Discrimination, Performance and Recuperation: How Teachers and Pupils Challenge and Recover Discourses of Sexualities in Schools

This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol 26 Issue 2, Author(s): David Nixon, “Discrimination, Performance and Recuperation: How Teachers and Pupils Challenge and Recover Discourses of Sexualities in Schools”, Pages 145-151, Copyright: Elsevier (February 2010)

This article seeks to examine the ways in which a heteronormative discourse dominates the practice and policies of schools in respect of sexualities.

Such heteronormativity produces discrimination both direct and indirect against those who fall outside a narrow descriptive band. However, there is increasing evidence of teachers, trainees and pupils who desire to ‘do sexuality’ differently, by performatively reinscribing their non-heterosexuality.

The response of the dominant discourse is to reassert its control, closing down such performance and re-emphasising old normativities. However, in this complex and messy expression of sexualities in schools identities are changed for all.