Queer breaches and normative devices: language learners queering gender, sexuality, and the L2 classroom

ABSTRACT

Cisgender and heterosexual norms permeate every level of language classrooms, from textbooks to classroom discourse to teachers’ actions, constraining queer/trans learners’ ability to be themselves. Yet queer/trans and non-queer/trans learners alike may challenge cisheteronormativity within the language classroom and create new possibilities. We investigate the possibilities of queer/trans learners’ agency within these normative structures by bringing together three cases from larger separate projects, examining the context and actions of learners in each setting as they attempt to queer their classrooms to make them habitable. Drawing from Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, we analyze the devices that orient students to classroom cisheteronormativity, actions that students and their accomplices may take to breach these norms, and the reactions to and potential of such breaches within the L2 classroom context. We find that orienting devices, including curricular representation, language use, and grading practices, convey implicit and explicit messaging that can limit expressions of gender and sexuality. Yet queer breaches, when not subject to straightening, can lead to new classroom possibilities for expression, playfulness, and identity validation. We conclude by considering the implications of this analysis for practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Cisheteronormativity
• queer and trans learners
• queer breaches
• orientation devices
• straightening devices

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Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2024.2316544)

Notes

1 In this article, we use queer and trans as umbrella terms to refer to a wide range of nonnormative (a)sexual orientations and (a)gender identities, respectively. We do so for reasons of expressive economy while acknowledging the problematic tensions that arise when using terms emerging from Anglo-Western epistemologies to collect diverse local articulations of sexuality and gender that transcend heterosexuality and cisgenders.

2 Given that gender self-identification data was not provided to researchers in this original 2015 observation, the gender designations and pronouns used in the analysis are based on appearance, classroom discourse, interview data, and (cisgender) researcher conjecture. As such, it is not possible to know someone’s gender identity or pronouns by looking at them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ashley R. Moore

Ashley R. Moore (he/him) is a critical applied linguist and Assistant Professor of TESOL at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. His research interests include queer and trans issues in language education, critical realist research methodologies, and linguistic dissociation, a relatively enduring psychosocial process in which an individual or group distances themselves from a set of linguistic practices already within their repertoire because those practices have come to connote a state of significant intersubjective disharmony, or contrasubjectivity. His recent empirical and theoretical work has been published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, and ELT Journal.

James Coda

James Coda (he/him) is Assistant Professor of ESL & World Language Education, Theory and Practice in Teacher Education in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences at The University of Tennessee-Knoxville. His professional experience spans K-12 as well as adult and higher education world language and ESOL contexts. His research interests include LGBTQ+ issues in language teaching and learning, gender and sexuality, queer theories and pedagogies, and identity. James’ work has appeared in Teaching and Teacher Education, TESOL Quarterly, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, among other refereed journals. He is also the co-editor of a 2021 edited volume on intersectionality and LGBTQ+ issues in language teaching and learning as well as a forthcoming co-edited volume on queer allyship in English Language Teaching (ELT).

Julia Donnelly Spiegelman

Julia Donnelly Spiegelman (she/her) is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Linguistics at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research and activism focus on the intersection of power, identity, and ideology in K-16 world language classrooms, seeking to understand and oppose the workings of transphobia and racism within these contexts. Julia’s work has been published in Applied Linguistics, Critical Multilingual Studies, The French Review, and L2 Journal. In addition to teaching French at the college level, Julia is a faculty member at the Multicultural Teaching Institute, where she works with K-12 teachers to develop awareness of their own identities and engage anti-bias pedagogies in their classrooms.

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (she/her), Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of Imperfect Tense (poems), and five scholarly books on the arts in education. Her forthcoming book, The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook, offers emerging and trained ethnographers exercises to spark creativity to increase the impact and beauty of ethnographic study. Winner of NEA Big Read Grants, the Beckman award for Professors Who Inspire, Hambidge and Resplandor artist residencies, and a Fulbright for 9-month study of adult Spanish-language acquisition in Oaxaca Mexico, Cahnmann-Taylor has served as Fulbright Scholar Ambassador, speaking about Fulbright around the country since 2020. For 10 years she served as poetry editor for Anthropology & Humanism and judged the ethnographic poetry competition. Her poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Women’s Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Barrow Street, and many other literary and scholarly homes. Currently, she works as co-translator with Kuo Zhang of China’s Labor Poet Laureate, Nianxi Chen. Translations of Chen’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, Plume, and Pedestal. See her website for more information: www.melisacahnmanntaylor.com.