Female Students and Cultures of Violence in Cities

Julia Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415869775
• eBook ISBN: 9781135132736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As the economy constricts, it seems living with a chronic sense of fear and anxiety is the new normal for a growing number of urban females. Many females are susceptible to victimization by cumulative strands of violence in school, their communities, families and partnerships. Exposure to violence has been shown to contribute to physical and mental health problems, a propensity for substance abuse, transience and homelessness, and unsurprisingly, poor school attendance and performance. What does a girl do when there is no place to get away from this, and even school is a danger zone? Why have so many educators turned their attention away from the reality of violence against girls? Why is there a tendency to categorize such violence as just another example of the general concept of "bullying?"

Critical educators who research the effects of current market logics on the schooling of marginalized youth have yet fully to focus on this issue. This volume puts the reality of violence in the lives of urban school girls back on the map, investigates answers to the above questions, and presents suggestions for change.

1 Capital and the Production of Classed and Racialized Females

Julia Hall

In the current stage of economic development, social freedoms have been relegated by those with power as an ‘extra’ or ‘entitlement.’ Whereas this has long been the historical reality among groups who have been dominated, now it is visible and felt by many who have been privileged. Missing in the culture is a sense of a larger, connective framework—something bigger than ourselves—in which we are linked to each other by our shared political commitments and commonality. Instead, people are left with only themselves to negotiate the struggle inherent in neoliberal productivity (Bauman, 2001). Countless are barely doing so, and a significant number in this category are girls and young women. This is the case particularly in communities characterized by economic and racial marginalization. While contestation is crosscutting, contemporary females are featured in this analysis as many of their concerns are assumed to have been addressed by past feminist movements (e.g., McRobbie, 2009, 2010). Women, however, continue to be victimized in evolving ways as an integral feature of capitalist relations. What this means for school age females living in neighborhoods of concentrated dispossession within cities is worth considering.

Over the past decade, my research on violence in the lives of girls in US urban locations chronicles ways in which neoliberalism produces gender (Hall, 2009, 2013, 2014; Hall & Weis, 2003). Much of this involves colonial class, race, and gender narrations/constructions. Co-produced by those with power within capitalist relations, such subject positions are devalued with particular exploitation among the intersections. The more diminished social and political importance is imposed upon females across cultures, the greater the increase of profitability to capital. In this sense, racialization refers to the process by which those with power ascribe an ethnic status of less value on others as a method of continued domination (Collins, 2008; Maldonado, 2009; Omi & Winant, 1994). Gender as a critical site of performativity (e.g., ‘female,’ ‘femininity’) is so well understood at this point in feminist theory it hardly needs explanation (McRobbie, 2010).

How the continuous devaluing of classed and racialized women translates on the ground for female students who have been racially or economically marginalized living in US cities is the subject of this book. It seems those who could change things have turned their attention to other things. With the destabilization of employment and the absence of a social contract, ever increasing numbers of girls are straining to negotiate their lives at home, in their larger surroundings, and in their schools as those spaces are becoming saturated with violence. What does a girl do when there is no place to get away from this, and even school is a danger zone? She may disengage from learning and this along with the danger itself likely has a negative impact on her future. Why have so many educators turned their attention away from this reality, seeing the issue as already addressed in prior decades? If it is acknowledged, why is there a tendency to categorize it as just another example of the generic, decontextualized, and depoliticized concept of ‘bullying?’

Critical educators and policymakers who research the effects of neoliberalism on schooling have yet fully to focus on this specific issue. Thrown back on themselves to negotiate life in their neighborhoods and schools, as specifically explored in this volume, females who have been racially or economically marginalized may more readily become targets for sex trafficking, domestic abuse, disability silencing, and the military-prison-surveillance complex. Severely lacking places to critique, messages in media saturate with consumption narratives. Narrow definitions of beauty, such as in the reality show America’s Next Top Model, contextualize meaning-making in competitive terms as young women engage in isolated projects of self-perfection.

