M L Rasmussen
Biographic Data
| ID | 14417 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M L Rasmussen |
| GIVEN NAMES | M L |
| FAMILY NAME | Rasmussen |
| SIGNATURE | RASMUSSEN M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6679-8110 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 223 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
From community engagement to lived experience leadership: A systematic review of HIV services among men who have sex with men
Community responses are essential to achieving the global goal of Ending AIDS by 2030, yet men who have sex with men (MSM) remain underrepresented and often tokenized within HIV initiatives. While community engagement is widely emphasized, far less attention has been given to leadership rooted in lived experience. Meaningful community engagement requires recognizing MSM not merely as a target population, but as leaders shaping HIV responses. This…
Everyday Intoxications: A Qualitative Analysis of Young People's Alcohol and Other Drug Consumption
Much sociological research on young people's drug consumption seeks to push past the narrow public health focus on risk and harm by centering pleasure as a key dynamic shaping the motivations and outcomes of these practices. This scholarship demonstrates the limits of a myopic focus on danger by examining, for example, meaningful forms of intimacy, social connection, and generative embodied pleasures that form alongside drug consumption. This oft…
Adoption, climate crisis and making kin: Australian young people discuss their reproductive futures
For many people in the Global North, climate crisis renders reproduction a fraught issue, prompting questions about whether it is right to bring more people into a rapidly deteriorating world. Feminist theorists have written variously about this issue, with many arguing for multiplying forms of kinship that are not based on biogenetic connection. Adoption is often offered as an example of such alternative kinning practices. This article reports o…
Religious parents, ‘whiteness’, secularism and modern english values: Dis/assembling ‘progressive’ relationships and sex education
Current scholarship has drawn on Jasbir Puar’s notion of homonationalism to condemn the racialised securitisation discourse that has emerged around Muslim communities associated with the 2019 school gate protests. These protests focused on the introduction of Statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in Birmingham’s primary schools. However, commentary has not addressed how debates over RSE and British values are informed by notions of unma…
Pregnancy, placentas and smoke exposure: Multiple understandings of pregnant embodiment during the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires
The health implications of prolonged wildfire smoke exposure - such as that seen during the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires - are a major concern in public health, not only in Australia but in many fire-prone areas globally. One group identified as potentially more susceptible to smoke exposure than the general population are pregnant women. Based on a study of how pregnant women and parents with newborn babies experienced the bushfire smoke event…
Wild adventures in thought and deed: In conversation with Kathleen Quinlivan
Professor Kathleen Quinlivan died in 2020; she was based at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. A conversation between Kathleen and Mary Lou Rasmussen, conducted in 2020, makes up the bulk of this afterword; Kathleen and Mary Lou were longtime friends and collaborators. This conversation resonates with Kathleen’s intellectual vitality and underscores a wild ethos that drove Kathleen’s passion for social and political change. Kathleen wa…
Secularisms, sexualities and theology
When we began to conceptualise the introduction to this themed symposium in Sex Education journal our initial instinct was fairly defensive. This came from, upon discussion and reflection, a bit of
Researching Young Men and Family Formation: Two Stories
Young men are underrepresented in Australian research on family formation, especially young men who are nonmarital fathers, and are not university educated. In this pilot project, an interdisciplinary research team (demography, sociology, and gender studies) based in Australia set out to design an approach that would engage this particular group of young men on the topic of family formation. We decided to employ a nontraditional research method (…
Religious literacy of Australia’s Gen Z teens: Diversity and social inclusion
Australia is a culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse country, however, learning about the religious dimensions of this superdiversity is inadequately reflected in the national school curriculum, notwithstanding recent attempts to address this at the state level in Victoria. Debates regarding the role of religion in school have raged across the country for decades and have impeded the introduction of learning about diverse worldviews …
Inclusive health care for LGBTQ+ youth: Support, belonging, and inclusivity labour
Drawing on findings from a study of two social generations of gender and sexuality diverse Australians, this paper offers a critical analysis of expectations and experiences of inclusive health care for LGBTQ+ youth. Data were collected by means of individual and focus group interviews with people from two different social generations who grew up in regional or urban Australia: those born in the 1970s (n = 50) and those born in the 1990s (n = 71)…
The myth of LGBTQ mobilities: Framing the lives of gender- and sexually diverse Australians between regional and urban contexts
