Friday 15 June 2007
Good Boy, Good Girl
I've been studying gender and its impact on children, recently. A lot of the material I've sifted through I knew and understood, like the concept that gender is taught and that from culture to culture roles of gender and gendered behaviour vary. The idea that took me some time to get my head around is how certain behaviour is supported by one gender but not the other, within same gendered groups, and practicing the acceptable behaviours then reinforces the stereotype of the gendered behaviour. Kind of mind blowing, huh? Basically, it means that if we were in groups of girls (or people who identified with the female gender) as children and adolescents then we were allowed to 'try on' the behaviours that were deemed 'okay' for girls to display or practice - the demure one, the bitchy one, the geeky one, the screechy one, the nagging one, the strong one, the tomboy, you get the picture. The same goes for boys (and people who identified with the male gender). There is a fairly wide range of behaviours that is acceptable within same-gendered groups, depending on what social class you were or what activities or hobbies you pursued. At the end of the day, though, you were subject to the scrutiny of your same-gendered peers deciding whether or not you had the acceptable, or an acceptable level of 'girl' or 'boy' behaviour. See, I love this stuff. The theories of how humans behave in packs have fascinated me; at times I've been the outcast of the pack and other times I've been a ringleader and each position comes with its own politics. Either way, behaviour (and deviant behaviour) determines your place in the pack and the reaction of others to you. TBC.
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3 comments:
I like this idea of 'trying on' behavior. I think you're on to something. More significantly, sociologically, behavior is no respector of deomographics. In other words, I think people of ethnicities, races, religions, political persuasions, etc. try on those respective behaviors, too.
Granted, gender is the first demographic we're assigned, so it's the most powerful, but the others--secondarily, tertiarily, etc.--end up playing an important role in helping us define what our gender means, how its valued, and how we're expected to behave.
Just my first two cents... I love this topic and can't wait to see where you go with it!
Judith Butler wrote a brilliant book called "Gender Trouble", which is lengthy and written in difficult, academic text and addresses the necessary fluidity of gender. As I understand it, basically, how can humans expect to have only two categories of behaviour - one for males, one for females - if we have so many biological ways of expressing human sex, not only XY, XX - you get what I mean? There should, therefore, be a range of suitable genders and gendered behaviour for all the variabilities. I'm not sure where I can take this subject but your comment about how we define or construct our gender, and then how those constructs determine the experiences we have as males or females, is the main topic of my latest paper. I, too, love the idea of gender fluidity and think that if certain constraints were lifted from 'boy' or 'girl' behaviour you might, initially, see some disconcert but after a time, I think it would be much more liberating to have no behaviour assigned to a gender or sex.
Gender fluidity. Lovely phrase. My friend, Thea Hillman, calls it 'gender f*cking.' Whenever I'd wear a suit and tie, she'd tell me she liked how I was bending stereotypes and behaviors and setting them on their heads. Anyway--my point is, gender fluidity/gender f*cking--I think they're interchangeable.
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