Since its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s, critical educational scholarship has also pushed far beyond the Marxist tradition and its focus on political economy and social class. Although the critical Marxist tradition remains a foundation for much of the work that followed, critical educational scholars now engage a range of intellectual and political traditions that help us better understand culture and identity, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, constructions of ability, ecological crisis, and their myriad intersections. Critical scholarship has also radically altered the way we inquire, from the way we conceptualize our research to the way we gather (...)

Catherine MacKinnon has made the most explicit theoretical attempt to subsume sexuality under feminist thought. According to MacKinnon, “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism... the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes, women and men“. This analytic strategy in turn rests on a decision to “use sex and gender relatively interchangeably“.

But how can an epistemic/ontological regime be brought into question? What best way to trouble the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality? (…) Without a doubt, feminism continues to require its own forms of serious play. (...) Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates. Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a “natural fact” or a cultural performance, or is “naturalness” constituted (...)

The harmful impacts of institutionalized gender normativity reverberate across the living world.

Generations of feminist, queer, and trans scholarship within and across the fields of Black and Indigenous studies, queer/trans of colour critique, and disability studies illustrate how gender normativity works to maintain the larger structures that facilitate its production - coloniality and racial capitalism central among them

Discrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.

Our analysis relies upon a social constructionist perspective that treats gender and sexuality as historically variable categories of difference overlaid onto external markers, behaviors, bodies, desires, and practices that typically function to reinforce major structures of inequality

Historically, transgender persons have been included in sociological curriculum to demonstrate the social construction of gender (Garfinkel 1967; Lorber 1994, 1996, 2005), explain the differences between the binary categories of sex and gender (Kessler and McKenna 1978), the concepts of “doing gender” (Messner 2000; West and Zimmerman 1987) and “gender display” (Goffman 1976). Most recently, the inclusion of medicalized intersexed bodies has furthered the argument that sex and gender categories are social constructs (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Kessler 1990; Preves 2003), while deconstructionist techniques posit gender performativity to expand and challenge these theories (Butler 1990; Halberstam 1998).

Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions - and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction “compels” our belief in its (...)

Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time. An open coalition, then, will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure.

It is impossible to think with any clarity about the politics of race or gender as long as these are thought of as biological entities rather than as social constructs. Similarly, sexuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology. Sexuality is as much a human product as are diets, methods of transportation, systems of etiquette, forms of labor, types of entertainment, processes of production, and modes of oppression. Once sex is understood in terms of social analysis and historical understanding, a more realistic politics of (...)

If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical dis-continuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there (...)

Given that race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability are socially constructed, the boundaries between groups are both rigid (in terms of their consequences for our lives) and fluid (because they can change).

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception (...)

According to her [Judith Butler], there is no natural sex, no definite point of reference that defines sex or gender. Rather, sex or gender are an effect of an ongoing repetition of social norms: discourses within power relations, namely those of normative heterosexuality and phallocentric logic, that materialize in time thanks to individual and social practices.

The idea of performativity is introduced in the first chapter of Gender Trouble when Butler states that “gender proves to be performance - that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed” (Butler 1990/1999, 25). For Butler, a performative act is one that “brings into being or enacts that which it names” (Butler 1995, 134). Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s account of language, Butler insists that gender is an imitation or miming of the dominant norms of (...)

Gender Expression: The expression of one’s gender identity, often through appearance and mode of dress, and also sometimes through behaviour and interests. Gender expression is often influenced by gender stereotypes.

The idea that sexual practice has the power to destabilize gender emerged from my reading of Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and sought to establish that normative sexuality fortifies normative gender.

Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.

Gender self-determination is a collective praxis against the brutal pragmatism of the present, the liquidation of the past, and the austerity of the future. That is to say, it indexes a horizon of possibility already here, which struggles to make freedom flourish through a radical trans politics. Not only a defensive posture, it builds in the name of the undercommons a world beyond the world, lived as a dream of the good life.

Gender affirmation: process of being affirmed in one’s gender identity. Four dimensions: social, psychological, medical, and legal.

Gender identity: The personal experience of oneself as a boy/man, girl/woman, as a mix of the two, as neither or (especially in those cultures embracing ideas about other genders) as a gender beyond man or woman.

Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. A typology of actions would clearly not suffice, for parodic displacement, indeed, par-odic laughter, depends on a context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered. What performance where will invert the inner/outer distinction and compel a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of gender identity and sexuality? What performance where will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the (...)

The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: “man” and “woman“. The parodic repetition of gender exposes as well the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an “act“, as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status.

We might become the new disestablishmentarians, the state religion we wish to disestablish being the religion of heteronormativity. We might argue that public policy and public institutions may not legitimately compel, promote, or prefer inter-gender relationships over intragender attachments. Without appropriating too much of the liberal baggage of the discourse of religious tolerance, we might borrow from this rhetoric a strategy for reversing the terms of antigay propaganda and exposing the myriad ways that state apparatuses promote, encourage, and produce “special rights“ for heterosexuality.

strategy of equivocation does not focus on social identities but on practices, processes as well as relations of Power knowledge and “truth“ (Foucault). It tries to subvert those mechanisms that secure the working of a normative heterosexual gender order or any other order which seems to be “natural“ or unquestionable. It intervenes into regimes of “normality“ and processes of normalization by revealing ambiguity where a single truth is claimed, where a clear line is drawn, or an entity is stabilized. It functions as an answer to the critique of identity politics as intervenes in the principle of identity. Therefore a (...)

We seek to move beyond assumptions that the purpose of a programme like DQSH [Drag Queen Story Hour] should be only to expose children to “diverse“ stories or easily digestible morsels of LGBT history and culture. Though DQSH publicly positions its impact in “help[ing] children develop empathy, learn about gender diversity and difference, and tap into their own creativity” (Drag Queen Story Hour, n.d.-a), we argue that its contributions can run deeper than morals and role models. In what follows, we keep with a common drag performance trope in redirecting our readers away from what’s said on the surface and (...)

How gender identity relates to sexual identity is another area frequently broached by students learning about transgender lives for the first time. Before entering a discussion that addresses transgender topics, be sure that students have a clear grasp on the distinctions between gender identity (what gender you feel yourself to be) and sexual identity (who you are attracted to). Students often want to know how to define transgender people’s sexual identity after a gender transition. A typical question is, “If a heterosexual man transitions to become a woman, is she a lesbian?” The answer should highlight sexual categories as social (...)

Drag differs from other forms of gendered performance in its tendency to “mock authority and challenge the status quo”.

Newton writes: At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion“. Drag says “my 'outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine“. At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine.” Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender significations from the discourse of truth and falsity.