Queering Citizenship by Macintosh and Loutzenheiser - May 28, 2015

Queering Citizenship

by Lori B. Macintosh and Lisa W. Loutzenheiser

In Queering Citizenship, Macintosh and Loutzenheiser (2006) propose to “read citizenship through sexuality and schooling as one avenue to explore the way educators can begin to facilitate a dialogue where sexually marginalized youth feel recognized and included” (p.95). The authors argue that queer theories may offer educators a way to challenge heteronormativity in schools. Macintosh and Loutzenheiser feel there is a need to encourage educators to acknowledge schools as part of a heterocentric ideology.

The chapter is divided into four main segments;

a)     Queered theory, student bodies and school spaces: queer theory uses as its premise, the idea that identities are not fixed and do not determine who we are. When this theory is used critically and as a tool, it offers alternative ways for us to view the complications of identity formation.

In schools, queer theory continuously interrogates heteronormativity since young generations do not benefit from one-dimensional categorizations. Students need to have spaces where they feel represented, or they belong to, and where their concerns are addressed within the official curriculum.

b)     Heteronormativity in the Classroom: when queer children enter the classroom they do not necessarily identify with the school setting. Many students feel their private life is somehow made public, since “the structuring of one’s social and political life is contingent upon heterosexual modes of address” (page 98). Whether or not a student chooses to self-identify as queer, his or her identity does not adhere to the established social norms.

c)     Complicating Discourses: in this section the authors draw attention to the criticism queer theory has received. They also use Johnson’s (2001) argument, that “by neglecting the interrelationships between race, sexuality and class, queer theory has somehow failed to live up to its full potential.”

Queer theory recognizes that gender, sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity are interconnected and do interact, which produces a wide array of mutable identities that resist rigid definitions. The authors also indicate the attention these intersected issues need.

d)    Entering a Queer Citizenry: Macintosh and Loutzenheiser claim that there is a lot to gain from analyzing and incorporating a queer and anti-oppressive theory. Gay and lesbian issues should not be treated in isolation and need to take part of the education given in schools.

Macintosh and Loutzenheiser conclude their chapter by arguing that a review of the current school space is needed. The authors address the need for a safe space, inclusive for all students, where heteronormativity can be challenged and queer subjectivities can be addressed.    

An action like challenging heteronormativity in schools is not an easy task, but a simple approach can go a long way. Macintosh and Loutzenheiser presented us with good arguments about heteronormativity in school settings and how there is a need to address it. One important aim we should all have as teachers is to challenge not only norms of race and sexuality, but also those of gender, class, nationality, and religion. By not addressing these issues, many students will continue to feel marginalized and excluded. Though I agree with most of their suggestions, I found the article did not present insightful methods as to what we could do as teachers when addressing these issues.

My question for this analysis would be: what methods could we implement in educational organizations when dealing with heteronormative codes? How can we better address gender issues in schools?  

A Note on Stockden - Pluralism, Corporatism, Educating Citizens

The main point of the article is to explain the threat that corporatism poses in its emphasis on providing students with employable skills for the job market – at the exclusion of what ought to be a primary responsibility for the democratic state, the provision of citizenship education. A limited view of democracy now prevails, one that is primarily about the pursuit of individual interests with other like-minded people, the author argues.  What is needed in response is a renewed emphasis on liberal education as a preparation for citizenship. If youth are not prepared through their education to value and participate in democracy in a broader sense, the democratic state will suffer a crisis of legitimacy and continue to weaken.

