Together Yet Separate
"You can't play with He-man, he's not for girls!" This phrase still echoes in my mind as I reminisce about my childhood playtime. As I reached for a He-man action figure from the toy box, I was handed a Barbie doll or a My Little Pony figurine. At that time, I was too young to realize the great chasm that gender had created for such a simple task as playing with toys. However, looking back, it becomes clear that gender, itself, plays a key role in the everyday lives of boys and girls. In Barrie Thorne's book, Gender Play, this role is depicted in various ways through participant observation, or ethnography. By researching the ways that children play an active role in "doing" gender, analyzing the neutralization of this socialized role, and displaying the effects that education, primarily those with a classroom setting, has on gender, Thorne provides ample support of the notion that gender is a social construction. From my experiences with the He-man doll, one can deduce a certain boundary line for activities between girls and boys. Barrie Thorne provides explanations of these boundaries by analyzing the ways that children play an active role in creating them. By having shared interests, or "behavioral compatibility", g
Because girls enjoy the same activities as other girls, and boys enjoy the same activities as other boys, a boundary for gender is marked. This example explains the division between boys and girls as one of shared interests. On the same level, boys tend to revolve around themes of physical strength and force, while girls have a tendency to structure themselves around physical appearance. This defined division between the boys' world and the girls' world depicts the complexity of gender neutralization. This psychoanalytic process, which is inherently developed, can explicate the tendency for boys to interact with boys and girls to interact with other girls. Most importantly, "by frequently using gender labels when they interact with kids, adults make being a girl or boy central to self-definition, and to the ongoing life of schools" (35). When referring to same-gender relationships, "boys talk about 'buddies,' 'teams,' and 'being tough,' whereas girls more often use a language of 'best friends' and 'being nice'" (90). As boys and girls avoid those of "the other kind", they establish the meaning of "doing gender". However, a second aspect joins the neutralization of gender - the aspect of "different cultures". In choosing to play with a He-man doll, I crossed this boundary. As we learned in lecture, various sociologists have hypothesized the reason for gender, such as Freud's penis envy, or Chodorow's maternal rejection theories. Although there is not overwhelming support, "boys find it more rewarding to interact and play with boys, and girls to interact and play with girls. Thorne explains this deviation by introducing the neutralization of gender, or the decrease in importance of gender divisions.
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