Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education 2016

CRITICAL CONCEPTS
IN QUEER STUDIES
AND EDUCATION
An International Guide for the
Twenty-First Century
Edited by
Nelson M. Rodriguez, Wayne J. Martino,

Jennifer C. Ingrey, and Edward Brockenbrough
QUEER Series Editors

STUDIES & William F. Pinar
EDUCATION Nelson M. Rodriguez,
& Reta Ugena Whitlock
Queer Studies and Education
Series Editors
William F. Pinar
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The College of New Jersey
Ewing, New Jersey, USA
Reta Ugena Whitlock
Department of Educational Leadership
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA
LGBTQ social, cultural, and political issues have become a defining fea-
ture of twenty-first century life, transforming on a global scale any number
of institutions, including the institution of education. Situated within the
context of these major transformations, this series is home to the most
compelling, innovative, and timely scholarship emerging at the intersec-
tion of queer studies and education. Across a broad range of educational
topics and locations, books in this series incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and intersex categories, as well as scholarship in queer theory
arising out of the postmodern turn in sexuality studies. The series is wide-
ranging in terms of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives and methodologi-
cal approaches, and will include and illuminate much needed intersectional
scholarship. Always bold in outlook, the series also welcomes projects that
challenge any number of normalizing tendencies within academic scholar-
ship, from works that move beyond established frameworks of knowledge
production within LGBTQ educational research to works that expand the
range of what is institutionally defined within the field of education as
relevant queer studies scholarship.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14522
Nelson M. Rodriguez • Wayne J. Martino • Jennifer C. Ingrey
Edward Brockenbrough
Editors
Critical Concepts in
Queer Studies and
Education
An International Guide for the Twenty-First
Century
Editors
Nelson M. Rodriguez Jennifer C. Ingrey
Department of Women’s, Gender, Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership
and Sexuality Studies Studies
The College of New Jersey The University of Western Ontario
Ewing, New Jersey, USA London, Ontario, Canada
Wayne J. Martino Edward Brockenbrough

Critical Policy, Equity, and Department of Teaching and
Leadership Studies Curriculum
The University of Western Ontario University of Rochester
London, Ontario, Canada Rochester, New York, USA
Queer Studies and Education

ISBN 978-1-137-55424-6 ISBN 978-1-137-55425-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55425-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947965
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: © Anjo Kan / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York
For a Queer Revolution, Everywhere
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank all of the contributors for their excellent
chapters. We are grateful for their work and insights in helping us to reflect
on the state of the field of Queer Studies and Education, on where it has
been and where it might be headed politically, epistemologically, theoreti-
cally, methodologically, and pedagogically.
Many thanks are owed as well to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan,
Mara Berkoff and Sarah Nathan, as well as to the entire Palgrave Macmillan
team, for all of their assistance with, commitment to, and encouragement
of this project. We are delighted to have our volume included in the Queer
Studies and Education series.
Finally, a slightly different version of Chapter 26, “Queer Literacy
Framework,” appeared as “A Queer Literacy Framework Promoting (A)
Gender and (A)Sexuality Self-Determination and Justice” in English
Journal 104(5), pp. 37–44. Copyright 2015 by the National Council of
Teachers of English. Used with permission.
vii
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
Wayne J. Martino, Nelson M. Rodriguez, Jennifer
C. Ingrey, and Edward Brockenbrough
2 Affect 5
Alyssa D. Niccolini
3 Allies of Intersectionalities 15
Paulina Abustan and A.G. Rud
4 Bitter Knowledge 23
Thabo Msibi
5 Bullying 35
Gerald Walton
6 Coming Out 47
Gabrielle Richard
7 Containment 57
Chris Haywood and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill
ix
x CONTENTS
8 Critical Intimate Praxis 67

Marilyn Preston
9 Encounter Stories 75
Janna Jackson Kellinger and Danné E. Davis
10 Faculty Trainings 87
Barbara Jean A. Douglass
11 Families 95
Amy Shema
12 Friendship 105
David Lee Carlson and Joshua Cruz
13 Genderfication 117
Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones
14 Gender Policing 127

Elizabethe Payne and Melissa J. Smith
15 Heteroprofessionalism 137
Robert C. Mizzi
16 Heterotopia 149
Jennifer C. Ingrey
17 Interlocking Systems of Oppression 161

Anna Carastathis
18 Internal Safety 173

Bethy Leonardi and Elizabeth J. Meyer
CONTENTS xi
19 Mathematical Inqueery 183

Kai Rands
20 Performance 193
Jennifer MacLatchy
21 Postgay 205
Alicia Lapointe
22 Privilege 219
Blas Radi and Moira Pérez
23 Promoviendo (Promoting) 229

Rigoberto Marquez
24 Public Pedagogy 239

Tina Gutierez-Schmich and Julia Heffernan
25 Queer Counterpublic Spatialities 249

Jón Ingvar Kjaran
26 Queer Literacy Framework 259

sj Miller
27 Queer Millennials 273

M. Sue Crowley
28 Queer of Color Critique 285

29 Queer, Quare, and [Q]ulturally Sustaining 299

Jon M. Wargo
xii CONTENTS
30 Queer Thrival 309

Adam J. Greteman
31 Queer Transgressive Cultural Capital 319

Summer M. Pennell
32 (Re)Fractioning Singularity 329

Erich N. Pitcher, Scotty M. Secrist, and Trace P. Camacho
33 Religiosity 341
Tonya D. Callaghan
34 Resilience 351
Rob Cover
35 Safe Space 361

Christine Quinan
36 Scavenging as Queer Methodology 369

Jason P. Murphy and Catherine A. Lugg
37 The Transgender Imaginary 381

Wayne J. Martino
38 Third Spaces 395

Shenila S. Khoja-Moolji
39 Trans Generosity 407

Nelson M. Rodriguez
40 Trigger Warnings 421

Clare Forstie
CONTENTS xiii
41 Utopias 435
Beatrice Jane Vittoria Balfour
42 Versatility 445
James Sheldon
43 Visibility 453
Jerry Rosiek
44 Visual Methods 463

Louisa Allen
45 Youth 473
Lisa W. Loutzenheiser and Sam Stiegler
Index 483
CONTRIBUTORS
Paulina Abustan is a Queer Pilipina– scholar-activist and student of Washington

State University’s PhD Program in Cultural Studies and Social Thought in
Education. She is nationally known to educate and mobilize students, people, and
communities of multiple identities toward social transformation and change. Her
research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in education
and on uncovering Feminist and Queer Indigenous and Mestiza Pilipina
identities.
Louisa Allen is an associate professor, in the Faculty of Education and Social
Work, at the University of Auckland. She specializes in research in the areas of
sexualities, young people and schooling, and innovative research methodologies
which seek to engage hard-to-reach research populations. Allen examines these
areas through the lenses of queer, feminist “new” materialist, feminist poststruc-
tural and critical youth studies theoretical frameworks. She has (co)authored four
books in these fields.
Beatrice Jane Vittoria Balfour is a doctoral student at the University of
Cambridge, affiliated with the Faculty of Education. Beatrice earned her BA in
philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MPhil in multi-
disciplinary gender studies at the University of Cambridge. Her current academic
interests are interdisciplinary and stand at the intersection between queer studies,
sociology, and the history of education. Beatrice has also been active in several
organizations and research groups, such as the research center on the politics and
theories of sexuality “PoliTeSse” and the Cambridge-based organization
“SeYOUality” where she volunteers to raise awareness around issues concerning
homophobia in education.
xv
xvi CONTRIBUTORS
Edward Brockenbrough is associate professor of Teaching and Curriculum at the

University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education. His research focuses on
negotiations of identity, pedagogy, and power in urban educational spaces, par-
ticularly through the lenses of Black masculinity studies and queer of color cri-
tique. His work has appeared in several journals and edited anthologies, and he
served as co-editor for a special issue of Curriculum Inquiry on “Queers of Color
and Anti-Oppressive Knowledge Production.” He is also the director of the Urban
Teaching and Leadership Program, a Warner School initiative that prepares urban
teachers with a commitment to social justice.
Tonya Callaghan is an assistant professor at the Werklund School of Education,
University of Calgary. She has over ten years of teaching experience in national and
international, rural and urban, and Catholic and non-Catholic environments and
is the author of the book That’s so Gay! Homophobia in Canadian Catholic Schools.
Her doctoral thesis Holy Homophobia was recognized with the following awards:
The American Educational Research Association Queer Studies Dissertation of the
Year; The Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal; and The Canadian
Association for the Study of Women and Education Outstanding Dissertation.
Holy Homophobia explores curriculum and educational policy implications of reli-
giously inspired homophobia.
Trace P. Camacho is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University where he
also serves as an assistant director in the Department of Student Life. Camacho’s
research focuses on the experiences of underrepresented students in college. More
specifically, his work focuses on the experiences of gay Latino men in college.
Anna Carastathis received her PhD in philosophy from McGill University and
has held research and teaching positions at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of
Concordia University, at Le Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de
Montréal (CRÉ), at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice of
the University of British Columbia, and in philosophy at California State University,
Los Angeles. Her research on intersectionality has been published in the journals
Signs, Hypatia, and Philosophy Compass.
David Lee Carlson is an associate professor in the Division of Teacher Education
at Arizona State University. He specializes in the methods of teaching English at
the secondary level. Carlson focuses primarily on the importance of critical and
queer theory in education, specifically the works of Michel Foucault. His most
current work explores the pedagogies of friendship and how they interact with
gender and sexuality studies in education. Carlson is the author of Composing a
Care of the Self: A Critical History of Writing Assessment in Secondary English
Education (Sense).
Rob Cover is the discipline chair of Media and Communication and an associate
professor in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia.
CONTRIBUTORS xvii
He researches and writes on queer youth, digital media theory, identity, and popu-
lation. His current research includes an Australian Research Council–funded proj-
ect on LGBT youth support in urban and rural locations. He is the author of many
articles and chapters, and his recent books include Queer Youth Suicide, Culture
and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (2012), Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer
Scandals, Masculine Identity and Ethics (2015), and Digital Identities: Creating
and Communicating the Self Online (Elsevier, forthcoming).
M. Sue Crowley is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at
Binghamton University. Her research interests focus on identity formation among
marginalized adolescents, including victims of childhood sexual abuse and queer
youth. Publications include The Search for Autonomous Intimacy: Sexual Abuse and
Young Women’s Identity Development and an edited volume, Beyond Progress and
Marginalization: LGBTQ Youth in Educational Context, as well as journal
articles.
Joshua Cruz is a PhD student in the Learning, Literacies, and Technologies
Program in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.
Danné E. Davis is associate professor of Elementary Education at Montclair
State University in New Jersey. Her work appears in various scholarly journals and
academic books. Dr. Davis’ teaching and scholarship have been recognized by
national and local organizations such as The Anti-Defamation League and The
National Association for Multicultural Education. Her current research involves
increasing elementary teachers’ awareness of and responsiveness to sexual diversity
in K–6 contexts. LGBT children’s picture storybooks ground much of her current
work.
Barbara Jean A. Douglass has been a social worker and community activist for
over 25 years. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Francisco
State University, and her PhD in education from the University of Rochester,
New York, where her main work has been in helping to expand diversity aware-
ness, programs, and curriculum in higher education on LGBTQ issues. She cur-
rently works as assistant professor of Social Work at Nazareth College.
Clare Forstie is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at Northwestern
University, a member of the interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies Cluster
at Northwestern, and a University Fellow in Gender and Sexuality at the University
of Wisconsin-Platteville. Her research explores the intersection of identities, emo-
tions, and communities. Her research interests include the sociology of emotions,
culture, identities, gender, sexualities, technology, and space and place, as well as
queer and feminist theories and methodologies. Her dissertation articulates the
relationship between close friendships, communities, and identities, in particular,
gender and sexuality.
xviii CONTRIBUTORS
Adam J. Greteman is an adjunct assistant professor of art education at the School

of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) as well as an affiliate faculty member of
Leadership at Creighton University. In his scholarship, he explores the intersection
of sexuality, education, and philosophy. His work has been published in Sex
Education; Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education; Educational
Theory; and other journals.
Tina Gutierez-Schmich, MPA, is an ABD doctoral candidate in education studies
and Equity Coordinator at a local school district. Gutierez-Schmich has conducted
action research within the course that is the focus of this chapter and co-instructed
the public pedagogy activities for the course. Her research focus is on public peda-
gogy and the productive spaces within conflict and discord in communities.
Anne Harris is an American-Australian playwright and senior lecturer in Creative
Arts Education, and writes in the areas of creative and cultural studies, diasporic
and refugee identities, and gender and sexualities diversity. She is the author of The
Creative Turn: Toward a New Aesthetic Imaginary.
Chris Haywood currently works in the Department of Media, Culture and
Heritage at Newcastle University, UK. His interests include understanding men
and masculinity in a range of areas including marginality, ethnicity, and disabilities.
He is currently writing an empirically led monograph on Men, Masculinity and
Contemporary Dating Practices.
Julia Heffernan is the director of the Master’s Program and Licensure for the
Department of Education Studies at the University of Oregon. Heffernan is the
instructor of the course “Education as Homophobia,” which is the subject of this
chapter. Her research focus is on heteronormativity in K–12 schools and curricu-
lum theories addressing minority studies and systems of oppression.
Jennifer C. Ingrey is an adjunct and part-time assistant professor in the Faculty
of Education, University of Western Ontario, teaching in the preservice, graduate
research-intensive, and graduate professional programs specifically in areas of
equity and social justice. She also teaches in the Writing Program at King’s
University College. Her research interests include the issues of gendered subjectiv-
ity in youth as it is experienced and formed in school spaces, namely the school
washroom and other subjugated spaces; the practice of gendered identity as par-
tial; and, the broader implications of equity and social justice on leadership studies
in education through the employment of transgender studies and queer theory as
frameworks. Her background in education is as a former high school English and
visual arts teacher.
Stacy Holman Jones is professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at
Monash University. She is the author of Kaleidoscope Notes: Writing Women’s
Music and Organizational Culture (AltaMira) and Torch Singing: Performing
CONTRIBUTORS xix
Resistance and Desire from Edith Piaf to Billie Holiday (AltaMira) and co-author of
the forthcoming Autoethnography (Oxford).
Janna Jackson Kellinger is associate professor of Middle and Secondary
Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research with queer
teachers has been published in numerous places, including as a book entitled
Unmasking Identities: An Exploration of the Lives of Gay and Lesbian Teachers.
Shenila S. Khoja-Moolji is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism and
the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She also serves as an
Affiliate with the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard University. Her research
interests include examining discourses on gender and education, especially as they
relate to populations in South Asia and immigrant diasporas. Her work has
appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (in press); Gender and
Education; Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education;
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education; Feminist Teacher; and the
Journal of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, among
others. In terms of public scholarship, she has contributed to The New York Times
and The Washington Post.
Jón Ingvar Kjaran has a PhD in educational studies from the University of
Iceland, School of Education. He currently holds a research position at the
University of Iceland, School of Education. His research focuses on gender, sexu-
ality, queer pedagogy, LGBTQ youth, cultural studies, and sociology of education.
He is currently working on a book based on his research, Constructing Sexualities
and Gendered Bodies in School Spaces: Nordic Insights on Queer and Transgender
Students, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of the Queer
Studies and Education series.
Alicia Lapointe is a PhD candidate at Western University where she researches
Gay-Straight Alliances and student activism in Ontario public and Catholic schools.
Lapointe also created and instructs the undergraduate course Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Trans*, Two-Spirit, Queer/Questioning (LGBT2Q) Issues In Education at
the Faculty of Education, Western University.
Bethy Leonardi is a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Education at
the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the co-founder of A Queer Endeavor
(http://aqueerendeavor.org/), an initiative aimed to support educators and
school communities in addressing topics of gender and sexual diversity in schools.
She completed both her MA and her PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder
in Educational Foundations, Policy, and Practice.
Lisa W. Loutzenheiser is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum
and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are
xx CONTRIBUTORS
centered in youth studies, qualitative methodologies, anti-oppressive and critical

race theories, curriculum policy, and gender and queer theories. Loutzenheiser is
particularly fascinated by the ways theories of race, sexualities, and gender are use-
ful (and fail) across research projects, methods, and methodologies.
Catherine A. Lugg is professor of Educational Theory, Policy and Administration,
Graduate School of Education, at Rutgers University. She is the author of numer-
ous scholarly articles on the topic of educational leadership.
Máirtín Mac an Ghaill works at Newman University, UK. He is currently working
with young Muslims about their experiences of growing up in England. He is working
on the publication of two edited collections: Muslim Students, Education and Neo-
liberalism: Schooling a “Suspect” Community (with Chris Haywood) and East Asian
Men: Masculinity, Sexuality and Desire (with Xiaodong Lin and Chris Haywood).
Jennifer MacLatchy has an MA in women and gender studies from Mount Saint
Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as well as a Post-Baccalaureate
Certificate in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University,
and a BA honors in human rights from Carleton University. Her research focuses
on queer ecologies, landscape, art history, Canadian national identity, and the ways
in which performance art runs through all of these. She also works as a kayak
guide, an aerial acrobatics teacher, an occasional circus performer, and frequently
experiments with performance art, installation, and photography on the margins
of built and natural landscapes.
Rigoberto Marquez is a postdoctoral fellow at Teachers College, Columbia
University, and a previous University of San Francisco Gerardo Marín Dissertation
Fellow in the School of Education. He has a PhD in education, with a designated
emphasis in Urban Schooling from the University of California, Los Angeles
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He has over 15 years of
experience organizing on different policy issues affecting queer youth of color in
schools and communities. His research interests include critical theories of race,
gender, and sexuality in education, queer youth of color, community engagement
and advocacy, law and education, and critical pedagogy.
Wayne J. Martino is professor of Equity and Social Justice Education in the
Faculty of Education and also an affiliate faculty member of the Department of
Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at The University of Western Ontario.
Previously, he taught in the School of Education at Murdoch University, Perth,
Western Australia. He is one of the book series editors for Routledge Critical
Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education, and serves on the Editorial Boards
of the following international refereed journals: Gender and Education (UK),
Journal of Men and Masculinities and the Journal of LGBT Youth in the United
States, Educational Review in the UK, and Teaching Education, Discourse: Studies
in the Cultural Politics of Education and the International Journal of Inclusive
CONTRIBUTORS xxi
Education. His books include So What’s a Boy? Addressing Issues of Masculinity and
Schooling (with Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2003, translated into Spanish in 2006
(Octaedro Press, Barcelona), “Being Normal is the Only Way To Be”: Adolescent
Perspectives on Gender and School (with Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2005), Gendered
Outcasts and Sexual Outlaws: Sexual Oppression and Gender Hierarchies in Queer
Men’s Lives (with Christopher Kendall, 2006), Boys and Schooling: Beyond
Structural Reform (with Bob Lingard and Martin Mills, Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), Gender, Race and the Politics of Role Modelling (with Goli Rezai-Rashti,
2012). His latest book, co-authored with Bob Lingard, Goli Rezai-Rashti, and
Sam Sellar, is entitled Globalizing Educational Accountabilities: Testing Regimes
and Rescaling Governance (Routledge, forthcoming).
Elizabeth J. Meyer is the associate dean of Teacher Education at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Gender, Bullying, and Harassment:
Strategies to End Sexism and Homophobia in Schools (2009) and Gender and Sexual
Diversity in Schools (2010). She is a former high school teacher and completed her
MA at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her PhD at McGill University in
Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She blogs for Psychology Today and you can follow her
on Twitter: @lizjmeyer.
sj Miller is deputy director at New York University, Metropolitan Center for
Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and an associate professor
of Literacy Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Miller is co-editor of
Generation Bullied 2.0: Prevention and Intervention Strategies for Our Most
Vulnerable Students and is co-editor of the journal English Education.
Robert C. Mizzi is assistant professor of Educational Administration at the
University of Manitoba, Canada. His research focuses on educators crossing bor-
ders and LGBTQ educators in both K–12 and adult education contexts. Mizzi has
written four books and over 50 chapters and articles in books, journals, conference
proceedings, and reports and is currently the perspectives editor (Adult Education)
of the journal New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development.
For more information, visit www.robertmizzi.com.
Thabo Msibi is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where he teaches in the Discipline of Curriculum
and Education Studies. His research focuses on “non-normative” gender and sex-
ual diversities and schooling in South Africa. His research work has been published
both in South African and in international scholarly platforms.
Jason P. Murphy is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers
University. His research addresses the intersections of educational policy and poli-
cymaking, bullying, and queer equity.
Alyssa D. Niccolini is a doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia
University. Her current research focuses on censorship events in secondary schools,
xxii CONTRIBUTORS
and her work on affect, sexualities, and gender has been published in Sex Education:
Sexuality, Society and Learning, Gender and Sexuality in Education: A Reader,
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of
Education, Bank Street Occasional Papers Series, English Journal and The English
Record. She has taught in Brooklyn, New York; the Khayelitsha Township in Cape
Town, South Africa; and Germany. She teaches public high school students
through a nonprofit in New York City.
Elizabethe C. Payne is founding director of QuERI—The Queering Education
Research Institute©, a research and policy initiative dedicated to bridging the gap
between research and practice to create more affirming school environments for
LGBTQ students and families. She is also visiting associate professor and interim
director of the LGBT Social Science and Public Policy Center at Hunter College’s
Roosevelt House City University of New York (CUNY). As a sociologist of educa-
tion, she specializes in qualitative research methodology, critical theory, youth cul-
ture, queer girlhoods, bullying, and LGBTQ issues in education. QuERI will be
located in Hunter College’s LGBT Social Science and Public Policy Center at
Roosevelt House through summer 2016. (www.queeringeducation.org)
Summer Pennell is an assistant professor of English Education at Truman State
University. Her research interests include secondary English education, queer the-
ory and pedagogy, qualitative methods, social justice education, and
intersectionality.
Moira Pérez is a teacher and researcher in philosophy and queer studies. Her
research offers critical perspectives on queer theory and politics from an intersec-
tional perspective, and brings them to fields such as philosophy of history and
ethics. Her PhD dissertation laid forward a queer philosophy of history, addressing
the political, epistemic, and aesthetic aspects of representations of the past in the
public sphere. Her current work focuses on the epistemological and political
aspects of progress narratives in LGBT histories. She is assistant professor of
Philosophy and Ethics, and coordinates workshops on queer thought in the city of
Buenos Aires.
Erich N. Pitcher is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University. His research
looks broadly at the use of organizational perspectives to understand equity, diver-
sity, inclusion, and social justice within higher education settings. More specifically,
he explores the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer people
within the academy. Pitcher’s dissertation focuses on the ways that organizations
shape the experiences of trans* faculty in academe.
Marilyn Preston is assistant professor of Liberal Studies in the Brooks College of
Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University. She studies and teaches
critical and affective pedagogies, sexuality, and sexuality education. Her work has
appeared in Feminist Teacher, Radical Teacher, and the Journal of LGBT Youth.
CONTRIBUTORS xxiii
Christine Quinan is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Utrecht University

(the Netherlands). Quinan works at the intersection of postcolonial studies and
gender/sexuality studies and is currently at work on a project that investigates
gender policing and surveillance in a post-9/11, postcolonial/neocolonial era
and the effects this has on gender-nonconforming and transgender bodies and
lives. Quinan’s work has appeared in several journals and edited volumes, includ-
ing Women: A Cultural Review and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal.
Blas Radi was born in La Plata (Argentina) in 1982. He is an independent trans
activist, and a philosophy student at University of Buenos Aires (UBA). His cur-
rent research focuses on trans studies and epistemic violence. Among other initia-
tives on gender identity and gender expression issues, he has presented on trans
issues in different political and academic contexts, including national and interna-
tional conferences and workshops, and written articles on trans issues in different
media. In 2010, Blas drafted and promoted a Resolution for the recognition and
respect of trans identities at the School of Philosophy and Literature, UBA
(Resolution CD 680/2010). He was also part of a national coalition, called
“Frente Nacional por la Ley de Identidad de Género,” which drafted and advo-
cated for a Gender Identity Law in Argentina, finally approved in May 2012 (Law
#23.746).
Kai Rands has been an educator and queer/trans activist in numerous settings.
Rands’ research and scholarly interests include trans studies, queer studies, math-
ematics education, and Deleuze studies/philosophy.
Gabrielle Richard is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University
of Montreal (Canada). Her research interests include teaching practices, educa-
tional inequality, gendered socialization, and heteronormativity in education. Her
work lies at the crossroads of sociology, education, gender studies, and gay and
lesbian studies.
Nelson M. Rodriguez teaches sexuality and queer studies in the Department of
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The College of New Jersey. He is also
co-editor of the series Queer Studies and Education (Palgrave Macmillan) and
Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education. His current
research areas span queer studies and education, critical masculinity studies, and
Foucault studies. His most recent publications are Queer Masculinities: A Critical
Reader in Education and Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in
Education (with William F. Pinar). His forthcoming books include Critical
Concepts in Queer Studies and Education: An International Guide for the Twenty-
First Century (Palgrave Macmillan); Queer Pedagogies: Theory, Praxis, Politics;
Educators Queering Academia: Critical Memoirs; and Friendship as Ascesis: Michel
Foucault, Queer Theory and Education.
xxiv CONTRIBUTORS
Jerry Rosiek is professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon where

he teaches courses on the cultural foundations of education and qualitative research
methodology. His empirical scholarship focuses on teacher knowledge and the
ways teachers learn from their classroom experience. Specifically, he looks at the
way teachers think about the mediating effects of culture, class, gender, sexuality,
and social context on student learning of specific subject matter content. His theo-
retical scholarship explores the way pragmatic philosophy, feminist materialism,
indigenous philosophy, and critical race theory provide promising ways to think
outside of necessary, but increasingly wearisome foundationalism vs. antifounda-
tionalism debates in the social sciences. His writing has appeared in several major
journals including Harvard Educational Review, Education Theory, Educational
Researcher, Qualitative Inquiry, Curriculum Inquiry, Educational Psychologist,
and the Journal of Teacher Education. His forthcoming book is entitled
Resegregation as Curriculum.
A.G. Rud is a distinguished professor in the Department of Teaching and
Learning, College of Education, Washington State University. He is nationally
known for his expertise in the philosophical dimensions of education. His research
focuses on the cultural foundations of education, with particular emphasis on the
moral dimensions of teacher education, P–12 educational leadership, and higher
education.
Scotty M. Secrist is a doctoral student at Michigan State University. His research
interests include college student success; teaching, learning, and curriculum in
postsecondary education; and diversity, equity, and social justice. His current work
focuses on how assessment and evaluation are taken up in higher education
research and practice.
James Sheldon is a doctoral student in the Teaching and Teacher Education PhD
Program in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies at
the University of Arizona. Sheldon graduated from San Francisco State University
with a master of arts degree in Special Education in 2014. His research utilizes
disability studies and queer theory to interrogate the definition of learning disabili-
ties and to advocate for using collaborative group work with underachieving
students.
Amy Shema has worked as an elementary school teacher and earned her doctor-
ate at the Warner Graduate School of Education, University of Rochester. Her
areas of research include early childhood education, professional learning for
teachers, nontraditional families, and queer studies. As a kin-related aunt, a kith-
related aunt, and godmother to a little girl with two mothers and two step-moth-
ers, Shema is committed to making schools safe and representative spaces for all
students to feel valued, respected, heard, and represented.
CONTRIBUTORS xxv
Melissa J. Smith is assistant professor and director of English Education at

University of Central Arkansas. She began her work with QuERI in 2008 as a grad-
uate student research fellow with the Institute and served as co-researcher on several
qualitative studies including an evaluation study of the Reduction of Stigma in
Schools Program. She is now the QuERI Assistant Director for Research. Her dis-
sertation research addressed the classroom teaching experiences of straight-identi-
fied teacher allies. She defended with honors in summer 2014. Prior to her doctoral
work, she was a high school English teacher in Omaha, Nebraska, Public Schools.
Sam Stiegler is a doctoral student in curriculum and pedagogy at the University
of British Columbia focusing on the educational experiences of queer and trans-
gender youth in and outside of schools. His work has been published in Pedagogy,
Culture and Society, The Journal of LGBT Youth, and Rethinking Schools.
Gerald Walton is a former bullied student turned social activist and professor
who challenges standard ideas about bullying. Unlike most researchers and theo-
rists, he argues that bullying persists in schools in part because the typical focus on
behavior and relationships—which he refers to as the dominant discourse on bul-
lying—fails to account for the more tenacious and difficult factor, being social
difference. He has written several articles on this topic for academic journals such
as the Journal of Youth Studies, Journal of Education Policy, Discourse: Studies in the
Cultural Politics of Education, The Journal of Homosexuality, and the Journal of
Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education. He is the editor of The Gay Agenda: Claiming
Space, Identity, and Justice (Peter Lang, 2014), has appeared on many radio and
TV programs, and has given many presentations to educators and students in
schools about homophobic bullying.
Jon M. Wargo is an assistant professor of Reading, Literacy, and Literature in the
division of Teacher Education at Wayne State University. Broadly, Wargo’s research
interests focus on how school and knowledge shape identities by accepting, negat-
ing, transforming, and promoting the sense of self and belonging youth bring to
and take away from encounters with the institution of education. Anchored in
interdisciplinary study, Wargo’s work engages with qualitative and humanities-
oriented approaches to research to explore the intersections of language and lit-
eracy education, technology, and cultural studies. His current research examines
digital technologies and the role virtual geographies plays in literacy learning. In
particular, Wargo examines the rhetorical affordances of digital media composition
for historically marginalized youth writing across formal and informal learning
spaces.
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 16.1 Close-up of Samara’s drawing 156

Fig. 24.1 Public pedagogy cycle of engagement 240
Fig. 24.2 Public arena operating as a queer text 241
Fig. 24.3 Future teachers’ scaffolded public pedagogy engagements 242
Fig. 26.1 A queer literacy framework promoting (a)gender and
(a)sexuality self-determination and justice 268
Fig. 44.1 Madison’s picture of her friend Hannah 467
xxvii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 24.1 2014 Teach OUT public pedagogy scaffold assignments 244
xxix
Introduction
Wayne J. Martino, Nelson M. Rodriguez,
Jennifer C. Ingrey, and Edward Brockenbrough
In Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education: An International

Guide for the Twenty-First Century, contributors were invited to advance a
key concept as a basis for reflecting on their engagement with queer studies
and education. The idea was derived from the inaugural volume of TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly in which the authors developed keywords
or concepts for a twenty-first-century transgender studies. In a similar
vein, but in relation to queer studies and education, the contributors here
also developed concepts that take up a cross section of scholarship, and
which speaks to various political, epistemological, theoretical, method-
ological, and pedagogical concerns. We felt that the “concepts approach,”
with its accessible and non-imposing format, a distinctive element of the
volume, would add to the book’s breadth of coverage, including the wide
range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches taken up
W.J. Martino ( ) • J.C. Ingrey

The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
N.M. Rodriguez
The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA
E. Brockenbrough
University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

N.M. Rodriguez et al. (eds.), Critical Concepts in Queer Studies
and Education, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55425-3_1
2 W.J. MARTINO ET AL.
across the chapter essays. In addition, we conceived of the tactic of deploy-

ing a concept as a heuristic means by which to provide some insights into
a mapping of the field—both epistemologically and methodologically—in
terms of creating a space for reflecting on the limits and possibilities of
queer studies in education for the twenty-first century. In no means did
we conceive of this endeavor as a totalizing project for determining the
limits of queer studies or its after-queer tendencies in education (Talburt
and Rasmussen 2010). Rather, we understood this heuristic approach as
providing a window on thinking about recurrent themes and tendencies
in queer thinking and research in education, particularly in light of the
critiques that have continued to surface about its political efficacy and
antinormative relevance (Wiegman and Wilson 2015; Eng et al. 2005;
McKee 1999; Jagose 2009; Noble 2006).
In this spirit, Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education is offered
as a potential resource for thinking about the field and for providing some
insights into persistent themes, as well as the continuing relevance of anti-
foundational queer scholarly work and its relevance for scholars in the
twenty-first century. While reviewers advised us to group the chapters
under particular thematic categories to make for a more coherent reading
guide for the volume, we struggled with such a task. Firstly, it imposed a
definitional logic that forced us to fit chapters into deterministic and arbi-
trary classificatory categories that imposed a degree of foreclosure in terms
of their relevance and capacity to speak simultaneously across a range of
thematic strands and philosophical and political concerns. Moreover, such
an approach went against our queer understanding of the indeterminacy
and instability of any definitional or thematic category. As a result, we
made a decision to list all entries alphabetically. We believe that this will
enable the sort of cruising potential of which Muñoz (2009) speaks in
terms of how we conceive of this volume and its reading practices with
regard to a particular deployment of the text as a resource for navigating
the various topics that are covered. We allow for the cruising potentiality
that the alphabetical listing of concepts permits, enabling readers to pull
together concepts and to explore dialogic possibilities across the chapters
as they see fit.
In speaking to the queer cruising potential of this volume, we also offer a
series of questions which we have generated in response to our reading and
critical concerns within the field about the limits, relevance, and utopian
possibilities of queer theories/studies. Such questions are not designed
to set the terms for policing queer theory’s limits or its potentialities in
INTRODUCTION 3
any definitive sense. They function as a means by which to provoke and

incite a dialogic engagement with a polemics and critical reflexivity that
has spoken to the field from its inception as a radical political project for
interrupting and disrupting regulatory regimes and classificatory systems
that impose constraints, while entertaining possibilities for imagining and
“enacting new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world and,
ultimately new worlds” (Muñoz 2009, p. 1):
• What are the proper subjects of queer theory/studies in education?

• What are the recurring themes, repetitions, and ruptures across these
chapters and what do they reveal about the field of queer studies in
education as a site of utopian possibilities or not?
• What meanings and possibilities are attached to queer theory and
with what utopian possibilities in mind?
• To what extent do queer studies in education continue to be haunted
by the abject, wounded figure of the gay subject as set by the terms
of a liberal emancipatory imaginary?
• To what extent is queer research in education still plagued by libera-
tory attachments and investments?
• How do queer studies in education conceptualize the closet? How
do those conceptualizations of the closet account for the shifting
meanings and politics of queer (in)visibility, abjection, and agency
across cultural, political, institutional, and pedagogical contexts?
• How is queer theory being employed to expand current horizons of
thought about sexuality, gender, and desire? Should queer theory
be confined exclusively to studies of sex and gender? What are the
effects and political ramifications in terms of losing such antifounda-
tional bases for critical inqueeries?
• To what extent does an approach to addressing the limits of queer
theory through a tactic of desexualization contribute to a fundamen-
tal depoliticizing strategy of erasure of sexuality and its hermeneutic
potential?
• Can an intersectional focus exclude sexuality as an analytic vector and
with what political or deradicalizing effects?
• What is it to be doing queer theory? What is the role of queer theory
and how are we to make sense of its activist potential for the twenty-
first century?
• To what extent has queer exhausted its purpose and political efficacy
or pertinence? Is it still relevant for millennials? To what extent do
4 W.J. MARTINO ET AL.
scholars still insist upon the continued relevance of queer, despite

its limitations? How far can queer be pulled and reshaped before it
becomes something else?
• To what extent is queer theory blinded by its anti-heteronormative
limits and failure to address the politics of cisgender and cissexual
normativity? Is queer always antithetical to the politics of transgen-
der studies or can it ontologically coincide with the aims of a desub-
jugating project?
• How are queer studies in education aligned with and/or in oppo-
sition to neoliberalist political and educational agendas? What are
the challenges to and possibilities of queer pedagogies, research, and
activism in neoliberal times?
• What particularities define queer work in the global north and in the
global south? How are queer studies in education bounded by, and
how might they traverse, this geopolitical divide?
• What topics/concepts are included and what topics are excluded,
and what do such gaps and silences reveal about the politics of queer
studies as it is delimited by this volume?
With these questions simply meant as a starting point for engaging with
the wide range of topics covered in this volume, we welcome readers to
cruise the chapters, drawing promiscuously from them in making connec-
tions to their own research projects and pedagogical questions within the
context and concerns of work in the field of queer studies and education,
and well beyond.
REFERENCES
Eng, D., Halberstam, J., & Muñoz, J. E. (2005). Introduction: What’s queer
about queer studies now? Social Text, 84(5), 1–17.
Jagose, A. (2009). Undisciplined: Feminism’s queer theory. Feminism and
Psychology, 19(2), 157–174.
McKee, A. (1999). (Anti)queer: Introduction. Social Semiotics, 9(2), 165–169.
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity.
New York: New York University Press.
Noble, B. (2006). Sons of the movement: FtMs risking incoherence on a post-queer
cultural landscape. Toronto: Women’s Press.
Talburt, S., & Rasmussen, M. (2010). “After queer” tendencies in queer research.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(1), 1–14.
Wiegman, R., & Wilson, E. (2015). Introduction: Anti-normativity’s queer con-
ventions. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 26(1), 26–47.
Affect
Alyssa D. Niccolini
Affect is central to contemporary queer theory. In education, attention to

affect is growing. In recent years, affect has given theoretical energy to studies
of (1) pedagogy (Albrecht-Crane 2005; Hickey-Moody 2013; Lewkovich
2010; Niccolini 2014; Pedersen 2013; Sellar 2009, 2013; Watkins 2006,
2011); (2) curriculum (Airton 2013; Helmsing 2014; Lesko 2010;
Niccolini 2013); (3) methodology (Coleman and Ringrose 2013; Davies
2014a; Fields 2014; Gershon 2013; Hickey-Moody 2013; Lenz Taguchi
2013; MacLure 2013a, b; Quinlivan and Rasmussen 2014; Rasmussen
2014; Ringrose and Renold 2014); (4) literacies and writing (Leander and
Boldt 2013; Dernikos 2015; Dutro 2013; Eakle 2015; Watkins 2006);
(5) early childhood (Davies 2014b); (6) policy (Sellar and Storan 2013);
(7) sex education (Gilbert 2014; Lesko 2010; Lesko et al. 2010; Niccolini
2013); (8) girlhood and (post)feminism (Ringrose 2013; Gannon et al.
2013; Khoja-Moolji 2015); (9) youth studies (Lesko and Talburt 2012;
Hickey-Moody 2013; Sarigianides 2014); (10) space and place (Ellsworth
2005; Ivinson and Renold 2013); (11) school materialities (Juelskjær et al.
2013; Springgay and Rotas 2014); (12) sexuality in school (Gilbert 2014);
(13) teacher education (Gilbert 2014; Lesko and McCall 2014); (14) queer
A.D. Niccolini ( )
Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

6 A.D. NICCOLINI
youth (Airton 2013; Gilbert 2014; Marshall 2014; Talburt 2014); and (15)
digital spaces (Kofoed and Ringrose 2012), among others.
While teasing out the various strands of affect theory from Deleuzian
to psychoanalytic that inflect these studies is beyond the scope of this
chapter, affect is mobilized here within a Spinozist legacy that looks to
bodies’ (both human and nonhuman) capacities to affect and be affected.
Although for some theorists affect is used synonymously for intersections
of feeling, emotion, and sensation (Cvetkovich 2012; Probyn 2004),
others distinguish emotion as biographical and personal (Shouse 2005;
Massumi 1987) while affect is “a prepersonal intensity” and a capacity to
affect and be affected (Massumi, p. xvi). Affect within this framework is
not confined to a self-contained subject but is emergent within all mate-
riality, both human and nonhuman (Chen 2012). Affect can thus move
between bodies. Gilles Deleuze (1988) provides a capacious conceptualiza-
tion of the body: “A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body
of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body,
a collectivity” (p. 27). Affect, within this conception, is part of the flows,
effects, and capacities of “immaterial bodies” such as bodies of knowledge,
atmospheres, moods, markets, and digital networks (Anderson 2009;
Blackman 2012; Flatley 2008; Papacharissi 2015).
Taking up notions of collectivities, several theorists have mobilized
affect theory to look at how feelings and intensities interact in com-
plex social assemblages that move beyond the intimacy and interiority
of the body to circulations within public spheres (Ahmed 2004; Berlant
2011; Cvetkovich 2007, 2012). They have provided productive means
for exploring often overlooked sites of resistance, affiliation, and queer
politics. Looking forward to the future of queer studies and education, I
see affect as a particularly generative theoretical tool. In discussing queer
theory’s attachment to affect, Jasbir Puar (2007) asks, “Is it the case that
there is something queer about affect, that affect is queer unto itself,
always already a defiance of identity registers, amenable to queer critique?”
(p. 207). In response to Puar’s questions, I propose that affect is inher-
ently queer in ways that point to key intersections of queer theory and
education: through attachments, transmissions, and pedagogies.
BAD OBJECTS
Affect queers normative attachments. Sara Ahmed (2004) points to
affect’s capacity to connect or “stick” objects, ideas, and bodies. Stickiness
“is about what objects do to other objects—it involves a transference of
AFFECT 7
affect—but it is a relation of ‘doing’ in which there is not a distinction

between passive and active” (Ahmed 2004, p. 91). What touches is
touched; what moves is moved. Affect acts as an adherent, accumulates
feelings, intensities, and histories to particular objects, but it also opens
up new possibilities of relation and attachments. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(2003) articulates well the vast range of attachments affects make possible:
Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations,
relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other
things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, dis-
gusted by shame, or surprised by joy. (p. 19)
Affect is thus intensely relational, working as a connector or conduit
between bodies, their histories, and their emergent possibilities. Dissolving
Cartesian imaginings of self-contained bodies, affect’s power for Massumi
(2002) lies in its openness: “Affect is autonomous to the degree to which
it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or poten-
tial for interaction, it is” (p. 35). In its capacity for a potentially limitless
range of possible attachments and interactions, as well as in the mobile
and unwieldy connections it makes possible, we might argue that affect is
inherently queer. Heteronormative conceptions of identity are founded on
fantasies of a stable, bounded, and impermeable humanist subject. These
notions of boundedness are echoed in fixed conceptions of gender, stable
sexual subjectivities, and the supposed inevitability and “naturalness” of
heterosexuality. Queerness, in the words of Susan Talburt (2000), “seeks
to disrupt the discrete, fixed locations of identity by understanding sexual-
ity and its meanings as not a priori given but as constructed, contingent,
fashioned and refashioned, and relational” (p. 3).
An attention to affect has prompted educational theorists to hone in
on a range of attachments such as enchantments with particular visions of
youth (Lesko and Talburt 2012), the passionate engagement of secondary
students to forbidden lesbian erotica (Niccolini 2013), and the politicized
investments in constructions of suffering queer students (Airton 2013).
Other theorists have moved outside of the human as a generator of affect,
looking to the affective resonances of sound (Gershon 2013), the affective
capacities of objects to draw in bodies, such as the ubiquitous “Freudian
couch” in school administrative offices (Juelskjær et al. 2013) and the way
data “glow,” entangling researchers in intimate relations (MacLure 2013a).
Affect and queerness also share affinities in their relations to school
spaces. Affective intensities, particularly “firework affects” (Thrift 2007,
p. 241) such as passionate engagement, intense excitement, fear, and
anger, are often deemed hostile to the muted affect and emotional restraint
8 A.D. NICCOLINI
demanded by school spaces. When intense affect is displayed by students

or faculty, they are often disciplined and/or pathologized. “The disruptive
student,” for example, is largely constructed as enacting an affective-range
at odds with that valorized by schools.
Like queerness, affective intensities may even be what Cindy Patton
(2013) calls “bad objects,” both in their unwelcomeness in school spaces
and their difficulties as objects of educational research. As Patton explains:
A bad object might be those people or things that are reviled in the main-
stream, an object—perhaps ourselves—that has to [be] wrested from the
clutches of a hostile culture and claimed as good. Another more formalistic
sense of bad object might be an entity or feature that is hard to study, that is,
something that can’t quite be turned into a “good” object of study.
Affect is itself often considered a “bad” object of study in that, by defi-

nition, it resists representational logics. Affect forces us, quoting Kathleen
Stewart (2007), “to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and
evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex
and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a
pull on us” (p. 4). MacLure (2013a, b), has cogently explored the “won-
der” of data and the complex ways affect opens us up to new modes of
thinking and doing qualitative research. Approaching data from an affec-
tive stance urges an intelligence that lies aslant of traditional conceptions
of meaning and logic, operating outside of full-cognizance or linguistic
chains of signification through a kind of felt-sense. Many argue this makes
affect unresearchable. Yet as Massumi (2002) assures, “it is not entirely
containable in knowledge but is analyzable in effect, as effect” (p. 260).
TRANSMISSIONS
In addition to the wide range of attachments it offers, affect is queer in its
transmission. Traditional conceptions of pedagogy imagine knowledge trav-
eling along vertical trajectories from teacher to student, adult to child, and
generation to generation. Vertical logics of transmission rely on a founding
faith in what Lee Edelman (2004) calls reproductive futurism which figures
the child as the future recipient and end-goal of politics. A recent recruit-
ment ad for the New York City Teaching Fellows captures this logic. The
ad depicts a female teacher standing next to a seated young male student.
Both teacher and student wear enraptured expressions with mouths agape.
AFFECT 9
The copy reads “You remember your first grade teacher’s name. Who will
remember yours? Make a difference.” The ad beckons a new generation of
teachers with the promise that their names will get passed on through their
students. Invoking patrilineality, knowledge gets imagined as extended
through a “generational line of inheritance (the vertical line of history)”
(Brennan, p. 75). The ad promises the future teacher that the student will
carry on her legacy through an adult-to-child hierarchical relationship. In
The Queer Child, Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) imagines growing side-
ways as an alternative to the way childhood “has been relentlessly figured as
vertical movement upward (hence ‘growing up’) toward full stature, mar-
riage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness” (p. 4). When child
development veers from the vertical lines set out as normative, it is aggres-
sively pathologized. J. Halberstam (2011) argues that these vertical logics
are also heteronormative, offering “a kind of false narrative of continuity,
as a construction that makes connection and succession seem organic and
natural, family also get in the way of all sorts of other alliances and coali-
tions” (p. 71). Affect as a form of knowledge transmission works differ-
ently. Rather than top-down, teleological or linear trajectories, it moves
between bodies in a form of transfer we might deem sideways (Stockton) or
what Teresa Brennan (2004) calls horizontal transmission. Brennan (2004)
looks to the transmission of affect as an intervention in dominant humanist
paradigms of contained bodies and argues it offers “more permeable ways
of being” (p. 11). Affect in her view goes beyond the boundary of the skin
and can pass contagiously between bodies and collectivities as well as influ-
ence through atmospheres and a suffusion in spaces. We can think with her
about the way bodies in schools get infected by a charged classroom after
a heated debate, intense discussion, the tenseness of an exam, or intensity
of a fight. Former teachers might think back to moments a buzz or energy
spread through a collective student body outside of their conscious control.
Affect offers educational theorists an opportunity to unmoor future-
directed fantasies of fulfillment and to give up a telos that invokes the
child as its future. What might happen if we moved away from normative
and limiting conceptions of the transmission of knowledge and imagine
affect itself as a form of intelligence? Indeed, affect does a lot of teaching
in classrooms. Charging bodies with excitement or uneasiness, disrupting
predetermined paths, or stalling out in dead zones of boredom or indif-
ference, affect can be thought of as a readiness for action and thought and
a form of body–mind responsiveness. Affect opens a porous space where
there are potentially limitless interactions among human and nonhuman
10 A.D. NICCOLINI
bodies. By proliferating rather than foreclosing potential interactions and

intimacies, affect is indeed a queer teacher.
QUEER PEDAGOGY
As Susanne Luhmann (1998) explored nearly two decades ago, pedagogy
is a very queer thing. Queer theorists in the humanities have found affect
a generative means of imagining “nondualistic thought and pedagogy”
(Sedgwick, p. 1). This is precisely the goal of many queer calls for ped-
agogy. Affect as queer pedagogy traverses and perturbs a wide range of
bodies and destabilizes the security sought in stable forms of knowledge
and identity. Affect opens up learning and thinking outside of the molar
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987) directives of normativities and makes itself
felt in classrooms by “sticking” (Ahmed 2004) students and teachers to
new and unexpected (often deemed “wrong” or “bad”) affects, texts,
bodies, and learning modes. In my own work, I have explored how the
affective intensities generated by erotica taught about sex and sexualities
outside of the normativities of abstinent-only and comprehensive sex edu-
cation in a US high school (Niccolini 2013). In a separate study, I explore
how the affective intensities and student excitement generated by the
topic homophobia resulted in a student teacher’s swift dismissal from her
fieldwork placement in NYC. Affect in this incident moved knowledge,
stimulating multiple bodies, creating a buzz among students, and inflam-
ing the passions of administrators and teachers (Niccolini 2016).
In thinking about the potentialities inherent in how bodies affect and
are affected by other bodies, affect theorists often invoke Spinoza’s (2013)
declaration that “no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers
of the body, that is, no one has yet been taught by experience what the
body can accomplish” (p. 96). Delueze (1988) sees this as a “provoca-
tion” (p. 17) and I extend that incitement to the unwieldy theoretical
body that is queer studies and education. What might we learn or do with
affect in queer studies and education? Puar argues that “affective analyses
can approach queernesses that are unknown or not cogently knowable,
that are in the midst of becoming, that do not immediately and visibly
signal themselves as insurgent, oppositional, or transcendent” (p. 204). A
queer feeling is always one just out of the grasp of conscious knowledge or
definitive articulation. Affect, like the best of pedagogies, points us toward
what we cannot know in advance, to our capacities to both affect and be
AFFECT 11
affected, and to the ever-renewing capacity of knowledge to disturb, sur-

prise, awaken, jolt, bewilder, and enchant our attachments to the world.
REFERENCES
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge.
Airton, L. (2013). Leave “those kids” alone: On the conflation of school
homophobia and suffering queers. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(5), 532–562.
Albrecht-Crane, C. (2005). Pedagogy as friendship: Identity and affect in the con-
servative classroom. Cultural Studies, 19(4), 491–514.
Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77–81.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Blackman, L. (2012). Immaterial bodies: Affect, embodiment, mediation. Los
Angeles: Sage Publications.
Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Chen, M. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Coleman, R., & Ringrose, J. (Eds.). (2013). Deleuze and research methodologies.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cvetkovich, A. (2007). Public feelings. South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3),
459–468.
Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Durham: Duke University Press.
Davies, B. (2014a). Reading anger in early childhood intra-actions: A diffractive
analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(7), 734–741.
Davies, B. (2014b). The affective flows of art-making. Bank Street Occasional
Papers, 31.
Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights
Publishers.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizo-
phrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dernikos, B. P. (2015). A gender gap in literacy? De/territorializing literacy, gen-
der and the humanist subject. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Teachers
College, Columbia University, New York.
Dutro, E. (2013). Towards a pedagogy of the incomprehensible: Trauma and the
imperative of critical witness in literacy classrooms. Pedagogies: An International
Journal, 8(4), 301–315.
Eakle, A. J. (2015). Bodies with and without organs: Literacies of a true-crime sex
and violence drama. In G. Enriquez, E. Johnson, S. Kontovourki, & C. Mallozzi
(Eds.), Literacies and the body: Theories and research on teaching, learning, and
embodiment. New York: Routledge.
Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham: Duke
University Press.
12 A.D. NICCOLINI
Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York:

Routledge.
Fields, J. (2014). Unflattering affect: The ordinary and illuminating experience of
boredom in qualitative research. Paper presented at the American Educational
Research Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
Flatley, J. (2008). Affective mapping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gannon, S., Gottschall, K., & Pratt, C.C. (2013). “A quick sideways look and wild
grin”: Joyful assemblages in moments of girlhood. Girlhood Studies, 6(1), 13–29.
Gershon, W. (2013). Vibrational affect: Sound theory and practice in qualitative
research. Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 257–262.
Gilbert, J. (2014). Sexuality in school: The limits of education. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham: Duke University Press.
Helmsing, M. (2014). Virtuous subjects: A critical analysis of the affective sub-
stance of social studies education. Theory & Research in Social Education, 42(1),
127–140.
Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics and affective
pedagogy. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research method-
ologies (pp. 79–95). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ivinson, G., & Renold, E. (2013). Subjectivity, affect and place: Thinking with
Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs to explore a young girl’s becom-
ings in a post-industrial locale. Subjectivity, 6, 369–390.
Juelskjær, M., Staunæs, D., & Ratner, H. (2013). The return of the Freudian
Couch®: Managing affectivity through technologies of comfort. International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(9), 1132–1152.
Khoja-Moolji, S. (2015, forthcoming). Becoming an “intimate publics”: Exploring
the affective intensities of hashtag feminism. Feminist Media Studies, 15(2),
347–350
Kofoed, J., & Ringrose, J. (2012). Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens
and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 5–20.
Leander, K., & Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “A pedagogy of multiliteracies”:
Bodies, texts, and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research, 45, 22–46.
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). “Becoming molecular girl”: Transforming subjectivities
in collaborative doctoral research studies as micro-politics in the academy.
Lesko, N. (2010). Feeling abstinent? Feeling comprehensive? Touching the affects
of sexuality curricula. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 10(3),
233–237.
Lesko, N., & McCall, S. (2014). Unhappiness, teaching, queers. Paper presented at
the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
Lesko, N., & Talburt, S. (2012). Keywords in youth studies: Tracing affects, move-
ments, knowledges. New York: Routledge.
AFFECT 13
Lesko, N., Brotman, J. S., Agarwal, R., & Quackenbush, J. L. (2010). Feeling
jumpy: Teaching about HIV/AIDS. International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education, 23(7), 823–843.
Lewkovich, D. (2010). The possibilities for a pedagogy of boredom rethinking the
opportunities of elusive learning. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(1),
129–143.
Luhmann, S. (1998). Queering/querying pedagogy? Or, pedagogy is a pretty
queer thing. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 141–155).
Mahwah: Erlbaum.
MacLure, M. (2013a). Researching without representation? Language and mate-
riality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative
MacLure, M. (2013b). Classification or wonder? Coding as an analytic practice in
qualitative research. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research
methodologies (pp. 164–183). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marshall, D. (2014). Feeling historical: Homosexual feelings and historical gay
politics. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association
Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy & notes on
the translation and acknowledgements. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), A
thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (pp. ix–xix). Minneapolis:
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables of the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Niccolini, A. (2013). Straight talk and thick desire with erotica noir: Reworking
the textures of sex education in and out of the classroom. Sex Education:
Sexuality, Society and Learning, 13(1), S7–S19.
Niccolini, A. (2014). Terror(ism) in the classroom: The queer pedagogy of affect.
Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual
Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
Niccolini, A. (2016). Animate affects: Censorship, reckless pedagogies, and beau-
tiful things. Gender & Education, 28(2), 230–249.
Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Patton, C. (2013). Bad objects. Opening remarks for “Bad Objects” seminar.
Queer Methods Conference, University of Pennsylvania. October.
Pedersen, H. (2013). Follow the Judas sheep: Materializing post-qualitative meth-
odology in zooethnographic space. International Journal of Qualitative Studies
in Education, 26(6), 717–731.
Probyn, E. (2004). Teaching bodies: Affects in the classroom. Body & Society,
10(4), 21–43.
Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham:
14 A.D. NICCOLINI
Quinlivan, K., & Rasmussen, M. L. (2014). The analytic affordances of engaging
with researcher affect: What’s at stake? Paper presented at the American
Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
Rasmussen, M. L. (2014). Affecting affiliations: Queer relationality and the boy in
the dress. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association
Annual Meeting.
Ringrose, J. (2013). Postfeminist education?: Girls and the sexual politics of school-
ing. London: Routledge.
Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2014). “F**k Rape!” Exploring affective intensities in
a feminist research assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 772–780.
Sarigianides, S. (2014). Rampant teen sex: Teen sexuality and the promise of hap-
piness. Journal of Youth Studies, 17, 1061–1076.
Sedgwick, E. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham:
Sellar, S. (2009). The responsible uncertainty of pedagogy. Discourse: Studies in the
Cultural Politics of Education, 30(3), 347–360.
Sellar, S. (2013). It’s all about relationships. In D. Masny & D. R. Cole (Eds.),
Education and the politics of becoming. London: Routledge.
Sellar, S., & Storan, J. (2013). “There was something about aspiration”: Widening
participation policy affects in England and Australia. Journal of Adult and
Continuing Education, 19(2), 45–65.
Shouse, E. (2005). Feeling, emotion, affect. M/C: A Journal of Media and
Culture, 8, 6.
Spinoza, B. (2013). Ethics. (trans: Elwes, R. H. M.). Hollywood, FL: Simon and
Brown.
Springgay, S., & Rotas, N. (2014). How do you make a classroom operate like a
work of art? Deleuzeguattarian methodologies of research-creation.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/09518398.2014.933913
Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham: Duke University Press.
Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child: Or growing up sideways in the twentieth
century. Durham: Duke University Press.
Talburt, S. (2000). Introduction: Some contradictions and possibilities of thinking
queer. In S. Talburt & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Thinking queer: Sexuality, culture,
and education (pp. 3–14). New York: Peter Lang.
Talburt, S. (2014). Ambient affects: Narrativizing global gay youth. Paper pre-
sented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting,
Philadelphia, PA.
Thrift, N. (2007). Non-representational theory: Space/politics/affect. London/
New York: Routledge.
Watkins, M. (2006). Pedagogic affect/effect: Embodying a desire to learn.
Pedagogies: An International Journal, 1(4), 269–282.
Watkins, M. (2011). Teachers’ tears and the affective geography of the classroom.
Emotion, Space, and Society, 4, 137–143.
Allies of Intersectionalities
Paulina Abustan and A.G. Rud
We often encounter educational leaders in higher education demon-

strating support for Queer students. University administrators, faculty,
and staff place ally signs on their doors and hang rainbow flags in their
offices. Educational leaders who support Queer identities and struggles
attend events and participate in campaigns organized by Queer students.
Although it is important for educational leaders to become Queer allies
who support Queer identities and struggles, becoming a Queer ally is
not enough when Queer students live and experience multiple, complex,
and fluid identities. This chapter challenges educational leaders to educate
themselves and their communities to become Allies of Intersectionalities
who support students, people, and communities of all marginalized iden-
tities. Allies of Intersectionalities seek to become allies to students, people,
and communities they do and do not identify with.
Queer theorists discuss the multiple, complex, and fluid identities of
Queer individuals. Loutzenheiser (2007) acknowledges that the Queer
community is not homogeneous when Queer identities are multiple,
changing, and fluid. Talburt (2005) describes Queer identities and prac-
tices as less predictable than lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)
P. Abustan ( ) • A.G. Rud

Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

16 P. ABUSTAN AND A.G. RUD
identities. Queers resist dominant and normative expectations and instead

act as creative agents who authorize their own experiences (Honeychurch
1996). Since definitions of what it means to be Queer differ for each indi-
vidual and community, it is important for Queer allies to acknowledge and
validate diverse identities.
Although it is important for educational leaders to become Queer
allies, it is not enough when students hold diverse racial, gender, sexual,
ability, and socioeconomic identities. Previous scholars discuss the com-
plex struggles that people of multiple identities experience. For example,
Alimahomed (2010) found that the racial identities and struggles of
Queer People of Color are often minimized and silenced in mainstream
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces. LGBTQ
activists predominantly promote marriage equality which ignores the
socioeconomic and racial discrimination Queer People of Color expe-
rience (Alimahomed 2010). Villarejo (2005) highlights the elitist and
exclusive practices of white and middle-class Queer spaces. Linder and
Rodriguez (2012) discuss the mental and physical exhaustion Queer
Womxn of Color experience when negotiating multiple identities in
multiple spaces.
Those with marginalized identities and multiple marginalized identi-
ties are often underserved and underrepresented in places of privilege and
power. For example, undocumented people in the USA encounter barriers
that those with US citizenship status do not encounter. Undocumented
students lack institutional support when unable to access university and
US government resources. Those that are Queer and undocumented
experience individual and institutional discrimination based on their sex-
ual identity and lack of US citizenship. Das Gupta (2006) incites Queer
scholars to discuss citizenship, national borders, and hierarchies of belong-
ing. Ferguson (2004) emphasizes the importance of a Queer of Color
Critique which questions capitalism and nation state boundaries that harm
and exploit undocumented communities and Queer People of Color.
Previous scholars highlight the importance of allies dismantling multiple
forms of oppression. Rosenblum and Travis (2006) emphasize the impor-
tance of allies working toward social justice around racial, gender, sexual-
ity, and class issues. DeTurk (2011) acknowledges the need for allyship
scholarship to support people and communities of diverse races, genders,
sexual orientations, and nationalities. Although previous scholars discuss
the importance of allyship toward multiple marginalized communities,
ALLIES OF INTERSECTIONALITIES 17
few scholars mention the need for educational leaders to become allies
toward people and communities of multiple marginalized identities.
Those who strive to become Allies of Intersectionalities utilize intersec-
tionality frameworks and practices. Intersectionality theorists argue that
the whole of one’s identity is not simply the sum of its parts (Crenshaw
1994; Lorde 1984). Simply adding up one’s identities does not equal a
single identity. Multiple identities and experiences interact and mutually
inform the constituted identity that is multiple, fluid, and complex. Abes
and Kasch (2007) discuss how those with multiple identities constantly
form and re-form identities. Those with multiple identities demonstrate
power and agency in creating their own identities when resisting norma-
tive identities (Abes and Kasch 2007).
Intersectionality theorists highlight the multiple oppressions that those
with multiple marginalized identities encounter (Collins 1990; Combahee
River Collective 1979; Crenshaw 1994; Davis 1983; hooks 1981; Lorde
1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981). Multiple identities of race, gender,
sexuality, class, and more exist together and intersect creating unique
struggles and experiences for those with multiple marginalized identi-
ties. People of multiple and intersecting identities often find themselves at
the borderlands in which they simultaneously belong and do not belong
(Anzaldúa 1987; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981). Collins (2004) coins the
“Outsider-Within” stance in which those with multiple identities are both
outsiders and insiders to the communities in which they identify with.
Crenshaw (1994) discusses the tension that occurs when differences are
ignored among and within groups. Identifying as either/or is problematic
and it is impossible to analyze multiple identities, experiences, and strug-
gles separately when identities, experiences, and struggles are interwoven
and connected (Crenshaw 1994). Tumang and De Rivera (2006) high-
light the interconnected and complex struggles of identity and belonging
migrant, displaced and Queer Womxn of Color of the Diaspora experience.
Current scholarship emphasizes the importance of intersectionality
scholarship and research that encourages researchers to examine multiple
standpoints when learning about individual and institutional problems.
Multiple identities intersect and interact with sociohistorical inequities and
systems of domination (Bowleg 2008). As those in the margins challenge
and resist normative identities (hooks 2004), it is important for Allies of
Intersectionalities to learn about and support the individual and systemic
struggles of those with multiple marginalized identities.
Allies of Intersectionalities:
1. Acknowledge and validate the multiple, changing, and fluid identi-

ties, experiences, and struggles of all marginalized people and
communities;
2. Commit to the ongoing education of themselves and their commu-
nities about the multiple issues that all marginalized people and
communities encounter;
3. Support events organized by communities of multiple and diverse
identities;
4. Strive to alleviate all forms of individual and systemic oppressions.
First, Allies of Intersectionalities affirm the multiple, changing, and

fluid identities, experiences, and struggles of all marginalized people and
communities. As Ladson-Billings (2000) rejects essentialized “Blackness,”
“Latina/ones,” “Asian Americanness,” and “Native Americanness,” Allies
of Intersectionalities reject essentialized identities and instead affirm the
complexity of marginalized identities.
Second, Allies of Intersectionalities seek to educate themselves and
their communities about the struggles that marginalized communi-
ties encounter. Murray (2011) discusses the critical need for schools to
include the voices of all marginalized students. Educational leaders who
learn about individual and systemic injustices will be able to implement
informed actions and policies that seek to alleviate individual and systemic
forms of discrimination for all marginalized students. Learning about the
personal and collective narratives of marginalized people will allow educa-
tional leaders to make informed decisions regarding students of marginal-
ized identities.
Third, Allies of Intersectionalities are in the continuous process of iden-
tifying ways they can support marginalized people and communities. Freire
(1970) discusses the importance of those committed to social change to
constantly re-examine and educate themselves. Learning about, utilizing,
and teaching inclusive language is one way for Allies of Intersectionalities
to examine and educate themselves and others. Voyer (2011) highlights
the importance of allies developing language that minimizes harm and
discrimination. It is important for allies to communicate their ongoing
education and evaluation of themselves through the usage of inclusive
language.
Fourth, Allies of Intersectionalities seek to dismantle oppressive situ-

ations and structures. Previous scholars demonstrate the importance of
allies alleviating individual and systemic injustices (Collier 2002; Reason
et al. 2005). Brown and Ostrove (2013) found that allies acknowledge
inequities when participating in informed actions to reduce systemic injus-
tices. Allies utilize their own privileges to resist the proliferation of inequi-
ties and injustices that the marginalized experience in society (Goodman
2001; McIntosh 1989). It is important for educational leaders to become
involved in different forms of activism that resist oppressive situations and
structures.
Utilizing an intersectional lens, we acknowledge that Allies of
Intersectionalities hold multiple identities of different privileges and dis-
advantages. As Suyemoto and Fox Tree (2006) discuss the importance of
People of Color becoming allies to People of Color, we encourage Allies
of Intersectionalities to support marginalized communities with which
they do or do not identify.
Educational leaders who seek to become Allies of Intersectionalities:
1. Promote student, teacher, staff, and community educational curri-

cula that discuss the multiple and interconnected struggles of mar-
ginalized people and communities. Every opportunity should be
taken to teach and learn about layers of interconnections;
2. Encourage existing university and community programs and spaces
to support intersectional identities;
3. Create new university and community programs and spaces that
support intersectional identities;
4. Initiate educational policies that improve campus and community
climates for all marginalized students, such as creating policies that
teach and encourage inclusive language and actions;
5. Support the scholarly and activist work of marginalized people and
communities.
It is important for Allies of Intersectionalities to give voice to the mul-

tiple identities and struggles of marginalized students, people, and com-
munities. Olson (2011) emphasizes the responsibilities of allies to listen
to and highlight the stories of marginalized groups. Allen et al. (2002)
found that allies create trust, recognition, interdependence, dialogue, lis-
ten to the pain of others, and commit to lifelong social justice learning and
growth. As Martinez (2014) stresses the importance of validating Queer
Womxn of Color voices, Allies of Intersectionalities seek to learn about

and alleviate the struggles of students, people, and communities of mul-
tiple marginalized identities.
As scholars, activists, teachers, learners, and researchers, we acknowl-
edge that multiple perspectives exist on this topic. We respect all perspec-
tives and seek to learn more about the struggles of those with marginalized
identities. Although we acknowledge that each person, community, and
struggle is unique, we validate and affirm shared experiences and strug-
gles. It is important for educational leaders to become aware of shared
struggles and dismantle the multiple individual and systemic oppressions
that students and people with multiple marginalized identities encounter.
We highly encourage educational leaders to participate in the ongoing
process of educating themselves and their communities to become Allies
of Intersectionalities.
REFERENCES
Abes, E. A., & Kasch, D. (2007). Using queer theory to explore lesbian college
student’s multiple dimensions of identity. Journal of College Student
Development, 6, 619–636.
Alimahomed, S. (2010). Thinking outside the rainbow: Women of color redefin-
ing queer politics and identity. Social Identities, 162, 151–168.
Allen, B. J., Broome, B. J., Jones, T. S., Chen, V., & Collier, M. J. (2002).
Intercultural alliances: A cyberdialogue among scholar-practitioners. In M. J.
Collier (Ed.), Intercultural alliances: Critical transformation (pp. 279–320).
Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands: The new mestiza = La frontera (1st ed.). San
Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
Bowleg, L. (2008). When Black + lesbian + woman ≠ Black lesbian woman. Sex
Roles, 59, 312–325.
Brown, K. T., & Ostrove, J. M. (2013). What does it mean to be an ally?: The
perception of allies from the perspective of people of color. Journal of Applied
Social Psychology, 43(11), 2211–2222.
Collier, M. J. (2002). Negotiating intercultural alliance relationships: Toward
transformation. In M. J. Collier (Ed.), Intercultural alliances: Critical transfor-
mation (pp. 49–80). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the
politics of self-empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Collins, P. H. (2004). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological signifi-
cance of black feminist thought. Social Problems, 6, S14–S32.
Combahee River Collective. (1979). A black feminist statement. In Z. Eisenstein

(Ed.), Capitalist patriarchy and the case for social feminism (pp. 362–372).
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Crenshaw, K. (1994). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics,
and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241–1299.
Das Gupta, M. (2006). Unruly immigrants: Rights, activism, and transnational
south Asian politics in the United States. Durham: Duke University Press.
Davis, A. (1983). Women, race, and class. New York: Random House.
DeTurk, S. (2011). Allies in action: The communicative experiences of people
who challenge social injustice on behalf of others. Communication Quarterly,
5, 569–590.
Ferguson, R. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing
Company.
Goodman, D. J. (2001). Promoting diversity and social justice: Educating people
from privileged groups. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Honeychurch, K. G. (1996). Researching dissident subjectivities: Queering the
grounds of theory and practice. Harvard Educational Review, 2, 339–355.
hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston: South
End Press.
hooks, b. (2004). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. In S. Harding
(Ed.), The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controver-
sies (pp. 153–160). New York: Routledge.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. In
N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research
(pp. 257–278). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Linder, C., & Rodriguez, K. L. (2012). Learning from the experiences of self-
identified women of color activists. Journal of College Student Development, 3,
383–398.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider. Trumansburg: The Crossing Press.
Loutzenheiser, L. (2007). Working alterity: The impossibility of ethical research
with youth. Educational Studies: Journal of the American Educational Studies
Association, 2, 109–127.
Martinez, S. (2014). For our words usually land on deaf ears until we scream.
Qualitative Inquiry, 1, 3–14.
McIntosh, P. (1989, July–August). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knap-
sack. Peace and Freedom Magazine, 10–12. Philadelphia: Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom.
Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.). (1981). This bridge called my back: Writings
by radical women of color. New York: Kitchen Table Woman of Color Press.
Murray, O. (2011). Queer youth in heterosexist schools: Isolation, prejudice and

no clear supportive policy frameworks. Multicultural Perspectives, 4, 215–219.
Olson, L. C. (2011). Anger among allies: Audre Lorde’s 1981 keynote admonish-
ing the national women’s studies association. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 3,
283–308.
Reason, R. D., Miller, E. A. R., & Scales, T. C. (2005). Toward a model of racial
justice ally development. Journal of College Student Development, 46,
530–546.
Rosenblum, K. E., & Travis, T. C. (2006). The meaning of difference: American
constructions of race, sex and gender, social class, and sexual orientation. Boston:
McGraw Hill.
Suyemoto, K., & Fox Tree, C. A. (2006). Building bridges across differences to
meet social action goals: Being and creating allies among people of color.
American Journal of Community Psychology, 34, 237–246.
Talburt, S. (2005). Queer research and queer youth. Journal of Gay and Lesbian
Issues in Education, 3(2/3), 87–93.
Tumang, P. J., & De Rivera, J. (2006). Homelands: Women’s journeys across race,
place, and time. Emeryville: Seal Press.
Villarejo, A. (2005). Tarrying with the normative: Queer theory and black history.
Social Text, 3–4(84–85), 69–84.
Voyer, A. (2011). Disciplined to diversity: Learning the language of multicultural-
ism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34(11), 1874–1893.
Bitter Knowledge
Thabo Msibi
“Bitter knowledge” is an important pedagogical concept if queer theory

(and by implication queer pedagogy) is to start speaking more widely to
an audience outside the Western white space of middle-class privilege. For
some time now, queer theory has been positioned in contexts like South
Africa (and one may argue throughout Africa) as a Western theoretical
construct, offering little understanding on how heteronormative and
queerphobic discourses can be successfully challenged. By its insistence on
individual agency, scholars have argued quite correctly that queer theory
fails to sufficiently acknowledge the complexities presented by commu-
nal forms of social organizing and the inherited structural machinations
at play in the interpersonal, structural, and societal relations of African
people. Given the history of race and racial oppression in South Africa
(and the continent of Africa), alongside the very sophisticated theorizing
that has followed as a result, I argue that queer theory has to borrow from
progressive theoretical perspectives on pedagogy developed outside the
realm of sexuality studies in order to have a more meaningful impact on
both the subjects who experience marginalization and mainstream educa-
tion. I therefore present the concept of “bitter knowledge,” as explored by
T. Msibi ( )
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

24 T. MSIBI
Jonathan Jansen (2008, 2010) is his post-conflict theory, as an important

theoretical concept for queer pedagogy in the twenty-first century.
This chapter explores firstly the concept of bitter knowledge in greater
detail, highlighting its use in studies on race. Based on my experiences
of teaching queer material to pre-service teachers in South Africa, it then
presents examples of how bitter knowledge can be queered. This is then
followed by discussions on why we need to queer bitter knowledge and the
resources that such queering would bring to queer studies and education.
WHAT IS “BITTER KNOWLEDGE”?

Jonathan Jansen, a prominent curriculum studies scholar in South Africa,
reflects in several scholarly platforms (see 2008, 2009, 2010) on being
the first black Dean at the University of Pretoria, an exclusively white
Afrikaner university during apartheid. He notes that during his tenure, he
became increasingly concerned about how it is that young white Afrikaner
students, with no experience of apartheid, would continue to carry racist
views about black people well after the collapse of apartheid. His concerns
were also amplified by the racial attack and murder of a black homeless
man by four young white boys from a prestigious private school as well
as the humiliation of four black women and one black man by four white
male students (known as the “Reitz Four”) from the University of the
Free State. The “Reitz Four,” all students in the Reitz Residence which
used to be exclusively white, were objecting to the racial integration policy
of the residences by the University’s management. In demonstrating their
objection, the students got the black workers to engage in several degrad-
ing activities, including eating food which had been urinated upon (see
Soudien 2010).
Given all these troubling activities, Jansen engaged in a process of trying
to understand why is it that white students continued to harbor negative
racial ideas, years after apartheid. For this purpose, he immersed himself
in the lives of white students. He attended their church services, spoke to
their parents, observed lessons in white primary and high schools, went
to movies and camps with his students, and became very much part of
the students’ communities. What he found from all these activities was
that, for the most part, the students were very much “decent, idealistic
and committed to their country; and that they [were] capable of change”
(2008, p. 62). However, the single most serious problem was that students
carried what he called “bitter knowledge”—received from their parents,
BITTER KNOWLEDGE 25
religious and academic institutions, social spaces, and other socializing

avenues.
Jansen (2008) uses Eva Hoffman’s work, entitled After Such Knowledge,
where she questions how it is that second-generation Jews who never
experienced the Holocaust behave as if they did, to theorize about the
white experience. Hoffman found indirect knowledge, which was received
through “the intergenerational transmission of spoken and unspoken
knowledge from the parents who were there, to the children who were
not” to have played a role in the responses of second-generation Jews
(see Jansen 2008). The effect of indirect knowledge is that the children
grew up bitter, and carrying the knowledge received as the only true,
undisputable knowledge. Jansen expands this concept to South African
white youth, who, in the present-day South Africa, are disillusioned, feel
attacked, and are vulnerable. These young people carry “bitter knowl-
edge,” that is knowledge which is troubling, often predicated on stereo-
typical thinking and held up as true. Jansen (2008) therefore argues that
for any meaningful pedagogical possibilities to occur in contexts riddled
with a history of racial violence and discrimination such as South Africa,
pedagogy needs to shift beyond binaries to a “post-conflict” pedagogy
that acknowledges the “humanness” and complexities presented by the
victim/perpetrator dichotomy. Such a pedagogy would acknowledge what
Jansen (2008) calls the “brokenness” of people: that “in our human state
we are prone to failure and incompletion, and that as imperfect humans
we constantly seek a higher order of living” (p. 71). For Jansen, this type
of pedagogy blurs the boundaries of victim and perpetrator and invites
“communion with other people and with the divine.”
I find Jansen’s notion of “brokenness” predicated on a problematic
evangelical Christian approach; in its desire for understanding, it risks
undervaluing the significance of the violence and abuse experienced by
those against whom these are directed. Further, Jansen’s singular focus on
race does much to undermine the complexity which he wishes to highlight.
Nevertheless, I find his idea of “bitter knowledge” useful in understand-
ing the multi-layeredness, complex, ambiguous, fluid, and contradictory
nature of the human experience. I suggest that the idea of “bitter knowl-
edge” can be appropriated by queer pedagogies to understand the inher-
ited and performatively constituted knowledge (see Butler 1990) which
defines our lives.
Queer pedagogy continues to occupy, dare I say, an uncomfortably mar-
ginal space in mainstream education scholarship, especially in “Southern”
26 T. MSIBI
contexts. While this may on the surface cohere with the often accepted
belief that it is acceptable for queer pedagogy to be in the margins since
it is by its nature not mainstream, it however remains undisputable that
queer pedagogy has to offer certain possibilities and opportunities. For
this to happen, queer pedagogy must be more transgressive and direct
in queering mainstream progressive pedagogies in order to teach more
queerly while at the same time allowing for progressive literature to queer
(verb) queer pedagogy itself. We need to radically shift queer pedagogy
from a “paranoid thinking which merely exposes the inevitability of struc-
tural violence enacted on the space of the queer, to a more ameliorative
response [of] reparative thinking” (Shahani 2005, citing Eve Sedgewick).
I believe the incorporation of bitter knowledge into queer discourse and
pedagogy can do much in extending our thinking about knowledge on
difference and identification.
QUEERING “BITTER KNOWLEDGE”

Any approach that seeks directly to advance queer pedagogy in the class-
room, thereby moving from “paranoia” to “reparative thinking,” must
have as its primary concession an understanding that students bring with
them particular received knowledge, the majority of which is constituted
by bitter knowledge. Regardless of context, education informed by an
idea of uncertainty must seek to disrupt the taken-for-granted notions
of identity and the structural manifestations which inform much of the
binary thinking we encounter in our classrooms daily. Such an under-
standing would need to bring the politics of imperialism and colonialism
into conversation with issues of sexuality. Individuals do not carry with
them compartmentalized forms of knowledge: various narratives framed
on identity politics are constantly being negotiated by our students. The
task of educators in teaching queerly therefore is about how to bring the
various discourses on identification into conversation with each other
so as to trouble bitter knowledge. As Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) noted
within the US context, the compartmentalization and dichotomization of
issues around discrimination and injustice on the basis identification run
the risk of creating the victim and perpetrator binary. I have, for instance,
observed the same in the context of South Africa when teaching has been
based on agents (oppressors) and targets (oppressed) (see Adams et al.
1997). Often black African students have been able to speak quite articu-
lately and vocally about racial oppression, but when it comes to issues
BITTER KNOWLEDGE 27
pertaining to sexual and gender discrimination, many of the very vocal

and articulate students lose their voices, with many harboring some of the
most queerphobic and sexist views.
From my experience, in order to advance a more queer pedagogy, one
ought to directly deal with the connected, systemic, and intersectional
ways in which discrimination finds meaning in students’ lives. This means
dealing with bitter knowledge more directly by starting from a point of the
known, using students’ experiences as a base, leading into the unknown.
In a class on queer issues for instance, academics should be able to directly
make links to racial and colonial experiences in order to provide more sub-
stantive learning when issues of sexuality are approached. In my teaching,
I often start with explaining what bitter knowledge is and how such bitter
knowledge may prevent us from learning. I talk directly about histories
of oppression, the historical erasure of African people’s own narratives
through empire, and the use of laws and religious texts to meet the needs
of the state. Apartheid laws of racial discrimination feature prominently
during our discussions. We discuss in quite explicit terms how notions of
“immorality” were used through apartheid state laws, using the so-called
Immorality Act (Sexual Offences Act 23 of 1957) and the Immorality
Amendment Act, 1969 (Act No. 57 of 1969), to prevent black people
from marrying white people and also to regulate sexuality through pro-
hibiting sex toys as well as male-to-male sexual encounters. I often then
discuss how this process drew directly from the Bible, and how such a
text was used to advance political ends. I offer examples directly linked
to the colonial project of denouncing indigenous knowledge systems
and the pluralistic sexual practices which accompanied such knowledge
(which were often considered barbaric) in order to advance Western, often
Christian beliefs. Through this discussion, I begin to lay the foundation
about the relativity of knowledge and how knowledge is received from one
generation to the next. I then transpose the discussions to the present-day
South Africa, where topics around these issues have become sensitive, and
ask students to share the type of knowledge they have about the “other,”
asking whether in their experiences with such knowledge is ever fully valid.
Very often, debates ensue with some students trying desperately to prove
that the stereotypical “bitter knowledge” they have of each other is in fact
true. Intentionally, I allow contradictory voices so as to allow for a trou-
bling of bitter knowledge.
By adopting this kind of pedagogical approach, I lay the foundations
for more direct teaching on issues of sexuality. There are three fundamen-
28 T. MSIBI
tal arguments that students invariably raise when teaching about issues
of sexuality in African contexts: (i) that “non-normative” same-sex and
gender identification are against God, (ii) that cultural practices prohibit
such engagement, and (iii) that heterosexuality is natural. The first two
arguments are addressed through the foundational discussion on the his-
tory of race so that by the time they emerge in the classroom they are
easily dealt with. As Shlasko (2005), using Luhman’s work, aptly points
out: “students’ ignorance about the thing one is trying to teach is not
merely the absence of knowledge. Rather, students may possess a different
knowledge that is not compatible with the new information” (p. 129). In
short, students possess bitter knowledge, knowledge which, if left unchal-
lenged, leads to the violence, bigotry, and discrimination that we witness
in our everyday lives. That a discussion on religion and religious texts can
be contested often provides an answer to that student who has received
knowledge of patriarchy as normal and the Bible as the only authoritative
script reflecting God’s views. Similarly, a student who holds to the received
bitter knowledge that has constructed African culture as purely patriarchal
and anti-same-sex desire is given an opportunity to trouble such knowl-
edge through understanding how the history of empire has functioned to
erase indigenous knowledge. Such a student would then be exposed to
queer texts written by scholars such as Marc Epprecht (2004, 2008) and
Limakatso Kendall (1998), demonstrating clearly the historical existence
of queer sexualities within the African continent. By building from exam-
ples of what the students know, one begins to teach queerly by addressing
the foundations of bitter knowledge. One is able to teach beyond the poli-
tics of race and sexuality, to speak more about the intersectional ways in
which systemic discrimination works. Once this is done, the heterosexual
matrix can then be addressed through speaking directly about theory and
presenting clearly definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality. The process
here is not on teaching about “the other,” rather, it is about queering the
self. Allowing students to directly confront new knowledge through deal-
ing with their own preconceptions is important for unlearning.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO QUEER BITTER KNOWLEDGE?

An important aspect in confronting bitter knowledge regards the under-
standing of knowledge as contested and also recreated. If queer theory
is to take seriously the multifaceted, contested, and contextual nature of
knowledge, it needs to break away from a purely Western discourse on
BITTER KNOWLEDGE 29
sexual politics. Bitter knowledge allows for teachers to actively disrupt

received knowledge, and by implication bitter knowledge, by responding
to contextual issues. This mainly requires a pedagogy that draws directly
on students’ experiences and narratives: the discourse therefore shifts from
being individualistic to complexifying our shared experiences of history
and knowledge. A pedagogy that seeks to be queer must understand that
each and every story told in the classroom is important and comes out of
a particular experience. In the context of South Africa, for example, where
discrimination has been embedded in the social fabric of the country, this
requires a careful and considered approach when teaching: an approach
that consciously acknowledges both the contradictions presented by a
racist history of colonialism and the manifestations of patriarchy through
everyday cultural practices. These are important aspects for theorizing
pedagogy on teaching sexuality as such teaching cannot be done outside
other forms of social identification. Judith Butler’s (1990) heterosexual
matrix presents clear evidence of this. Further, bitter knowledge forces us
to acknowledge that we have all received knowledge that we carry with
us. In the Western context, such knowledge may mean the direct con-
frontation of received bitter knowledge on AIDS for example, and the
complexification of experiences such as the lynching of black men in the
South. William Pinar’s brilliant analysis in his book The Gender of Racial
Politics & Violence in America (2001) is a great example of how queer
pedagogy can begin to confront bitter knowledge by complexifying mat-
ters of sexuality. Such an approach allows for shifting beyond the “ter-
ritorializing” discourses in academia which Rodriguez (2007) decries for
failing to offer “robust interdisciplinary[ity] in general and in terms of the
specific categories of gender and sexuality” (p. 108). Dealing with bitter
knowledge means that teaching must be more outwardly intersectional
(Sullivan 2003), transdisciplinary, and fun.
Shlasko (2005) has complained about the teaching on “non-normative”
gender and sexual diversities as such teaching has tended to be a pedagogy
which is “unthreatening to the norm [as it legitimises] … the boundaries
that continue to keep some people outside” (pp. 126–127). This is because
queer pedagogy has tended to focus on notions of tolerance and assimila-
tion. For the active disruption of bitter knowledge, pedagogy needs to
be addressed more queerly. This means that teachers must also question
their own positions in the teaching process. Teaching needs to be more
transgressive (see bell hooks, 1994), allowing teachers to also share their
own narratives while also problematizing their own received knowledge.
30 T. MSIBI
This may be tricky given our professional training as academics to be the

“bearers of expert knowledge.” However, bitter knowledge comes from
an understanding that we are all “cognitively damaged” (Spivak 2014).
Such cognitive damage requires that we understand the classroom space
as contested. This means that teachers need to be engaged in the process
of learning simultaneously with students. As Jansen notes, “teachers …
not only bring their own identities, they also carry their own knowledge
of the past” (2009, p. 71). Very often I have found myself confronting my
own internalized queerphobia and racism through the stories shared with
students.
An example of this confrontation regards my openness on my sexu-
ality when teaching. As part of the teaching process, I allow the per-
sonal to enter the classroom space by speaking outwardly about my
fluid sexuality and my refusal to claim a sexual identification category.
In a space that is safe, fun, yet contested, such a declaration is often
followed less by judgment but more by intrigue and questioning. This
then presents a wonderful opportunity for leaning and confrontation
of bitter knowledge. However, this has also previously led to some
challenges in that some “straight” colleagues took this to be a narcis-
sistic exercise, with some murmuring that they were “not interested
in my personal stories, but interested in knowing more about theory.”
While my colleagues’ own bitter knowledge is often troubled by my
outward declaration of a sexuality challenging normative expectations,
their utterances had some value as this has led to my own reflection
about the reasons for my classroom declarations. Very often declaring
one’s sexuality is viewed as “confessional” and can perhaps even be
seen as attention seeking, a reflection of one’s insecurities and need for
empathy and acceptance in the classroom. However, a declaration of
one’s sexuality that is critically informed can be a powerful pedagogi-
cal moment that disrupts bitter knowledge. This declaration allows for
vulnerability in the classroom, which, as bell hooks correctly points
out, presents the teacher as being “wholly present in mind, body,
spirit” (1994, p. 21). It is after all through our experiences that theory
can become alive (ibid.).
Confronting our bitter knowledge is also important because it enables
“border crossing” (Walkerdine 2013). Walkerdine’s theorization of “bor-
der crossing,” although mainly in the context of gender and class, is use-
ful in understanding the anxieties and violent nature of confronting new
knowledge. The direct confrontation of bitter knowledge is filled with
BITTER KNOWLEDGE 31
anxieties and can certainly be stressful, if not violent on both the per-
son holding such knowledge and those receiving it. Walkerdine (2013)
suggests that the space (in this instance the classroom) ought to be an
environment that is simultaneously warm and “safe” to enable imagina-
tion and movement into something new. She notes that change needs to
be supported “by both the creation of novel situations and challenges, but
in so doing, to understand that the process is indeterminate, plays upon
complex unconscious and affective processes, and demands the centrality
of safety to allow for imagination and experiments to be handled safely”
(p. 763). Confronting bitter knowledge enables queer pedagogy to speak
to uncertainty. It allows for students to trouble taken-for-granted notions
of truth.
Finally, a queer pedagogy that is imbricated on the confrontation of
bitter knowledge should also confront notions of failure. Recently, I
was teaching a class of 800 students when suddenly a student asked a
question about why some gay students in South Africa want to be like
women and why such students dress up in women’s clothing. I decided
to respond to the question with a question back to the student: “Tell me
what’s wrong with some men deciding to wear what is perceived to be
women’s clothing?” Instantly there was a wild uproar in the class. Some
students were amused that I saw it acceptable for men to wear women’s
clothing, while others saw me as the devil incarnate. Sexuality and gender
identity are often inseparable in classroom discussions, therefore requir-
ing a more queer approach when teaching. With a smile on my face, and
still keeping with the safe, fun but critical approach to disrupting bitter
knowledge, I added that I saw it perfectly acceptable for men to wear
skirts if they wished to do so and connected the discussion to theory,
drawing the students’ attention to the heterosexual matrix. For many
students, this was the first time in their lives that someone in authority,
more especially a man, had said something like this. About 20 students,
mostly male, staged a walkout in protest. This walkout troubled me:
How is it that I wasn’t able to communicate the new knowledge in a way
that would enable the students to confront their anxieties with a sense
of new imagination as Walkerdine (2013) suggests? This was a moment
of failure I thought. However, what I thought was a moment of peda-
gogical failure was in fact a moment of learning for many students. I was
surprised to be visited in my office by some of the very students who had
walked out. Teaching queerly and troubling bitter knowledge results in
such moments.
32 T. MSIBI
CONCLUSION
Bitter knowledge is an important concept for queer pedagogy to actively
engage with. This is more so important for contexts where a history of
racial violence and systemic denial and discrimination still features strongly
in the daily experiences of people. Confronting bitter knowledge enables
for queer to be queered. It allows for the complexification of the class-
room, a space where failure can offer key pedagogical moments. For queer
theory to be more critical of its Western position in the twenty-first cen-
tury, it has to be able to borrow from progressive pedagogies from the
South and therefore confront its own bitter knowledge. The concept of
bitter knowledge allows for a critical conversation within queer pedagogy,
a form of border crossing, where intersectional relations are privileged
over compartmentalized, “territorial” approaches. Queering bitter knowl-
edge will enable for a more transdisciplinary approach in queer pedagogies
and theorizing. Bitter knowledge is therefore an important concept for
queer theorizing in the twenty-first century.
REFERENCES
Adams, M., Bell, L. A., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1997). Teaching for diversity and
social justice. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity.
Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the
repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Education Review, 59(3),
297–324.
Epprecht, M. (2004). Hungochani: The history of a dissident sexuality in southern
Africa. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Epprecht, M. (2008). Heterosexual Africa?: The history of an idea from the age of
exploration to the age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom.
Jansen, J. (2008). Bearing whiteness: A pedagogy of compassion in a time of trou-
bles. Education as Change, 12(2), 59–75. doi:10.1080/16823200809487207.
Jansen, J. D. (2009). Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid
past. Cape Town: UCT Press.
Jansen, J. D. (2010). Educational leadership in racially divided communities. In
A. Hargreaves, A. Lieberman, M. Fullan, & D. Hopkins (Eds.), Second inter-
national handbook of educational change. Dordrecht: Springer.
BITTER KNOWLEDGE 33
Kendall, K. L. (1998). “When a woman loves a woman” in Lesotho: Love, sex,
and the (western) construction of homophobia. In S. Murray & W. Roscoe
(Eds.), Boywives and female husbands: Studies of African homosexualities
(pp. 223–243). New York: Palgrave.
Pinar, W. F. (2001). The gender of racial politics and violence in America: Lynching,
prison rape, & the crisis of masculinity. New York: Peter Lang.
Rodriguez, N. M. (2007). Queering the course of masculinity studies. Journal of
Curriculum and Pedagogy, 4(2), 107–112.
Shahani, N. G. (2005). Pedagogical practices and the reparative performance of
failure, or, “what does [queer] knowledge do?” JAC, 25(1), 185–207.
Shlasko, G. D. (2005). Queer (v.) pedagogy. Equity & Excellence in Education,
38(2), 123–134. doi:10.1080/10665680590935098.
Soudien, C. (2010). Who takes responsibility for the “Reitz four”? Puzzling our
way through higher education transformation in South Africa. South African
Journal of Science, 106(9–10), 1–4.
Spivak, G. C. (2014). Humanities, democracy and the politics of knowledge in
higher education. Presented at the 8th Annual Teaching and Learning in
Higher Education Conference, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pinetown.
Sullivan, N. (2003). A critical introduction to queer theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Walkerdine, V. (2013). Using the work of Felix Guattari to understand space,
place, social justice, and education. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(10), 756–764.
doi:10.1177/1077800413502934.
Bullying
Gerald Walton
It seems as though bullying affects just about everyone. Students are

targeted for and engage in bullying and are told by educators and par-
ents not to do it, parents wonder what can be done about it, teachers
intervene when they can, administrators produce anti-bullying policies,
and journalists feature bullying to sell newspapers and garner ratings
in TV news broadcasts. Public attention is captured when certain cases
garner attention from the press, such as those involving suicide, murder,
and/or lawsuits against school boards and teachers. The phenomenon
of school shootings by students who have endured constant bullying
from their peers also grabs public and media attention. Per usual pat-
terns of news coverage, each story quickly fades, but bullying as an issue
is thrust back into the spotlight when the next tragedy comes along.
Often, such tragedies arise from homophobic and transphobic bullying.
Tyler Clementi, Jamie Hubley, Jamey Rodemeyer, Blake Brockington,
and Leelah Alcorn are merely a few queer youth who completed sui-
cide in the aftermath of homophobic bullying that they endured at their
schools and online, and posthumously garnered significant but tempo-
rary press coverage for it.
G. Walton ( )
Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada

36 G. WALTON
In recent years, cyberbullying has become identified as a more tena-

cious problem than face-to-face bullying, reaching children anywhere they
happen to be through their computers and smart phones. Thus, bullying
is no longer a problem contained within schools. Primarily associated with
the social lives of children in the context of schools, bullying as a problem
commands enormous resources in policy development, prevention and
intervention programmes, education and anti-bullying campaigns, and
seemingly endless streams of research. What is it all for?
Amidst all of the talk and alarm, everyone seems to have an opinion
about what should be done about it. However, it was not always the case
that bullying was a topic of such concern, perhaps even moral panic. As
Ringrose and Renold (2010) observe, bullying is a discourse in itself that
is “organised around binaries of bully and victim, which enact rigid gender
norms and support heteronormative power relations” (p. 590). In other
words, the language of bullying, itself normative and hegemonic, is intrin-
sically connected to powerful norms of gender and sexuality. Bullying dis-
course would have it that bullying is perceived as threatening not only
safety and lives of students, but also very social order in schools. Bullying
situations were once largely trivialized as normative experiences in grow-
ing up and seen as useful in the development of character; sometimes, they
still are.1 These debates implicitly frame bullying as depoliticized by strip-
ping from the conversation how bullying discourse is preoccupied with
individual complicity while minimizing the role of gender and sexuality
norms, among other forms of social difference, that shape how bullying is
expressed. In short, the bedrock of bullying are discourses of normativity,
one form of which is gender and sexuality. Perhaps the issue is not limited
to mere normativity, but tenacious normativity, suggesting that social poli-
tics are powerfully at play. Fuelled by media investigations, interrogations,
and sensationalism, bullying commands widespread concern of parents,
educators, and students. Yet, it also continues to be a pervasive problem
in schools despite the efforts of researchers and educators to challenge it
and of journalists and anti-bullying event organizers to bring “awareness”
to it.
Another venue where bullying as a problem receives attention and
resources is the context of workplaces. The similarities between schools
and workplaces on how bullying is defined for policy and programme
development is not accidental, yet it is erroneous to consider workplace
bullying and school bullying as the same phenomenon. According to
Furedi (2001), workplace bullying has become identified as a chronic
BULLYING 37
problem over the past 20 years. He describes the social and political condi-
tions under which discourse on bullying emerged as a social problem and
how these problems came to be conceptualized and articulated, as he puts
it, “in the language of bullying” (p. 97), also known as bullying discourse.
According to Einarsen et al. (2011), identification first emerged in
Europe and, today, the concept is well known and discussed in North
American contexts as well. It manifests in vertical patterns (bosses and
supervisors towards employees), and also horizontal ones (employees
towards other employees). Workplace bullying tends to rely on similar
ideas about bullying that inform anti-bullying policies in schools. For
instance, Einarsen et al. offer this definition:
Bullying at work means harassing, offending, or socially excluding someone

or negatively affecting someone’s work. In order for the label bullying (or
mobbing) to be applied to a particular activity, interaction, or process, the
bullying behaviour has to occur repeatedly and regularly (e.g., weekly) and
over a period of time (e.g., about six months). Bullying is an escalating
process in the course of which the person confronted ends up in an inferior
position and becomes the target of systemic negative social acts. A conflict
cannot be called bullying if the incident is an isolated event or if two parties
of approximately equal strength are in conflict. (p. 22, italics in original)
The two venues of bullying are quite different but usually conflated as
identical. Dan Olweus, a researcher from Norway, has been highly influ-
ential since the 1960s in conceptualizing bullying. He is credited with
being the first scholar to tackle the issue in a significant and sustained way
through ongoing research. In the English translation of his work (1993),
he says that, “a student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is
exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one
or more other students” (p. 54). His definition, now standard in research
and educational policy contexts, is very similar to Einarsen et al.’s defini-
tion of workplace bullying, provided above. In short, this is the “bully-
ing discourse” that is discussed by Ringrose and Renold (2010) as being
normative. Typically, such school and workplace definitions suggest that
bullying comprises three elements: imbalance of power, repeated acts, and
intention to harm. Yet, unlike most workplace bullying, school bullying
has an additional characteristic that is pernicious and often overlooked.
That characteristic is social difference. Many queer children and youth
know this all too well. Usually, being different draws negative attention
from others, one manifestation of which is bullying. In the taxonomy of
38 G. WALTON
violence, a queering of bullying acknowledges social difference, including

but not limited to sexuality and gender identity and expression, and, in
doing so, points to avenues whereby social difference can be supported
and destigmatized. “Queering” the definition of bullying is not merely
adding “sexuality” and “gender” to a list of social differences; rather, it is
to overturn the usual and predictable notions of bullying that inform pol-
icy and practice. Doing so aligns with queer theory approaches to gender
and sexuality that destabilize the assumption that gendered and sexualized
selves are essential and permanent aspects of the self (see, for instance,
Butler 1990, 2004; Kosofsky Sedgwick 1990). Standard definitions have
become catch-all descriptions of any form of behaviour that is unwanted
in both school and work contexts, under which lies the binary of “vic-
tim” and “bully.” Unless workers are harassed because they represent, or
are perceived to represent, a particular social group, such as queers, the
egregious behaviour is not bullying. It is harassment. Social theorist Nan
Stein (2003) points out that calling sexual harassment “bullying” has the
detrimental effect of expunging women’s human rights that are based on
anti-harassment laws. One of the problems with addressing bullying, then,
is that the behaviours that get labelled as “bullying” are not alike. On the
other hand, “harassment” is the term favoured by theorists such as Alloway
(2000) as in “homophobic harassment” and “gender-based harassment.”
I would counter such a position with the argument that, while bullying is
certainly harassment of a sort, not all harassment is bullying. Illustratively,
while all thumbs are fingers, not all fingers are thumbs.
In the context of schools, Olweus focused his efforts on the behaviour
of individual students. His work was sparked by an incident in Norway
in 1982 when three boys, aged 10–14, completed suicide after enduring
severe and repeated bullying by their peers. The tragedy became a flash-
point for public and journalistic concern about bullying in schools and,
evidently, for Olweus’ scholarly examination of it. Today and for quite
some time, he has been the most influential theorist on bullying, at least
in the Western world. His definition gained traction among education
researchers and policy developers because it is concise, clear, and the com-
ponents of bullying are made explicit. However, it and its derivations are
generic in their approach, meaning that they identify components of bul-
lying moments, or what has become labelled as “bullying,” but they do
not specify what gives rise to bullying in the first place except to identify
differences in power between the bully and the bullied, such as physical
size.
BULLYING 39
Evidently, the multiple suicides in Norway that sparked Olweus’ work

have had little mitigating effect since then on suicidal ideation and com-
pletion patterns of bullied children. According to the Gay, Lesbian, and
Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in the USA and Egale Canada
Human Rights Trust (Egale) in Canada, some queer youth face ongoing
bullying from their peers and, as a result, may think about, attempt, and
complete suicide at higher rates than their straight counterparts.2 In 2010,
in particular, news media focused on several suicides of youth who were
openly queer or perceived as queer by their peers. The well-publicized
suicides led queer author and activist Dan Savage, together with his hus-
band, Terry Miller, to create the “It Gets Better” project, launched in
2010 (itgetsbetter.org). The project is a repository of video testimonials
from people, some famous (notably, US President Barack Obama), some
not, directed towards queer youth and those who are bullied through
homophobia. The message is that “it gets better,” meaning that life gets
better once high school is over and the bullying stops.
The Project has its detractors, most of whom seem to agree that the
campaign is, despite its shortcomings, well intended. Critics argue that
it asks them to wait for their lives to get better post-graduation (such as
Van Horn 2014; Veldman 2010), that the way that Savage and Miller
present “It Gets Better” perpetuates classist heteronormative American
Dream ethos that is unattainable for many youth (such as Goltz 2013;
Ryan 2010), and that queer children of colour often do not find that
“it gets better” in urban gay communities—the so-called gaybourhoods—
that tend to privilege whiteness and harbour racism (such as Tseng 2010).
Moreover, the central critique is that “It Gets Better” does little to help
queer children (and those perceived as queer) in their schools, right now.
By contrast, organizations such as GLSEN, Egale, the Trevor Project
(thetrevorproject.org), and the Matthew Shepard Foundation (matthews-
hepard.org) each work in the here-and-now towards employing strategies
and interventions that directly support queer children and youth. Savage
himself (2010) acknowledges its limitations, arguing that it was never
meant as an immediate solution for every student in every school, but
that it offers hope to queer children whose hope is depleted. As one might
have predicted from media-savvy Dan Savage, a book about the project
was published in 2012.
The emergence of the “It Gets Better” phenomenon suggests that anti-
bullying programmes have not succeeded at mitigating suicidal ideation
and completion that are a response to persistent peer bullying. There are
40 G. WALTON
several other problems with the ways that bullying is widely perceived
and perpetuated through public and educational discourse. One is that
the focus tends to be on behaviours at the expense of broader social pat-
terns, such as racism and homophobia, which are mirrored in patterns
of bullying. Anderson (2012) is clear in her claim that, “Anti-bullying
programs tend to [avoid] the hard talk about the most common moti-
vations: homophobia and race” (para. 23). Queering standard notions
of bullying brings such hard talk into focus. Connected to behavioural
approaches are interventionist approaches (such as Cappadocia et al.’s
focus on bystanders, 2012) and development approaches (such as Pepler
and Craig’s 2012 focus on relationships and Fenclau et al.’s 2014 focus on
lifespan development).
Another problem is the gendering of bullying as normative, as noted
above. Contrary to ideas promoted by researchers and educators, it is not
the case, despite widespread claims to the contrary (see Hardcastle 2014,
for instance) that girls bully other girls in particular ways and boys bully
other boys in particular other ways. Stereotypically and specific to boys,
bullies are widely perceived as physically larger than their comparatively
smaller targets, while, among girls, the currency of power might tend to
be popularity and the ability to manipulate others to exclude targets (Field
et al. 2009). Such gendered ideas are false dichotomies, the discursive
material that queer theorists target and deconstruct, and are replete on
the Internet. While it might be the case that girls tend to bully each other
relationally and boys tend to bully each other physically, it is also the case
that deviations from the patterns are more common than many research-
ers and educators seem willing to admit. Many girls bully each other with
physical violence, for instance, and many boys bully each other through
gossip, though even the term “gossip” is highly gendered and used mostly
in association with girls and women. When boys call each other “fags”
and write, “Johnny is a queer” on a locker room door, for example, they
gossip about each other by bringing their sexuality into question. In addi-
tion to gossip, boys also engage in varieties of social exclusion. Consider,
for instance, how some boys are rejected from high-status groups such as
sports teams. Yet, it is girls who are identified, almost without exception, as
those who bully through exclusion. Moreover and conspicuously, bullying
perpetrated by boys tends simply to be called “bullying,” whereas bullying
perpetrated by girls is often specified as “girl bullying.” In general, then, it
is the broad terrain of queer theory that implodes dichotomous discourses
and promotes ideas about gender and sexuality that are more fluid and mal-
BULLYING 41
leable than normative discourses acknowledge. That anti-bullying efforts

are hinged to normative discourses of gender and sexuality goes a long
way to explain why they are, largely speaking, ineffective.
A further problem, according to Juvonen and Gross (2005), is the
widespread belief that bullies lack self-esteem and pick on others whom
they perceive as weaker to feel better about themselves. On the contrary,
as Juvonen (quoted in Lin 2012) argues, “bullies are, by far, the coolest
kids, and the victims, in turn, are very uncool” (para. 8). Thus, bullies tend
to be those with heightened self-esteem, perhaps manifesting as a sense of
entitlement and superiority, rather than low self-esteem. Connected to
entitlement is the issue of pleasure. Entertainment media thrive on depic-
tions of revenge violence and the almost carnal satisfaction in aggressively
asserting power over others. Stopping short of simplistically claiming
that media causes violence, it is certainly the case that it has an influence.
In research on bullying, almost entirely absent is how bullying may be
motivated by gratification, even zeal. An exception is research on brain
activity that provides evidence that children who bully feel pleasure when
tormenting other children (see, e.g., Roach 2008; Newitz 2008). There
appears to be heightened activity in the parts of the brain associated with
reward and pleasure. Put differently, maybe it is the case that bullying
brings satisfaction, perhaps even fun.
Also marginalized in theories about bullying is how social difference
plays a key and, in some ways, a predictive role in who tends to be tar-
geted and who does not. Simply put, those who avoid being on the receiv-
ing end of bullying are usually those who fit in with their peers. Queer
youth are commonly targeted as not fitting in, particularly those whose
gender presentation could be described as non-cisgender (Ybarra et al.
2015). “Fitting in” implies sameness. While human behaviour is variable
and not subject to hard-and-fast rules, it is often the case that children and
youth bully those who do not look or act like them. As Amber Rehman, a
Pakistani, Anglo Canadian, raised in Quebec, and self-described disabled
person, said in the Huffington Post, “The worst thing about being differ-
ent is that you are a moving target for the local bullies” (2013, para. 2).
Difference means that normative social categories of gender, race, class,
sexuality, body size and shape, mental and physical ability, and other mark-
ers of difference come into play in bullying moments that typically disap-
pear in anti-bullying policies and programmes that focus on relationships
and bad behaviour, the substantive material of bullying discourse. When
viewed through a lens of social difference, it becomes clear that particular
42 G. WALTON
children, notably queer ones, especially those whose identities intersect

other marginalized markers of difference, such as Indigeneity, disability,
and fatness, are more likely to be targeted than other children. Simply
put, standard operationalizations of bullying miss the facts. Factoring in
social difference means that bullying moments, more than behavioural or
relational problems, can be seen as crystallizations of widespread social
prejudice.
A further problem is the common idea that bullying is routinely con-
sidered to be “anti-social” (e.g., Connolly et al. 2000, p. 301; Farrington
1993, p. 383). For Renda et al. (2011), such supposed anti-social behav-
iour is associated with similar behaviour and even criminality in adulthood.
It seems contradictory to argue that bullying behaviours are “anti-social”
and also assert that bully behaviours are often supported by peers, even if
in the silent complicity of the so-called bystanders. If bullying behaviour
garners social status and is supported by other children, then the notion
of bullying being “anti-social” is erroneous. Stevens et al. (2000) argue
that the goal for bullies is “to gain social outcomes such as dominance or
status among peers” (p. 22, italics added). The point is that bullying is
very much a social behaviour, albeit socially destructive.
Retaining Olweus’ highly influential conceptualization of bullying
and adding the tenacious problem of difference result in a synthesis that
advances understanding of bullying and thus enables more powerful
lenses by which to “see” it. Bullying from a queering perspective, then,
can be seen as when a student is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to nega-
tive actions on the part of one or more other students that stem from one or
more aspects of social difference, perceived or real, such as, but not limited to,
gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, body size and shape, and mental and
physical ability.
For queer children and youth, the issue of what is and is not bullying
matters. If anti-bullying policies rely on Olweus’ generic ideas, and if anti-
bullying programmes fail to identify homophobia as a significant motiva-
tor for bullying even while “fag” and “dyke” are routinely hurled between
students to demean each other, then the central problem is not with the
policies and programmes themselves. The problem is that educators and
administrators, among others, subscribe to normative and hegemonic dis-
courses about what constitutes bullying, and those ideas erroneously focus
on bad behaviour and how to regulate it to the exclusion of social and
political contexts that motivate bullying behaviours. Another problem is
that discussions about queer children and youth, as well as homopho-
BULLYING 43
bia in schools, are politically loaded and socially sensitive such that many
school boards do not want to incite public criticism and scrutiny, par-
ticularly from members and organizations of the religious right. Adopting
depoliticized policies based on generic ideas, many administrators thus
can tell concerned parents that something is being done about bullying
because policies have been written and programmes have been developed.
Or, as depicted in the 2011 US documentary Bully (thebullyproject.com),
some school administrators simply admit that they do not know what to
do about bullying. An honest approach, perhaps, but policy can help to
mitigate such resignation. While some schools now have policies against
homophobic bullying, few have policies against transphobia and vio-
lence against gender non-conformity and creativity, not to mention other
domains of human variation.
In recent years, increasing numbers of queer and trans students have
come out in their schools and more straight students support them.
Organizations such as GLSEN in the USA and Egale in Canada have
forged research and educational programmes to cultivate safer schools for
queer children and youth, and those targeted with homophobia regardless
of sexuality or gender identity. Pop culture is a significant factor in destig-
matizing and educating about queerness, perhaps more than educational
programmes. The influence of Lady Gaga’s pro-queer work, for example,
should not be discounted as over-commercialized pop culture that has
little social meaning. Yet, bullying of queer students, and those perceived
as such, continues in many schools. Not necessarily wilful neglect, admin-
istrators have been sold a bill of goods on what bullying supposedly is,
fuelled by academic research and policy-making that rely on normative
conceptualizations that erase differences such as queerness and that have
become discursively normative in themselves. Bullying in schools persists
regardless of efforts to stop it because gender and sexuality norms, con-
trary to queer theorists who critique artificial binaries, remain prominent
in social worlds and in anti-bullying efforts. Thus, it is high time to think
differently about bullying and revise archaic policies and programmes so
that they mirror contemporary school cultures. Queering the notion of
bullying is one avenue towards doing so.
44 G. WALTON
NOTES
1. See, for instance, a comments-based debate on debate.org entitled, “Is
Bullying Good for You?”: http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-bullying-
good-for-you
2. The totality of discussion and information on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) youth suicidal ideation and completion may tend to
stereotype LGBT youth as depressed, hopeless, and doomed. On the con-
trary, many live “typical” teen lives and are not necessarily bullied by their
peers and rejected by their families, as the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reminds us (see http://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/youth.htm).
REFERENCES
Alloway, N. (2000). Just kidding? Sex-based harassment at school. Retrieved from
http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/media/downloads/schoolsgender/learn-
ing/yrk12focusareas/gendered/justkidding.pdf
Anderson, E. (2012). Why we’re losing the fight against bullying. Globe and Mail.
Retrieved from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/why-were-losing-the-
fight-against-bullying/article1215943/?page=all
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Cappadocia, M. C., Pepler, D., Cummings, J. G., & Craig, W. (2012). Individual
motivations and characteristics associated with bystander intervention during
bullying episodes among children and youth. Canadian Journal of School
Psychology, 27(3), 201–216.
Connolly, J., Pepler, D., Craig, W., & Taradash, A. (2000). Dating experiences of
bullies in early adolescence. Child Maltreatment, 5(4), 299–310.
Einarsen, S., Hoel, H., Zapf, D., & Cooper, C. (2011). The concept of bullying
and harassment at work: The European tradition. In S. Einarsen, H. Hoel,
D. Zapf, & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Bullying and harassment in the workplace:
Developments in theory, research, and practice (3rd ed., pp. 3–40). Boca Raton:
CRC Press.
Farrington, D. P. (1993). Understanding and preventing bullying. In M. Tonry
(Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 17, pp. 381–458). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Fenclau, E., Jr., Albright, C. M., Crothers, L. M., & Kolbert, J. B. (2014).
Schoolyard scuffles to conference room chaos: Bullying across the lifespan. In
J. Lipinski & L. M. Crothers (Eds.), Bullying in the workplace: Causes, symp-
toms, and remedies (pp. 69–84). New York: Routledge.
BULLYING 45
Field, J. E., Kolbert, J. B., Crothers, L. M., & Hughes, T. L. (2009). Understanding
girl bullying and what to do about it: Strategies to help heal the divide. Thousand
Oaks: Corwin.
Furedi, F. (2001). Bullying: The British contribution to the construction of a
social problem. In J. Best (Ed.), How claims spread: Cross-national diffusion of
social problems (pp. 89–106). New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Goltz, D. B. (2013). “It Gets Better”: Queer futures, critical frustrations, and
radical potentials. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 30(2), 131–151.
Hardcastle, M. (2014). How girls bully: Covert tactics used when girls bully.
Retrieved from http://teenadvice.about.com/od/violencebullying/a/girl-
bullies.htm
Juvonen, J., & Gross, E. F. (2005). The rejected and the bullied: Lessons about
social misfits from developmental psychology. In K. D. Williams, J. P. Forgas,
& W. von Hippel (Eds.), The social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion, rejection,
and bullying (pp. 155–170). New York: Psychology Press.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Oakland: University of
California Press.
Lin, J. (2012). Psychologists studies make sense of bullying. Retrieved from
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/bullying-jaana-juvonen-233108
Newitz, A. (2008, July 11). Brain scans reveal that teen bullies get pleasure from
your pain. Retrieved from http://io9.com/5079234/brain-scans-reveal-that-
teen-bullies-get-pleasure-from-your-pain
Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at school: What we know and what we can do.
Cambridge, UK: Blackwell.
Pepler, D., & Craig, W. (2012). Healthy development depends on healthy rela-
tionships. Retrieved from www.prevnet.ca/sites/prevnet.ca/files/
HealthyRelationshipsPaper.pdf
Rehman, A. (2013). Bullied for being different. Retrieved from http://www.huff-
ingtonpost.ca/amber-rehman/getting-bullied-_b_2703901.html
Renda, J., Vassallo, S., & Edwards, B. (2011). Bullying in early adolescence and its
association with anti-social behaviour, criminality and violence 6 and 10 years
later. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 21(2), 117–127.
Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2010). Normative cruelties and gender deviants: The
performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school. British
Educational Research Journal, 36(4), 573–596.
Roach, J. (2008, November 7). Bullies’ brains light up with pleasure as people
squirm. National Geographic News. Retrieved from http://news.nationalgeo-
graphic.com/news/2008/11/081107-bully-brain.html
Ryan, J. R. (2010, November 13). “It Gets Better”…not for everybody. The
Scavenger. Retrieved from http://www.thescavenger.net/sex-gender-sexual-
diversity/glb-diversity/518-it-gets-better-not-for-ever ybody-339914.
html#comment-1564
46 G. WALTON
Savage, D. (2010, October 4). “It Gets Better”: A programming note. Retrieved
from http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/10/04/it-gets-
better-a-programming-note
Stein, N. (2003). Bullying or sexual harassment? The missing discourse of rights in
an era of zero tolerance. Arizona Law Review, 45, 783–799.
Stevens, V., Van Oost, P., & de Bourdeaudhuij, I. (2000). The effects of an anti-
bullying intervention programme on peers’ attitudes and behaviour. Journal of
Adolescence, 23, 21–34.
Tseng, J. (2010, October 3). Does it really get better?: A conscientious critique.
Retrieved from http://www.bilerico.com/2010/10/does_it_really_get_bet-
ter.php#kZZGs4Extr1Gvbur.99
Van Horn, T. (2014). F*** you Dan Savage: A queer criticism of the “It Gets
Better” Project. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/9477231/
F_You_Dan_Savage_A_Queer_Criticism_of_the_It_Gets_Better_Project
Veldman, M. (2010, October 19). Opinion: “It Gets Better” needs to do more:
Campaign for Gay Teens sidesteps the real issues. The Tech. Retrieved from
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N46/veldman.html
Ybarra, M. L., Mitchell, K. J., & Kosciw, J. (2015). The relation between suicidal
ideation and bullying victimization in a national sample of transgender and
non-transgender adolescents. In P. Goldblum, D. Espelage, J. Chu, &
B. Bongar (Eds.), Youth suicide and bullying: Challenges and strategies for pre-
vention and intervention (pp. 134–145). New York: Oxford University Press.
Coming Out
Gabrielle Richard
Two individuals face the camera. They are wearing scarves that cover their
faces. Only their eyes are exposed. They hold up and slowly flip signs that
read: “We’re teachers, lesbian and bisexual, in a place where we could lose our
jobs, our livelihood, our dignity, for being ourselves (…). We can’t be totally
‘out’ but we are here for you. Even if we can’t wear a rainbow flag.” Put
online in September 2010, the video was created by two teachers for the
“It Gets Better Project,” an initiative of American author Dan Savage in
response to the wave of suicides by teenagers harassed and bullied because
of their (real or presumed) homosexuality. The initiative is also an evoca-
tive incarnation of the contradictory injunctions under which lesbian, gay,
and bisexual (LGB) teachers operate.
This chapter suggests that the coming out of teachers remains central in
order to understand the practices they are capable of putting forth regard-
ing sexual diversity. I propose that this holds true, although in different
ways, for teachers of all sexual orientations. In the literature review, I will
discuss the factors impacting LGB teachers’ decisions to come out or not
to their students. Then, through qualitative data collected with Québec
(Canada) high school teachers, I propose to interrogate the way teachers,
G. Richard ( )
Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

