Foreword: queer teaching – teaching queer

The scope of the problem

There is a wealth of research documenting the detrimental effects of homophobia and transphobia within and beyond schools in international contexts (ILGA and Carroll 2016; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2013, 2014; Hadler 2012; IGLYO 2013; Semugoma, Nemande, and Baral 2012; Valentine et al. 2012), as well as a variety of national contexts, such as Australia (Carman, Corboz, and Dowsett 2012), New Zealand (Sexton 2012), Uganda (Muhanguzi 2011), South Africa (Bhana 2012), Canada (Egale Canada Human Rights Trust 2011), the US (GLSEN and Harris Interactive 2012), Israel (Pizmony-Levy et al. 2008), Turkey (Saraç 2012), Brazil (Mountian 2014), the UK (Stonewall 2014), Latvia (Mole 2011), Belgium (Hooghe and Meeusen 2012), and Ireland (Higgins et al. 2016). LGBT people who belong to ethnic minority groups can be doubly stigmatized, as they may feel erased from both mainstream LGBT collectives and their own cultural communities (Bonthuys and Erlank 2012; Kassisieh 2011; LaSala and Frierson 2012; Szymanski and Sung 2010).

In 2006, in response to what international human rights experts considered ‘well-documented patterns of abuse,’ a set of principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity was established. Principle 16 of these Yogyakarta Principles (International Commission of Jurists 2007) states that ‘Everyone has the right to education, without discrimination on the basis of, and taking into account, their sexual orientation and gender identity.’ The European Union has included homophobia as an equalities area to be addressed in schools:

Homophobic or LGBTI bullying is a serious issue of concern in many schools across the world, including Europe, even though it is one of the most unchallenged form of bullying. (Downes and Cefai 2016, 29)

The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Queer Youth and Student Organisation has identified education as a particularly important arena, and has published guidelines for inclusive school practice which include proactive teaching methodologies, ‘When heterosexuality is viewed as superior, individuals’ behaviour is restricted to rigid gender roles, resulting in stigma and discrimination towards those who deviate from such norms’ (IGLYO 2015, 9).

In the most recent survey conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), 67% of respondents reported hiding their sexual orientation at school, while 91% recall negative comments being made about a schoolmate who was perceived to be LGBT (2014). As a result of these kinds of school-based realities, the European Commission has released a list of actions to advance LGBTI equality, promising to support school practices such as sexual and gender diversity awareness campaigns and policies against homophobic bullying (2016).

These are important steps, but I argue that school research and intervention must adopt a deeper, cultural perspective. Clearly it is important to continue to provide people with legal protection from discrimination based on gender (identity) and sexuality, and to maintain awareness campaigns. Education can support these initiatives by addressing the broader assumptions and misconceptions around sex, gender, and sexuality that support social discrimination.

Schools as key sites of production AND resistance

School contexts play an important role in perpetrating or challenging discrimination. As with any other aspect of a school-based social justice and equalities agenda, improving practice need not imply a new or add-on curriculum (Stufft and Graff 2011). An equalities agenda with respect to sexual minorities may be conceptualized as a broadening and improving of the existing curriculum to include LGBT people and their experiences (GLSEN 2016). What is required, however, is a better understanding of how to address this important social justice issue in school contexts.

School bullying cultures may include practices like jokes and teasing that become normalized as behaviours ‘typical’ of the age group, but these should be recognized as everyday acts of social construction of gender and sexuality (Carrera Fernández 2010). Nevertheless, these social processes are often overlooked in the focus on concrete incidents of abuse with clearly identifiable victims and bullies (Carrera Fernández, DePalma, and Lameiras Fernández 2011).

Research in UK primary schools (DePalma and Atkinson 2007, 2010) has shown that children learn homophobia and transphobia at a very early age: that ‘gay’ can mean anything that is ugly or does not work properly, that gay and lesbian family members are best kept secret and that there are ‘boy’ activities and ‘girl’ activities (Allan et al. 2008). Our observations of how children reproduce narrow, stereotypical cultural understandings of sexuality and gender in English primary school settings have been supported by school-based analyses in other cultural contexts (Blaise 2005; Bryan 2012; Meyer 2010).

