The Role of Gender in Making Meaning of Texts: Bodies, Discourses, and Ways of Reading

A sociocultural view of learning suggests that literacy is a product of social practices rather than a learned skill solidly positioned in individual minds; for this reason, literacy is intimately linked to participation in social practices. Beyond written language, literacy-related social practices consist of and integrate distinctive ways of talking, feeling, thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting, while using assorted symbols and tools (Lewis). In using Gee's notion of Discourse as empowering and relating to social power, teachers can develop a classroom discourse about gender that improves students' understanding of the literature and their relation to it.

What happens when students talk about gender in school? Studies on gender discourses in classrooms have specifically examined how students negotiate their individual gender identities while disregarding their lived realities within a historical context (Cunnison; Davies; Francis; Kehily and Nayak; Francis and Skelton; Reay; Baxter; Abu El-Haj; Godley; Purohit and Walsh). Nevertheless, although it is difficult and uncomfortable for them, students' responses to discussing gender reveal that the discourse positively changes students' attitudes and improves reflection (Moore and Trahan; Widerberg; Titus; Cooks and Sun; Lili; Pace; Malkin and Stake). A goal of this article is to extend the dialogue on classroom discourse about gender by examining how students understand literature in the context of these gender discussions.

Understanding literature is not about making meaning found in the text itself, but rather it is a creative action, a transaction between the text and the reader that produces meaning (Rosenblatt). Consequently, how a text is understood is determined in part by who is engaged in the act of reading at a particular place in a particular time. When literature is discussed in the classroom, how a text is understood is also determined by who is engaging in that discourse.

Perhaps including gender as a discussion topic is not as important as how our students talk about gender and how it impacts the participants in that discussion. Consequently, feminist standpoint theory is a useful lens for examining the classroom discourse about gender because it is one way of connecting feminist knowledge and women's experiences to the realities of gendered social relations (Ramazanoglu and Holland). Due to the diversity of women and women's lived experiences, our context of discovery (what we want to know) and the context of justification (why it matters) will be multiple and complex. I will show that in the case of this study, this feminist standpoint is determined and impacted by bodies, discourses, and ways of reading.

The Best-Case Scenario

The setting of this study was a large, Midwestern suburban high school, which had a predominantly white, middle- to upper-middle-class population. Approximately twenty-seven hundred students attended the high school with 260 staff members, 140 of whom were certificated.

The building itself was newly built and impressive, divided into three different wings or pods. There was a large stone fireplace in the foyer, an extraordinary mural on the second story wall, and an enormous fountain in the courtyard between the foyer and the media center. The hallways were clean and quiet between classes, showing a pastel color palette, with geometric floor tiles forming a large circle at the heart of each pod. The hallways and classrooms were well lit.

Specifically, the field site was an English elective course called Gender Viewpoints, consisting of twenty-seven eleventh and twelfth graders taught by one Caucasian female teacher with ten years teaching experience. Of the twenty-seven students in the class, twenty-two were female and five were male. There were two African-American females, one Jamaican female, two Asian females, one Afghan female, and one Latino male; twenty appeared to be Caucasian.

This particular class was chosen because I believed that students who had signed up for this gender elective may have had a special interest in analyzing and discussing gender. Consequently, I originally perceived this context to be the "best-case scenario" for talking about gender.

Carrie, the teacher, was dual-certified in social studies and language arts; she had recently transferred to the English...