The sexuality of Roma girls through teachers’ eyes The discursive reproduction of ethnic and class inequalities in secondary school

Abstract

In the ethnographic study providing empirical material for my monograph, Exploring Sexuality in Schools. The Intersectional Reproduction of Inequality, published in 2019, I explored the intersections of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class with in a Hungarian secondary school. I tried to find answers to the question of how sexuality discourses in school constitute students’ gendered, ethnic and classed subjectivities, and how these discourses reproduce social inequalities in the institutional framework of secondary education. In this paper I analyse interview excerpts from teachers to demonstrate how gender and sexuality discourses which constitute ethnic and class subjectivities can be critically analysed. In the presented excerpts teachers talk about students’ sexuality and articulate the positionality of students in the ethnicized and classed hierarchy of the school. These two categories not only intersect but converge, so that they cannot be conceived of without one another in these discourses. Intersectional analyses often focus on the cross-section of two subjectivities. In my analysis I examine what happens at the sites where several subjectivity positions intersect with very materialistic consequences.