Sexting, Schools and Surveillance: Mediated Sexuality in the Classroom

Carrie Paechter (2004) has proposed that sexuality education occupies an inherently ‘problematic’ space within the broader secondary school curriculum, because it troubles the implied Cartesian split within schooling. By extension, students’ use of media (particularly mobile media), can be seen to further erode the boundaries between sexuality (which belongs ‘outside’, in the realm of bodies) and schooling, in which ‘the space of learning’ is understood as a realm of the mind (Paechter, 2004, p. 315). While students’ bodies can be contained and regulated within classrooms, their ubiquitous access to laptops and mobile phones allows them to sustain friendships and intimate relationships, and to co-inhabit other (sexual) spaces and places.