In Their Best Interest: Ethics of Education About Sexuality and Gender

• In Event: 66.016 - Resisting Regressive Notions of Opportunity: Participatory Scholarship in Action

Abstract

Sexuality is often viewed as a problem when talking about young people and educational institutions (Gilbert, 2014; Fields, 2008). Occasionally we discuss pleasure and choices (and mean it) but mostly we talk about risk (Irvine, 2002). This paper explores the educational goals of sexuality learning (in the explicit and hidden curricula) in schools and the queer possibilities for relationships explored in queer theory. It asks questions about the role of the queer researcher in advocating for educational opportunity for queer young people.

When collaborating as an activist or a researcher with LGBTQQ youth, we must navigate discussions of pleasure, choice, risk, and problem with young people. Recent reports show that LGBTQQ youth may experience excessive disciplining and control by school authorities that limits their self-expression, identity exploration, sense of belonging (GLSEN, 2016). These limits, in turn, may keep them from accessing educational opportunities. Researchers, including those at GLSEN, ask what teens are thinking, feeling, saying, doing, wanting, and needing in terms of sexuality and gender policy and justice, in schools and in other aspects of their lives, although many school policies do not reflect this research. Ethical research with young people needs to understand teens as both victims of violence or oppression based on their sexuality and/or gender expression and as political and social agents working for the relations and possibilities that they want to see in their lives. To whom does it matter what queer kids, trans kids, or straight kids think about sexuality and gender? What is required to create educational justice and opportunity for all LGBTQQ youth? And how does theory – queer theory in particular – help researchers understand the many layers of sexuality and gender subjectivity in young people?

Queer theory offers a framing of both ethical sexuality self-fashioning (Foucault, 1985) and ethical relationships (Foucault, 1981/1997; Butler, 2004). Foucault examines friendship and relationship possibilities offered by changing the assumptions about gender roles, about the place of desire in relationships and about the bodily intimacies between persons (who may or may not be lovers and may or may not be in romantic relationships) and so allows the disruption of the categories of relations that schools formally seek to produce. Butler (2005) challenges the notion of self-knowledge and static self-definition and in doing so she opens the possibility for us to become undone in our relations with others. This undoing allows us to change, to experience different aspects of ourselves, or to become unknown, and so to grow. If we are not fully known to ourselves, however, and cannot fully account for our identities, the boundaries of sexuality and gender that need strict policing in schools may shift or be transgressed. Gilbert (2014) suggests that it is desire, attraction, and sensuality that make moments of learning possible, but also that education about sexuality limits the possibilities for desires, attractions, and sensuality. This paper revisits the shifting roles of researchers advocating for educational opportunities as they negotiate power, subjectivity, and identities in sexuality and gender.

Author

• Darla Linville, Georgia Regents University