How is communication influenced by identity

These traits will dictate the people you collaborate with successfully, your team-working ability, and the type of environment you prefer to work in. For example, people who are highly conscientious are more able to work within teams and are less likely to be absent from work. These traits are also connected to leadership ability Neubert, Although it may seem counterintuitive at first, if you score low on the agreeableness scale, you are more likely to be a good leader.

If you consider the division between leaders and followers on a team, those who make decisions and voice their opinions when they do not agree are promoted to higher ranks, while those who are happy to go along with the consensus remain followers.

These traits will also influence your overall enjoyment of the workplace experience. For example, agreeableness and extroversion are indicators that you will enjoy a social workplace where the environment is set up to foster collaboration through an open office concept and lots of team-working. If you score low on these two traits but high on openness and conscientiousness, you might instead be an excellent entrepreneur or skilled in creative pursuits such as design or storytelling.

Your social identity gives a sense of who you are, based on your membership in social groups. Your social identity can also be connected to your cultural identity and ethnicity.

For example, if you are nationalistic or have pride in belonging to a particular country or race, this is part of your social identity, as is your membership in religious groups. But your social identity can also result in discrimination or prejudice toward others if you perceive the other group as somehow inferior to your own. This can occur innocently enough, at first, for example, through your allegiance to a particular sports team.

As part of your identity as a fan of this team, you might jokingly give fans of a rival team a hard time, but be cautious of instances where this could become derogatory or even dangerous. For example, if your fellow fans use an insensitive term for members of the rival group, this can cause insult and anger. The identifiers that shape your cultural identity are conditions like location, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, history, and religion.

Your understanding of the normal behaviour for each of these cultures is shaped by your family and upbringing, your social environment, and the media. Perhaps unconsciously, you mirror these norms, or rebel against them, depending on your environment and the personal traits outlined above. Your perception of the world, and the way you communicate this, is shaped by your cultural identity.

For example, one of our authors had a white South African colleague who, in casual conversation, used a racial term to refer to black South Africans. While offensive to those outside of his cultural and social group, the term was used within it habitually. Depending on your environment, you may feel societal pressure to conform to certain cultural norms.

For example, historically, immigrants to English-speaking countries adopted anglicized names so that their names would be easier to pronounce and so that they could more easily fit into the new culture. For example, Giovanni may have been renamed John as was the case with Giovanni Caboto, the Italian explorer, more widely known as John Cabot. However, consider how important your own name is to your identity. For many of us, our names are a central piece of who we are. Thus, in changing their names, these people ended up changing an integral element of their self-perception.

The cultural constructs of gender and power often play a part in workplace communication, as certain behaviours become ingrained.

Those same traits in female leaders are often considered weak or wishy-washy. It is difficult to be a female leader and be socially beyond reproach in the West.

Most of us are often totally unaware of how we enforce or reinforce these norms that prevent women from reaching their full potential in the workplace. Not to mention the implications on how a female leader might communicate effectively interpersonally. In some authoritarian cultures, it is considered inappropriate for subordinates to make eye contact with their superiors, as this would be disrespectful and impolite.

In some other cultures, women are discouraged from making too much eye contact with men, as this could be misconstrued as romantic interest.

These behaviours and interpretations may be involuntary for people who grew up as part of these cultures. Any of these identity types can be ascribed or avowed. Ascribed identities are personal, social, or cultural identities that others place on us, while avowed identities are those that we claim for ourselves Martin and Nakayama, Sometimes people ascribe an identity to someone else based on stereotypes.

If you encounter a person who likes to read science-fiction books, watches documentaries, wears glasses, and collects Star Trek memorabilia, you may label him or her a nerd.

However, ascribed and avowed identities can match up. To extend the previous example, there has been a movement in recent years to reclaim the label nerd and turn it into something positive, and hence, a nerd subculture has been growing in popularity.

