Childhood in a Global Perspective. Karen Wells. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Karen Wells
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: История
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509541720
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sites where this gets done. The classic study by Rubin, Provenzano and Luria (1974), which found that parents assign characteristics to new-borns on the basis of the child’s gender and in the absence of real physical differences, has been replicated by several subsequent studies. Parents’ essentialism about gender (the belief that gender is a natural category which has innate associations with behaviour and attitudes) has been shown in a correlational study to predict their children’s gender-typed preferences (Meyer and Gelman 2016). Subsequent studies in the USA have confirmed that parents do not (or do not believe they) parent girls and boys differently (Mesman and Groeneveld 2018: 22).

      Despite the evidence that parents in the USA do not explicitly parent in gender-normative ways, which is congruent with a discourse that social structures like gender and race do not determine individual’s life chances, other studies have shown that parents give both direct and indirect messages to their children about gender roles. This may involve gendering toys (that is, suggesting explicitly or implicitly that some toys are for girls and other toys are for boys) (Fisher-Thompson 1993; Seiter 1995); encouraging boys to be risk-takers and girls to be nice to others (Meyer and Gelman 2016); the distribution of household chores (Cordero-Coma and Esping-Andersen 2018); or the way that their bedrooms are decorated (MacPhee and Prendergast 2019). When families have limited budgets ‘parents are more likely to invest in developmentally enhancing activities for sons than for daughters’ (McHale et al. 2003: 133).

      There is also a good deal of empirical evidence that children have different experiences with their fathers and with their mothers and that these differences are significant for children’s gendered socialization. Leaper et al. (1998) found that mothers talk more to their children but are also more negative in their talk than fathers are. Some studies have found that the differences in how fathers and mothers interact with their children are reduced if mothers work longer hours and fathers are then more involved in daily family life; that is, if there is a more gender-equal distribution of care in the home. However, an ethnography of how the migration of Filipino women has impacted on gender roles in the family as fathers are left to care for their children found that gender norms were not undermined and in fact were strengthened (Parreñas 2005).

       Doing gender

      Another way of thinking about gender is as unavoidable social practices or what West and Zimmerman (1987) called, in their seminal paper of the same title, ‘Doing gender’. They cite Spencer Cahill’s (1986) work on gender development to illustrate their point that although gender is a performance it is not one we can refuse:

      little boys appropriate the gender ideal of ‘efficaciousness’, that is, being able to affect the physical and social environment through the exercise of physical strength or appropriate skills. In contrast little girls learn to value ‘appearance’, that is, managing themselves as ornamental objects. Both classes of children learn that the recognition and use of sex categorization in interaction are not optional, but mandatory. (West and Zimmerman 1987: 141; emphasis added)

      Despite West and Zimmerman’s claims of a radical break with gender socialization theories, their contribution to gender theory is more about the importance of naturally occurring data to understanding gender than it is a radical reworking of the concept of gender itself.

      Early theories of gender socialization were rather superficial; their strength was in the way that they challenged the idea that observable differences in the behaviour of girls and boys, and women and men, were somehow natural or biological. It therefore opened up the possibilities of changing gender-based inequalities. Theories of how children come to learn to ‘do’ or perform gender retain this advantage of gender socialization theories and in addition they enable us to think of children as active participants in shaping their social worlds. Empirically perhaps there is not so much distance between them; whether we learn, practise or perform gender, the crucial point is that we cannot avoid gendered positions and practices, so long as gender is accepted as a meaningful distinction between humans.

      Sarin’ampela