Abstract
Within a socio-anthropological framework, this paper studies how the relations between children’s bodies and material culture are related to age and gender identities. The empirical study involves nine focus groups of children playing a card game created for this research. The results illustrate how boys and girls favor different characteristics of these artifacts. They shed light on how this material culture provides symbolic resources for children relationships and performs what their bodies are and will be able to do.
Introduction
Today physical activities and sports are very widely practiced by children, but their importance is not taken into account in research, except in medical and psychological sciences, which are generally grounded in normative approaches to children’s bodies and development. On the one hand, French social sciences display little interest in childhood and sociological research is centered on an approach relating to children’s socialization, which emphasizes their becoming in relation to their different social backgrounds: it favors their parents’ points of view (Mennesson, 2020), sometimes coupled with the observations of children’s practices (Mennesson and Neyrand, 2010). This kind of analysis of the social formation of preference with regards to sports does not give voice to children, and does not take into account their perspectives on their physical activities, whether games or sports. Childhood studies also show little interest in the domain of children’s sports, with some famous exceptions such as Fine (1987). But it would be a challenging empirical field within which to test theoretical conceptions of the importance of the children’s body and the role of material culture for children’s agency (Prout, 2000). Most of the time artifacts are indeed central to children’s games and sports. Could one imagine playing tennis without a racket or soccer without a ball? Some activities such as skateboarding are even named after their material equipment. The development of children’s sports practices goes hand-in-hand with material innovations: it is one of the main conditions of making them accessible to very young children (Garnier, 2005).
The analysis of the diversity of material culture addressed at young children’s physical activities shows a continuum between two camps. In the first camp, the objects are designed for playful activities, games, or even “playing to do sport” and pretended play in relation to future sports practices. In the second, the objects are designed as authentic sports equipment built for institutional sports practices, for an initiation into the various sports disciplines or even early competition practices (Garnier, 2013). However, what do young children themselves consider as objects made for them? What kind of objects do they use or intend to use for their games or sport practices? For children, just as for adults, what is “good” can be a matter of dispute (Garnier, 2014). This text proposes to shed light on children’s perspectives regarding the objects that they may (or may not) use for their physical activities.
First, we will present the socio-anthropological perspective on which our research is based; then we will explain the methodology of our investigation. This methodology is based on games, and is specifically designed for investigating children’s points of view. Subsequently, we will analyse the results by examining all the ways in which, for children, objects mark gender and age identities and how they can be linked to various representations of sport and children’s mass culture, especially when objects are decorated with brand licensing of characters such as Hello Kitty. In this text we will purposefully leave open the respective definitions of “sport” and “play”, in order to analyse how children themselves define them through the ways in which they characterize the objects as being “appropriate for them” or not.
Objects: Services for marking and making children’s identities
Developed from the 1980s onwards by Latour (1988), actor-network theory leads to a renewal of the understanding of children’s bodies by giving a new importance to material culture and emphasizing the associations between humans and artifacts. This perspective also underlines how the reality of the world is put to the test by actors, by analyzing how the multiple dichotomies of our modern categories of thought are constructed and performed, such as individual and collective actors, agency and structure, nature and culture, etc. (Garnier, 1995). Additionally, gender studies, postcolonial studies and also disability studies further emphasize the importance of the body and its materiality. Notably, in relation to language, Butler (1993, 1998) underlines gendered performances where the body’s materiality is an effect of power relations. All of these studies participate in a critical and reflexive study of norms, values and classifications regarding the body, which are put to test in reality and are enacted into practices (Garnier, 2020). Finally, instead of definitions of children’s bodies conveying tense relationships between social and cultural constructions and a biological reality, researchers may empirically study how the actors themselves, including children, are involved in inquiries regarding the relative importance of its materiality and its power. It is also clear, for instance in Evaldsonn’s (2003) ethnographic observations of migrant girls’ games, that the physicality of the body is also closely related to the social context of children’s activities, including the composition of peer groups.
