Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 25

Gender socialization theories have been criticized by feminist researchers for their tendency to see socialization as a smooth transmission of ideas from adults to children that reproduce gender-based inequalities. Within the sociology of childhood there is a general dislike of socialization theories because of their tendency to represent children as empty vessels into which appropriate behaviours are poured. Barrie Thorne in her ethnography of girls and boys at school, Gender Play, notes: ‘Adults are said to socialize children, teachers socialize students, the more powerful socialize, and the less powerful get socialized’ (Thorne 1993: 3). Leena Alanen (1994) notes that treating children as being in an ‘immature and socially unfinished condition’ renders them problems and victims (1994: 28), making them the concern of welfare and social policy rather than sociology. Socialization theories have taken on these criticisms and more recent work on gender socialization does increasingly recognize that children are active agents in their own socialization. William Corsaro’s concept of ‘interpretive reproduction’ captures this notion that socialization is not a transmission from adult to child but that the child is involved in an active process of interpretation and reworking of gender, race and class (Corsaro 2005: 18–27).

Another way of thinking about gender is as unavoidable social practices or what West and Zimmerman (1987) called, in their seminal paper of the same title, ‘Doing gender’. They cite Spencer Cahill’s (1986) work on gender development to illustrate their point that although gender is a performance it is not one we can refuse:

little boys appropriate the gender ideal of ‘efficaciousness’, that is, being able to affect the physical and social environment through the exercise of physical strength or appropriate skills. In contrast little girls learn to value ‘appearance’, that is, managing themselves as ornamental objects. Both classes of children learn that the recognition and use of sex categorization in interaction are not optional, but mandatory. (West and Zimmerman 1987: 141; emphasis added)

Despite West and Zimmerman’s claims of a radical break with gender socialization theories, their contribution to gender theory is more about the importance of naturally occurring data to understanding gender than it is a radical reworking of the concept of gender itself.

Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, despite having a superficial resemblance to West and Zimmerman’s theory, does pose a radical challenge to our understanding of the concept of gender and to the sex–biology/gender–culture binary that underpins most theories of gender. Like West and Zimmerman in their ethnomethodology of gender she emphasizes its performative character. They challenge the idea of gender roles on the grounds that ‘[g]ender is not merely something that happens in the nooks and crannies of interaction, fitted in here and there and not interfering with the serious business of life’ (West and Zimmerman 1987: 130), and this closely resembles Butler’s contention that gender is inescapable. The resemblance between the two theories is nonetheless superficial because the power of Butler’s theory lies in its notion that there is ‘no doer behind the deed’ (Butler 1990: 142); that is to say that there is no ungendered or universal human subject who decides to ‘do gender’. The core of Butler’s thinking about gender and other subject positions like race and sexuality is that subjectification is necessary in order to become a part of human culture (Butler 1997) – at least as human culture is currently configured. Her second major contribution to the theory of gender is that gender identification is inseparable from the normalization of heterosexual desire. There has been some interesting small-scale empirical research done using Butler’s theory on how children’s gender performativities are bound up with heterosexual discourse at a very early age (Boldt 1996; 2002; Renold 2006; Martin 2009), and on how parents’ anxieties about homosexuality impact negatively on their prior commitment to gender-neutral child-rearing (Martin 2005).

Early theories of gender socialization were rather superficial; their strength was in the way that they challenged the idea that observable differences in the behaviour of girls and boys, and women and men, were somehow natural or biological. It therefore opened up the possibilities of changing gender-based inequalities. Theories of how children come to learn to ‘do’ or perform gender retain this advantage of gender socialization theories and in addition they enable us to think of children as active participants in shaping their social worlds. Empirically perhaps there is not so much distance between them; whether we learn, practise or perform gender, the crucial point is that we cannot avoid gendered positions and practices, so long as gender is accepted as a meaningful distinction between humans.

It is also worth noting that most of the research on gender roles and gender stereotyping in childhood has been done in the USA and predominantly within social psychology. While that definitely brings limitations to our understanding of gender roles in childhood on a global scale, we can say with confidence that all societies currently organize social and cultural life along gendered lines and that most treat gender as if it is a natural (rather than cultural) attribute of people. Nonetheless, exactly how a gendered division of political economy and socio-cultural fields is organized varies considerably across the globe in both adulthood and childhood. For example, in West Africa, especially in matrilineal societies, women have prominent roles in trading at scales from the roadside market to international trading circuits (especially in cloth). The presumption in Western sociology that the gender binary women/men maps onto the binaries private/public and home/work across the entire globe is demonstrably false (Amadiume 2015; Clark 1994; 2010; Cole et al. 2007). In turn, this has important effects on gendered care of children (Oyěwùmí 2016). While young children (boys and girls) need to be kept safe and nurtured this is not necessarily the task of their birth mother but could be shared with her co-wives, with aunts and with older (usually girl) siblings and cousins (Clark 1994), and be organized around ‘complementarity and similarity rather than on hierarchy and difference’ (Astuti 1998: 31). Among the Velo in Madagascar, humans become people through action. In keeping with this it is possible for a child sexed at birth as a boy to become a girl and then a woman:

Sarin’ampela are ‘men’ who ‘like women’ (tia ampela). ‘Liking women’ in this context is different from ‘looking for or wanting them’ (mila ampela), which is what other men do when looking for sexual partners; sarin’ampela ‘like’ women in the sense that they would prefer to be women. When they put this into practice, this results in the creation of an ‘image’: the ‘image’ of the woman they would like to be.

