Structural Liberalism and Anti-Bullying Legislation

Abstract

This article investigates the legal, semantic, and material implications of Massachusetts’ anti-bullying law through an analytic framework of structural liberalism. Specifically, this article asks how the law produces categories of fit and unfit subjects of the state through raced and gendered practices of individualism, paternalism, meliorism, and neutrality. Ultimately, this article suggests that the liberal law draws on and entrenches existing racial categories of victim and perpetrator, making non-dominant dimensions of LGBTQ identity and collectivity in schools legally and ideologically unrecognizable.

Notes

¹Journal policy is to capitalize “Black” and “White” only when they are used as nouns, so that the use of black in the term “black American” would not be capitalized as it is understood as a descriptor or an adjective. In this article, I deviate from journal policy, as the descriptors “black” and “white” when attached to a noun—American, student, person—are not describing color but rather culture and legal status, among many other collective dimensions of social identity. The capitalization of Black and White to refer to specific groups of people operates much in the same way that “Native,” “French,” or “Asian” operate to denote specific (though differently configured) socio-cultural categories of people when descriptively modifying “American”—for example, Native American.

²Like Kumashiro and others, I use the term LGBTQ to designate a related set of social, political, and institutional categories. This term best captures the dynamic interaction between individual agency and institutional, material, and ideological mechanisms of power. In other words, this term is not meant to unthinkingly lump together individuals who self-identify as L, G, B, and/or T, or to gloss over their differing experiences, but to recognize that the category of LGBT is mobilized and acted upon collectively, if not uniformly, in the contexts I am analyzing here.

³During the revision of this article, the law was amended to include teachers and other adults working in schools. However, their inclusion does not alter this argument, as they are positioned in these amended parts as acting antithetically to the state and its schools and to adults who are normalized institutional representatives—that is, those who do not bully. In other words, these “bullies” too are cast as errant individuals who fall outside the liberal norm of the state. However, their inclusion does merit further scholarly investigation, as it complicates citizenship and authority vis à vis this law and schools.

⁴While this article identifies gender, age, and race as analytic categories, it gives greater analytic attention to age and race. Gender is not always disaggregated in this analysis, and deserves deliberate and specific attention in further scholarship. For instance, it is important that the legal and socio-cultural positioning of Black girls vis à vis categories of predation and victimization be deeply interrogated in relation to the questions of citizenship and schooling outlined here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sabina E. Vaught

Sabina E. Vaught is an associate professor of Education, American Studies, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. Her scholarship examines the institutional contexts and dynamics of race, gender, and education through Critical Race Theory and feminist theories.