Introduction

School uniforms are one dynamic contributing to creating hierarchal differences in schools by reinforcing dominant patriarchal power structures (Friedrich & Shanks, 2021). Uniforms include the school dress for cisgenderFootnote 1 girls (see Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020), trousers for cisgender boys, and a range of spuriously named gender-neutral uniform items. Such clothing as polo shirts, blazers, and shorts have emerged from traditional figurations of male clothing both at school and beyond and are not gender-neutral as often claimed. This paper interrogates how school uniforms assist in re-creating a cis-heteronormative gender binary (Neary & McBride, 2021) that supports patriarchal power structures. Student body-minds (Pitts-Taylor, 2016) become within the material-discursive in school, including with the wearing of school uniform, that materialises dominant figurations of a white cisgender heterosexual schoolboy as ‘the matter’ and ‘measure’ equaling what it is to be a successful student.

School uniforms continue to proliferate and are a staple in dominant figurations of successful students materialising around the world (Bodine, 2003; Gentile & Imberman, 2012). In Australia, as in the United States (Ansari et al., 2022), the uniform as compulsory formal school wear is a growing phenomenon in both government (public) and private education systems—with even the most disadvantaged schools introducing compulsory, and often expensive uniforms that include, what I call the man uniform, the blazer. The blazer, despite dominant assertions of gender neutrality, iterates a patriarchal hierarchy, materialising the wearer as invested in and performing middle-class masculinity (Connell, 2008).

In this paper, I unpack the dynamism of school uniforms while feeling-thinking-making (Wolfe, 2022a) possibilities for a posthuman figuration (Braidotti, 2022) as a new imaginary for a successful student. My posthuman figuration emerges as ‘grounded and perspectival’ illuminating ‘the complexity of ongoing processes of subject formation’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 84) with one student (JaneFootnote 2) through our filmed discussion. My posthuman figuration for a successful student becomes through a non-binary ‘projective anticipation’ (Braidotti, 2022, p. 213), where I apply ‘epistemic insights of feminist theory’ (Braidotti, 2022, p. 213) as critique and speculate on possibilities that trouble everyday material life conditions of students to create new opportunities.

The overarching question I investigate is ‘What do school uniforms do’? My speculative critique evolves as a cartographic mapping, ‘a politically infused and theoretically framed map of power relations’ (Braidotti, 2022, p. 116), where I attempt to scrutinise situated material life conditions for the students who emerge with this research. I do this using text responses from a questionnaire and filmed intraviews (Kuntz & Presnall, 2012). The filmed intraviews with students illustrate affective experiences in-process, as Re/active Documentary (Wolfe, 2017b), and aim to create possibilities of reworking negative experience to make more affirming understandings of the affective experiences undergone.

This paper focuses on the affective response of one student, Jane, to and with their school uniform, at one government co-educational selective science high school, using a PhEmaterialistFootnote 3 lens. The school uniform is deemed a dynamic force rather than a neutral entity. As Neary (2021, p. 2) states, ‘gender binary is core to how cis-heteronormativity operates in schools’. The school uniform is dynamic and actively acts, assisting in creating binary gender differentiation in school. Barad (2007) would call this dynamism the making of agential cutsFootnote 4 that exclude and categorise, making difference. I ask how the uniform impacts students’ capacity to, when ‘capacity to’ (Wolfe, 2022b) is created relative to students’ intra-activeFootnote 5 (Barad, 2007) experiences, opportunities, relations, and resources, ‘as becoming otherwise with the world’ (Wolfe, 2022b, p. 2). Neary and McBride (2021, p. 11) correctly claim that ‘the architecture of gender which excludes and ‘others’ trans and gender-diverse young people in schools is the very same frame that restricts the interests, abilities, and pathways of all young people’.

This paper focuses on a conversation with Jane, a white high-achieving 15-year-old schoolgirl, through a fine-grain analysis of her articulated feelings of belonging and dis/comfort with her gendered school uniform/s. I was captivated by Jane's response because her overt verbal/kinesthetic feeling-thinking-making (Wolfe, 2022a) conversation about her uniform evidenced a push–pull affective coercion that appeared almost unspeakable. In her discussion, she acknowledges her affective feelings that led to the refusal of ‘comfy’ pantsFootnote 6 as nonsensical. However, she justifies her actions with the painful feeling that the ‘stigma’ of wearing pants to school is too much to bear. The mapped discussion appears as affectively tricky for Jane, as she speaks the unspeakable, interrupting the dominant successful student figurations she is inclined to aspire towards. What is speak-able is what can and cannot be comfortably said.

