Negotiating subjectivity: Exploring personal agency in children through gendered text

• Main Author: Baker-Sperry, Lori Michelle
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2001
• Subjects: Developmental psychology; Families & family life; Folklore; Individual & family studies; Personal relationships; Sociology
• ISBN: 0493575685; 9780493575681

The purpose of this study was to document and describe the negotitation of gendered messages by children. Fairy tales were selected as the textual site of negotiation due to their popularity among children and the simplistic form in which they are written (Zipes 1997). Therefore, the extent to which Grimms' Fairy Tales contains institutionalized messages concerning gender is of key concern to this study. Content analysis, discourse analysis and children's focus groups are utilized to explore the importance of human agency in the appropriation of gendered messages via text. Using content analysis, I explore the extent to which the original Grimms' Fairy Tales contain highly gendered messages. Using discourse analysis, I am able to extend the content analysis to an in-depth exploration of the messages and images offered in one particular tale, Cinderella. Finally, and most importantly, I conduct a series of focus groups to analyze the child's ability to engage in human agency, to negotiate the messages offered in the text, Cinderella. This portion of the study allows for an examination of textual media forms as “producers of meaning,” in an attempt to explore the ways that the meaning of the tale Cinderella is negotiated and produced among children through social interaction. The single most important finding in this project was that children do engage in the negotiation process regardless of the constraining influence of the classroom setting in which the focus groups were performed. The findings support the argument that socialization is not a one-way process. Instead, messages are filtered through the lived experience of the child and further negotiation occurs within group interaction. This study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between institutional structure and personal agency, especially as it relates to the childhood socialization process.