The gendered classroom: masculinity and femininity in Pakistani universities

Our gendering experiences begin with our birth. The formal educational gendering process begins the moment we enter school and continue throughout our educational journey. Sitting in the same classroom, reading the same books, listening to the same teachers at the same time, boys and girls have different experiences. Giving close attention to the temporal, physical/embodied and discursive dimensions of classroom life and relations in Pakistan, I highlight the extent to which the university classroom functions as gendered space in which masculinity and femininity are exhibited by young men and women (students). The data for the paper comes from in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews with universities’ teachers, focus group discussion with students and classroom observation. Foucauldian discourse analysis will be employed as a methodological and theoretical tool to unpack a number of concerns including the constitutive and constituted nature of teachers’ and students’ gendered practice and ideology. By employing discourse analysis, I take into account teachers’ and students’ classroom practices (sitting, walking and talking) as powerful discourses and analyse how these construct frameworks of meaning that define categories and specify domains of what can be said and done. The study, as stated earlier, attempts to delineate how the gendered practices in the classroom contribute to the construction of gendered identities, perpetuation of gendered power structure and disciplining young men and women as gendered individuals. It is pertinent to mention here that some of the study findings challenge the popular assertion regarding ‘gendered experience’ unpacked by feminist research in the global north.