Gender control: (Re) framing bullying, harassment and gender regulation

In the last decade, discourses of bullying and harassment have featured prominently within educational policy and administration, academic research, popular media, and public dialogue. The ways in which these have been framed has generally been consistent with an individualistic, behavioural perspective that distinctly outlines a ‘bully’ and a ‘victim’- each with specific attributes and performances. This approach arguably simplifies and reduces complex socio-cultural aspects surrounding young people and the wider communities that they are situated within, while simultaneously preventing a deconstruction of gendered, classed and racialised meanings within ‘bullying’ frameworks.
This chapter proposes utilising a post-structural feminist approach to re-frame ideas of bullying and harassment as only one indicator of a wider framework of gender regulation. The role of compulsory heterosexuality and the subsequent binary expectations of femininity and masculinity in the production of this regulation will be reviewed in consideration with wider literature. In consideration of these aspects, the concept of a gender regulation framework will be examined to allow more effective exploration of violence in schools.