Queer Teachers in Schools: a “Case” Study

Even today, despite the fact that more than fifty years have passed since the publication of Barbagli and Dei’s book (1969), official statistics (Orizzontescuola, August 3, 2021) tell of a teaching profession that is almost exclusively female: out of 943,681 teachers of all ranks and levels, 81.5 percent (768,667) claim to be female and only 18.5 percent (175,014) male (MIM, August 31, 2023). Schools, therefore, continue to perpetuate those socio-cultural conditionings – described masterfully by Gianini Belotti as early as 1973 – that push women to take on caring roles to a greater extent than men, while MIM, solely in its choice to collect and disseminate workers’ data according to binary parameters (male/female), is a spokesman for traditional power relations. On the other hand, although institutions have the function of crystallizing social relations in order to fulfill specific tasks (Malinowsi, 2013), they are unable to stop-and fortunately, we would add-social changes. The school, for example, is now intersected by a multitude of bodies – not only conforming, conventional, expected bodies, but also hybrid (Haraway, 1995), excessive, queer (Burgio, 2012; Burgio & Lopez, 2023) and crip (McRuer, 2006; 2012) – capable of challenging hegemonic identity norms in the areas of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, (dis)ability and of conveying new cultural and political content. Indeed, different bodily expressions can be interpreted as forms of reappropriation and resistance to identity and cultural homogenization. If society and institutions – educational ones as much as prison ones Gramsci, 2019; Foucault, 2014; Davis, 2009) – work in order to normalize irregular and imperfect bodies by bringing them back to standards of acceptability, performing one’s difference (even in an excessive, almost parodic way) can serve to bring identity norms and, consequently, systems of power to the surface (Butler, 2014; 2017). Given this theoretical framework, the questions from which our research moves concern teachers who do not identify with gender binarism and, in particular, with the sex they were assigned at birth. We wondered, in particular, how transgender people act out their role as teachers, but more importantly, how the context and school personnel perceive them and, possibly, incorporate them into a gestalt in which they are not expected. Accordingly, the objectives of the research were: - to understand through what processes transgender people are included or, conversely, excluded and marginalized in school settings; - to know the motivations that led these individuals to swell the ranks of the school sector despite the fact that in the collective imagination the teacher is still female; - investigate the political awareness of these individuals, who – with their nonconforming bodies – cross institutional spaces; - to probe the presence of a network of teachers who belong to the LGBTQIA+ community. Methodologically, our investigation took the form of a case study aimed at “describing, analyzing, and interpreting the uniqueness of real individuals and situations through accessible accounts” (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2011, p. 128).