Abstract
This chapter focuses on shared teaching discourses and contextually based discourses based on school location. The shared teaching patterns enforce the normalisation of childhood innocence and children’s fixed categorisation along gender lines that regulates children and childhood. These discourses are conservative and hegemonic and work against the articulation and practice of gender equality. The second part of the chapter focuses on the interrelationships between race, class and gender in specific socio-economic school contexts. The argument made in this chapter is that teaching discourses produce, regulate and reinforce childhood (sexual) innocence but always within social circumstances. These circumstances reveal the structural fractures and the steep grades of inequalities that mark South African life. Teaching discourses are produced in and through social and economic contexts that provide major contradictions to the construction of childhood innocence but also through dominant discourses of childhood innocence.
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Bhana, D. (2016). Children Are Children: Gender Doesn’t Matter?. In: Gender and Childhood Sexuality in Primary School. Perspectives on Children and Young People. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2239-5_2
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