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QUEER CIVICS, HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE, AND THE
CIS-STRAIGHT NATION-STATE: READING THE ILLUSION OF
LGBTQ+ INCLUSION THROUGH THE (QUEER) CHILD
James Joshua Coleman
Department of English
Arizona State University
Jon M. Wargo
Marsal Family School of Education
University of Michigan
Abstract. In this article, James Joshua Coleman and Jon Wargo interrogate the (queer) child as a concept
and specter that haunts civic life in the United States. Whereas scholars across a range of fields and
standpoints have questioned the value of LGBTQ+ inclusion in public school curricula, and society
more broadly, together Coleman and Wargo wonder at the capacity of civics education to include queer
(as opposed to LGBTQ+) citizens within the cis-straight nation-state. To explore this possibility, they
read across two bills: (1) H.R. 9197 (Stop the Sexualization of Children Act), and (2) Illinois House Bill 246
(Inclusive Curriculum Law). In so doing, they highlight how the (Queer) Child operates as an organizing
binary logic within these bills and examine how hermeneutical injustice impedes the formation of a
truly queer civics education. Specifically, Coleman and Wargo demonstrate how hermeneutical injustice
limits the nature of inclusion for LGBTQ+ citizens, both for exclusionary, anti-LGBTQ+ policy and for
seemingly inclusive legislation. Pointing to scenes that demonstrate hermeneutical justice and queer
survivance, they conclude by suggesting the construction of a queer civics education that stands outside
the binary logics of the cis-straight nation-state.
Key Words. civics education; queer theory; educational policy; childhood studies
Introduction
The (Queer) Child is and remains a specter haunting civic life in the United
States.1 From Florida’s recent “Don’t Say Gay” bill2 to the spate of anti-trans laws
barring trans youth from athletic participation and access to school restrooms
across the country, the (Queer) Child — at once invisible and hypervisible — is an
organizational binary that motivates educational policy and civic inclusion within
the cis-straight nation-state. As defined by Margot Canady, the term straight state
refers to the organization of the United States around a heterosexual/homosexual
binary.3 For her, this binary functioned across various areas (e.g., immigration,
1. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
2. Parental Rights in Education, H.B. 1557, § 1001.42 (FL 2022), https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill
/2022/1557.
3. Canaday contends, “From the mid-1940s into the late 1960s … , the state crafted tools to overtly target
homosexuality. In contrast to the earlier period, policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality
to define who could enter the country and be naturalized, who could serve in the military, and who could
EDUCATIONAL THEORY
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Number 5
2024
© 2024 The Author(s). Educational Theory published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Board of Trustees,
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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
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EDUCATIONAL THEORY
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welfare, the military) in twentieth-century America. It forged a self-replicating
infrastructure that perpetuated heterosexual norms within civic life and pushed
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals to the periphery. Extending this work, Jules Gill-Peterson highlights the recent uptick of
anti-trans legislation as an organized effort by the state “to become cisgender”
and thus secure its position as “a cis[-straight] state.”4 Education, too, has carried
this binary logic forward and developed its infrastructure (e.g., school design,
curricular norms, policy) in alignment with that cis-straight state. Ensuring such
alignment, as we will argue, the (Queer) Child binary — both figuratively and literally — functions as a mechanism through which the nation-state reproduces itself
today, specifically by means of anti-LGBTQ+ education policy that perpetuates
hermeneutical injustice.
Distinct from actual children, the (Queer) Child is an organizing logic that
aligns civic education with the cis-straight state. Moreover, as we demonstrate in
this article, the (Queer) Child links together two imagined figures of childhood.
On the one hand, it indexes an imagined Child in danger, one who is cisgender,
straight, white, and innocent. This figurative Child, an epistemic cipher, is used
to motivate legislation. For example, both the Stop the Sexualization of Children
Act5 and the PROTECT Kids Act6 seek to remove LGBTQ+ representation from
curricula, classrooms, and civic life, and such policy perpetuates hermeneutical injustice against actual LGBTQ+ children. As Kamili Posey explains,
“[h]ermeneutical injustice occurs when a knower is unable to understand significant aspects of their social experiences due to a structural prejudice in shared or
collective hermeneutical resources.”7 H.R. 9197 and H.R. 1781 perpetuate such
injustice by preserving interpretations of the Child as cis-straight, white, and
collect state benefits. A homosexual-heterosexual binary, in other words, was being inscribed in federal
citizenship policy during these years.” Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in
Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3 (emphasis in original).
