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Constructing andDeconstructingMasculinities throughCritical LiteracyBRONWYN DAVIESPublished online: 02 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: BRONWYN DAVIES (1997) Constructing and DeconstructingMasculinities through Critical Literacy, Gender and Education, 9:1, 9-30, DOI:10.1080/09540259721420

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G ende r and E ducation, V o l. 9 , N o. 1 , pp. 9 ± 3 0 , 1 9 9 7

C onstructing and D econs truc ting M asculinities through C ritical

L iteracy

BRONWYN DAVIES, J am es C ook U nivers ity , A us tralia

ABSTRACT T his pap er is se t out in three parts . T he ® rs t is a theore tical d iscus s ion ab out the w ay s

in w hich w e b ecom e gendered through the particula r discur s ive patterns made availab le to us in our

culture (s) . T he second provides a detailed ana ly s is of a clas sroom in w hich the teache r, M r G ood, is

w orking w ith the b oy s in his c las s to try to ge t them to take them se lves up as literate in w ay s that m ight

m ore usually b e esch ew ed b y b oy s w ho ach ieve hegem onic m asculinity . T he third par t develop s a de ® nition

o f critical literacy that follow s from the ® rs t tw o parts and w hich is relevant to the teaching of literacies

to b oy s .

The Construction of Gender through Discourse

Gender is constructed, through language, as two binary categories hierarchically ar-ranged in relation to each other. This construction operates in a variety of intersectingways, most of which are neither conscious nor intended. They are more like an effect ofwhat we might call speaking-as-usual’ ; they are inherent in the structures of the languageand the storylines through which our culture is constructed and maintained. Thestructure of the language and the dominant storylines combine, with powerful effect, tooperate on our conscious and unconscious minds and to shape our desire. Themale ± female binary is held in place because we come to see it as the way the world is

and therefore ought to beÐ what is constructed as truth becomes an (apparently) absoluteunconstructed truth. Foucault, in analysing this process, coins the term `regime of truth’ .Each society, he says, has:

its regime of truth, its general policies of truth: that is the type of discoursewhich it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instanceswhich enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by whicheach is sanctioned; the technologies and procedures accorded value in theacquisition of truth, the status of those who are charged with saying what istrue. (Foucault, 1980, p. 131)

C orrespondence: Professor Bronwyn Davies, School of Education, James Cook University of North Queensland,Townsville 4811, Australia. Email: Bronwyn.Davies@jcu.edu.au

0954-02 53/97/010009- 26 $7.00 Ó 1997 Journals Oxford Ltd 9

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A particularly powerful regime of truth emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, a time often referred to as the Enlightenment. This new regime of truth caughtus up in the glori® cation of science with its domination of the rational (male) mind over(usually female) matter. In the scienti® c regime of truth there are two sexes. Thedifferences between them are scienti® cally established as absolute, or essential. Thetwo-sex model is one in which each sex takes its meaning in opposition to the other, anydeviations are understood as aberrations, deviations from what is, and what ought to b e .

Enlightenment thought encapsulates much of what is understood as `modernism’ andis also fundamental to `humanism’. Post-modern and post-structuralist discourses takedelight in showing the discursively constructed nature of much that was taken in thesediscourses to be the fundamental unquestionable base on which argument could be builtand truth’ established. Through deconstructing those binaries which form the unques-tioned base of knowledge and re-visioning them as `metaphysical’ , rather than physical,old binaries become multiples, and the human body becomes something capable ofmanifesting itself in any number of ways.

But the concept of sex as not ® xed, and indisputably `opposite’ to the other sex, isdif ® cult to grasp because we have taken up our own physical and psychic being withinregimes of truth that have, as an unexamined base, the male ± female binary. Theevidence of our own minds and bodies tells us that we are indelibly one or the other,shaped and shaping ourselves within a truth which we do not understand as a `regimeof truth’ , but the ® rsthand, unquestionable truth of our own experience.

As Grosz points out, the culture cannot simply be understood as shaping andconstraining individuals from outside themselves. Their patterns of desire, or innerbodies’, are shaped, and in that shaping, come to desire and thus actively create theculture in which they are continuously being inserted, and through which their actionsand desires are read as meaningful.

Within our own culture, the inscription of bodies occurs both violently Ð inprisons, juvenile homes, hospitals, psychiatric institutions [and she might haveadded, schools] Ð keeping the body con® ned, constrained, supervised andregimented;¼ and by les s op enly aggress ive but no less coercive means, throughcultural and personal values, norms and commitments. (Grosz, 1990, p. 65).

The subject is nam ed by being tagged or branded on its surface, creating aparticular kind of `depth-body’ or interiority, a psychic layer the subjectidenti® es as its (disembodied) core. Subjects thus produced are not simply theimposed results of alien, coercive forces; the body is internally lived, experi-enced and acted upon by the subject and the social collectivity. Messages codedinto the body can be `read’ only within a social system of organisation andmeaning. They mark the subject by, and as, a series of signs within thecollectivity of other signs, signs which bear the marks of a particular social lawand organisation, and through a particular constellation of desires and plea-sures. (Grosz, 1990, p. 65)

The active taking up of oneself as male or female, dominant or passive, is a complexprocess that must be understood if we are to recognise and deconstruct the binaries inour own lived experience of them. That is, if we want to read the ways in which theculture inscribes itself on the inner and outer body, and if we want to read against thegrain, that is, discover other than dominant truths embedded in our experience and in

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the possibilities the culture holds open to us, we must look again, and more closely, athow discourse works to shape us as beings within the two-sex model. [1].

There are three stories from my pre-school study (Davies, 1989) which pick up andillustrate the complex interplay between linguistic structure, cultural storylines and theformation of the inner/outer body with its powerfully embedded patterns of desire.These are stories of subjection and transgression. They illustrate the ¯ uidity of genderand its socially or discursively constructed nature. At the same time they reveal the powerof rational binary thought to hold identity in place inside the binary systems it imposes.

The ® rst story is of George. I retell it here to demonstrate the force of linguisticstructures. George was often to be seen running around the pre-school yard with swirlingskirts and a cape ¯ ying out behind him. As he ¯ ew down the slope one morning, dressedin yellow butter¯ y cape and skirt, he shouted `I am the power!’ Later, he came over totalk to me, as I sat in the pre-school yard, writing down my observations and recordingconversations with the children. I asked him how it felt to have a skirt on. He said, `Ifeel powerful’ . Then another boy came over and punched George very hard in the chest.George took off his skirt, folded it up neatly, tucked it under his arm and punched theboy back. As the other boy ran away, I asked George why, if the skirt made him feelpowerful, had he taken it off to punch the boy. He said `no I didn’ t’ and ran away.

George’s denial completely baf¯ ed me. What did he mean when he said `no I didn’ t’?Only much later, when I was engaging with the text of our talk in written form andbeginning to make sense of how children become sexed/gendered, did I see what I haddone. I had made George’s claim of feeling powerful meaningless, or at least contradic-tory, and therefore unacceptable within the terms of rational discourse. I had done thisby assuming that the power he spoke of was the same power as that involved in punchinganother boy. The binary male± female coincided in my interpretation of George’ s actionswith the binary powerful± powerless. But the power George spoke of was obviously notthe same thing as male, dominant, forceful power nor, for him, compatible with it. Myinability to see, at that point, beyond the conceptual traps of the language and its binarystructure, with the powerful habitual links between one binary and another, meant thathis attempt to speak something different into existence was denied him. The force ofrational thought with its dualistic hierarchical structures was inadvertently used by me tohold the gender order in place. But it was also partly being held in place by George. Hehad to divest himself of one form of (female) power in order to use another (male) formof power. For him, in some sense, they were already coded in some form of binary, asoppositional and incompatible.

