Sheryl Clark

‘Why can't girls play football?’ Gender dynamics and the playground

This article focuses on the involvement of boys and girls in playground football. It is based on research conducted with 10- to 11-year-old pupils at two state primary schools in London. Boys and girls were found to draw on gender constructs that impacted variously on their involvement in playground football. The performance of masculinity through football translated into heavy investments for many boys who took any opportunity to prove both their knowledge and expertise in the sport. This investment rested on the derision and exclusion both of non-footballing boys and of girls. Associations between humility, restraint, niceness and femininity also had a negative impact on girls’ involvement in the sport. Prohibitions around desire and determination proved especially damaging to girls’ attempts at ownership and assertiveness within the game. This was compounded by boys’ co-optation of football as ‘inherently masculine’. Girls’ resistance strategies to male domination of the football pitch tended to focus on disruption and rarely resulted in equal participation. This was due to opposition from powerful boys as well as entrenched gendered zones of play that granted boys automatic rights to football and girls only marginal tenancy.

Learning gender in primary school playgrounds: findings from the Tomboy Identities Study

This paper starts from the idea that children learn and construct gendered identities within local communities of masculinity and femininity practice, including peer communities. The data presented come from an ESRC‐funded study of tomboy identities, which investigated the enabling and constraining factors for girls in taking up and maintaining tomboy identities, and the relationship between these and the perpetuation of active girlhood during the later primary school years. The paper considers how gender is constructed within the physical spaces of school playgrounds. We contrast the spatialities of the two research sites—one, an inner‐city school with restricted playground space; the other, an outer‐London school with extensive grounds—and examine the implications of these for childrens activities and associated identities. We show how the spaces of the school and the surrounding area are factors in the childrens construction of their identities, and how playground space is used partly to construct and maintain gender difference by both girls and boys. In particular, we examine how children use play as a means to the construction of their masculinities and femininities, and how these are enabled and constrained by their peer communities.

Being ‘Good at Sport’: Talent, Ability and Young Women’s Sporting Participation:

This article looks at the construction of active young femininities within the context of girls’ participation in sport. It draws on findings from longitudinal, qualitative research carried out in the UK. The research revealed the importance of ‘ability’ discourses as particularly salient for girls’ ongoing sports participation at secondary school. This was exemplified in the idea of ‘being good at sport’. Throughout the article I consider some of the difficulties for girls in holding onto notions of themselves as ‘good at sport’ and look at the ways in which this identity was both shifting and relational in the context of their peer and schooling interactions. The findings suggest that processes of team selection, emphases on performance outputs and ongoing expectations of fixed athletic development were all particularly relevant to girls’ sporting identities and participation both in and out of school.

Fitness, fatness and healthism discourse: girls constructing ‘healthy’ identities in school

ABSTRACT Drawing on longitudinal, qualitative research into girls’ participation in physical activity and sport in the UK, this article will explore girls’ embodied constructions of ‘healthy’ identities. My research with girls (aged 10–13) found that over the transition to secondary school, classed and gendered healthism discourses had come to powerfully frame girls’ sports participation by condoning the achievement of slender embodied femininities through physical activity. The findings suggest that while neoliberal indictments of self-care through physical activity can usefully frame girls’ individual ‘body projects’, these discourses also contribute to a hierarchisation of bodies within physical activity settings and to increasingly narrow standards of acceptable bodies able to take part in physical activity. Within the article, I consider how healthism discourses both regulate and are resisted by the girls as they work to construct physical identities within their school settings.

Risk, choice and social disadvantage: Young people’s decision-making in a marketised higher education system

Rising tuition fees in England have been accompanied by a policy mandate for universities to widen participation by attracting students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This article focuses on one such group of high achieving students and their responses to rising tuition fees within the context of their participation in an outreach scheme at a research-intensive university in the UK. Our findings suggest that rather than being deterred from attending university as a result of fee increases, these young people demonstrated a detailed and fairly sophisticated understanding of higher education provision as a stratified and marketised system and justified fees within a discourse of ‘private good.’ Our analysis situates their ‘risk’ responses within the discursive tensions of the fees/widening participation mandate. We suggest that this tension highlights an intensified commodification of the relationship between higher education institutions and potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds in which widening participation agendas have shifted towards recruitment exercises. We argue that an ongoing effect of this shift has resulted in increased instrumentalism and a narrowing of choices for young people faced with the task of seeking out ‘value for money’ in their degrees whilst concurrently engaging in a number of personalised strategies aimed at compensating for social disadvantage in a system beset by structural inequalities.