In this research, our aim is to stress the importance of material culture considered from a double perspective, technological and semiotic, in order to understand how the objects perform children’s bodies and what they mean for the children (Garnier, 2012). On the one hand, the technological dimension of the objects – size, weight, and more generally affordances (Gibson, 1979) refers to the wholeness of one’s behavior (physiological, psychological and social) as Mauss (1973) showed in his famous text, Techniques of the body. On the other side, the semiotic study of the objects is in line with the anthropological approach of the consumption of goods coined by Douglas and Isherwood (1979). Their perspective underlines the link between moral judgments, cognitive categories and objects: it is through the objects that a culture acquires stability and consistency, that it becomes visible and convincing. Goods also provide a “service of marking”: “every good can be perceived as a simple sample, a simple part of a flow of markings which participates in the elaboration of a system of classification” (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979: 97). This “service of marking” participates in the definition of one’s identity.
Many studies have investigated gender attributions of clothes, toys, youth literature, etc., and how these artifacts convey gender stereotypes from an early age (Martinez and Ames, 1997). However, age differences are less often taken into account. The processes of categorization of the objects go hand-in-hand with age classifications, even if their relationship is always relative to different contexts or situations. Objects assign ages to individuals: sometimes they are “too small” or “too big” for a certain child; reciprocally, sometimes children are “too young” or “too old”, to have a particular item. Often at the heart of conflicts and negotiations between parents and children, the objects also act as markers of “normality” in relation to the children’s development or rites of passage, for example when the child changes his/her bicycle (Clarke, 2008).
Objects are equally essential in social relationships between children. Peer groups present strong hierarchies between children of different ages: “Children do not just learn age concepts, they also develop complex ideas about a global age structure. In the case of peer groups, the age structure is also a hierarchy, and as such it is ‘based on a system of inequality’” (Passuth, 1987: 189). As Passuth points out, children consider age as commensurate to knowledge within the social hierarchy, not as a logical-mathematical number of years. This hierarchy involves power relations marked by tests of strength, but also a moral sense of what a “legitimate” behavior is at a given age. It appears in children’s criticism of other children who supposedly act “too old” or “too young” for their age: “Some age differences are legitimate, while others are illegitimate” (Passuth, 1987: 189).
Our research investigates how children’s objects highlight these hierarchies according to age and gender and how they appropriate them. Starting from the analysis of a corpus of objects and incorporating sports culture and children’s mass culture (Garnier, 2013), we will analyse how young children appropriate these age and gender categorizations through objects that are familiar to them in a French context, such as balls or scooters, or that can also refer to institutionalized sports practices, such as basketball boards.
It is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which children differentiate the objects in relation to the way in which they define themselves. In this sense, we will also be vigilant not to presuppose knowledge of what constitutes “sport” and what constitutes “play”, in order to understand these concepts from children’s perspectives. It is also necessary to understand from their point of view to what extent the branding of young children’s objects within children’s mass culture denotes both gender and age differences of objects.
Methodology of a study with young children
Involving young children in research demands creativity in order to avoid the imposition of the multiple biases that inevitably accompany adult’s perspectives. The challenge is more broadly to consider the children as full interlocutors of the researcher and to offer them situations that may be motivating and meaningful in regards to their everyday life (Garnier and Rayna, 2017). As we could not offer them the large range of real objects they may use for sports and games, we decided to create a specific card game with photographs of these objects to study their sense of social classifications of material culture. 1 The creation of a card game is a methodology used by sociologists, such as Boltanski and Thévenot (1983) and Bourdieu (1984), aimed to study adults’ classifications used for positioning in social space, proceeding by “principles of common vision and division”: “Since these principles work in a practical state and remain below the elicitation, they are not controlled either in their external form or in their condition of application, not all agents implement the same schema to think the same object; however, the different aspects of the same object (. . .) are both finite in number and common to all subjects” (Bourdieu, 1984: 563). Using the “prototype” theory (Rosch, 1978) that is a theory of informal categorization based on our sense of normality of what is a “typical” instance of such or such thing, this kind of game enables the sociologists to analyse everyday life categorizations that are usually implemented implicitly and tacitly.
In creating a card game for young children that shows different pictures of objects used in sports and games, our objective is to explore their sense of categorization of material culture in relation to their own way of classifying themselves and others. Material culture is thus the subject matter of this research in order to analyse how its categorization is embodied within children’s social perceptions of their identities.
