GENDER & SOCIETY / December 2000 Messner / CHILDREN CONSTRUCTING GENDER Perspectives BARBIE GIRLS VERSUS SEA MONSTERS Children Constructing Gender MICHAEL A. MESSNER University of Southern California Recent research on children’s worlds has revealed how gender varies in salience across social contexts. Building on this observation, the author examines a highly salient gendered moment of group life among four- and five-year-old children at a youth soccer opening ceremony, where gender boundaries were activated and enforced in ways that constructed an apparently “natural” categorical difference between the girls and the boys. The author employs a multilevel analytical framework to explore (1) how children “do gender” at the level of interaction or performance, (2) how the structured gender regime constrains and enables the actions of children and parents, and (3) how children’s gendered immersion in popular culture provides symbolic resources with which children and parents actively create (or dis- rupt) categorical differences. The article ends with a discussion of how gendered interactions, structure, and cultural meanings are intertwined, in both mutually reinforcing and contradictory ways. In the past decade, studies of children and gender have moved toward greater levels of depth and sophistication (e.g., Jordan and Cowan 1995; McGuffy and Rich 1999; Thorne 1993). In her groundbreaking work on children and gender, Thorne (1993) argued that previous theoretical frameworks, although helpful, were limited: The top-down (adult-to-child) approach of socialization theories tended to ignore the extent to which children are active agents in the creation of their worlds—often in direct or partial opposition to values or “roles” to which adult teachers or parents are attempting to socialize them. Developmental theories also had their limits due to their tendency to ignore group and contextual factors while overemphasizing “the constitution and unfolding of individuals as boys or girls” (Thorne 1993, 4). In 765 AUTHOR’S NOTE: Appreciative thanks to Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Lynn Spigel, Leslie Cole, Barrie Thorne, and the students in my sociology-of-sex-and-gender seminar for helpful comments on the first draft of this article. Christine Bose and the three anonymous reviewers at Gender & Society added additional suggestions that sharpened the article considerably. Special thanks to Sasha Hondagneu-Messner and Miles Hondagneu-Messner for making it possible for me to witness events like the one analyzed in this article. REPRINT REQUESTS: Michael A. Messner, Department of Sociology, University of Southern Califor- nia, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2539; e-mail: Messner@almaak.usc.edu. GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 14 No. 6, December 2000 765-784 © 2000 Sociologists for Women in Society