Probing the boundaries: how religion and sexuality are negotiated within Islamic educational institutions

As a subject of study, sexuality is ‘biologised’ as instinctual and natural. Sexuality is ‘privatised’ as a realm of experience and is often shielded among family and friends. Frequently cloaked in shame, laden with cultural, religious, moral and family proscriptions, sexuality is also often shrouded in ‘embarrassment’. In schools and in the classroom, sexuality is ‘suspect’ and has become the single most common site of considerable debate, contestations, a locus of both pleasure and anxiety, and a key arena for the patrolling of social boundaries. When ‘sex’ comes to school, it is institutionalised, subject to strict monitoring, surveillance, regulation and technique of governance, thereby disciplining behaviour, attitudes and use of bodies (Foucault 1979).