Lack of clear and effective policy and training, along with cultural assumptions and taboos about sexuality, have prevented teachers from exploring non-heterosexuality and gender variance within educational contexts. In general, the educational curriculum includes incomplete and inaccurate understandings of sexuality and gender (Carrera Fernández, DePalma, and Lameiras Fernández 2012). These inaccuracies are not accidental: schools are politicized spaces that promote genderism – ‘the pervasive and systemic belief in the naturalness and superiority of gendernormative’ (Airton 2009, 132), and where ‘heterosexuality is positioned as the default category of sexuality and thus normalized’ (Walton 2009, 212). School practice needs to improve our understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality in order to bring them in line with scientific understandings and with people’s lived experiences. Effective practice also involves recognizing and redressing systematic oppression, and in this sense forms part of an overall equalities agenda.

Broadening our perspective: from homophobia to heteronormativity

School-based interventions that focus on challenging homophobic bullying may fail to grasp the broader cultural context of heteronormativity, the ‘organizational structures in schools that support heterosexuality as normal and anything else as deviant’ (Donelson and Rogers 2004, 128). In primary schools, teachers often unconsciously maintain the heteronormative, for example, through heterosexualized fairy tales that children are asked to read and casual conversations made by staff about their heterosexual partners (Allan et al. 2008; DePalma and Atkinson 2007). In secondary schools, heteronormativity is reinforced by the tendency to exclude non-heterosexuality from the sex education curriculum (DePalma and Francis 2014b; Jones and Hillier 2012), or to unconsciously propagate un-interrogated social norms about sex, sexuality, and culture (DePalma and Francis 2014a, 2014c). Teachers may unintentionally reinforce gender stereotypes in their response to children’s atypical behaviours and preferences in well-meaning attempts to save them from peer pressure (Slesaransky-Poe and García 2009).

Heteronormativity draws upon misogyny and gender stereotypes as normalizing discourses (Brown 2011; Davies, Austen, and Rogers 2011; Fairclough 1988; Peterson 2011) and legitimizes homophobia by implying, for example, that boys and girls who do not conform to gender norms are (going to be) homosexual (Forrest 2006). As Nixon and Givens argue, ‘the boundaries of both gender and sexuality are policed by the troops of hegemonic masculinity’ (2004, 228). ‘Sissyphobia’ has been shown to influence gay as well as straight men (Sánchez and Vilain 2012), and among lesbian women, those who violate gender norms bear the brunt of discrimination (Levitt et al. 2012).

These realities reveal a kind of implicit social consensus that rewards unquestioning conformity to the status quo and penalizes diversity by casting any deviation from the norm as abnormal (in the pejorative sense) (MacNaughton 2005). This understanding of heteronormativity as a form of cultural hegemony, enacted through discourses that range from violence to silence, calls for a policy of proactive cultural change in schools. Such a change requires an interrogation of the assumptions underpinning heteronormativity, not only in terms of actions, but also in terms of exclusions and silences (Longaray, Ribeiro, and Da Silva 2011; McCormack and Gleeson 2010; Potgieter and Reygan 2012; Sauntson 2013; Wickens 2011).

Gender and sexuality are performances rather than passive experiences. These performances serve to establish and maintain norms involving desirability and social power. Seen in this light, social practices of exclusion and bullying are really just the tip of the iceberg. Responding to homophobia by simply responding to individual acts of violence will not be enough to change underlying heteronormativity (Payne and Smith 2012). Nevertheless, thoughtful and proactive classroom practice can change homophobic and transphobic climates, just as curricular strategies can challenge racism or xenophobia.

The articles in this Special Edition of Irish Educational Studies on ‘Queer Teaching – Teaching Queer’ aim to explore what the role of school might and should be in changing homophobic and transphobic cultures. As guest editor (along with Dr Declan Fahie and Dr Aideen Quilty), I consider these contributions to be a timely and important collection of theory-driven academic work that responds to the complexities described in this Foreword and offers inspiration and ideas for improving teaching practice.

Notes on contributor

Renée DePalma Ungaro teaches at the University of A Coruña (Spain). She specializes in the use of qualitative and participatory research methodologies to investigate social processes of marginalization and school-based responses. From 2006 to 2009, she was Senior Researcher on the UK-based No Outsiders project, a participatory action research project that aimed to address heteronormativity in primary schools.