Queering Literacy Teaching: Analyzing Gay-Themed Discourses in a Fifth-Grade Class in Brazil

Abstract

Following queer theory and critical discourse analysis principles, my aims in this article are to analyze gay-themed discourses in literacy contexts and to suggest a way of queering literacy teaching. In the first part, I focus on ethnographically generated data from a class of fifth-graders in Brazil. The analysis shows that homoeroticism was openly discussed by the pupils in off-task classroom discourses and in focus-group interviews, but in on-task classroom discourses led by the teacher it was an issue that was not to be raised. As a consequence, I argue that there is a need for openly incorporating gay and lesbian themes into classroom discourses and for queering literacy teaching. This can be done by introducing a view of discourse as a social practice, which makes it possible to analyze the ways in which sexualities are discursively constructed, thereby implying that there are differently situated ways of constructing sexualities rather than a single essentialist manner. In the second part, I introduce principles for a pedagogic discourse analysis to which literacy teachers could make recourse in order to show the discursive nature of sexualities. This approach is exemplified by an analysis of the discursive construction, in a Brazilian magazine article, of a man as gay.