Our member, Prof. Freeden Blume Oeur (Tufts University, US), talks about his collection, co-edited with Prof. C. J. Pascoe (University of Oregon, US), Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism (New York University Press, 2023).
This book is a critical tribute to the research, mentoring, and teaching of the feminist scholar of childhood, Barrie Thorne, and in particular her 1993 classic ethnography Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. Gender Play was the culmination of Thorne’s decades-long work to situate youth—their concerns and playfulness, their standpoints, their agency and subordination—squarely in feminist concerns. While the study of childhood and children held a marginal location in mainstream American sociology during the period when Thorne collected data for her book, feminism provided a language for Thorne to draw out issues of power, marginalization, and dependency.
The chosen name for our book, Gender Replay, has several meanings that capture the aims for the edited volume. It is a replay in the sense that it returns to Thorne’s book and describes how it came to be and the impact it has had; and it reflects on the development of “play” and “serious play” in in theorizing on gender, feminism, sexuality, youth, and social change.
The book’s fourteen essays are organized into four sections. The first, “Kids as actors, studying kids,” highlights how researchers can think alongside young people as meaning-making agents. The next section, “Racial and ethnic borderwork and play,” extends Thorne’s insights into various schooling contexts with a focus on issues of race and ethnicity. Section three, “Feminist praxis,” includes essays on how Thorne’s mentoring and political work has influenced many others (as well as a chapter that documents a discussion of the book in a small seminar). The final section, “Looking ahead,” opens new lines of inquiry in contexts ranging from high school makerspaces to youth activism.
My co-editor CJ Pascoe and I wrote our dissertations under Thorne’s guidance. Gender Play was a big inspiration for us both and others. We hope our own volume can also inspire others! As we write at the end of the book’s introduction, “To return to and revise (with love) [Thorne’s] own language one final time, as we traverse the concrete of academic theorizing, we hope our volume encourages creative sproutings, lining new paths to change amid the continuing and evolving play of gender, in ways that will help students, researchers, activists, and classroom instructors—young and old.”
During research at a school for her groundbreaking book, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (1993), the sociologist Barrie Thorne had quite an unexpected moment. She listened one day as the school loudspeaker blared, “Barrie Thorne, the Principal would like to speak with you.” That commanding request, familiar to many of us from childhood, transported Thorne back to her own elementary school days. She would later recall her “middling status” as a kid. The announcement likely provoked feelings of embarrassment and worry, perhaps even shame as “tugs of memory” brought back impressions of Thorne’s child self.
This poignant moment of self-reflection is a reminder that adults who study youth have one important thing in common: they were once children themselves. These childhood memories are both resources for and challenges to studying kids. Young people were the central actors of Thorne’s book—how they together create and experience gender, within school settings that constrain and enable gendered possibilities—but adults who study them become a part of their social worlds. Kids throughout the school likely giggled at the thought of Thorne being called to the principal’s office. She may have even wondered if the gatekeepers at the school were intending to scold her for some research violation! Thorne’s reflections in Gender Play are honest and personal, and they urge the same transparency of other youth researchers.
Our volume offers critical reflections on and celebrates Gender Play—its many lessons for feminism, childhood studies, the study of schools, and thinking on gender—as well as the larger research, teaching, and mentoring legacy of Barrie, its author. By providing an intimate view of the worlds of kids, in the thirty years since its publication Gender Play has had a lasting impact on how we understand the socialization of gendered lives, the place of children in feminist thought, and how schools often, in Barrie’s memorable words, “divide in a familiar geography of gender.” We are joined in this volume by a feminist community of authors—representing a wide range of interests, career stages, and professional and personal connections to Barrie—that will revisit and critically assess the insights from the book and help gift it to new audiences.
(The full introduction is available to read here.)