Queer Inquiry In Language Education Jlie V5#1

Cynthia Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136506666
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2006, This is a special issue of the Journal of Language, Identity and Education, focusing on Queer Inquiry in Language Education from 2006. It presents articles raging from discourses of Heteronormality; queering Literacy teaching in Brazil; discussion gender and sexuality in Japan; and forum discussions from Australia.

Constructing and Contesting Discourses of Heteronormativity: An Ethnographic Study of Youth in a Francophone High School in Canada

Phyllis Dalley

University of Ottawa

Mark David Campbell

Independent Scholar

This article explores the possibilities and impossibilities of establishing queer discursive spaces within a minority-language high school. Data examined here are from a three-year study of language and identity in a Francophone high school in Ontario, Canada. As two members of the larger research team, we draw on our close observations of teenage students as they interacted with their peers at school events and in corridors and classrooms. The article analyses the ways in which discourses of heteronormativity—which privilege heterosexuality—were reproduced as well as contested in students’ interactions within three domains: the general student population, a friendship network of five socially marginalised female students, and the lives of two gay male students. The analysis indicates that the heteronormative discourses produced and reproduced by the students had a silencing effect on gay male students but, paradoxically, created space for some straight female students to “play-act” lesbianism as a counter-hegemonic discourse. The findings highlight the irony of this school’s motto—”Unity in diversity”—in relation to young women and queer youth in particular.

Key words: heteronormativity, youth, high school, gay students, bilinguals

Using ethnographic data of youth interactions in a Francophone high school in Ontario, Canada, this article explores the possibilities and impossibilities of establishing queer discursive spaces at the school, given the heterosexual hegemony that prevailed.

Heterosexual hegemony, it has been argued, is reproduced in schools through two silencing processes: systematic exclusion, which operates by “ignoring or denying the presence of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people” (Friend, 1993, p. 212), and systematic inclusion: “When discussions regarding homosexuality do occur, they are consistently placed in a negative context. This results in the systematic inclusion in conversations about homosexuality only as pathology, only in regard to sexual behaviour and/or framed as dangerous” (Friend, 1993, p. 215). As Foucault (1990) has argued about sexuality generally, silencing is achieved through the careful and continual production and monitoring—by the self and by others—of speech acts. This process requires the construction of heterosexuality as “normal” human sexuality through explication of the abnormal. In other words, the silencing of homosexuality is predicated on the construction of a heterosexual/homosexual binary. As Grace, Hill, Johnson, and Lewis (2004) argue, “these dominant ideologies allow heterosexual men to maintain control by reinforcing binary structures that value heterosexual over homosexual and masculine over feminine, linking them together inextricably” (pp. 318–319). These identity categories (heterosexual/homosexual, man/woman) are, like other “clusters of ideas, images and practices”—or discourses—(Hall, 1997, p. 6), structured and circulated through linguistic human interaction (Foucault, 1972; Giddens, 1986; Gumperz, 1982). Likewise, they are materialised through an everyday “performativity” of straightness, queerness, maleness, and femaleness:

To say that “gender/sexual identity/desire is performative” does not mean the same as “it is performed.” Indeed, if “performed” is interpreted in its everyday sense to mean a kind of deliberate play-acting, it is obviously unsatisfactory: most of us, most of the time, are not aware of performing anything in this highly self-conscious way. What we are doing, however, is materializing gender/sexual identity/desire by repeating, consciously or not, the acts that conventionally signify “femininity” or “butchness” or “flirting.” (Cameron & Kulick, 2003, p. 150)

Thus, deciphering how insurgent sexualities are effectively silenced within institutions entails studying the everyday performances and uses of language that constitute, and also resist, norms of sexual and gender identities.

