bitchy girls and silly boys_gender & exclusion from school

The International Journal on School Disaffection Trentham Books 200930

Bitchy girlsand silly boys:Gender andexclusion fromschoolAnna CarlileDepartment of Educational StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeUniversity of London

Introduction

This paper is concerned with findings aboutgender which form part of a larger ethnographicstudy. The study was undertaken during myemployment as a local authority (school district) PupilSupport Officer, where my work involved the supportof young people who had been permanently excluded(expelled) from school for a variety of reasons,including sexual assault, violence against their peersor teachers, and what was known as persistentdisruptive behaviour. It focussed on the effects ofinstances of actual or threatened permanent exclusionfrom secondary school on pupils, families andprofessionals in an urban local authority: Enway.

The focus of the paper is the effects that professionalsassumptions about gender-identity and sexuality canhave on effective support planning for young people atrisk of or subject to permanent exclusion; and thelived experience of these young people with regard totheir gender-identity and sexuality, with particularregard to how this can contribute towards exclusion. Itbegins with a story about Nama, a young woman ofIraqi Kurdish heritage, who had been excluded foraggressive language and behaviour. Namas storyintroduces some of the complex gendered issuesexperienced by students at risk of or subject to apermanent exclusion and how these interact withissues of class and ethnicity. I will also briefly discussthe connection between habitus (Bourdieu, 1977),embodiment and (what I call) the extended body as atheoretical background to a discussion of sexuality,gender and identity, through three cases ofcompulsory heterosexuality. This is where the title,Bitchy Girls and Silly Boys comes from: I was helpinga young person at risk of permanent exclusion getstarted in a new school, and the head of yearexplained to the boy sitting in front of him: when youstart here, youll see lots of bitchy girls and silly boys:an example of gender roles being described in a waycongruent with compulsory heterosexuality. Theconclusion will clarify some of the links betweengender normativity and instances of threatened oractual permanent exclusion.

Namas storyNama came to the UK from Iraq with her family whenshe was little. A Kurdish Muslim family, they werefleeing violence in the country. At the age of fourteen,Nama was already used to school inclusion/exclusionprocedures. She was one of the only pupils I workedwith who made her own phone calls to ask what washappening with her school place. She was discussed for the second time- at the Enway Hard to Place PupilPlacement Panel at the beginning of January 2008. ThisPanel consisted of around fifteen head teachers andspecialist professionals, and was held every two weeks.Each time, we discussed around 25 students who weremoving between schools due either to their being atrisk of permanent exclusion or having other needs thatmade them what was termed Hard to Place. Thisincluded refugee and asylum seeker children, youngpeople who were chronic non-attenders and who weresometimes termed school phobic, and young peoplewho had moved into the borough because of a changein foster carer. Nama had moved schools for the firsttime after losing her temper and screaming at aclassroom of teachers and pupils and throwing a deskacross the room. She had a reasonably settled start ather new school, but sat through several weeks inconsistently sulky disengagement. One day sheexploded into a single lightning outburst of swearingand screaming in class. The Panels Safeguarding andSocial Care (social services) representative, a seniorsocial worker, updated the rest of us on what may haveinstigated the event: Her brother found her with twoboys in her room- he beat her up...she was takenunder police protection because of ongoing violencetowards her; ...we accommodated her (with a fostercarer)...shes scared of her family but was still talkingto them on the phone...

Thats very manipulative, volunteered Enways Headof School Admissions ...shes now with her uncle backin Enway... continued the social worker, ...we willfollow up with an assessment of the uncle and familyand do a core assessment to look at safety in her life...

Shes a very, very manipulative girl... added the headteacher at the Pupil Referral Unit (a school forexcluded children) who had previously worked withNama, ...this is a person running the adults in greatnumbers...

...and there is still an unevaluated and difficult-to-quantify risk to this child... explained the socialworker, adding that there had been talk within theSafeguarding team of her being at risk of either a

forced marriage or an honour killing, in punishmentfor the incident in her bedroom.

The concept of manipulation seemed to me to bestrangely incongruous when applied to a young personwho was both lacking in control over her life choicesand living with such a high level of apparent risk fromher own family. I wondered if it had its roots in astereotyped view of girls belonging to what was seenas Namas culture and of gender-appropriatebehaviour.

My manager, the Head of Inclusion, told me that shethought a boy would not have been calledmanipulative as Nama was. I sought advice from atrusted colleague who sometimes sat on the PupilPlacement Panel: a senior education psychologist, anda thoughtful practitioner.

I gave him the background, and then asked, Whatdoes this word manipulative really mean in terms ofNamas actual needs and the delivery of the mostappropriate support?

