Researching Gender Identity: Collective Representations, Communication and Language

Abstract

From the inquire to the conceptual references that intervene and structure the studies on gender identity and the need to locate the, in the social and cultural contexts, as well as from the intention to establish a relationship with the collective representation and the contemporary languages, this study reviewed different conceptual axes through an exploration of diverse theoretical currents. As a finding of this exploration, the study could identify mutations on the concepts, the paradigms and the communication flows that are configured through contemporaneity. The study makes evident the necessity for rethinking the usual classifications of modernity, i.e. overcome the binary categories for understanding gender. In this sense, it is necessary to take into account the communicative dimension implied by gender, no as a classificatory dimension of the human, but as a social and cultural process determined by the representations of each time and by its inherent communicative elements. Likewise, the study was able to establish a relation between three categories that allowed it to make evident contact points with gender identity studies through the collective representations of the territory, of fashion and identity, as well as from the social and cultural conditionings typical of the contemporary subject. This research allowed the establishment of lines of analysis for basing the overcoming of taxonomical and anachronistic approaches that typify in a binary way the gender identity. It also allowed the identification of territory as a key factor in interpretation, of fashion as a direct variable from the mentalities point of view and  dentity as a concept that works as a condition of possibility of the self-referentiality and the referentiality of the other in the subject. This way, it is possible to resignify practices from their existential experience with gender.