Abstract
In Helen Sauntson’s latest book, her stated aim is to extend, into the school setting of the United Kingdom as well as the United States, the study of discriminatory sexuality discourses in English. This move is certainly justifiable and welcome because very often attitudes and ideologies in schools lag behind progressive legislation and educational policy. On the one hand this is a somewhat open secret, but where Sauntson’s study adds so much value is in its meticulous execution and the uncovering of precisely how this lag is perpetuated by discourses both in schools and in curriculum documents.
It soon became clear to me, while reading the book, that the target readership is educationalists as much as it is linguists, and this makes a great deal of sense considering the book’s topic and aims. Where the book is highly instructive for a specialist audience of linguists is in its goals to stimulate dialogue between queer linguistics and applied linguistics, and to enable resistance to the pervasive problem of discriminatory sexuality discourses. This contribution takes the form of a theoretical framework that Sauntson calls Queer Applied Linguistics (QAL).
Sauntson prefaces the explication of QAL by asserting that queer theory is best placed to explain how identity categories come to have salience and come to be difficult to challenge in linguistic interaction. QAL is framed by Sauntson as an approach that uses queer linguistics within Critical Applied Linguistics (CAL), informing CAL about how to address social concerns with inequalities around gender and sexuality. It is a framework for examining how normative and non-normative constructions of sexual identity are enacted through and inscribed in language practices. Normativity is seen to be unstable precisely because it is temporally and spatially contingent (i.e., what is normative differs over time and across space). These theoretical commitments serve to provide a more nuanced sense of context, and they also buttress the social-justice-oriented approach of Sauntson’s QAL approach by emphasizing the potential for discursive interventions into the discriminatory practices highlighted in the accounts of LGBT+ students.
The linguistic analytical frameworks that she incorporates into her QAL project, allowing for the characteristics of different data sets (e.g., documents versus classroom conversations) are: (a) Tactics of Intersubjectivity, (b) Appraisal Analysis, (c) Corpus Linguistics, and (d) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The author thereby joins a growing consensus that the combination of corpus approaches with critical discourse approaches gives us an enhanced sense of both the effects of discourse and the cumulative nature of those effects. Tactics of Intersubjectivity is a methodology developed specifically with gender and sexuality in mind, viewing identity as emergent in interaction and providing three dyads of relational tactics for identity construction. Each dyad of tactics relates intersubjective dimensions, which are “similarity” (tactics of adequation and distinction), “realness” (tactics of authentication and denaturalization), and “power” (tactics of authorization and delegitimation) (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). Furthermore, by adding Appraisal Analysis to the mix, Sauntson argues that she is better able to analyze the feelings and attitudes of participants, thus augmenting the strength of the Tactics of Intersubjectivity model in investigating the role of language in the construction of sexual identities in relation to localized contexts. The Appraisal system (Martin & White 2005) provides a framework that can be used to categorize the encoding and enacting of social relationships and experiences through language. Its combination with Tactics of Intersubjectivity is one that Sauntson argues “[. . .] permits a more detailed view of how normativity, temporality and spatiality are discursively materialized and experienced” (54). An example that nicely ties the two types of analysis together is the student Hannah, who laments that LGBT+ identities were never talked about in her school. Sauntson analyzes this piece of data as Hannah’s perceived “lack of authentication” (90) of these identities. Here, and elsewhere in the data presented, this avoidance is appraised as “negative veracity” (113) and therefore “dishonesty” (62) about the existence of LGBT+ identities, drawing on the Appraisal framework. Thus we can see that these ambitious methodological goals of combining frameworks (also including corpus linguistics and CDA) certainly do obtain in the analysis and can provide inspiration for other researchers.
As part of framing the book’s focus and explaining the research design in chapters 1 and 2, Sauntson emphasizes that her school-age participants impart experiences of being targets of discriminatory practices directly aimed at regulating their sexuality, not just policing masculinity, as has sometimes been the case in past research. For example, the word gay has been used to bully or influence boys who are perceived to be enacting femininity, and it can make no reference to homosexuality at all in those cases. Sauntson’s point is that her study provides abundant examples where sexuality is the focus, either exclusively or partly. Data were collected from 2010 to 2016 in the United Kingdom and United States, and chapter 3 focuses on interviews with twenty LGBT+ individuals, ages 13 to 25, who were either attending schools or colleges or had recently left. What emerges is that interviewees overwhelmingly did not see schools as safe spaces. LGBT+ identities are not being authenticated in schools according to their accounts, while homophobic identities are being authorized via inaction in the face of homophobic bullying. That is, by not reacting against discriminatory practices, the school and teachers were seen by the research informants to be in collusion with the bullies. Furthermore, LGBT+ identities are being positioned in schools, not as authentic and legitimate, but as “a problem,” marginal, and/or different. For instance, one bullied informant was asked by his school to leave, presumably because this move was easier than confronting an entrenched bullying issue. In other cases, LGBT+ students felt differently treated and “othered” in discourse, whether by peers or teachers, and this was often the result of avoidance of the topic of sexual identities and silence about non-heterosexuality. The students suggested ways to more actively authenticate their identities via explicit discussion of LGBT+ issues and, importantly, via curriculum changes and the school-wide addressing of LGBT+ issues across the curriculum. It is interesting that when happiness and security is experienced around sexuality, it mostly emerges from having the support of individual teachers as well as access to support organizations outside of school. However, on the whole, the capacity of teachers to respond to sexuality-oriented bullying is deemed by the student informants to be low. As the author asserts, perhaps one message here is that even when a sensible whole-school approach, in which all teachers, administrators, and student leaders receive training, is absent (a pervasive problem), teachers can still make a difference despite acting alone, and this is by supporting LGBT+ individuals and challenging homophobic practices at key moments.
