interrogating book 14/6/09 4:31 pm Page i

INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN
PRIMARY SCHOOLS:
THE WORK OF THE NO OUTSIDERS PROJECT
interrogating book 14/6/09 4:31 pm Page ii
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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY
IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS:
THE WORK OF THE NO OUTSIDERS PROJECT
edited by
Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson

Trentham Books
Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling. USA
interrogating book 14/6/09 4:31 pm Page iv

Trentham Books Limited

Westview House 22883 Quicksilver Drive
734 London Road Sterling
Oakhill VA 20166-2012
Stoke on Trent USA
Staffordshire
England ST4 5NP

© 2009 Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.

First published 2009

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photo by David Williams

ISBN: 978 1 85856 458 6

Designed and typeset by Trentham Print Design Ltd, Chester and

printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge

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Contents

Introduction • vii
Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson

Chapter 1
Putting queer into practice: problems and possibilities • 1
Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson

Chapter 2
Seeking a queer(ying) pedagogic praxis: Adventures in the
classroom and participatory action research • 17
Fin Cullen

Chapter 3
Lessons in praxis: thinking about knowledge, subjectivity
and politics in education • 35
Deborah Youdell

Chapter 4
‘Vanilla’ strategies: compromise or collusion? • 51
David Nixon

Chapter 5
Speaking the unspeakable in forbidden places:
addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
equality in the primary school • 67
Alexandra Allan, Elizabeth Atkinson, Elizabeth Brace,
Renée DePalma and Judy Hemingway

Chapter 6
Toys, pleasures, and the future • 85
Susan Talburt

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Chapter 7
Bodies and minds: essentialism, activism and strategic
disruptions in the primary school and beyond • 95
Elizabeth Atkinson and Andrew Moffat

Chapter 8
A democratic community of practice: Unpicking all those words • 111
Renée DePalma and Laura Teague

Chapter 9
No Outsiders: Exploring transformations at the intersections
of communities of practice • 133
Elizabeth Brace

Note on contributors • 151

Acknowledgements • 154

References • 155

Index • 171

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Introduction
Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson

F
rom September 2006 to December 20081, members of the No
Outsiders research team explored ways in which heteronorma-
tivity operates in primary schools and classrooms. Our goal was
to interrupt these processes. The project took its name from a state-
ment made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the context of the heated
debate over homosexuality within the Anglican church community.
Tutu proclaimed, ‘Everyone is an insider, there are no outsiders – what-
ever their beliefs, whatever their colour, gender or sexuality’ (25
February 2004). The title of the project is deliberately ambivalent. On
one hand, it echoes Archbishop Tutu’s insistence that there are no out-
siders, while on the other, it reminds us that the effect of normalisation,
whether in relation to race, class, gender, disability, sexuality or other
features of identity, is to convey to outsiders that they have no place in
‘our’ society: a message conveyed not only by explicit acts of dis-
crimination but also by simply doing nothing. The No Outsiders project
aimed to support teachers in challenging that message within their own
schools.

Directed by Elizabeth Atkinson and Renée DePalma, the project was

funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, RES-062-
23-0095) to permit collaboration of the University of Sunderland with
the University of Exeter, the Institute of Education (University of
London) and 15 primary schools across England. By the second year of
the project, it had expanded to include a total of over 40 participants at
16 sites, including a nursery and a local authority.

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Over the nearly three-year lifespan of the project, beginning with inter-
viewing university researchers and contacting potential schools in
Spring 2006, through the school-based inquiry to the final editing of
this book in the Spring of 2009, the project has grown, shifted and com-
plexified in ways we could not have imagined when we wrote the initial
funding bid. Yet this very unpredictability is in a way what we expected
and hoped for. Drawing upon a methodological framework of Partici-
patory Action Research (PAR, described in detail in Chapter 8), we
insisted from the beginning that research would be designed according
to an ecological perspective, based on local realities and practices and
the particular interests of team members. This perspective also meant
that we as researchers would consider ourselves as part of the system
we were studying.

We started with the following broad general research objectives:

■ to add to the understanding of the operation of heteronormativity

– the normalisation of heterosexuality to the exclusion of any other
identities – in school contexts
■ to develop effective means of challenging this heteronormativity
■ to create a community of practice within which teachers can
develop effective approaches to addressing sexualities equality
within the broader context of inclusive education
■ to enhance teacher professional development and autonomy
through action and critical reflection

The team collated a resource pack drawn from existing published

materials, including videos, posters and books depicting gay and les-
bian characters, same-sex parents and non-gender conforming prota-
gonists. Whole-school training was provided by the project diversity
trainer (Mark Jennett) and the project also funded performers, artists,
workshops facilitators and documentary film-makers. In collaboration
with university researchers, teacher researchers developed specific
areas of investigation arising from their own interests and interroga-
tions of everyday practice. This has by no means been a straightforward
process, and it is the inherent tensions and complexities that we dis-
covered along the way that are explored in this book. Over the course of
the project we figured out how to articulate the questions that we, as a

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INTRODUCTION

team, were trying to answer. Taken as a whole across the entire project
team, these areas of focus can be summarised in the following ques-
tions:

■ How can sexual orientation be addressed for children in ways that

are relevant to their experience and growing understanding of per-
sonal identity, love and family diversity?
■ How can this work be extended across and beyond the curriculum?
■ Can literature and the creative and performing arts be particularly
powerful in drawing upon the imagination to help broaden under-
standings and shift attitudes?
■ How does transgender equality relate to gender equality, and how
might gender equality work in primary schools go beyond chal-
lenging a ‘blue for boys, pink for girls’ discourse to question gender
binaries?
■ What kinds of preparatory work are helpful, in terms of staff and
administration as well as parents and community?
■ How can parents’ concerns be addressed, both proactively and as
they arise?
■ How can coalition-building be developed between marginalised
groups who may not previously have seen each other as allies?
■ How can teachers’ own sexual identities and gender expression
support or constrain sexualities equality work in the classroom?
■ How can sexualities equality be incorporated into the values and
ethos of a Church school, and into the inclusive tenets of Islam?
■ How might lesbian and gay teachers act as role models for pupils?
■ How might queer theory inform classroom practice?

Practice at each research site was designed as part of and in response to

these lines of inquiry. Defining these particular questions was an im-
portant part of the research, and we have collected project teachers’
responses to them in another volume, entitled Undoing Homophobia in
Primary Schools, also to be published by Trentham. Underlying these
questions, however, we began to explore deeper lines of inquiry, related
to subtler and less tangible themes: themes of silence and speaking out,
faith and culture, leadership and role-modelling, personal and emo-

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

tional investment, gay rights/liberal humanist and queer perspectives,

safety and risk-taking, the possibility (or otherwise) of a queer peda-
gogy, and intersections between (queer) theory and practice. These are
the themes which we explore in detail in the present volume.

in the opening chapter the editors reflect on the fundamental tension

between the power of destabilisation offered by queer theory and the
emancipatory promise of strategic identity-based critical pedagogy.
Cullen explores the potential for a queer praxis within the spaces of
school, specifically analysing how teachers engaged with different
kinds of activism and theory. Youdell considers the relationship be-
tween the various conceptual tools, political modes and political goals
taken up within and beyond the project in terms of public and media
representation.

Nixon, too, examines ways in which the project work has been taken up
in public representation. He applies a geographic perspective on safe,
troubled and dangerous spaces, and considers what may be lost in em-
bracing safe – what he calls ‘vanilla’ – practice in potentially dangerous
contexts. Allan et al also take a geographical perspective, analysing
what can happen when the formerly unspeakable is finally spoken
within the carefully bounded spaces of schools. Talburt focuses on
school and its implicit discourses of futurity and the Child, and ques-
tions whether these spaces are so fundamentally un-queer as to pre-
clude the possibility of a ‘queer pedagogy.’

Atkinson and Moffat take up the theme of identity politics and queer
destabilisations of identity that has run throughout the project, in a
more personal exploration of ways in which they have experienced and
managed the deployment of their own lesbian and gay identities within
and beyond their project work, as a university researcher and teacher
researcher respectively. DePalma and Teague also analyse how project
members’ own sexualities came to fall within the research gaze of the
project, focusing on how researchers and teachers came to negotiate
the terms of power within this ‘democratic community of practice.’
Brace explores how the community of practice model has provided
opportunities to transform practice, both our own and that of others,
through sometimes difficult border negotiations with other practice
communities.

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INTRODUCTION

Throughout the book, the project members, teachers and university

researchers are consistently referred to by our first names, even when
our words and actions are being considered as project data and we are
in the position of research subjects. We have chosen not to use pseudo-
nyms because we understand that, as members of a collaborative re-
search team, we are all researchers and research subjects alike. Some of
the people and organisations who have collaborated with us (for
example, Jay Stewart from Gendered Intelligence (www.gendered
intelligence.co.uk) have also chosen to be identified by their real names.
We have drawn heavily for data not only on our personal research
journals, field notes and transcripts of interviews, but also on our email
correspondence and the crucial ongoing discussions we have had
throughout the project on the discussion forum within the team-
members’ section of the project website: a forum in which key issues
arising within the project were teased out, explored and analysed. Ex-
cerpts from these discussions are occasionally lightly edited for
grammar and spelling, but we have attempted to keep as much of the
original conversational style as possible.

This dialogic process throughout the project has been crucial to

deepening our understandings of the project work and developing the
multiple perspectives collected as chapters here. If it is true that we
have all been subjects of this research, it is also true that we have all
been co-researchers and co-authors of the research publications that
have come out of the project. We would like to thank all the members of
the No Outsiders research team, those who are officially recognised here
as authors and also those whose contributions are not officially credited
with authorship, but which are no less valuable.

Note
1 The project was originally funded for 28 months to December 2008, although it
received a 3-month administrative extension to March 2009. The project’s work has
continued since the end of the funding period, but the focus of this book is on the work
which took place up to December 2008.

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1
Putting queer into practice:
problems and possibilities
Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson

This chapter explores a theme which recurs in different forms throughout this
book: the tension between the destabilisation of norms offered by queer theory
and the consciousness-raising and potential emancipation offered by identity
politics and related practice. Looking first at the comparative safety offered by re-
course to new government requirements and guidelines in carrying out sexualities
equality work, the authors go on to examine the possibility of moving beyond these
neoliberal discourses and to ask what might constitute a queer practice. Recog-
nising the heterogeneity within the project team and the importance of
acknowledging different stances and motivations among the team members, the
authors demonstrate how this heterogeneity was played out through the mobilisa-
tion of a range of different discourses and practices during the course of the
project. They consider what needs to be unlearned if a real unsettling of sex and
gender binaries is to be achieved.

Introduction

I
n the No Outsiders project, we have explored how gender, sex and
sexuality are conflated in the process of constructing ‘appropriate’
gendered behaviours and preferences for boys and girls, so that
sexism, homophobia and transphobia are all deployed in the policing of
heteronormativity (DePalma and Atkinson, 2007a). While at times we
have focused separately on gender identity (DePalma, 2009) and sexua-
lity (DePalma and Atkinson, 2009), queer theory, with its emphasis on

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

destabilising categories of sex, gender and sexuality, permits a more

complex interrogation of how sex, gender and sexuality intertwine in
heteronormative processes.2

As project designers, we envisioned the No Outsiders project as an alter-

native to the discourse of victimisation and tolerance underlying
traditional UK-based anti-homophobia efforts (DePalma and Atkinson,
in press). We sought to answer the question, ‘What would it take to
teach queerly?’ We set out not only to interrogate the heteronormativity
implicit in schools but to explore how these processes might be inter-
rupted through critical pedagogical practices.

During the course of the project we developed a more complex under-

standing of the tensions between queer interrogations and classroom
teaching, between queer uncertainties and emancipatory practice. In
this chapter we explore these productive tensions. On one hand, we
examine the essentialising risks of an identity-based project: what
(hetero)sexist stereotypes might be propagated by role-model
approaches based on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)
identity politics? On the other hand, we examine the possibilities
afforded by strategically deployed identity work: in what circumstances
can identity politics be useful, and who might be harmed by an insis-
tence on fluidity and non-unitary identities?

The comfort and support of government guidance and the

(neoliberal) ideological strings attached
The increasing concern with homophobic bullying in schools in the UK
and abroad indicates a readiness to recognise sexualities equality, yet
government policy and guidance tends to reduce this to an anti-homo-
phobia and anti-transphobia – and more explicitly, a general anti-bully-
ing – stance (Department for Children Schools and Families, 2007;
Department for Education and Skills, 2002; Department for Education
and Skills and Department of Health, 2004; Home Office, 2008), a dis-
course we all tend to appropriate when we communicate with govern-
ment bodies or with the general public through the popular media.
While it has not necessarily been our aim to meet government require-
ments in this work, it gives our project teachers added confidence and
security to know that what they are doing supports them in meeting
their statutory obligations. Such a position has been eloquently sum-

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PUTTING QUEER INTO PRACTICE: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

marised by Alan Luke (2006), who identified the role of the critical edu-
cational researcher and activist as finding the spaces in policy and
policy-making in which critical work can be done.

Nevertheless, government support can be something of a double-edged

sword. As Ellis writes in his critique of Stand up for Us: Challenging
homophobia in schools (Department for Education and Skills and
Department of Health, 2004), the careful editing and ‘low-key’ release of
this document contribute to an overall discourse of (silent) tolerance:
Stand up for us is a plea for tolerance that just doesn’t even speak about
what is to be tolerated never mind trying to develop teachers’ and students’
understandings of how heteronormativity or compulsory heterosexuality
creates the very conditions in which homophobia is produced. (Ellis, 2007:
21)

In this sense, we recognise that by helping teachers to cast their No

Outsiders project work in terms of the existing government guidelines
we may be offering them the security to engage in professionally risky,
ground-breaking equalities work (DePalma, 2009), but that this may in
itself steer teachers away from work which might go beyond the scope
of neoliberal discourses of equality and tolerance.

Teaching for equality or teaching queerly?

As project members we have also discovered that the stances we take
and the discourses we draw upon depend not only on the context and
audience but also on our own fundamental understandings of what it
means to go beyond tolerance of LGBT people.

Within the project team, we share the conviction that the status quo,
where the ever-present threat of bullying and exclusion on the basis of
perceived sexuality and non-gender normative behaviours results in
silences and invisibility, is unacceptable. This kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t
tell’ tolerance only serves to perpetuate stereotypes and propagate
assumptions that all teachers and parents are heterosexual and fit
neatly and permanently into existing gender categories. In this sense,
we share the view that primary teachers must go beyond an anti-bully-
ing discourse of tolerance in the form of quiet acceptance (in other
words, simple lack of overt oppression). We share the view, which is not
necessarily expressed in all anti-bullying discourses around homo-

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

phobia and transphobia, that teachers need to reach beyond passive

and disingenuous tolerance of ‘those LGBT people’ to proactively incor-
porate discussions of sexuality and gender into their curriculum. We do
not, however, agree on how this should be done. Whether tolerant
silences and invisibilities can best be disrupted by highlighting lesbian
and gay histories and attacking hetero-gender stereotypes or by troubl-
ing the binaries implicit in the very categories of lesbian/gay, boy/girl is
a question that remains alive and unresolvable in our research.

Drawing upon Wenger and Lave’s insistence that a community of prac-

tice thrives on heterogeneity and is based on the assumption ‘that
members have different interests, make diverse contributions to
activity, and hold varied viewpoints’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991:97), we
purposefully set out to design a Participatory Action Research (PAR)
community which acknowledged dissensus, rather than consensus, as
the starting-point for action (see Chapter 8). We chose not to resolve
differences through compromise in ways that would inevitably mini-
mise or silence less powerful voices, and we have aimed to allow the
‘tension inherent in the very dynamics of language and the dynamism
demanded of the continuous action and reflection, action and reflec-
tion, of genuine praxis’ (Winkelmann, 1991:4) to persist. Keeping this
heteroglossic dialogue (Bakhtin, 1999) alive has constituted an ongoing
methodological challenge.

There has been an ongoing debate within the project about the extent
to which the use of project books depicting same-sex couples and of
gay role models in the form of teachers’ own lives might lead to strate-
gies which reinforce essentialist binaries (gay/straight, male/ female). It
is important to point out that these approaches tend to privilege some
sexualities over others (bisexuality, for example, is not represented in
children’s literature). In our case, these approaches also privileged
traditional (binary) gender experience, since none of our teachers
identify as trans or gender-queer, and children’s books that deal with
gender non-conformity do little to unsettle gender categories as such.
However, the project did enlist a consultant to engage project members
and some children in exploring gender from a trans perspective, and he
explicitly drew upon his own trans experience as part of this work (see
DePalma, 2009, for more details).

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PUTTING QUEER INTO PRACTICE: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

While some in the project have argued that this kind of identity work
implicitly reinforces discourses of victimisation and tolerance (see Ras-
mussen, 2001; Talburt and Steinberg, 2000 for similar arguments),
others have made strong cases for more equalities-based strategic
essentialism (see Guha and Spivak, 1988), drawing consciously upon
essentialist categories of gay and straight as a way to render trans-
gressive sex and gender identities less exotic and threatening (see
Chapter 2, Chapter 7 for further analysis of these perspectives).

There has been an extensive discussion among members of the project

team about the nature of queering and whether/to what extent what
teachers are doing in classrooms is or can be queer. When Elizabeth
(co-author of this chapter and project director) encouraged Andy
(teacher researcher) to move away from fixed identity categories in the
introduction to an early years teaching resource that he’d written, Andy
posted these comments to the website and began a debate around
them. First, he posted an excerpt from an email sent to him by Eliza-
beth:
I think the key is to strike a balance between keeping things clear-cut and
simple ... and being clear that life isn’t actually that simple – that sexual
identity is a fluid and changing thing, at least for some people ... It’s not
necessarily about being confused, but simply about variability in relation-
ships and identities.

Then Andy posted his own perspective:

I have to say I don’t really agree with your comments with regard to variability
in relationships and identities. While I am aware that I might be putting chil-
dren into boxes, I think it’s important to give children something to identify
with if they feel different. By saying ‘sexuality is fluid...’ aren’t you supporting
the theory that we all choose and we can be straight if we try?

In contrast, for Laura, another teacher researcher, claiming the label

‘gay’ felt like a constraint rather than an activist liberation. In response
to Andy, she wrote:
I take the point about when you’re different, wanting something to identify
with to somehow give some legitimacy and explanation for your difference.
And ... when I came out ... I hated the feeling I had to put myself in a box, that
I had to put a definitive label on myself. Some queer (for want of a better
word) educating at some point in my school life might have helped a bit.

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Fin, a university researcher, joined the conversation with the following

comment:
I think for many of the reasons, gendered and sexual essentialism can
trouble me – although I understand how powerful it can be as a tool in identity
recognition. However, I do recognise that certainties can be easier to com-
municate...

As this excerpt from a web discussion demonstrates, project members

differed in whether they saw themselves as taking a queer perspective
as exemplified by Elizabeth’s emphasis on fluid sexualities or taking on
an approach of strategic essentialism, as exemplified by Andy’s ‘giving
children something to identify with’. Many of us began to examine our
own contradictions and inconsistencies in the course of these discus-
sions. Andy later reflected:
I’ve been thinking all morning about our discussion re identity and I can see
where you are coming from. I talked to a colleague who said I was clearly
only interested in pushing ‘my gay agenda’ (!) which I thought was a bit harsh
– but it really made me think about what agenda I am pushing. I always say
‘You’re gay or you’re straight and that’s it’, but actually I should be saying so
much more.

This excerpt is included here not to demonstrate that Andy has changed
his mind but to illustrate the process by which he has complicated his
own perspective – a process that has been shared by many of us during
the course of the project. Neither was Deb, a university researcher,
equivocating her strong queer theory perspective when she wrote:
What’s important to me is queer practice, practices that trouble hetero/homo
binaries, practices ... So for me Queer isn’t about an identity, although it is
the one I feel most comfortable with, but I’m often also strategically a les-
bian...

Identity politics and deconstruction of categories might make uneasy

companions, but as Deb points out, many of us are at least occasionally
strategically something. Some of us, as Butler puts it, are still highly in-
vested in making sure our strategic essentialism doesn’t collapse into
just essentialism:
Identity categories tend to be the instruments of regulatory regimes, whether
as the normalising categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying
points of a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. This is not to say

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PUTTING QUEER INTO PRACTICE: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

that I will not appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian, but I
would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies.
(Butler, 1991:16-17)

Laura points out that it is hard to act from a place of deconstruction,

and describes herself as perpetually balanced between queering and
acting, as long as strategic essentialism is a temporary position:
I guess that’s partly how one can say [they] can fit together in the under-
standing that the action taken is never the end, is never final, can be tried
again differently etc ... activism tends to fix identities and concepts, again in
a way that is often necessary, but also limiting. It’s tricky. Maybe strategic
essentialism is the only way to move things forward.

Queering or conforming to the (patriarchal, heterosexist)

institution of marriage?
Andy deliberately came out to his pupils just before his civil partnership
in the hope that by extending the ways in which the marriages of
heterosexual people are celebrated and discussed in primary schools,
he could help make gay relationships part of the everyday fabric of
school life:
[My colleagues] will ask about [my partner] in front of people, it’s about being
out and talking with people just like heterosexual people talk about their
weekend with their wives and their girlfriends.

Just before he celebrated his own civil partnership, Miles, a head

teacher, held an assembly for year 4 and 5 classes in his school. He con-
nected his own upcoming celebration with a reading of the book King
and King (de Haan and Nijland, 2000), a story of two princes who fall in
love:
I started by reading King and King which some of the children were familiar
with. At the end of the book I commented there was a similarity for me as I
would be marrying my partner who was male in the half term holiday ...
During lunchtime many children congratulated me and wished me well. At
the end of the day a group of girls came to my room with some cards they
had made for [us]. A parent and her three children also came with a card and
a bottle of wine as she was ‘just so pleased and wanted you to know how
great we think it is’.

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

These vignettes illustrate Andy’s and Miles’ attempts to disrupt the

heteronormative processes that have systematically denied lesbians
and gay men privileges usually reserved for heterosexuals. Not only do
they claim their right to have their partnerships recognised in law, re-
cently conferred by the UK government via the Civil Partnership Act
(brought into force in December, 2005), but by doing this in the space
of a public primary school they insist that their privilege become nor-
malised (in the form of the everyday naming of Andy’s partner and of
Miles’ celebratory cards and wine).

Nevertheless, such normalising processes have not been uncritically

accepted by everyone in the project. Annie, who identifies as a straight
woman, has drawn upon a feminist perspective to critique the very
institution of marriage that some lesbian and gay activists have been
fighting to be included in:
I never got married, I am a feminist ... yet all these gay people around me are
rushing into civil ceremonies and these fancy weddings. And there is a part
of me that wants to go excuse me, excuse me, do you know what a wedding
is all about, it’s about property. I didn’t want my father to walk me down the
aisle and give me away to another man as a virgin.

As Charpentier (n.d.) points out, the words ‘I pronounce you man and
wife’ as a performative speech act is disrupted (or is it perhaps rein-
forced?) by the impossibility of ‘I pronounce you man and man’ or ‘I
pronounce you wife and wife’. The question is whether same-sex
couples’ appropriation of traditionally straight weddings (including, in
some cases, the word itself, despite the fact that they are only legally en-
titled to a civil partnership) queers or reinforces the patriarchal and
heterosexist institution of marriage.

Are gay penguins queer?

Each school participating in the No Outsiders project received a set of
resources including a range of storybooks depicting lesbian, gay and
non-gender conforming characters. For many teachers, simply having
these books in the school has made a significant impact. As our earlier
research suggests (DePalma and Atkinson, 2006, 2007b, 2009; Atkinson
and DePalma, 2008a), the silence around sexualities in general in
primary schools is a powerful force which renders problematic any
attempt to break it. A book about two people who fall in love, two

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PUTTING QUEER INTO PRACTICE: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

penguins raising a chick or a teenage boy deciding whether and how to

‘fit in’ can become a dangerous presence if the two people both happen
to be princes, the two penguins both happen to be male and the
teenage boy happens to be gay. In the UK it was a book about a small
girl, her daddy and his (male) partner that instigated Section 28 of the
1988 Local Government Act which, despite its repeal in England in
2003, was still cited by some of our earlier research participants as a
deterrent to even mentioning gay and lesbian identities in the class-
room (Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act stated that a local
authority shall not ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of
the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’).
In this climate, simply opening the box containing the project books in
the staffroom became a risky political act.

Nevertheless, there has been an on-going debate among the project

team around the danger of reinscribing certain social norms, such as
monogamy and child-bearing, through books that portray gay and
lesbian characters within these normative families, such as And Tango
Makes Three (Parnell et al, 2005): a particularly well-loved project book
telling the true story of two male penguins who raise a chick together.
Laura raised the concern in the web discussion:
I’m really concerned about the ways in which I find myself latching on to
knowable safe images of gay daddies and lesbian mummies or at least gay
and lesbian couples falling in love. I guess I’m partly led to this safe, middle
of the road place by the project books which inscribe these notions of
romantic, monogamous relationships (albeit with gay people or penguins
rather than straight ones).

Andy, however, rejected the notion that we need move beyond gay
penguins:
I just like the fact that we are talking about gay penguins. I don’t think we
need to get beyond that at this stage. We are in the early stages of this
nationally, this sort of thought process. The fact that we’ve got gay penguins
is fantastic, why do we need to worry about what’s next? We need to get
schools to do, to talk about gay penguins because at the moment ... most
schools aren’t doing anything.

The debate over whether or not we need to ‘move beyond gay penguins’
is one manifestation of the tension between strategic essentialist and

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queer approaches that runs throughout the project. As Andy argues,

children need to recognise the category ‘gay’ in order to undo a socially
constructed incommensurability between the category of ‘gay’ and the
category of ‘loving parents’ usually reserved for straight people, an
argument we have made in more detail elsewhere (Atkinson and De-
Palma, 2009). As Laura argues, however, this essentialism, however
strategic, runs the risk of reifying categories that a queer project seeks
to disrupt – for example, by reinforcing the perceived superiority of the
particular type of monogamous, child-centred family relationship em-
bodied by the penguins. Klara, a visitor to the project from Stockholm,
felt that the emphasis on safety restrained the potential of the project to
queer the classroom. She said of the approaches she observed in pro-
ject schools and the discussions she had had with many team mem-
bers:
I felt that it is okay to be gay as long as you act kind of straight. Or like it’s
okay to have two mums or two dads as long as they are exactly the same as
other families. You just kind of emphasise the whole sameness all the time
which makes perfect sense of course, saying ah, it’s the same love, every-
thing is ... But you just get this really cute, nice, lovely and fluffy image that
families are just great and fantastic and they are all the same really. And
everything is adorable.

Introducing LGBT role models and fighting for LGBT acceptance can be
seen as simply another form of tolerance discourse (Talburt and Stein-
berg, 2000). Yet Rasmussen (2006) points out that the introduction of
non-heteronormative identity representations into pedagogic spaces
through the normalisation of non-heterosexual family patterns
threatens heteronormativity. She argues that to recognise similarities
and normalities within the everyday is to undermine the subtle balance
through which the absent Other marks and maintains the hetero-
normative centre: ‘the avowal of different but equal ... is much less
threatening than the avowal of similar and equal’ (ibid:481). We found
ourselves equally affected by these two different perspectives as the
project developed and discussions between team members became
deeper.

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From role models to new commensurabilities

Youdell has written of the existence of ‘impossible bodies,’ certain
identity constellations that are constituted in school as incommensur-
able (2006a). Elsewhere she has specifically analysed the incommen-
surability of gay with certain notions of masculinity, and the complex
interplay between reinscription and recuperation enacted in a school
setting (Youdell, 2004a). Recalling Andy’s steadfast insistence on offer-
ing himself as a gay role model for his pupils, we consider here how this
ostensibly essentialistic practice might involve a complex process of
creating new commensurabilities. Deliberately introducing his unintel-
ligible body into school, Andy struggles to remain comprehensible to
his pupils as an out gay teacher:

Vignette 1: Yes, I am a gay teacher! (excerpt from Andy’s field notes)

Andy: Advanced skills teacher
Sam: Year 5 pupil
Celia: Andy’s teaching assistant (TA)
It’s Lunch time group in the Nurture Room. My TA Celia and I are having
lunch with a group of six children from Year groups 3-6 who are considered
to have ‘challenging behaviour’. Sam has known me for five years, and, like
all children in the school, knows that I have a male partner, and that I had
a Civil Partnership ceremony.

Sam walks to get a fork. As he returns he flops his wrist and says in a camp
manner I’m the only gay in the village3 (repeats this twice more) and sits
down, grinning. The child next to him looks embarrassed and keeps
looking at me for reassurance. I softly say Sam’s name in a friendly but dis-
appointed manner, expressing my disapproval: Sam.

Sam repeats again: I’m the only gay in the village.

looking directly at me. There is a slight air of confrontation about his doing
this although it’s more a humorous air. I think he expects me to laugh with
him.

Celia (TA): Sam, can you stop that please

Sam: Why?

Celia: I don’t like it

Sam: Why?

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Andy: Come on, Sam, you know why. Because I’m gay. It feels like you’re
making fun of me

Sam: You’re not gay!

Andy: Sam, we’ve been through this. You know I’m gay.

In this vignette we see the interplay between reinscription of a new kind

of gay body (the authority figure, the well-known and respected
teacher) and the recuperation of a gay body that is intelligible to Sam (a
kind of comic self-deprecating gayness available to Sam via popular
media in the figure of ‘the only gay in the village’). Sam’s understanding
of ‘gay’ is constantly at risk of being subverted, but also constantly tend-
ing to recuperate, restabilise. This vignette illustrates both the powerful
transformative potential of Andy’s own gay body to unsettle Sam’s cer-
tainties and the strong conservative potential of sedimented meanings
(what ‘gay’ already means to Sam) to render Andy’s gay body impossible
to Sam.

Vignette 2: Playing Monopoly with Andy’s boyfriend (excerpt from

Andy’s fieldnotes)
Andy: Advanced skills teacher
David: Andy’s partner
Sam: Year 5 pupil
Celia: Andy’s TA
On the last day of last half term I was being picked up from school by my
partner after lunch. He arrived at school early and texted me from the car
park so I texted back to say come in! So for the last fifteen minutes of lunch
David joined me in my class with my lunchtime group. The interesting
thing was that it just so happened that because of various events and
absences I only had one child in with me, the child being the very same
who had previously said ‘you’re not gay’ and mimicked the ‘Little Britain’
character.

I said to him and my TA, Celia, Oh David’s here early, he’s coming in to join
us, and the child visibly went white.

Sam: David? Your... your... your...

He didn’t know what to say so I helped him out.

Andy: My boyfriend, yes.

Sam: Coming? in here? now?

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PUTTING QUEER INTO PRACTICE: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

Andy: Yes – oh here he is!

Honestly, the look on the poor child’s face was a mixture of fascination and
terror as David walked in and sat down next to me. I have never seen the
child so quiet!

David joined the game of Monopoly with me and my TA and Sam for the
next fifteen minutes, during which time Sam relaxed and had bits of con-
versation. There was a nice moment when the child’s teacher, who knew
David, came in and sat down with us and made conversation for a while. I
couldn’t have set it up better; this modelling of total acceptance!

Since returning to school after the holidays Sam has mentioned that he
played Monopoly with David to the other children in both lunchtime
sessions. He boasts about the fact that he has met Andy’s boyfriend and he
has played Monopoly with him! It will be interesting to see if over the next
few months we have a repeat of the behaviour I saw from him previously.

This vignette reveals the transformative power of such a simple act as

playing Monopoly with someone, once some of your basic assumptions
about who those people can be and how they can be related to each
other and to you have been destablised. Sam’s initial discomfort (as evi-
denced by his obvious difficulty in voicing the simple phrase ‘your boy-
friend’ to Andy) and eventual comfort (as evidenced by later declaring
publicly that he has played Monopoly with this boyfriend) in this
vignette is particularly interesting. It suggests that the very discomfort
inspired by one’s understandings being unsettled and destablised may
be the key to what Butler describes as the productive practice of de-
grounding:
Some people would say that we need a ground from which to act. We need
a shared collective ground for collective action. I think we need to pursue the
moments of degrounding, when we’re standing in two different places at
once; or we don’t know exactly where we’re standing; or when we’ve pro-
duced an aesthetic practice that shakes the ground. That’s where resistance
to recuperation happens. It’s like a breaking through to a new set of para-
digms. (Butler, Osborne and Segal, 1994:5)

Our research suggests that recuperation by dominant discourses comes

all too easily, while reinscription requires not only momentary subver-
sion, but persistence. It may not be enough to provide a momentary
glimpse of new imaginaries (Atkinson and DePalma, 2008b); our re-

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search suggests that teachers must be constantly searching for these

moments of degrounding, fleeting as they may be, and seize the oppor-
tunity not only to break down incommensurabilities but to make new
possibilities. We do not intend to imply that this is a simple, progressive
development; in fact, Andy’s final reflection on Sam’s possible future be-
haviour suggests that he is far from convinced that this work is finished.

Queering as impertinent visibility

Deborah Britzman (1995) identifies the methods of queer theory as
‘impertinent’ methods which subvert the norms of public discourse
and go beyond the safe spaces of inclusion and equalities. She des-
cribes these methods as requiring an ‘impertinent performance’ and
states:
Some consider it [the term queer theory] as too angry, too oppositional – for
what they imagine as the general public ... In fact, queer theory is an attempt
to move away from psychological explanations like homophobia, which
individualises heterosexual fear and loathing toward gay and lesbian sub-
jects at the expense of examining how heterosexuality becomes normalised
as natural. The subject of Queer Theory is more impertinent and more labile.
(ibid:153)

Impertinence is, perhaps, one way of characterising moves made by

project participants which are deliberately visible where they would
normally be invisible. Deb writes in a web discussion:
I snog in the street and experience it as a political act in the context of the
tiny cathedral cities that I spend most of my time in ... I’m reminded that my
everyday practice has effects, and that I can be tactical about that. I try not
to get down about the all too ready recuperations...

McInnes suggests that a queer pedagogy, or rather what he describes as

a ‘pedagogy of incoherence’ (2008:115) would enable us to ‘pause at the
moment of recognition,’ taking ‘a conceptual step back from ... the
question of educational intervention’ to ‘work against the ‘danger’ with-
in circuits of recognition whereby axes of recognition become solidi-
fied’ (ibid:100). As a project team, we seem to be working in the spaces
between recognition and solidification. Many of our No Outsiders class-
room activities start, at least, with the impertinent visibility of that
which has been categorically erased from children’s (and many adults’)
realities. The question lies, in a sense, in where to go next.

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PUTTING QUEER INTO PRACTICE: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

Discovering that the heteronormal is not the only game in town may
simply lead to broadening the norm to let in a few qualified fringe dwel-
lers: trans men who fully transition and can ‘pass’, gay couples who
mate for life and raise young together (like gay penguins do!). Even the
best intentioned inclusion efforts render new exclusions, renegotiating
borders rather than questioning how and why we build them. Would
the new improved (non-hetero) normal have a place for people who are
not interested in monogamy and child-rearing? What would happen if
Andy had several casual boyfriends, rather than one life partner? What
would happen if, instead of a young handsome trans man who was
assigned ‘girl’ at birth, children met an older trans woman whom they
initially read as a man in a dress? What would happen if they met a
young person who resisted gender categories altogether, and whose
sex/gender history was not easily traceable? Is there a way to dance
quickly enough away from recognition to avoid being solidified, and is
there a way to start from a less secure, less normalised, and less read-
able place?