48 G. RICHARD
LGB and heterosexual alike, perceive the requirements of identity neu-

trality that target them. When and how do teachers decide to evoke their
private lives in class, and how do these concerns differ according to the
teachers’ sexual orientation? How can teachers’ practices regarding sex-
ual diversity (e.g., intervening in cases of homophobic victimization or
discussing sexual diversity in the classroom) be influenced by their deci-
sion regarding disclosure/dissimulation of their identity? Furthermore,
what can these politics of identity tell us about the existence of norms
in schools?
For many years, scientific, “profane,” and activist discourses have taken
position on the issues surrounding the disclosure of a teacher’s sexual
identity and other aspects of one’s private life to students. Griffin (1992)
studied the identity management methods advocated by gay and lesbian
(GL) teachers and determined four strategies—passing, covering, implic-
itly out, explicitly out—that serve as benchmarks on a continuum of sex-
ual orientation visibility. Passing as heterosexual constitutes the most strict
dissimulation strategy since an LGB individual will hide his or her life,
creating a series of lies to preserve the appearance of an entirely fictitious
heterosexual life. The covering strategy presumes that the teacher censures
the information he or she chooses to share by, for example, changing the
name and pronoun used to refer to a partner or using gender-neutral
language. Teachers who are implicitly out assume that their sexual orienta-
tion is common knowledge but never confirm it publically. Explicitly out
teachers are the still rare teachers who clearly divulge their sexual orienta-
tion and are known to be LGB in the workplace. They often become a
reference person in the school on sexual diversity issues and may elicit
revelations from students and coworkers.
Teachers negotiate the visibility of their sexual orientation in an effort
to reach or preserve a balance between their personal and professional
lives and, by the same token, maintain a certain level of security in their
profession. In doing so, they are confronted with relatively polarized opin-
ions with regard to the coming out imperative (Harbeck 1992). Those
who support disclosure cite the contact hypothesis (Allport 1954), and con-
sider that sexual diversity prejudices and stereotypes must be confronted
through coming out: divulging one’s non-visible sexual orientation. In
fact, Sears and Williams suggest that “the single most effective way to
change homophobic attitudes is through one-to-one personal contacts.
(…) Thus more research is required in order to establish the best ways
to encourage more lesbigay persons to come out” (1997, p. 7). Teachers
COMING OUT 49
quickly came under fire given their close ties with students, the authority
that comes along with their profession, and the fact that they have been
clearly identified as first-line agents in the fight against homophobia in
schools (UNESCO 2012).
Those who call for disclosure have also taken up the idea of teachers as
role models, which is largely based on the minority teacher model. Since
the 1980s, this model has elucidated the many positive impacts that the
presence of a teacher belonging to a minority can have on the students,
regardless of whether the students are part of the same minority. These
premises lead to seemingly compelling projections for LGB teachers.
In disclosing his or her sexual orientation, a teacher could contribute
to relating non-heterosexuality to a professional and personal success
model, demonstrating that one can have a satisfying love, family, and
professional life despite being LGB. Doing so may also confront stu-
dents to certain sexual diversity stereotypes they may have. However,
in practice, the association between the minority teacher model and the
LGB teacher is only partial, since it is entirely driven by the visibility
of the teacher’s sexual orientation—information that is not necessarily
public and may be much less so in the school environment. The minor-
ity dynamic seems to be personified randomly and unpredictably since
a teacher may choose to hide his or her sexual orientation and remove
himself or herself from the identity dynamic while another teacher whose
homosexuality is correctly or wrongly presumed may take part in it
(Richard 2013).
Regardless of whether they believe teachers should reveal their sexual
orientation in class, most practitioners, activists, and researchers agree that
this type of initiative must necessarily stem from a circumspect choice,
especially when minor children are involved and in the context in which
the homosexuality–pedophilia link endures. Studies have shown that there
are inherent obstacles for teachers seeking to come out. For example, Russ
et al. (2002) stated that groups of university students consistently found
an out LGB guest professor as less credible and less competent than the
heterosexual counterpart.
Many teachers choose to hide their sexual orientation, and their deci-
sion may be partially driven by the countless stereotypes, jokes, and nega-
tive comments on homosexuality that circulate in schools. Some scholars
suggest that disclosure comes at the price of the neutrality required to
teach while others reply that this neutrality is nothing more than an unat-
tainable pedagogical ideal in as much as the neutrality that is supposedly
50 G. RICHARD
threatened by openly homosexual teachers constitutes a normative and

heterosexist status quo (Elliott 1996). According to Griffin (1992), more
than any other factor, the fear of public accusations curbs disclosure:
being labeled as gay or lesbian or presumed to be a pedophile or child
abuser, becoming the subject of rumors of sexual advances of students,
being accused of promoting homosexuality or the advancement of the gay
agenda or recruiting students for conversion, and so on. Several authors
have therefore concluded that disclosure is not a viable option for most
non-heterosexual teachers (Khayatt 1999; Elliott 1996).
Taking a step back from these pressures on whether teachers should
come out or not, queer theorists have questioned the very discourses of
the closet (Hunter 2007; Rasmussen 2004; Sedgwick 1990). According
to these scholars, the coming-out discourses are problematically mobi-
lized by GL politics in three ways. First, they put forth a “born this way”
essentialist argument on sexual orientation that does not consider social
constructionist perspectives on identity construction. Second, they leave
LGB individuals virtually no alternative but to come out. Third, they fail
to consider the complex intersections of sexuality and other factors (race,
economic position, age, etc.) in decisions related to the closet. In short,
they suggest coming out might not be the tool for disruption it is pre-
tended to be, but rather the means by which problematic discourses are
reproduced.
METHODOLOGY
Data presented in this chapter stems from doctoral thesis research to better
understand Québec high school teachers’ practices with regard to sexual
diversity. Semi-structured interviews carried out with high school teachers
focused on their professional experiences with sexual diversity, especially
their interventions with regard to negative language on homosexuality
and the inclusion of such references in their teaching material. Interview
participants were recruited through the researchers’ personal and profes-
sional networks and collaborations with GL associations in schools. While
the researchers did not explicitly seek out LGB teachers, it seemed prob-
able that many interviewees would indeed identify as LGB given the sig-
nificance of the topic to non-heterosexual individuals. The interview plan
therefore included a series of questions on issues specific to LGB teachers,
especially with regard to the visibility they granted to certain aspects of
their private lives.
COMING OUT 51
Interviews were carried out with 22 high school teachers: 12 women

and 10 men. The participants were between the ages of 29 and 62 (aver-
age age: 37 years) and taught various subjects, from physical education
to French and ethics. Together, they possessed some 30 years’ teaching
experience. Six of the teachers were non-heterosexual: three gay men,
one lesbian woman, one bisexual woman, and one bisexual man. Of these
respondents, four had already discussed their sexual orientation with their
students. The opinions of heterosexual teachers were also of great impor-
tance in this study since they are privileged observers and stakeholders in
heterosexist school environments. Not only do they see their GLB col-
leagues negotiate visibility issues but they also provide insight into the
challenges teachers face when they choose to affirm or dissimulate aspects
of their personal lives.
ON COMING OUT, FROM THE GLB TEACHER’S

PERSPECTIVE
The divide between professional and personal lives is greatest in the reflec-
tions of GLB teachers on the in-class visibility of their sexual orientation or
conjugal or family situation, regardless of the degree to which the individu-
als may have disclosed any personal information. For ethical reasons or in
an effort to better manage the fragile relationship with their students at the
start of the year, none of the GLB teachers interviewed disclose their sexual
orientation to a class early on. It seems that the teachers who reveal their
sexual orientation choose to do so in response to two main occurrences:
questions from students and interventions to stop homophobic language.
An example of this is Sylvain, a physical education teacher. He does
not attach too much importance to his homosexuality but still uses it as a
lever to weigh his interventions against bullying, including homophobia.
He mobilizes his own experience as a gay man to illustrate the negative
impacts of homophobic language and confront students who had hoped
to find a sympathetic ear for such stereotypes:
I asked [a professional sports team] to come. When the players came out
of the locker room, two of my kids said “Hey, Sir, those players sure aren’t
fags!” (…) The next class, I said [to the entire class]: “The gym is no place
for homophobic language. I don’t usually discuss it but I like men. And it
affects me directly when you say things like that.” (Sylvain, physical educa-
tion teacher, gay)
52 G. RICHARD
The aforementioned visibility management models have advantages and

inconveniences, which teachers seem to consider cautiously. While com-
ing out to one’s class can appear to outsiders to be sudden or even selfish
in its intentions, it follows an intensive reflective process. The example of
Freddy, an arts teacher who had not yet discussed the topic with his stu-
dents, is quite revealing:
[In my free time], I help fight heterosexism and homophobia. When I’m at
school, I’m careful. (…) A classroom needs to remain open. I don’t want
my students to become closed off because of it. I’m afraid that kids won’t
take me as seriously. They only see the cliché and not the person behind it.
Is it justified or is it extra information? (…) Teachers are role models and I
can’t be a half model. I have to completely disclose who I am. (Freddy, arts
teacher, bisexual)
While their thought processes may lead to divergent conclusions with

regard to the relevance of coming out, all of the teachers interviewed
raised the issue of the quality of their relations with their students as their
main argument. Teachers who preferred dissimulation strategies (e.g.,
inventing an imaginary opposite sex spouse or refusing to answer any per-
sonal questions) said that they did not want to trouble their students, ruin
their teacher persona, or veer away from purely pedagogical objectives.
Those who were more in favor of disclosure (total or partial) insisted on
the importance of transparency and authenticity in maintaining a trust
relationship with their students—a relationship they believe is crucial to
the quality of learning.
ON COMING OUT, FROM THE HETEROSEXUAL TEACHER’S

PERSPECTIVE
Most of the heterosexual teachers that I interviewed were prompt to
declare they never talked about their sexual orientation with students.
When further questioned on their daily practices, it appeared that not
only all of them revealed certain details of their conjugal or family life to
their students, but also they believed that the information constitutes an
important lever to get the students’ attention:
I talk about it [my personal life]. A lot? No. You have to understand that a
teacher’s personal life is so fascinating to a student that it can become a tool.
COMING OUT 53
The right anecdote can lead into a topic. I talk about it more than others
but I’m not Mr. Anecdote. (Olivier, science and ethics and religion teacher,
heterosexual)
Heterosexual teachers also had opinions on whether or not GLB teachers

should come out in class. While most heterosexual teachers clearly rec-
ognized the potentially positive impact that an openly GLB teacher can
have on students from sexual minorities and those who are unsure about
their own sexuality, they also believe that coming out is an intimately per-
sonal decision. Beyond these concerns, however, two types of arguments
emerge: false equivalence and auto-marginalization. False equivalence
(Peel 2001) implies that heterosexual teachers do not explicitly mention
their sexual orientation in class and that setting different expectations for
GLB teachers creates a double standard and is even discriminatory:
I won’t go into class and say: “Hello group, I’m heterosexual.” So why
should a homosexual do it? But if you get asked the question, you’d better
be honest. Otherwise, the message you send, it’s just awful: “If you’re gay in
life you have to hide it?” (Annette, special education teacher, heterosexual)
In this case, the heterosexual teacher presumes a similarity between a het-

erosexual and a GLB person’s experience in disclosing details on their
private lives. As Annette does, many teachers seem to question the need
for a GLB teacher to mention his sexual orientation (why discuss it?) while,
even without specifying their sexual orientation, heterosexual teachers will
refer to their spouse, family life, or leisure activities. A GLB teacher who
wishes to speak about the same realities, which at first glance seem to be
relatively prosaic, would not freely disclose the information without care-
fully considering the consequences.
The auto-marginalization argument (why not discuss it?) stems from the
premise that the teachers who want to disclose their homosexuality or
bisexuality grant too much significance to a personal characteristic of little
importance or which is exclusively related to their private lives since it per-
tains to sexuality. Homosexual teachers should speak about their same-sex
partner by his or her first name or completely abstain from making refer-
ences to their personal lives:
What I notice is that students detect it very fast either through rumour
or because they observe it. [Coming out] to de-dramatize, to remove that
54 G. RICHARD
scandalous or unhealthy aspect, certainly. But, at the same time, children

don’t need to know about their parents’ sexuality, and the sexual orienta-
tion of their teacher is none of their business. There must be a clear break.
(Thomas, English teacher, heterosexual)
Those who uphold the argument consider that disclosing a minority sexual
orientation is only possible by moving into a state of hypervisibility that,
according to Atkinson and DePalma (2006), necessarily follows a state of
invisibility. Also, heterosexual teachers never evoke the heterosexism or
the presumption of heterosexuality that forces all non-heterosexual teach-
ers to take a stand on the issue. In fact, it is much more complex to affirm
a minority sexual orientation than to confirm an expected majority status.
Many of the heterosexual teachers who were interviewed disapprove
of the choice of certain teachers to disclose their sexual orientation and
were quick to suggest that sharing this type of information with stu-
dents is unnecessary, even detrimental to them, and that heterosexual
teachers do not discuss their sexual orientation in class. While it is true
that heterosexual teachers are very rarely called upon to confirm their
sexual orientation, they do not stop themselves from referring to their
spouse or conjugal or family life. These results suggest that the modes
by which a teacher refers to his or her sexual orientation are negoti-
ated within the parameters of his or her minority status. In view of this
minority status, GLB teachers may be called upon to disclose informa-
tion in response to a presumption of heterosexuality or a homophobic
episode at the risk that the resulting inevitable visibility will be perceived
as activism. Other teachers will opt to dissimulate their sexual orien-
tation—an equally demanding task since it requires constant monitor-
ing. Heterosexual teachers manage their sexual orientation through the
majority lens: evoking one’s personal life does not constitute a potential
threat and does not stem from any particular thought process since it is
an expected privilege.
SCHOOL NORMS RELATED TO GENDER AND SEXUAL

ORIENTATION
These results gain from being discussed in relation to the strong nor-
mative prescriptions relative to gender and sexual orientation in
schools. It has long been established that schools constitute hetero-
normative environments where heterosexuality, conformity to gender
COMING OUT 55
expectations, and complementarity of the sexes are valorized and legiti-

mized. In opposition, the individuals that emancipate from those norms
(e.g., because they identify as LGBQ, because they are trans, gender-
queer, or gender non-conforming) are consequently pushed aside or dis-
criminated against (Toomey et al. 2012). Teachers are among the many
actors operating in this environment and can come to play an impor-
tant role in the propagation or the contestation of these heteronorms,
whether it be by the information on sexual diversity they pass on or do
not pass on (e.g., by explaining to students that some of their opinions
on GLB people are informed by stereotypes and therefore not empiri-
cally valid, or by silencing information regarding sexual diversity), or by
the interventions they make or do not make when confronted to homo-
phobic violence, and so on.
Teachers’ posture regarding the visibility of their own sexual orienta-
tion seems to borrow from a similar logic. They can decide to conform
to the normative gender and sexual orientation expectations that target
them as educators (e.g., by asserting their heterosexuality) or choose to
resist to them (e.g., by coming out as non-heterosexuals to their students,
or by avoiding to explicitly reinforce the expectations that target them) at
the risk of being consequently penalized. This influence of gender norms
varies from one teacher to another, but seems to be at play for both het-
erosexual and LGB teachers.
Thirty years after the first studies on LGB teachers’ experiences, our
results suggest that the coming out literature remains central to the under-
standing of teachers’ apprehensions and fears, but also of the practices
they adopt regarding sexual diversity. Though some suggest that truly dis-
rupting heterosexuality and school norms would perhaps better be served
by other means (Telford 2003), it must be noted that global discourses on
GL politics—and increasingly, educational discourses as well—continue
on pressing these issues at the forefront of the conversation. As such, I
suggest coming out as a concept can hardly be avoided. LGB teachers con-
tinue to report fearing hostile reactions from students, students’ parents,
and their colleagues, as well as negative professional impacts if they decide
to come out. That said, these identity politics can—and should—also be
played by heterosexual teachers (Allen 2011). Bringing them into the con-
versation allows us to make visible the presumption of heterosexuality that
is inherent to social and school exchanges, but also to illustrate it in as
much as it constitutes a heteronorm.
56 G. RICHARD
REFERENCES
Allen, L. (2011). “Undoing” the self: Should heterosexual teachers “come out” in
the university classroom? Pedagogy Culture & Society, 19(1), 79–95.
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.
Atkinson, A., & DePalma, R. (2006, September). Permission to talk about it: LGB
and straight teachers’ narratives of sexual equality. British Educational Research
Association Conference, Warwick.
Elliott, M. (1996). Coming out in the classroom: A return to the hard place.
College English, 59, 693–708.
Griffin, P. (1992). From hiding out to coming out: Empowering lesbian and gay
educators. Journal of Homosexuality, 22(3–4), 167–196.
Harbeck, K. M. (1992). Coming out of the classroom closet: Gay and lesbian stu-
dents, teachers and curricula. New York: Harrington Park Press.
Hunter, S. (2007). Coming out and disclosures. LGBT persons across the life span.
Khayatt, D. M. (1999). Sex and pedagogy: Performing sexualities in the class-
room. Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 5(1), 107–113.
Peel, E. (2001). Mundane heterosexism: Understanding incidents of the everyday.
Women’s Studies International Forum, 24(5), 541–554.
Rasmussen, M. L. (2004). The problem of coming out. Theory Into Practice,
43(2), 144–150.
Richard, G. (2013). Politiques pédagogiques identitaires: Réflexions sur le modèle
du professeur minoritaire pour les élèves de minorités sexuelles. Chantiers de
l’intervention en sciences humaines, 3, n/a.
Russ, T., Simonds, C., & Hunt, S. (2002). Coming out in the classroom…An
occupational hazard? The influence of sexual orientation on teacher credibility
and perceived student learning. Communication Education, 51(3), 311–324.
Sears, J. T., & Williams, W. (1997). Overcoming heterosexism and homophobia:
Strategies that work. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Telford, D. (2003). Post-compulsory heterosexuality: Silences and tensions in cur-
ricula and pedagogy at university. In D. Epstein, S. O’Flynn, & D. Telford
(Eds.), Silenced sexualities in schools and universities (pp. 101–120). Stoke on
Trent/Staffordshire: Trentham Books.
Toomey, R. S., McGuire, J. K., & Russell, S. T. (2012). Heteronormativity, school
climates, and perceived safety for gender nonconforming peers. Journal of
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2012).
Education sector responses to homophobic bullying. Good policy and practice in
HIV and health education. Booklet 8. Paris: UNESCO, 59 pp.
Containment
Chris Haywood and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill
INTRODUCTION
Throughout our research and teaching, we have been continually
attempting to understand and make sense of identities, subjectivities, and
identifications. Queer theory has been extremely valuable in developing
a pedagogy, as it engages with the parameters of the (im)possibilities of
knowing. Often, the starting point for the engagement with queer the-
ory has been through notions of gender/sexuality, where queer theory is
able to “challenge dominant paradigms of sexuality and gender (Duong
2012)” (Warner and Shields 2013, p. 807). Although gender and sexual-
ity are key terms of reference in relation to our work on men and mascu-
linities, we have also been trying to work through themes such as “race”/
ethnicity, disability, and generation. The analytical framing of this work
involves decentring gender/sexuality from a queer theoretical approach.
Queer theory often questions the hegemonic representational strategy
that links the erotic and the object of desire and as a result produces new
C. Haywood ( )
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
M. Mac an Ghaill
Newman University, Birmingham, UK

58 C. HAYWOOD AND M. MAC AN GHAILL
configurations of gender/sexual identification, knowing, and experience.

The challenge has been to queer queer theory or as Sawicki (1994) sug-
gests, articulate a “desexualization of queer.” The generic basis for the
questioning of normalcy, underpinned in Michael Warner’s (1993, p.
xxvi) seminal Fear of a Queer Planet, highlights that: “The preference for
‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of gener-
alization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political
interest-representation in favour of a more thorough resistance to regimes
of the normal.” It is argued that these “regimes of the normal” demand
an epistemological security, where identities insist on clearly demarcated
borders and (il)legitimate ways of knowing. It is this demand, this impera-
tive to designate and categorize through the closing of possibilities that
restricts the “space of the possible” (Talburt 2000, p. 10).
One way of capturing this process of closing down the “space of the
possible” is through the concept of “containment.” Containment is used
here to unpack closed and often undisputed concepts through an engage-
ment with Bachelard’s (1984) notion of the epistemological break. The
notion of “break” is used to depict a discontinuity in the possibilities of
knowing that produces “correlative discontinuities issuing from a chain
reaction, we can identify there what we call ‘knowledge’” (Balibar 1978,
p. 211). The discontinuity is not a beginning and an end—as is charac-
teristic of a historical sequence but refers to a different way of knowing.
This means that knowledge itself is not better or more progressive, but
is premised on a difference that establishes itself outside a conventional
logic. It is this process of challenging how the deployment of knowledge
frames, designates, and contains its subjects that is impacting upon how
we are using queer theory. It is suggested that we need to question the
anchoring of queer within an epistemology of sex and gender and focus on
challenging regimes of normalcy. Therefore, containment is used here to
understand how the UK State institutions are able to contain and sanction
normative borders of ethnicity/“race.” The concept is used here as a key
dynamic in making sense of the current cultural context being experienced
by British-born Bangladeshi and Pakistani young men.
One of the difficulties with a more generic use of queer theory is that
despite its history in political activism, it can often lend itself to abstrac-
tion within a sequence of theoretical moves. It is important to point out
that a historical referent point for our use of the term containment is
located within the political relationship between the British State and
Northern Ireland. The policy of containment was used by the British State
CONTAINMENT 59
throughout the 1980s as a political strategy to manage political unrest.

According to Shirlow (2003), the British State managed its political oppo-
sition by designating it or containing it within geographical borders. The
implication of this is that the source of what was named the “Troubles”
could be found in urban working-class areas or on provincial borders. In
short, a policy of containment gave political opposition a source, a loca-
tion, and a position. This spatial demarcation of “troubled areas” not only
provided a means ideologically to separate communities, but it also, as
O’Duffy (1993) suggests, underplayed the social and economic inequali-
ties experienced between dominant and marginalized communities. At
the same time, containment not only concealed severe social inequalities
across different localities, but also operated through official discourses that
produced the criminalization of the political opponent (Shirlow 2003). As
a result, opposition to the British State’s occupation of Northern Ireland
was often reconfigured as being criminal. The implication of this fram-
ing of criminality through terrorism is that political legitimacy can only
be spoken by the dominant group. In the case of Northern Ireland, this
resulted in the power of the police to arrest anyone suspected of being a
terrorist (Northern Ireland Emergency Provisions Act 1978, s. 11, p. 1).
This political legacy feeds into the analytical concept of containment
and especially in the current context of Muslim men’s lives. British-born
Bangladeshi and Pakistani young men are growing up in a context where
State control and regulation of the “Muslim” is a major social and cultural
concern. The concept of containment has enabled us to think about how
the British State is re-classifying these young men from one as owning an
ethnic identity to one of belonging to a religious group. In short, the State
is involved in a contemporary authoring, through a regime of normalcy
that contains these young men through categories of religion.
RESEARCHING PAKISTANI/BANGLADESHI YOUNG MEN

We are acutely aware that undertaking research that is inflected by queer
studies can involve a number of contradictions. Nash and Brown (2008)
have highlighted that the process of knowledge in conventional social sci-
ence research may ultimately result in a positivistic emphasis on catego-
rization and measurement. At the same time, a consequence of trying to
capture the messiness of people’s lives may result in an overly textual read-
ing of identifications and subjectivities. As such, it is important not only to
focus on one sense of “queerness” but also to highlight how queer can be
used and constituted in multiple ways; otherwise understood as a process

of queering the queer (Degorska 2010). Our research practice has similar-
ities with Warner (2004), who highlights the importance of being reflex-
ive about how the process of inquiry constitutes the object. Warner also
suggests that a queer methodology should take into account the voices
of those being researched. This taking account of voices is not necessar-
ily through a reductive notion of empowerment, but through a spirit of
collaborative engagement in the production of knowledge. Undertaking
research with young people has involved exploring contested understand-
ings, interpretations, and meanings and how these are manifest within spe-
cific configurations of power/knowledge. By acknowledging that research
accounts are part of a mutual construction, the process of research also
disturbs conventional methodologies through its alignment with a col-
lective reflexivity—in order to challenge how state, media, and academic
discourses produce ways of knowing.
As part of the collaborative approach to research practice, we are sensi-
tive to how Bangladeshi and Pakistani young men are forging their mas-
culinities in relation to assumed ethno-religious identifications and social
practices. It is therefore possible to understand these young men’s experi-
ences as located within the space of the queer, where as Halperin (1995,
p. 62) suggests:
‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate
object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm.
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate,
the dominant.
Current government authorizations of Bangladeshi and Pakistani com-

munities are primarily being achieved through an elision between eth-
nicity and religion. Of particular significance, in understanding the
emergence of the figure of the South Asian/Muslim male student has
been the institutional deployment of key analytical categories, namely
culture, community, and religion that are implicitly assumed to be ahis-
torical, unitary, universal, and thus unchanging. In response, at times,
these young men’s emerging narratives offer an alternative view that
destabilizes dominant culturalist explanations ascribed by the state,
including institutional sites, such as schooling and policing, that locates
them as religious subjects (Faas 2010). Young men in our research
are subjectively experiencing the reconstitution of their identities that
CONTAINMENT 61
challenge State-led definitions of a religious identity. For example, Asif

questions how the category of Muslim is homogenized, and how this
contains young people’s experiences:
Asif It’s wrong to talk about the Muslim perspective and the
Muslim community and Muslim young men and women act
like this and that. There is no such thing. If you look at young
people round here, they have, they take up really different
styles, different ways. And, definitely you make friends cos
you have things in common that are really different to other
groups.
M.M Like what?
Asif Like what? Like everything. Obvious things, like whether you
go to college or uni, or you’re not working or those who join
gangs, different interests, music, how you dress, where you
go with your mates, everything.
Wasim You go up North or down to London and it’s really different.
We always say it at the weddings, these people are not like us.
Yasin When you ask about the future, for young Muslim people,
yeah everything is mixed together. When people are planning
for the future, it’s very different futures. Just even in our col-
lege, the future thinking is kind of linked to how you think
about the past, and whether you want to get away from it
or how much you know about the past in this country and
Pakistan and everything that’s happening now about all the
talk about Muslims. But mostly about how you make the
future good, same as any younger people.
When Wasim suggests that “these people are not like us,” he is illus-
trating the ways in which the subject, from a queer theory position, “is
cast as incoherent, unstable and radically incongruous” (Hammers 2015,
p. 1). The focus on the heterogeneous meaning of Muslim by the partici-
pants is inflected by an implicit or explicit understanding of earlier racial-
ized representations of their grandparent and parent generation that do
not make sense of contemporary social and spatial relations of their lives.
Importantly, they note that state and public institutional figures have little
understanding of their community, of inter-generational changes, or, per-
haps, most significantly, the changing morphology of Western urban sites,
such as Birmingham, in which new identities, both minority and majority
ethnic, are being manufactured. In her discussion on the formation of

European Otherness, El-Tayeb (2011, p. 4) highlights how national iden-
tities produce a sense of a shared past:
In Europe, migrants and their descendants are routinely denied access to

this common history. At the same time, they live with the national past as
much as the native population, while frequently simultaneously functioning
as its Other.
The shared national memory of ethnicity that had previously contained

a generation as migrant labour is currently being used alongside this mem-
ory and simultaneously expels them as a religious Other.
Abdul A lot of people would have heard about how are grandpar-
ents/parents were treated really bad, when they came from
Pakistan. But it’s different for the kids, for us. Like the ste-
reotypes our parents had are more like what the Somalis, the
Yemenis, or even the Poles experience now, cos they’ve just
arrived, with different language and all that.
M.M So, what about your generation?
Abdul It’s different for us because we’re born here, so we’re British
and have a Pakistan heritage. And, anyway probably every-
thing changed round here and everywhere after 9/11.
Imran It’s changed and not changed, white kids will still call you
“Paki” (a racist term frequently used in earlier decades) in
certain areas but it’s also that we’re seen as a terrorist or fun-
damentalist, those kinds of words, those stereotypes.
Majid When you start thinking about it, it’s all mixed up. Like words
like Asian, Pakistani, ethnics, what else, and worst of all the
BME and all the rest. I don’t know, they’re not really about
us are they? They’re about older generations.
Shabbir Maybe not about them, just white people giving us labels.
Wasim There is no straight, no straight-forward stereotype of young
Muslims because you get all the propaganda stuff about not
joining the terrorists. Like you hear government people on
telly after some terrorist stuff has taken place, they’re saying
that we need the most help, so as not to be persuaded to go
off to Afghanistan and train to become a terrorist. But the
main stereotype of us is that we are terrorists.
CONTAINMENT 63
Underpinning these young men’s contradictory uneasiness with a national

amnesia of migratory history is that a new religious, fundamental Muslim
masculinity is being ascribed. The discursive production of the “Terrorist”
signals renewed containment of a minority that symbolically ruptures an
imaginary of national identity. Recent political interventions in the UK
demonstrate a process of containment that involves a shift from that of
inclusion within an agenda of ethnicity and multi-culturalism, to one of
exclusion through programmes of counter-terrorism, Islamophobia, and
a fear of religious radicalization. This process of containment for these
young men results in a feeling of dis-connection and exclusion:
Azam Governments and police and even probably a lot of teachers

they don’t know nothing. They don’t really know about us.
About people who live around here. They don’t even know
anything about our white mates who live here and they’re
white. They talk as if we have just arrived in this country but
even I can see in a few years this city has really changed and
our parents say it’s really changed. It’s not just about us, the
whole city has changed. Go and talk to the white kids and
their parents and they will tell you. But government and peo-
ple in charge they don’t know this. They don’t live here.
Underpinning this State authorization of an imaginary Muslim masculin-

ity is a highly contradictory normalization that suggests on the one hand,
men are a major threat to the State (as potential jihadists) and to them-
selves (as highly vulnerable to terrorist recruitment), while on the other,
they are vulnerable to radicalization. Importantly, the subjectification of
Bangladeshi and Pakistani young men becomes paradoxical. The process
of a queering that involves recognizing how identities are structured and
cohered through the naturalization of an artificial real is highlighted by
Rahim:
Rahim I was amazed when I came over to the UK. I couldn’t believe
how many women were wearing the hijab. There were more
women in London dressed as Muslim than there were in
Pakistan. Pakistan is supposed to be this hotbed of Muslim
extremism and yet, where my family lives, we don’t wear the
hijab.
C.H Why do you think that is?
Rahim In the UK people are obsessed about whether someone is

really a Muslim or not but it is not straight forward because
my friends, those from the UK, sometimes want to make it
clear. It’s like my friends in Pakistan are learning how to be a
“proper” Muslim from their friends in London.
Rahim helps us recognize how containment is not simply about the

imposition of categories from outside, but also through a process of self-
ascription, internalization, and introjection. At the same time, this dis-
identification is contextually supplemented by intensified and ambivalent
rapidly shifting geopolitical processes, involving developments in global
economic restructuring and its impact on local and global labour markets,
advanced technological systems and increased cultural exchange, a series
of Western-led wars on Muslim societies, shifting patterns of migration,
the restructuring of a new world order, and the apparent reclamation of
ethno-religious identities.
CONCLUSION: CONTAINMENT, QUEER THEORY,

AND METHOD
This chapter has attempted to move away from queer theory as that which
is generically connected to regimes of gender/sexuality. Rather, it re-
positions the focus of enquiry on regimes of ethnicity/religion. This is
not to suggest that such identity formations are mutually exclusive, in
many ways they are fused in moments of simultaneity; however, this focus
here is very much on the processes of containment through particular
social and cultural categories of ethnicity/race and religion. We are not
entirely settled about, either as a theory, or a concept or a policy, but as of
a term it has been productive in thinking through how we come to frame
people, identities, and experiences. This is especially important in terms
of a queer pedagogy. Sometimes when carrying out teaching and research
in areas such as race/ethnicity, students and research participants often
provide a critical insight into your own pre-conceptions and assumptions.
In so doing, their responses invert and collapse the binary oppositions
that characterize the teacher/student or researcher/participant positions
as they become the teacher or the “knowing subject.” At these moments
where the normative boundaries that contain knowledge and understand-
ing break down, we recognize their heuristic value as critical incidents.
CONTAINMENT 65
The account of Tripp (1993) and his retrospective approach to critical

incidents enable a framing of such incidents as interpretive events, where
“Incidents happen, but critical incidents are produced by the way we look
at a situation: a critical incident is an interpretation of the significance of
events” (ibid., p. 8). These young men’s accounts are often characteristic
of critical incidents that open up and de-stabilize accepted ways of think-
ing and knowing that contain what we are able to think and know. It is
this process of reflexive retrospective interpretation of containment that
has provided a highly rewarding and disturbing element of our current
teaching and research practice.
REFERENCES
Bachelard, G. (1984). The new scientific spirit. Boston: Beacon.
Balibar, E. (1978). From Bachelard to Althusser: The concept of “epistemological
break.”. Economy and Society, 7(3), 207–237.
Degorska, M. (2010). Neo-Victorian Sapphic femmes fatale: Manipulation and
double game in Sarah Waters’ Affinity. Paper presented at the 2nd Global
Conference Evil, Women and the Feminine, Monday 3rd May 2010–Wednesday
5th May 2010, Prague. Retrieved from http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/04/degorskapaper.pdf
Duong, K. (2012). What does queer theory teach us about intersectionality?
Politics and Gender, 8, 370–386.
El-Tayeb, F. (2011). European others: Queering ethnicity in postnational Europe
(difference incorporated). Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press.
Faas, D. (2010). Negotiating political identities: Multi-ethnic schools and youth in
Europe. Farnham: Ashgate.
Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Hammers, C. J. (2015). The queer logics of sex/desire and the “missing” dis-
course of gender. Sexualities, 18(7), 838–858.
Nash, C. J., & Brown, K. (2008). Queer methods and methodologies. In
K. Browne & C. J. Nash (Eds.), Queer methods and methodologies: Intersecting
queer theories and social science research (pp. 1–25). Surrey: Ashgate.
Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act. (1978). London: HMSO.
O’Duffy, B. (1993). Containment or regulation? The British approach to ethnic
conflict. In J. McGarry & B. O’Leary (Eds.), The politics of ethnic conflict regu-
lation: Case studies of protracted ethnic conflicts (pp. 128–151). Oxon:
Routledge.
Sawicki, J. (1994). Foucault’s pleasures: Desexualizing queer politics. In D. Taylor

& K. Vintges (Eds.), Feminism and the final Foucault (pp. 163–183). Illinois:
University of Illinois Press.
Shirlow, P. (2003). Sinn Fein: Beyond and within containment. In J. Neuheiser &
S. Wolff (Eds.), Peace at last? The impact of the Good Friday agreement on
Northern Ireland (pp. 60–75). New York: Berghahn Books.
Talburt, S. (2000). Introduction: Some contradictions and possibilities of queer
thinking. In S. Talburt & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Thinking queer: Sexuality,
culture, and education (pp. 3–13). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Tripp, D. (1993). Critical incidents in teaching: Developing professional judgement.
London: Routledge.
Warner, M. (1993). Fear of a queer planet: Queer politics and social theory.
Warner, D. N. (2004). Towards a queer research methodology. Qualitative
Research in Psychology, 1(4), 321–337.
Warner, L. R., & Shields, S. A. (2013). The intersections of sexuality, gender, and
race: Identity research at the crossroads. Sex Roles, 68, 803–810.
Critical Intimate Praxis
Marilyn Preston
My students’ body language ranges from relaxed and open, comfortably

sitting back in their chairs, to tense, upright, hands fidgeting. I have just
informed them that their very first in-class activity is to write their own
poem of identity in the style of Andrea Gibson’s (2007) “Andrew.” The
spoken-word poem explores the authors changing conceptualizations of
their own gender and outing themselves as, at that point in time, gender-
queer. When I tell them that I want them to take out a piece of paper and
write their own “self,” they balk. I see some pens poised and frozen in air.
Other students write furiously. As the minutes tick by, I watch them sneak
glances at each other. One student finally asks if they will be reading them
aloud. No. They won’t even turn them in.
I also explain that their first paper, due in one week, will be a reflexive
account of their own coming out. They will have to have a conversation
with someone close to them about an aspect of their self that they haven’t
shared. The paper will explore what that conversation feels like, how it
goes, and how “coming out” narratives are both framed by and frame
experiences of particular identities. This class’s title is “Queer Identities”—
and the students assume I am asking them to come out regarding their
M. Preston ( )
Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, USA

68 M. PRESTON
sexual identities—but I want to queer that. Come out, I indicate, from

expectations and notions of a stable identity.
The following week I ask them to share their stories. Who, why, how
did they come out? They are nervous. They hem and haw. I come out
to them myself, as disabled, as a mother, as queer. The students begin to
share their stories—of mental illness, of depression, of secret geekdom,
histories of dis/abilities, desires to join the military. The stories range from
deeply personal to silly. This is the beginning of the development of a criti-
cal intimate praxis (CIP).
QUEERING INTIMACY IN CLASSROOMS

Halerpin (2003), writing about the disciplinization of queer theory,
reminds us that queer theory, at its heart, should be “deliberately dis-
ruptive” (p. 340). Scholars and students working from a queer paradigm
should focus not only on the theory, the creation and uses of knowledge,
but also on the term “queer” itself as a verb, the ways in which we can
disrupt and challenge normative understandings of what it means to be,
to exist, and even to know. The deeply personal experiences shared with
the class, and the first few activities/discussions are meant to deliberately
disrupt the students’ expectations and understandings of classroom con-
versation, content, and relations. CIP is a method of queering the space
of a classroom in order to collectively explore the ways in which identity,
experiences, and “truths” are constructed in order to work toward a space
where challenges to normative and unquestioned assumptions are wel-
comed and explored, collectively. The process creates a sense of intimacy
in order to build a space where challenges and critical inquiry are accepted
and welcomed. In addition, it also reinforces the ways in which experi-
ences, in this case the creation of a classroom community through inti-
mate knowledge, praxis, and relations, can influence and create a sense of
the self that does not rely on particular and knowable expressions, bodily
configurations, orientations, or affiliations, but rather on the process of
coming together with a common purpose.
The work of critical intimacy involves what Britzman (1995) calls “ethi-
cal relations” or working to move beyond simple identity-talk of experience
of sameness or difference and toward an understanding of identifications.
It asks how individuals come to identify across and through social catego-
ries and relationships, and the limits and boundaries around those identi-
fications, we then move the area of inquiry toward new potentials of self
CRITICAL INTIMATE PRAXIS 69
and community. Pushing the dialogue from a place of concrete, knowable,

and stable truths, to an improvisational, sometimes confusing, malleable
space in which students can disrupt each other, and me, with uncomfort-
able acts. In order to get to that space, I work toward a classroom that
contains intimacy. Intimacy is vulnerability combined with trust. To have
one without the other leaves individuals with either dangerous or only
surface-level connections, at risk of falling into connections based on iden-
tities, rather than connections that explore the ways in which selves are
constructed, shaped, and defined by experiences. CIP is a process wherein
students and teachers engage in the creation of intimacy with one another
in order to create the potentials for challenging notions of identity, self,
sexuality, and theory that sustain binary and hierarchical conceptions.
It often becomes easy for students (and for me as well) to expect or fall
back upon conceptualizations of identities as stable, or fixed, categories,
or processes—these ideas that reify and reinforce the “normal” and the
queer. Even in a queer identities class, the expectation that we will collec-
tively explore “queer identities” reinforces the discursive construction of
normative identities (read: straight, white, cis, able) as unmarked and runs
the risk of affirming the liberal discourse of tolerance for difference rather
than creating new potentialities that blur boundaries between categories
and ask students to recognize identities and experience as relational and
constituted through various embodied and affective experiences.
Often my scholarship on the ways in which we take up sexuality as part
of our identity and community-identifications becomes blurred with my
teaching—as I bring in my scholarship to students and bring my students
into my research. How do we, I often wonder, create classrooms wherein
students move beyond identifying each other as a “thing,” to identifica-
tions and feeling a sense of belonging to one another? In doing so, can we
move beyond digesting course content to exploring how interdisciplinary
course experiences can create social change? CIP allows for me to blur
the lines between teacher and scholar, between intellectual and intimate
space, between knower and learner—in order to work collaboratively with
students, and with those outside of the academy, to create new ways of
experiencing education and expand our notions of self.
Classrooms, traditionally, are spaces of rationality. Queer pedagogy
would have us challenge this notion, and with it the unspoken construc-
tion of emotions and rationality as in binary opposition. Queer pedagogy,
through the use of CIP, allows for the classroom to become a space that
contains both intellectual and intimate experiences. It asks participants,
70 M. PRESTON
both teacher and student, to value affect and vulnerability as much as

we value theory and data. By challenging this binary construction of
intellectual/intimate, I can begin to challenge multiple axes of knowledge
around identity and sexuality. By opening ourselves to the vulnerability
that is created as we share stories of self, we create a class of risky subjects.
Risky in the sense that we lay bare part of our selves we do not always feel
solid in, or that show weakness. Risky, also in the sense that it may chal-
lenge us to consider that the concreteness of our selves, the idea that we
grow or move in a linear fashion toward some marked “end,” might be a
fallacy. It might instead be that we, collectively, are prodded and pushed
by discursive constructions of self and experience—that the universal is in
fact our movement and affectations, and not our categories of identity.
By being open to intimacy, I ask the students that we also be open to
challenges. When someone shares an experience, it is expected that others
might ask questions that challenge the interpretation the student provides.
For example, when discussing gay bars, two students told the class that
they enjoy when straight-identified folk come to the bars. When pressed,
they shared that it was because it demonstrated that “they accept us” by
their attendance in queer spaces. Unspoken in this was the unquestioned
“they” as the hegemonic and so-called neutral heterosexual majority. This
belief was challenged by both myself and several other classmates, ask-
ing the students to attend to the idea that space and identity can be co-
constituted, and that by suggesting straight folk in queer space provides
acknowledgment you run the risk of reinforcing systems that work to
oppress queer folk. In a similar vein, when discussing Feinberg’s (1994)
Stone Butch Blues, several students expressed shock and outrage over a
scene where genderqueer Jess uses a dildo to have sex with a woman who
does not know that Jess is not biologically male. Several students shared
that this would feel like treason to them—that, if this had occurred to
them, they would feel “lied to.” The intimacy the students had with one
another allowed them to challenge those ideas—to ask questions about
why someone would interpret that as a lie—how bodies and identities are
constructed and who is allowed the power to claim identity for another.
The goal of CIP is not to create a classroom that simply emotes—
that has a closeness created by shared intimacies and ideas—but to move
beyond that closeness to begin to understand that the very idea of identity
as stable should be challenged. We can, through the use of stories, intimate
sharing, and risky dialogue, begin to see how the very experience of queer-
ness, in the most broad sense, contains unspoken practices that normal-
ize desires and narratives. The idea of coming out, while often discussed
as a liberatory moment, contains within it a universalizing discourse that
privileges particular notions of the self that rely on consistency and stabil-
ity. This story forecloses new forms of self creation in that it reinforces the
idea that one “comes out” of any form of closet—that one has to “come
out” in order to be recognized as a self. When we revisit the “coming
out” assignment throughout the semester, we slowly peel away the idea
of closet doors as oppression and begin to understand the closet doors as
powerful discourses whether they are open or closed.
EXPOSURE AND ETHICAL AUTHORITY IN CIP

Facilitating the creation of this space is difficult in that it challenges me as a
teacher and as an individual who strives to create ethical relations with others.
I want the space to feel open and inclusive of multiple voices at the same time
that I understand my roles as imbued with responsibility for the emotional
safety of students. The work of queering pedagogy is messy and there is no
map. Whitlock (2010) shares a story of feeling the failure to support her own
students in interrogating queer theory by realizing a sense of helplessness
when a student shares a story of powerlessness in challenging the homopho-
bia of children with whom he works. She writes that she offered guidance
that felt empty, that she did not work to question her own ignorance—that
which she could not bear to know—and failed both herself and her student
in a moment of uncritical self-reflexivity. She left silences in the space stu-
dents needed guidance. I try to remain aware of both the space I take up, as
the teacher, and of the spaces where I remain silent. I work, also, to remem-
ber that it is not the stories, the details shared, that create the knowledge in
the classroom, but the relations between the stories shared—I try not to
dwell in someone’s very private stories unless imperative and needed. It
is in the sharing, not the stories themselves, that I see CIP functioning.
Queering the classroom itself and opening the space up for new forms
of intimacy and sharing comes with a significant sense of responsibility.
I often wonder where I fit within this praxis. Where and how do I hold
emotional space for students sharing such intimacies, and how do I ensure
that the sharing leads to growth rather than a sense of exploitation. I
worry that I might fail to protect students from sharing too much, from
overexposing parts of themselves.
There are days when I leave the classroom with a sense of failure and
emptiness, and days when I feel manipulative. In an abstract world, I
72 M. PRESTON
would argue that I am working to queer my own role—that I abscond the

power traditionally associated with professors to the students, and that we
share that space, and in a way we do. However, I come into the courses
having already spent a good deal of time and dedicated an explicit effort
toward the self-reflexivity that is required to be open to the challenges
critical intimacy presents. When I fail at protecting my students from this,
I feel that failure.
Early in the semester, when discussing the mutable nature of sexual
identities, a student tentatively shared her own history of bisexuality, and
her struggles with it as an identity, as well as her struggles to be recognized
as a subject who wanted to cross categories. Her story was personal, and
included anecdotes that were clearly difficult, as her voice broke while
speaking. I sat back and allowed her fellow students to offer comfort, and
to struggle out loud with their own ideas of the validity of shifting sexuali-
ties. I did not know what to say in that space in order to sustain the ways
in which her narrative challenged her peers’ conceptualizations of iden-
tity while offering her the emotional support that a story like that should
elicit. Once I returned to my office, I sent her an email—apologizing for
my silence and thanking her for her frankness and openness. An email,
however, is no substitute for actual, tangible support during intimacy.
Moments like these have me question my goals and my abilities to meet
them. I go home haunted by my inability to hold the space for them. I
have found that, while I do not dismiss these feelings of failure, I have
come to accept them as part of my own process toward self-reflexivity
and openness—and I often discuss them with students. I remind them
that they should never share things with the class that they do not want
to share, that we have a standard of keeping intimacies in our confidence,
and that anyone can choose silence, and even leave the room, at any time
without having to explain their actions. I tell them when I am uncom-
fortable with topics or readings, my own hesitations with the lessons, or
my own concerns about the discussion. I work to remind myself that my
discomfort and emotions reflect my own struggle with a false dichotomy
between teacher/student.
MOVING BEYOND CLASSROOMS: CIP IN PRAXIS

The most challenging, and useful, part of CIP is not creating intimacy,
nor using that intimacy to interrogate notions of self and identity. The
hardest part is the praxis, the “doing” outside of the specific space of the
classroom. Certainly, asking a class full of students to engage in intimate

sharing, to be open to challenge, to begin to think in terms of identifica-
tion rather than identity is hard. Being a teacher who traditionally serves
as the facilitator of knowledge but who has to come off of that particular
perch and be open to my own challenges of self makes for hard, emo-
tional, and many times exciting labor—but what to DO with that?
On the last day of this class, several of my students had been asked to
present at “Diversity Day” at a local high school. They had been invited
specifically to speak about what it meant to be queer in high school, an
assumption being that they would share stories of survival against the
odds of socialization and bullying. The unspoken narrative that they were
supposed to follow was that they had survived a victimhood by virtue of
being a queer youth. While they did share identity experiences, the most
significant part of their presentation, the majority of the focus, and the
most challenging for both them and the organizers of the event, was that
they choose to focus on identifications—the ways in which we shape each
other’s experiences, the similarities and differences across lines of identity,
the way in which vulnerability as a state of flux creates experience and
connectedness. They focused on how power shaped the ways in which
people chose to identify. They shrugged off the role of spokesperson for
queers, and took on the positions of challenging discourses of victim/
bully, straight/queer, and intellectual/intimate.
Halerpin (2003) ends his examination of the normalization of queer
theory by reminding us that queer theory, at its best, should “startle, sur-
prise, and help us think what has not yet been thought” (p. 343). The
students’ work in my classes does not end—while my courses themselves
are meant to end chronologically on a note of questions—I hope they
have more than when they started. It is meant to get them to ask more
questions, and to demand more in the way of exploration and critique.
The students’ willingness to challenge the idea that they were victims, that
queerness can be contained, written in a nutshell, shared via a stage, and
attached to an “it gets better” linearity by focus instead of relations and
vulnerability points to the praxis of CIP. The presentation they provided
was disruptive to the norms and narratives expected of them, as queer sub-
jects. It, in fact, queered the very idea that they were individual subjects
by focusing on how we consider the notion of a subject. This was them
“doing” queer pedagogy outside of the space we created together.
74 M. PRESTON
REFERENCES
Britzman, D. P. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight.
Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165.
Feinberg, L. (1994). Stone butch blues. Los Angeles: Alyson Books.
Gibson, A. (2007). Andrew. In A. Olsen (Ed.), Word warriors: 35 women leaders
in the spoken word revolution (pp. 219–221). Emeryville: Seal Press.
Halerpin, D. M. (2003). The normalization of queer theory. Journal of
Homosexuality, 45, 339–343.
Whitlock, R. U. (2010). Getting queer: Teacher education, gender studies, and
the cross-disciplinary quest for queer pedagogies. Issues in Teacher Education,
19(2), 81–104.
Encounter Stories
Janna Jackson Kellinger and Danné E. Davis
While the notion of the intersectionality of identities within a person is

one that has been explored by queers of various descents, encounter sto-
ries, or narratives that make connections between personal identity experi-
ences and the identity experiences of other people, explore intersections
between the self and the other. Encounter stories build from the notion
of counterstories, or personal stories that challenge the white heterosexual
male-privileged meta-narratives. Counterstories helped shape a generation
of researchers, particularly those steeped in Critical Race Theory, as they
used stories of previously unheard voices to challenge the privileged nar-
ratives that often frame educational and other systems in the USA and
around the world. Encounter stories further the aim of counterstories by
offering a means to tap into our own identities to deepen our understand-
ings of the realities of other people. As narratives that explore ways in
which to better understand other people by understanding oneself and
vice versa, encounter stories reframe and reposition the hegemonic meta-
J. Jackson Kellinger ( )
University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA
D.E. Davis
Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA

76 J. JACKSON KELLINGER AND D.E. DAVIS
narratives that pit nonmajority against nonmajority allowing readers to

connect across identity borders.
The use of encounter stories is not new. For example, queer teachers in
McNaron’s (1997) and Jackson’s (2007) studies report an increased sensitiv-
ity toward and awareness of oppressed people, which participants attributed
to experiencing discrimination first hand. However, naming such parallels
and using encounter stories intentionally to foster shared understandings
and honor differences is a practice we introduced in “Teacher Educators
Using Encounter Stories” (Davis and Kellinger 2014). The use of encoun-
ter stories by teacher educators in particular recognizes that studying one’s
own classroom only tells part of the story. What teachers bring to the class-
room is another critical component of the story; who we are as people, what
we experience, and our reflections on those experiences shape our identi-
ties as educators and our practice within our classrooms: “Personal history
… provides a powerful mechanism for teachers wanting to discern how
their lived lives impact their ability to teach or learn” (Samaras et al. 2004,
p. 905). Unlike the descriptions of self-study in education that begin with
reflecting on a teacher/teacher educator’s practice, our use of encounter
stories begins with examining experiences outside of the classroom and how
these experiences inform teaching practices. In this way, encounter stories
employ the outward and inward gazes Ellis and Bochner (2000) advocate:
Back-and-forth autoethnographers gaze, first through an ethnographic

wide angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their
personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that
is moved by and may move through, refracts, and resist cultural interpreta-
tions. (p. 739)
Encounter stories “resist cultural interpretations” by making personal con-

nections between self and other; however, it is important that they also
resist the temptation to feel as though one completely understands the
other. As such, we take the stance that encounter stories are like asymp-
totes—curves that continually approach the x axis without ever touching it.
While self-study allows teacher educators to connect the details of their
experiences with their practice, Griffiths et al. (2004) point out some of
the difficulties conducting self-study:
Many self-study research projects do not address issues of social justice,

yet self-study is rich with possibilities for addressing these types of issues.
ENCOUNTER STORIES 77
A self-study does not require asking questions about social justice, but
moral and political issues are swimming just below the surface if one cares,
or dares, to look. We don’t always want to look. These are hard questions.
Issues related to diversity, difference, equity, discrimination, and injustice
have no easy answers and often implicate us personally, at least partially, in
the injustices we uncover. Self-studies of a more instrumental character are
safer, but can we afford, in teacher education these days, to choose to be
safe? (p. 656)
By expanding self-study to include making connections with other people,

“our use of encounter stories takes on this important work of examining
one’s self in relation to other people, using identities as bridges instead of
as barriers” (Davis and Kellinger 2014, p. 14).
As we state in our article:
We recognize that telling encounter stories requires courage but also some
vulnerability and that this, by its very nature, involves risk: “Looking at our-
selves up close, we risk exposing our insecurities, revealing bad habits and
dangerous biases, recognizing our own mediocrity, immaturity, or obsessive
need to control” (Nielson 1994 quoted in Samaras et al. 2004, p. 911).
True change, however, requires hard work: “Self-exploration is challenging
because we rarely want to face the parts of ourselves that are in conflict or
that do not satisfy us. But it is exactly these parts that can act as catalysts for
meaningful change” (Arhar et al. 2001, p. 61). This change is not isolated
to the self because “when we write vulnerably, we invite others to respond
vulnerably” (Tierney 2000, p. 549; Davis and Kellinger 2014, p. 14)
Modeling this vulnerability invites others to respond and use critical reflec-
tion in their own development:
It takes courage to expose our shortcomings, to make ourselves vulnerable

… [but it] model[s] for [our students] the process of life-long learning, and,
most importantly, to help them feel safe enough to take similar risks neces-
sary for their own development. (LaBoskey 2004, p. 858)
Thus, encounter stories speak to larger issues of identities by making

connections between the self and the other. Teacher educators can use
these connections to reflect on their teaching while simultaneously model
reflection as professional practice for in-service and pre-service teachers. In
turn, these pre-K–12 teachers can use encounter stories to foster reflection
in their students.
This reflective work enables teachers and teacher educators to question

their perspectives and assumptions behind their narratives and how those
stories frame our teaching. Thus,
We “use the ‘self’ to learn about the other” (Ellis and Bochner 2000, p. 741)
and use the other to learn about the self. This takes work as Connolly and
Noumair (1997) explain that historically “differences such as race, gen-
der, and sexual orientation of ‘others’ are often used as receptacles for the
unwanted aspects of oneself” (p. 322), a process that is mostly unconscious.
Moreover, our use of encounter stories draws on the ways in which autoeth-
nography situates a multi-layered self within the context of a multi-layered
culture as the self both enacts and resists this culture. Encounter stories
counter the myth that “written and verbal texts constituting the educative
process are raceless, unbiased syntheses of a ‘common culture,’ and that the
beliefs and values embedded in teachers’ and students’ racial identities have
no bearing on the knowledge that they mutually construct in the teach-
ing/learning process” (Brown 2002, p. 145). Mindful of Cochran-Smith
and Lytle’s (1999) statement that “teaching and thus teacher learning are
centrally about forming and re-forming frameworks for understanding prac-
tice” (p. 290), encounter stories are a way to develop another framework,
whereby teachers and teacher educators view their life experiences as a win-
dow into the world of others and vice versa. (Davis and Kellinger 2014,
p. 15)
Encounter stories examine how these reflective practices play a role in

shaping understandings about identity, defining who we are as teacher
educators, and how these beliefs play out in our classrooms. Bochner and
Ellis (2006) assert that the aim of autoethnography is to “make sense of
our lives” (p. 118) and defend storytelling as an element of autoethnog-
raphy as a means to this sense-making: “Sense-making involves turning
experiences into stories that theorize experience. The autoethnography
theorizes experience as a storyteller. The story is a theory” (p. 116). We
propose that encounter stories are uniquely situated to do such theorizing
as they aim to make connections across identities without erasing differ-
ences. Making these connections across identities can provide insights that
influence our work as teacher educators. For example, an experience with
homophobia outside the classroom by Janna, one of the authors, allowed
her to better understand how prior discussions of race and racism within
her classroom “intellectualized” race and racism in ways that erased the
personal nature of race and racism, which is described by a student in this
quote: “It is reality for us. It is not a discussion, not a theory. It is flesh and
blood” (Vanstory quoted in Cochran-Smith 2000, p. 173). By thinking
about how her own queerness pervades her life, she also realized that these
“race discussions” demonstrated her white privilege of only discussing
and thinking about race and racism during designated times and places.
Instead of intellectualizing discussions of identities in the classroom, the
real work of addressing discrimination cannot begin until teacher educa-
tors “get personal” (p. 171). Encounter stories are a productive avenue for
this as they open up spaces for possibility and growth.
While encounter stories allow us to “get personal,” they can also help
us as scholars and activists to make conceptual connections among oppres-
sions. As we pointed out in our previous work (Davis and Kellinger 2014):
Currently, queer scholars are shifting from focusing on victim narratives of

queer youth to stories of empowerment and resilience. Similarly, the wom-
en’s movement struggled with getting stuck in the victim narrative—a very
useful narrative as it highlighted the need for attention to women’s issues,
but, on the other hand, it perpetuated the myth of women as needing to be
rescued. Ironically, a useful tactic for one phase of fighting for civil rights
turns into a detriment in the next phase. Another example of this is token-
ism—the act of including underrepresented groups simply for the sake of
appearances. Currently this is decried in the black community but for queer
people, an organization desiring queer representation in their boardrooms
can serve as a recognition that queer people count. Despite the many differ-
ences queer people, blacks, Jews, women, and others face, we can learn from
commonalities across our fights for equality. (p. 7)
Encounter stories are one way to share, understand, and learn from
the oppressive experiences of other people. Our insights gleaned from
our personal encounter stories and the narratives of others have naturally
seeped into our research. Danné, whose own personal history of growing
up black spurred her initial interest in uses of multicultural literature in
elementary classrooms, has now expanded her analysis to include queer
representations (and lack thereof) in children’s literature. Janna’s exami-
nation of the “It Gets Better Project” campaign as a perpetuation of the
victim narrative also included an analysis of messages about what consti-
tutes success. In both instances, encounter stories influence our scholar-
ship and teacher education practice.
Encounter stories have also enabled us to be “activist scholars.” Mindful
of the superficial attention given to her blackness by many white, straight,
female elementary pre-service teachers and, on occasion by similarly situ-

ated colleagues, Danné notes both groups’ apprehension to queerness.
Their unresponsiveness has inspired three initiatives. One initiative entailed
leading elementary education department colleagues in a semester-long
discussion of Rita Kissen’s (2002) Getting Ready for Benjamin: Preparing
Teachers for Sexual Diversity in the Classroom. The range of chapters posi-
tioned her co-workers to weigh personal assumptions against the reality
of sexual diversity among schoolchildren and their parents. As a result of
the book group, a colleague invited Danné to share information about
queer children’s literature. For nearly five years, as a guest lecturer she
has presented a survey of young children’s queer literature to pre-service
students enrolled in a multicultural literature course. Subsequently, those
early interactions prompted designing and administering a five-item ques-
tionnaire to determine pre-service teachers’ awareness of the suitability,
scope, and sequence of queer literature in elementary contexts. Danné’s
responsiveness is the result of aligning her firsthand marginalized experi-
ences with lessons of heterosexism discovered through previous encounter
stories.
Janna successfully used encounter stories as a methodology to critically
question the use of the confederate flag as part of the cover art on an
edited book in which she was one of the authors. She challenged the art-
work by describing how others might see it and think “Even the queers in
the South are racist.” When none of the authors of color responded to the
ensuing e-mail conversation among the other authors, Janna employed
encounter stories to try to understand why this might be the case. By
imagining how she would feel had the art been homophobic in nature and
shown up in something as personal as an e-mail inbox, she was able to craft
a response speculating on the silencing impact on the authors of color. In
these ways and others, we have been able to use encounter stories as activ-
ism in the realm of scholarship.
Encounter stories have also been useful as a means of reflecting on and
enhancing our teaching. Because sexual orientation and race frame our
identities as teacher educators, we have and are devising ways in which to
recognize these identities influence our teaching and to model meaningful
ways of incorporating sexual orientation and race into classroom tasks and
topics by tapping into our own encounter stories. Drawing on Northfield
(1996), we recognize that “a central component of validity in self-study of
teacher education practices is whether such study results in a reframing of
practice by the teacher” (quoted in Hamilton and Pinnegar 2000, p. 239).
This also extends beyond the classroom. Prior to her activism through
queer children’s literature, Danné underwent Safe Space Project train-
ing to designate her office as a welcoming space for queer students. On
one such occasion, Danné developed a deeper understanding of a bisexual
student trying to situate herself within the campus community by making
parallels between her own experiences as an African American trying to
position herself at a university where the students, faculty, and community
are predominantly white and straight. These experiences involved figuring
out how to interact with people from conventional backgrounds, attempt-
ing to establish a support system, and confronting discrimination. This
ability to empathize is the crux of critically reflecting for understanding.
Both of us fold gender, race, and sexuality into our work as teacher
educators in all our classes, but we find that encounter stories allow us
to do so in deeper, more thoughtful, and meaningful ways. For both of
us, that means going from treating race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
and other identities as isolated silos to making connections among identi-
ties. This involves rewriting our syllabi in ways that reflect these deeper
connections. Instead of having classroom sessions and readings devoted
to “race,” “gender,” “class,” and so forth, rather we have sessions about
the “accumulation of privilege,” “messages in the media,” and the “social
construction of identities,” concepts that cut across all identities.
In addition, we constantly push our peers, our students, and ourselves
to broaden notions of diversity. For example, during a new teacher ori-
entation, Danné challenged a participant’s heteronormative statement,
something she would not have thought to do, or even recognized the
heteronormativity of his statement, without having previously reflected
on how US society’s tendency to view whiteness as the default parallels
heteronormative assumptions. While oppression based on race and eth-
nicity are generally recognized by our peers and students, oftentimes we
find ourselves challenging colleagues’ and students’ perspectives of mul-
ticultural education, and strive to extend and deepen their interpretation
of diversity toward establishing connections with lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, intersex, and queer perspectives.
We routinely remind peers, students, and ourselves about the danger in
making assumptions about race, gender, and sexual identity as we actively
challenge our own assumptions. Even in writing this piece, we noticed
our use of words such as “marginalized” which position the dominant
group, that is, white male heterosexual, as central. Despite our own criti-
cal reflections, we do sometimes find ourselves subject to the white male
hegemony—a smog (Tatum 1997) that we have breathed for far too long.
However, we have been able to use encounter stories as an antidote as it
decentralizes heterosexual whiteness by allowing people to make connec-
tions among underrepresented groups instead of being in constant com-
parison to the perceived norm. Sharing insights such as these and giving
space for our students to share theirs has been an invaluable pedagogical
tool for both of us.
One experience that Janna had exemplified the power of using encoun-
ter stories in the classroom as sharing her own encounter stories changed
“an emotionally charged situation into a productive and honest conversa-
tion” (Davis and Kellinger 2014, p. 11) as described in our original article.
Several students were upset by an incident that occurred in the previous
class so Janna used her own encounter stories to “open up the conversa-
tion and turn the discussion from an intellectual one into one in which
students openly shared their feelings and listened to one another” (Davis
and Kellinger 2014, p. 12). This was reflected in the course evaluations in
which students said Janna was a “risk-taker” who “makes the environment
comfortable for everyone to share opinions.” As we pointed out,
Like Berry and Loughran (2002) discovered, “we came to see an atmosphere
of trust could be established immediately if we showed we were prepared to
demonstrate our own vulnerability before asking student teachers to do the
same” (p. 18). Taking this risk by modeling her own struggles helped push
her students to move outside of their comfort zones, prompting students
to traverse across their own personal borders. (Davis and Kellinger 2014,
p. 12)
Teaching students to draw on their affirming and unfavorable encoun-

ters with people unlike them is useful, particularly in an era when the teach-
ing force is primarily white and ostensibly heterosexual and the student
population is becoming increasingly diverse. Helping pre-service teachers
reflect upon their border crossing encounters is one way to prepare them
to teach diverse populations and attend to social justice. Thinking about
the lives of other people develops empathy, which we define as the ability
to seriously consider and begin to deeply understand what it is like to be
someone else. As we interact with our students, many of whom differ from
our own sexual and racial identities, we experience various narratives, cross
unique borders, establish new connections, and make discoveries that
expand and deepen our understandings of our students, our world, and
ourselves. As teacher educators, we recognize the importance of affording

our pre-service teachers the same opportunities to connect and grow.
Our overarching goal for encounter stories is to model for students how
reflection fosters understanding and develops empathy for other human
beings. We acknowledge that other authors, notably Cochran-Smith
(1995), Palmer (1998), Pinar (1993), and Schön (1987) have explored
how reflecting on one’s identity improves teaching. However, our work
builds on extant examinations of how contemplation on one’s identity can
shed light on people’s sexual and racial identity experiences.
With the increasing globalization of society, expanding notions and
ways of being, and the escalating tensions that often surround identity, the
empathy generated through encounter stories could be the most impor-
tant lessons pre-service teachers learn—an understanding scholars are
beginning to recognize (see Liu 2014).
The individual empathy resulting from encounter stories can enhance
collective conversations across the fields. Similar to sociopolitical activ-
ists who strive to reach across communities, academics too need to find
ways to break free of their disciplinary silos. While today interdisciplin-
ary discourses about privilege, identity, and race are expected and sought,
queer identities and perspectives are less likely in the mix. Encounter sto-
ries are intended to counter academic ghettoization of race and sexuality;
encounter stories bridge the fields of queer studies and critical race theory.
More importantly, though, encounter stories offer a means to connect the
personal to the political and back to the personal as it employs empathy
as political, reflective, and academic tool. In other words, it helps bring
people together while honoring differences.
REFERENCES
Arhar, J., Holly, M., & Kasten, W. (2001). Action research for teachers: Travelling
the yellow brick road. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Berry, A., & Loughran, J. (2002). Developing an understanding of learning to
teach in teacher education. In J. Loughran & T. Russell (Eds.), Improving
teacher education practices through self-study (pp. 13–29). London:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Bochner, A., & Ellis, C. (2006). Communication as autoethnography. In
G. Sheperd, J. S. John, & T. Striphas (Eds.), Communication as…perspectives
on theory (pp. 110–122). Thousand Oakes: Sage.
Brown, E. (2002). The (in)visibility of race in narrative constructions of the self.

In J. Loughran & T. Russell (Eds.), Improving teacher education practices
through self-study (pp. 145–160). London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Cochran-Smith, M. (1995). Uncertain allies: Understanding the boundaries of
race and teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 65(4), 541–570.
Cochran-Smith, M. (2000). Blind vision: Unlearning racism in teacher education.
Harvard Educational Review, 70(2), 157–190.
Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice:
Teacher learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24,
249–305.
Connolly, M., & Noumair, D. (1997). The white girl in me, the colored girl in
you, and the lesbian in us: Crossing boundaries. In M. Fine, L. Weis, L. C.
Powell, & L. M. Wong (Eds.), Off white: Readings on race, power, and society
(pp. 322–332). New York: Routledge.
Davis, D., & Kellinger, J. (2014). Teacher educators using encounter stories. The
Qualitative Report, 19(10), 1–18.
Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity:
Researcher as subject. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualita-
tive research (pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Griffiths, M., Bass, L., Johnston, M., & Perselli, V. (2004). Knowledge, social
justice, and self-study. In J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, &
T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher
education practices (pp. 651–708). Dordecht: Kluwer.
Hamilton, M. L., & Pinnegar, S. (2000). On the threshold of a new century:
Trustworthiness, integrity, and self-study in teacher education. Journal of
Teacher Education, 51(3), 234–240.
Jackson, J. (2007). Unmasking identities: An exploration in the lives of gay and
lesbian teachers. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Kissen, R. (2002). Getting ready for Benjamin: Preparing teachers for sexual diver-
sity in the classroom. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
LaBoskey, V. K. (2004). The methodology of self-study and its theoretical under-
pinnings. In J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, & T. Russell (Eds.),
International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices
(pp. 817–870). Dordecht: Kluwer.
Liu, S. H. (2014). Effects of educational news stories on the beliefs of Taiwanese
teacher education students. Asia-Pacific Social Science Review, 14(2), 80–93.
McNaron, T. (1997). Poisoned ivy: Lesbian and gay academics confronting homopho-
bia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s
life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pinar, W. (1993). Notes on understanding curriculum as a racial text. In

L. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in edu-
cation (pp. 60–70). New York: Routledge.
Samaras, A., Hicks, M., & Berger, J. G. (2004). Self-study through personal his-
tory. In J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, & T. Russell (Eds.),
International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices
(pp. 905–942). Dordecht: Kluwer.
Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for
teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Tatum, B. D. (1997). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? And
other conversations about race. New York: Basic Books.
Tierney, W. (2000). Undaunted courage: Life history and the post-modern chal-
lenge. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research
Faculty Trainings
Barbara Jean A. Douglass
Studies show that many school of education faculty are uncomfortable

with or lack knowledge about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and
queer (LGBTQ) issues, yet are more prone to include LGBTQ content
in their courses with institutional supports. Facing accreditation standards
that include cultural competency requirements, schools of education have
a responsibility to prepare their students to work with and provide safety
for all students, including LGBTQ students. This chapter will discuss my
national survey of schools of education deans, highlighting the need to
bring queer studies into schools of education, to help break the cycle of
marginalization and invisibility of LGBTQ issues in schools of education.
The purpose of the study was to examine the institutional supports that
exist for faculty in US schools of education to receive training on LGBTQ
issues. This national online survey of deans of schools of education gath-
ered data from 279 deans from colleges and universities across the USA,
including private, public, faith-based, and historically black colleges and
universities, with deans responding from 46 of 50 states. The study found
that many schools of education faculty are continuing to be undertrained
in LGBTQ issues, with few institutional supports in place to provide them
B.J.A. Douglass ( )
Nazareth College, Rochester, New York, USA

88 B.J.A. DOUGLASS
training. Additionally, almost one-fourth (24.1 %) of schools of education

offered no training to faculty on LGBTQ issues.
These issues are important in light of ongoing data concerning the cli-
mate of intolerance around LGBTQ issues in schools. Homophobic and
gender nonconforming bullying are contributing to increased rates of sui-
cide among teens and preteens as young as ten years old (Diaz and Kosciw
2009). High school and middle school teachers, school counselors, and
administrators are key professionals in the school who can make a differ-
ence in the lives of students—yet studies suggest that school personnel are
not receiving the necessary training to be effective advocates for LGBTQ
youth (Diaz and Kosciw 2009). If schools of education were equipping
their students with information about LGBTQ issues in their courses, it
is likely that their graduates would be better able to interrupt bullying,
model culturally competent behavior, institute important safety policies,
and create safer schools for all their students, staff, and faculty. The major-
ity of students who do receive this course content are receptive to this
information, tend to utilize what they have learned, and, in their pro-
fessional careers, advocate for LGBTQ youth (Clark 2010). Additionally,
“the presence of a single, supportive adult in the lives of LGBTQ students
at school is the most critical factor in increasing the LGBTQ students’
sense of safety and academic achievement and in decreasing the risk of
truancy or dropping out” (Kim 2009, p. vi).
Similarly, colleges and universities are failing to provide LGBTQ stu-
dents with an environment that research suggests is necessary for learning
and scholarship (Rankin et al. 2010).
THE NEED FOR INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTS

Sherwin and Jennings’ (2006) survey of schools of education suggested
that the decision to include LGBTQ content in school of education
courses was primarily left up to individual faculty. Faculty who did not
include LGBTQ issues in their courses often failed to do so because of
their lack of knowledge or lack of interest in the area, perceived lack of
student interest, or perceived fear of protest by the university, the stu-
dents, or the community (Sherwin and Jennings 2006). Notably, faculty
who showed a lack of interest in LGBTQ issues tended to report being
“unknowledgeable” in this area (Jennings 2007). These findings suggest
that faculty may be undertrained in LGBTQ issues, which is also reflected
in the lack of LGBTQ content in their courses.
FACULTY TRAININGS 89
Shaw et al. (2009) showed that faculty need administrative support to

sustain increased diversity efforts, especially surrounding LGBTQ issues. In
their study, they conducted focus groups of college faculty to inquire how
faculty might help their students think about issues of difference, power,
and privilege through a series of questions. In the workshops, challenging
faculty members to apply concepts of systems of oppression specifically to
their disciplines was the key to encouraging curriculum transformation.
They concluded that “Curriculum transformation requires the full sup-
port of the institution and the individual” (Shaw et al. 2009, p. 6).
CHALLENGING HOMOPHOBIA AND HETEROSEXISM

Educational systems and teaching practices constitute and perpetuate dis-
crimination toward LGBT students and faculty, through the institutional-
izing of hegemonic discourses of heterosexuality and gender (McClean
1996; Britzman 1997). Thus, it is crucial that teachers actively challenge
the inequities perpetuated by broader sociocultural and political struc-
tures. “[B]ecause all teachers at some stage of their careers are going to
be teaching gay/lesbian students—they need to be aware of the classroom
practices that perpetuate homophobia” (Ferfolja and Robinson 2004,
p. 14). Colleges and universities who provide institutional supports for
their faculty to receive training in LGBTQ issues have the opportunity to
challenge these oppressive systems. In schools of education, along with
providing educational curriculum and experiences to their students to
meet cultural competency requirements, they are also instilling in their
students a foundation of equity and social justice pedagogy. I assert that
schools of education have a legal and moral obligation to provide the nec-
essary training to their students regarding LGBTQ issues, so as to equip
them with the knowledge they will need to create socially just and safe
schools. But how can faculty ensure their students are culturally compe-
tent if they, as faculty, are not culturally competent?
SAFE SPACE TRAINING

“Safe Space” training is a training model from Gay, Lesbian, and Straight
Education Network (GLSEN), which is a national organization, founded
in 1990, that helps provide training to high schools and colleges on Safe
Space training, as well as helps high schools start Gay/Straight Alliances,
which are support groups for LGBTQ and straight youth. Safe Space
90 B.J.A. DOUGLASS
trainings are usually two-hour trainings—although some are three to four

hours in length—on how to create safe spaces on campus for LGBTQ
students, staff, and faculty. They typically cover issues such as terminol-
ogy, current statistics on bullying and harassment, university policy, how
to be an ally, and how to create a more welcoming school for all. They
also may explore scenarios designed at interrupting homophobia and het-
erosexism, and may include a speaker’s bureau panel of LGBTQ students,
staff, and/or faculty. These trainings have been incorporated into high
schools and colleges nationwide as the standard model for “LGBTQ 101”
training, although specific training content may vary slightly. Safe Space
trainings in higher education are usually provided by LGBTQ student
groups on campus, often in conjunction with a faculty member, and some-
times with LGBTQ graduate student groups. Usually these trainings are
advertised and aimed at student participants, although staff and faculty
are welcome to attend. As more LGBTQ Resource Centers and Offices
for LGBTQ concerns sprout on campuses nationwide, Safe Space train-
ings have become more operationalized and become a regular part of the
campus culture and curriculum, including advertising the trainings to staff
and faculty. However, Safe Space trainings are not usually mandatory for
faculty (Kosciw et al. 2014).
In light of the fact that faculty are often not required to attend Safe
Space trainings, or diversity trainings, several questions emerge: Do
schools of education—or universities in general—offer LGBTQ training
to faculty? For faculty who wish to receive this training, where can they
go? Are there cultural competency requirements for faculty? Since stud-
ies show that faculty are more likely to include LGBTQ content in their
courses where there is institutional support (or perceived institutional sup-
port) (Jennings 2007), it is important to understand what opportunities
and institutional supports exist for faculty to become better trained in
LGBTQ issues.
MAIN FINDINGS OF THE STUDY

Results of this national online survey of deans showed that 54.5 % of
schools of education offered Safe Space training to faculty and 58 % offered
diversity training that included LGBTQ content—however, 43.7 % of
those diversity trainings included 10 % or less LGBTQ content. Training
to learn about LGBTQ curriculum was offered in 37.7 % of schools of
education. For those schools that did offer training in diversity topics that
included LGBTQ issues, deans reported that 33.7 % of schools mandated

attendance, and incentives to attend were offered in 11.6 % of colleges. In
schools of education that did not offer Safe Space training, but did offer
diversity training, those diversity trainings included 10 % or less LGBTQ
content in 50.7 % (n = 34) of those schools. This is important, as this means
that these schools (schools that have no Safe Space training, but do have
diversity training that includes 10 % or less LGBTQ content) will continue
to be undertraining their faculty in LGBTQ issues, as they either do not
have access to LGBTQ-related training, or the trainings that they do have
access to are minimal in regard to LGBTQ content.
The study also found that while some deans did not know if they
offer trainings on LGBTQ issues to faculty—and further, did not know if
they had openly LGBTQ students in their school—other deans (74.1 %)
reported that they believed their faculty needed to become more cultur-
ally competent regarding LGBTQ issues. Furthermore, 69.2 % of deans
reported that they wanted to make changes for inclusion, including pro-
viding more LGBTQ-related trainings for faculty, offering LGBTQ cur-
riculum training, hiring more openly LGBTQ faculty, and offering more
LGBTQ-related research opportunities. Other findings revealed that
24.1 % of schools of education did not offer Safe Space or diversity train-
ing that included LGBTQ content for their faculty. This shows an unac-
ceptable gap in the field, as it indicates that nearly a fourth of schools of
education nationwide are omitting LGBTQ diversity training from their
faculty offerings, and suggests these schools may not see LGBTQ diversity
as an institutional imperative.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR TEACHING ABOUT DIVERSITY

Universities have a responsibility to provide accurate information about
LGBTQ issues to our students for several reasons. First, information will
help to adequately prepare them for their future careers where they will be
called to serve LGBTQ individuals and families. Second, showing students
how LGBTQ diversity is valued and experienced within different cultures
will give them the opportunity to understand intersectionality of issues of
diversity. Third, sending a message that such information is a moral and
ethical imperative will also model the social justice values that are most
often reflected in the mission statements of our colleges. Indeed, deans
reported that 71.2 % of their schools’ mission/vision statements included
the terms “social justice” or “inclusion for all.”
92 B.J.A. DOUGLASS
Feminists argue that teaching is to be transformative, bringing about

social action and change (hooks 2000). By ensuring that all faculty in
schools of education are culturally competent in LGBTQ issues, institutions
of higher education will begin to close the gap on undertrained faculty in
LGBTQ issues. Social justice education offers a conceptual framework that
aids in an understanding and critical analysis of multiple forms of oppres-
sion, and provides tools for advocacy and activism to help create change in
institutions and communities. Social justice education incorporates a broad
range of sociological dimensions in teaching, and education more generally,
including attention to fairness and equity with regard to gender, race, class,
disability, sexual orientation, age, immigrant status, language, and so on
(Adams et al. 2007). One comprehensive national study found that faculty
emphasis on diversity in courses has positive effects on openness to racial
understanding and overall satisfaction with college (Astin 1993). A main
goal of social justice education is to disrupt, in educational contexts, domi-
nant paradigms and hegemonic forces, and encourage marginalized voices
to be heard, valued, and empowered. “What is omitted from our curricu-
lum is as important as what is included. Thus, the need to provide faculty
with the necessary skills and tools to address sensitive issues and resistance
is paramount in our quest to ensure culturally responsive and competent
educators” (McHatton et al. 2009, p. 133).
While LGBTQ lives and voices have historically been written out of
textbooks or been marginalized, institutional supports for faculty to
become trained are not uniformly present and often are minimal or non-
existent. Institutional supports remain a top priority for faculty to become
more culturally competent in diversity issues. “Diversity efforts require
intentionality if diversity is to be linked to core institutional processes”
(Smith 2009, p. 258). If LGBTQ people continue to be omitted from
our textbooks and our classroom curriculum, then schools of education
will continue to be participating in institutionalized discrimination and
oppression. If we continue to keep LGBTQ individuals, families, and
communities invisible, by keeping them out of the curriculum, then we
are accomplices in maintaining the marginalization of LGBTQ people,
including our LGBTQ students, parents, staff, and faculty.
CONCLUSION
This study ultimately sought to help school of education deans reflect on
any gaps that may exist in the training of their faculty regarding LGBTQ
issues, as studies show that faculty attitudes and knowledge regarding
diversity topics can affect students’ attitudes and knowledge (Jennings

2007). This study also showed that homophobia and institutionalized
heterosexism continue to be a significant factor in the marginalization of
LGBTQ lives and voices via the lack of trainings offered to school of edu-
cation faculty on LGBTQ issues. While GLSEN and other groups offer
training to K–12 teachers on LGBTQ issues, it remains unclear if there is
a commitment to training college faculty.
The study also showed, however, that the vast majority of deans of
schools of education acknowledged that their faculty need more cul-
tural competency in LGBTQ issues. It is hoped that this awareness can
lead to positive changes for faculty in schools of education regarding
becoming better trained in LGBTQ issues. Universities and colleges, as
well as schools of education, need to show leadership on this issue by
providing professional development training and supports for faculty
to learn about LGBTQ issues and their intersections, including giv-
ing them curriculum strategies to include LGBTQ content into their
coursework. “An approved curriculum on the subject [LGBTQ issues]
would enable teachers to feel less vulnerable to parents and administra-
tors” on these issues (Szalacha 2004, p. 235). Utilizing and strength-
ening Safe Space trainings for faculty is one easy way to do that. When
faculty are given the tools and the institutional supports to be inclusive
of LGBTQ issues in their classrooms, their chances of doing so greatly
improve.
REFERENCES
Adams, M., Blumenfeld, W. J., Castaneda, C., Hackman, H. W., Peters, M. L., &
Zuniga, X. (2007). Readings for diversity and social justice (2nd ed.). New York:
Routledge.
Astin, A. (1993). What matters in college?: Four critical years revisited. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Britzman, D. P. (1997). What is this thing called love? New discourses for under-
standing gay and lesbian youth. In S. de Castell & M. Bryson (Eds.), Radical
interventions: Identity, politics and difference in educational praxis. Albany:
SUNY Press.
Clark, C. T. (2010). Preparing LGBTQ-allies and combating homophobia in a
U.S. teacher education program. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26,
704–713.
Diaz, E. M., & Kosciw, J. G. (2009). Shared differences: The experiences of lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender students of color in our nation’s schools. New York:
GLSEN.
94 B.J.A. DOUGLASS
Ferfolja, T., & Robinson, K. H. (2004). Why anti-homophobia education in

teacher education? Perspectives from Australian teacher educators. Teaching
Education, 15(1), 9–25.
hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center (2nd ed.). Cambridge,
MA: South End Press Classics.
Jennings, T. (2007). Addressing diversity in U.S. teacher preparation programs: A
survey of elementary and secondary programs’ priorities and challenges from
across the United States of America. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23,
1258–1271.
Kim, R. (2009). A report on the status of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
people in education: Stepping out of the closet, into the light. Washington, DC:
National Education Association Research Department.
Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Palmer, N. A., & Boesen, M. J. (2014). The 2013
National School Climate Survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender youth in our nation’s schools. New York: GLSEN.
McClean, C. (1996). Men, masculinity and heterosexuality. In L. Laskey &
C. Beavis (Eds.), Schooling and sexualities. Victoria: Deakon Centre for
Educational Change, Deakon University.
McHatton, P. A., Keller, H., Shircliffe, B., & Zalaquett, C. (2009). Examining
efforts to infuse diversity within one college of education. Journal of Diversity
in Higher Education, 2(3), 127–135.
Rankin, S., Weber, G., Blumenfeld, W., & Frazer, S. (2010). State of higher educa-
tion for LGBTQ people, executive summary. Charlotte: Campus Pride.
Shaw, S. M., Champeau, D. A., & Amico, R. (2009). Infusing diversity in the sci-
ences and professional disciplines. Diversity & Democracy—Civic Learning for
Shared Futures, 12(3), 4–6. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges.
Sherwin, G., & Jennings, T. (2006). Feared, forgotten, or forbidden: Sexual ori-
entation topics in secondary teacher preparation programs in the USA. Teaching
Education, 17(3), 207–223.
Smith, D. G. (2009). Diversity’s promise for higher education: Making it work.
Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Szalacha, L. A. (2004). Educating teachers on LGBTQ issues: A review of research
and program evaluations. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education, 1(4),
67–79.
Families
Amy Shema
INTRODUCTION
Families are one of the most fundamental units of societies, and are critical
in the identity development of children. As such, families serve an integral
role in the formation of value systems and thinking patterns; they “serve as
a gateway through which children are introduced to the dominant social
norms” (Larrabee and Kim 2010, p. 351). According to The New York
State Learning Standards (Finch 2007), the concept of “family” is at the
core of social studies curricular content throughout the year in both kinder-
garten and first grade. Family is also revisited in numerous content strands
throughout the elementary grades and into the high school years, includ-
ing genealogy, human sexuality, and home economics, for example. As out-
lined by Larrabee and Kim (2010), the emphasis on families in educational
contexts serves at least three main curricular functions: “to understand the
function of families and their influence on individuals, to provide oppor-
tunities for students to better understand themselves and others, and to
examine the interactions between family and the larger society” (p. 352).
With such a focus on families, and because they serve as an integral influ-
A. Shema ( )

96 A. SHEMA
ence on student identity development, it is necessary that a comprehensive,

inclusive model of family, as they exist today, be explored in schools.
Exposure to diverse family constellations, the various relationships
among members, and a range of adult roles, benefits all students’ healthy
social development, regardless of their own family structure (Blumenfeld
1992; Larrabee and Kim 2010; Meyer 2012). Although families may
“look” different, all families function to meet similar goals of nurturing
the health and well-being of their members. As such, children need to
experience not only a curriculum that is representative of their own fami-
lies but also classroom instruction and discussions designed to include and
acknowledge a range of family structures because we live in a diverse soci-
ety (Blumenfeld 1992; Emfinger 2007; Larrabee and Kim 2010; Souto-
Manning and Swick 2006).
The modern American family as an institution is a social invention
that sets forth norms and values regarding family and gender roles. The
term “nuclear family” came into use in 1947 to refer to father, mother,
and children living within one household. Although family has been pro-
moted as a natural occurrence, the nuclear family, as it has been tradi-
tionally defined, is wrought with political influence and has implications.
Heinemann (2012) explains:
This hegemonic nuclear family model was not only reproduced in count-
less commercials and iconic TV series and films, it also inspired presidential
policies—welfare policies being the most notable example—as well as court
decisions and controversial press coverage of issues such as divorce, abor-
tion, same-sex marriage and women’s work. (p. 10)
Nationalism depends heavily on historical memory, since a shared past is

one of the foundations upon which national identity is based (Blumenfeld
and Devore 2014). Therefore, included in what it means to be an American
in the USA, is the perpetuation of the notion of the nuclear family as the
foundational structure behind an “American” identity (Blumenfeld and
DeVore 2014). For example, Heinemann (2012) argued that the ubiq-
uitous nature of the hegemonic family model has been used to motivate
working-class, immigrant, and minority families to aspire to a specific image.
Wrought with privilege, the traditional nuclear family has become one of
the nation’s most pronounced master narratives that intentionally promotes
a specific agenda in which white middle-class families are afforded the most
benefit (Ferguson 2007; Simoni and Walters 2001). Television shows such
as Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver depicted fabricated family units
FAMILIES 97
that still produce a nostalgic sentimentality about what family life was like
“back in the good old days.” Television shows portrayed “a plethora of
white, middle-class families showcasing simple problems” and images of
women in the role of housewife, often confronted with simple problems—
“happy people with happy problems” (Press 2009, p. 141). These images
served to reinforce a certain concept of family as normal and natural.
Traditional family organization, kinship, and vocabulary have been
established based on heterosexual family structures and gender norms.
Patterson (1995) remarks:
In heterosexual families, heavy cultural weight is traditionally placed on

biological kinship, and expectations for relationships with “blood kin” are
generally different from those for relationships with others. An important
issue among lesbian and gay families concerns the extent to which biologi-
cal relationships do or ought to affect the experiences of kinship (Polikoff
1989; Riley 1988; Weston 1991). (p. 266)
One result of this is the way in which “family” is defined determines who
is recognized and can be supported within institutional settings (Mercier
and Harold 2003). The definition of “family” impacts various services pro-
vided, institutional programs offered, research populations studied, and
legal commitments regarding families (e.g., marriage, adoption, guardian-
ship, etc.) (Heinemann 2012; Stacey 2011). Consequently, families that
do not conform to this model, for one or more reasons, are often consid-
ered non-traditional. Torrant (2011) describes that the nuclear family was
grounded in an “interlocking matrix of assumptions that, together, con-
stituted an ideology of this [nuclear] family form as natural when it was, in
actuality, a specific cultural and historical form that emerged in the West in
the nineteenth and, especially, the twentieth centuries (Collier et al. 1982;
Coontz 1992; Thorne 1982)” (p. ix). It is important to recognize how
the concept of “family” is a cultural construction, because the definition
and what “counts” as family changes over time and varies across cultures.
This two-parent, heteronormative model has been reproduced to such
an extent that it is considered to be “natural,” and thus the norm to which
other family configurations are compared. The number of heterosexual
nuclear families has been decreasing steadily over the past ten years, accord-
ing to US Census data (Kreider and Ellis 2009). For example, in 1991,
72.8 % of children lived with two parents, whereas that percentage dropped
to 68.7 % in 2004. However, due to the increasing prevalence and visibility
of non-traditional family structures, it is imperative that teachers are able
98 A. SHEMA
to recognize and include diverse family constellations in the curriculum.

Roughly two-thirds of all children in the USA will spend at least some time
in a single-parent household (Cherlin 2004), and one in four has a parent
who is an immigrant (Matthews and Ewen 2010). However, despite the
statistics, “public opinion still holds that it would be better for children
to be reared in a traditional mother-father family” (van Gelderen et al.
2012, p. 999). This is due in part to the perpetual ideological campaigns
coordinated by public intellectuals who have set up independent think
tanks and councils, like the Institute for American Values, the Institution
for Marriage and Public Policy, and the National Marriage Project, all of
which receive financial backing from private foundations (Stacey 2011).
Educational values anchored in white, middle-class values assume
that parents are heterosexual and expect families to exemplify hetero-
normativity in their attitudes, values, and gendered behaviors (Epstein
and Johnson 1998). When families do not meet certain norms, “social
policies, including educational policies, inscribe heterosexual monoga-
mous married units as the heart of the organization of the social field,
and there are punishments and restrictions for those who do not con-
form” (Pallotta-Chiarolli 2010, p. 41). These come in the form of not
being visible and included as part of class discussions, being viewed as an
anomaly during Mother’s Day and Father’s Day celebrations, and omit-
ted in paperwork, to name a few.
Although there are many different family arrangements, the tradi-
tional family model is often the only model acknowledged as valuable.
As Souto-Manning and Swick (2006) explain, the privileging of a tra-
ditional model limits the value of alternative family dynamics and “fails
to validate many parent/family actions that are important to children’s
well-being” (p. 188). Other scholars such as Michelle Fine (1994) and
Catherine Compton-Lilly (2004) have shown that schools tend to make
assumptions about families and parenting practices. When these assump-
tions affirm the cultural “norms,” many parents and families who do not
represent traditional families may feel isolated from schools, affecting both
their children and the other children in the classroom.
The exact number of same-sex families in the USA is unknown at this
time due to complexities with data collection (Russell and Muraco 2013).
However, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) states
that there are approximately seven million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-
gender (LGBT) parents with school-age children in the USA (Kosciw and
Diaz 2008, p. vii). These figures are assumed to be underestimated because
of the number of parents who would not have been included in this count
FAMILIES 99
because of various factors such as not being “out” or publically identifying

as gay or lesbian, parents in same-sex relationships were recorded as “sin-
gle” during the last census,1 or legal statutes assigned different parental
classifications. Bower and Klecka (2009) reference Pawelski et al.’s (2006)
statistics documenting that as many as ten million school children in the
USA have LGBT parents, which is a substantial number, thus warranting
research and further investigation into their life experiences.
Same-sex headed families are composed of the various demographics of
other families: single, partnered, married, and divorced. They comprise a
range of socioeconomic statuses; vary in racial, religious, and educational
compositions2; and are located in 96 % of counties in the USA (“LGBT
Families: Facts at a Glance,” 2011). According to revised estimates from
the 2010 Census, there were 131,729 same-sex married couple house-
holds and 514,735 same-sex unmarried partner households in the USA.3
Perlesz et al. (2006) comment on previous research conducted with
lesbian-headed families:
Living in a family that has changed from heterosexual parents to lesbian

mother/s is not the same as being raised from birth by lesbian parents....
Although seemingly obvious, making a distinction between the experiences
for children in stepfamilies and in de novo4 families is an important defining
feature of lesbian family experience, and a distinction that has been often
neglected in the literature. (p. 60)
Therefore, as the population of non-traditional families grows, we as a society

need to conceptualize what constitutes a family more broadly and develop
ways of having more fluid definitions of what it means to “be a family.”
There is a growing body of literature on teacher beliefs and practices,
elementary teachers’ attitudes toward family involvement, and pre-service
teacher training. A gap, however, exists in the research about elemen-
tary teachers’ beliefs toward today’s changing family dynamics, especially
as they pertain to the growing number of non-traditional families with
LGBT parent/s. Due to the variation of family arrangements, it is no
longer appropriate to conceptualize “family” as having two biological par-
ents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and so on. Ryan and Martin
(2000) suggest an alternate definition of a child’s parents as that of meet-
ing two criteria, “they have intention to be parents, and they assume the
responsibilities and functions of parents” (p. 208). It becomes especially
important for social service personnel and for educators to have a cultural
sensitivity to the distinctions made between family members who are bio-
100 A. SHEMA
logically related, or “blood-relatives” (kin), and those who are “chosen”

(kith) family (Perlesz et al. 2006; Weston 1991). These distinctions deter-
mine who “counts” as family to the members of that specific family, and
in some cases, kith family may be more prominent in a child’s life than kin
(Folgero 2008).
Although families come in many patterns, schools tend to reify cer-
tain social norms and apply dichotomous logic, or a “Western system of
thought based on binary opposition; defined by comparison” (Pallotta-
Chiarolli 2010, p. 4) to what counts, and consequently what does not
count, as a family or families. “Texts, pedagogies, routines, behavioral
expectations and curriculum design are based on presumptions of the
[heterosexual] nuclear family as the baseline social formation,” writes
Carrington (2001). She elaborates, “We must give serious consideration
to the implications of changing family forms and changing configura-
tions of community if we are to provide educational experiences adequate
to the needs of our students” (p. 194). Roseneil and Budgeon (2004)
posit that “if we are to understand the current state, and, likely, future,
of intimacy and care, sociologists [and educators] should decentre (sic)
the ‘family’ and the heterosexual couple in our intellectual imaginaries”
(p. 135). If this does not happen, “families and individuals who are situ-
ated within and on the borders of mainstream heteronormative monoga-
mist society” will continue to be considered “deviant” “as constructed
by the mainstream Center (sic)” (Pallotta-Chiarolli 2010, p. 5). Erera
(2002) contends that since research has not been able to keep up with the
rapid increase in family diversity, much of what is discussed and taught is
still influenced by the traditional family paradigm. As a result, the lack of
material may make diverse families seem to be more threatening because
they are less visible and not included in the mainstream discourse on
families.
Kosciw and Diaz’s (2008) findings regarding LGBT-identified students
and parents in K-12 schools, as well as Larrabee and Kim’s (2010) work
focused on pre-service elementary teachers, found that same-sex headed
families are not consistently included in the curriculum. Not only are these
families not included, almost one-half of Larrabee and Kim’s (2010) par-
ticipants indicated “they would not use these familiar (sic) constellations
[same-sex relationships] as examples in their teaching, even if they person-
ally recognized these relationships as families” (p. 363).
It is difficult to redefine what counts as “nuclear” when it is so cul-
turally embedded in identity, politics, and value-laden institutional struc-
FAMILIES 101
tures. One reason can be attributed to the generational gap or lag between
teachers, parents, and students as to what constitutes nuclear. Members
of the current teaching force are of a generation that has explicitly been
taught and continue to use nuclear family in context to refer to a two-
parent heterosexual household residing under one roof. This is especially
prevalent at the elementary level, where the majority of teachers5 were
primarily raised and educated in the 1970s when nuclear families were
more common. Even though teachers know that there are a range of
family structures, some of which are experienced by their students, they
still teach “nuclear family” with a clear definition in mind (Shema, forth-
coming). Without intentionally “queering,” or deconstructing its roots
and prevalence, the concept of nuclear family remains as a fixed concept
not only in the minds of the teachers but also in the curricula taught to
students. As a result, teachers hold tremendous power in defining which
families matter and which do not, thereby perpetuating the cycle of social
construction of privileged norms and value-laden cultural practices in the
USA, while at the same time marginalizing students with alternative fam-
ily structures. These messages are received and internalized by students
through a process for which teachers are greatly responsible even if they
are unaware or unintentionally do so.
When curriculum is inclusive of the diverse experiences of a cross-
section of society, students are afforded the opportunity to learn about
people who are already in their lives, providing validation for their own
experiences. Students who engage with curricula that mirror their own
lives feel that it helps to validate them in the public space of school (van
Gelderen et al. 2012). It is important for children to see themselves
represented in the curriculum in order to foster confidence, improve
motivation, and establish healthy peer relations. However, when stu-
dents do not see their family structures represented in the curriculum,
there can be negative consequences on their identity development,
which can lead to poor self-esteem, interpersonal struggles, and low
academic performance (Casper and Schultz 1999; Ladson-Billings
1994). The benefits of expanding representations of family structures
do not only serve those from non-traditional families; as we have learned
from scholars in the field of disability studies, the inclusion of “atypical”
models benefits all students (Kluth 2003; Sapon-Shevin 2007). Likewise,
including diverse family structures increases students’ exposure to new
models, and provides opportunities to discuss issues of representation,
normalization, and inclusion.
102 A. SHEMA
NOTES
1. In the 2000 US census, same-sex partnerships were not recognized as a
parenting category, resulting in same-sex headed families as being recorded
as “single-parent” households.
2. Much of the research on same-sex headed families has focused on lesbian-
headed families; however, there are some studies that investigated gay men
raising children. See Short et al. (2007), Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgen-
der (LGBT) Parented Families: A literature review prepared for The
Australian Psychological Society, for a complete review.
3. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2010.html
4. De novo families are those who choose to have families in the context of
their own relationship (e.g., donor insemination, adoption, fostering, etc.)
(Perlesz et al. 2006).
5. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass_2004_19.asp; average age of
elementary teachers is 42.2; 16.2 percent male, 83.8 percent female.
REFERENCES
Blumenfeld, W. (Ed.). (1992). Homophobia: How we all pay the price. Boston:
Beacon.
Blumenfeld, W., & DeVore, E. (2014). The family, conservative Christianity, and
lesbian and gay youth: A review of the literature. In A. Dessel & R. Bolen
(Eds.), Conservative Christian beliefs and sexual orientation in social work:
Privilege, oppression, and the pursuit of human rights. Alexandria: Council on
Social Work Press.
Bower, L., & Klecka, C. (2009). Lesbian mothers’ bid for normalcy in their chil-
dren’s schools. The Educational Forum, 73, 230–239.
Carrington, V. (2001). Globalization, family and nation state: Reframing “family”
in new times. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 22(2),
185–196.
Casper, V., & Schultz, S. (1999). Gay parents/straight schools: Building communi-
cation and trust. New York: Teachers College Press.
Cherlin, A. (2004). Deinstituionalization of American marriage. Journal of
Marriage and Family, 66, 848–861.
Collier, J., Rosaldo, M. Z., & Yanagisako, S. (1982). Is there a family? New
anthropological views. In B. Thorne & M. Yalom (Eds.), Rethinking the family:
Some feminist questions (pp. 25–39). New York: Longman.
Compton-Lilly, C. (2004). Confronting racism, poverty, and power: Classroom
struggles to change the world. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Coontz, S. (1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia
trap. New York: Basic Books.
FAMILIES 103
Emfinger, L. K. (2007). Rethinking welcoming literacy environments for LGBT

families. Childhood Education, 84(1), 24–28.
Epstein, D., & Johnson, R. (1998). Schooling sexualities. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Erera, P. (2002). Family diversity: Continuity and change in the contemporary fam-
ily. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Ferguson, S. (Ed.). (2007). Shifting the center: Understanding contemporary fami-
lies (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
Finch, J. (2007). Displaying families. Sociology, 41(1), 65–81.
doi:10.1177/0038038507072284.
Fine, M. (1994). Chartering urban public school reform. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Folgero, T. (2008). Queer nuclear families? Reproducing and transgressing het-
eronormativity. Journal of Homosexuality, 54(1), 124–149.
Heinemann, I. (Ed.). (2012). Inventing the modern American family: Family val-
ues and social change in 20th century United States. New York: Camous Verlag.
Kluth, P. (2003). “You’re going to love this kid”: Teaching students with autism in
the inclusive classroom. Baltimore: P. H. Brookes Publishers.
Kosciw, J. G., & Diaz, E. M. (2008). Involved, invisble, ignored: The experiences of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender parents and their children in our nation’s
K-12 schools. New York: GLSEN.
Kreider, R. M., & Ellis, R. (2011). Living arrangements of children: 2009. Current
Population Reports, P70-126, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The Dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African
American children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Larrabee, T., & Kim, Y. (2010). Preservice elementary teachers’ perecptions of
family: Considering future instruction on lesbian- and gay-headed families.
Journal of Research in Children Education International, 24, 351–365. doi:10.
1080/02568543.2010.510085.
Matthews, H., & Ewen, D. (2010). Early education programs and children of
immigrants: Learning each other’s language: Urban Institute.
Mercier, L., & Harold, R. (2003). At the interface: Lesbian-parent families and
their children’s schools. Children & Schools, 25(1), 35–47.
Meyer, E. (2012). From here to queer: Mapping sexualities in education. In
E. Meiners & T. Quinn (Eds.), Sexualities in education: A reader (pp. 9–17).
New York: Peter Lang.
Pallotta-Chiarolli, M. (2010). Border sexualities, border families in schools. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Patterson, C. (1995). Lesbian mothers, gay fathers, and their children. In A. D’Augelli
& C. Patterson (Eds.), Lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities over the lifespan:
Psychological perspectives (pp. 262–290). New York: Oxford University Press.
Pawelski, J., Perrin, E., Foy, J., Allen, C., Crawford, J., Del Monte, M., & Vickers,
D. (2006). The effects of marriage, civil union, and domestic partnership laws
104 A. SHEMA
on the health and well-being of children. Pediatrics, 118(1), 345–364.

doi:10.1542/peds.2006-1279.
Perlesz, A., Brown, R., McNair, R., Lindsay, J., Pitts, M., & deVaus, D. (2006).
Lesbian family disclosure: Authenticity and safety within private and public
domains. Lesbian & Gay Psychology Review, 7(1), 53–64.
Polikoff, N. D. (1989). This child does have two mothers: Redefining parenthood
to meet the needs of children in lesbian-mother and other nontraditional fami-
lies. Georgetown Law Journal, 78, 459.
Press, A. (2009). Gender and family in television’s Golden Age and beyond.
ANNALS, 625, 139–150.
Riley, C. (1988). American kinship: A lesbian account. Feminist Issues, 8, 75–94.
Roseneil, S., & Budgeon, S. (2004). Cultures of intimacy and care beyond “the
family”: Personal life and social change in the early 21st century. Current
Sociology, 52(2), 135–159.
Russell, S., & Muraco, J. (2013). The use of representative data sets to study LGBT-
parent families: Challenges, advantages, and opportunities. In A. Goldberg & K.
Allen (Eds.), LGBT-Parent families: Innovations in research and implications for
practice (pp. 343–356). New York: Springer Science+Business Media.
Ryan, D., & Martin, A. (2000). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender parents in
the school systems. School Psychology Review, 29(2), 207–216.
Sapon-Shevin, M. (2007). Widening the circle: The power of inclusive classrooms.
Boston: Beacon.
Short, E., Riggs, D., Perlesz, A., Brown, R., & Kane, G. (2007). Lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Parented Families: A literature review pre-
pared for The Australian Psychological Society. Melburne VIC: The Australian
Psychological Society ltd.
Simoni, J., & Walters, K. (2001). Heterosexual identity and heterosexism:
Recognizing privilege to reduce prejudice. Journal of Homosexuality, 41(1),
157–172.
Souto-Manning, M., & Swick, K. J. (2006). Teachers’ beliefs about parent and
family involvement: Rethinking our family involvement paradigm. Early
Childhood Education Journal, 34(2), 187–193.
Stacey, J. (2011). Unhitched: Love, marriage, and family values from West Hollywod
to Western China. New York: New York University Press.
Thorne, B. (1982). Feminist rethinking of the family: An overview. In B. Thorne
& M. Yalom (Eds.), Rethinking the family: Some feminist questions, (pp. 1–24).
New York: Longman.
Torrant, J. (2011). The material family. Boston: Sense Publishers.
van Gelderen, L., Gartrell, N., Bos, H., van Rooij, F., & Hermanns, J. (2012).
Stigmatization associated with growing up in a lesbian-parented family: What
do adolescents experience and how do they deal with it? Children and Youth
Services Review, 34, 999–1006.
Weston, K. (1991). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Friendship
David Lee Carlson and Joshua Cruz
Friendships are unique relationships between people. They usually involve

shared intimate moments, exclusive disclosures, and mutual admira-
tion. Friendships are held together by loyalty, commitment, and connec-
tion. The term itself gets linked to and distinguished from other types
of relationships, such as friends with benefits, best friends, as opposed
to acquaintances, and just friends to name a few. Friendships are situ-
ated and declarative, and as such, are constantly in flux and negotiated.
They are situated in the sense that individuals decide how to build and
maintain their friendships. They are declarative in that individuals declare
their friendship to another person. They are continually negotiated as they
change, and in some cases, dissolve. The lines between friendships and
other types of relationships can be quite fluid. Friendships can be queer in
the sense that queer is defined here as a historically contingent positional-
ity (Butler 1993; Halperin 1995; Foucault et al. 2011) and as an action, in
its doing, or practices (Jakobsen 1998). Queer friendships operate in their
opposition to heteronormative discourses and practices as well as their
focus on pleasure. As Foucault argued in a recently released interview in
Critical Inquiry,
D.L. Carlson ( ) • J. Cruz

Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

106 D.L. CARLSON AND J. CRUZ
I believe it’s very difficult to carry on the struggle using the terms of sexu-
ality without, at a certain point, getting trapped by notions, such as sexual
disease, sexual pathology, normal sexuality. Hence the need to pose the
problem difficulty. This is why, in a way that is, at the moment, absolutely
sketchy and for which I have as yet not content, I was putting forward, if
you will the theme of pleasure, which seems to me to escape these medical
and naturalist connotations and which have the notion of sexuality built into
them. After all, there is no “abnormal” pleasure: there is no “pathology” of
pleasure. (Foucault, Morar & Smith, 2011, p. 388)
We build on this idea of pleasure as a way to escape historically debilitat-

ing discourses of homosexuality. Queer friendships focused on pleasures
like queer performativity cannot persist “without the accumulating and
dissimulating historicity of force” (Butler 1993, p. 19), but they can be
reshaped and reimagined in educational settings. As Meyer (2012) argues,
“Queer theory offers educators a lens through which they can transform
their praxis so as to explore and celebrate the tensions and new under-
standings created by teaching new ways of seeing the world” (p. 9).
Friendships can originate and blossom in many different places and in a
variety of ways, but schools and educational settings tend to foster friend-
ships due to the social nature of these institutions. Schools tend to be one
of the main places that students learn about how to build and negotiate
friendships. As Cooper-Nicols and Bowleg (2010) argue, “Many schools
are not nurturing environments for GLB youth, and most schools have
been reticent to address the issues of GLB students” (p. 17). Schools can
also be a place where students learn how to distinguish between the vari-
ous types of friendships. For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer
(LGBTQ) youth, friendships can function in much the same way as their
heterosexual counterparts, and the role that sexual relations plays in the
emergence and development between gay men and women can be a bit
complicated (Nardi 1999). Many of the same terms gay men and women
use to describe their friendships remained similar to those they used to
describe their lovers (Weston 1991; Nardi 1999). Furthermore, Nardi’s
study illustrates that sometimes the potential for sexual relationships help
gay men tell whether or not they want to just be friends or date or build a
relationship with another man. Some in Nardi’s study reported that hav-
ing sex with a friend could be very comfortable and pleasurable, while oth-
ers report they would never have sex with their friends. The lines between
friends and lovers can be both fluid and quite confusing.
FRIENDSHIP 107
The role that sex plays in negotiating the social landscape of friend-
ship seems to be a rather important marker in how gay men and women
develop their friendships. Friends can turn into lovers into friends or sim-
ply be friends from the beginning. Historically, sex among friends was
quite common for gay men (see Kaiser 2007), and the term “friend”
has been used to describe someone as a partner or lover (Nardi 1999).
Furthermore, the distinction between straight and gay men is quite stark
in that sex is a much more important factor in determining one’s relation-
ship with other gay men. Although straight and gay men employ similar
words to describe their friendships, sexual relations do not play a part in
determining their friendships (or so they say). These types of sociological
and historical studies about friendships offer insights into the relationships
of gay and straight men, and the role that sex plays in the development of
these relationships. They also illustrate the ways in which metaphors get
employed by gay men to help them negotiate a difficult situation. This
chapter takes a slightly different angle on the topics of sex, friendship, and
gayness. Rather than toeing the quotidian lines between homo/hetero
(vertical) and gender (male and female) (or vice versa, depending on the
context), we explore the liminal spaces in subjective positions engendered
in friendships (Sedgwick 1990; Sullivan 2003). We want to seize upon
the fluctuating nature of friendships and argue that they are an ascesis
(Foucault 1994a). Furthermore, we want to promote the notion that
schools can be a place where educators can “explore traditionally silenced
discourses and create spaces for students to examine and challenge the
hierarchy of binary identities that schools create and support” (Meyer
2012, p. 14).
To do this, we argue that friendships as a homosexual ascesis are rela-
tions of force between relatively free, but potentially (un)equal partner-
ships. Foucault describes ascesis as the “work that one performs on oneself
in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily one
never attains” (Foucault 1994a, p. 137). This means that friendships func-
tion as opportunities to be ongoing, inventive work on the self.
Furthermore, we employ the metaphor of the Afro-Brazilian dance,
game, martial art capoeira to highlight the various, fluid, and potential
subject positions in a friendship as a gay ascesis (Foucault 1994a). We
position the concept of friendship as gay ascesis as bodies in motion, as
friendships and relationships which are always/already-in-the-making
(Miller 2004). As Erin Manning (2007) states in her seminal work regard-
ing the relationship between friendship and Tango, “Friendship is not
about home, about identity, about ethnic similarity or cultural appurte-

nance. Friendship is that which remains unknowable potential because it
remains other, unknown, of the present yet-to come” (p. 36). We argue
that friendship as a way of life, or as an ongoing production of the self with
others, exceeds the boundaries of the sociological language and categories
typically employed on this topic. Foucault’s work on sex, sexuality, and
ethics welcomes the metaphor of capoeira because of his mistrust of iden-
tity politics, institutional modes of relating, such as marriage and family,
and his emphatic claim that power/knowledge plays a profound role in
how friendships emerge and develop. This chapter offers scholars in edu-
cation, including teachers, the opportunity to reflect on both friendships
and sexuality in a more nuanced and subtle way (Britzman in Meiners &
Quinn, 2012; Carlson 1990; Kelly 1997). Instead of looking for institu-
tional structures of gender and sexuality binaries to dictate how students
should relate to one another, this chapter argues that friendship as an
ascesis illustrated in the metaphor of capoeira, involves a strategic interplay
of bodies, desires, and pleasures. The implications for this chapter involve
reconsidering sex education in schools as well as expanding how individu-
als can relate to their bodies to build new subjectivities and new friend-
ships, and how schooling as a democratic project may instead of building
regimes of truths about sexual bodies, may aid young men and women to
be produced as “subjects of particular forms of democratic sexuality and
desire, which also means as active subjects of their own desires” (Carlson
2012, p. 175).
Michel Foucault asserted that the emergence of the homosexual into
the social field represented an opportunity for gay men and women to
be proponents of new subjectivities, new relationships based on sexual
choice rather than sexual acts (Foucault 1978, 1994b, c). As he states in
the interview, “Yet it’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that
would make us work on ourselves and invent—I do not say discover—a
manner of being that is still improbable” (Foucault 1994a, p. 137). An
ascesis involves an attitude and practices of continual working on and/or
transforming of oneself in relation with others in order to fashion a homo-
sexual life. It is an ongoing process of continual invention and reflection as
a work on oneself in relationships with others. In his interview, he offers his
readers with a few conceptual markers to explore the notion of inventing
a homosexual ascesis based on friendship. He explains, for example, that
friendship is, “the sum of everything which they can give each other plea-
sure” (Foucault 1994a, p. 136), yet promotes subverting institutionalized
FRIENDSHIP 109
forms of relationships and calls to put forth a “program of proposals”

as “dangerous” (Foucault 1994a, p. 139). Foucault endorses a continual
becoming a homosexual; an attitude that engenders a greater elaboration
of relationships and pleasures. Foucault’s focus, however, was more onto-
logical, or one that explored how men could be with other men.
Foucault contends that friendship is a concept with multiple practices
that offers a possibility for different types of relationships. It is an ongo-
ing process of engagement, is not a static experience, and the term belies
the experience of it (Foucault 1994b). Friendship, like homosexual asce-
sis, remains a process of continual invention. Foucault is skeptical about
trying to integrate homosexuality into current historical institutionalized
relationships, such as marriage, and maintains that friendship offers gay
men and women the opportunity to offer individuals rich, intense, rela-
tional experiences that would be, in Foucault’s mind, “very complex to
manage” (p. 158). The homosexual ascesis based on friendship is based
on the principle of invention and intensities, or pleasures. The homosexual
ascesis nurtures a self that is based on the multiple curricular practices that
are ongoing and continually in-the-making (Miller 2004).
It is important at this point to point out that Foucault is not arguing
that a homosexual ascesis based on friendship should strive for absolute
freedom or one that promotes a “total liberty of sexual action” (p. 143).
Instead, he argues that negotiating specific, localized constraints and
openness intensify the potential sexual or pleasurable experience1 “by
introducing a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension and a perpetual
uncertainty” (1994b, p. 152). These components of novelty, tension, and
uncertainty will be important as we link Foucault’s homosexual ascesis as
friendship with the Afro-Brazilian dance, game, and martial art capoeira
below. However, bodies and pleasurable intensities as sites for a homosex-
ual ascesis remained very important for Foucault as well. Continual self-
invention was another important component for Foucault. As he states,
“Sexuality is something that we ourselves create—it is our own creation,
and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have
to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of
relationships, new forms of love, and new forms of creation. Sex is not a
fatality: it’s a possibility for a creative life” (Foucault 1994c, p. 163). It is
through the intersectionality between the inventive aspect of sexuality and
the ongoing self-production of ascesis that homosexuality can be based
on friendship and emerge with the possibility of new subjectivities and
relationships. To illustrate this idea, we use the metaphor of the capoeira

dance, martial art, and game.
The origins and historical trajectory of capoeira are debated and rela-
tively unknown. Capoeira began as a martial art, based on the clandestine
strategy of war against oppressive Europeans who colonized and oppressed
African people in the nineteenth century. Practitioners trained to be agile,
flexible, and strong in order to use their bodies in polyhedronic and fluid
ways in order to combat the brute force of the Europeans (Downey 2005;
Almeida 1986). Practitioners learned to be deceptive in movement and
presentation and learned to rely on chameleon-like street smarts to resist
European influences as they engage in continual self-fashioning of their
inner lives based on a philosophy grounded in struggle, illusion, and sub-
terfuge (Capoeira 2006; Lewis 1992). Furthermore, capoeira is highly
improvisational. Nestor Capoeira (2002) describes this improvisation as
a “war” with the state, the state representing rigid and prescribed values.
For him, capoeira is a place of both self-exploration and exploration of
the world in general, as he contends that capoeira is a metaphor for life
itself, and the lessons learned during capoeira play have transferable value
outside of the roda (the circle in which capoeira is played). Lewis (1992)
echoes this idea, explaining that capoeira games exist as an “alternative
to the quotidian” and act as “escapes from normal life while also serving
as models for reflection on deep cultural patterns in the outside world”
(p. 6). Capoeira can be understood as a dance, a fight, a game, an art
(Capoeira 2002; Ohadike 2007; Lewis 1992), a ritual (Capoeira 2002),
and a sport (Lewis 1992).
The definition of capoeira entirely depends on those who engage in
the activity at a given time. Specifically, those doing capoeira have the
power to define it via the attitudes that they bring to the roda and the
ways that they choose to enact those attitudes (Lewis 1992). If the artists
engage in the activity aggressively, they might be seen as opponents, and
the game itself becomes a fight. If two friends enter into the game with-
out the intent of hurting one another, they might be seen as “playing,”
and capoeira becomes a game. If they choose to act out acrobatics and
flourishes, the game might become something more like a dance or an art.
Rarely, however, do players of capoeira explicitly discuss or agree to the
spirit in which they will play the game. A player must interpret the intent
of his opponent and strategically adopt an attitude and way of playing that
either compliments or effectively “fends off” that of his opponent. Given
the speed at which the game is played, this reading of the opponent and
FRIENDSHIP 111
the reaction to this reading occur almost simultaneously, and in this way,
capoeira becomes “a seamless flow of mutual interpretation” (Lewis 1992,
p. 100), as each player must engage in this reading activity in relation to
the other player.
It is further complicated by the practice of “buying the game,” which
is essentially a “cutting in.” Any player outside the roda (or circle of play-
ers) can choose to interrupt a bout of capoeira and begin a new bout with
one of the original players. The original player must immediately reassess
and respond to this new opponent. Thus, there is an ongoing interplay
between capoeira players that exists in their actions upon each other; in
their actions, players exercise a kind of power over one another in that they
must strategically react to and shape their actions/attitudes around the
actions of the opponent.
To further complicate the relationships among/between capoeira play-
ers, a tenet of the game is the concept of “malicia,” simply understood as
trickery. Because reading the other is a necessary strategy within the game,
players are encouraged to engage in physical and psychological deception
(Capoeira 2002; Lewis 1992). Players may express an attitude or emotion
that doesn’t really exist, or they may “hustle” the other player, initially
pretending to be less skilled than they truly are. This adds a new vector
to the dynamic or agonistic relationship between players; a player has to
guess at what will confuse, intimidate, or trick an opponent, and act in
accordance with this assessment. In capoeira, self-control does not simply
refer to bodily control, but the ability to understand and express assorted
subjectivities and attitudinal instantiations. Self-control refers to exercising
personal control over, manipulating, and regulating the subjective self as a
strategic means of besting an opponent.
Despite the social and interactive elements of capoeira, the game pro-
vides an avenue of self-exploration, self-expression, and self-domination.
Lewis (1992) describes the end goal of capoeira as being a state of “pure
self representation” (p. 3) wherein capoeiristas become lost in the game
itself, forgetting about time, the world outside of the roda, physical con-
straints, and even language. Ohadike (2007) explains that in African based
dances like capoeira, “the body belongs to oneself, the language by which
the body expresses itself does not have to be anyone else’s language”
(p. 12). The individual movements within capoeira and the ways that
players choose to react to one another are self directed, stylistic choices.
The movements become manifestations of the players’ current attitudes,
thought processes, and desires; it is spontaneous, inspired action for the
benefit of the player himself. When performed correctly, capoeira should

lead to what Capoeira (2002) describes as “a lust and joy of life, a feeling
for being alive” (p. 25). For some, capoeira even acts as a religious experi-
ence for those playing it (Capoeira 2002; Lewis 1992; Ohadike 2007).
A homosexual ascesis based on notions and practices of friendship as
capoeiric openings of invention entail, then, operating within sometimes
clear, but often times obscure or amorphous limits within a given space.
Friendships as capoeira are a situated style determined and chosen by the
individuals in it. The ability to shift subject positions among a dance, mar-
tial art, and a game reveals the fluidity of potential relationalities given
for oneself in relation to others. One does not have complete agency, but
negotiates limits of freedom with oneself and with others. Individuals are
relationally dependent and are able to make “a set of actions upon other
actions” (Foucault 1983, p. 220) in relation to another. Furthermore,
friendships based on intensities are able to subvert “norms” of relating.
The chameleon-like nature of capoeira and the potential for trickery offers
a gay ascesis opportunities at self-invention, a chance to alter and fashion
oneself, and more important, to use bodies and pleasures in their various
guises as a dance, in a game, and as a martial art in relation to others.
As such, a gay ascesis based on intensities offers friendships that are rich,
dynamic, complex, and creative. They offer “perpetual novelty, a perpetual
tension, and perpetual uncertainty” (Foucault 1994ba, p. 152). So much
so, that a homosexual ascesis based on friendship belies a need to liberate
one’s desires, or confess one’s sexual secrets in order to determine the truth
of oneself, but fosters a desire for ethical self-fashioning based on bodies
and pleasures with others. It defies ready-made formulas, criterions, and
protocols, and instead, generates an always ongoing process of becoming
gay, as a continual self-production guided by capoeiric openings of poten-
tial subject positions based on sexual choices. Similar to Miller’s (2004)
assertions about queer autobiography as curriculum, capoeiric openings
“can cast in new terms the ways in which we might investigate our mul-
tiple, intersecting, unpredictable and unassimilatable identities” (p. 220).
In educational settings, friendship as an ascesis as capoeira belies norma-
tive matrimonial regimes of relations and subjectivities and celebrates the
strategic and nuanced, subtle dance between individuals. The implications
for this approach to sexuality in schools is rather than preaching abstinence
only dogma or perpetuated arcane rigid forms of heteronormative rituals,
schools could aid young adults with the sometimes confusing and ecstatic
experiences associated with friendships (Fine and McClelland 2006; Linville
FRIENDSHIP 113
and Carlson 2010). People need to have an understanding of their bodies as

well as an acceptance of other people’s bodies and the various forms of plea-
sures that they may or may not experience. Students can acquire an under-
standing that there is not only physical sexuality but also physical intimacy,
ecstasy, affection, and various practices and forms of sensuality (Carlson
2012). And, more important, that all of these experiences can be employed
to build and nurture friendships. Furthermore, schools could shift the focus
from bio-political, medicalized messages of the corpus to the more sen-
sual and pleasurable style of the body (Carlson 2012; Fine and McClelland
2006; Rodriguez in Pinar 1990). This means that the terms commonly
used and the criteria employed to determine, initiate, and maintain a friend-
ship can include sensual and sexual bodily pleasures based on a personal
style of the friendship. A body engaged in ascesis and uses friendships as a
way to work on the self in a series of capoeiric choices allows students to
experiment with the body and invent a self (Carlson in Pinar 1990). Schools
can be a place to help students think through the type of individual style
of the self they want to develop, and how to use friendships strategically,
or capoerically, to help them to enact that type of style without normative
or dogmatic regimes of the body, but with personal ones based on inven-
tion and experimentation. This means to think of bodies and pleasures with
schooling as “deciding how to interact and relate to others, rather than rely-
ing on a set of prescribed norms and prohibitions” (Carlson in Pinar 1990,
p. 117). This approach expands the possible way in education to enact a
schooled subject and to continually engage in a reflective practice of free-
dom with others. One that illustrates how a queer ethical care of the self as
ascesis based on friendship becomes not simple a type of desire but generates
the potentialities for an ethical form that becomes desirable.
NOTE
1. Pleasure is not always sexual. He also talks about learning and scholarly life
as pleasurable.
REFERENCES
Almeida, B. (1986). Capoeira: A Brazilian art form: History, philosophy and prac-
tice. Berkeley: Blue Snake Books.
Britzman, D. (2012). Queer pedagogy and its strange techniques. In E. R. Meiners
& T. Quinn (Eds.), Sexualities in education: A reader (pp. 292–308). New York:
Peter Lang.
Butler, J. (1993). Critically queer. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1,
17–32.
Capoeira, N. (2002). Capoeira: Roots of the dance-fight-game. Berkeley: Blue Snake
Books.
Capoeira, N. (2006). A street-smart song: Capoeira philosophy and inner life.
Berkeley: Blue Snake Books.
Carlson, D. (1990). Who am I? Gay identity and a democratic politics of the self.
In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 107–120). New York:
Routledge.
Carlson, D. (2012). The education of eros: A history of education and the problem of
adolescent sexuality. New York: Routledge.
Cooper-Nicols, M., & Bowleg, L. (2010). “My voice is being heard”: Exploring
the experiences of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth in schools. In C. C. Bertram,
M. S. Crowley, & S. G. Massey (Eds.), Beyond progress and marginalization:
LGBTQ youth in educational contexts (pp. 15–50). New York: Peter Lang.
Downey, G. (2005). Learning Capoeira: Lessons in cunning from an Afro-Brazilian
art. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fine, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2006). Sexuality education and desire: Still missing
after all these years. Harvard Educational Review, 76(3), 297–338.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: An introduction (Vol. 1). New York:
Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1983). Afterword: The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus &
P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics
(2nd ed., pp. 208–226). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1994a). Friendship as a way of life. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel
Foucault, ethics, subjectivity and truth (pp. 135–140). New York: The New
Press.
Foucault, M. (1994b). Sexual choice, sexual act. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel
Foucault, ethics, subjectivity and truth (pp. 141–156). New York: The New
Press.
Foucault, M. (1994c). Sex, power, and the politics of identity. In P. Rabinow
(Ed.), Michel Foucault, ethics, subjectivity and truth (pp. 163–173). New York:
The New Press.
Foucault, M., Morar, N., & Smith, D. W. (2011). The gay science. Critical
Inquiry, 37(3), 385–403.
Halperin, D. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Jakobsen, J. R. (1998). Queer is? Queer does?: Normativity and the problem of
resistance. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 4(4), 511–536.
Kaiser, C. (2007). The gay metropolis. New York: Grove.
Kelly, U. A. (1997). Schooling desire: Literacy, cultural politics, and pedagogy.
FRIENDSHIP 115
Lewis, J. L. (1992). Ring of liberation: Deceptive discourse in Brazilian Capoeira.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Linville, D., & Carlson, D. L. (2010). Fashioning sexual selves: Examining the
care of the self in urban adolescent sexuality and gender discourses. Journal of
LGBT Youth, 7(3), 247–261.
Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. Minneapolis:
Meyer, E. J. (2012). From here to queer: Mapping sexualities in education. In
E. R. Meiners & T. Quinn (Eds.), Sexualities in education: A reader (pp. 9–17).
Miller, J. (2004). Sounds of silence breaking: Women, autobiography, curriculum.
Nardi, P. M. (1999). Gay men’s friendships: Invincible communities. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Ohadike, D. C. (2007). Sacred drums of liberation: Religious and music of resis-
tance in Africa and the Diaspora. Trenton: Africa World Press.
Rodriguez, N. (1990). (Queer) Youth as political and pedagogical. In W. F. Pinar
(Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 173–186). New York: Routledge.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Sullivan, N. (2003). A critical introduction to queer theory. New York: New York
University Press.
Weston, K. (1991). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Genderfication
Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones
INTRODUCTION
“That Little White Symbol”
That little white symbol.

