Cross-sex peer conflict and the discursive production of gender in a Chinese preschool in Taiwan

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze an excerpt from a videotaped interaction among girl and boy students (ages five to six years) in a Mandarin Chinese speaking preschool in Taiwan to argue that one way in which gender is constructed is via cross-sex conflicts. The social organization of the preschool, including gender relations, is reflexively created through speech. Conflict, as a preferred form of interaction among children, is a prime arena for such organization (Goodwin, 1990; Corsaro, 1994). In my data, based on 500 hours of observations and 16 hours of videotapes of naturally occurring interactions over a nine-month period, I found that conflict occurs as frequently in cross-sex interaction as in same-sex boy-boy interaction. Ethnomethodological and post-structuralist frameworks are drawn on to show how children position themselves as male or female subjects within a particular sociocultural system. Some children, identified as peer leaders, play an important role in producing gender in the context of conflict through the doing of ‘borderwork’ (Thorne, 1986, 1993) to maintain and heighten gender boundaries. I found that an ‘aggravated’ style of conflict talk, associated in the language socialization literature with a masculine sex-typed style (while a ‘mitigated’ style is associated with feminine sex-typing), is also used by girls in the context of cross-sex conflict. Chinese girls subvert the masculine preferred form of conflict to produce new subject positions in the rapidly changing society of modern Taiwan. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.