This article explores these issues using data from a three-year ethnographic study of language and identity in a Franco-Ontarian high school that we shall call “Champlain.”¹ Official school discourses regularly promote the importance of respecting differences, following the “Vive la différence” ideology that was popular in the 1960s, when Francophone schools like Champlain were founded. As a minority language school, Champlain is a linguistically and culturally complex space. At the school, the main language of instruction is French, but in the broader environment surrounding the school, the predominant language is English (in the province of Ontario, Francophones account for 4.7% of the total population, and only 1.5% of the population in the city where the school was located [Statistiques Canada, 2005]). Most Champlain students are French/English bilinguals. At the time of this study, the only exceptions were monolingual Francophones arriving from the Francophone provinces of Québec or New Brunswick, and Somalian/French bilinguals from Somalia.

As members of a larger research team, we draw here on our close observations of teenage students as they interacted with their peers at school events and in the corridors and classrooms of the school. By analysing in depth some data that we presented elsewhere in a descriptive article (Dalley & Campbell, 2003), the current article focuses on discourses of heteronormativity. We use the term “heteronormativity” to refer to the insistence that “humanity and heterosexuality are synonymous” (Warner, 1993, p. xxii). “Heteronormative discourses,” then, are linguistic and/or cultural practices which construct and circulate heterosexual representations, practices, and identities as the natural or normal expression of humanity. Our article examines the ways in which discourses of heteronormativity were reproduced as well as contested at Champlain in students’ interactions within three domains: the general student population, a friendship network of five socially marginalised female students, and the lives of two gay male students. The analysis indicates that the heteronormative discourses prevalent among the student population had a silencing effect on the gay-identified male students but, paradoxically created space for some straight-identified female students to “play-act” lesbianism as a counter-hegemonic discourse. Although the data examined, particularly the girls’ play-acting, could be analysed from the perspective of gender theory, our interest here is in the ways students construct, contest, and struggle with discourses of heteronormativity in classrooms and throughout the school.

In language education, ethnographic studies of schools tend to ignore issues of non-heterosexual identity altogether. However, these issues are beginning to be addressed in more general education research, where there is a growing body of work on Canadian schools and youth in particular (as reflected in the majority of our references here). Some recent studies investigate the school experiences of youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer (Dobinson, 2004; Rasmussen, 2003; Yallop, 2004); other studies assess institutional attempts to address the needs of these youth through curricula (Ellis & High, 2004) and educational policy (Grace & Wells, 2001). In addition, a number of studies explore the experiences of teachers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer, and/or who teach queer issues (Grace & Benson, 2000; Sumara & Davis, 1999; Rasmussen, 2003; Khayatt, 1997, 1999; Misson, 1996; Sykes, 2004; Silin, 1999). Within as well as beyond education literature, attention is also being given to the methodological issues involved in undertaking queer research (Gamson, 2000; Grace, Hill, Johnson, & Lewis, 2004) and to the need for queer theory to include additional sexual identities beyond just “homosexual” and “heterosexual” (Namaste, 1994).

In the current study, taking an ethnographic approach (Gans, 1999; Thomas, 1993) made it possible to examine youth interactions (primarily with each other but also with their teachers and with us as researchers) in the school environment. This was significant because it allowed us to focus on the students’ actual socio-discursive interactions at school, instead of just their self-reported experiences of school after graduating (the latter is more typical in queer education research, perhaps due to the difficulties of providing safe spaces for queer-identified students to participate in school-based studies). This focus on discourse meant that we could take into account not only what was said but also what was not said, and thus trace some of the heteronormative silencing practices that became evident. Related to this is the fact that our investigation was long term, which meant that the same youth could be observed over time and across a range of situations and interaction types.

As Nelson (2005) notes, language education research rarely represents sexually diverse student groups, while queer education research similarly under-represents linguistically diverse student groups (see also Nelson, 2004). Thus it is significant that the cohort of youths we studied encompassed a complex range of sexual identifications, including those who identified as gay, as well as those who deliberately presented lesbian personas for counter-hegemonic purposes. Importantly, the students also encompassed a complex range of linguistic/racial/cultural positionings. Since our study was set within a minority language school comprising French speakers living in a predominantly English-speaking city, province, and country, the youth comprised mostly bilinguals and trilinguals, and included those born in Canada as well as newly arrived refugees and immigrants. While issues of multilingualism and globalisation are beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note that the marginalised students in our study could be considered double or triple minorities.

