Pistols and pride flags: How gender matters for boys in Welsh relationships and sexuality education

Abstract School‐based relationships and sexuality education (RSE) is a site of intense discursive circulation around the concept of gender. In the 2020s, international RSE curricula are responding to increasing visibility and cognisance of gendered and sexual diversity among young people and attempting to address gender‐based inequities and violence. Simultaneously, expansive RSE curricula are also the targets of sustained assault from ‘anti‐gender’ movements, which assemble diverse phantomatic fears—including crises of masculinity, reduced religious influence, the corruption of notional childhood innocence and reduced parental influence over access to sexuality education—into furious attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, feminism and RSE itself. These moves are typically framed as protecting young people but paradoxically ignore their lived experiences and persistent calls for more comprehensive education around gender and sexuality. Grounded in this hopeful yet fulminous international context, this paper asks what else can be learned about gender's discursive circulations from young people's negotiations of school‐based RSE. The paper offers a rhizoanalytic orientation to gender, entangling imaginaries of gender discourses in RSE as a waveform, and gender fears as phantoms with data produced during a doctoral project exploring teachers' negotiations of a new statutory, rights‐based national RSE curriculum in Cymru/Wales. Within rhizoanalysis, assemblage theory is deployed to explore how gender became salient during one event within a participatory, arts‐based RSE ‘creative audit’ at a Welsh secondary school. An encounter between two Year Ten (aged 14–15) boys, a toy pistol, a Pride flag and a teacher is engaged multiply through written analysis and a series of assemblage maps to explore the ways in which gender—differentially constituted across theorised assemblages—emerges, informs and shapes situated talk and interactions. The paper considers the challenge and promise of engaging boys in rights‐based education, and the role of teachers in fostering inclusion, tackling homophobia and addressing gender‐based violence, within a shifting cultural milieu where these inequities are gaining traction across diverse political and educational contexts.