Queer Teacher and Queer Student Bodies Sharing Classroom Space

• In Event: Volatile Bodies and Boundaries: Ethical Dilemmas in Teaching and Research

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the paradox of queer teachers’ bodies in classroom spaces as at once volatile and stable – feared and valorized. My work is shaped through a number of theoretical lenses related to education through poststructuralism, antioppression, psychoanalysis, and ethics. I pay specific attention to discursive contexts that construct queer/homosexual subjectivity (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1990), children as innocent (Gilbert, 2004; Popkewitz, 1998), queers as a threat to children (Rofes, 2005), (queer) teacher as role model (Piddocke et al., 1997; Rasmussen, 2004), and queer students as a population at-risk (Cohler & Hammack, 2007; Griffin & Ouellett, 2003). The tensions arising from the buttressing of “queer as threat” and “queer as role model” made it difficult for most of the teachers in my project to relate to their students in ways that were ethically satisfying (Campbell, 2003).

I carried out life history interviews with eight queer teacher/educators with diverse racial-ethno-cultural and linguistic backgrounds across a range of school environments. Four themes emerged from the dilemmas experienced by the participants: coming out; student crushes; bathhouses and change rooms; and student sexual expression.

I analyzed notions of conformity, resistance, power, knowledge and subjectivity that emerged from the dilemmas of the participants and uncovered issues of physical contact, preferential treatment, personal disclosure, and confidentiality.

Collectively the dilemmas in this project tell a story. For the most part, it’s a story about the ways in which bodies are poked, prodded, shaped and produced into queer teacher subject positions both inside and outside of classrooms. It is about the hyper-vigilance that queer teachers bring to our relationships with students. It is about a professionalism that sometimes bounds and gags us (Rofes, 2000) but occasionally and unexpectedly frees us to be playful, inventive, and creative in relation to our students.

The teacher participants approached students with great care and respect and enjoyed teaching mostly because of their interactions with students. Yet, normative discourses ignited an anxiety and desire to control students, the environment and themselves. The potential impact of bringing such a charge into relationships with students is that it can interfere with the hard work we do to come to know our students as differently situated Others (Ford, in press). The participants did not recall opportunities to discuss issues of ethics related to pedagogy and/or teacher-student relationships formally during their initial teacher education programs or professional development courses. Half the participants recalled discussions that relegated “ethics” to the discursive field of the law. The perception by the participants that legal discourse and ethics discourse is conflated in teacher education contexts is unsettling. Across the dilemmas, the teacher participants articulated this conflation through an ethic of prohibition – don’t hug students, don’t meet them individually, don’t talk about sex, don’t close the door, don’t disclose personal information. This raises serious questions about the current lack of space in teacher education contexts for teachers to discuss the development and maintenance of healthy satisfying and ethical relationships with their students.

Author

• Vanessa Russell, University of Toronto - OISE