Rejecting Queer Erasure: Moving Towards Queer Visibility in ELA by Michelle M. Falter

The Sunday Post on Ethical ELA is a year-long series featuring weekly contributions written by English language arts educator-scholars from across the country. Explore past posts here, and explore another Ethical ELA contribution from Michelle, Chandra L. Alston, & Crystal Chen Lee Becoming Anti-Racist English Teachers: Ways to Actively Move Forward. Welcome, Dr. Falter, to today’s Sunday Post!

Rejecting Queer Erasure: Moving Towards Queer Visibility in ELA

Given that June is PRIDE month, I wanted to use this platform of Ethical ELA to talk about inclusivity of LGBTQ books, authors, and topics. Full transparency: I am not a member of the LGBTQ community. I am your average white, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual woman. However, over the years as a teacher and teacher educator, I have been greatly affected by the many LGBTQ students I have taught and probably many more that never shared that part of themselves with me. Their stories of resilience and perseverance despite negativity, harassment, bullying, silencing, and more, have made me a better teacher, a better listener, and a better human. As a high school teacher in a conservative predominantly white public school in WI, I often was worried, like I am sure many of you are, that parents or, quite frankly, my own colleagues might not be okay with me discussing sexuality in any way in my English language arts classroom. Fear can and often does paralyze us as teachers from doing what is right. Doing what is right is hard and it takes guts. As I work with preservice and inservice teachers now, I try to help them find those guts — those places, texts, conversations, and pedagogies— that allow for the visibility and validation of queer voices and representation in our ELA classrooms rather than erasing or silencing their identities and stories. 

At the start of my teaching career, I definitely contributed to queer erasure. Queer erasure takes a lot of different forms in schools such as: not recognizing students’ pronouns; only putting heterosexual and gender-conforming posters around our classrooms or books in our curriculum; negating gender neutral bathrooms; only using language such as mom and dad or boyfriend/girlfriend; policing non-conforming dress codes, etc. Queer erasure can be any act that downplays, silences, or eliminates students’ identities that do not center heteronormative and cisnormative expectations about sexuality and gender. One of the simplest ways that teachers (and I) have contributed to queer erasure is my total disregard of sexuality in my discussions about even canonical texts. Take a look at this image below. How many of us have taught texts by these authors and talked about where these individuals grew up, or how race contributed to their views of the world, but didn’t once mention the fact that these authors were part of the LGBT community and how that may impact the stories and poems they wrote?

I often think about how I used to teach Langston Hughes as a part of a Harlem Renaissance poetry unit, but never discussed how he was a gay man. In his time, being gay was not something you shared openly; in fact, he hid his homosexuality from all but a few of his close friends. Knowing this information, how might that change our reading of a poem like a “Dream Deferred”? If students and teachers only consider things such as race or social class but negate or erase this other aspect of Langston Hughes’ identity, we paint a very incomplete picture of what he was thinking about and writing about. 

The same can be argued about Emily Dickinson’s works. Most students and teachers fall in love with her poetry because of the simplicity of her messages and careful selection of words. However, if we make visible information about Emily’s relationship with a woman named Susan, amongst others, it does change and complicate how we read lines like “her breast is fit for pearls” in her love poems. In many of the poems, it is also impossible to determine the genders and sexual identities of Dickinson’s speakers and addressees. Similarly, Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” takes on a completely new meaning when you make visible to students that he had a relationship with a confederate soldier named Peter Doyle. How can one not analyze these lines differently if we are made aware of this information?: 

Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

People throughout history, including teachers, quite often rewrite, reinterpret, or erase these queer elements saying that these relationships were merely platonic, or a “very close friendship.” But, when LGBTQ voices are not visibly and candidly vocalized in schools, this “hidden curriculum” of silence and erasure tells our LGBTQ students (and heterosexual students alike) that queer lives don’t matter and aren’t worthy of inclusion or respect.  What we as teachers choose to teach and discuss is just as value-laden as those things swept under the rug. McLean (1997) argued that “ignoring or denial of a group’s existence in literature invalidates the experience and self-identity of members of that group by rendering them invisible, not only to themselves, but to all other groups in society” (p. 182). And Mayo (2009) reminds us that this silencing and erasure is not protection against potential backlash but instead “indicates to all students that there are some people in the school who do not deserve to be spoken about” (p. 267) or cared for. And that matters. 

