Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2013

Vol. 34, No. 3, 424
438, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.717194

Troubling gender binaries in schools: from sumptuary law

to sartorial agency
Jennifer C. Ingrey*

Equity and Social Justice, Faculty of Education, Western University, London, ON, Canada

This article derives from a larger study on gender fluidity to focus primarily
on the sartorial aspects of gender. Secondary school students were interviewed to
investigate how they speak about gender expression, performance and fluidity in
their school. Using a Foucaultian analytic of subjectivation through regulated
surveillance and Butler’s theory of gender performativity and the abject, as well as
queer theorists such as Wilchins, my aim is to draw attention to the need to
de-naturalize the notion of a gender binary. Furthermore, I draw on Garber’s
analytic framework of sumptuary law to provide insight into the limitations of
gender expression and the potential for sartorial agency. The educational
significance lies in the need to disrupt the heteronormative education system to
resist the exclusion of gender non-conforming students.
Keywords: gender fluidity; sumptuary law; sartorial agency; gender performativity;
heteronormativity; self-fashioning

Introduction
This paper derives from a larger study I conducted in one secondary school in
Ontario which examined how students understand gender expression, gender
performance and gender fluidity in their everyday lives inside and outside of school.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the ways in which gender is lived and
understood by a group of adolescent students in one school community in
Southwestern Ontario. I am interested in providing insights into how individual
students enact their own gendered subjectivity or agency, as a basis for reflecting on
possibilities for troubling gender binaries in schools and ‘the ways in which
classifications police gender identities’ (Cooper, 2004, p. 88). I am concerned to
further knowledge about both the ways in which rigid classifications of gender
impact a group of students and how they perceive and understand gender fluidity/
gender non-conformity. The focus is specifically on how the students express clothing
choices, speak of fashion and dress in drag. By drawing on analytic categories derived
primarily from the work of Butler (1990, 1993, 2004), Foucault (1995, 1980, 1988),
and transgender theorists (Garber, 1992; Wilchins, 2004), as they pertain to
regulation, normalization and panoptic surveillance vis-a-vis the inscription and
embodiment of gendered subjectivities, my aim is to draw attention to sartorial
agency in relation to illuminating the significance of troubling gender binaries in the
lives of youth in one particular school community.

*Email: jingrey@uwo.ca
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 425

Context
Theoretically and empirically, certain studies around embodied subjectivity and
youth contribute significantly to my understanding. Davies’ (2006) study on the
subjectification of students is most aligned with how I see youth as subjects in this
article: they are engaged in their own subject-hood, or acting through sartorial
means, while they are also inculcated by the forces of consumerism, or acted upon.
Davies draws on Butler (1995) whose subject possesses a ‘conditioned agency’ and is
engaged in this ‘double directionality’ (Davies, 2006, p. 428). Grossman et al.’s (2009)
qualitative study asks about the perceptions, experiences and knowledge of LGBT
students who are identified based on ‘their actual or perceived sexual orientation or
gender identity by peers’ (p. 25) regarding sexual and gender violence; it links with
my study which asked how gender is understood and perceived through students as
witnesses to gender performativities. Of specific interest to my focus on sartorial
agency, Ma’ayan (2003) discusses how the masculine females in her study protested
the heteronormative oppressiveness of the school uniform, even critiquing the
appropriate gendered dress for physical education classes which relayed the message
that girls must look like girls at all times. Lasser and Wicker (2008) investigated how
LGB youth visually manage what they reveal to others about their sexual identity
finding that youth attempted to pass as heterosexual by donning ‘gender-typical
apparel’ (Lasser & Wicker, 2008, p. 110) while other male youth recalled suffering
harassment for wearing makeup. Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2001) look at one
gender fluid youth, Stephen, a self-identified tomgirl, to examine how youth’s
subjectivities can be transgressive and self-generating, focusing on his/her transitory
embodied subjectivity through an alteration of various sartorial styles and walks.
Preferring to look at the ‘signs’ of gender, Nayak and Kehily’s (2006) study is about
the regulation of gender through daily actions of performance in schools (p. 468),
while sartorial acts are subsumed within other bodily signifiers.
A select number of studies engaging with the issues of youth consumerism also
prove to be relevant. McRobbie’s (1993) work on femininity in rave culture of the
Thatcher years in England sees the youth subject as actively contributing to their
own subjectivity. Of more specific relevance is Marion and Nairn’s (2011) study of
French teenage girls’ experiences of fashion, inquiring how youth construct their own
subjectivity, or ‘self-identities’ (p. 31) through clothing and accessories. Citing
Foucault’s technologies of self, Willett’s (2008) study looks at pre-teen girls’
responses to consumer culture and fashion on ‘dollmaker’ websites, asking whether
they reject stylistic standards or conform to a stylistic hegemony; here Willett refuses
the binary of predetermined versus autonomous subject to embrace the ‘nuanced
ways in which girls are being managed and regulated through’ a reflexive self (p. 422).

