Discourse and disadvantage: 

Studying the gender dimensions of educational disadvantage







Rob Gilbert and Pam Gilbert

School of Education

James Cook University of North Queensland

















Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Australian Association 
for Research in Education, Newcastle, November 1994.

Discourse and disadvantage: 
Studying the gender dimensions of educational disadvantage

This paper argues that the concept of discourse offers productive ways 
of understanding the process of disadvantage in education.  The 
discussion reviews conventional approaches to the study of educational 
disadvantage, and points out important inadequacies in their approach, 
especially in their neglect of the concept of difference.  It then 
shows how a concept of discourse offers perspectives on disadvantage 
which go some way to resolving the conventional difficulties.  

The argument is illustrated in evidence gathered in a research project 
on gender and educational disadvantage (Gilbert, P., Gilbert, R. and 
McGinty, S., 1994).  The project, conducted on behalf of the 
Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training as part 
of their program in Gender Equity in Curriculum Reform focused on the 
way in which various forms of educational disadvantage and risk are 
experienced by girls, and compounded or modified in the discourses of 
femininity/masculinity which define family, school and other social 
relations. 

Identifying and analysing disadvantage

The standard approach to this issue is to identify indicators of 
disadvantage applying to groups defined by some characteristic of the 
students or their social or cultural location, and to measure the 
success of these groups in terms of access, retention, participation 

and attainment.  For instance, Mortimore and Blackstone (1982) list 
three overlapping groups identified by forms of disadvantage:

¥those denied access to educational opportunity in terms of type of 
school, resources, teachers, or curriculum (such as girls' access to 
non-traditional subjects, courses or careers);

¥those who, despite performing well in school, leave at the earliest 
opportunity Ñ the issue of retention rates;

¥those who underachieve or who perform less well than they might 
because a variety of social and environmental factors result in their 
being unable to take full advantage of educational opportunities. 

A similar approach is taken in the National Action Plan for the 
Education of Girls, which aims to 'create and refine processes which 
ensure equal educational outcomes for girls and boys' (AEC, 1993, p. 
vii), and specifies a series of system level indicators as criteria of 
the plan's success in the various priority areas.  These include 
indicators that the policy is being implemented in school provision, 
organisation, staffing, etc., as well as indicators of the intended 
outcomes for girls which the policy is meant to produce (with more of 
the former than the latter).  


Student outcome indicators are listed in the following priority areas: 

(a) 'Improving the educational outcomes of girls who benefit least from 
schooling', (Aboriginal (sic) and Torres Strait Islanders, girls from 
non-English speaking background, girls who have a disability, who live 
in rural and remote areas, or who live in poverty), where among the 
system level indicators are 'retention rates and attainment levels over 
time by group' (p. 17).

(b) 'Reforming the curriculum', where 'Participation rates and 
attainment levels over time of girls and boys, by group, across the 
curriculum' is an indicator.

(c) 'Broadening work education', which includes 'Participation rates or 
school leavers, over time, in entry-level employment, further education 
and training, by group' and 'The attainment levels of girls and boys in 
relation to key employment-related competencies'.

Access, retention, participation and attainment are the chief focii of 
the policy, and are clearly centrally important in assessing the 
effectiveness of schooling for any group.  However, while such an 
approach is an important way of demonstrating the existence of 
disadvantage, it offers few insights into how this disadvantage 
operates.  In fact, when applied to the performance of social groups 
defined by race, class or gender, the group indicator approach can be a 
definite barrier to understanding, for three main reasons:

¥it can disguise the complexity of intragroup and individual experience 
by focusing on potentially stereotyped group characteristics, 
¥it can be seen to blame school failure on some kind of group pathology 
rather than on the relationships among family, group culture, social 
and economic conditions and the school,
¥it rests on an explanatory model which fails to deal directly with 
practice in a way which is oriented to action,
¥it ignores the subjective concomitants of disadvantage Ñ how girls 
make sense of and respond to the exclusions, domination and constraints 
which constitute disadvantage.


Each of these issues will be discussed in turn.

