Introduction
1 Theory of gender studies
1.1 Gender identity and gender roles
1.2 Gender studies
2 Relationship between gender traits and loneliness
Conclusion
References
Glossary
Аннотация
INTRODUCTION
Loneliness is a condition that is widely distributed and severely distressing. Yet only a handful of psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists have studied the ordinary loneliness of ordinary people. Sullivan, the great American psychiatrist, is among the very few who have done so and among the very few in any of the social sciences who have attempted a description of the symptomatology of loneliness. His description is brief and sketchy, but nevertheless notably perceptive. In particular he commented on the "driving force" of loneliness — a force great enough, he pointed out, to cause people who were normally painfully shy to aggressively seek social activity. He concluded that "The fact that loneliness will lead to integrations in the face of severe anxiety automatically means that loneliness in itself is more terrible than anxiety". Others who have observed the pressures under which the lonely seem to act by and large have agreed with Sullivan's appraisal.
What do we mean by loneliness? The word has been used to describe a number of different conditions, even as other words, including depression and grief, have been used to describe conditions that would seem to have some affinity with loneliness.
Sometimes the term "loneliness" has been used to describe a not at all disagreeable condition in which a sense of one's separateness from others offers "a way back to oneself". This sort of loneliness refers to a time in which one is not only alone but also able to use one's aloneness to recognize with awesome clarity both one's ineradicable separateness from all else and one's fundamental connectedness. It is a time of almost excruciating awareness in which one sees clearly the fundamental facts of one's small but unique place in the ultimate scheme, after which one can recognize one's true self and begin to be that true self.
So, we can see that studying of loneliness is a very important matter. The investigation of this type can have a lot of aspect. In ours we will pay attention to the relations between loneliness and gender dimension. It's very obvious that the parameters of loneliness in some way depend on gender indentity.
The goal of this work is to establish the correlation between gender identity and loneliness. To achieve this goal, the following objectives of the study were determined:
1) study the essence of gender;
2) prove the importance of gender studies;
3) learn the concept of loneliness;
4) correlate gender dimension and concept of loneliness.
The work consists of introduction, main body, conclusion, bibliography, glossary and annotation.
1 THEORY OF GENDER STUDIES
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or an intersex variation which may complicate sex assignment), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity. Some cultures have specific gender roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra (chhaka) of India and Pakistan.
Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money’s meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).
In other contexts, including some areas of social sciences, gender includes sex or replaces it. For instance, in non-human animal research, gender is commonly used to refer to the biological sex of the animals. This change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s. In 1993, the USA’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started to use gender instead of sex. Later, in 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as “a person’s self-representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual’s gender presentation.
The social sciences have a branch devoted to gender studies. Other sciences,” such as sexology and neuroscience, are also interested in the subject. While the social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct, and gender studies particularly do, research in the natural sciences investigates whether biological differences in males and females influence the development of gender in humans; both inform debate about how far biological differences influence the formation of gender identity. In the English literature, there is also a trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social gender role. This framework first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978.
1.1 Gender identity and gender roles
Gender identity refers to a personal identification with a particular gender and gender role in society. The term woman has historically been used interchangeably with reference to the female body, though more recently this usage has been viewed as controversial by some feminists.
There are qualitative analyses that explore and present the representations of gender; however, feminists challenge these dominant ideologies concerning gender roles and biological sex. One’s biological sex is directly tied to specific social roles and the expectations. Judith Butler considers the concept of being a woman to have more challenges, owing not only to society’s viewing women as a social category but also as a felt sense of self, a culturally conditioned or constructed subjective identity. Social identity refers to the common identification with a collectivity or social category that creates a common culture among participants concerned. According to social identity theory, an important component of the self-concept is derived from memberships in social groups and categories; this is demonstrated by group processes and how inter-group relationships impact significantly on individuals’ self-perception and behaviors. The groups people belong to therefore provide members with the definition of who they are and how they should behave within their social sphere.
Categorizing males and females into social roles creates a problem, because individuals feel they have to be at one end of a linear spectrum and must identify themselves as man or woman, rather than being allowed to choose a section in between. Globally, communities interpret biological differences between men and women to create a set of social expectations that define the behaviors that are “appropriate” for men and women and determine women’s and men’s different access to rights, resources, and power in society and health behaviors. Although the specific nature and degree of these differences vary from one society to the next, they still tend to typically favor men, creating an imbalance in power and gender inequalities within most societies. Many cultures have different systems of norms and beliefs based on gender, but there is no universal standard to a masculine or feminine role across all cultures. Social roles of men and women in relation to each other are based on the cultural norms of that society, which lead to the creation of gender systems. The gender system is the basis of social patterns in many societies, which include the separation of sexes, and the primacy of masculine norms.
