Abstract:
Popular culture is omnipresent in the lives of young children. The mass media, movies, television, and product advertising all carry messages about acceptability and desirability, deeply entangled with traditional stereotypes about gender, sex-roles, and sexuality. The intersection of discourses of media, gender, and performativity and their impact on children’s behaviour was observed in relation to Frozen, the Disney movie, during a kindergarten-based research project. The central argument is that teachers can understand more fully about how children “doing gender” is tied up with narrow, fixed understandings about the way the world works by using constructs from feminist poststructural theory.
Journal issue: