Institutionalising Technologies: Masculinities, Femininities, and the Heterosexual Economy of the IT Classroom

Geographers' renewed interest in institutions reflects traditional concerns with the way institutions can shape geographies and a more recent interest in the ways geographies are important in shaping institutions. In this paper the authors build on this second strand of work and are specifically concerned with children's use of new information and communications technologies in schools. The authors suggest that multilayered institutional cultures, which are shaped by official school policy, teacher practice, and pupil culture, are exceedingly important in shaping distinct cultures of computing in (and within) the case-study schools. The highly gendered character of these institutional cultures is reflected in the very different attitudes of male and female pupils to computers and in the patterns of use which generally favour boys rather than girls. These are negotiated through competing masculinities and femininities in the classroom context, gender identities which are played out through normative understandings of heterosexuality. The authors conclude that we may indeed characterise institutions as ‘precarious geographical achievements’, as suggested by Parr and Philo. Schools are embedded within wider places, are important sites for the negotiation of gender and sexual identities, and, as spaces, are in part shaped through our notions of gender and sexuality. This achievement is only precarious as institutions are not forever solidified in their current form but are open to change, both inadvertently and through the concerted actions of individuals.