The Life and Politics of Passing: Gender, Professionalism and the Queer Teacher
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2020-04-20
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Abstract
There is a dearth of research that considers how discourses of professionalism intersect with gender and sexual diversity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) teachers in a Canadian context. The Alberta Teachers’ Association released its first resource aimed to support LGBTI teachers in early 2018, suggesting that gender and sexually diverse teachers are just starting to gain visibility within their professional organization. Through autoethnography, Institutional Ethnography, and Critical Discourse Analysis, this thesis examines how LGBTI teachers experience and perform their gender in response to conceptualizations of teacher professionalism that dictate queerness—particularly “visible” queerness—as contrarian to the neutral subjectivity that teachers are expected to uphold. With the growing relevance of queer-affirming spaces in school, such as Gay-Straight or Queer-Straight Alliances, it is necessary to examine possibilities of a queer professionalism and changing expectations for professional practice in queer spaces. LGBTI teachers in Alberta need more than recognition from their professional organization and this research begins to conceptualize a queer professionalism for teachers that breaks the bounds of heteronormativity in order to support and celebrate gender and sexual diversity broadly within Canadian schools.
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Anderson, J. L. (2020). The Life and Politics of Passing: Gender, Professionalism and the Queer Teacher (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.