He replied, The manipulative thing is a red herring...,and explained that Namas ambivalence wassomething everybody demonstrates at one time oranother. He suggested that there was a possibility thatNama was seeing her family as both good and bad,dealing with this by imagining that there are twofamilies- a friendly, nurturing family, and apersecuting family. It was a Kleinian perspective heoffered and I was struck by the potential level ofunderstanding and empathy that this kind ofinteragency collaboration between myself, a teachingprofessional, and an education psychologist couldengender. I felt this way of thinking was missing fromthe Panel, where delegates had colluded to describeher as manipulative. This collusion had happenedwithin what I call the extended body.

The extended bodyIn seeking to understand the complex forces involvedin the assessment, placement, reintegration andongoing support of the pupils with whom I wasworking, I turned to Foucault (1977), who discussesauthoritarian control of peoples physical bodies ininstitutions such as prisons, hospitals and schools. Heincludes educationalists in a list of those throughwhom authoritarian power is channelled, along withpsychologists, judges, and members of the prisonservice (p.21). When pupil support officers, heads of

The International Journal on School Disaffection Trentham Books 2009 31

year, learning mentors, social workers, attendanceadvisory officers and education psychologists arefaced with support planning for pupils with behaviourmanagement issues, aspects of the pupils attitude;behaviour; intention; and mental state becomesubject to a similar authoritarian power. UnlikeFoucaults docile bodies locked physically into prisoncells, hospital beds and school timetables, theseaspects are not to do with the physical body, but areextensions of it, and fall within what I have termed theextended body.

The vulnerability of the extended body is in its abilityto be extended further, providing more space withinwhich a person can be described, stereotyped,supported, controlled, or discussed. Thesediscussions transform the student-subjects extendedbody into a constituency of contested space: a spacein which a young persons agency can be expressed.This contested space of the extended body is wherepeople can project their own classed, raced, genderedreadings of someone sometimes described as labels but is also what the anthropologist Jafari SinclaireAllen (2009) calls a space of critical enunciation. Thismeans that just as negative assumptions are madeabout a young persons attitude or social class, theextended body provides a space in which youngpeople can re-narrativise themselves tell their ownstory to counteract or run alongside the multiplepathologising stories told about them in officialbehaviour logs, social services documentation, andexclusion panel paperwork.

Language and PowerButler (1999) explains Wittigs conception of languageas ...a set of acts, repeated over time, that producereality-effects that are eventually misinterpreted asfacts (p.147). I had a sense that the manipulativequality ascribed to Nama, originally invoked by theinterjection of a senior administrator at the Panel, hadbeen taken on as a fact by the other professionals,and that this (as well as the reasons for the dangerNama was in with regard to her family) had somethingto do with the fact that she was a girl. If I was right,what effect could a gendered label of this kind have ona pupils chances of being kept included, safe andemotionally supported at school?

I am reminded here of the idea that the ... power oflanguage isnt purely abstract...it enacts physical andmaterial violence on our bodies (LeBesco, 2001, p.76).Thus, the label manipulative had the power to

undermine the professionals belief andunderstanding of the actual danger Nama was in tothe point at which something terrible could happen toher. It was this label which prevented Safeguardingstaff before it was too late from planning a visit tocheck on Nama and to find out if she was in danger ofa forced marriage.

Habitus and embodimentAccording to Hoy (1999), Bourdieu ...seescomportment as predominantly configured by thesocial structures (the habitus) that individualsacquire through their upbringing in a particularculture or class (p.4). Bourdieus concept of habituscan thus be employed to explain how a girl, forexample, will have learned from her family and herculture from a very early age what the normed way ofbeing a girl looks like (in other words, the...internalization of the principles of a culturalarbitrary capable of perpetuating itself... (Bourdieu,1977, p.31). Csordas (1999) explains that(e)mbodiment is an existential condition in which thebody is the subjective source or intersubjective groundof experience... (p.143). So a persons comportment,whilst deriving from its habitus, can embody, or ismade up of, the experience of that habitus. Namasanger arguably a psychological (and biological)process1 did not appear out of nowhere in a pureand unmediated form (Blackman, 2001, p.210); that is,it was not simply manipulative, but was related tolived experiences involving her family, history,religion, gender, and peers.

In the context of thinking about schooling, Iunderstand all this to mean that there is an expected,normed, and stereotyped way that teachers and otherprofessionals expect a girl, for example, to embodygirlness. Namas anger did not fit into this.

Habitus, embodiment and the extended bodyThe vulnerability of the extended body can be seenwhen a mother is given a prison sentence as asanction for her childs non-attendance at school. Thisdemonstrates the reach of the extended body: apersons physical body can be locked up because ofsomething their child did.

