Inadvertently queer school leadership amongst lesbian,gay and bisexual (LGB) school leaders

Abstract

Lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) school leaders may understand these sexual identities as essentialist categories and present lived experiences resistant to the identity category-troubling tenets of queer theory, whose application in queer empirical research can nonetheless provide important insights into leaders’ identity, practices and power. In this article, I focus on reconciling this conceptual tension to produce an empirical account of inadvertently queer school leadership in England. The article uses queer theory to re-interpret findings from a study of five LGB school leaders to show that despite perceiving sexual identity in an essentialist way, these LGB school leaders sexually embody inadvertently queer school leadership. They trouble gender norms and conceptualizations of ‘leader’ through non-normative sexual embodiment; suggest queer identities for others; and challenge heteronormativity’s institutional foundations and other processes of normalization.

My aim in writing this article is to explain, using queer theory, how school leaders identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) may succeed in disrupting heteronormativity despite claiming identity labels which may reify and reproduce the constructed binaries underpinning it. I argue that they achieve this inadvertently, partly but significantly through embodying visibly a non-normatively sexualized leadership which precludes followers’ dismissal of the (homo)erotic foundation of their followership (Harding et al., 2011). Additionally, certain of their expressions of identities as leaders and their leadership practices invite a queer reading, such as their disruption of gender norms and their strategic use of historically heteronormative institutions to achieve anti-homophobic goals. Heteronormativity is here understood as the repeated and performative discursive constitution of non-heterosexual identities (Butler, 1993) in the binary abjection of heterosexual ones; ‘both’ are presented as stable, but are fragile, relational and historically-sited. Non-heterosexual identities are minoritized and stigmatized to establish a definitional and dominant normative space for heterosexuality.

Queer theory has been employed in organization studies to, inter alia, re-conceptualize leadership (Harding et al., 2011), educational leadership (Rottmann, 2006) and management (Parker, 2002), critique the gendering of leadership (Bowring, 2004) and underscore the gender performativity inherent in management (Tyler and Cohen, 2008). To apply queer theory to empirical study, though, can be problematic. Rumens used it to better understand organizational cross-sex friendships (Rumens, 2012) and Lee and his colleagues (2008) applied it to a leadership case study largely to show its potential for developing contextualized as well as abstract thinking. Therefore, this article seeks further to describe and reconcile the theoretical tensions which may arise when a queer analysis is conducted with participants whose essentialist identities might be troubled by queer theory’s destabilizing tendency.

This contribution focuses on English schools, which despite recent shifts in the perception of homosexuality (Rogers, 2010) as well as increasing legislative protection through, for instance, the Equality Act (2010), are still sites where heteronormativity is reproduced, gendering and (hetero)sexualizing bodies and, to varying degrees, ignoring, marginalizing or silencing non-heterosexual identities (Honeychurch, 1996; Mac An Ghaill, 1994). For Lugg and Koschoreck (2003: 4), school leadership, as ‘the final unrecognized and unexamined closet’, is heteronormative. Blount agrees, claiming that the obligatory heterosexuality of US school and district leaders has been central to the development of the role. From their beginnings in the 1850s, school leaders ‘existed in figurative relationship to teachers as husbands did to wives’ (2003: 9), and heterosexuality (indicated by marriage) as a leadership pre-requisite became increasingly entrenched throughout the 20th century before public moral fear. Heterosexual can therefore be added to white, masculinist and able-bodied as a characteristic embedded in Western conceptualizations of school leadership (Blackmore, 2006; Blount, 2003; Lumby and Coleman, 2007); this norm is reproduced in schools (Tooms et al., 2010) and reinforced by research which adopts uncritically heteronormative assumptions, as noted by Gunter (2006). That this article reveals queer conceptualizations and practices is not surprising; what is new is the explicit theoretical and methodological reconciliation of a queer analysis which problematizes fixed identity categories in order to better understand leaders and leadership with the variously essentialist conceptualization of research participants. The article is organized as follows; after outlining queer theory, I discuss the conceptual and methodological difficulties of its application to empirical study. The following section sets out self-reflexively the study’s methods. Finally, I discuss the ways in which these leaders are inadvertently queer.

Queer theory

Queer theory evolved from the late 1980s from some activists’ dissatisfaction with the exclusivity of the ‘lesbian and gay’ movement, the privileging of certain (e.g. white) identities within it and the movement’s claim consequently to represent people whose identities didn’t fit, and a parallel intellectual dissatisfaction with notions of those identities as essentially-conceived and an essential pre-requisite for emancipation (Stein and Plummer, 1994). That conceptualization had developed from a residual positivism and American society’s ‘civil rights’ narrative, in which equality was sought on the grounds of the unfairness of persecution predicated one’s stable, innate, minoritized identity (Gamson, 1995). Contemporaneously, some scholars began to establish the theoretical foundation of what would be called queer theory (at first by others). One such was Judith Butler, who offered paradigm-troubling insights into gender and sexuality in Gender Trouble (1990). She draws on Foucauldian notions of performativity and representation and Derrida’s identification of constructed binaries which dialectically define and privilege a position in abjection of its ‘other’ (Derrida, 1976). Butler cites the failure of gender universality or immanent conceptual exhaustiveness to insist that gender categories are illusory; nominative representation is actually conjurative, establishing ‘in advance the criterion by which subjects themselves are formed’ (1990: 2). Butler does not ask, for instance, how women may be better represented linguistically and politically, but rather ‘how the category of “women” … is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought’ (1990: 2.). She draws on Wittig and Rich to elaborate and critique the heterosexual matrix, wherein bodies are intelligible only when sex, gender and sexual desire are understood as stable characteristics, aligning not only with each other, but binarily and oppositionally through compulsory heterosexuality. So if identity categories are substantively empty, how should their signifying practices be understood? Butler suggests these practices constitute gender performatively, not through recalling some original template; they are copied recursively from other copies, and this ‘parodic repetition’, culturally policed, ‘reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original’ (p. 42, emphasis in original). Gender is, for Butler, best understood as drag; this metaphor ‘expose[s] the tenuousness of gender ‘reality’ in order to counter the violence performed by gender norms’ (1990: xxiv).

