Abstract:
This paper reports on work for the book entitled 'Schooling Sexualities', coauthored with Richard Johnson. It turns the spotlight on to lesbian and gay teachers. In it, we argue that the apparently ever-increasing surveillance of teachers and schools is partly to do with anxieties produced by the seductiveness of the best teaching. In turn, the paper points to the ways that the best teaching is constricted by the punitive surveillance of schools teachers and sexualities. Any exploration of the stories of lesbian and gay teachers will involve narratives of constraint and punishment, but our central story in this paper is much more positive. It concerns the reactions of a class of primary school children when their teacher came out to them, the steps they took to protect him and their sophisticated analyses of the ways they (and he) had to negotiate homophobia as a fact of every day life.