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

Abstract

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

‘They're just not mature right now’: teachers' complicated perceptions of gender and anti-queer bullying

“…Payne and Smith (2013) argue that in changing the definition from one of the bully/victim binary to one that understands gender policing and peer aggression as sustaining power imbalances we can begin to challenge heterosexist and gendered oppressions. The findings of this study support their conclusion, and demonstrate how teachers' own notions of both bullying and gender fail to realise the ways in which gender, sex and sexuality are co-constituted (Butler 1999;Youdell 2005). The teachers interviewed here, often the only officially sanctioned providers of sexuality-related knowledge in the school, are in a unique space that potentially affords them opportunity to challenge the ways in which gender-sexsexuality is articulated and functions for young people.…”

“…Sexuality and gender permeate schools from primary grades through higher education (Thorne 1993;Payne and Smith 2013;Youdell 2005). Sexuality has been used by students, teachers and administrators as a normalising discourse to regulate the social behaviours of youth (Chambers, Tincknell, and Van Loon 2004;Epstein, O'Flynn, and Telford 2003;Froyum 2007;Martino 2000aMartino , 2000bRenold 2000Renold , 2003Woody 2003).…”

Agency in action – young women and their sexual relationships in a private school

“…While recurring citations of gender usually lead to the replication of the heterosexual matrix (Butler 1990), 'performative utterances can go wrong, be misapplied or misinvoked' (Butler 1997, 151). Such misfiring need not be intentional (Youdell 2005). Butler (1997) argues that through discursive agency comes the possibility for a politics of performative resignification.…”

“…We begin therefore by seeking to examine how the concept of agency is understood by two dominant frameworks informing current theorisation of young femininities and sexualities. In this respect, a number of researchers have found a Butlerian framework very productive (see, for example, Allen 2008; Beavis and Charles 2007;Youdell 2005), while others favour the understandings of agency which emerge from the use of Bourdieu's concepts of the habitus and field (see, for example, Allard 2005; Thomson 2000). …”

Intersections of two isiZulu genderlects and the construction of 'skesana' identities

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AbstractDrawing on Youdell's (2000Youdell's ( , 2005Youdell's ( , 2006 work on identity formation, we examine in this article multiple performances of gender identities in relation to a particular language use among African men who engage in same-sex relations. Based on semi-ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with African men who are isiNgqumo speakers in the Durban metropolitan area in KwaZulu-Natal, this article portrays the intersectional nature of two genderlects.

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