Discourses that silence: teachers and anti-lesbian harassment

Tania Ferfolja

43 citations0/0 files storedDiscourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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Gender, Sexuality, and Education Gender and Feminist Studies LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy

Abstract

This paper examines the way lesbian identities are silenced in schools particularly through anti-lesbian harassment. Based on research with 30 self-identified lesbian teachers working across high schools in New South Wales, Australia, the discussion illustrates how various responses to anti-lesbian harassment silence the recognition of such harassment, contributing to the invisibility of lesbian identities in schools generally. The argument highlights the shifting nature of both the subject and power. It illustrates how discursively (re)positioning harassers re-establishes and reinforces the harassed teacher's personal and professional power; however, this simultaneously serves to rationalise the harassment. This silences the awareness of the prevalence of anti-lesbian abuse by individualising the behaviour and pathologising the harasser, while ignoring broader socio-political discourses that maintain the frequently subordinated location of lesbian subjectivities.

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References

1994Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook 1991Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 1976The History of Sexuality 1988Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory 1995An Introduction to Social Constructionism 1990History of Sexuality Vol. 2, Introduction 2003Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood 1991Foucault and education: disciplines and knowledge

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