Other theorists drew on Butler to question not deviants as a sub-group whose experiences from the margins might inform and trouble the centre, but deviance as the abjected product of the normalizing discourse, heteronormativity. Eve Sedgwick (1990), another important early contributor, employed literary criticism to problematize binaries of gender and sexual identity and show how words such as homosexual create and delimit possibilities for subsequent performative identifications.

As queer theory became more widely used, interpretations of its purpose and methods increasingly diverged. For Lauren Berlant, categories per se became suspect as reified political power, and their public problematization a goal of queer activism. She articulated queer as doing, as politically active, writing with Freeman of the importance of ‘the transgression of categorical distinctions between sexuality and politics’ in what she conceived as ‘a sexually radical movement for social change’(Berlant and Freeman, 1992: 154). They exemplify this through describing how the early-nineties activist group Queer Nation appropriated and (homo)sexualized cultural artefacts, activities and public spaces, belying their presumed sexual neutrality in exposing them as active producers of heteronormativity. Michael Warner drew on Sedgwick to argue that queer theory should become a tool of wider social theory to challenge the compulsory heterosexuality of modern societies (Warner, 1991). This queer pluralism prompted Berlant and Warner to ask what exactly queer theory may teach us about anything (1995). That ‘queer commentary takes on varied shapes, risks, ambitions, and ambivalences in various contexts’ (1995: 344) is, for them, a source of epistemological vigour; a stable queer theory would be oxymoronic, since most interpretations cohere to varying degrees around ‘unsettlement rather than systematization’ (p. 348). In other words, queer theory exposes and troubles (heteronormative) norms about the social world and their regulatory effects on bodies, and by extension organizations, instead of offering easy solutions for their remediation. For queer theorists, this ambivalence or multiplicity means that self-reflexivity is crucial in order to enhance public understanding and scrutiny (see McDonald, 2013); I shall share my own position when discussing my methodology. Next, I shall highlight some principal tensions involved in queer empirical enquiry, drawing on literature in which queer theory has been related to organizations, including schools.

The tensions in queer empirical enquiry: the case of organizations

Queer theory is not intended primarily as a tool to explain the non-normative lived experiences of those whom it constructs as embodied discursive subjects (Watson, 2005), but rather as one which examines how heteronormativity and other normalizing discourses lead to the recognition, formation and subjugation of these identities. Whilst applying a queer analysis may mean simply identifying the non-normative, queering increasingly means interrogating the normalizing discourse governing conceptualizations of almost anything, from gardens (Steyaert, 2008) to gender performativity in the comedy series The Office (Tyler and Cohen, 2008). These queer re-imaginings are typical in reconceptualizing the phenomenon such that the power relations, partly manifested as boundaries, which constructed it as normal and therefore invisible, are exposed as limited and limiting, and the practical and theoretical possibilities of the re-imagining explained. An important example of this is Parker’s (2002) queering of management, in which he establishes the advantages of conceptualizing it as performance and acknowledging both its ontological uncertainty and participants’ power positions. Harding and her colleagues (2011) adopt a more sexualized interpretation in their queering of leadership, in which they explain definitional difficulties by interpreting it as homoerotic and therefore, in heteronormative organizational contexts, unsayable. The purpose of queer theory in both these studies is to illuminate understanding of the phenomena under scrutiny through ontological destabilization, politicization and/or sexualization, where the politics and sexual are not so much added as revealed, following Eve Sedgwick.

There are, however, conceptual and practical difficulties for the queer empiricist in studying groups, i.e. lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people (LGBT) whose existence queer theory questions. Gamson (1995) argues that the challenge is to reconcile research within an oppositional epistemological context in which both positions are politically and ideologically sustainable. He explains how a coherent, collective identity has been necessary for LGBT people to combat the institutional discrimination they have faced (see also Rottmann, 2006). This identity, as the object of oppression, is the logical site of emancipatory claims and political action. It must be stable to qualify for protection. This conceptualization appears in studies of sexually-minoritized educational leaders by Tooms (2007) and Fraynd and Capper (2003). Institutional pressures also encourage the essentialist conceptualization of identities; for example, Ofsted, the non-ministerial government department which inspects English schools, lists categories of pupils whose welfare and achievement the school must address (Ofsted, 2012). These include lesbian and gay, as well as disabled and ethnic minority children. A sort of queer analysis is possible here, one which disrupts heteronormativity “only” by ‘refusing to remain silent about issues of sexuality’ (Koschoreck, 2003: 27) whilst retaining identity labels. However, Britzman (1995: 159), following Sedgwick, foregrounds queer theory’s problematization of inclusion and measures designed to ‘raise awareness’ by positioning ignorance as an active abjection of knowledge, rather than its mere absence, deployed to stabilize (dominant) self-identities:

[R]eceiving knowledge is a problem for the learner and the teacher, particularly when the knowledge one already possesses or is possessed by works as an entitlement to one’s ignorance or when the knowledge encountered cannot be incorporated because it disrupts how the self might imagine itself and others. (Britzman, 1995: 159)

Britzman illustrates here queer theory’s problematization of stable identities. To accept the label/identity without critique is to obstruct emancipation and reinforce the means of one’s oppression. Studies taking as their object LGBT people may therefore reify and reproduce the categories and differences produced by the heteronormative discourse they wish to disrupt (Stein and Plummer, 1994; Valocchi, 2005). Queer theory has therefore often focused on the textual (e.g. Bowring, 2004) rather than subjectively embodied product of discourse (Gamson, 2003). Nevertheless, Talburt and Rasmussen (2010) argue that the retrospective, erroneous historical imagining of queer theory as the conceptual successor to feminist and LGBT scholarship has entrenched a continuing attachment to the idea of a sexually-minoritized embodied subject, contributing to epistemological tensions. This textual emphasis has inevitably had consequences for the relationship between theory and practice, and especially practitioners. Watson cites Kirsch (2005: 75) to describe how for some, this move to a discursive focus evidences antipathy towards the empirical and questions the theory’s purpose and usefulness, ‘[queer theory] disengages the energetic level of alliance and interpersonal relations, only to refocus efforts on the reductionist deconstruction of texts interpreted only for personal use’. Rottmann (2006), like Britzman (1995) and Harding et al. (2011), distinguishes between queer leaders and queering leadership and privileges the latter. This avoids entanglement in queer theory’s ambivalent relationship with LGBT people to instead apply to leadership post-structuralist insights concerning the disciplinary and normalizing effects of discourse. Attempts to move on from the debate (e.g. Talburt and Rasmussen, 2010) without engaging in a theoretical resolution are unhelpful to the empirical researcher.

Researchers, recognizing these inconsistencies, have aligned queer theory with LGBT-focused empirical research in different ways. Rumens (2012) mobilizes queer theory to explain the cross-sex friendships of gay and bi-identified men and straight women, showing how these reproduce and disrupt heteronormativity. He alludes to the tension underpinning the present study when he writes, ‘individuals are [not] at liberty to “queer” aspects of their own lives as and when they see fit … creating “queer friendships” is a discursive activity that is conditioned by the material circumstances of people’s everyday work lives’ (p. 961). I suggest that the material includes the identifications through which it is lived. The instances of heteronormative reproduction identified are often allowed or facilitated by essentialist identities, underscoring the limitations of queer theory in empirical studies and creating a dilemma which Rumens acknowledges. Importantly, he does locate queer possibilities in and for these friendships; they are interwoven with and contingent on essentialism; a thoroughly queer empirical repudiation of a queer/essentialist binary. Lee et al. (2008) attempt to empty the terms gay, msm (men who have sex with men) and homosexual by reflexively noting the extent to which the labels do or do not capture behaviour, only claimed identity to justify their interchangeable use in the study. Their study found that their subjects distanced themselves from identifying as gay men to conform to a heteronormative view of ‘manager’, partly erasing the conceptual tension. Valocchi similarly argued that queer theory could be employed in empirical analysis to highlight ‘how the dominant taxonomies fail to capture the complexity of individual gender and sexual subjectivities and practices even among those who may define themselves in terms of those dominant taxonomies’ (2005: 753). To achieve this, he advocates using ethnography to capture practices which belie claimed beliefs and identities. Privileging the researcher as knower raises important questions of trustworthiness, however, such as, ‘what are the implications of theoretically interpreting research participants’ world view in ways which may unsettle or undermine their identity?’ The criteria for establishing trustworthiness may need re-negotiation to accommodate queer analysis. For example, long-established tenets such as participant verification (Cohen et al., 2007) and reporting ‘from the native’s point of view’ (Geertz, 1974) become difficult where participants adhere to, and may draw strength from, identities based on an essentialist epistemology inconsistent with that of the researcher’s privileged analytical framework. In these circumstances, on what grounds should trustworthiness consequently be claimed? [For a fuller discussion, see Lather (1993)].

Towards a framework for queer empirical enquiry

In constructing a framework which allows valid, queer empirical enquiry, this present study draws on a number of sources. First, Gamson (1995: 403) provides a heuristic for empirical research in an epistemological context fostering the solidification and dissolution of identities:

At the heart of the dilemma is the simultaneity of cultural sources of oppression (which make loosening categories a smart strategy) and institutional sources of oppression (which make tightening categories a smart strategy). Are some movements or movement repertoires more able to work with, rather than against, the simultaneity of these systems of oppression? When and how might deconstructive strategies take aim at institutional forms, and when and how can ethnic strategies take aim at cultural categories? Are there times when the strategies are effectively linked, when an ethnic maneuver loosens cultural categories, or when a deconstructionist tactic simultaneously takes aim at regulatory institutions?

