ABSTRACT
What is happening to gender in modern society? When this question is debated (both popularly and academically), conflicting impressions emerge. On the one hand, it seems as though nothing has changed, while on the other there appears to be a total disintegration. When our on-going research project, ‘Girls and boys in change?’, was introduced to the eighteen-year-olds who were to be the subjects of our study, we soon picked up the nickname of ‘sex-role ladies’. The girls’ reactions were divided along the following lines: some overwhelmed us with stories purporting to tell the TRUTH about the sly and dominating boys in their environment-‘we’ll be quite disappointed if you don’t record their covert power techniques!’ And there were those who listened to us with a polite, but knowing smile. They were clearly wondering how on earth we were to grasp anything as complex as adolescence today, using the extremely old-fashioned concept of gender-‘you see today, we are all individuals first and foremost’. And both groups were right, of course; psychological gender is both recognizable across generations, and yet changing constantly. How are we to understand this process? The primary aim of this article is to raise a few tentative theoretical points on this question.