Proliferating uniforms

School uniforms are often adopted as unproblematic by schools, parents, and students themselves, and there remain limited empirical studies, and conflicting results, on the consequences of learning and academic success related to uniform wearing (Ansari et al., 2022). The dogma surrounding uniforms as egalitarian (Bodine, 2003) is a discourse seemingly ignorant to the school uniforms’ infusion with intersections of class, race, sexuality, and gender inequity. This study evidenced an egalitarian discourse through comments like, ‘I think it's good in that we are all identifiable and we’re all wearing the same thing. There’s no, sort of, means for marginalisation or anything like that’ (15-year-old white male student).

School uniforms continue to emerge as a nexus of power  with other measures within the hidden curriculum (Robbins, 2018). Uniforms are often uncritically promoted by schools as increasing students’ academic success, school attendance, and belonging at school, and purported to enhance good in society by creating good citizens (Friedrich & Shanks, 2021). The school uniform has been identified as improving student self-respectability, discipline, school attendance, reputation, wealth, success, and status (see Baumann & Krskova, 2016; Gentile & Imberman, 2012; Hidalgo et al., 2013; Robbins, 2018; Stanley et al., 2011). These discourses all materialised in differing measures from the student responses from the broader questionnaire data in this study. The claims for what a school uniform produces, however, have mostly been measured/produced within a patriarchal, heteronormative, cisgendered, and white-Western apparatus invested in iterating itself.

The research that exists on school uniforms considers uniforms primarily as either a tool for improving discipline (Chacko, 2019) and academic performance– or as a physical restriction on bodies (McCarthy et al., 2019), usually focused on compulsory skirt and dress-wearing for females as ‘ritualized girling’ (Happel, 2013, p. 94). Girls are claimed to be sexualised and have sexist, restrictive movement (material) due to modesty requirements (discursive) not applicable to trousers/pants. Other researchers have claimed that ‘dress code enforcement and the high school environment are objectifying’ (Lim et al., 2021, p. 2) and ‘when examining students’ reports of their school experiences, those in schools that required uniforms demonstrated higher levels of victimization and lower-levels of school belonging’ (Ansari et al., 2022, p. 286). Studies also imply that the type of uniforms impacts girls’ physical activity, and that girls often prefer their ‘sports’ uniform (McCarthy et al., 2019) as it allows for the comfort of movement (as discussed below by Jane).

I highlight here how the school uniform, as a thing of dynamic force (Bennett, 2010), has been employed to sell elite private and public schools alike, reinforcing imagery of particular and gendered successful student figurations (see Figures 1 and 2) that arguably create ideations of success to the heteronormative nuclear family. It remains unclear from the previous limited and often contradictory research precisely how uniforms materially affect student outcomes, either academically or socially (Ansari et al., 2022). Research investigating how students feel when wearing their school uniforms is scarce.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Original Image, 2022, showing a billboard on top of an inner suburban building advertising a school. A white teacher and a white female student look and smile at a white male student doing work. All wear blazers.

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Original Image, 2022 image, shows a billboard advertising a school in the middle of a country field (outer suburban). A 6-member smiling hetero (brown) family is shown. The two older children wear blazers

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Australia context

In Australia, there exists a growing anti-compulsory dress movement who is lobbying governments and schools, led by the ‘Girls Uniform Agenda’ (GUA) (Mergler & Cariss, 2017, p. 1). GUA argues that girls must be allowed to wear pants and shorts. GUA highlights how girls suffer discrimination due to the requirement to wear dresses and skirts. They stress how skirts impede girls’ movement (stopping them from exercising, including modesty concerns) and highlight that dresses cause girls to be cold in winter. Both these concerns were also raised by girls in my study. GUA correctly exposes some inequities created by insisting on girl-specific uniforms and has had some important on-the-ground success with lobbying schools. Other research also makes claims about the negative health implications of school uniforms that impede movement (Watson et al., 2015). Consequences materialising from reductive gender differentiation, such as the wearing of gendered school uniforms, include the gender pay gap, gendered violence, and a reduction in girls’ participation in STEM and elite sports (Mergler & Cariss, 2017).

