Kathleen Quinlivan

Queer pedagogy, educational practice and lesbian and gay youth

Our article explores the potential that queer paradigms and pedagogies hold for affirming sexual diversity in secondary schools. In understanding the operation of schools as heteronormalising institutions, it is possible to move beyond viewing queer youth as a disenfranchised minority group requiring reparation within an equity framework (a process that we suggest operates simultaneously to legitimate heterosexuality and to reinforce the abnormality of same-sex desire). Using research that we have undertaken with lesbian and gay youth in New Zealand secondary schools, and drawing on queer, post modern and feminist theoretical threads, we explore three (hetero) normalising processes experienced by the queer participants in their schools; the maintenance of silences, the pathologisation of (homo)sexualities, and the policing of gender boundaries. We close by exploring how several queer pedagogical features - creating venues, abnormalising the normal, dissolving the homo/hetero binary and forming alliances -...

Whose Problem is This

Abstract This paper is concerned with how the needs of lesbian and gay youth are situated and defined in educational contexts and the intended and unintended consequences of framing their needs in particular ways. It is based on a case study of a senior college in New Zealand where a strategy for dealing with gay and lesbian youth was framed within a climate of market-driven educational reforms and where queer youth were viewed within the discourse of being “at risk.” This enabled the school to promote itself as providing a caring and nurturing environment without jeopardizing its position in the marketplace. However, this strategy had the unfortunate consequences of re-pathologizing lesbian and gay students and constructing their sexuality as a personal problem.

Popular culture as emotional provocation: the material enactment of queer pedagogies in a high school classroom

Drawing on the notion of popular culture as a form of queer emotional provocation, in this paper I suggest that attending to the material enactment of queer pedagogies in context enables an understanding of the importance of attending more fully to the emotional ramifications of queer pedagogies. Working within the context of a research project intended to explore the possibilities of destabilising normalising representations of sexualities and genders in a Year 12 New Zealand high school Health classroom, I explore one of several instances of emotionality that characterised the study, and its effects. Despite our best intentions, in the moment, the students, their teacher and I as a researcher experienced challenges in working with the emotional provocations that queer pedagogies engendered. I close by suggesting that attending more closely to the emotional implications of queer pedagogies would have enabled us to mine their pedagogical possibilities more fully.

Who's afraid of sex at school? The politics of researching culture, religion and sexuality at school

This paper explores the methodological politics of researching at the intersections of sexuality, culture and religion in secondary schools. It draws on experiences during a project concerned with how to address cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand. The paper focuses on two methodological sticking points, one occurring inside academia and the other outside, in schools. The first coheres around the process of gaining ethics approval from multiple institutional committees and the second accesses schools for participation. These sticking points are conceptualized as effects of a set of discursive and material constraints which are idiosyncratic to school-based sexualities research. We argue that discourses of sexuality and young people are mobilized in both spaces and intersect with a social moment of ‘risk anxiety’ in ways that shape the methodological possibilities of the research. These discourses serve to constitute sexualities research as ‘risky’ and ‘controversial’, an image which impedes the generation of new knowledge in the field. By rendering challenges of this research visible and discursively deconstructing the reasons for them, we refuse to dismiss school-based sexualities research as ‘too hard’. Instead, we aim to keep this topic firmly on the educational research agenda by alerting researchers to its challenges so they may prepare for them.

Crafting the Normative Subject: Queerying the Politics of Race in the New Zealand Health Education Classroom.

This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes, we critically queer how the Māori concept of hauora is deployed in the intended and operational NZ Health curriculum to shape the raced subject. Despite the best intentions of curriculum developers and classroom teachers to utilise Māori ways of knowing to meet their obligations within a bicultural nation, we argue that the notion of hauora is domesticated by being aligned with normalising individualistic notions of well-being that reflect the Eurocentric neoliberal individual enterprise subject. Palatable notions of Māori epistemologies as cultural artefacts and iconography drive that ‘inclusion’. The ‘cunning politic’ of (bicultural) recognition legitimates Māori ways of knowing in ways which privilege whiteness – reproducing rather than disrupting networks of power and dumbing down Māori epistemologies.

