Gendering Play, Producing Bodies: The Consequences of Gender in Play Specialism Strategies

Introduction

The classic definition of anthropology, one that comes from its name, has been the study of humans. Anthropology as a discipline has been developed as a method to study the ways humans live, make sense of and give meaning to the world. It’s most practiced methodology, ethnography, has been framed as deep hanging out (Geertz, 1998), attached to the image of the anthropologists who lives for long periods of times with a group of people in order to understand them better and draw theories about their way of life.

Yet, contemporary anthropology has attempted to critique this anthropocentrism that was at the core of its inception. Drawn to the critiques of the Nature/Culture divide made by a diverse array of theorists such as Donna Haraway (1998) and Bruno Latour (1993), and borrowing from the conceptual tools offers from distinct approaches such as Object Oriented Ontology (Harman, 2018), Geontology (Povinelli, 2016), and Neo-Materialism (Dolphijn & Tuin, 2012), contemporary anthropology has since paid more attention to the non-human actors that comprise the world we live in.

Inspired by these new anthropological approaches, this chapter aims to look at the topic of play specialism by investigating not only the human actors involved, such as patients and practitioners, but also by paying attention in the materials through which play is being organized. As we will demonstrate here, objects, materials, practices, spaces, and discourses when gendered can affect the ways into which boys and girls imagine their bodies and what they can do. This is because objects and materials such as toys, books, games, costumes, and movies are not to be thought only as passive and inactive until animated by human action and interaction, but are themselves agents with the potential to gender play and practice (Latour, 2007; Harman, 2016).

In addition to the components of these assemblages of humans and objects, it is also important that we understand the role of the space in which an assemblage takes place as equally significant to the production of new subjects. Taking the practice of play specialism as one that takes place in the hospital, and with children, helps us begin to understand the materiality of this networked approach, and how these non-human actors can produce new agenciations for human subjects. When we imagine the hospital as an anthropological space, one may construct it as a non-place (Auge, 2010), a place sterilized of signification and cultural production that merely serves as a vessel for the practice of medicine between a doctor and a patient. However, perhaps the reading of the hospital as a non-place becomes less likely to be made when one talks of the particular assemblage children-hospital. The contradiction between the sterile space of the hospital and the joyful play associated with children immediately produces different semiotic and affective readings of this assemblage. The association of hospitals with a particular form of vulnerable and precarious body, tend to exclude children of its imagination. Yet, when the presence of children is added to this reading of the hospital, one may be invited to remove the joyful play associated with children for an emphasis on the somberness of the hospital as a space. However, when we add the practice of play-specialism to the assemblage play-children-hospital, we radically re-assemble the semiotic and affective meaning of these connections. As Perasso et al (2021) have suggested, the practice of play allows children to be creative in the hospital as they do in other places. It de-emphasizes the somber notes of the hospital and instead emphasizes the joyful creativity of children, completely turning the assemblage upside-down. Therefore, we can see how in the flat-ontology approach, neither place, human, object, or action is represented as hierarchically superior a priori. Their configurations and the ups and downs of signification only take place within the particular connections they agenciate.

Once we understand that objects are active components of the ways play becomes gendered, we will also demonstrate that the gendering that occurs through play must be understood beyond discursive, performative, and ideological forms, but also in the way they are embodied and materialized, constructing gendered bodies (Hird, 2004). Particularly important to play specialism strategies is the understanding of the somato-political (Preciado, 2018) undertaking of gendering that not only produces new mentalities, but that also creates material body dispositions (Braidotti, 2002) in the children it aims to heal.