Backstage performances: A third grader's embodiments of pop culture and literacy in a public school classroom

Abstract

This article examines the less visible ways in which popular culture enters the classroom and shapes children's embodied performances as students and literate subjects. Foregrounding snapshots from a case study of a low-achieving, African American female student, I consider how popular culture is inscribed on students' bodies and becomes a means through which they perform their schooled selves, at the same time that school curricula are resources for constructing conceptualisations of popular culture images and texts. The examination of popular culture, literacy curricula and identities is informed by poststructural approaches to discourse, power and the body that allow the consideration of bodies as discursive means and as sites of inscription. This approach makes possible the examination of the politics of the curriculum, that is, the examination of the ways school curricula at their intersection with popular culture exert power onto students' bodies and produce norms and regularities that students take up, subvert and/or resist. From this perspective, I expose the ways in which the curriculum, popular culture and children's performances as gendered, literate and other types of subjects intertwine in the background of the official school space.