Barbie Girls Versus Sea Monsters Children Constructing Gender PDF

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Barbie Girls Versus Sea Monsters (Children Constructing Gender) By Michael A. Messner

Thesis ★ Observing highly salient gendered moment of group life among four and five-year-old children to explore conditions under which the gender boundary become activated and enforced ○ First observed through the writers 5 year old son's first season in soccer ○ Analyzed through Hochschild “magnified moments” ■ Episodes of of heightened importance, either epiphanies, moments of intense glee unusual insight or moments in which things go intensely but meaningfully wrong Barbie Girls Versus Sea Monsters ● Boys see the girls chanting ‘Barbie’, get mad and then begin to oppose by saying ‘No Barbies’ ● The parents don’t recognize anything wrong with this until the beginning of the parade where the boys invade the space of the girls ○ Only when the invading of the girls space happen do the parents take the kids away The Performance of Gender ● Since the publication of Judith Butler’s Book “ Gender Trouble (1990)” , academic feminists think of gender not as some “thing” that one has” but as situationally constructed through the performance of active agents ➢ The girls are performing as conventional ‘girls’ at four to five year old visions of femininity ○ The boys become the audience of these girls ➢ The boys in response construct an opposition to the barbie as a non-feminie counter force ○ Aggressively confronting the girls ➢ The parents perform with the other parents and mutually affirming the experience that's taking place as natural between boys and girls ➢ In both these cases, two groups begin to form ○ Opposed groups of boy vs. girl ○ Parents giving the stamp of adult approval to children performance differences ★ These parents lack to understand the children performances of gender (traditional femininity and masculinity opposition) is a construction of gender rather then perceived natural differences ★ Founded in the Theory of Performativity by Walters ○ Performance of gender is never a voluntary act but rather an intimate and systemically connected system of the power of gender [men] to control, violate and configure ★ Kessler & McKenna developed an analysis of gender as everyday practical accompaniments of people’s interactions ○ West and Zimmerman later argue that everyday interactions constructed masculane dominance and feminine deference

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Promotes femeinist theory that gender is actually an agent we can reshape based on the reshaping of our social structure ★ This entire event between Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters was not a full agency between two groups acting out on pure manifestation of sex differences through our biological processes but a micro event of our structrual and cultrual context inhbuting and promoting certain behaviours and interaction The Structure of Gender ● No similar actions between the boy and girl players were every highlighted by the parents ○ Supported by Lorber’s phrase “believing is seeing” ■ We selectively see aspects of social reality that tell us the truth that we prefer to believe rather then the objective truth ● Institutional context charaterizes and normailizes sex segragration among parent coaches and team mangers by structing sex segragration among chuldren ○ Ackers observation that organization even when appearing gender neutral tend to reflect and recreate a naturalizing hierarchical ordering of gender The Culture of Gender ★ Several girl teams were issued pink uniforms ○ Pink is commonly recognized as encoding femine meanings ★ No Boys teams were issued pink ★ After both teams were issued their colors, they were encouraged to theme their team name with their color ○ Sweat Names Cutesy Names that communicate small stature, cuteness and or vulnerability ○ Neutral/paradoxical names that carry no obvious gendered meanings ○ Power names that invoke images of unambiguous strength, aggression and raw power

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Boys were much more likely to choose power names compared to the girls teams who were much less likely to choose power names (4-5 year old group only) Sweet names ceases to exist for both girls and boys at the 14-17 mark...