Gender- and sexually diverse youth are often represented in popular discourses through concepts of movement and mobility. Conceptual stories of LGBTQ youth transitions to adulthood in particular are marked by narratives of movement from regional (rural and/or small towns) to major urban areas. Although not wholly outside lived experience, a cultural myth that portrays the experience of gender- and sexually diverse young people entering into 'adul…
Restricted modes: Social media, content classification and LGBTQ sexual citizenship
In the context of recent controversies surrounding the censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer online content, specifically on YouTube and Tumblr, we interrogate the relationship between normative understandings of sexual citizenship and the content classification regimes. We argue that these content classification systems and the platforms’ responses to public criticism both operate as norm-producing technologies, in which th…
Methodological challenges of designing a survey to capture young people’s (non-binary) affiliations in relationship to religion, sexuality and gender
Large-scale population studies surveying young people in relation to their worldviews have tended to frame their identities in a fixed and limited capacity while also treating the topics of religion/spirituality and sexuality/gender as discrete categories of scholarly analysis. We highlight the affordances and limitations of foregrounding fixed religious, sexual and gender-based identity categories in the process of collecting and analysing data …
Playing Recognition Politics: Queer Theoretical Reflections on Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Youth Social Policy in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s
Marriage Equality: Two Generations of Gender and Sexually Diverse Australians
Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliberal approach to sexual diversity. This article questions such assumptions by highlighting the reflexive approach to the utility of marriage and the significant diversity of opinion and attitudes towards marriage equality among gender- and sexually-diverse Australians. It does so by drawing on a major study of two social generations of gender- and sexually-diver…
Complex, Critical and Caring: Young People's Diverse Religious, Spiritual and Non-Religious Worldviews in Australia and Canada
Recent scholarly and media perspectives on religion and youth have often depicted young people as being apathetic when it comes to religion. The methods used in research on religion are also typically informed by outdated, fixed idea of religious identity that are no longer applicable, especially to young people. This paper confronts these issues by applying contemporary theories of religious diversity, including lived religion and religious comp…
Marriage Equality Time: Entanglements of sexual progress and childhood innocence in Irish primary schools
Ireland is a majority-Catholic country that has, in recent times, been held up as a model of sexual progress internationally. We employ the term Marriage Equality Time (MET) to signify the tensions related to temporality, sexuality and children that emerged as Marriage Equality (ME) was introduced in Ireland. Drawing on a study with six primary schools during the ME referendum, this article captures MET in its emergent state, exploring how parent…
Queer generations: Theorizing a concept
This article reflects on the concept of ‘queer generations’ as developed in the context of an ongoing study about belonging and sexual citizenship among two social generations of gender and sexual minority youth in Australia. We define the concepts ‘queer’ and ‘generations’ in the context of recent theoretical interest in temporality in childhood and youth studies in an attempt to think differently about gender and sexual difference. The main the…
Queerying Notions of “Difference” Among Two Generations of Australians Who Do Not Identify Heteronormatively
Progress in question: The temporalities of politics, support and belonging in gender- and sexually-diverse pedagogies
In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different approaches to the idea of progress emerge alongside competing temporalities of sexual and gender diversity and belonging in the context of public debates and discussions on the Safe Schools Coalition review (February 2016). The public debates provided an important point-of-focus for understanding the contemporary setting of support for minorities in relation to cultural belonging and i…
Homophobia, transphobia, young people and the question of responsibility
Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask – What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educat…
What’s the place of queer theory in studies of gender, sexuality, and education on the periphery
This article is an exploration of the problem of theorizing gender and sexuality of people who Raewyn Connell might describe as coming from the global periphery, but whose lives and futures are als
Sex, Health and the Technological Imagination
AcknowledgementsThis special symposium stems from workshops and collaborative meetings made possible by funding from the Monash Research Accelerator programme, Office of the Provost, Monash University, 2013–2014.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors
In Search of Critical Pedagogy in Sexuality Education: Visions, Imaginations, and Paradoxes
This article is about the purposes and the processes of teaching comprehensive sexuality education to diverse communities. We argue that establishing an educational response to addressing diversity in sexuality education involves challenging and interrupting current dominant forms of authority, subordination, and systems of hegemony prevalent in the teaching practices of this subject. We argue that critical pedagogy (influenced by the Frankfurt s…
