‘It's not bullying’, ‘It's just a joke’: Teacher and student discursive manoeuvres around gendered violence

Abstract

Threats or harassment related to the enforcement of gender norms remain largely unchallenged in many schools. Possibilities for meaningful interventions have been undermined by an over‐reliance on individual, psycho‐pathologised understandings of ‘bullying’ and a reluctance to examine contextual and socio‐cultural mechanisms of power. Poststructural feminist approaches offer an alternative view of gendered violence and its responses—one that focuses on the meanings that individuals and groups constitute through discourse around gender, violence and ‘bullying’. This article examines focus group data from teachers and students from one Australian school that experienced a significant event of gendered violence referred to as ‘Kick a slut in the head day’. Results demonstrate that participants minimised or dismissed the ‘seriousness’ of this event through employing particular ‘discursive manoeuvres’ drawn from hegemonic discourses of ‘bullying’. Teachers utilised essentialist discourses to illustrate that the incident was ‘not bullying’, while students suggested that it was a ‘joke’ or that the girl/s were deserving of the treatment. These findings suggest that ‘discursive manoeuvres’ are a helpful indicator for understanding contextual resistance to addressing gendered violence.

Exploring the secondary school experience of LGBT+ youth: an examination of school culture and school climate as understood by teachers and experienced by LGBT+ students

“…However, the easiest solution for schools and those who work within them is to blame individual students and/or their families for discrimination against LGBT+ students, and not ask themselves what steps need to be taken as an organisation to change the underlying culture (Payne and Smith 2013;Rawlings 2019).…”

Proximal or peripheral: temporality and spatiality in young people's discourses on gender violence in Sweden

“…Both the boys and girls often justified violence in adult heterosexual relationships, which were understood to be naturally characterised by inequality (Lombard 2015). Rawlings (2019) suggests that discursive actswhat she terms 'discursive manoeuvres'are part of the continuous negotiation of what violence 'is' (see also Carrera-Fernández, Lameiras-Fernández, and Rodríguez-Castro 2018). In her study on bullying in Australian secondary schools, she found that when discussing violence, both teachers and students drew on hegemonic discourses of bullying.…”

“…Failing to acknowledge the gendered dimensions of bullying and violence legitimises social hierarchies and normalises normative identities (Rawlings 2017(Rawlings , 2019. It reinforces dominant gendered perceptions regarding who commits violent acts and makes it more difficult to 'see' violence (Lunneblad and Johansson 2019).…”

“…Violence can also be perceived as 'messing around' and be related to humour (cf. Lahelma 2002;Rawlings 2019). In this article, we explore how young people in Sweden talk about and understand violence, with a particular emphasis on how these discourses co-construct violence, gender, space and place (cf.…”

“…Thus, the various understandings of violence adopted by young people place violence differently in time (ongoing vs. past) and space (distant/absent or close/present). These 'discursive manoeuvres' (Rawlings 2019) highlight how talk about violence territorialises and reterritorialises places as being 'safe' or 'unsafe' (Sack 1986) and is part of the gendered spatial regulation of young people's lives. By specifically analysing time and space in young people's talk about violence, this article contributes to research on their perspectives on gender violence.…”