Free, online games tailored specifically for girls have carved out a burgeoning niche in a marketplace that has traditionally catered to the interests of boys. However, girls' games may have a negative impact not only on girls' perceptions of their gendered roles in society, but also on their attitudes towards their future career choices. Using…

Through language, children participate actively in the construction of meanings around sexuality, which is governed unequally according to gender. This article examines the articulation of the social constructions of sexuality and gender with the pictorial and narrative representations of boys and girls from 9 to 11 years of age from four public…

The past two decades has seen widespread academic and public concern about boys' academic achievement and the emergence of discourses that identify girls as academic 'winners' in the primary classroom; however, this article aims to problematise these trends. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in a primary school classroom in London, this…

This article explores how academics with caring responsibilities negotiate the mobility imperative, with specific reference to attending conferences. We argue that, in the neoliberal and 'careless' context of higher education, negotiating conflicting identities of academic and carer are fraught with tensions for carers as they try to reconcile the…

This article explores how schools define situations in which students have been exposed to violence at school. The purpose of the study is to explore and investigate whether and how school violence is gendered and whether acts of violence are being coded as either masculine or feminine. The data were gathered at Swedish secondary schools. The…

Given the growing interest and representation of superheroes in comics and other media, we are interested in the ways young people read superhero texts and how those readings influence their conceptualisations of gender within and outside educational spaces. In this article we explore students' responses to (re)presentations of gender in superhero…

This article reports results of an ethnographic study of how girls are positioned, and position themselves, in relation to gender regimes in three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary education: Restaurant Management & Food, Health & Social Care, and Vehicle & Transport. The comparison shows that there are different…

This paper describes research exploring discursive constructions of gender and discursive/material intra-actions in two PreK classrooms in the United States, specifically through documentation of children's play. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, the research illustrates ways in which children are subjected through performative iterations…

This paper concerns physicality and the tendency to operate within bounds of familiar repertoires of embodiment. It questions the degree to which habitual ways in which we pose, repose, and action our bodies are authentic as opposed to constructed artifacts of our enculturation. With reference to notions of 'neutrality' as raised in Lecoq training…

This article describes a study of selfies posted on Instagram by a group of predominantly white, college women at a large public university in the US South. Selfies are used as data to explore how performances of traditional femininity are legitimated, authorized, and reinscribed through photo-posting practices. The authors argue that these…

In educational research, girls are frequently depicted as success stories, able to effortlessly navigate academic excellence as empowered females. However, these depictions lack nuance and often fail to capture the complexity of young women's experiences as they shift from compulsory schooling into higher education. Using a methodology of…

In recent educational discourse, public schools can be seen as sites of feminine power, as the majority of teachers are female and some gains have been made in girls' school achievement. However, some theorists argue that schools are too feminine, and thus boys' achievement is at risk. This article refutes this claim, and shows that schools are…

For this study, Swedish upper secondary schoolteacher students were interviewed about their experiences and perceptions of teacher work in light of the traditional gendered division of labor in teaching. While female teaching has been signified by caring work, male teaching has been signified by distant teacher-pupil relations and the use of…

This study assesses the effect of secondary schools' sex-composition on boys' and girls' felt pressure for gender-conformity. Whereas gender-conformity pressure affects adolescents' well-being, little large-scale research examines school features' influence. Multilevel-analyses are conducted on representative Flemish data of first grade students,…

Gender-normative discursive representations in textbooks could have deleterious impacts on pupils' gender identity development. This study sets out to explore the discursive construction of femininity and masculinity in anthology textbooks for primary education and scrutinize children's sense-making of gender-normative discourses. Grounded in a…