METHOD

Our long-term, first-hand observations of student struggles with heteronormativity were conducted in the context of a larger ethnographic study of ethnolinguistic identity and schooling² (Heller, Dalley, Ibrahim, & Campbell, 1994; Heller & collaborators, 1999). The larger study involved a team of bilingual researchers (including the authors of this article³) collecting data in the following ways: observing and audio-taping classroom sessions over a four-year period; conducting audio-taped interviews with 46 students and eight parents; accompanying 15 students as they went about their lives in school and, where possible, outside of school; observing, audio-taping, and sometimes videotaping informal discussions among several friendship networks; obtaining video-recordings (produced by the school’s student technology committee) of extra-curricular activities; and taking detailed ethnographic notes of all observations and interactions with students and school staff. In this article, we discuss data gathered from observations of all-school, whole-class, and small in-class group situations as well as of informal friendship network discussions.⁴ We focus on one female friendship network in particular, the marginalized “Nerds” (and their interactions with the dominant “Populaires”), as well as on two gay boys, Bernard and Zadun.⁵

The data are presented in three sections, which mirror student positionings in relation to the dominant heteronormative discourses of the school. The first section sets the broad context by exploring how these discourses were co-constructed as dominant across a number of sites in the school; the next section looks at how the Nerds openly challenged heteronormativity from their peripheral position; and the third section focuses on how Bernard and Zadun struggled with, and against, the dominant heteronormative discourses and their silencing effects. It is important to note that our knowledge of lesbian students at the school is limited to second-hand reports, while our knowledge of lesbian teachers is nonexistent. The limited space allocated here to lesbian perspectives thus reflects the limited space they seemed to occupy at the school.

It should also be noted that we use the terms “lesbian” and “gay” to signify same-sex attraction and coupling because that is how the students in the study used them. Though “queer” was not a commonly used term at Champlain, we borrow Sumara and Davis’ (1999, p. 192) definition of queer as “a marker representing interpretive work that refuses … the cultural rewards afforded those whose public performances of self are contained within that narrow band of behaviors considered proper to a heterosexual identity.”

CONSTRUCTING HETERONORMATIVE DISCOURSES AT SCHOOL

At Champlain, boys and girls controlled different public discursive spaces. Multi-cultural lunches and fashion shows were the domain of female students and general assemblies that of male students. The lunches positioned women as cooks at the service of others and the fashion shows constructed idealised forms of female beauty (skinny but not bust-less, preferably white skinned, blond haired, and blue eyed) and femininity/masculinity. In these fashion shows, females were ambiguously presented as alluring yet virtuous whereas males were presented as virile and commanding. The environment at Champlain can be characterised by Cameron and Kulick’s (2003, p. 31) observation that for “good boys” and “bad boys” alike, interest in sex is considered “normal and legitimate,” while for girls, such interest marks one as a rebellious “bad girl.” Normalcy was also constructed within a heterosexual/homosexual binary in which homosexuality was always deviant, as the following example shows.

At the fashion shows, expressions of homosexuality were strictly excluded. Indeed, when two boys decided to walk down the catwalk together during a rehearsal, the girls responsible for the show stopped the proceedings to insist upon the seriousness of the activity at hand and on the need for all to follow directions. The boys’ whispers and laughter suggested that presenting themselves as a same-sex couple was a way to ridicule the girls and their work, since homosexuality was clearly considered an absurdity.

The most legitimate student-controlled discursive spaces in this school were the assemblies, which were organised by the male dominated student council.⁶ Here, when a female character was needed in a skit, male students in drag were used. These boys were received with much laughter, and there was no question that they were playing female roles and not those of transvestites or transgendered males. The only direct refer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Copyright
• Queer Inquiry in Language Education
• Articles
• The Forum