ABSTRACT
Historical legacies of gender and patriarchy continue to influence the lives of young people, yet theplaceswhere theygrowupcanvary the intensity of these effects (McDowell and Massey 1984; Taylor 2012). This paper draws upon ethnographic research which explores young people and place and how such gender legacies continue to play out and affect young teenage girls in a South Wales Valleys’ community.1 General findings from the broader study revealed strong differences in the patterns of corporeal movement between young teen boys and girls inside and outside school (Ivinson 2012, 2013; Renold and Ivinson 2012a, 2012b). An anecdote from our fieldnotes illustrates these differences:
At break-times girls tended to inhabit the school yards surrounding a Victorian building. Whenever we walked through the yard, we passed girls sitting: they sat in groups on stone steps; in corners propped against brick walls and when it rained, they sat directly on the wooden floor of the main hall. Girls sometimes said they feared the gossip flowing between groups while boys told us their greatest fear at break times was that someone would hit them or trip them up. When we walked across the yard used by the boys that flanked a 1960s flat roofed building we had to walk around groups of boys standing together, swerve to dodge boys running or duck to miss a flying football.
