Posthuman Performativity and Secondary School "Bullying": Gendered Regulations as Discursive, Affective, and Material Intra-Actions

• In Event: 63.075 - Policing and Performing Gender Binaries: Teachers and Students Negotiating Heteronormative "Bullying" Discourses in U.S., U.K., and Australian Secondary Schools

Abstract

In this article, we critically engage with psychologically driven anti-bullying frameworks in schools. We argue that a more productive way of conceptualising and addressing bullying in schools is through understanding socio-cultural, discursive and material systems of regulation and rupture, particularly around gender and sexuality. Using a posthuman performativity lens to analyse empirical, qualitative data from students and teachers in England and Australia, we demonstrate that practices of gender policing occur regularly in both corporeal and digital contexts with complex material effects/affects.

Despite a large amount of material being developed in academic and professional settings to address bullying, the nature of research has generally relied on psychological theoretical frameworks. This is particularly the case when reviewing bullying in relation to young people and schools. As these frameworks have functioned to pathologise identities around bullying incidents into simplistic categories of ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ they have also resisted a recognition and analysis of the social and institutional mechanisms that compel or discourage particular behaviours. Drawing upon the work of Butler, Deleuze and Guattari and Barad, and applications of these perspectives in feminist educational research (Lenz-Taguchi and Palmer, 2013; Ringrose and Renold, 2014) we explore how a theory of posthuman performativity can help us to understand the non-subjective, anti-psychological and de-individualised aspects of gender regulations in on and offline space. We explore how injurious gender/sexual norms are structural, discursive, material and affective, showing how gendered norms are intra-acting, circulating and travellingforces with a range of psychical and social effects.

Our data is drawn from two research projects. The first was a study of gender and bullying in 2 Australian secondary schools, which collected data from focus groups and interviews with 30 teachers and principals and 20 secondary school students. The second study explored sexual cyberbullying and ‘sexting’ in 2 London UK secondary schools, through focus groups and interviews with 57 students and 11 teachers and heads. Using the combined findings, we explore how discursive signifiers such as ‘gay’ and ‘slut’ represent forms of gendered relational aggressive energies that intra-act,discursively materialize and affectively stick in contemporary youth settings, while simultaneously resisting institutional legitimacy, and therefore intervention (or intra-vention). ‘Gay’ and ‘slut’ are considered as discursive boundary setting terms with affective force that police a range of subjective differences, hierarchising identities and bodies. We demonstrate that the young people in our data simultaneously support, are persecuted by and sometimes resist performative regimes of binary gender roles in complex ways. We also show how practices of intra-relational aggression sometimes resist classification by teachers and staff as bullying, illustrating how they nonetheless represent moments of marginalisation, exclusion and emotional cost with psychical affects for those who experience them, not to mention erosion of subjective and performative diversity and possibility.

Our posthuman performativity lens provides new tools for understanding conflict as injurious norms that are structural, discursive, material and affective, showing how gendered regulations are intra-acting forces. We argue that our contextual and critical understandings of gendered regulations (and attendant material dimensions of injury and violence) will result in more effective bullying interventions.

Authors

• Victoria Rawlings, Lancaster University

• Jessica Lenore Ringrose, Institute of Education - London