Just this week a scholarly article that I wrote with Dr Elizabeth Parsons (formerly of Deakin University) was published by Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. It was sparked by Liz's subject "Power Politics in Children's Literature", in which we taught the films Princess Mononoke and FernGully. Liz had already given a conference paper on the topic and kindly invited me to co-write an article with her. It did feel quite strange to be writing an academic article about contemporary films, as I think the closest I'd ever gotten to the present-day before was about 1920 and, at the point of writing, I'd never written about films either. I'm grateful to Liz for showing me how to step into a new field and for the opportunity to co-write this paper with her.
If anyone is interested in this area, or perhaps the work of Hayao Miyazaki (because we all know you're not going to be interested in the saccharine-fest that is Ferngully unless you saw it as a child), here is the abstract for the paper:
Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox's Fern Gully (1992)
Informed by ecocriticism, this article conducts a comparative examination of two contemporary animated children's films, Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fern Gully (1992). While both films advocate for the prevention of deforestation, they are, to varying degrees, antithetical to environmentalism. Both films reject the principles of deep ecology in displacing responsibility for environmental destruction on to ‘supernatural’ forces and exhibit anthropocentric concern for the survival of humans. We argue that these films constitute divergent methodological approaches for environmental consciousness-raising in children's entertainment. The western world production demonstrates marked conservatism in its depiction of identity politics and ‘cute’ feminization of nature, while Hayao Miyazaki's film renders nature sublime and invokes complex socio-cultural differences. Against FernGully's ‘othering’ of working-class and queer characters, we posit that Princess Mononoke is decidedly queer, anti-binary and ideologically bi-partisan and, in accord with the underlying principle of environmental justice, asks child audiences to consider compassion for the poor in association with care for nature.
Cindy Crawford’s daughter has revived discussion about the place of girls in high-fashion modelling. Ten-year-old Kaia Gerber has been chosen as the face of Young Versace and one of the launch images, in which she has been posed in a way that recalls her mother’s supermodel shots of the ‘90s, is a world apart from fleecy-clad child models grinning cheekily in the monthly Kmart catalogue.
It beggars belief that there is a Young Versace range that caters to children from newborns to twelve-years-old. I suppose there are wealthy people out there who couldn’t be seen shopping at Target for their kids, but with the scrapes that most kids get into, and their rapid growth, it’s sinfully excessive to be spending thousands on a flimsy skirt.
Yet wealthy people frittering away money is not the most significant thing to consider about Kaia’s modelling work and the visibility of young girls in the fashion industry. Unlike Thylane Blondeau's Vogue shoot last year, in which she wore a full face of make-up, leopard-print clothing and oversize heels, there is no parody of the fashion industry in Kaia’s images. This campaign is designed to appeal both to girls and their mothers (wealthy ones at least, and to foster aspirations in everyone else), and to encourage the process of girls valuing themselves according to how they look and what they buy.
Both men and women can take pleasure in aesthetic objects and the enjoyment of wearing good quality clothing, but it is women who are judged as a result of their appearance in ways that can be crippling. We know that the appearance of female politicians is far more often a subject of discussion in the media than men’s appearance— Tony Abbott’s alarming “budgie smugglers” being the exception.
A fascinating piece by Dannielle Miller at Mama Mia shows that even when women are active in areas in which their appearance should not be relevant, it is their looks that are most often attacked as a way of dragging them down and destroying their authority. Some of the female media commentators interviewed here, and in other articles on this topic, describe extremely hateful anonymous responses, not about what the substance of their opinion, but how they look. Nina Funnell, who writes about a range of women’s issues, and who has spoken out about her own horrifically violent rape, has shamefully received abusive comments suggesting that she was not attractive enough to be raped in any case.
This is what leads me to be critical of images like that of Kaia Gerber. Some might feel that the image is sexualising and is encouraging girls to “grow up too soon”. While these things might be true as well, using a young girl to advertise high fashion in the same way as women are used to advertise products begins the process of judgement even earlier. If mature women are undermined continuously because of their appearance and struggle with the results of this, then girls, who have not yet always been able to forge a self-confident identity, will not have the resources to brush such judgements aside.
