Macintosch, L. B. & Loutzenheiser, L. W. (2006) Queering citizenship. In G. Richardson & D. Blades (Eds.), Troubling the canon of citizenship education. (pp. 95-102). New York: Peter Lang.

In this article, Macintosh and Loutzenheiser discuss the complex power relations inherent in how the notions of citizen and citizenship are addressed in curricula and classrooms. The authors suggest that one way of reading about citizenship is through sexuality and explore schooling as a way of investigating how teachers can initiate dialogues with the purpose of facilitating the inclusion the sexually marginalized youth. They believe that queer theory is useful “for engaging citizenship as it pertains to marginalized populations and issues of queer students” (95). Accordingly, they argue “queer theories and queering of theory offer educators sites of contestation through which to open up pedagogical and curricular potential and unsettle heteronormativity in schooling” (p. 98).

As for the why of queer theory, the authors highlight the theory’s non-conventional and provocative approach to identity: it “purposefully disrupts the notion that identity is fixed or immutable” (p. 96).  It can therefore be used as a critical tool to explore the complications of identity formation. This critical dimension in reflecting on how to include identities with different sexual orientations is important, for “uncritical inclusivity reifies the Other and reinforces the status quo” (p. 98).

The authors assert that if education is a democratic public sphere, the private lives of students should remain inconsequential for their participation. However, the heteronormativity of education assumes that belonging to either sex is the condition for the disconnect between the private and the social. Since the queer students do not neatly fit into this binary, their private is made public and an issue, if not a condition, for their inclusion in education.  This is where queer theories can shed critical light on how educational content, guidelines, and teaching approaches can liberate students’ bodies as a condition for inclusion. “The promise of queer theories lay in the disruption of heteronormativity, in disclosing the power of naming, and n the possibilities embedded in a curricular understanding based on an embrace of partiality and fluidity” (pp. 100-1).

When reading the article, I understood the authors’ use of queer theories not only as a lens to read the multiple ways of reading the way queer students experience schooling, but also a framework to approach identity in citizenship education in a larger sense. While queer theory might suggest the sexual dimension of identity, its purposeful disruption of identity notion can equally shatter the hegemonic racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural dimensions of identity. In so doing, it can assimilate more individuals in the democratic space of education, leaving the differences in identities as the private sphere and as such inconsequential for individuals’ participation in the realm of the social.

What I wished to see in the article was to mention some of the challenges that a queer-friendly teaching approach would look like. This is not a criticism, however, as this is a separate topic and the space of an article like this might not allow for it. In connection to such challenges, I notice that Catholic boards run many schools in Ontario. Are these schools open to queering citizenship education? How about parents? If they are sending their children to religious schools, would they be willing to incorporate issues related to queer theory in the educational curricula? How about teachers? Are teachers trained to incorporate issues related to mutable and dynamic identities into their teaching materials? Are they well versed about queer theories? I think these pragmatic challenges are worth considering when implementing queer theories in education.