We can see from this example that our ascribed and avowed identities change over the course of our lives. Sometimes they match up, and sometimes they do not, but our personal, social, and cultural identities are key influencers on our perceptions of the world. Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information to represent and understand the environment.

The selection, organization, and interpretation of perceptions can differ among people. When people react differently to the same situation, part of their behavior can be explained by examining how their perceptions are leading to their responses. For example, how do you perceive the images below? What do you see? Ask a friend what they see in the images. Are your perceptions different? Naturally, our perception is about much more than simply how we see images.

We perceive actions, behaviours, symbols, words, and ideas differently, too! When you recognize the internal factors that affect perception selection, you also realize that all of these are subject to change. You can change or modify your personality, motivation, or experience. Being aware of this is helpful in interpersonal communication because we can use our perceptions as a catalyst for changing what we pay attention to personality in order to communicate better motivation.

Once we modify those, we can open ourselves to new patterns experiences and ways of understanding. External factors can be designed in such a way as to affect your perception. Marketers, advertisers, and politicians are extremely well-versed in using external factors to influence perceptual selection. Most people would choose the glass container because it looks bigger and the clarity may make it seem brighter, despite the fact that it contains less water than the bowl.

Similarly, by understanding more about our own perceptions, we begin to realize that there is more than one way to see something and that it is possible to have have an incorrect or inaccurate perception about a person or group, which would hinder our ability to communicate effectively with them.

Examine the vignette below and determine which of the three types of internal selective perception most closely matches this situation:. At the time of her visit, a visa was required for Canadians, and, as part of the visa requirements, travellers needed to be digitally fingerprinted and have an eye scan.

During her first trip there was no lineup. She went and was scanned and printed with no issues. On her second trip, she went to the familiar area, but there were two long lines nearly equal in length. When this occurs, we typically find ourselves compelled to save face. We also help save the face of others. For example, if you trip and fall in public, you might get up quickly and hope no one saw. You might also blame what was on the floor for your fall. If you are with a friend, he might help you save face by pointing out that the cord you tripped over shouldn't have been there, and reassure you that no one saw.

In this way, he helps minimize the embarrassment and restore your competence face. Face threats are common, unfortunately, for many members of marginalized groups. For example, as we age, we lose much of our autonomy.

Many people with disabilities may also perceive threats to their autonomy face due to an inability to do the same things that people without disabilities can do. Marginalization can also create threats to both fellowship face and competence face, because people may feel disrespected and shamed about their membership within a stigmatized group. The act of intentionally providing information about yourself to another person when you believe that person does not already have that information is known as self-disclosure.

It involves sharing a part of yourself with someone else. It is intentional, or deliberate sharing, and truthful. As a relationship develops, social penetration theory tells us that communication increases in both breadth and depth.

In other words, self-disclosure over time is like peeling away the layers of an onion. Breadth is the range of topics one discloses to another, and depth is the level of intimacy with which one discusses those topics.

Self-disclosure varies among relationships, as not every relationship is characterized by the same levels of breadth and depth of self-disclosure. Some relationships are characterized by more breadth, such as co-worker relationships, while others are characterized by more depth, such as your relationship with your doctor. Self-disclosure follows a process, as closeness develops over time. As people get to know each other better they tend to reveal more about themselves.

An exception to this usual progression of intimacy can be found in relationships that are formed online, where the lack of face-to-face interaction actually encourages self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is typically reciprocal, which means that when one person self-discloses to another, the second person is expected to self-disclose in kind.

It is also influenced by culture and gender roles; self-disclosure is affected by the expectations imposed upon us based on our gender and the culture in which we find ourselves.

Self-disclosure has many important benefits. It increases trust and enhances relationships. Sharing with those in our lives helps us to maintain those relationships and reinforce the trust that we share with those people. Through reciprocity, self-disclosure allows us to get to know other people and for them to get to know us. Self-disclosure can also be an emotional release as sometimes we need to get something off our chest. We can also self-disclose in ways that help others, such as sharing something about yourself in an effort to console someone who is going through a hard time.