Theoretical frameworks
From sumptuary law to sartorial agency
Because the data from this paper derives from a larger study, I arrive at a new
analysis through a conceptual kneading, one akin to Anyon’s (2009) thoughts on the
dialectical relationship between data and theory, and Fine’s (2009) ideas that ‘writers
knead theory, research, and action’ as opposed to ‘superficially ‘‘fit[ting]’’ their data
into a pre-existing theoretical frame’ (p. 190). What emerged through new readings of
426 J.C. Ingrey

both the data and theory from Foucault and Butler became the focus for this paper.
Consumptive practices, although neither the main focus of the paper nor the original
project, I found to be more and more relevant in terms of their relationship to the
gendered self-fashioning I witnessed in the data.
Thus, I combined Butler’s (1990) concept of gender performativity and Foucault’s
(1995) disciplinary power through panoptic regulation, as well as a special focus on
the technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988, 2005), to examine a specific set of data on
dress and self-fashioning practices. Such a theoretical renewal required a considera-
tion of regulation through sartorial means. Alan Hunt (1996), in Governance of the
Consuming Passions, traces the history of sumptuary law from feudalism through to
the twentieth century. Originally sumptuary law regulated consumption according
to class and gender. Hunt sees the ‘culture of dress and appearance provid[ing] a way
of connecting up with elements of the history of subjectivity’ (1996, p. xvi); further,
Hunt concedes that, ‘dress provides one significant discursive apparatus through
which gender relations have been lived, experienced and thought about’ (p. 215).
He links a project of gendered subjectivation to a discourse of clothing.
Fortifying this link, Garber (1992) introduces sumptuary law in her study of
cross-dressing. She argues sumptuary law limited consumption, specifically guarding
against confusion of class, and secondarily, of gender: as Hunt (1996) calls it, it was a
politics of ‘recognizability’ (p. 217). The law ensured a body could be easily ‘read’, or
placed within identity categories ‘to enforce social hierarchy’ (Garber, 1992, p. 26)
and is exactly how I see it being translated to the context of public schools (in
Canada)1 today. As a form of regulation not governed by officials, but by the
governed themselves (the panoptic subjects), a modernized sumptuary law takes on
panoptic qualities (see Foucault, 1995), depending on the techniques of self-
regulation (and those of others) through surveillance.
Clothing as a commodity in a culture of consumerism is a sartorial expression of
gender and a tool for subjectivity through subjectivation (Foucault, 1995, 1982,
1988). Within a contemporary context of consumption, I transfer Foucault’s (1995,
1980, 1988) analytic of power and technologies of the self to think about youth as a
consuming subject. Kenway and Bullen (2008) argue consumer-media culture
contributes to ‘the creation of a new kind of being’ (p. 10), namely, the consumer.
Klein (2000) considers consumerism as a form of identity; youth engage in self-
fashioning practices that are obsessed with branding and commodification resulting
in a ‘colonization not of physical space but of mental space’ (p. 66). Furthermore, I
agree with McRobbie’s (1993) assertion that youth are more than mere consumers;
rather, they are ‘active negotiators and producers of culture’ (p. 422). The analytics of
power, especially through Foucault’s work, can help complicate this relationship
between consuming subject and consuming culture, especially in terms of subjectiva-
tion, or a ‘conditioned agency’ (Butler, 1995).
The two arms of power are at work in the constitution of this consumer subject:
sovereign power and disciplinary power (Foucault, 1980). Each operates in tandem,
the former occluding the operations of the latter. Sovereign power is associated with
the ‘right’; in this case, what is institutionally sanctioned or corporately endorsed in
consumer culture (like the content of major advertising or even political campaigns,
for example) belongs to the ‘true’ discourse supported by sovereign power. Power
produces knowledge which itself produces the effects of truth (Foucault, 1980), in
this case, of a corporate context which creates and is its own form of normalization.
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 427

Disciplinary power works at another level: in more insidious ways, it incites subjects
to participate in the mechanism of power. And because it is productive, rather than
repressive, in this sense, it describes the more nuanced operations of consumer
culture that go unacknowledged. What is trendy, how one commodity becomes
preferred, what is ‘in’, even what looks right and what does not to a consuming
subject: all of these are examples of how consumers come to ‘know’, and ‘like’,
through the mechanism of a power more closely aligned to the inconspicuous nature
of disciplinary power.
Furthermore, Foucault’s (1988) technologies of self speak to the strategies and
techniques these subjects perform and on whom disciplinary power performs which I
apply to think about how these subjects are then incited to certain actions of
consumerism. One of four technologies Foucault (1988) named to explain how
humans have historically related to themselves, technologies of the self are those that:

. . . permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain
number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of
being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness,
purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (p. 18)

To explore the development of the practices of the self, Foucault (2005) conducts a
genealogy across antiquity to understand how the subject has ‘been compelled to
decipher himself [sic] in regard to what was forbidden’ (p. 17). What is relevant for
my study is to think about the techniques which subjects enact upon themselves and
each other within a context of power/domination. And in this case, the context of a
consumer culture influences and produces these subjects through their actions, as
well as being produced by them.
Finally, I draw on the work of Butler (1990, 1993, 2004) to theorize the
constitution of the subject, particularly in how students understand the realm of
normal gender against that which they deem abnormal. Butler (1990) insists gender is
something that exists in its doing, in its repeated performance. It is through the study
of drag, that the performativity of gender
the disruption of gender as coherent with
sex
is revealed: ‘the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and . . . a true gender is a
fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies’ (p. 174). For Butler, the
position of transgender compels the questions of ‘what is real, and what ‘‘must’’ be’
(p. 29); it tells us what we deem to be normalized because it arrives at the limits.
Gender transgression defines our limits of legitimacy. The transgender position is the
unintelligible, that which defies the binary order, that which is excluded, that of the
‘abjected bodies’ (1993, p. 35). Butler (1993) interrogates how this ‘domain of abjected
bodies . . . fortifies those regulatory norms’ (p. 16), defines the limits of a ‘symbolic
hegemony’ and how those abjected bodies might then also have the power to ‘force a
radical re-articulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count
as ‘‘life’’, lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving’ (p. 16). The
position of the transgender or gender non-conforming body incites a new form of
reiteration, and disrupts the coherence of old performances. Because students in
my study point to the gender non-conforming body in their examination of
gender binaries, understanding the productive possibilities of theorizing the abject
(those rejected from legitimacy) also identifies their understanding of social norms.
Butler’s discourse on the abject (as defining the limits of intelligibility) relates
428 J.C. Ingrey

specifically to how students attempt to disrupt the intelligibility of gender binaries as

informed by their own experiences in school as a regulatory site for enacting and
performing sartorial agency as a material and discursive practice.

Methods and data sources

In the larger study from which this paper derives I was concerned to investigate
students’ experiences of gender and gender non-conformity. I used qualitative
inquiry to access ‘rich, detailed, and concrete descriptions of people’ (Patton, 2002,
p. 438) within students’ self-knowledge. Constructed as an instrumental case study,
‘to provide insight into an issue’ (Stake, 2005, p. 445), this paper becomes a sub-case
(Yin, 2006) because it uses the data collected from the larger study’s methods while
applying a distinct analysis to a focused set of the data. Inductive thinking (Jones,
2002, p. 468) provided opportunity for me to theorize how students’ bodies and dress
relate to their agency; it helped me formulate the theme of sartorial agency and
allowed me to understand that the sorts of regulations in these particular instances
were of a sumptuary nature.
I interviewed eight student
participants, five males and three females (yet not
specified as gender conforming or non-conforming) both in a focus group, and then
individually. Five of the students were in grade 11 at the time of research (age 16),
one in grade 12 (age 17) and two were in their first year of university (age 17 and 18).
I constructed each interview set to account for individual comfort levels and thus
balance each other out. The focus group interview lasted two hours with the seven
participants (one was able to attend only the individual interview) and was set up to
investigate the group’s general understandings of gender. I began with descriptive
inquiries about definitions of gender and sex, for example, through to interpretative
questions about past and present experiences of gender in school; finally, I ended
with questions probing their sights for their future school environment and
interactions with peers and teachers. Individual interviews lasted from 30 minutes
to 1 hour depending on the degree to which each participant elaborated upon
answers; these individual interviews were intended to develop unresolved themes
established in the focus group. Each interview used a semi-guided format; the nature
of open-ended questions and follow-up questions that evolved from participants’
responses is in line with seeking ‘more engaged personal narratives and more candid
opinions’ (Foley & Valenzuela, 2005, p. 223) because it follows the natural flow of
personal interaction.
I coded the data according to thematic similarities (Patton, 2002) using an open
coding approach, containing elements of the constant comparison approach (Cohen,
Manion, & Morrison, 2007, p. 493) once analysis progressed and I had decided on
thematic categories, including only sartorial modes of expression for this paper.
Because some of the theoretical understanding for this paper came after the data
collection, a potential limitation is that the complexity of the theory might supersede
the data. Referring to Anyon (2009), it is impossible to return to a previous
theoretical position without acknowledging new insights; data and theory, in this
dialectical relationship, inform each other in multi-directional ways. I only hope to
bring new vision to older data to think about sartorial expression in terms of
subjectification.
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 429

