Sosiologi gender

One of the most influential of the psychoanalytic theories of gender identity is the perspective developed in the book The Reproduction of Mothering. Its author, Nancy Chodorow, traces the implications for emotional development by linking them with the way mothers usually care for their infants in their formative years, while fathers are more emotionally distant. The development of an identity takes place as the infant gets more and more separated from his/her mother, with whom the infant is initially psychically merged. This process however operates differently for boys and girls. Girls can separate gradually, maintain a continuous sense of relationship with the mother, who is after all experienced as alike. For boys, on the other hand, separating from the mother, who is experienced as different, involves repressing the feminine aspects of themselves and rejecting their tenderness that was central to that early relationship. Boys' sense of maleness, according to Chodorow, is achieved at a great emotional cost.