Identity, abjection and otherness : creating the self, creating difference

Abstract

In Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: preschool children and gender (Davies, 1989/2003) and also in my book with Hiroyuki Kasama, Japanese Preschool Children and Gender. Frogs and Snails in Japan (Davies and Kasama, 2004) I explored how children take up their gendered identities, and in doing so constitute and maintain the binary and hierarchical gender order. I wanted to know how identity comes to be tied to biological difference, and genital difference in particular, in the construction and maintenance of ‘male’ and ‘female’ identities. I was curious about how gender is taken up as one of a pair of binary opposites with male as dominant and female as subordinate, despite discourses of gender equity being readily available. I was fascinated in these studies by the moments of transgression, when individual children successfully disrupted the apparent inevitability of this binary division of identities. I was interested in the work they did on themselves and each other to prevent these transgressions, and to recreate the binary and hierarchical gender order once it had been breached. I analysed those responses to transgression as children engaging in ‘categorymaintenance work’. I argued that they engaged in this work in order to be able to take up their own identities in meaningful and predictable ways within a known order:. . . individuals can deviate, but their deviation will give rise to categorymaintenance work around the gender boundaries. This category-maintenance work is aimed partly at letting the deviants know they’ve got it wrong – teasing is often enough to pull someone back into line – but primarily it is aimed at maintaining the category as a meaningful category in the face of the individual deviation that is threatening it.

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