What is essential to highlight in this debate, is the assumption that below the school dress in question, there lies a pre-determined cisgender female student (see Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020). The notion that schoolgirls wear dresses and schoolboys wear trousers frames a reductive conception of gender as binary and hierarchal (girls as lesser) that iterates gender inequity and can cause gender-diverse and transgender students considerable distress (McBride & Neary, 2021).

Affect

Affect is not something we have; it is an action and an ongoing process; of affecting and being affected simultaneously within events, such as wearing a school uniform. To affect and be affected is one capacity, not two (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 1994). Jane (in my student discussion below) wears the allocated uniform. Jane (with the uniform) is affected and, in turn, affects the world, in an affective push–pull action, through performative responses, a feeling-thinking-making. The capacity of things (to affect or be affected) becomes established through the event (intra-action) (such as the student wearing the school uniform) emerging as a mattering. Capacities emerge on a continuum that is never sedimented once and for all.

The premise that reality is created through affective relations as they emerge in the event/s of living frames this research. Consideration of relations at school include, what Manning (2016) has called, prehension of affect. Prehension of affect accounts for non-linguistic somatic liminal transmissions in the present, but where the present is troubled by the past (experience) and the future (possibilities/opportunities). Affective forces, in situ, may or may not be noticed cognitively by research participants but are always felt (Manning & Massumi, 2014). Prehension is the somatic body affectively problem solving an indeterminate state (Manning & Massumi, 2014) to make difference as determinate—through feeling-thinking-making (Wolfe, 2022a).

PhEmaterialism

A PhEmaterialist approach debunks a privileging of human agency by accounting for matter as dynamic, affective, and of consequence in activities, performances, and events. In this sense, the school uniform, as matter, is explored as a dynamic and powerful affective force in education. Student bodies intra-act (Barad, 2007) to become performatively as mattering with the uniform, as boy and girl students. Uniforms matter twofold, as a conception that materialises what matters and the differential affect on the bodies that wear them. Bodies respond affectively to the uniform with a sense of comfort or discomfort, consciously and unconsciously. The uniform diffracts with the student as a fluxing and pulsing non-linear affective continuum between comfort and discomfort, pride and shame (Mayes & Wolfe, 2020). Bodies that do not, or cannot, fit easily with the required uniform hurt as students undergo everyday activities at school (Wolfe, 2017a).

In an earlier study (Wolfe, 2016), a cisgender female student reported that the tights and long socks that she had to wear as part of her elite girls’ school uniform were painful as they pulled at the hair on her legs—the consequence was that she learned to shave her legs to avoid physical pain, her mattering diffracted in compliance. In a more publicly reported and overt example, Australian photographer James Robinson, a former elite private school boy, broke into his old school and set his blazer alight after kissing his same-sex partner. He photographed both actions as an exposé against the homophobia and misogyny he experienced while attending the elite boys’ school (Juanola, 2021). The (masculine, successful, hetero) blazer mattered in disenabling this queer student’s capacity to exist at this school. The blazer’s public destruction illustrated a reclaiming of the reduced capacity and abuse he had felt attached to wearing the blazer.

A PhEmaterialist lens pushes beyond discursive frames and considers a feeling-thinking-making (Wolfe, 2022a) within events where entities are ‘transformed and continually re-made through the concerted co-constitutive acts of objects–bodies–spaces [my emphasis]’ (Taylor, 2013). Applying Barad's theorising to Jane’s account of her feelings about her uniform allows me to consider the ethics of schooling practices associated with uniforms ‘as particular apparatuses of measurement that materialize the bounded things they measure’ (Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020, p. 187), in this case, the successful schoolgirl and schoolboy.

School uniforms as a dynamic force, as twofold mattering

School uniforms matter as a dynamic force that materialise multiple meanings. Students often uncritically absorb meanings in everyday school life, which may incite them to demonstrate the correct gender performance to receive acceptable recognition. Conventions include such tropes as the student wearing the school dress is female; the student wearing the school blazer is successful. The materiality of the uniform is ‘as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 20). The fluxing dynamism of the uniform is scrutinised with Jane's (cisgender/white/female/teenage) comments later in this paper, where her becoming with the uniform illustrates that ‘an actant never really acts alone’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 21).

