Post-Secondary Education and
Queer Student Engagement in Canada
Rachael Sullivan, University of British Columbia
At the recent ‘We Demand: History/Sex/Activism in Canada’286 conference, I was struck by the centrality of post-secondary education, and specifically university and college campuses, in the recollections of prominent queer activists. The contributors to the conference’s opening plenary included Ron Dutton of BC Gay and Lesbian Archives; barbara findlay, a prominent Vancouver lawyer; Janine Fuller, manager of Little Sister’s Bookstore; Amy Gottlieb, a Toronto- based educator and photographer; and Gary Kinsman, a professor at Laurentian University. In each account, these activists connected their early involvement in a wide range of social movements in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s – the peace movement, women’s liberation movement, student activism, gay and lesbian liberation – to a college or university campus. It was clear from their testimonies that these spaces had provided a crucial site where they could engage in radical thinking and activism, as well as explore issues of identity, sexuality, and desire.
I wonder if post-secondary education can still play an important role in the exploration of queer desires, political identification(s), and activist possibilities. Some people feel that colleges and universities have lost their central role in cultivating radical politics. At the end of the conference, a volunteer, Ivan Drury, noted:287 “We’re at a crisis where political radicals among students are probably at a historic low right now … Professors are largely more radical than their students. It should really be the other way around.” Drury’s dismay lies in the perceived apathy of students to ‘get involved’ in political and social justice activism on campus. The current perception is that students accept the status-quo without considering how they might want to and can change their university into one that is more inclusive and aware of LGBTQI2-S issues. In fact, LGBTQI2-S students could become some of our greatest leaders, if they are given the right tools, skills, and opportunities.
Today, a post-secondary education is recognized as important for personal development, as well as for future employment and career opportunities. Without encouragement and the opportunity to reflect on how the university and its resources could better meet the needs of LGBTQI2-S students, it is easy for students (myself included) to get caught up in the construction of post-secondary education as a means to an end for employment and income security. We need a critical reflection that engages with how universities and colleges can (again) be sites for citizenship and political engagement, rather than sites solely for academic training and accreditation. Consequently, I want to consider the role that post-secondary education and campuses play in LGBTQI2-S students’ lives and the potential that these sites might serve in the (re)making of radical queer students and citizens.
Perhaps the crisis described by Drury is reflective of the ways in which LGBTQI2-S needs have changed over time. Today, many universities and colleges provide resources for LGBTQI2-S students, including, amongst others, educational resources, visibility campaigns, administrative offices, and student groups that focus on issues of gender and sexual diversity. In many ways these resources have become the hallmark of hard won fights based on the concerns raised by queer students, staff, and faculty, predominantly students over the last 40 years. The aim has been to make university and college campuses ‘safe’ and more welcoming through equity and accessibility policies. While it is important to recognize that these policies have had a positive impact, how do they translate to the actual lived experiences of LGBTQI2-S? When we talk about making campuses ‘safe,’ whose safety are we considering, and within which spaces?
286 We Demand. (2011). History/Sex/Activism in Canada. Retrieved from http://ocs.sfu.ca/history/index.php/ wedemand/2011
287 Di Mera, M. (2011, August 31). Sex Activism in Canada. Xtra!. Retrieved from http://www.xtra.ca/public/ Vancouver/Sex_activism_in_Canada-10688.aspx
My doctoral research tackles some of these questions by exploring how queer students understand and engage with a Canadian university campus – in this case the University of British Columbia (UBC) – as a ‘safe’ space. Through these interviews I found that all of the students interviewed identified at least one place on campus that they felt was queer welcoming or friendly, many of which were student services and administrative spaces. This suggests that these UBC administrative and student services units have done a good job of establishing a welcoming environment for queer students by educating their staff and making sexual and gender diversity issues visible in these spaces. And, yet, half of the participants identified spaces that they would avoid on campus, which included some residential and social spaces. This strongly suggests that there is still work to be done on campus.
Understandably, students might be reluctant to raise questions or concerns when they and university administrators can point to the resources that are already provided. Perhaps the question that needs to be asked is this: Are the current resources meeting the needs of all LGBTQI2-S students at UBC or across Canadian post-secondary institutions in general? In my interviews I asked students what they would like to see changed across campus. Many had little to say, often stating that they had not had a chance to think about it. Perhaps it is because they had not been asked; to a certain extent, they may have been taught to be grateful for the resources that are available, rather than being taught to ask questions about the limits of their campus. In this sense I believe, radical activism, and more specifically radical queer activism, starts with learning to ask questions. Post-secondary education is a time and a place for developing critical thinking skills which are important for political engagement and activism.
