This paper explores how students and, to a lesser extent teachers, have engaged with their school's politics of legitimation to participate in a disruptive moment in sex/sexual/gender relations within their school. Over a period of 3 years students have, with the support of some teachers, actively sought to make homophobia an issue of concern within their school. Their activities have served to disrupt the legitimacy of the heterosexist hegemony operating within the school's discursive arrangements. However, powerful normalising discourses worked through the school to contain this disruption. It is the interplay between discourses of legitimacy, disruption and containment which is referred to here as the politics of legitimation.
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Martin Mills (1996) studied this question.