A Queer Literacy Framework Promoting (a)Gender and Self-Determination and Justice

• In Event: Teaching, Affirming, and Recognizing Trans and Gender-Creative Youth: A Queer Literacy Framework

Abstract

Objectives
Drawing from the queer literacy framework (QLF) (Author A, 2015), guided by ten principles and commitments about how to teach, affirm and recognize, trans* and gender creative youth (T*GCY), this study demonstrates how curriculum and pedagogy mediates safe, inclusive, and affirming classrooms. It offers literacy educators, and pre-and inservice pre-K-12 teachers strategies to meet their needs across economic, cultural and linguistic contexts. Such models show how rework social and classroom norms where differential bodies are legitimated, how to shift classrooms for reading (a)gender, and how to support students to experience value in their (a)gender self-determination.

Perspective(s)
Thirty years of research about the criticality for bridging LGBT issues (Quinn & Meiners, 2011) to school curriculum has been well-documented, yet education remains without a large-scale study for preparing pre-service teachers to address lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, intersex, agender/asexual, gender creative, and questioning youth (Author, 2015). As language and understanding around T*GCY identities have become part of the social fabric of society, youth have more access to support their processes of becoming. These opportunities have galvanized opportunities for both personal and social recognition.

Methods
With social positioning as the presumed or “normative” condition, those whose gender identities fall outside of the binary tend to be misrecognized, misunderstood, experience a double-consciousness (DuBois, 1903) and suffer from a recognition gap. Misrecognition subverts the possibility to be made credible, legible or to be read and/or truly understood. When one is misrecognized, it is altogether difficult to hold a positive self-image, knowing that others may hold a different or negative image. At school, T*GCY experience macro and microaggressions, and are forced to placate others by representing themselves in incomplete or false ways. Recognizing these dangerous realities, recognition underscores a new theory for trans*ness and a trans* pedagogy as methodology and seeks to inspire a sustainable curriculum of recognition for T*GCY.

Data sources
The primary data emerged empirically from within research studies and teachers’ classrooms who took up the QLF (see Tables 1 and 2). Teacher researcher’s intentions were to recognize the presence of T*GCY, and generate lessons that could sustain a safe, affirming, and inclusive classroom within myriad sociocultural and linguistic contexts. They designed curriculum, applied pedagogical knowledge, and generated assessments that accounted for intersectional identities for all students across social, economic, cultural and linguistic contexts.

Results
Students, when affirmed, have the power for self-recognition and to be spatially agentive. Such recognition cuts across borders of spacetime. Through an integration of a conscious curriculum, not only can T*GCY be recognized, but their peers can mirror back their lived realities. As teacher education and professional development remains open to evolving nuances of (a)gender, a stabilized futurity of students who embody (a)gender justice has potential to generate social shifts.

Scholarly significance
When schools support and privilege heterosexist, cisgender, Eurocentric, and gendernormative beliefs, students must focus on survival rather than on fulfillment. When school is not safe, T*GCY suffer. However, these teachers invited T*GCY to see their social value mirrored, to thereby experience (a)gender self-determination and justice, and to start living lives they were meant to have.

Author

• SJ Miller, University of Colorado - Boulder