Of course, for the past hundred years or more, girls have been able look to images of adult women in the media for an understanding of how they themselves should aspire to be and other girls can serve as the fashion and beauty police to ensure conformity. It is another level of pressure and expectation to have fashionable images of girls that are clothed and stylised as women, something that a 10-year-old cannot be, even if the image of Kaia from the neck-down looks as if she is a woman. The use of teen models often sells an unobtainable ideal of youth to women. However, selling womanhood to girls will surely only foster the same kind of degradation of girls' achievements in light of their looks as women already experience.
There have been quite a few stories about transgender girls in the news, not least of which on the controversy front has been the story of an American Girl Scout who opposes the inclusion of transgender girls within the organisation and is calling for a cookie boycott in protest.
I first began thinking about transgender girls after reading a Boston Globe article about twin boys, one of whom is now a trans girl. Without denying the existence of transgendered children and adults, I found some of the ideas presented in the article problematic. My feelings were especially pronounced in light of the recent discussion of the new Lego "Friends" range for girls and the gender segregation of toys.
The article about the Maines twins begins as follows:
Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.
Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.
Though Wyatt went on to express a clearer sense that he was a girl, as she identifies now as Nicole, it bothered me that toy preference was being used as a marker of gender dysphoria. While clearly identifying with the accoutrements of the gender the child feels that they truly are means feeling an affinity with the stereotypical markers of that gender, such associations suggest that there is likely something significantly unusual about a child who strays outside accepted norms with the toys or clothes that he or she likes. Though we need to support transgender children, we also don't want to encourage rigid separation of children's play according to gender by suggesting that if boys like typically "feminine" toys or girls like typically "masculine" toys that it indicates something wrong.
A 2010 research paper that sought to consider whether there is an innate preference in infants for particular colours and shapes, suggested that all children prefer dolls to cars at 12 months (this was measured by how much the infants looked at a particular toy). Once the boys in the study were about a year older, however, they seemed to prefer cars over dolls, whereas girls retained their preference for the dolls. The authors conclude that these difference "may arise from socialization or cognitive gender development rather than inborn factors." So, essentially, as boys get older they are gradually encouraged by their parents and the media they consume to ditch the dolls and start their Matchbox collection.
Clearly there is a percentage of children who have gender identity issues who need to be better accommodated and treated (some of the stories of trans boys and girls on the Mermaids website, the UK organisation for gender-variant children, are sad reflections of intolerance). Nevertheless, all children are being affected by the increasing gendering of childhood play, which seems to pathologise difference and diversity. Though Nicole's interest in Barbies and tutus was indicative of something more, it should not be a cause for alarm if a boy wishes to play with dolls or if a girl is more interested in a chemistry set than setting to work with a replica iron. UK toy store Hamley's has recently removed the "gender apartheid" of its separate boys' and girls' floors for toys (coded pink and blue) in a way that will hopefully allow children more scope to choose toys that interest them, rather than confining them to a limited selection according to what boys and girls are supposed to like.
I would suggest that the insistence of pushing children into their "right" gender also contributes to the bigoted attitudes that transgender children experience from their peers and adults. If you've not yet seen it, the video of an American Girl Scout, Taylor, expressing concern about Girl Scouts USA's decision to allow trans girls to enter the movement, shows her received ideas about the threat of transgendered people.
As a fan of Girl Guide history, I'm in support of the concept of a girls' and women's only organisation that encourages leadership and self-reliance, and, like Taylor from California, I would be disappointed to see boys being admitted. Nevertheless, Taylor is reproducing discriminatory attitudes about transgendered people that cannot see beyond strict binaries of biologically male and female. Taylor's YouTube video, which has sparked no shortage of discussion on feminist sites, is also embedded at a site called Honest Girl Scouts.
