ABSTRACT

Introduction This chapter attempts to demonstrate that contemporary gendered power relations are more complicated and contradictory than any simplistic binary discourse of ‘the girls versus the boys’ suggests (Heath, 1999). Although prevailing dominant discourses identify girls as ‘the success story of the 1990s’ (Wilkinson, 1994), this small-scale study of a group of 7 year-old girls attending an inner London primary school suggests that, particularly when the focus is on the construction of heterosexual femininities, it is perhaps premature always to assume that ‘girls are doing better than boys’. While girls may be doing better than boys in examinations, this chapter indicates that their learning in the classroom is much broader than the National Curriculum and includes aspects that are less favourable in relation to gender equity. Although masculinities are touched on in this article, this is only in as far as they relate to girls. This deliberate bias is an attempt to refocus on femininities at a time when masculinities appear to be an ever-growing preoccupation within education.