Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

In this paper, a Foucauldian interpretive framework for analysing the production of subjectivity serves as a basis for investigating the ways in which boys fashion their masculinities at one particular school. Interviews conducted with a group of adolescent boys, aged 15-16, in a catholic co-educational high school are drawn on the document certain social practices and behaviours, which become identifiable as particularised instances of masculinity. Data are used to investigate how these boys learn to relate to themselves and to others within the context of peer-group relations and dynamics at this particular school. Possible implications of this research for educational in schools are indicated.

'Cool Boys', 'Party Animals', 'Squids' and 'Poofters': Interrogating the dynamics and politics of adolescent masculinities in school

Since the 1990s the educational community has witnessed a proliferation of ‘bullying’ discourses, primarily within the field of educational developmental social psychology. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data of primary and secondary school girls and boys, this article argues that the discourse ‘bullying’ operates to simplify and individualise complex gendered/classed/sexualised/racialised power relations embedded in children’s school‐based cultures. Using a feminist post‐structural approach, this article critically traces the discursive production of how the signifiers ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ are implicated in the ‘normative cruelties’ of performing and policing ‘intelligible’ heteronormative masculinities and femininities. It shows how these everyday gender performances are frequently passed over by staff and pupils as ‘natural’. The analysis also illustrates how bully discourses operate in complex racialised and classed ways that mark children out as either gender deviants, or as not adequately performing normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. In conclusion, it is argued that bully discourses offer few symbolic resources and/or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday school‐based gender violence, and some new research directions are suggested.

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Normative cruelties and gender deviants: the performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school

This paper reports a qualitative analysis of data from a study of masculinity in 11–14 year old boys attending twelve London schools. Forty-five group discussions (N= 245) and two individual interviews (N= 78) were conducted. The findings indicate that boys’ experiences of school led them to assume that interviews would expose them to ridicule and so threaten their masculinity. Boys were generally more serious and willing to reveal emotions in individual than in group interviews. A key theme in boys’ accounts was the importance of being able to present themselves as properly masculine in order to avoid being bullied by other boys by being labeled “gay.” The ways in which boys were racialized affected their experiences of school.

Producing contradictory masculine subject positions: Narratives of threat, homophobia and bullying in 11-14 year old boys

Foregrounding the primary school as a key cultural arena for the production and reproduction of sexuality and sexual identities, this article goes some way to addressing what are absent from many sociological portrayals of young children and schooling. Drawing on data derived from an ethnographic exploration into children's gender and sexual identities during their final year of primary school, the article examines how dominant notions of heterosexuality underscore much of children's identity work and peer relationships. The article further illustrates how boys and girls are each subject to the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, where to be a 'normal' girl or boy involves the projection of a coherent and abiding heterosexual self. The implications of recognising children's sexual cultures and the pressures to conform to a heterosexual culture are discussed briefly in the concluding section.

"Coming out" : Gender, (hetero)sexuality and the primary school

The paper looks at the ways homophobias are expressed by young men in school. We focus on the verbal and physical manifestation of these displays to question the relation this has to the formation of hetrosexual masculinities. Our analysis suggests male identities are being worked out at a performative level where homophobic practices are fused with the struggle for a particular masculinity. Such investments illustrate why homophobia is so difficult to challenge within male peer groups. Throughout the research several questions arose: Why is homophobia rife within the cultures of young men? How are these views expressed in school? What functions does homophobia serve for pupil cultures and schooling? To begin to interpret some of these questions we adopt an ethnographic approach that reveals the internal dimensions of homophobic performances. Our work focuses on the complex inter relationships of masculinity, homophobia and schooling.

Playing it straight: Masculinities, homophobias and schooling

The article arises out of a research project concerned with sexuality and schooling. By exploring the various constructions of a pupil narrative we aim to develop an analysis of the complex meanings sexuality has in schools. The focus is on sexualised exchanges between teachers and pupils to explore the various ways sexuality is employed in schools. We draw out the complex dimensions of power in these exchanges that run through teacher/pupil relations and have a bearing on classroom practices.

‘The Christmas Kiss’: sexuality, story‐telling and schooling

Schoolgirl frictions: Young women, sex education and social experiences

The invocation of the ‘chav’ in these examples from the Urban Dictionary conjures up well-worn responses to a substratum of working-class youth, laden with disgust and condemnation. As shorthand for the unrespectable poor, Little Britain’s pram-pushing character Vicky Pollard serves as a recognizable representation of the modern-day ‘chav’. With her scrunched-back hair, day-glo tracksuit, hooped ear rings and predilection for smoking, drinking and swearing, Vicky Pollard’s chav identity is written on the body. Transnational depictions of ‘trailer park trash’ in the United States, ‘bogans’ in Australia, ‘neds’ in Scotland, ‘pikies’, ‘scallies’, ‘hoodies’ and ‘chavs’ in England are all ways in which those who are young, poor and white are brought into being in the contemporary global era. While a number of authors have critically discussed these representations, producing rich insight into the reworking of social class delineations in late-modernity (e.g., Adams and Raisborough, 2011; Hayward and Yar, 2006; Jones, 2011; Lawler, 2005; Tyler, 2008), surprisingly few have sought to engage with the voices of dispossessed youth themselves. Little is known about how young people speak back to these representations, transfigure or dissent from them.

Charver Kids and Pram-face Girls: Working-Class Youth, Representation and Embodied Performance

In this paper I aim to document the personal journey by which I became interested in researching issues of sexuality and schooling. Something which has now become an academic quest did not start out as such. Through the use of memory‐work to generate personal narratives, I draw upon incidents from my early career as a teacher as the basis for the recollection and analysis of this personal journey. The article illustrates the ways in which my present research interest is inextricably linked to my biography as a teacher and my political and emotional investments in certain forms of pedagogic practice. Finally, the article suggests that the use of memory‐work can be a productive approach as a method for research and as a mode of analysis.

Mary Jane Kehily

Papers

Playing it straight: Masculinities, homophobias and schooling

‘The Christmas Kiss’: sexuality, story‐telling and schooling

Schoolgirl frictions: Young women, sex education and social experiences

Charver Kids and Pram-face Girls: Working-Class Youth, Representation and Embodied Performance

Fragments from a fading career: Personal narratives and emotional investments