Drawing on ethnographic research in an urban high school in the USA, this article highlights how schooling structures and practices produce and reinforce an ideology of heteronormative binary gender. The construction of gender and sexuality occurs in systematic ways, shaped through structural forces and mapped onto social spaces and bodies. Yet,…

This article revisits the view that women are absent or insignificant across the extreme right spectrum. It draws on ethnographic research with grassroots activists in the English Defence League to explore whether a new generation of populist radical right movements offers a gender politics and practice capable of appealing to women and LGBT…

This article analyses five public consultation meetings about revisions to an LGBTQ-related school board policy on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. These meetings focused largely on the new provision that students in publicly funded schools be allowed to use the washroom that corresponds with their gender…

Relationships between girls and women have typically been explored through the lexicon of "friendship" or, where there is a presence of sexual desire, "lesbian". This article suggests the complexity and impact of female (same-sex) sociality, and its relationship to heteronormativity and power dynamics between girls and women…

This article investigates the prevailing social inertia of vocational training. Previous research indicates that gendered social norms contribute to sustaining gender segregation. Few studies, however, have paid attention to how the interplay of emotional and material factors impact on gender norms in vocational training. The article builds on an…

This article sets out to outline how prevailing gender structures can be challenged in physical education (PE) by exploring queer potentials in an event that took place during a dancing lesson in an upper secondary PE class. The event and its features were documented through video recording and post-lesson interviews with the teacher and some of…

This paper revisits the missing discourse of female desire [Fine, M. 1988. Sexuality, schooling and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire. "Harvard Educational Review" 58, no. 1: 29-53] in secondary schools. Instead of echoing previous studies that have documented how female desire is missing, this research starts from the…

The present article attempts to pay attention to the ways in which a group of young Cypriot students engage in the construction of conventional notions of masculinities through the negation and the fear of homosexual desire. Drawing on interviews with 12 male and female university students, I argue that many young men go through complicated…

Two key concepts arising from Butler's work are the heterosexual matrix--the conflation of sex-gender-sexuality which leads to the normalisation of heterosexuality--and performative reinscription--the discursive process by which the marginalised Other brings new meanings to normative identity constructions. While we have found both concepts…

The restructuring of secondary initial teacher education in England has seen a shift in both the focus and location of training, with an emphasis upon tightly defined competences and standards and upon more school-based work. In this paper, I discuss the impact of such changes on newly qualified teachers' (NQTs) knowledge of gender issues, through…

This research note aims to address concerns about schools as sites where students wrestle, materially and subjectively, with classed based notions of femininity, the promotion of heterosexuality, and the support of heteronormative, middle class families against and in contrast with their own working class families, identities and experiences. Two…

Reports data from a nationwide survey of New Zealand high school students and staff that examined their attitudes toward lesbian/gay/bisexual students. Most respondents perceived that lesbian/gay/bisexual students were not safe at school and that these students experienced subtle and extreme forms of intimidation. However, many students and staff…

This article explores the performance of masculinity(ies) within the classroom site. Drawing upon research conducted in two co-educational secondary classrooms, it examines the ways in which two groups of boys took up positions of dominance within their respective classrooms and, more specifically, focuses upon the ways in which they came to…

The ongoing moral panic surrounding adolescent boys continues to cause concern, proving pivotal in popular discourses centring on the "problem of youth". Drawing on ethnographic data from a large co-educational secondary school, this paper illustrates how school outcomes are adversely affected by working class boys' investments in peer…

This paper explores the implications and affects of a level two compulsory module concerned with "gender, difference and leisure" on a predominantly male student group studying for sports-related degrees. Participant observation was undertaken by a male and female lecturer who were delivering the module. A cohort of male football…