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Gender inequalities in schools have implications for life chances, emotional well-being and educational policies and practices, but are apparently resistant to change. This paper employs Judith Butler's conceptualisation of performativity in a study of young people and consumption to provide insights into gendered inequities. It argues that how the young people "do" gender in focus groups frequently involves the discussion of young women's bodies and clothes in ways that are "culturally intelligible". The focus on young women's bodies produced joking relationships and a taken-for-granted understanding of gender in some same-sex interactions, but sometimes created tension and divisions in mixed-gender groups. Discussions of sexualisation in single-sex and mixed-sex groups were similarly emotionally loaded. The paper argues that attention to gender inequalities requires detailed attention to the differential power relations in which boys express desires to control feminine bodies and girls police their own and other girls' bodies. Methodologically, the paper suggests that focus group discussions constitute an ethnographic site for analysis and that researchers co-construct young people's narratives of embodied gender practices in ways that mediate young people's gendered performances. (Contains 2 notes.)

The paper reports on research conducted by third-year sociology students into student identities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. This university was formed as a result of a merger between two formerly "racially" defined universities. The research, comprising interviews and observation and taking place at the University's Howard College (the formerly white University of Natal), was envisaged as a way of enabling the students to apply practically theories of identity, and as a means of generating local resources. In spite of the recent merger, "race" emerged as a major influence on student identifications, affecting associations on campus, what people did, where they went to in their break times and their attitudes to others. The paper investigates racialised groupings and identities on campus, how they are forged in relation to each other and students' emotional investments in them. It draws, also, on the researchers' own experiences, as black, white and Indian male and female students, of engaging in this research, and the issues and problems they encountered, and reflects on some of the methodological implications of students researching students and "race." (Contains 2 notes.)

In HIV and AIDS and life skills education in southern Africa peer education has been advocated as a way of democratizing relations between educators and students and encouraging participatory pedagogies. But what makes a peer educator, or rather how do people make themselves peer educators? Similarities in terms of age, social status and background do not automatically result in teachers and students identifying as peers and engaging in participatory teaching and learning. This paper focuses on an interview with men and women in their 20s who were identified as peer educators and taught life skills education to children in a "black" high school. How did they, as full-time paid employees several years older than their students working for a Christian organization, construct themselves as peers in relation to the male and female students they taught? It is argued that this involved contradictory ways of relating to students, moralistic and student-centred, and that they subverted and reproduced conventional gendered identities.

Jacob Zuma is the former Deputy President of South Africa who was suspended from office pending a court case on corruption charges but whose name has dominated the South Africa media over the last few months in relation to his prosecution for rape of a much younger woman who was HIV positive. The Jacob Zuma trial has produced powerful feelings for and against Zuma, thus, the author wants to reflect briefly on aspects of Zuma's appeal drawing on conversations with students--Zuma supporters--at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where he teaches. Furthermore, he states that teaching "Jacob Zuma" in mixed "race" and mixed gender classes without generating and reinforcing "racial" and gendered tensions, but encouraging self-reflexivity and engagement with "Others" presents a major challenge.

When Rob was about 14-years-old, at an all male boarding school, he was so glad that he did not have a tiny penis like another boy who was called girl. He was popular because he was good at sport, missed his mum and dog terribly but never showed it (except a little to his mum and dog) and talked a lot about girls he fancied. These memories were triggered by an interview based study on the identities of 11- to 14-year-old boys in London which we conducted from 1997-2000. Rob was the interviewer, and he interviewed boys in groups (45: 36 single sex and nine mixed) and individually (79) in 12 London schools.

This paper reports a qualitative analysis of data from a study of masculinity in 11-14 year old boys attending twelve London schools. Forty-five group discussions (N = 245) and two individual interviews (N = 78) were conducted. The findings indicate that boys' experiences of school led them to assume that interviews would expose them to ridicule and so threaten their masculinity. Boys were generally more serious and willing to reveal emotions in individual than in group interviews. A key theme in boys' accounts was the importance of being able to present themselves as properly masculine in order to avoid being bullied by other boys by being labeled 'gay.' The ways in which boys were racialized affected their experiences of school.