My second story is of Joanne. I retell it here to demonstrate the force of dominantcultural storylines. Joanne loved to play with the dominant macho boys. But they rarelyallowed her into their games as an equal, and she would not consider playing with themif they allocated her the position of victim. Their inclusion of `outsiders’ was often to usethem as victims, since they themselves preferred heroic positions. Joanne looked like aboy, she ran and talked like a boy. She was also unusually socially accomplished andknew that people were offended if they were caught out in `misrecognising’ her as male.She wore track suits the same as the boys, but signalled her positioning as `girl’ with agirlish topknot.

On the particular morning of this story, a new tree house had just been built in thepre-school yard. The dominant boys had attempted to make it their own place but thishad been disallowed by the teachers, who were at that time becoming more consciousof the strategies these boys used to dominate the playground. Joanne and her friendTony climbed into the tree house as soon as it was vacated and developed a brilliant

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strategy for keeping the others out. As other small children climbed tentatively up theladder Joanne or Tony would lean out over the balcony and discreetly drop sawdust intheir eyes as they looked up. The would-be intruders would start to cry and climb downthe ladder. Tony and Joanne were ecstatic as they successfully claimed this desirable leafyspace without any form of violence visible to the teachers.

At one point Tony saw me watching. He probably decided I had no real power in thecontext of this place and turned rapidly back to the game, to his immersion in theexcitement of it. Then Joanne saw me watching. She stood and looked at me, seeingherself through what she took to be my (adult, enculturated) eyes. She said to me, `weare just cleaning up all this sawdust that the carpenters have left on the ¯ oor’ . Hermoment of power, in contrast to Tony’ s, was gone as she repositioned herself in anacceptable storyline for her sex/gender. No matter how exciting the moment, she lost itwhen she saw herself from outside herself. And of course she was exercising another kindof power in doing so, that is the power to be convincing to others, to ensure she wasrecognised as a legitimate member of the culture. Such recognition is probably essentialfor those who want to transgress the boundaries of the dominant culture or todeconstruct old patterns and speak into existence new ones. At the same time, herexperience of power in the taking over of the tree house was not one she could simplytake pleasure in as Tony did.

The third story is about Geoffrey, and I retell it here to make visible the process ofembodiment of gender and the cultural power of that embodiment. Geoffrey was dressedup in a black velvet skirt. He and a smaller boy were ® ghting furiously on the pre-school¯ oor, with elbows, feet and ® sts in a furious tangle. Geoffrey seemed to be losing the ® ghtand was very angry, shouting at the smaller boy as he tried to disentangle himself fromthe ® ght. Eventually he pulled away, stood up, ripped off the black velvet skirt, threw iton the ¯ oor and said, with hands on hips, `now I’ve got more pants on!’ The smaller boyinstantly ran away, not willing to tangle with the transformed Geoffrey [2].

I did not see the beginning of this ® ght, and I do not know if it was the same patternof gratuitous violence that George had received. It may well be that, in both cases, anearly form of `poofter bashing’ was going on. Certainly much of the `work’ that childrendid in their play was category maintenance work. If people misplayed themselves bymoving across boundaries, as if they didn’ t know that these were boundaries that should notbe transgressed, they were instantly `caught out’ by others. The collective achievementof the culture as a meaningful and predictable place had to be worked at if individualswere to know how properly to position themselves within it (Davies, 1989).

The point that I want to make in this context, though, is that both Geoffrey and thesmaller boy read Geoffrey as weaker when dressed in female’ clothes. Geoffrey could befought and beaten if he had become female, even though only in outward form . Oncetransformed into the male form , he presented himself and was read as strong. There aretwo signi® cant points here. The ® rst is that the image is taken on bodily with powerfuleffects, and the second is that the inhabiting of one image or another is ¯ uid. Geoffreyis not locked into one or the other bodily form, though he is, like George, locked intoa reading of the forms as profoundly different, and in physical terms, arranged in ahierarchy of power.

Two aspects of post-structuralist discourse have remained more or less implicit in mydiscussion so far. One is a focus on the imaginative construction of worlds other than theones we already inhabit, and the other is the deconstructive work we might do to undothe bonds of already existing, discursively constructed worlds. To ® nd and make visiblethe detail of how one’s speci® city is put in place and maintained in place, as I have done

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so far, can be seen as a fundamental ® rst step in any post-structuralist analysis. To seewithin that process the power of binary thought to constitute you as one, and not theother, in any binary pair, and thus to make you separate from the other, yet taking yourmeaning and value in relation to the other in that binary pair, is where the really radicalwork of post-structuralist practice begins. Binary thought is revealed as metaphysical, thatis, not the result of observations of natural pairs which exist in the world, but as waysof seeing built around an unquestioned assumption of opposition and differenceÐ anopposition and difference that is built into the language and thus into the worldsconstituted through that language.

These binaries are particularly dif ® cult for those located in the ascendant half of thebinary pair to see. They take their category membership to be norm al, and normative,and those located in the other category to be marked by their difference. Peopleinhabiting such ascendant categories, such as male, heterosexual, white, middle-class,able-bodied, adult or sane, often wonder what all the fuss is about, and doubt even therelevance of their own category membership in determining who they might be. Theirprivileged, unmarked membership positions give them the illusion of being simplyhuman, a representative of the human race, able to speak authoritatively for those in allcategories, not just their own (Davies, 1993, pp. 89± 90).

What deconstruction does is to make visible the dependence of the persons inhabitingthe ascendant ca tegories on the existence of the sub ordinate category for their own privileged,unmarked location. As Cranny-Francis points out:

It can be argued that those rigid classi® cations which constitute each term ofthe binaries simply do not exist; instead, one term is constituted by therepression of the other, and in a move which places the marginalised term atthe very heart of the de® nition of the dominant. Nevertheless, as a set ofstrategic metaphors, these dichotomies continue to exist. (Cranny-Francis,1995, p. 24)

The dependence of the ascendant term on the subordinate term robs it of its unmarkedposition and its illusion of being the unmarked category, otherness to which is whatconstitutes `difference’ . Membership of any category becomes visible as a story, a ® ctivelocating of oneself (by oneself and others) through this or that discourse, within onecontext or another and in speci® c relations of power.

In the work I undertook with Chas Banks for S hards of G las s (Davies, 1993) we workedwith primary school children to make the power of discourse visible to them. In thefollowing transcript, Chas is talking to 11 year-old Zac about the ways he stories his life.He has taken photographs of his mother and father and arranged them such that thephotographs of his mother, all taken inside the house, are in the middle of the page, andthe photographs of his father, all taken outside the house, are arranged around theoutside of the page. When Chas questions him about whether his mother ever plays withhim in the garden the following conversation ensues:

Z ac: ¼ she does try, she tries playing cricket or soccer or hockey and we play all them outthe back garden.

C has: Do you play games with your dad? Does he ever play with you?Z ac: Oh he usually, he doesn’ t now `cause he’ s always usually working but and he’ s

getting older and but he used to muck around with soccer and play cricket. He stillplays cricket, his grandfather was A-Grade and he used to play for Dungowan andeverything.

C has: Really?