Designing the card game
The empirical investigation is rooted in the use of concrete props, specifically created and designed for this research project: a game of “Happy Families” of 42 cards representing seven families of objects. Each family is composed of six cards and each card shows the photograph of an object. Among the 12 families of objects designed for children’s physical activities analyzed in previous research (Garnier, 2013), we chose seven families referring to institutionalized sports and traditional games in France: scooters, skateboards, bikes, basketball backboards, skipping ropes, balls, rackets and (golf) clubs. Five preliminary interviews with parents show that these families of objects were used to a greater or lesser degree by children.
Each family of objects (the skateboard for instance) systematically includes six different objects whose properties vary regarding their semiotic and functional dimensions. On the one hand, their properties are based on their aesthetic appearance: the objects either do or do not have a brand (two of the six cards respectively present Hello Kitty and Spiderman licenses, which were the two most frequently used in our previous research (Garnier, 2013)) and may or may not be decorated with images, colors or accessories (a jump rope with handles shaped like a carrot and a rabbit, for example). On the other hand, the properties of the objects vary according to different sizes and functionalities (for example, three-wheeled or two-wheeled scooters, a three-wheeled scooter with two rear wheels for propulsion, bicycles with or without stabilizers, etc.). Thus each family of objects include six objects that present a priori different properties in relation to children’s age, gender, size, motor skills, etc.
Game-interviews with children
Collective interviews (N = 9), with children aged 5–6 years were conducted in small groups of three children who could choose one of the friends they wanted to be with. They consisted of 12 girls and 16 boys, mostly coming from middle-class families, who were in the same group in a nursery school: a girl trio, two boy trios and five mixed trios (two girls and a boy or two boys and a girl), as well as a mixed group of four. One of the main concerns was not to presuppose children’s knowledge of the objects, including their name, and their uses, in order to avoid transforming the interviews into a sort of questionnaire on knowledge of various sporting disciplines or physical activities. We also avoided asking each of them to describe his/her family’s environment (parents’ occupations and incomes, siblings, etc.) because the aim was not to explain their individual choices in relation to the social and cultural diversity of their family, but to let them discuss their choices among themselves.
After a short presentation, the organization of each collective interview followed the same three phases. First, we asked the group of children to make “families” (or “piles”) of cards that “went together”, while asking questions: “do you know these objects?” “Do you have any at home?” “Why or how did you put them together?”. The second step consisted of successively taking the different families of objects and asking the children to choose one of them in turn, discussing with the trio: “What object would you like to have for yourselves, and why?”, “Why do you not like the other objects?”, etc. A third phase consisted of a memory game where the goal was to turn over two cards out of three belonging to the same family. Finally, we organized a meeting with all the children in order to know how they found this game-study.
The choice of collective interviews aims to balance the power dynamic between children and the researcher and to show, through discussions between children, agreements and disagreements on their choices between different objects, their ways of identifying and categorizing them. Instead of a precise measure of the preferences of each child, we preferred a qualitative analysis of the ways they justify their choice, the elements of context that they use to categorize them and the discussion they have together about these choices. The verbatim of the interviews was studied with a thematic content analysis, paying attention to the interactions between children.
Results: What is “for children” from children’s perspectives
All the children were well involved in the empirical device used, and they were both surprised by and interested in this new kind of card game. The different compositions of the trios in respect to gender seemed very important in their discussion about their choices, and the mixed trios proved to be particularly rich in creating dynamics of discussions between girls and boys.
What constitutes “sport” and what makes children “big”
Giving names to objects
Among the different objects, children very often confused a golf club with ice hockey canes, but in one mixed trio, while looking at an image of a golf club, a girl said it was “skis”, and was immediately interrupted by the boys: “golf”. There is obviously a difference of expertise between girls and boys in terms of knowledge of physical activities, starting with the vocabulary of these kinds of artifacts. For instance, in the girls’ trio, the rugby ball is not spontaneously classified among the balls: for two of the girls, its oval shape excluded it from the category of balls. Conversely, in a boys’ trio, one of them observed that this rugby ball was more precisely a ball for American football. Some boys were able to use very specific denomination, for example with a racket: “It’s to do badminton”, said one of them. In addition to the denomination of the physical activities linked to the objects, boys were able to use a vocabulary that was precise enough to describe them, especially for bicycles: “brakes”, “handlebars”, “crutches”, “radius” and “speeds”. This knowledge of objects is not theoretical or bookish; it proceeds first of all from a relationship of use, whether real or imagined, in children’s environments.
