Abstract
This photovoice project is aimed at responding to a challenge: the invisibility and silence of existing sex and gender issues. It was an engaged project working with 12 children aged 9 to 12 in southeast China village. It seeks to understand 1) how children learn about sex and gender in everyday life and 2) how children experienced a provided sexuality education curriculum. The introduction of photo-taking opened up the possibility for participating children to make their observations and experiences visible. Centering the pictures produced and selected by children, in-depth interviews and group discussions generated personal narrative, collective reflection, and turned sex and gender topics discussable. With the recognition that sex and gender issues intersect with various factors in an individual life, researchers worked with each child in negotiating what they want to and feel comfortable expressing. This negotiation turned out to be a process of children showing their knowledge in sex and gender through euphemism, emotional expression, code-switching, and secret-sharing. These strategies are an extension of “knowing”: knowing what should remain invisible and silent without being limited by this knowing. The researcher team curated two exhibitions with different approaches: the community exhibition in the local reading room situates the unfamiliar discussion of sex and gender in the familiar presentation of community life; and the art gallery exhibition features each child’s life as mini ethnography, showing the contexts within which their knowledge and silence grew.
Presenters
Tong XinStudent, Ph.D. Student, Sociocultural Anthropology, Boston University, Massachusetts, United States Dan Chen
Lecturer, Experimental Art Department, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangdong, China
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Photovoice, Community-based Participatory Research, Sexuality Education for Children, China
