Girls Like This, Boys Like That

The Reproduction of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures

Victoria Cann

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350144361
• eBook ISBN: 9781838608613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What role does taste play in contemporary youth culture? How do young people reproduce, or alternatively, reject gender norms? Using new research and the work of renowned theorists such as Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, Victoria Cann argues that popular culture affects young people's experiences of masculinity and femininity and forces them to navigate a social minefield in which they are pressured to display tastes deemed appropriate for their gender. Combining her own unique empirical research with a strong theoretical framework, Cann widens and links the fields of gender and taste studies to show the everyday reality of twenty-first-century youth and their apprehensions - especially those of young boys- about participating in activities, or embracing pop-cultural preferences that have traditionally only been associated with the opposite sex.

1

Researching Youth Taste Cultures: The Study

When I started this research I wanted young people’s voices to be at the foreground of my study, and so an underlying principle has been to ensure that the findings and development of methods have been informed directly by the experiences of young people. While the older among us reading this have been 14 years old at some point in our lives, our experiences will be highly distinct from those who are 14 now. Raced, classed and (dis)abled experiences will only further impact these experiences, memories and understandings. Stockton’s work on the queerness of childhood highlights this tension well, when she writes, ‘[t]he child is simply who we are not, and in fact never were. It is the act of adults looking back’ (2009: 5). Perhaps, as adults, we can never really know children.

Researching youth is, as with many other social groups, in many ways bound up in power relations. As an academic researcher I cannot help but be older than my research subjects. In a country where people under the age of 16 have little autonomy, there remains what Ferguson calls an ‘enormous chasm of power that separates grown-ups and young people’ (2001: 13). Such power dynamics must be attended to when conducting research.

Methodological Reflections and Considerations

Researching youth gender subjectivities is tricky. It is tricky because identity is in its very nature subjective and during the transitional period of youth the parameters of acceptability are being worked out in a heightened manner. The methods that we use in our empirical research must therefore account for such complexities, whilst also attending to ethical considerations. Thus through the combination of the three methods used in this study we can begin to account for the plurality of youth experiences (as argued by McRobbie 1994) and the emphasis on meaning in qualitative research can help to capture this.

The combination of methods used throughout this research study is intended to delve further under the surface. Through my use of ethnography, identity pages and focus groups I have attended to the cultures of everyday life, with the aim of capturing an understanding of the lived experiences of young people. When researching youth and gender there is also a need to consider the ways in which research plays an ideological role, both in reproducing academic common sense about young people (Griffin 1993: 2) and about gender (Järviluoma, Moisala and Vilkko 2003: 18–20). The ethics of our research therefore extends beyond the treatment and care of our research subjects and ourselves, as it is also bound up in the construction of knowledge. All of the methods detailed below have been designed with the research subjects in mind, but beyond the design framework there remains a need for researchers to engage in practices of reflexivity.

One of the ways in which reflexivity can be achieved is by recognising our role as researchers, and in particular the impact that our social and cultural backgrounds have on our research. This has a dual importance in research engaging with youth, as we are forced to attend to both our position as adults in a power relationship with the young people of our studies, and to the role that memory plays in our understanding of youth. As a white (cis)female, working-class woman I occupy a number of positions of power. Consideration of, and reflection upon, the ‘plethora of power struggles’ (Dunbar, Rodriguez and Parker, 2001: 281) and the impact that these identities of mine have on my research subjects – particularly those of colour – is worthy of serious consideration.

In terms of memory and geography, occupying a reflexive position allows one to minimise the influence their own memories have on the reading of the participants’ experiences. For example, growing up in Norwich (the city of study) brings with it both strengths and weaknesses. I have a rich and in-depth understanding of the area and knowledge of the places that participants talk about. However, I have also engaged, and continue to engage, with the spaces in very different ways to the participants of my study. I either view these spaces in relation to the past, and thus through memory, or with respect to the present but as an adult. As Thorne has argued, memory is both an ‘obstacle and resource in the process of doing work with kids’ (1993: 7). I therefore follow the work of Biklen who writes that researchers need to ‘name and interrogate’ our memories in carrying out research with young people (2004: 724).