To project oneself using the objects
Even though the focus groups were not videotaped, it seems to us that in this situation, boys are much more likely than girls to imagine using the objects themselves, especially when it comes to scooters, balls and basketball backboards. They get up from their chair to demonstrate the gestures associated with the objects: “It’s the hardest part; you think it’s very easy, but in fact you put your feet like that”, said Octave in a trio of boys to explain to them the use of the three-wheeled scooter, standing up with his feet apart. In the same trio, Ryan explained a basketball backboard: “you have to jump like that”, showing the gesture to the others. Noam compared the advantages of heavy and light balls, moving animatedly while speaking: “the lightest is better when you do soccer, when you are a goalkeeper. . . When you are a goalkeeper, you take a heavy one: arh (gesture), this one is heavy but I can do it like that (gesture), I can train”.
In another trio of boys, Tom, Mika, and Alexandre engaged in a discussion while showing the gestures required by the different scooters and giving each other advice:
There you can’t turn too much and the wheels. . .
If you can avoid the stones, it will go faster.
Yes, but there you go with your feet, it’s the feet that lead; you have to turn there. . .
Actually, you have to put your feet on the back and to go straight: it will be difficult.
The images of the objects are signs representing actions; through the photographs, they appeal to and institute motor skills; they involve bodily performances which children are called to enact (Garnier, 2012). Boys especially project themselves into a situation where they are pretending to use the objects, where the objects fit them or where they have to exercise and improve their use. Sometimes they even imagine themselves in special environments or surfaces, such as with “pebbles” or “cement”, which would require different skills from the rider of the scooter and therefore modify their practice with the object.
References to oneself and the family
Boys, more than girls, spontaneously report on the physical and sporting activities they do outside nursery school and their choice of objects is often related to their experience of personal practice: “and I have a real tennis racket, because I play tennis”; “I did a real game” (rugby ball) or occasionally the opposite: “I won’t choose it because I have it” (soccer ball); “I have the Wii and I do golf”, etc. On the girls’ side, it is sometimes the very possession of the object that is indicated, as for the scooter: “mine is broken”; “mine is in my grandmother’s home” or for the jump rope: “I have the same at home”; “I have four at home”. For girls in the focus groups as in general, dance is very often the physical activity they practice outside school, and this may increase the difference with boy’s practices in relation to the objects selected for this study.
Beside their own practices, the children also refer to practices with their parents: “It is used for playing rugby, I have already played with my dad”, said a boy. “Sometimes with my mum we have fun. Valentine knows how to jump very well: Mum and I take a rope and she jumps”, explained a girl, speaking about her little sister. It is very common for siblings to own objects such as bikes and pass them on from the oldest to the youngest: “my big brother’s has the same”, “I have a little brother, he has a bike like that (without pedals)”, etc. There are also shared practices: “I have an air ball at home, it’s Hello Kitty; I have a lot of fun with my sister,” said another girl. More rarely, other members of the family are mentioned, for example by Lou, who recounted his experience of playing golf with his cousin and his granddad. Sports games being broadcast on TV are also mentioned, or special occasions such as holidays or festivals, as well as observing the practices of other children: “There’s a friend of my brother who has one, it’s hard to do,” said a boy referring to a scooter. Very often these practical experiences that the children are speaking about are gendered, especially in relation to their parents or older siblings and friends.
Sport authenticity versus aesthetic criteria
A discussion in a boys’ trio about the choice of the skipping rope shows the diversity of their positioning: the first one valued the authenticity of a rope made for training, “the true one”, he said; the second chose the rope referring to entertainment mass culture, “It’s Star Wars”; the third chose the jump rope with the rabbit and carrot handles: “it is really funny”, he argued. The “real” object is the canonical, standardized and conventional sporting object used in competition. In another way, sports shops provide this authenticity: “that’s a real one, I saw it in Decathlon” (a French brand of specialized sports shops), said another boy for a scooter.
