Ruptures to (Homo)Normative Literacy Practices in a High School Classroom: Queer Theory, Discreteness, and Intersectionality

• In Event: What Does Queer Theory Have Yet to Offer Literacy Education Research?

Abstract

Drawing on a yearlong literacy ethnography (Heath & Street, 2008) at a public, comprehensive, urban high school in a midwestern city, this presentation engages with queer theory to explore moments of rupture and stabilization with respect to the relationships among sexuality, gender, and race in classroom literacy events. I take up an ideological perspective of literacy (Street, 1995), where the cultural meanings of reading and writing are always bound up with power and identity – such as sexuality, gender, and race (Blackburn, 2003; Pritchard, 2017; Richardson, 2003) – a perspective that complements queer theory’s consideration of social, cultural, and politics relations of power. Data from the ethnography include fieldnotes documenting my daily participant-observer experiences at the school, audio and video recorded English language arts (ELA) lessons and Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club meetings, documents (e.g., teacher curricular materials, student writing), and interviews with students, teachers, and administrators. I analyzed these data through multiple cycles of coding – using structural, descriptive, and axial methods (Saldaña, 2016) – and an ongoing constant comparative approach (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007).

In this presentation, I focus on classroom literacy events where students and teachers discussed the intersections of queerness and race. I examine instances from these classroom conversations where people challenged intersecting matrices of domination (Collins, 2009), thus fostering ruptures to normativities of literacy and identity (Author A & Colleague, 2019; Ferguson, 2004, 2012), and I contrast these moments with others where students and teachers shut down conversations, resulting in stabilization, even reification, of dominant ideologies including homophobia, transphobia, and racism.

To explore what queer theory might yet offer the field of literacy education, I draw on queer of Color theorists to unsettle the prevalence of racial elision in queer theory, where whiteness remains unnamed and results in homonormative constructions of race and queerness (Brockenbrough, 2015; Duggan, 2003; Ferguson, 2005), a trend that also permeates literacy research attending to queerness, as highlighted in the literature review recently conducted by Colleague and Author A (2017). Specifically, I discuss what queer of Color theorist Ferguson (2004) has called ideologies of discreteness and ideologies of intersectionality (see also, Collins, 2009; Johnson, 2016; Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2015). In his argument, ideologies of discreteness reify structures of domination because they mask the ways in which structures, such as homophobia and racism, are intertwined. In contrast, ideologies of intersectionality enable people to name, interrogate, and challenge oppressive structures. Thus, my goal is to better understand discursive moves in classrooms where students and teachers interrogated ideologies of discreteness and took up ideologies of intersectionality, linguistic acts which in turn contributed to humanization. Broadly, I hope this work helps the field of literacy education attend to complexity, multiplicity, and fluidity rather than singular, static notions of identity and personhood.

Author

• Ryan Schey, University of Iowa