For Gamson, gay marriage exemplifies this; on one level it shows a stigmatized, quasi-ethnic minority reinforcing through adoption the institutions of the oppressive dominant discourse. Yet allowing lesbians and gay men within this institution dissolves its gender qualifications, and therefore its meaning; a profoundly queer act. The framework also draws on Butler. Her position has never been that it is possible to do without identity categories, for her:

[T]he juridical structures of language and politics constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating practices. As such … the task is to formulate within this constituted frame a critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize. (Butler, 1990: 6)

Problematization rather than denial summarizes her position. Finally, I must clarify my own interpretation of and use of queer theory, establishing their possibilities, boundaries and limitations. I understand queer not as an identity which I force upon my essentially identifying participants, but rather moments of transgression, non-normative aspects of identity or practices which subvert heteronormativity in some way without denying the personal validity and usefulness of my participants’ identity categories. Such queer moments overlay these claimed identities and permit me to follow Valocchi in exploring the incongruities, the instances where the data won’t fit in the claimed category. Like Lee and his colleagues (1998), I shall also examine what is permissible within the discursive framework identified. This creates the possibility of the ‘inadvertently queer’ school leader, where an essentially motivated or understood leadership practice or identity has a queer outcome. Such leaders are neither unenlightened nor mistaken in claiming a fixed identity, living and leading within the paradigm which, for Butler, precedes and constitutes them. Her exhortation that researchers critique that paradigm underpins the present attempt. The analysis’ claim to ethical soundness is located in the possibility of simultaneity in its conclusions; it aims neither to deride nor invalidate the original act nor its suppositions. This framework’s claim to trustworthiness rests in its reporting of phenomena as participants see them, and their juxtaposition with rather than imposition of any queer interpretation, exposing the analytical process to scrutiny.

The empirical study and I

This article re-interprets data generated through email interviews in summer 2011 with five current and former LGB-identified school leaders; this number being the most with whom I could feasibly generate rich data for that Master’s dissertation project. The conclusions drawn should therefore be seen as heuristic, though previous analyses in the field have drawn useful conclusions using data from even fewer people (e.g. Sinclair, 2005). My study (Courtney, 2011) explored LGB school leaders’ experiences of leadership in a way which acknowledged only superficially post-structuralist thinking about sexualities. It frankly alarmed me to engage meaningfully in what it meant for my (gay) sense of self to acknowledge that I may have helped construct that identity. In my youth, I had denied the role of choice and highlighted the analogy of ethnicity to encourage support for me and my ‘community’. So I wrote a dissertation which appealed discursively to that essentialist epistemology as the basis for the social justice I demanded. But it did not fully explain my participants’ data, even when they claimed identity labels as enthusiastically as I had, and I grew aware of my efforts to become the gay man I now was. I re-opened and re-interpreted memories of having cared, for instance, whether that girl at school rejected me, suggesting that coming out is more like ‘coming in’ (Connell, 1995: 152); a semi-conscious series of decisions to close doors on future possible selves. I decided to re-interpret the data using a queer lens to answer the new question, ‘to what extent do LGB school leaders’ leadership practices, professional and sexual identities disrupt heteronormativity?’. Their sexually-minoritized identity is a remnant of that original study; I will nonetheless argue that LGB leaders queer leadership, through non-normative sexual embodiment, in a way heterosexual leaders mostly do not. The participants are, or were recently, headteachers, deputy or assistant headteachers, or had whole-school leadership responsibilities in an English primary or secondary school. I chose email interviews so that my physical absence might reduce any anxiety arising from the potentially sensitive subject matter (Lee, 1993). Nonetheless, that ‘I’ would be ‘there’ wherever there was internet access, what Costigan calls the ‘collapse of distance’ (1999: xxiii) would enhance the social notion of interview. Ethically, this format meant that respondents were not compelled through interview momentum to answer a question which they might, after reflection, have preferred not to. The emails’ purpose, with precedents in studies by Fraynd and Capper (2003) and Tooms (2007), was to elicit narrative data contextualizing these leaders’ practices, motives and values within their development of sexual and professional identities and heteronormative discourse. The interviews were in-depth, semi-structured and asynchronous; this last because synchronous alternatives, such as instant messaging, are not easily encrypted, the possibility of which was a condition of my obtaining ethical clearance owing to the ‘potential [emotional] costs to those involved’ (Lee, 1993: 4). Each interview took place over approximately ten days, produced up to three thousand words and included such questions as ‘How have your experiences growing up influenced you now as a leader?’ and ‘What has influenced your openness now at school?’. Four participants were located through a key informant at an organization supporting LGBT teachers; the fifth was a personal contact. In a short exchange of introductory emails, I shared my claim to membership of the ‘community’ I was researching (gay, former school leader), establishing an informal tone to establish sufficient trust and mitigate any researcher-participant power differential. Then, the 11 questions were emailed one to three at a time to the participant (as encrypted attachments if preferred), the next being sent as an answer was received. I intended to approximate a conversation, characterized by responsiveness and flexibility, and to prevent the instrument’s becoming a questionnaire inviting superficial data. In fact, the data were intimate, confessional and constituted what Polkinghorne would recognize as diachronic narratives, being ‘autobiographical accounts of personal episodes and includ[ing] reference as to when and why actions were taken and the intended results of the actions’ (1995: 12). The data were analysed paradigmatically; the categories, following Butler (1990), Valocchi (2005), Gamson (1995), and Lee et al. (1998) were informed by a schema produced from the following questions, ‘do these data not fit an essentialist framework?’, ‘Do they critique that framework?’, ‘Do they describe what is permissible within it?’, ‘What is not being said?’, ‘Is heteronormativity, and/or other normalizing discourses disrupted?’. The transcripts were treated as narratives rather than discourse to retain the sense of each participant as a person rather than a discursive conduit (Gamson, 2003). I scrutinized each narrative for sentences, the unit of analysis, concerning (professional/sexual) identity or leadership and asked of each the questions in the schema. I identified themes such as visibility, which subsequently and inductively produced sub-themes including providing role-models.

