The moral dimension of class and gender identity-making: poverty and aggression in a secondary school in the city of Buenos Aires

Abstract

This paper presents some results of a qualitative study carried out in a secondary school in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina). It examines how two students from poor families responded to, and viewed, aggression by peers at their school. This paper argues that the examination of students’ narratives about aggression (based on classism and sexism) illustrates the analytical usefulness of the moral dimension of social life to unpack crucial aspects of the micro politics of class and gender and processes of identity-making. Following Sayer, this article maps students’ responses to immoral sentiments and misrecognition: the search for respect and respectability, and moral boundary drawing. It demonstrates that these reactions are entangled in students’ class and gender identity-making. It also shows how ‘victims’ are able to regain respect. However, the individualized nature of these processes and the spirals of aggression they instigate demonstrate the fragile and temporary nature of this achievement.

Keywords:

• social class
• gender
• identities
• morality
• emotions

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Stephen Ball, Joyce Caanan, Marta Cristina Azaola and Valeria Dabenigno for their insightful comments to previous versions of this paper. The author also thanks two anonymous referees for their constructive remarks. The author is also grateful to participants of the Sociology Research Seminar (Institute of Education) for their critical engagements with a previous version of this article. The author acknowledges the support from the Department of Sociology (University of Warwick), where she is currently a Visiting Fellow. The author also appreciates the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant reference PTA-026-27-2053), the British Sociological Association and the British Educational Research Association. Finally, the author specially thanks the teachers, students and pastoral assistants of Low Hill for their time, patience and generosity.

Notes

1. Sociologists have tended to overlook the link between recognition and distribution (Sayer 2005).

2. However, they are reproduced through identity non-sensitive mechanisms, although they affect people’s identities and subjectivity (Sayer 2005).

3. These statistics only relate to schools that are under the control of the Department of the Middle and Technical Education in the City.

4. Names of institutions and people are pseudonyms.

5. Low Hill’s general level of repetition was around double the city average of 12.9%.(Low Hill 2004).

6. Neither the schools nor the local government produced information about the socio-economic status of students and their families.

7. In 2010, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology launched the National Action Plan ‘The Rights of Girls, Boys And Teenagers: The Right to Have Rights’ (Plan Nacional de Acción por los derechos de niños, niñas y adolescentes: ‘Derecho a tus derechos’) to achieve the objectives of children’s and teenagers’ rights.

8. There are institutional procedures to deal with ‘misbehaviour’ in general.

9. According to teachers, this class was highly problematic, both in behavioural and educational terms. One student from it was internally expelled, and six out of a total of 33 students dropped out during the school year.

10. In Argentina, the legitimacy of the ‘game of schooling’ in schools like Low Hill is constantly challenged by the presence of ‘new students’ (in general, poor and first-generation of secondary school students, like Samira and Yutiel), changes in the power relationships between generations, and alterations of the goals and meaning of secondary schooling (see Tenti Fanfani 2003).

11. At the beginning of the school year, they were not part of the same group of friends. Over time, however, they developed spontaneous and strategic alliances as a response to aggression and abuse.

12. Collecting cans from the garbage is what ‘cartoneros’ do for living. They are informal collectors of recyclable materials who are associated in the media and lay discourse with social exclusion and extreme poverty (Schamber 2008).

13. In Argentina, having two surnames is interpreted as proxy indicator of high social class.

14. The literal translation of villa miseria is ‘misery town’.

15. Having darker skin has made people the target of racism since the inception of the Argentinean nation-state and had been crucial factors of the production of the ‘other’, the illegitimate (Margulis and Urresti 1999).