Abstract:
The Gender Matters research investigated the myriad, dynamic and ambivalent ways in which gender continues to shape young people’s experiences of secondary schooling. The breadth of issues we investigated included curriculum stereotyping, limiting pedagogies and classroom practices, genders and sexualities inclusion, gender equity and wellbeing policies, and the endeavours of some students, teachers and school leaders to reshape school cultures for gender justice. Our qualitative research design comprised focus group interviews and arts-based workshops with recent school leavers in NSW and current senior secondary students in ACT, and interviews with teachers and school leaders. We endeavoured to privilege the voices and perspectives of young people and our analytical methods sought to track the micronarratives and affective intensities of their accounts and representations of their experience.
Gendered and sexualised violence emerged as a wider cultural concern as our research coincided with a heightened public attention to these matters This paper threads through vignettes of gendered and sexualised violence in young people’s experiences of schooling and everyday life that emerged in our data. Theoretically we draw on poststructural understandings of gendered subjectivities as socially, discursively, materially and spatially inflected, as dynamic and relational. While gendered and sexualised violence are often understood as spectacular events, in our participants’ accounts we also found more subtle sensing of safe and unsafe spaces in and out of schools. We draw on concepts of slow violence (Higham, 2024), and of school violence as proximal or peripheral, contextual and contested, trivialised and mundane (Joelsson & Bruno, 2020) as we tease out the intricacies of these moments. provides insights into the complex work that young people need to do in order to survive in misogynistic cultures, and how allyship and peer support is mobilised.
Gendered and sexualised violence emerged as a wider cultural concern as our research coincided with a heightened public attention to these matters This paper threads through vignettes of gendered and sexualised violence in young people’s experiences of schooling and everyday life that emerged in our data. Theoretically we draw on poststructural understandings of gendered subjectivities as socially, discursively, materially and spatially inflected, as dynamic and relational. While gendered and sexualised violence are often understood as spectacular events, in our participants’ accounts we also found more subtle sensing of safe and unsafe spaces in and out of schools. We draw on concepts of slow violence (Higham, 2024), and of school violence as proximal or peripheral, contextual and contested, trivialised and mundane (Joelsson & Bruno, 2020) as we tease out the intricacies of these moments. provides insights into the complex work that young people need to do in order to survive in misogynistic cultures, and how allyship and peer support is mobilised.