Tuesday, September 12, 2017

"Genderless" Baby

I found a video that describes some of the concepts addressed in our “Historicizing and Theorizing Masculinity” module. One of the concepts we discussed was the history of boys clothing and how it drastically differ overtime. It also talked about the sexual “color coding” and how it become a social tradition since the 1920’s. They had baby boys dressed in blue while baby girls wore pink. This in a way reinforced gender norms and quickly placed babies in gender constructs.  Already, newborns were being gendered as one or the other thus, also reinforcing the idea that gender is a binary system.
This video I found describes how a Toronto family has decided to make their child genderless. They decided to name their baby Storm,  and only the family and their close friends, know the sex of the baby. As for everyone else, they don’t know how to classify if baby Storm is a boy or a girl. This stirs up the debate that if parents like this Toronto family are doing the right thing by having their baby Storm viewed as genderless to others. What do you think about this? You can check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi30NAByn0w 


No comments: