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Possibilities and Tensions in Queer and Trans Studies in Education
Growing out of a series of discussions and gatherings over the course of more than two years, Bridging the Rainbow Gap is a collection of chapters and response essays that take up key tensions, gaps, and possibilities in queer and trans scholarship in education. Working across K-12, higher education, and other education disciplines, the authors in the volume take up themes of identity development, ethnography, young adult literature, queer joy, queer potentiality, ideology, emerging issues in trans studies, whiteness in queer studies, and futures in queer and trans studies. Collectively, the book serves as an invitation into generative conversations about what queer and trans studies are, what they can be, and what they might do in education.
Possibilities and Tensions in Queer and Trans Studies in Education
Growing out of a series of discussions and gatherings over the course of more than two years, Bridging the Rainbow Gap is a collection of chapters and response essays that take up key tensions, gaps, and possibilities in queer and trans scholarship in education. Working across K-12, higher education, and other education disciplines, the authors in the volume take up themes of identity development, ethnography, young adult literature, queer joy, queer potentiality, ideology, emerging issues in trans studies, whiteness in queer studies, and futures in queer and trans studies. Collectively, the book serves as an invitation into generative conversations about what queer and trans studies are, what they can be, and what they might do in education.
Abstract
In this chapter, the author responds to and expands upon Gutzwa and Owis’s chapter on building bridges between K-12 and postsecondary trans studies. The author praises their engagement with positionality while interrogating the burden that minoritized authors bear to wrestle with positionality politics in the first place. The chapter asks how offering educators the opportunity for deep self-reflection might shift the hidden curriculum in schools. The author argues that trans studies could become more radical and transformative by including early childhood students and settings. Young children, their families, and their educators are not insulated from societal, institutional, or educational transphobia and must be supported and considered as equally as K-16 students and teachers. Finally, the author answers Gutzwa and Owis’s call to “imagine the future of trans studies in education” by offering potential ways that trans studies can navigate educational divides.
Abstract
Conjuring concepts of queer time and assemblage theory, this response to Prieto and Mayo’s chapter “Identity Development from High School through College: Considering Queer Adolescence across Contexts” highlights Prieto and Mayo’s excellent analysis of identity development theories. The chapter response adds further illustration of how queer growth is a process that builds beauty, empathy, kindness, and love to the life of the queer person. Further, this chapter firmly supports the importance of this kind of study of queer identity development as a life-saving endeavor, noting that understanding the transition from high school to college for queer people, especially in light of fluid identities intersecting with other identities such as race, can help address a lack of queer elders in some communities.
Abstract
In this chapter response, the author explores the arguments in Slovin and Schey’s chapter, “Queer(ing) Educational Ethnography within and beyond Schools,” to imagine collaborative approaches to research that ensures equitable, humanizing schools for racially diverse queer and trans youth. The author acknowledges her perspective as a practitioner researcher and how Slovin and Schey’s queer(ing) educational ethnographies across contexts relates to the tensions and constraints of her dual role. Notably, because Slovin and Schey assert that ethnographic projects are shaped not just by context, but by social location and how a researcher is read by participants and gatekeepers, the author of this response reflects on the challenges and opportunities of her practitioner study that examined YA literature and media by and about racially diverse LGBTQIA+ people. In conclusion, the author was moved by Slovin and Schey’s chapter to envision approaches to practitioner inquiry that feature the brilliance of youth resistance and agency to advance knowledge about teaching and affirming queer and gender diverse youth at the intersections of multiple identities.
Abstract
In the conclusion, the editors provide their analyses of the themes that have been attended to in the edited volume’s chapters. The conclusion chapter articulates how bridging the gap present in queer and trans studies can prove to help move these areas of research forward. Moreover, they outline recommendations for researchers and educational practitioners hoping to utilize the lessons from this text in their work. The conclusion also incorporates the editors outlining additional areas of exploration that can be further examined from this interdisciplinary perspective.
Abstract
The authors observe in the form and process of how people engage in conversations about racism, even and perhaps especially in queer spaces, something of the archetype of confession. In this chapter, the authors analyze these confessions of whiteness through the frameworks of Foucauldian confession, performativity, non-performativity, settler moves to innocence, and embodiment. The authors then collectively analyze these confessions as liturgical acts of orthodoxy in queer spaces, and call for a move toward a queer unorthodoxy in organizing around racial justice.
Abstract
In this chapter, the authors describe the utility of queer and trans young adult fiction within the college classroom. The authors, one studying secondary education contexts and the other studying higher education contexts, engage in a scholarly conversation on how they each have used young adult fiction, both in teacher education and in higher education and student affairs graduate preparation courses. Bridging the gap between K-12 and higher education and between undergraduate and graduate classrooms, the authors focus on the ways that they have used young adult fiction to help prepare students to work with queer and trans students in their future roles as teachers or student affairs professionals. The chapter concludes with future (re)imaginings of how queer and trans young adult fiction can be used across different educational contexts within the classroom. The authors include suggestions for pedagogical approaches and specific texts focused on queer and trans youth.
Abstract
This chapter explores queer and trans student identity development across high school and higher education contexts. Most early theories recognize the development of identity across the lifespan. Nevertheless, the K-12 and higher education literature on queer student identities and experiences does not often adopt the same approach: K-12 scholars rarely consider what comes next for high school students, and higher education researchers seldom center precollege experiences in their work. Further, much of the LGB identity development scholarship has not adequately contended with power, embraced fluidity, or considered multiple dimensions of identity. Literature on trans identity development has been particularly absent, as have models that include pansexual, asexual, and queer individuals. To address this gap, the authors examine queer and trans students’ identity exploration experiences in both high school and collegiate settings. The authors begin with a brief introduction to relevant student development theories then expand upon our own queer student experiences and connections to theory. Next, the authors present student narratives to explore how high school experiences inform identity development in college. The authors conclude with the ways existing theories help us to make sense of these experiences and point towards the need for new, critical and poststructural models.
Abstract
For decades, queer educational ethnographies have played an important role in interrogating both the experiences of queer and trans youth and the cisheteronormativity of schooling. In this chapter, the authors explore the critical conversations broached and expanded by this scholarship. The authors pay particular attention to what shifts have occurred for queer(ing) ethnographic praxis when scholars have taken it up across different learning contexts within and beyond schools. Focusing on methodological and empirical shifts, the chapter traces how queer educational ethnographies in multiple types of sites approach learning about queer and trans youth and the structures that shape their lives. Motivated by the authors’ curiosities and their participation in queer educational ethnography, the authors close by reflecting on future possibilities for this field of inquiry.