The Queer child of color: too muchness in the age of multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies

Beginning with the assumption that constructs of the child underpin our educational theories and practices, this dissertation takes up figurations of the child within two educational interventions. The study turns its focus onto the values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness especially as they are taken up within certain exemplars of multicultural education (MCE) and a specific curricular example of K-12 ethnic studies, and argues these values rely upon normative construction of childhood. Without discounting the importance of MCE and K-12 ethnic studies, this study shows how the MCE values of affirmation and inclusion, and the K-12 ethnic studies value of developing consciousness produce figures of the child that maintain aspects of normative constructs of childhood, especially a construct that understands children as naturally innocent. Moving through an interdisciplinary terrain of queer (youth) studies of education and queer theories of childhood from the humanities, this study outlines how children are figured within these values. Two narratives provide entry points for disrupting these constructions of childhood. Lawrence "Larry" King and the auto-narrative of being a Brown Boy in Drag are placed within the constructions of childhood reproduced through MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. Through a rasquache methodology, the author strings together characterizations of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag as being over-the-top or too much and centers the embodiments of queer childhood. It is precisely through this idea of iv too muchness that Larry and Brown Boy in Drag do not fit within these constructs and reveal the cracks of even our most critical-social justice forms of education, especially within the curricular models of MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. In turn, too muchness offers different imaginations of how children are figured in education theory, research, and curriculum.

THE QUEER CHILD OF COLOR: TOO MUCHNESS IN THE AGE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AND K-12 ETHNIC STUDIES by Ricky Jaime Gutierrez A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Education Culture and Society The University of Utah August 2019 Copyright © Ricky Jaime Gutierrez 2019 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Ricky Jaime Gutierrez has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Wanda S. Pillow , Chair 5/8/19 Date Approved Audrey Ann Thompson , Member Kathryn Bond Stockton , Member Frank Margonis , Member 5/8/19 Date Approved 5/8/19 Date Approved Date Approved Richard T. Rodriguez , Member Date Approved and by William Smith the Department/College/School of , Chair/Dean of Education Culture and Society and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Beginning with the assumption that constructs of the child underpin our educational theories and practices, this dissertation takes up figurations of the child within two educational interventions. The study turns its focus onto the values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness especially as they are taken up within certain exemplars of multicultural education (MCE) and a specific curricular example of K-12 ethnic studies, and argues these values rely upon normative construction of childhood. Without discounting the importance of MCE and K-12 ethnic studies, this study shows how the MCE values of affirmation and inclusion, and the K-12 ethnic studies value of developing consciousness produce figures of the child that maintain aspects of normative constructs of childhood, especially a construct that understands children as naturally innocent. Moving through an interdisciplinary terrain of queer (youth) studies of education and queer theories of childhood from the humanities, this study outlines how children are figured within these values. Two narratives provide entry points for disrupting these constructions of childhood. Lawrence “Larry” King and the auto-narrative of being a Brown Boy in Drag are placed within the constructions of childhood reproduced through MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. Through a rasquache methodology, the author strings together characterizations of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag as being over-the-top or too much and centers the embodiments of queer childhood. It is precisely through this idea of too muchness that Larry and Brown Boy in Drag do not fit within these constructs and reveal the cracks of even our most critical-social justice forms of education, especially within the curricular models of MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. In turn, too muchness offers different imaginations of how children are figured in education theory, research, and curriculum. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii Chapters 1. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 Fantasies of Childhood ............................................................................................ 10 Brown Boy in Drag: Toward a Sense of Too Muchness ......................................... 13 Rasquache Methodology--or, Writing With My Tacones On ................................. 16 2. QUEERNESS, CHILDHOOD, AND EDUCATION: MERGING QUEER YOUTH STUDIES IN EDUCATION AND QUEER THEORIES OF CHILDHOOD ................. 23 Queer Youth Studies of Education .......................................................................... 25 Using Queer as a Verb: Deconstructing Norms ....................................................... 26 Using Queer as a Noun: The LGBTQ Student ........................................................ 36 A Commitment to Youth ......................................................................................... 45 Queer Theories of The Child ................................................................................... 49 3. THE QUEER CHILD OF COLOR IN THE AGE OF MULTICULTURALISM ....... 56 White Childhood Innocence .................................................................................... 60 Including Black Children Into Innocence ................................................................ 65 Analysis Exemplars: The Limits of Affirmation and Inclusion............................... 68 Exemplars: The Documentary, Valentine Road, and GLSEN's Guides to Safety ... 70 Too Muchness as Intrusion: Rethinking Inclusion .................................................. 81 Chapter Summary .................................................................................................... 92 4. QUEERING THE ETHNIC STUDIES CHILD ........................................................... 96 Context on the Ethnic Studies Movement Into K-12 ............................................... 98 The Child of Ethnic Studies and Becoming Conscious ......................................... 101 Too Muchness and K-12 Ethnic Studies: A Reworking of Becoming .................. 112 On Becoming Queer .............................................................................................. 114 Chapter Summary .................................................................................................. 125 5. POSSIBILITIES AND IMPLICATION OF TOO MUCHNESS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION ................................................................................................. 127 Revisiting Becoming: Queerness, Childhood, and Education ............................... 128 Keeping With Too Muchness: Implications for Research ..................................... 132 Keeping With Too Muchness: Implications for Practice ....................................... 135 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 139 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In February of 2008 Lawrence “Larry” King, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California “was playing [a game] with a group of his girlfriends in the [schools’] outdoor quad. The idea was, you had to go up to your crush and ask them to be your Valentine. Several girls named boys they liked then marched off to complete their mission. When it was Larry's turn, he named Brandon, who happened to be playing basketball nearby. Larry marched right on to the court in the middle of the game and asked Brandon to be his Valentine” (Setoddeh, 2008). Brandon’s friends taunted Brandon and Larry. Two days after Larry asked Brandon to be his valentine, Brandon brought a gun to school and shot Larry twice at point-blank range. Larry was admitted to a hospital, declared brain dead the following day, and later taken off life support. The murder appeared across national news stories and the shooting was described by Ramin Setoodeh (2008) of Newsweek as “the most prominent gay-bias crime since the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard.” The murder garnered broad news coverage, investigative stories, and became the focus of a documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and picked up by HBO. Initial news coverage characterized Larry as a victim to horrific violence and prompted U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, 2 transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) advocacy organizations like GLSEN to underscore the rights of LGBTQ students and the need for schools to create inclusive environments (Harris, 2008). Secondary schools, colleges, and universities organized vigils and Day of Silence events to remember Larry and draw much needed attention to the harassment LGBTQ students face in schools (Harris, 2008). Larry became stapled into the memory of the LGBTQ community and the case served as an important reminder about the role schools play in anti-LGBTQ violence. Now, over 10 years since the murder, this dissertation remembers Larry and looks at a time (circa 2008) when schools were adopting antibullying and safe space initiatives meant to curb the violence toward LGBTQ+ students. At the same time these campaigns and initiatives were being adopted in schools, there was increased public and policy attention toward multicultural education (MCE) and K-12 ethnic studies. Around the time of Larry’s murder, several initiatives meant to support LGBTQ+ students paralleled key moments in MCE and K-12 ethnic studies: • In 2008, the year Larry was killed, Patricia Ramsey outlined the history of MCE and suggested the discipline’s “basic goals of equalizing educational opportunities and creating a diverse and truly equitable society have remained constant.” • In 2010, just two years after Larry’s murder, GLAAD began promoting Spirit Day, an annual day to speak out against LGBTQ bullying and bring awareness to bullying-related suicides. Spirit Day is observed in October as part of the National Bullying Prevention Month, a campaign originally started as a weeklong awareness campaign in 2006. • The growing campaign to end peer-to-peer bullying was complemented with GLSEN’s Safe Space Campaign, started in 2010 to respond to the findings of the 3 2009 National School Climate Survey showing 68% of LGBT student felt unsafe in school and 92% had been harassed in the previous school year. • In 2008, race and racism took a central role in political discourse with the campaign and election of President Barack Obama. A month after President Obama’s election NPR’s News & Notes (2008) held a month-long series on multiculturalism to discuss a changing national identity. The series interviewed Ronald Takaki who stated the election of President Barack Obama is a moment to “redefine the national identity.” The series described one major reason for why this moment had not come sooner, pointing to the lack of representation in US History courses of Asian Americans, African Americans, Chicanos, and Native people (NPR, 2008). • Writing in 2010, Cris Mayo addressed the absences of sexual and gender minorities in MCE. • In 2010, K-12 Ethnic Studies was receiving public and policy attention with the controversy over the Mexican-American Studies (MAS) program in Arizona (Julian, 2008). The MAS curriculum was developed from 2005 to 2010. The curriculum received criticism from then Arizona Superintendent of Public Schools, Tom Horne, who eventually was successful in his campaign to ban ethnic studies in Arizona in 2010. His attack on ethnic studies and the campaign to defend the curriculum had spread across national news stories and sparked other districts across the country to start their own ethnic studies programs. These overlapping moments in education—the increased concern of safety for LGBTQ students, a revitalizing of MCE, and the new attention to ethnic studies in K-12 4 schools—reinforced certain constructions of childhood and inevitably open an opportunity to understand how queer and trans students of color slip between the cracks of these curricular interventions. To explicate this relationship, the dissertation turns to two key data points. The first point of data looks how the child is constructed through certain progressive values within multicultural education (MCE) and K-12 ethnic studies. How queer and trans students of color fit or don’t fit within these education strategies has much to do with how young people like Larry fit or don’t fit within certain constructions of childhood. A textual analysis of GLSEN’s education guides, the Valentine Road documentary (Cunningham, 2013), and the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) Program are used to show how the values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness, values of MCE and K-12 ethnic studies, may reproduce normative constructions of childhood. The second point of data sifts through the archive of news coverage, investigative stories, and the documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013). This archive provides accounts of Larry’s life through interviews with teachers, friends, and those involved in the subsequent murder trial of Brandon. The archive illustrates the life of a young, biracial, Black, trans, femme, gay student who moved through her 1 school with 0F uninhibited joy. Larry embodies a different mode of being than the constructions of childhood offered through MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. Connecting Larry’s life with 1 Gender pronouns are used interchangeably throughout this dissertation to illustrate the shifting gendered identities Larry played with while at school. Larry was boy, girl, trans, nonbinary, and so forth, and played with several selves that resist a singular gender identity or expression. Throughout this chapter, the gender pronouns he/him and she/her, and the neutral pronoun they/them are used in reference to Larry. my own memories of growing up a queer Mexican kid, memories I name as the auto- 5 narrative of Brown Boy in Drag, I elaborate on what I call too muchness as a mode of being for queer and trans children of color. These data points, along with the writing with queer youth studies in education and queer theories of childhood—fields that at times converge and conflict—form the theoretical apparatus for analysis. Too muchness is an extension of what Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) calls growing sideways. Growing sideways signals modes of irregular growth that defy a linear trajectory toward full stature and citizenship (Stockton, 2009). Stockton was instrumental in directing the field of humanities into thinking about a queered sense of childhood that undermined (hetero)normative constructs of childhood or what a culture of adulthood names as appropriate and fitting for children. In this sense, growing sideways eludes adult agendas in naming what children should be and become. Growing sideways references literary and fictional children, and too muchness extends this theoretical thinking to the bodies of children in a context where children live a large part of their lives, schools. Placing the theoretical contributions of queer youth studies and queer theories of childhood within/against the values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness shows how normative constructions of the child are entangled within MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. In turn, these curricular interventions present a limited idea of who children are and who children could become. Children like Larry exceed these boundaries of these constructions of childhood and provide an opening to rethink and retheorize our current social justice projects within education. Larry and Brown Boy in Drag help push on the discursive boundaries established through MCE and K-12 ethnic 6 studies, drawing connections between queerness of color, childhood, and education. This is especially important for queer and trans children of color who inhabit these blind spots. This rethinking may recognize and allow for how queer and trans students of color contribute to the work of social and cultural change. I approach my analysis through an interpretation of the Chicana/o art aesthetic of rasquache as a methodological approach. A rasquache methodology helps address the gaps in queerness and childhood in education research while also pushing this research to be inventive and useful. In this sense, rasquache works as critique and creation. The inventive features of rasquache works within this research to repurpose the embodied disruptions of Brown Boy in Drag and Larry to provoke and remind MCE and K-12 ethnic studies of theoretical benefits of thinking about the queer-child body. The archive of newscasts, news magazine stories, and a documentary have collected and recorded interviews with teachers, students, and parents. These data sources provide a portrait of Larry’s multiple, shifting, and embodied identifications, that is at the heart of too muchness, and are applied to the values of MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. Reading this data through a rasquache methodology helps construct a story about Larry that stands within and against the dominant social narratives about Larry and children more broadly. I am drawn to MCE and K-12 ethnic studies because they represent education tools concentrated on the politics of identity within schools. MCE has a longer history in K-12 schools, becoming the standard model through which social and cultural difference is discussed. Therefore, the child of MCE is familiar, saturated with images of children from various cultures holding hands and other similar images that serve as constant reminders children will bring forth a peaceful multiculturalism. It is difficult to refer to a 7 single definition of MCE as different authors present varying interpretations and critiques of and about MCE. The themes of affirmation and inclusion, however, have been constant throughout the different variations of MCE. Affirmation and inclusion work as principal values and practices within Multicultural education and have become colloquial language in referencing education’s dealings with diversity. While there are certainly other principles within MCE, I turn to inclusion and affirmation as commonly referred values that are part of the vernacular of multiculturalism within education research and practice. The value of developing consciousness is also not a new concept and not unique to ethnic studies, but it has been further cemented as ethnic studies moves into the K-12 setting. It is important to revisit this value, especially as it moves to a younger audience and may reproduce certain normative thinking about children. The value of developing consciousness is somewhat of a departure from the peaceful multiculturalism of MCE curriculum. Developing consciousness is a move to focus on power, privilege, and oppression (Sleeter, 2011; Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015). This is a distinguishing point for ethnic studies and its approach to developing consciousness within young people. The language of development reignites a developmental narrative young people are typically situated within. This narrative situates children as becoming conscious and ethnic studies as the curriculum that would facilitate the coming to consciousness. The purpose here is to develop and educate a group of critically conscious individuals so they could eventually impact social change. The value of developing consciousness, with the emphasis on a developmental discourse, sets an ideal trajectory of growing up meant to guide children toward what Marcelo Diversi and Claudio Moreira (2012) name as “more critical forms of citizenship” (p. 193). 8 As K-12 schools adopt MCE and ethnic studies, they must wrestle with the dilemma of teaching about difference without closing off how those identities should be enacted, performed, and experienced. MCE and K-12 ethnic studies may further find useful those childhood deviations that split from constructions of childhood within values of affirmation, inclusion, and consciousness, moving beyond or reimagining those very values. Additionally, MCE and K-12 ethnic studies are educational tools fore fronting race, a social category still relatively abandoned within queer studies of education. Queer of color critique, an area of research interrogating “…social formations at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class,” (Ferguson, 2004, p. 149) has only recently come into focus within education since a symposium in 2015 at the American Education Research Association annual meeting. The symposium described itself as advancing “…the emerging scholarship of queer of color critique in education research and curriculum studies,” setting itself against the predominantly White queer critique within education (Brockenbrough et al., 2015). While several scholars within education, namely Cindy Cruz, Lance McCready, Roland Sintos Coloma, Edward Brockenbrough, and Tomas Boatwright have centered queer and trans youth of color in their work, they are few within queer youth studies in education that at best footnotes the politics of race. My turn to MCE, K-12 ethnic studies, and queer studies (in both education and the humanities) draws connections between racial justice projects and studies of gender and sexuality. This research continues to move educators and education researchers to continuously consider race, gender, and sexuality as multiple and overlapping analytical frames, drawing from and contributing to the overarching area of queer of color critique 9 in education. Overall, this writing matters for those who advocate for social justice education but may unconsciously reproduce dominant constructions of childhood that limit our imaginations of who children are and how they contribute to social change. Education researchers and practitioners must allow for these theoretical ruptures/openings within current ideals or fantasies childhood. If education fails to consider the nuanced ways children identify and move about schools, we lose the productive and radical repurposing queer and trans children of color bring to meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. The risk of doing nothing is greater for children, those bodies that inhabit the childhood category more steadily and who are coerced to adopt values and norms educators deem worthy. To that effect, I do not suggest that we need better preparation for teachers to more accurately and precisely recognize emerging modes of racial, gendered, or sexual being, a task that I find largely impossible within teacher education. Instead, I suggest that educators engage with the embodied politics of subjectivity within categories of childhood, a process I discuss in chapters 3 and 4, and are foundational to thinking about children through too muchness. The race, gender, and sexuality play from Larry and Brown Boy in Drag disrupt the fantasies of childhood produced through the MCE and K-12 ethnic studies values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness. Bringing too muchness into MCE and K-12 ethnic studies I ask the following questions that frame the scope and purpose of this dissertation. • How do children like Larry and the Brown Boy in Drag show the cracks of racial justice projects? Specifically, what are the constructs of childhood produced 10 within the values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness that are a part of multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies? • How do Larry and Brown Boy in Drag help draw connections among childhood, race, queerness, and education? What might come from these connections? More specifically, what might MCE and K-12 ethnic studies, and perhaps education more broadly, learn from an idea of too muchness? To address these questions, I more thoroughly introduce three primary concepts: fantasies of childhood, too muchness, and rasquache methodology. The first, fantasies of childhood, describes the ideas/ideals of childhood that are constructed through education projects like MCE and K-12 ethnic studies, often aligned with dominate understandings of children as innocent and naive. Too muchness, the second concept, illuminates the limitations of these fantasies of childhood through the lives of Larry and the author’s own narrative of being a queer Mexican kid. Too muchness itself is fleshed out through the third concept, which interprets the artistic form of rasquache as a methodological approach. Rasquache methodology guides the shaping of too muchness that in turn is used to deconstruct the fantasies of childhood within MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. These interrelated concepts are important in understanding the direction of this dissertation and research. Fantasies of Childhood To understand these constructions of childhood, or what I commonly refer to fantasies of childhood, I follow the queer and poststructural feminist work in education showing how identities are shaped and maintained through curricula, pedagogy, and 11 education policy (Britzman, 1993; Britzman et al., 1993; Ellsworth, 1997; Mayo, 2007; Mayo, 2014; Talburt, 2014; Talburt et al., 2014). For example, Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997) details how pedagogies are part of a process of interpellation, where pedagogy works as an education apparatus that constitutes the nature of individual subjects’ identities, specifically students’ identities. Pedagogy works as a process of “hailing” them into the interaction between teacher/school and student/child, calling children into being and naming identities that may be assumed within the classroom. The purpose, as Ellsworth (1997) explains, is to prompt students into the social locations from which they would receive and understand classroom content. This is not limited to pedagogy as schools more generally are implicated within the production of identities, making assumptions about childhood and what the needs of the child are and in turn creating fantasies of childhood. This creates fantasies of childhood and authorizes education strategies created to meet students’ needs. Following Ellsworth’s (1997) study, fantasies of childhood work to situate student-teacher relationships and the possibilities of what identities can emerge in a classroom, going through a process of interpellation where the political ideology of curriculum and pedagogy constitutes the nature of children’s identities. The fantasies of childhood situate children on a specified trajectory of “growing up” that Stockton (2009) describes as their “supposed gradual growth, their suggested slow unfolding, which unhelpfully, has been relentlessly figured as vertical movement upward (hence, ‘growing up’) toward full stature” and subjecthood (p. 4). The process of growing up reproduces the typical developmental narratives about children and what is both appropriate and inappropriate for their age. The social anxiety around the appropriate path for children 12 facilitates structures that regulate children’s growth. While queer and feminist studies in education have shown how schools are implicated within the process of producing and regulating subjects, Susan Talburt (2004) reminds us there is “little agreement about what sorts of subjects education aims to produce” (p. 17). Disputes about what and how we should teach children are tangled with the hopes and fears of who children may grow up to be. Education research, curricula, pedagogy, and policy are all implicated within this imagination of childhood, creating their own ideals of how children should perform in schools, what they should be taught, how they should be taught, and the standards for measuring their learning. The attention to values within MCE and K-12 ethnic studies suggests that even our most social justice-oriented strategies are implicated within this regulation and maintenance certain fantasies of childhood. Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997) argues that even when education is on the side of liberation, it is still overly rationalistic, ignoring the fact that however carefully goals are set out, curricula designed and implemented, there is no guarantee that the knowledge and social subjectivities offered will be appropriated as intended (p. 44). In other words, even as MCE and K-12 ethnic studies regulate the subjectivities that are possible within a school space and name what identities may or may not be performed within the classroom, children take up and repurpose social codes of race, gender, and sexuality that are unexpected and, as I argue, useful to education’s theorizing. Our education fantasies of who the child should be and who the child should become therefore find themselves at home in antioppressive pedagogies and curriculum 13 in very particular ways. I argue against a presumption that the theoretical work of MCE and K-12 ethnic studies is complete and simply requires administrators and teachers to properly implement their methods. MCE and K-12 ethnic studies should never be theoretically closed off and this writing attempts to keep them open—to continuously engage with meanings of social justice education. Thinking of these education projects as complete or sufficient dangerously stagnates MCE and K-12 ethnic studies and closes off further theoretical enrichment. I focus on MCE and K-12 ethnic studies precisely because they are projects I support and wish to see deeply theorized and flourish. My particular turn towards ameliorative projects is not meant to dismiss the general hope toward the making of a better world. Instead, the embodied performances from Larry and Brown Boy in Drag disrupt fantasies of childhood so as to open current social justice projects to continued theorization. Too muchness intervenes and mobilizes those sloganized or stagnated areas within MCE or K-12 ethnic studies. The critiques I make of our fantasies of childhood do not foreclose the political hope of a progressive or radical education project, but instead may repurpose them for queer of color projects/politics. Brown Boy in Drag: Toward A Sense of Too Muchness Larry’s story and the pleasure through which Larry paraded the halls of his school triggered memories of how my own child body would flaunt itself. I remember the delight in the sound my mother’s tacones (high-heeled shoes) would make on our laminate kitchen floors. I often sneaked about our small trailer wearing her tacones, teetering as I attempted to swivel my hips. It was a performance I enjoyed, even as I 14 attempted to hide it from my family. I would imagine a scene/stage (usually quinceañeras or bodas) and an audience full of family and community. Within my performances I eventually included towels on my head to mimic long hair and I became quite talented at flipping damp-heavy toallas (towels) over my shoulder. The tacones, toallas, and bodas were markers of my mother’s Mexican femininity I layered onto my own child body; I was a boy in señora drag. I found pleasure in my brown boy body in drag and desire to be seen by my imagined audiences—even while hiding. My behaviors and desires to see myself as pretty and sexy as the heels would elongate my legs, were marked as deviant by those descriptions of boyhood that naturalize rough playing and a lack of concern for style. In my case, it was a deviation from the growth into my father’s masculinity. I could not project myself into a future where I would become someone like my father, who, for me, represented the adult, Mexican masculinity. To assume a role like my father’s would be to follow an expectation of growing-up that meant finding fulfillment by working on el rancho. My young boy body was meant to signal a normative and innocent growing into manliness and heterosexuality. The racial, gendered, and sexual differences my body exhibited spilled over to other contexts such as school and the culture of my small town. The amount of labor I exhausted in publicly minimizing the Mexican femininity my body seemed to overflow with was not enough to deflect the exclusion and isolation I felt growing up in the predominantly White, rural, and conservative town where my family and I were marked as outsiders. Even as I tried to go unnoticed within school, calculating the movements my body would make so as not to suggest femininity, classmates took notice of me—a 15 continuous surveillance. Although I tried to contain my body, my schoolmates were well trained to notice the racial, gendered, and sexual differences. My gestures became too pronounced, my voice was too high-pitched, and I was too Brown. I was simply too much. My memories of wearing my mother’s heels and desiring to be sexy, and Larry’s overly sexual Black femininity were disconnected from a sense of normal, innocent kid things. Larry and Brown Boy in Drag are decidedly not innocent. Larry was described as “playing grown-up without fully knowing what that means” as he disrupted the everyday business of E.O. Green and shocked many students and teachers (Setoddeh, 2008). The embodied expressions of race, gender, and sexuality for Larry and Brown Boy in Drag could not be contained. Even when I tried to minimize my flamboyance as a young queer kid, it was too pronounced. Stringing together my memories with the various stories about Larry, and pasting them within the pages of queer studies literature in education, has allowed me to name and expand on this sense of too muchness. It is through too muchness that I think through my own and Larry’s childhoods. The attempts I made to minimize my body had failed and Larry relished in the ways his body bothered his peers and teachers. The memories I have of when my Brownness, femininity, and sexuality seemed uninhibited, represented by my mother’s tacones, are re-remembered as embodiments of too muchness. The term is meant to signal an abundance of identity (overflowing identities), when and where a body is in relationship with multiple labels and categorical markings— a body that houses multiple, unyielding identities. Too muchness borrows from Lee Airton (2013) description of “queerness as the possibilities and excesses of sexuality, where sexuality is the unstructured flow of desire that tends to organize and become 16 identifiable as sexualities” but never simply as nonheterosexuality (p. 534). Too muchness signals a similar mode of excess and does not limit itself to sexualities. In referencing Raymond Williams, Sandra Soto (2010) describes racialized sexualities as signaling that “‘something not yet come,’ something still ‘at the very edge of semantic availability’” and it is precisely within this location of unintelligibility where I locate the force of too muchness (p. 3). Chapter 3 describes this force as provoking thinking around an idea of intrusion rather than inclusion. Intrusion may situate the queer and trans child of color as agentive that can change the dynamics of the school. Chapter 4 similarly situates too muchness as reworking the value of developing consciousness, or an idea of becoming, within K-12 ethnic studies to consider the embodied provocations queer and trans children of color provide to the goals of social justice ethnic studies is committed to. I understand the contradiction here in naming embodied performances as too muchness that may escape that very naming. Yet, I have settled on the imperfect term to talk about Queer, Black, and Brown life that is too much, bigger than any word or set of words could fully describe. I will forever face misrepresenting the subjects I am talking about because I simply do not have access to a language that could be enough. Rasquache Methodology—or, Writing With My Tacones On I turn to my own memory of being a Brown Boy in Drag to inform my analysis. The process of using the material markers and embodiments of my mother’s femininity to fashion an altogether different form of expression is to perform a sense of rasquachismo, 17 utilizing what is available to create something beautifully different. To enter this research through a metaphor of writing with my tacones on is to posit a rasquache researcher. To write with my tacones situates myself as a researcher and writer. To use the scene of walking in my mother’s tacones also resists an authoritative stance, even as the academy demands a mastering of knowledge. The scene of a Brown Boy in Drag wobbling with my small feet in my mother’s tacones reminds me to not be too prescriptive and recognizes the uneven terrain of this research—the many moving parts and connections. In this sense, I want the sound of tacones to resonate in my writing and follow Sandra Soto’s (2010) suggestion that “when we queer methodologies—finally letting of those a priori criteria, which is also to say letting of our reliance on mastery—we can read like a queer,” or in my case to read like a Brown Boy in Drag (p. 88). In this sense, Brown boy in Drag is not simply meant to stand as a nostalgic turn towards my own personal history. The Brown Boy in Drag exists through what Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) calls a backwards birth, coming to be through retrospect and reflection. Stockton (2009) describes this queer child as ghostly, never existing in the present and only through memory. I reorient this ghostliness to serve the present. I reorient the relationship I have to my own childhood by carrying childhood memories forward into the present following Walter Benjamin’s (1969) suggestion of what an anecdote, story, or memory should do—to bring “things closer to us in space, allows them to enter our lives…. The true method of making things present is: to imagine them in our own space and not to imagine ourselves in their space.” As I remember my childhood queerness I situate the auto-narrative of a Brown Boy in Drag—my too muchness—as an ever-present catalyst, a ghostly haunting, to my reading and analysis, what I have called a rasquache methodology. 18 A rasquache methodology guides the textual analysis of a case study of Larry, my auto-narrative of a Brown Boy in Drag, and using these to further a textual analysis of two education curricula, multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies. Theorizing too muchness from Larry and Brown Boy in Drag and bringing it to bear on MCE and K-12 ethnic studies is similarly aligned to what Bettina Love (2017) calls messy and humanizing research. This research, like rasquachismo, forces connections and embraces the messiness of the research process and findings, “…fluid as queerness itself…” (Love, 2017, p. 541). Therefore, rasquachismo as methodology allows me to do three things. One, describe a process of scavenging or excavating in order to capture stories and scenes of the auto-narrative of Brown Boy in Drag and stories about Larry’s life. By sifting through memory, news stories, and a documentary, I have found scenes of how these queer kids of color lived their lives. Two, rasquache guides my excavation and reading to be attentive to the flamboyant and irreverent, or what I name as a sense of too muchness. For example, rather than eschew characterizations of Larry as too young, too rude, too loud, and too sexual, rasquache pushes me to take up and repurpose these everyday discursive renderings. Finally, to repurpose that flamboyance toward reading that is defiant and inventive offers MCE and K-12 ethnic studies, and education more broadly, a different way of thinking about childhood. Rasquache was originally a pejorative term referring to the lower class and impoverished status of many Chicanas/os. It claims what Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (1989) describes as a have-not sensibility, making do with what was available by incorporating 19 basic, simple, and crude materials into their art/creation. The incorporation of discarded everyday items (cans, string, broken glass, etc.) considers quotidian life and repurposes a status of economic vulnerability to make the most out of the least. Rasquache provokes the “superior” norms of Whiteness with the everydayness of Chicanidad by taking an oppositional stance through the cultural practices of a particular racialized experience (Mesa-Bains, 1999, p. 158). The work of picking up and using every day and discarded items guides my work toward scavenging through the multiple news stories, videos, and documentary. My interpretations closely align with what Judith Halberstam (1998) calls a queer methodology. She describes this methodology as a scavenging practice that uses “different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior” (p. 13). Emma Perez’s (1999) decolonial imaginary and her work of excavating the archive and finding women who have been hidden, and writing them into history, serves as an example of this excavation work. Similarly, rasquachismo allows me to collect fragments of narratives and memories and repurpose them toward a way of reading that is both queer and of color. As I sift through the archive, I pick up and capture information about Larry’s life, to tell an altogether different story about too muchness. While rasquache operates from a sense of making do, it is not simply about necessity or basic survival. Amalia Mesa-Bains (1999) explains, “In rasquachismo, the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least” (p. 157). While Ybarra-Frausto (1989) suggests that “to be rasquache is to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness seeking to subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside down,” there are modes of rasquache that do not necessarily come 20 from a position of consciousness (p. 5). The quotidian qualities point to its lived characteristics without necessarily relying on an active political consciousness. In this sense, rasquachimso allows me to capture the too muchness within the lives and memories of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag. I read the childhoods of Lawrence “Larry” King and a Brown Boy in Drag that are archived through documentaries, news stories, and my own memories, through this rasquache sensibility. I pay particular attention to those performances that, as Ybarra-Frausto (1989) explains, are “unfettered and unrestrained, [that] favor the elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe” (p. 6). Rasquache pushes me to recognize the everyday inventiveness within the lives of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag that utilize their material and social surroundings to create something vibrant and loud. For me, my tacones and flipping my “hair” were ways of expressing pleasure born from the everyday items I found within our small trailer. These items represent an everydayness of life—cheap Payless pumps that become part of an extravagant performance. It was a pleasure I found in occupying and taking up space, even within my imagination. The tacones were a way to extend and expand myself beyond the contours of my body—to be too much. The flair I found in my performance functioned as selfpleasuring as I reveled in the way my body moved, looked, and the way I imagined being looked upon. My appropriations of my mother’s femininity went beyond mimicry to something else that I was creating—something distinctive. Using rasquachismo I read my childhood performance as a cultural production that repurposed simply everyday items into shaping an altogether different way of being. My performance was part of a self- announcement as a way of recreating the world more colorfully. 21 Rasquache is not a fixed style or form and therefore does not define a multitude of experiences in a given community under a single idiom, marking my resistance to naming Larry under a singular gender or sexuality. Rasquache challenges me to consider the childhoods I turn to not as representative of as a singular form of being or expression, resisting the impulse to understand children under uniform scripts of being. As rasquache seeks to sustain the multiplicity of experience, I resist naming Larry or my own childhood as markers of a gay or trans identity that would fit neatly into inclusive and affirming pedagogies and curriculum. Rather than pinning down a singular mode of being, my close reading attempts to facilitate a theorizing that connects to a rasquache sensibility of being both defiant and inventive—as sites of critique and creation. My analysis of Larry defies the scripted form of childhood, the fantasies of childhood, offered through MCE and K-12 ethnic studies in particular and education more broadly. Like the rasquache practice of stringing together dissimilar items to create something altogether different, I string together the fantasies of childhood within MCE and K-12 ethnic studies with the embodiments of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag. After outlining how childhood is imagined through the MCE and K12 ethnic studies values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness I place Larry and Brown Boy in Drag at the center of these values. In other words, in sifting through the archives—through what has been remembered and recorded in news stories, a documentary, and my personal story—I have laid out the contours of what I am calling too muchness. I then bring this queered sense of being to bear on MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. A childhood that is queer and of color may disturb familiar notions of identity 22 that underpin notions of inclusion and affirmation within classrooms. The embodied gender, race, and sexuality play exhibited by Larry and Brown Boy in Drag pose a problem for multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies that inaugurate their own fantasies of childhood. The everyday performances elude mechanisms that call upon children to represent an ideal of childhood within MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. As I explain throughout the chapters, Larry and Brown Boy in Drag slip between the cracks of social justice pedagogies and curriculum and I urge other education researchers and practitioners to begin unpacking our constructs of what pedagogies and curriculum imagine the child to be. Stringing these messy and overlapping pieces, I wish to tell an altogether different story that may contribute to these exemplars specifically, and to education more broadly. CHAPTER 2 QUEERNESS, CHILDHOOD, AND EDUCATION: MERGING QUEER YOUTH STUDIES IN EDUCATION AND QUEER THEORIES OF CHILHOOD This chapter maps out an intellectual space that thinks through the theoretical contributions of queer youth studies in education (Britzman, 1993; Britzman et al., 1993; Ellsworth, 1997; Lesko, 2013; Mayo, 2007; Mayo, 2014; Talburt, 2014; Talburt et al., 2014) and queer theories of childhood (Stockton, 2009) to bring the relationship between queerness and childhood into the field of education. The turn to childhood is innovative within queer youth studies in education where youth is the privileged signifier meant to mark those students who are relatively out and actively involved in the making of identities, cultures, and spaces, while children are singularly located within normative constructions of childhood. The child has largely been undertheorized in queer studies of education. Innocence and all its associations of naiveté, inexperience, and purity are part of the everyday thinking about childhood and seep into theories of education. In a recent youth studies anthology Elizabeth Marshall (2012) argues “…innocence operates in less obvious or direct ways for youth than for young children,” rendering the category of childhood as obviously cemented within innocence (p. 296). Marshall (2012) demarcates a clear distinction between youth and children and moves quickly away from a 24 theorization of childhood and settles on the familiar territory of youth. The child is more obviously innocent, or simply and self-evidently innocent, which circumvents any theoretical investigation into a category of childhood and its connections to queerness, let alone any contributions to queerness and transness. Bridging theoretical moves from queer youth studies in education with queer theories of childhood, this dissertation brings the work of scholars like Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) to queer and social justice projects in education. Of central concern for queer youth studies of education is the specific role of student that young people and children inhabit, placing the child within an institutional/structural context. The distance between the queer theories of childhood and queer youth studies of education reinforces the age-old divide between theory and praxis. For my dissertation this translates to the schism between the theoretical moves of a queered childhood within the humanities and the material and structural concerns within the field of education. This bridging allows for a queer and materialist approach that names policies and practices that construct identity and structure opportunity. This chapter establishes contexts and problematics, which simultaneously serve as entry points for Chapters 3 and 4. I illustrate the current state of queer youth studies of education by describing two broad approaches to research. The principal problem within current research is the reliance on the signifier of youth that has ceded the child to normative discourses of childhood. It is not simply about redefining youth to include children, but to suggest childhood brings its own set of theoretical provocations as seen in childhood studies (Bernstein, 2011; Castañeda, 2002; Ferguson, 2000; Wallace, 1995) and queer studies of childhood (Edelman, 2004; Halberstam, 2012; Stockton, 2009). This hints to a different naming, perhaps a queer childhood studies of education, that would 25 allow for a different theorization of the social category and it’s queer interventions. The minimal research on queer childhood in education marks this writing as a particularly important juncture and provides the rationale and need for education research to consider queer theories of childhood. The blending of queer theories of childhood with queer youth (of color) studies in education allows for a weaving of autoethnographic work through my memories of being a Brown Boy in Drag and Larry’s embodied performances. With the theoretical foundations explored within this chapter, Larry and Brown Boy in Drag are brought into multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies. Queer Youth Studies of Education Within this section I explore two broad approaches to queer youth studies of education. In short, they can be described as, one, the important work to deconstruct regimes of gender and sexuality norms within school policies and practices, and two, research centering young LGBTQ people resisting these norms. Education then has used queer as both verb, aligning with the tradition of queer theory, and as noun or proxy for LGBTQ identities and aligned more traditionally with LGBTQ Studies. Jennifer C. Ingrey (2018) describes these two approaches as “…complex in that it involves the signifier or signified term: it is both the integration of queer content in curriculum as well as the practice of queering educational practices (i.e., curriculum, pedagogy and practice)” (p. 1). The dual use of queer illustrates how education considers the power of signs and symbols along with people’s material conditions. While I explain two broad approaches within queer youth studies of education, 26 they are not mutually exclusive. Most queer studies work in education employ both approaches simultaneously. Assertions of sexual difference by centering self-identified LGBTQ youth exist alongside analyses of how bodies and identities are policed in schools. Queer youth studies in education attempt to capture both the discursive exercises of hegemonic power and the resistance and resilience of LGBTQ students and educators. Researchers commonly document the experiences of LGBTQ people to show how gender and sexual norms are enforced within schools (Boatwright, 2016; Gilbert et al., 2018; McCready, 2010; Talburt, 2018; Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011). I’ll more thoroughly describe the two approaches below. Using Queer as Verb: Deconstructing Norms This section explores research that has used queer as a verb to undermine the norms of gender and sexuality. This research has typically followed the use of queer from the field of queer theory. Since queer theory emerged in the 1990s, the field of education brought queer critiques on the workings of schools and their complicity with regimes of normativity (Britzman, 1995; Pinar, 1998). A principal motive of queer work in education follows the tradition of queer theory as explained by Michael Warner (2000), using queer to expose the processes of normalization, rather than asserting sexual difference. Queer theory in education has emphasized how gender and sexual identities are policed. Traditionally, antihomophobic work in education had attempted to make schools more tolerant or accepting, a trend that still continues today. Queer theory in education, however, brought focused attention to the processes of normalization and 27 naturalization enacted through education discourses, curricula, pedagogy, and policy that would create such an exclusive and intolerant atmosphere to begin with. The turn to queer theory focused on the social and contradictory role of identity, challenging conventional norms through analyses of school relationships among students and teachers, as well as with curriculum, pedagogy, and policy (Britzman, 1995; Sumara & Davis, 1999; Talburt, 2000). This approach builds upon feminist researchers in education who have used poststructural feminist and race theory to understand identity as site of struggle and renegotiation (Ellsworth, 1997; Lather, 1991; Lesko, 2001; Pillow, 2004; Pillow & St. Pierre, 2002; St. Pierre, 2000). Here I turn to Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (1997) writing on pedagogy because at the time of her writing, queer theory had been entering the field of education with writings on pedagogy from Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell (1993), Deborah Britzman (1995), and Susanne Luhmann (1998) who had been grappling with poststructuralist and essentialist theories of identity in the context of the classroom. Their work started using queer as verb to describe the classroom context as moving beyond simply including queer content, affirming queer students, or a specific teaching method. Instead they mobilized queer to speak to the messy text of the classroom, how identities and knowledges are constructed, negotiated, essentialized, and then reconstructed, renegotiated—identity and knowledge as both fixed and fluid. In Ellsworth’s (1997) work she describes pedagogies as practices that “…set in motion the positions from which they can be ‘met’ and responded to…” by imagining an audience to be addressed (p. 9). Her examples point to education texts and their assumptions about students and student identities. Luhmann (1998) similarly describes queer theory challenging the pedagogical concern of representation, which protested 28 “…the portrayals of lesbians and gays as sick, sexually perverted, unhappy, and antisocial” (p. 143). The link between queer theory in education and the possibilities for rethinking pedagogy when put alongside feminist poststructuralism had brought about a new subfield of queer pedagogy that unsettled both repressive discourses and essentialist understandings of sexual and gender minority students. The overlapping writings on feminist poststructuralist thought in education and queer pedagogy signal the increased focus on how education produces and regulates social identity. At the time of Ellsworth’s (1997) writing, she described textbooks “looking more like glossy magazines or even websites…with sidebars, cross references, popular-culturebased activities (e.g., ‘compose a rap poem’), full color, and an abundance of choices” (p. 45). It is a structure of address to invite students to the social positions we imagine them already occupying—an Althusserian process of “hailing” a student into a position from which to receive the educational text. Following Louis Althusser, Ellsworth (1997) argues education calls on young people to assume a subject relative to the ideology of education. Schools are implicated within a system that produces the very students it seeks to educate through a method of calling them into being—into subject positions from which students are meant to receive class content. The power of education to call students into identities means a sense of becoming for young people that aligns with the education models that seek to educate them. Queer youth studies has historically brought queer to bear on the normalizing of heterosexuality, or what is called heteronormativity. The naturalization of heterosexuality in schools is, as Atkinson and DePalma (2008) say, is invisible and “…any mention of 29 alternatives is constructed as transgressive (‘not appropriate’) by the powerful silent force of the heterosexual matrix” (p.33). Sissy boys and butch girls fall outside the expected characteristics of students while heterosexuality and the gender binary hide in plain sight (Evans & Davies, 2000). Classroom practices segregate the sexes (e.g., boys and girls line up separately after recess) and teachers talk about their opposite sex partners, bringing their heterosexuality to school events or displaying it through pictures on their desks in the classroom. The disruption of heteronormativity within schools has also brought queer to bear on even antihomophobic interventions. Susan Talburt, Eric Rofes, and Mary Lou Rasmussen (2004) question the well-intentioned efforts to include and affirm LGBTQ identities. The “conventional liberal goals of tolerance, understanding, self-esteem, equity, and inclusion for queer youth that define such projects as ‘safe schools,’ providing accurate and positive curricular representations, or constructing ‘role models’ for queer youth” are insufficient in addressing the complex dynamics of society and education that effects students and teachers (Talburt et al., 2004, p. 6). The argument set forth by Talburt, Rofes, and Rasmussen (2004) critiqued the typical education goal of inclusion. Together with Ellsworth (1989, 1997), the critique shows how an emphasis on these liberal goals typically comes at the expense of young people’s creativity in their enunciation of desires, affiliations, community, recognition, all while responding to exclusion and marginalization (Talburt et al., 2004) More so, affirmation and inclusion may reproduce the very cultural norms that marginalize queer and trans children. Jennifer Esposito’s (2009) analysis of children’s books provides an example of a curricular intervention to provide representation of gay 30 and lesbian couples, but assumes a shared idea of family. The most notable book Esposito (2009) troubles is Heather Has Two Mommies that presents a normative, White, middleincome, same-sex couple with children. The book depicts Heather’s family as like any other two-parent household, a representation Esposito (2009) argues “does a disservice to children from lesbian families who may face discrimination and ridicule because they have two mommies” (p. 69). Esposito’s (2009) concern is the missed opportunity for the book to start introducing children to contexts of power and discrimination through which lesbian families navigate. The inclusive measure to normalize families like the one represented in Heather Has Two Mommies, leads to the point where LGBT identities are no different at all and sexual and gender difference are absorbed into gender and sexuality norms. Heather Has Two Mommies suggests being gay or lesbian is very much like being straight (and White and middle-class) and therefore facilitates LGBT involvement in heteronormativity. The book’s message is similar to mainstream LGBT politics that affirms gay and lesbian people to the extent their lives reflect a respectable nuclear family. For schools that affirm LGBT youth by including books like Heather Has Two Mommies provide normative scripts of gay and lesbian respectability and appropriateness. As Nathan Talyor (2011) has detailed, U.S. lesbian and gay themed children’s picture books, like Heather Has Two Mommies, deploy the homonormative subject, drawing from the work of Lisa Duggan (2003). Duggan (2003) describes and critiques conservative institutions like marriage and the military that were at the forefront of gay and lesbian politics. For example, marriage has historically worked as a conservatizing institution that pulled social services from low-income women of color, including LGBT 31 women of color. Marriage was encouraged as a policy solution for the government’s lack of social support for poor people. The fight for marriage equality neglected this history of marriage as a social institution and Lisa Duggan (2003) provided a new language to describe the danger of “conventional liberal goals” and their collusion with assimilationist politics that means to normalize and render powerless queerness. The conventional liberal goal of inclusion within institutions like marriage and military reproduces White, middle-class American values and becomes the mechanism through which these values are normalized in LGBTQ communities. Reading Heather Has Two Mommies through Duggan’s (2003) analysis, the story is indicative of a well-circulated narrative within mainstream LGBT politics that “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (p. 50). Taylor’s (2011) analysis points to children’s books stories as affirming “…White, middle-class values…” (p. 145) that has been centered in mainstream gay and lesbian politics. These stories that affirm these values, whether implicitly or explicitly, exclude the stories of queer and trans people of color and “…does not challenge various systems of oppression such as heterosexism, classism, racism, sexism, ableism, lookism, ageism, and geographical bias” (Taylor, 2011, p. 137). Taylor (2011) leaves with the question of what children’s books might look like if they are to critique systems of oppression, but also leaves unanswered how the purpose of these stories, to reduce homophobia and increase acceptance, limit the discourse around queer and trans youth. Through homonormative representations, an archetype is created through which 32 young people are measured. The imperative to adhere to a model citizen betrays inclusive models and the safety they promise because they limit the subjectivity of young LGBT people. Ingrey (2018) critiques the simplistic approach of teaching about lesbian and gay content and its “…means to address homophobia as if the discourse of safety is the only place for queers in the mainstream classroom content” (p. 7). The emphasis on safety limits queer subjectivity to that of potential and perpetual victim, inaugurating antibullying and safe space campaigns. Ingrey (2018) continues that while these are wellintended approaches, they are also “…highly reductionist to teaching about queers because it forecloses the agency of queer youth and fails to recognize them beyond their position of marginality” (p. 15). In so doing, the teaching about queers sets limits to the subjectivity of queerness. The representations of LGBTQ identities are therefore not simply a reflection of identities that