Language, Sexuality and Education

Presenting a range of data obtained from secondary schools in the United

Kingdom and United States, this path-breaking book explores the role played
by language in constructing sexual identities. Analysing the often complex
ways in which homophobia, heterosexism and heteronormativity are enacted
within school contexts, it shows that by analysing language we can discover
much about how educators and students experience sexual diversity in their
schools, how sexual identities are constructed through language and how
different statuses are ascribed to different sexual identities.

helen sauntson is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at York

St John University. Her books include New Perspectives on Language and
Sexual Identity (2007), Approaches to Gender and Spoken Classroom
Discourse (2012) and Key Debates in Sex and Relationships Education
(2016).
Language, Sexuality and
Education

Helen Sauntson
York St John University
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107126879
DOI: 10.1017/9781316411353
© Helen Sauntson 2018
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Names: Sauntson, Helen, 1972- author.
Title: Language, sexuality and education / Helen Sauntson, York St. John University.
Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : University Printing House, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042439 | ISBN 9781107126879 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex differences in education–Great Britain. | Sex differences in
education–United States. | Gender identity in education–Great Britain. | Gender
identity in education–United States. | Homosexuality and education–Great Britain. |
Homosexuality and education–United States. | Sexual orientation–Great Britain. |
Sexual orientation–United States. | Language and sex–Great Britain. | Language and
sex–United States.
Classification: LCC LC212.93.G7 S38 2017 | DDC 370.15/1–dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042439

ISBN 978-1-107-12687-9 Hardback

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For Kharis and Gabriel
 Contents

List of Figures page viii

List of Tables ix
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1
1 Confronting the Context 16
2 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings 28
3 Using Sociolinguistic Frameworks to Explore the School
Experiences of LGBT+ Youth 50
4 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity
in Schools 93
5 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents 123
6 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis and the Construction
of Sexual Identities 165
Closing Remarks 185

References 193
Index 202

vii
 Figures

3.1 Tactics of intersubjectivity page 57

3.2 Attitudinal appraisal framework 71
3.3 judgement categories 72
3.4 Affect – Evaluation of own feelings 73
3.5 Affect – Evaluation of others’ feelings 76
3.6 Judgement – Evaluation of own behaviour 78
3.7 Judgement – Evaluation of others’ behaviour 81
3.8 Appreciation 85
4.1 Tactics of intersubjectivity 96
4.2 Affect – Overall 107
4.3 Affect – Evaluation of own feelings 107
4.4 Judgement – Overall 110
4.5 Judgement – Evaluation of own behaviour only 111
4.6 Appreciation 115

viii
 Tables

2.1 Summary of data sets and analytical frameworks used within

the QAL approach page 48
3.1 Participant information 51
3.2 Tactics of intersubjectivity 55
3.3 Subcategories of affect 71
3.4 Items ascribed positive and negative valuation by the
young people 86
4.1 Items ascribed positive and negative valuation by
the educators 116
4.2 + Irrealis valuation 120
5.1 Key information about document sets 126
5.2 Word frequencies (English/ELA) 137
5.3 Keywords (English/ELA) 138
5.4 Sample concordance of culture* from KS3 and KS4 143
5.5 Sample concordance of culture* from ELASS 143
5.6 Sample concordance of differen* from KS4 144
5.7 Sample concordance of identi* from KS3 and KS4 146
5.8 Sample concordance of soci* from KS3 147
5.9 Sample concordance of soci* from ELASS 147
5.10 SRE Word frequency list 151
5.11 SRE Keywords 152
5.12 HEd Word frequency list 152
5.13 HEd Keywords 153
5.14 Sample concordance of sexual* from SRE 155
5.15 Sample concordance of sexual* from HEd 156
5.16 Sample concordance of pupil* from SRE 157
5.17 Sample concordance of STIs from SRE 157
5.18 Sample concordance of STIs from HEd 157
5.19 Sample concordance of safe* from SRE 158
5.20 Sample concordance of safe* from HEd 158
5.21 Sample concordance of violen* from HEd 159
5.22 Sample concordance of marriage* from SRE 161

ix
x List of Tables

6.1 Data set information 166

6.2 Keywords 168
6.3 Concordances of girl* 169
6.4 Concordances of boy* 170
6.5 Concordances of sex* 171
 Acknowledgements

I could not have written this book without the help and support of an incredible
group of people.
Firstly, invaluable support has been provided to me by York St John
University and, in particular, the Language and Identities in InterAction
(LIdIA) research unit. I am especially grateful to Clare Cunningham for
creating the time and space needed to complete this book, and for being an
amazing writing buddy.
Secondly, I would like to thank the fantastic research assistants who have
worked on this project – Oliver Athorn, Natalie Elton, Phoebe Harding, Sarah
Holliday and Bryony Jones. I am very grateful to Dr Kathryn Simpson for co-
conducting interviews with some of the participants. Big thanks also go to all
of the students I have had the pleasure of working with on the Language,
Gender and Sexuality module at York St John University during the prepar-
ation of this book.
I am extremely grateful to all participating individuals, schools and youth
groups. Thanks also go to the team at Cambridge University Press for provid-
ing valuable support throughout every stage of this project.
Finally, thank you to my wonderful family who provided support, encour-
agement and love in abundance throughout this project, and who continue to
inspire me in everything I do.

xi
 Introduction

The research for this book was conducted between 2010 and 2016 with the
book itself being written between 2013 and 2017. During this time, both the
United Kingdom and the United States experienced significant political
upheavals, the effects of which were felt globally. At the 2017 American
Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference, a dedicated special
invited colloquium was called to examine the effects of Brexit in the United
Kingdom and the inauguration of the Trump presidency in the United States.
The colloquium focused on the re-emergence of discriminatory or ‘exclu-
sionary discourses’ in relation to particular social groups. The concept of
exclusionary discourse can be applied to sexuality as its re-emergence signifies
insecurity and instability concerning sexuality rights and equality issues.
At the beginning of the 2013–17 period, in his swearing-in speech at the
beginning of his second term of office in January 2013, US President Obama
stated his commitment to LGBT+ equality: ‘Our journey is not complete
until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like everyone else under the law
for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another
must be equal as well’ (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/
2013/01/21/inaugural-address-president-barack-obama). By 2017, newly elected
US President Trump had vehemently opposed nationwide marriage equality in
the United States. Trump had also overtly supported the North Carolina HB2
law which allows businesses to discriminate against and deny services to
LGBT+ people and had said he would rescind Obama’s previously instated
transgender equality guidance (www.hrc.org/2016RepublicanFacts/donald-
trump-opposes-nationwide-marriage-equality). However, at the time of writing,
Trump had backtracked, stating that Obama’s executive orders relating to
LGBT+ equality would remain in place. Nevertheless, the Trump administra-
tion is widely reported as continuing to be characterized by strong anti- LGBT+
rhetoric (see, for example, Trump’s 2017 restoration of the military ban on
transgender people – www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41059503).
In the United Kingdom, similar progress towards LGBT+ equality has been
hindered by the United Kingdom’s initiation of the process to leave the
European Union, and the subsequent loss of European human rights law which

1
2 Introduction

protects those identifying as LGBT+ from discrimination in particular contexts

across EU countries. As far back as 2011, a Department for Education (DfE)
discussion document on the future of teacher training in England and Wales
stated one of its aims was to ‘help schools tackle bullying in schools, espe-
cially homophobic bullying’ (www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/409088/pfg_
coalition.pdf). By 2017, there was a notable absence of reporting of progress
towards achieving this aim. And organizations such as Stonewall were still
reporting high levels of homophobic bullying in schools and other organiza-
tions in the United Kingdom, suggesting that little has changed.1 However, in a
similar vein to Trump, Theresa May has backtracked on many anti-LGBT+
statements since taking office as British Prime Minister in 2016. In fact, May
has publicly apologized for her earlier votes against proposed laws to introduce
an equal age of consent and same-sex adoptions in the United Kingdom. By
2017, May had voted in favour of equal marriage and had launched a review of
LGBT+ asylum seekers during her tenure as home secretary.
In the United Kingdom and United States respectively, the pledges made by
the DfE, May and the Obama administration have been seen by many as being
significant recent steps forward in starting to address sexuality inequalities in
compulsory education. In the United Kingdom, the expression of the DfE
aims in 2011 was the first time that an explicit commitment to challenging
homophobia in schools had been made in any formal government document
and was, therefore, welcomed by many LGBT+ rights groups and educators.
However, despite these aims being stated, research indicates that heteronorma-
tivity and homophobia continue to pervade schools in the United Kingdom
and the United States, and that the effects of this are extremely damaging for
young people identifying as LGBT+ or those who are perceived as such (see
Chapters 1 and 2 for details). The aim of challenging discrimination around
sexuality in schools has clearly not yet been met, and there has been criticism
that the British and US governments have, as yet, done relatively little to try to
effect the implementation of their stated aims. Recent political developments
in UK and US governance look set to exacerbate this situation further. In
addition to an increased lack of political support in both countries, it has been
suggested that one of the reasons that the aims have not been achieved is that
we still do not fully understand how homophobia actually works; specifically,
we lack understanding of how heteronormativity and homophobia are enacted
in school contexts. In order to challenge homophobia, we have to first under-
stand what it is and how it works, and to set it within a broader examination of
how sexuality discourses are formulated in school environments. A key way in
which sexuality discourses (including homophobia) are enacted is through

1
www.stonewall.org.uk.
 Introduction 3

language. Whilst work in the field of language and sexuality has examined the
diverse ways in which discriminatory sexuality discourses can be linguistically
enacted, little of this research has been applied to school settings where the
effects of such discourses are, arguably, the most damaging due to the young
age of learners.
We are living in an age which is seeing great advances in terms of LGBT+
equality in parts of the world. In the United Kingdom and the United States,
there have been legislative changes and judicial rulings which enable same-sex
couples to marry and have the same adoption rights as heterosexual couples.
More public figures are openly LGBT+ than ever before. Although this book
focuses on the United Kingdom and United States, it is important to recognize
the positive changes that have been taking place in other parts of the world.
For example, same-sex marriage is now legal in fifteen countries (and civil
partnerships or unions are legal in several more) and there is rising support for
same-sex marriage, and LGBT+ rights more broadly, in many other countries.
At the time of writing, 94 member states of the United Nations had signed an
LGBT+ rights declaration in the general assembly. In many Western countries,
violence against LGBT+ people is classified as a hate crime. Despite these
numerous legal and institutional advances in LGBT+ equality, there are
evidently still many challenges and obstacles to overcome, particularly in
terms of changing social attitudes towards LGBT+ identities and relationships.
We continue to live in a world where anti-homosexuality laws exist in
78 countries (according to a 2013 survey by the International Lesbian and
Gay Association [ILGA]). Homosexuality is punishable by death in five
countries and it is punishable by imprisonment in several more.
Within the United States and the United Kingdom, the rate of hate crimes
against LGBT+ people remains high and has, in fact, increased in the United
Kingdom in recent years. A 2013 YouGov poll in the United Kingdom found
that one in six gay or bisexual people (about 630,000 individuals) had been a
victim of a homophobic hate crime in the preceding three-year period.2 The
survey found that lesbian, gay and bisexual people suffer wide-ranging abuse,
from physical assaults and threats of violence through to harassment, verbal
insults and damage to their property. The Home Office reported a 22 percent
rise in reported homophobic hate crimes in the United Kingdom in 2014–15.
Critics have been quick to point out that this does not necessarily indicate an
increase in homophobic hate crimes, rather it may suggest that more are simply
being reported to police. However, the National LGBT Hate Crime Partnership
counter this by arguing that the numbers reported are still only a small fraction
of the actual incidents. (Morris, 2015) Transphobic hate crimes in the United

2
These statistics are discussed in an Observer article (‘One in six gay or bisexual people has
suffered hate crimes, poll reveals’, The Observer, 13 October 2013).
4 Introduction

Kingdom are reported to be even higher than homophobic crimes. Figures

from the LGBT+ anti-violence charity Galop show a 170 percent rise in hate
crimes reportedly committed against transgender people in 2016. These
findings on reported homophobic and transphobic hate crimes in the United
Kingdom are further supported by research findings from Stonewall (2015).3
Even more recently in the United Kingdom, Galop reported a 147 percent rise
in homophobic attacks in the three-month period following the Brexit vote.
(Galop, 2016)
Similar worrying trends have been reported in the United States. In 2014,
the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs estimated that 20–25
percent of LGBT+ people in the United States experience hate crimes within
their lifetimes, with people of colour being even more at risk. This report also
found that LGBT+ people in the United States routinely experience both
psychological and physical violence, most physical attacks on LGBT+ people
are from strangers, and victims claim that the police often fail to respond
adequately to such violence. Such issues were further highlighted by the
internationally reported attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016 in which
49 people were murdered. In 2016, the FBI also reported that 17.7 percent of
all hate crimes in the United States were based on sexual orientation and 1.7
percent were based on gender identity (http://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2015).
These reported rises in LGBT+-targeted hate crimes in the United States
occurred despite President Obama’s signing of new LGBT+-inclusive hate
crimes provisions and repeated pledges to support the LGBT+ community.
In the United States in 2011, the FBI found that LGBT+-identified people
suffer from more mental health problems than their heterosexual counterparts
and are more at risk of suicide and attempted suicide. These risks and problems
are even higher amongst LGBT+-identified young people (see, for example,
the UK-based Prevalence of Homophobia surveys conducted by the United
Kingdom’s largest teaching union, the National Union of Teachers,4 and
reports from the LGBT Foundation5). Homophobic bullying and harassment
is still experienced as endemic in certain workplace and educational contexts.
Furthermore, LGBT+ identities are still under-represented and frequently
misrepresented in many public forums. It would seem, therefore, that attitudes
and ideologies lag behind the structural and legislative changes that have been
implemented in recent years. This situation applies to school settings, just as it
does to other social domains.

3
See Stonewall’s RaRE Research Report (2015) and www.stonewall.org.uk/media/lgbt-facts-and-
figures.
4
Details of these and other relevant studies of LGBT+ identities and mental health are provided on
the Schools Out website – www.schools-out.org.uk/research/contents.htm.
5
http://lgbt.foundation/About-us/media/facts-and-figures.
 Introduction 5

The teaching of sexual health issues in schools also remains problematic.

Recent reports have linked poor or no teaching about different sexualities to
high rates of STI infection (including HIV) among young people of all
sexualities. For example, in a recent BBC news article, a young HIV+ man
talks about the lack of relevant sex education he got at school (www.bbc.co.uk/
news/health-30118944). As will be shown in this book, sexual health
education has the potential to play a key role in challenging discriminatory
discourses which are damaging to those identifying as heterosexual as well as
LGBT+-identified young people.
In the United Kingdom, Stonewall have stated that what needs to be done
now in terms of working towards greater LGBT+ equality is to challenge
negative attitudes towards LGBT+ identities and to critically interrogate social,
cultural and political ideologies which construct heterosexuality as the normal,
and sometimes the only possible, form of legitimized sexual identity. In many
ways, this is more difficult than achieving the legislative reforms which have
already taken place. Challenging attitudes and ideologies is a longer-term task
and one in which academic work will play more of a key role. Academic work
on sexuality, within the social sciences in particular, is often aimed at increas-
ing understanding of what attitudes and ideologies about sexuality circulate in
particular contexts, how they circulate, what the effects of that circulation are
and what happens when they are challenged. Language-focused work on
sexuality uses the tools of applied linguistics to examine how particular
discourses of sexuality are constructed, circulated, perpetuated and challenged
through language in a range of contexts, including education. Language is a
key means through which social ideologies are constructed and circulated. If
we can understand how language operates in relation to ideologies about
sexuality, this may enable us to begin understanding how to use language to
challenge those ideologies which are detrimental to LGBT+ identities and
relationships. This is a key premise underlying this book.
This book sets out to examine in detail some of the intersections between
language, sexuality and education. A small number of empirical studies have
examined the role that language plays in sexuality and education. Some
studies, for example, have considered homophobic language use in schools,
but language-focused research on sexuality and education has not yet gone
much further than this. In the little research that does exist, some use has been
made of narrative analysis (Moita Lopes, 2006), classroom interaction analysis
(Nelson, 2012) and the analysis of linguistic signifiers of sexual identity.
(Rasmussen, 2004) Nelson (2012) is critical of the fact that, in language-
focused education research, there has been little dialogue between applied
linguistics and queer linguistics and calls for more attention to be paid to
how linguistic analysis can offer important insights into sexualities and educa-
tion. This book responds to this call. The urgency of addressing language and
6 Introduction

sexuality issues in education is perhaps best illustrated using the words of

some young LGBT+-identified people who were interviewed about their
experiences of being LGBT+ in school as part of the research for this book.
The short extracts below exemplify how the young people reported being
subjected to explicit verbal sexuality discrimination in their schools:

JOHN: I’ve experienced bullying and stuff like that in school

but it was when because I wasn’t like out or like that
and but I still got like ‘you poof’and all that crap
like that and it makes you feel uncomfortable
because you don’t wanna say ‘yea and what’because
then they’d know
AMY: I was playing football and I remember being on the pitch
and I was playing against all the boys which you know
was fairly normal really and somebody called out ‘oy
lezza’and it tends to be with those kinds of names
those kinds of connotations it sticks like superglue
and it just escalated from there really to the
gradual name-calling of course everyone won’t sit
next to you cuz you’re the lezza

But, in other cases, the young people discussed how they were made to feel
marginalized not because of explicit homophobia, but because of the silences
and absences in the discourses around non-heterosexual identities and relation-
ships circulating in their schools. For example, Todd does not report experi-
encing explicit homophobia, but notes an absence of acknowledgement of
anything other than straight sexual identities in his sexual health lessons:

TODD: you get like sexual health but it’s only on straight
people it was so annoying cuz I was like I know all of
like straight stuff but I wanted to know about the gay
stuff

Some of the teachers who were interviewed for this research raised similar
issues and concerns. There were numerous comments on the ways in which the
language used in schools effects discourses of heteronormativity, often in quite
subtle and complex ways. The short extracts below raise many important
issues concerning language, sexuality and schools which will be pursued
throughout this book. In the examples below, Abbie comments on the
silence around sexuality issues which is linked to the presentation of the school
curriculum. David discusses the difficulties around defining what homophobic
language actually is, as well as the problems in challenging it. Lauren notes
that homophobic language and behaviour in schools is often ‘covert’ and
 Introduction 7

sometimes difficult for teachers to even notice. And Ada raises issues around
the complex relationship between language, gender and sexuality.

ABBIE: it’s not openly addressed it’s not something which

people are forced to confront I suppose through
the texts that they teach I’m just thinking of some
of the poetry that’s on you know at key stage 4 it’s
not really I mean we do poetry from different
cultures which brings up lots of issues but it
doesn’t address sexuality directly there’s
nothing and it addresses race a lot but it doesn’t
sexuality isn’t in there
DAVID: things will be said there’s a locker room style humour
about that kind of thing isn’t there which will
occur and I think there’s scope for us to define that
a bit more so I think it’s difficult because it’s not
necessarily directed in the same way as other
things
LAUREN: it’s hard isn’t it cuz it’s quite covert so what
I perceive as being okay they might have a hard time
elsewhere but in the classroom I don’t pick up on it
ADA: his final year of school particularly in year 11 was not
a happy one but you couldn’t actually say that was
homophobic bullying it was but it was the subtext of
that you know ‘why is he wearing hair extensions’
and you know ‘that’s a girly thing to do’

These, and other, issues concerning the relationship between language,

sexuality and schooling will be explored throughout this book, using a range
of data sets and methods of linguistic analysis. A key premise is that the scope
of language study in relation to sexuality is much broader than just focusing on
homophobic language. Although it is important to examine explicit uses of
homophobic language, a problem with only focusing on explicit homophobia
is that it can deflect attention away from other (often more subtle but just as
damaging) ways in which discriminatory language practices around sexuality
are enacted in schools, as the extracts above illustrate. A narrow focus on
homophobic language can also shift attention away from the ways in which
heterosexuality is linguistically constructed in school settings and, in particu-
lar, how language works to normalize particular kinds of heterosexuality and
render other sexual identities (including certain types of heterosexuality) less
visible. The aim of this book is to conduct a detailed and systematic examin-
ation of the diverse ways that language can play a role in constructions of
sexual identities in school contexts. The main questions asked are:
8 Introduction

 What can linguistic analysis reveal about how educators and young people
in the United Kingdom and United States experience sexuality and sexual
diversity in their schools?
 Are different sexual identities constructed differently through language? If
so, how?
 Are different statuses ascribed to different sexual identities and, if so, what
are these statuses and how are they achieved through language?
 Within a queer applied linguistics approach, what can the application of
methods of spoken and written discourse analysis reveal about the relation-
ship between language and sexuality in school settings?
Through answering these questions, it is hoped that knowledge of how sexual
diversity is understood, constructed and enacted can be enhanced, with a view
to challenging the problems around sexuality which evidently persist in UK
and US schools.
The research presented in this book focuses on UK and US school contexts,
with data taken from both countries. This, of course, means that the data and
the research findings are of the most relevance to those contexts. However, the
findings and issues addressed may be of use to academics and educators
working in other countries in which similar problems around sexual diversity
issues in schools have been raised.
In relation to the significance of the research findings themselves, it is also
hoped that this book can convincingly demonstrate how a queer linguistics-
based analysis of language in school contexts can have real-world implications
for policy and practice. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, queer theory and queer
linguistics have been critiqued because of their perceived limited relevance to
real-world problems and situations. Throughout the book, I aim to show how
a language-centred, queer linguistics framework can offer useful avenues
for exploring classroom experiences and practices as sites which foster and
reproduce gender and sexuality inequalities.

A Critical Discussion of Terminology

In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I introduce and discuss some
key terms which are used throughout the book, followed by brief demo-
graphic information about the research sites. Many of the key terms used
throughout this book are ideologically contested and difficult to define. For
this reason, it seems necessary to include a critical discussion of some of these
key terms in this introductory chapter. They are: LGBT+, bullying, homopho-
bia, biphobia, transphobia and heteronormativity. These terms are related and
therefore critical discussion of their meanings inevitably involves a degree of
overlap.
 A Critical Discussion of Terminology 9

LGBT+
‘LGBT+’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender +) is a shorthand term for a
range of non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming sexual and gender
identities. There are now various resources which provide extensive lists of
‘identity terms’, and the addition of the ‘plus’ sign (+) onto the end of ‘LGBT’
is an acknowledgement of the diversity of gender and sexuality identities,
whilst at the same time realizing that it is not feasible to iterate or, indeed,
capture all of them when discussing gender and sexuality issues.6 The inde-
terminacy of the ‘+’ is also an attempt to go some way towards recognizing
that gender and sexual identities are fluid and difficult to define. In the
research presented in this book, many of the participants (and most of the
young people participants) are self-identified as LGBT+. However, it is
important to recognize that the school experiences of these young people
are not restricted to homophobic bullying – their experiences of gender and
sexuality in schools are more complex than this. Likewise, they are not the
only subjects who experience homophobic bullying, as will be explained
below. In fact, heterosexual-identified young people and educator participants
also report experiencing damaging discourses of gender and sexuality simply
because they constrain permissible or normative forms of heterosexuality
which are usually highly idealized. It is also important to acknowledge that
‘sexuality’ can involve more than the hetero/homo continuum, especially in
queer theory which underpins the approaches used throughout this book. For
example, identities and relationships may be discursively constructed as
normal/not normal in relation to other social dimensions of identity such as
ethnicity, age and social class.

Bullying/Homophobia/Biphobia/Transphobia
In the two contextual chapters which follow this one, I discuss previous
research on ‘homophobic bullying’ as a component of broader sexuality
discourses operating in school contexts. ‘Bullying’ in a general sense is
defined by Erhard and Ben-Ami (2016: 195) (drawing on work by Olweus,
1993) as ‘verbal, physical, or relational (indirect attacks) aggressive behaviour
that occurs intentionally and repeatedly in a relationship characterized by an
unequal distribution of power because the victim is often unable to protect
himself [sic] from the perpetrator’. They go on to specifically define homo-
phobic bullying as ‘an intended act meant to harm other peers psychologically
based on the perceived or actual sexual orientation of the victim’. (2016: 195)

6
See, for example, www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/glossary-terms and www.stop-homophobia
.com/lgbt-terms-and-definitions.
10 Introduction

Again, it is important to note that victims of homophobic bullying are not just
self-identified LGBT+ students (in fact, these students may actually not get
bullied at all), but may be any students who are perceived to be LGBT+.
Homophobic comments are also commonly used by adolescents to stigmatize
heterosexually identified peers who, for various reasons, are perceived as not
meeting the peer group expectations. Monk (2011) additionally points out that
‘homophobic bullying’ itself is a complex and highly variable term ranging from
‘at one end of the spectrum, extreme repeated systematic violence, to, at the other
end, overhearing the word “gay” being used in a pejorative way, being socially
excluded and experiencing a sense of being different’. (Monk, 2011: 186)
Throughout this book, many of the enactments of homophobia, biphobia and
transphobia are shown to be discursive rather than physical or overtly verbal.
The following definitions of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia are
taken from the No Outsiders group, a team of practitioners and researchers
who have conducted extensive action research into homophobia and
heterosexism in UK primary schools. These are not the only possible ways
of defining homophobia and heterosexism, but they encapsulate the key issues
occurring throughout this book:

Homophobia/biphobia/transphobia: these terms refer both to outright expressions of

prejudice, dislike or distaste towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender variant
people and also to the silencing or ignoring by individuals and institutions of these
people’s identities or existence. Like institutional racism, institutional homophobia,
biphobia and transphobia operate in schools as ways of marginalizing non-heterosexual
and non-gender normative identities. (No Outsiders, 2010: xiii)

What is useful about the explanation above is, firstly, it emphasizes that
sexuality discrimination can occur through silencing and ignoring as well as
through more overt expressions of prejudice. Secondly, it highlights that
homophobic, biphobic and transphobic practices function more widely to
marginalize any identity which is perceived to be non-heterosexual and non-
gender-normative.
As stated previously, this book does not restrict its focus to homophobia,
biphobia and transphobia. Rather, its focus is more broadly on how gender and
sexuality discourses are discursively produced in school settings. Homophobia
may be part of those discourses but it is not assumed from the outset that it is
the only one. A key difference here is that ‘sexuality discourses’ more broadly
encompass a field of desires, identities and practices whereas homophobia
responds negatively (e.g. through expressions of disdain, disgust, hatred or
isolation) to social actors located in certain positions within that field. Sexual-
ity and homophobia are further inflected by race, class and other intersectional
features – although those intersections complicate the alignment between the
two. In other words, homophobic invectives may be directed at subjects
 A Critical Discussion of Terminology 11

because of their assumed or perceived expressions of desire, identity and

practice, regardless of the subject’s actual claims to sexual identity. Therefore,
there does not necessarily need to be a (present) non-heterosexual victim to
identify certain practices as ‘homophobic bullying’, thus de-essentializing the
victim. Arguably, it is not homophobic expressions per se, but discourses of
what has been termed ‘heteronormativity’ that are also at work in these forms
of bullying and discrimination. ‘Heteronormativity’ is perhaps therefore a
more useful term than ‘homophobia’ for the reasons outlined above. It is also
a central focus of queer linguistics which provides the overarching theoretical
framework for the research presented in this book.

Heteronormativity
‘Heteronormativity’ may broadly be defined as ‘the discursive construction
of certain forms of heterosexuality as natural, normal or preferable’.
(Motschenbacher and Stegu, 2013: 520) Heteronormativity extends beyond
homophobia, biphobia and transphobia and can affect students of all sexual
and gender identities in potentially harmful ways. Heteronormativity refers
to practices which either implicitly or explicitly promote a view that hetero-
sexuality is normal and that all other kinds of sexuality are not normal.
Homophobia, heterosexism and heteronormativity are all related in that they
are mutually perpetuating. In the No Outsiders project (2010), the researchers
found that all of these related processes were pervasive in UK primary schools
but, significantly, that it was possible to begin to challenge and deconstruct
them through planned interventions. This is a theme which will continue to be
explored throughout this book.
Heteronormativity is a concept which is central to queer theory and queer
linguistics, as will be explained in Chapter 2. Hall (2013) describes three main
‘pillars’ of heteronormativity which are identified by queer theorists: monog-
amy; childrearing; conventional gender. These pillars ‘hold up’ heterosexuality
as the expected norm and ideologically link heterosexuality to normative
constructions of gender. Heteronormativity is discussed extensively by Warner
(1993) in his seminal queer theory work. Work by Warner and later by Duggan
(2002) also introduces the term ‘homonormativity’ to refer to the appropriation
of heterosexual relationship models into LGBT+ community members.
Motschenbacher and Stegu extend these arguments further:
[. . .] if heteronormativity denotes practices that sketch out certain forms of heterosexu-
ality as the norm, homonormativity accordingly denotes practices that construct certain
forms of homosexuality as the norm.’ (Motschenbacher and Stegu, 2013: 525)
In this explanation of homonormativity, the term does not refer straightfor-
wardly to a direct appropriation of heterosexual norms by LGBT+ social
12 Introduction

actors, but rather entails constructing certain forms and enactments of same-
sex relationships and LGBT+ identities as the norm. Stryker (2008) also
critiques early conceptualizations of homonormativity by pointing out that
sexual orientation is not the only way to differ from heteronormativity. Stryker
illustrates the perceived shortcomings of earlier definitions of homonormativ-
ity by focusing on transgender identities as resisting heteronormativity without
being homonormative. Issues around heteronormativity and homonormativity
were raised repeatedly by both the transgender and cisgender participants of all
sexualities in the research presented in this book, as will be presented and
discussed in later chapters.

The Research in this Book

This book presents a range of data obtained from secondary and high school
educational contexts in the United Kingdom and United States and applies
different methods of linguistic analysis to investigate aspects of the relation-
ship between language, sexuality and education. The research was conducted
over a period of approximately six years between 2010 and 2016. The sites for
the research were the cities of York and Birmingham in the United Kingdom
and Washington, DC in the United States. In the first instances, the selection of
these cities was opportunistic. I have lived and worked in Birmingham and
York and, as a result, I have a lot of knowledge about the cities as well as
established contacts in several of the local schools and LGBT+ networks and
youth groups. However, it also proved to be useful and interesting to examine
data from two cities which are quite different not just in terms of their location,
but also in terms of their population demographic.
York is a small city in the North of England.7 In the 2011 census, its
population was recorded as 198,051. In terms of ethnicity, York’s residents
are predominantly white (90.2 percent, with the overall white ethnicity popu-
lation percentage for England being 86 percent). The highest non-white ethnic
group in York is the Chinese group which counts for 1.2 percent of total
population of the city. Most of these are international students attending one of
the two universities in the city. As of 2011, 90.8 percent of York’s population
were born within the United Kingdom, 2.7 percent were born in other EU
countries and 5.5 percent were born outside Europe. The population of York is
highly qualified, with 40.8 percent of the population qualified to level 4 or
above in the last UK census. York’s primary economy is tourism, and it is the

7
York demographic information is taken from www.york.gov.uk/info/20037/statistics_and_infor
mation/79/census. Information for Birmingham is taken from www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs.
Information for Washington, DC is taken from www.birmingham.gov.uk/directory/35/popula
tion_and_census/category/447 (US Census Bureau) and www.census.gov/quickfacts/DC.
 The Research in this Book 13

second most popular place for tourists to visit in England after London. It has
around 7.1 million visitors per year and is currently the fourth best performing
economy out of 64 UK cities.
Birmingham is a much larger city. With a population of 1,085,400
(according to the 2011 census), it is the second largest city in the United
Kingdom after London. Birmingham’s population is younger than that of
York – Birmingham has a population ‘bulge’ around the 20–24 age group
mainly because of its three large universities. 45.7 percent of Birmingham’s
residents are under 30. There is more ethnic diversity in Birmingham than in
York with 42 percent of Birmingham’s population being from non-white
ethnic groups (the population percentages identifying as particular ethnic
groups are: white – 53.1 percent; Pakistani – 13.5 percent; Indian – 6 percent;
Caribbean – 4.4 percent; Mixed – 4.4 percent; white other – 4.8 percent) and
22 percent of the population were born outside the United Kingdom.
In the United States, the selection of Washington, DC as the research site
was also opportunistic in the first instance. It is a city I have visited many
times, and I have a number of academic contacts based there with whom
I work regularly on sexuality-focused research. Due to my familiarity with the
city, I also have a good knowledge of the local school system. These factors
were important in terms of facilitating access to the schools and participants
required for the research, as well as for enabling me to interpret the findings
from the data sets in relation to their geographical contexts. I was not able to
physically conduct research in the city, therefore I use survey and documentary
data for the US dimension of the research.
In terms of its demographics, Washington, DC has a population of 632,323
recorded by the US Census Bureau in 2013. Therefore, in terms of its population
size, it sits somewhere in between York and Birmingham in England. Like
Birmingham, it has a relatively young population with the median age being 33.
It is also ethnically diverse, but the ethnic groupings are different to those in
Birmingham. In Washington, DC, the 2013 census information revealed that
38.5 percent of the population identified themselves as having a white ethnicity,
50.7 percent identified as Black or African American, 3.5 percent were Asian,
2.9 percent identified as mixed race, 9.1 percent were Hispanic or Latino and 0.1
percent were Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. In total, 13.5 percent of
the population are born outside the United States. Washington, DC residents are
also highly educated with 51.2 percent of people over the age of 25 having a
bachelor’s degree or higher qualification. However, the 2013 census information
also records a high percentage (18.5 percent) of Washington, DC’s population as
living below the poverty level. This suggests that Washington, DC is a city of
contrasts with a population largely divided between those with low income and
living below or near the poverty line, and those with a higher income, higher
educational qualifications and a generally good standard of living.
14 Introduction

In the United Kingdom, the data collection methods used throughout the
research consisted of: interviews with young people; interviews with educa-
tors; classroom observations and recordings; and the collation of particular
curriculum documents for analysis. As I was not located in the United States
for any of the research period, the data collection methods used in the United
States consisted of: surveys with educators, and the collation and analysis of
curriculum documents from Washington, DC public schools. I describe each
of these data collection methods and the overall research design in greater
detail in Chapter 2.
Chapter 1 considers in more detail some current issues surrounding sexu-
ality and sexual diversity in relation to UK and US secondary/high school
contexts. This chapter sets the context for the subsequent linguistic analyses
presented in Chapters 3–6. Specifically, I consider the policy context in the
United Kingdom and United States, outlining key policies in both countries
which have had some influence, either positive or negative, on how issues
around sexual diversity are handled in schools. I also outline previous work
in the fields of language and sexuality and sexuality and education which
have relevance to the new research presented in this book. In Chapter 2,
I introduce the queer applied linguistics framework and the sub-methods of
linguistic analysis used in the analysis of data in Chapters 3–6. Each analyt-
ical framework within the overarching queer linguistic approach is then
described and exemplified in greater detail in the chapter where it is
first used.
In order to start with the voices of young people, Chapter 3, the first of the
data analysis chapters, presents data from interviews conducted with LGBT+-
identified young people who are either currently attending school or have left
school recently in the United Kingdom. In the interviews, the young people
reflect on their experiences of and attitudes towards school in relation to their
LGBT+ sexual identities. I firstly use the sociolinguistic framework of tactics
of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004, 2005) to investigate how
speakers use language to construct identities for themselves and others in
relation to school contexts. The analytical framework of appraisal (Martin,
2000; Martin and White, 2005) is then incorporated into the analysis of the
young people’s interview data in order to more fully investigate their feelings
and experiences of sexual diversity issues in their schools.8 Both of these
analytical frameworks, and the rationale for combining them, are discussed in
the ‘Research Design’ section of Chapter 2.
The frameworks of tactics of intersubjectivity and appraisal were also
used to analyze interview data collected from educators who were asked to

8
All terms used in the appraisal framework are presented using small caps.
 The Research in this Book 15

reflect on their experiences of how issues around sexual diversity are dealt with
in their schools, as well as on their attitudes towards sexuality and schooling.
This data and analysis is the focus of Chapter 4 and incorporates responses
from educators working in the United States as well as the United Kingdom.
Chapter 5 moves away from interview data and applies the linguistic
frameworks of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis (to form what
is termed ‘critical corpus analysis’) to written data in the form of curriculum
documents. The purpose of this analysis is to investigate how sexual identities
may be discursively constructed through the language used in curriculum
documents which directly inform classroom practice. The analysis focuses
on documents relating to the subjects of English and Sex and Relationships
Education in the United Kingdom and English Language Arts and Health
Education in the United States, as these are the subjects most widely talked
about by the young people and teachers in the interviews. I show in this
chapter how critical corpus analysis is helpful for uncovering particular
ideologies of sexuality which are embedded in the language of the curriculum.
Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on the analysis of spoken interactional data taken
from classrooms in order to explore how aspects of the UK Sex and Relation-
ships Education (SRE) curriculum are put into practice in real classrooms. The
data consist of transcribed recordings of Personal, Social and Health Education
(PSHE) lessons where the topic of the lesson was expected to address issues
around sexuality, to varying degrees. Some English lesson data was also
collected. Although the young people also referred to English as a subject in
which there was more freedom for discussing and addressing sexuality issues,
these issues did not actually arise at all in any of the English lesson data, a
point to which I return in Chapters 3 and 4. Therefore, this chapter focuses
only on analyzing the interaction in a sample of UK SRE lessons. The aim of
this chapter is to examine what kinds of sexual identities are constructed and
how spoken language is used to construct those identities in the lessons
examined. As in Chapter 5, the data is analyzed using elements of corpus
linguistics to identify what thematic practices concerning sexual identities are
constructed in the lessons. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is then used to
explore how those identities are constructed interactionally.
The four data analysis chapters are followed by a short chapter of Closing
Remarks in which I summarize the key findings of the book and consider what
these findings contribute to our existing knowledge and understanding of
sexuality and education. I consider the implications of the findings for educa-
tional policy and practice, as well as assessing what the research in this book
can potentially contribute to theoretical and methodological developments in
the fields of sexuality and education and language and sexuality.
1 Confronting the Context

As indicated in the Introduction, sexuality is a timely and important issue for

education. As a topic within education, sexuality has largely been focused on
in terms of sex education provision both in the United States and United
Kingdom. Until recently, little attention has been paid to the social dimen-
sions of sexuality and its relationship with issues of identity. Even now, it is
only the work of LGBT+ rights organizations such as Stonewall in the United
Kingdom and GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) in the
United States who are focusing on the social identity issues surrounding
sexuality and its treatment within schools. In this chapter, I briefly outline
how sex education has historically and politically been approached in UK
and US education systems. I then discuss recent and current work on sexual
identity issues in schools, with a particular focus upon key issues surround-
ing LGBT+ identities.
In Chapter 2, I provide reviews of literature in the fields of sexuality and
education, and language and sexuality. The reviews of literature are followed
by an explanation of the theoretical and analytical framework – queer applied
linguistics – which informs the research presented in this book. Finally,
I describe the research design and provide short summaries of the content of
each of the data analysis chapters.

Sex and Relationships Education (SRE)

History, Politics and Policy

In both the United States and the United Kingdom, little attention was paid
to sex education in schools until the work of Kinsey was published
throughout the 1950s and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Past and
current debates in both countries have focused on whether or not sex
education should be compulsory in schools and, in the US, there have been
(and continue to be) widespread discussions about what have come to be
termed ‘comprehensive’ and ‘abstinence-only’ approaches to sex education.
Whilst this book was being written, in the United Kingdom, the House of

16
 Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) 17

Lords voted against making sex and relationships education compulsory in

British schools but this was subsequently replaced by a vote in favour of
making SRE compulsory, reflecting the contentious and highly changeable
nature of the issue. In both countries, early sex education throughout the
1960s and 1970s focused almost exclusively upon the biological aspects of
human reproduction. Greater attention started to be paid to the health
aspects of sex education during the 1980s, primarily as a result of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic.
In the United Kingdom, Sex Education became mandatory in schools in
1993 under the Education Act. This act also specified that sex education had
to include information about HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted
Infections (STIs). Shortly after this, the 1996 Education Act consolidated all
previous legislation relating to SRE and made the subject mandatory for all
pupils of both primary and secondary school age in the Science National
Curriculum. The act specified that the biological aspects of sexual reproduc-
tion, puberty and information about HIV/AIDS and other STIs must be
covered in Science lessons. Other aspects of SRE could be covered in Per-
sonal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) but, unlike the Science national
curriculum which is compulsory, PSHE is non-statutory and schools can
choose what’s included.
The 1996 Act also specified that each school must provide a policy describ-
ing the content of SRE provision outside of national curriculum Science. It is
the school governors’ responsibility to produce and make available this policy
(further information about the SRE requirements stipulated by the 1996
Education Act is available from a fact sheet on the Family Planning Association
[FPA] website – www.fpa.org.uk/sites/default/files/sex-and-relationships-educa
tion-factsheet-january-2011.pdf).
The 2000 Learning and Skills Act set out more detailed and updated
guidance about SRE requirements for all schools in England and Wales. This
guidance stressed the importance of young people learning about marriage and
‘family life’ and it emphasized that young people should be protected from
teaching and learning materials which are deemed ‘inappropriate’. The act also
specified that SRE teaching should be sensitive and responsive to the age and
religious and cultural background of pupils. Under the act, parents have a right
to withdraw their child from all or part of SRE provided by the school outside
National Curriculum Science lessons. The SRE requirements and guidance are
slightly different in Wales and Scotland. I focus only on SRE provision in
England in this research. Alongside the act, the Department for Education and
Employment (subsequently the Department for Education) published guidance
on the delivery of SRE through the PSHE framework. In England, SRE
continues to be taught through the subjects of Science and PSHE, with the
PSHE elements still optional.
18 Confronting the Context

A final significant piece of legislation relating to sexual diversity issues in

schools in the United Kingdom was the Local Government Act 1988. Section
28 of this act made it illegal for homosexuality to be ‘promoted’ in schools.
Non-heterosexual relationships were described as ‘pretended family relation-
ships’. In many ways, this act set the ground for providing SRE which focused
exclusively on heterosexual (family) relationships and for creating and
maintaining a silence around any other forms of sexual identities, relationships
and family structures. Section 28 was finally repealed by Britain’s Labour
government in 2003, but there still appears to be a ‘legacy’ from section
28 which has resulted in a pervading silence and fear of openly discussing
non-heterosexual identities and relationships in schools. (Ellis and High, 2004;
Malmedie, 2012) This fearfulness is, in fact, a theme which recurs throughout
the research presented in this book.
In the United States, sex education can be traced as far back as 1912 when
the National Education Association called for teacher training programmes in
sexuality education. Although this was never implemented, the fact that the
issue was raised meant that sex education was included in US schools earlier
than in UK schools. In 1940, the US Public Health Service made a statement
strongly advocating sex education in schools which resulted in a greater
number of schools including sex education in their provision. In 1953, the
American School Health Association launched a nationwide programme
in family life education. Shortly after this in 1955, the American Medical
Association in conjunction with the National Education Association published
series of pamphlets commonly referred to as ‘the sex education series’ for
schools. Thus, materials for teaching sex education were available in the
United States earlier than they were in the United Kingdom. However, the
content of the materials was, predictably, focused primarily upon heterosexual
reproduction.
By 1989, 23 states had made sex education mandatory in public high
schools. Sex education was strongly encouraged by a further 23 states. In the
present day, most students now receive some form of sex education between
grades 7 and 12. However, some schools start to address topics earlier than this
and sex education provision and requirements do vary across states. Some
states, for example, have laws governing what is taught and whether or not
parents can opt out. This is similar to provision in the United Kingdom – it is
still the case that parents can choose to opt out of their children receiving sex
and relationships education.
The history of sexuality issues in schools in the United States has largely
been characterized by opposition between conservatives and health advocates
in what has come to be termed ‘abstinence-only’ and ‘comprehensive’
approaches to sex education. Abstinence-only approaches encourage students
to be sexually abstinent until marriage (with an implicit assumption that this
 Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) 19

applies to heterosexual marriage only even though same-sex marriage is now

legal in the United States). The abstinence-only approach is thought to have its
roots in the 1981 Adolescent Family Life Act which functioned to promote
chastity among adolescents and to encourage adoption among pregnant teens.
Comprehensive approaches to sex education focus on providing broader
factual information to students about sex and relationships and do not promote
one particular attitude to sexual behaviours and relationships over any other.
For decades, federal education policies in the United States required schools
to teach abstinence-only curricula in order to receive federal funding. Since the
1980s, opposition to abstinence-only approaches grew to the point where
programmes largely had all of their federal funding withdrawn. In 2009, the
US Congress passed an appropriations bill reversing that policy, eliminating
most funding for abstinence-only programmes, although it also provided more
funding overall for comprehensive programmes. Schools could still fund their
preferred programmes with city, county and state funds if allowable by those
governments. Santelli et al. (2006) provide an extensive review of abstinence-
only education policies and programmes in the United States and argue that
abstinence-only approaches are morally problematic and threaten human rights
to health and information. They report on studies which find inaccurate
information, for example, about contraceptive effectiveness and the risks of
abortion in abstinence-only curricula and conclude that such curricula ‘treat
stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact and blur religious and
scientific viewpoints’. (2006: 6) Additionally, they claim that abstinence-only
education can have profoundly negative effects on the physical and emotional
well-being of LGBT+ youth due to the fact that they ignore issues around
homosexuality except when discussing the transmission of HIV/AIDS.
What the United States and United Kingdom have in common in terms of
the historical and current provision of SRE in public schools is their continued
narrow focus on heterosexual reproduction. In the United Kingdom and in
comprehensive programmes in the United States, there is also a focus on
sexual health issues but, again, these predominantly relate to heterosexual
sex. Same-sex relationships and LGBT+ identities are still largely excluded
from sex education and other areas of the curriculum. Issues of gender are also
notably absent. It is important to note that a wider range of heterosexual
activities and relationships is also excluded and the focus is predominantly
upon monogamous heterosexual marriage. Given that sex education is still the
only subject which explicitly draws attention to sexuality, the omission of
LGBT+ issues is a key contributing factor to the invisibility and marginaliza-
tion that many LGBT+-identified students experience in school. And given
that LGBT+ identities and issues are also largely invisible across other areas of
the curriculum, this may further contribute to the negative feelings often
experienced by LGBT+ youth in school.
20 Confronting the Context

Sexualities and Education

Beyond the subject of sex education, Espelage (2015) argues that researchers
and practitioners in education have an ethical responsibility for engaging in
social justice-oriented work, including addressing issues of gender and sexual
orientation. She calls for more work in this area, especially increased attention
to the school experiences of transgender youth. She argues:
To ignore sexual orientation and gender identity, researchers and practitioners are
simply becoming less relevant to youth and less relevant to the field of bullying
prevention more generally. Without a gendered lens to this work, this could be
contributing to the limited efficacy of school based bully prevention efforts.
(Espelage, 2015: 3)
Espelage’s focus on ‘bullying’ is fairly reflective of the field of sexualities and
education as a whole which has been largely dominated by work which
explores homophobic bullying in schools. Berlan et al. (2010: 367) define
‘bullying’ as follows:
Bullying is a form of violence affecting the health of children and adolescents that may
disproportionately affect sexual minority youth. Bullying is characterized as a specific
type of aggressive behaviour that is unprovoked and intended to harm or disturb. The
behaviour occurs repeatedly over time and there is an imbalance of power, with a more
powerful person attacking a less powerful one.

