Philip Lortie & Kathleen Gallagher
'I’m just not going to play a gay role': Homophobia and silence in the Drama classroom.  (A play in 4 scenes)

An invidious aspect of citizenship is the extent to which the communities we create in our classrooms, theatres, neighbourhoods, and beyond, often coalesce around who is expressly excluded from these spaces.  Our presentation will use theatre as metaphor in order to interrogate the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within high school (Drama) classrooms, and to make explicit the ‘performances’ of identity in these charged environments.  This attempt to use theatre - rather than present these research stories in more traditional qualitative narrative - is to draw from theatre’s potency to serve the creativity, the performativity, and the reflective engagement that is at the centre of critical ethnographic research.
    The five researchers/presenters, with the help of the audience, will perform the scenes created from the transcripts and fieldnotes of a spontaneous and divisive class-wide conversation about homosexuality.  These scenes include an excerpt of an interview with one of the students who voiced intolerant attitudes, and a reading from a gay male researcher’s reactions to the homophobia he witnessed.  We will employ dramatic interpretative elements to provoke new insights into the theatricality of the students’ social positioning, and into the performative aspects of the act of research itself.
    As researchers, our belief is that sexual identity and desire need their place in high school conversations; conversations that engage the radical uncertainty of the postmodern subject in the very real material realities of sexist, racist, and homophobic classrooms.  To examine, in our research of youth and the theatre they make, the ways in which sexuality and other identity markers are socially constructed and performed (in life and in art), how the moral, gendered and discoursed cultures created in (theatre) classrooms reinscribe historical inequities is the most pressing job, we would now argue, of classroom-based research.