Elements of gender socialization and performance

Watch a bit of commercial television on a children’s program or network (Saturday morning cartoons, etc.). Take notes of the commercials you see for toys and other children’s products over the hour-long program (if you don’t have access to live TV, you can watch 20 minutes or so clips of commercials online or spend some time looking at the packaging of products in a toy store). Make some observations about what you see and take some good anthropological field notes – how are toys advertised? Which toys are typically advertised for boys, and which for girls? How can you tell? What does this mean about what kinds of interests and hobbies boys and girls are each supposed to have, respectively?

Think about the elements of gender socialization and performance that the text describes. What key strategies of toy advertisements highlight some of these aspects? Make sure you write detailed field notes about what you see. Think like an anthropologist and make the familiar strange: if you were explaining gender in the U.S. to someone who had never been here before, how would you describe the norms for boys and girls based on these advertisements?