(Mis)recognition within heterogendered lad culture: LGBTQIA+ students’ subjectivities in Higher Education

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses a gap in research on lad culture in British Higher Education (HE) by addressing how gender diverse students understand their subjectivities within this context. To do so, we introduce the concept of ‘laddish misrecognition’. Drawing on Benjamin and Fraser, we suggest both psychic and social mechanisms are at play in this mis/recognition. We also draw on Muñoz's ‘disidentification’ to explore what it means to live in this space. We apply this to discussions with 11 LGBTQIA+ students. We identify the complexity of their negotiations regarding: identifications with masculinity versus distancing oneself from ‘the lad’; being misrecognised as ‘a lad’, and wanting to challenge this; and navigating femininity and same-sex relationships while being misrecognised as heterosexual. By exploring accounts that are often positioned at the margins of discussion about lad culture (i.e. not predominantly heterosexual, cisgender), we suggest laddish misrecognition shows how identities are formed in-difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Lad culture
• misrecognition
• disidentification
• LGBTQIA+ students
• Higher Education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the term heterogendered here as it allows for an acknowledgment of the ways gender and sexuality are often interwoven in the experience of institutional exclusion. In Ingraham’s (1996) discussion of the institution as heterogendered, she takes a materialist feminist perspective to argue that the heterosexual imaginary works to obscure the way sexuality and gender are interconnected – for example, in sociological work on the family, where women's hidden labour is read as a gender oppression, rather than one at the matrix of gender and sexuality.

2 In the context of the extracts, being a ‘dick’ is more broadly negative, a bad person, whereas being a ‘fuckboy’ refers more specifically to a man who has many sexual partners.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvia Diaz-Fernandez

Dr. Silvia Diaz-Fernandez is a postdoc researcher at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her current research looks at online masculinities, feminist digital ethnography and the local Spanish manosphere. In her past work, she developed a feminist affective methodology through exploring the reproduction of lad culture within the context of British Higher Education. She has published work in ‘Qualitative Inquiry’ and ‘Gender Place and Culture’.

Adrienne Evans

Dr Adrienne Evans is Reader for Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK. Her research focuses on accounts of intimacy in the context of a postfeminist sensibility. In her work, she explores ways in which gender organises personal, social, intimate and cultural relationships, as well as their manifestations in media culture. She has published extensively on these topics and is the author of, among others, Technologies of Sexiness (OUP, 2014) and Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018).