Gender Ain't Neutral: Bad Girl Citizens, Unhomed

• In Event: 44.051 - Paths to Gender Justice in Education: Theories and Practices

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to provide a case study that presents an evidentiary warrant regarding the social construction of gender. This case of the societal “outcast” can teach our pre-service teachers about the importance of understanding how gender has been historically socially constructed and the way it shapes our knowing in today’s classrooms and in contemporary society. The study focused on the historical construction of female juvenile offenders in the United States of America, with a view to reflect upon contemporary judicial and educational understandings of this subject position.

The central premise in this presentation is to study how we “know” gender as a social construction from a poststructural perspective. I used a Foucauldian approach to discuss how some bodies, actions, beliefs and experiences are legitimized through discursively produced regimes of truth as normal and acceptable and others are abnormal, deviant and unacceptable (Foucault, 1977; Mills, 1997).

Using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995), I was able to analyze texts as discourse practices (text production, distribution and consumption) in order to reveal how this particular discursive event is an instance of socio-cultural practice. Thus, texts are studied as social spaces and are interrogated simultaneously as spaces of cognition and representation of the world and social interaction (Fairclough, 1995).

I analyzed documents and research studies on the topic of female juvenile offenders in the United States Juvenile Justice system. This allowed for an historical analysis of the discursive production of the way we “know” female juvenile offenders. Further evidence of the historical discourses was represented in a contemporary report from the American Bar Association and the National Bar Association, entitled Justice by Gender (2001). This report brings together many of the layered socio-historical discourses that emerged from the historical documents and that have contributed to the construction of gender through institutional technologies of power.

Some of the historical discourse “themes/truths” discussed in the study included: philosophizing discourses of “good girl” and “good child” that play out in the construction of socially acceptable (normalized) gender roles; the construction of female aggression as deviant; the sexualizing of female juvenile offenders and pathologizing of deviant behavior; the institutional discourses and technologies of power that used harsher restrictions and detainment practices to regulate the female juvenile offenders. If we then consider the constructions of gender embedded in the most recent report (Justice by Gender, 2001) addressing the failure of the “system,” we are faced with the creation of the “female deviant.”

School officials include teachers, administrators, school secretaries, bus drivers and custodians, to name a few. They are the first ‘state agent’ to be called upon to determine, interpret and apply how the rules and laws of the court system fit the situation at hand. Thus, this is an important case of the outcast worth studying and discussing because it reveals the historic social construction of the deviant subjectivity of female juvenile offenders.

[Note: References upon request.]

Author

• Lisa Cary, Murdoch University