Rebelling and Conforming

From: Kevin

While looking through family photos with my grandma, we unboxed many photos of myself and my cousins. It’s not surprising, her grandchildren are her favorite subject to talk about. Going through the years, I could see the story of how gender scripts persisted in our lives. I wanted to focus on these 4 photos though because I felt it really showed how “The Twins” lives were (and weren’t) affected by gender scripts.

            The two sets of photos have the twins’ bodies at near equal sizes, showing that they are equal in person too. In the top pictures, both the boy and the girl are posing with one of their new birthday toys. The girl has a toy you would expect any other to have, a Barbie princess doll. The boy has a stuffed animal, something that would be later discouraged for him to have if it wasn’t for the toy being clad in sports attire. But not only do the toys fit the models for gender, the dominant background colors fit too, almost as if it was fate for them to be shown with pink and blue respectively.

            The bottom photos tell a different story though. Now, both are following the same masculine role. The boy is posing for the school soccer team portrait. Here he’s shown outdoors, taking what he has learned from growing up with sports to the field itself. But now, the girl is posing in the same fashion. Taken right after winning a school track and field event, she poses confidently, looking straight into the camera to show off her new gold medal. The background in the girl’s photo tells more of a story though. Even though it isn’t a portrait, she isn’t posing with anyone else. All around her are boys, some walking, most watching the track for an upcoming event, with a lone girl on the far-right side. Even though she has a medal too, the other girl is looking down while she walks showing less confidence than the twin.

            It was good to see one of my cousins clearly break the stereotype that boys’ activities and girls’ activities were meant for one sex or the other, but it brings up some questions. How did society “fail” to teach the girl the proper gender script, and how would society have reacted if the boy “failed” to in the same way?