Contesting silence, claiming space: gender and sexuality in the neo-liberal public high school

Drawing on ethnographic research in an urban high school in the USA, this article highlights how schooling structures and practices produce and reinforce an ideology of heteronormative binary gender. The construction of gender and sexuality occurs in systematic ways, shaped through structural forces and mapped onto social spaces and bodies. Yet, through the ways that neo-liberalism operates, the production of gender and sexuality is made to appear as individual choice and expression rather than imposed and shaped by structures of inequality. In this context of neo-liberal individualism, educators and students negotiate structures of difference that construct gendered and sexualised bodies and social spaces. By using social semiotics to examine the ways sex, gender, and sexuality are read and written onto bodies and individuals, this research challenges us to think through how ‘safe spaces’ to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning are marked and contested through semiotic means in the social landscape of the neo-liberal public high school.