Reading the body: the rhetoric of sex, identity and discipline in girls’ education

Abstract

This essay focuses on key contemporary rhetoric, discourse, and practice directly speaking to or about adolescent girls. Using ethnographic work done at a southeastern all‐girls’ school, I examine the adolescent female body as a palimpsest, a rich and dense text subjected to and shaped by public rhetoric and pedagogical practice. I suggest that the identity of girl is made and remade by public rhetoric and pedagogic practice, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes and disfigurements tolerated, so that the very texture of this identity, the adolescent female body, becomes a palimpsestic landscape, on which the original ‘girl’ is sought and modern versions are interpreted. I consider how public discourses on girls and girls’ bodies are significant in the production of girls' identities, practices surrounding the empowerment and education of girls, and the very debates that centralize the adolescent female body as one in need of protection and surveillance.

Keywords:

• ethnographic research
• discipline
• the body and girls
• adolescent sexuality
• education

Notes

1. GSA was opened on 28 August 2000 with approximately 100 girls entering grades 6–9 in the southeastern region of the US. GSA describes itself as a non‐discriminatory, nonsectarian, college–preparatory school for girls. GSA embraces the belief that girls can benefit most from a single‐sex environment that matches their learning styles and meets their emotional and developmental needs during the critical middle and high school years. My ethnographic research consisted of both formal and informal interviews with GSA administrators and teachers and an engagement in participant observation within a number of classrooms throughout the semester. The research project was conducted over a period of 10 weeks, in which I observed classrooms two to three days a week. I entered into the school one month past its first semester and stayed through the Winterim courses. During these courses, I observed the feminism course every day for two weeks.

2. One may wonder what the conversations, the pedagogical practices, and philosophical frameworks within the GSA corridors and classrooms have to do with theories of educational discourse. This study of GSA pedagogy and philosophy is essential for three reasons. First, as a new school, GSA is working and rubbing elbows with the most current and cutting edge research on girls and girls’ education. Discussions and analysis of what constitutes a good education for girls are clearly still important. Testifying to this significance is Jane Fonda’s recent donation to Harvard encouraging well‐know psychologist Carol Gilligan to continue and expand her research on girls’ learning styles and needs. The conversations within the GSA faculty meetings, seminars and administrative offices are apparent reflections and representations of what larger discourses are saying about girls’ educational needs. Second, my work at GSA attempts to show that schools must be conscious about their philosophical frameworks; otherwise they put themselves at risk of reproducing problematic anti‐feminist and anti‐girl discourses and further disempowering young girls under the guise of empowerment. Finally, conducting studies solely at one educational site do not allow for generalizable discussions on girls’ education, but they do demonstrate how larger gendered educational discourses begin to play out in both enabling and disabling ways.

3. I realize that the images proffered in this statement are both racial and class embodiments and that girls, depending on their race, nationality, sexuality, and class take on a multitude of different identities. However, in the context of this analysis of public rhetoric and its shaping hand in the lives of girls, I choose these hegemonic versions of girlhood because they are the most widely accepted truths about girls.

4. Michel Foucault (1972) argues that discourses are ‘coherent, self‐referential bodies of statements that produce an account of reality by generating “knowledge” about particular objects or concepts, and also by shaping the rules of what can be said and known about those entities’ (79). Weedon (1997) further explains this poststructuralist framework. ‘Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the nature of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern’ (105). Such an analytical framework is highly relevant to this discussion of girls because it explains how public rhetoric on girls becomes accepted as realities of girlhood.

5. For more on these debates, specifically within the legal and political realm, see Rowland (2004).

6. Irvine (2002) and Levine (2002) both argue that the New Right social movement on youth sexuality and sex education were created by evoking feeling, tapping into essences and producing volatile community outbursts. The effect of such ‘emotion work’ is that immobile fears quickly translated into powerful mobilized outreach, in the form of depravity narratives, making up enemies and constructing risk.

7. While clearly much of this paper engages postmodern theorizing to discuss girls’ subjectivity, it is evident in the recent postmodern literature that speaks of and analyzes youth and sexuality that girls are not specifically mentioned or the very nuances of this identity that are attached to cultural discourse on youth sexuality are rarely, if at all, recognized.

8. Finding and placing GSA, Girls’ School America, in contemporary educational discourses must be done in the context of three women known as the GSA ‘founding moms.’ The inspiration to find and open a girls’ school emerged from the ‘founding moms’ contact with adolescent girls’ literature. The GSA Opening Ceremony pamphlet lays out the emerging mentality and questions that haunted these mothers.

In the summer of 1997, the mother of a rising fourth‐grade daughter began reading books such as Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. If young women were in as much emotional, psychological, and physical danger as Pipher stated, what could be done to improve their odds? What kind of educational environment best fostered confidence and resilience and nurtured what was special and unique in every girl? Research conducted by Harvard’s Carol Gilligan and the American Association of University Women added to the questions. Since research showed that girls and boys learned differently and both, but especially girls, often fared better in a single‐sex environment, why wasn’t there a girls’ school in Atlanta?

I quote at length from this to illustrate the integral connection between public rhetoric on girls, adolescence and identity and educational philosophy.

9. For more on the limitations and possibilities of ethnographic methods, see D. Kondo’s Crafting Selves; J. Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture, Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Culture, and Gay y Blasco and Wardle’s How to Read Ethnography.

10. At GSA, technology is identified as ‘an element and priority essential to an effective modern education’ (GSA Curriculum profile pamphlet). As one of the city’s first wireless, DSL laptop schools in which every student has a computer, GSA proudly boasts its loyalty to technological advancement. In a pamphlet explaining the GSA experience, a significant section is dedicated to technology.

Technology, the defining tool of the twenty‐first century, aligns itself as much with the humanities as with the sciences. It provides access to words and people, thoughts and ideas, arts and music. It challenges and permeates the way we perceive, receive and communicate. The computer is part of our everyday life and our students will make daily use of their laptops and the school’s wireless network. Because technological competence is critical for every graduate, we devote much of our effort to ensuring that our students can navigate not just in the present technological ocean, but across new worlds yet to be established.

This excerpt is suggestive in that there is a promise of the ‘cutting edge,’ a promise that at GSA girls will be part of the new, the undiscovered, the unmapped. The dominant role technology plays in GSA is demonstrative of the school’s unyielding belief in excellence and in girls. Technology is perceived and advocated as the ultimate path to excellence. As a laptop school providing daily use and access to the internet, GSA is convinced they are well on their way to mass‐producing excellent girls. (For more, see Charania 2001, Playing the education game: Excellence, elitism and the ignorance of class at GSA.

11. This paper will primarily examine the school’s fear of internet access in relation to the adolescent female body and sexuality. However, it is noted that this fear of internet access quickly unsettles GSA’s claim that technology is always a useful pedagogical tool.

12. These comments emerged out of my interviews with GSA faculty and staff where they all mentioned on some level the use of such statements to reign in girls who were misbehaving or stepping out of line.