Irina Schmitt

‘Normally I should belong to the others’: Young people’s gendered transcultural competences in creating belonging in Germany and Canada:

Young people create differentiated models of belonging. Their strategies reflect contexualized competences — the capacity to understand and negotiate the influence of national frameworks in specific situations. Theories that understand belonging as processual and intersectional offer useful frameworks with which to analyse this. This article uses data from empirical research with young people in a German secondary school and a Canadian junior high school to highlight young people’s situated competences and their critique of the respective frameworks of belonging.

„It’s just a name“? Young people in Canada and Germany Discuss ‚National‘ Belonging

Both Canada and Germany are multi-cultural societies, but with different approaches to this reality.2 In this chapter, I explore the question of how young people understand and define their social positions, and how much the process is influenced by the societies they live in. I use material from a qualitative research project in one German and one Canadian secondary school. Young people with and without migrant backgrounds3 shared their experiences and analyses with me, discussing issues of belonging on a number of levels. Drawing on some of these discussions, I seek to show if and how structural differences on the nationstate level materialise in the way participants reproduce different discourses on ‘national’ belonging. Statements of the Canadian participants are central here, and complemented by the comparative perspective of their German counterparts.

School policies, gender-sex-sexuality and ethno-cultural re-production in Sweden, Canada and Germany

In this text, I analyze the role of gender-sex-sexuality in school policies in Sweden, Canada, and Germany. Policies concerning young people’s negotiations of gender-sex-sexuality in schools draw on specific understandings of societal belonging and cohesion. Invariably such policies are part of national discourses regarding values and norms of gender and relationships, informed by concepts of ethnicized belonging. Furthermore, the analysis of school policy texts allows insights into conceptualizations of young people and their societal role in the context of ongoing neo-liberal re-configurations of schools and societies.

Theorising intersectionality and sexuality

In the light of the critique that intersectionality demands and reproduces static identity categories, the editors of Theorising intersectionality and sexuality, Yvette Taylor, Sally Hines and Mark E. Casey, and with them the authors of the 12 texts in the book, assert the usefulness of ‘claims making, entitlements and “rights” of situated sexual citizens’ (3), if it is connected to empirical work and engages actual experiences. In their introduction, the editors work with the mixed bag of historicity that the term intersectionality invokes. Theorising intersectionality and sexuality has its starting point in the reflection that while the vocabulary of intersectional analysis is expanded, sexuality easily is conflated into gender, or counted as possible but ultimately ignorable ‘etc.’, haunting what so easily gets positioned as the margins of feminist analysis. Thus, raising the question of the role of sexuality in intersectional work is questioning researchers’ and activists’understanding of how we negotiate the differences among feminists and our differing understandings of feminism. (Less)

Introduction: Heterogeneity, Belonging and Learning in Schools

In this part of the book we address the role of education for ethnicized and otherwise minoritized children and young people, and these children’s and young people’s influence on discourses and practices of education. From these debates, the position of institutionalized education as a major factor in nation re-building is more than obvious. That nations interpellate specifically gendered subjects is not new; schools are spaces for the re-production of very specific subjectivities in very specific national contexts.

Extending Family: Lesbian Baby Boomers, Heteronormativities, Sexual Citizenship, and Kinship

Lesbian Motherhood. Gender, Families and Sexual Citizenship is a nuanced analysis of the legal and discursive frameworks as well as of personal negotiations of lesbian mothers in Sweden and Ireland. Róisı́n Ryan-Flood carefully negotiates the notions of conformity and resistance, with the aim to open up these notions that are often applied in everyday encounters and theoretical presentations of lesbian mothers. The author specifically positions her study with lesbian “baby boomers”, women who chose to have a family with a lesbian partner. This distinguishes LesbianMotherhood. Gender, Families and Sexual Citizenship from earlier studies that mainly reflected the experiences of women who had children from earlier heterosexual relationships and positions the “baby boomers” as a reflection of changing cultural and legal conditions. If lesbian families are described as a continuous reinvention of naturalized kinship patterns, heterosexual families, Ryan-Flood explains, might by inversion be considered the “natural” ahistoric norm against which lesbian families have to work. She engages this simplification by offering the idea of heteronormativities, acknowledging (national) specificities of heteronormative policies and practices. This deconstruction of the notion of heteronormativity as nationally situated makes the comparison between Swedish and Irish experiences all the more interesting. Ryan-Flood’s analysis of the research participants’ family patterns makes this text a valuable contribution to current negotiations of kinship and sexual citizenship in family studies, childhood studies, welfare studies, and gender studies. It offers a useful reflection of the specific policy contexts and how these frameworks inform the research participants’ decisions in very profound ways. With Lesbian Motherhood. Gender, Families and Sexual Citizenship, Ryan-Flood takes the reader through four central aspects of lesbian parenting: the search for a donor; the interactions in “public” space, such as in medical institutions; the negotiations of parenting roles and parent identities; and, finally, the construction of family and parenting patterns. Ryan-Flood gives a careful presentation and analysis of gendered legal and socio-cultural contexts in Sweden and Ireland. For this study,

Teaching sex, queering 'youth'? Thinking about education through sexularism and homonationalism

In political debates, ‘children’ and notions of ‘the best interest of the child’ are used to dramatize and limit societal negotiations of sexuality and sexualities (Pellegrini, 2009). At the same time, “There has been a tendency amongst those who research marginalized youth to view social groups or identities as fixed units of analysis” (Loutzenheiser, 2007). With my presentation, I will engage notions of ‘youth’ with Joan W. Scott’s concept of sexularism (Scott, 2009) and Jasbir K. Puar’s problematization of homonationalism. Scott’s sexularism is a reflection that of secularism’s cultural indebtedness to specifically gendered Christian cultural histories and frameworks. Homonationalism addresses how queer subjects actively enter into the imaginary of the nation, and how the nation is using its imagining of queer communities in the intensification of power (Puar, 2007). How can these concepts help in reading and analysing education frameworks, and in analysing notions of ‘youth’? (Less)