Challenging Masculinity and Using Sexuality

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic research this paper focuses on how sexuality is deployed in regulative and tactical forms within Further Education. It examines how masculinity is institutionalised through the internal discourses of education. It demonstrates how, on the basis of the normalisation of masculinity, male teachers are able to regulate female students through the sexualising of situations. The resentment generated by being forced to confront their educational and feminine powerlessness leads the female students to develop a number of different coping tactics. One of these is a transformative attack on masculine hegemony whereby female students take up masculine subject positions and use strategies of masculinity to control male teachers. It argues that the refusal to give legitimacy and consent to masculine regulation, in education, on the basis of a cost‐benefit analysis, could engender challenges across the sites, thereby necessitating reconstructions of masculine power.