Queer and Trans Perspectives on Teaching LGBT-themed Texts in Schools

Mollie V. Blackburn, Caroline T. Clark, Wayne J. Martino, Mollie V. Blackburn, Caroline T. Clark, Wayne J. Martino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351346047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book focuses on queering texts with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) themes in collaboration with students - young to young adult – and their teachers - both pre- and in- service. It strives to generate knowledge and deeper understandings of the pedagogical implications for working with LGBT-themed texts in classrooms across grade levels.

The contributions in this book offer explicit implications for pedagogical practice, considering literature for children and young adults, and work in elementary school, high school, and university classrooms and schools. They give insights on exploring how queer and trans theories might inform the teaching and learning of English language arts with great respect to people who live their lives beyond hegemonic heternormativity and cisnormativity. They provide wisdom on how to provoke, foster, and navigate complicated conversations about sexuality, queer desire, gender creativity, gender independence, and trans inclusivity. In addition, they show how all of these are informed by an epistemological and ontological understanding of gender embodiment as a process of becoming. They offer insights into how queer and trans theories, as informed and driven by trans, non-binary and gender diverse scholars themselves, can move all of us beyond LGBTQ-inclusivity and inform reading, discussing, teaching, and learning in all of the classrooms and school contexts where we live and work.

This volume was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Teaching about sexual minorities and “princess boys”: a queer and trans-infused approach to investigating LGBTQ-themed texts in the elementary school classroom

Wayne Martino and Wendy Cumming-Potvin

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on research that is concerned to provide insight into the pedagogical potential for interrupting heteronormativity and addressing the politics of gender expression/embodiment in the elementary school classroom. It is informed by an engagement with queer and trans theoretical literature that raises questions about restrictive social systems governing thought regarding gendered and sexual regulatory norms. The focus is on examining pedagogical matters related to both interrupting heteronormativity and addressing what comes to be recognized as a viable gendered personhood through employing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ)-themed texts in schools. The paper concentrates on investigating the insights of one queer-identifying elementary school teacher as she reflects on the pedagogical potential of deploying literacy resources for discussing themes such as same-sex families and relationships, and transgendered and gender diverse subjectivities in the classroom. The study builds on research by Caitlin Ryan, Jasmine Patraw, Maree Bednar, Mollie Blackburn, and J.F. Buckley to highlight both the possibilities and limits faced by this teacher in dealing with sexual minority issues and diverse gender identities and expressions as part of the everyday school curriculum. Implications of the research for pre-service teacher education and for the professional learning of teachers more generally are outlined.

Introduction

In this paper, we draw on queer theoretical, trans-informed, and critical literacy perspectives to investigate pedagogical approaches to addressing LGBT-themed texts in the elementary classroom (Blackburn & Buckley, 2005; DePalma, 2013; Threlkeld, 2014). Through undertaking case study research, we examine one Canadian elementary school teacher’s reflections on using literacy resources in her classroom which include representations of same-sex families/relationships and/or address issues of gender expression that “fall outside of the strict normative categories of boys and girls” (Ryan, Patraw, & Bednar, 2013, p. 85). Overall, our aim in reporting on this study is to provide further insight into the pedagogical potential for interrupting heteronormativity and for supporting more equitable and diverse forms of gender expression in the elementary school classroom (DePalma & Atkinson, 2009). The focus on one specific case and one particular teacher enables us to generate more in-depth knowledge about pedagogical interventions in the elementary school classroom that are informed by our own engagement with the trans and queer theoretical literature. Given the lack of available literature that focuses on trans-informed critical literacy approaches, our purpose is to focus on the particularities of one teacher’s pedagogical interventions and to generate some reflection on how the use of queer and trans theories as resources can further enhance an understanding of the deployment of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ)-themed texts in the classroom. For example, we are particularly concerned to investigate the use of LGBTQ-themed texts, such as And Tango makes three (Richardson & Parnell, 2005), It’s a George thing (Bedford & Julian, 2008), and My princess boy (Kilodavis, 2010), and the pedagogical challenges involved in dealing with such texts, both pedagogically and in terms of the teacher’s own sexuality and gender expression. The particular case, we draw on in this paper, illuminates how one teacher’s use of LGBTQ-themed texts dovetails with her own embodiment and performativity of gender and sexuality in the classroom which she conceives of as a pedagogical resource for interrogating the cultural logics of gendered and sexual normativities (Rooke, 2010).

Overall, the case study highlights the pedagogical possibilities, as well as the demands that are placed on queer teachers in dealing with concerns and issues related to addressing sexual minority issues and gender non-conformity as part of the everyday school curriculum (Threlkeld, 2014). Attention is drawn specifically to the tensions related to the religious freedoms rubbing up against or conflicting with gender and sexual minority rights in this teacher’s particular context (see Martino, 2014; Walton, 2014). For example, the teacher we focus on in this paper speaks specifically about resistance from parents and faith groups in the broader community to anti-homophobic education that is concerned to address the positive recognition of sexual and gender minority subjects in the elementary school classroom. In addition to providing further insights into the micro-politics involved in the deployment of LGBTQ-themed texts in the elementary school classroom, as set against this backdrop of calls for religious accommodations in response to gender and sexuality minority education, our research also makes a specific contribution to the field of English education in that it draws on the field of transgender studies (Stryker, 2006) as a theoretical resource for making sense of pedagogical interventions which take into account the broader contextualization and cultural logics behind the policing of gendered normativities and transgressions in the elementary school classroom (Bornstein, 1994; DePalma, 2013; Killoran & Pendleton Jiménez, 2007; Rooke, 2010; Ryan et al., 2013).

