Michael Murgo - Becoming a Gendered Body

Over winter break, I had to get an oil change. In the waiting area, I sat near a man and his daughter, who appeared to be about 6 years old. He watched a football game on television while she repeated the verse “that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh uh-huh” many, many times. I thought she was never going to stop, until she noticed something that was peculiar to her--her father sat with his legs crossed. I found it intriguing that this simple bodily arrangement caught the girl’s eye and was peculiar enough to cause a disruption in her attention. The girl told her dad that he was crossing his legs and that he needed to uncross them. She asked if he was a girl, and then she kept saying, “You’re going to marry Mark! You’re a girl!” The dad just kept saying “no” while smiling intermittently yet primarily focusing his attention on the television screen. This event was a spectacle for me. I couldn’t believe that a girl at such a young age was policing gender. It got me thinking—how old was this girl when she first started recognizing and accepting gender norms? Why does she feel that she needs to police gender? How did she learn about gender norms?

In Karin A. Martin’s article Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschools, Martin explores these questions through observing various behaviors of children in the preschool setting, which reminded me of my experience in the waiting room. The first of Martin’s ideas that struck me was that gender is both a performance and an embodiment. We perform and display our gender through mannerisms, clothing, and behavior, yet our gender is also a deep “part of whom we are physically and psychologically.”  It is planted at such a young age and is constantly reinforced so that it is difficult to recognize it and even think that other gender non-conforming options exist. Gender is so influential that it affects people’s inner selves.

The article describes how women’s relative lack of confidence and agency stem from an inability to move freely as children. Girls are typically limited by their restrictive clothing which leads to a restrictive and reserved lifestyle. In the reading, two girls who wore overalls experimented with a new way of sitting by placing their feet on a table and leaning back. The two girls in dresses did not do this. Practicing a restricted way of handling one’s body leads to a future of the same. This may be why boys are so much more active—their activity is not restricted by their clothing, while girls’ activity is, whether it is from dresses or shoes with worse treads on their shoes. Uncomfortable tights with dresses led to girls spending much time rearranging and pulling at their clothes, creating a larger sense of physical self-awareness and possibly shame about their bodies, which carries on to their later lives. As a feminist myself, I value yet am shocked and repulsed by these findings. For me, it is novel to think of all the parents in this country who send their daughters off to preschool in a little dress and tights, completely unaware of the damage that they are doing and the future implications of their seemingly harmless actions. If parents want to their daughters to grow up to be confident women with a sense of agency and an understanding of their bodies’ capacities, they need to let their children “move confidently in space,” “take up space,” and  “use one's body to its fullest extent.” They cannot do this in their restrictive clothing and poorly constructed footwear. The clothes in which parents dress their children mold the experiences of the children in gendered ways.

Martin’s piece was extremely eye-opening, and left me wanting to know more. I wish she would have included the topic of transgendered individuals in her research, but perhaps that topic is out of the scope of this study. Moreover, many of the findings were intriguing, but some went unexplained. Why are teachers scolding girls for not following the rules while merely giving boys a figurative “slap on the wrist”? Would these findings be the same if the teacher were a man? What is it about girls that allow them to get the short end of the stick without teachers even realizing their giving it? I hope to explore these questions in future readings and lessons.