Presentation

1. Week 11: Gender & Sexuality
Reading synopses by: Dalia Kagan, Bo Na Song, and
Heather Yeboah

2. 1. Safe, Positive and Queering Movement
(Tara Goldstein, Vanessa Russell and Andrea
Daley)
The article focuses on developing anti-homophobia education in teacher
education and schooling contexts with three distinct anti-homophobia education
practices: coming out stories, homophobic name -calling analysis, and Pride Week
activities.
1)What are safe schools?
- Safe school planning is defined as a “ systematic process to create and maintain a
place where students can learn and teachers can teach in a warm and welcoming
environment free of intimidation of fear.” (Clarksean and Pelton, p.32) This definition
implies redress differences in stereotypes, violences and homophobic slurs at school
and within school environment.

3. - Safe schools also individualize the problems queer youth face while
simultaneously normalizing heterosexuality. (Quinlivan, 2002)
2) What are positive schools?
- Positive schools focus more on equity based policy.
- Unlike safe schools, the concept of positive schools are for the needs and
safety of employees, trustees, parents, volunteers and etc.
3) Both safe schools and positive schools are not able to approach sexuality
particularly queer sexuality even though they both try to construct and deal with
these issues.

4. 4) What are Queer schools?
- It is hard to define queer schools due to the policy regarding queer sexualities upon the
anti-harassment and anti-homophobia policy in the existing school boards.
- Instead, queer schools are viewed through examining the critique queer theory; From a
queer perspective, equal treatment and equal rights are applied to those who belong to
the marginalized group.
- It is possible to create anti-homophobia school environment as long as there is a policy
for positive school policy where equality and equity are presented; consequently, this
can be the remedy for homophobia.
- In order to create such school environment, deconstructing the barriers in one’s mind
considering the homophobia. (Kopelson, 2002)
- The critique pinpoints the importance of the differences, and promoting the acceptance
toward the queer students.

5. Three popular Anti-homophobia Education Practice
1. Coming out Stories
2. Homophobic Name -Calling
3. Pride Week Activities

6. 1)Coming Out Stories
- Coming out stories of queer youth is used as the educational approach for
both teacher education and schooling setting.
- This is regarded as strong and persuasive discourse among the progressive
educators.
- Teens Educating and Confronting Homophobia (TEACH) is one prominent
examples which is a peer-based program expecting the reduction of the
homophobic point of view by sharing and hearing the coming out stories.
- By sharing the stories, it helps to weave the gap between the queer students
and Others, and to develop confidence to redress homophobia.

7. Two Limitations of Safe and Positive Experiences
1)Limitations in the definitions
As who to be defined and belonged to is ambiguous, many students become the
target unnecessarily.
2) Coming out stories
This problems occur when the coming out stories are not relevant to the anti-
oppression curriculum. McCaskwell states that issues related to power and
privilege are not dealt with in systematic manner. (McCaskwell, 2005)

8. 2) Homophobic Name-Calling Analysis
- This aims to help Others develop empathy toward those marginalized group.
- This aims to help Others deconstruct their stereotype toward the queer
youths, and those who do not belong to dominant group. (Chasnoff & Cohen,
1996)
● Intent VS Impact
- Intent: There are two different aspects of the intent. One is more relevant to
safe moments and the other is more relevant to positive moments.
- Impacts: There are some possibilities for the queer youths or those who are
perceived to be targeted and harmed.

9. 3) Pride Week Activities : Plan-> Design-> Implement
● Planning: Goldstein employed the research based play Snakes and ladders.
● “Anti-racism and Pride Week” is organized on March 21 in order to
commemorate the elimination of racism and this was extracted from Snakes
and ladders.
● It begins with safe moment, develops to promote the moments, and create
safe schooling moments.

10. 2. Hetero-and Homo-Normativity: Critical
Literacy, Citizenship Education and Queer
Theory
(Heather Skyes)
Dr. Heather focuses on how sex and sexualities and genders are to be taught by
analyzing four different articles- “Cutting Like a Razor: The Poetry of Children”,
“Successful Boys and Literacy: Are ‘Literate Boys’ Challenging or Repacking
Hegemonic Masculinity?” , and “ They Didn’t Have Out There Gay Parents- They
just Looked Like Normal Regular Parents: Investigating Teachers Approaches to
Addressing Same-Sex Parenting and Non-Normative Sexuality in the Elementary
School Classroom”, and “ Citizenship Education and the Politics of Public
Participation: The Case of Same -Sex Marriage.”

11. “ Cutting Like a Razor: The Poetry of Children” by Nadjwa Norton:
- Young Black and Latina females writing hip-pop poetry about sexism and sexuality in
urban schools in U.S.
- Nadjwa Norton employes a critical framework of the two poems written by 9 and 10
year old students.
- “ Boys These Days” is about the sexual violence nowadays and tells women to take
care of their bodies. The second poem “ Why Not to Have Sex” is about hetero -
normative femininity in recent world such as at schools or classrooms.
- Norton tries to suggest women not to have sex which is pretty different from the
dominant U.S sex education discourse.
- Norton puts more weights on the critical literacy because it leads students to create
pieces on the controversial issues.

12. - “In Cutting Like a Razor”, Norton supports the results from the students’
critical literacy skills about sex and sexuality.
- What Norton states, “ It is important to help them craft their own arguments to
advocate for their choices, prepare them with strategies for negotiating the
fallout with various stakeholders, and assist them to reflect on the ripple
effects.” (p.450) This implies that she supports how the students create crafts
on the issues, sex and sexuality.

13. Hetero- normativity at the Intersections
-Regarding heterosexuality as dominance is the Hetero- normativity. What
teachers on hetero-normativity usually teach same sex as queer sexualities and a
fraught.
- Patriarchal, racial, colonial norms are the infrastructure of the hetero-normativity
problem.
- Patriarchal norms even exists between the two parties who make same sex
marriage.
- The three articles about literacies in sex and sexualities reflect anti-racism,
feminism, and masculinity.

14. Homo-normativity
- The”gay” students or citizens are not considered as abject, but become as
normative as heterosexual subject. This implies that the study of queer
studies looks at the two parties of the homosexual and heterosexual subjects.
- Sexualities and genders are deeply related to the colonialism and national
formation. What Suzanne Lennon states (2008) about same sex marriage in
Canada shows the links not only to the issues on sexualities, but also racial
analogies.
- Jasbir Puar (2007) discusses conflicts between the notion of homosexuality
and American nationalism about homeland security with the names war on
terror and post 9/11.

15. - “ The concept of homonationalism also applies to myriad other ways by which
gay subjects gain legitimacy within the nation state.” is assumed how
homonationalism is analyzed and compared to the Islamophobic, anti-Muslim
and anti Arab.
- The studies of Andrea Smith and Scott Moregensean (2010) are the
examples of how settler homonationalism is operated in the countries which
were colonized before.
- Dr. Heather also examined the lesbian and gay athletes to claim to participate
in the Vancouver Olympics, which resulted in three “pride houses” for athletes
and spectators.

16. Homo-normativity (You Tube Video)

17. 3. Judith Butler - “Your Behavior
Creates Your Gender”
There is a difference between gender performed and gender performative:
“Performed” → Taken on a role; acting in some way
“Performative” → Means that it produces a series of effects

18. “Being of a man” or “Being of a woman”
We feel as though our gender is an internal reality / a fact about us
According to Butler, it’s a phenomenon that’s produced all the time or
reproduced all the time
→ In other words, Butler’s notion of gender is more fluid than the rigid “being of
a man” or “being of a woman”.

19. How does this change the way we look
at gender?
Butler gives the example of “sissy boys” or “tomboys” as unable to “function
socially without being bullied.”
→ She presents issues with the question “why can’t you be normal?”
Institutional powers, such as psychiatric normalization, and informal practices,
such as bullying, which try to keep us in our gendered place.
Butler questions “how such gender norms get established and policed”; she
poses the question how to best overcome and disrupt them.
What do you think? How can this be accomplished?

