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Playing and resisting: rethinking young
people’s reading cultures
Alex Kendall
Abstract
In this paper I will argue that while young adult
readers may often be represented through ‘othering’
discourses that see them as ‘passive’, ‘uncritical’
consumers of ‘low-brow’, ‘throw-away’ texts, the
realities of their reading lives are in fact more subtle,
complex and dynamic. The paper explores the dis-
courses about reading, identity and gender that
emerged through discussions with groups of young
adults, aged between 16 and 19, about their reading
habits and practices. These discussions took place as
part of a PhD research study of reading and reader
identity in the context of further education in the Black
Country in the West Midlands. Through these discus-
sions the young adults offered insights into their
reading cultures and the ‘functionality’ of their reading
practices that contest the kinds of ‘distinction[s]’ that
tend to situate them as the defining other to more
‘worthy’ or ‘valuable’ reading cultures and practices.
While I will resist the urge to claim that this paper
represents the cultures of young adult readers in any
real or totalising sense I challenge the kinds of
dominant, reductive representations that serve to fix
and demonise this group and begin to draw a space
within which playfulness and resistance are alterna-
tively offered as ways of being for these readers.
Introduction
In this paper I will argue that while young adult
readers may often be represented through ‘othering’
discourses that see them as ‘passive’, ‘uncritical’
consumers of ‘low-brow’, ‘throw-away’ texts, the
realities of their reading lives are in fact more subtle,
complex and dynamic.
I begin with an exploration of how these discourses are
constructed and perpetuated and how they might serve
to situate readers within the wider discourses of
literacy curricula. I then move on to an analysis of
transcripts of young people talking about their maga-
zine reading to suggest how alternative readings of
these readers might be made. In conclusion I consider
the implications of these readings for educators.
The outcomes of research have enabled teachers and
tutors to better understand the ‘out of school’ reading
habits and preferences of primary and secondary
school-aged students. However there is little in the
literature dedicated specifically to illuminating the
life-world literacies of 16–19-year-olds, particularly
those who are studying within further education,
rather than school, environments. Reading habits
surveys, of both the larger scale (Hall and Coles,
1994, 1999; Whitehead, 1977), and the more local
(Millard, 1997) have focused on younger students,
and the more recent policy spotlight that the Skills for
Life strategy (Department for Education and Skills,
2001) has cast on adult literacy has equally left 16–
19-year-olds in the shadow-lands. This group of
readers seems to sit at the margins of reading research
in the United Kingdom. Thus while the key current
discussions about reading in secondary and adult
education are of interest to teachers in the 16–19 sector,
there is no comparative scale of enquiry, action,
exploration, experimentation or reflection specific to
this particular group of learners for teachers to engage
with, leaving them to extrapolate and eavesdrop, to
listen at the margins of other people’s conversations.
This void has been filled by a speculative chatter in the
public spaces within which the reading practices of this
group are discussed, staff rooms, senior common rooms
and the pages of professional publications, and debate
seems to have been fuelled by hunch and rumour and
influenced perhaps by a wider moral panic about the
degenerate ‘hoody’ generation. I have argued elsewhere
(Kendall, 2005, 2007) that ‘popular’ characterisations by
educators of the young adult reader often depict an
unskilled reader who rarely reads for pleasure and who
prefersmagazinesandtelevisiontobooks(Passmore,
2002). Such descriptions are often contextualised by
expressions of despondency or disappointment, stated
or inferred, on the part of the (well-meaning) teachers
and tutors who expound them:
‘‘Why have they got to 16, 17, 18, 19 without having
engaged with books?’’ (Teacher quoted by Kendall,
2007, p. 39).
When my colleagues and I interview prospective
students, we always seem to ask about their reading
habits. ‘‘Do you read for pleasure?’’ we ask, hoping for the
‘yes’ that we think will reveal an interest in matters
academic and thereby portend future collegial success
(Gallik, 1999, p. 480).