Group definition

The first difficulty with the group indicator approach is connected 
with the tendency to deal with groups defined by a single criterion.  A 
number of problems arises here, the main one being the dangers of 
essentialism and stereotyping of the defining characteristic.  For 
instance, culture and ethnicity can be taken to be determined by birth, 
rather than differently constructed through life in a variety of 
contexts and with a variety of results.  Stereotypes become the first 
resort in decisions about 'minority groups' and 'race and ethnicity 
become something only minority groups have' (Pettman, 1992, p. 13).  

A second problem is the neglect of diversity within groups.  For 
example, a focus on a single factor like non-English speaking 
background overlooks the diversity within this category, in which the 
relative success of some NESB groups may disguise the disadvantage of 
others (Kalantzis and Cope, 1988).  

Further, defining groups in this way gives no guidance on how the 
defining characteristics relate to each other, and can in fact erase 
certain groups from attention.  For instance, when people speak of 
racism, they may think first and predominantly of black men; when they 
speak of sexism, they may think of white women.  The consequence is the 
erasure of black women. 

Aboriginal women, for example, experience sexism in some ways 
differently from other Australian women, and racism in some ways 
differently from Aboriginal men; and they also experience sexism and 
racism differently according to their class and job, dependence on 
welfare, age, disability, sexuality and so on. (Pettman, 1992, p.55)

When the starting point for thinking about disadvantage is a set of 
groups defined by  single criteria, the way these forms of disadvantage 
are related in real social contexts is not adequately considered, and 
must then be brought together, usually in some simple additive model.  
Further, this model of disadvantage is typically institutionalised 
through funding programs, staffing and school administrative practice, 
creating additional problems of how the complex connections among the 
forms of disadvantage can be dealt with.

Group pathology

Definition in terms of class or cultural or gender group can focus 
attention exclusively on the group Ñ the 'blame the victim' syndrome.  
A typical example is offered by Byrne (1985), who believes that a 
concentration on group indices has sustained stereotypes of, for 
instance, the working class family defined by father's occupation which 
is unwilling or unable to support their child's education.  Byrne 
argues that this ignores the frequent working class commitment to 
education, and perhaps more significantly the role of the mother in 
contributing to the educational aspects of the home environment .

In pointing to the diversity of levels of performance among ethnic 
minority groups, Kalantzis and Cope (1988) warn that:

It is critical, however, that this phenomenon of uneven distribution is 
not put down to cultural pathology, but to the complex overlay of class 
(homeland and immigrant) and ethnicity, in which, in all probability, 
class is the more critical variable, albeit frequently expressed 

through cultural-ethnic identity and aspirations. (p. 48)

A parallel problem is that a focus on cultural difference among 
minority groups can distract attention from problems such groups face 
in the wider community, racism and sexism being obvious examples.  It 
may be difficult for school personnel, however enlightened, to 
comprehend the extent of racism or sexism in the community, and the 
impact this might have on the school related attitudes and 
relationships among girls.  This is not to suggest that schools are 
free of racism or sexism themselves, for schools will reflect the mores 
and practices of their society.  Rather, it is to suggest that the 
school is not sealed off from the relationships its students have 
beyond the school walls, which are part of the experience from which 
they interpret and respond to schooling.

Another relevant point here is that an analysis restricted to the 
relationships between groups and school indicators can overlook wider 
social and economic conditions, conditions which if taken into account 
may show matters in a different light.  Kalantzis and Cope (1988) argue 
for instance that using school retention as a measure is not 
necessarily an indication of success or satisfaction, since school 
retention rates, which may be high in a period of high unemployment, 
disguise HSC results and university entrance, where inequalities for 
non-English speaking and working class students become serious.

The tendency to pathologise difference makes the term 'disadvantaged' 
itself problematic, as it carries patronising connotations, and can 
distract from the faults of the system which produces the disadvantage. 
For instance, many Aboriginal people see the label 'disadvantaged' as a 
distraction from the reality that they have been systematically 
dispossessed, and argue that what they need is not welfare policies to 
ameliorate their disadvantage, but the handing over (back) of the 
entitlements which are their right. 

