Teachers and Adolescent Students Using LGBT-Themed Graphic Novels to Talk About Homophobia, Heterosexism, and Transphobia

• In Event: Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Ethnography and Language in Educational Settings: (Re)Envisioning and Reformulating Language Use in Educational Settings

Abstract

This paper analyzes four discussions of three lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) themed graphic novels across two groups: one, a group of teachers and teacher educators in an inquiry group committed to combatting homophobia and heterosexism through literature and film; the other, a group of LGBT, queer, questioning, and ally adolescents and teachers in an out-of-school literature discussion group. The teacher-inquiry group has met, continuously, for nine years with 29 regular participants. The literature discussion group was formed in 2006 as an offshoot of the teacher-inquiry group. This group, comprised of some members of the teacher-inquiry group, their students, and members of their Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), formed in order to read LGBT-themed literature they felt couldn’t be read in schools. This group included ten adults and twenty-two youth who met over three years to select, read, and discuss twenty-four texts. Among these were two graphic novels: Fun Home (Bechdel, 2006) and Skim (Tamaki & Tamaki, 2008). In 2010-2011, the teacher inquiry group also elected to select, read, and discuss LGBT-themed books. Of these six books, two were graphic novels: Stuck Rubber Baby (Cruse, 1995) and Skim (Tamaki & Tamaki, 2008).
These discussions are contextualized in nine years and three years of collaboration, respectively. As such, this study is grounded in both discourse analysis and ethnography. We understand discourses as socially constructed, multiple, and socially situated (Kress & VanLeeuwen, 2001). They are not, “linguistic and textual alone but involve habituated and largely unconscious ways of thinking, talking, feeling, acting, and being.… practical ‘grids of specification’ (Foucault, 1977, 1996)…[which are] almost always also classed, raced, and gendered” (Kamberelis & Dimitriades, 2005, p. 48). We bring queer theory to this understanding of discourse in order to interrogate heteronormativity and foreground the sexual (Author 2 &3 , 2011). Through articulation and interpretation, discourses are made evident through action (Kress & VanLeeuwen, 2001). While articulation makes discourses perceivable, through externally evident signs, texts, or text-like objects, including talk, interpretation does not. Instead, signs of interpretation may only be available internally, to the interpreter, in ways that are not yet articulated or available for others to perceive and interpret. We focus on discussions of graphic novels, in particular, to explore Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2001) assertion that multimodal texts enhance experiential meaning potential, which they conceptualize as humans’ “ability to match concepts with appropriate material signifiers on the basis of their physical experience of the relevant materials” (p. 75). In other words, coming together to select, read, and discuss multimodal texts, like graphic novels, promotes a complex conceptualization of the ideas in those texts.
With this assertion in mind, we analyzed four transcribed discussions of three LGBT-themed graphic novels in these two different groups. Preliminary findings suggest that discussing multimodal novels afforded opportunities to make discourses apparent through explicit articulation. Different discourses surfaced among adult-only vs. adult-adolescent discussions. Surfacing these discourses, related to homophobia, heterosexism, and transphobia, promoted critical discussions of oppressions and expanded the experiential meaning potential offered by the multimodality of these novels.

Authors

• Mollie V. Blackburn, The Ohio State University

• Caroline T. Clark, The Ohio State University - Columbus