In the following section, I apply this framework to the data to describe thematically inadvertently queer moments, practices and identifications and explain them in relation to queer theory and relevant literature.

Results and discussion

Jim, Nick and Lee understand their sexual identity in an essentialist way, identifying unequivocally as gay. Kathy and Annabel believe sexuality is fluid, but articulate their own using labels; bisexual and lesbian. None uses ‘queer’ to describe their identity or practice. Nonetheless, Annabel, the bisexual headteacher, describes her identity in recognizably queer terms by acknowledging the importance of other aspects of her identity, and describing how their interplay is essential to how she understands herself. The others present their sexual identities as primary, producing effects in subsequent attitude and practice; this suggests an essentialist, standpoint world-view.

These leaders mostly operationalize power from this essentialist perspective, using their leadership positions to target homophobia (hatred of a stable minority), rather than heteronormativity (the normalizing discourse). These practices are commonly manifested structurally. Nevertheless, some of these institutionally targeted, structurally effected attacks on homophobia have had the inadvertent consequence of disrupting the cultural foundations of heteronormativity within their schools.

The leaders’ sexual identities

My participants’ varying attachment to essentialist labels is not a finding, since it was a condition of their participation. It does, however, contextualize and define any inadvertently queer interpretations of their claimed identities, so I want to start by exploring it. Jim, Nick and Lee all narrate their sexual identity in terms of the discovery of a pre-existing, innate characteristic. Lee is typical in writing, ‘I remember being 13/14 and by that time understanding that I was gay’. Their difficulties related to accepting this identity: ‘Looking back, I suppose my journey to accepting myself as a proud gay man was typical of many gay kids growing up then (and now)’ (Jim). Their sexual identity is perceived as core to other aspects of their identity. Although this foregrounding of sexual identity can be traced from Foucault (1976), who insisted it was a necessary precondition to the homosexual’s constitution as an object of knowledge, subject to disciplinary power, it took root in the essentialist, standpoint writing and activism which flourished before (and during) the emergence of queer theory. For example, Spraggs wrote: ‘[Hiding my sexuality] excludes or drastically distorts almost every aspect of my daily life, affectional, intellectual, political and aesthetic’ (1994: 180). Kathy differs, believing that ‘sexuality is a fluid thing and can change throughout our lives’. Her sexual identity as a lesbian, however, appears stable; the only sexual fluidity in her story lies in her (now married) female friends’ adolescent attraction to her.

Sexual identity, or the experience of formative marginalization often accompanying it, is presented as a motivator for current leadership practices by all four participants identifying as gay or lesbian: ‘I’m the anti-bullying coordinator for school—which is perhaps a role I might not have taken on so willingly or with as much empathy as I have had I not been there myself’ (Jim). The essentialist conceptualization of sexual identity is made explicit by Jim, whose claims for the equitable status of homosexuality appeal to a stigmatized, quasi-ethnic collective identity:

When homophobic comments have been made by parents or kids, I’ve felt able to deal effectively with them in a calm and rational way (usually by equating their comments with a racist comment … ).

Kathy’s perspective again differs; on one hand, she fights for LGBT equality partly because she claims an identity which she believes sensitizes her to LGBT issues. She understands and operationalizes this fight in essentialist terms; aiming for inclusion through correcting misinformation about a stigmatized minority:

The ignorance surrounding LGBT issues is astounding but once educated attitudes do change—I only wish all school/colleges/uni’s would embark upon this work in schools. My mission is to ensure they do! (Kathy)

Simultaneously, she believes her goal is to dismantle the identity groups themselves: ‘One day we will not have to worry about labels as we’ll just be ‘people’ but until then we have to keep promoting and fighting for equality’. Here is evidence of Rottmann’s (2006) pragmatic operationalization of queer goals, which retains identity labels to mobilize political and social action. Kathy’s story, though, shows that while the goal may be queer, these identity-based means are not, and may lead to identity boundaries becoming more, not less fixed. She, as a lesbian, is essentializable, her views dismissible and her agenda exotic rather than fundamental:

I think the cost to me has occurred just recently when I did not get a permanent leadership post in my school … I very much feel I have been labelled as ‘Queen of the lesbians’. (Kathy)

Annabel’s narrative is queerer. She claims a bisexual identity, but spontaneously foregrounds other subjectivities in her current and nascent identifications; these do not simply compete with her sexual identity for primacy, but intersect productively in her self-constitution:

I think my Christianity strongly influenced my sense of justice, equality, sticking up for the powerless. My feminism … informed my strong belief that I didn’t need a man to help me with any of that. Bisexuality is almost a product of the two (don’t care about the judgements of others, don’t need a man). (Annabel)