Classed and racialized femininity has long been used by capital to discredit the state by perpetuating the concept of minimal worth. In an effort to divest the state from protective obligations and to divert resources towards private interest, it is coded the feminine ‘other.’ Efforts to undermine femininity are animated, for instance, in the image of the ‘nanny state.’ She is large, bloated, and wasteful. In keeping with this metaphor, public jobs in government and teaching are disparaged in terms of credibility and pay. In this discourse, the Western, masculine, and efficient private sector shakes the state from its stupor. It prescribes lean, profit-driven policy directed toward specific females and race groups with the intent of subjectivity modification and compliance across the life span. While impacting everyone, many such policies are focused on females who care for children and by extension the children themselves. Over the past few decades, examples of such legislation include the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, The Kennedy-Kassenbaum Fighting Fraud and Waste in Medicare Act, the Senior Citizen’s Freedom to Work Act, No Child Left Behind, school zero tolerance policies, and recent cuts to Medicaid and the Food Stamp Program. Resultantly, inside already disenfranchised communities, the evisceration of a social contract and the imposition of such policy demand new and compacted levels of flexibility, sublimation of emotion, and despair.

Classed and racialized femininity as a delegitimized set of subject positions is produced by capital in other ways as it extracts value. In neoliberal production regimes, the performative qualities of ‘feminine’ identity—traits such as flexibility, creativity, the ability to listen, and attentiveness—are increasingly valued as the worthy attributes of the female and male subject as worker, consumer, and entrepreneur (McRobbie, 2010, 2014). The economy today is intrinsically dependent on these elaborations. In fact, labor itself is becoming feminized: from the creative team member, to the mid-level manager, to the freelance professional, to the service worker. In the will to work, all must be flexible (Goodman, 2013; McRobbie, 2010).

Moreover, in maximizing labor output, neoliberalism continues to need gender to be intensely divided along lines of the colonial white and the ‘other.’ In such framings, ‘feminine’ traits such as flexibility, creativity, the ability to listen, and attention to detail are coded as the ‘essentialized’ white ideal. Capital casts the gender of females from groups who have been culturally dominated in naturalistic terms—as unwieldy, highly physical, hypersexual, and inattentive. These females require extreme ‘correction’ so ‘their’ gender can be steered towards more compressed forms of exploitation in increasing profit. History shows a main demand upon the labor of females from such groups has been the forced suppression of emotions. This has been an imposed requirement for some females from enslavement, to domestic service, to contemporary affective labor in day care centers and nursing homes (Collins, 2008). To a lesser extent, it has also been a necessity for women of low income in general and those in customer service positions. In interviews with white female flight attendants conducted by Arlene Hochschild (1983) in the restructuring 1980s, participants describe how they must suppress the self at all times. This includes suppressing feelings of anger, frustration, and exhaustion in order to inhabit the sustained cheerfulness of the role. Now firmly rooted in neoliberalism and its undermining of employment, flexibility and the sublimation of feelings are becoming the prized attributes of the subject across groups. Still, as in the past, the most condensed versions of this apply among females who are low income or from culturally marginalized groups.

Today, women from dominated groups often become the sole family breadwinner, thus further compressing labor pressures. Given the suppression of wages and rampant inflation since the 1970s, the imposition of crack on urban populations, and the extent of justice system regulatory functions, desolation for males from dominated groups has deepened (Alexander, 2012; Wacquant, 2009). Race and class profiling across institutions attempts to pre-write futures in limiting ways for many young men as fodder for the prison complex. For example, especially post 9/11, criminal history records can be accessed by the majority of employers (Alexander, 2012; MacLeod, 2009). Females today on the expanding margins continue to be disproportionately represented in minimum wage, unstable, caretaking capacities. These jobs include home health aides, nursing home aides, day care center attendants, housekeepers, cooks, and fast food workers. Such affective labor is physically and emotionally demanding and offers lack of control over time and space. With historically constricted access to jobs, networking opportunities, and education, there has been much less ability among families who have been culturally marginalized to pool resources to get through difficult times.

