‘The Word Gay has been Banned but People use it in the Boys’ Toilets whenever you go in’: spatialising children’s subjectivities in response to gender and sexualities education in English primary schools

Hall, Joseph J.

doi:10.1080/14649365.2018.1474377

Cited by 19 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…While the reification of heterosexuality has long been considered a core institutional goal of public educational systems in Canada and the UK (e.g. DePalma and Atkinson, 2009a;Herriot et al, 2018;Renold, 2005), the legal and social transformations resulting from granting LGBT people particular forms of citizenship have substantially altered the educational terrain (DePalma and Atkinson, 2009b;Hall, 2020). We argue that resistances to LGBTsupportive educational initiatives mark a significant departure from previous oppositional strategies opposing LGBT rights claims.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Inclusion in state institutions such as marriage positions only some LGBT people as acceptable citizens and only if they are prepared to operate within heteronormative values including monogamy, coupledom, marriage and middle-class aesthetic -a set of characteristics understood as 'homonormative' (Duggan, 2004;Richardson, 2017). This is also apparent in the inclusion of same-sex families in schools (see Hall, 2020).…”

Section: Making Good Citizens: Education Gender and Sexual Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understanding that school spaces are created through gender and sexualities (Epstein and Johnson, 1998;Renold, 2005), there is a growing and important literature critically examining the importance and implementations of more inclusive sexual and gender curricula (see e.g. DePalma and Atkinson, 2009a;Hall, 2020). This paper has highlighted how educational spaces are a key battleground for contestation over sexual and gendered citizenships, national values and nation-building that include but move beyond anti-gender contestations.…”

Section: Final Commentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, much of this scholarship focuses on LGBT inclusion through the implementation of anti-bullying policies and support for LGBT students (e.g. Herriot et al, 2018;Neary et al, 2017;Rayside, 2014), although there are critiques of this approach (see DePalma and Atkinson, 2009b;Hall, 2020). Here we take a different approach by considering the growing and increasingly well-organised opposition to the presence of multiple LGBT-positive discourses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resisting the mainstreaming of LGBT equalities in Canadian and British Schools: Sex education and trans school friends

Nash

Browne

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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It is well established that schools are not neutral sites for gender and sexualities, shaping (often heteronormative) school spaces. This paper augments examinations of the implementation of inclusive school curricula by exploring heteroactivist opposition to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) equalities in Canadian and British schools. It examines resistances to institution of a revised and updated Health and Physical Education curriculum in Ontario schools in Canada, and in the UK, the use of the Rowe family’s opposition to the presence of trans children in their own child’s classroom. This paper shows that once-invisible heternormativities are now being challenged through LGBT curricula and support for trans students. This creates classrooms as pivotal, geographical, social and political spaces that operate at the juncture of the public/private spaces of the home, public spaces of the neighbourhood and the imagined space of the nation and nation-building citizenship. Oppositional ideologies can no longer be understood through the labels of ‘anti-gay’, ‘homophobic’ or ‘transphobic’, and these oppositions go beyond ‘anti-gender’, such that the term heteroactivism names the activisms and ideologies that seeks to reassert the superiority of monogamous, binary cis-gendered, coupled marriages as best for children and for society. These ideologies are inherently geographical, drawing both on local and individual circumstances, but also transcending national boundaries. We highlight three dominant heteroactivist themes, namely, parental rights, interactions between state/schools/home and gender ideologies. This offers insights into how new sexual and gender rights are contested and resisted in new ways to consider the political, legal and social implications of heteroactivist strategies in schools.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Making Good Citizens: Education Gender and Sexual Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Final Commentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Resisting the mainstreaming of LGBT equalities in Canadian and British Schools: Sex education and trans school friends