exist outside the classroom and then included into the curriculum. Representation becomes a process of production—a process of signification through representation. The limiting discourses of who students can be or how students can embody queerness are also heavily mediated through race. Queer youth studies had historically been narrowly concerned with the construction and regulation of sexualities and genders without regard to how Whiteness is also involved within this construction or how queerness is theorized from a position of Whiteness. The antiassimilationist arguments of queerness were lacking insights from scholars like Cornel West (1990) who has made, I would argue, important queer arguments against assimilationist projects of representation that “uncritically accepted non-Black conventions and standards…that set out to show that Black people were really like White people—thereby eliding differences (in history and culture) between Whites and Blacks” (p. 103). West continued the critique against 33 these efforts as also erasing the multiplicity of Blackness across differences in class, gender, region, and sexuality. West’s interventions, written in 1990, were not brought to bear on the theoretical workings of queer theory that were happening at the time. Michael Hames-Garcia (2011) points to queer theory’s largely White genealogy. Namely, HamesGarcia (2011) calls into question what has been informally called the “holy trinity” of queer theory—Michele Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler—while disregarding the work of figures such as Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin who were writing on desire, erotics, race, and sexuality. This field of queer of color critique has made this intervention and shown how race has always been present within our queer theories. The field is largely an extension of women of color feminism and uses an intersectional lens (Crenshaw, 1989). Intersectionality is a lens for understanding how power collides and intersects. In this sense intersectionality is a theory of oppression and not necessarily a theory of identity, even when the experiences of women of color have driven and provide the foundation for this theory. Based on the experiences of women of color, intersectionality has taken the field of queer studies and queer youth studies to consider how race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social formations intersect and collude to disenfranchise and oppress young people. Contributions to queer of color scholarship in education take an intersectional approach in understanding how heterosexism colludes with systems of oppression like classism, White supremacy, nation, and patriarchy to maintain the marginalization of students. Importantly for Brockenbrough (2015) is how queer of color critique 34 “…insistently seeks to unveil the social and historical forces that have produced [queer of color] marginality…” (pp. 29-30). The marginality of queer youth of color had been produced through the field’s own lack of racial analysis. Marquez and Brockenbrough (2013) show how an intersectional lens is needed when considering the legal rights of young queers. While outlining important legal victories in securing the safety of young LGBTQ people, their analysis reveals the inattention these victories pay to harassment or how ideas of safety are also constructed through race. The claimed victories of school safety exclude the racist harassment young queer and trans youth of color face. Continuing the example of children’s books, Jasmine Z. Lester (2013) uses an intersectional lens to analyze LGBT-themed children’s books. Her findings are similar to Taylor (2011) that children’s books reinforce White, middle-class values by regurgitating typical representations of White, middle-class, same-sex couples. Intersectionality and queer of color critique calls for more expansive forms of queer analyses that see power as colluding to limit identity and the material conditions of those marginalized by that very collusion. Kim Hackford-Peer (2010) has deployed queer to investigate the positioning of queer youth through the discourses of safety that leave out other social locations such as race and class. Hackford-Peer (2010) deconstructs the reproduction of innocent-victim as a trope too inadequate to actually support queer youth. This form of identity policing implicates future multidimensional research to have deeper commitment to diversity and inclusion, or as Boatwright (2016) puts it, “Here is the T: race is so glaringly absent in mainstream gay media and research that we must be deliberate about its inclusion” (p. 4). This is also not simply about, as Patricia Hill Collins (2000) writes, “…starting with gender and then adding in other variables such as age, sexual orientation, race, social class, and religion, Black feminist thought sees these 35 distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure of domination” (p. 222). The intervention made by queer of color education extends the intersectional approach to research and is deliberate in including race, because race is always present. There are also those who have engaged queer and queer of color critique to move beyond a category of sexuality. Roland Cintos Coloma (2006) engages with queer critique “…by mobilizing it within, through, and beyond the framework of sexuality and putting it to work in postcolonial and educational studies” (p. 640). Coloma’s (2006) research adopts queer as verb, specifically methodology, that exceeds the question of sexuality and, as one possibility, may shed light on the power of imperialist patriarchal masculinity. Similarly, Lisa Weems (2007) critiques “…heteronormative assumptions about education, and educational discourse in which queer theorizing is relegated to issues of sexuality, sexuality is confined to (deviant) identities and where queer scholars are put in their supposedly ‘proper’ place, e.g., speaking only to/from/about sexual (minority) identities” (p. 196). She argues research should extend beyond the category of deviant sexuality, much like how Coloma engages with queer. Thinking of queer more expansively has urged scholars, like Mary Lou Rassmussen (2012), to challenge forms of analysis within education that would leave unquestioned a unified subject. Rasmussen (2012) urges educators to unpack the school policies and practices, even the most seemingly supportive of LGBTQ students. For Rasmussen (2012), the importance of unpacking these policies and practices is to stay faithful to the antinormative politics of queer. Demands for inclusive education should not appeal to the rules of Whiteness and straightness—producing a figure of the 36 appropriate or proper LGBTQ subject. Unsettling the subject of queer theory of education while identifying education practices that produce norms of race, gender and sexuality demands other means through which we, as educators and education researchers, build relationships with young people. Without assuming how students identify or what they need, queer theory in education began to pull from youth studies, such as Nancy Lesko’s (2001) work, to insist on understanding young people on their own terms where they are the best informants of their own lives, and for queer youth studies of education, how young people are the experts of their own identities. Subsequent writing and research took an anthropological approach, looking into young people’s own cultures, meanings, and the ways in which they attempt to change their lives and the lives of adults around them. In a sense, queer youth studies attempted to have young people speak for themselves, especially related to their experiences navigating repressive school practices. While queer worked as verb for a deconstructive approach of identifying processes of normalization, it also continued to focus on those young people who self-identified as LGBTQ. Using Queer as Noun: The LGBT Student While this section explores how queer is used as noun by centering the stories of queer and trans youth and queer youth, it should be noted that these are typically told to undermine norms of sexuality and gender. In using queer as noun, queer youth studies is similarly aligned with LGBTQ Studies where queer is predominantly used as a proxy to name lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer populations. Initial research on LGB sexualities and gender nonconforming students in schools stressed the harassment and 37 neglect youth experienced. The history of harassment created a context where it became important for education research to emphasize LGBTQ persons and their experiences. Eric Rofes (2004) documented anti-LGBTQ harassment to counter the widespread denial within education research that homophobia structured school experiences. Research documenting youth harassment continues to appear today, as research projects and interview questions seek to understand the experiences LGBTQ youth have with oppression. In order to center the voices of LGBTQ youth and name oppression, advocates for LGBTQ communities used/use the entry point of documenting hostility and harassment youth receive from peers and the lack of support from educators. As attention grew on LGBTQ youth in schools, studies report on the increased rates of bullying, dropping out, depression, homelessness, HIV infection, and suicide, and what schools could do to ensure students felt welcome (Brooks, 2010; Burdge et al., 2014a; Burdge et al., 2014b; Dank et al., 2015; Kosciw et al., 2012; Palmer et al., 2012). In naming oppression by documenting the victimization of LGBTQ youth, research added to the typical trope of the LGBTQ victim. Beginning in the early 2000s, queer youth studies in education began to question the emphasis on the figure of the LGBTQ victim as central for both research and work with LGBTQ students. As Rasmussen (2012) argues, “statistics [on LGBT victimization] are too often taken as a point of departure when contemplating the lives of LGBTIidentified young people” (p. 2). The story of the LGBTQ victim became widely circulated to the point of its establishment as the norm through which LGBTQ youth were talked about. Eric Rofes’s (2004) named this dominating narrative as “martyr- 38 target-victim” that defines LGBTQ youth solely by their victimization. Defining youth by this narrative inevitably situates minoritized youth under the guise of vulnerability and potential risk. For schools, this translates into LGBTQ students being at-risk of academic failure. After all, if students feel unsafe at school, learning will be halted or at least greatly inhibited. Through an emphasis of their at-risk status, LGBTQ youth come into meaning solely through their deaths or hyper-visible suffering, displaying their misery to garner sympathy and possibly resources. More recent examples of martyr-target-victim narratives call an end to bullying. Antibullying initiatives singularly construct the LGBT student as victim under threat from the figure of the bully and “…risks conflating LGBTQ identities, desires, and communities with depression, harassment, substance abuse, and even suicide” (Gilbert et al., 2018, p. 167). Young people are positioned within a victim/bully dichotomy that inevitably allows schools to sidestep any responsibility for normalizing heterosexuality and cisgender identity. When the onus of a hostile school environment is placed on another young person, the school ignores how their own policies, curriculum, and practices produce a culture of heterosexism and transphobia. The overwhelming story of victim/bully has prompted campaigns like It Gets Better to encourage young people to endure harassment until a presumably fulfilling adult life. Patrick Grzanka and Emily Mann’s (2014) study show how It Gets Better videos narrate a childhood and youth as a “temporary state of negative affect” as videos describe young people as “struggling to find a sense of identity” with “no where to go but up” (p. 384). The campaign’s reassurance to young people their suffering is temporary asks young people to refashion their pain “into inactive hope, introspective resilience, personal fantasy, and political 39 complacency” (Grzanka & Mann, 2014, p. 372). The videos allow schools to circumvent accountability on their part. Well-intended campaigns, in addition to education research, prop up the image of suffering LGBTQ young person. As Rofes (2004) might have said, emphasizing the suffering of LGBTQ youth narrowly describes the totality of minoritized youth through an especially bleak story overshadowing young people’s relationships with agency, desire, and pleasure. Cris Mayo (2014) critiques a similar trend in antihomophobic research that emphasizes the suffering of young queer and trans people at the expense of their participation in creating queer and trans spaces, cultures, and identities. Without discounting how homophobia and transphobia matter to the composition of a school or classroom, queer youth studies research began insisting that scholars and educators take seriously what Cris Mayo (2014) says are the ways youth “are actively and creatively involved in making their lives and communities” (p. 54). The dominating presence of victimizing narratives severs other possibilities of being and denies youth agency. The turn in queer studies of education research considers young people not simply as victims of discursive and material violence, but as agents, actively participating within the creations of queerness (Mayo, 2014). Whereas young people might have been rendered as passive victim, dependent or incomplete, current queer youth studies in education tries to understand young people as equal participants in the creation of cultures and communities. Scholarly work then shifted away from a uniform script of victimization and suffering toward narratives of agency. With this shift to emphasize agency, queer youth studies of education privileged the agentive youth, and quite unsurprisingly, had simultaneously privileged the experiences of White LGBT youth. As queer of color critique made important 40 interventions in education, reworking queer to consider the multitude of genders and sexualities across race, nation, and class (Eng et al., 2005), it also moved education research and practice consider the experiences of LGBT youth of color in exposing how homophobia and transphobia collude with White supremacy, classism, and misogyny. By exposing the various and overlapping systems of oppression, studies began to capture a how LGBT youth and LGBT youth of color experience violence and hostility. Reports from the GSA Network, Advocates for Youth, and the New York Urban Institute show increased rates of participation in sex work, homelessness, and suicide (Burdge et al., 2014a; Burdge et al., 2014b; Dank et al., 2015; Kosciw et al., 2012; Palmer et al., 2012). Understanding the overlapping systems of oppression and also supplanting narratives of “martyr-target-victim” with agency brought research attention on the lives of young LGBT people of color. Continuing to be influenced by queer of color critique, queer youth studies in education has followed by including youth of color within research projects. Edward Brockenbrough’s (2015) suggests the “body of critical scholarship known as queer of color critique can serve as a heuristic for education research on the agentive practices of queer students of color” (p. 29). Queer of color critique is situated largely outside of education studies and Brockenbrough (2015) argues the critique may help “shape an analytic framework for examinations of [queer of color] agency” (p. 29). He argues queer of color studies in education must privilege the “agentive practices of queer students of color [so as to] provide a counterbalance to discourses that reify narrative of youth victimization” (Brockenbrough, 2015, p. 38). Brockenbrough (2015) argues for research 41 to document the experiences of LGBTQ identified youth and students, much like Rofes (2004), and shifts the focus by centering LGBTQ youth of color agency, especially as their agency resists or subverts mechanisms of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and classism. This multidimensional analysis typically centers queer and trans people of color as those who live within the intersections of oppression. This approach to research has adopted the word queer as both noun and verb, centering the experiences of queer and trans youth of color to show the regulating mechanisms of multiple systems of oppression. The question here is how to address both this marginality and how young queer people fashion themselves and the spaces around them. Bettina Love (2017) demonstrates the need for more research that engages with the “…complicated social, emotional, economical, and cultural dimensions…” of Black life and the fluidity of queerness, which undermine a fixed representation or norm of gender and sexuality (p. 539). Love’s (2017) proposal for a “ratchet lens” means to complicate research and undermines homonormative or respectable representations of queerness that sanitize queer to the point of depleting its radical potential. Similarly, Martino and Cumming-Potvon (2016) analysis of gender argues for a queer politics that acknowledges gender as a material and embodied reality, and speak to the negotiation between the body and the discursive practices limiting subjectivity. Atkinson and DePalma (2008) through a temporary imagination of reversed norms (e.g., a world where straight people come out) asks teachers to imagine a queer future, that recognizes the history of hetero and homonormativity in schools while accounting for new iterations of gendered and sexualized subjects. Through the stories of queer and trans youth of color, researchers have shown 42 how young people and students resist institutional and discursive practices that maintain their marginalized position. Tomas Boatwright’s (2016) research with queer and trans youth of color found the importance of identity and peer relationships in their survival especially as “[q]ueer youth of color receive many different complicated messages about their identities and who they should be” (p. 191). Cindy Cruz (2011) similarly shows how queer street youth counter institutional and discursive practices that “…resist the tropes of criminalization and contamination that are often assigned to their bodies” (p. 548). The experiences of the effeminate queer youth in Boatwright’s work and bodily resistance central to Cruz’s work point to the intersectional system of domination intent on policing identity and maintaining the marginalization of queer and trans youth of color. Cindy Cruz (2001) calls on education research to center the body, especially when considering the experiences of women of color. Her suggestion is that for women of color “…production of knowledge begins in the bodies of our mother and grandmothers, in the acknowledgement of the critical practices of women of color before us” (Cruz, 2001, p. 658). Her work offers two important interventions. It first undermines the privileging of the mind over the body in the social sciences, “…such as the values of the rational, autonomous, independent, isolated researcher [that] dismiss corporeal approaches that validate the lived experiences of the body (p. 659). Secondly, Cruz (2001) reads the body as a messy text that is excessive and disorderly. In other words, the body disrupts a positivist tradition that renders the “…narratives of women of color as too corporeal, too colored, and sometimes too queer to be considered publishable” (p. 659). Thinking about Cruz within the field of queer youth studies and queer of color scholarship in education, provides an extension to think of agentive practices and knowledge-making as coming 43 from the bodies of students. The agentive practices of queer and trans youth of color were central to research showing how Black youth, including gay and gender nonconforming African American male students, would take up space in schools by congregating in hallways (Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011). Their bodies carved out spaces within the school where their queerness and Blackness were marginalized. Making space for themselves affirmed identities, contributed to the survival of queer youth of color, and counters a notion that schools (i.e., teachers and staff) have the sole power to create sanctioned safe spaces. Cruz (2011) names this resistance as talking back and existing within those intersections where racism fuses with the violence of poverty and homophobia. The stories of queer and trans of color youth position them as agents in disengaging, building friendships, making space, and talking back. Focusing on the agentive practices of queer and trans youth of color has moved queer youth studies in education to stringing consider the following points. • Deeper understanding of the relationships between the material and discursive worlds young queer and trans youth of color live in. Taking up the dual focus on the education structures shaping the lives of LGBTQ-identified youth of color, and the practices of normalization and subversion that happen every day within schools and youth spaces. • Their strong intersectional focus moves queer work to consider the multiple structures and systems of discourse queer and trans youth of color navigate, pushing antihomophobic research and practice to a broader antioppressive education. • 44 Pushes queer south studies to take seriously the institutionalized racism that LGBTQ youth of color live every day and the knowledge that arises from/within LGBTQ youth of color cultures. The work has continued to recommend for more queer-inclusive curricula and practices that affirm the experiences of queer and trans youth of color. As Brockenbrough (2016) writes about sex education, he argues what seems most important for serving Black and Latino urban queer youth are practices that are sex-positive, queer-inclusive, and culturally responsive. Boatwright (2016) similarly suggests “[a]dvocates of queer youth of color are concerned with providing them with tools that will help them affirm their identities…” so as to protect them from antiqueer bias and systemic oppression (p. 135). Affirming, including, and recognizing the resistance of queer and trans youth of color is set against the dominant victimizing narrative. The figure of the agentive youth conjures imaginations of how young people may consciously recognize their identities and navigate oppressive structures. Susan Talburt et al. (2004) has discussed the overarching figures of victim and conscious agent. The two opposing narratives construct a “binary of (1) narratives of risk and danger and (2) narratives of the well-adjusted, out, and proud gay youth” (Talburt et al., 2004, p. 9). This binary creates an opportunity for new intervention in queer youth studies and queer of color scholarship in education. In using both queer as verb and noun through this research the next section describes how a commitment to youth has left out the theoretical provocations a study of childhood can offer. A shift in focus to the child and childhood can offer important 45 insights. A Commitment to Youth The two broad approaches of using queer as verb and noun have relied on the signifier youth. A challenge in outlining the connections among children, queerness, and education is queer youth studies’ commitment to youth at the expense of a serious theorization of childhood, particularly a queer childhood. The call for a serious theorization of childhood does not signal a break or denial of youth. Where queer youth studies has produced exciting theoretical interventions around youth and youth cultures, the reliance on the signifier youth has more readily settled on the adolescent body and not the child. This presents two problems for queer youth studies: 1. Education research has focused education inquiry to LGBTQ youth who are out and can readily be contacted for research purposes, typically high school aged youth. 2. The focus on youth has ceded the child to normative constructions of childhood and all its associations to innocence, vulnerability, and naiveté. As innocent, children are left without access to agency, or an idea of children producing formations of race, gender, and sexuality. Even as the signifier youth expands, shrinks, and moves, it most readily settles on adolescent bodies who are consciously involved in LGBTQ+ organizations and/or are politically active in changing their schools and communities. A problem in solely using queer as a proxy for LGBTQ+ identities limits education research to those who have selfidentified as such, commonly through groups in schools like Gay Straight Alliances and 46 within the community through LGBTQ+ youth groups. The reliance on “outness,” as Cris Mayo (2007) addresses, limits our studies to “LGBT students who are in some way known to us” (p. 82). Because of this, Queer Youth Studies has been largely limited to young people who are “the most easily identified members of sexual minorities [who] are ‘out,’ that is, they self-consciously and publicly identify as a member of a sexual minority group and thus can be contacted, observed, and collaborated with on research projects” (Mayo, 2007, p. 82). Those who are not out, children, and those who transgress gender and sexuality norms who may not be LGBTQ+ are often left out of research projects. And while the age of young people who come out is getting lower, children continue to elicit social anxiety when they transgress norms of gender and sexuality. Therefore, high school aged young people are more readily understood through conscious agency and their capability to affect social change. While extremely important in understanding how young people affect change, the approach overlooks an understanding of how the child may create queer spaces or how a queered/raced childhood may impact school environments. Without an understanding of children as also involved in fashioning their own sense of being or contributing to creations of queerness and transness, children are left within linear developmental trajectory in education. These models have constructed Whiteness and heterosexuality as the typical modes of growing through which children of color and queerness are measured. Bergin and Bergin (2014), who write on child and adolescent development, suggest having a warm parent, someone who shows affection and kindness, monitor African American youth protects them from a trajectory of early sexual activity (p. 474) and admit “no single developmental path for LGBTQ orientation 47 has been identified” (p. 476). This developmental thinking continues to peddle the tired yet relentless deficit thinking within theories of cultural capital. As Bergin and Bergin (2014) explain, “students who have school-relevant knowledge, or who have parents who do, have cultural capital in school settings. Fortunately, you [the teacher] can provide cultural capital for your students whose families cannot” (p. 18). Children living in poverty and children of color are understood as lacking “school-relevant knowledge” and are subsequently labeled as “disadvantaged” and “at-risk.” These models mimic a dominant narrative of growing up that situates children of color and children in poverty as needing monitoring and correcting. Only through proper education may the innocence of children be protected to ensure their growth into becoming well-adjusted adults. The linear characteristic of developmental models flattens the nuances of childhood as lived and constructed within/against racist school policies and practices. The child as innocent is tethered to education practices that prioritize children in terms of preventing their victimization, even from their own cultural upbringing and families, and ensuring future stable identities. All this to say there are stark cultural meanings and responses between childhood and youth. If youth is the social position education scholars refer when discussing resistance, childhood is where they discuss innocence. In reference to Elizabeth Marshall’s (2012) writing on innocence in a youth studies anthology, children are selfevidently innocent, pure, and vulnerable. Whereas youth are allowed to be active, politically conscious subjects, children are largely ineffectual and in need of protection and guidance toward more critical forms of subjectivity. Even with education interventions like multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies children are situated within a process of growing up where their transformative 48 potential is developed. Developing agency and consciousness become the best and only methods through which children may influence social change. And only within their eventual growing up into being conscious citizens are children considered to harbor transformative potential. The child, both figuratively and literally, is undervalued within these models of education precisely through a logic that understands children as not yet socially conscious and not yet able to make sense of their experiences through a language that adults deem valid. For children to come to consciousness, education must intervene to provide the sense making tools children may eventually use to name themselves and their experiences. For children to come to consciousness signals their growth out of childhood and their potential to impact change. The subsequent stages of young adulthood and adulthood are where the hopes for a better future lie. The call to produce conscious minds means to inspire young people to become social change agents. The child is futureoriented, valued for their potential and eventual growth and contribution to society. The politics of building a better world hinges upon the appropriate education of children as future conscious subjects capable of impacting society. To ensure that children represent our future, our political projects depend upon our understanding of a child’s capacity to become what we want them be. As we hold an expectation of children to grow up into socially conscious youth, pedagogy prompts students to assume positions that would guarantee our hopes for a better future. The processes of creating the critical and conscious subject demands that we facilitate children’s growth into certain subjectivities and adopt values that we recognize as representing the future adults want to see in the world. For my purposes, MCE and K-12 ethnic studies work as education projects that 49 work toward making a better future and subsequently name those performances and behaviors that are understood as politically necessary, but subsequently construct a politically ideal child-subject and diminish others modes of expression for children. These other modes of being must be treated with the same capability to impact social change, especially for queer and trans children of color who enact their social identities in schools that are structured through norms of Whiteness, gender, and sexuality. It’s important to shift here to consider queer theories of the child. Situated outside the field of education they offer important interventions and discussions carried throughout this dissertation. Queer Theories of the Child It is at this juncture when queer youth studies of education, without fully engaging with the category of childhood, should consider queer theories of childhood from the humanities. Additionally, to keep with a queer of color critique, Robin Bernstein (2011), albeit not a work of queer theory, provides an important historical racial account of childhood. Mostly figurative and metaphorical, the queered child within the humanities may be brought to bear on the child within education. In general, queer theory has offered an imagination where childhood may harbor queer potential that resists the overwhelming forms of regulation and categorization. Most notably are Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) and Jack Halberstam (2012) in their writing and thinking about childhood as a category through which queerness may flourish. Stockton (2009) and Halberstam’s (2012) work moves away from other writing situating the child against queerness. Lee Edelman’s text, No Future (2004), rejects the 50 figure of the child precisely because his understanding of the child as the body and category through which the regime of the norm is reproduced. The figure of the child prompts what Lee Edelman (2004) calls a “reproductive futurism,” or the deferred future that would retroactively bestow meaning and secure all the normalizing social fantasies of family and law. In other words, the child, as a stand-in for the future, works to defer a future that we are perpetually waiting for but is made inevitably unattainable. As each generation grows, they rearticulate a script that aligns with the cliché our children are our future, working to reproduce cultural values and norms that Edelman characterizes as an ultimately conservative project. As Edelman (2004) states, “for politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child” (p. 2). The child remains the main theoretical beneficiary of every political intervention that is meant to bring a new social order, however radical it may appear to be. While Edelman (2004) importantly critiques “reproductive futurism” as replicating a hegemonic social order regardless of ideology, his “death drive” imagines the adult as the subject of queerness and of its political work, closing any possibility to imagine a relationship between the child and queerness. For him, the child is antithetical to the radical work of queer, a sentiment that I have heard through friends’ when seeing young children or strollers in, for example, the Castro District of San Francisco. In their imagination, the figure of the child singularly represents nuclear family, domesticity, and normativity, and intrudes upon the queer scene of the Castro. For my friends and for 51 Edelman, the child cannot come to represent queerness and may very well be a threat to its radical potential. This cultural imaginary cements the child within the realm of normativity and unintentionally supports a conservative ideology that historically positions queerness as a threat to childhood. In 2017, transphobic rhetoric surfaced within mainstream media due to policies, practices, and even directives from the now-revoked Obama Administration directive to honor a student’s right to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. The rhetoric has similarly positioned transness as a threat to childhood, marking the two as disparate identities even when children are self-identifying as transgender. Jack Halberstam (2012) and Kathryn Stockton’s (2009) work marks an important shift in thinking about the child’s relation to queerness and transness. For Judith Halberstam childhood offers a theoretically redemptive characteristic. Halberstam (2012) suggests that young people offer ways to reimagine categorical markings because they are not-yet adults. Halberstam (2012) repurposes the dominating narrative of children as “not-yet”—always defined by their eventual growing-up—to suggest their playful acts of language and identity “where meaning is contingent, illusionary, motile, impermanent, and constantly shifting to keep up with the data flows that course across their inchoate consciousness’s, [should influence adults to] improvise more, pick up terms, words, lexicons from children who, in many ways, live the world differently than we do, live it more closely, live it more intensely, and sometimes, live it more critically” (p. xxv). This harkens back to Cris Mayo’s suggestion that young people might create new identities by making unusual and unpredictable associations between meanings and words. 