Although equity and access policies have altered university and college campuses, it has also created an expectation of inclusion for marginal students, staff and faculty. But I want more than safe spaces and inclusion. I would like to believe that university and college campuses have the potential to become (again) the training ground for radical queers, where LGBTQI2-S students can engage with radical ideas about what queer experiences and lives could look like both on and off campus, rather than lives uncritically shaped by conventions and conformity. There is still work to be done. For instance, homophobic and transphobic hostility remains a threat both on and off campus and the imposition of gendered and sexualized violence is a reality that students face across Canadian campuses. While there are no easy answers to these issues, I believe that universities and colleges can provide students, especially LGBTQI2-S students, with the tools for awareness and radical engagement.
To extend our understanding of the complexity of LGBTQI2-S issues, we might consider questions that still need to be asked, including how are the needs of queers of colour, queers with disabilities, trans, intersex, and Two-Spirit students being identified and met by the university? Are issues of intersectionality being raised? And how do we deal with the complicated realities of LGBTQI2-S lives both on and off campus? Students need to be encouraged to think about these questions, and to pose their own. In fact, students need to learn how to connect issues of sexual and gender diversity to other issues of marginalization, and then be able to translate their critical questioning and activist skills to their lived realities, while also understanding how change can actually be achieved. This is the potential and possibility that post-secondary education and campuses offer our LGBTQI2-S youth.
It is my hope and goal to help students become (re)politicized through engaging with the questions above, perhaps not solely for themselves, but also for those whose relationship to power and opportunity is even more tenuous. For me, this means providing the opportunity and space for LGBTQI2-S students and their allies to be critical of the institution, while also generating new possibilities, creative solutions, and changing policies and resources on campuses.
It was only a generation ago that students were fighting for the right to organize, have a space on campus, and have issues of sexuality and gender included in the curriculum. In many cases, these provisions now exist across Canadian post-secondary institutions and, yet, there is still room for improvement. At this moment in time I fear we, as members of university and college communities, risk complacency because there has been so much improvement in terms of access and equity. The time for assimilation is over; not encouraging LGBTQI2-S students to ask hard questions of their college or university will do nothing to reverse the decline in queer student engagement and activism.
We need to think critically and carefully about how university and colleges can provide a rich opportunity for LGBTQI2-S student engagement. The crisis outlined by Drury, and the lack of radical queer students, is too important to be dismissed by both queer scholar and activists.
26
How (not) to do Queer Studies in the classroom: Teaching to think beyond tolerance
Christopher Smith, University of Toronto
In the fall of 2010, I was invited by the Association for Media Literacy (AML) to facilitate a workshop288 that explored the potential and fruitful relationship between Queer theory289 and media literacy. Understanding that queer theory can often be untranslatable outside of a university setting, I sought to enable future secondary school teachers to conceive of an anti-homophobic pedagogy that was accessible to teens and also encouraged their students to think critically. In tandem I wanted to underscore that queer theory/studies is not an umbrella term that encapsulates scholarship that accounts for the lives and histories of all individuals one might understand as being lesbian, gay, bisexual, etc. One must resist the desire for easy shorthand. Queer critique and theorizing as Natalie Oswin290 notes, is fundamentally invested in “understanding how norms and categories are deployed” by whom and for what purpose. What follows is a series of critical reflections that emerged for me from that encounter.
The inspiration for the workshop was borne out of a series of moments in the months prior to it. The first provocation emerged from a random conversation with a long-time friend, now a teacher at our former junior high school. During a lunchtime chat it was revealed by my friend that teaching empathy was a necessary and important shift in the Toronto District School Board’s mandate regarding equity. Intrigued, I pondered how a former, familiar pedagogical imperative of teaching tolerance291 suddenly became an investment in engendering an affective relationship to social justice.
At the time, like many other folks, I was watching television programs such as Ugly Betty and later Glee, curious about the near-coincidental emergence of narratives that focused on the lives of self- identified gay-male youth. One could imagine that such a cultural moment signals a shift in societal views or opinions about sexual-orientation(s), perhaps even an example of embracing tolerance as a successful means for confronting and resolving social conflict, as Malinda S Smith also queries in Queering In/Equality. Reminded of film and media scholar Kara Keeling’s caution in the essay “Joining The Lesbians: Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility,”292 that not all visibility is inherently progressive, I was prompted to ask, what sort of moment is this where gay male youth (in particular) are widely represented? Further, why is it that the experiences we are invited to share primarily revolve around bearing witness to the degradation that bullying entails?