Analysis of findings
The limits of acceptability defined: sumptuary laws
Students in this study conveyed an understanding that dress symbolizes agency and is
integral in the de-codification of gender. But, this first section outlines how gendered
dress, as it relates to self-fashioning practices, is framed in binary terms. Thus, these
students exercised a modern form of sumptuary law upon one another, keeping each
other in their proper stations, while subscribing to the discourse of consumer culture
simultaneously. They were engaged in ‘dividing practices’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 208)
according to gender, that are themselves fuelled by the technologies of self and
domination (1988). These students’ self-regulatory and fashioning practices need to
be understood within the broader context of the effects of commodification and
marketing (and their own socio-economic capabilities to respond to such forces) in
terms of how they impact their knowledge of self and others, particularly regarding
the embodiment of gendered subjectivity.
Given that original sumptuary law regulated according to gender and class
categories (Hunt, 1996), the analysis considers both components. Much of what the
students defined as the limits of acceptability of gender expression depended on
clothing and fashion, marking them as consuming subjects. What these students
know about gender is produced through their regulatory gaze, projected both upon
themselves and others. For Ralph S. it was clear that ‘girls wear Uggs and skinny
jeans . . . and guys, just jeans and shirts’, re-inscribing a binary gender framework. It
was the general perception in this school that many students were middle to upper-
middle class; thus the highly priced commodity, the Ugg boot, became one
important marker of normative femininity. Without even being aware of how
gender has been commodified, where certain sorts of gender are actually branded
(i.e. the Ugg boot standing in for proper and popular girlhood), these youth are
always already consuming subjects. Those students who could not afford to
participate in such consumptive practices risked being confronted not only by their
economic lack, but also by attributions of gender deficiency. The socio-economic
influence on majority group status was not lost to the students: ‘they’re well-to-do
kids . . . they can wear the clothes, spend $200 in a day and still have money for
lunch’ (Gray). But those students who cannot afford the labels have to ‘make up for
it somehow’, Gray explained of her peers; otherwise, ‘just because they don’t have
the money already means they can’t dress the same which means they’ll be outcast
which means they’ll act differently’. Certainly Gray and Ralph S. recall practices of
self they have witnessed in others: how their peers work on themselves in order to
mark themselves as a certain ‘acceptable’ sort of gendered body or how they
compensate for a knowledge that tells them they are otherwise insufficient in terms
of their gendered dress. If they are inadvertently speaking of themselves, then they
are engaging in those technologies of self (Foucault, 1988) that describe how they
have become (and continue to be) a certain sort of gendered subject. Gender is
known, experienced and produced through sartorial means within a culture of
commodification and consumption.
Edging towards the limits of legitimacy by appearing to subvert socially regulated
gender expectations, Ralph S. described his gender performativity in terms of a literal
performance. However, not explicitly about consumption, his scenario is about how
the body performs markers of gender expression through material means and is
430 J.C. Ingrey

hemmed in by sartorial regulation. Ralph S. described his drag costume for

Halloween as a legitimate form of performing the Other:

Ralph S.: I came to school with high heels, fishnet stockings, and a dress . . . Let’s
mess with everyone, but I have no intention of being gay . . . If I do that,
every day people will be like, ‘dude’ . . .
Interviewer: What would have been the reaction if you had worn what a regular
teenage girl would wear?
Ralph S.: On Halloween . . . there are excuses . . . If it was just some regular day,
people would think, ‘Ok, he lost a dare or something’. People don’t see me
as sort of a cross-dresser or homosexual, they see me as a very manly man.
Interviewer: Is that why you felt you could do that?
Ralph S.: I have nothing to prove.

