Public Gender Policing of Shiloh Jolie Pitt's Sartorial Selections and Kidswear Gen(d)erally

Promoting her summer-action flick Salt, Princess of the Global Poor and aspiring Cleopatra impersonator, Angelina Jolie, has a cover shot and feature article centered around her in the increasingly irrelevant Vanity Fair magazine, where she addresses her lifelong career as an actress, her high profile life partner Brad Pitt, and her famous brood of Jolie-Pitts as collected from each of the continents featured in Disney's theme park attraction It's a Small World. In the article one perhaps actually productive thing she seemed to do was address the scrutiny that she and her FOUR-YEAR-OLD daughter were receiving from tabloids and the public as resultant from her choice of clothing and short haircut.



Personally I think she looks insatiably adorable, but come on it's Brad Pitt plus Angelina Jolie, without some sort of mutated gene chances are you're gonna turn out alright. Photos of her rocking this style and haircut in several different situations were printed back in March with headlines hypothesizing about the potential doom that this implied and the confusion she must be having thrown upon her by her obviously oppressive and liberally-minded mother insisting on her to push parameters (see here).

In the VF piece, Jolie addresses the look by saying:

"Shiloh, we feel, has Montenegro style… It's how people dress there. She likes tracksuits, she likes [regular] suits. She likes to dress like a boy. She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys' everything. She thinks she's one of the brothers." More on the piece here.

Back when all of this was being printed I was really annoyed with the attitudes that were being spewed all about newsstands policing gender normative behavior and styles for this toddler. I'm glad that Jolie addresses it without perpetuating the alarm and gender panic that was unwarranted from the start.

I work at a community center where we have youth programs and over the summer we house a summer camp program. We have one class of three and four-year-olds who have a morning session where they do different arts and crafts, athletic games, songs etc. Everybody that enrolls in camp gets a tee-shirt that they have to wear when they go on trips and to the pool. This year, the preschool program's tee-shirts were hot pink. Nearly everyone's reactions upon hearing this went something along the lines of, "Oh my! What about the boys?"

What about the boys. Yes. Because when they're three and four there are so many biological differences that have already manifested themselves that vastly differentiate the boys from the girls. They can't possibly have their three and four-year-olds masculinity threatened by wearing pink tee-shirts! It will confuse them and deeply offend their parents. Well, only if their parents are as close-minded as one who a couple months ago thought his son needed to go to a preschool that catered towards children of special needs because his son only played with the girls (TRUE STORY!).

I know I'm making the grave assumption here that the attitude that gender is a socially constructed and reinforced system of control and status-quo is the dominant attitude (which evidently it certainly isn't), but even if you have something vested in the idea of a scientific and infallible connection between your genitalia and your greater social role, doesn't it seem like an obviously arbitrary correlation to make between femininity and pink? Between masculinity and short-hair and track suits? Why do we insist on policing one another and children into prescribed normative behaviors with no real backing behind those behaviors and assumptions?

I think that progress comes when more parents are able to accept without judgment the choices of style and appearance that their children are inclined towards despite the standard set by traditional notions of a masculine/feminine binary. Only through allowing them to challenge these representations can we escape the binds that they put upon us for no real reason. There is as much variation within the categories as there is between the standardized idea of each of the categories, especially when dealing with toddlers! They're basically all gender-queer at that point, not yet inescapably poisoned by the oppressive ideas of the gender binary and the necessity to conform to it.

For further reading and suggestions towards parenting children without genderalizations, click here.