When walking through Walmart and looking at the infant clothing you can see that girls' clothes are pink or purple, or just light-colored outfits. For the socks and for the bibs, they are pink or light colored and have this lace or ribbon around the top. Another thing that I have noticed is that girl clothes are "fancy" so they dress nice. Lots of dresses and skirts, usually have a cute animal print or cute lines/polka dot design. However, for the boys their clothing is usually a blue color sometimes with reds or greens, but it’s usually blue. Another thing I have noticed is that the boy clothing usually has like trucks, or dinosaurs or other "manly" prints. And by manly, I mean things that society says a boy should be into- trucks, dinosaurs, sports or monsters...etc.
One thing I noticed is there is not a lot of unisex clothing, it's a choice between one sex or the other. Another conclusion is that society is trying to put infants into their "correct" category by the clothing they wear. And by that, I mean, if you wear a pink dress that has polka dots and a head band, that automatically means you are a girl. And that's not true! It goes the same way for the boys. If you wear a t-shirt and jeans you must be a boy. Again, that is not true. These stores are trying to take infants and label them as one way or the other.
Just a side note: My mom dressed one of my sisters in a yellow and white jump suit looking thing, it was supposed to be a unisex outfit. But when most of my friends, first met her, they thought she was a boy because of that outfit. I think they thought she was a boy because of the style of clothing she was wearing- like they thought the jump suit was boyish? I am assuming it would have been better for them to know she was a girl if she was wearing a dress or a skirt. But that just shows that we use colors and styles of clothing to say she's a girl over a boy and vice versa.
Another thing I noticed, talking about boys versus girls, is that girls have way many more accessories. For example, they have the head pieces, the hats and the booties. Yes, boys have some of these too, however girls are expected to look nice and cute even as a baby. One of the main distinguishing factor is, the girls' clothing is pink, has a lot of extra accents such as lace and sparkles, glitter, diamonds, rhinestones and ribbon. Also, I think some of the activities girls are "guided" into are ballet/dance or theater/singing things that are not rough and tough like sports or outside activities- they say those activities are not for girls. These activities can also be pictures that are printed on the girls' clothing. Example, ballet: the store puts a ballerina on the front of a pink dress. Same for boys. Example, football: the store makes a football shirt or superhero outfit.
You made a lot of good points in this post! The most important one that I picked out was the fact that images on clothing usually correlates to later on careers that children have. You very rarely will see a little girl wearing a pink shirt with a little girl construction worker on. Same goes for boys. I don't think I have ever seen a boys shirt have a picture of a little boy dancer on it. It shows how we are socialized to view gender and that if we don't stick to these socialization's people are confused and aren't as supportive.
ReplyDeleteThanks for including the story about your sister's yellow and white jumpsuit. This raises an interesting point about how folks make assumptions, and how meaningful these gender categories can be for people. It is interesting to compare what activities/items/patterns are featured on clothing for different genders, and how that begins to steer kids toward somethings and away from others.
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