That little white person against a blue background,
it makes me sick.
I can’t even bring myself to accept that it represents a “woman.”
How could something that is supposed to represent me
cause me so much pain?
It is a fucking sign.
I stand there outside the door

and almost every time I fight myself about going in.
I can hold it, at least until this class is over,
until the next break, until I get home.
A. Harris () • S. Holman Jones

Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

118 A. HARRIS AND S. HOLMAN JONES
This battle with myself is a painful, daily, practice.

It has come down to mind over bladder.
Finally I just go in….
I see that…the room is full.

Full of people that had no struggle like I just did.
Full of people that are already participating in my anguish.
Full of rude stares, snide remarks,
full of gasps and “oh’s,”
full of judgment…
full of assumptions that I am some perverted person,
some unthinkable monster.
“This is the ladies room.”

“I am a lady.”
She laughs as she walks out.
She doesn’t even know,
I’m a sorority girl, just like she is.
…A few seconds of peace until I face this room of pain once again.
I get up, go out to a group of new judgmental faces.
I stare at myself in the mirror as I try to feel normal in this room full of
my difference.
“Excuse me.”
I finally escape.
… No matter how many times I tell myself and everyone else who I am,
I’m faced with this, everyday, telling me that everything a woman should
be is everything I’m not.
So now I live my life fighting to be recognized as a woman who can be
herself,
I am a woman, I am a lesbian, I am a butch, and I am beautiful.
I can hold it.
This poem was written and performed by Charli Gross, a student at

California State University, Northridge where I (Stacy) taught perfor-
mance studies courses. Charli chose to stage her work in a public bath-
room in a building on the CSUN campus, asking the students in our
performance poetry class to stand up, file out of the classroom, and follow
her down the hallway and into the women’s washroom. The students and
I crowd into the small space: some stand inside the stalls, some rest their
GENDERFICATION 119
backs against the porcelain sinks, some hover in the doorway, unsure about
their presence in this binarized, gendered space. After a few moments of
silence, Charli begins. As she recites her poem, she moves through the
bodies crowded around her, looking into the eyes of her classmates, hold-
ing their gaze, asking them to be here, with her, in her shoes, and in her
discomfort, until she says, “Excuse me” and makes her way to the door.
There she turns, faces us, and delivers the closing lines of her poem, an
invitation and a challenge to see her—as a woman, as lesbian, as butch, as
beautiful. As she leaves, she asks us to hold her words—to hold her body
and her beauty and her difference. And we do.
This moment of gender performance, situated as it was within a perfor-
mance about the visibility/invisibility of genderqueer bodies in binarized,
unsafe public spaces and staged within such a space (a bathroom on the
campus of a public university) was an occasion to ask questions about the
heteronormative, assimilationist, gentrifying, and ultimately genderfying
compliance culture that makes little or no room for diversity or ambigu-
ity. It’s also a moment that challenges its multigendered audiences, fellow
scholars, students, teachers, and strangers to consider how we can make
such performances more visible and more possible in our personal, insti-
tutional, scholarly, and pedagogical lives. Like Charli, we are trying to
find ways to speak about how gender is materially and affectively policed
in educational spaces, resist(ing) a kind of gentrification of even diverse
genders that craves intelligibility, and as a heuristic for making good on
the queer studies promise to “disturb the order of things” (Ahmed 2006,
p. 161).
Genderfication as a notion and a lived experience has been present in my
(Anne’s) teaching and research for many years, since I first taught in high
schools and now in higher education. As a classroom teacher, it seemed
that I could not bring my whole self to that work due to then-fears about
queer teachers and the conflation of queerness with pedophilia and child
welfare risks. As time went by, the mainstreaming of same-sex marriage
and “It Gets Better” imperatives meant that being “gay” was no longer
the same unmentionable it had been. Yet mainstream gayness is not the
same as queer, and visibility is not acceptance. As a high school teacher,
I felt the invisibility of my gay life was a liability in the trust relationship
between my students and myself. Effective teaching and learning pivots
on trust and respect, and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer
(LGBTQ) teachers, the silence around personal life sometimes felt like a
trust vacuum, as high school students need to make their teachers intel-
ligible (Butler 1990, 2005).
Much has changed, and I enjoy some “visibility” benefits of being out
as a lesbian in an era in which my colleagues and students mostly think
being lesbian means I am just like them, but where my unmapped gender
variance remains invisible or disturbing. The encroaching conservatism of
an imaginary LGBTQ community has and will continue to be debated,
and gender diversity is not exempt. Effeminate men are often dismissed
as not worthy of respect, and masculine women are seen as threatening
or aggressive, no matter how we perform ourselves as teachers. Like Ned,
a female-to-male (F2M) trans high school teacher who participated in a
queer teachers research study in 2013, my (Anne’s) experience in educa-
tion has been that sexual diversity is precariously acceptable, but gender
diversity is largely not (Harris and Jones 2014). And while superstars like
Laverne Cox and Caitlin Jenner are bringing welcome and rapid visible
change to binary gender variance, genderqueer and nonbinary difference
remain either invisible or unruly (including packers, tuckers, and other
publicly invisible body modifications or augmentations).
Sarah Schulman (2012) has noted that mainstream scholars and publish-
ers now largely produce queer cultural criticism, which contributes to a nar-
rowing and professionalization of queer thinking and queer commentary.
We extend Schulman’s thesis to an examination of how queer gentrification
finds expression and embodiment in schools as genderfication—a flattening
out of diversity and variation, a mounting anxiety around “difference mas-
querading as sameness,” and an increasingly binarized conceptualization of
“mainstream” versus “radical” queer subjectivities. Here, we consider gen-
derfication as a process of domination and marginalization of genderqueer
teachers and students. We focus specifically on how this shift is materially
and performatively staged in and around school bathrooms and ask how,
amidst the gentrification of these spaces, we can “hide/flaunt/learn” and
make room for “variation and discovery” (Schulman 2012, p. 82).
GENDERFICATION AND BATHROOM TROUBLE

Toby Beauchamp (2009) points out that “transgender studies provide an
ideal point of entry for thinking through state surveillance of gendered
bodies” (p. 357) and the ways in which the increased visibility of queer
bodies and queer politics has created a doorway into an educational hege-
mony driven by surveillance, control, and compliance that straightjackets
GENDERFICATION 121
queer bodies in schools (Harris 2013). The discursive and performative

promise of queer theory has not, by and large, made its way into either
primary or secondary schools, and trans teachers in particular are bearing
witness to that deficit today. While the rainbow diversity of queer students
may experience a warm and fuzzy flood of “It Gets Better” encourage-
ment (for more on this, see Harris and Farrington 2014), visibly and per-
formatively queer teachers (including trans ones) remain as marginalized
as ever.
Judith Halberstam (2011) reminds us that queer studies often describe
a utopian imaginary organized around a specific kind of queerness, largely
gay and male in embodied and performative ways (p. 149), and one that
Schulman (2012) and others have argued is gentrifying contemporary
queerness (p. 41). The process of gentrification, which operates according
to an ethos of “natural evolution” toward neoliberal notions of “prog-
ress,” trades on a rhetoric of assimilation, the flattening out of difference,
and cultural and political amnesia (p. 34). Gentrification replaces complex
realities with simplistic ones both materially and in the ways we think,
feel, and move in the world (p. 36, 52). Schulman explicitly highlights
the interrelationship between urban and cultural gentrification and that
of “queer gentrification” as a gentrification of the mind—both queer ones
and otherwise.
Halberstam (and others) map the terrain of bathrooms as sites of
gender performances marked by control, surveillance, and segregation,
writing that the “bathroom problem…illustrates in remarkably clear
ways the flourishing existence of gender binarism despite rumours of its
demise” (1998, p. 22). In schools, bathrooms are the locus of emerging
and explosive performances of gender and sexual awakenings. As gender
nonconformity rises, these sites do not become less contentious battle-
grounds, but more policed, condemned, and controlled. For example,
on the heels of the implementation of California’s “School Success and
Opportunity Act,” which includes provisions for allowing all students to
use the restroom of their choice, representative Michael Kennedy intro-
duced legislation designed to block similar rights in Utah on the premise
that sharing bathroom facilities with gender nonconforming and trans stu-
dents would make trans and non-trans students alike feel “uncomfortable”
(Knox 2014).
Some argue that a gentrifying marginalization of “difference” may
in fact be growing in response to the increasing mainstreaming of some
notions of “queer culture” that aligns gay and lesbian subjects with and
as increasingly similar to heterosexuals and positions genderqueer and

trans subjects as the targets of a cultural anxiety and violence predicated
on identifying a difference masquerading as sameness (Salamon 2010,
p. 112). Salamon (2010) equates this anxiety and violence with the US
“war on terror,” noting, “we are told always to be alert because potential
terrorists [and transpeople] could be hidden among us…danger is embod-
ied as difference masquerading as sameness…[and] pre-emptive violence
is offered as the only weapon effective against such an enemy” (p. 112).
Even more insidious than the dismissal of the fundamental right to use
the bathroom under the guise of making genderqueer and trans people
feel at ease (as if holding it would be more comfortable), this debate opens
the door to a direct and violent attempt to narrowly define gender in the
Utah legislative code, effectively negating a gender diverse individual’s
right not only to use the bathroom, but also to be. The proposed legis-
lation identifies gender as “either male or female phenotype…as docu-
mented by the individual’s birth certificate” (which presents another layer
of control for undocumented genderqueer and trans people) or “signed,
written documentation from a physician…based on a physical examination
of a person’s genitalia” and does not “mean an individual’s own opinion
of [their gender]” (Molloy 2014)1. The bathroom becomes a stage for
denying the intelligibility of genderqueer and trans people as human sub-
jects; a space for asking, “under what conditions [do] some human lives
cease to become eligible for basic, if not universal human rights” (Butler
2004, p. 57)? It is also an example of the genderfication of spaces in and
over which the already dehumanizing debate about whose lives count as
lives (Butler, p. 20) is reduced, then disappeared within the obfuscating
discussion of personal comfort.
The material affects of denying, hiding, altering or in other ways con-
trolling bodily functions to alleviate other peoples’ discomfort is a recur-
rent theme in gender-nonconforming self-narratives. Coyote (2014)
writes about learning to wait “nearly all day,” to use the toilet, a painful
and harmful practice that both trans teachers and students experience in
schools (Harris and Jones 2014). The policing of gender diversity renders
the bathroom a site of surveillance—a place where those who enter must
be on the alert for the potentially gender variant interloper to move into
a personal space undetected. Keeping genderqueer and trans people out
of bathrooms—or segregating them to single-stall restrooms designated
specifically for their use—works to reassert their “irreducible dissimilarity”
from the heteronormative mainstream (including lesbian and gay people)
GENDERFICATION 123
by making and marking them as at once hypervisible bodies and invisible

subjects (Salamon, p. 112).
This play between visible and invisible typifies the experiences of many
gender nonconformists and the ways our lives are surveilled not only by
state machinery and other publics but also the ways we continue to keep
watch over ourselves. Self-surveillance is tied not only or simply to efforts
to control genderqueer and trans bodies as they pass into and through
binarized gender spaces and practices, but also to protect those bodies
from the very real threats of violence that can and do occur in public
washrooms, as documented by several surveys in which upward of 70 % of
respondents report being denied access, verbal harassment, and/or some
kind of physical assault in public restrooms (Herman 2013; Grant et al.
2011; Connell 2011). Coyote speaks to the disconnect between the need
and effort to create safe public spaces for women and genderqueer and
trans people’s experiences of violence in those same “safe” spaces:
What I do know for sure is that every single trans person I have ever spoken
to…is hassled or confronted or challenged nearly every other time they use a
public washroom, anywhere…What is always implied here is that I am other,
somehow, that I don’t also need to feel safe. That somehow their safety
trumps mine. (Coyote 2014, n.p.)
The genderfication of washrooms makes the disappearance-or-violence

binary both unrecognizable and undiscussable. Bathroom trouble is a
clear and visible example of how a genderfication makes evolving gender
diversity persistently untenable in educational spaces. And yet bathrooms
are—or can be—places where the boundaries of public and private are
blurred and where we can hide/flaunt/learn/influence the diversity and
discovery of what might be genderly possible.
HOLDING IT: STRATEGIC VISIBILITY AND BODILY

SUBVERSION
Beauchamp (2009) calls for “strategic visibility” (p. 363) to counter the
“ideals of compliance [that] are grounded in normative understandings of
race, class and sexuality” (p. 363). If bathrooms are sites where questions
about compliance culture and genderfication are asked and answered, they
are also potential sites for staging “subversive bodily acts” that critically
interrogate the “implicit norms that govern the cultural intelligibility of
sex and sexuality” (Butler 1990, p. x). In a time of genderfication, might

gender nonconforming bodies and practices become sites of “dissonant
and denaturalized” performances that lay bare the “performative status
of the natural” and the normative workings of gender itself (Butler 1990,
p. 146)?
Connell (2011) argues that gender-nonconforming and trans people
“disrupt the taken-for-granted” division of bathrooms as public spaces
through “gender transition and transgressive appearance” and as such their
presence in such spaces is “key to challenging” practices that “maintain
the gender status quo” (p. 183). The disruptive performances taking place
in bathroom stalls and in front of washroom sinks work to create “oppo-
sitional pedagogies” in educational spaces (Halberstam 2011, p. 12). In
such performances, those who are teaching (teachers and students alike)
don’t explain, but rather, like Charli, lead the way along a path, allowing
those who walk with them to “get lost,” to “experience confusion,” and
“find their own way out or back or around” (Halberstam 2011, p. 14).
She writes,
the walk to the bathroom was symbolic….my classmates were all unaware
of where they were going, why they were going there, and they didn’t have
to think twice about it….I was the one…under scrutiny…Everyone else just
got to sit back and judge my performance, which is exactly what happens
when I enter a bathroom. Everyone else judges my performance of gen-
der…. (C. Gross, personal communication, October 28, 2014)
Charli’s bathroom-based gender nonconforming performance created a

strategic intervention into the “way the audience views the restroom,”
where the bathroom is no longer “‘just a bathroom,’ [but a place that
poses] threats [and] invokes feelings of fear, isolation, and shame.” For
Charli and others, this “politics of visual contact, and the power behind
looking at someone is made apparent and is acknowledged” (C. Gross,
personal communication, October 28, 2014).
Without forgetting the violence and erasure of gentrification, we use
the work that our students and we are doing in our classrooms and schol-
arship to make visible how genderqueer and trans bodies continue to be
controlled, surveilled, and resisted. We also imagine institutional and pub-
lic places that increase, rather than flatten out queer visibility, variation,
and freedom; spaces in which there’s more room for diversity, “variation,
and discovery.” Such places can be conceived and inhabited as, in José
GENDERFICATION 125
Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) words, stages upon which utopian performatives

are played out—critical spaces-in-action that are “not here yet, a certain
futurity, a could be, a should be…that remind us that there is something
missing, that the present and presence…is not enough” (pp. 99–100). By
resisting trans marginalization while at the same time resisting the gender-
fication of our own minds and bodies, we are making public spaces safer
for all our nonconforming gendered and sexual bodies, one bathroom and
one classroom at a time.
NOTE
1. Since we wrote this article in 2015, the “debate” over the right to use the
bathroom of their choice and the attendant denial of the basic human
rights and agency of genderqueer and trans people has taken an even more
widespread and violent turn. In May 2016, eleven US states announced
they were suing over the Obama Administration’s directive that public
schools allow trans students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that
match their gender identification. The lawsuit charges that the Obama
administration has effectively turned schools into “laboratories for a mas-
sive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running rough-
shod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy
rights” (Redden 2016).
REFERENCES
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham:
Beauchamp, T. (2009). Artful concealment and strategic visibility: Transgender
bodies and U.S. state surveillance after 9/11. Surveillance and Society, 6(4),
356–366.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life. London: Verso.
Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Connell, C. (2011). The politics of the stall: Transgender and genderqueer work-
ers negotiating the “bathroom question”. In C. Bobel & S. Kwan (Eds.),
Embodied resistance: Challenging the norms, breaking the rules (pp. 175–185).
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Coyote, I. E. (2014). Fear and loathing in public bathrooms, or how I learned to
hold my pee. Retrieved from: http://www.slate.com/blogs/out-
ward/2014/04/11/transgender_in_public_bathrooms_why_does_our_
safety_always_come_second.html
Grant, J. M., Mottet, L. A., Tanis, J., Harrison, J., Herman, J. L., & Keisling, M.
(2011). Injustice at every turn: A report of the national transgender
discrimination survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender
Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Retrieved from: http://
www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf
Gross, C. (2014). That little white symbol. Unpublished poem. n.p.
Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harris, A. (2013). The Ellen degeneration: Nudging bias in the creative arts class-
room. Australian Educational Researcher, 40(1), 77–90.
Harris, A., & Farrington, D. (2014). It gets narrower: Creative strategies for re-
broadening queer peer education. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and
Learning, 14(2), 144–158.
Harris, A., & Jones, T. (2014). Trans teacher experiences and the failure of visibil-
ity. In A. Harris & E. M. Gray (Eds.), Queer teachers, identity and performativ-
ity (pp. 11–28). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Herman, J. L. (2013). Gendered restrooms and minority stress: The pubic regulation
of gender and its impact on transgender people’s lives. Los Angeles: The Williams
Institute, UCLA School of Law. Retrieved from: http://williamsinstitute.law.
ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Herman-Gendered-Restrooms-and-Minority-
Stress-June-2013.pdf
Knox, A. (2014). Utah proposal dictates transgender bathroom use. Huffington
Post. Retrieved from: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/utah-proposal-dictates-
transgender-bathroom-use
Molloy, P. M. (2014). Utah rep wants to restrict trans bathroom access, mandate
physical exams. The Advocate. Retrieved from: http://www.advocate.com/
politics/transgender/2014/01/31/utah-rep-wants-restrict-trans-bathroom-
access-mandate-exams
Redden, M. (2016). Eleven states sue US government over transgender bathroom
policy. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2016/may/25/eleven-states-sue-us-government-transgender-
bathroom-laws
Salamon, G. (2010). Assuming a body: Transgender and rhetorics of materiality.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Schulman, S. (2012). Gentrification of the mind: Witness to a lost imagination. Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Gender Policing
Elizabethe Payne and Melissa J. Smith
INTRODUCTION
Mainstream educational conversations around queer identities and educa-
tion are dominated by risk- and deficit-based interpretations of how lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience school.
That is, LGBTQ youth are understood as easy targets, victims, and different
in ways that demand their peers and teachers express tolerance and empa-
thy. The students who target them—the bullies—are understood as indi-
viduals who need school intervention to correct their antisocial behavior.
This bully/victim binary is repeatedly reproduced in published research on
school bullying. In his review of post-2010 articles addressing the “school
bully,” Duncan (2013) found that, “[w]ith very rare exceptions, [school
bullying researchers] are looking at the nature, frequency and distribution
of bullying behaviours among young people” (p. 255) to the exclusion of
contexts in which bullying may occur and the social function it may serve
within school environments. Most of this research is rooted in educational
E. Payne ( )
Queering Education Research Institute, @ LGBT Social Science & Public Policy
Center, Hunter College CUNY, New York, NY, USA
M.J. Smith
Department of English, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, USA

128 E. PAYNE AND M.J. SMITH
psychology, and the driving research questions focus on individual bullies,

why they engage in aggressive behavior, and how youth behavior can be
managed or modified to decrease the frequency of bullying behaviors. For
example, the Routledge Handbook of Bullying in Schools: An International
Perspective (Jimerson et al. 2010) encompasses various perspectives within
the field of psychology on who bullies are and why they engage in aggressive,
antisocial behavior toward peers (see Alsaker and Gutzwiller-Helenfinger
2010; Hymel et al. 2010; Pellegrini et al. 2010; Vallaincourt et al. 2010;
Espelage and Swearer 2010; Nickerson and et al. 2010). According to
this body of research, bullies’ aggression results from a child’s inability to
express empathy, inadequate socialization around positive peer interaction,
or dysfunctional family structure. The subset of bullying research specifically
investigating LGBTQ bullying focuses more on the victim than the aggres-
sor, aiming to identify correlations between being bullied and negative aca-
demic and psychosocial effects (see Birkett et al. 2009; Espelage et al. 2008;
Poteat and Espelage 2007; Rivers 2011; Swearer et al. 2008). In total, this
research paints a picture of LGBTQ bullying that implies (1) youth who tar-
get peers—LGBTQ or otherwise—do so as a result of deficiencies in their
own psychosocial development, (2) the solution to LGBTQ students’ prob-
lems in school is to decrease violence and increase tolerance or empathy for
the “different” queer students, (3) the totality of the problem is the verbal
and physical harassment and that “risk” is the result of this harassment, and
(4) the problem is brought into the school from “outside.”
The limitations of this mainstream narrative about LGBTQ youth and
their school experiences are multiple, but the bottom line is the problem
is narrowly understood in terms of the social and emotional development
of individual youth: bullies and victims. The focus of the majority of bul-
lying research is “emphatically on the pupils themselves,” and “neither
school systems nor adults are seen as part of the problem” (Duncan 2013,
p. 255; see also Payne and Smith 2013). Questions about how schools are
“providing conditions in which [bullying] can flourish” are not explored
(Duncan 2013, p. 257). Additionally, there is little attention paid to the
persistent patterns of peer targeting. Students whose genders do not nor-
matively align with their biological sex are the frequent targets of bul-
lying and harassment. These patterns indicate that youths’ targeting of
their LGBTQ and gender nonconforming peers is not “based solely on
sexual orientation, but rather from judgments about perceived tendencies
to engage in forms of expression that run counter to gender conventions”
(Horn 2007, p. 329). The further the youth fall from idealized forms of
GENDER POLICING 129
masculinity and femininity, the more vulnerable they are to bullying as

well as more severe forms of violence. LGBTQ youth are often the most
vulnerable in this system. Therefore, we call for a paradigm shift—one that
positions the aggression targeting LGBTQ and gender nonconforming
students within a broader system of gender regulation that is experienced
by all people and in all contexts.
We propose gender policing as a concept that more accurately encom-
passes the cultural phenomenon of targeting gender performances that do
not conform to binary gender norms. We argue that shifting researchers’,
educators’, and policy makers’ collective understanding of peer-to-peer
aggression from bullying to gender policing and regulation of difference
will produce new possibilities for sustainable reform efforts that target cul-
tural manifestations of hegemonic gender, rather than only focus on elim-
inating overt bullying behaviors and developing tolerance between peers
(Payne and Smith 2013). Further, gender policing resists the assumption
that LGBTQ students are doomed to be victims and, instead, encom-
passes queer identities within a wide range of gender and sexual differ-
ences that should be recognized and valued within school environments.
DEFINING GENDER POLICING

Gender policing is the social process of enforcing cultural expectations
for “normal” masculine and feminine expression. Various levels of aggres-
sion—from microaggressions (Sue 2010) to overt verbal harassment to
physical violence—are targeted at individuals whose masculinity or femi-
ninity is perceived to violate cultural standards. These cultural standards
are dependent upon “enduring hetero-normative discourses that inscribe
a linear relationship between sex, gender and (hetero-) sexuality within the
‘heterosexual matrix’” (Youdell 2004, p. 253, using Butler 1990). That
is, a child’s biological sex corresponds with cultural assumptions about
physical appearance; sexual and romantic desires; friendships; academic
capabilities; career ambitions; and myriad other talents, interests, or life
milestones. As students go about their school day, all actions are measured
against heteronormative standards, which mean constant vulnerability to
the possibility of policing from peers or adults. This policing establishes
the boundaries of “normal” gender performance. This is a sociologi-
cal approach to the problem of bullying. Pascoe (2013) argues that this
sociological framing changes the problem of in-school violence from “the
product of pathological individuals who are ill-adjusted socially, [to] the
interactional reproduction of larger structural inequalities” (p. 89). This

redefinition is significant because it “attend[s] to the social contexts in
which bullying occurs, ask[s] questions about meanings produced by such
interactions and understand[s] these interactions as not solely the prov-
ince of young people” (p. 89).
The concept of gender policing reflects the argument emerging from
the field of educational sociology that bullying is an oversimplified repre-
sentation of a complex system of social interactions through which youth
negotiates their positions within social hierarchies. Educational research-
ers who have observed and interviewed youth about their gendered social
negotiations have generated empirical evidence illustrating how hetero-
gender norms circulate in school spaces, how youth navigate these norms
within their friendship groups, and how gender norms serve as tools for
acquiring social power. Binary gender enculturation occurs through-
out childhood, and through this socialization process children learn the
“rules” for regulating others through gender norms. In her ethnographic
research on 10- and 11-year-old children’s social relationships, Renold
(2000, 2006) found that pre-adolescent girls regulated each other’s gen-
der performances in relation to the cultural expectation that girls seek
positive (sexualized) attention from boys and keep their behavior within
the boundaries of innocence and sexual propriety. That is, girls evaluated
one another’s attractiveness to boys and socially punished anyone who
was seeking male attention too aggressively. Their male peers policed one
another around standards of physical and emotional toughness. Those
who did not meet the standards of “tough-guys,” “footballers,” or were
not perceived to be “sporting competent” (2000, p. 320) were subject to
homophobic teasing. Masculinity measured as inadequate led to accusa-
tions of nonheterosexuality. The narrative of bullying does not account for
these social behaviors where there is no clear “bully” and “victim,” nor is
it possible to argue that these aggressive exchanges result from a failure in
a child’s social or psychological development.
Ringrose and Renold (2010) have argued that there is a spectrum
of “normative cruelties” that are largely viewed by adults as inevitable,
“normal,” or harmless behaviors. Significantly, these “normative” acts
of gender policing operate within the same system of gender regulation
as acts of aggression that are deemed serious enough to draw punitive
attention from adults. For instance, “play fighting” or other aggressive
play is considered normal as long as no one is physically hurt or no one
is being overtly assaulted, and boys negotiate positions in their group’s
GENDER POLICING 131
social hierarchy through this masculine competition. This is considered

to be a normal part of boys’ social development and boys are expected
(by both peers and adults) to engage in these activities or face the con-
sequence of being excluded from the group. Girls position themselves
and others in social hierarchies by evaluating one another against cul-
tural standards for physical attractiveness, niceness, and sexual propriety.
Girls negotiate peer cultures where “meanness is…part of the normative
cruelties of ‘doing’ girl” (p. 585), and the “primary way girls are socially
sanctioned to express meanness is through subtle and direct regula-
tion of other girls’ sexuality” (p. 585). Both these examples illustrate
how youth “invoke regulative discourses around sexuality, appearance
and behavior in the private spaces of their friendship groups” (p. 585).
However, just because this aggression occurs within the boundaries of
friendship does not mean it is not damaging or regulatory, and it is
critical to recognize that this low-level or “normative” policing esca-
lates to more severe or overt versions of gender-based violence when a
transgression is perceived. That is, when “normative cruelties” escalate
in frequency or severity, they evolve into the forms of pervasive, overt
violence that are encapsulated by bullying narratives.
All types of gender policing are potentially damaging, and all youth
are vulnerable to targeting. But (actual or perceived) LGBTQ youth and
girls who are perceived to be sexually promiscuous or assertive are two
groups that are particularly vulnerable to escalating violence that creates
hostile, dangerous learning environments. “Slut” and “fag” are two of
the most powerful weapons youth use to target gender transgressions
(Payne 2010; Thurlow 2001). Research indicates that these words are
not only used against individuals who are gay or who are known to be
sexually active. Instead, they mark any gender transgression that is con-
sidered egregious enough to warrant public, hurtful, and stigmatizing
punishment. For example, Eder et al. (1995) found that in middle school
culture, girls were often marked as sluts, bitches, and whores for refusing
to be dominated by boys, demonstrating assertive behavior in any con-
text, or actively pursuing boys. Marked young girls were repeatedly sub-
jected to threats and taunts. They concluded that “labeling young girls
in this manner becomes part of a continual attempt to limit their sense of
sexual autonomy and identity” (Eder et al. 1995, p. 153) and force them
into a submissive gender position. Eliasson et al. (2007) found that 14-
and 15-year-old participants’ “gender identities, sexualities and scope for
social interaction are regulated through verbal abuse” (p. 602), and their
patterns of verbal targeting “simultaneously construct gender and pro-

duce power relations” (p. 589) that reward gender-conforming students.
In other words, gender-conforming students were able to establish more
socially powerful positions by verbally targeting—and thereby separat-
ing themselves from—peers who did not conform to idealized standards
of masculinity and femininity. Similarly, Chambers et al. (2004) found
that victims were targeted for a wide variety of reasons: “because they
deviated from some other physical, behavioural or attitudinal norm such
as being overweight, shy, thin or perceived to be ‘nerdy’” (p. 404), all
infractions of normative gender. As these patterns of aggression esca-
late, adult interpretations of this behavior shift, and the aggressors are
understood to be wielding power over peers who are “weak” in some
way. The bully/victim binary (Ringrose and Renold 2010) emerges as
the primary concern and focus of intervention, while the gendered social
dynamics, power differences, and social norms that fostered this violence
are overlooked.
“Bullying” behaviors are not antisocial but rather highly social acts
that maintain the peer boundaries for “normal” gender. The concept
of gender policing allows us to see this social function. The sociological
research on peer-to-peer aggression illustrates how gender policing is
part of the day-to-day reality of children and youth, and how low-level,
gender-based aggressions circulate through all kinds of social interac-
tions and are so common that they are hardly noticeable. The minor
examples of verbal policing are perceived to be harmless and virtually
everyone is a participant. More overt targeting is an escalated, more
violent version of the same policing and is usually a persistent, aggres-
sive labeling of gender performances that are not perceived as normal in
a particular context. The low-level aggressions are often warnings sig-
naling gender performances that will not be allowed, and more violent
targeting seeks to eliminate or eviscerate the most extreme violators of
the heteronormative social code. “Because these escalated verbal acts of
aggression draw from the same cultural system of meaning and practice
as everyday gender policing—a normalized part of social life—they are
not viewed as abnormal by youth” (Payne and Smith 2013, p. 22) or
adults. This system of gender regulation reflects the heteronormative
gender lessons students learn throughout childhood and adolescence,
and those lessons must become the object of our inquiry and interven-
tion if we are going to successfully address the problem of queer margin-
alization in educational contexts.
GENDER POLICING 133
GENDER POLICING: IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH

AND PEDAGOGY
Defining marginalization and harassment of LGBTQ and gender noncon-

forming youth in terms of bullying has limited the scope of intervention to
policies and practices that directly address overt homophobic acts. Within
this narrow frame, proposed solutions have failed to consider how edu-
cational institutions assume (and/or expect) heterosexuality and gender
conformity of all students, and thus limit possibilities for exploring why
LGBTQ youth are so vulnerable to peer violence. As Cris Mayo (2014)
argues:
[B]ullying as a term does not capture the institutional scope of exclusion

that LGBTQ and other minority youth experience. Nor does the term bul-
lying itself necessarily encourage school personnel to think broadly about
exclusionary and hostile experiences students face, especially those that are
based on gender and sexual orientation. (p. 57)
Understanding in-school harassment and marginalization of LGBTQ

youth as “bullying” is now so accepted in schools that it has “gained hege-
monic status” (Ringrose and Renold 2010, p. 590) and it has become
practically impossible to understand in-school violence—targeting
LGBTQ youth or anyone else—outside “the binary logic of protection
(i.e. ‘victims’ of bullying) and vilification (i.e. pathologising ‘the bully’)”
(Ringrose and Renold 2010, p. 574).
Going forward, research needs to look beyond the experiences of indi-
vidual LGBTQ students and those who harass them. Reframing the “prob-
lem” of LGBTQ student harassment as gender policing demands different
research priorities. We need a deeper understanding of the “pervasive
heteronormative discourse and symbols of appropriate gender and sexual
relations displayed through classrooms, peer groups and extracurricular
activities” (Wilkinson and Pearson 2009, p. 543). We need to utilize that
research to design and implement new approaches to school violence that
not only address the individual acts of violence but also address school as
a cultural site that privileges heteronormative gender and sexuality confor-
mity. Exploring the possibilities for intervention and prevention with a shift
to gender policing will allow for greater understanding of strategies that
could produce sustainable change. Additionally, more research is needed on
both professional development and preservice education to prepare educa-
tors to understand and challenge gender policing in their own pedagogy

and curriculum.
Shifting the common understanding of the problem away from indi-
vidual student behavior and toward a regulation of gender difference
that reproduces systemic oppression allows researchers to examine the
multiple ways schools privilege heterosexuality and (implicitly) give their
students and educators permission to marginalize LGBTQ and gender
nonconforming children and youth. This kind of knowledge is critical for
understanding why antibullying programs, zero-tolerance policies, char-
acter education, and other dominant interventions have failed to produce
sustainable change.
REFERENCES
Alsaker, F. D., & Gutzwiller-Helenfinger, E. (2010). Social behavior and peer rela-
tionships of victims, bully-victims, and bullies in kindergarten. In S. R. Jimerson,
S. M. Swearer, & D. L. Espelage (Eds.), Handbook of bullying in schools: An
international perspective (pp. 87–99). New York: Routledge.
Birkett, M., Espelage, D. L., & Koenig, B. (2009). LGB and questioning students
in schools: The moderating effects of homophobic bullying and school climate
on negative outcomes. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 38, 989–1000.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New
York: Routledge.
Chambers, D., Tincknell, E., & Van Loon, J. (2004). Peer regulation of teenage
sexual identities. Gender and Education, 16(3), 397–415.
Duncan, N. (2013). Using disability models to rethink bullying in schools.
Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 8(3), 254–262.
Eder, D., Colleen, C., & Parker, S. (1995). School talk: Gender and adolescentcul-
ture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Eliasson, M. A., Isaksson, K., & Leflamme, L. (2007). Verbal abuse in school:
Constructions of gender among 14-to-15-year olds. Gender and Education,
19(5), 587–605.
Espelage, D. L., & Swearer, S. M. (2010). A social-ecological model for bullying
prevention and intervention: Understanding the impact of adults in the social
ecology of youngsters. In S. R. Jimerson, S. M. Swearer, & D. L. Espelage
(Eds.), Handbook of bullying in schools: An international perspective (pp. 61–72).
Espelage, D. L., Aragon, S. R., Birkett, M., & Koenig, B. W. (2008). Homophobic
teasing, psychological outcomes, and sexual orientation among high school
students: What influence do parents and schools have? School Psychology Review,
37(2), 202–216.
GENDER POLICING 135
Horn, S. (2007). Adolescents’ acceptance of same sex peers based on sexual orien-
tation and gender expression. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36(3),
363–371.
Hymel, S., Schonert-Reichl, K. A., Bonanno, R. A., Vaillancourt, T., & Henderson,
N. R. (2010). Bullying and morality: Understanding how good kids can behave
badly. In S. R. Jimerson, S. M. Swearer, & D. L. Espelage (Eds.), Handbook of
bullying in schools: An international perspective (pp. 101–118). New York:
Routledge.
Jimerson, S. R., Swearer, S. M., & Espelage, D. L. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of
bullying in schools: An international perspective. New York: Routledge.
Mayo, C. (2014). LGBTQ youth and education: Policies and practices. New York:
Teachers College Press.
Nickerson, A. B., Mele, D., & Osborne-Oliver, K. M. (2010). Parent–child rela-
tionships and bullying. In S. R. Jimerson, S. M. Swearer, & D. L. Espelage
(Eds.), Handbook of bullying in schools: An international perspective (pp. 187–
198). New York: Routledge.
Pascoe, C. J. (2013). Notes on a sociology of bullying: Young men’s homophobia
as gender socialization. QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1, 87–103.
Payne, E. (2010). Sluts: Heteronormative policing in the stories of lesbian youth.
Educational Studies: Journal of the American Educational Studies Association,
46(3), 317–336.
Payne, E., & Smith, M. (2013). LGBTQ kids, school safety, and missing the big
picture: How the dominant bullying discourse prevents school professionals
from thinking about systemic marginalization or…why we need to rethink
LGBTQ bullying. QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1, 1–36.
Pellegrini, A. D., Long, J. D., Solderg, D., Roseth, C., Dupuis, D., Bohn, C., et al.
(2010). Bullying and social status during school transitions. In S. R. Jimerson,
S. M. Swearer, & D. L. Espelage (Eds.), Handbook of bullying in schools: An
international perspective (pp. 199–209). New York: Routledge.
Poteat, V. P., & Espelage, D. L. (2007). Prediction psychosocial consequences of
homophobic victimization in middle school students. The Journal of Early
Adolescence, 27(2), 175–191.
Renold, E. (2000). “Coming out”: Gender, (hetero)sexuality and the primary
school. Gender and Education, 12(3), 309–326.
Renold, E. (2006). “They won’t let us play…unless you’re going out with one of
them”: Girls, boys, and Butler’s “heterosexual matrix” in the primary years.
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27(4), 489–509.
Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2010). Normative cruelties and gender deviants: The
performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school. British
Educational Research Journal, 36(4), 573–596.
Rivers, I. (2011). Homophobic bullying: Research and theoretical perspectives.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender and sexual ori-
entation. Hoboken: Wiley.
Swearer, S. M., Turner, R. K., Givens, J. E., & Pollack, W. S. (2008). “You’re so
gay!”: Do different forms of bullying matter for adolescent males? School
Psychology Review, 37(2), 160–173.
Thurlow, C. (2001). Naming the “outsider within”: Homophobic pejoratives and
the verbal abuse of lesbian, gay and bisexual high school pupils. Journal of
Vallaincourt, T., McDougall, P., Hymel, S., & Sunderani, S. (2010). Respect or
fear? The relationship between power and bullying. In S. R. Jimerson, S. M.
Swearer, & D. L. Espelage (Eds.), Handbook of bullying in schools: An interna-
tional perspective (pp. 211–222). New York: Routledge.
Youdell, D. (2004). Wounds and reinscriptions: Schools, sexualities and performa-
tive subjects. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 25(4),
477–493.
Wilkinson, L., & Pearson, J. (2009). School culture and the well-being of same-
sex-attracted youth. Gender & Society, 23(4), 542–568.
Heteroprofessionalism
Robert C. Mizzi
The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on findings published else-

where (Mizzi 2013) that introduce and explain the concept of “hetero-
professionalism.” In this chapter, I draw attention to the role educational
administrators and community members may have in creating queer
exclusion through discourses of professionalism. Because of this exclu-
sion, it may be helpful to deconstruct some of the particular assumptions
and values associated with professionalism that interact with and silence
social difference. The problem is that professionalism, vis-à-vis having a
“professional” identity, engaging in “professional” behaviours, and oper-
ating on the basis of “professional” values, is often ill-defined in educa-
tional institutions and this creates the potential for marginalization. Fox
(1992) explains that, “professionalism means different things to different
people. Without a language police, however, it is unlikely that the term
professional(ism) will be used in only one concrete way” (p. 22). This lack
of consensus and clarification means that using professionalism as a regula-
tory tool is risky business. People govern and regulate themselves, and the
work of others, according to their own interpretation of professionalism
R.C. Mizzi ( )
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

138 R.C. MIZZI
(Dent and Whitehead 2001; Ross 2007). This is a slippery slope for queer
educators, who may be viewed as “unprofessional” by administrators,
staff, and community members because of persistent social misperceptions
that their sexuality and gender expression is perverse and wrong, and that
they will recruit students and staff to be queer.
CONSTRUCTING PROFESSIONALISM
Ivan Illich (1977/2005) made an early caution that professionalism is
a form of control over work, and since this warning there has been no
consensus on the definition of professionalism (Hargreaves & Goodson
1996). Professionalism is largely understood as the relationship between
a social institution and its workers (Kubow and Fossum 2007). There is
a hierarchy in this relationship, where social institutions carve out a par-
ticular “profession” through policy and programs and then expect their
workers to fall into alignment with the norms of the profession (i.e., to be
professional). Carr (2000) explains that:
(i) professions provide an important public service; (ii) they involve a theo-
retically as well as practically grounded expertise; (iii) they have a distinct
ethical dimension which calls for expression in a code of practice; (iv) they
require organisation and regulation for purposes of recruitment and disci-
pline; and (v) professional practitioners require a high degree of individual
autonomy—independence of judgement—for effective practice. (p. 23)
Power and knowledge are interconnected with the profession; there is

a particular body of knowledge (e.g., what is needed to be a certified
teacher) associated with and determined by social institutions, which, in
turn, cements the dominant power of the institution (e.g., only the social
institution determines certification) (Weems 2004). The problem is that
“independence of judgement” (Carr) affords autonomy and power to
“acceptable” professionals, which blurs professionalism with managerial-
ism. Workers feel that they must manage their own and the behaviours of
“others” (Dent and Whitehead 2001).
Inquiries into teacher professionalism, or professionalism in educa-
tional contexts, are gaining momentum in the literature. Briefly, the focus
of teacher professionalism is on how society provides authority to teach-
ers in exchange for their expertise and service. Teacher professionalism is
also about choices that teachers can freely make about their tasks in the
HETEROPROFESSIONALISM 139
classroom (Herbst 1989). Kubow and Fossum (2007) add that teacher
professionalism examines the deeper understandings and collaborations
that teachers develop about their classrooms and their schools and shows
how student-centred teaching might need some adaption in light of the
vast differences among students and societies. Teacher professionalism has
not been without critique in the literature. For example, Larabee (1992)
points out how teacher professionalism has been helpful to mainly urban,
male, and middle-class teachers, and, concomitantly, how it has marginal-
ized colleagues who did not fit this type.
There are different theoretical orientations of teacher professionalism.
Hargreaves and Goodson (1996) suggest five orientations. These orien-
tations are as follows: (1) classical professionalism, which is the profes-
sionalization process that has shaped teaching as a profession; (2) flexible
professionalism, which means there is a daily application of teachers’ practi-
cal expertise in their daily classroom contexts, and that there are connec-
tions to communities as part of a larger understanding of teaching; (3)
practical professionalism, which is the practical knowledge of teachers about
their work and role; (4) extended professionalism, which means teachers
collaborate on whole-school policies and decision-making processes; and
(5) complex professionalism, which means teachers, as global citizens, are
working increasingly in complex school environments marked by global-
ization. There is a particular set of cooperative learning, problem-solving,
and thinking skills that are required to function in this complexity. In
addition to this work, Sachs (2005) suggests activist professionalism, which
requires teachers to be active and responsive to their own lives and to the
lives of their students. Stone-Johnson (2013) adds parallel professionalism,
a view that professionalism has changed over time and that teachers will
experience professionalism differently based on their generation. There
are generational differences in the ways that teachers experience differing
levels of control over what they are to teach and how they are to teach, and
this, in turn, impacts their sense of professionalism.
There is a scarcity of research that explores the intersecting nature of pro-
fessionalism and queer discourses (Rumens and Kerfoot 2009). Woods and
Lucas’s (1993) earlier work suggests that the presence of queer workers dis-
rupts conventional values about professionalism. Despite this scarcity, what
has been suggested in the literature is that professionalism can be a detriment
to queer workers. Some more recent studies suggest that queer workers
interpret professionalism as being important to gain acceptance and promo-
tion in the workplace. This involves queer workers being non-judgemental,
140 R.C. MIZZI
providing the same service to everyone, not speaking loudly, concentrating

on meeting needs, avoiding effeminacy, not showing sexual arousal, and
not “flaunting” their sexuality or relationships (Deverall 2001; Ferfolja and
Hopkins 2013; Lugg and Tooms 2010; Rumens and Kerfoot 2009; Rudoe
2010). For example, Miller (2014) explains that “when a lesbian says [to her
colleagues], ‘My partner’s out of town,’ it’s deemed unprofessional” due to
the perception that she is declaring a lesbian sexuality through such a state-
ment (n.p.). Meiners and Quinn (2009) further suggest:
Professionalism has a colloquial meaning that is mostly about decorum

represented through the body and its adornments, clothing, hairstyle, and
actions, getting along with others, and it is gauged through complaints—
‘She didn’t behave professionally—she wore biker shorts, and had piercing,
let her tattoos show’—that we’ve heard about student teachers. What can
be professed professionally is what has already been accepted or mandated
by the field, but in education, where there is no commonly understood
knowledge base, the field guards its boundaries in other ways, such as by
scrutinizing styles of professionalism. We argue that teachers and professors
of education are indirectly or directly required by the profession to ‘cover’:
dress, hair, fashion, speech. They must conform to white heteronormative
mainstream, or they are marked as unprofessional. (p. 63)
In other words, the expectation to have appropriate dress (hairstyle, clothes,

weight) and language (terminology, expression, speech) sets boundaries of
acceptability and creates (hetero)norms that are political and hegemonic
in the school. These expectations construct surveillance, identity, and edu-
cational leadership, and negatively impact the lives of queer leaders, educa-
tors, and students (Lugg and Tooms 2010; Mizzi 2014a). For example,
despite being granted “permission” to be out to colleagues, being out in
the classroom may be a trouble spot for an administrator, as any discussion
of a teachers’ homosexuality may be perceived as not an “appropriate”
topic for conversation with students. It is no great leap that heterosexual
teachers are not met with the same level of censorship in respect to discus-
sion about their personal lives in schooling environments.
Lisa Weems (2004) provides a useful analytic lens that links the produc-
tion of family categories, race, and nation to professionalism. According to
Weems, there is a complex relation of power that evokes heteronormativity
and racialization when it comes to the construction of family in discourses of
professionalism and education. Weems explains that “the professional needed
to be ‘virile’ yet protect against sexual activity. Indeed, it is not just a male body
that makes a professional; it is the man of character, with vigilance toward
masculinity that achieves the position” (p. 244). While the male body is left
unproblematized, the female body must conform to masculinized interpreta-
tions of the “expert” in order to be accepted in a professional context. What
then emerges, as Weems explains, is self-regulated surveillance of “good” pro-
fessional norms and practices. With the hetero (“good”) and homo (“bad”)
binary so often reified in religious, social, and political discourse, the notion
of what is a “good” professional can be easily assumed as being heterosexual,
which may also exclude heterosexual identities that challenge the status quo,
such as single parents, mixed-race couples, and heterosexuals involved in the
kink, bondage, and leather communities. Weems explains that the “good pro-
fessional” is always “gendered, raced, and sexed” (p. 229) according to dis-
tinct norms and classification systems. Where there is not a “fit” of the queer
person to the work (hetero)norms, there may be experiences of feeling dis-
tracted at work, avoiding clients or students and co-workers, skipping social
events, and having difficulty finding mentors (Miller 2014). Lugg and Tooms
(2010) consider the community as being a factor in the practice of determin-
ing queerness as being professionally unsuitable. They explain:
Fit is not just about adhering to the norms set by a particular school organi-
zation. It is also about reproducing these norms because administrators are
to a great extent the managers, definers, and custodians of organizational
and social reality. Therefore, the traits and characteristics that fit in terms of
leadership vary depending on how a community defines the identity of their
educational administrators [original italics]. (p. 80)
Reproducing sexuality and professionalism norms cause me to further

question the impact of professional regulation on staff, particularly for
differently gendered individuals. Through my research I suggest that pro-
fessionalism continues to be a pervasive discourse that marginalizes queer
educators. I argue for further deconstruction of educational leadership,
community influence, and institutional practices in order to highlight
where professionalism has caused things to go awry for queer educators.
Significantly, I discuss how to get back on track so that professionalism is
a more collaborative and equitable discourse in educational workplaces.
CONVERSING HETEROPROFESSIONALISM
The concept of heteroprofessionalism emerged from my research on
eight gay male educators who travelled to Kosovo after the conflict to
provide educational support to the reconstruction efforts taking place
142 R.C. MIZZI
(Mizzi 2013). I also investigated two international education agencies

that employed four of these men. I conducted in-depth interviews
with the gay male educators on two occasions each, as well as with the
human resource and managerial staff members, to explain some of the
responses of the gay male participants. I also collected data from policy
research and autoethnography to layer the types of data being received.
In this research study, participants indicated to me that professionalism
was a problematic discourse. There were experiences where educators
were expected by their directors and colleagues to do the following:
(1) not speak about their homosexuality to their students, (2) leave
Kosovo as there was a perception that the reconstruction effort was
largely a heterosexual endeavour, (3) attend a pre-departure training
session based on heterosexist conceptualizations of family and a char-
acterization of gay men as having certain “looks” and “mannerisms”
(Mizzi 2014b), and (4) maintain heteronormativity in everyday dis-
cussions with colleagues and students. Even in unofficial spaces such
as staff social events, where workers are expected to remain “profes-
sional” (although this term is never defined in policy), the educators
chronicle frequent encounters with heteronormativity and homopho-
bia. Organizations investigated in this study did not exhibit a signifi-
cant amount of queer inclusion, and would opt to transfer staff victims
of homophobic harassment to another mission as a means to maintain-
ing the status quo. Unlike anti-racism and anti-sexism education, anti-
homophobia education was left out of the professional development of
agency staff members. These experiences silence queerness and queer
workers, and make it difficult to challenge heteroprofessionalism.
Heteroprofessionalism is multi-dimensional, largely because of the
complexity that characterizes human lives. To be heteroprofessional
means to:
1. reassert heteromasculinist dominance as a normative functioning of

an organization;
2. operate through discourses of professionalism to devalue homo-
sexual histories, identities, and understandings;
3. silence, undervalue, or marginalize workers who try to address hete-
ronormativity in the workplace; and
4. create policies and programs that do not take into account homo-
sexuality. (Mizzi 2013, p. 1618)
Through the introduction of this concept, my goal is to assist queer educa-

tors and leaders articulate some of their struggles with professionalism in
their educational workplaces so that when questionable experiences occur,
such as being asked not to disclose same-sex partners in front of students,
they are able to demonstrate that heteroprofessionalism may be at fault.
Similar to heteronormativity, heteroprofessionalism is indeed pervasive,
covert, and dynamic. It adopts different forms according to specific cul-
tures, generations, and communities that might prove difficult to identify
and address. Conflicting attitudes towards masculine and feminine gender
roles and/or sexuality may shape encounters with heteroprofessionalism.
Hill (2009) suggests that due to the recognition of sexual orientation in
anti-discrimination policy, there might be some “blowback” from workers
towards this inclusion. This means that while heteroprofessionalism may
be casual and slippery in educational institutions, it may also be engaged
as a purposeful political act in order to stifle organizational efforts that aim
to create queer inclusion. Also of concern may be, as Hargreaves (2000)
warns, and as my research suggests, the influences of globalization, mar-
kets, and competition and their entanglements with heteroprofessional-
ism. Heteroprofessionalism cannot be expected to be immune from the
economic engines of the twenty-first century. Globalization forces could,
for example, expect queer workers to adhere to heteroprofessionalism if
homosexuality is perceived as a threat to the nation, citizenship, and “pros-
perity” (Puar 2007). As I write elsewhere, “it may be difficult to challenge
heteroprofessionalism if (a) an organizational system is constructed in
such a way that it operates on the basis of heteronormative values and (b)
there is no mechanism in place to hold agencies responsible for inciting
oppressive behaviors through their heteronormative assertions” (Mizzi
2013, p. 1618). This may mean that the responses to heteroprofessional-
ism need to be tailored to specific contexts and communities.
CONFRONTING HETEROPROFESSIONALISM
Similar to Evans (2008), I see professionalism as being pluralistic, with
multiple orientations and perspectives. It is about acknowledging and
integrating understandings, identities, values, and practices that are left
out through heteroprofessionalism. Embedded in this inclusive form of
professionalism is a shared agreement that while interpretations of pro-
fessionalism might demand and reward a “good” professional, there is
144 R.C. MIZZI
exclusion when professionalism remains ill-defined, non-collaborative,

and devoid of diversity. Evans states:
Whilst such commonality—indeed, uniformity—may feature within a con-

ception of professionalism that is required, or even demanded, of an occu-
pational group, it is bound to dissipate into impracticable rhetoric at some
stage during the translations from what is required to what is enacted
because a wide, diverse range of individuals’ professionalities is entered into
the equation [original italics]. (p. 28)
As Evans notes about professionalism, I also argue that unravelling

heteroprofessionalism requires a diverse range of commitments and
collaborations due to its complex and covert nature (Mizzi 2013).
Appropriate responses to heteroprofessionalism may include a self-
reflective process of what it means to be educators and to be mindful
of how one’s knowledge, behaviours, and values promote heterosexism
and homophobia at work. Creating a work environment that builds
trustful and respectful relationships ensures that confrontations of het-
eroprofessionalism take place. This work environment also explores
and celebrates human diversity as a form of professionalism, which
means that conversations of sexuality, gender, race, class, and ability are
included in the professional discourse on becoming and being teach-
ers and leaders. If multi-cultural and multi-vocal aspects of society are
celebrated and included as a form of professionalism, then there is an
opportunity for students to learn a form of professionalism built on
mutual respect and care (Dantley 2009; e.g., Mizzi 2010).
The role of educational administrators and community members can-
not be understated when confronting heteroprofessionalism in their
workplaces. Exploring with staff what it means to be professional, how
professionalism is differently understoods to each person, and then work-
ing towards a common understanding may be a helpful start so that profes-
sionalism is no longer an elusive and unmediated concept. This definition
differs from a code of conduct as it establishes the necessary communi-
cation about professionalism and helps towards eradicating hegemonic
interpretations of the term, such as heteroprofessionalism. This effort may
demystify (hetero)norms in the workplace, facilitate staff discussion, and
bridge understanding about professionalism. The goal of this effort is a
work space where discourses of professionalism are based on the principles
of mutual respect, openness, collaboration, and dialogue.
The work on heteroprofessionalism is nascent. Further considerations

could include an exploration into the intersecting perspectives of racial-
ized, gendered, classed, and abled concerns of heteroprofessionalism. The
work could also include gender-variant perspectives in order to conceptu-
alize cisprofessionalism and, an exploration into homoprofessionalism in
queer circles such as gay-straight alliances, queer teacher associations, or
networks, or anti-homophobia curricula. These considerations may seek
to explain why queer educators, leaders, and students subscribe to the
hegemonic stances of professionalism, and duplicate such approaches in
queer contexts. Although these considerations fall outside the scope of
this chapter, they may be helpful extensions to consider for future work on
queer experiences of professionalism.
REFERENCES
Carr, D. (2000). Professionalism and ethics in teaching. New York: Routledge.
Dantley, M. (2009). Foreword. In J. Korschoreck & A. Tooms (Eds.), Sexuality
matters: Paradigms and policies for educational leaders (pp. vii–x). Plymouth:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Dent, M., & Whitehead, S. (2001). Introduction: Configuring the “new” profes-
sional. In M. Dent & S. Whitehead (Eds.), Managing professional identities and
knowledge: Performativity and the “new” professional (pp. 81–95). New York:
Routledge.
Deverall, K. (2001). Sex, work and professionalism: Working in HIV/AIDS.
Evans, L. (2008). Professionalism, professionality and the development of educa-
tion professionals. British Journal of Educational Studies, 56(1), 20–38.
Ferfolja, T., & Hopkins, L. (2013). The complexities of workplace experience for
lesbian and gay teachers. Critical Studies in Education, 54(3), 311–324. doi:1
0.1080/17508487.2013.794743.
Fox, C. (1992). What do we mean when we say professionalism?: A language
usage analysis for public administration. The American Review of Public
Administration, 22(1), 1–17.
Hargreaves, A. (2000). Four ages of professionalism and professional learning.
Teachers and Teaching: History and Practice, 6(20), 151–181.
Hargreaves, A., & Goodson, I. (1996). Teachers’ professional lives: Aspirations
and actualities. In I. Goodson & A. Hargreaves (Eds.), Teachers’ professional
lives (pp. 1–24). London: Falmer.
Herbst, J. (1989). And sadly teach: Teacher education and professionalization in
American culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
146 R.C. MIZZI
Hill, R. J. (2009). In/corporating queers: Blowback, backlash and other forms of
resistance to workplace diversity initiatives that support sexual minorities.
Advances in Developing Human Resources, 11(3), 37–53.
Illich, I. (1977/2005). Disabling professions. In I. Illich (Ed.), Disabling profes-
sions (pp. 11–39). London: Marion Boyars Publishers.
Kubow, P., & Fossum, P. (2007). Comparative education: Exploring issues in inter-
national context (revth ed.). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Larabee, D. (1992). Power, knowledge, and the rationalization of teaching: A
genealogy of the movement to professionalize teaching. Harvard Educational
Review, 62(2), 123–154.
Lugg, C., & Tooms, A. (2010). A shadow of ourselves: Identity erasure and the
politics of queer leadership. School Leadership and Management, 30(1), 77–91.
Meiners, E., & Quinn, T. (2009). Act out: Organizing for queer rights in educa-
tion. In J. Korschoreck & A. Tooms (Eds.), Sexuality matters: Paradigms and
policies for educational leaders (pp. 43–69). Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers.
Miller, C. (2014, May 16). Where are the gay executives? New York Times.
Retrieved from http://nyti.ms/1gJLwum
Mizzi, R. (2010). Unravelling researcher subjectivity through multivocality in auto-
ethnography [Special Issue]. Journal of Research Practice, 6(1), Article M3.
Retrieved from http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/201/185
Mizzi, R. (2013). “There aren’t any gays here”: Encountering heteroprofessional-
ism in an international development workplace. Journal of Homosexuality,
60(11), 1602–1624.
Mizzi, R. (2014a). Reifying demographic change: An exploration of educational
workplaces through the lens of gay male, immigrant educators. Paper presented at
the Canadian Association for the Study of Educational Administration/
Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration and Management
Joint Annual Conference, Fredericton.
Mizzi, R. (2014b). Troubling preparedness: Investigating the (in)visibility of
LGBT concerns within pre-departure orientations. Development in Practice,
24(2), 286–297.
Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham:
Ross, J. (2007). Second thoughts about “professionalism.” Inside Higher Ed.
Retrieved from www.insidehighered.com
Rudoe, N. (2010). Lesbian teachers’ identity, power and the public/private
boundary. Sex Education, 10(1), 23–36.
Rumens, N., & Kerfoot, D. (2009). Gay men at work: (Re)constructing the self as
professional. Human Relations, 62(5), 763–786.
Sachs, J. (2005). Rethinking the practice of teacher professionalism. In C. Day,
A. Fernandez, T. Hauge, & J. Muller (Eds.), The life and work of teachers:
International perspectives in changing times (pp. 76–90). London: Falmer.
Stone-Johnson, C. (2013). Parallel professionalism in an era of standardization.

Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 20(1), 74–91.
Weems, L. (2004). Troubling professionalism: Narratives of family, race, and
nation in educational reform. In B. Baker & K. Heyning (Eds.), Dangerous
coagulations?: The uses of Foucault in the study of education (pp. 225–260).
Woods, J., & Lucas, J. (1993). The corporate closet: The professional lives of gay men
in America. New York: The Free Press.
Heterotopia
Jennifer C. Ingrey
I conceive of Foucault’s (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986) concept of

the heterotopia, with a focus on inversion, as providing a dual func-
tion in queer research: it is both a marker to denote spaces that incite
or perpetuate the operations of gender regulation, and a queer reading
or desubjugating practice (Stryker 2006) that re-imagines gender. In
this chapter, I wish to outline how that concept of the heterotopia as
place and queering/desubjugating practice actually proved insightful
and productive for my own understanding of school gender regimes
(Connell and Pearse 2014) and gendered subjectivation of youth. In
this analysis, I consider how one student participant’s drawing derived
from the research at one school site can be heterotopic in its inversions
or reactions to a school-sanctioned arts-based Bathroom Project, as
well as how it can be read through a heterotopic reading practice to
rethink the structures of gendered legitimacy in school spaces in pur-
suit of gender justice.
J.C. Ingrey ()


150 J.C. INGREY
FOUCAULT’S HETEROTOPIA AS SPACE AND AS QUEERING/

DESUBJUGATING PRACTICE
In contrast to utopias, Foucault defines heterotopias as real spaces that
“are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak
about” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, p. 24). Providing recognizable
examples like cemeteries and Turkish spas, Foucault noted heterotopias
“have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites,
but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations
designated, mirrored, or reflected by them” (pp. 16–17). They are other
spaces—real spaces—that have a curious relationship to those spaces that
surround them.
As soon as I encountered this concept, I was intrigued to think how
these heterotopias could be visualized, imagined, or recognized in
everyday experiences, or, given my research background and interests,
in spaces in schools that confront students daily and become part of
how they constitute themselves as gendered subjects. Indeed, my past
research had identified the site of the school washroom as one powerful
and rich for analysis in its contribution to how youth understand their
own gendered relations and practices, and thus it appeared a natural step
to imagine the school washroom as a potential kind of heterotopia. The
third principle of heterotopias indicates that they “are capable of juxta-
posing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are them-
selves incompatible” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, p. 25). Initially, I
conceived of the school washroom as one that held different meanings
for different people. For a gender nonconforming youth, the space pres-
ents as a bathroom problem (see Browne 2004; Halberstam 1998; Munt
1998; Rasmussen 2009); for other youth who pass or are cisgender, its
unsupervised and yet highly regulated nature can be anxiety-provoking
and dangerous, a conclusion corroborated by some of the participants
in my research. I then focused analytically on “heterotopias of devia-
tion…those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation
to the required mean or norm are placed” (Foucault and Miskowiec
1986, p. 25). I was interested in how the washroom marks a body upon
entry as deviant by not being able to fit into one of the two binary
sexed washroom spaces. Indeed, Foucault’s practices of self, or how the
self constitutes oneself through one’s relationship to “games of truth”
(Fornet-Betancourt et al. 1987, p. 121) is the analytic modality to think
HETEROTOPIA 151
about how one even comes to know herself as deviant, as well as how,
simultaneously, the self is known to others as deviant.
Beyond denoting a space, the heterotopia is also a reading practice. I
had found an earlier iteration of the heterotopia as occupying a linguistic
role (Foucault 2010). In the preface of The Order of Things, Foucault
(2010) claims that heterotopias
are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because

they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle
common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the
syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax
which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to
“hold together.” (p. xix)
Foucault claims that while utopias “run with the very grain of languages…;
heterotopias…dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very
possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize
the lyricism of our sentences” (p. xix). Indeed, Kharlamov (2014) argues
Foucault’s heterotopia is “a way of showing how real social, cultural, and
spatial life is ultimately much more complex and entangled in relations of
power than such utopianisms can grasp” (p. 864). In this way, the hetero-
topia is a place (in language or in the physical realm) that calls attention to
normalized spaces and places by contrasting with them, indeed, by invert-
ing them, or even simply relating to them, but in a way that disrupts our
ability to continue to see them as normal, benign, or innate. To be able
to see the constructedness of our myths, our fictions, is the beginning to
being able to change what is around us for the better. It is what Kharlamov
(2014) calls the “heterotopic imagination,” that which allows one to see
“present and potential heterotopic properties and possibilities in virtually
any real or imaginary place” (p. 864).
Although Foucault couches this initial distinction in discursive
rather than spatial terms, the application is still viable to school spaces
that are spoken as they are thought and experienced; as well, it aids the
researcher to be able to apply a heterotopic reading practice to school
spaces, to ask how these spaces relate or invert normalizing practices
of gender. Hook (2007) argues the heterotopia is an analytic that “is a
particular way to look at space, place, or text” (p. 186) and in so doing,
erases the distinction between spaces and texts, or the spatial and the
linguistic, to be replaced by a focus on the process of looking and
152 J.C. INGREY
analysis of the disruptive possibility of heterotopias. In its very ability

to act not only as a signifier to denote “other” spaces, but also as a
process for reading these kinds of spaces, the heterotopia is a queering
or a desubjugating practice.
Queering is a “mapping” (Britzman 1995, p. 155) that attempts “to
exceed…binary oppositions…yet still hold[s] onto an analysis of social
difference that can account for how dynamics of subordination and sub-
jection work” (1998, p. 95). Desubjugating (Stryker 2006) happens
through transgender studies that unearth delegitimated knowledges
from both the embodied experiences of gender nonconforming, gender-
queer, and transgender individuals, and critical inquiry that dismantles
the hegemonic structures that relegitimate normative gender. Queering
and desubjugating I read as complimentary endeavors, much as Cavanagh
(2010) condones an intertwining of queer theory and transgender stud-
ies to avoid “losing sight of the nuances, complexities, and interlocking
disciplinary devices through which we are subjugated to networks of
power” (p. 19). Both queer theory and transgender studies contribute
reading practices that disrupt normalizing practices of gender consti-
tution. Transgender study “denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes vis-
ible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist” (Stryker 2006,
p. 3) among biological, social, and cultural assumptions and expecta-
tions of normative gender and sex. They also draw around the bound-
aries of what is normalized gender. As Britzman (1995) argues, queer
reading is “the study of limits, the study of ignorance, and the study of
reading practices [whereby] each method requires…an interest in think-
ing against the thought of one’s conceptual foundations; an interest in
studying the skeletons…[that] haunt one’s responses, anxieties, and cat-
egorical imperatives” (pp. 215–216). Although beyond the scope of this
chapter, Butler’s (1990) notion of the abject, that which disrupts the
fiction that gender is innate and fixed, is also a way of reading the limits
of legitimacy; in this way, the heterotopia could be a marker for, and a
way of marking out, the abject.
As a queering, desubjugating reading practice, heterotopic reading,
or the “heterotopic imagination” (Kharlamov 2014, p. 864) is also a way
to recognize or imagine the possible. Butler (1990) conceptualizes the
possible in gender constitution through her articulation of Foucault’s
notion of resistance, a necessary condition of power relations: “mobi-
lized possibilities of ‘subjects’ that do not merely exceed the bounds of
HETEROTOPIA 153
cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in

fact, culturally intelligible” (Butler 1990, p. 40). Because for Butler gen-
der is a repeated process of stylized acts that congeals and sediments over
time, possibility is in the potential for those acts to fail to be repeated in
exactly the same way. The “failure to repeat” is a “deformity” (p. 179) or
a re-formed act that “exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity
as a politically tenuous construction” (p. 179). The possibility lies in the
potential for something else to happen that is somehow different from
before. Indeed, it is an enticing possibility for heterotopias to denote
spaces that do not make deviants out of its entrants. If in the possibil-
ity of a gendered subject to fail at repeating gender in exactly the same
way there might also lie the possibility at a remaking of the self, or of
being recognized, and recognizing oneself, in a different way as other
than deviant, then the pursuit of a study of gendered performativities in
school spaces is warranted at making school spaces places that allow for
gender justice.
This chapter is a culmination of two lines of thought from the het-
erotopic analytic applied to school washroom spaces: the heterotopia
is a kind of queer reading practice (Britzman 1995), a desubjugating
practice (Stryker 2006), as well as a representative of a queered/desub-
jugated place itself. If utopias that “run with the very grain of lan-
guages” (Foucault 2010, p. xix) are then what is culturally intelligible,
what is legitimate, then the heterotopia, that which “dessicate[s]…and
dissolves our myths” (p. xix) is very likely what is culturally unintelli-
gible, delegitimated, and subjugated. And in this case, the heterotopia
is precisely the locus upon which we must direct our attention because
of its subjugated status, and for the very reason that it might prom-
ise a rethinking of the boundaries that draw out cultural intelligibility
especially, in this case, of gendered subjectivities. In Butler’s (1990)
terms, the possible is our goal: to redraw the bounds of gender legiti-
mation, to form a new gender regime, these are what lead to gender
justice for youth in schools. In the section below, I apply the notion
of the heterotopia, both as a site that represents ambiguity and inver-
sion as well as a practice of reading that queers or desubjugates, to a
student produced drawing to call attention to those subjugated spaces
and experiences, those knowledges, in order to desubjugate, or rele-
gitimate, them and ask how they can reveal the regulatory structures
that disqualify certain gendered bodies.
154 J.C. INGREY
RESPONDING TO THE BATHROOM PROJECT: HETEROTOPIC

PRODUCT AND PRACTICE
One of the school sites from my doctoral study I named Best High.
Serendipitously, the students there were already undergoing what I
later termed, the Bathroom Project, a vandalism-turned-public art-
turned legitimate curricular art project in the girls’ (and later boys’)
washroom(s). The art teacher had recognized the potential of “positive”
messages to girls scrawled on the walls and stalls of the washroom and
created an independent study project for her art class through the prin-
cipal’s endorsement; although I did not witness this first act of would-be
vandalism, I did record the paintings and comments from the students
who participated in the independent study, the Bathroom Project, a two-
phase endeavor. In this initial phase, messages like You are Beautiful
sprawled across the walls, as well as many others meant to boost girls’
bodily confidence and self-image. The second phase allowed students to
design an individual stall.
This chapter looks not at these images, however, but on one student’s
response to the Bathroom Project. Samara, a Grade 11 student, refused
to participate in the Bathroom Project; instead, I feature here a section
of a drawing she created that re-imagined the Bathroom Project. Samara
rejected the stereotypical messages that equated girls with physical beauty
and femininity with self-obsession. Furthermore, she seemed dissatisfied
thinking of herself in gendered terms; rather, she thought young girls
in her school should be concerned about academic progress and world
issues, rather than how they looked to others. She attributed various fac-
tors to her alternative or inverted view of school: she was born and raised
in Sweden, was living with her Iranian mother, and described herself as
multilingual and very curious.
Not only contrasting with the school endorsed Bathroom Project,
Samara’s notions of school differed from the institutional discourse
derived from the school administration. The school vice principal called
Best High “a good place to be” for all students. The school principal was
proud of the Bathroom Project itself, thinking it was about supporting
student voice: “[the students] are so proud of it and it means something
to them and that’s the most important thing to me is that when they go in
there they feel affirmed, you know. Their voice has been heard and that’s
important.” In other instances, the principal reiterated this affirming and
homogenizing view of the school and its students.
HETEROTOPIA 155
Yet, Samara did not feel her voice had been heard or affirmed. In con-
trast to the Bathroom Project, Samara’s drawing of the washroom literally
represents a prison to point to the darker side of imagined school spaces. It
is the lesser noticed, lesser acknowledged, version of school spaces. It rep-
resents the delegitimated, abject, deviant, or inverted view of the school.
Not that the trope of school as prison is new; indeed, it is itself rather
trite; but a more nuanced, heterotopic reading, coupled with Samara’s
own description of her drawing and experiences of school, alerts one to
hers and potentially others’ fears and vulnerabilities of these spaces that
certainly counter what the Bathroom Project participants were painting
on the walls about hyperfeminine practices of gender. Thus, this image
not only represents the space of the washroom which is heterotopic but
we can read this visual text as heterotopic also because of how it inverts
normalized perceptions of school spaces (Fig. 16.1).
Samara’s prison metaphor is echoed in Foucault’s (1977) theory of
the panopticon that explicates the relations and operations of power.
Foucault also named a prison as one example of a heterotopia, specifi-
cally for its ambiguity of entering and exiting: in the fifth principle, “het-
erotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both
isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault and Miskowiec
1986, p. 26). He continues to add that while in the prison, “the entry
is compulsory,” other sites compel an individual “to submit to rites and
purifications. To get in one must have certain permission and make cer-
tain gestures” (p. 26). I read this image as a pun on that notion because
the school washroom is imagined to be a space that contains the same
regulations and limitations as a prison, according to Samara, including
the entrances and exits. Samara claimed the prison represented her feel-
ings that school is “a very limited environment…in many ways, you can
feel like a prisoner because…you’re kind of in a pattern that you can’t
get out of.” The prison walls signified the enclosures of the school cur-
riculum and testing regime of knowledge. Although she did speak of the
confinement of the school washroom as a part of this oppressive system,
the prison metaphor in her re-imagined Bathroom Project was more
about highlighting what was important to her as a student rather than
reiterating the same kind of discourse of hegemonic femininity’s preoc-
cupations with image and physical self.
Samara reads the space queerly, adopting her own critique of school
regimes and gender regimes within. Britzman (1995) articulates the
practice of applying queer theory to education as an act of queering
156 J.C. INGREY
Fig. 16.1 Close-up of Samara’s drawing

HETEROTOPIA 157
both the signified and the signifier of “knowledge of bodies and bodies
of knowledge” (p. 152) where “something queer happens to the signi-
fied—to history and to bodies—and something queer happens to the
signifier—to language and to representation” (p. 153). Samara’s draw-
ing queers both the signified, the washroom space (with implications for
school spaces in general), and the practices of gender, and the signifier,
the washroom project itself as a form of prison that limits voice and
expression or valorizes only a certain form of expression about gender.
Furthermore, her act is a queering and its analysis is also a queering. Her
project inverts the norms of gendered expression both in the content of
her drawing (the signifier) and in the act of drawing against (as opposed
to reading or speaking against) the legitimate school project. Likewise,
this doubled queering is also a doubling of the heterotopia as both mark-
ing the space itself an inversion of the norm and using the drawing to
read against the norm.
Along with Butler’s (1990) acknowledgment of the abject as a tool to
locate the limits of knowledge, Britzman (1995) employs queer theory to
recognize what is included through what is excluded. Without Samara’s
interpretation of the problems of schooling and the Bathroom Project
itself, without this queer, desubjugating practice (Stryker 2006), the prob-
lems of legitimated gender norms in the school would continue to be
normalized and thus remain invisible. The Bathroom Project was thought
to be itself a triumph, especially by those who legitimated it from its incep-
tion as illegitimate vandalism; in other words, while it started off as subju-
gated, somehow in its rescue from vandalism into curricular project, it did
not necessarily represent a desubjugating of knowledges simply because it
seemed to erase those quiet voices of resistance and rewrite femininity as
hegemonic. It was meant to be a student-centered, student voice project
with authentic ties to students’ concerns. And if not for Samara’s and oth-
ers (whose work I cannot feature here due to space and scope) voices that
spoke against the school-sanctioned project, the Bathroom Project could
not easily be read queerly. At the least, it would represent only dominant
voices and continue to mark gender, especially femininity, in this case, as
heteronormative, essentializing and hegemonic. Thereby all other ways
of doing femininities would be deemed not to fit the school culture and
thus subjugated. Samara’s drawing works against this force to desubjugate
hers and others’ voices who have something to say other than what fits the
gendered school norm.
158 J.C. INGREY
CONCLUSION
Through my doctoral research, the notion that the bathroom in schools
could be a site rich for analysis also translated to the very particularity of
the space itself as a place that has always been present and yet somehow
othered in institutional discourse and yet, the very reason for the silenc-
ing is why it is a place to notice. Foucault (1980) insists the operations
of power work to conceal their source and asks that we turn to the most
local level of power to conduct an analysis of the relations of power. The
school washroom is a local level that allows for a closer analysis of the prac-
tices of gender that extend beyond its walls. This chapter has attempted
to think about how the notion of a heterotopia as both an othered place
that inverts and a practice to read against the norms of gendered expres-
sion, indeed a queering, is also a form of desubjugating knowledges and
spaces in schools to achieve a form of gender justice that seeks to disman-
tle knowable regimes of gender to make room for varied forms of gender
without the usual consequent demonization.
REFERENCES
Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight.
Britzman, D. (1998). Lost subjects: Contested objects. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Browne, K. (2004). Genderism and the bathroom problem: (Re)materialising
sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies. Gender, Place and Culture, 11(3),
331–346.
Cavanagh, S. (2010). Queering bathrooms: Gender, sexuality, and the hygienic
imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Connell, R., & Pearse, R. (2014). Gender: In world perspective (3rd ed.).
Cambridge, UK/Malden: Polity Press.
Fornet-Betancourt, R., Becker, H., Gomez-Muller, A., & Gauthier, J. D. (1987).
The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: An interview with Michel
Foucault on January 20, 1984. Philosophy Social Criticism, 12, 112–131.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (2nd ed.).
(trans: Sheridan, A.). New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings,
1972–1977. (trans: Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mepham, J., & Soper, K.). (Colin
Gordon, ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
HETEROTOPIA 159
Foucault, M. (2010). The order of things. Oxon: Routledge [original 1966].

Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27.
Hook, D. (2007). Foucault, psychology and the analytics of power. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kharlamov, N. A. (2014, in press). Heterotopia, overview. In T. Teo (Ed.),
Encyclopedia of critical psychology. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/
SpringerReference_310575.
Munt, S. R. (1998). Orifices in space: Making the real possible. In S. R. Munt
(Ed.), Butch/femme: Inside lesbian gender (pp. 200–209). London: Cassel.
Rasmussen, M. (2009). Beyond gender identity? Gender and Education, 21(4),
431–447.
Stryker, S. (2006). (De)Subjugated knowledges: An introduction to transgender
studies. In S. Stryker & S. Whittle (Eds.), The transgender studies reader
Interlocking Systems of Oppression
Anna Carastathis
The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression” was defined in a

social movement context by the Combahee River Collective (CRC) in “A
Black Feminist Statement” as the structural anchor of the experience of
simultaneous oppressions and as the target of integrated political struggle
(CRC 1977/1981/1983, p. 210). Nearly 40 years later, it has become
something of a commonplace within queer studies and social theory more
generally to assert that multiple forms of oppression and privilege con-
struct our experiences. Underlying this claim is the methodological view
that in order to analyze the ways in which sexual desires, sexual iden-
tities, sexual orientations, and sexual oppressions are lived, it is crucial
to consider how they are mutually constituted by other aspects of social
identity, such as “race” and ethnicity, gender and gender identity, class,
age and generation, disability, citizenship and nation, and religion (see
Taylor et al. 2010). But this view, that identities are not singular, but mul-
tiple, and that social theory and social movements must attend—ideally
simultaneously, but at least serially—to this multiplicity, did not always
seem as obvious as it perhaps (at least in certain contexts) does today;
moreover, it has determinate historical origins that are often elided in its
A. Carastathis ( )
Athens, Greece

162 A. CARASTATHIS
very taken-for-grantedness. Sociologist Jean Ait Belkhir (an exponent of

the “race, gender, and class” framework, which notably excludes sexuality
as a category of analysis) emphasizes the generative role of Black feminism
in the development of integrative approaches to conceptualizing oppres-
sions as multiple, co-constitutive, and simultaneous: “[u]ntil the emer-
gence of black feminism in the United States, not a single social theorist
took seriously the concept of the simultaneity of [race, gender and class]
intersection in people’s lives. This concept is one of the greatest gifts of
black women’s studies to social theory as a whole” (Belkhir 2009, p. 303).
Although, at this point in time, the concept of “intersectionality” has
become the predominant idiom for referencing multiple social identities
produced by multiple systems of oppression and privilege, it is impor-
tant to note that the now-popular “intersection” metaphor has numerous
historical antecedents in US Black feminism which can be traced to the
nineteenth century (Sheftall 1995; Gines 2014).
The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”—the particular
focus of this chapter—is rooted in Black feminist organizing in the 1970s;
the CRC invoked it to signal the need for an integrative theory of, and
a transformative praxis against, multiple oppressions. The CRC argued
that oppressions have been falsely fragmented by the division of antiracist
from antisexist discourses (and the implicit or explicit (hetero)sexism and
racism prevailing, respectively, in each), thereby defeating Black women’s
efforts to address the multidimensionality of oppression as it manifested in
their lives (CRC 1977/1981/1983). When it formed in 1974 in Boston
after the Conference of the National Black Feminist Organization (in
New York), its members came together “initially” around a “combined
antiracist and antisexist position,” but as the group “developed politically,”
it incorporated an analysis of “hetero-sexism and economic oppression
under capitalism” (CRC 1977/1981/1983, p. 212; see Breines 2006,
pp. 119–121; see Springer 2005). The CRC’s conceptualization of “inter-
locking systems of oppression” is particularly significant for contemporary
queer studies not only because it constitutes part of the theoretical and
political inheritance of intersectionality (which has become the predomi-
nant idiom for referencing multiple identities and oppressions in research
on sexualities and in inclusionary and multicultural education), but also
because it weaves together heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism,
and nationalism in its attempt to “combat the manifold and simultaneous
oppressions that all women of color face” (p. 210). In other words, it is a
concept that explicitly references “sexual” oppression—which is often con-
INTERLOCKING SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION 163
structed as a minoritarian social issue—while allowing scholars and educa-

tors to center the experiences of the global majority in a nonreductive way.
While the group comprised lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women, the
CRC names and contests heteropatriarchy from a “queer” collective sub-
ject position—“we are feminists and lesbians” (p. 213)—which upsets the
more common reduction of minoritized lesbian women to their hetero-
sexual counterparts in organizations that include both queer- and straight-
identified activists. This is significant, since in the trajectory that is often
plotted for the development of contemporary “intersectionality studies”
(often conflating it with the “race, gender, class” paradigm), the contribu-
tions of lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender women of color are often
rendered invisible, and the concept of intersectionality is often reduced to
a race–gender dyad (or race–gender–class triad) which excludes sexuality
as a category of analysis and assumes as its paradigm subject heterosexual
Black women (Taylor et al. 2010, pp. 1–2; Nash 2008; see Breines 2006,
p. 127).
“A Black Feminist Statement” was collaboratively authored in 1977 by
members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier (Smith 2003,
p. 70), and was attributed to the “Combahee River Collective” (honoring
the “guerrilla action” led by Harriet Tubman in 1863 which freed 750
enslaved people in South Carolina) (CRC, p. 210). It first circulated as a
pamphlet, before it was published in Zillah Eisenstein’s edited collection,
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1978); it was
then reprinted in Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s landmark anthol-
ogy This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
(1981); in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some
of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, co-edited by Gloria Hull et al.
(1982); and in Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
(1983). In other words, “A Black Feminist Statement” quickly became a
canonical text in the burgeoning discourse of women of color feminisms—
offering, as Loretta Ross puts it, “the theory we’d been dying for” (Ross
quoted in Smith 2003, p. 70).
The concept of interlocking systems of oppression articulates a critical
stance with respect to prevailing ways (then, but arguably still now) of
thinking about and organizing against oppression. Despite the existential
fact that many people simultaneously experience oppression that has indi-
visible racial, sexual, gendered, and class dimensions, social movements
have tended to abstract and focus on one aspect of oppression, taking
for granted privilege on the other axes. They install as normative subjects
164 A. CARASTATHIS
of those movements relatively privileged members of groups (e.g., Black

heterosexual men, white heterosexual women), who rely upon and repro-
duce some forms of privilege even as they contest some dimensions of
subordination and social hierarchy. In the process, those group members
whose experiences are constructed as non-prototypical, too “complex,” or
different from the norm that has been installed, are marginalized, nom-
inally or tokenistically included, or entirely excluded from the political
process (of formulating agendas, generating movement discourses, repre-
senting constituencies, etc.) or even from dominant conceptions of who
“belongs” in the group—of who “counts” as a member. As feminist Black
lesbian- and heterosexually identified women, the authors of the state-
ment observe that to date,
no ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppres-

sion as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of our oppression […] It
was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements,
as well as experience on the periphery of white male left, that led to the need
to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and
antisexist, unlike those of Black and white men. (CRC 1977/1981/1983,
pp. 211–212)
In response to the false inclusion, tokenism, exploitation, and marginal-

ization Black women experienced within New Left, socialist, Black civil
rights, Black nationalist, Black radical, and white feminist movements, the
CRC identifies as its urgent praxical task (synthesizing theory and prac-
tice) the development of an “integrated analysis and practice” of struggle
against “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression” (p. 210). The
notion of “integration” is very important in that it references the deep-
seated effects of segregation—a logic of oppression—even on “liberatory”
conceptual schemas, embodied identities and relationships, and alliance
politics. Integration of fragmented experiences of simultaneous oppres-
sion is necessary if political movements are to address oppression as it is
lived (by the world majority of people) and as it is structurally, systemically
constituted. For instance, the institutionalized curricular and disciplinary
divisions which assign one aspect of identity to “women’s, gender, and
sexuality studies,” and another to “ethnic studies,” and construct domi-
nant approaches to knowledge production as “neutral” with respect to
gender, sexuality, and race, can be resisted from within queer studies by
exposing the underpinnings of categorial fragmentation. The divisions
between structures of oppression are based on the inflection of oppres-

sion with privilege: the belief that racism can be separated analytically and
politically from sexism relies on an experience of racism that is inflected by
gender privilege (and vice versa). However, the CRC, composed of Black
women who “do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege
to rely upon […] are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or
even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions” (p. 214).
Moreover, this received division among “fronts” or categories of oppres-
sion distorts the simultaneity of oppressions in Black women’s lives. The
CRC states that they “find it difficult to separate race from class from sex
oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simulta-
neously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression
which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, for example, the history
of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repres-
sion” (p. 213). The categorial distinctions between “racial” and “sexual”
oppression distort the simultaneous operation of oppressions. By contrast
to the exclusionary tendencies and practices of single-framework politics,
Black feminist politics is “inclusive”: the CRC commits itself to working
on “any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World
and working people […] particularly […] those struggles in which race,
sex and class are simultaneous factors in oppression” (p. 217).
The CRC conjoins two often opposed conceptions of political strategy
based on this fundamental commitment to address multiple, “simultane-
ous factors in oppression”: that is, identity politics and coalition politics.
We often encounter disparaging claims about “identity politics” in class-
room discussions, based on the assumption that focusing on “difference”
is inherently divisive of a utopian—and indeed historically nonexistent—
humanist universalism. Moreover, queer theory has contributed to the
discrediting of “identity politics” without, however, addressing its Black
feminist roots. A return to these roots reveals the false dilemma between
“identity” and “coalition”: observing that “no other ostensibly progres-
sive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority,”
the CRC came to “realize that the only people who care enough about
us to work consistently for our liberation is us” (p. 212). “[S]pr[inging]
from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our
liberation is a necessity not as an adiunct to somebody else’s but because
of our need as human persons for autonomy,” the CRC’s “politics evolve
from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which
allows us to continue our struggle and our work” (p. 212). They argue
166 A. CARASTATHIS
that “the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come
directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody
else’s oppression” (p. 212). At first glance, this claim might appear to be
in tension with the CRC’s critique of the exclusions Black women experi-
ence in New Left, Black civil rights and Black power, and white feminist
movements. In a sense, the CRC’s critique amounts to the charge that
these movements claimed to represent a whole group (“Black people,”
“women”) while in fact representing a narrow, relatively privileged sub-
set of that group (“Black men,” “white women”) whose experiences and
interests were falsely universalized, while group members constructed as
non-prototypical (“Black women”) were nominally included but materi-
ally excluded. What is significant is that these unavowed “identity poli-
tics” had pretensions to universality that depended on erasure, whereas
the CRC avows an identity politics that is unapologetically focused on
Black women which, because of Black women’s structural position, has
the potential to be universally liberatory. Despite “[a]ccusations that Black
feminism divides the Black struggle” (p. 216), or that the collective sub-
ject of feminist politics has been undermined by Black feminist critique,
the CRC argues that an identity politics that attends to the subject posi-
tions of groups oppressed by the totality of interlocking systems of oppres-
sion has wide-reaching implications for social transformation. Insofar as
“the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the
political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patri-
archy” (p. 213), Black women—who, the CRC contends, are located at
the bottom of social hierarchies—“might use our position at the bottom
[…] to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were
free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our
freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppres-
sion” (p. 215). For this reason, Black lesbian feminist identity politics
are inherently inclusionary, and indeed constitute a “potential coalition”
(CRC 1977/1981/1983, pp. 210, 215; see Crenshaw 1991, p. 1299;
see Carastathis 2013) with all social groups with whom some aspects of
oppression are shared. Indeed, as Frazier recounts, the CRC worked in
coalition to found a “battered women’s shelter […] with community
activists, women and men, lesbian and straight folks. We were very active
in the reproductive rights movement, even though, at the time, most of
us were lesbians. We found ourselves involved in coalition with the labor
movement” (Frazier quoted in Breines 2006, pp. 122–123; see CRC,
pp. 217–218). In contrast to dominant understandings of identity politics,
the CRC oppose fractionalization and separatism as strategies and advo-

cate, for instance, “solidarity” with Black men “around the fact of race”
(p. 213). Rejecting biological essentialism as a “dangerous and reactionary
basis upon which to build a politic,” they argue against “lesbian separat-
ism [because it is not] an adequate and progressive political analysis and
strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any
but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class
and race” (p. 214). On the contrary, an identity politics that centers Black
lesbian working class women is an embryonic coalition, one which has a
uniquely liberatory potential.
Finally, the CRC’s conception of interlocking politics is in critical con-
versation with socialism (which often rejects “identity politics” as “epi-
phenomenal” of what it takes to be the fundamental social conflict, which
is class politics). The members of the CRC avow that they “are socialists
who believe that collective benefit should be the organizing principle of the
economy and material resources should be equally distributed among those
who create them,” but they reject the exclusive emphasis of socialist politics
(both in its descriptive and normative moments) on an ostensibly race- and
gender-neutral subject of class struggle. Rather, the CRC argues that class
relations express racial and sexual oppressions; accordingly, “[w]e need to
articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sex-
less workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant deter-
minants in their working and economic lives” (p. 213). The CRC rejects
the class foundationalism inherent in the view that sexism and racism and
homophobia are “epiphenomena” of class exploitation, which would disap-
pear automatically with a socialist revolution.
Arguing for an autonomous Black feminist movement, from which they
could build liberatory coalitions, the CRC sought to challenge racism in
the contemporaneous women’s movement (p. 218), and (hetero)sexism
in contemporaneous Black struggles, expanding on the feminist principle
that “the personal is political” by focusing on the social, economic, politi-
cal, cultural, and experiential dimensions of Black lesbian women’s oppres-
sion—the “multilayered texture of Black women’s lives” (p. 214)—in a
way that arguably had never been examined before. In other words, the
conceptualization of systems of oppression as multiple, interconnected,
and therefore simultaneously operative, constitutes a critical contesta-
tion of competing (and predominant) conceptualizations which isolated
a particular system of oppression, abstracted from its interrelations with
other systems, and defined its targets to the exclusion of their other social
168 A. CARASTATHIS
group memberships. To put it another way, the concept of interlocking

systems of oppression contests the solipsism and false universalism of mod-
els of oppression based on the experiences of relatively privileged group
members: that is, the inflection of unitary conceptualizations of oppression
with privilege (so that, for instance, “gender oppression” is normatively
cognized through the essentialized experiences of women with racial, class,
and sexual privilege). How do we resist these cognitive habits as queer
researchers, theorists and educators, and contribute to their unlearning by
our students? Arguably, by centering non-normative, multiply oppressed
members of social groups in an interlocking account of oppression, we
can work to reveal the simultaneous operation and imbrication of oppres-
sions—or, at least, how they have been discursively fragmented and falsely
disconnected from each other. In the context of queer education, it does
not suffice to make facile, throwaway claims such as “oppressions inter-
sect”; to instruct students to “pay attention to intersectionality”; or to
append a week on the intersection of racism with homophobia, or on
“queer people of color” to syllabi constructed to privilege the experiences
and analyses of white, cisgender, male, class- and citizenship-privileged,
able-bodied queer subjects. Rather, as queer scholars and educators we
must tarry with the conceptual challenges to monistic, essentialist thinking
that interlocking and intersectional analyses raise.
For instance, a question arises as to what, precisely, the concept of inter-
locking systems of oppression reveals: that is, does the claim that oppres-
sions interlock reveal multiplicity or fragmentation? In other words, does
the concept of “interlocking systems of oppression” make the “multiplici-
tous” experiences of queer women of color visible in a non-fragmented
way? Or does the concept make visible the fragmentation of these multi-
plicitous experiences? Drawing a distinction between multiplicity and frag-
mentation, the decolonial feminist philosopher María Lugones argues that
the interlocking of oppressions obscures the simultaneity of experiences
of multiple, “intermeshed” oppressions, and dissimulates the necessity of
contesting and resisting multiple oppressions simultaneously (Lugones
2003, pp. 223–224). The very fact that we conceptualize oppressions as
interlocking presupposes the fragmentation of simultaneous experiences of
multiple oppressions. To put it more simply, the notion that the systems of
capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy interlock seems to presup-
pose and precisely contests the divisions installed between them by move-
ment discourses that viewed them as at least analytically, but also politically
separable. The CRC makes the phenomenological claim that the “synthe-
sis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives”—a fact that
only an “integrated analysis and practice” of struggle against systems that
have been abstracted, isolated and defined against each other can begin to
grasp (CRC 1977/1981/1983, p. 210). But perhaps “interlocking sys-
tems of oppression” in the CRC’s account functions as what Crenshaw,
speaking of intersectionality, termed a “provisional concept”: “in mapping
the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant
assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories” but
its aim is to “disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or
separable” (as well as to integrate other categories of oppression “such
as class, sexual orientation, age, and color”) (Crenshaw 1991, pp. 1244–
1245n9). On this view, the claim that oppressions interlock prefigures,
but does not in itself constitute, the “integrated analysis and practice”
that the CRC commits itself to “developing” in the context of a Black
feminist political movement “to combat the manifold and simultaneous
oppressions that all women of color face” (p. 210). As Sherene Razack
has suggested, “[a]n interlocking approach requires that we keep several
balls in the air at once, striving to overcome the successive process forced
upon us by language and focusing on the ways in which bodies express
social hierarchies of power” (Razack 2005, p. 343). In other words, by
attending to phenomenologically simultaneous and indivisible (if analyti-
cally and politically bifurcated) oppressions, the concept of interlocking
systems reveals the internal heterogeneity of categories such as “women”
(some of whom are oppressed by racism and heterosexism while others
benefit from it). The integrative analysis mitigates against the positing of
“gender and racial essences” embodied in ostensibly “generic” normative
group members (e.g., white heterosexual women), the result of which,
as the Black feminist legal scholar Angela Harris argues, “is to reduce the
lives of people who experience multiple forms of oppression to addition
problems: […] ‘racism + sexism + homophobia = black lesbian experience’”
(Harris 1990, p. 588).
The significance of CRC’s intervention (constituting a crucial moment
in a trajectory of US Black feminist theory which spans three centuries)
is to challenge the fragmentation of experiences of multiple oppressions
as a precondition of political analysis and action. Arguably, the signifi-
cance of an “interlocking approach” is not that it enables us to combine
discrete categories of identity or oppression in a positivist attempt to
grasp social totality. Rather, for queer theorists, educators, and activists
for whom “sexuality” or “sexual orientation” remain foundational catego-
170 A. CARASTATHIS
ries of analysis, the challenge is to reveal their internal heterogeneity, to

undermine their analytic separability from categories of “race,” “gender,”
and “gender identity,” “class,” “disability,” “citizenship” and “nation,”
by theorizing (not merely stipulating) their co-constitutive intermeshed-
ness. In other words, what lies largely before us, even as it is prefigured in
the work of the CRC, is an integrative analysis of and struggle against the
plural and sometimes contradictory manifestations of heteronormativity,
heterosexism, and homophobia in and through the “multilayered texture”
of our lives.
REFERENCES
Anzaldúa, G., & Moraga, C. (Eds.). (1981/1983). This bridge called my back:
Writings by radical women of color (2nd ed.). Latham: Kitchen Table/Women
of Color Press.
Belkhir, J. A. (2009). The “Johnny’s story”: Founder of the race, gender and class
journal. In M. T. Berger & K. Guidroz (Eds.), The intersectional approach:
Transforming the academy through race, class, and gender (pp. 300–308).
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Breines, W. (2006). The trouble between us: An uneasy history of white and black
women in the feminist movement. New York: Oxford University Press.
Carastathis, A. (2013). Identity categories as potential coalitions. Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 941–965. doi:10.1086/669573.
Combahee River Collective. (1977/1981/1983). A black feminist statement. In
G. Anzaldúa & C. Moraga (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writings by radi-
cal women of color (2nd ed., pp. 210–218). Latham: Kitchen Table/Women of
Color Press.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics,
and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
doi:10.2307/1229039.
Eisenstein, Z. (1978). Capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialism. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Gines, K. T. (2014). Race women, race men, and early expressions of proto-
intersectionality, 1830s–1930s. In N. Goswami, M. O’Donovan, & L. Yount
(Eds.), Why race and gender still matter: An intersectional approach (pp. 13–26).
London: Pickering & Chatto.
Guy-Sheftall, B. (Ed.). (1995). Words of fire: An anthology of African–American
feminist thought. New York: The New Press.
Harris, A. P. (1990). Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory. Stanford Law
Review, 42(3), 581–616. doi:10.2307/1228886.
Hull, G., Scott, P., & Smith, B. (Eds.). (1982). All the women are white, all the
blacks are men, but some of us are brave: Black women’s studies. New York: The
Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
Lugones, M. (2003). Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against mul-
tiple oppressions. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Nash, J. C. (2008). Rethinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89, 1–15.
Razack, S. (2005). How is white supremacy embodied? Sexualized racial violence
at Abu Ghraib. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 17(2), 341–363.
Smith, B. (Ed.). (1983). Home girls: A black feminist anthology. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
Smith, B. (2003). Interview by Loretta Ross. Transcript of video recording, May
7–8. Voices of feminism oral history project. Sophia Smith Collection.
Springer, K. (2005). Living for the revolution: Black feminist organizations, 1968–
1980. Durham: Duke University Press.
Taylor, Y., Hines, S., & Casey, M. E. (Eds.). (2010). Theorizing intersectionality
and sexuality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Internal Safety
Bethy Leonardi and Elizabeth J. Meyer
INTRODUCTION
Creating safe schools has been a priority of the US Department of
Education for over three decades. In 1994, the US Congress set a goal
for “safe, disciplined, and drug-free schools” as part of the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Reauthorization. This goal stated:
“By the year 2000, every school in the United States will be free of drugs,
violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will
offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning” (1994). The prob-
lem with this definition is that it focuses exclusively on external forms of
safety: drugs, weapons, and violence that pose a threat to one’s physical
body. Until quite recently, there has been little to no formal attention to
addressing issues of safety that have more to do with students’ sense of self,
which may have a more enduring impact on their development, success,
and connection to school. In this chapter we provide a summary of trends
in school safety initiatives in the USA. We then offer a framework, based
in critical and queer perspectives and pedagogies, that introduces the con-
cept of internal safety (Leonardi and Saenz 2014). In this framework, we
B. Leonardi ( ) • E.J. Meyer

University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

174 B. LEONARDI AND E.J. MEYER
provide insights for teacher education programs to complicate notions of

safety in order to better support teacher candidates in cultivating environ-
ments that are affirming, and safe, for all students. Since queer theory
actively defies rigid constructions and hegemonic forces, in this chapter
we use multiple theories and approaches to challenge heteronormativity,
dominant narratives about school safety, and teacher preparation while
offering ideas that may allow educators to queer their own notions of
safety and belonging.
EVOLVING DEFINITIONS OF SAFETY