Philosopher Michel Foucault said that as sexual subjects, humans are the object of power, which is not an institution or structure; rather it is a signifier or name attributed to “complex strategical situation”. Because of this, “power” is what determines individual attributes, behaviors, etc. and people are a part of an ontologically
2 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GENDER TRAITS AND LONELINESS
This part of work shows that gender and gender-linked traits may contribute to individuals’ loneliness. This study examines the relations between gender, gender traits and various types of loneliness. It also addressed whether self-esteem might mediate such relations. Measures include a Demographic Questionnaire, the Bem Sex Role Inventory, Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, and the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults – SF. Men had higher global loneliness scores than women. For females, higher levels of masculinity were associated with reduced loneliness feelings, but the effect of masculinity was mediated by self-esteem. For males, neither gender roles nor self-esteem explained the degree of loneliness. Relative to undifferentiated-types, androgynous individuals tended to show the lowest levels of global loneliness. Masculinity and self-esteem was important in reducing loneliness for females, but future studies should continue to explore other factors that might contribute to males’ loneliness.
Loneliness is a common feeling. Knox, Vail-Smith & Zusman (2007) found that 25.9% college men and 16.7 % of college women had severe loneliness feelings. While this theme is common in literature and art, it was not until the 1970s that this phenomenon began to receive intense empirical exploration. Although loneliness is a common experience for human beings, defining loneliness in a clear and accurate way is difficult. Dozens of definitions have been proposed using different perspectives and emphases. According to Peplau and Perlman's (1982) summary, some have focused on inherent human needs for intimacy, some have emphasized the discrepancy between the desired and existing social relations, and yet others argued that loneliness might result from insufficient social reinforcement. Peplau and Perlman (1982) also noted that most definitions in social sciences shared three characteristics: loneliness resulted from deficient social relationships; loneliness was subjective; and the experience was negative.
Many factors may contribute to an individual's loneliness. Personal characteristics, cultural and situational environments, changes in an individual's real social relations and changes in a person's social needs can all be antecedents of loneliness. Loneliness has been linked with various negative emotions and behaviors such as depression, suicide and suicide ideation, anxiety and alcohol abuse. Therefore, it is of great value to investigate the predictors of loneliness and find effective ways to reduce lonely feelings among men and women.
Two perspectives exist concerning the dimensions of loneliness. The unidimensional model posits that loneliness is unitary, varying only in intensity, and is the result of deficits in a variety of relationships. This unidimensional conceptualization
CONCLUSION
In the study we tried to find out the correlation between gender identity and loneliness. To achieve the goal some objectives were established.
The first objective was to study the essence of gender. It was found out that gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or an intersex variation which may complicate sex assignment), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity. Also it was found out that gender identity refers to a personal identification with a particular gender and gender role in society. The term woman has historically been used interchangeably with reference to the female body, though more recently this usage has been viewed as controversial by some feminists.
Then we learnt aspects of gender studies. Gender studies are a field for interdisciplinary study devoted to gender identity and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. This field includes women’s studies (concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics), men’s studies and queer studies. Sometimes, gender studies are offered together with study of sexuality. These disciplines study gender and sexuality in the fields of literature, language, geography, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, cinema, media studies, human development, law, and medicine. It also analyzes how race, ethnicity, location, class, nationality, and disability intersect with the categories of gender and sexuality.
In the second paragraph the correlation between gender and loneliness was correlated. It was found out that gender and gender-linked traits may contribute to individuals’ loneliness. Many factors may contribute to an individual's loneliness. Personal characteristics, cultural and situational environments, changes in an individual's real social relations and changes in a person's social needs can all be antecedents of loneliness. The gender influences the person's mental stability too. We found out that there is no a common opinion about this matter. Whereas several studies have found no significant gender differences, others have shown that males were lonelier than females. Several studies indicated that men may feel lonely more often than women because they are not as well socialized in the social-emotional area and, as a result may deal with their loneliness in ways that alienate them even further from social contact. Alternatively, females may more successfully buffer loneliness, especially in the social-emotional areas of life.
In general, studies have shown that androgynous people possessing both masculine and feminine characteristics were less likely to be lonely than other types of individuals. Jones also found that undifferentiated individuals were the loneliest among
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