4. Jules Gill-Peterson, “The Cis State,” Sad Brown Girl (blog), April 14, 2021, https://sadbrowngirl
.substack.com/p/the-cis-state.
5. Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R. 9197, 117th Cong. (2022), https://www.congress.gov/bill
/117th-congress/house-bill/9197.
6. PROTECT Kids Act, H.R. 1781, 117th Cong. (2021), https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress
/house-bill/1781.
7. Kamili Posey, Centering Epistemic Injustice: Epistemic Labor, Willful Ignorance, and Knowing across
Hermeneutical Divides (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), xiii (emphasis in original).
JAMES JOSHUA COLEMAN (JOSH) is an Assistant Professor of English Education at Arizona State
University; email josh.coleman@asu.edu. His primary areas of scholarship are critical literacy, LGBTQ+
studies in education, youth literature, and teacher education.
JON M. WARGO is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies in the Marsal Family School of
Education at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor; email wargojon@umich.edu. His primary areas
of scholarship are in critical literacy, cultural studies, queer theory, and teacher education.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
innocent. However, in doing so, these two acts also summon that Child’s binary
opposite, the Queer Child, which functions within the cis-straight nation-state
as a threat to futurity itself. The existence of the Queer Child highlights the
fundamental truth that the Child can be queered, and such queering disrupts the
organizational logic of the cis-straight state. In short, the Queer Child portends no
future as we currently know it.8
Affecting inclusion of the LGBTQ+ subject in civics education, the binary of
the cis-straight Child and the Queer Child — what we call the (Queer) Child —
animates contentions surrounding who (i.e., a citizenry) and what (e.g., rights,
responsibilities) deserve full access to civic participation in the United States.
Whereas scholars across a range of fields and standpoints have questioned the value
of LGBTQ+ inclusion in public school curricula,9 and society more broadly,10 we
wonder at the capacity of civics education to include queer (as opposed to LGBTQ+)
citizens within the cis-straight nation-state, particularly given the hermeneutical
injustice of today’s educational policy. To explore this possibility, we read across
two bills: (1) H.R. 9197 (Stop the Sexualization of Children Act), a bill introduced to
the US Congress on October 18, 2022, that bans LGBTQ+ content in public spaces
for children under the age of ten; and (2) Illinois House Bill 24611 (Inclusive Curriculum Law), which mandates the inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals in the public
school history curriculum. In so doing, we highlight how the (Queer) Child operates
as an organizing binary logic within that legislation and examine how hermeneutical injustice impedes the formation of a truly queer civics education. Specifically,
we demonstrate how hermeneutical injustice limits the nature of inclusion for
LGBTQ+ citizens, both for exclusionary, anti-LGBTQ+ policy and for seemingly
inclusive legislation. Pointing to scenes that demonstrate hermeneutical justice
and queer survivance, we conclude by suggesting the construction of a queer civics
education that stands outside the binary logics of the cis-straight nation-state.
Queer Civics and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
Preparing students for full democratic participation by cultivating their
civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions is of growing concern in contemporary
8. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman advanced the figure of the Child as the
emblem of US futurity. This figure operates as a form of reproductive futurism or fantasy through which
the government justifies present-day actions in the name of protecting the future Child. In contrast, the
Queer Child offers no future to the United States because the Queer Child offers no potential for social,
cultural, or even biological reproduction. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
9. Michael Kokozos and Maru Gonzalez, “Critical Inclusion: Disrupting LGBTQ Normative Frameworks in School Contexts,” Equity & Excellence in Education 53, no. 1–2 (2020): 151–64, https://doi
.org/10.1080/10665684.2020.1764881.
10. Cris Mayo, “Pushing the Limits of Liberalism: Queerness, Children, and the Future,” Educational
Theory 56, no. 4 (2006): 469–487, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2006.00239.x.
11. Inclusive Curriculum Law, H.B. 246, § 5 (IL 2019), https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/101/HB
/10100HB0246.htm.
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US education. As demonstrated by a range of initiatives — from the National
Academy of Education’s report Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse12 to
nationwide efforts that seek to instantiate increased civics learning through state
legislation13 — civic education, both in concept and in practice, is considered
imperative for instructing children about who is or is not considered a viable
citizen.
