Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

In the discursive frame outlined, it is unsurprising that constitutions of gender and/or
sexuality that are beyond the bounds of these hetero-normative discourses are sites of
both injury and reinscription. It is the minutia of the day-to-day discursive practices that
constitute these injuries and reinscriptions in the school context that form the focus of
analysis that follows. Rather than offer an (inevitably partial) typology of the gender and
sexual identities performatively constituted inside schools, I will offer a reading of two
Episodes of ethnographic data in order to illustrate and better understand the processes
through which these constitutions and reinscriptions occur.

Methodology

In this exploration I am bringing together data generated through two distinct school
ethnographies, one undertaken in the UK, one undertaken in Australia. Reflecting the
broad post-structural framework underpinning this work, these studies brought together
research approaches developed within the tradition of school ethnography (see Delamont
& Atkinson1995 and Hammersley & Atkinson 1995) and more recent adaptations of
qualitative methods informed by post-structural theory (see Silverman 1997). This has
notable methodological implications - by approaching ethnographic methods from a
Foucauldian concern for productive power and discourse, research methods cease to be
tools for eliciting facts and become moments in which selves and knowledges are
provisionally generated (Silverman 1997). This may not change practices in the field, but
it does impact significantly on analysis that proceeds from a concern with discourses and
discursive practices.

12

<<   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   >>

More intriguing information