Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities

Exploring Childrens' Gender and Sexual Relations in the Primary School

Emma Renold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134377756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities takes an insightful and in-depth look at the hidden worlds of young children's sexualities. Based upon extensive group interviews and observation, the author illustrates how sexuality is embedded in children's school-based cultures and gender identities. From examining children's own views and experiences, the book explores a range of topical and sensitive issues, including how:

• the primary school is a key social arena for 'doing' sexuality
• sexuality shapes children's friendships and peer relations
• being a 'proper' girl or boy involves investing in a heterosexual identity
• children use gendered or sexual insults to maintain gender and sexual norms.

Grounded in children's real-life experiences, this book traces their struggles, anxieties, desires and pleasures as they make sense of their emerging sexualities. It also includes frank and open discussions of the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the boyfriend/girlfriend culture, misogyny and sexual harassment.
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities is a timely and powerful resource for researchers, educationalists and students in childhood studies, sociology and psychology and will be of great interest to professionals and policy makers working with young children.

Chapter 1

Sexualising gender, gendering sexuality

Some introductions

They (the boys) won’t let us play … unless you’re going out with one of them

(Hayley, aged 10)

I haven’t got a girlfriend […] I’m more into football

(Timothy, aged 10)

You need some boys to talk to sometimes, not just all girls, all the time. But you don’t want to get in a … like a relationship with them … BUT YOU STILL DO!

(Harriet, aged 10)

They say I’m gay … they say I’m like a girl

(Damien, aged 10).

This book explores the salience of sexuality in children’s accounts of being and becoming ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ during their final year of primary school.¹ As the children’s quotes above illustrate, it traces how gender and sexuality suffuse and shape the informal world of children’s peer group cultures and social relations in diverse and powerful ways. Exploding the myth of the primary school as a cultural greenhouse for the nurturing and protection of children’s (sexual) innocence, it vividly illustrates how children locate their local primary school as a key social and cultural arena for doing ‘sexuality’.² In the chapters that follow I explore girls’ and boys’ struggles, anxieties, powers and pleasures as they individually and collectively make sense of their gender and sexual identities within a local and global culture that expects nothing less than a ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1983; Jackson and Scott 2004).

The ethnographic research upon which this book is based (see Renold 1999) was conducted and written against a media and policy backdrop of competing representations of contemporary children in late capitalist societies as knowing and doing ‘too much too soon’, yet ‘not quite ready’ for sexual knowledge or activity (see Epstein and Johnson 1998).The year of the millennium witnessed a string of UK media moral panics in which childhood was being represented as a time of presumed innocence and under attack. The Guardian (UK broadsheet newspaper), for example, ran stories with headlines such as,‘Innocence on the line’ (Gerard 1999),‘The end of innocence’ (Birkett 2000) and ‘Too much too young’ (Ellen 2000). Meanwhile, the Department of Education and Employment (DfEE 2000) issued new Sex and Relationship Education guidance encouraging schools to develop policies and programmes that are ‘responsive to children’s needs’, providing they are ‘age-appropriate’ and don’t encourage ‘any early sexual experimentation’.The impetus and rationale to write a book on junior sexualities was fuelled by the dearth of published research on children’s day-to-day sexual cultures and identity-work beyond representations of dangerous sexualities (e.g. sexual abuse) or outside of a ‘sex education’ framework. As Sue Scott, in her plenary to the 2004 British Sociological Association Conference, stated: ‘there is a tendency to bracket off sex and sexuality as a special area of human life at the very edges of the social and cultural’ and ignore both ‘sexuality as everyday practice’ and ‘the institution of heterosexuality’. This is especially the case when it comes to children and childhood (see Jackson and Scott 2004).

Children’s presumed innocence, sexuality as everyday social practice and institutionalised heterosexuality are key themes that punctuate children’s own gendered narratives of being a ‘girl’ and ‘boy’.They are also themes that permeate the following chapters that make up this book. One of the book’s central aims is to situate sexuality firmly at the centre of how we conceptualise and theorise children’s gendered childhoods. In particular, the book invites us (adults) to think differently about the place and performance of gender and sexuality in children’s childhoods from the standpoint and experience of children themselves.