Applying Barad's (2007) conception of twofold mattering, I trouble the mattering of school uniforms. Barad (2007, p.3) states that ‘matter and meaning are not separate elements … and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder’. Matter is twofold: substance (matter) and significance (matter). School uniforms do not just affectively impact the body (comfort/discomfort) but also affectively incite ways to be a student. School uniforms focus on what a body ‘is’ limiting a student body’s capacity to become. School uniforms manifestly differentiate students and create binary sex, uncritically linked to gender (Youdell, 2006), where the Vitruvian man (Braidotti, 2019) forms the measure of the ideal student. I have previously written with Mary Lou Rasmussen on dress-wearing as intra-action (Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020). What we pinpointed within the uniform debate, and what I extend here, is the assumption that before the uniform, a schoolboy and schoolgirl pre-existed (always signified as ‘naturally’ cisgender). Thus, uniforms re-inscribe the heterosexual matrix. The material-discursive uniform becomes with the creation of the schoolgirl and schoolboy. Uniforms themselves as matter are not problematic but ‘a thing that needs to be noticed in the event and how this comes to matter’ (Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020).

Methodology

This article draws on data created through an individual filmed ‘intraview’ (Kuntz & Presnall, 2012)Footnote 7 with one of 13 secondary students. One question I asked participants was how they felt about their school uniform. This article focuses on one schoolgirl’s response. It outlines the affective negotiation of her school uniform requirements where she ‘both contest[s] and reproduce[s] institutional and peer regulation of girls’ dress’ (Raby, 2010, p. 334).

Jane discusses how she feel-thinks the school uniform is a thing that does. The uniform has force in the becoming process that appears as an affective involuntary problem-solving activity. I refer to this problem-solving as feeling-thinking-making (Wolfe, 2022a) which is consequential for Jane in negotiating her becoming with the world.

Jane’s feeling-thinking-making discussed emerges from the doing of research in process that perpetually moves, a creation of quantitative and qualitative modes and meanings interweaving through and within the diffractive apparatus that is this research. Accessing the filmic dialogues illustrates the point of my Re/active Documentary methodology (Wolfe, 2017b, 2018) that research data are unstable, as they change in matter and meaning through every viewing/reading. The research process focuses on how relations form through the research action of feeling- thinking of the intra-view as a re/action, a making sense. New and multiple patterns of mattering re/emerge with the imminent feeling-thinking-making (becoming) in the event of research, including the dissemination event.

Film Clip of Jane watch here

The research site

Blue Sky Secondary SchoolFootnote 8 (BSS) is a selective entry, urban government science school (Year 10–12) in a southern state of Australia. Students gain access to the school based on the results of a written test, an interview, and workshop participation.

Research design

The project consisted of a mixed method online questionnaire (n = 130) as (Year 10) students entered the school, 13 30-min filmed intraviews mid-way through the first year with all students who volunteered, and two one-hour focus groups (11 students from intraviews) 12 months after the intraviews. This paper focuses on one of the intraviews conducted and is a fine-grain analysis of Jane’s response to how she feels about her school uniform. I encourage the viewing of this film clip.

Jane’s response to her school uniform is considered through a smattering of other student responses on the material affect of school attire on their bodies as she deliberates on the dis/comfort created through a differentiation of gender. The ‘schoolgirl’ uniform at BSS consisted of a skirt, shirt, tie, tights, socks, dress, sweater, scarf, blazer, sports uniform, and regulation shoes. The ‘schoolboy’ uniform consisted of trousers, shorts, socks, a sweater, a scarf, a blazer, a sports uniform, and regulation shoes.

Situated research

The cognitive in education and educational research continues to matter at the expense of affective considerations. The sensing body has been associated with unreason, which has no place in our Cartesian-constrained schools (Wolfe, 2022a). Thus, affective impacts of schooling have remained undervalued and under-researched. The recent affective turn in education (Dernikos et al., 2020), focusing on relations, illustrates how reason is affective (Massumi, 2015). I think with Massumi's (2015, p. 6) proposition of rethinking rational choice as a relation of affect where ‘rational self-interest’ (linked to survival instinct) and ‘affective agitation’ (how a student is affected within the ecology of schooling/society) are indistinct and ‘at the heart of every act’. Jane’s conversation discussed below illustrates how Jane's choice not to wear trousers was made through affective reasoning (incitation connected to belonging), not as an autonomous individual (Wolfe, 2022a). Thus, thinking with Massumi (2015), I ask educators to consider matters regarding student choice, not as an individual act but as profoundly entangled in the communal.

