Visual and Cultural Identity Constructs of Global Youth and Young Adults

Situated, Embodied and Performed Ways of Being, Engaging and Belonging

Fiona Blaikie, Fiona Blaikie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000392630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This collection brings together the ideas of key global scholars focusing on the lives of youth and young adults, examining their visual and cultural identity constructs.

Embracing an international perspective encompassing the Global North and Global South, chapters explore expressions and performances of youth and young adults as shifting and entangled, in and through the clothed body, gender, sexuality, race, artistic and pedagogical making practices, in spaces and places, framed by new materialism, social media, popular and material culture. The overarching emphasis of the collection is on youth and young adults' strategies for engaging in and with the world, becoming a someone, and belonging, in settings that include a juvenile arbitration program, an artist community, high schools, universities, families and social media.

This truly interdisciplinary and international collection will have resonance not just within cultural and media studies, but also in education, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, child and youth studies, visual culture, and communication studies.

Part one
Contextualizing embodiments in space and place

1
Becoming somebody in boys’ schools

The significance of place ¹

Dónal O’Donoghue

Introduction

It was in the school hallway, out of the sight of others, that Eddy Bellegueule first encountered the two boys—one “tall with red hair” and the other “short with a hunchback”—who would physically assault him, push him, spit at him, bang his head against a brick wall, and kick him in the stomach for much of his time at middle school simply because they suspected he was gay. It was in the hallway that “they asked me who I was, if I was Bellegueule, the one everyone was talking about,” explains Eddy. “They asked me the question that I would repeat to myself endlessly for months, for years, You’re the faggot, right?” (Louis, 2017, p. 5, emphasis in original). Eddy was ten years old.

It was in the playground of his high school that Philippe Besson, at the age of 17, caught sight of Thomas Andrieu—“a boy in the distance leaning against the wall flanked by two other guys around his age” (Besson, 2019, p. 9). Not wanting others to wonder why he was interested in Andrieu, Besson told nobody. To tell somebody would be to confirm what others already suspected about him: that he preferred boys (Besson, 2019, p. 12). For Besson, the school playground afforded him the opportunity to come in contact with Andrieu and presented as a place where both could make plans to meet away from school, to have lunch, to give in to their desires, and to reap the pleasures of doing so.

While seated in his classroom at the age of 13, a few weeks after beginning secondary school, Victor Forde heard Brother Murphy say, in front of the entire class of boys, “Victor Forde, I can never resist your smile.” He wondered what it was about his smile that attracted Brother Murphy’s attention and remark. “It was like a line from a film, in a very wrong place,” he recalls (Doyle, 2017, p. 18)—a line that singled him out; a line that generated suspicion about his sexual orientation; a line for which he would suffer at the hands of his peers. Recalling the beating he received once class was dismissed, Forde says, “The slaps became thumps. They were all over me … I was kicked, punched, spat on” (Doyle, 2017, p. 21).

These three short accounts reveal that encounters in school happen in school spaces and are entangled in the places in which they occur. Oftentimes, the places in which they occur shape the encounters themselves, even frame them to a large extent—the hallway, the classroom, the playground in these instances. And the places themselves contribute to what one can interpret about the encounter—its distinctiveness and potential consequence. “One might even say that the place brings forth the encounter, and the encounter the place,” writes Jeff Malpas (2015, p. 4). Thus, the places in which encounters occur show up as particular types of places as a result.

Further, these accounts suggest that the school functions as a place where one encounters the other, many others, including oneself. It is a place in which one tries to figure out the meaning, significance, and potential of such encounters. It is a place where sensations are experienced, where desire is managed, where friendships are established and relationships developed. Some are denied. It is a place where moments, punctums, affects, and publics emerge, congregate, and dissipate, where a sense of oneself is imagined, negotiated, presented, and thought possible. In and through such moments, one comes into an appearance of oneself and others. These three short accounts also suggest that school is a place in which desire circulates and is sometimes neutralized, if not actively discouraged. It is a place in which comparisons occur, where some students perform in a manner that distinguishes them from others, that casts them as exemplary or exceptional, as bright or studious, as lacking motivation or of not trying hard enough to succeed. School is a place where insults are traded, rumors are spread, with and without consequence. It is a place where reputations get established or undone and where subjectivities get constituted.

