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



floor, and be a girl (proto-woman?), that is, maintain an appropriately feminine bodily
posture, including concealing the genitals whether wearing a short skirt or not. The girls’
ways of sitting illustrate their bodily responses to this challenge. The cost of failure here
is high - a blase approach to feminine posture, and the genital concealment intrinsic to it,
would be potentially constitutive of the whore, or even unintelligibility (Butler 1997a).
Simply by sitting in particular ways, then, these girls’ bodies cite and inscribe particular
discourses of heterosexual femininity and simultaneously constitute themselves as
embodied subjects within these terms.

Boys’ bodies are not compacted like those of the girls, knees are not pressed together or
hugged to the chest. Unlike the feminine body, the masculine body does not need to be
reigned in or controlled - it is in control. Its genitals regions do not have to be literally or
symbolically concealed. Many of these boy-bodies cite and inscribe a heterosexual
masculinity which is comfortable and entitled but which abides by its location in the
teacher/student binary. Other boy-bodies, however, cite a hyper-masculinity which is
large and imposing, with individual body parts instruments for maximising the comfort of
the body as a whole and genitals areas which need not be concealed.

These bodily practices are the practices of the performative habitus (Butler 1997a and
1997b) - at once formed by and formative of discourses of bodily femininity and
masculinity. Such practices are both intentional and tacit. A girl’s clutching at her skirt
hem or a boy’s occupation of space may or may not be self-aware activities in
this
moment. A girl may be thinking “I hope my knickers aren’t showing”, a boy may be
thinking “get out of my way”. But these bodies are not simply the neutral instruments of
self-conscious subjects. They are bound up with signification and the continued viability
of the subject. A girl cannot clutch her hem one day, secure her femininity, and then give
it up for the greater comfort of relaxed, spread legs. These bodily practices are
necessarily repetitious and citational - this is evident simply by looking around the
assembly hall and recognising the embodied subjects who sit. The practices of these
bodies are sexed, gendered and sexualised - the female body is already feminised, the
feminine is already heterosexual, the hetero-feminine is already female. Sex-gender-
sexuality, then, are not causally related, rather, they exist in abiding constellations in
which to name one category of the constellation is to silently infer further categories.

Making sense of how female (hetero-)femininities and male (hetero-) masculinities are
constituted through the bodily practice of sitting on the assembly hall floor is relatively



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