What is the purpose of cultural patterns such as gender conventions in clothing?
Do they simply arise out of a need in an earlier time and then continue through mindless transition?
Do they stem from societal structures and conflicts, manifested as material objects and patterns of their use?
Or are they responses to these social structures, the way we change them over time to suit our changing environment?
Or can our material world be reduced to the embodiment of neural impulses, evolutionary biology, or unconscious fears and desires?
Babies and toddlers have little choice in their clothing, which reflects the attitudes and beliefs of adults.
Children are known to acquire sex role stereotypes and begin to fit their own identities during these first years of life, this is a particularly useful way to understand how gender norms are negotiated, expressed, learned and changed.
Gender - refers to cultural differences between men and women based on the biological differences. Used for distinction in role, behaviour and appearance.
Sex - is to denote those biological differences
Current gender studies have a much more complex and fluid notion of both sex and gender.
Gender differences - refers to elements that are classified as feminine, masculine and neutral.
Gender Identity - personal congruence
Children of up to the age of about 6 or 7 in the US.
The age limit is important, children learn the patterns of gender-appropriate dress and the body of behavioural science research on gender identity in early childhood.
Children in early America were conceived as impressionable, but also that their physical surroundings were designed to shape their bodies and souls.
Changes brought upon middle class America after the industrial revolution and the American civil war, men left their work in the home and women were left in a different sphere.
The convergence of these trends at the end of the century, ambivalence about the industrialised future, anxiety about competition and survival, challenges to existing gender roles, resulted in changes in children's lives that are visible in their very appearance.
Children and Consumerism
Children have been the main targets of manufacturers, advertisers and marketers.
Countless researchers have documented the growing importance of consumption by and for children and analysed it's impacts on boys and girls.
Grant McCracken, Daniel Thomas Cook, Gary Cross.
The convergence of child-centred educational theories, middle-class parental concerns and psychology driven advertising.
For children, the parents are the main consumers, they act as the child's purchasing agent. The most significant changes in the gendering of children's clothes came when the 'toddler' was introduced.
Parents began to consult and value the opinions of small children in making purchases for them , 'consumer-tot'. Primary actors to reactors in responding to children's desires.
Children and Gender Identity
Which models had been discarded and credited.
Jean-Jaques Rouusseau and John Locke, G Stanley Hall, 'Baby X' studies.
Fashion participation is very much a matter of gender, and it has changed from men to women and children.
Fashionable clothing became a means of fitting in and instilling self confidence, even in very young children.
Identification - The child learns gender roles by imitating an adult model to whom they are attached emotionally.
Cognitive Development (Piaget) - The child is the agent of his own identity through a process of learning and acting gender rules.
Social learning - the child learns gender rules socially through a process of reward and punishment.
Gender Schema Model, The child constructs gender identity by processing messages from social community and fitting them together with previously received information.
Cultural associations of gender stereotypes play an important early role in this process but not necessarily a permanent role.
Gender aschematic
Social learning theory of gender acquisition combined with interactionism provides the necessary framework for studying gender symbolism with a dynamic system such as fashion.
Maccoby has always argued that gender roles are both biological and cultural in origin, shaped by social interactions. The relative importance of a child's interactions with peers, parents and siblings.
The Two Sexes - Growing up Apart, Coming Together
3 year olds know their own gender but don't always stick to these conformants.
from 4-8 gender appropriate behaviours are a moral imperative.
Girls understand both male and female scripts where as boys only understand male.
Other children act as enforcers of gender rules.
Children of 4-5 play mostly with their own sex.
The importance of ambiguity and anxiety as motivators for children's fashion changes.
As children mature they realise that gender is permanent and not subject to change based on appearance making them less dependant on stereotypical styles.
Fashion changes are shaped bu anxietites of sexuality which is observed very differently in girls than boys.
Adults interact with infants based on their assumed sex.
Clothing shapes the response of others to the baby.
Once children learn gender terms they begin to connect these terms to other things such as clothing.
They learn to correctly assign gender using hair and clothing cues about a year before they learn genital differences.
Gender permenance. Once this is realised they becom eless rigid int heir stereotyping.
A population that is shut out and frustrated by fashions based on a strict boy-girl gender binary. Gender dysphora, and gender incongruence.
Gender theory is expanding.
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