Boys and Girls

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Boys and Girls

• Gender, Normativity and Violence

Emma Renold, Cardiff
University, WALES, UK (renold_at_cf.ac.uk)
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Proliferation of Anti-Bullying organisations
3
UK Department for Children, Schools and Families
(DCSF)

• 2008 - Prejudice-driven bullying AND types of
  bullying
• Protection (victim) V Pathologisation (bully)
• Individualization of conflict and violence

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Hard-wiring aggression!

• Bullying tendency wired in brain
• Bullies' brains may be hardwired to have
  sadistic tendencies, US imaging research
  suggests.
• An area of the brain associated with reward lit
  up in scans when aggressive boys watched a video
  of someone inflicting pain
• "This work will help us better understand ways
  to work with juveniles inclined to aggression and
  violence."
• (BBC NEWS, 7 Nov 2008)

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GENDER NORMS

• Gender only exists as a norm to the extent that
  it is enacted in social practice and reidealized
  and reinstituted in and through the daily social
  rituals of bodily life
• (Butler 200448).

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Everyday violence of gender norms

• Violence as Regulation
• How violence becomes non-violence through
  everyday regulation of gender/sexual norms.
• Violence as Resistance
• How violence is invoked in resistance to
  regulatory norms
• Regulation and resistance subvert and reinforce
  hierarchical gender/sexual norms

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Theorising gender and sexuality
ROSI BRAIDOTTI
Judith Butler
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Norms in new times .

• Schizoid Neo-liberal societies
• Individualisation
• (flattens and erases difference, depoliticizes
  gender cultures with focus on self)
• AND
• Social cohesion
• (recognizes difference but without troubling
  the centre, the norm)

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The notion of gender as illusory is a valuable
theoretical resource resonating not only with
childrens reiterative gendered performances as
they struggle to project a coherent abiding
gendered self (Butler 1990 140).
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Intelligible genders and the hegemonic
heterosexual matrix

• I use the term heterosexual matrix ... to
  designate that grid of cultural intelligibility
  through which bodies, genders, and desires are
  naturalized ... a hegemonic discursive/epistemolog
  ical model of gender intelligibility that assumes
  that for bodies to cohere and make sense there
  must be a stable sex expressed through a stable
  gender (masculine expresses male, feminine
  expresses female) that is oppositionally and
  hierarchically defined through the compulsory
  practice of heterosexuality (Butler 1990151).

Adrienne Rich compulsory heterosexuality (1983)
Monique Wittig (1992) The Straight Mind
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Braidotti Schizoid double pull

• Deleuze and Guatarri Capitalism and
  Schizophrenia
• Simultaneous displacement and refixing of gender
  norms
• it engenders, propels and contains
  simultaneously opposite effects, degrees of
  gender equality with growing segregation of the
  sexes gender trouble on the one hand and
  polarized sexual difference on the other
  (Braidotti 2006 49).

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BRATZ DOLLS
Bratz World London Pretty n' Punk Meygan (left)
and Cloe (right)
Forever Diamondz Yasmin
Schizoid dynamic girls can invest in culturally
diverse femininities so long as they project
heterosexualized bodies
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Non-sexual heterosexualities, heternormativity
and sexual diversity

• pupils should be taught about the nature and
  importance of marriage for family life and
  bringing up children therefore pupils should
  learn the significance of marriage and stable
  relationships as key building blocks of community
  and society.
• This guidance is not about the promotion of
  sexual orientation (yet heterosexuality
  promoted throughout)
• (Sex and Relationship Education, DfEE 2000)

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• Heteronormativity
• (Sex and Relationship Education)
• AND
• Celebration of sexual diversity!
• (homophobic bullying)

Create an inclusive environment Do not assume
all young people in class are or will be
heterosexual (Homophobic Bullying DCSF 2007)
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Schizoid dynamics micro-social world of schooling

• Regulation of and resistance to gender norms
  through violence as part of the process of
  becoming an intelligible subject (Renold and
  Ringrose 2008)

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Boys will be boys Boys and the normalisation of
physical violence

• ER So what sort of things are you playing?
• Ryan Lift em up or trip em up.
• ER Lift them up or trip em up?
• Jake Right, its like squint and youve got to
  run across and theres two people there and
  youve got to lift them up and most people trip
  them / up.
• Sean Ryan got me yesterday and he stuck his
  foot out
• ER So you literally lift people up or you trip
  them over?
• All Yeah.
• (Later, that year .)
• ER What about in the playground, do you still
  play that tripping up game?
• All Yeah.
• Jake I got this massive black eye and it was
  all swollen.
• ER With that game?
• David No, we were playing granny bashers.

