Sexualities and Social Justice: Young People and the Doing of Gender and Sexual Equalities in a Former Ship‐Building Community

This participatory youth ethnography—utilising interviews, focus-groups,observational diaries, and artwork—explores young people’s differing attitudes to cur-rent sexual equalities in a former ship-building community in Northern England. Adapt-ing Raymond Williams’cultural Marxist framework on class, it identifies threeintersecting repertoires of transition: a dominant liberal disposition of“inclusive sexuali-ties”, based on the universal rights of the individual; a residual repertoire that recuper-ates masculinist tropes of patriarchy and“hardness”, associated with the passingindustrial era; and an emergent paradigm that seeks to“trouble”and destabilise gendercategories. We argue that place, locality, and labour market geographies criticallyimpact upon the types of gender and sexual identities deemed“appropriate”, situatingpossibilities for enacting social justice through equality legislation. The participatoryethnography critically examines the spatial circulation, accumulation, and dissipation ofgender and sexual equalities in young lives, identifying possibilities and challenges forfuture transformation.