Shards of Glass: Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identities

by Bronwyn Davies

The author explores with primary school age children the possibility of discovering different ways of being, as well as looking at the ways in which gender relations are resistant to change. The author is present in many as writer, child, research, mother and daughter. Shards of Glass looks at the processes through which gender is constituted from a poststructuralist at the usual ways knowledge is constructed in classrooms, the nature of femininities and masculinities, and the children's experience of sexuality. The author challenges us to work with children to allow them as speaking subjects to invent, invert and break old structures and speak/write into existence other ways of being. The new edition involves a refining and developing of the theoretical framework and analysis.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar based in Sydney, Australia. She is also a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

The distinctive features of her work are her development of innovative social science research methodologies and their relation to the conceptual work of poststructuralist philosophies. Her research explores the ethico-onto-epistemological relations through which particular social worlds are constituted. She is best known for her work on gender, for her development of the methodology of collective biography, and her writing on feminism and poststructuralist theory.

Reviews

[Diz]

The author presents a study that involved discussing gender issues with groups of children at different schools. The book focuses strongly on analyzing the discussions with students, and the content that focuses specifically on reading and writing doesn't appear until the end of the book (chapter 7 for reading and chapter 8 for writing). If you main interested in reading this is for the content on exploring gender through reading and writing, the content is probably a bit lighter than you are expecting. However, if you are interested in what children say about gender, there is a lot of content here. Just be aware that the study was conducted in the early 1990s, so what children said in those days might be different from what children say these days.

[Sara]

I have not read a lot of feminist academic literature prior to this book. And this was my first reading of a poststructuralist commentary of any sort. While it was initially challenging to reframe my thinking in a poststructuralist manner, I appreciated this structure to look at the binaries that exist in our lives, especially when it comes to gender. This work was thought provoking and will give my brain much to chew on for the next few weeks and beyond.