Irina Schmitt
Senior lecturer
Transgressing purity: Intersectional negotiations of gender identity in Swedish schools
Author
Summary, in English
The vulnerability of gender nonconforming young people is all too well documented. Arguably, “trans issues” in schools are not restricted to transphobic comments, and need to be analyzed intersectionally. Guided by Lugones’ discussion of the politics of purity read together with the analysis of cisnormativity, this article draws on interviews with Rakel, Robin and Mika, who were part of a larger study with 13 trans and nonbinary young people and young adults in Sweden, the first of its kind in Sweden. It engages their analyses of how schools and teachers express a desire for cisnormative purity in their interactions with gender nonconforming students. Normative whiteness and fat-phobia, as well as adultism and schools’ reluctance in instituting nondiscrimination regulations and policy frameworks into appropriate, affirming and reliable practices, violently affect gender nonconforming young people just as much as schools’ and teachers’ poor knowledge about gender identities. In examining participants’ negotiations with schools, this text reads both cisnormative oppression and gender nonnormative transgression as a condition of a specific moment in the Swedish political landscape marked by the simultaneousness of control and liberation, of imposed cisnormative purity and concurrent negotiation.
Department/s
- Department of Gender Studies
Publishing year
2023
Language
English
Pages
93-111
Publication/Series
Journal of LGBT Youth
Volume
20
Issue
1
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Topic
- Gender Studies
Keywords
- gender
- trans and nonbinary youth
- cisnormativity
- purity
- intersectionality
- school
- genus
- trans och ickebinära ungdomar
- cisnormativitet
- renhet
- intersektion
- skola
Status
Published
Project
- Young trans* and intersex peoples' experience of school
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1936-1661