While those quoted here lament the ‘what’ of young
people’s reading choices, others express deep-felt
Literacy Volume 42 Number 3 November 2008 123
rUKLA 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
concern about the potential effects of those choices and
the kinds of responses and interpretations that
preferred texts might elicit:
‘‘So enthralled are young women by the seductive power
of the media that critical faculties have been blunted.
Female students, the very group who should be challen-
ging these assumptions, are silent. Celebrity-led maga-
zines such as Heat and Closer are as eagerly consumed by
girls from ABC backgrounds – the student body – as by
their low-income peers. Such publications trap their
readers into cycles of anxiety, self-loathing and misery
that have become a standard mark of modern womanhood
. . . The girl becomes a harshly self-judging person’’
(McRobbie, 2005, p. 1).
Here McRobbie evokes the ‘media effects’ (Gauntlett,
2005) model of sense making about young people’s
interactions with magazine culture which perceives
content as offering a ‘blueprint’ for the management of
identity and its realisation in social activity and the
reader as a passive recipient of an encoded textual
product. In this case McRobbie seems to see her young
female students as ‘‘young media users [who] can be
seen as the inept victims of products which, whilst
obviously puerile and transparent to adults, can trick
children into all kinds of ill-advised behaviour’’
(Gauntlett, 2005).
What these responses share is a ‘common sense’ about
the values, practices and processes of reading and being
a reader which is fixed, knowable, predictable and
indexed to broader cultural norms about taste and
worth. Rather than describing the ‘realities’ of lived
experience this ‘common sense’ applies a kind of
‘cultural metrics’ to the reading subject and in the case
of the young adult reader finds him orher lacking. Such
common sense is grounded less in the lived experience
of young adult readers than it is in the ‘‘reification of
what it means to be properly literate’’ (Millard, 1997).
That is to say that these ideas articulate a ‘common
sense’ about different types of texts, their value (in
capital terms) and the worth of engaging with them that
situate the reader of culturally ‘illegitimate’ texts (for
example the young person who chooses Heat) as other
to the capital rich reader of ‘legitimate’ texts (the teacher
professional who prefers Jane Eyre). Rather than
eliciting any ‘truth’ about the significance or intrinsic
value of reading particular kinds of texts I will argue
here that these acts of ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu, 2002) at
once draw upon and perpetuate very particular ideas
about ‘valuable’ or ‘worthy’ reading and illuminate the
ways in which texts as ‘cultural objects’ might be seen
to operate within an economy of symbolic value
(Colebrook, 1997) and thus function as currency within
markets of social, cultural and capital exchange.
Drawing on data from a study of the leisure reading
habits of young adults in the Black Country in the West
Midlands, this paper suggests that if the focus of
enquiry is shifted from the ‘what’ of young people’s
reading cultures to the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, then a
more creative, playful (Maclure, 2006) and resisting set
of identities might be represented. This reorientation
seeks to ‘de-other’ the reading cultures of young adults
and in so doing to liberate literacy practitioners
from constraining discourses of cultural worth and
enrichment, encouraging them to bear witness to the
complexities of the reading practices young people
might participate in.
The reading habits of 16–19-year-olds:
evidence from the Black Country
This paper draws on a selection of data taken from a
wider study of the reading habits and identities of 16–
19-year-olds studying in further education contexts in
the Black Country in the West Midlands. Data collected
for the study included a larger-scale questionnaire of
leisure reading habits to a sample of 500 students.
Sixty-seven per cent responded (338 participants) and
of these 261 or 77% were female. This was followed by
focus group discussions, which invited interrogation
of the key findings emerging from the reading habits
study, extracts from which are cited later in the
paper, and ‘auto-ethnographic’ accounts of the reading
histories of individuals within the target population.
