Review_Author: Mark Smith
Book_Author: Barrie Thorne
Book_Title: Gender Play
Reference: 1993, New Brunswick (New Jersey), Rutgers University Press
Date: 5/17/2002
Time: 10:03:54 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.197.3
Thorne’s “Gender Play” is a rare gem of a book, well written, organized, and understood. Perhaps it’s ignored because of its very strengths. It’s probably too well written to be a considered a definitive academic analysis of children’s social activities. It also may very well be easily ignored because of its subject matter: kids’ play activities in school are too easily trivialized by mainstream educational research. Yet, in the attempt to trivialize children’s play, Thorne notes, educational researchers—as well as teachers—ignore the daily constructions of children in creating and maintaining their social worlds. There is an enormous complexity to play, which provides a scope and opportunity for action for all children in a given context. We ignore play at our peril, Thorne tells us, for to do so is to forget that play is the activity through which many of our most exclusionary and gender segregated cultural practices take root. Ignoring play, Thorne tells us, limits our space to think about how gender relations can improve and cross-gender collaboration can be fostered.
Thorne gives us hope in our endeavour to understand and improve gender relations among children. She takes pains to note that children’s play does not simply recapitulate social norms, following along the lines of a too often repeated “origin tale” of gender differences between girls and boys. Rather, Thorne emphasizes borderwork—the interactional work required to maintain boundaries of “boy” and “girl” activities and expectations. She notes that contrary to many understandings, gender is not always central to the experience of all of children’s activities. She notes: “The occasions where gender is less relevant, or contested, are also part of the construction of gender identities” (p. 87). In fact, it takes a significant amount of borderwork to create the seemingly non-degradable boundaries within the “ritualized spaces” boys and girls create on the playground and in the classroom (when for instance, they are waiting in line to go to the lunchroom). In particular, we realize from Thorne’s work that socialization, as seen from the perspective of the “origin tale” theorist, does not work that strongly; yet, at the same time there is significant pressure to live up to the ideal of being a boy or a girl. All this activity, Thorne always keeps in mind, takes place within a particular context: a same-age context, under surveillance from adult authority.
The sense of gender as a boundary, however, is frequently dissolved. The well described processes of “invasions,” where boys, in particular, invade girls’ activities, frequently strengthens gender divisions. This type of behavior highlights antagonisms in gender relations; however, there are also boys and girls who “cross” the gender lines, sometimes meeting with derision, sometimes accepted. The activity of “crossers” may weaken gender divisions, or may strengthen them.
But why do adults remember the moments of gender chasing and division and not the moments of affiliation? Thorne notes that borderwork carries extra weight from “ordinary” relations, because it is marked by conflict, emotional intensity, and expressions of forbidden desires. Borrowing from Goffman, Thorne notes that it may very well be this tension between “borderwork” and ordinary relations within the frames of “play” and “ritual” which set up the dualisms surrounding boys and girls. These dualisms, she well points out, “poke through the multiplicity” of gender relations and interactions in context (p. 107). Thorne notes: “To move our research wagons out of the dualistic rut, we can, first of all, try to start with a sense of the whole rather than with an assumption of gender as separation and difference” (p. 108). Understanding the complexity of gender involves “examining gender in context” (p. 108). The contextualized and non-dualistic reconceptualization of gender is important because the “view of gender as difference and binary opposition has been used to buttress male domination and to perpetuate related ideologies like the division between public and private” (p. 108). Noting that boys cross into the “private” world of girls in play, away from the “public” displays of gender on the wide expanse of the football field, and that girls also join such games, and are accepted by boys in a wide range of their activities limits the ease to which we can usefully utilize separate gender ideology. And all this comes from a study of kids playing on a playground! Thorne makes us realize that such a study is exactly where we find interactions which challenge existing gender ideology.
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Book_Author: Deposit Bonus
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