ABSTRACT

Schoolchildren’s embodied subjectivity has often been understood as a bio-political tool to ‘clean up’ and modernize poor and marginalized communities. In many post-colonial contexts, school uniforms frequently appear as visual symbols of a child’s clean, schooled body and democratic access to education. Through ethnographic research with 10–14-year-old schoolchildren in urbanizing areas in northern Tamil Nadu, my paper asks how children inhabit and co-construct the school uniform code’s cleanliness discourse in their everyday lives. Studying plural school uniforms through a spatial lens, I explore schoolchildren’s embodied and relational work in negotiating with the equalizing school uniform codes within the schools and the circulation of multiple school uniforms in the community outside. Engaging with a shifting visual aesthetic of embodied cleanliness in a context of class segregated schooling. I argue that school uniforms are discursive sites where exclusions of class and gender, with undertones of caste and age, are simultaneously reinforced and negotiated.

摘要

学童的具身主体性通常被理解为“清理”贫困和边缘化社区并使之现代化的生物政治工具。在许多后殖民地背景下，校服经常作为孩子干净、受过教育的身体和民主接受教育机会的视觉符号出现。通过对泰米尔纳德邦北部城市化地区 10-14 岁学童的民族志研究，我的论文询问了孩子们如何在日常生活中融入和共同建构校服规范的清洁话语。通过空间镜头研究多元校服，我探索了学童在与校内平等校服代码和校外社区流通多种校服的谈判中的具身和相关工作。在班级隔离教育的背景下，参与体现清洁的不断变化的视觉审美。我认为校服是话语场所，在这里，阶级和性别的排斥，以及种姓和年龄的暗示，同时得到加强和协商。