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Z ac: He teaches me strokes and everything.C has: Right, but he spends quite a lot of his time working and earning money to keep

the house repayments up [referring b ack to an ear lie r conversation] and ¼Z ac: Yeah¼C has: But she’s looking for a job?Z ac: Oh she isn’t really now.C has: Has she always stayed at home?Z ac: Yep.C has: She has?Z ac: Oh when we were young, about 1, 2, 3 she used, she worked at a stock station

agents.C has: Mm. Notice that these shots of your dad are outside?Z ac: Yeah¼C has: and these ones of your mum are inside. Is that fairly typical of the way they

operate?Z ac: Yep.C has: It is?Z ac: Oh but mum really, usually does help outside with the garden, she does the

gardening a lot.C has: Does she?Z ac: Yeah.C has: Does she do the ¯ ower part of the garden or the vegetable part or¼Z ac: All.C has: She does all of it does she?Z ac: She mows, and does things.C has: Right, so she’s very capable?Z ac: Yep.C has: Do you get on well with your mum?Z ac: Yeah.C has: Are you as close to your mum, closer to your mum or closer to your dad do you

reckon ?Z ac: Oh, [I’d be] closer to dad if he was at home more probably.C has: Would you?Z ac: Yeah.C has: Why do you think that is?Z ac: Oh because I like working outside on cars and that sort of thing. Not really sitting

inside doing nothing.(Davies, 1993, pp. 54± 55)

Zac constructs his mother as not rea lly playing with them, she only `tries’ , as `not really’working, or looking for work, not really being responsible for the garden, but `helping’in the garden, and ultimately as a boring inside person, doing nothing. He (correctly)positions himself inside the culture, as he knows he must, with his absent father. Hisfather is constructed as correctly male through family myths (of his grandfather) andmemories (of his father teaching him strokes). Zac understands himself as a (male) personin relation to these, rather than a person who is close to, or like, his much presentmother. He understands the binary male ± female as it operates in the discourses of theculture and speaks himself and his parents into existence through them.

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C ons tructing and D econs tructing M asculinit ies 15

Zac’ s capacity to use language to force the world into a pattern that maintains himand his father and grandfather in the ascendant term can be seen as a very powerfuldiscursive move. In entering into the realm of boys and literacy we should notunderestimate the desirability and joyful sense of power that boys can gain from beingpositioned within dominant forms of discourse which hand them ascendancy over others.

The following story, for example, was written by a boy whose usual textual produc-tions, both before and after the writing of this story, would have suggested he wasvirtually illiterate. Derek’s teacher asked the students to write a pirate story following areading of a feminist pirate story in which the male and female pirate did not know whatit really meant, in his reading, to be proper pirates, that is, properly violent. Derek askedwhether he could write a Ken and Barbie story and his teacher said no. So this is whathe wrote:

B arb ie and K en in P irates

One day when Ken was sailing along with Barbie they saw another ship in thedistance. Barbie said to Ken `What’s that?’ Ken said Its some saught of ship.Wait untill it gets closer. They found out they were pirates. The pirats cameon bord and Ken got an axe. The pirate ® red a warning shot in the air. Kenput the axe down, they took Barbie hostedege. While Ken had a few beers. Itwas a set up. Ken worked for the pirates and was the captens ® rst mate. Threeweeks later Ken came into Barbies room and said to Barbie lie down babe I’vgot a surprise for you’ . So Barbie lay down. Ken pulled an axe off the wall.Barbie said `What are you going to do with that?’ Ken said I I I have to killyou’ then he raised the axe and cut off Barbies head then arms then legs. Thenthey threw her head to the sharks and ate the rest of her for dinner.

THE END

The teacher was totally unnerved by this story, so much so that she could not evendiscuss it with him. He had totally silenced her. Of course we do not know Derek’ sintentions. He may have been angry with her, or he may just have been revealing that,whatever feminist discourse she might introduce to the class, he was clear about how realmasculinity was done [3].

In working with boys and literacy, there is a pressing need to extend them beyond thiskind of hegemonic masculine literacy, and to disrupt usual assumptions about power andthe illusions and ® ctions that hold it in place. Derek’s primary strategy in class was topresent himself as illiterate. The strategy he reveals here is one in which he reveals agreat facility with words. Layering one genre over another, Derek creates a complextissue of masculinity, the power and dominance of which would be dif® cult to call inquestion. He stitches together a range of discursive strategies which reinstate properdominant masculinity, even revealing with Ken’s stuttered I I I’ , how dif® cult theattainment of it may sometimes be. In working with boys and literacy we need to makevisible the constitutive force of discourse if we are to create ® ssures in the absolutenessof apparent naturalness of dominant masculinity. Through the process of deconstruction,we can make the dependence of the dominant category on the subordinate categoryvisible, and we can show the oppositional and exclusionary nature of the metaphysicallybased binary. In making it visible as a ® ction, it loses its apparent inevitability and thussome of its power to hold current relations in place. The work of putting binarycategories under erasure nevertheless remains as work that needs to be done, again and

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again, since the unspeaking of something can only ever be overlaid on the experience ofbeing spoken into existence through the binary, and each previous speaking is inscribedon the body like writing on a page that can only ever be partially erased.

In the follow ing reminiscence of growing up male, Eric Kupers describes a momentwhen he was invited, pressed, against his desire and his fear, to take up a dominant formof hegemonic masculinity. His story struggles to capture the contradictory press of his idea

of him self as a nice kid who would not hurt others, and his idea of him self as someone whocould be successfully male. His story tells of the moment in which he not only came tohurt someone else, but wanted to do so. At the same time, he is present in the story asmale adult who cannot applaud this moment, who is horri® ed at how his desire was soeasily manipulated. He uses the other boys almost as a Greek chorus: they provide thedominant discourse as something which exists outside himself yet which he recognises ashaving powerful effects on him as he is being constituted in this context at this time. Thisis a story driven by a strong moral imperative to tell the unacceptable nature of growingup male. Eric Kupers describes himself at the end of the story as someone who is`studying religion and modern dance. He is an avid Buddhist meditator and personalgrowth worker, and is searching for a way to take part honestly in the struggle for abetter world’ (1993, p. 33). His reason for telling his story, then, is a moral reason, drivenby other discourses which reject the form of masculinity that he describes himself asexperiencing in this moment. Eric Kupers, as he understands himself to be now, is onewho distances himself from the moment at the same time as he tries to capture its vividlived detail as a child. He tells how he did not really want to be violent, how he chosenot to be, but the powerful `Greek chorus’ spoke something else into existence that hecould not (did not?) resist:

`O.K., Eric, we want you to wrestle now. You always watch and I think youshould have to do it too.’

I froze. Me? I had never wrestled before. The idea also shocked everyone inthe room. I was the nicest kid most of them knew. Aggression and me didn’ tseem to mix. Very soon, however, their interest pushed them past their surpriseand they were enticing me out of the corner.

`C’mon, Eric, don’t worry. We’ ll help you if you need it,’ the oldest boy assuredme. So I wouldn’ t have to do it by myself? That did make it a little lessterrifying, and part of me even rose to meet the challenge. After all, I wasalready ® ve years old; it was about time for me to act it and prove that I toohave strength, agility, and inconsiderate toughness¼

`Eric, you wrestle with Marco,’ the oldest boy ordered. I panicked. It waslooking like I didn’t have the choice I thought I did. But wrestling with Marcoseemed like the best way to go if I had to do it with someone. Me against himwould mean everyone rooting for me¼

Marco was the unof® cial scapegoat for our after-school group. He was weirdlooking, wore glasses, was fat and hyper, did gross things, talked a lot ofSpanish, and was tough enough to survive all the abuse we dealt him ¼

Someone yelled, `Go!’ I grabbed Marco. I couldn’ t play the weakling now, Ihad to survive.

