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

order to identify the discursive practices embedded in them and the potentially
constitutive force of these.

This framework also suggests that rather than attempting to minimise, make visible, or
reflexively interpret the effects of the researcher, research practice is wholly implicated in
processes of ongoing subjectivation (of both the researcher and the researched) even as
these subjectivities form the objects of study. Reflecting the theorisation of the subject
outlined above, this methodological framework rejects an a priori, authentic, or essential
self who undertakes research, instead understanding the subject, including the researching
subject, to be perpetually but provisionally constituted through discourse. Given the
centrality of visual economies to prevailing discourses of gender and race (see Seshadri-
Crooks 2000), my own location within these discourses (woman, White) is undoubtedly
„visible’ to and taken as immutable by the students involved in the research. Yet my
social class, sexuality, and sub-cultural locations are perhaps less singular or „obvious’
and, therefore, less tightly constrained. In line with the wider theorisation of discourse
and subjectivation that frames this study, identity categorisations are seen to be as mobile
as the discursive circuits through which they are performatively constituted. For instance,
in the context of prevailing hetero-normative discourse, it is likely that students locate
(constitute) me as heterosexual - the unspoken Same of the heterosexual/homosexual
Same/Other binary - as long as an alternative sexual identity is not asserted. However,
once such Other positions are suggested (as they were during this research in some
circumstances and with some students), the circulation of previously absent,
marginalised, or unrecognised discourses becomes evident, as do the possibilities and
limits for Other subjectivities that these discourses offer. Introducing such discourses into
a research setting has the potiential to subjectivate the researcher and the researched in
ways that may well be unfamiliar, at least in the school context, even as these are
recognised as being contingent, provisional and fragile. It is these contingent, provisional
and fragile constitutions with which this paper is concerned.

Bodies being female-hetero-feminine & male-hetero-masculine

Scene 1. sitting

Year 11 (aged 15-16) Assembly. Each tutor group in the year group forms a single line
seated on the wooden hall floor. Teachers are seated on chairs/benches or stand leaning
against the wall. The room is full and students sit close together. A degree of body
contact is unavoidable. Girls sit cross-legged, with upper bodies drooping over the legs.

<<   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   >>

More intriguing information