Disadvantage also carries a stigma.  Almost none of the girls 
interviewed in the project reported in this paper identify themselves 
as disadvantaged, and the term (and the compensatory policies which it 
implies) fails to acknowledge the strengths and resources (usually 
personal or derived from social networks) which the girls use to cope 
and sometimes succeed in dealing with schooling. 


Explanatory models

 Models used to explain how the forms of disadvantage combine tend to 
mathematical and spatial metaphors, the most obvious being the additive 
model, where the effects of class are seen to be added to those of race 
and then gender (Pettman, 1992, p. 55).    Another metaphor is Fine's 
(1991, p. 119) suggestion that the separate elements of disadvantage 
can be seen to be 'braided' together, forming a  single strand.

The most common model used in depicting this issue is the 'dimensions 
metaphor'.  Here, the defining group characteristics become dimensions 
in space, which are seen to 'intersect' or 'interact' in particular 
locations, biographies, events. Like the other physical metaphors, this 
is an abstract, deterministic and static model, and cannot reflect the 
processes of change, conflict and negotiation which characterise the 
way disadvantage occurs in particular social practices and sites.  Nor 
does it consider the way disadvantage is discursively constructed as an 
experience by those who suffer it.  We need a more contextualised and 
dynamic notion if it is to be useful for understanding processes of 
disadvantage in particular contexts in a way which will help in making 

decisions in educational practice. 

Practices, discourses and experiences cannot adequately be abstracted 
from the material circumstances and historical junctures in which they 
occur; analysis cannot assume a predetermined framework which can 
simply be applied to any situation.  Understanding must be specific to 
each situation, testing the relevance of general concepts for 
particular people, times and places, tracing the terms on which social 
relationships are negotiated and the discourses through which they are 
constructed .

A common call in recent times has been to acknowledge difference and 
change rather than group identity as the predominant feature of people 
and their experiences.  In particular, this perspective rejects notions 
of objective human interest, abstract concepts of morality, and 
universal modes of reasoning as guarantees of justice, arguing that 
they lead to exclusionist ideas of justice and how it might be 
achieved, giving insufficient weight to the experience of inequality as 
expressed by those who suffer it, and imposing generalised strategies 
where flexibility and responsiveness are needed.

A difficulty here is how to avoid the extension of difference to 
individualism. There is in Australian schooling (and elsewhere) a 
strong ethic and ideology of individualism, and to say that all 
students are disadvantaged differently, or that forms of disadvantage 
combine uniquely for each student, is simply to invite the inadequacies 
of individualism in dealing with this problem.  Constraints and the 
processes of exclusion and alienation are not randomly distributed, but 
are institutionalised in historically reproduced sets of relationships, 
producing patterns of inequality and disadvantage which need to be 
understood in any realistic attempt to improve educational outcomes for 
disadvantaged groups.

Pettman (1992) balances the competing perspectives of recognising 
structures and patterns of relationships on the one hand, and 
acknowledging diversity and difference on the other, when she argues 
the need to 

contest the 'naturalisation' of categories and boundaries, especially 
those imposed on subordinate groups, without denying the validity of 
identities based on shared experiences and common social location.      
   (p. 127)

Individualism and infinite difference cannot sustain any form of social 
project, for the problems of disadvantage, and in this case of sexist 
practices, are matters of social relationships.  Equally, ideals of 
equality grow out of some general notion of just social relationships 
and shared values.  However, the ideal grounds for these just 
relationships cannot be identified by abstract rationalism.  The 
necessary balance is illustrated in Benhabib's goal 'to situate reason 
and the moral self more decisively in contexts of gender and community, 
while insisting upon the discursive power of individuals to challenge 
such situatedness in the name of universalistic principles, future 
identities and as yet undiscovered communities' (Benhabib, 1992, p. 8).

