The Psychology of Gender by Gary Wood

Author:Gary Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2018-02-05T06:48:16+00:00

5

GENDER STORIES, BACKWARDS,

FORWARDS AND SIDEWAYS

By way of an antidote to the impersonal world of statistics and the dark

side of gender-role stereotypes (in Chapter 4), this chapter begins an

excursion into the stories we tell about gender. Here we contemplate

how we use human creativity (and psychology) to consider alterna-

tive gender schemata in which we might thrive. This first half of the

chapter discusses the lasting effects of Judaeo-Christian scripture on

gender-role stereotypes and binary thinking. It also explores other

stories, such as fairy tales, science fiction and re-readings of cultural

history, all of which can impact on our gender schemata. The second

half of the chapter considers ways forward for a new psychology of

gender.

MEANING-MAKING AND GENDER

Gender adds a great deal to cultural richness. 1 Chances are it plays

an integral part in your favourite works of art, such as books, plays,

poems, songs, paintings, films and television programmes. Through-

out history, art has deployed gender in ways that are fun, entertaining

or thought provoking. 2 From Shakespeare’s plays to the films of John

Waters, from Japanese Noh to British Pantomime, from Glam Rock

to Hip Hop, from New Romantics to Punk, from Yaoi3 to fan fiction,

66 G E N D E R S TO R I E S

gender is a vital ingredient. Human creativity imbues our lives, and

our schemata, with colour and meaningfulness.

We are all storytellers. We all have life stories. Your story is not just

a linear narrative. You edit and construct it to convey a sense of who

you are, your psychology, your identity. Your story is also open to

different interpretations by others, in terms of how you fit into their

stories. Sociologist Michael Mulkay argues that ‘every “social action”

and every “cultural product” or “text” has to be treated as a source

or an opportunity for creating multiple meaning, or further texts’. 4

Psychologists Wendy and Rex Stainton-Rogers contend that ‘research

reports are the products of human meaning-making, as much are

films, fictions and fantasies’.5 Common sense, pop-psychology and

academic psychology all tell different stories about gender. This book

began with an allusion to dystopian science fiction short story Minority

Report which tells of advanced pre-cognitive crime detection systems.

Gender is also about having our lives mapped out before we have lived

them, and as much about self-identity, just as with science fiction, it is

about making sense of our relationship with ‘aliens and others’.

We begin with an early example of meaning-making that still

influences the social and political world today.

COSMOLOGY AND AMBIGUITY

Classics scholar Richard Hoffman defines a cosmology, in its broadest

sense, as a culturally specific account of how the universe came about. 6

We might think of a cosmology as an over-arching meta-schema. The

earliest cosmologies were religious accounts whose primary purpose

was to help people make sense of the human experience (and their

place in the universe). They imposed a structure that included the roles

and functions of the culture’s inhabitants and their relationship to each

other and to outsiders. This encompassed gender roles and attitudes to

sex and sexuality. English and American literature scholar Elaine Scarry

argues that Judaeo-Christian scripture can be credited with ‘sponsor-

ing a civilization to a degree shared by no other isolated verbal text’.7

Its influences are still detectable in Western psychology, psychiatry,

G E N D E R S TO R I E S 67

medicine and the law.

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