`Go, Eric! All right! Get him!’ I heard outside of my intense focus on protectingmyself and overpowering this guy I had hold of. We were locked, handsclenched in a pushing battle as I struggled for some leverage to overpower him.

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Marco was stronger than me and he manipulated me onto the ground. Shit!I was losing. I really am a weakling,’ I thought.

`C’mon, Eric!’ the others were saying. I couldn’ t be embarrassed like this infront of everyone. They probably wouldn’ t like me anymore. Anyway, this wasmy chance to show off, without worrying about hurting someone who anyonewould feel protective of. I could get away with letting out my violence, ® nally.From some deep anger in me came a wild strength. I remember tearing atMarco, and wrenching him under me. But I don’ t remember if it was just mewho overpowered him or if Frank, the oldest boy, and some others helped meby ripping Marco off me and onto the ¯ oor. Either way, Marco was pinnedand I was on top of him.

The others all cheered. They wanted more. The count started, `1Ð 2 Ð 3Ð ¼ ’Marco was starting to cry. I sort of wanted to stop, but the power andacceptance felt so great I didn’ t. I was ® nally `one of the guys’ at that moment.Every time Marco started to get up, someone would jump in and keep himdown¼ I didn’ t know when to stop. I looked for the others for some kind ofcue, but none came. Marco was crying harder. I was really hurting him, butwas scared to stop at the wrong moment because I might lose my `cool’ statusif I misjudged.

¼ I am haunted by the memory of my participation in bullying Marco, and ofmy feeling so rotten for hurting a friendÐ a fellow mis® t kid. (Kupers, 1993,pp. 31± 32)

Kupers is not, of course, doing a post-structuralist analysis of his experience. He is relianton humanist theory from which he draws the metaphors that make his story tellable andwith which he creates himself as the unitary rational humanist self who tells this story.It is, within humanist theory, peer pressure he is describing, and his own unwilling (butthen willing for one long moment) capitulation to that pressure to become powerful, tobe `one of the guys’, to be celebrated. He experiences this in his telling as a `part’ of himthat already existed, that rose to the challenge, that sought to `prove’ he was properlymale, that is, as one who has strength, agility and inconsiderate toughness’ and who has`violence’ which can be `let out’ and `deep anger’ that comes from somewhere insidehimself and yet despite himself. He achieves himself as the rational unitary character ofhumanist theory by emphasising the distaste he initially had for the aggression and thathe still has now. His description of the group of boys brutalising one ugly Spanish boy,and of himself sucked in, leave the reader in no doubt about how disgraceful he ® nds thismoment of savagery. The story is told as a momentary aberration in the face of forceswhich could not be resisted, but also a story of human struggle to be moral and good,to overcome that part of oneself which must also be wrestled with, and fought intosubmission, if one is to achieve true moral identity. The drama then, as Kupers tells it,is essentially an inner drama, one played out with powerful others present, who can beinstrumental in creating a slip from grace with their chorus-like production of a brutaldiscourse, a slip which must be told, and paid for, and then moved beyond. From apost-structuralist point of view, the `Greek chorus’ speaks a regime of truth about theachievement of oneself as male. Kupers constructs himself through that discourse, all thewhile experiencing extreme tension between this hegemonic discourse and anotherdiscourse about being the nicest person any of them knew. His story is one whichreachieves the dominance of the nice person discourse.

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Compare this with another story of ® ghting told by Virginia Woolf in her autobio-graphical M om ents of B eing:

Week after week passed at St Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Thenfor no reason that I know about there was a sudden violent shock; somethinghad happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life¼ I was ® ghtingwith Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our ® sts. Justas I raised my ® st to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped myhand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling.It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of somethingterrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horrib lydepressed. (Woolf, 1976, p. 82)

Here is a very different telling from Kupers’s telling. Here is someone not sittingcomfortably in a morally ascendant position, telling how they came to be this or that kindof person within the terms of one or another discourse or set of pressures. Instead, wehave a largely unexplained moment in which an event leaves an indelible mark ofpowerlessness and an attendant experience of depression. At ® rst she is entering into the® ght with Thoby, they are `pommelling each other with our ® sts’ , when for no apparentreason, her intention to hit is inhibited, and she holds back. Her body takes up whatYoung (1980) analyses as a feminine inhibited intentionality’ . There is no external Greekchorus here, just a feeling, a question she asks herself, which, in taking it up as her ow n, robsher of the right to defend herself. She stands there and lets him beat her. Where Kupersexperienced his moment of power and then rejected it, seeing the moment of power asaberrant but understandable, Virginia Woolf, overwhelmed by `hopeless sadness’, wasreduced to slinking off in a state of horrib le depression. Her subsequent debilitatingdepressions became something she could not control and eventually led to her death. Shecommitted suicide at the time the Second World War was announced, a time of greatfear, of helplessness and of violence of men against men.

Here is a text intricately connected with a ® nal choice of death that comes from anembodiment of oneself as other to dominant forms of male power. Woolf enables us toenter differently the question about how the binary male and female is established andmaintained. She does not just do this through a different way of telling. What she makesvisible, to me as reader, is the difference between taking oneself up as powerless (andvirtuous) when already positioned in the subordinate half of the male ± female binary (asshe does), and the experience of Kupers, rejecting his moment of successfully attaining(rightful) ascendant positioning in preference for another way of being that is informedby a morally ascendant discourse about the human struggle for virtue. The possibility ofascendancy in Virginia’ s ® ght with Thoby, should she actually ever have beaten him,could never be the one described by Eric. Eric’ s moment was one of glory, no matterthat he has lived to regret it, as is his other position of moral virtueÐ both are heroic.Marco was the necessary other for his moment of ascendance, just as Virginia knew thatshe was the other to Thoby’ s ascendance, knew it so well that she actually chose it.

Eric’ s story is one in which his desire for, and practice of, embodiment as powerful isone he seeks to move beyond. He can apparently do this despite his experience of itsurging up from some well-head of anger lying within him. What he is left with is aninscription on his memory of a `rotten’ feeling that `haunts’ him. But he has access to adifferent set of discourses that empower him to become a different kind of male from theone he temporarily became. As I have analysed in detail in S hards of G las s , Virginia’ sexperience of powerlessness is one she struggled constantly to express, always struggling

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with the fact that what she wanted to say was fundamentally unsayable. The words stuckin her throat, clotted on her pen, and were rubbed out before they could be published.

Desire is thus shaped through regimes of truth which make those desires seem correctand even inevitable. At the same time those desires can be read, through counter-discourses, as harmful. One regime is pitched against another in a struggle for domi-nance. What we see in the second part of this paper is a classroom in which multiple andcontradictory masculinities exist side by side, without one being pitched in competitionwith the other. The imaginary possibility of masculinity being multiple and diverse,rather than unitary and oppositional to femininity is played out here.

M ultiple M asculinities in the Classroom

In this section, I provide an analysis of one teacher’ s move towards multiplicity for theboys in his class. He does not deconstruct binaries, nor provide the possibility of re¯ exiveawareness of the multiplicity he makes available to them in the ways I discuss in the thirdpart of this paper. His strategies are to do with envis ioning and experiencing another set ofpossibilities, work that necessarily goes hand in hand with deconstructive work [4].