In this research, ‘entanglements are highly specific configurations’ (Barad, 2007, p. 74) and deserve unpacking to fully appreciate the possibility of enabling capacities in situ. Thus, I address the consequence of what materialises (objects–bodies–spaces) with the school uniform in these instances while calling attention to how matter matters, for whom, and in what ways.

Jane is halfway through Year 10 when she participates in a 30-min filmed intraview. She has already completed an anonymous online survey regarding her affective experiences at school. Jane previously attended a Steiner school (primary school) and then completed Y7-9 at a government girls’ school before her acceptance into this specialist science school.

The intraview occurs in the school's pristine boardroom, dominated by a glistening and expansive table. I am nervous about scratching the polished table and move carefully around it with my equipment. There are large windows that overlook a native Australian garden. The atmosphere exudes disciplinary governance. My white male camera assistant and I (white cisgender woman) find we speak in reverential hushed voices. The too-big-for-the-room table is encircled with the chairs of school decision-makers, while the framing walls purposefully boast the school's academic and sporting achievements. I feel the authoritarian weight of the room and request that other intraviews be conducted elsewhere. We carefully position ourselves, cramming the camera, lighting, and the interview chair as far as possible from the overbearing table, shrinking ourselves into a corner of the room.

This space of schooling rarely welcomes students, but it is a space that governs them. It is where school administrators create and enact policies and procedures. I worry about the limited feeling-thinking that can transpire for my participants in this space of their governance as I consider ‘the affective-material life of the spaces we teach and research in, both how materialities activate thought and how thought activates materiality’ (Niccolini et al., 2018, p. 324). I conduct two of the 13 interviews in this space and request the other intraviews to ‘move’ around the school. Lenz Taguchi's (2012, p. 275) states how the ‘material-discursive condition of this space of the interview is difficult to separate from any other event of talking involving a child and an adult that takes place in school’. Jane is not a child, but the unequal student/teacher power relationship remains in this space, that incites her to success and to ‘get it right’ (Quinlivan, 2017).

Wearing the boys’ uniform

Cisgender girl students participating in this study described their school uniform, using terms including ‘heavy’, ‘clogged, ‘crowded’, ‘suffocating’, ‘cold’, ‘scratchy’, ‘constricting’, ‘unconvenient’[sic], ‘restrictive’ and ‘uncomfortable’. All the boys and several girls (in their Year 10 intraview) responded that overall uniforms were a ‘good thing’. The boys explicitly linked the formal uniform with representations of success in academics and life. They recognised the uniform as overtly representing pride, elitist identity, and privilege connected to their selective entry science school. One male student explained how the uniform prevented marginalisation and that it was ‘a good thing’ that the girls could choose to wear the boys’ uniform.

In contrast, some girls were unaware they could choose to wear the boys’ uniform until we discussed it in the intraview. From the dialogues recorded, it is not difficult to understand how and why wearing the boys’ uniform could be problematic for pre-identified cisgender girls (Chacko, 2019). There were no debates regarding boys wearing the girls’ uniform. This silence is deafening.

The girls were much more critical than the boys of their assigned uniform, identifying covertly gendered differences of discomfort while also seemingly resigned to their uncomfortable fate. This fatalistic acknowledgment is juxtaposed with their uncritical denial of sexism or discrimination at school. As I have written about elsewhere, students are rarely taught to consider structural inequalities, resulting in ignorance of gender equity issues (Wolfe, 2022a, 2022c). Young women have been sold the promise that they live in a postfeminist (Ringrose, 2012) era of equity and choice for all (McRobbie, 2009).