Another trio of boys discussed the choice of the basketball backboard that is “for those who do basketball for real”; Tom challenged Alexandre’s choice: “No, but on TV, we see people who do basketball, and there are baskets like that which. . ., it has to bounce like that”, he said, pointing to the white frame drawn on the basketball backboard. In a mixed trio, the girl chose a Hello Kitty racket because “it’s pink, it’s cute” and one of the boys intervened: “but it’s not a real one because it has no holes”; the girl answered: “but we still have the right to choose it”. Even if the criteria are not easy to define, boys more often value the “real” sporting objects, or at least it is one of the criteria that justify their choice.
Girls favor another criterion: that of the aesthetics of the objects, as indicated by a discussion between three girls about the choice of a scooter, centered solely on the colors of the objects. Nina began: “that one, because it’s pretty, because it’s pink”; Amanda chose in turn: “it’s a girl’s scooter and I like black”; Emma reacted: “and I do not like it that much, because there is not too much colour”; Nina intervened again pointing out a rope: “it’s pretty and I like it because there is red”. The question of colors and, as we shall see soon, the Hello Kitty logo (which is very pink) holds an important place in the criteria of girls’ choices; on the other hand, the sporting authenticity of objects seems to have a marginal place.
Sports versus Play: The “stronghold of manhood”
The skipping rope is no doubt a “boundary object” (Star, 2010), perceived either as a traditional game mainly associated with girlhood or as an instrument of sports training, for boxing for instance. It is also the only family of artifacts which is rejected, within a boys’ trio: “it’s not for us, because in fact we are not girls, it’s not for us boys”. Children’s discussions about their choice of the jump rope in a mixed trio also raise the question of the different meanings of “sport” and “play”. One of the girls took the Hello Kitty rope and the other girl, Charlotte, the rabbit and carrot rope, while the boy, Noam, chose the black and purple rope, a boxing training type: “it’s used for sport, and I do sport on Saturdays”, he explained. For him, the jumping ropes chosen by the girls were not for sports, whereas the one he intended to use is: “I also do sports in the garden, I put on my sneakers, my swimsuit, not my swimsuit, my trousers, and I run in the garden. But “it’s a sport because you have to jump”, replied Charlotte. And then the boy recognized that he does not know how to jump and “it could be a little bit of a sport”.
The distinction between “doing sport” and “playing” also seems to be gendered. Charlotte appeared to have a broader conception of sport as entertainment related to a strong physical activity, while for Noam, sport seemed to be very different from play: it had to be done in a specific space and time; it was also a practice that requires a particular behavior that went beyond the energy and actions required by the physical activity. Sneakers and specific clothes symbolized this conversion; they operated as a kind of metamorphosis and completed the transformation to “athlete”. This definition of sport is not institutional, but it emphasizes the fiction of a separation between the world of sports and everyday life, as a “counter-society”, such as in certain definitions of sports as “serious games” (Defrance, 1994: 100).
What is (or is not) for “babies” or “big children”
All the children show a sense of age difference, distinguishing between what is or is not possible or appropriate at a particular given age. They are, generally, very sensitive to the precision of a given age, particularly regarding their own age, that of their siblings and also the age required for a particular object: “8, 7 (year-olds), they can go on that one, because there, it is too small”, explained a boy pointing to the reduced foot support on the scooter which requires better motor skills than a larger one.
To determine the age at which objects may be used, children are attentive not only to their size but also to their functional characteristics: “it is for the little ones, the 3-year-olds, it has wheels at the back”, explained a girl speaking about a bike, and another girl provided evidence that another bike was intended for “babies”: “it does not have pedals”. The three or four wheels of the special scooters can also be identified as providing support that helps them to be classified, especially by girls, in the category of objects for “little ones”, whereas boys argue that these same scooters make steering more complex. Conversely, some objects are not suitable for younger children: “iron stuff is not for babies” (a golf club). One boy chose a certain soccer ball for himself and a different ball for his little twin brothers: “it’s too heavy; they will take the lightest”, he explained.
