{"id":5232,"date":"2012-05-16T06:44:27","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T11:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=5232"},"modified":"2012-05-16T06:44:27","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T11:44:27","slug":"body-language-gendering-my-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2012\/05\/16\/body-language-gendering-my-daughter\/","title":{"rendered":"BODY LANGUAGE: Gendering my daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve written before about the gendering <\/a>phenomenon<\/a>\u2014how eager we are to gender our children, for whom gender, not to mention sex and sexuality, are meaningless, carrying only the meaning that we as skewed, culturally shaped adults bring with us.<\/p>\n

My daughter Maybelle, although she has a very gendered first name, does not go through the world as a specifically gendered being.\u00a0 She is equally fascinated with baby dolls and dinosaurs.\u00a0 She loves trains and Willie Nelson\u2019s \u201cWhiskey River\u201d (appropriate for a three year old?\u00a0 Perhaps not, but she does love it).\u00a0 There are many factors that lead to this androgyny of interests:\u00a0 her parents, of course, being fairly radical feminists plays a role.\u00a0 But also I think she doesn\u2019t pick up the gendered cues that her classmates are beginning to perform and observe.\u00a0 Having an intellectual disability is sort of beneficial in that it screens the subtle nuances\u2014nuances that I consider fairly pathological.<\/p>\n

Emotions, Maybelle responds to.\u00a0 But the notion that \u201cgirls wear dresses, boys play with dinosaurs\u201d?\u00a0 Not so much.<\/p>\n

\"Cutest<\/a>Adults, however, love some gender distinctions, particularly when little kids are concerned.\u00a0 Many adults who adore Maybelle get tingly at the idea of dressing her in little girl dresses.\u00a0 And here\u2019s the most successful strategy to come along:\u00a0 Maybelle\u2019s preschool teachers have suggested that they\u2019ll have an easier time helping to potty train her if we send her to school in dresses.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s been an effective strategy.\u00a0 We\u2019re very eager for Maybelle to become potty trained, and she seems eager to give it a try, herself.\u00a0 So we\u2019re sending her to school in dresses.<\/p>\n

Her dress-wearing was big news.\u00a0 Every person in Maybelle\u2019s preschool\u2014from the director to the undergraduate student workers\u2014have commented on the fact that Maybelle often comes to school these days wearing dresses.\u00a0 My mom, who lives about 500 miles away from us, heard about this fact through a friend of a friend, who found this significant enough that she called my mom up to say, \u201cI hear Maybelle\u2019s wearing dresses!\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of things strike me about this.\u00a0 First of all, if dresses really do make potty training easier, why aren\u2019t the little boys in Maybelle\u2019s class being encouraged to come to school in dresses?\u00a0 And second,\u00a0 it\u2019s interesting how much validation Maybelle gets.\u00a0 \u201cYou look so pretty!\u201d adults say to her.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something satisfying to many adults about a girl wearing a dress, and they\u2019re initiating the process that will make this feel satisfying to Maybelle, too.\u00a0 She\u2019ll pick up on the fact that she gets excessive good vibes when she wears a dress.\u00a0 They don\u2019t encourage boys to come to school in dresses for the same reason that they validate Maybelle for wearing one:\u00a0 these are both phenomena related to us creating and perpetuating gender.<\/p>\n

Of course she\u2019s adorable in her dresses, but she\u2019s also adorable when she looks a bit like a rock chick, like a comic book fan, like a nerd in her glasses, reading a book.\u00a0 I want her to have a lot of space to develop the personal expression that fits her best, no matter how that maps onto our current configurations of gender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve written before about the gendering phenomenon\u2014how eager we are to gender our children, for whom gender, not to mention sex and sexuality, are meaningless, carrying only the meaning that we as skewed, culturally shaped adults bring with us. My daughter Maybelle, although she has a very gendered first name, does not go through the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1919,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21097],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-body-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1919"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}