Whilst the above definition focuses upon individual behaviour, alternative

conceptualizations of bullying focus more on the interactional and social
dynamics. Rivers et al. (2007: 35), for example, define bullying ‘not as the
sum of unpleasant behaviours that are owned by children, but the product of
complex interactions within a system of social relationships that cannot be
changed by simply removing bullies or reinforcing victims’. This is important
as it situates bullying practices as social rather than individual ones. This
means that bullying can only effectively be challenged by invoking what
Rivers and Duncan (2013) term the ‘collective model’ whereby responsibility
for changing bullying behaviours is on the institutional ethos rather than
individuals.
There is much evidence to show that young people in the United Kingdom
and the United States are currently experiencing high levels of bullying and
other discriminatory behaviours based on actual or perceived gender identity
and sexual orientation in schools. The clearest indication of these levels of
inequality and discrimination come from national surveys conducted by Stone-
wall UK and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
respectively. The 2015 Stonewall RaRE Research Report found that more than
half (55 percent) of lesbian, gay and bisexual young people experience homo-
phobic bullying in school and 99 percent of students reported hearing frequent
 Sexualities and Education 21

homophobic remarks in their schools. The report also found that almost a third
of lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils are ignored or isolated by others and
41 percent have attempted or thought about taking their own lives as a direct
result of bullying. Amongst transgender youth, 59 percent reported having
deliberately harmed themselves (compared with 8.9 percent of all 16–24 year
olds).1 In the United States, the 2015 National School Climate Survey con-
ducted and published by GLSEN (Kosciw et al., 2015) found that 8 out of 10
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students in US schools experience
harassment because of their sexual orientation, and three-fifths feel unsafe at
school because of their sexual orientation (www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/
news/record/2897.html). Both surveys find prevalent use of the word ‘gay’
being used as an insult in schools. And both surveys find a lack of visibility
around LGBT+ issues in school. However, the reports do indicate that biased
language and victimization are decreasing slightly for the first time, and there
is evidence that school-based resources and support are starting to make a
difference in terms of challenging LGBT+ inequalities in schools.
Despite these signs of progress, the surveys stress that the majority of
LGBT+ students still face many obstacles in school which affect their
academic performance and personal well-being. The 2012 Stonewall Report
finds that ‘Gay pupils who are bullied are at higher risk of suicide, self-harm
and depression.’ Importantly, though, the reports found that where pupils feel
that they have been taught about LGBT+ issues in a positive way, LGBT+
pupils are 13 percent less likely to experience homophobic bullying, and
60 percent are more likely to be happy at school and to experience their school
as an accepting, tolerant and welcoming place. However, the Stonewall
Reports also identified a lack of training and confidence in dealing with
sexuality issues amongst teachers.
Homophobic bullying is the second most common form of bullying after
body size/weight and has detrimental effects on students’ well-being, safety and
academic achievement. The detrimental effects of homophobia in schools on
young people’s mental health have been examined by Pearson, Muller and
Wilkinson (2007) in the United States. Pearson et al. provide an overview of
various studies which have repeatedly found that same-sex-attracted youth
achieve lower academically than their other-sex-attracted counterparts. They
also note that same-sex-attracted youth are at a higher risk in general of mental
health problems, which can lead to disengagement from the learning process and
social withdrawal, both of which impact negatively on academic achievement.
There is also evidence to suggest that when students feel excluded from
lessons because of their sexuality, this can have a negative impact on their

1
www.stonewall.org.uk/media/lgbt-facts-and-figures.
22 Confronting the Context

school engagement and levels of attainment. (McDermott et al., 2008; Msibi,

2012; Pearson, Muller and Wilkinson, 2007; Rasmussen, 2006) The GLSEN
report found that nearly one third of LGBT+ students reported skipping classes
because of safety concerns relating to their sexual orientation and gender
identity. As we have already seen in the introduction, some of the LGBT+-
identified young people interviewed as a part of the research presented
throughout this book also reported on their own disengagement from learning
and varying degrees of social withdrawal. The reported grade point average of
students who were frequently harassed because of their sexual orientation or
gender identity was also lower than for students who were less frequently
harassed. Both the Stonewall and GLSEN reports found a reluctance for
LGBT+ students to report incidents of harassment or assault to school staff.
All forms of homophobia clearly have a serious negative impact on the experi-
ence of school and on attainment, and severely undermine any sense of
equality of rights and access to a safe and positive environment in which to
learn. Importantly, it is not only the LGBT+ students who are affected by
homophobia in schools, but everyone hearing homophobic language or wit-
nessing/ experiencing homophobic behaviour.
In addition to the Stonewall and GLSEN surveys, other recent research
confirms that homophobia and heterosexism are prevalent in UK and US
schools. (e.g. Allan et al., 2008; Berlan et al., 2010; Birkett and Espelage,
2009; Bryan, 2012; DePalma and Atkinson, 2009; Ellis and High, 2004;
Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Meyer, 2010) Poteat et al. (2013) provide a
comprehensive review of UK and US statistics on homophobic bullying in
schools, as well as a detailed review of literature which documents the
deleterious effects of homophobic bullying on young people’s mental health
and academic performance. Whilst current legislation and education policies in
the United Kingdom and United States are starting to recognize the need to
address sexual diversity issues in schools, their remit is rather narrow in that
they mainly focus on tackling homophobic bullying and explicitly homopho-
bic language, a point to which I return towards the end of this section. Whilst
these intentions are an important step forward, they nevertheless fail to recog-
nize that homophobia is not always overt and is more often construed as a
discursive effect of silence and invisibility. In some cases, they may also
function to obscure other discriminatory practices relating to gender and
sexuality such as biphobia and transphobia.
In work which has focused on explicit enactments of homophobia, gender
has repeatedly been found to play a central role. Epstein and Johnson (1998)
found the term ‘gay’ being used in UK schools to refer to boys who were
academically successful or who were simply seen as enjoying school work. In
their study, they found that some boys rejected the perceived ‘feminine’ of
academic work as a defence against being called ‘gay’. Duncan (2006) has also
 Sexualities and Education 23

examined the prevalent use of the term ‘gay’ as an insult in UK schools. In the
schools that Duncan visited, the use of ‘gay’ as an insult was a key way of
policing masculinity and was thus used more as a means of policing boys’
performance of gender than as an accurate way of referring to known or ‘out’
homosexuals. McCormack (2013) also found that homophobic language in
schools was targeted particularly at boys who are seen to not ‘measure up’ to
accepted norms of masculinity. Therefore, homophobic discourse works more
to regulate masculinities in schools than to enforce heterosexuality. However,
in the research presented throughout this book, the young people participants
discuss their experiences of being the targets of homophobic language which is
actually about their sexuality, and not just about the policing of masculinities.
Importantly, the girls in the study draw attention to their experiences of
discriminatory practices around gender and sexuality which shift the focus
away from issues of masculinity (see Chapter 3 in particular). In the United
States, Espelage (2013) and Birkett and Espelage (2015) also found that
homophobic name-calling in schools was rooted in gender and masculinity.
They review previous literature and assert that ‘one of the strongest predictors
of homophobic attitudes has been traditional masculinity, or masculinity that
values dominance, assertiveness, and a lack of emotion’. (Birkett and Espe-
lage, 2015: 186) Furthermore, their own research found that young adolescents
in school were heavily influenced by their peer group’s homophobic name-
calling and that those who perpetrated homophobic name-calling were also
likely to be victims themselves.
In South Africa, DePalma and Francis (2014) found that teachers of sex
education constructed highly gendered discourses in their classes through, for
example, casting boys as predatory and girls as victims of sexual predation.
They also observe that sex education classes reinforce heteronormative
assumptions.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative findings on the experiences of LGBT+
youth in schools, it has also been found that homophobic bullying can be
moderated through features of the school climate. Espelage (2014), for
example, found that students in a sample of US schools reported less bullying
where staff members felt supported by their administration and management to
explicitly address bullying (including homophobic bullying).
A shortcoming of existing work is its overwhelming focus on homophobia
and, in particular, homophobic bullying. In fact, work on sexualities and
education has itself, to a large extent, become dominated by discourses about
homophobia. Monk (2011) observes that homophobic bullying has become a
legitimate object of social concern in recent years (to the point where it has
become ‘mainstreamed’), and this has become reflected in sexualities and
education research. Monk notes how, from the late 2000s in the United
Kingdom, all three major political parties expressed concerns about
24 Confronting the Context

homophobic bullying. A result of this mainstreaming is that homophobic

bullying has been enabled to become a harm that can be spoken of. However,
Monk goes on to explain how homophobic bullying is a complex phenomenon
and is actually a productive process contingent on various cultural and political
factors. Moreover, the very naming of homophobic bullying as a concern in
the public sphere has played a part in constructing the school as potentially
dangerous rather than safe. The dominant discourse of bullying in schools is
one which is individualized – bullies are pathologized and victims are
held responsible for the effects of bullying through having and displaying
‘resilience’ (see, for example, the It Gets Better campaign which places
responsibility for dealing with the effects of homophobic bullying with the
victims rather than with the school system or the adults working within it).2
Thus, homophobic bullying becomes situated within a broader ‘law and order’
discourse where there are clear ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’. Monk argues that,
within this discursive conceptualization of bullying, structural forms of homo-
phobia get largely overlooked. This links back to Rivers and Duncan’s call for
a ‘collective model’ of challenging bullying to be deployed in schools. This is
an important point which recurs throughout the research findings presented in
this book.

Responses and Challenges to Gender and Sexuality

Inequalities in Schools
There have been a number of legislative and academic responses to the
problems outlined above. In the United Kingdom, the coalition government
of 2010 published its ‘Programme for Government’. Within the education
section of this programme for government, one of the aims stated is to ‘help
schools tackle bullying in schools, especially homophobic bullying’ (www
.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/409088/pfg_coalition.pdf). This aim was later
reiterated in a 2011 Department for Education discussion document on the
future of teacher training in England and Wales. This was seen by many as
being a significant step forward in starting to address sexuality inequalities in
compulsory education in the United Kingdom. The expression of these aims
was the first time that an explicit commitment to challenging homophobia
in schools had been made in any formal government document and was,
therefore, welcomed by many LGBT+ rights groups and educators. In the
United States, similar concerns have been increasingly raised about levels of
homophobia in secondary and high schools. The FAIR (Fair, Accurate, Inclu-
sive, and Respectful) Education Act was passed in the state of California in

2
www.itgetsbetter.org/.
 Responses and Challenges to Inequalities 25

2011 and is seen as being a landmark piece of state legislation. The FAIR Act
(described informally as the ‘LGBT History Bill’) encourages the inclusion
and visibility of LGBT+ people and issues into the state curriculum and in
textbooks used in schools in the state. The premise underlying the act is that
increasing visibility and inclusivity will help to reduce levels of homophobic
bullying in schools. Despite the Act being passed and signed into law in
2011, Governor Brown of California stated that state textbooks were unlikely
to be updated to reflect the requirements of the law until 2015. Although
the FAIR Act has not been extended to other states, sexual orientation
and gender identity are both covered as protected classes under DC law.
In 2015, a ban on discriminating against LGBT+ students attending
religious schools also became law specifically in DC. At a federal level,
the Student Non-Discrimination Act, aimed at protecting LGBT+ students
against bullying and discrimination in school, was introduced in the 111th
Congress (2010–2011) but by 2015 had still not been passed into law.
In the United Kingdom in 2007, the Gender Equality Duty was introduced
as part of the 2006 Equality Act in education. This act requires schools to
promote gender equality in the same way as race and disability equality.
Significantly, the act emphasizes the importance of inclusion for children
who do not conform to traditional gender norms, acknowledging that such
children often become subject to homophobic bullying and abuse as a result of
their perceived transgression away from culturally sanctioned gender norms. It
is consequently made clear in the guidance that it is impossible for schools to
address sexism without simultaneously addressing homophobia. The Home
Office published guidance on Transphobic Bullying in Schools in 2008. This
guidance stresses a need for schools to foster an environment in which gender
variance is accepted, and a need for all schools to support children who do not
adopt traditional gender norms, regardless of whether or not they choose
gender reassignment later in their lives. In 2010, the Equality Act was intro-
duced. The Act is designed to tackle discrimination based on race, gender,
disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief and covers all public
institutions including schools.
At the time of writing, the British government had just introduced com-
pulsory SRE into all state schools in England and Wales. This followed a
briefing paper published in 2016 outlining previous concerns over inconsist-
ent and sometimes inadequate provision of SRE in schools. The paper reports
on a 2013 OFSTED report which found that there was too much emphasis
placed on the ‘mechanics’ of reproduction in SRE and not enough on
emotions, relationships and sexual identity. The paper makes it clear that
SRE needs to address the needs of students of all sexual orientations and
identities and this is a key change to previous provision. However, the
document places issues around ‘homophobic bullying’ in the same section,
26 Confronting the Context

suggesting that this is the principal dimension of sexual orientation to be

addressed. Another complicating factor is that academies, free schools and
independent schools do not have to follow the same statutory obligations as
state-maintained schools. Even within state schools, parents have a right to
withdraw their children from SRE. Therefore, it remains to be seen how
effective these new requirements will be.
Academic research has also explored ways of potentially challenging homo-
phobia and heterosexism in schools. Work in the United Kingdom which
explores potential strategies includes DePalma and Atkinson (2008, 2009),
Jennett (2009) and No Outsiders (2010). In the United States, Bryan (2012)
explores ways of challenging heterosexism across all phases of compulsory
schooling. Van Dijk and van Driel (2007) explore various ways of challenging
homophobia in education across a range of international contexts. In Erhard
and Ben-Ami’s (2016) research on the schooling experiences of LGB youth in
Israel, they argue that certain ‘ecological protective factors’ (2016: 193) can
enhance young LGB people’s ability to cope with school homophobic
bullying. These ecological factors include: meaningful and reciprocal relation-
ships with peer groups and related and non-related caring adults; strong social
and emotional connectedness to the LGB community; and heterosexual school
peer acceptance. However, a focus on protective factors as increasing resili-
ence and coping mechanisms places the primary responsibility for dealing with
homophobia on recipients rather than perpetrators.
However, despite this research, the recent introduction of new legislation
and initiatives, and the aims of tackling homophobic bullying in schools being
more openly stated than ever before, research indicates that heteronormativity
and homophobia continue to pervade schools in the United Kingdom and the
United States (and elsewhere around the world). As stated in the Introduction,
in order to challenge sexual diversity discrimination, we have to first under-
stand what it is and how it works. A key way in which sexuality discourses are
enacted is through language. Whilst work in the field of language and sexuality
has examined the diverse ways in which discrimination can be linguistically
enacted, little of this research has yet been applied to school settings. Nelson
(2012) calls for there to be greater dialogue between queer theory/linguistics
and applied linguistics. Likewise, Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013: 519)
opine that ‘it is remarkable that queer theory and language-focused forms of
discourse analysis have, to date, only had limited contact with each other.’ In a
special issue of Discourse and Society, Motschenbacher and Stegu introduce a
series of articles which aim to use queer theory to inform language-centred
forms of discourse analysis in a range of contexts. They lament the fact that
contemporary discourse analytic approaches such as critical discourse analysis
and poststructuralist discourse analysis have, so far, only been used marginally
 Responses and Challenges to Inequalities 27

for queer linguistic purposes. The research in this book responds to these calls.
Throughout this book, I employ a range of discourse analysis approaches
within a queer linguistic framework to examine language and sexuality in
educational contexts. In the next chapter, I provide a more detailed examin-
ation of queer linguistics and present the analytical approach of ‘queer applied
linguistics’ which is used throughout this book.
2 Researching Language and Sexuality
in Educational Settings

A Brief History of Language and Sexuality Research

Language and sexuality is a rapidly expanding area of sociolinguistics and yet
its application to educational contexts remains fairly limited. In this chapter,
I include a brief overview of the development of the field of language and
sexuality in order to then apply it to the school-based research conducted for
this book. Cameron (2005) notes that the study of language and gender started
to give greater prominence to sexuality throughout the 2000s, increasingly
incorporating considerations of ‘queer’ gender identities and explorations of
the relationship between gender and heteronormativity. However, the earliest
work on language and sexuality can be traced back to lexical studies of ‘gay
slang’ which emerged during the 1960s. These studies mainly set out to
investigate and document lexica which were used exclusively by gay men.
Some studies examined the semantic patterns found within gay male lexica.
However, these early studies were criticized for being restrictive in their focus.
As Baker (2008: 52) explains:
[. . .] lists of words are a limited resource in that they provide only the briefest outline of
the language use of a particular identity group. So while a lexicon may tell us about the
preoccupations or taboos of a particular group, taken out of context they do not reveal
much about the ways in which identities are constructed.
Such criticism has informed the development of more recent research in the
field of language and sexuality. Although still focused on examining gay male
vocabulary use, Hayes (1981) attempted to go further by examining the
functions of particular lexical items within specific contexts of use. Hayes
devised the term ‘GaySpeak’ and argued that GaySpeak had three manifest-
ations depending on the context in which it was being used by gay men; the
three contexts were a secret setting, a social setting or a radical-activist setting.
However, Hayes’s work came under criticism from Darsey (1981) who argued
that the types of language use defined as GaySpeak could also be found in the
speech of people other than gay men. Darsey argued, for example, that
heterosexual speakers could use a ‘secret’ form of language to hide a relation-
ship from their parents. Such criticisms influenced an important premise of

28
 A Brief History of Language and Sexuality Research 29

contemporary language and sexuality research, that is, there is no such thing as
a uniquely and distinctively ‘gay language’ in much the same way that there is
no such thing as ‘women’s language’ in contemporary gender and language
research. Gay men, like women, are not a homogeneous group and will not use
language in the same way all the time to signal exactly the same identity.
Rather, identities are fluid, diverse and contingent upon context.
From the 1990s onwards, language and sexuality work began to focus more
explicitly upon the language use of gay men and lesbians in specific contexts,
with greater emphasis being laid upon the appropriation of particular linguistic
resources which are available to all speakers all of the time, but which may be
drawn on by lesbian and gay speakers in ways which index their sexual
identity. (e.g. Leap, 1995, 1996; Moonwomon, 1995) From this point, work
also began to include analysis of language used by lesbian speakers, although
there has been less attention paid to bisexual and transgendered speakers until
relatively recently.
Leap’s analysis of ‘gay English’ (1996) examines the ways in which gay
identity is materialized through discourse. Leap’s work is not a straightforward
search for the linguistic properties of gay speech, but is rather a nuanced look
at the ways in which gay men construct and signal identity and difference
through both coded and explicit language. Work focusing on the language
used by lesbian-identifying women in conversation reveals similar findings.
(Coates and Jordan, 1997; Moonwomon, 1995; Moonwomon-Baird, 2000;
Morgan and Wood, 1995; Morrish and Sauntson, 2007) Moreover, Queen
(1997) argues that what is interesting about lesbian speech is the ways in which
speakers draw on a variety of linguistic styles and resources to produce a
marked combination which enables speakers to identify as lesbian in a relevant
context. What is significant about these studies which focus on the construc-
tion of gay and lesbian identities in conversation is that they do not claim to
identify features of conversation which are unique to gay or lesbian speakers.
Rather, they examine how speakers deploy certain linguistic resources and
culturally recognizable semiotic codes as a means of temporarily performing a
collective identity through conversation. This approach is consistent with
recent work in the closely related field of language and gender. Sunderland
(2014) argues that gender differences are relevant in some contexts, especially
when examining representations of gender in discourse – this same principle
underlies much recent work in the field of language and sexuality. As
Motschenbacher concisely puts it, relevant questions in language and
sexuality are not ‘“How do gay and heterosexual men speak?”, but rather
“How are sexual identities linguistically constructed in particular contexts?”’.
(Motschenbacher 2011: 161)
Language and sexuality work from the 1990s onwards also began to be
more heavily influenced by aspects of queer theory. In Livia and Hall’s (1997)
30 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

landmark publication, Queerly Phrased, the term ‘queer’ is used to offer the
possibility of a more general, non-normative performance of resistance which
may or may not be tied to a particular category of sexual identity. Chapters in
the book draw on queer theory, in particular Butler’s (1990) development of
performativity theory. This theoretical approach is also drawn on throughout
this book, alongside a more language-focused critical discourse approach. These
theoretical frameworks are described in more detail in the queer linguistics
section of this chapter.
Livia and Hall’s volume was also particularly important for re-considering
the notion of ‘community’ in relation to sexual identities, along with a subse-
quent edited collection of papers by Campbell-Kibler et al. (2002). Chapters in
both volumes examine in detail arguments about the implications of the
organizing identity ‘queer’, and about the conceptualization of ‘gay speech’
as an ideological construct which may have some ‘imagined community’ as its
origin. Pratt (1987) argues that the rather abstract construct of the ‘gay
community’ is a classic example of an ‘imagined community’. (a term first
introduced by Anderson, 1983) Pratt argues that there is usually a distance
between the often imagined homogeneity of a linguistic community and the
heterogeneous experiences of the individuals who position themselves within
them. Nevertheless, the imagined community has a cultural significance for
individuals who feel affiliated in some way to the imagined community. For
LGBT+ individuals, for example, many identify with an abstract ‘gay commu-
nity’ whilst the reality of lived experience means that LGBT+ practices, beliefs
and so on are actually quite diverse. The development of the ‘community of
practice’ approach in sociolinguistics went some way towards enabling lin-
guists to account for both heterogeneity and homogeneity amongst particular
groups of speakers.
The idea of a sociolinguistic community of practice first emerged from
learning theory. Lave and Wenger (1991) and then Wenger (1998) developed
the approach by positing that meaning-making (through language and other
semiotic means) is primarily about social actions in context. Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet (1992) were among the first to apply the community of
practice approach to the study of language and gender and define a community
of practice as:

. . .an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an

endeavour. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations –
in short practices – emerge in the course of this mutual endeavour. (Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet, 1992: 198)

The community of practice approach places a central emphasis upon social

practices and relations within and across groups. There is no one way of
producing ‘identity’ through language. Identity (including sexual identity) is
 A Brief History of Language and Sexuality Research 31

a situated practice which can only be read and realized within the community
of practice. So individuals engage in linguistic practices to create meanings
within specific contexts. Those practices can change over different contexts so
that individuals may produce and perform different identities in different
communities of practice. Even if the community of practice is an ‘imagined’
one (e.g. the ‘gay community’), people can still engage in linguistic practices
which are recognizable to others participating in the imagined community as
construing a gay identity. It is this concept of sexual identity emerging from
and within communities of practice which has informed much language and
sexuality work from the late 1990s to the present day. In empirical studies of
the discursive construction of gay men’s identities in conversation, for
example, Leap (1996) and Morrish and Sauntson (2007) have observed
speakers ‘mutually engaging’ in the practice of producing particular linguistic
signifiers of gay and lesbian identity respectively within an imagined commu-
nity. It is the very practice of co-constructing that imagined identity that
construes the gay and lesbian identities of the speakers themselves within the
context in which the conversations take place.
These conceptualizations of ‘identity’ have also been incorporated into
queer linguistics – the approach which is adopted throughout this book. Hall
(2013) explains how social meanings around identity are multi-layered and
always shifting across time and space. This principle even applies to
heteronormativity, a point I discuss later in this chapter.
Cameron and Kulick (2003) foreground a distinction between sexuality and
sexual identity which they claim had been heretofore overlooked. In a similar
way to how earlier gender and language work was criticized for focusing on
the language used by women and presenting this as differing from a presumed
male ‘norm’, Cameron and Kulick criticize language and sexuality work for
marking out the language of sexual minorities as differing from a presumed
and unmarked heterosexual norm. An important point raised is that just
because heterosexuality is the ‘unmarked’ identity, does not mean that it goes
unmarked in discourse. And of course it does need to be examined. However,
the danger in investigating heterosexual and non-heteronormative sexual iden-
tities in the same way is that it risks subordinating non-heterosexual experience
to a heterosexual norm. What needs to be remembered and taken into consider-
ation is that heterosexual and non-heterosexual identities are not ascribed an
equal status in society. Arguably, the linguistic study of any identities which
are either directly or indirectly associated with particular enactments of power
needs to focus on problematizing and challenging those identities, rather than
reinforcing them. Thus, the study of the language used by particular men in
particular contexts should involve problematizing notions of masculinity, and
the study of language and heterosexuality should focus on problematizing and
questioning the very concept of heterosexuality. We also need to be careful
32 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

about not re-rendering invisible non-heterosexual identities in focusing upon

language and heterosexuality. Part of the ‘problem’ with non-heterosexual
identities is that they suffer from marginalization and lack of visibility (and
this applies to certain identities more than others, e.g. lesbians more than gay
men, particular racial and ethnic LGBT+ identities, disabled LGBT+ identities,
bisexuality etc). So whilst it is important to study language and heterosexuality
(in order to prevent the marking out of non-heterosexual identities as
‘deviant’), the ways in which it is studied needs to be carefully considered,
with particular care being taken not to marginalize or subordinate non-
heterosexual identities and, by doing so, re-assert a heterosexual hegemony.
Cameron (2005) observes that this debate has led to the development of two
interrelated strands of language and sexuality research – one which focuses on
liminal or ‘queer’ sexualities, and one which focuses on interrogating hetero-
sexual identities in relation to language.
The scope of the field has expanded in recent years with a number of
book-length publications being produced which focus upon specific aspects,
contexts and themes within language and sexuality rather than providing an
overview of the whole field. These books have also tended to make use of
more detailed and focused methods of linguistic analysis. Baker (2005) uses a
combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to explore
discursive constructions of gay men in public texts and contexts such as
tabloid newspapers, erotic fiction, advertisements and popular television
programmes. Through his investigation, Baker finds that homophobia still
underpins many contemporary understandings of male homosexuality. In a
later work, Baker (2008) uses similar methods of linguistic analysis to examine
the relationship between language, gender and sexuality across a range of text
types including advertisements, newspaper articles, personal advertisements
and websites. Whilst Baker focuses more of his work on discursive construc-
tions of gay men, Koller (2008) has used similar methods of critical discourse
analysis to examine representations and constructions of lesbians in discourse.
Koller takes a discourse-historical approach to examining how lesbian
discourses have evolved from the 1970s to the 2000s across a number of
non-fiction texts. Koller draws on a community of practice approach to explore
how the texts contribute to the construction of a changing lesbian community
in relation to the contexts in which they were produced. Morrish and Sauntson
(2007) explore some of the ways in which lesbians and gay men construct
sexual identity from the linguistic resources available within lesbian and gay
communities of practice. Morrish and Sauntson explore a range of data
(lesbian and gay conversations and narratives, coming out stories, representa-
tions of lesbians and gay men in film, erotic fiction and newspaper reports)
using different methods of discourse analysis (spoken discourse analysis,
critical text analysis and corpus linguistics). Both Clark (2012) and Jones
 Language and Sexuality in Education 33

(2012) use a community of practice sociolinguistic approach to examine

constructions of sexual identity within very specific communities of women.
Clark’s work focuses on the ways in which homophobic attitudes are enacted
through particular linguistic practices within a specific community of women
hockey players. The study uses the linguistic framework of critical discourse
analysis to examine the relationship between social structures and oppressive
attitudes towards sexuality within the community. Jones’s ethnographic study
examines the language practices of a lesbian walking group and how these
practices function to construct identity within the community.
Some contemporary language and sexuality research is also now more
concerned with how the relationship between language and sexuality is
manifested across different global contexts. Leap and Boellstorff’s (2004)
edited volume brings together work from around the world to explore pro-
cesses of globalization and their effects on lesbian and gay language practices
and identities. The Journal of Language and Sexuality, established in 2012, is
international in its scope and, although a great proportion of the work still
emerges from North America and Europe, the journal attempts to increase the
visibility of work being conducted in a wider range of international contexts.
In sum, the study of language and sexuality has grown from a fairly
restricted focus on lexical studies of gay men’s slang to a broader examination
of the various ways in which language can be used to index sexuality (includ-
ing both sexuality as sexual desire and sexuality as social identity) in localized
and globalized contexts of use. The field has moved from an almost exclusive
focus on gay men to investigating a range of sexual identities, and the incorp-
oration of elements of queer theory, sociolinguistics and anthropology has
involved a critical reconsideration of what is meant by ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual
identity’ and their relationship to linguistic forms, context and use.
As stated previously, the application of this field of research to education
has, to date, been fairly limited and under-exploited. In addition to the main
research questions presented in the Introduction, this book also considers what
we can learn about sexualities and education by looking at various aspects of
language, and what can be revealed about sexualities and education through
linguistic analysis that could not otherwise be identified. In doing so, I aim to
highlight the importance of including a central focus on language when
examining sexuality inequalities in education.

Language and Sexuality in Education

To date, work which has explicitly examined language and sexuality in
educational contexts has predominantly focused on ESL classrooms and
foreign and second language education (e.g. Liddicoat, 2007, 2009; Nelson,
1993, 1999, 2006; O’Mochain, 2006) (see Pavlenko, 2004 for a useful review
34 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

of work in the field of sexuality in foreign and second language education).

Liddicoat (2009), for example, examines classroom interactions from foreign
language classes in which lesbian and gay-identified students present chal-
lenges to heteronormative constructions of their sexual identities. Liddicoat
observes how the language classrooms examined are dominated by a ‘hetero-
normative framing of identities’ and that heterosexuality is always potentially
present in the classes. Ellwood (2006) explores some of the ways in which
English language classes can enable LGBT+ students to speak more openly
about their own sexual identities, especially if a conducive environment is
created by the teacher. O’Mochain (2006) reflects on his experiences as an
EFL teacher in which he attempted to incorporate discussions of gender and
sexuality into a context which was perceived to traditionally discourage such
discussions (a Christian women’s college in Japan). O’Mochain encouraged the
students to analyze and critically discuss gender and sexuality issues (as well as
more generic language and communication issues) in some life-history narra-
tives of local Japanese lesbians and gay men. Gray (2013) critically examines
the ways in which materials used for English language teaching are implicitly
heteronormative and frequently render LGBT+ identities invisible.
Nelson (2009) provides a book-length empirical investigation into English
language teachers’ and students’ experiences of talking in class about sexual
diversity and of negotiating sexual identities in language classroom contexts.
Within the overall ethnographic approach to the research, Nelson draws on
focus group and teacher interviews as well as classroom observations to explore
some of the pedagogic challenges and opportunities that arise as queer themes
become increasingly visible in English language teaching around the world.
Nelson concludes that a useful way forward is for teachers and students to see
challenges as opportunities and offers a number of ‘macro-strategies’ for
enabling this to happen. These macro-strategies include: teaching sexual liter-
acy as part of teaching language/culture; deconstructing anti-gay discourses for
teaching purposes; recognizing that student cohorts and teaching staff are
multisexual in a way that is intellectually enriching; evaluating teaching
resources to consider whether they are upholding or challenging heteronorma-
tive thinking. Nelson offers some practical examples for helping teachers to put
these strategies into action in classrooms. Whereas Nelson’s work looks spe-
cifically at English (as a foreign language) teaching, my own research in this
book examines schools more broadly and focuses more on subjects such as
SRE where issues of sexuality are expected to be overtly addressed.
Other recent work has examined language and sexuality in foreign language
textbooks and other learning materials and their use in classrooms. (Goldstein,
2015; Gray, 2013; Pakula et al., 2015; Pawelczyk and Pakula, 2015; Sunderland,
2015) In their study of EFL textbooks used in Poland, Pakula et al. (2015) find a
persistent non-representation of anything other than heterosexuality.
 Queer Linguistics 35

Sauntson (2015) provides an overview of work in language and sexuality in

educational contexts other than EFL and foreign language classrooms, an area
in which, arguably, much work still needs to be done. Some work in UK
mainstream school classrooms has examined in more depth the role of silence,
as well as continuing to investigate overt homophobic language. Epstein et al.
(2003), for example, identify schools as sites where heterosexuality is
constructed as normal and sexualities which transgress this norm are silenced,
often tacitly rather than actively. A range of routine silencing and regulatory
discourses in schools in international contexts have also been explored by
Francis and Msibi (2011), Gray (2013), Moita-Lopes (2006) and Sauntson
(2013) amongst others. Recent and current work combines classroom dis-
course analysis with ethnography. (e.g. Nelson, 2009, 2012; Sauntson, 2012)
Within a broadly ethnographic approach, Sauntson (2012) uses interactional
and interview data from British secondary school settings to explore how
gender and sexuality are discursively constructed in classrooms. The study
focuses mainly on student-student classroom talk and uses a range of discourse
analytic frameworks. The study reveals the intricacies of classroom interaction
as a site where gender and sexuality identities are played out on a daily basis
and as a site of constant ideological struggle. Although the work outlined
above makes use of a range of linguistic analytical frameworks, what it has in
common is its overarching use of queer linguistics, the approach also adopted
throughout this book.

Queer Linguistics
Queer linguistics is underpinned by queer theory, which takes ‘heteronorma-
tivity’ itself as its main object of critical investigation. Heteronormativity is
defined by Cameron (2005: 489) as ‘the system which prescribes, enjoins,
rewards, and naturalizes a particular kind of heterosexuality – monogamous,
reproductive, and based on conventionally complementary gender roles – as
the norm on which social arrangements should be based’. Queer theory
scholars such as Halperin (1993) and Milani (2014) have importantly pointed
out that there is actually no such thing as ‘queer theory’ in a singular form.
Rather, queer theory consists of many different approaches. But what all queer
theory work has in common is its critical investigation of heteronormativity
and its resistance to presenting gender as an a priori category – as something
which is already there waiting to be ‘discovered’. Instead, queer theory
interrogates the underlying preconditions of gender and sexuality identity,
and how these may be enacted and formulated in discourse. Jagose (1996)
notes that the non-specificity of ‘queer’ protects it from criticisms made of the
exclusionary and essentialising tendencies of referring to identity categories
such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’. But, as I explain in previous work (Sauntson, 2012),
36 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

this shift away from ‘identity’ can be problematic in terms of conducting

concrete analyses of gender and language. Even when gender (and sexuality)
is not conceptualized as an a priori category, the very fact that already-
established gender categories are evoked in the analysis (masculinity and
femininity) functions to reinstate those forms of identity which are associated
with gender without actually questioning where they come from or why they
are being evoked in the first place. Despite its resistance to using prediscursive
identity categories, I continue to argue that queer theory is actually better placed
to explain how those identity categories come to have such salience and are
difficult to challenge not just socially but in analyses of linguistic interaction.
Within queer theory, Butler’s (1990, 1993, 1997, 2004) theories of perfor-
mativity are of crucial importance for enabling us to question socially
sanctioned concepts of normality in relation to gender and sexuality. Queer
theory presents a unified view of gender and sexuality in that it recognizes that
cultural ideologies of gender normativity are bound up with assumptions of
heterosexuality. Butler (1990) develops this notion in her claims that hetero-
sexuality is naturalized by the performative repetition of normative gender
identities. Butler suggests that the categories of gender and sexuality have been
‘causally entangled in knots that must be undone’ (1998: 225–6) and readings
of queer theory often reveal apparently contradictory positions regarding
gender and sexuality. On the one hand, gender and sexuality cannot be
separated, yet on the other, it is sometimes necessary to separate them in
academic enquiry. As Cameron (2005: 486) explains:
We know ‘sex’ only through the ideological filter of discourse about gender. One is no
more natural than the other, both are cultural constructs, and the distinction between
them thus collapses.

In linguistics, work by Cameron (1997), Coates (2007), Leap (1996), Morrish

and Sauntson (2007; 2010), Motschenbacher (2011) and others has shown that
the semiotic resources associated with gender categories are deployed as a
means of constructing sexual identities in and through discourse. Gender and
sexual identity cannot be separated as the construction of both identities tends
to rely on the same discursive resources. Such work suggests that there is
a clear relationship between gender and sexuality, that the two are not
experienced separately, and cannot be separated for the purpose of analysis.
McElhinny (2014) argues that the very idea of two genders is conflated with a
presumption of heterosexuality. These arguments can be applied specifically to
the school context. Epstein (1994) has argued that schools are particularly
highly marked in terms of them functioning as sites for the reproduction of
normative gender and its associated heterosexuality. Eckert (1996) has also
commented that secondary schools are particularly marked sites for the
production of heterosexual identities. According to Eckert, the transition into
 Queer Linguistics 37

a heterosexual social order in secondary school brings boys and girls into an
engagement in gender differentiation and encourages boys and girls to view
themselves as ‘commodities’ on a heterosexual market. Thus, schools are
places where students not only learn what is prescribed by subject curricula,
but they learn the norms and rules associated with dominant ideologies of
gender and sexuality in order to commodify themselves in a predominantly
heterosexual marketplace. Thus, the principle of queer theory which claims an
integral and definitional relationship between gender and sexuality is of central
importance to queer linguistics and its application to the school context.
In Butler’s later work, she is careful to highlight notions of constraint rather
than claiming gender can be simply performed at will. Whilst retaining a
commitment to queer notions of performativity, Butler defines sexuality as
‘an improvizational possibility within a field of constraints’ (2004: 15) and
argues that both gender and sexuality are mobilized and incited by social
constraints as well as extinguished by them. These constraints often come
from essentialized social ideologies of gender and sexuality. Butler also notes
that performative accomplishments of hierarchized genders are often com-
pelled by social sanction and taboo. The result of this hierarchization is that
idealized or hegemonic masculinities and feminities stereotypically associated
with heterosexuality are ranked higher than the marginalized genders typically
associated with homosexuality. Drawing on the work of Connell (1995) and
Kiesling (2002) as well as Butler, Coates (2003, 2007) notes that heterosexu-
ality is an integral identifying component of the most powerful genders –
‘hegemonic’ masculinity and femininity – in society. Moreover, powerful
ideological mechanisms for linking gender to biological sex are crucial for
maintaining hierarchies of gender. When performances of gender are enacted
in the social world, those very performances become subject to interactional
practices which place the performance within a gender hierarchy that is
constantly under construction.
Queer linguistics draws on the principles of queer theory outlined above and
applies them to the study of language. Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013: 522)
helpfully define queer linguistics in concise terms as ‘critical heteronormativity
research from a linguistic point of view’. Most definitions and explanations of
queer linguistics are based around the concept of heteronormativity and use it
as a theoretical and analytical starting point:
The central target of QL is the linguistic manifestation of heteronormativity and,
connected with it, binary gender and sexual identity discourses. (Motschenbacher,
2011: 161)
Leap summarizes the primary concerns of queer linguistics as being:
[to] explore how social experience engages normative practice and its regulatory
constraint, recognizing that language as well as desire and other components associated
38 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

with sexuality are primary sites through which the work of normativity and regulatory
control unfold in everyday life. Queer linguistics is not the only mode of critical inquiry
engaged in such exploration; but queer linguistics is the only mode of inquiry willing
to insist that language and sexuality remain at the centre of this interrogation. (Leap,
2013: 648)

Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013) importantly note that queer linguistics is not
the same as gay and lesbian linguistics in which the object of study is ‘queer
subjects’. As they explain:
Using a Queer perspective [. . .] is not so much a matter of deciding what is Queer, but
of choosing to view certain behaviours in a non-heteronormative light or from the
perspective of the sexually marginalized. (2013: 520)

Importantly and in support of an earlier point made by Cameron and Kulick

(2003), within this explanation, queer linguistics can be applied to the critical
investigation of heterosexual identities and desires as well as those which are
sexually marginalized. They note that research on language and sexual minor-
ities tends to focus on analyzing linguistic manifestations of homophobia and
other kinds of sexuality discrimination, whilst queer linguistics more broadly
encompasses an analysis of discursive formations of all sexual identities,
including heterosexualities. Part of this analysis involves exploring the linguis-
tic means by which heterosexuality comes to be seen as the assumed default
sexuality whilst other sexualities become marked as ‘non-normative’. Further-
more, it is certain kinds of heterosexualities which are privileged and this is
also a concern of queer linguistics. (also discussed by Leap and Motschenba-
cher, 2012) These are important issues for this book. Some existing work in
sexualities and education has been critiqued for focusing too heavily upon
homophobia and implicitly assuming that challenging homophobic practices
will facilitate progress towards greater sexual equality (see Chapter 1). Whilst
this may be partly true, what we can take from queer linguistics is that there
also needs to be more critical scrutiny of how privileged forms of heterosexu-
ality are discursively formed in school contexts with a view to ultimately
challenging and changing such practices.
Queer linguistics seems an appropriate approach to use to examine the
ways in which particular discourses of sexuality are produced in school
contexts through the deployment of specific linguistic practices. In previous
work (Sauntson, 2012), I argue and illustrate how linguistic methods of
analysis can be used alongside queer theory to critically examine the discur-
sive constructions of ‘normal’ and ‘queer’ gender and sexuality in school
classrooms. I show how incorporating some of the principles of queer theory
into the types of analyses already used can help to uncover the ways in which
heterosexuality is naturalized and how other forms of sexual and gender
identity are ‘queered’ in classroom interaction. Queer linguistics can
 Queer Applied Linguistics 39

therefore provide a very helpful theoretical framework for examining how

normative and non-normative constructions of sexual identity are enacted
through and inscribed in language practices in schools, and how these
language practices may effect particular discourses of sexuality. However,
a queer linguistic approach has yet to be applied to the study of sexuality in
relation to schooling across a wider range of data and school-based language
practices. Nelson (2009) argues that because identities within queer theory
are conceptualized as performative acts which are produced through dis-
course, using a queer theory framework has the potential to engage teachers
and students in LGBT+ issues in language classes. As stated previously,
Nelson (2012) is critical that, in language-focused education research, there
has been little dialogue between applied linguistics and queer linguistics and
calls for more attention to be paid to how linguistic analysis can offer
important insights into gender, sexualities and education. The field of critical
applied linguistics in conjunction with queer linguistics can be particularly
useful for responding to this call. I elaborate this ‘queer applied linguistics’
approach in the following section.

Queer Applied Linguistics

Queer linguistics is not without its criticisms. Motschenbacher (2011)
documents the main criticisms levelled against queer linguistics – that it has
restricted relevance and real-life empirical applications and that there are
problematic issues concerning political agency. Motschenbacher counters such
claims by arguing that queer linguistics, contrary to the critical claims, does not
focus exclusively on documenting gay and lesbian aspects of language. Its
focus is on the ‘discursive materialization of all sexual identities’ (Motscehn-
bacher, 2011: 158) with particular attention paid to how heteronormativity
becomes materialized through discourse as the dominant sexuality. The effects
can be damaging for heterosexual-identified people as well as members of
sexual minorities. The political motivations underlying queer linguistics are
thus self-proclaimed and seen as a strength rather than a limitation. It has been
argued that there are tensions between queer linguistics as an identity-
questioning approach and the focus on LGBT+ issues, which instead suggests
an identity-affirming theoretical background. However, counter-arguments
claim that the notion of identity does not need to be dispensed with if taking
a queer linguistic approach. In terms of its empirical applicability, Motschen-
bacher again counters such criticism by arguing that queer linguistics lends
itself well to utilizing linguistic methods that have already been established
within other areas of applied linguistics and applying them to queer research
purposes. This is precisely the aim of this book. In the remainder of this
section, I explain how queer linguistics can be used within critical applied
40 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

linguistics to form what may be termed ‘queer applied linguistics’. In such an

approach, the language-focused critical heteronormativity research has real-life
empirical applications. In the case of this book, those applications relate to
addressing problematic issues of gender and sexual diversity in schools.
Critical applied linguistics (CAL) has been defined as ‘the practice of
applied linguistics grounded in a concern for addressing and resolving prob-
lems of inequality’. (Hall, Smith and Wicaksono, 2011: 18) According to
Pennycook (2001) and Hall et al., critical applied linguistics is an approach
to language study which addresses a specific problem for the benefit of a
defined set of ‘clients’ or end-users.

First and foremost, applied linguistics is concerned with individuals’ and groups’
language-related needs [. . .] Applied linguistics is, above all, a problem-solving discip-
line, and while any project in applied linguistics may begin with a description or
empirical investigation of the role of language in a real-world problem, it should aim
to end with the planning, testing and evaluation of a potential solution. (Hall, Smith and
Wicaksono, 2011: 17)

Drawing on Brumfit (1995), they argue that the identification of a ‘real-world’

problem should be informed by the people who experience it. But the above
definition does not address key theoretical issues which, I argue below, have
emerged from queer linguistics and are potentially useful to the field of
applied linguistics more broadly. Interviews in this book give a clear identifi-
cation of a set of social inequality problems related to gender and sexuality in
schools which can be investigated through an analysis of linguistic practices.
We may loosely define ‘queer applied linguistics’ (QAL), then, as CAL which
is informed by queer theory/queer linguistics and which is applied to address-
ing social concerns with inequalities around gender and sexuality. Like CAL,
QAL has a social justice orientation. Given the development of the field of
language and sexuality studies discussed earlier in this chapter, and drawing
particularly on Motschenbacher’s (2011) conceptual developments of queer
linguistic approaches, I argue that three key overlapping issues have emerged
as relevant to work which utilizes a QAL framework. These issues are:
temporality, space and normativity. ‘Real-world’ problems are always situ-
ated in time and space, and are therefore temporally and spatially construed.
These first two issues map onto what Motschenbacher calls contextuality
[spatiality] and fluidity [temporality] in his identification of dimensions that
a queer approach to sociolinguistics must be able to grasp. What is considered
a ‘problem’ is also at least partially constructed by culturally and socially
situated notions of ‘normativity’ – a concept which, according to Motschen-
bacher, needs to be theorized more fully in queer linguistics and, I argue,
needs to be more rigorously theorized within the broader field of applied
linguistics.
 Queer Applied Linguistics 41

Temporality
Leap (In press) argues convincingly that looking back at the historical
development of a field of applied linguistics is important and illustrates this
argument with reference to language and sexuality studies. The title of Leap’s
book is Language and Sexuality ‘Before’ Stonewall with the scare quotes
indicating that the temporal signification of ‘before’ is of central importance
and should be critically interrogated. Leap proposes the idea of a ‘before’ and
‘after’ in language and sexuality research with the Stonewall riots being a
revolutionary turning point in the history of sexuality.1 Leap explains that the
US Stonewall riots of 1969 have become ‘the emblematic, transformative, and
inaugurative moment that brought darkness into light, primitiveness into
advancement, and oppression into liberation’ (In press: 2) and references them
as a real-life event which helped to shape the development of the academic
field of language and sexuality. From this, Leap proposes the approach of
‘queer historical sociolinguistics’ for engaging with issues of time in relation to
language and sexuality. Significantly, Leap argues that temporal narratives can
frame historical events in such a way that the narratives obfuscate problematic
issues which persist after the event in question:
Conventional narratives exploring the history of sexuality [. . .] frame discussion of
history around certain big events, whose alignment into a single meta-narrative
unavoidably produces a sense of linear connection – one event either occurring before
another or after another. Linear connection in turn produces an appearance of chron-
ology and genealogy, and with that, appeals to advancement, progress and triumph.
(Leap, In press)
Leap argues that the ‘triumph narratives’ around Stonewall have framed the
events as transformative and liberating whilst at the same time, erasing lan-
guage practices which may have functioned to positively construe non-
heterosexual identities before the events in question. Moreover, what was
conceived of as a ‘problem’ after Stonewall (as a result of the triumph
narrative) was not necessarily construed as such ‘before’ Stonewall. Leap’s
work thus enables us to see how discriminatory language practices around
gender and sexuality are real-world problems which are historical (temporal)
constructs. Their temporal and contingent nature means that they are inherently
unstable and subject to narrative retellings which imbue them with different
meanings and effects in different temporal and spatial sites. Importantly, queer
time can also function to exclude, restrict and erase, rather than to open up
possibilities that lie beyond the ‘normal’. Leap argues that narratives of

1
For information about the Stonewall Riots, see www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-stone
wall-riot.
42 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

language and sexuality that end in ‘triumph’ may actually disguise homopho-
bic (and other discriminatory) practices.
This notion of temporality links to another important principle of queer
theory discussed by Hall (2013) – that heteronormativity itself is not stable
across time and space. Hall (2013: 638) argues:
Because acts are perceived to be queer only if they trouble the regime of heteronorma-
tivity, their subversive efficacy is reliant on the assumed cohesion of this platform [. . .]
the social meaning granted to heteronormativity, even if its idealization persists, is
always shifting across the interactions of those associated with it.
Milani (2013) also draws attention to the need for temporal analysis in the
discussion of normativity, asserting that normativity as a concept is never
stable and is always temporally and spatially contingent. It is from this position
that Hall argues that temporality (especially in relation to heteronormativity)
should be a key concern of queer linguistics. As will be discussed later, the
young people and teacher participants in this study refer explicitly to school as
a temporal (and spatial) state.

Spatiality
In another seminal queer theory work, In a Queer Time and Place (2005),
Halberstam argues that time and space are subjected to the same kinds of
naturalization processes as discursive practices. Therefore, ‘queer time’ can both
construct and resist normative identities. Both Halberstam and Freeman (2010)
argue that queer time produces ‘queer space’ and that the two are interlinked and
relative. Drawing on Halberstam’s (2005) work and transferring it to the study of
language and sexuality, Leap and Motschenbacher (2012: 7) state:
To study language, sexuality and queer temporality is to ask questions about linguistic
and sexual practices that take place in spatial and temporal domains that lie outside of
the ordinary, the familiar, and the ‘normal’.
Such ideas have led to a recent incorporation of examinations of space and
time in relation to language and sexuality. Milani (2013), for example, exam-
ines multimodal (linguistic and spatial) constructions of sexual identity in a
university environment. He argues that using multimodal methods of discourse
analysis, and incorporating a semiotic analysis of sexuality and space, could
further our understanding of the relationship between language and sexuality
and how it operates in educational and other contexts. In his later work on
language, gender and sexuality in public space, Milani (2014: 201) argues that
‘gender and sexuality are two important axes of power along which public
spaces are structured, understood, negotiated and contested’.
The notion of queer space is explored in a special issue of the Journal of
Language and Sexuality edited by Hiramoto (2015). Hiramoto (2015: 185)
 Queer Applied Linguistics 43

argues that ‘[. . .] subjectivity can shape and reshape one’s social relation to a
specific space’. King (2011) uses corpus linguistic methods to examine how
online chat rooms for gay men become queer spaces for performances of non-
heterosexual masculine identities and desires, advocating for place and space
being a central focus of investigation in language and sexuality research. King
argues that:
Places, like social categories, are no longer assumed to have fixed characteristics. In
fact, it has become a commonsense notion that places are socially constructed, and the
language of social relations and identity is inherently spatial. (King, 2011: 2)
This principle applies to schools which are temporal spaces representing a
particular ‘era’ in a person’s life. The young people interviewed for this
research frequently report their school experiences as conflicting with their
experiences of other spaces, such as the home, social media and the internet.
They often perceive different gender and sexual norms as operating within the
space of the school, meaning that ‘normativity’ itself becomes imbued with
specific meanings which are contingent on school space. The young people
participants, in particular, also often report different norms operating in differ-
ent school spaces, such as specific subject classrooms, toilets and changing
rooms. Thus, normativity itself shifts in relation to time and space.