There are many questions to be asked, and perhaps a great deal of cer-
tainty to unlearn, processes that are not particularly supported in
school contexts where questions are usually raised only to be resolved
as efficiently as possible. We are expected to keep things clear and
simple for children, to worry about what they don’t know when in fact
we as a project team are more worried about what they already do
know. Most people, school teachers and children included, are al-
together too sure about what gender is: there are two ‘opposite’ sexes,
man and woman, and gender is the inevitable categorical expression of
natural sex. We learn to spot a gay person early on, even without any
evidence about their sexual behaviour, and we are pretty sure what that
means in terms of their behavior, preferences and relationships.

We even know which Teletubby is gay, and the tendency to ‘out’ cele-
brities, even fictional ones, only serves to reinforce our sense of exper-
tise about gender and sexuality. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis must have
been born intersex, goes the logic, because this explains everything,
from her chiseled good looks, to her adopted children, to her gender-
ambiguous name (see, for example, http://www.snopes.com/movies/
actors/jamie.asp). Beloved comic book character Tin Tin was recently

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

outed by gay journalist Matthew Parris, whose tongue-in-cheek exposé

spares no details of the young man’s (fictional) life:
What debate can there be when the evidence is so overwhelmingly one-
way? A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a
scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged
sailor? A sweet-faced lad devoted to a fluffy white toy terrier ... whose only
serious female friend is an opera diva ... And you’re telling me Tintin isn’t
gay? (Parris, 2009)

Whether unsubstantiated Hollywood rumour or humorous journalistic

rhetoric, our recognition of the inherent logic of these arguments re-
minds us of the extensive knowledge we share about gender and sexua-
lity and how they are related. This is knowledge we have gained without
teaching, knowledge that must be undone rather than replaced with
newer, better knowledge. It doesn’t matter (to us) what sort of genitals
Jamie Lee Curtis was born with or whether Belgian cartoonist Georges
Remi (Hergé) had a secret gay activist agenda over 100 years ago.
Whether or not some of us start from a place of recognition, as No Out-
siders project leaders we have been deeply interested in how to turn
that recognition inside out: to unbelieve it, to unlearn it, to make of the
familiar something strange and slippery and unsettling. The extent to
which we have achieved this will remain open to debate – and is the
subject of much discussion in the rest of this book. But the process of
trying has, without a doubt, been enlightening for all of us.

Notes
1 We are including genderism, sexism and cissexism under the broader umbrella of
heteronormativity, but these processes might well be examined as separate from or
primary to heterosexism and heteronormativity; see, for example, (Airton, 2009;
Serano, 2007).
2 This is a popular catchphrase of the only gay character in the comedy series Little
Britain, aimed at an adult audience but widely watched by children.

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2
Seeking a queer(ying) pedagogic praxis:
Adventures in the classroom and
participatory action research
Fin Cullen

In this chapter, Cullen focuses on the tensions between the methodological fram-
ing of the No Outsiders project as participatory action research and its interpre-
tive/philosophical framing as a queer/feminist post-structuralist interrogation of
hetero- and gender normativity. She explores ways in which these tensions might
work both productively and as a closing force within the project, and brings con-
siderations from both critical pedagogy and queer theory to bear on the possibility
of a queer praxis which reshapes the classroom without simply either resisting or
reproducing existing norms, examining specific examples of project interventions.

F
or much of my involvement with the No Outsiders project I
struggled to comprehend the complexities of bridging theory,
practice and policy to ‘promote sexualities equality in the pri-
mary school’. Over the months, the team wrestled with what and how
dissensus might be formed in the project, what a queer pedagogy might
look like, ideas about social activism, political engagement, and peda-
gogy, and what might be realisable in the contemporary English pri-
mary classroom. This chapter emerges from these discussions, email
exchanges and web postings, and the multiple voices and approaches
drawn on at different points by members of the No Outsiders team.

The chapter explores the ways in which personal, professional and

political identifications and theoretical approaches influenced by queer

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

theory informed the school-based work. It critically reflects on how

notions of praxis might help to examine how theory and practice were
used by teacher researchers. The No Outsiders project as participatory
action research has valued the joint production and creation of know-
ledge in creating critically reflective approaches to challenging homo-
phobia and promoting gender and sexualities equality.

Through an examination of some of the pedagogic strategies deployed

in the No Outsiders project, I want to highlight how earlier ideas of
activism, civic engagement and lesbian and gay rights continued to
mark this project for the participants. Accordingly I explore lines of con-
vergence between such approaches and the politics and theoretical
potential offered by queer theory within the space of the school. By
doing so, I want to examine the potential of a queer praxis, and the chal-
lenges and opportunities in imagining critical classroom pedagogies
that might unpack hierarchical sex/gender discourses in play within
schools.

This is not always easy, as has been noted by scholars writing about
queer pedagogy over the past decade or so (Britzman, 1995; Sears, 1999;
Blaise, 2005). As O’Rourke (2007) acknowledges, there are dangers in
collapsing and collating queer theory and lesbian and gay studies. For
example, in recent years there has been increasing acknowledgement of
the differences between queer and LGBT approaches and of the poten-
tial risk of completely losing sight of queer theory’s questioning of nor-
malcy in lesbian and gay studies’ exploration of lesbian and gay his-
tories and representation, calls for LGB equalities and challenges to
heterosexism and homophobia.

Much of the influential theoretical work that provided an immensely

helpful conceptual framework was that of Butler (1993) in de-essen-
tialising naturalised categories and critiquing sex/gender binaries and
conceptual binaries of bodily sex, gender and sexuality that had marked
earlier writings in feminist and gay and lesbian studies. The concept of
heteronormativity also proved useful in examining how the positioning
of binary sex/gender privileges and legitimises heterosexual desire and
gender above all other gendered and sexualised identities (Ingraham,
1994; Letts, 1999). Work by education scholars has further explored how
such conceptual tools can aid researchers’ understandings of how the

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

repetition of signifying discourses upholds and reproduces enduring

sex/gender binaries and normative heterosexuality within early years
and school settings (Britzman, 1995; Francis, 1998; Epstein, 1999; Sears,
1999; Renold, 2005; Blaise, 2005; DePalma and Atkinson; 2007a).

No Outsiders as a project attempts to link practical work influenced by

diversity management perspectives and LGBT identity work with
theoretical work drawing on critical pedagogies and queer and feminist
post-structuralist theory. Lesbian and gay-identified teacher re-
searchers often took a more personal, organic approach by being ‘out’
in the school community, an attempt to provide a positive gay role
model for their students (see Chapter 5). Other approaches were
resource-led, including literacy, drama and arts work, such as co-writ-
ing with pupils a libretto based on one of the project books or using the
picture books during assemblies, literacy sessions and circle time.
Another resources-based approach, which I discuss later, was illus-
trated by one teacher who chose to ‘gender trouble’ the gender identity
of everyday maths worksheets as a way of engaging primary children in
debates about sex/gender discourses. The wide variety of approaches
taken by participants in this project allows us to consider how a wide
selection of approaches, strategies and modes of analysis may contri-
bute to providing a more nuanced understanding of what a queer(ying)
pedagogy might resemble.

Locating praxis
How might the project be engaged in ‘shaping the world’ (M Smith,
1994:162)? As a participatory action research project, No Outsiders owes
a debt to earlier emancipatory projects by radical educators influenced
by Freirian pedagogy (Freire, 1972) with a commitment to dialogue and
consciousness-raising among disenfranchised groups. The multiple
uses of notions of praxis within critical and feminist pedagogy and
action research has been explored by Weiner (1994), who argues for the
continued use of a feminist praxis in interrogating gender inequality
within school. Notions of praxis also influence the development of
some action research approaches (ibid). The action of action research
within schools and education settings is about shaping pedagogy and
developing curriculum resources, which involves peer learning and

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bridging the gap between academic theory and practice. As the No

Outsiders’ website states:
The No Outsiders research project was designed according to the partici-
patory action research (PAR) model, which links practice and systematic
reflection to form a powerful type of research that draws upon practitioner
strengths in ways that traditional academic research has failed to recognise:

‘It is now widely recognised that practitioners have unique insights into
practice which are simply not available to researchers who come in from
outside, and that professional knowledge is, therefore, an essential
component of understanding any educational practice.’ (Somekh, 2005,
p 3) (available at http://www.nooutsiders.sunderland.ac.uk/about-the-
project)

Action research models that arose from the 1970s started with know-
ledgeable practitioners who critically reflected on their practice and
engaged in dialogue with students in exploring the nature of social jus-
tice. Such an approach generated spaces for critical reflection and
action intended to create interventions that might shape practice.
These models take as given the need for ground-up solutions to the
problems of social inequalities as well as subjects that are fixed in their
raced, gendered and sexual identities and thus can mobilise around
such issues. Kincheloe (1991) argues that teacher research as a demo-
cratic form can work as a catalyst for political action and social change.
Kincheloe’s view might be seen as idealistic, as the appropriation of
some teacher research within ‘good practice’ models may be about up-
holding narrow neo-liberal models of education rather than mounting
robust critiques. However, research that is reflective and critically en-
gaged might begin to unpack some of the discursive formations of the
dominant social order.

I am also keen to tease out the selection of approaches that might be

contained in the project subtitle ‘researching sexualities equality.’ The
No Outsiders project has been influenced on a substantive, epistemo-
logical and methodological level by feminist post-structuralist and
queer theoretical analysis. In an array of seminar papers, articles and
films, it has also been shaped methodologically by the postmodern turn
within ethnography (Clifford, 1986). For example, the chapter in this
collection by Atkinson and Moffat is constructed so as to emphasise
dialogue between the multiple voices of the project team and is re-

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

miniscent of postmodern influenced approaches to composing ethno-

graphy (Ellis and Bochner, 1996).

The layers of interpretation and what might constitute data in such a

collaborative effort complicates the notion of a single line of enquiry
with a set and finite conclusion. Such diversity in approach may com-
plicate the claims that might be made for the emerging data. The notion
of ‘dissensus’ has been drawn on throughout the project to acknow-
ledge this diversity of voice. However, whilst notions of praxis may sit
comfortably with dialogue and dissensus, such an often fluid account
may not easily translate into clear pedagogic tools for the primary class-
room. The gay and lesbian equalities work has a much clearer outcome
base in both challenging homophobia and heterosexism via discrete
curriculum and policy interventions such as homophobic bullying
policies, support groups for gay teachers and parents, the use of books
with non-heterosexual characters, diverse families and storylines and
the inclusion of same sex relationships in Sex and Relationships educa-
tion.

So what’s queer about queer pedagogy?

Heteronormativity is replicated and sustained through the early years
and primary school via formal and hidden curricula, the perceived
centrality of the nuclear heterosexual family unit, the invisibility in
classroom texts and in many schools of ‘out’ lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans
(LGBT) or queer people and the lack of acknowledgment of LGBT or
queer parents (Thorne, 1993; Davies, 1993; Epstein, 1997; Epstein, 1999;
Renold, 2005; Atkinson and DePalma, 2008b). If O’Rourke (2007) is cor-
rect that queer theory within the academy has recently been increas-
ingly institutionalised and domesticated in its potential conflation with
lesbian and gay studies, it is worth revisiting what might be imagined to
constitute a queer pedagogy within schools. This would go beyond
pedagogic approaches that examined lesbian and gay rights or issues of
sex and sexuality. Britzman states that a queer pedagogy would attempt
to:
... exceed such binary oppositions as the tolerant and the tolerated and the
oppressed and the oppressor yet still hold onto an analysis of social dif-
ference that can account for how structural dynamics of subordination and
subjection work at the level of the historical, the conceptual, the social, and

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the psychic. ... These identifications I take as the beginnings of a queer peda-
gogy, one that refuses normal practices and practices of normalcy, one that
begins with an ethical concern for one’s own reading practices, one that is
interested in exploring what one cannot bear to know, one interested in the
imagining of a sociality unhinged from the dominant conceptual order. (1995:
164-165)

Following Britzman and work by Blaise (2005) I examine some of these

tensions between a modernist project of participatory action research
intended to shape pedagogic interventions and the wider discourse of
troubling normalcy offered by Britzman’s critique. In relation to
participatory action research and the No Outsiders research project,
there remain issues in thinking about whether school-based interven-
tions could question and challenge normalcy in the ways in which
Britzman suggests or even fundamentally begin to challenge binary
sex/gender and/or sexuality. Not that it is easy to separate sex-gender
from sexuality: the presumed normalcy and fixity enshrined in lan-
guage of a binary sex/gender system (girl/boy; gay/straight) remains
predicated upon notions of heterosexuality (Butler, 1993). I return later
to the difficulties in moving beyond such binaries.

At first glance, the connections between feminist post-structuralism

and queer theories and the school classroom may not be immediately
apparent. The theoretical thrust of queer theory and ‘gender trouble’
(Butler, 1990) within this project was treated with perhaps some under-
standable scepticism by many of the school-based teacher researchers,
who saw it as over-theoretical, the preserve of academia, and not easily
or straightforwardly translatable into classroom practice. This difficulty
in translating such an analytical frame to school practice has been
noted by Pascoe (2007) who, in an ethnography of the ‘anti-fag dis-
course’ in a US high school, noted that translating feminist post-struc-
turalist work to classroom interventions may not always be straight-
forward.

A queer praxis within education as a post-identity project may not be

synonymous with gay and lesbian identities (LG with the silent B and
T), and potentially may be seen to render suspect such fixed sexual
identities. To follow Britzman (1995) and think the unthinkable or con-
sider ‘queerying pedagogy [as] queerying its technics and scribbling
graffiti over its texts, of colouring outside the lines’ (Bryson and de

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

Castell, 1993:299), would go well beyond institutionally and state sanc-

tioned ‘diversity management’ (Mohanty, 1990: 299).

No Outsiders team member Deborah Youdell has argued for a range of

tactics for a performative political pedagogy (2007). These included a
troubling of normative constitutions of schooling and of subject posi-
tions, and the need to offer students opportunities to deconstruct these
positions and re-deploy the discourses that locate them (see Chapter 3).
Such approaches might prove challenging within the frameworks of the
No Outsiders project as realised within contemporary English class-
rooms, particularly if teachers do not wish to be read as unduly radical
or wish the project to be in accord with and legible within current policy
initiatives around, for example, inclusion. Like Youdell, I am not
attempting to evaluate these interventions set against a backdrop of
being sufficiently queer. However, I would argue that there have occa-
sionally been instances where teachers have used picture books, drama
work or other interventions to begin to trouble the regulatory norma-
tive discourses underpinning the sex/gender identities in play. Design-
ing and delivering critical pedagogic interventions based on feminist
post-structuralist or queer theoretical thoughts may differ substantially
from engagements which lend themselves to queer analysis in acci-
dental or playful inversion and troubling of heteronormativity.

Such theoretical underpinnings potentially have uses as a method or

tool of analysis. Queer theories tended to be used in the project as an
analytical tool in exploring data from the field rather than as an ongoing
legible pedagogic intervention in the classroom. However, work which
is largely framed within such diversity management discourses might
mobilise everyday resistances rather than deeply trouble the normative
constitutions of schooling. Britzman’s notion of queer pedagogy might
help us consider alternatives.

On one level approaches influenced by critical pedagogy might be con-

sidered incommensurable with the slipperiness of tangled, fragmented
and discursive sex/gender identities. Furthermore, as scholars have
noted, it is in the intersections between class, race, gender, (dis)ability,
generation and sexual identities that performances shape discursive
selves (Youdell, 2006; Mirza, 2008). Any approach that teases out just
one of these identity constellations (Youdell, 2006) in isolation is going

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

to be potentially problematic. The traditions of gay (and lesbian) rights-

based educational work might form an easier fit when drawing on a
relatively linear action research model to seek given legible solutions to
the problems of homophobia and heterosexism.

Yet the No Outsiders research team have at different points drawn on

divergent critical approaches including aspects of liberal humanism,
critical pedagogy, queer theory and feminist post-structuralism. The
project as realised within pedagogic intervention within classrooms was
predominantly based on this rights-based model of practice and several
of the research team were involved in debating what a queer(ying) peda-
gogy might resemble. Our discussions on the features of a queer peda-
gogy, such as the engagement with deconstruction, dialogue and un-
packing of taken-for-granted categories reminded me of earlier notions
of critical and feminist pedagogy. One practitioner spoke about how her
use of forum theatre techniques and a non-heterosexual fairytale
character was directly influenced by critical pedagogic approaches such
as Freire (1972), in addition to queer and feminist post-structuralist writ-
ings, notably Butler’s work on unfixing sex/gender binaries.

This is not to say a queer praxis involving queer pedagogues and peda-
gogy cannot exist in the current education climate in the UK. Nor do I
want to fall into the trap of the binary. This work is not about:
LGBT equalities vs. queer
Practice vs. theory
School vs. Academy

These either/or classifications are misnomers. But merely heading all

these subtleties under a broad notion of dissensus does a disservice to
the intricate hierarchies of power, knowledge and practice that might
be in play. The complexities and potential incongruity in such ap-
proaches are reflected in Spivak’s conditional call for a ‘strategic essen-
tialism’ (1988), and in Butler’s implicit acknowledgement of the need for
occasional strategic use of ‘universality’ in subsequent LGBT rights
work (Butler, 1999a:viii).

The potential within feminist post-structuralism and queer theories for

rejecting grand narratives and acknowledging shifting, multiple, com-
plex and reflexive subjectivities might thus be enabling rather than
challenging theories of gender, power, praxis and pedagogy. Coffey and

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

Delamont (2000) argue that this engagement with postmodern theories

enables scholars to formulate new critiques by illustrating the nuanced
complexities and contexts of how such power and inequality are opera-
tionalised within educational contexts. For Paechter (2001), the focus
on the centrality of the text and materiality of the body in post-struc-
turalist thought provides potential for scholars to interrogate power
relations, the production and interrogation of curriculum texts and the
production of gender performances. The No Outsiders project has taken
a similar starting point, focusing on experience rather than a given set
of methods or approaches.

Whether one commences inquiry based on a premise of LGBT equalities

and a recognition of the centrality of the sex/gender binary or instead
wishes to challenge fixed boundaries and trouble notions of normalcy
within the field settings fundamentally shapes both the research method
and legible interventions that spring from this epistemological base. Of
course, legibility may not be a desirable or anticipated outcome for
queer pedagogues who wish to unpick and question normalcy.

Such queer pedagogies are replicated throughout multiple instantia-

tions of the No Outsiders project as the resources were utilised in schools
and arts and drama projects were developed. The research team’s reflec-
tions, interviews and resources illustrate that teachers were engaged in
ongoing discussions with pupils in thinking through and being critical of
normative gendered and sexualised discourses. Such approaches can
complicate, even temporarily, the everyday sex/gendered subjectivities
within the primary classroom but have rarely reached the deeper inter-
rogations identified by scholars (Britzman, 1995; Blaise, 2005; Youdell,
2007) in fundamentally examining the normalcy of school relations and
the primacy of the educator’s agenda. The next section acknowledges
the project’s debt to professional and activist selves in enabling indivi-
duals to engage with debates around gender and sexualities equality in
school.

Past selves and present teaching

How, then, did practitioners use their own autobiographies, identities,
and political engagement to shape their work and how did this impact
on their adoption, reappropriation or rejection of theorisations originat-
ing in post structuralism and queer theories? Several teachers had

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

experience of activism within social movements such as student

politics, faith groups, environmental activism, lesbian and gay rights
groups and trade union work and this framed their attraction to and
participation in the No Outsiders project:
I was worried at the beginning that the project might have been to do with
flag waving or had a political agenda. I didn’t want that, but now I’m finding
myself wanting to lobby MPs and whatever it takes. I suppose because of the
‘rightness’ of what I’m discovering. .. I did have internal doubts, but haven’t
for a few years now. I have always tried to stand up against injustice and, as
a student, did the CND [UK-based anti-nuclear campaign] marches and the
boycotting of Barclays etc. Some of that earlier fervour seems to be re-
emerging. (Sue, web posting)

For Sue, a head teacher, the rightness of challenging social injustice

validates her involvement in the project, as she narrates it as part of a
wider history of movements for social justice.

The ghost of section 284 haunted this project, even though it was re-
pealed in England in 2003 and in Scotland in 2000. The damaging and
limiting effects of this pernicious piece of legislation had affected many
of the teachers earlier in their careers and continued to affect their per-
sonal and professional identities at school. One teacher researcher
spoke about how the project could engender a sense of optimism in the
wake of the distress of the Section 28 attack:
Jo: When Clause 28 was introduced I was in my early twenties. It was quite
a distressing time, it felt that society was going in a very negative direction ...
Now it feels things are changing ...

Elizabeth: Has it [your involvement in the project, or in anti-homophobic work

generally] re-radicalised you in any way ...?

Jo: In doing that [doing anti-homophobic work in school] ... it means probably
I’ve come up against negative attitudes and have had to challenge them ...
For so long I’ve only talked to people who are like-minded.

(Jo – in interview with Elizabeth Atkinson)

Other teacher researchers spoke candidly about how their involvement

in the project had reawakened their previous activist selves. For
teachers who identified as lesbian or gay, coming out to parents, col-
leagues or pupils was seen as a deeply personal and politically engaged

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

act, reminiscent of the political and personal transformation charac-

teristic of earlier participatory research studies within education
(Griffin, 1992). However, not all gay and lesbian identified teacher re-
searchers felt they could be ‘out’ to colleagues in school. In some
schools, teachers were unsupported by school leadership in coming out
to pupils because this was seen as a purely personal matter rather than
one of political and wider significance (for discussion on the some of
the tensions for research participants in discussing sexualities equality
in primary school see DePalma and Atkinson, 2009).

This understanding of teaching and involvement in the No Outsiders

project as a political act engaged in an everyday form of social action
was clearly articulated by many of the participants. This is not to say
that this work was a bolt-on political project, rather that the No Out-
siders project and a commitment to sexualities equality and a wider
inclusion agenda informed teachers’ everyday practice and shaped the
development of education interventions and schemes of work. The No
Outsider project also gave an explicit permission to discuss relevant
issues in challenging homophobia and promoting sexualities equality
with colleagues including support staff such as lunchtime supervisors.

Several teacher researchers brought into their practice their academic

study at universities before they commenced their teaching career,
which had provided an engagement with critical theory. One parti-
cipant’s university study of sociology, feminist activism and familiarity
with key academic figures shaped her commitment to equalities work
in her career:
I remember being at university and the only thing that I wanted to be was an
equalities officer ... I was at university in the late seventies and the sociology
agenda had just been discovered ... Ken Plummer was professor there ... and
he was hugely influential in my development. (Annie, taped discussion with
Fin)

Annie’s commitment to gender equality translated into a commitment

to support a scheme of emotional literacy work within schools in her
local authority. Whether teachers had been involved in peace or
women’s movements, anti-Section 28 protests or trade unionism, such
histories informed the values, practice base and identities of the re-
searchers with a commitment to social justice. This grounding of the

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

project’s participants in earlier activism led at times to an understand-

able wariness of the fluidity around post-structuralism and queer
theory and politics, as such activist groups had drawn upon clearly de-
fined identity positions to make political rights-based claims.

Theory-implicit and explicit approaches

The No Outsiders team consisted of practitioners based in universities,
schools, early years settings and local authorities. Such a breadth of
involvement inevitably involved a diversity of personal political his-
tories, opinions, approaches and engagement with practice and theory.
Andy, a teacher researcher, articulated a reluctance and wariness about
ideas of the academy and theory in general that was echoed by other
teacher researchers:
I am absolutely not big on theory, but I just choose not to go into those sorts
of things. I have been in on the web, I tend to write very sort of practical
things and then someone [else], they will come up and [write something]
really big into theory. And I am thinking oh God, I don’t know what to say now
so I will write something about I did this today and I ignored all the theory
stuff completely ... It’s not that I say that I am not taking it in, it’s just not some-
thing that I am particularly hot on really. (Andy, taped discussion with Fin)

Not being hot on theory was not necessarily a rejection of theoretical

underpinnings or the work of the academy. Rather, there was a sense
that theory was remote and steeped in inaccessible language that was
not easily translatable to the everyday of the school classroom (see
Chapter 8). Such tensions are particularly acute when dealing with
feminist post-structuralism and queer theories; aspects of Butler’s
works on the need to challenge the enduring nature of the heterosexual
matrix (1993) and heteronormativity (Ingraham, 1994) might appear
alien and incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with academic debates
and language. The academy, as represented by academic writings and
the theoretical concerns of the university-based researchers, could
appear both abstract and remote from the everyday concerns of prac-
tice. Arguably, the certainties of fixed gender and sexual identities as
legible political subjects are more intelligible in relation to the policy
discourse available to a school or local authority than the abstract
notions behind ‘gender trouble’. To ‘queer’ could be viewed with dis-
dain, particularly with echoes of an earlier painful, pejorative voice

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

experienced by some of the teacher researchers as an interpellation of

hate. The word ‘queer’ has a particular charge when talking about edu-
cation (Sears, 1999).

Queer theory, with a focus on unpacking normalcy, challenges the

foundations of lesbian and gay studies in examining and destabilising
fixed lesbian and gay identities (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 2002). Such contra-
dictions and tensions were observable within this project. As one
teacher researcher highlights below, the political endeavour of his pro-
ject work required him to concentrate on lesbian and gay identities:
Fin: Do the children ever quiz you or query you about that someone might
love a man and a woman?

Andy: No. I haven’t had that yet. No, no.

Fin: How would you handle it?

Andy: I haven’t handled it yet. I have gone down the line that you are gay or
you are straight. That’s the line that I’ve gone down. Because I want to make
the argument to almost try and adjust that homophobic attitude that you
choose to be gay. I am saying you don’t choose to be gay, you are or you are
not. It simplifies it, doesn’t it? (Andy, taped discussion with Fin)

The ‘fixed’ essential binary sexual subject was perceived by several

members of the research team as simpler and much easier to talk about
to children, parents and colleagues than the confusing fluidity of
‘queer.’ For Andy, being gay needs to remain a fixed identity in order to
avoid collapsing into the politically dangerous rhetoric of choice.
Andy’s approach to sexualities equality is primarily about consolidation
and opening up dialogue about lesbian and gay identities rather than
problematising the normalcy of heterosexuality. Andy is being strategic
in his deployment and use of essential binary categories. It is not that he
cannot grasp queer theory but that he sees it as potentially undermin-
ing his wider political agenda in supporting valuable sexualities equa-
lity work within his setting.

Such a position privileges the need to meet adults and children alike
where they are at over the abstract language of the academy and is seen
as a first step in a much larger politically engaged educational project
supporting social justice. The need to simplify sexual categories into
gay or straight and to acknowledge that gay people exist is seen as the

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

fundamental work of the project and this work is particularly facilitated

by the use of the project’s storybooks. This endeavour is not about inter-
rogating heterosexuality but about finding space for gay and lesbian
identities to be acknowledged and perhaps celebrated within schools
and the community. Such a focus on inclusion and diversity formed a
strong central theme in much of the project’s classroom-based work.

However, whilst several teacher researchers took a pragmatic route and

chose not to engage directly with the slipperiness of queer theory, other
teacher researchers explicitly used such theory to complicate and
trouble sex/gender binaries by entering into dialogue with pupils and
other teaching staff. For example, Laura used interventions inspired by
feminist post-structuralist thought to work with the children in writing
alternative fairytales, designing maths worksheets that destabilise
gender and using drama work to produce a non-traditional Cinderella
character who spoke about her fictional girlfriend (Cullen and Sandy,
2009). Such approaches included entering into dialogue about gen-
dered discourses with children, unpicking the norms of heterosexual
gender, and ‘gender troubling’ everyday classroom items, such as the
aforementioned maths worksheet. As Laura explained:
I drew a person that looked, I would say unmistakably if we’re talking in terms
of what is conventional, like a girl. But I called the person James. The kids
could not get their heads around it. [One child] asked if he could cross the
name out and change it to a girl’s name. I asked why he wanted to do that.
‘Because it’s not a boy!’ he replied. ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘Because he
is wearing a bow in his hair.’ ‘But can’t boys wear bows in their hair?’ I asked.
At this point the group of six children all laughed and told me no, boys can’t
wear bows in their hair. Of course I asked ‘Why not?’ [The child who wanted
to change the name] told me ‘boys wear bows around their necks not on their
heads’. I commented that I had never heard of anything like that and that I
thought anyone could wear a bow wherever they liked! (Laura, web posting)

This example of a gender-troubling maths worksheet is not meant to

represent a ‘valid’ example of an appropriate intervention. I am re-
minded in various interventions of how the queerying of sex/gender
regulatory framings might take place alongside a partial recuperation of
the heterosexual matrix. The slipperiness of this work might suggest
that even in diversity discourses we might both uphold and negate such
regulatory framings. The fixed unitary subject positions of the boys’ and

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

girls’ naming and attire are recognised and questioned by the pupils in
the classroom discussions, but the essential nature of the fixed gender
binary arguably remains. Laura subverts the binary, but does not dis-
mantle it entirely. The brief troubling of the gendered signifiers remains
temporal and contextual and does not trickle out beyond this brief
queer(ying) moment into the wider curriculum or classroom resources.

However, Laura is trying here to answer directly the calls by scholars

seeking a queer pedagogy (Bryson and de Castell, 1993; Britzman, 1995;
Blaise, 1995; Sears, 1999) by engaging children in a dialogue to inter-
rogate the implicit sexual binary underpinning gender norms. Laura’s
adventures in creating maths worksheets to challenge fixed notions of
gender might still revolve around the gender binaries, but they do start
to unpick key signifiers: the bow, the long eyelashes. The issue with such
an approach is that without returning to unpack this with the children
or continuing to discuss gender-regulatory discourses, this work may
seem remote and difficult to replicate and pass unnoticed in terms of
regulatory framings around what might be legitimately recognised as
‘good teaching.’

In fact, Laura’s engagement with queer theory was not without chal-
lenge from other teaching staff within her school. Laura reminds us that
while queer may be a legitimate frame for university researchers, it re-
mains potential anathema in the primary school. When she spoke with
a deputy head in her school about the educational potential in ‘queer’,
she was greeted with bemusement:
My deputy head said I had too much time on my hands if I was thinking about
fluid identities and troubling boundaries! I tried to explain how it could impact
on the way we teach identity but I think he didn’t like the way I couldn’t put
my finger on exactly what it is to ‘do queer.’ And my attempts were rather
lame. (Laura, web posting)

Laura is concerned that the term ‘queer’ might strike the school
management as unduly radical, yet she remains committed to using
queer theory in framing and thinking through classroom interventions.
One of the personal challenges I have explored during the latter part of
my involvement in this research project has been about teasing out
some of the individual participants’ perspectives on such theoretical
approaches and exploring how they inform ideas about what might be

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

do-able in the classroom. Laura’s rebuke from her deputy head that she
must have ‘too much time on [her] hands’ is an explicit critique of such
theoretical work as not being engaged in the real activities of the class-
room and school. Such a critique served to compromise Laura’s ability
to be an educational professional and queer theorist.

As this work progressed I became increasingly aware of how such

micro-moments of interaction can start the process of thinking the un-
thinkable (Britzman, 1995) within everyday classroom interaction, yet
how such moments may be fleeting and are not as legible as a whole-
school anti-bullying workshop or an assembly on gay historical figures.
Such approaches have ties with the dialogic elements in earlier work
regarding education and praxis. They produce critical reflection but
there remains a need to take heed of the ways in which heteronorma-
tivity and other regulatory hierarchical framings may be reinscribed
and reframed, as Youdell argues in Chapter 3.

Tactics and strategies – some further thoughts

My involvement as a researcher in this project has been deeply chal-
lenging and enlightening. It has provided insights into how post-struc-
turalist theory can be difficult to translate into legible classroom prac-
tice within the neoliberal school. It has led me to contemplate whether
the essential categories of gender and sexual orientation are, at least
some of the time, important tools for analysing and thinking through
how such regulatory framings endure. As a diverse project, No Outsiders
became a ground for interventions in terms of LGBT equalities in class-
room lessons, diversity management training and policy support
alongside a minority of theoretically motivated and inspired interven-
tions by classroom teachers.

This is not to say that day-to-day practice within schools is not fertile
ground for queer analysis. Recent ethnographies provide ample testi-
mony to the enduring possibilities of a queer eye (Sears, 1999; Renold,
2005; Blaise, 2005; Youdell, 2007) in unpicking and querying how
heteronormative discourses are sustained and recuperated. In the No
Outsiders project, queer theory as an analytic tool similarly provided
much scope for sketching out the productive and fruitful work that was
developing within a largely LGBT rights-based epistemological framing.
Bringing theory and action together in a search for queer praxis raises

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SEEKING A QUEER(YING) PEDAGOGIC PRAXIS

many questions about what is legible and perceived to be teachable

within primary schools and what might be legitimately and strategically
drawn on to develop this work further. This work constitutes learner
and teacher identities in myriad ways and troubles normative notions
of pedagogy within early years and primary settings.

Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my gratitude to everyone in the No Outsiders Research
team. Special thanks are due to Deborah Youdell, Renée DePalma, Elizabeth
Atkinson, Sandy Allan and especially Andy and Laura for insightful conversa-
tions and comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Note
4 Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 stated that a local authority ‘shall not
intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting
homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability
of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

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3
Lessons in praxis: thinking about
knowledge, subjectivity, and
politics in education
Deborah Youdell

In this chapter, Youdell illustrates the (im)possibility of taking a queer stance in a

world constituted by normative discourse, and explores the impact of these nor-
mative constructions on the project’s work. She unpacks the normative forces
which have shaped the project, while at the same time suggesting that some of
its work can be read simultaneously as both critical (and potentially normative)
social action and queer troubling. She suggests ways forward for work in this field
which acknowledge philosophical differences in relation to knowledge and know-
ledge construction and work with rather than against such differences, while re-
cognising their particular effects.

Introduction

T
his chapter considers what it means to engage in forms of politi-
cally inflected practice concerned with sexualities inside schools.
These practices and the politics that underpin them might aim to
challenge homophobia, enact anti-homophobic teaching, pursue
sexualities equality, interrupt heteronormativity, enable multiple and
mobile sex-gender-sexuality identifications and locations to be recog-
nisable and legitimate or move beyond sexed-gendered-sexualised
subjectivities. Embedded in each of these potential goals and the ways
that they are expressed here is a set of conceptual tools and an ap-
proach to politics and change. These might be characterised as liberal

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

reform politics, as identity politics or as queer politics. The relationship

between conceptual tools, political modes and political goals is an
important one, but it is also one that is subject to slippage and which
can be difficult to track. In this chapter I try to map some of the connec-
tions between political philosophies, goals and practices available to
and taken up by the No Outsiders project.

In particular, I explore the notion of ‘queer’ and its politics that have
come out of wider post-structurally informed thinking about power
and resistance. I set this alongside contemporary Left radical politics in
education and borrow the notion of praxis, the joining together of
theory and practice, to think tactically about the sorts of political prac-
tices we might engage in and the effects, wanted and unwanted, that
these might have. I consider the possibilities for and implications of
multiple political philosophies and associated tactics coexisting within
a body of social and political action. I argue that politics in education is
inevitably marked by undecidability concerning political philosophies,
goals, practices and effects and that, discomforting as this undecidabi-
lity may be, it is the condition of our work and may well be the condi-
tion of its possibility too.