52 For Stockton (2009), childhood itself is queer. As she states, children are defined as not adults and monitored as such because it distances them from the experiences that would define them as adults. Children are bound by this strange temporality that marks them as always firmly innocent and yet on a path towards those experiences that would mark them as adults. This awkward and strange growth leads Stockton (2009) to name the sideways growth of the queer child as a way to dislodge figures of children from the narrative of “growing up” that narrowly signals linearity, capital accumulation, and adulthood. Growing sideways allows an alternative to the relentless vertical growing to adulthood, employment, and heterosexual marriage. For Stockton (2009), the child does not necessarily need to signal a normative future and is found with a temporal strangeness where children “…share estrangement from what they approach: the adulthood against which they must be defined” (p. 31). Stockton’s queering of childhood works against the everyday thinking of queerness as something unrelated to children or as something that children only eventually grow into through a process of coming-out. Stockton’s (2009) analysis of the child queered by color theorizes the child of color as made queer through its estrangement from innocence. While the White child is made queer through innocence, the child of color is queer through a more contested relationship with innocence. Children of color are not afforded a presumption of innocence and come to be innocent through a display of victimhood. The child of color is not allowed to be weak or innocent and requires them to be imbued with innocence by endowing them with an abuse “from which they need protection and to which they don’t consent” (Stockton, 2009, p. 33). Robin Bernstein (2011) also drives an analysis on childhood through an understanding of how the category is mediated through meanings of Whiteness and Blackness. Bernstein’s (2011) analysis of childhood through a 53 historical lens shows how the category of childhood innocence came to be and was maintained through Whiteness. Childhood, innocence, and Whiteness had become entangled together. The queer child is largely metaphorical in Stockton’s work as she looks to the realm of fiction precisely because the queer child is not spoken of in public. Queer theories of childhood have largely focused on what Probyn (1995) calls “the modes in which [childhood] is articulated…” (p. 440). She continues, “central concern is not childhood per se (whatever that might be), but rather the deployment of childhood: how to write childhood” (Probyn, 1995, p. 443). The theme of the child is focused through childhood’s figurative or generative properties within, for example, literary genres, remaining redemptive on an intellectual level and distanced from the bodies that make up childhood. The metaphorical figure of the child is theoretically distanced from child bodies and the institutional contexts through which children navigate, such as schools. For Stockton, it is through metaphor the child grows sideways by underscoring the strange juxtapositions between words and meaning. As Kathryn Stockton (2009) argues, the metaphorical child has allowed certain flexibility in making connections between childhood and queerness, allowing the child to move more creatively within the humanities. Metaphor allows access to pleasure for the queer child as it hides from adult surveillance. In this sense it matters most what childhood represents rather than the lives implicated through the category of childhood—a childhood without children. I extend her argument from the private spaces of metaphor to sites, spaces, locations, and positions where queerness and childhood exist more publicly and in a 54 much more lived and daily fashion—to add flesh to the metaphor of the queer child and imagine how schools may be spaces of queer passion and pleasure. With the above being said, I do not mean to suggest that education research only plays catch-up to the theoretical work of the humanities. Rather, I suggest continued dialogue between queer theory in the humanities and education. As much as education stands to learn from the theoretical moves of queer theory in the humanities, scholars in the humanities may also learn from when theory is practiced in education. Education provides a place to theorize childhood and also address curriculum, pedagogies, policy, and practice. Education is the place where theory meets praxis and offers queer theory a sense of grounding. As I add flesh to the metaphor, Larry and Brown Boy in Drag are situated within education models and movements of multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies within the years of 2005 and 2018. The 13-year span, which starts a few years prior to Larry’s murder, also includes the interventions made by queer studies of childhood and queer (youth) studies of education. Adding flesh to the metaphor of the child within queer theories of childhood traces the embodiments of too muchness explored throughout this dissertation. My work extends the contributions by queer youth studies and queer of color scholarship in education to offer an intervention in favor of thinking of childhood, and especially queer and trans of children of color, as disrupting norms and creating new iterations of identity. Namely, I critique certain formations of affirmation, inclusion, and the development of consciousness (something that has privileged the mind over body), a perhaps controversial standpoint within social justice circles in education. Secondly, my 55 focus on childhood diverges from an emphasis on youth and how young people coalesce into resistant and critically conscious groups. Children are rarely allowed the opportunity to come together around queerness, or is their coming together rarely understood as queer. Writing within and contributing interdisciplinary field of queer youth studies and queer of color scholarship in education, I explore the discursive restrictions placed on child-bodies, even within progressive strategies of multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies, and how child-bodies push back. CHAPTER 3 THE QUEER CHILD OF COLOR IN THE AGE OF MULTICULTURALISM The very language we borrow to pin down identities, to situate an experience, to recognize an event, and to render intelligible the meanings of others is, as Zoe Wicomb suggests, both a linguistic right and a site of ideological struggle. Antagonizing these discursive boundaries, writes Kobena Mercer are the contradictory and conflicting ways people embody, conceptualize, and perform the politics of identity. (Britzman et al., 1993, p. 188) The antagonizing relationship described in the above quote from Deborah Britzman et al. (1993) frames this chapter’s focus on the relationship between embodied identities and multicultural education. More precisely, the too muchness of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag complicate the values of affirmation and inclusion within MCE. These values are not unique to MCE, but I choose MCE because of its dominance in childhood education. MCE has shown this dominance through a relentlessness presence in K-12 schools and in education research since its first iterations in the 1980s. James Banks is one of those pioneers of multicultural education and has been editor of the anthology, Introduction to Multicultural Education: From Theory To Practice, which has six editions spanning close to over 3 decades. The values of affirmation and inclusion have stayed through each edition and iteration of MCE. Understanding these values through Britzman (1993) and other queer studies in education scholars, they are strategies that pin down identities in order to situate an experience and recognize an event, while too muchness represents the embodied politics of identity. 57 This chapter analyzes affirmation and inclusion as values within Multicultural education and discusses three broad objectives. First, I lay the context of White and heterosexual childhood innocence. Moving from Robin Bernstein’s (2011) historical tracing of White childhood innocence in the mid-nineteenth century to how this construction has persisted to affect the schooling experiences of children of color in particular. Children of color, especially Black children, and queer children have been excluded from a presumption of innocence and the protections the value of innocence brings. The exclusion from innocence has led to harsh effects on children of color and queer children both in and out of schools. The normative construction of childhood innocence provides the context through which the principles of affirmation and inclusion enter. Inclusion and affirmation work as responses to the exclusion and denigration of children of color and queer children from innocence and an education system built to protect children presumed innocent. Since the beginnings of naturalized White childhood innocence, there existed efforts to include children of color into the category of childhood innocence by asserting their vulnerability and pain. But learning from feminist writers such as Sherene H. Razack (2007), Saidiya Hartman (1997), and Sara Ahmed (2000), the display of vulnerability, pain, and suffering may do more to reinforce White superiority. Learning from feminist of color lessons and thinking through queer studies of education, affirming and including the pain of children of color reproduces normative ideas of White childhood innocence in schools that are insufficient for children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag. Within the second section of this chapter, I show how the work of affirming and 58 including children of color and LGBTQ+ children into the ideal of childhood innocence find themselves within specific exemplars of multicultural education. Through a rasquache sensibility the chapter continues to string together Larry and Brown Boy in Drag to analyze the values of affirmation and inclusion found in MCE. Specifically, I do a textual analysis of the following exemplars of affirmation and inclusion: • GLSEN’s viewing guide to the 2013 documentary film, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013; GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013). The film documents the murder of Lawrence “Larry” King and the subsequent murder trial of Brandon McInerney. The viewing guide produced by GLSEN works as a discussion guide for educators who wish to show the film and address the needs of LGBTQ students. • “Ready, Set, Respect! GLSEN’s Elementary School Toolkit” (McGarry et al., 2016), which provides detailed lesson plans and examples, such as roles models, on affirming and including LGBTQ students. Affirmation and inclusion operate as values within these two guides. These values centralize safety to prevent and counter incidents of bullying, bias, and discrimination. As guides meant to keep students safe, they produce a protectionist discourse and keep intact a normative construction of childhood innocence that erases Larry’s Blackness and limit the possibilities of his queerness. The two guides fall short of recognizing the messiness of identity, or the multiple and shifting ways students embody and express race, gender, and sexuality. Ultimately, too muchness reveals the limitations of even our most wellintentioned responses to LGBTQ students. Finally, the chapter closes with a thinking of too muchness as an intrusion, rather than something for inclusion to absorb, and how the embodied politics of a queer and 59 trans of color identity may work as a political gesture with the power to change the landscapes of school. And while Larry and Brown Boy in Drag did not live their lives in a context where inclusion or affirmation were practiced, the task of this chapter is a follows a rasquache sensibility. That is the process strings together Larry and the values to create something new. A textual analysis, guided by rasquachismo, of Larry and Brown makes sense of their queerness, or too muchness, by bringing together discarded memories, fragments or bits of their lives from news coverage, investigative stories, and the documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013). And like rasquache, too muchness stands both as defiant and inventive, or defiant in its inventiveness. Too muchness begins to show the cracks of affirmation and inclusion through which young children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag fall. While at times politically necessary, these values tell a limited story of children and their expressions of race, gender, and sexuality. The conflict between affirmation and inclusion, and Larry and Brown Boy in Drag is located within, as Deborah Britzman et al. (1993) describes, the tension between language to pin down an identity and situate an experience and ways people embody and perform identity. I merge a framework of too muchness with Kathryn Stockton’s (2009) child queered by color and suggest Brown Boy in Drag and Larry work as an intrusion. This reading reorients Larry and Brown Boy and Drag as intruding onto the landscape of education rather than waiting/pleading for a benevolent multiculturalism to welcome/include queer and trans children of color. This also reorients childhood as a source of power in influencing the cultures of schools rather than being rendered palatable and therefore worthy of inclusion. Brown Boy in Drag and Larry’s embodied 60 identifications forces new relationships among the children, race, queerness, and education. While I weave my own auto-narrative of growing up as a queer Mexican kid, the chapter takes a particular turn toward expressions of Blackness. I turn to Blackness because Larry was a Black biracial kid and intentionally expressed a Black femininity and sexuality. As noted by Bernstein (2011) and Stockton (2009), childhood is saturated with racialized classifications of Whiteness and Blackness. In the spirit of rasquachismo, this disrupts multicultural strategies of how best to teach children of color and offers a different way of thinking about children of color. The irreverent and defiant embodiments of race, gender, and sexuality subvert adult fantasies of childhood that name Larry as someone who was denied the process of growing up and robbed his innocence. MCE is troubled by this too muchness, what Britzman et al. (1993) may describe as the “contradictory and conflicting ways people embody, conceptualize, and perform the politics of identity” (p. 188). White Childhood Innocence This section reviews the historical and contemporary construction of a childhood innocence raced White. This tracing of the exclusion of children of color from the category of childhood provides a context through which inclusion and affirmation have become important values. I focus on the work of Robin Bernstein and her book, Racial Innocence, which provides a thorough history of childhood as a category and its racialization. As Bernstein (2011) notes, beginning in the 19th century the belief of 61 children as innately innocent began to replace the widely held notion that children were just younger adults, and at times had much of the responsibilities of adulthood (p. 4). Bernstein’s (2011) focus on popular culture of the time demonstrates how things like books and toys circulated the conflation of innocence, childhood, and Whiteness. As Bernstein (2011) states, “childhood was then understood not as innocent but as innocence itself; not as a symbol of innocence but as its embodiment…this innocence was raced white” (p. 4). White children were constructed as innocent and vulnerable, excluding Black youth from these qualities. One particular example Bernstein details in her book is the inception of the Raggedy Ann character and doll. Bernstein (2011) describes how the creator of Raggedy Ann, Johnny Gruelle, appropriated blackface minstrelsy and traces Raggedy Ann’s minstrel roots back to the 1840s (p. 190). The storybook narratives coordinated with advertising to model play for White children. As Bernstein (2011) describes, “children in Raggedy Ann’s stories sleep with her, beat her, cut her, confide in her, kick her, and tree her. And, with great frequency, they hang her” (p. 189). Bernstein (2011) shows how Raggedy Ann along with other dolls functioned “as a special site through which nineteenth-century white children and adults articulated this libel” prompting, and “often explicitly instructing children of all races to beat, throw, soil, burn, and hang black dolls” (p. 21). Because the production of Raggedy Ann coordinated a specific prompt to play, these instructions were rendered innocent—without malice or specific political motivations. White children playing with Raggedy Ann, a doll rooted in blackface minstrelsy, made the imitations of violence innocent and contributed to the conflation of childhood, innocence, and Whiteness. As childhood innocence became synonymous with White children, non-White 62 children were excluded from innocence and from the category childhood altogether. Without the protections of innocence coupled with the prompted play to beat, cut, and hang black dolls, non-White children were also excluded from the virtue of vulnerability. Bernstein (2001) describes the construction of White innocence worked in tandem with an idea of Black children defined by an alleged inability to feel pain—without the human characteristic to experience suffering. Black children as not children, and therefore not innocent or vulnerable, were then left outside the protections offered to White children. Childhood and its associations with innocence and vulnerability became a property and mechanism of Whiteness. This set White and non-White children on different trajectories. And even more disturbing, these differing trajectories protected White children while justifying the brutality of anti-Black violence, even toward Black children. And while Robin Bernstein (2011) shows the history of childhood, innocence, and race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these histories are tangled up within the lives of young people today. The exclusion of non-White children from an innocent vulnerability continues to prevail with very real and material effects. Most notably, The Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement has reminded us of the violent effects to Black lives and communities when Black children are excluded from a presumption of innocence. The murder of 12-year old Tamir Rice is a prominent example of a Black child punished due to their exclusion from childhood innocence. The officers who killed Tamir were responding to a call about a Black man yielding a gun in the park. Tamir was killed only 2 seconds after police arrived. The caller’s tip of a “Black man” yielding a weapon is telling of Black children’s 63 exclusion from childhood. The logic follows if Black children are not children at all, they are older and prone to criminal behavior. Young Black people, irrespective of their age, are deemed older and more dangerous. Black children are then measured by a different set of cultural expectations, which includes a presumption of guilt and criminality. There is significant psychological evidence of this cultural bias including a recent study from the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences showing White participants maintaining a racial bias in assuming young Black men and boys to be more violent and criminal (Todd et al., 2016). The exclusion of Black children from a presumption of innocence is pervasive within education. Rethinking Schools (2015), a prominent national nonprofit organization committed to racial equity in schools, points to “overestimating the age, size, and culpability of Black children [as] a widespread phenomenon” and “how this affects Black children in schools….” Within education research, Ann Ferguson’s (2000) qualitative study is relevant as she describes a system of punishment within schools that gives rise to the African American “bad boy.” In her work, innocence was quickly stripped from Black students as transgressions from the young Black boys were adultified, or as Ferguson (2000) describes, interpreted as indications of an especially sinister and dangerous adult Black masculinity and therefore met with harsher punishments. The schooling process, as Ferguson details, produces the figure of the Black “bad boy” as a natural characteristic of young African American men (Ferguson, 2000). The exclusion from innocence authorizes schools to severely police and discipline young African American boys in order to surveil and control Blackness deemed dangerous. Larger scale quantitative studies have also revealed the excessively punitive 64 measures Black students face at schools. A 2015 report from The Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania shows Black students in Southern school districts were disproportionately suspended or expelled at rates 5 times or higher than their representation in the student population (Smith & Harper, 2015). According to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights data (2014), Black students across the country were suspended, expelled, referred to law enforcement, and arrested at disproportionately higher rates than their White counterparts. These data coupled with a 2017 study published by the Georgetown University Law Center on Poverty and Inequality that suggests the “…perception of Black girls as less innocent may contribute to harsher punishment by educators and school resources officers,” adds to understanding of a pervasive and relentless figuring of Black children as less vulnerable and worthy of harsher discipline. The severe punishment of Black students is the institutional legacy of an innocence raced White (Bernstein, 2011). The exclusion from innocence has been met with strong efforts to include Black children into the category of childhood innocence. Returning here to Bernstein’s (2011) historical account, as U.S. culture “began, at mid-[nineteenth] century, to libel black children as unhurtable and unchildlike….”, African Americans—both children and adults—began asserting that black children were, of course children and did, of course, feel pain” (p. 55). For Black children and other children of color, they first must suffer the effects of violence in order to reap the benefits of innocence. Black children occupied the space of childhood by asserting an ability to feel pain. Including Black Children Into Innocence 65 The display of pain is meant to argue on behalf of Black children’s innocence. Communicating the innocence of Black children through a display of pain and suffering works through what Saidiya Hartman (1997) describes as creating a “…common language of humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and, in turn, remedies the indifference of the callous” (p. 18). Hartman describes the efforts of an abolitionist named Rankin and his attempts to garner the sympathy of those too indifferent to slavery. Hartman critiques this form of public display because it invites spectators to imagine the suffering of the victim, to imagine the daily victimization of Larry, in order to render him innocent, but in the end centers the sympathies of the spectator. “In making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration” (Hartman, 1997, p. 19). The Black child loses their subjectivity in favor of the spectator’s empathy. This works in favor of the spectator as “[d]ifference becomes the conduit of identification in much the same way as pain does” (Razack, 2007, p. 379). Sherene H. Razack (2007) interprets Sara Ahmed’s (2000) writing on encounters with strangers to suggest that the appropriation of pain can happen when recognizing other’s difference. The spectator feels the pain of the suffering Black child and identifies with it so empathy may grow. Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) speaks to the cultural assumption of young Black children as “older, experientially, and more absorbing of life” in her analysis of William Blake’s 1789 poem “The Little Black Boy,” wherein the Black boy “…at the level of representation…make[s] ‘experience’—scenes of suffering, knowledge, or strength, tinged with the variable hues of courage, oppression, despair, or even excitement— intrude up ‘innocence…’” (p. 184). As White children are naturally innocent and 66 vulnerable, Kathryn Stockton (2009) notes the extra burden for Black childhood innocence that requires an emphasis on Black childhood suffering. Insofar as the Black child is suffering and publicizes their despair is the Black child rendered innocent. As Stockton (2009) states, “As odd as it may seem, suffering certain kinds of abuse from which they need protection and to which they don’t consent, working-class children or children of color may come to seem more innocent” (p. 33). The valid argument for Black children and other children of color to receive the protections of innocence tends to shore up scenes of vulnerability and fragility associated with White childhood. Scenes of Black pain elicit empathy and attempts to expand notions of innocence to include Black children and other children of color. The display of pain worked through efforts to integrate schools in the 1950s. Bernstein brings her analysis of Black dolls in the nineteenth century to the famous 1939 dolls tests by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in which Black children were asked to designate either a Black or White doll as “nice” or “bad.” Most of the Black children identified the White doll with favorable characteristics and the results of the study reveal internalized racism. The study was subsequently used in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to argue against the separation of African American children “from others of similar age and qualification solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Bernstein (2011) argues both the study and it’s use in Brown “staged a performance of black children’s pain, and this performance of pain asserted that black children are innocent and therefore children” (p. 22). The staging and showing of Black children’s pain worked to recognize the pain of the Black child, to 67 identify with Black children’s suffering, so as to grow the empathy of the all-White bench of the supreme court. The suffering of the Black child through their segregation and exclusion from an equitable education garnered empathy, which had taken a role in the court case to desegregate schools across the country. Empathy is understood as resulting in action and the improved material conditions of those being empathized with. To fast forward from 1954 to the movement of multicultural education from the 1990s and 2000s, the production of empathy responds to the exclusion and marginalization of minoritized children. Henry Giroux (2001) takes note of the exclusion of minoritized children from what he names as the “myth of childhood innocence,” or the maneuver of a political and school system to demarcate and exclude those children not presumed innocent and instead name them as problems or potential threats. Giroux names the failure of schools to recognize the innocence of minoritized children. Innocence works to structure inequities as young girls, children of color, low-income children, gender nonconforming, and LGBTQ+ students are disenfranchised within a system of education (Giroux, 2001). Repressive school practices overlook, steal, or corrupt the innocence of children of color, an innocence that exists naturally in all children. Giroux naturalizes childhood innocence in order to emphasize the cruelty of schools and educators that exclude minoritized children from the category of childhood. Emphasizing and empathizing with the marginalization of minoritized children works to include minoritized children into the protections of innocence. Kim Hackford- 68 Peer (2010) describes how queer youth are resituated within a victimizing trope and are rendered “…innocent victim of a society that marginalizes them because of their…identity” (p. 545). The value of childhood innocence and vulnerability prevails within efforts to include children of color and LGBTQ+ students. The value reinforces education’s commitment to advocate on behalf of a child’s right to be included in the category of childhood that has been stolen by the collusion of Whiteness and corporate culture (Giroux, 2001). As the doll tests used within Brown staged innocence and vulnerability in the fight for integration, MCE stages innocence in the fight for affirmation and inclusion. The work to affirm and include minoritized children plays on a construction of childhood innocence. Larry and Brown Boy in Drag disrupt these fantasies of childhood innocence precisely through their precarious relationship with the category of childhood, both inhabiting the category and undermining it. Their embodied performances of race, gender, and sexuality betray an idealism of childhood innocence that MCE attempts to maintain. Their betrayal or intrusion into innocence reveals the rifts within the MCE values of affirmation and inclusion that young children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag fall through. Without discounting the important work of affirmation and inclusion, the next section shows their incomplete story. Analysis Exemplars: The Limits of Affirmation and Inclusion The stories of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag—their too muchness—illuminates the limitations of childhood set by the values of affirmation and inclusion. The shift here to LGBTQ+ students looks particularly to the following data points that work as exemplars of affirmation and inclusion: • 69 GLSEN’s viewing guide (2013) for the documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013) • The documentary film, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013), itself also works as a data point • GLSEN’s Ready, Set, Respect! Elementary School Toolkit (2016) further works as an exemplar that reiterates the values of affirmation and inclusion These examples are important and relevant to this discussion because they represent the use of innocence within the values of affirmation and inclusion that is significant to the work of multicultural education. The first example, GLSEN’s viewing guide (2013) for the documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013), as well as the documentary itself, is directly related to Larry as his story takes a central focus of this chapter, while weaving in my autonarrative of a Brown Boy in Drag. GLSEN’s elementary toolkit reinforces the values of affirmation and inclusion and is a prime example of how these values are held in the highest regard especially for elementary aged children. This section details how all the above examples rely on a fantasy of childhood innocence, but lose sight of the racial underpinnings of its production. In addition, the use of innocence may reproduce the very codes of gender and sexuality, or the child-appropriate expressions of gender and sexuality, that were part of Larry’s exclusion and harassment. As I show, the staging of innocence fails for Larry and Brown Boy in Drag whose bodies were too Brown, Black, effeminate, sexual, disobedient, irreverent, loud, disruptive, intrusive (and I do mean to be wordy here) for the MCE values of affirmation and inclusion. Exemplars: The Documentary, Valentine Road, and 70 GLSEN’s Guides to Safety The horrific murder of Larry elicited a call from LGBTQ advocacy organizations for schools to create safe environments for all students, and especially for LGBTQ students. 