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



school. And Mirza (1992) highlighted the inadequacy of understandings of Black boys’
experiences of schooling - in particular notions of resistance - for making sense of Black
girls’ relationship to education and schooling.

This paper builds on the tools offered by this body of work and makes use of the
conceptual spaces that it has opened up. Specifically it concurs with studies that
demonstrate the subtle processes through which girls are constructed as gendered in
school contexts. Valerie Walkerdine has made a crucial contribution to understanding
how the school is implicated in constructing gendered subjects. Walkerdine (1990) argues
that a dichotomy of rationality/pathology underpins the production of self-regulating
subjects in schools and suggests that girls and women teachers are positioned through a
constellation of discourses, including discourses of femininity, passivity and irrationality.
Hey (1997) exposes the myth of such feminine passivity by showing how girls’
relationships with each other are ‘invested in the production of certain forms of power
and subjectivity’ (Hey 1997:23) through her analyses of the intricacies of the differences
between girls and the intersections of the discursive frames through which their
relationships are mediated. More recent studies, such as those by Benjamin (2003),
Kehily (2001) and Reynolds (200x) have refined these tools still further and have
demonstrated these processes across a range of specific contexts and in relation to the
construction of particular ‘sorts’ of girls. This paper picks up these concerns and refines
these theoretical tools still further in order to better understand and interrogate these
subtle and often taken for granted processes as they are lived daily inside school.

This paper also picks up recent concerns with sexuality and schooling. Schooling and
sexuality sit in an uncomfortable relationship. It has been argued that schools and
sexuality are constructed as fundamentally discrete and that the people who populate
schools - students and teachers - are constructed as intrinsically non-sexual (Epstein &
Johnson 1996). Epstein & Johnson’s (1996) work makes a significant contribution to a
small but expanding body of work that uses post-structural theorisations of the subject to
examine the experiences of gay and lesbian students. Similarly, Nayak & Kehily (1996)
make sophisticated use of these ideas to argue that homophobic practices in schools are
central to the ongoing constitution of heterosexual masculinities. Wayne Martino’s
(1999) research explores the policing of hegemonic masculinity in high school while
Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (1994) demonstrates the fluidity of young men’s identity and
sexual practices. Much of this work proceeds from a critical understanding of the reach of
hetero-normativity in schools. This has underpinned school research into the ways in



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