A Cripistemology Analysis of the Lived Experiences of Bullying, Discrimination, and Harassment of LGBTQI Young Adults With Disabilities

• In Event: Queer Kids, School Violence, and the Limits of "Bullying"

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
This paper seeks to understand the meaning-making of young adults with disabilities that identify as LGBTQI, particularly concerning their experience with bullying, discrimination, and harassment targeted at their intersectional identities. Historically, there has been a dearth of research highlighting the voices of intersectional disabled students’ experiences within the field of education research (Hernández-Saca, Kahn & Cannon, 2018). Research focused on bullying often focuses on unidimensional identities and often utilizes a deficit framework to understand the phenomenon of bullying (the bully as the socially maladapted and the victim as vulnerable and needing of our pity (Duncan, 2013; Liasidou & Ioannidou, 2020). Drawing on an a framework comprised of cripistemology (McRuer, 2016) grounded in disability studies in education (Baglieri, Valle, Connor & Gallagher, 2011) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), we aim to expand ways of thinking about bullying discourses and how intersectional bodies are constituted within hegemonic educational systems of ableism and homophobia.
Data, Findings, and Results
This paper draws upon qualitative data from two merged data sets of in-depth interviews of young adults with disabilities who identify as LGBTQI. This paper explores how queer youth with disabilities experience and make meaning of bullying and victimization as means to sustain hegemonic beliefs about disability, gender, sexuality, and race. These illuminations start with describing the experience of being policed and then present the consequences of the policing, illuminating how bullying acts as a hegemonic device to perpetuate compulsory able-bodiedness and police gender. Participants described complex navigation of the normalizing systems that were enforced through bullying. They often described their own conceptualization of normality, knowing that the social forces would allow them to avoid the homophobic and ableist targeting. They illuminated how their own experiences of internalized intersectional oppression also allowed them to re-think their own identity, liberating themselves and those around them. They described a fear of being targeted or rejected based upon how they deviated from normative expectations of behavior and identity, and so they would employ practices of passing, silencing, and hiding to avoid ableist, homophobic, and transphobic targeting. Although participants eloquently described the ways in which they were policed by normalizing systems, the interventions that they encountered are inadequate to capture the complexities of their experiences.

Significance
This paper provided powerful illuminations on how bullying acts as a hegemonic device by perpetuating internalized compulsory able-bodiedness and heteronormativity. Our participants described their experiences with anti-bullying interventions, specifically how adult interventions left much to be desired and that the most effective solution for them was to find spaces of liberation outside the boundaries of traditional interventions. We want to emphasize that thinking through our data on bullying with intersectional cripistemology helps to disrupt dominant heteronormative binary ways of understanding disability, gender, and sexual identities in schools. By exploring such strong narratives, we can come to understand how they disrupt dominant discourses of bullying and harassment that uphold white-supremacy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and compulsory able-bodiedness.

Authors

• Laurie Gutmann Kahn, Moravian College

• Angela Ingram, Pacific Lutheran University