The following transcripts are from one morning in the classroom of a primary schoolteacher in a small Australian rural school. The teacher begins the day with a classdiscussion about current affairs. The students then divide into groups and do mathemat-ics work followed by story-writing. The whole class then goes down to the river andwrites poetic prose about what they see. On return, they listen to a story about the pastin Australia and then Mr Good cooks a rabbit stew. The particular excerpts chosen heretrack some of the possibilities being made available to the boys in taking themselves upas oral and literate beings. The excerpts are chosen because they focus on the boys. Thisshould not be read as the entirety of the life of this classroom. The interactions with thegirls are not highlighted here. If the selection of excerpts is read to mean that the girlsare being ignored by Mr Good, this would be an entirely inappropriate reading. Theboys are not being taught that girls are able to be ignored, though Mr Good’ s gentlecharm and charismatic style, which he adopts with the girls (alongside his recognition oftheir intellectual prowess), is quite possibly signi® cant in the achievement of Mr Good asa competent (heterosexual) male in the eyes of the boys.

There are several points to observe in the transcripts I have chosen:

Ð Mr Good does not negate the range of possible masculinities available to the boys; hedoes not constitute literate masculinity as incompatible with other forms of masculinitybut, rather, celebrates a wide range of perform ances that might be called masculine;

Ð at the same time as showing he acknowledges and even celebrates some forms ofdominant masculinity, Mr Good reveals himself in his talk as sensitive and emotional;

Ð Mr Good invites the students to connect what they are learning about the world totheir own emotions and their own moral location in the world; that is, he does notabstract truth from embodied knowledge;

Ð Mr Good has a particular fascination with physical environments and invites thestudents to share that fascination and connectedness, and to express that connectionthrough spoken and written words.

The ® rst excerpt begins when the class has been looking at the world map in relationto a letter they have just received:

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M r G ood: Okay. [M r G ood claps hands quietly ] Anything else before we move on. Yes? [T o

b oy w ith hand up ]S (s) : [C las sroom talk]M r G ood: Sh sh.J am es: Mr Good, has New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, have they broken off as

islands off Australia like Tasmania?M r G ood: They, they think so. They think so. At at one stage [M r G ood gets up and goes to

map ] James, that’ s a [paus e] that’ s a really good observation. At one stage, they think,that all this was connected, [M r G ood is pointing out areas on m ap] ¼ it was a great landmass, and there was some sort of¼

J am es: ( ) um, they, they showed you, do you know how they, they think, do youknow how they make, thought they done that, they joined them all together and¼

M r G ood: [T o J am es] Yes? [T o T racey , turning to her and putting a hand on the top of her head]Just (one moment) [M r G ood looks at J am es]

J am es: like see Australia and ur Tasmania, looks like it can just join together?M r G ood: [M r G ood turns to map ] Good boy. [M r G ood, w ith hand on m ap, turns b ack to c las s]

There you go. [G esticula ting w ith other hand] Do you know why they think that, that thesebig, what’ s, what’ s the word that describes these that starts with `c’?

S : [W hisper] (Continent) [M r G ood makes an exp ec tant b ody and hand m ovem ent as if he has heard

the right answ er b ut w ants it said so a ll can hear](B oy ): Continent?M r G ood: CS s: (Continent[s])M r G ood: These continents were joined together. You know there is some evidence to

show that they were joined together.S (s) : They um they looked ¼M r G ood: [M r G ood makes a dow nw ard m otion w ith his hands ] You know how I’m really

wrapped inÐ what am I really wrapped in when we go into rain forests?S (s) : [Chorus answer] Buttress roots.M r G ood: That’s right yeh the buttress roots of the Ant, the Antarctic Beeches, those giant

trees with big buttress roots that are [pause] very very important as far as rain forestsare concerned and saving rainforests. They are found, of course, in that part ofAustralia and do you know those Antarctic Beeches are found in this part of the worldalso [sp eaking s low ly and pointing to map]. So it’ s thought from that sort of evidence¼

S : they were joined¼M r G ood: ¼ that it was they were joined together. A sort of one giant continent¼B oy : [B oy puts hand up ] Mr Good, can I show¼M r G ood: yes yes, you can [M r G ood step s b ack]B oy : [G oes to map] See that bit there? [P oints to m ap. M r G ood steps forw ard and looks]M r G ood: Yes.B oy : it looks like it can just go in there.S : Yeh looks like it ® ts in there.M r G ood: Still that’ s, that’ s fair enough.S : and that looks like it can join to that.M r G ood: Yeh.S : and that¼ can look like it can join to that and things like that.M r G ood: ¼ What’ s that [one]?S : It’ s like a jigsaw.M r G ood: Yes it’s sort of like a jigsaw isn’t it? ¼ Yes

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S : Mr Good ¼M r G ood: Yes?S : Like Greenland joining onto North America.M r G ood: Right.B oy : [S till s tanding near map ] Mr Good, it’ s like a big earthquake happened.M r G ood: Right, it sort of split them ¼B oy : Yeh.M r G ood: split them all all apart. [B oy goes to s it dow n. M r G ood’ s attention has turned to J am es

b ringing b ook over. M r G ood looks tow ards J am es] What have you found there [James]?[J am es leans ac ross and gives M r G ood the opened ency c lo paedia. J am es s tep s b ack . M r G ood holds

up the b ook for the clas s to see]M r G ood: Aahh right. Now look at this. Our own place on the earth. It’ s showing here

how things may have joined together.S : Where’ s Australia?S (s) : [O verlaid conversation. S everal s tudents near M r G ood stand up to look at enc y clopaedia]M r G ood: OK Give him a clap. That was a that was a great bit of research. [S tudents rem ain

standing and clap, other(s) s tand too].

What are the options taken up by the boys here? James initiates a discus s ion about landmasses through a question addressed to Mr Good. This is taken up with interest. MrGood directs attention to the map as a focal point to the conversation as he elaboratesthe theory, with assistance from the students. He invites the students to ob serve the map,to articula te the appropriate words but then conne cts their discus s ion to their experienc e of tripsto the rainforest, to M r G ood’ s pass ion for buttress roots and to the m oral issue of saving theenvironment. The issue is thus not discussed in the abstract but connected to language,to the students’ experiences, to emotions and to moral issues. In the mean time, Jameshas gone looking for the book he was talking about and shows it to Mr Good. He isacknowledged as a research er and receives public acclamation. In this the students are bothacknow ledged as skilful in acce ss ing know ledge resourc es , and ab le to recognise and applaud each other.

The students then initiate a discussion about the war in Iraq, which was occurring atthe time, and talk about a plane that was unable to land. Mr Good turns the discussionto the plight of the Kurds and to the way in which they can ® nd no safe haven:

M r G ood: Yes, but why why not let them come in, [paus e] `cause they’re starving?J am es: Because if they harboured the Kurds, the Iraqis might have a go at them.M r G ood: Good, that’ s, that’ s possibly one reason that that they’re worried ¼ about the

Iraqis, the Iraqis attacking.J oey : It could start another war.M r G ood: Yes. It could start another war. It could, um, but what about a country being

prepared to look after all those refugees. You know there are about, half a million, halfa million refugees.

B oy : That’ s a lot of people.M r G ood: It is, and people, it’ s really distressing us. It makes me sort of feel very very sad,

that, these people are actually dying of starvation right now. They’ re dying ofstarvation and large planes are coming in and dropping food. What are the air aircraftcalled that ah come from the airports that are transports that drop lots of food?[pause Ð R odney ’ s hand goes up] I know you know Rodney. You’re an expert. [pause] Um

S : not a Caribou, is it?M r G ood: No. [M r G ood w aits b ut prob ab ly as no voluntee rs he nods to R odney ] Go on.R odney : Galaxy?

