ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the construction of young people's identity within schooling contexts The black young gay men, of Asian and African-Caribbean origin, involved in the qualitative study were aged between 16 and 19 years. In England during the 1980s particularly, as a result of feminist, gay and lesbian writing and AIDS activism, the changing nature of men's lives and their experiences were much debated within a range of literatures, drawing upon sex-role, psychoanalysis and gender and power theories. Liberal accounts of the curriculum that reduces the heterosexist structuring of schooling to aberrant teacher prejudice are insufficient to explain the complex social interaction of white teachers with black male gay students. Presenting sexuality as enmeshed in a set of power relations, serves to highlight that rather than individualizing sexuality, the deployment of sexuality works within social relations of domination and subordination.