2.2 SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDER
2.2.2 Dominant discourses of masculinities in schooling contexts
27 sexual abuse, violence and HIV/AIDS infection as they are required to be submissive to their male counterparts, as they are the protectors.
In my 21 years‟ experience as a teacher, I have observed that the official culture of school professes to be gender impartial, yet is in reality delineated by the ubiquity of gender. This places girls in another opposing position whereby they are required to show an attractive hetero womanliness. As Aapola, Gonick and Harris (2005, p.250) state, “young women must submit to the male gaze and yet exhibit responsibility in avoiding unwanted male attention.” Thus, it means school culture reproduces the good girl and bad girl distinction, causing a lot of trouble and discomfort between different groups of girls. Schools, in my view, ought to be institutions that advance social connections sufficiently helpful for girls and boys to explore their spaces overtly without limits. Schools are organizations where girls and boys invest the greater part of their energy and along these lines ought to be free of any bias. I want to emphasise that the purpose of this study was not to compare girls and boys but to recommend that schools should be gender equitable environments. In the following section I discuss how gender constructions and expectations in South African schools keep on giving power to hegemonic masculinities over femininities.
28 life (Morojele, 2009). Nilan (2000) argues that it is unjust to expect girls and boys to conform to the set norms of behaviour as they are active agents who are responsible for their lives. This view energized me as my essential research technique is interviews, hence I was enthusiastic to listen to the way girls and boys construct gender if they are expected to fit to the already available pattern.
Hegemonic masculinity is probably to be established just if there is some correspondence between cultural and institutional power, as a group, not singular, process. This implies fundamentally hegemonic masculinity is viewed as the socially adequate front of masculinities at school, the masculinity holds control over others (both girls generally and boys of other masculinities). Therefore, it means that at school boys have powers to exercise over girls, resulting in gender inequality. The literature presents different pictures of hegemonic manliness for instance, a man in power, a man with power, and a man of force. Thus, masculinity is connected with being solid, effective, skilled, and dependable and in control. This implies for there to be an intense type of maleness, there ought to likewise be characters which are characterized as powerless. To demonstrate this, at school boys position themselves as manly by situating themselves as "other" to girls, remaining the other way to girls.
Gender socialization assumes that girls and boys are not competent to make significance of their lives yet are socialised by others, including their parents as grown-ups who have control over them (Renold, 2005). The general presumption of researchers is that children in the early years of development don't have the fitness to understand their conduct. Adults like parents and teachers are considered to have control over children and shape children get to be; therefore,
29 power is made to be negative. Relating this to my current study means that teachers seem to have power to pressure girls and boys to conform to the set attributes of gender. Consequently, the research on the investigation of children‟s schooling and experiences of gender inequality in the school environment in their primary years is more relevant and urgent, if schools have continued to perpetuate unconstitutional behaviour.
An influential contention has been made against overgeneralised definitions which underestimate the meanings of femininity and masculinity, which accept that they are general, altered and recorded classifications (Mac An, Ghaill, 1994) and which can't clarify the confusion of regular lived involvement and the hypothesis failure to handle issues around power. My experience of working in a primary school for 21 years makes me view a school as a site which conveys particular gendered practises and connects with constructions of femininity and masculinity in contradiction to the ways that the South African Schools Act requires. For this reason, there is a dire need of research in the area of gender at school which should aim to understand the complexity of power as the key. In recognizing primary schools as destinations of generally changing disagreements that effectively construct gender identities. I argue against the thoughts of gender orientation as static. In my experience gender power control in primary school settings is changing, which essentialist models tend to discount. Thus I employed photovoice as a data collection method that gave girls and boys power to talk about their experiences of gender at school based on the photos that they took. Girls and boys had power to decide which stories to tell me or not. Hence my stance that power is not static.
30 There are different kinds of masculinities; they vary according to cultures and times. In other words, there isn‟t a single pattern of being a boy depending on the surrounding where that particular person is growing (Morrell et al., 2012). Relationships are complex in masculinities depending on the hierarchy that has power and status to give power or take it away. These differences are also further seen between race, class and sexuality therefore, this difference means discrepancy in access to control and in the effects of power. Masculinities which are associated with power are in this manner fluid, constructed and cannot have a place with one individual or gathering. Masculinities are also socially constructed and include a perpetual battle between implications of being a man.
Masculine and feminine characters exist in connection to each other as mentioned earlier.
