same time. 46

Thus, gender relations are the constructs of the culture in which they work. Not only roles, but also the very belonging to a certain sex is attributed to individuals in the process of interaction. Prior to the modernity era, the problem of gender identity implicitly existed in the form of metaphysical categories of the male principle and the female principle in ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy. The Renaissance considered a woman in the context of the cult of beauty and harmony. In the time of the Enlightenment, the role of women is revised not only as a natural, but also as a social being. A new look at the phenomenon of gender identity opens up in psychoanalysis, where it is practiced fatally, as destiny. Today, the research interest in the development of gender identity is enormous. It is caused by the transformation of patriarchal gender attitudes and stereotypes, which is manifested, in particular, in the growing activity of women in those spheres of public life that were previously considered traditionally men’s, the liberalization of rights for both women and children, and the widening range of gender roles. Awareness of gender identity is the basis of human subjectivity and the constitutive element of social relations. Belonging to a certain social community and type of culture gives people confidence, creates a sense of security and social protection. Moreover, it provides some access to social networks, helps to accumulate and use social and cultural capital. From the point of view of E. Erikson, identity is based on awareness of the temporal extent of one's own existence, assumes the perception of one's own integrity, allows a person to determine the degree of his similarity with different people while simultaneously seeing his distinctness and uniqueness [57]. The person always categorizes his or her life, in the first place, on the basis of sex. From the first days the child interacts with dichotomous representations of the «masculine» and the «feminine» in the world. This is where the causal determination of gender identity lies. Gender identity is a specific type of social identity of an individual and a group. It is not inborn, although it is undoubtedly based on the innate sex differences of people, their assigned biological program. Gender identity characterizes the person from the point of view of belonging to the male or female group, and most important is how the person categorizes him- or herself. Different historical epochs, cultures, civilizations constructed gender and gender identity in different ways. Gender self-awareness includes 47

claims, expectations, representations of each gender about themselves and the other sex, understanding of gender roles in a given society and the establishment of acceptance or non-acceptance of these roles, willingness or unwillingness to be included in social life in accordance with the unwritten gender «rules of the game». Gender identity throughout life is filled with different content depending on social and cultural changes. The foundations of the identity formation are laid at the first stages of life, in the process of early relationships between mother and child. The mother (or caring person) performs the function of mirroring the child and his needs at the level of tactile and olfactory perception. At an early age, the child does not yet perceive the maternal image entirely, does not realize identity with her, but only perceives himself as her reflection. But in the process of tactile and olfactory contact this sense of foreclosure is transmitted from mother to child and determines the relationship between them. Primary identity is preverbal, and therefore it is difficult to articulate it with words. Sexual models in the context of gender approach, first of all, are based on the definition of social dominance in the awareness and functioning of sex (gender). Gender approach itself, in the presence of the semantic variability of the concept of «gender», may also include certain specific features of the theoretical perspective, which suggests that the gender studies are promising and multifaceted, promising the possibility of ambiguity of decisions. Thus, gender-sensitive approach focuses on individual differences and on the differences of views of men and women, while recognizing the status equality between them [180]. As already noted, sex is a social category that denotes indicators of social functions based on the ability to reproduce and role interaction of the sexes, as transmitters of life and performers of the offspring upbringing. Gender is a process category that denotes learning, «entering» into a role, mastering behavioral actions that are relevant or inappropriate to a particular gender status. Gender is a kind of structure, especially the structure of behavioral models and, first and foremost, the structure of domination and subordination, the structure of spheres of paid and unpaid (domestic) labor, as well as spheres of social space – public (male) and private (female). 48

The gender system takes into account not only the difference between the sexes, but also the attention paid to the sex by society. Thus, the spectrum of analysis shifts to the gender determination of social construction of sex. In this case, the subject of research changes: not sex, but society is the main object of analysis in its impact on the formation of sex, as included in the system of social expectations and prescriptions, which determines the individual from his ability to self-identify and compare himself and the abstract, ideal carrier of qualities of «true» men or women. Analysis of formation of gender identity involves several methodological approaches: – psychological; – sex-role approach; – social constructivism; – theory of androgyny (multipolar approach); – ethnographic approach; – theory of queer identity. The first paradigm comes from the natural predetermination of gender identity, the sex-role approach considers the process of socialization and the system of sexual roles to be the main one. The androgyny paradigm believes that the dichotomy of male and female roles depends on social norms, the pursuit of which hampers individual self-development. Ethnographic approach considers not the features of men and women, but focuses on the description of the country, community, social environment and cultural context. Queer theory calls into question heterosexual normativity, and has transsexual and homosexual identities as the subject of research. In psychoanalysis, studies of gender identity focus on the early stages of child development, on the one hand, the emphasis is on the impact of actual experience, on the other hand, on language in transmission, interpretation and representation of gender (language is not just words, but a system of values that precedes the actual mastery of speech, reading and writing). Introduced by Freud, the «female of female castration», «penis envy» and «the phallic identity of women» only at the end of the twentieth century were replaced by theories of multiple gender identity. Stoller working out his theory of the core of gender identity is proceeds from a primitive and unconscious sense of belonging to one’s own gender. «Deeply embedded in the core of the person, the «I am a woman» or «I am a man» sensation, a psychosocial source of sexual identity arises 49

immediately after birth. Mother and father denote their perception of the sex of the infant by gestures, words and the way they treat it» [41, p. 442]. The continuation of Stoller's ideas was the work of Ph. Tyson, R. Tyson [58]. They describe the three lines of development that make up the gender identity, which itself is differentiated by core gender identity, sex-role identity and the choice of the object of love. Sexrole identity is a conscious and unconscious interaction with others conditioned by sex that arises under the influence of the core gender identity. Sex-role identity is built on the basis of conscious and unconscious interactions between parents and the child, which can be linked by the position of the parents in relation to the biological sex of the child. J. Sandler and A.M. Sandler noted that along with the early creation of infant representations of objects and himself, he also creates representations of interaction, relations and dialogue between himself and objects [59]. These representations of «role relationships» fuse with other aspects of sexual awareness, so, in the end, the self-image contains elements of the core gender identity, along with the role that is taken towards other people as an identity. In one of the works of L. Kohlberg, who studied the cognitive development of children in the assimilation of sex roles, it was noted that cognitive abilities play a large role in the acquisition of sex-role identity [60]. In his opinion, the perception of biological data serves as the basic organizer for sexual experience and guides the child in the search for «similar objects» as role models in accordance with their identity. «Role relationships» are included in sexual awareness and selfimage, relationships to other people and form the basis of identity. The basis of the Stoller’s concept of core of gender identity is the idea of a basic, primitive, non-conflicting and partly unconscious sense of belonging precisely to this, and not to other biological species. Ph. Tyson and R. Tyson also note that as the child matures, his identification with objects similar to himself, along with the psychic representations of «role relationships», are exposed to and colored by cultural and social influences [58, p. 50]. The final product of the sex-role identity is the result of the interaction of the embedded intrapsychic structure and the culturally determined trained behavior. Sexual partner orientation, the third thread in the line of gender identity development, relates to the sex of the preferred object of 50

love. Development of sexual partner orientation also depends on the establishment of mutual relations between the mother and the child in his early life. It can be said that their relationship forms a model on which all future love relationships are built. The nature of desires and conflicts with objects during the phallic phase of psychosexual development, revitalization and resolution of these conflicts during adolescence are also important for the development of a sexual partner orientation. The Anglo-American school works in lines with Nancy Chodorow, Carol Giligan, the French school is based on the views of School. Freud and J. Lacan. Both schools explore the process by which the identity of the subject is created; both focus on the early stages of child development to find the key to the formation of gender identity. The theorists of object relations emphasize the influence of actual experience (the child hears, sees, is in certain relations with those who cares for him, especially, of course, with his parents), while poststructuralists emphasize the primacy of language in the transmission, interpretation and representation of gender. For substructuralists language means not words, but a system of meanings – symbolic orders that precede the actual mastery of speech, reading, and writing. Another difference between the named schools is based on the unconscious, which for Chodorow is subordinated to the conscious, and for Lacan – it is not. For the supporters of Lacan, the unconscious is the decisive factor in the construction of the subject; the location of sexual separation and, for this reason, the continuing instability of the gender subject. According to Chodorow, If the fathers were more involved in the upbringing of children and more often at home, the Oedipal drama could have finished differently. Language is the center of Lacan's theory; it is the key to introducing the child into a symbolic order. Through the language, gender identity is constructed. The central place is occupied by the phallus metaphor, the threat of castration embodies power, norms of the (paternal) law. The attitude of the child towards the law depends on the sex difference, on his imaginary identification with masculinity or femininity. In other words, imposing the rules of social interaction internally and in a certain way is gendered, since the woman necessarily has an attitude to the phallus which is different from the man’s. But gender identification, although it always seems coherent and fixed, is, in fact, extremely unstable. As systems of meanings, subjective 51

identities are processes of differentiation and delimitation, requiring the suppression of uncertainties and opposing elements to provide (create an illusion of) coherence and common understanding. The principle of masculinity is based on the mandatory suppression of feminine aspects (the subject's potential for bisexuality) and introduces conflict into the opposition between the masculine and the feminine. The suppressed desires are present in the subconscious and are constantly a threat to gender identity, denying its unity and destroying its need for security. In addition, conscious ideas about masculinity and femininity are not fixed, since they vary depending on the contextual use. Thus, there is a conflict between the subject's need for visibility of integrity and the inaccuracy of terminology, its relative values, its dependence on repression. This interpretation makes the categories of man and woman problematic, assuming that the masculine and the feminine are not inherent characteristics, but subjective (or fictional) constructs. This interpretation also implies that the subject is in a constant process of construction, and offers a systematic method of interpreting the conscious and subconscious desire, pointing to the language as a suitable point of analysis. The moment that requires attention is an exclusive fixation on the issues of the individual subject and the tendency to materialize the subjectively emerging antagonism between men and women as the central fact of gender. In addition, although there is openness in the concept of how the subject is constructed, the theory tends to universalize the categories and relationships of the masculine and the feminine. Although this theory takes social relations into account, linking castration with prohibition and law, it does not allow us to introduce the notion of historical specificity and variability. The phallus is only the signified; the process of building a gender subject is, ultimately, predictable, because it is always the same. If, as theoretician of cinema Teresa de Lauretis believes, we have to think in terms of constructing subjectivity in the social and historical contexts, then in terms suggested by Lacan there is no way to designate these contexts. The problem of sexual antagonism in this theory has two aspects. Firstly, it gives a certain timeless quality. The antagonism between the sexes is an inevitable aspect of acquiring gender identity. If the antagonism is always latent, then perhaps history does not offer the final solution, but only a permanent change in form, reorganization of the symbolization of differences and the sexual division of labor. 52

The binary nature of the opposition of the masculine and feminine remains the only possible relationship and a permanent aspect of the human condition. It rather perpetuates the atmosphere of constancy of sexual polarity. The constructed nature of the opposition [between men and women] creates an atmosphere of invariant and monotonous opposition of men/women. Carol Gilligan attributes this position to the divergent ways of moral development, followed by boys and girls, in terms of «experience» (lived reality). Female researchers pick up her ideas and use them to explain those «different voices» that often occur when attributing the causal: the discussion goes from the statement «Female experience leads to the realization of moral choice in accordance with contexts and relationships» to the statement «Women think and choose this way, because they are women». In this chain of reasoning implied is the extra-historical, if not essentialist, idea of a woman. This use of Gilligan's ideas contrasts sharply with the more complex concepts of «female culture» presented at the symposium «Feminist Studies» in 1980. The comparison of a number of articles with Galligan's formulations reveals the extent to which her presentation defines a man/woman as a universal, self-reproducing binary opposition, always fixed in the same way. Insisting on fixed differences (in the case of Gilligan, simplifying the data with more diverse conclusions about the sex and moral reasoning for emphasizing gender differences), feminists contribute to the thinking against which they want to speak. Although they insist on reassessing the category of the «feminine» (Gilligan believes that women's moral choices may be better than men's), they do not investigate the binary opposition itself. It is necessary to abandon the fixed and constant binary opposition, we need deconstruction in terms of gender differences. Using Jacques Derrida's definition of deconstruction, criticism means analyzing in the context the mode of action of any binary opposition, conversion and shifting of its hierarchical structure, rather than accepting it as real, self-evident or inherent in the nature of things. In a sense, of course, feminists have been doing this for many years. The history of feminist thought is the history of abandoning the hierarchical construction of the relationship between the masculine and the feminine in its specific contexts, an attempt to reverse or displace its actions. Structural functionalism in the study of gender identity proceeds from the theory of sexual roles that are acquired in the process of 53

socialization. Agents and institutions of socialization form a personality that assimilates cultural norms and values, including samples of the feminine and the masculine. In the center of the theory of socialization is the process of learning and internalizing cultural and regulatory standards that stabilize the social system. Learning involves the assimilation and reproduction of existing norms by the individual, and the individual itself is treated as a relatively passive entity that perceives the samples of culture, but does not create them. In the theory of sex-role socialization, the emphasis is on selfcategorization. The child learns the idea of what it means to be a man or a woman, then defines himself or herself as a boy or a girl, and then tries to harmonize the behavior with the notions of his or her gender identity. The theory of social learning, considering the mechanisms of the formation of gender identity, uses the idea of behaviorism – the principle of conditioning (reaction – stimulus). Adults encourage boys for masculine and condemn for feminine behavior, and with girls they do the opposite, the child first learns to distinguish between gender patterns of behavior, and then to comply with the relevant rules and, finally, integrates this experience in his image of the self. Social constructivism provided a wide range of concepts for the formation of gender identity. Among them, the central place is occupied by the theory of E. Goffman. To understand the nature of gender identity, he uses the notion of display. Communication involves demonstrating of one’s self, communicating some information about one’s self to set up a communicative bridge. Beginning the communication, the communicator tries to establish the basic trust. His display is a story about himself, a report to others, which, by its appropriateness, makes the person acceptable for communication. A display is a certificate that guarantees his recognition as a normal person, who does not need social isolation and treatment. In the process of communication, the exchange of information is accompanied by a background process of creating gender. The gender display is the main mechanism for creating gender at the level of interpersonal interaction. The concept of gender display shows that gender relations are not just the execution of sex roles, it includes invisible but complex mechanisms. The display is the variability of the representations and manifestations of the masculine 54

and the feminine in interaction. Gender display as a representation of gender includes not only the appearance, but also the internal content. The gender display looks like a natural manifestation of their essence – an expression not of gender, but of nature (biological sex). This is the nature of the construction of gender – the permanent representation of sex – reflection of our essence. Feminist researchers do not consider gender display an expression of the biological essence of sex. The display, shown in a variety of gestures, mimic, as well as in material equipment, is not a continuation of the anatomical and physiological sex, because it is not universal, but culturally determined. Different displays are represented in different societies and communities. Differences in gender displays make it difficult to reduce them to biological determinants, which makes it look different, highlighting the power dimension of gender relations in it. In dramatic theory, the importance of presentation is also considered. The audience and the performer create the importance of the presentation by their involvement and consistency. This is where the interactive nature of everyday performances manifests itself, where the gender display must be «performed» in such a way that the communication partners are correctly identified, i.e. as women/men with appropriate style and behavior in a particular situation. Communication requires the basic trust in the person interacted with, it is in turn based on an identification based on the social experience of the agents of interaction. Being a man and a woman and manifesting it in a display means being a socially competent person, trustworthy and fit in with communicative practices. This manifests itself in a variety of displays of femininity and masculinity. Goffman calls the means that are used in society for expressing sex identity formal conventional acts. They are models of behavior relevant in a particular situation. They are built on the principle of «statement – reaction» and contribute to the preservation and reproduction of the norms of everyday interaction. It is assumed that the performers of conventional acts are socially competent actors included in this social order, which guarantees them protection against infringements of insane (socially incompetent) individuals. Any situational behavior, according to Goffman, is thought of as gender colored. The gender display is a collection of formal conventional acts of interaction. As soon as the display no longer fits into the generally accepted norms of being, its performer gets into 55

the situation of the gender problem. If a woman tries herself in the male professions, the man shows feminine qualities, then the society will doubt their social competence as men and women. This doubt is due to the fact that their behavior does not fit into the norms of the gender display created by society. Goffman argues that in the process of interaction, the gender display acts as the starting point. Demonstration of belonging to a sex precedes the performance of the main practice and completes it. Goffman believes that the gender display is an inclusion in a more important practice, acting as a kind of prelude to a particular activity. Feminist constructivists West and Zimmerman go further than Goffman, showing that the gender display works not only at the moments of switching activities, but permeates interactions at all levels. Such ubiquity of gender permeates speech as well. In all languages there is a division into grammatical genera, and these structures color social interaction. Using gender language forms, we present how women and men should behave in any social situation. Every social situation of interaction is gender-colored. Images of masculinity and femininity are based on knowledge of the social competence of the interaction participants, and are expressed in the gender display. The gender display promotes the reproduction of the social order, based on the concept of the masculine and the feminine in this culture. At the heart of interpersonal communication lies the need for confident identification of the partner. The very possibility of categorization by sex is the key to communicative trust and social identification. Practice has shown that gender-based categorization can coincide, but also may not coincide with the biological sex of the individual. Biological signs of sex are hidden under clothes, their correlates are determined in the process of interaction. According to Goffman, appearance, voice, handwriting are universal identification tools. However, these sex identification tools do not always work. When the sex of the person you interact with is known, communication works. If an identification problem occurs, communication fails. The inconvenience caused by the inability to identify the sex of the interlocutor is indicated as a gender problem. The biological sex and the category of sex are analytically distinguishable. If the biological sex is determined through the presence of physiological and anatomical signs, the attribution of the sexual category occurs in a situation of interpersonal interaction. The categorization of belonging 56

to a sex is the basis of everyday interaction; it becomes a necessary non-reflected background for social communication. When categorization by sex is difficult, there is a communicative breakdown. The categorization by sex is determined by the cultural context. Gender is a system of interpersonal interaction, through which the notion of the male and female as the basic categories of social order is created, affirmed, confirmed and reproduced [49, p. 97]. Thus, E. Goffman in the «dramaturgical model» of social interaction explains how people, introducing themselves to others, managing impressions, construct the identity. Goffman emphasized the relationship between the image of one’s own self and the public image, on the performative aspect of gender identity. When forming a gender identity, a public image, an important role is played by stigma, which is associated with discrimination of certain identities. The process of introducing individuals to others in social interaction is a process of constructing collective identities. Gender identity is seen as embedded in the processes of social interaction, and gender manifests itself as the basic relation of social order. If the bipolar approach assumes a rigid differentiation of gender identity on the basis of sex (men have exclusively masculine, and women – feminine characteristics), the multipolar model of gender identity allows for the existence of several variants of gender identity within the same gender. At the end of the twentieth century, the bipolar model of gender identity was revised in the concept of S. Bem [56]. She suggested that men and women do not necessarily have to conform to traditional sex-role models and can combine both masculine and feminine characteristics in their behavior. S. Bem believes that the most relevant at the present time is the androgynous model of gender identity, which incorporates all the best of both sex roles. It is not difficult to see that gender identity is the result of a special process of coordinating factors that takes place in the subjective, inner psychological space of the person. In the course of this process, the person decides to adopt or develop ways of sociocultural presentation of his anatomical qualities in the manner and form that meets his individual personal characteristics. From this it follows that the variant of gender identity is a combination of the various properties and qualities by which the personality itself 57

characterizes its gender identity through gender perceptions of itself, gender self-esteem, gender plans, ways and patterns of behavior. From the point of view of the multipolar model of gender identity, its typology is represented by six options: – androgynous female; – androgynous male; – masculine female; – masculine male; – feminine female; – feminine male; The masculine variant is considered as a set of «instrumental» qualities of personality and is characterized by the greatest expression of such properties as independence, assertiveness, imperiousness, propensity to defend one's views, ambition, leadership ability, risk appetite, self-belief, self-sufficiency. In ordinary consciousness, these qualities are associated with men. The feminine variant is associated with «expressive» personality characteristics: modesty, diligence, conformity, loyalty, compassion, flexibility, empathy, propensity for cooperation and compromise. Masculine and feminine properties are largely due to the social context in the formation and development and have, rather, sociocultural determination. Masculine and feminine qualities are approximately equally inherent in the androgynous variant of gender identity. It is likely that representatives of this type of personality were brought up in a situation of less stringent regulatory requirements associated with sex-specific behavior. Such variability allows to suggest that the dynamic characteristics of the gender identity of an individual are due to the complex process of interaction of biological and sociocultural influences with value orientations and vital meanings aimed at satisfying the basic needs of the individual (the desire for internal coherence, self-actualization), regardless of gender. Being one of the structures of self-awareness of the individual, gender identity plays a decisive role in the processes of adaptation and self-regulation. If we look at diagnostic studies of the gender identity of focus group participants, about 80% of the subjects (both women and men) have an androgynous version of gender identity. Professional realization depends on the ability to adapt to the market economy, the level of motivation to achieve, self-confidence, flexibility and conformity. 58

