her theorisation of the inseparability of gender and sexuality in the contemporary
discursive frame, these analyses demonstrate how students’ mundane and day-to-day
practices - including bodily deportment, physical games, linguistic accounts, and uses of
clothing, hairstyles and accessories - are implicated in the discursive constitution of
student subjectivities. The paper argues for an understanding of sex-gender-sexuality
joined together in discursive chains and intersecting with further identity categories. As
such, the paper suggests that subjectivities might helpfully be thought in terms of
constituting constellations that create both possibilities and constraints for „who’ students
can be.
Sex-gender-sexuality: how sex, gender, and sexuality
constellations are constituted in secondary schools
Introduction
The relationships between gender, sexuality, and school experience have received
increasing attention in recent years. Much work in the area takes as given the sexual
orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks. This paper
offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around sex, gender, and
sexuality. It rejects the silent acceptance that sexual orientation is a biological,
psychological, or psychic pre-given that is synonymous with sexuality and exists in a
causal, linear, relationship with sexual identity. At the same time, however, it calls into
question the plausibility of severing the connection between gender and sexuality
advocated by some queer and feminist theorists. In doing this, the paper argues that such
a severing is not borne out in school level practices that are marked simultaneously by
gender and sexuality. Instead, the paper shows how sex, gender, and sexuality are
constituted in constellations that open up possibilities and set limits for „who’ a student
can be. In exploring these issues the paper draws on data generated through an
ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school.
This examination is framed by Judith Butler’s ongoing engagement with Foucault (1990,
1991, 1993, 1997a, 1997b & 1999) and recent rearticulation of Althusser and Bourdieu
(1997a & 1997b). In particular, the paper 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. These theoretical tools are used here to examine school