5 years after Larry’s murder Marta Cunningham released her documentary, Valentine Road, at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival that detailed the murder and the subsequent murder case of Brandon McIneney. GLSEN produced a viewing guide (2013) for the documentary intended for educators who wished to show the film to other educators and/or students. The viewing guide reads like a discussion guide and “…is intended to frame some of the critical issues raised by the film and suggest directions for dialogue among both students and adults” (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013, p. 1). The guide offers educators tools, using the film, to discuss with other teachers, administrators, or students on how best to cultivate a safe, inclusive, and affirming learning environment for students. The guide asks educators to begin conceptualizing how their schools could “be a safer and more affirming place for all students” and how they may “support and affirm gender nonconforming students [like Larry] while ensuring their safety” (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013, p. 1). Other organizations, like the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) Network, echoed GLSEN’s call “…to increase awareness, examine your school climate and create safe and affirming learning environments for all students” (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013, p. 4; GSA Network, 2009). The emphasis on safety makes a critique of affirmation and inclusion difficult because safety is held as a strong value within the guides. Valentine Road (Cunningham, 71 2013) and GLSEN’s accompanying viewing guide (2013) recalled the bullying and bias Larry received in the weeks before his death. Responses understandably centered on student safety and how schools can do better to protect children from harm. Tragedy, however, saturated Larry’s story and stagnated on the painful facets of his life. The viewing guide (2013) describes the film as telling “…an important story, one that leaves many questions unanswered about how our schools and communities deal with bullying, name-calling, bias, discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status and other personal characteristics. It also calls attention to the realities that face young people living in unstable, violent and abusive environments” (p. 3). This description of the film forms a strong connection between social identities (race, gender, sexuality) and the tragic incidents of harassment and discrimination in schools. These connections surrounding Larry’s story were also used by GLSEN to tell a larger story about LGBTQ+ youth—a story emphasizing the vulnerability and innocence of young people. Kim Hackford-Peer (2010) notes this positioning of young queers as innocent and vulnerable is at times strategic but shows the limiting discourse of safety. As the guides instruct schools to emphasize the safety of LGBTQ+ youth, young people are understood only through their marginality and victimization. The guide suggests the film should be shown with “department or leadership team during professional development to address LGBT issues, bullying and violence” or “in a professional learning community (PLC) to learn about the experiences and needs of LGBT students” (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013, p. 5). Bullying and violence become the issues facing LGBT students and the guide continues to ask educators: “How can you best support individual students at risk of being the targets or perpetrators of bullying and violence? And what must school communities do to foster respect, understanding and safety for all students?” (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013, p. 3) 72 The guide instructs educators to protect students from harm. Because the questions are framed within a discussion of LGBT issues of bullying and violence, the guide assumes other students are safe without regard to forms of harassment based on racism, misogyny, or classism. The role of educators is central as GLSEN prompts educators to fulfill roles of protectors and to intervene on behalf of students. GLSEN’s Ready, Set, Respect guide specifically addressed intervening in bullying and guides educators to stop bullying by acting as a physical barrier between bully and bullied: “STOP IT. Immediately stop the bullying. Stand between the bully(s) and those bullied, preferably blocking eye contact between them. Don’t send any students away, especially bystander(s). Don’t ask about or discuss the reason for the bullying or try to sort out the facts now.” (McGarry et al., 2016, p. 51) After educators stop the bullying they are to “cite the rules,” “provide support,” “impose consequences,” and “engage bystanders” (McGarry et al., 2016, p. 51). The role of a protective educator securing the safety of students ushers in an image of an innocent queer student or potential queer victim and reproduces a martyr-target-victim narrative (Rofes, 2004). Educators are urged to adopt practices that could prevent peer-to-peer incidents of harassment. Following the steps could make LGBT+ student less excluded or isolated from the school culture. The idea follows if Larry had been less understood as different, less as an aberration, and more so as a normal innocent child going through typical childhood dilemmas, violence may have been prevented. Even as the focus of GLSEN’s guide looks to LGBTQ+ identities, the selling point to educators becomes that affirmation and 73 inclusion matter too all students irrespective of difference for the sake of creating safe schools for everyone. GLSEN’s “Ready, Set, Respect! provides a set of tools to help elementary school educators ensure that all students feel safe and respected and develop respectful attitudes and behaviors (McGarry et al., 2016, p. 2; emphasis added). In addressing biased language, the guide asks educators to intervene and rearticulates the end goal of interventions by educators to benefit all students: While one might think that addressing biased language can occupy too much valuable instructional time, it is crucial to intervene when students use hurtful language. This is a critical part of creating a space that is safe for all students and ensuring that each student is given the opportunity to fully participate in classroom endeavors and learn and achieve. (McGarry et al., 2016, p. 3; emphasis added) One way to make Larry’s life as less disruptive is to render Larry’s needs as needs all students require—the need for safety and respect. GLSEN’s viewing guide (2013) reassures educators that practices meant to secure safety are meant to protect all students from harm, including children like Larry and Brandon. Rather than point to the difference between Larry and Brandon’s story, GLSEN’s viewing guide creates similarities. The guide (2013) introduces the two stories stating, “In many ways, Larry and Brandon couldn’t have been more different, yet they also had much in common” (p. 1). This language reinforces the values of equality and sameness even while recognizing difference. The guide recognizes difference through an ideal of harmonious multiculturalism where differences are made so familiar, they hardly matter. Larry’s Black racial identity is foregone in favor of a description of Larry as “multiracial.” The viewing guide (2013) writes of “Larry, who was multiracial, had become increasingly open about exploring his gender identity, and had recently started 74 wearing makeup and heeled boots to school” (p. 2). The multiracial marker erases Larry’s Blackness in favor of language that is more aligned with multicultural. The value of affirming and including all students promotes a sense of multiculturalism that is devoid of an analysis of power relations across sexuality, race and class. Adding to this erasure of race, the guide (2013) proclaims that “…[f]ive years later, the central facts of this story remain the same: homophobia is at the core of what killed Larry King and destroyed Brandon McInerney’s life, and in some cases adults failed both Larry and Brandon because of their own inability to deal with the multiple challenges they each faced” (p. 1). The declaration of homophobia being central to the murder undermines the racial underpinnings of the murder and Larry’s Black identity. It further rearticulates the cultural meanings of White childhood innocence by situating Brandon and Larry as both being failed by adults, both facing challenges, and both lives destroyed. The viewing guide (2013) states, “Brandon, who was Caucasian, had a girlfriend and displayed a growing interest in White supremacist ideology. However, both had difficult childhoods” (p. 2). The statement followed by the adverb “however” minimizes Brandon’s interest in White supremacist ideology in favor of seeing Larry and Brandon as similarly suffering. This comparison includes Larry into our culture’s habitual empathetic response to White childhood and ties Larry’s innocence up with Brandon’s by distancing Larry from Blackness. And inevitably the work to emphasize Larry’s innocence would fail. Switching temporarily to the documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013), even when Larry was killed, innocence was not presumed. Maeve Fox, the prosecuting attorney relied on 75 what she called the “basic facts” of the case. Witness statements describe how Brandon told Larry’s friend “to say goodbye to your friend” the day before the murder, had always been bothered by Larry, and how Brandon had originally forgotten then returned home for the gun he used to kill Larry (Cunningham, 2013). Fox assumed these basic facts would secure a guilty verdict and the innocence of Larry. Her assumption was Larry would receive a much more sympathetic response considering the facts of the case. But this wasn’t enough to secure the innocence of Larry, even after his murder. Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013) provides a haunting scene of three White jurors gathering in one of their homes in the affluent White community of Chatsworth, sharply different than the predominately Latino working-class community of Oxnard where Larry lived and went to school. The three White jurors drink wine and bond over their sympathetic feelings toward Brandon and their perception of him as one of their own, a kid who could have been their child or grandchild. They are willfully blind in their justification of Brandon’s White supremacy, describing his fascination with Nazism as innocent curiosity and his white supremacist drawing as “doodles.” The three jurors uphold Whiteness and its currency within the criminal justice system. These jurors had been part of the first trial when the jury deadlocked and the judge announced a mistrial. The jurors’ familial identification toward Brandon’s White childhood innocence was braided with their vilification of Larry. Rather than understand their innocence as tied together and mutual, as GLSEN constructs, Whiteness wields its typical strategy and vilifies Larry to render Brandon innocent—a racial construction not unusual to how race has operated and how Whiteness is defined through its construction of Blackness. For Brandon’s innocence to become a White familiarity, Larry was understood as too much; too flamboyant, too feminine, too sexual, too disruptive, and so forth. And because 76 Larry’s embodied identifications with femininity and sexuality were ardent identifications with Black femininity and sexuality, Larry was too Black. This too muchness was detailed through Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013), which showed how Larry would parade around school in girl’s clothes, wearing make-up, and requesting to be called by other names and in particular stereotypically Black women names. Shirley Brown, an educator at E.O. Green, told filmmakers much like the jurors that she believed “…Larry honestly did not have a clue, honestly, the consequences of his actions. I relate to Brandon because I could see my own self being in that very same position” (Cunningham, 2013). She expressed her understanding of Brandon’s predicament and continues to say, “I don’t know if I would’ve taken a gun. But a good swift kick in the butt might work well” (Cunningham, 2013). Larry had exceeded the boundaries of innocence and was situated outside its protections, to the point of eliciting desire to harm him even from teachers. Not only was Larry left unprotected, but the discursive positioning of Larry outside of innocence also rendered him culpable in his own death. With innocence so entangled with Whiteness, the discursive work to include Larry into the childhood category effaced Larry’s Black identity and the racial motivations of the murder. Innocence is granted when in close proximity to Whiteness. Sarah Lamble (2008) analyzes the ritualized performances of Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) and shows how in remembering the deaths of trans women of color the victim’s racial identities do more to construct a sympathetic spectator than actually recognize how racialized violence manifests. TDOR events mention how trans women of color are killed at higher rates but still cement the root of violence to the 77 singularity of anti-trans violence, without regard to how violence is also racialized or why it might matter that victims are overwhelmingly of color. In a similar fashion, Larry is deraced in favor of Larry’s connection to an LGBT identity. This takes the focus of GLSEN’s viewing guide to Valentine Road as it directs viewers (educators and students) to recognize certain themes of the film while ignoring others. The guide poses questions and prompts: • • • • What messages do your students get about LGBT people? How did his friends and other LGBT students in the film demonstrate resilience? Much was said about Larry’s gender expression in the film. Some people called him brave for being himself despite the opposition he faced. Others considered him attention-seeking, threatening and even dangerous. Examine current data on the experiences of LGBT students in school, understand the safe schools laws in your state and consider how policy impacts school climate. (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013; emphasis added) The guides also instruct educators and students to show and discuss in the film within the following contexts: • • As a staff, department or leadership team during professional development time to address LGBT issues, bullying and violence. In a professional learning community (PLC) to learn about the experiences and needs of LGBT students. (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013; emphasis added) There are numerous prompts and questions guiding educators and students to consider the experiences of LGBT students or how policies and practices affect LGBT students. One point of the 15-page document suggest teachers “[p]ay attention to the unique experiences of LGBT students of color,” but the mention of Larry’s Black identity is completely excluded (GLSEN Viewing Guide, 2013). The making of Larry as innocent through an erasure of his Blackness rearticulates the historical construct of White childhood innocence and falls into what Mary Lou 78 Rasmussen (2012) describes as “…methodologies of inclusion [that] inescapably produce their own exclusions...” and no matter how carefully contrived, the art of inclusion leaves unexpected blind spots (p. 46). The work to garner sympathy for Larry and emphasize his fragility minimized his Blackness. And if education is to seriously consider the work of queer of color scholarship, this erasure works against a queer politic where race is always already present. The erasure of Larry’s Blackness is an erasure of Larry’s queerness, working against the very affirming and inclusive practices the viewing guide means to direct educators and students toward. This racial blind spot is why assimilation looms over calls for inclusion creating an imperative for culturally different (read: non-White) students to fit within the larger school culture (read: White). Rasmussen (2012) outlines the art of inclusion as a method through which education organizes knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge. In other words, including social and cultural groups structure the knowledge of those groups. Rather than simply representing a group that exists outside of the classroom, the act of inclusion is involved in the production of knowledge about those very groups the classroom means to represent. Therefore, framing the reference point through which students are known and organized into social categories. One specific way in which inclusion operates is through the use of role models. I use role models here as an example of inclusive curriculum such as MCE. GLSEN’s Ready, Set, Respect! Elementary School Toolkit (McGarry et al., 2016) instructs educators to “Expand students’ knowledge of diversity by exposing them to role models through literature, lessons, and classroom guests” (p. 4). The guide’s suggestion follows a principle within MCE about representation within curriculum that has become a typical 79 strategy for creating a diverse curriculum. James Banks (2009) describes this principle of MCE as offering ways schools may include content from ethnic groups, women, and other cultural groups with the hopes that this inclusion will affirm students that share the identity representations within the curriculum. MCE urges to create affirming and inclusive environments to ensure students see themselves in the curriculum. The curricular and pedagogical turn to role models is a practice Deborah Britzman (1993) has called “both safe and comforting” for educators. For Britzman (1993), “role models arrive preassembled” and may police identity by defining whom young people should aspire to become (p. 25). In presenting role models, teachers enact their adult authority while forgetting the role “…cultural and institutional structures can play in defining the terms by which young people understand self and society and act on their understandings” (Talburt, 2004, p. 21). Anecdotally, during my time as a teaching assistant and instructor for an Introduction to Multicultural Education course offered to preservice teachers, my students requested structured and precise methods on how best to teach Black kids, Latino kids, LGBTQ+ kids, and so forth. Britzman (1993) continues, “[n]eglected in this simple version is the fact that idealized identities do no lend insight into the mobile and shifting conditions that make identity such a contradictory place to live” (p. 25). My students were so concerned with the proper representations they included in their lesson plans they dangerously ignored the multitude of, for example, Black or Latino expression and experience. I realize the importance of inclusive work and offering a stable identity people can define, hold onto, and proudly identify with. But while identity categories can serve as sites of resistance and opposition, Judith Butler (1991) reminds us how identity can 80 also be an instrument of control. And if inclusion means including marginalized students into a curriculum and school culture already White and heteronormative, it begs the question of what purpose inclusion serves if not meeting the demands of normativity. I point to at least a weariness of inclusion, especially when validation becomes assimilation. In this instance, inclusion does less to alter the very structure that initially led to the harassment Larry received and instead tries modifying Larry’s behavior—to make Larry less disruptive. Making a similar point to Rasmussen, Deborah Britzman (1995) suggest inclusive practices “…do not facilitate the proliferation of identifications necessary to rethinking and refashioning identity as more than a limit of attitude. In an odd turn of events, curricula that purport to be inclusive may actually work to produce new forms of exclusivity if the only subject positions offered are the tolerant normal and the tolerated subaltern” (p. 160). Only when Larry minimizes and contains their Blackness, becoming the tolerated subaltern, are they offered the protections of childhood innocence. Without transforming the very notion of childhood, children of color may fade into a fantasy of childhood innocence already painted White. This works in favor of Whiteness and heteronormativity that sets the standards of inclusion for minoritized students, and are included insofar as they embody acceptable forms of expression. Inclusive education as an identity-based strategy expands norms to absorb traditionally marginalized identities and makes them palatable to the school culture. When inclusive strategies set standards set forth by White heteronormativity they minimize and discipline what Bettina Love (2017) calls the “complex identities of Black queer youth” and other queer and trans youth of color (p. 540). In terms of this 81 dissertation, too muchness, or the embodied politics of identity of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag, complicates these standards of inclusion. Too muchness works against this structure by provoking a strategy that may lead to what Britzman (1995) describes as the “proliferation and refashioning of identity” (p. 160). The next section looks at how these embodied politics of identity take an effect on schools. Particularly how a description of Larry as irreverent and disruptive can be reworked to not only render strategies like affirmation and inclusion unworkable, but to also provoke a different way of thinking. This follows a rasquache sensibility that guides a reading that is disruptive and inventive. Too Muchness as Intrusion: Rethinking Inclusion [Larry] started to show up for class at Oxnard, Calif.'s E. O. Green Junior High School decked out in women's accessories. On some days, he would slick up his curly hair in a Prince-like bouffant. Sometimes he'd paint his fingernails hot pink and dab glitter or white foundation on his cheeks. "He wore makeup better than I did," says Marissa Moreno, 13, one of his classmates. He bought a pair of stilettos at Target, and he couldn't have been prouder if he had on a varsity football jersey. He thought nothing of chasing the boys around the school in them, teetering as he ran. (Setoddeh, 2008) Larry chased boys and moved about the school in his excessively ornamented body. With a Prince-like bouffant, glittery fingernails, and stilettos he was hardly overlooked, again, something Larry relished in. The textual analysis of Larry and the auto-narrative of Brown Boy in Drag provides data for the language of too muchness. Through a rasquache reading, the very scenes of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag rendered as too sexual, flamboyant, irreverent, and disruptive are repurposed in favor of redrawing relationships between school and child and provoke new thinking about how queer and 82 trans kids of color navigate schools. Specifically, the analysis turns to the body politics of Larry, weaving in moments of the auto-narrative of Brown Boy in Drag, through an excavation of memory, news articles, and the documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013), that provide scenes of Larry in school settings. The news articles and documentary are texts that provide documented events of Larry’s life through interviews with Larry’s school peers, teachers, and people involved in the subsequent murder trial of Brandon McInerney. The scenes paint of picture of Larry’s identities, behavior, actions, and irreverence as disrupting the everyday business of the school. This last section refashions and reworks, following rasquachismo, the labeling of Larry as disruptive to provoke a theoretical intervention as thinking of identities as intrusions, flipping the script of inclusion, and how too muchness alters the dynamics of classrooms and schools. Larry and Brown Boy in Drag and their embodiments of race, gender, and sexuality are situated here as intrusions into MCE. Intrusion renders the affirming and inclusive responses to the exclusion and marginalization of minoritized children as insufficient. Whereas inclusion grants agency to the educators, with the power to set the conditions for inclusion and exclusion, intrusion recognizes the ways students and communities force themselves into schools. Rather than the harmonious connotations of inclusion or of bounded safe spaces, intrusion emphasizes the political struggle of race, gender, and sexuality within schools. The varied identities of Larry are set against standards of inclusion and affirmation within MCE. When affirmation and inclusion pin down identities they work to contain the struggle of race, gender, and sexuality especially as they manifest within the embodied nuances of identity and the messy interactions within a classroom that 83 follow. They minimize the possibility for what Lee Airton (2013) describes as the unstructured flow of identity, or what I name as the too muchness through which Larry and Brown Boy in Drag lived their lives. Revisiting Airton’s (2013) definition, Larry and Brown Boy in Drag embody queerness as “…the possibilities and excesses of sexuality, where sexuality is the unstructured flow of desire…” (p. 534). Queerness is rendered as open and indeterminate, allowing for any child to be gay without necessarily growing up into a gay adult. The indeterminate flow of queerness disrupts a linear trajectory of growing up and connects with Stockton’s (2009) idea of growing sideways. Too muchness as a mode of growing sideways signals children extending themselves, a horizontal flow that reaches beyond the contours of their bodies. The horizontal sprawl of too muchness imagines Larry’s queerness, Blackness, transness as expanding and reaching all areas of the school. The sprawl expanded in a disruptive fashion. Larry defied teachers’ suggestions to minimize his flamboyance and flirtations. When Larry shares his desires toward boys and expressed his femininity to his teacher, Shirley Brown, she advised he keep is feelings private but expressed disappointment when Larry had “…progressed day by day in his outward appearance as girl” (Cunningham, 2013). Even as teachers and staff at E.O. Green advised Larry to “tone-down” his flamboyance or when other students harassed him, Larry would pronounce their Black femininity and sexuality even more (Cunningham, 2013). This bothered teachers, especially as they saw Larry as a child describing his as small-framed, or as Dawn Boldrin says, “[h]e was just a sweetheart of a kid. He was a little smaller, you know, those kind of kids. You tend to—okay you just wanna protect ‘em” (Cunningham, 2013). But he acted and behaved in ways that were outside of the expectation of how a 84 child should act. Even with all the cautionary advice to tone his behavior down, Larry continued to parade through the playgrounds, halls, and classrooms of E.O. Green—disobeying mandates to limit his expressions. This affected others and bothered Brandon says Samantha, Brandon’s girlfriend: “Whenever Brandon talked about Larry, it was about what Larry was wearing. I think Larry was kinda shoving it in everyone’s face. For you to come to school dressed like that, you’re making a big statement” (Cunningham, 2013). Larry made their presence known at school, coming “to school in makeup, high heels and earrings. And when the other boys made fun of him, he would boldly tease them right back by flirting with them” (Associated Press, 2008). As students harassed Larry, he deflected the bullying, wielding his Black gender and sexuality loudly to work as both shield and weapon. Larry would wield his Black feminine sexuality through the use of his other personas and adopted names like Leticia and LaTonya. He adorned his body with makeup, jewelry, big hairstyles, nail polish, and of course heels. Averi describes other students’ reactions to these personas: “I think they thought he was crazy. I think that’s kind of the thing he wanted” (Cunningham, 2013). The idea of being seen as crazy, ridiculous, sassy, and all of the above was a strategy of survival for Larry. These actions drove teachers to request administrators intervene. Some teachers “…were baffled that Larry was allowed to draw so much attention to himself” (Setoddeh, 2008). The horizontal sprawl of too muchness had created a frenzy about the school with teachers being concerned and baffled. Too muchness would push and pressure the school administration to respond and prompt the assistant principal, Sue Parsons, to affirm the 85 rights of students to all teachers (Setoddeh, 2008). Sue sent a memo to staff about Larry’s rights to self-expression. The memo stated, “as long as it does not cause classroom disruptions he is within his rights. We are asking that you talk to your students about being civil and nonjudgmental. They don't have to like it but they need to give him his space. We are also asking you to watch for possible problems” (Setoddeh, 2008). The reminder of a student’s right to express themselves was set within the mandate to maintain order. Larry could express her Black femininity insofar as it did not disrupt instruction, opening an opportunity for teachers to constitute the definitions of such disruptions. But “Larry, being Larry, pushed his rights as far as he could wearing a Playboy bunny necklace and approaching the most popular boys’ table at lunch, asking in a highpitched voice, ‘mind if I sit here?’” (Setoodeh, 2008). Larry enjoyed the ways she interrupted and disturbed the students and teachers, and refused to minimize her Black femininity and flirtations. And he did so with a feeling of uninhibited pleasure and authority. The culture to main order and stability also butted against Larry’s own desire to disturb his teachers and classmates. Catherine Saillant (2011) of the Los Angeles Times reported, “it wasn't just that King…had begun wearing makeup and women's spikedheeled boots…It was that he seemed to relish making the boys squirm at his newly feminized appearance and was taunting them with comments like ‘I know you want me.’” The enjoyment he received from chasing boys would often be coupled with telling them they “looked hot” and expressing his desire toward the boys at school. Larry’s disruptions were described by one conservative blogger as a provocation and Larry as the “erotic 86 provocateur” (Clough, 2008). Larry’s actions and words made the students and teachers uncomfortable and exceeded boundaries of what is acceptable for a child. The act of pushing his rights adds to a thinking of too muchness, particularly as Larry disobeyed requests to minimize his Black femininity and sexuality. Larry’s exceedingly displayed his life in ways he found enjoyable. Larry’s Black femininity and sexuality was an engrossing and occupying force, unsettling even those teachers who were sympathetic to Larry. Larry’s knowledge of the contempt with which his peers and several teachers viewed him only convinced him to be more effeminate and provocative. Larry’s overly sexual, gender transgressing, and disobedient Blackness on a child’s body complicates identity-based strategies that typically are okay with students being gay, but not acting gay. Whereas GLSEN’s guide argues for creating welcoming spaces in which students like Larry might feel included, too muchness renders this insufficient and incomplete. Too muchness pushes beyond the discourse of rights to consider how pleasure and enjoyment of students’ identities are experienced in schools. Larry’s pleasurable unruliness undermined and altered the dynamics of traditional school space, as Larry paraded through the school swerving his hips and blowing kisses to the boys. Larry’s subjectivities reached beyond to influence the cultural and social space of the school. Hallways became runways and classrooms became stages. His march onto the basketball court could be read as a precursor to his tragic murder, but can also be read as an act exposing the violent white heteromasculinity the school continued to defend even after the shooting. At the time of the documentary, Valentine Road, the school would not allow a permanent memorial on school grounds (Cunningham, 2013). 