Australian LGBTQ teachers,exclusionary spaces and points of interruption

Abstract

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) teachers are a marginalised group that historically have been absent from research on sexuality and schooling. Rather, much research in the field has focused upon the experiences of same sex attracted and increasingly, gender diverse young people in schools, as well as the delivery of sexuality education. Up until recently, very little research has been carried out that explicitly addresses the experiences of LGBTQ teachers, particularly within the Australian context. This article focuses upon key issues arising from the semi-structured interviews that the Out/In Front team carried out as part of a pilot study that took place between April and July 2013 in the state of Victoria, Australia. We interviewed nine current or former teachers working within primary and secondary education across the public, Catholic and private sectors. This paper focuses upon the notion that LGBTQ teachers exist within a ‘space of exclusion’ that is dominated by discursive mechanisms that (re)produce heteronormativity. We also argue that the Victorian policy context – as well as increasing socio-political tolerance for LGBTQ people within Australia – enables LGBT teachers to interrupt the discursive frameworks within which their professional lives are situated.

Keywords

Foucault heteronormativity homophobia queer teachers

Introduction

This article argues that to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) and to work as a teacher is to occupy complex terrain. We map this terrain in terms of how previous research has framed schooling, sexuality and LGBTQ teachers and outline the political context for LGBTQ teachers working in Victoria, Australia.

Although research with young same sex attracted and gender diverse people continues to dominate research on sexuality and schooling (DePalma and Atkinson, 2009; Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Ferfolja, 1998; Jones and Hillier, 2012; McKenzie-Bassant, 2007; Mutchler, 2002; Rasmussen, 2004; Rivers and Carragher, 2003, Thurlow, 2001; Valentine et al., 2001), there is a growing area of research upon the experiences of LGBTQ schoolteachers. Although such research is located predominantly within the United States (Endo et al., 2010; Griffin, 1992; Harbeck, 1992; Jennings, 1994) and the United Kingdom (DePalma and Atkinson, 2009; Gray, 2013; Nixon and Givens, 2002; Rudoe, 2010), it is also located within Ireland (see Neary, 2013), Nordic countries (see Lehtonen, 2004; Røthing, 2008), and within the Australasian context. The work of Hardie (2012), Ferfolja (2009) and Fefolja and Hopkins (2013) has recently offered insights into the New Zealand and New South Wales (Australia) contexts for LGBTQ teachers, respectively.

The research outlined above has shown us that to exist as a LGBTQ teacher is to negotiate tricky private and professional boundaries (Gray, 2013; Hardie, 2012), to move into the ‘risky business of choosing visibility’ (Grace and Benson, 2000) and/or to dive into the murky waters of understanding oneself as a ‘role model’ to same sex attracted young people (Khyatt, 1997; Martino, 2008; Rezai-Rashti and Martino, 2010). Such professional concerns are compounded by the fact that ‘there are few positive historical narratives from which [LGBTQ] teachers can draw’ (Ferfolja and Hopkins, 2013: 8) and that LGBTQ teachers are often viewed with a suspicion reserved for the criminally deviant (Ferfolja and Hopkins, 2013; Rudoe, 2010) or through an understanding that identifying as LGBTQ is incompatible with the teaching profession (Renold, 2005). We argue here that LGBTQ teachers exist at the intersection of the issues outlined above and that this constitutes a marked space of exclusion within the educational institution of school.

This paper illustrates that schools, despite recent and extensive socio-political change to the lives of LGBTQ people in Australia, continue to be dominated by a heteronormative discourse that assumes the heterosexuality and gender normativity of teachers. The discursive practices that act to reinforce heteronormativity within schools actively exclude LGBTQ identities, rendering them ‘other’ to the hegemonic norms of heterosexual sexuality and normative gender that make up the inherent, normal and preferred sexual and gender identities within schools. We illustrate how LGBTQ teachers continue to inhabit spaces of exclusion within schools but also examine the points of interruption that the LGBTQ teachers in our study brought to their workplaces.

