“Using Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism, discuss the stages in the formation of gender identity.” (2014)
Gender identity is a person’s sense of themselves as a woman, a man or another gender. George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self and Society, 1934) never wrote about gender. His account of the self nonetheless maps how it is learnt. Names, dress, toys, kinship terms and praise act as significant symbols. Through them a child comes to see itself as the kind of person others take it to be, and then to monitor itself against the community’s gender norms.
Stages of gender identity through Mead’s lens
1. Preparatory (imitation) stage, roughly the first two to three years
- The child copies gestures without grasping their meaning.
- Adults handle boys and girls differently: colour of clothes, tolerance of crying, rough or gentle play.
- In patrilineal India, Leela Dube (“On the Construction of Gender”, 1988) showed that rituals and sayings teach a girl early that she is paraya dhan, a temporary member of her natal home.
2. Play stage: significant others, one at a time
- The child takes the role of particular significant others: a girl “cooks” like her mother, a boy “goes to office” or plays policeman.
- Approval (“good girl”, “be a man”) and ridicule mark some roles as appropriate and others as wrong.
- The self is still a set of separate role-images.
3. Game stage: organised roles and rules
- In peer groups and school, the child must know the whole system of expectations: who plays cricket and who skips rope, who sits where, who is teased for crossing lines.
- Peers enforce these boundaries, and gender becomes a rule-governed position within a group.
4. Generalised other: internalised gender norms
- The community’s organised gender attitudes, including honour (izzat), modesty, breadwinning and care, become the “me”. The person now polices themselves without being watched.
- The norms are visible in data. In NFHS-5 (2019–21), 15% of women aged 15–49 wanted more sons than daughters, against 3% who wanted more daughters. The Time Use Survey 2024 found that women who gave unpaid care to household members spent 140 minutes a day on it, against 74 minutes for men.
5. The “I”: negotiation and change
- The spontaneous “I” can resist the gendered “me”. Girls enter sport, boys refuse aggression, and trans persons claim identities outside the binary.
- Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman (“Doing Gender”, 1987) extend this interactionist view. Gender is never finally formed but is continually “done” in interaction and held accountable to norms.
Limits of the Meadian account
- Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) argues that there is no stable gender core that stages complete. Identity is performative, produced by repeated acts.
- Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering, 1978) locates gender formation earlier, in pre-verbal attachment to the mother, which Mead’s cognitive stages miss.
- Intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989): a Dalit girl and an upper-caste girl meet different generalised others, so there is no single gender script.
Conclusion
Mead’s stages show gender identity as a social achievement: imitated, rehearsed with significant others, organised in games and internalised as a generalised other. His “I” explains why that identity can be contested and changed. A full account adds patriarchal power, since the generalised other is not consensual, and the intersection of caste, class and sexuality.