Children’s Gendered and Sexual Cultures: Desiring and Regulating Recognition through Life Markers of Marriage, Love and Relationships

Abstract

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.