What I aim to show in this chapter is that there are issues we need to confront when undertaking research with young people, but that there are ways in which in which we can grapple with them and produce meaningful understandings in the process. I outline here the three methods that I employed in this research – ethnography, online identity pages and focus groups – and explore the knowledge that I have built through the use of these methods, outlining the ways in which they can be employed in future taste culture and youth culture research. As part of this process I raise wider epistemological questions of doing feminist research to answer questions related to youth experience.

The Schools

The schools that took part in this study were selected based on their geographical location within Norfolk and their willingness to take part in the study. Given the increasing pressure and time constraints that teachers face within the British education system, my choices of where this research could be undertaken were governed largely by the availability of the schools. I have anonymised the names of the schools in line with the promises made to the participants and their parents/guardians. I have included contextual information below so as to better understand the background of the data collection sites, but much has been generalised so as not to disclose identities.

Figure 1.1 School participation in data collection in the Norfolk region

Boundary High

Boundary High is a co-ed comprehensive with under 1,000 students from a low socio-economic background located in proximity to a city in Norfolk. The proportion of students receiving the pupil premium¹ during the period of data collection was above the national average. The school is more ethnically diverse than other schools in the region but is lower than the national average. However, the number of pupils who speak English as an additional language is closer to the national average.

City High

City High is a co-ed comprehensive with under 1,000 students from a low socio-economic background located in close proximity to a city in Norfolk. At the time of data collection, the proportion of students that received the pupil premium was above the national average and the majority of students that attended the school are White-British.

Girls High

Girls High is an independent school in Norfolk that has under 1,000 students, all of whom are female. Students are largely from an affluent background and the majority of its students are White-British.

Outskirts High

Outskirts High is a large co-ed comprehensive with over 1,000 students from a predominantly low socio-economic background located in the outskirts of a Norfolk city. The school site is split into two (they do not mix until they are placed into ‘sets’ for their GCSEs), and I have called each half of the split ‘East Side’ and ‘West Side’. The proportion of students who received the pupil premium during the period of data collection was below the national average and the majority of students that attend this school are White-British.

Suburbia High

Suburbia High is a co-ed comprehensive with over 1,000 students that largely come from a relatively middle class socio-economic background and it is located in close proximity to a Norfolk city. The number of students eligible for the pupil premium at the time of data collection was below the national average and the majority of students are White-British.

The Norfolk Context

All of the data was collected in the proximity of a city in Norfolk, which is significant. This city, the only in the county, Norwich, is marked by its isolation, with few major roads servicing the area (there are no motorways) and transport connections to other major cities and counties being relatively poor.

Poor transport links and its location within the east of England mean that, despite having a relatively large population (there are over 200,000 residents), the city remains somewhat isolated in relation to the rest of the country. However, as with the participants of Vanderbeck and Dunkley’s (2003) study, the position of the city in a rural area means that while many outsiders may view the general location as rural, this is more complicated for those living in its proximity. For residents of the nearby villages, the coastal towns of Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as the in-land market towns, Norwich can often be viewed as more of a metropolis in relation to its surroundings. In this way then, Norwich is an interesting place as it straddles the rural and the urban – complicating binary conceptions of young people as either urban or rural (see Hopkins 2010: 239). As I demonstrate in Chapter 3, the rurality or ‘backwardness’ of Norfolk was also considered significant to the participants and their lived sociocultural experiences.

The Research Process

When I was a teenager I was a bit of a nightmare. I cared a lot about doing well at school (that was the competitive side of me) but I was also outspoken, I swore a lot and questioned the power of everyone around me. Teachers that liked me would describe me as ‘high energy’, while teachers that did not would describe me as ‘bolshy’. As an adult, in many ways young people frighten me because the young version of me kind of scared me – what if the teens I met were like I was? I questioned whether I was the right person to do this research. I figured the best thing I could do was rip off the Band-Aid and engage in youth culture from the outset, letting the young people guide my research design, leading to the first of the three metho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Library of Gender and Popular Culture
• Published and forthcoming titles
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Researching Youth Taste Cultures: The Study
• 2. Fitting in at School: The Context of Youth Taste Cultures
• 3. What is Gender? Theorising Gender and Young People’s Lived Experiences
• 4. Boys Like This: Masculinity and Appropriate Tastes for Boys
• 5. Girls Like That: Femininity and Appropriate Tastes for Girls
• 6. Living on the Edge: Regulating and Transgressing Gender Appropriate Taste
• Conclusions and Recommendations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright