Discourses of romance and constructions of gender among girls and boys in a day-care setting

This paper intends to elaborate on ways in which girls and boys are constructing gender in peer interaction.Discourses of romance are circulating in different cultural contexts, transcending time and space, as well as generations, and in later years eased by mass media. This paper explores ways in which girls� and boys� practices (in a day-care setting) draw on discourses of romance and other gender discourses. The analysis is based on field-notes and video-recordings from six months of fieldwork in two Norwegian day-care centres. Participant observations of daily life and child-child interactions in particular were the main research strategy. A variety of different situations (play-time, circle-time, meals etc.) and interactions among just girls and boys respectively, as well as girls and boys together, were considered.