Jennifer Ingrey

This dissertation investigates how secondary school students understand their own gendered subjectivity and the discursive and material processes that contribute to it through visual artifacts (photovoice projects) the students created of school washroom spaces. Drawing primarily on Foucault’s analytics of disciplinary space and the heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), I view the washroom space as producing and perpetuating gendered power relations that invert, suspect, or neutralize those existing in exterior spaces. Deploying both a Foucauldian and Butlerian analytics, these visual student responses are framed as confessional, queering or (de)subjugating (Stryker, 2006) and cartographic products, and hence, understood in terms of the insights they provide into the complex practices of self-constitution and gender subjectivities. Furthermore, through Britzman’s (1998) queer reading practice and critical readings of voice, the analysis of these queer and cartographic products h...

This paper derives from a larger study examining the gendered striations embedded in school washrooms but focuses on two photovoice projects that explore the implications for student understanding and subjectivation.  Thematically linked through elements of lightness and darkness, I examine these photographs through the theoretical frameworks of the closet (Brown, 2000), the heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), as well as Foucault’s (1975) disciplinary space which position them as material precursors to the issues of exposure and vulnerability for all gendered bodies in the space of the public school sex-segregated washroom.  As a queer methodology, or pedagogy, photovoice values student knowledge and pursues a social justice agenda.

This book advances a broad constellation of critical concepts situated within the field of queer studies and education. Collectively, the concepts take up a cross-section of scholarship that speaks to various political, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical concerns. The “concepts approach” with its accessible and non-imposing format, a distinctive element of the volume, will appeal to educators when introducing students to complex discourse and ideas in the field, and scholars will find the volume’s breadth of coverage, including the wide range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches taken up across the chapter essays, useful to think with for their specific research projects. Given the ongoing global centrality of sociocultural and political developments related to the topic of LGBTQ in the twenty-first century, the concepts in this volume, and the issues raised by each, will have wide international appeal among researchers, scholars, educ...

A survey of key contributors and theoretical tensions in the applications of queer studies in education is purposefully partial namely because of the impartiality embedded in the nature of ‘queer’, a verb whose action unsettles, dismantles and interrogates systems of normalization, beginning with heteronormativity and heterosexism. Queer theory emerged in the 1990s before influencing education, including both elementary and secondary schooling; however, queer is complex in that it involves the signifier or signified term: it is both the integration of queer content in curriculum as well as the practice of queering educational practices (i.e., curriculum, pedagogy and practice). The queering of pedagogy involves the queering of the educational subject, both teachers and students. In such a survey of queer in education, the ontological groundings for queer are important to consider given the paradoxical nature of queer to unpack and unsettle whilst maintaining its hold on an identity ...

YOUNG PEOPLE REGULARLY INHABIT THE UNREGULATED SPACE OF THE SCHOOL WASHROOM, which has consequences for their gendered subjectivities that often go unexamined. Asking students to express their experiences and understandings of what occurs in this gendered space is the first step to achieving gender justice in schools, or what Martino (2012) calls, " a transgender imaginary " , one that denaturalizes gender as derived from biological sex, and that honors the local and specific knowledge of " 'sissy-boys', 'feminized fags', and gender-variant individuals " and so on, to gain insight into " the embodied experience and dynamics of gender expression " (p. 223). A school that makes room for various gendered subjectivities and identities, that allows students to question the gender binary, is aligned with anti-transphobic and anti-oppressive pedagogies (Kumashiro, 2000). In this paper, I showcase and analyze students' photovoice projects commenting on the school washroom and other school spaces to access their subjugated knowledge (Foucault, 1980), those knowledges " that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity " (p. 82). In pursuit of a socially just project, I access student voice through photovoice, which I conceive as having the possibility to be a queer (if not genderqueer) methodology because of its ability to destabilize " the spaces it flags " (Noble, 2005, p. 165). This paper will take the form of a photo essay derived from a larger project on secondary school students' understanding of gender expression and its intersections with the gendered and social space of the school washroom. The photographs are the works of two particular students under the pseudonyms, Callie E. and Trina D., who explicate their understandings of their school space through photovoice (Thomson & Gunter, 2007). Thematically, I divided the students' photographs into two categories according to both the photographic content, as well as the students' own explanations of their pictures. These categories are, light, or, what was visible, and dark, or, what was shadowed. Callie specifically stated that the light and the shadows were important to her; in her photography class held at the school, she had learned how to capitalize on these elements through the development process.