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Using feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, this paper analyzes the public commentary and anxious concern about child-welfare in a recent lesbian teacher sex scandal in Vancouver, Canada, involving Jean Robertson. Arguing that the public and professional uproar is not really about child-protectionism so much as it is about the place of white teacher lesbianism in school culture, I ask new questions about how the regulation of teenage sexuality operates to secure heterosexual bifurcations of gender in the school. The idea of the innocent, white "girl" child is, in this paper, shown to anchor a public and professional worry about the proliferation of queer teenage identifications in the school. Using Judith Butler's formulation of the heterosexual matrix, Lee Edelman's conceptualization of reproductive futurity, Judith Halberstam's investigation of queer time and space, and Mikko Tuhkanen's postcolonial reading of lesbian sexuality in popular film, I underscore societal-based upset about white teacher lesbianism. I argue that the teacher sex scandals in North America are driven by an unspoken societal upset about identifications and desires inhospitable to binary gender positions and heteronormative futures. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper examines the social construction of white, female, spinster teacher personality profiles in the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the psychological, medical, and psychoanalytic literature, I provide an overview of how white unmarried female teacher personalities were understood in order to provide a historical context for present day queer and transgender identities in North American schools. I identify four main personality profiles of the female teacher in educational historiography which were informed by Freudian psychoanalysis: the masculinity complex; moral masochism; altruistic surrender; and the tyrannical disciplinarian. I conclude that spinster teacher personality profiles can be read as queer and gender-variant and that such readings shed light on gender and sexual regulation in education historiography. (Contains 2 notes.)

In this essay, the author first describes the cultural ethos of the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario (FWTAO), with its primary commitment to the never-married teacher. She then traces the declining status of the single, female teacher in the postwar period. Coupled with this decline is an emphasis placed on the importance of marriage and motherhood by the educational community. Second, the author examines the postwar sociological and psychological literature to show how traditional gender roles and heterosexual identity cultures were both regulatory and normative. The importance placed on heterosexual adjustment by educational administrators became intricately tied to the worry about female homosexuality, masculine identified, and independent women. This essay also argues that married women teachers attained the professional stature originally held by single female teachers. The newly formed allegiance to the marriageable and heterosexually attractive woman (whether married or unmarried) caused difficulty for single females wanting to pursue administrative positions. The call to embrace a heterosexual ideal of beauty worked as an obstacle to tenure and to upward career mobility for female teachers who could not or would not adhere to these regulatory ideals. (Contains 135 footnotes.)

L'auteure fait une enquete sur la levee de l'interdit du mariage pour les institutrices de l'Ontario apres la Seconde guerre mondiale et avance que cette preference est un exemple de [...]

PUBLIC TOILET SIGNS are changing, and the gendering of elimination is now subject to discussion and debate. This became obvious to me when an older male professor at York University [...]

As a critical methodology, performance ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to tap into what I call queer social scientific remainders by using the dramatic staging of ethnographic material such that it can be disseminated to audiences in an arts-based dramatic forum. While ethnographers are often drawn to the atmosphere of the theatre and its capacity to give multidimensionality to their research, there is a lack of engagement with queer theory and transgender countercultural aesthetics. There is also an investment in a transcendental truth that negates the possibilities of staging the emotive and unknowable dimensions of the gendered subject. Performance ethnography has become a pedagogically exciting methodological form because it can emotionally engage audiences in topics they would normally avoid. However, such topics must incite curiosity and critical questioning, as opposed to definitive truth claims and easy answers. As evidenced by the playQueer Bathroom Monologues(QBM)—my case study—audiences engage, refuse, query, contest, affectively respond to, and ignore, the difficult and disturbing excesses of research about queer and transgender material. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]