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

which heterosexual identities are constructed as normal while lesbian, gay and bisexual
identities are constructed outside acceptability (Mills 1999).

While there has been a tendency in research into sexuality and schooling for gender and
sexuality to be treated as discrete categories or for the relationship between these to be
taken as self-evident, this is changing. Emerging work is problematising the relationship
between gender and sexuality inside school. For instance, James Butler (1996) notes the
connections between masculinity and sexuality and highlights the apparent absence of
lesbian identities in schools. David McInnes and Murray Couch’s (2001) analysis of
„working class sissy boys’ provides a sophisticated exploration of the intersections
between masculinities and sexualities and social class identities. The significance of the
intersections of sexual and ethnic identity markers has also been stressed (Pallotta-
Chiarolli 1996).

There exists, then, both a substantial resource of research concerned with gender and
schooling and a growing body of work that engages with young people’s sexual
identities. This work on sexualities attempts to understand the connections between
sexuality and other identity categories and locates research concerned with sexualities
and schooling within the broader endeavour of the sociology of education. Building on
these developments, this paper aims to understand the connections between sex, gender,
and sexuality, as well as other categorisations such as race and social class, and
demonstrate the inseparability of these.

Analytical framework

The theoretical framework that guides the analysis offered in this paper is underpinned by
Foucault’s understanding of power, discourse and subjectivation (Foucault 1990 & 1991).
The paper engages extensively with Judith Butler’s work with these ideas. Specifically, it
takes up Butler’s understanding of the subjectivated subject who is simultaneously
rendered a subject and opened up to relations of power (Bulter 1997b) through ongoing
discursive processes of performative constitution (Butler, 1990, 1993, & 1997a). The
paper also makes use of and builds on Butler’s rearticularion of Bourdieu’s notion of
habitus and Althusser’s understanding of interpellation (Butler, 1997a & 1997b). Finally,
the paper takes up Butler’s assertion that with subjection comes discursive agency and,
therefore, the possibility of a politics of performative resignification (Butler, 1997a).

This framework suggests that identity categories, including those of gender and sexuality,

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