The site is purportedly run by current and former women of Scouting who disagree with the organisation's apparent conduct of sex education and support of a woman's right to choose (or pushing "pro-lesbian, pro-abortion role models"). In some ways the site is laughable ("FACTOID: Did you know that radical feminist Betty Friedan, founder of NOW (National Organization for Women) and NARAL (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) was on the National Board of GSUSA for 12 years?") but in others, especially the use, and perhaps production, of Taylor's video, it is disturbing. Specifically, it appears as if they have used a girl as a conduit for their discriminatory views.
On the Bitch magazine Facebook page, where the cookie boycott story was posted, Taylor was quite often attacked and was labelled a "creep". I would argue that the real creeps are those who are behind these campaigns to discriminate against gays and lesbians and transgender men and women in Scouting. It is a shame that such an articulate and intelligent girl has been encouraged to put forward these views, and that an organisation that is attempting to be progressive is being fractured by those who cannot fathom why reducing discrimination for this minority of children is a good thing.
Scouting was originally founded to accept children of all religious persuasions, so, despite some worrying statements at time from founder Robert Baden-Powell, at heart the aim was to be open to all kinds of young people. Perhaps girls might have even remained part of the original Scouting scheme in England if Edwardian social norms had not been so concerned about girls being too "boyish" and the presence of girls "softening" boys. I would hope that the society in which we live - a century after Scouting began in America in 1912 - will not reproduce outdated notions of what each gender should be by supporting the opposition to trans girls being part of Girl Scouts America.
I have an opinion piece in today's Age newspaper on the new Lego 'Friends' range for girls, which was produced in order to attract girls to the Lego brand.
Understandably, there is some debate on the issue in the comments already. Authors do not choose article titles in newspapers, so this would not have been my choice for a headline, but they are written to invite readers in with a bit of controversy. I guess the point of the article is that what we think girls and boys are is really a bit of a fiction.
Maybe a little girl is the best authority on the subject. And this girl's toy store complaints sum it up quite simply.
When we think of the things that we wish to shield children from, war has to be one of the most concealed topics, right up there with sex. While many boys, in particular, may revel in playing war-based games on computers and in reality, the actual substance of war is something that parents fret about. Especially after 9/11, which was the catalyst for the ongoing "war on terror", there was frequent discussion on talk shows about how to explain or conceal the situation from children, who may be frightened by a world in which people wish to kill others mercilessly.
Yet there is no ability to entirely conceal the reality from children who are located in places of conflict. While most of these war zones today are not within view of children in the West, children in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries were once very much aware of and encouraged to participate in war. If we look to World War One, children's books, magazines and organisations across the British Empire were saturated with the influence of war in a way that did not seek to conceal its horrors, but to use them to bolster children's ideological and practical participation in the war effort.
I co-wrote a paper with my colleague Kristine Moruzi on the war-time trilogies of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce. The illustration above is from Turner's novel Captain Cub and shows the kind of universal admiration for boys and young men who voluntarily enlisted in the war present in texts for young people at the time. We set our discussion of the novels against the Victorian School Paper, which was a monthly magazine that all children in the state were required to purchase and read from the late nineteenth century.
The cover from the February 1916 edition shows not only the way in which the war and Australia's necessary contribution to it where placed at the forefront of children's educational materials, but also how a role was figured for all kinds of people, including women as nurses and maintainers of the home front. It was important to generate a sense that all Australians were contributing to the war effort, even if children could only sacrifice treats and trips to the movies to contribute small amounts of money to various Education Department sanctioned appeals.
Other papers at the symposium showed just how diverse the contributions encouraged from children during World War One were. Branden Little from Weber State University spoke about the Junior Red Cross in the United States, which was so successfully promoted that eleven million American children enrolled during the War. The children not only made and gathered supplies for war victims and hospitals, but worked in 'Victory Gardens' to contribute to the food supply and raised funds to assist Red Cross efforts overseas. (The Junior Red Cross raised almost four million dollars at the time, which constituted 10 per cent of the total of Red Cross funds in the period).
