Queer and trans youth (not) knowing: experiences of epistemic (in)justice in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive secondary curriculum

Abstract

Purpose

Current legislative, policy and cultural efforts to censor and illegalize classroom discussions and curricular representations of LGBTQ+ people reflect longstanding challenges in English education. In an effort to explore what curricular inclusion can (not) accomplish – especially what and how current struggles over inclusion, censorship, illegalization and ultimately representation in English education might (not) contribute to queer and trans liberation – the purpose of this article is to feature the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers in classroom lessons with LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography at a Midwestern high school in which the author explored youth and adults reading, writing and talking about sexual and gender diversity, in this article the author focuses on one literacy learning context at the high school, a co-taught sophomore humanities that combined English language arts and social studies.

Findings

Engaging theories of epistemic (in) justice, the findings of this article highlight the experiences of queer and trans youth – especially two queer youth of Color, Camden and Imani – as knowers in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive classroom curriculum. The author describes epistemic harms with respect to distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements and reflects on alternative possibilities that youth gestured toward through their small resistances.

Originality/value

By centering the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, this article contributes to research about LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum in English teaching. Previous research, when empirical rather than conceptual, has tended to focus on the perspectives of teachers.

Citation

Schey, R. (2022), "Queer and trans youth (not) knowing: experiences of epistemic (in)justice in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive secondary curriculum", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 428-442. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-04-2022-0054

Introduction

As I write this introduction during 2022, a wave of legislation has unfolded during the past year in states such as Alabama, Florida, Gorgia, Iowa, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee that has sought to illegalize classroom discussions of topics such as queerness, transness, anti-Blackness and white supremacy and has had the effect of increasing the hostility of school climates, especially for trans youth (Movement Advancement Project, 2022). These actions foster a chilling and antagonistic environment for English teachers, in particular because they have occurred alongside intense efforts to censor books with these topics in K-12 school districts and community libraries. Undoubtedly, these policies and practices are current crises, yet they must also be understood as contemporary manifestations of longstanding histories of oppression in and beyond education (Graves, 2015). Indeed, a review of the past two decades of GLSEN’s school climate surveys for LGBTQ youth reveals that LGBTQ-inclusive curricula have never been widely available in US secondary schools (Kosciw et al., 2020).

Given this scarcity, it is perhaps unsurprising that research about inclusive curriculum has generally been limited – often conceptual rather than empirical – although there is a vibrant body of scholarship in English teaching. A little over a decade ago, Clark and Blackburn (2009) reviewed this literature and found that in these studies, teachers overwhelmingly positioned students as straight, homophobic and ignorant, which resulted in LGBT-inclusive teaching that was didactic. These trends have continued since 2009, as confirmed in a more recent review (Blackburn and Schey, 2017). Studies have largely focused on teachers’ attitudes (Page, 2017; Thein, 2013), experiences (Helton, 2020) and pedagogies (Helmer, 2016), and only a few reports feature queer and trans youth encountering inclusive curricula (e.g. Schey and Blackburn, 2019; Schey, 2020, 2021; Kenney, 2010; Vetter, 2010). Beyond English language arts (ELA) in content areas such as social studies, similar limits exist. Moorhead and Jimenez (2021) point out that “over the last decade, social studies education researchers reported very minimal progress incorporating LGBTQ+ people and their experiences into social studies curriculum” (p. 39), and Wargo (2022) notes that the few research reports documenting inclusion in social studies contexts rely on either controversial issue framings (Beck, 2013) or the efficacy of pre- and in-service teachers (Brant and Tyson, 2016), revealing little about youth experiences. Most studies focused on queer and trans youth engaging with representations of sexual and gender diversity occurred in contexts beyond classrooms such as afterschool programs (Storm and Jones, 2021), online platforms (Wargo, 2017), public streets (Cruz, 2013), school clubs (Johnson, 2017) or queer youth centers (Blackburn, 2012). As a result, the experiences, needs and desires of queer and trans youth with respect to classroom lessons, including ELA, are under documented.

In this article, I focus on the experiences of queer and trans youth in an English classroom featuring curriculum inclusive of sexual and gender diversity. Given the trend, first highlighted by Clark and Blackburn (2009), that inclusive instruction has tended to be didactic and, thus, positioned youth as ignorant, I offer an alternative perspective by considering the phenomenon of knowledge, specifically the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers. In doing so, I seek to contribute insights about the meaning and consequences of inclusive curriculum. It is important to consider what curricular inclusion can and cannot accomplish, especially to help clarify exactly what and how current struggles over inclusion, censorship, illegalization and ultimately representation in English education might (not) contribute to queer and trans liberation.

