The New Normal? Good Soldiers and the Punishing Present of Gay Equality

• In Event: Against Inclusion: Resisting School Militarization in the Name of Gender Justice

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This research explores how the privatization of schools created openings for the increased militarization of sectors of urban school districts. This pairing—neoliberal shifts with the expansion of military programs and schools—produced and required (new) forms of racialized masculinity. By charting how wider neoliberal privatization agendas—the charterization of schools and the expansion of a educational “choice” rhetoric—function to legitimate (and mask) the proliferation of military programs and schools in urban school districts, this research demonstrates how central racialized forms of heteropatriarchy are to contemporary reorganizations of cities and capital.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The national trend toward “right to work” laws, such as in Michigan, Indiana and Mississippi, makes it difficult for workers to organize and to call out unjust school conditions—from racist discipline practices to violence against LGBTQ students. Schools are increasingly sites of temporary and other forms of precarious, unprotected labor, reshaping how teachers and other adults advocate for all youth, particularly those queer or otherwise marginal. Scholars such as Lisa Duggan have argued economic and political shifts are deeply intertwined with, and inseparable from, the racial and heterogendered logics.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Building on seven years of participatory observation in counter-recruitment movements and community mobilizations against the militarization of public schools, this research synthesizes interviews with teachers in a Midwest urban school districts’ charter and military public schools and participant observations from affiliated meetings, with policy analysis and archival work.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
This research suggests that at a political moment when select LGBTQ lives across the US are achieving a measure of rights, particularly in schools, this “success” must be tempered and read across the “hardening” of access to heterogendered and racialized identities for other young people. While anti-bullying laws proliferate and recognition for gay (and even some transgender) students increases, school workers face increasingly difficult employment contexts—precarious, at will, devalued—that affect experiences and shape for LGBTQ members of school communities.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
LGBTQ education justice movements are being officially invited to participate in, and de facto legitimate, the “new normal” in education. There is a serious problem when “gay equality” means a network of strong and punitive anti-bullying laws that feed into zero tolerance discipline policies and the school-to-prison pipeline. In this context, LGBTQ school safety organizing runs the risk of both being isolated from and not in dialogue with interrelated justice struggles, and of too narrowing defining who counts as a member of the LGBTQ community. Pushing back on school privatization and making alliances with teacher unions has not been on the agenda of safe school movements, and it must be.

Authors

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

• Therese M. Quinn, University of Illinois at Chicago