Nash

Browne

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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“…In bringing this to the fore, this paper extends a previous study (Hall, 2020a) scrutinising post-Section 28 'gender and sexualities education' 1 for older primary school children by uniquely examining younger children's mixed reactions to Stonewall's dominant approach for introducing lesbian and gay sexualities at the outset of English primary education. Stonewall -a prominent and politically mainstream national Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans 2 charity -launched Different Families (as it will now be known) in 2011 following 'moral panics' in 2008 surrounding the progressive left project No Outsiders (DePalma and Atkinson, 2009a) with Stonewall favouring the introduction of familial sexualities as a more 'child-friendly' approach.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Permissible progress: Sexual(ities that) progress in and beyond English primary schools

Hall

2020

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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This paper examines what is permissible sexual progress in English primary schools by exploring the possibilities – but also the limitations – of the introduction of familial sexualities. In recent years, Stonewall (a prominent and politically mainstream Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans charity) have increasingly utilised ‘the family’ as a ‘child-friendly’ topic to encourage primary educators to broach same-sex relationships by incorporating their ‘inclusive’ range of Different Families resources into lessons. This strategic manoeuvre emerges in a socio-political and spatiotemporal context dominated by neoliberal sexual politics and follows ‘moral panics’ surrounding queer progressive politics inspired initiatives, most notably No Outsiders (2006–2009) which previously unsettled institutionalised discourses of ‘childhood (sexual) innocence’ in pursuing radical, but arguably necessary approaches for disrupting and undoing heteronormativity. In spite of this, Stonewall’s Different Families, Same Love initiative is now the dominant approach for introducing lesbian and gay sexualities in English primary schools; yet, little is known about how primary-aged children respond to this intervention. Focusing on a leading exponent of Stonewall’s initiative, I explore 4–9 year olds dis/engagements with gay and lesbian sexualities when introduced in a familial context. Reflecting on mixed ethnographic and focus group data, I question not only which gay and lesbian sexualities ‘progress’ in contemporary English primary schools, but also how well. To this end, recommendations are made for improving families’ curricula without losing sight of the limits of this approach.

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Popular boys, the ideal schoolboy, and blended patterns of masculinity for 10‐ to 11‐year‐olds in two London schools

Swain

2023

British Educational Res J

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Generating data from small group interviews with 41 boys aged 10–11 years from two London schools in 2022, this paper contributes to the field of gender by introducing a new form of non‐hegemonic and positive masculinity, which I am calling ‘blended’ masculinity, and which was the most common formation in each school. Although its features differed a little in each setting, this blended formulation broadly consisted of orthodox qualities of masculinity (e.g. athleticism, assertiveness, confidence, independence), combined with feminine‐associated traits (e.g. kindness, caring, sociability, emotional literacy). I argue that this blended form is different from previous conceptualisations of hybrid masculinity in the gender literature and is more akin to recent conceptions of hybrid femininity. There were no dominant forms of masculinity with hierarchical connotations of superiority, and no hegemony that legitimated unequal relations, with obvious subordination of other masculinities or femininities. Boys and girls generally got on well with each other and there was also no evidence of homophobia or misogyny. The paper also explores notions of peer‐group popularity, which was based on a series of resources, and delineates the characteristics of a fictional, ‘ideal’, schoolboy, whose features and attributes were connected to the different versions of masculinity on show.

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‘The Word Gay has been Banned but People use it in the Boys’ Toilets whenever you go in’: spatialising children’s subjectivities in response to gender and sexualities education in English primary schools

Abstract: This is a repository copy of 'The Word Gay has been Banned but People use it in the Boys' Toilets whenever you go in': spatialising children's subjectivities in response to gender and sexualities education in English primary schools.

Cited by 19 publications

References 45 publications

Resisting the mainstreaming of LGBT equalities in Canadian and British Schools: Sex education and trans school friends

Resisting the mainstreaming of LGBT equalities in Canadian and British Schools: Sex education and trans school friends

Permissible progress: Sexual(ities that) progress in and beyond English primary schools

Popular boys, the ideal schoolboy, and blended patterns of masculinity for 10‐ to 11‐year‐olds in two London schools

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