This interplay of identities corresponds to Carlin’s (2011: 56) articulation of queer, which ‘[looks] beyond sex and gender alone, across multiple, intersecting, and inter-dependent axes of self construction (nationality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, abilities, geography, and historical era)’ (see also Valocchi 2005). Conceptualizing intersectionality, especially in feminist writing, evokes some of the same dilemmas produced in queer analyses, particularly whether multiple identity categories are seen as stable or fluid; co-existing or co-productive (Harding et al., 2013). Annabel suggests that her sexual identity is constituted of other, distinct identities, neither of which concerns sexual desire and its object. A superficial Butlerian interpretation invites equanimity before this apparent construction, rather than discovery, of sexual identity, but the superfluity of desire may be theorized by applying another key proposition in Gender Trouble, drawn from Foucault. Butler suggests that power is ‘co-extensive’ (1990: 39) with sexuality; there can be no sexuality which is ‘outside’ power, yet power may generate as well as regulate relations in unforeseen ways, creating new possibilities for (sexual) subjects. Applying this idea to Annabel underscores how her sexuality ‘emerge[d] within the matrix of power relations’ (1990: 39, emphasis added), concerning principally faith and feminism, rather than desire.

Disrupting gender norms

Gender non-conformity became a major theme, conceptualized variously as more or less essential or performative. Jim, Nick and Lee described their own gender non-conformity as recognizing an existing, ‘natural’ condition and subsumed it within their gay identity: these differences were seen as early indicators of their homosexuality:

From about the age of five I knew I was different to other boys in my class. I knew this because I just wasn’t like them; I didn’t like football, didn’t like things that generally other boys liked and consequently all my friends were girls. This was not a problem in infant school but when I moved to middle school the playgrounds were split into girls and boys and I was thrust in to a world I didn’t feel part of. Suddenly I was forced to ‘be a boy’ and I remember it being very difficult. (Lee)

Jim and Nick describe their campness in similar essentialist terms, as natural parts of their personality expressed freely, or which betrayed their homosexuality in childhood (Jim). Campness, however essentially conceived, is queer in disrupting the assumed gender/sexual alignment of ‘leader’. As Honeychurch (1996: 345) notes, ‘camp is not only a style or a form of characterization by which queer identities are made visible, but is also a stance of resistance embedded in representational practices by which dominant cultural forms are challenged and dynamic queer identities are constituted’. Jim and Nick’s campness consequently may be inadvertently queer, by troubling a cultural target—notions of the right sort of leader—as the by-product of an essentially conceptualized condition.

Annabel’s gender non-conformity is more conscious and performative. She understands the forces which structure her positioning as a gendered subject; ‘my feminism means that I am aware of the societal pressures to conform with looks, etc.’, and performs a response suggesting non-heterosexuality, despite the possibility of stigmatization; ‘Being a Ms with sensible shoes and no understanding of foundation and powder means some parents have drawn their own conclusions and I have not corrected them or pointed out I am married’ (Annabel). This is a brave act revealing professional confidence: Fassinger et al. (2010) point out that women and men are perceived as effective and successful in leadership when behaving in a gender-appropriate way. This affects queer women doubly; since conceptualizations of leader and leadership are predominantly masculinized in the West, as a woman, she may perform leadership practices which disrupt this alignment in the eyes of the led and negatively influence her perceived effectiveness, and as a non-heterosexual female leader, she fails even to embody what society deems a ‘normal’ woman. Annabel is the queerest of the leaders in adopting an interrogative stance towards not just sexual orientation, but gender; ‘I still feel the need to question assumptions about gender roles’.

Disrupting heteronormativity through increased visibility

All five leaders disrupt heteronormativity inadvertently through disclosing their claimed sexual identity. The motivation includes first, performing an identity with which queer pupils might want to identify; e.g. ‘I think it is absolutely essential for students to have role models’ (Kathy). From an essentialist perspective, this is problematic, since admitting the possibility of a child’s identification with the leader’s identity belies the innate stability of non-heterosexual identities and reinforces the notion of their active construction. As Crimp (1992) explains, identification is never with itself, it is always with another. It is consequently and necessarily partial and relational. These leaders wished to supply alternatives to the identities available to them in their youth:

At the time, the only gay people I knew of were Larry Grayson and John Inman—negative stereotypes who reinforced my belief at the time that we were objects of fun; sad, pathetic people who lived alone or with their mother and were only good to laugh at. (Jim)

A second reason was to embody LGB leadership successfully and visibly to the wider school community. As Lee writes, ‘[m]y experiences growing up have influenced my leadership role to a huge extent. I am conscious of being a role model all the time, and a gay role model too’. Lee feels that he represents a novel type in the school and beyond, ‘[c]hildren need to know that gay people can be head teachers too!’. He will be what people think of when they imagine gay leader either as a type or possible template for their own identity construction, and he is aware of the accompanying responsibility.

A third reason is to challenge homophobia through visibility. Kathy writes passionately that this is why and how she practices leadership: ‘In school I believe we have a duty to ‘usualize’ different types of people from all kinds of backgrounds and act as role models for young people so they are educated about different kinds of people they will meet on their journey through life’. This is articulated from an essentialist epistemology; as Valocchi (2005), drawing on Foucault, writes, such actions as ‘giv[ing] students the “Facts” about the words “Lesbian”, “Gay”, “Bisexual” and “Trans”’ (Kathy) only reverse the discourse by redefining the categorizations and not problematizing their creation. Nevertheless, I suggest that heteronormativity is challenged here. One important discursive function of heteronormativity is to define homosexual, in abjection of which heterosexuals are defined (Honeychurch, 1996). This is perpetuated through stigmatization—the abjected homosexual remains silent and invisible out of shame. This has been especially true of school leaders (Blount, 2003). Whilst visibility may be dismissed as mere discourse inversion which sustains category reification, I argue that this misses the point in failing to acknowledge the shift in who defines. Visibility constitutes a counter-discourse, which as Sedgwick (1990) suggests, whilst not commensurate to the dominant one, is not devoid of impact or value. Ignorance may be institutionally sanctioned, but is not inevitable. So here, has visibility changed the definition? Kathy believes it has: ‘I have testimonials from past LGBT students who had a great time at school and were not bullied—this is the reason why I do this work in schools’.