Considering queer practices and politics

My thinking about ‘queer’ is located in Michel Foucault’s (1990b) His-
tory of Sexuality Volume 1: An introduction, a location that makes queer
inseparable, for me, from the work of Foucault and the more recent
thinking that has come out of this. This conceptual framework makes
queer about interrogating how discourses of sex and sexuality are
implicated in the processes through which we are made as ‘subjects’
who are sexed and sexualised in particular ways. Judith Butler’s Imita-
tion and Gender Insubordination (1991) and Eve Sedgwick’s Episte-
mology of the Closet (1993) are early pieces that powerfully demon-
strated the illusion of the preceding, unitary, self-knowing and sexed
and sexualised subject and the way that gay and lesbian identities and
identity politics are implicated in the constitution of these subjects.
Queer is also about resisting these processes through practices that un-
settle the meanings of these discourses and deploy other discourses
that have been subjugated, disallowed or silenced (Butler, 1997). The
take-up of the name ‘queer’, with its history of injury, and the re-deploy-

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LESSONS IN PRAXIS

ment of queer in order to make it mean something different and make

sense in new ways and in places where it has only been injurious or
where it has been wholly disallowed, is a key aspect of the politics of this
thinking. In this way, queer has sometimes been deployed tactically as
‘who we are’. But in the spirit of the theory that it draws upon, it has not
been who we really are, because ‘who we really are’ is rejected by the
queer theory that insists instead on practices – the bodies and plea-
sures, freed from regimes of sex and desire, of Foucault’s imagination
(1990a).

Judith Butler (1999b) has usefully engaged Foucault’s imagined replace-

ment of subjects made known and knowable though prevailing
accounts of sex and desire with mobile and multiple bodies and plea-
sures that exceed these accounts. She argues that while Foucault’s ‘rally-
ing cry’ has been massively important politically, in practice the force of
the dominant meanings of sex and desire is not as easily undercut as
Foucault’s call to bodies and pleasures might be seen to infer. We might
assert bodies and pleasures and refuse the binaries of penis/vagina,
man/woman, hetero/homo, and yet prevailing discourse presses these
upon us, like it or not. We might struggle to refuse these subjectivities,
but subject-hood is dependent on our intelligibility and so we might
have to take them up; we might find them put on us; and we might be
attached to them politically, socially, relationally, psychically.

In my previous research and writing concerned with sexualities and

schooling I have taken up Butler’s (1990; 1993; 1997; 2004) understand-
ing of performativity and subjectivation in and through the hetero-
sexual matrix to make sense of how a sexed and sexualised subject
comes to be ‘who’ s/he is in school contexts. This framework rejects the
rationality, permanence and coherence that characterise prevailing
accounts of the subject. Instead it offers a conception of a subject who
is subject to and made subject by relations of power in an ongoing way,
and yet comes to appear abiding and self-knowing through these pro-
cesses of subjectivation (Butler, 1997, 2004). My work in this area
(Youdell, 2003, 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a) is part of a body of post-
structural work that has explored the circulation of discourses in educa-
tion, the way these are implicated in constituting particular subjects of
education and the ways in which these subjects resist or reinscribe
these subjectivities (see Davies et al, 2001; Rassmussen and Harwood,

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

2003; Rasmussen et al, 2004; Renold, 2006). This work has also turned to
queer, deconstructive and performative politics to think about how the
practices, meanings and subjects inside schools and classrooms might
be shifted (Atkinson and DePalma, 2009; Hey, 2006; Rasmussen, 2006;
Talburt and Steinberg, 2000; Youdell, 2006a; 2006b). Such thinking has
looked to trouble normative constitutions of schooled subjectivities
and rupture the borders of intelligibility. It sets out to offer young
people tools to deconstruct their social and educational location, tacti-
cally redeploy the discourses that locate them and resist the recupera-
tion of their practices (Davies, 1993; Kopelson, 2002; Youdell, 2006a).

In this chapter I put these ideas to work in an effort to make sense of the
politics and practices of the No Outsiders project and, most importantly,
to think about the possible effects these practices might have. In the
context of a project framed expressly by queer conceptual tools and
which aims to take up and enact a queer politics, such a move needs to
be taken with caution. My intention is not to identify examples of work
from the project and consider their queer possibilities and/or failures.
Rather it is to contribute to the thinking through of the effects, the mis-
fires and the recuperations of our practices as part of the wider work of
the project team in this collection and elsewhere (Atkinson and
DePalma, 2009; Cullen and Sandy, 2009; DePalma and Atkinson, 2009;
DePalma and Teague, this volume). Nevertheless, as I approached
accounts of practice in project schools and classrooms, data generated
through the project’s web-discussions and my own participation in
project events and meetings, I was discomforted by the imagined
requirement that I place these under the gaze of my theoretical lens and
weigh up what was queer and what was not. In a project team of 30 plus,
these acts of weighing-up can neither be wholly collaborative nor be
expected to lead to consensus. And while the space for, indeed the
desire for, dissensus is written into the project design, in a setting
framed by the tradition of collaboration and consensus, dissensus is
harder to do than to say. Furthermore, solo readings of the practices of
others with whom one is, in principle, collaborating are not the same as
reading ethnography already abstracted from those about whose
practices it speaks, and such readings magnify the ethical problems of
authority and voice in research (Lather, 1991; Stanley and Wise, 1993; St
Pierre and Pillow, 2000).

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LESSONS IN PRAXIS

Rather than weighing up the specificities of particular project interven-

tions (yes, dear, lovely queer classroom, have a gold star and a glass of
champagne! Sorry dear, you really haven’t got the hang of this queer
thing have you? Do try to pay more attention in team development
days, oh, and stop calling me homosexual would you?), this chapter
considers the project’s multiple conceptual framings and the implica-
tions of these for our practices and their effects. At the heart of my
discomfort over any potential evaluative aspect to my consideration is
the risk of imposing a set of theoretical and political ideas as a frame-
work when those theoretical and political ideas would resist such
singular and singularlising imposition. And alongside this is my recog-
nition that in its praxis the work of the project is not simply or solely
queer (or post-structural, or Foucauldian). So I do not identify ‘exem-
plars’ of ‘queer’ practice in the project’s work, an identification which
would inevitably assume and constitute my position of/as authority
and indirectly criticise that work not singled out. Instead I explore the
fractures between and intersections across the multiple ways in which
knowledge, the subject, politics and sexuality are understood and
enacted in the project and suggest some of the implications of this
multiplicity. I argue that the practices of the project suggest simul-
taneously that:

■ knowledge is constituted and that it is self-evident

■ the subject is constituted through ongoing discursive practices and
that, while diverse, subjects are unitary and enduring
■ political practices take the form of discursive insurrections that un-
settle prevailing knowledges, meanings and subject positions and
that political practices correct erroneous knowledges and repre-
sentations and assert the rights of diverse disenfranchised indivi-
duals.

Versions of knowledge: constitutions and truth

A Foucauldian account of discourse and disciplinary power identifies
the constituted and productive nature of knowledge at the same time as
it underscores the indivisibility of power and knowledge (Foucault,
1990b, 1991). Central to Foucault’s understanding and his project is the
inquiry into how a particular set of ideas comes to attain the status of
truth in a given context and moment; he does not ask ‘Is this true? or ‘Is

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this more or less true that that?’ but ‘How does this come to operate as
a ‘regime of truth’ here and now?’ (Foucault, 1990b). This orientation to
thinking about knowledge and its relationship to disciplinary power
brings with it the expectation that multiple orientations to knowledge,
and multiple knowledges, will circulate simultaneously and that some
of these knowledges will be subjugated while some will be so self-
evident as to operate as regimes of truth. Yet while this account of know-
ledge has a degree of currency within the project team, not all team
members agree with it, or they might acknowledge it intellectually but
not appreciate its practical value.

For some members of the project team or in some aspects of the pro-
ject’s work there may be some unassailable truths or certain know-
ledges about which truth claims might tactically be made. For instance,
the right-ness in principle of equal opportunities for and treatment of
gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people can be seen as an
absolute truth of the UK’s equalities legislation as proposed in the
Single Equalities Bill (CLG, 2007). Here the foregrounding of legislative
reform is seen to further cement the status of formal political structures
and their underpinning principles (a regime of truth?) as well as the
insider citizen who is extended the ‘right’ to participate in these. In turn,
it is also seen to cement the outsider non-citizen who is denied this
participation as well as the illegitimacy or even unspeakability of any
alternative models of social and political organisation or change
(Burgess, 2008). Furthermore, there is a growing body of scholarship
and activism that argues that legislative reform actually benefits those
who are already most privileged and not those minoritised groups who
are held up as its key beneficiaries. This is because such moves only
arise when the demands of minoritised groups converge with the
interests of the dominant group, even if these interests are simply in
terms of having been seen to be ‘fair’ (Bell, 1992; Delgado, 1995).

Key to these critiques is the point that ideas that circulate as unassail-
able truths – whether this is that GLBT people should have the same
rights as heterosexual people, or that heterosexuality reflects or is the
result of normal development, or that sexualities (whether homo or
hetero) are the natural qualities of individuals – are in fact constituted
as truth through their circulation as true. To notice this movement
across orientations to knowledge in the work of the project is not to

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LESSONS IN PRAXIS

argue that all claims are of equal value, even if they are irreconcilable, or
to argue that some sort of reconciliation should be sought or that one
set of ideas should be prioritised over others. It is a reminder that within
a Foucauldian frame ideas are indivisible from power. All ideas are posi-
tioned, including the idea that knowledge can or cannot be certain, and
we can move tactically between these orientations, keeping sight of
their promises and costs.

Versions of the subject: constituted and unitary

A Foucauldian account of the subject suggests a subject continually in
the making, constituted and reconstituted a subject in and through
mobile relations of productive power, ‘a form of power which sub-
jugates and makes subject to’ (Foucault, 1982:212). This, for Foucault, is
the process of subjectivation (Foucault, 1988b, 1988c). This is not a sub-
ject who ‘is,’ but a subject who is ‘as if’ s/he ‘is’ (Butler, 1990, 1991, 1993).
This subjectivated subject is simultaneously made and made under-
standable through prevailing knowledges that offer accounts of the
subject. Prominent and prevailing amongst these accounts are versions
of the cognitive, emotional and moral development of the abiding,
unitary, self-knowing subject. Widely accepted in science, education
and popular culture, these accounts of the subject operate as regimes of
truth and in so doing obscure their claims to greater legitimacy or self-
evidence than alternative accounts. Indeed it is the profound pro-
ductive force in education of, for instance, developmental accounts of
the child that Foucauldian work draws our attention to (Slee, 1995; Har-
wood, 2006). This is not to deny the profound psychic and social reach
of the subject who ‘is’ or the prevailing, silent demand for speech and
action to be the work (and the intentional work) of the subject who ‘is’.
While some of us, sometimes, understand the subject (and ourselves)
conceptually to be constituted, we are constituted as if we were abiding
subjects and so we are continually compelled to constitute (and per-
haps experience) ourselves as abiding, unitary, self-knowing subjects.
Indeed, such a self is often (perhaps always) demanded in order for the
subject to be intelligible. It is no surprise then that we find ourselves
taking up these subject positions again and again.

For some members of the project team (note these self-contained sub-
jects whom I can’t help but call up here) and in some aspects of the pro-

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ject’s work – for instance when taking up a diversity discourse to argue

that heterosexuality should not be the only legitimate sexual subject
position that children encounter in primary school – this subject posi-
tion, and the subject who makes the claim, may well be unitary, abid-
ing, the result of developmental processes, self-knowing, even self-
evident. That is, as we suggest to the children, parents, colleagues and
the media that GLBT people should be recognised as legitimate and full
members of a diverse community we inevitably constitute ourselves
and others as if we were already enduring GLBT and hetero subjects
and that we can say with some certainty ‘who’ these sexualised subjects
are (Butler, 2005). These are constitutions of unitary subjects that are
likely to have implications in and for a project that was conceived with
the problematics of such constitutions in mind.

And Tango Makes Three

Given the ongoing focus of the media on the story books that have been
used in project schools, I want to use one of these, And Tango Makes
Three (Parnell et al, 2005), to consider further the knowledges and sub-
jects that circulate in and are constituted through the No Outsiders pro-
ject. And Tango Makes Three is the story of two male penguins who form
a relationship and together incubate an abandoned egg and rear the
chick. This is a tale about penguins but, in the tradition of such chil-
dren’s stories, these are anthropomorphised, given human characters,
emotions and engagements. So while it’s a story about penguins, it is
also a story about people. And Tango Makes Three does not name these
male penguins in terms of sexual identity or in stated contrast to ap-
proved, hetero relational forms. Yet the story does locate the coupling of
the two male penguins as unusual in its contrast to the rest of the
penguins’ male-female couplings, and as unnatural in as much as the
egg is abandoned (by a ‘normal’ male/female penguin couple) and so
donated to the male penguins by their Keeper, blessed by this donation.
The male penguins’ incubation of the egg and rearing of the chick cites
heterosexuality, monogamous adult coupling, homemaking and the
rearing of young as the coveted prize of couplings entered into by en-
during, self-evident, natural subjects. It is a tale of sex in the context of
emotional attachment and in the context of normative family relations.

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LESSONS IN PRAXIS

In this sense the book can be read as a relatively conservative inscrip-

tion of enduring unitary subjects and the normative heterosexual
nuclear family, even as it asserts the legitimacy of a homosexual emu-
lation of it. While these might be gay penguin daddies living the dream,
this representation of gay life as ‘just like’ straight life risks, amongst
other things, being implicated in disavowing lives that do not look like
an ideal (and idealised) hetero-monogamous nuclear family and con-
tributing to this idealisation. Furthermore, as Judith Butler (1991) has
argued, this is an emulation that will always fail, given that the homo is
the necessary Other of the hetero. Yet at the same time the book does
render intimate same-sex relationships and same-sex parents and
families visible, intelligible and legitimate. And when it is used in pri-
mary classrooms as a storybook and a basis for discussion and further
creative work the book makes these subjects visible, intelligible and
legitimate in a place where they have been invisible, unintelligible, and
illegitimate.

It is not the case that either one or other of these readings of And Tango
Makes Three and its citations, inscriptions and effects is correct or more
compelling or worthwhile than the other. Nor it is the case that one can
be made to erase the other – the first reading cannot be extracted from
the second in any straightforward way. The book is part of a perfor-
mative politics and it is part of a citational chain that inscribes hetero-
normativity. This, it seems to me, is unavoidable; we cannot close down
one or other meaning. The trick then, is to be aware of what practices
might do and to think tactically about their multiple effects.

Media citations
This reading of And Tango Makes Three is in stark contrast to readings
of the project represented in the media. I do not have space to go into
these in detail here: there has been extensive local, national and inter-
national media coverage throughout the project’s lifetime – much of it
controversial. But I explore some of the ways the media has headlined
some of the books used by the project and the implications of these
forms of representation.
Observer 11 March: ‘The Prince married a man, and lived happily ever after:
religious groups attack circulation of books raising gay issues among primary
school pupils’ (Asthana, 2007).

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Daily Mail 11 March: ‘Four-year-olds will get gay fairytales at school: Schools
are teaching children as young as four about same-sex relationships to
comply with new gay rights laws’ (Clark, 2007).

Members of the project team have had very mixed responses to and
readings of the way the media has represented the project, and there is
a great deal of potential for analysis. As my colleagues in the project
know, one effect these media articles had was to remind me of the queer
bubble formed by the community and university contexts that I in-
habit, as well as its fragility and the ease with which this bubble is
rendered illusory by the force of the discourses that prevail in the world
outside it. While the phantasmic, fleeting, or constrained nature of this
queer bubble does not undermine its significance or deny its promise,
these headlines remind me of the enduring power and knowledge net-
works that locate and limit it.

The force and endurance of a discourse of naturalised, unitary, self-

knowing subjects can be seen in references in these headlines to
princes, children and four-year olds – each a self-evident category with
which we are all familiar. The force and endurance of a discourse of
childhood innocence and risk of corruption is made explicit in the
Observer’s headline report that ‘religious groups attack’ and the coupl-
ing of ‘gay issues’ and ‘primary school children’ in which ‘primary’
underscores the child-ness and so prior innocence of these children.
The Daily Mail’s repetition of ‘four year-olds’ and ‘as young as four’ con-
stitutes this tethering together of childhood, innocence and risk of
corruption even more powerfully. The force and endurance of a dis-
course of the normative heterosexual nuclear family runs across these
headlines pieces, the Observer’s parodying of the Princes’ marriage to
each other cites the proper institution of heterosexual marriage. And
the enduring performative force of the erasure of homo-desires and
pleasures and containment of homo-subjectivity, even when this is a
(failed) copy of the hetero-, underpins the Observer’s facetious ‘happily
ever after’ as well as the Daily Mail’s reductive ‘new gay rights laws’
which calls up the derisory discourse of the ‘loony left’ and ‘political
correctness’ as it denies a legitimate homosexual subject-hood.

All of these discourses are called up by just these two headlines, some-
times explicitly and sometimes implicitly. Butler (1997) stresses that

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LESSONS IN PRAXIS

discourses do not have to be expressly cited in language, representa-

tion, or practices in order to have constitutive force – she insists that
silence, what is not said, can be powerfully constitutive. The constitu-
tive force of silence and the capacity for discourses to be called up in
silence is evident in the productive force of the two headlines.

In a context where sanitised and heterosexualised versions of homo-

sexuality are acceptable only as long as they ‘are not anywhere near my
children,’ a sentiment implicitly expressed by the concerned mothers
interviewed on BBC Radio 4 (2007), the inclusion of a text such as And
Tango Makes Three in a primary school curriculum can be seen as a
powerful practice of troubling simply in its speaking the legitimacy of
same-sex relationships and parenting. And the take up of diversity dis-
courses – recognition, equal opportunities and equal treatment (even
when these calls for recognition and equality inevitably inscribe the
sorts of natural, abiding, self-knowing GLBT subjects that post-struc-
tural accounts have challenged and queer politics have troubled) –
comes to appear an important tactical option when the alternative be-
ing powerfully promoted and constituted as reasonable by the media is
the erasure of these subjects. And given the need to be recognisable in
order to act (Butler, 1997, 1999b), these unitary subjects might not be
escapable, and in the context of this sort of media coverage we might
not want to escape them.

Childhood innocence
A notable absence in the project, and one that is sometimes under-
scored by the project team, are the sexualities or (perhaps proto-sexual)
bodily pleasures of children. The project team recognised this absence
and the force of the discourses that create it, and held a specialist
academic seminar to explore the issue in September 2008, supported by
the Society for Educational Studies. The popular press became aware of
the seminar and misrepresented and attacked the work of the project
once again (Doughty, 2008; Khan, 2008; Nicks, 2008).

Much has been written about the abiding tension in discourses of child-
hood between the child’s natural innocence and the child’s innate
potential for wickedness. These discourses insist on the ‘natural’ inno-
cence of children and their need to be protected as well as their need to
be reigned in, correctly trained and socialised in order to guard against

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the risk of wickedness and protect against their corruption, a task that
has been associated with the emergence of mass public education
(Aries, 1962; Cunningham, 2006). Just as Eve has borne the respon-
sibility for corrupting Adam and precipitating the Fall from the Garden
of Eden (Purkiss, 1994; Warner, 1976), so the already-corrupt homo-
sexual or homo-sympathetic teacher, who like Eve is often female or
feminised and carries the responsibility of sexual continence and the
risk of sexual incontinence, may corrupt the child she is charged to pro-
perly educate and protect.

Education scholars such as Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson

(1998), Emma Renold (2005), Mary Jane Kehily (2002), and Mindy Blaise
(2005) have demonstrated the refusal of childhood sexuality in school
discourse and the policing of sexuality in practice as well as children’s
engagements and investments in sexuality practices. In contexts
framed by discourses that refuse recognition of hetero-sexualities
amongst children, it is unsurprising to find an absolute refusal of
homo-sexualities amongst children. To speak of even the possibility of
the existence of childish sexualities and pleasures risks their recupera-
tion and redeployment in discourses of precocious sexuality, corrup-
tion, mal-development, pathology and abuse. These discourses have
incredible force. They are sedimented at the core of the codes and prac-
tices of professions from teaching, social work and child health to chil-
dren’s entertainment. They circulate seemingly constantly through
popular culture as it is expressed in multiple commercial forms, as well
as in social and family life. And this sedimentation is assured through
the apparent impossibility of countering these discourses that are
sealed and assured by their own truths – to appear to counter, chal-
lenge, dispute or disrupt these ‘truths’ is, by default, to risk constitution
as the aberrant Other whom these discourses delineates and guards
against.

Some of us have spoken of an abiding tension between the political and

theoretical conviction of the correctness of the project’s work and the
discomfort of talking about these issues with children, while others
have spoken of a straightforward and uncompromised comfort with the
project work. These different positions and, importantly, emotional ex-
periences seem to indicate less a divergent set of moral frameworks and
more a divergent set of discursive frames, some of which we draw on

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LESSONS IN PRAXIS

explicitly to conceive of and understand our work and some of which

are spectres that haunt our work and which we sense and see only fleet-
ingly.

Politics, tactics, movements

Writers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Butler have identified forms of
and spaces for resistance and in my previous work I have examined stu-
dents’ and teachers’ practices in school in order to explore the possibili-
ties, as well as the limits, for taking up these forms and spaces of resis-
tance in education settings (Youdell, 2004a, 2004b, 2006a, 2006b). These
tactics look to deconstruction and the potential of misfire (Derrida,
1974), discursive resistance and practices of self (Foucault, 1990a,
1990b) and performative politics that shift meaning and or allow dis-
courses into contexts where they have been disallowed (Butler, 1997).
Through these previous analyses I have shown how students and
teachers are already engaged in performative politics in their everyday
practices. If these ordinary, everyday practices are to be translated into
a post-structural political pedagogy (Youdell, 2006b) they are likely to
look towards and for:

■ troubling the normative constitutions of schooling, including the

subjectivities of children/young people and students/learners
■ creating conditions in which what/who is intelligible/unintelligible
might be shifted
■ offering young people tools to deconstruct their social and educa-
tional locations and redeploy the discourses that locate them
■ opening up spaces for children’s and young people’s practices of
self to be intelligible and legitimate
■ mobilising and proliferate young people’s everyday resistances

As I noted at the start, these post-structural ideas and the political

tactics that come out of them are not the only way of thinking about
knowledge, subjects or politics in the No Outsiders project. Alongside
and perhaps over and preceding these ideas are commitments to Left-
liberal reform and GLBT identity politics and the knowledges and sub-
jects that underpin them. These commitments suggest a different set of
concerns and approaches, including legislation and policy influencing

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and enactments, curriculum and community recognition, representa-

tion and tolerance and diversity and equalities agendas.

Perhaps a better fit for thinking about these sorts of concerns and how
they might be pursued is Michael Apple’s (in press) reinvigoration of the
notion and practice of the organic intellectual. Apple suggests a series
of tasks for such a scholar-activist, including engaging in political
action where spaces for this open up, facilitating the work of educators
engaged in political struggle, developing counter-hegemonic education
and acting alongside existing social movements. Although the under-
pinning philosophies, approaches and even the goals of post-struc-
tural, Left-liberal and identity politics differ, they do share a commit-
ment to challenging the enduring and normative privilege of particular
social groups constituted in particular ways, a sense of the important
part that education sites can play in enacting these challenges and a re-
cognition of the significance of everyday practice inside classrooms.

I am not arguing that a particular political philosophy, approach and set

of goals should be pursued and others set aside. Rather I want to argue
that we analyse the possibilities and limits of particular philosophies
and approaches, including the risks that one approach may have for the
goals of another. This analysis, however provisional and uncertain,
might offer insights into possibilities, limits and risks as well as tactics.
Michel De Certeau (1988) draws a useful distinction between the strate-
gies of institutions and governments that are encoding in policy and
legislation and embedded in the structures of institutions and the
tactics of everyday life which people deploy, often tacitly, in order to
survive and make the best of their daily existence. These tactics do not
need to remain oblique, although they often do. As an everyday politics
in education we might engage in an ongoing process of analysing the
potential of our tactics and the multiple effects of the tactics we deploy.
In the face of different circumstances and demands, and in pursuit of
particular effects, we might deploy politics of opposition, recognition,
resistance, deconstruction, reinscription, and performative practice.
We need not be fully conscious of our tactics in order for them to have
effects. But when they are elaborated and critically interrogated we are
able to consider the forms they might take under particular conditions,
even when the ‘right’ tactic will remain undecidable and we know that
we cannot guarantee effects.

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LESSONS IN PRAXIS

Foucault’s ongoing participation in political activism that included

state-focused protest alongside his intellectual work underscores the
fact that his attention to the productive effects of micro-power ran
alongside his engagement with the continued significance of sovereign
power and the need to engage at times in acts of political resistance to
this (Foucault, 1988b). Similarly, Butler’s direct work with the medical
and mental health professionals who assess transgender people pre-
senting for gender reassignment, alongside her philosophical work on
the illusory nature of gender, demonstrate her recognition of the need
for intellectual work and pragmatic, practical politics (Butler, 2004).
Furthermore, Butler’s (2007) concern with the possibilities for new
collectivities to be formed to act in the face of the disciplinary and
coercive forms of power that are seen in the US and UK military inter-
ventions in Iraq illustrates again the need to articulate the post-struc-
tural and the Left.

Allowing post-structural and critical Left politics to co-exist and speak

to each other in the way that I think both Butler’s and Foucault’s writing
and practice suggests also reminds us that a turn to post-politics is not
simply an identity politics pursued through the practices of self of an
individualised subjectivated subject (although Foucault clearly saw this
as part of political practice). Rather, it reminds us that individuals are
always constituted in and through relations of power and practice in
discursive fields that are inflected by and constitutive of the cultural
and the material. Butler’s thinking about new collectivities invites us to
think again about social movements, how these develop, how they can
be supported and the place of educators and scholars in them. The
demise of the popular left, a move away from oppositional political
philosophy and the sedimentation of neo-liberal individualism seem
together to have led us to neglect or stop being concerned with social
movements. The ideas I have explored here indicate, for me, that this
may well be the moment to revive the idea of and our commitment to
social movements, bringing together new collectivities in mobile ways,
complete with potentially irreconcilable ways of thinking and for
hybrid purposes. Indeed, we might think of the No Outsiders as approxi-
mating a moment of such a new collectivity.

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4
‘Vanilla’5 strategies:
compromise or collusion?
David Nixon

In contrast to the explorations offered by Youdell and Cullen of the affordances

and foreclosures of ‘queer’ within the project’s work, Nixon offers an alternative
critique, again emerging from the intersections within the project between queer
and gay rights discourses. Using interpretive lenses drawn from critical explora-
tions of sexualities equality and sexual geography (from which he draws the
chapter’s framing concepts of ‘safe space, troubled space and dangerous space’)
he focuses on the ways in which discourses of the ‘acceptable homosexual’ and
fear of moral outrage may have led project members to make their strategies of
intervention and resistance altogether too safe. He explores the effects and im-
pacts (or lack of them) of these ‘vanilla strategies’ and examines what happened
when the project was suddenly perceived as sexually dangerous. Nixon con-
siders the implications for the project’s participants, and the wider educational
world, of moving from safe to dangerous spaces.

Introduction

F
rom its beginning, the No Outsiders project has worked within
twin frameworks roughly described as equalities/social justice/
human rights on the one hand, and on the other the exploration
of queer in terms of theory, pedagogy and curriculum. This chapter con-
siders the intersections, challenges and tensions between these frames
via three concepts: ‘vanilla’ as defined by Silverstein and Picano (1993) to
mean safe and approved sexual practice and fantasy, Rofes’ (2000) con-

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tention that lesbian and gay educators have abandoned anything other
than vanilla in order to be acceptable in the teaching profession, and
Bell and Valentine’s (1995) process of mapping sexual geographies. Using
project literature, interviews, field notes, project website discussions,
blogs and media reporting I describe space which is safe, troubled and
dangerous, concluding that while the project has been queerer than at
first sight, the risks of this engagement have also been highlighted.

in his article ‘Bound and gagged’ in the journal Sexualities, Eric Rofes
speaks about attempting to negotiate the boundaries of acceptable be-
haviour between the worlds of some contemporary gay (predominantly
male) cultures and the culture of the educator. Rofes asks:
Are there ways to situate ourselves [as educators] in relationship to activities
common to some contemporary gay cultures such as cyber sex, drag, sex in
parks or participation in leather subcultures, without denying our own interest
or participation, feeling shame or being ejected from our profession? (2000:
442)

He concludes by emphasising what has been lost:

We’ve made compromises and sacrifices that have gone unspoken and un-
acknowledged. We’ve gained limited entry into the classroom by denying
authentic differences between many gay men’s relationships to gender roles,
sexual cultures and kinship arrangements compared with those of the
heteronormative hegemony. (ibid:459)

These issues have been present in much discussion and reflection dur-
ing the second year of the No Outsiders project, coming starkly into
relief as a result of reactions both within the project and in the media to
a day seminar entitled ‘Queering the Body: Queering Primary Educa-
tion’.

Located in English primary schools, this participatory action research

seeks, as its introductory literature states:
... to support you [the teacher researcher] in a creating a positive, inclusive
ethos and challenging homophobic discrimination in your own school or
classroom. This might involve, for example, including non-heterosexual
relationships within discussions of family, friendship, self or growing up, ex-
ploring a range of identities and relationships through literacy, art, history or
drama, or including a specific focus on homophobia within a class- or school-
based initiative to tackle bullying.

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The project’s teacher researchers were provided with reading material

to use in their own practice contexts, showing inclusive family struc-
tures or challenging gender norms, suitable for the primary age range.
They were encouraged to explore this material or discover their own
ways of developing this work. An interactive web forum restricted to
project team members has allowed teacher researchers and university
researchers to share data and reflect on this data both experientially
and theoretically.

By the start of the second year of No Outsiders the teacher researchers

and university researchers felt they had greater confidence and ex-
perience. They began to ask questions about the kind of images of
lesbians and gay men which were being held up, consciously or not, as
models of acceptability. To what extent were we advertising only safe,
comfortable ‘gay families’? Did we include any images that might
threaten or disrupt this pseudo-nuclear setup? Were we pursuing a
vanilla approach out of strategic necessity, as a first step, or out of reluc-
tance, fear or doubts about queer? Was this compromise or collusion
with the heteronormativity we all recognised as so prevalent in school-
ing? If we did things differently, what would a queer primary project
look like? This chapter begins to answer these questions, as well as ex-
ploring what happened in terms of public media reaction when the
project explicitly opened up the domain of queer.

In theoretical terms, the project situates itself and its research within
the broadly postmodern perspective by which sociologists of education
and their colleagues in related disciplines examine gender and sexua-
lities. The work of theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, Sedgwick and
Butler are then interpreted into the more specific arena of education.
Foucault’s (1970, 1997a, 1998) analysis of power, resistance and sexuali-
ties demonstrates the constructed nature of classifications hitherto
taken for granted, the networks of power which operate in and create
the discourse of sexualities and the possibility of individual and group
resistance within a network of power relations.

Butler’s notion of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ or ‘heterosexual hegemony’

(1990, 1993, 1994) describes the density of practice and concept which
allows autonomy to a single sexual culture; however, she points out that
that which is maintained by constant repetitions and appeals to ante-

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cedent authority can also be disrupted by the development of new

‘echo chains’ and fresh appeals. Postmodern and post-structuralist
writers provide, therefore, the means to examine the ‘taken as read,’ the
commonsense normalcy of life in and around schools, revealing who or
what is omitted from a reading and the far from normal experiences of
minorities. The insights of queer theory are particularly significant
(Jagose, 1996) in relation to education. Sumara and Davis write, ‘Queer
theory does not ask that pedagogy becomes sexualised, but that it
excavate and interpret the way it already is sexualised – and, further-
more, that it begins to interpret the way that it is explicitly hetero-
sexualised’ (1999:192).

Bell and Valentine examine how ‘the spaces of sex and the sexes of space
are being mapped out across the contemporary social and cultural
terrain’ (1995:1). By discussing the intersection of the discipline of
geography with contemporary work about sexualities, they are able to
trace growing interest in how space is sexualised and how sexual
identity is inscribed on both bodies and landscapes, advocating a queer
reading of geography as well as a queering of space. It is by means of the
trope of space that material in this chapter is organised: Safe space,
Troubled space, Dangerous space.

Safe space
In some senses, the introduction of books like And Tango Makes Three
(Parnell et al, 2005), We Do: A celebration of gay and lesbian marriage
(Rennert, 2004), and ABC: A family alphabet book (Combs et al, 2000)
into the primary staffroom and classroom marked a huge step forward
in the promotion of sexualities equality. Although We Do and Tango
tend to show safe gay families, it was only twenty years ago that UK
legislation included a clause (the infamous Section 28 of the 1988 Local
Authorities Act) stating that ‘a local authority shall not ... promote the
teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homo-
sexuality as a pretended family relationship,’ which was only repealed
in England in 2003. The children’s book Jenny lives with Eric and Martin
(Bösche, 1983), a particularly anodyne version of domestic harmony,
was reputed to have inspired the clause. But even the ‘safe’ texts offered
to project schools were not safe enough for some: the head teacher of
one project school locked the books in her office, only allowing circula-

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tion of The Sissy Duckling (Fierstein and Cole, 2002) on the condition
that the blurb on the inside cover containing the words ‘gay’ and ‘safe
sex’ were pasted over. Rasmussen (2006) recognises that the challenge
of these kinds of text lies in the description of straight and gay relation-
ships as equal and similar; this is more discomforting than equal but
different, which still allows an escape into the myths and stereotypes of
othering.

The provision of safe space in the classroom for the teaching of diversity
has a number of facets: if teachers are not comfortable saying words like
gay and lesbian, then unease will be quickly communicated to children,
which will tend to reinforce already established negative associations.
Gay and lesbian teachers have a particular interest here if they intend to
risk being more open about their own sexualities; and children with gay
or lesbian parents will talk less openly about their own families if they
feel unsafe to do so. An example of the benefits of this safe space linked
to the reading of a project text is given in one account of a classroom
incident:
One child in Class One – reception age [4-5 years old] – told the class her
carers were getting married – both female. This provoked huge discussion,
mainly the other children saying this was impossible and the class teacher
then came to me and asked me for support. So I went in and read And Tango
Makes Three and showed them the pictures of civil ceremonies in the photo
book we were sent. They all laughed, but I decided they would have laughed
if I’d told them butterflies used to be caterpillars. Anyway, they loved the story
and then the little girl whose foster parents are (allegedly) about to get
married stood up and explained the bedroom situation in their house. (Not
quite sure why she decided to announce this, but you know what reception
children are like.) Something along the lines of: there’s Anne’s bedroom with
the computer and there’s the bedroom they sleep in together and my bed-
room is next to that one. All hands went up at this point and I thought, here
we go, but in fact they all wanted to say where their bedrooms were in their
houses in relation to their parents. It was fun! There was a parent helper in
the room and I asked her afterwards how she thought the session went and
she was really positive about it. (Sue, web posting)

This account also illustrates some awareness in very young children of

a complex concept like ‘getting married.’ One child realised that it was
possible for a same-sex couple; the rest of the class felt that this was

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problematic. The introduction of bedroom arrangements does not lead

to a conversation about gay sex, but to a comparison of the geography
of children’s houses. This undercuts both objections to the research that
primary aged children are too young to understand this kind of teach-
ing and adults’ obsessive link of ‘gay’ with sexual practice.

For older children something different is possible. Andy had already

come out to his class with some trepidation earlier in the year, and now
recounts the benefits:
After summer I was talking with a mixed group of Y5 and 6 children over
lunch. We were talking about pizza. One girl said to me ‘Does David like
pizza?’
Me: (I was stumped for a second) ‘David?’
Girl: ‘You know, David! Your boyfriend.’
I have had thousands of conversations with children over the years about the
weekend or a holiday and my partner David has remained invisible, referred
to as ‘my friend’ if at all. Once I came out and told children my partner was
called David, he suddenly became real. To have a child ask innocently about
him in a conversation was wonderful. And there was no reaction from the
other kids. I said he did like pizza and then the conversation moved on. A
great moment! Heterosexual people are able to mention their wives and hus-
bands and partners, now I do too. As teachers and adults we are modelling
all the time the behaviour we want the children to reciprocate. I no longer feel
I am modelling fear and hiding. (Andy, web posting)

Beyond Andy feeling a warm glow of acceptance, there is evidence here

of normalisation. Perhaps more significantly, Andy discovers that to say
nothing about himself does not imply a neutral space but rather con-
veys to children the underlying connotation of gay sexuality as some-
thing to hide, to be fearful of. Now gay sexuality is something to talk
about, or not to talk about, in the dynamic of an ordinary conversation.

Troubled space
These accounts are examples of the gains to be made, in terms of sup-
porting diversity, from the adoption of vanilla strategies. As a tactical
approach to persuading critics, encouraging supporters, and publicly
reversing two decades of silencing, they should not be underestimated.
However they are problematic in at least three ways. They perpetuate

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the distinction between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ sexual sub-cul-

tures enjoyed by gay (and straight) men and women, aspects of which
are summarised in Rofes’ words above; they do not reflect more
generally the life experiences of men and women today and they do not
reflect the theoretical milieu in which the project is situated.

Rofes’ first statement above does not suggest that children should be
given tours of bars, parks, and gay bath houses/saunas and tearooms/
cottages, though that is what the project’s critics have imputed (see
‘Dangerous space’ below). Rather, he highlights continuing tensions
between teachers’ roles as agents in a process of cultural reproduction
which seeks to normalise and validate an almost exclusive and narrowly
constrained heterosexual matrix and teachers’ free expression of their
sexuality in the diversity of its desires and (be)longings. How to live with
this tension has both personal and professional consequences, with the
threat of both shame and dismissal if too bright a light reveals private
lives to a prurient public (see Patai, 1992 and DePalma and Atkinson in
press, for concepts of surplus visibility). Rofes suggests that this tension
and fear prevent the interrogation of prevailing family structures and
their implication in heteronormative discourses; we fail to recognise
the diversity of families which fall outside these narrow norms and to
learn from what non-traditional families have to offer.

Where Rofes’ statement is less helpful is in its reluctance to challenge

the conflation between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)
people and sexual activities, which has been remarked upon in research
elsewhere (eg Nixon and Givens, 2004; DePalma and Atkinson, 2006). In
the context of the No Outsiders project, for example, the use of a photo
of two muscled young men in shorts and singlets with a young child
that was selected by project teachers as an image of gay parenting has
been interpreted in one primary school as showing gay pornography.
Such conflation accounts for neither the range of heterosexual practice
which includes cyber sex, drag, sex in parks (UK English: ‘dogging’) and
sex parties (UK English: ‘swinging’) nor the range of homosexual prac-
tice which includes long-term, monogamous, committed and loving
relationships. The heteronormative hegemony behind these confla-
tions gains some of its strength from the system of hierarchical pairs
described by Derrida (1974). The first term in binaries such as man/
woman, mind/body, straight/gay is associated with power, rationality

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and the presence of a transcendental order, while the second term

marks absence, the ‘hidden, forbidden or repressed’ (Bass, 1978:x).
Contrary to the assumptions of the popular press, a queer primary
pedagogy would not be concerned with the minutiae of gay sex: its aim
might be the far more disruptive one of upsetting the authority of these
pairings. If Andy can talk of his boyfriend in the classroom without
essentialising his own sexuality, then this disruption will have started.

Spivak (1988) uses the term ‘strategic essentialism’ in her work on race
theory to refer to the option of allowing discrete and essentialist cate-
gories to persist temporarily, while recognising their limitations, be-
cause an overall strategic aim is advanced. By failing to acknowledge
the rich and subversive multiplicity of the lived experiences of the
twenty-first century adults our young people will become, there are
hints of this essentialism in the work of the project. Again the rationale
may be that fixed sexual identities which include a valorisation of ‘gay’
may be difficult enough at primary level without speaking about greater
fluidity or a queer identity; additionally, a robust approach to prejudice
and discrimination may be facilitated by a more fixed version of
identity. There is always the possibility that denying identity equals
denying persecution: the fist, the boot or the knife-blade do not first ask
questions about ontology. Nevertheless, there is a risk of reifying both
homo- and hetero- identities through knowledges and normalised
images which are partial and distorted, and this continues to construct
the binary pairs on which much discrimination is based (Talburt and
Steinburg, 2000). This is not to suggest that people choose to be gay,
straight, bisexual and so on; rather that the way in which they choose to
describe themselves and which others choose to describe them may
vary across time, geography and culture. And such choices will have dif-
ferently valued consequences.

It is this more general point which would be a possible starting-point

for the classroom, with pupils who already experience a variety of fami-
lial structures.

The No Outsiders research endeavour situates itself within a post-

modern and post-structural perspective which informs much contem-
porary academic discussion of sexualities. To use this plural form is a
result of an understanding of a fluidity of identity by contrast to an

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essentialist and fixed sexual identification. The project takes particular

note of Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997) and her accounts of gender and
sexuality, including her notion of ‘degrounding’: that shifts in under-
standing or practice may occur when we stand in two places at once, or
do not know exactly where we are standing (Butler, 1994; see also
Atkinson and Brace, 2007; Atkinson and DePalma, 2009).

The concept that we perform our gender and sexuality every day in
different ways is taken up by Deborah Youdell, who insists that what is
performed in one particular way – ie in a way which is antipathetic to
sexual minorities – may indeed be performed differently and in ways
which trouble normalised identity constructions. She discovers ‘the dis-
cursive practices that students deploy in order to resist performatively
constituted wounded identities and (potentially) reinscribe themselves
again differently’ (Youdell, 2004:481, original emphasis). As a research
team we also recognise the potential impasse between this theoretical
approach and a lively embracing of issues of social justice. We bridge
this gap by a call on the works of feminist post-structuralists in edu-
cation like Glenda MacNaughton:
Feminist poststructuralists believe that in order to disclose which discourses
should be privileged it is important to have a clear analysis of how discourses
are structured, what power relations they produce and reproduce and the im-
plications of different meanings for social relations. (2000:56)

Similarly, Elizabeth St. Pierre writes of her ‘deep, ethical concern for the
damage done to those trapped in the everlasting, insidious grids con-
structed by prevailing power and privilege’ (St. Pierre, 1997:282).

One project member highlighted that ‘the intersection of a multiplicity

of identities within myself does not stop me from making judgments
about how those identities interact with the everyday world’ and that
within the life of one individual such identities may at any one time be
mutually contradictory (Elizabeth A, web posting). This suggests that
postmodernism does not represent a tidy replacement structure, but
rather attempts to reflect the messy complexity of identity which is a
particular characteristic of sexual identities, including the possibility of
advocating for greater equality.

This overview makes clear the presence of creative tensions between

theory and practice at the heart of this research. We are aware that we

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risk collusion in failing to disturb sufficiently the settled normalities of

accepted hetero- and homosexual practice, so we are uncomfortable
that we may have inadvertently settled for the compromise of strategic
essentialism. We still wish to see changes in school practice to support
sexualities equality, so on occasions we have to come to that com-
promise. What evidence is there from within project schools to illustrate
these methodological and philosophical tensions? The two incidents
described above in which primary-aged children unpack the realities of
family life in twenty-first century Britain may be read in a much queerer
way. Several myths are exposed here: it is possible to talk about gay and
lesbian people in primary school lessons without sensationalising, and
without reference to sexual activity; a male primary teacher having a
same sex partner of whom he speaks in the classroom is not an ‘impos-
sible body’ (Youdell, 2006a); support staff and parents are sympathetic
to the teaching of equalities, especially in relation to homophobic
bullying. This last challenges the notion that such work is simply
extreme political correctness imposed by left-wing academics on local
cultures (see Wardrop, 2009).

Two significant events within our project schools also suggest that we
are more queer than at first sight – something to reassure those who
wish to settle for neither compromise nor collusion. The finale of an
inclusion week in a small village school took place in the local parish
church. The children processed a rainbow flag into the church and
acted out the story of King and King (De Haan and Nijland, 2000) in
which two princes fall in love and marry each other. The priest in his
homily at the end referred to Jesus as supporting outsiders:
Actually, there was another person who was really, really into No Outsiders
as well. It may come as a big surprise to you who that person was. See Jesus
was really into No Outsiders as well. He always went to look for the people
who were on the edges (excerpted from videotape).

This juxtaposition of young children, gay symbolism and story and a

religious institution in its medieval glory troubles a number of dis-
courses: in addition to those about children and sexuality, assumptions
about the prejudices of religious faith are also disturbed.

In another school, a teacher used the theme of alternative fairy tales to

dress up and act out a lesbian Cinderella, complete with boots, sparkly

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wig and leather jacket, allowing children to question her in character

about her ‘girlfriend.’ She had previously read King and King and found
that some children still wanted to insist that the prince really wanted to
marry a princess. While the pupils deployed some energy in either re-
turning the story of male characters to the hetero-norm or refusing to
shift Cinderella from her pretty, white straightness, others took permis-
sion to unsettle the comfortable fixity of this story and explore queer
alternatives. The teacher herself, given that this was almost a coming
out performance of her own, began to re-inscribe what it meant to be a
primary teacher (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 for analysis of this event).

Dangerous space
If these developments mark a shift in some primary schools from
vanilla to queer, then limits and brakes were imposed at the end of the
project’s second year. The project team ran a university seminar entitled
‘Queering the Body: Queering Primary Education’ and publicised its
intentions on a number of academic and professional websites:
One of the most fundamental questions the research team has been
addressing since the start of the project concerns the problematics of the
body. The team is concerned to interrogate the desexualisation of children’s
and teachers’ bodies, the negation of pleasure and desire in educational con-
texts and the tendency to shy away from discussion of (sexual) bodily activity
in No Outsiders project work. Through ongoing debate and exploration dur-
ing the project, members of the project team have challenged the pervasive
images of romantic love and life-long monogamy portrayed by the lesbian
and gay characters in the children’s books used in project schools; have
questioned the denial or repression of their own sexual identities, pleasures,
desires and investments; have explored the underpinning cultural and reli-
gious discourses which banish sex from sexuality; have raised the need for
and purpose of strategic essentialism in relation to sexualities and gender
identity; and have challenged each other to go beyond imagined possibilities
into queer practice. In addition, the team has explored the multi-layered ways
in which sex/gender/sexuality are written on and performed through the body
through the repetition and appropriation of specific social and cultural codes
and symbols; and ways in which such performativity might be interrupted/
disrupted in order both to queer the norm and normalise the queer (excerpt
from seminar announcement).

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Putting aside the political advisability of placing in the public domain

what might be conceived of outside academic circles as particularly
problematic, the focus of these seminar papers was to explore precisely
what this essay highlights about the methodological tensions and
potential contradictions which have been spoken, unspoken, or
alluded to tangentially across the project almost from its inception. The
interest here is not in the contents of this seminar (to which its parti-
cipants responded with enthusiasm), but in the reactions it generated
and what these reactions tell us about attitudes to sexualities in primary
schools. We are not too far again from Rofes’ cyber sex, drag, sex in parks
or leather subcultures: troubled spaces become dangerous spaces, but
dangerous for whom?

Initial negative reactions came from teachers engaged with the research
who, spotting the possibility of misinterpretation, were worried and
angry lest hard work and success in their own primary schools would be
undermined. After some discussion, teachers were reassured, perhaps
most effectively by one project teacher who planned to participate in
the academic seminar. The reaction in public media was not so mea-
sured. The Daily Mail of 16 September ran the headline ‘Teach ‘the plea-
sure of gay sex’ to children as young as five, say researchers’, and opened
with the words:
Children as young as five should be taught to understand the pleasures of
gay sex, according to leaders of a taxpayer-funded education project. Heads
of the project have set themselves a goal of ‘creating primary classrooms
where queer sexualities are affirmed and celebrated’. (Doughty, 2008)

While the phrase ‘the pleasure of gay sex’ is the newspaper’s own, else-
where the article cleverly quotes from the seminar description and
intersperses comments, including those posted on the Christian
Institute website:
The discussions provoked a furious reaction from critics of the homosexual
rights agenda. Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute said: ‘When an adult
who is working in a primary school suggests that children should explore
their sexuality, that should result in a complaint to the police’. Patricia
Morgan, author of studies of family life and gay adoption, said: ‘The proposal
is that primary school classrooms should be turned into gay saunas. This is
about homosexual practice in junior schools. The idiots who repealed Sec-
tion 28 should consider that this is where it has got them.’ (ibid)

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Similar stories appeared in the Daily Telegraph, with the headline: ‘Pri-
mary schools ‘should celebrate homosexuality’’ (another invented
quotation) (Khan, 2008) and in the Daily Star with ‘Outrage at gay sex
lessons for kids, five’ (Nicks, 2008). Blogs in each of these newspapers
followed the same line. Several right wing websites also reported this
story, for example: ‘BNP Leader Calls for Funding Cuts to State-Spon-
sored ‘Gay Sex to Five Year Olds’ Researchers’; the same sites named
some of the researchers (one by means of an unauthorised entry into a
social networking site) and were linked to other sites and blogs which
called for ‘Capital Punishment for the Paedo-Intellectuals’.

As a result of this reporting, individual teachers and researchers were

distressed, anxious and not a little fearful, with support being called on
from local authorities and university security departments as well as
from friends and family. At a major project dissemination event, initially
planned as the project’s publicity launch, the decision was taken not to
invite press representatives. Specific schools and teachers were not
named, and a sense of a celebration of achievements was harder to sus-
tain than would otherwise have been possible. This media coverage,
alongside the earlier reporting of protests over the project’s work in two
Bristol schools, may lead other schools and heads to question whether
the cost of this equalities work is too high both professionally and per-
sonally to justify the risk. This view has not been helped by an otherwise
sympathetic report in the Times Educational Supplement under the
headline ‘Gay education in primaries climbs back into the closet’
(Brettingham, 2008). While numerous messages of support came from
the project’s allies around the country, those not already familiar with
its work may have taken away the impression that to emulate it would
be dangerous and somehow corrupting.

At a level of theory and practice, significant lessons may be learnt from

all this. There are familiar strategies deployed: the reduction of edu-
cation about homosexuality and sexualities equality to the simplistic,
undefined notion of ‘gay sex’ through reference to censured sexual
practices, raising the spectre of the ‘dangerous queer’ of the 1980s New
Right agenda (A Smith, 1994); an attack on public funding bodies by in-
voking the image of the hard-pressed taxpayer, again reminiscent of a
previous era; the deliberate conflation of homosexuality and paedo-
philia; the undermining of teachers’ professional judgements about

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age-appropriate pedagogy; and the disassociation of education about

sexualities equality from other diversity strands. Behind these strategies
lie discourses of hetero-patriarchy and child protection which suggest
through a quiet but potent elision that only with a traditional system of
values and judgements are children safe, or in reverse, that by upsetting
the traditional order you risk the safety of your children. The physical
threat behind this manoeuvre is revealed in one of the blog headlines
(‘Capital Punishment for the Paedo-Intellectuals’); associated threats to
professional status and public reputation are just under the surface.
The link to conservative Christian organisations invokes an attack on
the cosmic order and the possibility of wider moral chaos should such
equalities work continue (Holloway, 1980).

This feels like dangerous space for researchers and practitioners alike,
but dangerous too for children. The project literature already described
writes into the curriculum and the life of the school the presence of
same-sex families, thereby ending potential feelings of invisibility for
these children and families and also promoting awareness of the notion
of difference for all children. The outlawing of homophobic bullying,
and of indiscriminate and pejorative use of ‘gay’ protects all children,
when this behaviour is used often to highlight and castigate any child
who is different from a narrow norm. The safeguarding of children may
not be best accomplished by reliance on the concept of a golden age of
childhood innocence (see for example Renold, 2005).

The resilience of these powerful and toxic alliances should perhaps not
have surprised the project team, but the degree of investment in
notions of childhood innocence bears further investigation. The con-
cept of queer is still not understood widely, or perhaps remains
frighteningly fluid: bisexual, transgender and queer identities are per-
ceived as being too much for the primary school. Gay or straight in their
essentialised forms are less upsetting, but beyond that is forbidden
territory – vanilla with a twist?

Returning to Rofes’ (2000) article, I would argue that his concerns about
assimilations and trade-offs are still helpful as spotlights to pick out the
detail of our practice in schools and institutions of higher education. No
Outsiders research has begun to engage in a queerer pedagogy, and a
queerer reading of what we have already achieved, as the examples des-

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cribed above suggest. The team has not avoided the exploration in
childhood discourses of ‘desire, bodies and erotic practices’ that fail to
disrupt ‘sex as an effective form of social control’ (ibid:459) or, as one of
our university researchers phrases it, investigating ‘the performative
force of silence’ (Deb, web posting). But we are now more fully cog-
nisant of the risks and recuperations involved.

Notes
5 ‘Like the ice cream of the same name, it’s both popular and plain. Used by some in a
merely descriptive way, and by others pejoratively, “vanilla” refers to a person whose
sexual fantasies and actions are among the most socially approved both in the gay
world and by those straights on its periphery’ (Silverstein and Picano, 1993:208).

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5
Speaking the unspeakable in
forbidden places: addressing lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender
equality in the primary school
Alexandra Allan, Elizabeth Atkinson, Elizabeth Brace,
Renée DePalma and Judy Hemingway

This chapter explores the ways in which the unspeakable – the recognition or ex-
pression of non-normative gender and sexual identities usually silenced or fore-
closed in primary education contexts – has not only found deliberate expression
in previously forbidden contexts in the course of the project, but has also seeped
out into a range of arenas within and beyond the project’s schools. These themes
are developed further in this volume through Atkinson and Moffat’s examination
of the effects of lesbian and gay visibility in educational contexts in Chapter 7, and
Nixon’s exploration of safe, troubled and dangerous spaces in chapter 4. Here,
three scenarios are examined in three different project settings: the staffroom, the
classroom and the after-school club. The authors explore the implications of leaky
knowledge and its impact on the shaping of discourses of knowledge both within
and outside the school.

Introduction: the production of school as a heterosexual place

T
he primary school is often thought of as a place of safety and
innocence (Kehily and Montgomery, 2004; Renold, 2005; De-
Palma and Atkinson, 2006); a place where childhood is nurtured
and sheltered, and where attempts to address what are seen as ‘adult’
issues may be seen as intrusions into or threats to this safety zone. In

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this context, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identities

are made absent in one sense through the fact that they are not
addressed in formal school contexts, while being made doubly present
by the fact that they are taboo, and are brought into being through the
popular discourses of homophobia.

This chapter draws upon data generated in primary schools to interro-

gate the ways in which school is produced as a particular bounded
place (or collection of places) where sexuality, and particularly non-
heterosexuality, is carefully policed by these boundaries. Since
September 2006, the No Outsiders research team has been exploring
ways of addressing LGBT equality in the context of English primary
schools. Each teacher researcher has generated strategies in their own
practice context, with the support of university-based research assis-
tants, and as strategies and issues emerged they have been shared with
the wider research team.

Massey writes of the spatial in terms of complex geometries of power;

‘Since social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with
power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is as an
ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification’ (1994:3).
Drawing upon students’ own metaphors, Gordon and Lahelma (1996)
compare school to an ant’s nest, with spatial relationships and move-
ments carefully channelled, compartmentalised and specialised. Yet as
McGregor has noted, schools are not static self-contained entities but
institutions continually being produced by interconnecting relation-
ships and practices which extend in space and time (2003:253). Draw-
ing upon field notes and journal entries recorded by teacher researchers
and research assistants, we investigate the ways in which this power-
laden social geometry of school has been meaningful within our pro-
ject, by focusing on three very different school places: the classroom,
the staffroom and a school-based after-school art club. Our analysis
engages with the contingency of place-making to show that place is
neither a unitary experience nor a neutral stage upon which social rela-
tions are enacted.

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The classroom: dissident bodies in (hetero)normative

landscapes
This vignette explores the intermeshing of the space of the classroom
and the place of the body in a provisional reading of an alternative fairy
tale performed during a primary school literacy-hour project. The
narrative focuses on how the body of a lesbian Cinderella challenges
the (hetero)normative landscapes of pedagogic spaces. It is with the
politics of the sexualised teacher body, framed within the wider ‘power-
geometries’ (Massey, 2005) of the British education system, that this tale
begins.

Producing lesbian space

The only thing that me and Cindy had in common is that we are lesbians and
I guess neither of us would really want to dress like Cinderella but I would
never wear what Cindy wore so I created a character fairly different from my-
self. (Laura, No Outsiders teacher researcher)

In her initial year as a class teacher who is not ‘out’ to the eight- and
nine-year-olds she teaches, Laura faced a range of issues. For example,
within the space of the government-imposed daily literacy hour she
was motivated to explore the themes raised in the gay-affirmative story
books loaned to participating schools. Laura’s determination chal-
lenged her deputy head and parallel teacher, whom she eventually
‘managed to persuade,’ and her teaching assistant who regularly re-
moved the age-appropriate project books from display by putting them
in a cupboard. Having passed the gatekeepers, Laura recorded in her re-
search journal, from which the following quotations are taken, her reso-
lution to ‘plan a unit which looks at ways that the themes in fairy tales
can be changed and adapted’.

The scheme of work during the ensuing fortnight began with the well-
known alternative tale of The Paper Bag Princess (Munsch and Mart-
chenko, 1982). This princess not only defies convention by refusing to
dress as pronounced fitting by a prince but also confounds the hetero-
normative denouement of other tales by rejecting the prince himself.
Although Laura reported that her class ‘loved’ this overturning of the
masculine privilege of self-determination, She recorded that the pupils
were ‘finding it hard to understand why princesses might not want to
wear beautiful dresses etc!’ In the next activity, Laura directed pupils to

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write as the Paper Bag Princess to Cinderella, ‘giving her advice’. This
was followed by work on the more recently published King and King
(De Haan and Nijland, 2000), and mention of homosexuality. Laura
wrote:
I talked quite openly with my class about the Princes’ sexuality – we began
the lesson with a letter from the Prince asking the class for help (because he
has to meet all these princesses but doesn’t want to marry any of them) and
then we read the book.

Despite this discussion, the embeddedness of heterosexuality and ideas

about marriage were such that the reasons Laura’s pupils suggested for
the prince not marrying a princess cohered around his preference for
singleton status and his wish to avoid gold-diggers. King and King was
also used as the stimulus for pupils to write lonely hearts advertisements
seeking a partner for the gay prince. With the exception of two pupils, the
class accepted the protagonist’s sexuality and wrote of his wishing ‘to
meet a handsome Prince to go on adventures with, play chess with, etc.’
At the end of the book when the prince marries another prince, Laura
observed that most pupils ‘did not react negatively to the outcome,’
although mention of lesbians evoked laughter and cries of ‘yuk!’

During the next literacy hour, Laura briefly left the classroom and re-
turned as Cindy. Aware of the limitations of restrictive forms of lesbian
identity and body habitus, she observed:
I found it difficult to decide what kind of Cinderella I would be. I didn’t want to
be completely feminine because they see loads of very feminine fairy tale
characters all the time and yet they also seem to think that all lesbians look
like men so I wanted to challenge that in them too. So I decided to be de-
finitely female but not pink and pretty. I wore boots and a sparkly wig and a
skirt and a leather jacket.

Resisting the Cartesian mind/body dualism associated with traditional

storytelling, Laura performed an alternative Cinderella story which was
‘a lot of fun up to the point at which I was telling them about this girl I
met at the party’ whereupon ‘it was very scary’. Recalling that ‘we’ve
talked in class about gay men – far more than lesbians (how does that
always happen?!),’ Laura felt on ‘pretty new ground’. After the per-
formance, Laura’s class hotseated Cindy (asked Laura questions which
she answered in character as Cindy). Laura reflected on this experience:

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One boy asked, incredulously, ‘So, are you really gay?’ and for a moment my
heart stopped (this was getting somewhat too close for comfort but I had set
this whole thing up and had to go with it) – so I answered ‘Well, this is my
girlfriend so yes, I’m gay’ and pointed to the picture I had of this girl on the
interactive whiteboard. That felt horrible but I couldn’t avoid it, seeing as I was
perfectly happy about answering all the other questions and I was doing this
for the very reason that I was aware that we hadn’t spoken much about les-
bians ... so I wanted to present a positive lesbian to them who was comfort-
able about being a lesbian.

Again resisting same-sex relationships and perhaps other aspects of

Cindy’s lifestyle, the pupils asked ‘Will you get married?’ and ‘When will
you get married?’ Laura felt that the pupils thought ‘the story hadn’t
been finally completed until there was marriage!’

Despite the production of lesbian space, Laura felt that she had ‘no idea’
what she would do if asked directly about her sexuality. But, she argued,
‘even though I can’t do it yet, I feel children need to know that there are
lesbians teaching them, existing in classrooms with them every day.’
Laura concluded by writing:
Yes, Cindy did come and share a classroom with them for a little while and
they interacted with her and she obviously challenged some of them who
assumed she was straight but then she went away. The episode perhaps
hinted at a different way to perform gender and sexuality and presented the
children with an alternative they’d not considered and I think this, combined
with other things we have done, is all contributing to them developing dif-
ferent understandings but, in itself, it’s not enough.

This vignette portrays the body itself as the site of meaning-making, as

‘the irreducible locus for the determination of all values, meanings, and
significations’ (Harvey, 2000:97). This particular body, ‘caught up in a
system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions’
(Foucault, 1977:11), serves to illustrate what kinds of bodies are pro-
hibited from the primary classroom. It has been argued that the ‘de-
sexualisation of teachers as teachers’ is attributable to ‘the desexualisa-
tion of schooling required (however problematically) by government
and dominant sexual culture’. Epstein and Johnson, 1998:122). Simul-
taneously, however, desexualisation assumes default heterosexuality
and while heteronormative teaching bodies are openly displayed in the
domain of the school, lesbian bodies tend to be rendered invisible. In

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this example, one No Outsiders teacher researcher challenged taken-

for-granted heterosexuality and produced a lesbian space (Valentine,
1996) in the classroom by using ‘representation, gesture and play’
(Creed, 1995:102) in the creation of an alternative Cinderella.

Pedagogic authority and the politics of hope

Laura’s analysis of her lesbian Cinderella performance echoes Davies’
view that ‘it is not enough’ merely to expose pupils to stories without
guidance in deconstructive skills (Davies, 1993:138). From a similar
position, it has been posited that as teachers we should not ‘abdicate
our pedagogic authority’ (McDowell, 1994:247) by neglecting to assist
children in understanding that certain authorial voices are more worth-
while than others. Rather, as ‘directors of conversation’ (ibid:242)
teachers should arguably take responsibility for helping pupils to recog-
nise sexuality and thereby work towards greater social justice. More re-
cently, an argument in support of ‘directive’ teaching approaches has
been pursued to affirm the moral legitimacy of homosexuality (Hand,
2007:69). The emancipatory potential of adopting directorial strategies,
combined with greater awareness of the power-geometries of place and
space, can be deployed by pedagogues to help children ‘read against the
grain’ (Davies, 1993:138) of the moral traditionalism typical of the fairy
tale genre and involve them in the making, re-making and if necessary
re-making again of space (Harvey, 2000) and place in all their myriad
forms.

The staffroom: border patrol

If, as McGregor (2004) suggests, little research has focused on the
spatiality of education and the ways in which social relations constitute
and are constituted in these spaces, it seems that even less research has
focused on the constitution of staffroom space. Notable exceptions,
however, have focused on the ways in which power arrangements
(especially gender relations) are constituted and spatialised in the place
of the staffroom (Shilling, 1991; McGregor, 2003; McGregor, 2004;
Paechter, 2004b). This chapter goes on to explore the ways in which
sexuality and sexual identities were performed in the staffroom and
how many teachers felt restricted to talking about sexualities equality in
these spaces – often viewing them as fixed and bounded places and the

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only safe, private and respectable (adult) places for this work to be
addressed.

All schools participating in the No Outsiders project received a set of

selected books and resources which affirmed LGBT identities and
troubled gender stereotypes. As the project books and resources packs
were delivered to the schools they were usually unpacked on staffroom
tables and left for teachers to browse at their leisure. The staffroom
functioned as a sort of border patrol through which these items passed
on their way to the rest of the school, and sometimes this border pas-
sage was denied. For some schools this has been a strategy demanded
of teachers by governing bodies, where, until further staff training has
been carried out, the books and any conversations relating to the pro-
ject were expected to remain in the staffroom. For other schools this has
been a decision made by senior management teams; some suggesting
that the project needs to stay within the space of the staffroom so that
the teachers can ‘get to grips with it first’ in order to examine their own
‘prejudices as a staff’ before ‘working out ways of moving forwards’.

The staffroom as a private space

A dominant way in which the staffroom appeared to be characterised in
these schools was as a ‘private’ space. McGregor (2003) uses Rose’s
(2002) research to demonstrate how spaces like the staffroom are often
used to extend people’s private lives out from the home; that personal
photographs and cards are displayed in these spaces in such a way that
they extend space-time beyond the limit of the room and constitute it
as familiar, familial and intimate. The next section is based on the ex-
periences and reflections of one of the authors, a No Outsiders research
assistant, and is written in the first person.
From my own observations in school I could certainly see the way in which the staffroom
was used for private chatter, gossip and general relaxation, as the following field notes
demonstrate:

I was told upon arrival at school today that this is a particularly nice school to work in,
mainly because the staff are so friendly but also because the staff are extremely supportive
of the project work and are quite open about sexuality – discussing it in an open-minded
and unprejudiced manner on a daily basis. Despite having been told this I am still surprised
at the level of personal chatter that plays out in this space and the (apparently) comfortable
way in which the staff ask each other about their weekends, their partners and their latest

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‘famous crushes’ whatever their presumed/acknowledged sexual orientation. This feels like
a very different space to the classroom that I have just left – much more intimate, friendly
and relaxed.

Yet despite this apparent ease and comfort with talking about sexuality among
colleagues in the staffroom, what many teachers felt less comfortable about was
the idea of these conversations leaving this ‘private’ space and entering a more
‘public realm’. In some schools this was a particular concern about parents, often
because it was feared that they may ‘go even more public’ and let the media know
about the work in school. However, this was also a concern about the information
entering the private space of the home (and people’s minds) after it had entered
‘public space’. As Brickell’s (2000) research suggests, this is not an unfounded
fear, for the idea that lesbian, gay and bisexual people ‘flaunt’ and ‘promote’ their
sexuality and as such force their ideas onto other people, invading their private
thoughts and spaces, is a dominant one that is regularly rehearsed in the media.
As Brickell notes, ideas like these can be traced back to the work of Freud enabling
a perception of the mind as a series of spaces that are open to being territorialised,
invaded and polluted.

Because of the distance from the children, parents and governors, the staffroom
also appeared to be characterised as a ‘safe space’ – a space where the project
and other issues regarded as relating to (homo)sexuality could be discussed away
from potential outrage, violence and prejudice. In some of the schools I visited I
was warned about the use of ‘more public’ spaces in the school, such as the play-
ground – about how pupils and their parents would become agitated and aggres-
sive towards members of staff. It is also no wonder that some teachers tried to
keep their discussions of (homo)sexuality bound to these ‘safe’ spaces, for as
Skeggs (1999) suggests, fear of violence is as significant a factor in people’s use
of space as violence itself. Within schools teachers are often expected to take res-
ponsibility for their own safety, and so if visibility (being recognised as LGBT or
an ally) is a central means for instigated attack, then invisibility would appear to
be the safest option. Indeed, a number of authors have commented on the need
for ‘safe’ spaces for LGBT people. Hubbard, in particular, contends that given the
fear of homophobic abuse, the metaphor of the private space of the closet appears
to be an ‘appropriate description of the schizophrenic spatial lives that many gays
‘not out’ in public space lead’ (Hubbard, 2001:56).

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The staffroom as an adult space

In other schools the concern with the project ‘leaving the staffroom’ was much
more related to concerns about the innocence of children. In this sense, the staff-
room was often characterised as a particularly ‘adult’ space where issues of sex
and sexuality could be discussed away from prying eyes and ears. There is a large
body of literature that acknowledges the way in which childhood has been viewed
as a time of ‘presumed sexual innocence’ – a time where children are presumed
to remain untouched and untroubled by the cares of the adult sexual world to
come (Jackson, 1982; Piper, 2000; Renold, 2002; Kehily and Montgomery, 2004;
we also recognise that this notion is raced and classed, see Epstein, O’Flynn, and
Telford, 2003). As Jackson (1982) suggests, discussions of children and sex re-
main controversial (especially in schools); children are defined by adults as a
special category of people deserving adult protection and sympathy. Sexuality is
seen as a ‘special area of life’ and one that should be reserved for adulthood.
Through observation I noted a marked difference in the way in which issues
relating to the project – and particularly the words ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ – were
talked about in the staffroom and how they were discussed in the rest of the
school. I reported this observation in my fieldnotes:
As I am walking through the main corridor of the school today after break time I
suddenly begin to realise how stilted our conversation about the project has become.
This appears to be in direct contrast to the flowing and ‘intimate’ chats that we were
having in the staffroom just minutes ago. Words like ‘sexuality’ and ‘gay’ are now
being muttered as opposed to being stated confidently and I am aware that I too begin
to follow the teacher’s lead – I too begin to mention the project in hushed tones and
become constantly aware of the children who surround me.

The way in which many of these teachers drew on dominant discourses of child-
hood innocence is not a new finding – many teachers continue to struggle with
these ideas (especially given the confusion that Section 28 still holds for many).
What is interesting however, is how these relations constituted and were consti-
tuted by social space; the ways in which the school corridors, in particular, were
being recognised as public, mobile, child-inhabited and therefore, dangerous
spaces to talk about sexuality (McGregor, 2004).

Staffroom space as fluid and dynamic

By being asked to keep (or to attempt to keep) homosexuality in the
staffroom, teachers were arguably being asked to try to maintain the
dominance of heterosexuality within the school. As Skeggs (1999)

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proposes, it is essential to see these claims to space simultaneously as

claims to identity. On an everyday basis the heterosexualised nature of
the school space often went unnoticed – many teachers were unaware
of the ways in which heterosexuality was spoken about or continually
performed in the ‘public’ space of the school, in the music that they
played in whole school assemblies, in books they read to their classes
and the conversations they had in lessons about their wives or hus-
bands (see Binnie, 1997; Bell et al, 1994; DePalma and Atkinson, 2009).

Nevertheless, there were many times when the project and wider dis-
cussions about homosexuality or homophobia could not remain in the
staffroom, but were outed through incidents of homophobic bullying in
the playground or through children’s own discussions about their les-
bian parents. There were also times during the research where the ‘safe’
and ‘private’ nature of the staffroom space could be questioned. This
was not just limited to those who identified as lesbian or gay, for in one
school a female teacher who identified as straight felt too intimidated to
talk about the project with others in the staffroom. This example per-
haps confirms Skeggs’ (1999) point that even if space is heterosexua-
lised it does not always benefit all heterosexual people.

Neither schools nor their staffrooms are spatial and temporal islands,
and so for effective sexualities equality education to take place in
schools we need to take account of these flows and networks that begin
and end outside the staffroom and the formally accepted space of the
school.

After-school clubs: a shift in time

Massey argues against ‘a view of place as bounded, as in various ways a
site of authenticity, as singular, fixed...’ (1994:5) and suggests that space
and time work together in the creation of social space (and her notion
of space in terms of ‘envelopes of space-time’ usefully reflects this). In
the instance of the after-school club described in this vignette, class-
room space literally changes in relation to time, and formal rules and
relationships change also. This transformation, we argue, offers
teachers huge potential for exploring sexualities equality.

An exploration of identities and labelling within the informal space of

an after-school art club, as part of the No Outsiders project, opened up

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possibilities for discussing sexualities with year six primary school chil-
dren. This initiative focused on the Holocaust. It was facilitated by a
class teacher, a No Outsiders teacher researcher (Kate) and visiting
artists and writers.