My informants described how one starts becoming a sarin’ampela from an early age. As young children, sarin’ampela prefer to spend time with girls rather than with boys, and learn to braid their friends’ hair, carry water on their head, search for head lice, and so on. As adults, their identity is defined most crucially by the fact that they perform ‘women’s jobs’ (asan’ampela) and adopt ‘women’s ways of doing things’ (fomban’ampela). (Astuti 1998: 49)

If children learn gender by doing more than by being explicitly instructed in what a girl and a boy should do, then the central modes of learning gender in most of the world are through play, work (in the broadest sense of the term, from ‘helping out’ to selling their labour outside of the family) and school (again, very broadly understood and including religious school, academic study and apprenticeships). Boys and girls very often do different types of work and play: boys herd cattle (Yusuff 2018) and shine shoes (Tanle 2018), and girls are more likely to be looking after their younger siblings and doing domestic chores (Grugel et al. 2020; Nascimento Moreira et al. 2017). Girls also tend to start work at younger ages than their brothers because what is considered ‘boys’ work’ often requires more strength and skill than young boys have (Lancy 2008: 244). In her ground-breaking ethnography of children’s work in Kerala, South India, Olga Nieuwenhuys (1994) describes how most of the work that girls do involves the care of their siblings and of the house. When girls help their mothers in weaving coir they do not describe it as work but as helping out. In contrast, when boys do exactly the same tasks they think of it as work and they expect to receive some payment for helping their mothers.

In many respects, then, girls’ work is not very different from women’s work. Like women’s work it is rarely recognized as work but is more thought of as care. In chapter 5 I discuss the ways that thinking of the work that girls typically do (especially chores and looking after siblings) as not really work distorts our understanding of what girls do with their time. For example, for the purpose of defining and reporting on the extent of child labour in relation to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN adopts the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) resolution to include either economic activity alone or economic activity and/or household chores. The former is called the System of National Accounts (SNA) production boundary and the latter is called the general production boundary. For the former it must be reported as child labour if the child is engaged in economic activity ranging from at least 1 hour per week for 5 to 11 year olds to 14 hours per week for 12 to 14 year olds to more than 43 hours per week for 15 to 17 year olds. In this model no account is taken of household chores. In the second model the same hours of economic activity apply but for children aged 5 to 14 years it counts as child labour if they do more than 21 hours of unpaid household work per week. For children aged 15 to 17 household chores of any extent do not count as child labour (UN 2019). For this reason, perhaps, campaigns against child domestic work are usually framed within the scope of slavery, one of the ‘worst forms of child labour’ for which there is no age or time threshold. In any case, if a 15-year-old girl, say, spends most of her time at home doing chores this will not appear in the reporting of child labour. In fact, it will not appear in any official records of children’s activities.

Although all contemporary societies have a gendered division of labour this does not mean that only girls do ‘girls’ work’ or only boys do ‘boys’ work’. Mothers living in migrant workers’ hostels in South Africa feared for their boys’ safety because they could not find work to occupy them in the city and so their sons were left to their own devices. They did not worry about their daughters because even in the city there were still younger children to be looked after, food to be prepared and housework to be done. However, if there were no girls in the family to do this work, then a boy might be called on to do it instead. One of the researchers’ boy informants said: ‘I do not think there is a difference between boys’ duties and girls’ duties. I have a friend, Sabela, and he does all the things that girls do because his sister does not live here’ (Jones 1993: 123). In East African Childhood (Fox 1967), for example, Joseph Lijembe describes how in the 1940s, when he was himself 4 years old, he was given the role of ‘nursing’, that is feeding, toilet-training and playing with his baby sister. This role fell to him even though boys were not supposed to take care of their siblings because ‘there was no older sister in the family, and my mother had to go off to work in the shamba everyday’ (Fox 1967: 4).

Despite a kind of pragmatic reworking of roles when there are not enough girls to do ‘girls’ work’ or boys to do ‘boys’ work’, this does not mean that the idea that there is such a thing as girls’ work and boys’ work does not persist. Even when there is a general shift in law and policy towards gender equality, it seems that gendered expectations of work still hold. Hewitt and Wells (n.d.), for example, in their qualitative study of white working-class families in London, found that girls’ and boys’ expectations of their life course were highly gendered, with girls wanting to work in hairdressing or beauty salons until they had children, when they intended to leave work to look after their children as their mothers had done, and boys generally expected to work in the building trade or as motor mechanics. Linda McDowell’s research on white working-class school leavers also suggests a persistence of gendered expectations of work. She comments that her respondents held ‘depressingly traditional views about genderspecific skills and abilities’, going on to quote a respondent who says ‘I think there is more jobs mainly for boys really. There are mainly motor places and stuff like that and places where you have got to do heavy lifting and they’re for boys’, and another respondent who says ‘Industry and engineering, they don’t usually take girls on, do they? Most girls aren’t interested in that anyway, they usually go for office work or journalism or something like that’ (McDowell 2000: 409, 410; 2002; see also Nayak 2003).