ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the processes behind disaffection and how young people practiced and 'worked out' their social relationships with peers and adults. In terms of behaviour, research shows that groups of boys and girls have contrasting ways of expressing disaffection and acting upon different values and pursue divergent goals. The working of disaffection as a power relation incorporated compulsory heterosexuality which was a norm exercised with both girls and boys. In a Technology lesson later in the day taken by a strict male teacher, her disaffection manifested itself through non-participation. While sexuality is anchored to disaffection in the instances, the power with which it is involved comes from and exists everywhere in the school world. The point therefore is not the invisibility of girls in disaffection but of the wider alternative network of responses through which girls navigate the social terrain. Disaffection functioned in part through gender relations and was enacted and sustained through talk.