While the Junior Red Cross proved popular with both boys and girls, there were also numerous organisations targetted specifically at each sex that supported particular war-time roles for each gender. The Girl Guides were a standout in this regard, with an international network of girls already in place across the Empire, which Mary Claire Martin from the University of Greenwich discussed. Though in places such as Australia, where Guiding was still establishing itself, the organisation did devolve somewhat into the Junior Red Cross, those groups of girls who did remain as Guides set about working to raise funds for the war effort. Girl Guide training at the time was very much concerned with nursing, and girls supplemented their community work with practice in bandaging the wounded and carrying imagined victims on stretchers to safety.
Christeen Schoepf from the University of New England spoke about the South Australian Children's Patriotic Fund, which, like the Junior Red Cross and the Girl Guides, actually raised quite a substantial amount for the war effort. What was particularly striking, apart from the quirky beauty of some of the events organised by the Fund, such as an Alice in Wonderland themed fair complete with giant mushroom, was the immersion of entire country towns in the war. When the Children's Patriotic Fund held an event or parade, people came from miles to support it. Whether their motivation was strictly related to the war or not, I can't say, but war certainly permeated community life. During talks from representatives from the Australian War Memorial and National Library we heard excerpts of songs sung by young girls who would situate themselves outside the prime location of the town pub to raise funds for the war.
As papers by Kim Reynolds (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and Jessica Gerrard (UTS) on pacifist movements for children, including socialist Sunday schools, noted, however, there were voices who opposed the war and sought to send children a different message to the mass of war-time propaganda. Nevertheless, their papers largely related to the UK, so how much these alternate voices permeated Australian culture during the war remains uncertain.
What seemed to come out across the papers was the sense of duty associated with the war. It is hard to conceive of children having any sense of nationhood beyond sporting events today and the concept of owing a duty to that nation seems so far removed from the ideas circulated during World War One that encouraged every child to "do their bit". Obviously, Australia is not as fixated on its relationship with Britain today, and we see war in a different light after the horrors of both world wars, Vietnam and endless fighting in the Middle East. So, in one way, the distancing of children from our involvement in war partially reflects our changing idea of conflict and greater reluctance to participate. But, also, we can see a sharp change in childhood expectations and the dissipation of the idea that children need to be part of important social changes and causes. While people do suggest that children are "losing their innocence" in the internet age, when it comes to war, children in the West are definitely more oblivious and shielded than they were a century ago.
I had an article published at The Conversation to coincide with Remembrance Day. It's called "Women in Australia's Military: On the Frontline of the Gender War", and was inspired by the news that women will be permitted to serve in armed combat roles in the future.
In response to the article, I received a lovely email from a woman who has served in the defence force, but who was prevented from pursuing her preference to be a helicopter pilot because she was a woman. Her daughter also wishes to enter the military- in the SAS, no less. Regardless of what some of us might think of military campaigns, I am please that this young girl will not be told that there is something she cannot do simply because she is female.
At the moment I'm preoccupied with colonial girls, or at least I should be. I'm currently reading some novels published by Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce for an upcoming conference, 'A Game That Calls Up Love and Hatred Both', about childhood and World War I. On a related note, I've been trying to think about why Australia does not have an equivalent of Little Women, Anne of Green Gables or The Secret Garden. There are not really any Australian girls' books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have achieved "classic" status, or which even remain in print. My Brilliant Career, perhaps, but it is not really read by today's girls in way that these canonical American, Canadian and English novels might be.
What today's Australian girls might read is a new series from Penguin, 'Our Australian Girl', which assembles a range of authors to imagine the lives of historical girls. Five years ago, an equivalent series, 'Our Canadian Girl', began publication in Canada, following the 'Dear Canada' series by Scholastic in 2001 for older readers. (Let us not even ponder the significance of the girls' series title evoking the idea of girls writing a letter to their nation, while the 2010 series for boys is titled 'I Am Canada'.). All of these books perhaps owe something to the success of American Girl merchandise. In 1986, the blandly named Pleasant Company began manufacturing dolls inspired by historical events, and in the ensuing decades, the cross-media franchise, which includes multiple books depicting the life of each historical doll, has become a phenomenon (albeit one in which the historical aspect has been somewhat subsumed by 'My American Girl' dolls that are contemporary in their dress and stories).