Unlike other studies, this study found that girls mostly did not have the same passionate attachment to their uniform as ‘a class-based embodied disposition’ (Pomerantz & Raby, 2018, p. 12) of comfort and belonging evident from the conversations with the boys. This may be because they were specifically asked how they felt about their school uniform. Two of the seven girls interviewed claimed they ‘liked’ their school uniform while one was ‘fine with it’, but they mainly did not discuss the uniform as a representation of a successful elite student, as the schoolboys had. The other five girls were more critical but focused on the affective aesthetics of the uniform—how they felt, looked, and how their bodies could or could not move with the uniform. Jane (below) does refer to the inappropriateness of not turning up to school in ‘trackies’Footnote 9 and looking like a ‘bogan’Footnote 10 but then discusses liking and wearing ‘trackies’ for sport. Her multiple perceptions of ‘trackies’ reveals the importance of place and space in making a sense of belonging in relation to class.

A recent Australian study found that a large proportion of children ‘would prefer to wear their sports uniform instead of their traditional uniform’ (McCarthy et al., 2019, p. 1) and that this would enable them to be more active. Most schools have a policy precluding students from wearing sports uniforms on non-sports days (McCarthy et al., 2019), which seems nonsensical and illustrates educational processes that are not inclusive of how students feel in school. But the sports uniform is also not gender-neutral, as claimed. My research school did not formally specify a girl or boy uniform until you go to the manufacturer’s listing.

Push–pull conversations: ‘it’s that stigma, like it’s bad saying that, but it's true’

Melissa How do you feel about your school uniform? What do you like about it, and would you prefer to have something else, or would you prefer other options?

Jane Yep, with my school uniform, I would –I'd probably prefer something more comfier [sic] because I feel like it's—our education is kind of more important than what image we give off. Obviously, I don’t—wear—come in wearing trackies and looking like bogans or something, but I don’t know, I feel like comfort, I know when I'm more comfier [sic] I learn better, and so maybe instead of having to wear- I know you can wear pants as a female, but there's kind of like a stigma that surrounds it, I guess. You can’t – people say, oh, just don’t worry what people think but that's kind of –that's hard, you're always going to worry, well I know myself, I am, and to just say, today, it's a really cold day, I’d probably prefer if I could wear pants and not—not be judged but I'd feel uncomfortable, I guess, and instead I can wear a skirt with stockings and I just don’t like stockings, I just find them itchy, so I guess modifying the uniform so that everyone is comfy and maybe even just not having a uniform at all and just having just like—because clothes, you can express yourself through and so I think that's really important, especially since it's boring just to—everyone to be the same and it just—it will allow people to just feel more free and more comfortable in themselves, especially coming from my primary school where we didn’t have a uniform because it was Steiner, I know people didn’t wear outrageous clothes, it was just like what you were comfy in and what you wanted to learn in and just not to focus on the outside, just to focus on your inside and just about your learning.

In the first instance, Jane immediately discusses the discomfort of her uniform on her body. She refers to the absurdity of the imagery of the ideal student as one wearing a uniform. Jane highlights that uniforms can inhibit learning if they cause discomfort. She articulates her understanding that image is important to schools as reinstating conservative, hierarchical representations of class (don’t wear ‘trackies’ and be a ‘bogan’ or be ‘outrageous’) but desires a more comfortable option than offered. She acknowledges that she can choose to wear trousers, but the stigma is too much to bear. She expresses her desire to wear pants to be comfortable ‘without being judged’ and focus on the inside, not the outside, and be ‘comfy’. The uniform trousers become with assemblages, and agential cuts are made, entangled with the affective violence (Hook & Wolfe, 2018) of shame and stigma for the wrong body; the female body. Jane's response illustrates a somatic feeling-thinking-making process in-action, where she is affectively summoned to productively adopt normative aspirational dispositions, including binary gender that becomes with the uniformed body. The girls’ uniform becomes in a process that is Barad's (2007) twofold mattering as substance and meaning.

Melissa When you were going to the Steiner school, would you have worn pants most of the time?

(I was interested that Jane once happily wore trousers but now chooses not to, despite her discomfort in wearing them.)

Jane Yep. I would have worn pants, maybe—they had the school top you could wear if you wanted to, and I probably put that on and just a jumper, and it was just—I was comfy, I just didn’t feel like this is the boys’ uniform, this is the girls’ uniform and one of us has to be uncomfortable and cold—my legs freeze.

