My Concept Application

As my previous, Gender Identity of Interest, blog said, I am interested in looking at how differences in locations that someone could grow up would influence the ways in which they see gender. Specificially, I was interested in looking at small-town Nebraska and seeing how that different from the large-city Texas I was from. However, after doing 2 interviews with women that were raised in towns that, from their population estimates, were no larger than 600 people, I learned that there were greater differences in areas of gender that I did not predict finding. 


To just give some background on the women that I interviewed, here are a few similarities that I found with what they said:


- In School, there were noticeable cliques that the boys and girls belonged to. However, since the grade levels were so small (the biggest graduating class was 55), everyone was "friends" with each other.
- Sports, as extra-curricular activities, were encouraged and were highly participated in. Interestingly, the following sports were common in both interviews: Basketball and Track, as well as some kind of younger league sports activity in elementary school
- Had mostly girl friends in the lower grade levels, but then had majority guy friends in high school
- Parents never explicitly said anything to them about what it meant to be/how they were supposed to be a woman; but a child when they were younger commented to them about doing things that were "for boys" or weren't "girly enough"
- On the other hand, their parents did do things that implicity created an idea of what it meant to be a girl. They got them toys that were specifically for girls and/or assigned them chores that went along with their feminine gender/sex.


From the above similar information nuggets, I found it interesting that what I would have hypothesized to be found, was nowhere in what they were telling me. But, what they said did, in fact, fit with something that we went over in class.


First, is the concept of Social Constructionism. According to DeFrancisco and Palczewski (2007), "social constructionsim suggests that meaning is constructed, not passively given, and that the creation happens in and through interaction with others and the culture" (p. 51). From this standpoint, I saw that the ideas the small town communities favored were not only from those in the community, but from the kind of lifestyle that was present in the towns. For example, although the type of work that was the backbone of the towns of the women I interviewed was different, there was still the mentality of hardwork instilled in everyone in the community. This could be the result of the very small population, thus the entire population knowing the business of the rest of the community/perpetuating the ideals of the community, or just the want to keep the community thriving. Either way, it was interesting that neither of the women I interivewed talked about their parents telling them specifics about what it means to be a girl or woman - and that they got that information from one of their peers. As both of them explained, by the time they heard from their peer the bit of information about them not living up to what was expected of their gender, neither of them showed interest or concern because they were already set in their ways - and were perfectly fine with that.


The other concept from DeFrancisco and Palczewski that corresponded to the information from the interviews I conducted was Cultural Ideology, which "refers to the ideas, values, beliefs, perceptions, and understandings that are known to members of a society and that guide their behaviors" (p. 145). This concept also plays off the idea of social constructionism in that no information is explicitly stated - what is valued in a community is the result of what is common in the community, or what is most present in the community to be learned by those who are part of the community. In other words, the ideals that a community hold dear are learned by those in the community through a variety of ways, and lead to how the community interacts and/or works. From the interviews from the two women, it could be said that something that was valued in both of their communities was the idea that children and young adults should do sports. It was never said in either of the interviews that either woman's parents pushed them to do any activities they were not interested in, but it could also be implied that simply being in the communities they grew up in, both women felt the need to do sports because it was something that was highly prevalent in their town.


These two concepts show how the majority of what we learn when we're younger, whether told explicitly or taught implicitly, is the result of where we are raised. While it is true that we learn from those that we are raised by, it is also true that we learn from what is going on around us. As stated earlier, there were times in the lives of the two women I interviewed where someone told them that they were not doing things that were in line with what it meant to be a girl/woman - however, younger members of communities rarely make "the rules". The influences and instructions the women I interviewed received from those older members in their towns were most likely what went to create their ideas and views of what it means to be a woman.


To finish out the rest of this project, I would like to interview one more woman who is from a small town in Nebraska. Although there were interesting similarities found between the two women I have interviewed, I would like to get another woman's perspective of the town she was raised in, and see if the found similarities could be explained as commonalities for women from small towns. (However, it will still be said that the similarities are not generalizable because they are all from the same state) Additionally, I would also like to visit either a town that one of the women I'm interviewing is/was from, or go to another small town and just people watch. It would be nice to see from nonverbals or hear from parents/friends/children any possible information about what it means to be a girl or boy; woman or man.