Both the Australian and Canadian series are aimed at girls from 8-11 and seek to bring "history to life". To support its take-up in schools, both series are supported by teachers' guides. For the Australian series, these classroom guides were prepared by Dr Pam Macintyre in the Education Faculty at my own university. The academic seal of approval and connection with "real" aspects of history were obviously important to Penguin.
Marnina Gonick has already researched the Canadian series and its representation of Canadian national identity, especially how the historical girl is used to consider contemporary questions of gender and nationality. (Her paper on this topic will hopefully be part of the Girls, Texts, Cultures anthology being edited by Mavis Reimer and Clare Bradford for Wilfrid Laurier University Press.) I am keen to find out how the Australian equivalent represents colonial girls in comparison with their representation in colonial books- though I'll need a cool $250 to buy all the books to date.
While Scholastic has published My Australian Story since 2000 (with a similar connection to the classroom and some high-profile children's authors), Our Australian Girl seems to be the first gender-based historical series of this type to appear in Australia. I first saw it in a bookstore in a large purpose-built display with all four volumes of each characters' story available. The cover artwork is very appealing, and avoids the obvious "this is a book intended to teach me something" look of the Scholastic titles, especially its use of a different charm bracelet motif on each of the characters' titles. The Grace books are about a London orphan who is transported to Australia in 1808 for stealing apples; the Letty books about a free settler who travels to Australia with her sister in 1841; the Poppy books about a girl with Indigenous and Chinese heritage living in a mission during the goldrush in the 1860s; and the Rose books are situated in the early 20th century and focus on the restrictions on girls and women (brought to a head by Rose's suffragette Aunt moving in with the family in Melbourne).
The series website encourages girls to document their own stories of becoming an Australian girl, to fashion their own book cover and learn to do activities enjoyed by the characters (including drawing horses and baking damper). The site recently held a competition where girl readers were invited to describe the kinds of charm they'd like to put on their own charm bracelet. The winning entry is not too far from the kinds of aspirations to be found in girls' magazines of a century ago, including to travel, care for animals, take care of babies and to knit and make things (with an aspiration toward lace making).
Like The Daring Book for Girls there could be an element of parental and grandparental nostalgia here hoping to inculcate old-fashioned values about femininity. Though there's still an element of heroism in the extracts published on the site, with Grace unperturbed when attacked by rats and lice while shackled to the convict ship, the initial signs are that these contemporary versions of colonial Australian girls might just be a little less adventurous than those in the stories real colonial girls read.
Just this week a scholarly article that I wrote with Dr Elizabeth Parsons (formerly of Deakin University) was published by Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. It was sparked by Liz's subject "Power Politics in Children's Literature", in which we taught the films Princess Mononoke and FernGully. Liz had already given a conference paper on the topic and kindly invited me to co-write an article with her. It did feel quite strange to be writing an academic article about contemporary films, as I think the closest I'd ever gotten to the present-day before was about 1920 and, at the point of writing, I'd never written about films either. I'm grateful to Liz for showing me how to step into a new field and for the opportunity to co-write this paper with her.
When we think of the things that we wish to shield children from, war has to be one of the most concealed topics, right up there with sex. While many boys, in particular, may revel in playing war-based games on computers and in reality, the actual substance of war is something that parents fret about. Especially after 9/11, which was the catalyst for the ongoing "war on terror", there was frequent discussion on talk shows about how to explain or conceal the situation from children, who may be frightened by a world in which people wish to kill others mercilessly.
What today's Australian girls might read is a new series from Penguin, 'Our Australian Girl', which assembles a range of authors to imagine the lives of historical girls. Five years ago, an equivalent series,