• CLEMENCE RUBAYA

  Author

This study investigates the role of social conditioning in the home in the
construction of gender consciousness in children and the perpetuation of a tilted
gender sociometry as reflected in literature. Through an examination of the
upbringing of children, the study drags the gender debate to the altar of the ancient
nature-nurture controversy by investigating, primarily, literary art on whether gender
differences are a biological and divine prescription or are a social and psychological
construction. The paper, which is based on a study of selected African literary works
of art by both male and female writers, explores what it terms ‘gender language’
which has been used as the medium of instruction in the education of children to
accept their socially defined gender paths. In this study, the ‘language’ of gender
should not be viewed as a literal speech or any particular world language but rather
as ways through which society attempts to show how maleness is elevated over
femaleness. The paper has discovered that what it terms as the language of gender
conditioning is subtle, slippery and never fixed but innocently appears in such facets
as naming, clothing etc. The paper has also shown that children do not produce but
reproduce the cultural heritage bequeathed them by the societies they are born into.
For instance, Evans (2003:84) entrenches the same argument when she shows how
“socialization about sex were seen as part of a process in which society created
particular kinds of boys and girls… basing on their given biology.” The paper has,
thus, underscored the argument that the home is not an innocent institution since it
tampers with the innocent child’s malleable psyche so that it fits with the fixed
monological gender ideological postures imbedded in that patriarchal culture. In a
nutshell, the paper has shown that gender consciousness in children is awakened,
among other ways, through naming, preferential treatment of one sex over the other,
clothing and other traditions. The paper posits that all these languages’ of gender,
consequently, create variations of experience for the two sexes.

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