Making meaning of gender-based violence: Elite subjectivity and gender performance in a Canadian private school

School-related gender-based violence is a global epidemic that affects students at all levels of public and private education. The study outlined in this dissertation started from a need to understand the scope of sexual harassment and sexism in schools to support my daughter through her experience of gender-based violence. Situated in an elite, Canadian private school, in the heart of a large urban city in Southern Ontario, this five-month study examines how “smart” Grade 7 and 8 Oak Lane Academy students make meaning of gender-based violence. I articulate what it means to “become” elite, and how smart and elite subjectivity was not the same for all students in a place committed to gender equity. In theorizing the ethnographic experience through a feminist poststructural lens, I was able to question normative gender discourses and assumptions by observing student performances of masculinity and femininity, which revealed a deeper understanding of the cultural narratives and social practices of the school. I illustrate how “boys” received privileges that were not afforded to “girls,” reinforcing patriarchal ideologies of entitlement, superiority, and hegemonic masculinity. I also address the hidden curriculum as a mechanism for maintaining dominant gender discourses, which enforced gender inequality and set the conditions for gender-based violence to exist and persist. In particular, I highlight symbolic violence as the seed of larger systemic violence. In the process of conducting classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups, I was able to look closely at what it means to be “a boy” and “a girl” at Oak Lane Academy, which perpetuated male privilege. Transitioning from subjectivity to relationality, I apply these meanings to demonstrate how students embodied and enacted masculinity and femininity, directly impacting how they navigated, negotiated, resisted, and redefined peer relationships and understood love. Lastly, I illustrate the implicit and explicit ways the Grade 7 and 8 students engaged in “play” through games and game-like behaviour inside and outside of the classroom. The implications of these findings offer new understandings of school policies and procedures, curriculum, pedagogy, and the curricular spaces in which students learn in order to more effectively address school-related gender-based violence.

Department dc:contributor.department

Philosophy

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Scheepstra, Traci Laine

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén

• curriculum
• elite-schools
• feminist-poststructuralism
• gender-based-violence
• gender-discourses
• relationships

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/92125

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/92125