Alcoholics Anonymous is an example of self-disclosing in efforts to help others. Though beneficial, self-disclosure also carries certain risks. We risk rejection if the person doesn't accept or like what we have disclosed. It can also give an impression of obligating others if you have self-disclosed, but they are not yet ready to, although they feel compelled because you have.

Self-disclosure runs the risk of hurting others with disclosures that are too critical or too personal. It can also violate other people's privacy when you share something with one person in your life about another person in your life.

How we self-identify, how we feel about our own identity, the techniques used in image management and facework, and considerations of self-disclosure all affect our communications with others.

In general, we tend to feel more comfortable around those that validate our identities and our self-esteem, and help us present favorable public self-images. It is not only useful to recognize this about ourselves, but also to recognize that everyone has the same needs.

This awareness can lead us to more competent communication and ultimately to greater relational satisfaction. Open Main Menu. Browse Courses My Classes. Sign In Subscribe Course Catalog. Understanding Communication and the Self. Self-concept The idea of self-concept is our own identity. Interested in learning more? Why not take an online Interpersonal Communication course? Online Class : Lean Management. Online Class : Marketing Copywriter Online Class : Sociology Online Class : Respectful International Workplace.

Online Class : Mastering Conversation Skills. Online Class : Collaboration Skills. Online Class : Introduction to Ethics. Online Class : Managing Your Career. In a group in Africa, young boys are responsible for taking care of babies and are encouraged to be nurturing. Gender has been constructed over the past few centuries in political and deliberate ways that have tended to favor men in terms of power. In the late s and early s, scientists who measure skulls, also known as craniometrists, claimed that men were more intelligent than women because they had larger brains.

These are just a few of the many instances of how knowledge was created by seemingly legitimate scientific disciplines that we can now clearly see served to empower men and disempower women. This system is based on the ideology of patriarchy System of social structures and practices that maintains the values, priorities, and interests of men as a group.

One of the ways patriarchy is maintained is by its relative invisibility. While women have been the focus of much research on gender differences, males have been largely unexamined. But that ignores that fact that men have a gender, too. Masculinities studies have challenged that notion by examining how masculinities are performed.

There have been challenges to the construction of gender in recent decades. Since the s, scholars and activists have challenged established notions of what it means to be a man or a woman.

Her speech highlighted the multiple layers of oppression faced by black women. You can watch actress Alfre Woodard deliver an interpretation of the speech in Video Clip 8. Feminism has gotten a bad reputation based on how it has been portrayed in the media and by some politicians.

When I teach courses about gender, I often ask my students to raise their hand if they consider themselves feminists. I usually only have a few, if any, who do. However, when I ask students to raise their hand if they believe women have been treated unfairly and that there should be more equity, most students raise their hand. Gender and communication scholar Julia Wood has found the same trend and explains that a desire to make a more equitable society for everyone is at the root of feminism.

She shares comments from a student that capture this disconnect: Julia T. Belmont, CA: Thomas Wadsworth, , 4—5. I would never call myself a feminist, because that word has so many negative connotations. I do think women should have the same kinds of rights, including equal pay for equal work. The feminist movement also gave some momentum to the transgender rights movement. Transgender people may or may not seek medical intervention like surgery or hormone treatments to help match their physiology with their gender identity.

The term transgender includes other labels such as transsexual , transvestite , cross-dresser , and intersex , among others.

Terms like hermaphrodite and she-male are not considered appropriate. As with other groups, it is best to allow someone to self-identify first and then honor their preferred label. If you are unsure of which pronouns to use when addressing someone, you can use gender-neutral language or you can use the pronoun that matches with how they are presenting. If someone has long hair, make-up, and a dress on, but you think their biological sex is male due to other cues, it would be polite to address them with female pronouns, since that is the gender identity they are expressing.

Gender as a cultural identity has implications for many aspects of our lives, including real-world contexts like education and work. Schools are primary grounds for socialization, and the educational experience for males and females is different in many ways from preschool through college. Although not always intentional, schools tend to recreate the hierarchies and inequalities that exist in society.

Given that we live in a patriarchal society, there are communicative elements present in school that support this. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, , 47— For example, teachers are more likely to call on and pay attention to boys in a classroom, giving them more feedback in the form of criticism, praise, and help.

This sends an implicit message that boys are more worthy of attention and valuable than girls. Teachers are also more likely to lead girls to focus on feelings and appearance and boys to focus on competition and achievement. The focus on appearance for girls can lead to anxieties about body image. Gender inequalities are also evident in the administrative structure of schools, which puts males in positions of authority more than females. While females make up 75 percent of the educational workforce, only 22 percent of superintendents and 8 percent of high school principals are women.

Similar trends exist in colleges and universities, with women only accounting for 26 percent of full professors. These inequalities in schools correspond to larger inequalities in the general workforce. While there are more women in the workforce now than ever before, they still face a glass ceiling, which is a barrier for promotion to upper management.

Many of my students have been surprised at the continuing pay gap that exists between men and women. In , women earned about seventy-seven cents to every dollar earned by men. In , Equal Pay Day was on April This signifies that for a woman to earn the same amount of money a man earned in a year, she would have to work more than three months extra, until April 11, to make up for the difference.

While race and gender are two of the first things we notice about others, sexuality is often something we view as personal and private. One only needs to observe popular culture and media for a short time to see that sexuality permeates much of our public discourse. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, , — Sexuality is also biological in that it connects to physiological functions that carry significant social and political meaning like puberty, menstruation, and pregnancy.

Sexuality connects to public health issues like sexually transmitted infections STIs , sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and teen pregnancy.

Sexuality is at the center of political issues like abortion, sex education, and gay and lesbian rights. While all these contribute to sexuality as a cultural identity, the focus in this section is on sexual orientation. The most obvious way sexuality relates to identity is through sexual orientation. The terms we most often use to categorize sexual orientation are heterosexual , gay , lesbian , and bisexual.

Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are sometimes referred to as sexual minorities. While the term sexual preference has been used previously, sexual orientation is more appropriate, since preference implies a simple choice. The term homosexual can be appropriate in some instances, but it carries with it a clinical and medicalized tone. So many people prefer a term like gay , which was chosen and embraced by gay people, rather than homosexual , which was imposed by a then discriminatory medical system.

The gay and lesbian rights movement became widely recognizable in the United States in the s and continues on today, as evidenced by prominent issues regarding sexual orientation in national news and politics. National and international groups like the Human Rights Campaign advocate for rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer GLBTQ communities. Gays and lesbians constitute the most visible of the groups and receive the most attention and funding.

Bisexuals are rarely visible or included in popular cultural discourses or in social and political movements. Transgender issues have received much more attention in recent years, but transgender identity connects to gender more than it does to sexuality.

Last, queer is a term used to describe a group that is diverse in terms of identities but usually takes a more activist and at times radical stance that critiques sexual categories.

While queer was long considered a derogatory label, and still is by some, the queer activist movement that emerged in the s and early s reclaimed the word and embraced it as a positive. As you can see, there is a diversity of identities among sexual minorities, just as there is variation within races and genders. As with other cultural identities, notions of sexuality have been socially constructed in different ways throughout human history.

There is resistance to classifying ability as a cultural identity, because we follow a medical model of disability Model that places disability as an individual and medical rather than social or cultural issue. While much of what distinguishes able-bodied and cognitively able from disabled is rooted in science, biology, and physiology, there are important sociocultural dimensions.

Ascribing an identity of disabled to a person can be problematic. If there is a mental or physical impairment, it should be diagnosed by a credentialed expert. People are tracked into various educational programs based on their physical and cognitive abilities, and there are many cases of people being mistakenly labeled disabled who were treated differently despite their protest of the ascribed label.

Students who did not speak English as a first language, for example, were—and perhaps still are—sometimes put into special education classes. Ability, just as the other cultural identities discussed, has institutionalized privileges and disadvantages associated with it. Ableism A system of beliefs and practices that produces a physical and mental standard that is projected as normal for a human being and labels deviations from it abnormal.

Ability privilege refers to the unearned advantages that are provided for people who fit the cognitive and physical norms. I once attended a workshop about ability privilege led by a man who was visually impaired. He talked about how, unlike other cultural identities that are typically stable over a lifetime, ability fluctuates for most people. We have all experienced times when we are more or less able.

Perhaps you broke your leg and had to use crutches or a wheelchair for a while. Getting sick for a prolonged period of time also lessens our abilities, but we may fully recover from any of these examples and regain our ability privilege.

Statistically, people with disabilities make up the largest minority group in the United States, with an estimated 20 percent of people five years or older living with some form of disability. Medical advances have allowed some people with disabilities to live longer and more active lives than before, which has led to an increase in the number of people with disabilities. This number could continue to increase, as we have thousands of veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with physical disabilities or psychological impairments such as posttraumatic stress disorder.

As recently disabled veterans integrate back into civilian life, they will be offered assistance and accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

As disability has been constructed in US history, it has intersected with other cultural identities. Arguments supporting racial inequality and tighter immigration restrictions also drew on notions of disability, framing certain racial groups as prone to mental retardation, mental illness, or uncontrollable emotions and actions.

See Table 8. These thoughts led to a dark time in US history, as the eugenics movement sought to limit reproduction of people deemed as deficient. During the early part of the s, the eugenics movement was the epitome of the move to rehabilitate or reject people with disabilities. Garland E. During the eugenics movement in the United States, more than sixty thousand people in thirty-three states were involuntarily sterilized.

Although the eugenics movement as it was envisioned and enacted then is unthinkable today, some who have studied the eugenics movement of the early s have issued warnings that a newly packaged version of eugenics could be upon us. Much has changed for people with disabilities in the United States in the past fifty years. The independent living movement ILM was a part of the disability rights movement that took shape along with other social movements of the s and s. The ILM calls for more individual and collective action toward social change by people with disabilities.

Some of the goals of the ILM include reframing disability as a social and political rather than just a medical issue, a shift toward changing society rather than just rehabilitating people with disabilities, a view of accommodations as civil rights rather than charity, and more involvement by people with disabilities in the formulation and execution of policies relating to them.

Paul K. As society better adapts to people with disabilities, there will be more instances of interability communication taking place. It is through intercultural communication that we come to create, understand, and transform culture and identity.

Intercultural communication Communication between people with differing cultural identities. One reason we should study intercultural communication is to foster greater self-awareness. Intercultural communication can allow us to step outside of our comfortable, usual frame of reference and see our culture through a different lens.

Additionally, as we become more self-aware, we may also become more ethical communicators as we challenge our ethnocentrism The tendency to view our own culture as superior to other cultures.

As was noted earlier, difference matters, and studying intercultural communication can help us better negotiate our changing world. Changing economies and technologies intersect with culture in meaningful ways.

As was noted earlier, technology has created for some a global village The perception that the world is smaller due to new technology that makes travelling and sending messages across great distances faster. People in most fields will be more successful if they are prepared to work in a globalized world.

Obviously, the global market sets up the need to have intercultural competence for employees who travel between locations of a multinational corporation. Perhaps less obvious may be the need for teachers to work with students who do not speak English as their first language and for police officers, lawyers, managers, and medical personnel to be able to work with people who have various cultural identities.

Many people who are now college age struggle to imagine a time without cell phones and the Internet. The digital divide was a term that initially referred to gaps in access to computers. The term expanded to include access to the Internet since it exploded onto the technology scene and is now connected to virtually all computing.

Discussions of the digital divide are now turning more specifically to high-speed Internet access, and the discussion is moving beyond the physical access divide to include the skills divide, the economic opportunity divide, and the democratic divide. This is relevant to cultural identities because there are already inequalities in terms of access to technology based on age, race, and class.

