Book Review: Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: Exclusions and Student Subjectivities

Few books are empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated.Even fewer make a genuine advance in helping us to comprehend how, on a day-to-day basis, educational inclusions are made and exclusions can be resisted.Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: exclusions and student subjectivities is such a book.Deborah Youdell refutes the charge that poststructuralist work cannot adequately deal with inequity and the daily politics of education (e.g.Hill et al, 1999), and, in a sense, this book aims to reclaim and propose a politics of the 'post'.The book is organised into five sections, with two broad themes.The first theme is concerned with questions of context, theory and method.Youdell repositions notions of social and educational inclusion and exclusion, and asserts that a focus on education as the benign mechanism for inclusion does not allow for a more fundamental questioning of how the institution of formal education, and school institutions, are themselves implicated in excluding students from the educational endeavour, from schooling, through their own processes and practices.(p.12)Youdell argues for educational exclusions to be considered within the often overlooked, the mundane, banal practices that are set aside in the search for the more dramatic and extraordinary.She proposes that there must be an understanding of the co-constitutive relationships between student and school, that the micro exclusions that take place in the most mundane moments everyday inside schools cannot be understood as simply being experienced by students.Rather these must be understood as constitutive of the student, constitutions whose cumulative effects coagulate to limit 'who' a student can be, or even if s/he can be a student at all.(pp.12-13)The basis of this understanding is recognition of how various identity categories can be seen to intersect in, and through, education.To explore this Youdell proposes three interrelated arguments.First, and complementing other research on 'intersectionality ' (e.g.Søndergaard, 2005), is that identity categories -of 'race', ethnicity, disability, class, gender, sexuality -become meaningful through interaction with other categories, and that these 'constellations of categorisations' may be seen as shifting and nonnecessary.Second, students are constituted through constellations, particularly through 'dichotomies of good/bad students and acceptable/unacceptable and even ideal/impossible learners' (p. 30, original emphasis).These constitutions link student identities to school practices, to include some young people, to exclude others.Of significance, is the emphasis on how within these constitutions there appears at times to be an inverse relationship between status in the mainstream student subculture and the organizational discourse of bad students and unacceptable, even impossible, learners.(p.30).The third line of argument is closely linked to the second; that it is everyday practices within schools that constitute students as good and bad and produce the conditions of inclusion and exclusion.What Youdell does is make a crucial distinction between the often conflated markers of

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