Gender Regulation, Violence and Social Hierarchies in School

"Victoria Rawlings' sharp analysis captures the critical aspect of bullying that tends to be overlooked by those who seek to understand the nature of bullying. Rather than focus on insufficient developmental or behavioural theories, Rawlings deftly investigates how discourse, especially of gender and sexuality, gives form to insiders and outsiders among students in schools, as they do in larger society. Rawlings' work is a refreshing and giant step forward on the matter of understanding the persistent and complex problem of bullying." (Gerald Walton, Associate Professor, Lakehead University, Canada) "An important and insightful critique of current approaches to dealing with gender-based aggression in Australian schools. Rawlings argues that 'anti-bullying' approaches, framed in discourses of individual pathologies, will continue to be largely ineffectual in addressing gender-based aggression, and bullying more generally, as they fail to adequately confront the centrality of social, cultural, and institutional factors that underpin these behaviours... a critical reminder that we need to not just look to the contemporary lives of young people to see how gender and power are perceived and negotiated, but also the cultural values of teachers. What is alarming is that many of the cultural discourses held by teachers and students around girls and sexuality, and around masculinity and power, discourses identified as central to gender-based aggression in schools more than three decades ago, continue to be pivotal to the 'everyday' gendered aggression encountered in schools today." (Kerry Robinson, Professor, University of Western Sydney, Australia) "This engaging book offers a timely and very important contribution to work on violence in schools. Through a detailed and nuanced analysis of rich interview data with students and teachers in two high schools in Australia, Rawlings explores the ways that bullying and violence are products of the particular social, cultural and institutional contexts in which they are performed. This much-needed book offers fascinating insights that will be of interest to academics, researchers, teachers and policy-makers." (Carolyn Jackson, Professor, Lancaster University, UK)

This book investigates the reasons why the traditional psychological understanding of bullying fails those affected, and deconstructs how bullying is shaped by prominent discourse.This book investigates the reasons why the traditional psychological understanding of bullying fails those affected, and deconstructs how bullying is shaped by prominent discourse. By drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory Victoria Rawlings highlights the social and cultural inequalities too often forgotten in analysis of aggressive behaviour in schools, and places particular emphasis on gender and sexuality as facilitating and constraining forces within school environments and bullying discourses. This book provides a necessary assessment as to why current anti-bullying approaches are failing, and offers an alternative explanation as to how and why bullying occurs. This is a timely and authoritative study which is based on qualitative research, including interviews and group sessions which are used to emphasize the real-life experiences of young people in schools today. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book has a broad appeal and will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, sociology, and education.