Boys often devalue artifacts for “little ones” because the actions they offer are “too easy”: “that one is useless, we cannot do anything with it, it’s for babies” (basketball); “the pedal-less bike is too easy, because you put your feet on the ground and you go forward”. Instead of “easy” actions suited for the “little ones”, boys show their preference for objects that offer resistance, a challenge to overcome, and opportunities to develop their skills or their strengths. In offering the tension of an “excitement”, these kinds of objects participate in a “quest for pleasure” (Elias and Dunning, 1986).
Children are quite excited by an upgrade of the same type of objects. For example, Louis explains that his parents offered him a “big bike – an adult bike” for his sixth birthday, instead of a “small-wheeled bike”: “this one is the one I had before I was 5 years old and afterwards, when I was still 5 years old, we removed the small wheels. Since I have a new one, now it’s for my little brother and we put the little wheels back on it.” Between the siblings, the transmission of objects denotes a hierarchy according to their age and valorizes the use of objects intended for those who are older: “I already use a bicycle like my brother’s,” says Killian proudly.
Licensing and images in general go hand-in-hand with the representation of what is designed or suitable “for children”: “It’s really for the big ones, there’s nothing on it” says Clément about an image of a competition basketball backboard; “it is more for the bigger ones and all the others are more for children, they are more decorated than this one”, adds another boy. The lack of decoration of the object marks a sort of sobriety, a concentration on its functionality. This absence of seduction by the images can be seductive in its own way. This “real” or the “true” basketball backboard also pleases Amanda, “because it is big, it makes you become stronger”. The object makes it possible to increase strength, as food does in another way. Growing up is shown by the material culture children choose or already own, not only as external signs of one’s identity, but also as embodied performance.
Hello Kitty versus Spiderman: Licenses to mark gender
Licensing is very important to young children, even in sports activities, both in terms of the collecting of objects and the defining of gendered identities. We will emphasize how frequently girls choose objects marked with a Hello Kitty logo, whereas boys rarely choose the Spiderman license. While children choose these kinds of objects, they position themselves in relation to their peers, displaying their gender identity and the “border work” relating to it (Thorne, 1993).
Hello Kitty for girls
We can state that the objects marked by the Hello Kitty logo are immediately related to gender: “it’s pretty and it’s a Hello Kitty scooter too, it’s a girly scooter”. For girls, this kind of choice is most common, to the point that in a mixed trio, one of the boys reacted: “she won’t stop choosing Hello Kitty!”. In another mixed trio: “she’ll always choose that one, the girls like Hello Kitty. So now we’ll call them Hello Kitty”, said the boy. It seems impossible to break the circularity of the assignments between this license and girls’ identity: seemingly, if one is a girl, it is impossible not to love Hello Kitty. This license seems to override and eclipse the other characteristics of the object: “because it has Hello Kitty!” gives an obvious explanation of girls’ choice.
But some of the girls displayed a certain distance from this brand, such as Charlotte who gave an explanation of the other girls’ choices: “apparently all the girls, they like it like that, because all the girls like Hello Kitty and that’s a Hello Kitty ball”. There may be a gap between a collective and a personal identity in relation to age differences. For instance, Tibora explained that her little sister “loves princesses and girly stuff like Hello Kitty”, and Clément reacted, in a mixed trio, to the choice of a Hello Kitty scooter by a girl: “in fact this one is for babies”. The decoration of the object, especially with a logo such as Hello Kitty, seems to indicate both the gender and age of its owner.