Bringing ‘gay’ into the primary classroom

The session described here focused on labelling. It included eighteen
children, the class teacher and Kate, and was also observed by a No Out-
siders university researcher. This session was one of three after-school
art club sessions held in addition to several formal classroom sessions
exploring marginality and difference in the context of the Holocaust.

The children were initially asked to consider different ‘outsider’ words

(for example ‘gay’, ‘Muslim’, ‘disabled’), and symbols (for example the
LGBT rainbow flag, the Muslim sickle moon, the wheelchair signifying
‘disabled’). Kate and her colleague then led the class in a discussion
about the way in which such labels are used in injurious ways (for
example using the words ‘gay’ or ‘Paki’ as insults), and in positive ways
(for example gay people and Muslim people using labels and symbols
to identify themselves and having pride in these identities). Finally the
children were asked to choose a symbol or label to decorate so it was
attractive and positive.

So the session explicitly focused on the forbidden subject of sexualities,

albeit embedded within wider discussions around identities and
marginality. Teacher researchers throughout the No Outsiders project,
and especially their colleagues, have expressed concern about discuss-
ing sexualities within the classroom. They fear parental and wider
public reaction, and are specifically concerned about how to introduce
sexuality as an appropriate classroom subject. As we saw, the fears are
partly induced by the notion that schools are havens of childhood inno-
cence. Through the explicit discussion of sexualities Kate brought in to
the primary classroom not just the forbidden subject of sexuality, but
also the doubly forbidden subject of LGBT sexualities, situating LGBT
oppression alongside other oppressions and actively breaking the cus-
tomary silence on sexualities within such settings.

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Coming out
One aspect of the session was to look at certain words that are used
as terms of abuse and why they are offensive. For example, Kate asked
the class how her Muslim colleague might feel if she were called ‘Paki’
and followed this by asking how she herself might feel if she were called
‘gay,’ as she was gay. This was the first time that this teacher researcher
had come out to children and she described the experience like this:
It was a very important moment for me, and while I have never been hidden,
I have not felt I could come out before now ... Coming out had to be some-
thing that happened in an appropriate context, and this was exactly right.
Before the session I had thought I would say I was gay, but was not entirely
sure. I used to teach this class, so felt at ease with them, and they with me.
In fact, not teaching them now (except in art club) made it easier.

As Epstein and Johnson (1998) have highlighted, ‘out’ gay and lesbian
teachers are threatened with the loss of their credibility, homophobia,
adverse media reactions, loss of privacy and even (in the past at least)
of their jobs. As discussed earlier, teachers’ personal sexual lives are not
seen as an appropriate subject in classroom spaces, despite the fact that
heterosexual teachers are implicitly and explicitly ‘out.’ Arguments sug-
gesting that LGBT teachers refrain from discussing their relationships
within the school fail to acknowledge that children themselves might
benefit from the openness of LGBT role models for a variety of reasons:
because they may identify (or eventually identify) themselves as LGBT
or just ‘different,’ because they have gay or lesbian parents (Letts and
Sears, 1999; Kissen, 2002) and because one of the duties of school is to
prepare all children to live in a diverse society (DePalma and Jennett,
2007).

Safe spaces
The researchers in the project have spent much time exploring how it
might be possible to make safe spaces in which children can talk about
sexualities and difference, including the sexualities of their parents,
their parents’ friends or indeed themselves. This vignette shows that the
informal space of this after-school club appeared to operate as just such
a safe space for Kate to discuss her own sexuality. She described this in
the following communication:

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Coming out to the art club was easier, and a considered decision. It’s true
that it’s more relaxed, as we all are there by choice ... if things had gone
wrong, or caused a much bigger reaction – I didn’t have to stand up in front
of them all day every day for the rest of the year! I think this also let them be
freer with me, as there was not going to be a change of role to a more formal
relationship the following day.

The informal nature of the space was a significant factor in Kate’s

decision to reveal her sexuality to the children. The formal-to-informal
shift that takes place in the transition between school hours and after-
school hours is associated with the relaxing of formal teacher-pupil
relationships. With the blurring of boundaries between public and
private, a space is opened up in which it becomes possible to explore
sexualities (including teachers’ sexualities) – a subject usually relegated
to the ‘private’ sphere. As Epstein and Johnson argue, ‘schooling stands
rather on the ‘public’ side of public/private divisions, while sexuality is
definitely on the private side’ (1998:1).

This moment of coming out appeared to open up the space in which

children themselves could talk about same-sex relationships in safety.
hooks (1994) argues that teachers must talk about themselves in the
classroom before expecting children to do likewise. Kate reflected:
Their reaction made me feel very accepted and supported by them. Even [a]
boy who had described gay as ‘minging’6 wanted to be sure I knew that he
didn’t think I was [disgusting].

Early on in the session, this boy had responded to the word ‘gay’ with
‘that’s minging’ and one of the girls had challenged him by suggesting
that there wasn’t anything wrong with being lesbian or gay. However, it
was only later, when Kate revealed her own sexuality, that the girl men-
tioned that she had an aunt who was gay. The conversation then snow-
balled: another girl said she knew a number of people who were gay
(friends of her parents) and that it upset her to hear them insulted.
Finally, the boy told the class that other people called him gay and,
significantly, when the children were later asked to take an outsider
symbol and decorate it, this boy chose the gay and lesbian pink triangle.
Kate was positive about the effects of the project for this boy:
The father’s been in to talk to the head teacher to say ‘I’m worried, my son’s
a fairy and what on earth am I going to do?’ The father’s at the stage where

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it’s just not acceptable, surely not his son, which is why this kid has got a hard
road over the next few years ... But hopefully, I know it’ll be a very small thing
in his life really, but to have this little bit of work where we’re saying it’s OK,
he can at least think ‘well not everybody thinks the same way, and there are
people who think it’s OK.’ And it’ll be really important for him as well if his peer
group is saying ‘well that’s all right, there’s nothing wrong with that’.

As Epstein et al (2003:20) suggest, ‘a whole range of behaviours can be

labelled ‘gay’ when a boy does them,’ and this session (and the project
more generally) allowed this boy to tell others that this issue was affect-
ing him.

Leaking
As Massey suggests (1994), ‘place’ is not fixed and its boundaries are
porous. Although this session took place within the boundary of the
classroom, its effects clearly went beyond it. The teacher researcher
describes the way in which her coming out had effects that leaked be-
yond the classroom and wider school walls:
The word must have spread throughout the school, but I have not had any
comeback, nor has it been reported to me by any staff. I did however hear
from a couple of parents of children who were in the session. They described
their children as ‘buzzing’ when they came out of the session. One parent,
who had her daughter when in a lesbian relationship ... said it had prompted
a very meaningful conversation between them about sexuality and relation-
ships.

The fear articulated by several of the No Outsiders teacher researchers

that parents might be offended or upset by the discussion of sexualities
in primary classrooms is here countered by positive parental reactions.
And the session prompted a ‘meaningful’ discussion between one child
and her mother that might not have happened otherwise.

In effect, talking about sexuality in this context represented talking in

the ‘public’ realm about what is usually considered ‘private’. However, it
might also be argued that together with the informal nature of the after-
school space, this discussion of sexuality transforms this public space
into private. Seemingly paradoxically, this constitution of the private
then leaks outwards via discussions between parent and child into the
public world outside of the classroom, yet simultaneously into the
private world of the family. Thus the public and private boundary

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SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE IN FORBIDDEN PLACES

appears to have a permeability that challenges the notion that sexuality

is necessarily contained in one sphere or another, and the notion that
there is indeed such a boundary.

Conclusion: Deconstructing mind/body, public/private ...

school/life
Massey (1994) usefully makes the link between place and nostalgia.
This resonates with the notion, critiqued here, of childhood place as
historically innocent and free of adult (sexual) concerns. As Paechter
argues, ‘Because schooling is obsessed with the exclusion of the body,
its explicit introduction is highly threatening’ (2004a:317). However, ‘...
the body and its sexuality are both ubiquitous and marginalised within
schools’ (ibid:309). Whilst sexuality is supposedly absent in the primary
school classroom, it is also strongly present both through that absence
and the implicit presence of heterosexuality. As Epstein and Johnson
(1998) argue, children are schooled into gender and sexuality in school
settings that are suffused (Epstein et al, 2003) with sexuality that is,
specifically, a heterosexuality. This is seen in the heterosexualised fairy-
tales that children are asked to read, the casual conversations held by
staff about their heterosexual husbands and partners, and by the way in
which, as Paechter (2004a) suggests, children learn about their sexua-
lised bodies via their separate use of boys’ and girls’ toilets and chang-
ing rooms.

Nevertheless, as Brickell (2000) suggests, spaces have not been seen as

singular or a priori for some time now. Researchers have investigated the
ways in which children have been able to territorialise and re-
territorialise a number of traditionally accepted ‘adult’ spaces (K Ras-
mussen, 2004). They have questioned the possibility of determining safe
and violent and spaces (Skeggs, 1999) and explored the possibilities of
‘private matters’ entering ‘public spheres’ (eg gay and lesbian pride
marches, Brickell, 2000). Many social geographers have followed Massey
(1994) in suggesting that space and place needs to be seen as dynamic
and multiple, extending beyond a singular context or place.

And so, despite the fact that our own perceived ‘private’ spaces can
come to take on a material existence that we truly believe in, spaces can
never really be fixed, for their boundaries are always open to con-
tinuous struggle and they are continually being made and remade

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through social relations (McGregor, 2004). For schools in particular

(Nespor, 1997:xiii), the division of space into the public and the private
is never helpful, as it enables wider problems (such as homophobia) to
be simply seen as school problems and it does not account for the ways
in which education and learning (about issues like homosexuality and
alternative family forms) could (and does) take place ‘through constel-
lations of relations that extend well beyond the classroom’ (McGregor,
2003).

Massey writes that place is defined by social relations that spill over
boundaries:
The particular mix of social relations which are thus part of what defines the
uniqueness of any place is by no means all included within that place itself.
Importantly it includes relations which stretch beyond – the global as part of
what constitutes the local, the outside as part of the inside. Such a view of
place challenges any possibility of claims to internal histories or to timeless
identities. (1994:5)

Vignettes like these and others show how the No Outsiders project as
exemplified by has offered insight into the potential of consciously and
persistently working across these apparently boundaried spaces within
and beyond schools: the project leaks from the staffroom into the ‘dan-
gerous’ spaces of the school corridor; it leaks inwards from teachers’
own convictions and actions into the classroom, and outwards again to
the community; it leaks from the pages of the project books to the
homes and workplaces of project teachers’ colleagues and friends and
it leaks back and forth between participating teachers’ private and pro-
fessional lives, with the project teachers finding themselves performing
actions in ways – and in spaces – in which they would never have
thought possible.

Inspired by the learning potential created by these conscious border

crossings, we exhort educators deliberately to reflect on the spatial geo-
graphies of schools and deliberately to transgress them. One of the
most fascinating and productive aspects of the No Outsiders project has
been simply noticing boundaries and mapping the various micro-cul-
tures of different places in the school: the classroom, the corridor, the
playground, the staffroom are all interrelated yet bounded. These
observations have inspired us to consider some important questions.

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SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE IN FORBIDDEN PLACES

What is acceptable and unacceptable to say and do? What happens

when words and actions leak from one space to the other? What hap-
pens when we open new channels and allow the fully diverse and physi-
cal world beyond school to trickle into our carefully restricted school
spaces? How can this be done so that spatial transgressions are produc-
tive while at the same time safe enough so that we don’t lose our jobs?

Simply asking these questions is a first step, and testing them is a great
stride. We might consider letting lesbian and gay identities, usually re-
served for the staffroom (if anywhere), leak into classrooms. We might
discuss our own or friends’ civil partnerships when we discuss marriage
or civil rights, we might all refer to our partners as partners, rather than
husbands, wives or ‘friends’, and engage in discussions with children
about why. We might bring sexualised language from the playground
into assemblies to unpack the meanings and implications, rather than
allowing it to flourish unchallenged in the less adult-centred school
spaces. We might invite our own and children’s physical bodies into
school, with all their complexities of sex, gender and sexuality, and we
might discuss how and why these complexities are policed in certain
ways, and in some cases entirely erased, inside and outside school.
Overall, we think the critical and persistent practice of boundary map-
ping and strategic leaking can be at least as effective in advancing
sexualities equality in schools as any specific resources or curriculum
guidance, and that this practice requires teachers to develop new ways
of thinking that enable them to identify and question established
school geographies.

Notes
6 Slang term indicating disgust.

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6
Toys, pleasures, and the future7
Susan Talburt

As a guest contributor to this volume, Talburt takes an outsider’s view of the

issues and possibilities raised by the work of the No Outsiders project. She offers
a close examination of the reproductive futurism in which pedagogy for social
change is embedded, and makes it clear that ‘queer’, with its rejection of hetero-
sexuality’s linear future and of the idealised notion of the Child for whose better
future we are exhorted to strive, cannot operate within such futurism. She sug-
gests that a queer pedagogy in this sense is an impossibility, particularly as queer
recognises and validates the sorts of human activities – notably pleasures justi-
fied in their own terms and not aimed at a future end – which reproductive
futurism rejects. In her play on the possibilities of pleasure, and on the pleasure
of (un)imagined possibilities, Talburt offers a challenge to members of the project
team and to others working within the tensions between ends-based social justice
work and the uncertain troublings of ‘queer.’

L
et me start with a story. We might call it a playful, pleasurable
story, as it is about toys. The story comes from a recent issue of a
corporate gay magazine, The Advocate. Thumbing through it one
day, a headline caught my eye: ‘Sex toys and children make uneasy bed-
fellows’. It seems that a company called Adam Male, which identifies
itself as a distributor of ‘the highest-quality sex toys, bondage gear, adult
DVDs, and sex accessories for the gay market’ (Lisotta, 2008) and which
donates over 25 per cent of its profits to philanthropic causes, sought to
give money to the wrong organisation. According to the article, ‘On
April 8, Adam Male released a statement announcing it was adding the

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

safe-schools advocacy group Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Net-

work (GLSEN) to the list of charities to which it donates profits’ (ibid).
When contacted by The Advocate, GLSEN’s director of communications
disavowed knowledge of the donation, stating that GLSEN had ‘not re-
ceived any funds from this organisation, and we do not accept any un-
solicited corporate sponsorships’ (ibid). Well, The Advocate was not to
be deterred and pressed further into this important story. A phone call
revealed that Adam Male’s parent company, PHE, reported that its
check for $250 had indeed been cashed. Not to let the story end there,
the Advocate recontacted GLSEN, whose communications director
now responded that although the check had been cashed, GLSEN
would be reimbursing PHE. The Advocate ended its story with a coy
phrase: ‘GLSEN’s reticence toward Adam Male may be due to the com-
pany’s product line, which includes grown-up devices like the Clone-a-
Willy Kit’ (ibid).

This article left me wondering what readers were meant to learn. What
problems does Adam Male represent for GLSEN? Why is The Advocate so
interested in pursuing the ambivalent tale of GLSEN’s disassociation
from this sex toy company’s $250 donation? And why did the Advocate
not inquire into the corporate citizens GLSEN does deem appropriate?
These include such entities as: Citigroup, which helped Enron set up the
sham transactions that eventually brought down the company; Price-
waterhouseCoopers which worked with Enron and was involved in five
other accounting scandals in which it overestimated profits, created
misleading financial statements and committed accounting violations;
Merrill Lynch, which was involved in stock market misrepresentation
and the Martha Stewart scandal; and Merck, which falsely recorded
$12.4 billion in pharmacy co-payments that it never collected.8

As many who work with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)
youth know, GLSEN is a non-profit organisation in the US that seeks to
legitimate LGBT subjects, both human bodies and bodies of knowledge,
in schools. GLSEN embraces a future in which schools will be safe for all
students, who should have ‘an education free of bullying and harass-
ment, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, or that of
their friends, family or loved ones’ (Jennings, n.d.). This future-oriented
stance points to a past and present that need to be corrected. As the
organisation’s founder, Kevin Jennings, explains on GLSEN’s website,

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TOYS, PLEASURES, AND THE FUTURE

‘We are steadfast in our commitment that, by coming together, we will

all play a part in creating a better future for America’s students’ (ibid).
GLSEN, then, would heal past and present wounds and prevent pos-
sible future harm.

Discomforts of pleasure
I want to hold this story in the background as an entry to thinking about
questions of pleasure, institutions, identities, temporality and adult-
child relations as they relate to some of the questions-or anxieties-
framing the proposal for the ‘Education and the Body: Queering the
Body; Queering Primary Education’ seminar coordinated by the No
Outsiders project team and funded by the Society for Educational
Studies in September 2008, the occasion that brought me into the con-
versation of the No Outsiders group.

A few sentences in the seminar proposal identified tensions between

the proposed work and the discourses and practices that came to con-
stitute it:
The team is concerned to interrogate the desexualisation of children’s and
teachers’ bodies...; the negation of pleasure and desire in educational con-
texts ...; and the tendency to shy away from discussion of (sexual) bodily
activity in No Outsiders project work, including the rejection of references to
sexual acts by pupils. (p1)

The seminar proposal asks, ‘At what cost do we deny children’s and
teachers’ sexuality? What do we lose if desire and pleasure are banned
from the classroom?’ (p2). These are difficult questions, particularly as
the No Outsiders project is supported by and directed to the state and
its future and its citizens’ futures. It appears that No Outsiders dwells in
the interstices of seemingly necessary institutional equity discourses
and queer challenges to the heterosexual matrix’s normalisations. My
sense is that this ‘placement’ is at once productive and impossible.

What I suggest is that the queer inclusion of bodies, pleasures and

desires in the space of education confounds ‘straight time,’ or hetero-
sexuality’s linear future (see Freeman, 2007; Halberstam, 2005). This is
not only because it tampers with the supposedly natural time and order
of the development of innocent children but, more saliently, because it
engages schools and children in a temporality that is not oriented to the

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future on which the heterosexual matrix depends. In short, it is impos-

sible to put pleasure to work for a certain type of future.

Many working in primary education lament what Michelle Fine, twenty

years ago called ‘the missing discourse of desire’ (1988), which she re-
cently identified as ‘still missing’ (Fine and McClelland, 2006) and to
which Tobin (1997) and others have added the term ‘pleasure’. The
elision of sexuality, pleasure, bodies and desire in schooling is said to
protect the child’s innocence and to protect it from the spectre of the
child molester, a figure conflated with the male homosexual, recruit-
ment and contagion (Sears, 1998; Silin, 1995; Tobin, 1997). Yet this idea
of protecting childhood innocence denies children engagement with
crucial knowledges, silencing children (and adults) and erasing their
sexual agency. This adult and expert discourse of innocence-to-protect
has a pre-existing and permanent temporality as something that will
evolve naturally to knowledge and experience in ‘due time.’ As Jenkins
argues, ‘the innocent child is a myth, in Roland Barthes’s sense of the
word, a figure that transforms culture into nature’ (1998:15). This
naturalisation of the myth of innocence, in turn, makes the myth itself
appear to be innocent, as if it were not discursively constructed and had
no effect of erasing children’s sexuality or sexual agency.

Eloquent arguments have been made for the inclusion of pleasure in

education – and not only as a challenge to discourses of innocence.
Mary Lou Rasmussen argues that the ‘deployment of pleasure provides
an efficacious departure from educational research that too often re-
inscribes pathological stereotypes of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
and intersex (LGBTI) identified young people’ (2004, p445). This think-
ing in the domain of research challenges dominant ideas of ‘at risk’
gender- or sexual-non-conforming minority youth (such as the repre-
sentations of GLSEN) and reminds us that danger and the wound are
not necessarily minoritised youths’ only dimensions. Yet, in the space of
pedagogy, it may be that we should not frame pleasure as antidote to
wounds and speech as antidote to silence.

As Foucault (1985) pointed out in the second volume of the History of

Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure, pleasure is not a spontaneous or natural
event but, to borrow Erica McWilliam’s words, is ‘constituted and
organised through available discourse’ (1999:3). Ethical subjects learn

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TOYS, PLEASURES, AND THE FUTURE

to recognise themselves as what Foucault called ‘subject[s] of desire’

(1985:6) and engage in techniques of the self relative to proper and im-
proper pleasures. Pleasure, then, constitutes part of the governing of
the self, in which subjects perform work on themselves as part of the
process of changing the self. This self-creation is constrained by avail-
able discourses and by subjects’ social, political, geographic and econo-
mic positionings. Pleasure is bound up with regulated (including self-
regulated) processes of becoming. Yet despite social, cultural and
institutional incitements to particular forms of pleasure, this becoming
a ‘subject of desire’ is not easily knowable or understandable. The state
and its institutions, as well as informal apparatuses, seek to regulate be-
coming, pleasure and desire, sometimes through instruction and some-
times through repression.

But as we know, both instruction and repression can be productive of

surprises and unpredictabilities. Thus, while pleasure and desire can be
thought of in terms of conformity or resistance to the state or dominant
moralities, they can also be thought of in more creative terms.

Queer conceptualisations of pleasure place it outside the realm of the

political, as a force that we mistakenly tether to purposes, however
liberatory our intentions. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, writes of
a refusal to link sexual pleasure with the struggle for freedom, a refusal to
validate sexuality in terms of a greater cause or a higher purpose, the desire
to enjoy, to experience, to make pleasure for its own sake, for where it takes
us, for how it changes and makes us, to see it as one but not the only trajec-
tory in the lives of sexed bodies. (1995:228)

Let me add that if pleasure has no teleology, neither does the sex toy
from which GLSEN would distance itself, unless one wants to configure
erotics and orgasms as teleological, which I do not wish to do.

Impossible pedagogical pleasures

But what happens when we bring together the non-teleology of plea-
sure and the teleology of the developing child? What seems to me the
pedagogical impossibility of pleasure in schools relates to the oxy-
moronic idea of ‘queer futurity’ suggested by Lee Edelman’s (2004) pro-
vocative text, No Future: Queer theory and the death drive. Although he
does not name it as such, a ‘queer futurity’ is impossible. Edelman

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

argues that mainstream politics – and I read this to include any struggle
that engages institutions, particularly those of the state – is based on a
fantasy of identity and meaning creation. The political centres the
future as its regulating force, the ideal that drives subjects’ actions.
Whether working from the proverbial left or right, we all agree on creat-
ing a better world, a better future. Edelman argues that to justify this
better future, the political uses the Child (with a capital C to distinguish
the figure of the Child from actual children) to regulate the present and
what can count as political discourse. In his words, ‘we are no more able
to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able
to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’ (ibid:11).

Edelman names this order ‘reproductive futurism,’ a ‘mandate by which

our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the
Child’ (ibid:11). This futurism opposes the figure of the Child to that of
the homosexual and queerness generally, which represent the death
drive, or ‘negativity’ (ibid:7) threatening the social order by refusing
futurism’s logic of meaning and identity production. The seeming self-
evidence of reproductive futurism preserves ‘the absolute privilege of
heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the
political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organising
principle of communal relations’ (ibid:2).

This is a Lacanian argument that places the social and political in the
Symbolic order, that of signs, representation, language, rules and the
law. The order in which subjects are formed, the Symbolic is the place
in which the signifier and signified are always separated. This separa-
tion of signifier and signified-or lack of wholeness-means that elements
in the Symbolic have no positive existence but are constituted through
their differences in a field of alterity and absence. As an effect of the
Symbolic, the Imaginary order incites subjects to misrecognise the
Symbolic as transparent, creating a fantasy of a world in which identi-
ties appear as stable, meaningful and recognisable. And the Child be-
comes the object and subject of the search for positivity, identity. But
queerness understands the ‘vicissitudes of the sign’ (ibid:7) and lives
where ‘narrative realisation and derealisation overlap’ (ibid, 2004:7).
Edelman explains:

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TOYS, PLEASURES, AND THE FUTURE

Where futurism always anticipates, in the image of an Imaginary past, a

realisation of meaning that will suture identity by closing that gap, queerness
undoes the identities through which we experience ourselves as subjects,
insisting on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and the futurism on
which it relies have already foreclosed. (ibid: 25)

For Edelman, then, queerness embodies the Symbolic’s unnameable

remainder of jouissance, which is more than pleasure and pain, ‘a
violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law’ (ibid:
25). It is an acknowledgment of the subject’s openness and the impos-
sibility of closure or transparent representation through language. His
thinking resonates with Roland Barthes’ (2005) distinction between
pleasure and jouissance, in which pleasure resides in the domain of
conscious enjoyment and linguistic representation (the Symbolic)
whereas jouissance is pure affect that does not know boundaries and
dissolves subjectivity. Pleasure, then, is contained within the social
order and jouissance is within and beyond it.

Given signification’s inherently oppressive politics, Edelman’s sugges-

tion for queerness is to ‘withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory,
from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism’
(2004:4). Futurism’s continual attempts to produce wholeness and
meaning, to suture past and present to repair the gap, create a per-
petually deferred future that regulates our present, holding us captive to
its promise by never arriving. Like illegal Ponzi, or pyramid investing,
schemes, this is a future based on promises that can never materialise.
Rather than submitting itself to the social order’s repetitive logic,
queerness must take up ‘the impossible project of queer oppositiona-
lity’ (ibid:4). This entails accepting the negativity ascribed to the figure
of the queer as ‘the bar to every realisation of futurity, the resistance,
internal to the social, to every social structure or form’ (ibid: 4). Edel-
man says polemically:
We do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since
all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form
of the future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary
image of the Imaginary past or as site of projective identification with an
always impossible future. (ibid:31)

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So this argument asks queerness to secede from the impossible and

normalising project of creating future meanings and identities in the
name of the Child.

Unteachable subjects
But can queerness refuse the Child in schools full of actual children?
Cavanagh asks whether educators could ‘embrace a pedagogy opposed
to reproductive futurism, normative heterosexuality, and the cate-
gorical gender binaries that the latter inscribes’ (2007:27). I am doubt-
ful, as that pedagogy ceases to be a pedagogy per se. Etymolocially
derived from the ancient Greek, pedagogy means ‘to lead the child.’ To
lead implies a destination, to a space, place, time, or self. So even as
educators may wish to lead children to open discussions of pleasure,
desires and bodies, such a pedagogy tethers pleasure to signification
and the Symbolic order’s production of wholeness and identity, to
liberatory fantasies of a better tomorrow. This better tomorrow may
seek to be a different tomorrow, but it is still one that speaks the lan-
guage of reproductive futurism and its ontological literalism.

Brenkman (2002) critiques Edelman’s stance, arguing that the political

‘is not simply a mechanism of social reproduction; it is also the site and
instrument of social change. Nor is it simply the field of existing power
relations; it is also the terrain of contestation and compromise’ (p176).
Yet, as Edelman (2002) notes in his response to Brenkman, such a
stance is unable to disarticulate queer from the very logic of futurism
Edelman problematises. In fact, in many instances, as queerness has
entered schools, it has tended to function as little more than what Fou-
cault (1978) called a ‘reverse’ discourse. In other words, it has offered
interventions that appear to be oppositional, but that function as
tactical elements operating within, and thus upholding, dominant
logic. Whether queer or identitarian, many school-based projects enact
an insidious queer developmentalism that seeks to respond to hetero-
normativity’s futurism (Janssen, 2008), creating an impossible ‘queer
futurity’.

If, as Cavanagh describes the myth, ‘It is for the good of the child that we
censor discussions about the body and its sexual capacities in school’
(2007:14), I would turn the question around to ask if it is also for the
good of the child that we are incited to discuss the body, desire and

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TOYS, PLEASURES, AND THE FUTURE

sexuality in school? If queerness is to speak of pleasure, desires and

bodies in schools, how can it do so without submitting itself to the Sym-
bolic’s realm of signification in the name of reproductive futurism? How
can it avoid substantialising identities through the ontological litera-
lism of the political order, a substantialisation supported, if not made
possible, by the figure of the Child and our collective future? My answer
is that it cannot, for attaching political change and subject formation to
pleasure works against pleasure’s very transformative potential. To
return to Grosz’s (1995) idea of pleasure as but one of many trajectories,
if we consider pleasure as ‘desubjectivating’ (Sullivan, 1999:252), we
cannot centre an intentional, autonomous actor who seeks or creates
pleasure with a direction or temporality. Rather, as Sullivan says of plea-
sure:
It is a pre-discursive, pre-subjective event, an exposure, a becoming-open
that is unnameable, that is, if you like, queer. Pleasure is a transformative
process, not because it is something I can employ to my own ends, but be-
cause it inaugurates the very site of (un)becoming. Pleasure exists before
the question of its meaning, its use, arises. (1999:254)

Pleasure does not develop. It creates and recreates in ways that cannot
be known in advance or directed to a future.

GLSEN, which does not refuse identity or the future or the Child, does
refuse pleasure, as GLSEN understands the ontological literalism of the
US cultural imagination in which children and pleasure have identities
and purposes. So GLSEN understands that to accept Adam Male’s
donation is to align itself with the development of future sex toy and
bondage gear shoppers. My sense is that what is troubling is not so
much the morality of these aberrant behaviours-though the morality is
always an enticing excuse, just as it is easy to point to the sad (tragic)
loss of childhood innocence, or development out of time. More troubl-
ing is the purposelessness of toys and their pleasures, their orientation
to a present and a presence that reproduce nothing. If the sex toy points
to a future, it is a future of what Lauren Berlant (2004) calls ‘live sex acts,’
which do not seek the reproduction of the same, and are not about sub-
stantialised identities or appropriate citizenship. Rather, ‘live sex acts’ is
a metaphor for subjects who follow a queer zeitgeist that understands
‘sexuality as a set of acts and world-building activities whose implica-
tions are always radically TBA [to be announced]’ (p77). Schools cannot

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announce themselves as radically TBA. And queerness cannot put plea-

sure to use to affirm and authenticate an order that predicates politics
in imaginary identities in the future. To remain ‘live,’ pleasure and queer
must refuse the false hope of unity, the realisation of the social subject
and the regulatory effects of the politics of signification.

Notes
7 This chapter is a slightly revised version of a paper I was invited to deliver as the guest
keynote speaker at the Education and the Body Seminar, held in Exeter in September
2008. In the spirit of the dialogue in which I participated, I have left much of the text in
the conversational style in which I presented these ideas.
8 Information on these companies’ crimes comes from www.citizenworks.org and
www.forbes.com. Accessed July 23, 2008. The list of GLSEN’s corporate sponsors can
be found at http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/donate/sponsors/index.html. Accessed
July 23, 2008.

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7
Bodies and minds: essentialism,
activism and strategic disruptions in
the primary school and beyond
Elizabeth Atkinson and Andrew Moffat

This chapter provides an alternative perspective to the queer critique offered by

Cullen and by Youdell. It offers a dialogue between two members of the research
team regarding the risks and rewards of presenting lesbian- and gay-identified
selves within and beyond the classroom. The authors explore their own histories
and practices in a dialogue constructed from excerpts from web-based discus-
sions and interviews, and examine the discourses underpinning their own narra-
tives. Following Nixon’s examination of safe, troubled and dangerous spaces, the
chapter explores how these are generated through particular performances of
self, and what other possibilities might be foreclosed by these performances.

Introduction

I
n this chapter, we explore the significance of the introduction of our
own gay bodies into educational spaces, and their potential to un-
settle norms around permissible, legible identities in school con-
texts. As Deborah Youdell (2006a) observed, the presence of ‘impossible
bodies’ in educational spaces can disrupt dominant discourses, and as
DePalma and Atkinson pointed out in the opening chapter of this book,
making some of these impossible bodies visible can forge new echo-
chains of connotation which, while always vulnerable to recuperation
by heteronormative discourses, open up possibilities for performative
resignification of wounded (gay) identities.

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We illustrate how, in our own experience as project team members who

identify as gay and lesbian, the discourses of essentialism and gay rights
have often taken strategic precedence over the more fluid discourses of
queer. For both Elizabeth, as the project director, and Andy, as a teacher
researcher, there have been many occasions when the need to assert
and affirm a gay rights discourse has seemed paramount, whether in
the classroom or in the broader policy and media arenas. Yet we have
both been aware of the alternative understandings and disruptions that
might be foreclosed by the stances we have taken, and debate over
these issues has formed a key focus for discussions across the project
team.

Each of us has experienced a conceptual shift during the course of the

project in relation to the deliberate deployment of gay identities. For
Elizabeth, the shift has been from theory to praxis: it was strategically
important for her from the beginning to name heteronormativity, and
later gender normativity, as dominant discourses to be challenged
through the affirmation of LGBT identities. But at the same time, she
was coming from a feminist post-structuralist perspective which re-
fused the seeming certainties of contemporary pedagogical discourse
and aimed to trouble these certainties through an undoing of boun-
daries and binaries around identities, research and practice. For Andy,
the shift has been in the opposite direction: starting with an urgent
need to assert and affirm a positive gay identity, the ways in which this
might encompass an affirmation of fluidity rather than a fixing of
categories have come increasingly sharply into focus. While the need to
affirm the legitimacy of non-heterosexual identities has remained para-
mount for him, the ways in which these identities are expressed and
explored have become more open to negotiation.

While strategic essentialism has played a key part in our performances

of self during the course of the project, we have been aware of the
tendency tone down our – or others’ – gay identities to make them safe
for public consumption. As Smith points out:
There is a distinction ... between homosexuality as subversive difference,
which disrupts the social order, and homosexuality as accidental difference
which can be added to the social order without any fundamental trans-
formation ... The law-abiding and not-diseased subject who keeps her ex-
pression of difference strictly behind closed doors in a monogamous relation-

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ship with another adult, the ‘good homosexual’, is distinguished from the
publicly flaunting element which strives to reproduce itself by seducing the
innocent young. This element could be called the dangerous queer.
(1994:204)

However, as individuals whose lives, however safely portrayed, position

us outside sexual norms and expectations, we are drawn to what Susan
Birden describes as an ‘Out-Siders’ praxis,’ following Virginia Woolf’s
notion of ‘Out-Siders’ as ‘those who side with the out’ (2005:22). Birden
states, ‘Praxis, in its simplest construal, means ‘theory plus action’’
(ibid). It is perhaps in this crucial juxtaposition of theory and action that
the need for strategic essentialism may be the deepest. It is what allows
the translation of a radical uncertainty into a practical possibility, a
place where ‘not knowing’ (Lather, 1993) becomes a starting-point from
which to act. As Caputo reminds us, ‘deconstruction offers us no excuse
not to act’ (1993:4), but we ask ourselves here what the motivations,
benefits and risks are of actions which present legible/intelligible
identities. As Judith Butler asks, ‘Can the visibility of identity suffice as a
political strategy, or can it only be the starting point for a strategic inter-
vention which calls for a transformation of policy?’ (1991:19).

Speaking the unspeakable through activist and queer

discourses
Much of the project’s work (see, for example Chapter 5, and Atkinson
and DePalma, 2008b) has been about speaking the unspeakable and
making possible the impossible in forbidden places. But while for some
this has meant affirmation through LGBT activism, drawing on liberal
pluralist and strategic essentialist discourses (Atkinson, 2008), for
others the desired unspeakable and impossible are further out of reach,
more nebulous and less prone to fixing yet another set of legible identi-
ties than liberal pluralism would allow. From this perspective liberal
pluralism and its attendant affirmation of a rights discourse is seen to
shore up the norm through the acceptance or tolerance of the margins,
and to prevent the exploration of other more radical starting points for
queering the classroom. While one perspective (Colley, 2003) is that to
name a discourse is to take the first step in challenging it, another is that
the very naming is to fix it in place. Ironically, working within queer
theory brings up both these perspectives. As Atkinson and DePalma

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(2009) have pointed out elsewhere, the naming of the heterosexual

matrix – one of the pillars of queer theory – brings with it the danger
that it becomes part of the mechanism of its own maintenance. A
crucial question becomes whether refusing or ‘unbelieving’ the con-
straints and constructions of the matrix might enable us to see other
possibilities and other readings for performances of self.