The findings from the reading habits survey are
revelatory in the sense that they describe what might
be ‘expected’ yet also signpost a broader, more varied
diet. The summary of reading choices outlined in Table
1 suggests, for example, that newspapers and maga-
zines constituted the most popular form of reading for
this group, thus lending some weight to the assertions
made by McRobbie and others above about the
orientation and focus of young people’s reading in
general and young women’s in particular.
Eighty-two per cent of participants report that they
read a paper every day or most days. The range and
variety of newspaper reading was considerable: the
338 students reported 387 references to newspapers,
mentioning 24 titles. Forty-four per cent of the papers
they read were ‘locals’ and 56% were ‘nationals’. Of
national newspaper titles 29% chosen were broad-
sheets and 71% tabloid. Although they are only slightly
more likely to read a local paper than a national they
were two and a half times more likely to read a tabloid
than a broadsheet. The majority read more than one
paper and 12 of the 338 participants (3.5%) reported
reading a tabloid and a broadsheet.
Magazines and fiction constituted the next two most
popular categories, with 61% of participants reading
magazines and 51% reading fiction most days or every
day. Fiction was also the type of reading on which
students were most notably divided with 49% never or
rarely choosing this type of reading.
Questions relating to magazine reading were included
in the questionnaire specifically at the request of the
124 Playing and resisting
rUKLA 2008
student pilot group. Interestingly the early drafts of the
questionnaire, which reflected the priorities of teacher
focus groups, had not asked about magazine reading,
and the student pilot group identified this as a
weakness of the questionnaire. The majority of
respondents (88%) reported that they read magazines
with 56% reading a magazine most days. Popular
genres are summarised in Table 2.
Independent samples t-tests were conducted to com-
pare the frequency of reading choices made by male
and female participants in the reading; habits survey.
Female participants were more likely to read maga-
zines (M52.31, SD 50.57) than their male counter-
parts (M52.50, SD 50.60; t(331) 52.45, P50.02).
No differences were found in the choices male and
female readers made about genre other than in
expressed preference for choosing romance fiction
where a significant difference was found in the score
for females (M53.02, SD 50.97) and males (M53.29,
SD 50.91; t(327) 52.06, P50.04).
The focus group discussants supported the findings
that tabloid newspapers constituted an important
and dominant aspect of their reading. However,
they were more ambivalent about the findings in
relation to fiction. There was an interesting disloca-
tion between the findings about fiction drawn from
the questionnaire and the focus group data. This
raised some interesting methodological questions
about the ways respondents preferred to ‘play out’
their reading identities within different modalities of
practice.
‘Taste’ undone
Bourdieu’s notion of distinction (2002) offers a useful
way of unravelling the ideas about reading choice
articulated above and the ways that we might choose
to make sense of them. Viewed through Bourdieu’s
lens the reading ‘choices’ young people make are never
value free but always already meaningful within wider
systems of cultural exchange:
‘‘Certain texts, and ways of reading those texts, do not
have a monetary value. But they have a value in so far as
they embody a principle of aesthetic autonomy, which is
no less culturally-determined or valued. It depends upon
valorising certain authors . . . certain ways of reading . . .
as well as the positions of those who confer certain values’’
(Colebrook, 1997, p. 107).
Colebrook offers the ‘Shakespeare industry’ (1997, p.
98) to illustrate how the consumption of and associa-
tion of oneself with ‘consecrated’ texts yields a profit of
distinction, ‘‘the more legitimate a given area, the more
necessary and ‘profitable’ it is to be competent in it,
and the more damaging and ‘costly’ to be incompe-
tent’’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 86).
Bourdieu argues that the maximisation of profit within
educational institutions and the wider society to which
they index is gained through recognition of, admira-
tion for and conspicuous or implied consumption of
the highest-status texts, that is to say the evolution of a
‘‘disposition to recognise legitimate works, a propensity
and capacity to recognise their legitimacy and perceive
them as worthy of admiration in themselves legitimate
positions within that institution’’ (Bourdieu, 2002, p.