In this chapter, I present two accounts that capture aspects of some boys’ experiences of being schooled in single-sex schools in Canada. These accounts were offered to me in part by boys who participated in a research study that I conducted to study boys’ experiences of being educated in independent, single-sex schools. These accounts convey how some boys imagine, describe, and reflect on the significance of place in their experiences of being educated and schooled. During the conduct of the study, I paid particular attention to the significance of school places in boys’ experience of schooling, for I was curious to learn why some boys feel out of place in certain school places, while others do not. I was also interested in understanding how learning masculinities and negotiating subjectivities in school are place-based. And I was curious about the ways in which place can be monopolized as a potential partner in advancing certain values of the school and others. During the course of the study, I wondered what happened when boys transgressed the supposedly common-sense connection between places and their articulated or assumed purpose. Interested in how places that compose school are perceived by students and how are they given form in how they are used, described, and represented, I was curious about how boys’ self-understanding was connected to how they see, articulate, use, and report their relationship to school places (O’Donoghue, 2018).

In sharing these accounts, I do not engage in an explicit analysis of their content. Nor do I frame such accounts by theories of gender, gendering practices, masculinities and sexualities, friendship, companionship, or surveillance, although this is not to say that traces of all of these concepts are absent in the accounts that are offered. All are implied to some degree, but none are foregrounded as interpretative tools. In taking this approach, I follow Elizabeth Grosz’s (2001) notion that the act of adhering to well-established categories can, at times, become a “blockage for thought” (p. 59). Presenting texts without demanding that one reads them in this manner or another can also result in one coming to think differently about something that might appear already known. Thus, I offer the two accounts in the hope that they in themselves provoke thought and response from the reader. For me, they convey to some extent the quality of “being-in-place” for these boys. These two accounts come from one of the two research sites at which I worked: Preston Hall Junior School for Boys. This school functions as a day school and boarding school. It has served elite groups since its foundation in the early part of the 20th century and thus has established a long history of educating the sons of the wealthy and elite in Canada and abroad. Before presenting each account, I wish to say a few things about the study’s intention and methodology.

Notes on the study and methodology

As I have explained elsewhere (see O’Donoghue, 2018), the study was an exploratory one conducted to gain an understanding of boys’ experiences of being educated in single-sex schools. It was pursued neither to prove a claim nor to investigate a hypothesis that preexisted it. Rather the study was conceptualized and conducted to consider what might be learned about how some boys negotiate and articulate their gendered and sexed subjectivities (always incomplete and ever-emerging) by considering how they perceive and experience place in school, while they produce it at the same time. While the larger study has been written about elsewhere, the accounts presented here have not been shared previously.

Boys who participated in the research studied the nature and experience of being in school, in its physical, material, social, and relational spaces and places. They did this by making photographs of places, short films of the school environment, and sound recordings of what they heard. As boys prepared themselves to make photographs, produce short films, and record sounds, they spent time studying the artworks of several artists who adopt the mediums of photography, film, and sound to explore urban and rural spaces and places, interiors and exteriors, and the attachments that people develop with places they encounter and inhabit in and across time. Similarly, with me, the boys explored the work of land artists and installation artists who work directly with space and produce place by doing so. Rather than my giving instructions on what to photograph or record, the boys engaged in inquiry processes similar to the artists that they studied and focused on the places with which they had already developed some level of familiarity—their school. The acts of making photographs, films, and sound recordings were a central and enduring activity in this study. They served to focus attention, cultivate thought, and invite participants to record, document, and critically reflect on the nature of the school places that they encountered, made, and inhabited on a daily basis, including places’ affective potentiality.

