Analyses of two LGBTQ-affirming schools in the United States and Argentina: Making hemispheric connections

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Improving School Experience for LGBTQ+ Students: Lessons from International and Transcultural Spaces

Proposal

Discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity directly impact students’ success in completing their education. While all SOGI minorities experience harassment and may not complete elementary, middle, or high school education, transgender students in particular are often bullied while in school, and rejected and harassed at home, which often results in expulsion from the house and into street economies like prostitution. This type of discrimination is common all over the world. To counter these horrific systemic exclusions (that have ended up becoming expulsions), some educational systems have implemented programs for high school completion for SOGI minority students in the last few decades. While they do not correct the structural damage done to LGBTQI students, such efforts begin to instill a sense of possibility or potentiality (Muñoz, 2009).

For this presentation, we focus on the Harvey Milk High School in NYC, the United States, and the Bachillerato Popular Travesti/Trans Mocha Celis in Buenos Aires, Argentina - two opposite extremes in the hemisphere. (In Argentina, travesti is a classed and racialized term that does not mean transvestite or cross-dresser, but transgender, although it stands in contradistinction to the latter, as a globalized term.) In doing so, we seek to extend comparisons that typically focus on area studies (a single region like Latin America), in order to better illustrate the impact of homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism across cultures – and in order to avoid simplistic culturalist analyses (e.g., Latin American cultures are machista or more homophobic than the U.S.). Through the use of documents that narrate their histories, websites and social media that uncover some of the processes that led to their foundation, their pedagogical philosophy, details about their curriculum, and experiences and demographics of their student body, we seek to consider a transformative, hemispheric Américas - a region connected through corrective efforts to change the world for SOGI students. (As authors, we are influenced by the interdisciplinary hemispheric network called Cuir/Queer Américas Working Group/Grupo de Trabajo Feminista y Queer de Las Américas - cuiraméricas.org).

Recently, more research about LGBTQ students and teachers in global contexts has emerged, examining the ways national or local contexts interface with individual and community identities. For example, Gato et al (2020) “asked participants to report anything they considered important about their school experiences as LGBTI students in Portugal,” while Pizmony-Levy, Rogel, & Shilo (2019) turn their attention to Israel, focusing on how Israeli activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worked together to surface the needs of LGBTQ students and develop curriculum to address bullying. Other researchers have taken on a regional approach; Kosciw and Zongrone (2019) authored a report documenting the outcomes of collaborative work between the American-based GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educators Network) and partners in 7 Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The report shares common challenges and highlights reasons for variations in school climate across the region. A 2019 volume edited by Kjaran and Sauntson (2019) takes on a more global lens, examining schools as queer transformative spaces and using queer and critical feminist theories to interrogate the experiences of LGBTQ+ students in locales such as Iceland, South Africa, China, and Croatia, among others. Our research adds to this emergent scholarship by taking on a hemispheric lens.

Literature about LGBTQ-affirming schools is also relatively sparse, given that few schools of this nature exist or are profiled in scholarly texts. Notable exceptions include scholarly studies of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, including a 1990 study of violence against lesbian and gay male youth by Hunter, a law article examining constitutional challenges to the school’s public funding (Bethard, 2004), and an analysis of student work at the school (Stiegler, 2010). Hope and Hall (2018) include the school in a study about inclusive education for LGBTQ students, along with two others: a short-lived school in Atlanta known as the “Pride School” and the Alliance charter school in Milwaukee. The authors argue that “offering a thriving LGBTQ-affirming space is more radical than simply offering a safe space… one that proactively affirms LGBTQ identities rather than simply keeping these students safe from attack” (p. 18), an argument shared by Sadowski (2020) in the book Safe is not Enough.

Queer pedagogies, whatever that is, has often emerged from either the queer or the pedadogical side of the equation. Educational projects on queer pedagogies emerging from Latin America unevenly consider queer theorizing in the region, mostly focusing on challenging the pedagogical engagements –a project that requires our attention (Ocampo González 2018). Yet others background the pedagogical project, offering instead critiques of queer, Kuír, or Cuir, without a rethinking of the educational platforms that impact those queer/Cuir students involved (Ramallo & Gómez, 2018). And yet other projects focused on education and queer studies in Latin America often fail to incorporate all regions; as a case in point, Pérez and Trujillo-Barbadillo (2020), focused on the Luso-Hispanic, foregrounding Spain, along with larger Latin American countries like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, leaving untouched much of Central America and the Caribbean; moreover, this and similar projects insist on a regional focus that instills a Spaniard referent (with colonial undertones), instead of a focus on, for instance, the Américas. Suffice it to say that a queer pedagogy is burgeoning in the last 3-5 years in ways that make our comparative project current - even edgy.

With this paper, we extend the conference’s idea of education without discrimination to an analysis in and through having experienced discrimination, resulting in analysis of spaces space organized around, but not exclusive to, SOGIE students and issues. We seek to fulfill this dearth of racialized SOGI populations in educational settings through an international comparison.

Authors

• Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, American University

• Christian A Bracho