Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

that has explored the links between school structures and practices, student identities, and
social inequalities.

Early work in the new sociology of eduction in the UK showed how organisational
strategies impacted to recreate social class divisions and posited the links between
differentiation, polarisation, and anti-school cultures (Hargreaves 1967, Lacey 1970,
Willis 1977, Ball 1981). Similarly, work in Australia demonstrated how schools were
implicated in reproducing social class inequalities (Connell 1982). And classic studies in
both countries have shown the educational significance of social class and gender for
working class boys (Walker 1988, Willis 1977). A significant body of feminist work has
been produced that has mapped the changing nature of the educational inequities faced by
girls and contributed to the development of feminist pedagogies (Arnot & Weiner 1987,
Delamont 1990, Griffin 1985, Kenway 1990, Luke & Gore 1992, Weiner 1985).

Likewise, a significant body of work has examined issues of race and ethnicity in schools
and developed a detailed picture of how schools are implicated in the continued
inequities experienced by indigenous, Black and ethnic minority students (Gillborn 1990
& 1995, Mac an Ghaill 1988, Mirza 1992, Sewell 1997, Rizvi 1997).

This body of scholarship has provided the intellectual setting and tools to respond to
political, policy, media and public concern with boys’ schooling and the now persistent
popular perception of boys’ educational underachievement. Critical education sociology
has shown how notions of boys’ underachievement fail to recognise the nuanced
intersections of social class, ethnicity, gender, and location (Collins et al 2001, Epstein et

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