Most people, school teachers and children included, are altogether too sure about what gender is: there are two "opposite" sexes, man and woman, and gender is the inevitable categorical expression of natural sex. Like all commonsense views, however, the gender binary has been socially constructed through normalising discourses that frame…

The present paper interrogates the ways in which school is produced as a particular bounded place (or collection of places) where sexuality, and particularly non-heterosexuality, is carefully policed by these boundaries. Drawing upon data generated in primary schools during a nationwide action research project ("No Outsiders"), we focus on three…

This paper arises from an online discussion project in the United Kingdom, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, in which higher education students and staff were invited to respond to a series of statements about sexual orientation in the context of schooling. This paper suggests that the silence of relative non-participation may have been…