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This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on 'youth' and 'youth services'. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of 'austerity', we take up Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or components that come together to produce a 'youth service assemblage' and its disassembly and reassembly. As we do this we demonstrate the usefulness of assemblage as way of encountering the productivity of relations across components and avoiding an account that over-states the force or scope of 'policy'. The paper concludes that by analysing in terms of assemblage, new challenges for thinking about politics emerge, in particular the limits of thinking in terms of a resistant political subject and the need to engage ambiguity.

To cite this article: Deborah Youdell (2005) Sex-gender-sexuality: how sex, gender and sexuality constellations are constituted in secondary schools, Gender and Education, 17:3, 249-270, This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered and sexualized selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault's understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theorization of the inseparability of gender and sexuality in the contemporary discursive frame, these analyses demonstrate how students' mundane and day-to-day practices-including bodily deportment, physical games, linguistic accounts, and uses of clothing, hairstyles and accessories-are implicated in the discursive constitution of student subjectivities. The paper argues for an understanding of sex-gender-sexuality joined together in discursive chains and intersecting with further identity categories. As such, the paper suggests that subjectivities might helpfully be thought in terms of constituting constellations that create both possibilities and constraints for 'who' students can be. IntroductionThe relationships between gender, sexuality and school experience have received increasing attention in recent years. Much work in the area takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks. This paper offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around sex, gender and sexuality. It rejects the silent acceptance that sexual orientation is a biological, psychological, or psychic pre-given that is synonymous with sexuality and exists in a causal, linear, relationship with sexual identity. At the same time, however, it calls into question the plausibility of severing the connection between gender and sexuality advocated by some queer and feminist theorists. In doing this, the paper argues that such a severing is not borne out in school level practices that are marked

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