Gender identity is a social construct and indicator of a mature personality, so it requires self-awareness. Gender identity is aimed at identifying the individual with the image of a sociocultural being. Together with the normative system of other identities, the prescriptions of gender identity are included in the structure of the normative apparatus of the individual. The multipolar approach in the typology of gender identity considered in the work makes it possible to draw the following conclusions: 1) biological sex is not the primary cause of psychological characteristics of behavior and social roles of women and men; 2) gender identity of a modern person as an element of egoidentity is a complex psychological structure that includes the hierarchy of life goals, values, representations and it cannot be reduced to the traditional dichotomy of the concepts of «masculinity-femininity»; 3) gender identity implies variability within the same sex (masculine, feminine and androgynous variant); 4) androgyny as a form of gender identity is the most characteristic and widespread among women and men in modern socio-cultural conditions; it is what helps selfdetermination of the person and provides the person with a feeling of emotional comfort. The multipolar approach distinguishes five types of gender identity: female, male, gay-lesbian, transsexual, transgender. S. Bem formulated the theory of three types of gender-role identity. The essence of this theory is as follows: gender identity can be formed as the predominance of either feminine or masculine characteristics, or androgynous complex, that is, as a combination of high masculinity and high femininity [56]. Thus, according to the concept of the structural-constructivist approach, the process of gender identity formation will be viewed from the standpoint of the interaction of the individual and social structures, assuming, on the one hand, the limitation of the subject to the historically prescribed system of social norms, and on the other hand, the possibility of the subject changing their character and content. Thus, gender regimes that seem stable and constantly reproduced can be transformed in the case of multiple modifications 59

of generally accepted gender norms at the individual level of everyday interactions. Teresa de Lauretis proposes to consider gender identity as a technology or performance. She believes that gender as a process of designing a subject produces such categories as man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual and others and intersects with other identification parameters like class, race, age for the production of the power system. She writes: «It seemed to me that gender was not the simple derivation of anatomical/biological sex but a sociocultural construction, a representation, or better, the compounded effect of discursive and visual representations which I saw emanating from various institutions – the family, religion, the educational system, the media, medicine, or law – but also from less obvious sources: language, art, literature, film, and so on.» [61, p. 136]. The reality of gender lies in the effects of the self-presentation of the individual. This is possible in the range from normative gender identity and social role to the erosion of gender boundaries and identity change, forever (transsexuals) or temporarily (transvestites). T. de Lauretis gave the name to the new scientific discipline – queer theory, which included the problems of issues that were not raised in the framework of gender and feminist studies. Queer theories are considered by some as aggressive counterparts of gender studies, which include not only the issues of sexual minorities, but also various practices of body modification (piercing, tattoos, scarification, bodybuilding). Queer theories represent ways to deconstruct gender and blur the boundaries of traditional sexual identities. Teresa de Lauretis regards women's identity as a material and symbolic process. Gender is a technology that defines a subject as male or female in the normative and regulatory process. T. de Lauretis regards gender as a process that constructs a sociallynormative subject through the construction of gender differences, which, in turn, involve racial, ethnic, social differences. Judith Butler, describing gender as a mark of cultural difference in her book «Gender Trouble», writes: «The sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. it does not follow that the construction of «men» will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that «women» will interpret only female bodies There is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of 60

sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.» [62, p.6] She describes the nature of identity as follows: «If one «is» a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered «person» transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out «gender» from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.» [62, p. 7] Unlike most researchers who relate to gender as a factor or measurement dimension, for Butler gender is a marker of biological, linguistic and cultural differences, i.e. an individual attribute. The basic proposition of the performative gender theory by J. Butler is the denial of the presence of the «pre-discursive self» in the structure of identity, therefore the understanding of language here appears as what forms subjectivity and not vice versa, and identity «is performatively constructed precisely by those manifestations that are considered the result of its existence, producing the impression of «natural givens». In modern sociological theories, gender identity is derived from the social context, which is formed according to the criteria of attribution of race (ethnicity) and class. According to British sociologists F. Anthias and N. Yuval-Davis, to speak separately about the class, gender, ethnicity and race, is not heuristic, because each context is determined by the interaction of these categories. Gender relations are formed according to the criteria of attribution of race (ethnicity) and class. Gender, class and ethnos create the syndrome of social identity. Social constructivism or constructivism in social knowledge is focused on the artificial origin of the social structure as a result of the conscious activity of people and social institutions. The extreme version of constructivism is connected with the absolutization of subjectivism and, accordingly, with the impossibility of social interaction. Constructivism in its extreme form (like postmodernism) turns to multiplicity, not based on any unity. It addresses the expansion of the framework, allowing research at the junction of 61

several sciences, which implies the polyvariety of interpretive models and the emergence of a «discursive genre». In Russian sociology, the systemic nature of gender identity (connection with gender, culture, socialization institutions) is not simply emphasized, but attention is drawn to the consistency of gender identity with all personally perceived images of the Self. N. K. Radina defines gender identity as belonging to a particular social group on the basis of gender. T. V. Bendas regards gender identity as identifying oneself with a certain gender, treating oneself as a representative of a certain gender, mastering the forms of behavior that correspond to it, and shaping one’s personal characteristics. E. А. Zdravomyslova and A. A. Temkina speak about the sociopsychological phenomenon, the product and the process of designing himself and social reality by the subject through constructs of masculinity and femininity. I. S. Kletsina understands gender identity as an aspect of self-consciousness, describing the experience of a person as a representative of a certain gender. Domestic sociology is currently at the stage of incorporating a gender approach into methodology, theory and the field of empirical research. The novelty of the gender approach in sociology has an institutional and cognitive nature, its development implies a sociologically informed analysis of the development of gender studies both in the West and in Kazakhstan science. In the domestic science, gender identity is represented in the works of S. M. Shakirova, K. A. Toktybayeva, N. A. Usacheva, G. G. Solovyeva, N. U. Shedenova, Y. Kozyreva and others. Kazakhstani gender studies, according to O. Zubkovskaya, experience «the influence of both the past Soviet emancipation policy and current practices of interaction with Western donors» [63]. She considers the geohistorical position of the researcher as the determining factor of discourse – «the ‘voice’ of Central Asian feminism is formed as a result of localization between various discourses of gender order – donor, Soviet and nationalist». Madina Tlostanova makes the diagnosis more categorically, arguing that feminism in Central Asia represents a double colonization – Soviet and American – and calls for a return to the «origins» [64, p. 350]. These positions reflect the methodological «non-Western» landscape, where the fundamental difference in analytical strategies is articulated. In the book «Under Western Eyes», Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues that Western scholars view the women of the East as 62

a homogeneous category, from their own cultural-mental positions, in the spirit of orientalist identity designs. Such a subjective position of consideration and evaluation through the prism of the Western standard, which Western feminists occupy in relation to the women of the East, is ultimately a monolithic masculine position [68, 158]. In the works of Kazakhstani researchers, gender identity is one of the most important and, along with ethnic, the most stable among all forms of a person's social identity. In the works of Kazakhstani researchers, the contradictions are studied between normative perceptions about personality traits and the behavioral characteristics of men and women, embedded in the basic gender stereotypes of the national culture, the inability or unwillingness of the individual to conform to these representations-requirements lead to the so-called gender conflict. In these studies, the following types of gender intrapersonal conflicts were considered. – Role conflict of a working woman, expressed as a «formula»: «I am a wife, I am a mother, I am a nurse, I am a cook, etc.» (the list can be continued indefinitely). – Conflict of fear of success, conducted studies of the features of the psychology of a business woman, revealed the characteristic features of women's thinking and their perceptions in the implementation of their production functions as follows. It is established that the woman pays more attention to the relations between the members of the collective, the sphere of interpersonal relations than the man. The woman is more sensitive to the emotional climate and shows greater sensitivity in understanding the mental state and moral collisions of the individual. But, due to low self-esteem and, at the same time, increased self-criticism, women later than men decide to devote themselves to productive activity, less often than men tend to get high public status, prestigious positions, and appreciate in their career the possibility of personal growth and self-improvement. Women are more limited in the opportunities for using in their careers informal relations, protectionism, mutual support, in obtaining informal information, i.e. in what is very actively used by men. – Existential-gender conflict is experienced both by men and women. Under the influence of public views, the 63

woman initially reconciles with a subordinate role in the family and at work, while the man is more used to the role of head of family, protector and earner. The whole life of the man is aimed at solving the problems of achieving a high career, a well-paid job, achieving a certain social status, etc. And the stronger the shock received by the man in case of loss of work or retirement. Having lost his job, a man often experiences a state of loneliness, meaninglessness of his existence, uselessness, etc. The main reason for the transformation of gender identity in approximately one third of women is the collision factor of her social roles – the manager at work and the performer at home. The woman must constantly prove to herself and others that she is able to be a good mother and wife, and also to do her job, in accordance with her qualifications. Women, being by nature more emotional than men, are more easily offended and sensitive to criticism, rudeness and personal insults. One more existential crisis in a woman occurs during the growing up of her children, when they no longer need her care and are separated from their parents. These conflicts are emotionally accompanied by feelings of resentment, aggression, irritability, depression, apathy, indifference, misunderstanding. As a rule, the greatest disappointment of the woman in the family or at work is if the man does not display the masculinity that the woman is looking for in his actions. And in turn, the man always yearns for femininity, for the modesty, devotion and grace of the lady of the heart, for the opportunity to protect her from all life's misfortunes. [66] In modern literature, you can find at least two more terms that are correlated in meaning with the concept of «gender identity». These are terms: sexual identity and psychological sex. Psychological sex is a complex of psychological, sociocultural and behavioral characteristics that ensure the individual, social and legal status of a man and a woman. Sexual identity is the unity of the behavior and self-consciousness of an individual who classifies himself as a certain sex and who is oriented towards the requirements of the corresponding sexual role [67, p. 282]. In this definition, the consistency of the mind and behavior of a person as a representative 64

of a certain gender is emphasized. An orientation, therefore, is the requirement of a sexual role. Sexual roles are a kind of social roles, they have a normative character, express certain social expectations and are manifested in behavior. At the level of culture, sexual roles exist in the context of a certain system of sexual symbols and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. The acceptance and assimilation by the individual of a particular sexual role gives him a gender identity, with which the self-consciousness of the person and all the properties of his behavior are subsequently correlated». Gender identity is a broader concept than sex-role identity, because it includes not only the role aspect, but also, for example, the image of the person in general (from hair and clothes to mental characteristics and behavior). Thus, in the phenomenon of sexual identity, first of all somatic signs are emphasized, on the basis of which the identity of a person as a representative of a certain gender is formed; in the phenomenon of the psychological sex, along with biological grounds, psychological and behavioral manifestations of the personality as indicators of the masculine and feminine acquire special significance, which fill the content of the self-awareness aspect of the individual, connected with the sex; in gender identity, the sociocultural parameters of the categories of «male» and «female» come to the fore, according to which a person identifies him- or herself with a specific gender group, constructing his or her identity as a representative of a certain gender. In modern foreign literature, the concept of «gender identity» is mainly used and not «sexual identity». «Gender identity is the awareness of oneself connected with the cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity. The concept does not operate beyond the limits of subjective experience and serves as a psychological interiorization of male or female traits, arising as a result of the process of interaction between the Self and others». In the above definitions one can see common points. This is an aspect of self-awareness of the individual, describing the experience of a person as a representative of a sex, as a carrier of specific sexspecific characteristics and behaviors that are correlated with the notions of masculinity/femininity. The general notion is the category of «masculinity/femininity», which is a marker and correlate of male or female identity. However, despite the apparent similarity of the analyzed categories of «sexual identity» and «gender identity», it is 65

important to note that outwardly similar descriptions of these phenomena are based on various methodological grounds. The ideas about sexual identity developed in the 1980s relied on the biologyevolutionary paradigm and sex-role-based approach, and modern conceptualizations of gender identity are based on the social constructivist paradigm. Gender identity is associated with the social status of the individual and his social parameters, namely: opportunities and limitations, access to socially significant values, hierarchical dependence, i.e. all those instances of regulation of social behavior that fix the sexual differentiation of the individual. An extremely complex issue is the issue of sociocultural determination of sex in the context of new regulatory requirements in the period of formation of non-traditional, innovative stereotypes of sexual behavior and relationships. The presence of a fundamental, initial base of gender construction is recognized as an axiom, tradition and language recognized by its basis. Language is a reflection of patriarchal norms and values and requires some renewal, and sometimes a new way of thinking. Quite controversial are the proposed strategies to combat patriarchal beliefs, since the construction of gender is determined by the culture of the given society and this historical epoch, it is necessary to influence the principles of culture that are not connected with the patriarchal symbolic order, free from masculine dominance of the value system. Harmonious partnership between men and women in public and private life can serve as an ideal for public welfare. In the practice of transformations, this implies the formation of a higher level of general cultural and emotional communication, which should be aimed at achieving mutual understanding between men and women in the joint solution of social, family, reproductive, sexual and other problems. An integral part of the process of socio-cultural transformation of any society is a change in the structure of models of gender identity. The concepts of masculinity and femininity are not reducible to the objective registration of gender differences, since they are a form of manifestation of power relations in society. Representations about the masculine and the feminine are very variable. Many ethnographers have demonstrated the relativity of those social norms that are built on the basis of the biological sex in 66

Western culture, and then are presented as axioms of culture. Historical studies carried out in the 1970s and 1980s using these ideas showed that the notion of the typically masculine and the typically feminine changes even in the history of the same society. Thus, we came to realize the need to distinguish the biological sex as a combination of anatomical and biological features and the social sex as a sociocultural construct that society «builds» over physiological reality. Gender is the fundamental dimension of social relations rooted in culture. It has elements of stability and elements of variability. In every society, especially multicultural and multinational, it is necessary to keep in mind gender diversity. This means that the translation and reproduction of gender models based on prescriptions and execution, corresponding to masculinity and femininity, will be differentiated for different social groups of society. Social reality is built in accordance with the assimilated and internalized patterns of femininity and masculinity. The identification process is associated with naming and placing oneself in socially constructed, culturally normalized categories, i.e. there is an alignment of identity from the material of a certain culture. The author of the thesis considers that gender identity is considered as a conscious definition of gender belonging. It is connected with our idea of our sex, which does not always coincide with the biological sex from birth. Gender identity can be considered as the awareness of oneself connected with the cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity. This concept operates as a result of the process of interaction of the Self and others. The existence of the identities of transvestites and transsexuals shows that gender does not depend only on sex, but is the result of building a gender identity in the process of social interaction. From a sociological point of view, gender identity is seen as a created, socially supported, socially transformed characteristic. Taking into account the change in methodological grounds, modern researchers come to the conclusion that it is necessary to take into account individual activity in the process of acquiring a gender identity. From this point of view, the first level of identity, covering the period of infancy and childhood, is characterized by the predominance of passive mechanisms for the assimilation of gender samples, and the second one implies the inclusion of consciouslyreflective possibilities of creative transformation of reality. Granting 67

the possibility of solving the dilemma of the subjective and objective determinants of personal development predetermines consideration of the structural and constructivist approach as a methodological basis for studying the process of formation of gender identity. I. Kon defines gender identity as a design that is a complex structured education that includes, in addition to awareness of one's own sexuality, sexual orientation, «sexual scenarios», gender stereotypes and gender preferences [69, p. 184]. With the development of society, the perception of sex and, accordingly, the variability of gender practices are becoming increasingly diverse, this mechanism is reflected in the theory of Giddens, based on the category of «resocialization». Conventionally, identity can be structured into two levels: the unconscious and consciously reflexed. The identification process, viewed as a continuous process of gradual acquisition or change of identity, helps to avoid the gap between these levels, and to emphasize the possibility of identity change. At the first level, the category of «identification» is seen as a passive process of children’s imitation (the period of infancy and childhood) of a certain socially approved behavior, in gender projection – imitation of behavior or certain qualities of men or women. At the second level, we are dealing with active mechanisms for analyzing one's own identity, expressed either in the conscious acceptance of the established identification model, or in the process of reidentification or resocialization. The category of «resocialization», proposed by Giddens, is revealed by him as «a process that results in the destruction of previously learned norms and patterns of behavior, followed by the process of assimilation or development of other norms» [70, p. 85]. Giddens' resocialization corresponds to the fifth stage of the development of identities by Erikson. In essence, they consider the same phenomenon – the process of conscious revision of an individual's own position, in particular, in both cases, the authors turn to youth, i.e. period when the individual is already capable of a reflexive analysis of his own position, in addition, at this time the teenager has already fully mastered the experience of the generation. In the process of identification of the first level, girls and boys are educated in the gender roles of a particular culture, and as a result there is expectation of behavior patterns corresponding to the public notion of «male» and «female» purpose. Differences in gender roles 68

depend, first of all, on the characteristics of culture and the process of socialization. Both sexes are equally experiencing social pressure and are not free from negative sanctions in case of deviation from the sex-role norm. From modern positions, the theory of identity of the first level can be assessed as not sufficiently taking into account the active participation of an individual in the formation of gender identity. Here, the activity of the individual's participation is seen in the fact that the cognitive structures of thinking are the organizing factors for the acquisition of a gender role, however, according to this view, the individual's main task remains to adapt to the surrounding reality, therefore he is focused on the reproduction of behavioral patterns that cause the approval by others. The second level of identity – adolescence, adulthood, old age – implies greater involvement of cognitive mechanisms and the possibility of a creative transformation of the environment. The most important is the stage of adolescence, because it is here that the conscious assimilation of the experience of the generation takes place. «Events experienced at this age become the basic determinants of the value dominant» [70, p. 85]. During this period, the environment is formed, with which the individual consciously identifies himself, the existence of which he supports. The notion of «resocialization» is of particular importance. Thus, an attempt is made to construct a gender identity that can change over time. From the perspective of this direction, gender identity is considered as a conscious definition of gender belonging. It is connected with our idea of our sex, which does not always coincide with the biological sex from birth. Masculinity and femininity are traditionally considered the standards of gender identity. Their expression occurs in different ways, but in any case it is determined by the gender order existing in society. Masculinity and femininity are socially constructed, created and changed in the course of history and prescribe patterns of how men and women should behave. These meanings and ideologies are usually regarded as ideal behavior and/or distinguish and extol men over women. The standards of masculinity are the standard for psychological evaluation of the person, young men about how to become «real men». The hegemonic definition of a man is a man who has power and is in power. Masculinity is reflected both on the micro-, and on the macro-level (bodily expression). The construction 69

of masculinity involves the subordination of women. Patriarchal cliches of masculinity require from a man the qualities of a conqueror, from a woman – those of a victim and a reward, struggle among men. In the study of masculinity, the first stone was laid by S. Freud, in his conception of the Oedipus complex, where the emphasis was on the subconscious phenomenon. Freud emphasized, as a key moment in the construction of masculinity – the overcoming of the «oedipal stage» in which the totality of the mother's desire and jealous competition with the father reaches the limit and is suppressed in response to the actual or symbolic threat of castration. In normal male development, this crisis is accompanied by identification with the father, the emotional association of the peculiarities (characteristics) of the father in the son. Chodorow reconsiders the importance of the Oedipus complex, shifting the emphasis to primary care of the mother in early childhood. This relationship implies an initial identification with the mother. The father is not the only example of masculinity for a little boy, he can take an example from an older brother, teacher (mentor), friend, sportsman or media star. The formation of male identity in boys is due to a number of characteristic features of gender socialization: the primary feminine identification with the mother, the feminine basic orientations of the child and the general feminization of upbringing adopted in our culture. To become a «real man», the boy needs to overcome the «feminine principle» in himself quite rigidly. Boys change the object of identification through attributing a woman with masculine signs. The development of male identity goes through three phases: – the first phase – the undifferentiation of masculine and feminine characters in the image of the Self; – the second phase – masculinization of woman as an object of identification; – the third phase – feminization of woman and masculinization of a man as an object of identification. Male identity is referring to the category of a male social group and reproduction of appropriate gender-related roles and selfpresentations. At the heart of the construction of the male identity lies the «ideology of masculinity». Traditionally, masculinity was considered heroism, service to the Motherland. In conditions of peacetime and apolitical nature of the majority of the population, this 70

concept is being eroded. In the definition of male identity, it is more appropriate to use the category of masculinity. Male identity is directly related to the cultural norm of anti- femininity. Men see aggressive or violent acts as a means of asserting and maintaining control over others. These violent actions are attempts to affirm a positive understanding of the Self, increase self-esteem, and confirm power in interpersonal interaction. Masculinity manifests itself in the orientation of the individual to achieve goals beyond the immediate situation of interpersonal interaction, femininity mediates contacts with other people built on emotional affinity and affection. Two indicators – masculinity and femininity form four types of gender identity: – masculine (high rates for masculine traits – aggressive, assertive, risk-averse, independent, courageous, etc. and low for feminine – affectionate, feminine, kind, loyal, attentive to others, etc.); – feminine (low rates for masculine traits and high rates for feminine traits); – androgynous (high rates for both masculine and feminine traits); – undifferentiated (low rates for both masculine and feminine traits). Paternity, i.e. having children has always been considered an indispensable indicator of «male power» and a component of male identity. Paternity as a social phenomenon has been strongly affected by changes in the last century, its authority and power in the family is declining. The modern father is evaluated according to traditionally female criteria, according to his achievements in the activities that he had not done previously. The complication of the structure and the increasing fluidity of marriage and family relations brought to life new fatherly roles and identities that were not previously known or were encountered much less often: native (biological) fathers, adoptive fathers, divorced fathers, single fathers, underage fathers, etc. More recently, it has been increasingly spoken about the crisis of gender identity or its transformation. Some diagnose this as a social disease of society, highlighting several factors, among which there are the demographic deficit of men, the greater biological vulnerability of men, compared with women and the modernization 71

factor. The impact of modernization has led to greater involvement of men in the public sphere and their insolvency in the private sphere, and further ousting from it. The reconstruction of the male identity goes in parallel with the process of reconstruction of femininity. When, from the time of the first Soviet construction projects, an image of a superwoman, a toiler, also responsible for maintaining the life of family members in the private sphere began to be created. The building of a market economy threw back the Soviet achievement of gender equality and reinforced the structural superiority of men over women in the public sphere (in the labor market, in the sphere of politics). The construction of male identity takes place through the practices of successful business as a «purely masculine occupation». Male gender identity is accompanied by the assertion of sexual domination, including the use of violence and constant anxiety about potency. The impulse to subordinate and humiliate women is the generic aspect of male psychology. In traditional cultures, control was provided through the ownership of the woman. Women were more likely to be subjected to male violence, especially within the household, but here they were protected from public spheres where men abused each other. In modern societies, women are much more likely to live and work in an anonymous public setting. Male sexual abuse has become the basis of sexual control. Freed from the conventions of war, men are more violent towards women than towards each other. Pornographic literature is part of the hegemonic domination system. The change in male roles is accompanied by a more cautious pulling of oneself into marriage ties and related economic obligations for the maintenance of the family. In order to remain free, a man must remain lonely to enjoy the fruits of his work, without social demands from his wife or family, while remaining focused on his economic success. Men are more prone to stress and pressure, the average life expectancy of women has exceeded that of men. Men can give up the role of a breadwinner, without giving up their usual economic privileges in comparison with women. The economic independence received by men has not become accessible to women who have to bear the responsibility that men have refused. Women, especially 72

those who lead families with a single parent, make up a high proportion of the poor. In the study of gender identity it is necessary to find out how this happens, why it happens; according to the formulation of Michelle Rosaldo, we must seek an expressive explanation: «It now appears to me that woman’s place in human social life is not in any direct sense a product of the things she does (or even less a function of what, biologically, she is) but of the meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interactions.» In order to investigate the meaning, we need to consider the individual subject along with the social organization and voice the nature of their relationship, since both are extremely important for understanding how gender identity is formed, how changes are occurring. It should be replaced with the notion that the social power of Michel Foucault's conception is the dispersal of constellations of unequal relations, randomly located in a social «force field». In these processes and structures there is a place for the concept of human action as an attempt (at least partially rational) to construct an identity, a set of relations, a society with a certain framework and language – a conceptual language that simultaneously establishes boundaries and contains the possibility of denial, resistance, reinterpretation, metaphorical imagery and imagination. At present, both within the framework of individual sciences, using the gender approach in the study and analysis of phenomena, and in gender studies themselves as a separate field of scientific knowledge, there is no unity in understanding and defining the concept of gender identity. However, it is still possible to derive some general ideas and principles in the understanding of gender, the mechanisms of its formation and gender identity: – Gender is one of the basic characteristics of an individual, which determines the psychological and social development of a person. The multicomponent structure of gender is determined by four groups of characteristics: biological sex; gender norms and behavior, gender stereotypes; gender identity. – Gender identity is categorization, obviously conditional, associated with a certain context, conventional and it can be played out and presented in different ways and carried out in everyday life. 73