Meeting at the crossroads: Re-conceptualising difference in research teams
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to attempt to theorise difference as encountered by a team of six diverse researchers interested in addressing cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education. Drawing Todd's (2003, 2011a, b) concepts of “the crossroads”, “becoming present” and “relationality” in conversation with Barad's (2003, 2007, 2012) ideas around relationality and intra-activity, the paper explores how “difference” in team res…
The Problem of Coming Out
This article focuses on contemporary research pertaining to the closet and coming out within and around educational settings in Australia, Britain, and the United States. The research tends to forge a relationship between inclusivity and coming out, a relationship that often situates the closet as a zone of shame and exclusion. Lesbian and gay politics often tend to reinforce this relationship. Many educational researchers are perturbed by "the c…
After‐queer’ tendencies in queer research
Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an ‘after‐queer’ vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an ‘after‐queer’, we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We cont…
Restricted modes: Social media, content classification and LGBTQ sexual citizenship
In the context of recent controversies surrounding the censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer online content, specifically on YouTube and Tumblr, we interrogate the relationship between normative understandings of sexual citizenship and the content classification regimes. We argue that these content classification systems and the platforms’ responses to public criticism both operate as norm-producing technologies, in which th…
Beyond gender identity
This paper focuses on the continuing significance of gender identity as a category of analysis within the field of gender theory and research in education. I begin by considering contemporary discussions of the limitations of research relating to gender theory and research in education. Following on from this, I explore some contemporary theorising on the category of gender within educational research in order to highlight ongoing debates that I …
In Search of Critical Pedagogy in Sexuality Education: Visions, Imaginations, and Paradoxes
This article is about the purposes and the processes of teaching comprehensive sexuality education to diverse communities. We argue that establishing an educational response to addressing diversity in sexuality education involves challenging and interrupting current dominant forms of authority, subordination, and systems of hegemony prevalent in the teaching practices of this subject. We argue that critical pedagogy (influenced by the Frankfurt s…
That's So Gay!”: A Study of the Deployment of Signifiers of Sexual and Gender Identity in Secondary School Settings in Australia and the United States
While notions of “choice”, essentialism and sexual identity have become some-what passe in the academy, the controversy associated with these notions has not waned within secondary educational settings. Official curriculum and peda-gogy in Australia and the United States is still, I will demonstrate, very much constrained by this hackneyed debate. In the first part of this article my focus is primarily on tropes of choice. I ponder how such trope…
Complex, Critical and Caring: Young People's Diverse Religious, Spiritual and Non-Religious Worldviews in Australia and Canada
Recent scholarly and media perspectives on religion and youth have often depicted young people as being apathetic when it comes to religion. The methods used in research on religion are also typically informed by outdated, fixed idea of religious identity that are no longer applicable, especially to young people. This paper confronts these issues by applying contemporary theories of religious diversity, including lived religion and religious comp…
Queer generations: Theorizing a concept
This article reflects on the concept of ‘queer generations’ as developed in the context of an ongoing study about belonging and sexual citizenship among two social generations of gender and sexual minority youth in Australia. We define the concepts ‘queer’ and ‘generations’ in the context of recent theoretical interest in temporality in childhood and youth studies in an attempt to think differently about gender and sexual difference. The main the…
Progress in question: The temporalities of politics, support and belonging in gender- and sexually-diverse pedagogies
In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different approaches to the idea of progress emerge alongside competing temporalities of sexual and gender diversity and belonging in the context of public debates and discussions on the Safe Schools Coalition review (February 2016). The public debates provided an important point-of-focus for understanding the contemporary setting of support for minorities in relation to cultural belonging and i…
What can a concept do? Rethinking education's queer assemblages
In a discussion of Deleuze's theorization of concepts, Todd May asks "what can a concept do with that which cannot be identified?" Or to put it another way, May writes – "A concept is a way of addressing the difference that lies beneath the identities we experience." This is not to say that identities, concepts, and experiences are linked in particular ways. The possibility of extending what a concept can do is also brought under scrutiny by Ann …
The cultural politics of queer theory in education research
