Sex-gender-sexuality: how sex, gender and sexuality constellations are constituted in secondary schools

Abstract This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender, and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered, and sexualised selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault?s understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theorisation of the inseparability of gender and sexuality in the contemporary discursive frame, these analyses demonstrate how students? mundane and day-to-day practices – including bodily deportment, physical games, linguistic accounts, and uses of clothing, hairstyles and accessories – are implicated in the discursive constitution of student subjectivities. The paper argues for an understanding of sex-gender-sexuality joined together in discursive chains and intersecting with further identity categories. As such, the paper suggests that subjectivities might helpfully be thought in terms of constituting constellations that create both possibilities and constraints for „who? students can be

Identity Traps or How Black Students Fail: the interactions between biographical, sub-cultural, and learner identities

The enduring inequities experienced by African-Caribbean students in UK schools has been well documented. This paper aims to better understand how these inequities have come to be so enduring. Through detailed analyses of data generated through a school ethnography, this paper demonstrates the processes through which African-Caribbean students are identified as undesirable, or even intolerable, learners. The paper builds on the insights offered by earlier school ethnographies while deploying and developing a new theoretical framework. This framework suggests that the discursive practices of students and teachers contribute to the performative constitution of intelligible selves and others. Drawing on this framework, the paper demonstrates how African-Caribbean race and sub-cultural identities, and further intersecting biographical identities including gender and sexuality, are deployed within organisational discourse as evidence of these students? undesirable learner identities

Diversity, inequality and a post-structural politics for education

This paper considers the contribution to understanding educational inequalities offered by post-structural theories of power and the subject. The paper locates this consideration in the context of the ongoing endeavour in education studies to make sense of, and identify ways of interrupting, abiding educational exclusions and inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Judith Butler's work, in particular her engagement with Foucault?s concepts of productive power and subjectivation, and the articulation of these ideas with the notion of the performative constitution of subjects, for making sense of the processes through which students come to be particular sorts of subjects of schooling. The paper argues that taking up these understandings not only enables us to better understand the endurance of particular configurations of educational inequalities, it also opens up new possibilities for interrupting these through a post-structural politics that seeks to displace prevailing discourses and constitute students differently through every-day practices of preformative reinscription

Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

Boys in school, homophobia, and forms of masculinity are currently the focus of significant debate in and about education and schools. Much of this discussion takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks and mobilizes equal rights discourses on behalf of gay and lesbian students. This paper offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around these issues. The paper takes up Judith Butler’s ongoing engagement with Foucault and her recent rearticulation of Althusser and Bourdieu to analyse data generated through school ethnography in Britain and Australia. This analysis details the processes through which gender and sexual identities are constituted inside schools; illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and sexuality in contemporary discursive frames; and demonstrates how students resist wounded homosexual identities and constitute legitimate Other selves through their day-to-day practices

Queer Outings?: uncomfortable stories about the subjects of post-structural school ethnography

In this paper I consider the abiding value as well as the limits of Queer; navigating the contradictions of a politics and ethnographic practice based on arefutation of an abiding subject; resisting subjectivation and needing recognition;and ‘coming-out’ in school ethnography framed by Queer theory. The papermoves from the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, borrowing Pillow’s(2003) notion of uncomfortable reflexivity and grafting the notion of the uncannyonto post-structurally informed ethnography via the work of Britzman (1998) andDelany’s (1988 & 2004). In bringing these ideas together the paper is an exercisein the discomfort provoked by both telling uncertain stories of the sort that areusually left untold about school ethnography and looking for glimpses of theuncanny in and through these. The paper suggests that attempts to engage what‘escapes’ from or ‘falls away’ in the telling of uncomfortable stories helps us toengage what is unspeakable in the normative framing of the school and adultstudentrelations within them and is a useful reminder of the impossibility ofknowing completely or with certainty. This, I suggest, offers useful insights toethnography and ethnographic writing and reading that we might characterise as‘After Queer’

Schooling identities : an ethnography of the constitution of pupil identities

This thesis is concerned with the constitution of pupil identities within the school context. My central goal is to offer an enhanced understanding of the processes through which inequities within the context of secondary education come to pivot around biographical, cultural and learner identities.\ud The thesis examines existing school ethnography concerned with pupil identities and maps key theoretical movements within the social sciences and humanities concerned with the subject and identity. I suggest that school ethnography has only recently begun to explore fully the interactions of multiple identity categories and the implications of these interactions. I also suggest that the utility of recent theorisations of power and the subject for understanding school-level practices remains under-developed. \ud My analyses of empirical data generated through an ethnography in one London Secondary School offers a response to these limitations. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and Robert Connell, my analyses show how the citationallinguistic, bodily, and textual practices of pupils and teachers contribute to the performative constitution of intelligible selves and others. I suggest that while performatively constituted subjects have discursive agency, the intelligibility of performative constitutions is constrained by the historicity of discourse. I demonstrate the significance of the discursive intersections and interactions of identity categories and suggest that identities can best be understood as and in constellations. These constellations open up and close down the possibilities for identities to both become traps and be reinscribed again differently. These analyses add depth to existing understandings of the ways in which identities are constituted, the significance of constellations of identity categories, and the processes whereby educational inequities are sustained. \u

Biological sciences, social sciences and the languages of stress

There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and children who are living this schooling in the day-to-day; whether this is best considered through the languages of ‘stress’; or what the implications – emotional, educational, embodied – of these experiences might be. This paper develops a transdisciplinary approach that brings social and biological accounts together in order to address the ‘more-than-social’ of the emotionality of childhood and schooling. We seek out opportunities for transdisciplinary connectivity and for new ways of seeing and knowing about learning. We consider what these ways of seeing and knowing might offer to education