Search

This paper discusses a study which compares the gender identities of battered women and non-battered women using a Battered Woman Scale (BWS). Most of those included in the sample of sheltered women had been beaten for from one to eight years. Their abuse was not an isolated incident, but rather an expression of long term tyrannical relationships. There are strong differences between the two groups of women. First, sheltered women were more likely to be classified as feminine or undifferentiated while the control group women were more likely to be androgynous. Second, sheltered women and control group women differ significantly on those gender role trait ascriptions predicted in the literature and used in this paper in the construction of the BWS. The problematic findings involve the African American women in the study. African American women have a specific set of problems and interactions which differ from white women. Previous work in this field which does not identify the race of the women in the shelters must be read in this light. However, the gender identity negotiation process is similar for white women and African American women and is framed by the generic form of sociation known as tyranny.

Research on identity suggests that a critical factor in identity concerns presentation or the behaviors actors perform in order to convince others of their identity. Yet identity also involves the attributions others make on the basis of these behaviors. In this paper, I argue that all acts do not fare equally in the process of attribution. Rather, individuals making attributions engage in a process of mental weighing as a way to determine which acts "count" toward identity and to what extent. While various components of the act contribute to its social weight--its presence or absence, markedness, frequency, context, and the manner in which it is performed--the lens through which the attributer views the act also influences the weighing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how 23 primarily upper-middle-class high school seniors anticipated identity changes as they prepared to leave home for college. The transition from high school to college is a period of "liminality" during which students are structurally in between old and new statuses. We discuss how students anticipated change, planned to affirm certain of their identities, imagined creating new identities, and contemplated discovering unanticipated identities. Such interpret We effort must be understood in the context of the ambivalence they felt about leaving home and achieving independence. The data also provoke discussion of how social class membership might be implicated in people's ability to control identity change as they move through the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rituals provide public solutions to some types of life crises, or change. There are crises which beset the individual in modern society which are not easily addressed by public ritual. The present paper observes such a life crisis and identifies conscious rites performed by individuals. These rites are called, "personal definitional rites", and take place in situations demanding identity changes. Newly acquired identity is performed ritually in an attempt to elicit recognition of a new social state. Thirty-six patients clinically defined as obese underwent gastric reduction surgery. Patients were interviewed after having lost excess weight in order to understand the social results of the dramatic change in appearance. Patients described various "rites" they used to complete their conversion from fat to thin. These rites are compared to rites of transition and definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]