GLSEN’s (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) bi-annual national school climate survey tells us that LGBTQ students still frequently hear homophobic remarks and negative comments about gender expression, hear homophobic remarks from school staff and teachers, feel unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, have been verbally harassed at school, have been physically harassed, and have been physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation or gender expression (Kosciw et al, 2019). These acts have a chilling effect on LGBTQ students’ attendance, which in turn affects their grades and ultimately graduation rates. If we truly care to educate all students and make sure they are successful, teachers need to proactively address this problem head on. We cannot remain impartial, silent, or worse yet, a contributor to LGBTQ students’ lack of self-worth or difficulty succeeding in schools. And the thing is, we can never fully know if a student is queer or gender fluid unless they choose to reveal that to us. As many students that you have that are openly queer in your classes, there are equally as many or more who do not feel safe to do so. By ignoring LGBTQ topics, discussions, or people, you may unintentionally be creating unsafe environments for those students.

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So what is the solution, then? A first step is to stop ignoring authors’ sexual and gender identities. Just like any other identity marker, we can use these as points for rich discussion in relation to the texts they write. Secondly, let your LGBTQ students know you care about their lives by displaying or incorporating images and photos that are not hetero or cisnormative. Even if you add one poster to your classroom, that is a start. Many teachers also now have classroom libraries. In your stacks of books, how many of the texts include diversity of sexual identities? Just the act of having those books in your classroom sends a powerful message to LGBTQ and heterosexual students. You can also educate yourself on LGBTQ history so you can reference this information, and learn how other English educators in different locations have successfully included LGBTQ literature into classrooms too. I personally recommend Michael Bronski’s (2019) A Queer History of the United States and Drs. Paula Greathouse, Brooke Eisenbach, and Joan Kaywell’s (2018) edited book, Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum, and the resources put out by the organization, History UnErased. These acts embody what my preservice teachers called “compactivism” (Erichiello, 2019) – small, simple, compassionate, acts that anyone can do for LGBTQ students that don’t raise a lot of eyebrows. 

For those that are ready to embrace the challenge of visible representation in your ELA classroom, one can start incorporating LGBTQ stories and texts in your curriculum. There are many resource lists available to help narrow in on the best texts to add to your literature circle choices or whole class novel reads. Some places to find great LGBTQ books are The Rainbow Library, Lambda Literary Awards lists, Stonewall Book Awards lists, the Rainbow Collection, the Trans Educators Network, and Hope in a Box, which provides public school educators with curated sets of LGBTQ-inclusive literature, distinctive curriculum for these books, and community and training on how to build an LGBTQ-inclusive classroom. Additionally, Gray (2021) offers some short texts that work well as a starting point if you don’t want to dive into a full novel. He offers three suggestions, all of which come from the website Gay Flash Fiction. They are:

1. Santino Prinzi’s (2017) story “Toys” about a trans child who wants to play with what are considered gender-inappropriate toys by some adults. Narrated in the voice of the child, the story could be used to practise the past simple while raising the issue of how transgender children are sometimes made to feel abnormal. 
2. Andres Fragoso’s (2017) story “My Father Cringes When He Sees Kyle Hold My Hand” is about a father’s acceptance of his gay son. The story, which revolves around school swimming competitions, could be used to practise sports-related lexis, as well as providing an opportunity to discuss the difficulty of coming out to a parent.
3. Vikram Kolmannskog’s (2018) prose poem “Orlando, Mi Amor”, written in response to the Orlando nightclub shooting, could be used to discuss language around love and relationships, while raising the issues of homophobia and racism (p. 144) 

