Renée Depalma
Biographic Data
| ID | 112405 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Renée Depalma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Renée |
| FAMILY NAME | Depalma |
| SIGNATURE | DEPALMA R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universidade da Coruña |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7927-321X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 143 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
From doll studies to a kaleidoscope of child-centered techniques: An epistemological research journey
Purpose Race is a complex and contextual construct, and there is no reason to assume that young children understand it in the same way as adults do. In this article, we reflect on the ways in which early doll study research was crucial in recognizing the existence of internalized racism from a very early age. Design/methodology/approach Drawing upon our experience using an adapted version of the doll study with racialized children aged 3–7 in a S…
Doing family: Nicaraguan transnational families' narratives on motherhood
This article explores transnational motherhood from the perspective of Nicaraguan migrant workers in Spain and Nicaraguan family members caring for migrant women's children. Our sample included families with children who have special needs, to explore how economically disadvantaged families draw upon migration as a strategy to address educational and physical needs not provided by a weak 'exclusionary' social policy regime. Applying the notion of…
De jure but not de facto: Pluricentric Portuguese in post-colonial Cabo Verde
In Cabo Verde, Portuguese is the official language, while Kriolu is the first language of virtually all the population. The schooling context clearly reflects this diglossic situation: while the vast majority of children speak Kriolu at home, Portuguese continues to be the exclusive language of instruction. Thus, Portuguese in Cabo Verde represents a post-colonial language that has maintained its de jure status but has not entered de facto domain…
Defining desire: (Re)storying a “fraudulent” marriage in 1901 Spain
In the second half of the 19th century, two Spanish primary school teachers were married despite the fact that their legal status as women rendered this union not only illegal but also publicly scandalous. In 2008 their story was resurrected in the form of a book based on an extensive review of educational, legal, and media archives. The Spanish press responded to the book’s publication by embedding the events within a more recent historical narr…
Intercultural priorities among immigrant organizations in Galicia (Spain): Beyond the offensive and defensive binary
What is Integration? A Comparative View from Immigrants and Municipal Policy
The ongoing project of citizenship construction in societies receiving international immigration demands a perspective that takes into account the interests, views and needs of all socio‐demographic groups, including those of newcomers as potential new citizens. We interviewed representatives of 16 immigrant associations operating in the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, reviewed immigration policy in 13 Spanish (Galician) municipalities, …
Feminism will be trans-inclusive or it will not be: Why do two cis-hetero woman educators support transfeminism
As two cis-hetero woman feminist educators, we provide an educator's perspective on trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourses. We begin by discussing the heterosexual matrix and the gender violence that it produces in schools as well as other socializing institutions. The socially constructed sexual binary constrains identity production to adhere to the heteronormative, at the same time excluding those who transgress this normativity.…
Galician Migrations: A Case Study of Emerging Super-diversity
Future teachers as agents of language revitalisation: The case of Galician early childhood education
In this article, we aim to explore the important role of future teachers in the revitalisation of minoritised languages. In the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, language legislation stipulates that the minoritised language be supported in educational settings, yet this support has been weak at best, particularly for schools in urban areas. Teacher training colleges and universities are responsible for the preparation of new teachers who a…
Asociacionismo inmigrante en Galicia. Demandas desde la precariedad
La llegada de inmigración extranjera a Galicia sin lazos con la emigración gallega y por causas económicas a comienzos del siglo xxi provocó el asentamiento de comunidades migrantes de forma estable. Uno de los indicadores de asentamiento de la inmigración extranjera y de integración en la sociedad de acogida es la creación de asociaciones étnicas. En la investigación en la que se basa este artículo nos centramos en el estudio del asociacionismo …
Gay penguins, sissy ducklings … and beyond? Exploring gender and sexuality diversity through children's literature
From 2006 to 2008 UK-based primary school teachers in the No Outsiders project explored possibilities for addressing sexualities equality in their classrooms. What all teachers had in common was a resource pack that included 27 children's books exploring themes of gender and sexuality diversity either directly or indirectly (i.e. by the presence of same-sex parents or gender non-normative characters). While such books have the potential to produc…
Language-learning holidays: What motivates people to learn a minority language