Teachers interviewed in chapter 4 also identified a chasm between policy and practice. The analysis demonstrates that US and UK educators have had a very similar experience, one in which homophobic bullying is tacitly sanctioned in their schools rather than condemned, and sexual diversity is rendered illegitimate by other teachers as well as many students’ families. This is compounded in the United Kingdom by a lingering, but inaccurate, sense of illegality around sexual orientation discussion in schools, which is a vestige of past legislation that is now long gone. From my perspective, the most interesting finding from the teacher interview data was that many of the teachers interviewed felt quite confident about their personal competence to tackle homophobia and to contribute to the legitimation of sexual diversity in schools and classrooms. However, other factors get in the way. More extensive training in how to address sexual diversity, though needed, is deemed by teachers to be nowhere near enough on its own. Instead it emerges that changes to the school curriculum, and its corresponding examination regime, would permit teachers to be more “independent and creative” in addressing LGBT+ issues. Lack of mention of LGBT+ identities and issues in the curriculum is deemed to be the main problem because this absence makes it much harder to prioritize provision of necessary training let alone its active use.
Turning attention to UK curriculum documents in chapter 5, the author combines CDA and corpus linguistics techniques (leaving aside ToI and Appraisal for this chapter) to analyze the English / English Language Arts and SRE / Health Education curriculum documents. The corpus techniques deployed are word frequencies, keywords, and concordance analyses. Sauntson’s corpus-based CDA reveals, in agreement with the interviewed teachers, an “illocutionary silencing” (163) around sexual diversity in the English curriculum. Sauntson argues convincingly that this silencing perpetuates heteronormativity, and it is as damaging as any overt homophobia. “Sexuality” is seen to indeed be a remit of the curriculum, but Sauntson’s careful analysis reveals that marriage and sexual activity are implicitly associated in these documents with reproduction, and the overwhelmingly positive values ascribed to marriage and reproduction, covertly, act to exclude anything but HETEROsexuality from the category “sexuality.” The “promotion” of “sexual orientation” (161) is explicitly prohibited, but it is not specified which sexual orientation is being referred to. Heterosexuality is, in fact, overtly promoted in the curriculum documents, so it becomes obvious quickly that heterosexuality is not being categorized as a sexual orientation. What we witness as readers of Sauntson’s analysis is the methodical uncovering of feats of avoidance that have left many traces in the curriculum texts.
Chapter 6 shifts focus to actual classrooms, to look at how curriculum is being transformed into teaching. We learn that sex is presented as happening more often for negative reasons than positive ones, girls are accorded little sexual agency in comparison with boys (cf. King 2014), and boys are positioned as predatory and the only ones who should be expected to experience any physical pleasure from sex. On the other hand, girls are expected to talk about sex from a risk-oriented framing, but boys are not expected to discuss it at all. Rather it is expected that they will just want it and do it. It is interesting to me that these results do not entirely parallel my own findings in New Zealand, where boys’ and girls’ sexual agency is more actively problematized in the sexuality education classroom (King 2014) and the curriculum does not avoid the topic of LGBT+, and the + includes intersex people (King 2016). The resulting extensive discussion of varied sexual and gender identities as well as sex variation (see also King 2019) supports Sauntson’s assessment that inclusion in the curriculum is key.
The main point the book demonstrates, as Sauntson argues, is that linguistic issues must not be ignored or downplayed in research about sexuality in formal education contexts because discriminatory practices now happen largely at a discursive level. This makes it much more difficult to challenge them. Suggested ways forward encompass expanding training to include linguistic coaching in how to discursively construct schools as safe spaces. Curriculum needs to be evaluated for language as well as content to avoid the status quo in which there is an exclusive focus on heterosexuality, in its guise as “sexuality,” to the exclusion of LGBT+ identities. Hopefully this book and its messages, rigorously researched and carefully argued, will ultimately take education providers a few steps away from complacency and thus a few steps closer to compassion and justice.
