Helen Sauntson

Presenting a range of data obtained from secondary schools in the UK and US, this path-breaking book explores the role played by language in constructing sexual identities. Analysing the often complex ways in which homophobia, heterosexism and heteronormativity are enacted within school contexts, it shows that by analysing language, we can discover much about how educators and students experience sexual diversity in their schools, how sexual identities are constructed through language, and how different statuses are ascribed to different sexual identities.

This book explores the narratives and experiences of LGBTQ+ and gender non-conforming students around the world. Much previous research has focused on homophobic/transphobic bullying and the negative consequences of expressing non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming identities in school environments. To date, less attention has been paid to what may help LGBTQ+ students to experience school more positively, and relatively little has been done to compare research across the global contexts. This book addresses these research gaps by bringing together ongoing research from countries including Brazil, China, South Africa, the UK and many more.



Each chapter examines results of empirical research into school experiences of LGBTQ+ students, and the experiences and perspectives of teachers and parents. All contributions are theoretically informed by aspects of queer theory and/or critical feminist theory, with additional insights from psychological, sociological and linguistic perspectives. Contributing chapters consider how educational workers may question socially sanctioned concepts of normality in relation to gender and sexuality in ways that benefit all students, and how they can ‘queer’ schools to make them less oppressive in terms of gender and sexuality.

Expertly written and researched, this book is an invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers and students in the fields of education, sociology, gender studies and anyone with an interest in gender and sexuality studies.

Researching Language, Gender and Sexuality leads students through the process of undertaking research in order to explore how gender and sexuality are represented and constructed through language. Drawing on international research, Sauntson incorporates a fluid understanding of genders and sexualities and includes research on a diverse range of identities.

This accessible guidebook offers an outline of the practical steps and ethical guidelines involved when gathering linguistic data for the purpose of investigating gender and sexuality. Each chapter contains up-to-date information and empirical case studies that relate to a range of topics within the field of language, gender and sexuality, as well as suggestions for how students could practically research the areas covered.

Student-friendly, this is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English language, linguistics and gender studies.

This volume serves as a critical examination of the discourses at play in the higher education system and the ways in which these discourses underpin the transmission of neoliberal values in 21st century universities. Situated within a Critical Discourse Analysis-based framework, the book also draws upon other linguistic approaches, including corpus linguistics and appraisal analysis, to unpack the construction and development of the management style known as managerialism, emergent in the 1990s US and UK higher education systems, and the social dynamics and power relations embedded within the discourses at the heart of managerialism in today’s universities. Each chapter introduces a particular aspect of neoliberal discourse in higher education and uses these multiple linguistic approaches to analyze linguistic data in two case studies and demonstrate these principles at work. This multi-layered systematic linguistic framework allows for a nuanced exploration of neoliberal institutional discourse and its implications for academic labor, offering a critique of the managerial system in higher education but also a larger voice for alternative discursive narratives within the academic community. This important work is a key resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, sociology, business and management studies, education, and cultural studies.

The first book that draws together the main current methodological approaches to the study of language and gender. Approaches include Sociolinguistics, Conversation analysis, Corpus linguistics, Critical discourse analysis, Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, Discursive psychology and Queer theory.

Presenting new and exciting data from lesbian and gay conversations, narratives, representations of lesbians in film and erotic fiction, and representations of prominent gay men in newspapers, this book looks at some of the ways lesbians and gay men construct identity from among the symbolic resources available within lesbian and gay communities.

Sexualities are perceived, constructed and represented in different ways in various languages and cultures. This volume addresses how people use various linguistic features to construct their sexual identities and relationships and how membership of specific social groups, based on sexual and lifestyle choices, may be signalled through language.

There is a great variety of sex and relationship education in the global North and South and this book draws together the global perspectives and debates on this key topic. Issues including gender-based violence, pornography, sexual consent, sexual diversity and religious plurality are all discussed with reference to cutting-edge research.

Gender is a hotly debated topic in the field of education. The role that language plays in educational contexts especially in the classroom has long been acknowledged. Innovatively combining approaches in the analysis of classroom discourse this book offers rich empirical findings as well as being theoretically interesting and valuable.

