{"id":8204,"date":"2015-10-31T18:05:50","date_gmt":"2015-10-31T23:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/?p=8204"},"modified":"2015-10-31T18:37:11","modified_gmt":"2015-10-31T23:37:11","slug":"clothing-and-costumes-happy-feminist-halloween","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2015\/10\/31\/clothing-and-costumes-happy-feminist-halloween\/","title":{"rendered":"Clothing and Costumes: Happy Feminist Halloween"},"content":{"rendered":"

For months I’ve been keeping an eye on (and meaning to write about) various campaigns that address or try to rectify gender stereotyping in children’s clothing. \u00a0I was cheering on Michele Yulo of\u00a0Princess Free Zone\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0and her\u00a0campaign to create a new line of suits<\/a> specifically for girls, (Suit Her<\/a>), which looks like it will need another round of\u00a0funding. \u00a0Yet more independent online shops\u00a0seem to be popping up to offer lines of slogan-free, neutral clothing for (mostly) girls and tracking how these shops re-envision engendering their wares could be the basis for a great study. \u00a0Asking the owners if they’re yet making any kind of significant profit or gaining traction using clothing to enact social change could well be another.<\/p>\n

Not too long ago I saw a great think piece which asked why refashioning girls’ clothing always means\u00a0refusing\u00a0skirts and dresses (i.e. rejecting the trope of femininity) and not offering boys a range of skirts, dresses, or pink garments and mixing all of this up. \u00a0It’s a point well taken and the lack of variety in boys clothing, nevermind fewer choices\u00a0overall, hits close to home as I continue to try to dress my three-year-old in ways that eschew slogans and\u00a0stereotypes.<\/p>\n

While independent visionaries will keep pushing boundaries (so I\u00a0hope) when a mainstream clothier makes a move it’s significant. \u00a0I was deeply intrigued (and initially suspicious) by the new line Ellen Degeneres launched with The Gap about two\u00a0months ago<\/a>, but am slowly coming around. \u00a0The videos shot for the line (and the “unstaged” behind the scenes ones) are deliberately black and white, with no pink anywhere. \u00a0The girls are making faces, getting muddy, catching frogs, creating with robotics, and pounding the drums \u2014 what girls do \u2014 or, the opposite of what girls are supposed to do?<\/p>\n

The blue\/gray\/black palette of the actual clothes reminds me of how frustrated I often feel not being able to buy lighter colors for my son \u2014 again, is this just a\u00a0simple\u00a0inversion so that the GAP can catch the wave of easy empowerment that so many corporations want to claim,<\/a> all under the guise of generously helping girls?<\/p>\n

https:\/\/youtu.be\/zIT1XyD_pPQ<\/p>\n

I was intrigued to learn that some of the nonprofessional models are part of the Pink Helmet Posse \u2014 skateboarders who all started young and are frank with Degeneres about the prejudice they have experienced.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j0wTcGT5ZP8&feature=youtu.be<\/p>\n

I was also cheered to learn that $250,000 from sales “will be donated to Girls Inc.” \u00a0Even if that’s a tiny fraction of their profit\u00a0and a simple PR move, it’s something for a nonprofit I respect. \u00a0Glancing at the #heyworld Twitter hashtag<\/a> they’ve coined, (meant to foster discussion about supporting girls), didn’t yield much and seems an easy vehicle through which the GAP can\u00a0keep promoting its campaign \u2014 i.e. \u00a0both sales and a message of social change. \u00a0But it is a step in a different direction for a major retailer whose children’s departments are fundamentally bifurcated.<\/a> I assume that this line “GapKids x ED Collection” will be solidly planted on the girls’ side, at least breaking up the color scheme a little, and changing\u00a0through\u00a0less static models, (literally, with\u00a0the girls in their advertising), the message\u00a0beyond the ad.<\/p>\n

