“I’m Here and I Am Queer”. Queer Teacher Identities in ELT. A Colombian Study

Abstract

There has been a significant upsurge of research regarding gender and its connection to teacher professional identity. In this paper, we adopt a decolonial stance to document how the queer identities and pedagogies of two teachers of English resist colonial notions of being and doing within the English Language Teaching (elt) setting. This study regards gender identity as a political mechanism that has been structured in terms of relations of domination. In addition, it explores these structures by employing the coloniality of being as the axe to analyse gender categories in the elt field. To do this, we used a narrative approach to voice personal constructions of gender and gendering discourses about queer identities and pedagogies. Findings suggest that queer teachers of English construct and negotiate their identities in their professional settings and their own performativities in the classroom shape their own epistemologies and teaching practices.