therefore, the production and reproduction of „compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1980).
The paper accepts provisionally Butler’s (1999) assertion, discussed above, that sex and
desire cannot be either easily separated or jettisoned in a historical moment in which sex-
desire continue to be tied together as central constituents of gender and sexuality.
Building on these ideas, the title of this paper and the analyses offered within it suggest
that sex, gender and sexuality are joined together in complex constellations. Such
constellations join together the body and discourse - sex-gender-sexuality is necessarily
bodily, concerned as it is with bodily pleasures and practices, but it is also discursive,
given the inscribed nature of the body and the impossibility of a „return’ to a pre-
discursive or pre-modern body untainted by gender and/or sexuality (Butler 1999 and
Grosz 1995).
In pursuing these concerns, the paper takes as its focus girls and the production of
femininities and female sexualities, although given the crucial part of man/woman,
masculine/feminine binaries in these productions (Cixous 1986), these analyses
inevitably also touch on masculinities and male sexualities. A concern with the terms and
reach of compulsory heterosexuality and, in turn, how particular hetero-femininities come
to be authorized and prevail and the apparent absence of lesbian girls in schools is key
here. The paper is not looking for lesbians in school, but exploring the sex-gender-
sexuality constructions of/by girls in school. In doing this, the paper begins to suggest
why it is so hard to „see’ „lesbians’ in school contexts.
Methodology
The paper draws on data generated through a school ethnography undertaken with year
11 students (aged 15-16) in a south London secondary school during the 1997/8 academic
year. This school ethnography was informed by methodological debates concerning the
importance of understanding practice in context; the role and status of the researcher and
the researched; and the potential for reflexivity to strengthen the insights offered by
ethnography (see Delamont & Atkinson 1995 and Hammersley & Atkinson 1995). The
methodological insights from what might be characterised as the traditions of interpretive
and critical school ethnography were supplemented and, indeed, scrutinized, in the light
of the theoretical framework outlined above and accounts of more recent adaptations of
qualitative methods informed by post-structural theory (see Alvesson 2002, Silverman
1997, Stronarch & MacLure 1997). Such theoretical and methodological developments
insist that data is generated, not collected. They also insist that those data generated be
understood as discursive monuments whose content and generation can be interrogated in