Karin A. Martin

BECOMING A GENDERED BODY: PRACTICES OF PRESCHOOLS*

Many feminist scholars argue that the seeming naturalness of gender differences, particularly bodily difference, underlies gender inequality. Yet few researchers ask how these bodily differences are constructed. Through semistructured observation in five preschool classrooms, I examine one way that everyday movements, comportment, and use of physical space become gendered. I find that the hidden school curriculum that controls childrens bodily practices in order to shape them cognitively serves another purpose as well. This hidden curriculum also turns children who are similar in bodily comportment, movement, and practice into girls and boys-children whose bodily practices differ I identify five sets of practices that create these differences: dressing up, permitting relaxed behaviors or requiring formal behaviors, controlling voices, verbal and physical instructions regarding childrens bodies by teachers, and physical interactions among children. This hidden curriculum that (partially) creates bodily differences between the genders also makes these physical differences appear and feel natural.

Normalizing Heterosexuality: Mothers' Assumptions, Talk, and Strategies with Young Children:

In recent years, social scientists have identified not just heterosexism and homophobia as social problems, but also heteronormativity-the mundane, everyday ways that heterosexuality is privileged and taken for granted as normal and natural. There is little empirical research, however, on how heterosexuality is reproduced and then normalized for individuals. Using survey data from more than 600 mothers of young children, ages 3 to 6 years old, this article examines how mothers normalize heterosexuality for young children. The data suggest that most mothers, who are parenting in a gendered and heteronormative context to begin with, assume that their children are heterosexual, describe romantic and adult relationships to children as only heterosexual, and make gays and lesbians invisible to their children. Those who consider that their children could some day be gay tend to adopt one of three strategies in response: Most pursue a passive strategy of “crossing their fingers” and hoping otherwise. A very few try to prepare their children for the possibility of being gay. A larger group, primarily mothers from conservative Protestant religions, work to prevent homosexuality. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding sexual identity development and the construction of heteronormativity.

Giving Birth Like A Girl

Relational, selfless, caring, polite, nice, and kind are not how we imagine a woman giving birth in U.S. culture. Rather, we picture her as screaming, yelling, self-centered, and demanding drugs or occasionally as numbed and passive from pain-killing medication. Using in-depth interviews with women about their labor and childbirth, the author presents data to suggest that white, middle-class, heterosexual women often worry about being nice, polite, kind, and selfless in their interactions during labor and childbirth. This finding is important not only because it contradicts the dominant cultural image of the birthing woman but because it reveals that an internalized sense of gender plays a role in disciplining women and their bodies during childbirth. The feminist sociological literatures on birth are concerned with how women and their bodies are controlled, yet they have overlooked this other dimension of control that is not institutional but is a product of how gender is internalized.

Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children's G-Rated Films

In this article, the authors examine accounts of heterosexuality in media for children. The authors analyze all the G-rated films grossing

Taking Women Professionals Out of the Office The Case of Women in Sales

100 million dollars or more between 1990 and 2005 and find two main accounts of heterosexuality. First, heterosexuality is constructed through hetero-romantic love relationships as exceptional, powerful, magical, and transformative. Second, heterosexuality outside of relationships is constructed through portrayals of men gazing desirously at womens bodies. Both of these findings have implications for our understanding of heteronormativity. The first is seemingly at odds with theories that claim that heterosexualitys mundane, assumed, everyday ordinariness lends heteronormativity its power. In fact, the authors suggest heterosexual exceptionalism may extend the pervasiveness of heterosexuality and serve as a means of inviting investment in it. The second offers ways to begin to think about how heteronormativity is gendered and racialized.

William Wants A Doll. Can He Have One? Feminists, Child Care Advisors, and Gender-Neutral Child Rearing:

Many women professionals traverse settings beyond the office in their work, but research on women professionals rarely follows them out of the office. Using a large, archived data set of focus groups with sales professionals, the authors ask how work in out-of-the-office settings affects women’s careers. The authors distinguish between two types of settings. In “heterosocial” settings, interaction rules are traditionally and normatively gendered; women and men are understood by others as heterosexually linked pairs, women (and men) become targets of gossip, and some women report sexual advances and sexual harassment. In “homosocial” settings such as golf courses and strip clubs, women’s disadvantage takes the form of exclusion.

Advice When Children Come Out: The Cultural "Tool Kits" of Parents

Using an analysis of child care books and parenting Web sites, this article asks if second-wave feminism’s vision of gender-neutral child rearing has been incorporated into contemporary advice on child rearing. The data suggest that while feminist understandings of gender have made significant inroads into popular advice, especially with regard to the social construction of gender, something akin to “a stalled revolution” has taken place. Children’s gender nonconformity is still viewed as problematic because it is linked implicitly and explicitly to homosexuality.

The Sexual Socialization of Young Children: Setting the Agenda for Research

The family is one of the main areas of social life where the normalization of gay and lesbian identity is incomplete. Most research analyzes the individual and psychological aspects of how families respond to children’s disclosure of a gay or lesbian identity and ignores the social, cultural, and historical contexts. An examination of the cultural discourses, tools, and strategies that are available to parents is necessary for a full understanding of how families respond to gay and lesbian children. The authors conduct an interpretive content analysis of 29 advice books to assess this cultural field and its institutional resources. They find three broad strategies offered to parents: relying on professionals for overcoming the grief of having a gay or lesbian child, normalizing gay and lesbian identity, and using “good” parenting skills. This article discusses how these strategies demonstrate the unsettled and often contradictory cultural field of gay and lesbian identity in the family and its implications for sexual identities beyond the closet.

Privates, pee-pees, and coochies: Gender and genital labeling for/with young children

In this chapter we reinvigorate socialization as a theoretical framework for studying gender and sexuality, and we do so by focusing attention on the sexual socialization of young children. We provide an overview of the literature on the sexual socialization of young children. We discuss why researchers should be interested in childhood sexuality, and the role of parents, peers and schools, and the media in sexual socialization. We also address three overarching issues: methodology, the hegemony of heterosexuality, and child sexual abuse. Throughout, we suggest and organize some of the empirical questions that form a research agenda for those interested in this topic.

GENDER AND SEXUALITY: Medical Opinion on Homosexuality, 1900-1950

Second-wave feminists argued that early bodily knowledge was necessary for women’s sexual health and well-being. Using survey data from over 600 mothers, we ask if, decades after the sexual revolution and the height of second-wave feminism, mothers now use anatomically accurate names for genitals with boys and girls? We also ask how children participate in genital labeling with mothers. We found about equal proportions of mothers used anatomical names with boys as with girls. Further, mothers used more common childish names with boys while using ‘privates’ or vague terms more with girls. Children were also active participants in the naming of their genitals as they altered mothers’ words through mispronunciations, (mis)interpretations and adoption of words acquired elsewhere.