–

Gender identity, along with the others (professional, ethnic, etc.) is one of the sides of the ego-identity and strives for integration and integrity with them. – Gender identity is related to our perception of our field – do we really feel ourselves as a man or a woman Specificity of gender identity as a component of the social identity of the individual is singled out. Firstly, gender identity is a special kind of social identity that coexists in a person's selfconsciousness along with professional, family, ethnic and other identities. Gender identity is among the most stable, as a rule, not subject to choice of human identities. Secondly, in the system of gender conceptualizations, gender identity is understood as a social construct. It is actively constructed by the subject throughout his life, during social interaction with other people and comparing himself with them. Thirdly, the person, constructing a gender identity, builds not only its own image, but also the image of the group to which it belongs or does not belong. The constructivist potential of gender identity lies in the fact that the person's awareness of his belonging to a gender group and the emotional significance of this group for him causes the construction of the «self-image» and the «groups image» in specific social conditions. Fourthly, gender identity is a multilevel, complex structure, including the basic and peripheral complexes of characteristics (Kon I. S., 2002; Zherebkina I., 2001; Ivanova E., 2001; Spence J. T., 1993; Koestner R., Aube J., 1995). Thus, gender identity is a sense of self-identity, awareness of belonging to a certain sex through categorization of masculinity and femininity, development of appropriate forms of behavior and the formation of personal characteristics. It is derived from the social context. Gender identity is not so much a stable whole as a volatile multiplicity. 1.3. The practice of empirical research on gender identity Gender studies have actualized the development of acute social problems that for a long time were not the subject of scientific discussions and for which there were no defining notions: family and sexual violence, «glass ceiling», gender separatism and sexual harassment, trans- and homosexuality, masculinization of society, gender conflict and gender equality. The author of the thesis puts a special emphasis on the fact that everyday practices of human 74

interactions, studied by «soft» methods (microsociological methods, biographical method, case study, hermeneutic techniques) are considered as a source of knowledge. Gender studies differ somewhat from women's studies by the choice of object and subject. According to N. L. Pushkareva, in contrast to «women's history», the history of gender (or gender approach to history) selects the subject of sex dialogue, and «not necessarily in the perspective of their hierarchy, stratification, but precisely in terms of reconstructing the historical evolution of the various forms of their interaction and complementarity [71, p. 2627]. It is no coincidence that the most brilliant philosophers of our time, including J. Lacan, J. Derrida and his followers, supporters of the postmodern theoretical feminism J. Kristeva and L. Irigaray, became interested in gender history (unlike the «women's history»)» [71, p . 33]. Gender studies have an interdisciplinary nature and include sociological, cultural, philosophical, historical and other approaches. For the short history of their development they have already acquired their own special discourse. We create our own terminology and vocabulary, which includes gender-neutral phrases and words for general use, special research objects and the subject of research are formed. Gender studies were formed initially in the mainstream of feminism, which as a social theory claimed to build an alternative methodology and epistemology within the social sciences. Feminist researchers tried to create not only a special field of research, categories and concepts, but also to form new ways of thinking, research methods and norms for their conduct. The first gender researchers sought to depart from the traditional methodology, believed that they were creating fundamentally new methods and techniques for collecting and analyzing data. Later, they come to the understanding that the originality of their methods of research is not to create previously unknown methods, but to put another methodological sense in existing methods and their further development. For example, feminist researchers are sometimes original in the method of authorship of research results, when it is recognized as exclusively collective. The specific subject and tasks of gender analysis required a new quality of the research methodology. The already existing toolkit was transformed for the gender dimension. For example, the well-known 75

feminist researcher S. Bem, rejecting the idea that expressed masculine qualities deny feminine qualities, created a scale for measuring masculinity and femininity and called it «an inventory of sexual roles». This scale, unlike the previous one, is built on a double coordinate system, it allows us to confirm that people combine masculine and feminine traits simultaneously. In the course of the research, the author of the thesis used this scale adapted by S. Burakova. In a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding the new features of human subjectivity, we would also like to note the possibilities of the theory and methodology of qualitative research that offer a method of investigation in which subtle processes, phenomena and their meanings are «grasped». As N. U. Shedenova notes, «the peculiarity of gender studies is a broader appeal to qualitative, «soft» methods of studying social and cultural phenomena. Interest in them is connected with the search for mechanisms for the emergence and consolidation of gender differences at the level of everyday practice, which structures an excellent way of knowing and thinking, the meanings of actions and behavior» [72]. Quantitative, «hard» research allows you to get a systematic view of social structures and institutions as certain individual entities, the laws of their development. Through the analysis of information obtained using formalized collection procedures, social, class, cultural types of people are constructed in an aggregated, gendered, non-dissociated form. The results of quantitative content analysis can be used to formulate hypotheses relevant to gender studies, to feminist theories and problems, and also to practical activities for the purposes of social change. The author of the thesis combined elements of quantitative and qualitative methods. It is obvious that quantitative and qualitative methods solve different problems, therefore they can not be mutually exclusive. Speaking about the correlation of quantitative and qualitative methods in sociological research, it should be emphasized that if quantitative methods are aimed at revealing quantitative signs of social processes, then qualitative methods are turned to the qualitative side of these processes. A qualitative research strategy is aimed at representative coverage and analysis of the quantitative distribution of characteristic features in the defined social phenomena that are oriented towards precisely identified common and main features. 76

When using qualitative methods, it is in principle about coverage, structural description and explanation of the dynamics of those social processes that are characteristic of the areas of public interest that are of interest, that is, about the individual and the particular in the subject of research, and not about bringing the regular and ordinary to the center of attention. From the perspective of qualitative research methods it is impossible to express system structures in terms, regardless of their constituents, and also of existing and suffering members of society. Let us point out the fundamental differences between qualitative and quantitative methods. These differences are, first of all, in a special empirical angle of view when considering social reality. If the quantitative methods in social studies are aimed at common characteristics (for the analysis of data on common characteristics for their subsequent typification), then the qualitative methods are oriented toward determining the differences. Qualitative methods will allow analyzing the common of two or more features, while omitting their differences. Quantitative methods make it possible to determine the difference by the fact that common features are used as a basis for comparison. Therefore, the goal setting for those methods is different: the disclosure of links in one case, the measurement of various expressions of already known features in the other. The strength of quantitative methods is, first of all, affected by the fact that they allow us to open a new and thoroughly systematized form. Thus, specialists define quantitative methods of social research as a kind of social diagnostics. These methods not only do not contradict, but, on the contrary, complement each other. However, their use in social studies is different. Quantitative methods are preferred in traditional sociological empirical studies, qualitative methods – when using the hermeneutic principle of analysis of social reality. At the same time, technical techniques for studying everyday life constitute a reservoir for the application of all social and scientific methods. From our point of view, in identity studies, priority should be given to qualitative methods, understood as an analysis of being (the surrounding world, the living space). We believe that the prospect of the client in its communicative conditioning can only be taken into account with the help of qualitative methods of empirical research. Previous polling techniques and coding techniques are insufficient for this purpose. It is also impossible to derive concrete theoretical forms from practical positions. The study of social reality occurs 77

mainly through its speech interpretation, colloquial forms of communication with the client. In this case, the use of the method must be correlated with a certain level of social reality. Essential are the following aspects of qualitative and empirical research: – fixation on the subject; – fixation on understanding of the general context of the event – on a specific situation; – on the hermeneutic analysis of what is happening. Based on the description of the meaningful segments of the structures of social processes, their specific analysis (individual and collective) is possible without carrying out a statistically representative (quantitative) study of the types of individual cases. The basis of the analytical explanation in this case is the theoretical and empirical reconstruction of social processes. The logic of this process corresponds with the logic of analyzing the qualitative method of social research. Gender-oriented social analysis uses quantitative methods when it is necessary to measure, for example, the amount of violence against women, the parameters of unemployment, structural parallels in life paths, etc. Qualitative methods find their application where it is necessary to understand the context of the received significant figures concerning the status of women, as well as the patterns of life stories and the problems of the vital world, the process of constructing a gender identity. For example, in order to trace the microprocesses of the development of gender identity, the researcher needs to empirically, analytically penetrate the routine with its inherent interactive constructs and answer the question of how specific, situationally connected practices of interaction are «condensed» into structures that last and are reproduced. Thus, we are approaching an understanding of more general questions: – how is the assimilation of the «authority-submission» structure as a means of reproduction of social domination achieved; – what is the «social agent» of this mediation; – how is the bisexual cultural system is institutionalized through the daily practice of interaction between men and women; – how do biographical procedural structures (layering of biographical experience), which stratify individuals on the basis of sex, crystallize in this practice. The transition of boundaries between sociology and psychology changes the optics of the research view. Sociological aspects typify 78

objective configurations of experience or procedural patterns in the sense of typical biographical structures that help describe and understand the situation of individual social groups. Accordingly, socio-psychological theories describe the internal dynamics of subjectivity, typical affect fields, patterns of motives, psychosexuality, etc. The use of interpretative methods allows us to fill these «abstractions» with real content, explain the «human» essence of social phenomena and processes. The researcher creates a realistic picture of social life, considering specific data in the context of social events. Each social situation is regarded as unique, reflecting a specific social experience, special experiences and suffering, which together form a specific «life world». The inclusion of the researchers’ own experience in the analysis of data obtained by observation, in-depth interviews, the biographical method, etc., the researchers' understanding of their own experience allowed to penetrate the female social experience in a different, deeper way, the specificity of which was previously excluded from the field of vision. In addition, attention was paid to the style and meaning of communication, through which one can always see a man or woman whose life experience is culturally and socially differentiated. In general, the distinction between «hard» and «soft» approaches to obtaining information is very conditional, there are many intermediate options between them. The «softness» of the measurement method by researchers means the possibility with its help to penetrate deep enough into the respondent's consciousness, which to a greater extent allows reflecting the opinion of the respondent (1). An important condition for qualitative methods is an attentive attitude to the context, to «speech discourse» (narrative). The discursive moment of speech is that, on the one hand, it is contained in the speech, but, on the other hand, it is not stated in the speech, but only is thought out if necessary. The methods of gender content analysis include the consideration of artifacts that are produced by women, about women or for women, by men, about men or for men, as well as by women for men and other combinations of categories. In the process of feminist content analysis, it can be revealed that this or that text translates exclusively patriarchal and even misogynistic views. On the other hand, a sample 79

of popular culture chosen for analysis can also show its opposition to the dominant culture. Researchers collecting cultural artifacts for social analysis can interpret them using quantitative or qualitative methods. For example, computer programs that count the frequency of using words can help us to reveal the hidden mechanisms that are embedded in a large number of documents. Similarly, a quantitative content analysis of the authorship and content of academic journal articles can be conducted, for example, on the percentage of men and women among authors or as objects of research, in terms of the methods used and the authors' approach to gender. Canadian psychologist Paula Caplan applied this method to demonstrate the antagonism of psychologists to the mothers of the children being surveyed: she analyzed nine major journals in the field of mental health research for three years during 1972-1982, applying 63 categories for reading and classifying 125 articles in the context of «accusation of the mother». Another example is a study by American researchers Diana Scully and Pauline Bart. They carried out a quantitative content analysis of gynecological textbooks and came to the conclusion that the portrait of women in these texts is drawn as an image of a mentally ill person [73]. The problem of polyidentity in sociology puts at the forefront the history of human existence and consciousness, their historicity and contextuality. The problem of identifying a subject is considered in connection with a specific context, that is, there is no «true» or eternally identified identification of oneself, speaking not in its own name, but on behalf of the collective, community, society. Unlike the classical subject, this is not an «ontological entity», but a person connected with the social context who speaks for himself. That is why it becomes necessary to include the autobiographical, the conceptualization of personal experience. In the study of experience, subjectivity it is ideal when the development of the interpretation of data occurs simultaneously with the help of the researcher and the researcher. It is recognized that the researcher «is not an invisible, autonomous, unaffected and impartial subject, but, on the contrary, a historically localized person with specific desires and interests that influences the formulation of tasks, the means and interpretations of the research». The construction of gender identity occurs through the mechanisms of social interaction. Therefore, in order to recreate and understand gender constructs, it is necessary to address the 80

respondents' free expression of information about a particular event or phenomenon. To do this, it is necessary to plunge into this very reality and allow informants to independently focus their attention on the types of social identity, which are the most important for them, with the subsequent deepening towards the formation of gender identity. At the same time, the empirical study of identification processes is problematic, because it is associated with a reflective narrative, which leads to distortion of results, to the construction of a new or complete loss of the old identity. In addition, identity is characterized by continuous dynamics, it is difficult to «grab» it in some real static state, it «slips away» from the researcher. A certain difficulty is represented by the multidimensionality of the phenomenon under consideration: «... at each particular moment, each of us is a combination of series of identification components and these components can be combined, and their combinations, in turn, may vary in different ways» [74]. Thus, the empirical study of identity involves two problems: on the one hand, fixation at the research level, and on the other hand, the reproduction of it by the researched subject. Identification interview involves the construction of a certain «image of the Self». Therefore, the researcher's task is to conduct a competent reconstruction. In this case, the researcher's interest is rather directed to the very method of «designing» a biography to reveal the narrator's social identity, focusing on the analysis of ways of constructing an identity and transforming it. In the course of such interviews, attention is focused on analyzing the image of the Self, which the informant seeks to create about itself, that is, on social identity. In the process of narrative keynote or in-depth interviews, respondents themselves determine the content, context and volume of their answers. The same applies to focus groups, group discussion on a given topic, which is often practiced in gender studies. In this row there are also biographical studies, which, in addition to the thematization of subjectivity, which is opposed as an achievement to positivistic discourse, objectifying the woman, make is possible for both the interviewee and the interviewer to support subject-object relations, to exchange a mutual perspective. The thematic field of biographies contains, in addition to individual features, other dimensions: the characteristics of social space, environment, generation, social stratum, subculture, etc. But a microanalysis of biographical interactions can also lead to the level of analysis of sex as a social construct. 81

In the field of qualitative research, certain maxims were conventionized: the introductory nature of qualitative research; overcoming the distance between the researcher and the subject; description as a step from phenomenon to structure. Of the three types of qualitative methodology for subjective-objective relationships: 1) directed at the studied subject; 2) on the studied object; 3) on their relationship in development – in gender discourse, the latter is welcome. The stages of a qualitative research process include the following: 1. qualitative research process as a sequence of decisions follows the principle of authenticity and structuredness (understanding of what is happening in the field from the point of view of the generalized theoretical perspective). 2. The relation between theory and empiricism corresponds to the principle of openness (theoretical structuring is postponed, «preliminary value» is slowed down) and is marked by equal attention to the context, without bias and excretion. A preference is given to implicit hypotheses. 3. The formulation of the question of determining the boundaries of the study is due to the abundance and variety of research material in the field of research. The concretization of the issue is connected with reduction and structuring as a limitation of the field of research and the research perspective. Possible research prospects include: – coverage of the subjectively meaningful meaning: – description of social action and social environment; – reconstruction of deep structures that generate interpretations and actions. 4. Approaching the field imposes certain restrictions. The role of the researcher in the field is similar to the position of a «professional stranger» (Agar’s term), he must have inherent attitudes toward a fundamental doubt in routine, social platitudes. Due to the lack of anonymity in the qualitative research, the problem of the professional ethics of the researcher, the protection of the interest of researchers in the data, and the respondents, which are partly protected by the coding of names and the conclusion of a contract on legal responsibility, is actualized. 5. The decision regarding methods of data collection is dictated by the specifics of the subject matter. Interpretation methods (objective hermeneutics, conversation analysis) and observation are preferable where the subject of analysis is studied in its natural 82

design. Reconstructive methods «grasp» the context and transfer it to the text (all kinds of interviews, field notes of the included observer, autobiographical story, biography). 6. Data fixing includes voice recording, its transcription and creation of the text as a new reality. The researcher here balances between the desire for the most complete coverage of data and the danger of fetishization of exact fixation. 7. Interpretation of the data is connected with a consistent solution of the following issues: – how to deal with the data; – whether the categorization is applicable and how, where the categories come from; – how the data is subject to categories; – what the purpose of the interpretation is (reduction or contextualization). 8. Generalization, evaluation, design of qualitative research is related to the following questions: – what is the evidence, typical of the results obtained; – what are the formal criteria for the researcher's subjectivity; In what direction should we modify the classical criteria for validity, reliability for qualitative research, and develop our own criteria. In gender studies and gender sociology, primarily designed for quality methods, a variety of tactics are used: case study (case history), life history, family history. In gender studies, it is important that analysts face a social perspective that explicitly places women and men, as well as their life worlds, in the center of observation and analysis. The goal is to find and analyze the patriarchal structures of society by means of which groups of men are evaluated higher and subordinate women in all significant social spheres. Therefore, the consistent application of the gender perspective is associated with the realization of the fact that gender, as a social and structural category, determines not only the conditions of real life for men and women, but also the thinking systems in which the individual socializes, which he assimilates and thereby supports, but which he can also change in a critical way. Qualitative paradigm is in demand to the extent, to which it deals with cognition, first of all, the hidden content of structures of gender inequality. Thus, qualitative methods allow analyzing the non-obvious activity of consciousness, expressed in the unconscious processes of corporality and sexuality, that allow 83

us to identify the «work of culture», social schemes in the individual dimension of identity and everyday social practices. The way and at the same time the result of the social construction of everyday life are social texts created by informants in the interview process. Social texts are ambiguous, they are constructed using various sign systems. Therefore, the research task is to interpret them taking into account a certain socio-cultural context. The text sets the semantic limits of perception of the information contained in it, associated with different stages of primary and secondary socialization and re-socialization. In the course of free expression, the most significant episodes and moments, representing the greatest subjective value for the informant, appear as associations. In the construction of gender identity, personal resources are important to meet the need for identification. This means interpersonal and intergroup interaction, direct and indirect. When the notions of close communities become obsolete, are no longer true, there is a need for new ideas and stereotypes. The formation of new ideas takes place under the influence of mass media, and interpersonal interaction plays the role of mediator of solidarity. These images are designed and broadcast by the media. Another mechanism for constructing an identity is attribution (assignment of meaning to an event that has occurred). Satisfying the need for identification with a particular group, the individual explains his own behavior and motives. This explanation is based not only on one's own experience, but also the interpretation of social interactions. Thus, attribution is a mechanism of social identification. The actions of the individual fill a certain identity with meaning, forcing to rethink the past and predict the future of the individual. There is a weakening of the polarization of gender roles, a change in the traditional system of sexual stratification. Segregation of labor has become less rigid and normative For the study of gender identity in the thesis, McCune's methodology was used, «Who am I?». Respondents are given 10 minutes to write twenty different answers to the question: «Who am I?» At the same time, it is emphasized that when answering this question, you can use both short answers (one or two words) and expanded ones (simple and complex sentences). The experience of research with the help of this technique shows that, as a rule, at the beginning of the list the responders use concepts that characterize their social identity: I am a businessman, a nurse, a research worker, 84

a teacher, a son, a daughter, a father, a wife, an amateur fisherman, a housewife, a representative of the middle class, a victim of reforms. Next, definitions related to personal identity were used: I am clever, reliable, responsible, I am beautiful, economic, addictive, romantic. Some of the respondents combine their social and personal identity: a successful entrepreneur, a caring wife and mother, a true friend. This variant of answers can be interpreted as non-contradiction, consistency of gender, personal and social identities. Feminist researchers proposed a number of new methods of data collection [75]. Let us dwell on some of these methods, analyzed in the work of the American scholar Shulamit Reinharz «Feminist methods in social research». Her work is aimed at overcoming the ignorance of feminist scientists and their ignoring the achievements of their predecessors. The method of «growing self-awareness» is based on the process of long discussion by a small group of women of personal experience without professional guidance. This allows them to realize their experience from their own points of view. For the first time such discussion clubs of women appeared in the US in the period after the Civil War to expand the «mental horizons» of middle-aged women from the middle class. This technique is often treated more broadly as the political, educational, therapeutic activity of women than as a research method. The result of the discussions is usually not publication, but a new way of thinking, notation or action that will contribute to changes in public practice, for example, the growth of women's political activity. A modification of the method of self-awareness growth is the research of the psychologist Mary Gergen, who created a discussion group of seven friends to discuss the life of women between 40 and 60 years and introduced various topics for discussion. She set herself the task of discussing with the group the opinion that menopause marked a new era in the life of a woman when she becomes more free, better self-fulfilling and more satisfied with life than in previous years. The discussion was centered around the question: is the traditional model of menopause as the «time of loss and decline of power» the best social construct for them? The work of the group was organized in the form of lengthy dialogues, tests and questionnaires were used. Such a discussion of equal interlocutors, without leadership and the imposition of the topic of conversation, made it possible to collect data which is more 85

