Breaking down the question

The question asks you to apply a specific theory to a specific outcome. George Herbert Mead did not himself write about gender identity, so the task is to take his account of how the self is formed through interaction and use its stages to explain how a gendered self takes shape. The command word "discuss" and the phrase "the stages" tell you the answer must be organised around Mead's developmental sequence.

The core idea to carry through is that identity, including gender identity, is not innate but social — it emerges as the child learns, through symbols and interaction, to see itself as others see it. Gender is thus something learned and enacted rather than simply given by biology.

Threads to develop:

  • Mead's premise that the self arises in social interaction through the exchange of significant symbols.
  • The developmental stages — imitation, play and game — read as stages in acquiring a gendered self.
  • The role of the generalised other in internalising society's gender expectations.

How to approach it

Begin by stating Mead's central proposition: the self is not born but made in interaction, through language and the capacity to take the role of the other. Distinguish the I and the me briefly to show that gender belongs largely to the me, the socially formed self.

Then move through the stages — the preparatory or imitative stage, the play stage, and the game stage — showing at each how the child acquires gendered meanings, drawing on the note on Mead on the self and identity.

Close with the generalised other as the point at which the broader gender order is internalised, and a brief evaluative note.

Model answer

George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism holds that the self is not present at birth but emerges through social interaction. Human beings communicate through significant symbols — chiefly language — whose meaning is shared, and it is by using these symbols that the child learns to take the role of the other, to view itself from the standpoint of those around it. The self that results has two aspects: the I, the spontaneous, acting subject, and the me, the organised set of others' attitudes that the individual has internalised. Gender identity belongs largely to the me: it is the internalisation of society's expectations about what it means to be a girl or a boy. Applying Mead's developmental stages shows how this gendered self is progressively built.

In the preparatory or imitative stage, the infant merely mimics the gestures of those nearby without grasping their meaning. A small child copies a parent applying make-up or shaving, or handles toys as it sees adults do, absorbing gendered behaviours by imitation before it can understand them. The raw materials of a gendered self are laid down here through unreflective copying of significant others.

In the play stage, the child begins to take the role of particular others one at a time — playing at being mother, father, nurse or soldier. In acting out these roles the child steps into gendered positions and rehearses the attitudes attached to them, learning what a "mother" does or how a "father" is expected to behave. By seeing itself through the eyes of the role it enacts, the child starts to attach gendered meanings to its own conduct and to distinguish behaviour coded as feminine or masculine.

In the game stage, the child can take the roles of many others simultaneously and grasp how they interrelate, as a player in a team must anticipate the parts of all the others at once. Applied to gender, the child now comprehends the whole web of gendered expectations — how conduct is judged not by one person but by the organised community. It internalises the generalised other, the attitude of society as a whole, and with it the prevailing norms of masculinity and femininity. Gender identity is thereby stabilised: the child regulates its own behaviour according to what "people in general" expect of its sex, and comes to experience these expectations as part of its own self.

Assessed briefly, Mead's framework is valuable because it treats gender as learned and social rather than biologically fixed, and it captures the active, interpretive part the child plays in acquiring identity. Its limits are that Mead himself said little about gender, that the account can underplay the coercive and unequal character of gender socialisation emphasised by feminists, and that it says little about how identities are later contested or changed. Even so, as an explanation of how a gendered self is assembled stage by stage through interaction, it remains illuminating.

Examiner's perspective

For a ten-marker, examiners expect the three stages to be named and explained in order and then applied to gender, not merely recounted as a general theory of the self. The commonest weakness is to describe imitation, play and game correctly but forget to gender them; the marks lie in the application.

Accurate use of Mead's vocabulary — significant symbols, taking the role of the other, the generalised other, and the I and me — signals genuine command of the thinker. A short evaluative sentence noting that Mead did not himself theorise gender, and that feminists stress the inequality of the process, lifts the answer above pure description and secures the higher band within the tight word budget.