ABSTRACT

By sharpening the focus to the way sexuality intersects with masculinity and the body, this chapter suggests that sexuality as both everywhere and nowhere takes a particular gendered configuration in relation to young men's bodies. It illuminates this situation through an exploration of how young men's sexual embodiment is 'pictured' via photo-diaries at school. Schools are a site which shapes how the intersections of masculinities, sexualities and bodies are played out. Within the sociology of education, schools are sites for the production of sexual identities through a plethora of everyday social practices and structures. The chapter also suggests that the conventional ordering of heterosexuality as a conduit for the constitution of masculinities underplays the way normative gender constitutes heterosexualities. Through a concentration on flesh, via visual methods, it is possible to literally see that characteristics of hegemonic masculinity are equated with what is deemed sexual.