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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for or wanting them’ (mila ampela), which is what other men do when looking for sexual partners; sarin’ampela ‘like’ women in the sense that they would prefer to be women. When they put this into practice, this results in the creation of an ‘image’: the ‘image’ of the woman they would like to be.

      My informants described how one starts becoming a sarin’ampela from an early age. As young children, sarin’ampela prefer to spend time with girls rather than with boys, and learn to braid their friends’ hair, carry water on their head, search for head lice, and so on. As adults, their identity is defined most crucially by the fact that they perform ‘women’s jobs’ (asan’ampela) and adopt ‘women’s ways of doing things’ (fomban’ampela). (Astuti 1998: 49)

      If children learn gender by doing more than by being explicitly instructed in what a girl and a boy should do, then the central modes of learning gender in most of the world are through play, work (in the broadest sense of the term, from ‘helping out’ to selling their labour outside of the family) and school (again, very broadly understood and including religious school, academic study and apprenticeships). Boys and girls very often do different types of work and play: boys herd cattle (Yusuff 2018) and shine shoes (Tanle 2018), and girls are more likely to be looking after their younger siblings and doing domestic chores (Grugel et al. 2020; Nascimento Moreira et al. 2017). Girls also tend to start work at younger ages than their brothers because what is considered ‘boys’ work’ often requires more strength and skill than young boys have (Lancy 2008: 244). In her ground-breaking ethnography of children’s work in Kerala, South India, Olga Nieuwenhuys (1994) describes how most of the work that girls do involves the care of their siblings and of the house. When girls help their mothers in weaving coir they do not describe it as work but as helping out. In contrast, when boys do exactly the same tasks they think of it as work and they expect to receive some payment for helping their mothers.

      Although all contemporary societies have a gendered division of labour this does not mean that only girls do ‘girls’ work’ or only boys do ‘boys’ work’. Mothers living in migrant workers’ hostels in South Africa feared for their boys’ safety because they could not find work to occupy them in the city and so their sons were left to their own devices. They did not worry about their daughters because even in the city there were still younger children to be looked after, food to be prepared and housework to be done. However, if there were no girls in the family to do this work, then a boy might be called on to do it instead. One of the researchers’ boy informants said: ‘I do not think there is a difference between boys’ duties and girls’ duties. I have a friend, Sabela, and he does all the things that girls do because his sister does not live here’ (Jones 1993: 123). In East African Childhood (Fox 1967), for example, Joseph Lijembe describes how in the 1940s, when he was himself 4 years old, he was given the role of ‘nursing’, that is feeding, toilet-training and playing with his baby sister. This role fell to him even though boys were not supposed to take care of their siblings because ‘there was no older sister in the family, and my mother had to go off to work in the shamba everyday’ (Fox 1967: 4).

       Global circuits of care and gendered childhood

      Family life is one of the most important sets of relationships within which children learn the significance of gender in all its dimensions from the psychological to the political and economic. For some children globalization has profoundly changed the structure of family life, through the expansion of global circuits of labour. These global circuits often depend on ‘regimes of labour intimacy’ (Chang and Ling 2000; Hochschild 2002) that involve women leaving their children in one country to do paid care for families in another country (see also chapter 10). In principle this shift in the organization of family life could lead to changes in the organization of gender roles: in what is expected of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. One study that explicitly addressed the impact of women’s migration on gendered orders at home found that in fact gender roles often hardened and that care done by mothers shifted to grandmothers and aunts more often than to fathers (Parreñas 2005). Furthermore the care that mothers provide for children had to continue to be done ‘at a distance’. Although both mothers and fathers migrate,

      Parreñas’s hypothesis that gender roles would change since many fathers now had, at least in theory, primary responsibility for their children was not valid for most of her respondents. Mothers were still expected to do the emotional care for their children, and other women – neighbours and relatives – took on their physical care. One of her respondents, a 17-year-old girl, said: ‘I try to carry the burden of solving my problems on my own, because I cannot help but think that