During the research process, the boys also participated in several research conversations with me. During these conversations, they spoke about their experiences of being in certain school spaces and places—spaces that they inherited by attending the school and places they made by living within its bounds. Accounts of what it felt like to inhabit certain spaces that were made into places were shared, without necessarily being defined. The spaces that preexisted their arrival and that were constructed with a certain image of them in mind were made into places of meaning, value, opportunity, and distinctiveness by the things boys did in them and because of them. As the two accounts that follow reveal, in such spaces and places, boys reflect on how they learn things about themselves and others. Appearing to others, as others appeared to them, they described how they presented and managed their bodies differently in different spaces and places.

Each of our conversations began by us taking time to look closely at photographs (still and moving) and sounds that the boys had made and recorded in advance of the conversations—in the days leading up to it. In looking at and talking about the images they made and the sounds they recorded, boys began to craft accounts of what it felt like to find themselves “in place” with themselves and others. In some respects, they had already begun the process of crafting these accounts as they tried to visualize them through the medium of photography and film. Talking with their images and about their images, the boys animated these images in ways that extended their content and could not be reduced to what was contained within their frames. A direct correspondence was drawn between the conditions of their production and the school lives of the boys who made them—lives that were shaped by the experiences that these boys had in the places that they photographed and recorded. Indeed, it could be said that the act of taking photographs and making films during the study put boys in contact with aspects of the places captured by the camera and made manifest in the image-making decisions that they made. Thus, in talking about the photographs and moving images they made, in recalling the conditions of their making and the intention behind the decisions to frame them in this way or another, the boys brought the images into form in ways that exceeded what appeared in the image.

During these conversations, we loosely followed José Esteban Muñoz’s concept and practice of associative analysis and reading. The concept of associative analysis and reading is described by Muñoz in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia as a “mode of analysis that leaps between one historical site and the present” (p. 3). To that end, Muñoz explains: “my writing brings in my own personal experience as another way to ground historical queer sites with lived queer experience. My intention in this aspect of the writing is not simply to wax anecdotally but, instead, to reach for other modes of associative argumentation and evidencing” (pp. 3–4). Muñoz goes on to provide an example of how this form of analysis is pursued by him. He writes,

when considering the work of a contemporary club performer such as Kevin Aviance, I engage a poem by Elizabeth Bishop and a personal recollection about movement and gender identity. When looking at Kevin McCarty’s photographs of contemporary queer and punk bars, I consider accounts about pre-Stonewall gay bars in Ohio and my personal story about growing up queer and punk in suburban Miami.

(p. 4)

It is with these modes of associative argumentation and evidencing that we engaged as we looked at and talked about the images that the boys had made—mainly photographs. In other words, we entered into dialogue with their images not only by studying their content but also by paying attention to the conditions of their production ² and interpretation, as well as the things they suggested, called forth, or animated. We reflected on what those conditions of production and interpretation enabled and provoked.

Thinking the images with other concepts such as noise, companionship, attachment, intimacy, intention, silence, and loneliness, we tried to understand aspects of them that might not appear on first inspection. We engaged with them as objects that had the capacity to tell us something by what they captured and disclosed—not telling in the instructive way, but a different type of telling: a telling that might be understood as a gesture of pointing toward, of placing an emphasis on, and an insistence about. We read them and thought alongside them in an effort to understand what they might be saying, what they might be pointing toward, what they might be reminding us of, what they might be telling (and not telling), and how they might be animating our thoughts, our reactions, our attachments.

Thus, one could say the images and the manner in which we engaged with them brought us into a space of correspondence with each other. Engaging with them in this manner permitted us to ask questions about what we were looking at, how we recognized what we believed we saw, what narratives we could decipher from them, and what we were being shown and invited to think about by them. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Contextualizing embodiments in space and place
• Part Two Making and engaging
• Part Three Becoming and Belonging
• Index