Dari E. Sylvester and Adam J. Scholars argue that these continued gaps will only serve to exacerbate existing cultural and social inequalities. From an international perspective, the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of access to high-speed Internet. And Finland in became the first country in the world to declare that all its citizens have a legal right to broadband Internet access. People in rural areas in the United States are especially disconnected from broadband service, with about 11 million rural Americans unable to get the service at home.

From paying bills online, to interacting with government services, to applying for jobs, to taking online college classes, to researching and participating in political and social causes, the Internet connects to education, money, and politics. Intercultural communication is complicated, messy, and at times contradictory.

Therefore it is not always easy to conceptualize or study. Taking a dialectical approach allows us to capture the dynamism of intercultural communication. A dialectic A relationship between two opposing concepts that constantly push and pull one another.

To put it another way, thinking dialectically helps us realize that our experiences often occur in between two different phenomena. This perspective is especially useful for interpersonal and intercultural communication, because when we think dialectically, we think relationally. This means we look at the relationship between aspects of intercultural communication rather than viewing them in isolation. Intercultural communication occurs as a dynamic in-betweenness that, while connected to the individuals in an encounter, goes beyond the individuals, creating something unique.

Holding a dialectical perspective may be challenging for some Westerners, as it asks us to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously, which goes against much of what we are taught in our formal education. Dichotomies Dualistic ways of thinking that highlight opposites, reducing the ability to see gradations that exist in between concepts.

Rather, they accept as part of their reality that things that seem opposite are actually interdependent and complement each other. I argue that a dialectical approach is useful in studying intercultural communication because it gets us out of our comfortable and familiar ways of thinking.

Since so much of understanding culture and identity is understanding ourselves, having an unfamiliar lens through which to view culture can offer us insights that our familiar lenses will not. Specifically, we can better understand intercultural communication by examining six dialectics see Figure 8.

Figure 8. Source: Adapted from Judith N. The cultural-individual dialectic Dialectic that captures the interplay between patterned behaviors learned from a cultural group and individual behaviors that may be variations on or counter to those of the larger culture. This dialectic is useful because it helps us account for exceptions to cultural norms.

For example, earlier we learned that the United States is said to be a low-context culture, which means that we value verbal communication as our primary, meaning-rich form of communication. Conversely, Japan is said to be a high-context culture, which means they often look for nonverbal clues like tone, silence, or what is not said for meaning. Does that mean we come from a high-context culture? Does the Japanese man who speaks more than is socially acceptable come from a low-context culture?

The answer to both questions is no. Neither the behaviors of a small percentage of individuals nor occasional situational choices constitute a cultural pattern. The personal-contextual dialectic Dialectic that highlights the connection between our personal patterns of and preferences for communicating and how various contexts influence the personal. In some cases, our communication patterns and preferences will stay the same across many contexts.

In other cases, a context shift may lead us to alter our communication and adapt. For example, an American businesswoman may prefer to communicate with her employees in an informal and laid-back manner. In the United States, we know that there are some accepted norms that communication in work contexts is more formal than in personal contexts.

However, we also know that individual managers often adapt these expectations to suit their own personal tastes. This type of managerial discretion would likely not go over as well in Malaysia where there is a greater emphasis put on power distance. So while the American manager may not know to adapt to the new context unless she has a high degree of intercultural communication competence, Malaysian managers would realize that this is an instance where the context likely influences communication more than personal preferences.

The differences-similarities dialectic Dialectic that allows us to examine how we are simultaneously similar to and different from others.

However, the overwhelming majority of current research on gender and communication finds that while there are differences between how men and women communicate, there are far more similarities. Even the language we use to describe the genders sets up dichotomies. The static-dynamic dialectic Dialectic that suggests culture and communication change over time, yet often appear to be and are experienced as stable.

Although it is true that our cultural beliefs and practices are rooted in the past, we have already discussed how cultural categories that most of us assume to be stable, like race and gender, have changed dramatically in just the past fifty years.

