Standardising Sexuality: Embodied Knowledge, “Achievement” and “Standards”.

In this paper, we argue that education and the possibility of becoming educated are in tension with sexuality in schools and that, consequently, students tend either to suppress all kinds of knowledges—embodied and otherwise—that are neither welcome nor recognised within the formal contexts of schooling or debar themselves from success in terms of educational achievement. Students embody identities both as learners and as sexual subjects. Discourses of sexuality and education, therefore, come together in embodied ways. The difficulty for students arises from the discursive and semiotic construction of schools as being on the “rational”, “mind” side of the “mind–body” split, which typifies modernist, Enlightenment thinking. The paper examines specific ways in which four girls produce themselves in dialogue with, on the one hand, official (Governmental and school) discourses of “standards” and “achievement” and, on the other, particular powerful constructions of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]