Normativity
Motschenbacher (2014) has been critical of the lack of theorizing around the
term ‘normativity’ (including heteronormativity) in queer linguistics. He
argues that much recent language and sexuality work makes frequent
reference to the concept of normativity without fully explaining or theorizing
it. Motschenbacher argues that speakers have a tendency to orient towards
a shared notion of normativity in their language practices. However, norma-
tivity itself is not stable and a way of theorizing it is to view it as constantly
shifting and relative to context. Motschenbacher illustrates these ideas through
reference to empirical data in which speakers who identify as objectophiles
(people who experience erotic and/or romantic desire for inanimate objects)
discuss aspects of their sexual identity. Motschenbacher finds that the
speakers orient towards a shared notion of what constitutes ‘normative’
sexual behaviour through describing their own sexual identity as non-
normative. However, the speakers simultaneously make efforts to construct
their identity as normative through eliding their own sexual practices with
those who they construct as normative. For example, they describe their
relationships with objects in the same terms as humano-heterosexual
(heterosexual relationships between humans) monogamous relationships.
I incorporate Motschenbacher’s conceptualization of normativity within queer
44 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

linguistics, and the sociolinguistic community of practice notion of identities

emerging from (linguistic) practice, into my own queer applied linguistic
approach throughout this book. In practical terms, this means examining
how and why speakers and writers orient towards particular ideas of norma-
tivity through their language practices, and how normative genders and
sexualities are represented through the language used in school settings. It
also involves being aware of how the very notion of normativity may shift in
relation to spatial and temporal contexts.
In sum, queer applied linguistics is problem-focused and has a social justice
orientation relating specifically to gender and sexuality issues. It takes critical
heteronormativity analysis as its central focus and recognizes that key issues
within contextualized examinations of heteronormativity need to take into
account temporal and spatial understandings and realizations of normativity.
These are the key principles which underlie the research design for this book.
The combination of linguistic frameworks (introduced below) incorporated
into the overarching QAL approach has been designed to include a consider-
ation of these key issues.

Research Design
Motschenbacher (2011) and Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013) argue that
queer linguistics lends itself well to an eclectic combination of linguistic
analytical frameworks (or methodological pluralism) in order to provide mutu-
ally qualifying positions. Leap has also referred to a ‘scavenger methodology’
(In press: 10) as being particularly appropriate for queer inquiry across a range
of disciplines. In this book, the frameworks used are: tactics of intersubjectiv-
ity; appraisal analysis; corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis.
These frameworks are used to variously uncover language practices in the
data sets of: interviews with young LGBT+-identified people; interviews and
surveys with educators; curriculum guidance documents and curriculum itself;
and classroom interactions. The analytical frameworks are briefly introduced
in this section but explained in greater detail in the data-focused chapters in
which they are applied.
The use of a combination of approaches responds to Rampton et al.’s (2002:
387) argument that a range of approaches to the study of classroom interaction
‘offer more to the analysis of classroom discourse than they do alone’. Baker
(2008), for example, uses the largely quantitative approach of corpus
linguistics to demonstrate how frequent patterns of particular words can
contribute to discursive constructions of gender. Baker argues that ‘numbers
count’ in the sense that the frequencies with which speakers use particular
linguistic features can be used to uncover the ‘cumulative effects of language’
(2008: 77):
 Research Design 45

A single word or phrase might just suggest the existence of a discourse. But other than
relying on our intuition. . .it can sometimes be difficult to ascertain whether such a
discourse is hegemonic, mainstream, resistant or marginal. It is only by collecting
numerous supporting examples of similar linguistic phenomena, that we can start to
witness the cumulative contribution of specific linguistic items to a given discourse.
Motschenbacher (2011) similarly argues that the more linguistic traces there are
of a discourse, the more dominant it is, therefore corpus linguistics can be
particularly useful for quantifying linguistic traces to support critical analyses of
text which proclaim certain discourses of gender and sexuality to be dominant
and others to be marginalized. Theoretical discussions and exemplifications of
combining corpus and critical discourse approaches are provided by Angouri
(2010) and Mautner (2009). In a special issue of the Gender and Language
journal, Baker (2013) introduces a series of studies which use corpus linguistics
methods to critically investigate gender, noting that such studies successfully
make use of a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Furthermore,
Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013) argue that queer linguistics is entirely
reconcilable with quantitative methodologies, especially if they are not used
in isolation. Throughout this book the largely quantitative method of corpus
linguistics is used alongside critical discourse analysis within an overarching
queer linguistic approach in order to make assertions about the strength of
particular sexuality discourses as they are linguistically manifested. These kinds
of ‘critical corpus’ approaches have relatively recently started to be used to
investigate discursive formations of sexualities. (e.g. King, 2011; Milani, 2013)
In fact, combining corpus approaches with more critical approaches counters
the oft-cited criticism against corpus methods in that they enforce categoriza-
tion and, in doing so, ignore problematic cases and ‘the local negotiability of
identity constructions’. (Motschenbacher 2011: 167)
For Chapter 3, a sample of UK-based LGBT+-identified young people were
interviewed about their school experiences. LGBT+ young people were
focused on because their voices are still largely under-represented in educa-
tional research. I was primarily interested in the experiences of young people
who identified themselves as belonging to a gender and/or sexual minority
group, given the recent policy changes outlined in the Introduction and
Chapter 1. The participants were identified through their involvement with
LGBT+ youth groups in York and Birmingham and local university LGBT+
groups in these areas. I wanted to examine the language used by these young
people when talking about their experiences of being LGBT+ in school, and
what this could reveal about how particular sexuality discourses circulate in
school contexts and how the young people experience and construct sexual
identities in relation to schooling. Bucholtz and Hall’s ‘tactics of
intersubjectivity’ framework was used to investigate this in conjunction with
a framework of appraisal. (Martin, 2000; Martin and White, 2005) Bucholtz
46 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

and Hall’s (2004, 2005) ‘tactics of intersubjectivity’ is a sociolinguistic frame-

work which was conceived specifically with gender and sexual identities in
mind. The framework has been very influential in the study of language and
sexuality and has made a significant contribution to sociolinguistics more
broadly by offering new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between
language and identity. The framework provides an effective means of explor-
ing how speakers use language to understand and construct their sexual
identities in relation to localized contexts. Previous applications of the frame-
work (Morrish and Sauntson, 2007; Sauntson and Morrish, 2012; Sauntson,
2016) have shown how LGBT+-identified speakers frequently experience
secondary/high school in a state of pervasive illegitimation surrounding
LGBT+ identities.
Appraisal is a specific type of discourse analysis which focuses upon
categorizing evaluative language. When talking about sexuality, people often
focus much of their talk on feelings, emotions and judgements, and the
appraisal framework is designed to analyze these aspects of talk.
Appraisal, therefore, provides a framework for analyzing and describing
evaluative language and categorizing the ways that feelings, emotions, atti-
tudes, social relationships and experiences are encoded in language. It is a
more effective means of analyzing how feelings, attitudes and values are
inscribed in language than thematic analysis alone. In Chapter 3, appraisal
is therefore used to explore how language embodies the participants’ feelings,
attitudes and values towards sexual diversity in schools. The rationale for
combining the particular frameworks of tactics of intersubjectivity and
appraisal is that both can be used to reveal the linguistic strategies people
use for engaging in processes of identification and intersubjective
positioning/stance-taking. The data comprises interviews which are essen-
tially narratives of personal experience, therefore, the data lends itself well to
being analyzed using these social identity-focused frameworks. The way that
these analytical frameworks are combined together is explained in more
detail in Chapter 3.
In addition to the interviews with young people, interviews were conducted
with educators working in secondary schools in the United Kingdom and an
electronic survey was distributed to educators in high schools in Washington,
DC. The analysis and emergent findings from these data sets are the focus of
Chapter 4. The educators interviewed and surveyed consist of class teachers
but also include educators who perform other important roles within their
schools, such as student support officers and senior managers. In the interviews
and surveys, the educators discuss their perceptions of how issues around
sexual diversity are handled in their schools and what they think the key issues
are. Like the young people interviews, the interview and survey data from the
educators were analyzed using linguistic frameworks in order to better
 Research Design 47

understand how the speakers understand and construct different sexual iden-
tities in relation to the school contexts, and how their language encodes
particular feelings and attitudes towards issues around sexuality and schooling.
To this end, as in Chapter 3, the frameworks used to analyze this data are
tactics of intersubjectivity and appraisal. This enables a direct comparison
of the young people’s and adult educators’ perceptions of how sexual diversity
is constructed and experienced in the school environment (revealed through
the application of the tactics of intersubjectivity framework) and their own
feelings and attitudes towards sexual diversity and schooling (revealed through
the application of appraisal analysis).
The focus of Chapter 5 is on the analysis of written curriculum documents
and how issues around sexual identity and diversity are represented and
encoded in these. Given the broad scope of the secondary curriculum and
the detailed nature of the linguistic analysis, it would not have been feasible to
conduct an analysis of the curricula for all subject areas. I therefore focus on
the subjects which the young people and teacher participants seemed to
discuss as being the most relevant to how they experienced sexuality at school
(identified in the preceding two chapters); these subjects were English and
SRE in the United Kingdom and English Language Arts and Health Education
in the United States. The curriculum documents were analyzed using a
combination of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001) and corpus
linguistics as a means of exploring how the language used in the documents
contributes to the construction of particular ideologies around sexual diversity
and identity. This chapter expands on previous work in which I have used
CDA to examine the discursive construction of sexuality ideologies in the
English National Curriculum programmes of study (for England and Wales).
This work revealed that there are marked absences around sexuality in the
English curriculum encoded particularly in the experiential values of its
vocabulary. These silences are identifiable in classification schemes, over-
lexicalization of ideologically contested words and the semantic profiles
created by the patterns surrounding particular words revealed through the
corpus analysis. I argue that the cumulative effect of these features is an
‘illocutionary silencing’ (Sauntson, 2013) around sexual diversity in the
English curriculum, which, in turn, effects a discourse of heterosexism. This
previous study shows that a combination of corpus linguistics and CDA can be
an effective means of uncovering sexuality ideologies in written curriculum
documents. Curriculum documents are important in both the United Kingdom
and United States for governing the content and approach taken to teaching
subjects in many secondary and high schools. Thus, the extended application
of CDA to a wider range of documents may be useful to uncovering ideologies
about sexuality as a precursor to perhaps challenging any negative discourses
which may be found.
48 Researching Language and Sexuality in Educational Settings

Table 2.1 Summary of data sets and analytical frameworks used within the
QAL approach

Chapter Data set Linguistic analytical frameworks applied to data set

Queer Applied Linguistics (QAL)

Chapter 3 Young people interviews Tactics of intersubjectivity Appraisal
Chapter 4 Teacher interviews Tactics of intersubjectivity Appraisal
Chapter 5 Curriculum documents Corpus linguistics Critical discourse analysis
Chapter 6 Classroom interaction Corpus linguistics Critical discourse analysis

In Chapter 6, a series of classroom observations of SRE lessons was

conducted in order to explore how elements of the curriculum analysis con-
ducted in Chapter 5 were actually put into practice. In the interviews with
young people which had been conducted prior to the classroom observations,
participants highlighted the subject of PSHE as being subjects which lend
themselves well to issues around sexuality being raised and discussed. In their
2004 research, Ellis and High also found that young people reported ‘homo-
sexuality’ being mentioned more in PSHE (and English) than in any other
secondary school subjects, albeit in a largely negative way. SRE is taught
within the curriculum subject of PSHE. Thus, the selection of subjects for the
classroom observations was driven by the participants themselves. The process
of conducting classroom observation, recording, transcription and analysis is a
time-consuming one. This means that large amounts of interactional data
cannot be used in this chapter and data is taken from UK classrooms only
for reasons of feasibility. The classroom interaction data is analyzed using
combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. (following
Baker, 2013)2
In sum, the linguistic analytical frameworks of tactics of intersubjectivity,
appraisal, corpus linguistics and CDA are used to examine the data sets
under a broad queer applied linguistics (QAL) approach. The use of a combin-
ation of different analytical frameworks is threefold. Firstly, the different data
sets (classroom interaction, interviews and curriculum documents) lend them-
selves to different methods of analysis. The analytical frameworks themselves
have been designed in relation to different types of linguistic data. Secondly, it
has been widely argued within applied linguistics that the simultaneous appli-
cation of more than one framework to the analysis of a data set can provide a
more detailed and nuanced analysis than the application of a single framework.
(Hammersley, 2003; Motschenbacher and Stegu, 2013; Rampton et al., 2002;

2
All research was conducted in line with the ethical standards set out by the British Association of
Applied Linguistics (BAAL) and the British Educational Research Association (BERA).
 Research Design 49

Sauntson, 2012; Sunderland and Litosseliti, 2008) This is important in terms of

maximizing the potential validity and value of the research findings. Finally,
through using different analytical frameworks under an approach which
applies queer linguistics to educational contexts, it is hoped that this approach
can offer new insights into the fields of language and sexuality and discourse
analysis more broadly. Table 2.1 provides a summary of the data sets and
analytical frameworks used throughout the book.
3 Using Sociolinguistic Frameworks to Explore
the School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

The data presented in this chapter consist of interviews with 20 young LGBT+
identified people (aged 13–25) who attend or have recently attended schools
and colleges in the UK cities which are the research sites for this book. In the
interviews, the young people reflect on their experiences of, and attitudes
towards, school in relation to their LGBT+ sexual identities. The young people
were identified through their membership of LGBT+ youth groups. This was
the most practical way of accessing openly LGBT+ young people for the
research and it had the advantage of providing a context in which the young
people felt comfortable talking about their school experiences. All interviews
were individual and were semi-structured to allow for a degree of flexibility.
They lasted between 20 and 40 minutes. The same set of questions was used in
each interview, although there was flexibility for interviewees to discuss other
related points if they wanted to. The questions focused on interviewees’
perceptions of sexual diversity issues in school. Due to the potentially sensitive
topic of discussion, the youth workers who ran the groups were present in
the interviews. The interviews were recorded and transcribed in full. Brief
information about each of the participants is included in Table 3.1.
The interviews themselves contain sequences of narrative in which the
participants narrate their experiences of being LGBT+ in relation to school.
In this sense, this aspect of the research is based within a qualitative, narrative
inquiry approach. Clandinin and Connelly (2000: 20) define narrative inquiry
as ‘a way of understanding experience’. In this chapter, the participants
use narratives within the interviews to reflect on and understand their own
experiences of sexuality and schooling. Through the telling of narratives in an
interview situation, participants construct identities for themselves and others
through the language used in these narratives. De Fina and Perrino (2011) are
critical of how narrative interviews are sometimes viewed as ‘inauthentic’
linguistic data. They describe research interviews as being a ‘legitimate inter-
actional encounter’ (2011: 1) and argue from this that the language produced
in narrative interviews is just as rich and authentic for sociolinguistic analysis
as language collected from other situations. In fact, in some situations, they

50
 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth 51

Table 3.1 Participant information

Name Age
(pseudonym (at time of Sexual orientation and
if requested) interview) Types of school/s and college/s attended gender identity1

Alex 18 11–18 mixed-sex comprehensive Gay man

Amy 22 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive Lesbian woman
Left school aged 12 to be home-educated
after being persistently bullied at school
Currently self-employed
Carl 18 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive Gay man
Attended sixth form college but dropped
out after a few months
Currently unemployed
Fay 18 Attended 11–16 mixed-sex school but left Bisexual woman
because of being bullied
Attended a ‘half way’ school for a period of
a few months
Attended another 11–18 mixed-sex
comprehensive school
Currently in the sixth form of the last
11–18 school attended
Hannah 17 11–18 single-sex girls’ school Lesbian woman
Currently attending the school’s
sixth form
Jack 17 11–16 mixed-sex faith school (Catholic) Gay man
Currently attending sixth form college
John 16 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive (with Gay man
some periods of home education
following bouts of bullying
at school)
Currently attending sixth form college
Martin 18 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive Gay man
Sixth form college – dropped out after a
few months
Currently completing IT apprenticeship
Tad 18 Several 11–16 comprehensive schools Gay man
(including a period at a school for
students who have been bullied and who
have special educational needs)
followed by sixth form college
Currently attending sixth form college
Todd 16 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive Gay man
Currently attending sixth form college
Josh 17 11–18 single-sex boarding school. Gay man
Currently in Year 12.
Dan 15 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. Bisexual man
Currently in Year 10.
52 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

Table 3.1 (cont.)

Name Age
(pseudonym (at time of Sexual orientation and
if requested) interview) Types of school/s and college/s attended gender identity1

Ruby 17 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. About to Prefer not to say

start attending sixth form college.
Charlie 16 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. Just Bisexual man
completed Year 11.
Steven 14 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. Year 9. Gay man
Jason 15 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. Year 10. Bisexual man
Ashford 15 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. Year 10. Trans asexual
Nikki 25 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. Lesbian woman
Employed.
Abby 18 11–16 mixed-sex comprehensive. Sixth Prefers no label
form college (just completed).
Ashley 20 11–18 single-sex boys’ independent. Queer, demi-sexual,
gender queer. Uses
female pronouns.
1
Participants defined their own sexual orientation and gender identities.

may yield more authentic data and they may afford participants a space for
talking about issues or topics that they may consider too taboo, taken for
granted or silenced in more everyday contexts. As Modan and Shuman
(2011: 14) state ‘interviews afford tellability that may be otherwise restricted’.
Narrative interviews are thus seen as real interactional events in their own
right – in narrative interviews such as those used in this research, participants
are not simply reflecting on the language practices they use elsewhere, they
are simultaneously engaged in language practices which contribute to the
sociolinguistic construction of identity. The interview data in this chapter
therefore does not provide direct evidence of institutional school practices
(unlike Chapter 6), but contains young people’s accounts of how they have
perceived and experienced those practices, how they are meaningful to them,
and how they feel those experiences have contributed to the construction of
their sexual identities.

Tactics of Intersubjectivity (ToI): Framework

Using the tactics of intersubjectivity framework (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004,
2005), the language used by the young people in the interviews was analyzed
in order to provide insights into how the participants understand and construct
their sexual identities in relation to school. The application of the framework
enables a consideration of how the young people use language to construct
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity (ToI): Framework 53

their sexual identity in relation to aspects of schooling (such as the curriculum,

anti-bullying policies and practices and the school environment), with a
specific focus on how they perceive school practices as enabling or constrain-
ing particular enactments of their sexual identity. The framework offers deeper
insights into sexuality and education than can be gained from thematic analysis
alone, and can contribute towards developing understandings of sexual
diversity issues in schools.
Bucholtz and Hall’s (2004, 2005) ‘tactics of intersubjectivity’ is a socio-
cultural linguistics framework which was conceived specifically with gender
and sexual identities in mind and offers a revealing framework for the analysis
of the relationship between identity and language. The framework has been
very influential in the study of language and sexuality and has made a
significant contribution to sociolinguistics more broadly by offering new
ways of conceptualizing the relationship between language and identity.
The framework aims to understand how individuals negotiate and establish
relations with each other and how they construct identity through language
and social interaction. To date, the framework has been applied to the study of
talk and identity in lesbian communities (Jones, 2012), to explore the rela-
tionship between gender and second language learning (Langman, 2004) and
to examine articulations of class, identity and desire among transgender
groups in India. (Hall, 2005)
ToI recognizes that identities emerge in context, that they may be temporary
and multiple, and that they are negotiated with other social actors and in
relation to structures of ideology and power. Within the tactics of intersubjec-
tivity model, ‘identity’ is treated not as an empirical category, but as a product
of processes of identification. As Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 587) state:
. . .we argue for a view of identity that is intersubjectively rather than individually
produced and interactionally emergent rather than assigned in an a priori fashion.

Identity is, therefore, seen as a discursive construct that emerges in interaction –

it is emergent, intersubjective and relational. The tactics of intersubjectivity
framework specifically develops this relational view of identity by offering an
explicit methodological framework for considering how gender and sexual
identities are produced relationally and intersubjectively in and through
situated discourse. The framework has been successfully applied to analysis
of gender and sexuality identity construction but, as yet, there have been no
applications to the study of sexual identities in school contexts.
Bucholtz and Hall describe ‘tactics of intersubjectivity’ as ‘analytic tools
to call attention to salient aspects of the discourse situation’. (Bucholtz and
Hall, 2004: 493) They identify three pairs of relational ‘tactics’ through which
identity is intersubjectively constructed in local contexts of language use –
adequation and distinction; authentication and denaturalization; authorization
54 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

and illegitimation. Each pair of tactics operates on a continuum rather than a

dichotomy.1
Identities are intersubjectively constructed through several, often overlapping, comple-
mentary relations, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice, and authority/
delegitimacy. (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005: 598)

The three pairs of tactics map onto three dimensions of intersubjectivity –

similarity (adequation and distinction), realness (authentication and
denaturalization) and power (authorization and illegitimation). (See Walz,
2016, for more details on the three dimensions of the ToI framework.)
Table 3.2 contains definitions and examples of each of the tactics.
Although these pairs of tactics are presented separately for the purpose of
analysis, Bucholtz and Hall are careful to stress that they are not necessarily
mutually exclusive and typically overlap and work in conjunction with one
another in what they term ‘an ever-shifting matrix of identity relations’.
(2004: 506) Tactics of intersubjectivity, with its roots in interactional socio-
linguistics, is particularly useful for analyzing participants’ intersubjective
processes of identification in interview data. Because the participants are
explicitly talking about school experiences in the interviews, the subsequent
incorporation of appraisal then enables a detailed and nuanced analysis
of how they use evaluative language to appraise key entities, affective and
social behaviours and processes. These are also a concern of tactics of
intersubjectivity. An underpinning principle of appraisal is that evaluative
language is intersubjective – it occurs in relation to people, behaviours,
entities, processes and so on. And, importantly, evaluation can occur in
relation to the key QAL issues of normativity, temporality and spatiality.
Combined together, ToI and appraisal can provide a detailed explanation
of how such concepts come to be discursively materialized and experienced by
the participants.
Whereas the ToI framework operates along intersubjective dimensions
which are not aligned with any specific units of linguistic analysis,
appraisal relates specifically to units of lexico-grammatical meaning. This
means that the lexico-grammatical markers of appraisal can be seen as
construing the tactics, therefore providing the ToI framework with analytical
units. Processes of intersubjective identification are realized through the
language of evaluative stance and positioning. How people evaluate things
says things about how they want to perform their identity. When I apply the
frameworks in Chapters 3 and 4, I find that the judgement subcategory of
appraisal is used particularly frequently to construe the tactics, precisely
because the tactics are social and behavioural (as is the judgement category

1
of the intersubjective tactics is presented using italics.
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity (ToI): Framework 55

Table 3.2 Tactics of intersubjectivity

Realized as statements
Tactic Definition with meanings such as. . . Examples from data

Adequation Speakers use language They are like me I can confide in

which makes I am like them someone who’s like
appeals to social Like straight people, I. . . been through the
sameness and We all have similar same thing.
highlights social feelings you wouldn’t do if you
practices which are were straight so
consistent with their what’s the big
own identity. difference.
Distinction Speakers use language People like me are I don’t go round
which makes different than. . . wearing little skirts
appeals to social They treat us differently and stuff like that
difference and Unlike straight people, I’m not a girly girl.
suppresses social we. . . it was surprisingly
practices which are We have different shocking and they
not consistent with feelings and treated me a lot
their own identity. experiences different.
Authentication Speakers use language I am being open and I was like ‘sorry that’s
to make claims to honest about my just the way I am
realness and sexual identity I’m more of a man
authenticity in The sexuality I present to than a woman’ it’s
relation to their own the world is a real and the truth
and others’ true reflection of how she knew I was gay
identities. I feel and she won’t have
I feel like my sexuality is it she says ‘you are
recognized by, and who you are’ you
reflected accurately in, know.
society
Denaturalization Speakers use language I am not open or honest you don’t wanna say
in ways that draw about my sexual that to anybody so it
attention to how identity was keep it quiet
identity is I pretend to be straight it’ll go away keep it
experienced or when really I am gay/ quiet it’ll go away
perceived as being lesbian/bisexual kind of a feeling for
false, untrue, My sexuality is not me that if I just
fragmented or recognized by, or carry on and just
problematic in some reflected accurately in, keep doing my
way. society work and stop
playing football and
say ‘yea I like that
boy in the
magazine’.
try and conform to a
certain extent that it
it’ll all be just go
away.
56 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

Table 3.2 (cont.)

Realized as statements
Tactic Definition with meanings such as. . . Examples from data

Authorization Language use denotes The institution (e.g. my English teacher’s

a state whereby a school) views my like she’s always
subject is perceived sexual and gender supportive of it and
to be afforded some identity as acceptable she’s always on
degree of I am allowed to be open about treating
institutional about my sexual and people equally no
recognition and gender identity in my matter what
where power is used school with no
to legitimate certain negative consequences
social identities.
Illegitimation Language use denotes My sexuality is not seen at my new school
a state in which a as acceptable by the they’re currently
subject is perceived institution (e.g. school) discouraging gays
as being structurally There will be punitive and stuff
marginalized, and consequences if I am I still got like ‘you
where power is used openly LGBT+ in my poof’ and all that
to revoke or school crap like that and it
withhold validation makes you feel
of certain identities. uncomfortable.

of appraisal). The three short examples from the data below illustrate the
construal of tactics through appraisal judgement markers.

at my new school they’re currently discouraging gays and stuff

(illegitimation expressed as negative PROPRIETY)
I’m not a girly girl (distinction expressed as negative
NORMALITY)
I’m more of a man than a woman it’s the truth (authentication
expressed as positive VERACITY)

The ToI framework was applied systematically to the entire data set so that every
occurrence of each tactic was identified. Although the intention was not to
conduct a quantitative analysis using the framework, the fact that every occur-
rence was identified, provided an indicator of which tactics were being expressed
by the participants with greater frequency. This then provided a basis for
selecting illustrative examples of what appeared to be the most salient issues
for the young people through their use of the tactics throughout the interviews.
The next part of this chapter will discuss and exemplify the key issues which
emerged from the systematic application of the framework. Findings around each
pair of tactics will be discussed in turn. The final part of the chapter then considers
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 57

the findings in relation to the other data sets in this book as well as discussing
potential implications of the findings for educational policy and practice.

Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis

The analysis shows that the patterns of tactics of intersubjectivity used by the
young people when talking about sexual orientation in relation to schooling
can draw attention to the most salient issues and problems concerning sexual
diversity and schools. Figure 3.1 shows the overall results of the ToI analysis.
The tactic of illegitimation is the highest followed by distinction. The differ-
ence in frequency of occurrence between authentication, denaturalization and
authorization is fairly small whilst adequation is the least frequently used
tactic. The ‘negative’ tactics all occur more frequently than their corresponding
positive counterparts within each dimension.
The sections below consider key findings from the application of each pair of
tactics in turn. Specific extracts from the data are included to illustrate these key
findings to give an indication of what were the most salient issues expressed by
the young people in relation to the construction of their LGBT+ identities. The
specific parts of each extract which instantiate the tactics are underlined – no
underline means that the whole of the extract instantiates the tactic.

Adequation and Distinction

According to Bucholtz and Hall, adequation and distinction within the
dimension of ‘similarity’ are key ways of constructing identity through

180
165
160

140
121
120

100 94
86 88
80

60 51

40

20

0
Adequation Distinction Authentication Denaturalisation Authorisation Illegitimation

Tactics of Intersubjectivity

Figure 3.1 Tactics of intersubjectivity

58 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

language – this dimension provides a framework for accounting for how

notions of sameness and difference are socially produced and perceived. The
young people in the study were found to frequently engage these tactics in the
process of understanding and constructing their sexual identities in relation to
other social actors in the school environment. As expected, the participants
used adequation around recognition of other LGBT+-identified people
(students and teachers), as in the following example:

JACK: I came out in college cuz I felt like college would be

more people are a bit more open-minded they’ve
matured a little bit not everyone obviously but no
actually I didn’t even come out it was someone
actually told my mom it was my mom’s best friend he was
gay so I thought well I can confide in someone who’s
like been through the same thing (adequation)

Here, Jack expresses adequation (expressed as positive normality in

appraisal terms – see appraisal section below for more detail) as feeling
similar to someone who has ‘been through the same thing’ and evaluates this
as a positive experience (in that he had someone to confide in). But adequation
was also sometimes used to emphasize participants’ perceived similarities
between LGBT+ and heterosexual identities (i.e. attempts to minimize the
difference between them). The young people were both marking out their
sexual identity as LGBT+, rather than heterosexual and/or cisgendered, but
also made appeals to social sameness on the grounds that they did not wish to
be treated differently in school from their heterosexual counterparts. In another
example from Jack below, he utters the phrase ‘what’s the big difference’ to
express adequation (a perceived similarity) between heterosexual and ‘gay’
identities. The adequation here (again construed as positive normality)
involves asserting that both heterosexual and gay people do not openly and
excessively discuss their sex lives and are therefore similar in this respect
rather than different.

JACK: it was about May time just before gay pride last year and
well things are better now but that’s he’s [my Dad]
accepted it but I think he’s got this stupid image in
his head that I’m gonna go round talking about my sex
life so which you wouldn’t do if you were straight so
what’s the big difference (adequation)

The young people’s use of distinction was more frequent than their use of
adequation, suggesting that they often experienced their sexual orientation
identities as marginal and ‘different’. Many of the occurrences of distinction
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 59

referred to the young people being treated differently as a result of their actual
or perceived sexual identity in school. This treatment is reported as coming
from teachers as well as other students. Some examples are as follows:

JOSH: I’ve moved nearly every single time because of bullying

just like being the odd one out sort of thing never
really fit in when I was younger (distinction
expressed as negative NORMALITY)
TAD: the main school I sort of had problems with my sexuality
is when I came out I was around fourteen and I came out
to a sixth former and I felt comfortable in doing so
because home life wasn’t going too good and in school
I was being taunted anyway so I thought I’d just
rather be open about it now and I came out and
instantly I was thrown the stereotypes it was
shocking and for a lot of people it was surprisingly
shocking and they treated me a lot different
(distinction expressed as negative NORMALITY and
INSECURITY).

In the examples above, Josh and Tad both report experiencing ‘problems’ with
their (gay) sexuality and that they were bullied at school, suggesting that the
distinction expressed in the extracts is something that was experienced nega-
tively. The distinction is realized through the statements ‘never really fit in’
(Josh), ‘being the odd one out’ (Josh) and ‘they treated me a lot different’
(Tad). Tad discusses his experience of this distinction using negative affect
(insecurity) terms such as ‘shocking’, ‘problems’ and ‘taunted’. This nega-
tive experience of distinction was the case for all of the other young people in
the study and can also be seen in the extracts below.

AMY: I was moving from juniors to senior schools

obviously it’s a big leap to begin with but I never
really had any trouble I’d always made friends
very easily I always achieved academically
teachers liked me everything was fine er until
I was playing football and we I remember being
on the pitch and I was playing against all the
boys and somebody called out ‘oy lezza’and it
tends to be with those kinds of names those
kinds of connotations it sticks like superglue
and it just escalated from there really to the
gradual name-calling er of course everyone
won’t sit next to you cuz you’re the lezza
(distinction construed as negative
NORMALITY)
60 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

STEPHEN: one of them is a trans and the only trans like we have
in the school I’ve talked to him um and he was
saying oh he found it really hard when he came cuz
he was the only one (distinction construed as
negative NORMALITY and co-occurring with
UNHAPPINESS)

In the first example above, Amy reports being marked out as ‘different’ (an
instantiation of distinction) as a direct result of her lesbian sexual orientation.
Many of the occurrences of distinction referred to gender as well as sexual
orientation. This supports previous work which has explored the interrelation-
ship between constructions of gender and sexual orientation whereby sexual
‘difference’ is often (but not exclusively) understood, experienced and
expressed through references to gender non-normativity. (e.g. Cameron,
1997; Coates, 2007) It is also interesting to note in this example how Amy
reverts to the impersonal second person singular to generalize her own per-
sonal experience to a larger phenomenon. In the second example, above,
Stephen discusses another student in his school who identifies as transgender
and attributes the distinction to them with the phrase ‘he was the only one’.
Stephen reports how the student in question ‘found it really hard’ thus attrib-
uting a negative affectual response to the process of distinction.
In the next extract, Fay reports experiencing and understanding her sexual
orientation in relation to what she is not, especially in relation to gender. The
young people report these kinds of perceived distinctions as something which
was problematic for them in their school environments. This suggests their
schools were seen as restrictive in terms of possibilities for a range of gender
expressions as well as sexual identities.

FAY: when I left school things got a lot better in my life

I started making more friends started to get meet
more people started joining more groups outside
of school I did start going to this club called
Duke of Edinburgh [. . .] one of the youth workers
said ‘stop acting like a boy to the boys’ like he
didn’t say it word for word but he meant it was like
‘oh stop acting like such a lad you’re meant to be a
girl act like a girl’ and I was like ‘sorry that’s
just the way I am I’m more of a man than a woman’
(distinction) it’s the truth (authentication
expressed as positive VERACITY)I am you know that
by the way I dress and whatnot I don’t go round
wearing little skirts and stuff like that I’m not
a girly girl (distinction expressed as negative
NORMALITY)
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 61

In sum, the adequation occurrences in the data mostly refer to participants’

recognition of, and feelings of affiliation with, other LGBT+-identified people
in school. However, some adequation occurrences are used to emphasize
participants’ perceived similarities between LGBT+ and heterosexual iden-
tities (i.e. attempts to minimize the differences between them). The distinction
occurrences are used mainly as a means of the participants experiencing and
constructing their sexual identity as socially ‘different’ from their peers. Some
of the distinction occurrences are also used to refer to participants’ perceived
gender identities as being socially different from the majority of their peers.

Authentication and Denaturalization

In the data, there were few examples of authentication occurring in relation to
LGBT+ identities. This suggests that the participants’ perceive ‘authentic’
LGBT+ identities as being largely invisible in school. There were a small
handful of instances in which some of the young people referred to particular
teachers who they perceived as lending a degree of authentication to their
LGBT+ identities through their verbal acknowledgement or acceptance of
them, as Carl states:

CARL: I wasn’t too keen on English but the teacher was great if
anybody would have said anything she would have you
know she wouldn’t have it she know she knows she knew
I was gay and she says ‘you are who you are’you know
(authentication)

Carl reports the teacher as lending authentication to his gay identity through
the attributed phrase ‘you are who you are’ and also through his confirmation
that ‘she knew I was gay’ (construed as positive veracity on the part of
Carl). Both of these phrases denote honesty and openness between Carl and his
teacher; he was openly gay with her and did not try to conceal his sexual
identity. The teacher recognized this openness and reportedly authenticated
Carl’s identity by stating that he should not attempt to change or conceal it. If
she had done this, it would have been an instance of denaturalization (and
illegitimation) rather than authentication. But there were, in fact, more occur-
rences of the young people explicitly noting the absence of authenticating
practices around LGBT+ identities, as in the following extract:

HANNAH: I can’t recall ever in English it ever being ever being

discussed I don’t know whether that was purposely
or whether it just didn’t come up but no it wasn’t
really spoke about at all (absence of
authentication)
62 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

Hannah laments the perceived lack of authentication around LGBT+ identities

in their schools. At several points during the interviews, the young people
talked about a perceived lack of authenticating practices around LGBT+
identities specifically in relation to the curriculum (usually construed as
negative veracity and therefore ‘dishonesty’). Some of the young people
specifically mentioned the subject of English and all reported an absence of
authentication around LGBT+ identities in their English classes, as in the
examples below:

AMY: it wasn’t really discussed if it was discussed at all it

was discussed in passing and then it’s gone
I remember reading what’s the book called brilliant
book The Color Purple fabulous book I stayed up all
night reading it was one of those books for me but
even with that it wasn’t really mentioned (absence of
authentication) which to me was like surely that’s a
huge part of this book.
ABBY: [discussing studying Oscar Wilde in English] the teacher
would be like brush it off oh you’re reading a bit far
into this [. . .] he’d be like Abby you’re just looking a
bit too far (absence of authentication)

As well as stating that LGBT+ identities and issues were absent as a form of
authenticating practice from the English curriculum, Amy points out how this
can have a negative and confusing effect. In discussing the teaching of The
Color Purple, she reflects on her confusion about the absence of discussion
of the lesbian relationship which she considers to be at the very heart of the
novel. This contributes to Amy’s overall view of her school as unaccepting
and hostile in relation to LGBT+ identities. Similarly, Abby reflects on her
experience of studying the work of Oscar Wilde in English and offering an
interpretation of the work in relation to Wilde’s known homosexuality. Abby
reports that the teacher claimed she was ‘reading a bit far into this’, thus
closing down an opportunity for discussing sexuality issues in the context of
the lesson.
The occurrences of participants noting an absence of authentication could
arguably also be coded as illegitimation, as the cumulative effect of the lack of
authentication at a micro level results in illegitimation at an institutional level.
I return to this point later. When authentication did occur in relation to LGBT+
identities, it tended to be expressed as hypothetical or as something which was
desired, but which did not currently happen in school. I have termed these
occurrences as irrealis authentication (a term used in appraisal analysis –
see appraisal section for more detail) to indicate that the speaker is referring
to something hypothetical rather than actual instances. Irrealis markers are
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 63

realized through the use of certain modal verbs and other verbs of intent, but
also other lexical resources can be used (note the use of would, can and if in the
extracts below). Some typical occurrences of irrealis authentication (which are
often construed as positive valuation in appraisal terms) being used by
the participants to express a need for the actual authentication of LGBT+
identities are as follows:

AMY: I think English is perhaps the best subject to introduce

it through it’s a very what can I say creative subject
you can’t get English right or wrong because it’s all
about a matter of opinion and your perception a book
can mean something to me and mean something completely
different to you and I think it’s a good way of maybe
celebrating differences so I think it’d be a perfect
subject to really egg on the issue of homophobia and
sexuality making it just an everyday thing that it’s
not it doesn’t have to be a ‘right now we’re gonna talk
about gay issues’you know it can just be a part of
everyday conversation and it not have to be focused on
(irrealis authentication)
FAY: maybe if there’s you know like there’s different groups
things like that there’s well if there’s like an agent
from each of them that went to the school to the
different schools just to speak about it in an
assembly and like let all the kids know about it [. . .]
make it more visible make everyone know ‘hello we are
here’(irrealis authentication)

In these instances, the young people do not state that LGBT+ identities are
authenticated but, instead, provide helpful suggestions for how they believe
LGBT+ identities could be authenticated within the school environment. Amy
suggests curriculum changes to English (such as incorporating texts in English
that contain gay characters) and the opening up of conversations which
normalize sexual diversity (‘it can just be a part of everyday conversation’).
Fay suggests assemblies and support groups as ways of increasing visibility of
LGBT+ identities (‘hello we are here’). The irrealis (unrealized) nature of
these suggested authentication strategies is indicated through the use of modal
verbs (in Amy’s extract, note the use of ‘can’ and ‘would’) and modal adjuncts
such as ‘maybe’ and ‘if’ (used by both participants). They state in these
extracts that, if these strategies are deployed in schools, then it is more likely
that LGBT+ identities will become authenticated.
The young people use denaturalization (construed as negative veracity)
mainly to refer to their efforts at concealing their LGBT+ identities in the
school environment, as in the following example:
64 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

AMY: I knew that I should tell somebody about what was going on
so I told my mum but it’s not one of those things that
you really wanna spread about even more you don’t wanna
say that to anybody so it was keep it quiet it’ll go
away keep it quiet it’ll go away kind of a feeling for
me that if I just carry on and just keep doing my work
and stop playing football and say ‘yea I like that boy
in the magazine’(denaturalization) try and conform
to a certain extent that it it’ll all be just go away
(denaturalization)

Amy had earlier discussed having been bullied because students had
believed her to be a lesbian. She reports (above) how she subsequently
pretended (an instantiation of denaturalization) to be attracted to boys to
avoid further bullying. Thus, fear is a key emotion (expressed in
appraisal terms as insecurity) which the participants express in relation
to the occurrences of denaturalization, suggesting that they experienced
school as a non-tolerant and threatening environment in relation to their
sexual orientation. This denaturalization example shows overwhelmingly
that, for the most part, the young people were not comfortable with disclos-
ing their sexual identity at school and did not view school as a safe and
tolerant environment. But, importantly, the young people see the introduc-
tion of more visible and numerous authentication strategies (such as the
curriculum changes and introduction of groups and assemblies addressing
LGBT+ issues mentioned by Amy and Fay in earlier examples) as being a
means of changing this. This is a significant and helpful point which could
help schools understand how to create safer and more accepting and inclu-
sive environments for their students.
Denaturalization was also used by the young people to indicate how silence
and absence around non-heterosexual identities functioned to denaturalize
them, as in the following examples:

JOSH: they never really sit you down and talk to you about
it they sort of just push it aside and sweep it
under the mat (denaturalization)
ASHFORD: for us that’s all just like shoved under the carpet
and ignored as much as possible
(denaturalization)

The denaturalization tactic is used here to render LGBT+ identities as ‘not

authentic’ because they are not afforded any visibility in the school context.
Denaturalization was used in a similar way by the educators, as will be
discussed in Chapter 4.
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 65

Authorization and Illegitimation

The final pair of tactics in Bucholtz and Hall’s framework are authorization
and illegitimation within the power dimension. They consider the structural
and institutional aspects of identity formation. Illegitimation can be enacted
through the censoring or ignoring of particular identities, as well as by expli-
citly dismissing them and this enactment of illegitimation was found to
frequently occur in the data. The occurrences of authorization which relate
to sexual orientation in the data are quite complex. Some of the instances refer
explicitly to the perceived authorization of heterosexual identities in the school
context. For example:

INT: were issues around heterosexuality ever raised did that

come up in discussion or did that come up in analyzing
a text or a film
CARL: yea cuz they was all about men and women men being with
women (authorization of heterosexuality)

Here, Carl reports that heterosexual relationships between women and men
were explicitly discussed when they occurred in the materials being used in
lessons, a clear example of the institutional authorization of heterosexual
identities. Although they were few, some examples did refer to the authoriza-
tion of LGBT+ identities. However, on close examination, it appears that these
occurrences tend to be hypothetical or irrealis, as is the case with many of the
authentication examples which refer to LGBT+ identities. There were, in fact,
hardly any examples of the actual authorization of LGBT+ identities. Most of
these examples involved the young people constructing an ‘idealized’ version
of the school environment in which LGBT+ identities would be authorized
(irrealis authorization). This occurs in a similar way to the ‘idealized’ or
irrealis authentication of LGBT+ identities discussed in the previous section.
For example:

AMY: outside the school I had [name of youth group] but it would
have been nice from an earlier age than so before
I even reached senior school to know that
homosexuality exists and that it’s all right
(irrealis authorization)

In this example, Amy uses the modals ‘would have’ within the verbal group to
indicate that the authorization practice of ‘knowing that homosexuality exists
and that it’s all right’ had not actually occurred in primary school but that she
would have experienced this as something positive (‘it would have been nice’)
66 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

if it had occurred. The authorization ‘it’s all right’ is, again, a hypothetical
endorsement of LGBT+ identities as being socially sanctioned within school.
Again, the fact that most occurrences of authorization in relation to LGBT+
identities were irrealis (such as the one above) suggests that the young people
perceive a need for actual authorization and that this would be something that
would have improved their own school experiences.
Another key point emerging from the analysis of authorization is that many
of the occurrences refer to the young people’s perceived authorization of
homophobic identities. The latter is often experienced and identified through
the inaction of schools and teachers towards homophobic bullying. By not
challenging homophobic practices, the young people perceived ‘the school’ as
colluding in those practices. In the example below, Carl states that he was
‘getting bullied’ and that he experienced this bullying as being authorized by
the school through their lack of response to it (‘they wasn’t doing anything
about it’ and ‘the bullies would be let go’). Given that bullying is usually an
activity that is challenged and reprimanded within schools, Carl’s assertion
that his teachers neither challenged the homophobic bullying nor reprimanded
the bullies is noteworthy as an example of the authorization of bullying
through inaction on the part of the school. Carl also refers to the habitual
nature of this through his use of the phrase ‘a lot of that happened’.

CARL: I was getting bullied and I was going to them [teachers]

and they wasn’t doing anything about it
(authorization of homophobic bullying expressed as
negative CAPACITY attributed to teachers)a lot
of that happened the bullies would be let go
(authorization of homophobic bullying expressed as
negative CAPACITY attributed to teachers)

The examples of illegitimation, as expected, often refer to the young people’s

perceived illegitimation of LGBT+ identities; the young people reflect on
experiencing school as a place where LGBT+ identities are, for the most part,
illegitimized. In the extract below, Tad reports his homosexuality as being
constructed as a ‘problem’ by his school, which is an example of the school’s
illegitimation of gay identity. Tad also reports that he was ‘asked to leave the
school’ when he did not supply the names of his bullies. This is a further
instantiation of illegitimation in that the school chose to exclude a gay student
rather than those who were bullying him. In the data, most of these types of
occurrences of illegitimation were expressed in appraisal terms as negative
propriety ascribed to the self.

TAD: I was seen as a sort of a main problem (illegitimation) and

because the bullying was limited by some of the
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 67

teachers pinpointing who was bullying me wanted to ask

names but obviously I wasn’t that comfortable in
giving out names for fear of being hurt again so
because I didn’t respond in the way that they wanted me
to I was asked to leave the school the tutor sat down
with my mother and said ‘either way he’s black he’s gay
and he’s gonna have problems anywhere he goes’
(illegitimation)

As in previous extracts, Tad states fear (realized as insecurity in the

appraisal system) as being a key emotion which he experienced in relation
to this aspect of his schooling; he reports not naming his bullies for fear of
further bullying and goes on to state how his gay identity was subsequently
illegitimized rather than the identities of the bullies being illegitimized.
There were numerous other instances in the data set of the young people
reporting on their schools’ illegitimation of LGBT+ identities. Some examples
are as follows:

RUBY: at my new school they’re currently discouraging gays

and stuff [. . .] they’re just like we don’t like
people being gay and we don’t encourage people
being gay (illegitimation)
DAN: when we did about marriage it has to be heterosexual
cuz it has to I asked the teacher and she said we
can’t do anything like LGBT and marriage because
it’s illegal to do it in the church and school
(illegitimation)
ASHFORD: we had to do an anti-homophobia poster and on mine
I referenced asexuality on it and my teacher told
me off for it (illegitimation)
ASHFORD: they were talking about friends and relationships
and all that in French and in his paragraph he put
down boyfriend and he keeps doing it to see how
many times it’s corrected to girlfriend and right
now it’s been seven times he’s been corrected from
boyfriend to girlfriend in French
(illegitimation)
ABBY: girls couldn’t wear blazers and boys couldn’t wear
jumpers and the boys had to wear ties and the
girls didn’t have to wear ties and they wore like
the feminine the V tops which I hated but we
weren’t allowed to wear ties because it was you
know in a grammar school it’s like boys and girls
there’s no in between (illegitimation)
68 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

NICKY: they’re kinda just like girl boy this is what

you get as a girl this is what you get as a
boy but they’d never kind of like have the
possibilities of in-between
(denaturalization/illegitimation)

In the extracts above, it is not only LGB identities which are perceived to be
illegitimated in the school context. Ashford reflects on the illegitimation of
asexuality and Abby and Nicky report illegitimation occurring in relation to
non-normative gender identities and gender diversity.
However, illegitimation also occurred in relation to the identities of homo-
phobic ‘bullies’ throughout the interviews. For example, the students some-
times discussed particular teachers who challenge homophobic bullying and
are therefore perceived as illegitimizing those who construct an identity as a
bully. In doing so, they condemn their behaviour using negative propriety.
For example:

FAY: in certain classrooms the only time this girl starts

having a real fight and comes over and fights me the
teacher runs out the classroom right goes to the
classroom next door which is Mr [Name] he was a safe
good teacher he was safe he was the safest teacher
I would say and he came in like and was like ‘right
get off her now’ literally he didn’t that’s why he was
so safe he would say if they were being bullied if
they started saying anything he would go straight
to the room like ‘oy stop that’ (illegitimation of
bullying)

Here, Fay reports that because she perceives homophobic bullying to be

illegitimized in this context, she has a good relationship and responds well to
the teacher (‘he was safe’). Thus, when homophobic bullying is illegitimized,
Fay’s emotional response and enjoyment of school is more positive. In fact, all
of the young people interviewed perceived teachers’ explicit illegitimization of
homophobic bullying as an experience which made them feel more positive
about engaging with school.
In sum, findings from the data presented in this chapter so far indicate that
in the schools attended by the young LGBT+ people, there is a state of
pervasive illegitimation surrounding LGBT+ identities. The participants
express a desire for this institutional illegitimation to be replaced by author-
ization using a range of authentication strategies in their schools, and give
specific examples of how this may be achieved in different lessons and as
whole-school strategies.
 Appraisal: Framework 69

Appraisal: Framework
The next stage in the analysis involved analyzing the interviews using the
framework of appraisal (Martin, 2000; Martin and White, 2005) in order to
provide a more nuanced analysis of the evaluative language used by the young
people. As explained earlier in this chapter, appraisal also provides a
framework for analyzing how some of the tactics of intersubjectivity are
realized in specific units of linguistic analysis. The tactics, therefore, can be
construed as interactional effects or outcomes of the linguistic markers of
evaluation. The analysis of evaluative language also provides more informa-
tion about how the young people feel and intersubjectively position themselves
in relation to sexual diversity issues in schools and how they evaluate their
experience of being LGBT+ in school. The framework of appraisal is
explained in this section and is used to analyze interview data both in this
chapter and in Chapter 4 (educator interviews).
Appraisal provides a framework for analyzing and describing evaluative
language and categorizing the ways that feelings, emotions, attitudes, values,
social relationships and experiences are encoded in language. The appraisal
system categorizes the ways that social relationships and experiences are
encoded in and enacted through language. Martin defines appraisal as:
The semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements, and valuations, along-
side resources for amplifying and engaging with these evaluations. (Martin, 2000: 145)

Appraisal consists of the systems of attitude, graduation and

engagement. attitude is the primary system through which people
express emotions, judgements and values and is therefore of most interest in
the present study. Martin identifies three broad subsystems of attitudinal
positioning within the appraisal system: affect, which refers to the lin-
guistic resources deployed for construing the individual’s emotional responses;
judgement, which refers to the linguistic resources deployed for construing
moral or social evaluations of behaviour; and appreciation, which refers to
the linguistic resources deployed for construing the ‘aesthetic’ qualities of
processes and natural phenomena. When people talk about sexuality, they tend
to talk very explicitly about personal feelings, emotions, values and judge-
ments. For this reason, appraisal is a suitable analytical framework. Some
examples of each of the main subsystems of attitude are included below
(appraising items are underlined).

