Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood

Emily W. Kane, Phil Jones

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441190574
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood explores gender and sexuality in children's lives, from early childhood through adolescence, bringing together key inter-disciplinary perspectives. Kane explores how childhood gender and sexuality are constructed, resisted, and refined within children's peer cultures, within social institutions like the family, education, and media and the role the state holds in structuring children's lives - defining their rights and opportunities through gender and sexuality-related policies and programs. Examples of research, interviews, activities, key points and guidance on further reading encourage the reader to actively engage with the material and to develop a critical relationship with the content. Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood is essential for those studying childhood at undergraduate and graduate level and of great interest to those working with children in any field.

Part 1

Debates, Dilemmas and Challenges: The Background to Gender and Sexuality in Childhood

1

Introduction

Chapter Outline

Introduction and key questions

How do researchers and practitioners think about children and childhood today?

How does this new approach shape the way we conceptualize childhood gender and sexuality in particular?

How do these new ideas and approaches impact children’s lives?

Introduction and key questions

Researchers, practitioners and activists interested in children and childhood are increasingly focused on children’s agency and children’s rights. They are asking questions from the points of view of a diverse array of children and listening to children’s voices as they aim to work in partnership with young people. Recent years have also seen new approaches to addressing issues of gender and sexuality, with attention to a wider range of gender identities and sexualities, sensitivity to variations by other social locations and national contexts, as well as greater recognition of the many arenas in which gendered patterns are constructed and resisted. It is the intersection of these two changing fields that is the topic of this book. This chapter introduces emerging approaches to children and childhood, as well as their implications for the study of gender and sexuality in childhood, by exploring three key questions:

•How do researchers and practitioners think about children and childhood today?

•How does this new approach shape the way we conceptualize childhood gender and sexuality in particular?

•How do these new ideas and approaches impact children’s lives?

How do researchers and practitioners think about children and childhood today?

In stark contrast to the old adage that children should be seen and not heard, recent decades have witnessed an explosion of scholarship and action that assumes children should very much be heard: that their rights, autonomy and voices should play a pivotal role in research, policy and practice related to childhood. Children have been studied for centuries, with varying approaches taken by adult experts as they attempted to understand, care for, manage and even control young people. But as some authors in the interdisciplinary field now known as childhood studies point out, for much of history children have been viewed as some combination of innocents in need of adult protection or social problems in need of adult intervention (Shanahan, 2007). Either way, adults are assumed to know best, to know how to identify and serve the interests of both children and society by protecting innocent children and controlling problematic ones. Those involved in childhood studies today see children and childhood in a more nuanced manner, one that treats children as autonomous social actors who are not just in training for eventual participation in the adult world but are already active participants in their own peer worlds and the broader, multigenerational social world as well. Children are not simply blank slates upon which adults inscribe their influence, lessons and directions. They are resourceful agents, with their own interests and informed first-hand knowledge, who recreate and refine the social world rather than just passively accepting it as it is passed down by adults. Sociologist of childhood Corsaro (2005, 18–19) has coined a term that captures this outlook effectively: interpretive reproduction.

The term interpretive captures the innovative and creative aspects of children’s participation in society . . . children create and participate in their own unique peer cultures by creatively taking or appropriating information from the adult world to address their own peer concerns. The term reproduction captures the idea that children are not simply internalizing society and culture, they are actively contributing to cultural production and change.

Along with this emphasis on children’s agency, also central to contemporary approaches to childhood studies are children’s autonomy and rights. Rather than assuming children’s best interests are automatically met by allowing adults to make decisions for them, this perspective prioritizes the autonomy and rights of children as independent social actors. Considered in detail in another book in this series (Jones and Welch, 2010), this movement is clearly evident in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). As Jones and Welch (2010, 46) note, the UNCRC identifies ‘the human rights to be respected and protected for every child under the age of 18 years’, with those rights based on a set of guiding principles: ‘non-discrimination, the best interests of the child as the primary consideration, survival and development of all children, and participation of children in decisions that affect them’. They emphasize the tension between rights and duties, and how these play out differently and contentiously in various national and cultural contexts, particularly in terms of the links between a rights framing and Western conceptions that tend to prioritize the individual apart from and over social obligations or duties. But across these tensions and contentions, Jones and Welch (2010) point to substantial evidence that attention to children’s rights (or unfortunately in some cases just a ‘rights veneer’) has become a central feature of much policy, practice and scholarship.

This approach to thinking about children has a parallel in the way scholars and advocates are viewing childhood these days: not as a naturally fixed and clearly demarcated developmental and chronological period, but rather as a historically and culturally fluid social construction, a dynamic product of social processes that changes in concert with social forces and activist efforts. At what ages and in what ways people should be considered children is a social question, one answered in varying and shifting ways at different times and in different places.

Key points: A note on the terms childhood, youth and adolescence

James and James (2008) note that some of those working with and studying children use the term ‘youth’ to refer to the latter end of what is socially recognized as childhood, generally ages 13 to 18 (149). Acknowledging all of these terms as social constructs, this book uses children and childhood to refer to the full range of ages from birth to 18, and sometimes uses the term youth to refer to older children. Given the frequency with which the literature and practitioners refer to ‘adolescents’, that term appears too, encompassing the same age range. The term invokes a more biological meaning, while this book’s emphasis is on childhood as a social phenomenon. But the terms ‘adolescent’ and ‘adolescence’ are particularly common in the research literature on sexuality and sexual health, literatures often situated at the intersection of social science and more biologically oriented sciences, and thus the term is used most often when those topics are being considered.

