The experiences of female sports fans have been largely marginalised in academic research to date and little research has examined the formative sporting experiences of female spectators. This article draws on 51 semi-structured interviews with three generations of female fans of one (men's) professional football club (Leicester City), to…

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of…

China has seen dramatic transformations in ideals of femininity since the 1970s. This article explores what it entails for young women of the only-child generation to construct "modern" womanhood within a context of multiple and conflicting gender discourses. Based on life history interviews in Beijing, the article shows that both a…

Gender distinction has been shown to characterise both undergraduate experiences and outcomes. Yet research recounted in this article supports work that shows that young people are often unaware of such trends, subscribing instead to individualist perspectives that foreground equality of opportunity and agency. This article examines the gender…

History is often embedded, explicitly or implicitly, in discourses on contemporary aspects of gender and education, but relatively few scholars engage critically with history as they grapple with current issues. This article posits "historical sensibility" as a means of engaging constructively with the past when scrutinising and working…

Using Hofstede's cultural dimension of masculinity/femininity, this quantitative content analysis investigated the coverage of virginity loss (i.e., occurrence, tone, and association with negative consequences) and pregnancy (i.e., occurrence, tone, and negative consequence of sex) in 2,496 feature stories from all issues of three U.S. and…

Constructions of femininity and attendant notions of feminism are being produced in different ways in different places around the world. This is a complicated global process that cannot be reduced to analyses that take place in nation states. This paper seeks to respond to and enhance Angela McRobbie's compelling argument about understandings…

Informed by a social and critical turn of reading practices and a poststructuralist paradigm of gender, this study delved into the commonly held belief that reading and language learning is a feminine domain, and examined the connection between the construction of gendered subjectivities and English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) reading practices…

The reason that girls and women withdraw from science and technology education and careers has been a universal concern in the social sciences. This study investigated how gendered constructions of identity are translated into the barriers and fears that female students and professional women experience in decision-making about their careers. We…

This paper turns to debates in post-critical public pedagogy to focus on how a small body of films might potentially work as vehicles for teaching and learning about youth, gender and space. It is argued that representations of the rural shape what is possible for girlhood, being both enabling and constraining for the subject. Framed by discourses…

This paper is based on analyses of ideas about girls and boys in sports as they are presented in textbooks used in coaching education programmes in Sweden. Specifically, it explores gender in relation to descriptions of girls' and boys' bodies and bodily development during puberty. Texts construct gender differences. Masculinity is…

Scholars have sought to identify the complexity and multidimensionality of the phenomenon of sexual identity formation since the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 (Bayer, 1981). This article addresses the manner in which the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer [LGBTQ]…

When embarking on ethnographic fieldwork, a researcher must carefully consider how to present oneself when entering the field. Presentations of self become particularly important when the culture under study maintains narrowly defined expectations for personal appearance and behavior. The more defined the expectations, the more important it is for…

General education programs, in postsecondary institutions, provide a broad base of learning in the liberal arts and sciences with common goals that prepare undergraduate students for living informed and satisfying lives. In the United States, dance units in public institutions, offering general education coursework for non-majors (dance…

In this forum we engage in a dialogue with Allison Gonsalves's paper '"Physics and the girly girl--there is a contradiction somewhere": Doctoral students' positioning around discourses of gender and competence in physics'. In her paper Gonsalves uses a sociocultural approach to examine women doctoral students'…