On Cartographies of Anti-homophobia in Teacher Education: (and the Crisis of Witnessing Rural Student Teacher Refusals)

Abstract

This paper explores the problem of student refusals in a rural Australian teacher education programme as a problem located in particular spatialised social relations. Drawing upon teacher educator reflections and student online discussions, the paper documents a situated approach to anti-homophobia teacher education: one in which student conservatism is read not as an ideological issue, but as an issue of repetitions. Situated within a context of postcolonial rural Australia, the repetitions of student homophobia emerge as symptomatic of moral anxieties in relation to the crisis of white presence (Rowse, 1993), hierarchical social structures of differential privilege, the formation of new abject subjectivities (Kristeva, 1982), saviour fantasies (Robertson, 1997), fears of losing (or finding) children (Pierce, 1996), and deep ambivalence towards their own learning (Britzman, 1998). Developing cartographies of anti-homophobia in teacher education is a movement away from analyses of homophobia as acts of discrimination to more specific situational analyses that take account of the spatialised nature of both homophobia and resistances to anti-homophobia programmes.