Sex in the lesbian teacher's closet: the hybrid proliferation of queers in school1

1. This essay is a substantially revised version of a chapter published in S.L. Cavanagh, Sexing the teacher: School sex scandals and queer pedagogies (University of British Columbia Press, 2007).

Abstract

Using feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, this paper analyzes the public commentary and anxious concern about child-welfare in a recent lesbian teacher sex scandal in Vancouver, Canada, involving Jean Robertson. Arguing that the public and professional uproar is not really about child-protectionism so much as it is about the place of white teacher lesbianism in school culture, I ask new questions about how the regulation of teenage sexuality operates to secure heterosexual bifurcations of gender in the school. The idea of the innocent, white ‘girl’ child is, in this paper, shown to anchor a public and professional worry about the proliferation of queer teenage identifications in the school. Using Judith Butler's formulation of the heterosexual matrix, Lee Edelman's conceptualization of reproductive futurity, Judith Halberstam's investigation of queer time and space, and Mikko Tuhkanen's postcolonial reading of lesbian sexuality in popular film, I underscore societal-based upset about white teacher lesbianism. I argue that the teacher sex scandals in North America are driven by an unspoken societal upset about identifications and desires inhospitable to binary gender positions and heteronormative futures.

Keywords:

• woman
• teacher
• gender
• sexuality
• school
• queer

Notes

1. This essay is a substantially revised version of a chapter published in S.L. Cavanagh, Sexing the teacher: School sex scandals and queer pedagogies (University of British Columbia Press, 2007).