Discrimination, performance and recuperation: How teachers and pupils challenge and recover discourses of sexualities in schools

This article seeks to examine the ways in which a heteronormative discourse dominates the practice and policies of schools in respect of sexualities. Such heteronormativity produces discrimination both direct and indirect against those who fall outside a narrow descriptive band. However, there is increasing evidence of teachers, trainees and pupils who desire to ‘do sexuality’ differently, by performatively reinscribing their non-heterosexuality. The response of the dominant discourse is to reassert its control, closing down such performance and re-emphasising old normativities. However, in this complex and messy expression of sexualities in schools identities are changed for all.