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Yes, that’s a verb. “Gendering” is definitely an activity engaged in by parents, friends, doctors, midwives, passers-by and children old enough to walk unaided. I say “gendering” because this is all about constructing an identity for someone primarily predicated on exactly what gender they qualify as of the two rigidly codified genders society has available for common use.
Are there really only two? Judith Butler argues that we could construct as many as we like. The problem is how to construct them in a spirit other than that of resistance to the two we have.
Or do we really have as many as two? Butler also documents that actually, we only have one gender that has political force or power – the male one. Being female is something you do when you aren’t a man. Male is default and unquestioned. Female is something one assembles in contrast to being male and in doing so, one reinforces the Real Gender.
Anyway – gender is something we can perform – we don’t have to follow the roles prescribed (literally) for us from birth.
The above is a travesty of Butler’s deeply felt and very complex writings (and a very selective travesty at that) but over the last few weeks, issues which have been very abstracted to me have started to become uncomfortably real.
It begins before birth with uneasy jokes about what colour baby-grows we’ll allow in the house. It turns out that if they’re gifts, the only colour available is pink. People start talking about ‘pretty clothes’.
I find myself starting to favour the pink all-in-ones. All of a sudden, my tiny, beautiful daughter is becoming a secret ideological battleground where every time I change her clothes, I struggle with a hegemonic ideology of what it is to be a girl or a boy. Are we going to buy any dresses? (No – supermum doesn’t see why she can’t wear jeans). What do we do with ‘pretty things’? Am I disadvantaging her by resisting positioning her as a girl? Why am I uncomfortable at her being identitified as a boy when I had little problem with dudelet being mistaken for a girl? I didn’t mind him being called ‘pretty’. I suspect I don’t want people to call her ‘handsome’.
How will I explain to her how all this works when I’m only just starting to comprehend it myself? And how can I do it without putting down dudelet? How do we bring someone up to comfortable with her own idea of what it means to be a ’she’ without bricking her into a limiting corner of ’she-ness’ designed by men for the benefit of men?
Fathers with girls, how do you address this?
Filed under: family, feminism, gender, ideology, parenting, politics | Tagged: boys and girls, family, feminism, gender, ideology, Judith Butler, parenting, politics
I have struggled with this too. My son loves “pretty” things, and even had a favorite dress for a while. Which we only let him wear in our house, for the most part. My husband was worried that, even though at my son’s age it doesn’t really matter, if my son continued to want to wear dresses he would face negative social pressures later. I remember certain baby or toddler clothes that somehow seemed just “unmasculine”, though I couldn’t explain why.
I have no idea how to explain to my kids why, in our culture, only girls wear dresses but both boys and girls can wear pants. Why boys’ clothes are all fairly dull and unornamented, while it is near to impossible sometimes to find girls’ clothes that aren’t pink and sparkly. So far, I just tell them “that’s how people dress where we live.” Weak, I know.
Both of them love to dress up, in which as imaginative play I let them have free rein. We are really aggressive about limiting their regular clothes to plain colors or patterns, few images and no words at all.
One of these days I just know my son is going to announce that when he grows up he’s going off to Tahiti where he can gladly wear a sarong all the time.
I’ll get Aly to read this and respond :)
Well, I’m a Mammy with a boy, but I was worried, before he was born, that he would turn into a horrible aggressive karate-killer. The clothes and toys available for boys reinforce this. I’ve lost count of the number of outfits I’ve seen with skulls on them, and these are for little boys as young as a year old! But I have to say that from a very early age he’s asserted his personality so strongly and has done exactly what he wants to do. I don’t even know if he’s aware of gender yet (we had a battle yesterday when he insisted that a female Fisher Price playperson was “MAN!”, guess who won that one?!) Also, I haven’t seen him behave aggressively at all, which is a relief, and he loves taking very good care of his teddies. I suppose it’s just a case of letting these little individuals be their own people, as much as possible in this sort of society. Although I think the situation for little girls is worse, the pinkness of the clothes doesn’t bother me so much as all the straplessness and skimpiness – *shudder*
I think it’s easier with a boy – probably because, as you say, it’s a default.
