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Textbook Gender Regulation Violence and Social Hierarchies in School Sluts Gays and Scrubs 1St Edition Victoria Rawlings Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Palgrave Studies in Gender
and Education
Series Editor
Yvette Taylor
School of Education
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow
United Kingdom
This series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly
diverse and complex area of interdisciplinary social science research: gen-
der and education. Because the field of women and gender studies is
developing rapidly and becoming ‘internationalised’ – as are traditional
social science disciplines such as sociology, educational studies, social
geography, and so on – there is a greater need for this dynamic, global
Series that plots emerging definitions and debates and monitors critical
complexities of gender and education. This Series has an explicitly feminist
approach and orientation and attends to key theoretical and methodolo-
gical debates, ensuring a continued conversation and relevance within the
well-established, inter-disciplinary field of gender and education.
The Series combines renewed and revitalised feminist research methods
and theories with emergent and salient public policy issues. These include
pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education; ‘early years’ and ‘life-
long’ education; educational (dis)engagements of pupils, students and
staff; trajectories and intersectional inequalities including race, class, sexu-
ality, age and disability; policy and practice across educational landscapes;
diversity and difference, including institutional (schools, colleges, univer-
sities), locational and embodied (in ‘teacher’–‘learner’ positions); varied
global activism in and beyond the classroom and the ‘public university’;
educational technologies and transitions and the (ir)relevance of (in)for-
mal educational settings; and emergent educational mainstreams and mar-
gins. In using a critical approach to gender and education, the Series
recognises the importance of probing beyond the boundaries of specific
territorial-legislative domains in order to develop a more international,
intersectional focus. In addressing varied conceptual and methodological
questions, the Series combines an intersectional focus on competing – and
sometimes colliding – strands of educational provisioning and equality and
‘diversity’, and provides insightful reflections on the continuing critical
shift of gender and feminism within (and beyond) the academy.
Gender Regulation,
Violence and Social
Hierarchies in School
‘Sluts’, ‘gays’ and ‘scrubs’
Victoria Rawlings
The University of Sydney
Camperdown, New South Wales, Australia
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 Introduction 1
3 Gender Regulation 31
References 285
Index 299
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
It was a baking hot, windy day when I first arrived at Wilson High
School. The previous day I had made the seven-hour car journey from
Sydney, and I now approached the school’s gates, surveying the brown
brick buildings that were surrounded by brittle, dry grass. I made my
way into the air-conditioned front office with a sense of relief from the
oppressive heat, and was introduced to my research contact at the
school. She advised that she had found a space for me to conduct
the first of my two focus groups with the female students, and showed
me up to the small meeting room adjacent to the school’s library. After
a brief wait, five girls (aged 15 and 16 years) entered the room. They
were full of life and laughter and I was immediately caught up in their
positive energy, knowing that they would be a talkative group for the
session that I had planned. Despite a brief moment of apprehension,
the girls happily obliged when I encouraged them to ignore the red
light of the voice recorder and chat amongst themselves as they would
normally.
Part way through the focus group, I asked them about whether they
could talk about any moments that they had seen, heard about or experi-
enced in regard to someone trying to intentionally hurt someone. With
this question, they began to talk about an incident that they had experi-
enced the day before.
Bec: Yesterday this girl made a Facebook group, and it was like . . .
(whole group groans)
Alice: Did you hear about that?
Bec: Kick a slut in the head day right
[...]
Vic: So explain to me what happened because I’m not really clear on
this
Jennifer: Ok, a girl made a Facebook group [ . . . ] And so yesterday at
school like all the boys were going around kicking girls in the
head.
Linda: Like they actually were
Kathryn: They were violently
Bec: I got kicked in the head
Alice: You did?
Bec: Yeah
Jennifer: So did I
Alice: Really?
Bec: Yeah
The imagery of this incident has stayed with me for a long time. One girl
from the school was violently attacked by a group of male students just the
day before. How could this happen? What could cause such a brutal and
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Linda: Was it like a girl who actually had a name for herself though?
Alice: Yeah
Bec: I think so
Linda: That would be why, like, and . . . boys are just . . . boys. They’re just
like that!
The concept of schools as sites that ‘ingrain prejudice’ rejects the more
hopeful and positive perspective of schools as safe spaces for young people
to flourish, to establish their identity and to recognise and pursue their
individual interests. Instead, the quote from Jennings (1999) suggests that
schools are sites that do not necessarily have a positive influence on
autonomy, nor on individuality; rather they are places where young people
may learn to recognise, resist and persecute any forms of difference. This is
obviously not the only possible outcome; they are also spaces that can
foster a sense of community, activism or social justice. While schools have
an undeniable role in shaping these outcomes, there remains a lack of
recognition or investigation of how and why different schools produce
these varying results. What are the procedural, systemic or contextual
differences between a school that fosters prejudice and one that
encourages the celebration of diversity? Attempting to deconstruct some-
thing as abstract as student attitudes to diversity raises a host of questions
about learning that occurs outside of a formal syllabus; for example, who
arbitrates what should be taught, and what should be silenced? Who
decides what can be learned at school, and what lies outside our
6 GENDER REGULATION, VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL HIERARCHIES IN SCHOOL
potential to view social and institutional practices that inform these mean-
ings; that inform the ways that we confirm or combat prejudice through
the schooling process.