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M r G ood: No.S (s) : Oh Rodney.M r G ood: Not a Galaxy.R odney : Hercules?M r G ood: Sorry?R odney : Hercules?M r G ood: Good boy.T racey : Oh good on ya.M r G ood: Hercules. Big, lots and lots and lots of Hercules. What are they called, a whole

group of planes?S : Squadron.B oy : [M r G ood does not respond to previous answ er b ut nods at a b oy w ith his hand up] Flight. [M r

G ood looks to som eone e ls e]S : A squadron.M r G ood: Good on you.S (s) : Squadron, squadron.M r G ood: A squadron, a squadron of planes.

In this excerpt Mr Good again invites the students to connect their observations of eventsin other parts of the world to reason (why is this happening), to fee lings (in this case, his),and then to langua ge and the par ticula r interes ts of the boys who started the conversation.The details of what planes and the jargon of war are discussed alongside the concernthey might feel for the refugees and the political issues that might lead to this plight. MrGood goes on to invite the students to express their own feelings about the war. This they® nd dif® cult. The ® rst response is I don’ t know’ , to which Mr Good responds `That’ sfair. You, you don’ t know. That’s cool’ . They then offer, it’s like suicide’ and `ridiculous’ .Mr Good picks up on `ridiculous’ and proceeds as follows:

M r G ood: (Okay) Right. No reason for it. You know we just read about people dying andwe we see it on TV but, if you can just sort of imagine [paus e] if that happened here,[pause] because life life is very precious isn’ t it? Hmm. Life is very precious and whenwe think of little Kurdish children or Kuwaiti children or Saudi Arabian children orIraqi children [paus e] sort of dying. [paus e] That’ s sort of [pause] how do you feel aboutthat? [M r G ood turns head tow ards T race y , apparently gets no rep ly and turns to front]

S : [pause] Feels awful.M r G ood: [M r G ood turns to another s tudent] How do you feel about that? [M r G ood turns head

tow ards a student]S (s) : ¼ scared, scared.M r G ood: [M r G ood say s another ch ild ’ s nam e and touches (her) ha ir]S : Distressed.M r G ood: Distressed.S : Distressed.M r G ood: Yeh, so do you think there’s another way around having wars? [paus e] What’ s

a what’ s another ¼J ane: ¼ started the war (front).S : Yeh.M r G ood: Is there another way than sort of shooting at each other? [O verlaid q uie t talk b y

s tudents]. You’ re a very wise and knowledgable person. [S tudents laugh]S : It’ s not going to solve anything.M r G ood: Sorry? [M r G ood didn’ t hear s tudent’ s answ er]

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S : It’ s not going to solve anything.M r G ood: How, how else, how else can we sort of sort out these disputes? [S tudents talk

w hile M r G ood is speaking]B oy : Kill someone.M r G ood: But that’ s killing someone, mate, that’ s not much good. Yes. [O verlaid talk from

childr en. M r G ood indicates b oy w ith hand up]L aurie: Co-operate.M r G ood: Ah ah, [M r G ood indicates he w ants quiet] just listen to this.L aurie: Co-operate.M r G ood: What does that mean?T racey : [paus e] Oh Mr Good.S (s) : Oh [S tudents call out and several hands go up]M r G ood: Yeh.L aurie: We all work together.M r G ood: Stand stand. That’ s it come here [M r G ood so ftly asks L aurie to s tand and com e out

to the front of the group]. That’ s a that’ s a superb superb answer Laurie. [M r G ood puts arm

around L aurie’ s b ack] Just just say that again.L aurie: We all work together.M r G ood: Just working together, people sitting down and talking and perhaps¼T racey : Don’t we already do that though?M r G ood: Well we do most of the time. Yeh, but there are some times, some times when

we don’ t. Let’ s face it, there are some times when we don’ t.

Mr Good thus invites the students again to think about their emotions and to expressthem. He then connects the negative feelings they have about war to a discussion aboutproblem-solving in their own lives. When a boy offers `killing’ as a way of solvingproblems Mr Good does not accept the answer, but is friendly towards the boy: `Butthat’ s killing someone, mate, that’ s not much good’. It is as if the answer is recognisablyhegemonic, and what observably does go on, but it’s `not much good’ for them. He thusaccepts the boy’ s display of hegemonic knowledge, but accords greater value tosomething else in this context for this group of students.

In the story-writing lesson that follows later in the morn ing one group of boys writesa dominant hegemonic story called `danger football’ in which they represent themselvesas heroic. While the girls are playing football with them in the story, it is the girl whofalls and breaks her arm. Mr Good does not comment on the content of the story, as heis intent on persuading this group of boys that they can actually write. Thus, they doengage in writing and at the same time display themselves as hegemonic in termscelebrated outside this classroom. The class is then divided up into writing groups for thetrip to the river:

M r G ood: In a in a moment we’ re going to go down for a walk to the river. Now, I wentout ® shing last Saturday and I noticed so many things along the river that really, reallysort of impressed me [J osh ’ s hand goes up] were just so lovely. What’ s happening at themoment sort of, [F ew hands go up ] yes [T o b oy/ J oey w ho ® rs t had hand up]

J oey : The leaves are falling off the tree and they go in the river and and ¼T racey : [M r G ood points a t T rac ey] Change of season.M r G ood: Yes that’ s right. It’ s a change of season. What, what region of the of the state

do we live in? It’ s called [paus e Ð points and nods] Yes. [P oints again b ut p rob ab ly not at sam e

child]S : Northern tableland.

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M r G ood: Well its Northern tablelands, also more speci ® cally The New England¼ do youknow that the New England is just so famous for its change of seasons? Now whatseason have we just come from? [S everal hands go up . M r G ood points at one]

S : The New EnglandS (s) : Summer, summer.M r G ood: What season are we going into?S : Oh.S : Autumn.M r G ood: Good. [P o ints a t som eone e ls e] Spell Autumn please.S : a-u-t-u-m-n [M r G ood has nodded as each letter is said, and w hen ch ild hes itated b efore `m ’ , M r

G ood half m ouths it]M r G ood: ¼ We’ re just going into autumn so there’s a really lovely [G irl leaning on T ’ s kne es

looks round then gets up and go es off cam era] sort of change and as I, as I was walking alongthe bank there as I was walking along the bank, [paus e Ð M r G ood looks at girl] is thatthe phone or something?

S : No.M r G ood: Don’ t worry. [pause Ð girl returns and sits dow n aw ay from M r G ood] As I was walking

along the bank I, I saw all sorts of tremendous things, all sorts of tremendous thingsand, I really, I really thought of of putting down ah¼

S : the rod.M r G ood: The ® shing rod [paus e] and painting. And I can’ t, I can’ t paint [paus e] pretty

hopeless at that, but I also thought of, you know, keeping, keeping a record becauseit was just it was so so lovely. Well in a moment we’ re going to go take full advantageof that and perhaps I can share with you a little bit ¼ R ight, what do you think a agood way of sort of recording rather than [M r G ood points] yeh

S : Writing, writing.M r G ood: Yes, good one.T racey : Writing.M r G ood: Yeh [M r G ood points to another child]S : Memory.M r G ood: We’ll keep [M r G ood taps his forehead] all those sorts of things in mind. I’m going

to take a camera down with me.

