Refocusing on Boys, Girls and Sexuality in the Primary School

Abstract

The chapter focuses on the major findings of the study and the implications of refocusing on gender and childhood sexuality in the primary school. Boys’ and girls’ own gender and sexual conceptualisations, their approaches and actions, produce a highly problematic and paradoxical position between teaching discourses and the actual evidence of children’s gendered and sexual agency. Childhood innocence and gender innocence in the early years of primary schooling is an adult-teacher perpetuated myth; the underlying rationale is not one that boys and girls have adhered to. Consequently, dominant discourses, which rely on reductionist and essentialist notions of gender and childhood, must be part of a broader political project in the early years of primary schooling in order to make available alternative possibilities for envisioning sexuality, gender relations and the construction of masculinities beyond gender as a binary, beyond sexual innocence, whilst vigilant of the heteronormative constraints. The chapter traces the implications of the challenges in working within the field of gender, sexuality and young children and offers some alternative interpretations of the field of childhood beyond ignorance and innocence, taking heed of the diversity of experiences and the significance of local contexts in the shaping of gender and childhood sexualities. In the context of boys’ and girls’ active agency, the shaping of gender and sexuality as well as the effects of gender inequalities, gendered violence and sexual harassment, the chapter argues for greater focus and interventions that deal with this phase of schooling.