Negotiating Gender: Gender Narratives and Gender Identities

Abstract

Gender at the Hope in New York City is the focus of this chapter. Eglinton argues that young people used visual material culture (VMC) to make sense of, negotiate, and perform local masculinities and femininities. The author brings in Bruner’s (Acts of meaning.Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990) ‘narratives’, which she conceives as gender models or stories of masculinity and femininity, and demonstrates how youth used forms of VMC to construct and make sense of particular gender narratives making up their world including ‘gangstas’, ‘girlie girls’, and ‘tomboys’. In the second part of the chapter, Eglinton argues young people’s own gender identity work was a point of continuous negotiation: for both boys and girls, narratives were neither fully invested in nor fully rejected. Drawing on the work of Connell (Gender, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002), in particular the idea of a ‘gender order’ composed of those dominant values and ideals of gender, Eglinton suggests that young people, working with/within and through the gender order, through particular material and sociocultural constraints, and in unison with their own lives, used cultural forms to rework, negotiate, and perform new gender narratives.