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Blurred boundaires and gaming violence

• Rick You used to beat me up
• Ryan No I didnt/
• Rick Yes you did, you did body slams on me
• Ryan That was because we were playing fights
• Rick Were we? (sounds unsure)
• Ryan Yeah

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Teaching staff and playground monitors

• ER What about the dinner ladies? Can you tell
  them?
• Neil Theyre not bothered, theyre not
  bothered
• Simon Yeah because if someone kicks you or
  something, they/
• Neil You /need to be crying before they take
  any notice
• Graham They call you a wimp
• Simon You have to be either crying or lying on
  the floor with loads of people round you
• ER For?/
• Simon To get any attention

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PARENTS AND FAMILIES

• ER Can you tell them (your parents), would they
  come up to the school if they found out youd
  been hit and teased?
• Graham No probably not my dad told me to stick
  up for myself, but he doesnt know them like I do
  (almost in tears)
• ER I know its very difficult (he nods)
• Simon If I do tell my mum and dad, what happens,
  coz my dad, he teaches me some moves, he teaches
  me how to block, by putting two arms in front of
  me
• (...)
• and if I do get into a fight and I tell my mum
  and dad and say well I just thumped them and I
  just ran off, so and my dad says so you won the
  fight then and I go yeah (unconvincingly) and
  my mum and dad go good for you.

Schizoid dynamic using gender norms to combat
violent effects of gender norming!!
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Being a girl sexual objects, sexual subjects
and sexual harassment
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Beyond the school gates blurred boundaries

• Trudy Once when me and Debbie went to the park
  right and these boys were on these swings, I
  think we were about nine and I had these short
  jeans on and this boy (she starts laughing) and
  this boy goes, I want your body and once/
• Debbie Right OK, then, me and Michele and Trudy
  were on the landing at the park and these boys
  were walking past and suddenly stopped and
  pulled their pants down (they laugh)
• ER How did you feel?
• Debbie Horrible/
• Hannah Well erm this boyfriend er we met him at
  Godfrey Lane park and he started, on the way
  back coz we wanted to get away from him because
  we didnt really know him. He kept pinching my
  bum (the others laugh) and I was trying to run
  away and he kept pinching my bum.
• Trudy Its nice getting all the attention but/
• Hannah You hear these stories of getting raped
  and stuff and Id be really scared oh whats
  going to happen and you here these stories about
  people dying, well not dying but ... (school
  bell rings and the interview is cut short).

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• Heterosexual harassment of young girls is
  increasingly being recognised as a normalising
  feature of the social world of primary schooling
  as research problematizes assumptions that
  connect sexuality with adolescence.

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Were used to it normalisation of sexual
harassment

• ER Do boys pick on you like they do their
  friends?
• All No.
• ...
• Trudy They punch you in the boobs.
• Annabel Yeah they punch you in the boobs
  sometimes and pull your bra
• and that really kills.
• Trudy Yeah, they go like that (shows me)
• ER So what do you do to that
• Annabel Nothing, we just walk away going like
  this (hugging chest), don't
• touch me but/we dont tell
• ER You don't tell anyone?
• Annabel and Carla No.
• ER Why not?
• Kate Because you ... they might think its a
  big deal
• Trudy Because we're used to it.

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• Annabel No, we do think its a big deal, but if
  we told someone like Miss
• Wilson, shed just say oh don't be so silly
• Trudy They'd laugh.
• ...
• Carla And I'd be too embarrassed
• Annabel and Kate Yeah.
• Trudy Yeah and we don't like causing an
  argument, we don't I don't like causing an
  argument.
• ...
• ER Don't you punch him back? (when he hits you)
• Trudy No, coz you can't really
• Annabel You dont
• Carla They hurt you.
• ER Sometimes/
• Trudy Girls really don't fight boys

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Girls as subjects and objects of sexual desire
sexual violence

• Presumed Innocence (compulsory non-sexual
  heterosexuality, intensified within primary
  school)
• Normalisation of sexual agency (shift from sexual
  objects to sexual subjects, increasingly
  compulsory performance to signify as girls)
• Normalisation of sexual harassment

SCHIZOID DYNAMIC
Compulsory sexy femininities (pleasure and
power)
Compulsory danger and risk (intensified by
sexy?)
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• Norms may or may not be explicit, and when they
  operate as the normalizing principle in social
  practice, they usually remain implicit, difficult
  to read, discernible most clearly and
  dramatically in the effects they produce
• (Butler 2004 41).

