Pink toenails and princess boys: contemporary discourses of boys’ gender-fluidity in USA television news

Abstract

This article analyzes four national soft news stories about boys’ gender-fluid expression that aired between 2010 and 2012. In each of these stories, boys’ feminine-identified actions received explicit support by newscasters and guest experts. Simultaneously, newscaster banter reframed the approbation of gender-fluidity to a more traditional characterization of gender as an immutable binary construct. The acceptance of gender-fluid behavior was attenuated by four discursive frames: the avowal of gender-fluid expression as acceptable only when child’s play, the presentation of boys’ mothers as supporting the violation of social norms, the positioning of parental acceptance as an act of reluctant resignation, and the assertion of male news reporters’ traditional masculinity and heterosexuality. Identifying limits to U.S. news media’s support for small acts of gender non-conformity sheds light on journalists’ and publics’ negotiations of gender and sexuality at a time in which the ontological state of these constructs is being disrupted and rearticulated.

Keywords:

• Gender
• boys
• hegemonic masculinity
• news
• gender binary
• transgender
• gender-fluid

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Adam Klein for comments on early drafts of this paper, and to the three anonymous JoCAM reviewers and editor Amy Jordan for their focused and helpful feedback. The author also thanks Brian Rentas for his research assistantship during the early stages of this project.

Notes

1. I use gender-fluid to refer to children who do not conform to typical gender roles but do not identify as gender-variant or transgender. “Gender-fluidity conveys a wider, more flexible range of gender expression, with interests and behaviors that may even change from day to day” (https://www.genderspectrum.org/glossary/gender-fluidity/).

2. Atkinson (2011) identifies banter on soft news as “pseudo-spontaneous” because its scripting is central to the performance and family atmosphere on the set of soft news programs. That said, it is impossible to know which of the utterances in my data are scripted.

3. Though these terms have been used by various scholars and advocates to capture specific identities, they share the common definition of defying a male/female gender binary. See Ehrensaft, 2007.

4. In none of these cases were the boys in question identified as cis-gender or male-bodied; reporting on these children assumed these markers. Dyson Kilodavis’ mother is explicit in Dyson’s desire to be identified as a boy.

5. The 1980 and 1987 American Psychological Association‘s diagnostic manuals included a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder in Children (GIDC). In the 1994 the diagnosis changed to Gender Identity Disorder and included subcategories for children, adolescents, and adults. In the 2013 manual the name changed to Gender Dysphoria.

6. Baron (1986) identifies “ain’t” as associated with masculinity, p. 64.