ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the understanding of how young people live religion, culture and sexuality between home and school. It seeks to understand how Chana, a 16-year-old Muslim woman makes sense of meanings about sexuality gleaned from her African family and sexuality education in her New Zealand state secondary school. The chapter explores dominant framings of this experience, in which youth from religious and cultural minorities are portrayed as caught between conflicting sexual ideologies from home and school. The work of new materialist feminisms offers an alternative way of conceiving the prominent and active empirical scene. While new materialisms have many proliferations, they are united in insistence on the significance of materiality in social and cultural practices. The concept of intra-activity derives from quantum physics and establishes an ontological understanding whereby the conventional divide between the material/discursive is dissolved. Discursive features refer to the discourses, social, cultural, language-based meanings which represent and constitute how all of these material features are understood.