For supporting details, Stockden notes that business interests and special interests have at various times pushed to make education primarily about producing workers with the skills needed for the economy. There have been periods of stronger and weaker business influence on education. A 25 year period from 1905 marked a high point for business influence on schools in the U.S. (In Canada this period also saw a lot of interest and activism around vocational education). Ultimately, the progressive forces prevailed, and by the 1930s, citizenship education in the U.S. was on more solid footing. But Stockden says the forces of corporatism have recently become much stronger. Neoliberalism and managerialism have made their way into education, putting outcomes-based learning centre-stage, eroding the flexibility of teachers to teach reflective citizenship and encouraging society to view curriculum as akin to “delivery of a business service”(81). Students use education to pursue their economic self-interest; what more could be expected of education? – so argues the neoliberal view. Stockden provides a provocative discussion of inequalities and meritocracy. Drawing from Guttman, he argues that the “logic” of the current system would appear to suggest that only members of the meritocracy will be prepared to receive an education for citizenship, with the rest “encouraged to be passive in political affairs (87). All of this brings to mind the classic study which compared citizenship learning in an elite school and an urban school in New Jersey, which was alluded to in class a few weeks ago.

The strength of the article is in providing a good historical overview of writers who have tackled the tensions in citizenship: Saul, Dahl, Held, Barber, White, Taylor, Lasch, Guttman and many others.  The author shows in important ways that tolerance for groups that are different from one’s own is not sufficient as a core concept in citizenship education, because of the obvious power imbalance that exists among the groups. Equality and justice have to be seen as core objectives in teaching citizenship, Stockden writes.

The author also gives a useful explanation of the tension between the need to give students an apprenticeship in learning how to be free, while at the same time giving them a base of understanding to be “good citizens.” The effort is unavoidably programmatic; it is not a free-for-all where we can invite students to discover and stumble upon the right citizenship virtues all on their own. This is of course one of the key paradoxes for citizenship education in democratic states: just like chemistry or French grammar, it apparently has to be “delivered” to students. And yet citizenship is different from other subjects, surely! A key difference is that optimal citizenship outlook and practices are intended to have life-long applicability in a broad sense (e.g., how to be in society) that make them entirely unlike other content areas.

In terms of weaknesses in the article, the author seems to write as though we are just today beginning to see more value in the traditions of resistance to the dominant paradigms in education scholarship when in fact these traditions of resistance are well established, because there have long been a need for them. Stockden might therefore have referred to people like Henry Giroux, or for that matter, bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress) or even Rousseau much earlier in the article.  Moreover, the “approaches” for teaching that the author jams into the concluding paragraphs of the article – drawing them straight from Gardener, Boix-Mansella, Schwab, and Nussbaum while not adding much in the way of his own ideas – are in my mind much too broad to be useful in the discussion of the need to prepare students for citizenship.

                                                                                                         

Reading note - Kymlicka, Uneasy Partners

There are scholars who argue multiculturalism tilts the delicate balance between religious freedom and equality rights in favour of the former.  Multiculturalism's deference to religious groups may then be at odds with the open-minded, socially liberal citizenship norms that Canada would wish to promote.  This cautionary view has been strengthened from time to time by studies, or media stories, that point out where the promises of integration have failed – and where it is possible to put the blame on religious freedom. It may even be the consensus view among secular immigrants who are new to Canada.  They can find the units on multiculturalism covered in their children’s schools puzzling, a departure from the treatment of diversity in their country of origin. In the family of nations Canada is -- in Laczko's words -- a “statistical outlier” in its emphasis on ethnic, racial, and religious diversity.

Will Kymlicka sees this as a flawed lens on multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is fundamentally a rights-based conception of citizenship that represents quite simply the best instrument available for integrating our large immigrant populations, he says. Moreover, Janice Stein has overstated the concern about the achievability of “deep multiculturalism” in light of the potential tension between equality rights and religious freedom.  Kymlicka says the debate about religious freedom goes back centuries and its relationship to multiculturalism (a little more than 40 years old) is unclear: “a red herring in this debate.” The great strength of Kymlicka’s argument is to show that, while multiculturalism has at times degenerated into political correctness or “tokenism,” it has been a good policy for Canada because it is consistent with the development of human rights. Critics who point to the divisiveness that is possible with multiculturalism have failed to recognize that diverse groups “converge on Charter values” (Kymlicka, 153). Moreover, it is in the diversity of participation in civil society organizations that we can find multiculturalism at work.