The purpose of this first chapter is to outline and offer a number of introductions. First, I introduce and critically explore a number of key theoretical concepts and perspectives (from feminist to queer theories) that collectively offer a theoretical framework sensitive to the complexities of children’s gendered, generational and sexual social worlds. Next, I reflect upon how I came to research children’s informal and often private school-based gender/sexual cultures. Finally, I explore what it means to undertake research that privileges the subjective experiences of children themselves and how this approach and my theoretical framework both inform and ultimately shape the structure of the following chapters.

Using theory to think Otherwise: feminist, poststructuralist and queer theories

The impact of social constructionst perspectives over the past 30 years or so has contributed significantly to our understanding of how sexuality and gender are shaped and reshaped by the societies and cultures within which we live. Feminist accounts have troubled the relationship between (biological) sex and (social) gender by arguing how the category ‘sex’ (e.g. male/female) is the product of ‘gender’ (rather then the other way around) thus laying the blame for gender inequalities at the door of society rather than biology. Contemporary socio-historical accounts that literally trace the making of sex (Lacquer 1990) and (hetero/homo)sexuality (Foucault 1978; Weeks 1981, 1986; Katz 1996) have been pivotal in disrupting essentialist truths and dualisms about the ‘nature’ of sex, gender and sexuality as something fixed, natural, stable and coherent. It is not the purpose of this section to offer a full excavation of this literature on gender and sexuality theory in Western culture, primarily because comprehensive reviews already exist (see Weeks 1985, 1986; Hawkes 1996; Richardson 1996). Rather, I critically explore how my engagement with feminist poststructural, socio-cultural and queer perspectives (particularly the work of Bronwyn Davies, Valerie Walkerdine and Judith Butler) each provide ways of troubling and simultaneously making sense of the kinds of gendered and sexual identities and relations of primary school girls and boys. In brief, feminist postructuralist and socio-cultural perspectives enable a thinking Otherwise about the contradictory and multiple ways in which children experience and negotiate the gendered category ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ (and the power of gender norms). Queer theory enables a thinking Otherwise about the heteronormativity of these gender identities and the sexualisation of gender and the gendering of sexualisation in children’s identities more widely.

Touched by feminist poststructuralism

I have found feminist appropriations of poststructuralist perspectives (see Weedon 1987) especially useful in challenging old and opening up new and exciting ways of conceptualising and deconstructing the social processes through which we become gendered. Particularly powerful has been the deployment of the term ‘discourse’ (as socially organised frameworks of knowledge and meaning) in exposing how certain regulatory ‘truths’ about gender (e.g. ‘boys are boisterous’, ‘girls are weak’) come about and create and control particular ways of thinking, feeling and acting as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. Bronwyn Davies’ research in Australian primary schools was one of the first to deconstruct how young children’s gender identities are constituted through discourse and discursive practices.This approach enabled her to fracture the simplistic (yet all powerful) sex/gender binary of ‘male/masculinity’ and ‘female/femininity’ and illustrate how children engage with a range of multiple masculinities and femininities, while simultaneously exploring how the rigid male/female dualism is produced and reproduced.There is now a growing body of empirical research within the field of gender and education that explores gender as multiple and relational (see Francis and Skelton 2001a).Many gender theorists now recognise the plurality and diversity of masculinities and femininities and the pushes and pulls of the gender dualism which binds together sex/gender categories (e.g. masculinity with male, femininity with female) – thus how masculinity and femininity are co-constructed in opposition to each other (e.g. male is not to be female and vice versa, see Davies 1989b, 1993a).

A further significant shift over the last two decades, particularly in the work of Bronwyn Davies and Valerie Walkerdine, has been locating children not as passive recipients imprinted upon or ‘socialised’ by ‘society’, but making room for the child as active agent in the gendering process and fully implicated in the construction and maintenance of their social and cultural worlds (Davies 1989a). Attributing greater agency and self-knowledge to children’s ‘doing’ of gender is particularly important given the historical denial of children as active constructors and mediators of their identities and social worlds more widely (James and Prout 1998).³ Feminist research into young children’s gender identities and relations has always been concerned with integrating and exploring the relationship between the ‘being’ (via child-centred methodologies) ‘becoming’ (self in process) and ‘doing’ (child as active and agentic) of gender (see Davies 1989a, 1993a; 1993b;Walkerdine 1989a, 1990; Jones 1993; Rhedding Jones 1994, 1996; Francis 1997). In particular, I have found the concepts of ‘performativity’ (Butler 1990) and ‘positioning’ (Davies and Harre 1991) especially productive in thinking through children’s ongoing struggles in being, doing and becoming gender/ed and the costs and consequences of projecting or transgressing normative gender identities.

