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Sexualities
2016, Vol. 19(3) 286–303
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460715583602
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Article
Australian LGBTQ
teachers, exclusionary
spaces and points of
interruption
Emily M Gray
RMIT University, Australia
Anne Harris
Monash University, Australia
Tiffany Jones
University of New England, Australia
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 deliv-
ery 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
Corresponding author:
Emily M Gray, School of Education, RMIT University, Bundoora, VIC 3083, Australia.
Email: emily.gray@rmit.edu.au
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 normativ-
ity 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.
Gray et al. 287
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 hetero-
normativity 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
288 Sexualities 19(3)
wishes to prevent harm coming to ‘them’. Within this paradigm the LGBTQ sub-
ject in school remains within a space of exclusion. Schools remain part of the
‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler, 1990) where heterosexuality is the dominant, normal-
ised 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 dom-
inant 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 pro-
fessional 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
Gray et al. 289
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 intoler-
ance, 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 experi-
ences of our LGBTQ teacher participants. Such an approach enables us to address
290 Sexualities 19(3)
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 sub-
jective 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’ les-
bian, gay, bisexual or transgender is to subscribe to an identity that carries par-
ticular 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 tea-
cher 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 cur-
rently 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).
Gray et al. 291
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 dis-
cussion 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 par-
ticipants 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
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
292 Sexualities 19(3)
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 bat-
tler’, 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 domi-
nated 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
Gray et al. 293
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 ‘reluc-
tant 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:
294 Sexualities 19(3)
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 achieve-
ment 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 com-
position 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, pos-
ters 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 homo-
phobia 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 homo-
phobia, 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
Gray et al. 295
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 know-
ledge 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 mech-
anisms 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 iden-
tities, 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
296 Sexualities 19(3)
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 pol-
itically 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 sec-
ondary 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 sub-
ject 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.
Gray et al. 297
Ned was aware that being a trans teacher was to exist within a space of exclu-
sion. 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 defin-
itely 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 con-
cerned 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 under-
standing 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, sexu-
ality and gender diversity and who prevent LGBTQ content and education from
occurring, thus (re)producing the binaries of normal/abnormal; harmless/danger-
ous that characterise the spaces of exclusion inhabited by LGBTQ teachers in
schools.
298 Sexualities 19(3)
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 inter-
rupt 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 poli-
cies 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 insti-
tutions 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 con-
tinue through professional learning into their professional lives. This would con-
tribute 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 mean-
ing’ (Youdell, 2011) within their schools through their interruptions to the dom-
inant discourses that shape the institutional practices of their workplaces.
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.
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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 institu-
tions. 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 sex-
ualities. 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
302 Sexualities 19(3)
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.
Gray et al. 303
