The Roots of FemininityMasculinity

26 stand in isolation but presuppose a nd are related to counter roles” Lindesmith Anselm, 1956: p.11. The meaning of male is masculinity and female is femininity Stryker, 1980. The meanings of masculine and feminine are necessarily contrastive. To be male masculine is not to be female feminine and vice versa. Gender meanings are related to one another as opposite ends of a single continuum, returning to the bipolar conceptualization of masculinity and femininity. Indeed, masculinity and femininity are negatively related when individuals are asked to judge themselves based on the self-descriptors masculine and feminine Spence, 1993. A gender identity scale constructed along lines described above has certain properties. First, the scale evolves out of the meanings of maleness in relation to femaleness that actually are held in the population from which the sample is drawn. This procedure contrasts with many researches that use attributes that are assumed to carry meanings of masculinity and femininity with no attempt to check if they have these meanings for the respondents. Second, the measure outlined above incorporates the assumption that meaning is contrastive. The meaning of female is in contrast to the meaning of male and vice versa. Third, by focusing upon self-meanings, we separate issues of who one is gender identity from what one does gender roles or what one believes gender attitudes and stereotypes. From this perspective, androgyny may be thought of not as combining masculine and feminine meanings, but as being flexible in the kinds of behaviors in which one engages sometimes more masculine in meaning, sometimes more feminine in meaning. 27

6. Community of Practice

According to Eckert and Ginnet 1992, communities of practice develop activities and ways of engaging in those activities, they develop common knowledge and beliefs, ways of relating to each other, and ways of talking. Some communities of practice may develop more distinctive ways of speaking than others. Thus, it is within communities of practice that linguistic influence may spread within and among speech communities. Eckert and Ginet 1992 also state that “the importance of the community of practice lies in the recognition that identity is not fixed, that convention does not pre-exist use, and that language use is a continual process of learning” p.10. The community of practice is a prime locus of this process of identity and linguistic construction. Community of practice is also known as ethnic group by children. They may develop little jokes, greetings, nicknames, and funny ways of pronouncing things even swearing. Gleason and Perlmann 1985 point out that there are certain ways of speaking which are not acquired from peers and cannot be obtained by parents. Children try to be a part of the community by mastering everything so that they will not be rejected from the community. It may be more central to their construction of a self and they construct an identity in the process of balancing the self they are constructing across these communities of practice. This identity is inseparable from their participation in community of practice.