When Queer Meets Teacher: A Narrative Inquiry of the Lived Experience of a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Queer teachers, as a result of inherent heterosexuality, have been historically living in a society of victimization and marginalization. Despite advances in LGBT rights and policies, research on queer teachers remains contextually undertheorized. Thus, this paper, based on life history interview, presents a narrative study of a non-local English teacher working in Thai higher education. Premised on the post-structuralist perspectives, this article aims to explore the construction of queer self as a professional language teacher through how sexuality is negotiated in the process of interacting with diverse subjects. The findings illustrate the fluidity of queer subjectivity within different discourses, where corresponding strategies are self-imposed to negotiate the boundaries between queer and professional selves. While queer individuals are affected by the dominant discourse of heteronormativity, queer visibility within institutional cultures comes down to a subjective piece. We conclude that queer teachers are professional subjects since the discourse of queer as professional is (re)constructed and normalised at the workplace.