Leave “Those Kids” Alone: On the Conflation of School Homophobia and Suffering Queers

Abstract

In this article I make a conceptual intervention in the idea that queer children and youth have needs that differ from those of other children and youth on the basis of their gender or sexuality alone, and that doing well by them requires adults to act on the basis of this difference. Namely, I examine the conflation of “fighting school homophobia” and “helping young queers.” I argue that making space for queerness in education is not the same as making space for queers, and that queer young people ought to be left alone. I offer two explanations for the conflation’s persistence such that “leaving them alone” is generally unthinkable: one affective and one institutional. In the first instance, I read a short memoir through a recent queer theoretical account of childhood as queerness, and argue that the “queer child” is the vehicle of queer adult longing for origins. In the second instance, I show how in education the nebulous (queerness) tends to become concrete (homophobia) and therefore actionable (fight homophobia) because of the constraints of schooling as the singularity of education in the present. In the conclusion, I suggest that a twist on the liberal concept of individual rights may ironically provide a pragmatic means of moving beyond the flourishing of individual queers and toward the flourishing of queerness in schools, and offer some preliminary suggestions of what can be done if queerness was to become the beneficiary of anti‐homophobia interventions in education.

Notes

Notes

1. I am surely making a generalization, but on the broadest possible order of “sameness,” or the belief that homophobia exists in educational institutions, that it ought not to, and that it can be made to recede through the actions of school actors. This belief, in my view, is constitutive of the kinds of interventions and interveners I am addressing throughout.

2. GLSEN frequently publishes widely cited and highly influential studies of queer and trans youth school experiences across the United States. Visit www.GLSEN.org for full public access.

3. Throughout the article I use “they” and its derivatives as standard gender‐neutral pronouns where general pronouns are required. For more information, visit theyismypronoun.tumblr.com.

4. Although I have made efforts in this paragraph to include other sexual minority identity labels, I generally proceed in this section with “gay” given that it is Stockton’s preferred term. “Gay” here can be thought as only an exemplar; members of other identitarian categories or communities surely look back to childhood in other ways and to similar ends. Or, they do not, and this is perhaps just as significant. When I have used queer interchangeably with “gay” it is to mark gay as just such an example and not the exception or master category.

5. At the time of writing, Born This Way could be found at www.borngaybornthisway.blogspot.ca. The popularity of the blog has spawned a recent book showcasing its online material in print (Vitagliano, ).

6. The term “butch” is most often—but not only—used to describe people who are female‐bodied, masculine‐identified, masculine‐presenting and non‐heterosexual. On the contemporary life of butchness and butches, see Bergman () and Coyote & Sharman (). For earlier and historical accounts, respectively, see Nestle () and Kennedy & Davis ().

7. I want to momentarily interrupt the assumption here that all non‐heterosexual teachers move about in schools as non‐normative subjects. In the mythically tolerant North American urban landscape, if every teacher has a photograph of their monogamous life partner displayed on their desk, then the heterosexual teacher who refuses this sharing—regardless of their relationship status—is queer: more queer, perhaps, than the non‐heterosexual teacher who does not.

8. I use the plural “investments” because there are surely others apart from the queer mirror relation, including but not limited to the affective force of the “suffering child” who is widely deployed in making various claims to space and time in schools. The use of this image in queer projects is in need of further investigation.

9. In developing this definition, I draw on the conceptual vocabulary of assemblages or dynamic systems of self‐organizing becoming developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (), and their interpreters (Bell, ; Massumi, ). This is, however, a looser rendering for exegetical purposes; for example, a Deleuzian reader will correctly recognize that my use of possibility comes much closer to potential in keeping with Brian Massumi’s () usage. Further, the spirit of my definition is certainly not unique to Deleuze scholarship but is endemic in queer theory, past and present. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler (1993b) has similarly declared that “if the term “queer” is to be a site of collective contestation … it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes” (p. 228). And in the editor’s introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner () suggested early on in the field’s development that “ ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual … [and] therefore also suggests the difficulty in defining the population whose interests are at stake in queer politics” (p. xxvi). In addition, the idea of queerness as horizon, utopia or futurity has been recently and most thoroughly set out by José Esteban Muñoz (). As an aside, and despite their differences (see Muñoz, pp. 91–96), Lee Edelman’s () claim that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one” (p. 17) seems to me sympathetic to a kind of queer ness utopia instead of altogether anti‐utopia or anti‐future (as Edelman’s argument is frequently characterized); where they differ, however, is that Edelman’s “queer utopia” is one where the Symbolic is not taken as reality tout court despite our sustaining investments in it, for example, our identities, while Muñoz insists on the complex, evolving significance of what he terms “modes of particularity within the social [that] are constitutive of subjecthood” (p. 95), or modes that might be described as identitarian. My definition of queerness is greatly informed by these queer theory conversations and indebted to the work of these theorists.

10. There are numerous examples of this excess in the history of queer communities, where an identity term or linked‐up way of life that had served for a while is found to be restrictive or inadequate. Rather than require that such judgments are correct, my notion of queerness is again Deleuzian in naming these shifts and ruptures as inevitable and necessary: as becoming. For a thorough exposition of the concept of becoming across Deleuze’s body of work and the work of his many interpreters, see May ().

