ABSTRACT
Research has pointed at music as an important feature of teenagers’ everyday life, especially when it comes to identity construction. Persson argues that this assumption in fact blurs the picture, hiding students’ complex interactions in which other aspects could be at stake as much as music, even in a classroom in a so-called music-profiled school. In this chapter, the author shows how different positions regarding general themes such as conformity/rebelliousness, seriousness/humour, uncertainty/confidence, and emotionality/rationality are at stake for the students. A detailed reading, using methodology from conversation analysis and discursive psychology, shows how different rhetorical resources are available to accomplish attractive positions and how this affects the students’ possibilities for engaging in musical activities in the classroom. The rhetorical resources and the positions are finally discussed in the light of research showing how these resources in different contexts are being used to express femininity and masculinity. The author argues that close attention to the students’ positioning could be fruitful in opening the possibility for the teacher to achieve greater social inclusion among highly motivated students where competition is an important feature.