AFFECT:
it’s sort of discomforting when they’re saying you have sex with a
woman and that’s the end of it (INSECURITY)
over the summer I’d been feeling really bad (UNHAPPINESS)
70 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

JUDGEMENT:
I had to leave due to my dyslexia and they couldn’t cater for it
(-CAPACITY)
they don’t really get that it’s part of their job (-CAPACITY)
I didn’t say anything to any of the teachers (-VERACITY)

APPRECIATION:
this kind of was a positive story (+VALUATION)
it’s just a waste of effort and money and stuff and we’re not
actually learning what we need to learn (-VALUATION)

As indicated above, each of the categories can have a positive or negative

value. These values work on a sliding scale of graduation, where
evaluations may be intensified, played down and where comparisons may be
drawn for amplifying effect. Appraisal categories are mainly distinguished
semantically, and are realized primarily through the lexico-grammar of a text.
Figure 3.2 provides an overview of the system of attitude.
Each of the three subsystems of attitude will now be explained in more
detail before discussing the findings of the study.
Affect is primarily concerned with the semantic resources deployed for
construing emotions and feelings. Martin (2000) and Martin and White (2005)
subdivide affect into four subsystems to add delicacy to the framework.
Table 3.3 shows the affect subcategories which work on a sliding scale of
positive and negative dimensions.
Judgement enables a speaker/writer to evaluate behaviour as conforming
or not conforming to a particular set of social/cultural norms. This is the aspect
of attitude that deals with social evaluations of behaviour and social
practice, and it is these aspects of evaluative language that position the
individual within a broader social and cultural system. judgement is sub-
divided into two broad areas:
Social esteem – Assesses institutions, individuals and behaviours in terms of their:
normality (how usual/unusual they are), capacity (how capable they are) and
tenacity (how determined or resolute they are). Social esteem markers provide
evaluations of how behaviour conforms or does not conform to socially desirable
standards.
Social sanction – Assesses institutions, individuals and behaviours veracity (how
truthful they are) and propriety (how ethical they are) and provides evaluative
markers which indicate whether a behaviour is seen as right or wrong. (Based on
Martin, 2000)
Figure 3.3 summarizes the judgement system.
Appreciation is the subsystem of attitude that expresses positive and
negative evaluations of texts, processes and phenomena. Affect and
 Appraisal: Framework 71

Table 3.3 Subcategories of affect

Positive affect Negative affect

Inclination (expresses feelings of desire) Disinclination (expresses feelings of fear)

Happiness (expresses feelings of
cheerfulness and affection)
Security (expresses feelings of confidence
and trust)
Satisfaction (expresses feelings of interest
and admiration)
Unhappiness (expresses feelings of misery
and antipathy)
Insecurity (expresses feelings of disquiet and
surprise)
Dissatisfaction (expresses feelings of ennui
and displeasure)

Impact
(did it grab me?)
Reaction
Quality
(did I like it?)
Balance
(did it hang together?)
Appreciation Composition
(of text/process) Complexity (was it hard to follow?)

Valuation
(was it worthwhile?)

Un/happiness
(affairs of the heart)

Affect In/security
(emotion) (eco-social well being)

Dis/satisfaction
(pursuit of goals)

Normality (is s/he special?)

Capacity (is s/he capable?)

Judgement Tenacity (is s/he dependable?)
(behaviour)
Veracity (is s/he honest?)

Propriety (is s/he beyond reproach?)

Figure 3.2 Attitudinal appraisal framework

(adapted from Eggins and Slade 1997, and Martin and White, 2005)
72 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

Figure 3.3 judgement categories (based on Martin, 2000)

judgement are different in that they refer to the feelings and judgements of
people. According to Martin (2000), the appreciation subsystem is organ-
ized around three variables – reaction (the degree to which the text/process/
phenomena in question captures our attention and the emotional impact it has
on us), composition (our perceptions of proportionality and detail of the
text/process/phenomena) and valuation (assessment of the social signifi-
cance of the text/process/phenomena).
Martin argues that both judgement and appreciation are, to a certain
degree, ‘institutionalisations of feeling’ in that they both encode feelings.
Martin proposes that affect is the basic system of attitude, which is then
institutionalized into judgement and appreciation so that ‘judgement
institutionalizes feelings as proposals (about behaviour), whereas appreci-
ation institutionalizes feelings as propositions (about things)’. (Martin 2000,
147) For example, in the extract below, Sex and Relationships Education
classes as a phenomenon are negatively valued using the appraising items ‘a
waste of effort and money and stuff’ and ‘we’re not actually learning what we
need to learn’ which are labelled as appreciation.

it’s [SRE] just a waste of effort and money and stuff and we’re not
actually learning what we need to learn (-VALUATION)

But describing SRE lessons as being ‘a waste of effort. . .’ implies that I feel
dissatisfied by the lessons and I experience negative emotion as a result of its
negative value, therefore the evaluation contains an element of affect at its
most basic level which is then institutionalized into an evaluation of something
as ‘a waste of effort and money’. For ease of reference, I have simply ‘double-
coded’ the relevant examples cited in this paper, as the distinction between
 Appraisal: Analysis 73

90

80 79

70

60

50 46
40 36
31
30
22
20
12 14
10
1
0
Dis/inclination Un/happiness In/security Dis/satisfaction
Positive Negative

Figure 3.4 Affect – Evaluation of own feelings

whether the appreciation is institutionalized affect or not is not of central

importance in this analysis.

Appraisal: Analysis
In this section, findings are presented around the three main subsystems of
affect, judgement and appreciation. Each attitude marker was
identified in the data and then all markers were counted up. Within each
subsystem, the numbers of attitude markers in the whole data set are
presented and discussed in the sections below. It was also useful to separately
examine the attitude markers used when the young people were referring to
their own feelings and judgements only. In the overall markers, attitudes
expressed towards and ascribed to others (e.g. teachers, parents) are also
included. The quantitative findings are presented using bar charts in each case
and then discussed in more detail with illustrative examples from the data.
Whilst the quantitative findings are useful for giving an overview of the main
feelings, judgements and valuations which predominate in the data, a qualitative
examination of specific examples is revealing for seeing how these markers are
being used in context and, importantly, what some of their key referents are and
how they help to realize intersubjective processes of identification.

Affect
Figure 3.4 shows the distribution of the different types of affect markers
used by the young people to refer to their own feelings and emotions.
74 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

Figure 3.4 shows that the most frequently occurring affect category is
unhappiness followed by insecurity. In all four of the affect subcat-
egories, negative feelings occur more frequently than the corresponding posi-
tive ones. This shows that the young people’s evaluation of their own feelings
throughout the interviews in relation to their gender and/or sexual identity and
school is overwhelmingly negative.
The most frequently occurring of all of the subcategories is unhappiness.
Some examples are included below (appraising items are underlined):

ASHLEY: I’ve always had sort of really terrible anxiety and

depression and sort of gradually feelings got
worse and worse
FAY: I hated school I used to do whatever I wanted to get
away from it it was that bad
JOSH: screaming on the inside like I’m not happy at this
school I’m getting bullied
MARTIN: I had loads of problems at school [. . .] it [school] was
just awful for me
TODD: I had anger issues I used to throw tables and chairs and
walk out crying cos things made me really upset

The young people also express insecurity relatively frequently when dis-
cussing their own feelings of being LGBT+ in school. Some examples include:

ASHLEY: there was a dress code and I had to abide by that and all
of that made me feel very uncomfortable
ASHLEY: it would be just very confrontational in a way that
sort of made me very very anxious gave me sort of
panic attacks
JOHN: I got that all the time as well as the dirty looks that
make you feel uncomfortable
JOSH: it’s just sort of discomforting when they’re saying
when you have sex with a woman and that’s the end
of it
ABBY: I remember this relationship sort of thing I had with
this one girl and like I was terrified she’d like use
it if we’d fall out I don’t know why it’d bother me
but if we’d fall out she’d be like I’m going to tell
everyone and stuff I would be absolutely terrified
I would like have nightmares I wouldn’t be able to
sleep for weeks
 Appraisal: Analysis 75

Although not occurring as frequently as unhappiness and insecurity,

dissatisfaction occurs much higher than the corresponding satisfac-
tion subcategory (which occurs only once in the entire data set). In the
examples below, factors reported as causing feelings of dissatisfaction
included, most notably, the strict gendering of the school environment (Ashley
and Ashford) and the school’s SRE provision (Todd).

ASHLEY: I hated the fact that it was all boys I hated the fact
that I wasn’t they didn’t really want me to use my
chosen name they didn’t want me to use my chosen
pronouns
ASHFORD: that annoys me when the fire bell goes why do I need to
line up with a bunch of girls
TODD: you get like sexual health but it’s only on
straight people which was so annoying I was
like I don’t need to know all about this straight
stuff

Although the young people’s evaluations of their own feelings were more
negative than positive in all of the affect subcategories, it is still interesting
to examine the instances where they expressed positive affect in order to
uncover what it is about school environments that can result in positive
affect. Some examples of happiness and security are included below.
The factor that the young people attribute to their happiness and security
the most is having the support of individual teachers in the school, again,
emphasizing the importance of individual teachers as a recurring theme
throughout young people’s interviews.

ALEX: I had a mentor at school and he like helped me

(HAPPINESS) cos I was really troubled
JACK: an RE teacher actually supported me (HAPPINESS)
ASHFORD: my teacher that I trust (SECURITY)the most that
I went to about being trans he is one of the most
progressive people in the entire school
TAD: luckily I had in the school which I was being bullied
in a teacher who was gay and she worked with
physical education and she made it more
comfortable for me (SECURITY) to even be in that
environment

Some also attributed happiness and security to organizations outside of

the school itself, such as LGBT+ youth groups. But it is perhaps worth
76 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

18 17
16

14 13
12
12

10

8 7
6 5
4
2
2 1 1
0
Dis/inclination Un/happiness In/security Dis/satisfaction

Positive Negative

Figure 3.5 Affect – Evaluation of others’ feelings

emphasizing that these factors that are attributed to positive affect occur
outside the school rather than taking place within the school itself.

TODD: [LGBT+ youth group]’s given me a lot of help it’s really

helped me (HAPPINESS)
FAY: through coming to [LGBT+ youth group] I’ve actually
become a better person I’m not scared (SECURITY) of
my sexuality I’m not scared (SECURITY) of other
people
ASHLEY: we’ve also got a big LGBT network and my involvement in
that has been very helpful (HAPPINESS) it was also
really helpful (HAPPINESS) that I’m on the women’s
committee

Figure 3.5 shows the distribution of affect markers used when the young
people refer to the feelings of other people who they mentioned in the
interviews.
Figure 3.5 shows that insecurity is the most frequently occurring
affect subcategory used by the young people when talking about the feelings
of others, followed by disinclination and unhappiness. The total occur-
rences are lower overall though, reflecting that the young people provided more
evaluation of their own feelings than those of others in the interviews.
However, the affect attributed to other people is also overwhelmingly
negative. In the disinclination, unhappiness and insecurity
 Appraisal: Analysis 77

examples below, the young people attribute some of these feelings to other
LGBT+ students.

FAY: there could be kids out there like ‘I like this what does
that make me’something like that if they’re like
struggling (UNHAPPINESS) to know who they are
JACK: there’s seven people in that class that are thinking ‘oh
shit’(INSECURITY) right now
DAN: the only trans we have in the school which is quite I’ve
talked to him and he was like saying he found it
really hard (UNHAPPINESS) when he came cos he was
the only one and he found it really hard
(UNHAPPINESS)

Insecurity examples, in particular, were also attributed to teachers being

‘afraid’ to openly address sexuality issues in their classes and in school
generally:

HANNAH: I think a lot of teachers are scared (INSECURITY) to

bring it up
JOSH: Miss was very shocked (INSECURITY) when I wrote about
a gay teen suicide of Jamie Rodemeyer and he killed
himself and I wrote about that

Finally, some of the negative affect examples attributed to others referred to

their perceived discomfort and insecurity of non-heteronormative identities.

AMY: I had to change separate from the rest of the class

because they refused to change in front of me
(INSECURITY)
RUBY: they’re [the school] just like they’re not we don’t like
(DISINCLINATION) people being gay and we don’t
encourage (DISINCLINATION) people being gay

Taken together, these typical examples of affect suggest an overwhelmingly

negative school climate for LGBT+ students.

Judgement
Figure 3.6 shows the distribution of judgement markers used by the young
people when evaluating their own behaviour.
Figure 3.6 reveals that the judgement subcategories of capacity and
veracity occur the most frequently when the young people are making
78 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

40
36 36
35 32
30 28
24
25 22
20
16
15

10 8 8

5 3

0
Normality Capacity Tenacity Veracity Propriety

Positive Negative

Figure 3.6 Judgement – Evaluation of own behaviour

judgements about their own behaviour. The positive and negative veracity
examples refer mainly to the young people disclosing or not disclosing (being
‘out’ or ‘not out’) their gender or sexuality identity, as in the following
examples.

AMY: you don’t wanna say that to anybody so it was keep it

quiet it’ll go away keep it quiet it’ll go away
(-VERACITY) kind of a feeling for me [. . .] if I just
carry on and just keep doing my work and stop
playing football and say ‘yea I like that boy in
the magazine’try and conform (-VERACITY) to a
certain extent that it’ll all be just go away
ASHLEY: I came out in secondary school I was very open
(+VERACITY) about being trans I came out about
16 so both the school and pretty much all of the
students knew about it (+VERACITY)
JACK: I didn’t come out (-VERACITY) at school just because
it was quite homophobic and well especially in a
Catholic school when it’s always depicted as
being wrong in RE and stuff so like it was just
I weren’t willing to do it so I kept it to myself
(-VERACITY)
STEPHEN: I kind of came out (+VERACITY) slowly to my teachers
like I told my SEN [Special Educational Needs]
worker then they had a meeting with all the staff
 Appraisal: Analysis 79

ABBY: I’m still not out (-VERACITY) in that area because

it’s just not spoken about really

The attitudinal judgement subcategory refers to social behaviour, therefore

the markers can function to express aspects of social identity covered by the
ToI framework. In the above examples, negative veracity realizes denatur-
alization of LGBT+ identities and positive veracity is used to realize
authentication.
In the positive capacity occurrences in which the participants are
evaluating their own behaviour, these tend to occur in relation to positive
assessments of their own academic ability – they do not refer to anything
explicitly to do with gender or sexuality. However, the negative capacity
occurrences often refer to the participants’ perceived lack of knowledge
and awareness of gender and sexual diversity, in particular, anything
outside of heteronormativity (traditional gender binaries and heterosexuality).
These negative capacity markers often co-occur with negative affect
markers and denaturalization in the ToI framework, as in the following
examples:

FAY: at first I didn’t know (-CAPACITY) what a lesbian was

I only thought there was em gays and bis I didn’t even
know (-CAPACITY) there was a lesbian
(denaturalization) until I met that guy he told me
about lesbians and transsexuals and hermaphrodites
and loads of other areas but until I met him I didn’t
know (-CAPACITY) about any of that
(denaturalization)
JACK: always in my head when I was young I was thinking ‘I’m
never gonna be able to (-CAPACITY) come out’just
couldn’t (-CAPACITY) get on with my life just be
pretending (denaturalization)

In the normality and propriety subcategories of judgement, negative

occurrences are higher than positive ones. Some examples of negative nor-
mality and negative propriety are included below. The negative nor-
mality examples most often occur when the participant is evaluating their
own behaviour as different from the perceived ‘norm’ operating in the spatio-
temporal context of their school. In this way, many of the negative normal-
ity occurrences overlap with instances of distinction in the ToI framework
and, in doing so, this tells us which specific elements of evaluative lexico-
grammar function to realize the distinction. The negative propriety
examples below often occur when participants reflect on what behaviours (of
their own and others) were disallowed or condemned in the school context.
80 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

Thus, the negative propriety examples usually function to instantiate the

tactic of illegitimation.

FAY: I’ve had comments about being a dyke being a weirdo

being a freak (-NORMALITY; distinction)
JOHN: I wasn’t like out or anything like that but I still got
like ‘you poof’and all crap like that (-NORMALITY;
distinction)
JOSH: I’ve moved nearly every single time because of bullying
just like being the odd one out (-NORMALITY;
distinction) sort of thing never really fit in
(-NORMALITY; distinction) when I was younger
ABBY: girls couldn’t wear blazers and the boys couldn’t wear
jumpers (-PROPRIETY; illegitimation) and stuff
like that and the boys had to wear ties and the girls
didn’t have to wear ties and they wore like the
feminine v-tops which I hated but we weren’t allowed
to wear ties (-PROPRIETY; illegitimation) for a
while until the last year because it was you know in
a grammar school it’s like boys and girls there’s no
in between or anything
NICKY: it’s almost like if you’re the first one to come out and
be gay or dress differently you’re the one that’s
going to be made an example of (-PROPRIETY;
illegitimation) [. . .] it’s like being gay and
kind of like dressing gay is on another level so
you don’t wanna kind of bring the attention to
yourself
TAD: I was seen as a sort of main problem (-PROPRIETY;
illegitimation)

Tenacity is a relatively infrequently occurring subcategory of judgement

in the data. When it does occur, there are more positive than negative occur-
rences and these are mainly to do with the young people reflecting on their
own perseverance and resilience in the face of perceived adversity surrounding
gender and sexual diversity issues, as in the following examples:

CHARLIE: if a random kid like just like bullies for any reason
I don’t let it get to me (+TENACITY)
MARTIN: I had fortnightly meetings with the principal
because I was the only one to stand up
for (+TENACITY) the way things were in
school
 Appraisal: Analysis 81

160
139
140

120
99
100
85
80

60
38
40 30
16 17
20 8
4 5
0
Normality Capacity Tenacity Veracity Propriety

Positive Negative

Figure 3.7 Judgement – Evaluation of others’ behaviour

Examples such as these show that the young people interviewed felt they
needed fairly high levels of tenacity in order to survive and thrive in the
school environment.
Figure 3.7 shows the distribution of judgement markers used by the
young people when evaluating the behaviour of other people who are referred
to in the interviews.
Figure 3.7 reveals quite different trends in evaluating the behaviour of others
from the most frequent ways that the young people evaluated their own
behaviour. In making judgements about the behaviour of others, propriety
emerges as the highest category (both positive and negative) suggesting that
the young people are concerned with the moral and ethical behaviour of others,
whereas they are more concerned with honesty and capability when evaluating
their own behaviour. Because of its high frequency, it is worth examining who
and what sort of behaviour is being judged as unethical and immoral by the
young people. In the examples below, several instances of propriety are
attributed to other young people in relation to their positive or negative
attitudes towards gender non-conforming and/or LGBT+ identities and rela-
tionships (both their own and those of others):

AMY: children are so critical (-PROPRIETY) as we were

saying children are cruel (-PROPRIETY)
ASHLEY: no one has really said anything awful to me about my
gender or sexuality everyone’s been kind of
accepting (+PROPRIETY)
82 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

CARL: every time we had an assembly if there was an award

ceremony and he had to go up and get a certificate
or anything they’d all shout out hide your arse or
watch your arse something like that (-PROPRIETY)
FAY: they like treated me with respect (+PROPRIETY) they
didn’t treat me like I was different
RUBY: we did have one lesbian cover teacher who came in and
like some of the guys in that class were complete
dickheads (-PROPRIETY)
HANNAH: we had a gay teacher once and she got mocked a lot for
being gay (-PROPRIETY)
NICKY: there was an out lesbian couple and as soon as everyone
found out about them people refused to get changed
in the same changing room at PE and no teacher ever
did anything about it (-PROPRIETY)

Other examples attribute positive or negative propriety to particular teachers

in the young people’s schools.

ASHLEY: the first person I came out to at school was a teacher

and was the head of the English department [. . .] he
was completely accepting of it (+PROPRIETY)
I sort of came to him in a distraught mess and he
was just great (+PROPRIETY)
CARL: I actually started telling people I was gay and then
Mr Baker changed and he started to be very nasty
to me (-PROPRIETY)
FAY: some of the teachers were really horrible to me
(-PROPRIETY) because I was bi
STEPHEN: my English teacher’s like she’s really supportive of
it and she’s always on about treating people
equally no matter what the sexuality or what the
sexual identity is (+PROPRIETY)
ASHFORD: we had two lessons on it and one of them was we had to
do an anti-homophobia poster and on mine
I referenced asexuality on it and my teacher told
me off for it (-PROPRIETY)
ASHFORD: the entire class is just really transphobic
(-PROPRIETY) and it’s just not a very nice
atmosphere and the teachers almost laugh along
with it (-PROPRIETY)
MARTIN: my head of year was amazing she was always helpful
(+PROPRIETY)
 Appraisal: Analysis 83

Negative propriety also occurs when evaluating the school’s (perceived

negative) attitude towards LGBT+ issues when compared to their positive
attitudes towards race and ethnicity.

ASHFORD: if it ever does come up at our school it is dealt with a

lot more seriously than homophobia [. . .] it’s like
Black History month is celebrated in schools and
anything to do with sexism and breaking down
barriers and sexism is celebrated in schools all
different religions celebrated in schools and
then Pride month is completely ignored
(-PROPRIETY)

Many of the negative (and some positive) capacity examples used by

the young people usually involved judging the behaviour and perceived
capabilities of teachers. These examples reflect the participants’ perceptions
that many teachers are unable to know how to address issues of gender and
sexual diversity in schools. Significantly, the teachers make the same kinds
of negative capacity judgements about themselves, as will be discussed
in Chapter 4. In their interviews, the teachers’ capacity judgements of
their own behaviour are mainly concerned with the differing levels of
knowledge and awareness of homophobia and sexual diversity issues that
teachers claim to have. So both students and teachers express concern over
a perceived lack of knowledge and ability for adequately meeting the needs
of a sexually diverse student population in their schools. When the teachers
do express positive capacity, it usually refers to them reporting that they
feel very knowledgeable about sexual diversity issues. Importantly, they
attribute this to their life experiences outside school, rather than indicating
that it is derived from any pre-service or in-service training. Another key
similarity between the teachers’ and the young people’s use of capacity
markers is that both sets of participants perceive silence and inaction to be
problematic forms of behaviour in their schools and indicators of negative
capacity. Such instantiations include phrases such as ‘it wasn’t really
spoken about’ and ‘no one seemed to do anything about it’. Similar
examples from the teacher interview data are included and discussed in
Chapter 4. The negative capacity examples often function to construe
denaturalization in the ToI framework (i.e. negative capacity equals
being a less knowledgeable and therefore ‘less authentic’ teacher) as in
some of the examples below.

ASHLEY: some teachers just didn’t pay attention to it

(-CAPACITY) and it would sort of become a process
of I would have to keep going back to say I’m still
having problems here
84 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

HANNAH: some people just don’t know how to handle it cos they
don’t understand it (-CAPACITY)
JACK: there was a gay lad in school and he did get bullied a
lot about it and no one seemed to do anything
about it (-CAPACITY)
RUBY: schools just like it’s not really their problem it’s
like something personal that they have to kind of
deal with and they don’t really get that it’s part
of their job (-CAPACITY; denaturalization) it’s
just like literally your job
STEPHEN: teachers have to be better educated (-CAPACITY)
quite a lot of them are quite older so they don’t
understand it (-CAPACITY) really
ABBY: teachers just need to open their eyes (-CAPACITY)
[. . .] like you’re teaching about this author you
have no idea (-CAPACITY) what they’re actually
writing about you need to get some education
NICKY: I just go back to they need to be educated better
(-CAPACITY)
TODD: I got bullied and I told a teacher she didn’t do
anything it was just rubbish (-CAPACITY)

The veracity examples are mostly negative and predominantly refer to

students’ perceived pretence on the part of teachers/the school that identities
beyond heterosexuality and binary cisgender exist, as in the following
examples:

ALEX: just didn’t even mention it (-VERACITY;

denaturalization) anything like that
JOHN: when I was at school like we never it was never spoke
about (-VERACITY; denaturalization)
JASON: that’s all just like shoved under the carpet and ignored
(-VERACITY; denaturalization) as much as possible
ABBY: they’d just say like we do not tolerate homophobia and
stuff they’d show like an emotional video never
bring it up again (-VERACITY; denaturalization)
every two years they’d do that
TODD: they were silent on it cos they didn’t really talk about
it (-VERACITY; denaturalization)

The veracity markers construe a denial (denaturalization in ToI terms) of

what the students themselves perceive to be the ‘truth’, i.e. that gender and
 Appraisal: Analysis 85

sexuality are diverse, non-binary and unstable. Therefore, the veracity

markers work to construct gender and sexual diversity in the schools as a kind
of ‘untruthful absence’.

Appreciation
Figure 3.8 shows the distribution of positive and negative markers of the three
main subcategories of appreciation.
Figure 3.8 shows that valuation is by far the most frequently occurring
subcategory of appreciation. The teachers in their interviews also deployed
valuation as the most frequent subcategory of appreciation but they
attributed positive and negative valuation to different phenomena from the
young people. This will be discussed further in Chapter 4. Given that valu-
ation is the appreciation subcategory that occurs the most in the data, it is
worth examining what particular things, entities and processes in the school
environment the young people actually evaluate in these occurrences. Table 3.4
provides a summary of the key entities which are valued positively and
negatively.
Out of the frequently occurring appraised items, school environment and
school policies are often ascribed negative value in relation to gender and
sexual diversity. The examples below show how the negative valuations of
school environment and policies often materialized as a perceived lack of
support and inaction. In particular, the students perceived their schools’ anti-
bullying policies as being largely ineffective due to them not being acted on.

120 111

100 94

80

60

40

20
5 6
2 2
0
Reaction Composition Valuation

Positive Negative

Figure 3.8 Appreciation

86 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

Table 3.4 Items ascribed positive and negative valuation by the young
people

+Valuation Valuation

LGBT youth group SRE

Specific teachers School (in very general terms)
English School’s treatment of homophobic bullies
Safe spaces PE
University/college (in general terms) Specific teachers
Being involved in women’s and/or LGBT+ Playground
organizations
Drama RE
Youth club School policies
Books with gay characters Physics
School security guards School’s handling of gender issues/gender
segregation
Music Exams
RE (Religious Education) School uniform policy
Being at a PRU (Pupil Referral Unit)
Discussions about LGBT identities, relationships
and issues
Year 11
Art

Some of the teachers in the study (see Chapter 4) also commented on this
perceived disparity between policy and practice.

HANNAH: I just don’t think there was any support at all

(-VALUATION) in our school
JOHN: schools at the minute don’t really do everything they
say (-VALUATION) like these policies and crap like
that
MARTIN: overall I think it [school bullying policy] was
ineffective (-VALUATION)

SRE also featured highly amongst the negatively valued phenomena by the
young people. Given the high levels of dissatisfaction with SRE expressed by
the young people, this is one of the reasons for focusing in more detail upon
the subject of SRE in Chapters 5 and 6. Such negative valuations were often
realized as students commenting on their experience of SRE as irrelevant and
meaningless due to its exclusive focus on binary gender and heterosexuality.
Even within the discourses of heterosexuality, the students perceived these to
be restrictive in only focusing on physiology (for girls, this only involved
periods), pregnancy and contraception.
 Appraisal: Analysis 87

ASHLEY: there was never really a point that they spoke about
anything other than the male development and the
straight standard relationship (-VALUATION)
ASHFORD: it’s like one of my friends at school is gay and I’m
asexual so I was I’ve been sitting through these
lessons which we’ve both been sitting through
these lessons which just don’t apply to us so it’s
just a waste of time and a waste of effort and
money and stuff and we’re not actually learning
what we need to learn (-VALUATION)
ABBY: you would have thought that would be taught in a
sexual health class and it really just never
touched it like the only thing that they’d talk
about was like periods (-VALUATION)
NICKY: that’s literally all it is this is how you have safe
sex if you don’t have safe sex then you’ll get
pregnant and you could also get that and this and
that is literally all I got taught (-VALUATION)
TODD: it’s all about reproduction how’s it gonna work if
like if it’s a vagina and another vagina or a penis
and another penis (-VALUATION)

Whilst SRE was overwhelmingly ascribed negative value, the subjects of

English and Drama stood out as being positively valued by many of the young
people.

AMY: I think English is perhaps the best subject (+VALUATION)

to introduce it through [. . .] it’s a good way of maybe
celebrating differences so I think it’d be a perfect
subject (+VALUATION)
CARL: when I done Drama that was okay that was good
(+VALUATION) I had a nice teacher as well

Whilst Amy attributes the positive value of English to the nature of the subject
itself (as being concerned with exploring ‘difference’ and encouraging discus-
sion of topics), Carl attributes the positive value of Drama to the Drama teacher,
rather than to the subject itself. Valuations of individual teachers are also
frequent throughout the data, although some teachers are valued positively
whilst others are ascribed negative value. Because teachers are ‘people’, the
appreciation markers are often double-coded with judgement as evalu-
ations of teachers’ behaviour. The frequent evaluations of individual teachers
show that they play a significant part in the school lives and experiences of the
young people. Again, a key finding is that the behaviour of individual teachers is
88 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

seen as being able to ‘make or break’ the young people’s experiences of gender
and sexual diversity in particular school subjects. This finding supports previous
work by Ellis and High (2004) who found that responses from young LGB
people in their study revealed the power of individual teachers in the pedagogic
relationship and how this facilitated positive attitudes towards sexual diversity.
Amongst processes and phenomena that were frequently ascribed negative
value, binary constructions of gender in schools were commented on by a
number of the young people.

ASHFORD: another thing that schools need to change is

segregating or like putting people in different
things because of their gender (-VALUATION)
ASHFORD: girls’changing room right next to it they’re on
completely different sides of the school and even
our PE lessons are quite often segregated which
is ridiculous (-VALUATION)

Examples such as those above reveal how the young people expressed an
overwhelmingly critical attitude towards what they perceived to be gender
‘segregation’ along the lines of binary sex. Therefore, the students themselves
experienced a relationship between gender and sexual diversity – if gender was
restricted, then that also made sexuality restricted and heavily policed in the
school context. PE was referred to as a subject in which sexuality was experi-
enced as heavily restricted as a result of binary gender segregation. This
supports work by Anderson (2013) and Rivers (2011) who have argued that
the principle cause of homophobic bullying is actually sporting abilities rather
than sexual orientation itself.

MARTIN: I was bullied and beaten at sports [UNHAPPINESS]

I have a phobia [INSECURITY] of sports I’ve got
numerous scars on my head from sports equipment
I’ve got one on my eyebrow from a cricket bat it was
people who just targeted me in something
TAD: I’ve always had an issue with physical education
because it’s a very intense sport it’s always the
boys are doing football it’s very aggressive
[-VALUATION] and very and as big as a person that as
I am I’m very feeble very spiritual very calm
person and in those kinds of environments I’m kind
of ‘whoa is the ball gonna hit me’you know
[INSECURITY] so that’s always been a touchy
[-VALUATION] subject for me
FAY: in PE it comes up in like the sporty area and there’s
more of it because there’s quite a few other kids in
 Appraisal: Analysis 89

the class and the teacher can’t watch every one of

them at the same time [-CAPACITY] so yea so in like
the sporty area it it’s not the best [-VALUATION]
JOHN: I hated PE I think I don’t like PE cuz it was proper like
boy-ey do you know what I mean [UNHAPPINESS] like
all the jocks and stuff like that and I’m just not
like that I was the one that just sat on the bench
and never did anything cuz I hated it
[UNHAPPINESS] and it makes me feel uncomfortable
[INSECURITY] as well because you know like when
somebody’s like proper [. . .] you know some chaps
right when they’re playing a game of basketball
football whatever they’d get proper competitive
and I hate that [UNHAPPINESS]

In the valuation subcategory of appreciation, there were many occur-

rences of irrealis positive valuation in which the young people ascribed
positive value to imagined or hypothetical phenomena and processes. These
irrealis examples are a useful indication of what young LGBT+ people
themselves believe would help to make schools more inclusive and accepting
of gender and sexuality diversity.
High up in the category of irrealis positive valuation are the inclusion of
explicit discussions and conversations about gender and sexuality identity in
school:

ASHLEY: I think that it would be good (irrealis +VALUATION) to

implement discussion of sexuality and gender
identity in any kind of conversation about sexual
health

Other students also value such discussions but not as explicit topics. Instead
they place positive value on the hypothetical scenarios of gender and sexuality
issues becoming a normal part of everyday conversations in school spaces:

HANNAH: when you do work around characters individually that

would be a part of it so I think that would it would
just raise awareness or it would just make it more
everyday or more kind of normal (irrealis
+VALUATION)
NICKY: make it visible and available rather than being like
this is what goes on in the world cause that’s what
we got as people that aren’t sure of their
sexuality we got the whole straight thing rammed
down our necks so it wouldn’t necessarily be nice
for us to be like right everyone’s gay now here you
90 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

go this is gay education and stuff like that but

something that’s just ready and available for them
if they do want to kind of explore (irrealis
authentication/irrealis +VALUATION)

A final key phenomenon which is ascribed irrealis positive valuation is the

notion of ‘safe spaces’ in school. Whilst some of the examples refer to the
explicit inclusion of spaces within school in which LGBT+-identified young
people can go and be guaranteed not to experience harassment or
discrimination, other examples refer to turning existing spaces which are
considered to be currently ‘unsafe’ into safer spaces. The most frequently cited
of such spaces were PE changing rooms and the playground.

ASHLEY: I think that in terms of policy there should really

have been some safer spaces (irrealis
+VALUATION)
ASHFORD: what’d be ideal (irrealis +VALUATION) would be like
cubicle changing rooms like in a swimming pool
FAY: the one place that can be the worst place [-
VALUATION] for a kid if they’re a bit different if
they’re bisexual or a lesbian or gay or trans or
anything or if they’re just completely different
[-NORMALITY] the one place is the playground
literally that is the one place where they have to
be quite well for me constantly moving around
different areas I even had to sneak out of school
when I was younger because I hated [UNHAPPINESS]
being there

Discussion
The main findings from the ToI analysis presented and discussed in this
chapter are, firstly, that illegitimation and distinction are the most frequently
occurring tactics. The distinction patterns of use suggest that many of the
young people experience feelings of difference in schools and consider them-
selves to be treated differently as a direct result of their gender and sexuality
identities. In the ‘realness’ dimension of the ToI framework, the young people
repeatedly recognize and report on a lack of authentication practices around
gender and sexual diversity in their schools. The lack of authentication of
LGBT+ identities at a micro level results in illegitimation of anything outside
the heteronormative at a more macro level. Denaturalization, lack of authenti-
cation and occurrences of irrealis authentication are often expressed as
marked absences. On the other hand, within the power dimension,
 Discussion 91

discriminatory practices around gender and sexual diversity are seen to be

authorized. The young people provide many specific examples of this (i.e.
students not being reprimanded for homophobic language and other behav-
iour). Within the authorization and illegitimation tactics, silence and inaction
are identified by the young people as significant problems in how they experi-
ence their gender and sexual identity in the school context.
Findings from the appraisal analysis reveal that the young people in
the study report experiencing high levels of unhappiness and insecur-
ity which they relate directly to the experience of identifying as LGBT+ in
school. Any positive affect was attributed mainly to actions and behaviour
of individual teachers and organizations and people outside the school itself
(e.g. youth groups). Within the judgement attitudinal subsystem, teachers
were often attributed negative capacity as a way of evaluating their
perceived in/abilities for dealing with issues around gender and sexual
diversity. The negative capacity markers often co-occur with unhappi-
ness and insecurity suggesting that a lack of capacity on the part of
teachers is felt to result in negative affect for the young people them-
selves. Negative propriety also occurs relatively frequently, again with the
young people evaluating the moral behaviour of individual teachers as a key
part of their narratives of personal experience. Given the amount of evalu-
ative language that is focused around teachers, the professional role of the
teacher is clearly a highly significant and impactful one for young people
identifying as LGBT+. Teachers were discussed using evaluative language
much more than peers and family members, for example, and were therefore
afforded a high priority in terms of affecting young people’s feelings and
own behaviours in schools. This warrants investigating the attitudes and
behaviours of teachers and other kinds of educators in more detail in
Chapter 4.
The patterns of appreciation show there is much positive valuation
of the subject of English and of specific teachers involved in working with the
young people participants. Conversely, there were high levels of negative
valuation attributed to the subject of SRE, the schools’ handling of homo-
phobic bullying, the subject of PE and specific teachers that the young people
had contact with in school. Given that some individual teachers were ascribed
positive value, this again suggests that the attitudes and behaviours of individ-
ual teachers can make a significant difference to the school experiences of
LGBT+-identified young people. The markers of irrealis positive valuation
provide potentially useful information about what the young LGBT+ people
would find helpful for increasing their levels of positive affect in the school
environment, namely, the inclusion of explicit discussions and conversations
about gender and sexuality identity in school and the provision of LGBT+
‘safe spaces’. The combined analysis of evaluative language and the linguistic
92 The School Experiences of LGBT+ Youth

construction of identification processes enables a detailed examination and

understanding of how these young people experience being LGBT+ in their
school environments. In the following chapter, I use the same analytical
frameworks of ToI and appraisal to investigate the school experiences of
sexual diversity from the perspective of educators.
4 Educators’ Perspectives on Language
and Sexual Diversity in Schools

In Chapter 3, many of the young people identified teachers as key evaluative

factors in influencing their positive or negative school experience. Specifically,
teachers’ perceived capacity and propriety were evaluated and how
these elements of social behaviour functioned to realize the young people’s
intersubjective processes of denaturalization and illegitimation. In the tactics
of intersubjectivity analysis, there were instances in which the young people
referred to particular teachers who they perceived as lending a degree of
authentication to their LGBT+ identities. In the appraisal analysis, negative
affect occurrences were used to describe teachers as ‘scared’ of addressing
gender and sexual diversity. Within the judgement subcategory, both
positive and negative propriety and capacity occurrences often related
to specific teachers and their perceived attitudes towards LGBT+ identities
(propriety) and their ability to deal with issues of gender and sexual
diversity (capacity). Individual teachers were one of the most frequently
occurring referents for both positive and negative valuation in the
appreciation subcategory. In sum, individual teachers are perceived by
the young people in Chapter 3 as being able to make a real (positive or
negative) difference to their school experiences. This provides a justification
for conducting a more detailed analysis of a sample of educators’ school
experiences and perspectives on sexual diversity issues. Beyond this research
project, teachers’ ‘capacity’ for addressing sexual diversity issues has been
commented on by LGBT+ rights organizations and educational campaigns.
For example, in an article published in 2013 in the British Times Educational
Supplement newspaper by the UK-based charity Stonewall, Tryl identifies
teachers’ ‘lack of confidence’ as being the most significant barrier to tackling
homophobic bullying in UK schools:
The single greatest barrier that teachers still face in tackling homophobic bullying is a
lack of confidence. Adding a new criminal offence won’t change this confidence deficit
[. . .] (Tryl, 2013: 23)

Whilst this may be true, this extract (which is fairly typical of the whole article)
is also rather problematic in its presentation of all teachers in deficit terms

93
94 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

(i.e. as having a ‘confidence deficit ’ and ‘lack of confidence’). The idea of

teachers ‘failing’ and ‘lacking confidence’ persists in the public mindset as a
key reason for the perpetuation of homophobia in schools. And the focus of
such ideas is almost exclusively on homophobia, rather than sexual diversity
issues more broadly. Chapter 3 reveals some of the varied and often complex
evaluations of individual teachers made by the LGBT+ students in the study.
The work presented in this chapter is also partly inspired by my dissatisfaction
at the continued blame that is placed on teachers and the way that teachers are
often referred to in negative and over-generalized ways. Whilst it is probably
true that some teachers do lack confidence and knowledge about how to
challenge gender and sexuality discrimination (and some teachers may actually
be complicit in perpetuating it), this is not the case for all teachers. And
teachers themselves cannot be held entirely responsible for the continuation
or reduction in discriminatory language and behaviour in schools.
In the research presented in this chapter, I draw on interviews and survey
responses of a sample of educators in which they explicitly report on their views
on sexual diversity issues in schools.1 Interviews are used to give the UK
educators a voice and to enable them to talk about their own experiences and
opinions in detail. Due to being based in the United Kingdom, it was not feasible
for me to travel to the United States to conduct interviews with the teachers in
Washington, DC, therefore I replicated the interview questions in the form of a
survey and distributed this electronically to a sample of DC-based educators. The
application of the ToI framework firstly provides insights into how the partici-
pants experience and reflect on gender and sexual diversity issues and identities in
relation to school. appraisal is then used to systematically explore how
specific aspects of the language used in the interviews embodies speakers’
feelings, attitudes and values towards sexual diversity issues in schools. As in
the previous chapter, the frameworks are used here in combination to analyze
the data. In both cases, educators were asked to reflect on their experiences of
how issues around sexual diversity are dealt with in their schools, and their
attitudes towards sexuality and schooling. As in Chapter 3, the analytical
layering of ToI and appraisal analysis offers a particularly comprehensive
means of understanding the perspectives and experiences of the educators.

Data
Data for this chapter comprises semi-structured interviews with 14 educators
working in a range of 11–16 and 11–18 schools in York and Birmingham in the
United Kingdom, and detailed survey responses from 23 educators working in

1
Participants include teachers, trainee teachers, school counsellors, headteachers and other
members of school management teams.
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 95

schools in Washington, DC in the United States. The UK teachers were recruited

through my own contact with local schools in both cities and the US teachers
were contacted via an electronic survey distributed to all public high schools in
Washington, DC. The UK-based interviews were individual and conducted over
the course of several months to fit in with the interviewees’ and researcher’s
availability in each of the research locations. In the interviews, the educators
discussed their experiences of sexual diversity issues. Each interview was audio-
recorded and lasted between twenty to forty minutes. To ensure confidentiality,
interviews took place privately in the teachers’ own classrooms in the schools in
which the teachers worked (in most cases, after school had finished for the day).
The survey questions used with the US educators were the same as those used in
the interviews with the UK participants. However, the survey instrument meant
that the questions were more structured and there was no room for flexibility in
terms of any developing discussions that may have emerged. But survey
respondents were given space to write responses to open questions and they
were also provided with an opportunity to express their experiences and
thoughts on other issues which they deemed relevant to the research which were
not included in the survey questions. The remainder of this chapter follows the
same structure as Chapter 3 – I discuss the findings from the ToI analysis
followed by the findings from the application of the appraisal framework.

Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis

The results of the ToI analysis are shown in Figure 4.1. Whilst these statistical
findings cannot provide detail about how and why the tactics are being used,
they give a useful starting point in terms of enabling us to see the prevailing
patterns of usage across the whole data set.
The results in Figure 4.1 show that the most frequently occurring tactic in the
data is illegitimation. The second highest is authentication. One key reason why
illegitimation occurs so frequently is because it actually refers to two predomin-
ant types of illegitimation – the perceived illegitimation of LGBT+ identities
(reported as coming from parents, other teachers and occasionally from stu-
dents), and the teachers’ perceived illegitimation of homophobic behaviour in
their schools. There is clearly a tension between these two uses of illegitimation
which will be discussed further below. A similar phenomenon occurs with the
tactic of authorization. Some uses of authorization refer to the teachers’ percep-
tions of LGBT+ identities being institutionally authorized in their schools, whilst
other uses of authorization refer to the reported authorization (institutional
legitimation) of homophobic (and other forms of discriminatory) behaviour.
The distinction tactic is often used when the teachers are marking out the identity
of their ‘school’ as being ‘different from’ other schools – many of the distinction
occurrences refer to the school being perceived as exceptional in that it is more
96 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

160

140 135

120

96
100

80 71
65 65
60

40
26
20

0
Adequation Distinction Authentication Denaturalisation Authorisation Illegitimation

Tactics of Intersubjectivity

Figure 4.1 Tactics of intersubjectivity

liberal and tolerant of gender and sexual diversity than other schools. The tactic
of denaturalization occurs when the teachers are discussing school attitudes
towards same-sex relationships and LGBT+ identities – they frequently report
these identities being denaturalized through silence and absence in the school
environment. The findings were very similar across the UK and the US data, the
only real difference being the slightly higher use of authentication over the
second most frequently used tactic of illegitimation. But the ways in which the
tactics were used (what they were used to refer to and so on) were remarkably
similar, suggesting comparable issues concerning gender and sexual diversity
are being recognized by the teachers in both the US and UK schools. Due to this
similarity in results across the two data sets, they will be considered together in
the remainder of this section.

Adequation and Distinction

Within the first pair of tactics – adequation and distinction – distinction is used a
number of times by the teachers in relation to other staff in their school as a
justification for not doing more around sexual diversity in schools. In the
following examples, distinction is used to create difference between staff
members in terms of their attitudes and stances towards gender and sexual diver-
sity. This is then used as a reason for not including teaching around gender and
sexual diversity more explicitly and comprehensively in the school curriculum,
i.e. for fear of offending those who are ‘not comfortable’ (note the overlapping
denaturalization) with sexual diversity (again, words and phrases which
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 97

instantiate the tactics in each example are underlined – no underline indicates that
the whole extract is instantiating the tactic). In the examples below, the distinction
in each case is realized as negative normality in appraisal terms.

DAVID: we are working with students parents staff who all

have different perceptions (distinction)
DAVID: you can’t assume that the values that will be shared
across the whole body of staff and sometimes
they’re not (distinction) perhaps I could put out a
behaviour review tomorrow and the values behind it
aren’t necessarily something that everyone will
go with in terms of the approaches we take on
various things (distinction)
NADINE: you’ve got such a diverse teaching staff
(distinction) I think a lot of it’s uncomfortable
(denaturalization; INSECURITY)
PAT: I am wary because for a start I don’t want to impose
things on other teachers who might not feel the
same as me (distinction)

Several of the distinction occurrences refer to different kinds of schools (again,

expressed through negative normality). In these examples, the ‘identity’ of
the school is expressed as ‘different’ (usually more liberal and tolerant) from
that of other schools.

JENNY: it’s a school with a lot more tolerance by students

towards each other (authorization) than I think
happens in a lot of schools (distinction)
NEIL: I’m sure there’s a different kind of homophobia that
goes on in public schools (distinction)
ROBERT: I certainly think my experience is a small percentage
compared to the majority (distinction)

There were some occurrences of distinction in which the teachers constructed

LGBT+ identities as gender-differentiated, as in the following example:

LAUREN: I think other you know less flamboyant males girls

I think I think it’s different for girls
(distinction)

This is an interesting observation and one which was more notable in the
analysis of the young people’s interviews discussed in Chapter 3. However,
98 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

discussion of gender in relation to sexual diversity by the teachers was

relatively low compared to that of the young people.

