Post-Structural Analysis of Anti-LGBTQ+ Educational Policies

• In Event: Challenging Power in Education: Policy, Discourse, and Resistance in Local and Global Contexts

Abstract

Using Institutional Theory and Poststructural Policy Analysis, we interrogate 13 anti-LGBTQ+ policy texts and explore how these texts may cause separations between policy and practice, how they construct “teachers” and “students” as subjects and objects of the state, and how they promote cisheteropatriarchy. The terms reactive-evasion and identity-evasiveness are coined to describe the texts’ discursive mechanisms. The term identity-specificity, or the humanizing practices of recognizing identities, is coined as a fundamental component of educational quality. Our work is an articulation of resistance and asserts: (a) these dictates adversely affect educational institutions; (b) a fundamental component of educational quality is identity-specificity; and (c) policy bereft of the humanizing testimony of those about whom that policy is generated reinforces oppression.

Authors

• Dennis Williams, University of Virginia

• Patricia Beron Crimmins, University of Virginia