Abstractions

The abstract of Michael Tholander’s article “Cross-Gender Teasing as a Socializing Practice reads: In many studies of teasing between boys and girls, researchers have concluded that teasing affirms boundaries and asymmetries between the sexes through so-called borderwork (Thorne, 1993). However, in this study of teasing during student-run group work, teasing was shown to reach far beyond mere cultural reproduction of gender differences. Not only did teasing sometimes seem to contribute to tearing down traditional gender roles, but it was also employed for many other practical purposes. The study adopts a dialogical perspective on gender socialization to illustrate the fine details of how boys and girls orient to gender in teasing practices. However, quantitative analyses also show that gender is oriented to on an aggregate level: cross-gender teasing is far more common than same-gender teasing. This finding supports van Dijk's (1999) hypothesis that gender is a systematic relevance category.

Despite these facts and the obvious way that my own child was bullied, it is stated within a different abstract from Carol Lynn Martin’s article within a volume of “Sex Roles” that bullying happens more in a specific gender. The abstract begins, “Cross-sex behavior in boys generally is viewed more negatively than cross-sex behavior in girls.”