Рубрика: GENDER AND POWER

Politics of Personality

To speak of personality as an object of politics is to tread on dangerous ground; the issue of totalitarianism is very close. Authoritarian regimes of all persuasions in the twentieth century have made sustained attempts to mould the upbringing and outlooks of their citizens. Liberal critics of ‘totalitarianism’ such as Hannah Arendt have their most […]

The Historical Dynamic in Personality

The historicity of personality has been recognized in social theory mainly by constructing historical typologies of character. A particular character type is supposed to be dominant at one period of history and then is swept aside in favour of a new type in a new epoch. The classic sequence is David Riesman’s ‘tradition- directed’, ‘inner-directed’ […]

Personality as Practice

Personality, Society and Life History Chapters 8 and 9 have described how structures of gender relations enter into personal life and shape personalities. The fact is clear, but how to understand it is more difficult. ‘Enter into’ is a metaphor, and we might ask just what is being ‘entered’. Has personality some distinctive substance, as […]

Socialization

In both academic social science and the popular literature on gender in the last two decades the commonest approach has been through concepts of social moulding or ‘socialization’. Schematically, the main argument runs like this. The new-born child has a biological sex but no social gender. As it grows older society provides a string of […]

The Mystery in Broad. Daylight

Gender Formation and Psychoanalysis How are the structures of personal life discussed in the last chapter formed? There are two main approaches to this question that are compatible with a social analysis of gender. Socialization theory treats gender formation as. jthe acquisition and internalization of social^ norms_. It stresses continuity between social context and personality, […]

The Effect of Structures

To this point I have discussed the production of sexual character as if each milieu were independent of all others. It is time to bring into the analysis the structures that interrelate milieux (chapter 6) and their historical composition into a gender order for the society as a whole (chapter 7). To start with the […]

Multiple Models: From Typology to Relationship

Scalar models of personality have often stemmed from theories of personality ‘types’. Extraversion-introversion scales and the famous ‘F scale’ of authoritarianism both derive from such typologies, devised by Jung and the Frankfurt school respectively. M/F scales similarly derive from unitary models of sexual character, in effect ‘dimensionalizing’ them by adding a range of possibilities in […]