Butler (1990) argues that Foucault’s philosophy on power is useful and adaptable to understanding how gender is discursively constructed. Locating the body as the central or primary source of control is fundamental to understanding gender, she says. In Gender Trouble she proposes that as the body is core to power, or vice versa, the body is granted subjective status because it has the power to do, act and perform subjectively. This is important as it allows us to recognise alternative sexualities and resistance. This view also highlights the fluidity and multiplicity of both power and gender.
Butler believes that doing gender is simultaneously doing sexuality (1990; 1993). Hence, her argument that gender and sexuality are social and cultural constructs holds her views on knowledge-related behaviours as gendered performances. Knowledge of, and the probability of, the rewards for expected behaviours, such as social inclusion and societal sanctions, motivates individuals to behaviour in ways that align with a desired outcome or create a desired effect. From reading Butler, one can conclude that as gender is performed, it is imitative and a mimicry of what is observed and learnt within social systems. This suggests that girls’ (and boys') gendered performances are strategic and therefore agentic. Yet Butler argues that performativity is repressive and oppressive: because gender is performed, it is not
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a choice, but a performance, an act that has to be performed every day to clarify one’s gendered position and to adhere to gender roles and gender constructs.
According to Butler, the policing of gender equates to the policing of sexuality. She asserts that, in policing gender, it is heterosexuality that is ultimately policed. Butler’s emphasis on heterosexuality as a hegemonic construct of gender also points to the frailty of
heterosexuality in that although heterosexuality is an exalted social construct, it is unstable and therefore contestable. This is evident when, for example, the girls (my respondents) challenge their subordinate positioning in gender relations and disturb or fracture normative discourses within the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1993).
While behaviour that is transgressive of gender norms (including homosexuality and lesbianism) point to the instability of gender constructs, Butler warns against reading nonconforming or alternate gender performances as wholly subversive. She maintains that although challenging or resisting dominant constructions of gender points to the instability of gender constructs, it also works to reinforce dominant and traditional constructs of gender.
Thus, the desire or the compunction to police gender and heteronormativity also suggests that both gender and sexuality are illusory in that transgressive behaviours are feared and
punished.
Ever so often I have found myself ‘talking’ to Butler and mulling over the concepts of gender performativity, gender performance and gender positionality. These concepts were especially challenging to me because the idea of the girls performing gender positioned them as actors impersonating female personas, suggesting that their behaviours were impersonations or mimicries derived from knowledge, yet the ways in which they positioned themselves were contingent upon the discursive positions that they occupied, for example, learner, girlfriend, friend, peer or foe. Whilst these discursive positions might seem mundane, nothing
extraordinary, my study showed that the choices the girls made in performing or adopting conforming or nonconforming behaviours determined the outcomes of such positioning. For example, in order to maintain relationships with boyfriends, they adopted a subservient position, agreeing that physical punishment (being hit, for example) inflicted by their boyfriends was related to discipline and love, which is consistent with Wood, Lambert and Jewkes (2007) findings.
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Unbeknown to their boyfriends, girls sometimes also sought concurrent relationships because of the gifts that such relationships generated. South African studies (Hunter, 2010;
Ranganathan et al., 2016), as with studies conducted in sub-Saharan Africa (Mojola, 2015), have shown that such concurrent relationships are ultimately linked to a provider masculinity that reinforces girls’ subordinate status in heterosexual relationships and increases their risk of disease and danger. Studies show that girls are able to negotiate heterosexual relationships and that some seek to secure multiple boyfriends for the rewards (financial or material) that such relationships may generate, such as presents and money to purchase items like cool drink and pies in school, for popularity and for self-satisfaction (see Ranganathan et al., 2016;
2017). This recognition of exchange or gift-giving also raises questions as to how to define such relationships. Hunter advocates a comprehensive understanding of the nuanced gender dynamics that are present in such relations (Hunter, 2005; 2010). He argues that they are agentic for both men and women as they allow men to display a provider masculinity (isoka) that elevates a man’s status through his ability to provide, whilst simultaneously creating opportunities for women to secure financial and material resources in the context of poverty.
Hunter's study was in Mandeni, a north coast town in KwaZulu Natal that was undergoing industrialisation at the time of his fieldstay. His analysis of how masculinities and
femininities were constructed in the midst of an emerging HIV pandemic forces us to review the stigma and discrimination that shadows transactional sexual relationships in contexts of poverty. The increasing attention being given to the diverse constructions of femininities creates, as I discussed in chapter one, a space for the shift (and even for the rupture) of the victim–perpetrator discourse that exists in heterosexual relationships. However, the adoption of traditional or hegemonic femininities also exacerbate girls’ (and women’s) susceptibility to risk, especially with regards to sexual decision making—particularly the negotiation of condom use and safe sex—sexual violence, sexual coercion and sexually transmitted diseases (Jewkes & Morrell, 2012). This again highlights the lopsided power that circulates within heterosexuality.
A key element of poststructural feminist theory hinges, as I have said, on researcher reflexivity. It was thus important that throughout my analysis of the data I recognised and reflected on my own experiences as a primary school girl and my current position as a
married woman. Analysing this trajectory from school girl to married woman, I found myself thinking about how the exercise of power keeps girls and women (and kept me) subordinate.
Many of my experiences with gender and sexual violence were, like the girls in this study,
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linked to a desire to establish and achieve autonomy from society rather than an act of resistance. I could see that my position as a female, a teacher and a Gender Studies doctoral student was embedded in my attempt to provide an anti-essentialist reading of the girls’
experiences of sexual violence as a way to declassify and disrupt dominant discourses around young girls’ sexuality. This is why I am so drawn to post-structural feminist theory that acknowledges how age, class and gender influence female subordination, but also
acknowledges strength, resilience and agency, and therefore advocates for the recognition of female empowerment and self-determination. Feminist studies deploying a poststructuralist framework, have challenged stereotypes and discourses on violence and gender showing, instead, how girls contest their positioning as physically weak and passive—which challenges stereotyped feminine behaviours and therefore also biological essentialism. Bhana (2008), in her study focussing on young primary school girls, showed that their agency comes to the fore when they take on violent femininities to claim power, respect and also to instil fear in other girls at school. Bhana pins this arrogated femininity to race and class which, she asserts, shapes gender and gendered behaviour. For example, girls’ lack of compunction for
demanding lunch from other girls is underpinned by huge structural inequalities such as poverty and deprivation and is thus linked to survival strategies. Morojele (2011), too, challenges the construct of primary school girls as fearful and retreating in the face of looming violence from boys. His study showed how girls contest their subordinated positioning by retaliating and even conquering boys in fights. However, both studies also note that femininities are always in transit, meaning that enactment or performance of different femininities is underpinned by rewards which may be associated with status, popularity and resources. I explore both these studies in depth in chapter 3.
Poststructural theories such as those put forward by Butler, Gavey and Bordo force us to recognise agency and resilience which are critical to contestations of gender inequality and gender violence. Thus we come to value the interpretations of experiences as constituting authenticity. I now move on to discuss how the school is a site for the production of gendered experiences and gender inequality.