One weakness in the article is Kymlicka’s satisfaction with the view that religious groups converge on Charter values over time. He says multiculturalism does not deviate from equality rights and human rights jurisprudence, indeed does not exist outside that framework (146). It would appear that even the religiously orthodox have to grapple with diverse identities, and the state and the courts have granted them a measure of freedom to adapt incrementally. Kymlicka isn’t asking women, racial minorities, and sexual minorities within religious organizations to accept a curtailment of their rights indefinitely. However his argument emphasizes the importance of the courts’ role in setting accommodations – their development of batteries of tests over several years – and it gives an idea of how long some groups can be expected to wait before they have a voice or can meaningfully belong in some religious organizations.

Kymlicka notes with approval that legal requirements of non-discrimination “have gradually been extended to private sector employers” among others (143), but he overlooks that within certain ethnic groups (religious or otherwise), there is differentiated access to higher education based on gender, even in Canada.  Very traditional gender roles within families can exist, but the “ethos of multiculturalism” as Stein as argued, makes the authorities cautious about causing offence to anyone. The deference to group rights can find itself at odds with the individual rights of women and girls, who must work hard to claim their legitimate educational rights allowing them to freely pursue more advanced career goals.

With respect to immigration and integration, here too, Kymlicka says our anxieties are overblown. He says again that we can trust that they will “over time, converge on Charter values.” I think it would be more accurate to say that they converge on our civil society opportunities (note the experiences of Vietnamese immigrants in Toronto and Boston that were compared by Bloemraad). Equally important, and perhaps especially when it comes to religiously minded immigrants, is the notion of well-being, which Kymlicka does not speak to, though it can further strengthen arguments for multiculturalism. In essence, the more that religiously-minded immigrants lose the self-perception that the religious parts of their identity are inconsistent with the culture of their new country, the more quickly they can develop a sense of well-being as newcomers and be encouraged to put down roots.

Reading note on Feminism Confronts Democracy by Jennifer A. Tupper

    Jennifer A. Tupper starts her article by “Stolen Sisters” report which relate to the murders of Aboriginal girls and women. She challenges the assumption that democracy exists, particularly as it relates to the lives and experiences of girls and women in schools and in broader society. And she also tries to examine how women are discursively produced by universal conceptions of citizenship. She thinks education plays a crucial role in this production, exemplified in and through curriculum. She then interrogate the extent to which citizenship education, a significant goal of schooling is used to perpetuate, rather than disrupt, the fallacy of democratic education. Tupper also argues that even in modern democracy, women’s participation as full members is situated within inequalities, as public space is gendered as a masculine domain whereby “men were used as the standard or norm for understanding citizenship. Pateman theorized that the construct of citizenship was founded on the basis of the exclusion of women. Therefore, in modern liberal views of citizenship, the rights of individualism are valued, and patriarchal separation of private and public spheres is validated. 

    Tupper argues that modern liberal democracies are problematic in the context of citizenship education. The meta-narrative of universal citizenship portrayed in liberal citizenship perpetuates an acceptance “that democracy exists, despite feminist claims to the contrary, and accepts that citizenship exists universally”. In this meta-narrative, assumptions are made that the act of simply acquiring the status of citizen assures individuals are empowered as agents to enact full citizenship rights. However, Tupper maintained that full lived-experiences of citizenship are dependent on a multitude of factors, including gender. The impact of the universal citizen meta-narrative in citizenship education results in students “who are less able to understand the complexities of the world they inhabit, less able to integrate those experiences into a growing making sense “of that world”. The meta-narrative of universal citizen constrains spaces for those who are marginalized by the constructs of liberal citizenship, disempowering their capacity for agency, as the identity of citizen is assumed in democracy. 

     In this article, what I resonated with the author is that to many teachers, teaching content to students is a neutral act. And teachers simply deliver the content they have been mandated to and are careful not to declare their own perspectives or opinions. Thus, it is easy to ignore difference. We must be aware that standardizing educational goals does not mean education is democratic. 