26). With regard to reading and college students,
success or competence (achievement) as a reader will
be understood in terms of a general acceptance and
internalisation of institutional positions. Which texts
have value and which do not and which reading
practices have value and which do not? Texts falling
outside the authority of curricula, Heat,Closer, More and
Total Film, become other to discourses of legitimacy:
‘‘Illegitimate extra-curricular culture, whether it be the
knowledge accumulated by the self-taught or the
‘experience’ acquired in and through practice, outside
the control of the institution specifically mandated to
inculcate it and officially sanction its acquisition, like the
art of cooking or herbal medicine . . . is only valorised
the strict extent of its technical efficiency, without any
social or added-value, and is exposed to legal sanctions
(like the illegal practice of medicine) whenever it emerges
from the domestic universe to compete with authorised
competences’’ (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 25).
The ‘habitus’ of teachers and students, where habitus
is understood as ‘social inheritance’ (Grenfell and
James, 1998, p. 16), are, through virtue of their
Table 1: Choosing different types of reading
How often do you choose the following types of reading? (%)
Every day Most Days Rarely Never
Newspapers 32.1 49.8 16.5 1.5
Magazines 4.5 56.3 38.3 0.9
Fiction 10 40.7 43.2 6.1
Biographies 0.6 4.9 59.1 35.4
Non-fiction 3.1 26.4 54 16.6
Internet 7.3 34.1 37.5 21.1
Poetry 2.1 11.6 54.6 31.7
Literacy Volume 42 Number 3 November 2008 125
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qualifications, experience and differing relationships
with the curriculum (designers and consumers)
differently situated within the ‘field’ of institutional
meanings about reading and thus are differently
positioned in their potential to draw down real and
prospective profits. Teachers and students are seen as
‘‘individuals (with particular social, scholastic and
academic habitus) positioned in fields which structure
the representations of their products’’(Grenfell and
James, 1998, p. 176). Crucially in institutions young
adult readers are rarely positioned as brokers of
‘legitimate’ capital in the sense that their preferred
reading choices (which may indeed be ‘profitable’ and
legitimate in the social and extra-curricular fields
within which they participate) are rarely embraced
by or positively represented through the values of the
curriculum.
Bourdieu refers to this process of legitimisation of
cultural objects as ‘consecration’ (Bourdieu, cited in
Colebrook, 1997, p. 107). Through the imposition of
curricula and its resultant processes of curriculum
selection and de-selection, the school or college can
be seen to be active and influential in the process
of consecration: ‘‘the educational system defines
non-curricular culture (la culture ‘libre’), negatively
at least, by delimiting, within dominant culture, the
area of what it puts into its syllabuses and controls by
its examinations’’ (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 23). Thus
consumption of and association of oneself with
‘consecrated’ texts yields a profit of distinction: ‘‘the
more legitimate a given area, the more necessary and
‘profitable’ it is to be competent in it, and the more
damaging and ‘costly’ to be incompetent’’ (Bourdieu,
1992, p. 86).
It is likely then that young people will find themselves
in educational contexts within which their free reading
choices (la culture libre) are discursively classified as
illegitimate and deficient. In this paper a range of
discursive data about magazine reading, that might
conventionally support the kinds of deficit models
articulated above, is ‘re-read’. Rather than the passive
‘consumer’, ‘tricked’ by the ‘‘seductive power of the
media’’, a more thoughtful and evaluative ‘reader’
emerges, a reader with perhaps a more playful,
resistant orientation.