difficult to accumulate in other ways, and to reinterpret results in a broader context. The method of creating group diaries is combined with «growing consciousness». It reveals the dynamics of women's lives. Sharing information, identifying common problems and achieving their resolution, women get the opportunity to test their own feelings and experiences. At the same time, two tasks are achieved: they comprehend their social experience, both on an individual and on a collective basis. Thanks to this, women reflect by themselves, which can lead to future social changes. An example of a collective «inscribing» of their thoughts and feelings is an anonymous computer group diary, formed by students of the sociological department to describe the cases of sexism in the educational process. The process of writing, reading, responding and rewriting was both an individual and a collective task. The students looked at this diary as a strategy for spreading the feminist ideology at the department, as a challenge to the dominant research practice. A close research method is a feminist group interview. It is in many respects similar to the focus group method, which came to social studies from the field of marketing. Its characteristics are the presence of a leader leading the discussion, face to face interaction and time limitations. The format of the group interview facilitates the exchange of experience between women and the strengthening of the identification of patterns of behavior through the shared experience. This method is developed by the German researcher Frigga Haug's «memory-work» method, based on the fact that women wrote stories about memory about different parts of their bodies, read them to each other, and then discussed. This allowed to jointly develop a comprehensive idea that girls are socialized for sexual existence, alienated from their bodies. The drama method is also a qualitative method of analysis. It is based on the collective creativity to create a story on a certain topic and its performance. Discussion by the group of the scene is the next phase of the process of obtaining social facts. When analyzing data, special attention is paid to the social context within which this method is played. The British feminist Vivien Griffiths carried out her research project in two mixed secondary schools. Together with the girls, the stories on various topics, often offered by themselves, were created collectively. They dealt with the relationship between parents and daughters, patterns of resistance to power, the relationship of young girls to their gender, the impact of gender on 86

their actions in the present and desires and hopes for the future. The method of drama demanded cooperation, collective participation from the participants, it enabled people to «find their voice» verbally and nonverbally (through facial expressions, gestures). Important components of this qualitative methodology were obtaining of specific data and dependence of their interpretation on the social context. The next method is a non-authoritative research voice, or a narrative about the flow of consciousness of multiple persons – it is based on the desire of feminists to radically eliminate their authorship. This allows us to move away from the so-called objective position of social science, which in reality represents a private view from a private point of view. Susan Krieger in the book «The Mirror Dance» proposed an innovative form of writing that refutes the style of directed passivity of the reader inherent in conventional writing. This book has become an experiment both in the female language, and in the method of social science. In the polyphony of the lesbian community, the voices of the individual persons differed from each other, then merged and became indistinguishable, reflecting the degree of the community unity. The method she created is close to the data collected and makes the author's voice invisible. She set herself the task of minimizing the analytical and theoretical comments in the body of her text. As an author, she had to present a story so that all the details were clear, and put them together in a story to give meaning. Through the construction of the story, she implicitly offered her opinion, but only as one of the possible alternatives. This allowed the reader to make his own interpretation of the data provided, to come to conclusions by himself. Feminist scientists who experimented with this method sought to show more in this way from what «takes place» in reality, abandoned the analysis limited to any theoretical model fashionable at the time. For example, Jane Marcus collected testimonies of mentally ill patients as victims of the repressing social regime. Conversation is another feminist methodical invention, experimenting with an unauthorized voice and with multiple voices. For example, sociologist Rose Minton used the format of the conversation to express the unusual experience she had experienced. In November 1982, she participated in a two-day demonstration of 3,500 women in Washington, which became a symbolic ritual through which they expressed their fear, anger, sadness and hope to the Pentagon military. Shocked by the novelty of this mass political 87

action, the researcher, together with Michelle Wittet, also interested in the theme of the women's movement, analyzed the unique «demonstration». The result was an article that was an informal interview, a conversation-interaction, organized around the look of one woman and her interpretations of events during the women's action in the Pentagon, and the spontaneous response and analysis of the second woman. Many feminist researchers experiment with conversation as a means of collecting and reflecting data and ideas. This method perfectly illustrates how knowledge is socially constructed and tested. The conversation differs from the interview method with its division of labor between the one who asks the questions and the one who answers. Unlike the work of one author, where readers can simply «sit behind» and «listen» to the author's voice, the reader should take part in reading the conversation, overcome the contradictions of interlocutors, hear pauses and silence. Another feminist innovation is the way a book is written using intuition or associative writing. Instead of a conversation between two or more people, Susan Griffin in her book «Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her» creates a conversation between two or more parts of herself. Through a non-thematic intuitive process, she listens to herself, to her uncivilized self. By this experience the researcher proves that the non-separation of emotions from cognition or from the process of working on a book is a feminist alternative to patriarchal thought. Another way of abandoning conventional scientific limitations is the revival of identification as a methodological principle that criticizes the remoteness, neutrality and objectivity of the researcher. Many feminist researchers worked with identification when they reconstructed the images of the pioneers of feminist thought and practice. They themselves got into their characters and invited readers to identify, correlate themselves with them. Feminists notice that to be objective in traditional science has obtained the meaning «to make the other the object», not to identify with the other. Choosing an identification path allows you to really «know» the other. An example of such a study is the project of Barbara Katz Rothman aimed at studying women who have decided to have an abortion after an amniocentesis (analysis of the physical and mental health of the fetus). The researcher notes that the drawback of this method is the pain of identification with people who suffer. In this method, knowledge, emotions and relationships are intertwined. 88

Feminist scientists are inventive in the study of personal experience. This is due to the fact that they seek to do away with the separation of the researcher and the person being studied. Some of them start with their own experience, analyze it and do not collect other data. So the sociologist Marianne Paget studied the process of confrontation between life and death, when she herself fought her serious illness. Others start with their experience, comprehend it and then only collect other data to compare with their experience. They use their identification with the study group to deepen the research. For example, Shulamit Reinharz realized her experience of miscarriage and then studied similar experiences of other women. Such data collection and analysis is an illustrative example of the vanishing difference between the researcher and the the person being studied. For the generalized analysis, the author of the thesis also used the materials of narrative interviews published in the books «Sex of the Woman» (Almaty 2000), «Between the Slogans of Communism and the Laws of Islam» (Tashkent 2000), «Oral History and Biography» (Moscow 2004) «Women's Oral History» (Bishkek 2004). Despite the variety of subjects, they echo each other. Fixed multiple individual cases and events still occur in the same temporal, social and cultural space. Oral stories – subjective in the form of historical representation – on the whole do not contradict the objective historical reality. The methods and techniques for collecting, submitting and analyzing data in a study of gender identity are focused on the following tasks: 1. to understand the reasons for ignoring their own experience and develop ways to include it in the process of cognition, reflection, to achieve the implementation of research from the perspective of women and the characteristics of their experience, 2. to soften and overcome the hierarchy, authoritative discourse that permeates the relations of researchers and the studied people, through the inclusion of the informants in the dialogue, their active participation in the study and in the discussion of its results, 3. to overcome the estrangement, autonomy and impartiality of the researcher himself by recognizing him as a certain person with his desires and interests, as well as through empathy, sincerity in relation to the people and object being studied, and refraining from dry, analytical interpretation of the data obtained. 89

P. Bourdieu argued that «the story of life tends to come close to the normative model of the official representation of the personality», so the researcher's task is to achieve the degree of intimacy that would allow him to share the not entirely publicly focused moments of the interview. In the course of the study, it was much more difficult for women to talk about themselves and their personality than about anything else. Perhaps this is due to the prevailing cultural traditions, among which an important place is taken by the personal modesty and closeness of everything that is encouraged and even implanted by family and public upbringing regarding subjectivity. The author recorded the discomfort of active working women in a patriarchal environment, they found themselves outside the rigid regulated framework by which the traditional society restricts the woman's personality. Feminist researchers are focused on the process of producing new knowledge, and therefore they are ready to create in different and unusual ways. For such people, the feminist spirit is emancipatory, including liberation from the stiffened methodological traditions. The complexity of the gender identity phenomenon predetermines the problem of developing a new methodological approach to its empirical study, adequate to the realities of modern society. In this case, we mean a set of general theoretical provisions and methodological principles, as well as technical procedures adapted to the specific problems of the research situation, the specificity of the subject matter, its content, the formation mechanisms and the areas of manifestation. Qualitative research, based on an individual level of analysis, reflects the real phenomena of the individual's life in the society in all its inconsistency and diversity, not seeking to reflect the average statistical data. Thus, the main issue of qualitative research of gender identity is to determine the mechanisms of its formation and transformation in modern conditions. The methodology of qualitative research is a study of microanalysis, based on the study of the individual aspect of social practice. The study of mechanisms for the formation of gender identity is based on qualitative methods of analysis that allow one to trace the multiplicity and variability of gender behavior patterns in certain social contexts

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2 GENDER IDENTITY IN THE PERSONALITY STRUCTURE

2.1. Self-identity as the source of gender identity formation As a fundamental problem, the problem of self-identity emerged not long ago, but rather quickly it became the center of intersection of the most important directions of theoretical-methodological and experimental studies of modern sociology. Self-identity is the basic condition that ensures human stability, the foundation of gender identity. Self-identity is a permanent process of the formation of gender identity and self-development of the individual, the source of the sustainable existence of a person in time and space. Sociological analysis of understanding the identity – as a condition and evidence of the dynamics of a person's selfdevelopment, an open self-developing system – is more productive and ensures continuity with the development of science and humanity. The general analysis of the problem of identity, conducted in this chapter, allows us to assert that the modern (actual) understanding of identity is not a structural, but a procedural understanding of identity. The stability of human existence in the world is ensured not by the development, transformation, formation, etc., of identity, but the dynamics of a person as a self-developing system that has a spatio-temporal organization ensures the stability of space and time. The very dynamics of self-development through identification allows the person to maintain the integrity of himself in the growing diversity and multidimensionality of the spaces of life. Self-development and identification allows the person to maintain integrity in the growing diversity and multidimensionality of spaces of life. The fundamental change in views on the nature of self-identity is due to the circumstances of the development of society. The era of scientific and technical, clerical, political and cultural revolutions, which created and continues to create the polyvariety of the modern world, opens up new opportunities and presents new demands arising 91

in the process of revising the representations and approaches of identity. In sociological studies of human development and behavior, social practices, subjective interpretation, narratives, the principles of system determination, self-organization are in the spotlight. Modern society, experiencing the era of social change, enters a stage of development that in many respects can be defined as innovative. The signs of the innovative stage are quite sharp and frequent changes occurring in various spheres of human existence. These changes present new challenges, to which the person is often not personally prepared. Particularly intensively changes the area of relations and worldprojects, and the fundamental attitude (the attitude of the person to him- or herself and to his or her sex. In the era of social change, gender identity is also transformed. Change ceases to be a circumstance or attribute of the situation (that is, changes cease to «occur»), but become a product of psychological (subjective) life (expectations, choices, projects). The intensity of identification processes and the importance of identity formation are increasing. This is evidenced by the growing interest in the problematics of the identity of specialists from a wide range of areas of knowledge and the tendency of explaining problem situations through the description of newly emerging identities. A person who lives in the era of social change is a person seeking support, the basis for self-determination between the flow of being and his own detachment. In sociology, the problems of social change have been studied for several centuries. The very term «social change» was introduced in the XIX century. It can be found in the works of many well-known sociologists and economists. Traditionally, the problems of social development, differentiation of its role structure, formation of a unified system of values and norms, emergence of social stereotypes and identity, as well as the activities of the individual in changing conditions were associated with the problems of social changes. Significant differences in the modern interpretation of this concept are in the accents put forward by modern sociology: a view of human life as a process of the subject's stay among objects (classical rationality), the process of development by the subject of ways of cognition and development of the world (nonclassical rationality) or the transsubjective process of the formation of the human in nature, world, person (post-nonclassical rationality) also define the interpretation of social changes as the processes of evolution, revolution, regeneration. 92

Social changes cause or can cause processes that affect the system of ideas, creeds, beliefs and values, both of the individual and society as a whole, lead to the inevitability of reviewing and reassessing the systems of basic beliefs and values that evolved over the period of the existence of the given society and person, which cannot be painless for both an individual and a society. Social changes stimulate the processes of renewal and transformation of social representations, as well as normative and value systems of each social group, including gender. There occurs a transformation of gender stereotypes, which leads to the desire to comply with the new gender expectations of society and others. Such changes cannot take place without severe emotional experiences. The situation of social change contributes to the emergence of new social practices, which often become clear after they become a kind of norm of behavior. So, we can see that the understanding of such social practices as transsexuality, transgender is being seriously transformed, that researchers hardly have time to create classifications that are rapidly becoming obsolete. The biological, economic, and psychological aspects of understanding social practices are also changing. Today, it is necessary to review not only the characteristics of gender identity, but also the theoretical basis for understanding identity. This requires new methodological exercises. The issues of gender identity factors in the light of empirical facts are not solved at the level of classical dichotomies between the male and female. It is necessary to raise the problem of identity formation. Development of identity is a problem of how modern person ensures the stability of his being in the multidimensional world both in the content and dynamic aspects, preserves the integrity, completeness of his own self, changes without being unfaithful to himself, without losing his world. How the person becomes and remains a modern person. The emergence of identity in the era of social change is a special mode of human development, providing authenticity of existence, a principle and mechanism that ensures the progressive development of human life in the context of social change. The problem of the development of identity arises against the background of the unnatural (sometimes supernatural) level of intensity and dynamism of the individual existence of modern man, amid the fact that the sociocultural and economic transformations of social space are happening today so quickly and irreversibly that there are situations of loss of identity everywhere – the gap between 93

new realities and the system of human representations that have developed under the influence of communicatively-mediated influences of culture, ways of understanding and evaluating oneself, mindset, including «implicit attitudes of thought, value orientations, automatisms and consciousness skills» [76 ]. In the innovative society, the meanings of communicative situations not only of small scales (characterized by relatively short duration) but also of large, even great scales, the duration of which exceeds a single human life, as well as the person's notions of time, change intensively. Identity is not experienced in a concrete actual experience, but acts as a requirement of complicating and increasing the level of self-development. Identity is intensely experienced in the context of social change. The era of social change is created by the constant emergence of new types of risks, some of which acquire their form in psychological phenomena. Among them an important place is occupied by the risks of identity formation – specific risks associated with practices of formation and restoration of personal integrity, personal potential, personal competence. Self-identity is the person's ability to realize himself in critical situations (identity crisis). The external form of self-identity crises can be suddenly emerging intolerance to uncertainty, capable of reaching the level of neophobia, manifested as progressive rigidity, or the emergence of many-sided «syndromes» – «chronic fatigue», «emotional burnout», «development stress», «anxiety», etc. The dynamics of self-development can be represented as a mechanism for self-diagnosis of the system that sends signals (emotional, first of all), when the system is forced to close and self-development loses its coherence due to internal causes (illness, old age, etc.) or external circumstances, often independent from the person (loss of significant other, catastrophe, cataclysms, ostracism, forced migration, economic crisis, etc.). The crisis of self-identity is manifested in self-diagnosis, giving emotional signals, which allows to record and disclose the essential aspects of gender identity as a continuous process of development, accompanying the self-development of the person, his gender representation. In the period of critical life transformations, selfidentity signals the person about a possible deformation of identity. There are very few studies in which deviations of gender identity are causally associated with the uniqueness of the structure of integral 94

personal self-identity, with the peculiarities of its normal and abnormal development. Identity is both universal and renewable. The self-identity of the human individual as a person assumes the identity not only of his essential characteristics, but also of those qualities that express his uniqueness and distinctness. Therefore, the person’s identity immanently includes his or her individuality. The individual's acquisition and preservation of his or her identity, on the one hand, and the formation and development of the identity, on the other, are two interrelated and mutually reinforcing aspects of the same process. The most important qualities of identity (integrity, stability, continuity and individuality) determine a certain degree of autonomy of the individual in relation to other individuals, as well as to those formal and informal associations, communities and organizations to which he belongs. On the other hand, the presence of a certain degree of autonomy of the individual is a necessary prerequisite for the emergence and preservation of his self-identity in the process of various external influences of social nature. It would be a mistake to regard the process of self-identification of the person as wholly taking place in the inner, spiritual world of the person and independent of everything external in his life activity. In fact, it is carried out in the process of diverse forms of activity of the individual – the mastery of culture, self-realization and selfaffirmation. Therefore, as V. S. Barulin correctly notes, «identification means building up a kind of infinite number of internal lines connecting the person with the macrosocial world in which he lives. This set of threads... forms a kind of panorama of the inner spiritual self-awareness of the person» [77, p. 356]. The process of identification of the individual from this side acts as the internalization of his sociocultural influences in the course of diverse communicative relations, and thus as a result of the interaction of the individual, personal and socio-cultural principles. In this case, it is difficult not to agree with J. Habermas that «no person can dispose of his identity as if it were his property... I cannot simply for myself keep that self, which in my mind appears as given to me, it does not «belong» to me [78, p. 38-39]. The current state of the process of identifying a person in modern society can be described as a crisis. Radical changes of a negative nature have transformed the nature of identity, as well as the perception of its relation to it as an individual, and society. 95

Since self-identity is an essential, constant human self, an inner, subjective concept of oneself, the issues of the formation and development of identity are relevant throughout the life course of the individual. Self-identity is social in origin, it is formed as a result of the interaction of the individual with other people and the assimilation of the experience developed in the process of social interaction. The change in self-identity is also due to changes in the social environment of the individual. Self-identity is not a given, but experience and relationships, constantly formed and reformed, it is what gives a person a sense of significance of his being within the given society (and from the point of view of the society). The sense of self-identity can either be strengthened by comparisons or be destroyed if some characteristics cease to correspond to the existing ideas, and their behavior no longer meets expectations based on past experience. Self-identification is the process by which a person either a) extends his identity to someone else, or b) borrows from someone, or c) mixes or confuses his identity with the identity of another person. The construction of self-identity, the entire psychosocial experience depends on the development of object relations and develops through understanding of how the person is represented and evaluated by other people. The sense of self-identity can always change, depending on the relationship of the individual with the environment, and the development of identity can be viewed as an evolutionary process that proceeds from simple anxiety-protected forms of identity to higher socio-cultural ones. Self-identity is a social and cultural phenomenon. Culture is a «concrete of social relations» not only because it is passed on from one person to another in the process of socialization and contacts with representatives of other cultures, but also because it shapes people's sense of belonging to a certain community, i.e. sense of identity. Self-identity is experienced by the person continuously, being transformed by virtue of various social ties. Its function is adaptation in the broadest sense of the word. Identity includes the conscious and unconscious mechanisms of solidarity/rejection, uniqueness/identity, autonomy, working throughout life. Identity is one of the main mechanisms of personal development of social reality, which is the basis of the formation of a system of personal meanings. In accordance with subjectively defined 96

identifications, the person organizes and directs his behavior. Identification is impossible beyond comparison, outside communication, only as a result of interaction, direct and indirect, with another group, this community acquires its «special» features. We can say that identity is a symbolic means of uniting with some and distancing from others. Post-structuralism has developed its own approach to understanding the processes of gender identity and self-identity. Julia Kristeva, Lucy Irigaray developed the views of Jean Lacan, and Nancy Chodorow, Carol Giligan represent the school of object relations. Lacan proposed the theory of signifiers, from which the main thing in sign systems and communications is the difference between the signifier (the one who transmits a meaningful message), the signified (what is indicated) and the sign. The signifier can be a physical object, a word, or some picture. The signified is a mental concept, shown by signifier. The sign is the connection between the signifier and the signified. Lacan's self-identity is generally problematic. Lacan disputes the basic assumption contained in the question «Who am I?», assuming dependence on the relations and dialectics of the Self and other people. According to Lacan, there is no presence, only language, and the absence of the identifiable core of the Self can only be recovered by the «imaginary self», «fantasy», in which identity is preserved by a protective mechanism, like «negation». He argues that the subject demonstrates itself only through a false realization that meaning is determined through difference. But, nevertheless, poststructuralism and essentialism raise questions about how insignificant or fragmentary self-identity is and how far the inherent qualities with which people seek to differentiate a man and a woman extend. The followers of Lacan, Kristeva and Irigaray in their works show that women in a specific way are excluded from the field of symbolic language as such. Lacan considers as the initial one the idea of decentralization, fragmentation of self-identity, he denies the existence of a single, whole Self. The individual, according to him, is a split subject with its own stories that can constantly change and reshape identity, subjectivity that does not have fixed characteristics. According to Lacan, the person is never identical with himself, he is always in search of himself. He calls into question the dependence of Self on other people, understanding it as a fantasy and protective mechanism. The person from the beginning, from birth is not a 97

mental whole. The child is a «fragmented body», connected symbiotically with his mother. According to J. Lacan this period is called a «separation complex», when a child yearns and eagerly desires contact with the mother's breast. He does not feel individual unity and integrity at the pre-mirror stage. J. Lacan calls the «premirror» experience of the infant «a fragmented image of the body», believing that the primary experience of the Self is given to the child in parts and fragments. As the child grows up, breaks the symbiotic relationship with his mother, he is looking for a replacement object. And his own image becomes this object, but it will never fill the original unity with the mother. This dissatisfaction stimulates an endless search for identity, the desire to gain an imaginary integrity. His own image, image of the body allows him to gain some imaginary integrity and is a primary identification. The child learns to react emotionally to his own image in the mirror, appearing at the junction of the inner and outer, as he is reproduced within him, but at the same time is perceived as the result of appropriating something external. This primary image, according to J. Lacan, is the ideal of the Ego and this stage, the period between half-year and a year and a half, Lacan calls the «mirror stage». Here the turning point is the realization that the image in the mirror is his image. The child perceives himself as an autonomous, separate entity from the mother. Initially, the image in the mirror is perceived by the child as a stranger, but later identification occurs. Formation of self, or personal identity, i.e. the linking of isolated impressions into the «transcendental unity of apperception» is the result of identifying the child with the object with which he communicates (in «normal» cases – with the mother's body). J. Lacan understands identification as a process of transformation of a subject when he assigns his image to himself. Finally, at the age of eighteen months to three years, the child goes through the «oedipal stage» – through learning the language he learns to symbolically mediate his own drives. The child constructs his identity, identifying with the image of the other, which keeps the feeling of self in him. In other words, «otherness» is something that inevitably lies within us and therefore subjectivity can not have a stable «self-identity». The structure of the subject contains the «self» and «not-self» at the same time, while the mirror image of the child is always a symbolic construction of fantasy, and self-identity acts as a function that is subject to constant, therefore it is possible only at 98

the level of fantasy. The absence of the identifiable core of the Self, according to Lacan, can only be recovered by the «imaginary self», «fantasy», in which identity is preserved by a protective mechanism, like «negation». Directly the crisis of identity of an individual is expressed in the deformation of all its essential features, in particular, such inextricably interconnected as integrity, sustainability and continuity: «integrity» and «continuity» have become feelings rarely experienced in our time. Moreover, they are no longer desired, and if they are, then such a desire is usually associated with sinister assumptions and fears», states the famous British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman [79, p. 186]. The reason for this contradicting nature is the phenomenon in the fundamental changes in the sociocultural situation in which modern person turned out to be. We are talking about such changes as the multiply increased dynamics of social processes; the strengthening of existing and emergence of new forms of social alienation of the individual; the loss of the individual's connection with the traditional system of norms and values in the context of the general cultural crisis of traditionalism; domination in the society of the consumer lifestyle and associated values and orientations. Without personal identity, the person can not exist as a single individual in principle, the consequence of this is its transformation, a kind of «transition» into another content and time status: integrity, stability and continuity as an attribute of identity are replaced with fragmentarity, eclecticism and discontinuity in the process of its changes , and the permanence and constancy – with momentariness and situationality. An individual with such a transformed identity no longer sets himself the goal of finding himself, his inner self, remaining himself in a kaleidoscope of life changes and situations, and without «unnecessary» emotions and painful experiences, «in time» replaces his identity with another one, the most appropriate to the changed life circumstances. So the personal identity from the constant identity «for life» turns into a variable situational identity «for some time». A person, constantly changing under the influence of external circumstances and internal processes of self-development, continues to remain in a special way corresponding to himself and the world – in all diversity and variability. The structural units of identity are physical, intellectual, moral traits, i. e. individual characteristics, as well as the factors of an individual's belonging to a particular social group: ethnic, gender, professional, etc. 99