Using queer theory and trans-informed approaches

We draw on both queer and trans theoretical approaches and the analytic insights they provide with regard to investigating the cultural logics of gendered and sexual normativities at play in teachers’ lives, pedagogical repertoires, and school contexts. Deborah Britzman (1995) argues for the need to build deeper knowledge and understanding of the pedagogical interventions that are committed to interrupting heteronormativity. As Dennis Sumara and Brent Davis (1999) explain, queer “is not meant as a signifier that represents gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered identities.” Rather it:

functions as a marker representing interpretive work that refuses what Halley has called “the heterosexual bribe” – that is, the cultural rewards afforded those whose public performances of self are contained within that narrow band of behaviours considered proper to a heterosexual identity. (p. 192)

Mollie Blackburn and J.F. Buckley (2005) specifically argue for teaching a queer-inclusive language arts curriculum that involves employing LGBT-themed texts to “disrupt notions of the normal” at the heart of “a logics of identity categorization,” as a basis for working “against the oppression that comes with being named, labeled and tagged” (p. 202).

Britzman (1995), for example, explains that queer theory is concerned to interrogate the production of heteronormalization as a pedagogical project that is committed to “examining how heterosexuality becomes normalized as natural” (p. 153). She specifically argues that queer theory “offers methods of critique” and, hence, has the potential to inform pedagogical interventions and the fostering of reading practices that are designed to address constraining systems of thought and grids of intelligibility pertaining to the privileging of heterosexuality as a basis for the production of normalcy and forms of sociality and identification. According to Britzman (1998), “reading practices are socially performative,” and while often implicated in heteronormative projects can equally be invested in “unhinging the normal from the self.” In this sense, they have the potential to serve “as an imaginary site for multiplying alternative forms of identifications and pleasures not so closely affixed to – but nonetheless transforming – what one imagines their identity imperatives to be” (p. 85).

This framing of reading practices as a pedagogical basis for interrupting heteronormativity resonates with our commitment to exploring conditions of possibility for imagining a social self and forms of identification that are not governed by a disavowal and repudiation of same-sex desire and gender non-conformity. It is in this capacity that we envision the use of picture story books as pedagogical resources for introducing children to non-normative representations of sexuality and gender and for creating spaces for posing questions about the heteronormative limits of gendered and sexual normativities (Rooke, 2010). This commitment to the use of such picture story books such as And Tango Makes Three, My Princess Boy, and 10,000 dresses, therefore, is not to be confused with the problematic “plea of inclusion” identified by Britzman (1998), which involves merely adding “marginalized voices” to the curriculum, in an:

attempt to “recover” authentic images of gays and lesbians … in the form of tidy role models [which can then] serve as double remedy for the hostility toward social difference (for those who cannot imagine difference) and for the lack of self-esteem (for those who are imagined as having no self). (p. 86)

Rather, in following Mary Lou Rasmussen (2006), we are concerned to investigate how such texts, which “introduce young children to avowedly unthinkable representations of sexual and gender identity,” might be used to foster reading practices that open up imaginary possibilities for embracing the affirmation of non-normative and more expansive forms of desire and gender expression (p. 474; see also Threlkeld, 2014).

Thus, we build on the important critical queer work of scholars such as Mollie Blackburn (2012), Caroline Clark and Mollie Blackburn (2009), and Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson (2009) who have also investigated the pedagogical implications of interrogating heteronormativity through the deployment of texts “as sites for the proliferation of reading practices” and for provoking “deconstructive revolts” in the critical literacy classroom that are invested in “questioning the impulse to normalize” heterosexuality and gender expression (Britzman, 1998, p. 92). Fin Cullen (2009), for example, acknowledges the important role of teachers using picture story books “to begin to trouble the regulatory normative discourses underpinning sex/gender identities in play” (p. 23). However, Blackburn and Clark (2011) claim that while scholars have argued for reading and discussing children’s and young adult literature in schools which deals with queer and trans-related themes, “we know very little about how to do this” (p. 222), and what is involved in pedagogically navigating heteronormalizing discourses and contexts in the critical literacy classroom.

