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Schools, identity, and homosexuality

University of British Columbia

This work is a life-history analysis of thirteen homosexuals aged 17-22, ten of whom are male. The thesis concentrates on six themes: concepts of sexuality and their portrayal in the curriculum; school episodes or experiences; teachers’ and administrators’ role(s) in these experiences; concepts of identity; and the institutional intent of schools to influence students. To this end, the interviews probe how influential schools are, how participants interpret the “lesson(s)” of the curriculum on sexual matters, and whether they associate school experience with the development of their own sexual identities. All the subjects detect circumstances and attitudes whose effect is to disparage homosexuality and to discourage serious discussion of it. The subjects are less unified in concluding whether schools intend to influence them and their circumstances, and whether what they remember counts as evidence of influence. Although they criticize schools for making them invisible, most of the subjects tacitly accept the ideology of the education system. They believe that the system fosters, encourages, enlightens, and enables its students. They believe in the system as an ideal, and they believe in the accuracy of their appraisal of it. They do not consider that a schooling ideology based on a binary understanding of gender that relentlessly counterpoises masculinity and femininity, male and female, and hetero/homosexual, requires the very invisibility and silence they detest. As they contend with compulsory heterosexuality, they blur the importance of identities in their lives. Thus do they constitute their own exclusion so as not to be trapped by it.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-04-22

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7501

Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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