ABSTRACT
Containment of girls' desire to marginal spaces has occurred despite what social commentators have coined an increasingly 'sexualised culture' in the Western world. This chapter aims to start from the proposition that female desire is an everyday presence in school life. The current research attempts to push past 'talk' and its constitutive discourses in order to materialize girls' desire. In articulation with evidence that girls' desire is often still missing through the official curriculum of schooling, the chapter argues that 'unofficially' it is decidedly present. Given the persistent elusiveness of female desire and debate over whether it exists in less commodified forms, the chapter seeks to tease out and theorise female desire at school in more complex ways. As part of thinking about desire in more complex ways, it draws attention to different forms of girls' desire such as personal desire and recognition of desire of others.