Authentication and Denaturalization

Within the second pair of tactics, several participants used authentication to
indicate strategies for positively acknowledging and recognizing LGBT+
identities within the school environment. In other words, they referred to
practices which were used, often routinely, to authenticate LGBT+ identities,
as in the following examples:

JOE: most classrooms are designated as LGBT ‘Safe Space’

(with posters displayed [authentication])
ROBERT: in terms of a presence they have stonewall posters
all around the school (authentication)
ELLIE: we did read a book that related to being an LGBT
student (authentication)
JENNY: we study the work of gay poets and we look at we look
at identity and relationship there
(authentication)
FRANCES: I do invite writers to my classroom, particularly
those who incorporate LGBT characters
(authentication)
PETE: materials, LGBT liaisons from DCPS, other workshops
hosted in each school. I have run some workshops
(authentication)
JOE: we have a ‘Gay/Straight Alliance’club that meets
weekly (authentication)
ADA: in art lessons stuff like that comes up
(authentication) and often it’s because we look
at David Hockney and give me three facts about
David Hockney he’s gay he smokes and he’s from
Yorkshire

The practices identified as authentication strategies for gender and sexual

diversity by the teachers are: posters, books containing LGBT+ content or
themes, workshops, groups (e.g. GSA in the United States) and conversations
about sexual identity that emerge from lesson content.
Authentication was also used to indicate the ‘genuineness’ of the identities
of students and teachers (with some of the respondents self-referring) who
were ‘out’ in their schools. In the following examples, authentication is used to
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 99

construe a ‘real’ sexual identity and is therefore realized as positive veracity

in appraisal terms.

JOE: many students and faculty are out (authentication)

along with a few transgender students
FRANCES: we also have several students in various stages of
transition, some openly to the student body some
just openly to the staff (authentication)
ELLIE: I do have colleagues-teachers and administrators
who are openly gay (authentication)
PETE: I have always been very open about it with students
(authentication)
JENNY: there are a number of people who’ve been ‘out and
proud’as it were who’ve been very clearly in gay
relationships who’ve held hands with children of
the same gender or been identified as a couple
(authentication)

Authentication is similarly used to refer to the ‘real-world’ LGBT+ identities

of people outside the school environment. The tactic is used here to draw
attention to students’ knowledge of real LGBT+ identities and how that often
sits in tension with the denaturalization of such identities within the school
context:

NEIL: there are real people out there who are gay not just Paul
O’Grady or Graham Norton on the television there are
real world homosexual people out there and they do
realize that (authentication)

Authentication is sometimes used by participants as a way of constructing

themselves as ‘authentic’ teachers and, therefore, justifying and emphasizing
the value of their opinions. In this way, authentication of the self is used as a
means of lending authority and trustworthiness to the propositional content of
the interview responses.

NATALIE: I’ve been teaching a long time I’ve been teaching

22 years (authentication)
LAUREN: I’ve taught for twenty years in a range of schools
mostly previously Brighton for twelve years at a
mixed comprehensive down there yeh bit of
experience and all the rest of it
(authentication)
100 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

In a number of places, authentication occurs but as irrealis authentication in

which the participants discuss what, hypothetically, would work to authenti-
cate LGBT+ identities in their schools rather than what does actually happen.
The irrealis nature of the following occurrences of authentication are indicated
through linguistic features such as grammatical modality and irrealis verbs
such as ‘need’ (and, in appraisal terms, construed as irrealis positive
valuation):

SALLY: I would like to include more, but currently only

explicitly contend with issues of LGBT identity/
issues in film and photography
(authentication). . .wish for more resources/
collaborators (irrealis authentication)
ELISE: I think it would be useful for them to have a contact
where they could get advice about how to do that
in the best way and discuss that (irrealis
authentication)
NATALIE: I think that sort of discussion would be productive
would help (irrealis authentication)
DAVID: what students need in front of them is they need that
personal story they need some kind of role model
and they need somebody who has sort of walked the
walk and been in schools and experienced both
sides of that experience (irrealis
authentication)

Turning to the occurrences of denaturalization, these are often used by

participants when they are discussing the feelings of discomfort experienced
by others in relation to sexual diversity. These ‘denaturalization as discom-
forting’ instances (realized as insecurity in the appraisal framework)
refer mainly to school staff, as in the following examples:

SALLY: many older staff members (and some younger ones) are
just not comfortable talking about LGBT issues/
students, and don’t stop to think about how to
prevent their isolation in the classroom or how to
interact with their parents (denaturalization)
ABBIE: I think some people perhaps are uncomfortable with
their own feelings about it (denaturalization)
NADINE: I think staff need to feel comfortable (irrealis
authentication) and I think at the moment maybe
that’s not the case for all staff
(denaturalization)
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 101

The people referred to in these examples are reported as experiencing non-

heterosexual and gender non-normative identities as denaturalizing. In other
places, it is education itself, rather than specific people, which is denaturalized.
This is particularly relevant as the denaturalization tactic is used in precisely
the same way by the young people in Chapter 3. Many participants, especially
in the United Kingdom, reported feeling as though the learning that happens in
schools is somehow ‘not real’ (it is denaturalized) and, therefore, issues around
gender and sexual diversity cannot be covered because that would constitute
‘real’ (authentic) learning which is not the role of schools. In the examples
below, participants make reference to ‘box ticking’, ‘teaching to the exam’ and
‘league tables’ as oppositional practices to what is considered to be authentic
learning experiences. In appraisal, these instances of denaturalization are
construed as negative veracity (i.e. the behaviours are evaluated as being
‘not truthful’).

ABBIE: ticking a box ticking a box Ofsted were coming

(denaturalization) it was just prior to an Ofsted
inspection and I think that’s why it was put there
I don’t know whether it would have been put there
otherwise (denaturalization)
ABBIE: it’s all like exam exam exam which is I mean I suppose
they have to because otherwise they’d get closed but
it y’know gives a sense of pace but it lacks depth
it’s skimming across the surface and getting them
through those hoops (denaturalization)
NEIL: I am concerned with passing my NQT year and ticking the
boxes (denaturalization)
NEIL: we look better on the league tables but are we a better
school at the end of it not necessarily
(denaturalization)

The third and final use of the denaturalization tactic occurs when the partici-
pants talk about the absence, silence and denial of any issues to do with gender
and sexual diversity in their schools. Again, this is a key finding as it is also a
notable feature of the ToI analysis of the young people’s interviews. It is
significant that both sets of participants use this tactic in the same way and
construe it as negative veracity on the part of ‘the school’ as a set of
depersonalized social actors. In the following examples, gender and sexual
diversity is denaturalized through its absence, invisibility and avoidance.

ADA: it’s not really something that’s talked about a great

deal I’m not aware of anything being proactively
done (denaturalization)
102 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

ELISE: from my experience of working here I think anything to

do with that aspect is skirted over swept under the
carpet and not talked about (denaturalization)
NATALIE: it’s all hidden and pushed off into corners
(denaturalization)
PAT: it was never an issue that was talked about or raised
with her (denaturalization) and you know I felt
she was kind of troubled
PAT: the positive aspects of gay culture or of people
being different is totally ignored
(denaturalization)

Authorization and Illegitimation

Authorization and illegitimation were, perhaps, the most interesting tactics in
terms of the analysis and findings, as was the case for the respective ToI
analysis of the young people’s interviews presented in Chapter 3. Like the
young people, the educators also used illegitimation to refer to their perceived
illegitimation of sexuality-based discrimination and bullying in their schools.
In the following examples, discrimination and bullying are illegitimized (real-
ized as negative propriety) by the teachers.

PETE: most teachers would not allow inflammatory language

(illegitimation) (fag, dyke, etc.) in his/her
classroom. In addition, we have done campaigns
at the middle school to get students to stop
using the phrase, ‘that’s so gay.’
(illegitimation)
NATALIE: no you don’t say that to anybody and it doesn’t matter
and it’s unacceptable at any level isn’t it
(illegitimation)
LAUREN: I’m not having it in my space (illegitimation of
homophobia) so you know fair enough they might
come out elsewhere but they know that it is wrong
we won’t talk I’m just trying to think actually we
do have those conversations about homophobia but
I wonder if I do have those conversations or if
I just make it very clear I’m not having it
(illegitimation)

Conversely, homophobia and other kinds of gender and sexual bullying are
frequently reported as being authorized by other staff within the schools that
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 103

the teachers work. In the following examples, teachers lament the school’s lack
of punitive action when it comes to bullying around gender and sexual
diversity through their use of the authorization tactic (construed as negative
capacity ascribed to school staff in the examples below):

PAT: the word ‘gay’is bandied around as an insult all the

time and no-one they don’t take any notice at all
(authorization)
SUSIE: they can say what they like to do with sexuality and
gender and that drives me up the bloody wall
because nobody really puts their foot down
(authorization)
SUSIE: I raised it with senior management I raised it with a
male member of senior management team and he
laughed (authorization)
NEIL: no-one else really challenges them on it so they just
get away with it (authorization)

In some instances, the teachers went further and noted that sexual bullying was
often authorized in the school environment while racism was consistently
illegitimated. This perceived ‘double standard’ between the school’s handling
of racist and homophobic incidents and practices was a recurrent theme in the
interviews of both the teachers and the young people:

LAUREN: homophobia is still acceptable (authorization) in a

way racism isn’t (illegitimation)
SUSIE: racial discrimination absolutely but sexual
discrimination it isn’t being picked up on it isn’t
being you know sexual discrimination on grounds of
sexuality gender discrimination on grounds of
gender not even biological sex isn’t picked up on
isn’t squashed (authorization)
JENNY: if it was a racist insult I feel that those children’s
feet would not have touched the ground (irrealis
illegitimation)

Despite the routine authorization of homophobic bullying perceived by the

teachers, they also reported instances in which gender and sexual diversity
were authorized, rather than illegitimated.

ABBIE: I think a lot of people just breathed a sigh of relief

firstly because it was okay to talk about it
104 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

(authorization) and then secondly that it could

be spoken about and it was okay for pupils
(authorization)
NATALIE: it is now almost becoming acceptable
(authorization) for same sex couples to walk
round together
NEIL: in terms of on a sort of casual note the department
100% accepting and talk freely about sexuality in
all forms and accepting of it (authorization)

The participants did use the tactic of illegitimation of sexual and gender
diversity when reporting numerous instances of bullying and discriminatory
behaviour in their schools. The illegitimation of gender and sexual diversity in
these instances was attributed mainly to the students’ ‘homes’ (i.e. their
families) and from other teachers and students.

ABBIE: when the message they’re getting at home is you can’t do

that because it’s gay (illegitimation) it’s not
going to make any difference what you put in front
of them
PAT: there’s obviously a lot of homophobia coming from the
homes (illegitimation)
ADA: my son is gay and he was teased by one or two
(illegitimation) but the worst was from dinner
supervisors (illegitimation) who because he had a
different appearance (distinction) he was
victimized (illegitimation)
LAUREN: you do have nutty religious parents I’m quite happy to
take them on but you have got that element of people
acting insane you can’t do this (illegitimation)
PAT: it’s very difficult with the religious thing if people
actually say to you this is against our religion
I will not have it (illegitimation)

In these examples, any form of gender or sexual diversity is perceived to be

illegitimated by various actors within and linked to the school environment and
seen as a particularly challenging set of issues.
A particularly interesting use of illegitimation occurred when some of the UK-
based teachers made reference to Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act
in English schools legislation. In these occurrences, illegitimation was used to
refer to the perceived illegality of discussing anything to do with sexual orienta-
tion (and, in particular, homosexuality) in schools. Even though Section 28 was
 Tactics of Intersubjectivity: Analysis 105

repealed in 2003 (see Chapter 1), some of the educators appeared to believe it
was still in effect and some expressed confusion over its present legislative
status. This is evidenced through their use of words such as ‘wary’, ‘fear’,
‘afraid’ (all occurrences of insecurity in appraisal terms) and ‘not
allowed’. Malmedie (2012) argues that there continues to be a ‘legacy’ of
Section 28 which, even several years after being repealed, results in ‘teachers
worrying whether they were allowed to talk about gay issues or characters in
class’. (Malmedie, 2012: 20) There is evidence of this concern through some
of the teachers’ use of the illegitimation tactic as well as a more comprehensive
analysis of appraisal markers which are discussed later in this chapter.

LAUREN: I started teaching when clause 28 came in and so you know

especially again teaching in Brighton it was all you
weren’t allowed to say it (illegitimation) I mean we
are we’re allowed to do what we want I mean I remember
clause 28 was about not promoting it really it was
bizarre it was all shite wasn’t it really
VIKRAM: I don’t know whether I’m allowed to I don’t think I’m
allowed to promote it under section 28 is that
right (illegitimation)
SUSIE: penetrative sex just don’t have that you’ll be alright
you won’t get pregnant but you can’t talk about
anything else can you are we allowed to talk about
homosexuality in are we allowed to mention it
because I wasn’t sure that you were but I did
(illegitimation)

In the extracts above, it is clear that confusion leads to silence around sexual
and gender diversity.
A number of the teachers deployed the illegitimation tactic when discussing
their perceptions of the school curricula and examination syllabuses as being
highly restricted. There were a number of assertions, as in the examples below,
in which the teachers reported a perceived illegitimation of issues dealing with
gender and sexual diversity from the examination boards governing the
content of what is taught in lessons.

ABBIE: I mark for the exam boards and they’re quite

interesting in that they won’t deal with anything
that might be remotely controversial in their
exam papers (illegitimation) for fear of
offending people
NATALIE: I think the present regime would like to constrain
that hugely (illegitimation) I’m not sure that
106 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

they can but it’s a so much more prescriptive

curriculum than it ever was

These perceived constraints about ‘legitimate’ content in school lessons is a

finding which concurrently emerged from a systematic application of the
appraisal framework discussed in the following section.

Appraisal: Analysis
In this section, findings are presented around the three main subsystems of
affect, judgement and appreciation. As in Chapter 3, each attitudinal
marker in the educators’ data was identified and then all markers were calcu-
lated. Within each subsystem, the numbers of attitude markers in the whole
data set are presented and discussed in the sections below. Again, it was also
useful to separately examine the attitude markers used when educators
were referring to their own feelings and judgements only. In the overall
markers, attitudes expressed towards and ascribed to others (e.g. students,
parents, colleagues, senior managers) are also included. The quantitative
findings are presented using bar charts in each case and then discussed in
more detail with illustrative examples from the data. As in Chapter 3, the
quantitative findings are useful for giving an overview of the main feelings,
judgements and valuations which predominate in the data, whilst a qualitative
examination of specific examples is then revealing for seeing how these
markers are being used in context and, importantly, what some of their key
referents are.

Affect
Figure 4.2 shows the distribution of the different types of affect markers
used by the educators. All affect markers appear here, including those which
refer to educators’ own feelings as well as those which refer to the feelings of
others who the educators talked about in their interviews. As with the tactics of
intersubjectivity analysis, the findings from the UK and US educators were
very similar. This provides further indications that the issues being faced by
teachers in relation to schooling and gender and sexual diversity are similar in
the United Kingdom and the United States.
Figure 4.3 shows the distribution of affect markers used when educators
refer exclusively to their own feelings.
Figure 4.3 shows that insecurity is also the most frequent affect
marker used when teachers refer exclusively to their own feelings. However,
there are more inclination than disinclination markers and more
satisfaction than dissatisfaction markers. Therefore, in these
 Appraisal: Analysis 107

140
115
120

100

80

60
39 41
40 29 31
19 15
20 10

0
Dis/inclination Un/happiness In/security Dis/satisfaction

Positive Negative

Figure 4.2 Affect – Overall

80
69
70

60

50

40

30
18 18 20
20
12
10 7 6
4
0
Dis/inclination Un/happiness In/security Dis/satisfaction
Positive Negative

Figure 4.3 Affect – Evaluation of own feelings

subcategories, teachers express more positive than negative feelings. Happi-

ness and unhappiness markers are used with almost equal frequency. At a
first glance, the proportionally high use of insecurity markers may support
assertions made by others (e.g. Tryl, 2013) that teachers lack confidence and
feel uncertain about addressing sexual diversity issues. However, a slightly
108 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

different picture emerges when particular examples are examined in more

detail. Many of the overall unhappiness occurrences refer to LGBT+
(although mainly gay male) students who the teachers perceived as being
unhappy at school as a direct result of their sexual orientation.

ADA: his final year in school particularly in Year 11 was not

a happy (UNHAPPINESS) one
NADINE: he did suffer (UNHAPPINESS) quite a lot of homophobic
comments

The positive security occurrences relating to teachers’ own feelings are

largely related to them stating that they do feel comfortable about challenging
homophobic language and behaviour.

SUSIE: I’m quite happy (SECURITY) to take them on

In fact, all of the teachers interviewed reported feeling comfortable with

challenging homophobic language and behaviour, which contrasts with the
idea of a ‘confidence deficit’. Why, then, are the insecurity markers
so prevalent? When examined in context, the insecurity occurrences in
relation to teachers’ own feelings are mostly expressions of ‘finding things
difficult’ in relation to changing attitudes towards sexual diversity issues in
school.

SUSIE: it’s very difficult (INSECURITY) I find to combat it

PAT: it’s very very hard. . .it’s difficult (INSECURITY)

Examples such as these do not refer to teachers finding it difficult to challenge

sexuality discrimination because they lack confidence, but that the general
environment makes it ‘feel difficult’ to challenge. But, importantly, such
examples suggest that there is not necessarily a lack of confidence on the part
of the teacher, but that the difficulty experienced emerges from something
beyond the control of the individual. This will be discussed later again in the
section on appreciation. The in/security occurrences referring to the
feelings of others tend to relate to varying comfort levels in challenging
discriminatory practices and in discussing sexual diversity issues more
broadly.

ELISE: I’ve heard some members of staff react to alternative

sexualities in a very sort of buttoned down
fearful (INSECURITY) way
 Appraisal: Analysis 109

DAVID: you’ve got such a diverse teaching staff I think a lot

of it’s uncomfortable (INSECURITY)
DAVID: I think staff need to feel comfortable and I think at
the moment maybe that’s not (INSECURITY) the case
for all staff
NATALIE: many older staff members (and some young ones) are
just not comfortable (INSECURITY) talking about
LGBT issues/students

Therefore, the educators report a range of feelings and attitudes towards sexual
diversity from their colleagues but more participants report that it is their
colleagues rather than themselves who feel fearful and uncomfortable about
openly addressing issues relating to sexuality. Like the unhappiness
markers, some of the insecurity occurrences relate to participants express-
ing concerns about LGBT+ students and levels of gender and sexuality-based
discrimination in the school:

CHARLES: I wasn’t happy (INSECURITY) about that and that was a

concern to me
DAVID: I am concerned (INSECURITY) that they might suffer in
cyber-bullying

Examples such as these support previous research discussed in earlier chapters,

which shows that gender and sexuality-based bullying is still prevalent in the
UK and US schools in which the participating educators work. It also seems
that the educators in this study are aware of the extent of the problem and view
it as very serious. A small number of the educators also used insecurity
markers when referring to strategies for supporting LGBT+ students in school
which they deem to be insufficient or failing in some way:

CHARLES: we are highly concerned (INSECURITY) we just feel

the level of safeguarding practice within
that trans support group is falling short of
what we expect of organizations working with
children
CHARLES: I would have grave concerns (INSECURITY) if a 14 year
old met with an adult [. . .] that’s an alarm bell
(INSECURITY) for me because [. . .]if you get a
concern (INSECURITY) how do you deal with it who
do you signpost to and who supervises you and
who’s managing your advocacy and who’s managing
your professional practice
110 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

200
173

150 137 137

115
100
68
45 53
50 36
24 26

0
Normality Capacity Tenacity Veracity Propriety

Positive Negative

Figure 4.4 Judgement – Overall

In the examples above, Charles’s feelings of insecurity arise out of concern

for the students in question in relation to their emotional, physical and social
well-being.

Judgement
Figure 4.4 shows the overall distribution of judgement markers used by the
educators.
Judgement was the only attitudinal subcategory in which there was some
variance between the UK and the US results. In the US responses, the propor-
tion of the occurrences of positive veracity were higher than the negative
occurrences, whilst the reverse was the case for the UK data. In the US data,
the positive veracity occurrences focus on the educators’ reflections on
being open with students about LGBT+ issues and, in some cases, teachers
saying that they are openly LGBT+ in their school, as in the following
examples (in which the positive veracity functions to construe authentica-
tion of identity in each case):

PETE: I am queer myself and [. . .] I have always been very open

(+VERACITY) about it with students
JOE: I am open (+VERACITY) to students talking about
identity and issues
ELLIE: I do have colleagues – teachers and administrators
who are openly (+VERACITY) gay
FRANCES: We have a GSA and many students and faculty who are
out (+VERACITY), along with a few transgender
students
 Appraisal: Analysis 111

120
102
100

80
59
60

40
23
18 18
20
5 6 7
3 3
0
Normality Capacity Tenacity Veracity Propriety
Positive Negative

Figure 4.5 Judgement – Evaluation of own behaviour only

Whilst this may initially suggest that US school contexts are more conducive
to teachers being open about their LGBT+ identities, further data would be
needed to support and substantiate this claim.
Figure 4.4 shows that the Judgement subcategories of capacity and
propriety occur the most frequently, with the negative markers in each case
being used more than the positive markers. The positive capacity and
propriety markers are, however, notable in that they are used more than
both the positive and negative markers in the other three subcategories. In the
tenacity and veracity subcategories, positive markers are used more than
negative ones – the reverse is the case for the normality subcategory. When
participants’ judgements of their own behaviour are separated out from all of
the Judgement markers, there are some notable differences, as shown in
Figure 4.5.
Figure 4.5 shows that, while capacity markers remain high, the propri-
ety markers are low when educators are evaluating their own behaviour. This
tells us that most of the propriety markers used actually refer to judgements
educators make about the behaviour of others. The difference between positive
and negative capacity markers is greater when educators are evaluating their
own behaviour, with the negative markers being used almost twice as much as
the positive ones. In the rest of the subcategories, positive markers are used the
same as or more than negative ones, although all of these other subcategories
are used relatively infrequently compared to capacity. The prevalence of
negative capacity markers does suggest that the educators evaluate and judge
themselves as not being capable of dealing with sexual diversity issues. In this
112 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

sense, the markers do suggest that these teachers may, indeed, ‘lack confi-
dence’. However, it is once again important to closely examine examples of
occurrences of the Judgement markers to see if this is actually the case.
In the data, the capacity judgements of the participants’ own behaviour
are mainly concerned with the differing levels of knowledge and awareness of
homophobia and sexual diversity issues that they claim to have. Many of the
positive capacity markers actually refer to participants reporting that they
feel very knowledgeable about sexual diversity issues. Importantly, they
attribute this to their life experiences outside school, rather than indicating
that it is derived from any pre-service or in-service training.

ADA: my twins were here they are now 22 and my son is gay [. . .]
I would say personally that I’m very aware
(+CAPACITY) so all of that is clamped down on
SUSIE: I know what I’m dealing with (+CAPACITY) and I’ve lived
in Brighton and all the rest of it you know so you
know what you’re talking about (+CAPACITY)

Many of the overall capacity judgements (both positive and negative) refer
to other staff and ‘the school’ as a kind of personified entity. It is interesting to
note that many of the negative capacity judgements that refer to other people
often take a passive grammatical form and do not indicate agency, as in the
following examples:

NATALIE: issues surrounding those sorts of things are not

handled particularly well (-CAPACITY)
SUSIE: nothing’s ever been done about it (-CAPACITY)
ROBERT: in most schools it’s far worse than that and it’s not
being recognized (-CAPACITY) as an issue in the
first place
DAVID: it’s recognition and acknowledgement that’s missing
(-CAPACITY)

This suggests that the educators do not want to explicitly attribute blame when
they are making negative capacity judgements about the behaviour of
others. These examples also suggest that silence and inaction are perceived
by the educators as being problematic forms of behaviour in their schools and
as barriers to tackling gender and sexuality-based discrimination. This supports
previous research which has examined the role of silence in perpetuating
homophobia in schools. (Epstein et al., 2003; Sauntson, 2013)
Many of the tenacity judgements relate to the participants themselves
and other people either challenging or not challenging homophobic behaviour,
 Appraisal: Analysis 113

and either tackling or not tackling issues around sexual diversity more broadly.
As with the negative capacity markers, the negative tenacity statements
which evaluate others’ behaviour often take the form of agentless passives. In
the examples below, the first three illustrate teachers expressing positive
tenacity by stating that they ‘fight’ and ‘challenge’ homophobia. Agency
is clearly indicated here through the use of ‘I’. In the final four examples,
negative tenacity markers are used to refer to other people not reacting to
homophobia. In these examples, the impersonal ‘nobody’, ‘they’ and ‘it’s’
function is used to disguise agency and it is not clear who the Judgement is
being attributed to in these cases.

LAUREN: I do actually kind of challenge (+TENACITY) them

FRANCES: I shut down (+TENACITY) slurs and epithets whether
they are used intentionally or not
SUSIE: nobody really puts their foot down (-TENACITY)
JENNY: it’s not challenged (-TENACITY) as much as racist
language
JENNY: they’re not prepared to do anything about it
(-TENACITY)
JOE: enforcement is uneven (-TENACITY) throughout the
school building.

Again, we see silence and inaction being negatively evaluated here. Examples
such as these were fairly prevalent, suggesting that silence and inaction are
identified by the educators as significant barriers to effectively challenging
homophobic language and behaviour. Although the other judgement subcat-
egories are not used as much as capacity, it is worth briefly examining how
these markers behave in the data. The veracity statements which evaluate
the behaviour of others often refer to particular gay male students and teachers
who are either out (positive veracity which construes the intersubjective
tactic of authentication) or not out (negative veracity which construes
denaturalization) (i.e. truthful or not truthful about their sexual orientation).

LOUISE: the ones who I know they’re very proud and very open
(+VERACITY)
LOUISE: we’ve got a gay member of staff who’s totally open
(+VERACITY)
NATALIE: the member of staff was not at all public (-VERACITY)
about his sexuality it was quite difficult he
wasn’t openly (-VERACITY) gay
114 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

CHARLES: he enjoyed dressing up as a woman and he didn’t hide

(+VERACITY) that from us didn’t want to hide
(+VERACITY) that from his peers

These examples are fairly typical of the whole data set in that they contain
reports of students and staff being either open or not open about their lesbian,
gay, bisexual or transgender orientation. The educators’ reports of closeted
LGBT+ teachers suggest that their school environments are not always condu-
cive to making LGBT+ staff (and some students) feel comfortable about being
open about their sexual orientation. Like the negative capacity markers
which refer to the behaviour of others, many of the negative veracity
statements do not refer to a specific person but are expressed using the
existential ‘it’ and agentless passive constructions, as in the following
examples (which, again, function to construe the denaturalization of LGBT+
identities):

ABBIE: it can be avoided (-VERACITY) too easily I suppose

because it’s not openly addressed (-VERACITY)
ABBIE: it just wasn’t talked about (-VERACITY) it was just
ignored (-VERACITY)
PAT: it’s all hidden (-VERACITY) and pushed off into corners
(-VERACITY)

As discussed above, the markers of propriety are quite high overall but
low in relation to participants’ own behaviour, showing that most of them refer
to the educators’ judgements of the behaviour of others. The data reveal, when
specific examples are examined, that many of the positive propriety judge-
ments relate to students, whilst many negative propriety judgements relate
to parents, as in the examples below. Negative propriety statements which
do refer to students (and, occasionally, teachers) actually function to condemn
homophobic behaviour.

NEIL: the pupils they are much more liberal (+PROPRIETY) in

their attitudes
NICKY: the kids are really quite inclusive (+PROPRIETY)
DAVID: the kids are very accepting (+PROPRIETY)
ROBERT: it was a completely normal conversation and anybody
only cared about the football game or that they
were playing the Xbox the fact that he was playing
with his husband didn’t matter and that was really
nice (+PROPRIETY)
 Appraisal: Analysis 115

180
162
160

140

120 116

100

80

60
39
40 30

20 14 12

0
Reaction Composition Valuation

Positive Negative

Figure 4.6 Appreciation

PAT: I think there’s still some very sort of bigoted

(-PROPRIETY) views
CHARLES: she’s not got a lot of support (-PROPRIETY) for her in
her house

Thus, the educators appear to perceive a main ‘problem’ with tackling homo-
phobia and with openly addressing sexual diversity issues in school as being
the potentially negative attitudes which will be expressed by parents
(especially in the UK data). On the other hand, they perceive students them-
selves as being inclusive and accepting.

Appreciation
Figure 4.6 shows the distribution of positive and negative markers of the three
main subcategories of appreciation.
Figure 4.6 reveals that most of the appreciation markers (both positive
and negative) used by the participants fall into the valuation subcategory.
In other words, educators use more markers that relate to assessing the social
116 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

Table 4.1 Items ascribed positive and negative valuation by the educators

+Valuation Valuation

Opportunities for open discussions
and conversations
Teachers’ relationships with students
English/English Language Arts
(subject)
History (subject) (UK only)
A-level English (ages 16–19)
Key Stage 3 English (ages 11–14)
Science (subject) (UK only)
Form tutor system (UK only)
School support systems
Assemblies (UK only)
‘The school’
School policies (USA only)
Student-initiated activities
Curriculum (general)
Exam paper and syllabus content (UK only)
A-level (Advanced level) English syllabus (UK only)
GCSE English syllabus (ages 16–19) (UK only)
Sex and relationships education (UK only)
Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE)
curriculum (UK only)
Teaching to the exam (UK only)
Discrimination around gender
School’s handling of sexual diversity issues
Homophobic remarks
Teaching about sexuality issues as a single issue
‘The school’
Enforcement of school policies (USA only)
(one particular) trans support organization (UK only)
Curriculum (general)

significance or value of things and entities that they discuss. Within valuation,
the data reveal more positive than negative markers. Within the other two
subcategories, there are more positive than negative reaction markers used,
but more negative than positive composition markers used. Given that
valuation is the appreciation subcategory that occurs the most in the
data, it is of most value to examine what particular things, entities and processes
the educators actually evaluate in these occurrences. Table 4.1 provides a
summary of the key entities which are valued positively and negatively.
In Table 4.1, the items in bold were ascribed the same positive or negative
value by the young people in Chapter 4, suggesting that these phenomena are
of increased importance given that both sets of participants evaluate them.
A key difference is that the young people ascribe negative value, as well as
positive value, to individual teachers. This again suggests that teachers are key
players who can make a difference to the positive or negative experiences of
LGBT+-identified young people in schools. The findings in Table 4.1 show
that the educators ascribed generally positive values to the subjects they teach,
claiming that there is much potential in these subjects for incorporating
positive teaching about sexual diversity issues. They also ascribed positive
value to conversations and the good relationships they perceive themselves as
having with their students. Some participants also mentioned school support
systems, public school policy (in the United States), the form tutor system (in
the United Kingdom) and school assemblies (in the United Kingdom) as
 Appraisal: Analysis 117

positive aspects which could facilitate positive teaching about sexual diversity
and challenging homophobia. But the participants also ascribed negative value
to some aspects of subject teaching, specifically the curricula and exam
syllabuses which they have to use to inform their teaching. This was particu-
larly notable in the UK teachers’ comments in which several stated that the
Key Stage 4 (ages 14–16; GCSE and A-level) curricula and syllabuses in
particular were evaluated negatively for being very constrained and for con-
taining so much prescriptive content that they do not allow for any conversa-
tions about sexual diversity to take place. Some educators also ascribed
negative value to discrimination around gender, which they believed happened
routinely in their schools and which they linked to the perpetuation of homo-
phobia. Some participants negatively evaluated the notion of teaching about
LGBT+ issues as a single issue and argued instead for embedding sexual
diversity issues more fully into subject curricula. In the United States, some
educators positively valued the DC public school policy around sexual diver-
sity but evaluated its implementation negatively, stating that there was a
perceived frequent failure or inconsistency by schools to enforce it.
In all of the data, but in the UK educators’ responses in particular, many
instances of negative reaction and negative valuation relate to
subject curricula and exam syllabuses (both in general and specific aspects
of them). These often co-occur with the tactic of denaturalization, as in the
examples below:

ABBIE: paper 1 which is not fiction and media is so boring

there’s nothing meaty in there (-VALUATION)
ABBIE: it’s the old traditional dead white males you know it’s
Lord Of The Flies it’s To Kill A Mockingbird it’s the
same stuff that I learnt at school you know the same
texts still on there and even you know the whole of
Key Stage 4 curriculum’s being re-written at the
moment and they haven’t brought in anything
(-VALUATION)
PAT: it’s all like exam exam exam it lacks depth (-VALUATION)
it’s skimming across the surface (-VALUATION) and
getting them through those hoops
(denaturalization)

Several positive valuation markers which relate to UK Key Stages 3 and 5

(ages 11–14 and 16–19) show up in the data:

ABBIE: I think it’s limited to Key Stage 5 and A level texts

which seem to be more broad and open (+VALUATION)
118 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

NEIL: Key Stage 3 I’d say is far more open to wider discussions
(+VALUATION) simply because it’s not constrained
(+VALUATION) by exam
NEIL: there’s more potential (+VALUATION) at Key Stage 3 for
us to bring in texts that might be helpful and useful
(+VALUATION)

In both the United States and the United Kingdom, conversations and discus-
sions about sexual diversity issues are evaluated positively using positive
valuation and positive reaction markers:

ADA: we felt that it was important to have the conversation

(+VALUATION)
LOUISE: at A level you can have really good talks about it
(+VALUATION)
JENNY: it was interesting that we had this discussion
(+REACTION)
JENNY: you couldn’t avoid having a discussion about it which
is good (+ VALUATION)

Many positive valuation markers refer to the relationships that teachers

(self and others) have with their students (in both countries):

LOUISE: there are students who do have good (+VALUATION)

relationships with those teachers
SUSIE: it shows what strong (+VALUATION) relationships
I have with the kids

In the UK data, there are several negative valuation occurrences referring

to sex education and PSHE:

SUSIE: I think it [Sex Education] all needs a massive

overhaul (-VALUATION)
ROBERT: Personal Social and Health Education I don’t think
that requires discussions of sexuality on the
curriculum which I think is quite controversial
(-VALUATION)
PAT: we just get booklets that we’re supposed to teach and
they can be on anything from you know how to choose
your career to erm I don’t know sort of erm oh all
sorts of daft (-VALUATION) things [PSHE]
 Appraisal: Analysis 119

In sum, through the appreciation markers, the educators do pinpoint

several areas of what they perceive to be existing good practice in addition
to identifying aspects of school which they believe to be very ineffective. In
the United Kingdom, this is, most notably, the Key Stage 4 curriculum and
exam syllabuses, and sex education provision. In the United States, it is an
inconsistency and failure on the part of the schools to implement their inclu-
sion and sexual diversity policy.
It is interesting to compare the valuation analysis of the educators’
data with that of the young people presented in the previous chapter. The
commonalities across the two data sets in terms of positive valuation include:
opportunities for open discussions and conversations; English/English
Language Arts as a subject and ‘the school’ in very general terms. Negative
valuation occurrences in both the educators’ and young people’s data refer
to: exam paper content; sex and relationships education; discrimination around
gender; school’s handling of sexual diversity issues and ‘the school’ in general
terms. Given that these phenomena were ascribed positive or negative value in
the same way by all of the educator and young people participants, these are
perhaps the most significant and require the most urgent attention in terms of
improving schools in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

‘Irrealis’ valuation
The examples discussed above all refer to realis occurrences of appreci-
ation: valuation. However, many of the valuation occurrences in the
data are actually irrealis in that they evaluate imagined or hypothetical entities
and processes, rather than real or actual ones. Irrealis + valuation often
construes irrealis authentication in the ToI framework. It seems important that
the educators deploy many instances of irrealis positive valuation in order
to express their attitudes and opinions about what would, in theory, work well
as a means of positively addressing sexual diversity issues, but which, at the
moment, do not actually take place. These could perhaps be suggestions for
future policy and practice around dealing with sexual diversity issues in
schools in a more positive way. Table 4.2 summarizes the main entities and
processes to which the educators ascribe positive irrealis valuation.
In Chapter 3, the young people also attributed positive irrealis valuation to
having open discussions about gender and sexual diversity issues in school as a
way of authenticating LGBT+ identities. But this was the only similarity with
the educators’ data. The young people also attributed irrealis valuation to
the availability of safe spaces in school and the need to make discussion of
gender and sexuality part of an ‘everyday conversation’. Therefore, perhaps
unsurprisingly, the needs of young LGBT+ people and educators are different.
120 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

Table 4.2 + Irrealis valuation

+ Irrealis Valuation

Training on sexual and gender diversity issues

Supportive environment and open discussions
A curriculum which allows students and teachers to be more creative
A contact point in school where students can go for advice on coming out
Advice for teachers
More resources

with educators identifying advice and training, and changes to the curriculum
and exam content as potentially the most useful things for making schools more
equal places with regard to sexual and gender diversity.
The results in Table 4.2 show that, although the educators do suggest that
training would be helpful (and something that they do not currently have
access to), it is not the only explanation they offer for why sexual diversity
issues are not perceived to be dealt with effectively in their schools. They also
suggest making changes to the school curriculum and examination syllabuses
which would enable both students and teachers to be more independent and
creative. This was, in fact, the most frequent item which was ascribed irrealis
markers of positive valuation. This is something that cannot be addressed
simply through training sessions on challenging gender and sexuality-based
discrimination in schools. The educators also suggested creating a contact
point in the school where LGBT+ identifying students could go for advice
on coming out and other issues related to their sexual orientation, and also the
availability of more advice for teachers. They also proposed finding general
ways of creating a more supportive environment in the school, not just for
assisting LGBT+ students, but for enabling all students to discuss and address
sexual diversity issues openly and positively.

Discussion
Findings from both of the analytical frameworks applied in this chapter show
high degrees of similarity between the reported experiences of US and UK
educators. In sum, the ToI analysis reveals that illegitimation and
authentication are the most frequently used tactics. The tactic of illegitimation
is most commonly used to refer to the educators’ perceived illegitimation of
homophobia and bullying around gender and sexual diversity in their schools.
This tactic is often construed linguistically using the evaluative judgement
marker of positive propriety (in which homophobic and bullying behaviour
is seen to be sanctioned rather than condemned). Conversely, homophobia and
 Discussion 121

other kinds of gender and sexual bullying are frequently reported as being
authorized (using the tactic of authorization realized linguistically as negative
propriety) within schools. The patterns of illegitimation in the teacher data
reveals a perceived ‘double standard’ between schools’ handling of racist and
homophobic incidents and practices. It also shows that the educators attribute
illegitimation of gender and sexual diversity mainly to students’ homes (fam-
ilies), and to other teachers and students (expressed as evaluative markers of
negative propriety to condemn the behaviour of others). In the UK data,
illegitimation is also used to refer to the perceived illegality of discussing
anything to do with sexual orientation in schools, i.e. the ‘legacy of section
28’. These occurrences of illegitimation are construed by appraisal markers
of affectual insecurity on the part of the teachers. The UK educators also
use the illegitimation tactic when discussing their perceptions of the school
curricula and examination syllabuses as being highly restricted – in other
words, they attribute a kind of agency to curricula and exam syllabuses in that
they illegitimate gender and sexual diversity through non-inclusion.
Within the ‘realness’ dimension of the framework, the educators referred to
various authentication strategies for positively acknowledging and recogniz-
ing the ‘realness’ of LGBT+ identities that they believed to be operating within
their school environments. Authentication was also used to construct identities
of LGBT+ teachers and students as ‘genuine’ and ‘out’. However, there
were high occurrences of irrealis authentication (realized as irrealis +
valuation) to make suggestions about what would, hypothetically, work
to authenticate LGBT+ identities in schools. By implication, this means that
such strategies are not seen to be happening in schools at the moment. This
perception was further reinforced by the educators’ use of denaturalization in
which they frequently reported the denaturalization of LGBT+ identities (or,
indeed, any kind of gender and sexual diversity) as being effected through
silence and absence in the school environment. Denaturalization was also
employed as a means of referring to other teachers’ perceived ‘discomfort’
about gender and sexual diversity in schools. A commonly reported barrier to
making schools more inclusive and diverse in terms of gender and sexuality
was other teachers’ lack of acceptance or acknowledgement of LGBT+ iden-
tities as genuine. The participants also used the tactic of denaturalization to
reference oppositional practices in their schools to what they consider to be
authentic learning (e.g. teaching to the exam/box-ticking).
The appraisal analysis findings reported in this chapter show that the
educators feel restricted in terms of subject curricula and exam syllabuses,
timetables and pressure to achieve exam results. This is mainly shown through
the appreciation (especially negative valuation) markers, although it is
also partly reflected through negative capacity judgements which are attrib-
uted to other people, or agentless personalized entities such as ‘they’ and ‘the
122 Educators’ Perspectives on Language and Sexual Diversity in Schools

school’. These appear to be the most important factors in explaining why the
educators believe sexual diversity issues are not addressed by the schools in
which they work. This suggests that training alone, although valuable, may not
completely solve the problems currently faced by educators and students in
relation to sexual diversity issues in UK and US schools. The findings also
highlight the need for more detailed analyses of educators’ attitudes and
experiences of sexual diversity in schools, rather than relying solely on
large-scale quantitative-only surveys, which inevitably lack the detail that is
obtainable through more qualitative approaches.
The appraisal analysis findings also show that both the UK and US
educators do feel confident in challenging gender and sexuality-focused dis-
criminatory language and behaviour in some situations, as evidenced through
the positive capacity markers (and some of the positive markers of affect).
Therefore, it is inappropriate to make blanket statements about teachers’
confidence levels in deficit terms. The findings presented in this chapter reveal
that issues around ‘security’ and ‘confidence’ in relation to sexual diversity
issues are actually rather complex. Educators’ feelings of in/security certainly
need to be examined and considered in detail (alongside other feelings) before
any plans for training or any other strategies for dealing with sexual diversity
issues are put in place.
In support of previous research (Epstein et al., 2003; Sauntson, 2013), the
appraisal analysis findings also suggest that it is often silence around sexual
diversity issues, rather than overt homophobic bullying, that is identified as a
bigger problem by the educators in their schools, both in the United States and
the United Kingdom. This is evidenced through many of the negative Judge-
ment markers used (especially negative capacity, veracity and ten-
acity) as well as through some of the negative valuation markers. This
suggests that it is just as important to address issues around silence as around
explicit forms of discriminatory language and behaviour pertaining to gender
and sexual diversity.
Perhaps the most important outcome of the findings presented in this chapter is
that they suggest that tackling gender and sexuality discrimination issues in
schools cannot be addressed as a single issue without consideration of other
factors in the school environment as identified by the educators. Issues around
constrained curriculum and exam requirements, in particular, are identified as
needing to be addressed. It is clear that the educators who participated in this study
would value more freedom over what is taught and more flexibility to allow time
for conversations about sexual diversity to happen in school, and that these issues
need to be addressed in order to deal with sexual diversity issues in schools more
positively and effectively. With these issues in mind, the next chapter provides a
closer examination of the language used in some key curriculum documents
currently being used to inform content and practice in UK and US schools.
5 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in
Curriculum Documents

The previous two chapters have shown in detail some of the ways in which
language operates to (re)produce, and sometimes challenge, discourses of
heteronormativity in schools. Previous research (e.g. Meyer, 2010) proposes
that curriculum intervention is one possible strategy of challenging heterosexism
and homophobia in schools. In order to change curricula, it is first necessary to
understand how they set up particular positions concerning sexual diversity. In
this chapter, I use elements of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to
examine how the language used in certain curriculum and curriculum guidance
documents in England and the United States construct positions and ideologies
about sexuality. Unlike the preceding two chapters, this one focuses on analyz-
ing written texts. It is useful to analyze curriculum documents as they set out
what schools are expected to teach and, to a degree, how they are expected to
teach it. Educators use curriculum documents to inform and guide their teaching
so there is a direct link between these texts and classroom practice. Therefore,
the language used within curriculum documents is important given its direct
relevance to what happens in classrooms.
My analysis focuses on the national curriculum for England and Wales
programmes of study for Key Stage 3 and 4 (secondary aged 11–16) English
and guidance documents for Sex and Relationships Education (SRE), and the
‘Scope and Sequence’ and ‘Standards and Learning Activities’ documents for
the Washington, DC district English Language Arts and Health Education
curricula for grades 9–12. These two sets of documents are roughly equivalent
in terms of their function, scope, style and the age ranges they cover. The focus
on English and English Language Arts is partly because it is a ‘core’ subject
which is compulsory throughout Key Stages 3 and 4/grades 9–12 and which,
potentially, might lend itself well to exploring issues around sexual diversity
without explicitly concerning itself with sex and relationships education. In
their interviews, the young people also consistently singled out English as a
subject which was more likely to provide opportunities for addressing sexual
diversity (see Chapter 3). Throughout the chapter, I argue that the two English
curricula are worded in ways which do not encourage teachers to incorporate
sexual diversity issues into their English teaching. This can have the effect of

123
124 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

perpetuating discourses of heteronormativity which can be detrimental to the

well-being of all students, but especially to those identifying as LGBT+. The
analysis of the roughly equivalent SRE and Health Education documents for
the United Kingdom and United States respectively is fairly self-explanatory –
these are the subject areas in which the remit is to educate young people about
sexual relationships and sexual health, therefore it is in the teaching of these
subjects that the most overt discussions of sexual diversity are expected to take
place. The young people interviewed also talked explicitly about their over-
whelming disappointment at the content and delivery of sex education in their
experience (and some of the educators too – see Chapter 4). However, like the
English curricula, I argue and illustrate that SRE and Health Education also
present restricted views of ‘sexuality’ and discourage teachers from incorpor-
ating issues of sexual diversity into their teaching. The effects of the language
used in the documents can be, at best, confusing for both teachers and young
people and, at worst, harmful in that the effect is the perpetuation of sexuality
discrimination and misrepresentations of other important issues such as
consent and sexual violence. This is despite ostensibly positive assertions
concerning sexual diversity and inclusion in the documents.1
A key argument made is that linguistic presence in the form of inclusion in
the curriculum legitimizes certain subject content and ideological positions,
while linguistic absence may function to delegitimize certain positions.
Linguistic presence and absence, therefore, function to prioritize particular
discourses over others. In relation to discourses of sexuality, this may poten-
tially be damaging if the same discourses are repeatedly prioritized whilst
others are delegitimized through their recurrent absence.
This chapter also illustrates how different aspects of linguistic analysis may be
combined to provide a more nuanced examination of how particular discourses
are constructed in written texts. I broadly situate the analysis within critical
discourse analysis (CDA), an approach widely used within linguistics to uncover
social and political ideologies in texts. As discussed earlier, within QAL, an
eclectic combination of methods and frameworks of analysis is valued. There-
fore, as well as CDA, I also use elements of corpus linguistics as a means of
adding detail and rigour to the analysis, and of countering some of the limita-
tions of using a CDA approach on its own. In the remainder of this chapter,
I firstly describe the documentary data analyzed, followed by an explanation of
the analytical frameworks of CDA and corpus linguistics. I discuss findings
from analysis of the English/English Language Arts documents first, followed
by the SRE/Health Education document analysis. The chapter concludes with a
discussion of key issues emerging from the whole analysis.

1
See, for example, the 2016 briefing paper on Sex and Relationships Education in Schools
(England) – www.parliament.uk/commons-library.
 Data and Methods 125

Data and Methods

In England and Wales, the national curriculum in state schools sets out the
scope of what is to be covered for each age range in each subject area.2 The
curriculum is divided into ‘Key Stage 3’ (what students are expected to learn in
the 11–14 age range) and ‘Key Stage 4’ (ages 14–16). Within each subject, the
curriculum consists of descriptions of ‘levels’ which are used to assess the
progress that students make in the subject, and ‘programmes of study’ which
set out the topics to be covered and the skills which students are expected to
acquire. For the subject of English, the programmes of study are broadly
organized around the English-based skills ‘strands’ of ‘speaking and listening’,
‘reading’ and ‘writing’. Each subject programme of study is accompanied by a
set of ‘explanatory notes’ (embedded into the programme of study document)
which give examples of how each topic and skill might be delivered in
practice. As the programmes of study deal with the actual content of the
subject, it is the English national curriculum programme of study (including
the explanatory notes) which is examined in this chapter. In the United States,
there is a similar state curriculum for each subject delivered in state schools.
Whereas the curriculum for England and Wales is divided into ‘key stages’, the
Washington, DC state curriculum specified the content to be covered within
each individual grade. The ‘scope and sequence’ documents set out the kinds
of skills that students are expected to develop in each grade based around the
broad strands of ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘speaking and listening’ and ‘language’.
Unlike the English national curriculum programmes of study, the DC scope
and sequence documents provide detail on the order in which topics and skills
should be covered and actually give specific time periods in the school year for
the delivery of each part of the curriculum. The ‘standards and learning
activities’ documents are shorter and provide examples of how the skills which
students are expected to acquire might be taught in practice. In this way, they
are quite similar to the explanatory notes which accompany the English
national curriculum programme of study. Again, these documents are divided
into grades and skills strands.
The sex education curriculum documents are a little different. In Washing-
ton, DC, sex education is delivered as part of Health Education more broadly.
In the United Kingdom, it is taught as part of Personal, Social and Health
Education (and also minimally as part of Science). Therefore, in both contexts,
there is no single ‘sex education’ curriculum document to examine like there is
for English. In DC, the ‘Health Education standards’ document sets out what
students are expected to learn in the subject area through all grades – there is

2
Responsibility for producing school curricula in Scotland and Northern Ireland is devolved.
126 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.1 Key information about document sets

Size of
text/corpus
(number of
Full document name Subject Age words) Abbreviation

UK – England and Wales

English Key Stage 3 programme of study1 English 11–14 4576 KS3
English Key Stage 4 programme of study2 English 14–16 5119 KS4
Sex and Relationships Education guidance3 Sex Education 11–16 9657 SRE
USA – Washington, DC
English Language Arts Scope and Sequence English 14–18 24,392 ELASS
Grades 9–124
English Language Arts Standards and English 14–18 13,112 ELASLA
Learning Activities Grades 9–125
Health Education Standards Grades Pre-K- Sex Education 4–18 10,422 HEd
High School (all grades)6
1
English Key Stage 3: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130904095149/https://
media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/e/english%202007%20programme%20of%20study%
20for%20key%20stage%203.pdf
2
English Key Stage 4: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130904095149/https://
media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/p/english%202007%20programme%20of%20study%
20for%20key%20stage%204.pdf
3
Sex and Relationships Education Guidance: www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/
attachment_data/file/283599/sex_and_relationship_education_guidance.pdf
4
English Language Arts Scope and Sequence documents: https://dcps.dc.gov/publication/grade-
11-english-language-arts-scope-and-sequence
5
English Language Arts Standards and Learning Activities: https://osse.dc.gov/sites/default/files/
dc/sites/osse/publication/attachments/2016%20Health%20Education%20Standards_0.pdf
6
Health Education Standards: https://osse.dc.gov/service/dc-educational-standards

no separate document for specific age groups. In the United Kingdom, there is
no curriculum for PSHE as it is not a statutory subject in schools. Instead there
is a curriculum and standards ‘guidance document’ which makes suggestions
for how and what to deliver in the sex and relationships education part of
PSHE. As the DC ‘Health Education standards’ and the England and Wales
‘Sex and Relationships Education guidance’ documents are the closest to a
curriculum for the subject in each country, these are the documents used for
analysis in this chapter. A summary of information is included in Table 5.1
with links to each full document set in footnotes.