Some cultural values remain relatively consistent over time, which allows us to make some generalizations about a culture. For example, cultures have different orientations to time.

The Chinese have a longer-term orientation to time than do Europeans. Myron W. Boston, MA: Pearson, , — This is evidenced in something that dates back as far as astrology. The Chinese zodiac is done annually The Year of the Monkey, etc. While this cultural orientation to time has been around for generations, as China becomes more Westernized in terms of technology, business, and commerce, it could also adopt some views on time that are more short term.

We always view history through the lens of the present. Perhaps no example is more entrenched in our past and avoided in our present as the history of slavery in the United States. Where I grew up in the Southern United States, race was something that came up frequently. The high school I attended was 30 percent minorities mostly African American and also had a noticeable number of white teens mostly male who proudly displayed Confederate flags on their clothing or vehicles.

There has been controversy over whether the Confederate flag is a symbol of hatred or a historical symbol that acknowledges the time of the Civil War. I remember an instance in a history class where we were discussing slavery and the subject of repatriation, or compensation for descendants of slaves, came up. Why should I have to care about this now?

The privileges-disadvantages dialectic Dialectic that captures the complex interrelation of unearned, systemic advantages and disadvantages that operate among our various identities. As was discussed earlier, our society consists of dominant and nondominant groups. To understand this dialectic, we must view culture and identity through a lens of intersectionality Acknowledges that we each have multiple cultures and identities that intersect with each other.

Because our identities are complex, no one is completely privileged and no one is completely disadvantaged. For example, while we may think of a white, heterosexual male as being very privileged, he may also have a disability that leaves him without the able-bodied privilege that a Latina woman has. This is often a difficult dialectic for my students to understand, because they are quick to point out exceptions that they think challenge this notion. For example, many people like to point out Oprah Winfrey as a powerful African American woman.

When we view privilege and disadvantage at the cultural level, we cannot let individual exceptions distract from the systemic and institutionalized ways in which some people in our society are disadvantaged while others are privileged. As these dialectics reiterate, culture and communication are complex systems that intersect with and diverge from many contexts. A better understanding of all these dialectics helps us be more critical thinkers and competent communicators in a changing world.

France, like the United States, has a constitutional separation between church and state. As many countries in Europe, including France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, have experienced influxes of immigrants, many of them Muslim, there have been growing tensions among immigration, laws, and religion.

In , France passed a law banning the wearing of a niqab pronounced knee-cobb , which is an Islamic facial covering worn by some women that only exposes the eyes.

Although the law went into effect in April of , the first fines were issued in late September of Hind Ahmas, a woman who was fined, says she welcomes the punishment because she wants to challenge the law in the European Court of Human Rights.

She also stated that she respects French laws but cannot abide by this one. Her choice to wear the veil has been met with more than a fine. The bill that contained the law was broadly supported by politicians and the public in France, and similar laws are already in place in Belgium and are being proposed in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Intercultural relationships Relationships formed between people with different cultural identities and includes friends, romantic partners, family, and coworkers. Intercultural relationships have benefits and drawbacks.

Some of the benefits include increasing cultural knowledge, challenging previously held stereotypes, and learning new skills. This same friend also taught me how to make some delicious Vietnamese foods that I continue to cook today. I likely would not have gained this cultural knowledge or skill without the benefits of my intercultural friendship. Intercultural relationships also present challenges, however. The dialectics discussed earlier affect our intercultural relationships. The similarities-differences dialectic in particular may present challenges to relationship formation.

Perceived differences in general also create anxiety and uncertainty that is not as present in intracultural relationships. Once some similarities are found, the tension within the dialectic begins to balance out and uncertainty and anxiety lessen.

Negative stereotypes may also hinder progress toward relational development, especially if the individuals are not open to adjusting their preexisting beliefs. Intercultural relationships may also take more work to nurture and maintain. The benefit of increased cultural awareness is often achieved, because the relational partners explain their cultures to each other. This type of explaining requires time, effort, and patience and may be an extra burden that some are not willing to carry.

