Embedding the Complexities of Gender Identity Through a Pedagogy of Refusal: Body as Literacy

• In Event: 61.070 - Sheraton Roundtable 10 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 61.070-5 - Reclamation and Refusal: Reimagining Curriculum for Healing and Hope

Abstract

Students with complex gender identities are highly attuned to how schooling practices reinscribe cis-and-gender identity normativity. Considering that access and recognition shape and inform students’ identities, those with complex gender identities are positioned as “other” by their relationality to school-based relationships. Yet, their heightened bodily awareness enables them to dislodge from the norms that many students are vulnerable to embodying. As they move back and forth between their in-and-out of school lives, their bodies are generators of literacy. Outside of school, their gender identities are always in conversation as they simultaneously affirm, recognize and question its construction and are in “play” with its indeterminate complexity. These expressions are resistance against assimilation which makes their bodies potentially literacy-dexterous.

Author

• sj Miller, Monte Del Sol Charter School