This short concluding chapter summarises the key issues which have emerged from the research presented in preceding chapters in the book. The chapter focuses particularly upon the common global issues relating to LGBTQ+ equality and diversity in education which are discussed in the contributions, as well as key points of difference across international contexts. We also consider the potential global and local implications for educational policy and practice and how positive change may be implemented. The tension between positive social and legal changes relating to LGBTQ+ rights and equalities and the concomitant 'lag' experienced by schools is, in fact, a key theme which emerges from a number of the chapters in this volume. As Ferfolja and Ullman discuss in their chapter, many factors contribute to this critical absence, or 'gap' between progressive society on the one hand and conservative schools on the other in terms of LGBTQ+ rights and policies. These include a lack of curriculum direction and leadership and confl icting discourses in policy. Furthermore, histories of public moral panic and hysterical debates in the media about inclusions of LGBTQ+ themed material in schools is reported in several of the chapters. In Australia, Ferfolja and Ullman argue that in the media and the public discourse it is often assumed that parents oppose this kind of education. Here the dominant discourse revolves around the need to protect children from such 'dangerous' knowledges. This trend has also been on the increase in South America, particularly in Brazil where the right-wing conservative block, which controls the media, dominates the public discourse on these issues. Fabrício and Moita-Lopes discuss this recent backlash and moral panics regarding gender and sexuality diversity with increased discrimination and homophobia/transphobia and homophobic/transphobic violence in the society. As reported in this chapter, educational policies focusing on inclusivity of LGBTQ+ issues in the curriculum have been attacked by religious conservative groups/politicians and, in some federal states, suspended during the past years. This has resulted in a renewed 'heterosexualisation' of school spaces through the institutionalisation of particular norms concerning gender and sexuality, as discussed by Barrientos et al. in relation to the Chilean context. Kjaran et al. also draw attention to the gap in the policies regarding sexuality and gender diversity in schools in South Africa and Iceland. The National

This chapter introduces the key themes and questions to be addressed throughout the book. It introduces salient aspects of the social, political, historical and economic context relating to the research presented in the chapters appearing in the volume. The chapter presents the rationale for producing the book. The introduction then outlines the theoretical underpinnings of chapters in the volume which are all informed by queer theory and/or critical feminist theories, with additional insights from psychological, sociological and linguistic perspectives. Specific attention is paid to the utilisation of feminist and queer theories in conceptualisations of space and place in which it is argued that space has the potential to be ‘queered’ through the performative enactment of non-heteronormative identities, desires and practices. We develop this argument by suggesting that schools, as both physical and ideological ‘spaces’, can be queered in ways which open up a range of possibilities for enacting gender and sexual identities, the result of which is a positively transformative social and learning experience for all students. The chapter explains how each of the subsequent chapters will exemplify such process through presenting empirical research which is informed by these theories of queer transformative space.

This chapter provides a nuanced examination of the experiences of young lesbian and bisexual women in UK schools. A growing body of research examines sexuality and schooling, however, very little of this research questions how homophobic and biphobic discourse operates in differing ways for young women and men and tends to implicitly assume that homophobia is experienced in a similar way. Given the particularly detrimental effects of bi/homophobic discourse on girls, a more nuanced analysis of the gendered aspects of bi/homophobic discourse in schools is needed. This chapter goes some way to redressing this balance by exploring young gay and bisexual women’s experiences.

The chapter uses data from interviews with lesbian and bisexual-identified young women in which they discuss their experiences of negotiating and enacting their sexual identities in the school environment. The interviews are analysed using Bucholtz and Hall’s tactics of intersubjectivity framework to examine how participants understand their sexuality identities in relation to the secondary school context. Findings indicate that the frequent enactments of homophobia and biphobia through silence, ignoring and censoring in the school environment were particularly salient for the young women in the study. Furthermore, analysis of the interviews provides insight into some of the reasons for this gendered experience which relate to the UK school context and some specific strategies for challenging homophobia and biphobia that the participants have developed.