In our opinion, self-satisfaction is, to a large extent, satisfaction with oneself as a woman or as a man. The totality of ideas about oneself, the self-image of a woman or a man is included in the general self-concept of personality. Adequacy-inadequacy of these representations, this or that affective attitude to these representations, including the level of their acceptance, influence the choice of strategy and tactics of self-realization, can determine its success. For most people, self-identity is mediated by attachment to others or devotion to different institutions – nations, religions, professions, social group. Instead of identifying with the clan, a herd instinct develops, resting on the feeling of undoubted belonging to the crowd. And this fact remains unchallenged, despite the fact that the homogeneity of the crowd and the conformism of its participants are often covered by the illusion of individuality. However, without identifying ourselves with anything and with anyone, we run the risk of losing ourselves. This threat is a powerful motivator, forcing us to do everything possible to gain a sense of identity. Self-identity as a new entity in the most general form could be defined as a permanently experienced identity of the Self in time and space; it assumes the authenticity of self-perception, the high level of integration of private dynamic and contradictory images of the Self into a single coherent system, through which a stable, generalized and integral individual-personal self-determination is formed and maintained, which is supported and shared by the community of meaningful others. Self-identity implies self-determination in relation to the basic relationship between the self and the social environment. Therefore, in accordance with the functions that perform self-identity in the life of the individual, it is customary to distinguish several of its types: sexual, moral-value, ethnic, professional, age, etc. Thus, gender or sexual identity is understood by us as a special case of personal self-identity, due to which a subjective «sense of gender» arises, masculine or feminine type models of behavior develop and the desired choices of the sexual partner are realized. We assume that the harmonious development of gender identity fosters the person’s satisfaction with self-realization, and, conversely, diffuse identity prevents the self-realization of the individual. Modern researchers, when studying identity problems, pay attention to the following characteristics of identity: the division of oneself, the work of the individual and ontological: the typologies of 100

life worlds, understanding and self-knowledge as the basis of being of the person, the features of development at different stages of growing up. Self-identity is a system characteristic of a person as an open system, the mode of existence of which is self-development, consisting in the ability of a person to keep the continuity of his self in a stream of spatial-temporal transformations and manifests itself in critical situations (in identity crises), in the form of temporal relations-manifestations the effects of derealization, the «compression of time», its «condensation», concentration on one of the temporal horizons (temporalities). These temporal manifestations have a great psychological meaning: through them the person joins the reality of «transitions», learns about the violation of the process of self-development as the basis for the stability of his being, the emergence of a threatening gap between the image of the world and the way of life (prison, exile, conscription, emigration, hospice, etc.), or the equally threatening rapprochement (old age, which extinguishes the potential of self-development, is «a lifeless perfect merger of subjective activity with one's own world». This is reflected by the qualities and individual characteristics of the dynamics that make up the core of the human stability mechanism both in relation to the changing world and in relation to the transformations (deformations) of the value-semantic dimensions of the living space that entail a change in its configuration and content. Violation of dynamics is a violation of the person's readiness to proclaim a worthy future, to meet it and respond to its challenges, i.e. readiness to «change oneself without being unfaithful to oneself», and, at the same time, it is a loss of willingness to challenge the past, in order to reassess it and reconstruct the experience. The study of self-identity as a condition of human stability should form a theoretical and methodological basis that contributes to the sustainability of human development in the changing world. The combination of methodological tools for analyzing the temporal and ontological characteristics of self-identity has made it possible to formulate modern practices aimed at creating systems for accepting responsibility and managing new types of risks of identity formation. The analysis allows us to identify the basic trends in understanding the problem of identity of the individual. At the moment, the following basic trends are highlighted: the tendency to permanent 101

actualization of the problem of identity of the individual and the tendency towards a processual understanding of identity. Development of identity is a problem of how modern person ensures the stability of his being in the multidimensional world both in the content and dynamic aspects, preserves the integrity, completeness of his own self, changes without being unfaithful to himself, without losing his world. How the person becomes and remains a modern person. The emergence of identity in the era of social change ensures the progressive development of human existence in the context of social change. Identity is a condition, not a function, an expression of the fundamental dynamic foundation of a person as an individual, since without identity, the simultaneity of stability and uniqueness is impossible. The study of self-identity in gender sociology is carried out by qualitative methods, where the sociologist acts under certain circumstances that set a certain level of reflection. The researcher is engaged in the situation and must «follow the thinking of another person», keeping up and not running ahead. The researcher is limited. Not always can we afford to go all the way from taking reflexive data to the most detailed convincing description. For this it is necessary not to discard, but to accept theoretical assumptions as additional data. Theoretical assumptions should be considered the result of reflection, held earlier and «ossified» in its time. In modern qualitative studies, preference is given to the ordinary language of description, because ordinary language provides us with the widest possible classes of names and descriptive concepts. Ordinary language allows us to catch a lot of nuances (that is, it is fixed as a rigid structure, prolonged state, long-lasting, sufficiently stable social, personal, etc. identity). In the course of the study of in-depth interviews in the analysis of self-identity, the events preceding and following the described action are included in the event itself, but not as past and future, but as their acceptance by the person here and now in the event, in the act. The results of the studies illustrate the experience of inconsistency with gender standards and expectations of the environment. The objective of the research was to describe the dynamics of identity with regard to conformity of gender order and the processes of gender representation. Studies of the experience of gender identification in the situation of social changes can serve as the basis for the organization of social practices in which there is not 102

and cannot be ready knowledge and the decision completing process, but there is a need to master the situation of social changes, to make decisions at this time. Being oneself and becoming oneself are two tasks that a person must solve simultaneously in a specific time of his or her life. This is possible only in the case when such an opportunity lies in the nature and dynamics of human development. Identity is reduced to the phenomenon of readiness to be oneself in the world at the cost of necessary changes. It is the willingness to «pay» the necessary price of change as a system characteristic that ensures success. Self-identity can be defined as a meaningful relation of the modernity of losing and obtaining oneself in the world. The qualitative characteristics of the emergence of identity are determined by the conformity of the past and the proclamation of the future. The social aspect is dominant in human development. The individual has many opportunities to identify himself, in most cases, experimentally, focusing on real and ideal people, on their habits, traits, ideas. Each historical era offers a limited set of such working models. The individual must at every step acquire a sense of reality from the realization that his individual path is a successful version of group identity and is in accordance with the space and life plan of the group. When studying identity, it is necessary to pay attention to the environment, not only the external one, surrounding the individual, but also the internal one, that is why sociology was chosen as a tool for knowledge of identity.When studying identity, it is necessary to pay attention to the environment, not only the external one, surrounding the individual, but also the internal one, that is why Erikson chose sociology as a tool for knowledge of identity, for «identity is verified by psychosocial experience». The sense of identity depends entirely on the relationship with the environment. In understanding the nature of identity, there are temporal parameters of identity (temporality) associated with human development and changing environmental factors. According to S. M. Jakupov, it is in the society and thanks to it that sex-age identification of the person occurs in ontogenesis. The society acts as a system-forming factor in the process of bifurcation by gender. The sex-age features of the person, which are initially formed as ambivalent by gender, constitute a substantial filler of the gender properties of a person. This means that the gender subject is initially 103

predisposed to split with subsequent connectivity through internal dialogue mechanisms. In science, a sufficient number of facts have accumulated, allowing one to talk about the gender determination of self-identity. Therefore, the combination of all manifestations (phenomena) of gender-related forms of mental, cognitive and social activity of a person is expedient to be designated by the term «gender subject». «Gender subject» is defined by him as a collection of two components that are different in their psychophysiological content, underlying the activity of the subject of activity and the most complex process of the ontogenetic development of the person. The concept of «gender subject» emphasizes the presence of two different components in terms of their psychophysiological content, underlying self-identity. The process of formation of gender identity allows us to talk about a special «gender subject», in which the «doubling» of the mechanisms of mental activity occurs. A characteristic feature of a gender subject is, most likely, an internal dialogue between the ambivalent content of cognitive processes. Sexual determinism of self-identity is mediated by the requirements of the cultural environment and finds expression in various kinds of interactions [80]. The period of social transformations leads to an understanding of the fact that changes cease to be an attribute of the situation (that is, changes cease to «occur»), but become a product of subjective life (expectations, choices, projects). In the era of change, the intensity of identification processes and the danger of loss of identity, formation of an illusory, fictitious identity increases. The formation of identity today is already a means not so much of adaptation or development as a condition of modernity of the person, a condition of existence. Self-identity as a new entity in the most general form could be defined as a permanently experienced identity of the Self in time and space; it assumes the authenticity of self-perception, the high level of integration of private dynamic and contradictory images of the Self into a single coherent system, through which a stable, generalized and integral individual-personal self-determination is formed and maintained, which is supported and shared by the community of meaningful others. Self-identity implies self-determination in relation to the basic relationship between the self and the social environment. Therefore, in accordance with the functions that perform self-identity in the life of the individual, it is customary to distinguish several of its types: sexual, moral-value, age, etc. Thus, 104

gender or sexual identity is understood by us as a special case of personal self-identity, due to which a subjective «sense of gender» arises, masculine or feminine type models of behavior develop and the desired choices of the sexual partner are realized. The formation of identity today is not a means of adaptation or development, but is becoming a condition of modernity of the person. This occurs in the process of identifying and disengagement of the subject with himself, with experience, with reality in accordance with the gender expectations of his environment. In general, as it was previously noted, the emergence of identity is the process of socialization, identification with significant other and isolation, detachment from the significant other. Formation of identity is the process of achieving constancy, stability of the individual in time and qualitative change, emergence of a new level of organization, a new order, objective identity. Self-identity – the correlation of oneself with oneself, perception of oneself as a unique and independent personality – is accompanied by the identification of oneself with a certain gender. Self-identity as a continuous process of identity formation, accompanying the selfdevelopment of the person, is the foundation of gender identity. Selfidentity is individualized and culturally schematized, which manifests itself in social behavior and interaction, in the system of interpersonal relations, in the experience of one’s gender. Thus, the main characteristic of the dynamics of identity formation is the person's discovery of his or her self as the uniqueness and stability of his or her being. The formation of identity can be regarded as: the process of identifying the subject with himself, his sex; the process of socialization, identification with significant other and isolation, detachment from the significant other; the process of achieving constancy, stability of the individual in time and qualitative change. 2.2. Masculinity and femininity in the context of sociocultural organization of society Historical analysis of society shows us the presence of images of masculinity and femininity in all the «tissues» of human existence, which reflects such a fundamental feature of human nature. We find the division of male and female roles in the earliest testimonies of humanity, and their fixation is explained by the natural process of 105

natural and social evolution, which enshrined certain specific and expedient functions. Gender systems differ in different societies, but in each society these systems are asymmetric in such a way that men and everything «men’s/masculine» (character traits, behavior, professions, etc.) is considered primary, significant and dominant, and women and everything «women’s/feminine» is defined as secondary, insignificant from the social point of view and subordinate. The essence of constructing gender is polarity and opposition. An important role in the development and maintenance of the gender system is played by people's consciousness. The construction of the gender consciousness of individuals occurs through the dissemination and maintenance of social and cultural stereotypes, norms and regulations, for violation of which the people are punished by society. It should be emphasized that historically the notions of «gender», «gender role», «gender identity» applied exclusively to women. At the present time, concepts of masculinity are being developed, and these definitions apply to both sexes. For a long time it was not customary to talk about the existence of male gender, it was «invisible». This is due in part to the classical definition of person («man»), fixed in many languages of the world, fixed in folklore, where person and man are equal. Male gender is specific because its main determinative – masculinity – today is a special quality acquired in formation. According to the conventional opinion: women are born, men are made. And one more feature in the understanding of male gender lies in the man’s denial of femininity, which is present in himself. The femininity inherent in a man is expressed in love or absence of love for his mother, in the idea of an ideal woman, etc. Thus, modern social knowledge requires analysis of both masculinity and femininity, as well as attributive characteristics of the individual and personal being. At the moment, gender studies are methodologically based on three gender models, which can be designated as classical, nonclassical and modern. In the 1990s, men entered gender studies. They are preoccupied with parallel themes: socially constructed masculinity, the plurality of masculinity outside the so-called hegemonic masculinity, described in a widespread way: a white heterosexual middle-class man. Now masculinity is subject to challenge and destabilization. 106

Today, men's studies are a rapidly evolving part of the humanities, close to women's and gender studies. They are united by a common paradigm – the social construction of masculinity – and the general strategy – discursive destruction, deconstruction, destabilization of artificial, patterns of masculinity exorbitant for ordinary males. Men’s studies have emerged not as a response to women's studies, but as a result of the recognition of the complexity and heterogenity of the «man» category. In the nineteenth century, «men’s» and «women’s» traits and properties were viewed as a strict dichotomy, something mutually exclusive, any deviation from them was perceived as a pathology or a movement toward it. Then female normativism gave way to the idea of a continuum of masculinefeminine properties. Since the 1970s, first in the West, and then in the USSR, much has been said and written about the fact that the traditional male lifestyle, and perhaps even the psychological properties of a man, do not correspond to modern social conditions and that men have to pay too high a price for their dominant position. However, the causes of this «masculinity crisis» and possible ways to overcome it are treated differently and even in the opposite way. Some authors see the problem in the fact that men as a gender class or a social group lag behind the demands of the time, their attitudes, activities and especially group self-awareness, the ideas about what a man can and should be, do not correspond to the changed social conditions and are subject to a radical change and restructuring. That is, men must look and move forward. Other authors, on the contrary, see the social processes that undermine male hegemony as a threat to the everlasting «natural» foundations of human civilization and call upon men, as traditional defenders of stability and order, to put an end to this degradation and bring society back to a calm and secure past. These disputes themselves are not unique. Since men were the dominant force in society, at least in its public sphere, the normative canon of masculinity and the image of the «real man», like all other fundamental values – «true friendship», «eternal love», etc., have always been idealized and projected into the past. Until the mid-1980s, mainly popular books and medical and biological research were devoted to men's problems. Then the number of publications began to grow exponentially, capturing all new topics and branches of knowledge. Numerous serial publications appeared, some reading books became bestsellers. For example, the 107

reading book by Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner «Men's Lives» from 1989 to 1998 was reissued in a massive circulation four times. The most complete bibliography of literature on men and masculinity, compiled and regularly reprinted by Michael Foot (Australia) consists of 50 sections and counts more than 3000 titles. More and more special magazines about men and for men appear. In Australia it is XY: Men, sex, politics (since 1990), Certified Male (since 1995) and Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (since 1996), in England – Achilles Heel and Working With Men, in the US – The Journal of Men's Studies (since 1992) and etc. The most authoritative international interdisciplinary scientific journal «Men and Masculinities» (editor-in-chief Michael Kimmel) has been published by Sage since 1998. The American Men's Studies Association (AMSA) unites men and women engaged in teaching, research and clinical practice in the field of men’s studies and working with men. Its goal is to «promote the critical discussion of issues relating to men and masculinity and to spread knowledge about men's lives among the general public» by studying men’s life experiences as «socio-historical and cultural constructs». These publications contain a lot of new interesting information about different sides and aspects of male existence. However, the relationship between the concepts of «men's life» and «masculinity» remains controversial. «Male research» is usually understood as the subject area of knowledge, covering all that concerns men, including the biology of the male body, male health, etc. This male analogue of feminology could be called social andrology. While masculinity is often treated as a special social identity, which exists exclusively in a particular society and changes with it. The feminist movement gave birth to a kind of public reflection of the relationship between men and women. New categories of thinking and speech that have entered into the practice of communication have emerged. The birth of unisex as a category in this situation can be explained quite easily. N. Luhmann in his «Evolution of ideas» [81, p. 148-163] showed that in the course of communication, the system of discrimination that exists in the semantic structure (a set of written categories) is correlated with the system of actual circumstances in which communication operations are immersed. As a result of this correlation, new differentiations arise that are checked for persuasiveness by the communication situation itself, and either adapt to the situation or are forgotten. In 108

our case, this means the following: the rigid and categorical division of the world into female and male soon showed its inconsistency. This manifested itself not only in the ability to describe phenomena associated with same-sex love or gender change, but also the constant manifestations of «feminization of men» and «masculinization» of women, i.e. what according to I. Kon's idea can be called «unisex» [82, p. 27]. In other words, the primary categorization of women and men, firstly, gave rise to mutual penetration of male and female characteristics and practices, and secondly, made visible, and then identified new categories of gender and sexuality, unisex in particular. Unisex can be seen as a gap existing between rigid social categories (masculine – feminine). Being a category itself, it creates a space where the feminine and the masculine die, but the men’s and women’s can exist without conflict (in the social sense). We can say that unisex is the space of freedom from gender differences. However, the multitude of choice options can be hardly more simple than its rigid imposition, and given that this space is limited, the attitude of a representative of a free unisex culture can be complicated in the space of relations of the bipolar world, even though the rigid framework is the most concrete, and sometimes one-sided, rough and narrow. Today we observe different degrees of feminine and masculine traits in men and women, and their properties are multifaceted and multidimensional. «Female» physique can be combined with «male» interests and feelings, and vice versa, and much depends on the field of activity and situation. The everyday idea of femininity and masculinity is based on everyday experience: some traits are considered masculine because they are to a bigger extent or more often manifested by men. The ongoing transformations undermined many habitual gender stereotypes, led to the understanding that these differences and variations are not pathological distortions (perversions) or undesirable deviations from the norm, but normal, natural manifestations of individuality. In modern science, there are four main paradigms of masculinity: biological, psychoanalytic, socio-psychological and postmodern. The two first paradigms are essentialist, silently implying that the most important properties that distinguish men from women are objective reality, culture only formalizes and regulates their manifestations. The second two paradigms are constructivist, in which masculinity is the product of culture and social relations, which impose the 109

corresponding representations and images on individuals. The interpretation of masculinity as a combination of natural qualities that distinguish men (or males) from women (or females) is historically the oldest. Masculinity and social expectations associated with it depend not on the properties of the individual, but on the characteristics of the male social role. Biological and evolutionary approach. The interpretation of masculinity as a combination of natural qualities that distinguish men (males) from women (females) is historically the oldest. Its formulation can be found as far back as in the works of ancient Greek historian Xenophon, according to which «the nature of both sexes since birth... God has adapted: the nature of women for domestic labor and cares, and the nature of men for external ones. Body and soul of the man, he arranged so that he is more able to endure cold and heat, travel and military campaigns, so he appointed him to work outside the house. «That is why «it is more fitting for a woman to sit at home than be outside, and a man is more ashamed to sit at home than to take care of external affairs» [83, p. 38]. Modern evolutionary biology and sociobiology, of course, do not talk about the «destiny» of men and women, but they state the existence of stable cross-cultural and cross-species sex-dimorphic features of male and female behavior and try to give them a functional explanation. According to the theory of the Moscow scientist V. A. Geodakian, the process of the self-reproduction of any biological system includes two opposite tendencies: heredity – a conservative factor, striving to preserve all parental attributes in the offspring, and variability, through which new signs arise. Females represent a kind of permanent «memory», while males represent an operative, temporary «memory» of the species. The flow of information from the environment, associated with changes in external conditions, is first perceived by males, which are more closely related to environmental conditions. Only after screening out stable shifts from temporary, random ones, genetic information falls inside the maleprotected stable «inertial core» of the population represented by females. According to the evolutionary theory of sex, the norm of the reaction of female individuals, that is, their adaptability (plasticity) in ontogeny is somewhat wider in all features than in males. The same harmful environmental factor modifies the phenotype of females 110