This special issue was born from the idea that there are certain habits of thought and boundaries drawn around the use and perceived place of queer theory in education research. Our intention in th
Marriage Equality: Two Generations of Gender and Sexually Diverse Australians
Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliberal approach to sexual diversity. This article questions such assumptions by highlighting the reflexive approach to the utility of marriage and the significant diversity of opinion and attitudes towards marriage equality among gender- and sexually-diverse Australians. It does so by drawing on a major study of two social generations of gender- and sexually-diver…
Cruel Optimism’ and Contemporary Australian Critical Theory in Educational Research
‘Cruel optimism’ is a term coined by Lauren Berlant. In conceptualizing this term, Berlant draws on the resources of critical theory to interrogate people’s desires for things they think may improve their lot, but actually act as obstacles to flourishing. This notion may be useful for analysing the current state of education in Australia, and the desire to believe that My School, and the associated data it provides, will enable schools to address…
Play School , melancholia, and the politics of recognition
This paper draws on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘gender melancholia’ as conceived in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, and Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the face of the Other mobilized in Butler’s more recent work. In particular, I will focus on gender melancholia in order to consider why non‐heteronormative identities might cause such consternation when they appear in a specific pedagogical context. I also consider how the notion of…
After dark in the antipodes: Pedagogy, Place and Queer Phenomenology
This paper pursues issues of pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology in the context of what might be meant by the term ‘after‐queer’ or ‘what falls outside queer’ as we currently theorise, practice and locate queer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s account of how bodies become oriented by the ways in which they take up time and space, this paper investigates how bodies become oriented within and around the field of a television series that centres Indige…
Scrutinizing sexuality and psychopathology: A Foucauldian inspired strategy for qualitative data analysis 1
This article discusses a Foucauldian‐inspired strategy applied to the analysis of the production of truths about psychopathology, sexuality and young people. Drawing on an interpretation of Foucault’s genealogical tactics, this strategy involves the deployment of four angles of scrutiny: discontinuity, contingency, emergences and subjugated knowledges. The authors discuss how these angles can be drawn on to scrutinize those practices that diagnos…
Methodological challenges of designing a survey to capture young people’s (non-binary) affiliations in relationship to religion, sexuality and gender
Large-scale population studies surveying young people in relation to their worldviews have tended to frame their identities in a fixed and limited capacity while also treating the topics of religion/spirituality and sexuality/gender as discrete categories of scholarly analysis. We highlight the affordances and limitations of foregrounding fixed religious, sexual and gender-based identity categories in the process of collecting and analysing data …
Queerying Notions of “Difference” Among Two Generations of Australians Who Do Not Identify Heteronormatively
Homophobia, transphobia, young people and the question of responsibility
Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask – What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educat…
Wounded Identities, Sex and Pleasure: "Doing it" at School. NOT
Sex and pleasure are fundamental aspects of students' lives and school cultures. They are also integral to students' sense of well-being and can determine their propensity to engage or disengage with the desire to love, learn and transform themselves. Taking the fundamental role of pleasure as its starting point, this paper discusses the idea of how a Foucaultian inspired "ethics of pleasure" might be used to proliferate ways of reading, producin…
Playing Recognition Politics: Queer Theoretical Reflections on Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Youth Social Policy in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s
Interview with Raewyn Connell: The Cultural Politics of Queer Theory in Education Research
Mary Lou Rasmussen (MLR) & Christina Gowlett (CG): Raewyn, can you talk about your key influences in theorising gender as a concept?Raewyn Connell (RC): Well, firstly the women's movement of the 19
Crafting the normative subject: Queerying the politics of race in the New Zealand Health education classroom
This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes, we critically queer how the Māori concept of hauora is deployed in t…
Young people, education and unlawful non‐citizenship: Spectral sovereignty and governmentality in Australia
This paper considers Judith Butler’s discussion of the intersections between governmentality and sovereign power in Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. We consider this interrelationship with a view to considering how this might enable us to expand our understanding of contemporary discourses governing young people within and outside Australia. In particular we focus on the production of groups of young people, such as those cla…
What’s the place of queer theory in studies of gender, sexuality, and education on the periphery