In this chapter, I reflect on my involvement in a postgraduate TESOL programme spanning two national contexts-a pre-masters stage taught in China, followed by a Masters stage taught in the UK. On the pre-masters course, sexuality issues are never discussed in the classroom. But on the MA course, they are explicitly addressed in positive ways in the context of critical language learning and teaching. This raises the question of how to prepare international students for dealing openly with sexuality issues when studying TESOL in the UK. In considering this, I draw on China-and UK-based data consisting of classroom interaction, interviews with students, and individual and group ethnographic reflections. The queer linguistics-informed analysis reveals that, although sexuality issues are not discussed in China, critical reflections on gender are encouraged in some lessons. These observations can provide a useful starting point students' critical thinking about sexuality in UK TESOL classrooms.

New statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidance for schools in England was published in 2019. One of the major revisions since the preceding version has been the new inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities and relationships. Some groups in the UK have recently protested against this inclusion of positive teaching about LGBTQ+ identities and relationships, suggesting that, although there is overwhelming support for the new guidance, there are still groups in society who are opposed to democratic teaching about this dimension of equality. Focusing on publicly-available video recordings of the protests, this article firstly critically analyses the key discursive strategies deployed by the anti-LGBTQ+ protest groups to produce discrimination and denial. I then compare the language used by the protest groups against the language used by other UK groups who support and continue to campaign for LGBTQ+ inclusion in RSE. Positive discourse analysis, as a progressive dimension of critical discourse analysis, is used to examine how the language used by these groups functions to resist the discriminatory discourse used by the anti-LGBTQ+ groups analysed in the first part of the article. Analysis of the discourse used by the two sets of groups reveals conflicting discourses around what is perceived to constitute 'democracy' and 'equality' in the context of LGBTQ+ inclusion and schools, suggesting that these are fragile concepts in the current British political climate.

This paper reports on research that examines the use of acknowledging moves in the single-sex group discussions of 12–13-year-old girls and boys in their Key Stage 3 Design and Technology lessons. Within structural-functional models of discourse analysis, acknowledging moves are a discourse feature that perform the function of providing feedback to another speaker’s utterance. Cullen (2002) has noted that little attention has been paid to the use of these moves in classroom interaction, arguing that this is a serious oversight as this part of the classroom exchange can perform important educational functions. The study of acknowledging moves has been even more neglected in the study of pupil group discussion, especially in relation to gender, and this paper aims to provide a contribution towards addressing this research gap. Employing techniques of functional discourse analysis, the findings of this study show that there are considerable differences in both the amounts and types of acknowledging moves used by the girls and boys in their respective group discussions. I suggest that, and attempt to illustrate how, these discoursal differences may contribute to our understanding of gender-differentiated attainment levels in Key Stage 3 Design and Technology.

This special issue sets out to investigate a number of areas of concern, regarding gender and sexuality, which are identifiable in the current British higher education environment. We argue that current dominant 'neoliberal' discourses, which emphasise the commodification of higher education in the U.K., function to set limits upon 'equality'. While these discourses often suggest a widening of opportunities within higher education, with an emphasis upon unlimited individual freedom and choice, the lived experience can be rather different for women and sexual minorities. This issue explores the impact such discourses are having upon gender and sexuality identities and practices in the academy.

This article uses corpus linguistic methodologies to explore representations of lesbian desires and identities in a corpus of lesbian erotica from the 1980s and 1990s. We provide a critical examination of the ways in which “lesbian gender,” power, and desire are represented, (re-)produced, and enacted, often in ways that challenge hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. By examining word frequencies and collocations, we critically analyze some of the themes, processes, and patterns of representation in the texts. Although rooted in linguistics, we hope this article provides an accessible, interdisciplinary, and timely contribution toward developing understandings of discursive practices surrounding gender and sexuality.

This article reports on findings from a small-scale study that investigated sexuality discourses in the U.K. secondary English curriculum. In addition to conducting a critical analysis of English curriculum documents, interviews were also conducted with some English teachers and young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)-identified people who attended, or had recently left, secondary school in Birmingham, U.K. Key findings indicate that issues around sexual diversity are noticeably absent from the curriculum, while other forms of diversity are more visible. This means that teachers are not explicitly encouraged to explore sexual diversity in their teaching, and the effects of this on young LGBT-identified people are overwhelmingly negative.

