Before reading this post, please take a
second to examine the picture above.
This past Sunday, I attended a baptism
for my friend's daughter. It was kind of a last minute decision, so
as a result I ended up making a special trip to my local Woodman's. I
picked up a card and then found myself looking around the
magazine/book aisle. School was the last thing on my mind at 8PM on a
Saturday night, but as I looked through the children's section I
couldn't help but notice how the books were arranged and coordinated
according to gender. Dora the Explorer books were next to Cars
puzzles. Barbie Magic Plays were among SpongeBob SquarePants, which were all next
to Toy Story and Elmo Music Players. I took a minute to further
analyze not only the placement of the books, but also the color
choice, text style, and the focal point of each cover. The books for
girls were printed with smaller cursive/fancy writing, while the
books for boys had larger bold words. The books for girls also
included more words to
describe the contents – “Barbie,” was lengthened to “Barbie:
Fun with Barbie and Friends,” whereas the books for boys had very
short titles, such as simply “Cars,” or even none at all. ALL
of the books for girls had one to several animated human characters
on the cover, whereas the boy books had ZERO
human characters displayed. I could write an entire dissertation
about the differences I noticed, but I just wanted to highlight a few
for this blog. I thought of a couple questions as I was thinking
about this example of gender.
- How did certain colors become socially constructed to mean a specific gender?
- Do you think publishers should include a more ambiguous type of book design or content? What would that book look like and what would it include?
For people who are not learning about gender in schools, this picture would be hard to interpret. For those of us who are learning about specific gender, this is a clear example as to how our society, even groceries stores think about gender. I would suggest for publishers to try to design these books for both genders, however, my thought is that we want children to read. We want them to like what they are looking at and if that so happens to be pretty cursive letter to thick bold font then let it be. What they could do is try to design a book that has both male and female likings to it. If this were to happen families could buy just one book for both of their children if they so happen to have boys and girls.
ReplyDeleteThat was a really good idea with the picture attachment.
It helps us really see the difference.