The concept of safety can take on very different meanings in school settings
depending on the speaker and the context. As stated in the introduction,
official and governmental definitions of safety tend to focus on issues of
security and control. The Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities
Act (SDFSCA) (1994) was included in the 1994 ESEA Reauthorization
to meet the stated safety goals. The SDFSCA’s notion of safety focused
exclusively on drug and violence prevention and provided funding to
schools to specifically address these two issues. Seven years later, during
the 2001 reauthorization of the ESEA, commonly known as No Child
Left Behind, the Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO) (2001) was
added to the legislation. The USCO allows parents to transfer their chil-
dren out of “persistently dangerous” and into “safe” schools. Each state
was left to establish its own definitions of “persistently dangerous” and
generally focused on counting reports of firearms, fights, physical assaults,
or gang violence. Safe schools were thus defined as those that were not
“persistently dangerous,” due to an absence of reported violent incidents.
These definitions of safety—largely focused on the absence of violence—
are insufficient when working to support the healthy development of
youth and to create school environments that are affirming. However, the
emphasis on school safety has been a valuable entry point to allow scholars
and advocates interested in broader notions of safety to bring attention to
the problem of bullying, harassment, and other forms of violence targeted
toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth in
schools. In the early 1990s, there was a growing awareness and attention
toward the risks and vulnerabilities experienced by gay and lesbian youth
in schools (Rofes 1989; Treadway and Yoakum 1992; The Governor’s
Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth 1993; Unks 1995; Ries 1995).
INTERNAL SAFETY 175
By focusing on issues of risk and safety, educators and activists were able
to break the silence around topics of gender and sexual diversity (GSD)
and begin to focus more comprehensively on issues of safety and inclusion
in school environments. Although there are problems and limitations with
this risk narrative (e.g., Talburt 2006; Cruz 2011), it was a strategic start-
ing point for work around LGBTQ issues and for recognition of schools
as largely, and dangerously, heteronormative.
Developing out of this work by educators and activists are more com-
plex and nuanced notions of safety that go beyond zero tolerance, weap-
ons, and physical assaults and are informed by critical and queer pedagogies
(Freire 1970; Bryson and de Castell 1993; Britzman 1995; Kumashiro
2002b). These conceptions of safety consider the daily lived experiences of
students and the systems and norms that enable and constrain those expe-
riences. In Don’t be so Gay! Donn Short (2013) used interview data from
LGBTQ students and teachers in Toronto, Canada, to identify a spectrum
of conceptualizations of safety. Mapping closely onto “official” notions
of safety, and seemingly with a goal of establishing “disciplined” environ-
ments, Short defined the first two levels as control and security. The most
basic level, control, was defined as exercising strict control over students’
movements and bodies; similar to the level of control, security was exem-
plified by the use of metal detectors, security guards, and zero-tolerance
policies. The third and fourth levels defined by Short, equity and social
justice, represented more comprehensive understandings of safety and
moved toward disrupting and changing heteronormative school cultures.
Equity was represented by approaches that promoted efforts at achieving
equity and addressing diversity issues in proactive ways. The fourth level
of safety was defined as working toward social justice. In these schools, stu-
dents and teachers actively engaged in various forms of community work,
explored issues of privilege and oppression, and worked on projects that
actively addressed social issues. The concept of internal safety, introduced
by Leonardi and Saenz (2014), aligns most closely with the equity and
social justice levels defined by Short and anti-oppressive education more
broadly.
Focusing on students’ internal safety with respect to GSD specifically
requires more than simply treating symptoms (e.g., bullying, suicide)
of unsafe schools; it requires acknowledging, challenging, and queering
heteronormative school cultures. Central to this concept is its emphasis
on the importance of educators promoting student autonomy and self-
determination, both of which, Leonardi and Saenz (2014) argue, are

contingent upon “favorable social contexts of choice” (Moses 2002). As
noted by Butler (2004), autonomy and self-determination are complex
concepts. In schools, for example, as primary social contexts for youth,
norms are established and enacted; students, who did not choose those
norms, are constituted by those contexts. As a result, their agency is “riven
with paradox” (Butler 2004, p. 3). In order, then, for students to exercise
self-determination, they must rely on institutions of social support; “self-
determination becomes a plausible concept only in the context of a social
world that supports and enables that exercise of agency” (Butler 2004,
p. 7). Prioritizing students’ internal safety requires attending both to stu-
dents’ evolving identities as well as the social contexts in which they live
and learn. To create, with students, contexts in which they feel affirmed,
in which they feel internally safe, students must have equal educational
opportunities that are “worth wanting” (Howe 1997); they must have
choices that make sense for their social, personal, and cultural identi-
ties and that reflect and provide frameworks for who they are becoming.
This requires acknowledging the ways in which heteronormativity shapes
our society and schools, and actively attempting to disrupt it, and posi-
tions teachers as integral in this process of critiquing and queering school
cultures.
INTERNAL SAFETY: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEORY

AND PRACTITIONER
Our system of public education is built on a commitment to providing

all students with equal educational opportunities. When students do
not feel safe at school, we are neglecting our responsibility to fulfill this
promise. Dominant notions of safety—built mostly on considerations of
physical aggression and danger—do not attend to the different ways that
students experience school as a result of how who they are interacts with
where they are: the collision of identity and school culture (Leonardi and
Saenz 2014). Central to internal safety is the need for school environ-
ments to be places where students feel affirmed, where they are supported
through their process of becoming. We argue that creating favorable social
contexts of choice with respect to GSD, and in which students can be
internally safe, requires that teacher education programs support teacher
candidates to develop habits of heart and mind that are informed by
INTERNAL SAFETY 177
transformative, queer, and critical pedagogies and with the goal of teach-
ing for anti-oppression.
If we expect teacher candidates to move into classrooms ready to
create contexts where students can be internally safe, we must sup-
port them, in teacher education programs, in their own processes of
becoming. Considering the history of safety, conceptualized over time,
we might assume that the ways in which our candidates experienced
school were not ways that afforded them internal safety; further, given
the resounding silence around GSD, the systemic exclusion that has
been noted continuously in decades of education research (e.g., Dalley
and Campbell 2006; Friend 1993), and data on teachers’ attitudes and
beliefs around these topics (e.g., Bower and Klecka 2009; Dessel 2010;
Meyer 2008; Petrovic and Rosiek 2007), we can also assume that they
were not supported to recognize and disrupt heteronormative social
and institutional practices that are actively operating in our schools
(Blackburn and Smith 2010). To hone the habits of heart and mind nec-
essary to create classrooms in which students may be internally safe, we
argue that several components need to be central to teacher education.
Importantly, sense-making and “critical dialogues” (Meyer and Lesiuk
2010) or a “culture of conversation” (Leonardi 2014) are necessary
for candidates to internalize and operationalize ideas of internal safety.
Central to these discussions is critical ontology (Kincheloe 2003, 2005;
Meyer 2011): processes for candidates to make sense of systemic oppres-
sion and to participate in an ongoing self-reflection. Finally, dialogue
must be informed by queer pedagogy. Candidates must be engaged in a
process of “unlearning” (Britzman 1998; Kumashiro 2001) common-
sense assumptions of what counts as “normal” and supported in that
process. By recognizing the ways that taken-for-granted norms, particu-
larly related to identity, serve to protect some students and police oth-
ers, candidates will be prepared to (re)think safe spaces, not as those
absent of danger, but as those that are at once affirming, and at the same
time critical of “reigning ideologies of subjectivity, power, and mean-
ing” (Green 1996, p. 326).
SUPPORTING TEACHERS TO TAKE ACTION

We begin with the assumption that to create environments that afford
students opportunities to feel internally safe, candidates must be engaged
with Kincheloe’s (2003) notion of critical ontology: “a way of being that
is aware of the ways power shapes us, the ways we see the world, and
the ways we perceive our role as teachers” (p. 53)—and they must be
engaged in critical, queer, and transformative pedagogies (Sleeter and
Delgado Bernal 2004; Giroux 2004; Freire 1970; hooks 1994). Critical
pedagogy positions teachers in a dialogical process with their students as
they “examine the world critically, using a problem-posing process that
begins with their own experience and historical location” as well as an
analysis of that experience (Sleeter and Delgado Bernal 2004, p. 142).
Freire (1998) believed that “the development of democratic life requires
critical engagement with ideals through dialogue” and that “[d]ialogue
demands engagement; it occurs neither when some parties opt out silently
nor when those with the most power simply impose their views” (p. 242).
Through critical dialogue, candidates can examine dominant cultures and
normative discourses, such as those that perpetuate heteronormativity, and
critique the ways in which those cultures and discourses, and their own
involvement in them, perpetuate inequity in society as well as in schools
(e.g., McLaren and Mayo 1999). hooks (1994) argues that engaging in
dialogue “is one of the simplest ways we can begin, as teachers, scholars,
and critical thinkers to cross boundaries” (p. 130)—to struggle together
to understand the ways that privilege and oppression function and to cre-
ate more equitable, more safe, schools. Moving beyond historically con-
structed narratives of safety and into expanding notions of safety requires
that we support candidates to understand the ways in which systems oper-
ate in schools. In particular, they need to understand not only how they
are themselves situated within those systems given their own experiences
and historical locations, but also how they perpetuate them by reifying
discourses of difference and dangerous binaries that are the roots of what
make schools dangerous to begin with (Britzman 1995; Meyer 2007). To
be clear, what we are asking of candidates is not just to engage an “inclu-
sive curriculum” or new teaching methods, but rather, to engage in “an
inquiry into the conditions that make learning possible or prevent learn-
ing” (Luhmann 1998, other’’ p. 130). Luhmann (1998) continues, “[w]
hat is at stake in this pedagogy is the deeply social or dialogic situation of
subject formation, the processes of how we make ourselves through and
against others” (p. 130); this requires that candidates participate in the
ongoing process of self-actualization (hooks 1994).
Heteronormativity and associated norms that perpetuate the lack
of both external and internal safety in schools act much like racism, as
“smog in the air” (Tatum 1997). Simply implementing anti-bullying
INTERNAL SAFETY 179
programs or dumping canned curriculum onto students will not work

to queer notions of safety or disrupt heteronormativity. While there
are, in fact, “strategies that work”—in a “strategies that work context,”
Kumashiro (2001) suggests we refuse these strategies (p. 3). Education,
“good teaching” (Palmer 1998), and the creation of safe school cul-
tures cannot be reduced to using rote methods of instruction (Shor
1993). Good teaching—“like any truly human activity, emerges from
one’s inwardness, for better or worse” and “comes from the identity and
integrity of the teacher” (Palmer 1998, p. 2). Before teachers can turn
outward in their attempts to create these spaces, they must be supported
to turn inward, to trouble taken-for-granted notions of what is normal,
to be self-reflective about their own pedagogy, and to engage in critical
self-reflection and dialogue with respect to the ways in which power,
privilege, identities, and oppression function in their own lives. To sup-
port their students, teachers must “have a critical knowledge of them-
selves—an understanding of their own thoughts, feelings, and values as
the product of historical and cultural processes of which they may not be
fully aware” (Petrovic and Rosiek 2007, p. 203). As a sacred vocation,
teaching demands that pedagogues be engaged in a process of self-actu-
alization and committed to their own well-being (hooks 1994). In caring
for the souls of their students, which hooks (1994) argued is essential to
create contexts for learning, teachers must be committed to remaining
open to this process. With respect to anti-oppressive education, this con-
sciousness-raising process and the work to change both self and society,
this honing habits of heart and mind, is often painful (Kumashiro 2001).
When we support candidates to recognize that the norms that we take for
granted, that we perpetuate, are oppressive, we put them into a form of
“crisis” (Kumashiro 2001). As teacher education programs, we need to
take this seriously. How must teacher education look if we are to put our
candidates into “crisis” for the sake of them developing these habits of
heart and mind, for the sake of supporting them to create classrooms and
schools in which their students have the best chance at internal safety?
CONCLUSION
The framework that we put forth in this chapter relies on queering tra-
ditional notions of safety to create more expansive notions that place as
central students’ identities and school cultures and contexts in which they
learn. Students must, of course, be free from external harms, but they
must also be free from dangerous normative claims that often wrongly
challenge them to sacrifice the integrity of who they are becoming, their
internal safety. This is particularly true when we consider the harmful and
complicated influences of heteronormativity on students’ school experi-
ences, and must be acknowledged as fundamental to conversations about
how to create safer schools. By encouraging future teachers to actively
reflect upon their own identities and experiences in schools, on the ways
in which privilege and oppression have impacted their own educational
opportunities, and to engage in critical dialogues, we may be able to bet-
ter support them to do the difficult and complex work that is involved
in creating spaces where students’ sense of internal safety is carefully cul-
tivated and protected. In addition to prompting a greater awareness of
the teacher-self embedded in broader sociopolitical contexts, this form of
autobiographical study intends to move the individual to a deeper level
of engagement and action within their own communities (Meyer 2011).
What cannot be lost, however, is how teacher educators are implicated
in these processes. Importantly, to ask our candidates to do this work,
teacher educators must be willing to engage in this ongoing process of
praxis ourselves—to model it and embody it transparently as part of the
curriculum we offer future teachers.
REFERENCES
Blackburn, M. V., & Smith, J. M. (2010). Moving beyond the inclusion of
LGBT-themed literature in English language arts classrooms: Interrogating
heteronormativity and exploring intersectionality. Journal of Adolescent &
Adult Literacy, 53(8), 625–634.
Bower, L., & Klecka, C. (2009). (Re)considering normal: Queering social norms
for parents and teachers. Teaching Education, 20(4), 357–373.
Britzman, D. P. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight.
Bryson, M., & de Castell, S. (1993). Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect.
Canadian Journal of Education, 18(3), 285–305.
Cruz, C. (2011). LGBTQ street youth talk back: A meditation on resistance and
witnessing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(5),
547–558.
Dalley, P., & Campbell, M. D. (2006). Constructing and contesting discourses of
heteronormativity: An ethnographic study of youth in a francophone high
school in Canada. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 5(1), 11–29.
INTERNAL SAFETY 181
Dessel, A. B. (2010). Effects of intergroup dialogue: Public school teachers and
sexual orientation prejudice. Small Group Research, 41(5), 556–592.
Freire, P. (1970/1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Friend, R. A. (1993). Choices, not closets: Heterosexism and homophobia in
schools. In L. Weis & M. Fine (Eds.), Beyond silenced voices: Class, race, and
gender in United States schools (pp. 209–235). Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Giroux, H. A. (2004). Critical pedagogy and the postmodern/modern divide:
Towards a pedagogy of democratization. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31,
31–47.
Goals 2000: Educate America Act. (1994, March 31). Safe and drug free schools
and communities act (SDFSCA) of 1994 § 7101.
Green, F. L. (1996). Introducing queer theory into the undergraduate classroom:
Abstractions and practical applications. English Education, 28(4), 323–339.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. New York: Routledge.
Howe, K. (1997). Understanding equal educational opportunity: Social justice and
democracy in schooling. New York: Teachers College Press.
Kincheloe, J. (2003). Critical ontology: Visions of selfhood and curriculum.
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 19(1), 47–64.
Kincheloe, J. (2005). Autobiography and critical ontology: Being a teacher, devel-
oping a reflective persona. In W. M. Roth (Ed.), Auto/biography and auto/
ethnography: Praxis of research method. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Kumashiro, K. (Ed.). (2001). Troubling intersections of race and sexuality:
Queer students of color and anti-oppressive education. Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Kumashiro, K. K. (2002b). Troubling education: Queer activism and anti-oppres-
sive pedagogy. New York: Routledge Falmer.
Leonardi, B. (2014). Tilling the soil for LGBTQ inclusive policies: A case study of one
school’s attempt to bring policy into practice. Unpublished dissertation, University
of Colorado Boulder, Boulder.
Leonardi, B., & Saenz, L. (2014). Conceptualizing safety from the inside out:
Heteronormative spaces and their effects on students’ sense of self. In
D. Carlson & E. Meyer (Eds.), Gender and sexualities in education: A hand-
book. New York: Peter Lang.
Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
McLaren, P., & Mayo, P. (1999). Value commitment, social change and personal
narrative. International Journal of Educational Reform, 8(4), 397–408.
Meyer, E. J. (2007). “But I’m not gay”: What straight teachers need to know
about queer theory. In N. M. Rodriguez & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), Queering
straight teachers: Discourse and identity in education (pp. 15–32). New York:

Peter Lang.
Meyer, E. J. (2008). Gendered harassment in secondary schools: Understanding
teachers’ (non)interventions. Gender and Education, 20(6), 555–570.
Meyer, E. J. (2011). Critical ontology and teacher agency: Postformal autobiogra-
phy and its impacts on research and practice. In J. L. Kincheloe (Ed.), Key works
in critical pedagogy (pp. 219–226). Boston: Sense Publishers.
Meyer, E. J., & Lesiuk, V. (2010). Subverting the ivory tower: Teaching through
critical dialogues. Cultural Studies <−> Critical Methodologies, 10(5),
394–396.
Moses, M. S. (2002). Embracing race: Why we need race-conscious education policy.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Petrovic, J., & Rosiek, J. (2007). From teacher knowledge to queered teacher
knowledge research: Escaping the epistemic straight jacket. In N. M. Rodriguez
& W. F. Pinar (Eds.), Queering straight teachers: Discourse and identity in edu-
cation (pp. 201–232). New York: Peter Lang.
Ries, B. (1995). Safe schools anti-violence documentation project: Second annual
report. Seattle: Safe Schools Coalition of Washington.
Rofes, E. (1989). Opening up the classroom closet: Responding to the educa-
tional needs of gay and lesbian youth. Harvard Educational Review, 59,
444–453.
Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. In P.
McLaren & P. Leonard (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 25–35).
Short, D. (2013). “Don’t be so gay!”Queers, bullying, and making schools safe.
Vancouver: UBC Press.
Sleeter, C. E., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2004). Critical pedagogy, critical race the-
ory, and antiracist education: Their implications for multicultural education. In
J. Banks & C. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives
(Vol. 8, pp. 240–258). Hoboken: Wiley.
Talburt, S. (2006). Queer research and queer youth. Journal of Gay & Lesbian
Issues in Education, 3(2–3), 87–93.
Tatum, B. D. (1997). Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?:
And other conversations about race. New York: Basic Books.
The Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. (1993). Making schools
safe for gay and lesbian youth (p. 57). Boston: The Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.
The Unsafe School Choice Option § 7912 (2001).
Treadway, L., & Yoakum, J. (1992). Creating a safer school environment for les-
bian and gay students. Journal of School Health, 62(7), 352–357.
Unks, G. (Ed.). (1995). The gay teen: Educational practice and theory for lesbian,
gay and bisexual adolescents. New York: Routledge.
Mathematical Inqueery
Kai Rands
Within queer studies in education, mathematics has been one of the last
school subjects to be taken up. Similarly, mathematics education has been
slow to consider queer perspectives (Rands 2009). Mathematics and
mathematics teaching have traditionally been seen as outside of the socio-
cultural context (D’Ambrosio 1999), and as neutral, universal, and unin-
fluenced by the social realm. More recently, two social turns have reframed
mathematics and mathematics education as social processes (Valero and
Zevenbergen 2004). The first social turn is toward social constructivism,
drawing on the work of Lev Vygotsky. Research stemming from this social
turn focuses on the ways in which mathematical knowledge is socially con-
stituted within the classroom. The second social turn is toward a perspec-
tive based on sociology and critical theory. Central to this view is the
role of power, privilege, and oppression in mathematics and mathematics
education. These two social turns have set the stage for the emergence of
critical perspectives on mathematics education such as critical mathematics
literacy, critical race theory in education, and numerous others. Among
these perspectives, queer theories, issues, and people have been largely
overlooked.
K. Rands ( )
Independent Scholar, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

184 K. RANDS
In my scholarship, I have conceptualized two versions of queer-

ing mathematics education, each of which relates to a different usage
of the term “queer.” The first way in which “queer” is commonly used
is as an umbrella term for the expansive list of identities “Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender … (LGBT…).” I call approaches to queering math-
ematics education related to this usage of queer “Add-Queers-and-Stir”
Mathematics Education. The second usage of “queer” is the way in which
it is used in queer theory. I call approaches to queering mathematics edu-
cation related to this usage of queer “Mathematical Inqueery.” These two
approaches point to a tension between “the substantive queer (as a label
for a person, thereby implying the constitution of identity)” (O’Driscoll
1996, p. 30) and the “anti-identity critique of queer theory” (Wiegman
1995, quoted in O’Driscoll 1996, p. 30). O’Driscoll suggests that the
two uses of queer, though in tension, are most productive when seen as
interplay rather than opposition. In this chapter, I will briefly describe each
approach and give several examples.
“ADD-QUEERS-AND-STIR” MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
Queer as an Umbrella Term

Originally a derogatory slur used against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-
gender (LGBT) people, “queer” has been reappropriated in the last half
century. As an umbrella term, queer as a noun summarized the identities
gay and lesbian, later adding bisexual, transgender, and other identi-
ties into a list that some call “alphabet soup.” According to O’Driscoll
(1996), this substantive queer is used to signify something particular
about the material sexuality of specific groups. Through this significa-
tion, the term also produces straight as an “opposite” term. Mobilizing
this usage of queer serves to “shore up” collective categories, supporting
a public collective identity “complete with political and cultural insti-
tutions, festivals, neighborhoods, even its own flag” (Gameson 1995,
p. 391). Underlying this model of collective identity is the assumption
that what “queer” people share “is the same fixed, natural essence, a
self” with particular shared desires. Such presumed shared identities and
desires as well as shared oppression provide the basis for rights-based
queer movements.
MATHEMATICAL INQUEERY 185
LGBT Pedagogy
The tensions between the two uses of “queer” align with tensions
between “gay/lesbian pedagogy” and “queer pedagogy.” Hoad (1994)
suggests that gay/lesbian pedagogy “looks more like a conscious-
ness raising pedagogy, entailing alerting students to the questions of
homophobia, creating tolerance of diversity in the classroom, scrupu-
lously avoiding a recognition of the classroom as an eroticized space”
(p. 54). Similarly, Jeremy Brunson suggests that “LGBT pedagogy is the
incorporation of LGBT issues into teaching” and mentions hate crimes
and same-sex relationships as topics that should be discussed in class-
rooms (quoted in Sierra-Zarella 2004, p. 107). LGBT pedagogy, like
the term “queer” as an umbrella term, focuses on “shoring up” collec-
tive identities and assumes shared desires. Similar to rights-based queer
movements, LGBT pedagogy has as goals representation and inclusion
of queer people, issues, and topics.
“Add-Queers-and-Stir” Mathematics Education

One approach to queering mathematics education that is aligned with
“queer” as an umbrella term and the description of LGBT pedagogy
above is to “add” queer issues and topics to the mathematics curric-
ulum. One way to do so is to incorporate representations of queer
people in story/word problems. An example from my previous scholar-
ship sets up a context that includes representations of numerous family
structures:
We want your families to come for “Curriculum Night.” Your families will
play math games. One game is called “Pattern Block Pictures.” Each per-
son will make a picture with paper shapes and glue. Each person will need
4 hexagons, 3 trapezoids, 5 triangles, 4 blue parallelograms, and 6 white
parallelograms. 2 kids live with two moms. 1 kid lives with two dads. 1 kid
lives with two moms sometimes and a mom and a dad other times. 8 kids
live with a dad and a mom. 3 kids live with a mom. 1 kid lives with a dad.
2 kids live with a grandma. 4 brothers and 2 sisters will play the game too.
(Rands 2009, p. 184)
Some of the questions the teacher might pose based on the context
include the following:
186 K. RANDS
• How many people will play the game?

• How many hexagons [or trapezoids, triangles, blue parallelograms,
or white parallelograms] do we need in all?
• How many hexagons will the grandmas use together?
• How many of each shape can you fit on a sheet of paper?
• How many sheets of paper will we need for each shape so that we will
have enough shapes for everyone?
Other examples of the “Add-Queers-and-Stir” approach include incor-

porating queer symbols such as pink triangles and the gay flag into geom-
etry lessons, analyzing data to compare frequency of queer and straight
character representations in library books, constructing timelines of queer
history and history of other groups to scale so that the distances between
dates correlate with the amount of time between events (Rands 2009).
MATHEMATICAL INQUEERY
Queer in Queer Theory

Queer theory uses “queer” not as an abbreviation for “LGBT…,” but
instead as a complex network of signification in which identification is
considered contingent, unfixed, and in a constant process of reconstitution
through discursive practices (Butler 1990, 1993; Curran 2006; Foucault
1978; Sedgwick 1993; Sumara and Davis 1998; Talburt and Steinberg
2000; Warner 1999). Queer theory rejects “inclusion” and “representa-
tion” as ultimate goals because queer theory rejects the idea of an essen-
tial enduring “self-identical subject” that could be fully represented or
included. For example, Butler (1993) asserts that any identity category,
including “queer,” is a “necessary error” required for affiliation. Hence,
“queer” can never have a fixed political referent and will never “fully
describe those it purports to represent” (Butler 1993, p. 571). Rather
than inclusion and representation, queer theory emphasizes questioning
and inquiry. Rather than “shoring up” identities, queer theory questions
and enquires into the ways in which they are produced and maintained as
apparently fixed. Queer theory reveals the ways in which identity catego-
ries function performatively in the sense introduced by Austin (1975) and
mobilized by Butler (1993). Identity is an effect of a “doing” that brings
it into being. The effect comes to be taken for granted as an apparent
noun which covers the verbal repetition needed to produce and maintain
it. Moreover, the effect is taken for granted not simply as one of multiple
possible effects, but as necessary fact rather than produced through one of
multiple possible sets of acts. Moving from representation and inclusion to
inquiry (Nelson 1999) allows the interrogation of this performative pro-
cess, revealing the processes behind the effects and that identities could
be otherwise. Ultimately, such inquiry serves to interrogate and critique
normativity: the ways in which it is produced, how it functions, and its
relation to power.
Queer Pedagogy
In contrast with the emphasis in LGBT pedagogy on representation and
inclusion of LGBT issues and topics in the curriculum, queer pedagogy like
queer theory takes identity as unfixed, contingent, and performatively pro-
duced. Queer pedagogy moves from inclusion to inquiry (Nelson 1999).
As Luhmann (1998) suggests, pedagogy can be “posed as a question (as
opposed to the answer) of knowledge” (p. 126). Queer pedagogy cri-
tiques a view of pedagogy as concerned with strategies for effective knowl-
edge transmission and students as “rational but passive beings untroubled
by the material studied” (p. 126). Queer pedagogy mobilizes the “desire
to subvert the processes of normalization” (p. 128). Hoad (1994) views
queer pedagogy as something “risky and explosive; it requires a radical
interrogation of all social analyses, particularly in areas that appear to have
little to do with sex” (p. 54). Like Luhmann, Hoad asserts that queer
pedagogy “should favor questions over answers [and] should shock and
titillate, not just inform” (p. 54). Like queer theory, queer pedagogy
stretches past a focus on (hetero/homo)sexuality toward a broader focus
on normativity. Queer pedagogy “insists on the importance of sexuality
… as constitutive of everyone and everything” at this point in history
(Shepard 1994, p. 54), but also “takes its bearings in defining itself against
normativity, not heterosexuality” (Parker 1994, p. 55).
Mathematical Inqueery
Mathematical inqueery is an approach to mathematics education which
uses a queer theoretical lens. Like queer theory and queer pedagogy,
it shifts the emphasis from representation and inclusion to inquiry.
Mathematical inqueery goes beyond asking students to discern and
describe mathematical relationships (e.g., Hiebert et al. 1997), develop
188 K. RANDS
problem-solving strategies (e.g., Carpenter et al. 1999), and participate

in mathematical discourse with one another (e.g., Whiteneck and Yackel
2002). Mathematical inqueery challenges normativity and questions the
boundaries of social, identity, and mathematical categories. Mathematical
inqueery mathematizes the queer and queers mathematics. In the remain-
der of the chapter, I will describe several examples of mathematical
inqueery from my work.
Queering Geometry The story problem example in the “Add-Queers-

and-Stir” section incorporated representations of queer families in a
geometry task. However, the task left dominant notions of shape, family,
and the shapes of families intact. Mathematical inqueery pushes teach-
ers and students to take the level of inquiry one step further to question
dominant conceptions through questions such as the following (Rands
2009):
• What types of families are still left out in this story problem?
• How do we tend to define family (e.g., those who live with you and
those who are biologically related to you)? What are different ways
to think about family?
• When we talk about families in only this way (e.g., those who live
with you), how does that make it hard to think about family in other
ways?
• What shapes are included in the pattern block sets? What types of
pictures do these shapes make possible and impossible?
• Could we make up a shape that does not even have a name?
• Could there be types of families and types of shapes we have not even
thought of yet?
Questions such as these encourage students to question the assump-

tions underlying categories (in this case, categories of families and shapes).
They push students to interrogate what constitutes a family, shape, and
shape of a family and imagine new ways of thinking and relating in society.
Queering Argumentation One way to queer argumentation is to question

the rhetorical strategy of making arguments using numbers, as is com-
monly done in many contemporary societies. Some questions teachers and
students might explore include the following (Rands 2009):
• When and where do people make arguments using numbers such as

percentages and fractions?
• What are other ways to make the same arguments without using
numbers?
• Can you make a contradicting argument using the same numerical
data?
• What do number-based arguments leave out that other types of
arguments do not and vice versa?
• How do listeners/readers respond to number-based arguments?
These questions move beyond using numerical data to make arguments

to questioning the underlying ways in which these arguments function in
society.
Another example of queering argumentation involves considering the
ways in which contemporary mathematical proofs are a “pretty queer
thing” (Rands in press). Although the process of mathematical proof
may at first glance seem as far from queer theory as possible, the revolu-
tions through which mathematical proof went between 1890 and 1930
(Quinn 2012) reveal parallels with queer theory. According to Quinn
(2012), proofs in previous eras could include appeals to physical intuition,
authority, and the casual establishment of alternatives. Modern proofs,
on the other hand, require careful justification of each step. This shift
in what “counts” as a proof encourages the critique of common sense
assumptions—as does queer theory. This change allowed mathematical
phenomena such as Peano’s space filling curve and Weierstrass’s nowhere-
differentiable function to be accepted as existing, despite being apparently
outrageous. These developments resonate with queer theory’s impulses to
question the boundaries of categories (e.g., what counts as a “curve”) and
challenge normativity.
Queering Time Queering time involves considering chronopolitics.

Freeman (2005) describes chronopolitics as:
The management of entire populations: both the state and the market pro-
duce biopolitical status relations not only through borders … and other
strategies of spatial containment, but also and crucially through tempo-
ral mechanisms. Some groups have their needs and freedoms deferred or
snatched away, and some don’t … some human experiences officially count
as life or one of its parts, and some don’t. Those forced to wait … whose
190 K. RANDS
activities do not show up on the official time line … are variously and often
simultaneously black, female, queer. (p. 57)
“Young” can be added to the list. Mathematical inquiry might involve

examining the chronopolitics of “child development” perspectives and
the ways in which time is regulated through classroom and school rou-
tines and daily schedules in schools and other places students frequent. In
many ways, school serves as a time-deposit box for young people, a place
to spend time until they enter the “real world.” A curricular example of
mathematical inqueery into time could take place during a unit on telling
time or one on elapsed time. Rather than simply learning how to tell time
on clocks, a class could consider questions such as the following:
• What are all the different ways time is broken up throughout the
school day? How is this decided?
• What ways is time broken up outside of school? How is this decided?
• What types of events are celebrated and which are ignored or
overlooked?
• In different contexts, with whom is time spent? How much time?
Doing what?
• How could time be used/spent/experienced differently in school
and elsewhere? What other possibilities are there?
QUEER INTERPLAY
I would like to return to O’Driscoll’s suggestion that the two uses of
queer, despite their inherent tension, are most productive when conceptu-
alized as interplay rather than in opposition. Queer theory poses the ques-
tion, what does x make possible and impossible. “Add-Queers-and-Stir”
mathematics education and mathematical inqueery each enable different
things. “Add-Queers-and-Stir” mathematics education aims for inclusion
and representation of queer issues and topics, which have been glaringly
absent. Mathematical inqueery recognizes the ways in which inclusion and
representation ultimately fail to live up to their promise, and shifts the
emphasis to questioning, interrogation, and inquiry of mathematics and
the world. Taken together, the interplay between the two approaches to
queering mathematics and mathematics education supports using math-
ematics to push beyond binaries, pose questions about the world, and
imagine new possibilities.
REFERENCES
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Critically queer. In Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of
“sex” (pp. 223–242). New York: Routledge.
Carpenter, T., Fennema, E., Franke, M., Levi, L., & Empson, S. (1999). Children’s
mathematics: Cognitively guided instruction. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Curran, G. (2006). Responding to students’ normative questions about gays:
Putting queer theory into practices in an Australian ESL class. Journal of
Language, Identity, and Education, 5(1), 85–96.
D’Ambrosio, U. (1999). Ethnomathematics: The art or technique of explaining and
knowing & History of mathematics in the periphery: The basin metaphor. Preprint
116. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality volume 1: An introduction. New York:
Random House.
Freeman, E. (2005). Time binds, or, erotohistoriography. Social Text, 84–85(3–4),
57–68.
Gameson, J. (1995). Must identity movements self-destruct? A queer dilemma.
Social Problems, 42(3), 390–407.
Hiebert, J., Carpenter, T., Fennema, E., Fuson, K., Human, P., Murray, H., et al.
(1997). Making sense: Teaching and learning mathematics with understanding.
Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Hoad, N. (1994). Response in forum: On the political implications of using the
term “queer”, as in “queer politics”, “queer studies”, and “queer pedagogy”.
Radical Teacher, 45, 52–57.
Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Nelson, C. (1999). Sexual identities in ESL: Queer theory and classroom inquiry.
TESOL Quarterly, 33, 371–391.
O’Driscoll, S. (1996). Outlaw readings: Beyond queer theory. Signs, 22(1), 30–51.
Parker, A. (1994). Response in forum: On the political implications of using the
Quinn, F. (2012). A revolution in mathematics? What really happened a century
ago and why it matters today. Notices of the AMS, 59(1), 31–37.
Rands, K. (in press). Queering mathematics pedagogy: Mathematical inqueery. In
C. Mayo & N. Rodriguez (Eds.), Queer pedagogies: Theory, praxis, politics. New
York: Springer.
192 K. RANDS
Rands, K. (2009). Mathematical inqu[ee]ry: Beyond “Add-Queers-and-Stir” ele-

mentary mathematics education. Sex Education, 9(2), 181–191.
Sedgwick, E. (1993). Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shepard, T. (1994). Response in forum: On the political implications of using the
Sierra-Zarella, E. (2004). Constantly queerying: Practicing responsible pedagogy
at Syracuse University. In The Graduate School of Syracuse University (Ed.),
Interrupting heteronormativity (pp. 105–130). Syracuse: The Graduate School
of Syracuse University.
Sumara, D., & Davis, B. (1998). Telling tales of surprise. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Queer
theory in education (pp. 213–219). Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Talburt, S., & Steinberg, S. (Eds.). (2000). Thinking queer: Sexuality, culture, and
education. New York: Peter Lang.
Valero, P., & Zevenbergen, R. (Eds.). (2004). Researching the socio-political
dimensions of mathematics education: Issues of power in theory and methodology.
Boston: Kluwer.
Warner, M. (Ed.). (1993). Fear of a queer planet: Queer politics and social theory.
New York: The Free Press.
Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life.
New York: The Free Press.
Whiteneck, J., & Yackel, E. (2002). Making mathematical arguments in the pri-
mary grades: The importance of explaining and justifying ideas. Teaching
Mathematics, 8, 524–527.
Performance
Jennifer MacLatchy
Performance art has long been a fertile medium for experimentation

with and critiquing gender and sex norms. This toying with the under-
standing that gender and sexual identities are fluid and malleable, and
exist in contrast to societal norms of heterosexuality and binary gender,
makes performance art of great importance to the field of queer stud-
ies. As theorists of performance studies and feminist epistemologies—such
as Dwight Conquergood, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway—have
argued, studying and engaging with performance can be a way of prac-
ticing methodologies that take a more embodied, situated perspective.
As Judith Butler argues in her theory of gender performativity, gender is
not biologically fixed or inherent, but rather, it is something that seems
to be true because of repeat performances (Butler 1990). After studying
early feminist performance artists of the 1970s, such as Martha Wilson
and Suzy Lake, as well as more recent performance works by artists like
Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, I began to experiment with perfor-
mance art myself, and explore the ways that this performance informs my
research. Indeed, performance has been an indispensable tool for feminist
J. MacLatchy ( )
Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, NS, Canada

194 J. MACLATCHY
critiques and challenges to gender roles and gendered beauty ideals, and
thus, it seems that it may also be useful to the field of education as a tool
for understanding the fluidity of sex and gender.
Judith Butler, in her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity, outlined a theory of gender and performativity that
argues that there is nothing essential about gender, but rather, it is socially
constructed, malleable, and non-binary. She explains that gendered bod-
ies are produced by social expectations and assumptions about an internal
essence of gender, which results in repeated performances of those gen-
der expectations, and over time these repeat performances make it seem
as though gender is a constant and objective truth (Butler 1999, p. xv).
Therefore, she argues, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender
is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gen-
dered stylization of the body” (Butler 1999, p. xv). She illustrates this point
with a discussion of drag. If we see what we believe to be a man dressed as
a woman or a woman dressed as a man, we are assuming that there is an
internal essence or reality that is at odds with an external artifice (Butler
1999, p. xxiii). But, as Butler argues, there is no way to know anything
conclusive about another person’s sex, gender, or sexual identity based on
any of this. Butler explains that it is at this moment, when we realize that
we cannot always tell the difference between real and unreal, that fixed
categories of binary gender come into crisis (Butler 1999, p. xxiv).
In his article “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical
Research,” Dwight Conquergood argues that performance is a way to be
actively involved as a participant in the production of knowledge, rather
than as merely a removed observer. Conquergood was a North American
theorist of performance studies who focused on marginalized groups and
the “scriptocentrism” of Western academia that privileges epistemologies
of the written word over all other forms of knowing. “Scriptocentrism”
in dominant epistemologies privileges the written text, and therefore also
privileges those aspects of knowledge that can be seen, measured, and
recorded in written text. Explaining that “scriptocentrism” erases mean-
ing derived from “other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative activity,”
Conquergood argues for a “promiscuous travel between different ways
of knowing” (Conquergood 2002, p. 145). This would offer potential
for knowledge derived from a direct engagement with the subject mat-
ter, rather than the more removed “view from above” (Conquergood
2002, pp. 146–147). Engaging in this “travel between different ways of
knowing,” and exploration of the “space between analysis and action, […]
PERFORMANCE 195
theory and practice” might allow us to develop a more nuanced, com-

plex, multi-layered understanding of—and feeling for—queer, embodied
ways of knowing that have been overlooked and ignored by mainstream
scholarship (Conquergood 2002, p. 145). Performance, therefore,
becomes an experimental learning experience for the participant-observer.
Sandra Harding, American theorist of gender, science, and technol-
ogy, explains the differences between two such sorts of epistemologies
in her article “Reinventing Ourselves as Other.” She explains the con-
cept of “ahistorical foundationalism,” which is the belief that knowledge
can be unsituated in experience and social location, and thus be objective
(Harding 1993, p. 141). However, people are never without social loca-
tion, and so, although one may try earnestly to be unbiased and objec-
tive, this goal is made somewhat impossible by the inescapable reality of
one’s social location. Even if it were possible to be completely removed
from the experiences and biases of social location in order to be truly
objective, any piece of knowledge produced without such connection to
experience or concrete reality would run the risk of being overly abstract
and irrelevant (Harding 1993, p. 141). In contrast with this concept,
Harding introduces the idea of “experiential foundationalism” as the epis-
temological view that any spontaneous and uncritical understanding of an
experience is true because of its grounding in concrete reality (Harding
1993, p. 141). While such grounding in experience and concrete reality
is valuable and crucial to the production of knowledge that has a basis
in reality, critical reflection is also crucial for evaluating various possible
explanations for experiences. In addition, simply being of a certain identity
or social location does not make one equipped to speak on behalf of all
people of similar identities or social locations (Butler 1997, p. 301). Thus,
Harding argues in favour of a middle ground between these two extremes.
By being present in the experiences of concrete reality that are dictated
by social location, one then has a foundation of experiences, striated with
social, cultural, and political power dynamics. One can reflect upon these
experiences in order to produce a more complex knowledge of the per-
sonal and social realities of one’s own experience and identity that may
not always be represented in the dominant spheres of academic knowledge
production (Harding 1993, p. 142). This theory echoes Conquergood’s
argument that performance studies can yield knowledge from the space
between analysis and action, and is thus vital to the project of queering
knowledge production. These queer, embodied ways of knowing might
alter the ways in which the field of education communicates and interacts
196 J. MACLATCHY
with knowledge. A shift in educational methods from a “scriptocentric”

perspective to more embodied, diverse forms of knowledge may queerly
affect methods of teaching and learning.
Similar to Harding’s concept of “ahistorical foundationalism” is what
Donna Haraway calls “the god-trick.” Haraway, an internationally rec-
ognized feminist theorist of science and technology (European Graduate
School 1997–2012), describes the absurdity of attempting to generate
purely objective knowledge from some universal, non-situated view-
point that is both everywhere and nowhere, or, what she calls “the god-
trick.” In an article titled “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question
in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” she explains that
attempts at formulating absolutely objective scientific knowledge result
from a masculinist delusion that the social positioning of the white
Western heterosexual able-bodied male is neutral, while everyone else’s
social location is marked as non-normative, and therefore unable to pro-
duce unbiased knowledge. She points to the tendency for the use of
technology-enhancing vision in scientific research to cause the delusion
that we can remove ourselves from social location. “I would like to insist
upon the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory sys-
tem that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into
a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1991, p. 188). She argues
that, rather than attempting to leave behind our bodies and social loca-
tions in pursuit of some imaginary objective truth, that it is important
to both value the knowledge gleaned from an embodied and situated
social location as well as to apply critical reflection in the production
of knowledge. “We need the power of modern critical theories of how
meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bod-
ies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for
a future” (Haraway 1991, p. 187). Her arguments, then, are similar
to Harding’s—they emphasize the importance of an embodied research
such that the knowledge that we gain will be grounded in and relevant
to real life. Thus, knowledge can be best produced by the subjects them-
selves: by those who know what it is like to truly live those realities, and
who performatively resist and transform the ways in which gender roles
and sexual norms structure queer bodies and identities in cultural spaces.
An educational framework that demonstrates this integration of situ-
ated social location and applied critical reflection would benefit from the
inclusion of performance and its potential to highlight the malleability of
what we think we know about sex and gender, human and nature.
PERFORMANCE 197
Performance art has been particularly useful to feminist projects of

exploring ways in which gender roles and sexual identity work to shape
the body. It is especially conducive to challenging gender and sexual iden-
tities because these identities are malleable, shifting, and changing over
time, resisting solid definition. These shifts often find their expression in
varying outwards gender performance. Here, the word “performance”
does not mean something false or pretend in opposition to reality, but
rather, it is the way that we bring physical and social manifestation to
creative urges while responding to and contesting the social constructs
of sex and gender. Early feminist performance art beginning in the 1970s
explored the idea of social roles and identity being fluid and malleable by
playing with transformations of gender roles to expose the fallacy of fixed
identity (Wark 2001, p. 125). Performance art takes gender roles as its raw
material and then exaggerates, distorts, and contrasts them to expose their
absurdity. Thus, gender roles and stereotypes are shown to be performa-
tive social constructs, not at all rooted in any sort of rigid biological deter-
minism. Feminist performance art, being a genre particularly well-suited
to experiments with remixing, transforming, and parodying gender and
sexual norms, appears vital to the future of queer studies and education.
As a changeable and revisable reality, gender norms can be put on and
taken off, exaggerated and contrasted, and thus shown to be performa-
tive and malleable. Feminist performance artists, using their bodies as an
artistic medium, give physical embodiment to these theoretical critiques
of sex and gender norms. Martha Wilson, a feminist performance artist
who began her career in the 1970s at the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, worked with gender representation in her performance and
photography. She created images of herself dressed in differently gendered
clothing, embodying different gendered mannerisms, performing con-
trasting gender stereotypes and identities. In a 1974 work titled I make
up the image of my perfection/I make up the image of my deformity, Wilson
presents side-by-side images of her own face with different makeup, hair-
styling, and jewellery (Wilson 1974). By putting on contrasting presenta-
tions of gendered beauty ideals in side-by-side images, Wilson shows the
viewer that gender identity is not something fixed or innate, but rather,
is a sort of performance. Her contrasting images can bring categories of
sex and gender into crisis as the viewer finds it impossible to know which
image depicts Wilson’s true self and which is artifice. In her other works,
Wilson collages torn-up pieces of culture into a mix that does not read
straight, or that might read queerly as a rejection of established structures
198 J. MACLATCHY
of legibility. In shedding labels and transgressing categories, she rejects

and disrupts established ways of knowing and structuring identity.
Suzy Lake, an American feminist performance artist, does this as well in
her 1972–1975 piece titled, On Stage. This piece consists of a collection
of 84 images of herself in various costumes, poses, and settings that pres-
ent a variety of different feminine roles and personas (Baird 2011). She
uses exaggeration, along with the contrast of all of these varying images
presented together, to expose the falseness of beauty ideals. In a text
accompanying one of the images, Lake explains that “role playing is a daily
occurrence; it can be as subtle as dressing for a special occasion, diplomacy,
or inadvertently picking up someone’s mannerisms” (Lake 1972–1975).
These images, then, show that gender identity and gender presentation
are a sort of role playing. Gender roles can be put on and taken off at any
time, and performed in different ways in response to different social and
cultural settings.
Both Martha Wilson and Suzy Lake enact various gender identities for
photographs that they then display side by side for contrast. It is this con-
trast that exposes the performative nature of the identities portrayed in the
images, and forces the audience to consider the possibility of sex and gen-
der being malleable and fluid. By contrasting their various performances
of gender roles and identities, both Wilson and Lake show that these roles
and identities can be taken on by choice, and the artists exercise their own
agency in putting them on and discarding them at will. Even while living
and performing in a culture with norms that shape how they are perceived,
they also work to transform those cultural norms by toying with them
and undermining their power. A study of such transformed and remixed
gender performances might aid the field of queer studies and education in
creating understanding of the malleability of gender.
In another performance art piece, feminist performance artists Shawna
Dempsey and Lorri Millan use humour and parody to queer the role of
the park ranger and expose its embedded heteronormative masculinity. In
1997 in Banff, Alberta, Dempsey and Millan performed their piece called
“Lesbian National Parks and Services,” in which they dressed in park-
ranger-like uniforms emblazoned with official-looking crests and badges,
and subtly inserted themselves into the Banff environment by looking and
behaving like park rangers (Dempsey and Millan 1997). Despite wearing
the word “lesbian” embroidered on every article of clothing, their effec-
tive posturing allowed them to surprise and confuse their audiences when
they began teaching about such things as endangered lesbian ecosystems,
PERFORMANCE 199
and pointing out invisible monuments to founding foremothers (Walter

1999, p. 45). Their initial “passing” as “real” park rangers allowed this act
of performance art to slip undetected into the spaces of everyday life, caus-
ing audiences a moment of confusion about what was real and what was
not (Walter 1999, p. 45). From this confusion it becomes apparent that
roles and identities—from sex and gender identities to roles that invoke
status and authority—are performative, since they can oftentimes be put
on and taken off.
These performances leave the distinction between what is real and what
is false blurred, and reveal that there may not be as clear a distinction
between reality and artifice—or between binary genders, or sexual identi-
ties—as we are trained to think. The capacity for art and performance to
do this kind of blurring and remixing makes it indispensable to the future
of queer studies and education. Queerness is often expressed through
visual signifiers, thus, a study of the field of visual aesthetics that explores
the possibilities of reshaping these signifiers is important to education in
the field of queer studies.
José Esteban Muñoz, American queer theorist and scholar of perfor-
mance studies, in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity, argues that aesthetics play an important role in how we propose
and envision future worlds. “Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed
and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic,
especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata
of a forward-dawning futurity” (Muñoz 2009, p. 1). For Muñoz, it is
queerness, or the potential for undoing restrictive modes of identification,
that points towards shaping a queer utopic future. Performance art is a
conducive medium for the project of dismantling social norms surround-
ing gender and sexuality because “it is not simply a being but a doing
for and towards the future” (Muñoz 2009, p. 1). In queer performance,
the fluidity of identity is transformed from theory into an active doing,
bringing physical manifestation and life to abstract theories. And so, per-
formance makes visible a queer aesthetics that reveals a blurred—or non-
existent—boundary between truth and artifice of sex and gender identity.
Queer performance is not just an act of a man dressing as a woman, and
vice versa. Queer performance throws into question whether there is such
a thing as a man or a woman, and how dress and mannerisms signify any
of these.
Indeed, feminist and queer performance artists have made great con-
tributions to feminist and queer studies by demonstrating just how fluid,
200 J. MACLATCHY
malleable, and performative gender roles can be. The performance of art-
ists like Wilson, Lake, and Dempsey and Millan not only bring embodi-
ment to the theories produced by feminist and queer academics but also
help inform the direction of future theories and practices. Queer theorists
and educators may gain new perspectives, not only from studying the
works of performance artists like these but also through exploring our
own relationships with gender performance.
In my own research, after studying and writing about Dempsey and
Millan’s Lesbian National Parks and Services, I used their work as a model
for experimenting with performance art myself. As a part of their perfor-
mance, Dempsey and Millan make a parody of military-style recruitment
practices when they try to recruit “Junior Lesbian Rangers” to their “les-
bian forces” (Dempsey and Millan 1997). Available for purchase as a sort
of artist’s book is their Handbook of the Junior Lesbian Ranger (Dempsey
and Millan 2001). This handbook is an invitation from the artists to join
in, to cross the spectator-performer divide, and thus eliminate that divide
such that we are all artists and performers, enacting a queer version of the
world together. So, armed with this handbook of instructions on proper
uniform and manner of conduct, I set out to explore the wilderness of a
national park from the adopted perspective of a lesbo-centric park ranger.
I did not perform before an audience, as Dempsey and Millan did by inter-
acting with the public in their roles as queer park rangers, but I did use this
posturing as a vantage point from which to make observations that were
shaped by the performative activity of taking on the role of the “Junior
Lesbian Ranger.” I became more aware, in ways that I had not taken
notice of before, of how landscape within national parks is constructed
to reflect certain social and cultural norms. I wrote about the supposedly
heterosexual and monogamous nature of loons, and about the illustrated
image of a white heterosexual family happily observing the sights together,
on an informative placard. I wrote about the restrictiveness that I felt as
a result of park rules that mediated and constrained my ability to interact
with the landscape, and about what it felt like at times to be a lone woman
in masculinized wilderness spaces without a male companion for protec-
tion, when cultural narratives so often reinforce the stranger danger myth
of the bad man in the woods. I found myself noticing heteronormativity
in narratives about nature much more than I had before taking on this
performative role. These explorations led me to a deeper understanding of
how concepts of heteronormativity are built into knowledge about nature,
PERFORMANCE 201
and to understanding how landscape is thus structured to make me a gen-

dered and sexed body in different ways in different spaces.
Finally, performance art seems to have great usefulness to the field of
queer studies in its potential for transforming ideas about fixed sexual
and gender identities. While performing pieces of remixed culture, the
performer still exists within the culture that frames and shapes the per-
formance. But even while being shaped by cultural norms of sex and gen-
der, the performer can confront, challenge, and potentially work towards
transforming these norms. This cultural pastiche and remixing is a claim
to agency. By asserting the power to shape and control how gender frames
identity, the performance artist—as well as anyone going about their daily
lives in resistance to heteronormative sex and gender roles—lessens the
apparent legitimacy of rigid sex and gender norms. Through repetition,
gender transformations and challenges to heteronormativity become rec-
ognizable, and thus real, queer counter-culture.
Performance art has helped to show the fluidity of gender and sexual
identity through its remixing and transforming, and critique of the way
such norms are imposed. Queer and feminist performance artists have an
important place in queer theory and the future of queer studies because
of their active role in bringing queer aesthetics to life. Martha Wilson,
Suzy Lake, and others have challenged the validity of stereotypical gender
norms and sex roles by contrasting differing roles and thus dismantling
their claim to being inherent truths about gender. Shawna Dempsey and
Lorri Millan have shown us that social scripts can be rewired using parody
in order to point out the ways in which heteronormativity is entrenched in
places we might not have noticed. Studying the works of queer and femi-
nist performance artists brings attention in the field of queer studies and
education to the particular ways in which gender roles and heteronorma-
tive expectations can be used as raw materials for a social critique that envi-
sions a queer aesthetics of identity. As well then, engaging in performative
acts of resistance to heteronormativity allows researchers, students, and
performers of queer studies to move away from mere critical spectatorship
and “scriptocentrism,” into a more experimental and embodied theory
that is nuanced with the feeling of gender and sexual scripts being enacted
and contrasted on one’s own body. Through this act of, and study of, per-
formances of such unpredictable and malleable nature of queer aesthetics,
the future of queer studies is moving into a queerly creative reimagining
of gender and sexuality.
202 J. MACLATCHY
Acknowledgements This chapter is loosely extracted from my master’s thesis, for

which I have the members of my thesis committee to thank: Dr Karin Cope, my
thesis supervisor, and Dr Carla Taunton and Dr Alan Brown, supervisory commit-
tee members. In addition, I extend my thanks to Carla-Marie Elliott and Amber
Moon Graveline for their editing and proofreading.
REFERENCES
Baird, D. (2011). Self-inventions: The photography of Suzy Lake. Border Crossings,
119. Retrieved from http://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/self-inventions-
the-photography-of-suzy-lake
Butler, J. (1997). Imitation and gender insubordination. In L. Nicholson (Ed.),
The second wave: A reader in feminist theory (pp. 300–315). New York:
Routledge.
Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance studies: Interventions and radical research.
The Drama Review, 46(2), 145–156. Retrieved from http://www.csun.
edu/~vcspc00g/301/psinterventions-tdr.pdf
Dempsey, S., & Millan, L. (1997). Lesbian national parks and services. Finger in
the Dyke Productions. Banff, Alberta. [Performance].
Dempsey, S., & Millan, L. (2001). Handbook of the junior lesbian ranger. Winnipeg:
Finger in the Dyke Productions.
European Graduate School. (1997–2012). Donna Haraway—Biography. Retrieved
from http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/biography/
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature.
Harding, S. (1993). Reinventing ourselves as other. In L. S. Kauffman (Ed.),
American feminist thought at century’s end: A reader (pp. 140–162). Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell.
Lake, S. (1972–1975). On stage. 84 selenium toned fibre-based prints, 11 × 14,
editioned 2011. Toronto: Georgia Scherman Projects.
Walter, K. (1999). Lesbian national parks and services: Scenario. In K. Walter &
K. Maclear (Eds.), Private investigators: Undercover in public space (pp. 45–46).
Banff: Banff Centre Press.
PERFORMANCE 203
Wark, J. (2001). Martha Wilson: Not taking it at face value. Camera Obscura, 15(3),
1–33. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&
url=/journals/camera_obscura/v015/15.3wark.html
Wark, J. (2006). Radical gestures: Feminism and performance art in North
America. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Wilson, M. (1974). I make up the image of my perfection/I make up the image of
my deformity. http://canadianart.ca/online/see-it/2009/05/07/martha-
wilson/
Postgay
Alicia Lapointe
INTRODUCTION
Social acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)
people appears to be a spectacular illusion that is largely propagated by
the emergence of “gay-positive” representations in mass media. In par-
ticular, Michael Sam’s experiences as an openly gay football player, and
Caitlyn Jenner’s transition have monopolized social media and news out-
lets, which beg to question if widespread LGBT-affirmative attitudes exist,
and whether homophobic and transphobic discrimination are issues of the
past. These questions and tensions are explored in this chapter by defining
and analyzing the conceptual category of “postgay.” Both Walling (2008)
and Ghaziani (2011) argue that we do not reside in a gay- and trans-
affirmative world—a postgay utopia where understanding, acceptance,
and celebration are afforded to all. Such notions of postgay imaginaries
ignore or rather downplay the persistence of (hetero/cis)normative cli-
mates and systems in terms of their regulatory effects (see Walling 2008).
Queer theory provides a lens to examine the limits and possibilities of
postgay as a basis for exploring the lived realities of gender, sexual, and
romantic minorities (GSRMs) in the twenty-first century. As such, this
A. Lapointe ( )

206 A. LAPOINTE
chapter explores tensions that exist between LGBT acceptance and the
limited ways in which LGBT people are invited to exist in society (i.e.,
pressure to imitate (hetero/cis)normative social conventions) (Ghaziani
2011). I critique the term postgay as it relates to cultural trends that recog-
nize sexual and gender diversity, yet privilege homonormative conformity
within (hetero/cis)centric society (see Ghaziani 2011). I contend that
LGBT is not “ordinary” in schools and society—despite increased socio-
cultural and political efforts to make it such (Walling 2008)—because insti-
tutionalized oppression remains intact (see Britzman 1998; Linville 2009).
Thus, “Post-gay … may not translate to post-discrimination” (Ghaziani
2011, p. 120). Overall, queer theoretical perspectives facilitate the explo-
ration of the limits and possibilities of postgay as it relates to queer/trans
folks living in the twenty-first century. Throughout this chapter, the ana-
lytic and explanatory potential of postgay is explored through examining
LGBT media coverage and advancements in GSRM human rights, post-
gay utopian assumptions, contemporary youth’s identification choices,
LGBT assimilation and diversity, and student-led club names and identities
(Lapointe 2014, 2015). I will also reflect on my own research as it relates
to the insights of Ghaziani (2011, 2014) and Walling (2008) to further
illuminate the productive aspects of postgay in the lives of GSRM youth.
LGBT PEOPLE: MEDIA AND HUMAN RIGHTS

With increasing LGBT media coverage and the introduction of more equi-
table rights for LGBT people in North America (e.g., anti-homophobic
clauses in safe schools policies—see Legislative Assembly of Ontario 2015),
it appears as if we may be living in a postgay era where discrimination and
harassment are obsolete. Yet, LGBT representation is often limited and ste-
reotypical (see Walling 2008). Research on the 100 highest grossing movies
from 2007 to 2014 reveals that only 19 out of 4610 speaking characters
were LGB and none were trans (Robinson 2015). There were also no LGBT
speaking characters in the top animated movies of 2014 (Robinson 2015),
which demonstrates the (hetero/cis)centric nature of the film industry.
In addition to the (hetero/cis)normative cultural context, civil rights for
LGBT people have steadily increased in the USA with The Supreme Court
recently ruling that all “same-sex” couples can legally marry (Liptak 2015).
The sanctioning of “same-sex marriage” or “gay marriage”—a telling col-
loquial expression—demonstrates how (mis)understandings about sex and
gender—ones that are firmly rooted in the male/female binary where sex
POSTGAY 207
and gender are perceived to be interchangeable—are routinely employed

to describe same-gender partnerships; and how tolerance and assimilation,
rather than affirmation and celebration, undergird the advancement of
LGBT rights in North America. Moreover, the institution of marriage is
now a place where LGBT people are “given” the opportunity to be just like
the straight majority and to live “out” their lives under socially accepted
conditions (see Ghaziani 2011). From examining LGBT people within
the media and politics of normalization (see Ghaziani 2011) it is clear that
LGBT people are only invited to exist under particular social conditions—
ones in which (hetero/cis)normativity is not interrogated or challenged (see
Britzman 1995, 1998; Linville 2009). As such, postgay “may be marked by
the acceptance of a segment of gays and lesbians who are gender conform-
ing, middle class, upwardly mobile—in other words, those best able to take
advantage of the benefits of assimilation and the valorization of a particular
type of diversity” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 104).
POSTGAY UTOPIA?
Does postgay mean that we are living in a utopian era of gay liberation
where acceptance of gender and sexual diversity is no longer a real problem
and where homophobia, heterosexism, heteronormativity, and cisgender-
ism no longer are issues for GSRM youth? Walling (2008) and Ghaziani
(2011) both reject this notion. Walling (2008) articulates that LGBT is by
no means ordinary (i.e., “normal”) in popular culture or within the edu-
cation system because heterosexuality is assumed and expected (Sullivan
2003), and LGBT is only “normally” accepted under particular condi-
tions (i.e., when LGBT people conform to heteronormative cultural cus-
toms, such as marriage) (see also Ghaziani 2011). First, GSRM people are
positioned as “queer” because heterosexual and cisgender identities are
taken-for-granted as natural and normal in society (see Britzman 1995,
1998; 30+ Examples of Cisgender Privilege 2015). Due to (hetero/cis)
normalcy identifying one’s queer sexuality, gender, and/or romantic ori-
entation is a fundamental aspect of youth culture, and but one of many
reasons why Walling (2008) “suspect[s] that the extinction of the ‘gay
adolescent’ is more distant than Savin-Williams would have us believe”
(p. 112). Second, if “schools have to become ‘tolerant’ of LGBTQ youth,
they are willing to do that as long as LGBTQ youth conform to cer-
tain behaviors and spaces” (Linville 2009, p. 173). It is, the “notion of
heterosexuality as an institution, rather than simply an act which takes
208 A. LAPOINTE
place between a man and a woman” (Sullivan 2003, p. 121), that guides
Walling (2008) and Ghaziani (2011) critiques of postgay. Walling (2008)
and Ghaziani (2011), for example, both acknowledge that while societies
are “moving beyond the closet” (Seidman 2002, p. 6) in terms of LGBT
people being “out” and having similar civil liberties to the straight major-
ity, heterosexual privilege continues to pervade social life (see Britzman
1995, 1998; Kumashiro 2002). Moreover, schools in particular are places
where normative understandings of sexuality and gender circulate and
are reproduced (Elliott 2015; Linville 2009), and where homophobic
and transphobic prejudice and discrimination are common (Kosciw et al.
2014; Taylor et al. 2011).
Walling (2008) purports, “Most adolescents’ lived experiences are far
from postgay” (p. 114) because GSRM youth are encouraged to “out”
themselves in straightforward ways (see Ghaziani 2011). As Sullivan
(2003) states, when sexual minorities are positioned as “‘just like every-
body else’ … [they] do not constitute a threat to normative society”
(pp. 24–25); thus, integrating GSRMs into (hetero/cis)normative society,
and heterosexualizing LGBT culture by inviting GSRMs to participate in
circumscribed ways demonstrates how heterosexism and cisgenderism are
displaced within postgay rhetoric. Drawing on the notable work of Seidman
(2002), Ghaziani (2011) states, “only a certain, perhaps even contradic-
tory type of ‘diversity’ may be encouraged: a narrow range of expression,
displayed within the already-narrow parameters of ‘normal,’ that is palat-
able to heterosexuals and that contributes to the goal of assimilation”
(p. 104). The tensions between assimilative tactics, and cultural preserva-
tion, innovation, and redefinition illuminate the pitfalls and productive
potential of postgay as a conceptual category in terms of its explanatory
capacity to define the terms of a particular queer zeitgeist that is charac-
teristic of the twenty-first century. In short, by examining contemporary
queer identificatory labels the category postgay becomes more relevant in
twenty-first century discourse (see also Walling 2008).
QUEER IDENTIFICATION AND EXPRESSION

Queer theory provides a framework for interrogating the limits of fixed
identity categories (Linville 2009; Sullivan 2003), and for engaging with
postgay insights as a means by which to subvert homonormativity (see
Ghaziani 2014) by rejecting “labels of previous generations” (Walling
2008, p. 111; see also Savin-Williams 2005). Contrary to Russell et al.’s
POSTGAY 209
(2009) work, which found that teenagers still adopted conventional LGB
identity labels, many youth are replacing traditional, exclusive identity
labels with more contemporary identifications (e.g., pansexual, agen-
der, and demiromantic) or going label-less altogether (Ghaziani 2014;
Savin-Williams 2005). According to Savin-Williams (2005) and Ghaziani
(2014), youth’s identities often cannot be crammed into preexisting
L-G-B-T silos and as such they are now identifying in more progressive
ways. From examining youth identification practices it is clear that stu-
dents may be evolving quicker than their schools who are still struggling
to address “LGBT” issues (see Walling 2008), which demonstrates how,
“Institutional change invariably takes place more slowly than individual or
even generational change” (p. 117). For example, the education system
is a space where GSRM youth are both constrained and encouraged to
assimilate into (hetero/cis)normative school culture (see Lapointe 2014;
Martino 2014).
ASSIMILATION AND DIVERSITY
Ghaziani (2011) describes postgay as the contradictory oscillation between
assimilation and diversity. This “conflicting relationship” (p. 100) spot-
lights how similarities, rather than differences among heterosexual and
LGBT people are emphasized—despite diversity that exists within and/
or across GSRM communities. For example, the sameness/difference
hyphen is exercised when people utilize person-first language to reiterate
that, above all, people are human regardless of their intersecting iden-
tities (e.g., race, ability, sexual orientation, and gender). For example,
de-emphasizing rhetoric is used to deny and rebut the intersectional rela-
tionship between systemic racism and transphobia; more specifically, “all
lives matter” has been used to undermine the “trans black lives matter”
movement, which draws attention to institutionalized racism and the mur-
ders of trans women of color (Black Lives Matter 2015). “All lives matter”
is deployed to conceal white privilege by insisting that everyone is equal
because we are all human, thereby positioning racism and/or transpho-
bia as non-issues. Likewise, Ghaziani (2011) interrogates postracist and
postgay assumptions by suggesting that, “Assimilation can mute identity
as much as diversity can amplify it by highlighting distinctions” (p. 100).
The distinctive choice to celebrate or suppress particular GSRM identities
and/or expressions demonstrates how postgay influences can both nega-
tively and positively impact GSRM people, which relates to the limits and
210 A. LAPOINTE
possibilities of postgay as a conceptual category. These tensions are further

played out when student-led groups re-envision their club names and col-
lective group identities.
STUDENT-LED GROUP NAMES AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

Ghaziani (2011) declares, “the transition to a post-gay era becomes theo-
retically useful, as it presents an opportunity to reimagine the relationship
between ‘us,’ ‘them,’ and even ‘thems inside’” (p. 102). Through dis-
cussing these three interrelated “groups,” Ghaziani (2011) explores how
diversity and assimilation concerns influence the contemporary naming and
collective identity conceptions of student-led groups, such as Gay–Straight
Alliances (GSA). Ghaziani (2011) uses postgay insights to problematize
“us” versus “them” political strategies that draw distinctions between
homo/hetero and cisgender/transgender people (see also Sullivan 2003)
in order to put the spotlight on the evolution and transformative possibili-
ties afforded by the development of student-led clubs. Assimilation and
diversity impact what groups call themselves insomuch that “gay … no
longer requires explicit mention in the names of some LGBT organiza-
tions and events” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 105). Queer theoretical perspectives
that position identities as “multiple, contradictory, fragmented, incoher-
ent, disciplinary, disunified, unstable, [and] fluid” (Gamson 2000, p. 356),
can be employed to critique the name GSA because, “The group on whose
behalf the organization exists is now so diverse that it defies acronyms,
which are perceived as static and singular” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 113). Taylor
et al. (2011) further problematize the name, GSA:
Some GSAs go by other names such as Rainbow Clubs, Human Rights

Clubs, or Social Justice Clubs. This is sometimes done to signal openness
to non-LGBTQ membership (though, of course, some of these are not
GSAs and might not address homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia), and
sometimes because “Gay-Straight Alliance” seems problematic in that “gay”
does not necessarily refer to lesbians or bisexuals and trans identities are
not explicitly encompassed by the expression. However, using the acronym
“GSA” to represent any student group concerned with LGBTQ matters has
become commonplace. (p. 19)
Similar to Ghaziani (2011), Taylor et al. (2011) highlight two significant

points: (1) many groups rename their club because the name, GSA, fails
to capture the diversity within and/or outside GSRM communities, and
POSTGAY 211
(2) many GSAs purposefully recruit straight and/or cisgender students in

an attempt to build alliances with non-GSRM youth. The acronym GSA,
like LGBT, has become normalized, but youth’s engagement with postgay
perspectives has the productive potential to influence social change, spe-
cifically in school communities.
Group Names Many student-led clubs no longer name their group GSA
because this static acronym cannot capture every identity and thus remar-
ginalizes the “thems inside” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 102), such as those who
identify as trans, asexual, or intersex. Ghaziani (2011) asserts, “students
construct collective identity in a post-gay era by electing a general name
(one that does not list specific groups) and an identity-muted name”
(p. 114). Proposed name changes reflect an increased sensitivity to the
diversity within and beyond GSRM communities; since many students
identify in, outside, and/or beyond the binary, many students want their
club name reflect these differences. These concerns influence “leaders to
strategically name their organization in a way that can convey identity
without being specific” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 117). As such, generic names
are not always easily linked to GSRM support, education, and advo-
cacy, and thus may only be understood in context, which suppresses the
explicitness of LGBT identity (Ghaziani 2011). What this means is that
club names may not communicate their purpose, and students may not
find what they are looking for when group names are stripped of LGBT
markers. In addition, generic names “afford … primacy to an assimi-
lationalist strategy that may not be optimally compatible with interest
group politics” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 118), such as the desire to decenter
(hetero/cis)normativity.
Collective Identity An “‘Us’ and ‘Them’” mentality replaces an “‘Us’ ver-

sus ‘Them’” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 116) positionality when sociopolitical
distinctions between hetero/homo and cisgender/transgender are refash-
ioned. This is evidenced when non-GSRM students are recruited and wel-
comed into GSAs and alliance-building is emphasized. Such a movement
redefines GSA’s collective identity by inviting everyone—not just those
who identify as GSRMs—to participate in GSAs (Ghaziani 2011). The
evolution of GSAs’ purpose from supportive spaces for GSRM members
to education and advocacy groups for GSRM issues (Ghaziani 2011; see
also Collins 2013 and Lapointe 2015) signifies how student-led clubs are
blurring identity boundaries (Ghaziani 2011). However, does doing so
212 A. LAPOINTE
help dismantle the taken-for-grantedness of heterosexuality in school-

ing? (see Britzman 1995). Since (hetero/cis)normativity permeates soci-
ety, should GSAs welcome privileged subjects into what is likely the only
queer/trans-friendly space that GSRMs have access to? Does a focus on
alliance-building encourage GSRM youth to further assimilate into (het-
ero/cis)normative society rather than work toward queer/trans political
change? As Ghaziani (2011) states, recognizing and challenging discrimi-
nation and mobilizing efforts are more effective when identity boundar-
ies are clear (see also Sullivan 2003). Thus, when GSAs draw on postgay
insights, they may be operating in ways that promote acceptance and
understanding toward homonormative individuals rather than addressing
the spectrum of possibilities and pleasures that exist outside of a hetero-
sexualized and cisgendered gaze (see Ghaziani 2011; Serano 2007).
MY OWN RESEARCH
In this section I draw on research with Canadian high school GSA mem-
bers and their club advisor to further illuminate the explanatory potential
of critical postgay perspectives. Following the insights of Ghaziani (2011,
2014), I focus on how participants understand and express their identi-
ties, and conceptualize their group’s name and collective identity. The
original purpose of this study was to develop more knowledge on GSAs
and their members through an embedded, multiple-case study (see Yin
2014) with two public and Catholic high school GSAs. I attended each
club’s meetings, participated in discussions, activities, and events, and
took strategic field notes from March through June, 2015. Included in
this chapter are data from one public GSA case consisting of semistruc-
tured interviews and diaries with five students (Hayden, Sasha, Reese, Kai,
and Andie), as well as participant observations. Pseudonyms are used to
uphold confidentiality.
SEXUAL AND ROMANTIC ORIENTATION

Many students are identified as pansexual (Hayden, Reese, Sasha, and
Kai) and/or a romantic minority (Hayden, Reese, and Sasha) at some
point in time. Hayden identified as pansexual and panromantic, “I don’t
have a specific preference really. … If I ever was in a sexual relationship,
it would be with, I don’t care who. … And the same thing if I was in a
romantic relationship.” Thus, Hayden described how he was sexually and
POSTGAY 213
romantically open to all people, regardless of their gender(s). When asked

how they would describe their sexual orientation Reese stated, “I kind of
have an idea. I’m pansexual, but I prefer women … cisgender women.
I prefer cisgender women. I should say that because you should specify.
… My romantic orientation is more, I don’t know, it’s demipansexual I
guess. It’s just all encompassing.” With this passage Reese specified that,
although they are demipansexual—may become attracted to people of any
gender after they develop a strong emotional and romantic bond with
them—they prefer cisgender women. It was significant for both Hayden
and Reese to specify the particularities of their identities because this fos-
tered a more accurate account of their feelings.
Youth embraced pansexual and/or panromantic orientations as
opposed to identifying as bisexual. For Sasha, identifying as pansexual
related to how he conceptualized gender. At the time of the interview,
Sasha described his sexual and romantic orientations as follows:
I’m not sexually attracted to people and I never realized that for the longest
time. … I don’t get aesthetic attraction either … [for example] they might
have a nice face, but I don’t want to do anything with them type of thing …
when I first learned about it [sexuality], I was like, oh maybe I’m bisexual
… but, I prefer pansexual because … the two gender thing, and then after
a while I was like, oh there’s asexual, oh that’s cool … o h, wait a minute.
Here Sasha discussed how his previous identity label was impacted by
his knowledge of sexuality as it shifted from traditional to postgay con-
ventions. His sexuality was politically grounded in that he identified as
pansexual—as opposed to bisexual—to contest the male/female binary.
Sasha, like many participants, debunked the idea that there is only one
form of attraction (i.e., sexual orientation). He clearly communicated that,
“in my case at least, there’s four types of attraction. Sexual, romantic, aes-
thetic, and emotional … and I just never felt the first one, and the second
one, I thought I was aromantic, but I’m demiromantic.” Sasha went on to
describe romance as holding hands, snuggling, being together, and doing
things that people find romantic. Emotional attraction was portrayed as a
bond that develops in relation to the time you spend with someone, how
much you like them, and how they make you feel. Sasha then explained
aesthetic attraction as an appreciation for physical features—similar to the
admiration of particular art. Thus, postgay insights helped Sasha commu-
nicate the intricacies of his identities.
214 A. LAPOINTE
GENDER
For many participants, traditional gender labels were not viable options.
Hayden, Reese, and Kai all described their gender as non-binary. With
the exception of Andie all youth paused to think about how they identi-
fied at that particular point of time, and detailed the intricacies on their
identities.
Sasha disentangled his gender identity from his gender expression
by stating that he is “fairly male,” but also “androgynous.” He elabo-
rated, “I would like to think male, but I kind of do more female because
I was raised female.” Kai was a bit reluctant to describe their gender at
first because their friend was present throughout much of the interview.
After some time passed Kai stated, “just more fluid sort of because it just
depends on the day. … Sometimes I gravitate towards female, but usually
I’d rather represent myself in a more non-binary fashion. … I haven’t
really figured it out because I haven’t been able to explore.” Likewise,
Hayden described his gender as male as well as gender fluid, “I identify as
male, but sometimes I kind of feel a bit more gender fluid-ish. So I aim-
ing to get more, follow the more, um, male traits, I guess that’s the word.
But, at the moment I am more gender fluid.” Hayden shared that he uses
makeup to make his lips smaller and his cheeks more prominent so that he
“look[s] more like a guy.” Like Kai, he positioned gender as something
that is in flux because “other days I try to make myself look more like a
girl, but I don’t do that as much … I wake up and see how I feel.” After
much thought and initially declaring, “I don’t really know” Reese stated,
“I have been thinking a lot of about it lately. … I’m thinking maybe demi-
gender. … Sometimes there’s just days where I don’t identify as a female
right now. I don’t identify as anything. It comes and goes.” Throughout
the conversation Reese described demigender as, “sometimes I identify as
agender and sometimes I identify as female, but occasionally I identify as
a demiboy”—partially embraces masculine characteristics. Drawing on the
insights of Ghaziani (2014), it is clear that these youth understand their
gender to be intricate and fluid, which signifies how they are employing
postgay perspectives to describe their identities.
POSTGAY 215
CLUB NAME AND IDENTITY

Recognizing and embracing sexual, gender, and romantic diversity and
building alliances with others were increasingly important for participants.
This increased sensitivity translated into healthy critiques of their club.
Following Ghaziani’s (2011) findings, GSA members problematized their
club’s name and their collective identity.
Club Name Although the club was still named a GSA, many participants
believed that the title failed to capture its diversity. Sasha, for example,
was reading a blog on Tumblr, which suggested that Gender and Sexual
Equality was a more inclusive name for such a group. He communicated
that the name GSA assumes that people are either gay or straight, but the
club is actually for anyone who “identifies anywhere on any of the spec-
trums.” Sasha was keenly aware that the group’s composition was “now
so diverse that it defie[d] acronyms, which are perceived to be static and
singular” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 113). Likewise, Reese declared:
I think our GSA has a lot to work on to be a better GSA and to be the best
GSA it can be, starting with a name change. Because I just feel like that’s
really un-inclusive. I mean GSA … we’re not about just gay people and
straight people. … I would either just change the name to gender and sexual
alliance or change it to GSE, which is gender and sexual equality club. And
I think that would be really nice. But, the problem is … it was kinda too late
in the year to change it when we actually thought about changing it, and
it was a shame because, you know, we actually brought that up a lot. … It
actually bothers a lot of people … the name bothers a lot of people because
it’s not just gay people and straight people. It’s LGBTQ+ [short pause]
+++++ … so many!
The proposed name change reflects an increased sensitivity to students’

identifications in, outside, and/or beyond the binary (see also Ghaziani
2011, 2014). Rather than extending the acronym to make it more inclu-
sive a generic name—one that details the mission of the club (i.e., equal-
ity)—was perceived to be more appropriate.
Hayden echoed Reese’s thoughts:
It doesn’t really, like, some up anything. It just, like, G-SA. ‘Cause I find in
this society, it’s really weird, people are, like, kind of obsessed with, like, the
216 A. LAPOINTE
gay part. You’ll see it in movies and stuff or books; if they have a gay couple
people are like, OMG … But, people don’t dare touch anything that has
to do with gender identity or anything. … I’m guessing it’s because people
they don’t know enough about it. So I think the main problem with it just
‘cause it has G-SA.
Here Hayden described how gay and lesbian identities have become
(somewhat) normalized in society through mass media. This mainstream-
ing displaces, for example, gender minorities and exemplifies how par-
ticular types of diversity are valorized over others (see Ghaziani 2011).
Overall, the use of gay obfuscates contemporary understandings of sexual-
ity and gender and fails to capture how today’s youth are identifying (see
Ghaziani 2014; Savin-Williams 2005).
Club Identity Reese’s feelings toward allyship and building alliances were as
follows, “I think sometimes they feel awkward coming to GSA because it’s
a predominately queer community, especially in our school. … I think we
have one, uh, cisgender, heterosexual person in our entire GSA.” Through
this statement Reese acknowledged that their GSA caters to GSRMs, but,
they “wish[ed] we could better include them. … I think they should mar-
ket it to everyone … we really do need that aspect to our GSA … we
need support from our straight students.” During the first observation the
advisor reiterated Reese’s views. At this meeting, she told everyone that
she wanted it to be known that GSA is not just for gay people, and that
everyone is welcome to join and participate. She saw the club as a place to
“learn and share,” and where “straight people can support their friends.”
After the meeting, she approached students in the hall and encouraged
them to join the club. She communicated that the group was for everyone
and that anyone can and should participate. This strategy demonstrated
how she adopted postgay sentiments (i.e., building alliances) in order to
reconfigure the collective identity of the group (see Ghaziani 2011).
CONCLUSION
This chapter drew on queer perspectives to explore the conceptual efficacy
of the term postgay as it relates to sociocultural and political progressions,
contemporary gender, and sexuality labels, and the names and collective
identities of student-led clubs. The works of Walling (2008) and Ghaziani
(2011) were employed to problematize the notion that we live in a post-
POSTGAY 217
gay utopian world where homophobia, heterosexism, (hetero/cis)norma-

tivity, and cisgenderism cease to exist. The prefix post was interrogated
so not to be “blissfully ignorant of a group’s [GSRMs] historical and
present-day struggles” (Ghaziani 2011, p. 120) with systemic oppression.
Overall, both the problematic and productive shifts produced by employ-
ing postgay as a conceptual category were explored to provide insight into
“LGBT” life in the twenty-first century.
REFERENCES
30+ Examples of Cisgender Privilege. (2015, August 17). Retrieved from http://
itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2011/11/list-of-cisgender-privileges/
Black Lives Matter. (2015, August 16). Retrieved from http://blacklivesmatter.
com/about/
Britzman, D. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Towards a psychoanalytic
inquiry of learning. New York: State University of New York Press.
Collin, R. (2013). Making space: A Gay-Straight Alliance’s fight to build inclusive
environments. Teachers College Record, 115(8), 1–26.
Elliott, K. O. (2015). Queering student perspectives: Gender, sexuality and activ-
ism in school. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning.. doi:10.1080/14
681811.2015.1051178.
Gamson, J. (2000). Sexualities, queer theory, and qualitative research. In N. K.
Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.,
pp. 347–365). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Ghaziani, A. (2011). Post-gay collective identity construction. Social Problems,
58(1), 99–125.
Ghaziani, A. (2014). There goes the gayborhood? Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Palmer, N. A., & Boesen, M. A. (2014). The 2013
national school climate survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-
gender youth in our nation’s schools. New York: GLSEN.
Kumashiro, K. (2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and anti-oppressive
pedagogy. New York: Routledge Falmer.
Lapointe, A. (2014). Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) members’ engagement with sex
education in Canadian high schools. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and
Learning, 14(6), 707–717. doi:10.1080/14681811.2014.914024.
Lapointe, A. (2015). Standing “straight” up to homophobia: Straight allies’
involvement in Gay-Straight Alliances (GSA). Journal of LGBT Youth, 12(20),
144–169. doi:10.1080/19361653.2014.969867.
218 A. LAPOINTE
Legislative Assembly of Ontario. (2015). Bill 13, Accepting Schools Act, 2012.
Retrieved from http://ontla.on.ca/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&
BillID=2549
Linville, D. (2009). Queer theory and teen sexuality: Unclear lines. In J. Anyon
(Ed.), Theory and educational research: Toward critical social explanation.
Liptak, A. (2015, June 26). Supreme Court ruling makes same-sex marriage a
right nationwide. The New York Times. Retrieved http://www.nytimes.
com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html?_r=0
Martino, W. (2014). “Love the sinner, hate the sin”: The clash of religious and
sexual minority rights in Ontario Catholic schools. In G. Walton (Ed.), The gay
agenda: Creating space, identity, and justice (pp. 207–222). New York: Peter
Lang.
Robinson, J. (2015, August 5). New report uncovers staggering inequality for
anyone not Young, white, straight, and male in Hollywood. Vanity Fair:
Hollywood. Retrieved from http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/08/
inequality-women-race-sexual-orientation-movies
Russell, S. T., Clarke, T. J., & Clary, J. (2009). Are teens “post-gay”? Contemporary
adolescents’ sexual identity labels. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 38(7),
884–890.
Savin-Williams, R. (2005). The new gay teenager. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Seidman, S. (2002). Beyond the closet: The transformation of gay and lesbian life.
Serano, J. (2007). Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoat-
ing of femininity. Emeryville: Seal Press.
Sullivan, N. (2003). A critical introduction to queer theory. New York: New York
University Press.
Taylor, C., Peter, T., McMinn, T. L., Elliott, T., Beldom, S., Ferry, A., Gross, Z.,
Paquin, S., & Schachter, K. (2011). Every class in every school: The first national
climate survey on homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in Canadian schools.
Toronto: Egale Canada Human Rights Trust.
Walling, D. R. (2008). A “postgay” horizon and lessons for high school and
beyond. Journal of LGBT Youth, 5(2), 109–118.
Yin, R. K. (2014). Case study research: Design and methods (5th ed.). Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications.
Privilege
Blas Radi and Moira Pérez
In recent decades, Queer Theory and its approach to genders and sexuali-
ties has been the focus of attention of nearly all disciplines, particularly
within the humanities. The urgency to incorporate gender and sexuality
issues often seems to take a toll on its depth and critical consideration,
resulting on occasions in a mere extension of bibliographical material or
the addition of a unit in an otherwise unaltered syllabus. In the field of
research, the immediate consequence is an outpouring of scholarly scru-
tiny across campuses, congresses, and journals, which addresses the obsta-
cles faced by what is usually merged under “sex and gender diversity” or
“lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) community,”1 but seldom
aims at challenging or eliminating the actual obstacles.
These types of strategies imply squirming an approach to educational
and academic work as a tool against the ongoing oppression of the people
addressed by those knowledges and to ensure better life conditions for
them. Our tenet is that confining Queer Studies to a mere topic area or
“a budget-organising administrative label” (Mignolo 2005, p. 50) implies
positing them as an end in themselves, and not as “a detour on the way
to something more important” (Hall 1997, p. 42), thus reinforcing the
B. Radi ( ) • M. Pérez
University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

220 B. RADI AND M. PÉREZ
privilege system they are rooted in. As we will see, obstacles and privileges
are two sides of the same coin. Whereas for some, obstacles are truly such,
for others—who were not going to encounter them in the first place—
they spell opportunity as subjects of inquiry.
In her consideration of the unequal distribution of impediments and
ease, tiredness, and exhaustion, Sara Ahmed describes privilege as “an
energy-saving device” (2013a). Bodies and subjectivities that comply with
given standards invest less effort in opening doors that involve constant
struggles for others. An assessment of the mechanisms at work in the acad-
emy shows that the logic of privilege functions as the backbone of institu-
tional policies which, like old garments, “acquire the shape of those who
tend to wear them” (Ahmed 2013a).
This leads us to affirm that when analyzing queer practices in education
and research, the concept of privilege must be a crucial concern, even more
so if we observe that “power relations operate not only when we do not
notice them, but also, and mainly, when we refuse to acknowledge them,
and declare them non existent” (Cabral 2014). Privilege is, therefore, the
organizing principle in our analysis, which is structured in two moments.
By identifying the privileges we benefit from and the hierarchies they sup-
port/that are supported by them, we offer a critical view of the prevailing
practices that govern a large portion of Queer Studies in our days. With
this aim in mind, our text will revolve around the discussion of the produc-
tion of absences and presences. We begin by reviewing various scenarios
and situations that are common in academic education and research. Firstly,
we analyze the ways in which “presence effects” are produced for agents
who are in fact kept away from physical and symbolic spaces, and, secondly,
the simultaneous mechanisms that produce the absences of those who do
inhabit such spaces, but are constantly erased from them.
The second part of our chapter offers a number of suggestions aimed
at making use of the educational and research spaces we inhabit, in order
to challenge the institutional engineering of privilege. Through them, we
intend to engage the intellectual horizon of teaching and research in a com-
mitment with practices that do not end at the mere recognition of guilt
(Smith 2013) or at a theoretical approach of the phenomenon, but rather
become effective in dismantling the structures of privilege they partake in.
Our twofold arrangement comes as a response to the risk marked by
Ahmed, whereby focusing exclusively on “what are we to do,” “in moving
on from the present towards the future,” “can also move away from the
object of critique, or place the white subject ‘outside’ that critique in the
PRIVILEGE 221
present of the hearing,” into a morally comforting place (Ahmed 2004).

We believe that each of these moments is crucial and must get the atten-
tion it deserves. If we venture to offer recommendations, it is because we
also acknowledge the urgency that propels them, and uphold theoretical
action and education as an empowering practice.
THE PRODUCTION OF PRESENCES IN A SCENARIO

OF ACTUAL ABSENCE
What are the contents of our syllabus? Which bibliographical resources

do we use? Who lectures? What are their credentials? Who is education
addressed to? Who has access to it? In order to address these questions, we
consider academic practices and policies such as lecturing, written produc-
tion, the organization of events, research groups, grants or financial aid
and their requirements, among others.
There are those who inhabit educational spaces and those who do not.
Some speak, others listen, others write; some attend university, for others
it is not even a possibility. This contrast between absence and presence
happens over and over again in educational circles, an expression of the
ways in which absences are a counterpart of presences guaranteed by a
hierarchy built around the logic of privilege.
These hierarchies produce an “effect” of presence in a scenario of actual
absence. In other words, on the one hand, we find a nominal presence (a
certain topic is addressed, a syllabus is compiled, an activity is organized),
and on the other, an actual absence (the people being discussed are not
actually there, or they are, but in a peculiar way, as we will see). Many
educational institutions describe themselves as “inclusive” or “friendly,”
while in fact they do not include, or they actively expel, the people they
allegedly welcome. What lies behind that declaration of “inclusiveness”?
Let us see a few cases.
When inclusion is linked to the notion of “diversity”—a bottomless
theme by definition—it is often reduced to dissident or non-normative
sexes, genders, and sexual practices. This cutback on diversity turned into
a theme area runs parallel to the selections of bibliographical sections and
target publics: Who are lectures addressed to? Who can attend? Who is
allowed to speak? What is the gender being considered when it is outlined
without a body, a neighborhood, a skin color, an age range? An array of
commitments is reenacted in each option, proving—yet again—that there
are no innocent choices. Limiting sources to the work of, say, white cis-
sexual feminists from the Global North, involves the deliberate action of
disowning contributions of trans or black authors, or from other geopo-
litical locations.2 If we consider the topics addressed by Queer Theory, this
becomes all the more problematic, since it results in explicitly discussing
privilege, while only privileged subjects are being cited. In her consider-
ation of the political impact implied in those bibliographical selections and
the urgencies of transsexual people, Viviane Namaste has questioned the
practices of well-intentioned teachers who describe themselves as allies of
transsexuals, and she has urged them to read—and assign—more than the
handful of canonic names in the field (Namaste 2005, p. 9).
“Inclusive” or “diverse” institutions and events usually have a single rep-
resentative from a wide and heterogeneous collective. Twentieth-century
feminism has taught us to be shocked when a male speaker appears as the
sole representative of female-related issues (Alcoff 1991); yet we are (still)
not shocked if, say, a cissexual man speaks for trans women, transvestites,
trans men, lesbians, and genderqueers. The fact that this hypothetical man
is gay seems to grant him enough credentials to speak, as if people were
interchangeable and as if those being spoken for were not severed from
that site by an increasing number of obstacles—one of them being pre-
cisely that logic of representation.
Academic events rarely take into consideration that enrollment fees may
be equal for all, but their cost is not. Meanwhile, event budgets are chan-
neled to pay the fees of renowned lecturers who already hold (well) paid
academic positions. Who is left out by this oversight?
In fact, it is often the case that those who speak about a given issue or
problem are those for whom it is actually not a problem. This can be the
case with teaching practices, text-selection, resources offered in class, or
the organization of events. On the other hand, people for whom it is a true
issue appear as paradigmatic cases, causes of concern—in many cases, with
the purpose of supporting arguments aimed at results that are completely
alien to them. In any case, discussion is always voiced by those who can
speak (as universals) precisely by virtue of the privileges that allowed them
access, for instance, to education.
THE PRODUCTION OF ABSENCES IN A SCENARIO

OF ACTUAL PRESENCE
Let us now turn to the ways in which the absentee is produced as such. We
already noted that when “diversity” is included in programs, a wide array
of issues is reduced to certain topics, certain authorized voices, and certain
PRIVILEGE 223
subjects. It also entails a strict hierarchy whereby the authors allowed to

enter the realm of “diversity” are usually (predominantly cissexual) gays,
lesbians, and heterosexual feminists. This is not about reproving or dis-
avowing the value of successful academic journeys, but rather about point-
ing at (and objecting to) research on vulnerable collectives that does not
question the current logic of institutional recognition, and coexists har-
moniously with its functioning and reproduction. In our field, meritocracy
tends to create an illusion of equality which produces a reassuring effect
(Dussel 2008, p. 43), while the selection of teachers, professors, sources,
and texts is based on the recognition of the privileged paths legitimated by
the academy. In this regard, we can outline three observations.
First, we underscore that academic excellence cannot be regarded as an
impartial indicator, since the possibilities of real access to opportunities are
not equal for all. In this respect, Eduardo Glavich has shown that, when
it comes to opportunities, institutional requirements of eligibility ensure
that beneficiaries will be privileged subjects. This is why he refers to “the
selection of the already selected,” as conditions of access to opportunities
turn out to actually be mechanisms for certifying social, economic and
symbolic privileges already at work—in other words, the certification that
the journey has been obstacle-free (Glavich 1997, p. 10). For instance,
postgraduate requirements show that those welcome into academic cir-
cuits are young people. But a meteoric career is only possible if the path is
not filled with obstacles, thus granting incalculable advantages to people
whose life conditions are taken care of (Nguyen and Catania 2014), which
allows them to obtain academic credentials—including financing—within
the time-limit required by reward systems.
The second observation notes how that kind of research tends to be
presented in terms of dissidence and questioning of the status quo, while
it strikingly fails to apply a similar questioning to the academy where it is
carried out. One wonders how it is possible to mistrust institutions, while
quoting academic excellence as a legitimacy criterion when it comes to
outlining a syllabus, selecting content, and conversing with others.
Finally, we observe that in knowledge-building processes, those less
privileged occupy fewer places and the ones they do have access to are
subordinate ones, usually related to giving witness. Thus, certain perspec-
tives and paths seem to have no place in the production of knowledge—or
at least not with equal status.
It is possible to take this a further step, into the intellectual canni-
balism we are witnesses to. Students and researchers frequently dialogue
with members of the collectives they study, and incorporate the resources
that are continuously put at their disposal by their subjects of inquiry.

However, the works they produce quote exclusively the most renowned
experts in the field, or themselves, as if their conclusions were theoreti-
cal outbursts stemmed from profound and solitary introspective voy-
ages combined with long library hours. In terms of Boaventura de Sousa
Santos’ (2010) sociology of absences, we could say we face an operation
of massive epistemicide.
As a result of these factors, we find that access to the academy has a pro-
hibitive cost for those who can only be a part of it as object, corpus, and
never-cited source. Paradoxically, while underprivileged subjects carry out
a never-ending work in order to make institutions more livable (Ahmed
2013a), their job is silenced, and its visible results, although often cel-
ebrated and exhibited, are usually inscribed in other people’s trajectories.
In a nutshell, we are witnesses to—and accomplices of—the erasure of
knowledges, their agents, and processes, as well as their expropriation at
the hands of authorized subjects, who hold the necessary credentials to
teach, write, and publish (Applebaum 2008).
TOWARD A QUEER THEORETICAL ACTION

Doing research on or teaching Queer Theory—which, as we hope to have
shown, can be done in the most conservative fashion—is not identical to
developing queer practices of teaching and research. We need to move
beyond symbolic commitment, in order to value and benefit from what
Queer Theory can offer for the dismantling of the institutional engineer-
ing of privilege.3
The subjects whose material conditions of existence are directly involved
in the work of Queer Theory are among the ones erased and rejected
by institutions (including the academy). Queer Theory should priori-
tize them, not only in its moral considerations but also when it comes to
institutional regulations. In this regard, queer practices of research and
education must challenge the logics of privilege. There is no unique for-
mula, but it is possible to try out alternatives that allow for diversity in
campuses, classrooms, and libraries.
A safe start may imply acknowledging who we are targeting when we
produce work such as texts, lectures, or speeches: defining who we are
addressing, and what message we wish to convey. This will mean revisiting
the vocabulary we use, the role models we generate, the circles in which
the event or its call for papers is publicized, the accessibility of physical
PRIVILEGE 225
spaces, the language and its translations, the biographical and bibliograph-
ical journeys assumed in readers and listeners. In reality, who we suppose
will be reading us is who we wish to be read by.
Needless to say, it is not a matter of generating those presences at any
cost or in any manner. Based upon these considerations, our research can
start by resisting erasure in our written production. Without doubt the
references we include in our writing are gestures of academic recognition:
Who are we willing to acknowledge? Even though quotation standards
reproduce their exclusion, we can dodge them by quoting unconventional
sources produced by those people we are already working with, although
we tend to “forget” quoting their names.
And there is more: we can share the writing process. And even more:
if our research is focused on underprivileged collectives, we can avoid
superspecialization oriented toward silent dialogue among colleagues,
and instead put our work at the service of the urgencies of the group
that enables it. This does not—and should not—mean to play saviors,
because the processes we are looking at are not guided by the messianic
leadership of a theory. It means to try out a different plan, propelled
by redistributive purposes built on cognitive depth, critical complexity,
and sensibility in gaze, while considering the dimension of historical
reparation. It means turning papers into theoretical tools put into stra-
tegic use, with the ability to not only detect obstacles but also remove
them.
We need to examine and expand the bibliographical references in our
courses, bringing in a catalog that goes beyond canonical names. This
involves questioning our concept of authority, giving up the comfort of
repetition, and taking on the extra task of exploring against the tide in
order to find and install in academic circles the contributions of people it
has no interest in including.
But we also need to design courses targeted to students who do not
comply with the models of privilege. This also applies to teachers and
researchers: selection must cease to choose those “already selected,” too.
The purpose is not to feel satisfied about ourselves, or add a touch of color
by creating isolated spaces of “diversity,” but to include underprivileged
people in each and every space in the academy. We must examine which
places are occupied by each collective, and apply dynamics that allow for
everybody to inhabit any of them, without omitting decision-making
positions. The work on institutions in order to make them more inhabit-
able, just as with research and education, is already being done, albeit
unrecognized. Recognizing it is to recognize it as work—that is, paid

work. As Ashley Hunter (2014) has summoned:
I understand that you want to collaborate with black trans folk since we
seem to be trending right now but understand, we don’t work for free.
(…) If you dont have Black Trans Women in leadership roles and on your
board i (sic) will charge double. Its called doing the work! Our lives are not
disposable, deliverables, commodities or photo ops. Remember, Visibility
leads to accountability. Accountability creates opportunity. Do the work!
#paythelady.
This is not about acting as research objects or beneficiaries of alien grace,

it is about being recognized as students, teachers, and researches in their
legitimate right. This implies removing any requirements that could result
in the exclusion of a given group. Individual practice, no matter how pro-
gressive, functions within an institution that sets its own conditions; there-
fore, positing a nominal equality that stands at odds with actual inequality
is tantamount to excluding the people it claims to include.
Action must be encouraged and accompanied by a thorough examina-
tion of the structures in which it operates. A true counterhegemonic alter-
native must create deviations as opportunities for resistance, and reparative
policies must head the list because, paraphrasing Evelyn Fox Keller, in
order to change the excluding structures of privilege, just adding indi-
viduals and stirring is not enough. We must produce a different social
contract, in which those who are now absent can be present, and under
equal conditions.4
NOTES
1. Defining the subjects of Queer Theory is an inherently contradictory task.
In this case, we will only note that we generally (albeit not always) find that
queer perspectives refer to subjects who do not meet social expectations on
sex and gender, or what is defined as a standard sexual or gender behavior.
However, we wish to point out that the definition of this set (or even that of
“diversity”) as tantamount to “lgbt people” is extremely problematic, as we
hope to make clear in our analysis.
2. In this respect, we follow the considerations on epistemology of ignorance
discussed by authors such as Charles Mill, Linda Alcoff, and Vivian May.
3. At this point, we met a number of difficulties in retrieving our own consid-
erations and letting ourselves be affected by them, although we agreed that
PRIVILEGE 227
they should not curtail critical work, but rather provide a frame for discus-
sion and nourishment. When it comes to outlining recommendations,
deciding for whom and from where we write is not an easy enterprise. Firstly,
because we are two individuals, and our journeys as well as our positions
within the academy are very different. We do not believe that there is such a
thing as “privileged people” on one side and “underprivileged people” on
the other. We grant that, in a way, privileges and obstacles do affect us all.
The key here resides in that “in a way,” which points at tremendous
differences.
4. We wish to thank M. Teresa La Valle for her help with the translation of this
essay.
REFERENCES
Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-
racism. Borderlands e-journal, 3, 2.
Ahmed, S. (2013a, November 17). Feeling depleted? [blog post]. Retrieved
October 29, 2014, from http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/11/17/feeling-
depleted/
Ahmed, S. (2013b, August 27). Black feminism as life-line. [blog post]. Retrieved
October 29, 2014, from http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/08/27/black-
feminism-as-life-line/
Alcoff, L. (1991). The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique, 20,
5–32.
Applebaum, B. (2008). White privilege/white complicity: Connecting “benefiting
from” to “contributing to.” Philosophy of Education Archive, 13, 292–300.
Cabral, M. (2014, March 7). Cuestión de privilegio. [newspaper article] Retrieved
October 29, 2014, from http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/
las12/13-8688-2014-03-08.html
De Sousa Santos, B. (2010). Descolonizar el saber, reinventar el poder. Montevideo:
Ediciones Trilce.
Dussel, I. (2008). La escuela media y la producción de la desigualdad: Continuidades
y rupturas. In N. Montes & G. Tiramonti (Eds.), La escuela media en debate.
Buenos Aires: FLACSO/Manantial.
Glavich, E. (1997). La elección de los elegidos. Dialéktica: Revista de Filosofía y
Teoría Social, VI, 9, 9–38.
Hall, S. (1997). Old and new Identities, old and new ethnicities. In A. King (Ed.),
Culture, globalisation and the world-system: Contemporary conditions for the rep-
resentation of identity (pp. 31–68). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hunter, L. A. (2014, July 30). #paythelady [Facebook post]. Retrieved October
29, 2014, from https://www.facebook.com/lourdes.hunterdior/posts/1020
2993502103120?fref=nf
Mignolo, W. (2005). Cambiando las éticas y las políticas del conocimiento: Lógica
de la colonialidad y postcolonialidad imperial. Tabula Rasa, 3, 47–72.
Namaste, V. (2005). Sex change, social change. Reflections on identity, institutions,
and imperialism. Toronto: Women’s Press.
Nguyen, N., & Catania, T. (2014, August 5). On feeling depleted: Naming, con-
fronting, and surviving oppression in the academy [guest contribution].
Retrieved October 29, 2014, from http://thefeministwire.com/2014/08/
feeling-depleted-naming-confronting-surviving-oppression-academy/
Smith, A. (2013, August 14). The problem with “privilege” [blog post]. Retrieved
October 29, 2014, from https://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/
the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/
Promoviendo (Promoting)
Rigoberto Marquez
How Promoviendo or “promoting” became a word to describe how I push

queer studies in education forward, I must first share my testimonio of
how I came to do “queer” or more specifically “queer of color” research
in education. In the tradition of (Queer) Chicana feminist scholars who
have used testimonio in education as an important methodological tool to
privilege and center the subjectivities of bodies marginalized by the main-
stream (Delgado Bernal et al. 2012), I begin this chapter with a testimonio
to situate my body and its lived experiences that inform how I approach,
interpret, and think about my work. As Cruz (2001) states, “the inclusion
of the body holds the beginnings of charting new territories in epistemic
approaches, where we can begin to develop strategies to rethink our work
in education to reflect the multiplicities of language and history in less
partial and less distorted ways” (p. 664). Thus I share my story of coming
to queer of color theory in education and how I apply it in my collabora-
tive work with the Promotoras of Mujeres Contra el Sexismo in hopes that
it will inspire others to think about their histories and stories of coming to
queer studies in education.
R. Marquez ( )
Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

230 R. MARQUEZ
PROMOTING A QUEER OF COLOR BODY

How I understand, use, and theorize queer theory in education stems
from my own experiences as a young queer Chicano of catholic Mexican
immigrant parents, raised in an African-American and Latina/o working-
class neighborhood of Los Angeles. From an early age, I was aware of
my race, gender, and sexuality as markers of difference that kept me from
participating fully in my schooling. Hearing homophobic and derogatory
remarks directed toward me and other students perceived to be queer
were common occurrences in my education. However, not only were my
experiences of “difference” and “otherness” limited to my gender expres-
sion or sexuality, but also my working-class racial identity marked me as
different. As part of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s effort to
populate and integrate San Fernando Valley schools, students from the
“inner city” took hour-long bus rides into white middle-class neighbor-
hoods to attend school. On the promise of a better education, I went from
my African-American and Latina/o working-class environment to a school
in a predominantly white and wealthy neighborhood. Like the majority of
the students of color who came to school on the bus, I was tracked (Oakes
1995) into remedial courses where all my classmates were students from
other working-class communities of color. Resisting the school districts
push to integrate, the school became two schools in one, one school for
the students from the neighborhood and another for the students of color
who came on the bus.
Eventually, I crossed the schools manifested color line (Ladson-Billings
and Tate 2006) and made it into a college track program where I was one
of a handful of students of color. It was in these early years of racial border
crossing (Anzaldúa 1987) that I first began to understand the multidi-
mensionality (Hutchinson 2000) of my identities. The bullying, harass-
ment, and microaggressions (Kohli and Solórzano 2012) I experienced
in school looked and felt different depending on the group of students
and teachers I was with at that moment. How people saw my body and
reacted to its presence was motivated in part, by their own experiences and
knowledge of queer brown bodies and their own racial positionality. Cruz
(2001) states that the brown body, “even in a space created for lesbian
and gay youth, is still contained within the parameters of its (future) use,
whether as worker, citizen, or its complicity with a racially gendered social
order” (p. 665). In a similar fashion, the bullying and harassment my
queer brown body experienced was linked to the perpetrators self-interest
PROMOVIENDO (PROMOTING) 231
in maintaining their own position of power. The queer brown body is thus
subjugated, in order to maintain a regulated and hegemonic order of race,
gender, and sexual identity that marginalizes and maintains queer of color
bodies as the “other.”
Isolated from communities of color and queer communities, like many
queer persons of color, I turned to African-American and Latina/o HIV/
AIDS organizations for guidance and direction. As a community college
student in the late 1990s, I attended these spaces and found a great sup-
port system—a community that understood and discussed the struggles
and intersecting identities of young queer men of color while simulta-
neously empowering its members through leadership development. This
early engagement with community groups made me recognize the power
community organizations have in transforming lives.
My involvement within HIV/AIDS organizations lead me to want
to learn and focus on theories of race, gender, sexuality, and its inter-
sections. As an undergraduate, I discovered the work of queer of color
theorists (Ferguson 2004; Cohen 2005; Muñoz 1999; Rodriguez 2003;
Somerville 2000) and tried to put some of these ideas into practice through
my involvement with queer people of color groups working to combat
homophobia and racism in schools. With a focus on praxis, I created,
ran, and promoted outreach projects for high school and community col-
lege students that spoke about the college experience, and cultivated their
identities as young (queer) people of color. I soon found myself training
and educating practitioners working with students of color on how to be
inclusive of queer issues in their education initiatives. Unfortunately, what
I encountered while working within these spaces was a hesitation to dis-
cuss how these programs perpetuate heteronormative ideas of success and
family, which marginalize queer youth of color in the process. This lack
of a critical engagement by education and community practitioners on
the intersectional identities of their student participants, particularly from
Latina/o communities, instilled a passion to find new ways to promote
awareness and gain support for queer youth of color.
As a community organizer for Bienestar,1 I had the opportunity to
advance new strategies on how to educate Latina/o communities on
queer Latina/o youth issues. Working from a community strength model,
we knew that creating a strong base of grassroots support within Latina/o
communities was essential to gaining support for queer Latina/o youth.
During my tenure at Bienestar, the same-sex marriage debate in California
was also starting to gain momentum and conversations about queer rights
232 R. MARQUEZ
were becoming part of the dominant discourse in the state. As a pro-

queer rights organizer in east Los Angeles, I knew that only by going into
Latina/o communities and having Latina/o community members engage
in frank conversations with other Latina/o’s about queer issues was the
way to build broad base support. A lesson that I learned as a community
organizer was that Latina/o parents, given the knowledge and necessary
tools, have the power to change hearts and minds, one conversation at a
time.
What my experiences have taught me is that if we are going to trans-
form schooling environments for queer Latina/o youth, it must begin
from the ground up. We have to develop strategies to engage local school
communities in ways that educate community members about the queer
experience in order to build support for queer Latina/o youth. The work
the Promotoras of Mujeres Contra el Sexismo are advancing provides us
with an example of what this work can look like. For the last two years,
the Promotoras have been engaging Latina/o parents through a work-
shop series that seeks to humanize the queer experience by having direct
and heartfelt conversations about the multiple forms of oppression faced
by queer Latina/o youth and how as Latina/o parents they can support
queer communities. The work the Promotoras are advancing is trans-
forming hearts and minds of hundreds of Latina/o parents in southern
California on queer issues and I would argue, (in)directly affecting the
lives of queer Latina/o youth who live in these communities. My collabo-
ration with the Promotoras has focused on documenting their pedagogical
and discursive practices in their role as Promotoras, how this informs their
teaching of the queer workshop series, and how their work can be used as
a blue print or model to create other similarly structured programs.
PROMOTORES
Promotores (Promotora(s) or Promotor)—also called Community Health
Workers or Lay Health Workers—are known for effectively bringing about
transformative change in communities. Their roots trace to the socio-
political activism and social movements of the 1960s in Latin America.
Promotores in these countries historically promoted literacy and education
as fundamental human rights, while fostering self-reliance and an aware-
ness of community strengths (Torres and Cernada 2003). Promotores
have particularly become a powerful force in health advocacy, as a signifi-
cant body of research attest to the impact Promotores have on improving
the health outcomes in the Latina/o communities they serve (Swider

2002). This model for building an awareness of health issues makes the
Promotores highly influential and a powerful tool of intervention. Starting
in the 1980s, health practitioners in the USA started to become aware
of the effectiveness of Promotores in Latin America and wanted to imple-
ment similar approaches in the USA, particularly within densely popu-
lated Latina/o communities in rural and urban areas that lacked access
to basic forms of healthcare and information. California became a leader
in a Promotor/a model, given its growing population of Latina/o’s (Love
et al. 1997; Torres and Cernada 2002). Today, there are over 4000
Promotores in California that work with community organizations, hospi-
tals, institutions, and universities to improve the lives and health outcomes
of Latina/o’s (Latino Health Access, Visión y Compromiso, & Esperanza
Community Housing Corporation 2011).
In recent years, the Promotor/a model has expanded its focus from only
health prevention and dissemination of health information to more directly
advocating and building a movement for broader human rights and social
justice issues that directly affect Latina/o communities. Access to good
schools for their children, safe and affordable housing, and a living wage are
some of the social issues Promotores are promoting in the community. The
process of how Promotores build support for different social and political
issues is described as a three-stage process: (1) build profound relationships
over time based on mutual respect, empathy, and understanding; (2) share
information and local resources; and (3) create opportunities for commu-
nity members to participate in individual and collective actions (Latino
Health Access, Visión y Compromiso, & Esperanza Community Housing
Corporation 2011). A Promotor/a model then is an effective approach to
build support for political and social justice issues since Promotores already
are leaders and trusted members of the community. Working and collabo-
rating with Promotores to build programs and projects that educate com-
munity members on a particular social justice issue becomes a powerful way
to build support and a movement from the ground up.
PROMOTORAS DE MUJERES CONTRA EL SEXISMO

AND THE LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER
(LGBT) ACCEPTANCE PROJECT
The Promotoras of Mujeres Contra el Sexismo have served Latina/o com-
munities in southern California for over 20 years. This highly success-
ful Promotora program was created to address the lack of access Latina
234 R. MARQUEZ
women have to reproductive health care and sexuality information. Since

the Promotora program launched, more than 700 women have been
trained to act as Promotoras and have reached more than 150,000 resi-
dents in southern California. In 2011, the Promotoras were approached
by a local queer Latina/o foundation wanting to develop a project that
would increase the awareness and acceptance of queer Latina/o’s within
Latina/o communities. In 2012, with the organizations funding and sup-
port, the Promotoras started to lay the foundation for a workshop curricu-
lum similarly structured to other Promotora programs.
The curriculum for the workshop series was created over the course of
a year by collaborating with different pro-queer rights advocacy organiza-
tions such as Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
During this time, the Promotoras began the process of learning and adopt-
ing some of their strategies and started to develop a curriculum they felt
would be effective and could resonate with the Latina/o populations
they engaged with the most—Latina immigrant mothers. The result was
a four-part workshop series called The LGBT Acceptance Project that
engages Latina/o parents through activities and exercises about the per-
vasive homophobia and heterosexism within Latina/o communities and
the consequences this has for young queer people. The workshop series
also devotes a significant amount of time to teaching parents how they can
become advocates and allies for queer youth in their schools and commu-
nities. To date, the Promotoras have offered close to 100 workshop series
with over 1000 parents participating.
PROMOTORAS AS ANTI-OPPRESSIVE EDUCATORS

In my work with the Promotoras, I was interested in documenting their
discursive and pedagogical practices in order to understand how they pro-
moted discussions and came to new-shared meaning and understanding
about the lives of queer Latina/o’s. Four themes or types of exchanges
within the workshop series emerged:
1. Promotoras and parents engaging in discussions about what it means to

be queer and the types of oppression associated with a queer identity.
2. Exchanges of Promotoras and parents making comparisons from their
own life experiences as Latina/o’s to discuss similarities in oppression.
3. Instances where Promotoras and parents discussed the intersectionality
of oppression.
4. Parents identifying ways they can serve as allies and advocates for social
change.
These types of instances and exchanges were significant moments

within the workshop series as parents and Promotoras grappled with con-
versations that lead to developing new levels of awareness and understand-
ing about oppression in the lives of queer Latina/o’s that was mediated
by the parents’ own backgrounds and experiences. In essence, the work
the Promotoras engage in expands the work of Kumashiro (2002) on anti-
oppressive education, to include what it can mean for Promotoras and
Latina/o immigrant parents to engage in conversations about oppression
and marginalization that is mediated by their own language, immigration
status, gender, and racial positionality.
For example, in the first session of the series, Promotoras engage parents
in a series of activities that cover terminologies associated with different
queer identities. The goal is twofold; at one level, they want parents to
understand the meanings of these terminologies and identities in order to
build a common language around queer identities for the remaining ses-
sions, but they also want parents to recognize the different types of oppres-
sion associated with these identity markers. The discussions and activities
that lead to a shared understanding of these identities is a process; the
Promotoras are inundated with parents’ own perspectives of what it means
to be queer. Parents share how they came to understand queer identities,
terms like “de ambiente,” “marimacha,” “lesbica,” and “transvesti” are
shared among parents. The Promotora and parents then engage with these
terms; for example, in one Promotora’s session there was an exchange how
in different regions of Mexico these terms have different meanings and
types of behaviors associated with them. One parent shared, “en mi pueblo,
nosotros llamamos mujeres lesbianas, marimachas. Son mujeres que se visten
como hombres” (“in my town, we call lesbian women, ‘marimachas.’ They
are women who dress like men”). These exchanges then lead to a conver-
sation about gender identity and gender performance and types of dis-
crimination people who dress in gender nonconforming ways encounter
in their lives.
When I asked Maria Felix, the Promotora whose class this exchange
took place in, why it was important for her to let parents engage in the
exchange she says that:
236 R. MARQUEZ
An important role we play as Promotoras is to try to get the [parents] to

understand [the material] with the words they use and the words we use.
Because we are from the same community, we have to come to understand
each other through similar language, with similar terminology.
In another session, Promotora Alejandra Guzman begins an activity

during part four of the workshop session asking parents to discuss in what
ways they have experienced discrimination. One theme consistently raised
in all the Promotoras sessions was the experience of being undocumented
in this country and the feelings of silence, surveillance, and loneliness one
experiences. In this particular session with Alejandra, a parent described
the experiences of being undocumented to being in the shadows or in the
closet. Soon after this exchange, Alejandra asked the parent to think about
the experiences of queer persons who are in the closet and then to take
it a step further and think about the experiences of undocumented queer
Latina/o’s. For many parents, this was the first time they were asked to
relate their feelings of being undocumented to the experiences of oppres-
sion one might experience as a queer person in the closet, but then use
that point of reference to make sense of the experiences of oppression
queer Latina/o immigrants might go through.
When I asked Alejandra what prompted her to facilitate the conversa-
tion in this manner, she stated:
So they could understand their suffering. I am going to give you an exam-

ple. I suffered a lot when I first came here because I was undocumented. I
could not hold a good job, and that caused lots of suffering, frustration and
even some trauma because of the feelings of desperation. Then if a person
is LGBT, she also suffers because she is a lesbian. So then parents do make
the connection, that is, they see that they do suffer more, they realize there
is more pain, more suffering and more frustrations.
I followed Alejandra’s response with why she thinks it is important that

parents understand the similarities and intersecting forms of oppression.
Alejandra Guzman responded by saying:
In the last session when we talk about discrimination, we say that LGBT per-
sons suffer three times the discrimination. Because if she is a lesbian women,
then undocumented, and then of another race, their suffering is three times
as heavy. That is why we do it this way.
CONCLUSION
The Promotoras in their teaching employ multiple ways of engaging their
curriculum that invites parents to construct new understandings of issues
of oppression and marginalization that take into account the multiple
forms of oppression experienced by queer youth of color, with the end
goal of teaching parents how they can become advocates and allies.
In my work, I make a case for a queer of color critique to education
research and practice that focuses on identifying and developing anti-
oppressive and humanizing approaches education practitioners can employ
to account for the multidimensionality of oppression and marginalization
queer and gender nonconforming youth of color encounter in schools
every day. If we engage in research and practice that critically discusses
issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and its interplays with schooling and
education, we can transform dominant/singular narratives of oppression
and marginalization that currently do not account for the multiple forms of
oppression experienced by students who live and exist in the margins. One
definition of “promote (promoting)” is to further the progress of (some-
thing, especially a cause, venture, or aim); support or actively encourage. My
approach to queer studies in education focuses on collaborating and work-
ing with practitioners on the ground that are promoting and advancing a
level of consciousness about the intersectional and multidimensional forms
of oppression that has the power to deepen acceptance and recognition
of the multiple forms of oppression experienced by queer youth of color.
NOTE
1. BIENESTAR is a unique nonprofit social service organization dedicated to
positively impacting the health and well-being of the Latino community and
other underserved communities in southern California. Founded in 1989,
the organization uses an innovative and compassionate peer-to-peer model
that is 100 % culturally relevant to its constituents. It primarily targets the
Latino gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender segments of the community.
REFERENCES
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books.
Cohen, C. J. (2005). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential
of queer politics? In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer
studies: A critical anthology. Durham: Duke University Press.
238 R. MARQUEZ
Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. International Journal

of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(5), 657–669.
Delgado Bernal, D., Burciaga, R., & Flores Carmona, J. (2012). Chicana/Latina
testimonios: Mapping the methodological, pedagogical and political. Equity
and Excellence in Education, 45(3), 363–372.
Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique.
Hutchinson, D. L. (2000). Identity crisis: Intersectionality, multidimensionality,
and the development of an adequate theory of subordination. Mich. J. Race &
L., 6, 285.
Johnson, E. P., & Henderson, M. G. (Eds.). (2005). Black queer studies: A critical
anthology. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kohli, R., & Solórzano, D. G. (2012). Teachers, please learn our names!: Racial
microagressions and the K-12 classroom. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(4),
441–462.
Kumashiro, K. (2002). Troubling education: “Queer” activism and anti-oppressive
pedagogy. New York: Routledge.
Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (2006). Toward a critical race theory of educa-
tion. In A. D. Dixson & C. K. Rousseau (Eds.), Critical race theory in educa-
tion: All God’s children got a song (pp. 11–30). New York: Taylor & Francis.
Latino Health Access, Visión y Compromiso, & Esperanza Community Housing
Corporation. (2011, March 29). The Promotor model: A model for building
healthy communities. Los Angeles: The California Endowment. Retrieved
on October 20, 2014 from http://www.visionycompromiso.org/wordpress/
wp-content/uploads/TCE_Promotores-Framing-Paper.pdf.
Love, M. B., Gardner, K., & Legion, V. (1997). Community health workers: Who
they are and what they do. Health Education & Behavior, 24(4), 510–522.
Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of poli-
tics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Oakes, J. (1995). Two cities’ tracking and within-school segregation. Teachers
College Record, 96(4), 681–690.
Rodríguez, J. M. (2003). Queer Latinidad: Identity practices, discursive spaces.
Somerville, S. B. (2000). Queering the color line: Race and the invention of homo-
sexuality in American culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
Swider, S. M. (2002). Outcome effectiveness of community health workers: An
integrative literature review. Public Health Nursing, 19(1), 11–20.
Torres, M. I., & Cernada, G. P. (2003). Sexual and reproductive health promotion
in Latino populations. Parteras, promotoras y poetas: Case studies across the
Americas. Amityville: Baywood Publishing Company Inc.
Public Pedagogy
Tina Gutierez-Schmich and Julia Heffernan
Public pedagogy is not a settled concept. We choose to use the term

public pedagogy knowing it does not have a clear definition or common
understanding in research (Sandlin et al. 2011). Acknowledging the lack
of agreement, we use this construct because it offers a framework and
conceptualization of our project not available in the limits of other more
familiar and commonly utilized constructs.
Our education project sits within and outside the historical and primary
site of preservice teacher preparation. Central to this project is the notion
that cultural studies education takes place both within and far beyond the
classroom. It is the practice outside of the classroom that is our focus.
We use public pedagogy in an attempt to capture the complicated inter-
play between individuals, space, knowledge, and time outside the class-
room. We also use it to capture the explicit multiple directional teaching
and learning between preservice teachers and their public engagements
(see Fig. 24.1).
In Fig. 24.1 above, preservice teachers encounter ideas and people in
the public arena through public pedagogy assignments. Through these
encounters the public arena acts as a text, which informs preservice teachers
T. Gutierez-Schmich ( ) • J. Heffernan
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

