Queer Theory in Education

William F. Pinar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135706456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Theoretical studies in curriculum have begun to move into cultural studies--one vibrant and increasingly visible sector of which is queer theory. Queer Theory in Education brings together the most prominent and promising scholars in the field of education--primarily but not exclusively in curriculum--in the first volume on queer theory in education. In his perceptive introduction, the editor outlines queer theory as it is emerging in the field of education, its significance for all scholars and teachers, and its relation to queer theory in literacy theory and more generally, in the humanities.

Chapter 1

Constructing Knowledge: Educational Research and Gay and Lesbian Studies

William G.Tierney

Patrick Dilley

University of Southern California

Arguably, during the last decade, few issues have become more contentious in schools, colleges, and universities than lesbian, gay, and bisexual topics. New York City's rainbow curriculum, for example, was truncated, and its school chancellor fired in large part due to the controversy over teaching lesbian and gay topics (“Teaching About Gay Life,” 1992). Salt Lake City's school system decided to ban all after-school activities when faced with the possibility of having to allow a lesbian and gay youth group to meet in a school (Brooke, 1996). Auburn University in Alabama ended up in the state supreme court when the student senate decided to de-fund a gay campus group (“Alabama Denies Aid,” 1992). Campus surveys at multiple universities (e.g., University of California at Los Angeles; Shepard, 1990) rated campus intolerance of homosexuality as more serious than racial or gender intolerance.

Such problems are relatively recent; a generation ago, much less a half century ago, schools, colleges, and universities never had visible and vocal complaints about lesbian and gay issues on the magnitude that occurs today. Indeed, if homosexuality were ever discussed, it was usually only as an aberration, an issue to be expunged from education. More often than not, however, homosexuality and homosexuals were never considered.

How researchers have studied homosexuality, and who studies topics related to lesbian and gay issues, also has changed dramatically. Although research on homosexuality was not prolific a generation ago, it existed. However, whereas researchers once came primarily from psychology or sociology, today lesbian and gay studies—or “queer studies”—has mushroomed into multiple disciplines and areas of inquiry. What was once a topic that fell under the rubric of “deviancy” has branched out into numerous intellectual arenas.

In this chapter we trace the history of inquiry into lesbian and gay issues primarily in the United States.¹ We point out the discourses that have surrounded the topic and focus exclusively on how these discourses have derived from, and impacted, educators and educational institutions. We do not consider, for example, studies about life-span development of lesbian and gay people, or issues pertaining to the personal counseling of lesbian and gay youth. Frankly, the research literature on lesbian, gay, and bisexual issues has become too vast; our purpose here is to offer conceptual clarity to one domain of inquiry and to consider how primarily North American educational researchers have reconfigured their own stances and an area of inquiry throughout the century. We suggest that the implications of such findings are quite significant for how one thinks about knowledge production. We conclude by pointing out gaps in the literature and considering arenas that await further inquiry.

HOMOSEXUALITY AND DEVIANCY

Until the mid-1970s, the literature about homosexuality and its relationship to education was framed in one of two ways: either by absence, or by defining the topic as deviant. The professional guardian of academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), lists no instances where a scholar who tried to study homosexuality had his or her academic freedom abridged. One might assume that a controversial topic such as homosexuality would have engendered tests of academic freedom in much the same way that other similarly contested topics did at the turn of the century. However, we have found very little research that pertains to education and homosexuality. Simply stated, few scholars studied the topic unless they were psychologists or sociologists interested in deviancy (Tierney, 1993).

The research that existed always used the framework of deviance as the way to define the topic. Willard Waller's classic, The Sociology of Teaching (1932), for example, pointed out the danger of allowing homosexuals to teach. As homosexuality was considered a disease infecting homosexuals, Waller suggested that homosexual teachers would be able to contaminate students and spread the illness.

“Nothing seems more certain than that homosexuality is contagious” wrote Waller (1932, p. 147). The import of such a finding, of course, was that a noted scholar brought to light the problems schools encountered with homosexuals. Homosexual teachers also were believed prone to falling in love with their charges. “The homosexual teacher develops an indelicate soppiness in his relations with his favorites,” suggested Waller, “and makes minor tragedies of little incidents when the recipient of his attentions shows himself indifferent” (p. 148). Obviously, no school principal would desire someone who either infected children with a disease or fawned after them. Accordingly, Waller encouraged principals and superintendents not to hire homosexuals; and the way one identified a homosexual was by personality traits such as “carriage, mannerisms, voice, speech, etc.” (p. 148); if discovered, they should be fired.

Waller's work is helpful for a variety of reasons: it lends insight into how we once defined homosexuality and educational practice. Waller's text was considered a landmark study in the United States that employed sociological methods to investigate education. And yet, he had no empirical evidence on which to base his findings that homosexuality was a disease or contagious. He based his certitude about homosexuality's contagion, then, on opinion and belief, rather than on fact and evidence.