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Effects

• Policy is consistent in its failure to
  acknowledge how normative gender and
  developmental discourses (e.g. play,
  innocence) operate to
• naturalize gender/sexual violence (non-violence)
• Undermine/silence claims of gender/sexual
  violence both at the level of disclosure and at
  the level of intervention

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They call us girls boys as abject subjects

• Intelligible masculinity
• football, fighting, emotionally-resilient
  (hard), hyper-competitive (work and play),
  recognisable heterosexual (desiring and
  objectifying girls/women)
• Unintelligible masculinity
• binary opposite or absence of these practices
  aligned boys with girl-ness (misogyny) and
  gay-ness (homophobia)

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Boys and the schizoid tweenage heterosexual matrix
Boys proximity to girls

• Masculinity confirming
• (heterosexualizing)

• Masculinity denying
• (feminizing)

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Its not fair on us, just because were not
girls

• On gendered music tastes
• Simon The girls act differently, they kind of
  make fun of you/
• Jay The girls/
• Toby The girls like the music/ we like
• ER So they like the stuff you like?
• Toby Yeah.
• Simon Precisely.
• Jay And just because theyre girls and were
  boys doesnt make us any different. Why cant we
  support, like erm lets say I like Boyzone or
  something like that, why cant we like them? ...
  Its not fair on us/ just because were not
  girls, then we cant like it

Doing boy through the subordination and
objectification of girls and women.
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Struggle to sustain non-normative masculinities

• The more boys were positioned as feminine, as
  failed boys, and failed hetero-boys the more
  they seemed to traduce the feminine and reinstate
  the symbolic power, which as white middle-class
  boys, they felt entitled too.

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Schizoid queering and norming? heterosexual
violence and homoeroticism

• Toby and Steven tell me that some of their
  favourite games when they were in Year 4 (age 9)
  were fantasy games and they still play them
  today. I ask them what did they used to play when
  they were younger. Steven replies "Well we used
  to play one game where we were in my bedroom and
  we made a van out of stuff. We used to pretend
  that we broke into the school using the van and
  drove into the playground to kidnap the girls we
  used to fancy at the time ... after we got them
  into the van we pretended to have it off with
  them on the bed". Steven then continues to
  describe that they used to act 'having it off'
  with each other. One of them would pretend to be
  the girl and one the kidnapper. At this point,
  Simon interjects with "so did I" and informs the
  group that he and his best friend used to play
  the same game at home. They all fall about
  laughing.

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Phallogocentric norms

• Undoing gender
• The pain and powerlessness of gender troubling
  (social punishments of transgressing gender
  norms) and gender bending (investing in
  non-normative masculinities) work to undo gender
  (unintelligible subject).
• Fixing gender
• To reinstate boy-ness (intelligibility) involved
  reconfiguring the subordinated relational Other
  (the girl/woman the feminine).

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Just bad-girl-bullies?

• Hayley Kirsty just went up to Harriet and hit
  her on the back just because she was getting on
  her nerves and we were only laughing
• ER In P.E.?
• All Yeah/
• Harriet In our changing rooms
• ER Kirsty went to hit Harriet
• All Yeah/
• Amanda And I said no-one hits my friends so I
  had to/because no-one hits my friend
• Harriet No and then you Hayley hit Kirsty as
  well didn't you/
• Hayley We beat her up in the playground didn't
  we (half-smiling, victorious)
• Amanda No she came, you know she's tall, and she
  thinks she's really big and everything, she
  walks up to you like that and then she goes 'did
  you swear at me' or something like that/
• Hayley So we pushed her against the wall we
  pushed her against the wall behind the bike
  sheds and we started hitting her.

