The Power of Things! A ‘New’ Ontology of Sexuality at School

Abstract

This chapter is an experiment. The word experiment when used in relation to research usually belongs to the domain of the pure sciences, and not critical sexualities studies. Employing the word ‘experiment’ here extends a bridge across the traditional disciplinary gulf between pure and social sciences. This chapter is experimental in that it breaks with analytic traditions of sexualities research in schools, by drawing upon the work of feminist physicist and philosopher Karen Barad. My aim in this chapter is to reconfigure the way in which we might think about how sexuality comes into being at school. In this sense, I am concerned with sexuality's ontology and interrupting what has been characterized within new material feminisms as its anthropocentric focus. Anthropocentrism is a frame of thought that centers humans and human meaning-making as the sole constitutive force of our world. It places humans above other matter in reality, creating a hierarchy in which humans reign supreme. Hultman and Lenz Taguchi explain how such a perspective 'reduces our world to a social world and neglects all other non-human forces that are at play'. Much existing research in the field of sexualities and schooling has exhibited this anthropocentric focus (my own included). The legacy of the 'linguistic turn' engendered by post-structuralism has been to encourage an understanding of sexuality at school as discursively constituted through everyday schooling processes and practices. An emphasis on the discursive constitution of sexuality is evident in examinations of sex education, the curriculum, classroom pedagogy, teachers' work, group interaction and sexual cultures. A desire to explore what more we might think about sexuality at school, in a way that decentres the human subject, is the motivating force for this discussion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)