Princess Boys and Girlie Girls

11/19/2011

2 Comments

 
I am in Boston for the Social Studies History Association conference, where I gave a paper on (surprise!) the history of pink as a gender signifier. Dominique Grisard, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, organized the (amazing) panel on girls as consumers and gave a paper drawn from her current research on pink. It's part of her own book-length project, "Pink. En/Gendering a Color", which can't be published soon enough. In it, she will bring a more theoretical consideration of pink"s complicated symbolism from a transnational perspective. The morsel she offered at SSHA was a tasty preview. Looking at Jenna Lyons and her son's pink toenails, Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter and the movement to accept gender nonconforming boys, Dominique observed the following (my paraphrasing):

When princess boys adopt stereotypical signifiers of femininity, it is defended as performing their authentic selves. When girlie girls embrace the same signifiers, it is critiqued as adopting an artificial construction imposed by consumer culture. 

So which is it?
 


Comments

Eliza link
11/21/2011 12:00

That's a great question. After all, isn't giving in to social pressure one way of exploring one's own identity?

I read a first-hand blog post of this question, and of gender-expression in general recently... very interesting:
http://uppoppedafox.com/?p=3743

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Jo link
11/21/2011 12:22

Thanks for the blog, link, Eliza! Not only is giving in to social pressure one way of exploring identity, I think that most of us had done exactly that at one point or another. It reminds me of a Japanese saying I found decades ago about artistic training and creativity: "enter the mold and then break it". It was in an article about the lengthy artisanal training for craftspeople in Japan, and the belief that only by mastering the limits of a crafts can you transcend them.

I think that kids playing dress-up (especially in our very gender-binary culture) might be doing the same thing. After all, they are perfectly capable of seeing how older kids and adults dress, which isn't binary at all. Eventually, they, too, will break the mold.

(That doesn't mean that these stereotypes don't also convey some pretty awful essentializing messages -- that being feminine is the same as being sexy, for example.)

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