In this chapter we offer a series of snapshots which illustrate these per-

formances of self in a variety of contexts and examine the discourses
which have shaped them. These extracts are drawn from discussions
and transcripts on the research team’s private web forum, which serves
simultaneously as a site of data collection and data analysis (and where
these discussions themselves constitute both) and analytical emails be-
tween project team members. They include extracts from email and
web-based conversations between Andy and Elizabeth and extracts
from transcripts of recorded conversations between Andy and Fin
Cullen, our London and Midlands regional researcher, whose conversa-
tions with each of us have repeatedly challenged our thinking and posi-
tioning, plus extracts from our contributions to broader web discussions
across the whole research team. Recombined to create a new dialogue,
these snapshots demonstrate the discursive processes at play which
shape how we conceptualise, represent and interpret the project. We
present them here with brief interpretive comments (in italics) and close
the chapter with a summary of the discourses which have shaped our
positions and our exchanges.

Playing with fire: safe spaces; dangerous spaces

Elizabeth
As a lesbian researcher setting out to explore sexualities equality five or
six years ago, I was a) warned by colleagues to keep my politics separate
from my professional life; b) advised to stick to something safer, like
race (!); and c) discouraged from openly naming myself as a supporting
staff member for gay and lesbian student teachers on our primary
training courses.

Andy
I’d talked to my head teacher for two years about coming out at school
because I’d done all this work ... all very pastoral ... you know at lunch-
time we’d talk about ourselves, about what we do ... lots of circle time

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things, emotional literacy stuff, how do you feel ... So all my work is
about that and yet I felt I wasn’t being honest to the children. And
several times I was getting them to be open and honest to me and yet
the biggest thing about me I was keeping a secret ... I really resented
that. I wanted so badly to come out ... basically it all happened because
I had my civil partnership. And I just started to think if I was straight and
getting married it would be nice in the assembly, there would be a big
thing, the children would know about it and make me cards. I am
getting married for God’s sake, why am I not telling the children, this is
ridiculous.

For each of us, the desire to be identified and identifiable as gay/lesbian

was both a driving need and a lurking fear: the attempts by Elizabeth’s
colleagues to divert and/or silence her and to draw a line between the
personal and professional and the two years of conversations between
Andy and his head teacher before he finally came out at school illustrate
the perceived elision between being openly gay/lesbian and being simul-
taneously perceived as both dangerous and in danger.

Andy
I did it in circle time, just within a kind of game. It was a truth and lie
game and we all said two lies and one truth and can you guess what the
lies and what the truth is. And I ... I’ve got four sisters, I was born in Aus-
tralia and I am getting married at the weekend. And someone said ‘Oh,
you are getting married?’ and I said ‘Yes, to my partner David’. Right,
your turn and we carried on. And that was at half past two and by
quarter past three literally the whole of the school was talking about it.
Have you heard that Mr Moffat is gay, he is getting married, he is getting
married to a man. But I talked to the teachers beforehand and I said
‘Look I am going to do this. If any kids ask you I want you to say yes, isn’t
that brilliant, I am going to the wedding, it’s wonderful, isn’t it’ ... And
then no kids came up to me but every teacher had kids coming up to
them to say ‘Is it true Mr Moffat is gay?’ and ‘Is it true that Mr Moffat is
getting married to a man?’ ... [Recently] one of the mums [at school]
talked about her son who was in the Y6 class when I first came out two
years ago. She said her son came home and said ‘Mr Moffat’s gay’ and
she didn’t know what to say so she said ‘Mr Moffat’s happy, you mean’,
to which her son replied ‘he is happy, and he’s got a boyfriend too!’

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The normalisation of same-sex relationships through the recognition of

the socially acceptable practice of legally endorsed, committed mono-
gamy (albeit under the othering label of civil partnership rather than
marriage) is juxtaposed here with the disruption of the norm through the
image of the impossible body (clearly a source of astonishment for the
pupils at Andy’s school) – a man’s male spouse at a wedding ceremony. As
discussed in Chapter 1, the recognition and performance of legal
partnerships for same-sex couples can be read as both profoundly queer
in its disruption of the patriarchal and oppressive connotations of mar-
riage and profoundly normative in its acquiescence with the upholding
of hierarchies of acceptable and unacceptable relationship patterns. For
both of us, the act of marrying our same-sex partners has been a (poten-
tially queer) repudiation of heteronormativity and also a statement of
gay pride, while for others such an act represents nothing more than the
reinforcement (or perhaps minimal expansion) of the status quo.

Being a role model: a two-edged sword?

Andy
See for me I have a massive thing about role models because I felt that
I didn’t have any when I grew up. You know, I want to be a good gay, a
good role model for any gay child who is growing up ... I did have girl-
friends when I was little but you know, I am so conscious of portraying
this image of a gay man, thinking oh God, I don’t want to ... It’s almost
as if I want to say no, I had boyfriends actually [laughs]. I know, I know,
it’s ridiculous ... completely ridiculous. But there was this whole thing
about not wanting to confuse them, wanting them to be very clear, look
I am gay therefore I like men, you know ... [I was saying recently to Fin
that] I am still thinking I should cut my hair ... I went into a year six class.
They were appalling, they were really badly behaved. And as I walked in
they were all tittering. And I know it’s because of my hair. There is no
other reason why they’d titter. Fin said she’s worked with quite a few
male teachers and youth workers with long hair. I said, ‘Is it high-
lighted?’ She said, ‘A lot of them are blond. I don’t think it’s highlighted.’
And I said, ‘Yeah, you see.’

Elizabeth
I can ‘pass’ as straight – and frequently do – and sometimes use this to
make myself seem less threatening to anxious head teachers or nosy

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reporters – and I notice that, while I am completely out in my academic

and university lecturing life, I avoid telling members of the press that I
am a lesbian, for fear that they will somehow feel that this negates the
value of the whole No Outsiders project. So what does that say about the
right of LGBT people to research the area of their own sexual identity? Is
this research LESS legitimate because it’s headed up by a lesbian?

Andy’s desire to present a fictionalised version of himself as having had

boyfriends when he was younger and Elizabeth’s heterosexual or lesbian
performance of self according to context illustrate the hierarchy of
acceptability of sexual identities: it is better/safer to appear straight than
gay and better/safer to appear gay than bi. And bi is an identity marker
that neither of us has chosen to claim (see ‘The absent B and T’ below for
further discussion), preferring instead the safer trappings of respectable
gayness. And we both make conscious choices about the deployment of
symbols of gayness in our performances of self, being aware, yet again, of
the sense of being both dangerous and in danger when we choose to use
these symbols to make ourselves intelligibly gay. The danger here, of
course, is not only of limiting the repertoire of recognised symbols of gay-
ness for ourselves and others, but of failing to recognise that these
symbols (such as long, highlighted blonde hair for a man) may have
other or no meanings in different contexts, and that countless people who
identify as gay may not choose to use them, or may be unaware of them.
Furthermore, in Elizabeth’s discussion of passing, there is also the sense
that one needs to do nothing to pass as straight other than choose not to
deploy gay-identified symbols and discourses: an assumption that rein-
forces the concept of heterosexuality as the norm rather than as also be-
ing performatively and discursively constructed.

The dangerous homosexual

Andy
There was one time I wrote [on the project web forum] about: the dis-
cussion was about the whole gay penguin thing and are we just pre-
senting images of gays being in happy families. And I said something
like look, we do need to talk about gay people being in happy families
because there isn’t any representation of that. We don’t need to talk
about gay saunas and cottaging, I didn’t say that but something like
that, something that was still up there at a later date and then I started

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worrying, I was worried about I hope that people don’t think that I am
saying that’s what gay life is about, gay saunas and ... I can’t remember
what it was, something else. Something seedy. [Looking back, what I
actually said was] I think at this point in the children’s lives we should
be promoting safe images of gay people and gay families, to redress the
balance. We need to talk about gay people falling in love because that
image has been hidden for so long. They can find out about saunas and
gaydar when they come out in their teens!

Again, the spectre of the dangerous homosexual rears its head – this time
in an explicit call for safe representations of gay people and gay families.
As Nixon has pointed out (see Chapter 4), the absolute requirement to
maintain the impression that educators – and especially teachers of
young children – follow only one pattern of sexual activity belies the
varied reality of both heterosexual and non-heterosexual teachers’ (and
others’) lives. A similar fear of bringing contamination into childhood
purity was expressed by Elizabeth after visiting another project school to
do some literacy and art work with 5 to 6 year-old children, based on the
same story of gay penguins mentioned above by Andy (Parnell et al,
2005):

I noticed myself not taking photos of the less artistically mature pictures
– eg C’s and B’s – first because they were less obviously penguins (or
that’s what I told myself) but then, underlying this, because I imagined
the newspapers saying ‘Look at how they are getting hold of children
who aren’t even old enough to draw or paint properly and brainwashing
them’ ... And I did the same with the writing – avoiding taking photos of
the children’s tiny hands doing the writing because it made them seem
so innocent; hesitating before photographing anything that might seem
as though they’d been indoctrinated into PC gay-loving-ness. (And all
this, still in the absolute conviction that this project is doing the right
thing!)

Here the hetero-norm is put to work to maintain social stability, and

when we feel ourselves threatening it, we fear we are rocking the founda-
tions of our world. In such a context, pursuing a gay essentialist strategy
is itself a strategic disruption; but it is one which is always open, as in this
case, to recuperation.

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Pushing boundaries and being (or not being) a rebel

Andy
I don’t joke with straight men, ‘Oh, phwoar, he’s nice’ but you know, I
always joke with women. Every day with the women, female teachers or
staff or the dinner ladies, it will be, ‘Oh, look Andy, there’s a postman
outside’ or a fireman, you know, but I won’t do that with the straight
men ... I made my gayness acceptable by laughing about it with people
... I am making it safe ... by laughing about it ... this is why I worry about
the whole camp thing and about wearing a holly outfit in the Christmas
[pantomime], I am just perpetuating the whole John Ingram9 thing. I
am not pushing boundaries at all, not changing their ideas. I worry that
I am doing myself and the gay cause, you know, the gay sort of agenda
a disservice ... Am I just perpetuating the whole idea of what a gay man
is? ... It wasn’t so bad last year because actually I was being very straight
... you know, we were all sailors wearing white tight t-shirts and hats, but
this year I’ve got a holly bush on and I am dancing around faldilala, now
that’s big fairy, that’s like a big gay thing.

Notwithstanding Andy’s interesting illustration of straightness by

recourse to the established camp image of sailors in white tight t-shirts,
the concern over the perpetuation of gay stereotypes illustrates the ten-
sions between acting as a role model and disrupting norms. As Andy
illustrates, he is making his gayness safe by laughing about it. In sharing
his laughter with women but not with men, he is perhaps also perpetuat-
ing the hierarchy that privileges heteromasculinity over all other forms of
sexuality and gender expression. To laugh with the women is to show
allegiance with them as lesser human beings; to exaggerate campness
(and its association with perceptions of femininity) is to emphasise the
division between gay men (and heterosexual women) and real men.

Elizabeth
I’ve always been torn between ‘being good’ and ‘being a rebel’ –
whether it was teaching reading in my Reception class in my NQT
[newly qualified teacher] year, where I refused to use reading schemes
and got into trouble with the head ... to jumping through Standards
hoops with students while not believing in the whole crazy system
which they uphold ... So what’s different? I think what’s different is that,
before, all the ‘safe’ things were the things I was rebelling against – read-
ing schemes, National Literacy Strategy, ‘Standards’ criteria etc. – but

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now, the ‘safe’ thing is at the same time the ‘dangerous’ thing, because
however safe it is, some people still won’t even go near it. So I have to
play safe in order to play dangerously – but at the same time, there’s
always the risk that I’ll slip into the safeness myself – which I was begin-
ning to do – instead of keeping the critical edge. And ... there is a danger
that ... the whole project might slip that way and become dangerously
depoliticised – which is also why I’m becoming deeply interested in
how the project is rekindling dormant activisms in a lot of its parti-
cipants ...

The question of what makes pedagogy – and other forms of practice – safe
and unsafe takes on a new dimension here: perhaps Elizabeth’s earlier
disruptions and refusals in the areas of literacy teaching and the assess-
ment of teacher training were, in some ways, queerer than her liberal
pluralist/gay rights activist incursions into the unsafe territory of hetero-
gender normativity. Yet as Nixon has illustrated in Chapter 4 in relation
to the moral panic in the media over the project’s work, the fact that the
safest acts – reading a story, talking about families – become unsafe in the
context of the project’s work also gives them the potential to disrupt
norms through the shifting of the ground on which safeness and norms
rest, in addition to the potential simply to reinforce that ground by the
reiteration of otherness. So we are perhaps remaking and stabilising the
ground at one and the same time.

Histories and identities: our pasts and our presents

Elizabeth
What does it say about the private/public, personal/professional divide
– if there is one – when I find myself sitting in the Cathedral of the city
where I went to school, watching Sue’s school parade their rainbow
banner down the aisle? This is where we went to respectable concerts,
for heaven’s sake! This Cathedral Green (oh yes, it has to have capitals)
is where we used to meet up with other schools for country dancing
festivals. This small city is where I had my first experiences of (hetero-
sexual) romance, and where I was amorously pursued when I was 13
and 14 by a much-hated and marginalised young lesbian, whom I tried
to cure with Christianity ... This is the small city where my best friend
and I (I’ll call her Belinda – she was a policeman’s daughter, which
always seems significant) rolled naked on the hay bales in a shed near

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her house, pretending to be a grown-up man and woman, and played

‘doctors’ in my bedroom, never once connecting our explorations of
each other’s bodies with love, sexual attraction or lesbian relationships.

The recuperation of the hetero-norm is deeply embedded in Elizabeth’s

narrative. Heterosexual romance (with the heterosexual merely added in
parenthesis, as this is of course what romance means) is implicitly
opposed to homosexual predation and the acts of sexual pretence carried
out by two young girls are seen as natural practice for adult heterosexual
coupling. Furthermore, all the trappings of the establishment – Church,
State (and its instrument the school) and folk tradition – are paraded as
significations not of the constraints of the heterosexual matrix but simply
of the ordinary life that we all lead. At the same time these significations
are recruited to the matrix as unshakeable monoliths against which the
tiny fist of a lesbian presence will almost certainly batter to no avail.
Leaving aside for a moment the assumptions underlying the univer-
salisation of country dancing and concerts in the cathedral as every
child’s lived experience, the message here is that by simply entering the
environment in which these innocent childhood pursuits had taken
place as a lesbian adult, Elizabeth comprised a sort of automatic con-
tamination, with the added implication that the only way to infiltrate
normality with such a dangerous presence is to do it well away from
home.

Andy
I moved away from [my home town] when I was 18 and although I now
live there again it’s the other side of the city to my parents and it takes
half an hour to visit them. Whenever I drive over there, to the place I
grew up, I feel uncomfortable. The place makes me feel angry. Similarly
as I drive away there is a sense of relief. I know this is because the place
reminds me of being closeted as a teenager and feeling desperately un-
happy. Walking around the small town centre reminds me of the feeling
that I was isolated, and that there was no way out. There is a lot of anger
in me towards that place. I thought going back there with my partner
would change the way it made me feel, but it didn’t. It just made me feel
insecure.

Andy still feels the constraints of the heterosexual matrix almost as a

physical presence in his home town: the experience of being isolated in

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the crowd and trapped both by the closet and by the demands of hetero-
normativity provides Andy with ample motivation for the presentation
of gay identity which has become a central part of his personal and pro-
fessional life. And as the following extract demonstrates, the matrix made
itself felt from the early years of Andy’s childhood experience.

Andy
When I was in school, when I was about 8, I won a competition in
school and I sang ‘A little peace’ by Nicole, Germany’s winning Euro-
vision song ... And I wore a dress and a floppy hat, to be her, to perform.
And I won the competition. And looking back I realise now that it was
the first time I used drama. The first time I realised I am actually good
at something, I can use drama to make children laugh. Lots of children
were going oh, that was great, that was great, that was great. And you
know in those days if you weren’t good at sport as a boy you had no
status at all. So it was the first time I thought I was popular and it was
because I wore a dress and sang a song. So I spoiled it basically by ...
wearing the dress to go home. And I think I did it because I wanted to
retain that popularity but outside the stage ... It made me feel good. I felt
good wearing a dress. So I wore a dress going home and got beaten up
... But there is not a picture of [me being Nicole] at all. For me that was
the proudest moment of my childhood, you know, I will always
remember that. And I wish that somebody had taken a photo of me in
that dress and that guitar. But no, why isn’t there a picture of me in that
dress with the guitar? ... there are a couple of me playing football ... God
knows how they could have possibly found me playing ... There’s me
and my bike. It’s as you would expect, you know.

The surplus visibility Andy experienced – and its disturbingly violent

consequence – by the simple act of wearing a dress outside the sanctioned
arena of ‘performance’ contrasts ironically with the invisibility through
which the wearing of the dress is erased by its absence from representa-
tions of himself as a child. And the absence of the dress – and of Andy’s
desired performance of self – is all the more marked because of the pre-
sence of the heteronormal – the football and the bike. So Andy’s child-
hood is shaped through both presence and absence, with visibility and
invisibility working together to reinforce the norm and to erase the ab-
normal, while his desire to reassert the visible reappears in his adult life.

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The absent ‘B’ and ‘T’: bi and trans identities

Elizabeth
My own personal history around gender identity seemed at first un-
problematic. While I have deliberately, consistently challenged trainee
primary teachers, for example, to justify their assumption that I am a
woman, and shocked them by emphasising that I may not always have
been one, my sense of gendered identity remained unrocked until a) I
fell in love with a woman – when for a brief moment I wondered,
foolishly, whether this somehow made me in some way into a man –
and b) some fifteen years later, I attended a transgender conference
where we were all invited to write our preferred personal pronoun along
with our preferred name onto our badges. ‘It’s only the trans people
here who need to do that,’ I found myself thinking. ‘Everyone can tell
from my name and my appearance that I’m a proper woman.’ (!)

As a whole team, perhaps our queerest moments, in terms of encounters

with and challenges to our unspoken assumptions, have been in our
explorations of gender expression and gender identity, led and supported
by Jay Stewart of Gendered Intelligence (www.genderedintelligence.org.
uk). The naïveté of Elizabeth’s response to the challenges of a trans-
friendly environment, and of her fear that her love for a woman must
make her a man, both speak of the elision of sex-gender-sexuality within
the heterosexual/heterogender matrix and demonstrate the queering and
subversion of gender norms presented by the spectrum of trans identities.

Andy
I haven’t even thought about [transgender stuff], to be fair. And I
wouldn’t know where to start. I am taking it one step at a time. Let’s just
deal with gay and lesbian things. Even bisexual, I mean, really, you
know, it’s hard, it’s hard. Because what I am saying to people, what I am
sort of preaching in my lesson plan to people is that you don’t choose to
be gay. It’s like having blue eyes or red hair, you know, you are gay or you
are not gay. But bisexual fucks all that up. So actually can you not be bi-
sexual, please. [laughs] ... because on the one hand you want to say
look, we have No Outsiders, it’s equality, you can love who you want to
love like I was saying to the kids. But then that’s like saying you’ve got a
choice. You haven’t got a choice. If you are gay, you are gay. It’s not like,
you know, I might want to love a woman but I can’t. I love men. So it
does make things very complicated that does, it ruins my whole scheme

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quite frankly [laughs] ... let’s deal with [the more complex issues] when
we are all talking about gay people existing. At the moment gay people
don’t exist in the primary curriculum, you know, and in schools.

Elizabeth
I suppose one of the things about bi identities – whether or not they have
that term attached to them (I hate the idea that people might describe
me as bi) is that they carry within them the promise of impermanence –
how can you have one lifelong partner if you’re attracted to both sexes?
So bi seems inherently more dangerous, perhaps, than straight or gay –
and of course, you can never trust bi people – you never know which way
they’ll turn ... How can we overcome all this guff and present the notion
of being attracted to, and happy to love, both sexes as being just as stable
as any other identity? . . What do we teach children when they first enter
pre-school educational settings (whether the ‘formal’ setting of the
nursery or the ‘informal’ playgroup)? Sorting and matching! What goes
with what; what belongs in what category; what doesn’t belong. Oh yes,
we have interlocking/overlapping circles when we do venn diagrams
showing how some things can belong to more than one category – but
do we do this about gender? Or sexuality? Not yet! Or do we ask whether
and why we need gender or sexuality categories? Not yet!

Neither of us has ever presented as bi, and while a number of members of

the project team have had relationships with people of both genders,
none have chosen identify openly as bi within the context of the project.
For many people, the need to erase heterosexual pasts is part of the
motivation to assert a homosexual present, which becomes all too
difficult if bi enters the picture. If gay is dangerous, then bi as constituted
by the discourses of heteronormativity is clearly more dangerous still:
what worse threat than that of the predatory homosexual, after all, than
the threat of the undercover agent who could equally well turn their pre-
dation in either direction, or could abandon the permanence of a
relationship with one gender for the lure of a relationship with the other?
The message that comes across clearly here is the perceived imper-
manence of bisexuality as a component within a relationship – which
contrasts oddly and illogically with the known and recognised imper-
manence of many heterosexual bondings – and the assumed superiority
of long-term commitment to one partner over long-term or short-term
relationships to multiple partners – whether simultaneous or serial.

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BODIES AND MINDS

Concluding reflections
The processes underlying our performances of self in the examples pre-
sented here are illustrated by the primacy of categorisation and label-
ling in our discussions; the difficulty of introducing a queer perspective
once these categories have become situated as the frame for our dis-
course; the (consciously and subconsciously) felt need to maintain the
image of the safe homosexual; and the tensions between achieving
tangible effects in children’s and colleagues’ thinking and behaviour,
and working towards a more disruptive, de-normalising queer practice.
The exposure of these discourses raises questions about the implica-
tions of presenting ourselves as uncomplicatedly and safely gay; the
normalisation of stable, romantic gay relationships and the hierarchisa-
tion of such relationships over other relationship patterns; the privileg-
ing of gay/lesbian over bisexual identity; the taken-for-granted elision,
albeit within a homonormative, rather than heteronormative matrix, of
sex-gender-sexuality in our performances of self; and the concomitant
erasure of transgender and/or gender-queer possibilities. They also
demonstrate the need for us to disavow heterosexual experience in our
own lives for fear that it might contaminate the legitimacy of our pre-
sent gay selves.

Conversely, the examples we have presented illustrate the role and

value of a strategic essentialism, drawing on liberal humanist and social
justice perspectives, in presenting legible gay selves in a world where
simply to claim or affirm a non-normative identity may, in a sense, be
queer enough. They also illustrate the personal and emotional value of
claiming such non-normative identities for ourselves as teachers,
parents and/or children.

We offer these presentations of self as illuminative of our experience

within and beyond the No Outsiders project. The questions they raise
are pertinent to our own thinking, to the debate within the project and
to wider debates within the educational and social world. There is no
right way to do this work, or to be ourselves. But the different ways in
which we and others have approached the interrogation and disruption
of heteronormativity offer starting points, we hope, for further con-
sideration of how to do, be and think the differences that may make a
difference to all of us.

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Note
9 The late John Ingram’s highly camp character, Mr Humphreys, with his catch line, ‘I’m
free’, not only became the hallmark of the popular British department store sitcom,
‘Are you being served?’ (1972 to 1985) but continued a trend of two-dimensional camp
portrayals in film and television which virtually obliterated other representations of gay
identity.

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8
A democratic community of practice:
Unpicking all those words
Renée DePalma and Laura Teague

One of the questions which occupied the project team from the outset was the
possibility of creating and maintaining a democratic process for the team-
members within the operation of the project itself: a project which brought with it
the continuing possibility of the mobilisation of hierarchies of power on a number
of fronts. In this chapter DePalma and Teague analyse of the complex, uncertain
and sometimes painful process of building an intentional research community that
involves people from very different practice communities (primary schools and
universities). As members of these two different communities (the senior re-
searcher and a teacher researcher), the authors reflect on this process of building
and maintaining such a community, particularly focusing on attempts to foster
democratic relationships among participants.

It does not matter that I did not mean – consciously, at any rate – to take
power; what matters is what got meant. (Moje, 2000:34).

I
n the original funding proposal, the No Outsiders research consor-
tium was defined as a global action research community (Somekh,
2005), drawing, as Somekh does, upon the Cultural Historical
Activity Theory (CHAT) notion of a community of practice. While the
word ‘community’, for some, may carry connotations of harmony and
even homogeneity, the project proposal anticipated that much of the
project development would emerge from dissensus, rather than con-
sensus, ‘What makes engagement in practice possible and productive is

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as much a matter of diversity as it is a matter of homogeneity’ (Wenger,

1998:75).

Heterogeneity was implicit in the project design, which paired teacher

researchers, as privileged and expert insiders to the teaching practice,
with university-based research assistants who would provide both an
outsider perspective and a particular expertise in research methodo-
logies. The hope was to create dialogic relationships that would contest
hierarchies, and the project proposal explicitly stated that fully dialogical
relationships can best be achieved when ‘academics’ and ‘practitioners’
work together as co-researchers to challenge traditional hierarchies
which separate the researcher from the researched. Thus data collection
tools such as interviews, observations and on-line communications are
recognised as complex and power-laden, and the right of the researcher
to interpret the researched is not taken as automatic.

In addition, the project’s shared focus on sexualities equality required

us to negotiate our own understandings of what that might mean in our
own particular local practices (DePalma and Atkinson, in press) and
how that (re)positioned us in terms of our professional and personal
identities (Allan, Hemingway, and Jennett, 2007; Atkinson, 2008; Nixon
and East, 2008). This chapter explores how participants negotiated the
terms by which we brought our own sexual identities into our group
discussions.

From the inside, as we have been participated in the on-going process

of building this community, we step back momentarily and endeavour
to take this process apart, drawing upon Walkerdine’s metaphor of un-
picking the knitting:
How we carry out the research, what questions we ask, what counts as data,
what is judged to be true are all entangled in the pursuit of ‘the truth’, and we
get caught up in this too. Our research becomes a process of disentangling,
of pulling ourselves free of the web. It is like unpicking knitting, the wool still
bearing the imprint of the knots which formed it into a garment. This garment
often seemed to fit us well and even to keep us warm on winter nights. Taking
it apart can be painful and does not reveal the easy certainty of answers.
(1998:15)

Analysing the web-based and email discussions that participants had

over the course of the first year of the No Ousiders project, we speci-

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A DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

fically focus on the early negotiations of the hierarchical relationships

among teacher researchers and university researchers. These discus-
sions were permeated with themes of data ownership and surveillance,
the effect of academic discourse, the different goals and constraints of
practitioners and academics and the nature and status of research and
practice. Specifically drawing upon these themes, we analyse the
assumptions about community, practice and democracy that underpin
our intentionally designed democratic community of practice by
examining our own negotiations of power, trust and ownership during
the first year of the project. Rather than providing guidelines for esta-
blishing and maintaining a democratic community of practice, we
examine the complexities inherent in the process. We argue that the
negotiation process itself is a crucial aspect of collaboration and recom-
mend resisting the temptation to expect these negotiations to minimise
dissent and reach compromise.

A community of practice as a vehicle for a participatory

action research (PAR) project
The community of practice model (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger,
1998) was adopted for the No Outsiders project because it seems parti-
cularly attuned to the processes and assumptions underpinning parti-
cipatory action research (PAR). Underpinning the notion of communi-
ties of practice is Lave’s understanding that learning is not separated
from the practice itself, ‘Learning is an integral aspect of activity in and
with the world at all times’ (1996:8). In their description of communities
of practice, Lave and Wenger invoke what they refer to as a long Marxist
tradition of rejecting mind-body dualisms to emphasise ‘relational
interdependency of agent and world, activity, meaning, cognition,
learning, and knowing’ (1991:50). This resonates with the fundamental
tradition in action research that rejects the separation of research and
practice:
Action research is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by
participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice
of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situa-
tions in which the practices are carried out. (Carr and Kemmis, 1986:162)

The fusing of participant-learner positions characterises the purposeful

process of expansive learning in which ‘the motivation for learning is an

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increase in the power-to-act in the real world, characterised by an in-

crease in the actions available to the individual’ (Roth et al, 2000).

German psychologist Kurt Lewin is generally credited with coining the

term ‘action research’ and is widely considered the ‘father’ of action re-
search, but since Lewin’s work in the 1940s, action research has evolved
into a complex array of approaches with different underlying philo-
sophies and concerns (Kemmis, 1993; Westlander, 2006). While Lewin’s
original notion of action research was relatively researcher-driven,
there has been an increasing trend toward more collaborative ventures
where fundamental aspects of the research are constantly negotiated by
practitioner and professional researcher in a version coined by William
Foote Whyte (1991) as participatory action research (PAR). The com-
munity of practice and PAR frameworks were explicitly linked in the
original No Outsiders project proposal as a way to challenge hier-
archical relations between research and practice, researcher and re-
searched, and the proposal included a plan to conduct an ongoing
meta-investigation of these processes alongside the particular projects
taking place in school sites throughout the UK:
The study is based on an ecological perspective, which strongly implicates
the researcher as an inseparable part of the reality studied. This requires not
only an explicit description of the researcher’s participation in the classroom,
but also an explicit analysis of how the researcher’s thoughts changed as a
result of participation (Carson and Sumara, 1997). To this end, we plan to
collect and analyse existing data (focused discussion transcripts, web dis-
cussion postings, research assistant reports, and our own communication)
to explore the potential of a research-based community of practice to create
spaces for professional development. In this sense, we will be conducting our
own action research project along with the teacher researchers. (excerpt
from No Outsiders research proposal, Case for Support)

As mentioned earlier, the project designers were particularly interested

in the process of community building through negotiation and dis-
sensus, particularly since teacher researchers were expected to generate
the goals and objectives of their action research projects based on their
classroom experience and concerns, while research assistants were
expected to take the role of research consultants and ‘critical friends’
(Campbell et al, 2004:106). They had no idea what the research projects
would look like or what kinds of relationships might emerge among the

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No Outsiders community members. They embraced PAR knowing that

negotiations among different parties, with different understandings of
ethics, goals and interests, reinvents each PAR project as unique, ‘the
course of events is to a great extent unpredictable, offers unexpected
twists and turns, and ... initial overall research planning is not possible to
follow without striking out new paths’ (Westlander, 2006:60). This un-
predictability was both exhilarating and terrifying, and offered an
opportunity to ‘explore an ecological approach to ethics through con-
tinual negotiation of power, language and authentic participation that is
particularly compatible with the participatory nature of collaborative
action research’ (Collins, 2004:349).

Whose community? Whose practice?

Nel Noddings reminds us that ‘Community is not an unalloyed good; it
has a dark side’ (1996:245), illustrating her point by demonstrating that
both Nazi sympathisers and non-Jews who rescued Jews during the
Holocaust attributed their actions to the values of their respective com-
munities. The word ‘community’ can be misleading because popular
usage leads us to believe that we think we know what it means. We tend
to take the word to imply an unproblematic, normative group failing to
consider implicit potential for (even inevitability of) power dynamics
and conflicts, ‘the reification of community in ordinary forms of lan-
guage can lead us to neglect the messy relations between individuals
and communities’ (Linehan and McCarthy, 2001:130). Lave and Wenger
are careful to qualify their notion of community to incorporate diver-
sity:
In using the term community, we do not imply some primordial culture-shar-
ing entity. We assume that members have different interests, make diverse
contributions to activity, and hold varied viewpoints ... Nor does the term
community imply necessarily co-presence, a well-defined identifiable group,
or socially visible boundaries. It does imply participation in an activity system
about which participants share understandings concerning what they are do-
ing and what that means in their lives and for their communities. (1991:97-98)

Drawing upon Bakhtin’s (1999) notion of heteroglossia, Winkelmann

notes that community is inhabited by multiple and conflicting voices
and argues that by turning community into a simplified, stable com-
modity ‘we ignore the tension inherent in the very dynamics of

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language and the dynamism demanded of the continuous action and

reflection, action and reflection, of genuine praxis’ (1991:24). It is this
heteroglossia that we focus on in this analysis.

Kemmis reminds us that we cannot conceptualise research without

attending to the institutional contexts within which this research takes
place:
as a social practice, [research] is always and inevitably socially- and
historically-constructed. We begin to see how the social practice which is
research is a social practice which relates to (and has its meaning in a con-
text of) other social practices like those involved in serving a bureaucracy, or
participating in the practices which constitute a disciplinary field, or parti-
cipating in social movements. (1993)

No Outsiders might actually be seen as a hybrid research community,

since members of two pre-existing institutional practice communities
were intentionally brought together to transform the way each institu-
tion operated separately (the way academics researched and the way
teachers taught). The reality was in fact much more complex, as each
individual simultaneously participated in various communities of prac-
tice (Rock, 2005; Wenger, 1998) and action research in particular pro-
vides ‘different imperatives, different affordances and different mean-
ings for participants depending on their positioning within overlapping,
inter-related communities of practice’ (Somekh, 2006).

In No Outsiders, people were positioned not only in terms of their

relationship within the community (university researcher – teacher
researcher, South West group — London group) but also in terms of
their positions in their regular (long-term) practice communities.
University researchers include those with a broad range of experience
and institutional status, from graduate students finishing PhD theses to
established researchers. Some were relatively new to sexualities re-
search; others were unfamiliar with action research. Primary school-
based participants were similarly diverse in terms of their own institu-
tional positioning, from the head teacher of a tiny rural Church school
to a first-year teacher in a diverse urban school, for example. In this
analysis we will focus on the ways in which simultaneous participation
in either the (primary) school community or academic research com-
munity affected No Outsiders participants’ engagement with the ‘joint

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enterprise’ (Wenger, 1998) of addressing (LGBT) equalities in primary

schools.

The project started in September 2006 with a national meeting of all

project participants. Aside from one other national meeting (January
2007) and an additional regional meeting in each of the three regions,
most group communication during the first year of the project took
place by e-mail or via the project website, which included a password-
protected asynchronous discussion forum for project members. In
early October, in response to some email reflections on power and
democracy within the project that she received from Laura (teacher
researcher and co-author of this chapter), Elizabeth, the principal
investigator, initiated a new discussion to the No Outsiders web forum
entitled ‘Is our project democratic?’:
I’d really like to start a discussion about this, as it’s absolutely central to how
the project develops – but I’d very much like it to be in a separate discussion
on the left hand menu, because that way it will always stay visible for us to
come back to and rethink ... as Laura, one of our teacher researchers, has
already pointed out in a very thoughtful and thought-provoking email, we still
know who holds the power, and who is interpreting whom! Yet in this very
statement, she turns the tables, and quite rightly starts interpreting the
actions of the university-based research team.

This posting led to a discussion about the possible ways in which the
affordances and constraints of our institutional communities, as well as
certain cultural understandings of the hierarchical relationships be-
tween these two communities, affected our participation in No Out-
siders. Some of these included:

Time to participate in discussions

Different institutional communities prioritised differently the amount
of time participants were expected to devote to these negotiations. The
project was designed (by two academics!) with the understanding that
this kind of negotiation would be an integral part of the research. Our
interactive project website was meant to facilitate the communication
among physically-dispersed community members and provide a maxi-
mum flexibility in terms of space and time that would afford parti-
cipation for everyone.

