Gender and Sexuality Policing: The Violence That ‘Doesn’t Count’

Abstract

In this chapter I review data from students and teachers about moments of violence at school that target individuals’ gender or sexuality, utilising the work of Judith Butler (The Force of Nonviolence) to examine and interpret their accounts. In doing so, I argue that ubiquitous definitions of ‘bullying’ that emerge from the state and operate in schools and other institutions actively resist recognition of gendered violence, regardless of how it manifests. Through examining the ways that students and teachers experience and define violence while constrained by hegemonic policy narratives, I argue that as it stands, bullying policy entrenches violence against minority groups along existing structural lines of oppression and subjugation. In doing so, bullying policy significantly tests the bonds between students and teachers, undermining their fundamental relations. This analysis illustrates that a more nuanced, comprehensive, and socially just imagining of violence is needed to empathically and deliberately move towards nonviolence in schools.