Watching the emergent gender of my three-year-old daughter as she develops into a little girl, I wonder about the factors that have contributed to her progression. In particular, I am curious about how her toys and her way of playing with them (which is essentially a form of practice for adult life), shape her now and how they might influence the type of adult she eventually becomes.
This has also caused me to reflect on the development of my own gendering and the toys of my childhood. In many ways, my toys presented the masculine role-models and ideals for me to look up to and to model myself after. Going through a box of my old toys, which had remained in storage under the stairs at my parent’s house, I attempted to photograph these toys as I once saw them in order to try to understand what sort of influence they might have had on me.