Representations of Gender Categories among Young People in the Czech Republic
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2006 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Zborník abstraktov z konferencie "Sociálne procesy a osobnosť 2006" |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://www.saske.sk/SVU/ |
| Field | Psychology |
| Keywords | gender categories; social representations; feminity-mascilinity |
| Description | Representations of gender are common knowledge about the sex categories that are present in every culture and are basis for social organisation. In all societies people have their theories about gender that are present in virtually every aspect of life (Unger, 2001). According to the empirical research the five main meanings of femininity and masculinity can be distinguished (for overview Wyrobková, 2005): gender roles, characteristics that differentiate the sexes, attractive characteristics for the opposite sex, gender stereotypes and gender identity. Perception of gender categories seems to be bipolar (Unger, 2001), but theory of symbolic asymmetry claims they differ in the way gender meanings are organised in relation to a common symbolic universe (Deschamps, 1982). Masculine category does not define only males but its meaning is also embedded with a superordinate category of the individual in general. On the contrary feminine category defines only females (Amancio, 1993, 1997, Eagly & Kite, 1987). The scope of the present study was to find out how the gender categories are represented, structured and how they are related toward the superordinate category of human beings among young people in the Czech Republic. The method of “free associations” was used on the sample of 220 subjects. The both qualitative and quantitative approach in the data analysis was used. The paper is divided into the three parts. The first part offers a brief introduction to the theoretical issues of femininity and masculinity. Further on, the main findings are presented and finally are discussed in the last section. |
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