"Deviance" as (Un)Doing: Queerness as Civic Curriculum in a Small-Town Ohio High School

• In Event: The Curriculums of Settler (Un)Doing: Place, Historicity, and Deviance Across Educational Spaces

Abstract

Civic education has long been heralded for its democratizing potential even while criticized for its white, capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative and colonial politics (Author, 2015; Swalwell, 2013; Wheeler Bell, 2014). For example, settler colonial studies scholars (Calderon, 2014) demonstrate how official social studies textbooks perpetuate narratives that reify settlerness while justifying Indigenous dispossession and erasure. Elsewhere, I build on this scholarship by examining how curriculum and pedagogical moves deployed by U.S. Government teachers under the guise of “political neutrality” overwhelmingly enact curriculum that (re)produces right-wing/settler politics, (Author, 2019). While important to theorize and empirically study this “doing” of settler colonialism via curriculum and pedagogy, this paper pivots toward uncovering moments of curricular “undoing” of settlerness; that is, how settler colonial politics are unfastened, untied, or loosened in the classroom space. Specifically, it focuses not on top-down teacher-enacted curriculum, but on queer students’ undoing via their “deviance” from the sexual norm (Cohen, 2004). This queerness also made space for political “deviance” via the creation of a counterpublic (Fraser, 1990) within their politically conservative classroom and larger school-community.

This paper is part of a larger study focused on understanding how youth in predominantly white schools come to understand and engage with politics. I look comparatively at two schools in central Ohio: one affluent and suburban; the other small-town and semi-agricultural. Throughout the academic year 2017-2018, I observed everyday school life in US Government classrooms at each site including how students made sense of curriculum and political events occurring in real-time, and how racial, economic, gender, and sexual politics impacted interactions. Additionally, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 42 students across both sites. This paper draws from this data, focusing on the experiences of six self-identified LGBTQ youth at the small-town high school located within a staunchly Republican county.

Cohen’s (2014) conceptualization of “deviance as resistance”—that Black queerness functions as deviance from a racial/sexual norm and that this serves as resistance to the larger white heteronormative politic—provides the central lens by which to understand the “deviance” of white and white-perceived LGBTQ youth in this study. Being “out” with regard to sexuality functioned as resistance to heteronormativity and provided a nascent counterpublic in the school community. Aside from solely impacting their own political development, this counterpublic served as an (un)doing of settler curriculum for the larger public sphere of the school through resisting heteronormativity and opening up space for politics that troubled Whiteness, patriarchy, coloniality, and class. Further, I argue that analyzing the experiences of these white/white-perceived youth through a black queer lens makes visible the “wages of whiteness” (Roediger, 1999) that these youth still possess, given that working-class white students, while negatively impacted by economic liberalism, continue to reap the benefits of Whiteness and settlerness within U.S. liberal democracy. By analyzing these youth’s experiences in this way, I illustrate how queerness functions always already as an “undoing” of the norm, and importantly, add to literature demonstrating queerness’ political/educational potential and join calls for a queering/undoing of (settler) civic curriculum.

Author

• Dinorah Sanchez Loza, The Ohio State University