May
I, Please, Queer Your Kids? The New Queer Pedagogy Education should not
be about maintaining or defending categories but asking about how
categories work. Sara*, Junior Year 2001
at a Spartanburg South Carolina High School: As I have
been thinking about my experience and everything surrounding it,
I am realizing where it has brought me. Although it is sometimes
painful, I don’t reflect on it with anger or hurt. I dealt
with being angry about it in therapy, years ago, and have since
looked upon it in a much different way. I gain strength from
it, knowing that had it not been for everything that happened, I
probably would not be the woman that you know. That said here
is some of my story…. Shortly after everyone found out
about me, one of my teachers asked to speak with me after class.
I didn’t know what it was about, as far as I knew I had done nothing
wrong. He told me how well I was doing in class. He
wasn’t a teacher I particularly liked, but I knew I did well in
his class, so I didn’t really understand why he was talking to me.
Until he began telling me that he had heard things about me.
I knew exactly what he was talking about but this was the first
time a teacher was bringing it up. I asked him what he meant
and he told me that a group of teachers were talking about me in
the lounge the other day. He proceeded to go into how he thought
I needed to pipe things down and not talk about it. He found
it disturbing that the teachers were even talking about me and didn’t
know why I had to make it a big deal. I realized that he was
telling me to shut up, to let everything go and then people would
stop talking because it made him uncomfortable that he had a gay
student. I was furious, but didn’t know what to do.
This was coming from teachers, the very people who were supposed
to protect me. I didn’t do anything about what he said.
I didn’t know what I could do. Sara’s
testimonial links the current educational and administrative preoccupation
of queerness and gayness in the American Public School system to
our not-so-distant past of continued student abuse. What is
particularly striking about this portion of her interview is the
predominance of teacher-to-teacher regulation, the teacher’s shame
concerning non-conformist students, and the overarching and entrenched
behavioral expectations for both teacher and student. To add
more layers to this already rich excerpt, our teacher in question
is an African-American man teaching in a highly conservative Southern
school. His request to not “make a big deal” about sexuality
underlines the following prejudice—one’s sexuality has little or
nothing to do with school and learning. Coming from a racial
minority perspective, sexual minority issues take a blow.
How does Sara’s suggested minority status differ so radically from
his racial minority status to be outside the realm of speech and,
it seems even, her own bodily protection? What privileges
race over sexuality and sexual behavior in this situation?
And why do these contradictions in privilege exist and thrive in
our educational climate where some forms of discrimination are controlled
and regulated? Another
important point to be raised is the language Sara uses to describe
her experience. Despite her assertion that therapy has aided
her in moving beyond these traumatic experiences, she still cannot
name them. “It” reverberates throughout her piece: “Although
it is sometimes painful, I don’t reflect on it with
anger or hurt. I dealt with being angry about it in
therapy, years ago, and have since looked upon it in a much
different way. I gain strength from it….” Kate
Evans in Negotiating the Self highlights the predominance
of “It” in stories of sexual otherness. “In fact, ‘it’ emphasizes
the power of language: to name it makes it ‘real,’ and to not name
it can emphasize one’s disregard or disgust for ‘it.’ ‘It’
can be both dehumanizing, and a marker of the power of ‘it.’
Is ‘it’ the unspeakable? The worst possible (thus unnamable)
thing?”2 Can it then be true that Sara has internalized
the silence pushed on her by her teachers and school administrations?
If so, this serves point to highlight the tremendous impact teacher
behavior, reaction, and evaluation of sexual otherness in school
have on student awareness of subject matter and also of themselves.
Britzman’s
opening quote speaks to the confusing issue of teaching about self
and other and overarching social identity categories.3
She neither condemns one category nor heralds another, such as heterosexual
versus homosexual, in educational discourse. Rather she maintains
educators’ purpose is to attempt to explain how these categories
arise. In retrospect, this statement despite its simple assertion
is highly critical and advanced. Britzman hits the root of
educational paranoia when it comes to sexuality and sexual otherness.
Eve Sedgwick further explains this dilemma: “Simply put, paranoia
tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn toward
and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular, symmetrical
epistemologies.”4 By asserting the contagion of
queerness, any school system, any teacher, any student, and any
administrator has an increased chance of exposure. Paranoia
becomes the vaccine to this social disease. It has seeped
into pedagogical practices resulting in the devaluation and disgust
with which queer studies is viewed in mainstream educational discussions.
In advocating queer learning spaces, educational institutions run
the risk of losing all categories, run the risk of leaving all subject
matter ripe learning material, and inadvertently allow for provocative
and resistant citizens to thrive. In linking this theoretical
pondering to my opening example it makes perfect sense that Sara
was told to “pipe down.” Keep it quiet. Don’t disturb
your role because you unsettle mine. Yet
it does not have to be all downhill. Eve Sedgwick draws attention
to the rampant policed lines of school paranoia and sees an opening.
She states, “finding myself as teacher, as exemplar, as persuader,
as reader to be less and less at the center of my own classroom,
I was also finding that the voice of a certain abyssal displacement—and
mine was certainly not the only such displacement going on in these
classrooms—could provide effects that might sometimes wrench the
boundaries of discourse around in productive if not always obvious
ways.”5 Where educational paranoia seems to have
become a sort of educational paralysis, with any adverse learning,
learners, or educators suspended in mid-air, bulges present themselves
on the lines of repressed versus nurtured knowledge, perverse versus
natural knowledge, and perverted versus decent educators.
These bulges are crucial. Throughout
the course of this essay, I have chosen to describe non-normative
sexuality, sexual discussions, and sexual beliefs as the Sexual
Other instead of the widely used term Sexual Minority.6
I have diverged from this term for the following reasons.
No longer is the term “sexual minority” revolutionizing as in the
Rubin sense.7 “The time has come to think about
sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic,
a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty,
war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But
it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility
of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously
crazy about sexuality.”8 Modern American society
thinks about sex all the time. Something
more dangerous is lurking than silence about sex. As consumers
we are bombarded with images of sex—the more non-normative the higher
the pay-off.9 Society has become fascinated with
sexual minority behavior and has adjusted accordingly by ripping
off and co-opting what was previously viewed as rebellious.
These former rebellions now are entangled in the politics of radical
differentiation—“we may look and act like that, but we are
not the same.” Likewise, total legal and educational repression
of homosexual relationships is no longer uniform or unilateral.
For example, in the Massachusetts Public Schools educational discussions
about gay and lesbian sexual identity are common place supporting
the state’s recent legalization of same-sex marriages. Instead,
what has happened now is a political, legal, and educational polarization
when it comes to sex. What have been lost are all the facets
within the framework of sexual minorities. And what we have
been given is a simplified, more stabilized view of a chosen sexual
minority utopia. For these reasons, my identity as a Sexual Minority
educator or identification as a member of a cohesive Sexual Minority
group has become quite confusing. Taking a few steps backward
in my own personal quest for legal and political rights, my vantage
point as an educator has become to advocate for more developed,
analytical discussions concerning the nature of oppression and its
links to mental forms of rebellion that resist educational institutionalization. To
spearhead this approach, I am relying on two examples concerning
my sexual orientation and body politics as a Boston Public student
teacher in the spring of 2005. I find these analogies ripe
for comparison to the regional treatment of sexuality in Sara’s
narrative but also the more ubiquitous concern over the limitations
in the concept Sexual Minority. Furthermore, I inject the
conundrum of queer action and queer identity into educational discourse
through a unique body politic—mine not the only one. What
I seek to offer through this pedagogical exegesis is a how-to speak
about, learn from, and communally benefit from sexual otherness
and queerness in general. Most importantly, it is my desire
to unearth the stabilizing effects of the Sexual Minority category,
to speak about what has been covered up by dominant sexual discourse
not by way of just silence, or overt forms of discrimination, but
by way of embracing previously marginalized forms of identity and
behavior to the exclusion of those even more destabilizing.
Lastly, in accordance with Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, Deborah Britzman,
and Kate Evans, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s article “Sex
in Public” as well as Kevin Kumashiro’s book Troubling Education:
Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy offer invaluable
insights and resources. Heterosexist
hegemony is rampant in the American School System. It can
be noticeably discerned in Southern conservative communities but
is equally prevalent in our Northern cities despite liberal political
policies. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner point out:
“hegemonies are nothing if not elastic, involving dispersed and
contradictory strategies for self-maintenance and reproduction.”10
It is these contradictions I am focusing on in examples at Boston
Public School X.11 During
my first week of student teaching a particularly interesting and
poignant conversation took place between me and my assigned cooperating
teacher. Aside from dealing with reactions and assumptions
made about student teachers—lack of experience, unaware of “real-life”
educational drama, etc.—this interaction laid the groundwork for
a difficult practicum. As a self-identified, multi-dimensional,
queer gay femme woman12, I felt invested in knowing school
reaction to other queer and/or gay identified teachers. I
was promptly informed of our one openly gay male teacher and his
problematic position as a white man in a largely non-white school
and student body. When I further inquired about any female
queer or gay identified teachers, I received the following statement:
“I do not know any openly gay women at the school but when I went
to Smith College as an undergraduate and for a couple years after
I dated women, so I can be a representative.” About four months
later, after much watching for her disclosure of her unknown, potentially
queer status to no avail, I received the following advice about
“coming out” in my later teaching positions. “I don’t respect
teachers that fail to come out. I am, in fact, totally against it,”
she declared with much pride and conviction. Hegemonic sexuality
had been set. The
second example I draw from my time spent at Boston Public School
X centers around student reactions to my sexual identity.
During my coursework as their student teacher, I would be participating
in history exhibitions and research papers. In formulating
the research questions with my cooperating teacher, we included
various topics centering on issues of sexuality in American history,
for example: Several students jumped at the chance
to talk about this topic, particularly to address the recent legalization
of same-sex marriage in their state. Despite my known identity
politics, my cooperating teacher refused to grant me position as
first informant on the movement and queer politics in general maintaining
she was able to teach this topic with as much knowledge and understanding.