Critical Discourse Analysis

The analysis draws on the tools and frameworks of critical discourse analysis
and corpus linguistics, introduced in Chapter 2. Critical discourse
 Critical Discourse Analysis 127

analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2001) conceptualizes language as a form of social

practice and sees any ‘text’ as both reflecting and affecting the social and
interactional contexts in which it is produced and received. This differs from
more ‘traditional’ forms of discourse analysis in which analysis can be quite
de-contextualized. Fairclough (2001) argues that exploring the relationship
between texts, interactions and contexts is a key principle of CDA, with a
specific focus on how power is enacted and reflected through language.
Ideologies which prevail in the wider social context in which texts circulate
become inscribed in texts, often in subtle ways. Thus, CDA may be used to
uncover ideologies about sexuality which are embedded in curriculum docu-
ments. Although individual CDA-based studies may differ in their focus and in
terms of the specific language features analyzed, what they have in common is
an emancipatory goal. CDA studies tend to work towards social justice which
means they are particularly useful within a QAL framework which also has a
social justice orientation.
Proponents of critical discourse analysis (CDA) argue that it is a diverse
approach containing different ‘strands’ of analysis, which arguably may
include the other frameworks (corpus-based linguistics, appraisal, tactics
of intersubjectivity) used throughout this book. Whatever form of detailed
linguistic analysis is used within a CDA approach, it always works towards a
socially transformative goal. CDA is explicitly concerned with social injustice,
power struggles and in/equalities and with examining the role that discourse
plays in constructing, reifying and contesting these issues. According to
Cameron (2001: 123–4), CDA is concerned with the ‘hidden agenda of
discourse’. She explains:

. . .the central claim of CDA is that the way certain realities get talked or written about –
that is, the choices speakers or writers make in doing it – are not just random but
ideologically patterned. These choices do much of the work of naturalising particular
social arrangements which serve particular interests, so that in time they may come to
seem like the only possible or rational arrangements.

In relation to gender and sexuality, the ‘hidden agenda’ tends to be concerned

with the way language is used to construct ideologies around gender and
sexuality. Those ideologies are ‘naturalized’ in that it seems as though they
are naturally occurring rather than discursively constructed. This works not
through single or occasional instances of particular kinds of language use, but
through the repeated and systematic patterning of language. In analyzing these
patterns, Cameron urges us to pay attention not just to the surface features of
language (what is said or written) but to more subtle underlying features,
presuppositions and patterns (how certain things are said or written). For this
reason, the kind of linguistic analysis used at a descriptive level within CDA
needs to be systematic and able to identify repeated patterns across stretches of
128 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

text. It is only through repetition that particular ideologies become naturalized

through discourse. The more quantitative methods of corpus linguistics are
well-placed to identify these kinds of repeated patterns across large stretches of
interactional text.
Lazar (2005) states that one of the key aims of feminist-informed CDA is
showing that social practices which may appear to be neutral and natural are
actually gendered in ways which sustain a patriarchal social order in the wider
sociopolitical context. She argues that dominant relations of power systematic-
ally privilege men as a social group and disadvantage and exclude women. The
work of feminist CDA is to uncover how this is achieved discursively with the
idea that understanding is a precursor to social transformation. Although
Lazar’s initial outline of feminist CDA does not explicitly address sexuality,
the same principles can be applied. Recent work has started to apply feminist
CDA to a more explicit analysis of sexual identities in discourse. (Koller,
2008; Pakula et al., 2015; Pawelcyzk and Pakula, 2015)
My own use of CDA in this and the following chapter is largely under-
pinned theoretically by Foucualt’s work on discourse, gender, sexuality and
identity – work which also informs aspects of queer theory more broadly.
Foucault encourages us to view both language and identity as ‘a multiplicity
of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies’.
(1990:100) Foucault describes discourse as language in action, claiming
that discourse can be understood as a series of events or ‘statements’ that
set up relationships with other statements. These dialogic relationships
between statements can be a site of struggle and Foucault argues that it is
the struggle over power relations which creates what we perceive as reality.
For Foucault, different discourses do not simply reflect different realities but
play an active role in creating realities, identities and relationships. This
supports a broader post-structuralist view of discourse as a ‘socially consti-
tutive signifying practice’. (Lazar, 2005: 11) Within CDA, Fairclough (1995)
explains how the relationship between discourse and the social is a dialectical
one so that discourse both constitutes, but is also constituted by, social
practices and structures.
However, Foucault is careful to argue that, although there are an infinite
potential number of discourses available, certain discourses have evolved
throughout history into dominant or ‘hegemonic’ discourses whilst others have
become marginalized. Therefore, the potential fluidity of discourse and gender
is, in reality, constrained to some extent by broader social structures. Lazar
(2005) notes that hegemonic structures themselves are never static and are,
therefore, always susceptible to challenge and resistance. In order for any sort
of social hegemony to be maintained, it must be able to adapt over time to
social changes. This creates a tension between hegemonic structures as power-
ful and resilient but, at the same time, fragile and open to contestation.
 Critical Discourse Analysis 129

Throughout this chapter, I use Fairclough’s (2001) CDA framework within

a broad QAL-informed inquiry which inevitably draws on elements of feminist
CDA. (Lazar, 2005) Fairclough’s framework offers a detailed and lengthy list
of the specific linguistic features which may be examined, but the analysis in
this chapter mainly focuses on the way ideologies are conveyed through what
is present and absent/silent in the texts, and the way such presences and
absences are marked through lexical choices. In a chapter of limited length,
Fairclough’s entire CDA framework is too extensive to apply.
The questions which Fairclough presents focus on the realization of three
kinds of values in texts. These values, drawn from systemic functional linguis-
tics, are experiential, relational and expressive. Fairclough defines experiential
values as being concerned with the content of a text, and the kind of know-
ledge and beliefs that are subsequently presented as an effect of a text’s
(selective) content. Relational values refer to social relationships and the ways
in which those relationships are inscribed in the text. Finally, expressive values
refer to textual enactments of particular kinds of social subjects and social
identities. These values are realized through three sets of formal features in any
text – vocabulary, grammar and textual structures. I mainly focus on the
linguistic realization of experiential values in the vocabulary of the curriculum
documents. Experiential values are of most interest and significance because
the primary purpose of a curriculum is to prescribe what counts as valid
‘knowledge’ and it is the subject content of the curriculum which most often
comes under scrutiny in critical analysis or debate. Likewise, the focus of this
chapter is restricted to analyzing experiential values as they are realized
through vocabulary. It is the critical analysis of the ways in which experiential
values are realized through the text’s vocabulary which is the most illuminat-
ing in terms of how ideologies around sexuality are presented in the curriculum
documents. Therefore, from Fairclough’s framework, the main question asked
is ‘What experiential value do words have?’ Within this overarching question,
I focus on three sub-questions proposed by Fairclough (2001: 91):
 What classification schemes are drawn upon?
 Is there overwording?
 Are there words which are ideologically contested?
The analysis is structured around each of these sub-questions. However, it is
first necessary to consider some of the limitations of CDA, and how these are
dealt with in the analysis. The biggest concern which has been levelled at CDA
is that the analysis can be biased. If analysts set out to find evidence of
particular kinds of discrimination or inequality in texts, this potentially leaves
the analyst open to the criticism that they will simply find what they are
looking for and will make the analysis fit their own political agenda. Analysts
may also be selective in terms of only presenting texts which support and
130 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

illustrate the kinds of inequality they have been focusing on – it may be the
case that many similar texts are not discursively imbued with the inequality but
can be conveniently ignored by the analyst. Baker et al. (2013) suggest that
one way of reducing this potential bias is to combine CDA with more
‘objective’ methods of analysis and this is the primary rationale for incorpor-
ating some corpus-based analysis alongside CDA in this chapter. Baker (2008)
has argued that corpus linguistics and CDA can be used productively together
and that using a combined approach can go a long way to addressing some of
the criticisms which have been levelled at both approaches when they are used
in isolation. Another limitation of CDA that has been noted is that it relies
heavily on what is present in the text. (Cameron, 2001; Baker et al., 2013)
CDA is less able to account for what may also be absent. Corpus linguistics is
similarly not able to account for linguistic absence. As Baker et al. note, ‘the
corpus cannot reveal what is not there’. (2013: 23)
Some speech act theorists have argued that silence can be defined as a
speech act. The concept of silence in relation to power relations and
homosexuality has been well-documented. (e.g. Sedgwick, 1990)
A locutionary act may not necessarily be homophobic, but the perlocutionary
effect on the reader may be experienced as homophobic depending on the
context in which the text is circulating. Morrish states that ‘homophobia may
still be the result even when overt homophobic messages are not part of the
text’s content’. (2011: 328) In educational contexts, DePalma and Atkinson
(2006: 334) have also pointed out that heteronormativity is ‘maintained not
only in terms of what is said and done, but also in terms of what is left out of
the official discourse’.
Drawing on Austin’s (1962) distinction between locutionary speech acts
(what is said) and illocutionary acts (the action that is performed when
something is said), Langton (1993) distinguishes between locutionary
silence (what is not said) and illocutionary silencing (the action performed
when something is not said). In previous work (Sauntson, 2013), I have
argued that ‘illocutionary silences’ around sexual diversity routinely occur in
various aspects of schooling. If we incorporate these insights from speech act
theory into CDA, we can argue that the ideologies around sexuality which are
constructed through linguistic presence and absence in the curriculum are
characterized largely by taboo – sexuality is absent from the text, therefore it
does not count as valid ‘knowledge’ or subject content. The use of this aspect
of speech act theory also goes some way to addressing the limitation of CDA
to only account for what is present in the texts under scrutiny. The analysis of
absence is, of course, difficult and susceptible to analyst bias. What is
expected to appear in a text but does not is inevitably going to be fairly
subjective. It is very difficult to overcome this issue but the incorporation of
researcher reflexivity and the addition of some corpus-based analysis may go
 Corpus Linguistics 131

some way to supporting the claims made about notable linguistic absences in
the texts analyzed.

Corpus Linguistics
Sinclair (1991: 171) defines a corpus as ‘a collection of naturally occurring
language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language’. Corpus
linguistics is a largely quantitative method which involves using a computer-
held body of naturalized texts, and a range of computerized methods, to
explore aspects of language use. McEnery and Hardie (2012: 1–2) define
corpus linguistics as ‘[. . .] a group of methods for studying language. . .dealing
with some set of machine-readable texts’. An advantage of using corpus
linguistics is that it enables us to make observations about language use which
go beyond intuition and, because it is computer-based, it allows the explor-
ation of patterns of language use which are not observable to the human eye.
Within corpus linguistics, it is acknowledged that the use of small, specialized
corpora can make useful contributions to understanding the language use of
specific groups of people or the language patterns found in particular text
types. Specialized corpora are usually designed with very specific research
projects in mind, as is the case in the corpus employed for this research.
Hunston (2002: 123) was one of the first researchers to draw attention to the
potential benefits that corpus linguistics offers critical discourse analysis:
Many of the arguments that critical linguists use depend upon assumptions about the
influence upon people and on society of language whose meaning is covert. It seems
apparent, then, that corpora are a very useful tool for the critical linguist, because they
identify repetitions, and can be used to identify implicit meaning.

Tognini-Bonelli (2001) distinguishes between corpus-driven approaches and

corpus-based approaches. In the former, the researcher is driven by whatever
the computerized analysis reveals to be frequent or salient in the corpus. An
advantage of this approach is that language features which may contradict the
analyst’s intuitions can be revealed as well as those that support intuition. This
helps to reduce the issue of researcher bias. The latter is more focused on using
a corpus as a way of testing existing hypotheses or intuitions.
In this chapter, as in the following Chapter 6, frequent words and keywords
are examined along with some of their semantic patterns. The specific corpus
techniques used in this chapter are word frequencies, keywords and concord-
ance analyses, available using the software Wordsmith Tools. (Scott, 2014)
I use an analysis of word frequencies in this chapter as the first step in the
corpus analysis. This is a useful starting point for word-based corpus analysis
as it can begin to reveal information about themes within the texts comprising
the corpus. Overwording and absences can also be revealed through the
132 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

application of word frequency analysis. This can then provide a basis for
further analysis. The combination of these approaches also facilitates a critical
analysis of large amounts of text, and therefore enables a critical analysis of
language patterns to be conducted. Stubbs (1996) argues that the semantic
patternings revealed by these techniques can contribute to the production of
certain discourses in the corpus and he defines a discourse as ‘recurrent phrases
and conventional ways of talking, which circulate in the social world, and
which form a constellation of repeated meanings’. (Stubbs, 1996: 158) Baker
(2008) has written extensively on the combination of corpus linguistics and
CDA and argues that ‘numbers count’ in the sense that the frequencies with
which speakers use particular linguistic features can be used to uncover the
cumulative effects of language. These points are supported by Mautner (2009)
who provides a comprehensive discussion of the mutual benefits of combining
corpus linguistics with critical discourse analysis. Corpus linguistics, therefore,
is a helpful way of revealing particular discourses around sexuality as they are
embodied in the curriculum documents.
The second stage in the corpus analysis was to conduct a keyword analysis,
followed by a concordance analysis of some of the frequent and keywords.
Scott (2014) defines a keyword as a word that occurs in a corpus more often
than would normally be expected when compared to another corpus. Examin-
ing keywords can highlight unexpected, or marked, frequencies in the corpus,
rather than just the high frequency words, and this can be quite revealing in
terms of the more unusual meanings and trends presented in the corpus.
A keyword analysis requires the corpus under scrutiny to be compared with a
‘reference corpus’ which is a larger and more general corpus. In this case, the
keywords lists were generated by comparing each document set with a word
frequency list from the British National Corpus (www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/).
A next stage commonly used in corpus analysis is to consider the semantic
environment of some lexical items. Examining the concordances in which a
word appears can help to build up a semantic profile of that word which can
contribute to revealing any underlying discourses and ideologies in the corpus.
Using keyword and concordance analysis together can provide a fairly good
overview of the main themes, discourses and ideologies prevalent in the
data set.
In keeping with a critical discourse analysis approach, I also examined the
concordances of some words which were not necessarily frequent or key, but
which were felt to be ‘ideologically contested’ in some way. In all stages of the
corpus-assisted analysis, a consideration of what the analyst considered to be
notable absences is included, alongside a commentary on what is obviously
present in the analysis and what it means in terms of ideologies and discourses
of sexuality. In the remaining sections of the chapter, I firstly examine the
English and English Language Arts curriculum documents, and then I move on
 English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 133

to investigate the SRE guidance document for England and Wales and the
Washington, DC Health Education curriculum documents.

English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis

A combination of the above methods of analysis reveals a number of interest-
ing issues in both sets of English-based curricula. On the one hand, both sets of
curriculum documents do seem to offer possibilities for exploring sexuality
issues. Descriptions of what is to be studied within each of the key skills are
fairly open-ended, and there seems to be scope for teachers interpreting those
descriptions in such a way that sexuality could be addressed. However, there is
a concurrent lack of visibility around sexuality which may function to discour-
age its exploration. As seen in the previous two chapters, silence around sexual
diversity is a key theme which emerged during the interviews with educators
and young people with all interviewees talking about the negative impact of
this on their learning (young people), teaching (educators) and overall experi-
ence of school.

Thematic Analysis of Classification Schemes

Classification schemes refer to the organization of vocabulary into discourse
types within a text. Both the English and English Language Arts curriculum
documents contain several classification schemes, some of which include:
 Authors
 Lists of texts
 Genres and text types
 Technical skills
 Types of language variation
 Themes in literary texts
The use of classification schemes within all curriculum programmes of study is
more to do with the ‘genre’ of the texts rather than with what ‘messages’ the
texts are trying to convey. Classification schemes are used as a concise way of
setting out what subject knowledge students are expected to learn. But there
are some classification schemes in the English subject area which are interest-
ing to examine in terms of sexuality, especially when sexuality is markedly
absent when it might logically be expected to appear. One such example is
found in the explanatory notes for the KS4 ‘language structure and variation’
element which states that students should explore ‘the ways in which language
reflects identity through regional, social and personal variation and diversity’.
These language-focused elements seem to raise tensions between opening up
opportunities for exploring sexuality issues and simultaneously closing them
134 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

down through marked silences. Here, the explicit mention of social and
personal variation and diversity seems to lend itself well to exploring variation
around sexuality. However, the explanatory notes which accompany this
section put restrictions on its possible interpretations:
The ways in which language reflects identity: These could include accent, dialect,
idiolect, lexical change, varieties of standard English such as Creole, occupational
variation, and differences in language use according to age and gender. (KS4
explanatory notes)
There is an absence around sexuality here, as the differences in language use
listed do not specify sexuality as a form of sociolinguistic variation. Although
the explanatory notes function only to offer suggestions as to how teachers
may interpret the programme of study, the very absence of sexuality (and the
concurrent visibility of variables such as age and gender) may mean that
teachers are less likely to include it in their delivery. Sexuality as a social
variable is also absent from the ELA documents (although there is less
emphasis in general on language variation within the language skills strand
of ELASS). In the extract below from a Grade 10 ELASLA rubric stating that
students must learn to ‘Analyze the ways in which the style and structure of a
speech support or frustrate its meaning or purpose’ (Grade 10 ELASLA), the
examples that are provided focus only upon race and gender:
Example: Students evaluate famous political speeches such as Shirley Chisholm’s (first
African American woman elected to Congress) 1972 campaign speech for president and
Adam Clayton Powell Jr’s (US politician and clergyman) speeches to secure equal
rights and opportunities for African Americans.
Here, as in the UK-based example, the possible social identities around which
‘style and structure’ may vary are exemplified only through reference to race and
gender, and not to sexual orientation (or any other forms of identity). As isolated
examples, this would not be problematic, but the repeated foregrounding of race
and gender in the examples and explanatory notes in each set of documents, and
concurrent repeated absence of references to sexuality, produce a cumulative
discursive effect of conveying the idea that sexuality is not as important as race
and gender, or is not as legitimate or authentic as a form of identity. This supports
the reported experiences of some of the young people discussed in Chapter 3.
Another example occurs in a scheme which I refer to broadly as ‘social
variation/diversity’. Particular kinds of social variation are referred to through-
out the programmes of study, especially in relation to representations of
identities in literature and the construction of identities through language.
Examples from KS4 include:
This could include relating the way women are presented in literature.
Themes could include images of men and women, place and identity. (KS4
Explanatory notes)
 English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 135

Age and occupation are also referred to in relation to the language variation
scheme. Again, we can see that, whilst social identities based on gender,
nationality, age and occupation are present in this scheme, sexuality is absent.
The same phenomenon can be seen in ELA. Across ELASLA, there are a total
of 16 references to racial identity, seven references to gender and six to
religion and belief. Sexual orientation is entirely absent from the documents
(as are other forms of identity such as disability and age). Thus, in ELASLA,
racial identity is given more prominence than any other form of social identity.
In KS3 and KS4, gender is explicitly referred to the most but there are implicit
references to racial identity which can be identified through an examination of
frequent words, ideologically contested words and concordances (see the
sections below). Drawing on Peterson’s (2011) work, even though these
classification schemes appear to be ‘value-free’, the very absence of sexuality
as a form of social identity effects a discourse of heteronormativity by erasing
the possibility of sexual diversity.
In KS3 and KS4, one place where sexuality could be interpreted as being
included in a classification scheme is in the list of recommended authors that
appear in the explanatory notes for ‘Reading’. Whilst some known LGBT+-
identified authors are included in these lists and/or authors who deal explicitly
with LGBT+-related issues in their work (e.g. Oscar Wilde, Jackie Kay, Carol
Ann Duffy, Morris Gleitzman), there is no explicit mention of how their works
may be used to explore issues around sexuality. This same phenomena occurs
in the ELA curriculum documents. Authors who are known to have been LGB
are included in the suggested texts to be studied (e.g. Walt Whitman, Virginia
Woolf ) but there is no explicit reference to how their literary works could be
used to explore issues around sexuality equality and diversity. This apparent
incongruity was noted by some of the UK-based teachers and young people (as
discussed in Chapters 3 and 4).
The literary themes which are included in the ELA documents (in ELASLA)
are: civil disobedience; political speeches; race relations; racial experiences and
attitudes in America; journeys; immigration to the United States; individual and
society; freedom and responsibility; war; Native Americans; classical Greek
drama and epic poetry. From these themes, racial identity is the only form of
social identity which stands out as being explicit in the documents. In the
national curriculum documents, the themes are vaguer. The literary themes in
the KS3 and KS4 classification schemes can simply be identified as: the English
literary heritage; texts from different cultures and traditions; and specific refer-
ence to the requirement for students to study at least one play by Shakespeare.
In sum, analysis of the classification schemes in the curricula do not make
any explicit reference to sexual orientation as a form of social identity, whilst
they do reference other forms of social identity, especially race in the US
documents and (to a lesser extent) gender in the UK documents. Thus, certain
136 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

social identities are legitimized as subjects of study in English through their

explicit presence in the curricula. Although it is not stated that sexual orienta-
tion should not be studied, evidence from the educator interviews suggests that
teachers are less inclined to focus on themes and topics which are not explicitly
included in the curriculum documents.

Overwording and Underwording

Fairclough links the ideological struggle over certain words with the use of
‘overwording’ (an unusually high degree of wording) in texts:
Overwording shows preoccupation with some aspect of reality – which may indicate
that it is a focus of ideological struggle. (Fairclough, 2001: 96)
Using the tools of corpus linguistics can help to identify which items are ‘over-
worded’, or salient in some way. It is useful to produce word frequency and
keyword lists for each set of documents in order to illuminate some of the
overwording which occurs. Word frequency lists can highlight the most fre-
quently occurring words in a corpus and keyword lists can show which words are
particularly salient in relation to the particular texts under scrutiny. Both salience
(keyness) and frequency can indicate different kinds of lexical emphasis. But,
importantly, the word frequency lists can also highlight what is not frequent, or
absent, from the texts. Corpus linguistics is not, on the whole, well-equipped for
exploring or accounting for textual absence and the meanings which may be
created from absence. As explained earlier, this is where a combination of corpus
linguistics with CDA can be particularly fruitful as the analysis can focus on both
presence and absence, and on both intuition and counter-intuition.
In the word frequency and keyword lists below, only the lexical words are
included as this is the most revealing in terms of exploring experiential values
of vocabulary. (Fairclough, 2001) The words in the frequency lists are also
lemmas, i.e. the base forms of words which can vary in terms of word class,
grammatical tense and so on (for example, identi* includes identity, identities,
identify, identified, identifies, identifying, identification). Lemmas are indicated
through the use of an asterisk. Words which have a frequency of 0.3% or
higher are included in the word frequency lists below (due to the size of the
corpora, this seemed sufficient for enabling identification of words which were
actually appearing frequently in each text). For the keyword lists, the top
40 words are included (Table 5.3). In Table 5.2, words which appear in the
frequency lists of all four documents have been highlighted in bold.
Tables 5.2 and 5.3 show that there is considerable overlap in the UK
documents between words which are frequent and words which are key.
Although there is some overlap, there is more variation between the frequent
and keywords in the US documents. Many of the frequent and keywords in
English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 137

Table 5.2 Word frequencies (English/ELA)

Word KS3 KS4 ELASS ELASLA

Write* X X X X
Use* X X X X
Text* X X X X
Include* X X X
Pupil* X
Different* X X X
English X X
Language X X
Other* X X
Idea* X X X X
Meaning* X X
Read* X X
Understand* X X
e.g. X
Develop* X X X
Culture* X X
Range X X
Vary* X
Student* X X X
Speak* X X
Context* X
Literary X
Listen* X
Purpose* X X
Analyze* X X
Evidence X
Word* X
Reason* X
Draw* X
Topic* X
Information* X X
Standard* X
Issue* X
Support* X
Demonstrate* X
Discussion* X
Grade* X
Research* X
Example X
Present* X
Organize* X
Evaluate* X
138 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.3 Keywords (English/ELA)

Keyword KS3 KS4 ELASS ELASLA

Write* X X X X
Text* X X X X
Include* X X X
Pupils X
Use* X X X X
e.g. X X
Meaning* X X X
Language X X X
Ideas X X X X
English X X
Develop X X
Variations X
Understand* X X
Culture* X X
Explore X X
Different X X
Engage X X
Read* X X X X
Listen* X X
Speak* X X
Drama X
Explain X
Multimodal X X
Sentence X
Range X X
Paragraph* X X
Structure X
Fiction X
Organize X
Literary X X X X
Notes X X
Subject* X X
Grammar X
Reader X
Curriculum X
Purpose X X
Context X X
Theme* X X X X
Imaginative X
Image X
Students X X X
Explanatory X
Unfamiliar X
Evaluate X X
Skills X
Traditions X
English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 139

Table 5.3 (cont.)

Keyword KS3 KS4 ELASS ELASLA

Situations X
Connections X
Analyze* X X X
Curricular X
Websites X
Evidence X X
Reasoning X
Determine X
Conventions X
Clarify X
Explicitly X
Topic X X
Specific X
Literature X
Cite X
Demonstrate X
Inferences X
Discuss* X X
Command X
Diverse X
Phrases X
Grade X X
Delineate X
Word X
Audience X X
Focuses X
Nonfiction X
Multiple X
Information* X X
Objective X
Correctly X
Example X
Strand X
Compare X
Identify X
Endnotes X
Expository X
Rhetorical X
Author’s X
Quotations X
Sources X
Speech* X
Essays X
Research X
Footnotes X
Bibliographic X
140 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.3 (cont.)

Keyword KS3 KS4 ELASS ELASLA

Format X
Presentations X
Internet X
Elements X
Figurative X

both sets of documents are unsurprising. There are a number of words which
relate to the ‘technical’ aspects of the subject of English (e.g. text, language,
paragraphs) and some which relate to the kinds of academic skills it is expected
that students would develop through their study of the subject (e.g. read, write,
describe, evaluate, discuss). The US documents seem to focus even more on
these technical and skills-focused words than the UK documents. These are not
particularly interesting or useful to examine in any further detail as they relate
more to the nature of the texts (subject-specific curricula) rather than uncovering
any ideologies about social identity or diversity that may be embedded. It is more
interesting to examine those words which do not fall into either the subject-
related ‘technical’ or ‘skills’ categories as these may be functioning to do more
‘ideological work’ in the text. In fact, prior to conducting the corpus analysis,
I had already identified most of these words as ‘ideologically contested’, therefore
the corpus analysis went some way towards confirming my own intuitions about
particular ideologically contested words being either frequent or key in the
documents. There is clearly not space to examine all of the frequent words and
keywords in detail, therefore I will only focus on the words which appear as both
frequent and key and whose concordance patterns reveal something interesting in
terms of their semantic profile and embedded ideologies. Given that the inquiry
focuses on sexual diversity and identity, it makes sense to examine more closely
those words which may pertain to these issues in some way. Given the broader
CDA framework, a case can be made for examining the semantic behaviour of
some less frequent and less salient words if their meanings are contested,
especially if they pertain (or could potentially pertain) to issues around sexuality
(e.g. words such as identity, different and diverse). Before going on to analyze the
concordances, I will briefly say more about these ideologically contested words.

Ideologically Contested Words

In his CDA framework, Fairclough (2001) argues that certain words have
contested meanings and are the focus of ideological struggle. He refers to
 English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 141

these as ‘ideologically contested’ words. Some of these do also appear as

frequent and/or key as discussed in the previous section. But others do not
have a particularly high frequency and/or keyness. This is where the know-
ledge and experience of the analyst can go some way to redressing the
limitations of the purely quantitative and largely decontextualized methods
of corpus linguistics. Many words and phrases which appear in the English
and English Language Arts curricula are broad in terms of their meanings,
and this could be an advantage in terms of incorporating sexual diversity into
the English curriculum. I have identified the following words and terms as
being ideologically contested in both sets of curricula and which may have
some semantic relationship to issues around sexuality: culture*; identi*;
soci*; differen*. Given that these terms are ideologically contested, there is
actually scope for relating some of them to issues around sexuality and
sexual diversity. For example, terms such as social justice and cultural
identity could potentially be interpreted in terms of sexuality identity and
justice. One example comes from the description of the KS3 and KS4
‘reading’ content:
The choice of texts should be informed by the cultural context of the school and
experience of the pupils. It could include texts that:
 help pupils explore their sense of identity and reflect on their own values, attitudes
and assumptions about other people, times and places, either through continuity or
contrast with their own experiences
 explore common experiences in different and unfamiliar contexts (time, place and
culture)
(KS3 and KS4 explanatory notes)
‘Identity’ is an ideologically contested term here. Again, there seems to be
potential for using texts to discuss sexuality as a form of identity, and for
encouraging students to engage with a range of issues around sexuality. This
same phenomenon can be found in the ELA documents. For example, at Grade
12, it is stated that students should ‘Analyze and compare style and language
among significant cross-cultural literary works’. ‘Cross-cultural’ is, arguably,
an ideologically contested term here and could potentially refer to sexuality as
a cultural variable and form of identity. But the examples of texts that are
provided following the statement are The Odyssey and Toni Morrison’s
Beloved, neither of which have themes or characters that explicitly lend
themselves to exploring sexuality as a cultural issue but which do foreground
other social variables such as nationality, race and gender. In the Grade 9
documents, another example similarly restricts the potential meanings of
‘culture’ to race, ethnicity and nationality and excludes through absence any
other possible meanings or interpretations:
142 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Example: Students read about some of the different cultures described in African
Beginnings by James Haskins, Kathleen Benson, and Floyd Cooper. They generate
researchable questions about how and why the cultures developed as differently as they
did and support conclusions by citing evidence from the resources. (Grade 9 ELASLA)

Thus, a preliminary analysis of sections of the English and ELA curricula

seems to reveal opportunities for exploring issues around sexuality. However,
both the UK-based teachers and young people who were interviewed claimed
that this rarely happens (see Chapters 3 and 4). Thus, overwording, under-
wording and examining some ideologically contested words can begin to
reveal the main experiential values constructed through the vocabulary of each
text. But the analysis can be developed further by examining in more detail
how the vocabulary behaves semantically and how this may further contribute
to the construction of particular sexuality discourses.

Semantic Profiles of Frequent, Key and Ideologically

Contested Words
So far, corpus-assisted methods of word frequency and keyword lists have
helped to identify some elements of overwording in the curriculum docu-
ments. Some of these are also ideologically contested. It is also potentially
important to examine some less frequent and less salient words which are
ideologically contested. This should then enable a more detailed picture to
emerge of how important words are behaving in the texts in ways which
may (or may not) contribute towards the construction of discourses of
sexuality through each text’s experiential values. Following this, some
ideologically contested words (even if they do not appear in the frequency
lists) are briefly examined, especially if they occur in both the UK and US
documents.
The relatively high frequencies of culture* suggest that the transmission of
‘culture’ is a particular experiential concern of the English/ELA curricula.
Often, the way that word is used, and the other words that it frequently co-
occurs with, place restrictions upon its meaning potential. Culture is a broad-
ranging term. But the documents seem to be defining culture narrowly by
equating it with nation, nationality or ethnicity. By looking at the ‘appropriate
texts’ listed in the curriculum (below), ‘different cultures’ seems to imply texts
which are produced by non-white or non-British authors.
Texts appropriate for study at Key Stage 3 include some works by the following
authors: John Agard, Maya Angelou, Kwesi Brew, Anita Desai, Deborah Ellis, Athol
Fugard, Jamila Gavin, Nadine Gordimer, Gaye Hicyilmaz, Beverly Naidoo, Grace
Nichols, C Everard Palmer, Bali Rai, John Steinbeck, Meera Syal, Mildred D Taylor,
Mark Twain, Adeline Yen Mah and Benjamin Zephaniah. (KS3 explanatory notes)
 English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 143

Therefore, ‘different cultures’ is narrowly defined here by the authors’ (non-

white) race and ethnicity or the texts they write which explore those issues.
A critical analysis would note that these interpretations exclude sexuality,
whilst explicitly including other aspects of social identity. Lexical choices
around race, ethnicity and gender are frequent, whilst sexuality is conspicu-
ously absent. The extract below illustrates this.
When choosing texts from different cultures and traditions, it is important to look for
authors who are so familiar with a particular culture or country that they represent it
sensitively and with understanding. (KS3 explanatory notes)
Whilst these are clearly important texts and issues to include as a part of the
curriculum, it is important to acknowledge that ‘culture’ can vary along other
dimensions including sexuality. The emphasis on race and ethnicity seems to
be overworded, to the point where it silences other possible interpretations of
what ‘different cultures’ could mean. Examining the concordances of culture*
also supports this. The most frequent lexical collocates in KS3 and KS4 are
traditions, texts and different. Culture* also co-occurs with identity twice and
culture or country in one example. In ELASS, culture* occurs the most
frequently with experience, multiple, variety, point of view and religious
beliefs. Therefore, in both KS3 and KS4 and ELASS, the concordances
suggesting ‘difference’ and ‘variation’ in relation to culture are valued and
emphasized. Sample concordances are included in Tables 5.4 and 5.5.

Table 5.4 Sample concordance of culture* from KS3 and KS4

contexts (time, place and culture) .Contemporary writer

list of writers from different cultures and traditions (below
When choosing texts from cultures and traditions, it is
different
are so familiar with a particular culture or country that they
of writing from different cultures and traditions, relating
process relates to identity and cultural diversity. Critical
and contributes to our sense of cultural identity. Students learn to
it to experience different times, cultures ,viewpoints and situations

Table 5.5 Sample concordance of culture* from ELASS

reveal the conflict between their cultures ,values, and religious

and in texts from multiple cultures .Evidence-based writing
a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a
in texts from a variety of cultures .Evidence based writing
144 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.6 Sample concordance of differen* from KS4

or move beyond it to experience different times, cultures,

viewpoints
explore common experiences in different and unfamiliar contexts
Creole, occupational differences in language use according
variation, and
and assumptions of writing from different cultures and traditions,
ability to look at an idea from different perspectives. It also
also develops the ability to hold different interpretations, and to

However, the co-occurrence of culture with ‘country’ in KS3 places a

restriction upon a potential plurality of meanings. There are not many occur-
rences of culture* overall in ELASLA but, in the ones that are there, culture*
co-occurs with explicit mentions of Sioux, China and African. As in KS3 and
KS4, this suggests that culture* is equated with ‘nationality’ and that this
meaning of culture prevails over other possible meanings.
The collocations of culture* seem to show that words and concepts to do
with sexuality as a form of cultural identity are conspicuous through their
absence. Because they are ‘underworded’ in these documents, teachers report
finding it more difficult to include them in their delivery of the curriculum, as
discussed and exemplified in Chapter 4.
Similar patterns of meaning emerge when the collocates of differen* are
examined. The most frequent lexical collocates of differen* in KS3 and KS4 are
texts, traditions and cultures. No collocates explicitly refer to identity but there
are some co-occurrences of differen* with interpretations, perspectives and
circumstances which suggests that a consideration of different perspectives and
interpretations of texts is valued in the curriculum. Again, the collocation of
differen* with cultures and texts comes about mainly because of the frequent
repetition of the phrase ‘texts from different cultures and traditions’– an idea
which is therefore given prominence in the English curriculum.
The lexical collocates of differen* in ELASS share few similarities with
those in the UK-based documents. They refer mainly to technical features of
language and text such as word, meanings, parts of speech and writing. There
are very few ‘non-technical’ collocates in the list. There are just a couple of
occurrences of points of view and one of world views. Therefore, the concord-
ances of differen* appear not to be as ideologically contested as in the UK
documents, even though the lemma occurs frequently throughout the texts.
This is a similar case in ELASLA, in which the frequent lexical collocates are
similarities, students and audiences, with points of view co-ocurring with
differen* a couple of times. ‘Difference’ in relation to identity is entirely
absent in all documents. The inclusion of difference in relation to identity
 English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 145

may function to signal to teachers the potential for addressing issues of

difference around sexual identity through their teaching of the subject. But
the very absence of this possibility may discourage teachers from including
this in their delivery of the curriculum.
The potential meanings of vary* are similarly restricted when we look at
how they behave in the documents. In KS3 and KS4, vary* refers mainly to
language variation as shown in phrases such as ‘Varied linguistic and literary
techniques’, ‘how English varies locally and globally’, ‘regional and global
variations’ and ‘language structure and variation’. ‘Regional/local’ and
‘global’ suggest that the geographical background is given more prominence
in relation to language variation than other possible forms of identity in the
document. One such example is:
Understanding how English varies locally and globally, and how these variations relate
to identity and cultural diversity. (KS3)
Although language is referred to in terms of ‘social and personal variation’ in
KS4, the only specific types of social variation which co-occur with vary* are
creole and occupational variation. Therefore, we again see restricted meanings
around variation in the lexical collocates. Language can vary in relation to
sexuality (and many other forms of social identity), but these do not co-occur
with vary*, effectively rendering them absent.
The collocates of vary* in ELASS and ELASLA are less ideologically
contested and refer mainly to technical aspects of language such as speech, tasks,
contexts, writing, verb, phrases, noun, syntax and transitions. The frequent
repetition of a number of phrases can explain the collocation patterns in these
texts, for example, ‘Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks’, ‘add variety
and interest to writing’ and ‘use various types of phrases’ recur several times
throughout the document. Again, variation around identity (including sexual
identity) is entirely absent. It is, of course, difficult to claim this from the corpus
analysis alone, but it may contribute to discouraging teachers from including a
consideration of variety in relation to sexual diversity in their teaching.
The remaining words examined in this section do not appear as frequent or
key, but they are typically considered ‘ideologically contested’, therefore it
may be interesting to also consider their collocation patterns to see if the
meanings which emerge are, indeed, ideologically contested. In KS3 and
KS4, culture* occurs in close proximity to identity three times. The phrase
cultural identity occurs twice and national identity occurs once. The same
occurs in KS4, plus here there are also two occurrences of ‘the ways in which
language reflects identity’ (but then one of these co-occurs with ‘accent’).
The examples in Table 5.7 suggest that the only form of ‘identity’ being
explicitly highlighted in these curriculum documents is cultural identity. Cul-
ture, as seen earlier, is itself restricted in terms of meaning and ideologically
146 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.7 Sample concordance of identi* from KS3 and KS4

contributes to our sense of identity .Pupils learn to become

cultural
how these variations relate to identity and cultural diversity.
questions of local and national identity , for example by exploring
ways in which language reflects identity :These could include

contested. The co-occurrence of ‘national’ with ‘identity’ also emphasizes

nationality as a more significant form of identity than other possibilities, such
as sexuality, gender or race and so on. Whereas ‘identity’ is the most fre-
quently occurring form of the lemma in the UK-based documents, ‘identify’
occurs in most instances in the US-based documents. It is used in a more
‘technical’, and less ideologically contested, way in both ELASS and ELA-
SLA in that it appears in phrases which refer to students being able to identify
particular technical features in texts such as patterns, statements, punctuation,
imagery and alliteration.
There are three occurrences each of value* in KS3 and KS4. ‘Values and
assumptions in a text’ and ‘reflect on their own values, attitudes and assump-
tions’ occur in both KS3 and KS4. ‘How ideas, experiences and values are
portrayed differently in texts’ occurs in KS3 and ‘cultures and traditions
influence values, assumptions’ occurs in KS4. Again, there is clear acknow-
ledgement of difference in terms of values with no one set of values being
given prominence. The same is found in the US-based documents with phrases
such as ‘audience’s knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases’
and ‘conflict between their cultures, values, and religious beliefs’ accounting
for most of the occurrences of ‘value’. One typical example is:
Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly and thoroughly, supplying the most relevant
evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner
that anticipates the audience’s knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases.
(ELASS Grade 11)
Despite the explicit emphasis on difference and variation around ‘values’, we
again see culture* co-occurring with ‘values’ in both the UK and US docu-
ments. ‘Religious beliefs’ also co-occurs with ‘values’ in the ELA documents,
as in the following example:
Evidence-based writing focuses on how the written and spoken words of Native
Americans, Africans and colonial Europeans reveal the conflict between their cultures,
values, and religious beliefs. (ELASS Grade 11)
This means that the interpretation of values as referring to culture and religion
is given more prominence, whereas other meaning possibilities (such as values
relating to sexuality and sexual identity and behaviour) are absent.
 English and English Language Arts Documents: Analysis 147

Table 5.8 Sample concordance of soci* from KS3

perceptions of Victorian social justice). Explore their

society and present
make a positive contribution to society. The importance of English
they will need to participate in society and employment. Pupils learn
to explore the culture of their society, the groups in which they

Table 5.9 Sample concordance of soci* from ELASS

convey identity in a diverse society. As they read and write,

messages about their current societies the authors convey through
the concepts of poetic social justice and legal justice.
justice,
and the role of law in modern society. Evidence based writing
focuses

Although soci* is not a frequent word, its collocates are quite varied in KS3
and KS4. In KS3, there are two occurrences of ‘social justice’, two occur-
rences of ‘Victorian society’ and references to ‘contributing to’ and ‘partici-
pating in’ society (which also appears in KS4). There is one reference to
‘explore the culture of their society’. In KS4, there are two occurrences of
‘relate texts to their social and historical contexts’. The reference to ‘Victorian
society’ in KS3 is quite marked as no other historical period stands out in
this way.
‘Social justice’ is a co-occurrence which appears in ELASS. In fact,
‘justice’ is the most frequent lexical collocate of soci* (realized as social) in
the US document sets, suggesting that ‘social justice’ is emphasized as some-
thing to be examined throughout the study of the subject. Within ELASS, there
are also some references to ‘diverse society’, ‘current societies’ and ‘modern
society’.
In ELASLA, no clear semantic patterns are identified because the occur-
rences are more varied. There are some co-occurrences of social with ‘polit-
ical’, e.g. ‘understanding of the social or political philosophy’, ‘similarities and
differences in the social and political contexts’ and ‘American political and
social life’. Therefore, it would appear that ‘society’ is closely linked with
‘politics’ in these documents but not in the others. What is perhaps notable is
that ‘social identity’ is absent in all of the documents. Social identity may
encompass sexual identity, therefore the lack of co-occurrences of social with
identity may, again, restrict opportunities for teachers believing that it is
legitimate to address issues of sexual identity through the teaching of English.
148 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

In KS3, the two occurrences of divers* appear in the phrases ‘original and
diverse ways’ and ‘identity and cultural diversity’. In KS4, there are two
occurrences of ‘identity and cultural diversity’ and one of ‘social and personal
variation and diversity’. Again, diversity is something which is explicitly
linked to culture and identity, suggesting that diversity in terms of culture
and identity is something which is valued. However, because the meanings of
both culture and identity are restricted through their limited collocations, the
notion of ‘diversity’ actually sits in tension with the lack of plurality of
meaning. In ELASS, the collocate patterns emerge mainly as a result of the
repeated use of particular phrases such as ‘Respond thoughtfully to diverse
perspectives’ and ‘work with diverse partners’. There are no occurrences of
divers* in ELASLA.
The analysis presented and discussed in this section suggests that words
which have possibilities for leading to addressing sexual diversity issues
through the English curriculum actually have fairly restricted meanings when
we examine how they behave semantically in the texts. Overwording, in
terms of frequent and key words, and concordances of particular words
contribute to the prioritizing of particular meanings over others. This
seems particularly significant when examining the semantic profiles of ideo-
logically contested words. It would appear that there are opportunities for
expressing a wider range of possibility of meaning, especially in relation to
words such as culture, identity, different and diverse, which may lend
themselves well to opening up discussions about sexual diversity through
the teaching of English. But these opportunities are certainly not being made
explicit through their repeated absence and underwording. Thus, in the
English curriculum documents examined for England and Wales and Wash-
ington, DC, we see another example of a ‘routine silencing’ (Epstein et al.,
2003) of sexual diversity issues in schools. Moreover, the analysis perhaps
helps to start to make sense of the young people’s experience of silencing in
schools. Despite the young people’s identification of English as a subject in
which they see potential for expressing more authentic sexually diverse
identities, it is not the subject curriculum itself which facilitates this, rather
the perceived actions, attitudes and behaviours of individual English teachers
themselves. Thus, there is perhaps a case for arguing about giving teachers
greater agency and empowerment in their teaching, a point I return to in the
final chapter.

SRE and Health Education: Analysis

I now turn to examining Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) in the United
Kingdom and Health Education (HEd) in the United States as subjects in
which addressing sexuality issues is a key part of their remit. Like English,
 SRE and Health Education: Analysis 149

these subjects were explicitly discussed by the young people in the interviews
as being meaningful (and usually problematic) in some way in relation to
sexuality. An initial thematic analysis of both documents suggests that,
although sexual orientation does appear (often in a positive way) in HEd,
there remains a presumption of heterosexuality throughout the sections which
deal with sexual health. Thus, a tension is created between the curricular
emphasis on fostering positive attitudes towards sexual diversity and non-
heterosexual sexualities and its concurrent erasure of homosexuality from
issues around sexual health. For example:
Describe why abstinence and contraception are important. (HEd Grade 8)

Describe the benefits of abstinence as the most effective means of contraception.

(HEd Grade 8)

Recognize that women should begin to receive regular gynaecological exams [. . .]

when they begin to engage in intercourse. (HEd High School)
Critical discourse analysis is, again, useful for showing how this happens and
how a discourse of heteronormativity is produced through the language
(including silence) used in the documents. The same analytic procedure is
used to examine the SRE and Health Education documents as the English
documents in the preceding section.