87 The narrative surrounding Larry resonated with my auto-narrative of Brown Boy in Drag. Larry had lived in a fashion similar to my own childhood fantasies. The pleasure Larry experienced living their life was the pleasure I found in my fantasies of parading through a quinceañera with my tacones. The noise of my heels and the swivel of my hips would create a scene in the religious context of the party. I desired to be seen, to cause drama, and to command attention. Within my fantasy, I would even imagine my audiences’ facial reactions as I walked through the quinceañera, aunts and cousins “clutching their pearls,” so to speak, or covering their mouths in shock. The conservative, religious audience was necessary to create the shocking reactions I imagined on my spectators faces. The pageantry of my performance and the melodrama I envisioned marked my fantasy as not simply a form of innocent dress up. While dress-up is a game typically associated with childhood, I was instead a Brown Boy in Drag. As I walked among my imagined audience it was always about being looked at, a performance demanding an audience’s gaze. I understood tacones as creating a scene and a presence, much like a drag performance. The ways my body overflowed with identity, femininity, and Brownness were sites of pleasure and desire that pushes back on attempts to minimize and constrain my body to the stylized performances of masculinity. Rather than condemn descriptions of Larry as “erotic provocateur” or deny the sexuality of Brown Boy in Drag, rasquachismo picks up and refashions these stories and bits of memory into scenes of queer and trans children of color’s too muchness. As bodies that extend and disrupt spaces, even those imaginative spaces, Larry and Brown Boy in Drag grow sideways and intrude onto normativity. Too muchness plays off the language of intrusion introduced through the figure of the child queered by color in 88 Stockton’s (2009) work to reorient the relationship between school and child. In her analysis of the film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Blackness intrudes onto normal configurations of the White family, forcing certain connections that in turn shed light on the exclusionary and ignorant Whiteness of the family (Stockton, 2009). Stockton names this intrusion working as a mirror, where Blackness reflects back “making [the White family] turn and look back upon themselves” and reveal their shortcomings when measured against their own self-image of being tolerant and accepting (p. 184). Bringing to bear intrusion on the scene of multiculturalism is, as Stockton (2009) might describe, a type of forced connection and reflects back onto these MCE values. This reflection illuminates what Cris Mayo (2014) names as the adult insufficiency and inadequacy to regulate students’ identities in favor of learning (p. 38). The reflection and the work of intrusion dislodge the normalizing practices of inclusion and affirmation so as to refashion cultures within schools and classrooms. I argue that similarly intrusion has the capacity to provoke the terms of engagement within a classroom. Whereas inclusion is set by schools and teachers who decide the boundaries of who and who will not be included, intrusion sets the student as the principal actor intruding onto the scene of the school and classroom. After all, Larry had caused the school to reflect on its own policies of dress code and teacher concern about violations of dress that would result in a memo from the assistant principal. Intrusion also signals the contentious engagement between student and teacher/school that inclusion would attempt to alleviate. Intrusion is attentive to the messy social, embodied, and unconscious features of identities. Larry’s shifting and overlapping identifications were intrusions, disruptive to classrooms and cause confusion among 89 teachers about how best to manage class time. I understand the danger in naming differences in race, gender, and sexuality as intrusions and the children who embody these differences as trespassers onto the scene of the school. This may reproduce discourses of disruption that have negatively impacted students of color, queer, and trans students. Queer and trans youth of color are overly disciplined and policed. But these students help push conversations about the struggle between the free speech of students and school/district policies, working through arguments that attempt to balance a student’s ability to express themselves without fear of disciplinary action from educators. The tensions between Larry’s rights and the description of Larry as pushing the boundaries of his rights, resurfaced during Brandon’s trial. Larry’s flirtations and expressed desire toward the boys were seen as actions that went too far. So disruptive to the point teachers, community members, and jurors began to construct Larry as the bully, instigating his own murder. As the LA Times reported, “One teacher after another […] testified in the murder trial about their deep worries that King's feminine attire and taunting behavior could provoke problems — and that E.O. Green Junior High administrators ignored them” (Saillant, 2011). Jurors also related to Brandon “as one of their own” and argued in favor of Brandon’s innocence and his right to express his own interest in White supremacy as innocent curiosity. The juxtaposition between a system’s protection of Brandon’s right to express himself and Larry’s embodied performances as pushing his right to express himself set the imbalance of power across the trial and cultural discourse surrounding the case. 90 The pushing the boundaries of rights orients Larry’s too muchness as an intrusion and signals an encroaching upon and invasion into the seemingly normal practices of the school. A particular scene tells the story of Larry walking onto the basketball court where Brandon and his friends were playing. The scene was widely reproduced because, as news reports constructed, had been telling of Larry’s bold flirtations as triggers for Brandon who had been set on a violent course of action. As reports describe, Larry marched onto the basketball court, a scene of normal masculinity, and made public his desire for Brandon. Larry interrupts the regular play of the game to ask Brandon a typically innocent question, “Will you be my valentine?” Larry’s intrusion on the basketball court drew attention and demanded visibility. Larry’s same-sex and interracial desire toward Brandon spurred a very different relationship than the typical romantic relationship the question would initiate. The enunciation of the question—a question that is reminiscent of childhood crushes and normal heterosexual childhood coupling—is thrown off course. Larry’s intrusion had reinvented the question to one saturated with homosexual and interracial desire. The question was altered into a triggering event that would unsettle a normative masculinity so much that it had to reassert itself through violent murder. The innocence of the question would be stripped and force educators to review a seemingly normal interaction between two schoolyard children during Valentine’s Day. In this fashion, Larry’s march onto the basketball courts illustrates Stockton’s (2009) analysis of children of color as intrusions into an ideal of innocence. Children queered by color are peculiar as they are saturated with knowledge of the world and intrude upon a construction of childhood innocence at odds with experience. This 91 experience, or strength as Stockton refers, makes the child of color as stranger to familiar notions of innocence, all while inhabiting a child-body. I extend this thinking to Larry who similarly intrudes onto innocence, and the effort to maintain innocence within the school, through their identifications of Leticia and LaTonya. The personas worked as both armor against the harassment Larry received and were wielded as weapons to taunt boys and teachers. Larry’s intrusion onto the basketball court and question toward Brandon is similarly marked within oppression, as the question was said to have triggered Brandon into killing Larry, and with experience, as Larry expressed same-sex desire. The question is reconfigured into a much more grown-up and dangerous exchange. Larry’s intrusion worked to repurpose the Valentine’s Day proposal, forcing the school to reconsider the innocence of a question. Larry’s intrusion forced new connections between childhood sexuality and teacher and administrator preparedness. Teachers were unsure how to address Larry’s intrusion, instructing Larry to not wear make-up to school and limit his demeanor. Newsweek reported his transgressions had become so pronounced that even teachers who wanted to support Larry were not sure how they could, concerned about the balance between self-expression and disruption to other students. Dawn Boldrin, Larry’s teacher who had often advocated on his behalf, later regretted gifting Larry her daughter’s used glittery homecoming dress. Boldrin had cautioned Larry to not be so ostentatious, but “…despite his teacher’s warnings, Larry flaunted his new prized possession” (Dubreuil & Martinez-Ramundo, 2011). In an interview with 20/20 she regretted gifting the dress to Larry, suggesting she was not thinking clearly and may have unintentionally accelerated an already dangerous situation. Following Stockton’s (2009) understanding of intrusion as illuminating certain 92 practices, Larry’s intrusion also worked on the school as a mirror—as a reflection back onto the school culture. The excessiveness through which Larry performed her identities reflected back onto a school culture and forced administrators, teachers, and other students to struggle with dilemma considered too grown up for a middle school. The intrusion works as a form of connection as Larry forces the school to consider the relationship between childhood and queerness. Intrusion opens the door to a guarded innocence, in this sense guarded by the school (Stockton, 2009). Larry creates the context through which teachers reflect on their own ethical dilemma of supporting students or denying their self-expression. “That is, the child intruder, the child queered by color, makes [schools] reflect upon their ethics of inclusion…and reflect upon their image as liberal [educators]” (Stockton, 2009, p. 192). This forced connection works as a mirror to reflect back and place inclusion and affirmation “in a different kind of light” (Stockton, 2009, p. 84). While MCE has done well in providing tools for affirming identity and experience in relationships with young people, too muchness shows how children’s embodied identifications complicate those affirmations. Chapter Summary Within this final section I move toward some implications in rethinking Edward Brockenbrough’s (2015) suggestion that queer of color analysis in education should consider the ways young people negotiate and navigate their school contexts. Larry’s too muchness signals a nuanced relationship between young people and the material and discursive worlds they live and must navigate (Brockenbrough, 2015). 93 The chapter worked through different exemplars of multicultural education such as GLSEN’s Viewing Guide for the documentary, Valentine Road, and GLSEN’s Ready Set Respect guide for elementary education that guide educators to adopt practices of inclusion and affirmation. At the time of Larry’s murder these values were increasingly emphasized as a response to the number of incidents of bullying that lead to other cases of violence and suicide and to ensure the safety and security of queer youth within schools. But these values rely upon normative constructions of childhood that have been constructed with White innocence. When centering the lives of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag the values of affirmation and inclusions are necessary to unpack because they may reproduce normative constructions of childhood within MCE. The construct of childhood works against the lives of children like Larry who transgress norms of race, gender, and sexuality. These guides provided by GLSEN argue on behalf of Larry’s childhood through a sympathetic call for affirming and including children like Larry. Yet it is disconnected from a historical understanding of childhood raced White and may dismiss his Blackness, queerness, and transness. The reliance upon a normative construction of childhood relied upon the spectacle of pain and vulnerability, but was not enough to guarantee Larry’s innocence, even after he was murdered. It was not enough to guarantee Larry received an equitable education. Identifications as Larry, LaTonya, Leticia, and Latoya as trans, genderqueer, cis, boy, girl, Black, White—embodying various and moving configurations of race, gender, and sexuality were simply too much for the school, students, and teachers. Larry, Leticia, Latoya, and Latonya disobeyed the demands of self-restraint and obedience, an 94 expectation schools commonly have for students of color, gender nonconforming and sexually expressive students. Through the standard of white adolescent masculinity, Larry’s Black effeminacy and excessive sexuality were marked as disorderly and threatening to the social stability of the school tied to the stability of identity. Affirmation and inclusion tell incomplete stories of childhood, queerness, and race. Affirmation and inclusion are not the only ways in which educators and educational theorists may think and speak about childhood, queerness, and race. The child queered by color circles back to the history of children of color being excluded from an ideal of innocence but reworks this exclusion into a provocation. Placing the embodied politics of Larry’s life alongside affirmation and inclusion provokes the production of the child under these values and urges educators to consider more expansive notions of childhood. While inclusive education relies upon identifiable identities that are then included into the curriculum and pedagogical strategies, too muchness speaks to their students’ sideways growth, their unstructured flows of being. The unstructured flow, the too muchness refuses mandates to structure identity in distinct and stagnant social categories, especially when in relation to the child. Too muchness works against tendencies that render the queerness of sexuality, race, and gender to easily identifiable categories for the purposes of minimizing “contradictory and conflicting ways people embody, conceptualize, and perform the politics of identity” (Britzman, 1993, p. 188). When children fail to meet the measures of inclusion and affirmation, they become too disruptive even for educational practices meant to advocate on their behalf. I reiterate here the intent not to disrupt inclusion and affirmation to the point of suggesting their futility. Instead the intention is to disrupt the normalizing 95 practices that often seep into even our most well-intentioned education practices. Inclusion and affirmation should resist the tendency to establish norms of identity or else they risk restricting children to adult fantasies of childhood. Larry’s too muchness situates him outside the boundaries and protections of innocence. But rather than argue on behalf of his innocence, the chapter argues how their too muchness may provide a reworking and refashioning of how identity is included, or rather, how identities intrude upon education. The intrusion speaks to how children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag dislodge fantasies of childhood within practices like affirmation and inclusion. Following Lee Airton (2013), including and affirming queers (read as LGBTQ) is not the same as making space for queerness. Too muchness is that force that makes space, demands for queerness to be recognized, and situates the queer and trans child of color as embodying that force. CHAPTER 4 QUEERING THE ETHNIC STUDIES CHILD This chapter is located within the 2005-2018 movement to push for ethnic studies curriculum within K-12 schools. This chapter analyzes the value of developing consciousness found with K-12 ethnic studies curriculum, specifically within the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) Mexican American Studies Program between 2005 and 2010. I turn to TUSD’s Mexican American Studies program because of its national recognition (even inspiring a now widely used documentary, Precious Knowledge) and its work as a catalyst for other schools and districts across the country to adopt similar ethnic studies curricula. This analysis adds to a K-12 ethnic studies curriculum that emphasizes social justice, but argues against a sole focus on developing consciousness. The development or raising of consciousness is central to ethnic studies, as Tintiangco-Cubales et al. (2014) states, “the key components to a community responsive Ethnic Studies pedagogy includes developing critical consciousness, developing agency through direct community experience, and growing transformative leaders” (p. 12). Marcelo Diversi and Claudio Moreira (2012) also speak to the development of consciousness is a central principle within the socio-political work of K-12 ethnic studies meant to create a more socially just society through curricula and pedagogies that “can guide children toward more 97 critical forms of citizenship by addressing social injustice head on, overtly, frankly, and carefully” (p. 193). The development of consciousness takes a central part in both the theorization and implementation of K-12 ethnic studies. This emphasis, however, has left little room for children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag to be figured within the work of K-12 ethnic studies. The chapter pushes K-12 ethnic studies to consider children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag as ethnic studies curriculum takes shape in schools. Their narratives show the limitations of developing consciousness, and keeping with the both the defiant and inventive characteristics of rasquache, the chapters strings together Larry and Brown Boy in Drag’s too muchness and the work of developing consciousness within K-12 ethnic studies curriculum. To do this, this chapter writes through the following two broad goals: One, to trace the value of developing consciousness within K-12 ethnic studies curriculum and theory particularly as it works from an ideality of childhood. I look specifically at the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) Mexican-American Studies Curriculum through two specific data points: 1. A Curriculum Audit of the Mexican American Studies Department done by Cambium Learning in spring of 2011. The audit continues to show how course syllabi “support and substantiate” the goals of the program, including the goal of critical consciousness. 2. The English Journal article, Developing Critical Consciousness: Resistance Literature in a Chicano Literature Class by Curtis Acosta, former teacher and creator of the Mexican American Studies (MAS) curriculum at TUSD. This article provides the curricular foundation for the TUSD MAS Program. 98 The chapter uses too muchness and weaves it with queer theory and queer youth studies literature to read through the value of developing consciousness within TUSD’s Mexican American Studies Program. This analysis will show how the value works from a construction of childhood to name whom the child is and who the child should become, inevitably leaving out children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag. The second objective of this chapter is to place Larry and Brown Boy in Drag, and their too muchness, in relation to K-12 ethnic studies to provoke a retheorization of the developing consciousness and working from the Halberstam’s (2012) rethinking of becoming. The theoretical intervention of too muchness within this dissertation urges K12 ethnic studies to engage with embodies politics of identity within childhood, especially queer/trans children of color and their performative play to impact social change. The emphasis on developing consciousness forgoes the body as performing experience, and when this mode of being is how children communicate, it also forgoes children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag. Larry and Brown Boy in Drag’s disruptive and inventive embodied subjectivities reorients K-12 ethnic studies toward a queer and trans of color politics to consider how queer and trans students of color impact change. In sum, the chapter places the child subject of queer theory in relation to the child subject of K-12 ethnic studies. Context on the Ethnic Studies Movement Into K-12 In the aftermath of Arizona’s House Bill 2281 in 2010, a bill that effectively banned K-12 ethnic studies curricula, communities across the country urged their school districts to implement ethnic studies courses. San Francisco Unified School District 99 adopted ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement starting in the 2015-2016 school year (Lynch, 2016) and Los Angeles Unified School District followed with a plan to require high school student take an ethnic studies course starting in the 2018-2019 year (LAUSD, 2015). The legislative body of California recently approved legislation requiring the state to create a standardized ethnic studies curriculum high schools would have the option to adopt (Wang, 2016). Many other smaller school districts in comparison to San Francisco and Los Angeles in California have either adopted a similar curriculum or are considering offering ethnic studies as an elective or making it a high school graduation requirement (Ethnic Studies Now Coalition, 2016). A media release from the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition in California states the bill is the “first of its kind in the nation, and follows the lead of multiple local districts, including; El Rancho Unified, Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland, and over 25 other local districts who have established, expanded or made ethnic studies a graduation requirement locally” (Ethnic Studies Now Coalition, 2016). California law in 2018 only recommends for schools to adopt the standard curriculum created by the state. A bill introduced in the 2017-2018 legislative session attempted to make Ethnic Studies course a requirement for high school students across the state but was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown in September 2018 (Vanhooser, 2018). Oregon has already passed a similar law making it the first state to require K-12 ethnic studies curriculum with a plan for implementation by 2021 (June, 2017). The 2017-2018 year became the first year all high schools in Indiana were required to offer ethnic studies courses as an elective in high schools (Gov. Holcomb signs Ethnic Studies, 2017). This movement to implement ethnic studies in K-12 schools is different from the 100 values of multicultural education that have been available to educators for decades. While K-12 ethnic studies shares similar values of inclusion and affirmation, ethnic studies curriculum also engages with the politics of power and privilege. In practice, MCE has typically emphasized equal representation, but “simply infusing representation of racially and ethnically diverse people into curriculum, based on the assumption that students will develop positive attitudes by seeing diversity, makes only marginal impact on students’ attitudes” (Sleeter, 2011, p. 16). As ethnic studies moves into the K-12 arena, it stands as a response to a multiculturalism “…that portray[s] diverse groups but ignores racism” (Sleeter, 2011, p. viii). Schools are more reluctant to adopt ethnic studies because it moves beyond affirmation and inclusion to raising the political consciousness of students about an economically driven and governmentally sanctioned racial caste system. Therefore, the political motivations of ethnic studies have not been the selling point for school districts to adopt an ethnic studies curriculum or for legislators to push ethnic studies as a high school requirement. Lawmakers, policy-makers, curriculum developers, and administrators are sold on the positive academic outcomes that ethnic studies programs have produced. A 2016 study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education, which focused on students in an ethnic studies pilot program in San Francisco, revealed that students who participated in the course had higher attendance, better grades and earned more credits toward graduation than their peers who did not participate (Dee & Penner, 2016). Sleeter (2011) adds to this by showing the effectiveness of ethnic studies curricula in high schools particularly “in relationship to three overlapping effects on students: academic engagement, academic achievement, and personal empowerment” (p. 9). For 101 example, the social studies curriculum within the Mexican American Studies Department in Tucson, Arizona saw similar academic success among the students enrolled in their program. Students who participated in the program saw higher academic success and graduation rates (Cabrera et al., 2012). While most states and districts have implemented ethnic studies within high schools, with the exception of the Oregon bill requiring ethnic studies standards throughout its K-12 social studies curriculum, the move within the years following the ban of MAS signals a growing emphasis on all children needing an ethnic studies curriculum. The intervention made within this chapter may be read as premature, as K-12 ethnic studies is still within its infancy stages and has yet to be widely adopted. It is also challenging for me, as someone who personally advocates for K-12 ethnic studies, argues for its implementation, and signs petitions in favor of the new California law. But to adopt the sort of critical intellectualism that ethnic studies itself espouses, I follow Jen Gilbert’s (2014) cautionary note that “being on the right side of an issue is not enough if, in standing there, we erode the possibility for new, more expansive understanding of…learning” (p. xiii). More specifically for this chapter, is how K-12 ethnic studies has, even within these early stages of its implementation, its own construct of childhood and how that construct omits the too muchness of children, especially queer and trans children of color. The Child of Ethnic Studies and Becoming Conscious Within this section I look specifically at how the child is constructed within the TUSD Mexican American Studies Program/curriculum. Curtis Acosta’s (2007) writing on the program and philosophy of the curriculum as well as the curriculum audit 102 performed by Cambium Learning (2011) provide the data while I think with youth studies and childhood studies scholarship. The textual analysis allows for understanding how the child is situated within the curriculum. TUSD’s Mexican American Studies curriculum was implemented in 1998 and had grown exponentially throughout the years, being offered from elementary up through high school. Curtis Acosta, who was influential in developing the curriculum for Tucson High Magnet School began offering a Chicano/Raza Studies block of literature and history in 2003. Acosta (2007) described the growth of the program to the point of offering “…eleven Raza Studies classes—six sections of junior literature and history and five section of senior literature and government” (p. 42). The reason this chapter turns to this specific example of a K-12 ethnic studies program is its prominence within a national dialogue around offering ethnic studies in K-12 schools and its distinction from MCE as an education curriculum with a more pointed critique of power and injustice. Ethnic studies in K-12 schools gained wider attention after the MAS program at TUSD was being banned. National news outlets reported on the racist attack toward the program predominantly from Tom Horne, Arizona’s former superintendent of public instruction. Horne would eventually draft a bill signed into law by former Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, prohibiting ethnic studies curricula (Lacey, 2011; Otero & Cammarota, 2011). As a result, the TUSD Mexican American Studies program was dissolved. The political battle to save the Mexican American Studies Program made national headlines, inspired a documentary, and motivated many other school districts across the country to stand in solidarity with TUSD and to consider implementing their own ethnic studies programs. Curtis Acosta and the entire Mexican American Studies 103 program at TUSD were leaders and served as a model in the movement to offer ethnic studies in K-12 schools. The major values and goals of the MAS curriculum are based on a model of “critically conscious intellectualism” that had three components: One, curriculum that is culturally and historically relevant; two, pedagogy that develops the critical thinking and critical consciousness of students; and, three, authentic teacher caring that respects students as intellectual human beings (Cammarota, 