without affecting their genotype, whereas in males it destroys not only the phenotype, but also the genotype. For example, at the onset of the glacial period, the wide response rate of females from distant ancestors allowed them to «make» the fur or fat thicker and survive. The narrow norm of the reaction of the males did not allow this, therefore only the most genotypically «shaggy» and «fatty» ones survived and passed on their genes to the offspring. With the advent of culture (fire, fur coat, dwelling) along with them, the «inventors» of this culture also survived and were popular with females. That is, the culture (fur coat) serves as a phenotype (fur). Due to different reaction rates, women have higher learning, upbringing, conformance abilities, and men have better resourcefulness, ingenuity, search abilities. Therefore, new tasks that are solved for the first time, but can be solved haphazardly (maximum requirements for novelty and minimal – for perfection) are better solved by men, and familiar problems (minimum of novelty, maximum perfection), on the contrary, by women. In genderology, which is strongly influenced by feminism and social constructivism, the biologo-evolutionary paradigm is unpopular. It is considered reductionist (the complex and diverse forms of masculinity are reduced to a universal biological imperative), sexist (gender properties are reduced to sexual ones), anti-historical (gender properties look more or less the same everywhere) and politically conservative (it is often used for ideological substantiation and justification of gender inequality and male domination). However, this criticism is only partially true. Although the gender division of labor and other social functions does not necessarily follow from sexual dimorphism, these phenomena are interrelated. The fact that individual differences between men are greater than inter-sex does not exclude the presence of some more or less common traits that characterize men as a population. These properties are manifested in the structure of morbidity, mortality, specific risk factors, etc., and are reflected in stereotypes of masculinity, the elements of which have cross-cultural and even inter-species validity. Some aspects of men’s behavior, beginning with an increased (in comparison with women) aggressiveness and a tendency to build hierarchical relations of domination and subordination and ending with phallic symbolism, have their roots in the behavior of our animal ancestors and are associated with the same psychophysiological automatisms. People as the biological 111

species of homo sapiens cannot completely free themselves from their animal heritage [84]. Behavioral sciences, ethology and psychology cannot ignore these facts, for all the complexity of their interpretation. The famous American psychologist, the world's leading expert on the psychology of gender differences, Eleanor MacCoby, emphasizes in her last book 6 that their explanation includes a biological component. Many features of the behavior of boys reproduce what is characteristic of primates: sexual segregation in games of youngster of different sexes, different style of game activity – males have much more power games and ostentatious, and sometimes real, aggression, asymmetric relations with adults – young males as a group are separated from adults earlier and to the bigger extent, than females, and also show less interest in their younglings and interact with them less often. Some features of the behavior of boys, although dependent on the style of their upbringing, have psychophysiological roots. A higher level of metabolism makes the boys physically more energetic and active. When children play alone, their sex differences are minimal in this respect, but boys look much more active in the same-sex group. Boys are more excitable and more difficult to control. Due to their later maturation, boys acquire speech skills later and have less emotional self-control, which makes their behavior more spontaneous and aggressive. These features of men’s behavior are to some extent associated with the action of the male sex hormone – testosterone. Psychoanalytic approach. A much more popular masculinity paradigm in gender studies, especially in those by feminists, is psychoanalysis. Like the bioevolutionary theory, psychoanalysis is essentialist and universalist in the sense that it postulates universal male properties, as well as the mechanisms and stages of the formation of a man’s character. However, it believes that these properties are not set biologically, but are formed in the process of individual development, as a result of the interaction of the child with parents. All children begin their emotional life with identification with their mother, whom they love and are simultaneously afraid of. But girls identify with the mother forever, they enjoy the intimate emotional relationship with her and form a need for such relationships. On the contrary, boys soon learn that they are different from their mothers, they must form their male identity negatively, by 112

separating themselves from their mothers and forming a sense of self as something independent, autonomous and individual. This is achieved through negative reactions – misogynia, emotional alienation from women and the assertion of their male superiority, the universal personification of which is the cult of the penis/phallus. In other words, gender psychology is asymmetric: feminine identification is predominantly parental, while masculine identification is gender-role. Unlike girls who develop flexible personal identifications with their mothers, boys need positional identification with different aspects of the generalized male role. They assimilate those components of their father's masculinity, which otherwise, as they fear, might be directed against them (fear of castration). In the process of formation of the boy's personality, he has specific male fears and communicative anxieties, the nature and especially the psychosexual properties of the adult man depend on the degree and method of overcoming them. Psychoanalysis had a strong influence on the clinical study of the characteristics of masculine identification and its internal contradictions leading to psychosexual disorders and difficulties. It showed that male identity, in spite of its appearance, is not at all monolithic, its components are often mismatched and internally contradictory. Based on psychoanalysis, a number of fruitful models for the formation of alternative male identity variants have been created (Erik H. Erikson, Harry Stack Sullivan and others). The application of the psychoanalytic apparatus to the interpretation of anthropological data has also shown the existence of sociocultural variations of masculinity and types of «male character». If classical psychoanalysis studied primarily the relationship of the boy with the parents, and the role of the father and mother seemed more or less uniform, then the feminist psychoanalysis (Nancy Chodorow), emphasizing the disfiguring influence on the men of the patriarchate, considers male psychological conflicts the result of the joint action of immanent internal contradictions of masculinity and the specific type of socialization of boys in a particular society. This enriches the scientific understanding of the nature of «male subjectivity», which often includes such «non-male» features as masochism and narcissism [85]. Psychoanalytic ideas and methods are widely used in feminist cultural and art studies [86]. However, the overwhelming majority of social scientists and psychologists are skeptical about the psychoanalytic paradigm. The 113

basic categories of psychoanalysis are not scientific concepts, but metaphors, its conclusions cannot be statistically verified and do not possess predictive power. Different schools and currents of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung, Lacan, neo-Freudians) are conceptually incompatible with each other, the same terms mean completely different things for them. Following the ordinary consciousness, psychoanalytic theories often reduce masculinity to sexuality or describe it primarily in sexological terms, which is a strong simplification. The psychoanalytic paradigm allows expressing and describing the subjective experiences of men associated with the «masculinity crisis», but concrete historical social realities and especially the mechanisms of social change escape from it. Unlike the biological and evolutionary paradigm and psychoanalysis, which tend to view masculinity as something unified and objectively given, the social paradigm sees in it the product of history and culture, considering «male properties» derived primarily or even exclusively from the existing system of sex/gender roles that the child learns in the process of socialization. The place of immanent «masculine character» is occupied by historically changeable «male roles». In the 1930-60's «Sex psychology» was replaced by «sex differences psychology», which were not reduced to sexuality, but mostly considered to be given by nature. In the late 1970s, as the range of psychic phenomena studied expanded and biological determinism declined, the term was replaced by the softer «sex related differences». In the 1980s. they were called «gender differences», which may not have a biological basis whatsoever. Accordingly, the idea of masculinity changed. In the Х1Х century «men’s» (masculine) and «women’s» (feminine) traits and properties were considered strictly dichotomous, mutually exclusive, any deviation from them was perceived as a pathology or a step in this direction. Then the strict normativism gave way to the idea of a continuum of masculine-feminine properties. Developed in the 193060's, numerous masculinity/femininity (M-F) tests suggested that although the properties of M and F themselves are polar and alternative, specific individuals differ from each other only in terms of their degree of severity. At the same time, different M-F scales (intelligence, emotions, interests, etc.) do not coincide in principle with each other. This means that masculinity is not a unitary feature, a man with a high M score on one scale may have a low score on 114

another scale, etc. And it depends not on his immanent natural characteristics, but on the specific sphere of his activity, occupation, social status, etc. In other words, masculinity and social expectations associated with it are derived not from the properties of the individual, but from the characteristics of the male social role. Hence the transfer of attention from individual traits to socio-cultural stereotypes and norms, socialization styles, etc. Parallel shifts occurred in anthropology and in sociology. The historical and ethnographic study of masculinity is connected, first of all, with the works of Margaret Mead, who found that primitive tribes, even those close to the level of social and economic development, can have different canons of masculinity, for example, calm and peaceful Arapeshi live next to bellicose, aggressive Mundugumors. It's not biology that comes to the fore, but culture and upbringing. Although Mead's findings are often quoted in textbooks as established scientific facts, her field studies were methodologically imperfect. To modern anthropologists, male roles in pre-industrial societies do not seem as plastic as seen by Mead, who greatly exaggerated the peacefulness of the Samoan men. Nevertheless, the normative canons of masculinity in primitive peoples are not the same, let alone the psychological properties of individual men. Although most human societies expect militancy and high achievements from their men, there are exceptions to this rule (affectionate Tahitians and timid Semai). According to anthropologist David Gilmour, «masculinity is a symbolic scenario, an infinitely variable and not always necessary cultural construct» [87]. To understand this diversity, it is necessary to distinguish not only the ascriptive masculine features themselves, but also those specific areas of activity in which they are «supposed to» manifest themselves. In the sociology of the 1950's – 1960's an important role was played by the theory of Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales, who considered the differentiation of male and female roles in the structural and functional plan. It turned out that on both the macrosocial (within the framework of large social systems) and on the microsocial (in small groups), sex roles are often complementary: the male lifestyle is predominantly «instrumental», aimed at solving objective problems, and the female is emotionally expressive. This theory contributed to the integration of socio-anthropological and psychological data into a single scheme. However, feminist criticism 115

has shown that at the heart of the dichotomy of instrumentality and expressiveness, for all its empirical and worldly persuasiveness, lie not so much natural gender differences as social norms, the pursuit of which hampers the individual self-development and self-expression of women and men. The theory of gender socialization is developing in the similar way. In the light of psychoanalysis, masculine self-awareness and behavior are depicted by products of imitation and identification with a specific man – father or his symbolic image. Sociologists and social psychologists supplemented this approach by studying the generalized socionormative rules and concepts introduced into the child's mind by parents and educators. «Sex-role typing» according to this scheme goes from top to bottom: adults deliberately instill in children, especially boys, the norms and representations which they should be guided by. However, empirical evidence shows that the role of parents in this matter is not as great as it is customary to think. In most cases, parents do not impose the choice of games or the same-sex friends on the child, they interfere in the children's relationship only when they think that the son is behaving differently from the way he «should». According to MacCoby’s conclusion (1999), domestic socialization plays only a small role in the segregation of the sexes. Although in some aspects parents do in fact have different attitudes toward sons and daughters, differentiating depending on this encouragement and punishment, individual children’s preferences regarding playmates among same-sex peers do not depend on this. A characteristic style of interaction in boys' groups, including manifestations of aggression and distancing from adults, is created and maintained largely beyond and independently of the influence of adults. The cross-cultural anthropological data is the same. The very word «socialization» should be understood cum grano salis: boys become what they are not so much as a result of direct learning from adults, but as a result of interaction with their own kind, within the same-sex boys’ groups, there is inevitably a number of individual and intergroup variations. This makes scientists interpret masculinity not as a single and stable whole, but as a mobile and variable multiplicity. The emergence of the postmodern paradigm of masculinity, which has become widespread in the last 15 years, is closely 116

connected with the general tendencies of not only gender studies, but of all modern human studies and has several ideological sources. Firstly, it is a feminist analysis of gender as a structure of social relations and especially of the relations of power. Secondly, it is sociological studies of subcultures and problems related to the marginalization and resistance of social minorities. Thirdly, it is post-structuralist analysis of the discursive nature of any social relations, including sex and sexual identities (Michel Foucault). In the light of this approach, masculinity, like the gender properties themselves, is not something self-sufficient, it is organically intertwined with racial, sexual, class and national relationships. At the same time, it is obviously conditional, associated with a certain context, conventional and it can be played out and presented in different ways (gender display, performance). An important aspect of this approach is a comprehensive (simultaneously anthropological, socio-psychological and biomedical) study of the phenomenon of the «third sex» and homosexuality. Since, as Judith Butler convincingly showed, the traditional canon of hegemonic masculinity is directed not only and not so much against women as against homosexuality, the «normalization» of homosexuality makes life easier not only for gay men, but also for a lot of heterosexual men whose physique or behavior does not match the rigid and admittedly unrealistic canon of masculinity. The main achievement of this approach is the deconstruction of the idea of a single, solid, universal masculinity. As Connell writes, «there is no single image of masculinity that is found everywhere. We should talk not about masculinity, but about «masculinities». Different cultures and different periods of history construct gender differently... Diversity is not just a matter of the differences between communities; no less important is that diversity exists within each environment. Within the same school, the same place of work or microdistrict, there will be different ways of playing masculinity, different ways of mastering how to become a man, different images of the Self and different ways of using the male body» [89]. «Hegemonic», culturally dominant, the most prestigious in this environment, masculinity characterizes only men standing at the top of the gender hierarchy, and its signs are historically changeable. Although they are usually attributed to specific individuals, they are collective, created and maintained by certain social institutions. 117

These images are multilayered, multifaceted, contradictory and changeable. Unlike popular bestsellers that speak of male problems in general, outside of time and space, most modern studies of masculinity are «ethnographic», they describe and analyze the position of men and the characteristics of male identity, not in general, but in a particular country, community, social environment, cultural context. Since masculinities, like the men themselves and their characteristic lifestyles, are heterogeneous, multidimensional and diversified, the stereotype of the «real man» makes sense only in a certain system of interrelated social representations. The multiplicity and fluidity of images of masculinity is manifested not only in history, but also in the life of every particular individual who, in different situations and with different partners, «does», «plays» and «represents» different masculinity. Psychologists have long noticed that boys and men more often than women present obviously false, unreal images of Self to their surrounding, simply speaking – show off. The concepts of «gender display», «making gender» and «gender performance» make it possible to better describe and theoretically comprehend the different hypostases of the male self and possible options and ways of their integration and disintegration. This has, apart from culturological, an important psychotherapeutic value. Different paradigms of masculinity not so much deny each other as are mutually complementary. However, the gap between theory and empirical data in «men's studies» is even greater than in women's studies. Understanding gender as a socially constructed sex allows talking about different types of masculinity and femininity, not reduced, for example, only to sexual orientation. A. Giddens defined this new phenomenon as «plastic sexuality». Plastic sexuality can be formed as a characteristic feature of individuality and therefore it is internally limited by itself. At the same time, it liberates sexuality from the rule of the phallus (or even the reign of the phallus), from the haughty importance of the male sexual experience [90, p. 31]. Supporters of the search for a «pure» social theory of gender suggest solving similar problems of ascent to sexual dichotomy using the theory of practice, focusing on what people do when they constitute the social relations in which they live. Thus, the main focus of these theories are the interrelationships of structure and 118

practice. Instead of asking questions about the original roots and ultimate grounds for which no answer can be found, supporters of this approach consider the problem of organizing gender relations as a process that is currently underway. They believe that the structure is not predetermined, but is formed historically. Hence the possibility of different ways of structuring gender, reflecting the dominance of different social interests. From these constructions, organically grows the idea that the forms of sexuality are social constructions, and femininity and masculinity as the structures of the characters of people should be regarded as historically changeable, and nothing can prevent the appearance of several forms of character peculiar to a given sex in the same society and at the same time. Thus, it is obvious that the diversity of femininity and masculinity is seen in this approach as the fundamental fact of the gendered way of manifestation of gender structures in life. The concept of masculinity and femininity proposed by S. Bem [91], on the contrary, suggests greater mutual independence of these two qualities than in the bipolar model. She believes that some people show a high frequency of both masculine and feminine behavior. This manifestation of both types of behavior by one person is called androgyny. Accordingly, some people may rarely exhibit one kind of behavior or the other, thus remaining relatively undifferentiated. Finally, there may be a case when a person exhibits a high level of behavior of one type and a level of the other, which, in this way, can be considered more masculine or feminine. The difference between these two models is only the degree of independence that they attribute to these two factors. Thus, the orthogonal model comes from the complete independence of masculinity and femininity. In the non-orthogonal model it is assumed that the statement: the more «masculinized» a person is, the less «feminized» he or she is, and vice versa, is only true to some extent. Comparison of the groups of men and women by the correlation of real masculine and feminine characteristics with normative standards shows that men, in comparison with women, are more dependent on the normative standards of masculinity-femininity. They feel a more pronounced pressure on the norms of sex-specific behavior, so they more than women try to comply with them. The behavior of women is more individualized, less dependent on the norms of sex-specific behavior. It can be concluded that since men 119

are more susceptible to pressure from the social environment with respect to the gender characteristics shown in behavior, they are more sensitive to intrapersonal conflicts of gender content. The predominant importance of masculinity for women is associated with the widespread gender stereotype of a masculine woman in modern society, while the connection between femininity and the patterns of the formation of a person's identity in men, namely its ambiguity and inconsistency, is a reflection of the characteristics of the man's acceptance of his femininity in adolescence. Such theoretical constructs are certainly a significant step in the consideration of gender, but the traditional use of femininity and masculinity categories is virtually impossible, since for whatever place we put the biological determinants of gender, we must agree that the content of the above categories contains direct references to the sexual dichotomy. The simplest model used to construct the concept of sex roles is a view of masculinity and femininity as the two extreme poles in the continuous spectrum. Such a bipolar model is based on the assumption that the more often or the bigger the extent to which a person manifests masculine behavior, the less often and weaker the feminine behavior is manifested, and vice versa. An essential feature of this model is hierarchy: alternative functions complement each other «vertically», so that women have a subordinate, dependent role. Women respond more to pressure from society because of their focus on relationships with others. Bipolarity is based on stereotyping. Cultural stereotypes of masculinity and femininity differ not only in degree, but also in the nature of the fixed properties: men are more often described in terms of labor and social activity, and women – in family-related terms. This selectivity predetermines the focus of our attention. It is not so much that the boy is objectively stronger than the girl (this is not always the case), but rather because the «strength – weakness» axis, which occupies a central place in the images of masculinity (boys are constantly judged by this parameter), is much less significant in the system of ideas about femininity (girls are often judged by their attractiveness or care). Talks about «true masculinity» and «eternal femininity» only confuse the issue, imposing on people a uniformity that history never knew. The stereotyped interpersonal expectations are indeed social facts. According to the role theory, they are effective because their observance is rewarded, and deviation from 120

them is punished by other people. And the fact is that people make a choice in favor of preserving existing customs. These problems are reproduced in scientific psychology. In the ХIХ century masculine and feminine traits were considered strictly dichotomous, mutually exclusive, and any deviation from the norm was perceived as a pathology or a step towards it (a learned woman is a «blue stocking»). Then the strict normativism gave way to the idea of a continuum of masculine-feminine properties. Masculinity is a set of characteristics of behavior, opportunities and expectations that determine the social practice of a group, united by sex. In other words, masculinity is what is added to anatomy in order to obtain the male gender role. Femininity is characteristics associated with female sex or the characteristic forms of behavior expected of a woman in a given society, or a socially defined expression of what is considered to be positions inherent in a woman. Traditionally, it was assumed that femininity is biologically conditioned, and attributes such as passivity, responsiveness, gentleness, maternal absorption, caring, and emotionality were attributed to it. These representations were in accordance with the attribution of women to private and not to the public sphere. The idea of intermediate forms between the «ideal man» and the «ideal woman» has become the source of a new idea that masculinity and femininity are not mutually exclusive structures. Each person contains a certain ratio of masculine and feminine traits with a high level of their manifestation and is defined as androgyny. On the basis of this idea, S. Bem singled out not two, but four sex-role types: 1. Masculine – high masculinity and low femininity. 2. Feminine – high femininity and low masculinity. 3. Androgynous – high rates of both masculinity and femininity. 4. Undifferentiated – low rates of both masculinity and femininity. Moreover, masculinity and femininity may or may not coincide with the purely biological identity of men and women. For gender identity, crucial is not the empirically fixed sex, but the actually performed social role of a man or a woman. This shows the independent nature of gender as the social (non-biological) sex. Their divergence in the modern world is determined by economic, demographic and other factors. 121

I. I. Bulychev in this regard expresses an important idea that couples of femininity/masculinity and womanliness/manliness are not completely synonymous, identical and mutually inversive. Their role and functions in modern gender theory are different. Masculinity and femininity at the level of the phenomenon can differ quite a bit from the traditional standards of manliness and womanliness in a number of situations [92]. The main methodological principle of the relationship between masculinity and femininity is expressed in the law of their complementation. At the same time, the complementation does not at all imply their common possibility to change places and to move into each other, quite the contrary. Despite the fact that each historical era forms in some ways specific standards of manliness and womanliness, the set of masculine and feminine traits is not subject to significant changes. Known elements of absoluteness in gender reality and, accordingly, in the representations of images of masculinity and femininity, certainly exist. This can be explained only by the fact that man and woman are created by a natural biosocial evolution, which has assigned certain and expedient functions to them. The natural and historically conditioned separation of male and female functions is an extremely profound factor that determines the most important features and images of man and woman. Social evolution on earth for thousands of years, despite the familiar rapprochement and modification of the standards of manliness and womanliness, has not yet led to a radical change. We believe that the factor of natural conditioning of the differences between the two sexes will be a constant and stable reference point for drawing demarcation lines between men and women in terms of gender as well. I. I. Bulychev, considering the gender picture of the world, directly linked the concepts of masculinity and femininity with biological determinants. In particular, he pointed out that the natural circumstances are related to the fact that the genes of man and woman are by no means completely male or female. It is about the presence of female genes in the male constitution; and vice versa, about the presence of male chromosomes in the female genetic set. These hereditary features are reflected in all real behavior of men and women. At the same time, deviations from the main line of behavior are sometimes very significant, which leads to the appearance of men with feminine character traits and women with masculine traits. In actual gender 122

practice, specific men and women more or less embody the features that are included in the content of categories of masculinity and femininity. At the same time, the presence in the constitutions of men and women of certain traits of the opposite sex does not at all make people men-women, or vice versa. The presence of opposing characteristics in their natural, as well as social constitution, speaks only of the absence of absolute, impassable facets between the two sexes and the presence of a relativity factor in these facets. However, this relativity exists on the basis of absoluteness, and therefore, the principle irreducibility of one sex to another. If we move from social problems to individual psychological ones, there will be even more variations. Firstly, different men and women have unequal degrees of masculinity and femininity. They can be more or less masculine, feminine or androgynous. Secondly, male and female properties are multifaceted and multidimensional. A «man's» physique can be combined with «woman’s» interests and feelings, and vice versa, and much depends on the situation and the sphere of activity (a business woman can be tender in bed and aggressive in business). Thirdly, our ideas about masculinity and femininity and the corresponding psychological tests are based not on rigorous analytical theories, but on everyday common sense and everyday experience: we call some traits or properties feminine, simply because in accessible empirical material, they were more often or to a bigger extent manifested by women. But this can depend on the environment, upbringing and the nature of the activity. Changes in the social status of women and men that have occurred before our eyes have undermined many of the usual stereotypes, prompting these differences and variations to be viewed not as pathological perversions or undesirable deviations from the implied norm, but as normal, natural and even necessary. The data obtained during the research confirm the existence of a gender identity crisis, or rather, internal gender conflict. This is manifested in the discrepancy, the differentiation of real and ideal gender images. To the question «Do you agree with the idea of reviving the traditional ideas about the role of men and women?» 68.4% of positive responses were received against 31.6% of negative ones. At the same time, only 45% of respondents have behavior consistent with traditional gender concepts, 36.7% of respondents try to 123

combine traditional and modern gender requirements, and 18.4% of behavior does not coincide with traditional gender concepts. To the question «Do you want your husband/partner, apart from being the breadwinner, to have such qualities as kindness, ability to empathy, sympathy?» 68.5% of women answered positively.