This essay on a similar topic:
http://www.literarymama.com/oped/archives/001116.html
I found really powerful – made me realise that there is no such thing as ungendered clothing – we are always making choices, and the most we can do is acknowledge those choices.
Chatterboy is blonde, and I found it fascinating how many people assumed he was a girl (as a baby) for that reason. But we’ve hesitated before letting him out of the house in his preferred pink – worrying about teasing seems such a cop-out, but it is a real worry, too.
It is very difficult. I have trouble getting Amy to wear anything but pink. The other day she refused to believe that I was a nurse because “girls are nurses daddy”. It really saddens me.
I’m to blame as much as society, for the subtle gender prompting rather than the blatent.
It’s very difficult.
Wow! Great post, lots of food for thought!
I’m a Mum with two very different girls. Eldest – very noisy extrovert, lives in jeans/ug boots, spends hours on hair/make-up/long painted nails, preferred Barbie to baby dolls, loves English, hates maths, camping, creepy crawlies and washing up (because of her nails!), has a tattoo, wants to be a hairdresser or a solicitor! Youngest – much quieter, thoughtful, prefers her own company, very sporty, ‘trackies’/trainers, plays with baby dolls, loves maths and science, hates arguments and loud music, potty about ponies, rescues baby birds, wants to be a farmer or a midwife.
The whole gender/engendering issue has me more confused, the more I think about it! My girls have grown up surrounded by students studying English Lit/Cultural Studies, often engaged in healthy debates about gender. When my eldest daughter was 8 years old, she told us all off for referring to God as masculine: ‘How do you know God isn’t a girl?’
I have always encouraged them to choose their own clothes/toys/books, to experience lots of different activities and to remember that they can do anything they want to do, be anything they want to be. I question choices they make, encouraging them to understand why they are making them, but always support them.
If they ask me what I think/believe about something, I tell them, but I also tell them other possible opinions and encourage them to make up their own minds. (For example, I am fascinated by religion, but not a follower of any. My youngest daughter is a Christian and goes to a Catholic school.)
I have recently been looking at this from a new perspective: brain physiology. There are apparently definitive differences in male and female brains. Hmmm … but is this the result or the cause of engendering? (Yes, definitely just more confused!)
Gender has certainly been the subject of many lively, interesting conversations with my daughters. I hope they will continue to be curious and open-minded, because the conversations get more interesting as they get older!
Thank you for the very helpful comment on my blog, by the way! :o)
Hey folks! I’ve just had a similar experience to some of you (and not for the first time). Buying dudelet spare shoes in Woolworths, we ask him what he likes. He goes straight for the pink trainers with butterfly patterns. Supermum and I look at each other, thinking the same thing – should we let him have some? How will the boys at his school treat him. “They’re all too big…” offers supermum tentatively. “Look – they’ve got flashing lights on, ” I say, casually tapping a sliver pair on a shelf. Coloured lights flare up and down their full length and dudelet immediately switches allegiance. I feel relieved. And guilty.
Oh and PG, thanks for the link to that article. Everyone used to mistake dudelet for a girl as well.
Moondreamer, I’ll be in my late fifties by the time I’m facing bringing up a teenage girl. You’re scaring me.
Achelois – it would be nice to ‘meet’ Aly :)
Helen, that innocent lack of an assigned gender. How I miss it!
Henitsirk, all bets are off when they start going to school. Peer pressure. So hard to resist.
Dan, dudelet went through a phase of announcing loudly that the baby was ‘only a girl’. God only knows where he heard that.
Not a father and only have sons but I would say we all suffer from the constructions of gender. Without losing sight of the ways we can be constricted by gender, put the little person’s personhood first as much as you can.
I wish there was a good answer to this. My daughters both wore pink baby-gros, but now as their own tastes and styles are developing, one is veering away from a feminine look to a much more tomboyish, jean-clad look and the other is still stuck in the world of pink. Their little brother doesn’t have any pink clothes, but he does get dressed up as a fairy quite often, complete with high heels, handbag and fairy wings.