M r G ood thus sets the scene for the writing by describ ing his own em otional responseto the beauty of the landscape, and by inviting the students to articulate the kinds ofwords that w ill connect the experience w ith one kind of literacy: season, autum n,sum m er, N orthern Tablelands. H e then m oves on to the experience he had of seeing som any wonderful th ings that he wanted to record them . A t th is po int, in terestingly, hetalks about his own inability to paint, and `g ives perm ission ’ to the experience of beingunable to do som ething artistic . H e then invites the students to think about the recordsthey m ight m ake. A s they set o ff for the river he exp lains to them that he wants them tolook for words that w ill enable them to describe what they see, and points ou t that theyhave to listen to their own m inds for good words as well as look to see what they see:

S : [B oy stands , M r G ood stands] Laurie, [pause w hile b oy looks around] Andrew.M r G ood: [T alk ing to som eone off cam era] Now you’ve got a good team, you’ve got a good

team. You you two can work it out. Do you want to work by yourself? You and ¼ canwork together. Okay. [S tudents talk] Now let’ s have your attention again please. [M r

G ood click s ® ngers and child ren `freez e ’ and are s ilent. M r G ood is s tanding in m iddle of room w ith

childr en around him ] When I walked along the river bank I sort of didn’ t look at a tree

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and say, you know, the tree looks magni® cent as the sun shines through its sort ofsparkling leaves. I just looked, I saw, I just, words¼

B oy : Came into your head.M r G ood: [M r G ood looks at b oy] Yeh, they did, words just sort of came into my head and

I sort of, words like sparkling and, rather lovely words. So that might be the way togo about things. Just look at the words that ah, that leap into your mind when we,when we get down to the river.

L ater, on returning from the river:

M r G ood: I’ve seen a couple of examples of what has come from the groups but um,Laurie, could we hear yours ® rst, from your group. Would you like to read it?

L aurie: Ah, I’ ll read it, Mr Good.M r G ood: Right Okay. We’ ll just leave what (you’ re doing for a minute).M r G ood: [J ane gets up, crosses room and returns w ith shee ts o f paper to s it in sam e p lace . M r G ood

talks to som eone at his feet] Ah ah just wait until he¼L aurie: Dead limbs sit on the still.M r G ood: Wait a moment. Actually we might read just in a really really really loud, a loud

voice so we can get some ideas from it.L aurie: [Kneeling at edge of group ] Dead limbs sit on the still water as the cool wind blows

gently through the trees. Trout and other ® sh jump harmlessly through the water.Insects swim around in the calm water. Platypus bob up and down like a yo-yo lookingfor food. Birds sing happily in the trees.

In these various excerpts from this one morning in the classroom, we see how Mr Goodinvites and makes possible for the boys a connection between language, valued forms ofschool knowledge, their embodied being in the world, themselves as people withresponsibility and agency, their emotions, their connectedness with the landscape aroundthem and the connection of these to wider geographical, political and moral landscapes.The connection between these and spoken language is continually sought, and thefurther connection to others’ writing and then to their own is successfully established.Laurie reads without apparent self-consciousness a poetic piece of prose that sitscomfortably with the range of other masculinities available to him in the classroom:mates with the teacher, one who knows and learns from books, one who plays footballdangerously, one who knows about war and planes and killing, one who considers moraland philosophical issues and emotional issues, and one who can speak about these.

Mr Good reveals his own preferences, and does not censor the boys’ reading of howto be masculine. Rather, he invites them to broaden their range and celebrates theirachievements in articulating a range of possibilities. What he does not offer them is thekind of re¯ exive knowledge that would allow them to see what is happening and tocritique the various discourses that are made available to them. They practise a rangeof masculinities but are offered no discursive tools for articulating their movement acrossthat range or for choosing between one or another (Davies, 1994). In the ® nal sectionI will discuss the importance of that kind of re¯ exive awareness in the development ofliteracy programmes for boys.

Critical Literacy

What critical literacy opens up is the possibility of students and teachers becomingre¯ exively aware of the way in which speaking-as-usual constructs themselves and others.

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And it also opens up the possibility of thinking/writing/speaking in quite different ways,ways that enable boys to position themselves in multiple subjectivities which they canrecognise and claim as their own despite regimes of truth that dictate otherwise. Muchof the impetus for critical literacy comes from feminist post-structuralist theory andpost-colonial theory. In these theories there is a strong move away from the automaticprivileging of dominant colonising discourses and a move towards multiple voices,multiple perspectives, multiple ways of seeing the world.

Colonising discourses have provided the conceptual frameworks through which we domuch of our teaching and through which we have done most of our learning. One effectof this is that even when we were or are positioned in the margins, we saw/see from thepoint of view of the centre. As women we saw ourselves negatively through men’ s eyes,as homosexuals we saw ourselves negatively through heterosexual eyes, as `ethnic’ we sawourselves negatively through Anglo eyes, as `disabled’ we saw ourselves through `able-bodied’ eyes, and so on. Post-structuralism and post-colonialism have begun to disruptthat particular violence. Such negative, discursive constructions can no longer so easilygo unnoticed nor seem a normal part of the way things are and ought to be.

A second shift in perceptions, following that original disruption, is to recognise (andown) the qualities that give us our particular ethnic or sexual or cultural identity. Theseare no longer experienced as `other’ to an ascendant category but as a rich, shiftingcomplex set of possibilities which may or may not take their meaning in relation to theonce ascendant `other’ category. Having disrupted the apparently natural ascendancyand rightness of the ascendant term, the binary begins to lose its original meaning andforce. This then takes us into the third (or post-structuralist) tier of feminism. Each personcomes to see the multiple ways they are positioned and in which they position each other.Old notions of identity are disrupted, new discursive possibilities are opened up througha play on language, and the unconscious, the body, desire and emotions are maderelevant in the playful construction of new identities and new meanings (Davies, 1994).

Kirby (1991) observes that the leverage for analysing the inhabiting of oppositionalterms inevitably comes from those who inhabit the negative or subordinate categories.She points out that the destabilising of any binary involves:

Ð work on the part of those on the negative or subordinate side of the binary to showhow the binary terms are in fact dependent on each other for meaning;

Ð revealing how the separation of individuals into binary categories is an idea(1), ametaphysical ® ction, rather than an essential fact of human existence; and ® nally,

Ð work to reveal the `complicitous intertext’ through which we accomplish individualhuman existence out of both sides of any binary even while we create the mytholog is-ing practices through which we separate out one term from the other.

If we begin by analysing the inhabiting of oppositional terms and we must takeleverage for this from the negative side of the binary (w oman/ b ody / lands cape ),then we are inevitably faced with a spectre of something more, somethingwhich, because it embraces and confounds both terms, destabilises de® nitionsand rethinks meanings.¼ M ind and body, subject and object, ¼ are none ofthem either autonomous notions or simply separable as subjects. They are eachproduced within a complicitous intertext, a writing, as Jacques Derrida calls it,which is all encompassing. (Kirby, 1991, p. 12)

From the negative side of any binary, one also encompasses the positive/dominant side.By making that inhabiting visible and being at the same time not-tha t, other-to-tha tdominant category, one destabilises the positive side.

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While those inhabiting an ascendant category have dif ® culty recognising their depen-dence on the subordinate term for their own meaning, the imagination of the person whois not in the ascendant category is trained in an education system which takes those inthe ascendant category to be the major source of meaning making, those who are usedto being ascribed the status of¼ saying what counts as true’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 131).From the negative or subordinate category, we discover both the ways of makingmeaning from those who are positioned as ascendant, and our simultaneous (thoughpartial) exclusion from them. In a fundamental sense, those who inhabit subordinatecategories are bi-cognitive, or bi-modal, and as such are more likely to see the shifting,¯ uid and precarious, discursively constituted nature of identity.

