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Louise Archer
(2003) Race, Masculinity and Schooling: Muslim Boys and
Education (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill) Louise Archer’s book draws together a number of threads in debate regarding
social inequalities in education pertinent to Muslim communities.
One is the ‘boys in crisis’ debate, and the concerns of how ‘laddism’ is
allegedly fostering a negative attitude towards learning amongst boys in
schools, a debate which frequently subsumes discussions of ethnic minority
boys’ underachievement. Indeed, laddism is a feature of Muslim masculinities
evidenced within Archer’s own research data.
The issue of ‘laddism’ also ties in with an increasingly widespread interest
in Muslim masculinities across a number of academic disciplines and within
popular discourse. In the wake of 9/11, popular discussions of Muslim males
have tended to focus on ‘dangerous Muslim men’ such as Abu Hamza and Osama bin
Laden.
The negative presentation of Muslim men links into a further theme, the ‘new’
racism of cultural stereotyping, witnessed in the emergence of a specific bias
against Muslims, commonly termed Islamophobia. Richardson and Wood (2000) and
the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (2004) have both identified
Islamophobia as a significant barrier to educational achievement among some
Muslim groups in the UK.
Previous research is reviewed, and various constructions of ethnicity are
discussed, including the (laughable) ‘quadric-polar’ concepts used by some
social psychologists, which are problematized in terms of their normative
assumptions about white hegemony, and their binary thinking which
misrepresents heterogeneous and diverse communities as monoliths.
Instead, Archer draws on the works of Stuart Hall in order to make sense of
the idea of ethnicity, and draws on post-structural feminist critiques which
attempt to dismantle various myths surrounding Asian culture. She then goes on
to offer a similar critique of the representations of Muslim men, which
present them as either, ‘behavers and achievers’, effeminate (in the case of
Asian Muslim men) or as, ‘folk devils’.
Archer’s research centres on a discourse analysis of taped interviews of a
four groups of Muslim teenage boys attending schools in North West England,
although reference is made to Archer’s regrettably unpublished doctoral study
which studied comparable groups of Muslim boys and girls. Theoretical
understandings of gender draw on the writings of R W Connell, but a new
concept - ‘local hegemony’ - is developed to describe masculinities which are
dominant within a specific and distinct geographical area. Insights from
post-structural theories and post-colonial gender studies inform an
understanding of boys’ genders constructed in relations to ethnical, racial,
religious and cultural identities, as well as in relation to female
identities, and the impact of outside school factors is viewed as significant.
Archer’s analysis reveals that negotiations around power and struggle for
authenticity are key features in boys constructions of gender identities, with
boys in the study creating locally hegemonic masculine identities by
associating Muslim masculinity with power, privilege, ‘hardness’ and
hyper-heterosexuality. Archer also devotes a specific chapter to Muslim boys
and racism, which the boys construct as a masculinized phenomena linked to
neighbourhood nationalisms. However, analysis of data reveals masculinities
are contested and negotiated within different contexts, with boys asserting
‘Muslim’ masculinities primarily within a political sphere, whereas
patriarchal ‘Asian’ identities are evoked in relation to gender and black
‘gangsta’ identities linked to youth culture.
Archer rejects the idea that the cohort of British Muslim boys in her study is
necessarily typical, but instead draws on her analyses to raise a number of
important themes pertinent to educators in a wide range of contexts. These
primarily focus on post-structural and discursive understandings of knowledge,
but are nonetheless pertinent to the needs of teachers and those concerned
with the education of Muslim children.
Archer argues against seeing her research as little more than a tool for white
teachers to ‘know more’ about Muslim boys, on the grounds that this fails to
challenge the social inequalities and status quo which persist as barriers to
Muslim boys’ educational achievement. Rather, she emphasizes how particular
discourses have real effects on pupils within schools, where such discourses
define groups as separate and ‘other’. In particular, she draws attention to
how racist discourses shift and normalize, more recently to embrace culture
and ethnicity discourses, which essentialism groups and legitimatise the
representation of ethnic and faith groups as homogeneous.
Archer’s response to these is to reject identity politics and all discourses
that racialize gender or religious groups, including the use of
black-teachers-as-role-models which she argues only further essentializes
black people and fails to address institutional inequalities. Instead, she
presses teachers to use hers and similar research to help “pay attention to
the process of racialization within their work” (p.164) and re-examine everyday
practices which help build restrictive social hierarchies. In this, she calls
for teachers to develop a better understanding of the social phenomenon of
class, race and gender and how these forces perpetuate social injustice
through and within education.
Richardson and Wood (2000)
Inclusive Schools, Inclusive
Society (Trentham Books)
Research comment: this book as opened my eyes to the power and sensitivity of
discourse in producing and reproducing social inequalities. This must be a
core concern of any research and discourse associated with the same.
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