As Anna says, we are all constricted by gender, but I would like there to be ways out of that constriction and I’m not sure if I’m brave enough to lead the way!
My main concern is my son’s growing sexism. He has already compartmentalised what girls can do and what boys can do and he’s only four years old.
I don’t think we can avoid gendering and even if individual parents try to avoid it society would ensure that boys remain boys and girls wear pretty frocks.
We let Mariam wear blue overalls and Ray wore her pink baby-grows!
I have 3 daughters, two are identical girl twins. So identical I can only tell who is who in baby pictures by what they are wearing! One I dressed in pastels, the other in primary colours. A random choice and more to do with identification than anything else. They are now nearly 10. The one we dressed mainly in pastels loves pink and glitter (I didn’t insist on pink btw) and I worry if I have, in someway, influenced her. On the other hand, she mixes that pink with jeans and boots and hates make up.(She wants to be a hairdresser or a teacher). The other one is more of what I call urban chic: black and grey (with glitter – naturally) with jeans and boots, loves make up and wants to be a business woman (for the suits I think!) when she grows up. I read loads of books about how to avoid identical twins not finding their own identity that it overshadowed the worry that I was gender stereotyping them. In addition, my eldest daughter is somewhere in between. The only constant in my house is a love of jeans and (fake) ugg boots paired with a love of reading. Dolls come out every so often get played with constantly for a week or so and then something else comes along – the wii or sims on the pc. I think that as long as we let them choose when they are able to do so they will find their own ‘gender’. Friends, school peers and favourite tv characters (Hannah Montana et al) seem to have more of an influence on my three than anything else.
Hi Aly -thanks for dropping by. Dudelet has had flashes of that and we do (gently) jump on it. It’s difficult to deal with issues, though, (as Dan mentions above) that derive from attitudes which are still embedded in everyday life. If he sees women being treated in a certain way, it’s going have an influence. Though I wouldn’t want to be in your son’s shoes if he’s still expressing those opinions to his mother as a teenager…
I have a friend who is raising her girls “not as girls but as humans” – sounds complicated but that’s what she says. The girls wear what they want which could be gender neutral clothes, boys’ clothes or cute dresses. But now that they are nearly 10 years old they are not being invited to birthday parties by their male friends and find themselves having to answer questions like “why don’t you wear some lively colours?”
In some communities parents MUST make sure boys are raised as boys and girls are raised as girls. I’ll give you an example – in Pakistan a girl is called ‘baby’ and a boy child is called ‘baba’ (haha!) and you cannot call a boy a ‘baby boy’ because that would really offend his parents who think ‘baby’ is feminine and sissy. People will come up to you and ask if the baby in your arms is a “baby or a baba”! These parents make sure boys NEVER wear pink clothes or play with anything resembling a doll. I have met many people who take at least one nude picture of their sons in infancy to ‘tease him’ when he is older and that photo becomes a proof of his manhood!
Our R loves M’s Barbie dolls and she has always played with cars. Of course, they each have their own toys but I never stop them from playing with what they want. As I type this R is playing with his cooking set and serving me cabbage and egg (yuck!).
It is a complicated world we live in.
[...] following on from the Thursday’s post, my cousin just sent dudelette a gorgeous brown party dress for a three to six month old. One of [...]
Miss Wiz – three!?! “they will find their own ‘gender’.” Spot on.
And S, complicated is my word of the week.
Hello,
i find fighting it a losing battle and so I find myself saying things like “that’s for girls” and then I hate myself. But letting my son wear a pink dress would just mean lots of laughter and taunts, which would reinforce the message in an even more negative way. Designer shops often stock clothes in less gendered styles and colours, but who can afford them?
Hi! Thanks for dropping by – I actually can’t understand people who buy designer clothes for babies – I mean to spend that much on something that they’ll grow out of in about a week? In some ways, its easier with a girl with a big brother, I suspect – less stigma attached to putting her in all her siblings old baby gros etc.
[...] and so are gender roles which were erroneously created and supported. Caring parents are now making informed decisions about how they would like to raise their children without gendering them unnecessarily. And then [...]