Gender, Development & Identity: A Course Reflection. Psychology Essay

Gender, Development & Identity: A Course Reflection
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Gender, Development & Identity: A Course Reflection
This course is and, I believe, will always be of enduring impact on my understanding of the human psyche, gender, identity, and socialization processes. My learning curve follows a fairly common path starting with a sense of unease and ending with full subscription and willing engagement in between. Typically, learning – and, for that matter, unlearning – concepts and
habits well embedded in one's everyday life since childhood are hard to dislocate, let alone change. This course has, however, made it possible for me to change perspective in numerous ways, not only about concepts I have come to learn (more) about yet, more importantly, about who I am and where I stand. Indeed, for a diversity of stereotyped notions about gender, development, and identity, I have come to develop a more critical understanding of what I accept as "normal" or just okay. If anything, empathy – or, using coarse language, emotional intelligence – is one major vehicle via which I have come to learn (and unlearn). To step out of my own comfort zone of (happy) heterosexual identity into different, (once distant, now so familiar) shoes of multiple identities amounts to a journey of soul-searching. The "facts" and "statistics" I have been shown may be helpful to ground abstract concepts into reality. Then again, factual information is not devoid of richer and deeper discussions and conversations, just as helpful to understand where one (I?) stand (should stand?) about gender, development, and identity. This course is, in hindsight, more of a yet another course in psychology. This course is, I admit, a transformative experience only should one listen carefully and empathize mindfully. The particulars of the current course may – will – fade after a while. The meanings – experiences – I have gained are not going anywhere. This course reflection is, accordingly, less about regurgitation of matters past discussed in class and more about a critical evaluation of what I have come to understand – and be – after such course.
The Freudian conceptualization of gender – and women – offers an interesting starting point. In a Freudian proper understanding of gender, development, and identity, past experiences, particularly sexual experiences, shape present and future human behavior. This understanding, critiqued by Feminist psychologists, is informed by a sexist and patriarchal conceptualization of gendered identity as binary: male/female or Oedipus/Electra. Identifying gaps in the Freudian analysis of gendered identities by Feminist psychologists offer wider windows to understand gender and identity beyond binaries. Indeed, much of subsequent work ...