Testing times : The construction of girls' desires through secondary education

This thesis explores the links between sexuality and academic achievement for girls in secondary education. It investigates primarily how sexual and learner identities are embodied by young women and the implications of this for their educational success or failure, their emotional well-being, their relationships and their imagined adulthoods. I research a range of young women's experiences across the spectrum of educational attainment and draw from a range of self-identified and emergent sexualities and asexual practices. In contrast to much work which explores only the experience of young women's developing heterosexualities, the research presented here focuses particularly on young women who have emergent lesbian, bisexual or trans-gendered identities or who practise culturally marginalised forms of heterosexuality. Although based on a small selection of case studies, it includes the experience of asylum seekers pupils, Traveller pupils and minority ethnic pupils. I argue here that the Cartesian mind/body split as it is enshrined in the standards and school effectiveness agendas has detrimental consequences for both highly achieving pupils and those who are not academically successful as defined within these agendas. The study concludes by suggesting that learning about sexuality and sexual knowledge needs to be more centrally and openly present in schools in order that marginalised sexual identities are able to participate more fully in learning that the complexity of the relationship between sexuality and learning in psychoanalytic accounts is made available to teachers and that more research is undertaken to make visible girls who 'do girl' differently, by adopting non-normative sexualities or through the practice of masculinity.