Pink Toenails and Princess Boys: Contemporary
Discourses of Boys' Gender-Fluidity
in U.S. Television News
• Participants:
Emilie Zaslow, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Studies
• What are the frames through which soft news
reifies the gender binary construct?
• Analysis of four national soft news stories (2010-
2012) about boys' gender-fluid expression.
• Identifying limits to U.S. news media's support
for small acts of gender non-conformity sheds
light on journalists' and publics' negotiations of
gender and sexuality at a time in which the
ontological state of these constructs is being
disrupted and rearticulated.
• Small acts of gender non-conformity received explicit
support by newscasters and guest experts.
• Newscaster banter reframed the approbation of gender-
fluidity to a more traditional characterization of gender
as an immutable binary construct.
• Used four discursive frames:
– the avowal of gender- fluid expression as acceptable only
when child's play
– the presentation of boys' mothers as supporting the
violation of social norms
– the positioning of parental acceptance as an act of reluctant
resignation
– the assertion of male news reporters' traditional masculinity
and heterosexuality.