     I found what I concerned in the article is that do the schooling the only factor that need to be challenged  as democratic institution to promote democratic education? The government and officials are also obliged to ensure the safety of Indigenous women, and to address the deeper problems of marginalization that has placed so many Indigenous women in harm’s way.

     The questions I’m considering in the article are: In what aspects must men and women be equal in order to be equal participants in a democratic system? How specifically do the schools reinforce the democratic education from curriculum perspective?

Feminism confronts democracy - Tupper (2008) - May 28 Reading Note - Jenn Bergen

Tupper, J. (2008). Feminism confronts democracy: Challenging universal citizenship and democratic education. In A. Abdi & G. Richardson (Eds.) Decolonizing democratic education (pp. 67-76). Rotterdam: Sense.

Main Argument

Tupper (2008) argues that women and girls, especially racialized women and girls, have never been full members of Canadian democracy, since it was built on colonial and patriarchal assumptions that are reproduced in the present. In addition, Tupper (2008) argues that the public school system supports this process of reproducing women and girls as second-class citizens of democracy.

Supporting Points

Tupper (2008) argues that, “for women, democracy has never existed” (p. 68). First, she reminds readers that political rights were originally based on “a fraternal contract that constitutes civil society as a patriarchal or masculine order (Pateman as cited in Tupper, 2008, p. 68). Later modifications to this original formation, such as awarding women the right to vote and participate more readily in political realms does not, however, erase these original inequalities (Tupper, 2008, p. 69). In fact, she argues that full inclusion of women in a system which was originally based on their exclusion may never be possible (2008, p. 70), as the foundational assumptions behind this exclusion live on in practice (women as emotional versus men as rational, etc.) (2008, p. 70). In order to provide examples of this inequality at its worst, Tupper uses the Stolen Sisters report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada in order to provide examples of how democratic rights are not experienced universally. She related several of the stories from the report, and in doing so illuminates the most disturbing parts of violence against Indigenous women and girls – that this violence is sexist and racist, but responses from the (democratic) public authorities are also sexist and racist (2008, p. 73).

The public schooling system, as an extension of the state, is interrogated next for its role in reinforcing second-class citizenship for women, through what Tupper has termed the “meta-narrative of universal citizenship” (2008, p. 72). Using examples from several Canadian provinces, Tupper show how citizenship is constructed as equally applicable to all students, and at worst, presented this way neutrally by teachers (p. 72). She questions embedded assumptions in these curricular documents that discuss rights as unequal in the past, but currently universal; primarily male contributions to the founding of the nation; and the “production of whiteness as the norm” in citizenship curricular narratives (p. 74). She then concludes by reiterating that citizenship as status and citizenship as practice subjugate women and girls as second-class citizens in Canadian democracy, in particular Indigenous women and girls (p. 75).

Assessment / Critique

Tupper (2008) presents the under-discussed gendered nature of citizenship and forces readers to confront the effects of patriarchy and colonialism on current manifestations of differential rights in practice for women and girls in Canada. Her argument is strengthened by weaving the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women into her chapter, as heartbreaking reminders of how commonplace male violence against women is in our ‘democracy’. I also appreciated the way that she subtly disrupts standard chapter-writing format, in order to point to just how complex and intertwined issues of equality, gender, and citizenship are, if not in policy, then definitely in practice. Most importantly, Tupper supports her arguments with both a variety of theoretical feminist views on citizenship, and real-life examples of how gender inequality is embedded in universal notions of citizenship.

The only criticism that I had of this chapter was that it was too short. Tupper made her points succinctly and supported them very well, but I would have liked more discussion of how school curricula reinforces the inequalities she is outlining. I’m sure that she has likely written about that elsewhere, but I found myself craving more examples. As a result, I was left with questions about how Tupper would see the ‘way forward’ in addressing some of these issues. What does an education for a plurality of citizenship identities look like? Should education for citizenship actually be more about educating for social justice?