From: Sarah
One of the main way children learn anything, especially
gender roles, is through media. Children’s media primarily consists of family
and animated movies, dolls, toys, and children’s shows and cartoons. Almost
every person watches Disney movies as a child, ad boys and girls alike fall in
love with the story. However, a boy
owning anything with a Disney princess or any Disney female character is frowned
upon.
It was my little cousin Sophia’s 4th birthday
party, and her grandparents (not my grandparents) got her a scooter. It was a
Spiderman scooter and she loved it. She loves superheroes, especially Spiderman.
However, even though she was happy about it, I couldn’t help getting a little
upset at the reasoning. There were two scooters at the school where her
grandmother worked; one Spiderman and one Frozen. She played on both of them.
Now you’d think that they would have picked Frozen for her and complied with
gender norms and them picking Spiderman was progressive. This was not the case.
Their main reason for picking Spiderman over Frozen? “Well when Brody (Sophia’s
1year old brother) gets older, he can ride it too! Can’t have him riding a
girly Frozen scooter, now can we?” The decision wasn’t even made with purely
Sophia in mind, but her brother.
This photo represents two things; one, having gender,
specifically femininity, constrained to a box. I was originally going to have
more ‘boy like’ toys like superheroes and cars, but I thought that they would
not fit in the box of femininity. Two, it symbolizes a yard sale box, where
children try to get rid of their childhood, but they cannot get rid of the
gender roles they have learned. Children, especially girls, learn common gender
roles from Disney movies, Barbie’s, and other dolls. The color is muted to show
that children believe the toys no longer define or help them, but the ideas are
already in place.
Femininity needs to be normalized. Girls are criticized if
they are too feminine and criticized if they are too masculine. Boys are praised for being
masculine and put down extremely for doing anything moderately feminine.
1 comment:
These movies and toys are really what every girl is grown up on. We are told that Barbie dolls are what we are supposed to play with and the Disney "princess" movies are what we are supposed to live by. Because we are girls we are supposed to live by the femininity code and while we play with trucks or cars we are not considered to be conforming to the actual girl standards that we were set to follow by since we were little or we probably would be called different if we choose car and trucks over Barbie dolls and princesses.
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