To explore these topics, I draw from a broader yearlong literacy ethnography (Heath and Street, 2008) in which I explored how youth and adults read, wrote and talked about sexual and gender diversity at a public, comprehensive, urban high school in the Midwest that I call Harrison High School [1]. I describe the experiences of queer and trans youth in a sophomore (Grade 10) humanities course that combined ELA and social studies (US studies), a course in which the co-teachers Ms Abby and Mr Brooks regularly included representations of LGBTQ+ people and topics. The following questions guide my inquiry:

Q1.

In the sophomore humanities course, what were the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers?

Q2.

What were the consequences of their experiences for oppressive values, particularly epistemic injustices?

By focusing on the experiences of queer and trans youth in the context of LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum, I am able to reflect on how epistemic practices can amplify and stymie the liberatory possibilities of such curriculum. To do so, I engage theoretical work about epistemology, sexuality and gender, focusing on epistemic (in)justice, which I turn to next.

Theoretical framework: Queer knowledges and epistemic (in)justices

Broadly construed, curriculum constitutes a question of what knowledges are valued and sanctioned in educative contexts such as English classrooms (Pinar, 2019). Thus, curriculum is not only about the presence or absence of representations but about the epistemic practices that, for example, students and teachers co-construct during classroom lessons. A sociocultural approach to knowledge resonates with foundational insights from queer theory, namely, that sexuality, and interconnectedly gender, operates as an epistemic site (Ferguson, 2004; Hall, 2017). For instance, Lorde (1984) characterizes the erotic as “a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence” (p. 57). For her, the erotic functions as a source of power and knowledge that fosters connections among people. By attending to the erotic, Lorde suggests the importance of affective knowledge, that is, of visceral, embodied, felt intensities, such as those related to emotion, that function as ways of knowing and intuiting, of affecting and being affected by the social (Ahmed, 2014; Sedgwick, 2003). Complementarily, Foucault (1978) describes sexuality as an effect of a “regime of power-knowledge-pleasure” (p. 11). Queer studies in education has applied queer theoretical insights about knowledge, power, sexuality and gender to discussions of curriculum and pedagogy, focusing on questions such as (cishetero)normativities and the limits of knowledge (Britzman, 1995; Kumashiro, 2015).

To theoretically extend conversations about queer pedagogy and curriculum, I draw from feminist, post-structural and queer theorizing of epistemic (in)justice (Fricker, 2007; Hall, 2017; Medina, 2013). Although any definition of epistemic injustice potentially forecloses possibilities of knowing and reproduces such injustice, the concept has been broadly conceived to describe:

How epistemic practices and institutions may be deployed and structured in ways that are simultaneously infelicitous toward certain epistemic values […] and unjust with regard to particular knowers (Pohlhaus, 2017, p. 13).

Scholars have frequently discussed epistemic injustices related to testimony and hermeneutics. Testimony can be defined “as any kind of telling in and through which the expression and transmission of knowledge becomes possible” (Medina, 2013, p. 28), and testimonial injustice involves instances when people and their knowledge claims, because of asymmetries in power relations and identity-based oppression, are assigned too much or little credibility. For instance, queer youth speaking in class about sexuality might be discredited because of their age or sexuality. Hermeneutic injustice names gaps or lacunae in the pools of shared meaning making resources, resulting in a situation “when a subject is unfairly disadvantaged in her capacities to make sense of an experience” (Medina, 2013, p. 90). For example, trans youth, because of cissexism in society, might struggle to name their identities, describe their experiences, and understand their desires. I draw on the heuristics of testimonial and hermeneutic (in)justice to describe the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers, and I consider the epistemic practices and harms in their classroom experiences.

Method

The classroom

The co-taught sophomore humanities course combined ELA, taught by Ms Abby, and social studies, taught by Mr Brooks. Both had taught at Harrison for over a decade and were well loved by staff and students alike, with Mr Brooks being a proud alumnus. Ms Abby identified as a white, middle class, straight, cisgender woman and Mr Brooks as an African American, middle class, straight, cisgender man. Both were significantly involved with extracurricular activities, with Ms Abby leading multiple clubs [such as the genders and sexualities alliance (GSA)] and Mr Brooks coaching athletics (such as football). They had co-taught sophomore humanities for several years, having great respect for each other. They worked together cohesively, co-planning curriculum and frequently leading the class together. Youth, or their parents, chose to enroll in the humanities class, and many students told me they did so because of their college-degree aspirations or their fondness for the subject matter and teachers. The enrolled students were racially and ethnically diverse, although a greater percentage of students were white compared to Harrison’s overall enrollment (for more information on Harrison, see Schey, 2019, 2022). Several queer youths were out in the class and a number attended the GSA.