Complex contradictions: Mapping the terrain for LGBTQ teachers

In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault argued that the binary divisions within which individuals are categorised (for Foucault, mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal) marks the exclusion of particular groups of people during particular historical moments (lepers, the insane, prisoners, homosexuals). Surveillance and disciplinary techniques not only keep the excluded other in their place but also shape the way in which they are understood by dominant social groups (Foucault, 1975). If schools are to be understood as social institutions that reflect the social order to which they belong, then the exclusionary spaces that exist outside of them will exist inside. It is in this way that, we argue, LGBTQ teachers have come to inhabit a space of exclusion within schools. The presence of the LGBTQ teacher within contemporary western contexts reflects a society that is not quite accepting, yet not completely intolerant of gender and sexual diversity. The exclusionary space inhabited by LGBTQ teachers in schools is a complex and contradictory one because of the complex and contradictory ways in which gender and sexuality is constructed, understood and enacted outside of schools.

An examination of the way in which non-normative gender and sexual identities are constructed within contemporary schools brings us to another layer of the complex terrain that we occupy when we talk about teaching and sexuality. This layer encompasses the contradictory notion that at the same time as heteronormativity is being actively (re)produced within schools, there is also an increasing awareness of the presence of same sex attracted and gender diverse young people. This has arguably come about because most of the research that has been carried out within the field of sexuality and schooling has focused upon the experiences of same sex attracted young and gender diverse people (DePalma and Atkinson, 2009; Epstein and Johnson,1998; Ferfolja, 1998; McKenzie-Bassant, 2007; Mutchler, 2002; Rasmussen, 2004; Rivers and Carragher, 2003, Thurlow, 2001; Valentine et al., 2001) or upon the content and delivery of sexuality education (Chambers et al., 2004; Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Hilton, 2001; Jones, 2011; Lewis and Knijn, 2002). This work, coupled with the work of political action groups like the Safe Schools Coalition in Australia, School’s Out in the UK and It Gets Better in the USA, has resulted in an acknowledgement of the consequences of homophobia/transphobia for young people within schools and a recognition of the need to protect same sex attracted and gender diverse students from harm and to create safe and supportive learning environments for them.

Contemporary schools are then dominated by a heteronormative discourse that whilst simultaneously acknowledging the risks to the health and wellbeing of same sex attracted and gender diverse young people of being in an environment that vilifies them. Røthing (2008) offers us a way of understanding such a complex and seemingly contradictory set of conditions through her work on ‘homotolerance’. For Røthing, although LGBTQ people are not seen as an equal (or even visible) part of the school community, the school community is tolerant of ‘them’ and wishes to prevent harm coming to ‘them’. Within this paradigm the LGBTQ subject in school remains within a space of exclusion. Schools remain part of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler, 1990) where heterosexuality is the dominant, normalised version of sexuality and is reified within schools. The LGBTQ school subject continues to be forced to exist within spaces of exclusion (Foucault, 1967), a marked presence that is spoken into existence as other to the dominant heteronorm and is positioned as being ‘at risk’ rather than celebrated.

The range of factors outlined above position the LGBTQ teacher within a precarious and contradictory space of exclusion within schools. LGBTQ teachers’ lives are further complicated by a widely held belief that children are innocent and need to be protected from ‘adult’ sexual knowledge (Khyatt, 1997; Renold, 2005; Rudoe, 2010; Sedgwick, 1990), which means that disclosing one’s identity as an LGBTQ teacher may be ‘considered outside the realm of what is appropriate for children to know or discuss’ within schools (Khyatt, 1997: 130). In addition the fear that some kind of ‘gay agenda […] will recruit children to homosexuality’ (Rudoe, 2010: 26) has the potential to further exile LGBTQ teachers into spaces of exclusion.