Waller also had no comparative data about whether homosexuals developed more or less “soppiness” toward students than heterosexual teachers. Indeed, he provided no statistical or qualitative data about the percentage of homosexual teachers who developed crushes on students. We also do not know how he derived his finding that homosexuals acted in one particular manner, or utilized one specific speech pattern. Curiously, in a profession with a significant percentage of females, Waller also overlooked lesbians and concentrated strictly on male homosexuals.

Of course, one might easily deride the comments Waller made as ancient history, albeit only 60 years ago. Nonetheless, Waller's book remains a classic that continues to garner respect as a study that will be considered a landmark of the 20th century; indeed, Webb (1981) suggested the book as “a classic study…remarkably fresh” (p. 239). Waller's comments on homosexuality are certainly in keeping with general discussions about lesbians and gay males that were made at the time; however, his work did not reflect any research in a manner that we would accept today. Nevertheless, such work has had vast influence in providing direction for studies about homosexuality and schooling.

Even in the 1970s, research about homosexuality and its influence on education still primarily worked from a psychoanalytic framework of deviance. Fromhart (1971), for example, wrote that “Homosexuality represents only one of the possible variations of sexual identity confusion seen by therapists and counselors who treat college students” (p. 247). DeFries (1976) wrote that lesbian students also had ambiguous identities. Bauer and Stein (1973) similarly suggested that homosexual students had confused identities. Echoing Waller, they noted: “The [homosexual] male student may also possess qualities that he or others characterize as effeminate, such as a lack of athletics, graceful and fragile carriage, and particularly, an inability to be directly assertive” (p. 835).

NORMALCY AND ASSIMILATION

The 1970s also saw a rise in a second, more intensive and prolonged, burst of research that looked at lesbian and gay people not as deviants, but as “normal” or quasi-normal. This line of research primarily began after the Stonewall Riots in a New York City bar in 1969, and after the American Psychological Association (APA) removed homosexuality as a form of mental disorder in 1973. As historian John D'Emillio (1992) observed, Stonewall was the spark that ignited a powder keg of gay anger and resistance.

By 1973, just four years later, almost a thousand lesbian and gay organizations had been created…. These organizations come in all sizes and shapes: national, state, and local; political, religious, cultural, service, recreational, and commercial; organizations based on gender, ethnic, and racial identity; and organizations based on occupational and professional affiliation. (p. 164)

To be sure, no single event demarcates one line of research from another, but one of the points we suggest in the next section is that research streams have the potential to mirror and/or advance actions in the general society. In this light, a riot by gay men and lesbians in a bar in Greenwich Village signaled that those who had been defined as deviant and faceless were no longer going to submit to harassment such as the police action in the bar. The action by an association of the size and prestige of APA symbolized how the principle academic arena where homosexuality had been studied and defined also admitted past mistakes and pointed toward alternative ways to think about and define a particular area of inquiry.

The results were quite significant for the research community. The clinical term homosexual gave way to the terms gay and lesbian. Although, as we will show, a third line of work has developed in the last decade and a small fragment of research still clings to the original thesis of homosexuals as a mentally ill group, the vast majority of research about gay and lesbian people in education falls into the categories of normalcy and assimilation, what historian Lisa Duggan (1992) might call research that appeals to the liberalism of educators. Instead of deranged, psychologically stunted “cases,” gays and lesbians were (and are) studied and presented as a minority (presumed by oppressive public misunderstanding and hatred) and like heterosexuals except for “sexual preference,” and in need of “the ‘liberal’ rights of privacy and formal equality” (Duggan, 1992, p. 13).

At the same time, educational research moved out of the strictly psychological and sociological domains and into multiple arenas. Researchers were no longer only positivist scientists but also individuals who mirrored the broad fabric of theoretical work that had come to enrich the field of educational theory. And finally, researchers were not only disengaged scientists—presumably heterosexuals—studying lesbian and gay people; frequently, we discover the “natives”—lesbian and gay researchers—studying issues pertaining to their group, giving an insider's voice and perspective. Louie Crew's The Gay Academic (1978) is a good example.

Four primary categories of research may be found that use the idea of normalcy in the study of gay and lesbian topics and how they interface with educational issues and systems: (a) issues of visibility; (b) studies of the climate of the organization; (c) studies that suggest ways to improve educational organizations for lesbian and gay people; and (d) studies about gay and lesbian studies.