The humanities course was scheduled in a “block” format, meeting daily for two instructional periods, approximately 90 min. Almost 70 students were enrolled, and everyone attended together, meaning the class was bustling with energy and activity. In their teaching, Ms Abby and Mr Brooks took up topics of inequity and justice, and they were committed to integrating LGBTQ+-inclusive texts throughout the course. The teachers built the curriculum on the foundations of the social studies US history requirements but organized the course thematically rather than chronologically. Unit topics focused on power and identity (such as politics, race and gender) and were explored using material ranging from the founding of the US Government to contemporary history. The English curriculum complemented historical themes, primarily using short non-fiction texts and emphasizing argumentative and expository writing. Ms Abby, Mr Brooks and the youth described the course as being discussion-based, meaning that several times, each week much of the entire block period was used for whole-class discussions. These long activities resulted in many youth sharing ideas, and the teachers encouraged students to make connections between course topics and their lives. This pedagogical approach combined with LGBTQ+-inclusive curricular texts resulted in LGBTQ+ youth speaking publicly about sexual and gender diversity and, thus, navigating experiences of epistemic (in)justice as they were treated as credible and knowledgeable, or not, by other people in the classroom.

The study

During the 2016–2017 school year, I completed a yearlong literacy ethnography (Heath and Street, 2008) at Harrison High School (for additional information on the ethnography, see Schey, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022). I approached this project drawing on my experiences previously working as a high school English teacher and GSA co-advisor to support queer and trans youth, families and educators. If privilege, as Ahmed (2013) argues, can be understood as an energy-saving device, then I attempt to leverage the reserves afforded through my identities as a white, straight, cis man to affect change in schools, so they become more livable, just and compassionate for marginalized people, especially queer and trans people. I recognize this work is complex, coalitional work that necessarily remains partial and incomplete. It is vital for me to listen to and learn from queer communities, following their lead (Anzaldúa, 2012; Blackburn, 2014). As part of such effort, for over a decade and a half, I have participated in teacher inquiry groups focused on combatting homophobia, transphobia and cisheterosexism (e.g. Blackburn, Clark et al., 2010; Blackburn et al., 2018), which challenge me to act, reflect on my mistakes and learn through dialogue.

During my year at Harrison, I attended school daily as a participant observer, observing classes and spending time in lunch periods, between classes, at assemblies, after school and at extracurricular events, such as GSA meetings. To construct data, I wrote daily fieldnotes, audio and video recorded classroom lessons, collected documents (such as curricular materials and student assignments) and conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers, students and administrators.

I analyzed these data through multiple coding cycles (Saldaña, 2016). The first cycle used structural and descriptive coding, broadly categorizing the larger ethnographic record for subsequent retrieval and analysis, including codes such as “LGBTQ+-inclusive lessons.” This cycle led to a second in which I used open coding, following a logic of grounded analysis that resulted in a proliferation of codes (e.g. “queer youth speaking about queerness in class”) and related subcodes (e.g. “LGBTQ+ youth as credible,” “LGBTQ+ youth as not credible” and “expectations for LGBTQ+ youth to be out”). A third cycle of coding and analysis – using pattern, axial and theoretical codes – synthesized the large number of codes and revealed broader patterns and overlaps across the data, such as co-occurrences and divergences of LGBTQ+-inclusive lessons and queer and trans youth as credible or not. This process led to the findings I discuss next.

Findings: Queer and trans youth as (not) knowing in English teaching

In this section, I explore the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers – or how they could and could not be legitimate knowers – in the context of the sophomore humanities classroom and its LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum. I demonstrate that even though the ELA teacher Ms Abby and some students stated an explicit commitment to valuing knowledge from queer and trans people, the epistemological practices of the classroom only attended to epistemic (in)justice in limited/ing ways, all focused on testimony narrowly. As a result of these limits, the classroom perpetuated epistemic harms. Namely, there were distortions of credibility, both surpluses and gaps, and assimilationist requirements with respect to homonormativity and respectability. To organize the findings, I first discuss testimony, then credibility and finally homonormativity.

