Reshaping Literacy Normativity Through Sponsorship in English Education: LGBTQ-Inclusive Texts in Independent Choice Reading

• In Event: 25.081 - Reframing, Reshaping, Repositioning: Critical Approaches to Literacy and Transformation

Abstract

Drawing on a yearlong literacy ethnography at a public urban comprehensive high school, this presentation focuses on the experiences of students – both queer and straight cisgender youth – encountering LGBTQ-inclusive texts through required independent choice reading in their English language arts course. I argue that varying forms of literacy sponsorship impacted how these curricular texts functioned as resources for challenging cisheteronormativity. When individual access and choice were sponsored, youth at times scorned these texts while at other times enjoyed them. In these acts, they established a publicly visible relationship to queerness, which entailed risk. In contrast, when queerness was collectively sponsored for a group, there were greater possibilities for reshaping literacy normativity.

Author

• Ryan Schey, Auburn University