Navigating Regimes and Ruptures as a Gay Principal Promoting Social Justice in School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: How to Change the World: LGBTQ Activism as Education

Abstract

This paper investigates the ruptures from institutional discourse and consequent navigation of normalizing gender and sexuality regimes in schools by one school principal through a qualitative case study analysis. Situated within a larger project that examines a student-led art activist project, the bathroom project, this paper focuses on how the school principal acts as both visionary and transformative leader, albeit mitigated by the conditions of subjectivation. Through Foucaultian analytics of technologies of self and power, as well as the discourse of Butler’s giving an account of oneself, the interview data from this school principal articulates the competing drives and complicated work of pursuing social justice in schools as a sexual minority leader.

Author

• Jennifer Ingrey, The King's University College