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Media moral panics the rise of the girl bully

• Girls are now bigger bullies than boys (Guardian
  2002)
• 40 girls suspended for mass intimidation
  (Telegraph, 2004)
• Rise of the bully girls (Daily Mail, 2005)
• Girls are the biggest bullies (Liverpool Echo
  2007)

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Violence as/of resistance to hyper-sexualised
femininities

• Contrary to the boys assumptions that girls are
  free to do what they want and transgress
  symbolic gender boundaries, to signify as
  intelligible girls involved significant
  investments in cultural markers that signify
  dominant notions of heterosexual femininity
  (sexual subjects sexual objects).
• - from the heterosexualization of boy- girl
  interactions (e.g. friendship, borrowing a
  pencil)
• - to the production and policing of their own
  and other bodies as heterosexual desirable
  commodities (sexy but not too sexy)

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Recouping sexualized/classed Others

• Harriet Yeah, they all wear like mini-skirts to
  discos, but I dont want to, Im wearing my
  shorts-dungarees to the discos (laughs) ... and
  theyre (Kirsty and two friends) all wearing
  these mini- skirts.
• ...
• Amanda Im just wearing my check T-shirt/ and
  shorts.
• Harriet Yeah.
• Amanda They wear, they wear like mini-skirts to
  impress the boys.
• ER Do you think so?
• Amanda Yeah and we, Im just going in something
  that is comfortable, not so that boysll go out
  with me.
• ...
• Harriet She (Kisrty) likes to impress the boys,
  but me and Amanda arent, dont really care.
• Amanda Some people like something thats comfy
  and then some people think oh Ive got to look
  like tarty/
• Harriet Yeah going around and getting all the
  boys around you.
• ER So you dont feel like that at all?
• Harriet No, if boys like you then they like you
  for the way you are not coz of how you look or
  how fashionable you are.

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Collective girl power? re-classifying others
42
No simple bad-girl bully/girl power discourse

• Both groups of girls are negotiating the classed
  dynamic of girls subjectification to the
  violence of regulatory norms.
• Violence invoked by girls as survival and
  resistance to being positioned within regulatory
  and punishing heterosexual matrix and its
  schizoid demands (sexual subject, sexual object
  and sexually innocent).

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Resistance, Normativity and Otherization

• Resistance operates to consolidate and
  reterritorialize other forms of dominance,
  differentiation and otherization.
• Power and privilege in sustaining queer
  practices.

44
Normative Violence

• Gender/sexual norms reconfigure some violences as
  non-violence.
• Resistance and intervention to normative violence
  can consolidate other norms
• Violence as performative effect of negotiating
• increasingly schizoid gender/sexual norms?

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Schizoid subjects and ethical relationality

• Ethics of relationality
• This would involve understanding and addressing
  the flows of power and the very real and symbolic
  violence embedded in how boys and girls negotiate
  the schizoid nature of being, doing and becoming
  gendered/classed/racialised/aged etc.

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Multiple belongings

• Children provide frequently compelling critical
  commentaries upon the struggles of living and
  being in the social.
• On challenging heteronormativity
• Julia If it was sort of really weird for a girl
  to go out with a boy, what would you feel like if
  you wanted to go out with a boy? It wouldnt be
  very nice would it if everyone was saying to you
  urgh, thats so disgusting. You should let them
  do what they want to do.

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• There is a very strong case for anchoring the
  subject in an ethical and dialogic bond of its
  relation to others if we are to create a
  sustainable project of change to the many
  violences invoked and re-invoked in the making of
  gendered subjectivities within childhood and over
  the life course.

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Publications

• Renold, E. (2005) Girls, Boys and Junior
  Sexualities exploring gender and sexual
  relations in the primary school (London
  RoutledgeFalmer).
• Renold, E. (2008) Beyond masculinity?
  Re-theorising contemporary tomboyism in the
  schizoid space of innocent/(hetero)sexualized
  femininities, International Journal of Girlhood
  Studies, 1 (2)
• Renold, E. and Ringrose, J. (2008) Regulation
  and Rupture mapping tween and teenage girls
  resistance to the heterosexual matrix, Feminist
  Theory An International Interdisciplinary
  Journal 9 (3) pp. 335-360
• Ringrose, J. and Renold, E. (under review for
  British Journal of Education Research) Normative
  cruelties and gender deviants The performative
  effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in
  school.