It took students working on these two questions to refuse her help.
They later confessed to me they did not think she was capable of
helping them to the same degree. The private heterosexism
apparent in the first example now morphed into the privileged yet
threatened space of heteronormativity. “A
whole field of social relations becomes intelligible as heterosexuality,
and this privatized sexual culture bestows on its sexual practices
a tacit sense of rightness and normalcy. This sense of rightness—embedded
in things and not just sex—is what we call heteronormativity.”13
Through this teacher’s embrace of the topic (thing) of gay and lesbian
history and the Gay Rights Movement, she became increasingly insensitive
to a queer body in her classroom, queer politics that may or may
not overlap with gay politics, and to a certain extent successfully
denied students access to appropriate resources. Kevin Kumashiro
relates this predicament to educational discourse. “[E]ducation
involves learning something that disrupts our commonsense view of
the world. The crisis that results from unlearning, then,
is a necessary and desirable part of antioppressive education.
Desiring to learn involves desiring difference and overcoming our
resistance to discomfort.”14 What my cooperating
teacher repeatedly rebuffed was her personal discomfort of subversive
knowledge and questions, thereby gripping her traditional authority
as classroom teacher with an iron fist. She would not relinquish
this control no matter how much it may benefit her student teacher
or students. However, few recognized the transparency of this
dilemma and those that did had little or no power to challenge her.
What
these two examples coupled with the earlier testimony of a young
gay youth in the American South aptly demonstrate is the interconnectedness
of heterosexist culture, heteronormativity, and what Britzman calls
straight reading in educational spaces. Despite a difference
of four years in these two vignettes and despite major legal regional
distinctions—Massachusetts is the only state that sanctions same-sex
marriage—the power of the straight educational world stares us in
the face. When issues of queerness, myself being representative
of this view throughout my narrative, intersect, conflict, and crash
into mainstream society’s view of the gay and lesbian citizen subject,
queer always loses. What I have attempted to do is to pull
off the veil of acceptance and to uncover even deeper threads of
anti-queer sentiment in American educational discourse, by describing
one queer body’s attempt to teach and to learn. What I desire
is further study into the realm of queerness in the public space
of the classroom and the connection between my specific type of
queerness to other forms. How do these other queer bodies
operate in school? What problems do they hit up against as
queer teachers? And lastly, how can we, as queer educators,
protect our investments and teaching approaches, and yield positive
pedagogical results. Throughout
my course as student teacher, I found my embrace of Queer to rein
students in, to pull out questions they felt uncomfortable to ask
before, and to crack the foundation of our minority inclusion of
Gay and Lesbian as a sound pedagogical approach. Britzman
sings the benefits of queer, “Queer Theory occupies a difficult
space between the signifier and the signified, where something queer
happens to the signified—to history and to bodies—and something
queer happens to the signifier—to language and to representation.
Queer Theory offers methods of critiques to mark the repetitions
of normalcy as a structure and as a pedagogy.”15
Perhaps when all is said and done, queer will be indistinguishable
from any other social body because queer educators have sought to
question the lines of natural, normal, and perverse knowledge.
And because they have disturbed their own roles to the benefit of
disrupting everyone else’s. Works Cited Alexander, Jonathan. “Class Issues:
Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and The Public Sphere.” Radical
Teacher 57 (December 31, 1999) 36. Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner.
“Sex in Public.” Blackburn, Mollie V. “Understanding
Agency Beyond School-Sanctioned Activities.” Theory
in Practice 43, 2 (Spring 2004) 102-110. Britzman, Deborah P. “Is There
A Queer Pedagogy? Or Stop Reading Straight.” Educational
Theory 45, 2 (Spring 1995) 151-165. ---. Lost subjects,
contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning.
State University of New York: Albany, 1998. Bryson, Mary and Suzanne de Castell.
“Queer Pedagogy: praxis makes im/perfect.” Canadian
Journal of Education 18, 3 (Summer 1993) 285. Burt, Richard and Jeffrey Wallen. “Knowing
Better: Sex, Cultural Criticism, and the Pedagogical
Imperative in the 1990s.” Diacritics 29 (1999) 72-91. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge:New
York, 1990. Christian, Barbara. “What Celie Knows
That You Should Know” in Anatomy of Racism. University
of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1990. Evans, Kate. Negotiating the Self: Identity, Sexuality, and Emotion in Learning to Teacher Routledge Farmer: New York, 2002. Gregory, Marshall. “Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 1, 1 Duke University Press, 2001. Kumashiro, Kevin. Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy. Routledgefalmer: New York, 2002. Loutzenheiser, Lisa W. and Lori B. MacIntosh. “Citizenships, Sexualities, and Education.” Theory in Practice 43, 2 (Spring 2004): 151-158. Rasmussen, Mary Lou. “The Problem of
Coming Out.” Theory in Practice 43, 2 (Spring 2004):
144-150. Rubin,
Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics
of Sexuality” Pleasure
and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, 1984. Sedgwick,
Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University
of California Press: Berkeley,
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