The link between the concept of embodiment and thatof the extended body is that professionals normedexpectations of appropriate (and, in this instance,gendered) embodiment are projected inside the


contested space of the extended body. Assumptionsabout gender do not just affect the way people talkabout children; they act directly on the child2. Therelationship between embodiment and the extendedbody, then, is that the extended body describes thecontested space within which arguments aboutappropriate forms of embodiment in other words,normed ways of being are conducted. One of myhopes on starting my ethnography study was that ifthe situation was documented and explained, teachersand the other professionals working with youngpeople at risk of exclusion might begin to ...deflate thetendency to think that there can only be one set ...ofnormal, socially-normed ways to exist... (Hoy, 1999,p.9). Talking about the extended body constitutes aneffort to deconstruct the effects and problems ofassumptions made about embodiment with regard tothe interaction between a person and the multifariouscultural, gendered, biological, theoretical, and socialpressures at play. The extended body is wherepronouncements on embodiment occur and wherethey are contested. It is also where the one-that-embodies engages in the task of proving him or herselfworthy of inclusion. Is this a space for the exercise ofagency, or the plasticity of habitus(Hoy, 1999, p14)?

I want to look now at this theory in action, applying itto ethnographic examples.

Sexuality, gender, and identity: ignored, invisible,or pathologised Compulsory heterosexuality (Francis, 2005, p.14) is adevice of institutional norming which refers to the wayin which young people are required to exist accordingto stereotyped gender expectations. It exerts its ownspecific pressures (including economic pressures) onthose young people who find themselves transgressingthe boundaries of what is expected of them in terms oftheir gender identity. When a young person in Enwaywho is permanently excluded or is at risk of beingexcluded demonstrates concerns regarding sexuality-identity issues, the matter tends to be ignored,invisible, or pathologised3. I worked in Enway foralmost three years, and during this time, I came acrossjust three cases where there was an overt sexuality-identity component to the case as well as a risk ofpermanent exclusion. This in itself is concerning, aswith around four hundred case-files in my batteredgrey filing cabinet, I should have met many more gayyoung people. However, the three cases I have seenand which are described below are significant inthemselves.

(1)The Appledown LesbiansVicky, 14, was at risk of a foster care placement due toconflict with her mother. Her papers appeared at thePupil Placement Panel after she kissed an older girl inthe school foyer and ran down the corridor shriekingWere lesbians!

The schools Inclusion Manager (the senior teacher incharge of pastoral care) immediately separated thegirls, and wrote up their behaviour as disturbing.Vicky was not given the chance to discuss her sexualityand was placed at an off-site placement for sixmonths- a small unit for young people who have beenexcluded or suspended. Most young people stay at thisunit for one to three weeks.

Stepping into a young persons extended body (and thegendered aspects of this, subject to heteronormativityas they are, are particularly vulnerable to description)and labelling the embodiment of sexuality disturbedeffectively renders that aspect of her invalid.Normative lines have been drawn in the contestedspace of her extended body, and she has not beengiven support to develop the psy techniques (Rose,1999) (such as self awareness, resilience, or a safe wayto express emotions) and the self-management toolsto embark on a self-mapping (or a self-identifying)enterprise.

(2) Bizarre, disturbed and weirdAt age 14 Kate, like Vicky, was at risk of being placed infoster care. Her social worker brought her case to thePupil Placement Panel seeking an alternative tomainstream education. At the Panel meeting the socialworker reported that Kate had shaved her head andhad said she felt she was a girl stuck in a boys body.As an afterthought, the social worker told the Panelthat Kate had threatened to drown her baby brother inthe local canal.

The social worker had described head-shaving asbizarre, disturbed and weird, only mentioning thethreat to drown the sibling as incidental information.Discussing the case in more detail, I realised that thepossibility that Kate could be considering her genderidentity and that she could be transgendered was notbeing accepted by her social worker as important.

Seeking to investigate and challenge the apparentinexorability of sexual difference, this young personhad transgressed the normed borders of acceptablebehaviour. Kates mental state (distressed), and her


intent, attitude, and behaviour (for example, theshaving of her head), being conducted as they wereboth on the physical body and inside the porous skinof the extended bodys contested space, becamevulnerable to description as bizarre, and thereforeinvalid.

(3)Over my dead body...Michael, aged 12, was a heavy-set British boy ofCarribean heritage4 with a shaved head. He had ahistory of truanting and risk-taking (climbing on theschool roof ) and was unable to focus in class. Hisheadteacher described him as a thug- a word withracist overtones and told me, over my dead body ishe coming back here. When I met Michael and heardhim talk, using my body as ...a tool for research...(Csordas, 1999, p.149) with ...somatic modes ofattention... (ibid, p.153), I paid attention to mygaydar5, perceiving that Michael seemed to becamp6.

