Abstract In places such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, girls are increasingly hailed as contemporary educational success stories and are positioned as presenting ‘ideal’ and ‘good’ student subjectivities. While it is not all girls who are succeeding in schools in these places, the middle-class girls who are more likely to succeed academically are often still constrained in classroom spaces. These constraints are exemplified in comments from the participants in this research who suggest that these girls are responsible, do not push boundaries, are not entertaining, interesting or lively, and have nothing to say. This is in contrast to the perceptions they have of boys as entertaining, lively, interesting, boundary-pushing, verbal and irresponsible. This thesis explores the ways that students in the case study school fill their classroom spaces, and suggests that many female students are constrained within these spaces, partly due to immediate constraints (such as uniforms), but also due to broader discourses of sacrifice and entitlement. This feminist research project draws on poststructuralism in looking at the ways one group of 14-15 year old middle-school students at an elite private school in Australia made use of their classroom spaces. While this was a gender-focused study, other aspects of difference between students were persuasive in shaping and constraining student subjectivities. These differences between students related to race/ethnicity, class and gender, as well as to alliances between students and familiarity with the structures of schooling. These differences between are made sense of in relation to discourses of sacrifice, as well as in relation to discourses of entitlement. Rather than residing in fixed subject positions, it is within the way that differences between subjects are made meaningful that the impact of discourses of entitlement and sacrifice can be observed. In this research, entitled subjectivities, such as the ‘entertainer’ or the ‘lad’, were less accessible for girls, as well as for students designated ethnically/racially marginal/Other, for students who were unfamiliar within the hierarchies of the class and the school, and for students who lacked influential alliances. This ‘entertaining’ subjectivity formed the most popular and valued subject position for certain boys. While in some ways this subjectivity worked against academic application, ‘entertainers’ were popular with students and staff. This subjectivity, however, involved the objectification of students deemed less desirable in their subjective presentation. It also often disrupted the learning context. The entertaining subjectivity exercised entitlement and rendered many students sacrificial due to the denigration of others that was often a part of being entertaining as well as due to the necessary toleration of noise and disruption. Disruption partially explains the allure of the entertaining subjectivity – it can present a valued disruption to the routines of the classroom. It often involves (and plays a role in constituting) students deemed popular and worth watching in the classroom space and thus is tied up with popularity. That this subjectivity is inaccessible for many students indicates constraint. This research calls into question the claim that girls are educational success stories. Instead, the ‘success’ of middle-class girls is complex and must be contextualized. Many of the girls and a number of the boys within this research accessed discourses of sacrifice as a protective posture, as a way of minimising the disruptive potential of their success, application and/or desires, and as a way of embracing an acceptable subjectivity. The consequences of taking a sacrificial position in relations of power are particularly clear in more physical subjects where many of these students were observed as less confident in the use of their bodies; but the consequences are subtly influential in an array of learning contexts through physical constraint, immobility, low-level volume and tolerance of entitled subjectivities. Thus discourses of sacrifice and entitlement are indicative of competing discourses and political struggle. This research concludes that attention needs to be paid to the ways that students resist dominant versions of gender. While some of the students in this research resisted these dominant versions, resistance often has the contradictory effect of reinforcing dominant discourses. Schools, particularly teachers, can play a role in harnessing the transformative potential of points of resistance, opening up the possibilities for student subjectivities, particularly in terms of reducing the constraints that inhibit engagement with education. A feminist politics of difference and a recognition of female masculinity and male femininity presents productive ways of thinking about differences between students in contrast to a current state of affairs in which difference doubles as deficit. Such a process of discursive destabilisation problematises notions of gender, particularly those notions that constrain students. Embracing female masculinities and male femininities may enable a more ‘feminine’ approach to learning from boys, and a more ‘masculine’ approach to physical participation from girls. In problematising notions of gender, and explicitly labelling behaviours within one body as masculine and feminine, possibilities for student subjectivities will be broadened.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/291170 |
| Creators | Emma Charlton |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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