Paper short abstract:

How do children interpret the clothed body? In the paper, based on interviews of 5-7 year old children, I will introduce how children themselves analyze age, gender, body, function and aesthetics.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will discuss how 5-7 year old children interpret the clothed body. I´m preparing my PhD study on childrens clothing as material culture.Typical feature in the study of childhood has been the fact that childhood has been seen from adult´s point of view. There has been studies on parents ideas of childwear and on childhood memories of grown-ups. The demand of researching children in their own right saw a daylight in childhood studies in the 1970s. There has been increasing interest in childrens own experiences ever since. In my study I have wanted to express childrens´ own voice: their own thoughts and feelings. I have been interviewing children in small groups and we have been talking about their own clothes as well as some pictures of historical childwear in museum collections. How do children analyze age, gender, body, function and aesthetics? How do they express their visual and tactile observations and their emotions? How does their strong sense of certain social conventions interact with the vivid world of imagination, narratives and fairytales?