No other professional noticed Michaels campness,and did not take it seriously when I suggested that hemay be distracted from succeeding in school due topossible sexuality-identity issues that needed to beexplored. Having been placed in a small, supportiveschool for young people struggling to fit in atmainstream school, Michael has since come out asgay. But even before he came out, professionalattention to Michaels struggling with hissexuality/identity might have explained some of whatwas behind his lack of focus, and at least warrantedinvestigation. It could even have prevented hisexclusion from school. Butler (1999, p.147) argues thatheteronormativity, or compulsory heterosexuality, isso pervasive as to prevent observers, such as two(usually excellent) inclusion managers and aheadteacher, in Michaels case, from seeing thepossibility of someone, especially a black boydescribed as a thug, with all the masculine overtonesthat go with his image, as possibly being gay.

The stories of Vicky, Kate, and Michael, above,challenge heteronormative comprehensions ofsexuality. Even where issues of sexuality and genderidentity were only a possible source of anguish, in allcases, the young people were displaying emotionallydistressed behaviour that could have lead theprofessionals working with them to at least offerinformation and support on issues of sexuality andsexual/gender identity. Until Michaels placement inan alternative school, I could not find one other

professional among them (they included a socialworker, a family therapist, a headteacher, and twoinclusion managers) who seriously considered thatthese three young people might be gay ortransgendered.

There is still a long way to go before issues ofsexuality/identity are open for discussion in all Britishschools. I think that some permanent exclusions couldbe avoided if this were not the case.

Other aspects of gender and exclusion fromschool In addition to the stories of sexuality andgender/sexual identity, the ethnography discovered arange of other issues around gender. One of theseconcerned the capacity of mixed and single-sexschools to offer a crystallised understanding of someof the broad accepted understandings about genderidentity and sexualised behaviour within the Enwaycontext. For example, it was found that in all-boysschools, teachers tended to use more physical contactwith the students than in mixed or girls schools. Inone school, the headteacher, wandering the corridorsin search of an untucked shirt-tail, would pick up theoffending boy by his waistband and shake him downinto his trousers.

An overview of gendered class reproduction throughGCSE choices7 (for example, the over-promotion ofDesign and Technology for boys, and Social Care forgirls and encouragement into vocational qualificationssuch as plumbing and childcare) revealed a focussedeffect of gender-related pressures on young people.These were especially problematic in the midst of thetransition between schools which is often forced as aresult of a permanent exclusion or a risk of permanentexclusion, as subject choices were often made in thepressured environment of a school entry interviewmade by a suspicious pastoral team leader, rather thanover the two weeks of though-provoking activitiesusually provided to enable a careful choice to bemade.

Horizontal violence (Friere, 1996) in schools wasfound to often be manifested as sexual aggression, andlinked with young peoples experiences of domesticviolence. Many cases of permanent exclusion fromschool have involved young people who havedemonstrated sexual aggression or violence followingthe witnessing of domestic violence, usuallyperpetrated by men on women. Friere has labelled


horizontal violence as that which peers inflict oneach other to gain a modicum of power within anoppressive system. If we see the pressure exerted by aschool system that engages heteronormativity as aform of oppression along with other kinds of culturalnormativities, it can be seen how this jostling forposition can result in sexual or gendered violence.

The ethnography also gives account of the work alreadybeing done in Enway to develop support strategies andself-management skills designed to tackle the negativeeffects of gender-normed understandings. For example,in his new alternative school Michael (above) was ableto attend a boys group run by a learning mentor8

which encouraged discussion about role models,sexuality, motivation and health.

Gendered assumptionsBecause of the range of pressures due to perceptionsabout gender and gender normativity discovered inthe ethnography, I suspect that some permanentexclusions from school occur because of habitualnegative assumptions about pupils, most of which areseeded within the contested space of pupils extendedbodies. Gender is a useful prism through which toinvestigate this problem because its inexorablebiological reputation stretches the limits ofstereotype deconstruction and ideas about theextended body. Normed, fixed and essentialisedunderstandings about gender and its interaction withculture, ethnicity, and sexuality/identity have aprofound and complex effect on judgments madeabout the extended bodies of pupils at risk of orsubject to a permanent exclusion. Because of this, thecontested space of the extended body becomespopulated with normative pronouncements aboutpupils genders and gendered behaviours.

