This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents' views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand 'sexualisation' qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to…

This study focuses on sexting amongst young people in Northern Ireland about which there is, as yet, very little qualitative research. To address the gap, and using a liberal philosophical feminist framework, focus group interviews were conducted with seventeen (ten girls and seven boys) 16-17-year-olds to explore their views on sexting. The young…

This paper develops and applies the emergent concept of institutional transphobia to explore the barriers to transgender research in early years education. It argues that institutional processes embed and disguise the logic of transphobia by drawing on dominant, taken-for-granted claims of the inappropriateness or irrelevance of gender-focused…

This qualitative research paper discusses how the material environment of preschool classrooms contributes to early childhood experiences of gender. It applies poststructuralist and posthumanist concepts -- primarily Barad's agential-realism -- to analyse ethnographic data extracts drawn from the author's semi-longitudinal study in a UK nursery.…

The question of how to tackle abuse through adolescent sexual image sharing is an increasing concern for schools, yet little is known about how they should respond. In this article, I review school responses to this phenomenon. The findings presented are taken from a mixed-methods study into harmful sexual behaviour carried out in seven…

The focus on, and concern about, young girls and preteens or "tweens" relates to the "sexualisation" of girlhood and the notion that girls are "growing up too fast" and becoming "too sexy too soon". In both popular and academic accounts, "tween" magazines and the increasingly "sexualised"…

In this article I explore two questions -- how does, Thatho, a transgendered life orientation teacher enact, resist and reproduce dominant understandings of gender and sexuality in terms of his own identity and practice; and what specific possibilities, challenges and resistances exist for a transgender educator in the rural. Using life-history…

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 thinkpiece arises from personal reflection on researching "sexualisation", on the individuals and issues encountered and on elements that were unspoken or more rarely voiced. It suggests that the discourse on sexualisation tends to construct an "other" from which speakers distance themselves, variously defined as "bad" mothers, sexualized…

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…

Since the moral panic discourse is shutting down discussions about how children are making meaning of gender and sexuality, this paper argues that a new logic is needed for understanding childhood sexuality. A postdevelopmental logic is created by working with Deleuze and Guattari's ["Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizoprhenia."…

Popular discourses on the problem of sexualisation are beset by emotively charged rhetoric that all-too-often promotes a visceral and affective response as opposed to reasoned and nuanced examination. Drawing on materials from the Social Purity Movement (1860-1910) as well as contemporary anti-sexualisation literature, this article argues that a…

This paper explores the public political media spectacle of Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy and her status as a single mother through the lens of a critical feminist discourse analysis. The author explores how cultural anxieties over teenage sexuality and unintended pregnancy in America are constructed when the pregnant teen is the daughter…

This paper explores the considerations of sexualisation and gender stereotyping in the recent UK government report "Letting Children be Children". This report, the "Bailey Review", claimed to represent the views of parents. However, closer reading reveals that, while the parents who were consulted were concerned about both the…

This viewpoint begins by exploring whether the global phenomenon of the 2011 "SlutWalks" constitutes a feminist politics of re-signification. We then look at some qualitative, focus group data with teen girls who participated in a UK SlutWalk. We suggest girls are not only negotiating a schizoid double pull towards performing knowing…