‘Effeminate arty boys and butch soccer girls’: investigating queer and trans-affirmative pedagogies under conditions of neoliberal governance

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on conversations with two English teachers in an Australian government speciality arts focused school to investigate possibilities for envisaging trans-affirmative and queer pedagogies in the classroom. It draws from two studies that are concerned to investigate how gender and sexually diverse students are being supported in the education system. Our study employs queer and trans-informed epistemological insights into the pedagogical limits of heternormativity and cisgenderism in high schools. The data involved engaging with teachers who responded to a range of multi-literacy resources that addressed the politics of queer and trans representation, recognition and visibility in their classrooms. We tease out several themes which pertain to the institutionalisation of heteronormativity and cisgenderism, and how it is entwined with neoliberal governance in one particular case study school. Our purpose is to illustrate how this gender and sexuality politics works in tandem with a particular manifestation of neoliberal governance in the public education system, and plays into a specific policy discourse with particular consequences for schools, students and teachers in terms of impression management and its calculative and performative effects.

Keywords:

• Cisgenderism
• heteronormativity
• neoliberal governance
• queer and trans pedagogies
• transgender

Notes

1. We use heteronormativity throughout to refer to the privileging and normalisation of heterosexuality (see DePalma and Atkinson 2009b). Cisgender refers to a person whose gender identity corresponds to that assigned on the basis of their sex designation at birth. Cisgenderism, therefore, refers to a system of gender privilege and gender normalisation that refuses the legitimacy or intelligibility or gender identification, which is not based on an alignment of gender identity assigned on the basis of birth sex (Teich 2014).

2. Our decision to focus on only two teachers was a methodological one, and is related to our concern to provide more in depth and context specific contextualisation of the teachers’ pedagogical reflections on addressing gender and sexual diversity under specific conditions of neoliberal governance. Currently, we are working on another case study involving two of the other 9 teachers, which focuses on another manifestation of this phenomenon, but in a different Independent Public school context with its particular emphasis on marketing and recruiting certain sorts of students. These decisions are based on our concern with specificity and what Stake (1995) refers to as ‘boundedness’ involving ‘concentrated inquiry’ (444) as it pertains in our research to generating more in-depth and contextualised understandings of the impact and effects of neoliberal policy governance on teachers’ pedagogical practices.

3. Micro level analysis involves studying interactions at the classroom level where the focus is on the individual teacher in this particular case, while the meso level analysis involves more interactions between teachers and those at the administrative level of the school. The macro analysis involves broader systems of governance, which extend beyond the local school context (see Blackstone 2012).