Schooling,Sexuality and Male Power: towards an emancipatory curriculum

In England economic and political imperatives are forcing sociology to retreat from the educational map, which is overladen with the ubiquitous rhetoric of managing the 1988 Education Reform Act. Progressive local education authority curriculum policies are under continuing threat from central government. Against this background, this qualitative study sets out to explore the interrelationship between masculinity and schooling. The particular focus is a group of young male gay students’ experience of schooling and sexuality. They provide a critique of most conventional theoretical work on education and gay sexuality, which is informed by models of social pathology that construct ‘blame the victim’ accounts. In reconceptualising young gays’ schooling, the students point to current repressive conditions that underpin all young people's lives in the 1990s. In so doing, they provide fresh evidence to support feminist analysis that sexual/gender systems, which are class and ‘race’ specific, are of fundamental importance in structuring curriculum. In response, the young men explain how schools are a strategically significant site on which to develop an alternative politics of schooling and sexuality. At the same time they argue that being gay is both a positive and creative experience.