Unmasking Masculinity (Routledge Revivals) by David Jackson

Author:David Jackson [Jackson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781317612384
Google: wgFXCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-08-11T05:59:27+00:00

The framework of the grammar school

Grammar school was such an important, formative influence on my language because of the way it brought class relations into close contact with gender relations. And it did so within a context of an all-boys’ institution of unrelieved, claustrophobic intensity.

Even though I was a cultural hybrid (with a background of cultural displacement and evacuation to a holiday resort)20 with no sustained, indigenous roots, I enjoyed playing around with and trying out language. I even remember using an Enid Blyton word ‘scrumptious’ to mean delicious in an 11-plus test. But by then I was vaguely aware of and anxious about the colloquial ‘vulgarity’ of the choice. I think I can remember asking my mother whether I should have used it. But despite the slight hesitations, I generally revelled in the exuberance of vernacular forms.

However, the experience of grammar school undermined a large part of this exuberance. The cultural intimidation of the privileged linguistic and cultural capital21 that I met with in the narrowly academic grammar-school curriculum eroded my confidence in my own language resources. This bred an awareness of class inferiority in me, making me feel ashamed of my own linguistic ‘inadequacy’ in the face of middle-class cultural authority.

Two examples come to mind; in a boy called Stephen (who exuded the sureness of an economically buoyant, middle-class background) there was no sense of cultural discontinuity between his home background and school performance. He was comfortable in the knowledge that he was a high flier, a destined Oxbridge star, and I was really impressed by the ease with which he was able to handle phrases like, ‘Milton’s swelling sonorities’ in a sixth-form English essay. But I can also remember the sting and smart of the way he put down my language.

I was always using the word ‘imply’ in a muddled way, and one day he leaned across to me and said: ‘Don’t you mean “infer”?’ That lingering smart sent me off rummaging in the Oxford English Dictionary, and deepened a sense of linguistic anxiety in me so that today I still approach possible linguistic pitfalls with extreme wariness.

The other example shows clearly the class conflict and struggle that went on in that school between different languages and knowledges. There was a rigid class hierarchy maintained between the formal, ‘objective’ knowledges22 of subject disciplines and the invisible, everyday resources and understandings that working-class students like myself were bringing into the classroom.

My own cultural confidence was sapped by official classroom moments such as when an English teacher, who must have been very insecure himself around this ‘objective’ knowledge, came in to teach us the social background of the eighteenth century in preparing us for the Oxford Board ‘A’ level English Literature period paper.

For several hours he gave us dictated notes on the ‘rules of neo-classic decorum in eighteenth-century England’, not stopping to invite questions but just checking that we copied the notes down accurately. It was such deliberate mystification that as the teacher was leaving the room I asked him why we were doing this.

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