Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects



In examining these issues the paper takes up Butler’s ongoing engagement with Foucault
(1990, 1991, 1993, 1997a, 1997b & 1999) and recent rearticulation of Althusser and
Bourdieu (1997a & 1997b). In particular, it takes up Butler’s (1999) theorisation of the
inseparability of gender and sexuality in the contemporary discursive frame. In this
context of constraint, the paper explores the possibilities of Butler’s (1997a) politics of
performative resignification which suggests that discourses might take on non-ordinary
meanings and function in contexts where they has not previously belonged. Using these
tools the paper examines the possibilities for identities constituted through injurious
performative practices to be remade. In the school context, the paper asks how, whether
and under what circumstances such wounded identities might be circumnavigated,
reappropriated or reinscribed. In responding to these questions the paper offers detailed
examinations of school moments in which students who have been injuriously
interpellated ‘homosexual’ refuse the (impossible) return to hetero-normativity and
instead redeploy this wounded subject-hood to reinscribe themselves in ways that insist
on the intelligibility and legitimacy of homosexual/non-heterosexual selves and
pleasures.

Background

The sociology of education represents a critical tradition that has linked education
scholarship in the UK and Australia for some time. This tradition has been underpinned
by concerns about the role that schools play in the reproduction of inequitable social
relations. Of particular significance here is that body of work within education sociology



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