Seminar 6: Centre for Gender and Violence Research Seminar Series

Schools produce regimes of gender and sexuality, including overt and covert curricula based on assumed essentialist differences between girls and boys, reinforced and regulated through uniform, sport and peer pressure.

This paper discusses the findings from a pilot study drawing on participatory action research techniques with 42 young people in six workshops in Northeast England. The focus of the workshops was to explore with young people their memories about where and how they first encountered being ‘gendered’ and/or having a sexuality.

This paper focuses on those key moments when their behaviours, presentation and/or ideas were subject to facilitators and/or regulators of their gender and/or sexuality. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and ‘space for action’ (Sharp-Jeff, Kelly and Klein, 2017) we conclude that young people want and need brave active spaces to discuss and ‘do’ gender and sexuality, and to resist essentialism and social control. Schools can be both places where control is created and entrenched and where it can also be resisted.

Our research suggests that better whole school responses to dismantle regimes of gender and sexuality can be created by and for young people.

Speaker biographies

Dr Catherine Donovan, Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at Durham University

Catherine has researched the family and intimate lives of lesbians, gay men, bisexual women and men and, more recently, trans and non-binary people for nearly 30 years focussing in recent years on domestic and sexual abuse.

With colleagues she has conducted the first multi-method research comparing love and violence in same sex and heterosexual relationships (Donovan and Hester 2015) and the first focussing on the abusive behaviours of lesbians, gay men, bisexual women and men and trans women and men (Donovan and Barnes (2020).

Relatedly, her research also includes sexual abuse in universities including developing and/or evaluating prevention programmes such as for active bystanders and relationship and sex education. Working in partnership with hate crime support organisations Catherine has also collaborated with colleagues to produce an intersectional analysis of hate and has developed a new concept, hate relationships, to capture the situation in which individuals/families are victimised repeatedly in and around their homes by neighbours with profound physical and mental health impacts. Catherine is on the Board of WWIN, a domestic abuse service in Sunderland and the Drive Project’s national working group developing interventions for LGBTQ+ perpetrators of domestic abuse.

Professor Geetanjali Gangoli, Centre for Research in Violence and Abuse and Department of Sociology, Durham University

Geetanjali works on violence and abuse, and her specialism is addressing the intersecting roles of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability in the perpetuation, experience, and prevention of violence and abuse.

Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on, and contributing to the disciplines of sociology, social work, gender studies, legal and policy studies. She is concerned with the implications for practice, and the intersections between policy and practice.

Her research has had impact in several areas, including the creation of innovative and highly rated training for practitioners, and influence in policy and practice in the areas of immigration law; forced marriage, domestic abuse, and honour-based abuse.

Dr Hannah King, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Durham University

Hannah researches in the areas of young people's experiences of marginalisation and youth policy; domestic and sexual violence; and more recently in the experiences of women in prison.

She is committed to working with innovative and participatory methodologies, with experience of PAR, visual, arts-based, creative, biographic and longitudinal approaches. She is a member of the Management Group for PORSCH (Prison and Offender Research in Social Care and Health) North East; an Editor of YOUNG (Nordic Journal of Youth Research), and a member of the British Sociological Association's Youth Studies Group.

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