Missing from the literature is any indication of whether leaders’ being out or promoting visibility carries more weight in countering a dominant discourse, since their choices embody not just personal, but organizational and institutional truths (Mayo, 2007). Harding and colleagues’ (2011) queering of leadership offers a clue. For them, leadership is (homo)erotically predicated—leaders incite followers’ desire to make them want to follow their instructions, but leaders’ bodies must be absent from the scene of seduction to sustain organizational heteronormativity. I argue that visible LGB leaders problematize the second of these propositions in personifying, and therefore having followers unable to ignore, a necessarily sexualized and embodied leadership, one in which constitutive but normally suppressed ‘lust or submission’ (Sinclair, 2009: 270) is reinserted. This is because heteronormativity defines non-heterosexual identities according to sexual behaviour; to imagine gays, lesbians or bisexuals is to imagine the ‘deviant’, definitional sexual practices performed by and invocative of their bodies. I am not suggesting that heterosexual leadership is wholly disembodied, Sinclair (2005: 403) reminds us that bodily performances are central to leadership, yet also that ‘we have been encouraged not to notice them’. If the desire an LGB leader evokes is explicitly discursively embodied, then the possibility of its consummation must be at least fleetingly entertained. This, I suggest, constitutes an attritional attack on organizational heteronormativity. The door may still be slammed shut, but the view beyond has been glimpsed.

If visibility may queer leadership, then it must be acknowledged as a major queer theme in this study despite almost never being articulated as such by the leaders. These appeal instead to various discourses, from personal effectiveness; ‘… if I can’t be open about myself and speak about my partner in the same way that heterosexual colleagues do, then how can I perform at my best?’ (Jim), to social justice; ‘There is an unspoken right that heterosexual colleagues have which enables them to talk openly about their weekend, their partner, their kids; I have that right too as far as I’m concerned’ (Jim), and authenticity; ‘The impact [of not being out] is I am not being true to myself’ (Lee).

Inadvertently queer leadership practices

All the participants, out or not, wrote of using their authority as leaders to increase the visibility of non-heterosexual identities and life-styles in the curriculum, policies and by promoting inclusive cultures.

Annabel reported that her governors ‘were genuinely pleased that the sex education course was amended to include homosexuality and same-sex attraction’; after a struggle, Lee was able to write that ‘all teachers at my school have delivered the plans in the challenging homophobia resource’ and Jim has ‘provided lesson plans for every year group which link with the books from the No Outsiders [an anti-homophobia] project’. Kathy’s work to ‘usualize’ LGBT identities in her school and beyond has been particularly remarkable; she has co-ordinated LGBT history month for six years, led staff development in this area and attracted governmental attention.

The three gay-identifying leaders articulated those of their leadership practices combating homophobia in the quasi-ethnic terms reminiscent of the essentialism of feminist and race standpoint theories. However, such practices occasionally disrupt heteronormativity. One such occasion is described by Jim, who writes:

The knock-on effect [of my challenging homophobia] is that this work doesn’t just benefit the (possible) ‘gay’ kid but all kids who have been bullied because of perceived differences in their sexuality or just because they don’t fit someone else’s idea of what the ‘norm’ should be.

Here, Jim recognizes that his efforts have had an impact beyond that which might be expected were they focused on LGBT pupils conceptualized essentially. I suggest that this is because he is not simply challenging negative actions towards a stigmatized minority whose experience is independent of other forms or targets of discrimination; he is implicitly attacking the processes of normalization and abjection themselves, and the embodied products of these as other bullied students. This universalizable problematization of the normalizing effects and products of discourse characterizes queer theory (despite the misleading attachment to sexual identities projected in its name), whose ‘subjectless critique establishes, in Michael Warner’s phrase, a focus on ‘a wide field of normalization’ as the site of social violence’ (Halberstam and Muñoz 2005: 3). Mayo (2007: 80) agrees; ‘Queer theory, then, is as concerned with the press of normative power in dominant culture as it is in queer subcultures themselves … ’.

Heteronormativity is partly sustained by legal, medical, policing, media and religious institutions. These have criminalized, pathologized or portrayed as deviant or sinful non-heterosexual acts and identities. Invoking institutional support, albeit ostensibly to challenge homophobia rather than heteronormativity, I argue is an inadvertently queer leadership practice. Annabel exemplifies this in her positive relationship with the governors of her church school; ‘[h]arassment is taken seriously [by the governors] and there is support for my hardline approach to the use of gay as an insult’.

Jim also appeals to an institution, his union, to resolve a discriminatory incident:

When two members of staff voiced their bigoted views (come from a Christian point of view) … The NUT [National Union of Teachers] got involved and the members of staff were given a written warning.

