Gender (Re)Play: Power and Children’s Resistance to Cultural Stereotypes

• In Event: 3251 - Children and Youth, Power, and Culture: Relationships to Power in a Vulnerable World

Abstract

Research suggests that children have the agency to resist gender norms and stereotypes. Yet, we know relatively little about when, how, why, and among whom that resistance occurs. This study examines the conditions that facilitate children’s resistance to gender norms and stereotypes. I base my analyses on data from more than two years of ethnographic research with students, parents, and teachers in one socioeconomically diverse, suburban, public elementary school. I find that children’s resistance to gender norms and stereotypes is contingent on existing systems of power, hinging on: 1) the participation of powerful (i.e., popular) students, and 2) the support of powerful adults. Specifically, I find that two groups of popular students—one consisting mostly of girls; the other all boys—both engage in regular, sustained, group-based behaviors that are inconsistent with traditional gender norms and stereotypes. The popular girls use their acts of resistance to avoid gendered constraints and to establish their dominance over other more traditionally feminine peers. The popular boys use their acts of resistance to perform for (and win approval from) peers and to demonstrate and maintain closeness in their relationships with friends. With both groups, however, the success of such resistance depends, at least in part, on support from parents and teachers. I discuss the implications of these findings in relation to research on the relationship between culture, status, and power, the role of gender and popularity in children’s peer cultures, on “hybrid” masculinities, on changing cultural attitudes toward gender and gender-nonconformity, and on the roles that power and inequality play in shaping who benefits from those changing norms.

Author

• Jessica McCrory Calarco, Indiana University