240 T. GUTIEREZ-SCHMICH AND J. HEFFERNAN
Fig. 24.1 Public pedagogy cycle of engagement
about the course topic, homophobia in education. This education occurs

as members of the public react, question, and explain their experiences,
opinions, and beliefs about educational topics related to lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identifying youth to students
engaged in acts of public pedagogy. Preservice teachers then take in this
new information as they design future public engagements and actions to
educate and advocate in support of the population we collectively identi-
fied as LGBTQ or queer youth and in opposition to homophobia and
heteronormativity in education. New engagements result in new learn-
ing, which in turn results in additional redesigns for future public engage-
ments. This is the pedagogical cycle that takes up alternative texts and
engagements in this critical pedagogy learning project.
In considering the location of these critical pedagogy projects, public
refers to multiple spaces outside the classroom within the local community
PUBLIC PEDAGOGY 241
that are progressively identified by both the preservice teachers and the
course instructors. The sites, such as businesses, schools, restaurants, and
personal residences provide different locations, context, and meaning for
each preservice teacher.
In exploring this critical concept, we also intentionally emphasize the
pedagogy rather than the curriculum of the course studies and engage-
ments. We assert it is the specific teaching strategies of preservice teacher
engagement in partnership with curriculum that offers the potential inter-
ruption of heteronormativity in our community and schools and provides
an avenue of activism for safer schools and anti-homophobic initiatives.
First and earliest in the preservice teacher experience was the public
arena operating as a text for teaching and the preservice teacher positioned
as the learner (see Fig. 24.2).
This public pedagogy paradigm was the result of scaffolded assign-
ments for these future teachers as they intentionally engage in the taboo
topics of heteronormativity and schooling.
The second public pedagogy paradigm involved these future teachers
engaging the public in educational activities (see Fig. 24.3).
Through field observations and course activities, students were required
to be engaged in a reciprocal relationship with the public regarding the
topic of education as homophobia. Preservice teachers were assigned to
observe, engage, and finally teach the public about heteronormativity and
anti-oppressive education, even as the public was in the process of teach-
ing these future teachers about the same topics.
Fig. 24.2 Public arena operating as a queer text

Fig. 24.3 Future teachers’ scaffolded public pedagogy engagements
TEACHOUT: FIVE YEARS OF PUBLIC PEDAGOGY

In 2014, a group of 23 preservice teachers and three graduate students
in the field of education studies took part in a course titled Equality of
Opportunity: Education as Homophobia. This was the fifth year the
course included a series of public pedagogy assignments and service projects
for the community at large. The projects were designed and implemented
by the preservice teacher educators within the program, teachers in the
k–12 community, and youth advocates and families explicitly and adversely
impacted by homophobia in schools. Therefore, the projects have become
extensive and deeply connected to the broader community the education
program serves. This annual series of public pedagogy projects for the
course are entitled TeachOUT.
Beginning in 2010, the future teachers enrolled in this course were
assigned a single public pedagogy task of hosting a regional teacher educa-
tion forum with the partnering k–12 community. This initial forum was
entitled TeachOUT: The Annual Forum on Gender Identity and Sexual
Orientation Issues in Education. This outreach public pedagogy project
was initially designed to meaningfully fulfill a critical pedagogy field obser-
vation credit for this preservice teacher education course.
In ongoing development of a critical curriculum for this teacher edu-
cation course on education as homophobia, we imagined a curriculum
that would nurture a teacher identity as one of a pragmatic educational
activist for marginalized youth. The course curriculum and ultimate public
PUBLIC PEDAGOGY 243
pedagogy frame for teaching and learning was designed through the lens
of Kevin Kumashiro’s (2002) theories of anti-oppressive education and
Susan Birden’s (2005) theory of out-sider praxis in teaching.
Kumashiro (2004) proposes that discourses preparing teachers to chal-
lenge oppression could move beyond teachers as practitioners, research-
ers, and professionals. Although these more traditional discourses have an
important place in teacher education, historically they have not centered
teacher education to challenge oppression. Kumashiro (2004) notes that
“no practice is always anti-oppressive” (p. 3), but as this course title high-
lights, there is a responsibility for teacher education programs to “explore
the anti-oppressive changes made possible by alternative discourses on teach-
ing” (p. 3). The alternative discourses provided by Kumashiro (2004) and
utilized for this curriculum include preparing teachers for crisis, uncertainty,
healing, and activism through public observations, actions, and reflections.
In theorizing the curricular goals at the inception of this course, there
was a hope that through these public engagements and reflections the
students would see the role of teacher as one of a pragmatic educational
activist. The curriculum would require what Birden (2005) calls the edu-
cational praxis of the out-sider, in which the teacher is called to identify
with the LGBTQ student who lives outside of heteronormative discourse
and to make “an educational commitment to generous dialogue across
difference and to the abatement of heterosexism and anti-lesbian and
gay prejudice representing a retreat from compulsory heterosexuality”
(p. 25). We would extend Birden’s (2005) theory to incorporate the het-
eronormative bias and violence against gender-variant youth often labeled
as transphobia as well as the pervasive heteronormative patriarchal gender
bias against gender-nonconforming youth Elizabeth Meyer (2009) identi-
fied as gender harassment.
In theorizing a pedagogy for developing this anti-oppressive and out-
sider praxis, the authors became interested in public pedagogy as a strategy
for engaging preservice teachers in a dialectic experience with the broader
community regarding gender identity and sexual orientation topics in
schools.
TEACHOUT 2014
Over the course of a ten-week term, preservice teachers were assigned
weekly public pedagogy field assignments as a series of structured observa-
tions and interactions with a central focus on observing, reflecting upon,
and ultimately disrupting heteronormative practices in education. The

initial public pedagogy field assignments were individual activities while
later in the term students were assigned to public pedagogy teams for
larger orchestrated activist teacher interactions within eight different high
schools (see Table 24.1).
A small sampling of data from observations, personal narratives, field
reflections, and interviews is shared in the following section of this chapter
to illustrate how these engagements with the public text informed and
transformed these preservice educators’ notions of the roles and responsi-
bilities of a teacher with regard to critical pedagogy and heteronormativ-
ity. We have given the preservice education students pseudonyms in the
excerpts below.
It is our argument that the public pedagogy-based observations,
engagements, and reflections of these preservice students supported the
development of an anti-oppressive pedagogic framework for their future
teaching and an out-sider praxis during this period of development as
future teachers.
Table 24.1 2014 Teach OUT public pedagogy scaffold assignments

Student public pedagogy focus Assignment Public
co-participants
Publically marked as queer

Daily wearing of a gay pride nametag lanyard Campus
Sitting in public spaces with books with visibly queer topics Campus
Entering queer youth spaces
Guest at a local high school gay straight alliance meeting 20 Youth
Join same high school GSA as university partner 20 Youth
Engaging in queer education dialogs
Publically solicit a donation for a fundraiser for queer youth Businesses
Join school district planning committee for an alternative prom 40 Educators
Design materials and activities for a series of advocacy events Open audience
Engaging in queer youth advocacy
Host the TeachOUT citywide fundraiser: B B Queer 200 Guests
Host a high school assembly: Beyond Bullying: Anti-Oppression 500 Students
Host university public event, An Evening with Ivan Coyote 300 Students
Engaging in queer youth Education
Co-host regional LGBTQ inclusive high school prom 200 Students
Host TeachOUT—GSA Youth Leadership Summit 120 Students
Engaging in teacher education regarding heteronormativity
Host N.W. National Women’s Studies Accoc. Conference 300 Educators
PUBLIC PEDAGOGY 245
POSSIBILITIES
Analysis of preservice student data suggests that structuring field experi-
ences by means of public pedagogy engagements is a promising practice.
Public pedagogy offered these future teachers heteronormative educational
engagements that queered their thinking in four crucial critical pedagogy
arenas: (a) individual identity development in relation to homophobia and
heteronormativity; (b) structured opportunities to develop and enact an
anti-oppressive queer-positive curriculum; (c) opportunities to develop
professional capacity for engaging in an educational dialogue related to
gender identity and sexual orientation; and (d) critical experiences con-
structing learning opportunities for LGBTQ “out-sider” youth in the
development of an out-sider praxis as a future teacher.
The future teachers developed public pedagogy projects and engaged
in an array of activities in the community that incorporated gender iden-
tity and sexual orientation difference into the classroom community.
In addition, these future teachers moved from a commitment to what
Birden (2005) labeled the compulsory heteronormative mis-education
of LGBTQ youth to an education developed to support and incorporate
LGBTQ youth while allowing their queer identities to remain intact. A
vignette of each of these promising findings is shared here to highlight
how future teachers experienced the engagements.
(a) Preservice teachers accessed a highly relevant text for personal identity
exploration and development with regard to their own gender identity
and sexual orientation as it relates to heteronormativity, social hierar-
chies, and oppression.
Preservice teachers were assigned to display a gay pride rainbow lanyard

in some way as they moved around through their day. After wearing the
lanyard in the residence halls, one student, Jeff, shared a story of one of his
fellow residents coming out to him as gay. Jeff noted that as a third-year
resident advisor he had never before had a student come out to him as gay.
He stated that he thought it happened because he was wearing the rainbow
lanyard. Jeff said he thought that it had never happened before because he
was seen as “too much of a bro” and because of that, perhaps gay students
did not trust him or think he was safe. Jeff suggested wearing the lanyard
had really had him thinking about his own experiences with gender rules
and masculinity. He went on to talk about his personal struggles with his
own body image. He shared that even with over-exercise, waxing, and
unhealthy diets, he struggled often with his body not conforming to the
white majority around him. Upon his return to campus a year after receiv-
ing a lanyard and wearing it publically, Jeff specifically credited the rain-
bow lanyard with his growing realization that he just needed to be happy
being himself, and recognizing that other people’s issues with who he is,
or who LGBTQ people are, should not dictate his behavior or feelings.
Jeff has continued wearing the lanyard and engaging in the dialogue both
internally and externally long after the public pedagogy project ended.
(b) Preservice teachers accessed a highly relevant text for professional

identity exploration and development with regard to their founda-
tional beliefs about the roles of equity, advocacy, and activism in the
profession of k–12 public-school teaching. The public pedagogy proj-
ects offered them a space to develop and enact curriculum based upon
the theories of anti-oppressive education.
I used to think of teachers as people who were never supposed to take a side
or say what they believed about anything. I thought that was the rule of
being a professional. Now I think how those kids at the youth summit are
just out there on their own if the teachers don’t say something and take a
stand about all the gay bashing and gender roles and abuse in schools. I just
keep thinking how brave those kids were and they were only in eighth grade.
If they can be that brave I owe it to them to teach, to speak up, to take a side
and not be neutral. It is like that Paulo Freire saying from class, “Washing
one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means
to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” After the youth summit, after
listening to those kids tell their stories of what happens to them every day at
school. … Well, I get exactly what that quote means now. A true teacher has
to take a stand. (Megan, student journal, 2014)
(c) Preservice teachers participated in ongoing public discourse related

to gender identity and sexual orientation minority youth and families
in a real-world setting and thereby developed fluency in critical lan-
guage and concepts necessary to advocate for gender and sexual
identity diverse youth and families.
PUBLIC PEDAGOGY 247
Making the bathroom gender neutral didn’t just make them inclusive for
Ivan E. Coyote (Author note: Ivan E. Coyote is a gender identity activist
and author who was the keynote speaker at the TeachOUT 2014 conference) or
other people who intended their performance. They also could have made
a student, staff member, or any adult that struggles with men and woman’s
bathrooms on a daily basis feel included and comfortable in the bathroom
for once. The signs were hung up to make people feel comfortable and
included in the bathroom setting, only if it was for a few hours, and to raise
awareness regarding the importance and need for gender neutral bathrooms
in our society. The students, adults, and staff members who entered the
bathrooms throughout the performance hopefully took time to look at the
signs and learn about the importance of gender neutral bathrooms. Whether
they read about gender neutral bathrooms or not, if they entered into one,
they were exposed to the term which may have empowered them to lean a
little about it. (Rachel, personal narrative, 2014)
We would argue these pedagogical moves developed the preservice teach-

ers’ ideas about breaking the professional silence regarding heternorma-
tivity and homophobia. The practice of disrupting silence and engaging
in dialogue are fundamental to teaching and learning about gender and
sexuality in education.
(d) Preservice teachers move from what Kumashiro (2004) identified as

“Education for the Other” to what Birden (2005) named an “Out-
sider Praxis” in which they incorporate gender identity and sexual
minority youth and families into the central “we” of elementary
education.
When we first started making the outline for the poster, who and what we
wanted on there, we were thinking of a title to draw attention. We were
having a tough time thinking about what would be inclusive and eye catch-
ing for youth. We brainstormed a title, we thought about, “you are in good
company,” but then it seemed it was not inclusive. The word “you’re” is
singling out the individual, which would have the opposite effect we were
wanting. We wanted the poster to strike the feel of community for the stu-
dents at the summit and not distance them further. So the word “we” really
includes everyone and creates a sense of community—“we are in good com-
pany.” This is something that was very eye-opening about the creation of
the poster. Words sometimes seem insignificant, but often hold all the mean-
ing. In this case I was removing myself from the community because I do
not identify as LGBTQ, but really that is where the problem lies. (Barbara,
personal narrative, 2014)
This critical praxis of centering on the experiences and learning of mar-

ginalized identities within the education community, the simple shift from
you to we, is what is at the heart of the anti-oppressive pedagogy this
course aspires to develop each year.
It is a challenge to describe an educational strategy and process that
lives in a complex interplay between time, space, people, knowing, and
being. It is both an individual and group exploration that is fluid and
unpredictable. Over the last five years, our observations and conversations
with preservice teachers in and out of the classroom, their writing, their
projects, and extensive interviews have led us to propose there is great
possibility in using public pedagogy as a strategy in preservice teacher edu-
cation. There is the possibility of preservice teachers moving into their
classrooms as pragmatic educational activists. There is the possibility of
teachers with the knowledge and skills to teach and reach more students.
There is the possibility of teachers committed to the disruption and trans-
formation of dominant and constraining cultures.
REFERENCES
Birden, S. (2005). Rethinking sexual identity in education. Oxford: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Kumashiro, K. (2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and anti-oppressive
Kumashiro, K. (2004). Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social
justice. New York: Routledge Falmer.
Meyer, E. (2009). Gender bullying and harassment: Strategies to end sexism and
homophobia in schools. New York: Teachers College Press.
Sandlin, J., O’Malley, M., & Burdick, J. (2011). Mapping the complexity of public
pedagogy scholarship. Review of Educational Research, 81(3), 338–375.
doi:10.3102/0034654311413395.
Queer Counterpublic Spatialities
Jón Ingvar Kjaran
INTRODUCTION
Henri Lefebvre has suggested that those from the hegemonic class, who
inhabit a particular space, actively produce it with their actions, behaviour,
and embodiment. Thereby, they reproduce their dominance within soci-
ety (Lefebvre 1991). Queer theorists and human geographers have elabo-
rated further on the social production of space, albeit giving more weight
to the importance of its discursive production (see e.g., Massey 2005).
Doreen Massey has suggested that all spaces have three main character-
istics (Massey 2009). First, space is relational; it is a product of relations,
both present and absent, produced “through the establishment or refusal
of relations” (Massey 2009, p. 17). Second, space is “the dimension of
multiplicity” (Massey 2009, p. 17); that is, multiple relations and phe-
nomena inhabit each particular space or spaces. Third, space is a process,
constantly made, unmade, and remade through different constellations of
relations. Here Massey is rejecting a deterministic view that treats space as
something that is unchangeable. She stresses that the production of space
is “a social and political task” (Massey 2009, p. 17). Individual subjects
J.I. Kjaran ( )
University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

250 J.I. KJARAN
are, therefore, according to Massey, able to influence and change their

environment with their presence, actions, and embodiment.
Emphasizing the political and social aspects of the concept of space pre-
supposes that within space and between spaces there is a power struggle
and conflict (Massey 1991, 1994, 2005). Massey (1994, 2005) concep-
tualized this power struggle under the term “geometry of power,” which
exists at all spatial levels. According to her, within spaces, in the network
of social relations, individuals and groups have different opportunities
in claiming space for themselves (Callard 2011; Massey 2005). Massey’s
understanding of power within space(s) is, therefore, relational (see also
Foucault 1995). Subsequently, space is a manifestation of power, which
makes it possible to map different threads of power within particular
space(s) or between spaces.
Massey’s understanding of space is useful to explain the gendered and
sexualized processes of exclusion and inclusion within particular space(s)
in upper secondary school. The space(s) within the school environment
is (are) normally depicted as heteronormative, excluding the visibility of
queer students (see e.g., Nast 1998; Pascoe 2007). Within school spaces
there is an ongoing power struggle, subtle or overt. The school environ-
ment itself tends to be supportive in (re)producing heteronormativity and
gender stereotypes. This power struggle takes place at different spatial
levels, from the classroom to the locker room, and its manifestations and
oppressive character can vary between different settings (Hubbard 2001).
However, space is not stable and fixed. It is, as Massey has suggested,
remade and unmade constantly, which then opens up the possibility of
queering it, creating queer spatialities, where emancipatory and transgres-
sive acts can thrive, giving students and educational workers, both queer
and non-queer, opportunity to learn about the queer Other (see e.g.,
Kumashiro 2002). In other words, queer spatialities can be understood
as counterpublics, coined by Nancy Fraser (1990) and Michael Warner
(2002).
Fraser explains counterpublics as “parallel discursive arenas where mem-
bers of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses
to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and
needs” (Fraser 1990, p. 67). Warner also emphasizes the discursive char-
acter of publics as “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than
discourse itself” (Warner 2002, p. 67). Moreover, the public is “a kind of
social totality” (p. 65), whereas its limits and discursive circulation is never
fully known. It is also an imagined space with a concrete audience (Warner
QUEER COUNTERPUBLIC SPATIALITIES 251
2002). Moreover, counterpublics are in principle the same kind of space

as publics but are characterized by their tension to the larger public arena.
According to Warner, “Discussion within such a public is understood to
contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by
alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about
what can be said or what goes without saying” (Warner 2002, p. 56). This
notion of counterpublics resembles Fraser’s description of “parallel discur-
sive arenas.” However, differing from Fraser, Warner puts more emphasis
on the discursive character of counterpublics without necessarily connect-
ing them with particular subordinated groups. In that sense, the concept
of a counterpublics has a wider resonance and can be used in order to form
new identities and worldviews within school settings. Counterpublics can
therefore be understood as transformative discursive spaces where coun-
terknowledges can be cultivated through critical engagement with the
dominant norms and contexts of the cultural environment (Warner 2002).
This approach to space(s) entails an opportunity to analyse the various
spatial aspects of school spaces, from the classroom to the locker room,
in order to understand the processes of exclusion and inclusion based on
gender and sexuality, with the ultimate aim of drawing attention to the
various possibilities of queering space(s) and creating queer spatialities. In
the following section, two examples will be given of how queer spatialities
can be created, carved out, in the classroom/curriculum on the one hand
and within school corridors and communal spaces on the other hand.
QUEERING HISTORY, QUEERING THE CLASSROOM:

A QUEER COUNTERPUBLICS?
In a course about the Holocaust, at an Icelandic high school, a three-week
session dealt with the so-called Pink Holocaust, the persecution of sexual
minorities (non-heterosexuals), mostly gay men, during the Nazi period
in Germany from 1933 to 1945. This three-week session was initiated by
an openly gay teacher in order to carve out a queer space/counterpublics
for queer and non-queer students alike. He used the clause in the new
national curriculum for upper secondary schools in Iceland, which opens
up possibilities to teach about queer issues and reality, even offering queer
theory as an independent subject. During and after the three-week mod-
ule, students’ perceptions were explored, in particular if the content of
the module changed their understanding towards queer issues, and how
252 J.I. KJARAN
gay students experienced the course. Could, for example, the module be
understood as constituting a queer counterpublic space?
Within the space of the module, the students were confronted with
difficult histories, which brought difficult knowledge (Britzman 1998).
The students, who attended the course, gained new insights into the real-
ity and history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer
people; in other words, the module disturbed their preconceived world-
views (Weltanschaung) and engaged them in a kind of “crisis of learning”
(Ellsworth 2005), as can be seen from the following quotes:
I cannot comprehend why they [the Nazis] were more against homosexu-
als than for example criminals. Actually I cannot understand why they were
against homosexuals at all. (Student evaluation, 2014)
I am shocked that I did not know that gays experienced so grim a fate
during the WW2 and still today. Some only think of the Jews as the only
victims of the holocaust and Nazi persecution. (Student evaluation, 2014)
Gradually, the students became aware of the many voices implicated in

such a complicated and horrendous event as the Holocaust was, nurturing
in them an understanding of the Holocaust as a “narrative without clo-
sure” which is not easy or in some ways even impossible to comprehend
(Ellsworth 2005).
The self-identified gay students, who were interviewed, experienced the
module as liberating and talked about how it made them feel more safe,
included, and welcoming, as can be seen from the following quotes:
I have never been in a course or a seminar where one of the topics is this,
you know gay issues. I think for me I was maybe more enthusiastic learn-
ing about these issues, even more than my classmates. (Gay male student,
interview, 2014)
I had never heard about these issues in compulsory school or in any other
course at my school until now. You know there have never been any discus-
sions about homosexuality at this school so this was something new. … It
was so nice to have finally some kind of cause to stand for … hearing that my
classmates were now talking about this even after class. It was really interest-
ing and nice to hear that. (Gay male student, interview, 2014)
Thus, for self-identified queer students in particular, the module could

be understood as a counterpublic, vis-á-vis the dominant narrative of the
Holocaust, drawing attention to counterstories of other minority groups
that were persecuted by the Nazis. In that sense and also because it influ-
enced profoundly most of the students who participated, it could be said
that the module had some troubling effects, and in that sense queered
the hegemonic discourse of gender and sexuality (see e.g., Jagose 1996;
Warner 1991), thus creating a queer counterpublic spatiality within the
classroom.
THE PIT: CARVING OUT A QUEER SOCIAL SPACE

At Forest, an Icelandic high school, there are two large communal spaces
for general use and several smaller ones, located throughout the building.
The two main communal spaces are concentrated around the canteen,
which is situated at the centre of the school. One of these two spaces
is called the Pit, because one actually has to go down couple of steps to
reach it. The other communal space at Forest surrounds the Pit, called
here the Surroundings. It is where the “mainstream” students meet, hang
out, and have their meals during breaks. The Pit, on the other hand, is a
space where students, who are regarded as somehow different and even
marginalized, hang out. They are not following the flow, whether in terms
of music, fashion, interests, or sexual orientation. The students who hang
out in the Pit are labelled by the Surroundings as the Pit-trash. When a
transgender student was asked, to describe the Pit and its occupants, she
said the following without any hesitation:
This particular group at our school gets lots of prejudices and people regard
us as freaks. We are regarded somehow different from other students. We
are at the bottom of the “pecking order” and the “normal” students call us
the Pit-trash, although they do not know anybody in this group of students.
These are just prejudices. Also, other students at our school, “the normal”
ones, do not go into the Pit because they think that only strange people
hang out there. So in my view, hanging out in the Pit is like deciding to be
part of another group of people, you are then put into a certain category.
As is indicated in the quote, the students in the Pit are categorized by

other students as strange and different. Those students who venture into
the Pit are marked as alien or freaks, not to be associated with. The “Pit-
trash” experience prejudice from “mainstream” students occupying the
Surroundings. This was also confirmed by one of the student counsellors at
Forest. The “mainstream” students draw a line between themselves, who
254 J.I. KJARAN
are “normal,” and those occupying the Pit and regard them as “abnormal”
or freaks—abjected others. However, it was noted during observations
that most feel comfortable in the Pit. They interacted freely with each
other, talked, and made jokes, and it seemed that it empowered them to
be able to occupy that particular space on their own terms. This can also
be seen in the following quote from the same transgender student:
I feel good in the Pit, it is a great place. Sometimes I sit upstairs, in the
Surroundings, with the “normal” students, but somehow I do not feel as
good there. The Pit is my space, a more comfortable place, being with the
Pit-trash is like being at home.
In the quote she uses the word “Pit-trash” to describe the members of the
Pit, the same word the “normal” students use to label them. This was also
noted, when talking to some of the Pit-members and during observations.
They used that particular word among themselves, however, in a rather
humorous way. By doing that, they were in a way reclaiming/reappropri-
ating this negative word in a Butleran sense (Butler 1990), neutralizing
its stigmatized meaning, and at the same time defying the dominant dis-
course of the Surroundings as demarcated space of exclusion. They did this
also by drawing a line between themselves and the others. They did this in
order to gain coherence in the group and to resist the discourse of normal-
ity, whether in terms of sexuality, appearances, music taste, or interests.
Due to the close proximity of these two different spaces, there seemed
to be a constant tension between them. The students who inhabit the
Surroundings are in a position to view the students in the Pit from above,
symbolizing both their superior status and the views many of them have
about the “Pit-trash.” They, on the other hand, are a constant physical
reminder for the other students how they should not act or behave. At
the same time, they destabilize the discourse of normality with their close
presence and coherence in the group. The Pit, as a space of other, is an
important space for maintaining diversity at this particular high school. In
the Pit, spaces are made and remade in accordance with the composition of
the students occupying them at any given time. In the Pit, queer students
and other marginalized groups felt safe and welcomed because of the mul-
tiplicity of discourses and bodies. They and other students, who did not
conform to the dominant discourse of gender, sexuality, or appearances,
gained a voice and a platform to disrupt the discourse of heteronorma-
tivity governing the spatial limits and terms of the Surroundings. They
did so with their bodies, performances, and actions, finding strength in

the coherence of the group, depicted as the deviant “Other.” The Pit can
therefore be defined as queer form of spatiality, a microcosm of differ-
ent spaces and identities, where marginalized students have the possibil-
ity to claim or create a space for the other, but also gain a voice and an
opportunity to resist and queer the dominant spatial performances of the
Surroundings. It thus constitutes a queer “counterpublics,” where mar-
ginalized groups have the opportunity to produce counterdiscourses in
order to remake that particular space and queer the Surroundings by for-
mulating oppositional identities, bodies, and appearances (Fraser 1990;
Kjaran and Jóhannesson 2015).
CONCLUSION
Drawing on Doreen Massey’s theoretical work on space, particularly the
notion of space not being stable and fixed, but rather remade and unmade
constantly, opens the possibility of creating queer spatialities, where eman-
cipatory and transgressive acts can thrive. Queer spatialities can also be
understood as counterpublics, a term coined by Nancy Fraser (1990) and
Michael Warner (2002), where new identities can be formed, alterna-
tive discourses and new worldviews nurtured. Understanding space(s) as
unstable and constantly changing on the one hand and as counterpublics
on the other hand entails an opportunity to analyse the various spatial
aspects of schools, from the classroom to the communal spaces, in order
to draw attention to the processes of exclusion and inclusion based on
gender and sexuality, as well as various possibilities of queering space(s),
creating queer spatialities. Two empirical examples were given from two
different Icelandic high school settings.
In the first case, the formation of counterpublics within the communal
spaces challenged the dominant discourse of gender and sexuality. There,
spaces, particularly the so-called Pit, were made and remade (Massey
2009) in accordance with the composition of the students occupying it
each time. Thus the Pit is a good example of the processes of inclusion,
exclusion, and queering, and how these factors interplayed in forming
that particular space. It was created as an inclusive space for those students
who were excluded from the main space of the canteen, the so-called
Surroundings. As a result, it was gradually transformed into counterpub-
lics and constitutive of a queer spatiality. The Pit, as an inclusive queer
space, bolstered the coherence of the “abjected” other, the students who
256 J.I. KJARAN
were considered to be “abnormal,” either in terms of sexuality, gender,

ethnicity, or other physical appearances.
The second example revolved about the creation of queer counter-
publics within the space of the classroom/curriculum. Thus, the module
about the Pink Holocaust, in particular, contributed to the transgression
of the curriculum and the dominant discourse of gender and (hetero)sexu-
ality. The fact that queer studies are mentioned in the current Icelandic
national curriculum from 2011 made it feasible to pose “queer” as an
organizing principle of the module at that particular high school, which
opened a space for creation of a queer counterpublics and thus a queer
space. Thus, the initiative of the history teachers and the curriculum sup-
ported each other in that the course was provided.
The two examples discussed in this chapter provide insights into mul-
tiple spatial relations in schools, where the processes of inclusion, exclu-
sion, and queering intersect in the making and remaking of spaces (Kjaran
and Jóhannesson 2015). Moreover, the understanding of spaces described
in these examples can have implications for other situations, settings or
research, particularly in terms of investigating gender and sexuality. First,
space is not fixed but can be queered and changed. The Pit is an example
of that. Second, space is multilayered; it can be made and remade in accor-
dance with the embodiment of its occupants. Thus, queer space(s), carv-
ing out queer spatialities within school settings, is an important factor, in
order to ensure diversity of discourses and thus diverse performances of
either gender or sexuality.
REFERENCES
Britzman, D. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry
of learning. New York: State University of New York Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity.
Callard, F. (2011). Doreen Massey. In P. Hubbard & R. Kitchin (Eds.), Key think-
ers on space and place (pp. 299–306). London: Sage Publications.
Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. London:
Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. New York:
Vintage Book.
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of
actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25(26), 56–80.
Hubbard, P. (2001). Sex zones: Intimacy, citizenship and public space. Sexualities,
4(1), 51–71.
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory. New York: New York University Press.
Kjaran, J. I., & Jóhannesson, I. Á. (2015). Inclusion, exclusion and the queering
of spaces in two Icelandic upper secondary schools. Ethnography and Education,
10(1), 42–59.
Kumashiro, K. K. (2002). Troubling education. Queer activism and anti-oppressive
pedagogy. New York: Routledge/Falmer.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Massey, D. (1991). A global sense of place. Marxism Today, 38, 24–29.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage Publications.
Massey, D. (2009). Concepts of space and power in theory and political practice.
Documents D’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 55, 15–26.
Nast, H. (1998). Unsexy geographies. Gender, Place and Culture, 5(2),
191–206.
Pascoe, J. (2007). Dude you’re a fag. Masculinity and sexuality in high school.
Berkely: University of California Press.
Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text, 9(4 [29]),
3–17.
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
Queer Literacy Framework
sj Miller
HISTORIOGRAPHY: BUILDING THE QUEER LITERACY

FRAMEWORK
Gender and sexuality norms, conscribed under heteropatriarchy—
a history we never made—have colonized and established violent and
unstable social and educational climates for the millennial generation of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, intersex, agender/asexual, gender creative,
and questioning youth (LGBT*IAGCQM) (Miller 2014c). While many
studies by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
and their allies show that LGBT*IAGCQM students feel safer overall in
schools than their LGBT*IAGCQ predecessors, due to shifts in national
and state policies and amendments advocating for LGBT rights, state
antibullying laws, increased numbers of Gay–Straight Alliances, and a
wider social acceptance of LGBT*IAGCQ people, schools still strug-
gle to normalize the inclusion of an LGBT*IAGCQ-positive curricula
(GLSEN 2011, 2013; Kosciw et al. 2010). This work addresses, through
a queer literacy framework (QLF), how teachers educators can support
preservice teachers to understand and read (a)gender and (a)sexuality1
s. Miller ()
New York University, Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the
Transformation of Schools, New York, NY, USA

260 S. MILLER
through a queer lens; how to rework social and classroom norms where
bodies with differential realities in classrooms are legitimated and made
legible to self and other; how to shift classroom contexts for reading (a)
gender and (a)sexuality; and how to support classroom students toward
personal, educational, and social legitimacy through understanding the
value of (a)gender and (a)sexuality self-determination and (a)gender and
(a)sexuality justice.
Adolescent culture today teaches us that some youth eschew gender
and sexual labels. Faced with these realities, teachers are challenged to
mediate literacy learning that affirms these differential realities in their
classrooms. That said, how can teachers move beyond discussions rel-
egated to only gender and sexuality and toward an understanding of a
continuum that also includes the (a)gender and (a)sexuality complexities
students embody? How can we undo restrictively normative conceptions
of sexual and gendered life, unhinging one from the other, and treat
them as separate and distinct categories? Even more critical, how can we
support preservice and inservice literacy teachers to develop and embody
the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to help all students
learn (NCATE 2000) while simultaneously supporting them to remain
open to redefinition and renegotiation when they come up against social
limits?
For students to be self-determined-autonomous beings, they must be
afforded favorable opportunities or have opportunities “worth wanting”
(Howe 1997) from within favorable social contexts (Leonardi and Saenz
2014). When we consider that gender and sexuality categories, which pre-
date our existence, typically shape how we think inwardly about ourselves
and others, classrooms that fail to affirm students’ (a)gender and (a)sexual
diversity contribute to students not wanting to connect or participate in
learning. However, when favorable social conditions are present, students
can experience an internal safety that has limitless possibility for students
to be “read” or “made” legible both to themselves and others. Applying
a QLF across literacy-focused classrooms, these questions, concerns, and
conditions, suggest that a reading of adolescence/ts that encourages (a)
gender and (a)sexuality self-determination can pivot toward (a)gender and
(a)sexuality justice. As adolescents come to see their realities reflected,
affirmed, and made legible both through literacy practices in the class-
room, and society writ-large, self-determination and, hence, a queer
autonomy can be realized.
QUEER LITERACY FRAMEWORK 261
KEY TERMS FOR THE QLF

Queer refers to a suspension of rigid gendered and sexual orientation cat-
egories (Jagose 1996), and is underscored by attempts to interrogate and
interrupt heteronormativity, reinforced by acknowledging diverse people
across gender, sex, and desires, as well as to foreground the sexual ori-
entation (Blackburn and Clark 2011). Queer embraces the freedom to
move beyond, interstitially, intersectionally, even away from, and even to
return to, identity categories (Britzman 1997). Queer is not relegated to
LGBT*IAGCQ people, but is inclusive of any variety of experience that
transcends what has become subsumed by socially and even viable politi-
cally accepted categories for gender and sexual orientation. The addition
of the lowercase (a) in front of both gender and sexuality demonstrates an
expanding understanding that some people do not ascribe to social defini-
tions for either. (A)gender references those who may eschew gender, and its
biological, historical, and even social definitions; and (a)sexuality refers to
those who are not sexual or who do not identify with a sexual orientation.
Queer, therefore, is a continuum for (a)gender and (a)sexuality expressions.
Self-determination is the right to make choices to self-identify in a way
that authenticates one’s self-expression, and which has potential for the
embodiment of self-acceptance. It is also a type of self-granted or inherited
permission that can help one refute or rise above social critique. It pre-
sumes choice and rejects an imposition to be externally controlled, defined,
or regulated. It presumes that humans are entitled to unsettle knowledge,
which can generate new possibilities of legibility. It means that any form of
(a)gender or (a)sexuality begets the same inalienable rights and should be
afforded the same dignities and protections. De facto rights, thus, avow a
way of intervening in social and political processes because one’s discourse
and way of being demonstrates placement as a viable stakeholder in society
and reveals that no one personhood is of any more or less of value than
any other.
For this work, (a)gender and (a)sexuality justice and queer autonomy
are interchangeable terms because they each ideologically reflect an actu-
alized freedom of humans to be self-expressive without redress of social,
institutional, or political violence. Where (a)gender and (a)sexuality jus-
tice actualized, homophobia, transphobia, gendertyping, and hence,
compulsory gender and sexuality labeling, would be deemed as systemic
forms of violence, which would incur appropriate consequences. In sum,
262 S. MILLER
teachers who take up a QLF can be agents for social, political, and per-
sonal transformations.
UNEVEN-BODIED REALITIES
We are dependent on norms and external forces for our social acceptance
and worth. These norms, which are put on psyches from birth, maintain
status quo beliefs and make identities legible and readable. One’s legibil-
ity is therefore socially mediated and constituted. One cannot exist with-
out drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede one’s existence, so
from inception, personhood is constituted outside the self, leaving little
space for organic experiences of internal safety. Norms, which construct
ways to read and understand the other, create uneven social realities, and
one’s sense of internal safety (for further explanation on internal safety, see
Leonardi and Saenz 2014; Meyer and Leonardi, Chap. 18, this volume),
or the ability to be a self-determined autonomous agent who determines
how to live one’s own life, is often at odds with competing societal norms.
Paradoxically, our very personhood depends on recognition, which is
inexorably connected to social norms. Yet, some of these conditions make
life unlivable. Sewn into the fabric of heteropatriarchy, gender and sexuality
norms have been relegated and naturalized (Butler 2004, p. 43) by restric-
tive discourse, in particular, under laws and social mores. Butler (2004)
contends that people are regulated by gender norms, which make them
credible and legible to each other (p. 52). As Foucault (1978) reminds us,
the self constitutes itself in discourse with the assistance of another’s pres-
ence and speech. The force of knowing the true self lies in the rhetorical
quality of the master’s discourse (Butler 2004, p. 163).
When we are not accepted, bodies are open to violence (emotional,
psychic, physical, psychiatric, etc.). Violence is thereby a symptom of anxi-
ety for those threatened by intelligibility. Gender and sexuality, therefore,
operate as regulatory norms to remind us that under patriarchal domina-
tion both are symbolic signifiers of the power of the external over the
limits to self-determination, and subsequent, self-worth.
To the detriment of those who do not ascribe to gender and sexuality
norms and cannot reap social and political benefits, the norm operates to
keep people from gender and sexual self-determination. The norm polices
and inhibits internal freedom. This is not to say that those who live out-
side the norm and have come to accept their lived realities suffer, but it
does suggest that there are often psychic, emotional, political, economic,
and sometimes physical consequences. These consequences suggest that

human value is context based, that one’s happiness and success can be
dependent on social legibility (Butler 2004, p. 32) and that only certain
lives are worthy of protection. In other words, violence—broadly speak-
ing—is permissible and human worth is protected selectively under law.
Thus, in a society that only protects some, and where external realities are
regulated, the question we are left with is one of deep moral consequence:
How can teacher educators rework gender and sexuality norms so all bodies
are entitled to experience and can experience self-determination with a resul-
tant, queer autonomy?
The classroom space holds contemporaneous plurality and teachers have
great agentive possibility to rupture dangerous dichotomies and myths
about gender and sexuality while educating adolescence/ts about how all
students (and others) can be rendered legible. Bodies are not reducible
to language alone because language continuously emerges from bodies as
individuals come to know themselves. Bodies thereby generate and invent
new knowledges: “The body gives rise to language and that language car-
ries bodily aims, and performs bodily deeds that are not always understood
by those who use language to accomplish certain conscious aims” (Butler
2004, p. 199 on Felman 2002). So how can a QLF subvert the master’s
discourse and shift norms to affirm differential-bodied realities?
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
While nearly 30 years of research about the criticality for bridging LGBTQ
issues (Quinn and Meiners 2011) to school curriculum has been well doc-
umented, education remains without a large-scale study of how Schools
of Education are preparing preservice teachers to address and incorpo-
rate LGBT*IAGCQ into pre-K–12 classroom education. There is, how-
ever, a growing body of pre-K–16 LGBT*IAGCQ research across various
geographical contexts of preservice teacher preparedness. These subfields
include personal beliefs personal about LGBT*IAGCQ issues, teaching,
and queering disciplinary literacy, challenges to gender norms, preparing
teachers to teach queer youth of color, and program effectiveness on pre-
paring teachers to teach LGBT*IAGCQ issues.
Yet, there is an egregious gap in the field about preservice teachers’ feel-
ings of fitness/preparedness to teach and include LGBT*IAGCQ issues in
their classrooms (Jennings 2014; Quinn and Meiners 2011). Quinn and
Meiners found that 57 % preservice teachers needed more training to work
264 S. MILLER
effectively with LGBT*IAGCQM youth and 65 % indicated they needed

more specific education to address homosexuality. Similarly, Sears (1992)
found that prospective teachers were reticent about including LGB issues
in the curriculum, with only 29 % expressing that they would include issues
related to homosexuality. He reported that prospective teachers’ cumulative
knowledge about homosexuality was minimal (p. 61), and few were willing
to pay attention to gay and lesbian students’ needs. These realities are resul-
tant of the legacy of heteropatriarchy and its colonizing impact on social
and educational policies and what Jennings (2014) found—that by the
end of preservice coursework and as students enter into student teaching,
LGBT*IAGCQM issues were nearly extant in coursework and discussions.
What we do know is that students’ identities are impacted by teachers’
beliefs and perceptions of adolescence/ts (Hagood 2002; Lesko 2012;
Mahiri 2004; Miller 2009, 2012; Miller et al. 2013; Miller and Norris
2007; Moje and Helden 2004; Petrone and Lewis 2012) and that that
LGBT*IAGCQM students carry vulnerabilities that make them susceptible
to suicidal ideation, lowered Grade Point Average, bullying and harass-
ment, lowered self-esteem, higher truancy and drop-out rates, and cog-
nitive overloads (Kosciw et al. 2010). Unfortunately, and more too often
than not, the classroom and its prevailing social environment, through lack
of democratically favorable contexts of choice and adequate options, rein-
scribe heteronormative and gendertypical realities. For students who are
LGBT*IAGCQM and have differential-bodied realties, schools are not just
unsafe, they are restrictive, constrictive, and reinforcers of multiple forms of
systemic oppression.
For students then, who are LGBT*IAGCQM or have differential-bodied
realities, they are highly attuned to prevailing gender and sexual norms
and typically feel unsafe from the moment they cross onto school property.
Gaps in codes of conduct, posters that do not reflect their realities, gen-
dered and heteronormative school events, locker rooms, gendered bath-
rooms, notes home that reinforce heteronormative or gender norms, and
a hetero, gender-normative and undemocratic classroom curriculum, all
ignore their truths, delegitimizing their lived realities, and absent a sense
of communal belonging. Such macroaggressions, day after day, and year
after year, scream to students they do not matter, and systemically desta-
bilize their abilities to ever feel or experience safety at school, and even in
their lives, writ large. These contextual realities, however, can be shifted by
a deeper and more informed understanding of how heteronormativity and
gendernormativity vulnerabilize students in our schools, which can lead
toward contexts shifting.
Moses draws from Kymlicka (1991) and Raz’s (1979) work in par-
ticular ways—integrating their ideas to support a conceptualization of
personal autonomy and self-determination. Moses’s (2002) concept of
“autonomy as self-determination” provides a framework to analyze race-
conscious education policies that mitigate the racism and oppression often
experienced by students of color in US educational institutions.2 Moses
then conceptualizes the ideal or possible realization of self-determination
through two specific conditions: favorable social contexts of choice and
authenticity. Leonardi and Saenz3 (2014) take up these concepts and apply
it to how queer youth, who as they experience internal safety, can become
self-determined. Building from Moses, they proffer that internal safety
requires “both autonomy and self-determination and that these compo-
nents are contingent upon favorable social contexts of choice” (p. 207).
Drawing from the combined works of Moses (2002) and Leonardi and
Saenz (2014), I extend these concepts to building the QLF.
There are solutions, however, to legitimating the realities of
LGBT*IAGCQ students and students with differential-bodied realities.
Fostering conditions that can lead to internal safety, schools must strive to
rid the environment of “unsafety” (e.g., all forms of bullying, see Miller
et al. 2013) by eliminating all enactments of domination and oppression
(Young 1990) from the micro- to macrolevel across practices and policies.
Schools predicated on democratic values that inspire independence, integ-
rity, and an adequate range of options (Raz 1979) can ostensibly shift the
prevailing schooling environment. The QLF was developed as a tool for
that very purpose.
The QLF reflects values that students must be allowed to self-identify
however they choose and to be provided opportunities to see themselves
reflected back in a positive manner. Such legitimacy can foster a student’s
ability to experience internal safety. To that end, teacher educators must
first help to unpack complexities of the language and the commitments in
the QLF and build a continuum of understanding with preservice teachers
about (a)gender and (a)sexuality and its intersectionalities. As preservice
teachers study, unpack, and practice the QLF, they will develop a repertoire
of resources that they, in turn, can utilize in classroom practice. Such prac-
tice can instill in their dispositions, a confidence to address LGBT*IAGCQ
topics in the classroom. By teaching preservice students about how bodies
are vulnerable to reinforcing hidden ideologies, LGBT*IAGCQ-inclusive
curriculum can cut across literacy work and rupture oppressive narratives
that can be recast into school and across community spaces. In so doing,
adolescents and how we understand adolescence (adolescent/ce), has
266 S. MILLER
great potential to steward in a queer autonomy as people move across

their lived experiences—which can promote social acceptance of (a)gender
and (a)sexuality justice.
WHY A QLF MATTERS

The QLF is a critical interventionist and political strategy to challenge the
taken-for-granted value of hegemonic demarcations of gender and sexuality
assumed under patriarchy and hidden within and by curriculum. It is a strat-
egy for literacy teachers to reinscribe, instate, and affirm differential-bodied
realities and give voice to those who experience illegibility and delegitimiza-
tion. Because social norms have great structural power in shaping the lived
realities of people and humans come to identify with a set of social conven-
tions from birth (Miller 2012), when gender and sexuality norms are fixed
and rigid, people are made vulnerable to internalized and external oppres-
sions. Wherefore social norms most often reinforce self-acceptance and can
take a toll on one’s psyche by destroying self-love, acceptance, and internal
safety, when one does not ascribe to binary gender or sexual orientation cat-
egories, the QLF as a tool for legitimatization affirms all forms of (a)gender
and (a)sexuality expression. A QLF matters because it positions teachers as
agentive who, through their teaching, can affect and influence adolescence/
ts to not only expand social norms but to influence policy en-route.
WHY NOT USING A QLF MATTERS

To not challenge current understandings of gender and sexuality norms,
we are left with a myopic and vulnerable understanding of the evolving
lived realities of people. If we ascribe to a recurrence of sameness, it cre-
ates a flattening and unidimensional perspective of gender and sexuality,
while it continues to delegitimize those who do not ascribe to gender
and sexuality norms by relegating them to ongoing inferior status. In the
literacy classroom (and eventually for schools writ-large), the absence of
a QLF reinscribes gender and sexuality norms in schooling practices and
enhances policies of exclusion for it obscures voices from rising and hav-
ing power to change and shift social spaces. Most critically, its absence
condones an anxiety that emerges from the unknown and which can pro-
duce and reproduce systemic forms of violence. Both teacher educators
and teachers alike, who do not employ a QLF, become co-conspirators in
not only reproducing current understandings of gender and sexuality but
also in reproducing rationales that can lead to gender and sexual violence.
THE QLF
The QLF comprises ten principles with ten subsequent commitments for
educators who queer literacy practices. The framework is underscored by the
notion that our lives have been structured through an inheritance of a politi-
cal, gendered, economic, social, religious, linguistic system we never made
and with indissoluble ties to heteropatriarchy. This is not to suggest that we
should do away with (a)gender and (a)sexuality categories altogether, but that
we pivot into an interstitial paradigm that refuses to close itself or be narrowly
defined, and strives to shift and expand norms that account for an interstitial-
ity of (a)gender and (a)sexuality complexities and differential-bodied realities.
In this new space, the in-between, the incommensurable, the open, and the
yet-to-be defined, a QLF can shift norms that operationalize our lives.
The framework is intended to be an autonomous, ongoing, non-
hierarchical tool within a teaching repertoire; it is not something someone
does once and moves away from, rather, the principles and commitments
should work alongside other tools and perspectives within a teacher’s dis-
position. An intention of the framework is that it can be applied and taken
up across multiple genres and disciplines within literacy acquisition, as was
not intended for any sole literacy purpose.
APPLICATIONS ACROSS THE QLF

When working across the framework, there are several axioms that must
be presupposed and applied to each principle:
• We live in a time we never made, gender and sexuality norms predate

our existence;
• Non-gender and sexual “differences” have been around forever but
norms operate to pathologize and delegitimize them;
• Children’s self-determination is taken away early when gender and
sexuality are inscribed onto them. Their bodies/minds become
unknowing participants in a roulette of gender and sexuality norms;
• Children have rights to their own (a)gender and (a)sexuality legibility;
• Binary views on gender and sexuality are potentially damaging;
• Gender must be dislodged/unhinged from sexuality;
• Humans have agency;
• We must move away from pathologizing beliefs that police humanity;
• We are all entitled to the same basic human rights;
• Life should be livable for all (see Fig. 26.1).
268 S. MILLER
1. Refrains from possible presumptions that students are Educators who use queer literacy never presume that
heterosexual or ascribe to a gender students are a particular sexual orientation or a gender.
2. Understands gender as a construct which has and Educators who employ queer literacy are committed to
continues to be impacted by intersecting factors (e.g., classroom activities that actively push back against
social, historical, material, cultural, economic, gender constructs and provide opportunities to
religious) explore, engage and understand how gender is
constructed.
3. Recognizes that masculinity and femininity Educators who engage with queer literacy challenge
constructs are assigned to gender norms and are gender norms and gender-stereotypes and actively
situationally performed support students’ various and multiple performances
of gender.
4. Understands gender and sexuality as flexible Educators who engage with queer literacy are mindful
about how specific discourse(s) can reinforce gender
and sexuality norms, and they purposefully
demonstrate how gender and sexuality are fluid, or
exist on a continuum, shifting over time and in
different contexts.
5. Opens up spaces for students to self-define with Educators who engage with queer literacy invite
chosen (a)genders, (a)sexuality, (a)pronouns or names students to self-define and/or reject a chosen or
preferred gender, sexual orientation, name, and/or
pronoun.
6. Engages in ongoing critique of how gender norms are Educators who use queer literacy provide ongoing and
reinforced in literature, media, technology, art, history, deep discussions about how society is gendered and
science, math, etc. primarily heterosexual, and thus invite students to
actively engage in analysis of cultural texts and
disciplinary discourses.
7. Understands how Neoliberal principles reinforce and Educators who employ queer literacy understand and
sustain compulsory heterosexism, which secures investigate structural oppression and how
homophobia; how gendering secures bullying and heterosexism sustains (a)gender violence, and generate
transphobia; and how homonormativity placates a meaningful opportunities for students to become
heterosexual political economy embodied change agents and to be proactive against,
or to not engage in bullying behavior.
8. Understands that (a)gender and (a)sexuality intersect Educators who engage with queer literacy do not
with other identities (e.g., culture, language, age, essentialize students’ identities, but recognize how
religion, social class, body type, accent, height, ability, intersections of culture, language, age, religion, social
disability, and national origin) that inform students’ class, body type, accent, height, ability, disability, and
beliefs and thereby, actions national origin, inform students’ beliefs and thereby,
actions.
9. Advocates for equity across all categories of Educators who employ queer literacy do not privilege
(a)gender and (a)sexuality orientations one belief or stance, but advocate for equity across all
categories of (a)gender and (a)sexuality orientations.
10. Believes that students who identify on a continuum Educators who use queer literacy make their positions
of gender and sexual minorities (GSM) deserve to learn known, when first hired, to students, teachers,
in environments free of bullying and harassment administrators and school personnel and take a stance
when any student is bullied or marginalized, whether
explicitly or implicitly, for (a)gender or (a)sexuality
orientation.
Fig. 26.1 A queer literacy framework promoting (a)gender and (a)sexuality self-
determination and justice
CONCLUDING COMMENTS FOR THE EFFICACY OF THE QLF

Teacher education and professional development for teachers that support
(a)gender and (a)sexuality self-determination, and that remain open to
evolving understandings of (a)gender and (a)sexuality, can generate a sta-
bilized futurity for (a)gender and (a)sexuality justice; as individuals leave
schools, they can remain autonomous and embodied by an internalized

safety as they navigate their life pathways. Such justice can disrupt poten-
tially portentous oppressions and instead, lead to harmonious spaces that
can benefit the lives of youth coming into the world, and eventually, edu-
cational contexts. To not address or affirm the (a)gender and (a)sexuality
differences in our youth, is to reinscribe gender and sexual violence.
A hope for the QLF is for teacher education programs to take up this
work and modify it to their social, racial, linguistic, and geographic con-
texts. Over time then, as more literacy educators continue to use the QLF
across different disciplines, its effect can have real-time consequences.
Through its spatialized autonomy, its efficacy across contexts can have a
generative effect on teachers, students, and spaces with its various inhabit-
ants, who, as stewards with expanding mindsets can truly begin to create
even more equitable and accepting spaces over time. As teachers’ (and
others) dispositions expand to support the well-being of students’ per-
sonal and social legitimacies through understanding their own and the
value of others’ (a)gender and (a)sexuality rights to self-determination,
(a)gender and (a)sexuality justice is not just possible, it can be realized.
A hope for the QLF is for teacher education programs to take up this
work and modify it to their social, racial, linguistic, and geographic con-
texts. As preservice teachers study, unpack, and practice the QLF, they
will develop a repertoire of resources that they, in turn, can utilize in class-
room practice. Such practice can instill in their dispositions, a confidence
to address LGBT*IAGCQ topics in the classroom. Over time then, as
more literacy educators continue to use the QLF across different disci-
plines, its effect can have real-time generative consequences for students,
who, as stewards with expanding mindsets can truly begin to create even
more equitable and accepting spaces. As teachers’ (and others) disposi-
tions expand to support the well-being of students’ personal and social
legitimacies through understanding their own and the value of others’
(a)gender and (a)sexuality rights to self-determination, (a)gender and (a)
sexuality justice is not just possible, it can be realized.
Such a realization is happening in education at the policy level. The
newly vetted Standard VI in secondary English teacher preparation, a
standard for social justice, advocates for LGBT*IAGCQ topics, among
other topics related to traditionally undervalued identities in the class-
room (for specific lessons and assessments, see Alsup and Miller 2014;
Miller 2014a, b, c, d [challenges to YAL and text complexity], e). This
new anchor for social justice and subsequent studies can support teacher
270 S. MILLER
education programs to reflect on ways to integrate topics of (a)gender

and (a)sexuality across all of teacher preparation. Over time, and as other
disciplines work to develop academic standards along with queer-inclusive
curriculum, and that affirm students’ differential-bodied realities, and
hence, self-determination, a queer autonomy has real-time possibility for
becoming a normalized and integrated curricular piece—and that would
be the ultimate justice.
NOTES
1. The lower case (a) in parenthesis does not nullify gender or sexuality, it is a
way of combining the terms so both gender refusal and gender and sexuality
refusal and sexuality are collapsed into one word.
2. See Moses (2002) for a robust discussion of autonomy as self-determination,
which is characterized by Raz’s (1979) concepts of integrity, independence,
and adequate range of options, et cetera. Herein, these terms are thoroughly
defined.
3. For an extended discussion on “internal safety,” see Leonardi and Saenz’s
(2014) conceptualization.
REFERENCES
Alsup, J., & Miller, s. (2014). Reclaiming English education: Rooting social justice
in dispositions. English Education, 46(3), 195–215.
Blackburn, M., & Clark, C. T. (2011). Becoming readers of literature with LGBT
themes in and out of classrooms. In S. Wolf, K. Coats, P. Enciso, & C. Jenkins
(Eds.), The handbook of research on children’s and young adult literature
Britzman, D. P. (1997). What is this thing called love?: New discourses for under-
standing gay and lesbian youth. In S. de Castell & M. Bryson (Eds.), Radical
interventions: Identity politics and difference/s on educational praxis (pp. 183–
207). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Felman, S. (2002). The scandal of the speaking body. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction. New York:
Random House.
GLSEN. (2011). Teaching respect: LGBT-inclusive curriculum and school climate
(Research brief). New York: GLSEN.
GLSEN. (2013). States with safe school laws. Retrieved from http://www.glsen.org
Hagood, M. (2002). Critical literacy for whom? Reading Research and Instruction,
41(3), 247–266.
Howe, K. (1997). Understanding equal educational opportunity: Social justice,

democracy and schooling. New York: Teachers College Press.
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduction. New York: New York University
Press.
Jennings, T. (2014). Themes of LGBT representation and curricular location
within educator preparation. American Education Research Association Annual
Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
Kosciw, J., Greytak, E., Diaz, E., & Bartkiewicz, M. (2010). The 2009 national
school climate survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
youth in our nation’s schools. New York: GLSEN.
Kymlicka, W. (1991). Liberalism, community, and culture. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Leonardi, B., & Meyer, L. (forthcoming). Internal safety. In E. Brockenbrough,
J. Ingrey, W. Martino, & N. M. Rodriquez (Eds.), Critical concepts in queer
studies and education: An international guide for the twenty-first century.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Leonardi, B., & Saenz, L. (2014). Conceptualizing safety from the inside out:
Heteronormative spaces and their effects on students’ sense of self. In L. Meyer
& D. Carlson (Eds.), Gender and sexualities in education: A reader (pp. 202–
229). New York: Peter Lang.
Lesko, N. (2012). Act your age!: Cultural constructions of adolescence. New York:
Routledge/Falmer.
Mahiri, J. (Ed.). (2004). What they don’t learn in school: Literacy in the lives of
urban youth. New York: Peter Lang.
Miller, s. (2009). (Dis)Embedding gender diversity in the preservice classroom. In
S. Steinberg (Ed.), Diversity and multiculturalism: A reader (pp. 193–209).
Miller, s. (2012). Mythology of the norm: Disrupting the culture of bullying in
schools. English Journal, 101(6), 107–109.
Miller, s. (2013). AP gatekeeping: Exploring the myths of using YAL in an AP
English classroom. Alan Review, 40(2), 79–84.
Miller, s. (2014a). Cultivating a disposition for sociospatial justice in English
teacher preparation. Teacher Education and Practice, 27(1), 44–74.
Miller, s. (2014b). Hungry like the wolf: Gender non-conformity in young adult
literature. In C. Hill (Ed.), The critical merits of young adult literature: Coming
of age (pp. 55–72). New York: Routledge.
Miller, s. (2014c). Moving an anti-bullying stance into schools: Supporting the
identities of transgender and gender variant youth. In S. Steinberg & A. Ibrahim
(Eds.), Critical youth studies reader (pp. 161–171). New York: Peter Lang.
Miller, s. (2014d). Text complexity and “comparable literary merit” in young
adult literature. Alan Review, 41(2), 44–55.
272 S. MILLER
Miller, s. (2014e). English is “not just about teaching semi-colons and Steinbeck”:
Instantiating dispositions for socio-spatial justice in English Education. Scholar-
Practitioner Quarterly, 8(3) 212–240.
Miller, s. (2015). Reading YAL queerly: A queer literacy framework for inviting (a)
gender and (a)sexuality self-determination and justice. In D. Carlson & D.
Linville (Eds.), Beyond borders: Queer eros and ethos (ethics) in LGBTQ young
adult literature (pp. 153–180). New York: Peter Lang.
Miller, s., & Norris, L. (2007). Unpacking the loaded teacher matrix: Negotiating
space and time between university and secondary English classrooms. New York:
Peter Lang.
Miller, s., Burns, L., & Johnson, T. S. (2013). Generation BULLIED 2.0: Prevention
and intervention strategies for our most vulnerable students. New York: Peter Lang.
Moje, E. B., & van Helden, C. (2004). Doing popular culture: Troubling discourses
about youth. In J. A. Vadeboncoeur & L. P. Stevens (Eds.), Re/constructing “the
adolescent”: Sign, symbol, and body (pp. 211–248). New York: Peter Lang.
Moses, M. S. (2002). Embracing race: Why we need race-conscious education policy.
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). (2000).
Standards, procedures, and policies for the accreditation of professional educa-
tional units. Washington, DC: Author.
Parker, B., & Bach, J. (2009). Gender variant and transgender issues in a profes-
sional development book group. English Journal, 98(4), 96–101.
Petrone, R., & Lewis, M. A. (2012). “Deficits, therapists, and a desire to dis-
tance”: Secondary English pre-service teachers’ reasoning about their future
students. English Education, 44(3), 254–287.
Quinn, T., & Meiners, E. R. (2011). Teacher education, struggles for social jus-
tice, and the historical erasure of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer
lives. In A. Ball & C. Tyson (Eds.), Studying diversity in teacher education
(pp. 135–151). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Raz, J. (1979). The morality of freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sears, J. T. (1992). Educators, homosexuality, and homosexual students: Are per-
sonal feelings related to professional beliefs? Journal of Homosexuality, 22(3–4),
29–79.
Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Queer Millennials
M. Sue Crowley
INTRODUCTION
Recent advances in social acceptance and legal rights for lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in some regions of the
world are often linked in the media to the emergence of the millennial
generation (DeHaan et al. 2013; Jones and Cox 2012). The research lit-
erature on this generation (Cohen 2011; Abdul-Alim 2012), however,
suggests that there are many nuances in the attitudes and expectations of
millennials that may be obscured by sampling issues (e.g., White, middle-
class, college students). In the years since Howe and Strauss (2000) first
coined the term millennial generation, debates about the type and degree
of significant differences across generations have continued (Twenge et al.
2012; Trzesniewski and Donnellan 2010; Konrath et al. 2011). This is
particularly true of questions about racial, ethnic, economic, and religious
variations among millennials (Hunter and Hughley 2013; Jones and Cox
2012; Cohen 2011), suggesting that numerous social and political divi-
sions remain.
M.S. Crowley ()

Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA

274 M.S. CROWLEY
Although opinion polls consistently report high percentages of queer

acceptance among millennials in general, one area of continued concern
remains: victimization of queer youth in secondary schools (Kosciw et al.
2012b). Along with other research on trends in school victimization
(Robinson and Espelage 2013), results of the 2013 GLSEN School Climate
Survey (Kosciw et al. 2013a) indicate both progress and prejudice in the
treatment of queer youth among their secondary school peers. Because
adolescence remains a time when the task of identity formation in general
and sexual identity in particular confront teenagers with unique challenges
to their emergent sense of self and peer relationships (Crowley 2010), posi-
tive attitudes about LGBTQ people among millennials may only arise when
those developmental challenges are removed from the high school context.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the research literature on mil-
lennials and LGBTQ youth through a queer lens. Specifically, the study
focuses on the extent to which research on the experiences of queer youth
in secondary schools may provide insights into the results of sometimes
conflicting multidisciplinary research findings on the millennial genera-
tion. An ecological theoretical framework is applied in an attempt to gain
a better understanding of what has changed and what has remained largely
unchanged in the school lives of queer millennials. The ecological model
considers the impact of various circumstances in a person’s life from the
broadest historical context (e.g., baby boomers and millennials) to local
influences, such as characteristics of one’s community and personal experi-
ences that may impact one’s mental health. Therefore, it provides a means
to examine various factors across multiple levels of analysis from the most
personal, microlevel experiences to large-scale macrolevel historical and
social changes (Bronfenbrenner 1979).
OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH LITERATURE ON THE MILLENNIAL

GENERATION
Psychological research on millennials has produced contradictory results,
with one group of researchers reporting shifts in values and personal
characteristics that support the progressive image presented by Howe
and Strauss (2000) (Twenge et al. 2012) and another reporting few if
any differences across generations on these same variables (Trzesniewski
and Donnellan 2010). A look at the samples for much of the research on
the millennial generation reveals a number of limitations (Jones and Cox
QUEER MILLENNIALS 275
2012). Perhaps most importantly, studies often draw from college popula-
tions for reasons of convenience. Given the number of students enrolled
in two- and four-year colleges, it is possible that nearly half of millennials
are not represented. That half most likely includes many youth of color,
as well as poor and working-class youths. Therefore, diverse comparisons
across groups are rare, leaving little evidence of variation or potential
sources of variation among millennial youth (Abdul-Alim 2012).
A series of studies on first-generation college students, a group that
includes more minorities and fewer middle-class members, revealed that
most universities emphasize approaches that promote independent learn-
ing strategies that run counter to the more interdependent norms that
characterize the backgrounds of first-generation students (Stephens et al.
2012). Also, research on social class among millennials, such as one study
of skilled construction workers, found few changes in work and gender
beliefs (Real et al. 2010). In terms of racial variations, research from the
PEW Research Center (Jones and Cox 2012) reported significant dispari-
ties across religion, race, and ethnicity. Perhaps the most surprising result
indicated that a large majority of White millennials favored Romney over
President Obama in the 2012 election. Finally, research on heterosexual
high school students’ attitudes about their LGBTQ peers produced mixed
results. The findings suggested that millennial females are more accepting
of sexual minorities than males, with both Black and White males report-
ing more negative attitudes than their female counterparts (Horn et al.
2008). Overall, the results suggest a great deal of variation in attitudes and
beliefs among millennials.
These variations are also evident in the ways in which queer youth have
begun to shift away from traditional lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) iden-
tity labels (Guittar 2014; Coleman-Fountain 2014). Coleman-Fountain
suggested that queer youth today are more likely than previous genera-
tions of LGBTQ people to eschew sexual labels due to a desire to situate
their sexuality within the boundaries of a broader, intersectional identity
that enables them to identify with majority peers. This may form the basis
for a generational divide between queer adults and youth, wherein the lat-
ter perceive their sexuality as one element of a much more complex array
of attributes (Crowley 2010). It is unclear, however, to what extent these
findings are a result of macrolevel generational shifts in larger historical,
societal contexts, and/or individual developmental explorations typical of
adolescence.
276 M.S. CROWLEY
PROCEDURES
The research for this chapter is based on a meta-analytic review of stud-
ies focused on the experiences of queer youth in secondary school con-
texts. Inclusion in the review required that the research meet the following
criteria:
1. Sampled youth enrolled in secondary school at the time the research

was conducted.
2. Or, retrospective research with college-age young adults that focused
on their recent secondary school experiences.
3. Given the recent and sudden shifts in public opinion, policy, and law, a
cutoff was imposed to sample research published within the past five
years, between 2009 and 2014.
Twenty-seven studies matching these criteria were obtained from

Education Resources Information Center, Education Source, Sociological
Abstracts, and PsycINFO.
RESULTS
The studies in this review focused primarily on school climate and/or
school belonging in an effort to examine three interrelated issues: (1) the
extent to which queer youth confront homophobia in many forms, from
verbal to physical violence; (2) negative impacts of homophobia on queer
youth; and (3) the effectiveness of efforts to ameliorate homophobia in
middle and high school.
First, the extent to which queer youth encounter prejudice in second-
ary schools varies greatly depending on the regional and local characteris-
tics of the community in which the school is located (Kosciw et al. 2009).
Improvements in attitudes toward LGBTQ people are evident in media,
social policy, and law, yet the extent to which those advances have translated
into safe and accepting school environments for queer youth has been slow
(Gastic 2012) and uneven across regions and locales within the USA (Kosciw
et al. 2013a). Even in urban areas characterized by increased visibility and
resources, such as Boston, MA, researchers have documented significant resis-
tance to the acceptance of queerness in any form among both students and
sometimes teachers (Cooper-Nichols and Bowleg 2010).
Kosciw et al. (2009) focused on demographic and ecological factors,
identifying two that are often associated with hostile school climates for
queer youth. One related to locale and the other to characteristics of the
community. The authors noted that school districts in rural locales and
small towns remain persistently homophobic. The one characteristic of
communities that favorably influenced school climate was the educa-
tional achievement of parents. The greater their education level, the safer
the school climate for queer youth. This finding was further supported
by Ueno’s (2010) research on friendships between queer and straight
students.
Research that focused specifically on urban environments (Blackburn
and McCready 2009; Gastic 2012) complicates the literature on school
climate for queer youth by explicitly addressing issues of race, immigrant
status, economics, and religion. Intersections of multiple social identities
are added to the singular identity label of sexual orientation. Within the
school environment, “students’ attitudes about sexual minorities exist
within contexts that are informed by experience, culture, and communi-
ties” (Gastic 2012, p. 54). Significant differences in attitudes about sexual
minorities were evident across race/ethnicity and gender. Males were less
likely than females to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ)
peers and this was most notable among Black students and least notable
among Latino/as. In keeping with results noted above by Kosciw et al.
(2009) and Ueno (2010), Gastic (2012) also found that students whose
parents had a college education were significantly more likely to report
having an LGBQ friend.
Outside of school, isolation from one’s minority community may be
an issue of prime importance for queer youth of color (Jamil and Harper
2010). In keeping with this concern, Blackburn and McCready (2009)
emphasized that “urban educators working with queer youth need to
understand and be prepared to address multiple social and cultural issues
that intersect with sexual and gender identities” (p. 229).
Finally, gender at both the immediate microlevel and cultural macro-
level continues to be a factor in patterns of queer victimization in schools
(Bortolin 2010). In a study of trends on school victimization for queer
youth in England, Robinson and Espelage (2013) reported that gay and
bi-identified boys encountered more harassment relative to their straight
peers, while levels of harassment for girls were equal. Gender noncon-
forming boys continue to be at greater risk.
Second, the impacts of homophobic experiences on queer youth
included a wide range of negative outcomes, including increased risk of
homelessness (Corliss et al. 2011), substance abuse (Birkett et al. 2009;
278 M.S. CROWLEY
Darwich et al. 2012), suicidality (Birkett et al. 2009; Hatzenbuehler
2011), depression (Heck et al. 2014; Birkett et al. 2009), lower self-
esteem (Kosciw et al. 2013b), general emotional distress (Almeida et al.
2009; Heck et al. 2014), absenteeism (Birkett et al. 2009), lower aca-
demic achievement (Kosciw et al. 2013b; Morrison et al. 2014), and sexu-
ally risky behaviors (Robinson and Espelage 2013).
Research on the negative impacts of victimization and other forms of
homophobia also demonstrated that school-based supports could ame-
liorate many of these problems for queer youth (Kosciw et al. 2013b).
For instance, Hatzenbuehler (2011) reported that in unsupportive school
contexts, suicide attempts were 20 % more likely among LGB students.
Victimization, school avoidance, and substance abuse were significantly
reduced for LGBQ youth when they perceived support from adults rel-
ative to their straight peers (Darwich et al. 2012). In the same study,
the negative effects of perceived low levels of adult support appeared to
impact lesbian and gay (LG) students most of all. In contrast to other
studies (Birkett et al. 2009), Darwich and her colleagues (2012) noted
that questioning youth reported lower levels of victimization than LG
youths. Differences in the impacts of victimization across types of queer
youth (e.g., gay, bisexual, and questioning) are not clearly understood.
These variations may be the result of different sampling procedures, meth-
odologies, and/or school contexts.
As might be expected, different degrees of victimization also appeared
to influence the extent to which queer youth were affected. Robinson
and Espelage (2013) divided student responses into higher and lower
categories of peer victimization for matched pairs of queer and hetero-
sexual youth. They reported that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) youth in the high peer victimization group engaged in more
sexually risky behaviors than their straight peers, but questioning youth
did not. In a prior study using the same sample, Robinson and Espelage
(2012) also reported increased suicidal ideation and attempts in the high
victimization group. Their study included students in grades seven and
eight where LGBT middle schoolers reported the same negative effects.
Robinson and Espelage (2013) suggested that interventions to support
LGBT youth need to begin at these earlier grades. Their finding echoes
concerns expressed by Horowitz and Itzkowitz (2011). The 2011 and
2013 GLSEN School Climate Surveys emphasized that middle school
professionals need to explicitly address LGBTQ issues.
Third, recent literature on efforts to combat homophobia in schools has

examined a variety of programs and interventions, including safe school
programs (Black et al. 2012), mentoring (Gastic and Johnson 2009),
exposure to LGBTQ individuals and groups (Knotts and Gregorio 2011),
and Gay–Straight Alliances (GSAs) (Walls et al. 2010; Toomey et al. 2011;
Toomey and Russell 2013; Mayberry et al. 2013).
Walls et al. (2010) examined the impact of GSAs on LGBTQ students’
experiences by comparing schools with and without GSAs, as well as
whether or not the queer-identified students were active members of the
GSA in their school. They were interested in understanding whether the
presence of a GSA helped students because they would receive direct sup-
port from individual adults or whether the expected benefits might reflect
a more general improvement in school climate. In schools with a GSA,
queer students were less likely to drop out or be absent from school, more
likely to know a safe adult they could seek out for support, and reported
significantly higher grade point averages (GPAs). Even queer students
who were not members of their school’s GSA benefited in similar ways,
suggesting an overall improvement in school climate compared to schools
without GSAs.
In a retrospective study of college-aged young adults (specifically, ages
21–25), Toomey and colleagues (2011) reported reduced depression and
increased self-esteem, as well as greater academic achievement among those
who had attended a school with a GSA. Membership in a GSA also appeared
to be related to fewer problems with substance abuse. Overall, however, the
presence of a GSA with or without active participation appeared to provide
a buffer against emotional problems, while strengthening academic achieve-
ment. Research with LGBQ students in grades 7 through 12 reflects similar
benefits for the presence of a GSA on measures of school belongingness and
GPA (Toomey and Russell 2013). On a cautionary note, however, the study
also found that positive effects diminished in the presence of high levels of
school victimization, raising the possibility that the presence of a GSA in an
unsupportive community context may limit the benefits reported in other
research on GSAs (Wooley 2012).
Finally, in a review of the literature on “Safe Schools” programs of vari-
ous types, Black et al. (2012) found that nondiscrimination policies need
to be explicitly inclusive of queer youth to ensure their effectiveness. In
addition, the presence of GSAs, a queer inclusive curriculum, and sup-
portive staff encourage greater school involvement among queer youth.
280 M.S. CROWLEY
Schools that implemented policies and safe school programs appeared to

reduce harassment and with it many of the negative impacts associated
with victimization.
CONCLUSION
In general, there have been improvements in school climate for queer youth
as support services of various types increase across the country. As of 2013,
however, a majority of queer students continued to report feeling unsafe
in their secondary schools (Kosciw et al. 2013a Report). Just as research
examining variations among millennials in general indicates continued divi-
sions across race/ethnicity, progress for queer youth is both evident and
still inconsistent. Despite of inconsistent progress, like their heterosexual age
peers, they are less likely than older generations of queers to engage in politi-
cal activities by claiming sexuality as a particularly salient marker of identity.
Yet, unlike their age peers, their status as one type of minority, a sexual minor-
ity, continues to present them with challenges that have an impact on their
emergent identities. As a generational cohort, most do not think of these
challenges in political terms, relying instead on personal, emotional connec-
tions to provide what support is needed (Crowley 2010). Again, from an
ecological perspective, the extent to which they may obtain such support is
highly context specific. While they reflect many of the common experiences
of their millennial generation, research on secondary school experiences indi-
cates that queer youth often continue to encounter prejudice, harassment,
and even violence in their everyday lives at school. From a theoretical per-
spective, millennial queer youth reflect the realities of the times in which they
have come of age, reminiscent of the ecological perspective which ascribes
significance to the historical circumstances within which people experience
adolescence. As such, they may constitute a barometer to measure the depth
of social changes in attitudes toward LGBTQ people in general.
REFERENCES
Abdul-Alim, J. (2012). The millennial view: Today’s 18-to-29 year olds grapple
with ideas of race, politics, and religion in new study. Diverse Issues in Education,
29(12), 8–9.
Almeida, J., Johnson, R. M., Corliss, H. L., Molnar, B. E., & Azreal, D. (2009).
Emotional distress among LGBT youth: The influence of perceived discrimina-
tion based on sexual orientation. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 38(7),
1001–1014.
Birkett, M., Espelage, D. L., & Koenig, B. (2009). LGB and questioning students
in schools: The moderating effect of homophobic bullying and school climate
on negative outcomes. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 38(7), 989–1000.
Black, W. W., Fedewa, A. L., & Gonzalez, K. A. (2012). Effects of “safe school”
programs and policies on the social climate for sexual-minority youth: A review
of the literature. Journal of LGBT Youth, 9, 321–339.
Blackburn, M. V., & McCready, L. T. (2009). Voices of queer youth in urban
schools: Possibilities and limitations. Theory Into Practice, 48, 222–230.
Bortolin, S. (2010). “I don’t want him hitting on me”: The role of masculinities
in creating a chilly high school climate. Journal of LGBT Youth, 7(3),
200–223.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Cohen, C. (2011). Millennials and the myth of the post-racial society: Black youth,
intra- generational divisions, and the continuing racial divide in American poli-
tics. Daedalus, 140(2), 197–205.
Coleman-Fountain, E. (2014). Lesbian and gay youth and the question of labels.
Sexualities, 17(7), 802–817.
Cooper-Nichols, M., & Bowleg, L. (2010). “My voice is being heard”: Exploring
the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual youth in schools. In C. C. Bertram,
M. S. Crowley, & S. G. Massey (Eds.), Beyond progress and marginalization:
LGBTQ youth in educational contexts (pp. 15–50). New York: Peter Lang.
Corliss, H. L., Goodenow, C. S., Nichols, L., & Austin, S. B. (2011). High bur-
den of homelessness among sexual-minority adolescents: Findings from a rep-
resentative Massachusetts sample. American Journal of Public Health, 101(9),
1683–1689.
Crowley, M. S. (2010). Defining themselves: LGBTQS youth online. In C. C.
Bertram, M. S. Crowley, & S. G. Massey (Eds.), Beyond progress and marginal-
ization: LGBTQ youth in educational contexts (pp. 250–278). New York: Peter
Lang.
Darwich, L., Hymel, S., & Waterhouse, T. (2012). School avoidance and sub-
stance use among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning youths: The impact of
peer victimization and adult support. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(2),
381–392.
DeHaan, S., Kuper, L. E., Magee, J. C., Biglow, L., & Mustanski, B. S. (2013).
The interplay of between online and offline explorations of identity, relation-
ships, and sexuality: A mixed methods study with LGBT youth. Journal of
Sexual Research, 50(5), 421–434.
Gastic, B. (2012). Urban students’ attitudes about sexual minorities across inter-
sections of sex and race/ethnicity: Data from a longitudinal study. Journal of
LGBT Youth, 9, 42–58.
282 M.S. CROWLEY
Gastic, B., & Johnson, D. (2009). Teacher-mentors and the educational resilience
of sexual minority youth. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services: Issues in
Practice, Policy & Research, 21(2–3), 219–231.
Greytak, E. A., Kosciw, J. G., & Boesen, M. J. (2013). Putting the “t” in
“resource”: The benefits of LGBT-related school resources for transgender
youth. Journal of LGBT Youth, 10(1–2), 45–63.
Guittar, N. A. (2014). “At first I just said ‘I like girls’”: Coming out with an affin-
ity, not as identity. Journal of LGBT Youth, 11(4), 388–407.
Hatzenbuehler, M. L. (2011). The social environment and suicide attempts in
lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. Pediatrics, 127(5), 896–903.
Heck, N. C., Lindquist, L. M., Machek, G. R., & Cochran, B. N. (2014). School
belonging, school victimization, and the mental health of LGBT young
adults: Implications for school psychologists. School Psychology Forum, 8(1),
28–37.
Horn, S. S., Szalacha, L. A., & Drill, K. (2008). Schooling, sexuality, and rights:
An investigation of heterosexual students’ social cognition regarding sexual ori-
entation and the rights of gay and lesbian peers in school. Journal of Social
Issues, 64(4), 791–813.
Horn, S. S., Kosciw, J. G., & Russell, S. T. (2009). Special issue introduction: New
research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth: Studying lives in con-
text. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 38(7), 863–866.
Horowitz, A., & Itzkowitz, M. (2011). LGBTQ youth in American schools:
Moving to the middle. Middle School Journal, 42(5), 32–38.
Howe, N., & Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials rising: The next great generation.
New York: Vintage Books.
Hunter, J. S., & Hughley, M. W. (2013). “It’s not written on their skin like it is
ours”: Greek letter organizations in the age of the multicultural imperative.
Ethnicities, 13(5), 519–543.
Jamil, O. B., & Harper, G. W. (2010). School for the self: Examining the role of
educational setting in the identity development among gay, bisexual, and ques-
tioning male youth of color. In C. C. Bertram, M. S. Crowley, & S. G. Massey
(Eds.), Beyond progress and marginalization: LGBTQ youth in educational con-
texts (pp. 250–278). New York: Peter Lang.
Jones, R. P., & Cox, D. (2012). A generation on transition: Religion, values, and
politics among college-age millennials. Washington, DC: PEW Research Center/
Georgetown University.
Knotts, G., & Gregorio, D. (2011). Confronting homophobia at school: High
school students and the gay men’s chorus of Los Angeles. Journal of LGBT
Youth, 8, 66–83.
Konrath, S. H., O’Brien, E. H., & Hsing, C. (2011). Changes in dispositional
empathy in American college students over time: A meta-analysis. Personality
and Social Psychology Review, 15, 180–198.
Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., & Diaz, E. M. (2009). Who, what, where, and why:
Demographic and ecological factors contributing to hostile school climate for
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. Journal of Youth and Adolescence,
38(7), 976–988.
Kosciw, J. G., Bartkiewicz, M., & Greytak, E. A. (2012a). Promising strategies for
prevention of bullying of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.
Prevention Researcher, 19(3), 10–13.
Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Bartkiewicz, M. J., Boesen, M. J., & Palmer, N. A.
(2012b). The 2011 national school climate survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender youth in our nation’s schools. New York: GLSEN.
Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Palmer, N. A., & Boesen, M. J. (2013a). The 2013
national school climate survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-
gender youth in our nation’s schools. New York: GLSEN.
Kosciw, J. G., Palmer, N. A., Kull, R. M., & Greytak, E. A. (2013b). The effects
of negative school climate on academic outcomes for LGBT youth and the role
of in-school supports. Journal of School Violence, 12, 45–63.
Mayberry, M., Chenneville, T., & Currie, S. (2013). Challenging the sounds of
silence: A qualitative study of gay-straight alliances and school reform efforts.
Education and Urban Society, 45(3), 307–339.
Morrison, M. M., Jewell, L., McCutcheon, J., & Cochrane, D. B. (2014). In the
face of anti- LGBT behavior: Saskatchewan high school students’ perceptions
of school climate and consequential impact. Canadian Journal of Education,
37(2), 2–29.
Real, K., Mitnick, A. D., & Maloney, W. F. (2010). More similar than different:
Millennials in the U.S. building trades. Journal of Business Psychology, 25,
303–313.
Robinson, J. P., & Espelage, D. L. (2012). Bullying explains only part of LGBTQ-
heterosexual risk disparities: Implications for policy and practice. Educational
Researcher, 41(8), 309–319.
Robinson, J. P., & Espelage, D. L. (2013). Peer victimization and sexual risk dif-
ferences between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual or questioning and non-
transexual heterosexual youths in grades 7–12. American Journal of Public
Health, 103(10), 1810–1819.
Stephens, N. M., Fryberg, S. A., Markus, H. R., Johnson, C. S., & Covarrubias,
R. (2012). Unseen disadvantage: How American universities’ focus on inde-
pendence undermines the academic performance of first-generation college
students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1178–1197.
Toomey, R. B., & Russell, S. T. (2013). Gay-straight alliances, social justice
involvement, and school victimization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer
youth: Implications for school well-being and plans to vote. Youth and Society,
45(4), 500–522.
284 M.S. CROWLEY
Toomey, R. B., Ryan, C., Diaz, R. M., & Russell, S. T. (2011). High school gay-
straight alliances (GSAs) and young adult well-being: An examination of GSA
presence, participation, and perceived effectiveness. Applied Developmental
Science, 15(4), 175–185.
Trzesniewski, K. H., & Donnellan, M. B. (2010). Rethinking the “generation
me”: A study of cohort effects from 1976–2006. Perspectives on Psychological
Science, 5(1), 58–75.
Twenge, J. M., Campbell, W. K., & Freeman, E. C. (2012). Generational differ-
ences in young adults’ life goals, concern for others, and civic orientation,
1966–2009. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(5), 1045–1062.
Ueno, K. (2010). Patterns of cross-orientation friendships in high schools. Social
Science Research, 39(3), 444–458.
Walls, N. E., Kane, S. B., & Wisneski, H. (2010). Gay-straight alliances and school
experiences of sexual minority youth. Youth & Society, 41(3), 307–332.
Wooley, S. W. (2012). “The silence itself is enough”: The day of silence and
LGBTQ awareness. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 43(3), 271–288.
Queer of Color Critique
Over the past decade, incidents like the fatal shooting of Lawrence King
inside a California junior high school (Setoodah 2008), the homopho-
bic violence toward and harassment of gay and gender nonconforming
students at Morehouse College (Knight 2010; Lee 2003), and the sui-
cides of bullied young students like Jaheem Herrera (Simon 2009) and
Carl Walker-Hoover (James 2009) have located queerly marked students
of color within contemporary narratives on queer youth victimization.1
Against this backdrop, a burgeoning corpus of research has attempted
to disrupt the abjection of queers of color (QOCs) by investigating their
experiences across K–12, post-secondary, and alternative and out-of-school
academic settings (Blackburn 2005; Brockenbrough and Boatwright
2013; Brockenbrough 2012; Cruz 2008; Kumashiro 2001; McCready
2010; Patton and Simmons 2008; Quinn 2007; Strayhorn et al. 2008).
Given the traditional absence of QOC perspectives in educational litera-
ture on queers and racial minorities, this scholarship has already made an
invaluable intervention by asserting the need to wed race and sexuality
when studying the educational plights of QOCs. However, the consider-
able diversity of racial, sexual, gender, socioeconomic, and national iden-
E. Brockenbrough ()

286 E. BROCKENBROUGH
tities among QOCs, as well as the myriad domains of educational policy

and practice that QOCs encounter, leave ample uncharted territory for
future educational research. With QOCs experiencing academic under-
performance (Diaz and Kosciw 2009), harassment and violence (Quinn
2007; Rau 2008; Setoodah 2008), and institutional exclusion (James
2013; Mungin 2009) across educational settings, a clear need still exists
for more scholarship on QOCs in education.
To that end, this chapter draws upon a body of work dubbed “a QOC
critique” (Ferguson 2004) as an analytic framework for examinations of
QOC educational experiences. Much like critical race theories (Lynn and
Dixson 2013), disability studies (Gabel 2005), and other discourses on
difference originating outside of educational studies, QOC critique can
organize analytic works across subfields of educational scholarship into a
more coherent educational research agenda on QOC difference. In what
follows, I offer an overview of QOC critique, provide examples of how my
own work has engaged the field, and propose future directions for QOC
critique within educational scholarship.
QUEER OF COLOR CRITIQUE: AN OVERVIEW

Drawing upon the title of Ferguson’s analysis of the historical formation
of Black queer subjectivities (2004), “a QOC critique” indexes an inter-
disciplinary corpus of scholarship on the dialectics between hegemony
and resistance that shape the lives of queer people of color across local,
national, and transnational contexts. Mirroring the relationship between
intellectual work and lived experience in Indigenous studies (L.T. Smith
1999), Black feminism (B. Smith 1983), and other bodies of scholar-
ship that attempt to disrupt the subjugation of oppressed peoples, QOC
critique challenges dominant scholarly and cultural narratives on power,
identity, and belonging by bringing QOC lived experiences from mar-
gins to center, and by making them the source and site of anti-oppressive
knowledge production. Informed by queer studies’ resistance against
sociohistorical constructions of queer deviancy (Eng et al. 2005; Jagose
1996; Warner 1993) and by the attention to multiple and intersecting
forms of identity and oppression from women of color feminism (Lorde
1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983), QOC critique deploys an analytic lens
with two key affordances: it names and contextualizes the marginalization
of QOC difference, and it differentiates strategies of resistance to account
for the shifting exigencies of the lives of QOCs.2 This dual concern for
QUEER OF COLOR CRITIQUE 287
the sociohistorical construction of QOC marginality and the strategies of

QOC resistance that result is what distinguishes QOC critique from other
fields as a compelling heuristic for investigating QOC encounters with and
resistance against multiple systems of power in any number of contexts,
including education.
By tracing the social reproduction of QOC marginality, QOC cri-
tique seeks to denaturalize the pathologization of QOCs by exposing the
hegemonic social orders within which those pathologies were produced.
Some works, for instance, have analyzed economic and residential poli-
cies across multiple nation-states that legislated the containment of QOC
deviants in fringe social spaces (Allen 2011; Leap 2002). Other works
have explored racist and heteronormative US immigration policies that
have marginalized queer migrants of color (Cantu et al. 2005; Luibhéid
2005; Reddy 2011; Solomon 2005) and the convergence of racism,
homophobia, and poverty that marginalizes QOCs living with HIV and
AIDS (Allen 2011; Manalansan 2003; Ramirez 2011; Rodriguez 2003).
QOC analyses also have highlighted the cultural politics within commu-
nities of color (Decena 2011; Gopinath 2005) and predominantly White
queer communities (Manalansan 2003; Yoshikawa 1998) that perpetu-
ate QOC marginality, as well as the role of cultural productions in cast-
ing QOCs as the cultural Other (Johnson 2003; La Fountain-Stokes
2011). Together, these examples reveal the focus in QOC critique on
the economic, political, social, and cultural technologies that reproduce
QOC marginality.
Along with interrogating the multiple systems of domination that seek
to diminish QOC possibility, QOC critique has explored the variety of
strategies developed by QOCs for resisting oppressive power and asserting
their own agency. For instance, this scholarship has focused on the daily
negotiations of multiple identities, noting how QOCs may make certain
identities more visible at times (e.g., race, ethnicity, class, religion) while
downplaying others (e.g., queer sexuality, gender non-conformity, immi-
grant status, HIV status) to strategically position themselves for participa-
tion in myriad social contexts (Allen 2011; Asencio 2009; Decena 2011;
Johnson 2008; Manalansan 2003). QOC critique has also spotlighted
strategies for collective organizing, noting the triumphs and tribulations
of political mobilization and community-building efforts among QOCs
themselves (Aguilar-San Juan 1998; Allen 2009; Bailey 2009; Rodriguez
2003) and between QOCs and their potential allies (Cohen 2005; Miao
1998; Yoshikawa 1998). Together, these works illustrate the attention in
a QOC critique to individual and collective strategies of resistance that

enable QOC survival in the midst of multiple systems of domination.
Its dual focus on the reproduction of and resistance against QOC mar-
ginality makes QOC critique a unique site for transformative knowledge
production by, about, and for QOCs. Given the function of schools as sites
of social reproduction (Apple 1982; McLaren 1994), the role of educa-
tion in reproducing QOC marginality demands critical scholarly attention.
Since QOC analysis situated beyond educational studies has yet to take on
a consistent and rigorous examination of schools, educational scholarship
that engages QOC critique could make important contributions to critical
scholarship on QOCs, as well as to broader educational discourses on dif-
ference, power, and social justice.
QUEER OF COLOR CRITIQUE IN EDUCATION: TWO

EXAMPLES
As noted earlier, QOC critique generates new and unique scholarly insights
by bringing QOC lived experiences from margins to center and by making
them the source and site of transformative knowledge production. Two
examples from my own work illustrate the analytic advantages of this mode
of scholarship. The first example engages QOC ways of being and knowing
to question the relevance of the politics of queer visibility. As I have previ-
ously described (Brockenbrough 2015), QOC critique in scholarly fields
beyond educational studies has cast insightful doubts on the liberatory
effects of coming out for non-White queer subjects. In the process, per-
forming degrees of queer invisibility—where queerness may be completely
hidden or, if visible, is not openly acknowledged—emerges as an agen-
tive practice for some QOCs who prioritize connectedness with families
and racial communities over coming out. Such was the case for five Black
queer men who were among the participants in a study I conducted on
the identities and pedagogies of Black male teachers in an urban, predomi-
nantly Black school district in the eastern USA (Brockenbrough 2012).
Navigating educational institutions marked by homophobic surveillance
of queer teachers, these Black queer men exercised certain forms of agency
in the workplace despite—and arguably because of—their closeted queer-
ness. Remaining in the closet allowed two of the men to successfully chal-
lenge homophobia without losing power and credibility as openly queer
subjects, and the closet enabled all of the men to connect with and serve
the multiple needs of their Black students as Black male teachers and role
models. Echoing QOC critique found in other scholarly fields, my analysis
of these Black queer male teachers revealed queer invisibility as a poten-

tially agentive practice for them as non-White queer subjects whose desire
for racial connectedness trumped the need for queer visibility. Centering
the lived experiences of Black queer male teachers enabled a QOC critique
that troubled the emphasis on coming out that pervades much of the
scholarship on (White) queer teachers. More than a space of queer abjec-
tion, the closet—when understood through the racially mediated experi-
ences of Black queer male teachers—may serve as a protective and agentive
space. This possibility came to the fore when QOC critique was brought
to bear on the lives of Black queer male teachers.
A second example from my scholarly work reveals how QOC ways
of being and knowing can trouble popular presumptions of safety and
unity within QOC spaces. QOC critique more broadly has explored a
wide array of racial, gender, sexual, class, religious, national, and other
identities that shape QOC lived experiences (Brockenbrough 2015). In
doing so, this scholarship troubles grand narratives of QOC experience by
charting the multiple—and sometimes conflicting—identity performances
and communal allegiances that shape the lives of various QOC constitu-
encies. The concern for multiple and intersecting identities in QOC cri-
tique at large drove my analysis with a co-author of the experiences of
transgender youth of color at an urban HIV/AIDS prevention center that
provided education and other services to Black and Latino queer youth
(Brockenbrough and Boatwright 2013). Two factors—limited funding
for transgender-focused programming and some gay males’ transphobic
attitudes toward their transgender female peers—posed serious challenges
to trans-inclusiveness at the center. Complicating romanticized notions of
safe space that overlook potentially divisive identity politics among queer
youth, this analysis spotlighted internal fissures in queer spaces that can
compromise the safety of transgender youth of color. Additionally, a spe-
cific focus on two transgender female youth at the center unearthed their
own sophisticated strategies for creating trans-supportive networks within
a potentially transphobic space. As with my analysis of Black queer male
teachers, centering the lived experiences of transgender youth of color cre-
ated new opportunities for understanding QOC ways of being and know-
ing through educational research.
While the experiences of QOCs can be explored through myriad modes
of scholarly inquiry, three characteristics distinguish the examples above as
QOC critiques. Firstly, like QOC critiques more broadly, both examples
above illuminated institutional factors—e.g., homophobic surveillance of
queer teachers in schools and limited funding for trans-specific support ser-
vices—that produced QOC marginality. In doing so, both analyses not only
contextualize the dilemmas faced by QOC subjects in these educational
spaces, but they also enable advocates to place the onus on these spaces,
rather than on queer people of color, to transform the institutional policies
and cultures that marginalize QOC participants. Secondly, both examples
above revealed queer people of color’s strategies for resisting marginaliza-
tion and exerting their own forms of agency. It is especially important to
note that these strategies did not align neatly with some prevailing dis-
courses on queer educational experiences like the benefits of queer visibility
or the advantages of safe spaces for queer youth. By bringing QOC ways of
being and knowing to the forefront, QOC critique can expand our knowl-
edge of how queer subjects navigate a range of educational spaces, and it can
complicate the very construction of queer educational agendas. Thirdly, as I
describe elsewhere (Brockenbrough and Boatwright 2013; Brockenbrough
2012), the insights that emerged in my work resulted from deliberate efforts
to center the emic perspectives of QOC research participants—efforts that
were aided by my own insider status as an openly queer Black researcher.
While being a queer person of color is not necessarily a prerequisite for
engaging QOC critique (for instance, see Blackburn 2005), what is essential
is that scholars forge the types of connections with QOC individuals that
afford access to honest and nuanced emic perspectives, as these perspectives
constitute the unique and original contributions of QOC critique. Together,
the three characteristics that distinguish my work as QOC critique also align
it with the works of a cadre of educational scholars who similarly center
QOC emic perspectives in order to understand how QOC subjects encoun-
ter and negotiate power in educational contexts (Blackburn 2005; Coloma
2013; Cruz 2008, 2011; Marquez and Brockenbrough 2013; McCready
2010; Quinn 2007). My work, along with the writings of these similarly
minded scholars, reveals how QOC critique can serve as a unique mode of
scholarly production that makes significant contributions to queer studies
in education.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
As noted earlier, the considerable diversity of identities among QOCs, as
well as the myriad domains of educational practice and policymaking that
QOCs experience, leave ample uncharted territory for future educational
scholarship. As more scholars engage in QOC critique, several concerns
warrant particular attention. Firstly, it will be important for scholars to
consider the specific questions and issues that QOC critique can address
within various subfields of educational research. Doing so will not only

help scholars within various subfields to apply QOC critique to their work,
but it will also enable scholars across those subfields—teacher education,
educational policy, curriculum studies, Latino education, and so on—to
engage in a collective effort to improve the educational experiences of
QOCs. Secondly, researchers must make deliberate attempts to engage the
full diversity of identities that comprise the QOC category, for the current
literature addresses the experiences of Black queer males more than any
other racial-sexual-gender identity group, and QOC students more than
other stakeholders like teachers, administrators, and families.3 Thirdly, a
number of questions regarding research methodologies will require care-
ful investigation. While it is not uncommon for educational research to
draw upon studies conducted in out-of-school spaces, the methodologi-
cal implications of moving such research into educational settings—with
new questions regarding researcher positionalities, participant safety, par-
ticipant voices, and so on—warrant strategic consideration. Additionally,
methodological diversity will need to be considered, as much of the extant
educational research on QOCs relies on qualitative methods.4 This is
not necessarily a call for more quantitative scholarship on QOCs; in fact,
Bowleg’s (2008) description of the challenges of capturing the intersec-
tionalities of Black lesbians’ identities via quantitative methods offers valid
reason for concern. Bringing QOC critique to educational research pro-
vides a new opportunity for collective discussions on the affordances and
limitations of varied modes of knowledge production for scholarly analyses
on QOCs. All of the considerations listed above will be vital to making
QOC critique a relevant heuristic for educational research.
Finally, scholars who examine the educational experiences of QOCs
must consider how to contend with the resistance that this work may
engender. This resistance may come from multiple sources: school or col-
lege and university administrators who may oppose making their insti-
tutions accessible as sites for research on QOCs; academic journals and
grant-awarding foundations that may dismiss the salience of this research;
colleagues in various subfields of educational research who may challenge
the relevance of QOC experiences to current dominant conversations; and
perhaps some QOCs themselves who may be wary of scholarly efforts that
might increase their visibility. The minimal attention to QOCs across a
number of scholarly discourses in educational literature speaks to a poli-
tics of knowledge production which, intentionally or not, has reproduced
QOC invisibility. Naming and disrupting that politics will be essential if
educational researchers truly want to make room for QOC critique.
NOTES
1. “Queer” is used in this chapter to denote same-sex desires and identities, as
well as transgender and other gender identities and expressions that are
marked in similar fashion as deviant and/or nonconforming by heteronor-
mative power structures. “Queer of color” is used to denote queer subjects
who are marked as non-White and targeted as such under White supremacy.
This includes people marked fully or partially as Black, Latino, Asian, or
Indigenous/Native American. These uses of “queer” and “queer of color”
reflect the deployments of these terms in a queer of color critique, the body
of scholarship that is reviewed in this chapter.
2. See Cohen (2005) and Reddy (2011) for further discussions of queer stud-
ies’ influence on a queer of color critique, and see Ferguson (2004) and
Hong and Ferguson (2011) for further discussions of the influence of
women of color feminism.
3. A number of examples (Blackburn 2005; Goode-Cross and Tager 2011;
Harper and Gasman 2008; Harris 2003; McCready 2010; Patton 2011;
Strayhorn et al. 2008; Vaught 2004) speak to the focus on Black queer males.
While more scholarship is needed on Black queer males, the extant literature
offers more on their experiences than Black queer females (Blackburn 2003;
Patton and Simmons 2008; Quinn 2007), queer Latinos (Cruz 2001; Misa
2001), queer Asians (Ngo 2003; Varney 2001), and trans students of color
(Brockenbrough and Boatwright 2013). Diaz and Kosciw (2009) include
specific attention to Native American queers in their work of queer students
of color, but attention to them in the literature overall, as with many other
queer of color subgroups, remains scant. All of these works on queer students
of color outnumber the few works on queer of color educators (Alexander
2005; Brockenbrough 2012; Lewis 2012), and other queer of color stake-
holders appear absent from the current research literature.
4. Examples of the limited number of quantitative works in the extant litera-
ture include Battle and Linville (2006) and Russell (2001), as well as Diaz
and Kosciw (2009) who employed mixed methods.
REFERENCES
Aguilar-San Juan, K. (1998). Going home: Enacting justice in Queer Asian
America. In D. L. Eng & A. Y. Hom (Eds.), Q & A: Queer in Asian America
(pp. 25–40). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Alexander, B. K. (2005). Embracing the teachable moment: The Black gay body
in the classroom as embodied text. In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson
(Eds.), Black queer studies: A critical anthology (pp. 250–265). Durham: Duke
University Press.
Allen, J. S. (2009). For “the children” dancing the beloved community. Souls,
11(3), 311–326.
Allen, J. S. (2011). Venceremos?: The erotics of Black self-making in Cuba. Durham:
Apple, M. W. (1982). Education and power. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Asencio, M. (2009). Migrant Puerto Rican lesbians negotiating gender, sexuality,
and ethnonationality. NWSA Journal, 21(3), 1–23.
Bailey, M. M. (2009). Performance as intravention: Ballroom culture and the poli-
tics of HIV/AIDS in Detroit. Souls, 11(3), 253–274.
Battle, J., & Linville, D. (2006). Race, sexuality and schools: A quantitative assess-
ment of intersectionality. Race, Gender & Class, 13(3/4), 180–188,
190–191,194–199.
Blackburn, M. V. (2003). Disrupting the (hetero)normative: Exploring literacy
performances and identity work with queer youth. Journal of Adolescent &
Adult Literacy, 46(4), 312–324.
Blackburn, M. V. (2005). Agency in borderland discourses: Examining language
use in a community center with Black queer youth. Teachers College Record,
107(1), 89–113.
Bowleg, L. (2008). When Black + lesbian + woman ≠ Black lesbian woman: The
methodological challenges of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality
research. Sex Roles, 59(5/6), 312–325.
Brockenbrough, E. (2012). Agency and abjection in the closet: The voices (and
silences) of Black queer male teachers. International Journal of Qualitative
Brockenbrough, E. (2015). Queer of color agency in educational contexts:
Analytic frameworks from a queer of color critique. Educational Studies, 51(1),
28–44.
Brockenbrough, E., & Boatwright, T. (2013). In the MAC: Creating safe spaces
for transgender youth of color. In K. Jocson (Ed.), Cultural transformations:
Youth and pedagogies of possibility (pp. 165–182). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Education Press.
Cantu, L., Luibheid, E., & Stern, A. M. (2005). Well-founded fear: Political asy-
lum and the boundaries of sexual identity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In
E. Luibheid & L. Cantu (Eds.), Queer migrations: Sexuality, U.S. citizenship,
and border crossings (pp. 61–74). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cohen, C. J. (2005). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical poten-
tial of queer politics? In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer
studies: A critical anthology (pp. 21–51). Durham: Duke University Press.
Coloma, R. S. (2013). Ladlad and parrhesiastic pedagogy: Unfurling LGBT poli-
tics and education in the global south. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(4), 483–511.
Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. Qualitative Studies in
Education, 14(5), 657–669.
Cruz, C. (2008). Notes on immigration, youth, and ethnographic silence. Theory

Into Practice, 47(1), 67–73.
witnessing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE),
24(5), 547–558.
Decena, C. U. (2011). Tacit subjects: Belonging and same-sex desire among
Dominican immigrant men. Durham: Duke University Press.
Diaz, E. M., & Kosciw, J. G. (2009). Shared differences: The experiences of les-
bian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students of color in our nation’s schools.
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. Retrieved from http://www.
glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/2374.html
Eng, D. L., Halberstam, J., & Muñoz, J. E. (2005). Introduction: What’s queer
about queer studies now? Social Text, 84/85, 1–17.
Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in Black: Toward a queer of color critique.
Gabel, S. L. (Ed.). (2005). Disability studies in education: Readings in theory and
method. New York: Peter Lang.
Goode-Cross, D. T., & Tager, D. (2011). Negotiating multiple identities: How
African-American gay and bisexual men persist at a predominantly White insti-
tution. Journal of Homosexuality, 58(9), 1235–1254.
Gopinath, G. (2005). Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and South Asian public
cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harper, S. R., & Gasman, M. (2008). Consequences of conservatism: Black male
undergraduates and the politics of historically Black colleges and universities.
Journal of Negro Education, 77(4), 336–351.
Harris, W. G. (2003). African American homosexual males on predominantly
White college and university campuses. Journal of African American Studies,
7(1), 47–56.
Hong, G. K., & Ferguson, R. A. (2011). Strange affinities: The gender and sexual
politics of comparative racialization. Durham: Duke University Press.
Press.
James, S. D. (2009, April 14). When words can kill: “That’s so gay.” Retrieved
from http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=7328091
&page=1
James, S. D. (2013, March 25). All-female Smith College returns transgender
woman’s admissions application. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/
Health/female-smith-college-returns-transgender-womans-admissions-
application/story?id=18805681#.UWxjnoJAu8Q
Johnson, E. P. (2003). Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the politics of
authenticity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Johnson, E. P. (2008). Sweet tea: Black gay men of the South. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press.
Knight, L. J. (2010, October 12). Exclusive interview: Morehouse student

speaks on harassment. Retrieved from http://bitchielife.necolebitchie.
com/2010/10/morehouse-university-seeks-to-affirm-the-illusion-that-
black-males-are-not-gay/
Kumashiro, K. K. (Ed.). (2001). Troubling intersections of race and sexuality:
Queer students of color and anti-oppressive education. Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
La Fountain-Stokes, L. (2011). Gay shame, Latina- and Latino-style: A critique of
White queer performativity. In M. Hames-Garcia & E. J. Martínez (Eds.), Gay
Latino studies: A critical reader (pp. 55–80). Durham: Duke University Press.
Leap, W. L. (2002). “Strangers on a train”: Sexual citizenship and the politics of
public transportation in apartheid Cape Town. In A. Cruz-Malave & M. F.
Manalansan (Eds.), Queer globalizations: Citizenship and the afterlife of colo-
nialism (pp. 219–235). New York: New York University Press.
Lee, C. (2003, August 13). Homos 101. The Village Voice, p. 42.
Lewis, M. M. (2012). Pedagogy and the sista’ professor: Teaching Black queer
feminist studies through the self. In E. R. Meiners & T. Quinn (Eds.), Sexualities
in education: A reader (pp. 33–40). New York: Peter Lang.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Freedom: Crossing Press.
Luibhéid, E. (2005). Introduction: Queering migration and citizenship. In
E. Luibhéid & L. Cantú (Eds.), Queer migrations: Sexuality, U.S. citizenship,
and border crossings (pp. ix–xlvi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lynn, M., & Dixson, A. D. (Eds.). (2013). Handbook of critical race theory in
education. New York: Routledge.
Manalansan, M. F. (2003). Global divas: Filipino gay men in the diaspora. Durham:
Marquez, R., & Brockenbrough, E. (2013). Queer youth v. the state of California:
Interrogating legal discourses on the rights of queer students of color.
Curriculum Inquiry, 43(4), 461–482.
McCready, L. T. (2010). Making space for diverse masculinities: Difference, inter-
sectionality, and engagement in an urban high school. New York: Peter Lang.
McLaren, P. (1994). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the
foundations of education (2nd ed.). New York: Longman.
Miao, V. (1998). Coalition politics: (Re)turning the century. In D. L. Eng & A. Y.
Hom (Eds.), Q & A: Queer in Asian America (pp. 65–78). Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Misa, C. M. (2001). Where have all the queer students of color gone?: Negotiated
identity of queer Chicana/o students. In K. K. Kumashiro (Ed.), Troubling
intersections of race and sexuality: Queer students of color and anti-oppressive edu-
cation (pp. 67–80). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
by radical women of color (2nd ed.). New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color
Press.
Mungin, L. (2009, October 17). All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing.

Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/17/college.dress.code/
Ngo, B. (2003). Citing discourses: Making sense of homophobia and heteronor-
mativity at Dynamic High School. Equity & Excellence in Education, 36(2),
115–124.
Patton, L. D. (2011). Perspectives on identity, disclosure, and the campus envi-
ronment among African American gay and bisexual men at one historically
Black college. Journal of College Student Development, 52(1), 77–100.
Patton, L. D., & Simmons, S. L. (2008). Exploring complexities of multiple iden-
tities of lesbians in a Black college environment. Negro Educational Review,
59(3–4), 197–215.
Quinn, T. M. (2007). “You make me erect!”: Queer girls of color negotiating
heteronormative leadership at an urban all-girls’ public school. Journal of Gay
& Lesbian Issues in Education, 4(3), 31–47.
Ramirez, H. N. R. (2011). Gay Latino cultural citizenship: Predicaments of iden-
tity and visibility in San Francisco in the 1990s. In M. Hames-Garcia & E. J.
Martínez (Eds.), Gay Latino studies: A critical reader (pp. 175–197). Durham:
Rau, K. (2008, February 13). The voice of Black queer youth. Retrieved
from http://www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=3&STORY_
ID=4257&PUB_TEMPLATE_ID=2
Reddy, C. (2011). Freedom with violence: Race, sexuality, and the US state. Durham:
Rodriguez, J. M. (2003). Queer Latinidad: Identity practices, discursive spaces.
Russell, S. T. (2001). Adolescent sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, and school
environments: A national study of sexual minority youth of color. In K. K.
Kumashiro (Ed.), Troubling intersections of race and sexuality: Queer students of
color and anti-oppressive education (pp. 113–130). Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Setoodah, R. (2008, July 18). Young, gay and murdered. Newsweek. Retrieved
from http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/07/18/young-gay-
and-murdered.html
Simon, M. (2009, April 24). My bullied son’s last day on Earth. Retrieved from
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/23/bullying.suicide/
Smith, B. (Ed.). (1983). Home girls: A Black feminist anthology (1st ed.). New York:
Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Solomon, A. (2005). Trans/Migrant: Christina Madrazo’s all-American story. In
E. Luibheid & L. Cantú (Eds.), Queer migrations: Sexuality, U.S. citizenship,
and border crossings (pp. 3–29). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Strayhorn, T. L., Blakewood, A. M., & DeVita, J. M. (2008). Factors affecting the
college choice of African American gay male undergraduates: Implications for
retention. NASPA Journal, 11(1), 88–108.
Varney, J. A. (2001). Undressing the normal: Community efforts for queer Asian
and Asian American youth. In K. K. Kumashiro (Ed.), Troubling intersections of
race and sexuality: Queer students of color and anti-oppressive education
(pp. 87–103). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Vaught, S. (2004). The talented tenth: Gay Black boys and the racial politics of
southern schooling. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education, 2(2), 5–26.
Warner, M. (1993). Introduction. In M. Warner (Ed.), Fear of a queer planet:
Queer politics and social theory (pp. vii–xxxi). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Yoshikawa, Y. (1998). The heat is on Miss Saigon coalition: Organizing across race
and sexuality. In D. L. Eng & A. Y. Hom (Eds.), Q & A: Queer in Asian
America (pp. 41–56). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Queer, Quare, and [Q]ulturally Sustaining
Jon M. Wargo
INTRODUCTION
Although the classroom is still considered the primary space for unearthing
rich points that inform the teaching and learning of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2) youth—a space wherein
activities and products are read as hieroglyphs to uncover solutions to so-
called problems—it dismisses the embodied experience of, and resistance
to, the oppressive and domineering affects of school and schooling.1 In
this chapter, I attend to these tensions by providing a succinct variation
across three themes to strike a chord for a politics of praxis and action for
LGBTQ2 youth. First, I survey the historical and cultural tensions embed-
ded within theorizing a “queer” pedagogy. I then borrow from Johnson
(2001) to operationalize “quare,” a possible approach to pedagogy that as
I argue, moves away from the queer that fails to acknowledge the corpo-
real and materialized reality of youth of color. In the final section, I center
the “q” from quare to (re)imagine what a [q]ulturally sustaining peda-
gogy would entail for LGBTQ2 youth of color. Ultimately, I argue that
a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy examines how LGBTQ2 youth lives
J.M. Wargo ()

Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

300 J.M. WARGO
are complicated narratives whose rhizomatic experiences and subjectivities

move relationally to other communities and affinity spaces they traverse.
A [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy illuminates the fluidity of race, class,
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and desire as we work together and partner in
the struggle for educational equity for all.
ON QUEER (PEDAGOGY)?
At a moment when queer has gained momentum in educational studies
and the academy more broadly, the once humanist project of queer as
an identity politics and form of resistance has evaporated into theoretical
and conceptual projects that divorce it from the everyday lived experi-
ences of LGBTQ2 peoples. Queer, from its earliest etymological incanta-
tions as both a noun and a verb, has held a slippery form and definition.
“The word ‘queer’ itself,” according to Sedwick (1993), “means across—
it comes from the Indo-European root—twerkw, which also yields the
German quer (traverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart … it is
relational and strange” (p. xii). Taken up by acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome (AIDS) activist groups such as “Queer Nation” and “ACT UP,”
queer served a more political function in the late-twentieth century. This
re-appropriation of the word became a “linguistic sign of affirmation and
resistance” (Butler 1993, p. 233). Queer, in sum, antagonizes identity
while simultaneously claiming a radical visibility.
Centered in the resistance politics of gay and lesbian rights movements,
queer then became an adjective to characterize and foreground a type
of pedagogy that could emerge in educational contexts. However, and
as Luhmann (1998) maintains, how do we operationalize queer in the
classroom? Queer, as a lens, disrupts knowledge. Britzman (1995) in her
now foundational piece, “Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading
Straight,” isolates three features of a so-called queer pedagogy toward
which she works in “thinking against the thought” of cultural presupposi-
tions. Britzman’s first queer feature is the study of and argument against
the limits of inclusion. Within an equity framework, she contends, inclu-
sion has the potential to reinforce heterosexuality. A secondary line of
inquiry Britzman explores is the study of ignorance. Through her queer/
ing pedagogy, Britzman explored “thinking the unthinkable” and worked
to acknowledge the liminal spaces and lived histories between binaries of
gender and sexual difference. For Britzman, the epistemological problem
lies between the pedagogical questions what is truth and what is text? In
QUEER, QUARE, AND [Q]ULTURALLY SUSTAINING 301
considering the power of ignorance, Britzman argues that the pedagogue

must “rethink its methods of how to read that queer space where discur-
sivity occurs” (p. 162). At a tertiary level, Britzman focused on “reading
practices.” Encouraging students to read for difference, allowing for a
type of queer pedagogy was facilitated by ongoing dialogue with self and
reading to understand what we cannot bear to know. Although Britzman’s
queer pedagogy made way for others to join in the goal of enacting and
theorizing a queer pedagogy of sorts, the project of inclusion (both aca-
demic and social) cast a shadow over the once radical reads of queer peda-
gogy. Queer, as Britzman forecasted, began to reinforce static categories
of identity and heterosexuality. In educational studies, queer became syn-
onymous with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. It was a way to
classify, to sort, and to include. Moreover, it transformed into a category
predominantly white LGBTQ folks wore and a descriptor that did not
quite fit LGBTQ2 students of color (e.g., see McCready 2001). Hence,
queer pedagogy became a watered down facet of the shallow multicultur-
alism that pervades so-called inclusive teacher education spaces and class-
room contexts. Queer, in a way, lost its skin.
In its theorizations that move the body to the periphery to take on
poststructuralist tendencies, queer limits those whose bodies are continu-
ously oppressed and dominated by institutions and legal systems. Cohen
(1997) argues that a, “queer theorizing which calls for the elimination of
fixed categories seems to ignore the ways in which some traditional social
identities and communal ties can, in fact, be important to one’s survival”
(Cohen 1997, p. 450). Hence, queer must be acknowledged as the flesh
many of us are stitched into and seek desire from. Queer is not solely a
placeholder or categorical variable by which we can label, but an orienta-
tion and experience we must build resistance and praxis upon.
ON QUARING A PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS?