Still, at the same time as acknowledging that the LGBTQ teacher is a marked presence within schools, it is also important to represent LGBTQ teachers as agentic (Rudoe, 2010), as subjects who are capable of resistance (Ferfolja and Hopkins, 2013; Harris, 2013) and as professionals who actively interrupt the dominant heteronormative discourse of their workplaces. In order to illustrate the ways in which our participants were able to challenge the heteronormative order of their schools, we draw upon the Foucauldian notion of the conditions of possibility (Rose, 1999) whereby ‘ways of speaking truth, persons authorised to speak truths, ways of enacting truths and the costs of so doing’ (Rose, 1999: 19) are put under analysis in relation to LGBTQ teachers. Here, we are concerned with how our participants were able to speak about their lives, both to us and within their workplaces, with the ways in which they performed their identities at work and with the costs, both personally and professionally, of doing so. Here, we follow Francis who argues that,

While we may agree theoretically that the self is constituted through discourse, we still feel ourselves to have agency, moral obligation, and preferences for different kinds of discourse […] describing our lives is part of being a human subject. (Francis, 1999: 391, emphasis in original)

This means that we do not seek to refuse or take flight from the identity categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, rather we engage with the possibilities for ‘undercutting the hierarchical binaries’ (Youdell, 2011: 38) that constitute the professional worlds that our participants inhabit. So although the LGBTQ teachers in our study may have understood their workplaces to be at worst unsupportive or intolerant, at best open-minded or at least ‘homotolerant’ (Røthing, 2008), they were not blind to what Connell (2011) terms the ‘microculture’ of their schools, and demonstrated active resistance, political action, as well as deliberately interrupting the discursive mechanisms that dominated their workplaces. This paper offers an analysis of participants’ experiences that draws upon the lived experience of their working lives and examines the normativities that dominate LGBTQ teachers’ professional lives as well as the possibilities for discursive interruptions. We also reflect upon some of the assumptions made by our teacher participants about the impact that the socio-economic status, location, and community values that are reflected by students at the schools in which they work have upon the way in which LGBTQ identities are understood within them. The following section will examine the policy context of the state of Victoria.

The Victorian context

Within Australia, education is largely a state-based enterprise, with some national influence. There is currently no federal policy protecting LGBTQ teachers and of all of the states and territories, Victoria has the most substantial and supportive policies related to LGBTQ teachers. This specifically includes an extensive Human Resources policy on same sex attracted employees with ‘vignettes’ illustrating, for example, how a principal should handle parent complaints against or the bullying of gay and lesbian teachers on the basis of their sexuality (State Government Victoria, 2010), and a human resources policy on gender identity for teachers that discusses issues such as how gender transition might best be supported (State Government Victoria, 2009).

Within Victorian state schools LGBTQ teachers are recognised and protected. Independent and religious schools are not subject to state legislation in the area of LGBTQ teachers’ rights and religious schools in particular can ask that teachers employed by them sign a document stating that they will uphold the ‘religious ethos’ of the school – failure to uphold this contractual obligation could result in dismissal. Although there is little evidence of LGBTQ teachers being dismissed from jobs in Australian Catholic schools, research by Ferfolja (2005) has shown us that the threat of dismissal has been used to both silence and harass LGBTQ teachers working in the Australian Catholic education system.

There remains a need for research into LGBTQ teachers’ experiences, and how they relate to context. This article contributes to a growing field of research in this area through its engagement with why it is that despite increasing social acceptance of LGBTQ lives within Australia, coupled with state-based political initiatives that offer legal protection to LGBTQ citizens within the workplace, stories of intolerance, homophobia, transphobia and institutional apathy remain.

Theoretical framework

An analytical framework inspired by poststructuralist feminist, queer and Foucauldian theories of gender and sexuality has allowed us to unpack the experiences of our LGBTQ teacher participants. Such an approach enables us to address the complexities of participants’ experiences as LGBTQ educators whose sexual identities are subject to minoritising discursive practices within the workplace.

LGBTQ teacher identity, like all identity, is constructed through the location of the self within a particular discursive framework (Grace and Benson, 2000; Khyatt, 1997; Lasky, 2001). However unlike all identities, specific meanings are attached to the categories ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’ and ‘queer’ and so our subjective experiences of LGBTQ as identity are shaped by the relationship between power and knowledge that (re)produce them as social categories of being (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1976; Paechter, 2007). Within this paradigm, the meanings that are attached to LGBTQ identities are understood in terms of the way in which dominant social structures, in this case schools and education policies, position them as ‘other’ and locate them within spaces of exclusion. Therefore to ‘be’ lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender is to subscribe to an identity that carries particular meanings that are laced with hierarchical power relationships that shift over time and context (Adams St. Pierre, 2000; Butler, 1990).

