PISOS OPCIÓN 74

My study is an ethnography of a youth group and concerns the establishment of gender identities and trans identities, as well as the establishment of new understandings of gender within and beyond the group. All ethnographic writing is intended to communicate a comprehensive understanding of a community to outsiders. As such it always requires detailed description (Geertz, 1973). This will likely include description of the community members and their relationships, routines and rituals, and significant artefacts (O'Reilly, 2009). However, my focus is the changing and developing identities within 4D, the youth group. A community of practice is understood to involve changing identities, as well as producing localised effects including knowledge, language, and performances of identity (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). I will use a community of practice framework as it provides tools to look at the production of identities and the performance of those identities. It also suggests a focus on the development and changes to local knowledge and language within a community.

The term ‘community of practice’ describes a community of people who are mutually engaged in a shared practice, working together in shared ways towards shared objectives (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). The young people in 4D engaged with each other with a shared purpose, and so the group functioned as a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). The value of a community of practice framework is that it considers a social group or community to develop through the engagement of the members:

The value of the notion communities of practice … lies in the fact that it identifies a social grouping not in virtue of shared abstract characteristics (e.g. class, gender) or simple co-presence (e.g. neighborhood, workplace), but in virtue of shared practice. In the course of regular joint activity, a community of practice develops ways of doing things, views, values, power relations, ways of talking. And the participants engage with these practices in virtue of their place in the community of practice, and of the place of the

community of practice in the larger social order. (Eckert, 2006, p. 683)

The engagement of the members of a community of practice is productive: it produces knowledge and language, as well as identities and performances of identity (Mills, 2011). Identities are developed within and produce power relations between the group members as well as beyond the group. A communities of practice framework suggests a detailed enquiry into the processes within the youth group to understand changing identities, and understandings of identity within the group (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Changing of identities is intrinsic to a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Members change identity as they develop expertise in the community; this is an ongoing process. Newcomers join the community and are accepted in the group as legitimate new members. Wenger (1998) calls these newcomers ‘legitimate peripheral participants’. They are accepted in the group and are allowed to see and participate in at least some of the group practices. As these newcomers learn about the group they move to become more central members of the group.

As I have described in chapter 2, identities are constructed in power relations between people and groups (Foucault, 2000). These power relations also produce knowledge, that is power/knowledge (Foucault, 1978). As well as changing identities within 4D, my study is concerned with how the young people understood trans and gender identities, and how this knowledge was developed and deployed within the group. This in turn affected the power relationships between members of the group. This focus also fits well within a community of practice framework. In a community of practice members engage with each other to negotiate meanings significant to the practice of the community. As community members engage with each other they establish and re-establish knowledge as well as learning about the practice. This knowledge in turn produces and reproduces power relationships in the community.

The identity work that the members of 4D were doing was unusual; it was unlike the identity work considered by many researchers using a communities

of practice framework (Clark, 2012; Eckert, 1989; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992; Jones, 2012; Paechter, 2003, 2007). The members of 4D were actively seeking to establish alternative identities to the ones they had been accepted as holding. In fact, in my study, many of the participants were actively seeking to establish an identity constructed in binary opposition to the identity they were assigned at birth: many of those assigned female at birth sought to be understood and accepted by themselves and others as male, and many of those assigned male at birth sought acceptance as female. Other 4D members were seeking to establish a gender identity, or a concept of gender that remains unavailable, or not understood or accepted, in many wider communities. For example, a fluid or non-binary gender identity was and remains unaccepted, and in fact inconceivable, in many communities.

In most communities of practice, once peripheral members have moved to more central membership they remain as central members. For example, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) original work looked at apprenticeship learning in communities of practice such as tailors and midwives. Once the tailors and midwives had moved to become central members in the community of practice they generally remained as central members during their working life. Experienced tailors became master tailors with a high level of status and ability to mobilise power within the community. 4D was unusual in that there was an expectation that central members were on an outbound trajectory. This was in part because of the membership requirements of the group: participants had to be 25 or under. In fact, most young people moved out of the community once they had established their preferred identity or had transitioned sufficiently away from their original identity, although there was no explicit requirement for this (see chapters 8 and 10).

Wenger (1998) identifies three features that a community of practice must have: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. I will discuss these requirements in the following section of this chapter. I will consider in detail how the practice in 4D met these requirements in chapter 7.