In this article, we examine the experiences of 18 Galician language learners who participated in what Garland [(2008). The minority language and the cosmopolitan speaker: Ideologies of Irish language learners (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of California, Santa Barbara] refers to as a ‘language-learning holiday’ in Galicia in north-western Spain. We examine what motivates these learners to travel abroad to study Galician and in some cases to…
Learning a minoritized language in a majority language context: Student agency and the creation of micro-immersion contexts
This study investigates the self-reported experiences of students participating in a Galician language and culture course. Galician, a language historically spoken in northwestern Spain, has been losing ground with respect to Spanish, particularly in urban areas and among the younger generations. The research specifically focuses on informal linguistic interactions available beyond the classroom that are usually a defining characteristic of langu…
You need to have some guts to teach: Teacher preparation and characteristics for the teaching of sexuality and HIV/Aids education in South African schools
Using in-depth interviews, we asked sexuality educators in South Africa about their own professional preparation and what they believed were necessary educator characteristics for teaching Sexuality Education. Our findings show that our teachers taught Sexuality Education without any appropriate qualification or preparation, but because they had a lighter teaching load and had room to take on more teaching hours. Nevertheless, they all mention th…
Teacher perspectives on abstinence and safe sex education in South Africa
The stakes are high for sex education in South Africa: it has been estimated that 8.7% of young people live with HIV. Within primarily US and UK contexts, there has been much debate over the relative merits of abstinence-only and comprehensive sexual education programmes. These perspectives have largely been presented as irreconcilable, but in-depth interviews with 25 life orientation teachers across the Free State Province of South Africa reveal…
Silence, nostalgia, violence, poverty: What does ‘culture’ mean for South African sexuality educators
In in-depth interviews with 25 Life Orientation teachers in South Africa, we found that teachers spontaneously drew upon notions of culture to explain and justify people's sexual beliefs and behaviours and their own role as educators. Drawing upon a Bakhtinian understanding of discourse, we apply critical semantic analysis to explore how culture is deployed as a discursive strategy. Teachers draw upon particular understandings of culture availabl…
South African Life Orientation Teachers: (Not) Teaching About Sexuality Diversity
Although South Africa is one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of constitutional and legislative rights for LGBT individuals, education is one of many social arenas where these ideals are not carried out. Interviews with 25 practicing teachers revealed very little description of practice, but widely divergent understandings around sexual diversity that drew on various authoritative discourses, including religious teachings, …
Choosing to lose our gender expertise: Queering sex/gender in school settings
Most people, school teachers and children included, are altogether too sure about what gender is: there are two ‘opposite’ sexes, man and woman, and gender is the inevitable categorical expression of natural sex. Like all commonsense views, however, the gender binary has been socially constructed through normalising discourses that frame certain ways of thinking and doing as ‘commonsense’ and thus unassailable. As Judith Butler points out, resist…
Pathologizing gender identity: An analysis of Spanish law and the regulation of gender recognition
Despite recent worldwide legal advances in the protection of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights, legal systems continue to take the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ to be based on a fixed and permanent natural order. Taking the current Spanish law regulating changes in gender identity as an example, we analyze how this recent (2007) legal advance still imposes medical criteria that pathologize the trans person and reinforce se…
Sex/gender identity: Moving beyond fixed and ‘natural’ categories
Despite feminist understandings of the socially constructed nature of sex and gender and anthropological studies of alternative constructions, western societies tend to understand sex and gender in terms of mutually-exclusive hierarchical categories. We analyze the process by which a heteronormative sex-gender-sexuality system is constructed and legitimized to the exclusion of those whose physiology and/or behaviors do not conform to it. We provi…
Postcolonial Perspective, Social Integration and Cultural Diversity vis-à-vis Neoliberal Policies and Practices in Galizan Schooling
The authors base this article on findings from two qualitative studies conducted in Galiza (northwest Spain), in the province of A Coruña: an action research project in an early childhood education classroom; and a composite of ethnographic enquiries focusing on secondary education and vocational training programmes. Both studies sought to contribute to a fundamental transformation of schooling toward a more just, integrative and democratic inter…
A view of rural schooling through the eyes of former students
The Ashgate research companion to queer theory, edited by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke
Teachers' memories of disciplinary control strategies from their own school days
This article provides a vision of school disciplinary strategies as provided by childhood school memories of practicing or unemployed teachers. This narrative approach allows us to understand the school and its daily routines and rituals from an insiders' point of view, drawing upon the double perspective teachers employ when reflecting on their own experience as school children. The results of the study demonstrate a wide range of disciplinary p…