Spiderman: A superhero who is not really “sporty”
Like Hello Kitty, the objects marked by the Spiderman license participate in the fun of children’s mass culture (Brougère, 2014). Some of the boys loved or even “adored” Spiderman and collect these objects: “I have the same at home, I have Spiderman cars and a Spiderman toy”, said Achille, choosing a Spiderman skipping rope. Here again, the other characteristics of the objects are overlooked in favor of this license and its image suffices to justify the choice of the objects: “I like Spiderman stuff”. But this license does not unanimously attract all the boys; many particularly like Buzz Lightyear or Cars. Moreover, the Spiderman license is less attractive than the other characteristics of the object: “I do not have Spiderman stuff, it is rubbish”, said Clement, comparing two scooters: “because this one goes fast, the other one, Spiderman, is slow”. In a boy’s trio, Tristan explained why he prefers a basketball backboard with a basketball photo, rather than a backboard with Spiderman: “because it’s real sport”. Boys seem to be more interested in the functionality of the object and its “sport” image than the license. It seems that, less than girls, they do not care a lot about collecting as many objects as possible of the same license. What is certain is that more often than girls, boys pay attention to the details of the objects or to their materials, for instance with a basketball backboard: “this one it is metal, when it’s a hard ball, it bounces”.
The attachment of the majority of the girls to Hello Kitty and a weaker attachment of fewer boys to Spiderman could be seen as surprising. The image of Hello Kitty is often reduced to the head and she seems very far from the world of physical activities, but it is a “cute” figure that is omnipresent in all areas of girls’ lives – a character loved by its very recurrence (Cross, 2004). On the contrary, Spiderman, clothed in red and blue, is muscular, agile and combative, but as a superhero, his power is fictional (Eco, 1976). Very often, the boys prefer to project themselves within the realms of the real world of possibility with regard to using the objects, as opposed to an imaginary one.
Crossing the gender divide?
Alexander’s choices often differed from those of the two other boys. For instance, he said he wanted “all the bikes”, including the one marked Hello Kitty: “but it is pink,” intervened Mika; “I want it anyway, I like pink: pink is my favourite colour”, he replied. Alexander also justified his choices: “But I also love Hello Kitty, I like both, I play with girls’ stuff, I have girl friends”. In turn, but differently, Tom also proposed to weaken the gender divide: “I also like girls’ stuff, but the girls also play Bayblade (spinning top toy), like my girl friend Sarah; I know Barbie”.
In a different way than boys, within a mixed trio, girls can exert a pressure toward gender conformity marked by the Spiderman license. For instance, Sarah asked several times of Henry who preferred, for example, “the real tennis racket” and “the jump rope belonging to the big ones”: “why don’t you choose Spiderman? Why don’t you choose the boys’ stuff? It’s also for boys!” The underlying idea seems to be that of a kind of symmetry or balance: if the girls choose Hello Kitty, the boys must choose Spiderman. This is what Shany also said in a mixed trio: “I would say that if there is a girl and a boy who are twins, because they are alike, the boy would choose Spiderman and the girl Hello Kitty. Then there is no problem”.
Through the objects, the question of equality between girls and boys and what it means to live together is raised. When in another mixed trio, Tibora, one of the girls, chose the Spiderman ball, “because it can go everywhere”, Killian, the boy, explains why she chose a “boy’s ball”: “maybe she thinks that we would laugh at her if she chooses a Hello Kitty balloon”. The other girl, Thea, made a different hypothesis: “because she does not like Hello Kitty” and Tibora answered: “I also like Hello Kitty but I do not want to choose it and because in that way girls can play with boys”. Not only does this example show how the objects construct a strong border between boys and girls, but it also indicates the asymmetry between girls choosing boys’ items and vice versa. The Spiderman ball “designed” for boys can “go everywhere” but the same does not apply for the Hello Kitty objects. The mixed trios create social situations of asymmetry between boys and girls where gender and power are at stake. The world of objects, and especially that of objects made for sport and physical activities, is a powerful site for showing gendered “border work” (Thorne, 1993).
Concluding discussion
Age and gender differences were very relevant in the discussions between children about objects related to their physical activities. More generally, the study of material culture seems to be a touchstone for childhood studies, because it facilitates the analysis of how our categories of understanding of childhood and children are objectified in everyday life. Additionally, it gives the researchers the opportunity to strengthen the links between their theoretical perspectives and the empirical inquiry with children themselves. In this conclusion, we aim to discuss some of the stakes of this research, starting with its methodology.