Rereading magazine reading
The data that follow are drawn from the transcripts of
seven small group discussions with 16–19-year-olds
studying English or literacy courses at a further
education college in the Black Country in the West
Midlands. The groups comprised between three and
five students, involving 23 participants in total, all of
whom were following English or literacy courses at
Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF, formerly
National Qualifications framework or NQF) levels one,
two or three. Participation was voluntary and partici-
pants and groups were self-selecting; this meant that
the gender make-up of groups was varied with some
groups being all male, others all female and some
mixed. The discussions took place in informal, but
quiet, spaces away from the classroom setting and
were semi-structured around the findings of the
region-wide reading habits survey. Students at the
college had participated in this survey although none
of the 23 had completed a questionnaire. Participants
were asked to respond to 21 stimulus questions or
statements which were offered ‘‘pack of cards style’’
for the participants to turn over at their own pace. I led
the discussions and although I had been a teacher at
the college two years previously I was not known
personally to this intake of students. The ‘cards’
invited them to respond to the statistical findings of
the reading habits survey, to discuss the press
responses to them and to articulate their own ideas
and views about their reading practices and identities.
The extracts selected for discussion here focus parti-
cularly on magazine reading which the discussants
agreed, in line with the findings of the reading
habits study, represented a hugely significant aspect
of their reading preferences and leisure time acti-
vity. The additional focus on the magazine reading of
Table 2: Popular magazine genres
Genre reported Frequency with which
preference for genre cited
Young women’s 115
Women’s 62
Music 22
Men’s 21
Heavy metal music 14
Sport/football 13
Film 12
TV listings 11
Gossip TV 11
Gossip celebrity 8
Hair and beauty 8
(Football 7)
Newspaper magazine
supplement
6
Cars 4
Games 4
Hobbies 4
Computing 4
Gossip 3
Black culture 2
Consumer 2
Current affairs 2
Animals 1
Gay interest 1
Health 1
Motor 1
Musician 1
126 Playing and resisting
rUKLA 2008
the female participants seems especially pertinent
because it is the magazines which women choose that
are so often represented as the archetypal ‘profitless’
read-see McRobbie above.
Students attributed a range of functions to their
magazine reading: entertainment, to pursue hobbies
and interests, to find out about favourite celebrities and
to become more informed about what they perceived
to be important and relevant contemporary issues:
‘‘[I buy them because of the] stories they’ve got in them,
because I read OK and Empire you know the film
magazine and if it’s got a film that I want to read about
then I buy it or if it’s got a celebrity that I’m interested in
then I’ll buy it’’ (group 1, female).
‘‘Yeah the funny things, like the confessions and stuff, I
love those back page[s], I always go straight to the back
pages’’ (group 1, female).
‘‘[do you read magazines?] Occasionally, not on a regular
basis, not like every single week just occasionally I read
musical ones to do with different bands I like and that . . .’’
(group 3, male).
‘‘[about More magazine] I thought it was just a celebrity
magazine but it’s not they do some really good articles,
really good issues, they’ve done stuff on like robbers and
what you can do [to protect yourself] and all kinds of
things, drugs, anorexia they’ve done all kinds of good
different subjects and they’re not afraid to say what they
think which is good’’ (group 2, female).
Magazines were often the focus of ‘quiet time’:
‘‘I’ve never really discussed it with my friends we don’t
talk about magazines’’ (group 2, female).
‘‘If I’ve left a magazine lying around and my friend comes
round I’ll pick it up and we’ll have a laugh at something
or whatever but ordinarily I think you buy a magazine
and it’s time for yourself to sit down and read and just
have some peace and quiet’’ (group 2, female).
But single copies of magazines seemed to ‘flow’ freely
between readers separated by experience, gender and
generation with some readers clearly enjoying the
voyeurism of the interloping:
‘‘Well, I don’t buy them very often but when my sister
comes home [from University] I go up to my sister’s she
shares, she’s living with 3 other girls and like they have
which magazine they buy each week and then in the flat
there’ll be five different ones in so I can like [choose]
anything’’ (group 5, female).
‘‘I read FHM because my brother buys it and I just like
reading it’’ (group 2, female).
‘‘I read Woman’s Own when I’m really bored in the bath,
it’s my Mum’s and I’ve read Elle which is my sister’s’’
(group 4, female).