However, citizenship as a marker of full civic participation and inclusion
remains contested. It can be understood as both a practice and a status. As a practice, citizenship emphasizes actions that advance civic reasoning and discourse.14
As a status, it often indicates identity. A citizen, thus, becomes incorporated
into the status of citizenship through acts and habits of the nation-state (take, for
instance, fulfilling the obligation to serve in the military). For historically minoritized communities in the United States, however, and for the LGBTQ+ subject
in particular, contemporary discourses surrounding K–12 civic education — and
indeed on citizenship — remain largely silent on issues surrounding gender and
sexuality.
LGBTQ+ inclusion in K–12 social studies education primarily operates from
a position of status. It posits identity-based access to citizenship for individuals
identifying as LGBTQ+ through particular institutional rights (e.g., marriage).
Historically, these rights have been those debated and discussed by students
through legislative policies and seemingly controversial issues,15 or examined as
lived practices in queer and LGBTQ+-affirming spaces.16 Although more states
now require the role of LGBTQ+ people to be included and taught in public
schools (see, for instance, Illinois House Bill 246, Inclusive Curriculum Law; and
12. Carol D. Lee, Gregory White, and Dian Dong, eds., Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse
(Washington, DC: National Academy of Education, 2021), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED611951
.pdf.
13. See, for example, Massachusetts’s Senate Bill, An Act to Promote and Enhance Civic Engagement,
S.B. 2375, § 2ZZZZ (MA 2018), https://malegislature.gov/Bills/190/S2375.
14. In this article, we understand citizenship to connote a range of rights required for individual liberty
and collective political engagement and also to be a means of cultural identity. Reading citizenship as
status, we aim to examine queer citizenship — and the possibility of qualifying as a citizen more fully —
through its intersections with the child and articulations of inclusion, equality, and equal opportunity.
15. See, for example, Terence A. Beck, “Identity, Discourse, and Safety in a High School Discussion
of Same-Sex Marriage,” Theory & Research in Social Education 41, no. 1 (2013): 1–32, https://doi
.org/10.1080/00933104.2013.757759; Diana Hess, “Teaching about Same-Sex Marriage as a Policy
and Constitutional Issue,” Social Education 73, no. 7 (2009): 344–349, https://www.socialstudies.org
/social-education/73/7/teaching-about-same-sex-marriage-policy-and-constitutional-issue; and Wayne
Journell, “Should Marriage Equality Be Taught as Controversial Post-Obergefell v. Hodges?,” Teachers
College Record 120, no. 8 (2018), 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811812000805.
16. See, for example, J. B. Mayo, “Negotiating Sexual Orientation and Classroom Practice(s) at School,”
Theory & Research in Social Education 35, no. 3 (2007): 447–464, https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104
.2007.10473344; and Jon M. Wargo, “‘Can I Just Be a Human?’ Reading LGBTQ+ Youths’ Civics
Talk-as-Text,” Journal of Social Studies Research 46, no. 1 (2022): 19–33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jssr
.2021.11.002.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
California’s Senate Bill 48, FAIR Education Act17 ), this form of citizenship is
premised on the cis-straight nation-state.18 Next, we briefly detail how the United
States can be read as a straight nation-state and how it has transformed into a
cisgender nation-state. Our goal in this discussion is to trouble LGBTQ+ inclusion
and advance a queer civics perspective.
Civics and the Straight Nation-State
Citizenship in the United States has long been mobilized to disenfranchise
LGBTQ+ communities from civic access. In the late twentieth century, many
states crafted tools to target homosexuality.19 These policies used queer identity,
mainly under the guise of sexual deviance and perversion, to restrict who could
enter the country, become a citizen, serve in the military, and garner state benefits.
In The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America,
Canady emphasizes that “Over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century,
the state crafted citizenship policies that crystallized homosexual identity, fostering a process by which certain individuals began to think of their sexuality in
political terms, as mediating and mediated by their relationship to the state.”20 As
a result, “[a] homosexual-heterosexual binary … was being inscribed in federal citizenship policy.”21 According to Canady, when citizenship is constituted through
sexuality and sexuality is generated through political terms, the sole means of
incorporation or inclusion of the LGBTQ+ subject is through the nation-state.