In parallel with measuring change within the kids’ clothing world, I was curious how Halloween would fare this year. \u00a0The yearly lament about the oversexualization of costumes for both girls and women has been well underway, and this recent article\u00a0comments on how often “man” v. “girl”<\/a> is\u00a0used to describe\u00a0parallel costumes.\u00a0With Target’s recent desegregation of the toy aisle, I wondered what\u00a0they would do with Halloween.\u00a0Visiting two local stores revealed costumes\u00a0identified by ages v. gender, although the costumes themselves (not unlike the toys) definitely skew towards gender stereotypes.<\/a><\/p>\n

More cheering, in parallel with\u00a0the work independent retailers are doing, there has been an amazing wealth of feminist Halloween ideas out on the Internet. \u00a0A quick roundup shows real pushback against sexualized, reductive costumes that define what girls can be through the limitation of their offerings, although these are all “home made” v. mass marketed costumes. Some play on a facile definition of feminism, some gleefully use the holiday to\u00a0publicly\u00a0make a\u00a0social statement with\u00a0pointed humor.\u00a0\u00a0Some good ideas from Girls Leadership here<\/a>. Thanks to Bitch Media for this great collection.\u00a0<\/a>And some good ideas are also listed here. \u00a0<\/a>
\n\"RBG<\/a><\/p>\n

The recent article in the New York Times, “Where Have All the Tomboys Gone?”<\/a>\u00a0(which highlights Degeneres’s new GAP line) refers to the term “tomboy” as “retro” and\u00a0outdated, unnecessary when (of the people interviewed) there’s casual acceptance of girls who don’t want to dress in stereotypically feminine ways and surprise that it would be otherwise (at least in their families). The trend\u00a0of women adapting\u00a0“men’s wear” is traced\u00a0with emphasis that\u00a0this is a one-way street\u00a0in the mainstream, i.e. there is never\u00a0a public trend of men wearing styles designated for women.<\/p>\n

“Tomboy” as a phrase might be leaving the American lexicon, but keeping an eye on Halloween costume options is\u00a0one way to watch\u00a0levels of crossing and acceptance. \u00a0With the awareness that girls adapting into male-designated clothing is always far less objectionable than the reverse, glad as I was to see lists of feminist costume ideas proliferate on the web, I regret that there wasn’t a list for boys or men. While one girl at my son’s preschool chose a male superhero costume (complete with rippling plastic chest), the winks at how “cute” this was, I’m certain, wouldn’t have gone to a boy dressing up as Elsa.\u00a0Moving beyond just gender, this article, “What Color is Your Princess?”<\/a>\u00a0astutely\u00a0highlights the assumption of whiteness within the princess universe,\u00a0which is of greater concern to the author than that her son wants to dress up as one at all.<\/p>\n

I didn’t know the Onion ventured into video and stumbled on this one from a few years back.<\/a>\u00a0 Entitled, “How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume for Your Effeminate Son” it’s a parody that’s painful to watch as boys who don’t want masculinized costumes are “rehabilitated” into stereotypically “boy costumes” to\u00a0disguise their features or habits labeled as feminine. \u00a0It’s stunning in its spot-on precision about anxiety about boys breaking with male code.<\/p>\n

As a yearly barometer,\u00a0Halloween can offer\u00a0a quick read of current trends, pop culture, and what gender stereotypes are readily available and which are still transgressive to cross. Yet, studying what commercial retailers and independent outlets do the rest of the year\u00a0is a far more steady signifier of what change has occurred, and what trend is edging over into expectation. \u00a0 In a year’s time it will be interesting to see what is (still) considered humorous, provocative, or casually acceptable. \u00a0Happy feminist Halloween!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For months I’ve been keeping an eye on (and meaning to write about) various campaigns that address or try to rectify gender stereotyping in children’s clothing. \u00a0I was cheering on Michele Yulo of\u00a0Princess Free Zone\u00a0\u00a0and her\u00a0campaign to create a new line of suits specifically for girls, (Suit Her), which looks like it will need another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21109,1],"tags":[2397,55,21395],"class_list":["post-8204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-off-the-shelf","category-uncategorized","tag-boys","tag-gender","tag-girls"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204","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\/1912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8204"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8214,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204\/revisions\/8214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}