ABSTRACT
This book has explored children’s everyday gender and sexual cultures, identities and relations in their final year of primary school in a semi-rural market town in the East of England. It has shown how children actively locate the school as a key social and cultural arena for creating, appropriating and redefining a range of spaces through which they can share, display, hide and ultimately negotiate their gendered and sexual selves. Focusing on the sexualisation of children’s gender identities, one of the overarching ‘findings’ of the study was identifying heterosexuality as a pervasive and normalising force mediating and regulating children’s school-based relations and relationships in ways that constrain and empower how they live out their gendered identities as ‘girls’ and ‘boys’. In this concluding chapter, rather than provide a summary of each individual chapter, I have identified a number of salient points from the empirical chapters that expand upon this central theme. I have selected issues and topics that are relatively underdeveloped in the research literature by way of contributing to and articulating ‘new’ knowledge about boys, girls, sexuality and primary schooling.They include the following:
Gender identities and relations are produced within a heteronormative framework of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.
