Queer masculinities, gender conformity, and the secondary school

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore how the institutional discourses of sexuality and gender subjectivate students as legitimate or marginalized sexual and gendered beings at a UK secondary school. Employing participant observations, interviews, and auto-ethnographic data from a yearlong PGCE course, I reflexively analyze moments where subjectivation can be identified as operating through and by the school and between students and me. I find that the productive and regulative power of the school is illuminated by queer masculinities and show that gay men contest the school’s regulative processes. However, my analysis suggests that the queer contestation of norms is of limited use when it is not allied with a concern for institutional and cultural change through more traditional political methods.