Constructing Sexualities and Gendered Bodies in School Spaces: Nordic Insights on Queer and Transgender Students

254 Pages·2017·3.379 MB·English

by  Jón Ingvar Kjaran (auth.)

CONSTRUCTING
SEXUALITIES AND
GENDERED BODIES
IN SCHOOL SPACES
Nordic Insights on Queer
and Transgender Students
Jón Ingvar Kjaran
QQUUEEEERR Series Editors
SSTTUUDDIIEESS && William F. Pinar
EEDDUUCCAATTIIOONN Nelson M. Rodriguez,
& Reta Ugena Whitlock
Queer Studies and Education
Series Editors
William F. Pinar
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The College of New Jersey
Ewing, New Jersey, USA
Reta Ugena Whitlock
Department of Educational Leadership
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA
LGBTQ social, cultural, and political issues have become a defining fea-
ture of twenty-first century life, transforming on a global scale any number
of institutions, including the institution of education. Situated within the
context of these major transformations, this series is home to the most
compelling, innovative, and timely scholarship emerging at the intersec-
tion of queer studies and education. Across a broad range of educational
topics and locations, books in this series incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and intersex categories, as well as scholarship in queer theory
arising out of the postmodern turn in sexuality studies. The series is wide-
ranging in terms of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives and methodologi-
cal approaches, and will include and illuminate much needed intersectional
scholarship. Always bold in outlook, the series also welcomes projects that
challenge any number of normalizing tendencies within academic scholar-
ship from works that move beyond established frameworks of knowledge
production within LGBTQ educational research to works that expand the
range of what is institutionally defined within the field of education as
relevant queer studies scholarship.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14522
Jón Ingvar Kjaran
Constructing
Sexualities and
Gendered Bodies in
School Spaces
Nordic Insights on Queer and Transgender
Students
Jón Ingvar Kjaran
School of Education
University of Iceland
Stakkahlíð
Reykjavík
105 Iceland
Queer Studies and Education
ISBN 978-1-137-53332-6 ISBN 978-1-137-53333-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53333-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931682
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F
oreword
This book makes an important contribution to the field of queer studies
in education. It provides significant insights into the institutionalization
of heteronormativity and cisnormativity in the Icelandic schooling system
and its impact on the lives of queer and transgender students. Kjaran’s
engagement with Foucault’s work on heterotopic spaces in schools leads
him to generate productive insights into queer subjectivities, and deepens
our understanding of schools as potential sites of queering and counter
hegemonic interventionist practices. While Kjaran’s study provides knowl-
edge about the lives of queer and transgender students in the Icelandic
school system, where research on this population is scant, and contributes
to our understanding of the marginalization, stigmatization and invisibil-
ity of gender and sexual minorities in the schooling system in this context,
his research has far wider implications in terms of its theoretical and philo-
sophical significance. He provides us with another window on the use of
Foucauldian- and Butlerian-inspired theory in education with its capacity
to deepen our understanding of the complexities involved in constituting
and negotiating queer/trans subjectivities and spaces in heteronormative
and cisnormative schooling contexts. Moreover, Kjaran provides empirical
insights into the limits of certain post-gay renderings of schools as pro-gay
sites that are somehow cleansed of homophobia.
Kjaran’s philosophical engagement with critical questions of utopia, as
they pertain to reflections on the Nordic context in terms of its progres-
sive policies and laws regarding human rights legislation endorsing the
livability and recognizability of same-sex relationships, is also a mark of his
distinctive contribution to the field of schooling genders and s exualities.
v
vi FOREWORD
He draws attention to the need to be always attentive to the gaps between
policy and practice, which signals the importance and need for research
that is committed to policy enactment in schools (Ball et al, 2012) in its
capacity to generate more nuanced understandings of the operations of
heteronormativity and cisnormativy in the everyday lives of students and
educators in these institutional contexts. However, while Kjaran sheds
light on the workings and persistence of heteronormativity and cisnor-
mativity in Icelandic schools, in spite of this Nordic nation’s progressive
policy context, he is careful to position queer and transgender students
as agentic in carving out spaces of recognizability and livability that chal-
lenge familiar and reductive tropes of victimhood (Rasmussen, 2006). In
