the history of social inequality in the [UK United Kingdom]. In the UK the lasting
impact of the failing-boys’panic in the United Kingdom was visible in the 4-year
(2000–2004) Department for Education and Skills 4-year (2000–2004) project
‘Raising Boys’Achievement Project’, which was developed as a‘holistic’school
resource, focused entirely on‘helping boys succeed’. The gender gap has thus come
to refer in a‘common-sense’way to the‘disadvantage’facing boys. In the 2007 UK
Labour governments’policy document, Gender and Education: The evidence on
pupils in England (DfES 2007 ) is almost entirely preoccupied with boys’
achievement and offering strategies for boy-tailored learning strategies in schools.
Significant issues of behaviour and safety are raised in the report (school discipline
problems, school-leaving and truancy) but only as key‘indicators’of racialised
(black) and working class boys’‘failure to attain’. Every issue is reduced to the
outcome of attainment. What happens conceptually is that gender—as a relation or
as a culture or as an identity—is never able to be addressed; gender is only a
measure/variable for what it can tell us (or not) about achievement. The assumed
logic of the gender gap continued to dominate the UK Coalition government’s
Department for Education website guidance ( 2010 ), which assured the reader:
The National Strategies, at primary and secondary...provide support for techniques to
tailor teaching and learning to the needs and interests of boys...include[ing] setting clear
objectives to help them to see exactly what they have to learn, and interaction with the
teacher in the whole-class sessions keeps boys motivated and involved. (DfE 2010 : OO)In the next section we aim to show how the news media selectively picks up on
these binary gender discourses about educational achievement that pit girls against
boys, congealing into a dominant yet reductive pattern of gender stereotyping and
the narrative of‘failing boys’and‘successful girls’. We want to pay attention to the
psychosocial or affective anxieties (that is the public waves of feeling which enliven
fantasies about the state of gender and education) that are generated in the news
media (Skeggs and Wood 2012 ).
26.4 What Is a Postfeminist Educational Media Panic?
Segal ( 1994 ) talks about abiding‘gender anxieties’over shifting and destabilising
feminine and masculine‘roles’and subject positions. This relates to transformations
in contemporary, late-modern cultures characterised by de-industrialization and the
partial break down in the conventional‘sexual contract’and gender roles in the
private and public spheres, as theorised over twenty years ago by Pateman ( 1988 ).
Blackman and Walkerdine ( 2000 ), drawing on Cohen discuss‘moral panics’as
public anxieties generated when behaviours are found‘deviant’. Gender and queer
theory shows us that gendered and sexuality behaviour is feared if it jars against
(hetero) normativity (if it troubles or disturbs the normal heterosexual matrix or
order) (Butler 1990 ). Moral panics as contagious and shared group anxieties are a
useful framework for thinking about the affective dimensions and dynamics of how
388 J. Ringrose and D. Epstein