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

• In Event: Queer-Inhumanisms: Unsettling the Legacies of "Man" Across the Curriculum

Abstract

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. 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 are, intend to, or 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, and ableist logics that are endemic to the school. I argue that making space for gender-nonconforming identities within schools will propitiously 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 how “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 a cisheteronormative system (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; Weheliye, 2014).

Methods

This study analyzes observations, interactions, and interviews with the youth participants over the course of my time at the high school by drawing on queer theory, trans studies, and critical disability studies.

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, University of Victoria