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#TomboyCulture

By Stephanie Cook (MJour'18)

Search for Title IX and you’ll find a landmark federal civil rights law passed in 1972. Search for the term “title nine,” however, and the top result will likely be a national chain of women’s athletic clothing stores.

Legally, the implications of Title IX—which established new requirements for gender inclusivity in federally funded educational programs—were broad. Publicly, the law is known mainly for one thing: allowing women in sports.

As women growing up with Title IX took to fields, courts and arenas, the trend became woven into the fabric of society. Sporty girls became known as “tomboys,” a term that fascinates Jamie Skerski, senior instructor in the Department of Communication.

“That’s my generation, that’s Mia Hamm’s generation,” Skerski says. “For the first time, you have a generation of women who benefit from Title IX, and in the 1990s, imagery of sporty girls explodes in popular culture. Books and movies depicting athletic girls went mainstream.”

Originally, “tomboy” described a young boy who was out of control or didn’t conform to polite culture. Later, it shifted to describe unruly women. The modern incarnation is a young girl who is biologically female but prefers the activities we associate with boyhood, Skerski says.

“They exhibit gender behaviors that we associate with masculinity,” she says. “That used to be seeking education or wanting to wear pants, and now, because of Title IX—because girls and women have had more opportunities in athletics and sports—tomboy has come to mean athletic girl.”

The word “girl” is important, as society’s acceptance of tomboys almost always has an expiration date.

“Most narratives have tomboys trading in their soccer cleats for high heels in the end,” Skerski says. “It’s a way to discipline that rebellion. You can do it, but popular culture says this isn’t a permanent status. You should grow out of it.”

At TEDxCU in 2018, Skerski presented the talk “,” inspired in part by students in her senior seminar on gender and rhetoric, whom she’d asked to present gender collages.

“I had not even talked about tomboys at this point in the semester, but I heard, over and over again, ‘Here was my tomboy stage.’ It was all about freedom—freedom of dress, freedom of being strong—until you hit that junior high-middle school adolescence,” she says. “When I heard it coming out of my students’ mouths, I was like, ‘Wow, it’s cultural, it’s personal, it’s on an identity level as well as a narrative level.’”

As industries from entertainment to fashion embrace—and profit from—tomboys, Skerski warns that they often rob tomboys of an essential function: gender rebellion.

“You get sexy tomboy or pretty tomboy,” she says. “It’s becoming more of a normative, dominant kind of identity rather than that rebellious woman or girl.”

#TechieToddlers

Many toddlers can unlock a phone screen before they can walk or talk in full sentences. Some preschoolers open cartoons on YouTube or take selfies before they can hop on one foot or pedal a bicycle.

Digital native kids approach media differently from their digital immigrant parents, says Art Bamford, a PhD student in the Department of Media Studies who co-wrote the book Every Parent’s Guide to Navigating Our Digital World, published in 2018.

“If you have those early formative experiences in one sort of media environment, then you carry a lot of that baggage,” he says.

For Generation Alpha and Generation Z kids, new technologies present possibilities and challenges their parents couldn’t have anticipated.

“One thing I’ve thought a lot about since writing the book is data collection,” he says. “The sooner kids are on social media, the sooner that’s being collected.”

Advertisers, who gear messaging specifically toward adolescents, pose another issue.

“Adolescence is this identity-forming period, where you’re figuring out who you are separate from your family,” Bamford says. “When I was that age, I’d be really into hip-hop for a while, then I’d be really into indie rock. You’re trying stuff out and things are changing. But if every time you go onto Facebook or Google or Instagram, the ads that you see—because they’re based on your search history—are about hip-hop, then you’d think, ‘I guess I’m really into hip-hop.’”

Because many parents rely on a model set by their own parents, dramatic shifts in technology can leave them feeling lost, but it’s normal to feel that way, Bamford says.

“I’d just remind parents that it is new—there’s a lot of new questions and challenges, and they shouldn’t think they’ve got to figure it out right out of the gate,” he says. “And when they do trial and error and start to figure some stuff out, share that with parents who have younger kids.”

#MiningForKnowledge

What can kids learn from building up and breaking down blocks?

It’s a question that speaks to the past and future of education.

In 1798, Maria and R.L. Edgeworth made one of the earliest known references to toy blocks in their book Practical Education, calling blocks “rational toys” that could be used to teach kids about gravity and physics.

In 2019, Jorge Perez-Gallego—scholar-in-residence at CMCI’s Nature, Environment, Science and Technology Studio for the Arts—is co-principal investigator of a project that uses the block-based video game Minecraft to teach children about the same things.

“Physics works in the world of Minecraft, and you can actually dictate what works and what doesn’t,” Perez-Gallego says. “We created worlds in which we have two moons, or no moon at all, or we’re really close to the sun. So while kids navigate those worlds, they realize that certain things are off. They can notice that, and they start asking ‘why’ questions.”

For the project, funded by the National Science Foundation, Perez-Gallego creates digital worlds that present “what if” scenarios. In research terms, he is providing kids with an informal learning environment: an educational setting where there is no defined task or goal, other than to be curious and explore.

“When you become a scientist, no one’s telling you what to do. You’re out navigating the world and trying to make sense of it. You might come up with a research question, but that comes from you and from observing your surroundings, not from someone telling you what the question is,” he says. “In a way, we’re just taking their hands and walking them through a space that they can explore freely. At the end of the day, that’s what science is.”

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