288 Queer Theory & Media Representations in the Classroom. (2010, October 23). Association MediaLit. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2izJUip0aQ
289 Queer Theory. (2005). Welcome to Queer Theory!. Retrieved from http://www.queertheory.com/default.htm
290 Oswin, N. (2008). Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography, 32 (1).
291 Teaching Tolerance. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved from http://www.tolerance.org/
292 Keeling, K. (2005). “Joining the Lesbians:” Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility. In E. P. Johnson & M.G. Henderson (Eds.), Black Queer Studies: A Critical Analogy. (213-227). Durham: Duke University Press.
Despite the different narrative trajectories of both shows, what aligns Glee and Ugly Betty is the explicit theme that educational institutions have failed these youth. Presuming that the reader is familiar in some sense with the narratives I am referring to, the profound display of neglect by educational administrators to create a safe environment for learning resonates as itself a form of violence. Indeed, both of these shows emerge within a heteropatriarchal regime of representation and visibility. As such, an archetypal image of a gay male youth can only be knowable and represented for an audience if they are enduring such trials and tribulations. One is left with the question: Why is this the logical avenue to pursue? Further, is there an undisclosed pleasure in doing so? Do audiences, by virtue of thinking that tolerance is their mandate, secretly relish in the violence displayed before them? Watching/engaging Glee can make you feel like a ‘good’ empathetic person, from a distance. One can say to himself or herself with ease “I would never treat someone else like that.”
After encountering the It Gets Better campaign that was then reaching a critical mass by the time of the workshop, my focus shifted to a series of other related questions. Despite the well-intentioned gesture of empathy by primarily elder coupled gay men, towards LGBTQ youth enduring homophobic and transphobic violence, what might be the limitation of this gesture?
Gerald Walton noted in this LGBTQI2-S series, “[n]ational surveys from GLSEN293 in the United States and Egale294 in Canada indicate that gender atypical youth are more likely to be the target of harassment and bullying than their gender typical counterparts.”295 Similarly, as Melissa Carrol suggests, the It Gets Better campaign “evidences a widespread lack of political information, care, and sentiment for young female queers, especially those deemed unhappy.”296 In addition many have highlighted how the campaign lacks a nuanced understanding of how queer youth of colour negotiate homophobia. See a counter response297 by the Embracing Intersectional Diversity Project298 led by Tomee Sojourner as an example.
It is not my goal to revise these assessments, much of which I am in agreement with. However, while I concur with many of the critiques circulating in the blogosphere, the elision of ‘race’ in this conversation is striking.
293 Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. (2012). 2009 National School Climate Survey: Nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT Student Experience Harassment in School. Retrieved from http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/library/record/ 2624.html
294 Eagle Canada. (2011). Youth Speak Up about Homophobia and Transphobia. Retrieved from http://www.egale.ca/? item=1401
295 Walton, G. (2011, November 30). LGBT Lessons (Not) learned: Dominant gender ideology as a basis for transpohobic and homophobic violence. [Blog Entry]. Retrieved from http://blog.fedcan.ca/2011/11/30/lgbt-lessons- not-learned-dominant-gender-ideology-as-a-basis-for-transphobic-and-homophobic-violence/#more-2095
296 Carroll, M. (2011, November 25). The L-Word: It’s not Getting Better For Lonely Young Lesbians. [Blog Entry]. Retrieved from http://blog.fedcan.ca/2011/11/25/the-l-word-it%E2%80%99s-not-getting-better-for-lonely-young- lesbians/#more-2091
297 tomeesojourner. (2010, October 10). I am Proff That It Gets Better-Eid Project Campaign. Podcast retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a74XuJHzid8
298 Embracing Intersectional Diversity Project. (2011). In Tomee Sojourner. Retrieved from http:// www.tomeesojourner.com/Creative-Projects/creative-projects.html
Let’s consider for instance, the unfortunate suicide of 11-year old Carl Joseph Walker.299 Carl Walker an African-American youth became one of many whose suicide would be noted and signalled to as further evidence that schools are becoming increasingly hostile environments due to a rise in bullying.
