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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Using a language of equality, inclusion, and opportunity, schools serving non-dominant youth increasingly adopt “character-building” military programs. These programs funnel young people into the military, discipline (new) forms of racialized masculinities, and police rigid gender norms. We ask:
1) How do military programs discipline and regulate non-dominant bodies to meet neoliberal and global war on terror exigencies?
2) How does the human rights framework justify these violent military programs in the name of justice?
3) How do we make sense of the gaining popularity of these military programs and the contradictory norms and practices that define them?
4) How might we “queer” school militarization and resist these racialized and hetero-patriarchal practices in ways that do not further marginalize non-dominant youth?

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 2: Histories and Futurities (The Frames of Curriculum)

Chair

• Lance Trevor McCready, University of San Francisco

Papers

• Schooling Bodies for War: An Ethnography of the Making of Military Men - Nicole Nguyen, University of Illinois at Chicago

• The New Normal? Good Soldiers and the Punishing Present of Gay Equality - Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University; Therese M. Quinn, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Student Constructions of the Gendered Body at a Public Military Academy - Heather L. Horsley, University of Illinois at Chicago