GENDER AND IDENTITY IN POSTMODERNITY: NASCENT CONSIDERATIONS

Abstract

It is urgent to reflect on identity and how it can be engendered by personal characteristics. The dichotomy that emerges when it comes to the identity between men and women reveals a segregation in which positive value is attributed to one and negative value to the other, placing the gender binary in our society as a unique condition. To this end, the guiding thread of this article will seek to understand the relations of identity in postmodernity and the relations that gender has in the post-structuralist movement, in a qualitative methodological proposal that encompasses basic texts on gender and identity in which the authors, in a surgent way, weave considerations. From the conception of identities, we see that differentiating individuals is a process imbricated with meanings that reinforces the historical and geographical characteristics to which the subjects are subjected, which presents constant modifications, which gives rise to new identities. With regard to gender, the search for it to become an analytical category crosses the struggle of minorities affected by inequalities in power relations and the resignification of the term so that it does not only differentiate male from female, opening space for new conceptions and categories. The current social construction, therefore, demands that the meanings loaded with absolute truths be remodeled, counterposing modern thought and resignifying identities and gender, to deconstruct the ambiguities and generalizations rooted in each one of us.