Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

Wounds and reinscriptions:

schools, sexualities and performative subjects

Deborah Youdell

School of Education, Macquaire University, Australia.

Introduction

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. This paper aims to offer an alternative view of the school level processes at work
around masculinity and sexuality. It aims to radically unsettle the prevailing acceptance
that sexual orientation is a biological, psychological, or psychic pre-given that is
synonymous with sexuality and which exists in a causal, linear relationship with sexual
identity. Furthermore, it aims to show how the strategic rupture of gender and sexuality
advocated by some queer and feminist theorists is not borne out in school level practices
that are marked simultaneously by gender and sexuality. In addition, the paper aims to
call into question the usefulness of the equal rights discourses inferred by the broad
conception of the homosexual student as a victim of homophobic exclusion and abuse.
From this starting point, the paper draws on empirical data generated in British and
Australian schools in order to demonstrate how students resist wounded homosexual
identities and constitute legitimate homosexual/not-heterosexual selves.

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