Gendered Subjectivities in single-sex based education in a mixed school

Javier Sierra Gordillo & Jonathan Alexander Delgado Ochoa, Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas, Colombia;         Abstract: In school, there are instituted, installed practices and re-producers of classification and standardization of gender within an essentialist binary framework(Bonder, 1998) Yet, experiences and local struggles for power in the community of practice (Paechter, 2013) make up local resistance in the institutional interstices. That issue has inspired an interpretive qualitative study that attempts to analyze students’ discourses to identify enactments of subjectivities about its gendered nature in a single-sex learning environment. Therefore, findings reveal students’ enactments of gendered subjectivities during their interaction as an important part of the EFL (Delgado, 2019) in a private school in Bogotá. The study problematizes discourses of binarism in gender found in data by relying on post-structuralist feminist and subject positioning theories (Butler, 1990, Foucault, 1982, Weedon, 1987, 2004). Data was collected through audio transcripts of classroom interaction along with field notes to register participants’ interactions. The role of the researcher was participant observer. Aspects of feminist post-structural discourse analysis (Baxter, 2008) along with critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001) were considered to analyze a corpus made of interactions’ significant moments (Baxter, 2003) Results shed light on emerging gender identities, (re) construction and positions in the language classroom towards masculinities and femininities. These subjectivities highlight moments of institutional and personal tensions, towards the continuing reactionary (re)production of certain institutional discourses on gender relations in the classroom. (VanDijk, 1989) Implications thus invite teacher-researchers to study asymmetric sociolinguistic power relationships in educational settings. Hence, the need for insisting on broadening studies about gender and English learning arises, as language is not the academic end, but the means to mediate sociocultural meanings.