I’ve probed gender barriers in play since my own childhood — avoiding my older brother’s hand-eye coordinated and/or rough-and-tumble games, embracing girls’ only ballet and jewelry-making sessions, joining mixed gender groups for recess tag, infiltrating the fifth grade boys’ touch football and basketball games (albeit for flirting purposes)…
As an education and social policy major, I read Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play: Girls and Boys at School. Years later, as an early childhood educator and advocate, I couldn’t help but notice segregation on the playground and co-optation of children’s toys, embodied in material empires of blue or pink bells and whistles.
This one-minute video below continues the conversation. Because the jump rope (like all good children’s toys) is easily accessible and open-ended, concerns around toys possessing sexist, consumerist biases and controlling narrow modes of play are moot. However, social practices surrounding the game still reify gender divisions. Adama explains that this jump rope-style game is very much in the province of females; while, he admits, he played it with his older sister when he was very young, it is forbidden for older boys — boys can play basketball or steal mangoes from trees.
Although the girls jump rope-defined barriers and the boys scale great heights, it seems neither party uses these skills to transcend gender walls. Should they?