with their father and the masculine psyche in both sexes, without devaluing their femininity. First, girls develop an early identification with their mothers ; then they need to identify with their fathers without idealizing his sex and creatively transform early and late feminine and masculine identifications, in societies largely shaped by patriarchy. A difficult task. Also, identification is far from a passive process. Children actively seek it. In many subtle ways, they introject and project aspects of themselves and the Other in this process, through memories, non-verbal fantasies and energetic expressions of desire. Until relatively recently, psychological debates mainly portrayed each sex as the ultimate carrier of the feminine and masculine principles. However, these principles are part of each sex, and both sides are shaped in both sexes by patriarchal domination and its continuous and creative reformulations. In terms of feminist author, Gayle Rubin (1989, page 113), “… as sexuality is a nexus of relationships between the genders, an important part of women ´s oppression is contained and mediated by sexuality.” And new, increasingly growing, sexual orientations: homosexuality, bisexuality and transexuality, among others, reframe our concepts of the feminine and masculine in ways beyond precedent, and merit new theoretical focuses and developments from within the neoreichian movement. Cultural and Social Research on Women Cultural and Social Research has shown that, at a structural level, the social situation of women and men has substantively changed, since most of the psychological theories discussed were formulated. First, men are more-though not enough- involved in childrearing and household work. Second, the increasing, though still unequal, participation of females in employment at a global level, the gradual though growing presence of women in social and political realms, in the Sciences, Arts and Culture, a sustained growth in the use of contraceptive methods, and positive changes in the medical attitudes towards pregnancy and parenting, have made women more socially visible and led them to occupy a larger amount of positions, enjoy better conditions and take relevant decisions, within previously exclusively male terrains (9). Male vulnerability and fragility has been exposed, with less projection onto women. Men have become more aware of their emotional lives and problems, partly due to the gradual erosion of traditional roles. Organized women in a or several movements have tended to publicly own self-reflections on, how they sometimes simultaneously oppose and embrace gender stereotypes. Both sexes- though most frequently women- have begun to acknowledge that false ‘masks’ of independence are sometimes used to hide or compensate for confused and chaotic internal landscapes, arising from gender patterns. ( See for example, Segal, L., 1990; Mandell, N. et.al., 1995, Butler, J. 2004) In Latin America, local trends on gender transformations are similar to global ones. However, there are ‘objectively’ less social and economic possibilities for the majority of women to actively participate in the public sphere. Many times, the threat of poverty curtails independent initiatives and throws women back into dependency, submission and stereotype. In the 1990s, I undertook a series of studies on household, sexual and reproductive patterns, involving more than one thousand working families in Brazil and Argentina (Acero, 1991a; 1991b ;1995). It showed a number of interesting intergenerational changes in gender patterns in the way crucial life events- like marriage, first contraceptive method used and first children-, were handled by women and men, as well as, some substantive inter-country differences (10). For example, younger generations, of up to 25 years of age, mainly in Brazil, had perceptions on and attitudes towards fertility, reproduction and union quite distant from traditional ones. However, domestic violence, performed mainly by men, is still a very severe regional problem. It is also positively correlated with gender stereotypes. Men confronted with hardship and/or economic failure, frequently resort to desperate and irrational responses, like violence and abuse within the home. For example, selected evidence for Chile, showed that, between 2002 and 2003, female complaints on intra-couples’ violence were in the order of 108.9 and 127.7 cases (per 10.000 females of age 15 and over). In 2005, half the households of Santiago´ s Metropolitan area had experienced some form of violence. This was mainly psychological in nature (43.2% of cases), but mild and acute physical violence accounted for almost a quarter of cases, and sexual violence represented 14.9% of cases. ( PAHO, 2006). Other prevalent indirect forms of violence on women are associated to maltreatment and/or inefficiencies in Sexual and Reproductive Health services. For example, 21 % of maternal deaths in Latin America are related to pregnancy, childbirth and postchildbirth, which are mainly caused by complications from clandestine abortions, of the order of four million a year (Alan Guttmacher, 1999) (11). Many social conditions are to change still, to attain social equality between the sexes. The majority of local and international populations need also to have access to adequate material means of subsistence and other resources, such as education and health; precondienergy & character vol.37 may 2009 53
54 Publizr Home