‘‘If I leave magazines around the house then my brother’s
will read them and then they’ll say they didn’t as they
don’t want to be seen reading a women’s magazine’’
(group 2, female).
A: ‘‘I read FHM, sometimes Loaded, just them two, and
sometimes when I go down my cousins cos they’re all girls
sometimes Sugar’’.
All: Laugh
Researcher: ‘‘So you pick it up if it’s around? Why?’’
A: ‘‘It’s got interesting things, sometimes it does have
some interesting gossip, which I would like to know
about’’ (group 1, male).
Readers consume with a certain vicarious pleasure
magazines for which they are the non-intended
audience, peering playfully at a world they feel is
intended for ‘others’ with curiosity and enjoyment.
The typical female reader’s relationship with maga-
zine content was confident and assertive. They
welcomed the fact that magazines were ‘‘not afraid to
say what they think’’ (group 2, female) about im-
portant issues and felt magazines offered them useful
information and opinions: ‘‘they’re always on about
your body and how you shouldn’t be ashamed [of it]’’
(group 4, female). However they also felt comfortable
with and justified in rejecting and resisting the ideas
and images on offer, feeling that they were not
especially influenced by what they read in magazines:
‘‘sometimes they have babyish stuff in don’t they . . . they
have some really naff clothes in there and they say it’s
fashionable and you just don’t believe it’’ (group 4,
female).
They did however express concerns about what they
perceived of as ‘‘other groups of readers’’. The
participants in group 2 (an all-female group) could
not remember any specific ways in which things they
had read in magazines impacted on their own lives but
they did articulate concerns about the impact of
magazine reading on younger readers or readers with
low self-esteem:
A: ‘‘I think people with low self-esteem are where they
read something about anorexia and think ‘oooh I might
get some attention from that’ or smoking or drinking I get
some attention I’ll try that and they’ll read other people’s
experience and they’ll think well they got attention maybe
I can’’.
B: ‘‘I think maybe younger kids as well, say a young girl if
she reads say Sugar or Bliss or something and all the
make-up and the clothes and fashion and they’d probably
take that away and think ‘oh I want that new top’ or that
coat or something’’.
C: ‘‘And when they’re like 13 and there’s like all these
Sugars and stuff and they’ve got like oh love you need to
find a boyfriend and look at all these pictures and stuff
and I think it’s really bad because they don’t need to and
the magazines sometimes portray that they have to be
popular and to be . . . [trails off]’’.
Researcher: ‘‘But you wouldn’t say that was a problem for
your peer group?’’
All: ‘‘No’’.
B: ‘‘I think it’s just like a younger age group’’.
Literacy Volume 42 Number 3 November 2008 127
rUKLA 2008
A: ‘‘Because they’re more gullible aren’t they, they believe
what they read’’.
In her ‘othering’ of the social groups vulnerable to
persuasion and damage than her own, student A
seems to share a view similar to the teachers and
commentators cited above who asserted their concerns
for and about the welfare of the young adult readers
they teach and observe.
At other times magazine articles were used as
reference points for ‘negative identification’ (Gaun-
tlett, 2002, p. 199):
A: ‘‘. . . the life stories make you feel better about
yourself’’.
B: ‘‘Like ‘I was pregnant at 12 and survived’ thank god
that’s not me’’ (group 4, 2 females).
This pattern of consuming magazines, at times
engaged, at others playful or resistant, resonates with
the ‘‘pick and mix’’ female reader Gauntlett (2002)
identifies:
‘‘They enjoy the magazines, and may at times learn bits
and pieces – ideas how to look or behave, as well as
straightforward information about health, popular culture
or social issues. At the same time, these readers would not
often argue that the magazines are perfect or ideal . . . the
magazines are not taken literally although they may
suggest some good ideas’’ (Gauntlett, 2002, p. 196).
