Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a case study analysis of how cultural schemas operate in the context of preadolescents' gender role socialization from an intersectional standpoint.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I draw inspiration from Naomi Quinn’s longstanding interest in understanding how psychocultural processes associated with cultural schemas may contribute to producing, perpetuating, and transforming gendered inequalities and disparities. I explore this concern through an ethnographic case study of a British émigré family who resides in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan region, and whose members include female and male fraternal twins, age eleven. I employ discourse and narrative analysis to demonstrate how these two preadolescent siblings are socialized into gendered hierarchies and power differentials that are shaped by culturally available schemas involving gender roles and norms.

Analysis is informed by 58 hours of ethnographic, videotaped interactional and interview data that derive from a larger corpus collected by the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) and that document the daily lives, routines, and cultural values of 32 ethnically diverse, middle-class, dual-earner Los Angeles area families.

Data analysis additionally interrogates how cultural schemas that involve gender intersect with – and mutually influence – other cultural schemas that are salient in the twins’ lives (e.g., developmental phase, social class, race, and immigration status). The paper therefore sketches out how cultural schemas that index relative privilege (i.e., male gender, whiteness) and relative marginality (i.e., female gender, immigrant status) combine to produce complex, intersectional subjectivities and positionalities as the twins differentially enact, and innovate upon, the available cultural schemas imparted to them.