Kristina Gottschall

Hard Lines and Soft Scenes: Constituting Masculinities in the Prospectuses of All-Boys Elite Private Schools.

Over the last decade, education researchers have been concerned with the ‘impression management’ activities of schools in the current climate of school corporatisation. Among these activities is the dissemination of school prospectuses that, far from being merely arbitrary sources of information, are seen as strategic texts that communicate the ethos of educational providers to potential clientele. Through sociocultural, feminist and post-structuralist frames, we consider how the positioning of masculinities is utilised as a marketing technique in such texts and, in turn, how such texts are implicated in the discursive construction of idealised schooling subjectivities. We undertake a semiotic analysis of the prospectuses of six private boys schools in the Sydney region of New South Wales, Australia, considering how masculinities are represented within binaries that position older boys as hard, strong and capable, and younger boys as small, weak and vulnerable. We argue that schooling is depicted in these texts as providing the necessary training ground for boys making the transition from boyhood to manhood. We argue that these images of masculinity continue to be associated, either directly or indirectly, with narrow notions of social privilege.

Starry eyes and subservient selves: Portraits of ‘well-rounded’ girlhood in the prospectuses of all-girl elite private schools

This article continues a discussion about the ways in which gender is constructed in the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. While before we focused on the construction and promotion of valorised masculinities in elite private boys school prospectuses (Gottschall, Wardman, Edgeworth, Hutchesson & Saltmarsh, 2010), we now extend that work by investigating the versions of femininity celebrated in the promotional materials of elite girls schools. We also contrast, compare and critique the subjectivities constructed by elite private girls schools in relation to the elite private boys schools. Drawing on feminist and post-structuralist theoretical frames and semiotic techniques, we consider how the text, layout and images of the prospectuses work to legitimate and/or disrupt hegemonic versions of ‘well-rounded’ femininity predicated on physical beauty, passivity and subservience.

‘You're not just learning it, you're living it!’ Constructing the ‘good life’ in Australian university online promotional videos

ABSTRACT Online promotional videos on Australian university websites are a form of institutional branding and marketing that construct university experience in a variety of ways. Here we consider how these multimedia texts represent student lifestyles, identities and aspirations in terms of the ‘good life’. We consider how the ‘promise of happiness’ is deployed to appeal to perceived consumer desires within the local student market, as well as within the highly competitive global knowledge economy. These texts position university students as youthful, attractive, active and fun, and depict student life as being about leisure and pleasure. Such representations promote cultural and social entitlement to the ‘good life’ as if synonymous with choice, participation and success in higher education. Learning and scholarship are depicted as secondary activities. We also contend that claims to cosmopolitanism and consumerism are framed by racialised entitlements where Whiteness remains both a commodity and norm.

From the frozen wilderness to the moody sea: rural space, girlhood and popular pedagogy

This paper turns to debates in post-critical public pedagogy to focus on how a small body of films might potentially work as vehicles for teaching and learning about youth, gender and space. It is argued that representations of the rural shape what is possible for girlhood, being both enabling and constraining for the subject. Framed by discourses around the politics of representing the rural, a range of popular Australian films will be analysed to think about how popular film might use representations of the rural to educate spectators about girls as ‘successful’, ‘in crisis’ and/or as girls asserting ‘girlpower’. The films include four key Australian ‘coming of age’ films about girls growing up in rural/rural coastal locales: Peaches set in a sleepy town on the banks of the Murray River, Somersault set in the frozen wilderness of Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains, Caterpillar Wish set in the coastal town full of secrets and lies, and in Indigenous film maker Ivan Sens Beneath Clouds, showing the Country passed through during a rural New South Wales road trip.

'Jesus! A Geriatric - That's All I Need!': learning to come of age with/in popular Australian film

Popular film texts are powerful means by which Western societies construct, maintain, protect and challenge concepts of childhood and youth-hood. As a context where audiences learn about the self, their culture, and their place within it, popular film is understood here as pedagogic, that is, as a space where key lessons about the formation of subjecthood might take place, and at what costs. This article takes into account scholarship on popular culture as pedagogy, challenging narrow notions of popular film as a simple transmission of knowledge. Focused on how pedagogies might be at work, this article explores the use of humour, repetition, otherness, becoming and sentimentality within a selection of Australian films, and how they orientate audiences towards knowing the youth subject in particular ways. Questions of generation and how it is constructed as a commonsense battle between ‘young’ and ‘old’ are considered through the coming of age films, The Rage in Placid Lake (2003), Hey Hey Its Esther Blueburger (2008), Crackers (1998) and Spider & Rose (1994).