20. The Formation of Gender
Butler believes that gender is culturally formed
However, “It is also a domain of agency or freedom”
“It’s most important to resist the violence that is imposed by gender norms
especially to those who are … nonconforming in their gender presentation”
How can we ensure we don’t perpetuate gender norms, and their
associated risks, in our classrooms?
Can anyone share any stories where they have either succeeded or
failed in this?

21. 4. Deborah P. Britzman - “Is there a Queer
Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight”
Britzman begins with a series of questions:
Can gay and lesbian theories become relevant not just for those who identify as gay or lesbian but for those who
do not?
What sort of difference would it make for everyone in a classroom if gay and lesbian writing were set loose from
confirmations of homophobia, the afterthoughts of inclusion, or the special event?
What is required for gay and lesbian scholarship and demands for civil rights to exceed its current ghettoized and
minor identity?
What if gay and lesbian theories were understood as offering a way to rethink the very grounds of knowledge and
pedagogy in education?
What is required to refuse the unremarked and obdurately unremarkable straight educational curriculum? (151)

22. Minoritizing and Universalizing (156)
Britzman discusses how “exclusion sets the limits of inclusion and hence constitutes both
the included and the excluded.”
She examines Eve Sedgwick’s two forms of discourse: minoritizing and universalizing.
Minoritizing → “close down … the question of whether a particular experience is relevant
or not”
Universalizing → “begin with a view of identity as a category of social relations. … [It]
attempts both to study these relations and the refusals to recognize the relational, and
to provide techniques that might pose as a problem the differential responses to a
condition, experience, or technique” (156)

23. We need more than “[adding] marginalized
voices to an already overpopulated site”
Britzman asserts that “Inclusion, or the belief that one discourse can make room
for those it must exclude, can only produce, as Butler puts it, ‘that theoretical
gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities
of signification’” (158)
→ Ironically, facilitating inclusion is then the cause of the exclusion it tries to
prevent.
Britzman comments on “The case of how gay and lesbian studies has been
treated in a sentimental education that attempts to be anti-homophobic serves
as my example of where arguments for inclusion produce the very exclusions
they are meant to cure” (158).

24. The power of language -
Homophobia
→ “[provisions of information and techniques for attitudinal change] are
emblematic of the limitations produced when gay and lesbian subjects are
reduced to the problem of remedying homophobia, a conceptualization that stalls
within a humanist psychological discourse of individual fear of homosexuality as
abject contagion and shuts out an examination of how the very term homophobia
as a discourse centers heterosexuality as the normal” (158)
The keywords in this passage are: problem, remedy, and contagion in
association with “homophobia”, a term which in itself “Others” people within
the gay and lesbian community

25. 5. Interrupting Heteronormativity:
Toward a Queer Curriculum Theory
by:Dennis Sumara & Brent Davis
In summary, the article is based on a premise to discuss that curriculum is
sexualized and heterosexuliazed. Sumara & Davis aim to inquire about what
queer theory can offer to curriculum theory. Moreover the premise, is based on 2
investigations/projects: 1. a project involving a group of gay, lesbian, and
transgendered teachers; 2. Involving teachers and children in grades 5 & 6. Both
projects illustrate findings about sexuality theories.

26. Project 1: involving a group of gay, lesbian, and transgendered teachers
Within this project Sumara & Davis give a text to 8 gay, lesbian, & transgendered
teachers and in doing so discuss the responses they received from all
participants. The results they got from the participants was not what they expected
and they concluded that for example, a gay man may not think like a lesbian
women. Explicitly stated: “In reading and responding to Audre Lorde’s Zani: A
New Spelling of My Name, for example, we discovered that no two members of
our group identified similarly.” Precisely what is most intriguing is: “Not only were
the responses noticeable structured by learned gender differences, they were also
clearly influenced by the members’ racial and ethnic backgrounds (all members
were Caucasian, whereas American).” This discovery asissted in seeing the paper
as a document that could show influential other avenues that bring people to
understand themselves and their identity to the forefront.

