Recognition Beyond Bullying: Resisting Neoliberal Understandings of LGBTQ Sexuality in U.S. Schools

• In Event: 16.018 - Sexuality, Social Justice, and Schooling: A Cross-Disciplinary Investigation

Abstract

Purposes: Lisa Duggan calls for “a friendly critique of the agenda of . . . mainstream [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)] organizations” that have developed an agenda “in direct relation to the rhetorical requirements of recognition in an economically conservative era” (2012). Increasingly in even progressive education research and practice, the category “LGBTQ youth” rests on a disingenuously rational notion that young people—any more than “old people”—can, should, and do articulate legible sexual selves; line up in clear sexual categories; define themselves exclusively as victims and deny the possibility of LGBTQ aggression; and offer themselves for instruction, intervention, and assessment in sexuality education and anti-bullying campaigns.
I will present findings from The Beyond Bullying Project (BBP), a project funded by the Ford Foundation for which I am co-principal investigator. BBP shifts the focus from individual bullied youths to affirmative and generative notions of LGBTQ lived experiences and rights. Such a shift is key to resisting neoliberal incursions on queer movements for social change and on North American educational institutions.
Theoretical Frameworks: BBP couples Duggan’s critique of neoliberal logics of recognition with Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s sociological understanding of membership and participation as “a matter of belonging, which requires recognition by other members of the community” (2011). Stories gesture toward new spaces beyond social and linguistic conventions in ways straightforward instruction and lessons cannot (Foucault, 1973). As Ken Plummer asserts, “Stories can be heard when a community has been fattened up, rendered ripe and willing to hear such stories. . . . they gain momentum from an interpretive community of support” (2002).
Methods: At the center of BBP is a school-based storytelling booth, in which youth and adults audio and video record first-person narratives. Concurrent with the storytelling installations, BBP conducted “flash ethnographies” in each school community: interviews with administrators, teachers, students, staff, and community leaders and participant observation at school events and in classrooms and hallways.
Data Sources: Across three racially diverse U.S. urban high schools, BBP collected over 400 stories (292 unique storytellers) ranging in length from one to thirty minutes about friendship, family, love, culture and the ordinary trials of living your life in school. We also conducted 79 qualitative interviews and 234 hours of participant observation.
Substantiated Conclusions: Students and teachers are able to achieve and negotiate recognition and thus belonging as they identify and dis-identify with the stories being told about them, the stories they are allowed to tell others, and perhaps most important, as they come to recognize multiple possibilities for desire, intimacy, interaction, and social connection. Such possibilities allow conversation, practice, and policy to move sexuality education, broadly conceived, beyond bullying.
Scholarly Significance of the Study: BBP interrupts normative hostility of high schools to LGBTQ lives by designing, hosting, and studying intergenerational, interactive, multimedia storytelling about a broader set of LGBTQ-related issues than those that usually find space in schools. Collected stories resist neoliberal agendas by locating LGBTQ people and issues within ongoing social networks and interactions.

Authors

• Jessica Fields, San Francisco State University

• Jen Gilbert, York University

• Nancy L. Lesko, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Laura Mamo