Dominant gender forms indicate masculine and feminine identities as different and therefore benefit a hegemonic type of manliness in connection to femininities and different sorts of masculinities. Presently in the society the hegemonic masculinity type of masculinity is respected more than other types of masculinities. The hegemonic masculinity type is associated with being definitive, forceful, hetero, physically overcome, energetic and focused as further discussed in Chapter 4 and 5. Most boys perform hegemonic masculinity as it is more respected than other patterns. This type of masculinity is the one that has more power and is supported by most boys.
Connell (1995) recognizes four sorts of masculinities including the hegemonic form. The difference between these types of masculinities is that the other three are non-hegemonic types of masculinity, in other ways they do not believe in investing power. They do not dominate the
31 space like the hegemonic masculinity as a result pecking request of masculinities is recognised.
The non-hegemonic forms of masculinities are not respected because of the way they involve race, class, sexuality and ethnicity. For instance, a boy who goes to school in Kwa-Mashu a township which lives black individuals might be unique in relation to a rich boy who goes to school in a rich range in Durban. However even within the same contexts there isn‟t a single type of masculinity there is a variety of masculinities which exists. The imperative point is that diverse types of masculinities exist together and the hegemonic form must be always battled for and is liable to challenge. I am mindful that not all men encapsulate the basic type masculinity, and many live in a condition of strain with, or remove from, hegemonic masculinity (Morrell et al., 2012) but the forms of segregation and grading becomes the source violence and conflict amongst boys. Hegemonic masculinity can be calm and understood yet it has a danger of being violent, as in the case of discrimination. In this thesis I decided to use the idea of masculinities in terms of (re)production. This attends to power within the micro contexts and acknowledges the patterns of inequalities that serve as a vehicle that breed power between women and men in unequal ways.
I maintain that girls and boys actively construct gender by either adhering to or subverting the hegemonic masculine and feminine ways of performing gender (Butler, 1990). In order to address the diversity and ambiguities on how girls and boys actively construct gender, we need to transcend our understanding of gender construction as sexual activity is part of an extensive variety of talks through which children characterize, arrange and basically build their gendered selves .In this regard, Bhana (2005a) has shown how primary aged boys construct hegemonic masculine performances in ways that illustrate that hegemonic masculine discourses and
32 performances are inseparably attached to overwhelming ideas of heterosexuality. I believe interrogating the „heterosexual presumption‟ in the ways through which children construct gender will make visible its „normalization‟ and subsequent dominance over other forms of masculinities, including femininities.
Renold (2004) asserts that, according to common sense understandings, young children are innocent and do not know anything about sexuality. This argument is set against a growing recognition that assumed, primary school children do not know anything sexual– and as someone who has spent 21 years with children in the primary school, I concur. Renold‟s argument implies that sexuality particularly heterosexuality is available as well as pivotal to the association of primary schools, and features prominently in the processes through which young children construct gender‟ (Renold, 2004). Her study illustrates how children (hetero) sexual societies are an important aspect in how they construct gender, and how the organizational heteronormativity of the primary school provides a matrix on which girls and boys construct gender. She also shows how in particular hegemonic masculinities and femininities involve a „heterosexual presumption‟ of gendered children. To my understanding, she illustrates how being a girl and includes building up or if nothing else putting resources into and anticipating a conspicuous and hegemonic hetero gendered personality. Boys who did not belong to the perceived hegemonic masculinity are given nasty names like gays and lesbians. They are excluded in the soccer teams and bullied; schools are not a safe environment for them. It is clear that gay and lesbian children do not have a place at school and no one is prepared to talk about this gender category.
Therefore, boys who fall into the gay category might have kept it a secret in order to be acceptable as normal boys.
33 These factors permeate and thus ultimately affect in a negative manner the everyday classroom and playground interactions amongst and between girls and boys, and as such become a significant site for children‟s active contestation, negotiation and construction of gender. As a result, I argue that in schools there are gendered spaces and discourses that affect children‟s geographies. This study finds it important to investigate children‟s geographies (discussed in details on 2.2.4) as a way to find the meanings of gender that girls and boys attach to places and spaces within the school. Butler (1997) agrees that the most disturbing factor in this regard is how girls and boys actively follow each other to ensure that others perform within the expectations of hegemonic masculinities and femininities which do not automatically happen. In these cases, such performances of gender have genuine social and enthusiastic results which are harming for both girls and boys.
From the above discussions, it becomes clear that girls and boys do not have a platform to exercise agency to navigate their gender-based experiences but are forced to conform to the set norms of behaviour. For example, the boys who belong to hegemonic masculinities are not only excluding the non-hegemonic gender identities, but subtly subordinate all things regarded as feminine which is majority of girls.