Discourse, disadvantage and subjectivity

The discussion so far has argued that the focus on abstract notions of 
group difference, the group indicator approach to disadvantage, and the 
dimensions model of how forms of disadvantage combine, are not helpful 
in understanding the processes by which disadvantage operates in school 
contexts.  We need an approach which is sensitive to aspects of 

disadvantage beyond the indicators, and to the negotiation and 
construction of experience in particular sites.  Such an approach must 
try to take the standpoint of the girls themselves, for only in this 
way can we arrive at a concept of disadvantage broad yet specific 
enough to understand how the group characteristics and outcome criteria 
are manifest in the lived experience of girls themselves.

Take for example the three forms of disadvantage listed above from the 
analysis of educational disadvantage by Mortimore and Blackstone 
(1982).  They include those students who are denied access to quality 
education, those who leave early, and those who underachieve because 
social and environmental factors prevent them from taking advantage of 
educational opportunities.  

But why does the list exclude those who underachieve or who perform 
less well than they might because of the social dynamics of the school 
itself, including those flowing from the construction of gender?  And 
should we not also add those who, irrespective of, or indeed as part of 
their academic performance, learn and come to accept a social 
positioning which reduces the potential power of their learning?  
Objective indicators of success in terms of access, retention and 
attainment cannot grasp the subjective experience which goes along with 
them, and which is crucial in understanding the subsequent effects of 
the indicated outcomes on the life chances and life choices of girls.

These points are important in understanding the full force of gender 
disadvantage, and it is in these respects that the concept of 
disadvantage needs to be expanded.  Access, participation and even 
achievement may count for little if girls are at the same time learning 
to accept positions in the gendered construction of social space which 
disempower them, which prevent them from using their learning in 
socially powerful ways.  These questions may be crucial to 
understanding how, despite obvious improvements in access, retention 
and achievement, there are still areas of the curriculum where success 
is predominantly a male preserve, and why improvements in school 
retention and achievement are not producing corresponding changes in 
the place of women in powerful positions in society at large. (Yates, 
1993)

Discourse and the study of educational disadvantage

Arguments similar to this have been made by Iris Young (1990), who 
claims that contemporary theories of justice are dominated by a 
distributive paradigm, which tends to focus on the possession of 
material goods and social positions.  Young argues that

Serious conceptual confusion results, however, from attempting to 
extend the concept of distribution beyond material goods to phenomena 
such as power and opportunity.  The logic of distibution treats 
nonmaterial goods as identifiable things or bundles distributed in a 
static pattern among identifiable, separate individuals.  The 
reification, individualism, and pattern orientation assumed in the 
distributive paradigm, moreover, often obscure issues of domination and 
oppression, which require a more process-oriented and relational 
conceptualization.
Young, 1990, p. 8.

Young continues by arguing that the concept of distribution should be 
limited to material goods, and that other important aspects of justice 
include decision-making procedures, the social division of labour, and 
culture.  It is clear that these aspects of justice, which Young labels 
nonmaterial, include many of the elements of the concept of gender and 

gender relations.  In such areas, Young argues that oppression and 
domination should be the primary terms for conceptualising injustice, 
and that this involves identifying five aspects: exploitation, 
marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.  

Young's characterisation of oppression as nonmaterial is highly 
questionable in light of materialist approaches to language and meaning 
(Coward and Ellis, 1977).  However, it is true that many aspects of 
domination, exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural 
imperialism and violence take forms that are not amenable to 
distributional analysis on the kind of group basis outlined above.  
Young's emphasis on a process-orientated and relational approach is an 
important one, and one for which the concept of  discourse is very well 
suited.

The need for such an approach to the process and relations of gender 
disadvantage are also apparent in Harding's (1986) analysis of the 
three elements of gender.  Harding describes gender as a fundamental 
category through which meaning is ascribed to everything, a way of 
organising social relations, and a structure of personal identity.  The 
combination of categories of meaning, social relations and personal 
identity is the classic triad of the concept of discourse.

As used here, the term discourse refers to the practices through which 
people use symbol systems such as language in their everyday activities 
and interactions, and how these systems produce, organise and constrain 
these practices.  Discourse analysis consists of those research methods 
and theoretical frameworks which try to comprehend these practices and 
relationships.  The special focus of discourse analysis is the 
connections among meaning, social practices and social relationships.  
Put another way, discourse analysis studies how the things we do and 
the patterns of events of everyday life are related to the ways in 
which those actions and events are represented.

