Staying Inside The Gender Sphere

From: Sylvia
For my photo I had an idea to show an aspect of feminine gender roles outside of its appropriate gender sphere. Quite literally, I used a fisheye lens to take my picture because it makes the picture look like it is in a sphere, showing not only symbolism of the gender spheres, but also, not thinking outside of the box or in this case the bubble. The setting of the picture is a boys room. The footballs and baseballs on the bedspread mark it as a boys room as well as the posters of the video game Call of Duty and idolized football players on the wall. These are socially acceptable aspects of boy culture. What is not acceptable socially is marked by little Ryleigh's finger pointing and laughter, a boy holding a baby doll and a cuddly stuffed animal. Although, it came very natural for her to act this way, for this picture I asked Ryleigh to point and laugh at Cody. When I asked her what she thought of the picture I took she said, "Boys don't play with babies, Cody looks funny." She knew, even at age 3, that this image of a boy playing with a baby doll is not normal boy behavior. Afterwords, I tried to explain to her that it is OK for boys to play with baby dolls just as it is OK for her to play with Cody's action figures or "boy toys." She started to understand and replied, "I guess it's OK for him to play babies." The major point of the picture, is that anyone growing up in the consumer savvy U.S. knows which toys are deemed acceptable for boys and which are deemed acceptable for girls. We learn this at an extremely young age as we are fashioned from birth with pinks and blues, tiaras and footballs, baby dolls and action figures. A baby doll is not only a toy, but also a device used to socialize little girls into mommy/feminine roles or feminine gender scripts. When boys step outside of their gender script, such as Cody did, it becomes a source of humiliation and embarrassment. Boys are told from a young age not to act like a girl, "boys don't cry, girls do"- "you throw like a girl"- "you fight like a girl." The humiliation of people laughing at them, just as Ryleigh did in the picture, is a negative consequence to stepping out of line; it forces boys back into a set gender script for boys by negatively reinforcing those gender scripts (i.e. boys are to be masculine and must perform scripts deemed masculine by society).