Production Of Meaning Through Peer Interaction: Children And Walt Disney's Cinderella

According to Lori Baker-Sperry in her writing The Production of Meaning through Peer Interaction: Children and Walt Disney’s Cinderella, children are placed in a society where it is up to them to interpret popular gendered fairy tales such as Cinderella. Children “actively interpret the social world by constructing the meaning of social messages” (Baker-Sperry 717). Prior to the reading of Cinderella, the children identified stereotypical gender expectations of Cinderella as beautiful and nice even though the story does not explicitly use these descriptions. The reading groups served as an environment where gendered assumptions were discussed, but not distrusted. The children were highly influenced by the other peers in the group. Collaboration in the peer group solidifies gendered perceptions, and therefore, the children “often accept gendered expectations as truth” (Baker-Sperry 718). …show more content…
However, occasionally the truth was “negotiated, added to, and subtracted from as [the children] filtered the messages through their own experiences, hopes, and desires” (Baker-Sperry 722). The girls frequently evaluated their physical qualities compared to Cinderella’s and established personal expectations of marrying a prince in the future. This demonstrates that fairy tales play a major role in childhood development and furthermore, gendered messages. Therefore, Lori Baker-Sperry is correct in that fairytales, specifically Cinderella, provide an instrument for children to interpret socio-cultural theories of gender, the influence of peer culture, and the fine line between fantasy and experience because the first grader’s childhood development experiences serve to confirm this