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Nevertheless, Laura brought up early on that as a teacher she felt she

would benefit from ‘more explicit discussion between teacher re-
searchers and university researchers about where this project is coming
from theoretically – which is all a bit impossible because of time con-
straints on the teachers’. Teacher researchers did participate on the web
and participation did increase somewhat over the course of the project,
but particularly in the beginning the university researchers were a
stronger presence. What the designers didn’t anticipate was an institu-
tional time constraint influenced by institutional definitions of legiti-
mate practice. The project funding provided for teachers to be released
from teaching obligations for a certain amount of research time, but
schools were not always able to release teachers even to meet with the
university researchers or attend project events, much less to spend their
valuable working time on web discussions. For the university re-
searchers, discussion and reflection was congruent with institutional
practices (research and publications), while for teacher researchers dis-
cussions were typically associated with free time activities. As university
researcher Elizabeth B. pointed out: ‘University researchers are paid to
spend time discussing research issues, teacher researchers are paid to
spend time in the classroom, and must find additional time to engage
with the website’.

Conflicting institutional messages

All teachers participating in No Outsiders had to secure permission
from the head teacher (if they were not themselves the head). But this
formal consent did not automatically translate into a great deal of
institutional support. Even when the teacher was the head teacher,
each school had a different set of negotiations to undertake with the
local school community – colleagues and parents – as preparation for
sexualities work that might be perceived as dangerously subversive.
Different local contexts contributed to a wide discrepancy between
some teachers who designed and implemented rather concrete and
successful projects early on and those who, at the end of the first year,
were still negotiating terms for beginning their No Outsiders work – for
example, revising policy documents or discussing project books with
peers.

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Nevertheless, as members of the No Outsiders team, teachers were also

aware of the expectation that they would produce some kind of action
research project. There was a good deal of discussion about this, with
university researchers insisting that those teachers who reflected on the
process, even when no concrete progress was made, were also doing
valuable action research. Yet some teachers seemed to feel caught
between conflicting institutional demands, with the No Outsiders com-
munity calling for progress and schools calling for caution. Laura, for
example, lamented that she felt compelled to ‘do’ something by the No
Outsiders community, but was not yet ready in her teaching com-
munity, ‘I’m good at thinking ... but doing is more tricky. There’s no
point me being involved in this if all I will do is think...’

Unequal institutional status

It was Laura who from the beginning questioned the ability of indivi-
duals to divest themselves of the power invested in them by their
institutional status:
I love the fact that this project involves teachers and head teachers and [local
authority] people and academics and whoever else and its commitment to
there being no outsiders is important. But simply by having all these people
on board and saying we’re all working together is not enough – there needs,
perhaps, to be dialogue about the potential difficulties in order that we can
move towards something genuinely more ‘equal’.

Moje (2000) and Somekh (2002), reflecting on their own experiences

with university-school collaborations, both recognise that while these
collaborations are inevitably imbued with the affiliatory power of the
authoritative, prestigious university institution, it would be an over-
simplification to ignore other ways in which power permeates and
structures these relationships. Somekh (2002) reminds us that the rela-
tively low status of education in the academy, claims about scientific
and non-scientific ways of knowing and popular negative associations
with the word ‘academic’ can contribute to more complex power rela-
tions. Moje (2000) points out that collaborative relationships are nego-
tiated interpersonally in terms of multiple embodied affiliations, so that
what one wears or eats (or doesn’t) can be interpreted in terms of
power-laden associations. Nevertheless, in our hybrid community, the
university-school hierarchy was felt to be a particular challenge to pro-

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moting cross-institutional collegial relationships. Laura explained how

her perceptions stemmed from her own experiences as a university stu-
dent, and related these to similar teacher-pupil hierarchies she parti-
cipates in within her own school:
When I was an undergraduate I was genuinely scared of going to talk to half
the lecturers. And I guess I agree that there isn’t really a solution – because
the imbalance of power between different groups is ingrained in society. But
we can keep working towards an ideal in the way we behave towards each
other ... I guess I am always in a position of power as the teacher in my class-
room but I can choose how to use that power and I can do everything I can
to listen to the children in my class and to help them to engage with the learn-
ing they do and to develop their own voices.

Roth argues that communities of practice are characterised by ‘unques-

tioned background assumptions, common sense, and mundane
reason’ shared by members (cited in Barab and Duffy, 2000:36). In a
sense, our shared understandings included a hierarchical system of
binary relations (the academy/school, theory/practice) that implicitly
coloured our relationships even as we challenged these binaries.

Different discourses with unequal status

Tusting (2005) draws upon Fairclough’s (2003) notion of ‘semiotic order’
to examine how ways in which discourse is organised in particular
social fields brings global social orders to bear on local semiotic inter-
actions. Semiotic meaning is shaped by social structure that reaches be-
yond the moment of interaction by actors who are ‘shaped by their
whole history of interactions’ (Tusting, 2005:42). The social order that
places the academy above teaching practice places a higher value on
the discourse of academia.

Somekh writes of the ways in which power relations are construed by

the different discourses of university- and school-based researchers,
‘Those very terms that alienated the teachers were those that would
give the project status in the eyes of the academy’ (2002:96). She writes
that by recognising that neither discourse was more or less extensive or
exclusive than the other, participants came to realise the value of
possessing multiple fluencies, ‘we would direct our writing to different
audiences and draw each others’ work to the attention of those who
otherwise would not have given it credence’ (ibid:99). Similarly, No Out-

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siders teachers communicated with parents, colleagues, administra-

tors, religious leaders and the press in ways that went beyond the dis-
cursive expertise of university researchers. Yet while we might explicitly
recognise the value of non-academic discourse, the fact remained that
teachers frequently reported that they felt excluded by the academic
discourse that university researchers habitually used in web-based con-
versations that were meant to be inclusive. Sue, a teacher researcher,
described her reaction to encountering theoretical discourse on the
web discussion forum as a strong emotional sense of inadequacy and
exclusion:
[I’m] not sure what I say makes any sense. I think you are all incredibly brainy
and smart, by the way ... I really don’t get it, feel terribly dim, a total outsider,
want to fall asleep, but also have a dreadful urge to laugh hysterically ... Am
I the only one who has that reaction?!

Laura supported Sue’s position, ‘As much as it fascinates me and I find

the concepts and frameworks ... useful tools for thinking about things, I
do also find it hard to take all the jargon seriously. And it’s jargon –
you’re totally not dim whatsoever’. Through Laura’s use of the term
‘jargon’ she highlights that Sue is not an intellectual but a discursive
outsider. Along these lines, another teacher researcher, Andi, related
her own frustration with academic discourse to her experience in the
Comenius program, an international, multilingual project, ‘I have just
returned from the Czech Republic where the group I am working with
all speak a variety of languages ... believe me we have had difficulties.’
And Renée tried to unpick assumptions about academic discourse and
intelligence by reminding Sue that, as an outsider to UK political and
school systems, she felt overwhelmed by the very discourse Sue (as an
experienced head teacher) is proficient in:
When I first started working in the UK, I was first overwhelmed by all the
acronyms I had to learn ... But it wasn’t just the acronyms, it was the way
things are organised, who does what and why ...You were very helpful to me
in that, however, because you clarified the issue (well, you clarified why it
was confusing and ambiguous, but still!) when you sent us that letter to your
[local authority].

The reference is to a letter Sue wrote to her local authority concerning

her analysis of government guidance for schools on approaching
religion and sexuality, an issue that she introduced to the No Outsiders

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discussion forum and explained at length. Sue’s analysis drew upon

considerable professional expertise and the careful reading of various
complex government documents, a discourse that, as Renée wrote, she
found initially impenetrable. While the No Outsiders community did
rely on knowledge and expertise that was distributed across parti-
cipants, so that not all participants had the same understandings of the
practice as a whole (Hutchins, 1994) and this distributed expertise in-
cluded valuable discursive proficiencies (Somekh, 2002), this distri-
bution did not imply equal status.

Not-so-mutual accountability
Wenger expects communities of practice to engage in joint endeavour,
where members are mutually accountable (Wenger, 1998). In his classic
description of claims processors at a company he calls Alinsu, Wenger
stresses that while all processors were ultimately held accountable by
managers to process claims accurately and efficiently, processors nego-
tiated this accountability with each other in an emergent shared prac-
tice. They were accountable not only to Alinsu managers, but also to
each other for ‘making their work life bearable’ (p81, but see DePalma,
in press for an analysis of the limitations of Wenger’s claims processors
example). Nevertheless, the way that No Outsiders spanned academic
and school institutions meant that our accountability was split. Our
shared practice emerged as a response to two different sets of
‘managers,’ with very different institutional goals, standards and
policies.

As mentioned earlier, schools often felt accountable to their local

authorities and local communities to not rock the boat. Academics
were under pressure to prove themselves as productive academics
which, as Moore reminds us, is not particularly congruent with this kind
of endeavour, ‘Academics work within institutions that are steeped in
traditions and hierarchy. There are tensions between the traditional role
of an academic researcher and a person who is truly committed to com-
munity based participatory research’ (2004:157). Those of us who
secured institutional funding for the project had an additional
accountability: as project designers, Elizabeth and Renée were ex-
pected to produce something like what the ESRC had paid for. Failure
to do so might seriously jeopardise their future institutional standing.

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Laura pointed out that this unevenly distributed accountability further

contributed to hierarchical relations, ‘I guess to move further towards
there being more equality between university researchers and teacher
researchers ... teacher researchers [would have] to have been (and be)
more involved in decisions about the project.’

Shifting notions of democracy

These discussions prompted us to question the democratic nature of
the project more deeply. We went from assessing various threats to
democracy to reconceptualising how democracy itself might work.
Nick, a university researcher, wondered if the project designers’
ultimate accountability to the funders might require there to be limits
to shared decision making:
Could a project such as this be entirely democratic? Even if it could be,
should it be? For example: Elizabeth [principal investigator], you are account-
able to ESRC. If the rest of us decided democratically to negate some aspect
of your contract with ESRC, that would leave you in an untenable position. I
am much more certain that we can and must be clear and honest, with
ourselves and each other, about where power lies and how that power is
enacted through decisions. If this is always on the agenda, that will help us
to clarify the spaces within which we can establish democratic ways of
working, and spaces in which we can’t.

Elizabeth responded by pointing out a fundamental ironic tension

underpinning the project: the success of the project proposal was pre-
dicated on exactly the democratic processes that Nick thought might be
short-circuited by institutional accountability:
It’s a good point, Nick – there ARE places where my accountability to ESRC
means I need to maintain control – BUT on the other hand, one of the things
the referees for the proposal liked about the project was its design, which is
fundamentally about trying to establish a sort of working democracy between
people with different types of knowledge and expertise.

Later, when Elizabeth asked the teachers to help decide whether or not
to accept a production company’s proposal to make a documentary
about the project (which was an expected outcome), Sue, a teacher re-
searcher, reflected on this process:
I did feel pleased that my views were being sought. Then, I thought that in
fact the final say will have to rest with Elizabeth [principal investigator]. So, is

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that democracy? It could be seen as a tokenistic gesture towards democracy.

Elizabeth might care about what we think, she might not, but is that ultimate
decision going to the vote? I doubt it.

Sue’s characterisation of democracy as an impossible and not parti-

cularly desirable goal seemed to be closely tied with the reduction of the
concept to a static and potentially tokenistic system of majority rule.
Later Deb, a university researcher, refocused this notion of democracy
from a static system to dynamic discursive process:
I think that when [Elizabeth] asks ‘is the project democratic?’ we are drawn
into thinking about in/equality of power, who has and does not have it etc. A
‘zero-sum’ model. And as various of you have pointed out, access to re-
sources (time, knowledge, language, budgets) means that, with this notion of
power, there are inequalities (which we can then engage in dialogue over
and modify our practice in order to address).

In her own academic writing, Deb has drawn upon Foucault’s re-
formulation of power as sovereign (that ‘possessed by’ a leader) to a
notion of disciplinary power (the discursive deployment of self-evident
truths): ‘One discourse in not intrinsically imbued with more or less
power than another. Yet the historicity of particular discursive practices
means that some discourses ... do come to dominate and bound legi-
timate knowledge and, indeed, what is knowable’ (Youdell, 2006a:35-
36). Disciplinary power can be interrupted by interrogating those truths
that seem self-evident, which recasts democracy as a process rather
than an ideal state of equally shared power. Wenger also situates power
within a continual negotiation process: ‘it requires or creates some form
of consensus in order to become socially effective, but the meaning of
the consensus is something whose ownership always remains open to
negotiation’ (1998:207). Viewed in this light, a democratic community is
an emergent process of interrogation guided by the question, ‘By what
means do individuals come to be positioned within a group at a parti-
cular moment and over time?’ (Berry, 2006:514).

Negotiating the research gaze

This section describes a particular case where participants negotiated
their positioning within the group over time. Once again drawing upon
Foucault, this case concerns surveillance, or the power of the anony-
mous gaze. Referring to the panopticon prison design10 where one

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guard would be able to observe a number of individual prisoners who

could see neither the guard nor the other prisoners, Foucault writes that
the object of the panoptic surveillance ‘is seen, but does not see; he is
the object of information, never a subject in communication’ (1997b:
200). In an email sent to Elizabeth, Renée and Judy (all university re-
searchers) on September 30, 2006, Laura’s description of the university-
teacher relationship strongly parallels Foucault’s panoptic relationship:
I feel that although I may be researching in my classroom in relation to
whatever project I develop ... I am still being researched by you whereas you
can research without being researched yourself. What I say in these emails
and on the discussion forum can be interpreted by you.

The teachers may be researchers, but they are under the watchful gaze
of the university researchers who, as Laura puts it, enjoy the privilege of
researching without being researched ... the unseen gazer. Renée’s
response reveals that she is still applying her early idealised notion of
the project’s shared practice; she suggests that while university re-
searchers might train the research gaze on teachers, teacher researchers
might just as easily train the research gaze on university members:
Yes, this makes a lot of sense to me. It feels like we can go off and write our
interpretations of your postings, because they’re data. Which I have to agree
feels really creepy to me ... That being said, I suppose other people on the
web might want to use people’s postings as data ... I think we agreed that
nobody would use anybody’s postings as data without first letting people
know what they wanted to use them for and getting permission from the
people themselves. That goes for everyone, Elizabeth A, me, teachers
[university researchers], etc.

Renée failed to take into consideration some of the institutional

realities described above, which make it rather unlikely that a teacher
would have the time or inclination to view a university researcher as a
research subject, a reality Laura gently points out in her response:
I guess in life in general whatever anyone says or writes (or in whatever way
discourse is made public) ... can be open to interpretation. But then me
interpreting something someone says in a conversation is different to me
interpreting it and then writing and publishing a paper on it.

While this exchange prompted Elizabeth to involve the No Outsiders

community in the web-based discussion of democracy described

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above, an examination of further email communications between

Laura and some of the university researchers reveals that Laura’s dis-
comfort at being the subject of the research gaze was far from resolved.
In addition, we can see that our shared project focus on sexualities
equality has positioned Laura in an unfamiliar and complex way in
terms of her local practice community, which in turn has placed her in
an awkward position in terms of the No Outsiders community: under
what conditions might the conflict between Laura’s teacher and sexual
identity become our data, placing Laura in an even more vulnerable
position under the research gaze?

A month and a half later, Laura, still concerned that she was not ‘doing’
enough, sent an email to Elizabeth and Renée where she critically
analysed some of the personal factors that she felt might complicate her
position as a No Outsiders teacher researcher who was not out in her
school:
Although I realise that this project is about equality rather than personal flag
waving of any sort, I can’t get myself out of it ... and when I begin to question
its relevance, I always come back to myself and think that it’s not for nothing
that I feel anxious about coming out to colleagues ... I wonder how differently
(or not) I’d understand this if I was straight ... And when I deal with other
equalities issues I wonder how much I understand the subtler aspects of
issues people face.

Focusing on Laura’s concerns about ‘not doing’ enough, Elizabeth res-

ponded by enthusiastically supporting Laura’s self-reflections as
powerful data and encouraged her to post them in the section of the
project website where people’s data, in whatever form, were being
collected and shared:
I’m really glad that you feel that being a lesbian allows you to see the signi-
ficance of LGBT equality and to press ahead and do something about it – it’s
all too often the case that gay teachers feel that they shouldn’t address the
issue, exactly because they’re gay! ... This conversation ... is really valuable
potential project data ... If you’re happy for it (or selected bits, if you prefer) to
go on the website as data, either now or in the future, that would be great.

Renée responded as well, encouraging Laura to keep self-reflecting and

to consider this as a valid form of data collection:

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... Good action research is very much self-reflective, so please don’t feel
compelled to leave yourself out of the equation. For me the weakest of action
research is when people just do something and describe it, and the strongest
is when people interrogate how their own identities affect and are affected by
their teaching. I think you are definitely on your way to the good stuff ... Eliza-
beth and I have reflected rather a lot on how our identities as straight and
lesbian researcher position us with respect to our work and perhaps in-
fluence our perceptions, relationships and actions.

In this posting, Renée revealed that she and Elizabeth have these same
kinds of self-reflections, but at this point neither university researcher
went so far as to actually share their self-reflections with Laura (Eliza-
beth referred to ‘gay teachers’ in general, and Renée mentioned only the
fact that she had reflected, without giving any details). In other words,
they have not yet engaged Laura personally, but only as mentors or
coaches. And they have not exposed themselves to the public gaze
(sharing their own self-reflections as ‘data’ with the rest of the team) as
they recommend she does. While Renée and Elizabeth might seem a bit
slow to understand what seems rather obvious in hindsight, it is pro-
bably useful to point out that both remained focused on Laura’s earlier,
explicitly stated concerns that thinking was not doing, which masked
Laura’s additional personal safety concerns until she found herself
forced to state these more explicitly as well.

Laura responded by reminding the university researchers that placing

one’s personal life in the public gaze is risky (even theory is safer!) and
tactfully suggests that they start the public self-reflection discussion:
It would feel slightly different posting something like this to posting something
about theory ... theory is much safer! But I agree, our own identities are
central to what we are doing and interrogating all the issues that surrounds
this is important – so for that reason, I feel I ought to post ... If one of you
guys were to start a discussion I’d probably respond with something along
the same kind of lines as what I’ve written here.

Elizabeth, apparently interpreting Laura’s invitation to start a discus-

sion as literally placing the words on the discussion forum, reiterates
her request to upload Laura’s relatively private email reflections into the
public data space of the web:
I’ve just had an email conversation with another teacher researcher in the
project who, like you Laura, is offering some fabulous thought-provoking

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comments through long email discussions. I’ve asked her – and I’d now like
to ask you – for permission to put up either the whole of the email exchanges
we’ve had – you, me, Judy, Renée – or edited highlights if you prefer ... not
into the discussion forum but into the ‘our project data’ section of the website.

Drawing upon earlier exchanges, Elizabeth seems to have read Laura’s

reticence as a lingering belief that her ‘thinking’ was not valid data, a
concern that Laura had expressed earlier. Finally, Laura abandoned her
earlier tactful and discreet approach by directly stating her concerns
about who is researching whom in relation to the explicit aims of the No
Outsiders project to disrupt these very hierarchies:
Because I care that this project is as democratic as it can be ... because it
has more potential to be than other research – I’ll only put stuff up about my-
self if you guys [university researchers] are prepared to do the same. Other-
wise it’d feel weird – like only the teacher researchers were being researched
... If you’re wanting us to interrogate our own subject positions and the impact
that has on our perceptions, actions etc. in relation to this project – and put
our reflections about that stuff on the web – then you also must do the same
... for the sake of trying to keep things equal-ish! Do you see where I’m com-
ing from? Or do you think I’m being ridiculous?

Laura retreats back to a more cautious position at the end, inviting the
university researchers to decide whether they think she is being ridi-
culous, but in the end she managed to disrupt research relationships
that we as a team had taken for granted. By demanding that the univer-
sity researchers subject themselves to the same surveillance that they
expected of the teacher researchers, Laura contests and re-imagines her
subject position in the No Outsiders community. This constitutes a
renegotiation of practice: the university researchers must share the
practice of being the object of research in this research community. The
short term result was that Elizabeth initiated a new web discussion
entitled ‘Speaking as a lesbian: Researcher identities and the impact on
research’ where she took the lead in sharing her reflections on her posi-
tion as a lesbian researcher as community data (see Chapter 7 for some
of these reflections).

Later, reflecting on this experience in an email, Elizabeth explained that

Laura’s insistence that we (university researchers) take the lead on self-
reflection constituted a turning point in her understanding of the
democracy of the project and her role as principal investigator. She re-

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flected on further risks that she took in opening additional discussions

about her positioning in the project in terms of sexual history, academic
identity and teaching experience, risks she would not have taken ‘had it
not been for Laura’s early exhortation to ‘you guys’ to open ourselves up
to critical commentary and analysis on personal issues before she
would be prepared to do so herself.’

Elizabeth’s description of her ‘turning point’ contributes to our belief

that this renegotiation of community positioning constitutes, rather
than reflects, our democratic process.

A ‘democratic’ ‘community’ of ‘practice’: from product to

(unpredictable, uncomfortable, never-ending) process
Michelle Fine (1994) compares the researcher-researched relationship
with other power-imbued relationships between members of dominant
and marginalised racial and ethnic groups; the researcher has the
power to define the research and terms of interaction. In this sense,
academics’ attempts to give teachers choices and voices in the research
process risk belittling and essentialising them in ways similar to any
attempt to ‘empower’ the Other. The university researchers’ early
attempts to encourage teacher researchers to voice their personal re-
flections as legitimate project data may have been just such a mis-
guided attempt at empowerment.

Members of a research community, particularly one that self-defines as

transgressing traditional researcher-subject dichotomies, will need to
negotiate their unique terms of empowerment. Eisenhart exhorts us to
accept the postmodern challenge of holding the tension among the
various, and perhaps incompatible, perspectives that emerge through
research: ‘we will have to participate, along with others, with one per-
spective or voice among many. We will have to speak what we know and
believe in, but we will also have to listen, deliberate, negotiate, and
compromise around the knowledge and beliefs of others who are
involved’ (1999:465).

This negotiation process might not always be pleasant, particularly as it

requires honest expressions of conflicting interests that tend to be sub-
dued by dominant cultural notions of niceness that encourage us to
avoid conflict (Moje, 2000). While the negotiations described in this

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paper were relatively congenial, this kind of honesty can lead to angry
outbursts and open confrontation. Nevertheless, honest reflections on
emotional responses such as anger, betrayal and frustration ‘can ulti-
mately strengthen the relationship and make it more nearly a partner-
ship of equals’ (Somekh, 2002:89). Lave identifies conflict as inherent in
human joint endeavour, and specifies that this conflict tends to reflect
situated interests, feelings and beliefs rather than abstract ‘truth’ claims:
Analysis focused on conflictual practices of changing understanding in
activity is not so likely to concentrate on the truth or error of some knowledge
claim. It is more likely to explore disagreements over what is relevant;
whether, and how much, something is worth knowing and doing; what to
make of ambiguous circumstances; what is convenient for whom, what to do
next when one does not know what to expect, and who cares most about
what (1996:15).

Whether congenially or confrontationally negotiated, these disagree-

ments cannot be silenced in the pursuit of civility or safety, but need to
be continually and openly negotiated by all interested parties. Frank-
ham and Howes (2006) emphasise process in their account of setting up
a collaborative relationship between university and teacher re-
searchers. Rather than regard disturbances as unfortunate side-effect of
collaboration, they argue that knowledge cannot be separated from the
processes of generating it and that these processes, enacted through
talk as action, are integral to the research. Responding to McNiff’s
(2002) call for researchers to explore the kinds of relationships needed
to produce educational knowledge, they suggest that relationships are,
by their very nature, unknowable; therefore action research, reliant on
particular relationships that develop in specific context, must be con-
stantly reinvented (Frankham and Howes, 2006).

Yet the very understanding that relationships are negotiated through

(sometimes uncomfortable and conflicting) dialogue with an unknow-
able, unfinalisable (Bakhtin, 1999) Other might help us enter into dia-
logic relationships with our research partners. While this might satisfy
McNiff’s call for a ‘kind of relationship,’ it is the kind of relationship that
recognises its unknowability right from the start. Given this un-
knowability, we cannot provide guidelines or a list of ‘best practice’ for
democratic community building, but we can share some insights that
have arisen in the building of our own community:

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■ Communities of practice are dynamic and emergent, and neither

stable nor predictable. As Wenger writes, ‘There is an inherent un-
certainty between design and its realisation in practice, since prac-
tice is not the result of design but rather a response to it’ (1998:233).
■ Participants in practice communities will have different goals and
understandings which must come to bear in negotiations of mean-
ing. In our case, situated understandings were shaped by our cur-
rent (sometimes conflicting) responsibilities to other practice com-
munities as well as different personal histories. We discovered this
complexity in practice, as conflicts emerged.
■ There is an element of trust involved in revealing our understand-
ings to each other (Laura had to trust Elizabeth and Renée enough
to reveal the source of her discomfort, and Elizabeth had to trust
the team enough to initiate discussions of her own sexual identity
in relation to the project). Just because our web discussion forum
was password-protected doesn’t mean we necessarily felt safe with
each other. This trust emerges as relationships develop, and cannot
be taken for granted.
■ Keeping dialogue alive is essential to any community of practice,
but particularly to one devoted to innovation and transformation of
practice. An important challenge for the No Outsiders team has
been resisting the temptation to smooth over our differences,
‘Blending, somehow, always ends up privileging the perspective of
the blade’ (Wenger, 1998:256).

We are not saying that we have completely succeeded in following our

own advice; our relationships are certainly not entirely open and trust-
ing, and no relationship is ever fully dialogic. Nevertheless, we suggest
that researchers consider democracy as process and engage each in
constant reflexive dialogue without fear of the unknown or disruptive.

Note
10 The panopticon was designed by Jeremy Bentham but never instituted. Foucault re-
lated in an interview that the early 19th century prison design projects he studied in-
variably made reference to Bentham’s panopticon (Foucault, 1974).

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9
No Outsiders: Exploring
transformations at the intersections
of communities of practice
Elizabeth Brace

Like DePalma and Teague, Brace explores how Wenger’s concept of communi-
ties of practice, upon which the project was designed, has shaped the develop-
ment of the project. While DePalma and Teague focus primarily on internal
dynamics, Brace explores the ways in which the complex and fluid community of
practice which constituted the No Outsiders project overlapped and intersected
with a range of other communities, examining both the benefits and tensions of
these overlaps. She focuses in particular on two instances of opposition to the
project’s work which drew on faith-based communities of practice in different con-
texts. Brace demonstrates how the sometimes difficult negotiations that occur
across boundaries where communities of practice ‘have nudged up against and
overlapped other communities’ can provide opportunities for transformation.

Introduction

A
s Groundwater-Smith and Mockler (2005) argue, practitioner
research should be transformative in intent and action. Based
on a participatory action research (PAR) model, the No Out-
siders project aimed to effect political change. One of its two stated
objectives was ‘to create a community of practice within which teachers
can develop effective approaches to addressing sexualities equality
within the broader context of inclusive education’ (extract from the
funding bid). The project design included plans to create an alliance be-

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tween academics and teachers who, as a wider team working across

three regions in England, would form a single community of practice
(Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). With its agenda to effect change,
it was hoped that this community of practice would act as what Somekh
(2005) describes as a global action research community, which might
genuinely have the power to inform policy and practice within and
beyond the project schools.

This community of practice was explicitly conceptualised in terms of

the relationships among No Outsiders team members and particularly
the relationships between university and teacher researchers. While the
project’s stated aims were to effect change beyond the project, the ways
in which No Outsiders as a community of practice might relate poli-
tically to other communities of practice was not stated (see DePalma, in
press, however, for a post-hoc account). The nature and degree of these
changes has been largely unanticipated. Here I explore aspects of this
process.

I begin with the concept of a community of practice, particularly in rela-

tion to Wenger’s description of constellations of overlapping communi-
ties of practice (1998). The focus moves to the many ways in which No
Outsiders has fruitfully related to and worked with and alongside other
communities. Finally, I look at two examples of the tensions this pro-
cess can evoke. Such tensions have presented challenges, but they have
been productive too, compelling us to examine and re-examine our
aims with reference to our positionings within multiple communities.

What is a community of practice and what are

constellations?
The notion of ‘communities of practice’ has been taken up broadly
across the social, educational and management sciences (Barton and
Tusting, 2005) and was developed in particular by Jean Lave and
Etienne Wenger in their book Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral
participation (1991). Legitimate peripheral participation suggests that
knowledge is not simply transferred from what Lave and Wenger term
‘masters’ or ‘old-timers’ and assimilated by ‘newcomers’ or ‘appren-
tices’, but that learning represents a complex process involving indivi-
duals’ trajectories through communities of practice. While learning is
often imagined as separate from and even contrasting with practice,

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NO OUTSIDERS

Lave and Wenger’s sociocultural understanding of learning re-casts it as

a feature of all practice, which emerges as members negotiate their
engagement in a shared practice. Hildreth and Kimble describe com-
munities of practice as ‘vehicles’ for learning (2008:ix).

Wenger (1998) subsequently took these ideas forward, particularly the

concept of communities of practice, exploring the social relationships
associated with them (Hughes et al, 2007a). In his later work, Wenger
uses the concept more widely than in his work with Lave, including in
the ‘knowledge-intensive workplace’ (Hughes et al, 2007a:3). While his
later work has been seen as lacking ‘critical edge’ (Barton and Tusting,
2005:6), Wenger does move the work forward in crucial ways.

Wenger elaborates on how meaning is produced within communities of

practice, refering specifically to the roles of participation and reification
in this process. He uses the term ‘participation’ to relate to both action
and connection: for him, the term refers to ‘a process of taking part and
also to the relations with others that reflect that process’ (1998:55). The
meanings that are negotiated within a community of practice involve
both participation and what he calls ‘reification.’ Wenger states:
I refer to the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects
that congeal this experience into ‘thingness.’ In so doing we create points of
focus around which the negotiation of meaning becomes organised ... Writ-
ing down a law, creating a procedure, or producing a tool is a similar process.
(ibid:58)

However, such objects or tools can take on a life of their own. Using the
example of the workplace statement of values, this does not necessarily
mean that the values within it are reflected in practice: it can become,
or is in a sense already, divorced from its origins. Further, ‘reification as
a constituent of meaning is always incomplete, ongoing, potentially en-
riching, and potentially misleading’ (ibid:62). Wenger sees participation
and reification, then, as complementary processes through which
meaning is negotiated in any community of practice, ‘Negotiated
meaning is at once both historical and dynamic, contextual and
unique’ (ibid:54). What varies from community to community is, there-
fore, the degree to which one or the other process is dominant.

Secondly, as Lave and Wenger suggest, communities of practice overlap

with ‘other tangential and overlapping communities of practice’ (1991:

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98). As such, they ‘constitute a complex social landscape of shared prac-

tices, boundaries, peripheries, overlaps, connections, and encounters’
(Wenger, 1998:118), and it is this aspect of communities of practice that
I focus on here. Wenger introduces the term ‘constellations’ to refer to
these communities and to the ‘constellations of interconnected prac-
tices’ associated with them:
constellation refers to a grouping of stellar objects that are seen as a con-
figuration even though they may not be particularly close to one another, of
the same kind, or of the same size. A constellation is a particular way of see-
ing them as related, one that depends on the perspective one adopts.’ (ibid:
127)

Wenger gives a range of reasons for why communities might form a

constellation, including:
shared historical roots; having related enterprises; serving a cause or belong-
ing to an institution; facing similar conditions; having members in common;
sharing artifacts; having geographical relations of proximity or interaction;
having overlapping styles or discourses; competing for the same resources.
(ibid:127)

He usefully explores what happens at the boundaries and peripheries of

communities where they overlap with others and, in doing so, connect
with them. For Wenger boundaries represent closure and discontinuity;
peripheries imply openness and continuity. As he suggests, ‘joining a
community of practice involves entering not only its internal configura-
tion, but also its relations with the rest of the world’ (ibid:103). Wenger
uses the concept of ‘brokering’ to describe the way in which people take
elements from one community of practice into another. Where com-
munities connect, he uses the term ‘boundary objects’ to describe the
way in which the artefacts and concepts associated with one com-
munity of practice might cross from one to another, or link one with
another. Returning to the notion of reification, such objects and the way
in which they are understood can be reified by other individuals and
groups beyond the community of practice that gave birth to them.
Meaning can change in reification, as I go on to discuss.
There have been a number of valid criticisms of Lave and Wenger’s work
on communities of practice. Critics have identified a lack of clarity
about what falls inside and what falls outside communities of practice.

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NO OUTSIDERS

Some have commented on the ahistoricity of the model (Engeström,

2007; Jewson, 2007), its lack of attention to power (Barton and Hamil-
ton, 2005; Hughes et al, 2007a; Engeström, 2007; Jewson, 2007), the ten-
sions within communities of practice (Fuller, 2007; Jewson, 2007), the
influence of social divisions (Hughes et al, 2007b) and its inherently
non-transformative nature (Fuller, 2007; Jewson, 2007).
My analysis also focuses on this last criticism: that the community of
practice is by nature not transformative. This is important in light of our
own deliberately transformative aims. Commenting on Lave and
Wenger’s conceptualisation of learning in general, Jewson (2007) argues
that both Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) work lack focus
on innovation due to its emphasis on the replication of existing prac-
tice. In this way communities of practice might arguably be static
(Fuller, 2007): although there are newcomers to the practice, the prac-
tice itself does not change.
On the other hand, Schwier and Daniel argue that ‘communities are not
static; they shift, morph, and undulate, sometimes in unpredictable
ways’ (2008:356). Arguably, Lave and Wenger’s work, with its focus on
social processes, suggests this. They state that: ‘since activity and the
participation of individuals involved in it, their knowledge, and their
perspectives are mutually constitutive, change is a fundamental pro-
perty of communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991:117).
DePalma (in press) suggests that Wenger’s (1998) most widely read
work, which takes a group of people working in an insurance company
as its example of a community of practice, has reinforced the notion of
a group of people working towards replication rather than change.
However, DePalma argues that communities of practice just ‘are’ – they
are not inherently transformational, or indeed, reproductive but they
do have the potential to be so, depending on their context and nature.
She has illustrated how this has taken place in relation to No Outsiders,
expanding our understandings of how communities of practice might
operate. As she suggests, the project itself has been involved in the
transformation, rather than the reproduction, of teaching and research
practices. While the potential for transformation has usually been asso-
ciated with what happens within a community of practice, our own
aims have been to effect transformation beyond No Outsiders’ borders.
However, this process has not been unproblematic.

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Mapping out communities

The community of practice that is No Outsiders has developed into a
web of relationships that has become increasingly complex and exten-
sive. While connections with other groups was certainly anticipated
and planned, the various ways in which we, as a community of practice,
have nudged up against and overlapped other communities to form
various constellations has sometimes been unexpected. In addition,
relationships were often built through organic processes whereby
strategic connections were made across and between different indivi-
duals and groups as the potential or need for them arose.

While institutions or labelled groups do not in themselves represent

communities of practice, where aims and practices are shared by
people who operate within these institutions or groups, single or
multiple communities of practice can arguably exist within them. The
multiple groups and communities of practice we have had contact
with, and formed constellations with, both as individual researchers
and as a wider project, include:

■ Local authority representatives

A number of local authorities (LAs) have made efforts to adopt or
mirror project work in their local institutional contexts. Their ap-
proaches range from inviting No Outsiders project teachers to pre-
sent workshops at school or authority-level professional develop-
ment events to more elaborate mentoring schemes, such as
partnering LA schools with No Outsiders schools.

■ Academics
Groups of like-minded academics have supported us in disseminat-
ing our work via seminars, conferences, newsletters, collaborative
publications, etc. These include research groups situated within
academic institutions, such as the Centre for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe, based at the University of
Exeter, and the Centre for Equalities and Social Justice, based at the
University of Sunderland. They also include pan-institutional
special interest groups (SIGs), such as the Queer Studies SIG of the
American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Sexua-
lities SIG of the British Educational research Association (BERA).

