Between the Lines

The male and female signs that greet us at the toilet door offer us two very binary options, but in reality sex and gender is far more complicated than those signs suggest. Sex is never as simple as a binary choices, and it is this that queer theory wants you to understand; that all our pre-conceived ideas about gender roles and sexual identities are in fact unstable, and can be destabilized by simply picking them apart. Queer Theory is a relatively new cultural theory which emerged out of the 1990s, but very much has its origins in the work of Michel Foucault . It looked to establish sexual orientation as a fundamental category of analysis and understanding, and thus it has both a social and political aim. It is a criticism informed by a resistance to homophobia and heterosexism by exposing the ideological and institutional practices of heterosexual privilege. It was the feminist critics of the 70s that first began to explore and dissect gender, but the feminist outlook soon began ...

On a recent trip to a Wilko’s store, I was disappointed to see a range of children’s books both implicitly and explicitly divided by gender. Do we not give children books to engage their imagination, to expand their horizons and to bloom their creativity irrespective of their gender?  I was particularly drawn to two colouring books titled, The Boy’s Colouring Book and The Girls’ Colouring Book by publisher Buster Books pictured below. As is clear from the books covers, the books perpetuate stereotypical ideas of gender. Whilst we don’t fully know what effect the influence of books could have on children’s understanding of gender, the messages that these books send merely reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender, and by perpetuating these ideas we are preventing equal opportunities. They seem to suggest that only males have an interest in space travel, adventure, martial arts, cars and construction, where female interests are limited to fashion, motherhood and all thin...