Performative genders and positioning: challenges and possibilities

The idea that ‘gender’ is not something that you ‘have’ but something that you ‘do’ and continually ‘do’ (‘re-do’) through everyday social and cultural practices has been developed by Judith Butler (see Harrison and Hood-Williams 2002) through the concept of ‘performativity’. In her book, Gender Trouble (1990), Butler emphasises the citational nature of identity where gender is actualised through a series of repetitive performances that constitute the illusion of a ‘proper’, ‘natural’ or ‘fixed’ gender. Identity is thus understood to be the effect of these on-going performances. Butler explains:

The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence,must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self ... significantly if gender is instituted through acts ... then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and perform in the mode of belief.

(Butler 1990: 140–1)

For Butler, then,‘gender’ does not pre-exist behind the ‘performances’ of gender. Rather, gender comes into being through performance (see Bell 1999). And it is these gendered expressions (‘stylized acts’) continually produced and reproduced that constitute the fiction of a coherent stable identity and give the illusion of a fixed set of gender norms. It is this performative metaphor and the notion of gender as ‘illusory’ that I have found an invaluable theoretical resource. This is not just because I had come across a concept that fully reflected my everyday observations of children’s reiterative performances as they attempted to project an ‘abiding gendered self ’, but in making sense of children’s despair at the impossibility of this task. It also assisted me in mapping how gender norms through constant citation come into being and are held in place and how gender norms are undermined and can be destabilised in the course of these reiterations. This last point, however, is more problematic and warrants a little more explanation.

Butler draws attention to the subversive potential of performative genders in two related ways. First, through a wilful transgression and violation of gender norms that expose other gender performances and thus ‘gender’ as less than real. And second, how gaps and cracks in performances open up discursive spaces and create possibilities for alternative gendered performances. Both accounts, however, are problematic.As the following chapters illustrate, children (as each others’ harshest critics) were more than ready to expose the gaps, cracks and transgressions of other children who constantly struggled to pull off convincing gender performances (i.e. those girls and boys who actively engaged and challenged existing gender norms, see Chapter 7). But they did so often in ways that consolidated and reinforced rather than undermined or thwarted gender norms.

The concept of performativity has been instrumental in recognising the ‘doing’ and ‘living’ of gender as much more contradictory than other studies on children’s gender relations would have us believe. However, as Butler herself questioned in ‘Bodies that Matter’ (Butler 1993; see also Jackson 1996; Lloyd 1999; Richardson 2000), transgressive acts do not necessarily result in the subversion of gender norms, but can serve to reinforce them, depending upon social context and audience. Paying attention to the constraints as well as the possibilities of enacting non-normatitve gender/sexual performances, as I do throughout this book, thus involves attending to the social space and social relations within which gender performances occur. As Moya Lloyd explains below:

It is easy to over-emphasize the discontinuities in gender performance; to present them as indicative of disruptive behaviour.What is occluded, as a consequence, is the space within which performance occurs, the others involved in or implicated by the production, and how they receive and interpret what they see.

(Lloyd 1999: 210)

To explore the ways in which gender performances are enacted and interpreted by children through everyday social relations, Davies and Harre’s (1991) notion of ‘interactive’ and ‘reflexive’ positioning has been particularly useful to differentiate between and explore the intentional and unintentional ways in which children position/are positioned by others (‘interactive’) and how they position themselves (‘reflexive’). Chapter 7 is dedicated to mapping the costs and consequences of those girls and boys who dare to deviate from and resist gender normative performances and the significance of space and audience in creating the possibilities for their individual and collective transgressive acts. However, as Davies (1989b: 235) illustrates in her discussion of agency, power and the rigidity of the male/female binary, ‘doing gender’ (and ‘sexuality’) in non-normative ways is not simply a matter of choice, ‘but involves grappling with both subjective constraints and the constraints of accepted discursive practices’. Paying attention to the ways in which identities are constructed (through social interaction) within a nexus of power relations, which involves conceiving of power (and thus discourse) as both a repressive and productive force (Foucault 1977), is an all important step in making sense of the ways in which ‘doing boy’ and ‘doing girl’ can be both constraining and empowering in different contexts.⁴ Thus while I recognise and explore the fluidity and shifting nature of gendered power relations, I also recognise the ways in which power (via discursive formations) can operate in regulatory and constraining ways, what Foucault referred to as ‘major dominations’ (see Ramazanoglu 1993: 240).Thus, I will be referring to hegemonic and dominant discourses, identities and postitionings, but also attending to emergent/transformative discourses and thus those who are marginalised within dominant discourses (Cain 1993).And one of the most marginalised discourses, or configuration of discourses, when it comes to children’s gendered childhoods, is that of sexuality.

