An Individual’s Gender Experience: Socio-Cultural Context

Abstract

The article highlights gender experience development in an individual. The sociocultural context of gender identity development is addressed from the perspective of socialconstructivism. The author describes the mechanism of constructing gender schemas and normswhich reflect socio-cultural experience. Drawing on poststructuralist ideas, the author explorescultural texts which encode assumptions and concepts that serve as schemas for perceiving andunderstanding reality, for reflecting the processes of an individual’s development as a discursivebeing in his or her interpretation of socio-cultural experience. The article also analyzes masculinityand femininity models shaped by socio-cultural schemas and explores gender role expectationsamong the young people in Ukraine