Not only did Ralph S. think he was playing at the limits of acceptability, he thought
this play asserted his virility, his confidence in his own gender identity, because only a
‘manly man’ could perform in drag and escape social persecution. How he
understands his own gendered self is through the meeting of everyday acts and
this occasional (and legitimated) transgression. Furthermore, he explained that drag,
or ‘dress-up’, was normalized in his childhood: ‘every boy sometime in their life
played dress-up . . . I did that, I don’t see myself as a transvestite’. But then he added,
‘when I was young I thought everyone had a penis, I never saw the other side’. To a
boy who cannot see gender, dress-up cannot be about gender transgression; to this
same boy as an adolescent who does subscribe to very rigid gender lines, dress-up
does not seem to change from his childhood play. He is still toying with limitations,
albeit in a way that he deems is safe and unchallenging to his own ‘manly’ status.
Beyond these technologies of self, or those techniques that Ralph S. enacts to feel
safely and appropriately gendered, there is also the context of domination. These
limits must be enforced by the technologies of power (Foucault, 1988), otherwise
Ralph would have no hesitation or consideration of temporality; his sartorial
expression is socially regulated. It would be of no consequence whether it was
Halloween or any other day if Ralph S. were motivated by some other means to
transgress gender expectations. But because he is highly conscious of appropriate
occasions (whereby ‘appropriate’ is governed by peer surveillance and social ‘rule’)
his self-practices are always grounded in power relations.
Of further relevance here is how Butler uses the analytics of drag to explicate
gender performativity (1990). Through the performance of drag, which is itself, ‘a
stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler, 1997a, p. 402), gender is destabilized, unfixed and
exists through temporality rather than permanence; ‘drag implicitly reveals the
imitative structure of gender itself’ (1990, p. 175). Although Ralph’s performance is
literal
he is literally performing drag for Halloween
a closer look suggests Ralph’s
performance of drag confirms his gendered subjectivity. Appearing to subvert
masculine traits and donning the guise of a woman is, for him, a good way to assert
that he is a ‘manly man’. Indeed, through fishnets and a skirt, Ralph escapes the
requirements of hegemonic masculinity under the reasoning that only a truly
confident man, one who has ‘nothing to prove’, could appear as a woman. However,
he does not alter his entire performance to suit the outfit. For one, it is Halloween,
which is an occasion that legitimates costuming, if not cross-dressing, and it is safe
because it is temporary and carnivalesque. Furthermore, his masculine physique was
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 431

still visible (i.e. musculature and unshaven legs) and his stance of sitting in a skirt
with his legs wide open is decidedly ‘masculine’. Ralph believes he is playing at the
margins when he is actually re-inscribing a hegemonic masculine code of parodying
femininity. He did not venture into the abject, the de-legitimized, because he
maintained his position as a hegemonic manly man cross-dressing for amusement.
Ironically, however, Butler (1990) explains drag parodies ‘the notion of an original or
primary gender identity’ (p. 174) which is antithetical to Ralph’s explanation. Rather,
he believes he is engaging in a most ‘uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping
from within the practice of heterosexuality’ (Butler, 1990, pp. 174
175); and yet what
his performance accomplishes, at least in the theorization Butler offers, is to ‘reveal
the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized
as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence’, namely, sex,
gender identity and gender performance (p. 175). Through drag, Ralph S. performs
the possibility of a transgressive act, but thinks of it as a means by which to affirm
his hegemonic masculinity. Again, citing the technologies of self embedded in those
of domination (Foucault, 1988), Ralph S. might believe he is sartorially agentic, but
his performance is best understood as an exemplar of social or sartorial regulation,
or a form of modern sumptuary law governing how boys can transgress in their dress
and on what occasions.

Exceeding the limits: emerging sartorial agency

From responding to the expectations of binary gender and enforcing a form
of sumptuary law upon each other, students in this study were also capable of
complicating regulation through questioning or transgression thereby enacting an
agency, particularly surrounding their sartorial acts. Through their negotiations of
gender, the students defined the limits of gender acceptable behaviour ultimately by
defining what is rejected, or in Butler’s (1993) terms, the abject. That which is outside
of the normal
crossing either economic, or gender lines
produces ‘cultural anxiety’
(Garber, 1992) and is corrected within the mechanism of power through regulation
(Foucault, 1995). Hunt (1996) adds that transgressing gender norms invokes a social
anxiety (p. 218). But how students react to the irregular, or abnormal, in terms of
gendered dress depends on the nature of their agency, albeit conditional and partial.
As a form of technology of self, enforced by the technologies of power and
domination (Foucault, 1988), the consuming subject regulates the body, both literally
in the sense of fashion, body art and hairstyles, and figuratively in the sense that
gender is temporary but repeated through stylized acts and has the possibility to
change through its constant reiterations (Butler, 1990). Fashion itself is also
temporal. However, both fashion and gender can appear permanent because their
reiterations are often so unconscious and embedded in normalization. Similar to the
Ugg boot mentioned above, skinny jeans became another marker of normative
femininity for the students in this study for instance. The skinny jean references the
dominant discourse of thinness in girls; however, when applied to the boys it becomes
transgressive:

Some guys wear [skinny jeans] too . . . [and] get ridiculed for that [See Raj below]; indeed
the ridicule is usually, ‘that’s so gay’, which points to the conflation of gender and sex
transgressions in the ‘regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence’. (Butler, 1990, p. 173)
432 J.C. Ingrey

Raj expressed his intolerance of these social rules:

A friend of mine . . . he is really into street culture . . . avoiding popular brands. It just so
happens skinny jeans are for that. He’s not gay at all . . . it’s comfortable. He’s just like
normal, he just has a varied taste and style. I commend him for that, for being different.