Visibility

A popular phrase often used for individuals who are open about their gay or lesbian sexual identity is that they have “come out of the closet.” We use the term visibility to denote the inclusion of, and the presentation of, individuals, groups, and topics of gay, lesbian, or bisexual interest as a part of society and a part of our educational systems. Cullinan (1973) was one of the first researchers in higher education to reflect this paradigm shift of research—and of gay self-identity. He interviewed 10 gay men from Wayne State University's student organization, summarizing that, “[w]hile society often labels him as sick, perverted and having a criminal mind, the homosexual sees himself as a moral and ethical being,” representing “the ‘new’ homosexual on campus whose identity is emerging from the midst of a sea of prejudice” (pp. 346–347). Harbeck's (1992) book, Coming Out of the Classroom Closet, is an example of a research emphasis that gives visibility to lesbian and gay issues within education. That edited text, although vastly different from Waller's epic, is emblematic of research that seeks to prove the normalcy of lesbian and gay people. The work is multidimensional; topics cover areas such as legal issues, historical work, curricular change, psychological health, and school-based projects. Much of the work seeks to prove that lesbian and gay educators and students always have existed, to expose the costs of invisibility, and to suggest how to correct the wrongs against gays and lesbians. The work combines empirical and exhortative approaches, and frequently adopts an emancipatory voice. Additionally, Ringer (1994) reported on a survey of the effects of faculty coming out in the classroom, and Opffer (1994) used interviews to note the experiences of college instructors who had become visible to their classes.

The principle goal of visibility research is not unlike research that involves other oppressed, or multicultural, groups. Weis and Fine (1993), for example, edited Beyond Silenced Voices, and McLaughlin and Tierney (1993) edited Naming Silenced Lives. Both texts involve qualitative research practices that seek to understand “silencing in public schools” (Weis & Fine, 1993, p. 1). Among groups who are included as silenced and deserving voice are lesbian and gay educators and students. In the Weis and Fine text, Friend (1993) wrote, “serious discussion of how inequalities in terms of sexual orientation are reproduced and sanctioned by schooling has been absent in the social analyses of diversity, equity and power in education” (p. 210). His work involved an analysis of what he defined as the ideology of silencing: heterosexism and homophobia. Naming Silenced Lives includes a chapter that is a life history of a gay person of color (Tierney, 1994). What we discover, then, is not only the visibility of lesbian and gay educators, but also the claimed relationships with other marginalized groups in education. Rather than focusing on fractured identities in need of repair or as the problem, the focus of work shifted to the larger society's homophobia and heterosexism as the problem.

Similarly, Khayatt's (1992) book utilizes feminist concepts of patriarchy to understand the standpoint of lesbian teachers. Khayatt interviewed 19 lesbian teachers in order to ground the experiences of such women in the social organization of the school. In effect, Khayatt's work struggles to contradict mainstream assumptions about female teachers, and to give voice to a group that had previously been invisible. Rensenbrink (1996) published the life history of a lesbian elementary school teacher, including her primarily positive experiences, and the consequential effects on her school and her students, of coming out both to a fifth-grade class and to fellow teachers. Bensimon (1992) presented an academic-life study of one lesbian faculty member where she utilized a “feminist-lesbian standpoint from which to view the effects of the public/private logic has on her as a professor” (p. 100).

Family members, as an integral part of the educational process, offer more opportunities for visibility and voice in education. Casper, Schultz, and Wickens (1992) analyzed data from a longitudinal interpersonal study of the relationships between gay and lesbian parents and school administrators and teachers; they urged “breaking the silences” by “opening a dialogue” to replace “an active but ‘silenced’ dialogue under the surface of parent-teacher discourses” (1992, p. 109). Sears’ (1993/1994) extensive literature review categorizes curr...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Constructing Knowledge: Educational Research and Gay and Lesbian Studies
• Chapter 2 A Generational and Theoretical Analysis of Culture and Male (Homo)Sexuality
• Chapter 3 Who Am I? Gay Identity and a Democratic Politics of the Self
• Chapter 4 Remember When All the Cars Were Fords and All the Lesbians Were Women? Some Notes on Identity, Mobility, and Capital
• Chapter 5 Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy Is a Pretty Queer Thing
• Chapter 6 Queer Texts and Performativity: Zora, Rap, and Community
• Chapter 7 (Queer) Youth as Political and Pedagogical
• Chapter 8 Appropriating Queerness: Hollywood Sanitation
• Chapter 9 Telling Tales of Surprise
• Chapter 10 Understanding Curriculum as Gender Text: Notes on Reproduction, Resistance, and Male-Male Relations
• Chapter 11 From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: On Finding Oneself in Educational Research
• Chapter 12 Carnal Knowledge: Re-Searching (through) the Sexual Body
• Chapter 13 Unresting the Curriculum: Queer Projects, Queer Imaginings
• Chapter 14 Queering the Gaze
• Chapter 15 Fantasizing Women in the Women’s Studies Classroom: Toward a Symptomatic Reading of Negation
• Chapter 16 On Some Psychical Consequences of AIDS Education
• Chapter 17 We “Were Already Ticking and Didn’t Even Know” [It]: Early AIDS Works
• Chapter 18 Of Mad Men Who Practice Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility
• Chapter 19 Autobiography as a Queer Curriculum Practice
• About the Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index