Within social institutions like schools, disciplinary power is operationalised through processes that act to normalise some identities and mark others (Foucault, 1976; Youdell, 2011), as well as through the knowledges that are valued and promoted within classrooms (or not). Power then actively (re)produces spaces of exclusion (Foucault, 1976) and within schools as social institutions the discursive mechanisms that (re)produce heteronormativity exile the LGBTQ teacher to such an exclusionary space.

Methodology

The Out/In Front pilot study began in March 2013 and, between March and July, nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers who identified as lesbian, gay, transgender and queer. Participants were approached via a Facebook page set up by the Out/In Front research team, the mailing list of a Victoria-based action group for LGBTQ issues in schools and through snowball sampling, including through one researcher’s own professional networks as an ex-school teacher in Victoria. The interviews were transcribed and then coded and analysed thematically in order to draw out emergent themes.

Ethical approval was obtained from all three participating institutions. Participants’ anonymity was assured by removing any identifying place names, schools or other identifying factors. In addition participants either chose or were assigned a pseudonym. Five participants were female and all identified as lesbian. There were four male participants, two identified as gay and two as queer. One male-identified participant is currently transitioning. Five participants were currently teaching within Victorian schools, four taught until recently and currently work within the education sector. All participants were or had been classroom teachers and none had management responsibilities. Six participants worked within Victorian public (government) schools, two within the Catholic system and one worked at a private school for girls (see Table 1).

Table 1.

A portrait of Out/In Front participants.

Participant	Years teaching	Sector	Currently teaching
Bec	5	Public primary	Yes
Catalin	6	Public secondary	No
Chris	24	Catholic secondary	Yes
Jessica	6	Catholic/private secondary	No
Jodie	2	Public secondary	Yes
Margaret	5	Public secondary	No
Michael	4	Public secondary	No
Ned	4	Public secondary	Yes
Simon	9 months	Public primary	Yes

When discussing the data, the term ‘LGBTQ’ is used as an umbrella term to refer to the diverse identities that participants articulated. When referring to individual participants, we defer to their descriptions of themselves. This gives participants agency within our analysis of their experiences and allows for a discussion of their experiences on their terms.

Drawing on the participant data, the remainder of the paper examines how LGBTQ teachers continue to inhabit spaces of exclusion within schools as well as the points of interruption that the LGBTQ teachers in our study brought to their workplaces.

Normativity in schools: Spaces of exclusion for LGBTQ teachers?

We intentionally asked participants about discourses of ‘normality’ within their schools in order to be able to locate (or not) the LGBTQ teacher as ‘the other’ within the normal/abnormal binary that is operationalised within schools across sectors and locations in Victoria. Asking participants about what was considered to be normal within their workplace environment enabled us to examine not only how participants were located within exclusionary spaces within their schools, but also allowed for an analysis of how they located themselves in relation to these norms.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the socio-political context within which our participants worked, the spectre of heteronormativity haunted participants’ narratives about their workplaces. Schools were understood by participants as reflecting the dominant culture that surrounded them, and homophobia and sexism was linked to notions of social class, cultural capital and socio-economic status.

For example, Jodie is 34 and identified as lesbian. She worked as an art and design/metalwork teacher at a public secondary school in semi-rural Victoria. Her position was her first teaching job since graduating as a teacher. Jodie understood her school community as

Very low socio-economic status individuals in this area. There are exceptions but majority are … the great Aussie battler […] they’re not overly academic in any way. They are here mostly for the socialisation process […] there’s a lot of social problems in this school. There’s continuous homophobia, there is continuous racism, sexism especially in my department.

Jodie’s assumptions about the students at her school positions them in a way that connects them to a discourse of nationality and social class: ‘the Aussie battler’, a (white, heterosexual, male) working class hero who rejects the intellectual and exists within a microcosm of sameness. The participant’s understanding of normality at her school furthered this narrative and positioned her students as following a heteronormatively gendered trajectory in life:

Well normal is, if you’re a female […] having acrylic nails, career is certainly not at the forefront at all, it’s more getting maybe some kind of job but really just getting a man […]. If you’re a male, it’s certainly what trade are you in, who’s your wife, do you have a sexy wife, what car do you drive.