Here, Raj indicates his friend is not only rejecting gender norms, but also the
corporatization of culture that inculcates youth. He is aware not only of how his
friend works on his own gendered subjectivity through subversion, but also of the
overwhelming force of consumerism. Raj’s friend’s choices to appropriate a piece
of clothing normally attributed to girls (of the dominant feminine group) mean that
he is disrupting the continuity of repeated acts of gender (Butler, 1990). He may even
be defining a new ‘street’ style that will become commodified in the near future by
fashion corporations (see McRobbie, 2002). Thus, agency in a corporate culture is
temporary and constantly negotiated (and re-made); it is as fluid and fleeting as
gendered subjectivity. In this culture of consumption that markets gender as binary,
skinny jeans for girls emphasize the shape of the body, preferably a ‘skinny’ one at
that. This added dimension of sexuality (which is explicit in many jean advertise-
ments) constructs a girl as exhibiting her sexuality through her bodily form. For a
boy to draw attention to his figure, the signals are confused: feminizing a boy is to
produce him as gay. Raj’s friend is not sexualizing himself necessarily, but if he uses
the same codes that girls do for sexuality, his sexuality will be judged. Wilchins
(2004) remarks that gender transgressions in dress for men are ‘more an affront to
the politics of gender and therefore more threatening’ (p. 38). For heteronormative
boys, attention to the body is taboo especially as dictated in hip-hop culture whereby
jeans are of the baggy sort (Ibrahim, 1999). Now considered mainstream for male
attire, Klein (2000) charts that the baggy jean was co-opted by white suburban boys
from black hip-hop youth who co-opted it from the ‘yacht-going’ crowd in Tommy
Hilfiger advertisements.
But Raj’s friend does not wear the baggy jeans. His act of donning the skinny
jeans, whilst remaining a ‘normal’ boy, according to Raj, exposes the non-referential
quality of performance in gender (Butler, 1997a, p. 404). In other words, the jeans do
not make the man, because their meaning changes according to specific norms for
governing the corporeal and sartorial inscription of hetero-masculinity. This is not to
suggest that the gendered boy exists first and then the jeans adapt to fit; rather, the
boy’s gender is itself in the process of re-definition through the performances of
wearing skinny jeans (as well as every other act of gendered behaviour). Then
through these performances, an agency emerges, simultaneously. The boy in the
skinny jeans, by reworking his gender expression and expectations, is enacting his
own agency.
Symbolically, the skinny jeans are significant because their advertising history
connotes the image of the rebel. Originally worn by workers, ‘cowboys, outlaws and
artists’ (Botterill, 2007), jeans are paradoxically today the most uniform article of
clothing: everyone owns a pair. Raj’s friend might see himself as a kind of a gender
rebel. Yet, the simple act of wearing jeans cannot alone signal rebellion: how denim is
worn, the brand (whether generic or designer), the fit, the wash and the colour are all
dictated by certain gender norms and economic realities. Raj’s friend is only
rebellious because he inverts these complicated rules. Nonetheless, within this jean
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 433

performance, Raj’s agency is also in process because he reconsiders for himself what
is normal. He is re-working for himself what acceptable gendered behaviour can
mean, shifting the bounds of acceptability. Through an analysis of his friend’s
sartorial agency, Raj’s own subjectivity is also being defined. For each boy, these are
their sartorial practices of the self (Foucault, 1988).
The students named other ‘outsiders’ to conventional gender behaviour also
based on visible expressions or sartorial technologies of self (Foucault, 1988)
precisely because these transgressions help locate the legitimized forms of gender.
Many of the students described one boy (not known to the interviewer and bearing
the pseudonym, Jay) as their token gender transgressor:

Jay’s very feminine . . . very comfortable in heavy makeup . . . mascara . . . wears big
platform boots . . . gets a lot of second glances . . . ‘Oh, he’s still here, what a
freak’ . . . and
I’ll never forget the day he started wearing stuff like that . . . so many heads turned
around. [He was] really off-setting the balance. (Bert T.)