`Critical literacy’ , as it is used in the study of texts, is one in which:

the more conventional, structuralist approach of the search for the essentialtruth, the real meaning the author intended to convey and so forth has beenabandoned in favour of a post structuralist approach where the emphasis isplaced on the plurality of meanings which are determined by the socialbaggage’ ¼ which the reader brings to the text. [In approaching reading froma critically literate perspective we] do not search for one meaning or the `real’nature of the character or the true’ relationship between characters.¼ What isemphasised is the need for awareness of how texts are constructed and howthey can be `interpreted’ by readers from different positions. [We] seek to teaseout the gaps and silences that are a hidden feature of the texts. [We] seek toascertain how the reader may have been positioned by the maker of the textand how meaning and power relationships may change if this positioning isresisted or altered. (Lemon, 1995, p. 41)

Threadgold extends this de® nition to something more far-reaching, demanding ofteachers that they develop a wide range of skills for becoming critically literate:

Teachers need to be doing action research in their own classrooms to establishcollaboratively and with other teachers what they are doing that is useful andto publish it, but they also need to do some linguistics, some recent criticaltheory, some social theoryÐ you name itÐ to make the ventriloquism and theheteroglossia of the situation in which they are positioned accessible, availableto them. Otherw ise the many uses in local sites, the local sociologies whichLuke imagines will emerge and be made possible from his intervention atcurriculum level, may well emerge, but may emerge in ways that have littlerelationship to the ideological’ engineering, the agendas for enfranchisementand social change, which his work attempts to further. Ventriloquism, learningto mimic the discourses of the master, is, ¼ a double edged sword, one that cancolonise as well as enfranchise, and one that requires a very considerable levelof critical literacy to practise ¼ (Threadgold, 1996, p. 14)

I am wanting ¼ to suggest that a knowledge of critical theory includingstructuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and feminist theories but alsosocial theory and critical discourse analysis Ð has to be part of what we arecalling critical literacy for teachers of English. (Threadgold, 1996, p. 13)

Everyone enacts theory, perform s it, embodies it, debates it, contests it, associal practice, on a daily basis in the ways in which they read and write, speakand listen, see and look, behave and live. Few however are helped to have any

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explicit knowledge or understanding of what it is that they are doing. (Thread-gold, 1996, p. 12)

The de® nition of critical literacy that I am currently working on and derived from mywork with children and in observing classrooms such as Mr Good’s, is the capacity tomake language live, to bring oneself to life through language and, at the sam e tim e , bringto bear on language a critique which makes visible the powerful force of rationality andof linear patterns of thought, of usual speech patterns and usual metaphors, and arecognition of their constraints and limitations. Critical literacy enables one to under-stand how culture(s) and discourse(s) shape the body, desire and deeply felt personalknowledges. This involves developing the capacity to:

Ð move beyond the constraints of rational linear thought and to recognise and evencelebrate multiple and contradictory patterns of thought, to embrace multiple ways ofknowing and of coming to know (only one of which is rational argument);

Ð read oneself and its possibilities in different discourses and contexts;Ð engage in moral/philosophical critique; andÐ recognise the `inherent limits to critique and transformation within any and all

Discourses’ (Gee & Lankshear, 1995, p. 17). This is necessary because discourseenchants us, drawing us into the magic of the possibilities it opens up and at the sametime places us under a spell which blinds us to its power and its effects (Gee &Lankshear, 1995).

These capacities involve the abilities to know well and to use effectively the linguisticforms available to us as well as to recognise their powers and their limitations. Thelimiting nature of dominant discourses is described by Toni Morrison (1993, pp. 13± 14)as dead language:

a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyieldinglanguage, content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censoredand censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose otherthan to maintain the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its ownexclusivity and dominance. However, moribund, it is not without effect, for itactively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential.Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape otherthoughts, tell another story, ® ll baf¯ ing silences. Of® cial language smitheried tosanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor, polished toshocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there itis; dumb, predatory, sentimental, exciting reverence in school children, provid-ing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony amongthe public.

The development of re¯ exive strategies which reveal and provide strategies for under-mining `dead language’ implies the ability to immerse oneself in each discourse (to beenchanted by itÐ to know the possibilities of oneself through itÐ to make language live)and the ability to break its spell. This requires the capacity to:

Ð know how to read oneself bodily/emotionally and to know the power of dominantdiscourses to seep into the unconscious and shape desire;

Ð know the pleasure of the power language gives and also its dangers; andÐ engage in moral reasoning which is far more than the imposition of one morally

ascendant discourse over another; it is the capacity to engage in re¯ exive thought in

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which the discourse through which one ascertains what is taken to be a truth at anyone point in time is always open to revision, to the kind of revision that might leadto a different truth.

Through such skills we come to know how enchanting language is, we learn to revel inthe enchantment of knowing ourselves in the world through language. At the same timeas we learn to be transgressive, we develop the skills of critical imagination throughwhich we open up new possibilities, think the as yet unthinkable, beyond and outsidedead language.

With c ritical soc ial literacy oneself becomes a shifting, multiple text to be read. Theconstruction of that self through discourse, though positioning within particular contextsand moments and through relations of power, is both recognised and made revisable.Critical social literacy involves the development of a playful ability to move between andamongst discourses, to move in and out of them, to mix them, to break their spell whennecessary. It involves the capacity re¯ exively to critique text and context and to act onthat re¯ ection. It involves the capacity to make sense of the discursive shift, to articulateit, and to make it sensible’ in the terms of the cultural/discursive patterns one isspeaking/writing into existence. It breaks the enchantment of the compulsory struggletowards dominant and hegemonic forms of masculinity and balances this with anunderstanding of the effects of that struggle and the freedom to enter into other regimesof truth, understanding at the same time their enchantment and their limitations.

Critical literacy and critical social literacy are not aimed at replacing one dominantdiscourse with another morally ascendant discourse. They are not `reformist’ in the senseof re-form ing the bodies and minds of the students in a different and speci® c moulddictated by those with authority. Rather, they are aimed at giving students some skill incatching language in the act of formation and in recognising and assessing the effects ofthat formation. In a critically and socially literate classroom language is no longer a deadtool for the maintenance of old certainties, but a life-giving set of possibilities for shapingand reshaping a complex, rich, ¯ uid social world. A critically and socially literateclassroom would not be caught up, as some might fear, in a mindless, relativist spiral.Rather, in the very visibility and analysability of language, and its effects, lies thepossibility of being open to a philosophical and moral critique of the many and multiplemeanings and modes of being embedded in and created through different uses oflanguage.

NOTES

[1] See Laqueur (1990) for an analysis of the two-sex model and its origins in the Enlightenment. This is alsoanalysed in Davies (1993). Prior to the Enlightenment, Laqueur demonstrates that there was a one-sexmodel, and the division between men and women was understood as both socially constructed andordained by God.

[2] In the Renaissance period, that is, prior to the Enlightenment, clothes were understood as creating theperson . As such, what clothes could be worn and by whom , were subject to rulings from kings and otherswho had power to establish regim es of truth. Such rulings were clearly aimed at maintaining male ± femaledifference and also class difference (O rgel, 1995).

[3] This story is discussed at greater length in Davies (1996).[4] I have analysed this morn ing in this classroom from a differen t perspective to the one I am taking up here

in Davies (1994). In that 1994 analysis I exam ined the ways in which the teacher might have extendedwhat he was doing if he had access to post-structuralist theory.

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