To be different within this context is to occupy a space of ontological exclusion. Jodie stated that her (mostly) male students continually question her about her ability, as a female, to instruct them in the fundamentals of metalwork. Her gender-based exclusionary experiences had been constant since commencing her job and as well as feeling other to the social, political and economic norms of her school, she also experienced direct and threatening homophobia from students as the following statement illustrates:

I was playing substitute teacher for a class and there were a group of year nine science boys, practical science, all boys in the class […] I started writing something on the board, I asked one of them to come up the front and write something on the board and ‘dyke’ was written on the board. So at that point I actually walked out and I had the class taken over […] that’s probably the most uncomfortable I’ve ever felt because there was a gender imbalance and that had a huge impact. I was feeling like there’s nothing I can do in this situation, [I felt] helpless, completely helpless.

Jodie’s experiences illustrate the ways in which lesbian teachers are often doubly subordinated within their jobs and are often prey to the twin stigmas of both sexism and homophobia (Rich, 2003/1980). As a woman teaching in a male dominated area, Jodie is perceived as an inauthentic intruder upon a male-only space. This experience epitomises a dominant ‘gender regime’ within schools (Connell, 1995). As a lesbian Jodie occupies a marked space of exclusion, a space where the delicate balance of power that exists between teacher and pupil is inverted (Epstein and Johnson, 1998) and the lesbian teacher faces the threat of, and in this case actual, sexual harassment from the boys that they teach (Robinson, 2000; Skelton, 2001). In addition, Jodie’s experiences of sexism and homophobia at work coupled with her understanding of her students’ attitudes towards her as being linked to social class, cultural capital and socio-economic status suggests that a mutual unintelligibility exists between the participant and her students. Participants who worked in schools with similar socio-economic and social contexts to those described by Jodie articulated similar exclusionary experiences and understood the intersection of social class and homophobia in similar ways.

Jodie described her struggle with the management team at her school and expressed ambivalence about the way in which they handled her call for a whole school approach to tackling homophobic bullying within the school: they do so within the context of ‘sexual harassment’ rather than naming the vilification of LGBTQ people as ‘homophobia’. She stated that:

I feel as though the school is protecting itself. They are trying to protect its staff but ultimately they’re protecting themselves because if there was any genuine concern or understanding of the impact, it would be a very clear system.

By refusing to label homophobic incidents as homophobia the management team at Jodie’s school keep LGBTQ people, identities and issues within a space of exclusion. Such an act erases Jodie’s experiences as a lesbian-identified woman and reimagines the harassment she has endured as sexual rather than homophobic. Jodie’s statement that ‘the school is protecting itself’ reflects this notion, as the school’s refusal to name homophobia means that, as an institution, it is able to leave the ways of being that dominate it relatively uninterrupted, protected. The school has provided a reluctant kind of support for Jodie as a lesbian teacher and for students who are same sex attracted or gender diverse. The experience of ‘reluctant support’ was in contrast to the experiences of participants who felt that they worked in a supportive environment, as the following section outlines.

Schools as inclusionary spaces?

Understandings of what is perceived to be ‘normal’ within particular community contexts shaped the ways in which participants experienced their workplaces. The previous section outlined how homophobia was linked by participants to social class, cultural capital and low socio-economic status. Similarly, participants who worked in supportive schools also related their experiences to the social, economic and community context within which their school was located. Tolerance for or acceptance of LGBTQ teachers was read by participants as being tied to the high socio-economic status and accompanying middle class, left-wing cultural capital of the dominant culture of the school’s locale.

For example, Simon was a beginning teacher in his late 20s who worked as an early childhood teacher at an inner urban primary school whose feeder community the participant understood as, ‘middle-class, high socio-economic, a mixture of professionals and artsy types’. Simon identified as gay and understood normativity within his school as follows:

I think normal in our school is excelling academically. I think there’s a big pressure in that way to be normal in terms of meeting expectations […] parents would be more concerned about academics than other things, than other areas, because they’re very – parents come from professional middle-class backgrounds. They want their children to excel academically.

