Bem’s Gender Schema Model

Gender is a social construct, but it also becomes quickly represented internally as an intrapsychic one. “Who I am” often has deep roots in “how I am female or male.” One branch of feminist psychological theory posits that children develop gender schemata (Bern, 1993). These schemata are not simply internalizations of external gender roles but rather represent dynamic interactions of the person, the social environment, the age and developmental stage of the individual, and thus her or his capacity for more or less abstract thinking. Gender schemata commonly begin as more fixed and rigid representations, reflecting a younger child’s incapacities to violate category rules or make abstractions, but they do not always become more open and flexible as life goes on. Painful experience, cultural norms, fearful temperament, or other factors may result in a long-lasting rigidity of some aspects of an individual’s gender schema. Feminist therapists are interested in uncovering their clients’ gender schemata, not simply to challenge them but to understand how and where sources of personal power and disempowerment have become linked with this important component of self.

Chodorow and the Reproduction of Gender

Other feminist theorists have proposed different ways of understanding the power of gender to inform the construction of self and experience, and its capacity to serve as a facilitating or obstructing factor in a person’s life. Chodorow (1978, 1989), arguing from an object relations perspective, has suggested that internal representations of gender arise in the intrapsychic space evolving from interactions between mothers, who are the primary caregivers of children, and very young children who either become like mother (girls) or unlike her (boys). Her theory reflects the gendered division of child-rearing practices where, even in societies that offer mothers alternatives to breast-feed (or have breast pumps and refrigerators for the expressing and storing of breast milk into bottles) or to work outside the home and not be infant caregivers, men are commonly denied the chance to have this kind of intimate relationship with young infants. Silverstein and Auerbach (1999), exploring the actual relationships of fathers to their children, challenge the essentialist underpinnings of Chodorow’s paradigm, noting that girls raised by gay men or single heterosexual fathers develop a female-gendered self.

Kaschak’s Self-In-Context

Kaschak (1992), in her self-in-context model, proposes that not only is identity—indeed, all experience—gendered but explores how gender then takes on social valence that becomes woven into the misogynist fabric of patriarchy. Understanding the meanings of gender as sources of power and disempowerment leads feminist therapists to explore how valued and devalued ways of being—those that are oppressive but feel deeply required, or desired, yet feel utterly unattainable—are attached at the core to gendered divisions of experience. Like other feminist theorists of gender, Kaschak proposes that gender is an enactment that emerges within the interaction between specific experience and acquired information and the various contextual milieus available to each person, with the nature of those milieus strongly influenced by culture.