Sexual identity categories are often constructed in everyday discourse as relatively fixed and stable, but such constructions usually do not sit comfortably with people’s lived experiences of their own and others’ sexualities. This paper examines the tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004) used in the discursive construction of sexual identities among members of a university women’s football team. Using tactics of adequation/distinction, authentication/denaturalisation and authorisation/illegitimation, the women both construct and deconstruct boundaries as they seek to diminish the potential for conflict within the team. Instead, a tolerant and ludic attitude to sexuality is projected, and one which the speakers acknowledge arises from the university context, and at their particular life stage. We conclude that this community of practice has embraced ‘queer temporality’ (Halberstam 2005) — among the women, the possibility of temporary and contingent sexual identities is foregrounded, and these identities can be discursively signalled in various ways, including, but not co-extensive with, desire.

Schools are sites in which heterosexuality is constructed as normal and sexualities which transgress this norm are silenced, often tacitly rather than actively. In this study, linguistic analysis is used to argue that, in school environments, homophobia and heterosexism are discursively realised as much through what is not iterated as through what is explicitly stated or enacted. Elements of critical discourse analysis and speech act theory are used to examine how the language used in the English curriculum programme of study documents constructs certain ideologies about sexuality, and how this may be linked to the cultures of heterosexism and homophobia which, according to recent research, pervade UK schools. Findings reveal that there are marked absences around sexuality in the English curriculum encoded in the experiential values of its vocabulary. These silences are identifiable in classification schemes, over-lexicalisation of ideologically contested words and the semantic profiles created by the collocation patterns surrounding particular words. Drawing on speech act theory, I argue that the cumulative effect of these features is an ‘illocutionary silencing’ around sexual diversity in the English curriculum, which, in turn, effects a discourse of heterosexism.

In this paper, we present an analysis of ‘pleasure’ in sex and relationships education (SRE) in England. Drawing together two distinct sources of data and different but complementary analytical frameworks, we argue that pleasure is largely absent within SRE and that this discursive silence serves to produce highly gendered and heteronormative understandings of sexual agency, autonomy and empowerment. A critical linguistic analysis of current Department for Education (DfE) SRE guidance for England reveals that sex is positioned as a ‘risky’ and dangerous activity, which is clearly linked to child protection; sex is not discussed as pleasurable. Focus group discussions conducted with young women in the North East of England highlight the ways in which gendered discourses about pleasure construct expectations for ‘appropriate’ sexual identities and behaviours. These may be linked to negative experiences such as sexual harassment and bullying and compromised sexual subjectivity. We suggest that existing DfE SRE guidance in England be re-examined with particular reference to addressing gender equality, including in relation to access to a discourse of sexual pleasure and rights.

Universities in 2011 find that they must justify their existence in economic terms, not intellectual ones. To this end, mission statements locate the university in an environment of increasing competitiveness and commodification. In this paper, we take a sample of 10 mission statements from the UK research-intensive Russell Group and the business-focused University Alliance. We use APPRAISAL analysis to explore how the evaluative language used in the statement embodies the value of the universities. In the statements examined, we find that differences between the mission groups are realised most notably through APPRAISAL markers of JUDGEMENT and APPRECIATION. We find a greater
emphasis on markers of value in the University Alliance statements. We suggest that
these newer universities are required to discursively echo the government’s call for universities to ‘add value’ to graduates. The Russell Group, encoding greater use of markers of APPRECIATION: REACTION, is perhaps more influenced by the call to demonstrate ‘impact’.

Recent research into sexuality and education shows that homophobia is
particularly prevalent and problematic in schools. However, little of this
work has drawn on linguistic frameworks. This article uses the tactics of
intersubjectivity framework to examine how a group of LGB-identified
young people understand their sexuality identities in relation to the secondary
school context. The application of this framework offers deeper
insights into sexual orientation and education than can be gained from
thematic analysis alone and can contribute towards developing understandings
of sexual diversity issues in schools. The framework is applied
to interview data in which young LGB people talk about their school
experiences. Findings show that in the schools attended by the young
LGB people, they have experienced a state of pervasive illegitimation
surrounding LGB identities. The participants express a desire for this perceived
institutional illegitimation to be replaced by authorisation using a
range of authentication strategies.