This book is about sexuality in a school. Sexuality and school may sound like strange bedfellows at first, but sexuality is in us and all around us, in every aspect of life, so why would school be an exception? Many scholars have ascertained sexuality’s presence in schooling , and in fact, it was present in Marzipan Baker and Cakemaker School in many ways, including the baking practice class I had the opportunity to observe. What does learning to produce bakery products have to do with sexuality, especially in the middle of a class? Well, it was part of vocational instruction, it was part of learning how to handle dough and how to form delicate pastries. Students were forming sexual organ-shaped pastries to entertain each other, they were performing sexual acts between pieces of freshly baked pastries, and the baking technology teacher instructed a student to handle the dough as gently as he would his girlfriend. 1 This was one particularly illustrative example of the presence of sexuality in school, and many others will follow in this book.
I spent two school years in Marzipan Baker and Cakemaker School between 2009 and 2011 conducting a school ethnography. 2 Marzipan is a school where students learn food industry professions, they will become confectioners, bakers or sweets factory workers, and there was also a small grammar school stream. The names of the school and all respondents are pseudonyms. I conducted interviews with students and teachers, I observed sex education and other classes. I observed the school environment and formal and informal interactions between lessons. Via these activities I collected an enormous amount of rich field material, in search of answers to my overarching research question: What is the role of sexuality in shaping social inequalities in a school environment?
Accessing schools for research is not easy, at least in Hungary. Grammar schools are overrepresented in qualitative research data because they are more likely to allow researchers to work with them. However, because of the high level of classed and ethnic segregation between school types, the student (and teacher) population in grammar schools consists mainly of white middle-class people. Therefore I very much appreciated the opportunity to do my fieldwork in Marzipan, because the ethnically mixed and mostly working - and lower-middle class student population allowed me to engage with under-researched social groups in an educational environment and made it possible to examine the constitution of sexuality from an intersectional perspective.
Sexuality is important for adolescents in many ways. Although people are sexual beings from birth, contemporary discourses of life stage categorization highlight adolescence as a special period when many young people ‘become sexual’. That means they encounter and experience ways of doing sex that are typically considered to be ‘adult’ ways, they experience ‘adult’ emotions, sexual feelings, desires and pleasures, they confront issues of sexual orientation, learn about biological and medical aspects of sexuality and reproduction, face specific forms of sexualization and sexual violence, make decisions about their sexual body. What is not commonly conceived as part of adolescents’ ‘becoming sexual’ is how sexuality is not only part of but also constitutive of one’s subjectivity. Subjectivity constitution happens discursively and through practice, in all spheres of young people ’ lives, including school. Sexuality is part of schooling , despite all efforts of making it invisible.
In my analysis I focus on sexuality beyond itself. Sexual subjectivity constitution happens through curricular and non-curricular activities in schools, through discourses and institutional practices, through sex education and other educational activities and through the formal and informal interactions among students, among teachers and school officials, and between students and teachers and school officials. School also provides a physical space for the constitution of sexual subjectivities . Sexualities are not only constituted in school but also constitutive of other aspects of subjectivities, such as gender, class and ethnicity, and these constitution processes are the ones I explore in this study.
My commitment to and involvement in working with social inequalities was an additional motivation for researching sexuality in schooling . School is an institution where social inequalities are re/produced. It is a hierarchical institution where individual subjectivities are positioned in hierarchical patterns in a network of power relations, within a broader social framework where distinction between social groups means subordination, discrimination, oppression and exclusion of one group by another. Therefore my analysis of subjectivity constitution also reveals social inequalities, and thus, it has a political motivation, besides a scholarly one.
What does it mean that sexuality is constitutive of subjectivities in discourses and practices? It means that there are ways of talking about sexuality that create binary gendered , sexual, classed and ethnic distinctions between people and allocate group positionings with different power for different people; it means that one of the ways differentiation between groups of people works is through sexuality. For example, ways young people talk about losing their virginity constitute a specific ethnic subjectivity for them and inscribe ethnic identity as binary and important. Or the ways young people talk about having sex and about their sex partners create dichotomous gendered positions for them. Or the ways teachers talk about the sexual behaviour of students allocate different classed positions both for students and for themselves.
And what does it mean that sexuality is implicated in re/producing social inequalities in schools? It means, for example, that the way teachers talk about Gypsy 3 girls’ reproductive patterns may determine how much effort they invest in educating them, which, in turn, may reproduce Gypsy girls’ disadvantaged social positioning. Or when a teacher sexually harasses a student , her reaction to it may influence her classed positioning in the vocational streaming structure of the school, which, in turn, may determine her future work career and socio-economic situation. In this book I analyse such subjectivity-constitutive sexuality discourses and practices, and show how a range of discourses and practices, some directly connected to the institutional regulation and division of students (such as streaming and vocational training ), and some seemingly not related to the subject-matter of education (such as hygiene, sexual behaviour or sexual harassment) can be directly implicated in producing raced , classed , gendered subjectivities and at the same time in perpetuating social hierarchies and inequalities within and outside the educational institution.
There is a large body of (mostly quantitative) research on social inequalities in education 4 and a large body of (mostly qualitative) literature on the constitution of young people’s subjectivities in educational institutions. However, the two fields are weakly connected. My study enriches qualitative inquiries into the daily manifestations of these processes in particular schools by adding sexuality to the picture and demonstrating that sexuality is not just something that is present in school but something that plays a significant and direct role in the re/production of social inequalities.
This study is a unique project in the sense that it is the first feminist ethnography-based book written about a Hungarian educational setting in English, from a post-structuralist theoretical perspective, in conversation with international scholarship in the field. As such, it addresses a gap in qualitative education literature focusing on Central-Eastern European post-socialist ...