When walls talk: Consumption, gender, and identity in children's bedrooms

In this thesis I assert that the discourses of both ideal and real depictions of children's bedrooms serve as vehicles for social doxa. The catalogs of Restoration Hardware Kids, Pottery Barn Kids, and The Land of Nod convey not just what an ideal boy's bedroom or girl's bedroom looks like, but what an ideal boy or girl looks and acts like. Thus, children's bedrooms operate as pedagogical sites of gender. Illuminated by Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, furniture pieces and decorative accessories are revealed to facilitate disparate motions, lifestyles, and habits which construct disparate gender identities. In this thesis I argue that both ideal and real depictions of children's bedroom spaces function as pedagogical spaces, reflecting the doxic expectations of gender and facilitating accordant enactments of masculinity or femininity. The embodied relationship between the children and their material environment weaves the gender habitus of girlness or boyness into their performance of everyday life.