This paper complicates normative and "common sense" narratives about gender, development, and political participation in the Middle East by problematizing the emancipatory promise embedded in dominant discourses and assumptions about schooling. Schools are the focus of much attention from the development arena, as sites for engendering political norms, particularly the norm of political participation as a form of "empowerment." Such approaches, underscored by security and development reports on the region's "youth bulge" and its implications for the demographic and leadership landscape of the future, alternatively frame boys as threats and girls as victims, in need of educational intervention as they transition into adulthood. These approaches also operate on the assumption that youth are passive recipients of ideology and content, rather than active agents in the process of becoming political participants on their own terms. In doing so, they also neglect how schools are significant sites of discursive production regarding gender norms and expectations. Drawing on 21 months of field research at ten religious and secular schools in Greater Beirut, this paper engages feminist poststructural theory to explore the complex and particular ecologies of school contexts and the ways in which they shape, monitor, and regulate gendered discourses of political participation, including who is allowed to participate and when and how. The paper focuses largely on the pedagogical practices at one Shi'i girls' school in Beirut's Southern Suburb after the 2006 summer war between Hizbullah and Israel to unpack the notion of "empowerment" at the intersection of gender and political participation. Drawing on rich illustrative classroom data, the paper explores how teachers and students, together, negotiate the discursive production of gender in relation to forms of political participation--such as resistance, militarism, democratic dialogue, and activism--through a critical, participatory, and anti-oppressive pedagogy that interrupts dominant heteronormative discourses. At the same time, gendered discourses at other levels of operation serve to regulate behavior and expectation. The paper thus demonstrates that schools in fact are neither emancipatory spaces, nor sites of hegemonic reproduction of gendered discourses. Rather, they are sites of contestation, in which the interrogation of gender norms and empowerment occurs in multiple spaces, including the classroom, and in which regulation occurs in the mundane rituals and daily interactions that constitute the school space.