27. Project 2: Involving teachers and children in grades 5 & 6
This project, similar to the first, required students and children in grades 5 & 6 to
read a science fiction novel The Giver by: Lois Lowry. The book is about a people
that live in a controlled future where men and women adopt 1 - 2 children and
sexual feeling or “stirrings” are not allowed.The term Stirring, became a topic
amongst the students and in an interview with a student, Margaret, “Don’t worry,
you’ll have them soon. Girls usually get them before boys. Most of the girls in our
class have stirrings, but hardly any of the boys do.” Margaret, revealed vital
information to her being. What causes her stirrings? And while ‘boys may not get
stirrings yet’. Further Sumara & Davis, discuss the importance of boys not feeling
“stirrings” because of the knowledge behind what a stirring is.

28. Curriculum & Sexuality-In Conclusion
Sumara & Davis summarize how sex and knowledge, as complex as they are, can be illuminated within
the curriculum.
Firstly, curriculum theory can and should run deeper in an effort to get to the true essence of sexuality.
Second, a focus on delving into the queer identities and question heterosexuality as its seen as a “...stable
category...”
Third, people are different, curriculum theory in its form should strive to present the differences rather than
show differences from one groups of people to another.
Fourth, curriculum theory can take us to explore the experiences of desire, please, and sexuality because
they do not stop tehre and become complex

29. 6. Conclusion to the Special Issue: Queer of Color
Analysis: Interruptions & Pedagogic Possibilities by:
Lance McCready
This paper is framed around the 2 questions: “(1) How can queer color
epistemologies interrupt hegemonic processes of knowledge production? And (2)
how can these interruptions inform transformative pedagogical work that benefits
queers of color specifically and anti-oppressive educational scholarship more
broadly?” (McCready 515)
The main points in the article can be summarized with the following key words &
terms:
Heuristic, HIV/AIDS, Roland Coloma (academic) & Parrhesia, heteronormativity,
Inclusivity.
I will discuss these words in reference to the article.

30. Heuristic & HIV/AIDS and Teachers
To start, heuristic by definition is: enabling a person to discover or learn something
for themselves (dictionary.com).
McCready illustrates to us how a queer youth of color in an alternative education
showed through a poem the life and death of his brother, his cause of death being
AIDS. Key question that McCready raises from the student and the poem: “How
many teachers trained to administer the formal curriculum would feel prepared to
address issues such as HIV/AIDS, homelessness and racism in their classroom?”
(514) The truth is not many and this is an issue. McCready continues by stating
that state-sponsored curriculum does not delve deep enough to take on giving
queer youth of color the curriculum they need primarily based on their life
experiences.

31. Roland Coloma & Parrhesia
Roland Coloma is an author that McCready brings up in his paper, mainly in
reference to an article he wrote where he brings up Ladlad, the first Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender political party in the Philippines to participate in a national
election (516). Coloma’s reference to Ladlad, lends us a hand in understanding
curriculum from another angle, that being that we can see an educational space
forming at the national level.
Parrhesia- is the practice of truth-telling.
Ladlad is built on Parrhesia and lends us a tool in the way that our curriculum is
set up.

32. Global North vs. Global South with
Queer Studies
With Coloma’s ideas still at the forefront, he suggests that the Global North takes
over the scholarships of Queer Studies, primarily with White gay men. Even with
the rise of the queer of color studies in the 1980’s, Coloma argues that it is not
enough as there still needs to be an exposure of queer studies coming from the
South, that can, in his words: “contribute, enhance, and even intertwine in the
understanding and enactment of Global North projects” (516).

33. Inclusivity
McCready concludes with: “Queer of color epistemologies can help us improve the
lives of queer youth of color in schools, and more generally make schools more
inclusive of all students” (520).