How to ‘fail’ in school without really trying: queering pathways to success

Abstract

In this paper we explore our experiences working with queer and trans youth who have taken ‘non-traditional’ pathways out of high school. Drawing on Foucauldian theories of normalisation and Halberstam’s queerings of time, success, and failure, we consider how certain aspects of schooling have shaped queer and trans youths’ desire to seek out GEDs or early entrance into post-secondary school as strategies to escapes their high school environments. Through our reflection on our experiences with these students, we have identified some of the barriers that these students faced with regard to high school completion. Additionally, we found the tension between success and failure often shaped the alternative paths these queer and trans youth had chosen in an effort to negotiate their schooling experience. In the end, we question the current organisation of secondary schooling and suggest that a (re)envisioning of alternative educational pathways out of secondary schooling would provide destigmatising, non-normative modes of engagement with schools and learning.

Keywords:

• queer and trans youth
• school leavers
• high school
• post-secondary
• failure

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Shannon Moore and Hélène Frohard-Dourlent for their insightful feedback on previous drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Here we use the term ‘queer’ to describe the multiple and diverse interpretations of non-heterosexuality that we have encountered through our work with youth. The aim of using the term queer is to recognise the fluidity, inconsistencies, variations, and alternative naming practices that ‘non-heterosexuals’ might employ within a specific time and/or context (see, e.g., Rankin 2004; Bell and Valentine 1995; Kramer 1995).

2. In this paper we have elected to use the abbreviated ‘trans’ for ‘transgender’ to recognise students and youth ‘whose gender identity, expression or behavior is different from those typically associated with their assigned sex at birth, including but not limited to transsexuals, crossdressers, androgynous people, genderqueers, and gender non­conforming people’ (National Centre for Transgender Equality 2009, 1).

3. We use the verb formation of the term ‘queer’ to signal our desire to disrupt and trouble the normalising discourses that shape educational expectations of students, queer or otherwise, by twisting how success and failure are used to describe their movement through this system (Sullivan 2003). By employing queer as a conceptual tool, our aim is to reconsider the normative forces that obscure queer and trans students’ experiences in traditional school settings.

4. The GED (formerly the General Education Diploma) exam is a nationally recognised test developed by the GED Testing Service and is recognised as an equivalency diploma for those without a high school degree (New York State GED Testing Office 2013).

5. Here, we ask how the (seemingly invisible) processes of normalisation produce specific notions of power and privilege that are applied to different bodies in different ways. In an effort to answer this question, we pull from Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012, 102) argument that ‘desiring silences’ are productive rather that representing a lack or an absence. We posit that some of the negative experiences of queer and trans youth in schools may appear, not as visible, audible, and easily recognisable violences and aggressions, but rather as silences and omissions.

6. According to Hopmann (2007, 115), Bildung refers to ‘the use of knowledge as a transformative tool of unfolding the learner’s individuality and sociability’.

7. Pseudonyms are used.