I experienced this type of backlash from my white classmates in middle school who teased me for hanging out with the African American kids on my bus. While these challenges range from mild inconveniences to more serious repercussions, they are important to be aware of.

As noted earlier, intercultural relationships can take many forms. The focus of this section is on friendships and romantic relationships, but much of the following discussion can be extended to other relationship types. Even within the United States, views of friendship vary based on cultural identities.

Despite the differences in emphasis, research also shows that the overall definition of a close friend is similar across cultures. A close friend is thought of as someone who is helpful and nonjudgmental, who you enjoy spending time with but can also be independent, and who shares similar interests and personality traits.

Intercultural friendship formation may face challenges that other friendships do not. Prior intercultural experience and overcoming language barriers increase the likelihood of intercultural friendship formation. Patricia M. Sias, Jolanta A. In some cases, previous intercultural experience, like studying abroad in college or living in a diverse place, may motivate someone to pursue intercultural friendships once they are no longer in that context.

When friendships cross nationality, it may be necessary to invest more time in common understanding, due to language barriers. With sufficient motivation and language skills, communication exchanges through self-disclosure can then further relational formation.

Research has shown that individuals from different countries in intercultural friendships differ in terms of the topics and depth of self-disclosure, but that as the friendship progresses, self-disclosure increases in depth and breadth. Further, as people overcome initial challenges to initiating an intercultural friendship and move toward mutual self-disclosure, the relationship becomes more intimate, which helps friends work through and move beyond their cultural differences to focus on maintaining their relationship.

In this sense, intercultural friendships can be just as strong and enduring as other friendships. Again, intercultural friendships illustrate the complexity of culture and the importance of remaining mindful of your communication and the contexts in which it occurs.

Romantic relationships are influenced by society and culture, and still today some people face discrimination based on who they love. Specifically, sexual orientation and race affect societal views of romantic relationships. Although the United States, as a whole, is becoming more accepting of gay and lesbian relationships, there is still a climate of prejudice and discrimination that individuals in same-gender romantic relationships must face.

Despite some physical and virtual meeting places for gay and lesbian people, there are challenges for meeting and starting romantic relationships that are not experienced for most heterosexual people. Letitia Anne Peplau and Leah R.

Clyde Hendrick and Susan S. But some gay and lesbian people may feel pressured into or just feel more comfortable not disclosing or displaying their sexual orientation at work or perhaps even to some family and friends, which closes off important social networks through which most romantic relationships begin.

There are also some challenges faced by gay and lesbian partners regarding relationship termination. Gay and lesbian couples do not have the same legal and societal resources to manage their relationships as heterosexual couples; for example, gay and lesbian relationships are not legally recognized in most states, it is more difficult for a gay or lesbian couple to jointly own property or share custody of children than heterosexual couples, and there is little public funding for relationship counseling or couples therapy for gay and lesbian couples.

While this lack of barriers may make it easier for gay and lesbian partners to break out of an unhappy or unhealthy relationship, it could also lead couples to termination who may have been helped by the sociolegal support systems available to heterosexuals.

Despite these challenges, relationships between gay and lesbian people are similar in other ways to those between heterosexuals. Gay, lesbian, and heterosexual people seek similar qualities in a potential mate, and once relationships are established, all these groups experience similar degrees of relational satisfaction.

Despite the myth that one person plays the man and one plays the woman in a relationship, gay and lesbian partners do not have set preferences in terms of gender role. In fact, research shows that while women in heterosexual relationships tend to do more of the housework, gay and lesbian couples were more likely to divide tasks so that each person has an equal share of responsibility.

Keeping in mind that identity and culture are complex, we can see that gay and lesbian relationships can also be intercultural if the partners are of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.

While interracial relationships have occurred throughout history, there have been more historical taboos in the United States regarding relationships between African Americans and white people than other racial groups. Robert A.