Homophobia, transphobia and culture: Deconstructing heteronormativity in English primary schools
This article presents some of the advances in legal support for addressing homophobia and transphobia in school settings and provides a critique of school‐based policies that focus on these phenomena as particular incidents involving bullies and victims. Defining heteronormativity as a cultural phenomenon underpinning recognisable acts of aggression, the authors describe some of the chief factors that seem to inhibit teachers from addressing sexu…
Un‐believing the matrix: Queering consensual heteronormativity
Two key concepts arising from Butler’s work are the heterosexual matrix – the conflation of sex‐gender‐sexuality which leads to the normalisation of heterosexuality – and performative reinscription – the discursive process by which the marginalised Other brings new meanings to normative identity constructions. While we have found both concepts useful, we consider the extent to which the very act of naming – or in Althusser’s words, hailing – the …
The nature of institutional heteronormativity in primary schools and practice-based responses
Homophobia, transphobia and culture: Deconstructing heteronormativity in English primary schools
This article presents some of the advances in legal support for addressing homophobia and transphobia in school settings and provides a critique of school‐based policies that focus on these phenomena as particular incidents involving bullies and victims. Defining heteronormativity as a cultural phenomenon underpinning recognisable acts of aggression, the authors describe some of the chief factors that seem to inhibit teachers from addressing sexu…
No Outsiders ’: Moving beyond a discourse of tolerance to challenge heteronormativity in primary schools
In this paper we describe a UK‐based participatory action research project that looks beyond the discourse of tolerance to investigate and challenge heteronormative processes in primary schools through reflective action research. This 28‐month ESRC‐funded project supports 15 primary teachers working in schools in three regions of the UK to develop action research projects that address lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in their own s…
Dangerous spaces: Constructing and contesting sexual identities in an online discussion forum
This paper explores ways in which the research design of an anonymous online discussion forum on sexual orientation and schooling fostered the creation, maintenance and/or disruption of linguistic constructions of participant identity. The paper focuses on the presentation of self and the performance of sex–gender–sexuality within a research environment carefully designed as a 'safe space': an environment in which the body is conspicuous by its a…
South African Life Orientation Teachers: (Not) Teaching About Sexuality Diversity
Although South Africa is one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of constitutional and legislative rights for LGBT individuals, education is one of many social arenas where these ideals are not carried out. Interviews with 25 practicing teachers revealed very little description of practice, but widely divergent understandings around sexual diversity that drew on various authoritative discourses, including religious teachings, …
Permission to Talk About It: Narratives of Sexual Equality in the Primary Classroom
Based on practitioner interviews and action research, this article explores heteronormativity in U.K. primary schools, providing a performance venue where teachers' voices can be heard. Our particular focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality in the primary school makes the voices of minority practitioners and equalities activists, generally expected to be silent in the school context, appear to sound particularly loud. Shi…
Imagining the homonormative: Performative subversion in education for social justice
This paper focuses on the operation of heteronormativity in online and face‐to‐face dialogues about sexualities and schooling, and seeks to tease out the means through which this operation is enacted. The data arise from two linked research projects focusing on participants' perceptions and concerns about addressing issues related to sexual orientation in school contexts. Analysis of data from both sources showed that participants' narratives wer…
What is Integration? A Comparative View from Immigrants and Municipal Policy
The ongoing project of citizenship construction in societies receiving international immigration demands a perspective that takes into account the interests, views and needs of all socio‐demographic groups, including those of newcomers as potential new citizens. We interviewed representatives of 16 immigrant associations operating in the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, reviewed immigration policy in 13 Spanish (Galician) municipalities, …
You need to have some guts to teach: Teacher preparation and characteristics for the teaching of sexuality and HIV/Aids education in South African schools
Using in-depth interviews, we asked sexuality educators in South Africa about their own professional preparation and what they believed were necessary educator characteristics for teaching Sexuality Education. Our findings show that our teachers taught Sexuality Education without any appropriate qualification or preparation, but because they had a lighter teaching load and had room to take on more teaching hours. Nevertheless, they all mention th…
Leaving Alinsu: Towards a Transformative Community of Practice