The exploitative labor of females from culturally dominated groups has historically worked to justify the undercutting of wages for all females (e.g., Williams, 1991). Moreover, as more women across groups have accessed higher education and middle class professions, Collins (2008) clarifies how this has been experienced differently for females from culturally dominated groups. As she explains, African American middle class women have not been spared from condensed labor. Such females who have reached middle class standing are more likely to work in shrinking government agencies. Collins describes how these jobs involve “the care of the personal needs of the destitute and the weak” (p. 72). These women are impossibly tasked with solving problems among deteriorating and underfunded systems and in overworked conditions. As Collins asserts, some African American women who are today part of the professional business class occupy positions that often resemble “corporate mammies.” These females are there to clean up after everyone but are never really in charge. With the exception of those who are high earners, many women have several jobs and then compressed care taking at home. Increasingly divested of commonality, females must rely on themselves as individuals.

With the ascendency of neoliberalism, the collapse of the economy has resulted in the naturalization of precarious employment. It is ironic that while so much unstable and condensed work has historically been heaped on women from culturally dominated groups, the label of ‘welfare cheat’ has been applied as well. When it comes to an amalgam of structures that support single parenting, inflation, and low wage work, recent policy reform has resulted in new levels of devaluation for women and children who have been economically marginalized. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (i.e., welfare reform), for example, harkens to the colonial corralling of female bodies. Drawing on the same well-worn stereotypes as unfeminine, hypersexual, uncaring mothers, and welfare cheats, this policy is directed to all ‘unworthy’ women who have refused to be accountable in terms of work and sexuality. The legislation paternalizes, blames, and pointedly individualizes the experiences of women who find themselves impoverished. This policy effectively ended 61 years of federal assistance. As the primary caretakers of children and consequently the main qualifiers, it impacts women and children most. Due to structural racism, this acutely hits families from culturally dominated groups. With the reform, women and children now have a set time clock of benefits, between two and five years. Once that expires there is nothing else (Hays, 2003; Wacquant, 2009).

In the colonial tradition, strict corporal punishments await any who transgress the rules of this reform. In an effort to dissuade women from having children, mothers of newborns are required to work, and at all times they must provide evidence they are looking for a job or are employed. Most of the jobs ‘found’ by women are in unstable, inflexible, fast food type places. If unable to find a job, in order to receive assistance, women are assigned to unpaid, full time work in a state agency. Given the low benefit levels, substandard childcare is mostly the option. Any child born to a parent who is already receiving help is designated a ‘capped child’ and does not receive any assistance. If a mother unexpectedly has to stay home to take care of a sick child and must miss a day of work, this results in a sanction. The penalty for this specific infraction is the denial of all support for a month with the benefit time clock still ticking. This also punishes children whose rent, food, and heat are paid for by that withholding. Once the overarching time limit has expired, women and children are on their own. With no social provisions, survival depends on food banks, charitable organizations, and perhaps dependent relationships with abusive partners and the dangers of the underground economy (Hays, 2003; Wacquant, 2009).

As capital continues to produce classed and racialized gender, many are painfully feeling it, especially in communities in cities that have been most marginalized. As subjectivities afforded little importance among the larger culture, this violence is mostly ignored among those with power. The unnatural conditions of poverty and segregation are nerve-racking and relentless, and are themselves forms of intensity that create circumstances for further brutality. Whereas violence is known to cut across social class and race, females in areas of concentrated poverty across cultural groups are embroiled in it. With the disappearance of both employment and a social safety net, there are few opportunities to escape such conditions. Stressful family and community relationships can be characterized by isolation, conflict over lack of resources and conventional opportunities, and contestation over power imbalances—which may involve tensions around gender roles. Data indicate girls and women in such an atmosphere are exposed particularly to high rates of aggression, as both witnesses and as direct victims (Hall, 2009, 2013, 2014; Hall & Weis, 2003). This has been seen to encompass physical battery, sexual assault, harassment, and being the victim of a violent crime.