Concurrently with the groundswell of It Gets Better submissions, the material fact that young Carl Walker may have been encountering homophobia quite differently was overlooked. He was not an archetypal ‘out’ gay youth. As remembered by his mother Sirdeaner Walker, he was a sensitive, caring young boy. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey300 shortly after young Carl’s demise, Ms. Walker disclosed that Carl had never declared any internal struggle with his sexual orientation to her. Many have probably presumed that an inability for Carl to disclose his ‘true’ self was the cause for him taking his life. That might be a serious misstep. I was moved by Ms. Walker’s insistence, that he would have been loved regardless if he were to, as we say, “come out.”
If we take this moment seriously, however, the challenge before us is to critically assess whom we imagine and seek to address in anti-homophobia campaigns, as well as our pedagogy. The experiences of young Carl Walker suggested to me that homophobia was ever present in his daily life, and yet we can also infer that much of this had little to do with his ‘actual’ experience of his sexual orientation. As a result, black students like Carl Walker might not garner any solace, and are not addressed in the notion (however well intentioned) that “it gets better.”
As has been noted in the recent study conducted by Egale “Every Class in Every School, Egale’s Final Report on Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia in Canadian Schools”301 an increasing number of students are encountering homophobia due to their ‘perceived’ sexual orientation. According to the final report, “10 percent of non-LGBTQ students reported being physically harassed or assaulted about their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.”
This empirical fact illustrates in part that experience of intolerance (in particular homophobia) by youth happen in complex ways. In tandem with the heteropatriarchal assumptions about sexual orientation and gender performance students confront, we might also consider how such assumptions are deeply racialized from the outset. Such a consideration does not necessarily mean adapting previously existing modes of inquiry so that they become ‘inclusive’ of the experiences of queer youth of colour, as some might infer. Rather, we might ask for instance, in what world does a sensitive black male youth (such as Carl Walker) become a target of homophobia? What limited (and racist) assumptions of and about black masculinity informed such hostile aggression?
In such a circumstance what is revealed from the outset is that many students who are interpolated as ‘queer’302 for gender non-conformity are also perceived to be in breach of normative racial/racist codes of masculinity/femininity. Further, it illustrates to us that racism and homophobia often operate in tandem to command particular performances of gender by youth of colour.
299 Donaldson James, S. (2009, April 14). What Words Can Kill: ‘That’s So Gay.’ ABC News. Retrieved from http:// abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=7328091#.T1E1hfU4iSp
300 The Oprah Winfrey Show. (2009, May 6). The Truth About Bullying. Retrieved from http://www.oprah.com/ relationships/School-Bullying/3
301 Taylor, C. & Peter, T., with McMinn, T.L., Elliott, T., Beldom, S., Ferry, A., Gross, Z., Paquin, S., & Schachter, K. (2011). Every class in every school: The first national climate survey on homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in Canadian schools. Final Report. Toronto, ON: Egale Canada Human Rights Trust.
302 Ward, J. (2008). Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGTBQ Activist Organizations. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press).
To pose such questions then is to take a queer pedagogy beyond the presumption that the purpose of our intervention is solely to create safer educational settings for sexual-minorities, and gender outlaws. As Sirma Bilge has posited, ‘queer’ must be understood as a political metaphor without a predetermined referent that serves to challenge institutional forces normalizing and commodifying difference.” 303
Akin to what Bilge proposes as a “queer intersectionality” approach, in the workshop, I sought to engender a critical space where we could discuss how multiple systems of domination shape media representations, how they eventually circulate, and how they are consumed. A queer pedagogical approach as I imagined it at the time, might engage media literacy beyond enabling students with the skills to decipher representations. Rather, in expanding what we imagine as ‘literacy,’ media representations became a site where students could acquire the critical tools to assess cultural phenomena such as Glee or It Gets Better, within their broader sociological context.
In the end, I am left with the understanding that much work is still needed on this front. We must be able to account for those lives that seemingly fall outside of our frame of inquiry. We must be willing to also ‘queer’ ourselves, as we encourage others to be critical of the society they are inheriting.
303 Bilge, S. (2011, October 18). Developing Intersectional Solidarities: Plea for Queer Intersectionality. [Blog entry]. Retrieved from http://blog.fedcan.ca/2011/10/18/developing-intersectional-solidarities-a-plea-for-queer- intersectionality/