Lesbian Cinderella and other stories: telling tales and researching sexualities equalities in primary school

Abstract

This article provides a critical account of a selection of approaches that were used in the 26-month No Outsiders participatory action research project in education settings. The paper questions what challenges are presented to educators in critically exploring and challenging heteronormative sex-gender discourses. We revisit some of the tensions in undertaking a project of this kind, by exploring data episodes as vignettes to highlight the recuperative nature of heteronormativity. The paper's title originates in one of the author's dramatic persona of Cindy, a Lesbian Cinderella. We critically reflect on this creation, acknowledge Cindy's potential, and query the characters' capacity to even briefly ‘trouble’ heteronormative discourses in action within the classroom. Finally, we argue that pupils' multiple and shifting subjectivities, and understandings of these discourses offered by such pedagogic interventions, provides an arena for children to resist, reappropriate and challenge such figures that move beyond bounds of heteronormative sex–gender discourses.

Notes

^1. For more information about the No Outsiders project, see www.nooutsiders.sunderland.ac.uk.

^2. The now repealed Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 stated that a local authority should not ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.