The War Against Boys? Gender Inequality in Middle School Classrooms

• In Event: 196 - Regular Session. Education and Gender: Gendered Interactions and Intersections in Schools

Abstract

Despite popular conceptions that the United States is a democratic and open society that has stripped away barriers that once limited girls and women’s opportunities in the public sphere, broader inequalities that disadvantage girls and women persist. In this paper, I draw upon 12 months of participant observation research and 40 semi-structured interviews conducted at a highly diverse public middle school in Los Angeles, examining how gender is created, negotiated and potentially contested in the education system. In a sociohistorical moment in which gender inequality is assumed to be a relic of the past, boys draw upon six interactional strategies to maintain hierarchical and categorical patterns of gender relations in classrooms: interruptions, disruptions, contestations, disobeying teachers’ instructions, refutations, and redefinitions. This research contributes to existing gender theory by illuminating how boys naturalize and legitimate hegemonic gender relations in classrooms, and by theorizing how gender relations in school fit into the shifting gender order more broadly.

Author

• Michela Musto, University of Southern California