Undergraduate dissertation prize for the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Working Group of the RGS-IBG, 2007

This paper examines gender performance in the junior boarding houses of an English boarding school. Judith Butler's performativity framework (1990) was modified to include geographic notions of space, and applied to answer three research questions. Firstly, within the junior boarding houses, how is gender performed in and through space? Secondly, how does 'the school' influence these gender performances? Thirdly, what do the findings tell us about Judith Butler's 'abstract subject' and its theoretical value when operating in space? There were six phases of qualitative data collection and a number of important findings. Most importantly, it was concluded that gender is performed in a variety of ways in and through space, that gender performance is influenced by the operation of discourses in and through space and that Butler's 'abstract subject', and correspondingly the relationship between subjectivity and discourse, must be retheorised by geographers if they are to mobilise performativity alongside geographic notions of space.