“That's So Gay!”: A Study of the Deployment of Signifiers of Sexual and Gender Identity in Secondary School Settings in Australia and the United States

Abstract

While notions of “choice”, essentialism and sexual identity have become some-what passe in the academy, the controversy associated with these notions has not waned within secondary educational settings. Official curriculum and peda-gogy in Australia and the United States is still, I will demonstrate, very much constrained by this hackneyed debate. In the first part of this article my focus is primarily on tropes of choice. I ponder how such tropes are utilised, prohibited and circumvented within the confines of the school. This analysis is informed by interviews I conducted with people who work to support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teachers and students in secondary school settings. Given the tenuous position of choice in official discourses of schooling, I go on to consider how the language young people use has the potential to disturb hetero and homo normalising practices. I do this by conceiving familiar and unfamiliar sexual and gender identity categories as catachreses. My focus is on the now ubiquitous term “that's so gay” where “gay” comes to signify all things uncool and nerdish. This strategy is provoked, in part, by my frustration with advocates for lesbian and gay identified youth who underscore the “victimhood” of these young people via an insistence that terms such as “that's so gay” be read as always, and, in every way, a homophobic slur. By conceiving “that's so gay” as catachresis it is possible to see how such terms can simultaneously sustain and disrupt the normalising practices that objectify schooling's subjects.