ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon ethnographic research with 83 young, white, working class women, aged seventeen to eighteen, on ‘caring’ courses, conducted over a period of 3 years in a Northern college of Further Education.1
Although the arguments are generated through further education, they may be valid across other sites of education. The chapter is divided into three sections; section one examines how discourses of familialism, biological reproduction and hygiene, contribute towards the institutionalisation and normalisation of masculinity by framing the organisation and experience of education. Section two examines how sexuality is ubiquitous in classroom interaction.2 Whilst flirting and fantasy are used as compensatory tactics to enable students to ameliorate the daily humiliations of sexism, female students are able to draw upon sexuality as a tactical resource to challenge directly the legitimacy of masculine regulative power.3 These challenges are analysed in the third section where the students are shown, through the recognition that they give legitimacy and consent to masculinity, to move into the form of what Giddens (1979) describes as discursive consciousness. Their knowledge of masculinity enables them to subvert strategies of masculine regulation. However, this subversion is contained by their class location as it is not carried across to other sites where economic and cultural security could be jeopardised.