Firstly, we can point out that the “Happy Families” cards game that we created was well adapted to and motivating for the young children, including when they sometimes transformed it into a game of guessing the others’ choices of the objects. Small groups of three children enhance their participation and the discussion between them. This was especially the case with mixed trios, and their interactions show the importance of their gendered composition, when for example the boy had to justify his choice to two girls or when one the girls legitimizes the other girl’s choice to him. One of the limits of this study comes from the choice of the objects in relation to sports and games that favored boys’ physical activities, as it is the case more generally in adults’ practices. It will be interesting to open up the repertoire of the objects to include those that may be more favored by girls. Another limit is linked to the use of photographs instead of the real objects. This tends to increase the weight of their semiotic dimension and to reduce the weight of their materiality, while we underline the necessity to consider both of them in our conception of material culture. Following Miller’s (2010) anthropological example of a chief in Cameroon, we can argue for a “gradation between more or less material”: “materiality is gained by substances through the process of circulating through his body and presence” (p. 73). The 2D images certainly favor the “service of marking” of goods (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979) rather than the “technics of the body” (Mauss, 1973) that are only involved in the use of 3D objects. But this distinction seems also to be gendered, as we see boys, more often than girls, imagining through the photographs or imitating the physical challenges the objects may or may not offer. Here we lack a videotape of the interviews in order to study precisely how the photographs may or may not be a stimulus for actions. Another consequence of this relative importance of the semiotic dimension seems to be that of the two licenses, Hello Kitty and Spiderman, from the children’s points of view. The images of these characters do not have any impact on the action with objects, but they symbolize and perform gendered choices and also age categories.
From early childhood, the material culture of physical activities and sports is a “stronghold of manhood” (Elias and Dunning, 1986), built by and for men. Boys not only display a wider knowledge of this domain, but they also often prefer the “real” sports material to the “toys”, performing the pleasure of excitement they offer. The overall increase of women’s sports practices and the transformation of masculine identities cannot hide more subtle differentiations that still dedicate sports and physical activities to men. Through material culture, gender differences are instituted and naturalized: “institutions are fixed by a structural analogy with the body” (Douglas, 1986: 69).
The hierarchy of children’s choices also seems to be very clear between objects for “babies” and objects for “older children” or “big ones” which allow children to become stronger, as noted with respect to Amanda’s choice of one of the basketball backboards, “because it is big, it makes you become stronger”. Material culture embodies the process of growing up: not only in the sense of the age hierarchy and status among children, but also as a performance of what they are or will be able to do. Growing up means appropriating a material culture made for “the bigger ones”, not only symbolically but also physically. In this sense, objects perform and institute physical skills that show the reality of growing up and becoming “strong”. Material culture not only represents children’s actual identity: the “non-human actors” also have their own agency (Latour, 1988) which participates in children’s agency and children’s becoming by providing the strengths that make them “older”.
Miller (2010) underlined this importance of objects in children’s socialization as a process of learning how to act appropriately with them in their everyday life and also how to twist adults’ ordinary uses. His theoretical framework balances “alienation” as “we are ourselves grown up and matured in the light of things that come down from previous generation” (p. 53) and “objectification” as “the way we enhance our capacity as human beings” (p. 59). This tension seems at the heart of children’s choices, between the gendered habitus they have already developed and the possibility of increasing new strengths and performing growing up. Children’s bodies are made in this double process with things mixing unconscious embodiment and possibilities of change enacted in the present. This recalls that a child’s body is primarily characterized by an uncertainty that opens alternative futures, as it is emphasized in Spinoza’s (2017) Ethics: “No-one has yet determined what the body can do” (p. 52).
Finally, we can point out that, in this research, opening up this space of dialog between boys and girls and listening to their critique and their justification of what is “good” for them are both essential for understanding their ways of appropriating a material culture. Children’s voices express their diversity and their shared interest in this material culture of games and sports activities: “The pleasure of physical consumption is only part of the service rendered by the goods; the other part is the pleasure of sharing names” (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979: 98). The research on material culture with children may provide opportunities to counter insidious and prevalent cultural stereotypes woven into their everyday lives: “the lesson of material culture is that the more we fail to notice them, the more powerful and determinant of us things turn out to be” (Miller, 2010: 54).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
