Sexist and heterosexist responses to gender bending in an elementary classroom

Curriculum Inquiry

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 1996, Pages

  Boldt, Gail Masuchika ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0040978956     PISSN: 03626784     EISSN: 1467873X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1180039     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. The report of this episode and of conversations with and among my students that appear throughout this article comes from notes I have written, usually within a few hours of the happening, about classroom discussions or events that strike me as particularly interesting or puzzling in relation to gender and sexuality. They appear in dialogue form, but they do not represent verbatim transcriptions but rather my best reconstructions. The realities of my teaching life do not make it possible or practical to have a video camera or tape recorder running when these moments are happening, but I do my best to capture the details of the event. When possible, I confirm the details with the children or other adults who were present. What I find "puzzling" or "interesting," how I remember things, and what I fail to even notice in the end may tell more about me than about my students. However, as I hope becomes clear, this article ends up being more about my perspective on my students than on the students themselves.
2. I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to Joseph Tobin, Donna Grace, Richard Johnson, Anne Phelan, and Elizabeth Fowkes-Tobin for our reading group discussions on Butler and Sedgwick, and to all of the above as well as Lynda Stone, Aaron Levine, Jonathan Silin, Diane Stephens, Judith Newman, and Cynthia Ward for discussion and feedback on this article.
3. Several discussions of multiple subjectivities are offered in education theory books and articles. See, for example, Moss Gemma, Un/Popular Fictions (London: Virago, 1989);
4. Valerie Walkerdine, "Sex, Power, and Pedagogy," in School Girl Fiction (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 3-15;
5. Bronwyn Davies, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Preschool Children and Gender (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989).
6. This case is made exceptionally well in Marta Savigliano's Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). Savigliano uses neo-Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, deconstructivist, world systemic, and postcolonial theories to analyze the colonizations of Argentina, of the tango, and of herself as a self-described "Third World Intellectual Woman" living in exile. She demonstrates how the same text can read convincingly in terms of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and colonialism.
7. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 182.
8. Notes on conversations with my students. Certain details were altered to protect their identity, but care was taken to avoid altering the spirit of the incidents.
9. Notes on conversations with my students.
10. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 33.
11. Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 140-141.
12. Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 231-232.
13. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 225.
14. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 121.
15. Notes on conversations with my students.
16. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 17.
17. Notes on conversations with my students.
18. Due to our expectations for him, Stephen is undoubtedly read by his social audience as presenting a more consistent "gender-bending" performance than he does. Certainly, Stephen does not present a consistent feminine performance; just as there are things about him that set him apart from "more masculine" boys in the class, there are things about Stephen that mark him as masculine.
19. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 17.
20. American Psychiatric Association Staff, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), pp. 265-266.
21. Quoted in Eve Sedgwick, "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," in Michael Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 71.
22. Sedgwick, p. 72.
23. Sedgwick, p. 73.
24. See, for example, Monica Miller Marsh, "Implementing Antibias Curriculum in the Kindergarten Class," in Shirley Kessler and Beth Blue Swadener (eds.), Reconceptualizing the Early Childhood Curriculum (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), pp. 267-288;
25. Hilda Hernandez, Multicultural Education: A Teacher's Guide to Content and Process (Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing Company, 1989);
26. Louise Derman-Sparks, Anti-Bias Curriculum (VHS), (Pasadena, CA: Pacific Oaks College, 1988).
27. For examples of some of the more overt kinds of discrimination in the classroom, see Myra Sadker and David Sadker, Failing at Fairness (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994).
28. For a discussion of the reinscriptions of sexist binarism in "child-centered" pedagogy, see Valerie Walkerdine, "Femininity as Performance," Oxford Review of Education, 15 (No. 3, 1987),
29. reprinted in Lynda Stone (ed.), The Education Feminism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 57-69.
30. Notes on conversations with my students.
31. Notes on conversations with my students.
32. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 22.
33. Bronwyn Davies reports an incident where a boy in preschool was allowed by his teachers to paint his nails with red nail polish. This provoked an angry note to the school from the boy's father as well as the four-year-old boy explaining forcefully to his teachers the next day that "he was a good boy" and "boys don't wear nail polish." At one point, the boy exposed his genitals to his teachers to make his point that he was a boy. Davies comments that the teachers were "introducing one form of discourse here in which the possession of male genitals and 'feminine' behavior were incompatible" and that "The child's father found this a serious threat to the boy's achievement of masculinity as he understood that term . . ." Bronwyn Davies, "The Discursive Production of the Male/Female Dualism in School Settings," Oxford Review of Education 15 (No. 3, 1989), p. 237.
34. Thomas Newkirk, "The Narrative Roots of Case Study," in Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan (eds.), Methods and Methodologies in Composition Research (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. 130-152.
35. bell hooks, Yearning, Race, Gender, and Cultured Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 150-151.
36. I am particularly impressed by the descriptions offered by Gemma Moss in Un/Popular Fictions of the power that her female high school students already have to "hold their own" against the attempts of boys to "do power" over them. Moss describes her own efforts to support the girls in what they are already doing rather than worrying them into being passive, helpless victims who can only be saved by the efforts of an heroic teacher. Moss's writing has helped me to focus more on the real issues that are actually at hand with the children, rather than worrying and daydreaming about the future or about seemingly "bigger" issues. I have also become aware of the way that I often speak for the girls rather than encouraging them to speak for themselves.
37. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 22.