Thus, the queer subject (as distinct from the LGBTQ+ subject) becomes an
anti-citizen. The queer subject, together with queer theory’s anti-normative position,22 destabilize the binaries on which civic life is constructed.
Civics and the Cis-Straight State
Recent efforts to impose greater authoritarian control by means of anti-Black
and anti-trans legislation suggest that we have entered what Gill-Peterson called
17. FAIR Education Act, S.B. 48, §§ 51204.5, 51500, 51501, 60040, and 60044 (CA 2011), http://www
.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_0001-0050/sb_48_bill_20110714_chaptered.pdf.
18. Notably, this cis-straight state is grounded on suppositions that construct the civic architecture
of what it means to be a queer citizen in the United States. Sexuality, marriage, and reproduction —
core expressions of selfhood — are intimately bound together in furtherance of a “homonormative”
(Lisa Duggan’s term) or “homonationalist” (Jasbir Puar’s term) understanding of civic participation. Lisa
Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
19. Like Canady, who drew on George Chauncey’s work, we use the term homosexuality here to signal
how it, as a personality type and as a condition classified in the medical literature, was but “one of several
powerful (and competing) sexual ideologies.” Canaday, The Straight State; and George Chauncey, Gay
New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York:
Basic Books, 1994), 27.
20. Canady, The Straight State, 10.
21. Ibid., 3.
22. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
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the cisgender, or cis, state.23 As a result, the fiction of a gender binary coordinates
the state through the “biological anchor of political governance.”24 As a “strategy
of state power,” the cis state “defines citizenship through an obligatory alignment
of physical anatomy with legal gender markers and visual appearance.”25 We have
seen this transition from the straight nation-state of the twentieth century to the
cis-straight nation-state of the twenty-first century in real time. Take, for instance,
North Carolina’s 2016 House Bill 2, Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act
(colloquially known as the bathroom bill).26 This bill, and the many offshoots
that have followed it, highlight how questions of gendered access become covert
attempts to expel queer and trans life from the broader social world.
Regimenting gender and sexuality, the cis-straight state proffers freedom under
specific conditions and limitations.27 This authoritarian rule also has what Jasbir
Puar dubs “homonationalist tendencies,”28 although these are not made explicit.
In concert with regimes of anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and imperialism, the
codification of whiteness inherent in the queer modern nation-state signals a
repudiation of those LGBTQ+ subjects who remain illegible to the queer Western
world (e.g., two-spirit individuals, hijra, people of other non-Western genders
and sexualities). Yet, how does the shape of civic learning, and indeed the form
of citizenship itself, shift relative to the (Queer) Child? Through exploring this
query’s impossible logics and incompatibilities, we illuminate how competing
approaches to LGBTQ+ inclusion in civics education diverge in the freedoms they
afford to and the frictions they create within a US queer citizenry.
A Note on Our Critique
Before providing the theoretical footing for our argument and performing our
dual reading of educational policies and the (Queer) Child, it is important to address
how we shaped this project’s commentary. As two queer-identifying individuals,
our goal is not to damage our own self-interest by critiquing LGBTQ+ inclusive
legislation and policy. Indeed, we believe that all individuals, LGBTQ+ included,
should be afforded the same rights and recognition. LGBTQ+ inclusion is important and, in our opinion, the right thing to do. However, like Jen Gilbert, we believe
23. Gill-Peterson, “The Cis State.”
24. Ibid.
25. Jules Gill-Peterson, “The Cis State II,” Sad Brown Girl (blog), June 3, 2022, https://sadbrowngirl
.substack.com/p/the-cis-state-ii.
26. Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, H.B. 2, §§ 1–5 (NC 2016), https://www.ncleg.gov
/BillLookup/2015E2/H2.