Although one might imagine it unsurprising that a teaching union would support its member’s complaint about homophobia; Spraggs’ (1994) vivid description of the same union’s lack of support some years previously is a reminder that this is a relatively recent advance. Other examples in this theme include Nick’s calling the police to have a homophobically abusive parent arrested and Kathy’s use of the national media and contacts with Downing Street and the Department for Education to disseminate her message.

Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to make contributions to the field in three areas. First, theoretically, by discussing the conceptual tensions involved in queer empirical study involving people identifying as LGB. Second, methodologically, in developing a framework to permit such study through the development of inadvertently queer leadership. This was prompted by my desire to reconcile an emic fidelity to the participants’ lived experiences with queer theory’s insights concerning the discursive construction of fragile identities and the discursive target of queer political action. Third, empirically, by presenting and discussing claims relating to the identities and practices of a group of sexually-minoritized school leaders.

The LGB school leaders participating in this study neither identify as queer nor attach queer motivations to their embodiment and enactment of leadership. This is for several reasons; a policy landscape which encourages the conceptualization of sexually-minoritized people as stable categories, and personal attachment to a collective identity from which they draw strength and which gives meaning to how they understand themselves. This analysis has revealed differences concerning leaders’ perception of their sexual identity notwithstanding all five’s attachment to identity labels, with Annabel and Kathy favouring a conceptualization of it as fluid, and Annabel’s foregrounding other aspects of her identity in her self-authoring. Gender norms are disrupted by four of the leaders and may arguably contribute evidence for a queer interpretation, but again in most cases this is inadvertent, since for Jim, Nick and Lee, these differences between how they perform masculinity and how a heteronormative society expects them to are taken as indicators of their innate homosexuality. Annabel is again the most overtly queer in consciously performing a non-conformist gender role in order to suggest an ambiguous sexual identity. Promoting the visibility of the leaders’ sexual identity and non-heterosexual identities themselves are presented as an important goal and manifestation of LGBT leadership. Although essentially motivated, these have a claim to fulfil the queer objective of disrupting heteronormativity, along with other practices such as appealing to formerly heteronormative institutions and attacking the discursive root of bullying.

Even when applying an understanding of inadvertently queer leadership limited to only those queer moments glimpsed through a veil of heteronormativity, these results still support somewhat the view of Mayo (2007: 79), in her examination of the LGBT/queer epistemological dichotomy, that ‘It turns out … things have been queer all along’ in blurring what has been perhaps constructed as an uncompromisingly hard distinction, a epistemological binary ironically residing at the heart of queer theory. They may also somewhat legitimize pragmatic, social justice-oriented LGBT leadership practices in the eyes of some interpreters of queer theory who might previously have admitted no such possibility, although to use the language of legitimization is to submit to what Talburt and Rasmussen (2010) characterize as a misleading narrative of a temporally and politically progressive queer movement, culminating in some right way to understand heteronormativity and operationalize political action aimed at undermining it. Such a narrative positions queer theory as the intellectual successor to LGBT studies and its knowledge claims as superior. My research has shown that across these English schools, queer theory is not even the temporal successor to LGBT studies; there is evidence not just of a ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivac, cited in Halberstam and Muñoz, 2005: 3), but of an emotional as well as pragmatic attachment to one’s fixed sexual identity, or to a fixed label even if one’s experiences are not fixed. That, however, doesn’t preclude the queer. In opposition to claims that attaching one’s identity to a fixed label in turn fixes one’s identity can be made the counter-claim that the occupation of this definitional space by individuals with diverse and occasionally mutually inconsistent characteristics redefines it. For example, Kathy’s membership of the category ‘lesbian’ may alter it to include women whose sexuality is potentially fluid, and the membership of women such as Annabel may redefine it to include those whose sexual orientation may derive in part from ideology. This resonates with collective identity theory, whose evolution from an explanation of identity as a pre-existing entity to a ‘dynamic, emergent’ one is described by Schlesinger (1987: 237, emphasis in original). Despite Butler’s (1990) misgivings concerning the ontological superfluity of the resultant labels, this, potentially, is how one might imagine the reconciliation of essentialist and constructionist views of identity, if not epistemologically then pragmatically. The labels remain as a focal point for identification and action, but their meanings change across time and space. Both impulses are correct and necessary.

The same processes apply to conceptualizations of leaders and leadership, and this is where a wider-ranging interpretation of inadvertently queer is both possible and conceptually productive. The visible presence of LGBT people in leadership roles challenges the heteronormative assumptions underpinning the ways in which leadership is imagined because such visibility is an antecedent of and prerequisite for the troubling of the category within which it occurs, strengthening its claims to queer authenticity. Furthermore, the conflation of sexual identity with the sexual act in the heteronormative model means that the visibility of queer leaders in schools necessarily invokes their (sexual) bodies. Whilst this may be a residual product of heteronormative constructions of homosexuality, its effect now is to produce an embodied conceptualization of leadership which is non-normatively sexual and which may awaken, albeit transiently, the erotic desire in followers normally sublimated within heteronormative organizations. Not only the leaders, nor even leadership, but its dialectic counterpart followership is inadvertently queered in this analysis. As Harding et al. following Hocquenghem, note (2011: 942), ‘bodies are attracted to bodies’; this notion underpins leadership, and LGB leaders render it visible; a queer attack on the fabric of heteronormativity which they might not have intended, but which nonetheless opens up possibilities if not for its dismantling, then at least its unsettling in organizational contexts.