Popular culture is omnipresent in the lives of young children. The mass media, movies, television, and product advertising all carry messages about acceptability and desirability, deeply entangled with traditional stereotypes about gender, sex-roles, and sexuality. The intersection of discourses of media, gender, and performativity and their…

In this essay, I review three recent monographs: Jordynn Jack's "Autism and Gender," Anne McGuire's "War on Autism," and Melanie Yergeau's "Authoring Autism." Each of these texts centers disability--autism in particular--and in doing so, they highlight the insidious ways in which our cultural, institutional, and…

Background: There is widespread agreement that participation in post-compulsory physics needs to be widened and increased, particularly among women and under-represented communities. This paper contributes to understanding of the processes that produce unequal participation, Methods: The paper undertakes a Bourdieusian analysis of longitudinal…

This essay will describe one activity that the author uses in her human sexuality course to illustrate how patriarchal systems have affected the experiences of females and males across the sexual lifespan. Through this fairly simple and straightforward activity students are able to utilize common experiences and knowledge of real-world issues and…

This paper considers the educational implications of the recent emphasis on the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer (LGBTQ) people in Ireland. Operating from the perspective that discourses constitute rather than merely reflect material reality, thereby shaping or "structuring" how we…

This essay makes the case that during the American cold-war era, Disney's animated film classics worked in tandem with their True-Life Adventure series of nature documentaries to reproduce traditional mothering ideology under patriarchy. The animated films do this not by animating the realities of marriage, childbirth, and mothering work for girls…

This study examines LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses in five recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult books. The analysis brought scenes of violence and sex/love scenes to the fore. Violent scenes offered readers messages that LGBT people are either the victims of violence-fueled hatred and fear, or, in some cases, showed a gay person…

Developmental research on social categorization has overwhelmingly focused on perceptions about and experiences of individuals who are clear or prototypical members of discrete and usually dichotomous social categories. For example, studies of social categorization, stereotyping, prejudice, and social identity have generally explored how children…

Given how pervasively political, cultural, educational, and religious institutions are built on a foundation of stereotypes and binary assumptions, it is easy to understand why people find the current reassessment of all things gender disquieting and disruptive. The consequences of this upheaval can be found in all corners of pre-K-12 schooling,…

Previous studies have demonstrated that several contextual factors influence the relationship between aggression and peer victimization in early adolescence, including gender of the same-sex peer group and gender composition of the school. The current study replicated and expanded on this research by examining the moderating influences of gender…

Despite clear messages from current physical education (PE) curricula about the importance of adopting socially critical perspectives, dominant discourses of gender relating to physical activity, bodies and health are being reproduced within this school subject. By drawing on interview data from a larger ethnographic account of boys' PE, this…

Sexually objectifying messages about girls and women are common in U.S. popular culture. As a consequence of exposure to such messages, girls may develop "internalized sexualization," or internalization of the belief that sexual attractiveness to males is an important aspect of their identity. We hypothesized that internalized…

Challenges of media and gender literacy classes include the danger of steering students towards "right" interpretations of media texts while simplifying the complex relationship between audiences and media texts. The current paper describes a case study that focused on two high school teachers who were motivated by their protectionist…

Although many self-identified bisexual individuals report having at least one child, bisexual parents' unique experiences, including sexuality-related communication with their children, have been largely absent from the parenting literature. We conducted in-depth interviews via telephone (or digital telephony such as voice over Internet protocol)…

Few educators or philosophers of education would argue that schools' sole purpose is to keep children safe. Yet a particular subset of students in the United States--lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students--are often served by their schools as if their mere safety were a sufficient objective in and of itself.…