The Discipline of Love

Abstract

This article draws on a small-scale qualitative study to explore the relationship between some of the more implicit disciplinary dimensions of schooling and a group of boys' investments in heterosexual romance. It argues that romance provided the boys with a cultural repertoire—that is, a narrative resource or set of discursive practices—through which they negotiated and made imaginative sense of the “little cultural world” of their college. In particular, the article suggests that romance served to police and discipline relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in the pupils' culture while providing for the boys a mode of subjective orientation to key disciplinary practices of schooling. As such, romance may be seen as a resource through which the boys “worked themselves into” the dispositions of a middle-class or professional habitus.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.