Men's Socialization and the History of Man's Life: The Reproduction of Male Culture in the Individual Narrative

Abstract

The research in question is based on the gender schema theory by Sandra Bem. The purpose of the research is to study male narrative features in the context of the norms of male socialization. The aim of the research under consideration is a comparative analysis of male and female autobiographies features, which are not confined to male and female speech characteristics and reflect revision of gender socialization norms by the subject. With the help of biographical interview method autobiographies of women aged 31 to 72 (N= 34) and men aged from 23 to 69 (N= 36) living in provincial Russian towns were transcribed and contrasted. The autobiographies underwent categorial analysis procedure conducted by experts; the obtained categorial matrices were processed with the use of mathematical methods of statistics. Considerable attention was given to men’s life stories during the process of analysis. Quantitative data analysis allowed to reconstruct the structure of men’s and women’s autobiographies, which reflected gender socialization norms. The obtained algorithm, being geared towards the search for gender markers in the autobiographies, identified gender-specific markers in men’s texts whereas the female ones were retrieved owing to non-specific categories. This allowed to conclude that the modern Russian male socialization practices are more traditional. According to the results of the research, the categorial structure of autobiographical texts in men and in women is similar in key events and specific to each gender group at the same time. As far as gender normativity is concerned, male stories are more frequent to contain the gender norms abidance markers. Female stories are more individualized and fall into different scenarios (gender-standardized and non-standard).