Through regulatory surveillance, Jay suffers the ‘second glances’ and the label of
‘freak’. His performance is unacceptable because it refuses to conform to expecta-
tions of suitable gender for boys and his peers are compelled to remind him of that
repeatedly. He is known to be different and thus unworthy. However, his
transgressions are productive both for his own agency and that of the students in
this study who described him. By disrupting the gender norms, he points to a set of
possibilities of gender, that gender can be reworked and separated from the sexed
body. According to Bert T., Jay does not wear the makeup or the platform boots as a
costume, an occasional performance for Halloween, for example. It is not a form of
drag for the purposes of amusement; it may not even be a political act, one that
marks the fiction of coherent gender with sex and sexuality (Butler, 1990, pp. 174

175). It is for him something more ordinary; indeed it is in the mundanity of
repetition that gender exists (Butler, 1990). And although he is invoking a certain
sort of gendered performance through platform boots or heavy mascara, the context
of consumerism describes what is accessible or possible for Jay to create a certain sort
of gendered subjectivity.
However, despite his continual transgressions, which may appear to be evidence
of total agency, he is not immune to the pressures of behavioural correction his peers
and his environment impose upon him. He occupies the subject positions of both
master and slave (see Butler, 1995 and Davies, 2006). For his peers, Jay summons the
‘fag’ position as a ‘threatening spectre’ (Pascoe, 2007, p. 15); to them, gender non-
conforming behaviour is conflated with non-normative sexuality, thus they punish
each equally. In terms of the specific techniques of the self that a subject enacts ‘to
transform oneself’ (Foucault, 1988, p. 18), or in this case, to respond to certain
accusations of homosexuality, Jay altered his behaviour across certain social
contexts:

When we’re like walking down the street, he doesn’t even think about it, he just
automatically tones it down . . . he walks a different way, he moves a different way . . . it’s
amazing the changes . . . it’s almost as if he’s a different person . . . the day where we were
walking to his bus stop and two guys came up behind us . . . when he turned to
them . . . the first thing they did was burst out laughing and ridiculing him because he
434 J.C. Ingrey

was wearing makeup . . . ‘check out this faggot and his makeup’ . . . he forgot to tone
himself down, . . . to walk like a normal person, to act like a normal person and talk like
a normal person . . . like a normal boy, yeah . . . and he’s never done it again since . . . [on
the street he doesn’t take his makeup off] he just acts different . . . you don’t see the
makeup he acts so different. (Bert T.)

Gender is not tied to the physicality of the body and neither is it coherently linked to
sexuality, as Butler (1990) argues. If Jay can alter his gender expression or transform
himself to suit the situation (for reasons of safety) then it cannot be innate to his
sexed body, and it complicates its relationship to his gendered identity. But neither is
a hegemonic masculinity innate to his male body. The very stability of binary gender
is disrupted through Jay’s agentic ability to adjust accordingly. In a panoptic sense,
he is contributing to his regulation by participating as the surveyor of his own
actions: Jay now remembers, in certain situations, to watch his walk, talk, and to
‘act . . . like a normal boy’, similar to what Stephen knows about appropriate boy
behaviour in Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli’s (2001) study. Jay is constantly self-
regulating for survival: the occasional mistake reminds him to be vigilant. However,
despite the immanent danger, he maintains his non-normative gender performance in
times of relative safety, which happens to be in school surrounded by his friends. Out
on the street without the aid of a group of allies, he is alone. And despite the school
being an institution that historically and currently enforces heteronormativity, if not
homophobia and transphobia, Jay finds this space the most protected comparatively.
Yet, what he does to play with gender expectations and to challenge them is itself not
only a form of agency, but a badge of courage. Even at school he is not immune to
ridicule and peer-regulation. It is through negotiating the bounds of acceptability,
challenging them and keeping himself safe that he is being agentic, albeit
conditionally (Butler, 1995). Or in Foucault’s terms, Jay’s subject-hood is produced
through the intersection of how he operates on himself (the technologies of self) to
respond to how society operates on him (the technologies of power/domination)
(1988, pp. 18
19).
In another form of self-practice, Ralph S., through yet another reiteration that
disrupts and complicates, further reveals his own gendered subjectivity. Ralph S.
recalled a scenario with friends and his green pants: ‘my friends decided . . . they got
drunk so they decided . . .,‘dude, let’s smoke your pants’. . . [laughter] So they took off
my pants, I’m like, four huge guys took off my pants and they started to smoke my
pants’. Earlier Ralph S. had described his Halloween drag as evidence of his
manliness; now he jokes that he was dominated by male bodies and had to succumb
to being stripped of his clothing. What was particularly significant about those green
pants, enough to be targeted by his peers, is unknown. Precisely what he meant by
‘smoking’ the pants is also unclear. But what is certain is that the pants were the code
that others read and responded to through gender regulation and subsequent gender
harassment. The materiality of the green pants represented something materially and
discursively transgressive and thus open to punishment. What is most remarkable is
not necessarily that Ralph was literally stripped of his dignity by his peers, but that
he re-tells of the incident while laughing.
According to Butler, although performance does reflect a ‘prior social condition’
(1997b, p. 158) in that no one does gender without reference to the collective, it can
be re-thought within each utterance. Butler’s (2004) investigation of Antigone’s
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 435

