ABSTRACT
The young people in this research experienced considerable silencing of their gender and sexuality by their mainstream peers, teachers and parents, which extended beyond the usual sanitizing and asexual practices of schooling (Singh, 1995; Walkerdine, 1990). The mainstream pupils, within their regime of governmentality, either ignored or deliberately erased their gendered and sexual identities. In Brian’s case, however, there was scope within the mainstream pupils’ governmental regime for breaking some of the usual rules of sexual contact. Teachers silenced gender and sexuality within their discourse of needs whereas parents did this by their apparent reluctance to look beyond the pupils’ school
lives and to consider matters of relationships and parenthood. Nevertheless the pupils’ transgressive practices were at times directed against these silences and erasures, seeking to assert themselves as gendered and sexual subjects. The pupils’ transgressive practices enabled them to challenge the obligations on them to be simultaneously disabled and ‘exempted from the male productive role and the female nurturing one’ (Asch and Fine, 1997:241, original emphasis). This chapter explores the ways in which mainstream pupils, teachers and parents silenced gender and sexuality among the pupils with special needs and considers the pupils’ attempts to insert gender and sexuality into their identities and experiences. In the final part of the chapter, the resistance within the disability movement to the silencing of gender and sexuality is explored.