Figure 1 – Attitude to androgynous qualities of men in Kazakhstan families

However, more affirmative answers (92%) were received to the question «Do you like the images of open, friendly men shown in newspapers, books, films, advertising?»

Figure 2 – Attitude to the ideal androgynous qualities of men in Kazakhstan society

During the focus group, the women answered the question about the desired traits of the husband/friend with a proviso: «At home, in relationships with me and children, the husband should be gentle, kind, but outside, at work he must be tough.» In the responses of 124

men, the difference between an ideal and a real image is not so noticeable. To the question «Do you want your wife/girlfriend, apart from the role of a housewife, to be a successful, well-earning woman» 72% of positive answers were received.

Figure 3 – Attitude to the real androgynous qualities of women

To the question «Do you like the images of independent, successful women, shown in newspapers, books, films, advertising?» 86% of men answered positively.

Figure 4 – Attitude to the ideal androgynous qualities of women

As the difference in answers shows, women are more demanding of masculine qualities, which is in demand during periods of economic transformation. At first glance, it seems that masculinity 125

and femininity can be completely replaced by the synonyms – «manliness» and «womanliness». But the word «manliness» denotes not so much the aggregate of masculine qualities, as the moral and psychological property equally welcomed in both genders. «Manly woman» sounds fine, but «womanly man» – very bad. «Masculinity» is not so much manliness as «mannishness», which no woman can take as a compliment. This example shows how difficult it is to distinguish the descriptive meaning of a term from the normativeprescriptive one. This problem also exists in science, where descriptions often hide prescriptions and stereotypes of mass consciousness. Attempts to objectively identify typical male and female characteristics and how these differences are created are undertaken by different sciences. Especially important in this regard is evolutionary biology. According to the theory of V. A. Geodakian, the process of the self-reproduction of any biological system includes two opposite tendencies: heredity – a conservative factor, striving to preserve all parental attributes in the offspring, and variability, through which new signs arise. The degree of polarization of ascriptive (attributed) gender traits is not the same in different societies. Although masculinity is usually associated with instrumentality (efficiency, pragmatism, outside orientation), independence and aggressiveness, and femininity – with expressiveness (emotionality, sensitivity, etc.) and softness, different cultures look unequally rigid in this respect, allowing anthropologists to talk about «masculine» and «feminine» cultures. Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede empirically compared typical value orientations of people in different cultures on several grounds, including masculinity and femininity. The primary value orientations of masculine cultures are distinguished by a high evaluation of personal achievements; high social status is considered a proof of personal success; everything big, large-scale is appreciated; children are taught to admire the strong; losers are avoided; a demonstration of success is considered a sign of good manners; thinking leans toward rationality; the differentiation of roles in the family is strong; people care a lot about self-respect. The primary value orientations of feminine cultures, on the contrary, highlight the need for consensus; care of others is valued here; the feelings of others are spared; there is a clear focus on service; small is considered beautiful; there is sympathy for the oppressed; modesty 126

is highly appreciated; thinking is more intuitive; membership in a community, group is valued [93]. But the value orientations of culture are not synonymous with the individual qualities of men and women. Many people consider gender properties unequivocal, inextricably linked with gender identity: if a woman is passive and tender, she will be like this in any roles and situations. But men and women interact with each other not in a vacuum, but in specific social roles, and the nature of gender differentiation in different spheres of activity, for example, in production and in the family, often does not coincide. No less important are the historical conditions. It is considered, for example, that the need for social success for women is lower than for men, and that modern «business women» are a completely new, unprecedented phenomenon. But maybe it's not so much a desire to achieve at all, as the specific socionormative framework of «attainable» behavior? The socialites of the Balzac era were no less energetic, power-hungry and cruel than their husbands and lovers. However, in those historical conditions, an ambitious woman could make a career only indirectly, finding her husband or organizing her own social promotion with her own, specifically women's means. Today these restrictions have disappeared. A woman can achieve a high social status herself, without the help of a man, and this significantly changes the motivation and nature of the relationship between men and women with the same natural inclinations and differences. New theories no longer consider masculinity and femininity as the poles of the same continuum, but as independent, autonomous dimensions. Instead of a simple dichotomy of «masculine» and «feminine» individuals, four psychological types of men appeared: masculine (having high M and low F); feminine (high F and low M); androgynous (high scores on both scales) and psychologically undifferentiated (low scores on both scales) and the same four categories of women. However, the M and F scales are ambiguous. Their measurements are correlated, on the one hand, with individual properties, and on the other hand with social gender prescriptions, and these are completely different phenomena. It seems that the existing tests satisfactorily measure and predict such aspects of masculinity/femininity, as instrumentality and expressiveness, but it is unclear how these properties are combined with other features of masculine and feminine behavior. Instrumentality (focus on things, domination, subjectivity) as opposed to expressiveness (focus on 127

people, caring, communication) is manifested, in particular, in the interests and requirements of people to their activities. A metaanalysis of six Dutch studies conducted over the past 40 years, with a combined target of over 14,000 men and women, beginning with the high school age, showed an amazing stability of gender differences in this issue. The same was demonstrated by a meta-analysis of 242 American samples (321,672 men and boys and 316,842 women and girls) from 1970 to 1998, which investigated gender differences in the properties of the preferred work. Although the difference in the preferences of men and women is small, it mostly coincides with gender stereotypes. At the same time, many of the professions' characteristics became more important for women and girls in the 1980s and 1990s than in the 1970s, which indicates an increase in the level of women's claims as gender barriers decrease. There are a number of scientific papers in which the results of the BSRI in non-American groups were studied. It is interesting that they often contradict the generally accepted stereotypes. According to DeLeon [94], African Americans and Puerto Ricans, both men and women, are more androgynous than European-Americans. Two other studies also showed that African American women score more on androgyny than European-American women. This can be explained by the historically high level of unemployment among black men and low pay for their work, which resulted in black women occupying more secure positions in the labor market than white women. The historical experience of African American women has led to their perception of femininity to include self-confidence, physical strength, resourcefulness and self-reliance. In a study conducted in 1983 by Pu and Vazquez-Nuttall among women attending colleges, black female students scored the highest scores on the scale of masculinity, followed by Hispanics and then by white women. Kranau et al. found that Mexicans are the most feminine among immigrants who assimilated the culture of American society, despite the fact that their behavior is becoming less and less feminine. But Puerto Rican women living on the island, according to one of the latest studies, were by no means more feminine than Puerto Rican women living in the United States. A comparison of the results of BSRI in African American, Puerto Rican and European-American men showed that the highest percentage of men of feminine type and the lowest percentage of men of masculine type were found among Puerto Ricans. Puerto Rican men, on average, scored significantly more on the femininity scale than men from the African-American 128

and European-American subgroups. DeLeon thinks that the reason is that Puerto Rican culture encourages manifestations of attachment to the family, caring for others, caring for children – traits that are described in BSRI as the feminine type. The masculine variant is considered as a set of «instrumental» qualities of personality and is characterized by the greatest expression of such properties as independence, assertiveness, imperiousness, propensity to defend one's views, ambition, leadership ability, risk appetite, self-belief, self-sufficiency. In ordinary consciousness, these qualities are associated with men. The feminine variant is associated with «expressive» personality characteristics: modesty, diligence, conformity, loyalty, compassion, flexibility, empathy, propensity for cooperation and compromise. Masculine and feminine properties are largely due to the social context in the formation and development and have, rather, sociocultural determination. Masculine and feminine qualities are approximately equally inherent in the androgynous variant of gender identity. It is likely that representatives of this type of personality were brought up in a situation of less stringent regulatory requirements associated with sex-specific behavior. Such variability allows to suggest that the dynamic characteristics of the gender identity of an individual are due to the complex process of interaction of biological and sociocultural influences with value orientations and vital meanings aimed at satisfying the basic needs of the individual (the desire for internal coherence, self-actualization), regardless of gender. Being one of the structures of self-awareness of the individual, gender identity plays a decisive role in the processes of adaptation and self-regulation. The multipolar approach in the typology of gender identity makes it possible to draw the following conclusions: 1) biological sex is not the primary cause of psychological characteristics of behavior and social roles of women and men; 2) gender identity of a modern person as an element of egoidentity is a complex psychological structure that includes the hierarchy of life goals, values, representations and it cannot be reduced to the traditional dichotomy of the concepts of «masculinityfemininity»; 3) gender identity implies variability within the same sex (masculine, feminine and androgynous variant); 129

4) androgyny as a form of gender identity is the most characteristic and widespread among women and men in modern socio-cultural conditions; it is what helps self-determination of the person and provides the person with a feeling of emotional comfort. Modern feminist researchers, including both women and men, reject the attribution of social roles that supposedly correspond to the qualities of men or women. We deny the evaluation that fixes preestablished «masculine» qualities, such as aggression, and reject preestablished «feminine» qualities, for example, sympathy. Any quality can appear in any person and should be evaluated by itself, and not in terms of the sex of the person in whom it appeared. Focus group participants tend to identify themselves with certain images of masculinity and femininity. In these orientations, the known discrepancies between the stable traditional notions (they are reproduced in the system of subject-object relations) and the modernization ones, in which the specific gravity of the androgynous representations is gradually increased (this is the result of the social dynamics inherent in gender activity), are now being revealed quite prominently. The attractiveness of masculine features for both sexes is associated with the receipt of large social rewards for their presentation, especially in the public sphere. However, this does not mean that the society has set itself the goal of achieving absolute gender symmetry, even if it were so, the success of such a project without significant changes in the biological level of men and women would be simply inaccessible. When comparing the results of quantitative and qualitative answers, it was found out that in the responses to questionnaires, masculine qualities are singled out by men, in response to the adapted questionnaire of S. Bem, the presence of androgynous quality is shown. The results of the focus group show that preferences change with age. Orientation to androgyny, the desire to go beyond the rigid dichotomization, is more common in older people, adolescents are oriented mainly to polar images of «male» and «female». Although the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are historical and changeable, they are distinguished by great stability, considerably behind the shifts in real gender stratification, be it the social division of labor or value orientations. Participants in the focus group independently filled the questionnaire of M. V. Burakova, compiled on the basis of the S. Bem’s questionnaire. The calculation of the results showed the 130

predominance of androgynous traits in middle-aged men, the predominance of masculine traits in young men, while for women, the predominance of androgynous qualities in all age groups is characteristic. The results of the studies confirmed S. Bem's thesis about the mutual independence of masculine or feminine traits, according to which for some individuals both masculine and feminine behavior, manifested with high frequency, is characteristic. Manifestation of both types of behavior by one person is called androgyny. On the other hand, some people may rarely exhibit one kind of behavior or the other, thus remaining relatively undifferentiated. If there is a high level of one type of behavior and a low level of the other type, behavior is evaluated as more masculine or feminine. The classical questionnaire includes 60 adjectives, each of which the subject evaluates on a 7-point scale based on how accurately it characterizes him or her. Twenty adjectives from this list constitute a scale of masculinity: manly, analyzing, ambitious, aggressive, dominant, etc.; another twenty make up the scale of femininity: womanly, warm, loving children, attentive to the needs of others, etc.; and the remaining twenty are neutral: envious, reliable, serious, self-conceited, tactful. The adjectives were selected based on what characteristics were considered gender-appropriate at the time the scale was created. This was done to determine the place of gender in a cultural context, and not in the personality of an individual. A person who has scored a large number of points both on the scale of masculinity, and on the scale of femininity, is considered androgynous; the one who scored a high score on the scale of femininity, but low on the scale of masculinity, is considered feminine; and the person whose score on the scale of masculinity far exceeds the results on the scale of femininity, is considered masculine. The term «undifferentiated» in this questionnaire denotes those who scored equally low scores both on the masculinity and the femininity scales. We call a person whose self-determination and behavior coincides with that which is considered gender-appropriate in his society gender-typical. Bem herself lamented that the concept of androgyny implies that some of the approved qualities are «masculine», and some are «feminine», because this is fundamentally contrary to our intention to reduce gender polarization. She argued that the concept of androgyny is far from the real state of affairs: proceeding from it, changes must occur at the personal level, whereas in reality the 131

elimination of gender inequality will inevitably require changes in the structure of public institutions. Another intractable problem lies in the possible loss of a positive social identity, which will entail smoothing of the male-female dichotomy. One can agree with Bem that androgyny, in spite of the problems hidden in it, makes it possible to build a picture of utopia, where one does not have to give up those qualities and behaviors that his society considers to be gender-inappropriate. The importance of this concept is also that it makes us realize the equal appeal of the qualities traditionally considered feminine, and the qualities that we are accustomed to consider masculine. This is especially important in the light of the fact that the masculine qualities to date are presented more normative and desirable. This is confirmed by the results of the survey. The question «What qualities prevail in your character?» revealed a self-assessment of masculine and feminine qualities in the respondents. The answers demonstrated the dominance of masculine properties, only 2.3% of the men admitted having feminine qualities. While 7.3% of the women admitted having masculine qualities, 34.5% recognized anrogynous qualities in themselves and 58.2% had feminine qualities. Masculine qualities prevail in 46.3% of Kazakhs, in 46.4% of Russians. Feminine qualities were noted by 35.8% of Kazakhs, 28.6% of Russians. Androgynous qualities were noted in 17.9% of Kazakhs, in 25% of Russians (Figure 5, 6).

Figure 5 – Self-assessment of masculine and feminine qualities (with ethnic breakdown)

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Figure 6 – Self-assessment of presence of masculine and feminine qualities (with gender breakdown)

The presented data confirm the words of Zillah Eisenstein, that naturalized constructions of masculinity become more important at the stage of economic transformation of different countries. Changes in the social status of women and men that have occurred before our eyes have undermined many of the usual stereotypes, prompting these differences and variations to be viewed not as pathological perversions or undesirable deviations from the implied norm, but as normal, natural and even necessary. However, the traditional notions of masculinity and femininity do not meet the conditions of modern life. The author's research is far from evaluative judgments and is more inclined to posing the following questions. Should we strive to weaken the polarization of stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in the education of boys and girls or, on the contrary, to cultivate gender characteristics? Hence the debate about the pros and cons of joint and separate education. Opponents of coeducation usually argue that it promotes the feminization of boys and the masculinization of girls and the formation of some sort of unisex. In fact, nothing like this is happening. Even within the framework of joint training and education, boys and girls spontaneously create and maintain a kind of gender segregation that begins as early as four-five years and continues until the end of adolescence. There is not one, but two different cultures of childhood, where those properties are formed, which will later be called masculine and feminine. The school can 133

enhance or alleviate these differences, but its influence is less than we think. Gender identity depends on the expectations of society, on the ideas about what a man and a woman is allowed to do. Such role expectations are broadcast through religious prescriptions, media settings, masculinity and femininity images. Representations of masculinity and femininity can be observed in the sources and symbols of archaic cultures, ritual practice. The symbols fixed in the ritual regulation of the sexual hierarchy are gradually cemented and implemented at a subconscious level. Examples of ritualization of gender symbols include rituals of birth, defloration. The symbolization of gender differences turns into a system of ethical and axiological principles, social norms and stereotypes, turning into something natural and self-evident. 2.3. Transgender as the manifestation of the identity «crisis» The modern world, characterized by great dynamism and variability of sociocultural patterns and norms, causes the individual to experience additional difficulties: what was the accepted norm for a person yesterday, today may already not be in demand. The social position and character of the activities of men and women are changing. However, changing the very basic attitudes and values of men and women is a more complex, subtle and long-term process. It is even accepted to talk about the crisis of gender identity. The crisis of gender identity is the experience of the inconsistency of changing oneself as a man or a woman, the discrepancy of internal values (images and ideals of masculinity/femininity), non-acceptance of oneself or individual aspects of one's personality as a man or a woman. The crisis of gender identity manifests itself in the following planes: - as a crisis of images and norms of masculinity and femininity associated with «blurring» or, conversely, excessive stereotyping (crystallization) of norms in communication channels of the society (for example, media, education, state institutions); - as a crisis of identity of men and women, an internal conflict, accompanied by a «loss» of the feeling of integrity of oneself as a man or a woman. 134

In the phenomenon of gender identity crisis, in the opinion of I. S. Kletsina, the situation is reflected in which the models of masculine and feminine behavior, represented by the bearers of male and female identity, are largely not conforming to the normative patterns of true masculinity or femininity prevalent in the public consciousness [95]. We believe that the extreme form of the crisis of gender identity is generated by a situation in which men and women, realizing their disparity in the basic characteristics of the generally accepted and normatively given model of masculinity/femininity, actualize this problem in public discourse as a personal and socially significant one. The crisis of gender identity as an internal gender conflict is also experienced by quite normal people. The crisis of gender identity is, on the one hand, a sociocultural phenomenon, and on the other hand, it is an individual personality problem. In the latter case, it is not a problem of an individual, but a state of social and psychological disadvantage, characteristic of a large part of men and women as representatives of gender groups. Therefore, this phenomenon has not so much a psychological as a social nature and should be analyzed taking into account the influence of various factors.

Figure 7 – The reaction of others to non-standard gender behavior

The results obtained in our survey show the prejudice and strength of stereotypes in Kazakhstan society. To the question «When you behave differently from the way your gender is supposed to, what is the reaction of the people around?» the following answers 135

were received: negative reaction – 17.3% (of which: 18.6% men, 16.4% women, 11.9% Kazakhs, 28.6% Russians), positive reaction – 7.1% (of which: 4.7% men, 9.1% women, 6% Kazakhs, 10.7% Russians), neutral reaction – 13.3% (of which: 2.3% men, 21.8% women, 13.4% Kazakhs, 14.3% Russians), (Figure 5, 6) the answer «I always behave according to the standards of my gender» was given by 62.2% of respondents (of which: 74.4% men, 52.7% women, 68.7% Kazakhs, 46.4% Russians).

