Queer Teachers Identity And Performativity

What do we mean when we talk about 'queer teachers'? The authors here grapple with what it means to be sexually or gender diverse and to work as a school teacher within four national contexts: Australia, Ireland, the UK and the USA. This new volume offers academics, educators and students a provocative exploration of this pivotal topic.

What do we mean when we talk about 'queer teachers'? The authors here grapple with what it means to be sexually or gender diverse and to work as a school teacher within four national contexts: Australia, Ireland, the UK and the USA. This new volume offers academics, educators and students a provocative exploration of this pivotal topic.

"How do gay and lesbian teachers grapple with their professional and sexual identities at work, given that these identities are constructed as mutually exclusive, even indeed as mutually opposed? Using rich interview and ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School's Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what's expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell takes readers into the private and professional lives of gay and lesbian educators, along the way developing the innovative concept of racialized homophobia, which thwarts challenges to sexual injustices in schools. She also uses her own experiences as one point of intersection with the ideas in this volume. Connell's exploration of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers other complicating factors, from local law and politics to race and gender privilege. With a sense of ethnographic verve and an engaging authorial presence, School's Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics."--Provided by publisher.

Much of the focus of anti-homophobic/anti-heterosexist educational theory, curriculum, and pedagogy has examined the impact of homophobia and heterosexism on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) students and teachers. Such a focus has provided numerous theoretical and pedagogical insights, and has informed important changes in educational policy. Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in Education remains deeply committed to the social justice project of improving the lives of GLBT students and teachers. However, in contrast with much of the previous scholarship, Queering Straight Teachers shifts the focus from an analysis of the GLBT «Other» to a critical examination of what it might mean, in theory and in practice, to queer straight teachers, and the implications this has for challenging institutionalized heteronormativity in education. This book will be useful in courses on educational foundations, curriculum studies, multicultural education, queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, and critical theory.

Based on a qualitative research study of gay and lesbian teachers, Unmasking Identities explores how gay and lesbian teachers bring together their identities in a climate where the two have historically been pitted against each other. Janna Marie Jackson demonstrates that participants made direct and indirect connections between their experiences related to being gay or lesbian and their classroom practices of promoting social justice and building on students' understandings. This process of integrating their sexual identities with their roles as teachers was facilitated and inhibited by several factors including the community atmosphere, school culture, and family status. This unique book explores what happens when identities are oppressed and suppressed and the consequences when they finally break free. Unmasking Identities provides theoretical understandings and practical advice for teachers, administrators, and policy-makers who are concerned about gay and lesbian issues. This engaging text will appeal to those interested in gender studies and issues in education.

This book draws upon contemporary Irish and international research which explores the critical interplay between education studies and sexualities. Scholars from Ireland, Canada, Spain, the U.K. and Sweden employ the conceptual lens of Queer Theory to interrogate and destabilise long-standing regimes of truth/knowledge, and in so doing, highlight the suitability and applicability of this theoretical perspective within educational discourses. By reframing and repositioning gender identity/expression as a performative expression on a fluid continuum, this book provokes readers to (re)view how they see education, pedagogy and schooling. The book interrogates what happens to teaching, and teachers, when queerness permeates their practice, thus exposing the ways in which heteronormativity informs and shapes our places/sites of education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Irish Educational Studies journal.

Sexual Orientation and Teacher Identity: Professionalism and GLBT Politics in Teacher Preparation and Practice examines the nature of LGBTQ issues and teacher identity as social, cultural, and political constructs. In particular, the contributing authors to this collection of chapters present a collection of chapters (contemporary discourses) that will illuminate and critique the practices, structures, and politics in both teacher preparation programs and public school settings that affect LGBTQ teachers and their identity in relation to the struggles of teachers as professionals face in obtaining recognition. The contributing authors of the book focus on teachers are entering educational settings where difference connotes not equal, and discourses of LGBTQ politics, identity, and difference are interwoven with a realization of discrimination and marginalization. The authors, drawing on their personal and professional experiences, give much needed voice to recognition and the formation of identity from a LGBTQ viewpoint as they relate to teachers, teacher educators, and other cultural workers responsible for shaping professional identities of teachers and for teaching students in schools and classrooms across the nation.

The work of Judith Butler has been at the forefront of both theorising the subject as a product of power and explicating possibilities for political alliances and action that are available to such subjects. Mobilising a range of philosophical resources from Hegel and Foucault to Lacan, Levinas Wittig and Arendt, her work has held a core concern with the way that the subject is made in terms of sex, gender and sexuality and has been an invaluable resource in the development of queer theory and thinking about queer practice. Butler’s scholarly work has been aimed primarily at a philosophical audience, yet her insights into the constitution, constraint and agency of subjects are profoundly political and have become invaluable resources in feminist, queer, anti-racist and anti-capitalist work. Over the last two decades she has been a major influence on research concerned with social justice in education and has changed the ways that classroom practices and relationships can be understood, transforming the way we think about both ‘teacher’ and ‘student’. This collection brings together some of the most outstanding work in education that has developed and applied Butler’s work to empirical questions, translating her philosophy for an education audience and providing compelling analyses of the ways that the subjects of education are made, how inequalities are produced in the minutiae of practice and how education’s subjectivated subjects can act politically. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.