Contesting silence, claiming space: gender and sexuality in the neo-liberal public high school

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic research in an urban high school in the USA, this article highlights how schooling structures and practices produce and reinforce an ideology of heteronormative binary gender. The construction of gender and sexuality occurs in systematic ways, shaped through structural forces and mapped onto social spaces and bodies. Yet, through the ways that neo-liberalism operates, the production of gender and sexuality is made to appear as individual choice and expression rather than imposed and shaped by structures of inequality. In this context of neo-liberal individualism, educators and students negotiate structures of difference that construct gendered and sexualised bodies and social spaces. By using social semiotics to examine the ways sex, gender, and sexuality are read and written onto bodies and individuals, this research challenges us to think through how ‘safe spaces’ to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning are marked and contested through semiotic means in the social landscape of the neo-liberal public high school.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer theory
• ethnography; identities
• heteronormativity
• queer sexualities
• secondary education
• North America

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at Gender and Education as well as Sarah A. Robert for her careful editing and guidance through the process of writing this article. Earlier versions of this piece, in part, appeared in iterations of various talks I gave between 2012 and 2015. I wish to extend my gratitude to colleagues who provided valuable insight in response to those talks: Patricia Baquedano-López, David Minkus, Deborah Lustig, Christine Trost, Genevieve Negron-Gonzales, Kathryn Zamora Moeller, Becky Alexander, Emily Gleason, Erica Misako Boas, Irenka Dominguez-Pareto, Cecilia Lucas, José Lizárraga, Arturo Cortéz, Usree Bhattacharya, Adam Mendelson, Tadashi Dozono, Jen Collett, Sabina Vaught, Chris Vargas, Greg Youmans, Danny Barreto, Paul Humphrey, Barbara Regenspan, Mark Stern, Navine Murshid, Emma Fuentes, and a special thanks to Monisha Bajaj for encouraging me to consider submitting my work for this issue. The views expressed in this article do not reflect those of the funding agencies, and any errors and shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names of places and people have been changed to pseudonyms to protect participants’ anonymity.

Additional information

Funding

Carving out writing time was made possible by generous funding from a number of sources for which I am deeply grateful: the AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship, the National GLBTQ Youth Foundation Dissertation Grant, the Institute for the Study of Social Change Youth Violence Prevention Graduate Fellowship, the Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship, and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Stipend at University of California, Berkeley.