11. Although education is certainly not unique in this regard as an institution, there is something about the teaching–learning relation and its reliance on intersubjectivity to make change that does speak to the uniqueness of education with regard to my argument; I take this up shortly.

12. The examples with which I am personally familiar include Allies McGill, McGill Safe Space, and GRIS (Groupe de Recherche et d'Intervention Sociale). The first two are student‐ and staff run, respectively, and based out of McGill University in Montreal. GRIS is a Montreal‐based and mainly francophone non‐profit organization. The description of GRIS workshops illustrates my point in this section, in that they “rely on the personal experiences of gay, lesbian and bisexual volunteers. They are specially trained to answer any and all questions asked by students. Volunteers work in pairs, most often by a male and female team, which allows youths to see there is more than one homosexual reality” (“GRIS Montreal: Our workshops,” n.d.).

13. The intersubjective model of homophobia supports what Kevin Kumashiro () has termed education for and education about the Other, approaches relying on the static construction of an oppression and the people it uniquely harms in order to envision change on an interpersonal not structural scale. I do not wish to imply that the entire field of anti‐homophobia education ignores the pervasiveness and systematic character of homophobia in favour of an individualistic rendering. I do wish to point out that the necessity of pedagogy—with its “doing something about X” character—means that the intersubjective, individualizing encounter has a way of popping up even in the most systemically focused anti‐oppressive accounts of anti/homophobia in education. See also Kumashiro’s critique, in the same article, of anti‐oppressive pedagogies that rely on the consciousness (and rationality) of individual subjects.

14. A possible rejoinder here is that schools do not want queers, and that queers have to fight for access to education. My own familiarity with relatively accepting Canadian urban centres is likely reflected in this aspect of my argument: that schools want all of their actors to be able to remain. Disproportionate school dropout rates among poor students and students of colour (e.g., Fine, ) could also serve as a refutation. However, the fact that schools and school boards are generally unable to articulate a preference for keeping out or forcing out particular students is, to my mind, significant. On the surface, at least, keeping school actors in school is required for schools to retain their identity as such, and the surface can be crucial; I return to this point in the conclusion when I discuss the political significance of getting by in everyday life.

15. This has been tried, as with Toronto’s Triangle Program and the Harvey Milk High School in New York; however, these are still school‐based, and they aim to attract older youth who self‐identify as non‐heterosexual. As doubly success and failure of education writ large, these queer schools represent a far more limited “solution” than anti‐homophobia advocates are generally prepared to accept.

16. A full review is beyond the scope of this article. As a recent example, however, Kevin L. Nadal and colleagues (Nadal et al., ; Nadal, Rivera, & Corpus, ) have further concretized homophobia by articulating categories of “sexual orientation and transgender microaggression” that are recognizable and can be immediately acted upon.

17. Janssen (), writing specifically on queer youth, echoes Stockton’s worry. Presuming the “successful ascendancy and arrival of the queer self … the queer experience is not so queer after all in its familiar developmentalist packaging, anchored in a normal (if alternative) chronology” (p. 76).

18. Although Stockton admits the existence of “the child who already feels queer (different, odd, out‐of‐sync, and attracted to same‐sex peers)” (p. 6) or who “ may be fully conscious of its deferred birth . . . [and] may await only (the right to claim) a word” (p. 15), this child or youth perhaps sits better in unnamed obscurity relative to the intentionality of adults for reasons similar to those I outline later. Namely, young people with a queer or gay self‐concept may also bring something new that may flourish in the space of queerness offered by childhood.

19. The contemporary philosophical debate about the merits of negative and positive rights in a democratic society arguably began with Isaiah Berlin’s () distinction between positive and negative liberties. For a concise account of the conversation, see the entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Carter, ).

20. A detailed critique of homonormativity and homonationalism (see Duggan, ; Puar, ; Sycamore, ) is beyond the scope of the article but logically follows any consideration of the risks of legibility and “positive difference” as grounds for anti‐homophobia work.

21. My emphasis on experimentation here reflects a suspicion of “empowerment” (see Ellsworth, ) as a foreseeable, actionable goal of research or pedagogy, and one frequently ascribed to PAR as providing a necessarily more empowering research experience. However, there are as many strands of PAR as there are theoretical investments, including Deleuzian (Amorim & Ryan, ; Drummond & Themessl‐Huber, ) and more broadly poststructuralist (Cahill, ; Cameron & Gibson, ). This multiplicity of approaches bodes well for what I am suggesting: an attentiveness to the infinite expressions of queerness and/or/as sexuality in infinite local contexts.

22. Jacques Derrida’s (, ; Derrida & Dufourmantelle, ) theory of hospitality holds great promise for thinking through the difficulties of being unconditionally open to queerness as the nebulous excess of sexual (and other) possibilities; this body of scholarship has been taken up in educational philosophy by Claudia Ruitenberg (, , ) and others but not yet with persistent regard to queerness and/or sexuality, a notable exception being Gilbert ().