Utilizing Foucault’s Ideas on Madness to Critique the Re-Pathologization of Queerness in U.S. Educational Discourses

• In Event: Toward the Extralinguistic: New Emergences With Foucault’s Unpublished Writings in Educational Research Methodologies

Abstract

In the current socio-political climate in the United States, conservative politicians and judges have begun to hold up LGBTQA persons as proverbial punching bags in the ongoing culture wars—and schools are “ground zero” for this conflict (Donegan, 2023). For example, a recent expansion of the so-called “don’t say gay” bill in Florida bans all discussions of LGBTQA topics in K-12 schools (Pendharkar, 2023). This recent rash of anti-LGBTQA legislation follows years of progress for queer people in the U.S. including the de-pathologizing of homosexuality in the American Psychiatric Association’s second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (Drescher, 2015).

Legislation and policies that target the LGBTQA community serve to instill fear and shame in an already marginalized community (Messinger et al., 2022). I argue that the efforts of politicians and school officials represents an effort to reinstate views of gender-sexual diversity as deviant and pathological. Foucault’s thoughts on madness provide educational researchers a framework through which to understand and critique the current politicization of LGBTA/queer topics in education. I argue that “LGBTQA” and “queer” fits within his conception of madness in the current socio-political climate in which policy makers attempt to silence queerness/madness. In so doing, I argue that politicians and policy makers seek to shame queer people and queer topics into silence—to code their very existence as something mad that should be hidden away. Just as Foucault noted madness, like queerness, can be “a source of shame for the family, something that remains hidden” (1967/2023, p. 25). Queer teachers in Florida who wish to build trust and safety in their classrooms for LGBTQA students now find themselves in a position in which speaking their truth is banned and coded as mad. By simply existing in K-12 schools in the state, queer (“mad”) teachers “communicate what is incommunicable” (Foucault, 2023, p. 40).

One paradox inherent in this situation is that Foucault asserts that the mad person is a “revelator” and “the great truth operator” (2023, p. 41). Thus, the mad person lives in the extralinguistic. As such, persons of queer experience hold truths about pleasure that heterosexist policy makers cannot access. Through laws and policies, “transgender people’s lives are restricted and regulated at the institutional level” (Kean, 2021, pp. 265).

Utilizing Foucault’s ideas about madness and the extralinguistic in tandem with other lenses such as Kean’s (2021) critical trans framework for education can help educational researchers dismantle taken-for-granted norms about gender and to critique harmful policies and laws that “[take] a serious toll, physically, mentally, and emotionally, on our most vulnerable transgender populations” (Kean, 2021, pp. 266). In this era of political division, it is vital that researchers wield new methodological tools. Just as Lorde (1979/1984) noted that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” educational researchers cannot research sinister laws and policies like “don’t say gay” with the tools of bigoted policy makers. We as researchers can bring to light the sinister, corrosive nature of systems that reify persons of queer experience as mad.

Author

• Joshua Palkki, Georgia Institute of Technology