Gender Norms and Princess Culture

It’s stereotypical for people to have a family member they do not like or get along with, or is crazy, and my family is no different.  One of my cousins, who is nothing short of a tom-boy, has an 8 year old daughter that she obsessively dresses in pink, and it drives me crazy, for a number of reasons.

My cousin consistently pulls her hair back into a ponytail, dresses in over sized t-shirts and shorts (yes, even in the winter) and considers shoe shopping to be the flip-flop section at Old Navy.  That in and of itself drives me crazy and perhaps because I used to 12dress the same way when I was in high school.  Regardless however, my cousin insists that her daughter wear almost nothing but pink and purple (by her choice, not her daughters).  It has even gone as far as forcing her daughter to wear “some article of pink” in every single one of her school pictures, for the purposes of filling a picture frame with, eventually, all 12 pink school pictures.  I asked my cousin, what if her daughter does not want to wear pink one year, or goes through a similar tom-boy phase, to which she responded “I don’t care – she is going to wear pink.”

I find this particularly interesting because my cousin herself does not own a pink item in her own wardrobe, and yet forces it on her daughter.  This idea has definitely encouraged my cousin’s daughter to be feminine, but also strong-willed and not take crap from anybody.  This characteristic could have come from my cousin however who, like I mentioned, is a super tom-boy and can be intimidating herself.

It is entirely possible that my family might just be crazy, or they could have really bought into and have been engrained with the idea of pink and princesses for girls.  Either way, as we discussed gender in class, this is the first thing that popped into my head, imaging how different my baby cousin’s life would be if we did not market pink for girls, or if princess culture did not exist.