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



bounds of intelligibility that these map, and identifying moments in which these bounds
shift or are breached, the paper offers a set of analytical tools for interrogating how
subjectivities are constituted within bounds of intelligibility that are sedimented and
enduring, but not absolute or determined, and, therefore, open to change.

The paper underscores the significance of constellations of particular identity categories
when considering the reach of compulsory heterosexuality. The analysis offered shows
how working class and middle-class girls have available to them, and/or can deploy,
different discursive resources, and are subject to and subjected by different discursive
demands - discursive resources and demands that open up different possibilities and
impose different constraints for sex-gender-sexualities.

For instance, the analysis shows how working class girls deploy significant discursive
resources to navigate a virgin/whore dichotomy even as their discursive practices are
implicated in its inscription. It shows how this discourse takes on new forms as girls
struggle to tease a out third space (Cixous and Clement 1986) that allows heterosexual
feminine desire within the context of a mainstream working class youth sub-culture, even
as such a subjectivity is rendered unintelligible by the terms of this dichotomy. The
hetero-femmes whose practices are framed by this discourse, and who are constituted
within its terms are not understood to be either anti-feminist heretics deceived by
backlash politics or post-feminist dopes seduced by the promise of cultural bricolage or
the chimera of female privilege in a post-industrial age. Rather, the analysis offered
provides insight into how these girls constitute femininities that are: rewarded within
prevailing discourse; required of and sought by them; come with the price of sex-gender-
sexuality constraint and; ultimately, are impossible to achieve.

In contrast, the analysis shows that discursive resources that render lesbian identities both
intelligible and legitimate are available to/deployed by particular students in ways that are
not available to/deployed by others. That is, in this analysis it is high-attaining girls from
liberal middle-class homes, who are already constituted as outside the mainstream student
sub-culture and who enjoy the institutional protection that their class and attainment
profile confers, whose practices provisionally constitute them intelligibly outside hetero-
femininity and/or the virgin/whore binary. Yet the analysis I offer is subject to the same
constraints of discursive intelligibility as the girls’ practices - when we „look’ for
lesbians is schools we seek a particular sex-gender-sexuality that cites particular
discourses and which is constituted and rendered visible in particular ways. This sex-
gender-sexuality requires a particular discursive frame - a lesbian student, and her



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