Children’s gendered and sexual cultures : desiring and regulating recognition through life markers of marriage, love and relationships

Children’s gendered and sexual cultures are dynamic and involve complex negotiations between various stakeholders, including children, families, educators, the media and the broader community. This chapter, based on qualitative research undertaken with children, parents/guardians and educators in Australia, examines how the discourse of marriage features predominantly in children’s gendered and sexual cultures, significantly influencing their understandings of love, intimacy and relationships.1 Employing a theoretical lens that encompasses feminist post-structuralism, queer theory and post-developmentalism, we explore how children constitute their own gendered and sexual subjectivities. Fundamental to this process is heteronormativity, which regulates many children’s perceptions of the ‘appropriate’ girl and boy subject, ideals of romantic love and marriage. The ritual of marriage, which in Western cultures is linked to discourses of romantic love, family and having children, is central to children’s enculturation within heteronormative values and morals. Children take up the discourse of marriage, mimetically incorporating its symbolic meaning into their imaginary worlds. The hegemony of the romantic, fairytale and carnivalesque nature of Western marriages further captures children’s desire to be part of this sociocultural ritual. We argue that an examination of children’s sexual cultures and sexual subjectivities from the perspective of children is critical in understanding the complexities that are often absent from the sexualization debates that prevail in some Western cultures. These debates are characterized by arguments about the perceived erosion of sociocultural differences between adults and children and the alleged loss of childhood innocence, especially children’s sexual innocence (e.g. Rush & La Nauze, 2006; Levin & Kilbourne, 2008). Central to many of these debates is the dismissal of children’s knowledge and understandings, sexual subjectivities, desire and agency. Further, these debates reiterate gendered discourses that echo patriarchal, heteronormative, moralistic values and double standards associated with young girls’ sexualities in particular (Renold & Ringrose, 2011; Egan, 2013). The children’s comments in the research on which this chapter is based provide a counter-narrative to ways in which children are all too frequently constituted within these sexualization debates. Children demonstrated a critical engagement with gendered and sexual cultures and self-regulated their behaviours within the boundaries of what they viewed as possible. Learning about gendered and sexual cultures is a dynamic and fluid process, and within this context children actively interpret, negotiate and transform the discourses of love, marriage, relationships and sexuality that they take up as their own (Kontopodis et al., 2011).