Kiss and Tell: Boys, Girls and Sexualities

Abstract

Sexuality is an important resource through which young children account for being and becoming boys and girls in the early years of schooling. The chapter highlights a range of sexualising practices through which boys and girls exercise their sexual agency, analysing the implications for gender relations. The chapter makes two important claims. First, young children, whether adults approve or not, are already involved in heterosexual cultures and desires. They do so through the construction of boyfriend and girlfriend cultures, through sexualising practices that include kissing and love letters. Secondly, the insertion within heterosexual cultures not only provides evidence of their pleasures, agency and desires as they debunk the myth of sexual innocence, but their sexualities are already caught up in normative constructions of gender through which power inequalities are manifested, underpinned by femininity as subordinate. Children’s active participation in these sexual cultures and practices is simultaneously embedded within normative constructions of gender involving relations of power. Both boys and girls express sexuality, have fun and pleasure and in doing so they counter the myth of childhood sexual innocence. Their expression of sexuality however, involves tensions and contradictions and is marked by gender power imbalances. Boys’ tensions involve contradictory association with girls, invoking sexuality, power and misogyny. Girls’ desires tend to be already in the service of the heterosexual male gaze.