Unpacking Entangled Networks of De/humanization Using an Identities-in-Practice Lens

• In Event: Consequential Teaching: Centering Teachers' Identities-in-Practice in Complex Times

Abstract

Three years into my first teaching job, I am sitting alone in my classroom after school, reading 9th-grade essays on courageous characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. My door is propped open. In the hallway, there is laughter. “Dyke!” a girl yells. I freeze. They run. After this, I always grade with the door closed.
When I move across the country, I come out to my new principal on my first day of summer professional development. “Oh, sure,” he says. “That’s fine. These kids have so many problems, they’re trying to figure out where they’re going to sleep tonight, if they’re going to eat. They couldn’t care less if you’re gay.”
These vignettes illustrate some of the intertwined histories of race, class, gender, and sexuality that I explore in this critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014). Drawing on an identities-in-practice lens (Author, 2011, 2014), I identify and unpack emotionally evocative moments in my 12-year career as a high school English teacher, moments I locate by combing through old journal entries and email exchanges. In my analysis of these vignettes, I highlight how various contexts and interactions have shaped my understanding of myself, my students, and education more broadly.
The above vignettes highlight these intersections. Though each one is memorable for me as an emotional moment as a queer teacher, each one also highlights other important systems and identities. In the first, my whiteness was unmarked, but it saturated the moment, as I combed through five-paragraph essays about To Kill a Mockingbird. I corrected commas in sentences that positioned Black people not as protagonists but as tragic backdrops to white characters’ heroism. Everything about this moment was an investment in whiteness -- my narrow focus on academic literacies, my choice to center canonical literature, my essay prompt featuring white male protagonists. Even the slur directed at me showcased the student’s implicit investment in whiteness, with homophobia operating as a pillar of the colonial gender roles that support white supremacy (Lugones, 2010; Spillers, 1987).
In the second vignette, my principal suggested that I would be accepted at my new school because students were simply too poor to worry about my sexuality. At that moment, I was relieved and proud: I had come out! It was no big deal! I did not then recognize that this framing implicitly required me to invest in my students’ continual socioeconomic insecurity: as long as they had bigger problems to worry about, I could be as gay as I wanted.
This abbreviated analysis illustrates the thinking I will bring to this paper, as I examine how my multiple identities as a white, affluent, queer person, and the diverse contexts in which I taught, shaped my recognition that whiteness, queerness, and wealth operate as entangled networks of humanization and dehumanization, accumulation and dispossession. I suggest that locating moments in which one of our identities surfaces as emotionally significant – in my case, queerness -- and analyzing them intersectionally, allows teachers to understand the nexus of systems in which we are always positioned.

Author

• Karen Zaino, Miami University (OH)
  Presenting Author