[Download] "Tomboys and Sissy Girls: Exploring Girls' Power, Agency and Female Relationships in Childhood Through the Memories of Women (Report)" by Australasian Journal of Early Childhood * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Tomboys and Sissy Girls: Exploring Girls' Power, Agency and Female Relationships in Childhood Through the Memories of Women (Report)
- Author : Australasian Journal of Early Childhood
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 242 KB
Description
SINCE THE EARLY 1990s, feminist scholars have theorised the gendered experiences of being a girl, or of girlhood (Aapola, Gonik & Harris, 2005; Driscoll, 2002; Griffin, 2004; Harris, 2004a, 2004b; Johnson, 1993; McRobbie, 1991; Reay, 2001; Renold, 2005; Renold & Ringrose, 2008, in press; Thorne, 1993; Walkerdine, 1990; Walkerdine, Lucey & Melody, 2001). The gendered experiences of younger girls in early childhood have also gained prominence during this time (Blaise, 2005; Davies, 1993; Jones, 1993; MacNaughton, 2000; Yelland, 1998). Griffin (2004 p. 29) reminds us that 'there is nothing "essential" about girlhood' but it is constituted and negotiated within socio-cultural, political and historical discourses. Feminist poststructuralists have highlighted how girls (and boys) can take up different subject positions within competing discourses of gender that are available to them (Davies, 1993; Walkerdine, 1997). Girls' location in discourses of gender can depend on a range of issues such as one's age, class, sexuality, ethnicity, peer group influences and geographical location. In terms of sexuality, children are often presumed to be heterosexual and expected to modify their gender performances accordingly. Girls and women are expected to embody femininity, and boys and men are expected to embody masculinity. This discussion is primarily focused on the experiences of four women whose stories provide a glimpse of how they negotiated discourses of gender in childhood. Through their transgressions from gender norms and the taking up of different ways of doing gender, we can understand childhood as a potentially queer time and space--a space in which children can subvert dominant discourses of childhood through taking up alternative ways of performing gender and relating with each other (Robinson & Davies, 2007). Becoming a gendered subject is complex and involves the negotiation of a range of gendered performances through which the child is often read as either the conforming subject or actor of resistance. Gender is performative and is a dynamic, relational and a fluid component of subjectivity (Butler, 1990, 2004). It is this process of gender formation, referring to the cultural inscription of bodies into masculine and feminine characteristics within a heterosexual matrix that these women have tried to subvert in some ways in their early years of life.