CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Rédai, Dorottya |
|---|---|
| Title | Sexing the School. Constituting Gender, Ethnicity and Class through Discourses of Sexuality in a Hungarian Secondary School. |
| Summary | My dissertation seeks answers to the following broad research question: “What is the role of sexuality in shaping social inequalities in a secondary school?” It is based on a school ethnography which I conducted between 2009 and 2011 in Marzipan Baker and Cakemaker School, a combined secondary vocational-technical-grammar school in a large town in Hungary. My fieldwork consisted of observing sex education and other lessons, semi-structured small-group interviews with cc. 90 students and individual interviews with the school nurse, five teachers and the school director. I analyse topics related to sexuality, including virginity, marriage, hygiene, pleasure, and ways of talking about them, through which my respondents constitute gendered, classed and raced/ethnic subjectivities. I highlight a hitherto neglected use of sexuality in this context. Several researchers have pointed out that schools themselves reproduce gendered, raced and classed inequalities within their walls. I argue that discourses on sexuality in this school constitute binary categories of gender, race/ethnicity and class, and contribute to the formation of students’ subjectivities based on these categories. In other words, sexuality is not only one of the axes of social inequality, it is also constitutive of these axes. The sexuality discourses and practices I have identified and the subjectivities they constitute simultaneously create categories of exclusion and allocate people within and outside, leading to a re-inscription of social inequalities in schooling. My study addresses three interrelated fields of scholarship: schooling and young people’s sexuality; the discursive constitution of gendered, ethnic and classed subjectivities; and the re/production of social inequalities in education. |
| Supervisor | Fodor, Eva |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/redai_dorottya.pdf |
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