Disrupting Dichotomies for Social Change: A Review of, Critique of, and Complement to Current Educational Literacy Scholarship on Gender

A few years ago, I attended a round-table discussion on girls, literacies, and identities. The presenter drew from the work of Judith Butler to analyze data that represented girls engaging in electronic literacies to interact with peers. Consistently, the presenter interpreted their social dynamics in heterosexist ways, arguing that the girls were making particular moves for the purpose of instigating or developing romantic relationships with boys. The possibility that any of the girls (or boys) may have experienced same-sex desire was not considered. More specifically, there was a situation in which a girl electronically represented herself as a boy and entered a boys' chat room. The presenter interpreted this move as being a way for this girl to gain access to what the boys thought about the girls; she was cast as a sort of spy in a girl-boy game. This interpretation troubled me: not because I understood it to be an improbable interpretation, but because in coming to this analysis, the presenter drew from the work of Butler - who is not only a feminist but also a queer theorist - and because it seemed to dismiss other possibilities completely. For example, I wondered whether the girl's representation of herself as a boy and entrance into the boys' chat room could also be interpreted as electronic cross-dressing and what difference such an interpretation would make for the implications of the research. However, it seemed to me that in this discussion, such an interpretation was impossible. It felt as if I, as a lesbian - and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth with whom I work - were impossibilities. Unfortunately, the impossibilities of LGBTQ youth in educational scholarship around gender and literacy are not limited to this single study. Queer youth are routinely ignored in this literature and in classrooms. In this conceptual essay, I draw on my firsthand experiences with queer youth to illustrate the significance