Classroom commitments to testimony

Ms Abby, through her pedagogy in the sophomore humanities classroom, repeatedly emphasized the importance of testimonial justice in the form of listening to and honoring people’s lived experiences. She explained to me during a lesson-planning session:

I thought about “What is it that I want to create in our classroom space?” And I want to create a listening space, where people can hear other people’s stories and ideas. I try to emphasize to them the importance of listening.

Listening was partially about people’s ideas, but with students, Ms Abby highlighted how people’s lived experiences and identities influenced what they did, and did not, know. She repeated this concept so often that youth echoed it. For instance, Tamarah – who identified as a Black, straight, cis young woman – began a statement in class by saying “Ms Abby always talks about experiences.”

As Tamarah’s comment implied, several sophomore humanities students took up this commitment to lived experience and, thus, testimonial justice. Grayson – who identified as a white, straight, cis young man – said the following about classroom conversations:

It can be sort of powerful in a way if there's someone in that group [LGBT people] who wants to know, or like who is okay with everyone knowing who they are, and […] they want to make sure that everyone knows that what they're saying is coming from someone who is part of the LGBT community.

Grayson described knowledge claims as epistemically forceful (“powerful”) when linked to public acknowledgement of a student’s LGBT identity. Extending Ms Abby’s pedagogical approach of sanctioning experiential knowledge, he specifically validated LGBT youth as knowers through ascribing an increased authority to their conversational contributions – that is, their acts of testimony – about queerness and transness. In doing so, he in effect defined identity as automatically conferring credibility to a single person.

Grayson’s LGBT-specific articulation of Ms Abby’s general epistemic practice signals valuable efforts to interrupt classroom scenarios in which queer and trans youth might be marginalized as knowers because they drew on their own experiences rather than dominant bodies of knowledge. However, his articulation also relied on essentialism and individualism, which feminist theorists have problematized in discussions of standpoint epistemologies. Such scholars recognize that relationships between knowledge and power result in asymmetries of knowledge and credibility, echoing elements of what Ms Abby, Tamarah and Grayson stated. However, a standpoint does not automatically flow from an individual’s identity. Instead, it is a collective vantage point and an achievement emerging from a politicized consciousness (Collins, 2009; Hall, 2017; Harding, 2004). Indeed, Medina (2013) cautions against “overstatements,” that is, “conferring automatic epistemic privilege to the oppressed” (p. 17). Even though the classroom’s lived experience epistemology perhaps attributed credibility to the experiences of queer and trans youth, it simultaneously promoted a sort of individualistic relativism in that there was not an attention to collective vantage points and power asymmetries among groups, as I demonstrate below. Thus, the intervention into epistemological injustice focused on testimony but only in relatively narrow ways. This narrowness resulted in epistemic harms with respect to distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements, both of which I discuss next.

Before doing so, it is important to clarify that although Ms Abby valued and promoted experience as a classroom epistemology, I do not mean to suggest that she directly caused or is solely responsible for Grayson’s, or any student’s, problematic use of experience. Indeed, scholars in queer studies (Scott, 1993) have for several decades troubled broader cultural and academic discourses with respect to experience, so these tensions far exceed a single classroom or teacher. My intent instead is to describe the localized ways in which youth took up experience epistemically. Such description suggests needs for English teachers, regardless of intent, to engage with epistemic tensions, such as distortions of credibility and assimilationist requirements, rather than simply promote experience, implications that I explore further in the discussion.

Distortions of credibility

In the sophomore humanities classroom, cishet youth distorted credibility when they problematically defined experience in terms of essentialism and individualism. Because of essentialism, credible knowledge about sexual and gender diversity needed to be linked to queer and trans people, which resulted in cishet youth instrumentalizing and dehumanizing queer youth such as Camden. Because of individualism, cishet youth treated queer and trans youth as lacking credibility because they did not recognize collective vantage points as an epistemic phenomenon. In both instances, queer and trans youth were wronged as knowers through problematic attributions of (a lack of) credibility.

Essentialism.

Camden – who identified as a gay, biracial (Black and white), cis, young man – explained how some cishet youth, specifically those who expressed anti-queer values, invoked him and his gay identity in classroom discussions. He said:

It's kind of weird, but it's just like I feel like they're saying that because what they're going to say is something offensive, but I'm not- I don't get that offended by the things because I know a lot of people are joking and stuff. And so it's just, if it's a joke or something, I'll be like, “haha” [deadpan tone], you know. But then people will be serious and stuff. And so when people bring it up in class, it's just like, “okay, so they're acknowledging it.” You know, they're trying to be as respectful as they can. But then it just kind of feels weird, like, “Oh, that's why you're bringing up my name, it's just to help you out” and stuff. And it's just- it's- I’m okay with it. But it's a little weird.

