ABSTRACT
This book explores the salience of sexuality in children’s accounts of being and becoming ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ during their final year of primary school.1 As the children’s quotes above illustrate, it traces how gender and sexuality suffuse and shape the informal world of children’s peer group cultures and social relations in diverse and powerful ways. Exploding the myth of the primary school as a cultural greenhouse for the nurturing and protection of children’s (sexual) innocence, it vividly illustrates how children locate their local primary school as a key social and cultural arena for doing ‘sexuality’.2 In the chapters that follow I explore girls’ and boys’ struggles, anxieties, powers and pleasures as they individually and collectively make sense of their gender and sexual identities within a local and global culture that expects nothing less than a ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1983; Jackson and Scott 2004).