speech acts in Sophocles’ tragedy is useful here. When Antigone confesses her crime
of wrongfully burying her brother, she re-frames the crime to become something
productive. By asserting her will, and denying guilt, she does not succumb to the will
of the king. Through publishing her act, by speaking it through confession, it is
questionable if she is merely doubling her guilt, but certainly she is exerting her own
will despite its fatal consequences. Ralph S. does not speak of a crime he committed,
but he is publishing something that may incite guilt because he was victimized: a
particularly ‘unmanly’ position to be in. The key in this analysis is that the original
act is separate from the act of re-telling it, whether the re-telling doubles or assuages
one’s guilt. It is Ralph’s choice to re-tell the story, to publish it, and it is entirely his
will that can re-frame it. The memory may not be amusing to him, but to present it as
such, Ralph S. is able to re-claim his control over the situation, appear to be the
‘good sport’, one who is not harmed.
Ralph S. describes an incident of gender harassment but is still exhibiting a form
of agency by denying the role of victim, just as Antigone denied her brother’s
dominance over her. Recall, Ralph S. is the self-ascribed ‘manly man’ and has
‘nothing to prove’. He may be telling two contradictory stories (i.e. the Halloween
drag and the smoking of the green pants), but his second utterance of this gender
performance is a step away from the first indicating that repeated stylized acts do not
have to be identical. Butler (1990) identifies the possibilities within gender
performance: through manipulation of the acts, and attention to challenging the
heteronormative system, small changes are evidence of an agentic self at work. Ralph
S. does not directly challenge heteronormativity, despite his claims of doing drag and
especially in the way that he understands drag to affirm his hegemonic masculinity.
Rather, he is a proponent of the binary gender system, but ironically, and
understandably does suffer some punishment within the structure that survives
precisely because it is so highly regulated. Nonetheless, he is agentic conditionally,
hemmed in, limited by what is discursively and materially possible, and can operate,
with varying degrees of agency, only within those possibilities.

Conclusion and implications

This paper has sought to illuminate the problems embedded in secondary school
students’ expectations and regulations of gender expression and its intersection with
sexuality through troubling the binaries of gender. Furthermore, it aims to contribute
to a discourse about gender and sexuality in schools that outlines the perception and
consequent treatment of gendered bodies ignores the actual gender and sexual
identity of subjects. Indeed, according to Wilchins (2004), transgender is a term that
should apply to ‘practically everyone, since almost every person rubs up against
narrow gender roles at some point in their lives’ (p. 26). She defines the system of
gender normativity to produce ‘a fascism of meaning . . . an assault of meaning that
forces people to live as gendered impossibilities’ (p. 38). Thus, all students (and
consequently all people) are potential targets for heteronormative backlash; systemic
changes must be put in place to account for the safety of all gendered bodies in
schools.
A study on students’ negotiations within gender binary frameworks and their
own sartorial subjectivity highlights what is lacking in the educational field to
address these issues: namely, adequate curriculum and policy designed to become
436 J.C. Ingrey

critical of gender binary reiterations and normalization. Through an extension of the

theories outlined in this paper, the systemic planning that informs gender regulation
and harassment could be disrupted. By developing and employing theoretical
frameworks that interrogate gender and include gender non-conformity, more
empirical studies on queer and transgender students could help further under-
standing about their unique experiences in schools. Applying the work of Britzman
(1995), an objective to queering not only the pedagogy but the policy and leadership
of schools could help to uncover masked assumptions and resulting actions that
belong to a heteronormative regime. Professional development opportunities at the
school and board level could introduce gender fluidity into the discourse of gender
expression. And transgender as an identity distinct from queer or lesbian, gay and
bisexual categories must be more explicitly included in equity policies. In line with
the consideration of youth as consuming subjects, Kenway and Bullen (2008) also
suggest a pedagogy of the profane and the popular, or bringing consumer-media
culture into the classroom, which would begin to problematize it in a way not unlike
the work of critical pedagogues. More knowledge must be built around how students
accept or reject gender norms in this consumer culture so that pedagogical practices
and curriculum, as well as school leadership, can support the move to a more
equitable and just society for all gendered bodies in schools.

Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for the support of Dr Wayne Martino, supervisor and mentor, for his
unfailing and always kind guidance. Although the original data preceded funding, the author
is also grateful for the SSHRC CGS doctoral grant that supported the writing of this paper.

Note
1. In Canada, public schools (from elementary through to secondary levels, including
enrolment of students aged 4
17) are funded by the individual provinces under Ministries
of Education which also provides and oversees curriculum.

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