Girls, femininity and classed subjectivity

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Girls, femininity and classed subjectivity

• Valerie Walkerdine
• School of Social Sciences
• Cardiff University

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Introduction

• Background to working with girls the 4/21
  project and research on video games
• Want to think about this also in relation to
  masculinity in valleys community

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Nice, kind and helpful

• Study of 10 year olds - favourite ascription
  amongst girls and teachers
• Difficult to be clever without being this and
  also cleverness ascribed to hard work and rule
  following
• Girls not displaying this could be called tomboys
  or in one case - a madam

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femininity

• In this sense, femininity is strongly regulated
• I found similar patterns much more recently in
  relation to a study of children and video games

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• Femininity as nurturant, co-operative, helpful,
  while attractive, sexually active, excessive etc
  - how might girls and young women manage this
  bewildering constellation of often incompatible
  modes of femininity?
• One issue is to understand how this is lived and
  experienced?

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Practices and experience

• Regulating Prudence
• Suburban terrorists
• Separation of work and play, clear indication of
  power

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Insensitive mothers

• Tizard and Hughes Young children learning, 1984
• Sensitive mothers as basis for making meanings
  and implicitly of educational success

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• All mc mothers sensitive
• Some wc mothers insensitive - rows, boundaries,
  explicit power
• Animals in a zoo who after all are really rather
  tame
• Reverse prediction - the only 3 wc girls who get
  to uni have insensitive mothers

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• Phoenix and Husain show similar patterns for
  black and minority children, in particular, the
  clear sense of strong boundaries, need for
  firmness, power etc, with added concern about
  racism
• (Parenting and ethnicity, Joseph Rowntree
  Foundation)

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How do working class girls succeed in education?

• In Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody (2002) Growing up
  girl psychosocial explorations of gender and
  class, we argue that we have to view wc
  educational trajectories as different and not
  deficient copies of mc trajectories

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Some examples

• Persistent inequalities in educational provision
  - difference in schools
• Womens domestic labour in normal development -
  consequences of different amounts of time and
  orientation to it
• The only 3 wc girls who go to university have
  insensitive mothers

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• Sensitivity may have predictive power for mc but
  not for wc (ie only those produced in relation to
  a discourse of sensitivity)
• Playing as a game and weak boundary maintenance
  between work and play

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WC practices

• Strong boundaries between work and play
• Got washing to do, got ironing to do - it all
  takes time love
• Explicit about power differentials, mothers as
  authority, accept hate and difficult emotions

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Kerry and Naomi

• Examples of a MC and WC girl

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Nicky
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Holly
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Moving beyond cycles of deprivation arguments

• For MC families education is about the retention
  and reproduction of mc status
• For wc, all we want for our children is to do
  better than we did. I think thats what everyone
  wants.
• This means separation from and disidentification
  from parents, friends, community and this s very
  painful (see Walkerdine, 1991)

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Femininity and masculinity in a south Wales
valleys community

• Young unemployed men wont take available work
  considered feminine
• Tradition of hard manual masculinity and history
  of community affect
• Illiteracy and femininity
• Distance from the femininewoman, gay or mammys
  boy

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• Clear strong distance between femininity and
  masculinity in steel works, now masculinity
  appears too close to femininity so what appears
  as a problem of masculinity is about femininity
  (and the maternal)
• Trying to uphold a masculinity which the fathers
  can no longer do and thus the pain of change

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• Working with femininity demands sensitivity to
  the complexities of class and the exigencies of
  classed social and psychic relations
• Now class is back on government agenda -
  important to understand how this is lived as
  gendered