Thematic Analysis of Classification Schemes

Although the HEd remit is wider than that of SRE (in that the Health Education
curriculum is designed to cover various aspects of health education, not just
sexual health), what is covered in both documents is actually quite similar. The
SRE guidance covers issues (e.g. media influences and family) which are
included in the HEd curriculum. In both documents, the vocabulary seems to
indicate two schemes which broadly relate to ‘concepts’ (the concepts to be
covered in teaching the subject) and ‘skills’ (the skills which students have to
demonstrate and deploy). The ‘skills’ scheme is primarily realized through the
repeated occurrences of verbs such as explain, describe, name, locate and
summarize. This scheme emerges mainly due to the nature and purpose of the
text, i.e. a curriculum document is intended to set out the skills which students
are expected to develop and use in their learning of a particular subject. The
‘concepts’ scheme covers particular topics within the broad subject of Health
Education indicated by the repeated use of particular words and phrases
(especially in sub-headings). These include: emotional health; nutrition;
human body systems; disease prevention and treatment; school and commu-
nity health. ‘Sexuality, reproduction and health’ appears as a topic area from
grade 2 upwards in the curriculum, although, as explained earlier, sexuality
150 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

issues overlap with the other topics to the point where sexuality seems to be
embedded through most of the curriculum. Within the sexuality area, there is a
focus on issues around abstinence, contraception and disease prevention
(cancer and STIs are the two diseases which are named the most). The sections
which focus explicitly on ‘sexuality, reproduction and health’ for the most part
sit in between sections on ‘human growth and development’ and ‘disease
prevention and treatment’ in HEd. They are also close to sections on ‘alcohol,
tobacco and other drugs’ (a topic area which is absent from SRE) which focus
primarily on the dangers of using these substances. Thus, in terms of structure,
the positioning of the sexuality sections next to those concerned with the
physical body, disease and substance abuse may contribute to presenting
sexuality in physical and negative terms (also a key finding of Chapter 6). In
SRE, sexuality does not appear as a separate section but runs throughout the
whole document.
Although the term ‘abstinence’ is not used, there does seem to be a similar
theme emerging in SRE. The notion of ‘delaying’ sexual activity is mentioned
a number of times. ‘Marriage’ and ‘family’ are also given prominence in SRE
with both presented in fairly positive terms as will be seen through the
concordances later on. ‘The importance of marriage for family life’ is a phrase
which occurs several times and therefore appears to be a prominent theme in
the text. For example:
Within the context of talking about relationships, children should be taught about the
nature of marriage and its importance for family life and for bringing up children. The
Government recognises that there are strong and mutually supportive relationships
outside marriage. Therefore, children should learn the significance of marriage and
stable relationships as key building blocks of community and society. (SRE)
The concept of ‘marriage’ is not prominent in HEd but, in both documents,
there is an implicit endorsement of heterosexuality through an emphasis on
reproductive sex, pregnancy, contraception (including abstinence as a means
of preventing pregnancy and the transmission of STIs) and a concurrent
absence of references to non-heterosexual forms of sexuality. There is minimal
reference to ‘sexual orientation’ in SRE but this is in conflict with an explicit
directive not to ‘promote sexual orientation’. In both documents, there is
emphasis on pregnancy and STIs as outcomes of sexual activity. This is
reflected in the extract below which appears in the Grade 7 section (similar
phrases appear throughout the whole document). The extract also includes a
typical example of how the document classifies abstinence as ‘healthy’ and
‘promiscuity’ as ‘unhealthy’.
Define STIs and HIV/AIDS; describe behaviors that place one at risk for HIV/AIDS,
STIs, or unintended pregnancy; and explain why abstinence is the most effective way to
prevent disease or pregnancy.
 SRE and Health Education: Analysis 151

[. . .] Differentiate healthy sexual behaviors (abstinence) from those that are harmful
(date rape, sexual promiscuity); and identify barriers and support. (HEd: p,8–9)

Throughout the document, abstinence is also presented as the most effective

form of contraception. There is, therefore, an implicit assumption being made
that ‘sexual activity’ is necessarily heterosexual (as same-sex sexual activity
does not result in pregnancy):
Describe the short-term and long-term consequences of adolescent sexual activity, and
the benefits of abstinence as the most effective means of contraception. (HEd: p.9)
There are notable absences around pleasure, consent and social dimensions of
sexuality and sexual activity. These classification schemes are reflected in the
overwording (frequency) and underwording (absence) of particular lexical
items and through the semantic behaviour of these and ideologically contested
words. As in the previous analysis of the English curriculum documents, the
ways that the experiential values of the vocabulary are embedded into the texts
can be further examined using the corpus-assisted tools of word frequency,
keyword and concordance analyses.

Overwording and Underwording

Word frequency and keyword lists for the SRE and Health Education docu-
ments are included in Tables 5.10–5.13 as a useful starting point for examining
overwording and potential underwording in the texts.
The results in Tables 5.10–5.13 show that many of the keywords are
similar to the frequent words and these are linked to the main topic that the

Table 5.10 SRE Word frequency list

Number of occurrences % frequency in

Word in document set document set

School* 176 1.82

Sex 154 1.59
Relationship 150 1.55
Education* 143 1.48
Parent* 91 0.94
Pupil* 88 0.91
Child* 76 0.79
Teacher* 76 0.79
Young* 68 0.70
People 60 0.62
Policy* 55 0.57
Health 44 0.46
Sexual 44 0.46
152 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.11 SRE Keywords

1. sex 2. education 3. relationship 4. school/s

5. PSHE 6. pupil/s 7. parents 8. sexual
9. young 10. teacher/s 11. relationships 12. policy
13. STIs 14. confidentiality 15. child/ren 16. health
17. framework 18. contraception 19. teaching 20. learning
21. professionals 22. guidance 23. key 24. puberty
25. inappropriate 26. need 27. people 28. ensure
29. secondary 30. appropriate 31. issues 32. effective
33. develop 34. educators 35. peer 36. primary
37. protection 38. delaying 39. teenage 40. support

Table 5.12 HEd Word frequency list

Number of occurrences % frequency in

Word in document set document set

Health* 283 2.72

Describe 79 0.76
Explain* 73 0.70
Disease* 71 0.68
Use* 69 0.66
Other* 67 0.64
Sexual* 66 0.63
Demonstrate* 65 0.62
Family* 62 0.59
Include* 51 0.49
Influence* 49 0.47
Ability 48 0.46
Body* 47 0.45
Student* 45 0.43
Community* 44 0.42
Identify* 43 0.41
System* 42 0.40
Behave* 40 0.38
Personal 40 0.38
Safe* 40 0.38
Standard* 40 0.38
Develop* 39 0.37
Drug* 39 0.37

document deals with (i.e. sexual health education) and the key social actors
involved (pupils/students, parents and teachers). In this sense, the frequent
words are not particularly revealing about ideologies. But there are some
interesting keywords a little further down the list in the 20–40 positions. For
 SRE and Health Education: Analysis 153

Table 5.13 HEd Keywords

1. Health 2. describe 3. demonstrate 4. explain

5. behaviour* 6. analyze 7. disease* 8. grade
9. prevent* 10. sexual 11. strand 12. alcohol
13. influence* 14. ability 15. emotional 16. skills
17. identify 18. student 19. family 20. standards
21. safety 22. drugs 23. personal 24. community
25. STIs 26. body 27. healthy 28. including
29. nutrition 30. communication 31. locate 32. use
33. enhance 34. respectful 35. tobacco 36. physical
37. feelings 38. related 39. ways 40. strategies

example, keywords such as STIs, confidentiality, contraception, puberty, in/

appropriate start to reveal discourses around disease and risk emerging as well
as an emphasis on the physical dimensions of sexual activity and relationships.
It is also perhaps worth noting that the words HIV and abuse also occur just
outside the top 40 keywords at positions 41 and 43 respectively. These words
further contribute to a discourse of sexuality as associated with risk and disease.
Notable absences in both lists (or appearing very low down) are words to do
with consent, love, pleasure, emotions and the social dimensions of sexuality.
There is nothing which indicates anything to do with the promotion of equality,
respect and non-violence. And there is very little which suggests a positive
semantic prosody being constructed around sexual identity and sexual activity.
In HEd, disease* also appears in high positions in both the word frequency
and keyword lists. As in the ELA documents, the verbs which indicate the
kinds of skills that students demonstrate in their learning in HEd appear in the
word frequency list – this is not the case for SRE. The verbs are, for the most
part, also not key in HEd. Whereas parents and teachers are both frequent and
key in SRE (as well as pupils), students are the only social actors occurring in
the frequency and keyword lists for HEd. Thus, there appears to be more
emphasis placed on students and what they are doing (or are expected to be
doing) in the US documents. Frequent and keywords such as disease and body
indicate that sexuality is associated with the physical and medical, as it is in
SRE. But the appearance of frequent and keywords such as family, community,
personal, emotional, feelings, communication and respectful indicate that
sexuality encompasses a wider range of meanings than it does in SRE. Unlike
in SRE, drug*, alcohol* and tobacco* appear in the HEd word frequency and/
or keyword lists. This is partly to do with the fact that the document relates to
Health Education more broadly, rather than just sex education, but the sections
which deal explicitly with drugs and alcohol are linked to their effects on
sexual behaviour, as in the following example:
154 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Discuss how the use of alcohol and other drugs impairs decision-making; increases
the risk of violence; and places one at risk for sexual assault, pregnancy, and STIs.
(HEd: p.10)
Note also the absence of any notion that alcohol may potentially place one at
risk of being the perpetrator of sexual assault and an implicit assumption that
it is young women, more than young men, who are being discouraged from
drinking in this section through explicit reference to pregnancy.3
In sum, the word frequency and keywords lists suggest that both documents
construct sexuality as predominantly physical (although the US documents
less so) and as associated with disease and risk above all else. The HEd
document is broader in its construction of sexuality as encompassing emo-
tional and social dimensions, but also links it to other behaviours considered
‘risky’ such as using drugs and alcohol. There is notable underwording and
absence around love, consent and issues of violence (including homophobic/
biphobic/transphobic violence and including violence between young people).

Ideologically Contested Words

A number of the words appearing in the frequency and keyword lists above
are, arguably, ideologically contested, as well as some words occurring in the
documents which do not appear on these lists. Ideologically contested terms
include adjectives such as safe and violent – such words are likely to be
ideologically loaded with particular meanings around what is considered safe,
violent or inappropriate behaviour. The way that particular verbs behave in the
documents may also be interesting to consider in terms of the ideological work
they are doing – such verbs include protect and promote. Marriage also stands
out as being ideologically contested, especially in terms of how it behaves in
the texts and the semantic prosodies that this behaviour creates. In the next
section, I examine the semantic profiles of some frequent and keywords which
have the potential to be ideologically contested in some way. I also examine
some other ideologically contested words which do not necessarily appear as
frequent or key.

Semantic Profiles of Frequent, Key and Ideologically

Contested Words
The words sexual, health, pupil (United Kingdom) /student (United States) and
STIs appear as both frequent and key in both documents. It is unsurprising that

3
A useful recent article on alcohol and sexual assault in higher education in the United States
appears in the US Chronicle of Higher Education – http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Campuses-
Can-t-Talk/148615/.
 SRE and Health Education: Analysis 155

Table 5.14 Sample concordance of sexual* from SRE

of infection, through delaying sexual activity and teaching

know how the law applies to sexual relationships. National
sex; access confidential sexual health advice, support
in the form of inappropriate sexual relationships. The new
sexually active or contemplating sexual activity. This will
contemplating having, sex. If sexual abuse is suspected, tell
is not about the promotion of sexual orientation or sexual
should be no direct promotion of sexual orientation.

sexual* is both a high frequency word and a keyword given that the documents
under scrutiny focus on sex education. The sample of UK concordances in
Table 5.14 show sexual is often followed by activity and health. On the couple
of occasions when it co-occurs with orientation, it is often within a negative
construction which discourages or forbids teachers from ‘promoting’ sexual
orientation. This is a problematic issue which is explored in more detail below.
Sexual and abuse also co-occur a number of times. None of the co-occurrences
indicate anything about pleasure or consent or anything about sexual diversity.
The patterns in the concordances (like the keywords) construct sexual activity
as purely physical, as having implications for physical ‘health’ and as being
risky through the co-occurrences with abuse. Thus, what emerges is a
restricted view of what ‘sexuality’ is and what the key issues are which need
addressing.
Similar patterns of sexual* co-occurring with health and activity emerge in
HEd. However, the right collocates in particular are more varied than in SRE,
with behaviour, relationships, involvement, attraction and feelings also
appearing. Sexual orientation as a term also appears more often than it does
in SRE and, in HEd, does not co-occur with the verb promote. Sexual* appears
within the phrase sexually transmitted infections (STIs) a number of times and
also appears close to reproduction several times. These collocations contribute
to constructing sexuality as primarily associated with reproduction and disease,
despite the other collocations suggesting broader meanings than are found in
the UK document.
Given its high frequency and keyness, it is useful to examine the concord-
ances of health. In SRE, health frequently appears in phrases such as ‘health
professionals’ and ‘sexual health’. As expected, it also appears within the
subject phrase ‘Personal Social and Health Education’ a number of times.
The idea of ‘sexual health’ encompassing more than the physical and medical
is not indicated at all. There is, for example, no indication that mental health
issues could be related to sexuality in any way, or that mental and emotional
health need to be paid attention to along with physical and sexual health.
156 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.15 Sample concordance of sexual* from HEd

human growth and development. Sexuality, Reproduction, & Health

to end relationships, postpone sexual involvement, and remain
decisions about friends, sexual relationships, family,
for HIV and STIs before sexual behavior and the risks
enduring emotional, sexual, or affectional attraction
romantic,
close friendship, love, and/or sexual attraction. Examples of
produce offspring. Sexual contact between
Intercourse: individuals
trusted adult if one has been sexually abused or hurt in an
physical intimacy. Identify sexual feelings common to you
sex, gender, ability, sexual orientation, gender
identity
and places one at risk for sexual assault, pregnancy, and
Differentiate healthy sexual behaviors (abstinence)

Again, these absences could be important if it discourages teachers from

discussing ‘health’ as something broad and beyond the purely physical. The
top lexical collocates for health* in HEd are: personal, community, infor-
mation, emotional, behaviors, education, skills, explain and disease. Again,
there is nothing particularly remarkable here, other than a slightly wider range
of meanings appear to be indicated through high frequency collocates such as
emotional, personal and community.
Pupil* is both a frequent and keyword in SRE. Left-collocate verbs in the
concordance lines in Table 5.16 include help, encourage, protect, make sure,
guarantee, reassure and ensure. To the right, we see frequent occurrences of
phrases which indicate pupils needing support or being at risk. The frequent
co-occurrences of these verbs and phrases helps to construct a discourse of
pupils as being ‘vulnerable’ and in need of care, protection and reassurance.
Whilst this may be the case to a degree, it is worth noting that the concordances
indicate nothing about empowerment, agency or the construction of pupils as
active subjects. It also contributes to the construction of a discourse of sex and
sexuality as ‘dangerous’ and ‘risky’ rather than enjoyable and empowering.
Student* in HEd occurs more in relation to skills and what students are
expected to do in class through their learning of the subject (e.g. demonstrate,
explain, comprehend). Student* does not explicitly co-occur with anything to
do with sexuality or any of the related themes identified as co-occurring with
pupil*.
STIs appear as both frequent and key in both the US and UK documents.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about the concordances, other than
STIs tend to co-occur with HIV/AIDS. It would appear that HIV/AIDS is still
singled out for attention in both sets of documents. The very fact that STIs are
 SRE and Health Education: Analysis 157

Table 5.16 Sample concordance of pupil* from SRE

pupil of the ground rules. If the pupil needs further support,

a teacher is concerned that a pupil is at risk of sexual abuse
for learning as it encourages pupils to consolidate what
education groups can all help pupils discuss sensitive issues
avoid embarrassment and protect pupils’ privacy by always
procedure; making sure that pupils are informed of source
confidentiality; reassuring pupils that, if confidentiality
Schools should ensure that pupils are protected from
teaching
developing sexuality. Some pupils will be more vulnerable

Table 5.17 Sample concordance of STIs from SRE

to be aware of the risks of STIs including HIV and know

the incidence of HIV/AIDS and STIs and it has particular
their knowledge of HIV/AIDS and STIs; teaching them assertive
or teaching about HIV/AIDS and STIs should include: helping

Table 5.18 Sample concordance of STIs from HEd

of birth delivery when HIV and STIs are present. Disease Prevention
testing both partners for HIV and STIs before sexual behavior
place one at risk for HIV/AIDS, STIs , or unintended pregnancy
Sexual Transmitted Infections ( STI ) Define STIs and HIV/AIDS

frequent and key in both documents is the most interesting and important
findings and this contributes to the discourse of ‘risk’ around sexuality that
both documents arguably construct through their language choices.
There are also a number of words which are frequent and/or key in one
document set but not the other. These are safe, protect, violent, marriage and
promote. It is worth briefly examining the collocation patterns of these fre-
quent and keywords as they are also, arguably, ideologically contested.
In SRE, although safe* itself does not appear as a particularly frequent word
or as a keyword, there is a discourse of ‘safety’ constructed through the high
keyness of words such as ensure, need and support. These kinds of verbs are
also frequent collocates of the high-frequency and high key word pupil*.
Therefore, it is potentially interesting to examine the term safe* itself as a
way of gaining deeper insight into how the safety discourse is operating
throughout the document.
158 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

Table 5.19 Sample concordance of safe* from SRE

to enable them to negotiate safer sex. 2.20 STIs are major

to expect schools to provide a safe and secure environment.
different types of contraception, safe sex and how they can access
a responsibility to ensure the safety and welfare of their pupils
of unwanted pregnancies. Safer Sex and HIV/AIDS and
people about condom use and safer sex in general; young people
(STIs) 2.17 Teaching about safer sex remains one of the

Table 5.20 Sample concordance of safe* from HEd

and helps consumers identify safety risks. Contraceptive:

Distinguish between a good/ safe touch, a bad/unsafe touch

Collocates of safe* in Tables 5.19 and 5.20 suggest that ‘being safe’ is
constructed only as avoiding pregnancy and disease (through collocates such
as contraception, HIV/AIDS and STIs). There is underwording and absence
about safety against sexual violence, coercion or non-consent. The co-
occurrences of safe* with environment also function to give the impression
that school is a safe environment. The possibility of school not being a safe
environment is not indicated at all through the collocations. But, as shown in
Chapters 3 and 4, school is a space which is experienced by some students (and
some staff ) as unsafe in relation to issues around sexuality and relationships
(e.g. bullying, actual sexual violence or threats of sexual violence, casual
sexism, homophobia and other forms of gender and sexual discrimination).
In HEd, safe* mainly occurs within the phrases ‘safety skills’ and ‘health
and safety’. Occurrences of safe* which do refer explicitly to sexuality, like
SRE, relate to the use of contraception. One occurrence also relates to
educating young people to be safe from sexual abuse (i.e. teaching them to
differentiate ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe touching’). However, the possibility of this
occurring between young people is, again, absent as is any mention of
ensuring that young people are safe from homophobic violence and
discrimination.
Protect* appears as key (mostly in its nominalized form of protection) in
SRE. It does not appear as either key or frequent in HEd. In SRE, patterns
around the verb protect* are dominated by left-collocations of child followed
by protection. Phrases such as ‘child protection issues’ and ‘protect* from
inappropriate teaching materials’ which appear a number of times in the
concordances above are vague and unsubstantiated, as in the following typical
examples:
 SRE and Health Education: Analysis 159

This guidance also sets out advice on how schools can set in place arrangements so
pupils can be protected from inappropriate teaching and materials. (SRE)

Schools should ensure that pupils are protected from teaching and materials which are
inappropriate, having regard to the age and cultural background of the pupils concerned.
(SRE)
This vagueness is potentially problematic, and it is not clear what children
need ‘protecting’ against, what might constitute ‘child protection issues’ and
what are considered to be ‘inappropriate’ teaching materials. This suggests that
SRE constructs young people as vulnerable and in need of protection, particu-
larly from ‘inappropriate teaching’ and ‘inappropriate materials’ but, notably,
much less so from inappropriate behaviour both from adults outside the school
space and other young people. Notable absences around protect* include
protection from discrimination and bullying (including bullying because of
actual or perceived sexual orientation). This is something that potentially could
fall under the remit of SRE but which does not feature at all.
As explained earlier in this section, there are also a number of words which
stand out as being ideologically contested in either one or both of the docu-
ments. Although they are not necessarily key or frequent, it is also useful to
examine how these ideologically contested words behave in the texts.
Violent/violence are arguably emotive terms and therefore likely to be
ideologically contested in terms of how they behave and the meanings they
construct in the documents. Violen* appears a number of times in HEd but
hardly at all in SRE suggesting that it is a notable absence in the UK subject.
Violen* in HEd constructs young people as potential victims of violence,
especially in relation to dating violence, domestic abuse, verbal abuse and
violence related to substance ab/use. Although it is important to educate young
people about the possibilities of sexual violence (again, it is potentially
harmful that it is ommitted from SRE), it is perhaps misleading to only
construct young people as victims. The semantic profiles indicated through
the concordances in Table 5.21 erase the possibility of young people them-
selves being the perpetators of sexual (and other) violence which may not be
an accurate reflection of their lived experiences.

Table 5.21 Sample concordance of violen* from HEd

abuse, rape, and other forms of violence; and discuss strategies

health consequences of domestic violence, child abuse, rape, and
reduce, and report dating violence and sexual assaults.
image, alcohol, drug use and violence. GRADE 8 Family & Cultural
gossip are a form of verbal violence, and work to stop
160 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

There is nothing in the semantic profiles of violen* which includes anything

about violence based on sexual identity or orientation. Importantly, this is
something that the young people in their interviews reported routinely experi-
encing at school (as discussed in Chapter 3). Therefore, it would seem that
issues around homophobic (and other forms of sexuality-directed) violence are
worth including in the teaching of sex education. However, the apparent
underwording and absence indicates another missed opportunity for address-
ing homophobia as a form of violence related to sexuality.
Marriage*, although not key or frequent, does appear a number of times in
SRE. Marry and marriage do not appear at all in HEd, although family does
appear. However, family mainly relates to culture and influences as discussed
above. Marriage does not co-occur with family in HEd, and there is not the
same prioritizing of marital relationships as there is in SRE. Marriage is
arguably an ideologically contested term, especially given the recent legal
and social changes concerning same-sex marriage in both the United States
and the United Kingdom. Marriage also behaves in a rather ideologically
contested way in SRE as indicated by examining the concordances. Marriage
collocates with stable and family which therefore constructs the idea that
marriage is always stable, and, by implication, that other kinds of relationships
are either less stable or not stable. Marriage, stable and family all repeatedly
collocate with each other. Importance and significance also collocate with
marriage, thus marriage is clearly ascribed positive attributes throughout the
text, as can be seen in the extract below:

Within the context of talking about relationships, children should be taught about
the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and for bringing up
children. The Government recognises that there are strong and mutually supportive
relationships outside marriage. Therefore, children should learn the significance of
marriage and stable relationships as key building blocks of community and society.
(SRE: p.11)

Presumably, heterosexual marriage is being referred to in such examples,

although this is not made explicit. Although same-sex couples can have
children, this is not something that can happen ‘naturally’. Therefore, the
inclusion of ‘children’ in the same sentence as ‘marriage’ and ‘family life’
implicitly constructs marriage as heterosexual. It is not acknowledged any-
where in the guidance that marriage is also legal in the United Kingdom for
same-sex couples. The idea of marriage being emphasized as important and
significant and as being associated with stability and family life, conflicts with
how the verb ‘promote’ operates as discussed below. By implication, non-
marital relationships are rendered less important and significant and ‘marriage’
continues to be valorized. A further notable absence is the possibility of
children being safe from abuse within their families. This is not suggested at
 SRE and Health Education: Analysis 161

Table 5.22 Sample concordance of marriage* from SRE

the value of family life, marriage, and stable and loving

should learn the significance of marriage and stable relations
understanding of the importance of marriage for family life, stable

all through the collocation patterns – ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ are only ever
presented as positive and ‘safe’.
There is also an absence of explicit references to either same-sex or
opposite-sex marriage. There appears to be an implicit assumption that ‘mar-
riage’ refers to heterosexual marriage only. This actually contradicts the
meanings created through promote* – another ideologically contested term
in SRE. Promote* only occurs twice in SRE – one in relation to protecting
children’s welfare and once in relation to promoting sexual orientation. The
latter appears in a short section on ‘sexual orientation’ and is quoted below:
Young people, whatever their developing sexuality, need to feel that sex and relation-
ship education is relevant to them and sensitive to their needs. The Secretary of State for
Education and Employment is clear that teachers should be able to deal honestly and
sensitively with sexual orientation, answer appropriate questions and offer support.
There should be no direct promotion of sexual orientation.
Sexual orientation and what is taught in schools is an area of concern for some
parents. (SRE: p. 12–13)
Although the opening sentence seems positive and accepting of sexual
diversity, there are echoes here of the section 28 legislation which was
repealed in 2003. In the UK teachers’ interviews discussed in Chapter 4, this
was also a notable finding. The idea of being able to ‘promote’ any sort of
sexual orientation is highly contested and the phrasing of this part of section
28 has a long history of being critiqued. In this sense, it is arguably the most
highly ideologically contested verb in the whole document. Given that the SRE
guidance was reviewed as recently as 2013, it is alarming that the section 28
echo of ‘promote sexual orientation’ has been retained. For a reader who
knows the history of the legislation, this phrase clearly means ‘do not promote
homosexuality’ in the teaching of SRE. This conflicts with the fact that schools
are now governed by the Equality Act which clearly prohibits discrimination
on the grounds of sexual orientation. However, the phrase also sits in tension
with the fact that (particular kinds of ) heterosexuality appears to be ‘promoted’
all the way through the guidance. The phrase, therefore, is confusing and
problematic in a number of ways. It is perhaps not surprising that teachers
are confused and nervous about how to address issues of non-heterosexual
identities and relationships in SRE, given the retention of this phrase. There is
also a significant tension here in that heterosexual marriage is ‘promoted’
162 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

through its overwhelmingly positive references through the document whilst,

at the same time, there is an explicit directive not to ‘promote’ sexual
orientation. We can therefore deduce from this that when the document
prohibits teachers from promoting sexual orientation, heterosexuality is, in
fact, exempt from this. Thus, the semantic profiles of marriage and promote*
together function to effect a discourse of heteronormativity. In the extract
above, ‘sexual orientation’ is ascribed a negative prosody through the inclu-
sion of ‘concern’ within the same sentence. It avoids stating that, for many
parents, addressing sexual orientation in sex education is viewed as very
important and something to be welcomed and encouraged. The discourse of
heteronormativity constructed also starkly contrasts with the final statement in
the SRE ‘sexual orientation’ section:
Schools need to be able to deal with homophobic bullying. (SRE: p. 13)
This is the only mention of homophobic bullying in the entire document and
the statement is not elaborated on at all. The clear irony here is that the
wording of the rest of the ‘sexual orientation’ section may actually play a part
in contributing to the perpetuation of homophobic bullying in schools through
its prioritizing of heterosexuality and its retention of the section 28 directive
not to ‘promote’ sexual orientation. Given that the section 28 legislation is
relevant to the UK context only, the behaviour of promote* is arguably less
contested in HEd. Promote* appears mainly within the phrase ‘health promo-
tion and disease prevention’ in HEd. Again, these instances refer to ‘health
promotion’ broadly, not just sexual health. Furthermore, ‘homophobic
bullying’ is the only form of discriminatory behaviour that is mentioned in
the document which renders other forms of gender and sexual discrimination
(biphobia, transphobia and so on) invisible.

Discussion
In sum, all of the curriculum and guidance documents analyzed in this chapter
are worded in ways which do not encourage teachers to incorporate sexual
diversity issues into their teaching. This is the case both in subjects whose
primary remit is to explicitly address sexuality issues (PSHE and Health
Education) and in English as an example of a subject where there is no
expectation that such issues will be addressed, but which may lend themselves
to learning about diversity along different dimensions. The analysis reveals
that there are marked absences around sexuality in the English curricula
encoded in the experiential values of the vocabulary. These silences are
identifiable in classification schemes, overwording of some frequent, key and
ideologically contested words (such as culture*) and the semantic profiles in
the concordances of overworded and ideologically contested items. The
 Discussion 163

cumulative effect of these discursive features is an ‘illocutionary silencing’

around sexual diversity in the English curriculum, which, in turn, produces an
effect of heteronormativity. This works in conjunction with competing dis-
courses in schools which tell teachers not to openly address sexual diversity
issues. The effect is produced not just through the linguistic associations
between culture and ethnicity/nationality, but also through discourses which
present non-hetereosexuality as dangerous, especially in school spaces.
‘Sexuality’ as a topic is one which is clearly addressed in the SRE and HEd
curricula as a central part of their remit. However, there is little in both
documents which actively encourages teachers to incorporate positive teaching
around ‘sexual diversity’. In both documents, the analysis reveals that the
semantic profiles created around concepts such as ‘sexuality’ and ‘health’ are
fairly restricted. Moreover, the findings show that a predominant discourse of
‘risk’ and ‘disease’ is created around sexuality and sexual behaviour. The
collocation patterns of frequent, key and ideologically contested words in the
texts suggest mainly negative semantic prosodies being created around active
sexual behaviour and the discursive construction of young people as vulnerable
and ‘at risk’ if they engage in sexual activity. Heterosexuality is prioritized
through findings such as the frequent association of sexual activity with
pregnancy. Furthermore, heterosexual marriage is highlighted as ‘important’
and ascribed positive value in the UK SRE guidance document. This sits in
tension with the fact that this document explicitly prohibits the ‘promotion’ of
sexual orientation. Without specifying which sexual orientation should not be
promoted, the association of marriage and sexual activity with reproduction,
and the overwhelmingly positive values ascribed to these, strongly imply that it
is homosexuality which should not be ‘promoted’. The text therefore embodies
heteronormative and even homophobic values. The analysis also reveals that
both sets of documents contain notable absences around love, consent, the
possibility of bullying and sexual violence taking place between young people
and meanings about sexuality which go beyond the physical and medical.
The findings in this and previous chapters show that linguistic presence in
the form of overt homophobia, and linguistic absence in the form of silence
around sexual diversity, are equally damaging. As stated in the Introduction, in
order to fully tackle all forms of gender and sexual diversity discrimination
circulating in schools, we must not only tackle overt forms of homophobia, but
we must also seek to fill the silences around difference and diversity which
pervade schools. Some ways that we might do this include campaigning to
change the wording of the curriculum, especially the explanatory notes (United
Kingdom) and standards and learning activities (United States) sections in
which specific examples are provided of how terms can be interpreted. In the
English curricula, for example, having just one example focusing on sexuality
would make it visible and would legitimate it as a topic of discussion. In
164 Exploring Ideologies of Sexuality in Curriculum Documents

sexuality education, the documents could reduce their focus on the physical,
medical and disease aspects of sexuality and try to balance this more with a
consideration of the emotional and social dimensions of sexual identity and
sexual behaviour. Explicitly including references to love and addressing issues
of respect and consent may help to achieve this. An acknowledgement that
some of the ‘risks’ associated with sexual activity may actually come from
young people themselves and that young people can be the perpetrators of
sexual violence and bullying as well as the victims, may provide them with a
more honest and realistic education, and may actually help to prepare them for
a wider range of both positive and negative possibilities about what they may
encounter when they begin to engage in sexual relationships. The explicit and
positive inclusion of sexual diversity, and the equally positive presentation of
different sexual orientations and relationship types within these (e.g. marriage,
non-marriage, polyamory) may also better prepare students for engaging in
their own sexual and romantic relationships as well as for understanding those
of others which may be different from their own. As stated in the introduction
to this chapter, linguistic presence and absence is important to analyze in
documents such as school curricula which influence what is taught in schools
because inclusion in the curriculum legitimizes certain subject content, while
absence may function to delegitimize it. Linguistic presence and absence
functions to prioritize particular ideological positions over others, especially
in relation to the experiential values of the vocabulary used in the texts. The
interviews in Chapter 4 revealed that educators feel confident about incorpor-
ating what is explicitly included in the curriculum into their teaching but feel
much less confident about incorporating anything which is not included.
Therefore, in order to change what happens in schools, a contributing factor
may be the insertion of a greater diversity of meanings into the ‘exclusionary
language’ of school curricula.
The analysis of the curriculum documents is revealing but what it does not
tell us is how curricula are actually deployed in classroom settings. The next
chapter moves on to explore how aspects of the SRE guidance documents are
put into practice in a number of lessons.
6 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis and the
Construction of Sexual Identities

This chapter is the last of the data analysis chapters and focuses on the
analysis of spoken interactional data taken from classrooms. The data
consists of transcribed recordings of SRE/PSHE lessons where the topic of
the lesson is expected to address issues around sexuality, to varying degrees.
Chapter 3 started with the voices of the young people who participated in
this study. In their interviews, they identified SRE as a key site for the
reinforcement of heteronormativity and, therefore, as a temporal space in
which they repeatedly felt isolated and marginalized. The previous chapter
showed how the language of the SRE curriculum itself can reinforce such
ideologies of gender and sexuality (and in the English curriculum). This
chapter focuses on the actual practice of SRE by analyzing a sample of SRE
lessons in two UK schools.
The chapter examines what kinds of sexual identities are constructed, and
how spoken language is used to construct those identities in the lessons
examined. The data is firstly analyzed using the corpus methods of keyword
and concordance analysis to broadly identify what kinds of sexual identities
are constructed in the lessons. Critical discourse analysis of spoken classroom
interaction is then used to explore how those identities are constructed
interactionally. In the remainder of this chapter, I will firstly provide a brief
explanation of the specific elements of corpus linguistics and CDA used before
applying them to an analysis of the classroom interaction data.

Data and Analytical Frameworks

Three full PSHE lessons (each 1 hour and 10 minutes in length) were recorded
and transcribed in full. Two lessons were recorded in School A and one in
School B, as summarized in Table 6.1.
Both schools were located in York area of the United Kingdom over a
period of three months. School B is located in York itself and has an intake of
predominantly white, middle-class students from the urban area of York.
School A is located outside York and has a more diverse intake of students
from a wider range of urban/rural locations, and ethnic and social class

165
166 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

Table 6.1 Data set information

Lesson
Year/age of students Topic of lesson duration

School A lesson 1 Year 9 (ages 13–14) ‘Choices that affect your future’ 70 minutes
(delivered by class teacher)
School A lesson 2 Year 9 (ages 13–14) ‘Future goals’ (delivered by class 70 minutes
teacher)
School B lesson 1 Year 9 (ages 13–14) ‘Safer sex’ (delivered by school nurse) 70 minutes

backgrounds. These schools were chosen because of these different locations

and student populations, even though they are located in the same part of the
United Kingdom. Teachers and students at the schools were all used to having
observers, in the form of parents, inspectors and researchers and the schools as
a whole had a positive attitude towards educational research being carried out.
This meant that neither the teachers nor the students felt inhibited or uncom-
fortable about having a researcher present during their lessons. In all classes,
the students were told that I was a researcher investigating the broad content of
their SRE lessons. Consent was gained from the students’ parents, via their
teacher, to use the recordings in this research. Names of all participants
involved in this part of the research have been changed or removed in all
transcriptions as a means of anonymizing them.
As part of the research, I also audio-recorded four English lessons in the
schools because both the teachers and the young people in the interviews (see
Chapters 3 and 4) reported that English was a subject in which issues of gender
and sexuality (and ‘relationships’ more broadly) were more likely to be
explicitly addressed. However, in the lessons that I collected, there were no
gender and sexuality triggered points or emergent points in any of the lessons.
Therefore, this chapter focuses only on the SRE lessons in which there were
frequent ‘gender triggered points’ (GTPs) which I explain below. Perhaps the
absence of GTPs in the English lessons is, in itself, quite significant given the
students’ and teachers’ expectations that this subject would afford opportun-
ities for opening up discussions about such issues. The issue of absence where
presence was expected has been a key finding of previous chapters.
To analyze the data, I use elements of corpus linguistics (keyword and
concordance analysis) combined with CDA to investigate how the classroom
is a political site for the negotiation and enactment of gender and sexuality
identities and power relations. As explained in Chapter 5, whilst the applica-
tion of the corpus techniques to the whole data set can provide a useful starting
point, the application of CDA to specific sequences of classroom dialogue can
reveal how discursive features contribute to the construction and/or subversion
 Data and Analytical Frameworks 167

of sexuality ideologies. The specific corpus techniques used are the examin-
ation of keywords and collocations, again, using the software Wordsmith
Tools (2014). As in the previous chapter, this process enables the identification
of some of the key themes, processes and patterns of representation in these
texts which can provide a starting point for the critical discourse analysis. As in
Chapter 5, concordances of some words which are not particularly frequent or
key, but which to the analyst stand out as being ‘ideologically contested’ in
some way, are also examined, as ignoring these words would potentially run
the risk of missing some particularly important aspects of the texts. One
example of this which is discussed in Chapter 5 is use of the infrequent verb
promote in the UK SRE guidance document. It is only my own intuition and
prior knowledge of how this word has historically been used within sex
education in British schools that led me to examine its semantic patterns of
use. And these patterns, although infrequent, are very important in terms of
how sexual diversity is currently dealt with in SRE.
In the practical application of CDA in this chapter, I draw specifically on
Pakula et al.’s (2015) notion of identifying ‘gender triggered points’ (GTPs) in
classroom interaction to examine the discursive construction of gender and
sexuality. GTPs are based on Sunderland et al.’s (2002) previous concept of
‘gender critical points’ in classroom interaction in which explicit reference is
made to male and female humans as a way of drawing attention to gender and
making it relevant in some way to the lesson. A ‘gender triggered point’,
according to Pakula et al., happens when gender is negotiated into relevance
through the spoken interaction that takes place around a particular text being
used for teaching. They write:

Extending Sunderland et al’s (2002) concept of the ‘gender critical point’ to the notion
of the ‘gender triggered point’ we believe enriches the analytical apparatus by high-
lighting the dynamic character of classroom interaction and in particular the central role
of teachers. (Pakula et al., 2015: 58)

In other words, GTPs occur when teachers ‘gender’ the texts they are using in
the classroom. GTPs therefore do not reside in teaching materials themselves,
but in interactional elaborations of them. In this chapter, I develop the concept
of GTPs by proposing that they do not have to be triggered by written material,
but by any stimulus used in the classroom, including student or teacher-
initiated talk. GTPs can occur, therefore, as soon as any participant in the
interaction effects gender and/or sexuality through the use of a particular word,
phrase or other discursive meaning-making practice.
The use of this kind of CDA within an overarching QAL approach enables a
greater focus on how macro discourses and ideologies around sexuality are
embedded and inscribed within micro interactions. As in Chapter 5, the
incorporation of elements of corpus methods alongside CDA facilitates the
168 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

identification of salient themes in the interaction which can then be used as the
basis for more detailed critical analysis.

Corpus Linguistics: Analysis

In what follows, I firstly present and discuss the keyword analysis and then
analyze some concordances of the keywords which appear to signify ‘gender
triggered points’ (GTPs) within the CDA framework.

Keywords
The top 20 keywords in the whole classroom interaction data set are presented
in Table 6.2.
The keywords reveal an overwhelming focus on STIs through the high
keyness of words such as (genital) warts and gonorrhoea. It is also worth
noting that, when a separate keyword analysis was conducted for School
B only, other keyword indicators of STIs were also present, such as AIDS,
HIV, lice and virus. Penis appears a keyword in the whole data set but terms
for female genitals do not appear on the keyword list anywhere, being men-
tioned only a few times in all of the data sets. Condom is the second highest
keyword, suggesting that talk about condoms are a key feature of these SRE
lessons, again highlighting the prioritization of male genitalia and the need for
protection against STIs. The gender-triggering keywords of girl* and boy*
both appear on the list, with girl* having a higher keyness (14) than boy* (20).
This suggests that the lessons focus more on girls than boys, even though
female genitals are rarely referred to. Judgement appears as a keyword. When
examined in context, it is interesting to note that the uses of the word focus
mainly on negative judgements about sexual promiscuity and young people’s
age of their loss of virginity. There are also some warnings about girls being
‘judged’ for their sexual behaviour but not boys. Some of these occurrences
will be examined in greater detail later in this chapter. The keyword analysis
helps to provide initial indications of some of the key themes and concerns of
the interactional texts under scrutiny. Analysis of the concordances of some of
these keywords enables a more detailed picture to emerge of how such words

Table 6.2 Keywords

1. warts 2. condom 3. somebody 4. penis 5. sex

6. do 7. genital 8. got 9. gonorrhoea 10. want
11. people 12. like 13. judgement 14. girl* 15. bit
16. talked 17. put 18. lesson 19. know 20. boy*
 Corpus Linguistics: Analysis 169

behave in the texts in ways which may (or may not) contribute towards the
construction of discourses of sexuality in the lessons.

Concordances
It seemed fruitful to analyze the concordances of girl* and boy* as they are
both gender-triggering and key in the interaction. Table 6.3 shows all of the
concordance lines for girl* in the data set.
To the left, girl* co-occurs with young, the (indicating general reference),
that (indicating specific reference) and little (when the teacher in School A is
discussing her own daughter). It also co-occurs with boys and the binomial
boys and girls/girls and boys and with the reporting of statistics (a quarter of
girls). The processes co-occurring to the right of girl* are talks, cycling
(occurring in one particular lengthy story that the teacher told the class about
her own daughter), sleeping around and not having planned. In other words,
the processes have predominantly negative meanings. Other meanings sug-
gested through the concordances are that girls have little agency. The only time

Table 6.3 Concordances of girl*

1 on a boys penis and warts on a girls vulval area as well. I’m

2 the condom will stay inside the
3 made that judgement about that
4 tell I can tell you I know that
5 em just after I I had my little
6 what would you think about the
7 what do you think not a very nice
8 cycling the other day with my
9 went ‘go on keep going’my little
10 girl who’s on there and there’s a
11 lads who are mates and loads of
12 have er somebody talked about the
13 it’s somebody I know right young
14 there’s more boys a quarter of
15 quarter of girls so out of the
16 the relationship okay I’ve had
17 cos you didn’t work last lesson
18 right so if you if you this young
19 work out it says a quarter of
20 they weren’t talking about
21 intimate relationship was with a
22 pressure by partners boys and
23 loved I talked to you about em a
24 should do it but it should be the
25 about the guy but it should be the
girl, and the sperm inside will
girl well I can tell you I know
girl and I know that she is the
girl I had people talking about
girl that got it be honest what
girl why cos she’s sleeping
girls and we’re cycling along
girl er my eldest nine-year-old
girl who talks on there and she
girls who are mates and it’s
girl who’s on there and there’s
girl she’s at university and
girls so out of the girls they
girls they looked at a quarter
girls er coming to me and talking
girls could I ask you four just
girl here okay she is eighteen
girls and a third of boys so
girls yeah you’re right it is
girl it was her first time they
girls not having planned or
girl that I taught in my early
girl as well they were being
girl as well oh absolutely yeah
170 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

Table 6.4 Concordances of boy*

1 the penis, and what happens with
2 warts and you can see warts on a
3 leave bit like that? Like a lot of
4 finished having sex, your penis
5 were in year 6, and all these
6 police was er when I was 18 I had a
7 I’ve ever met she’s had very few
8 time because it was her long-term
9 put under pressure by partners
10 quarter of girls and a third of
11 a third of boys so who who are
12 she doesn’t sleep around and the
13 Christmas time’em a long-term
14 that they’re gay if there’s more
15 about they’ve been with older
16 pressure I actually don’t
think the
17 it now it says so there’s more
18 looked at okay and a third of
boys is because the semen uses
boy’s penis and warts on a girl’s
boys do put condoms on like that
boys won’t be Just glide it out
boys ran and it was to show how
boyfriend who was in the police
boyfriends she’s very much she’s
boyfriend so we make judgements
boys and girls not having planned
boys so who who are boys meant
boys meant to have sex with I
boy she had unprotected
boyfriend and it had lay dormant
boys they’re gay all right yeah
boyfriends they feel that
boyfriend’s putting that
pressure
boys a quarter of girls so out
boys had sex under the age of 16

that girls are indicated as having agency is when they are ‘sleeping around’ and
having unprotected intercourse with boys. They are also de-eroticized and de-
romanticized. The meanings revealed through the concordance patterns do not
indicate emotions and feelings, leading to the construction of a rather
de-humanizing discourse of gender and sexuality for girls. Unlike girls, boys
are sometimes indicated to be in a relationship through use of the word
boyfriend/s as shown in Table 6.4.
There is one reference to the possibility of boys having non-heterosexual
relationships through the co-occurrence of gay in line 14. Interestingly, the
processes attributed to boys give boys more agency than girls and construct
boys as more active (have/had sex, put condoms on, glide it out, ran, putting
pressure on). Therefore girls and boys appear to be constructed differently in
terms of expected sexual agency and responsibilities for certain kinds of
behaviours and sexual activities.
As well as the gender-triggering girl* and boy* words, it was also interest-
ing to examine concordances of sex* as it is a high keyword and forms the
main focus of all of the lessons. Concordances for sex* are shown in Table 6.5.
The concordances show that sex* co-occurs frequently with words indicating
illness/disease. Unprotected also co-occurs a number of times to the left. This
clearly shows how sexual activity is mainly talked about in relation to risk in the
lessons. Thus, the discourse of sex that is constructed is one of sex as dangerous.
 Critical Discourse Analysis 171

Table 6.5 Concordances of sex*

1 either cuddling somebody or having sex with somebody then these

2 you contract AIDS, other than
3 your anus as well. Pain during
4 So when you’ve finished having
5 you never will have unprotected
6 gonorrhoea is a disease it’s a
7 control of your destiny in terms of
8 please it’s the second clip of the
9 and she’s never had unprotected
10 and 84% of young women who had
11 when it was sort of a lot of
12 watched that ‘A to Z of Love and
13 but not equally willing to have
14 and say ‘I’m ready we’ll have
15 quite serious sort of bullying and
16 to look at the second clip of
17 that’s done about young people and
18 believe that most young people have
19 for example pregnancy it can be
20 gonorrhoea what’s gonorrhoea a
21 sleeps around she’s been having
22 need to know is GUM clinic is a
23 bribery of yeah like if you have
24 might you say if you don’t have
25 they’ll pass your exam if you have
26 teaching career who mistakenly took
27 67% of young people are not
28 who who are boys meant to have
29 at okay and a third of boys had
sexually? How else can you
sex, itching, like we said,
sex, your penis boys won’t be
sex, you do need to get a
sexually transmitted disease
sexual health and relationships
‘Sex in Your City’connect it
sex it was the first time because
sex at the age of 13 or 14 wish
sexual activity in it okay it
Sex’there was the guy on there
sex compared with their partner
sex’and you might get to that
sexual abuse cos it’s abusing
‘Sex and Your City’you might
sexual activity statistics over
sex before they leave secondary
sexually transmitted diseases
sexually transmitted disease
sex okay somebody says ‘sleeps
sexual health clinic all right
sex well that might fall into
sex what might that person say
sex with them I think that comes
sex okay as feeling loved and
sexually active before the age
sex with I don’t get that they’re
sex under the age of 16 it’s

So far, the corpus analysis has indicated that the prevailing ideologies of gender
and sexuality constructed through repeated linguistic patterns in the interaction
are: sex is dangerous; boys are expected to have sexual agency; girls are not
expected to have sexual agency, although they are responsible for preventing
risk; sex as a whole is de-eroticized and is predominantly heterosexual.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Whilst identification of keywords and some of their frequent collocations using
corpus techniques enabled key themes to be identified in the discourse, CDA
allows for a critical examination of the interaction in terms of how ideologies
of gender and sexuality are discursively constructed. Following Sunderland
et al.’s (2002) and Pakula et al.’s (2015) concept of focusing critical analysis
172 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

upon ‘gender critical points’ in the discourse, this aspect of the analysis
critically examines the ideologies which are constructed in sections of the
discourse where gender and sexuality are ‘made relevant’ in places which may
or may not be indicated through the keywords. Given that the subject is SRE,
this does occur frequently. The remainder of this chapter discusses the findings
of the CDA in terms of the discourses of gender and sexuality which emerged
from the classroom interactions. On the whole, the CDA supported the prelim-
inary findings from the corpus analysis. But this aspect of the analysis added
more depth and enabled a more insightful investigation of how those dis-
courses were constructed across the interaction, as well as revealing other
notable features of the discourse.
A first key finding which is not revealed through the corpus analysis alone
was that there are in fact many tensions between the ideological assumptions
regarding gender and sexuality in the interaction. For example, on the one
hand, allusions are made to non-heterosexual relationships and identities by
the teachers through the use of gender-neutral terms such as partner, as in the
following example:

1 T: being put under pressure by partners boys and girls

2 not having planned or discussed it and feeling the lack
3 of control

But, more frequently, there are ideological assumptions made about normative
gender and (hetero)sexuality. In the first two examples below, explicit refer-
ence is made by the teacher to ‘mum and dad’, thus inferring that a heterosex-
ual two-parent family structure is the expected norm:

1 T: diseases it can be something as simple as your mum or

2 dad have found condoms in your bedroom or the pill
1 T: and you’ve got your mum and dad there and you’re like
2 [singing noise] or your gran is even worse isn’t it

In other examples, the teacher makes reference to ‘the guy’ and ‘the girl’ when
discussing ‘relationships’ in a general sense, thus reinforcing heterosexuality
as the expected norm:

1 T: when we watched that ‘A to Z of Love and Sex’there

2 was a guy on there that talked about his first intimate
3 relationship was with a girl it was her first time
1 T: just glide it out don’t just pull your penis out
2 because what happens is the condom will stay inside the
3 girl
 Critical Discourse Analysis 173

Another key finding is that particular and restricted discourses of hetero-

sexuality are (re)produced through the interaction as well as through the
content of the lesson (which is controlled to a large degree by the wider macro
context). Monogamous heterosexual relationships are ideologically afforded a
high status and sexual activity which takes place within such relationships is
prioritized. Other possible relationship and sexual activity options are notably
absent from the discourse. This supports Motschenbacher’s (2010, 2011)
argument that heteronormativity is ‘ubiquitous’ and continually thriving in
everyday talk. But there is also no diversity represented within heterosexual-
ity – it is almost always constructed as two-person, monogamous and involv-
ing no physical sexual activity other than vaginal intercourse. Furthermore, in
support of the corpus findings, sex is constructed as risky and dangerous, even
the vaginal intercourse that is presented as the primary activity taking place
within such heterosexual relationships. This supports findings from other
studies. (Allen and Carmody, 2012; Sundaram and Sauntson, 2015a) In the
examples below, words such as emergency, dilemma, unwanted, unfortunately
and pressure help to construct sex in negative terms, and always focusing on
‘unwanted’ outcomes, such as pregnancy and the transmission of STIs. In the
first example, this coincides with the idea that sexual activity amongst teen-
agers is expected to remain ‘hidden’ from parents and caregivers and that
engaging in sex is something that young people would not normally be
expected to discuss with their families. It is implied in this example that the
hypothetical ‘mum and dad’ would not have been involved in the young
person’s decision to start engaging in sexual activity and to take measures to
ensure protection. The notion of secrecy and lack of dialogue amongst families
is a theme which runs throughout the whole sequence of lessons. The possi-
bility of sex being a topic which is openly discussed in a positive way in the
home is entirely absent from the discourse.

