Wounded identities, sex and pleasure: "Doing it" at school. NOT!

Sex and pleasure are fundamental aspects of students' lives and school cultures. They are also integral to students' sense of well-being and can determine their propensity to engage or disengage with the desire to love, learn and transform themselves. Taking the fundamental role of pleasure as its starting point, this paper discusses the idea of how a Foucaultian inspired "ethics of pleasure" might be used to proliferate ways of reading, producing and experiencing research related to sexualities and schooling in Australia and the United States. This "ethics of pleasure" is considered through a reading of two texts, Young, Gay and Proud (YGP) (1978), a text written for lesbian and gay young people by an autonomous collective of the Melbourne Gay Teachers' and students' Group (MGTSG) and, a letter written to Dan Savage, a nationally syndicated "agony aunt" in the United States.