Perhaps here is a good point to reference my own personal journey.
To me, the most relevant aspect of my educational experiences was
growing up as a same-sex attracted teenager in an urban girls’ school.
I was lucky enough, at the age of 14 onwards, to have a group of
friends who supported my coming out journey for several years. This
support was definitely needed, as despite a (little L) liberal upbringing in
a progressive family, and the positive contributions of friends around
me, I felt a deep sense of unease, largely constituted by hatred of my
(continually denied) sexual orientation. In retrospect, it is easy for me to
recognise that being surrounded by ‘certain behaviours, language, atti-
tudes, which are linked with being [a] “normal” girl or boy’ and the
connected compulsory heterosexuality (which I ascribed to for many
years) was more powerful than the support of my family and friends
during this period of my life. This understanding acted as the starting
point for this research, as I aimed to explore the often-invisible (or at
least, taken for granted) boundaries that are produced and performed in
moment-to-moment transfers through discursive practices. I believe that
these were the ultimate factors that largely depleted my sense of self-
worth and led to a long-term and premature rejection of my current
(exceptionally content) identity.
This acknowledgement features here for two reasons, namely to situate
my personal interest in the following research and to illustrate my initial
movements, both of which influence my research position and the out-
comes that will follow. Although a personal investment may have been the
ignition point for this book, the depth of theory and possibility in viewing
and responding to prejudice, inclusion, exclusion and performance in
schools cemented my research interests. These moved from being specifi-
cally based in gender and sexuality to a more diverse conceptualisation of
what it means to ‘go with the crowd’ and perform to normative and
endorsed standards.
USING POSTSTRUCTURALISM
The first aspect of this discovery was a re-conceptualisation of what schools
are and what they represent. Poststructuralism offers a particularly relevant
theoretical perspective to assist with this process. Within poststructural
1 INTRODUCTION 9
that informs them from different paradigms. This is the foundation of the
research presented in this book. In it, I have attempted not only to
envisage and illustrate the ‘realities’ of the participants, but also to
demonstrate the ways in which dominant research ideologies are effective
in positioning them. These ideologies manifest in the discursive practices
of teachers, other students, family members and the media, and can
function to position individuals into categories that they may not ascribe
to or identify with.
Although the foundation of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ represents a critical
engagement point of this research, other binary research foundations
additionally produce identity consolidations. Within the understanding
of prejudice, inclusion and exclusion in schools, a pertinent example is
the conception of ‘bullying’, which can be approached from many differ-
ent research paradigms. Some of the questions that these raise include
‘What is a ‘bully’?’ ‘How do ‘bullies’ behave?’ ‘What is a ‘victim’?’ ‘Whose
fault is this?’ and ‘How do we conceptualise ‘bullying’?’ These questions
illustrate ideological and discursive contentions, but are also importantly
relevant at a micro level. As we approach them either implicitly or expli-
citly, the answers hold distinct discursive implications for the individuals
that invest in them or those who have them applied to them.
In recognition of the above, I have aimed in the following chapters to
explore the ways in which knowledge and values are produced in schools
and how schooling processes, both formal and informal, affirm or negoti-
ate these. Through adopting a critical, qualitative and poststructural
approach, I acknowledge that I am interested in undermining ‘taken for
granted’ or ‘common sense’ truths that operate to affirm normative values
in schools like ‘girls’ and ‘boys’, or ‘bully’ and ‘victim’. Indeed, these
constructed identities represent avenues of power and possibilities of pre-
judice as they operate to define who is ‘in’ or ‘out’ through inferential
attributions. By examining how individuals and groups construct ideas
about ‘others’, I hope to demonstrate the power of language and domi-
nant discourse in creating hierarchical social realities, where investments in
norms can result in valued or discarded identities and demonstrate to
others the ways that they should ‘be’.
In recognising these foundations, I specifically seek to examine and
deconstruct the gendered and social realities that are experienced (and
constructed) within two high schools in New South Wales, Australia.
The gendered focus of the research represents my response to both my
initial concerns and interests in research as well as the ongoing dialogue
12 GENDER REGULATION, VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL HIERARCHIES IN SCHOOL
mechanisms of control for all who speak or hear them. As such, I depart
from these more linear understandings to gain an understanding of how
many different individuals within schools experience, reject or contribute
to gendered and social realities that sustain persecution for nonconfor-
mity. This re-positions homophobia, gender-based violence and general
interactions as performances that require continual construction from the
whole school community, rather than just being relevant for a minority.
It affirms that particular interactions affect all individuals through defin-
ing social and performative boundaries and restricting difference and
diversity. Rasmussen helpfully reiterates this: