Identity and Difference: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in High School Contexts

In school, social interactions amongst students and between students and teachers construct possibilities, highlight boundaries, index difference, and mark transgressions around gender and sexuality norms. This ethnographic study explores the ways reading identity and difference while positioning others through teasing and jokes regulate gender and sexuality across school contexts. Examining everyday linguistic and social practices, this research questions what happens to constructions of "safe space" in high schools when students are spatially excluded and marginalized by their social locations and identities. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in a large urban public high school in Northern California, this dissertation incorporates the research methods of participant-observation, audio and video recording, interviews, questionnaires, and artifact collection. Focusing on two kinds of sites within one Northern California high school, the research looks at how the form and content of peer education, classroom social interactions, curricular materials, and teacher instructions and interventions both construct and contest binary gender and heteronormativity. One site for inquiry is a student-led club, the gay-straight alliance (GSA), which engages in activism, peer education, and awareness-raising efforts to target homophobia and transphobia in their school. The other kind of site explored in this study is the classroom--in particular, three freshman social studies courses that represent the school's curricular and pedagogical approach to the study of gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ issues.This dissertation explores the complex and contradictory relationship between the disciplining forces of everyday practices and structures of schooling that position people as gendered and the regulation of gender and sexuality done through joking and teasing. Participants wield power by joking and teasing about gender transgression, by claiming others' identity for them, and by positioning people as "other." Such maneuvering can position people differently across school contexts--allowing some to move through school spaces more freely while others become the site for examination and regulation of binary gender and heteronormativity. Joking illuminates the ambiguity of gender and sexuality and gets past a deeply engrained knowledge regime--that of the ideology of binary gender held together by the linchpin of heteronormativity. The structure of language, ideology, and schooling can close down rather than open up options in terms of gender and sexual identity and expression for participants. For some, ambiguity opens up creative possibilities for expression and identification, whereas for others, ambiguity constructs bodies and identities as the sites for such examination and regulation. This study focuses on the micro-level of violence done through performative speech acts that enact upon students' bodies and identities in an educational environment that strives toward constructing "safe space." Complicating the very possibility of such educational goals, this work highlights the intricacy of who gets to speak and how in school contexts