Classed and racialized gender as a constellation of discredited identity positions also shapes school policy, structure, and culture. In the momentary economy, public spaces such as schools, which represent physical and ideological sites from which to think, critique, and act, have been demolished altogether. Students are instead measured by ideologies, attitudes, and dispositions that align with market interests. This includes the tactic of division, in which all are recast as economic actors in an antagonistic struggle for survival. As reflective of wider cultural messages, in schools youth are positioned as unable to trust others and to see deep divisions among all (e.g., in curricular messages, in competition over resources, and in high stakes test scores). They are pitted against each other across gender, race, social class, and so forth, in an unwinnable struggle to come out on top. This form of schooling alienates and oppresses all students. However, given the colonial subtext of subjugation and relational silencing, this takes on new dimensions in decisive ways for females of low income, many of whom quietly live in fear.

In terms of gender divisions, today boys privileged by race and class are often viewed as situated on the losing end of feminism as the learning needs of girls have been ‘over-accommodated’ to their detriment (e.g., Brooks, 2012). In this competitive and discordant environment, claims of female violence and silencing, including sexual harassment, are often rationalized away as overblown. This simplified understanding of ‘inequity’ erases powerful linkages between gender, class, and race. It also implies too much has been done to ‘help’ girls. Whereas perhaps privileged white female students may have expanded opportunities in discrete subject areas, such as math and science, others have been left to fend for themselves. In the neoliberal social order, that which is ‘classed,’ ‘raced,’ and ‘female’ continues to have evolving and negligible social, cultural, and political value.

Situating the Investigation

The cultures of violence presently experienced by female students in their communities, homes, and schools take form under the aegis of neoliberal expansion. As a global force, this process is reliant upon the strategy of accumulation by dispossession in which all areas of life the world over are subjugated to the uncompromising needs of the market (e.g., Harvey, 2005). In this system, human rights, environmental standards, worker safety measures, and public spaces, including the notion of the public good, have been forcibly dismantled by transnational corporations and their policy networks in the endless fixation with bringing what is outside within its bounds in subjugation. Steeped in the rationality of positivism, there are profound feminist and colonial underpinnings to this never-ending practice of targeting, isolating, cornering, dominating, controlling, and forcing of nature and culture into submission. Many of the most vicious outcomes of this actualize in the Southern Hemisphere, where the domination over the ‘wild’ feminine and ‘primitive’ ‘other’ has been the defining feature of colonial policy. Inhumane outcomes also take place in the North, with its history of state-sponsored land purges and forms of corporal control (Alexander, 2012; Bannerji, 1995; Collins, 2008; McClintock, 1995). Capital has produced racialized and gendered subject positions and plunged many groups into a history of violent devaluation in order to meet its needs.

Key to this collection is the operational culture of violence underlying capitalism. Brutality was experienced by populations from the earliest advancements of this system with the enclosure of common land. This resulted in mass starvation and a forced exodus of previously rural populations into urban centers where they were suddenly left to fend for themselves. Over time, this same narrative has continued, and has taken on new forms as a culture of hyper-individualism matures. Aggression is defined here as widely manifest—in structural, hegemonic, and personal ways (Collins, 2008; Rubin, 1976). It is historically expressed across all relations, driving the core impulse to dominate and control ‘wild’ and ‘primitive’ nature, and thus is innately raced and gendered. It is the central organizing feature of institutions and policies and takes on meaning within interpersonal interactions. Given the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Capital and the Production of Classed and Racialized Females
• 2 Human Sex Trafficking in the City: Seeking Victims among Domestic Girls
• 3 Longitudinal Ethnography: Uncovering Domestic Abuse in Low-Income Women’s Lives
• 4 Gender as the Next Top Model of Global Consumer-Citizenship
• 5 Neoliberal Fantasies and the ‘Centaur State’: Confronting Hypermasculine Violence in Urban Public Schooling
• 6 ‘Prisonization’ and Latinas in Alternative High Schools
• 7 Disability and Silences That Do Not Tell
• 8 When Black Girls Became Pretty: Teacher Biography as Source of Student Transformation
• 9 Stop the Potlucks
• Contributors
• Index