Publication: Centering Schools in LGBTQ Politics

I have a new chapter in a collection Teaching LGBTQ Politics. Three colleagues had the idea of collecting chapters from folks addressing all kinds of elements of how to teach LGBTQ politics in higher education programs. For me, this was an opportunity to advocate for a particular segment of politics that I think gets ignored: politics within and about educational institutions. So the chapter, “Centering Schools in LGBTQ Politics” was born. (I’m happy to share a copy, just email me).

This interest spilled out of my primary censorship research. As I was exploring the arguments to remove books from libraries, whether public or school, I became interested in broader elements of activism around schools. As I engaged in archival work on censorship, I also started to collect materials related to queer educational activism and I figured the first place I would deploy this was in my LGTBQ Politics class where about 1/3 of the class now looks at educational activism and school politics (including higher education). The chapter essentially lays out my argument for this approach beginning with Margot Canaday’s now classic The Straight State where she argued that the federal government was instrumental in creating the gay/straight binary and entrenching it in American politics. To my mind, schools are one of the secondary institutions that enforce this entrenchment through the continued normalization of straightness and the othering of queer identity, in effect the public school system is the Straight School.

Queer educational activism since around 1970 has sought to challenge this in many ways. I outline three themes that I explore in class. Teachers themselves took the first steps to challenge the straight state asserting their right to be out not only as a matter personal to them but also to help students who were suffering. Then I turn to some discussion of student activism. Queer students in the late 1980s and early ‘90s began to challenge their own school environments. Faced with significant abuse from other students, to say nothing of institutional authroities, queer students organized and pushed back seeking protection, space, and a right to their public identity. Then I close with a look at curriculum. This is the briefest part because until 2010 it was all pretty awful. Only in the 2010s do we see some substantial movement towards inclusive education that, of course, has come to a crashing halt in the Republican war on education.

All in all, this was a fun piece to write and I’m happy to see it finally published. It also got my favorite response ever in peer review where the reviewer announced they had never included schools before and plan to start now. The rest of the collection is even better and is full of tips and interesting ways to incorporate LGBTQ existence into courses. This is especially important as we face the most powerful anti-LGBTQ movement in nearly two decades.