After recognizing a lack of children’s voices in the debate about the children’s book Kivi och monsterhund and the gender-neutral pronoun hen that occurred in the beginning of the year of 2012, I decided to interview pre-school children about the same book. My purpose with the study was, using semi-structured group interviews, to examine how 6-year olds talked about the main character Kivi. With the help of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I have studied how the children constructed Kivi’s gender in their speech. I have looked at how they recall the appearance of Kivi to establish their gender, and detected insecurity when the normative gender attribute was questioned. I have also studied which pronouns the children used, and in which contexts they used them. I found that they mixed pronouns during the interviews, which I noted as a possible sign of gender insecurity or a consequence of grammatical immaturity. Lastly I looked at how the children spoke about Kivi in relation to activity and characteristics. My conclusion is that Swedish language as it is now makes it hard to speak about more than two genders, and therefore the word hen could be useful. The incapacity to speak about Kivi as neither a boy nor a girl, or maybe both, generates a need among the children to “decide” their “proper” gender. With hen comes the opportunity to speak beyond these language barriers, and therefore also make it a possible existence.

I den stora hen-debatten under 2012 saknades barnens perspektiv. Syftet med denna uppsats är att belysa det genom att ta reda på vilka pronomen förskolebarn använder i sitt samtalande om barnboken Kivi och monsterhund som endast innehåller könsneutrala pronomen. Materialinsamlingen gjordes genom barnintervjuer i fokusgrupper där fyra- och femåriga förskolebarn fick samtala om boken och som analyseringsmetod har en mestadels kvantitativ metod använts för att ta reda på pronomenens frekvens. Resultaten visar att barnen inte reagerade nämnvärt på hen och använde det inte heller själva. Kivi omnämndes av barnen som han medan monsterhunden refererades till som den eller han.  Hypotesen att barnen skulle tillskriva Kivi sitt eget kön visade sig inte stämma då skillnaderna i pronomenanvändning pojkar och flickor emellan var minimala. Resultaten kan bero på att mannen ses som norm och kvinnor som ”det Andra” (de Beauvoir 2002) samt att barnlitteraturen domineras av pojkar. Resultaten överensstämmer också med tidigare forskning av Merrit & Kok (1995) som visar att karaktärer med könsneutrala namn tenderar att tillskrivas manligt kön. / In the great debate over the gender-neutral pronoun hen in 2012, the perspective of the children was missing. The aim of this bachelor essay is to shed light on that perspective by investigating which pronouns pre-school children use in conversation about the children’s book Kivi och monsterhund which contains only gender-neutral pronouns. The material was obtained through children’s interviews in focus groups where four- and five-year-old pre-school children talked about the book and the material was analyzed by using a mostly quantitative method to find out the frequency of the used pronouns. The results show that the children scarcely reacted to hen nor did they use it themselves. Kivi was referred to by the children as he while monsterhunden (the monster dog) was referred to as it or he. The hypothesis that the children would ascribe Kivi their own gender proved to be incorrect as the differences in use of pronouns between boys and girls were minimal. The results may be an effect of the man being viewed as the norm and women as “the Other” (de Beauvoir 2002) and the dominance of boys in children’s literature. The results also correlate to previous research by Merrit & Kok (1995) that show that characters with gender-neutral names tend to be ascribed male gender.