2.4 Constructing Identity
Who are you? Take a moment and write down all the different identities that you might answer that question with. Your list likely includes references to your race, gender, sexual orientation, political identity, ethnicity, or age. Maybe it also includes your family background, the work you do, your social status, and your hobbies and passions. Your list of the things that make you who you are is as individual as you are.
Here’s another question: How did you become you? Most people would agree that our identity is based on a combination of all of these factors and much more.
In sociology, identity formation is a process of coming to understand ourselves and differentiate ourselves in relation to our social world. Identity formation relates to our presentation of self, or how we portray ourselves to society through actions, expressions, and affiliations with others. As demonstrated by the list you just made, identity is multifaceted. In this section, we will look briefly at identity formation in general and then explore how individuals form and express gender identity.
Sociological Theories of Self-Development
As discussed in the previous section, we are born with a genetic makeup and biological traits. However, who we are as human beings develops over time, often through social interactions. Many scholars in psychology and sociology have theorized about identity development. Psychologists tend to look inward at the qualities of individuals (mental health, emotional processes, cognitive processing). In contrast, sociologists tend to look outward to qualities of social context (social institutions, cultural norms, interactions with others) to understand human behavior.
One of the pioneering contributions to sociological perspectives on self-development was Charles Cooley (he/him) (1864–1929). He stated that people’s self-understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them—a process termed “the looking-glass self,” which is thoroughly social (Cooley 1902). It is based on how we imagine we appear to others. This projection defines how we feel about ourselves and who we feel ourselves to be. Therefore, the development of a self involves three elements in Cooley’s analysis: “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of [their] judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.” For example, how we express gender is based on how we think society and others will view us, and we internalize the positive or negative consequences of what others think of us, as well as how we feel in response to this social process.
Later, George Herbert Mead (he/him) (1863–1931) advanced a more detailed sociological approach to the self. He agreed that the self, as a person’s distinct identity, is developed through social interaction. He further noted that the crucial component of the self is its capacity for self-reflection (Mead 1934). He broke th