Discipline, Erasure, and Silenced Subjectivities: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Florida's 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act

This critical policy analysis is concerned with the discursive linguistic practices and social justice implications surrounding the passage of Florida's controversial “Parental Rights in Education Act” (PREA), which enacts limitations on classroom instruction involving topics related to gender and sexuality. Foregrounding this essay lays a call for social work scholarship to recognize the significance of the critical semiotic and post-structural turn in social science research, which evinces the importance of attending to the nuanced relationship between discourse, power, ideology, and identity formation. As a field espousing the tenets of social justice and commitments to the broader aims of social equality, social work holds an inherent investment in understanding the politics of language and, by extension, the language of emancipatory change. Informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA) and feminist post-structural thought, this analysis brings to the forefront the relevance of discourse, language, and semiotics as crucial objects of inquiry and seeks to examine what norms are in operation in the context of this legislation. What can discourse reveal about the nature of the social problem as postulated by PREA, and what discursive implications might it contain? Ultimately, this analysis contends that PREA represents a new threshold of educational and queer surveillance, best understood when bracketed by the ideologies of neoliberalism, cis-/heteropatriarchy, and the concomitant articulation of transphobia.