This article is an exploration of the problem of theorizing gender and sexuality of people who Raewyn Connell might describe as coming from the global periphery, but whose lives and futures are als
Queering Schools and Dangerous Knowledges: Some New Directions in Sexualities, Pedagogies and Schooling
(2001). Queering Schools and Dangerous Knowledges: Some new directions in sexualities, pedagogies and schooling. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 263-272
Queer Trepidations and the Art of Inclusion
Youth and Sexualities
A new collection that addresses the problematic pathologization of queer youth, this book argues that the majority of educators and youth workers still know little about queer youth's negotiations of
That's So Gay!”: A Study of the Deployment of Signifiers of Sexual and Gender Identity in Secondary School Settings in Australia and the United States
While notions of “choice”, essentialism and sexual identity have become some-what passe in the academy, the controversy associated with these notions has not waned within secondary educational settings. Official curriculum and peda-gogy in Australia and the United States is still, I will demonstrate, very much constrained by this hackneyed debate. In the first part of this article my focus is primarily on tropes of choice. I ponder how such trope…
The Problem of Coming Out
This article focuses on contemporary research pertaining to the closet and coming out within and around educational settings in Australia, Britain, and the United States. The research tends to forge a relationship between inclusivity and coming out, a relationship that often situates the closet as a zone of shame and exclusion. Lesbian and gay politics often tend to reinforce this relationship. Many educational researchers are perturbed by "the c…
Wounded Identities, Sex and Pleasure: "Doing it" at School. NOT
Sex and pleasure are fundamental aspects of students' lives and school cultures. They are also integral to students' sense of well-being and can determine their propensity to engage or disengage with the desire to love, learn and transform themselves. Taking the fundamental role of pleasure as its starting point, this paper discusses the idea of how a Foucaultian inspired "ethics of pleasure" might be used to proliferate ways of reading, producin…
Scrutinizing sexuality and psychopathology: A Foucauldian inspired strategy for qualitative data analysis1
This article discusses a Foucauldian-inspired strategy applied to the analysis of the production of truths about psychopathology, sexuality and young people. Drawing on an interpretation of Foucault’s genealogical tactics, this strategy involves the deployment of four angles of scrutiny: discontinuity, contingency, emergences and subjugated knowledges. The authors discuss how these angles can be drawn on to scrutinize those practices that diagnos…
Scrutinizing sexuality and psychopathology: A Foucauldian inspired strategy for qualitative data analysis 1
This article discusses a Foucauldian‐inspired strategy applied to the analysis of the production of truths about psychopathology, sexuality and young people. Drawing on an interpretation of Foucault’s genealogical tactics, this strategy involves the deployment of four angles of scrutiny: discontinuity, contingency, emergences and subjugated knowledges. The authors discuss how these angles can be drawn on to scrutinize those practices that diagnos…
Play School , melancholia, and the politics of recognition
This paper draws on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘gender melancholia’ as conceived in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, and Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the face of the Other mobilized in Butler’s more recent work. In particular, I will focus on gender melancholia in order to consider why non‐heteronormative identities might cause such consternation when they appear in a specific pedagogical context. I also consider how the notion of…
Beyond gender identity
This paper focuses on the continuing significance of gender identity as a category of analysis within the field of gender theory and research in education. I begin by considering contemporary discussions of the limitations of research relating to gender theory and research in education. Following on from this, I explore some contemporary theorising on the category of gender within educational research in order to highlight ongoing debates that I …
Young people, education and unlawful non‐citizenship: Spectral sovereignty and governmentality in Australia
This paper considers Judith Butler’s discussion of the intersections between governmentality and sovereign power in Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. We consider this interrelationship with a view to considering how this might enable us to expand our understanding of contemporary discourses governing young people within and outside Australia. In particular we focus on the production of groups of young people, such as those cla…
Get real about sex: The politics and practice of sex education, by Pam Alldred and Miriam E. David
Maidenhead, Open University Press, 2007, 208 pp., £22 (paperback), ISBN 978‐0‐33521‐141‐05 Get Real About Sex is an important and highly readable text; it provides a thought provoking combination o
Secularism, religion and ‘progressive’ sex education
This article engages contemporary debates about the notion of secularism, outside of the field of education. I draw on these debates to consider how ‘progressives’ in sex education in the USA draw on and reinscribe religious/secular divides. I will consider the affinities, prejudices and attachments of scholars who advocate a secular worldview, in the context of sex education, and I will consider some of the consequences that ensue from this way …