Like Gauntlett’s readers (2001b) the female partici-
pants in this study did not seem to read magazines as
‘blueprints’ for authoring identity. Rather, magazines
seemed to offer possibilities for ‘being’ that ‘might’ be
engaged with dialogically and the (female?) reader is
invited to ‘‘play with different types of imagery’’
(Gauntlett, 2002, p. 206). This would seem to diffuse
the kinds of concerns about young women’s maga-
zines that are expressed by writers like McRobbie
(1991, 2005) who is concerned about the impact on
readers of the ‘negative’ imagery and identities
offered. This opens up the possibility of a more
liberated, ‘promiscuous’ even, understanding of ma-
gazine reading that is not captured, less understood,
through a narrative of ‘distinction’.
Here then is a potentially more radical reading
experience where ‘readers’, ‘texts’ and ‘readings’ are
in Bernstein’s (2000) terms weakly framed and
classified, opening up the kinds of possibilities for a
‘‘new social basis for consensus of interest and
opposition’’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 11) within which
identity/ies are always already ‘‘exposed as artifice
and performance’’ (Gauntlett, 2002, p. 206).
This resonates with Foucault’s contemplation of the
potentiality of magazines to facilitate the authoring of
‘alternative’ culture/s. Speaking of homosexual iden-
tity/culture he wonders whether:
‘‘something well considered and voluntary like a magazine
ought to make possible a homosexual culture, that is to say,
the instruments for polymorphic, varied, and individually
moderated relationships’’ (Foucault, 2000, p. 139).
Here Foucault rethinks the cultural meanings of the
magazine. Magazines are interesting for him not on
account of their symbolic value but in their capacity to
perform and replay responses to the question ‘‘what
can be played?’’ (Foucault, 2000, p. 140). In these terms
the magazine reading of the participants discussed
above might be recast from ‘passive’, ‘consumerist’
and valueless, as understood by the teacher ’s talking
above, to something commensurate, or at least sympa-
thetic to, Butler’s (1990) understanding of ‘gender
trouble’. In her reclaiming account of the tradition of
the women’s magazine Beetham argues, unlike for
example McRobbie (1991), that the magazine genre has
always offered possibilities for imagining new desires:
‘‘If the reader accepts the position of ‘woman’ offered by
the magazine, she takes on both the role and character
which defines it as womanly . . . I want to resist this way
of describing how the periodical works, not least because
as a genre it has another equally important characteristic
which militates against this argument . . . the more
successful periodical forms like the magazine and news-
paper are the least homogeneous. The periodical is
generically as well as physically more liable to disin-
tegrate than the book. Its typical contents – narratives,
poems, pictures, competitions, jokes – are forms which
have a more substantial cultural presence outside the
periodical. All this suggests a more fractured rather than
a rigidly coherent form’’ (Beetham, 1996, p. 12).
Beetham goes on to argue that these characteristics
serve to ensure that the ‘‘interpellation of the reader
into the role that the magazine defines’’ is always
already ‘‘fractured by the way the form works to
empower the reader’’ (Beetham, 1996, p. 13). In
Bernstein’s (2002) terms both framing and classifica-
tion, power and control are weak, enabling an
elaborated code within which discourse, identities
and voices are less specialised and the selection of
communication (sequencing, pacing, criteria, etc.) is
more negotiable. For Beetham these features of the
magazine genre define it as a ‘feminine’ opposite and
Beetham claims Kristeva’s (1979) notion of ‘women’s
time’ for the magazine, to the more tightly classified
and framed novel. The magazine, Beetham argues,
enables and encourages the possibility of the ‘resisting
reader’ (Fetterley, 1978, in Beetham, 1996).
A case for optimism?
In contrast to McRobbie’s expression of concern about
her students, I am optimistic about the ‘critical
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faculties’ of the participants in my research. Although
my findings did seem to suggest that teachers are right
to assert that students prefer, and are most likely to
read, magazines and tabloids (local and national) and
that reading seems not to be at the top of their list of
leisure time activities, it is in making sense of and
responding to these particular findings that caution
must be exercised. A sensible response requires re-
evaluation of how students’ self-selected reading is
perceived and valued and must challenge the (perhaps
nearest to hand) reference points that conventional and
dominant discourses have weaved into a common
sense about reading. Bean’s notion of ‘functionality’
(1999) is useful for thinking through the first of these
issues. Bean argues the need to better understand how
adolescents view the functions of in school and out of
school literacy and uses the term ‘functionality’ to
‘‘suggest that activities we engage in serve some valued
purpose in our lives. These may range from efforts to forge
social identity as an adolescent to accomplishing an
academic or athletic career. Functionality . . . implies that
adolescents have a sense of purpose and agency in their
actions’’ (Bean, 1999, p. 442).
Thus reading habits might be seen to reflect purposeful
choices and decision-making about issues that are
central to the lives and understandings of readers.
Bean argues for broader definitions of adolescent
literacy that embrace the functions of reading and
writing in young people’s lives; thus the personal
function of reading magazines for the young woman
quoted in Bean’s research ‘‘just for fun . . . to learn stuff.
I read stuff I’m interested in . . . related to my life’’
(1999, p. 445) might be valued and embraced as such.
Failure to do this not only obscures key facets of
adolescent literacy but, warns Bean, may engender a
‘‘sharp divide between the culture of the school and the
students who are stakeholders in a school, students may
choose to reject the official curriculum’’ (Bean, 1999, p. 446).
He concludes that:
‘‘until we bridge the gap by tapping the multiple literacies
in adolescent lives, we will continue to see adolescents
develop a disinterested cognitive view of in-school literacy
functions and a more enthusiastic view of out-of-school
discourse functions’’ (Bean, 1999, p. 447).
This leads into a further crucial issue about how we
think through the process of reading. I argue that we
need to see a move away from text-centred teaching
about reading towards something like post-structur-
alist understandings (see Peim, 1993 for practical
suggestions) that allow us to think about texts in more
complex ways, enabling a wider definition of ‘text’ and
what it means to ‘read’ text (see Kendall 2008). Much
may be gained by looking to debates in contemporary
Media Studies where writers like Buckingham (2000),
Gauntlett (2001a, 2007), McDougall (2006) and McDou-
gall and O’Brien (2008) are rejecting the patronising
belief that students should be taught how to ‘read’ the
media in favour of approaches that bear witness to
more negotiated, complex and reflective uses of media
content. This might liberate us from the cul-de-sac
debates about the differences between the tastes and
preferences of different groups of readers – Bourdieu’s
(1991) notions of habitus and field would suggest that
such differences are inevitable and unavoidable – and
move us towards a more critical positioning from which
we might consider how we make sense of the texts we
encounter. In this way while we cannot, and neither
should we want to, police or control what our students
choose to read we might better ensure that we explore
with them the readings they produce and encounter,
encouraging them to reflect on their own reading
practices with a criticality that is both questioning and
demanding. This might mean helping them ‘‘to
describe, observe and analyse different literacies rather
than just learning and teaching the one literacy [school/
college literacy] as given’’ (Street, 1999, p. 54), which
might in turn encourage new debates about the
structure and content of existing curricula and the sets
of values it serves to construct and maintain.
In conclusion I argue that a focus on the ‘what’
precludes a deficit model for making sense of young
adult reading cultures and invites the reader to share
in a ‘‘reading against the grain’’ (Street, 1999), which
demands that we, literacy professionals, reposition
ourselves to take an ‘inexpert’ look at the ‘illegitimate’
fields that define and protect our ‘expert’ identities.
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Alex Kendall, Associate Dean, Education, School
of Education, University of Wolverhampton,
Gorway Road, Walsall WS1 3BD, UK.
e-mail: A.Kendall@wlv.ac.uk
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