While queer, as a heuristic, has attained prowess with its ability to trouble
and/or unsettle larger discourses concerning power and subjectivity, some
would argue it has lost its humanizing and political praxis. In a move to
suture this disconnection, Johnson (2001) argues for a “quare” theory
and practice. Quare, in comparison to queer, has its roots in the African
American vernacular tradition. Quare positions race, class, and ethnicity as
central elements to the corporeal construction of queer bodies. Johnson
argues that quare speaks from a “culture-specific positionality” (p. 2). It
302 J.M. WARGO
“moves beyond simply theorizing subjectivity and agency as discursively

mediated to theorizing how that mediation may propel material bod-
ies into action” (Johnson 2001, p. 9). A quare pedagogy and praxis, in
comparison to queer, “offers a more utilitarian theory of identity politics,
focusing not just on performers and effects, but also on contexts and his-
torical situatedness” (p. 13). Hence, quare speaks from a “theory in the
flesh” perspective (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981).
For LGBTQ2 individuals a “theory in the flesh” is the perspective of
primacy given the materialized and embodied identity we wear. Johnson’s
“quare,” and as you will see in my own “[q]ulturally sustaining” con-
struct, is a pedagogy that has its theoretical and conceptual roots in the
embodied politics of resistance. Beginning in the analysis and examination
of the subjugation of US women of color, a theory in the flesh orienta-
tion works to nuance the multiple and intersecting forms of domination
that oppress women of color. Like Anzaldúa (1987), hooks (1990), Lorde
(1984), and Muñoz (1999), theorists whose work align with the “theory
in the flesh” perspective, Johnson’s quare envisions a politics and praxis
that looks beyond the white gaze to shake white supremacy’s incisive grip.
Quare encourages “strategic coalition building around laws and policies
that have the potential to affect us across racial, sexual, and class divides”
(Johnson 2001, p. 18). Quare, in contrast to queer, is not only a construct
for the academy, but also an enacted and lived experience. Quare is the
skin we live in. It is the resistance and the struggle. Quare acknowledges
the power in community building and resources inherent in identities of
difference.
Quare, with its ramifications for a potential pedagogy, has made its way
into recent scholarship concerning LGBTQ2 youth. Reviewing education
research that surveys pedagogical practice and pedagogy with LGBTQ
urban students, Blackburn and McCready (2009) argue that urban educa-
tors working with LGBTQ youth of color need to be responsive and pre-
pared for addressing the multiple social and cultural issues that intersect
with sexual and gender identities. Similarly, and used here as an exemplar
to highlight the quare tenets of pedagogy, is Brockenbrough’s (2014)
“Becoming Queerly Responsive: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for
Black and Latino Urban Youth.” In his article, Brockenbrough (2014)
highlights how the Midtown AIDS Center (MAC) employed culturally
responsive pedagogical strategies to “address a range of emotional, devel-
opmental, and educational needs” (Brockenbrough 2014, p. 2) among
the center’s Black and Latino urban queer youth (BLUQY) participants.
Providing an array of asset-based pedagogies and resources for BLUQY,

the center, according to Brockenbrough, becomes a space of cultural
affinity and projects of humanization. Thus, Johnson’s quare, a project
wherein he as a cultural theorist worked to employ it as a strategy to re-
read queer academic texts, could be considered a type of pedagogy that
works to explicitly make connections across and toward being culturally
responsive to LGBTQ2 youth of color.
TOWARD A [Q]ULTURALLY SUSTAINING PERSPECTIVE

Although educators working across in-school and out-of-school contexts
with LGBTQ2 youth have argued for a responsive pedagogy, attending to
the cultural specifications and intersections of gender, sexuality, and race,
I argue that responsive and the resource pedagogies embedded within
that category of pedagogy is not enough. In this concluding section, I
call for a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy ([Q]SP), one that works against
deficit-based approaches to LGBTQ2 youth and moves beyond facets of
LGBT and queer inclusion. Like Paris’s (2012) culturally sustaining peda-
gogy, a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy (one wherein the q of quare and
the African American vernacular tradition situates and gives queer a role
of primacy in culture), “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—lin-
guistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of
schooling” (Paris 2012, p. 95). However, and in contrast to Paris (2012),
it centers the corporeality of the queer body for LGBTQ2 youth of color
whose gender and sexual identity is always already enmeshed within larger
markers such as language, ritual, desire, and cultural practice.
While resource- and asset-based pedagogies for young people, Paris’s
(2012) included, have sought to (re)humanize cultural pluralism in the
democratic project of schooling, few have centered gender and sexual
identity as a primary lens through which many of our youth experience
the institution. Hence, what I offer here, and what I call for in the conclu-
sion of this chapter is a pedagogy aimed to sustain the [q]ulturally queer
differences of LGBTQ2 youth. A [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy repo-
sitions the embodied experience of LGBTQ2 peoples. It recognizes the
ethical potential of queer sexualities, the social communities they produce,
enable, and legitimize, and the literary and cultural forms they create.
Looking beyond the Western white heterosexist patriarchal capitalist gaze
that stains lackluster attempts to celebrate difference and diversity, a [q]
ulturally sustaining pedagogy reinserts the political into pedagogy and
304 J.M. WARGO
praxis. [Q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy acknowledges and affirms how

the LGBTQ2 body uses its corporeal materiality to transgress, how it in
and of itself acts as a borderland and bridge to connect cultural and com-
munity alliances. A [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy acknowledges how
fraught queer is as an identity category and personal marker, but how
hopeful it is in helping to story the bodies of young queer people.
Like my aforementioned alignment of Brockenbrough (2014) and
Blackburn and McCready’s (2009) scholarship to Johnson’s (2001)
quare, I would argue that several scholars have engaged and documented
possible enactments of what I am offering here as [q]ulturally sustain-
ing pedagogies. Cruz (2013), for example, examines the lived realities for
LGBTQ youth of color in her article, “LGBTQ Youth of Color Video
Making as Radical Curriculum: A Brother Mourning His Brother and a
Theory in the Flesh.” In her article, Cruz (2013) examined a video poem
that a youth participant composed to examine and memorialize his twin
brother who had recently passed to complications from AIDS. Through
reading the video as text, Cruz argued that the process of “storying the
self” (Goodson 1998) was examined as a form of radical curriculum, one
that surpassed the limited comprehensive sex education youth were receiv-
ing in a continuation school in Los Angeles, California. I draw on Cruz
here as an exemplar of [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy as she re-centers
the LGBTQ2 body as a site for praxis. While not under the guise of a [Q]
SP approach, Cruz illuminates how a theory in the flesh becomes a radical
politic and pedagogy.
As a language and literacy researcher and teacher educator, I, too, have
sought to participate in and enact a type of [q]ulturally sustaining peda-
gogy. As a theoretical construct embedded within a politics of resistance,
a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy manifests itself through the literatures
and literacies of LGBTQ2 peoples, their folklore, performance and ver-
bal art, and ritual. In essence, a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy starts
through the expressive means of “storying the self.” While there are few
curricular resources that I would include under the purview of [q]ultur-
ally sustaining pedagogies, I have seen teachers working with LGBTQ2
students and enacting this type of pedagogy by centering LGBTQ2
youth voices in a variety of ways. For instance, Sonnie’s (2000) edited
volume, Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology,
facilitated the exploration of how issues such as immigration, imperial-
ism, polyamory, and disability have all come to intersect and sit on the
LGBTQ2 body. Similarly, Yosimar Reyes (2008), a self-proclaimed “two-
spirit gangsta” poet, and his spoken word translanguaging poem, “For
Colored Boys Who Speak Softly,” was used to identify how the multiple
subjectivities and identities we have and hold are showcased through reli-
gion, gender identity, cultural ritual, language, and desire. By examin-
ing how LGBTQ2 lives are complicated narratives whose intersectional
experiences and subjectivities move relationally to other communities and
affinity spaces they traverse, we can begin to see how a [q]ulturally sus-
taining pedagogy highlights the fluidity of race, class, gender, ethnicity,
sexuality, and desire.
A [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy, as I illuminate here, is a preliminary
presentation, meant to be suggestive if not yet fully integrated. Defining
a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy for LGBTQ2 youth is part of a larger
project for many of us who came out and sought school and education as a
place of refuge, only to be denied access to and/or felt inadequate in shar-
ing our bodies as it did not read like others’ who more readily dominated
these so-called safe spaces in school and society. A [q]ulturally sustaining
pedagogy is a pedagogy that not only looks beyond the white gaze that
has come to cloud projects of queer and queering, but one that also looks
inward, past the homonormative and depoliticized assumptions of queer
sexual domesticity and material consumption.2
A [q]ulturally sustaining perspective acknowledges that being certain
kinds of people is work—work that relies on and is sustained through
embodied and expressive forms of resistance and communication—the
taking up, putting on, pushing back and against citational performances
about what it means to be a particular kind of person, student, teacher,
even as these selves vary across time, space, and culture. My goal then in
putting forth a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy, is to (re)humanize queer
through the act of teaching. However teaching certain kinds of people,
I would add, puts us to work, reflexively asking: who and what comes to
be recognized as intelligibly human, valuable, and worthy of protection
as we ourselves have scars and stories? Like Driskill (2011) acknowl-
edges, a [q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy traces its lines and movements
within the cultural scars and traces of oppression and colonization. A [Q]
SP approach works to (re)learn and restore the queer story-ed body of
LGBTQ2 people.
306 J.M. WARGO
NOTES
1. I use LGBTQ2 to acknowledge the presence and persistence of two-spirit
authors, educators, and youth who have resisted colonial gender binaries
and sexual regimes.
2. Like Duggan (2003), I use homonormativity to describe a certain type of
politics that “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and
institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility
of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay
culture.”
REFERENCES
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute.
Blackburn, M., & McCready, L. (2009). Voices of queer youth in urban schools:
Possibilities and limitations. Theory Into Practice, 48, 222–230.
Brockenbrough, E. (2014). Becoming queerly responsive: Culturally responsive
pedagogy for black and latino urban queer youth. Urban Education, 51(2),
1–27.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York:
Routledge.
Cohen, C. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential
of queer politics? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, 3(4), 437–465.
Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ youth of color video making as radical curriculum: A
brother mourning his brother and a theory in the flesh. Curriculum Inquiry,
43(4), 441–460.
Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality?: Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and
the attack on democracy. Boston: Beacon.
Driskill, Q. L. (2011). Pedagogy. In Q. L. Driskill, D. H. Justice, D. Miranda, &
L. Tatonetti (Eds.), Sovereign erotics: A collection of two-spirit literature
(pp. 182–184). Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Goodson, I. F. (1998). Storying the self: Life politics and the study of the teacher’s
life and work. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum: Toward new identities (pp. 3–20).
New York: Garland.
hooks, b. (1990). Yearning. Boston: South End Press.
Johnson, E. P. (2001). “Quare” studies, or (almost) everything I know about
queer studies I learned from my grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly,
21(1), 1–25.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
McCready, L. (2001). When fitting in isn’t an option, or why black queer males at
a California high school stay away from project 10. In K. Kumashiro (Ed.),
Troubling intersections of race and sexuality: Queer students of color and anti-
oppressive education (pp. 37–54). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
by radical women of color (pp. 35–40). Watertown: Persephone Press.
Muñoz, J. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics.
Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, ter-
minology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97.
Reyes, Y. (2008). For colored boys who speak softly. In E. Xavier (Ed.), Mariposas:
A modern anthology of queer latino poetry. Moorpark: Floricanto Press.
Sonnie, A. (Ed.). (2000). Revolutionary voices: A multicultural queer youth anthol-
ogy. Los Angeles: Alyson Books.
Queer Thrival
Adam J. Greteman
A PROPOSAL
To thrive is a thing one does. One thrives at this, that, or the other. And
when one thrives one “grows or develops well or vigorously.” To thrive is
no easy task as questions immediately emerge if particular forms of growth
or development are, in fact, “well.” Queers are acquainted with the prob-
lems of development given that for much of the twentieth-century queers,
particularly homosexuals, were viewed as being in a state of arrested devel-
opment. They were not well. Queers simply would not grow up and by
not growing up could not thrive or develop well into full-fledged adults as
defined by the “professionals.” Queers were pathologized, arrested, medi-
cated, shamed, and much more. Yet, within this queers resisted, developed
new kinship networks, political organizations, and created various types
of queer communities that thrived—taking a stance for themselves. Such
resistance helped queers survive and cultivate new modes of being so that
at the end of the twentieth century it is possible to see that some changes
have been made.
A.J. Greteman ()

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

310 A.J. GRETEMAN
Queer, of course, is a strange term. It is less about an “identity,” and

more of a stance. To draw on Richard Ford (2007), queers’ stance is “to
live outside some social norm or other” (p. 479). Some queers have gone
normal and so their stance has changed. They have become mainstream,
part of the political fabric, an interest group, or set of interest groups that
can lobby and impact the political sphere. This is not entirely bad. Change
happens as people find different ways to survive and thrive. There remains
in the midst of such changes, however, a need to articulate alternatives
and critiques of neoliberal, read mainstream, approaches to surviving and
thriving (Conrad 2010; Polikoff 2008; Warner 1999). How, we have to
ask, can we continue to take the stance to live outside social norms in ways
that allow us to not only survive against but also thrive in the face of social
pressures, violence, and the cult of normality?
To explore this I propose the critical concept “queer thrival” for queer
educational thought in the twenty-first century. I utilize queer thrival to
articulate ways that queers might develop or grow vigorously. To thrive
on its own implies a telos—a development that can be considered well.
“Well,” however, so easily slips into talk about “healthy” development
given the rise of, for instance, “wellness centers,” so queer must modify
thrival, as in queer thrival, so that such a concept reminds us that to thrive
is not simply to develop well but to develop in a way that does the work of
queerness—taking a stance, an ever-changing stance, against social norms,
well. Queer thrival takes risks. This work contests, makes strange, and dis-
rupts space and time. It promotes and recruits. To engage queer thrival is
to ask that we investigate, uncover, and invent ways of thriving upon and
amid our surviving. However, it does not replace the continued need to
address and advocate for survival. Rather, queer thrival looks to help guide
queers into a twenty-first century in ways that do justice to our existence
utilizing our survival to cultivate our queer thrival. By developing and
arguing for queer thrival, we might more forcefully promote agendas and
contributions to open up space and time outside of the changing social
norms. Can queers, not only survive or “get by,” but actually thrive or
develop “well,” not in the normative sense but in a sense developed in a
queer space and time? I am betting we can, in part, because history, the
stories that can be told by queers having survived, are also stories that are
simultaneously about thriving. Those who have survived and accounts of
such survival implicitly illustrate or implicate queer thrival. Upon survival,
queer thrival becomes possible and perhaps one day it might be said that
queers thrived.
QUEER THRIVAL 311
My concern is that the frame of survival has hidden noticing or advo-

cating for queer thrival. One of the tasks for queer educational scholars in
the twenty-first century might be to illustrate the possibilities and prom-
ises of queer thrival in schools. Of course, within education, the emphasis
on survival makes sense given education’s conservative and reactionary
style. Laura Essig reminds us poignantly after a spate of queer suicides in
2010, “queer youth are not a tragedy,” but that as a society “we prefer our
queers as victims. They’re easier to support and much less scary that way”
(Essig 2010, October 3, np). It is palatable to argue that queer kids, ever
the victims, deserve to live—should survive school. We might even argue
that queer kids should be able to thrive in the “normal” world, following
the straight and narrow. However, it is less acceptable to contemplate how
queer kids might thrive as queer, to queerly thrive, amid the onslaught
of various regimes of normal worlds. It is this desire, a desire for queer
thrival, as opposed to simply thriving that I am interested. Fears of queer
thrival abound, from Anita Bryant’s famed campaign in the 1970s to the
controversy that erupted when David Halperin taught a course on “How
to Be Gay” at the University of Michigan. To allow queers to thrive, to
advocate for queer thrival—as teachers, as students—is a challenge. What
is needed, as Eve Sedgwick (1991) pointed out decades ago, is a “strong,
explicit, erotically invested affirmation of many people’s felt desire or need
that there be gay people in the immediate world” (p. 26). While “gay”
might not be a stance as outside social norms anymore given the legaliza-
tion of gay marriage in many states, the acceptance of gays in the military,
and the inclusion of sexual orientation in anti-discrimination policies, how
do we affirm the need for queer thrival?
HISTORY
History is tricky. Queer theory may have a history or more so histories
and how one tells such a story orients people to the world in different
ways. Queer theory has joined conversations that exist under the banner of
“critical” thought asking that sexuality matter and illustrating the central-
ity of sexuality in thinking politics, ethics, and more. Yet, it is a challenge
for scholars to make sense of the competing narratives, myths, and ten-
sions within queer theory. It takes time and energy to join the rather queer
program in progress called queer theory. We must embrace such attempts
realizing that much has been said and done before us and much more will
be said and done after us. In the third decade of its existence, we all now
312 A.J. GRETEMAN
“come late” to the conversation and while it is no fun to come late, we

come nonetheless as queers will always come and need to make sense of
our present state of queer theory, queerness, and queers.
“Queerness,” as Muñoz noted, “is a structuring and educated mode
of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the
present” (p. 1). Queerness, in its myriad forms, desires to see and feel, to
survive, past the present time. And it does not do this naturally. Rather,
it is an educated desire emerging in its space and time, which is rarely
“school.” From street violence to HIV/AIDS, from schoolyard bullying
to youth suicide, queers have fought in the present to survive into the
future because of their desires—educated desires—that taught them that
here in the present, was not how it had to be; that the sun might come
out tomorrow. It may not, of course, and queers know this for tomorrow
is, well, always a day away. We are here, in the present, and have work to
do, that risks the future because the future is a precarious concept that at
least symbolically, enacts a certain amount of violence against queers and
queerness (Edelman 2004).
The knowledge of queer struggles for survival marks queer theory.
Sedgwick (1993) noted as much writing, “the knowledge is indelible, but
not astonishing, to anyone with a reason to be attuned to the profligate
way this culture has of denying and despoiling queer energies and lives”
(p. 1). She continued, “I look at my adult friends and colleagues doing
lesbian and gay work, and I feel that the survival of each one is a mira-
cle. Everyone who survived has stories about how it was done” (p. 7).
These stories seen in books—both academic and popular—film, televi-
sion, art, and more are what constituted queer theory and show that we
are still here. And we are still here, we are still queer. We survived. But
what came with our survival? This is what I think needs to be fleshed out.
How can queer theory and its practitioners illustrate ways we have thrived
and might thrive upon having survived or in the midst of our ongoing
survival? How can we reframe our survival to also notice that such stories
orient us toward our queer thrival?
Over the three decades since Sedgwick’s comments, queers and their
theories have survived amid great loss and in many ways been institu-
tionalized again which itself is a form of loss (Ferguson 2012). Being a
survivor in the 1980s and 1990s was “surviving into threat, stigma, the
spiraling violence of gay-and-lesbian bashing … and the omnipresence of
the somatic fear and wrenching loss” but also to be a survivor was “to have
survived into a moment of unprecedented cultural richness, cohesion, and
QUEER THRIVAL 313
assertiveness for many lesbian and gay adults” (Sedgwick 1993, p. 3). The
memories of such survival and related techniques have served us well. The
cultural richness, cohesion, assertiveness, and other consequences of sur-
vival offer us now a chance to continue the work of queerness. To pay
homage to how the decision to stand outside social norms there in the
past, here in the present, and there in the future might hold in tension the
struggle of survival and the promises of queer thrival.
AN ILLUSTRATION OR THREE
How, dear reader, you might ask, does such a concept get taken up in
research and teaching? We might begin with Cris Mayo (2014) who tells
us:
In the midst of being critical of how certain sexual orientations and gender
identities have come to be dominant and how others have worked to be
recognized or organized, learners need to take stock of where they are,
consider what they have systematically ignored or avoided, and begin to
move to new considerations of the possibilities that have, at least to some
extent, remained outside the regular curricula or outside the considerations
of policy. (p. 19)
The work of survival done by and with queer theory has, in many ways,
had some success. Gay kids in schools are more recognized, have more
protections against bullying and discrimination, and have created a move-
ment for Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs). There is recognition that gay and
lesbian subjects deserve to survive. Lisa Duggan’s (2004) concept “homo-
normativity” coined over a decade ago illustrates the success that some
have had at surviving; surviving through assimilation. I am not sure we
can totally fault such a strategy, although we might not see such a strat-
egy as very queer. We must, as Mayo taught us, recognize the process of
becoming recognized or dominant while also remembering to continue
our search for those left behind, unnoticed, unrecognized. This, Mayo
(2014) suggested, “requires taking on new kinds of curiosities and being
aware of the sorts of ignorances that have structured schools’ relation to
reproducing ‘normal’ unquestioningly” (p. 74).
Can education utilize and become curious about lessons from queer
subcultures—such as the Leather community or barebackers—that offer
models of queer thrival within and because of sexual pleasures? Can
314 A.J. GRETEMAN
queers educate youth on ways of living, being, and relating that embrace
any number of “dissing” actions (e.g., dissent, disobedience, disidentifi-
cation) to thrive recognizing that there is no prescription for this form
of “wellness?” (Greteman 2014; Muñoz 1999, 2009). Such questions
are central to my work within queer educational research. In my work
I seek to explore both how queer subcultures offer educational oppor-
tunities to make schools survivable for GLBTQ students but also queer
practices that assist in cultivating queer thrival beyond the hetero- and
homonormative.
Joining the trend in the late 2000s to engage the emerging discussions
on barebacking and its practitioners, I sought to “fashion a bareback peda-
gogy” in the contested terrain of sex education (Greteman 2013a). “The
figure of the barebacker,” I argued, “while a contested ‘empirical reality’
… operates as a figure—represented in discourse to discipline and regulate
what counts as normal gay sex” (p. 3). The barebacker might, at first look,
have no place in sex education; however, I argued the barebacker is central
to it because “barebackers, by inhabiting the outside of sex and sex educa-
tion, are made ‘other’ by dominant discourses that emerge post-HIV that
have classified particular practices (risky vs. safe) and models of intimacy
(healthy vs. unhealthy)” (p. 2). In engaging the figure of the barebacker, I
sought less to promote such practices but to explore the ways a particular
population considered “queer” for their sexual practices both teaches us,
but also is able to thrive amid the homophobic and normative discourses
that often position such practices as pathological. In the face of risk, bare-
backers open up opportunities to encounter queer thrival by asking how
the definition of wellness developed in the face of the AIDS crisis comes
into conflict with queer practices that seek to stand outside the social
norms established by science, medicine, and politics.
And while queers have been and still are considered pathological in
some ways in some places, there is a history of their thrival. It is this history
that interested me in “Lessons from the Leather Archives and Museum:
On the Promises of Bondage, Domination, Sadism, Masochism (BDSM)”
(Greteman 2013b). What happens, I explored in this article, when art edu-
cation students are taken to The Leather Archives and Museum (LA&M)
to encounter the archives and art of the Leather, Fetish, and Bondage,
Domination, Sadism, Masochism communities? While teacher education
and education scholarship has and continues to expound on the state of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students, such
work has often, until recently, focused on the victim narrative—a narrative
QUEER THRIVAL 315
both Rofes (2005) and Marshall (2010) have challenged. My work with
students at LA&M sought to instead focus on the material realities of
sexual subcultures that contest normative ideas and practices. What does
the art of this complicated community teach us about queerness? And how
does the potential discomfort of being in the midst of explicitly sexual art
work and history assist students in moving beyond an abstract understand-
ing of queerness to a concrete view of the complexity, the projects, and
the lessons of queer practices that are outside the norm? As I wrote then:
the hope is that such lessons created the opportunities that allowed for an
encounter with strange ideas, images, languages, and ways of relating that
might reframe education and the practices of teachers ever so slightly to
allow not only for queer educational scholarship to be occupied by survival,
but also become preoccupied with the thrival of queerness. (p. 264)
The lessons from LA&M are, by no means, all happy lessons. To thrive is
not easy. No, the lessons were complicated by the violence against BDSM
communities and the challenging debates within them. Yet, within such
realities the communities represented illustrated through art and archives
not only the ongoing survival of these communities, but also how they
have thrived amid normative assaults.
Dissent may be key to queer thrival. In “Dissenting with Queer Theory,”
I draw on my readings of Jacques Rancière to articulate the importance of
the joke in education. “The joke dissents,” I argue,
from what is proper and appropriate, using past ideas and actions to see the
present realities while intervening into the unknown future. It does not seek
consent, merely laughter. It disrupts the distribution of the sensible while
also possibly reestablishing that distribution. It is risky. (2014, p. 426)
Queers have been the butt of jokes for decades and queers have fought
back using jokes. While there is often a defensive response to jokes seen in
the reactions of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to
any possible hint of “anti-gay” sentiments, there is also possibility in the
joke. As John Waters (2010) notes “If we can laugh at the worst things that
happen to us because of our sexuality, we’ll be the strongest minority of all,
proud to be illegal, proud not to be like everybody else” (p. 10). Waters
humorously continues, “Instead of ‘act up,’ I’m for ‘act bad.’ Let’s embar-
rass our enemies with humor” (p. 10). And embarrassing our enemies and
316 A.J. GRETEMAN
ourselves might be a way toward queer thrival. By laughing at ourselves we

survive and queerly thrive to make possibilities of queerness visible, inhab-
itable, and pleasurable.
CONCLUSION
To survive opens up the possibility to thrive. To thrive means that one
has survived. Might queers thrive in the twenty-first century contesting as
they have for decades the norms that police and limit ways of being and
relating? Such work is, of course, never done because queer is a stance that
one commits to taking in order to expose the limits of norms while seek-
ing to expand them. In the midst of economic inequality, ecological devas-
tation, homophobic and transphobic violence, systemic racism, and much
more our relational fabric is wearing thin. We cannot neglect the reality
that to survive is still a challenge for various populations, nor can we forgo
the challenges and possibilities that emerge upon surviving. While assimi-
lation will continue to be an option, I want to hope that the twenty-first
century will find ways to survive and thrive queerly, contesting neoliberal
toleration, throwing shade at limiting ideas of success, fighting against
income inequality, caring for the earth, and much more. Such a hope, a
hope of cooperation and community, should not be dismissed as a mere
dream but a continued search for radical queer politics that “fight against
the institutional impoverishment of the social fabric, and for the creation
of unconventional forms of union and community” (Roach 2012, p. 14).
Queer thrival offers some critical leverage in doing such work as queer
theory and its practitioners continue their work in the twenty-first century.
REFERENCES
Conrad, R. (Ed.). (2010). Against equality: Queer critiques of marriage. Lewiston:
Against Equality Publishing Collective.
Duggan, L. (2004). Twilight of equality: Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the
attack on democracy. Boston: Beacon.
University Press.
Essig, L. (2010, October 3). Queer youth not a tragedy. The Chronicle of Higher
Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/
queer-youth-not-a-tragedy/27380.
QUEER THRIVAL 317
Ferguson, R. (2012). The reorder of things: The university and its pedagogies of
minority difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ford, R. (2007). What’s queer about race? South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3),
477–484.
Greteman, A. (2013a). Fashioning a bareback pedagogy: Towards a theory of risky
(sex) education. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society, and Learning, 13, doi:
10.1080/14681811.2012.760154
Greteman, A. (2013b). Lessons from the leather archives and museum: On the
promises of BDSM. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(2), 254–266.
Greteman, A. (2014). Dissenting with queer theory: Reading Ranciere queerly.
doi:10.1080/01596306.2014.888845.
Marshall, D. (2010). Popular culture, the “victim trope”, and queer youth analyt-
ics. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(1), 65–85.
Mayo, C. (2014). LGBT youth and education: Policies and practices. New York:
Teachers College Press.
Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of poli-
tics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
New York: NYU Press.
Polikoff, N. (2008). Beyond (gay and straight) marriage: Valuing all families
under the law. Boston: Beacon.
Roach, T. (2012). Friendship as a way of life: Foucault, AIDS, and the politics of
estrangement. Buffalo: SUNY Press.
Rofes, E. (2005). A radical rethinking of sexuality and schooling: Status quo or
status queer? Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Sedgwick, E. (1991). How to bring your kids up gay. Social Text, 29, 18–27.
Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Waters, J. (2010). Of P’Town, the pope, and pink flamingos. The Gay and Lesbian
Review, 17(5), 10–16.
Queer Transgressive Cultural Capital
Summer M. Pennell
Social justice education strives to create equitable education for all stu-
dents, particularly those of minoritized populations. While this is a valu-
able goal, without a critical perspective this framework can rely on deficit
perspectives. An extreme example is Payne’s (2005) work that uses stereo-
types of people with low socioeconomic status as a framework for “under-
standing poverty.” If the goal is to bring minoritized populations to the
level of the majority—by talking of achievement gaps, for example—then
the effort relies on what is seen as lacking in the minoritized population,
creating the view that these populations need help and saving. The theory
of social capital (Bourdieu 1986) offers a different way of viewing groups:
looking at the strengths a social or cultural group possesses. This theory
has largely been misinterpreted as applying only to the white middle class.
In response, Yosso (2005) created a model to illustrate the cultural capital
possessed by communities of color. She outlined five types of cultural capi-
tal for people of color: aspirational, familial, linguistic, navigational, and
resistant. Using this model, educators can see communities of color as full
of strength, rather than lacking the tools of success, and can incorporate
these forms into their teaching. All of these forms can apply to the spec-
S.M. Pennell ()

Truman State University, Kirksville, MO, USA

320 S.M. PENNELL
trum of queer people as well, but I also see space for an additional form:
transgressive.
In this chapter, I will outline a model of queer transgressive cultural
capital, demonstrate how the undocuqueer movement (an activist group
of undocumented queer people in the USA) is an example of this form
of capital, and address how it can be used in education.1 This model will
allow educators to see the unique strengths present in intersectional queer
communities. Because Yosso’s (2005) model was for people of color, I
intentionally use an example from a queer community of color. When I
first began this work, I presented my initial ideas at a conference, uncon-
sciously choosing examples of white queer people. Dr. Juan Rios Vega, a
colleague, kindly said “I love what you have done, but as a gay man from
Panama, I don’t see a space for me here.” This gave me pause: while I was
working on a model for queer communities broadly, I had inadvertently
contributed to the false assumption that queer equals white. Was I falling
trap to the difficult question posed by Kumashiro (2001): “Is there com-
fort … in seeing queerness and racial difference as separate and distinct?
(p. 12). This short conversation with Juan changed the way I approached
this work.
As a white cisgender lesbian, I aim to heed Anzaldúa’s (1987) words
about white allies, in that “they will come to see that they are not help-
ing us but following our lead” (p. 85). In this chapter, I am taking the
lead of undocuqueer activists who point out the intersectionality between
activist movements of minoritized populations by offering a model for rec-
ognizing and valuing their work and group strengths. I am not asserting,
however, that the undocuqueer activist communities are the only example
of queer transgressive cultural capital. This group is just one example of
a phenomenon I believe is present in queer communities more broadly. I
also acknowledge that my whiteness increases the likelihood that my voice
will be heard compared to scholars of color. This makes my relationship
to my own work contentious, and I welcome critique and dialogue on this
subject.
While it could be said that the example of the undocuqueer move-
ment used in this chapter fits the model of cultural capital because of
race or ethnicity alone, I see this group as a way to highlight the inter-
sectionality—meaning interlocking identities and oppressions (Crenshaw
1991)—inherent in queer communities. Undocuqueer individuals may
face oppression for such characteristics as their nationality, race, ethnic-
ity, sexuality, gender identity, or gender expression. Additionally, since
QUEER TRANSGRESSIVE CULTURAL CAPITAL 321
many undocuqueer people in the USA are from Latin@2 communities

(evidenced by the activist movement using both English and Spanish in
their materials), I have chosen to incorporate the work of Chicana queer
and feminist theorists. As such, there is room for future analysis on queer
transgressive cultural capital using queer and feminist work from other
populations and scholarly movements, such as black feminism or indig-
enous theory.
DEFINING QUEER TRANSGRESSIVE CULTURAL CAPITAL

To define transgressive cultural capital, we must first examine the definition
of transgress. Looking to its definition, it means “to go beyond a bound-
ary or limit” (Merriam-Webster 2013), in contrast to resistance, which is
defined as “effort made to stop or to fight against someone or something”
(Merriam-Webster 2013). From this perspective, while resistant capital is
generally reactive to oppression, transgression is more proactive.
Looking to theory, there is more nuanced investigation into the mean-
ing of transgressive. White and Stallybrass (1986) see Babcock’s (1978)
articulation of “symbolic inversion” as transgression: “any act of expressive
behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion pres-
ents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms be
they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political (Babcock
1978:14)” (p. 17). The authors also summarized Foucault’s ideas on
transgression. Foucault saw it as:
The interrogation of boundaries, “a realm, no doubt, where what is in ques-

tion is the limit rather than the identity of a culture.” … Transgression
becomes a kind of reverse or counter-sublimation, undoing the discursive
hierarchies and stratifications of bodies and cultures which bourgeois soci-
ety has produced as the mechanism of its symbolic dominance. (White and
Stallybrass 1986, pp. 200–201)
Thus, transgression seeks to interrogate the limits placed on people by

mainstream society. To transgress is to point out that social constructions
are a way to control those who do not fit neatly into normalized ideas of
individuals and cultures. By pointing out limits, transgression can then
go beyond them to create more nuanced, robust understandings of iden-
tity. This emphasis on “expressive behavior” also lends transgression an
element of play. Huizinga (1955), in his extensive work on play, wrote
322 S.M. PENNELL
that “the contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid” (p. 8).
This fluidity, and the necessity of its “spatial separation from ordinary life”
(Huizinga 1955, p. 19), illustrates the uniqueness of transgression as a
form of capital and again sets it apart from resistance.
Transgression can be playful and serious; it can be an artistic representa-
tion of political protest, a direct mockery, or a subtle form of subversive
expression. While people expressing resistant cultural capital may speak
out at protests, they use their transgressive cultural capital to make cre-
ative protest signs, appropriating and manipulating cultural codes to cre-
ate playfully serious new meanings. Additionally, this playful seriousness
refuses to lie on a binary, making it ripe for queer use as queer defies and
counters binaries.
Given this exploration into theory, I define queer transgressive cultural
capital as the ways in which queer communities proactively—and often play-
fully—challenge and move beyond boundaries that limit and bind them
to create their own reality. These limitations may include social categories
(such as gender binaries) or institutional boundaries (such as gender-non-
conforming children not being allowed to use the restroom that matches
their gender identity). While this form of capital can be seen as similar to
transformative resistance (Solorzano and Delgado Bernal 2001), I think it is
more productive to see it as distinct from resistance to emphasize how trans-
gressive capital has a focus on space and incorporates play. Transgressive cap-
ital can also highlight the intersectionality of queer communities, as these
groups exist within and between many interlocking social boundaries.
UNDOCUQUEER
One example of queer transgressive cultural capital is found in the
“undocuqueer” movement, made up of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-
der, and queer (LGBTQ) undocumented immigrants in the USA (Shore
2013). This term was coined (demonstrating queer linguistic cultural cap-
ital) by Julio Salgado, a young immigration activist, as a way to highlight
the lives of queer people in migrant communities and to show how they
are leaders in the migrant rights movement (Chávez 2013). As with the
queer act of coming out, undocumented activists hoped that by coming
out as undocumented, they could counter citizens’ stereotypes of undocu-
mented immigrants. Yet, coming out as undocumented has higher stakes
than coming out as queer. While queer citizens face discrimination, depor-
tation is not something documented US citizens fear when coming out.
The undocuqueer movement points out one example of a border cross-

ing, both literally and figuratively, that happens in queer communities
occupied largely by people of color. It also points to the multiple chal-
lenges faced by queer undocumented immigrants. For example, they may
have no employment protection for both their immigrant status and their
sexual orientation or gender identity. Transgender undocumented people
may have no access to safe, gender-affirming treatment as their immigra-
tion status and gender identity may mean they are denied the health care
they need. As Salgado stated about the connection between being queer
and being undocumented:
It’s about being part of a community that is constantly marginalized and

finding strength in what others see as our weakness. It’s about finding a
common ground and becoming a huge fist to punch the one bully we have
in common. (Chávez 2013, p. 101)
Undocuqueer individuals live multiple transgressions daily, and by con-

necting these aspects of their identity they show how the intersections are
forms of strength. By bridging different activist communities together,
undocuqueers go beyond resistant cultural capital (such as protesting
discriminatory practices and spaces) to transgressive cultural capital (by
going beyond geographical and physical barriers to create fluid activist
spaces, and using playful imagery and symbols to represent their move-
ment). As Arrizón (2006) stated in a queer examination of Latin@ experi-
ences through Anzaldúa’s theorizing of the borderlands, “the queering of
mestizaje [mixed race] … represents the body as a border dweller capable
of constructing its own space” (p. 26). Using mestizaje as a theoretical
concept for populations from more than one culture or group experience,
undocuqueers are also border dwellers on multiple fronts who make space
for themselves in overlapping activist spaces. Showing both the playfulness
and seriousness of transgressions, undocuqueer activists create their own
physical and metaphorical spaces within activist communities and the USA
more broadly.
Additionally, undocuqueer activists strategically and playfully use
rhetoric from existing rights movements. LGBTQ rights activists created
National Coming Out Day in 1987, and undocuqueer activists began a
National Coming Out of the Shadows Day in 2010 (Chávez 2013). The
metaphor of the shadow, rather than the closet, is used as a metaphor
for immigrant people as they are often invisible to mainstream society
324 S.M. PENNELL
(Chávez 2013, p. 88). Hearkening to the freedom riders of the Civil
Rights Movement, some undocuqueer activists have an “undocubus” as
part of a “No Papers, No Fear” tour (http://nopapersnofear.org). While
the bus is a recognizable symbol of activism, the group added symbols par-
ticular to the undocuqueer experience. It is covered in butterflies, symbols
of migration and transformation, uniting the experiences of queer and
migrant. The slogan “No papers, no fear: Journey for justice” was written
in English on one side and Spanish on the other, as many undocumented
immigrants in the USA are from Latin America. The bus encompassed the
complexity, intersectionality, and creativity of the movement. It also high-
lights the queer transgressive cultural capital emphasis on space and play:
it has an emotional space in the collective memory of the USA, physically
moved through contentious spaces in the name of activism, and allowed
activists to playfully engage in civil disobedience with symbolic meaning.
APPLYING QUEER TRANSGRESSIVE CULTURAL CAPITAL

TO EDUCATION
Using the example of undocuqueer populations, we can see how a model

of queer transgressive cultural capital can affect how the topic is addressed
in the classroom. Some educators may use a model of gaps, and focus on
problems undocuqueer people face due to their interlocking oppressions,
such as lack of financial resources for college, lack of community for trans-
gender activists who are arrested and put in isolation rather than with oth-
ers of their gender, lack of access to health care, and lack of employment
protection. These are all important points of discrimination, and should
be understood by a general public who may not realize that undocuqueer
people face discrimination due to their race, ethnicity, citizenship status,
sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression in combina-
tion. Yet, if this is where the discussion ends, K–12 students or preservice
teachers may feel undocuqueer people have a solely negative experience,
and it may be difficult for them to see the positive aspects of their identity.
Applying queer transgressive cultural capital to an analysis of
undocuqueer activist movements, we can see the strengths inherent in this
group. Due to traveling in multiple activist spaces, undocuqueer activists
know how to navigate the leadership of LGBTQ, immigrant, labor, and
students’ rights groups. Networking is vital for activist communities, as
together these groups can share resources, contacts, and support. Because
undocuqueer activists lead intersectional lives, they are able to find the
“broadly resonant master frame[s] … associated with the practice of cross-

movement activism” (Carroll and Ratner 1996, p. 601). Furthermore,
because the movement is youth-led, these activists also navigate and cross
online spaces, which is becoming increasingly important for social activists
(Olsson 2008).
Looking to these strengths, teachers and teacher educators can exam-
ine the undocuqueer movement from a positive stance. K-12 students
can analyze the symbolism of the undocubus and transcripts of speeches
from National Coming Out of the Shadows Day to see where rhetoric
from multiple social movements was combined in sophisticated ways. This
would require students to practice a variety of skills, such as research, ana-
lyzing rhetoric, analyzing visual symbols, recognizing and understanding
historical references, and synthesizing information. These skills align with
Common Core State Standards Initiative (2010) for English Language
Arts, making the inclusion of undocuqueer activist movements in the cur-
riculum justifiable for teachers. Teachers can use standards such as “CCSS.
ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.3 Analyze how and why individuals, events,
or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text” and “CCSS.ELA-
LITERACY.CCRA.R.4 Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a
text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative mean-
ings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone”
(Common Core State Standards Initiative 2010).
Teacher educators could show their preservice teachers the strengths
of these individuals and communities, and how these strengths could be
applied advantageously in the classroom. Teacher educators could show
videos or bring in guest speakers who are undocuqueer activists, to model
for their preservice teachers how to demonstrate positive traits and skills
such as creativity, playful and sophisticated use of rhetoric, organizational
and community building techniques, the importance of historical knowl-
edge, and the value of networking across social groups. These are skills
that many teachers want their students to learn, and the undocuqueer
movement can be used as a positive example. Through their queer trans-
gressive cultural capital, the undocuqueer movement has proven that dif-
ferences are strengths, not weaknesses, and this is a positive example for
all students and educators. There may be undocuqueer students in the
classroom as well, though expecting these students to represent this group
is as problematic as asking any minoritized student to represent an entire
group. Additionally, undocumented students may not want to reveal their
citizenship status for fear of retribution.
326 S.M. PENNELL
Using the model of transgressive cultural capital will allow educators to

point out the positive aspects of minoritized populations and cross beyond
a discourse of gaps and deficits. It can be used with other positive models
such as Yosso’s cultural capital (2005) by focusing on the preexisting funds
of knowledge found within groups (Moll et al. 1992). It can show the
benefits of belonging to queer communities by analyzing documents and
speeches from activists. While queer communities do not need to include
activism to be valuable, these communities are easy to find information
on as they tend to provide it freely online making it accessible to teachers
and students. Again, if educators face opposition from administration for
including these groups in their curriculum, they can point out that the
inclusion of queer communities aligns to national standards. While this
alignment will not guarantee complete acceptance from cautious adminis-
trators, it can give educators a degree of protection.
CONCLUSION
Queer transgressive cultural capital is a concept that can be explored fur-
ther in education research, particularly how it can change the way teachers
and researchers view queer communities. It can be useful to scholars who
study queer communities and value intersectional work, as it highlights the
strengths that result from moving within several communities and move-
ments. Queer transgressive cultural capital can also inform future work
on research methods. While recognizing problems and personal struggles
of particular groups is important, this is not where our work should end.
Searching for the transgressive cultural capital within groups and social
movements can highlight the strengths that form as a direct result of a
complex identity. While here I have chosen to focus on one group in
particular, it can be applied to other queer intersectional groups, such as
the Combahee River Collective (1995), a black feminist, lesbian-inclusive
group of the 1970s.
As a queer education activist, I often speak to educators and students
about bullying and the dangers queer students face. But I am tired of talk-
ing only of problems, and queer transgressive cultural capital allows me
to speak of the strengths queer students possess. With queer transgressive
capital, queer students can be valued for their complex synthesizing and
analytical skills. Teachers can then encourage these ways of thinking and
working in their own students, using intersectional examples that lie out-
side of the traditional canon. As mainstream schooling normally focuses
on white people, this model also draws attention to other racial groups
who might otherwise be underrepresented, if represented at all. This can
allow teachers to resist and transgress the whitestreaming (Urrieta 2009)
of schools and approach social justice through their curriculum content
and framing. This framing of strength can give students hope and pride
more than statistics on bullying and dropout rates, by focusing on pos-
sibilities rather than problems. What boundaries might they cross and
dismantle using their own queer transgressive cultural capital? What new
spaces do the transgressed boundaries create? Among others, these ques-
tions will require further theoretical work and research on the topic of
queer transgressive cultural capital.
NOTES
1. For a discussion on queering Yosso’s (2005) five forms of capital, see
Pennell, S. M. (2016). Queer cultural capital: implications for education.
Race Ethnicity and Education, 19(2), 324–338.
2. I choose to use Latin@ rather than Latina/o in line with Latin@ activists
who use the “@” to signal gender neutrality and ambiguity (Rodríguez
2003).
REFERENCES
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands: The new mestiza = la frontera. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books.
Arrizón, A. (2006). Queering mestizaje: Transculturation and performance. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Babcock, B. A. (Ed.). (1978). The reversible world: Symbolic inversion in art and
society: Papers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of
theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Westport:
Greenwood Press.
Carroll, W. K., & Ratner, R. S. (1996). Master framing and cross‐movement net-
working in contemporary social movements. The Sociological Quarterly, 37(4),
601–625.
Chávez, K. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional pos-
sibilities. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Combahee River Collective. (1995). A black feminist statement. In B. Guy-
Sheftall (Ed.), Words of fire: An anthology of African-American feminist thought
(pp. 231–240). New York: The New Press.
328 S.M. PENNELL
Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010). Common core state standards for
English language arts. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-
Literacy/CCRA/R/
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Identity politics, intersectionality,
and violence against women. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Boston:
Beacon.
Kumashiro, K. (2001). Queer students of color and antiracist, antiheterosexist
education: Paradoxes of identity and activism. In K. Kumashiro (Ed.), Troubling
intersections of race and sexuality: Queer students of color and anti-oppressive edu-
cation (pp. 1–25). Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers.
Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for
teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms.
Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132–141.
Olsson, T. (2008). The practises of internet networking—A resource for alterna-
tive political movements. Information, Communication and Society, 11(5),
659–674.
Payne, R. (2005). A framework for understanding poverty. Highlands, TX: Aha!
Process.
Rodríguez, J. M. (2003). Queer Latinidad: Identity practices, discursive spaces.
Shore, E. (2013, March 11). Who are the “UndocuQueer?” New reports shed
light. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com
Solorzano, D. G., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2001). Examining transformational
resistance through a critical race and LatCrit theory framework: Chicana and
Chicano students in an urban context. Urban Education, 36(3), 308–342.
Urrieta, L. (2009). Working from within: Chicana and Chicano activist educators
in Whitestream schools. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
White, A., & Stallybrass, P. (1986). The politics and poetics of transgression. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Yosso, T. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of
community cultural wealth. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.
(Re)Fractioning Singularity
Erich N. Pitcher, Scotty M. Secrist, and Trace P. Camacho
Attempts to move away from viewing queer college students’ identities

in a singular fashion (e.g., sexual orientation) necessitates analytical, the-
oretical, and conceptual tools to understand the dynamic, multifaceted
features of identities. There are many potential tools to examine queer stu-
dents’ identities in non-singular ways. We propose the queered metaphor
of (re)fractioning singularity as a broad category of theoretical approaches
which includes, but is not limited to, Intersectionality, Model of Multiple
Dimensions of Identity, and Borderlands Theory.
Imagine a beam of white light passing through a prism. The prism refracts
or bends the light. When a prism refracts light, white light is broken, or frac-
tured, into the colors of the visible spectrum. What is often overlooked in
this process is that white light consists of various colors of light. We argue
that this image of light passing through a prism is an important metaphor
for thinking about queer college students’ identities. One’s use of lenses and
frames is like the light aimed at a prism. In this metaphor, prisms represent
students’ experiences with identity. If one only looks at the white light and
not what is refracted on the other side of the prism, the process of viewing
this breaking of light into the visible spectrum is ignored. (Re)fractioning
E.N. Pitcher () • S.M. Secrist • T.P. Camacho

Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

330 E.N. PITCHER ET AL.
singularity describes the act of bending or breaking singular notions of iden-

tity within research, theorizing, and praxis. By examining the ways that our
theoretical lenses bend light, we can illuminate the multiple identities of
participants.
In keeping with queer’s etymological roots, to soil or to ruin, we seek to
ruin singular notions of identity within queer studies in higher education.
Given that the study of identity is a hallmark of higher education research,
the use of theory and accompanying epistemological and ontological assump-
tions is important to scholars/practitioners alike. Often in higher education
research, theories of identity derive from psychological and human develop-
ment perspectives that assume identity progresses in a linear fashion through
a variety of stages (e.g., D’Augelli). Stage models create paths of appropriate
development, rendering paths not chosen as marginal. We argue that devel-
opmental models risk creating singular, legitimized ways of being and know-
ing identity that results in theories being taken up like a single beam of white
light that never (re)fracts to make multiple identities visible.
In this chapter, we encourage queer studies scholars in higher education
to deviate from normalized conceptualizations of identity and to (re)fract
singular notions of identity. Such deviations and refractions leave marks or
impressions in our field, and generate new or alternative lines of research,
which allow one to traverse new theoretical ground in unexpected ways
(Ahmed 2006). Returning to our queered metaphor, this chapter utilizes
the (re)fractioned light from the prism as the primary tool for (re)fractioning
the concept of identity as it is used in higher education research and student
affairs practice. Using this queer prism, we illustrate the multiple ways that
the concept of identity might be understood or interpreted. By examining a
single case through three different perspectives, we argue that each approach
offers a different level of theorizing the queer prism with Intersectionality
offering systems level analysis, the Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity
offering an individual-level analysis, and Borderlands Theory developing
ways to see individual, group, and systematic processes. We developed the
case for this chapter with data from the National Study of Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Student Success.1
INTERSECTIONALITY
In this section, we describe Intersectionality by presenting some consider-
ations in designing intersectional research and then apply Intersectionality
to a research case study. Intersectionality addresses the overlapping, mutu-
(RE)FRACTIONING SINGULARITY 331
ally reinforcing, and intersecting matrix of subordination that influences

the lived experiences of Black women which, at the time this framework
was developed, could not be easily understood within existing feminist
frameworks or antiracist frameworks (Hill Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1989).
Rather than viewing the experiences of Black women as racism plus sex-
ism, the goal of Intersectionality is to understand how a combination of
social forces (e.g., racism, sexism, and heterosexism) uniquely shapes the
experiences of Black women. Intersectionality draws attention to the ways
in which identities are dynamic, mutually constitutive, and socially con-
structed (Bowleg 2008; McCall 2005).
“Intersectionality refers to the interaction between gender, race, and
other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institu-
tional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these
interactions in terms of power” (Davis 2008, p. 68). Dill and Zambrana
(2009) described Intersectionality as “an innovative and emerging field
of study that provides a critical analytic lens to interrogate racial, ethnic,
class, physical ability, age, sexuality, and gender disparities and to contest
existing ways of looking at these structures of inequality” (p. 1). In other
words, Intersectionality takes a structural approach to examine the ways
in which social inequality and differences manifest in the lives of individu-
als and can make visible the effects of interlocking systems of oppression.
As Museus and Griffin (2011) note, intersectional analyses are not yet
common in higher education research. As Intersectionality is taken up in
higher education, a central concern is avoidance of co-option and misuse
of this perspective. Given our central argument that research in the area
of queer studies must not follow logics of singular notions of identity,
research that engages an intersectional perspective, is necessary, but must
attend to the history and theoretical roots of this perspective. In particu-
lar, in taking up this perspective, one must ask and answer intersectional
research questions, despite the challenges associated with that task. As
Bowleg (2008) contends, intersectional research must focus on measuring
meaningful constructs (e.g., experiences with racism) and feature ques-
tions that are designed with Intersectionality in mind (e.g., as a Black
queer woman). Warner (2008) suggests that researchers need to attend
to which identities one collects information about and why throughout
the research process. Categories of analysis cannot be left unexamined
and considering “master” categories (McCall 2005), such as sexuality or
gender, as having singular, fixed, and stable meanings is the antithesis to
a queer theoretical stance (Jagose 1996). Therefore, in conducting queer
research using an intersectional lens, continuous questioning of categories

and reexamining the ways the research maintains fidelity to this perspec-
tive become important touch points throughout the research process.
Having described this perspective, we now use this lens to examine the
case of Dorian, a Black/African American, gay man from a working-class
background. Dorian was a participant in the National Study of LGBTQ
Student Success, a research team that involves the authors. In examining
the transcript from Dorian’s interview through an intersectional lens, we
can articulate the ways that interlocking systems of oppression manifest
and continually reinforce each other in his life.
Dorian discussed his experience initiating and coordinating an orga-
nization called the Coalition for Queer People of Color. He described
his campus as having multiple resource centers that address the needs of
LGBTQ people, but he noted that, “none of them were … culturally com-
petent enough to be sensitive to the varying needs of LGBTQ students
of color.” His comments pointed to the ways that the systems of racism,
heterosexism, and genderism shape the experiences of LGBTQ Students
of Color in ways that White LGBTQ people simply do not experience.
Dorian described a key intervention that would have improved
his success in college by saying, “I would definitely have been bet-
ter served had I … would’ve been very much served by a life skills
course, I think, looking at how to—coming from a working-class back-
ground, I had no idea how to budget or how to finance.” Throughout
his interview, Dorian describes how he was able to access services for
sexually and racially diverse students, albeit in non-intersectional ways
(e.g., LGBTQ services or multicultural services), but that his need
to improve his skills around financial management was not addressed.
Intersectionality also allows us to see the need for a life-skills course
as deriving from a social class system that disadvantaged him, adding
another interlocking system of oppression that shapes his college expe-
rience. Taken together, Dorian’s narrative illustrates how the inter-
sections of various oppressive social systems shape his experience in
college. If we examined his experiences in college only through the
single lens of queer theory, the ways in which his race, social class,
and sexual orientation intersect would not have been nearly so visible.
What is made visible by our description of this case are the ways in
which the prism of Dorian’s identity allowed us to (re)fracture light
and make visible the ways in which larger systems of oppression shape
his experiences.
MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF IDENTITY

In this section, we describe the Model of Multiple Dimensions of
Identity, offer a brief critique, and apply this model to the case of Dorian.
While the theoretical construct of Intersectionality refers to the overlap-
ping, mutually reinforcing systems of subordination, Abes, Jones, and
McEwen’s (2007) reconceptualized Model of Multiple Dimensions of
Identity (MMDI) recognizes an individual’s multifaceted identity. The
MMDI was specifically developed for a higher education context. This
model examines the interaction between identities rather than to com-
partmentalize each identity, as developmental models often do (e.g.,
D’Augelli, Cass).
Jones and McEwen’s (2000) Model of Multiple Dimensions of
Identity posits that each identity is one piece of the larger puzzle that
makes up an individual’s whole identity. Three components comprised
the original MMDI: (1) a core understanding of one’s situated self, (2)
the role of the sociocultural context (sociocultural factors, personal aspi-
rations), and (3) the significant dimensions of identity orbit the core
self (Jones and McEwen 2000; Renn and Reason 2012). The multiple
identities intersect with each other and become more or less salient to
an individual depending on the context, family background, sociocul-
tural conditions, current experiences, career decisions, and life planning
(Jones and McEwen 2000).
Later Abes and colleagues (2007) reconceptualized the model by add-
ing a dynamic meaning-making filter. This meaning-making filter operates
between an individual’s self-perception of their multiple identity dimensions
and the contextual influence. The addition of the meaning-making filter
allowed for separating the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cognitive factors
involved in identity development (Abes et al. 2007). According to, within
the MMDI, “Cognitive growth leads to a more refined understanding of self
and others. In this sense, it is a driver of identity development, rather than
aspects of identity prompting increased cognitive complexity” (p. 167). In
other words, the meaning-making filter, or one’s capacity to make meaning
of the interactions of one’s self with contextual influences, is dynamic.
While the MMDI has certainly been helpful for advancing the study
of identity within higher education and student affairs, we describe three
potential pitfalls with this approach, particularly when pairing this perspec-
tive with a queer approach. First, the meaning-making filter represents a
cognitive component in identity development that relies on rationality and
assumes that an individual develops a more complex meaning-making filter

through increasingly more complex rationality. Queer theorists, however,
would question the centrality of rationality (Jagose 1996).
Second, this framework relies on a cognitive meaning-making filter that
is dynamic, but still suggests that the goal of identity development is a
specific growth direction. This growth leads to particular goals or paths
that have associated values. A concern with the creation of “good” devel-
opmental pathways is that when one deviates from the path, this devia-
tion becomes a matter of good and bad (Ahmed 2006). Thus, systems of
domination are not disrupted or critiqued in the MMDI as it provides a
specific script or direction to result in a specific kind of cognitive growth
(e.g., cognitive growth based on dominant rationality).
The third critique, and possibly most problematic assumption under-
girding the MMDI, is that it centers the individual as a unit of analysis.
The model posits that as the individual exists in a specific sociocultural
context, the person reads the environment around them, in doing so
they factor in their own perceptions of self, and grow cognitively to
account for incongruence between themselves and the environment.
We argue that while these influences shape how one understands their
identity, sociocultural processes create and limit identity possibilities for
individuals. Social forces make certain identities impossible, while others
are possible. With this model in mind, we return to the case of Dorian
to explain further.
Dorian is simultaneously a gay, Black, working-class man. Dorian
described the difficulty of attempting to bring his whole self to various
spaces. He described the experience of being examined as a racialized
being within the multicultural center, a gay man in the LGBTQ center,
and his whole self at an allies retreat where the full humanity of Dorian’s
multiple and intersecting identities were visible and possible. While the
MMDI certainly helps us as researchers to understand how the socio-
cultural contexts Dorian found himself in constrained his ability to fully
express himself, we come to realize through the use of the MMDI that
even if Dorian sees himself as a queer Black, working-class man every-
where he goes, others will only recognize him as what is allowable within
those spaces. While the MMDI does allow us to move past a singular
aim of identity theory, a limitation of this perspective is the inability to
create new identities outside of what is deemed acceptable within one’s
sociocultural context.
BORDERLANDS THEORY
In this section, we describe Borderlands Theory, describe the possibili-
ties this perspective brings, and then apply this perspective to Dorian’s
case. Borderlands Theory develops from the geographical space of the
US-Mexico border, a space where hybridity or la mezcla is possible and
where the “first and third worlds scrape together and bleed,” thus creat-
ing a distinctly border culture (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 25). A Borderlands’
perspective is a way to explore in the interaction between one’s queer
identity, racial/ethnic, gender, and other social identities (Anzaldúa
1987) thus bringing together a mixture of self, group, and systemic
dynamics. Within a Borderlands perspective, oppressions are not hier-
archical, static, or stable across time. Rather, oppressions are marked by
fluidity, taking on nuances within particular contexts. The Borderlands
perspective provides an opportunity to move away from binary opposi-
tions. Through this turn, Borderlands provides fruitful resonance with
queer approaches to research about the multiple identities of queer and
trans college students.
This third space between sociopolitical, economic, national, gender,
and sexual borders is an important, albeit, underrepresented, space of
research within higher education. This notion of the borderland becomes
a place of meaning making and identity negotiation and formation.
Anzaldúa proposes that a border is not a point of differentiation but rather
an in-between or liminal space of intersections and transformations that
illuminate systems of power which she refers to as a nepantla (Anzaldúa
1987; Lunsford 1998; Keating 2006; Hammad 2010).
Nepantla is also “the site of cultural production” (Lunsford 1998,
p. 6) and a place of “unarticulated dimensions of the experience of mes-
tizos living in between overlapping and layered spaces of different cul-
tures” (Anzaldúa, p. 176). Nepantla is both a place and a generative
process where transformations of one’s understandings of self and tol-
erance of ambiguities of identities occur (Keating 2006). Instability of
identity, unpredictability, and transition characterizes this process and
space. Living within Nepantla can shatter one’s self-identity and is often
described as chaotic and confusing (Keating 2006). Through nepantla
one can become nepantleras or those who facilitate passages between
worlds, often through processes of dis-identification and transformation
(Keating 2006). The key challenge facing “in-betweeners” is social con-
sequences of one’s inability or refusal to adhere to a singular notion
of identity (Keating 2006). Using Borderlands Theory in the study of

identity within higher education settings allows researchers to under-
stand social identities as not just intersecting and overlapping but also as
mutually constructed.
In viewing identities as in-between and ambiguous, researchers and
practitioners can consider how singular identities might come together to
form multiple and multiplied ways of being. In the case of queer individu-
als, one can begin to ask in what ways does one’s queer identity challenge
notions of what it means to be Latinx, for example. While this may seem
to create tensions between two identities, Borderlands highlights the arbi-
trarily constructed divisions between identities, and creates an opportunity
for a new identity to form, one that comes from straddling such arbitrary,
socially constructed divisions. This perspective allows researchers to see
the process of participants engaging in a third space of tension and trans-
formation. As Muñoz (2008) states “Borderland Theory creates a ‘space’
to grapple with our sense of self and the complexity of our multiple identi-
ties in an affirmative manner” (p. 8).
Returning again to the case of Dorian, he provides insightful commen-
tary on how his multiple identities cohere:
I definitely think socioeconomic status is very important to me. I come

from a working-class background. … Also I think ability as it pertains to
physical health, so also related to my socioeconomic status. For a long time
my family couldn’t provide health insurance to me and that was very trying
… having access to a limited number of health-related services that were
affordable and of quality became a huge struggle for me. I would say those
two identities pretty much—have been very salient to me as I navigate being
a college student: my socioeconomic status and ability as it relates specifi-
cally to physical health.
Dorian situates his identity at a border, a time/space of being, which he

calls “college student.” He describes how this socioeconomic status and
ability status create difficulties, gesturing toward a more physical manifes-
tation of what Anzaldúa describes as la frontera (1987). What we come
to understand about Dorian by applying Borderlands Theory is that his
salient identities come up against one another and illuminate the power
structures that create the individual manifestations of identity he describes.
The space where he explores his ability status and social class create pos-
sible sites of meaning making and transformation.
CONCLUSION
Renn (2010) argued that “there is much to be learned from studies that
use queer theory and studies that theorize on the nature of gender iden-
tity and sexuality as constructed in—and constructing—higher education
organizations and the experiences of people in them” (p. 137). We extend
Renn’s comments in stating that there is much to learn about queer sub-
jects and in queer studies in higher education when the theoretical and
analytical approaches follow (re)fracted notions of identities. As stated
earlier, identity plays a central role in higher educational research, from
professional organizations creating formal statements to guide the field,
to the theories that undergird student affairs practice.
In this chapter we drew on three perspectives that (re)fractioned sin-
gularity in considering the lives of queer and trans collegians within queer
studies in higher education. By drawing on Intersectionality, Model of
Multiple Dimensions of Identity, and Borderlands Theory, we sought
to show that queer studies in higher education must not take a singular
approach to the study of sexually and gender diverse individuals. The ideas
we advance here highlight the importance of queer studies scholars in
higher education refracting light through the prism of students’ existence
in order to make visible the various streams of identity. We demonstrated
this idea of (re)fractioning singularity through the experiences of our par-
ticipant, Dorian. Dorian’s case illuminates the multiple different readings
one can take in making sense of the experiences of our participants. Each
of the perspectives used here illuminated different aspects of his identity,
examining the structural, individual, and the interplay of these two levels
of analysis.
In closing, we seek to contribute to the existing dialogue in higher
education about the use of Intersectionality and the MMDI by explic-
itly connecting this dialogue with queer studies. We also advocate for the
increased use of Borderland Theories in conceptualizing students’ experi-
ence. We contend that research that seeks to move away from a singular
notion of identity must take serious the frameworks proposed here, and
elsewhere, throughout the entirety of the research process, from the initial
question, to the design, the development of instruments and protocols,
and in the analysis and presentation of one’s findings. While we advocate
for the use of these three perspectives in research about queer people in
higher education, we do so in a cautionary way.
We urge thoughtful consideration about the applicability of each of

these perspectives, encouraging scholars to read the primary texts, consider
the epistemological and ontological assumptions made, and to determine
the applicability to one’s research or praxis context. We also posit that by
first developing deeper conceptual and theoretical understandings of how
queer theory approaches (e.g., understanding how to resist and disrupt
singular, fixed, and stable notions of identity in research) and then pairing
this perspective with theories that describe identity categories as having
some material realities (e.g., Intersectionality) may enhance one’s theo-
retical and conceptual approach to the study of identity. In so doing, one
must also take serious the various dimensions of identity that constitute the
gendered and sexualized lives of the students one engages in their research.
NOTE
1. We would like to thank Drs. Renn and Woodford for their generosity in
allowing us to develop this chapter around the experiences of one of our
participants in the study.
REFERENCES
Abes, E. S., Jones, S., & McEwen, M. (2007). Reconceptualizing the model of
multiple dimensions of identity: The role of meaning-making capacity in the
construction of multiple identities. Journal of College Student Development,
48(1), 1–22.
Anzaldúa, G. E. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute.
Bowleg, L. (2008). When Black + Lesbian + Woman ≠ Black Lesbian Woman: The
methodological challenges of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality
research. Sex Roles, 59(5–6), 312–325.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black
feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist
politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–167.
Davis, K. (2008). Intersectionality as buzzword. Feminist Theory, 9(1), 67.
Dill, B. T., & Zambrana, R. E. (2009). Emerging intersections: Race, class, and
gender in theory, policy, and practice. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hammad, L. K. (2010). Border identity politics: The new mestiza in borderlands.
The Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 2(3),
303–308.
Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the
politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduction. New York: NYU Press.
Jones, S. R., & McEwen, M. K. (2000). A conceptual model of multiple dimen-
sions of identity. Journal of College Student Development, 41(4), 405–414.
Keating, A. (2006). From borderlands and the new mestizas to nepantlas and
nepantleras: Anzaldúan theories for social change. Human Architecture:
Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 4(3), 4–16.
Lunsford, A. A. (1998). Toward a mestiza rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on composi-
tion and postcoloniality. JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 18(1), 1–29.
McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, 30(3), 1771–1800.
Muñoz, S. M. (2008). Understanding issues of college persistence for undocumented
Mexican immigrant women from the new Latino diaspora: A case study (Doctoral
dissertation). Ames: ProQuest/Iowa State University.
Museus, S. D., & Griffin, K. A. (2011). Mapping the margins in higher education:
On the promise of intersectionality frameworks in research and discourse. New
Directions for Institutional Research, 2011(151), 5–13.
Renn, K. A. (2010). LGBT and queer research in higher education: The state and
status of the field. Educational Researcher, 39(2), 132–141.
Renn, K. A., & Reason, R. D. (2012). College students in the United States:
Characteristics, experiences, and outcomes. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Warner, L. R. (2008). A best practices guide to intersectional approaches in
psychological research. Sex Roles, 59(5–6), 454–463. doi:10.1007/s11199-008-
9504-5.
Religiosity
Tonya D. Callaghan
Religiosity stems from the Latin word “religiositas” (religiousness) and

refers to an affected or excessive religiousness or an inappropriate devotion
to some aspects of the rituals and traditions of a religion. It is an unfriendly
concept for many gender and sexually diverse people who are often the
brunt of religiosity that specifically targets gender and sexual expression
that religious believers consider to be nontraditional or not procreative.
Some members of religious groups oppose gender nonconformity and
sexual diversity because of a belief that “homosexual acts” and gender-
variant expression are immoral behaviors, or possibly illnesses, which can
be stopped or cured by sheer will or prayer. This opposition is tied to
sacred religious texts and grounded in what many religious people regard
to be a socially accepted prejudice (O’Donohue and Caselles 1993).
In their study of the relationship between homophobia and specific per-
sonality traits, psychologists Johnson, Brems, and Alford-Kenting (1997)
found statistical evidence to connect religiosity with the following: more
biased beliefs about the origins of homophobia; greater emotional dis-
tress such as fear and anxiety around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or
queer (lgbtq)1 people; less approval of human rights for lgbtq people; and
T.D. Callaghan ()

The University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

342 T.D. CALLAGHAN
greater overall homophobia. Social psychologist Wilkinson (2009) cau-

tions, however, that the relationship between religiosity and homophobia
is quite complex and requires a multidimensional analysis of an array of
attitudes associated with homophobia.
SCHOOLS
Religiosity is particularly problematic for gender and sexually diverse
teachers and students in faith-based schools where homophobic and
transphobic doctrines of the faith are more commonly enforced than
other prohibitive doctrines. For example, in Canadian Catholic schools,2
the subject of my research, Catholic doctrine, prohibits premarital sexual
relations as contrary to the Catholic faith; yet, heterosexual students and
teachers who engage in this activity are rarely if ever penalized for it.
On the other hand, lgbtq students and teachers who engage in what the
Catholic doctrine refers to as “homosexual genital activity” are summar-
ily disciplined in Catholic schools. My most recently completed study
(Callaghan 2012) shows that this discipline can take a myriad of forms
such as the firing of lesbian and gay teachers because they married their
same-sex partners; the firing of lesbian and gay teachers because they
wanted to have children with their same-sex partners; the firing of trans-
gender teachers for transitioning from one gender to another; the pro-
hibiting of gay and lesbian students from attending their high school
proms with their same-sex dates; the barring of students from appearing
in gender-variant clothing for official school photographs or functions
such as the prom dance; and the denial of students the right to establish
Gay–Straight Alliances, the in-school student clubs that aim to make
schools more welcoming for all students, regardless of their sexual ori-
entation or gender identity.
Canadian Catholic education leaders tend to enforce infractions hav-
ing to do with Catholic doctrine related to gender and sexual diversity
more than other elements of the doctrine pertaining to sexuality. For
those unfamiliar with Catholic doctrine regarding lgbtq people, who are
referred to in Catholic parlance as “persons with same-sex attraction,” it
can be distilled down to the colloquial Christian expressions of: “It’s okay
to be gay, just don’t act on it,” or “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” This
irreconcilable concept underlies curricular and policy decisions regarding
gender and sexual diversity and the existence of lgbtq people in Catholic
schools (Callaghan 2012).
RELIGIOSITY 343
This finding is corroborated by the National Catholic Reporter, an

American independent news source for Catholics and other interested
parties, which recently reported that religiously inspired firing of lgbtq
Catholics appears to be on the rise (Shine 2014). This independent jour-
nalistic outlet reports that, since 2008, approximately 40 lgbtq employees
within Catholic institutions in the USA have been fired, forced to resign,
or otherwise dismissed because they were living in a manner that Catholic
Church officials deemed to be contrary to Catholicity. Catholicity, or the
state of being in accordance with Catholic doctrine, is increasingly invoked
as a reason for discriminating against gender and sexually diverse individu-
als, as is religiosity in general (Baird 2007). Interestingly, Catholic doc-
trine also forbids the use of contraception and divorce, yet it appears that
a high percentage of married heterosexual teachers are keeping their jobs
in spite of deciding not to have children, or in spite of having miraculously
small families of only two or three children, or in spite of getting divorced.
POLICY
Catholic and non-Catholic schools alike often lack educational policies
written specifically to protect students, teachers, and others working
within school systems from discrimination on the basis of sexual orienta-
tion or gender identity (Goldstein et al. 2008). This is especially true for
faith-based schools where not only are such policies lacking but explicitly
harmful ones often exist. The problem is not limited to Catholic schools
and involves many kinds of religious schools. A case in point is Trinity
Western University (TWU), an evangelical Christian college in Langley,
British Columbia, Canada, whose mission is to “develop godly Christian
leaders” (TWU 2014, p. 1). TWU attracted the attention of the Canadian
news media after it won governmental approvals in December 2013 to
open a law school despite strong objections from lawyers, human rights
activists, civil liberties groups, and members of the general public because
the Christian college discriminates against gender and sexual minorities.
The discrimination comes in the form of a “community covenant” that
TWU enforces, which requires students and staff to respect the Biblical
decree that “sexual intimacy is reserved for marriage between one man
and one woman” (TWU 1999, p. 1). This community covenant actively
discourages lgbtq students from attending this Christian college and lgbtq
faculty from seeking employment there. Moreover, it reveals that TWU
will train lawyers who may be inclined to disregard Section 15, the equality
344 T.D. CALLAGHAN
rights provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982),

which protects against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
It seems ironic and contradictory for a law school to graduate law-
yers who may disregard the equality rights of lgbtq people due to per-
ceived conflicts with their religious beliefs and Canadian law. Lawyers are
expected to champion the rule of law and safeguard the rights and free-
dom of all persons. Lawyers should therefore respect all aspects of the law
in thought and in deed. Of course, it is important to remember that in
Canadian law the freedom to hold beliefs is broader than the freedom to
act on them—lawyers who graduate from TWU will be judged on their
conduct, not on their beliefs.
TWU is not the only Christian scholastic institution in Canada that
requires students and staff to adhere to a code of conduct that is dis-
criminatory toward gender and sexually diverse individuals. Several other
schools have similarly worded Christian “covenants” that have simply
gone unnoticed in Canadian culture primarily because of many Canadians’
deep respect for the fundamental freedom of religion, which is a constitu-
tionally protected right guaranteed by Section 2 of the Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedoms (1982). In addition to respecting the fundamental
freedom of religion, many Canadians regard the religiously inspired homo-
phobic discrimination occurring in publicly funded educational institu-
tions as a normal part of religious freedom that should not be challenged.
For example, in just one province east of TWU in British Columbia, the
province of Alberta is host to several cases of Christian schools writing
educational policy that overtly discriminates against non-heterosexuals.
One case in point is Prairie Christian Academy, an evangelical Christian
K–12 school in the southern Alberta town of Three Hills, which posted on
its website professional and ethical standards requiring teachers to “abstain
from homosexual relations” and “sexual relations outside the bonds of mar-
riage” (the document was later removed following extensive coverage in the
news media) (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2014, p. 1). Such “cov-
enants” are not confined to Christian schools in Alberta—Islamic schools
also prohibit students and faculty from engaging in homosexual behavior.
When the existence of such codes of conduct was brought to the attention
of the Government of Alberta, the Minister of Education at the time called
for a review of all educational policy in Alberta faith-based public schools
to ensure that it complies with Alberta human rights legislation (McClure
2014). No news is currently available regarding the status of this review.
RELIGIOSITY 345
CURRICULUM
Given that schools tend to lack educational policies that protect lgbtq
people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender
identity, it is equally rare to find mainstream curricular materials that men-
tion the existence of non-heterosexuals, and even more unlikely to find
any that present lgbtq people in a positive light by referring to their his-
torical and cultural contributions (Bickmore 2002). Curriculum theorists
refer to this kind of omission as a null curriculum—a marked absence that
shows what is actively not taught is just as important and revealing about a
culture as what is overtly taught (Eisner 2002; Flinders et al. 1986; Posner
1995).
The meager presence of queer positive curricula in public schools shows
that decisions about what should be taught in schools are made by people
in power whose perspective reflects that of the dominant culture. The het-
eronormative orientation of school curricula, policies, and practices is not
only about denying rights to gender and sexual minority groups but also
about centering and privileging heterosexuality as the norm.
RESEARCH
My ongoing research into religiously inspired homophobia in Catholic
school settings is unique in that I am one of the few anti-homopho-
bia education researchers willing to study faith-based schools. By con-
trast, early twenty-first-century educational researchers have diligently
chronicled the development of anti-homophobia education in public
schooling contexts in order to challenge institutionalized heteronorma-
tivity (Griffin and Ouellett 2003; Khayatt 2000; Kumashiro 2002; Lugg
2003; Martino and Frank 2006; Rodriguez and Pinar 2007). Although
some anti-homophobia concepts have been slowly infused into public
secular schools, introducing anti-homophobia education into Catholic
schools has been met with strong resistance (Bayly 2007). To my knowl-
edge, educational policies and curriculum related to non-heterosexuals
in Canadian Catholic schools, along with their effects on the experiences
of lgbtq individuals in those schools, have not been extensively studied
in the field of education. I therefore challenge anti-homophobia edu-
cational researchers to overcome their reluctance to include religious
schools in their studies.
346 T.D. CALLAGHAN
TEACHING
I am a course coordinator for a preservice teacher course called Diversity
in Learning at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education.
Being a course coordinator is a leadership role involving the collaborative
development of a common course outline for up to ten sections of the
course that will be delivered by different instructors with varying degrees
of experience. Diversity in Learning explores key topics in diversity educa-
tion from a critical social justice perspective. Critical social justice theo-
rists recognize inequality as deeply embedded within social structures and
actively seek to rectify this injustice. Course readings are informed by criti-
cal social theories that explore power and privilege in educational contexts
with a view toward thinking critically about the social context in which
people teach and learn.
The course presents religion as another form of diversity that needs
to be respected while simultaneously inviting students to understand the
concept of Christian privilege. It is a fine line to walk. The main message
I try to impart to my students is that we must respect religious beliefs
while also remaining critical of them. My general rule of thumb is that
we should respect religious beliefs, but when the expression of certain
religious beliefs calls for the suppression of someone else’s human rights
and also flies in the face of the laws of the land, then it is not reasonable to
defer to the expression of those questionable and illegal religious beliefs.
CONCLUSION
The infusion of religion in public schooling seems to be on the rise, includ-
ing in post-secondary institutions, which is surprising given that universities
are now more about reason than faith. This apparent rise is more evident
in primary and secondary schools, however. For example, my research
has shown that, in Canadian Catholic schools, punitive Catholic doctrine
pertaining to the behavior of lgbtq people began to be disseminated in
Catholic schools as a kind of backlash to the highly publicized advance-
ments of same-sex legal rights in Canada in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. Yet, even as religiosity may be on the rise, a counter-
movement of organized atheists is also developing that invites atheists to
meet for Sunday assembly just as many religious congregants do.
Because of the prevalence of homophobic and transphobic bullying in
public school settings, some government officials are calling upon educa-
RELIGIOSITY 347
tion leaders to ensure that educational policy and curriculum does not
discriminate against vulnerable gender and sexual minorities. Some school
administrators are designing more enlightened policy that aligns with
human rights legislation and others are continuing to deny that the prob-
lem exists. One way to convince the deniers is to conduct more educa-
tional research on the plight of gender and sexually diverse individuals in
religious school settings.
NOTES
1. Researchers who examine sexual and gender diversity in a variety of contexts
generally use the acronym LGBTQ (in upper case) because members of this
population often use the words that comprise the acronym to describe
themselves (Baird 2007). I transform the acronym into lower case because
it is less jarring to read and is less likely to linguistically set up the population
as an obvious Other. In North America, the lgbtq population is also referred
to as: “non-heterosexuals,” “gender and sexual minorities,” or “gender and
sexually diverse persons.” These latter terms are often more appropriate as a
label for those who have immigrated to North America from countries that
do not recognize lgbtq identities.
2. In Canada, Catholic schools have a long and somewhat complicated his-
tory, originating with Britain’s victory over France for the colonies of
North America in the early 1700s. The two main faith groups at the time
were Catholics and Protestants. As a concession to the faith group in a
minority position in any given community, a Separate School System was
established to ensure that Catholic families could send their children to
Catholic schools if living in a predominantly Protestant area and vice versa.
Separate schools currently have constitutional status in the provinces of
Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. Separate schools are operated by civil
authorities and are accountable to provincial governments rather than
church authorities. Religious bodies do not have a constitutional or legal
interest in separate schools and, as such, Canadian Catholic separate
schools are not private or parochial schools that are common in other
countries.
REFERENCES
Baird, V. (2007). The no-nonsense guide to sexual diversity (new updated ed.).
Toronto: New Internationalist.
Bayly, M. J. (Ed.). (2007). Creating safe environments for LGBT students: A catho-
lic schools perspective. New York: Harrington Park Press.
348 T.D. CALLAGHAN
Bickmore, K. (2002). How might social education resist heterosexism? Facing the
impact of gender and sexual identity ideology on citizenship. Theory and
Research in Social Education, 30(2), 198–216.
Callaghan, T. D. (2012). Holy homophobia: Doctrinal disciplining of non-
heterosexuals in Canadian Catholic schools (Doctoral dissertation). University of
Toronto, Canada. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1807/32675
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (2014, April 14). Publicly funded school
with anti-gay policy spurs Alberta review. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
News Calgary. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/
publicly-funded-school-with-anti-gay-policy-spurs-alberta-review-1.2610122
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (1982). Part I of the Constitution Act,
1982, RSC 1985, app. II, no. 44. Retrieved from http://laws-lois.justice.gc.
ca/eng/Const/index.html
Eisner, E. W. (2002). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation
of school programs (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Flinders, D. J., Noddings, N., & Thornton, S. J. (1986). The null curriculum: Its
theoretical basis and practical implications. Curriculum Inquiry, 16(1), 33–42.
Goldstein, T., Collins, A., & Halder, M. (2008). Anti-homophobia education in
public schooling: A Canadian case study of policy implementation. Journal of
Gay and Lesbian Social Services, 19(3 & 4), 47–66.
Griffin, P., & Ouellett, M. (2003). From silence to safety and beyond: Historical
trends in addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues in k-12
schools. Equity and Excellence in Education, 36(2), 106–114.
Johnson, M. E., Brems, C., & Alford-Keating, P. (1997). Personality correlates of
homophobia. Journal of Homosexuality, 34(1), 57–69. doi:10.1300/
J082v34n01_05.
Khayatt, D. (2000). Talking equity. In C. E. James (Ed.), Experiencing difference
(pp. 258–270). Halifax: Fernwood.
Kumashiro, K. (2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and antioppressive
Lugg, C. A. (2003). Sissies, faggots, lezzies, and dykes: Gender, sexual orienta-
tion, and a new politics of education? Educational Administration Quarterly,
39(1), 94–134.
Martino, W., & Frank, B. (2006). The tyranny of surveillance: Male teachers and
the policing of masculinities in a single sex school. Gender and Education,
18(1), 17–33. doi:10.1080/09540250500194914.
McClure, M. (2014, April 15). Faith-based schools under scrutiny: Province to
review enforcement of human rights. The Calgary Herald. Retrieved from
http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=562555ec-
beb1-49b2-9e6a-bd652a50efc4
O’Donohue, W., & Caselles, C. E. (1993). Homophobia: Conceptual, defini-
tional, and value issues. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment,
15(3), 177–195.
RELIGIOSITY 349
Posner, G. J. (1995). Analyzing the curriculum (2nd ed.). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Rodriguez, N. M., & Pinar, W. F. (Eds.). (2007). Queering straight teachers:
Discourse and identity in education. New York: Peter Lang.
Shine, B. (2014, September 25). Catholic jobs lost over lgbt issues on the rise.
National Catholic Reporter. Retrieved from http://ncronline.org/news/peo-
ple/catholic-jobs-lost-over-lgbt-issues-rise
Trinity Western University. (1999, January 5). Obeying the authority of scripture
(TWU core values statement series No. 1). Retrieved from https://www.twu.
ca/about/values/obey-scripture.html
Trinity Western University. (2014). The mission of Trinity Western University.
Retrieved from https://www.twu.ca/about/
Wilkinson, W. W. (2009). Religiosity, authoritarianism, and homophobia: A mul-
tidimensional approach. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion,
14(1), 55–67. doi:10.1207/s15327582ijpr1401_5.
Resilience
Rob Cover
Discourses of queer youth regularly represent non-heterosexual young

men as vulnerable and as victims who are inherently without strategies for
coping with adversity (qv. Rasmussen 2006; Marshall 2010; Driver 2008,
p. 3). Alternatively, queer youth are sometimes marked as fundamentally
resilient, as avid users of tools of resilience and community such as the
Internet (Smith and Gray 2009, p. 74; Wexler et al. 2009, p. 566; Hillier
and Harrison 2007; Bryson and MacIntosh 2010). In the latter approach,
protective factors are typically presented as specific to queer youth (e.g.,
Russell 2005, p. 10), therefore also minoritizing and essentializing resil-
ience. Both approaches ignore the diversity of queer young lives and the
capacity for a subject to be both vulnerable and resilient—concepts which
need to be unpacked if we are to further our understanding of minority
lives (Harvey 2012, p. 325). Significantly, both approaches also ignore
the fact that growing up occurs in a series of transitions, cultural encoun-
ters, and circumstantial changes. Queer—lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-
gender (LGBT)—youth are neither all victims and vulnerable, nor are
they all self-reliant and resilient. Recent research has indicated that non-
heterosexual youth continue to have a higher rate of suicide and self-harm
R. Cover ()
The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

352 R. COVER
(Cover 2012), although this is by no means indicative that vast numbers

of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex youth require support,
intervention, or preventative measures throughout all aspects of the tran-
sition into adult life.
In reconsidering the pedagogies of resilience and the resiliences of
pedagogies for and about queer youth, it is necessary to ask, firstly, what
human, psychological, and subjective “resilience” might be said to mean
in the context of public discourses of queer youth suicidality and, secondly,
what a concept of “resilience” does for queer youth identity in terms of
relationality and representations of “hope” for a liveable life. I will begin
with a brief overview of the different uses of resilience in the context of
broad social representations of queer youth and will critique this through
a discussion of the anti-suicide “It Gets Better” video site which aimed to
produce resilience among predominantly bullied queer youth by “teach-
ing hope” as a form, pedagogy, or condition of resilience.
RESILIENCE AND THE QUEER YOUTH SUBJECT

Developed by Crawford Holling in the 1970s, the concept of resilience
was used to describe the capacity of a system to “absorb change and dis-
turbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or
state variables” (Holling 1973, p. 14). In terms of ecology and the physi-
cal sciences, the notion of resilience operates within an assumption that
future events will not be known but will be unexpected, thereby requiring
a capacity to accommodate those events whatever form they take (p. 21).
When later used in the psychological sciences, the term resilience likewise
assumes disruption and uncertainty in lived experience, requiring a resil-
ient subject to be capable in both learning and adaptation. In the context
of queer youth, resilience, then, can be applied to mean an adaptation
to new situations which exacerbate vulnerability to suicidality for those
who are positioned to seek escape from intolerable emotional pain or the
perception of life as unliveable (Cover 2012, p. 148). Resilience in this
use presumes that, for example, bullying has a detrimental causal relation-
ship with suicidality when it newly occurs if the subject does not have the
capacity to adapt and incorporate it into everyday life. Bullying, however,
is generally related to suicide only by virtue of its ongoingness rather than
it being a sudden shift in social relations.
Striking about much of the discourse of resilience in the psychological
sciences is that the concept of resilience presumes a unitary subject who
RESILIENCE 353
is a subject prior to relationality and sociality (e.g., Leipold and Greve

2009; Singh et al. 2011; Smith and Gray 2009). Resilience is thus seen as
a capacity to cope with adversity as if adversity arises prior to the subject
rather than being a form of relationality that conditions the subject. In
that context, the queer youth subject is understood in essentialist terms,
whereby sexual subjectivity is represented simultaneously as both a norm
and abnormal, and is a factor of subjectivity that is understood to pre-
exist sociality. That is, the queer youth subject is queer before relationality
with others, thereby before the kinds of relationalities that might demand
resilience.
For scholar Michael Unger, there is a need to move beyond 1980s psy-
chosocial research which frames resilience within individualized concepts
of highly personal, essential capacities to resist or bounce back from threats
and risks throughout life. Instead, resilience can be defined through more
social and cultural perspectives as well as knowledge of the physical envi-
ronment in order to understand it as
a set of behaviors over time that reflect the interactions between individuals
and their environments, in particular the opportunities for personal growth
that are available and accessible. … The likelihood that these interactions
will promote well-being under adversity depends on the meaningfulness of
these opportunities and the quality of the resources provided. … [R]esil-
ience results from a cluster of ecological factors that predict positive human
development (more that individual traits), and that the effect of an indi-
vidual’s capacity to cope and the resources he or she has is influenced by the
nature of the challenges the individual faces. (Unger 2012b, p. 14)
In this context, resilience is interactional rather than a personal “asset”;

it is a shared quality by which individuals recover and sustain liveabil-
ity against threats through engagement with and by communities, cul-
tures, families, populations, and institutions. In the context of queer
youth, LGBT young persons in educational settings and the pedagogies
of sexualities more broadly, then, a contemporary approach to resilience
implies that both the young queer persons and the cultural environ-
ment—which may include communication forms such as film and tele-
vision media representation, online resources, social networks, and the
like, in addition to face-to-face, family, and institutional supports that
foster self-reliance—are both together implicated in forming an educa-
tional setting of resilience.
354 R. COVER
To take an ecological approach to resilience allows a reframing of queer

youth not as vulnerable because they are queer, but as subjects consti-
tuted in the (inequitably distributed) precarity of corporeal life in sociality,
and thereby already formed in (inequitably distributed) resilience to the
sorts of shifts, changes, and adversities that shift one from an experience
of vulnerability to an experience of a life that is unliveable (Butler 2004,
2009). Approaching queer youth suicide from a perspective not of risk
but through the simultaneous fostering and critique of resilience opens
the possibility of providing solutions that aid younger persons to resist
suicidality as a flight from intolerable pain without articulating the self as
inviolable and thereby losing the ethical value of the recognition of vulner-
ability. The question, then, is whether such critique can be found in sites
of resilience discourse in relation to queer youth.
Within a cultural and ecological approach to resilience, the very notion
of resilient self-management is pedagogical. Both integrated within and
separate from formal, tertiary, and institutional education, pedagogies can
be about the capacity to critique the conditions of liveability which, in this
case, includes the resilience against social factors that make certain queer
lives unliveable. Such critique can include finding and understanding
frameworks that help explain why some lives “are lived successfully despite
the threats people experience to their healthy psychosocial development”
(Unger 2012a, p. 2). For Unger, resilience is always about forms of learn-
ing, education, and pedagogy. If part of the capacity to develop resilience
occurs within the context of interactions between the self and the social,
then that includes a critical engagement with what resilience means.
Our sense of who we are, our identity as resilient or vulnerable, depends on

these processes of co-construction and negotiation. … The self is both what
we learn from the statements of others, as well as self-generated meaning-
making within culturally diverse social spaces that provide varying opportu-
nities for accessing the resources we need to experience resilience. Just as we
are influenced by the meaning systems of others, so too do we participate
in their co-construction which reflexively determines who we think we are,
what we value and how we behave. (Unger 2012b, p. 23)
In the context of the education frameworks through which resilience is

fostered, then, it is important to consider the ways in which the “self”
and young LGBT identities are produced as both “representation” and
“resource” in contemporary media, online sites, and other forms of
RESILIENCE 355
popular culture. For Henry Giroux, cultural sites such as media forms
are always pedagogical, operating alongside the work of educators but
most effective when critically engaging with the conditions of liveabil-
ity towards a politics of preventing the “making vulnerable” of subjects
(Giroux 2003, p. 14). This points to the need to understand the repre-
sentation and representability of queer youth as subjects of both vulner-
ability and resilience in order better to make sense of what constitutes
queer youth resilience.
QUEER YOUTH RESILIENCE, HOPE, AND REPRESENTATION

The video blogging site “It Gets Better” (http://www.itgetsbetter.org)
presents a useful example of the cultural representations and pedagogi-
cal resources designed to foster youth resilience, since it is grounded in
the notion of fostering “hope” as a key component of resistance to youth
suicidality. The site was begun by columnist Dan Savage in response to a
spate of reported queer student suicides in September/October 2010 in
the USA. The site hosts more than a thousand video contributions, many
from queer adults who seek to provide hope for younger persons by show-
ing that queer adulthood is markedly different from the experiences of
harassment, bullying, loneliness, or surveillance experienced by queer
youth in school and family environments. This is among the first widely
available communicative media form to address directly queer youth on
issues related to suicide and the first to draw on lived experiences as a
means by which to provide resources for queer youth resilience. The fact
that these experiences are related through video logs (vlogs) provides the
texts with a greater sense of authenticity and a framework which often
addresses youth directly on the topic of suicidality (Cover 2012).
Savage’s intention was to produce resilience in queer youth by impart-
ing “hope for young people facing harassment” and to create “a personal
way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that … it does indeed
get better” (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-
project/). Hope, in this context, it is represented as the core attribute of
queer youth resilience. The tag line of the site is:
Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly
gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them
what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for
them. (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/)
356 R. COVER
Hope for the future is frequently presented as hope for an end to school
days. In the primary video of the site, Dan Savage’s partner Terry describes
his school experiences:
My school was pretty miserable. … I was picked on mercilessly in school.

People were really cruel to me. I was bullied a lot. Beat up, thrown against
walls and lockers and windows; stuffed into bathroom stalls. … Honestly,
things got better the day I left high school. I didn’t see the bullies every
day, I didn’t see the people who harassed me every day, I didn’t have
to see the school administrators who would do nothing about it every
day. Life instantly got better. (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/
about-it-gets-better-project/)
Such comments present a picture of school life in which the institutional

norms of secondary schools that depend so heavily on surveillance, dis-
criminative norms, economies of secrecy, and disclosure permit bullying
and ostracization to flourish and become, then, the site of hopelessness
in what to many appears at the time as a period of never-ending perma-
nency. Indeed, teenaged life has often been figured in geographic terms as
a kind of hopeless banishment from the realities that are yet to come: Eve
Sedgwick referred to that period as “that long Babylonian exile known as
queer childhood” (1993, p. 4). The emphatic focus on the institutional
environment of high school rather than family, rural towns, closetedness,
religious discourse, or feelings of isolation is remarkably important in
changing the contemporary way in which the social situation of queer
youth suicide has been depicted. The discourse of the “It Gets Better
Project” and contributions makes “school” its object—a site that demands
resilience of its queer students as the remedy to the detrimental effects of
bullying. Here, however, resilience is not depicted as adaptability but the
strength to tolerate and, effectively, “wait out,” a bullying environment.
The focus on bullying that frames the dialogue on queer youth sui-
cide and youth resilience in the “It Gets Better” videos is the product of
a mid-2000s shift in focus to the effects of bullying on LGBT youth in
place of critiques of heterosexism, sexual identity, coming out, and physi-
cal violence (Fodero 2010), regularly depicting bullying as directly causal
of suicide (Kim and Leventhal 2008, p. 151; Espelage and Swearer 2008,
p. 157; Hegna and Wichstrøm 2007, p. 35). Bullying, in these representa-
tions, is articulated as that which is, on the one hand, preventable through
punitive institutional policies and, on the other, as an ineradicable fact
RESILIENCE 357
of living through school years. It is, in the latter depiction, that expe-
rience for which younger LGBT persons must manage their own resis-
tance. In depicting school as the site of anti-queer bullying, the “It Gets
Better Project” represents queer youth as losing hope of escape from the
intolerable pain of bullying in its persistence and repetition. However, the
site’s purpose is to show that escape from the school environment to what
is regularly depicted as a neoliberal, white, and affluent representation
of queer adulthood, founded on conservative coupledom (Cover 2010),
careers, urban living, and relative wealth—depictions somewhat different
from the reality of diverse queer lives. The shift from the school bullying in
queer youth to the liberal stability of queer adulthood is figured in the “It
Gets Better” discourse as not only possible but also as that which should
be anticipated. It is in that anticipation that resilience is articulated in a
way which calls upon queer youth to manage their own resiliency by hav-
ing or performing hopefulness.
Representing hope as the performative element in queer youth resil-
ience has precedence as a suicide prevention strategy. Hopelessness is a
key factor in much of the contemporary academic discussion of suicide
risk in general and is often used as a predictor for recognizing suicidal
behaviour (Battin 1995, p. 13), although it is also particularly associated
with suicidality and queer teenagers. Hopelessness is usually understood as
despair or desperateness, the lack of expectation of a situation or goal one
desires or feels one should desire. For Holden and colleagues, hopeless-
ness is counter to social desirability, which is understood as the capacity
to describe oneself in terms by which society judges a person as legitimate
or desirable (Holden et al. 1989, p. 500). Psychological and psychiatric
measurement techniques frequently rely on Aaron T. Beck’s Hopelessness
Scale, which utilizes a twenty-question true/false survey designed to mea-
sure feelings about the future, expectation, and self-motivation in adults
over the age of 17 years as a predictor of suicidal behaviour. Beck and col-
leagues attempted to provide an objective measurement for hopelessness
rather than leave it treated as a diffuse and vague state of feeling in patients
with depression. The tool asks a series of questions, most about the future,
presenting a score on whether or not the answers given were true or false
(Beck et al. 1974). While the questions and the scale are not used uncriti-
cally, the relationship between the discursive construction through the
questions of what constitutes hopelessness and the aims of the “It Gets
Better” videos are notably comparable. The objective, then, of the videos
is to provide evidence of hope and instil it such that hope and the future
358 R. COVER
are concomitant entities that produce resilience. As Rebecca in the intro-

ductory statement of another video contribution put it:
You may be feeling like this pain will last forever, like you have no control,
it’s dark, oppressive and feels like there is no end. I know—I get it. But I
promise … hang in there and you’ll find it. … Wait—you’ll see—it gets bet-
ter! (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/video/entry/wxymqzw3oqy/)
As can be seen, such video examples respond to a discourse of hopeless-

ness aligned with the framework exemplified by Beck’s scale, prompting
queer youth audiences of these videos to imagine a future for themselves,
to understand hope in temporal terms of future wellbeing, and to know
that the future does not necessarily hold the same kinds of unpleasantness
as experienced in the everyday high school environment.
IDENTITY, SEXUALITY, RESILIENCE

An issue emerges for how queer youth suicide is understood within this
particular formation that posits non-heterosexuality as problematically
vulnerable (non-resilient) to suicide emerges in the assumption of resil-
ience as “lack.” This ignores the opportunity to think through the condi-
tions of queer youth in terms of the interaction between different facets of
identity (such as gender and ethnicity, but also personal experience), dif-
ferent contexts in which identity is performed, and different institutional
settings that vary in response and valuation of non-normative aspects
of subjectivity, thereby allowing a vulnerability not to be an attribute of
being a queer youth but to be understood as produced across a nuanced
and complex array of factors. While the traditional approach to resilience
invokes both an individualization of the subject and a disciplinary regime
of pastoral care, queer youth in the “It Gets Better” discourse of hope are
depicted multiply—inherently vulnerable and lacking resilience at the first
level, constituted in a relationality within a schooling environment that
fails to provide the ecological resources for resilience and self-reliance at a
second level, and thirdly, as a group of persons who are only able to find
and develop resilience by looking beyond school.
What the discourse of that which we might refer to as “resilient hope-
fulness” does is represent queer youth reductively as inherently non-
resilient. It ignores the multiple expressions of sexual identity, the capacity
to respond to suicidality through a critique of normative sexual subjectiv-
RESILIENCE 359
ity, and the capabilities of queer youth to develop meaningful relationships

across all sexual possibilities that are, themselves, forms of resilience or at
least mitigations of vulnerability. At the same time, “resilient hopefulness”
is produced within a context in which a normative sociality of bullying cul-
ture is expressed as timeless and unchangeable (rather than historical and
institutional), thereby requiring queer younger persons to learn through
institutional education and broader cultural pedagogies the skill of manag-
ing vulnerability, risk, resilience, and identity as an individualized responsi-
bility outside of communities of care.
REFERENCES
Battin, M. P. (1995). Ethical issues in suicide. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Beck, A. T., Weissman, A., Trexler, L., & Lester, D. (1974). The measurement of
pessimism: The hopelessness scale. Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, 42(6), 861–865.
Bryson, M., & MacIntosh, L. (2010). Can we play “fun gay”?: Disjuncture and
difference, and the precarious mobilities of millennial queer youth narratives.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life. London: Verso.
Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? London/New York: Verso.
Cover, R. (2010). Object(ives) of desire: Romantic coupledom versus promiscuity,
subjectivity and sexual identity. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural
Studies, 24(2), 251–263.
Cover, R. (2012). Queer youth suicide, culture and identity: Unliveable lives?
London: Ashgate.
Driver, S. (2008). Introducing queer youth cultures. In S. Driver (Ed.), Queer
youth cultures (pp. 1–18). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Espelage, D. L., & Swearer, S. M. (2008). Addressing research gaps in the inter-
section between homophobia and bullying. School Psychology Review, 37(2),
155–159.
Fodero, L. (2010, October 1). Teen violinist dies after student internet lark. The
Age. Retrieved from http://www.theage.com.au/world/
Giroux, H. A. (2003). Public pedagogy and the politics of resistance: Notes on a
critical theory of educational struggle. Educational Philosophy and Theory,
35(1), 5–16.
Harvey, R. (2012). Young people, sexual orientation, and resilience. In M. Unger
(Ed.), The social ecology of resilience: A handbook of theory and practice (pp. 325–
335). New York: Springer.
Hegna, K., & Wichstrøm, L. (2007). Suicide attempts among Norwegian gay,
lesbian and bisexual youths: General and specific risk factors. Acta Sociologica,
50(1), 21–37.
360 R. COVER
Hillier, L., & Harrison, L. (2007). Building realities less limited than their own:
Young people practising same-sex attraction on the internet. Sexualities, 10(1),
82–100.
Holden, R. R., Mendonca, J. C., & Serin, R. C. (1989). Suicide, hopelessness, and
social desirability: A test of an interactive model. Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology, 57(4), 500–504.
Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual
Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23.
Kim, Y. S., & Leventhal, B. (2008). Bullying and suicide. A review. International
Journal of Adolescent Medical Health, 20(2), 133–154.
Leipold, B., & Greve, W. (2009). Resilience: A conceptual bridge between coping
and development. European Psychologist, 14(1), 40–50.
Marshall, D. (2010). Popular culture, the “victim” trope and queer youth analyt-
ics. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(1), 65–86.
Rasmussen, M. L. (2006). Becoming subjects: Sexualities and secondary schooling.
Russell, S. T. (2005). Beyond risk: Resilience in the lives of sexual minority youth.
Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education, 2(3), 5–18.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Queer performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.
GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1(1), 1–14.
Singh, A. A., Hays, D. G., & Watson, L. S. (2011). Strength in the face of adver-
sity: Resilience strategies of transgender individuals. Journal of Counseling and
Development, 89(1), 20–27.
Smith, M. S., & Gray, S. W. (2009). The courage to challenge: A new measure of
hardiness in LGBT adults. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, 21(1),
73–89.
Unger, M. (2012a). Introduction to the volume. In M. Unger (Ed.), The social
ecology of resilience: A handbook of theory and practice (pp. 1–9). New York:
Springer.
Unger, M. (2012b). Social ecologies and their contribution to resilience. In
M. Unger (Ed.), The social ecology of resilience: A handbook of theory and practice
(pp. 13–31). New York: Springer.
Wexler, L. M., DiFluvio, G., & Burke, T. K. (2009). Resilience and marginalized
youth: Making a case for personal and collective meaning-making as part of
resilience research in public health. Social Science and Medicine, 69(4),
565–570.
Safe Space
Christine Quinan
Like many other contributors to this volume, my teaching philosophy is

shaped by a queer pedagogical praxis; that is, it is fundamentally struc-
tured around an acknowledgment and questioning of privilege, hierar-
chy, and traditional approaches to learning and teaching alongside an
interrogation of what it means to speak and be heard within both edu-
cational institutions and queer communities. The classroom is a space
of both critical inquiry and emotional involvement, a space that we all
negotiate differently depending on learning styles and abilities, levels
of comfort in speaking, relationships to English, feelings toward aca-
demic “jargon,” and opinions on the oft-confining physical classroom,
among other factors. Here, the creation of spaces where students can
ask critically minded questions and express their opinions on contro-
versial topics becomes essential. In recognizing the classroom as a space
of vulnerability, the concept of “safe space” may prove helpful yet also
potentially problematic. Because what is safe for some is certainly not for
others and because “safety” is a privilege to which not all have access, can
safe spaces exist? In negotiating this question, Annette Henry’s (1994)
words remain prescient: “There is nothing ‘safe’ about engaging stu-
C. Quinan ()
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

362 C. QUINAN
dents in rigorous and critical ways. It seems to me that to be able to

speak of safety in the ‘belly of the beast’ reveals class and race privilege.
Only a certain elite has the privilege of cultivating a safe space in main-
stream institutions that perpetuate the very inequities which we fight
against as feminist educators” (p. 2). What, then, are our responsibilities
as queer educators in creating certain types of environments? In queer
pedagogy, should we be wary of a discourse of “safety” that may feed
into neoliberal focuses on security and surveillance? What tools can we
use to challenge this rhetoric while maintaining a focus on the politics of
speaking and being heard?
Of course the notion of safety has long been at the heart of feminist
and queer activism and scholarship, with first Women’s Studies and then
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies programs being in
part born out of a need for safe spaces in heteronormative male-centered
academic institutions. But when it comes to the concept of “safe space,”
where are we now? It often seems that the term has become a catchall for
discussing the type of teaching and learning environment we think we
should strive for, but it often goes unexplained and sometimes unques-
tioned; indeed, we may believe that our job as queer educators involves
attempting to create such safety and security for students to engage with
personally and academically challenging, triggering, and eye-opening
material. Consequently, it becomes important to ask what is at stake
in making use of this concept to create spaces to which marginalized
subjects may turn to be heard and witnessed, to express defiance, or to
be their authentic selves free from the strictures of traditional learning
environments.
As Lauren Berlant (2001) notes, we have long been encouraged to
seek out the safe spaces, those spaces “where there is no trouble.”1 But
this desire for spaces free from emotional pain or societal control is no
less than a “foggy fantasy.” Even still, we may not be so quick to discard
the concept of “safe space,” which, for many of us, may have served as a
pedagogical security blanket in an otherwise violent world. Thus, even
if we maintain an interest in creating such intentional spaces (even as we
acknowledge their impossibility), it seems we cannot hope to construct
environments in which there are no moments of discomfort, fear, con-
tention, or stress. The queer studies classroom is not—cannot be—such
a space “where there is no trouble.” Instead, such learning requires, to
paraphrase Donna Haraway, a “staying with the trouble.”
SAFE SPACE 363
Building upon this tension, Audrey Thompson summarizes one of the

key debates around safe spaces:
The solemnity with which teachers, students, and researchers invoke the
ideal of a ‘safe space’ suggests that there are literal pedagogical conditions
under which students can be free from self-doubt, hostility, fear, or non-
affirmation. … [But] what we count as ‘safe’ is an imaginary construction
reliant on ritualized forms of control. … Safety from overt harm that is
framed in terms of civility … allows us [to] imagine a ‘normal’ student and
extend some of his needs to other students (cited in Stengel and Weems
2010, pp. 505–506).2
Indeed, an uncritical or unreflective use of safe spaces often suggests the

(desired) absence of difficulty or debate. For example, we often avoid “dif-
ficult dialogues” around difference. As Gale Young (2003) writes, “This
‘code of silence’ is a reflection of a societal denial that cultural factors
matter and that such things as sexism, racism, and White privilege exist.
To avoid feeling awkward or making others uncomfortable, faculty often
perpetuate the code of silence” (p. 349). Although it is our responsibil-
ity to address such silences, we often do not know how, with “safe space”
being a convenient cover for not discussing certain topics.
Even as we reject the idea that the classroom could ever be fair, demo-
cratic, and devoid of power relations, we must interrogate our respon-
sibility as queer educators to queer students, transgender and gender
nonconforming students, and students of color. Because the world “out
there” is indeed violent and unsafe, should we strive to create environ-
ments that are zones of acceptance and safety? As Melissa Redmond
(2010) echoes, “in spite of racism, sexism, caste, ableism, heteronorma-
tivity, and other oppressive systems, can students and teachers construct
‘intentional spaces’ in which they engage to learn and un-learn their
lives?” (pp. 8–9). For queer studies courses in particular, it is important
to acknowledge that the process that many students undergo, in which
their perspective may dramatically shift, often to a point of no return, is
necessarily an uncomfortable—if not also contentious and stressful—expe-
rience. Megan Boler’s “pedagogy of discomfort” (1999) remains a useful
concept in that it encourages us to sit with our emotions and discomfort
around discussing oppression and social injustice, including homopho-
bia and racism, with the goal of creating social change and new ways of
relating to one another. Boler (2000) elaborates elsewhere: “a discussion
364 C. QUINAN
of racism or homophobia cannot rely simply on rational exchange, but

must delve into the deeply emotional investments and associations that
surround perceptions of difference and ideologies. One is potentially faced
with allowing one’s world-views to be shattered, in itself a profoundly
emotionally charged experience” (p. 325).
Further, even as we may recognize a need for open spaces where stu-
dents can think through challenging material and difficult emotions, we
might also be skeptical of deploying a neoliberal rhetoric of “safety” and
“security” that many of us as queer scholars and pedagogues want to dis-
mantle. Indeed, we might wonder if encouraging safe spaces (or at least
terming them so) is feeding into a neoliberal focus on safety and exclu-
sionary practices. If we see neoliberalism for what it is—ideologies and
policies that destroy resources created for vulnerable populations, redis-
tribute wealth away from the poor and to the elite, strip away achievements
made by social movements, and increase criminalization and immigration
enforcement (Bassichis et al. 2011)—it is worth being wary of using a dis-
course of safety and security when we speak of creating intentional spaces
free of violence and discrimination.
In her discussion of the gendered aspects of security and safety in neo-
liberal times, Inderpal Grewal (2006) states that the contemporary issue
of security/insecurity pervading American politics forces us to think about
feminisms “in newly urgent ways” (p. 25). Similarly, we might consider
how the increased focus on secure spaces prompts timely reflections for
queer theory and pedagogy. Grewal goes on to ask: “How do we under-
stand what is happening with feminism when feminist discourses are used
to bomb and to liberate, when feminist discourses, strategies, and injuries
become available in new and unintended ways to empower, to secure,
and to destroy?” (p. 25). And we might ask the same question of queer
studies, particularly as we witness the ways in which homonationalist dis-
courses have been taken up to bolster homeland security at the expense of
other groups and nations who are constructed as backward, retrogressive,
and homophobic. Even as it may claim that they are fluid and permeable,
neoliberalism delineates the borders and boundaries of the public and the
private, reifying divisions between insiders and outsiders, us and them.
Who, then, is deemed worthy of safety and protection? And from whom?
At whose expense does the security of some come?
Queer pedagogy aims to open up dialogue and resist essentializing
notions while taking a long critical look at processes of normalization
through which we are consistently constructed. We are forced to question
SAFE SPACE 365
the student/instructor relationship and to be critical of pedagogy itself.

