moments in which sex-gender-sexualities are constituted, resisted, and reinscribed
through the day-to-day practices of students.
Background
The tradition of critical sociology of education has been underpinned by concerns about
the role that schools play in the reproduction of inequitable social relations along axes of
class, gender, race, and, more recently, sexuality. Extending this tradition, the sociology
of education has begun to engage with post-structural theories to make sense of the
school’s impact on, and school experiences of, particular groups of students. This has
underpinned a shift in research foci and analyses from boys and girls to masculinities and
femininities and towards sexualities. It is in the intersection between this critical tradition
and the growing concern with masculinities, femininities, and sexualities in school
contexts that this paper is located.
Feminist studies in education have made a significant contribution to understanding
gendered selves as well as gendered experiences of schooling. While the critical school
ethnographies of the 1970s tended to be concerned with the schooling of boys, Lambert
(1976) and Delamont (1989) both undertook studies of social relations in girls’ schools, a
grammar and an elite public school respectively. Substantial research into girls and
schooling was undertaken during the following decade and is reflective of those
understandings of gender inequalities, and the reproduction of gender roles that were seen
to underpin these, that were dominant during the period. See for example, Davies (1984);
Griffin (1985); Mahony (1985); Weiner (1985); Lees (1986); Askew and Ross (1988);
Holly (1989); and Stanley (1989). This body of work offered significant insights, two of
which are particularly pertinent here. First, it was suggested that schools not only
reinforce dominant societal sex roles but also ‘enforc[e] a set of sex and gender roles
which are more rigid than those current in the wider society.’(Delamont 1990:5). Second,
it was argued that girls’ responses to school could not be understood in terms of pro- or
anti-school sub-cultural formation. Rather, girls’ gender development in the context of
the school was interpreted as an ‘active response to social contradictions’ through ‘a
simultaneous process of accommodation and resistance’ (Anyon 1983:19). Work
concerned with the schooling of Black girls identified the complexities of girls’
experiences of and responses to schooling and highlighted the limits of notions of
differentiation and polarisation and additive models of subordination developed through
critical studies of boys’ schooling. For instance, Fuller (1984) argued that Black girls’
adaptations to schooling are simultaneously (and consciously) pro-education and anti-