Purpose: I take as a starting point the disparaging comments about the place of history and philosophy of education in initial teacher education (ITE) made by the chair of the Teacher Education Expert Panel established by the Australian Government in 2023, which I take to be the most recent attempt at resurrecting the tired debate over "the…

This forum essay offers reflections on the theme of the 2021 annual meeting of the Religious Education Association--"Gender, Sexuality, and Wholeness: Religious Education for Confrontation and Healing." Pondering the melancholy of violence inflicted upon racialized, sexualized, and queer bodies in the United States, the author invites…

This article addresses the controversy surrounding the Safe Schools Coalition Australia. Certain politicians and media commentators have accused the initiative of harming the students it ostensibly aims to benefit. Those accusations have, in turn, been labelled 'homophobic' by supporters of the Coalition. This article suggests that the term…

In this article, the author writes a commentary about an article that she wrote with Marcia McCoy (Muehlenhard & McCoy, 1991). In that article, they "tested the hypothesis that the sexual double standard, which gives more sexual freedom to men than to women, might in some situations make women reluctant to acknowledge their desire for sexual…

Peggy McIntosh (1988) famously unpacked what she called an "invisible knapsack" of privileges socially conferred upon whites, men, and heterosexuals (1988). She argued that not only are women and minorities at a disadvantage, but those with social power enjoy benefits that are both unearned and unjustified. We often accept those…

For some time now, school boards, Ministries of Education, and the popular media have been expressing concerns about failing boys and how best to meet their needs, framing these concerns in terms of a crisis in which boys are the "new disadvantaged". This perspective does not provide an accurate representation of the problem and, in fact, detracts…

This article analyzes the few published references to gender variation among Plains Indians in order to contribute to a growing corpus of literature concerned with building a more complete picture of the social and cultural lives of individuals accustomed to these practices. In recent years these people have been known among Native Americans under…

In this article the authors take up the invitation to respond to the previous articles in the special issue. They discuss why it is so difficult to speak and write about gender and sexuality, and difference more generally, in the neoliberalised university. They make the case that the neoliberal university engages and uses categorical difference,…

Boys' literacy underachievement continues to garner significant attention and has been identified by journalists, educational policymakers, and scholars in the field as the cause for much concern. It has been established that boys perform less well than girls on literacy benchmark or standardized tests. According to the National Assessment of…

Feminist and critical race theories offer the concept of intersectionality to describe analytic approaches that simultaneously consider the meaning and consequences of multiple categories of identity, difference, and disadvantage. To understand how these categories depend on one another for meaning and are jointly associated with outcomes,…

In this article I argue that evolutionary theorizing can help sociologists and feminists better understand gender inequality. Evolutionary theory explains why control of the sexuality of young women is a priority across most human societies both past and present. Evolutionary psychology has extended our understanding of male violence against…

This article argues that narratives forecasting spectacular mobility for Black people/people of color along with the growth of the Black middle class function as proof that America "works" and that the American dream is obtainable for all. However, what is concealed within this "meritocratic" discourse is that full acceptance into this society is…

Comments on the article by G. M. Herek, "Legal recognition of same-sex relationships in the United States." There are many arguable contentions Herek made in his defense of same-sex marriage. We have chosen to focus on only one in this commentary: What is the active ingredient in marriage that serves the socially advantageous goal of civilizing…

A perennial talking point of politicians and scientists, since the time of the Greeks, is to lament how American youth are sliding into moral decrepitude, lawlessness, and poor mental health. Indeed, to hear some observers talk, particularly in this election year, young people in the United States are being battered by a coarsened culture that…

This article discusses my interactions with the teacher in whose classroom I conducted my doctoral research. That project was concerned with using transformative Drama pedagogy to reconceptualise cultural identity in multicultural curricular policy. The participants in my study comprised of 15 Grade Nine Drama students and their teacher at "May…