Abstract
School: a Feminist Ethnography of Playing with Gender
Pay attention to how children play. This is the significance of Barrie Thorne’s celebrated Gender Play (1993), a feminist ethnography of children playing with gender in school. If we look with patience, empathy, and without imposing ourselves, we might learn something about what children do with differences like gender and race. Gender Replay, edited by Freeden Blume Oeur and C.J. Pascoe, celebrates Barrie Thorne’s feminist scholarship in sociology with special emphasis paid to her foundational book. It is striking that one of Barrie Thorne’s most significant contributions to the fields of sociology, gender studies, and education is to pay attention to children when they play. One might think that caring deeply about what children do and what they think about what they do is commonsense. Yet, each contributor to Gender Replay celebrates Thorne for adeptly teaching them how to do just that and more.
Gender Play is most notable for documenting the incredible amount of hours Thorne spent observing children play in an ethnographic study of how play matters in the construction of gender in two elementary schools. The methodological rigor is significant for showing children’s agency in constructing gender differences. This view challenges mainstream views of children’s gender being uncritically socialized by school practices. Thorne provides thick descriptions of how children come together and come apart by gender differences when they play and do other things in school. The synthetical understandings of children coming together to play and going apart to avoid “cooties” reveal what children and youth might be teaching adults if they looked and listened enough.
Gender Replay is valuable for articulating the many uses for Thorne’s methodology and past work that may seem dated for newer researchers. The collection takes readers back in the first section titled Kids as Actor, Studying Kids and moves us forward with a section showing how Thorne’s work can be recontextualized in Looking Ahead. Contributors throughout the collection define who and what Thorne has meant to them and how her work has inspired a range of interdisciplinary topics and research approaches. The clearest example of extensions of her work is found in the section titled Racial and Ethnic Borderwork. The three chapters in this section are dedicated to explorations of race inspired by Thorne’s earlier explorations of gender.
The book presents useful scholarly analysis alongside personal memories of teaching and learning with Barrie Thorne at the University of Southern California and, later, at UC Berkeley. The intermingling of thinking and feeling in academic writing in Gender Replay conjures a similar affective pull as Thorne’s own scholarship while maintaining attention to criticality, also a hallmark of Thorne’s work. Barrie Thorne, as a mentor, teacher, researcher, and colleague, is very much felt in this book.
Gender Replay contributes to many disciplinary fields. Thorne’s original text has been widely used as a seminal text by education and sociology researchers concerned with gendered social relations to illustrate a multiple case study design for more than comparison to one another. Like many of the contributors, I drew from Thorne’s Gender Play study design to explore gender in two all-girls schools—one private and one public—that was intentionally not comparative. Thorne illustrates how to read cases together and apart. The power of this approach allows for a more expansive analysis than comparison which, in education, often takes a more evaluative tone rather than descriptive. The contributors of Gender Replay agree that Thorne taught them that description takes time and empathy.
As an edited collection, the book is a thoughtful recap of Barrie Thorne’s contribution for newer scholars in the field who may be deterred from reading the original book with a publication date of 1993. A common refrain by multiple contributors to this collection is that they continue to assign Thorne’s Gender Play in their gender and education courses and ethnographic methodology courses. Gender Replay is an important reminder to those of us familiar with Thorne’s earlier feminist scholarship that Gender Play does not have an expiration date.
The appreciation for Thorne’s empathetic mentoring, critical teaching and learning, and careful ethnographic research felt somewhat repetitive when the collection was read as a whole. However, the affective attunements to paying attention to children laid out here by her many students, junior colleagues, and scholarly peers are worth reading again. I am not sure that sociology and education researchers can be reminded enough to pay close attention to children, especially when they play.