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Children's play remains a key site for negotiating identities as young children try on different possibilities from popular culture and the broader social landscape. While this play can be generative in broadening available gender expressions in particular, such play can also reproduce harmful and limiting stereotypes that serve to narrow and exclude identities, particularly for girls of color. This qualitative study of three girls in a kindergarten classroom illustrates the tensions inherent in claiming centrality, specifically for girls of color who are often decentered, underrepresented, and tokenized in curriculum and popular culture. Against this backdrop, intersectional theories and artifactual literacies frame how identities are (re)constructed and sedimented on texts as historical and social artifacts, documentinghow children move between multiple expectations and presumptions about their identity. In order to construct and justify certain play scripts, children apply dominant gendered and racialized narratives to interpret the world and set up their play. Through an analysis of the social context, play episodes, popular culture artifacts, and the use of symbolic tools, this paper shows how children straddle and mobilize themselves across varying social contexts and assert their voices despite the dominance of White girls within their social, cultural worlds. Although the girls featured in this paper show that monolithic images are malleable as children work out their social positionings, the invisibility of girls of color in popular culture reinforces powerfully normative cultural scripts. Consequently, young children normalize whiteness while limiting and excluding possibilities for girls of color to express intersectional identities.
Mona (White), Jasmine (Black), Tina (Asian American), and (occasionally) Arlene (Asian American) were close friends in a kindergarten classroom within a diverse, mixed-income school in the Midwest (all names are pseudonyms). I begin with these girls' gender and racial identities as important to their experiences and interactions in play; they were not "bearers of separate identities, as gendered, then raced or vice versa, but as both at once" (Ferguson, 2001, p. 22). Figure 1 shows Mona's drawing of their friendship circle, featuring herself as a version of Hannah Montana with her three friends encircling her. Their multiple identities were frequently "sedimented" (Rowsell & Pahl, 2007) on texts (written, drawn, and oral) as artifacts or social histories of children's shifting experiences and social relations. Like Mona, all...