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Popular girls aren't into reading: Reading as a site for working-class girls' gender and class identity work
Scholes, Laura
Scholes, Laura
Author
Abstract
A seminal body of work emerged in the 1980s recognising reading as a site for gender and class identity work. However, understandings around working-class girls’ reading identities are invisible in the current Australian education policy space where gender equalities with respect to curriculum subjects have disappeared. This paper draws on a broader study of the reading experiences of 615 boys and girls attending elementary schools in Australia to focuses on interviews with eight girls (9–11 years old) attending schools in lower socioeconomic communities. The paper explores the girls’ perspectives on reading, being popular at school, and academic success from an understanding of literacy as social practice. Highlighted are discourses of femininity associated with reading where popularity is associated with anti-reading identities; being pretty and hanging out with the boys is associated with higher social status; and doing well academically can lead to social marginalisation. Highlighted are tensions between the lived lives of the girls and the idealised feminine reader depicted in the educational policy context in Australia and broader performativity agendas where girls are illustrated as successful and motivated readers.
Keywords
girls and reading, reading identities, social class, working class, feminine discourse
Date
2019
Type
Journal article
Journal
Critical Studies in Education
Book
Volume
Issue
Page Range
1-16
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education (ILSTE)
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
File Access
Controlled