Queering gender and compulsory heterosexuality: outing the ordinary

The socially constructed, multiple and ‘performative’ nature of gender has been widely recognised, but much less so can be said of sexuality and specifically heterosexuality.When sexuality has been the focus of social analysis and theorising, this work has tended to focus upon sexual minorities (i.e. the sexual Other). Heterosexuality has, until relatively recently, remained an invisible, unexamined and taken-for-granted norm (see Richardson 2000). Early feminists and proponents of queer theory, however, have radically interrogated, problematised and thus rendered visible the ways in which heterosexuality is not only socially constructed but fundamental to the social, cultural and material conditions that shape and regulate our everyday lives. Adrienne Rich’s (1983: 21) powerful conceptualisation of heterosexuality as ‘compulsory’ was one of the first to draw attention to the institutionalisation of heterosexuality as something that is ‘imposed, managed, organised, propagandised and maintained by force’. Since then there has been an expanding literature specifically examining the interaction and intersection of heterosexuality and gender, particularly (although by no means exclusively) by those theorists associated with what has come to be known as ‘queer theory’ (e.g. Butler 1990, 1993; Sedgwick 1990, 1997; Dollimore 1991;Warner 1993; Sinfield 1994).

Described as the ‘grandchild of academic feminism and gay liberationist theory’ (Hostetler and Herdt 1998: 2), queer theory builds on and employs general poststructuralist perspectives and confronts the binary focus of sexual and gender categories:

Queer theory is linked to forms of politics which deliberately seek to break down the fixed boundaries between the hetero/homo, gender and other binaries to multiply sexual categories and ultimately dissolve them, insisting that ‘queer’ itself is not some bounded community, or not only so, but is everywhere.

(Johnson 1997: 9)

While there is much debate over what constitutes ‘queer theory’ (see Hostetler and Herdt 1998), the radical shake-up of the relationship and inter-dependency of gender and sexuality has provided some complex (and challenging) theoretical accounts of the gendering of sexuality and the sexualisation of gender (see Butler 1990, 1993; Sedgwick 1990;Wilton 1996, 2004). For many, proponents of queer theory have provided the conceptual space from which to expose and contest the hegemony of heterosexuality and the politics and practice of heteronormative and heterosexist social worlds.

In my own research, Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of how gender is routinely spoken through a ‘heterosexual matrix’ has been pivotal in thinking through the ways in which children’s normative gender identities as ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ are inextricably tied to dominant notions of heterosexuality, as Butler sets out below:

I use the term heterosexual matrix ... to designate that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized ... a hegemonic discursive/epistemological model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.

(Butler 1990: 151)

Here, Butler is arguing that the ‘real’ expressions of masculinity and femininity (what she defines as ‘intelligible genders’) are embedded and hierarchically structured within a presupposed heterosexuality. In other words, to be a ‘real’ boy or girl would involve desiring or growing up to desire the opposite sex, such is the power of the ‘heterosexual imaginary’ (see Ingraham 1996).Alternatively, to deviate from normative ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’ (or ‘unintelligible genders’) can throw heterosexuality into doubt (e.g. consider the ‘homosexualisation’ of boys who step outside normative gender boundaries). Disrupting the linear story that there is first a sexed subject which expresses itself through gender and then through sexuality, Butler exposes the developmental path of sex, gender and desire to be wholly illusory and further illustrates, along with other identity theorists (Hall and du Gay 1996),how this ‘illusion’ (i.e. the ‘hegemony’ and ubiquity of the heterosexual matrix) is maintained through the policing and shaming of ‘abnormal’ or Other sexual/gendered identities (Butler 1993). Constituting both heterosexuality and gender as inherently unstable by showing how each depends upon the contrasting presence of an Other for their reference point (as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’) exposes their compulsory and fragile nature. Indeed, the power and fragility of normative gender/se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography