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This article revisits one of the more contentious debates in current studies of narrative: the claim that identities are, in some sense,fabricatedby and in narratives, and the counter-claim that individuals have inherent capacities, such as a dynamic unconscious, that precede or are in excess of any identity-building work that narrative might do. The article approaches this debate via competing theories drawn from sociology and cultural studies, contrasting post-structuralist and Foucauldian theories with a Kleinian cultural analysis of narrative. The theoretical discussion is illustrated via a story told by a young man who apparently had strong investments in heterosexual romance.

This article draws on a small-scale qualitative study to explore the relationship between some of the more implicit disciplinary dimensions of schooling and a group of boys' investments in heterosexual romance. It argues that romance provided the boys with a cultural repertoire—that is, a narrative resource or set of discursive practices—through which they negotiated and made imaginative sense of the "little cultural world" of their college. In particular, the article suggests that romance served to police and discipline relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in the pupils' culture while providing for the boys a mode of subjective orientation to key disciplinary practices of schooling. As such, romance may be seen as a resource through which the boys "worked themselves into" the dispositions of a middle-class or professional habitus.

This article is based on the ethnographic study of children's play at break time in two contrasting primary schools in north London. Play in the two schools was differently gendered, at least partly because of the different organization of the playground. The article will argue that children will use the means available to them to construct gender in their playgrounds and that this will frequently involve the reproduction of hegemonic cultural identities and relations of power. However, the article will go on to argue that local interventions at the level of the individual school can and do bring into question such identities and power relations, in the process making available to children ways of being that are more open to possibility and difference.