Queer in the Classroom: Countering Teacher Heteroprofessionalism

• In Event: Queering Pedagogy, Professionalism, and Care: Learning From Queer and Trans Educators Across Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
Heteroprofessionalism describes how heterosexuality is deemed compulsory within professional contexts, indicating that normative gender is somehow a requisite component of professional conduct (Mizzi, 2016). Through various institutional levels, teachers are made to believe that their professional role precludes them from having a gendered and desiring self, particularly if that self is not gender-conforming or heterosexual. This study examines how heteroprofessionalism impacts LGBTI teachers in southern Alberta schools and conceptualizes a radical queer counter-professionalism that resists respectability politics (Ward, 2008).

Theoretical Framework
I draw upon critical queer theories (Butler, 2007; 2011; Foucault, 1990; Hall, 2003; Johnson, 2001; Morgensen, 2011; Muñoz, 1999; Puar, 2017; Sullivan, 2003) to make sense of the ways that gender and sexuality are monitored and marginalized in education contexts. For teachers, queer identities are surveilled and policed through modes of professionalism, forcing individuals that might identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex (LGBTI) to present and maintain themselves as straight and cisgender (Gray & Harris, 2014). The construction of gender and sexuality is also bound up in the construction of race, necessitating queer theories that center upon the experiences and voices of queer people of colour (Alexander, 2018; Johnson, 2001; Kumashiro, 2002; Somerville, 1994).

Methodology
Using what Halberstam (1998) describes as a “scavenged” queer methodology, I employ multiple qualitative approaches, including autoethnography (Adams & Holman Jones, 2008), Institutional Ethnography or IE (Smith, 2005), and Critical Discourse Analysis or CDA (Machin & Mayr, 2012).

Data Sources
To generate a nuanced understanding of how LGBTI teachers experience and respond to heteroprofessionalism, this study begins with an autoethnographic storying of my own experiences. This serves as the standpoint for the IE analysis of local education policies and provincial legislation, including the Education Act (2012), the Teaching Profession Act (2000), and the Alberta Human Rights Act (2000). Lastly, I used CDA to analyze four editorial articles that captured the eruption of anti-LGBTI sentiments in response to the release of an Alberta Education (2016) resource to support LGBTI inclusion in schools.

Substantiated Conclusions
Queering teacher professionalism necessitates a reframing of the narratives that view LGBTI teachers as a detriment or inconvenience in the school environment. Whereas many efforts have fallen short by suggesting that queer and trans people are “just like us,” and “normal,” a queer/ing professionalism would not construct queerness antithetically as sameness but, would instead frame gender and sexual diversity as extraordinary. Because much of queer and LGBTI history has been rooted in dispersal and isolation (Filax, 2006, p. xvi), a reclamation of queer community offers another opportunity to resist heteroprofessionalism. Queer counter-professionalisms can then emerge through intergenerational community-building and mentorship without being constrained by expectations concerning appropriate/inappropriate queerness.

Scholarly Significance
If queer and trans identities can be celebrated as valid and valuable within the teaching profession, then there is opportunity to deconstruct, disrupt, and redefine professionalism in queer/ing ways that embrace and nurture gender and sexual diversity beyond the white-washed upper-middle-class aesthetic of homonormativity (Carnes, 2019).

Author

• Jamie Anderson, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author