Heteronormativity and Gender in Childhood
My current research was initially motivated by my curiosity about the experiences of gender non-conforming or “gender creative” children. With the visibility of children like Shiloh Jolie-Pitt and Cheryl Kilodavis’ “Princess Boy” son, Dylan, a national conversation seems to be developing around what is natural, and what is socialized, about gender and gendered expression.
Additionally, there has been a lot of talk lately about bullying and LGBTQ kids, because of the rash this past year of highly publicized suicides by LGBTQ bullying victims. Studies have shown that kids who are LGBTQ or are perceived to be LGBTQ are far more likely to be bullied in school than their straight or straight-appearing peers.
What’s the connection between this two conversations? Well, in a way they are both about gender – about people behaving in ways other than how society says they are “supposed to” behave (whether by dating/being interested in those of the “wrong” sex, or acting, dressing, speaking, walking, having interests, etc….in ways that are deemed “incorrect” for their gender). They both have me wondering about what the relationship is between what society tells us about gender, and how we actually experience it. What social processes negotiate between personal experience of gender and societal conceptions about gender?
When I began delving into the current research on children and gendered behavior, I found confirmed for me what I suspected to be true – that a lot of the anxiety about non-normatively gendered behavior in our society is related to anxiety about homosexuality – in other words, that when people worry about kids not behaving “correctly” according to their gender, at least part of what they are worried about is that such behavior is an indication that the child could be gay. Parents and child-professionals then wonder what the appropriate response to such behavior is – do we encourage it? Suppress it? Embrace it? Redirect it?
What I’ve come to conclude is that the major parenting paradigm in our society is heteronormative – meaning that it operates based upon the underlying assumption that children are future heterosexuals, and that heterosexuality is not just the expected but the desirable outcome of maturation from childhood to adulthood. In other words, just as criminals in our justice system are presumed “innocent until proven guilty,” in our society, kids are presumed “heterosexual until proven not.”
How does this presumption of heterosexuality impact kids’ experiences? And what does it all have to do with how we think about gender in our society? It’s hard to pinpoint, though, exactly what practices (by parents, medical professionals, teachers, those who produce children’s media, and others) contribute directly or indirectly to how kids understand their own gender and/or society’s expectations about gender. So rather than approach studying gender in childhood this way, I figured I’d take a slightly different entrance into the topic. Instead, I’m asking – how do parents go about doing the business of parenting when they don’t have an expectation that their children will necessarily be straight?
The most logical place to look for such parents, I thought, would be to talk to parents who are themselves not straight – those who probably grew up under an expectation that they would be straight and/or normatively gendered, but who didn’t meet society’s expectation on that front. And, in fact, other studies indicate that LGBTQ parents may be more likely than their straight counterparts to take more of a “wait and see” approach to their children’s eventual sexual orientation and/or gender expression/identity.
Though I expect (and hope!) that my research on heteronormativity and gender in childhood will span across multiple projects and many years of my career, where I am right now is just at the beginning stages, having conversations with LGBTQ parents about their parenting philosophies, practices, and experiences.
If you are such a parent and you’re interested in helping with my research, please see my recruitment post to see if you qualify for this stage of the study. Even if you don’t qualify right now, you can feel free to email me anyway [kate.averett (at) utexas (dot) edu], subscribe to the blog, and/or check back here from time to time if you want to be kept up-to-date on future studies and on what’s happening as my research progresses.
