“Appropriate for School”: Childhood, Relationships, and Intimacy in a U.S. Middle School
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Authors
Walls, Alana
Issue Date
2025
Type
Dissertation
Language
en_US
Keywords
Anthropology , Childhood , Education , Gender , School , Sexuality
Alternative Title
Abstract
This dissertation examines how the routines and structures of schooling interact with young people’s beliefs, ideas, and norms of relationships, sexuality, gender, childhood, and the path to adulthood. Based on ethnographic research at a middle school in urban Nevada with students, teachers, and staff members, I study how young people navigate school policies, practices, and regulations as they form relationships and come to understand themselves as sexual and gendered beings. I consider the way adults at the school, which I refer to as Sunrise Academy, interpret official policies and construct informal regulations related to youth sexuality and gender. I have structured this dissertation into three standalone articles, each analyzing the nexus of schooling, childhood, relationships, and intimacy. In the first article, I build on feminist anthropological theories to show how adults cultivate an informal practice of care—one that simultaneously privileges heterosexual norms while also creating space for queer-identifying students to explore and express their identities. The second article focuses specifically on the revision and implementation of the sex education curriculum at Sunrise Academy; I analyze how adults frame revisions to sex education content as “what’s best for children,” often oversimplifying complex topics such as intimacy, sexuality, and gender, and presenting sex education as objective, neutral, and universally applicable. Finally, in the third article, I outline how adults and students differently construct the skills and capacities deemed necessary to attain full adult personhood, situating my ethnographic research within anthropological literature at the intersection of education and personhood. Drawing on my ethnographic research and responding to calls for anthropologists of education to advocate for change and apply critical theory to real-world issues, I propose incorporating greater nuance into school-based conversations about sexuality and gender, centering youth and their voices within educational settings, and reimagining schools in alignment with their democratic foundations.