Needing to be ‘in the know’: strategies of subordination used by 10-11 year old school boys

created, by the official school regime, and so the boys were able to use storylines that
were already there. The following quotation, which was used about Timothy, could
apply equally to either boy:

Rex: He can’t play football, he can’t run, he can’t play rugby, he can’t play
cricket and...he can’t play anything

As Highwoods operated a policy of selection, subordination by low academic attainment
was not such a prominent feature within the peer-group culture as in the other two
schools. Although it would be easy to assume that any boy who was unable to compete
with the cultural hegemony of the sporty boy would be subordinated this was not
necessarily always the case. Other Year 6 boys who were in the school C teams (and
who were therefore both perceived and formally positioned as being less-
talented/proficient) told me that they experienced little or no abuse, and further
investigation revealed that their poor sporting abilities was only one of a number of
reasons for Timothy’s and Daniel’s exclusion. The fundamental reason was that they
were different from the norm and were lacking certain culturally valued qualities. Not
only were both boys no good at sport (and so had a shortage of sporting prowess), they
did not enjoy rough games (and so had a deficit of courage and toughness), and
importantly, gave the impression of putting in little effort. Daniel was also accused of
preferring to play with younger aged boys (presumably because he did not have any
friends in Year 6), and he supposedly had an obsession with sticks and was referred to by
some of the boys as ‘The Woodsman’.

In this long extract below we are talking about why three boys thought Timothy spent so
much of his time on his own. I have included such a long extract in its entirety as it
provides an unedited, contextualised, example of the kind of conversations I had with the
boys. There are lots of interruptions as the boys almost fall over each other in their
enthusiasm to position Timothy as a kind of ‘unmasculinised other’ at the bottom of the
hierarchy.

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