ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how spatial and material schooling arrangements constitute particular sexual meanings and identities for students. Officially schools are spaces in which academic pursuits are prioritised while issues of sexuality are subordinated in importance. While schools officially marked these places 'non-sexual', students' embodied engagement with them served to disrupt and co-opt this intention. The chapter shows how students contest these desexualised spatial arrangements through embodied practices, recasting them as sexual. That sexuality and space are mutually constitutive is not new in geography and visual sociology, but it is within education, with few studies concerned with how space shapes sexuality at school. The chapter sketches the uptake of the 'spatial turn' in education to reveal how an exploration of the spatial dimensions of schooling might further understandings of schools as sexualising agencies. It also outlines the conceptualisation of space and its differentiation from 'place'.
