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67 3 CHAPTER THREE Learning to Be Boys and Girls W hen I asked tombois at what point they first became aware of being tombois, or of liking boys’ things, their answers were generally consistent : “Since I was little,” “since first grade,” or “in elementary school.” One tomboi declared, “I was always a tomboi.” Another said, “Growing up, I never felt like a girl,” disallowing any possibility that s/he could have girlish desires or feelings. Still another tomboi thought that s/he knew s/he was a tomboi “around four or five years old, because that’s when I started to like boys’ clothes, not girls’ clothes.” Tombois did not offer a narrative of learning to be or of becoming tombois, but instead saw themselves as always boys. According to their stories, everything they did growing up was what boys did, a sentiment that was echoed in girls’ childhood narratives about being girls. For tombois and girlfriends, their earliest memories recall a time when their sense of reality has already been formed, a time when their practical sense of the world allows them to take for granted its social categories and expectations and their own position in it. The challenge of this chapter is to take adult narratives that situate gender as always already known and identify the processes by which children come to take up gender. Using their childhood narratives, I analyze both tombois’ and girlfriends’ enactment of gender and their interactions with socially significant others—their families, extended kin, neighbors, and friends. My focus in this chapter is the intersection of childhood, gender, and subjectivity . Anthropological approaches to childhood are broadly concerned with the ways children learn and acquire cultural meaning, emotions, and behaviors. Although recent research on children’s agency has offered new insights into the processes by which children acquire a sense of self, surprisingly little attention has been given to the processes of gendering in childhood or to cultural forms of masculinity and femininity and their consequences for the practices children engage in.1 Work by feminist anthropologists has dealt broadly with the treatment of girls as they learn to become women, but few have addressed the processes by which children learn gender.2 Debra Skinner’s (1989) intriguing early research on Nepali girls finds that the process of internalizing gender is neither straightfor- CHAPTER THREE 68 ward nor smooth, although all the girls follow the path that is laid out for them.3 Judging by the majority of anthropological studies, and despite Moore’s (1994) admonishment that individual subjects may enact multiple and competing identities , the anthropological individual appears to take up the normative gender designated for her or him during childhood to become a woman or man. Childhood has not been a major focus of literature on male or female transgenderism in anthropological studies either, possibly due to the difficulties of assessing childhood processes from adult narrators. Nevertheless some early studies offered tentative hypotheses to explain transgenderism. In one study, male transgenderism in Plains Indian culture was attributed to the young male’s failure to attain proper masculinity because of his inability to meet the rigorous requirements of male initiation (Hoebel 1949).4 In contrast female transgenderism was not seen as a failure to attain proper femininity but the result of, for instance, having a proclivity for men’s tasks or being raised as a son (Devereux 1937; Honigmann 1954). Both views reflect Western assumptions about gender hierarchies and the privileged status of masculinity. Alfred Kroeber (1940), who believed that biology was the root of such behavior, stated that Native American societies provide a niche for people who are inclined to act like the other sex. He assumed that such behavior results from an inborn state that takes the form (niche) offered by particular cultures. More recently a solid body of work on lesbian, gay, and transgender studies has moved anthropological thought beyond notions of innate proclivities or failed learning.5 While most of this work does not examine childhood processes, two studies I note here offer some thoughts on childhood. Don Kulick (1998) points out that girlish behavior and early sexual desire for men are formative for male-bodied travesti in Brazil, with the emphasis on sexual desire. While his work provides important insights into a complicated subjectivity, it leaves open the question of what prompted those early behaviors and desires. By what processes did travesti come to be attracted to men? Their emphasis on a growing awareness of desire seems...

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