These systems of discourse work in a variety of ways to provide: 
1the meanings through which the world is represented for us;
2the practices in which this process of representation connects with 
social relations, including
(a)the expectations, rules and conventions by which we interact with 
each other in particular situations; and
(b)structured patterns of discursive practice which reproduce meanings 
and social relations over time as institutionalised practices;
3the categories and distinctions by which we construct our identities 
as thinking, feeling individuals Ñ our subjectivity.

In studying educational disadvantage in schools, we need to recognise 
that schools are sites in which social relations and people's senses of 
themselves are constructed in a range of discourses and other 
environmental conditions which are already there.  Life in schools is a 
constant process of negotiating these relationships and constructing 
experience in the circumstances, discourses and other resources 
available to members.  The negotiations produce pathways among the 
range of possible relationships, and the person's experiences and sense 
of self are constructed in the process.  The diversity of discourses 
and contexts means that the terms within which one operates and the 
senses of self constructed in the process are also diverse, and usually 
contradictory.

Such an approach would focus attention on the meanings girls attribute 
to the processes of schooling; how these processes relate to their 
developing sense of selves; how the various group characterisations and 
the outcomes criteria  are experienced and made sense of by the girls 

themselves; how they are woven into the stories girls and others 
construct to interpret present experience and its significance for 
their futures; how these stories form a base from which girls construct 
their sense of themselves, and present and project this sense into 
their developing relationships with others.


Gender positioning in school sites

In patriarchal societies we cannot escape the implications of 
femininity.  Everything we do signifies compliance or resistance to 
dominant norms of what it is to be a woman....
(Weedon, 1987, pp.86-7)

Any discussion of the impact and influence of gender on secondary 
school practices needs to acknowledge Weedon's warning: there is no 
un-gendered space for young women to occupy in school sites.  Their 
words, their actions, their bodies, their relationships are read by 
their teachers and other students (both female and male students) not 
as the words, actions, bodies, and relationships of an un-marked 
category of  'secondary student',  but as that of women - and of 
"women" as women are constructed within a patriarchal society (see, for 
instance, Lees, 1993).  Policy documents or educational practices that 
talk about ungendered student categories, or about treating boys and 
girls all alike, miss this important divide.  Those who talk about 
students as a generic ungendered category will simply not be able to 
see the gender significance of what is going on.  We need to talk about 
women and men students - not to assume that women or men students are 
homogeneous groups of subjects, but to mark out how readings of gender 
provide one of the most important ways in which meanings are attributed 
to social practice. This initial reframing of secondary school 
discourses to encompass gender constructed difference must precede any 
analysis of the impact of gender upon schooling.

Teenage schoolgirls read their own lives, and in turn are read by their 
teachers, their male classmates, and other female classmates, in terms 
of available and accessible discourses on femininity (Roman and 
Christian-Smith, 1989; Gilbert and Taylor, 1991). The "women" that 
teenage girls can be - the range of subject positions available - is 
circumscribed by these discourses, and different school institutions 
will allow for and support the circulation of different discourses on 
femininity.  There are many ways of living out life as a woman, and 
religion, class, and privilege will clearly impact upon the 
construction of gender in secondary schools (see Lesko, 1988; Kenway 
and Willis, 1990).  

Teenage girls are also encouraged to make readings of femininity 
through their families, their peer groups, and media constructions of 
gender (Christian-Smith (ed), 1993).  The family site emerges as 
central in the early formulation of legitimate femininity for young 
women, and is potentially very narrowing.  As Weedon (1987, p. 100) 
warns, 'the way in which gender is understood and acted upon in the 
context of the nuclear family is central to the reproduction of the 
sexual division of labour and current norms of femininity and 
masculinity'.

