“Please Sir! Can I Come Out of the Closet and into the Classroom?”: British Low Culture and Representations of Queer Masculinities in Education

Abstract

This chapter considers representations of queer masculinities in British Low Culture as cultural pedagogy, making explicit the presence and, perhaps more importantly, the absence of queer masculinities in the cultural representations of education. Offering quintessentially British case studies, the chapter draws from what Leon Hunt (1998, p. 75) refers to as “‘[b]ehind the school desk’ fiction”—such as comics and pulp novels, illicitly read by schoolchildren during school hours—and television sitcoms, dramas, films, and so on that present/misrepresent schoolchildren, schools, and schooling. While often openly homophobic in their attitudes, this chapter insists that such texts, as per hegemonic masculinity, suppress homosexuality, while reproducing the heterosexual status quo. By examining the intersections between the categories/concepts of queer masculinities and education, this chapter proposes an understanding of the range and layers of meanings and practices of those intersections as well as offering the possibility for imaginatively reconstructing the categories/concepts themselves. This chapter suggests that the range and layers of the term queer can be better understood in two ways: queer peculiar, and as an insult to homosexuals. The ambiguous tension between the two definitions allows British Low Culture of the classroom to engage with insulting representations of queerness because they “hide” behind the “school desk” of queer peculiar.