Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning Special Issue: Call for Papers

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Everyday Spaces of Schooling

Sex, gender, and sexuality circulate in every moment and space of the school day. Ideas about who and what students can and should be and inform curriculum, school policy, rituals and traditions, pedagogy, physical spaces, classroom materials, discipline procedures, dress codes. Sex, gender, and sexuality infuse social interactions among those who occupy school space, constitute exclusions and inclusions that create, maintain, and sometimes challenge heteronormative school cultures.

In this Special Issue of Sex Education, we seek papers that explore the ways normative expectations around sex, gender, and sexuality are multiply present throughout the school. We aim to map how daily practices of heteronormativity in schools affirm gender and sexual conformity and position students, teachers, and families who do not conform as “Other.” We seek empirical and theoretical papers from anthropology, cultural geography, education, and sociology that consider sex, gender, and sexuality across primary and secondary school contexts and at all ages. We are especially interested in papers that consider sex, gender, and sexuality as they intersect with other social differences and identities, including ability, class, ethnicity, and race. Contributions may address one or more of the following questions:

How does heteronormativity help enforce regimes of health, wellness, and ability?
How do ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality create and foreclose interactional possibilities among and between teachers and students?
What is the relationship between systems of student prestige and the performance of hegemonic gender and sexuality?
How do sex, gender, and sexuality interrupt or affirm racialized and classed experiences of schooling?
What are the limits of character education and anti-bullying efforts for creating sexual and gender equity and reducing violence in schools?
What role might LGBTQ inclusive classrooms play in reducing school violence?
How do educators understand their roles in systems of power that enforce gender conformity?

Guest editors:

Jessica Fields is Associate Professor of Sociology and a member of Research Faculty at the Center for Research and Education on Gender and Sexuality at San Francisco State University, USA.

Elizabethe Payne is Director of the Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI) and a part-time Associate Professor in the Cultural Foundations of Education Department at Syracuse University, USA
Instructions for Submissions

Peer review: Papers for the Special Issue will be subject to normal peer review in line with the procedures of the journal Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning.

Timeline: Please submit papers by June 1, 2014 here.

For more information on submissions please read our guidance for authors.

Mark papers clearly for consideration for publication in the special issue “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Everyday Spaces of Schooling”.