Wenger's portrait of Alinsu insurance claims processors as elaborated in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity remains closely associated with the community of practice model. The enduring metaphor of Alinsu has limited the scope of Wenger's theory to relatively simplistic, closed, and reproductive systems. The model has both reproductive and transformative potential, and it is the latter that has been less widely taken up and …
The voice of every Black person”: Bringing authentic minority voices into the multicultural dialogue
Feminism will be trans-inclusive or it will not be: Why do two cis-hetero woman educators support transfeminism
As two cis-hetero woman feminist educators, we provide an educator's perspective on trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourses. We begin by discussing the heterosexual matrix and the gender violence that it produces in schools as well as other socializing institutions. The socially constructed sexual binary constrains identity production to adhere to the heteronormative, at the same time excluding those who transgress this normativity.…
Strategic Embodiment in Virtual Spaces: Exploring an on-line discussion about sexualities equality in schools
This paper analyses patterns of participation on a voluntary anonymous Web-based discussion forum, open to students and faculty in one UK university, concerning sexualities equality in schools. Analysis revealed that participants often rejected the security of anonymity and strategically embodied themselves and others (as gay, straight, parents, etc.) to provide authority and ethical grounding for certain arguments. These embodied arguments invit…
Doing family: Nicaraguan transnational families' narratives on motherhood
This article explores transnational motherhood from the perspective of Nicaraguan migrant workers in Spain and Nicaraguan family members caring for migrant women's children. Our sample included families with children who have special needs, to explore how economically disadvantaged families draw upon migration as a strategy to address educational and physical needs not provided by a weak 'exclusionary' social policy regime. Applying the notion of…
Future teachers as agents of language revitalisation: The case of Galician early childhood education
In this article, we aim to explore the important role of future teachers in the revitalisation of minoritised languages. In the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, language legislation stipulates that the minoritised language be supported in educational settings, yet this support has been weak at best, particularly for schools in urban areas. Teacher training colleges and universities are responsible for the preparation of new teachers who a…
Language-learning holidays: What motivates people to learn a minority language
In this article, we examine the experiences of 18 Galician language learners who participated in what Garland [(2008). The minority language and the cosmopolitan speaker: Ideologies of Irish language learners (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of California, Santa Barbara] refers to as a ‘language-learning holiday’ in Galicia in north-western Spain. We examine what motivates these learners to travel abroad to study Galician and in some cases to…
Pathologizing gender identity: An analysis of Spanish law and the regulation of gender recognition
Despite recent worldwide legal advances in the protection of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights, legal systems continue to take the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ to be based on a fixed and permanent natural order. Taking the current Spanish law regulating changes in gender identity as an example, we analyze how this recent (2007) legal advance still imposes medical criteria that pathologize the trans person and reinforce se…
Postcolonial Perspective, Social Integration and Cultural Diversity vis-à-vis Neoliberal Policies and Practices in Galizan Schooling
The authors base this article on findings from two qualitative studies conducted in Galiza (northwest Spain), in the province of A Coruña: an action research project in an early childhood education classroom; and a composite of ethnographic enquiries focusing on secondary education and vocational training programmes. Both studies sought to contribute to a fundamental transformation of schooling toward a more just, integrative and democratic inter…
When Success Makes Me Fail: (De)constructing Failure and Success in a Conventional American Classroom
This article examines the case of Laura, a 9-year-old Mexican immigrant who officially “failed to learn English” in an American school. It may be more accurate to say that schooling failed Laura, and in ways that went beyond language learning. This diagnosis of failure is criticized, along with the individualistic and essentialist assumptions about success and failure that support it. My analysis, based on a sociocultural notion of agency, sugges…
Not just any direct experience will do: Recasting the multicultural teaching practicum as active, collaborative and transformative
Providing a teaching practicum where university students preparing to be teachers can interact with children from different cultures has been widely praised as an effective means to improve teachers’ cross‐cultural sensitivity and teaching effectiveness. However, some research suggests that direct experience with minority children may in fact serve to confirm racist or stereotypical perceptions, particularly in school settings. This paper describ…
The sound of silence: Talking about sexual orientation and schooling