27. Our understanding of freedom as a collective action is anchored in the works of Hannah Arendt and
Linda Zerilli. Rather than the liberal democratic view of freedom as located in individual sovereignty
and liberty, Arendt and Zerilli conceived of freedom as located in a democratic politics found in new
forms of association and the ability to act in concert in response to questions of common concern. See
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and Linda Zerilli,
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
28. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 70.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
that “[b]eing on the right side of an issue is not enough if, in standing there, we
erode the possibility for new, more expansive understandings of sexuality and
learning.”29 Moreover, we know that these rights, recognitions, and responsibilities — especially when connected to issues of gender, sexuality, and other axes of
difference — are distributed unequally in liberal democracies. Thus, in this project
we approach critique in a manner similar to Robyn Wiegman: we believe critique
“derive[s] its most fascinating and passionate rigor from registering the contradictions and incoherencies that arise from identificatory modalities as they fail,
just like we do, to arrive in any of the right places.”30 Hence, we do not provide
exhaustive remarks about the topic of queer civics, nor do we provide illustrative
examples that can promote purposeful pedagogies in K–12 public schools. Indeed,
the school remains an apparatus of the cis-straight nation-state. However, because
both of these policies rest on the backs of childhoods — real and imagined, queer
or otherwise — our argument focuses less on their real or perceived outcomes and
more on how each of these documents draws links between claims for queer inclusion and the experience of civic education.
No Hermeneutical Future for the (Queer) Child
In No Future, a formative work in queer theory, Edelman famously asserts,
“Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized;
fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; … fuck Laws both with capital ls and
with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that
serves as its prop.”31 Advancing his theory of reproductive futurism, Edelman
distinguishes the Child as an amalgamative imagined figure from actual children.
For him, the capital-C Child is a fantasy, an alibi for adult desire, and, more
importantly, an organizational logic by which social and civic orders (e.g., democratic education, the pursuit of freedom, other infrastructures for civic life) are
maintained. In contexts of schooling, the common phrase “Do it for the kids”
advances reproductive futurism. It assumes childhood as an ontological origin and
renders an imagined Child needing adult mediation. The subtending logic here
goes something like this: children, because they are fundamentally different from
adults32 and incapable of self-sufficiency, require adult intervention to access X
(X here likely referring to some educational opportunity, hermeneutical resource,
or form of knowledge). Seemingly straightforward, this phrase exemplifies, on
a small scale, the capacity of the Child — again, no actual children mentioned
here — to organize civic life. Teachers imagine the figural Child in need, feel
29. Jen Gilbert, Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014), xiii.
30. Robyn Wiegman, “Eve, at a Distance,” Trans-Scripts 2 (2012): 171–2.
31. Edelman, No Future, 29.
32. In his history of childhood, Philippe Ariès discovered a fundamental shift in conceptions of childhood
in the Middle Ages. Children were no longer seen as miniature adults but instead became a unique
development class that warranted specific civic rights, such as education. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of
Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick, (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).
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sympathetic, and so give freely, whether of their time, money, or labor, to create
a pathway to a better future for the Child. The Child, as Edelman explains, is “the
emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value.”33
In a cis-straight nation-state, the Child is unerringly straight, cisgender, white,
and innocent.34 In particular, the Child propels civic reproduction by suppressing
actual children’s sexual orientations and gender expressions through particular
forms of hermeneutical injustice. For example, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill
and the federal H.R. 9197 (Stop the Sexualization of Children Act) operate from
an assumption of the Child’s cis-straight status. The bills use this status to bar
discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity with actual children in public
schools and libraries. Presuming a cis-straight — and, more implicitly, white —
innocent Child, these bills seek to reproduce the social and civic structures of
the cis-straight nation-state by preserving “the willful hermeneutical ignorance
of dominant knowers.”35 As defined by Posey, willful hermeneutical ignorance
involves “cognitive maneuvering where dominant knowers refuse to make what
they do know — that marginalized epistemic resources exist, for example —
consistent with their own worldview.”36 The “Don’t Say Gay” bill and other
anti-LGBTQ+ legislation operate as a form of willful hermeneutical ignorance.
Lawmakers are battling at the level of interpretation to remove marginalized
knowers’ hermeneutical resources from civic life and education.
As a backlash to rapid increases in LGBTQ+ visibility in the twenty-first century, such legislation reinforces interpretations of the Child as cis-straight and,
in doing so, preserves the country’s cis-straight status. However, the increased
presence of actual children identifying as LGBTQ+ has thrust battles for hermeneutical control over educational content into the political center stage. Moreover,
this battle has forged the presumed cis-straight Child and Queer Child into an
organizational binary (e.g., the (Queer) Child), which now intimately shapes civic
education. Recognizing this binary at work in educational policy, then, what divergent logics does the (Queer) Child animate within the US cis-straight nation-state?