It is also important to acknowledge trans-informed theoretical perspectives and how they have informed our own understanding of the need to address important questions of gender expression, embodiment, and non-normativity. Davina Cooper (2004), for instance, highlights “the specific sense of embodiment and ‘realness’ felt by transgendered and transsexual people” (p. 85). She points to tensions or differences between some feminists who “seek to dismantle the hierarchy between men and women” and transgender activists “who seek to dismantle the hierarchy which privileges the expression of fixed dimorphic genders over more fluid and multiple genders” (p. 84). Raewyn Connell (2009), for example, rejects the strategy of degendering and, hence, gender abolition in favor of a “strategy of gender democracy,” which involves a specific commitment to “equaliz[ing] gender orders rather than shrinking them to nothing,” a position which, she claims, “assumes that gender does not, in itself, imply inequality” (p. 146). Thus, Connell identifies this tension in terms of divergent politics organized around gender abolition versus gender democratization. We are concerned in this paper to examine how one particular teacher uses LGBTQ-themed texts which is consistent with both a commitment to interrupting heteronormativity and embracing a project of gender democratization. This latter focus is reflected in her efforts to use texts to introduce her students to “avowedly unthinkable representations of sexual and gender identity” as a basis for acknowledging the recognizability, livability, viability, and humanity of gender minority personhood (Butler, 2004a; Rasmussen, 2006, p. 474).

However, it is important to note that there are fundamental tensions between transgender theoretical perspectives in terms of their alignment with the critical project of queer theorizing and those articulated by transsexual theoretical accounts that are grounded in material embodiment of living and experiencing gender (see Prosser, 1998). For instance, Patricia Elliot and Katrina Roen (1998) identify the problem of pitting a transgender or genderqueer politics against a transsexual politics. The former is often organized around a celebratory discourse that affirms the gender outlaw who contests the gender order, while the latter is epitomized by the figure of the gender defender who supports the gender order (p. 238; see also Namaste, 2006). Gender outlaws emerge as the political embodiment and manifestation of gender fluidity (Bornstein, 1994), and are set against those transsexual subjects “who want to fit or belong” by embodying and living gender according to the determination of gender norms. Elliot and Roen, however, point to the limits of such antagonistic political positions which cast transsexual subjects in these oppositional terms and which rely on the problematic assumption that one is “free from the desire to conform” and may escape entirely the effects of “dominant gender norms and desires” (p. 239). As Elliot (2009) explains, these rifts raise volatile questions about “how to think about and indeed live gender variance” and the need for analytic frameworks that attend to both questions of gender fluidity and to political issues pertaining to those who wish to comply with or to embrace certain gender norms and livable forms of gender embodiment (p. 5): “Can different theoretical frameworks and assumptions about gender be given equal respect without establishing or reinforcing politically divisive hierarchies” (p. 6).

Our position is that a queer politics that acknowledges gender and sexual fluidity and a politics of gender democratization that acknowledges “gender as a material and embodied reality” can both co-exist and provide useful analytic points of departure for investigating the pedagogical significance of addressing one’s embodied relationship to and identification with particular norms as a life-long project of continuous negotiation and work on fashioning the gendered self. For example, as Bobby Noble (2004) argues: “No one articulation (of masculinity) is original. And thus each is capable of re-articulation and/or re-construction” (p. xi). This political project is captured by Susan Stryker (2006) who conceives of transgender studies as:

Concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between biological specificity of the sexually differentiated body, the social roles and statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gender personhood. (p. 3)

Through the case of one queer-identifying teacher that we draw on in this paper, we provide insights into how our engagement with both the queer and trans theoretical literature enables us to generate theoretically informed insights into the pedagogical deployment of LGBTQ-themed texts in their capacity to address the politics of queer, trans and gender creative embodied expression (Slesaransky-Poe, 2013).

As Butler (2004a) cogently articulates, there are clearly social justice implications to the cultural mechanisms and social norms that work to define and solidify what is to count as a viable expression of embodied gendered personhood:

The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered being, a criterion that posits coherent as a presupposition of humanness, is not only one which, justly or unjustly, governs the recognizability of the human, but one that informs the ways we do or do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire, and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moment before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professions to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender, and hence, the unrecognizability of one’s personhood. (p. 58)

As Riki Wilchins (2004) points out, “knowledge of gendered bodies cannot be objective in any meaningful way because the pursuit of it requires a whole host of assumptions about what counts as real, the binary nature of gender, the boundaries of normal, and so on” (p. 62). In this paper, hence, we are conscious of the need to investigate cultural mechanisms and norms that work to sustain what is to count as a viable expression of embodied gender identification. How is the viability of gender non-conformity and of choosing to live as the opposite gender to that which was assigned at birth understood and how might teachers use a literacy resource such as a picture story book like My princess b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Investigating LGBT-themed literature and trans informed pedagogies in classrooms
• 1 Teaching about sexual minorities and “princess boys”: a queer and trans-infused approach to investigating LGBTQ-themed texts in the elementary school classroom
• 2 Gay penguins, sissy ducklings … and beyond? Exploring gender and sexuality diversity through children’s literature
• 3 Queering chapter books with LGBT characters for young readers: recognizing and complicating representations of homonormativity
• 4 Scenes of violence and sex in recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult novels and the ideologies they offer their readers
• 5 The social importance of a kiss: a Honnethian reading of David Levithan’s young adult novel, Two Boys Kissing
• 6 Reading queer counter-narratives in the high-school literature classroom: possibilities and challenges
• 7 Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course
• 8 Learning from preservice teachers’ responses to trans-themed young adult literature: improving personal practice in teacher education
• 9 Queer and trans-themed books for young readers: a critical review
• Index