In Search of Critical Pedagogy in Sexuality Education: Visions, Imaginations, and Paradoxes.

This article is about the purposes and the processes of teaching comprehensive sexuality education to diverse communities. We argue that establishing an educational response to addressing diversity in sexuality education involves challenging and interrupting current dominant forms of authority, subordination, and systems of hegemony prevalent in the teaching practices of this subject. We argue that critical pedagogy (influenced by the Frankfurt school of thought and developed by Freire 1974, 1973; Giroux 1988, 2003; and Kincheloe 2004) is a vehicle to explore and expand existing teaching pedagogies and cultural investments in sexuality education, as well as a way to contribute toward more effective teaching and student learning in this subject area. The turn to critical pedagogy in this article is an acknowledgement that the dilemmas of the secondary classroom and the questions of what becomes of sexual knowledge in that space are too big to ignore. Conservative pedagogies still reign in school-based sexuality education. Educational standards in this subject area are still strictly associated with risk knowledge (McWilliams 1996) and normative ideals of sex, sexuality, and gender are pervasive in the teaching practices of this subject (Allen 2007; Rasmussen 2006).

‘Getting It Right’? Producing Race and Gender in the Neoliberal School Based Sexuality Education Assemblage

This chapter explores the im/possibilities of engaging with knowledges about race and gender in school-based sexuality education within neo-liberalism. Dilemmas from an Australian and New Zealand research project investigating contemporary knowledges about religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes are explored. Utilising de-colonial studies, queer, and post-humanist theories, I map the operation of a colonising and normative ‘getting it right’ assemblage operating across classroom and focus group sites, and what it produces. I explore some tentative post-humanist and de-colonising pedagogical approaches for engaging with and working the knowledges about race and gender that were produced in focus groups, and suggest some (admittedly challenging) possibilities that they could hold for ‘working’ sexuality education knowledges in schools within a neoliberal era.

A Radical Plurality: Re-thinking Cultural and Religious Diversity in Sexuality Education

This chapter engages with debates about addressing cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education. It argues Sharon Todd’s concept of radical plurality offers a reconfiguration of the pedagogical encounter for sexuality education students, by disrupting a view of cultural and religious diversity as a set of identity characteristics which inevitably engender classroom conflicts. Instead, the idea of a radical plurality sets a different pedagogical scene. It means encountering the pedagogical space of education beyond instrumental terms and as an unpredictable site, ‘where we cannot know … what the future holds and what subjects will unfold in its midst—subjects both unique and different, in relation’ (Todd, Stud Philos Educ 30: 511, 2010). As a new form of pedagogical ethics, it may constitute a radical proposition for the future of sexuality education.

Homophobia, transphobia, young people and the question of responsibility

ABSTRACT Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask – What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educational responses that suggest a remedy in advance of the enactment of perceived bullying. Our paper draws on research conducted by the authors in four such schools, two in Australia and two in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It is a deliberate turn away from focusing on who should be held to account for homophobia and transphobia.

Meeting at the crossroads: re-conceptualising difference in research teams

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to attempt to theorise difference as encountered by a team of six diverse researchers interested in addressing cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education. Drawing Todds (2003, 2011a, b) concepts of “the crossroads”, “becoming present” and “relationality” in conversation with Barads (2003, 2007, 2012) ideas around relationality and intra-activity, the paper explores how “difference” in team research might be re-conceptualised. The aim is to theorise difference, differently from Other methodological literature around collaborative research. Typically, this work highlights markers of difference based on researcher identity (such as gender and ethnicity) as the source of difference in research teams, and examines how these differences are worked through. The aim of this paper is not to resolve difference, but understand it as occurring in the relational process of researchers becoming present to each other. Difference that is not understood as the product ...