A final point that must be emphasized in even a brief overview of the way children and childhood are understood today is the diverse array of experiences children have, and the diverse array of childhoods, across racial/ethnic groups, classes, genders, sexual orientations, nations, religions and levels of ability and disability. Bühler-Niederberger and Van Krieken (2008, 148), in a recent analysis of global influences on children and childhood, argue that ‘the notion of children’s agency should not be interpreted as meaning that children (are) . . . purely individualized actors. Rather, they act within the frame of social, economic and political structures that often limit the scope of possible action’. Inequalities in access to social resources and opportunities, globally or within a given nation or community, shape how children can execute their agency. These inequalities structure different patterns and possibilities for childhood across different social groups. Economic constraints might encourage child labour in one context, such as the patterns Jacquemin (2006) documents in the Ivory Coast, where domestic service by young girls is sometimes encouraged by parents in need of the income their daughters can produce. In other contexts, early marriage for girls might be dictated by religious traditions, such as the Hindu practices sometimes evident in rural India that are described by Dubey and Dubey (1999), or by poverty and economic necessity, explored in a variety of Latin American nations by Galambos and Martínez (2007). Racial or ethnic discrimination might block opportunities for children of colour in yet another context. Such patterns shape not only children’s experiences of childhood, but also whether and how their voices are heard in policy and in research. As Ali, Fazil, Bywaters, Wallace and Singh (2001) argue, for example, disabled children have been particularly absent from the scholarly literature, with research on their experiences based on data gathered from caregivers rather than children themselves; among such children, even more dramatic is the absence of attention to the unique experiences and needs of black and Asian disabled children in the United Kingdom. Throughout this book, many examples of research and practice that demonstrate how childhoods vary by factors such as race, ethnicity, immigration status, national context, ability, religion, economic status, gender and sexuality are considered.

How does this new approach shape the way we conceptualize childhood gender and sexuality in particular?

Chapter 2 offers a more detailed consideration of recent trends in scholarship and practice related to gender and sexuality, but a highly condensed preview is in order here. Throughout this book, gender and sexuality are considered together. While gender refers to the social categories marking males and females, and the variety of expectations, roles, opportunities and traits socially associated with each, sexuality refers to the closely related expectations, roles, opportunities and traits socially associated with sexual activity, sexual identity and sexual orientation. Like childhood studies, gender and sexuality studies has been marked by changes in recent decades, changes that intersect with and in some ways parallel those related to childhood studies.

•Increasing attention to the social construction of gender and sexuality categories.

•Emphasis on hearing the voices and respecting the autonomy of people disadvantaged by social hierarchies of gender and sexuality.

•Recognition of the wide diversity of gendered experiences across nations, racial and ethnic groups, social classes, religions, sexual orientations and abilities.

Key points: Gender and sexuality

The links between gender and sexuality are explored more fully in Chapter 2, but a few brief points are helpful for highlighting why they are considered together throughout this book.

•Many scholars interested in gender, including childhood gender, now argue that traditional gender categories are built in part through the construction of traditional sexual orientation categories, linked in the concept of heteronormativity (see Chapter 2).

•For example, Martin and Kazyak (2009) document how presumed heterosexuality and ‘sexiness’ are inseparable from the representation of femininity offered in animated children’s movies produced in the United States and distributed internationally, a melding they refer to as ‘heterosexiness’ (see Chapter 6).

•And Renold (2007) investigates how UK primary school boys enact masculinity, concluding that even at young ages the social definition of a ‘real boy’ includes heterosexual orientation and presumed sexual interest in pursuing girls, a conclusion that fits well with a broader trend in the scholarly literature to recognise ‘the embeddedness of gender and sexuality’ (275) (see Chapter 5).

These examples indicate the importance of considering sexuality alongside gender, even in the earlier years of childhood. As the range of research documented throughout this book reveals, these connections are even more obviously apparent as youth move into the ages at which they are making decisions about sexual activity, sexual health and sexual risk and as gendered expectations shape the landscape of those decisions in important ways.

These changes are all the more notable in the context of exploring gender and sexuality in childhood. The growing concentration on children’s rights, agency, autonomy, voice and diversity intersect both to increase and shift the focus on children’s gendered worlds. With particular interest in how children’s gender and sexuality are shaped by adult influence but also resisted, refined and reproduced within children’s peer cultures, and with attention to a much broader range of gender identities and sexual orientations, research and practice related to gender and sexuality in childhood has taken new directions. From the family to schools and educational policy to mass media and marketing to the peer cultures children craft, with cross-cutting influences from government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business, medicine, sport, religious and cultural organizations and a range of advocacy groups of all stripes, the social worlds in which children’s gender and sexuality are reproduced and resisted offer a wealth of intriguing topics that form the basis for this book.

How do these new ideas and approaches impact children’s lives?

The impact of these new approaches goes far beyond the textbook page or the volumes of academic research journals. From infancy to adolescence, across the wide age range encompassed by the term childhood, a focus...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Part 1 DEBATES, DILEMMAS AND CHALLENGES: THE BACKGROUND TO GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN CHILDHOOD
• Part 2 AN INTERDISCIPLINARY OVERVIEW OF RECENT RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
• Part 3 IMPLICATIONS FOR CHILDREN’S LIVES
• References
• Index