The social construction framework explains that there is no essential, universally distinct character that is masculine or feminine - behaviors are influenced by a range of factors including class, culture, ability, religion, age, body shape and sexual preference. Construction of gender theory argues that girls and boys are actively involved in constructing their own gendered identities. Men and women can even take up a range of different masculinities and femininities that may at times contradict each other. This construction of gender identities (or subjectivities), varieties of femininities or masculinities, is also seen as dynamic, ongoing, changing and changeable, rather than static or fixed. Allard, Cooper, Hildebrand, & Wealands (1995: 24) assert that we “are not passively shaped by the larger societal forces such as schools or the media, but are active in selecting, adapting and rejecting the dimensions we choose to incorporate, or not, into our version of gender”. This emphasis on the complexities and contradictions in the social relationships that shape our understandings of what it means to be male and female - both individually and collectively, and the notion of agency, or conscious choice, distinguish the model of the social construction of gender from essentialism or sex role theory. Feminist and pro-feminist researchers have also emphasised how power is contextually and historically shaped and regulated and linked to the benefits and costs of “emphasised femininity” - based on “compliance ... and accommodating the desires and interests of men”” and “hegemonic masculinity” characterised by power, authority, aggression, technical competence and heterosexuality. (Connell 1987:183) Poststructuralists emphasise the effects of language and discourse – how gender is spoken into existence; the intersections of race, class, dis/ability and sexuality; the problem of masculinist structures and the need to disrupt and transform male / female binaries. Unless we understand and challenge these binaries we will, according to Alloway (1995:12) perpetuate “gendered ways