Camden described a classroom situation during which cishet youth – sometimes jokingly, other times seriously – named him when making statements about queerness. On one level, these linguistic acts were social in that the youth invoked Camden to shield themselves from potential criticism. For instance, if Camden laughed (“haha”) and defined a statement as not offending him, then a homophobic joke (perhaps “that’s so gay”) would be acceptable. On another level, these linguistic acts were epistemic and, because of essentialism, perpetuated epistemic harm. In class, Camden became the token queer who, because of his queerness, became a rhetorical symbol that made another – implicitly cishet – youth’s statement acceptable and, thus, credible. In a context in which lived experience carried heavy epistemic weight, Camden was hypervisible.

Students’ discursive actions enacted epistemic harm in multiple ways. In one way, Camden was instrumentalized. Rather than honoring his testimony, Camden’s publicly visible queerness became a symbolic tool to justify statements and shield people who – whether well intentioned and “trying to be as respectful as they can” or not – ultimately said something offensive and hateful about queer people. He became an object to be used, and in this way, youth dehumanized him. Rather than being a credible knower, he was reduced to an epistemic tool. Thus, his credibility was distorted through his lack of agency to choose. In another way, his credibility was distorted because he was granted too much. Because of essentialism, statements about queerness needed to be tied to queer people who were present in the classroom. Such moments were ones of tokenism, in which Camden represented all queer people and knowledge authoritatively, a situation that warped his experiences as a knower by granting and expecting more than any single person can or should bear.

Individualism.

Furthering distortions of credibility in the classroom, cishet youth defined experiential knowledge through individualism rather than collectivism, which in turn produced epistemic harms such as dismissal and marginalization. Describing classroom discussions of queer and trans topics, Camden explained how he and two other LGBTQ+ youth – both of whom, like Camden, were out with their classmates – experienced testimonial injustices:

If it's just me, Casey, and Thomas continuously throughout the period trying to like combat these like issues that people are having with us [queer and trans people], it's kind of like pointless because they just see the three of us as what they're against. And they're like, “No.” But then if they see someone like Mariam or Grayson, then they're like, “Okay, they're like me, and they have a different opinion than me.” And then I think because they're not a part of it, they're less emotionally tied to it, so it's more strictly based on like facts.

In contrast with Grayson, Camden suggested that rather than having greater credibility to speak about sexuality and gender, queer and trans youth such Camden, Casey and Thomas were treated as having less credibility. My point though is not to determine whether Camden’s or Grayson’s description was more accurate. Rather, I am interested in understanding how homophobia and transphobia result in descriptions of epistemic practices that seem contradictory.

Reflecting the prevalence of epistemic essentialism among students, Camden suggested that youth evaluated knowledge about sexuality and gender through direct, causal ties to an individual speaker’s identity. Queerness and transness became disqualifying identities, resulting in suspicious knowledge claims, and therefore, a testimonial injustice through which an audience’s (i.e. cishet youths’) identity prejudice (i.e. homophobia and transphobia) resulted in a credibility deficit for the knowers (i.e. Camden, Casey and Thomas). Camden drew a contrast with cishet young people such as Mariam and Grayson, who were granted credibility, even credibility excesses, precisely because of their sexuality and gender being normative, that is, as “like me” in the view of the cisheteronormative audience. Thus, distortions of credibility harmed Camden, Casey and Thomas as knowers.

This distortion was about individualism. Despite a trio of queer youth expressing a collective viewpoint, some cishet students denied them the status of legitimate knowers. The definition of lived experience epistemology circulating in the classroom only recognized individual experiences as causally producing knowledge. This interpretive frame made it difficult for listeners to recognize a locally emergent LGBTQ+ standpoint in the classroom and to value the labor required from Camden, Casey and Thomas to achieve and express this shared vantage point. Instead, an individualistic frame resulted in a suggestion of emotionality and relativism that discredited collective knowledge. This epistemic harm was not only about the testimonial injustice of distorted credibility; it also suggested that the hermeneutic resources of the classroom – in this case a limited/ing definition of the role of experience in producing knowledge – harmed queer and trans youth as knowers. Indeed, as Medina (2013) explains, “testimonial injustices become not simply likely but almost inescapable when the persistence of hermeneutic gaps renders certain voices less intelligible (and hence less credible)” (p. 96).