Jane is now made to feel the gendered distinction of what it is to be a girl student. Cold. There is a distinct girls’ uniform, which is uncomfortable, but she still feels compelled to wear it.

Melissa And your girls’ school?

(Jane also attended another high school before attending her current school, so I am interested in their uniform policy and students’ responses to uniforms)

Jane At my old girls’ school, we had the—yeah, just like this uniform with the skirt and everything, but here it's a lot warmer because we can actually stay inside at lunchtime, where at my old school, we had to be outside, and it was freezing so people would just wear trackies under their skirts and pull them down.

Melissa So they weren’t allowed to wear pants at the girls’ school, or-?

(I ask for clarification on the school’s policy on girls wearing trousers)

Jane You were, but then again, it's that stigma, like it’s bad saying that, but it's true. You kind of—I don’t know, yeah. It's just that people would then judge you. It's so mean, but that's just what happened, yeah.

Jane vocalises the power of the imminent threat of stigma (shame). The consequence of that the girl students obediently wear their silently assigned skirts and dresses, despite ‘freezing’. She states, ‘it's bad saying’, showing that she understands she is transgressing the rules of recognition of speaking the unspoken of affective violence, what Jane calls ‘so mean’, on the bodies assigned as a girl.

Melissa And here, you can wear pants too?

(Jane is my first intraview conducted at the school, and I seek clarification)

Jane Yeah, there’s pants available here as well.

Melissa And not many people do?

(I ask this question as I have not seen any girls in trousers.)

Jane I know with the sport uniform, I wear the trackies because they're really, really comfy and warm, but I just haven’t tried on the other pants because I'm just not sure. I don’t know; they just don’t look comfy.

Jane wears the tracksuit pants designated for sport, which she claims are really ‘comfy and warm’. These ‘trackies’ were previously discussed in relation to an identity of a ‘bogan’, but this identity does not seem to follow the ‘trackies’ when worn in sport. Jane is ‘unsure’ about wearing the other school trousers (previously called the boys’ uniform). This ambiguity is connected to how they ‘look’ and how they may make her feel uncomfortable due to ‘stigma’ and shame. Even without wearing them, the idea alone makes her uncomfortable. The materiality of the trousers matter as meaning, and they signify a masculinity which in the gender binary sits in opposition to the successful schoolgirl. She has not tried on the school trousers (to verify if they are physically uncomfortable) as the thought of wearing them is too much and possibly unspeakable.

Jane emerges within specific material-discursive apparatuses, in the event, in memory, past/present future -created with her. In this conversation with me, this smart girl feel-thinks-makes sense of the world around her. And she actively articulates Massumi’s (2015, p. 6) ‘rational self-interest’ (ensuring she belongs) and ‘affective agitation’ (the various forces affecting her) through her feelings of the fear of non-recognition if she wears the boys’ allocated trousers. She openly describes her discomfort with the material uniform itself, but the more significant pain is the prospect of wearing ‘pants’ due to the ‘stigma’ attached. Despite her apparent fear, she questions why girls must be uncomfortable. She has already reflected on her prior experience (stigma free) of wearing trousers in primary school. She understands the binary gender inequity that the requirement to wear the uniform creates, ‘this is the boys’ uniform, this is the girls’ uniform, and one of us has to be uncomfortable’. She aligns the required formal uniform within a politics of recognition, stating that her schooling should be more about education than an image (successful schoolgirl in a dress)- while continuing to perform as incited.

Jane recognises the affect of her girls’ uniform as feelings of discomfort, such as being cold or having itchy legs. She refuses to ameliorate the discomfort of the girl uniform by wearing trousers (boy uniform) as the greater hurt, feelings of nonbelonging or anticipated exclusion, of moving outside her assigned performative gender categorization of girl is too shameful. Jane articulates tensions felt as the relational push–pull of the ‘field of potential’ (Massumi, 2015, p. 44) she is becoming with. There is a multiplicity of choices/actions she can take. She desires to break free from the girl uniform that hurts, but she also feels the need to remain within the binary gender category that she is invested in. The tension recounted here is not one to be solved but instead considered ‘as an activating force …opening spaces for maneuvering within difference’ (Niccolini et al., 2018, p. 325) within the particular entanglement of uniforms with binary gender and power structures.