1 T: understand the impact that your decisions have on your

2 life and remember that there are other people involved in
3 that life and it can be for example pregnancy it can be
4 sexually transmitted diseases it can be something as
5 simple as your mum or dad have found condoms in your
6 bedroom or the pill

In the example below, it is also interesting to note the presence in line 2 of an

implicit gender construction of girls and women as the givers and exchangers
of advice, thus placing responsibility for any negative outcomes of heterosex-
ual activity with them.

1 T: right two things there

2 there was one was obviously giving advice to her mate
174 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

3 about the morning after remember we did that quick quiz

4 we did all about so we know that it’s up to 72 hours
5 afterwards that the morning after pill can be used it’s
6 now called the emergency contraceptive for that reason
7 because it’s not just the morning after and then
8 obviously she went through that dilemma of obviously her
9 periods were late that can be caused by anything but if
10 it’s coincided with her having intercourse with somebody
11 then obviously she wants to get it tested

Similar gender discourses have been found by Dobson and Ringrose (2016) in
their analysis of campaigns to protect young people from sexual exploitation
(e.g. sexual bullying, sexting). Dobson and Ringrose highlight the emphasis on
girls to manage their behaviour (both online and offline) so as not to become
victimized, rather than focusing on teaching boys to take responsibility for
their behaviour (i.e. not engaging in any sexually exploitative behaviour).
Sundaram and Sauntson (2015b) also note that some recent, high-profile cases
around alleged rape have focused on the responsibility of individual women to
manage risks around sexual behaviour (e.g. Ched Evans case).1 The discourse
of women as responsible for their own victimization (or avoidance of it) is
clearly also present in these SRE lessons.
This gendered theme of the implicit construction of women and girls as
responsible for safe sex also occurs in the following two examples (along with
another example of an implicit construction of sex to mean nothing other than
heterosexual vaginal intercourse).

1 T: as we’ve talked about in the past they didn’t even know

2 couldn’t remember if they’d had intercourse or not so they
3 never went for emergency contraception
1 T: young girl she’s at university and she collapses rings
2 her mum says ‘mum I’m in a lot of pain I don’t know what
3 to do’she said ‘just ring the out of hours doctor’
4 the doctor sends an ambulance and she’s rushed into
5 hospital okay they think it’s a burst appendix but they
6 start doing the tests and it’s nothing to do with the

1
Ched Evans is a Welsh professional footballer who was tried for the rape of a 19-year-old
woman in 2016. Evans was acquitted of the alleged rape, on the basis of her previous sexual
history and the fact that she was intoxicated at the time of the alleged crime. This outcome
sparked serious concerns amongst women’s support groups and campaigners about allowing the
complainant’s sexual behaviour to be taken into account by the jury in a way that may
prevent women from reporting sexual offences in the future. For more information, see www
.theguardian.com/football/2016/oct/14/footballer-ched-evans-cleared-of-in-retrial and www
.independent.co.uk/voices/ched-evans-footballer-rape-trial-acquitted-justice-woman-misogyny-
consent-prison-walk-free-a7362276.html.
 Critical Discourse Analysis 175

7 appendix and they start doing tests and they don’t know
8 why she’s doubled up in pain and she’s cramped and really
9 uncomfortable and they just start her on some intravenous
10 antibiotics and she starts to pick up a bit so they start
11 testing they start delving a little bit deeper and ask
12 her some questions they found out that it was gonorrhoea
13 does anybody what what gonorrhoea is
14 S2: a disease
15 T: it’s a sexually transmitted disease an infection
16 sometimes called STD or STIs okay
17 that was mortifying for her mother when she found out
18 because there’s a big stigma isn’t there there’s a big
19 stigma around all of that what would you think about that
20 person your first impression what would you think about
21 that girl be honest what do you think
22 S3: not a very nice girl
23 T: why
24 S1: cos she’s sleeping around
25 T: sleeping around and you can be honest that’s what
26 people will judge

In the extract above, it is worth noting in lines 20–26 that the teacher makes a
point about girls being negatively judged for engaging in early sexual activity
(with boys). This same statement is not made about boys. The ideological
gendering of heterosexual activity also occurs in relation to constructions of
boys and men as always wanting sex and putting pressure on girls and young
women to engage in sexual activity with them. The possibility of girls putting
pressure on boys is never raised, neither is the possibility that boys may want
to engage in sexual activity for positive reasons such as being in love. This
creates an ideological expectation that boys will always put pressure on girls to
have sex with them.

1 T: I’ve had girls coming to me and talking about

2 they’ve been with older boyfriends they feel that
3 pressure

The ‘riskiness’ of heterosexual sex is frequently reinforced through explicit

discussion of the physical symptoms of STIs such as gonorrhoea and genital
warts, as in the next three examples:

1 T: he had given her gonorrhoea it had laid dormant so

2 that means that it was in her body it had been in her
3 body since Christmas time or before because they split up
4 at Christmas so it’s been in her body there lying dormant
5 so they managed to treat it cos they went ‘thank goodness
176 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

6 she said that’do you know what it’s done it’s already
7 left scars inside her what it can do it can affect the
8 fallopian tubes that come up to the ovaries so it
9 actually can affect fertility you might not know you’ve
10 got it at all she didn’t until she was doubled up in pain
1 T: what happens is when you’re either cuddling somebody
2 or having sex with somebody then these little blisters
3 will pop and the fluid will run out into other people’s
4 skin
1 T: rashes sores on your penis or vagina and the genital
2 warts can go around to your anus as well pain during sex
3 itching

Heterosexual activity is almost always discussed in relation to negative reasons

for starting to engage in it, such as pressure (from partners and peers) and
being under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. Again, the possibility of
sexual activity occurring because of positive reasons is notably marginalized.
The idea that first sexual activity is often associated with the negative feeling
of ‘regret’ also occurs at several points in the lessons:

1 T: I’ve seen lots of particularly girls come to my drop

2 in tears and wished that they’d waited it’s a big thing to
3 start having a sexual relationship and there’s lots of risks
1 T: peer pressure is a massive one low self esteem that’s when
2 you’re lacking in confidence maybe there’s not things aren’t
3 going well at home or in some of your friends and you feel a
4 little bit down and you feel like you want to feel warm or
5 loved by someone the big one is alcohol and drugs that is a
6 huge one because what does alcohol do what can alcohol do to
7 us if we have too much
1 T: girl A didn’t have a boyfriend she thought because her
2 friends having sex she wanted to have sex as well so that she
3 was doing the same thing basically and girl B did put a bit of
4 pressure on her she did confess that to me girl B decided at
5 the party decided she wasn’t going to have sex girl A who
6 didn’t have a boyfriend didn’t have any condoms she did have
7 sex with somebody all she remembered was his first name she
8 had been drinking alcohol and she came to see me for a
9 pregnancy test I said to her you can’t have a pregnancy test
10 for three weeks but I gave her emergency contraception and
11 then she had to come back and have a pregnancy test and I had
12 to test for chlamydia as well which is a sexually transmitted
13 infection so that night at a party when it should be fun she
14 should be having fun and enjoying herself ended up where she
 Critical Discourse Analysis 177

15 had three weeks of tears worry and feeling very low and upset
16 about what she’d done

From the examples and issues critically discussed so far, it would seem that
opening up a wider range of possibilities around heterosexual identities and
relationships may be an effective way forward for SRE. This includes referring
to sexual activity in more positive ways to begin to ideologically associate it
with positive feelings. This may actually function to more effectively ‘protect’
young people from potentially ‘dangerous’ sexual relationships. In the United
Kingdom during the writing of this book, a new law about domestic violence
and coercive behaviour was brought into effect. Some of the examples dis-
cussed above explicitly refer to ‘pressure’ being put on young people to
engage in sex. But there is never any consideration within the SRE classes
observed that this may actually be an illegal activity. Given recent legislative
changes, it is imperative that young people be taught that coercing someone
into engaging in sexual behaviour is now illegal, even if they are in a
relationship. In fact, there was only one occurrence in all of the data in which
issues of illegality around (hetero)sexual activity were explicitly raised:

1 T: I don’t know whether you’re aware, hopefully you never will

2 sometimes it does happen that young people actually do have
3 sex with someone under the age of 13 even if they give consent
4 the law sees it that they not old enough to understand what
5 they’re doing and actually to actually give consent you might
6 think who’s going to have sex with someone under the age as we
7 know when girls they can sort of put some nice clothes on make
8 some make up on do their hair they can actually look older
9 than actually what they are I know a situation where a girl of
10 12 came to see me not at this school but at one of my drop ins
11 and she asked for a pregnancy test and when I asked her why
12 she told me that her brother’s friend had had sex with her the
13 day before and she was 12 she was in year 7 and he was just 16
14 obviously we don’t know whether he took advantage of her but
15 I’m sure the police do but he did end up going to prison and
16 he’ll actually now be known as a sexual offender

Another key finding which emerged from the application of CDA to the data in
terms of focusing on GTPs was that ‘gender’ was frequently conflated with
biological sex especially in sequences of interaction where physicality was being
discussed. ‘Gender’ is also constructed in binary terms and transgender and
gender variance issues are completely ignored. For example, there were frequent
references to ‘penis’ (biological male) in relation to ‘boys’ (gender). References to
male genitalia were also much more prevalent than references to female genitalia.
178 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

In the whole data set, there were only three references in total to female genitalia –
vulva, vagina, where you put your tampon – and one reference to periods as
signifying biological femaleness. There were no references to the clitoris and no
references to female orgasm or the idea that girls could derive any sort of physical
pleasure from sexual activity. This contrasts with a total of 19 references to male
genitals – 14 occurrences of penis and five occurrences of semen/sperm. Further-
more, talk about biological body parts in relation to sex almost always occurred in
relation to the negative consequences of engaging in sexual activity, such as the
transmission of STIs, as illustrated in the following examples:
1 T: this is thrush so this is what a discharge would look
2 like boys the one below is what a thrush discharge would
3 look like for a girl
1 T: you just pop that in where you would put your tampon
1 T: thrush is sexually transmitted but you can get it
2 without sex it’s usually caused by girls putting too many bath
3 balls and soaps things like that and using too much soap on
4 your genital area and boys it can be caused from you using too
5 much soap but also from boys if you don’t clean yourselves
6 properly like your penis or your foreskin then you can get
7 thrush that way or girls if you wore nylon knickers
1 T: it’s genital warts and you can see warts on a boy’s
2 penis and warts on a girl’s vulval area as well
1 T: if you don’t get it treated then it can cause
2 infertility when you’re older which means it might stop
3 you from conceiving a baby in the natural way that a baby
4 is conceived

In examples such as these in which the teacher is discussing the negative

consequences of engaging in heterosexual activity, there are more serious
consequences for girls than for boys. The negative consequences include
infertility, pregnancy, STIs (there are more examples discussed of girls having
STIs than boys), being labelled and having regrets. This is illustrated in the
examples below.

1 T: right 67 percent of young men and 84 percent of young women

2 who had sex at the age of 13 or 14 wish they had waited okay
3 that is the biggest regret it’s that thinking because of all
4 them pressures back here all of those pressures are put on
5 that person
1 T: women are more likely than men to say they wish they had
2 waited longer and reported not having been equally as willing
3 as the partner so what are the reasons what are the factors
 Critical Discourse Analysis 179

4 putting pressure on by partners being put under pressure by

5 partners boys and girls not having planned or discussed it and
6 feeling that lack of control shouldn’t be there okay

The real-life examples that are provided in these teacher-led discussions only
involve girls. For boys, there are a couple of mentions of boys having regrets
about having sex age 13 or 14. The only other two occurrences of negative
consequences for boys in the discourse are one about someone going to prison
and being labelled as a sex offender (see earlier example), and another about
King George dying of syphilis.
In all of the classroom interaction observed, the talk of the students is highly
restricted. Talk is dominated by the teacher in each lesson, and students say
very little. This means that, when students do talk, their contributions are
salient. Importantly, there are some ‘critical moments’ when the students do
raise issues around gender and sexuality which challenge normative discourses
in a positive way. It is interesting to focus on these sections of interaction to
examine how the teacher and other students respond and negotiate their way
through such exchanges.
In the first example below, it is a student who introduces the possibility that
not all young people are heterosexual. The class are being shown some
statistics about the numbers of young people who report being sexually active
before the age of 16. The numbers are higher for boys than for girls. In lines
6 and 8, the student suggests this difference may occur because some boys are
engaging in sexual activity with each other (‘they’re gay’).

1 T: 67 percent of young people are not sexually active before

2 the age of 16
3 S1: how does that work out it says a quarter of girls and a
4 third of boys so who are boys meant to have sex with I don’t
5 get that
6 S4: they’re gay
7 S1: if there’s more boys
8 S3: they’re gay
9 S1: all right yeah
10 T: do you get it now
11 S1: it says so there’s more boys
12 T: a quarter of girls so out of the girls they looked at a
13 quarter of them so it’s it’s out of the group they looked at
14 okay and a third of boys had sex under the age of 16 it’s out
15 of the groups that they looked at

This is, in fact, the only time that non-heterosexual identities were referred to
in the data. In the next example, the student’s verbal contribution focuses on
the idea that adults (teachers) can ‘bribe’ young people to have sex with them.
180 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

1 S1: can’t bribery be one of them

2 T: bribery
3 S3: of yeah like if you have sex [inaudible]
4 T: well that might fall into there
5 so what what what might you say if you don’t have sex
6 what might that person say to you
7 [. . .]
8 give me give me a situation
9 S1: dunno like if a teacher says they’ll pass your
10 exam if you have sex with them
11 T: I think that comes into quite serious sort of bullying
12 and sexual abuse cos it’s abusing the situation isn’t it
13 so if somebody in authority is doing that then that’s
14 completely wrong and illegal

Interestingly, this is a negative dimension of sexual activity that is not raised

by the teacher, but by a student. Although the teacher explicitly tells the class
that such activity would be illegal, there is no further discussion of the
potential sexual coercion of young people by adults.
In the next example, the student challenges the gendered notion that boys
put pressure on girls to engage in sexual activity. The student objects to the
way the boy in the video they have been watching is ‘demonized’ in a way that
the girl is not. The student raises an important point here and one which relates
to arguments presented earlier in this chapter – boys are repeatedly constructed
as coercive and their reasons for wanting to engage girls in sex is to do with
power and dominance, rather than any positive feelings such as love.

1 S2: don’t you think they were being like a bit unfair
2 on that video thing like that group of kids that like
3 talked about it like they were saying like the guy the
4 guy should do it but it should be the girl as well they
5 were being really like thought about the guy but it
6 should be the girl as well
7 T: oh absolutely yeah you have a responsibility that it’s
8 two to tango as they used to say
9 S2: yeah
10 T: right yeah you have an ultimate it doesn’t matter what
11 relationship or stage in the relationship
12 S2: like they were always talking about the guys
13 being the ones to form the relationship they weren’t
14 talking about girls
15 T: yeah you’re right

This supports the findings of Lamb (1997) who observes that, in SRE, discus-
sions of pleasure for boys do not recognize nuanced forms of intimacy such as
 Critical Discourse Analysis 181

hugging, caressing or even nurturing one’s own body. Boys are primarily
constructed as a ‘predatory male sexual subject’. (Allen and Carmody, 2012)
Although this is supported by the findings in this study, it is also important to
note that the students challenge this gendered discourse in the above extract. The
teacher supports the challenge (line 15) but does not pursue the topic any further.
All of these contributions by students to the interaction raise important issues.
They show a great deal of awareness on the part of the students and perhaps a
desire to know and understand more about these issues. The examples show that
students are aware of same-sex relationships, gender and power issues, adult-
child power relations and the possibility of manipulation and coercion into
sexual activity. But these issues are not explored much beyond the sections of
interaction in which they are initiated by the students. This was reinforced in one
of the observed lessons in which students were working silently on designing
posters showing what they still felt they needed to know about SRE. Because
there was no verbal interaction, this lesson yielded no interactional data but it
was interesting to observe that almost all of the students included something
about sexual diversity/sexual orientation in their posters.

Teachers’ Views
The findings from the critical corpus analysis presented and discussed so far
appear to be overwhelmingly negative in terms of the discourses of gender and
sexuality which are embedded and reinforced through the SRE classes
observed. It is important to emphasize that teachers report having little agency
over what is taught in SRE classes. For example, teachers report being
restricted by the resources they have access to and the information they are
provided with, as in the following examples which occur as an integral part of
the classroom interaction:

1 T: I’m still waiting for my model condom demonstrators

2 which are basically model penises that you stick on the desk
1 T: now I’m just gonna show you this now these are quite old
2 statistics but they haven’t changed dramatically
3 S1: aren’t the videos that we’re watching like five year old
4 though Miss
5 T: they’re a bit older yeah but it’s still current they update
6 them regularly they come through on the internet so we just
7 take them off the Leeds site so they haven’t updated it yet
8 cos they see it as okay cos some of the stuff from Leeds is
9 very different now isn’t it but they can’t do it every year

They are also restricted by the time allocated to SRE and its place in the
timetable. As well as there being very little time allocated to SRE, all of the
182 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

lessons I observed were in the afternoon, not in the morning – the ‘core’
lessons such as Mathematics and English seem to be timetabled in the morning
whereas SRE is marginalized by being pushed to the end of the day. Teachers
are restricted by their own time pressures with limited amounts of time to
spend on lesson preparation and marking given the numbers of students they
teach and the amount of bureaucratic tasks required of them.
When I talked to them outside of the lessons, both of the SRE teachers in the
study were incredibly open and supportive and knowledgeable about non-
heterosexual relationships and identities and the schools as a whole appeared
to have an open, positive and inclusive attitude. School A, in particular,
appeared to be very inclusive. For example, there were Stonewall posters on
the walls in corridors and classrooms and there was much visibility for LGBT
history month and IDAHOT (International Day Against Homophobia and
Transphobia) such as wall displays and reports in the school newsletter.
Similarly, in School B, the SRE teacher was very open and positive about
same-sex relationships and LGBT+ identities when I chatted with her infor-
mally outside the lesson. But she talked about being constrained by time and
the materials available. She reflected on feeling a need to prioritize given the
time constraints – and physical safety becomes a priority over anything else
which results in a greater focus on preventing STIs.

Discussion
There are a number of key discourses of gender and sexuality that emerge from
the analysis presented in this chapter. Firstly, a discourse of gender emerges
that presents differential values for girls and boys which are usually negative
and potentially ‘damaging’ (Sunderland, 2004) and ‘injurious’ (Butler, 1996)
to both. Girls are responsible for their own behaviour and are more heavily
judged (negatively) for their sexual behaviour. It is discursively implied that
girls have a greater responsibility for safer sex than boys. Girls are also
discursively constructed as having less sexual agency than boys. In fact, the
only agency they are afforded is to do with ensuring that any sex that takes
places is ‘safe’. Unlike boys, girls have no agency in terms of initiating sexual
activity or relationships. Boys, on the other hand, are discursively constructed
as predatory (putting pressure on) and always ‘ready for sex’. In these discur-
sive formations, gender itself is presented as binary, static and conflated with
biological sex.
Within these binary constructions of gender which are reduced to biological
sex, the physicality of males is highly visible and normalized. Female physic-
ality is only visible through references to pregnancy (which is always con-
structed as a negative outcome of heterosexual intercourse). Sexual pleasure is
discursively construed as something to be experienced by biological males
 Discussion 183

only. Sundaram and Sauntson (2015a) note that the perpetual absence of
‘pleasure’ as a theme in SRE classes results in a failure to challenge norms
that construct girls as sexually passive/in danger and boys as necessarily
sexually active/desiring.
Sex itself emerges as a practice that is risky, dangerous and something to be
avoided and ‘delayed’. Sex often has ‘unwanted’ outcomes and, in all of the
lessons observed, there are no explicit mentions of any positive outcomes of
sex. This ‘de-eroticization’ of sex has also been observed by Brook
(2013) who found that young people ‘switch off’ from SRE (including mes-
sages about safer sex) when it is de-eroticized. Sex is also discursively
constructed in the lessons as secretive and not something to be openly
discussed in the family. This overlaps with a gendered discourse in that it
emerges that it is permissible for girls (but not boys) to discuss it between
themselves. Boys are more active in terms of initiating sexual activity, whereas
girls are presented as reflecting and talking about it, often in negative terms
(indicated through words such as worry, pressure, concern, dilemma and so
on). Sex is presented as happening more often for negative, rather than
positive, reasons such as being drunk, peer pressure and as a result of pressure
from partners.
The student-initiated interactions in the lessons observed indicates a poten-
tial mismatch between what is taught in SRE and what students actually want
to know. This supports the work of Hilton (2007) who notes a well-established
gap between the content of SRE delivered in schools and what young people
want to know. There are significant absences revealed through both the corpus
and critical interactional analysis. There are, for example, absences around
sexual and gender diversity, coercion and consent, gender issues and positive
aspects of sexual relationships such as love and pleasure. Importantly, the
teachers themselves expressed a desire for change but reported feeling
restricted and disempowered.
Finally, the main focus of all of the classes is on heterosexual reproduction
and there is a continual reinforcement of heteronormativity. There is often an
implicit, taken-for-granted assumption of heterosexuality, including in families
as well as in the future sexual orientation of the students themselves. Hetero-
sexuality is very much constructed as the expected norm. This is despite the
fact that there is recognition and explicit acknowledgement in the wider school
environment of a wider range of sexual and gender identities. This visibility of
gender and sexual diversity is not reflected in the SRE classes observed. There
are, in fact, some tensions between the different possibilities for sexual orien-
tation discursively constructed as permissible in the lessons, but these possi-
bilities are minimal and the lessons still have a predominantly heterosexual
focus. Furthermore, heterosexuality itself is represented in a very restricted
way. It is constructed as always monogamous and, in terms of sexual activity,
184 SRE Classroom Interaction Analysis

enacted through vaginal intercourse only. Other possibilities for heterosexual

desire, activity and identity are entirely absent. This supports Allen and
Carmody’s (2012) argument that there is a need for an extended ‘discourse
of erotics’ in SRE which acknowledges different forms of desire (and pleas-
ure). This would not only be beneficial to LGBT+ students and teachers, but
also to heterosexual-identifying individuals.
As a final note, it is important to point out that, whereas ‘gay’ and ‘homo-
sexual’ are occasionally included in the discourse, ‘bisexuality’ is not. Other
forms of sexuality such as asexuality are also entirely absent. These absences
around sexual diversity were repeatedly noted by some of the LGBT+ young
people in their interviews (see Chapter 3) suggesting that such absences are
experienced as significant reinforcers of heteronormativity in the school envir-
onment. As in the previous data analysis chapters, a recurring theme is, again,
the discursive reinforcement of heteronormativity, in this case through the
language used in the space of the SRE classroom.
 Closing Remarks

In this concluding chapter, I summarize the key findings of the book and
consider what these contribute to existing knowledge and understandings of
sexuality and education. I consider the implications of the findings for educa-
tional policy and practice, as well as assessing what the research in this book
can potentially contribute to theoretical and methodological developments in
the fields of sexualities and education and language and sexuality. What this
chapter does not do is make definitive ‘conclusions’. Milani (2014) notes that
‘uncertainty’ is what crops up in many queer theoretical writings, and this
includes research informed by queer linguistics. This book similarly ends on
notes of ‘uncertainty’ over what the practical implications may be and how the
fields to which it refers may subsequently develop. Importantly though, in
keeping with a QAL approach, I do make some suggestions (with the emphasis
on these being suggestions only) for how the research findings may be utilized
in a practical way by schools and educators.
The research in this book has highlighted the continued importance of
focusing on language when addressing sexual diversity issues in schools, and
in research on sexuality and schooling. As emphasized in the Introduction and
throughout, it is only through systematically analyzing linguistic practices that
we can get to the heart of how gender and sexuality discourses are constructed
and circulated in school spaces. The research presented in this book ultimately
has an emancipatory aim of contributing towards addressing inequalities around
sexual diversity in schools. In order to do this, linguistic issues cannot be
continued to be ignored or downplayed when exploring sexuality and schooling.

Summary of Key Findings

What the research in this book has shown, perhaps overridingly, is that
homophobia (and other gender and sexuality-based discriminatory practices)
in schools now largely operates at a discursive level and is therefore very
difficult to challenge. Moreover, a focus on ‘homophobia’ is, itself, exclusion-
ary of other forms of discriminatory practices around gender and sexuality
which are clearly experienced habitually by the young people who participated

185
186 Closing Remarks

in this study. It is evident that research on language, sexuality and education

must move beyond a focus on homophobia towards broader queer linguistic
issues of gender and sexuality diversity. The context of the research suggests
that sexual equality (‘triumph’) is becoming an accepted linear ‘triumph
narrative’ (Leap, In press) which actually functions to occlude and obscure
ongoing discriminatory practices in relation to gender and sexuality, which
continue to be discursively achieved.
The research also strongly suggests that schools in both the United States
and the United Kingdom are operating under a culture which discourages risk-
taking on the part of educators and students. Expressions of overt gender and
sexuality discrimination, but also talking explicitly about sexual diversity
issues, are both considered ‘risky’ practices in schools. This means that those
operating in school environments can neither openly express discriminatory
ideas without punitive consequences nor they also cannot openly discuss
gender and sexuality in a positive and inclusive way, also for fear of (different
kinds of ) punitive consequences. Fear and confusion on the part of both
educators and students is a key theme emerging from the multiple data
analyses conducted in this project – feelings which are surely not conducive
to creating a positive school climate and learning experience.
What the application of linguistic frameworks of analysis within an over-
arching QAL approach also reveals are the details of how gender and sexuality
discourses are enacted and achieved (and could therefore be challenged)
through language. The combined ToI and appraisal analysis of the interview
data in Chapters 3 and 4 (both with the young people and educators) revealed a
perceived gap between school rhetoric around challenging gender and sexual-
ity discrimination and actual practice. Participants noted that appropriate
policies were in place but were not enforced, meaning that ideologies and
practices in the schools were perceived to be lagging behind the policies
themselves. The policies are, in effect, ‘not real’ (lacking in authenticity) if
they are not being enacted. Both the young people and the educators believed
that a key way of enacting the policies and translating pro-diversity rhetoric
into practice is to include a range of ‘authentication strategies’ in schools. This
would simultaneously counter the pervasive absences and silences which
function to denaturalize LGBT+ identities in schools. Illegitimation and dis-
tinction are the highest intersubjective tactics used by the young people in their
interviews, revealing that they experienced many feelings of difference and
being treated differently as a direct result of their gender and sexuality iden-
tities. They also frequently reported discriminatory practices around gender
and sexual diversity as being institutionally authorized in their schools. The
young people provide lots of specific examples of this (i.e. students not being
reprimanded for homophobic language and other behaviour) which, again,
reveal that silence and inaction are identified as significant problems.
 Summary of Key Findings 187

The interview analyses also reveal much attitudinal variability amongst

teachers as a professional group. Both the educators and young people report
inconsistent attitudes and values around gender and sexuality amongst school
staff which translates into inconsistent practices. Thus, participants perceived
there to be what may be termed as an ‘attitudinal rupture’ amongst teaching
staff. This is realized as various dimensions of attitude such as affect
(e.g. differing levels of ‘fear’ and in/security), judgement (e.g. varying
levels of capacity and propriety) and appreciation (specific teachers
are highly valued by young people whilst others are ascribed negative
valuation which is linked to negative affect on the part of young people).
The negative affect experienced by the young people is often realized as
unhappiness and insecurity – these negative feelings are reported by the
young people to be related to their experience of identifying as LGBT+ in
school. Any positive affect was reported to be a result of the actions and
behaviour of individual teachers and organizations and people outside the
school itself. Markers of unhappiness and insecurity often co-occurred
with the young people making negative capacity judgements of teachers in
terms of their perceived ability levels in dealing with issues around gender and
sexual diversity. Therefore, a perceived lack of capacity on the part of
teachers was narrated as resulting in negative affect for the young people
themselves. The young people’s use of negative propriety was high when
evaluating the behaviour of others – as with capacity, these judgement
markers mainly evaluated the behaviour of individual teachers, thus highlight-
ing their importance for young people. It is teachers as individuals and their
interactions with young people that are vitally important for enabling LGBT+
students to have a positive school experience. This is a key finding which is
reflected in the suggested interventions in the following section. The markers
of irrealis positive valuation give useful information about what young
LGBT+ people would find helpful and valuable to increase their levels of
positive affect in the school environment. Importantly, some of these over-
lap with the markers of irrealis and realis valuation used by the educators
in Chapter 4.
In Chapter 4, the findings from the QAL-informed application of both
frameworks show a high degree of similarity of experience between US and
UK teachers. In both data sets, the ToI analysis reveals that illegitimation and
authentication are the most frequently used tactics. The tactic of illegitimation
is most commonly used to refer to the teachers’ perceived illegitimation of
homophobia and bullying around gender and sexual diversity in their schools.
Conversely, homophobia and other kinds of gender and sexual bullying are
frequently reported as being authorized within schools. The patterns of illegit-
imation in the educators’ data show that they attribute illegitimation of gender
and sexual diversity mainly to students’ families, and to other teachers and
188 Closing Remarks

students. In the UK data, illegitimation is also used to refer to the perceived

illegality of discussing anything to do with sexual orientation in schools, i.e.
the ‘legacy of section 28’. The UK teachers also use the illegitimation tactic
when discussing their perceptions of the school curricula and examination
syllabuses as being highly restricted. Like the young people, the educators in
the study use authentication to construct identities of LGBT+ teachers and
students as ‘genuine’ and ‘out’. However, as with the young people, there were
high occurrences of irrealis authentication to make suggestions about what
would, hypothetically, work to authenticate LGBT+ identities in schools. The
educators use denaturalization to report their perceived denaturalization of
LGBT+ identities as being effected through silence and absence in the school
environment. Denaturalization was also employed as a means of referring to
other teachers’ perceived ‘discomfort’ about gender and sexual diversity in
schools. The educators also used the tactic of denaturalization to reference
oppositional practices in their schools to what they consider to be authentic
learning. Distinction is used to refer to diversity amongst staff as justification
for not explicitly addressing issues of gender and sexuality diversity in class
(i.e. having different views).
The appraisal analysis findings also show that both the UK and US
teachers do feel confident in challenging homophobic language and behaviour
in some situations, as evidenced through the positive capacity markers (and
some of the positive markers of affect). The appraisal analysis findings
also suggest that it is often silence around sexual diversity issues, rather than
overt homophobic bullying, that is identified as a bigger problem by the
educators in their schools, both in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Perhaps the most important outcome of the study is that it suggests that
tackling homophobic bullying in schools cannot be addressed as a single issue
and that specific issues around constrained curriculum and exam requirements,
in particular, need to be addressed. This suggests that training alone, although
valuable, may not completely solve the problems currently faced by educators
and students in relation to sexual diversity issues in UK and US schools.
The critical corpus analysis in Chapter 5 shows that all of the curriculum and
guidance documents analyzed in this chapter are worded in ways which do not
encourage teachers to incorporate sexual diversity issues into their teaching.
This is the case both in subjects whose primary remit is to explicitly address
sexuality issues (SRE/PSHE and Health Education) and in English as an
example of a subject where there is no expectation that such issues will be
addressed, but which may lend themselves to learning about diversity along
different dimensions. The analysis reveals that there are marked absences
around sexuality in the English curriculum encoded in the experiential values
of the vocabulary. And linguistic presences and absences function to prioritize
particular ideological positions over others. ‘Sexuality’ as a topic is one which
 Summary of Key Findings 189

is clearly addressed in the SRE and HEd curricula. But there is little in both
documents which actively encourages teachers to incorporate positive teaching
around ‘sexual diversity’. In both documents, the analysis reveals that the
semantic profiles created around concepts such as ‘sexuality’ and ‘health’ are
fairly restricted. Moreover, the findings show that a predominant discourse of
‘risk’ and ‘disease’ is created around sexuality and sexual behaviour. Hetero-
sexual marriage is highlighted as ‘important’ and ascribed positive value in the
UK SRE guidance document. This sits in tension with the fact that this docu-
ment explicitly prohibits the ‘promotion’ of sexual orientation. The analysis
also reveals that both sets of documents contain notable absences around love,
consent, the possibility of bullying and sexual violence taking place between
young people and meanings about sexuality which go beyond the physical and
medical. Arguably, the language of the documents functions to promote feel-
ings of fear and confusion – feelings which are already experienced by young
LGBT+ people and some educators, as shown in Chapters 3 and 4.
In the analysis of SRE classes in Chapter 6, the findings of Chapter 5 were
reinforced. Furthermore, the critical corpus analysis revealed the emergence of
a discourse of gender that presents differential values for girls and boys which
are usually negative for both. Girls are discursively constructed as having less
sexual agency than boys. On the few occasions when they are afforded agency,
it is to do with ensuring that any sex that takes places is ‘safe’. Unlike boys,
girls have no agency in terms of initiating sexual activity or relationships
whereas boys are discursively constructed as predatory and always ‘ready for
sex’.
Gender itself is constructed as binary and reduced to biological sex. Within
such discourses, the physicality of males is highly visible and normalized
whereas female physicality is only visible through references to pregnancy
which is always constructed as a negative outcome of heterosexual intercourse.
Sexual pleasure is discursively construed as something to be experienced by
biological males only. Sex itself emerges as a practice that is risky, dangerous
and something to be avoided and ‘delayed’. Sex often has ‘unwanted’, rather
than any positive, outcomes.
The student-initiated interactions in the lessons observed indicate a potential
mismatch between what is taught in SRE and what students actually want to
know. There are significant absences revealed through both the corpus and
interactional analysis. Importantly, the teachers themselves expressed a desire
for change but reported feeling restricted and disempowered. Finally, the main
focus of all of the classes is on heterosexual reproduction and there is a
continual reinforcement of heteronormativity. There is often an implicit,
taken-for-granted assumption of heterosexuality, including in families as well
as in the future sexual orientation of the students themselves. Furthermore,
heterosexuality itself is represented in a restricted way. It is constructed as
190 Closing Remarks

always monogamous and, in terms of sexual activity, enacted through vaginal

intercourse only. This produces negative social, emotional and educational
outcomes for all students, not just those identifying as LGBT+.

Ways Forward?
SRE will continue to play a key role in fostering an inclusive climate towards
gender and sexual diversity in schools. I contend that legislative moves such as
the recent introduction of compulsory SRE in schools in England will not
solve these problems, principally because the language of the SRE guidance
has not changed and therefore still contains the injurious discourses around
sexuality identified and discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.1
Curriculum and guidance documents could be audited by applied linguists
specializing in language, gender and sexuality to ensure that certain ideological
positions regarding sexuality are not prioritized, not just in the SRE curriculum
but in other subject curricula such as English/English Language Arts and
Science. The research presented through this book has revealed a number of
habitual linguistic absences which function to occlude gender and sexuality
diversity which is clearly a lived experience for many young people and those
involved in their education. These exclusionary discourses around gender and
sexuality need to be changed into discourses of inclusion. But, importantly, the
incorporation of ‘inclusive language’ in teaching guidance documents needs to
also be translated into practice and reflected in the language that is used in SRE
(and other subject) lessons. Both educators and students need to believe that
policies and documents will be enforced and, therefore, have a tangible influ-
ence on their school experiences. Such interventions may start to work towards
removing negative heteronormativity discourses which are evidently pervasive
in UK and US school environments and to replace them with ‘gender and
sexuality inclusive’ discourses. This is surely a job for applied linguists to take
on and has the potential to be a clear outcome of school-based QAL inquiry.
Whilst work in sexualities and education refers to the possibility of introducing
‘pro-gender-diversity’ approaches in schools (e.g. Bryan, 2012; Meyer, 2010),
such work has yet to focus on the linguistic dimensions of such approaches.
Additionally, the following QAL-informed interventions may contribute to
greater gender and sexuality inclusion in schools:
 An obvious intervention is the provision of specialized training for teachers
who deliver SRE (and other subjects in which gender and sexuality issues
logically appear). Ollis (2013) notes that professional learning/continuing
professional development (CPD) for teachers enables them to develop

1
www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-39116783.
 Ways Forward? 191

knowledge, comfort and confidence in relation to the delivery of effective

SRE. Importantly, Ollis argues that such training is most effective when a
whole-school approach is taken, rather than targeting a small group of
individual teachers with responsibility for teaching SRE. I would add to
this, based on the research presented in this book, that such CPD needs to
include providing educators with linguistic resources which enable them to
start discursively constructing schools as spaces which are inclusive and
celebratory of diversity, and in which the habitual and repeated use of pro-
diversity language produces the cumulative effect of creating new ‘norms’
of gender and sexuality identities and practices.
 The production of handbooks and briefing documents for school inspector-
ates (OFSTED2 in the United Kingdom and IMPACT3 in Washington, DC)
on gender and sexuality diversity and inclusion across all curriculum areas.
School inspectorates in the United States and United Kingdom play an
important role in determining curriculum content as well as school policies
and practices. Although there is much opposition to the role of school
inspectorates, the current reality is that they are central to informing what
happens in schools, therefore queer applied linguists need to engage in
productive dialogue with these organizations. In the United Kingdom, the
current OFSTED School Inspection Handbook refers to ‘disadvantaged
pupils’ but only in terms of socio-economic status (SES), special educa-
tional needs and disabilities. The handbook mentions ‘prejudice-based
bullying’ but only in general terms. The only time that LGBT+ learners
are mentioned is in the Common Inspection Framework which states that
school inspectors should pay particular attention to the educational out-
comes of ‘vulnerable groups’. But no detail is provided about how to do
this, or how to identify such groups.
 Linked to the point above, I would suggest that audits of SRE curriculum
and delivery include a focus on the language used to teach the subject,
rather than just examining the content of lessons. Specific attention could be
paid to ensuring that language is not being used to exclusively promote
discourses of heteronormativity.
 Finally, Poteat et al. (2013) stress the importance of parental support for
promoting resilience amongst LGBT+-identified young people, as well as

2
See the OFSTED School Inspection Handbook – www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-
inspection-handbook-from-september-2015 and the Common Inspection Framework for Educa-
tion, Skills and Early Years – www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
file/461767/The_common_inspection_framework_education_skills_and_early_years.pdf.
3
IMPACT is the current DC State Public School evaluation system. For information, see https://
dcps.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dcps/publication/attachments/1.%20General%20Education
%20Teachers%20with%20Individual%20Value-Added%20Student%20Achievement%20Data
.pdf.
192 Closing Remarks

the creation of a positive school climate, school-based programmes on

gender and sexual diversity and peer support. I would add to this that greater
attention needs to be paid to how the resources of language can be used to
create a ‘positive school climate’ in relation to gender and sexual diversity,
and that all educators have a responsibility to be critically aware of the
language used in schools and its potential effects on young people.

QAL and Future Research Directions

What this book has presented is a queer linguistics-based analysis of language
and sexuality with real-world implications for policy and practice relating to
schools. School-based language practices are overwhelmingly experienced as
sites which foster and reproduce gender and sexuality-based discrimination but
there is much scope for challenging and changing these practices. I hope that
the book has demonstrated that a language-centered, queer linguistics frame-
work (QAL) offers useful avenues for exploring the themes of gender and
sexual diversity and inequalities in schools. Moreover, I have attempted to
illustrate how the analytical tools of applied linguistics may be utilized within a
QAL approach to develop existing knowledge and understanding of sexuality
and education.
The data sets and analytical frameworks used in this book are by no means
the only ones that may be used within a QAL approach. Indeed, a key strength
of QAL and queer linguistics more generally is its flexibility and adaptability
to context and purpose. And a QAL approach itself is not intended to be
presented as a ‘finished product’. The queer dimension of the approach itself
means that it should not be stable, but should instead be constantly evolving
and always open to contestation and critical development. As an approach,
QAL certainly needs more rigorous theorization of spatiality, temporality and
normativity, as well as what Pennycook (2017) has recently termed ‘a queer
approach to materiality’ whereby greater attention is paid to discursive materi-
alizations of sexualities in relation to political economies. The data in this book
clearly show that schools operate within the context of political economies
which influence factors including the availability of teaching resources, estate
investment (e.g. building cubicle toilets and gender-diverse changing rooms),
in-service teacher training, inclusive curriculum development, family liaison
and extra-curricular activities. Furthermore, future projects in language, sexu-
ality and education will take place in different times and spaces and may
address different conceptualizations, understandings and experiences of sexual
and gender normativity. But what they will have in common is a desire for
social transformation, and a move towards greater social justice for all those
involved in education.
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 Index
adequation, 53, 57–58, 61, 96
affect, 59, 69–70, 72–77, 79, 91, 93, 106,
122, 187
agency, 39, 112–13, 121, 148, 156, 169–71,
181–82, 189
appraisal, 14, 44–45, 47–48, 54, 58, 62,
66–67, 69, 91–95, 97, 99–101, 106,
121–22, 127, 186, 188
appreciation, 69, 72–73, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93,
106, 115, 119, 121, 187
asexuality, 68, 184
authentication, 53, 57, 61–65, 68, 79, 90, 93,
95–96, 98–100, 110, 113, 119–21, 186–88
authorisation, 53, 57, 65–66, 68, 91, 95, 103,
121
biphobia, 8, 10–11, 22, 162
bisexuality, 32, 184
Butler, Judith, 30, 36–37, 182, 194
cisgender, 12, 58, 84
classification schemes, 47, 129, 133, 135, 151,
162
collocation, 144–45, 157, 161, 163
community of practice, 30, 32, 44
conceptualisations of ‘identity’, 31
concordance analysis, 132, 165–66
corpus linguistics, 15, 32, 44, 47–48, 123–24,
126, 128, 130–32, 136, 141, 165–66
critical applied linguistics, 39–40
critical corpus analysis, 15, 181, 189
critical discourse analysis, 15, 26, 32, 44–45,
47–48, 123–24, 126, 131–32, 167
culture, 141, 143–46, 148, 160
curriculum
English, 47, 62, 141, 144, 148, 151, 163,
165, 188
Health Education, 15, 17, 47, 116, 124–26,
148–49, 153, 162
PSHE, 15, 17, 48, 116, 118, 126, 155, 162,
165
Science, 17, 116, 125
202
denaturalization, 53, 57, 61, 63–64, 79,
83–84, 93, 96, 99–101, 113, 117,
121, 188
discourses of
disease and risk, 150, 153–55, 189
law and order, 24
marriage, 17, 19, 150, 160–61, 163, 189
discriminatory discourse, 1, 3, 5, 7, 20, 41–42,
94, 108, 122, 186
distinction, 53, 57–61, 79, 90, 95–97
English Language Arts, 15, 47, 116, 119, 123,
132–33, 141
Equality Act, 25, 161
exclusionary language, 1, 35, 131, 185, 190
FAIR Act, 25
Fairclough, Norman, 47
Foucault, Michel, 128
‘gay language’, 44
gender
binary, 37, 84–86, 88, 177, 182, 189
boys, 22–23, 37, 168, 170–71, 174–75,
179–80, 182, 189
categories, 36
differences discourse, 37, 97
discrimination, 10–11, 20, 25–26, 90, 94,
103, 108–9, 112, 117, 119–20, 122, 129,
158–59, 162, 186, 192
Gender Equality Duty, 25
girls, 23, 37, 86, 168–71, 173–75, 179–80,
182–83, 189
hierarchies, 37
masculinities, 23, 37
variance and non-conforming, 25, 81, 177
gender triggered points, 166–68, 177
heteronormativity, 2, 6, 8, 11–12, 26, 28, 31,
35, 37, 39, 42–44, 79, 123–24, 130, 135,
149, 162–63, 165, 173, 183–84, 189–91
heterosexism, 10–11, 22, 26, 47, 123
 Index
heterosexuality, 5, 7, 9, 11, 23, 31, 34–38, 84,
86, 149–50, 162, 172, 183, 189
homonormativity, 11
homophobia
and racism, 10, 103, 121
bullying, 2, 4, 8–11, 20–26, 64, 66–68, 85,
88, 91, 93, 102–3, 109, 120–22, 159,
162–64, 174, 187, 189
homophobic language, 5–7, 22–23, 35, 91,
108, 113, 188
homophobic violence, 3–4, 10, 20, 124,
153–54, 158–60, 163, 189
homosexuality, 18–19, 37, 104, 130, 149,
161, 163
identity
cultural, 17, 141, 144–45, 148
gender, 9, 11, 28, 36, 52, 61, 68, 183
‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’, 31
national, 17, 145
processes of identification, 46, 53–54, 73, 92
racial, 32, 135
sexual, 5, 11, 16, 25, 29–33, 36–37, 39,
42–43, 47, 53, 55, 58–59, 61, 64, 74, 91,
98, 145–47, 153, 160, 164
social, 33, 46, 79, 135, 140, 143, 145, 147
ideologically-contested words, 129, 135, 140,
142, 148, 151, 154, 159, 163
illegitimation, 54, 57, 61–62, 65, 67–68, 80,
90, 93, 95, 102, 104–5, 120, 187
injurious discourse, 182, 190
irrealis, 62–63, 65–66, 89–91, 100, 119–21, 187
judgement, 54, 69–70, 72–73, 77, 79–81,
87, 91, 93, 106, 110, 120, 187
keyword/s, 132, 136, 142, 151, 153–54,
156–57, 165–66, 168, 170
LGBT+
in/visibility, 19, 22, 101
inequalities, 2, 8, 21, 24, 33, 40, 185, 192
legal rights, 3, 19, 160
mental health, 4, 21–22, 155
youth, 19–21, 23, 26, 50
narrative inquiry, 50
normativity, 36, 38, 40, 42–44, 54, 60, 192
overwording, 47, 129, 131, 136, 148
parents, 17, 26, 114–15, 152, 173
performativity theory, 30, 36–37
power, 9, 20, 30–31, 42, 53–54, 56, 65, 90,
127–28, 130, 166, 180
203
QAL. See queer applied linguistics
queer applied linguistics, 8, 14, 16, 27, 39–40,
44, 48
queer historical sociolinguistics, 41
queer linguistics, 5, 8, 11, 27, 31, 35, 37,
39–40, 42–43, 45, 49, 185, 192
queer theory, 8–9, 11, 26, 29, 33, 35–38, 40,
42, 128
school
climate, 2, 23, 60, 64, 75, 77, 92, 114, 121,
186, 190, 192
importance of teachers, 7, 23, 61, 66, 68, 75,
77, 83, 86–87, 91, 93, 116–18, 121, 148,
187
policies, 53, 85, 116, 186, 190–91
Section 28, 18, 104, 121, 161
semantic profiles, 47, 148, 154, 159–60, 162,
189
sex and relationships education
abstinence-only approaches, 16, 19,
150–51
comprehensive approaches, 16, 18–19
guidance, 17, 123, 126, 149, 160–61, 163,
167, 188, 190
sexual
abuse, 155
activity, 66, 150, 153, 163–64, 173, 175–78,
180–82, 184, 190
consent, 124, 151, 153–55, 158, 163–64,
183, 189
health, 5–6, 19, 75, 124, 149, 155, 162
orientation, 4, 9, 12, 20–22, 25–26, 51,
57–58, 60, 65, 88, 104, 108, 113–14,
120–21, 134–35, 149–50, 161–63, 181,
183, 188–89
pleasure, 151, 153, 155, 178, 180, 183,
189
sexuality
discourses, 2, 9–10, 26, 45, 142, 185–86
discussions about, 34, 89, 91, 116–19, 124,
148, 166
diversity, 8, 14, 18, 22, 26, 34, 40, 46–47,
50, 53, 57, 63, 69, 79–80, 83, 85, 88, 90,
92–94, 96, 98, 100–1, 103–9, 111, 113,
115–24, 130, 133, 135, 140–41, 145,
148–50, 155, 161, 163–64, 167, 181, 183,
185–87, 192
silence
discursive effects of, 6, 18, 22, 35, 64, 83,
91, 96, 101, 105, 112–13, 121–22, 130,
133, 149, 163, 186, 188
illocutionary speech act, 47, 130, 163
space, 40, 42–43, 54, 158–59, 165
spatiality. See space
204 Index

tactics of intersubjectivity, 14, 44–48, 52–54,
57, 69, 93, 106, 127
temporality, 40, 42, 54, 192
transgender, 1, 4, 12, 20–21, 53, 60, 177
transphobia, 8, 10–11, 22, 162
triumph narrative, 41, 186
underwording, 142, 148, 151, 154, 158, 160
vocabulary, 47, 129, 133, 136, 142, 149, 151,
162, 164, 188
word frequency, 132, 136, 142, 151, 154