Bryson and de Castel’s (1993) commentary on queer pedagogy and praxis
further elucidates what we might hope for from a critically queer approach
to teaching and learning:
Queer pedagogy could refer to the deliberate production of queer relations

and to the production of subjectivities as deviant performance—that is to
say, to a kind of postmodern carnivalesque pedagogy of the underworld,
as agitation <implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in the
production of so-called normalcy in schooled subjects> …. It seems that a
worthwhile avenue for the elucidation of a queer praxis might be to con-
sider the value of an actively queerying pedagogy—of queering its technics
and scribbling graffiti over its texts, of colouring outside the lines so as to
deliberately take the wrong route on the way to school—going in an alto-
gether different direction than that specified by a monologic destination.
(pp. 298–299)
Following in this line of queer pedagogy, it is integral to discuss the

dynamics of the classroom itself, that is, what the space becomes and what
we all become within it. The question of who is allowed and encouraged
to speak and who is being heard (and not heard) is also central to this dis-
cussion. While the concept of “student voice” and the idea of “helping”
students speak has been shown to be problematic (Ellsworth 1989), listen-
ing—to ourselves and to one another—is, I believe, at the heart of a queer
pedagogical approach. One of the pedagogical challenges encountered in
disciplines like queer studies that attempt to question and subvert pre-
conceptions about the world around us is that we inevitably approach the
material with particular assumptions, beliefs, and values. And we all speak
from a certain subject position that is an accumulation of our upbringing
and our past and present experiences. It remains important for each of
us—instructor included—to examine our own subject positions and how
it structures our worldview. Pointing out the myriad social categories that
we all inhabit and then together reflecting on how our own subjectivity
is composed of various intersecting identifications, many of which carry
with them certain invisible privileges that affect not only our daily lives
but also our presence in the classroom, can be a strategy for encourag-
ing open-minded speaking and listening. However, safe space may not be
able to save us here, for queer studies and queer pedagogy are themselves
“unsafe” projects in that they seek to upend norms, question authority,
and dismantle identity categories.
366 C. QUINAN
But perhaps it is through discarding illusions of safety that we may

approach something closer to open dialogue that takes at its core respect,
curiosity, and the possibility for growth. As Gloria Anzaldúa (2002) writes:
[T]here are no safe spaces. “Home” can be unsafe and dangerous because
it bears the likelihood of intimacy and thus thinner boundaries. Staying
“home” and not venturing out from our own group comes from wounded-
ness, and stagnates our growth. To bridge means loosening our borders,
not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the
stranger, within and without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped
of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and
does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that
we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk
being wounded. (p. 3)
And it is in Anzaldúa’s accurate admission that there are no safe spaces

that I grow all the more hesitant to throw away the concept and the hope,
for it is through stepping across the threshold and risking being wounded
that we grow. Queer pedagogy calls us to critique the concept of “safe
space” even as we strive toward an inclusivity and safety that will never
actually exist. Because of what queer pedagogy does, it becomes an impor-
tant method for simultaneously subverting the notion of “safe space” and
holding onto it for dear life.
Susanne Luhmann (1998) forces us to think critically about our work
as queer teachers and researchers:
If queer pedagogy … is foremost concerned with a radical practice of decon-

structing normalcy, then it is obviously not confined to teaching as, for, or
about queer subject(s). Moreover, the refusal of any normalization, be it
racist, sexist, or whatever, necessarily has to be part of the queer agenda.
… [Q]ueer theory must persist in self-critiques and hence reflect on how
normalization may also constitute lesbian and gay studies. (pp. 128–129)
This focus on self-critique must be key to our engagement with ambigu-

ous and ambivalent concepts like “safe space.” Just as engaging in meta-
discursive practices that name and discuss the power relations, hierarchies,
and processes we are bound up in may have a liberatory dimension, per-
haps repeatedly critiquing the notion of “safe space” in the classroom—
invoking its impossibility because we are constructed by the world outside
wherein our ancestral lineage and the existence of oppression, violence,
SAFE SPACE 367
white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, racism,

and ageism are passed to us—could get us to a safer space. Indeed, I echo
Bryson and de Castel’s call for embracing imperfection as we negotiate
this quagmire of safety: “praxis makes im/perfect; that is to say, an eclectic
melange of the wonderful, the awful, and the in-between. And perhaps, in
pedagogical matters, im/perfect outcomes are necessarily the norm. Just
as ‘safe sex’ has been discredited, there may … be no such thing as a ‘safe
pedagogy.’ But what about the notion of a ‘safer’ pedagogy?” (p. 300).
NOTES
1. Although Berlant here refers to heterosexual intimacy, it is not so difficult to
apply this notion to “other” sexualities, particularly at a time when gay
rights discourses occupy the American newsreel.
2. Thompson extends her argument to more radical ideas of safe spaces, which
may “attempt to recognize terms of safety referenced to the situations of
oppressed and marginalized students” (cited in Stengel and Weems 2010,
p. 506). But echoing Berlant, she states that even though “such spaces may
feel safe, the safety is nevertheless imaginary insofar as it is framed by what
we desire, resist, fear, and ‘need.’ … [R]eimagining educative safety requires
playing with and against our existing desires, fears, assumed needs” (Stengel
and Weems 2010, p. 506).
REFERENCES
Anzaldúa, G. (2002). (Un)natural bridges, (un)safe spaces. In G. Anzaldúa &
A. Keating (Eds.), This bridge we call home: Radical visions for transformation
Bassichis, M., Lee, A., & Spade, D. (2011). Building an abolitionist trans and
queer movement with everything we’ve got. In E. A. Stanley & N. Smith
(Eds.), Captive genders: Trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex
(pp. 15–40). Oakland: AK Press.
Berlant, L. (2001). The subject of true feeling: Pain, privacy, and politics. In
A. Sarat & T. Kearns (Eds.), Cultural pluralism, identity politics, and the law
(pp. 49–84). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York: Routledge.
Boler, M. (2000). All speech is not free: The ethics of “affirmative action peda-
gogy”. Philosophy of Education, 321–329.
Bryson, M., & de Castel, S. (1993). Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect.
Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’éducation, 18(3),
285–305.
368 C. QUINAN
Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the
repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3),
297–324.
Grewal, I. (2006). “Security Moms” in the early twentieth-century United States:
The gender of security in neoliberalism. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly,
34(1&2), 25–39.
Henry, A. (1994). There are no safe places: Pedagogy as powerful and dangerous
terrain. Action in Teacher Education, 15(4), 1–4.
Luhmann, S. (1998). Queering/queerying pedagogy? Or, pedagogy is a pretty
queer thing. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 120–132).
Redmond, M. (2010). Safe space oddity: Revisiting critical pedagogy. Journal of
Teaching in Social Work, 30, 1–14.
Stengel, B. S., & Weems, L. (2010). Questioning safe space: An introduction.
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29, 505–507.
Young, G. (2003). Dealing with difficult classroom dialogue. In P. Bronstein &
K. Quina (Eds.), Teaching gender and multicultural awareness (pp. 347–360).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Scavenging as Queer Methodology
Jason P. Murphy and Catherine A. Lugg
Queer Theory (QT), and its similarly disruptive offspring Queer Legal
Theory (QLT), have both been “latecomers” to educational scholarship.
Partially, this has been due to the entrenched homophobia of the field
(Harbeck 1997; Lugg 2006b; Sears 1991). But we also argue this is due
to a slavish devotion to traditional social science research methodologies,
and experimental design in particular (see AERA). One result is that data
are remarkably difficult to find. As one queer historian has remarked, a
“professor in my doctoral program even warned that I would never be
able to obtain enough data to piece together a respectable article, much
less a book” (Blount 2005, p. 9). How, then, do you answer a research
question for which there are no data?
In this chapter, we argue that queer research methodologies are scav-
enging methodologies that combine interdisciplinary data collection tech-
niques in unique ways, reimagining where and how data for research can
be found and evaluated. This methodology stems from both queer theo-
retical notions of anti-essentialism as well as the real-world challenges of
finding data related to queer issues, including those in US public schools.
J.P. Murphy () • C.A. Lugg

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

370 J.P. MURPHY AND C.A. LUGG
A BRIEF PRIMER ON QUEER THEORY AND QUEER LEGAL

THEORY
QT emerged from the intersection of virulent and violent heterosexism
and homophobia in the late 1970s–1990s and increasingly public political
responses by queer activists and organizations. These decades were rife
with violent and sometimes deadly discrimination (Bronski 2011; Garland
2001; Gross 1993). Political actors demanded that many rights and legal
protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons be
eliminated (Blount 2005; D’Emilio and Freedman 1997; Garland 2001),
demanded the enactment of anti-LGBT civil laws—as well as the greater
enforcement of existing anti-LGBT criminal laws (Bronski 2011; D’Emilio
and Freedman 1988; Eskridge 1999; Garland 2001; Knauer 2000)—and
spread “no promo homo” school policies prohibiting educators from sup-
porting queer youth and faculty in schools (Blount 2005; Eskridge 2000;
Lugg and Murphy 2014). The AIDS pandemic also led to targeted pub-
lic attention on “queers with AIDS,” making LGBT persons particularly
vulnerable to discrimination and harassment outside of and inside schools
(Britzman 1998; Eisemann 2000; Garland 2001; Eskridge 1999, 2000;
Lugg and Murphy 2014; Platizky 1998).
Political organizations like Queer Nation and ACT UP formed in
response to this period of deadly homophobic politics. They engaged
in direct political action that was often theatrical, sometimes sardonic
or humorous, and very confrontational (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988;
Doll 1998; Signorile 1993). One example was the reappropriation of the
slur “queer” as an inclusive term for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
queer, and intersex (LGBTQI)-identified persons (Gould 2012). Queer
Nation staged protests with slogans designed to be simultaneously catchy
and confrontational—such as the now-famous chant, “We’re here. We’re
queer. Get used to it.” Members of ACT UP arranged for a 35-foot tall
condom to be dropped over the house of late Senator Jesse Helms, a
notorious homophobe representing North Carolina (Strub 2008). Queer
activists across the country were remarkable for their theater, humor, and
their willingness to publicly name individuals and organizations engaged
in practices that erased and/or stigmatized LGBTQ identities.
Scholar-activists translated this queer activism and its oppositionality
into QT (Tierney and Dilley 1998; Lugg 2006a; Turner 2000). Queer
theorists are concerned with exposing and challenging the heteronorma-
tivity and essentialized gender dichotomies that come packaged in much
SCAVENGING AS QUEER METHODOLOGY 371
of anti-queer politics (Case 1991). In contrast to structuralist frameworks

which seek to filter the “essential” characteristics of a phenomenon from
the messiness of lived experience, QT sees all identity as perpetually in-
contest and, consequently, variable (Mayo 2007; Seidman 2010). Queer
identities are fluid, flowing through and over the mutually exclusive heter-
onormative expectations for how all men and, separate from that, how all
women are “supposed to be” (Butler 1993; Halberstam 2005). Further,
QT and QLT draw on multidimensionality and intersectionality (perspec-
tives from Critical Race Theory and feminism, respectively) to explain
the variety of interrelated biases that also interact within ongoing identity
negotiations—such as race, gender, class, religion, and so on (Hutchinson
2001; McCready 2010; Stein and Plummer 1994; Valdes 1998). And, as
Critical Race Theory assumes racism to be the default setting for much of
everyday life (Crenshaw 1991; López 2003), QT and QLT assume het-
erosexism is the daily norm for organizations and those persons who live
within them (Valdes 1995).
QT and QLT are also notably anti-assimilationist. In contrast to earlier
scholarship in Gay and Lesbian Studies that showed LGBT students do
exist in schools and critiqued how schools deal with supposed deviance,
queer scholarship aims to disrupt heteronormative ideas of what is normal
when and where they result in oppressive environments for queer persons
(e.g., Harbeck 1997; Kissen 1996; Tierney and Dilley 1998). QT and
QLT are particularly attuned to finding sites wherein heteronormative and
essentialist expectations are institutionalized—like in schools—erasing and
stigmatizing the complex ways queer persons actually “are.” The aim of
QTs is not to make queer identities palatable or visible but to directly
challenge the structures keeping queer identities invisible and stigmatized.
Consequently, studies using QT and QLT are often just as oppositional,
creative, and anti-assimilationist as their activist roots (Turner 2000).
SCAVENGING AS QUEER(ER) METHODOLOGY

Queer scholars reimagine what counts as data and have combined meth-
ods from various research traditions to construct rigorous and factual
records of the lives of queer persons within institutions like schools. In the
words of Halberstam (1998),
A queer methodology … is a scavenger methodology that uses different

methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been
deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human

behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are
often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic com-
pulsion toward disciplinary coherence. (p. 13)
These reimaginings arose out of both the historical stigmatization and

erasure of queer persons in schools (Blount 2005; Graves 2009; Harbeck
1997; Lugg 2006b) as well as from a more theoretical need to account for
the multiple dimensions of queer experiences (Valdes 1995). The result is
a varied and nuanced scavenging methodology aimed at uncovering and
examining queer experiences in schools.
Queer scholarship originated in the humanities and, as such, has been
heavily qualitative, historical, textural, and philosophical. Early research-
ers exposed the discursive limitations of taken-for-granted dichotomies
such as “straight/not-straight” and “normal/deviant” in literature (Doll
1998), movies (Russo 1987), and broader forms of media (Halberstam
1998). Many relied on narrative analysis, much like that performed by
critical race theorists (e.g., Bell 1993). Others turned to historical analyses
of queer persons’ lived experiences (e.g., D’Emilio 1998; D’Emilio and
Freedman 1988). Later, researchers combined research methods from the
humanities with methods from other disciplines, looking to police reports,
court decisions, and written records from political movements, resulting in
QLT (Hutchinson 2001; Lugg 2003, 2006b; Valdes 1998). Halberstam
(1998), for example, drew on a wide array of sources—from literature,
movies, photographic artwork, case histories, and periodicals—blurring
the boundary between the textual and discursive representations of queer
persons’ lives typically taken up in the humanities with ethnographic, his-
torical, and archival methods from across social science disciplines such as
cultural studies and history.
Such interdisciplinary scavenging is theoretically and methodologi-
cally advantageous to queer researchers who focus on the queer experi-
ences of persons in US public schools. The traditions of social science
research have long positioned queer people as being somehow “defi-
cient,” of being not natural, and of lacking proper heterosexist norms
and values (see Ahmed 2006). This became especially true as education
developed into a profession for scientific educators (e.g., Conklin 1927).
Consequently, traditional methods of social science research present
inherent problems for “objective science,” since these long-term notions
of queer inferiority (at best) and dangerous pathology (at worst) are
woven into the woof and weave of most any data collection and subse-
quent analysis (see Eriksen 1999).
Research on queer issues in schools—and on the persons who spend
their days inside schools—poses a constellation of methodological chal-
lenges for researchers. Since the 1950s, school administrators have been
encouraged to resist queer people by laws criminalizing queer identities
(Canaday 2009; Lugg 2006b) and by broader political rhetoric patholo-
gizing queerness, equating queers with moral turpitude, especially where
children are concerned (Bronski 2011; D’Emilio and Freedman 1988).
Administrators have been tasked with seeking out and removing edu-
cators suspected of being queer from schools (Graves 2009; Harbeck
1997; Lugg 2003; Waller 1932/2014), a charge which often targeted
educators whose gender performances did not conform sufficiently to
heteronormative expectations of “manly” or “womanly” dress/behavior
(Blount 2005; Lugg and Tooms 2010). Beginning in the 1990s, many
school districts and some states enacted no promo homo policies forbidding
educators from supporting or including positive representations of queer
identities in school curricula (Eskridge 2000; Lugg and Murphy 2014).
Many educators interpreted these as forbidding any support for queer per-
sons and/or identities while in school to avoid accidentally falling afoul
of the proscriptions (for examples, see: Lugg and Murphy 2014). While
explicit no promo homo policies are somewhat rarer at present, administra-
tors remain concerned with enforcing behavior that is deemed heteronor-
mative by their colleagues and their communities (Blount 2003; Lugg
2008; Tooms 2007; Tooms et al. 2010). Consequently, administrators
are careful to police their own dress/behavior so as to avoid falling prey
to claims they might be queer (Blount 2003; Fryand and Capper 2003;
Tooms 2007). Further, administrators can hesitate to support gay-straight
alliances (MacGillivray 2004; Tooms 2007) and even express concerns
about intervening in the harassment of queer-identified students for fear
that doing so may lead them to be labeled queer (Lugg and Murphy 2014;
Lugg 2008; Pascoe 2007). The result is a tradition of institutionalized
homophobia and policed heteronormativity embedded within how many
schools, and administrators, function.
This tradition of erasing and stigmatizing queer identities in pub-
lic schools has made accessing data difficult for school-based research-
ers. Administrators and school boards reject requests for access to school
spaces and school records (Lugg and Murphy, under review). Educators,
as well as parents and students, are hesitant or unwilling to consent to
studies about queer issues, especially in districts with former no promo

homo policies and in states where no promo homo policies remain (Lugg and
Murphy 2014). Additionally, large and consistent quantitative datasets on
queer issues in US public schools are exceedingly rare.1
Limited access to school spaces presents researchers with a dilemma:
how does one collect data in schools when access is routinely denied?
Queer theorists have subsequently scavenged across disciplines for data
collection strategies, generating hybrid ways to “unearth” data. Queer
scholars have culled information from across publicly available printed
sources such as curricula and textbooks, disciplinary records, as well as
court and legal documents (Jennings 2014; Lugg 2006a). Others have
developed novel ways to recruit participants, circumventing the need for
administrative approval by shifting units of analysis from school sites to
smaller case studies of interested individuals (Lugg and Murphy, under
review). Some have turned inward, going so far as to draw upon their own
experiences (Rofes 1985, 1994).
Another dilemma faced by queer researchers has been the destruc-
tion of historical archives and the deliberate obfuscation of identities
(see Blount 2005). Queer educators and administrators have taken
care to “cover” their sexual identities—appearing to be straight while
among their colleagues and students (Fraynd and Capper 2003; Tooms
2007; Yoshino 2002). Many do so by following heteronormative-gen-
dered scripts for mannerisms and appearance and by carefully selecting
pronouns when telling stories about partners (Ahmed 2006). Further,
archives containing descriptions of queer educators’ and students’ expe-
riences in schools have been destroyed, with articles ripped out of news-
papers and magazines, and artifacts in libraries defaced (Blount 2005;
Harbeck 1997).
Some queer scholars have constructed their own strategies for locat-
ing patterns across erased and/or vandalized accounts of queer persons
in schools. One author used the strategy of underlining every possible
“queer mention” in a book or photocopied journal article, listing the page
number at the front of either. While it was not a systematic process, as her
career has spanned decades, this strategy allowed the citations to accu-
mulate (see Lugg 2006a). Others have sought out modern spaces such
as online forums, blogs, and email correspondence for accounts of queer
lives (Halberstam 1998). Data from these new sources are often combined
with movie tropes and televised depictions of “queer” characters (e.g.,
Meyer 2014).
Given the ad hoc nature of scavenged data collection and analysis,

researchers who scavenge can be accused of being nonsystematic, non-
rigorous, and, of course, of not being particularly scientific. Yet, tradi-
tional forms of social science are, by design, as blind to queer issues as they
are blind to racism, sexism, and other forms of structural oppression (see
Valdes 1995). Such expectations are akin to asking a contemporary hip-
hop artist to make her/his work sound more like J. S. Bach. It is possible,
but such requests do great violence to both traditions. Faced with schools
which are hesitant-to-hostile toward entertaining queer issues, and faced
with traditional methodologies which are blind regarding multidimen-
sional queer identities, scholars scavenge for data and analytic methods
that can expose the heteronormativity embedded in both traditions.
CONCLUSION: HOW DO YOU ANSWER A RESEARCH

QUESTION FOR WHICH THERE ARE NO DATA?
The theoretical orientations of QT and QLT toward disrupting hetero-
normative and heterosexist structures, and the interdisciplinary strategies
researchers have used to navigate the practical dilemmas of researching
queer issues in schools, have lead scholars to scavenge accounts of lived
queer experiences from diverse places and to combine analytic tech-
niques from across disciplinary boundaries. The result has been rigorous
and exciting scholarship on queer issues (e.g., Halberstam 1998; Meyer
2014)—although the work in education remains nascent.
There is no one definition, or form, of a scavenger methodology—
by design. As Harbeck (1997) suggests, “when one brings alternative
resources and an interdisciplinary perspective to bear on the matter …
they reveal new avenues of argument and recourse” (Harbeck 1997,
p. 28). The novel interdisciplinary arrangements of research methods are
the epistemological and analytic strengths of scavenging. Queer scholar-
ship answers questions for which there are no easily gatherable data by
circumventing the heteronormative traditions within American schooling
and by creating newer (queerer) research methodologies tailored to indi-
vidual research questions and the schools in which these questions are
being asked. There is no one set of “scavenged methods.” Methods need
only be tailored to answering a study’s specific research questions.
In pursuing scavenging, researchers are seeking to answer questions
that were seemingly unanswerable. As such, they and we are taking
methodological risks. Risk-taking has been embraced by scholars in other
areas of research, most famously by Critical Race theorists. For those of us

concerned with the liberation of queer people, it is incumbent upon us to
take up the challenge as well.
NOTE
1. It is worth noting that the US Department of Education did technically
begin collecting quantitative data on queer students’ schooling experiences
in the 2013/2014 School Crime Supplement—although this “collection”
comprised only two questions, each of which related to harassment and bul-
lying. A notable exception to the dirth of large-n quantitative datasets on
queer students’ school experiences comes from the Gay, Lesbian, Straight
Education Network’s biannual studies of school climate (see Kosciw et al.
2014).
REFERENCES
Bell, D. (1993). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York:
Basic Books.
Blount, J. M. (2003). Homosexuality and school superintendents: A brief history.
Journal of School Leadership, 13(1), 7–26.
Blount, J. M. (2005). Fit to teach: Same-sex desire, gender, and school work in the
twentieth century. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Britzman, D. P. (1998). On some psychical consequences of AIDS education. In
W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 321–335). Mahwah: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Bronski, M. (2011). A queer history of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York:
Routledge.
Canaday, M. (2009). The straight state: Sexuality and citizenship in twentieth cen-
tury America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Case, S. (1991). Tracking the vampire. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies, 3(2), 2–20.
Conklin, A. M. (1927). The school as a new tool. Journal of Educational Sociology,
1(2), 93–99.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics,
and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241.
D’Emilio, J., & Freedman, E. B. (1997). Intimate matters: A history of sexuality in
America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Doll, M. A. (1998). Queering the gaze. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in edu-
cation (pp. 287–298). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Eisemann, V. H. (2000). Protecting the kids in the hall: Using Title IX to stop
student-on-student anti-gay harassment. Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, 15,
125–161.
Eriksen, J. (1999). Kiss and tell: Surveying sex in the 20th century. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Eskridge, W. N., Jr. (1999). David C. Baum Memorial Lectures on civil liberties
and civil rights—Hardwick and historiography. University of Illinois Law
Review, 2, 631–702.
Eskridge, W. N., Jr. (2000). No promo homo: The sedimentation of antigay dis-
course and the channeling effect of judicial review. New York University Law
Review, 75, 1327–1411.
Fraynd, D. J., & Capper, C. A. (2003). “Do you have any idea who you just
hired?!?” A study of open and closeted sexual minority K-12 administrators.
Journal of School Leadership, 13, 86–124.
Garland, J. A. (2001). The low road to violence: Governmental discrimination as
a catalyst for pandemic hate crime. Law & Sexuality, 10, 1–91.
Gould, D. B. (2012). Education in the streets: ACT UP, emotion, and new modes
of being. In E. R. Meiners & T. Quinn (Eds.), Sexualities in education: A
reader (pp. 352–363). New York: Peter Lang.
Graves, K. L. (2009). And they were wonderful teachers: Florida’s purge of gay and
lesbian teachers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gross, L. (1993). Contested closets: The politics and ethics of outing. Minneapolis:
Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural
lives. New York: New York University Press.
Harbeck, K. M. (1997). Gay and lesbian educators: Personal freedoms, public con-
straints. Malden: Amethyst Press.
Hutchinson, D. L. (2001). Identity crisis: “Intersectionality”, “multidimensional-
ity” and the development of an adequate theory of subordination. Michigan
Law Journal, 6, 285–317.
Jennings, T. (2014). Is the mere mention enough?: Representation across five dif-
ferent venues of educator preparation. In E. J. Meyer & D. Carlson (Eds.),
Gender and sexualities in education: A reader (pp. 400–413). New York: Peter
Lang.
Kissen, R. M. (1996). The last closet: The real lives of lesbian and gay teachers.
Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Knauer, N. J. (2000). Homosexuality as contagion: From The Well of Loneliness to
the Boy Scouts. Hofstra Law Review, 29, 403–501.
Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Palmer, N. A., & Boesen, M. J. (2014). The 2013
National School Climate Survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender youth in our nation’s schools. New York, NY: GLSEN.
López, G. R. (2003). The (racially neutral) politics of education: A critical race
theory perspective. Educational Administration Quarterly, 39(1), 68–94.
Lugg, C. A. (2003). Sissies, faggots, lezzies, and dykes: Gender, sexual orienta-
tion, and a new politics of education? Educational Administration Quarterly,
39(1), 95–134.
Lugg, C. A. (2006a). On politics and theory: Using an explicitly activist theory to
frame educational research. In V. Anfara & N. Mertz (Eds.), Theoretical frame-
works in qualitative research (pp. 175–188). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Lugg, C. A. (2006b). Thinking about sodomy: Public schools, legal panopticons
and queers. Educational Policy, 20(1–2), 35–58.
Lugg, C. A. (2008, March [2009, Sept]). Why’s a nice dyke like you embracing
this post-modern crap? Journal of School Leadership, 18(2), 164–199.
Lugg, C. A., & Murphy, J. P. (2014). Thinking whimsically: Queering the study
of educational policymaking and politics. International Journal of Qualitative
Research in Education, 27(9), 1183–1204.
Lugg, C. A., & Tooms, A. K. (2010). A shadow of ourselves: Identity erasure and
the politics of queer leadership. School Leadership & Management, 30(1),
77–91.
MacGillivray, I. K. (2004). Sexual orientation and school policy: A practical guide
for teachers, administrators and community activists. Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Mayo, C. (2007). Queering foundations: Queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender educational research. In L. Parker (Ed.), Review of research in edu-
cation: Difference, diversity and distinctiveness in education and learning
McCready, L. (2010). Making space for diverse masculinities: Difference, intersec-
tionality and engagement in an urban high school. New York: Peter Lang.
Meyer, E. J. (2014). Masculinities on The O.C.: A critical analysis of representa-
tions of gender. In E. J. Meyer & D. Carlson (Eds.), Gender and sexualities in
education: A reader (pp. 124–132). New York: Peter Lang.
Pascoe, C. J. (2007). Dude, you’re a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Platizky, R. (1998). We “were already ticking and didn’t know” [it]: Early AIDS
works. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 337–348). Mahwah:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rofes, E. (1985). Socrates, Plato, and guys like me: Confessions of a gay school teacher.
Boston: Alyson.
Rofes, E. E. (1994). Making our schools safe for sissies. The High School Journal,
11(1&2), 37–40.
Russo, V. (1987). The celluloid closet: Homosexuality in the movies (Rev. ed.). New
York: Harper & Row.
Seidman, S. (2010). The social construction of sexuality (2nd ed.). New York: Norton.
Signorile, M. (1993). Queer in America: Sex, the media, and the closets of power.
New York: Random House.
Sears, J. T. (1991). Educators, homosexuality, and homosexual students: Are per-
sonal feelings related to professional beliefs? Journal of Homosexuality, 22(3–4),
29–79.
Stein, A., & Plummer, K. (1994). “I can’t even think straight”: “Queer” theory
and the missing sexual revolution in sociology. Sociological Theory, 12(2),
178–187.
Strub, S. (2008, July 17). Condomizing Jesse Helms’ house. The Huffington Post.
Retrieved August 2, 2014, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-
strub/condomizing-jesse-helms-h_b_113329.html
Tierney, W., & Dilley, P. (1998). Constructing knowledge: Educational research
and gay and lesbian studies. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education
(pp. 49–71). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tooms, A. (2007). The right kind of queer: Fit and the politics of school leader-
ship. Journal of School Leadership, 17(5), 601–630.
Tooms, A. K., Lugg, C. A., & Bogotch, I. (2010). Rethinking the politics of fit
and educational leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 46(1),
96–131.
Turner, W. B. (2000). A genealogy of queer theory. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Valdes, F. (1995). Queers, sissies, dykes, and tomboys: Deconstructing the confla-
tion of “sex”, “gender”, and “sexual orientation” in Euro-American law and
society. California Law Review, 83, 3–377.
Valdes, F. (1998). Beyond sexual orientation in queer legal theory: Majoritarianism,
multidimensionality, and responsibility in social justice scholarship or legal
scholars as cultural warriors. Denver University Law Review, 75, 1409–1464.
Waller, W. (1932/2014). The sociology of teaching. Eastford: Martino Fine Books.
Yoshino, K. (2002). Covering. Yale Law Journal, 111, 769–939.
The Transgender Imaginary
Wayne J. Martino
INTRODUCTION
The concept of the transgender imaginary, while informed in its early
stages by my reading of Taylor’s treatise on modern social imaginaries
and Wright Mills’s sociological imagination, is very much grounded in
and inspired by transgender and transsexual scholars and activists such as
Connell (2009a, b) who writes about a program of “gender revolution”
and “gender democratization,” and Lane (2009) who speaks of trans as
“bodily becoming.” It is also inspired by Rubin’s (1998) phenomeno-
logical research that stresses transsexual bodily ontology as a necessary
grounding for a politics of trans recognition and embodiment, which I
see as linked to questions of gender justice that Butler (2004) addresses
with regard to what is to count as viable and livable gendered person-
hood. Reflecting on the contribution of trans scholarship and autoeth-
nographic narrative accounts such as those provided by Doan (2010)
and Nordmarken (2014), I attempt to unravel in this short piece how
Stryker’s (2006) emphasis on the desubjugated knowledges and “embodied
experiences of [trans] speaking subjects” are central to an articulation and
W.J. Martino ( )

382 W.J. MARTINO
grounding of the political terms of the transgender imaginary (p. 12).

In addition, I draw on Fraser’s (1990) rethinking of the public sphere
and revisioning of modernist social imaginaries, a political project which
I argue is also tied to a subaltern counterpublics, that is at the heart of
my conception of the transgender imaginary as a space for acknowledg-
ing and affirming trans bodily ontologies and lived experiences of gen-
dered bodily existence. In short, the transgender imaginary is understood
as a counterpublic space that allows for the articulation of what Rubin
(1998) claims are transsexual possibilities and life projects, which are also
informed by Nobel’s (2004) insights into the envisioning of gender as “an
on-going, contingent non-foundational self-producing” life project that
cannot be extricated easily from other axes and structures of relationality
involving class, race, sexuality and nation (p. 23). It is in this sense that
Butler’s (2004) notion of “fantasy” as a basis for imagining and imagina-
tive possibilities for coming into gender being vis-à-vis “the stylization of
embodiment itself” in terms of its “constitutive possibility” resonates with
my conception of the transgender imaginary in its capacity to take on a
particular political resonance (p. 217). The transgender imaginary as it
relates to a counterpublic space for the articulation of transnarratives that
speak to the onto-formative enactment of gendered embodiment is also
significant in pointing to the pedagogical potentialities in deploying such
narratives as “a strategy of gender democracy” (Connell 2009b, p. 146).
THE TRANS SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

Wright Mills (1959), in speaking of the sociological imagination, identifies
a transformative “self-consciousness” as involving the capacity to grasp the
significance of biography—our personal and ontological perspective—as
connected to broader historical and structural relations. Such a disposition
entails acquiring a particular sensibility that is founded not so much on a
form of abstracted empiricism but rather “a quality of mind” that promises
the realization of a deep understanding “of the realities of ourselves in
connection with larger social realities” (p. 15). This conception of imagi-
nation is central to understanding the transgender imaginary as grounded
necessarily in the voices and embodied experiences of trans subjects them-
selves, and must be understood in response to what Namaste (2000)
documents as the epistemic violence that has contributed to the institu-
tional and cultural erasure of the lived and bodily ontological existence of
transgender people in the everyday world. For example, Namaste (2000)
THE TRANSGENDER IMAGINARY 383
writes of the proliferation of images of male-to-female transsexual and

transgendered people in the media, but highlights the rhetorical tropes
that have reduced them to “to the merely figural” (p. 52)—fetishized
objects of fascination within a dominant culture that continues to be pre-
occupied with limited and binary frames of reference that deny “the phe-
nomenological reality of many transsexual lives” (Rubin 1998, p. 275).
For example, as Halbertsam (2005) and Bettcher (2007, p. 55) point out,
transgender people often get cast within a representational system that
constitutes them either as frauds who engage in “invisible deception,” or
as fakes who actively embrace “visible pretense.” In addition, within the
epistemological limits imposed by some deconstructionist queer accounts
of transgendered subjectivities, the problematic of what Eliot and Roen
(1998) identify as the conformity/deviance binary model, which pits trans-
gender subjects who embrace gender fluidity as gender outlaws against
transsexual subjects who embrace gender boundaries as gender defenders
or conformists is clearly evident (p. 239).
The transgender imaginary refuses such categoricalism and, instead,
encapsulates more dynamic possibilities in the realization of gendered per-
sonhood that are in line with the phenomenological perspectives on desub-
jugation that are advocated by both Stryker and Rubin. Stryker argues for
a more sustained consideration of the particularities and specificities of
the trans speaking position, and highlights the need to “demonstrate the
extent to which soma, the body as culturally intelligible construct, and
techne, the techniques in and through which bodies are transformed and
positioned, are in fact inextricably interpenetrated” (p. 12). She goes to
point out that it is important to acknowledge the body as “the contin-
gent ground of all our knowledge, and of all our knowing” and that it
is in creating spaces for transgender people to provide accounts of their
own embodied experiences and of “their relationships to the discourse and
institutions that act upon and through them” (p. 13) that I understand as
central to embracing a transgender imaginary.
This position also captures Rubin’s (1998) phenomenological meth-
odological emphasis on the legitimacy of transsexual people’s accounts of
their own corporeal realities and their contingent realization (p. 269). For
example, he argues that such a method justifies “a turn to the self-reports
of transsexual subjects as a place to find counterdiscursive knowledge”
(p. 271). This trans imaginary research enterprise is important, Rubin
asserts, given the delegitimization or cooptation of transsexualism by
feminist and queer studies under conditions which occlude the chance for
384 W.J. MARTINO
transsexuals to speak in “our own names” (p. 272). In this sense, the trans-
gender imaginary encompasses a deep phenomenological understanding
of the need for the articulation of transsexual possibilities that refuse the
epistemic violence that continues to be imposed through the framing of
transsexuality as “false consciousness” and as endorsing a crude form of
gender essentialism. For example, given that female-to-male (FTM) trans
people in Rubin’s research do not “conceive of their life projects in terms
of ‘gender fucking,’” he claims that they are “made to suffer from another
kind of false consciousness within the queer paradigm, where essential-
ist narratives are assumed to recapitulate gender normativity” (p. 276).
Rather, Rubin’s phenomenological analysis of transsexual people’s lives
provides insight into not so much the fixity of gender boundaries, but
offers a more nuanced account of transsexual identities and bodies that
need to be conceptualized temporally in terms of constantly evolving con-
tingencies that refuse an understanding of gender as “neither reifiable or
internally stable” (p. 279). This position is consistent with that of Hines
(2006) who advocates the need to explore the formation of transgender-
embodied experiences and bodily ontology by allowing the space for
self-generated narratives as “formed though divergent experiences and
constructed in relation to temporal factors of generation, transitional time
span, and medical, social and cultural understandings of practice” (p. 49).
Such an emphasis on the generation of trans self-narratives is central to
understanding the educative and pedagogical potential of such texts, a
point that I take up later.
THE POLITICS OF TRANS EMBODIMENT

Noble (2004) and Roen (2001), however, caution about the need to
avoid the ethnocentrism that has pervaded queer and trans epistemologi-
cal horizons, and argues for attention to intersectional models that trouble
categorical singularity. This requires interrogating questions of a refusal to
ignore white privilege and questions of racialized transsexual bodies and
transgendered ways of being (Roen, p. 254). Noble, for example, writes
about his own embodied and ontological perspective as a white, trans man
who refuses to embrace hegemonic masculinity, but who reflects on his
own transsexual embodiment though classed, gendered, and racialized
lenses. For example, he states: “when we think we are seeing FTM trans-
sexual male privilege, what we are actually seeing, I suggest, is whiteness
modifying masculinity to give it power … we would be remiss to suggest
that this FTM is transitioning into a privileged gender position in our

culture” (p. 25). Hence, Noble’s account of being a white transsexual
man further illuminates that trans self-identification cannot be reduced so
easily to a universal imperative of categorical singularity which occludes
what Nobel refers to as “radial modulation” and “categorical indetermi-
nacy” (p. 26). In this capacity, Nobel reflects on his whiteness and refusal
to be “fully manned,” both discursively in terms of the conscious use of
his boi name, Bobby, and with regard to his gender presentation within
a strategically constituted “discursive space of tranny masculinity,” which
he situates as outside of clinical and medical frames of reference for citing
transsexual bodies (p. 26).
Such transsexual voices nuance and trouble at the same time the limits
of a transgender imaginary that get caught up in a categorical singularity
and binary framing of a gender war that casts trans subjects as either gen-
der outlaws or gender conformists. Nobel, in fact, casts transsexuality as
“a permanent space of becoming” and “a permanent place of modulation
of what came before and what comes after never fully accomplishing either
as an essentialist reality” (p. 26), a point that is also reiterated by Lane
(2009). Lane, for example, argues for the need to “replace old dichoto-
mies and to theorize sexed/gendered embodiment” and to embrace what
is grounded more empirically in an understanding of biological diversity,
contingency, and nonlinearity (p. 140). She reiterates that the biological
and the social are inextricably intertwined in complex, contingent, and
nonlinear ways “to produce unique combinations of sexed bodies and
brains, gender identities and social relations of intersubjective recogni-
tion.” Such a concept as the transgender imaginary captures the spirit
of such diversity which refuses crude designations of transsexual subjects
as merely reifying a gender conformist and dichotomous gender binary
system. It is also consistent with the call for more phenomenological
accounts as constitutive and rehabilitative spaces for theorizing transsexual
and transgender lived corporeal experiences on their own terms (Rubin
1998, p. 279).
Such a conception of a rehabilitated phenomenology, which grants
agency and complexity to transgender and transsexual people as sub-
jects of their own embodied and corporeal gendered experiences and
being in the world, is also consistent with Connell’s (2009b) views of
gender democratization and transgendered self-identification as an onto-
formative, situated, and contingent process. Connell (2012), in line with
other trans scholars, such as Namaste (2000) and Prosser (1998), critique
386 W.J. MARTINO
the appropriation of transsexual experience in the service of a queer proj-

ect of gender subversion that occludes economic conditions and structural
inequalities that are central to building a deep understanding of the mate-
rial realities of transsexual bodies transgendered ways of being in the world.
In this sense, Connell points to the difficulties posed by a deconstruction-
ist identity project in its capacity to account for the corporeal existence
of and realities faced by transsexual women. It is the “specificity of trans-
sexuality at the level of social practice” that is central to Connell’s concern
to illuminate the role of social institutions, the economy and knowledge-
power relations that is central to understanding the multiple pathways and
patterns of gender formation. These historically contingent practices and
processes are at the heart of striving for a livable and viable gendered per-
sonhood and involve a contradictory and relational dynamic that is con-
stantly under negotiation throughout one’s life project of self-constitution
and fashioning as a gendered embodied subject (Butler 2004).
It is in this sense that Connell (2012) treats gender as an onto-formative
project of self-constitution, rather than a performative citational practice.
She distinguishes the available repertoire of gendering practices available
at a specific historically contingent point in time, given an organization’s
particular gender regime, from practicing gender with its transformative
potential for the ontological grounding of a new practice through time.
The latter is conceived as a practice that “continuously brings social reality
into being,” and which in turn has the revisioning capacity for rethink-
ing or negotiating the terms of the social structure of gender relations
(p. 866). For example, Connell speaks of “multiple transsexual narratives
of embodiment” that cannot be simply reduced to a binary choice between
masculine and feminine embodiments, but as an experience in which such
forms of embodiment are experienced as alternating with each other over
time (p. 867). The onto-formative practicing of gender, therefore, attends
to this multifaceted process of gendered embodiment, and conceives of
it as necessarily involving a conflictual dynamics that must be constantly
negotiated and as necessarily arising in embodiment. For example, Connell
points to the onto-formative practicing of gender involved in transsexual
women’s processes of making sense of “having a man’s body and woman’s
body at the same time, or one body merging from the other, or (most tra-
ditionally) being trapped in the wrong body” for which there is no suitable
or adequate metaphor (p. 867). As Sanders (2010) illuminates through
an examination of the digital photographic artwork produced by FTM
artist, Briden Cole Schuren, this trans artist represents his own gender
transitioning process in the onto-formative terms that are articulated by

Connell. His “transitioning body” is not represented as “a spectacle, but
in a manner reflecting a deeply reverent metaphysical contemplation of his
coming into being—emerging from darkness—dimly coming into align-
ment with Briden’s conscious choice” (p. 2).
I embrace the onto-formative process of gender constitution as a cen-
tral tenet of the transgender imaginary in that it endorses bodily ontologi-
cal agency as a basis for desubjugation that is at the heart of the political
and phenomenological project of transsexual becoming, and brings ethi-
cal integrity to an understanding of transsexuality as involving “the pro-
ductive, creative work of the subject struggling to articulate itself within
received categories” (Rubin 1998, p. 266)—a project of gendered self-
realization, recognition, and actualization that entails what Connell
(2012) refers to as process of “liminal contradiction,” one that cannot
be reduced to merely reifying an unequal binary gender system (p. 867).
As Connell (2009b) asserts, “gender does not, in itself imply, inequality”
(p. 146).
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNTS OF TRANS BECOMING

The autoethnographic accounts provided by Doan (2010) and Nordmaken
(2014) provide further insights into this onto-formative process of trans-
sexual embodiment and transgendered ways of being as explicated by
Connell (2012). Nordmarken’s narrative account of his own everyday
interactions “living in a gender-ambiguous body” provides nuanced onto-
formative insights into his bodily experiences of sexed transition. He
engages in bodily ontological reflexive self-narration as a basis for creat-
ing a pedagogical space for thinking about the terms of a transgender
imaginary that is committed to building a deeper understanding of trans
becoming—a process that Rubin’s empirical research with FTM transsex-
ual people is understood as “the process of unfolding through a process
of bodily change” (p. 277). Nordmarken’s notion of bodily inhabiting
and living a complex betweenness captures Connell’s (2009a) point about
conceptualizing social embodiment, not so much in terms of fixed bodily
categories (p. 108), but as a dynamic historically contingent and negoti-
ated process of embracing the livability and viability of one’s gendered
personhood. In reflecting on the process of his sexed transition, both prior
to and after he began taking testosterone, Nordmaken reflects on his own
bodily ontological process of transgendered being that is understood more
388 W.J. MARTINO
in terms of unfolding over time and under certain conditions and in spe-
cific social circumstances. He asserts that he does not inhabit a different
self since beginning testosterone treatment—“I am still the same person,
even as I transition” (p. 38). Rather it is his understanding of the shifting
social locations and the politics of recognition that operate in response to
his sexed embodiment that lead him to reflect on how he comes to under-
stand the livability of his own gendered personhood.
Nordmarken asserts that he simply cannot erase his femininity and the
“subjugations of femaleness” that continue to shape his life as he con-
tinues to embody his transmasculine being (p. 38). He mentions that he
still feels the feelings of being treated as a female in terms that denote
inferiority, and which have historically been a part of his socialization as a
female prior to transitioning. Nordmaken has not shed his femininity as a
snake sheds its skin; it is incorporated into his transmasculine embodied
consciousness:
I feel new feelings particular to transness: anxiety, fear, hypervigilance. It can

be dangerous to be a transsexual. It can be a lot of emotional work to navi-
gate the cisgender world. I experience sexism, homophobia, transphobia,
and White, male, able-bodied privilege. (p. 38)
In speaking of his gendered shifting and ontological bodily experience “as

a transgender being” in terms of betweenness and being queerly between,
Nordmarken illuminates how queer identificatory possibilities are not anti-
thetical to an understanding of transsexual embodiment (p. 38). His nar-
rative insights resonate with Hines’s (2006) queer sociological account of
transgender, which pays heed to the lived and material experiences of gen-
dered embodiment as a continual, contingent, contradictory, and changing
process of identity formation and self-constitution. Such a process cannot
be abstracted out of a consideration of “temporal factors of generation”;
“transitional time span”; and the medical, social, and cultural conditions
under which bodily self-understandings of transgendered and transsexual
being are understood and continually unfolding over one’s life project of
gender formation and self-fashioning. This conceptualization, once again
ties in with the terms of the transgender imaginary, which revolve around
a commitment to creating a pedagogical space of desubjugation vis-à-vis
doing justice to “comprehending transsexual life projects” (Rubin, p. 271).
Doan’s (2010) autoethnographic narrative account of her experiences
as a transgendered woman also offers queer and trans insights into trans-
sexual embodiment that are grounded in a materialist and bodily onto-
logical perspective that informs a deep understanding of the terms of a

transgender imaginary as a nonlinear contingent and situationally specific
horizon of possibility. Like Nordmarken, Doan also emphasizes the het-
eronormative regulatory regimes of surveillance that explicate the spa-
tial conditions under which cisgender normativity operates to impact on
her lived experiences of transsexual embodiment. Such regimes enforce
separation rather than a deeper intimacy and freedom that is afforded
by embracing a transgender imaginary, which is committed to building
intimacy and belonging across our embodied differences of gendered
complexity and “ever-shifting relationalities” (Nordmarken 2014, p. 49).
Doan, for example, documents spatial encounters and interactions that
have resulted in sexual harassment and threat of violence in response to her
transsexual embodiment and its potential to incite the threat of violence.
She recounts an experience of a man bumping into her on a crowded
sidewalk after stopping abruptly while waiting for a taxi outside an airport
terminal. He launched into a vituperative verbal assault asserting his dis-
gust that was born out of a recognition of her transsexual embodiment:
“I know what you are. You can’t fool me!,” he shouted (p. 640). Doan
also writes about an experience with an inebriated older man accompanied
by a younger woman in an elevator who started staring intently at her
and after asserting, “What have we here?” reached over and grabbed her
breasts upon leaving the elevator as if to verify that she was wearing “fals-
ies.” Serrano (2007) identifies such harassment in terms that speak to the
specificity of transsexual embodied experiences of violence and uses the
terms transmisogyny and transsexism to illuminate this specificity. Doan
speaks to the heteronormative limits that come to define the regulatory
regimes that sanction violence and harassment directed at transgendered
and transsexual bodies. However, it is important to point out that her
narrative accounts of such experiences function pedagogically in that they
turn our attention very powerfully to the regulatory forces at play and the
spatial tyranny that is experienced as a consequence of being recognized
and visibly identified as a transsexual person.
TRANS PEDAGOGICAL POSSIBILITIES AND SUBALTERN

IMAGINARIES
It is in this pedagogical capacity that phenomenologically grounded
accounts of transsexual and transgendered embodied experiences of
unfolding and being in the world can serve as a horizon for fostering a
390 W.J. MARTINO
transgender imaginary that can attend to the forces that prevent its real-
ization. Nordmarken, for example, speaks of the pain of separation that is
a consequence of such transsexist and transmisogynist regulatory regimes
of embodied surveillance, but believes that through “the wounds of my
gendered life” lies the potential for a rebirthing and reshaping of the
self: “The potential for love is created by the pain of separation, manifest
in oppression, and taking place in interpersonal rejection, intrapsychic
fragmentation, and institutionalized social devastation. … Perhaps we
can find freedom from pain through attaching again—to the fragmented
parts of ourselves and to those who are separated from us” (p. 48). In
this capacity, Nordmarken’s account resonates with Stryker’s (1994)
transsexual appropriation of monstrosity, which Nordmarken frames
in terms of the reclamation of his humanity and gendered personhood
as a reconstitutive and political force of resistance that speaks to onto-
formative imaginative possibilities for realizing a transsexual gendered
personhood across an ever-shifting terrain of contingent relationality.
The terms of such a transgender imaginary conjure up the gender revolu-
tion and politics of social solidarity which Connell (2009b) mentions and
which pertains to collective efforts directed at the contestation of gender
hierarchies while refusing to abolish gender identificatory possibilities.
She argues that the logic of gender democratization as an alternative to
degendering is built around “equaliz[ing] gender orders, rather than
shrink[ing] them to nothing” and argues that this sort of democrati-
zation “is a possible strategy for a more just society [as] indicated by
the many social struggles that have actually changed gender relations”
(Connell 2009b, p. 146).
This logic of democratization is one that resonates with Fraser’s
(1990) reconceptualization of the public sphere in terms that speak
to its constitutive possibilities, particularly with regard to envisag-
ing and expanding contestatory spaces for members of subordi-
nated social groups, a phenomenon which she terms “subaltern
counterpublics” (p. 67). Such spaces entail subaltern members
“interact[ing] discursively as a member of a public” whereby pos-
sibilities exist for “disseminating one’s discourse into ever widen-
ing arenas” (p. 67). This ever-widening participation in the public
sphere—what Fraser refers to as “that indeterminate, empirically coun-
terfactual body we call ‘the public at large’” (pp. 67–68)—is central
to the realization of a transgender imaginary where a proliferation
of trasnarratives and transcounternarratives becomes possible. For

example, the plurality of trans people’s perspectives has been made
possible through engaging in social networking sites and the post-
ing of YouTube videos involving self-narratives detailing experiences
of and understandings of trans embodiment and what it means to be
transgendered. It has resulted in an expansion of the complexity of a
rhetorics of desubjugation that attends to communicative possibilities
for trans people themselves to engage in a participatory and contesta-
tory publics of trans self-constitution and recognition on their own
terms. Gabe, for example, engages in such a contestatory interaction
that comes to characterize the spirit of participatory democracy that is
tied to Fraser’s notion of a subaltern counterpolitics through posting
his own YouTube video, which involves him sharing his own transnar-
rative (see Gabe 2011):
This video [is about] … the idea of a transnarrative that’s a very typical trans
storyline that we all come across at one point or another and how I do and
don’t fit into that, because I read something on Tumblr, how somebody
posted something about how they were looking for stories from people who
didn’t go through the whole, um, didn’t follow the whole like, you know “I
knew I was trans when I was two. I’ve always been a boy and that’s who I
am” didn’t follow that storyline. … [So I thought] it might be pertinent to
make a video about that because I thought there might be people out there
who didn’t share that experience.
This example of the proliferation of a transnarrative is an illustration of

a counterpublics and the Internet as a participatory space where trans
people as peers can deliberate and share their experiences “across lines of
difference” (Fraser, p. 70; Cordes 2013). This participatory parity, which
is tied to a subaltern counterpublics as an onto-formative space of self-
recognition and embodied self-understanding, is central to the realiza-
tion of a politics of trans desubjugation that speaks to the terms of the
transgender imaginary as a conceptual tool and basis for understanding
the terms of a politics of trans corporeal self-constitution and knowing
(Rubin 1998). Such spaces also allow for participatory possibilities from
subordinated groups who, as Fraser points out, “would have no other are-
nas for deliberation among themselves about their needs, objectives and
strategies” (p. 66). For example, the online positing by Zeigler (2013),
which involves a discussion of the burden of representation as it pertains
392 W.J. MARTINO
to the first black transgender actress to play the role of Sophie Burset, a
black transgender inmate in the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black, is
one of the many illustrative cases of the operations of a subaltern counter-
politics in a stratified society:
Carrying the burden of representation as being the first show to include

a black transgender actor as a cast lead does not make OITNB [Orange
is the New Black] cutting edge. No. What makes it work—what makes it
memorable—what makes it powerful, is that, it offers an image of black
trans womanhood that is complex, messy, imperfect and, above all, human.
Hopefully, work by allies who are fascinated by the trans narrative, will fol-
low suit. (see also HuffPost Live 2013)
Through such a proliferation of discourses about the diversity of trans

experiences and the possibility, as the OITNB case exemplifies above, for
attending to the question of race and visibility vis-a-vis black trans repre-
sentation, what is permitted, though never full realizable, is a “participa-
tory parity” that allows for a contestation among “a plurality of competing
publics” and “inter-public discursive interaction” (Fraser, p. 68).
CONCLUSION
Overall, Fraser’s notion of a counterpublics moves beyond Taylor’s (2004)
modernist construction of the public sphere in terms of possibilities for
self-government as a basis for participatory democracy and a revisioning of
the ethical principles of mutual relationality and respect as they pertain to
a politics of trans desubjugation. It is Taylor’s emphasis on the conditions
that enable new understandings of sociality and imaginative possibilities
that suffuse “the narrative of our becoming” (p. 27) through engaging
in a participatory publics that inspired my thinking about the transgen-
der imaginary as an analytic and political category for comprehending the
onto-formative possibilities of trans desubjugated empistemologies and
transsexual life projects (Rubin 1998, p. 272; Connell 2012; Nordmarken
2014). In addition, it is by engaging with transgender and transsexual
scholars and trans self-narratives that the onto-formative and constitutive
possibilities for building an understanding of transgender as an ethico-
political project of self-actualization—grounded phenomenologically in
the lived experiences of the unfolding of gendered embodiment—can be
better realized. Herein lies pedagogical possibilities for drawing on trans-
narratives in educational contexts that illuminate—simultaneously and in

their complexities—the onto-formative, performative, imaginative, and
unfolding dimensions of gendered corporality as they emerge temporally
and over the life project. As Butler (2004) claims:
Fantasy is not simply a cognitive exercise, an internal film that we project

inside the interior of the mind. Fantasy structures relationality, and it comes
into play in the stylization of embodiment itself. Bodies are not inhabited
as spatial givens. They are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging,
altering signification—depending on their interactions—and the web of
visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity,
their constitutive past, present and future. (p. 217)
Such a notion of fantasy or imagining, as it informs an understanding of

trans bodily existence as an ontological contingency that unfolds over the
life course, and which is predicated on the imperative for transgender and
transsexual people to account for their embodied experiences of gender
in their own terms, is central to the conceptualization of the transgender
imaginary. It speaks to a subaltern counterpublic pedagogical arena for
fostering a trans participatory democracy that is committed to a politics
of solidarity and gender revolution as understood in terms of an onto-
formative recognition and growing awareness of trans self-constitution that
encapsulates experiences of complexity and contradictory embodiment.
REFERENCES
Bettcher, T. (2007). Evil deceivers and make-believers: On transphobic violence
and the politics of illusion. Hypatia, 22(3), 43–65.
Connell, R. (2009a). Accountable conduct: Doing gender in transsexual and
political retrospect. Gender and Society, 23(1), 104–111.
Connell, R. (2009b). Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Connell, R. (2012). Transsexual women and feminist thought: Toward new
understanding and new politics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
37(4), 857–881.
Cordes, D. (2013). The emergence and danger of the “acceptable” trans narrative.
http://www.bilerico.com/2013/03/the_emergence_and_danger_of_the_
acceptable_trans_n.php. Accessed online 30 Jan 2015.
Doan, P. L. (2010). The tyranny of gendered spaces: Reflections from beyond the
gender dichotomy. Gender, Place and Culture, 17(5), 635–654.
394 W.J. MARTINO
Elliot, P., & Roen, K. (1998). Transgenderism and the question of embodiment:
Promising queer politics? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 4(2),
231–261.
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of
actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25(26), 56–80.
Gabe. (2011). How I knew I was trans: My story and the trans narrative. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo3Qav6cLtY. Accessed 25 Nov 2014.
Hines, S. (2006). What’s the difference? Bringing particularity to queer studies of
transgender. Journal of Gender Studies, 15(1), 49–66.
HuffPost. (2013). “Orange is the new black” and its new black trans narrative.
http://on.aol.ca/video/orange-is-the-new-black-and-its-new-black-trans-
narrative-517867693. Accessed 30 Jan 2015.
Lane, R. (2009). Trans as bodily becoming: Rethinking the biological as diversity,
not dichotomy. Hypatia, 24(3), 136–157.
Namaste, V. (2000). Invisible lives: The erasure of transsexual and transgendered
people. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Noble, B. (2004). Sons of the movement: Feminism, female masculinity and
female to male (FTM) transsexual men. Atlantis, 29(1), 21–28.
Nordmarken, S. (2014). Becoming ever more monstrous: Feeling transgender in-
betweenness. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(1), 37–50.
Prosser, J. (1998). Second skins: The body narratives of transsexuality. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Roen, K. (2001). Transgender theory and embodiment: The risk of racial margin-
alisation. Journal of Gender Studies, 10(3), 254–263.
Rubin, H. (1998). Phenomenology as method in trans studies. GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies, 4(2), 263–281.
Sanders, J. H. (2010). (Re)imagining gender. Journal of LGBT Youth, 7(1), 1–5.
Serano, J. (2007). Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoat-
ing of femininity. Emeryville: Seal Press.
Stryker, S. (1994). My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of
Chamounix: Performing transgender rage. GLQ , 1(3), 237–254.
Stryker, S. (2006). (De)subjugated knowledges: An introduction to transgender
studies. In S. Stryker & S. Whittle (Eds.), The transgender studies reader
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern sociological imaginaries. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Wright Mills, C. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford
University Pres.
Zeigler, R. (2013). “Orange is the new black” and its new black trans narrative.
http://blackademic.com/orange-is-the-new-black-and-the-new-trans-
narrative/. Accessed 30 Jan 2015.
Third Spaces
Shenila S. Khoja-Moolji
Even though we observe a continuum of sex, gender, and sexuality in our

everyday lives (Fausto-Sterling 1996), societies, historically, have marked
variously sexed bodies into particular categories of gender, with corre-
sponding sexual desires. The production, legitimization, and transmission
of knowledges about difference, however, are wrought with complexity, as
they are coterminous with establishing a hierarchy of power-differentiated
bodies, experiences, and desires. Schools, along with other societal institu-
tions, partake in this endeavor. Through a range of administrative policies,
curricular choices, pedagogical practices, and architectural designs, they
gesture toward and/or willfully structure difference, along the axes of
gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and so on (see Kuzmic 2000; Lareau
2007; Lesko 2012; Olsen 1997; Willinsky 1998). However, schools are
also spaces where interrogation and blurring of these differences takes
place (see Sumara and Davis 1999; Loutzenheiser and Macintosh 2004).
In this chapter, I seek to explicate the production, operation, and contes-
tation of knowledges of difference based on sexual desires within school
contexts, and emphasize the productivity of postcolonial theorizations of
S.S. Khoja-Moolji ()

University of Pennsylvania, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and
Women’s Studies, Philadelphia, PA, USA

396 S.S. KHOJA-MOOLJI
“third space” and “liminality” (Bhabha 1990, 1994) in dismantling the

gay–straight binary.
In recent decades, we observe a rise in the establishment of formal
and informal spaces and activities for supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students in schools. The Gay–Straight
Alliance (GSA) clubs and cyclical advocacy events, such as National Day of
Silence, Coming Out Day, and so on, are some such examples. However,
I argue that these spaces and activities can be read as institutionalized
queer activism that instead of distorting the gay–straight binary, para-
doxically, re-articulate it. I then propose that instead of trying to iden-
tify, mark, and categorize sexual subjectivities—either for the purpose of
anti-discrimination policies or advocacy campaigns—we may be served
well by considering a proliferation of sexual subjectivities. Drawing on
theories of third spaces and liminality, which emphasize performances that
disrupt dominant binaries, I read the performances of Lawrence King,
a 15-year-old boy who was shot at a school in California, as an instance
of a third space. I show that Larry’s performance exceeded that which
we imagine as appropriate homosexuality and, therefore, threatened the
sexual binary; his performance became unrecognizable, thereby inhabit-
ing Bhabha’s (1990) third space. Such performances show the precarity
of binary representations and shed light on the possibility of other liv-
able sexual subjectivities. This chapter, thus, brings together postcolonial
and queer concerns to trouble and re-think the formalization of LGBTQ
advocacy in educational contexts.
CONTESTING DOMINANT CONSTRUCTIONS OF DIFFERENCE

Production of differences along the axes of sex, gender, and sexuality is
a complicated process. It not only involves defining an acceptable social
identity and an opposing other—man/woman, masculinity/femininity,
heterosexuality/homosexuality—but also involves unequal relations of
power. For instance, the female occupies not only an oppositional stance
to the male but also an inferior status; the heterosexual is construed as
not only not-homosexual but also superior. The oppositional positions of
women, femininity, and homosexuality have historically subsumed a range
of social identities within them, serving to homogenize “the other.” I call
such constructions of difference the “dominant difference” because they
provide the most prevailing ways for us to comprehend the hegemony of
man, masculinity, and heterosexuality. The subject positions of woman,
THIRD SPACES 397
femininity, and homosexuality form the “dominant other”; they occupy

a marginal position vis-à-vis the accepted social identity but a dominant
position vis-à-vis the marginal identities and subjectivities that they make
invisible—such as hermaphrodites, male pseudohermaphrodites, female
pseudohermaphrodites, bisexual, transsexual, autosexual, and gender non-
conforming, among others. Clearly, the marginal identities do not carry
the same authority as the “dominant other” because dominant otherness
is an imperative for hegemonic constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Said differently, without the homosexual, the heterosexual cannot retain
its primacy, but even before the naming of the bisexual the homosexual
retains some coherence. Construction of difference, thus, is a complicated
process and includes a range of processes of domination and marginaliza-
tion. However, subjects constructed as “the other” contest their margin-
ality by challenging the very basis of dominant difference. They do so by
moving in and out of, what scholars such as Homi Bhabha (1990) have
called, third or liminal spaces.
Proliferation of Difference Through Third Spaces

Postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha has used the concepts of third spaces,
liminality, and hybridity (sometimes interchangeably) across various essays
to signal the fluidity and negotiation entailed in the production of cul-
tural identities. He argues that cultural differences, including gender and
sexual identities, cannot be ascribed to pre-given traits. Instead, articula-
tion of identities is an “ongoing negotiation” (Bhabha 1994, p. 2) that
involves continual interface and exchange of performances. We can draw on
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to understand this further. Butler
(1990) argues that gender identities are not ontological but are produced
in, through, and during performances—it is the repetition of performances
of that which we recognize as feminine or masculine that gives femininity
or masculinity a semblance of naturality or coherence. This does not mean
that scholars like Bhabha and Butler ignore the materiality of the body or
presence of sexual desires. What they direct us toward is to analyze the insti-
tutions and practices that make some bodies and desires recognizable and
others unthinkable. Thus, poststructuralist and postcolonial theories ges-
ture toward conceptualizing sexual identities as performances that are then
placed in power-differentiated hierarchies. However, what happens when
we witness a performance that exceeds the established categories? Or, when
we are unable to place someone within the binary of gay–straight?
Bhabha (1990) notes that it is precisely at those moments of excess

that we can see the fragility of the project of representation. He directs
us to ask: “How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the
sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender,
etc.)?” (Bhabha 1994, p. 2). It is this place of excess or in-betweenness
that Bhabha (1990) calls the “third space” (p. 211). Performances within
the third space threaten the normativity of binary representations and defy
neat categorizations. Third spaces, thus, make possible articulations of sub-
jectivities that may be more complex or even ambivalent. Performances,
here, are not simply the sum of the parts but a new formation: “this third
space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures
of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood
through received wisdom” (Bhabha 1990, p. 211). In third spaces, hence,
we observe, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) might describe as, a “pro-
liferation” of identities that subvert the knowledge-power nexus that sus-
tains binary representations. They make possible new kinds of “becomings”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Attending to such forms of becomings
means that we rid ourselves of preexisting interpretive frameworks and pay
attention to other conditions, narratives, and life scripts that, too, are pos-
sible. Thus, Bhabha’s project ultimately entails not only making visible the
binary structures of our knowledge systems but also directs us to consider
emergent subjectivities at the interstices of difference.
The Politics of Institutionalized Spaces and Practices

of Queer Activism
Schools, like other societal institutions, partake in the production of dif-
ference. In order to make schools more hospitable environments for stu-
dents of all sexual identities, curricular and extracurricular approaches
have undergone considerable discussion and research. The establishment
and popularity of GSA clubs, in this context, can be read as a particu-
lar moment through which the school administrators, teachers, as well as
students and parents signal their support for queer students (see Quasha
2010). Similarly, a range of activities have been designated and institution-
alized as appropriate for expressing solidarity with gender nonconform-
ing and/or nonheterosexual populations. These include National Day of
Silence, Coming Out Day, and Think Before You Speak campaigns, among
others. The creation of these spaces and activism opportunities, however,
has not been without contestation. Cris Mayo (2004), for instance, has
THIRD SPACES 399
outlined the protracted legal and political struggles that have accompanied
the installation of such practices, spaces, and nondiscrimination policies
within schools, and Lesko (2010) traces the ways in which such debates
manifest themselves in curricular choices around Sexuality Education.
These efforts have resulted in spaces, like the GSA clubs, that are marked
as “safe spaces” (see Mayo 2013; Quasha 2010) that allow students to
access knowledges about queer history and engage in conversations about
topics considered taboo in the dominant environment. Safe spaces, how-
ever, are not free of contradictions and tensions. Dumont Piper (2011),
for instance, notes that separate spaces construct particular topics and
subjects as nonnormative and, therefore, only appropriately situated on
the margins of society, this is, in the safe spaces. By marking the GSA as
safe for discussions about queer issues, we also imply that the everyday is
not a hospitable place for such dialogues. Paradoxically, then, the GSA
reinforces the very marginality of queer issues that it was established to
overcome. In a similar vein, setting aside particular days, events, or activi-
ties during which students can officially engage in queer activism also re-
inscribes this marginality. I see such practices as forms of institutionalized
social justice activism. Here, protest and advocacy are appropriated for the
purpose of educational institutions to mark themselves as culturally diverse
and welcoming of all sexual identities. Protest becomes scripted, routin-
ized, and sanitized. This form of activism, which is configured, legalized,
and legitimized by school authorities, may do little to destabilize institu-
tional arrangements that produce unequal relations of power along the
axis of sexuality in the first place.
In thinking about institutionalized activism, I am reminded of de
Certeau’s (1984) distinction between tactics and strategies. According
to de Certeau (1984), strategies are practices deployed by the powerful
to delimit and designate their own place, from where they can establish
relations with an exteriority. Said differently, strategies allow the power-
ful to establish a panoptic practice through which they can analyze, read,
predict, and manage others. In contrast, tactics are minor points of resis-
tances employed or enacted by the powerless within the predefined and
predetermined constraints of their everyday contexts to disrupt their sub-
jection: “the space of a tactic is the space of the other” (de Certeau 1984,
p. 37). The powerless take what they can from the discourses, commodi-
ties, and spaces of dominant societies, in the service of their own empow-
erment. Yet, de Certeau also notes that tactics over time can be made
redundant when they are co-opted by the status quo. That is, when tactics
are institutionalized they can lose their efficacy. Similarly, I, too, wonder
about the limits of activist actions under the auspices of the institutional-
ized GSA when said actions have been made cyclical (such as the annual
engagement of National Day of Silence) or mandatory (such as sessions
focusing on LGBTQ issues during school orientation). What kinds of
effects does this form of activism have on proliferating queer subjectivi-
ties? What kinds of excesses are produced?
More broadly, we can read the institutionalization of queer activism in
schools as an element of a wider “discursive storyline” (Davies 1989) or
knowledge regime through which the subject position of gay and straight
are elaborated. Munro (1998) argues that for “events or selves … to exist
[they] must be encoded as story elements” (p. 266). GSA clubs and cycli-
cal advocacy campaigns do precisely that; they bring into effect the binary
of straight-gay by allocating particular sites, times, days, and activities
where this binary can be inhabited. Consider, a recent article by J.B. Mayo
(2013) in which he defines the function of a GSA club at a high school in
a mid-western city in the USA. Here, the complexity of the continuum of
sexuality is reduced to predefined categories. Individuals entering the GSA
are subjectivated (Butler 1997) as “gays,” “straight allies,” or “question-
ing.” There is limited sense of fluidity or movement across sexual subjec-
tivities and little playing at the border. According to Butler (1997), the
process of subjectivation denotes:
both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection—one inhab-
its the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to a power, a sub-
jection which implies a radical dependency. … Subjection is, literally, the
making of a subject, the principle of regulation according to which a subject
is formulated or produced. (p. 83)
GSA clubs and cyclical advocacy campaigns then, paradoxically, produce

the gay and straight subject. In the case presented by J.B. Mayo (2013),
for instance, the gay subject (or her ally) is expected to learn particular
histories of struggle, such as learning about the Stonewall events, confess
about personal insecurities, take on the burden of explaining her own (or
her friend’s) sexual identity, and engage in activism for its recognition. The
straight-non-ally’s subject position, too, is relationally elaborated as being
hostile to sexual minorities and in-need-of-awareness/education. We can,
thus, observe the making of the subject position of gay, straight-ally, and
straight-non-ally. This is also in line with Bhabha’s (1990) observation
THIRD SPACES 401
that often the creation or recognition of diversity is accompanied by forms

of containment of difference (p. 208). Even though sexual differences are
endorsed in and through the GSA, they are also simultaneously contained
and monitored through predefined possibilities of subject positions.
In addition, within the binary of straight-gay, the subject position
of “straight” emerges as desexualized, masking its heteronormativity.
Straightness, here, sets itself up from a position of exteriority (de Certeau
1984), and others (queers) have to explain their sexual subjectivities in
relation to it. It is through references to straightness that the category of
“gay” defines, defends, and produces itself. The category of “straight,”
then, has the normative stance from which it can construct its political and
cultural judgments. We are, thus, enrolled in a storyline whose characters
have predefined scripts. By partaking in this endeavor—and, its spaces and
practices—we constitute these characters as well.
This, however, is in contrast to Bhabha’s (1990) descriptions of a third
space, as explained earlier. Third spaces are sites of ambivalence where
subjects exceed categorizations. In descriptions of the operation of GSA
clubs (such as Mayo 2013), we observe little of that. Yet, it is significant to
remember that this does not mean that such emergent subjectivities are/
were not possible in GSA. Processes of subjectivation are never total or all-
determining; there is always excess. What I am arguing, however, is that
the institutionalization of queer activism creates a discursive environment
where processes of subjectification gesture toward predefined categories as
opposed to proliferation of sexual subjectivities.
I now analyze the shooting of Lawrence King, a 15-year-old boy from
North California, to provide a glimpse of what/how a third space might
look like.
LIMINAL PRACTICES
In the context of differences of sexuality, we can locate third spaces on
the fuzzy boundaries of what Jordan-Young (2010) calls the “three-
ply-yarn of sex, gender and sexuality” (p. 15). This metaphor is useful
because it pushes back against conceptualizing sex, gender, and sexu-
ality in discrete or abstracted ways. It directs us to, instead, consider
their entanglements. Third spaces, located at these borders or interstices
(Bhabha 1994), allow subjects to draw on seemingly distinct aspects of
sex, gender, and sexuality and embody them in ways that visibly chal-
lenge the underlying arrangements that inform binary constructions. In
doing so, third space subjects engage in conversations across differences

to construct competing narratives, contest established differences, and
carve out new spaces for themselves. Hence, third space subjects engage
in two processes: first, they are located on the boundaries; and, second,
they visibly engage in practices or embody identities “that involve the
dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and
structures” (Szakolczai 2009, p. 1). While interpretations of third spaces
(or, as Bhabha (1994) has called it elsewhere, “liminality”) in anthropo-
logical literature represent it as a place of transition, a threshold through
which people move between a pre- and a postliminal state, I follow Sila-
Khan’s (2004) use of liminality as a space of permanence: “a perma-
nent opening into a world of multiple values” (p. 6). Third space, then,
is a space of permanent in-betweenness, whose location, practices, and
events threaten the dominant order. Lawrence King’s example highlights
this further.
In 2008, Lawrence, who was assumed to be homosexual, was shot dead
by a fellow classmate, Brandon McInerney. During Brandon’s trial, the
defense argued that Lawrence used his sexuality to harass the shooter—
just a day before the killing, Lawrence is reported to have said “I love you,
baby” to Brandon (Kahn 2011). This event was described as the last straw
by Brandon. Lawrence had moved into the third space of sex, gender,
and sexuality, and had started accessing components of these as tactics
that visibly challenged the dominant constructions of homosexuality: a
few months before being killed, he began engaging in bodily modifica-
tions by wearing high heels and nail polish; he then started cross-dressing,
chasing boys who used to bully him, and befriended girls by chasing away
boys from crowded school cafeteria tables (Salamon 2011). His visible, in-
between performance was in stark contrast to the socially accepted identity
of the homosexual as the effeminate, deficient position, which, through
practices of bullying and harassment, was to serve to institute heterosexu-
ality as the norm. In the third space, Lawrence performed a new form of
subjectivity by drawing on aspects of gender and sexuality not previously
available to him. What emerged then could not be neatly categorized as
either homosexual or heterosexual and, thus, threatened the certainties of
dominant binaries.
This example hones in on the borders of the three-ply-yarn, the third
space. Similar to Throne’s (1993) conceptualization of borderwork, which
pays attention to the moments when gender and sexual boundaries are
evoked to create difference (pp. 64–88), third spaces are evoked to
THIRD SPACES 403
destabilize dominant difference. For instance, Lawrence did not cross-

dress every day; indeed, on most says he occupied the position of the
“other”—the homosexual who was bullied and harassed for being effemi-
nate. However, at particular moments and on particular locations he
engaged in liminal practices and moved into the third space to push for a
restructuring of difference. What is key here is that third spaces or enact-
ments of liminality do not have to be continuous, nor do they have to be
located within specific physical sites; third spaces are possible even during
fleeting moments, through gestures, and during everyday practices, such
as walking differently.
While the metaphor of the three-ply-yarn is useful in showing the inter-
relationships of sex, gender, and sexuality, additional plys for class, race,
and ability have to be added to account for the ways in which subjects
experience domination and oppression. Larry, for instance, was a person of
color from a low-income background and Brandon was a white, middle-
class boy. How did Larry’s class, race, and ability intersect with his liminal
position? Did it increase or decrease his capacity to engage in liminal prac-
tices? Are particular subjects more likely to move into third spaces versus
others? When?
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have attempted to show the ways in which institutional-
ized spaces and practices of queer activism within schools, can, paradoxi-
cally, re-articulate the gay–straight binary. While postcolonial theories of
third space and liminality can be helpful in illuminating different ways
of engaging with sexual subjectivities in educational contexts, it may
only happen if we move away from the framework of “diversity” to “dif-
ference.” That is, instead of seeking common, universalist values that
all diverse student and teacher populations can affiliate with and agree
upon, it may be more productive to work with the assumption that often
differences—as they have developed historically and culturally—are, per
Bhabha (1990), incommensurable. Hence, only through “a defiant affir-
mation of a multiplicity” (Grosz 1994, p. 19) of sexual desires, bodies,
and subjectivities can we hope for schools to become more hospitable
spaces.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Dr. Nancy Lesko at Teachers
College, Columbia University for her feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.
REFERENCES
Bhabha, H. (1990). The third space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In J. Rutherford
(Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 207–221). London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London:
Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Davies, B. (1989). The discursive production of the male/female dualism in
school settings. Oxford Review of Education, 15(3), 229–241.
De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Randall, Trans.). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
phrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Fausto-Sterling, A. (1996). The five sexes. In K. E. Rosenblum & T. C. Travis
(Eds.), The meaning of difference: American constructions of race, sex and gen-
der, social class, and sexual orientation (pp. 68–77). New York: McGraw Hill.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies. Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Jordan-Young, R. (2010). Brain storm: The flaws in the science of sex differences.
Boston: Harvard University Press.
Kahn, C. (2011, October 22). At teen’s trial. Bullying of gays in focus. NPR News.
Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2011/07/12/137796716/
gay-victims-trial-seeks-classmates-murder-motive
Kuzmic, J. J. (2000). Textbooks, knowledge, and masculinity: Examining patriar-
chy from within. In N. Lesko (Ed.), Masculinities at school (pp. 105–126).
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Lareau, A. (2007). Unequal childhoods. In M. L. Andersen & P. Hill Collins
(Eds.), Race, class, and gender: An anthology (pp. 348–358). Belmont: Thomson.
Lesko, N. (2010). Feeling abstinent? Feeling comprehensive? Touching the affects
of sexuality curricula. Sex Education, 10(3), 281–297.
Lesko, N. (2012). Act your age! A cultural construction of adolescence. New York:
Routledge.
Loutzenheiser, L., & Macintosh, L. (2004). Citizenship, sexualities, and educa-
tion. Theory Into Practice, 42(2), 151–158.
Mayo, C. (2004). The tolerance that dare not speak its name. In M. Boler (Ed.),
Democratic dialogue in education: Troubling speech, disturbing silence
(pp. 33–50). New York: Peter Lang.
Mayo, J. B. (2013). Critical pedagogy enacted in the gay-straight alliance: New
possibilities for a third space in teacher development. Educational Researcher,
24(5), 266–275.
THIRD SPACES 405
Munro, P. (1998). Engendering curriculum history. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.),

Curriculum: Toward new identities (pp. 263–294). New York: Garland.
Olsen, L. (1997). Made in America: Immigrant students in our public schools.
New York: The New Press.
Piper, D. (2011). Space spaces. In N. Lesko & S. Talburt (Eds.), Keywords in youth
studies: Tracing affects, movements, knowledges. New York: Routledge.
Quasha, S. (2010). A program review of a middle school gay-straight alliance (GSA)
club. St. John’s University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing.
Salamon, G. (2011). Paper presented at Masculinity, Complex. Conference at
Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Sila-Khan, D. (2004). Crossing the threshold: Understanding religious identities in
South Asia. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers in association with The Institute of
Ismaili Studies.
Sumara, D., & Davis, B. (1999). Interrupting heteronormativity: Toward a queer
curriculum theory. Curriculum Inquiry, 29(2), 191–208.
Szakolczai, A. (2009). Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situations
and transformative events. International Political Anthropology, 2(1),
141–172.
Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Willinsky, J. (1998). Learning to divide the world: Education at empire’s end.
Trans Generosity
Nelson M. Rodriguez
INTRODUCTION
The term transgender, as Stryker and Currah (2014) note, “has a long
history that reflects multiple, sometimes overlapping, sometimes even
contested meanings” (p. 1). Related to a critical knowledge formation,
however—that is, to the academic field known as transgender studies—the
term has only been in circulation for little over two decades. Its appear-
ance, in fact, in the early 1990s, coincides with when transgender studies
“began to take shape as an interdisciplinary field” (Stryker and Currah
2014, p. 4). As a catchall term connected to a field of study within aca-
demia, transgender is similar to other critical-based studies that are con-
cerned, in general, with analyses of power/knowledge. In this regard,
Stryker and Aizura (2013), drawing from the examples of performance
and science studies, make a useful comparison to the critical project of
contemporary (i.e., post-1990s) transgender studies. As they explain:
If pre-1990s discourse could be described as the performance of certain

objectifying and minoritizing ways of understanding trans phenomena, then
N.M. Rodriguez ( )
The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA

408 N.M. RODRIGUEZ
what came afterwards could be conceptualized as a kind of performance

studies that treated this earlier work as its own archive and object of inquiry;
to the extent that the earlier work understood itself as constituting a science
of the sexed and gendered self, then the later field bracketed and historicized
the truth claims of that science somewhat in the manner of science studies.
(p. 2)
In making a distinction between a post-1990s body of knowledge on

transgender phenomena from earlier work, Stryker and Aizura highlight
that a great deal of knowledge production on gender variance existed long
before the 1990s. What changed in the 1990s, however, was the emer-
gence of discourse production—informed in part by a broad constellation
of critical theories providing “powerful contestations of normative knowl-
edge that emerged over the course of the twentieth century” (Stryker and
Currah 2014, p. 4)—that enabled “a different kind of sense to be made of
transgender phenomena,” (Stryker and Aizura 2013, p. 1), that enabled
the emergence of a different—that is, critical—speaking position.1 Such
critical discourse production has contributed to the process, though obvi-
ously unfinished to date and not without struggle, of institutionalizing
transgender studies within the academy. Along with the institutionalization
of any academic field of study, of course, includes an ongoing production
of a range of concepts. Indeed, concepts can be one way to help legiti-
mate a field and to “map” it epistemologically (and politically) in terms
of where it has been and where it might be headed. “Postposttranssexual:
Key Concepts for a Twenty-First Century Transgender Studies,” the inau-
gural volume for the recently launched journal TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, could be read in such a way. From this perspective, the con-
cept of trans generosity put forward in this chapter is situated within the
ongoing development of concepts within transgender studies for thinking
about the complexity of evolving notions of gendered embodiment in the
twenty-first century. Yet, as I demonstrate in the final section of this chap-
ter, the concept of trans generosity is an analytically mobile one, having
important theoretical, pedagogical, and political implications for gender
and sexuality studies, more generally. In other words, the concept, espe-
cially in relation to questions of identity and identity politics, can also be
taken up well beyond the specific site and concerns of transgender studies.
In addition, given the queer-inflected emphasis of the concept, my hope
is that it proves useful for thinking about the ongoing complicated rela-
tions between queer theory and transgender studies. And finally, given
TRANS GENEROSITY 409
that I take up a queer-inflected trans generosity in relation to questions of

education and pedagogy, I hope the concept also proves useful for think-
ing about questions of teaching and/or research within the context and
concerns of the overall field of queer studies and education.
This chapter, thus, is organized across three sections. The first focuses
on delineating the meaning of trans generosity in relation to queer
embodiments linked to a productive critique of bigenderism. In the sec-
ond section, I situate the concept within broader debates between queer
theory and transgender studies, specifically focusing on the theoretical and
political tensions that have arisen with indexing trans bodies/identities as
figures for queer critiques of the entrenched system of binary gender. In
this way, the complexity, yet potential promise, of invoking simultaneously
queer and trans discourses is explored. Informed by these two sections, in
the final part of the chapter I consider an approach to a queer/trans peda-
gogy that situates, as a form of generosity, the capacity of queer embodi-
ments to critically instigate an understanding of queerness as a form of
desire linked to a queer utopia.
WHAT IS TRANS GENEROSITY?

Articulated with any number of critical concepts and theoretical perspec-
tives, particularly, though not exclusively, those arising out of the field of
gender and sexuality studies, trans generosity could conceivably invoke a
broad range of meanings as it illuminates an array of transgender phenom-
ena. In this way, the concept of trans generosity is potentially generative.
I initially introduced the concept while analyzing the stories of three bio-
logical females who identify as “genderqueer” in the documentary, Gender
Rebel (2006). At that time, I defined trans generosity as the “capacity
that genderqueer bodies and identities potentially have to critically pro-
voke new kinds of sustaining (gendered) social relations and social spaces
when genderqueer bodies and identities are lived ‘openly’ in ways that
problematize the delimited language, logic, and structure of bigenderism”
(Rodriguez 2012, p. 281). In this chapter, I continue with this definition,
further unpacking it in the service of elucidating the concept. As my defi-
nition of trans generosity indexes queer forms gendered embodiment—for
example, genderqueer—in the next section I provide a brief overview of
Queer Theory and some of its main tenets that relate to the meaning of
trans generosity put forward in this chapter. I specifically focus on earlier
queer theoretical work on the topic of performative subversion of gender
410 N.M. RODRIGUEZ
binaries as the latter intersects with the notion of “line of flight” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987) that relates to queer phenomenology’s (Ahmed 2006)
orientation to bodily placement, as well as to the critically productive
notion of “failure.” From this perspective, the concept of trans generos-
ity can be understood as simultaneously invoking a number of analytic
idioms.
QUEER THEORY, FAILURE, AND LINES OF FLIGHT

A number of developments, both within and beyond the context of aca-
demia, helped to generate the conditions for the emergence of Queer
Theory in the early 1990s in the USA. Among others, these include the rise
of the New Right and Christian Right of the 1970s and 1980s and the need
to organize and resist their virulent homophobic and heterosexist discourse
and policies (see, e.g., Stein 2012); the appearance of more militant forms
of queer activism by organizations such as ACT UP and Queer Nation as a
response to the Regan Administration’s lack of engagement with the AIDS
crisis of the early 1980s; and, within higher education, the growth of post-
structuralist thinkers beginning in the 1960s who generated a set of ideas
about the discursive constitution of the subject, thus initiating a number of
scholarly campaigns attempting to “denaturalize” identity.
More specifically, within the context of academic knowledge produc-
tion, Queer Theory—from some of its earliest work to the present—has
been engaged in a critique of normative models of sex, gender, and sex-
uality, thus challenging any number of “normalizing tendencies”—for
example, “clear-cut” identity categories (such as gay or heterosexual),
sex and gender binaries (such as male/female, masculine/feminine), and
assimilationist forms of sexual politics, to name a few—that limit how we
might think about and embody the categories of gender and sexuality,
as well as other categories of social difference. One significant effect for
identity (and identity politics) of Queer Theory’s antinormative analytic
vocabulary and methodology has been to problematize the normative
notion and explanatory framework of natural identity. As Jagose (1996)
explains: “Demonstrating the impossibility of any ‘natural’ sexuality …
[queer] calls into question even such apparently unproblematic terms as
‘man’ and ‘woman’” (p. 3). Thus, “queer marks a suspension of identity
as something that is fixed, coherent and natural” (Jagose 1996, p. 98),
making possible a rejection of identity categorization per se by emphasiz-
ing multiplicity, fluidity, and instability.
By illuminating, then, the discursive production of sexuality and gender

(e.g., Foucault 1990; Butler 1990), effectively denaturalizing essentialist
notions about these categories, and destabilizing the naturalized norms
that have been built up around them, queer theoretical work has served
to legitimate non-normative sexualities and genders. As Jagose (1996)
explains when describing the critical project of Butler’s (1990) Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity:
Although Gender Trouble is framed most prominently in terms of feminism,

one of its most influential achievements is to specify how gender operates
as a regulatory construct that privileges [the norm] of heterosexuality and,
furthermore, how the deconstruction of normative models of gender legiti-
mates lesbian and gay subject-positions. (p. 83)
In highlighting gender as a performative in the service of deconstruct-

ing heterosexuality as a hegemonic norm (an effect of the sex/gender
system), thus legitimating “lesbian and gay subject positions,” Butler’s
Gender Trouble can be read as doing queer work. But Queer (Theory) is
also about destabilizing subject positions themselves, identity categories, and
this is the work that queer embodiments potentially do. Queer embodi-
ments highlight, that is, a longstanding tenet of queer theory, summarized
by Jagose (1996) as follows: “queer describes those gestures or analyti-
cal models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations
between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire … queer focuses on
mismatches between sex, gender, and desire” (p. 3). In short, by high-
lighting and problematizing “the delimited language, logic, and structure
of bigenderism” (Rodriguez 2012, p. 281), queer embodiments open up
the possibility for new kinds of queer relations to oneself, to others, and
to the creation of queer spaces themselves. It is this potentially enabling
aspect of queer embodiments that constitutes their “generosity.” From
this perspective, trans generosity is a queer concept.
To further understand the concept of trans generosity, that is, the criti-
cal meaning of generosity associated with queer embodiments, it is useful
to consider what these embodiments “fail” at doing and what such failure
makes possible. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam (2011) notes
that:
Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing,

unbecoming, not knowing may offer more creative, more cooperative, more
412 N.M. RODRIGUEZ
surprising ways of being in the world. … What kinds of reward can failure
offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punish-
ing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with
the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable
adulthoods. (pp. 2–3)
Thinking with Halberstam’s formulation of failure, queer embodiments, by

moving across space and time “off line” (Ahmed 2006)—specifically in terms
of not following (i.e., embodying, living out) sex/gender conventions (con-
ventions read as an example of Halberstam’s “punishing norms”)—quite
possibly fail at reconstituting the hegemony of the gender binary. As such,
queer embodiments can be imagined as, or provoking, “lines of flight” that
designate “an infinitesimal possibility of escape. … Applied to the gender/
transgender spectrum … [lines of flight designate] a move—that is, as a
political move, a strategic or tactical move, a move in a game-space—and as
movement itself, a displacement between the established plateaus of gender
[sex, and sexuality]” (Fournier 2014, p. 121). In this way, queer embodi-
ments open up new (gendered) relations and spaces yet to be imagined and
experienced; they potentially engender a queer “escape too glorious to have
already happened but still there, open, somewhere between ‘right now’ and
the closest future” (Fournier 2014, p. 122). In other words, by not fol-
lowing (or “failing” to follow) the plethora of lines that orient the body
in directions that would reconstitute the hegemony of bigenderism, queer
embodiments “potentially bring within reach—that is, generously open up
the possibility for—social relations and spaces that might otherwise remain
out of reach when those relations and spaces are thought and lived within
the territorializing logic of two socially constructed sex/gender categories
and the accompanying logic of fixed notions of identity” (Rodriguez 2012,
p. 281). And again, it is this enabling aspect of queer embodiments that
constitutes their generosity.
INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN QUEER THEORY

AND TRANSGENDER STUDIES: COMPLICATIONS
AND POSSIBILITIES
As might be suggested thus far in this chapter, the concept of trans gener-
osity taps into debates that, as Chris Beasley (2005) notes, “may be found
across the Modernist–Postmodernist continuum, stretching from deeply
Modernist accounts of gender as essence to a refusal of identity categories

associated with Queer Theory” (p. 153). While it is not possible in the
available space of this chapter to provide a thorough accounting of these
debates, it is important to pause here and highlight that deploying trans
bodies and identities as the “epitome of gender incoherence and disrup-
tion along queer lines” (Beasley 2005, p. 159) has been contested (see,
e.g., Namaste 2000; Prosser 1998). Indeed, rather than being viewed as
“generous,” a queer-inflected notion of trans generosity could in fact be
framed by some as antitranssexual. Therefore, in terms of taking up the
concept of trans generosity in future work—either pedagogically, politi-
cally, and/or theoretically—it will be important to recognize and address
the complexity of the sometimes vexed interimplication of queer and trans
discourses.
For example, in situating these debates within the specific context of
exchanges between transgender and transsexual theorists on the issue
of (stable) identity, Chris Beasley (2005) highlights, among others, the
work of transsexual theorist, Margaret O’Hartigan (1993). Beasley notes
that O’Hartigan “argues very vociferously that sex change is not gender
change, let alone gender dismantling. [O’Hartigan], along with other
transsexuals (either pre or post-operative), argues that she changed her
bodily sex from male to female, but did this to maintain and enhance
a gender continuity—her deeply-felt sense of femininity” (Beasley 2005,
p. 153). O’Hartigan’s work, then, can be seen as an instance of a broader
debate, a debate stretching back to at least the mid-1990s, a debate that
has raised concerns about the limitations—politically and theoretically—
with the queering or undoing of gender.
Similarly, although he views bodily sex as flexible, transsexual theo-
rist Jay Prosser, as Beasley (2005) notes, “urges conformity with the
normative gender binary and recognizes ‘the value of gendered real-
ness’” (pp. 153–154). Prosser (2013) specifically takes aim at Butler’s
(1990) Gender Trouble because he views it as the pivotal work that
“yoked transgender most fully to queer sexuality … [transforming]
transgender into a queer icon” (p. 35). The aspect of Butler’s work
that troubles Prosser is “the assumption that transgender is queer is
subversive” (Prosser 2013, p. 37). As Prosser states (2013): “It should
be understood that, although it never makes such argument, Gender
Trouble does set up the conditions for this syllogism: transgender =
gender performativity = subversive” (p. 37). As with O’Hartigan, then,
414 N.M. RODRIGUEZ
Prosser’s work problematizes the queer notion of fluidity and advo-

cates, instead, finding a stable “gender home.” Beasley (2005) sum-
marizes Prosser’s argument as follows:
Prosser … argue[s] that many trans people are “anything but queer....They
are not, and do not aspire to be, in any way transgressive. What they want
is to be authentically themselves....This requires that they straighten (not
queer) the relationship between their sex and gender.” In this perspective,
transsexual represents a claim to identity (to a gender identity and to an
authentic true core self). (p. 154)
These complex and ongoing identity debates between transgender and

transsexual theorists raise a question that has been succinctly asked by
Heather Love (2014): “What is the place of queer in transgender studies?”
That depends on who is asked. Love (2014) suggests that affinities exist
between Queer Theory and Trans Studies, even, specifically, as regards
the theoretically and politically thorny question of stable identity. As Love
explains:
In distinction to both gay and lesbian studies and sexuality studies, queer
studies defines itself as a critical field that questions stable categories of
identity. Transgender studies also defines itself against identity, offer-
ing a challenge to the perceived stability of the two-gender system....If
queer can be understood as refusing the stabilizations of both gender and
sexuality implied by the categories gay and lesbian and opening onto a
wider spectrum of sexual nonnormativity, transgender emerged as a term
to capture a range of gendered embodiments, practices, and community
formations that cannot be accounted for by the traditional binary. (2014,
pp. 172–173)
The notion of “instability” in Love’s formulation might indeed be read as a

general point of epistemological and political connection between the aca-
demic formations of queer and trans, suggesting productive possibilities in
terms of future queer work in transgender studies. In terms of the concept
of trans generosity advocated in this chapter, future theorizing should try
to continue to account for the complexity, limits, and possibilities of the
meaning(s) of “generosity” associated with a queer deployment of the
concept, especially in light of the debates briefly highlighted here. It will
also be important to consider these sorts of issues within the context of
approaches to queer/trans pedagogies.
TRANS GENEROSITY AND QUEER/TRANS PEDAGOGY

In discussing queer embodiments in relation to the concept of trans gen-
erosity, the concept thus far has been positioned as primarily relevant to
transgender studies, as the debates highlighted between transgender and
transsexual theorists in the previous section might suggest. However, as
I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, queer embodiments, and the
complexity of their generosity, is a topic that has relevance to any num-
ber of fields of study concerned with debates that center on the topic
of stable and fluid notions of identity categories and the complex the-
oretical, methodological, political, and pedagogical questions that arise
across these debates. This is the case, in part, because work in both Queer
Theory and transgender studies has been taken up across the disciplines
in the humanities and social sciences. For example, in my earlier work on
trans generosity (see Rodriguez 2012), I situated the concept within the
context of women’s studies and the women’s studies classroom, raising
questions, by way of an analysis of the cultural politics of the documentary
Gender Rebel (2006), about how to approach teaching the queer-inflected
generosity of the concept while complicating stable notions of woman-
hood. Thus, I conclude this chapter by returning to Gender Rebel, focus-
ing on a section of the documentary that demonstrates the complexity
of the meaning of generosity in terms of the relationship between queer
embodiments—again, by way of the category genderqueer—and stable
notions of sexual identity categories, and briefly reflect on the implications
for queer/trans pedagogy.
Gender Rebel (2006) “documents the lives of three biological
females—Jill, Lauren, and Kim—in their early to mid-20s who identify
as genderqueer” (Rodriguez 2012, p. 276). When I initially analyzed the
documentary as a means by which, in part, to introduce, define, and reflect
on the concept of trans generosity, I focused my analysis on the stories of
Jill and Kim only. I argued then that Jill’s “coming out to her mother as
genderqueer has brought into imaginative reach for Jill’s mother, Elaine,
the possibility of envisioning, albeit not without struggle, a new kind
of mother-‘daughter’ relationship, one whose gendered meanings and
practices … will have to be renegotiated to make more room for gender
ambiguous formations” (Rodriguez 2012, p. 281). In this way, I framed
Jill’s coming out process and genderqueer identity as a form of gener-
osity in its potential to redefine the meanings of the identity categories,
mother and daughter, and the lived relations between them, in a way that
416 N.M. RODRIGUEZ
potentially “further afforded opportunities for gendered [relations and]

‘becoming[s]’ not yet visualized” (p. 281). In the section below from
Gender Rebel, I focus on a selection of Lauren’s narrative, specifically her
struggle, along with her boifriend, Liz, to explain the concept of gender-
queer (and be accepted as genderqueer) to Liz’s lesbian-identified aunt.
Lauren, who grew up in a predominantly Italian American community,
began to explore her genderqueer identity in college. In explaining what
genderqueer means to her, Lauren states: “To me genderqueer is think-
ing beyond male and female, constructing my own identity using those
attributes. It’s like I’m feeling masculine with those feminine attributes.
And like the closet role model I have to that is a gay male.” In terms of
her sexual identity, she goes on to note that she “never really identified as
a lesbian. I wasn’t really sure what to call myself. And I think part of that
was gender. What a lot of people don’t understand is that gender identity
and sexual orientation are different things.” In the following section from
the documentary, Liz, who also identities as genderqueer, takes Lauren to
meet, Mara, Liz’s lesbian-identified aunt, who has never heard of the term
genderqueer. In the following scene, while sitting at Mara’s kitchen table,
Lauren explains to Mara why she binds:
Lauren That’s an ace bandage. So you just hold it down like this and
wrap it around.
[…]
Mara And you do this because you don’t want people to know
you’re a woman.
Lauren Well it’s more just like presenting in the way I want to.
Mara Oh, so sometimes you feel like a male and sometimes you feel
then you want to have breasts?
Lauren I want to present the way I want to. And like some communi-
ties might see me one way, some might see another, but I’m
presenting how I feel.
Mara OK, then how you feel has to be male then.
Lauren Sometimes. And it just changes though. Most of the time I
don’t really feel like either.
[Mara asking Liz] You don’t consider yourself a female?
Liz I don’t identify as being in either gender box.
Mara You don’t identity as being a male or a female?
Liz I identify as being genderqueer. It’s a different gender option.
Mara [to Lauren] I mean I understand the whole thing about peo-
ple who feel trapped in a woman’s body and they want to have
a sex change operation. [Looking to Liz and in a somewhat
frustrated tone]: But you’re not even saying that. You’re say-
ing you don’t identify as either.
Liz Right.
Mara [looking completely flabbergasted at Liz] Well, you only get two
choices.
Liz [pointing to Lauren] Well this is a genderqueer, right here.
Mara She’s a woman.
Liz She’s a genderqueer.
Mara She’s a woman.
Mara So, uh, do you consider yourselves a lesbian couple?
Liz and Lauren [laughing] No.
Mara [completely exasperated] No? You’re two women dating each
other but you’re not a lesbian couple. I don’t understand it.
Liz Yet.
Mara I don’t know if I ever will.
Liz’s voiceover My aunt just doesn’t get it. She’s just old school lesbian,
just totally can’t grasp the concepts at all.
[…]
Mara I guess I’m just concerned like here comes along all these new
terms that I don’t even understand … and I am gay. What’s
going to happen to the average person? Are they gonna stop
the whole gay movement because they don’t understand, this
is like really blowing their minds now?
The exchange among Lauren, Liz, and Mara can be cast as a struggle,
particularly around the politics of language, knowledge, and meaning-
making, to “educate” Mara on the topic of queer embodiment. Their
dialogue, therefore, provides an opening to consider approaches to
queer/trans pedagogies interested in taking up queer embodiments and
the complexity of their generosity in classroom contexts, particularly in
relation to questions of student resistance to encountering queer/trans
forms of knowledge. For instance, Liz states that her aunt is “an old
school lesbian” who “just doesn’t get it, just totally can’t grasp the con-
cepts at all.” Liz’s comments could be read as suggesting that with more
knowledge and time, Mara might “get it.” The implication of this way of
418 N.M. RODRIGUEZ
thinking for pedagogy is that, as additional knowledge is acquired on a

specific topic, resistance to that new information will eventually fall away.
And such an assumption might in fact be borne out in some instances.
However, given the antifoundational aspect of queer and queer embodi-
ments, including their unsettling of stable notions of sexual and gen-
der identities, an aspect that might be understood and felt by some as
rather “ungenerous,” as Mara’s response might suggest to encountering
knowledge about the category genderqueer; it might be useful for stu-
dents to engage with a queer/trans pedagogy that, as Britzman (1998)
notes, “offers methods of critiques to mark the repetitions of normalcy
as a structure and as a pedagogy” (p. 214). This approach would then
account for resistance to encountering queer epistemologies not sim-
ply resulting from a lack of knowledge; rather, such a pedagogy would
reposition “resistance as not outside of the subject of knowledge or the
knowledge of subjects but, rather, as constitutive of knowledge and its
subjects” (Britzman 1998, p. 214). In other words, students would be
invited to grapple with how the construction of repetitions of normalcy
generates within those repetitions resistance to what has been co-con-
structed as “outside” or non-normative to those very repetitions of nor-
malcy. Understood in this way, students can then critically reflect on
why they “cannot bear to know” (Britzman 1998, p. 214) about cer-
tain (queer/trans) knowledge(s). A queer/trans pedagogy approached
as such would then situate students squarely within an analysis of how
queer embodiments (and transgender phenomena more generally) might
be viewed as critically generous in their ability to illuminate and to “help
unsettle historically and contextually specific knowledge(s) that shape
understanding of normative gender” (Galarte 2014, p. 146.), thus pro-
viding the pedagogical conditions for imagining something else, for pos-
sibly cultivating a queer imaginary. In this way, queer embodiments, and
queerness more generally, are recast in utopian terms as “a structuring
and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the
quagmire of the present” (Muñoz 2009, p. 1). Approaching the subject
of resistance along these lines might be especially efficacious in generat-
ing the kind of flexibility needed, as Galarte (2014) notes, for queer and
trans pedagogies to “keep up with the continually shifting terms and
conditions through which gender is named, imagined, and theorized” in
the twenty-first century (p. 147).
NOTE
1. Stryker and Currah (2014) identify a number of critical perspectives, includ-
ing “critical theory, poststructuralist and postmodern epistemologies, postco-
lonial studies, cultural studies of science, and identity-based critiques of
dominant cultural practices emanating from feminism, communities of color,
diasporic and displaced communities, disability studies, AIDS activism, and
queer subcultures and from the lives of people interpellated as being trans-
gender” (p. 4).
REFERENCES
Beasley, C. (2005). Gender & sexuality: Critical theories, critical thinkers. London:
Sage Publications.
Britzman, D. (1998). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. In
W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum: Toward new identities (pp. 211–232). New York:
Garland Publishing.
phrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Elliot, P. (2010). Debates in transgender, queer, and feminist theory. Farnham/
Burlington: Ashgate.
Epstein, E. (Director). (2006). Gender rebel. [Documentary]. United States:
Friction Films.
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction. New York:
Vintage.
Fournier, M. (2014). Lines of flight. Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-
First Century Transgender Studies. Special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, 1(1–2), 121–122.
Galarte, F. J. (2014). Pedagogy. Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-
First Century Transgender Studies. Special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, 1(1–2), 145–148.
Garner, T. (2014). Becoming.Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First
Century Transgender Studies.. Special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, 1(1–2), 30–32.
Press.
420 N.M. RODRIGUEZ
Love, H. (2014). Queer. Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First

Century Transgender Studies. Special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, 1(1–2), 172–176.
queer thing. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education. (pp. 141–155).
Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Namaste, V. (2000). Invisible lives: The erasure of transsexual and transgendered
people. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
O’Hartigan, M. (1993, May). Changing sex is not changing gender. Sound Out.
Prosser, J. (1998). Second skins: The body narratives of transsexuality. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Prosser, J. (2013). Judith Butler: Queer feminism, transgender, and the transub-
stantiation of sex. In D. E. Hall, A. Jagose, A. Bebell, & S. Potter (Eds.), The
Routledge queer studies reader (pp. 32–59). New York: Routledge.
Rodriguez, N. (2012). Queer imaginative bodies and the politics and pedagogy of
trans generosity: The case of Gender Rebel. In J. Landreau & N. M. Rodriguez
(Eds.), Queer masculinities: A critical reader in education (pp. 267–288).
Dordrecht: Springer.
Stein, M. (2012). Rethinking the gay and lesbian movement. New York: Routledge.
Stryker, S., & Aizura, A. Z. (2013). Introduction: Transgender studies 2.0. In
S. Stryker & A. Z. Aizura (Eds.), The transgender studies reader 2 (pp. 1–12).
Stryker, S., & Currah, P. (2014). Introduction. Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts
for a Twenty-First Century Transgender Studies. Special issue of TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(1–2), 1–18.
Trigger Warnings
Clare Forstie
INTRODUCTION
Few recent key concepts provoke as much academic debate and critical ire
as the use of the trigger warning in classrooms and instructional materials.
Instructors seek to balance concern for students’ experiences with the need
to teach difficult, challenging topics, and trigger warning debates high-
light tensions within academia between accommodating and challenging
students, between instructional freedom and institutional pressures, and
between instructors’, institutions’, and students’ politics. Trigger warnings
are generally statements, written or verbal, given in the classroom prior
to sharing content and/or on the syllabus to indicate potentially trigger-
ing content, and they are intended to protect students from experiencing
trauma in the classroom. Debates about trigger warnings have exploded
in blogs and on Tumblr, on activist and academic listservs, in popular
news sources like The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and
Mother Jones; industry-specific news sources like The Chronicle of Higher
Education and Inside Higher Ed; and on occasionally vitriolic comment
threads in these online spaces. Whether and how to use trigger warnings
C. Forstie ( )
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

422 C. FORSTIE
in the classroom marks a debate specifically in feminist and queer class-

rooms,1 and in feminist and queer studies, more broadly, as instructors
and researchers consider how power-laden contexts beyond the classroom
affect how we teach, how students learn, and how we change the world.
TRIGGER WARNINGS: A BRIEF HISTORY

While content warnings more generally have a long history, trigger warn-
ings arose in online feminist blogs and discussion forums in the late
1990s.2,3 Trigger warnings were initially intended to provide readers with
a warning that material may prompt traumatic responses specifically from
sexual assault survivors. In these online discussions, proponents of trigger
warnings argued that survivors of sexual assault, with or without a Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, deserved the ability to choose
whether to expose themselves to potentially triggering or re-traumatizing
material. As Guardian journalist Jill Filipovic noted, “graphic descriptions
of rape might lead to panic attacks or other reactions that will really ruin
someone’s day. Easy enough to give readers a little heads up—a trigger
warning—so that they can decide to avoid that material if they know that
discussion of rape triggers debilitating reactions” (2014). The comments
on one much-discussed article in the midst of the early, online trigger
warning debate (Hess 2010) are particularly instructive: those who sup-
port trigger warnings suggest that they allow readers to mentally prepare
themselves for difficult material, which allows them to remain engaged
in and contribute to online discussion. Proponents initially emphasized
debilitating responses to potentially triggering material, although calls for
expanding trigger warnings to a range of material quickly grew in tan-
dem with desires to create and maintain online feminist safe spaces. These
calls transferred to the classroom as students and administrators (and,
occasionally, faculty) considered the reality that course materials and dis-
cussions may be triggering students too. As demands to provide in-class
and on-syllabus trigger warnings became more common and more pub-
lic, coverage and commentary from mainstream media and feminist and
nonfeminist bloggers gripped the trigger warning discourse, prompting
vehement responses from both proponents and critics of trigger warnings
in the classroom.
In the broadest sense, trigger warnings in the classroom fit neatly into
discourses of inclusivity and student support. Students with PTSD, in par-
ticular, could be alienated or shut out of classroom discussions around
TRIGGER WARNINGS 423
materials that might contribute to or trigger their trauma. Even the most
vocal critics of trigger warnings acknowledge that students who seek
accommodations for diagnosed illnesses should be respected. More gener-
ally, creating an inclusive classroom requires an awareness of intersecting,
simultaneous sources of oppression. For example, the most well-covered
administrative (and advisory) policy emerged from Oberlin College
(Oberlin College, Office of Equity Concerns 2013).4 The definition of
“trauma,” at least in Oberlin’s policy and in subsequent discussions of
trigger warnings, expanded from individual to collective trauma and the
need to facilitate an inclusive classroom for individuals who are subject
to one or both kinds of trauma. As Oberlin’s policy states (in an excerpt
frequently quoted in coverage of trigger warnings):
Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything
that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism,
cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that
all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before
and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.
(Oberlin College, Office of Equity Concerns 2013)
Academic critics, queer theorists, and other commentators reacted to this

advisory policy and its subsequent mainstream media coverage. Many
responded to a particularly critical The New York Times article by Jennifer
Medina provocatively titled “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make
Students Squirm” (2014). Critiques of trigger warnings from famous
queer theorists, feminist bloggers, and academics (Halberstam 2014;
McMillan-Cottom 2014; Schmidt 2014) aligned along three axes: first,
the idea of the “neoliberal classroom,” a concern that the language of
trauma is being adopted by institutions to discipline instructors’ freedom
of speech (American Association of University Professors 2014) and abil-
ity to teach challenging material to the benefit of what Tressie McMillan-
Cottom calls “student-consumers.” This and other claims pit “comfort”
against “academic freedom” and against academically rigorous or chal-
lenging experiences (Hoover 2014). A second critique suggests that
providing a “safe” classroom is impossible, potentially detrimental to stu-
dents’ learning, and that students should not be “coddled” (Drum 2014;
Johnston 2014). Finally, some critics also claim that labeling content as
potentially triggering can effectively mark specific content as marginalized
and overly determine the course of discussion (Filipovic 2014) and can
424 C. FORSTIE
affect how individuals interact with material (Kang 2014). While these
critiques seem generally shared by proponents of trigger warnings, these
critical responses prompted reactions from those both using and avoiding
trigger warnings in the queer classroom.
TRIGGER WARNINGS AND TENSIONS IN THE QUEER

CLASSROOM
Trigger warnings as a timely key concept highlight long-standing ten-
sions within queer theories and classrooms. Given that the trigger
warning debate has revolved mainly around their use in the classroom
(queer, feminist, or otherwise), I focus my comments on the pedagogi-
cal fractures that have emerged in the debates about the use of trigger
warnings. I argue that trigger warnings offer a conceptual case through
which we might consider the place of power, affective engagement, and
politics for students, instructors, and institutions in the queer class-
room. Critically engaging with trigger warning debates demonstrates
that queer classrooms will never be fully “safe,” on the one hand, but
that creating inclusive, productive, and change-inducing opportunities
for students and instructors requires ongoing reflection about these
tensions.
Power
Discourse around trigger warnings in the queer classroom expose ten-
sions around how power is managed and maintained. In particular, who
demands and defines trigger warnings? While critiques of trigger warnings
have asserted that educational institutions pressure faculty to use trigger
warnings in their classrooms, in many cases, the imperative to include trig-
ger warnings arose from students themselves; for example, in the cases of
Oberlin and the University of California, Santa Barbara (Tremonti 2014),
students initiated the call for trigger warnings, and this call was taken up
institutionally. Furthermore, while we might consider faculty as empow-
ered in the queer classroom, given the student-consumer model, we might
legitimately question whether students or faculty are most empowered. As
a group of seven humanities faculty point out in their comprehensive list
of trigger warning critiques, “Faculty of color, queer faculty, and faculty
teaching in gender/sexuality studies, critical race theory, and the visual/
performing arts will likely be disproportionate targets of student com-

plaints about triggering, as the material these faculty members teach is by
its nature unsettling and often feels immediate” (Freeman et al. 2014).
The trigger warning discourse further highlights the vulnerability particu-
larly of early career and marginalized scholars or scholars who teach mar-
ginalized material (Medina 2014).
And yet, students’ exercise of power in the queer classroom varies tre-
mendously, as instructors well understand. Students are encouraged to use
student health and counseling services and disability support services to
access the institutional power to request accommodations. Some suggest
that the appropriate avenue for dealing with triggers is through student
health services (Schmidt 2014), but this suggestion ignores the possibil-
ity that these institutional structures may invalidate particularly queer
students’ experiences. Students who are alienated in and through these
institutions may have difficulty laying claim to the power to request a trig-
ger warning. The complex sources of trigger warnings highlight the com-
plicated workings of power in the classroom, a space where institutions,
students, and teachers engage in shifting ways.
Furthermore, the definition of “trigger warnings” as a concept illus-
trates the complexities of power in the queer classroom. Both proponents
and critics of trigger warnings have employed medical discourses, per-
sonal narratives, and normative “common sense” strategies to identify and
circumscribe what content counts as triggering. Trigger warnings have
typically been applied to content both representing and traumatizing mar-
ginalized groups. As McMillan-Cottom, an academic and blogger who
uses trigger warnings for some content, states:
Yet, no one is arguing for trigger warnings in the routine spaces where sym-
bolic and structural violence are acted on students at the margins. No one,
to my knowledge, is affixing trigger warnings to department meetings that
WASP-y normative expectations may require you to code switch yourself
into oblivion to participate as a full member of the group. Instead, trigger
warnings are being encouraged for sites of resistance, not mechanisms of
oppression. (2014)
Power and privilege in the queer classroom becomes quickly complicated

when we consider whether and how content is marked as a potential site
for individual or collective trauma. Which content should or should not
be provocative? For whom?
426 C. FORSTIE
Affect
The definitional limits of trigger warnings suggest a second tension in
the queer classroom around the role of feelings, emotions, and affect.5
Halberstam’s (2014) pointed critique of trigger warnings demonstrates
this tension. In a much-discussed and cleverly crafted blog post critiqu-
ing the rise of trigger warnings, Halberstam describes the emergence of
a distinctly neoliberal discourse of harm, of hurt feelings, and the idea
that those within queer communities wield hurt feelings as a political
weapon. Halberstam connects this wielding of affective power to neolib-
eral discourses of harm as an individual experience unlinked to structural
inequalities and calls the expression of harm within queer communities
“NOT social activism. It is censorship.” There is some agreement about
the value of Halberstam’s critique: the individual focus of trigger warn-
ings equates all harm and trauma without considering its systemic source
(Cross 2014). However, the debate that erupted around Halberstam’s
blog post suggests that who is entitled to expressions of affective harm
in queer spaces (and how these expressions should be circumscribed) is
still up for debate (Forstie 2014). Within the queer classroom, which
may be conceptualized as a queer community or activist space, how are
the experience and expression of emotions best handled? How do we, as
instructors, make space for the effects of students’ affective engagement?
These questions are further complicated when we consider the affective
engagement of the instructor, as well. Critiques of trigger warnings sug-
gest that instructors are not well-trained to manage students’ emotions,
nor should they be; in the student-consumer model McMillan-Cottom
critiques, any kind of affective struggles must be minimized or eliminated
altogether, and trigger warnings protect students from these struggles. On
the other hand, trigger warnings may also demonstrate affective engage-
ment. Trigger warnings, Halberstam seems to suggest, encourage indi-
vidual expressions of affect by some in ways that silence others. In the
queer classroom, where affective engagements are common, instructors
must negotiate how trigger warnings function to limit or encourage these
engagements.
In Halberstam’s blog post and other critics’ responses to trigger warn-
ings, a notable slippage occurs between trauma and affective engage-
ment, more generally. While trigger warnings have historically been
employed to prevent re-traumatizing, trauma is equated with discomfort
(Medina 2014), as writer, activist, and performer Julia Serano argues in
her critical response (Serano 2014). On a practical level, distinguish-

ing between trauma and discomfort in the queer classroom highlights
a second dimension of affect: what kinds of emotional expressions are
productive for students’ learning and what kinds inhibit learning? Shaw-
Thornburg (2014) pens one of the few visible responses to the trigger
warning debate from a survivor of sexual assault, arguing that survi-
vors “deserve the chance to take care of themselves.” While the clinical
definition of trauma may seem more or less clear, whether students (or
instructors) label affective experiences as trauma may either enable or
constrain productive conversations. The “trigger-warned syllabus” may
allow students to protect themselves from alienating traumatic experi-
ences and engage in affectively productive ways. On the other hand,
trigger warnings may discipline some content or experiences as affec-
tively dangerous, thus limiting classroom conversation. Halberstam sees
trigger warnings as a “distraction” from the real political work in which
queers (particularly young queers) should be engaging. However, for
those who have seen hearts and minds changed in the course of an affec-
tively challenging class discussion will attest, affective labor can be politi-
cally productive (although it is not necessarily so).
Finally, a focus on affect in the trigger warning debates highlights a sim-
ple, yet frustratingly persistent, set of assumptions around the gendered
nature of emotions. Critics of trigger warnings like Halberstam frame
those who request a trigger warning as perpetually and newly “fragile” and
imply that this fragility is problematic. The majority of articles written as
part of the recent trigger warning debate are firmly opposed to institution-
ally mandated trigger warnings, and many are opposed to trigger warnings
as a whole, asserting that students should not be coddled (Drum 2014;
Johnston 2014). The gendered tone of terms like “coddling,” “fragile,”
or, as one critic notes, “an over-preoccupation with one’s own feelings—
much to the detriment of society as a whole” (Jarvie 2014) seems clear.
Oddly enough, this gendered rhetoric is shared by even the purportedly
queerest among us: Halberstam’s use of terms like “fragile,” “naked, shiv-
ering, quaking little selves,” “hypersensitive,” or “weepy white lady femi-
nism” (2014) are juxtaposed with a kind of postmodernist queer activism
as the purportedly more masculine antidote (Cross 2014) to the coddling
that trigger warnings represent. In brief, affective expression in the queer
classroom remains gendered, although how we, as instructors, expose and
respond to these realities for queer and non-queer students alike remains
an open question (Nishida and Fine 2014).
428 C. FORSTIE
Politics and Generations
A final tension in the queer classroom and, more generally, queer theory
that the trigger warning debate highlights revolves around moments of
political activism and change.6 Trigger warning critics have employed sev-
eral tactics to dismiss the concerns of those calling for trigger warnings,
including highlighting generational divides (Halberstam 2014), exclaim-
ing about the futility of online engagement and activism and its trans-
ference to offline contexts (“The editorial,” 2014), parodying trigger
warnings and portraying them as hyperbolic (Friedersdorf 2014; Jarvie
2014; Rudnick 2014; Zimmerman 2014), and accusing those in favor of
trigger warnings of being assimilationist (Halberstam 2014). These tac-
tics highlight the political strategies at stake in the queer classroom and
frame trigger warnings as the wrong political tactic, perhaps a tactic that
is at once too feminist and not adequately queer (Cross 2014). However,
responses to these critiques have lent texture to these political debates
and suggested ways in which trigger warnings’ critics and proponents may
be flattening the political discourse. Serano, for example, explains that
“There have always been activists who only want to focus on, and talk
about, their own issues, concerns, pain, perspectives, etc.—they exist in
every generation. What is new (or at least new-ish) about many contem-
porary activist settings is that people are starting to take other people’s
concerns seriously (or at least, arguably, more seriously than they used
to)” (2014). Trigger warnings may be construed as opportunities to either
take others’ concerns seriously or discipline discourse.
In a second political tactic, critics of trigger warnings bemoan the
spread of trigger warnings from the feminist blogosphere to the sacred
halls of the classroom (Goldberg 2014; Jarvie 2014). Some critics
assert that classroom spaces are not the same as online spaces, and
sources of political activism in both spaces should and do look quite
different, as do concepts of safety in both kinds of spaces (Zamanian
2014). As Johnston (2014) asserts, compared to online spaces, the
classroom provides a context where space is shared, is interactive in
real time, and involves less choice. Yet, fears of online contexts from
older generations of academics and activists pervade the trigger warn-
ing debate (“The editorial,” 2014). At the core of these anxieties, in
terms of the queer classroom, is a critical question: when should tactics
from Tumblr, for example, make their way into the queer classroom,
into queer theory, and into queer activism?
Finally, the hyperbolic, dysphemistic, and satirical tone of some critics

further highlight the political challenges that trigger warnings represent.
For example, one critic likens trigger warnings as an “arms race” where
“where different groups of students demand that their highly particular,
politicized sensitivities are as deserving of a trigger warning as any other.
Everyone from anarchists to college Republicans will join in. Kids will
feel trauma when their trauma isn’t recognized as trauma” (Friedersdorf
2014). Some liken trigger warnings to cancer (Goldberg 2014), some use
the language of a moral panic (Jarvie 2014), and others craft over-the-
top parodies (Rudnick 2014; Zimmerman 2014) or suggest that trigger
warnings represent tactics of assimilation (Cross 2014; Halberstam 2014).
The persistence of these tactics suggests that techniques of invalidation
as a political strategy are alive and well. The queer classroom, then, may
take a lesson from feminism: the personal is political, and those who have
experienced sexual assault and have appreciated the trigger warning no
doubt have a personal stake in those kinds of mocking responses (McEwan
2014), just as those who have felt silenced by trigger warnings do. In sum,
a close reading of the trigger warning debates suggests several political
tensions and tactics that are still at play in queer discourse, in the queer
classroom, and in queer theoretical debates, more generally.
TO TRIGGER WARN OR NOT TO TRIGGER WARN?