This paper arises from an online discussion project in the United Kingdom, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, in which higher education students and staff were invited to respond to a series of statements about sexual orientation in the context of schooling. This paper suggests that the silence of relative non‐participation may have been exacerbated by other levels of silence operating within the wider social, political and educational context of…
Not just any direct experience will do: Recasting the multicultural teaching practicum as active, collaborative and transformative
Providing a teaching practicum where university students preparing to be teachers can interact with children from different cultures has been widely praised as an effective means to improve teachers’ cross‐cultural sensitivity and teaching effectiveness. However, some research suggests that direct experience with minority children may in fact serve to confirm racist or stereotypical perceptions, particularly in school settings. This paper describ…
The voice of every Black person”: Bringing authentic minority voices into the multicultural dialogue
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities: Exploring Children's Gender and Sexual Relations in the Primary School - by Emma Renold
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities: Exploring Children's Gender and Sexual Relations in the Primary School. By Emma Renold. Pp. 206. London and New York: Routledge-Falmer. 2005. £21.99 (pbk). ISBN 0-415-31497-6 (pbk)
Strategic Embodiment in Virtual Spaces: Exploring an on-line discussion about sexualities equality in schools
This paper analyses patterns of participation on a voluntary anonymous Web-based discussion forum, open to students and faculty in one UK university, concerning sexualities equality in schools. Analysis revealed that participants often rejected the security of anonymity and strategically embodied themselves and others (as gay, straight, parents, etc.) to provide authority and ethical grounding for certain arguments. These embodied arguments invit…
Speaking the unspeakable in forbidden places: Addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in the primary school
The present paper interrogates the ways in which school is produced as a particular bounded place (or collection of places) where sexuality, and particularly non‐heterosexuality, is carefully policed by these boundaries. Drawing upon data generated in primary schools during a nationwide action research project ('No Outsiders'), we focus on three very different school places: the classroom, the staffroom and a school‐based after‐school art club. O…
Dangerous spaces: Constructing and contesting sexual identities in an online discussion forum
This paper explores ways in which the research design of an anonymous online discussion forum on sexual orientation and schooling fostered the creation, maintenance and/or disruption of linguistic constructions of participant identity. The paper focuses on the presentation of self and the performance of sex–gender–sexuality within a research environment carefully designed as a 'safe space': an environment in which the body is conspicuous by its a…
Un‐believing the matrix: Queering consensual heteronormativity
Two key concepts arising from Butler’s work are the heterosexual matrix – the conflation of sex‐gender‐sexuality which leads to the normalisation of heterosexuality – and performative reinscription – the discursive process by which the marginalised Other brings new meanings to normative identity constructions. While we have found both concepts useful, we consider the extent to which the very act of naming – or in Althusser’s words, hailing – the …
Imagining the homonormative: Performative subversion in education for social justice
This paper focuses on the operation of heteronormativity in online and face‐to‐face dialogues about sexualities and schooling, and seeks to tease out the means through which this operation is enacted. The data arise from two linked research projects focusing on participants' perceptions and concerns about addressing issues related to sexual orientation in school contexts. Analysis of data from both sources showed that participants' narratives wer…
When Success Makes Me Fail: (De)constructing Failure and Success in a Conventional American Classroom
This article examines the case of Laura, a 9-year-old Mexican immigrant who officially “failed to learn English” in an American school. It may be more accurate to say that schooling failed Laura, and in ways that went beyond language learning. This diagnosis of failure is criticized, along with the individualistic and essentialist assumptions about success and failure that support it. My analysis, based on a sociocultural notion of agency, sugges…
No Outsiders ’: Moving beyond a discourse of tolerance to challenge heteronormativity in primary schools
In this paper we describe a UK‐based participatory action research project that looks beyond the discourse of tolerance to investigate and challenge heteronormative processes in primary schools through reflective action research. This 28‐month ESRC‐funded project supports 15 primary teachers working in schools in three regions of the UK to develop action research projects that address lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in their own s…
Permission to Talk About It: Narratives of Sexual Equality in the Primary Classroom
Based on practitioner interviews and action research, this article explores heteronormativity in U.K. primary schools, providing a performance venue where teachers' voices can be heard. Our particular focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality in the primary school makes the voices of minority practitioners and equalities activists, generally expected to be silent in the school context, appear to sound particularly loud. Shi…
Leaving Alinsu: Towards a Transformative Community of Practice
