Queering School Literacy Practices: Interventionist Approaches

Abstract

This chapter reviews research into school literacy practices that suggest a way of discursively destabilizing frozen notions of sexuality. The review explores questions such as: How can school literacies collaborate with the reconfiguration of crystalized meanings about gender and sexuality performances? What kind of queer experiences can classroom talk promote? What are some of the meaning-effects produced by the circulation of gender and sexuality discourses in the classroom? The answers to these questions are organized in three groups: interventionist projects observed by a researcher; interventionist projects carried out and evaluated by a teacher-researcher; and projects involving teacher-researcher collaboration. The last group is explored by analyzing empirical data generated in a high school in Brazil. The underlying argument is that education may contribute to interrupting an essentialized order that defines and legitimates gender and sexuality. By putting sexuality issues at the front of the educational agenda, the interventionist research in literacy contexts reviewed in this chapter destabilizes both the gender divide and the so-called heteronormative matrix that play crucial roles in the ways we have historically learned to (1) understand ourselves and others; and (2) construct patterns of normalcy and deviance.