Gender, visible bodies and schooling: cultural pathologies of childhood

Abstract

In this paper, I consider two interrelated problems. The first concerns the issues and difficulties involved in studying how children think about their bodies, in the schooling setting. The second involves an attempt to bring together a series of phenomena around which gendered media and social panics are being constructed in the UK and elsewhere.

I discuss the problems concerned with the practicalities of studying children's bodies in a setting in which the body is effaced. I argue that the problems arising from this effacement are compounded by children's embarrassment about their bodies, particularly in a situation in which bodies are supposed to be invisible. Related to this, I argue that children's and young people's bodies that are made visible in schools and other public or semi-public arenas are rendered pathological by that very visibility. I suggest that we can see all these metaphorically pathological bodies in terms of a failure of or resistance to the disciplinary institutions of the school and the family, and that such an understanding of ‘problematic’ bodies can help us to see what they have in common. I conclude with suggestions for future research.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Body
• School
• Research
• Moral panic

Notes

1. ‘Tomboy identities: the construction and maintenance of active girlhoods’. ESRC number RES-00-22-1032, 2005-6, based at Goldsmiths, University of London.

2. In this context, what I mean by ‘visible’ is that it is something that gets noticed. Thus, for example, the mass of older boys playing football in most primary school playgrounds at break times is not visible in this sense, because it is taken for granted and so unquestioned. A girl playing alongside the boys as an equal, however, would be visible, in this sense, because she would be an anomaly.