Simon understood ‘normal’ in his school to be linked more to academic achievement than to a sense of local or national identity. Simon’s experiences act as a direct contrast to Jodie’s whose professional life was dominated by an almost stiflingly localised sense of ‘normal’. This stark contrast may partly be due to the difference in education sectors, however it is also largely due to the way in which participants made assumptions based upon the socio-economic and political composition of the local community.

Simon felt well supported as an out gay man at his school. He discussed an incident that illustrated this when a parent had come to open day and questioned the head about having seen Simon reading alone with children from his class. The parent had asked, ‘Is that allowed?’ and the head had reassured the parent and reinforced Simon’s position as a professional and trustworthy member of staff. However, the incident left Simon ‘shocked’ and he started thinking ‘for the first time’ about the conflation of paedophilia and gay male sexuality that has been part of the historic public discourse around male early childhood and primary teachers (Carrington and Skelton, 2003; Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Jones, 2004).

At first glance it did not seem as though Simon operated within a space of exclusion as a gay teacher: there is little identity-based bullying at his school, posters celebrating diversity are pasted around the building, and there is a supportive head teacher in place. However, although heteronormativity was not overt and did not manifest itself through the discursive mechanisms of sexism, racism and homophobia as illustrated by Jodie’s experiences, heteronormativity was present in more subtle ways, such as parental expectations of their child’s behaviours at school. Simon illustrated this point when he stated that,

Dads like their boys to be boys. They like them to do boys’ things […] but like, the other day, some of my kids, must have been at after-care, one of the women was painting fingernails, and two of my boys had painted fingernails, and I said, ‘Oh, that looks really nice’, just because I was just like, well, why not? What does it matter? They like it. It doesn’t matter. If they like it. And so when I do have discussions with parents, I don’t discuss anything as if it might be an issue. I don’t flag things as an issue.

Parents at Simon’s school, despite their community’s apparent rejection of homophobia, have expectations that their children will behave in heteronormative gender-appropriate ways. This led us to think back to Røthing’s (2008) work on ‘homotolerance’. The local community at Simon’s school is tolerant of LGBTQ people and issues, however ‘they’ are still not part of the community and boys in particular are expected to behave as such by their fathers. This suggests that despite an ethos of tolerance and active strategies in place to counter homophobia and transphobia, LGBTQ people exist within this community in a space of exclusion. Because the conditions of possibility in Simon’s school are favourable towards LGBTQ people and issues, Simon allows children to perform their gender as they wish. The supportive environment in which he works, coupled with his knowledge of the Victorian policy context from LGBTQ teachers, enables him to do this work without fear of repercussion.

‘It sort of finds you even if you don’t find it’: Points of interruption

This section focuses upon deliberate points of interruption to the discursive mechanisms that (re)produce heteronormativity within schools. As outlined earlier these interruptions do not constitute a rejection of the identity categories lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, rather the interruptions contribute to what Youdell (2011) terms the ‘chain of meaning’ of LGBTQ identities within the institution of school.

Many participants felt that there was a need to ‘normalise’ LGBTQ identities within schools and that somehow, simply by being open about their sexual identities, this would happen. Khyatt (1997) has written about the conundrum inherent within such a belief and argues that sheer numbers of people coming out within a particular context does not produce change in and of itself.

Nonetheless, participants in this study deployed a range of strategies that did bring about some change to the schools within which they worked. Previously we have seen how Jodie occupied a space of exclusion within her school and that marked her as other to the heteronormative gender and sexuality regime that dominated her workplace. However, because of her experiences Jodie has brought change to her school. She educated herself about her rights at work and demanded that action be taken to counter both the homophobia she experienced and the students’ constant use of homophobic pejoratives. As a result her school brought in an outside agency to provide staff with professional learning on LGBTQ issues and has implemented a policy that positions homophobia as ‘sexual harassment’. The participant feels that although this has not resulted in a culture change at her school, she has had an effect upon her workplace:

[The] kids don’t have a lot of tolerance really for […] anything that they have to think about or they’re out of their comfort zone, sometimes it gets them offside […] but I can say when I leave this school, I’ve made an impact. It’s just how it’s happened; it wasn’t my intention but I can honestly say I’ve made an impact on this school.

