We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
The Gender Binary Meets the Gender-Variant Child: Parents’ Negotiations with Childhood Gender Variance.
- Authors
Rahilly, Elizabeth P.
- Abstract
Until recently, raising a young child as transgender was culturally unintelligible. Most scholarship on transgender identity refers to adults’ experiences and perspectives. Now, the increasing visibility of gender-variant children, as they are identified by the parents who raise them, presents new opportunities to examine how individuals confront the gender binary and imagine more gender-inclusive possibilities. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “truth regime” to conceptualize the regulatory forces of the gender binary in everyday life, this work examines the strategies of 24 such parents, who represent 16 cases of childhood gender variance. Specifically, I analyze three practices—“gender hedging,” “gender literacy,” and “playing along”—through which these parents develop a critical consciousness about gender binary ideology and work to accommodate their children’s nonconformity in diverse discursive interactions. Taken together, their newfound strategies and perspectives subvert traditional conceptions of “gender-neutral” or “feminist” parenting, and reveal new modes of resistance to the normative transmission and regulation of gender practices.
- Subjects
TRANSGENDER children; GENDER-nonconforming people; ATTITUDES toward child rearing; FEMINISM; LONGITUDINAL method; GENDER identity
- Publication
Gender & Society, 2015, Vol 29, Issue 3, p338
- ISSN
0891-2432
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/0891243214563069