To explore hermeneutic injustices further: Camden described a credibility gap emerging because queer and trans youth were “emotionally tied to” their sexuality and gender. Beyond the homophobic and transphobic characterization of only queer and trans people having affective connections with sexuality and gender, this dismissal of Camden, Casey and Thomas relied on a binary of reason and emotion. This hierarchical binary produced a hermeneutic injustice, namely, the shared pool of meaning making resources was constrained because of the exclusion of affective epistemic practices. Discussing queerness and epistemic injustice, Hall (2017) states that queer knowing has important “affective dimensions” (p. 163). Anzaldúa (2012) – who challenges essentialist binaries through discussing mestiza consciousness – explains that “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residence of an unnatural boundary” (p. 25). Hall (2017) extends Anzaldúa’s insight, describing the borderlands as an epistemic “space where queer knowing is an affective register cultivated in the fraught and shifting place between worlds” (p. 163). Considering Camden’s statement alongside these descriptions of queer knowing clarifies an epistemic harm. If queer knowing involves an “affective attunement” (Hall, 2017, p. 163; see also, Lorde, 1984), then cishet youths’ disregard of Camden, Casey and Thomas’ knowledge claims (i.e. testimony) happened alongside and through a disregard of specifically queer meaning making resources (i.e. the affective as a nonbinary hermeneutic resource for queer knowing). Thus, distortions of credibility relied on individualism, which operated through erasures of the collective testimony provided by queer and trans youth in the classroom and the (in)valid hermeneutic resources these youth might mobilize.

In sum, Camden highlighted how in the sophomore humanities classroom there were distortions of credibility despite teacher and student commitment to validating youths’ testimony based on lived experiences. He showed that many youth used a definition of testimony that was limited/ing because of its reliance on essentialism and individualism. Distortions of credibility manifested in paradoxical ways that simultaneously ascribed too much and too little credibility to queer and trans youth such as Camden, resulting in cishet youth instrumentalizing and dehumanizing him, denying collective vantage points and excluding queer, affective ways of knowing. Furthermore, cishet youth were ascribed too much and too little credibility, with Grayson and Mariam needing to validate Camden, Casey and Thomas’ knowledges yet cishet youth largely being protected and legitimized when expressing ignorance of sexuality and gender.

Assimilationist requirements and homonormativity

In addition to distortions of credibility, epistemic injustices unfolded in the classroom with respect to assimilationist, homonormative requirements. Even though Ms Abby and some students articulated a commitment to listening to lived experiences, not all speaking positions were legitimate in the classroom. Indeed, to articulate knowledge of lived experience, queer and trans youth needed to be publicly located in a stable identity within grids of cultural intelligibility (Foucault, 1978). This need to be located resulted in a requirement for youth to adopt a normative way of being LGBTQ+ and to conform to dominant expectations for acceptable, intelligible and respectable ways of being queer. In other words, youth were required to assimilate to homonormative (Duggan, 2003) models of queerness, which were, in this case, white ways of being queer (Ferguson, 2005).

Reflecting on how youth responded to Camden’s contributions during classroom lessons, Imani – who identified as a Black, cisgender young woman and alternatively as bi, bicurious and questioning – described how students tried to figure out other students’ identities:

Of course as people, we always wonder, “Is this person this? Is this person that?” You know when clues start dropping and they don't seem like the norm, whatever that is supposed to be, who are we to determine what the norm is? But it's like if they seem sort of out of the norm, whether it be sexuality or race wise, you begin to question things. And so last year, people were like, “Oh, no, he's [Camden’s] gay,” or “Oh, no, he's straight” or “Oh, no, he's this or he's that.” And so when he had finally came out, or I guess when it kinda became public and everything just got established, you're like, “Okay he's this.” […] I feel like at a certain time you just have to establish things.

She described youth tightly monitoring, if not policing, one another with respect to grids of cultural intelligibility of sexuality and race. Although Grayson’s comments perhaps afforded youth agency in disclosing their queer and trans identities (“if there's someone in that group [LGBT people] […] who is okay with everyone knowing who they are”), Imani suggested that, as a group, youth in the humanities course ascertained speakers’ identities with respect to rigid binaries of “this” or “that,” such as “gay” or “straight.” Because experience was defined through essentialism and individualism, to present knowledge entailed an identity disclosure. Therefore, subtle contours of youths’ actions resulted in “clues […] dropping,” especially when someone identified in a non-dominant way with respect to queerness or race and, therefore, did not “seem like the norm.” The accumulation of clues led to an expectation among youth that “at a certain time” one’s identity needed to become unambiguously “establish[ed].” In short, to be credible, a person needed to occupy a stable location in identity binaries and, thus, assimilate to normative expectations for being nonnormative, such as a homonormative way of being queer.

