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Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication
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How To Be The Best At Everything: The Gendering And Embodiment Of Girl/Boy Advice, Barbara Lesavoy
How To Be The Best At Everything: The Gendering And Embodiment Of Girl/Boy Advice, Barbara Lesavoy
Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought
This paper explores the binary divide packaged under the children’s How be the Best at Everything (2007) girl/boy advice books. Postmodern and materialist feminist thought as a lens into media-infused social and class reproduction provide a theoretical framework in interrogating this gender binary. I argue that that the books, as heteronormative nostalgia, operationalize a theory I term “gender retraction,” a phenomenon in which the vast knowledge that informs our identity spectrum propels us into a cultural time warp, where, with an array of socially inscribed possibilities, the binary clarity of age old girl/boy categories has resurging appeal The paper exposes …