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the most powerful forces impacting upon young people s in-school
behaviour continues to be the power of the normative, discursively pro-
tected, gendered and classed sense of self. What it means to be a boy, or
a girl, or a student in school continues to connect very directly to the
same kinds of dominant truth régimes internalised technologies of the
self tracked in different detail by Foucault. These technologies work
gradually, at times imperceptibly; accumulatively constructing a position
which becomes difficult to refuse; arriving ultimately at the impregnable
status of the natural and normal way of things. Many of the truths
which inform curriculum planning, pedagogy and wider community
understandings about education, about gender and about languages sit
comfortably within these safe houses.
Gee (1991) foregrounds the significance of the act of identification by
the individual subject in discursive formation, the act which involves
recognition, both of self and of others, as acceptable, appropriate players
in imaginable worlds; worlds which interpellate and position sanctioned
versions of self into appropriate subject positions (Butler, 1999:20). Of
course, as Butler also argues, the offered subject position can always be
refused or renegotiated; but, as many educational research projects have
indicated, and as our own data confirm, refusal or renegotiation of sanc-
tioned norms requires courage and good strategies.
Gender
Our study sits squarely within current debates around gender and edu-
cation, alongside talk of crises in masculinity, gender and educational
performance. Gender, therefore, is the second key concept which assists
in the framing of this project, a term used loosely and uncritically in
many of these debates, often conflating with sex and with biology. Our
The Gendering of Languages Education 29
interest is in boys who choose to study languages, or more specifically
in boys who choose not to study languages; and it s important to make
the distinction between gender and biology. Our interest is in gender as
a social construct and key cultural organising principle, not in biology.
The subjects in our study are not the essentially male, biologically
determined, coherent, subjects of cognitive science: believed to be pre-
determinedly hardwired for certain kinds of cognitive behaviour, with
brains arranged in ways that predispose them to do well in certain
curriculum areas (such as maths and sciences) but less well in others
(language-related areas). The boys in this study are theoretically quite
other boys: they are socially constituted, culturally performed gendered
boys (Cameron, 1998; Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman, 2002). Butler talks
about being transitively gendered: how the calling of the individual
as girl or boy produces the effect (1999:20, in Pennycook, 2004:13).
Leaving aside for now the issue of biologically based and scientifically nar-
rated accounts of differentiated brain formation and function (see later in
this chapter), we emphasise that our interest lies in the impact of socially
constructed biological accounts of difference and in the implications of
these understandings in relation to foreign language study. Grosz details
the thorough ways in which essentialism does its work (1995): shoring up
the belief that characteristics, traits and capacities defined as women s and
men s essences are shared in common by all women and men in all times
and contexts, underlying all apparent differences and variations which
differentiate women and men. Such essentialism is sustained and protected
by governing frameworks of knowledge .
Our understanding of gender has obvious points of connection with
the account of discourse formation outlined above. Gender, unlike biol-
ogy, is recognised as a social, cultural and discursive construct; one of
the most salient and load-bearing key principles of cultural organisa-
tion. The poststructuralist, discourse-informed view not only sees
gender as socially and discursively constituted, but also, importantly, as
always intersecting with other key social and cultural variables, such as
social class, ethnicity, health status; as fluid, unstable, capable of recon-
stitution (Johnson, 1998; Cameron, 1998). It emphasises instability and
incoherence, at the same time recognising the power and influence of
the individual and collective cultural desire to be both stable and coher-
ent. It refuses the notion of generic boy , immutably formed, set in
stone and accounted for via prescribed versions of masculinities. Rather
than being essentially formed predispositions, characteristics and
attributes mapped out from the beginning fact of biology the socially
constructed boy is recognised as ineluctably shaped, prompted and
30 Boys and Foreign Language Learning
ultimately hailed into socially sanctioned versions of the self. This
is the end result of Foucault s truth effects, which congeal, settle and
stabilise into how things are ; the process described by Pennycook as
sedimentation (2004:13 14). The end result may often seem every bit
as unchangeable as any biological given, but the process which leads to
this product indicates otherwise. The individual socially formed boy can
shift into unboy-like configurations if he chooses: the price may be
high, he may choose not to take up the option, but the option is there.
The poststructuralist, discursively accounted-for gendered self is always
in process; and is on the far side of the divide from biology.
Gender as performativity
Judith Butler s work in the early 1990s made the conceptual move which
has since informed much of the theoretical work around gender, identity,
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