Normative cruelties and gender deviants: the performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school
By J. Ringrose, E. Renold. Judith Butler and Education, 2010
204 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Since the 1990s the educational community has witnessed a proliferation of ‘bullying’ discourses, primarily within the field of educational developmental social psychology. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data of primary and secondary school girls and boys, this article argues that the discourse ‘bullying’ operates to simplify and individualise complex gendered/classed/sexualised/racialised power relations embedded in children’s school‐based cultures. Using a feminist post‐structural approach, this article critically traces the discursive production of how the signifiers ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ are implicated in the ‘normative cruelties’ of performing and policing ‘intelligible’ heteronormative masculinities and femininities. It shows how these everyday gender performances are frequently passed over by staff and pupils as ‘natural’. The analysis also illustrates how bully discourses operate in complex racialised and classed ways that mark children out as either gender deviants, or as not adequately performing normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. In conclusion, it is argued that bully discourses offer few symbolic resources and/or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday school‐based gender violence, and some new research directions are suggested.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a41ea2f8cadd305d575abdab013d2240c212c2c
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In Gender Studies
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- School bullying and fitting into the peer landscape: a grounded theory field study (2018, background): “…tends to conceptualize and reduce the problems of bullying in terms of individual or family dysfunction, deficits, or pathology – a discourse that has been criticized by several scholars (Bansel et al. 2009; Canty et al. 2016; Ellwood and Davies 2010; Horton 2011, 2016a; Ringrose and Renold 2010).”