The discourse around trigger warnings in the classroom exposes tensions
that continue to thread through queer studies and education: in particular,
tensions around how power is manifested and negotiated, when and how
affect is productive in classroom conversation, and how political claims are
framed and deployed. The question remains: how and when do we use
trigger warnings in our classrooms, if at all? To use a phrase my students
loathe: it depends. Keeping these three tensions in mind, however, helps
to generate a set of questions to consider when making this decision. For
example, when considering trigger warnings and, more generally, creating
inclusive and productive queer classroom spaces, we might ask: How is
power being enacted in my classroom? How might the relative institu-
tional power matter (e.g., teaching in an elite, private university context
compared to a rural state school)? How might students’ access to cultural
and institutional power vary? What is my relative privilege and affective
responsibility to my students? Have any requested accommodations, or
do students know that requesting accommodations is an option? What
430 C. FORSTIE
are my students’ skills and facility with respectful conversation? What is

the affective feel of the classroom, and who is being challenged? What are
the overlaps between students and their (or my) online activism? How do
I perceive my students and their political engagements? What are their
political tactics and how might they be opening or closing productively
challenging discourse? How am I framing the political contexts in which
we are enmeshed? Given these and other considerations, do I implement
trigger warnings in the queer classroom, in my syllabus, before sharing
particular content? Ultimately, whether and how to use trigger warn-
ings in the queer classroom is a political choice. The queer classroom is
fundamentally affective, political, and imbued with power, and whether
trigger warnings enable inclusive and productive individual and social
change depends on how we frame and manage the structural and politi-
cal contexts that run through our classrooms. As more recent discussions
about sex and sexual assault on campus suggest (Kipnis 2015), critical and
queer theoretical approaches to pedagogical practices are likely to engage
questions of affect, power, and political tactics with varying effects within
the queer classroom. Focusing on trigger warnings suggests that these
three dimensions provide a framework within which we can think through
broader cultural debates and their relationship to the field of queer studies
and education.
NOTES
1. While a tidy definition of “the queer classroom” does not exist, much like
definitions of the “feminist classroom” (Hall 2007), I use the term “queer
classroom” to refer not only to classrooms where queer content and indi-
viduals are present but also to classrooms that feature and focus on queer
political processes and goals. By this admittedly broad definition, virtually
any classroom may potentially be queer, although I am writing from my
experiences in social science and gender studies queer classrooms, specifi-
cally. How trigger warnings play out in, for example, STEM queer class-
rooms may be worth exploring.
2. See (Vingiano 2014) for an extensive history of creation and migration of
the term “trigger warning” on the web.
3. Given the rise of trigger warnings on the internet, it seems fitting that the
bulk of my data are drawn from this online discourse. Furthermore, it is
important to distinguish between the use of trigger warnings and the dis-
course around trigger warnings. Claims from journalists and academics who
do quite vocally scorn the use of trigger warnings in the classroom should
not be taken to reflect how trigger warnings are actually used in the class-
room (when they are used at all).
4. Oberlin’s extensive guidelines for supporting students are worth an in-depth
read, and a content analysis of similar policies might yield interesting results.
5. While substantial confusion around the distinction between emotions, feel-
ings, and affect persists, I use affect to mean the embodied experience of emo-
tions. For a more extensive exploration of affect, see (Massumi 2002) and
(Gould 2009).
6. It would be easy to conflate queer theorists with a critique of trigger warn-
ings and map this debate handily onto the historical divide between feminist
and queer theories. However, this chapter tackles the use of trigger warnings
in the classroom specifically, and plenty of individual queer instructors sup-
port and critique the use of trigger warnings in the classroom.
REFERENCES
American Association of University Professors. (2014). On trigger warnings.
Retrieved from http://www.aaup.org/report/trigger-warnings
Cross, K. (2014, July 7). Jack Halberstam’s flying circus: On postmodernism and
the scapegoating of trans women. Feministing. Retrieved from http://femi-
nisting.com/2014/07/07/jack-halberstams-flying-circus-on-
postmodernism-and-the-scapegoating-of-trans-women/
Drum, K. (2014, May 19). What’s the end game for the trigger warning move-
ment? Mother Jones. Retrieved from http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-
drum/2014/05/whats-end-game-trigger-warning-movement
Filipovic, J. (2014, March 5). We’ve gone too far with “trigger warnings.” The
Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentis-
free/2014/mar/05/trigger-warnings-can-be-counterproductive
Forstie, C. (2014). “Bittersweet” emotions, identities, and sexualities: Insights
from a lesbian community space. In S. Newmahr & T. Weinberg (Eds.), Selves,
symbols and sexualities: An interactionist anthology (pp. 183–200). New York:
Sage Publications.
Freeman, E., Herrera, B., Hurley, N., King, H., Luciano, D., Seitler, D., & White,
P. (2014, May 29). Trigger warnings are flawed. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved
from https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essay-faculty-
members-about-why-they-will-not-use-trigger-warnings
Friedersdorf, C. (2014, May 20). What HBO can teach colleges about “trigger
warnings.” The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/educa-
tion/archive/2014/05/what-trigger-warning-activists-and-critics-
can-learn-from-hbo/371137/
Goldberg, J. (2014, May 19). The peculiar madness of “trigger warnings.” Los
Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/
la-oe-goldberg-trigger-warnings-20140520-column.html
432 C. FORSTIE
Gould, D. B. (2009). Moving politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s fight against AIDS.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Halberstam, J. (2014, July 5). You are triggering me! The neo-liberal rhetoric of
harm, danger and trauma. Bully Bloggers. Retrieved from http://bullybloggers.
wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-
rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/
Hall, D. E. (2007). Cluelessness and the queer classroom. Pedagogy, 7(2),
182–191.
Hess, A. (2010, April 16). Trigger warnings and being an asshole. Washington City
Paper. Retrieved from http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sex-
ist/2010/04/16/trigger-warnings-and-being-an-asshole/
Hoover, E. (2014, July 28). The comfortable kid. The Chronicle of Higher
Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Comfortable-
Kid/147915/
Jarvie, J. (2014, March 3). Trigger happy. The New Republic. Retrieved from
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116842/trigger-warnings-have-
spread-blogs-college-classes-thats-bad
Johnston, A. (2014, May 29). Trigger-happy. Slate. Retrieved from http://www.
slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2014/05/hostos_community_col-
lege_professor_angus_johnston_explains_why_trigger_warnings.html
Kang, J. C. (2014, May 21). Trigger warnings and the novelist’s mind. Retrieved
September 17, 2014, from http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/
trigger-warnings-and-the-novelists-mind
Kipnis, L. (2015, February 27). Sexual paranoia strikes academe. The Chronicle of
HigherEducation. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-
Strikes/190351/
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham:
Duke University Press Books.
McEwan, M. (2014, March 4). Triggered. Shakesville. Retrieved from http://
www.shakesville.com/2014/03/triggered.html
McMillan-Cottom, T. (2014, March 5). The trigger warned syllabus. Tressiemc.
Retrieved from http://tressiemc.com/2014/03/05/the-trigger-warned-
syllabus/
Medina, J. (2014, May 17). Warning: The literary canon could make students
squirm. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.
com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-
squirm.html
Nishida, A., & Fine, M. (2014). Creating classrooms of and for activism at the
intersections of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and disability. Multicultural
Perspectives, 16(1), 8–11.
Oberlin College, Office of Equity Concerns. (2013, December 22). Support
resources for faculty. Retrieved September 16, 2014, from http://web.archive.
org/web/20131222174936/http:/new.oberlin.edu/of fice/equity-
concerns/sexual-offense-resource-guide/prevention-support-education/
support-resources-for-faculty.dot
Rudnick, P. (2014, August 18). Extreme trigger warnings. The New Yorker.
Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/
triggers
Schmidt, P. (2014, September 8). AAUP says “trigger warnings” threaten aca-
demic freedom. The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: The Ticker. Retrieved
from http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/aaup-says-trigger-warnings-
threaten-academic-freedom/85573
Serano, J. (2014, July 13). Regarding “generation wars”: Some reflections upon
reading the recent Jack Halberstam essay. Whipping Girl. Retrieved from
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/regarding-generation-wars-
some.html
Shaw-Thornburg, A. (2014). This is a trigger warning. The Chronicle of Higher
Education, 60(39). Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=
GALE%7CA372960175&v=2.1&u=northwestern&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&a
sid=0b91dc3ca38c9fccd2e62167c32c1bd7
The editorial: “Trigger warnings” are easy to ridicule--but they offer a harbinger
of things to come a generation raised in a protective bubble. (2014, June 2).
Maclean’s, 127(21), 7.
Tremonti, A. M. (2014, April 8). Should college and university professors attach
“trigger warnings” to certain kinds of course material? CBC Radio, The
Current. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2014/04/
08/should-college-and-university-professors-attach-trigger-warnings-
to-certain-kinds-of-course-material/
Vingiano, A. (2014, May 5). How the “trigger warning” took over the internet.
BuzzFeed News. Retrieved from http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/
how-the-trigger-warning-took-over-the-internet#2ngk3fd
Zamanian, P. (2014). Queer lives: The construction of queer self and community on
Tumblr. Sarah Lawrence College. Retrieved from http://gradworks.umi.
com/15/25/1525441.html
Zimmerman, J. (2014, May 20). My syllabus, with trigger warnings. The Chronicle
of Higher Education Blogs: The Conversation. Retrieved from http://chronicle.
com/blogs/conversation/2014/05/20/my-syllabus-with-trigger-warnings/
Utopias
Beatrice Jane Vittoria Balfour
INTRODUCTION
Recent debates in queer studies have centered upon the idea of utopia.
The dispute has been polarized between two discernible positions. On the
one hand are those who hold an anti-utopian thesis, arguing that utopian
ideals present fixed prescriptions for the future that, in important respects,
complicate and undermine the aims of queer politics (Edelman 2004). On
the other hand, there are those who rest upon a pro-utopian position who
argue that queer utopian thinking offers a channel for imagining new ways
of living that can resist the hegemonic status quo, giving hope to margin-
alized subjects (Muñoz 2009). Central to this debate around the idea of
utopia has been the image of the Child as “the embodiment of futurity”
(Edelman 2004, p. 10). Situated within this academic debate, my chap-
ter provides some preliminary reflections around the ways that utopian
images of childhood may shape the gendered and sexualized character
of educational discourse around children. It does so by drawing upon
an empirical study that I am undertaking in Italian schools for children
up to six years old that adopt a progressive educational philosophy. This
B.J. Vittoria Balfour ( )
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

436 B.J. VITTORIA BALFOUR
philosophy treats children as active protagonists in their learning, allow-

ing them to follow their own interests and desires in the educational pro-
cess. The methodological aspect of this study consists in an ethnographic
research, involving interviews with current and former teachers, parents,
and administrators, the analysis of classroom documentation and in-school
observations.1 Through an interdisciplinary framework that unites queer
theory (Edelman 2004; Muñoz 2009) with educational research about
gender (Cannella 1997; Langford 2010), in what follows, I examine two
utopian narratives of childhood found in the schools investigated as they
pertain to their gendered and sexualized educational discourse.
REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM
In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman (2004) examines
the utopian narrative of reproductive futurism, which amounts to the idea
of seeking to establish a better social order to be passed on to the rising
generations. As Edelman states, reproductive futurism “works to affirm a
structure, to authenticate a social order, which it then intends to transmit to
the future in the form of its inner Child” (italics in original, 2004, p. 3). So
for Edelman, the Child is central to the narrative of reproductive futurism as
“the embodiment of futurity” (2004, p. 10).2 Furthermore, Edelman also
shows that in Western liberal democracies, particularly in the USA, this image
of the Child tends to be accompanied by a heteronormative discourse. This
discourse fixes gender in sex (i.e., males are expected “naturally” to develop
masculine behaviors, and females feminine ones), and defines sexual desire
as the desire for the “opposite” gender/sex grounded in a “natural” drive
for reproduction. Finally, according to Edelman, this heterosexual discourse
usually accompanies reproductive futurism because reproductive futurism is
a pro-procreative ideology that safeguards there being future generations to
whom the established social order can be passed.
However, as Edelman also argues, the heteronormative narrative of
reproductive futurism marginalizes all of those queer people who do not
comply with heteronormative standards—“anyone whose gender and sex-
uality ‘can’t be made to signify monolithically’” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 29
qt. in Thomas 2013, p. 268). This is because within this narrative, these
people are seen as potential threats to the procreative project implied in
reproductive futurism. As Edelman (2004) describes it:
“If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.” “If, however,

there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall
UTOPIAS 437
on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently

destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social
organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.” (Italics in original,
pp. 12–13)
Within heteronormative reproductive futurism, in other words, those

whose practices cannot be seen as complying with procreative aims are
marginalized in the name of a Child “whose innocence demands our
defense” (Edelman 2004, p. 2). Edelman, therefore, concludes by reject-
ing the utopia of reproductive futurism embodied in the image of the
Child. As he states, if “the sacralization of the Child […] necessitates the
sacrifice of the queer,” queer people have to sacrifice the Child in favor of
a queer politics based on no future (2004, p. 28).
How does reproductive futurism, however, contribute to understand-
ing the ways that the image of the Child may have shaped the heteronor-
mative discourse in the classrooms of the schools under consideration in
my study? Many of those whom I have interviewed have described these
schools as the result of fights for the construction of a better society start-
ing from the education of the new generations of children. A particularly
meaningful example of this narrative is provided in the following quote by
Patriza, one of the teachers that I have interviewed, who says:
[i]t was a commitment, a challenge, a desire and an engagement in the com-

mon good. It was a window on something that was really the desire to invest
in a new school, a new society, and so the desire to invest in new schools
that would have prepared new children. […] It was a strong idea of a bet-
ter future. […] It was a world that revolved around the child. […] And I
wanted to contribute to this because [these schools] for me really promoted
at best this idea of a new community, a new form of citizenship, a new idea
of the child [living] a democratic situation in the daily educational practices
of the schools.
This passage by Laura, in line with Edelman, seems to describe the cre-
ation of these schools as part of a fight “‘for our daughters and our sons,’
and thus as a fight for the future” (Edelman 2004, p. 3). Moreover, from
the interviews in the schools it also emerges that within this narrative,
an educational philosophy that makes the Child a protagonist of their
own learning is seen as serving the aim of forging a better society. This
is because it is seen as educating children from early on to the values of
democracy by way of leaving children free to follow their own interests,
rather than imposing on them pre-established lessons, like more tradi-
tional forms of education typically do (see also Cannella 1997; Langford

2010; MacNaughton 2000).
Finally, as reading through the lens of Edelman’s critique would also
expect to find, some of those among my interviewees who have endorsed
the narrative of reproductive futurism have also expressed a heteronorma-
tive view of gender,3 as the following exchange between myself and Maria,
one of the former teachers, suggests:
Maria It was a social vision [driving our commitment for the fight
for the schools for a better society].
[…]
Beatrice How do you define gender?
Maria Let’s say that genetically we are different, but we are differ-
ent as feelings, then of course there is the exception. Then
it is true that the gender is that one, and so we are naturally
suited to different things, [for example] boys and men are
more suited to play football. […] Normally I think that men
and women get married because they complement each other.
In accordance with Edelman’s critique then, as the aforementioned extract

from my interviews would seem to suggest, among some who have been
interviewed in these schools there is a binary, oppositional, and natural-
izing view of gender that Edelman described as typically accompanying
reproductive futurism.4
However, as feminist and educational theorists have also shown (see,
e.g., Cannella 1997; Langford 2010), when heteronormative standards
enter the school context in educational approaches where the Child is
allowed to follow its own interests and desires, it is likely that these hetero-
normative standards are reproduced. Indeed, as gender and educational
theorists have shown when they are not controlled for, heteronormative
standards can regulate the gendered culture in the school. For instance,
this can happen by the gender differential treatment according to hetero-
normative standards of children by the teachers (Fine 2010). An example
of an intervention of teachers that accords with heteronormative standards
was found in a classroom in the schools investigated where the teachers
gave gender differential presents for Christmas to the boys and the girls.
Toys wrapped in blue paper were given to the boys and those wrapped
in pink paper were given to the girls. However, as one of the parents
said, “what if a child liked a toy that was typically associated with the
UTOPIAS 439
other gender? For example, what if a girl liked knights?” So, as gender and
educational theorists’ work would suggest, when heteronormative stan-
dards are in place, it is likely that adults will contribute to the reproduc-
tion of a heteronormative discourse in schools, unless barriers are put in
place to control for such reproduction to happen. To put it differently,
when the Child is represented as a “genderless construct” that does not
demand intervention to dismantle binary and oppositional categories in
schools, while real children are treated accordingly to heteronormative
standards, the Child can be seen as functioning as a regulatory mechanism
that can contribute to the reproduction of a heteronormative social order
(Langford 2010, p. 118).
To conclude then, this section has linked Edelman’s notion of repro-
ductive futurism with educational theory. In doing so, it has shown that
despite its intent to allow for a more democratic educational approach,
embodied in an image of the Child as the protagonist of its own learning,
it is likely that in these schools reproductive futurism functions to regulate
the life of real children according to heteronormative standards. This is
because a gender-neutral image of the Child, whose “natural” interests
are to be accommodated in the school, does not demand the intervention
to dismantle binary and oppositional gender practices when these are seen
as innate.
QUEER UTOPIAS
Should the baby, then, be thrown out with the bath water? Or is there
some way in which this image of the Child as the protagonist of its own
learning could be interpreted that rescues the Child from functioning as a
regulatory mechanism to control the development of real children accord-
ing to heteronormative standards? In other words, what would a utopian
narrative of the image of the Child for the creation of a better society, that
was not automatically heteronormative, entail? To begin to answer these
questions, it is helpful to consider the work of Josè Esteban Muñoz.
In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, in accor-
dance with Edelman, Muñoz (2009) contests the notion of futurity domi-
nant in neoliberal democracies (Edelman 2004; Muñoz 2009). As Muñoz
says, here “the only futurity promised is that of reproductive majoritarian
heterosexuality, the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through
overt and subsidized acts of reproduction” (Muñoz 2009, p. 22). Like
Edelman, then, Muñoz argues that in neoliberal democracies the notion
of futurity, embodied in the image of the Child, tends to perpetuate a het-

eronormative discourse. However differently from Edelman, who rejects
utopias tout court, Muñoz argues for the possibility of a queer futurity. As
Muñoz explains, “Lee Edelman advises queers that the future is ‘kid stuff.’
Although I believe that there is a lot to like about Edelman’s polemic—
mostly its disdain for the culture of the child—I ultimately want to speak
for a notion of queer futurity” (Muñoz 2009, p. 22). So according to
Muñoz, queer utopia is not an end or telos for creating a better society
to be passed on to future generations. Rather, queer utopia is concerned
with futurity insofar as it has to do with potentiality. As Muñoz states, “I
wish to argue that queerness is not quite here; it is […] a potentiality”
(2009, p. 21). In other words, according to Muñoz, queer utopia gives
a glimpse to individuals about other potential ways of living in the future
that do not conform with a view of gender and sexuality that is heteronor-
matively defined: it is “not an end but an opening horizon. Queer utopia
is a modality of critique that speaks to quotidian gestures as laden with
potentiality” (Muñoz 2009, p. 91).
Moreover for Muñoz, one important way in which queer utopias are
disclosed to individuals is through queer aesthetic practices. These prac-
tices enable individuals to imagine other potential ways of being that can
challenge a heteronormative discourse. An example provided by Muñoz is
Kevin Aviance’s drag performances. Aviance performs without a wig, does
not hide the bulge in between the legs, yet is clearly effeminate in all of
the movements. So Aviance’s drag performances are queer because they
reveal the “powerful interface between femininity and masculinity that is
active in any gender, especially queer ones” (Muñoz 2009, p. 79). Just like
Aviance’s drag performances that disclose the space in between feminin-
ity and masculinity, according to Muñoz, aesthetic practices have a queer
function when they give individuals an “anticipatory illumination” of a
queer world that could be (Muñoz 2009, p. 3): “such illumination will
provide us with access to a world that should be, that could be” (Muñoz
2009, p. 64). Therefore, in contrast with Edelman who rejects utopias
as a tool for queer politics, Muñoz concludes that utopias can be queer
when they give a glimpse to individuals, for example, through aesthetic
practices, about other ways of living that resist heteronormative standards.
This notion of a queer utopia described by Muñoz is perhaps useful
in examining an alternative utopian narrative in the schools investigated.
Similarly to Muñoz, some in the schools investigated seem to associate
a view of the Child as full of potential to be discovered through educa-
UTOPIAS 441
tion to aesthetic practices, which are seen as ways in which children can
explore their different potentials. In other words, these aesthetic practices
have been seen by some in these schools as ways to “break down the con-
straints created by mono-lingualism, closed-off disciplines, preconceived
categories and predetermined ends,” also in terms of identity and gender
(Vecchi 2010, p. xix). For example, Lorenzo, a teacher and a parent of one
of the children in the schools under consideration, highlights the attention
toward aesthetic practices in these schools:
I really appreciate anything that is related to the artistic side of things in

the schools, such as the use of the different aesthetic languages like paper
or colours. […] There is an important attention toward these aesthetic
languages.
Finally, others specifically relate this attention toward aesthetic practices in

the schools to issues of gender. As one of the parents, named Elena, notes:
[t]he positive thing that we can say for what concerns issues of gender in
these schools is the use of non-structured materials, such as clay. This use of
non- traditional materials can get around that thing [i.e., the heteronorma-
tive constructions of identity] because you cannot say “you cannot play with
cars because you are a girl.” Then I think that the accent on the aesthetic
languages, which include verbal but also non-verbal languages, could help
because it could contribute to construct a more fluid and less categorical
idea of the identity of the individual.
Thus, aesthetic practices in these schools have been seen, by some, as ways
in which children could discover their potentials, including non-binary
ways of constructing gender by way of encouraging children to imagine
other ways of performing gender. In other words, as Muñoz would say,
some queer aesthetic practices in the schools have been seen as affording
real children with an “anticipatory illumination of queerness,” providing
them with access to a queer world that could be (Muñoz 2009, p. 22).
CONCLUSIONS
Although only indications for further research can be grasped from this
brief analysis, the findings that I have presented seem to suggest that
in progressive education, the utopian image of the Child can take up a
double-connotation, with contrasting implications on the gendered and
sexualized discourse in schools. On the one hand, in accordance with

Edelman’s (2004) critique, the Child as the repository of a more demo-
cratic vision of society seems likely to reproduce a heteronormative order
in schools when children are encouraged to follow their innate potentials
that extend also to their “natural” gender practices. On the other hand,
in line with Muñoz’s work, as the last section of this chapter would seem
to suggest, the image of the Child could also be understood in a way that
aligns more with Muñoz’s definition of queer utopia as potentiality that
encourages real children to get a glimpse of different ways of being in the
future, which extend also to gender, through educational practices in the
present. Finally within this framework, queer aesthetic practices could be
seen as one way in which this process could begin in schools. However,
the implications of this study go beyond progressive education per se,
to educational theory and practice in general. Indeed, the chapter also
suggests that to be as fully productive as it might be, the debate around
utopias in education should not be polarized between exclusive notions of
utopia. There is a pressing need, instead, for an overarching study of the
notion of utopia that describes how in education a queer utopian vision
could flourish to challenge, and ultimately replace, the heteronormative
utopia of reproductive futurism.
NOTES
1. All the names used in this chapter are pseudonyms in order to protect the
anonymity of the subjects in the study. Moreover, the quotes reported in
this chapter are translations from the interviews that have been conducted in
Italian. The translation has been adapted to the language in order to make
the reading of these passages more fluid.
2. The Child with capital “C” here refers to the image of the Child to be dis-
tinguished from the real historical child with lower “c.”
3. It is important to note that some of those whom I have interviewed have not
expressed their conception of gender, and I have not asked as asking would
have not aligned with the flow of the interview.
4. See previous note.
REFERENCES
Cannella, G. S. (1997). Deconstructing early childhood education: Social justice and
revolution (3rd ed.). New York: Peter Lang.
University Press.
UTOPIAS 443
Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender: The real science behind sex differences (1st ed.).
London: Icon Books Ltd.
Langford, R. (2010). Critiquing child-centred pedagogy to bring children and
early childhood educators into the centre of a democratic pedagogy.
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 11(1), 113.
MacNaughton, G. (2000). Rethinking gender in early childhood education.
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Thomas, C. (2013). Ten lessons in theory: An introduction to theoretical writing.
New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role and
potential of ateliers in early childhood education (1st ed.). New York: Routledge.
Versatility
James Sheldon
Relationships are a prominent topic in queer studies today; the notion of

queer challenges the norms of how we interact and the ways in which we
relate to each other, both in everyday life, but also (I suggest) within the
classroom. Queer pedagogy, in particular, has been fascinated with the
role of the teacher within the educational process. Some suggest that in
order to do queer pedagogy, we should take the teacher entirely out of the
process, symbolically killing the Lacanian Father and freeing us from the
rules of society and of language. A professor of mine in graduate school,
upon hearing that my research area was queer pedagogy, conjectured that
the queerest pedagogy of all would be to not show up to class at all, and
put a sign on the door saying “no professor is coming; you’ll have to teach
yourselves.” From this chaos, I suppose, students would create their own
chaordic leadership and then teach themselves the course material.1 In this
fantasy, teacher/student hierarchies would be abolished (as there would
no longer be an instructor) and other educational hierarchies would evap-
orate as well. In reality, students would likely establish their own new hier-
archies, even without the teacher/Father present.
J. Sheldon ( )
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

446 J. SHELDON
The majority of learning does require some sort of guidance from a

more experienced person, however. (Even the most extreme example of
solitary learning I can think of, studying from a book on your own, is a dia-
logic encounter between yourself and the author of the book.) Learning is
a process of coming to recognize your own implication in the material and
the consequential affects it has on one’s self. Susanne Luhmann (1998,
p. 150), in her article “Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy Is
a Pretty Queer Thing,” offered two framing questions to consider when
encountering new knowledge: “What does this information do to one’s
own sense of self? What does the knowledge ask me to reconsider about
myself and the subject studied?” Guidance of a teacher or other mentor is
essential in this process. The word pedagogy itself comes from the term
pedagogue, which derives from the term for the slave who escorted chil-
dren to school. The pedagogue both protected them on the way to school
but also guiding them as well (Bryson and de Castell 1993). Pedagogy, at
least in this theoretical sense, requires both a child and a guide.
Queer pedagogy provides a useful way to deconstruct this relationship
between teacher and student, a relationship marked by student crushes,2
and their counterpart, teacher favoritism. On an unconscious level, queer
pedagogy suggests these relationships are often charged with libidi-
nal energy. Moreover, traditional transmission theories of knowledge,
as Susannne Luhmann (1998) reminds us, are modeled after pederasty,
whereby, as Jane Gallop (1982) suggests, “[a] greater man penetrates a
lesser man with his knowledge” (Gallop, p. 63, cited in Luhmann, p. 148).
This penetration of knowledge parallels the penetration that happens
during anal sex, but, I suggest, changes in our models of anal sex paral-
lel the changes that have happened in pedagogical models. Looking at
the traditional models, we find the classic model of pederasty where the
older/greater man penetrates a younger/lesser man. Steven Underwood
(2003) wrote of this traditional model, noting:
Fucking and getting fucked traditionally symbolize opposite poles of the power
spectrum: getting fucked is considered the ultimate act of submission while
fucking someone is viewed as taking control and dominating them. (p. 9)
Although Underwood was only studying encounters between men, similar

dominance and submission can occur among fucking and getting fucked when
two women have sex. As a self-identified gay/queer man, I do not want to
presume to be an expert on lesbian sexuality but do want to make it clear that
I am not intending to create a theory that is solely about gay male sexuality.
VERSATILITY 447
These models of pederasty are, however, gradually becoming replaced

by a notion of versatility in the anal sex act. As Underwood (2003)
contends, “The reciprocal scenario, where both men take turns fucking
each other, is often exercised as a celebration of equality…Versatility is a
unique and important feature of male anal sex” (p. 9). Many people start
with their identity and from there derive the activities that they perform.
For example, when I first came out, I identified as a bottom, and starting
from my identity, believed that I should get fucked when having sex and
do things that fit within that identity. Versatility invites us to instead start
with the activities and then from there construct our identities; no longer
are we constrained merely by our predetermined roles. It invites us to con-
sider the many different possible activities, rather than just the two tradi-
tional ones, and consequently opens up many other options for identities.
Similarly, in a pedagogical encounter, every interaction between a
teacher and a student constructs their relative positionality; pedagogy
is performative, and thus it is the action of doing teacher-ly things that
makes one a teacher, and doing student-ly things that makes one a stu-
dent.3 An optimal pedagogical situation, much like an optimal (gay) sexual
situation, maximizes the frequency, novelty, and flexible positionality of
(pedagogical) exchanges between two (or more) people.
In moving from a pedagogy of pederasty to my proposed pedagogy of
versatility, it thus becomes desirable for the teacher (whether in a classroom
or an informal setting) to blur the lines between students and teachers.
Some form of delegation of authority to students over pedagogy, classroom
management, and (perhaps even) curriculum seems necessary. I was a stu-
dent for three years in a Master’s in Equity and Social Justice in Education,
and many of the teachers had students facilitate class sessions; a group of
students would become the teacher for the duration of the class period.
Thinking about memory, as I go backward in time into my own experi-
ences as a student in a Master’s program, I think of Anne Carson’s (1999)
Economy of the Unlost, cited in Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s, In a Queer
Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives:
What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present,

connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lost-
ness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a
void. Memory depends upon void, as void depends upon memory, to think
it. Once void is thought, it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought, it
can be commodified. (cited in Halberstam 2005, p. 47)
448 J. SHELDON
As I considered these memories from time of my master’s program, I

came to some realizations. This kind of pedagogy makes sense in a mas-
ter’s seminar in which the teacher has selected readings, and the goal is to
facilitate a discussion of the main ideas of those readings. It did, however,
tend to reproduce the same teacher/student dynamics as before, only with
the students being the teachers. It also minimized the frequency of inter-
actions; in a traditional teacher-centered classroom, even if a student is
teaching the class, only one person can talk at a time. Whenever it was my
turn to facilitate, I would usually turn things on their head. One time, I
structured class as a giant cocktail party, complete with cheese and crack-
ers, where people went around and talked about the course readings (an
idea I borrowed from Brookfield and Preskill 2005). Another time, I had
my fellow graduate students work in groups to apply Foucauldian theories
of education to their own experiences utilizing power as teachers. There
were moments of a pedagogy of versatility; these moments did not happen
just because the teacher handed over the reins (so to speak) to the class.
Returning to my criteria of frequency, novelty, and flexible position-
ality, I find that a truly queer pedagogy would necessitate some sort of
groupwork. In this kind of model, students can interact with each other
without having to create a student/teacher dichotomy among themselves,
and the teacher recedes into the background of the classroom. As a com-
mon 1990s education slogan suggested, the teacher moves from being
the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” Groupwork also maxi-
mizes the frequency of interactions within the classroom; ideally, you have
an entire classroom full of students engaged and talking, instead of just
one student talking while everyone else thinks about other things.
When I was in elementary school in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s,
groupwork was the trendy educational buzzword; teachers were experi-
menting with a variety of ways of grouping students and having them
collaborate on projects. Sometimes, this entailed complex multiple month
projects, as when we did an Oregon trail simulation that involved reading,
writing, prioritizing, and problem solving. Other times, though, the group
simply picked one student and assigned them competence and responsi-
bility for the work of the group. “Here, you’re good at social studies;
why don’t you answer the questions, and we’ll all copy what you write.”
Thus, perceived ability (although sometimes connected to actual ability)
becomes the primary determinant of status in a classroom. This is why
the fantasy that I opened with of a classroom about a teacher is doomed
to fail; status hierarchies form anytime a group of people get together in
order to work on a goal.
VERSATILITY 449
Perceived ability is often more important in groups than actual ability.

Elizabeth Cohen observes that “perceived academic or intellectual abil-
ity, whether it is actually relevant to the task or not, has the power to
affect both the participation and influence in small groups of students”
(1994, p. 31). This perceived ability, or what Cohen calls status, tends to
be ascribed to those who are privileged in society based on nonacademic
characteristics such as being white, male, attractive, thin, or able-bodied/
able-minded.
Similarly, dating and sexual opportunities are allocated based on status
markers; as gudbuy t’jane (2011) argues,
trans status (or having a disability, or not meeting cultural beauty standards,
or any of the markers of undesirability imposed by external systems) limits
or completely denies access to opportunities to date and to be desire able
to others.
Thus, in the realm of dating and sexuality, certain people are denied
access based on status characteristics. In groupwork, a student having
their ideas invalidated invariably leads to withdrawal from the group, thus
reducing the frequency of their pedagogical encounters with other stu-
dents. Thus, attention to status becomes even more crucial when doing
groupwork; a teacher has to use intentional moves to disrupt status hier-
archies or else risk reproducing preexisting social dynamics and having the
efficacy of groupwork collapse.
Complex instruction offers a series of teacher moves to address these
issues of status in a classroom. One of the key moves is assigning com-
petence; a teacher publicly recognizes the contribution of a student to
the academic work in a unique way. This can be tricky to do and requires
a shift in the role of the teacher; instead of a teacher determining the
right or wrongness of answers, they instead turn into more of a sleuth,
digging into the operations of status within their classroom and map-
ping out the hierarchies. Assigning competence has to be very strategic
too—it is important for teachers not to hover over groups or to inter-
fere too much in their process. Sometimes, it is best to note a moment
where a student that is ascribed low competence particularly shines and
then mention it later when doing a wrap-up or summary of the day. A
teacher can refer back to that again when introducing tasks the next day.
Assigning competence should also be used in ways that expand what
it means to be smart in class, highlighting some new way in which a
student contributed to the discourse. Another key instructional move
450 J. SHELDON
offered by complex instruction is called a multiple abilities orientation.

In a multiple abilities orientation, a teacher lays out all the different abili-
ties that will be useful in the upcoming task in order to prime students to
look at many different approaches and to value many different strengths
in the classroom. Assigning competence shifts the classroom discourse
in a way that minimizes the influence of status characteristics within the
classroom, allowing everyone to have the same frequency of versatile
(pedagogical) encounters.
Moreover, I want to suggest, there is an epistemological shift needed;
instead of the teacher determining the right answer to a question, ques-
tions need to be designed in such a way that there are many different
possible answers. Luhmann suggests that pedagogy be viewed as a set of
questions rather than an answer. If teachers can successfully make this
shift, a student’s answers start to take on their own independent valid-
ity and then are confirmed or critiqued through the interactions with
peers rather than an expert teacher determining what constitutes a correct
answer. Tasks need to have a complexity in them, and aspects of it need to
be ambiguous in order to allow the group to construct their own mean-
ings and to get to make real, authentic, autonomous decisions. Tasks need
to also be challenging enough that a high-status student can not just grab
the task card and complete the entire task on their own; they are forced to
rely on other students in the group in order to successfully complete the
task, thus forcing interdependence and interaction.
There also needs to be conscious attention to roles within a group.
In a sexual encounter, people automatically (and many believe, naturally)
gravitate toward certain roles. Queer calls into question the naturalness of
this, though, asking questions like “Why do women tend to be typecast as
submissive? Why do Asians tend to get typecast as bottoms? Why do Blacks
and Latinos get typecast at Tops?” Queer also opens up a lot more possi-
bilities for sexual identities, suggesting that instead of merely having Tops/
Dominants and bottoms/submissives that we can have possibilities such as
Pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies

in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers,
divas, Snap! Queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wan-
nabees, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men. (Sedgwick
1993, p. 247)
Likewise, when students are engaged in groupwork, students gravitate

toward certain roles in a group, often in ways that reinforce status hierar-
VERSATILITY 451
chies in the classroom. Our versatile pedagogy of groupwork would ask

questions such as, “Why do certain students tend to take on certain roles
within groups when left to their own devices?” From this, teachers can
choose to intentionally queer these hierarchies by disrupting the way in
which these roles are assigned to students.
In a sexual encounter, one might explicitly choose a role other than
what your gender or race might dictate, and likewise, in the classroom,
many teachers find it helpful to disrupt the apparent naturalness of these
roles by explicitly assigning roles to students. Going back to the teacher’s
role as a guide within the classroom, the teacher might assign a certain role
to a certain student or might randomize the roles so that everyone can try
out different roles. These temporary positionalities within the classroom
are not reified in the same way as the role of student or teacher though;
they are changed regularly, and thus these positionalities don’t take on
the same sort of ossified reality as being a student or a teacher. Thus, this
assigning of roles helps to enact a pedagogy of versatility.
Being a student or a teacher is something that is assigned to you a
priori that you enact through performance but often without much choice
in the manner. I taught a class once in which the class got rather out of
hand, with students talking out of turn and being disruptive and throw-
ing things. In that moment, I didn’t want to be the teacher, but it was
the role that was given to me, and (short of quitting my job on the spot)
I had to be the teacher for the duration and enact the role that was given
me by engaging in teacher-like activities. Group roles, however, can be
changed from task to task; students are expected to be versatile in their
roles within a group, much like how a gay man in the 2010s is expected to
be versatile in sexual roles from encounter to encounter. There is also an
aspect of novelty in that students get to interact in many different groups
throughout a semester and with many different students and to take on
many different roles.
A pedagogy of versatility offers a new way for teachers to think about
roles and status in the classroom. Merely utilizing groupwork is but a start
in this process. It is necessary for teachers to make active moves to disrupt
status hierarchies, such as assigning competence, assigning roles, and enact-
ing multiple ability orientations. These moves queer the classroom by fur-
ther increasing the frequency of interactions and allowing students to have
flexibility in their roles within their groups. Rather than simply eliminate
the teacher from the classroom altogether, a versatile pedagogy takes into
account the role of the teacher but provides opportunities for student initia-
tive, thinking, and autonomy through the use of collaborative groupwork.
452 J. SHELDON
NOTES
1. Chaordic is a portmanteau of chaotic and order coined by Hock 2000.
2. This idea originates from an unpublished paper by Ri J. Turner.
3. I am thinking here of theories of conversational discourse and how identity
is created through linguistic interactions. I am also thinking here of theories
of gender performativity, and how performativity plays out in the act of
teaching.
REFERENCES
Brookfield, S., & Preskill, S. (2005). Discussion as a way of teaching: Tools and
techniques for democratic classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bryson, M., & de Castell, S. (1993). Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect.
Canadian Journal of Education, 18(3), 285–305.
Carson, A. (1999). Economy of the unlost. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press. Cited in Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender
bodies, subcultural lives. New York, NY: New York University Press. Also
cited on https://xicanainnyc.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/unos-interesting-
quotes/
Cohen, E. (1994). Designing groupwork: Strategies for the heterogeneous classroom.
Gallop, J. (1982). The daughter’s seduction: Feminism and psychoanalysis. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
gudbuy t’jane. (2011). Dating from the margins: Desexualizing and cultural
abuse. Retrieved September 30, 2014, from http://gudbuytjane.wordpress.
com/2011/10/13/dating-from-the-margins-1/
Hock, D. (2000). The art of chaordic leadership. Leader to Leader, 15
(Winter 2000). www.meadowlark.co/the_art_of_chaordic_leadership_hock.
pdf. Accessed 30 Oct 2014.
Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Queer and now. In M. Edmundson (Ed.), Wild orchids
and Trotsky: Messages from American universities (pp. 237–266). New York:
Penguin.
Underwood, S. G. (2003). Gay men and anal eroticism: Tops, bottoms, and versa-
tiles. New York: Routledge.
Visibility
Jerry Rosiek
For the last century, queer politics in the West has been a politics of vis-
ibility. It has been organized in resistance to social norms that presume
universal heterosexuality and cisgender identity. These social norms—
which for the purposes of this chapter, I will call heteronormative dis-
courses—enforce an invisibility on same-sex desire and the performance
of transgender identity in three primary ways: explicit repression, implicit
normalization, and abjection. In what follows, I discuss these processes of
erasure, how they play out in schools, and how educators can work against
them.
REPRESSION
Repression operates explicitly. Heteronormativity organizes and endorses
violent repression of anything falling outside of its prescribed versions of
gender and sexual identity. This repression takes many forms: from indi-
vidual verbal and physical assaults; to criminalizing same-sex relationships;
to treating same-sex desire and gender-queer identities as psychological
pathologies; to pervasive shaming of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-
J. Rosiek ( )
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

454 J. ROSIEK
der, and queer (LGBTQ) persons in popular culture by church pastors,

stand-up comediennes, school playmates, and so on. These toxic mixes
of interpersonal, social, and institutional violence create an atmosphere of
terror that coerces people to hide those parts of their lives that do not fit
within heteronormative expectations. In schools, this means that LGBTQ
students, teachers, and families often choose not to disclose these parts
of their identity, for fear of the consequences to themselves or those they
love.
It is this type of invisibility, an actively chosen avoidance of attention,
that gives rise to the phrase “being in the closet” to describe concealing
one’s sexual identity.1 A significant portion of LGBTQ rights advocacy
over the last half century has advocated “coming out” of the closet—defy-
ing the risks and making one’s LGBTQ identity public—as an important
political act. Doing so has been thought to have two primary benefits.
First, it dispels the personal and political isolation that comes with silence.
Doric Wilson, playwright and participant in the 1969 Stonewall riots that
are considered the start of the modern gay rights movement, expressed
this sentiment:
That’s what happened Stonewall night to a lot of people. We went, “Oh my

God. I am not alone, there are other people that feel exactly the same way.”
(quoted in Davis and Heilbroner 2011)
Second, making one’s LGBTQ identity public broadens the circle of allies
who might support LGBTQ equality and civil rights. Freedom fighter
Harvey Milk took such a stand. He admonished:
Gay brothers and sisters…You must come out. Come out…to your par-
ents…I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they
will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives…come out to
your friends…if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors…
to your fellow workers…to the people who work where you eat and shop…
come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone
else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distor-
tions. For your sake. For their sake. For the sake of the youngsters who are
becoming scared by the votes from Dade to Eugene. (Milk 1978, p. 368)
The burden of this visibility falls first and foremost on LGBTQ students
and families. They risk becoming the target of heteronormative violence
if they “come out” in the hopes of contributing to a collective transfor-
VISIBILITY 455
mation of heteronormativity itself. The establishment of Gay-Straight

Alliances on public school campuses across the nation takes up this kind
of politics of visibility. They provide a space where LGBTQ students do
not have to feel alone and where gender and sexual difference is acknowl-
edged and accepted. And they provide a space for heterosexual cisgender
students to publicly support LGBTQ inclusiveness (Miceli 2005).
NORMALIZATION
Normalization operates implicitly. Heteronormativity shapes the lenses
through which we see the world. It provides the concepts and categories
into which we expect the things of this world to fit. If we don’t know to
look for something, we often do not see it or have difficulty remembering
it. And if we are socialized to expect to see something, we often see it even
if it is not there. Heteronormative discourses socialize us to expect cisgen-
der heterosexuality everywhere we look. Consequently, student experi-
ences that fall outside of the boundaries of these expectations are often
invisible to the educators who are supposed to care for and teach them.
According to Involved, Invisible, Ignored, a report by the Gay, Lesbian, &
Straight Education Network:
…research has shown that when the children of lesbian or gay parents enter
school, the family must contend with how their family configuration coun-
ters the norm—they may find that families like theirs are invisible or not
represented and may even encounter representations that their family con-
figuration is deviant. (2008, p. 35)
Unlike the intimidation of repression, this kind of invisibility is not elec-

tive, it is enforced. Even when parents or students want to assert their
difference from heteronormative expectation, those expectations muffle
or silence such assertions. From administrators who find it difficult to use
the word “lesbian” in a parent meeting (GLSEN 2008, p. 81) to teachers
not noticing the social violence happening to a gender-queer student in
class because that child doesn’t fit into their narratives of what childhood
experience is like (Rosiek and Heffernan 2014), educators’ responses to
LGBTQ students and families are constrained by the discursive resources
available to them.
This kind of invisibility complicates the practice of “coming of the
closet” as an act of resistance. Even when students and families do the
456 J. ROSIEK
courageous work of “coming out” to a school community, this is never a

single act. As soon as a student moves to a new class, a new grade, or a new
school, or simply speaks to a person, they are once again faced with the
assumption that they are heterosexual and cisgender, requiring the work
and risks of “coming out” to be repeated (Sedgwick 1993). In effect,
there is no permanent condition of being “out” because heteronormative
discourses continually erase the “coming out” gesture. Coming out, then,
is a continual practice. This in turn means that the risk of social rejection,
harassment, or assault is undertaken repeatedly.
Resisting the invisibility enforced by normalization is not something
that can be accomplished by LGBTQ students and families alone. This
transformation requires whole communities to do the work of making
gender and sexual pluralism visible. It requires education of teachers and
administrators so they can expand their imagination to include anticipa-
tion of the needs of LGBTQ students and families. Teachers need to learn
to interact with students in ways that do not assume heterosexuality and
cisgender status as a default. This can involve relatively simple, but impor-
tant, gestures like using language that explicitly acknowledges the possibil-
ity that the child may have same-sex parents, as in the following example:
A friend of ours was recently mentoring a preservice teacher whose stu-

dents were changing singular verbs to plural. One student looked at the
example in the book: “My mom is swimming.” After hesitating for a min-
ute, the student pulled out a solution: “My parents are swimming.” The
teacher moved on to the next child. Later, the mentor suggested gently,
“You know, that was an opportunity to mention the fact that some kids have
two moms, and that it would be fine to say, “My moms are swimming.”
(Editors of Rethinking Schools 2014, http://www.rethinkingschools.org/
archive/28_03/edit1283.shtml)
Or it can involve explicitly acknowledging that people experience gen-

der and sexuality in a variety of ways. Such an ethic needs to extend to
the curriculum—such as including LGBTQ rights struggles in civil rights
histories—and extracurricular events—such as changing prom “King”
and “Queen” rituals to be more gender flexible. When educators affirm
the normality of many different gender and sexuality identities in their
interpersonal and pedagogical practice, it relieves LGBTQ students of the
burden of doing all the work of making a place for themselves in a com-
munity. They do not have to incur the same level of risk when and if they
choose to “come out.” Eventually, if LGBTQ inclusiveness is performed
VISIBILITY 457
well within an entire community, then a new norm may be established,

and “coming out” becomes less a politics, and more an ordinary personal
act of disclosure.
ABJECTION
Abjection, like normalization, operates implicitly. However, whereas nor-
malization provides both a definition for what is normal and definitions
for what is deviant, abjection does not provide a name for anything outside
of the recognized social categories. For example, in a community where
homosexual experience is labeled as deviant, there is at least a vocabu-
lary—however shame inducing—that permits persons experiencing same-
sex desire a form of self-recognition. This vocabulary and self-knowledge
permits social solidarities to form. However, in that same context, there
may be no language available—especially to children—to describe trans-
gender and gender-queer experiences.
This invisibility can be simultaneously personally and politically disem-
powering. If we lack the language to describe an experience, we can’t
discuss it with others. This prevents the formation of identity and social
solidarities needed for effective political mobilization. Additionally, and
perhaps more importantly, this lack of language makes it impossible to
acknowledge the learning and losses associated with these experiences.
According to Butler (1997), one needs to be able to name a desire, in
order to mourn the loss of desired personal or social relationships. Without
language to name the desire, the conditions frustrating the desire cannot
be identified, and the grief associated with the loss is inchoate and fixates
upon other objects of focus. Failure to mourn can condemn the subject
to a state of melancholia, trapped in a relation to an idealized object of
desire (“I will never have something so good as that”), unable able to
form new personal and social relationships. In this way, self-understanding
is deflected, and personal growth is inhibited. Alienation and withdrawal
can result, which in addition to being personally painful also intensifies
political debilitation.
The condition of abjection highlights the limitations of a politics of
visibility. First, there can be no resistance to abjection through “com-
ing out” because such a gesture requires a vocabulary through which
to assert—however temporarily—some visibility. Second, the creation of
such a vocabulary, one that would enable the positive inclusion of pre-
viously excluded experiences within the scope of human normalcy, will
458 J. ROSIEK
always involve its own corresponding exclusions. The normalization of

same-sex marriage intensifies the exclusion of consenting polyamorous
relationships. The inclusion of lesbian and gay rights within the umbrella
of civil rights protections can be seen as adequately addressing heteronor-
mative social violence but actually make it more difficult for the unique
needs of transgender and gender-queer persons to be recognized. The
consistent use of white LGBTQ experience to represent LGBTQ experi-
ence in general erases and further marginalizes the unique experiences of
queer persons of color.
These concerns points to the need for another mode of political resis-
tance to heteronormativity, one that avoids the undertow of an identity
politics (with its attendant risk of essentialism and implicit exclusions) and
instead problematizes the processes by which gender itself is constituted.
Judith Butler, building on the work of Julia Kristeva, argues that abjec-
tion is actually the constituting condition of heteronormativity. The exis-
tence of heterosexual cisgender identity—what Butler (1993) calls “the
subject”—depends on something different and considered deviant against
which to define itself. She writes:
The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabit-

able” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by
those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under
the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the
subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of
the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification
against which—and by virtue of which—the domain of the subject will
circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then,
the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection,
one which produces a constitutive outside to the subjected, an abjected
outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repu-
diation. (p. xi)
Heteronormativity’s dependence on the existence and then exclusion of

queer and transgender experience, according to Butler, renders it unsta-
ble. Herein lies an opportunity to make visible, not previously excluded
gender and sexual identities but the socially constructed character of all
such identities.
Ironic engagements that underscore the instability of these construc-
tions can weaken the coercive force of heteronormative discourses on our
lives. Butler offers drag performances as an example of this kind of poli-
VISIBILITY 459
tics. The drag artist, through the skillful repetition of normative gender
performances, can effectively denaturalize those norms—demonstrate that
the gestures, manners, attitudes, and behaviors we associate with a par-
ticular gender have no natural connection to a person’s biological sex.
Through repetition, the implication can settle in that we are all engaged
in drag performances.
In schools, highlighting the instability of gender and sexuality norms
might take many forms. It might involve changes in dress by teachers
or students, as happened in a Harlem high school (Foresta 2003). Or
it could involve lessons that involve students in the impossible task
of identifying stable signifiers of gender identity or that explore his-
torically and culturally different performances of gender (Rodriguez
2012). It might involve students in forms of public pedagogy, in which
all students encounter the coercive force of heteronormative discourses
(Heffernan & Gutierez-Schmich, this volume). The goal of such peda-
gogy is not to include previously excluded persons within the defini-
tion of “normal” but instead to make the socially constructed nature of
gender and sexuality binaries visible to students. This in turn can help
students and communities recognize the irrationality of their impulse
to divide the world into gender normalcy and gender deviance and to
see the violence that does to some folk. As David Valentine (2007) puts
succinctly:
The goal is not to identify the perpetrators of fraudulent categorizations

but to open up the question of how all of us are responsible for—and sub-
ject to—the limits and possibilities of self-making in a broader and strati-
fied political-economic context. The goal is to reveal how the categories we
live by—must live by—have histories, politics, and economies and produce
effects that can be debilitating for some as they can be liberating for others.
(p. 246)
SUMMARY
Social erasure is arguably the essence of dehumanization. By rendering
whole classes of people invisible, we render the suffering they endure as
the result of social norms out of the reach of transformation. The first step
in any change in this condition is to make visible both the suffering and
the social processes that cause it.
The types of resistance to heteronormative erasure of queer lives sur-
veyed in this chapter are not mutually exclusive. For as long as we live
460 J. ROSIEK
in a heteronormative culture, all three of these modes of oppression—

repression, normalization, and abjection—will be operating, and there-
fore all modes of resistance to heteronormativity are both justified and
necessary. Sometimes, these different modes of resistance may seem to
contradict one another. “Coming out,” for example, relies on categories
of identities that ironic performative interventions seek to destabilize.
Curriculum that highlights the queer identity of famous historical fig-
ures can work to naturalize gay/straight binaries and thus works against
the grain of other curricula that emphasizes the wider variety or socially
constructed nature of sexual identity. We need not be overly burdened
by such inconsistencies, however, as they are less the result of confusions
within queer studies and more the consequence of contradictions within
heteronormativity itself. As the great queer poet and abolitionist Walt
Whitman said:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Let our resistance to heteronormativity in schools contain multitudes of

strategies. And then, someday soon, our schools will safely, happily, and
quite visibly, contain gender multitudes.
NOTE
1. The actual etymology of the phrase “coming out of the closet” is more
complicated. According to social scientist Evelyn Hooker (1965) and
historian George Chauncey (1994), the phrase “coming out” was used
in early twentieth-century US gay culture as an analogy to a debutante’s
coming out party. It described the moment someone is introduced to
and becomes a member of a larger and not necessarily hidden LGBTQ
subculture. It was not until the later twentieth century that those words
became connected to the idea of “the closet,” perhaps through a refer-
ence to the idiom of “having skeletons in one’s closet,” which refers to
hiding shameful secrets from public knowledge. The combined phrase
“coming out of the closet” came to signify a personal and political
refusal of heteronormative shame and marginalization through a general
public acknowledgment of one’s sexuality (see also Whisman 2000).
VISIBILITY 461
REFERENCES
Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: Gender, urban culture, and the making of the
gay male world, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.
Davis, K., & Heilbroner, D. (2011). Stonewall uprising. Burbank: Warner Brothers:
Transcript. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tran-
script/stonewall-transcript/?flavour=mobile
Editors of Rethinking Schools. (2014). Editorial: Queering schools. Rethinking
Schools, 28(3). Retrieved from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/28_
03/edit1283.shtml
Foresta, C. M. (2003). Dressing up. Rethinking Schools, 8(2). Retrieved from
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/18_02/dres182.shtml
Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network. (2008). Involved, invisible, ignored:
The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender parents and their chil-
dren in our nation’s K–12 schools. New York: GLSEN.
Hooker, E. (1965). Male homosexuals and their worlds. In J. Marmor (Ed.),
Sexual inversion: The multiple roots of homosexuality (pp. 83–107). New York:
Basic Books.
Miceli, M. (2005). Standing out, standing together: The social and political impact
of gay-straight alliances. New York: Routledge.
Milk, H. (1978). That is what America is: Speech given on gay freedom day, 6-25-
78. In Schilts, R. (1982). The mayor of Castro street: The life and times of Harvey
Milk (pp. 364–371). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Rodriguez, N. M. (2012). Queer imaginative bodies and the politics and peda-
gogy of trans generosity: The case of Gender Rebel. In J. Landreau & N. M.
Rodriguez (Eds.), Queer masculinities: A critical reader in education (pp. 267–
288). Dordrecht: Springer.
Rosiek, J., & Heffernan, J. (2014). Can’t code what the community can’t see: A
case of the erasure of gendered harassment. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(7),
726–733.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Epistemology of the closet. In H. Abelove, M. Barale, &
D. Halperin (Eds.), The lesbian and gay studies reader (pp. 45–61). New York:
Routledge.
Valentine, D. (2007). Imagining transgender: An ethnography of a category.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Whisman, V. (2000). Coming out. In B. Zimmerman (Ed.), Lesbian histories and
cultures: An encyclopedia (pp. 187–188). New York: Garland.
Visual Methods
Louisa Allen
Visual methods do not seem a particularly queer endeavour in the field of

education—until you pair them with sexualities research in schools. Within
the field of critical sexualities studies in education, research has predomi-
nantly employed text or language-based methods such as interviews, focus
groups, and questionnaires (Epstein and Johnson 1998; Pascoe 2007;
Bay-Cheng 2003; DePalma and Atkinson 2009). While some school-
based researchers have utilised photo-methods, their focus has been on
gender, rather than sexuality. For example, O’Donoghue (2007) has used
photo-methods to explore masculinities in schools in Ireland. This dearth
of visual methods in school-based sexualities research is partly attributable
to controversies surrounding the collection and distribution of images of
young people more generally.
Schools are risk-averse spaces (Jones 2001), and use of visual meth-
ods in sexualities research can be viewed suspiciously. Gaining access to
schools to research sexualities presents one initial challenge. Congested
daily timetables and high volumes of researcher requests often mean access
to schools is limited and usually to studies deemed less controversial. The
social constitution of sexuality as something private, potentially embarrass-
L. Allen ( )
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland,
Auckland, New Zealand

464 L. ALLEN
ing, titillating, and dangerous (Hawkes 2004) means many schools do not
wish to acknowledge, let alone interrogate its presence. That sexualities
research might divulge information that may tarnish a school’s reputation
such as teenage pregnancy can also be a disincentive to their participation.
Some schools view their remit as “the province of the mind” (Paechter
2004), and, subsequently, sexuality which invokes the body is considered
peripheral to its core academic concerns.
In countries like New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, recent media
attention around the taking and distribution of “sexual images” via student
mobile phones has cultivated an environment of caution around young
people and camera use (Netsafe 2005). Research which involves young
people using cameras to capture meanings about sexuality at school there-
fore presents too “risky” a proposition. The perceived volatility of this
combination is evidenced in what is documented by sexualities research-
ers as an often protracted and frustrating institutional ethics review pro-
cess. Extended approval times generated by the need to attend to large
numbers of revisions and methodological changes are some of the barriers
sexualities researchers in education have highlighted (Allen 2009a; Sikes
and Piper 2012).
It is this environment which renders the utilisation of visual methods
in sexualities research at school “queer.” In his delineation of the aim of
queer studies, Donald Hall (2007) writes “…the pedagogical project of
queer studies…is a continuous and insistent interrogation of notions of
the normal” (p. 186). If the current norm of critical sexualities research
in schools is the use of text (language)-based methods, then the intro-
duction of visual methods might constitute a queering of this field, so
might students’ use of cameras to capture moments in which the sexual
is acknowledged and legitimated at school via the research process. This
visual research practice disrupts a dominant social perception of the rela-
tionship between young people, cameras, and sexuality as only danger-
ous. Such a discourse enjoys currency in contemporary debates around the
“risks” of “sexting,” whereby young people exchange images and/or texts
of a sexual nature (Ringrose et al. 2012). Young people’s use of cameras to
capture the sexual at school, in a way that is deemed legitimate, and aca-
demically valuable, is subsequently rendered “queer” within conventional
educational research paradigms.
Within the bounds of recent post-structural understandings of sexuali-
ties in education, a “theoretical norm” is to understand sexual meanings
and identities as discursively (re)produced at school (Epstein and Johnson
VISUAL METHODS 465
1998). This constitution occurs through a plethora of institutional struc-

tures and processes such as the curriculum (Sears 1992), pedagogic
practices (Measor 2004), and peer group interactions (Kehily 2002). The
advent of what has been coined the “spatial turn” in the social sciences
(Kalervo et al. 2007) alongside interest in “new” materialisms (Coole and
Frost 2010) has illuminated new dimensions of schooling implicated in the
(re)production of sexual meanings and identities. These conceptual para-
digms can be seen to queer the discursive pre-eminence of the sexual, by
interrogating the role that space and the material conditions of schooling
(including the arrangement of objects and bodies), play in its constitution.
Instead of understanding sexuality as largely discursively produced and
the individual human body as the privileged site where sexuality happens,
“new”1 materialist thought offers alternative ways of thinking sexual-
ity’s ontology (Fox and Alldred 2013). Drawing on the work of Barad
(2007), it is possible to see how matter and meaning are co-constitutive in
sexuality’s becoming at school (Allen 2015). From this perspective,
sexuality does not pre-exist matter/meaning but comes into being via their
relation (see Allen 2015 for further details). This theoretical framework
queers our current understandings of the ontology of sexuality at school
and instead foregrounds matter (or the material) while decentring the
human subject.
Visual methods intersect with these foci in their capacity to illuminate
and capture the spatial and material landscape of schooling. The field of
visual methods is diverse and can include use of cameras, drawings, car-
toons, videos, and diagrams (Pink 2007). Here, I concentrate on photo-
methods as they have been employed in my own work around the “Sexual
Cultures of Schooling” (see Allen 2009b). The sexual cultures project
was concerned with understanding how meanings about sexuality are pro-
duced “unofficially” in two New Zealand secondary schools, in spaces
beyond official sexuality education curriculum and policy. As I was inter-
ested in elements of schooling not usually designated as sites of learning,
such as desktop and bathroom graffiti, and those spaces typically off-limits
to researchers, such as the gym locker rooms, I needed an innovative data
collection method.
Becker explains that photos are “valuable for the way they convey real,
flesh and blood life” (Becker cited in Rose 2007, p. 238). In a project
interested in the spatial and material, cameras held the capacity to “enflesh”
what has been characterised as the disembodied character of schooling
(Paechter 2004). Photos not only reveal bodies but also their relationship
466 L. ALLEN
and positioning to other material objects, as well additional contextual fea-

tures, such as whether space is in or outside. As well as generally capturing
what the photographer intends to take a picture of, photos can also reveal
material details that the photographer did not intend or originally notice.
In this way, the material and spatial features of an image are foregrounded,
offering a rich source of analysis that lends itself well to concerns of “the
spatial turn” and “new” materialisms.
To illustrate the facility of photo-methods for queering the ontology of
sexualities and school-based sexualities research methods, I draw on one
photo example (For more see Allen 2013a, 2015). In the sexual cultures
project described above, visual methods involved a combination of photo-
diaries and photo-elicitation interviews. For the photo-diaries, students
in the last two years of secondary school (ages 16–18) were given a 24
exposure disposable camera and asked to take photos over seven days of
how they learned about sexuality at school. It was hoped that these images
would reveal moments in which meanings about sexuality and the types
of student sexual identities that were legitimated (which comprise part of
the sexual cultures of schooling) were manifest. Following the collection
of disposable cameras, I developed the films and photo-diarists engaged in
an individual photo-elicitation interview (Pink 2007). This involved them
choosing images from their photo-diaries which they wanted to discuss
and my asking them what these revealed about sexuality at their school.
It is one image from Madison’s photo-diary and her interview narrative
surrounding it which I explore as an example of the queer work visual
methods might do in education (Fig. 44.1).
One of the photos Madison selected to talk about was of her friend
Hannah sitting on a bench outside her classroom. The image echoes
many others across the 22 diaries where the photographer has taken a
picture of a friend. In accordance with ethical regulations around preserv-
ing participants’ anonymity, Madison has cropped Hannah’s head from
the photo, so only from her chin down is visible. Focus is subsequently
directed to Hannah’s white spaghetti-strap tank top and her body within
it. Introducing the photo, Madison remarked that her friend Hannah was
known for her “boobs”:
So Hannah she’s known for just, I mean her boobs and that’s it and yeah I
wanted to take that [photo] because that is sexuality because that’s pretty
much there. And its everyday like girls walk around with tops on like that
and they think it’s just a top, but really boys are talking about it all the time
VISUAL METHODS 467
Fig. 44.1 Madison’s picture of her friend Hannah
so it’s like, this portrays that sexuality is expressed without you even know-
ing and that’s what that picture is about basically. (Madison, 18 years)
What is immediately apparent on viewing this image is a portrayal of the

student body that diverges from other representations of student sexuality
in school-based research. The visual component of the photo illuminates
Hannah as an enfleshed sexual subject in a potent manner. The visual
physical presence of Hannah’s body renders her, within the bounds of het-
eronormative female sexuality, as sexual. Capturing students in the desex-
ualised context of schooling (Epstein and Johnson 1998) as embodied
sexual subjects (on their own terms) has only previously been achieved via
language-based methods. Visual methods in this instance bring this por-
trayal into sharper relief, delineating the material contours of the embod-
ied sexual student subject.
Taking the lead from Madison’s narrative, my initial analysis of this pic-
ture concentrated on Hannah’s sexual embodiment and sartorial address
(Allen 2013a). In alignment with a discursive rendering of this image, I
drew attention to dominant discourses of heterosexuality and femininity at
work in constituting Hannah as a sexual subject. The analytic focus of the
468 L. ALLEN
picture was Hannah’s body as a site of the material-discursive manifestation

of female sexuality (Butler 1993). Returning to this image later and under
the influence of “new” materialist feminist thinking (Lenz Taguchi 2012;
Barad 2007; Bennett 2010), I began to interpret it differently. One of the
critiques progressed by “new” materialist feminism is that current think-
ing is anthropocentric, in the way it centres humans and human meaning-
making as the sole constitutive force in our world, placing humans in a
hierarchy above other matter in reality (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010).
Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) argue that researchers need to bring an
anti-anthropocentric gaze to their data, where the human subject is decen-
tred and “things” (or the material) are brought to the fore.
Practising anti-anthropomorphism in relation to Madison’s photo facil-
itates a queering of the discursive constitution of sexuality at school. When
I paid attention to “things” in this image, other insights about the (re)
production of sexuality surfaced. For instance, letting Hannah’s human
body recede, material features of the photo such as the wooden bench
(she sits on), a plastic water bottle (positioned to the left of the frame) and
not one, but two mobile phones, one silver held in Hannah’s hands and
another lying next to the water bottle. In previous analysis of this photo,
I did not notice these phones, nor were they a feature of participants’
interview talk. However, as I began to look for them across photo-diaries,
they surfaced everywhere; lying on student desks, carried by students as
they walked around the school or sat on the sports field, forgotten on a
bench outside an empty classroom, and clutched by one young woman as
she embraced her boyfriend. As a mundane, everyday feature of contem-
porary school life, mobile phones were not remarked upon by myself or
the participants and were barely noticed in our viewing of diaries during
the interview. Yet their persistent material presence across all diaries was
indisputable. Without the use of this visual method and its ability to cap-
ture unacknowledged and unintended details by the photographer, they
might have been permanently lost.
While it might seem obvious that mobile phones are implicated in the
constitution of student sexuality at school, much current discussion and
literature is shrouded by a discursively constituted moral panic (Ringrose
et al. 2012). By drawing visual methods into conversation with the theo-
retical work of “new” material feminists, it is possible to re-orient the
terms of this debate. Instead of blaming the advent of mobile technol-
ogy and/or young people’s use of it as “bad,” it is possible to untether
this discursive moralism and draw attention to a new ontology of sexual-
VISUAL METHODS 469
ity at school. Within the constraints of the current short discussion, it is

only possible to reference this complex argument and gesture to its future
elaboration here, so for those who are interested, I direct them to (Allen
2013b). What I can say is that an anti-anthropocentric reading of this
debate draws attention away from whether the combination of mobile
phones and young people are “good” or “bad” to a recognition of the way
sexuality becomes via their relation. Paying attention to “things” has impli-
cations for recognising that sexuality is more than discursively constituted
at school and to propose that human bodies are not the privileged site for
its making and expression. Recognising mobile phones as objects with
equal capacity for “force” (Bennett 2010) as humans via their relation
with them has radical implications for our understanding of how sexuality
is made at school (Allen 2015).
Such understandings are only made possible by innovative data col-
lection tools such as visual methods. The capacity of photos to capture
and store material and spatial details that participants may not intend and
which researchers may not typically notice secures a rich source of data for
future queer readings of these images currently unimaginable.
NOTE
1. That “new” materialism’s ideas are “new” is contested. For instance,
Hoskins and Jones (2013) argue perceptions of the world as an entangled
continuity of the human-natural (as expounded by “new” materialisms)
have always been part of traditional Maori thought in the Aotearoa-New
Zealand context. Objects are to be respected and seen as alive, with the
potential to form part of energy exchanges with humans.
REFERENCES
Allen, L. (2009a). “Caught in the act”: Ethics committee review and researching
the sexual culture of schools. Qualitative Research, 9(4), 395–410.
Allen, L. (2009b). “Snapped”: Researching the sexual culture of schools using
visual methods. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education,
22(5), 549–561.
Allen, L. (2013a). Behind the bike sheds: Sexual geographies of schooling. British
Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(1), 56–75.
Allen, L. (2013b). Sexual assemblages: Mobile phones/young people/school.
doi:10.1080/01596306.2013.846901.
470 L. ALLEN
Allen, L. (2015). The power of things! A ‘new’ ontology of sexuality at school.

Sexualities, 18(8), 941–959. doi:10.1177/1363460714550920.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entangle-
ment of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bay-Cheng, L. (2003). The trouble of teen sex: The construction of adolescent
sexuality through school-based sexuality education. Sex Education, 3(1),
61–74.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Routledge.
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and
politics. London: Duke University Press.
DePalma, R., & Atkinson, E. (2009). Interrogating heteronormativity in primary
schools: The no outsiders project. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books.
Epstein, D., & Johnson, R. (1998). Schooling sexualities. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Fox, N., & Alldred, P. (2013). The sexuality-assemblage: Desire, affect, anti-
humanism. The Sociological Review, 61, 769–789.
Hall, D. (2007). Cluelessness and the queer classroom. Pedagogy, 7(2), 182–191.
Hawkes, G. (2004). Sex and pleasure in western culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hoskins, T., & Jones, A. (2013). Object lessons: Vital materiality, methodology
and indigenous studies in education. Te Puna Wānanga Research Seminar
2013. Thursday 31 October. Faculty of Education, University of Auckland.
Epsom Campus.
Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis
of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational
research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5),
525–542.
Jones, A. (Ed.). (2001). Touchy subject: Teachers touching children. Dunedin:
University of Otago Press.
Kalervo, N., Gulson, S., & Colin, S. (2007). Knowing one’s place: Educational
theory, policy, and the spatial turn. In N. Kalervo, S. Gulson, & S. Colin (Eds.),
Spatial theories of education: Policy and geography matters (pp. 1–16). New York:
Routledge.
Kehily, M. (2002). Sexuality, gender and schooling: Shifting agendas in social learn-
ing. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2012). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing inter-
view data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 265–281.
Measor, L. (2004). Young people’s views of sex education: Gender, information
and knowledge. Sex Education, 4(2), 153–166.
Netsafe, The Internet Safety Group. (2005). The text generation mobile phones
VISUAL METHODS 471
and New Zealand youth: A report of results from the internet safety group’s
survey of teenage mobile phone use. Internet Safety Group Inc.
O’Donoghue, D. (2007). “James always hangs out here”: Making space for place
in studying masculinities at school. Visual Studies, 22(1), 62–73.
Paechter, C. (2004). “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano”: Cartesian dualism and the
marginalisation of sex education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of
Education, 25(3), 309–320.
Pascoe, C. (2007). Dude you’re a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography: Images, media and representation in
research (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications.
Ringrose, J., Gill, R., Livingstone, S., & Harvey, L. (2012). A qualitative study of
children and young people and “sexting”: A report prepared for the NSPCC.
London: Institute of Education, University of London.
Rose, G. (2007). Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of
visual materials (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications.
Sears, J. (Ed.). (1992). Sexuality and the curriculum: The politics and practices of
sexuality education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Sikes, P., & Piper, H. (2012). Ethical research, academic freedom and the role of
ethics committees and review procedures in educational research. International
Journal of Research and Method in Education, 33(3), 205–213.
Youth
Lisa W. Loutzenheiser and Sam Stiegler
WHY YOUTH, WHY QUEER, TRANSGENDER

AND GENDERQUEER YOUTH?
Within, across, among, and between queer, transgender, and genderqueer

communities, and outside of these same communities, the topic of what
to “do” about queer, transgender, and genderqueer youth is a contempo-
rary “hot topic.” In dominant communities this conversation too often
defaults to conversations or strategies for how to deal with bullying. Even
from within, projects such as “It Gets Better” also position queer youth
as not-quite-adults who are victims who must wait for fulfillment. Not
only are these youth viewed as merely adults-in-waiting but the ways in
which they are also always already at-risk solidifies them as subjects whose
complexities are muted and/or erased. Similarly, salient differences and
multiple oppressions for those who might align with the identities of
queer, genderqueer, and/or transgender are in danger of being flattened
or erased.
The youth of youth studies are the subject of legions of social science
research. While honoring and recognizing the important work of those
who came before, we also desire to think about how continuing to push at
the boundaries of the concept of youth will advance a dialogue in a manner
L.W. Loutzenheiser ( ) • S. Stiegler

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

474 L.W. LOUTZENHEISER AND S. STIEGLER
that invites researchers, teachers, teacher educators, and other educators

to unthink the category of youth, particularly in ways that embrace local
contexts for queer, transgender, and genderqueer youth. The majority
of the studies position youth in two ways. The first is universal, natural,
and developmentally staged—assumed to be cisgender and heterosexual.
The second is still presumed to be cisgender and heterosexual is natu-
rally rebellious and resistant to parental structures and to the institutional
structures. Even many studies that take lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB)
youth as their focus solidify both the concept of youth and those who are
LGB. Recently, transgender and genderqueer youth have become central
to and disaggregated within research studies but transgender and gender-
queer youth remain mostly stable categories that leave race unmarked,
resulting in natural-seeming default to whiteness.
We will not rehash the exceptional work recently undertaken by
Brockenbrough and Boatwright (2013), Cruz (2011), Gilbert (2014),
Lesko and Talburt (2012), MacIntosh (2007), McCready (2010) and
Rasmussen et al. (2004) who each complicate how queer and/or trans-
gender youth are understood, but invite the reader to interrogate this
work, and others cited through them. Our work is interested in difference
and how thinking with the concepts of queer, genderqueer, and trans-
gender youth opens spaces outside the bounds set by youth studies of
the Birmingham School, developmental models of adolescence, and the
commonsensical notion of teenager as consumer and purveyor of style.
We argue that notions of subcultural and developmental models applied
to queer, genderqueer, and transgender youth are exceeded and exploded
to a degree that renders queer, genderqueer, and transgender youth frac-
tured and productively unrecognizable.
Imaginary Youth
Perhaps a key insight into the constructedness of youth as a discernable
social category is the ever-shifting age limits that constitute “youth.”
When does one stop being a child and start being a youth? And, moreover,
when can one not claim their youth at all, thereby being forced into per-
manent adulthood? Youth groups, programs, and service providers fluctu-
ate between both the lower and upper thresholds that delineate youth.
From not-yet-youth, or no-longer-youth, the categories emphasize the
need to uncover the other determining factors that compromise what it
commonly understood as “youth.” Youth, while approaching adulthood,
YOUTH 475
are still constructed socially, culturally, politically, and discursively with

the understandings and protectionist concern and paternalism afforded
the youngest of children. Kincaid (1998) explains this imagined “child
rechurns our cultural curds, innocence, and purity, into a modern snack
food we can ingest and use to nourish, excuse, and explain ourselves”
(p. 70).
This is of specific importance to queer studies and education for the
category of youth sits at one of the major intersections of these two
fields of study. Further exploration of how society educates subjects
about sexuality and gender identity, and their intersections, is necessary
given the dominant constructions of sexuality and gender. Namely, that
one identified as child or youth, is understood not to have a sexuality,
nor knowledge of the sexual world, as a but then, upon reaching adult-
hood, is supposed to have a fully developed knowledge of sexuality and
gender (Berlant 1995). Furthermore, as the child becomes youth and
then moves toward being adult, the overlapping constructions of race,
sexuality, gender, and ability interrupt society’s ability to consume all
youthful bodies only through the lens of age. What happens then when
youth is not simply seen as this intermediary and unidirectional step
between childhood and adulthood. Instead, of continuing to approach
youth with the “[u]topianism [that] follows the child around like a fam-
ily pet” (Bruhm and Hurley 2004, p. xiii), we seek an interruption of
the only-ever-forward movement that youthful bodies are expected to
take, enticing researchers and educators to examine the ways race, sexu-
ality, gender, and ability of young bodies are put under erasure by the
category of youth.
Imaginary Knowledges
In one of our research projects, youth who participated in a five-day lead-
ership camp for self-identified queer, genderqueer, and transgender youth
aged 14–25 repeatedly demonstrated that developmental models were fal-
lacies as were any conceptualization of a singular subcultural notion of
who those called youth are. What happens at camp occurs across the tem-
poral markers of adolescence (Halberstam 2005). Growth, the hallmark of
youth development, is evident both similarly and differently across camp-
ers (14–21), cabin leaders (19–25), and adult volunteers (25 and up). The
similarities and differences has less to do with age than it did how much
experience camp participants had with feelings of belonging, acceptance,
and embracing risk in an environment where risk was not merely tolerated
but invited.
The youth/camper/cabin leader identities are tied to the temporality
and spatiality of camp and the island on which it is located both figura-
tively and literally. Perhaps camp can occur in some of the ways that it does
because it is overtly restricted in time and space. Just as intended, youth
appear on the island for five days each summer, so do their intentioned
monikers of queer and/or transgender. The meanings of these words
referring forward and back to the continuum of meaning made possible
by the camp, only to be remade alongside more normative meanings in
the imperfect moments of camp. Talburt and Rasmussen (2010) warn that
there is “a desire to run after queer projects in research, while recogniz-
ing that the ‘queer’ project is necessarily incomplete, even unrealizable”
(p. 2). Heeding their warning, thinking about queer, genderqueer, and
transgender youth within education and educational research is not look-
ing for the “spaces that regulate gender and sexuality” nor are we engaged
in revealing “liberated subjects, liberated moments, and political efficacy”
(p. 2). Rather queer youth as a concept is interrogated, knowing that the
youth and their queerness are already defined, their identities concret-
ized in the multiple spaces they occupy as “youth” and to which they are
refused entrance as “queer.” They are not victims; they are not an “at-risk”
categorization; they do not represent the child body preyed upon or a
system that does not care about them and/or views them as a problem to
be solved. These are not youth who find themselves suddenly empowered,
liberated by their own actions and the actions of others. While they may
occupy some of these spaces at different points, the campers and cabin
leaders are seen to occupy these spaces simultaneously and out of tempo-
ral sequence. Conversely, they inhabit a space at camp that is described as
“magic.” And yet this “magical space” is also a space where they some-
times enact the normativity of their overdetermined transgenderness and
queerness, where they each have and lack agency and where the impacts of
being both discursively and materiality produced are deeply felt.
Imaginary Teaching
One of the underlying assumptions about teaching is that teachers (are
supposed to) know who their students are and how to teach them. The
youth body is supposedly always fully known and intelligible because of
its “natural” innocence and purity and age. Queer studies, then, intrinsi-
YOUTH 477
cally chafes against normative regimes of truth about education that con-
structs bodies that are not-yet-adult as having a non-relationship with sex,
sexuality, and gender. However, imaginaries of youth can be rethought to
include youth are always in constant relationship to the sexual despite the
dominant understandings that would keep “the sexual” and “youth” as
incapable of possessing a connection (Kincaid 1998). Given queer studies’
frequent focus on queer, genderqueer, and transgender youth, it becomes
possible to see how the “child is precisely who [adults] are not and, in fact,
never were” (Stockton 2009, p. 5). Instead of assuming adults can look
backward to their own life histories and experiences as a way of knowing
and understanding youth, “education must be open to the surprise of
sideways growth so that we can learn to tolerate that we can be nothing
or anything” (Gilbert 2014, p. 23). While this is especially important for
queer studies given the impossibility of knowing, in advance, which youth
may grow up to be queer, genderqueer, or transgender (Mayo 2006), it
also highlights the impossibility for education of knowing who youth are
and how best to teach them. Moreover, this letting go of assumptions
about youth highlights, according to Stockton (2009), “the darkness of
the child” (p. 3). Education and queer studies share the project of opening
up static ways of knowing and thinking.
Rethinking the teaching of youth, then, demands a rethinking of
youth to “simultaneously confound the nature/culture divide that holds
such traction in early years education, to queer what counts as nature
(and by association childhood), and to de-centre the romantic pure
and natural yet becoming-rational and autonomous individual child”
(Taylor and Blaise 2014, p. 379). If the term “youth,” then, is vacated
of its crystallized and unyielding predetermined qualities, the expecta-
tion that teachers, pedagogy, curriculum, anti-bullying measures and
schools already know youth and how to get them to an educated state of
knowing begins to crumble. This framing uncovers “the impossibility of
perfect fits between what a teacher or curriculum intends and what a stu-
dent gets;…what a teacher ‘knows’ and what she teachers; what dialogue
invites and what arrives unbidden” (Ellsworth 1997, p. 52). When queer
studies and education engage with and trouble imaginaries of youth,
there is a demand for “thinking is something other than compliance; it
is an engagement with uncertainty and doubt” (Gilbert 2014, p. 65).
Moreover, it underscores the need to examine the contradictions and
intersections inherent in imaginaries of youth and how those play out in
research and teaching.
CONTRADICTIONS AND COMPLICATIONS
While society might always be trying to push, shove, and force youth
toward future educational goals, queer studies and education can ask for
whom these futures are understandable and accessible? The future, as
Muñoz (2009) argues, “is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids,
queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (p. 95). The future,
then, is only accessible to those bodies physically able to move down this
path lined with gendered, sexualized, racialized, and abled “pre-reqs” for
the bodies that attempt to navigate its trajectory. When queer, gender-
queer, and transgender youth are spoken of as such, race, Indigeneity, and
ethnicity go undiscussed. We are suggesting that the promise of youth in
queer studies and education is in the explicit marking and analysis white-
ness, racism, anti-blackness, colonial assumptions, and settler privileges as
sexuality and gender identity are interrogated within education.
Complicating Research
Returning to the camp study, anti-oppressive frameworks are central in
the training of staff, and the attention paid to who came to camp (camp-
ers, cabin leaders, and cabin leaders) in relation to a balance of sexualities,
gender identities, racial backgrounds, and Indigeneity as well as ability.
This was not always an easy coming together resulting in the researcher
being privy to tensions. Attending to the tensions in the midst of a mostly
joyful story of belonging and acceptance requires a research framework
that could acknowledge silences and difference in a manner that did not
solidify race, genders, or sexualities. As a participant observer, the adult
researcher is both implicated by the tensions and produces knowledges
through them. This is neither “good” nor “bad” but rather necessitates
a willingness to explore multiple literatures from multiple communities
and paradigms to begin to make sense of the criss-crossing discourses and
narratives. And perhaps this is a lesson of thinking of queer, genderqueer,
and transgender youth as cross-cutting, intersectional, and temporally dis-
ruptive beings; the researcher becomes responsible to attend to the mul-
tiple communities with whom they engage. This commitment, we would
argue, is not manifest in reflexive statements of research culpability but in
the deep engagement with contextually located communities and all types
of literatures emanating from those communities to develop frameworks
that offer respect to the thinking traditions of the queer, genderqueer, and
YOUTH 479
transgender youth with whom one researches. This is a sizable task for any
researcher, none of whom will be either ultimate insider or outsider of any
study of queer, genderqueer, or transgender youth. Nor is it an “answer”
for the problem of queer research; but one approach that incorporates the
knowledge that there is no singular answer, just as there is not singular
queer, genderqueer, or transgender youth.
Contradictory Teaching
The task of unpacking the constructions of youth concurrently works to
expose many of the contradictions of teaching. Specifically, the queered
lens troubles the notion of what youth are (supposed to be) and inter-
rupts the regimes of truth that surround the ways in which youth should
“do” education, schooling, and learning. Queerness “disrupts idealized
and saccharine myths about children, sexuality, and innocence and imag-
ine new versions maturation” (Halberstam 2005, p. 117). Many of the
theories behind teaching, as it is commonly understood, rest on logics
of progression, development, and forward movement expected of youth
bodies. Students are always supposed to be moving from less knowing to
more knowing, from one grade level to the next, toward graduation and
away from failing. The pathways toward educational success—toward the
always already forward path youth are supposed to be traveling down—are
narrow enough to predetermine which bodies can make the journey.
What might it mean to think of education in ways that better account
for what the material and discursive distances between how race, gen-
der, class, sexuality, and ability do to the lived experiences of youth? How
might we pay attention to the ways in which constructions of identity
affect youth’s relations with schools, curriculum and pedagogy, law, media,
health, communication, and relationality allow for the intersecting and
overlapping experiences of youth be taken into account? Queer studies
has long held that queerness stands to offer tools to critique, slow down,
and think against a variety of dominant norms (Cohen 1997), includ-
ing race, class, and ability. Ignoring the impact of race and racialization,
for example, when considering the experiences of queer and transgender
youth in schools, reinforces and reproduces notions that to talk about race
is take time away from talking about gender and sexuality, thereby ignor-
ing and pathologizing the existence of queers of color (Brockenbrough
2013). Queer studies and education as discussed here open spaces to work
and think against the pressure to cut and separate discussions of inter-
section and difference into stand-alone conversations and considerations.

Rather, when taking up the question of youth, we are more able to “take
pleasure in tarrying, and…look[ing] both hard and askance at the norm”
(Freeman 2010, pp. xvi–xvii). In this way, teaching and research about
with and for youth can remove the blockages that view intersectionalities
and the complexity of youth as a detour, as additive, and as in competition
for attention from social discussions that can only deal with one “issue”
at a time. If there is an inherent risk to labeling and predetermining who
youth can, should, and may be, then queer studies and education offers
opportunities to assert that constructions of “youth” remain open, vari-
ant, and ever-shifting.
REFERENCES
Berlant, L. (1995). Live sex acts (Parental advisory: Explicit material). Feminist
Studies, 21(2), 379–404.
Brockenbrough, E. (2013). Introduction to the special issue: Queers of color and
anti-oppressive knowledge production. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(4), 426–440.
doi:10.1111/curi.12023.
Brockenbrough, E., & Boatwright, T. (2013). In the MAC: Creating safe spaces
for transgender youth of color. In K. Jocson (Ed.), Cultural transformations:
Youth and pedagogies of possibility (pp. 165–182). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Education Press.
Bruhm, S., & Hurley, N. (2004). Curiouser: On the queerness of children.
Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical poten-
tial of queer politics? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3(4), 437–
465. doi:10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.
witnessing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(5),
547–558. doi:10.1080/09518398.2011.600270.
Ellsworth, E. A. (1997). Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the power of
address. New York: Teachers College Press.
Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Durham:
Gilbert, J. (2014). Sexuality in schools: The limits of education. Minneapolis:
Kincaid, J. R. (1998). Erotic innocence: The culture of child molesting. Durham:
YOUTH 481
Lesko, N., & Talburt, S. (2012). An introduction to seven technologies of youth

studies. In S. Talburt & N. Lesko (Eds.), Keywords in youth studies: Tracing
affects, movements and knowledges (pp. 1–10). New York: Routledge.
MacIntosh, L. B. (2007). Does anyone have a band-aid? Anti-homophobia dis-
courses and pedagogical impossibilities. Educational Studies, 41(1), 33–43.
Mayo, C. (2006). Pushing the limits of liberalism: Queerness, children and the
future. Educational Theory, 56(4), 469–487. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.
2006.00239.x.
McCready, L. T. (2010). Making space for diverse masculinities: Difference, inter-
sectionality, and engagement in an urban high school. New York: Peter Lang.
Rasmussen, M. L., Rofes, E., & Talburt, S. (Eds.). (2004). Youth and sexualties:
Pleasure, subversion, and insubordination in and out of schools. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth cen-
tury. Durham: Duke University Press.
Talburt, S. (2004). Constructions of LGBT youth: Opening up subject positions.
Theory Into Practice, 43(2), 116–121. doi:10.1207/s15430421tip4302_4.
Talburt, S., & Rasmussen, M. L. (2010). “After-queer” tendencies in queer
research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(1),
1–14. doi:10.1080/09518390903447184.
Taylor, A., & Blaise, M. (2014). Queer worlding childhood. Discourse: Studies in
the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(3), 377–392. doi:10.1080/
01596306.2014.888842.
INDEX
A Anzaldúa, Gloria E., 17, 163, 230,

abject, 3, 152, 155, 157, 458 286, 302, 320, 322, 335, 336,
abjection, 3, 285, 289, 453, 457, 458, 366
460 apartheid, 24, 27
absence, 28, 174, 221, 266, 285, 345, ascesis, 107–9, 112, 113
363 autoethnographic, 381, 387, 388
activist scholars, 79 autoethnography, 78, 142
affect, 5–11, 70, 93, 97, 196, 227, 233, auto-marginalization, 53
266, 302, 324, 365, 422, 424,
426, 427, 429, 430, 431n5, 449
affect theory, 6 B
agency, 3, 17, 23, 112, 142, 176, 198, barebacker, 313, 314
201, 267, 287, 288, 290, 302, Bathroom Project, 149, 154, 155, 157
385, 387, 476 bathroom trouble, 120–3
Ahmed, Sara, 6, 7, 10, 119, 220, 221, BDSM, 314, 315
224, 330, 334, 372, 374, 410, becomings, 398
412 bigenderism, 409, 411, 412
AIDS, 29, 92, 151, 231, 287, 289, binary, 26, 38, 64, 69, 70, 100, 107,
300, 302, 304, 312, 314, 370, 120, 123, 127, 129, 130, 132,
410, 419n1 133, 141, 150, 152, 193, 194,
Allies of Intersectionalities, 15, 17–20 199, 206, 211, 213–15, 266,
anti-foundational, 2, 3, 418 267, 322, 335, 383, 385–7,
antiheteronormative, 4 396–8, 400, 401, 403, 409,
anti-oppressive education, 175, 179, 412–14, 438, 439, 441
235, 241, 243, 246 binary gender enculturation, 130

and Education, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55425-3
484 INDEX
biological essentialism, 167 cisgenderism, 207, 208, 217

bisexual, 15, 16, 44n2, 47, 51–3, 72, cisprofessionalism, 145
81, 87, 98, 100n2, 106, 119, 127, cissexual, 4, 222, 223
163, 174, 184, 205, 210, 213, colonialism, 26, 29
219, 233, 237n1, 240, 252, 259, Combahee River Collective, 17, 161,
273, 275, 277, 278, 299, 301, 163, 326
314, 322, 330, 341, 351, 352, coming out, 47, 48, 50–3, 55, 67, 71,
362, 370, 396, 397, 453, 474 245, 288, 289, 322, 323, 325,
bitter knowledge, 23, 25–32, 34 356, 396, 398, 415, 454, 456,
Blackburn, Mollie V., 177, 261, 277, 457, 460
285, 290, 292n3, 302, 304 coming out imperative, 48
black feminism, 162, 166, 286, 321 concepts, 1, 2, 4, 58, 81, 89, 176,
Black male teachers, 288 200, 246, 265, 270n2, 345, 351,
Black queer male teachers, 289 353, 366, 397, 408, 409, 417,
border crossing, 30, 32, 82, 230, 323 421, 428, 455, 474
borderlands, 17, 323, 329, 330, containment, 57–9, 63–5, 189, 287,
335–7 401
borderlands theory, 329, 330, 335–7 contradictory teaching, 479
Britzman, Deborah P., 68, 89, 108, counterknowledges, 251
152, 153, 155, 157, 175, 178, counterpublic, 249, 252, 253, 382,
206–8, 212, 252, 261, 300, 301, 393
370, 418 counterstories, 75, 252
bullying, 35–43, 43n1, 51, 73, 88, 90, covering, 48
127–34, 174, 175, 178, 230, critical dialogue, 178
244, 259, 264, 265, 268, 312, critical incident, 65
313, 326, 327, 346, 352, 355–57, critical intimate praxis, 67, 68
359, 376n1, 402, 473, 477 critical ontology, 177
bullying discourse, 36, 37, 41 critical pedagogy, 178, 240, 242, 244,
bully/victim binary, 127, 132 245
critical race theory, 75, 83, 183, 371,
424
C cruising, 2, 4, 199, 439
capoeira, 107–12 Cruz, Cindy, 229, 230, 292n3, 474
Catholic doctrine, 342, 343, 346 culturally competent, 88, 89, 91, 92,
Catholic schools, 342, 343, 345, 346, 332
347n2 cyberbullying, 36
child, 8, 9, 50, 119, 174, 190,
435–42, 442n2, 446, 455, 456,
474–7 D
chronopolitics, 189, 190 desexualisation, 467
cisgender, 4, 41, 150, 168, 207, 210, desubjugating/desubjugation, 4, 149,
211, 213, 216, 320, 388, 389, 150, 152, 153, 157, 158, 383,
453, 455, 456, 458, 474 387, 388, 391, 392
INDEX 485
dialogic, 2, 3, 178, 445–6 futurity, 125, 199, 268, 435, 436,

discourses of professionalism, 137, 439, 440, 478
140, 142, 144
drag, 194, 440, 450, 458, 459
G
gay, 3, 5, 15, 16, 31, 39, 44n2, 47,
E 48, 50, 51, 53, 70, 81, 87, 89,
ecological theoretical framework, 274 93, 97, 99, 102n2, 106–9, 112,
Edelman, Lee, 8, 312, 435–40, 442 119, 121, 122, 127, 131, 141,
educational leaders, 15–20, 140, 141 142, 145, 174, 175, 184–6,
Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 5, 26, 252, 365, 205–17, 219, 222, 223, 230,
477 233, 237, 240, 243–6, 251, 252,
encounter stories, 75–83 259, 264, 273, 275, 277–9, 285,
epistemological break, 58 289, 299–301, 306n2, 311–15,
ethical authority, 71 320, 322, 330, 332, 334, 341,
ethical relations, 68, 71 342, 351, 352, 355, 362, 366,
ethical self-fashioning, 112 367n1, 370, 371, 373, 376n1,
experiential foundationalism, 195 396, 400, 401, 403, 410, 411,
explicitly out, 48 414, 416, 417, 446, 447, 451,
453–5, 458, 460, 474
gay-straight alliances (GSAs), 145,
F 210, 259, 273, 279, 313, 342,
faculty trainings, 87 455
failure, 4, 25, 31, 32, 71, 72, 130, (a)gender, 259–61, 265–70
153, 410–12, 457 gender creative, 259
families, 44n2, 91, 92, 95–101, gender expression, 138, 214, 230,
102n1, 102n2, 102n4, 185, 188, 320, 324
242, 246, 247, 288, 291, 343, genderfication, 117, 119, 120, 122–5
347n2, 353, 454–6 gender fluidity, 383
family structures, 96, 97, 101, 185 genderfying, 119
feminism, 4, 5, 162, 163, 166, gender identity, 31, 38, 43, 161, 170,
194, 196, 222, 286, 292n2, 321, 197–9, 214, 216, 235, 242, 243,
364, 371, 411, 427, 429, 468, 245–7, 291, 305, 320, 322–4,
491n1 337, 342, 343, 345, 414, 416,
field observation, 241, 242 453, 458, 459, 475, 478
Foucault, Michel, 105–9, 112, gender non-conforming, 55
149–53, 155, 158, 186, 250, gender performance, 119, 121, 129,
262, 321, 411 130, 132, 197, 198, 200, 235,
(re)fractioning singularity, 329, 330, 373, 459
337 gender policing, 127, 129–34
Freire, Paulo, 18, 175, 178, 246 genderqueer, 55, 67, 70, 119, 120,
friendship, 105–9, 112, 113, 129–31, 122–4, 152, 222, 409, 415–18,
277 473–9
486 INDEX
gender, sexual, and romantic I

minorities (GSRM), 205 identity, 6, 7, 10, 16, 17, 26, 31, 38,
Gilbert, Jen, 5, 6, 474, 477 43, 48–50, 55, 59, 61, 63, 64,
Giroux, Henry A., 178, 355 67–70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 81,
globalization, 83, 139, 143 83, 95, 96, 100, 108, 131, 137,
groupwork, 448–51 140, 141, 153, 161, 164–7,
169, 170, 176, 177, 179, 184,
186–8, 194, 195, 197–9, 201,
H 208–16, 230, 231, 234, 235,
Halberstam, Judith, 9, 121, 124, 150, 242, 243, 245–47, 261, 274,
371, 372, 374, 375, 411, 412, 275, 277, 280, 286, 289, 291,
423, 426–9, 447, 475, 479 300–5, 310, 320–4, 326,
Halperin, David M., 60, 105, 311 329–38, 342, 343, 345, 352,
heteronormative, 4, 7, 9, 23, 36, 39, 354, 356, 358, 359, 365, 371,
54, 81, 97, 100, 105, 112, 119, 386, 388, 396, 397, 400, 402,
122, 129, 132, 133, 140, 143, 408, 410–16, 419n1, 441,
157, 175, 177, 198, 201, 207, 447, 453, 454, 457–60, 475,
231, 243–5, 250, 264, 287, 478, 479
292n1, 306n2, 345, 362, 371, identity management, 48
373–5, 389, 436–42, 453–6, identity politics, 26, 55, 100, 108,
458–60, 460n1, 467 165–7, 289, 300, 302, 408, 410,
heteropatriarchy, 162, 163, 168, 259, 458
262, 264, 267 imaginary knowledges, 475
heteroprofessionalism, 137–145 imaginary teaching, 476
heterosexuality, 7, 28, 49, 54, 55, 89, imaginary youth, 474
130, 133, 187, 193, 207, 212, implicitly out, 48
243, 300, 301, 345, 358, 396, indirect knowledge, 25
402, 411, 439, 453, 455, 456, 467 in-service teachers, 77
heterosexual matrix, 28, 29, 31, 129 interlocking systems of oppression,
heterosexual teachers, 50–5, 140, 343 161–3, 166, 168, 169, 331, 332
heterotopia, 149–53, 155, 157, 158 internal safety, 173, 175–80, 260, 262,
heterotopic imagination, 151, 152 265, 266, 270, 270n1
homonormativity, 208, 268, 306n2, 313 intersectionality, 17, 75, 91, 109,
homophobic, 35, 38, 43, 48, 51, 54, 162, 163, 168, 169, 234, 320,
55, 80, 88, 130, 142, 205, 206, 322, 324, 329–2, 333, 337,
208, 230, 241, 277, 285, 288, 338, 371
289, 314, 316, 342, 344, 346, intersex, 81, 211, 252, 259, 352, 370
364, 370, 410 intimacy, 6, 68–72, 100, 113, 314,
homophobic bullying, 35, 43 343, 366, 367n1, 389
homosexual ascesis, 107–9, 112 Islamophobia, 63
hooks, bell, 17, 29, 30, 92, 178, 179, It Gets Better, 39, 47, 73, 79, 119,
302 121, 352, 355–8, 473
INDEX 487
J M
Jagose, Annamarie, 2, 253, 261, 286, mathematical inqueery, 183, 184, 187,
331, 334, 410, 411 188, 190
mathematical knowledge, 183
mathematics education, 183–5, 187,
K 190
Kincheloe, Joe L., 177 Mayo, Cris, 133, 313, 371, 398, 477
Kumashiro, Kevin K., 175, 208, 235, McCready, Lance T., 277, 285, 290,
243, 247, 250, 285, 345 292n3, 474
mestizaje, 323
microaggressions, 129, 230
L millennial, 259, 273–5, 280
Ladson-Billings, Gloria, 18, 101, 230 millennial generation, 259, 273, 274,
lesbian, 7, 15, 16, 39, 44n2, 47, 48, 280
50, 51, 81, 87, 89, 97, 98, minoritized, 163, 319, 320, 325, 326
102n2, 106, 118–22, 127, 140, model of multiple dimensions of
163, 164, 166, 167, 169, 174, identity, 329, 330, 333, 337
184, 185, 198, 200, 205, 207, multidimensionality, 162, 230, 237,
210, 216, 219, 222, 223, 230, 371
233, 235, 236, 237n1, 240, 243, Muñoz, José Esteban, 2, 3, 199, 231,
252, 259, 264, 273, 275, 277, 312, 314, 418, 435, 436,
278, 291, 299–301, 312–14, 439–42, 478
320, 322, 326, 330, 341, 342,
351, 352, 362, 366, 370, 371,
376n1, 396, 411, 414, 416, 417, N
446, 450, 453, 455, 458, 474 neoliberal, 4, 121, 310, 316, 357,
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and 362, 364, 423, 426, 439
queer (LGBTQ), 16, 87–93, 106, nepantla, 335
119, 120, 127–9, 131, 133, 134, New Left, 164, 166
174, 175, 207, 210, 215, 240, new material feminists, 468
243–6, 248, 263, 273–6, 278–80, No Child Left Behind, 174
301, 302, 304, 314, 322–4, 330, non-binary, 194, 214, 441
332, 334, 347n1, 370, 396, 400, non-traditional family structures, 97
454–6, 458, 460 normalization, 63, 73, 101, 187, 207,
Lesko, Nancy, 5, 7, 264, 395, 399, 474 364, 366, 453, 455–8, 460
LGBTQ2 youth, 299, 300, 302–5 (hetero/cis)normative, 205, 206, 208,
liminality, 396, 397, 402, 403 209, 212
lines of flight, 412 nuclear family, 96, 97, 100, 101
Lugg, Catherine A., 140, 141, 345,
369, 370, 372–4
Luhmann, Susanne, 10, 178, 187, O
300, 366, 446, 450 ontoformative, 390
488 INDEX
P privilege, 16, 23, 39, 54, 79, 81, 83,

panromantic, 212, 213 96, 134, 161–5, 168, 175,
pansexual, 209, 212, 213 178–80, 183, 196, 206–9,
Pascoe, C.J., 129, 250, 373, 474 219–22, 224–6, 229, 268, 346,
passing, 48, 199, 329 361–3, 384, 388, 423, 425, 429
pedagogical, 1, 3, 4, 23, 25, 27, 30–2, professionalism, 137–45
49, 52, 82, 119, 232, 234, 240, Promotoras of Mujeres Contra el
247, 300, 302, 354, 355, 361–3, Sexismo, 229, 232, 233
365, 367, 382, 384, 387–9, 392, Promotores, 232–3
393, 395, 408, 415, 418, 424, Promoviendo, 229
430, 446, 447, 449, 450, 456, 464 public pedagogy, 239–46, 248, 459
pedagogy, 5, 8, 10, 23–7, 29, 31, 32, public pedagogy assignments, 239,
57, 64, 69, 71, 73, 89, 133, 134, 242
177–9, 185, 187, 239–48,
299–305, 314, 352, 354, 362–7,
409, 415, 418, 445–8, 450, 451, Q
459, 477, 479 quare, 299–306, 418
pedagogy of discomfort, 363 quare pedagogy, 302
pedagogy of versatility, 447, 448, 451 queer allies, 15, 16
pederasty, 446, 447 queer counterpublic, 249–56
performance, 101, 118, 119, 124, queer counterpublic spatialities, 249–56
129, 193–201, 235, 247, 304, queer embodiment, 417
365, 396, 397, 402, 407, 408, queer failure, 412
451, 453 queer friendships, 105–33
performance art, 193, 197–201 queering, 24, 26–8, 32, 37, 38, 40,
performatively, 25, 120, 121, 186, 42, 43, 60, 63, 68–71, 101,
187, 196 149–3, 155, 157, 158, 175, 176,
photo-methods, 463, 465, 466 179, 184, 185, 188–90, 195,
Pinar, William F., 29, 83, 113, 345 251–3, 255, 256, 263, 305, 323,
policing of gender diversity, 122 327n1, 365, 413, 446, 464, 466,
postgay, 205–14, 216, 217 468, 2501
power/knowledge, 60, 108, 407 queering argumentation, 188, 189
praxis, 67, 68, 71–3, 106, 162, 180, queering geometry, 188
231, 243–5, 247, 248, 299, 301, queering time, 189
302, 304, 330, 338, 361, 365, queer legal theory (QLT), 369, 370
367 queer literacy framework (QLF), 259,
presence, 49, 88, 119, 124, 125, 173, 268
220–2, 230, 250, 254, 262, 279, queer methodology, 60, 369–76
305n1, 345, 365, 397, 464, 467, queer millennials, 273–80
468 queer of color (QOC), 16, 229–2,
pre-service teachers, 24, 77, 80, 82, 237, 285–92 292n1, 292n2,
83 293n3
INDEX 489
queer of color critique, 16, 237, Rasmussen, Mary Lou, 2, 5, 50, 351,
285–92 292n1, 292n2 474
queer of color theorists, 231 Renold, Emma, 5, 36, 37, 130, 132,
queer pedagogy, 10–11, 23–7, 29, 31, 133
32, 64, 69, 73, 177, 185, 187, religiosity, 341–7
299–301, 362, 364–6, 445, 446, repression, 165, 453–5, 460
448 reproductive futurism, 8, 436–439,
queerphobic, 23, 27 442
queer, quare, and [q]ulturally resilience, 79, 351–9
sustaining, 299–306 Ringrose, Jessica, 5, 6, 36, 37, 130,
queer studies, 1–4, 6, 10, 15, 24, 59, 132, 133, 464, 468
83, 87, 119, 121, 161, 162, 164, roda, 110, 111
183, 193, 197–9, 201, 219, 220,
229, 237, 256, 286, 290, 292n2,
330, 331, 337, 362–5, 383, 395, S
409, 414, 422, 429, 430, 435, safe space, 81, 89–91, 93, 123, 177,
445, 460, 464, 475–80 289, 290, 305, 361–7, 367n2,
(White) queer teachers, 289 399, 422
queer tendencies, 2, 4 safe space trainings, 90, 93
queer theory, 3–6, 23, 28, 32, 38, 40, safety, 31, 36, 71, 87, 88, 123,
57, 58, 61, 64–5, 68, 71, 73, 173–80, 260, 262, 264–6, 269,
106, 121, 152, 155, 157, 165, 270, 270n3, 289, 291, 361–4,
174, 184, 186–7, 189, 190, 201, 366, 367, 367n2, 428
205, 208, 219, 222, 224, 226, same-sex marriage, 96, 119, 206, 231,
230, 251, 311–13, 315, 316, 458
332, 337, 338, 364, 369–1, scavenging as queer methodology,
408–10–14, 415, 428, 436 369–76
queer thrival, 309–16 schools of education, 87–93, 263
queer transgressive cultural capital, scriptocentrism, 194, 201
319–27 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 38, 50, 107,
queer utopias, 439–41 186, 372, 436, 450, 456
queer womxn of color, 16, 17 self-determination, 176, 260–3, 265,
questioning youth, 259, 278 267–70, 270n2
[q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy ([Q] self-reflexivity, 71, 72
SP), 303 (a)sexuality, 259–61, 265–70
sexual orientation, 16, 47–55, 78, 80,
81, 92, 128, 133, 143, 161, 169,
R 209, 213, 242, 243, 245, 246, 253,
racial border crossing, 230 261, 266, 268, 277, 311, 313, 323,
racism, 30, 39, 40, 78, 79, 142, 162, 324, 329, 332, 342–5, 416
165, 167–9, 178, 209, 231, 265, social justice, 16, 19, 76, 77, 82, 89,
287, 316, 331, 332, 363, 364, 91, 92, 175, 210, 233, 269, 288,
367, 371, 375, 423, 478 319, 327, 346, 399, 447
490 INDEX
social justice education, 92, 319 trans*, 259, 382–93

sociological imagination, 381–4 transgender, 1, 4, 15, 16, 44n2, 81,
space of the possible, 58 87, 98, 102n2, 106, 119, 120,
strategies, 39, 48, 52, 93, 133, 127, 152, 163, 174, 184, 205,
167, 179, 187–9, 210, 219, 229, 210, 211, 219, 233–4, 237n1,
231, 232, 234, 241, 275, 240, 252–4, 273, 278, 289,
286–90, 302, 351, 364, 374, 292n1, 299, 301, 314, 322–4,
375, 391, 399, 425, 428, 330, 341, 342, 351, 352,
460, 473 362, 363, 370, 381–93,
Stryker, Susan, 149, 152, 153, 396, 407–9, 412–15, 418,
157, 381, 383, 390, 407, 419n1, 447, 453, 457, 458,
419n1, 708 473–80
subaltern counterpublics, 382, the transgender imaginary, 381–93
390, 391 transgender studies, 1, 4, 120, 152,
suicide, 35, 38, 39, 47, 88, 175, 407–9, 412–14, 415
278, 285, 311, 312, 351, 352, trans generosity, 407–19
354–8 transgression, 131, 256, 321–3
Sullivan, Nikki, 29, 107, 207, 208, transmasculine, 388
210, 212 transphobic, 35, 205, 208, 289, 316,
342, 346
transphobic bullying, 35, 346
T trigger warning, 421–31, 430n1–2,
tactics, 208, 399, 402, 428–30 430n3, 431n6
Talburt, Susan, 2, 5–7, 15, 58, 175,
186, 474, 486
teacher educators, 76–81, 83, 180, U
242, 263, 265, 266, 325, 474 undocuqueer, 320–5
teacher professionalism, 138, 139 undocuqueer movement, 320, 322,
teachers, 9, 10, 20, 24, 29, 30, 35, 323, 325
47–55, 63, 69, 76–8, 80, 82, 83, utopia, 2–4, 121, 125, 150, 151, 153,
88, 89, 93, 97, 99, 100, 102n5, 165, 199, 205–7, 217, 409, 418,
108, 119–22, 124, 127, 138–40, 435–42
144, 175–9, 180, 188, 222, 223, utopian, 2, 3, 121, 125, 151, 165,
225, 226, 230, 239–48, 256, 206, 207, 217, 418, 435, 436,
259, 260, 262–6, 268, 269, 276, 439–42
288, 289, 291, 304, 311, 315,
324–7, 342–4, 363, 366, 395,
398, 403, 425, 436–8, 447–51, V
454–6, 459, 474, 476, 477 versatility, 445–52
testimonio, 229 visibility, 3, 48–52, 54, 55, 87,
third spaces, 395–403 97, 119, 120, 123, 124, 226,
INDEX 491
250, 276, 288–91, 300, 392, Y

453–60 youth, 5, 25, 35, 73, 79, 88, 106,
visual methods, 463–9 127, 149, 150, 174, 206,
230, 240, 259, 260, 274, 285,
299, 311, 325, 351, 370,
W 473–80
Warner, Michael, 58, 186, 250, 251, youth studies, 5, 473, 474
255, 286, 310
washrooms, 123
women of color feminisms, 163

Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education 2016

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education 2016

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

CRITICAL CONCEPTS

Nelson M. Rodriguez, Wayne J. Martino,

QUEER Series Editors

More information about this series at

Wayne J. Martino Edward Brockenbrough

Queer Studies and Education

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947965

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: © Anjo Kan / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

8 Critical Intimate Praxis 67

14 Gender Policing 127

17 Interlocking Systems of Oppression 161

18 Internal Safety 173

19 Mathematical Inqueery 183

23 Promoviendo (Promoting) 229

24 Public Pedagogy 239

25 Queer Counterpublic Spatialities 249

26 Queer Literacy Framework 259

27 Queer Millennials 273

28 Queer of Color Critique 285

29 Queer, Quare, and [Q]ulturally Sustaining 299

30 Queer Thrival 309

31 Queer Transgressive Cultural Capital 319

32 (Re)Fractioning Singularity 329

35 Safe Space 361

36 Scavenging as Queer Methodology 369

37 The Transgender Imaginary 381

38 Third Spaces 395

39 Trans Generosity 407

40 Trigger Warnings 421

44 Visual Methods 463

Paulina Abustan is a Queer Pilipina– scholar-activist and student of Washington

Edward Brockenbrough is associate professor of Teaching and Curriculum at the

Adam J. Greteman is an adjunct assistant professor of art education at the School

centered in youth studies, qualitative methodologies, anti-oppressive and critical

Christine Quinan is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Utrecht University

Jerry Rosiek is professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon where

Melissa J. Smith is assistant professor and director of English Education at

Fig. 16.1 Close-up of Samara’s drawing 156

In Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education: An International

W.J. Martino ( ) • J.C. Ingrey

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

across the chapter essays. In addition, we conceived of the tactic of deploy-

any definitive sense. They function as a means by which to provoke and

• What are the proper subjects of queer theory/studies in education?

scholars still insist upon the continued relevance of queer, despite

Affect is central to contemporary queer theory. In education, attention to

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 5

affect—but it is a relation of ‘doing’ in which there is not a distinction

demanded by school spaces. When intense affect is displayed by students

Affect is itself often considered a “bad” object of study in that, by defi-

bodies. By proliferating rather than foreclosing potential interactions and

affected, and to the ever-renewing capacity of knowledge to disturb, sur-

Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York:

We often encounter educational leaders in higher education demon-

P. Abustan ( ) • A.G. Rud

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 15

identities. Queers resist dominant and normative expectations and instead

1. Acknowledge and validate the multiple, changing, and fluid identi-

First, Allies of Intersectionalities affirm the multiple, changing, and

Fourth, Allies of Intersectionalities seek to dismantle oppressive situ-