this sense and in reading the book I couldn’t help but return to Muñoz
(2009) and his reflection on queer utopias as concrete possibilities and
potentialities that need to be situated historically, and invocation to take
heed of struggles and political activism that precede the present moment
in envisaging a social imaginary for embracing gender and sexual diversity:
Concrete utopias are relational to historically situated struggles, a collectiv-
ity that is actualized or potential … Concrete utopias can also be daydream-
like, but they are hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even a solitary
oddball who is the one who dreams for many. Concrete utopias are the
realm of educated hope … Hope along with its other, fear, are affective
structures that can be described as anticipatory. (p. 3)
Embodied in the voices of queer and trans youth that are represented in
the pages of this book are definite signs of such anticipatory hope and
possibility that speak to utopian possibilities of envisaging a queer and
trans livability and recognizability (Butler, 2004) in the education system,
one which has been built on a history of queer and trans activism but
which can never ever be fully determined or realized in advance (Stryker
& Silverman, 2005; Carter, 2010; Valentine, 2007). It is in this sense
that Kjaran’s book speaks to an ethical commitment to continue to docu-
ment the lived experiences of queer and trans youth in the school system,
with the view to a consideration of anticipatory possibilities for think-
ing beyond the horizon of heteronormative and cisnormative constraints
for envisaging an alternative social imaginary for living gender and sexual
diversity in all of its shifting and indeterminate temporality.
Wayne Martino Ph.D.
FOREWORD vii
Faculty of Education and Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist
Research
The University of Western Ontario, Canada
References
Ball, S., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy
enactments in secondary schools. Abingdon: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Carter, D. (2010). Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay revolution.
New York: St Martin’s Press.
Muñoz, J. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity.
New York: New York University Press.
Rasmussen, M. (2006). Becoming subjects: Sexualities and secondary school-
ing. New York: Routledge.
Stryker, S. (2008). Transgender history. Berkley CA: Seal Press.
Stryker, S., & Silverman, V. (2005) Screaming queens: The riots at
Crompton’s cafeteria (Documentary) KQED/Independent Television
Productions.
Valentine, D. (2007). Imagining transgender: An ethnography of a cat-
egory. Durham: Duke University Press.
A
cknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who saw me through
this book: to all those who provided support, talked things over, read, wrote,
offered comments, allowed me to quote their remarks and assisted in the edit-
ing, proofreading and design. I would especially like to thank Professor Wayne
Martino for encouraging me in writing this book and giving me constructive
comments and good feedback through the whole writing/production pro-
cess. Above all I want to thank my participants, who shared their experiences
and trusted me with their stories. I dedicate this book to them and indeed
queer youth globally, that still need to struggle with heterosexism and het-
eronormative culture in schools. I also wish to thank my publisher, Nelson
Rodriguez, for giving me the opportunity to publish this book within the
Queer Studies and Education Series. Moreover, I wish to personally thank the
following people for their contributions to my inspiration and knowledge and
other help in creating this book: Sólveig Friðriksdóttir for preparing the index
and reading through the bibliography and other references, Rafn Kjartansson
for proofreeding the book at different stages, my two former PhD supervisors,
Professor Ingólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson and Guðrún Kristinsdóttir for their
constructive feedback and support, Professor Debbie Epstein for her sup-
port and encouragement during my Ph.D-studies, and Þorvaldur Kristinsson,
writer and independent researcher on queer lives and reality, for inspirational
and fruitful discussion in relation to queer issues in Iceland and worldwide. I
would also like to express my thanks to everyone that gave me their kind per-
mission to use or quote their material in this book. And last but not the least,
I express my gratitude to the students, staff members and administration of
the two high schools where I did my fieldwork when conducting the research
for this book.
ix
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Schooling of Gendered Bodies and Sexualities 13
3 The Nordic Context: LGBTQ Civil Rights and 
Educational Policies on Gender and Sexual Minorities 59
4 T he Institutionalization of Heteronormativity in Schools 97
5 E thical Relationality and Heterotopic Spaces in Schools 147
6 Queering Schools, Queer Pedagogy 177
7 Beyond Queer Utopias and Post-gay Agendas 203
Bibliography 211
Index 233
xi