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



femininities is based on a familiar moral scale. In the terms of this moral scale, a girl
should be a virgin: she should “leave it to later”, “she shouldn’t be sleeping with anyone
at all”. If she is not-virgin, she should only have coitus with a boy with whom she has an
(implicitly monogamous) relationship (her boyfriend). The number of these relationships
should be limited. Sex outside a relationship - “sleeping around” - is unacceptable. A girl
should not discuss her sexual activity with anyone, including friends who are girls. The
greater the number of boys a girl has had sex with (coitus or not), the greater the
imperative for silence.

The girls’ moral discourse and the virgin/whore binary that it cites is not just a
prohibition of sexual activity. Rather, some possibility for sexual activity is retained,
although this is tightly bounded and the risk of “slag” is ever present. In the girls’
constitution of heterosexual femininities, sexual activity is only protected from the
performative interpellation slag if a girl does not talk about this sexual activity. That is,
feminine sexual desire must be silenced. Sexual activity outside a relationship states
boldly this feminine sexual desire. This is the apex of active (and, therefore, immoral)
heterosexual femininity - the slag or whore of the virgin/whore dichotomy - and is
censured most strongly. The implications of this moral discourse for the availability of
viable heterosexual femininities are significant.

In naming Su Lin “slag” - or whore - the group members implicitly constitute their own
heterosexual femininities in hierarchical opposition to this: virgin. The reference to
“Chinatown” is also significant. Juliet is distancing herself from her one-time friend by
implicitly constituting her as the racial Other. This also implicitly entwines Sue Lin’s
heterosexual femininity - slag - with her Chineseness. Juliet is citing and inscribing the
discourse of the sexually promiscuous and exotic Other. That this is a discourse which
has also been deployed to denigrate Black and Mixed-race heterosexual femininities
seems to go unrecognized in the group’s own implicit deployment of it.

The moral discourse of heterosexual femininities deployed by the group cites and
inscribes both paternal discourses of heterosexual femininity and the religious discourses
in which these are rooted. Within what has become a secularised discourse, the girls are
citing and inscribing a discourse of prized feminine virginity which must be „saved’ in
order to be gifted to, or taken by, the „right’ man. These overlapping religious and secular
discourses of feminine (im-)morality also entail the necessity for this (im-)morality to be
policed. A policing that is discursively positioned as being in the interest of girls and



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