Lesbian, gay and bisexual teachers’ ambivalent relations with parents and students while entering into a civil partnership

Abstract

Schools are quasi-public/private organisations and being a teacher involves negotiating personal and professional boundaries. These boundaries have posed particular challenges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT-Q) teachers whose everyday lives are complicated by legislative, religious and cultural constraints, moral panics about childhood innocence, reductive discourses about sexuality and negative stereotypes. In many contexts, the past decade has seen rapid change in the politics of sexuality as legal structures for same-sex relationships have emerged and promised normalisation for LGBT-Q people. Such developments raise questions about how these changing politics of sexuality are spilling over into school contexts. In Ireland, entering into a civil partnership (CP) altered the shape of LGB teachers’ relations with their colleagues in schools. But neoliberal systems of performance and accountability coalesce with a persisting uncomfortable relationship between LGBT-Q identification and schooling ensuring that LGBT-Q teachers have different kinds of relations with parents and students. This paper provides new insight into these relations as LGB teachers entered into a CP. I argue that their work to manage these relations had ambivalent effects. Fore-fronting a high-performing professional subjectivity and maintaining distances with students while acting as agents of change (re)produced heteronormativity but simultaneously enabled moments that promised queer, transgressive potential.

Keywords:

• LGBTQ
• teachers
• civil partnership
• same-sex marriage
• heteronormativity
• school

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the participation of the 15 teachers. Thank you for giving so generously of your time, efforts and reflections. Thank you to Dr Breda Gray and Prof. Mary O’Sullivan for extensive feedback and support.

Notes on contributor

Aoife Neary is Lecturer in Sociology of Education at the University of Limerick. Drawing on feminist, queer and affect theory, her work explores the politics of gender and sexuality as they are lived, constructed and configured in schools and society.

Notes

1. Throughout this paper, the acronym LGB is used to refer to the teachers in this study and the acronym LGBT-Q is used when referring to the politics of sexuality and gender identity more generally. ‘Bisexual’, ‘transgender’ and many categories of identification are often subsumed in acronyms in ways that further silence the complexities of gender and sexuality. Furthermore, there are many tensions between LGB and queer politics. The inclusion of the dash is a continuous reminder of these silences and tensions. 

2. 97.4 percent of Irish primary schools (Darmody, Smyth, and McCoy 2012). 53.2% of second-level schools (Darmody and Smyth 2013) are under sole religious patronage.

3. Section 37(1) of the Employment Equality Act was amended in 2015 to include that no religious organisation ‘may give less favourable treatment on gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, traveller community, disability grounds or the ground of race’. However, it also adds that differentiation in recruitment or dismissal is possible ‘where the religion or belief of the employee constitutes a justified occupational requirement’ (Employment Equality [Amendment] Act 2015).

4. Homonormativity refers to a sexual politics that not only fails to critique but actually serves to reproduce and sustain heteronormative assumptions and institutions (Duggan 2004).

Additional information

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Irish Research Council.