Gender and the extended bodyWhen the behaviour, intention, attitude and mentalstate of the extended body of a permanently excludedpupil (or a pupil at risk of permanent exclusion) isconsidered with reference to gender, the contestedspace of that extended body can become contestedbecause of its gender. Thus the invoking of anappropriate level of empathy and practical support forNama in the face of her being labelled manipulativewas conducted within the contested space of herfemaleness. The perceived fact of the gender-identities of Nama, Vicky, Kate and Michael (and theinteractions between this and their perceived

ethnicities and cultural backgrounds) was a normedstate one expected to be embodied in a certain way against which criticisms could be made on the basis ofrelativity, undermining or screening appropriateassessment and support planning procedures behind afog of misconceptions.

Agency and the plasticity of habitus I would maintain that understandings about genderderive from the inevitable habitus (Bourdieu, 1997),the habits of class, style, belief and assumptionreproduced in us by our families and cultures. I do notthink that most of the teachers and other professionalswho are involved with inclusion and exclusion atschool reflexively or purposely make negativejudgements about pupils on the basis of their genderidentities. If, for example, a teacher has never met orthought about a transgendered person, it is less likelythat students thoughts on the flexibility or dysphoriaof their own genders would be taken seriously, or evennoticed. The fixed biology of our genders might makechanging gender seem impossible, if it has not yetbeen confronted as a possibility. However, as Hoy(1999) states, as a result of the all-pervasive quality ofhabitus, (w)e tend to prefer the familiar that we havealready coped with and we build up non conscious,unwilled strategies for avoiding the perceptions ofother possibilities... (p.15) Teacher fatigue in the faceof multiple administrative, financial and emotionalpressures must play a part in the development of thishabit of avoidance. But this is not an inevitable state ofbeing, and I think that there is a space for the exertionof professional agency in the idea that habitus doeshave ...a degree of plasticity... (ibid, p.14).

ConclusionIf schools are understood to be institutions whichreproduce the social order (Bourdieu, 1977; Freire,1996; Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2003), then they must beunderstood as institutions which are bent towardsreproducing the normed gendered aspects of this.And, I would argue, part of the expression ofadministrative power through this normalising processrequires recourse to ...performative exclusions thatmark the threshold of the abject (Weiss, 1999, p.50;Kristeva, 1982). Those working to support pupils atrisk of or subject to a permanent exclusion fromschool need to take into consideration the idea thatthey will be especially vulnerable to abjection throughthe inequitable results of this (often gendered)norming process.


ReferencesAllen (April 2009), Seminar: Race in the Modern World

Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London

Blackman, L (2001) Hearing Voices: embodiment and experienceLondon: Free Association Books

Bourdieu, P and Passeron, J (1977) Reproduction in Education,Society and Culture London: Sage Publications

Butler, J (1999, first published 1990) Gender Trouble Routledge:London

Csordas, T.J. (1999) Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology. InWeiss, G and Haber, H (Eds.). Perspectives on Embodiment.New York: Routledge. 143-162.

Foucault, M (1977) Discipline and Punish Harmondsworth: PenguinBooks (Trans. Alan Sheridan)

Francis, B (2005) Not/Knowing their place: Girls classroombehaviour in Lloyd, G (Ed.) Problem Girls: Understanding andsupporting troubled and troublesome girls and young womenOxon: RoutledgeFalmer

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Hoy, D (1999) Critical Resistance: Foucault and Bourdieu, inPerspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature andCulture, ed. Honi Haber and Gail D. Weiss (London: Routledge,1999)

Kristeva (1982) Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection (trans.Celine Louis-Ferdinand) New York: Columbia University Press

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S (2003) The Essential Conversation: Whatparents and teachers can learn from each other USA: RandomHouse

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Notes1 Depending on your theoretical background

2 The Panel delegates naming of Nama as manipulative, forexample, opens her up to the risk of further violence againsther.

3 My use of the words gay and lesbian as opposed tohomosexual here was a conscious choice because I dislike thepathologising implications of that word.

4 I acknowledge that these ethnicity labels are problematic andrun the risk of essentialising experience based on assumptionsabout a persons experience with regard to their perceivedethnicity

5 The sense or vibe that lesbian, gay and transgendered peopleand their families and friends can have that someone may belesbian, gay or transgendered

6 Camp should be understood here specifically from a positiveand non-heterocentric point of view and can refer to people ofvarying sexualities including heterosexuality

7 Compulsory examined courses in all subjects running over twoyears from age 14 to age 16

8 Learning Mentors have been instituted in English schools inorder to deal with what is termed barriers to learning. Thesemay be social, behavioural, emotional, or learning-related.


bitchy girls and silly boys_gender & exclusion from school

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