RE: Re(2): middle class play

From: Nate Schmolze (schmolze@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 06 1999 - 12:14:16 PST


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Dillon [mailto:dillonph@northcoast.com]
Sent: Monday, December 06, 1999 10:08 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Re(2): Re(2): the whiteness of middle class play

Diane,

I don't know who you're responding to or who said that

>more research is needed before anyone can recognize how
But I'm curious as to why you are so determined to link Pokemon to your
sex/gender and now, class/race issues? I think that Pokemon might be one of
the first truly global tertiary artefacts shared among pre-pubescent
children. Does that threaten you somehow?

Paul H. Dillon

My concern is on the other end, how pokemon or all these other notions of
carnival can be abstracted from or transend issues of sex, gender, race, and
class. Maybe we should rewrite our so called theories of development and
now have the pokemon stage.

I am sorry, it was kind of humorous at first that somehow this natural,
authentic child became realized in pokemon, and if we as teachers or parents
object in anyway to this corporate exploitation we are not sensitive to
children. Now, it seems this is a universal artifact of childhood in which
children all over the can be defined by participating in this global
activity setting. I swear Clinton and Blair are on this list somewhere.

Yes, having global tertiary artifacts threatens me. What bothers me even
more, I suppose, is we call certain activity settings (school) socialist and
accept that children's action is contrained, but somehow now the market is
going to save our children from us. Maybe since its global and universal
and all, we should add it to universal human rights. Something akin to one
of the alienable right of childhood is to have access to pokemon. We can
even form the Global Pokemon Libeties Union.

My kids like transformers, power rangers, barbie (on the way out), and
Britney Spears (on the way in) and while I personally don't take the route
of banning very often (generally an inferior form of social control) I would
never assume that somehow their interest in these artifacts are natural,
global, or universal. They have particular contraints and I willingly
accept the consequences of my actions, as a parent, without assuming those
artifacts are somehow representative of an eternal child.

Nate



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