Jodie was enabled by the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Rose, 1999), the socio-political context of Australia as a nation and her own knowledge of the rights afforded to her by the state of Victoria, and was able to interrupt the discursive mechanisms that dominate her workplace. Although this was not her intention when she began teaching, it is an unintended consequence of existing as a lesbian teacher within semi-rural Victoria, a context where LGBTQ people and issues are not visible and are, as Jodie’s experience illustrates, marginalised and discriminated against.

Jodie did not set out to change her school, as she states, that is ‘just how it happened’. Other participants however were more deliberate and set out to interrupt or challenge the heterosexual hegemony of the institution of school. This was framed as a political non-choice by participants who articulated a sense of inevitability about being LGBTQ and being a teacher. For example Catalin, a 37-year-old ex-secondary teacher currently working within sports education stated that,

I think the personal is political […] if there was no homophobia in the world it wouldn’t be an issue but the fact that you are a lesbian working in a space with young people when the stereotype is that LGBTI people are paedophiles, it’s almost a political move in itself. It is about challenging the world and changing it and putting your hand up and saying we are not supposed to be in [schools] but I’m going to put myself there anyway.

Here, Catalin articulates a strong sense of political duty that echoes Renold’s assertion that ‘in many ways identifying as lesbian or gay is either experienced or reported more widely […] as being incompatible with being a teacher’ (Renold, 2005: 28). Catalin demonstrates active, agentic resistance to a discourse that positions her sexuality as incompatible with her sexuality and she understands this, in and of itself, as political. Participants who understood themselves as politically active expressed a desire to interrupt the education system in similar ways to Catalin.

The most striking example of such political sensibility came from Ned, a secondary school teacher who had been working at a school in the outer suburbs of Melbourne for four years. Ned was in his 20s and identified as queer. At the time of interview, Ned was gender transitioning from female-to-male. Ned understood himself as an activist and, like Catalin, felt that being an activist was inseparable from being a teacher. He stated that:

I guess like my politics are quite important to me, it became more important, probably from the second I started teaching […] if you are that kind of a person, it keeps your head up in that environment. It sort of finds you even if you don’t find it.

The inevitability of the politics of identity impacting upon the adult LGBTQ subject working within education is illustrated by Ned’s statement where it becomes an ontological position. There is no intersection between politics and teaching here, they are one and the same and it is the understanding that teaching is a political act that ‘keeps [Ned’s] head up’ at work.

Ned was aware that being a trans teacher was to exist within a space of exclusion. However his belief that his journey would profoundly affect his students kept him in the profession despite his fear of exclusion:

I definitely put off taking hormones because I was afraid of what would happen, and I didn’t want to give up teaching […] And I think that publicly transitioning, as painful as it like is in an ongoing sense at work, is like something that’s going to affect the kids that I come into contact with. And so yeah, I mean, making the decision to stay with teaching despite it being not the easiest decision to make, yeah, is definitely influenced by that sort of belief.

The management at Ned’s school were supportive to an extent and Ned talked about one staff member in particular who educated himself and was ‘willing to learn’ about trans issues. It was, however, the students that Ned was most concerned with and the thought of affecting students positively that kept him going. The participant was seemingly rewarded for this and was supported by his students in a more meaningful way than by his colleagues. His students set up a Facebook page in support of his transition and were perceived by the participant to be more open to his transition than were his colleagues, as the following statement illustrates:

I gave [the students] permission to ask questions as long as they were respectful and that kind of thing. And it’s been fantastic […] I mean, they all call me Mr.________ and they use male pronouns, and even if they slip up, they’re not – they’re not bad about, like – when staff members slip up, they tend to be really like make it, it’s all about them. It’s all about, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m trying, it’s just so hard’, that kind of thing. Whereas with kids, they’re like, ‘Sorry’, ‘Oh, all right’. And just, let’s move on.