Imani resisted such imperatives. She described herself as questioning her sexuality, at times more strongly identifying as bisexual or bicurious, but she shared this information with very few people. In my discussions with students, almost everyone characterized Imani as straight, an assumption, of course, indicative of the school’s heteronormativity. In her words, her sexuality was “not something I’m hiding. It's not something I'm trying to announce. It's just there.” Even as Imani eschewed publicly disclosing her sexuality – perhaps related to “coming out” narratives being racialized as white (King, 2014; Moore, 2011) – she still articulated, perhaps even internalized, the requirement for queer people to be visible in stable, acceptable ways to be recognized. This dynamic was an epistemic injustice: to access the rather vexed and limited possibilities for being credible as an LGBTQ+ knower, Imani and other queer and trans youth were not able to simply exist as themselves in ways that made sense to themselves, but instead they needed to perform contortions to fit themselves within normative expectations for visible queerness or transness.

Camden explained how he experienced the surveillance described by Imani, specifically focusing on the intersections of his sexual (gay) and racial (biracial, Black and white) identities. He discussed how the interrelations of his identities did not neatly fit into the limited/ing normative categories of experience that were intelligible in the classroom. He said:

One day I'll be like, “Okay, I'm living my life.” And they'll go, “Ooooh! He's just being white.” And I'm just like, “That's not a thing.” And then another day, they're like, “You're supposed to be Black. You're supposed to be like hard and stuff and like gangsta.” And I'm just like, “That's kinda racist,” and I don't know how to respond to it, so I just kind of ignore it.

Camden described the narrow identity categories available to him, which resulted in interconnected racist and homophobic regulation. His biracial identity was erased, particularly through its relation to his gender and sexuality. He recounted his experiences of being out and living his life, being accused of being white because of his sexuality, and then subsequently having peers expect him to express Black (cis)masculinity through a display of toughness or “be[ing] hard.” This marginalization was because of not only his race existing between binaries but also his gay sexuality disrupted the homophobic, racist binary of white gayness and Black straightness.

While Imani’s statements indicated the need for assimilation, Camden suggested that because of the ways racism and homophobia became intertwined in defining homonormative models of gayness, not every LGBTQ+ youth even had the same possibilities to assimilate. In this dynamic of being harmed as a knower, Camden’s insights reveal not just a testimonial injustice (i.e. that there was a distortion of credibility) but a more profound hermeneutic injustice. The fact of the unintelligibility of his biracial gayness indicated that queer and trans youth, and particularly queer youth of Color, were misunderstood and misrecognized because of lacunae in the classroom’s shared epistemological resources for naming and interpreting identities. In this way, Camden and Imani encountered the hermeneutical injustice of “having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding” (Fricker, 2007, p. 155, emphasis in original; see also Medina, 2017), namely, their queer of Color personhood. Thus, rigid, binary identity constructs that promoted homonormative, assimilationist requirements produced epistemic injustices of not only distorting credibility – a testimonial injustice – but also making it difficult if not impossible to recognize and understand non-(homo)normative experiences – a hermeneutic injustice.

Discussion: epistemic (in) justice and LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula

In the context of the sophomore humanities classroom’s LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum, Ms Abby and some students such as Tamarah and Grayson named a commitment to valuing knowledge shared by queer and trans youth was based in lived experiences. Although this commitment to honoring testimony gestured toward epistemic justice, the effects were limited/ing, particularly because of the problematic ways that youth mobilized testimonial practices and did not attend to disrupting oppressive hermeneutic practices. As Camden indicated, both essentialism and individualism were problematic elements of some cishet youths’ distortion of credibility. In some moments, he was instrumentalized and dehumanized as a token symbol of queer credible knowledge rather than a knower himself. At other times, queer and trans youth such as Camden, Casey and Thomas were dismissed as knowers, while white, cishet youth such as Mariam and Grayson were granted excesses of credibility, testimonial injustices which dovetailed into hermeneutic injustices in which reason and emotion were dichotomized and a queer affective register of knowledge rejected. Imani and Camden revealed further epistemic tensions in that to offer testimony required queer and trans youth to conform to normative grids of intelligibility that characterized identities in rigid, binary ways. This dynamic resulted an assimilationist, homonormative imperative that emerged through the co-constitution of racism and homophobia.

