Gender and Sexualities in Education
A Reader
Series:
Edited By Elizabeth J. Meyer and Dennis Carlson
28. Hatred Haunting Hallways: Teacher Education and the Badness of Homophobia(s)
Introduction: On Badness
Extract
Chapter 28
Hatred Haunting Hallways
Teacher Education and the Badness of Homophobia(s)
Lee Airton
When you are targeted, it’s hard to know what to do. Sometimes I wrap myself in queer or psychoanalytic theory. I try to remember how we all suffer from gender- and heteronormative regulation, and that this is the transference (they do not hate me, they hate their own desire to break conformity, they hate the choices they have had to make against their desire). In so doing I can act with compassion; I can smile at staring children and say hello to glaring parents. I can approach gawking adolescents and warmly invite their questions. Humanizing myself is my best response. But sometimes I hide, behind a newspaper, behind a pillar. Sometimes I shut down and just go home. Sometimes I am rude or confrontational. A month ago I abruptly turned and walked towards a teenage couple who were following me in a subway station. They slowed and held each other, hiding their faces while I walked three slow circles around them and intoned “I see you…” on my last lap. We all have our ways of getting by.
This chapter was written during the school holiday months of July and August, in the largest city in Canada. Streets, subways, markets, and restaurants are different in the heat. Summer brings families and their school-age children into public space at all hours of the day. The street...
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