Wenger's portrait of Alinsu insurance claims processors as elaborated in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity remains closely associated with the community of practice model. The enduring metaphor of Alinsu has limited the scope of Wenger's theory to relatively simplistic, closed, and reproductive systems. The model has both reproductive and transformative potential, and it is the latter that has been less widely taken up and …
Homophobia, transphobia and culture: Deconstructing heteronormativity in English primary schools
This article presents some of the advances in legal support for addressing homophobia and transphobia in school settings and provides a critique of school‐based policies that focus on these phenomena as particular incidents involving bullies and victims. Defining heteronormativity as a cultural phenomenon underpinning recognisable acts of aggression, the authors describe some of the chief factors that seem to inhibit teachers from addressing sexu…
The nature of institutional heteronormativity in primary schools and practice-based responses
The Ashgate research companion to queer theory, edited by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke
Teachers' memories of disciplinary control strategies from their own school days
This article provides a vision of school disciplinary strategies as provided by childhood school memories of practicing or unemployed teachers. This narrative approach allows us to understand the school and its daily routines and rituals from an insiders' point of view, drawing upon the double perspective teachers employ when reflecting on their own experience as school children. The results of the study demonstrate a wide range of disciplinary p…
Sex/gender identity: Moving beyond fixed and ‘natural’ categories
Despite feminist understandings of the socially constructed nature of sex and gender and anthropological studies of alternative constructions, western societies tend to understand sex and gender in terms of mutually-exclusive hierarchical categories. We analyze the process by which a heteronormative sex-gender-sexuality system is constructed and legitimized to the exclusion of those whose physiology and/or behaviors do not conform to it. We provi…
Postcolonial Perspective, Social Integration and Cultural Diversity vis-à-vis Neoliberal Policies and Practices in Galizan Schooling
The authors base this article on findings from two qualitative studies conducted in Galiza (northwest Spain), in the province of A Coruña: an action research project in an early childhood education classroom; and a composite of ethnographic enquiries focusing on secondary education and vocational training programmes. Both studies sought to contribute to a fundamental transformation of schooling toward a more just, integrative and democratic inter…
A view of rural schooling through the eyes of former students
Choosing to lose our gender expertise: Queering sex/gender in school settings
Most people, school teachers and children included, are altogether too sure about what gender is: there are two ‘opposite’ sexes, man and woman, and gender is the inevitable categorical expression of natural sex. Like all commonsense views, however, the gender binary has been socially constructed through normalising discourses that frame certain ways of thinking and doing as ‘commonsense’ and thus unassailable. As Judith Butler points out, resist…
Pathologizing gender identity: An analysis of Spanish law and the regulation of gender recognition
Despite recent worldwide legal advances in the protection of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights, legal systems continue to take the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ to be based on a fixed and permanent natural order. Taking the current Spanish law regulating changes in gender identity as an example, we analyze how this recent (2007) legal advance still imposes medical criteria that pathologize the trans person and reinforce se…
Teacher perspectives on abstinence and safe sex education in South Africa
The stakes are high for sex education in South Africa: it has been estimated that 8.7% of young people live with HIV. Within primarily US and UK contexts, there has been much debate over the relative merits of abstinence-only and comprehensive sexual education programmes. These perspectives have largely been presented as irreconcilable, but in-depth interviews with 25 life orientation teachers across the Free State Province of South Africa reveal…
Silence, nostalgia, violence, poverty: What does ‘culture’ mean for South African sexuality educators
In in-depth interviews with 25 Life Orientation teachers in South Africa, we found that teachers spontaneously drew upon notions of culture to explain and justify people's sexual beliefs and behaviours and their own role as educators. Drawing upon a Bakhtinian understanding of discourse, we apply critical semantic analysis to explore how culture is deployed as a discursive strategy. Teachers draw upon particular understandings of culture availabl…
South African Life Orientation Teachers: (Not) Teaching About Sexuality Diversity
Although South Africa is one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of constitutional and legislative rights for LGBT individuals, education is one of many social arenas where these ideals are not carried out. Interviews with 25 practicing teachers revealed very little description of practice, but widely divergent understandings around sexual diversity that drew on various authoritative discourses, including religious teachings, …
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (28 works) · Gender Studies (27 works) · Pedagogy (18 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Human sexuality (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Heteronormativity (10 works) · Lesbian (10 works)