Another way to make gender and sexuality more visible in the ELA classroom is to take up an intentional critical and/or queer lens to whatever you are reading. We can help position our students to read texts in a way that does not privilege heteronormative or cisnormative views, but instead asks us to queer, i.e. make strange or disrupt, what is seen as normal. Critical queer readings force us to no longer take for granted that the world should be seen through a heterosexual and cisgender lens. Doing a queer reading asks students to excavate and interpret the ways texts are already always sexed and the ways in which they are explicitly heterosexed. For example, take any of these commonly taught texts below. A critical queer reading of The Color Purple, for example, means investigating the implications of the characters’ relationships and sexualities, particularly as they intersect with gender, race, and class, and as they relate to power in the novel, rather than glossing over the relationship between Celie and Shug. A queer reading of The Merchant of Venice may provide us with a new way of understanding Shylock’s cruelty: his anxieties about having been “cuckolded,” or a new way of interpreting non-heteronormative moments in the play, like whether Antonio is in fact gay. Furthermore, through a crtical queer reading, The Hunger Games could be re-interpreted as a site of defiance, a challenge to the tradition of normative thinking, and a departure from society’s flawed construction of reality. Even the Capital itself could be interpreted as an emblem of queerness – the citizens of the capital disrupt notions of gender expression through their elaborate costumes, makeup, and hair. 

Taking a critical literacy lens on literature allows us to ask different types of questions about the texts we read in our ELA classrooms. Lewison et al. (2002) offer five questions that we can use to critically examine texts. They include:

• Whose voices are heard and whose are silenced?
• Who is privileged and who is marginalized in the text?
• What does the author want us to think?
• How does the author use specific language to promote their beliefs?
• What action might you take based on what you have learned from the text? 

Using these questions, one can begin to unpack and critique issues of gender and sexuality in ANY text. Furthermore, we can ask our students to imagine the stories if key aspects of gender and sexuality were changed and how, and in what ways, that might impact the story. Teachers can prompt students to “re-story” and “bend” the text, as Thomas & Stornaiolo (2016) propose, by rewriting key scenes changing elements of gender and sexuality and then analyzing how that change might affect the story as a whole. Thomas & Stornaiolo write that “storying is always connected to power–who can tell stories, how many, when, and under what circumstances,” so by bending who tells the narratives and giving students the power, classrooms can “better reflect a diversity of perspectives and experiences” (p. 314). 

All of these strategies provide ways that ELA teachers can make LGBTQ students, people, and stories visible. When I began as a teacher in a very conservative public school I was paralyzed by fears of worst case scenarios and what-ifs. As I grew as a teacher, I learned that what was worse than those fears was the erasure of my LGBTQ students’ right to be fully human and seen. Queer erasure is doubly unjust – it denied my LGBTQ students recognition in the curriculum, but it also denied my non-LGBTQ students the opportunity to expand their thinking and see the world through a different perspective. Once I realized that, I never turned back. And to be honest, I have never had a problem with parents or administrators. As I truly believe: where there is a will, there is a way. I hope that you find your way, too. Your students are counting on you.

References

Bronski, M. (2019). A queer history of the United States for young people. Beacon Press.

Errichiello, C. (2019). Compactivism: Standing up for LGBTQ+ students. English Journal, 109(2), 99-101.

Gray, J. (2021). Addressing LGBTQ erasure through literature in the ELT classroom. ELT Journal, 75(2), 142-151.

Greathouse, P., Eisenbach, B., & Kaywell, J. F. (Eds.) (2018). Queer adolescent literature as a complement to the English language arts curriculum. Rowman & Littlefield.

Kosciw, J. G., Clark, C. M., Truong, N. L., & Zongrone, A. D. (2020). The 2019 National School Climate Survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth in our nation’s schools. New York: GLSEN.

Lewison, M., Flint, A. S., & Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on critical literacy: The journey of newcomers and novices. Language Arts, 79(5), 382-392.

Mayo, C. (2009). The tolerance that dare not speak its name. In A. Darder & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (2nd ed., pp. 262-273). Routledge.

McLean, M. M. (1997). Out of the closet and onto the bookshelves: Images of gays and lesbians in young adult literature. In T. Rogers & A. Soter (Eds.), Reading across cultures: Teaching literature in a diverse society (pp. 178-198). Teachers College Press.

Thomas, E. E., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2016). Restorying the self: Bending toward textual justice. Harvard Educational Review, 86(3), 313-338.