‘Doing identity’ in the Botswana classroom: negotiating gendered institutional identities

Abstract

Drawing on post-structural and post-colonial conceptions of gender, this paper explores multiple student masculinities and femininities in the classrooms of four junior secondary schools in Botswana. These gendered identities, it is argued, are negotiated within broader institutional constraints that have been socio-historically produced. Such constraints include the colonial legacy of heavily authoritarian (and inherently gendered) teacher-student relations, which in turn are sustained (and resisted) through the practice of English as the medium of instruction, and a punitive disciplinary regime, which has corporal punishment at its core. Three similar gender performances are identified for both girls and boys: ‘good classroom students’, ‘classroom rebels’, and ‘docile bodies’, though these are discursively produced and interpreted differently, against the norms of masculinity and femininity, and within a pervasive and stereotypical binary gender ideology.