Shame is evoked by an identified girl wearing the allocated ‘boy’ uniform of trousers, as it marks a transgression of the heterosexual matrix that is reproductive of gender stabilisation. Normative restrictions secure the normative boundaries of sex with an unspoken ‘threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic unlivability’ (Butler, 1993, p. xxiii). Performing girl in Australian schools includes ‘frocking up’Footnote 11 in order ‘to solicit a becoming…in the struggle for recognition’ (Butler, 2004, p. 44) as a successful girl student.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have discussed ways the figure of the schoolgirl emerges through relationships with other bodies and matter encountered within schooling assemblages. The aim was to highlight how uniforms matter in more ways than academic opportunities for girl students. My concern remains with how school uniforms reinforce binary gender, which may constrain girls’ capacity to fulfil all they can become. School uniforms affect girls’ well-being by impacting their sense of self, identity, and belonging at school and contributing to everyday binary gendering that not only privileges some bodies but creates gender hierarchies of inequity (Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020). The ontoepistemological (Barad, 2007) experience of one girl student has been unpacked, with attention to the prehension of affect within a situated ecology. The unpacking illustrates how schoolgirl subjectivity is co-produced through the measurement that is school uniform wearing. The paper recounts the ambivalence Jane feels-thinks, elucidating the push–pull of the field of potential. She expresses conflicting desires. Firstly, to break free from the uniform that hurts, and secondly, to remain in her gendered position within the recognised binary category, which she is deeply invested in.

I am arguing for education stakeholders to evaluate how everyday material-discursive forces of school uniforms, as a feeling-thinking-making of schooling, has material consequences on young lives and results in privileging some bodies over others by making categories—in this case, the binary figuration of the schoolgirl and the schoolboy. Braidotti's (2019, p. 84) posthuman figurations ‘start by questioning who “we” might be’, as a call for more ethical visionary alternatives to existing figures. School uniforms carry everyday discourse and meanings that support reductive hierarchies of difference and are dynamic and affective. The (assumed) neutral school uniform increases or decreases the capacities of the diverse bodies that wear it in various ways. I offer a speculative vision for a posthuman figuration of a non-binary successful student as an affirmation of possible futures. I ask educators to feel-think how this would matter and what this would do.

My research continues to refeel-rethink-remake everyday assumed neutral school practices to envision new flourishing places and spaces for equity. I attend to feeling-thinking-making about uniforms to illustrate absurdities associated with gender creation that appear as common-sense, reproduced in schools as affective violence on students, and how this is silently felt and materialises inequities. Rarely has research accounted for the actual dynamic materiality of the uniform as a thing or contested the multiple ways it emerges with gendered hierarchies within the relational field of schooling. I restate that most school uniforms are based on Western white male wear—shirt, tie, blazer, pants, polo shirt, shorts, and school shoes. The gender-neutral uniform for female students is traditionally the boys’ uniform—a tie, shirt, shorts, polo shirt, trousers, and blazer. At BSS school, uniforms distinguish students as elite (selective science school) and as male or female through various items of clothing (blazer, trousers, dresses, skirts, tights, shorts, ties). The basis of the uniform is male, and although girl students are patronisingly ‘allowed’ to wear trousers (noted explicitly as the boys’ uniform), this does not appear as common knowledge and is problematised through Jane's recounted feelings. What is glaringly absent, as the unspoken, is the notion that some boys might desire to wear dresses (see Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020). The school dress here signifies ‘lack’ for the wearer, or what we are not (ideal successful student), as uncomfortable.

Many schools run programmes and activities to mitigate gender bias and discrimination in schools, including LGBTQI + clubs and special inclusive events (girls in STEM). But everyday material-discursive practices within classrooms (Wolfe, 2019), sporting spaces (Wolfe, 2017a), and seemingly benign places such as toilets (Slater et al., 2019), along with compulsory school uniforms (Neary & McBride, 2021; Wolfe & Rasmussen, 2020) continue to reinstate a gender binary and hegemonic discursive modes of being and belonging (Kenway & Bullen, 2011). Uniform wearing, as an unspoken affective becoming process, activates a student body problem-solving activity that is consequential. The school uniform is a thing of material-discursive force rather than a passive entity with known attributes. School uniforms assist in materialising girl and boy students as distinct and opposite, situating girl students as lesser.