Queering classes: Disrupting hegemonic masculinity and the effects of compulsory heterosexuality in the classroom

Abstract

This essay focuses on the classroom and school environment as a setting where queering masculinity has opportunity and benefit for students, teachers, and administrators, particularly as relates to boys and the learning environment. Queering is defined as the disruption of those normative attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors evidenced in the curriculum, classroom, and school culture that reinforce hegemonic heterosexuality and gender conformity. As used here, such disruption introduces a paradigm of masculinity and sexuality that has a plurality of expressions and potentialities. This requires systemic change that addresses, models, and supports ways of being masculine that might otherwise be devalued because of association with and meaning given to homosexuality. Queering, then, disrupts assumptions of masculinity and its relationship to hegemonic heterosexuality.