After‐queer’ tendencies in queer research
Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an ‘after‐queer’ vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an ‘after‐queer’, we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We cont…
After dark in the antipodes: Pedagogy, Place and Queer Phenomenology
This paper pursues issues of pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology in the context of what might be meant by the term ‘after‐queer’ or ‘what falls outside queer’ as we currently theorise, practice and locate queer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s account of how bodies become oriented by the ways in which they take up time and space, this paper investigates how bodies become oriented within and around the field of a television series that centres Indige…
Revisiting Moral Panics in Sexuality Education
There is a common impulse within academic research on sexuality education to draw on the notion of moral panic in order to better understand 'unreasonable' and emotional opposition to the implementation of sexuality education programs. The aim of this article is to interrogate this tendency to classify religious opposition to the sexuality education curriculum as suggestive of a 'moral panic'. I begin with a brief discussion of how the notion of …
No Outsiders and “ the eternal sunshine of the spotless child ”
Interrogating Heteronormativity in Primary Schools: The No Outsiders Project is a book that reflects on a research project based in primary schools and funded by The Economic and Social Research Council of the UK. This text is accompanied by another practice-focused work: Undoing Homophobia in Primary Schools. The project was led by Elizabeth Atkinson and Renée DePalma in collaboration with researchers at the University of Exeter and the Institut…
Pleasure/desire, sexularism and sexuality education
Pleasure and desire have been important components of researchers' vision for sexuality education for over 20 years, a trend inspired by Michelle Fine's seminal paper, Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire. This essay considers how discourses related to pleasure and desire have been taken up in the USA and internationally by researchers who have been sympathetic to Fine's lament regarding the missing discou…
Practising Critique, Attending to Truth: The pedagogy of discriminatory speech
Teaching in university education programmes, can, at times, involve the uncomfortable situation of discriminatory speech.A situation that has often occurred in our own teaching, and in those of our colleagues, is the citation of homophobic and heterosexist comments.These are comments that are more likely to occur in foundation subjects such as philosophy and sociology of education.The occurrence of such situations has prompted debate regarding ‘s…
Performing an intervention
n\t\t\t\t\tWhat does it mean to intervene, or to perform an intervention? Presumptively conflictual, the term finds meaning in its clinical and behavioural application as an enforced practice of modification: one performs an intervention on an (often) unwilling subject. Cut one way, you could tell a history of sex/ualities education as a history of interventions of this kind: efforts to interrupt and redirect affective investments, sexual practic…
Cruel Optimism’ and Contemporary Australian Critical Theory in Educational Research
‘Cruel optimism’ is a term coined by Lauren Berlant. In conceptualizing this term, Berlant draws on the resources of critical theory to interrogate people’s desires for things they think may improve their lot, but actually act as obstacles to flourishing. This notion may be useful for analysing the current state of education in Australia, and the desire to believe that My School, and the associated data it provides, will enable schools to address…
Meeting at the crossroads: Re-conceptualising difference in research teams
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to attempt to theorise difference as encountered by a team of six diverse researchers interested in addressing cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education. Drawing Todd's (2003, 2011a, b) concepts of “the crossroads”, “becoming present” and “relationality” in conversation with Barad's (2003, 2007, 2012) ideas around relationality and intra-activity, the paper explores how “difference” in team res…
What can a concept do? Rethinking education's queer assemblages
In a discussion of Deleuze's theorization of concepts, Todd May asks "what can a concept do with that which cannot be identified?" Or to put it another way, May writes – "A concept is a way of addressing the difference that lies beneath the identities we experience." This is not to say that identities, concepts, and experiences are linked in particular ways. The possibility of extending what a concept can do is also brought under scrutiny by Ann …
The cultural politics of queer theory in education research
This special issue was born from the idea that there are certain habits of thought and boundaries drawn around the use and perceived place of queer theory in education research. Our intention in th
Interview with Raewyn Connell: The Cultural Politics of Queer Theory in Education Research
Mary Lou Rasmussen (MLR) & Christina Gowlett (CG): Raewyn, can you talk about your key influences in theorising gender as a concept?Raewyn Connell (RC): Well, firstly the women's movement of the 19
Sociology (46 works) · Gender Studies (40 works) · Political science (25 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (22 works) · Gender Studies (22 works) · Human sexuality (22 works) · Law (21 works) · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy (21 works) · Politics (19 works)