These findings offer nuance to scholarly understandings of inclusive curricula. Of course, political and cultural acts to erase and illegalize representations of queer and trans lives from curricula are a form of epistemic injustice if not epistemic violence. Still, the mere presence of curricular representations does not necessarily disrupt and transform epistemic injustices in classrooms. Indeed, as Camden, Casey, Imani and Thomas experienced, queer and trans students can encounter distortions of credibility and profound lacunae in the collective pools of epistemic resources.

Yet the presence of epistemic injustice does not mean that queer and trans youth are defined by this harm or solely exist in a state of victimhood (Blackburn, 2007; Marshall, 2010). Instead, Camden and Imani enacted resistance even in the tight spaces of the classroom (Cruz, 2013), and their small resistances gesture toward alternative, more epistemically just practices that are vital for English education pedagogies when engaging LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum.

First, knowledge and, thus, learning cannot be treated merely as individualistic, isolated phenomena. Such epistemic practices result in the too-easy dismissal of a trio of LGBTQ+ youth such as Camden, Casey and Thomas articulating a shared vantage point. Moreover, isolating knowledge from the collective webs of social relationships suggests that knowers are not accountable for their (lack of) knowledge. Knowledge must be approached as a collective achievement that entails accountability, including accountability for learning across time. In approaching knowledge as a collective phenomenon, this shift not only entails particular knowledge claims (i.e. testimony) but also shared epistemic pools (i.e. hermeneutics), including affective ways of knowing.

Next, links between identity and knowledge cannot be essentialized in simplistic ways. On one level, essentialism is a hermeneutic framework that reifies binaries and calcifies normative grids of intelligibility. Queer youth of Color such as Camden and Imani needed to assimilate to homonormative identity models grounded in homophobia and racism. Instead, possibilities for fluid and nonbinary ways of knowing and be(com)ing must be possible. Thus, inclusive curriculum must engage queer pedagogical models of questioning certainty and stability rather than pronouncing authoritative knowledge about LGBTQ+ people.

On another level, when students and teachers essentialize knowledge, queer and trans youth become necessary experts and cishet youth become always already ignorant (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007). They do not and cannot know, so their ignorance about sexuality and gender is justified, even naturalized. It elides their knowledge and responsibility for knowledge. In turn, knowledge-as-essentialized suggests that knowledge is fixed (i.e. a person either is or is not an identity and, therefore, does or does not and can or cannot know), which forecloses possibilities for learning. Thus, rather than simplistically essentializing knowledge and identity, knowledge needs to be understood as fluid, flexible, collective and distributed. Such fluidity opens up possibilities for both learning and accountability. In doing so, not only can distortions of credibility be brought into focus but also distortions of epistemic responsibility can be redistributed and brought into balance.

Conclusion: epistemic contexts for LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum

As the experiences of queer and trans youth at Harrison High School such as Camden, Casey, Imani and Thomas demonstrate, the presence of LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum does not inevitably or uniformly foster a classroom context that is necessarily safe or affirming. This is not to say that curricular representation does not matter. It does. However, the experiences as knowers of Camden and Imani in particular reveal that there is a need to attend to the epistemic practices of a classroom, especially the practices through which youth, and in particular queer and trans youth of Color, are positioned as (not) credible and the identity categories that youth must take up to even be recognized as potentially credible knowers.

These epistemic injustices do not merely arise after the introduction of LGBTQ+-inclusive curricular texts. Instead, questions of testimonial and hermeneutic (in)justice are always present in classrooms. English teachers, particularly those embroiled in controversies about inclusion and curriculum, thus have viable pathways for interrupting some epistemic harms that queer and trans youth experience, especially by following the lead of these youth. Perhaps queer and trans youth beyond Harrison High School will engage in small resistances such as constructing collective LGBTQ+ vantage points, engaging in affective knowing or taking up fluid and nonbinary speaking positions. Perhaps they will not. It is impossible to know ahead of time what queer and trans youth will or will not do, and my point is not to essentialize them. Rather, epistemic tensions such as distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements suggest that English teachers must listen to, learn from and respond to the particular epistemic practices of the queer and trans youth in their classrooms. In turn, they must foster epistemic contexts that are more just, affirming and humanizing. Such contexts can amplify the liberatory possibilities of LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum when English educators teach it.

Note

1. Names of people and places are pseudonyms.