multiple audiences, must have at least a tacit knowledge of this discursive frame in order
to engage in those practices necessary to be meaningfully constituted in these terms.
Indeed, she needs to „know’ that she can „be’ „lesbian’ and „be’ this without being
exposed to significant risk in school.
The analysis offered, then, demonstrates the inseparability of sex-gender-sexuality and
shows how these are constrained by particular constellations of identity categories and
the availability of particular discursive resources. In doing this, the paper helps us to
better understand why the constraints of sex, gender, and sexuality are so difficult to
shake off. It provides insight, for instance, into why education policy or curricular
changes that may (or may not) have improved girls’ educational achievement have not
simultaneously simply freed-up or expanded who or how girls can be - what sex-gender-
sexuality demands and is demanded inside school. In turn, this analysis suggests the
limitations of liberal reform and oppositional identity politics. This is not, however, an
unoptimistic analysis, rather, new analytical tools and strategies for politics are
suggested. Deconstructive politics (Butler 1997a) are evident tacitly in the discursive
practices of students and explicitly in the analyses of these offered. Enduring discourses
and the hierarchical binaries that function within them are identified; their sedimented
meanings noted; their contradictions teased out; and their silences highlighted. Practices
that insist that discourses that have been silenced be intelligible and legitimate, even if
only fleetingly, in school context are explored. And practices that navigate, resist, or
undercut enduring discourse; deploy it in new ways; and overlay it with alternative
meaning are interrogated.
These analyses concur with Butler’s (1997a) suggestion that the moment in which sex-
desire might be un-tethered and replaced with bodies and pleasures has not yet come. It
has been my goal to illustrate theoretical and analytical tools others concerned with
understanding sex-gender-sexuality can make use of in alternative contexts. In doing this
I hope that I have also shown girls opening discursive spaces for themselves to be
otherwise.
References
ALLVESSON, M. (2002) Postmodernism and Social Research (Buckingham, Open
University Press).
ANYON, J. (1983) Gender and class: Accommodation and resistance by working class
and affluent females to contradictory sex-role ideologies in S. WALKER & L.