“The marketing illustrations for children’s Halloween costumes remains largely anchored in traditional gender roles, images, and symbols. The symbolic representations of gender contained within Halloween costumes may, along with specific costume titles, refurbish stereotypical notions of what women/girls and men/boys are capable of doing within the realm of their imaginations.”

Adie Nelson

Although the term “fantasy” implies a “play of the mind” or a “queer illusion,” the marketing illustrations for children’s Halloween costumes suggest a flight of imagination that remains largely anchored in traditional gender roles, images, and symbols. Indeed, the noninclusive language commonly found in the names of many children’s Halloween costumes reverberates throughout many other dimensions of the gendered social life depicted in this fantastical world. For example, the participation in the paid-work world and financial success for men and of physical attractiveness and marriage for women is reinforced through costume names that reference masculine costumes by…

“Jimmy, like most of the male batterers I have encountered, suffered from both forms of addictive intoxication: the need for merger with an abundant other and the need to wrestle nature, as represented by his wife, into submission. Shirley helped me see the connection between the two forms of intoxication in a couple’s therapy session when she offered a suggestion.

“If you really want to be of use to somebody,” Shirley proposes, folding out the wrinkles of her fashionable miniskirt, “what you should do is write yourself up some little grant, you know, some little research project, and figure out what happens to guys when their girlfriends spend time on the phone. I never met a man yet who didn’t get berserk when I was on the phone for more than ten minutes.”

Jimmy sputters, “Hey, listen. The baby was crying. I’m trying to get your attention. You’re…