The stories by which most young women initially come to make sense of 
their lives are stories that circulate within the discourses of the 
family.  Family stories are also read alongside the stories about women 
and men circulating in the media - stories which are far from 
gender-neutral.  While the stories that predominate in the popular 
culture of teenage young women, and in their homes, their churches and 

their schools, offer various readings of femininity - and various ways 
of living out femininity - the important issue is that gender is always 
there (Roman and Christian-Smith, 1989; Gilbert and Taylor, 1991).  The 
social construction of femininity, albeit in different forms, still 
lies at the centre of the construction of the social subject (Davies, 
1993).

The version of femininity which predominates in primary school years is 
clearly the version which reads little girls as "schoolgirls": 
well-behaved, clean, neat, uniformed, obedient, docile and a-sexual 
female subjects whose feminine bodies and faces are hidden underneath 
pinafores and bloomers, or masked by plaits, braids and scrubbed-clean 
faces (Walkerdine, 1990).  The good little girl-child construct can 
easily be accommodated within the good little schoolgirl construct. The 
compliant female child who has learnt to share, co-operate, act 
dutifully, and give way to boys, fits easily into the primary school 
classroom site.  Being a "schoolgirl" within this construction is 
likely to bring rewards in terms of school achievement, teacher favour, 
and family pride.  Because the sexuality of the girl-child is masked by 
the protective discourse of childhood, the schoolgirl construct can be 
accommodated within discourses of childhood much more readily than can 
the schoolboy construct.  

However the shift from schoolgirl to woman - to sexual female subject - 
introduces dynamics that completely alter this balance and this reading 
(see Mikel Brown and Gilligan, 1993; Moore and Rosenthal, 1993).  The 
schoolgirl who menstruates, or the schoolgirl who has breasts, can no 
longer be read as child.  And the schoolgirl who laughs at - or retells 
- sexy jokes, or the schoolgirl who kisses schoolboys on class camps, 
is no longer an ungendered child.  The schoolgirl now has to be read as 
a woman, and yet she is a woman in a social institution which is not 
organised or structured as a site for adults, particularly in terms of 
sexuality.  

Most noticeably, the schoolgirl is likely to have school toilet and 
menstruating facilities that a woman would find demeaning and 
unacceptable.  The schoolgirl is likely to have to live with a constant 
stream of sexual harassment (often ignored and treated as "schooling as 
usual" by administrators and teachers) that would be frustrating as 
well as frightening for an adult woman (Lees, 1993).  She daily lives 
out her life before her male and female peers and her male and female 
teachers as a gendered social subject: as one who menstruates, as one 
who can be raped, as one whose body can be the constant object of the 
male gaze.   And yet this seems to happen in a vacuum, unacknowledged.  
The schoolgirl's gendered being is made invisible within the school, 
because the school site has difficulties in dealing with a sexual 
subject within its institutional practices.

How does the 'schoolgirl' now read her new position as gendered sexual 
subject: as woman?  We have argued that girls seek out stories by which 
to make sense of, and to order, their worlds, stories constructed in 
and from the available discourses.  Some are more accessible than 
others, particularly the discourses of femininity which dominate in 
popular culture.  Some stories are brought to life within particular 
institutions - as in various religious institutions, or particular 
schooling systems, or types of family settings, or cultural groups.  
One of the dominant discourses which holds femininity in place is the 
romantic storyline: the storyline which offers heterosexual love, 
marriage and childbirth as seductive reward for becoming feminine (see 
Gilbert and Taylor, 1991).  

The feminine/romantic woman recognises that she needs to support the 

autonomous/masculine man if romance and its seductive desires are to be 
fulfilled.  Female career achievement, female intelligence, female 
ambition will then need to be read in terms of supporting, rather than 
challenging or in competition with, masculine career achievement, 
intelligence, ambition.  The woman who follows this storyline will make 
various choices about how she wants to be read as a gendered "feminine" 
woman.  She will read her own ambition and drive to succeed in terms of 
maintaining her own acceptability as a woman within this hierarchical 
construction of gender relations (see Davies, 1993).  

