Who are you calling queer? Sticks and stones can break my bones but names will always hurt me

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that there have been significant increases in the number of problems reported by students who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. This paper seeks to describe, by means of autobiographical account, the educational implications of being identified as ‘queer’ within schools. It draws on experiential stories to illustrate the injurious effects of homophobic speech acts and attempts to show how reconstructed narratives of the self can be used in educational research. The stories told in this article speak about the impact of heteronormative practices in education and how a sense of self can become constituted through the authorising, performative utterances of wounding words.