It is the adults in Ned’s professional life then who complicate his experience of his workplace. The conditions of possibility at Ned’s school meant that although he occupied a space of exclusion within his school, he was able to interrupt the way in which his students understood the possibilities of gender in terms of its stability and performance. Here, a pedagogical moment acts as an interruption to the discursive mechanisms that dominated Ned’s school and he finds empathy and understanding in the young people he teaches. However, that his colleagues were not as understanding or tolerant of Ned and his identity has important implications for the ways in which we understand the spaces of exclusion occupied by LGBTQ teachers. Part of the exclusion comes from the ways in which adults view young people as in need of protection from the ‘dangerous knowledges’ (Britzman, 2000) of sex, sexuality and gender diversity and who prevent LGBTQ content and education from occurring, thus (re)producing the binaries of normal/abnormal; harmless/dangerous that characterise the spaces of exclusion inhabited by LGBTQ teachers in schools.

Conclusion

The socio-political landscape of Australia and its apparent acceptance of LGBTQ lives (Ferfolja and Hopkins, 2013) is characterised by what Røthing (2008) describes as ‘homotolerance’, that is, that the heterosexual majority understand the LGBTQ minority as, ‘close to “normal”, or (almost) “just like us”’ (Røthing, 2008: 258). Nonetheless, we have demonstrated that LGBTQ teachers exist within institutional spaces of exclusion in schools in Australia. The teachers in our study were not imprisoned by these spaces however, and were able to deliberately interrupt the discursive mechanisms through which the dominant understandings of gender and sexuality were (re)produced within their schools. The pilot work of the project did have its limitations, however, in that we were not able to compare the teachers’ experiences to those of teachers in contexts with less supportive policies in place. Further research is required to gain such comparative data in the future, through a nation-wide study that compares data across different states and territories, locations and contexts.

The study shows that in spite of policy that protects LGBTQ teachers within the state of Victoria, LGBTQ issues are still being addressed within their schools within a reactive paradigm, due to direct and explicit homophobia. Gender and sexual identities need to be understood in all their complexity within social institutions such as schools in order to fulfil our potential as questioning, learning and knowledgeable beings. Policy makers should consider making lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues part of a real social justice agenda, one which abandons the ‘tick box’ mentality that characterises many of the current guidelines in this area. This work might begin in teacher education when teachers are training and continue through professional learning into their professional lives. This would contribute to the creation of schools as safe spaces for everyone, teachers and pupils alike.

None of the participants in our research have dismantled, rejected or taken flight from binary identity categories, nevertheless they have altered the ‘chain of meaning’ (Youdell, 2011) within their schools through their interruptions to the dominant discourses that shape the institutional practices of their workplaces.

Footnotes

Funding

Out/In Front: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Teachers in the Workplace was funded by a Monash University Faculty of Education Engagement Grant Scheme (EGS) and by the School of Education at the University of New England.

Emily M. Gray is a Lecturer in Education Studies in the School of Education, RMIT University, Australia. Emily’s interests within both research and teaching are interdisciplinary and include sociology, cultural studies and education. She is interested in questions of gender and sexuality and with how understanding these identity categories are lived by individuals and experienced within social institutions. Her key research interests therefore lie with questions related to gender, social justice, student and teacher identity work within educational policy and practice and with wider social justice issues within educational discourse and practice.

Anne Harris is a playwright and Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts Education in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia, and publishes in the areas of creative and cultural studies, diasporic and refugee identities, and gender and sexualities. She is an alumna of Young Playwrights Inc. and a graduate of New York University where she studied with Arthur Miller, Tony Krushner and Maria Irene Formes, among others. She also continues collaborations begun in Central Australia, where she lived and worked for seven years.

Tiffany Jones is Senior Lecturer in Contextual Studies in Education in the School of Education, University of New England, Australia. She researches and publishes on GLBTIQ issues in education, policy, homophobic bullying, youth wellbeing and suicide, sexuality education, values education, and health and social policy and is the author of Understanding Education Policy. Dr Jones has received a range of awards including various postgraduate scholarships, the Griffith University Medal, the Association for Women Educators Award for Girls’ Education, the ATLAS International Institute for Qualitative Methodology Highly Commended Dissertation Award and a UNE Partners Early Career Researcher Grant.

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