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NO OUTSIDERS

■ Arts workers
We have worked with a number of arts workers and groups, many
of whom have done multiple projects with the same project schools
or worked across several project schools. Some have worked
nationally with project schools in different regions, including an
actor/writer/poet and a film company that has been documenting
the project’s activities.

■ Activist groups
Activist groups have been involved in the project, and some mem-
bers have acted in an advisory capacity. Throughout the project we
have continued to develop such contacts.

■ Teaching colleagues, school governors, parents, and children

As expected, contact with these groups has been considerable, due
to the nature of practitioner research: individual teacher re-
searchers in particular have acted as contact points or brokers in
relation to the project, with immediate colleagues and others, both
inside their schools and beyond.

It is particularly difficult to determine whether No Outsiders begins and

ends with the core group of university and teacher researchers or
whether it expands, as the boundaries blur, where arts workers,
activists, local authorities, teachers’ colleagues, parents and children
work with us as (sometimes unwitting) allies. This is particularly so
where people use the title No Outsiders in their schools to describe a
philosophy or as a title for their inclusion week, or a local authority runs
a No Outsiders day: both of which have happened during the course of
the project. It is also anticipated that when the project funding ends, the
work that has been done will continue. Teachers themselves will con-
tinue their work and may even continue to see themselves as a defined
group. Some local authorities are already looking at ways of replicating
the project in their schools. In this sense No Outsiders, while a bounded
28 month project, continues and expands, but not necessarily in a form
that its originators intended or had control over.

While communities of practice are most often conceptualised as

working inwards – individuals working at the periphery move towards
the centre of the community or towards mastery – our aims to trans-
form practice beyond our own community of practice into others can

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INTERROGATING HETERONORMATIVITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

more accurately be described as pushing awareness, understanding

and knowledge of sexualities equality outwards. There are many ways in
which, via the work of individuals as brokers, we have worked across
the borders between our own community of practice and others. For
example, one teacher researcher has developed teaching resources that
have been widely taken up by teachers outside the project. These
materials act as what Wenger (1998) calls boundary objects that span
the divide between communities. Similarly, another teacher researcher
has been asked to act as a case study for equalities workers and other
teachers to learn from, and many of the teacher researchers have been
invited to talk about their work in other practice settings.

It is important to keep in mind that the mere fact of having a No Out-

siders teacher based at a school does not imply that the entire school, or
even the head teacher, might be considered to belong to the No Out-
siders community of practice or even support it. Any given school will
support a complex array of interacting and sometimes conflicting com-
munities, requiring constant negotiation between No Outsiders and
schools where members are based. For example, one teacher researcher
in the project worked hard to reconcile her own strong belief in the pro-
ject’s aims with the less than enthusiastic response to the project from
her colleagues and also the head teacher. It was only when a project
head teacher from a different school visited to show a film of her
school’s inclusion week that these colleagues began to voice their sup-
port for addressing sexualities. Crucially, the head decided to include
project books into the literacy spine and the subject of sexualities ex-
plicitly within the school’s own inclusion week. Although in this
instance the head acted as an additional broker for the project by sup-
porting its work, this was at best a temporary role: as the teacher
researcher went on to say afterwards, the steps forward taken in her
school, and by her head, were sometimes followed by steps backward.
This is only one example of how particular teacher researchers, acting
as brokers between communities, sometimes sat uneasily with their
feet in two different camps with, at times, different aims and objectives.

More widely the project has had impact as an entity in itself. Returning
to Wenger’s concept of reification, the project title, which itself reifies a
statement by Desmond Tutu that there are ‘no outsiders’ regardless of
beliefs, colour, gender or sexuality, has been reified by people and

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NO OUTSIDERS

organisations beyond the project. For some it has come to represent

sexualities equality work in primary schools per se. There are a number
of local authorities keen to associate themselves with the project: it
seems that beyond simply drawing on the knowledge we have acquired,
such affiliation appears to act as a symbol of their own commitment to
sexualities equality. For example, Newcastle City Council’s 2008-9
Sexual Orientation Equality Plan11 includes a statement that it is seek-
ing affiliation with the project as part of a public statement detailing
how they are addressing sexualities equality. The issue with such reifica-
tion is the way in which the meanings associated with the object in
question – in this case the label or symbol No Outsiders – can change, as
DePalma (in press) has highlighted. I return to this issue later.

While it is true that we have influenced and supported others, it is also

important to acknowledge that others have influenced and supported
us. The connection we made with Gendered Intelligence, an organisa-
tion promoting the rights of transgender and gender variant youth,
affected our work particularly meaningfully. The relationship both chal-
lenged and changed our own understandings of what transgender
meant, and how that related to gender and sexuality and to notions of
fixed and fluid identities. The resulting increased awareness in our
negotiation of these already-contested borders has deepened our
understanding of the difficulties and complexities associated with this
work. The association has also had an impact on some project schools
which chose to take up specific work on gender identity. In a way which
was echoed in other collaborations, we came to see Jay Stewart, the co-
founder of Gendered Intelligence who worked closely with us and led
workshops in some project schools, as an essential member of the No
Outsiders team.

A powerful example of how the communities of others overlapped our

own to mutual benefit and in a way that blurs the boundaries between
them is illustrated by Roy, a member of a drama group that worked with
one of the project schools during their inclusion weeks both in the first
and second years of the project. Initially, Roy felt hesitant when he and
his group were asked to address sexualities as part of their work with us.
He reflected on his initial concerns in one of the project documentary
films:

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I came to the project a year ago ... and I thought, ‘I’m not touching this with
a barge pole!’ It’s – you know, it’s a, a no-go area, it’s going to cause all sorts
of problems, parents aren’t going to like it when you’re talking to children
about homosexuality, or transgender ... and I just thought, ‘No, I’m not going
to do that’. And [the teacher researcher] gave me some books, some chil-
dren’s books to read and we read the books and we thought, ‘I don’t really ...
it’s not what we’re going to do.’ And then, I’ve got a 10 year-old daughter, she
came home and she saw these books and she read a couple of the books
and she said to me, ‘We can’t have these in the house.’ I said, ‘Why can’t we
have these in the house?’ And she said, ‘Well, people might think we’re gay
or something.’ And I realised in that moment that at 10 years old, she was
already being bombarded with peer pressure; she’d already realised and
made her mind up that gay is bad and we can’t go there, and I thought, ‘Well,
if at this age they’re already saying that we can’t accept people for their life
choices, then we have to start educating them earlier.’ That was when I rea-
lised what [the teacher researcher] was trying to do and I thought, ‘Well, I
have to get involved.’

Roy’s statements that he ‘came to the project’ and ‘I have to get in-
volved’ suggest more than simply working with No Outsiders from the
outside: he saw himself as committed to our aims and practices. His use
of the shared repertoires and boundary objects associated with the pro-
ject, such as the project books, and the way in which he worked with
teacher researchers to deliver workshops that met the aims of the pro-
ject also point to this, albeit temporary, belonging. This attitude will
have certainly influenced other members of his drama group, reflected
both in his willingness to act as their representative on film and in his
own response to my request for permission to use his words here: in an
email he made it clear that he and his group were proud to be named in
relation to their No Outsiders-related work. Roy’s own community of
practice effectively overlapped our own, and blurred the boundaries
between the two.

Working with dissensus?

As DePalma (in press) suggests, Wenger’s (1998) description of the im-
port and export of practices fails to capture the way in which practice is
also exercised in peripheral spaces between us and others in a complex
process of developing shared understandings. Wenger himself suggests
that it is at the boundaries of communities of practice and in the

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NO OUTSIDERS

overlap with other communities of practice that meanings associated

with those communities can change. While this can be positive for the
communities that intersect, there is the potential for meanings to
change in less positive ways, and this can lead to either a breakdown in
negotiations and relations or to further focused negotiations involving
participants whose prior exclusion had supported a false sense of reso-
lution.

Further, while Wenger’s boundary objects can prove useful ways of ex-
porting ideas, utilising them in different practices can be risky. For
example, the term ‘sexualities’ is commonly employed in academic
circles to avoid essentialising identity categories such as ‘lesbian’ or
‘gay’. But this was not easily imported into primary education contexts.
The use of the term ‘sexualities’ was questioned by some primary prac-
titioners and social activists because of its implied reference to sex –
particularly problematic given the sexualisation of gay, lesbian and
bisexual people (Ellis and High, 2004; DePalma and Atkinson, 2006) and
the way in which children are constructed as innocent (Epstein and
Johnson, 1998), making discussion of sexual identities with young chil-
dren seem inappropriate. However, the use of ‘LGBT’ (as imported from
much current activist practice) was seen by some team members to be
less than inclusive – what about the straights, queers, questioning and
intersex...?

The term ‘homophobia’ was strategically imported from current govern-

ment (as well as some media) discourse reflecting recent attention to
homophobia and homophobic bullying as a way to render it recog-
nisable and legitimate for teachers. However, one teacher researcher
suggested that it might be problematic in that some of the families in her
school community would link this word to homosexuality and its pro-
motion, which, she felt, they would view negatively. This illustrates that
even within the same institution, importing terms or boundary objects
across professional and social communities can be tricky. The varied
understandings of these terms, based on pre-existing assumptions and
personal histories, meant that as boundary objects they might fail to
express the project’s aims or, worse, prejudice people against it.

While Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) refer to tensions that
might occur within communities of practice, little attention is given to

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how these operate in relation to other communities of practice or how

communities of practice operate in constellations. I explore two of the
ways in which our work has overlapped with particular faith communi-
ties and the tensions associated with this overlap.

The first relates to the concerns of a largely Somali Muslim community

had about the project and how our own community of practice nego-
tiated these concerns. For the sake of brevity, I describe the perspectives
of the various communities and organisations (No Outsiders, parents,
local council, etc.) in general terms, but there were complex dynamics
within and across the groups. Early in the project’s second year, families
with children in one of the schools that had recently joined expressed
concern about its No Outsiders work. They objected that there had been
a lack of consultation on the use of project materials, including the chil-
dren’s books provided by the project. The objections were based on
parents’ perceived rights and on the community’s religious faith: one
representative from the community – Farooq Siddique, community
development officer for Bristol Muslim Cultural Society, governor at the
school, and Bristol Evening Post columnist – told the BBC: ‘In Islam
homosexual relationships are not acceptable’ (Siddique, 2008).

While families and community representatives agreed that homo-

phobia should be tackled, they were unhappy with the project’s more
proactive approach where lesbian, gay and bisexual people, identities,
and relationships were being discussed. Siddique said that:
The agenda was to reduce homophobic bullying, and all the parents said
they were not against that side of it, but families were saying to us ‘Our child
is coming home and talking about same-sex relationships, when we haven’t
talked about heterosexual relationships with them yet ... it appears the
primary schools are operating under the premise that to challenge homo-
phobia it is necessary to explain what homophobia is. (ibid)

Siddique made further reference in the media to the concerns of

parents that children’s innocence was being threatened and the
parents’ prioritisation of academic subjects over ‘homosexuality’ (ibid).
These responses to the project’s work echo those we have encountered
during the project and elsewhere.
Feelings ran high after the radio broadcast. Some members of the com-
munity picketed the school and tried to send children home. The local

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NO OUTSIDERS

council became involved and sanctioned the removal of the project-

related books from the school, since these were at the centre of parents’
concerns and because the safety of staff and public would, they be-
lieved, be facilitated by the books’ withdrawal. Several community
meetings were held to try and work through the tensions, which were
still not fully resolved at the time of writing. However, negotiations have
not reached the point of breakdown and are being taken forward by,
among others, the local LGB activist/support group. Time will tell
whether negotiations will indeed break down now that No Outsiders is
no longer officially involved.
Significantly, a local council representative recently informed us that
any further sexualities work in schools would have to continue without
the label ‘No Outsiders’, as this, she argued, had become too inflam-
matory. As a term that has acquired particular connotations within a
particular history of border negotiation, it has been rejected as boun-
dary object as the borders between the No Outsiders community and
the local communities are closed down. Nevertheless, the local council
has made a strategic move in an attempt to facilitate negotiations
around the actual practices initiated by the No Outsiders community,
suggesting a possibility that a transformation of practice may continue
beyond the officially recognised intersection of communities.
The second example relates to the setting up of an equalities group in
one of the project schools, with an agenda to address multiple equa-
lities. It was partly funded by No Outsiders and members included
parents, governors and teachers, with a parent-governor as the Chair.
Tensions arose early – in the first meeting – when two of the parents ob-
jected to the inclusion of sexualities equality on the group’s agenda on
Christian grounds. As before, representation was raised as an issue:
[One of the two parents who opposed sexualities work] felt she hadn’t been
fully represented in the minutes of the previous meeting, and that some
people had treated her differently since that meeting. The second part I’m
sure is probably true? It’s hard for people to be as open and friendly when
they feel someone has fundamentally different ideas from their own.
(Teacher researcher journal)

While these parents, like the Somali Muslim parents, acknowledged

that homophobia should be tackled, they objected to the exploration of
sexualities equality with children of primary school age:

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It’s so frustrating to have lots of people full of energy and enthusiasm blocked
by two people ... They insist ... that they have nothing against homosexuals,
but don’t want their children to hear any mention of them when so young.
Substitute Black: ‘I have nothing against Black people, it’s just that I think chil-
dren need to be older before they hear about them...’ (Teacher researcher
journal)

The confusion of children in relation to having to navigate these dif-

ferent kinds of relationships was referred to, and the two parents used
their Christian beliefs to support their arguments. One of them implied
that she represented the wider Christian community in her view that
same-sex relationships were unacceptable. Yet many of others in the
group were Christians, and they questioned this parent’s claim to repre-
sent their religion. When the protesting parent tried to support her
arguments by reading passages of the Bible relating to same-sex
relationships, this was strongly objected to by the others. Except for the
two parents, all the members of the group – some gay, some straight,
some Christian, some not – argued strongly against the school exclud-
ing sexualities equality issues. Many were upset and angry that their
own or their friends’ sexual identities were seen as less valid than other
sexualities.

Clearly, what equalities actually meant was contested in this setting,

despite the supposedly cohesive joint enterprise of addressing multiple
equalities areas. And the No Outsiders community of practice, with its
own understandings of what equalities include, overlapped uncom-
fortably with the equalities group community of practice, whose
membership included individuals whose understanding of ‘legitimate’
equalities differed from ours and from that of other members of the
group.

While both sets of objectors referred to the notion of parental rights,

and to the way in which proactive sexualities equality work threatened
the innocence of children, religion appeared in both cases to be the
bedrock from which parents concerns arose. However, this supposedly
unifying factor perhaps obscured the way in which the Muslims and
Christians involved did not necessarily represent their wider communi-
ties, and the fact that these wider communities did not consist only of
people who shared the same opinions on how sexualities equality
should be addressed in schools. Such complexity and multiplicity of

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NO OUTSIDERS

opinion has not necessarily been represented in the media, which has
tended to identify two apparently opposing groups. Early press articles
suggested that Christian organisations opposed the No Outsiders pro-
ject, although at this point such opposition was not evident. Later,
when the Daily Mail misrepresented an academic conference planned
by No Outsiders group members, another newspaper cast the issue as a
conflict between religion and homophobia, announcing that: ‘An
academic conference organised by a group that works to combat
homophobic bullying in schools has been attacked by fundamentalist
Christians’ (Grew, 2008). While Christian parents strategically drew
upon a reified (if not universally recognised) notion of religious doc-
trine to support their rejection of sexualities as a legitimate equality
area, this reification was all too readily taken up by the media, who
seemed eager to portray pitched battles between clearly-defined and
essentially opposing communities.

Similarly, when Bristol City Council liaised with No Outsiders and the
Somali families, a commentator on a report in the Daily Mail appeared
to rejoice at the prospect of this (mythical) pitched battle, stating that:
‘The trendy do-gooders don’t know which way to turn! They love to ram
the gay movement down everyone’s throat, but don’t want to offend
Muslims’ (Clark, 2008).

The tendency to focus on these divisions has jeopardised the brokering

process between ourselves and others and has obscured the complex
picture of our relationships with people of faith and faith groups. We
have had both supporters of faith and non-religious opponents. One of
the project schools is run by a Muslim head teacher and we have had
the support of a Muslim academic during our negotiations with the
Somali parents, who spent time with us explaining how same-sex
relationships are viewed and understood by his faith. Nevertheless, the
fact that we have made relatively fewer connections with Muslims and
Muslim organisations may have made it easier for us to cast them as the
Other. It is crucial to see religious groups not as fixed and unified
entities, but as shifting and multiple practice communities working
within broader institutional contexts. These religious communities are
constantly negotiating their practice in terms of their institutional con-
text as well as in relation to the communities with which they overlap,
and No Outsiders is one of these. No Outsiders has been working at a

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variety of intersections with multiple, often changing, communities of

practice that may not always cohere.

While work at these intersections has been challenging, their effects

have often impelled us to change and grow as a community of practice.
The project has responded to the two examples described here – in the
main – agreeing to try and work with, rather than against, those who are
uncomfortable with our work. As a teacher researcher commented
early on about the reactions in the project web discussion forum: ‘I
think the ‘us’ and ‘them’ categorisation would be reductive’. Kate, the
teacher researcher working with the equalities group, said this on the
matter:
Perhaps we can find a way forward to work together, but it will need the two
opponents of same sex relationships to realise that we are trying to be inclu-
sive and supportive of all minority groups – and not trying to promote homo-
sexuality over all other lifestyles, and will require the rest of us to back down
from seeing them as the enemy. (Research journal)

Others have pointed to the complexity in people’s positionings, in terms

of both identity and beliefs:
The ... nuanced dynamic needs to sustain us and nurture us, so that it cannot
be simply depicted as warring factions. All ‘communities’ are intersected with
fault lines that zigzag down their length; and all our identities are intersected.
(University researcher, web posting)

This approach has worked with varying results. The two Christian
parents described above chose to resign from the multiple equalities
group and move their children into other schools. This represents a
closing down of communications and of the potential inherent in the
overlaps between our communities.

In the other school, negotiations continue. These may allow for a

moving forward in the Muslim parents’ understanding of our work and
in the project team’s understandings of the parents’ perspectives. How-
ever, No Outsiders will no longer be directly involved, and the project
name, which has acquired a reified meaning within the local com-
munity that we had not anticipated, will not be uttered. But teachers
who once straddled the boundaries between local practice and No Out-
siders practice remain, and their practice has been transformed by this
multi-membership in ways that imply new trajectories within their

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NO OUTSIDERS

local practice. Boundary objects such as materials may still find their
way into the schools, and our aims may still be reflected.

It is worth noting that negotiations of the kind that arose in the cases
described here and elsewhere in the project had not taken place before.
Here, two previously silent communities, the Somali Muslim com-
munity and the local LGB community, both of which represent wider
groups traditionally marginalised in the UK state education sector, are
now engaged in dialogue. The silence has been broken, with concerns
surfacing and being discussed openly and, hopefully, constructively.
The events will have compelled the local authority to think carefully
about how such work, increasingly required as part of wider policy, is
conducted in its schools. Thus the direct impact of No Outsiders
teachers’ work and its effect on the wider community may prove to be
enduring, perhaps the more because of the concerns it raised.

It is unlikely that the benefits that we, No Outsiders, have gained from
negotiations will be lost. Working with other communities, particularly
in moments of tension, has caused us to think and rethink not only how
we do sexualities work within the project but also the wider implica-
tions, both theoretical and in practice. This has been evident in our
web-based discussions, but it is also true that as individuals we will
surely carry with us the valuable insights into such border work that we
have gained from these difficult processes.

Conclusion
Our own experience demonstrates that communities of practice do
have the potential to be transformative. This has been seen in terms of
our influence on others, causing them to take on similar aims, to adopt
No Outsiders as a tag, or to rethink how to view sexualities and its
relationship with equalities. So we have achieved some of the political
change we sought. However, this work has also transformed us, both as
a team and as individuals. Our aims, knowledge and understanding
have all been challenged and moved on by our experiences in the pro-
ject.

Through this process it has become clear that where No Outsiders might
seem to be working in opposition to other communities within constel-
lations of practice, apparent conflicts may act to shift the status quo, for

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example by facilitating or even forcing dialogue with previously silent

groups. The neat picture of communities of practice as discrete groups
that sometimes overlap or compete is challenged. It has become clear
that constellations of such communities of practice operate in complex
ways. The boundaries between communities blur and overlap; we
intersect in many ways and on many levels. We are individuals who are
also members of multiple groups; communities of practice are not
homogenous but are locked in a process of change. Development and
intersections between these multiple communities are not fixed – they
shift according to context.

Another important aspect of the work has been the way in which the
use of boundary objects, as well as the processes of reification, some-
times compels us to let go of the work that we have started or the mean-
ings associated with it. The meanings we have given to our work have
the potential to break down when they reach our borders. Although we
can work towards managing that process, we have had to accept that we
cannot control it. This is particularly salient as we near the (official) end
of the project.

Note
11 http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/wwwfileroot/cxo/equality/SOEPlan.pdf (p6-7).

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors for their help and support during the develop-
ment of this chapter, and Renée DePalma in particular for her input on the
nature of communities of practice.

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Notes on contributors

Alexandra Allan is a Lecturer in Education Studies in the School of Education and

Lifelong Learning at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include
gender, sexuality, childhood, social class, private education and single-sex school-
ing. Her publications include: ‘The importance of being a lady: hyper-femininity and
heterosexuality in the private, single-sex primary school’ (Gender and Education,
2009) and ‘Bright and Beautiful: high achieving girls, ambivalent femininities and
the feminization of success in the primary school’ (with Emma Renold, Discourse,
2006). Her current empirical research focuses on young middle-class girls’ ex-
periences of the private education system and their perceptions of risk.

Elizabeth Atkinson was a Reader in Social and Educational Inquiry and Co-
Director of the Centre for Equalities and Social Justice (CESOJ) at the University
of Sunderland. She has published widely on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-
gender identities and equalities in primary school settings and in 2007 was
awarded the Queer Studies Scholar Activist award by the Queer Studies Special
Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. Elizabeth is the
Director of the ESRC-funded No Outsiders project, which is the focus of this book.

Elizabeth Brace was the North East university-based research assistant on the
No Outsiders project. She recently completed her PhD at Newcastle University in
the UK. Based primarily on interviews with women labeled as having a learning
disability living in the north east of England, her PhD research focused on the ways
in which the social norms associated with the intersection of gender, sexuality and
‘learning disability’ impact on people’s lives. Prior to this Elizabeth worked in the
social services and voluntary sector. Her professional and research interests
centre on equalities issues in relation to gender, sexuality and disability.

Fin Cullen works as a lecturer in Youth Work studies at Brunel University. From
2007- 2009 she was involved in the No Outsiders project as a Research Officer
based at the Institute of Education, London. Her academic work has centred on
children and young people’s cultures and issues of gender and sexuality. Since the

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early nineties, she has worked as a youth worker, and continues to manage and
develop UK-based youth projects.

Renée DePalma received her PhD in 2003 from the University of Delaware (US),
where she helped establish the university-community partnership La Red Mágica
with the Latin American Community Center in Wilmington, Delaware. She worked
from 2004-2009 at the University of Sunderland (UK) in sexualities equality
research and was Senior Researcher for the No Outsiders project. Her research
and teaching has focused on social justice and equity in terms of ethnicity, lan-
guage, race, gender and sexuality. She is currently book reviews editor for the
journal Power and Education and holds a research fellowship at the University of
Vigo, Spain.

Judy Hemingway is a lecturer in the Department of Geography, Enterprise,

Mathematics and Science at the Institute of Education, University of London. She
is a geography educator whose research interests are concerned with space,
place and learning. Judy’s cross-disciplinary work, which interrogates the inter-
faces between school and academic geography, makes special reference to
developments in social and cultural geography and critical pedagogy. While her
recent cross-disciplinary research has focused on the spatial politics of sex and
relationships education, Judy’s broader interest is in the lifeworlds of young people.

Andrew Moffat has taught in primary education since 1995 as a class teacher, a
teacher in a behaviour unit, in a Nurture group and a as deputy head. In 2003 he
received a Masters in Teaching children with Educational and Behavioural Difficul-
ties and he became an AST in behaviour management and inclusion the following
year. Andrew has written an emotional literacy scheme of work for the primary
school and has been commissioned to write similar schemes of work to promote
healthy relationships, pupil voice and challenging racism. In 2007 he wrote the re-
source ‘Challenging homophobia in early years’ for his TLA stage 4 assignment,
which was accredited by the GTC in 2009. By March 2009 schools in 24 different
Local Authorities were using this resource.

David Nixon was awarded a PhD in theology from the University of Exeter (UK)
in 2002, and is currently working as an Anglican parish priest in Plymouth. He has
worked in Exeter as a University Teaching Fellow, focusing on issues of gender,
power and sexuality, and was Associate Research Fellow covering SW England
for the No Outsiders project. He has both an academic interest and practical
engagement in issues of marginalization, stemming from his work with homeless
people (the subject of his doctorate). He is presently exploring the stories of sexual
minorities in education and the church and continues to research and write in
these fields.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Talburt is associate professor and director of the Women’s Studies

Institute at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She has published in the fields of
curriculum studies, qualitative research, higher education, and gay and lesbian
studies. Her books include Subject to Identity: Knowledge, sexuality, and
academic practices in higher education (2000), the co-edited Thinking Queer:
Sexuality, culture, and education (2000), and the co-edited Youth and Sexualities:
Pleasure, subversion, and insubordination in and out of schools (2004).

Laura Teague has worked in primary education for the past four years and is
currently a classroom teacher in a North London school. In her role as equality and
diversity coordinator, she has written policies, supported staff and worked with
parents to promote issues around race, disability, gender and sexualities equality.
She participated in the No Outsiders project from 2006-2009 where she contri-
buted to research papers and took a leading role in implementing the project in
school.

Deborah Youdell is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University

of London. Her work is located in the Sociology of Education and is concerned with
educational inequalities in relation to race, gender, sexuality, religion, social class,
ability and disability and the way these are connected to student subjectivities and
everyday life in schools. Deborah is co-author of the award-winning Rationing Edu-
cation: policy, practice, reform and equity and author of Impossible Bodies, Impos-
sible Selves: exclusions and student subjectivities. Her latest book, Becoming
Radical, will be published later this year. She is Regional Editor of the International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and is on the Editorial Boards of the
British Journal of Sociology of Education, Race Ethnicity Education, and Critical
Studies in Education.

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Acknowledgements

Chapter 5 originally appeared under the same title in Sex Education, 8(3) p315-
328 (2008) and is reprinted here with permission. An earlier version was pre-
sented at the Place-Based Sex/Sexualities and Relationship Education Con-
ference, University of London Institute of Education 23 May 2007.

Chapter 8 appeared under the same title in Educational Action Research 16(4)
p441-456 (2008) and is reprinted here with permission.

Earlier versions of Chapters 3 and 8 were presented at the annual meeting of the
British Educational Research Association, University of London Institute of
Education, 5-8 September 2007, Chapter 3 as Queer classrooms? The possibi-
lities for post-structural pedagogies in primary schools and Chapter 8 as A demo-
cratic community of practice: unpicking all those words.

Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 9 were presented at the annual meeting of the
British Educational Research Association, Heriot-Watt University, 3-6 Sep-
tember 2008, Chapter 2 as Seeking a queer pedagogic praxis: Adventures in the
primary classroom and Chapter 9 as No Outsiders: a complex and ever-ex-
panding community of practice.

Earlier versions of Chapters 6 and 7 were presented at the Queering the Body;
Queering Primary Education seminar, University of Exeter, 16 September 2008,
Chapter 6 as Queering the body; queering primary education: new imaginaries
and new realities; and Chapter 7 as Bodies and minds: strategic essentialism and
political activism in sexualities equality work in the primary school.

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Index

action research viii, 4, 17- critical pedagogy x, 17, essentialise/essentialism/

20, 22, 24, 52, 111, 23 -24, 152 essentialist 2, 4-7, 9-
113-116, 119, 127, 11, 18, 24, 58-61, 64,
130, 133-134 democracy/democratic x, 95-97, 102, 109, 129,
activist/activism x, 3, 5, 7- 20, 111, 113, 117, 143
8, 16-18, 25-28, 40, 123-125, 128-131,
48-49, 95, 97, 104, 154 family/families ix, 2, 9-10,
139, 143, 145 desire 18, 37-38, 44, 57, 21, 33, 42-44, 46, 52-
61, 65, 87-89, 92-93, 55, 57-58, 60, 62, 64,
border x, 15, 38, 72-73, 97, 99, 101, 106 73, 80, 82, 86, 101-
82, 137, 140-141, dialogue/dialogic xi, 4, 102, 104, 143-144,
145, 149, 150 19-21, 24, 29-32, 94- 147
boundary/boundaries 25, 95, 98, 112, 119, 124, feminine/feminised 46,
31, 52, 68, 79-83, 91, 130-131, 149-150 70, 103
96, 103, 115, 133, disrupt/disruption 4, 8, 10, feminism/feminist 8, 17-
136, 139-143, 145, 46, 53-54, 58, 61, 65, 20, 22-24, 27-28, 30,
148-150 95, 96, 100, 102-104, 59, 96
bully/bullying 2-3, 21, 32, 109, 128, 131 Foucault/Foucauldian 36-
52, 60, 64, 76, 86, dissensus 4, 17, 21, 24, 37, 39, 40-41, 47, 49,
143-144, 147 38, 111, 114, 142 53, 71, 88-89, 92,
diversity viii, ix, 19, 21, 124-125, 131
civil partnership/Civil 23, 28, 30, 32, 42, 45, futurity x, 89, 91-92
Partnership Act 7, 8, 48, 55-57, 64, 112,
11, 83, 99-100 115 gender
coming out (as LGBT) 5, bias/stereotypes 4, 6,
7, 26-27, 56, 61, 78- emancipation/ 16, 73
80, 98-99, 102, 126 emancipatory x, 1-2, binary/categories ix, 1,
community of practice viii, 19, 72 3, 4, 15, 18, 22, 24-
x, 4, 111, 113-114, embody/embodied 10, 25, 30-31, 92, 108,
116, 120, 122, 131, 91, 119 (in)equality ix, 18, 19,
133-140, 142-144, 25, 27
146, 148-150

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expression/ leaking 67, 80, 82, 83 post-structuralism 17, 19-

behaviours/identity/ legibility 23-25, 28, 32-33, 20, 22-25, 28, 30, 32,
(non)conformity/ 95, 97, 109 36-37, 39, 45, 47-49,
normativity/role viii, ix, liberal pluralism 107, 104 54, 58-59, 96
1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 17-20, praxis x, 4, 17-19, 20-22,
23, 25, 28, 31, 52-53, marriage 7-8, 44, 54, 70- 24, 32, 35, 36, 39, 96-
61, 63, 86, 88, 96, 71, 83, 100 97, 116
103-104, 107 masculinity 11, 69, 103 prejudice 58, 60, 73-74,
queer/gender variant media x, 2, 12, 42-45, 52- 143
see trans 53, 58, 62-63, 74, 78, press see media
Gendered Intelligence xi, 96, 101, 104, 121,
107, 141 143-144, 147 queer theory ix, x, 1, 6,
14, 17-18, 21-22, 24,
hegemony 48, 52, 53, 57 normalisation vii, viii, 6, 8, 28-32, 37, 54, 89, 97-
heteronormal/ 10, 14-15, 56-59, 61, 98
heteronormativity vii, 87, 92, 100, 109
viii, 1-3, 8, 10, 15-16, recuperation 11-14, 30,
18, 21, 23, 28, 32, 35, parents viii, ix, 3, 7, 10, 32, 38, 46, 65, 95,
43, 52, 53, 57, 69, 71, 21, 26, 29, 42, 43, 45, 102, 105
90, 92, 95-96, 100, 55, 57, 60, 74, 76, 77- reification 10, 58, 115,
106, 108-9 80, 105, 109, 118, 135, 136, 140-141,
heterosexism 7, 8, 16, 18, 121, 139, 142, 144- 147-148, 150
21, 24 148 reinscribing 9, 11-13, 32,
heterosexual Participatory Action 37, 48, 59, 88
matrix/heterosexual Research (PAR) see religion 43-44, 60-61,
hegemony 28, 30, 37, action research 121, 144, 146-147
53, 57, 87-88, 98, performativity 8, 23, 37- rights (LGBT) x, 18, 21,
105, 107 38, 43-44, 47-48, 59, 24, 26, 28, 32, 40, 44,
homophobia ix, 1-3, 14, 61, 65, 95, 101 51, 62, 83, 96, 104,
18, 21, 24, 26-27, 29, pleasure 37, 44-46, 61- 141
35, 52, 60, 64, 68, 74, 62, 85, 87-89, 91-94 role model ix, 2, 4, 10,
76, 78, 82, 143-145, 147 police/policing 1, 46, 62, 11, 19, 78, 100, 103
68, 83, 104
identity vii, ix-x, 1-2, 5-6, policy 2-3, 17, 21, 23, 28, safety x, 1, 9-10, 14, 51-
10-11, 19, 22-23, 28- 32, 47-48, 96, 97, 55, 64, 67, 73-74, 76,
29, 31, 36, 42, 47-49, 118, 122, 134, 149 78-79, 81, 83, 86, 95-
54, 58-59, 61, 70, 76, political/politics x, 1-2, 6- 98, 101-104, 109,
86, 90-93, 96-97, 101, 7, 9, 14, 17-18, 20, 127, 130-131, 145
106-110, 126, 129, 23, 25, 26-29, 35-40, Section 28 9, 26-27, 33,
131, 141, 143, 148 43-49, 60, 62, 69, 72, 54, 62, 75
innocence 44-45, 56, 64, 89-94, 97-98, 104, sexism 1, 2, 16
67, 75, 77, 81, 87-88, 121, 133-134, 149 sexual identity 5, 42, 54,
93, 97, 102, 105, 143- 101, 109, 126, 131,
144, 146

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INDEX

sexualisation 18, 25, 35- tactics 14, 23, 32, 36-38, uncertainty 97, 131
37, 42, 45, 54, 61, 69, 40-41, 43, 45, 47-48, unspeakable x, 67, 97
71, 76, 81, 83, 87, 143 56, 92
sexualities equality viii, ix, temporality 31, 76, 87-88, victim/victimisation 2, 5
2, 25, 29, 35, 51, 60, 93
63-64, 83, 98, 112, tension viii, x, 1-2, 4, 9,
126, 133, 140, 146 17, 22, 27-29, 45-46,
silence ix, 3-4, 8, 22, 36, 51, 57, 59, 60, 62, 85,
41, 45, 56, 65, 67, 77, 87, 103, 109, 155,
88, 99, 130, 149-150 122-123, 129, 133-
social action/social 134, 137, 143-145,
change/social 149
movement/social tolerance 2-4, 10, 48, 97
(in)justice 20, 26-27, transformation/
29, 35-36, 48-49, 51, transformative x, 12-
59, 72, 85, 92, 109, 13, 27, 76, 80, 88, 93,
116, 138, 143, 96-97, 116, 131, 133,
staff/staffroom ix, 9, 27, 137, 139, 145, 148-
30-31, 54, 60, 67-68, 149
72-76, 80-83, 98, 103, trans/transgender ix, 2, 4,
145 15, 21, 40, 49, 57, 64,
stereotype 2-4, 55, 73, 67-68, 86, 88, 107,
88, 103 109, 141-142
subjectivity 24-25, 35, 37- transgression/
38, 41, 44, 47, 49, 91, transgressive 5, 82-
93 83, 129,
transphobia 1-2, 4
truth 39-40-41, 46, 99,
112, 124, 130

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