This discursive construction is in potential conflict with school 
discourses which recognise achievement and success without 
acknowledging the gendered construction of such concepts, and which 
also read school pupils as ungendered social subjects severed from 
their discursive social networks with their gendered relationships and 
pervasive sexuality.  The schoolgirl/woman is faced with choices once 
she is read as a sexual social subject.  She can stay on her 
'schoolgirl' line of accommodation, and become one of Walker's 
"accommodators" (Walker, 1985), or she can resist being positioned as a 
child and take up a position as woman within school institutional 
practices.  As a woman, however, she is a challenge and threat to the 
school both as a sexual subject, and as an adult subject.  Dependent 
upon the readings of femininity circulating in the site within which 
she now has to operate, and dependent upon her own discursive history 
as a gendered social subject (through class, ethnicity, school-defined 
achievement), she must take up a position from which to operate.  

She might choose to resist the readings of femininity available within 
the school context: to rail against sexual harassment and denigration.  
However this may be unwelcome within the school site,  where practices 
that recognise and assert the status of women are unlikely to be in 
place, and where the versions of femininity that predominate may read 
her behaviour as that of a woman who doesn't know her place.  The irony 
is that once girls' practices indicate that they want to be treated as 
adults - that they are adult and therefore sexual subjects - the school 
is likely to import negative moralistic judgements about uppity women 
who do not know their place within the patriarchal order.

The schoolgirl might also choose - again dependent upon her discursive 
history of perceptions of workable alternatives - to take up the sexual 
subjectivity offered: to join in to the form of gender relations she 
perceives to be on offer.  This might mean accepting a position as the 
sexual, gendered body that gives pleasure to men and only has a 
validity if it can attract men.  Given versions of femininity on offer 
through the family, the church, and the media, this might well be seen 
as a socially condoned position to occupy.  But again the school is 
likely to import negative moralistic judgements about promiscuity and 
visible female sexuality and to read schoolgirls who take up this 
position as potential sluts and whores.  Young women need to negotiate 
this accommodation very carefully, if they are not to be positioned as 
promiscuous. (See Gilbert, P. and Gilbert, R., 1994a)

The romantic discourse and storyline must also introduce various 
tensions for young women in terms of home and ethnic backgrounds, where 
the mythology of the romantic heterosexual marriage and family jars 
with lived family realities, cultures, crises. (See Gilbert, P. and 
Gilbert, R., 1994b)  Given the pervasiveness of constructions of 
Western female beauty, Western nuclear families, and Western gender 
relations through the popular media, there is potentially a disjuncture 
between the cultures of communities and the culture of the school in 
terms of versions of femininity on offer.  The community culture may 
make it difficult for young women to find any of the positions of 

femininity on offer acceptable.  They may be forced into the compliant 
schoolgirl position because it accommodates rather than challenges the 
school institution.  


Conclusion

The operation of the dimensions of disadvantage needs to be seen as a 
process of production of discursive positions and material 
circumstances.  Given the diversity, contradiction and change which 
characterise this process, the construction of subjectivity and the 
negotiation of resources, relationships and personal situation is 
inherently diverse for each individual.  However, the challenges 
individuals face, the discourses with which they interpret and 
construct them, and the resources they use in the process are not 
infinite and random, but are to a significant extent systematically 
patterned.  

Confronting sexuality is a challenge all girls face, however different 
its cultural and other variants might make it; dominant media images 
are presented to girls as a group, however differently placed they are 
in their reading of them; exclusions, domination and constraints 
arising from racism, isolation, and disability are widespread, however 
much local and individual circumstances might ameliorate them; regional 
economies differ in the opportunities they offer, affecting the life 
chances of whole communities of young people. In no context is this 
system of exclusion, domination and constraint more apparent than that 
of the construction of gender and its impact on the school careers of 
girls.  To consider the processes of disadvantage girls without 
acknowledging these patterns is futile.

Equally, to try to analyse these processes through a static group 
analysis, or by focusing on distributional questions alone, loses sight 
of the meanings and relations which are central to the practices which 
produce the group differences and the distributional inequalities.  A 
discourse approach which connects the elements of meaning, social 
relations and subjectivity provides a crucial perspective on the 
practices of gender disadvantage in education.


References

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