Wording (In)Human Worlds: Gender-Nonconforming Youth and the Necessary Illegibility of Language

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Queer-Inhumanisms: Unsettling the Legacies of "Man" Across the Curriculum

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This paper draws on data from a yearlong ethnography with several gender nonconforming (GNC) youth in an urban high school in Vancouver, Canada. The Vancouver School Board positions itself as a leader for queer and trans students, especially following the adoption of an expansive policy on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in 2014 and their recent implementation of a province-wide SOGI 123 project. Still, many schools are responding to the increasing presence of trans and GNC youth through accommodation tactics that strive to usher individual students toward gender legibility. Accommodation is only tenable for youth who can transition to another stable binary gender identity. Furthermore, accommodation ‘works’ by garnering the necessary resources to enable an individual student to be included without reckoning with, let alone seeking to dismantle, the colonial, cisheteronormative logics that are endemic to the school. I argue that making space for liminal identities within schools will impact the ways all students express their genders (Sedgwick, 1990).

Perspectives or theoretical framework

Schools regulate gender and sexuality, from the built environment to the curriculum (Airton, 2013; Gilbert, 2014; Kehily, 2002; Loutzenheiser, 2015; Rasmussen, 2006; Woolley, 2015). Airton (2013) argues that even queerness, emerging from a desire to resist fixity, is made stable in the context of schooling. Airton (2013) observes “in education the nebulous (queerness) tends to become concrete (homophobia) and therefore actionable (fight homophobia)” (p. 543). Gender nonconforming youth disrupt dominant understandings of gender by performing their genders outside of and/or in rejection of cisheteronormative systems (Meyer & Pullen Sansfacon, 2014). Since the understanding of legible genders in North America derives from adherence to settler and racialized logics, to understand gender nonconformity necessitates examining the systems of power that have participated in and continue to structure both our understandings of what it means to be (in)human and, specifically, to be a GNC (in)human (Butler, 1990; Million, 2013; Simpson, 2017; Stryker, 2015).

Methods

This study draws from queer theory, critical trans studies, and scholarship on settler homonationalism to analyze observations, interactions and interviews with youth participants.

Results and Significance

Stryker (2015) discusses trans studies as a way to abolish what ‘human’ has historically meant. In doing so, we “begin to make it mean otherwise through the inclusion of what it casts out” (Stryker, 2015, p. 229). Though the recent policy and SOGI 123 project have introduced a specific form of language into schools that attempt to name GNC youth, there are many other gender nonconformities that exist within the school that are unsanctioned, unrecognized, and brilliant in their illegibility. I am fascinated by these gender nonconformities, especially the ways youth imagine and perform these (in)humanities while in school. During the year I spent moving through the day with different GNC youth, I witnessed these young people engage, resist, ignore, play with, and at times appreciate the (il)legibility generated by their (in)humanity (Stryker, 2015). In this presentation, I explore how GNC youth created queer worlds within the school through turning toward their own (understandings of) language.

Author

• LJ Slovin, The University of British Columbia