Girls, femininity and classed subjectivity

1. Girls, femininity and classed subjectivity Valerie Walkerdine School of Social Sciences Cardiff University

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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?

6. Practices and experience • Regulating Prudence • Suburban terrorists • Separation of work and play, clear indication of power

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

8. 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

9. 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)

10. 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

11. Some examples • Persistent inequalities in educational provision - difference in schools • Women’s 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. Kerry and Naomi • Examples of a MC and WC girl

15. Nicky

16. Holly

17. 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 that’s what everyone wants’. • This means separation from and disidentification from parents, friends, community and this s very painful (see Walkerdine, 1991)

18. Femininity and masculinity in a south Wales valleys community • Young unemployed men won’t take available work considered feminine • Tradition of hard manual masculinity and history of community affect • Illiteracy and femininity • Distance from the feminine:woman, gay or mammy’s boy

19. 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

20. 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