Figure 8 – The reaction of others to non-standard gender behavior (ethnic breakdown)

Figure 9 – The reaction of others to non-standard gender behavior (gender breakdown)

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The crisis of gender identity in women is manifested in the role conflict; fear of success; various kinds of depression (feelings of inferiority, housewife syndrome, «helplessness», etc.); a heightened sense of affiliation; fear of loss of femininity (acquiring masculinity). The crisis of gender identity in men is manifested in the need for achievement; maintaining the hierarchical male community; the mental costs of homosociality; experience of the consequences of aggressive behavior and violence; maintenance of the myth of hypertrophic male sexuality; fear of acquiring femininity and losing masculinity. Recovery, integration of personality is a more complex process, with differentiated content for men and women. The development of liberalization in society, understanding of gender as a characteristic of social order, the change in the discourse about homosexuality, legitimization of homosexual relations, the discussion of the problem of transsexuals, formerly regarded as anomalies, are now perceived as features of the diversity of life. Rethinking gender identity at the end of the twentieth century was reflected in the emergence of new concepts of «transgender», «transgenderism», «transsexuality», «intersexuality», gave rise to techniques and technologies for sex modification. Transgender deals with the internal state and social identification, and not with the preference of partners in sex, which is expressed in disobeying the conventions of belonging to a certain sex. Gender polyvariety has received a theoretical response in the form of queer theories, which comprehend «alternative subjectivity», corporeality, unconscious processes, marginality, identity, normalization, performativity of subjectivity as sexuality of «another dimension». People with transgender identity and unidentified gender identity confirm the understanding of gender identity as not a biological characteristic, but as a product and effect of the sociodiscursive regime of power, rediscovering sexuality as neosexuality. The first known figure in American transgender was Christine Jorgensen. Born a man and having fought in World War II, Jorgensen was one of the first to undergo a sex change operation. The press highlighted this event as very important in the news. Newspapers wrote: «An American army soldier returns from Europe as a beautiful blonde.» Many transsexuals saw on his example that sex change by surgery is possible and went this way, addressing their 137

doctors with requests to change their sex. Christine Jorgensen really catalyzed the movement of transgender people. There are two such individuals in the government of President Obama. There have been many active people in the history of transsexuality, but we can not safely refer to them as transgender people. In many cultures, many scientists have been involved in the issue of sex change, but only in the 30s of this century in Germany Magnus Hirschfeld, a doctor of Jewish-German descent and a homosexual, founded a clinic whose activities were exclusively aimed at studying sex issues and where sex-change operations were conducted. But, unfortunately, the clinic was burned by the Nazis, and the development of transgender studies was suspended for decades. In the United States, the cost of medical services can be deducted from taxes, but the costs associated with changing sex did not enjoy such a privilege. Recently, however, the American tax court ruled that if people want to undergo transgender procedures, the costs of such procedures should be considered legitimate and can be taxdeductible. At the heart of the decision was the intention to bring relief to people suffering from life in a body that did not meet their gender orientation. Transgender deals with your internal state and social identification, and not with your preference for sex partners of one or the other – or both – of the sexes. It is interesting that in America it was the transgender people who started the movement for the rights of homosexuals. The first protests were organized by them at Compton’s cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966 and a few years later at Stonewall Bar in New York. In both cases, the leaders were transgenders, not observing the conventions of belonging to a certain sex. It was them that paved the way for homosexuals. However, transgenders, in turn, were discriminated by homosexuals, and only today groups have joined forces in the struggle for their rights. The phenomenon of transgender, as an expression of gender identity crisis, becoming the subject of scientific analysis in post-nonclassical scientific discourse, allows us to reveal hidden power mechanisms and strategies in the formation of identity, that is, already in its political dimension. Nature has demonstrated to us phenomena that contradict the usual notions about the human sex. Rethinking gender identity at the end of the twentieth century was reflected in the emergence of new 138

concepts such as «transgender», «transgenderism», «transsexuality», «intersexuality», and also gave birth to methods and technologies of sex modification. Natural sexual diversity, as it turned out, can express itself not only in anatomical and genetic combinations, but also in non-fixed sexual identities, reflecting the possibility of interchangeability of gender and sexuality, which was manifested in the emergence of innovative sexual practices, as well as sex modifications. For example, over the past few decades, thousands of transsexual individuals have carried out a so-called transsexual «transition», which involves changing the social sex and surgical correction of the genitals. The phenomenon of transgender that conquers cultural space has brought to life new social phenomena such as transphobia and transgender prostitution. The sexual diversity that has opened up to the scientific world as a result of the emancipation of sexological knowledge, declared sexual «otherness» that does not fit into the traditional understanding of sex and gender, overturn habitual representations and offer new opportunities for understanding habitual categories: «biological sex» and «gender», «femininity» and «masculinity», «normativity» and «deviation», etc. And, first of all, the need to rethink the «biological sex» is revealed, since all the varieties of sexual manifestations, according to scientists, are of the neurobiological nature. The multiple-level system of sex, having a biological basis itself, confirmed by scientific research, allowed legitimate access to the cultural space of marginal identities, and this is what called into question the previous understanding of sex. Thus, according to the poststructuralist vision, rethinking of the traditional understanding of the «biological» sex is possible precisely in the phenomenon of «sexual deviations», since it is in them that sex most clearly reveals itself as a cultural construct that directs sexual experience by introducing abstract categories of gender as the main and causal functions within the boundaries of any discursive approach to the problems of sexuality. That is, if «sex» in the traditional scientific sense means precisely «coherence and consistency» of its manifestations recorded by science, «coherence and integrity between sex, gender, sexual practices and desire» (J. Butler), forming, and thereby supporting its «normality» and «understandability», the existence of sexual «othernesses» destroys precisely this «coherence and consistency», and, consequently, the intelligibility of sex as a category. 139

The processes leading to homosexual orientation are not pathological, but quite understandable from the point of view of evolutionary biology: «homosexuality genes» have a beneficial effect on the reproductive capacity of the species as a whole (for example, reducing aggressiveness in the relationships within the group), so they did not disappear in the process of evolution. In this case, genetic polymorphism – the existence of species with slight differences in the internal structure leading to different phenotypic forms (hair color, height and other characteristics of the individual, and, apparently, sexual orientation is one of them) – is a key factor for explaining the hetero- and homosexuality at the biological level. The same genes and processes, which in the vast majority of cases lead to heterosexual orientation, in some cases lead to homosexuality – just as the same genes and prenatal processes lead to the righthandedness of most people and the left-handedness of just about every tenth of us. The main problem is extremely small and often unrepresentative samples in the observations and experiments conducted so far, since interest in the subject is relatively marginal: nobody has died of homosexuality yet. Nevertheless, to the question: «Where do gay people come from?» – the authors would reply with no hesitation: «The same place where straight people come from.» Queer passions for the followers of deconstruction and its child – queer theory – attempts of psychologists and biologists are just a reason to smile: why unnecessary efforts, if homosexuality is the same clay colossus as heterosexuality. They are social constructs, either which we rule (neglect, overcome, accept, change, supplement with new meaning, manipulate), or which we are ruled by, when we allow ourselves to be guided by the ideas and representations by which culture and society enslave us in order to maintain the status quo, in this case – heteronormality. As social constructs, gender and sexual identities are mobile, multidimensional and plastic. Queer-theory attempted to free the debate about sexuality from dichotomous thinking: homo/hetero – natural/perversion – acceptable/sinful – and formulate other ways of communication and existence through the affirmation of differences without traditional denial or submission of the other. Every form and method of gender and sexual being is important and «correct» because of its existence and without dependence (negation, analogy or transcendence) on another way of being. Queer theorists have tried to formulate not so much an alternative to heterosexuality (and 140

at the same time homosexuality) as to offer a vision of a comprehensive identity that does not accept any normative behavior and its influence on the individual's identity, since any ethical judgment is essentially dictated by the desire for control and power. «A queer is a supporter of creative realization of desire in the name of pleasure for the sake of pleasure itself» (Catherine M. Dale) Queer thinking is therefore the «space of the deepest tension and contradictions» (Elizabeth Grosz), which casts doubt on the boundaries of communities, identities and the necessity (and even the possibility) of moral canons and defends the existence of a variety of free individuals who define their being exclusively in the process of voluntary relationships. Queer theory, undoubtedly, had an impact on the gay worldview. An obvious example here is Peter Tatchell, a living legend of British activism. He captured police stations, when the police threw all their efforts to maintain moral standards and not to fight crime, put foreign political leaders under «civil arrest», interrupted the meetings of the Synod of the Anglican Church. The OutRage group he created has been in the spotlight many times because of the «outings» – public disclosure of someone's homosexuality – usually politicians, journalists and churchmen who took the lliberty to make homophobic statements or actions. P. Tatchell is sure: «In a future, more enlightened epoch, homophobia will be vanquished. The present separate, exclusive sexualities of straight and queer are likely to be eventually supplanted by a more inclusive, polymorphous sexuality. This dissolution of rigid hetero and homo orientations and identities is thus both the precondition for, and the proof of, queer emancipation – for without differentiation and polarity, there can be no conflict and prejudice.» P. Tatchell – and with him several gay organizations – refused to support the proposal of the British Labor government on civil partnerships for same-sex couples: the same as marriage is a means of discrimination against non-heterosexuals, civil partnerships open only to same-sex couples would be discriminating against straight people and those who do not want to introduce an element of public commitment into their relationship. Behind this refusal, of course, there is a lack of confidence in the institution of marriage regulated by the state, and not by the spontaneity of social sentiments. Accordingly, the institution of civil partnerships is seen as a means of imposing a certain way of life on gays and lesbians by the state and the 141

heterosexual majority, namely, monogamous relationships, and even more marginalizing the forms of sexual relations and practices that are less or more unacceptable to most people. When there are differences between women based on such factors as nationality, origin, age and sexual identity, this can be another barrier. In addition – it is known that very often even our lesbian friends can treat obvious differences between women very critically and without support, believing that nothing will come of it. This situation can be especially destructive and isolating for a couple – to be outsiders for both heterosexual society and their own community. Of course, sometimes the reluctance of your female friends to accept your partner changes with time, however, for such couples coping with double stigma is very difficult. In this situation, the couple feels that they are obliged to represent their relationship and their partner as perfection, because everyone expects their failure. This expectation from oneself is too difficult. It is very important to find people who will support your relationship, even if it requires visiting the family (couple) therapy for a while. For many lesbian couples it is very characteristic at the beginning of a relationship to spend all their free time together – drowning in mutual love and opening each other. Friends can be lost, activities that need to be dealt with separately can be abandoned, and relationships gradually acquire the likeness of a cocoon. For a certain time for both women this can be a very positive experience. But, eventually, this total focus on each other gradually decreases, and as a rule, one of the women expresses the need for personal space. Maybe she wants to be alone or spend time with her friends. If she has felt this for a while, it can happen suddenly or intensely. In any case, her partner can feel that by this she says she wants to distance herself from her. Feeling hurt or rejected, she may be disappointed or begin to get angry, doubting love or devotion of her beloved. But the one that wants freedom and space, can feel misunderstood, feel that she is «suffocating», that she is being controlled and then feel an even stronger need for personal space. A very unfortunate combination. Few people have the reserves of mutual understanding and the desire to persuade each other and therefore, such situations lead to scandals. Instead of figuring out how to support one another's needs in a separate pastime, they get this separate time from each other only after a quarrel, which usually ends badly for both women. 142

Transsexualism is a complex and little studied phenomenon as well. Because transsexualism affects such fundamental aspects of personality as sex and gender identity (awareness of oneself as a man or a woman), many people treat it with prejudice and condemnation. Transsexuals are still often subjected to discrimination, feel hostility at work, in various everyday situations and even in their own family. With the physical transformation through which the transsexual passes, there is an increased emphasis on the press, which often represents the story as if the «seductive woman once decided to become a man» or «the father of the family suddenly turned into a woman». Because of such stories, it seems that transsexualism arose recently (thanks to the possibilities of medicine), and is a person’s whim. This article, perhaps, will help to understand the true essence of transsexualism. At the same time, in recent years positive changes in public opinion have been observed in many countries: transsexuals are treated in a more tolerant way and with better understanding, and transphobia (hatred of transsexuals) is punishable. In most people, biological sex and gender identity are the same. So, a man born feels like a man, and a woman born feels like a woman. But for some people they are different, in this case they speak about violations of gender identity. 1) sex is defined as male at birth, but the individual relates himself to the female sex (female gender identity); 2) sex is defined as female at birth, but the individual relates herself to the male sex (male gender identity); 3) the individual (regardless of sex at birth) who considers himself to be of both sexes and/or no sex (bigender or androgyne). This gender identity is not related to hermaphroditism, which refers to the physiological aspects of the structure of the organism, and not to the self-awareness of the person. There are many types of violations of gender identity: dissatisfaction with the traditional social role associated with gender, transvestism and others. In most cases, it is a desire to be accepted by the society as a gender representative of the corresponding gender identity, and not a desire to permanently change the physical sex. An exception is the violation of gender identity called transsexualism. The difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, given above, explains the difference between transsexualism and homosexuality. Homosexuals of both sexes are satisfied with their anatomical sex, their sex and gender identity is the same, they do not 143

have a desire to change their sex, but are simply attracted to people of the same sex. The problem of transsexual, in turn, is the discrepancy between anatomical sex and gender identity. A transsexual, like any other person, can define his or her orientation as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. For example, an individual whose sex is defined as female at birth, who is making/has made the transition and lives as a man, can be heterosexual (if he is attracted to women), homosexual (if he is attracted to men) or bisexual (if he is attracted to both sexes). Transvestites wear the clothes of the opposite sex for two reasons: – to experience a temporary belonging to the opposite sex (the so-called dual role transvestism). – dressing up is connected with getting sexual pleasure. In any case, transvestites do not want to change the physiological sex: dressing up or temporary transformation into a representative of the opposite sex is sufficient for them. However, there are cases when transsexuals, in the process of searching for themselves, not yet realizing their true essence, consider themselves transvestites. Teresa de Lauretis singles out several new interpretations of contemporary subjectivity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick justifies queer identity in a «closed space» situation in the context of the gaylesbian theory. The theory of performative subjectivity by J. Butler is an expression of the radical concept of identity, raising the question of «compulsory heterosexuality» and «the homophobic discourse of modern culture based on repressive exclusion mechanisms», as well as the construction of queer identities that are «also carried out by power, not through the discourse of the norm, but through discourse of shame». The problem of sexual deviations before the studies of M. Foucault was considered neither in philosophy nor in culturology and traditionally belonged to the department of medicine and law. «Medico-legal collusion», which M. Foucault speaks of, and, after him, J. Butler, outlines the «chalk circle», breaking away from which seems quite difficult. The medicalization of corporality, the «psychiatrization» of sexual deviations, biological determinism continue to be a system of coordinates in the comprehension of transgender and transsexualism. And this means that knowledge about the phenomenon continues to be constructed following the 144

techniques of normalizing the individual. Therefore, the traditional attribution of sexual deviations to the field of psychiatry and sexology, as well as psychology and psychoanalysis, requires critical reflection. The earliest data evaluated the number of transsexuals in the adult population as follows: 1 per 37,000 biological men and 1 per 107,000 biological women. The latest statistics of the prevalence of transsexualism among people with gender identity disorders in the Netherlands, however, contains the following data: 1 per 11,900 biological men and 1 per 30,400 biological women. The following four observations, which have not yet been investigated fundamentally, increase the probability of a wider spread of the phenomenon: – Non-recognized gender problems were accidentally diagnosed when patients experienced anxiety, depression, bipolar personality disorder (manic depression), behavioral disorders, alcoholism, drug addiction, split personality, borderline conditions, other sexual and intersexual disorders. – The following groups may have violations of gender identity: male transvestites not seeking help, similar (transformed) female individuals, transgender people, and male and female homosexuals. – In some people, the level of violation of gender identity fluctuates at the clinical threshold. – Gender discrepancy in individuals with a female body may not be noticeable to specialists and scientists in certain cultures. Transsexuals have always existed, in the history of any society. The attitude towards them was different. An example of transgender and transsexual people being an important and respected part of society is the culture of the Indians of North America, where the socalled «people of two spirits» (homosexuals, transgenders and transsexuals) were considered gifted with special abilities and took an important place in society. However, only in the last few decades, transsexuals have obtained the opportunity to undergo treatment with hormones and surgeries. The study of transsexualism began relatively recently (in the 40s – 50s of the last century), and so far nobody has answered exactly to the question of the causes of transsexualism. 145

Many experts believe that the answer to this question is encrypted in the genetic code, others talk about hormonal failure during the fetal development, as the cause of which a number of factors could serve (beginning with stress and malnutrition and ending with side effects from certain medications). The only thing experts agree on is the biological, and not the psychological or behavioral origin of transsexualism. For example, it has been established that a particular section of the hypothalamus, which varies in size between men and women, in transsexuals corresponds to their gender, rather than to the biological sex. The main idea of queer theory was the idea of rethinking the understanding of heterosexuality as a «natural given», whose role and status were now formulated in terms of «imposed heterosexuality». This allowed serious analysis of the problem of homophobia in culture, both at the interpersonal and intrapersonal level («acquired homophobia» directed against its own identity). Because of this, those forms of sexuality, which in the traditional paradigm were defined as deviations or marginalities, now declared their socio-cultural equality, defending the idea of «otherness» in the form of «alternative subjectivity» and winning a discursive space. However, in modern Kazakhstan society, the attitude towards non-traditional sexuality remains largely critical. Thus, in our survey, 52% of respondents indicated a negative attitude towards people of non-traditional sexual orientation, 21% – normal and 26% – indifferent attitude. At the same time, 9% of respondents have friends with non-traditional sexual orientation. Correlation analysis of socio-demographic factors shows that people with higher education, women, Russians, students and people working in commercial structures are more tolerant of «different sexuality». Thus, transgender is the extreme expression of a crisis of gender identity. Legitimization of sexological knowledge, sexual «otherness» that does not fit into the traditional understanding of sex and gender, overturn habitual representations and offer new opportunities for understanding habitual categories: «biological sex» and «gender», «femininity» and «masculinity», «normativity» and «deviation», etc. As a result, we can say that the crisis of gender identity is, on the one hand, a sociocultural phenomenon, and on the other hand, it is an individual personality problem. And in the latter case, it is not a problem of an individual, but a state of psychological disadvantage, 146

characteristic of a large part of men and women as representatives of gender groups. Therefore, this phenomenon has not so much a psychological as a sociopsychological nature and should be analyzed taking into account the influence of various factors. The crisis of gender identity of a person is always a challenge to the evolution of a person as a psychosocial creature, and if the person does not perceive this challenge, then there is a probability of a crisis of such intensity that he sweeps away his personality with all its depth and power. In extreme cases, we have options for either personal death (pathology with loss of the person), or complete personal involution (social outsiders).

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CONCLUSION The cardinal transformations of the 20th century led to an even greater crisis of identity. According to the Western sociologists A. Giddens and Z. Bauman, modern society is characterized not by the replacement of certain traditions and habits by others, equally stable, reliable and rational, but by a state of constant doubt, the multiplicity of sources of knowledge, which makes the self more volatile and requires constant reflection. In a rapidly changing society, the instability and plasticity of social and personal identity becomes consistent and natural. The identity crisis affects the unshakable, until recently, fundamental categories of gender, ethnicity, etc. The boundaries between norm and pathology become blurred. The task is to preserve not only one’s own integrity, but also freedom of choice. This is explained by the fact that earlier psychological rigidity allowed to survive, in modern conditions, psychological transformation allows us to adapt more successfully to the requirements of a changing environment. A. Giddens calls selfidentity «an unfinished developing project» [124]. 1. Identity is a sense of self-identity, of fullness, of belonging to the world and to other people. Identity is the defining component of the internal structure of the personality, which develops throughout life, passes through overcoming crises, can change in a progressive or regressive direction. Identity is a condition for ensuring the stability of a person in the dynamics of his formation as a person. Formation of identity in modern conditions is not only a means of adaptation and development, but a condition of existence, the basis for interaction and the stability factor provided through group membership and internalization. The identification process includes not only self-esteem, but also evaluation by the environment, dichotomized into the male and female principles. 1. Social constructivism sees gender as an ideological system that supports compulsory heterosexuality. Feminist theories consider gender as a mechanism and symbol of power relations, poststructuralism as performance and technology, in particular linguistic, sociological theories as a system of interpersonal interaction. Gender is a social construct, it presupposes selfconsciousness and self-determination in everyday practices of interaction between male and female, it is constantly reproduced in the structures of consciousness and in the structures of action. 148

2. Gender identity is an internal structure created in the process of development that allows an individual to organize the image of the Self and to function socially in accordance with the perceived sex and gender. In gender identity, the socio-cultural parameters of the categories of «male» and «female» come to the fore, according to which a person identifies with a particular gender group, constructs his identity as a representative of a certain gender. Gender identity is a sense of self-identity, awareness of belonging to a certain sex through categorization of masculinity and femininity, development of appropriate forms of behavior and the formation of personal characteristics. 3. The methodological possibilities of qualitative sex studies in the study of gender identity have been realized. The usage of qualitative methods is connected with the search for mechanisms for the emergence and consolidation of gender differences at the level of everyday practice, which structures an excellent way of knowing and thinking, the meanings of actions and behavior. 4. Self-identity – perception of oneself as a unique and independent personality – is accompanied by the identification of oneself with a certain social community, with a certain gender. Selfidentity accompanies the person’s self-development and is the foundation of gender identity. Self-identity is manifested in social behavior and interaction, in the system of interpersonal relationships. Gender identity as an aspect of self-identity, describing the experience of a person as a representative of a certain sex, is one of the basic characteristics of the personality and is formed as a result of the internalization of male or female traits in the process of interaction of the Self and others. 5. The features of the modern process of gender identity formation are expressed in feminization of men and masculinization of women. Change in normative patterns of masculinity and femininity change the traditional gender order to a different extent in all social groups. The complex interactions of men and women with each other in specific social roles reflect the nature of gender differentiation in different spheres of activity. 6. The transgender phenomenon as an expression of gender identity crisis allows us to identify hidden power mechanisms and strategies in the formation of identity. The sexual diversity that has been legitimized as a result of the emancipation of sexological 149

knowledge, declared sexual «otherness» that does not fit into the traditional understanding of sex and gender, overturn habitual representations and offer new opportunities for understanding habitual categories: «biological sex» and «gender», «femininity» and «masculinity», «normativity» and «deviation», etc. The existing process of transformation of gender roles and identities cannot be stopped, but it can be made more adaptable to reality, in particular, it is necessary to eliminate the connection between masculinity and economic instrumentality. A change in the sociocultural conditions of the person’s existence leads to constant transformation and the need to form a new identity. Emerging at this stage, personal difficulties can lead to a severe neurosis – identity crisis, «losing oneself». Therefore, the main function of identity is to adapt to the modern world in the broadest sense. A person can maintain identity only by being open to new information and constantly changing adequately to it. In other words, he or she remains identical to him/herself, «balancing» on the verge of the self and not-self. This key point is reflected in most existing concepts of identity. According to A. Giddens, identity is not a complete process, for it must be constantly reproduced and transformed, ensuring the adequacy of existence. The formation of gender identity can be an effective tool for the social development of the personality, provided it facilitates the acquisition of a diverse sex-role repertoire, a culture of communication between the sexes. In our opinion, the most important features of a gender culture are the following: aspiration to self-improvement of individuality; integrity of the «image of the self»; development of female (male) dignity, sense of distinctness of the inner world, formation of sustainable positions in the choice of global, dominant values; creation of humane relations based on mutual understanding, mutual trust, mutual respect. In the modern period, it is necessary to form new models of gender relations that promote a more complete personal realization. At the same time, the ideal gender structure of society is the order in which each individual acts as a free and responsible moral actor.

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CONTENTS

1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3.

2. 2.1. 2.2 2.3.

INTRODUCTION

3

THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE STUDY OF GENDER IDENTITY Basics of theoretical concepts of the phenomenon of identity Gender identity as a subject of sociological analysis The practice of empirical research on gender identity

5

GENDER IDENTITY IN THE PERSONALITY STRUCTURE Self-identity as the source of gender identity formation Masculinity and femininity in the context of sociocultural organization of society Transgender as the manifestation of the identity «crisis» CONCLUSION REFERENCES

5 40 74

91 91 105 134 148 151

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Научное издание

Kylyshbayeva Bibigul Nauryzovna A STUDY OF GENDER IDENTITY Monograph Выпускающий редактор Г.С. Бекбердиева Компьютерная верстка Г.К. Шаккозовой Дизайн обложки: А. Калиева ИБ № 18183 Подписано в печать 02.08.2018. Формат 60х84/16. Бумага офсетная. Печать цифровая. Объем 9,75 п.л. Тираж 50 экз. Заказ № 4602. Цена договорная. Издательский дом «Қазақ университеті» Казахского национального университета имени аль-Фараби. 050040, г. Алматы, пр. аль-Фараби, 71, КазНУ. Отпечатано в типографии издательского дома «Қазақ университеті».

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