Always the larrikin: Ben Mendelsohn and young Aussie manhood in Australian cinema

Ben Mendelsohn is Australian cinemas quintessential working-class larrikin of his generation. This paper will consider the kind of young, masculine, roguish, destructive character that Mendelsohn has been playing since the 1980s. It will argue that by borrowing from his cinematic forefathers and adding his unique contemporary stamp to the mould, Mendelsohn incites audiences towards a particular brand of masculinity where being young, being male and being Australian is normalized and idealized. For good and for bad, Mendelsohn is a powerful text by which Australian society constructs, maintains, protects, challenges and teaches concepts of manhood.

‘At-Risk’ youth sport programmes: Another way of regulating boys?

Community youth sport programmes often target boys who are considered ‘at-risk’ of failing at school or not transitioning to an ‘ideal’ adulthood, with the assumption that sport will ‘save them from social alienation’. In this chapter, we extend literature that examines sport programmes as a form of governmentality. We show how on the one hand such programmes reinforce the need for self-regulation among youth, and on the other hand produce an attraction to certain aspects of being a young person ‘at-risk’ (where it appears the more ‘at-risk’ you are the more likely you are to become a ‘famous’ sportsperson). We draw on ethnographic data collected from seven 13–15-year-old boys (including two Indigenous Australian and two Maori) involved in a regional New South Wales Police-run community-based Youth ‘At-Risk’ Programme. This programme aimed to improve relationships between local police and young people who had previous involvement in minor criminal activity. In this context, sport, rather than educational success, is positioned as a ‘way out’ of social marginalisation for young males, especially Indigenous boys, where the overrepresentation of Indigenous men in popular sports, such as rugby league, can establish desirable future selves. In other words, the very programmes that are designed to counter ‘risk’ through sport can work to maintain, create or celebrate risk, making participants feel even more alienated and disengaged from school and/or the workforce when they step outside of the sport programme and return to these ‘normalising’ contexts.

Co-optation of diversity in nationalist advertising: a case study of an Australian advertisement

ABSTRACT Co-optation theory, more commonly used in sociology and marketing literature, has value in media and cultural studies for examination of how countercultural ideals such as diversity can be assimilated into dominant discourse, in ways that neutralize the concepts’ countercultural significations. This paper demonstrates the value of co-optation theory through a case study of an Australian nationalist advertisement, which co-opts the concept of diversity and utilizes it in a way that is palatable to the imagined White Australian audience. In the process, it is argued, the concept of diversity is neutralized and stripped of its countercultural significations, and masculine Anglo-Australian identity is sustained as an idealized norm. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of the advertisement and its surrounding media reception is conducted to explore the advertisement as an instance of co-optation that was largely met uncritically, and resultantly, passed as a national adulation of an assimilationist ideal dressed as diversity.

Social justice and race critical education research

‘Consider, for example, educators’ and educational researchers’ concerns with assimilation, civilization, vocational training, IQ, poverty, cultural difference, remedial education, school readiness, achievement gaps, accountability, and standardization – all of these conversations were and still are intimately connected to race and racism regardless of whether we name them as such’ (Brayboy, Castagno, & Maughan, 2007, p. 159).

‘Trashing the suburban streets’: Learning about ‘bad’ youth with/in Idiot Box and Suburban Mayhem

ABSTRACT Katrina is a suburban 19-year-old single mother with murder and mayhem on her mind. Kev and Mick are unemployed 20-something suburban blokes who get the idea from a cop show to rob their local bank. This article considers how images and ideas about suburbia frame representations of gendered and classed youth in the Australian films Idiot Box (Caesar, 1996) and Suburban Mayhem (Goldman, 2006). These films ambivalently celebrate and critique suburbia in their portrayals of ‘bad’ young protagonists. Taking a post-critical approach to pedagogy, this article explores these films as vehicles for teaching and learning about youth and subjectivity. The films and their suburban settings are considered in relation to a (post) Gothic aesthetic in Australian cinema. The article analyses key locations highlighted in the film, including the neighbourhood, the beauty salon, the shopping mall and the street, and asks how contemporary youthful femininities and masculinities are constructed and known in these simultaneously familiar and uncanny places.