2007; Cammarota & Romero, 2009; Romero, Arce, & Cammarota, 2009). The second goal and value of instilling consciousness in TUSD’s Mexican American Studies curriculum forms an idea of the child—situating a figure of the child within ethnic studies curricula. Even as the curriculum is written for a high school setting, the language of developing consciousness frames the students on a linear, developmental trajectory, where students move from a state of internalized oppression toward a state of critical consciousness. The TUSD Mexican-American Studies curriculum commits itself to this narrative as it outlines its goals for the program include the “[w]ork towards invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student…” (Cappellucci et al., 2011, p. 19). The process of invoking, or giving rise to a consciousness that does not exist before, is the intervention ethnic studies curricula to the lives of students. Instead, internalized oppression exists where critical consciousness has yet to be developed. Acosta (2007) writes about the Mexican American Studies curriculum and describes high school aged youth as having lived within “barrios and communities [that] often perpetuate [the] feeling that academic success is White. Having internalized their oppression and formed these attitudes, it is crucial for the students in the beginning stages of their journey to 104 look within themselves and their history to discover their humanity and academic identity” (p. 37). Students are situated within this idea of a beginning stage where they internalized codes of Whiteness. Whiteness has taught them education exists only for White students and to succeed within an education system they become White. The intervention of ethnic studies is crucial, as Acosta writes, so their path can be corrected toward a trajectory of critical consciousness. This developmental narrative constructs a present, yet invisible, child that preceding the stage of internalized oppression. Acosta (2007) writes about high-school aged students: “When students enter our Chicano/Raza Studies classrooms in their junior year, they are veterans of surviving in a system that has historically oppressed and marginalized them” (pp. 36-37). Even as the curriculum is situated within a high school setting, the figure of the child is an ever-present figure being shaped. If high school students are veterans of a system, children are novices, at the beginning stages of an oppressive system. The child is situated within an innocent stage before they learn and become veterans to an oppressive system. This construct of the child is further developed through the use of a metaphor of semillas (seeds), as described by Jose Gonzalez, a former educator within the TUSD program. The metaphor of semillas describes the development of consciousness as a planting or cultivation within the minds of students (Palos, 2011). Semillas is a recurring metaphor because it situates an ethnic studies curriculum as planting then cultivating knowledge within the students’ minds. The metaphor of semillas resonates with educational strategies that argue for early interventions, when the dirt is fertile for planting and before the child has adopted a false sense of self or a distorted view of 105 reality. Children who are not veterans are still new to a system that oppresses them and perhaps have not yet internalized oppression. Within this framing, minoritized children are potential victim to schools’ Eurocentric, middle-class, and heteronormative values. I locate this rendering of the child within previous examples to show how the construct is pervasive. The child of ethnic studies is similarly situated to the Black children participants of the doll test used within Brown v. Board of Education. The spectacle of pain as described earlier was meant to show the effects of oppression and as damaging Black children’s sense of themselves. These examples show how children become victims to oppression, especially on their psyche and perceptions towards themselves and their communities. Ethnic studies, with a focus on correcting this internalization stand as protecting children and warding off internalization. Ethnic studies then stands guard against systems—consumer culture, Whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity—that would corrupt a child’s sense of their self. If students’ minds are protected from internalizing oppression and consciousness is planted and cultivated, the child is placed on a trajectory toward becoming critically conscious subjects. This idea of becoming and potential is present within the syllabus for a Chicano Studies course at Wakefield Middle School within TUSD, which states, “This class is intended to get students to become critically conscious about the society that we live in and the history that has made it what it is today [emphasis added]” (Cappellucci et al., 2011, p. 21) The ethnic studies curricula of TUSD intends to set students on the path to become critically conscious-minded subjects. Within this state of becoming conscious subjects, children are oriented within a forward-moving pathway toward a more 106 democratic future. This sense of both individual and societal progress places the child in a perpetual state of not-yet critically conscious. As Jo-Ann Wallace notes, the child is repeatedly figured, even in oppositional theories and politics, such as within ethnic studies curricula, as “the subject out of time…the subject yet to come—not yet literate, not yet capable of reason, not yet full agential” (Wallace, 1995, p. 298). The figure of the child comes to be defined by this status of not-yet. Children stop being children when they are literate, capable of reason, and agential. Their growing up is signaled by these characteristics. It’s important to revisit Nancy Lesko’s (2001) writing about the state of “not-yet” in which young people are culturally situated. While Lesko (2001) specifically addresses the constructed stage of adolescence, her arguments are extended to the category of childhood. Lesko (2001) describes the state of “not-yet” as a perpetual state of becoming. Under this idea of becoming, children are understood as “…having great potential but also as being liable to go astray, imagine as ships without stable moorings or rudders…” (p. 41). Lesko adds the idea of the children being especially impressionable and ethnic studies curricula fit within her analogy as the moorings and rudders that prevent children from going astray. Importantly in Lesko’s (2001) description of becoming is the potential of children and their liability “to go astray.” Children are unfinished social projects where adults project the hopes and fears of a future society. The child, as Claudia Casteñeda (2002) suggests, is particularly open to these hopes and fears because it is not fully formed and open for shaping. As Casteñeda (2002) reiterates Lesko’s idea of becoming, she states the 107 child is constructed as “a potentiality rather than an actuality, a becoming rather than a being” (p. 1). The anxiety of young people going astray is also entangled with the possibilities and hope of them walking the right path. The TUSD MAS program projects a hope on young people who may eventually be radically conscious and therefore may impact social change. On a journey to becoming critical subjects, children are especially primed for revolution. Children become the great hope under K-12 ethnic studies curricula and will become ethical, critical, and radically democratic subjects. Youth and children are inviting to our political hopes because they are understood through this potential—a location where the child is the agent of change for the future and become the stories of the United States’ learning, growth, and progress. The appropriate path to a subjectivity that could impact social change is described within the TUSD Mexican American Studies Program as a “curriculum and learning resources [that] are appropriately designed and implemented…” to guide children in understanding their experiences so they may “…combat oppression, racism, and prejudice” (Cappellucci et al., 2011, p. 61). Student consciousness is continuously shaped to help them navigate racially hostile environments and reach a state where they understand “how education can serve as a tool for their own advancement as well as for serving their community” (Sleeter, 2011, p. 9). Teaching young people to “look within themselves and their history,” or more critically understanding their experiences, is part of a trajectory towards critically conscious-minded subjects. The path of developing critical consciousness is the method to reach individual and social transformation. The path to consciousness is defined through the model of “critically conscious intellectualism” within the TUSD Mexican American Studies Program. This model emphasizes an academic intellectualism and students’ minds are shaped to recognize 108 oppression. Consciousness is understood as a rational and realistic understanding of the world and not a distorted view under a system of oppressive meanings. Individual course syllabi show the academic focus of critical consciousness that align with state standards. Within a government course students explored social justice and engaged in “…activities involving participant observation, formal and informal interviewing, and photo documentation” (Cappellucci et al., 2011, pp. 20-21). Students are positioned as researchers and social scientists. Another course within the program instructs students on research project where “…findings will be presented to the school administrators, district administration, the school board and other relevant bodies of policy makers” (Cappellucci et al., 2011, p. 20). These is a fair lesson within the curriculum and important skills to learn, but nonetheless linear in its thinking and part of a logico-scientific inquiry that appeals to the formal structure of description and explanation that education policy relies upon. Developing critical consciousness works through the logico-scientific inquiry and relies upon what Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) describes as an overreliance on reason and rationalism. Rationalism and empiricism are Western constructs and appropriated within the curriculum to suggest students can learn, through a developed consciousness, to objectively identify, name, and combat systems of power. Critical consciousness requires the student to possess a degree of knowledge. As Acosta (2007) writes, “[m]any educators assume that minority students bring a vast amount of knowledge of their community’s history and culture with them when they enter the classroom. However, in our experiences we have found this is not the case” (p. 36). This knowledge, which is simply unavailable to young children (Wallace, 1995), situates the child before their 109 consciousness can be raised and their subjectivity fashioned to more radical modes of being. The child, within this preconscious state, is incapable of provoking systemic change. But considering how Acosta (2007) situates his students as veterans of a system of oppression also signals how students have experienced racism. This is somewhat different from imagining a child completely without knowledge but does require some theorizing here. Students enter the classroom lacking knowledge of their history and culture. Within the TUSD MAS program as Acosta (2007) describes, consciousness would help students make sense of their own experiences. So as ethnic studies curricula would recognize Brown Boy in Drag and Larry’s experiences with oppression, it would require an intervention to guide them to more critical forms of subjectivity. As Sleeter (2011) states, “students of color experience racism; ethnic studies does not introduce them to that concept,” but they do require the language to make sense of their experience (p. 9). Ellsworth (1989) this can only go so far in dismantling the power relations within classrooms and schools and actually reproduces systems of power. Children, like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag, are left without the ability to transform themselves and the worlds around them precisely because they’re outside of an ethnic studies curriculum. Even as my childhood self-understood wearing my mother’s tacones was wrong, evident through my attempts to hide from family, the value of developing consciousness prompts a retroactive reading of my experiences through adult theorizations. This method to make meaning is important, but reveals a construct of childhood that is separate from a critical subjectivity dependent on a conscious mind. 110 The paradigm dominating TUSD’s ethnic studies curriculum set boundaries of consciousness that configures the child as a potentiality and locates that potential within a cognitive developmental narrative. Students’ ability to transform their individual and social lives relies upon a privileged state of critical consciousness. As a precursor to a politically oriented identity, children are rendered without the ability to act from knowledge that would be developed by an ethnic studies curriculum. As ethnic studies curriculum privileges a critically conscious mind as a prerequisite for affecting social change, the child and their bodies are left without the means to influence dominant ways of thinking and broad social justice movements. I say this not to argue in favor of anti-intellectualism, but rather reiterate Cindy Cruz’s (2001) critical intervention about the epistemology of the brown body. Cruz (2001) critiques the Cartesian split between mind and body, or an understanding of knowledge that privileges of the mind over the body. Cruz (2001), working from a Chicana feminist framework, argues in favor of education research that values corporeal approaches that validate the lived experience of the body. In other words, theory is not simply a task of the mind. The body holds knowledge and “…is a critical component of the study of agency and empowerment” (Cruz, 2001, p. 668). As Cruz (2001) mentions, “[n]othing provokes the custodians of normality and objectivity more than the excessiveness of a body” (p. 659). Too muchness as gesturing to this bodily excessiveness is also devalued within an idea of consciousness that privileges rational and linear learning. The emphasis on developing critical consciousness excludes the body as a source of this disruption. In her review of K-12 ethnic studies research, Sleeter (2011) counters a 111 common misconception about K-12 ethnic studies as “touchy-feely and non-academic— even as lowering academic standards, as examples will illustrate—ethnic studies curricula are academically based, usually designed to improve students’ academic performance, and sometimes explicitly focus on university preparation” (p. 5). In offering the important counter argument about the rigor of ethnic studies, Sleeter (2011) abandons the body—the “touchy-feely”—of identity and consciousness. While K-12 ethnic studies privileges experiential knowledge, the emphasis on developing consciousness dismisses the corporeal “where experience is performed not explained” (Cruz, 2001, p. 659). The narrative of a critically conscious subject should not elide “a narrative that works outward from our specific corporealities” (Cruz, 2001, p. 658). The worthwhile project of developing critical consciousness should be cautious of how that very value, even when progressively aligned, can shape our understanding of how the body can impact change. The abandonment of the body in favor of knowledge of the mind leaves an ethnic studies value of developing consciousness as a trajectory toward a disembodied consciousness. By disembodied consciousness I mean a consciousness that emphasizes a mental process of knowing at the expense of how the body, and especially the child-body, is saturated with identities to the point it pushes back on the very oppressive discourses K-12 ethnic studies critiques. Acosta (2007) writes about the ethnic studies curriculum at TUSD as developing the consciousness of students “…that will allow them to be critical of the constraints in their lives, in order to develop projects that address these issues and offer real change in our community” (p. 41). The emphasis on developing consciousness, particularly a sort of cognitive development, limits the way children already enact a mode of embodied consciousness or agency, without the need for development. The development and guiding of children towards a privileged state of critical 112 consciousness abandons the body through which children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag perform identity. In this sense, an emphasis on a cognitive critical thinking misses the way queer and trans children of color create new and emerging identities. Too muchness begins to enter here as a rupture to this linearity of thought, of a developmental narrative that situates children as precursors to a more radical subjectivity. The next section more strongly considers Larry and Brown Boy in Drag, who did not act from a position of consciousness, but embody modes of being that push back on the very systems of power an ethnic studies curriculum undermines. The preoccupation with the development of critical consciousness dismisses the present provocations and interventions from children like Larry and Brown Boy in Drag. Their disruptions and transgressions were bodily in nature and narratives of developing critically conscious subjects undermine the possibility for the child as a vantage point from which to rethink (and queer) K-12 ethnic studies. Privileging a state of consciousness alongside “the absence and elusiveness of the body…defines and delineates any consideration of how new identities…are being invented within a contestation of dominant discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (Cruz, 2001, p. 657). And it is within these emerging identities, the reinvention and repurposing codes of race, gender, and sexuality, where children contest dominant discourses and contribute to the political work of K-12 ethnic studies. Too Muchness and K-12 Ethnic Studies—A Reworking of Becoming "He was like Britney Spears," says one teacher who knew Larry. "Everyone wanted to know what's the next thing he's going to do." Girls would take photos of him on their camera phones and discuss him with their friends. "My class was in a frenzy every day with Larry stories," says a humanities teacher who didn't have Larry as one of her students. He wore a Playboy-bunny necklace, which one of his teachers told him to remove because it was offensive to women. But those brown Target stilettos wobbled on. (Setoddeh, 2008) 113 This last section considers Larry and Brown Boy in Drag as cultural producers and provocateurs that counters the construct of the child within the TUSD Mexican Mexican American Studies Program and K-12 ethnic studies more broadly. I bring in an analysis of Larry and the auto-narrative of Brown Boy in Drag, and more importantly their too muchness, to push on the construct of the child discussed in the previous section. To help continue a theorization of too muchness I follow the rasquache sensibility of scavenging and sifting through fragments of Larry’s life captured by: • Various news and investigative stories surrounding the murder of Larry, especially coverage that provides glimpses into how Larry lived their life. • The documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013). These two texts provide events, incidents, and stories of Larry’s life and provide the data for a thinking of too muchness. Simultaneously, too muchness is placed within and against the construct of the child produced by MAS and ethnic studies more generally. Lastly, the signals questions of what ethnic studies may learn from too muchness. The analysis is guided by rasquachismo by reworking the very path to consciousness constructed through ethnic studies curricula. Rasquachismo guides the reading to not do away with consciousness but to suggest too muchness as impacting change. Too muchness is also guided by rasquachismo by highlighting those moments that are irreverent and creative. The opening quote to this section is one of those moments Larry in which Larry disrupted the everyday operation of the school, caused frenzy, and 114 disobeyed instructions from adults. It was these very scenes that were used against Larry in the murder trial following Larry’s death. While these descriptions were used to incriminate Larry, rasquachismo’s skill of repurposing the everyday into creative expression guides the analysis to repurpose these descriptions in favor of a queer of color politic. Too muchness takes up the very rhetoric used to libel Larry and strings it together to offer a different entry point into K-12 ethnic studies. This is not to displace the value, but forces a new orientation toward an ethnic studies curriculum. While Larry and the Brown Boy in Drag were not students of ethnic studies and their queerness largely falls outside of the purview of its curricular and pedagogical goals, both narratives outline a sense of childhood and modes of being that help rethink K-12 ethnic studies. On Becoming Queer This new orientation shows how children may already be contributing to the work of subverting the very schooling practices ethnic studies challenges. While changing oppressive situations is predicated on learning a certain kind of knowledge within the value of developing consciousness, too muchness pushes thinking to consider ways children can subvert oppressive situations without the prerequisite of consciousness. Too muchness and its emphasis on embodiment, especially the body’s overflowing and irreverent characteristics, troubles the emphasis on developing consciousness, especially as this development creates a construct of childhood that limits the capacity of the child to impact change. Rather, understanding Larry and Brown Boy and Drag as cultural producers 115 draws upon characterizations of them as being over-the-top, disruptive, and irreverent— when their bodies are “…excessive in its disorderly movements and conduct” (Cruz, 2001, p. 659). The emphasis on developing consciousness within the minds of young people misses the possibilities of Larry’s embodiments, Brown Boy in Drag, and other queer and trans children of color. With significance on developing critically conscious minds, the dramatic gestures, effeminate voices, swiveling hips, runway-like poses and faces, and all other forms of bodily excessiveness fall outside the political scope of K-12 ethnic studies. The everyday frenzy of Larry stories, for example, are set within/against the construct of the child who is supposed to maintain a demeanor conducive to learning. In fact, conservative rhetoric named Larry’s transgressions as “playing grown-up” and going outside the bounds of childhood. Playing grown up was addressed through a Newsweek article on the death of Larry, which mentioned Larry’s overly sexual demeanor as raising “a troubling set of issues. Kids may want to express who they are, but they are playing grown-up without fully knowing what that means” (Setoddeh, 2008). Larry, who had expressed himself in ways deemed too sexual, transgressed the boundaries of childhood and deviated from the appropriate developmental narrative. Their Playboy necklace, chasing/flirting with boys, and, moving and accessorizing their body were deemed too adult. Reworking this construction of Larry as playing grown up is precisely the type of embodiment that harbors the unruly and inventive characteristics of queerness and race. It also defies the adult surveillance and regulation adults have over children’s desires and sexualities. While not focusing on the bodies of children, Jack Halberstam (2012) writes childhood defined through a status of not-yet—of becoming—is where children, without 116 knowledge/meaning, are set to break those very rules of meaning. The status of not-yet consciousness is much more open to cultural production precisely because it has yet to be closed off by settled understandings of what is appropriate. Without an ethnic studies curricula or education to teach the stereotype of Black women “[Larry] told a teacher that he wanted to be called Leticia, since no one at the school knew he was half African-American” (Setoddeh, 2008). Rather than completely refute stereotypical representations, Larry’s adopt what his friends describe as “stereotypical Black names” (Cunningham, 2013). Larry embraces and lays over himself the archetype of the sassy Black woman, a figure that has been repeatedly and justifiably critiqued because of its reductive presentation of Black women as entertainment for White audiences. The stereotype names Black women as more expressive, opinionated, loud, and has been reproduced as a popular comedic trope—most historically known within the character, Sapphire, in the 1930s radio show, Amos ‘n’ Andy. The figure of the sassy Black woman continues to be represented today in popular images within advertisements, popular culture, and viral YouTube videos and memes. Larry’s use of the stereotype, however, should not be read as a simple reproduction of a demeaning character. Rather, in reading this performance through rasquachismo, Larry repurposes the archetype as a means of survival, much like the repurposing of discarded items made into art. Larry took the archetype and flipped the script of the Black sassy woman from the comedic prop of Whiteness to armor against homophobic and racist harassment. His friend, Averi, describes this fashioning as Larry “[w]anting to change. Be a new person and that’s who his alter ego was. One day he would be Lucretia, and the next, like, Latonya. But it always started with ‘La’. Everyone 117 knew Larry was part black. So, it was like a generic kind of black name” (Cunningham, 2013). The use of a generic black name, as Averi describes, makes use of stereotypes. As Averi continues, she suggests that Larry’s alter ego has an attitude or sass, saying, “You don’t mess with Latoya or Latonya” (Cunningham, 2013). Larry’s creation and embodiment of Latoya and Latonya do not operate from a state of critical consciousness as defined by the TUSD MAS program. Instead these creations allowed for queer, race, and sexuality to be indeterminate. In refashioning a stereotype typically dismissed as simply demeaning, Larry refashioned meanings of race, gender, and sexuality in ways that met his own needs of survival and expression. Mary Louise Rasmussen (2006), while not necessarily discussing youth or childhood, describes this process of creation through an idea of becoming similar to Halberstam (2012). As Rasmussen (2006) states, “continuously becoming subjects, a process that may involve not only the struggle but also creativity in the reinscription of subjectivities and identities” (p. 31). Latoya and Latonya reinscribe and rewrite the stereotype of the sassy Black woman. The trope, Larry, Latoya, and Latonya become identities not cemented to a particular meaning and through these creative iterations of identities work in favor of a queer kid of color. Again, Nancy Lesko (2001) largely critiques the idea of becoming and asks how “[c]an we consider youth as more than becoming?” (p. 61). Halberstam (2012), Rasmussen (2006), and Kathryn Stockton (2009) all help reimagine this concept that also helps answer it. A rethinking of children as becoming does not have to reinforce some eventual stage of development. Rather, childhood as continuously becoming and as Stockton (2009) names, growing sideways lets children be strange without an adult intervention to correct transgressions. 