Inner‐city femininities and education: ‘race’, class, gender and schooling in young women’s lives

Abstract

This paper considers how urban, ethnically diverse working class girls’ constructions of femininities mediate and shape their dis/engagement with education and schooling. We discuss how girls generated a sense of identity value/worth through practices such as ‘speaking my mind’—which prioritized notions of agency and visibility and resisted the symbolic violences associated with living social inequality. However, we argue that this strategy was inherently paradoxical because it countered dominant discourses of the normative (middle class) female pupil and hence resulted in drawing girls into conflict with schools—a position that many girls came to ‘regret’. We illustrate how the girls’ attempts at resistance and transgression were constrained by gender‐ and class‐based discourses around moral worth, as girls struggled to be recognized as ‘good underneath’ and attempted to ‘change’ over the course of the project and their final year/s of schooling (to ‘become good’). This process, we suggest, illustrates the implication of reflexivity in the production of gendered and classed identities and inequalities, and illuminates how an internalization of multiple discourses of authority and surveillance of the self is integral to the production of the working class female educational subject.