Chapter 7: Making Sense Of Contradictions In Deep South Schooling: Queer Potentialities and Possibilities

Students expect schooling to provide them with education on a variety of academic subjects, like reading, writing, mathematics, and the sciences. However, as others have thoroughly documented, schools also teach a hidden curriculum (Giroux & Purpel, 1983). That hidden curriculum teaches students the dominant sets of norms, values, identities, and ways of knowing, often closely identified with white supremacist heteropatriarchal ideals, perhaps especially in the U.S. South (Strunk, Locke, & Martin, 2017). Within the hidden curriculum, students receive an education about their own worth within communities from other students, teachers, and administrators with whom they interact. Those students, teachers, and others in the schooling context often police socially constructed gendered and sexual boundaries (Birden, 2005; Meiners & Quinn, 2012), creating and sustaining the gender binary and heteropatriarchy. This literature has been more carefully reviewed elsewhere, including by Strunk, Baggett, Riemer, and Hafftka (2016), so the focus of this chapter is on giving voice to the participants of the present study.