118 Or, for ethnic studies curricula, Larry may strangely adopt a Black woman trope without adults need to correct or halt the appropriation. Larry’s adoption of a stereotype, rather than being read as a simple form of internalization, is made strange in its transgressions of gender and childhood. Larry, read as boy from an outside world, adopts a Black woman trope. The trope is older, a woman, bold, and irreverent. Laying this trope over himself, Larry makes himself strange to the expectations of Black boyhood. Larry then helps to answer Nancy Lesko’s (2001) very own question of thinking of children “beyond becoming” by recognizing childhood queerness existing within its own right and its own transformative potential. Thinking of becoming as indeterminate also opens thinking of children as cultural producers—as makers of culture. For my upbringing the context of a rancho, the rural setting so many Mexican agricultural workers and their families live within, did not allow for popular media representations of gay people. The lack of representation led to the creation of a Brown Boy in Drag performance. Without access to knowledge that would inform me of what it means to be gay allowed for other forms of identification. As Judith Halberstam (2005) describes, the “preadults, preidentitarian [child] roles offer a set of opportunities for theorizing gender, sexuality, race, and social rebellion precisely because they occupy the space of the ‘not-yet,’ the not fully realized” (p. 177). Without access to codes of gayness, my mother and her Mexican femininity became the markers of my queerness, allowing for a sense of queerness rooted in Mexican womanhood. Brown Boy in Drag was able to produce different meanings and connections of queerness and Mexicanness. This cultural production involved within the becoming-ness of Brown Boy in 119 Drag and Larry highlights a point of contention in negotiating identity. In particular it challenges the construct of the child created through the value of developing consciousness. Brown Boy in Drag and Larry undermine this developmental narrative within the TUSD program that states, “…once knowledge is gained, then it is our obligation to transform oppressive situations through action. Thus, it is essential for our students to develop consciousness that will allow them to be critical of the constraints of their lives…” (Acosta, 2007, p. 41). Larry and Brown Boy in Drag did not exist without knowledge but simply refashioned the knowledge and meaning available to them to create something distinct for themselves. Picking up and reading this conservative rhetoric through Stockton’s idea of growing sideways situates Larry and Brown Boy in Drag as a cultural worker/producer. Larry and Brown Boy in Drag as producers of cultures deems too adult add flesh to Stockton’s (2009) figural “homosexual child,” which, at the time of her writing, comes to be only through a backwards birth—a looking back from adulthood and naming childhoods as queer (p. 158). Stockton (2009) describes the “homosexual child” as not “…able to present itself according to the category ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’—categories culturally deemed too adult, since they are sexual, though we do presume every child to be straight” (p. 6). By playing grown up, Larry signals a mode of growing sideways, where childhood and adulthood (present and future; boy and womanhood) are layered over each other—where Larry and the sassy Black woman are on the same child body. And while the becoming-ness of childhood is precisely where different modes of racial and sexual being may be imagined, I am reminded of what Anita Harris (2004) 120 calls the indiscriminate praise of children and youth “imagined as those who may be best able to prevail, having grown up with unpredictability as their only reality. After all, young people are taking up the opportunities of late modernity…in ways that many of an older generation find admirable” (p. 5). I am cautious of the romanticized versions of childhood, which privilege the resilience and creativity of childhood and reproduces another fantasy of an ideal, revolutionary subjectivity located within the child (Halberstam, 2005). Larry’s irreverence and unruliness, however, is different from a romanticized idea of childhood Harris describes. Harris (2004) cautions against the admiration older generations have about young people. Too muchness, rather, speaks to those moments of disturbance and high anxiety, where creativity is not admired but concerning. Too muchness resists this indiscriminate praise highlighted by Harris (2004) but maintains the queerness of childhood theorized by Halberstam (2005). Too muchness speaks to the frenzy and anxiety among the students and staff at E.O. Green. The naming of Larry as “erotic provocateur” or instigator as a means to blame Larry is redeployed as a powerful force capable of changing the culture of the school in service of queer and trans of color children. The force was described by a conservative blogger: “[Larry’s] feminine attire and his effeminate mannerisms radiated confusing sexual signals in every direction. He was openly and aggressively flirtatious with boys who were struggling to establish secure masculine personas” (Clough, 2008). Framing femininity as radiating and confusing unsettled the secure masculine personas of the boys. This embodiment aligns Larry within what Cindy Cruz (2001) describes as the embodied and contested codes of race, gender, and sexuality, and Bettina Love’s (2016) call for research to recognize the multiple identities of young people. Extending from 121 their work is how too muchness pushes against discursive renderings as an aggressive force. Larry disorients “secure masculine personas” of normative boyhood and a school culture that would sympathize with toxic masculinity. His march onto the basketball court could be read as a precursor to his tragic murder, but through too muchness his intrusion onto the normal play of boyhood exposes the violent white heteromasculinity the school continued to defend after the shooting. At the time of the documentary, Valentine Road (Cunningham, 2013), the school, refusing to be defined by this incident, would still not allow a permanent memorial on school grounds. Larry’s daring provocations were similar to the fantasies I had as a Brown Boy in Drag. My desire to sashay, make an entrance, be admired, and lay claim to a space like a quinceañera is imagined through too muchness. While taking up the cues of Mexican femininity I learned from my mother, tías, and other women, Brown Boy in Drag exaggerated and sexualized their performances, working both within categories of femininity and masculinity while simultaneously overturning the heavily gendered and desexualized Catholic culture of our community. The too muchness of the scene and demands to be seen also lays claim to the power of the performance. Similarly, the agentive power of Larry’s embodiments and identifications disrupted the everyday business of E.O. Green and disturbed the students and staff. Larry’s unruliness undermined and altered the dynamics of traditional school spaces, as Larry would parade through the school swerving his hips and blowing kisses to the boys. As Larry began to more and more express her Black femininity and demanded to be 122 called Latoya or Latonya, “[t]he staff at E. O. Green tried to help as Larry experimented with his identity, but he liked to talk in a roar. One teacher asked him why he taunted the boys in the halls, and Larry replied, ‘It's fun to watch them squirm’” (Setoddeh, 2008). Larry’s identifications influenced the cultural and social space of the school as hallways became runways and classrooms became stages. The everyday cultural production of queerness of color within the performances of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag are importantly situated within schools where their embodiments clash with their roles as students. Within the Newsweek article describing Larry as playing grown up describes the problem for the school as: …teachers and parents are often uncomfortable dealing with sexual issues in children so young. Schools are caught in between. How do you protect legitimate, personal expression while preventing inappropriate, sometimes harmful, behavior? Larry King was, admittedly, a problematical test case: he was a troubled child who flaunted his sexuality and wielded it like a weapon—it was often his first line of defense. But his story sheds light on the difficulty of defining the limits of tolerance. As E. O. Green found, finding that balance presents an enormous challenge. (Setoddeh, 2008) The feelings of discomfort experienced by teachers because of Larry’s flaunting and weaponized sexuality tested the limits of teacher support. Too muchness suggests a disruptive, or perhaps a more disturbing childhood and all the feelings of frenzy, anxiety, and threat it elicits. Tapping into the conservative rhetoric characterizing Larry as too much focuses on the most radical aspects of Larry’s identifications and performances. Understanding what antagonizes conservatism and keeps it on its toes, so to speak, is a way into the most radical parts of queerness and race. Larry’s irreverent and over-the-top demeanor forces more messy forms of exchange within the classroom and school (Britzman, 2002). The challenge for teachers is to try and teach from within this confusion. Ellsworth (1997) describes how teachers 123 may practice being attentive to these moments of hesitation, stammering, and confusion when met with children like Larry (Ellsworth, 1997). The pedagogical tendency to guide students correctly may miss an opportunity for teachers to entertain a question about the queerness. Rather than normalize the strange, teachers may hold open those moments of anxiety and disturbance. As Ellsworth writes about pedagogy, “[t]eaching about and across social and cultural difference is not about bridging our differences and joining us together in understanding, it’s about engaging in the ongoing production of culture in a way that returns yet another difference” (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 139). This sets the classroom as a stage of cultural production for queer and trans children of color and opportunities for them to influence the culture of their schools and classrooms. Larry’s identifications pushed against the material and discursive boundaries of E.O. Green. While teachers felt inadequately trained or prepared to respond appropriately to Larry, I do not suggest that we need better preparation for teachers to more accurately and precisely recognize emerging modes of racial, gendered, or sexual being, a task that I find largely impossible within teacher education. Instead, I suggest educators engage with the embodied politics of subjectivity and resist minimizing those identifications and bodily displays considered too much. While awareness of LGBTQ identities and cultural sensitivity trainings may provide a basic understanding, changing a school’s coercive practices requires the continuous work of educators to allow too muchness to change them and their schools. How then can an ethnic studies curriculum set the stage where students and teachers are participating in the “ongoing, interminable cultural production that is teaching and learning” (Ellsworth, 1997, pp. 141-142)? Rather than the strictly 124 chronological growing up into critical consciousness, Larry and the Brown Boy in Drag suggest a different orientation toward ethnic studies curriculum and pedagogy. Their narratives gesture toward possibilities of embodied disruption and suggest curricular and pedagogical strategies that embrace the uncertain, confusing, messy, and disturbing interactions that happen within classrooms and schools. A curriculum or pedagogy that accounts for the overwhelming multiplicity of students’ identities may respond to Cris Mayo’s (2014) suggestion that we look for means in which we allow for the unexpected, yet fruitful, ways children relate with various and shifting signifiers of race, gender, and sexuality. The uncertainty and unpredictability of what happens in schools and classrooms necessarily shift educator positionality. In this sense, it means that educators must relinquish fantasies of producing ideal youth, adults, subjects, and citizens—giving up the quest to produce critically conscious minds. As the movement pushing for Ethnic Studies curriculum and pedagogy within K12 schools progresses, we should couple the tremendously important benefits of academic achievement for students of color with the unexpected and at times shocking ways children express their racial, gendered, and sexual lives. The characterizations of Larry as provocateur show the transformative potential of Larry’s embodiments rather than the anticipated critically conscious mind he might have developed under an ethnic studies curriculum. Jen Gilbert’s (2014) insistence that “[o]ur capacity to theorize childhood as something more than the projection of adult desires onto smaller bodies is central to…politics that could open itself up to the indirection/misdirection of desire…" allows for a queering of K-12 Ethnic Studies (p. 22). Ethnic studies must deeply theorize childhood. And while the scope of this chapter has been concerned with the child of K-12 125 ethnic studies, it has implications within the tendencies by which fantasies of teaching coerce all children into subjectivities adults deem as possible and necessary. Too muchness asks racial justice to keep with queerness and for queerness to keep with racial justice. The data rationale for implementing K-12 ethnic studies should not, as Cris Mayo (2014) may suggest, name all that is or all that could be under an ethnic studies curriculum. Curricular approaches should account for the embodied expressions of race, gender, and sexuality of children—the too muchness of children—in addition to critically conscious subjectivity. Chapter Summary The chapter took an analytical lens to the curriculum of K-12 ethnic studies, using the Tucson Unified School District Mexican American Studies Program. Going through the value of developing consciousness, a central component to the curriculum, the chapter shows how the child is figured into the curriculum. Developing consciousness protects the child from internalized oppression, and values the conscious mind as a means to affect change. The child, situated before consciousness can be developed is left wihout the possibly to affect change. Too muchness offers a different narrative. By looking at how Larry lived their life, too muchness is seen as affecting the students and teachers and transforming the everyday happenings and spaces of schools. Too muchess is further theorized as a transformative force coming from the body of children, and not necessarily from a conscious mind. This opens up the possibility to see children as cultural producers. To link this back to queer of color scholarship in education this also recognizes how queer and trans children of color can be more than martyrs, targets, or victims. And more 126 importantly, how queer and trans children of color become agentive forces, but perhaps in unexpected ways. Just as educators and schools should be ready to feel a sense of discomfort in how young children express themselves, so should scholarship. Young people, like Larry, may use meanings of race, gender, and sexuality in different ways that elide adult expectations and fantasies. CHAPTER 5 POSSIBILITIES AND IMPLICATIONS OF TOO MUCHNESS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION This dissertation started with the auto-narrative of Brown Boy in Drag and the case of Lawrence “Larry” King to address how even our most well-intended education models, like Multicultural education and K-12 ethnic studies, miss the mark in supporting queer and trans children of color. By weaving together queer studies of education and queer theories of childhood, I entered the research through an analysis of how the child is constructed through these curricular interventions specifically through the values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness. These worthwhile approaches, if left undertheorized, leave behind Larry and Brown Boy in Drag in education research and practice. Through a textual analysis driven by a rasquache methodology I began to see how Larry and Brown Boy in Drag force connections among childhood, race, and queerness that in turn theoretically push MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. Rasquache guided the research to latch onto those discarded descriptions of Larry and memories of Brown Boy in Drag that characterized them as over-the-top and too much. Too muchness became the disrupting and creative force within this dissertation. As too muchness is developed throughout the chapters, so too are its implications for MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. Too muchness signals those embodied provocations into our constructs of 128 childhood within the values of affirmation, inclusion, and developing consciousness within MCE and K-12 Ethnic Studies. The embodied provocations of too muchness, however, extend beyond these two education exemplars. After providing some theoretical takeaways through the merging of queer studies of education and queer theories of childhood, I turn to how too muchness can be extended to education research and practice. Revisiting Becoming: Queerness, Childhood, and Education Within this section I revisit the discussion on becoming, restating key points from queer youth studies and queer theories of childhood, and how this merging of fields results in a reworked idea of becoming that better responds to queer and trans of color life. Queer youth studies of education have critiqued the cultural situating of young people within, what Nancy Lesko (2001) calls a perpetual state of becoming, or the framing of young people as unfinished subjects. Within this construction young people are not living in the present and are rendered within a continuous stage of growing up, as Kathryn Stockton (2009) also writes in her work on the queer child. Even as children step outside the bounds of normative childhood, these actions are interpreted as signaling an adult subjectivity or understanding. Stockton’s (2009) description of backwards birth, or the utterance of “I was a gay child,” retroactively bestows meaning and constructs a coming-of-age narrative that secures childhood experiences to an already existing identity. This limits the queerness of children to LGBTQ+ identities or necessitates that gender and sexuality transgression singularly means an eventual coming-out story. The figural trans child follows a similar logic 129 because “…there is no way to conceptualize a boy becoming a woman except to argue that either one was never a boy or one is not really a woman” (Gilbert, 2014, pp. 20-21). This rendering of a LGBT identity as always already there limits the force of queerness. As Jen Gilbert (2014) describes, “…precocious questions of childhood lose their interrogative quality, and instead questions forecast answers about the future” (p. 21). This discourse of becoming flattens and fixes identity to a specified trajectory that loses its interrogative and queer potential. The loss of the interrogative force is great when considering how this rendering of identity translates to broader social implications. Becoming reiterates the normative process of growing up for young people. This process causes social great anxiety and hope as young people come to represent and embody the progress of the country. Reinscribed often within the cliché our children are our future, young people are meant to become the great saviors of society so long as they may be protected from harm and their development is correctly facilitated. There is therefore a great cultural impetus and imperative to regulate young people’s growth. The language of becoming provides a discursive platform for keeping young people in check and ensure their identities are developed appropriately. Education becomes a major regulating institution in the lives of children and as shown through Chapters 3 and 4, even progressively aligned interventions like MCE and K-12 ethnic studies are not immune to this discursive rendering of children. There is much to critique about the discourse of becoming considering its regulating power on young people and in particular around the category of childhood. However, bringing together queer theories of childhood with queer studies of education produces a theoretical alternative and nuance to the discussion around becoming. The 130 major takeaway from bringing these fields of study together is a reworking of becoming as offering a queer potential that continues an ameliorative project of making schooling better for queer and trans of color life and honoring the present-ness of children. Rather than refute the idea of children as becoming, queer theory locates potential in rendering identity as becoming or as constantly unfolding. In the field of queer studies of education, Mary Lou Rasmussen (2006) describes the process of “continuously becoming subjects” as where the potential to create alternative modes of being come to be. And while Rasmussen does not specifically discuss the figure of the child, joined with queer theories of childhood suggests greater potential within the category of childhood. Childhood understood as the realm of play and lacking knowledge of the world provides a greater potential to get things “wrong” about the world since children do not understand cultural meanings and norms. Halberstam (2011) suggests, failing, unbecoming and not knowing “…may in fact offer more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (p. 2). These alternative ways of being the world are those moments when children’s speech and actions conflict with those narrative fantasies constructed by adults (Gilbert, 2014, p. 22). The speech and actions are those embodiments of children like Larry and Brown Boy and Drag. Taking Halberstam and Gilbert together suggests children, precisely through this state of “not knowing,” allows for more failings, more opportunities for children to mismatch meanings and create new ones. The outcome here is the presymbolic knowledge by reworking this idea of becoming. And because education in turn pushes queer theory to consider the real and living children, rather than the metaphorical and figural child, children’s presymbolic form of knowledge is a form of embodied knowledge. To follow Cindy Cruz (2001), 131 research may recognize how experience is performed rather than explained. Instead of turning to the logico-scientific where young people explain their experiences, too muchness looks to those embodiments from children that disrupt the everyday business of schools. Too muchness recognizes children as cultural workers who shape the worlds around them through embodied performances. Becoming is reworked to honor the embodied knowledge of children and how this knowledge subverts the knowledge of children. The embodied knowledge of children, written throughout this dissertation as too muchness, may refashion the ways identities are experienced and performed, create new modes of being in the world, and in turn rework the relational characteristics of identity. Situated within the context of education, this form of becoming—this too muchness—creates different relationships among students, teachers, and schools. To consider children as cultural producers means to understand their work to produce alternative temporalities than the ones set by what adults deem appropriate. For the relationships among Larry, Brown Boy in Drag, MCE, and K-12 ethnic studies this translates to recognizing how children are shifting meanings of race, gender, and sexuality rather than plead for schools to affirm and include students or wait for young people’s consciousness to be developed. The major theoretical implication of this work and the merging of queer theories of childhood and queer studies of education is understanding how children’ embodiments complicate those identity-based strategies in education, even those meant to make better the educational environments of minoritized students. This adds to the discussion of how educators are moving away from essentialism because it simplifies identity and limits subjectivity, but also grasp onto the identities as relational or the power involved with 132 identity production. To put this theory to work means educators must relinquish the narrative fantasies of childhood and in turn relinquish some sense of authority. The theoretical push follows Jen Gilbert’s (2014) insistence that “[o]ur capacity to theorize childhood as something more than the projection of adult desires onto smaller bodies is central to…politics that could open itself up to the indirection/misdirection of desire…” (p. 43). Being open would ask what would it be like to have the overtly sexual, Black trans child or a Brown Boy in Drag stand-in as the sign of the category childhood? Because childhood lives within education, this imagination of the child figure may lead to sweeping changes in our education research and practices, especially those meant to intervene on behalf of the marginalized. At the very least this demands a pause in thinking, in stepping back and understanding how children are figured into our education research projects, theories, curricula, pedagogies, and policy. While this theoretical intervention signals certain absences, it more importantly leads to possibilities in research and practice. Keeping With Too Muchness: Implications for Research In terms of research, this work forces connections in a canon of queer studies of education that is still a largely White, and works to signal the absences of gender and sex in curricula seeking racial justice. Rasquache methodology has helped to force connections that in turn contribute to queer of color scholarship in education calling upon research to continue using an intersectional lens in understanding queer and trans of color marginality and agency. Putting rasquache in service of queer and trans of color life means a methodological approach that breaks from standards of gathering data and 133 analysis. Specifically, this work offers 2 different but related outcomes for future research. 1. Data gathering must look to where queer and trans of color life emerges without necessarily being predicated on stable LGBTQ identities. This also means to look for queer and trans of color life in multiple location including anecdotes, memory, observation, interviews, school records, disciplinary reports, documentary, news stories, and more. 2. Analysis must look to both the discursive rendering of young people and how young people’s bodies push back. Rather than the typical framing of young people as resisting oppressive or coercive practices, albeit important, analysis must also be attentive to how young people are also creating alternatives— situating them as cultural producers. The process to gather data, especially when addressing queer and trans of color life, must decenter the typical approach to collaborate with young people who are relatively “out” (Mayo, 2007). That is research that works with young people whom selfconsciously and publicly identify as LGBTQ+. Brown Boy in Drag was not out and Larry, although publicly identified at times as gay and transgender, was murdered and can no longer be collaborated with on research. This opens the possibility to consider transgressions and productions from those not necessarily who are LGBTQ. Furthermore, this dissertation calls for research to think of our murdered as continuing to provoke thought. Larry is, extending Stockton’s (2009) thinking of a ghostly child, haunting and should be. This reworks the typical thinking in queer youth as victims and martyrs and 134 situates those young people lost to suicide and murder as agents—with power to change schools and classrooms years after their deaths. In terms of analysis, this work reiterates the work of Coloma (2006), Airton (2013), and Weems (2007) who suggest queer be used as an analytical framework that exceeds categories of sexuality, too muchness breaks with the molds and boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. In other words, too muchness is offered as a framework for education inquiry that may involve issues of sex, sexuality, gender transgression, Blackness, Brownness, and more. Too muchness emphasizes on an idea of and more to highlight the intricate lives of queer and trans people of color. In this sense, this work responds to Bettina’s (2017) call for research on Black queer youth to be attentive to the complicated and overlapping dimensions of Black queer life. Love (2017) says research is necessarily messy, with many moving parts in order to respond to the lives of young people who themselves move beyond cemented meanings that restrict who they are and how they live. She calls for an intricate framework involving “…theoretical orientations that are dynamic, multifaceted, hyper-local, and not generalizable” (Love, 2017, p. 540). Just as queer of color scholarship in education has turned to the dynamic lives and agentive practices of queer and trans of color youth (Boatwright, 2016; Brockenbrough, 2015; Love, 2017) this research turned the analysis to the category of childhood, taking cues from queer theorists in the humanities (Halberstam, 2012; Stockton, 2009). By doing so, this research continues to advance queer of color scholarship in education and understand children as cultural producers, rather than simply as consumers of culture. Research must recognize how children speak, and how they speak knowledge from their bodies. Jo-Ann Wallace had asked this question early on when queer theory had been making its way into the field of education. Wallace (1994) presents the 135 question, “Can children represent themselves—culturally, socially, politically—or is advocacy the only means by which their well-being can be safeguarded?” (p. 295). Importantly, since children inhabit identities that adults deem inappropriate and not suitable for children, research must look to when child bodies exceed these boundaries. The naming of Larry and Brown Boy in Drag through too muchness captures this language and calls for researchers to hold onto the unruly expressions of children. They create new words, names, categories, performances, and often take from the discursive and material worlds around them. The abundance of identities of queer and trans of color life grows sideways and its horizontal sprawl intrudes upon schools, making space and demanding to be recognized. This shifts the agentive power away from the school to the student and results in new relationships and makes important curricular interventions. Keeping With Too Muchness: Implications for Practice This dissertation has made interventions into two curricular exemplars, MCE and K-12 Ethnic Studies. MCE has a long history in education and has operated as the default curricular model when thinking through sociocultural difference and education. But the values of affirmation and inclusion have relied too frequently on a construct of normative childhood. Without the necessary unpacking of how the child is figured within these values they run the risk of reproducing a norm of childhood that dismisses the very students they are meant to include and affirm. I looked particularly at GLSEN’s guides to safety and especially as they either directly relate to Larry or were developed after the murder. While GLSEN understandably worked to secure the innocence of Larry, in so 136 doing erased Larry’s Black identity and queerness. In making Larry innocent, GLSEN has forgotten the queerest parts of Larry’s life. Affirmation and inclusion forgo descriptions of Larry as disruptive and antagonistic in favor of a story rendering Larry as a martyr and victim. Forgetting the disruptive and antagonistic features of Larry’s life and also forgets Larry as someone who lived unapologetically, expressed attraction for boys, and embraced his Black femininity. Similarly, within K-12 ethnic studies, particularly the example of TUSD MAS program, the child is position without the necessary critical skills to exercise a sort of agency that could bring about change. The child, situated before consciousness can be developed, is left without the ability to impact the world around them. Too muchness intervenes within this construction of childhood. Too muchness undermines the value of developing consciousness especially as it attempts to protect the child from internalization and privileges the conscious mind as a means to impact change. It instead signals a sort of embodied consciousness or the ability of the body to change the spaces of schools to better fit the needs of queer and trans children of color. These critiques are about reimagining an entry point for K-12 Ethnic Studies and MCE. The too muchness of race, gender, and sexuality works as a deliberate presence in spaces and constructs that may unknowingly eschew unruly bodies of queer and trans children of color. Larry, for example, caused anxiety about the subject positions he was taking up and the identities he was embodying, identities deemed too adult and too sexual for the construct of childhood. Larry and Brown Boy in Drag’s excessiveness, horizontal sprawl, sideways growth—too muchness—are far too unruly, disruptive, and loud to be contained by education that means to affirm, include, or develop their consciousness. 137 Rather than call for new curriculum to be made in response to the critiques and interventions made throughout this dissertation, the urgent call here is to rethink the curricular models we currently have, namely MCE and K-12 ethnic studies. For practitioners, this dissertation voices an urgent call to build on these curricular exemplars to honor the embodied knowledge of queer and trans of color life. To follow Bettina Love’s (2017) writing on research to become more intricate, so must curriculum. Too muchness then rethinks curriculum as a living space that is connected to queer and trans of color life and its overlapping identifications. Curriculum must be developed in connection to place and community and continuously reshaped by the intrusions of queer and trans of color life. MCE and K-12 ethnic studies must be queered, or be open to those moments that are most shocking and disturbing. I understand the irony here that for curriculum to be open to these shocking moments would undermine them as shocking. But the power of too muchness to change curriculum relies precisely within those moments and curriculum must wrestle with this dilemma. The implication for schools and classrooms is the expectation of conflict that arises and its potential to cause change. The embodied politics of identity (Britzman et al., 1993) must remain political and contentious. Educators may at least expect their curriculum to fail and to allow the façade of harmonious classrooms to fade. Too muchness then is about letting go of an idea that attempts to bridge differences and asks teachers and students to join together in understanding. Instead, the curricular task is to not be too prescriptive and “…about engaging in the ongoing production of culture in a way that returns yet another 138 difference” (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 139). This perhaps may just be written into curriculum, but speak to how curricula are implements and practiced within the classroom. Too muchness then has the greatest potential to unseat the authoritative position of curricular models that attempt to name all that could or should be. And while the term disrupt may be overused in the intellectual field of queer theory, it has very real and material meaning in the context of schools and classrooms. When students are labeled as disruptive, it has real meaning in the lives of students of color, and queer and trans students who are disciplined at higher rates (Burdge et al., 2014a; Burdge et al., 2014b). For this reason, it’s important to flip this word on its head, to dislodge this term from the grasps of education and place it in favor students who disrupt repressive and coercive school practices. As we continue to demand for MCE and K-12 ethnic studies, educators must be attentive in not reproducing the normative constructs of childhood. Innocence continues to be a normative rubric that has policed a system of race, gender, and sexuality within schools. 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