Media and Gender Socialization

Processes: Structure and Agency

Gender socialization occurs the moment a child is influenced by the social processes and cultural discourses that circumscribe male and female behavior. While biological and anatomical differences appear foundational in the processes of gendering, biology and anatomy are themselves constructed in relation to language and discourse. Processes of gendering initially take place via choice of names, the imposition of clothing, and the specific ways cultures address children. When de Beauvoir suggested that she became a woman, she highlighted how gender identities are socially formed in relation to the specific cultural and discursive structures. If gender, at the beginning of the 20th century, took shape around the discourses of religion, the family, and the school, today media representations also significantly influence how women's and men's identities are perceived.

Socialization refers more generally to various sociocultural processes that provide individuals and groups with a sense of values and beliefs. Values are fundamentally linked to ideology and politics, but they also structure modes of behavior via media representations. Socialization is a twofold process, requiring, on one hand, agencies and structures whose function it shape social subjects and, on the other, citizens who are socially interpellated. More recently, socialization has been understood in the context debates surrounding the social construction of identity. Social constructionist perspectives, especially in light of work since Mary Mclntosh in sociology and Michel Foucault in the sphere of discourse theory, underline how the processes involved in acquiring the society's everyday norms of behavior do not come about by means of a single determining event or unique interpellation, but instead occur in ongoing ways in an individual's life history.

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