Moreover, what impact do those logics have on conceptions of queer civic education, particularly at the level of hermeneutics? To attach (Queer) to Child is
to highlight the presumed cis-straight status of the imagined figure that recent
anti-LGBTQ+ youth legislation seeks to protect. Moreover, it emphasizes the fearful potential of the Child to be queered or to become the Queer Child, whose very
33. Edelman, No Future, 4.
34. Robin Bernstein highlighted how, beginning in the nineteenth century, innocence became raced
white through a process of US historical production. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing
American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
35. Posey credits Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. for the concept “willful hermeneutical ignorance.” See Posey,
Centering Epistemic Injustice, 60; and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice:
Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27,
no. 4 (2012): 715–735.
36. Posey, Centering Epistemic Injustice, 62.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
existence threatens the hermeneutical logics of futurity on which civic action and
participation in the United States are built.
Civic life and sexuality are mutually constitutive. Together, they shape the
politics surrounding the figurations of the (Queer) Child. Highlighting the (Queer)
Child’s reach in US politics today, Kathryn Bond Stockton explains,
Surprisingly, even conservative Americans who trumpet family values juxtapose their children
with “homosexuals.” Of course, they do so in order to oppose them to each other, fighting the
threat of homosexuality under the banner of “what’s good for children.” Yet by doing so, they
make the concept of homosexuality central to the meaning of the children they embrace.37
For us, the (Queer) Child is an imagined, anti-normative figure and binary that
animates contemporary civic politics. Following Edelman, we contend that the
(Queer) “Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must
be thought” and interpreted.38 In the next section, we read across two recent
pieces of educational legislation, the federal Stop the Sexualization of Children
Act and Illinois’s Inclusive Curriculum, with particular emphasis on the willful
hermeneutical ignorance advanced through the (Queer) Child binary.
Polemical Policies and the Issue of Inclusion: Detailing H.R. 9197
and H.B. 246
We begin by first historicizing two recent pieces of educational legislation,
the federal H.R. 9197 (Stop the Sexualization of Children Act) and Illinois’s
H.B. 246 (Inclusive Curriculum Law). Next, we analyze how the (Queer) Child
binary operates across these bills and illuminate how the willful hermeneutical ignorance that underlies lawmakers’ constructions of the Child, Queer
Child, and, ultimately, the (Queer) Child binary censures an understanding of
citizenship and civic life apart from the cis-straight nation-state. Whereas the
Stop the Sexualization of Children Act advances cis-straight, white, innocent
conceptions of the Child for the purpose of excluding positive depictions of
the Queer Child from civic education, H.B. 246 advances homonormative conceptions of the (Queer) Child to include only certain children identifying as
LGBT, namely, those who propagate homonationalist future citizens in the
United States.
H.R. 9197: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act
On October 18, 2022, House Republican Conference Vice Chairman Mike
Johnson (a representative from Louisiana), alongside 32 Republican members of
Congress, forwarded the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act (H.R. 9197).
According to the bill, this legislation would “prohibit the use of Federal funds to
develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually oriented program, event, or
literature for children under the age of 10, and for other purposes.”39 Understood
37. Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, 3.
38. Edelman, No Future, 3.
39. Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R. 9197, 117th Cong. (2022).
647
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by many as the national version of Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” laws,
the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act qualifies sexually oriented materials as
“any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity, any lewd or lascivious
depiction or description of human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity,
gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.”40 This
legislation targets LGBTQ+ educational materials and activities, ranging from
federally funded sex education initiatives to Drag Queen Storytime and other such
events in public libraries.
According to California Congressman Doug LaMalfa, a cosponsor of the bill,
this policy will ensure that “not a dime of federal tax dollars … go to any public
school, government agency, or private organization that intentionally exposes
young children to sexually explicit material.”41 The language surrounding age is
important for some, such as Andrew Wells, president of Missouri’s chapter of No
Left Turn in Education. In a St. Louis Record article, he said, “I disagree with
that language because it should not be 10 years old … If we’re talking sexually
explicit material, there is not a state law that I have ever seen that allows minors
to be exposed to sexually explicit material. Minors are anyone under 18, and
not anyone under 10.”42 If it had been signed into law, H.R. 9197 would have
allowed parents to sue any organization (e.g., school, library, community center)
that violated the act more than once in five years, and if the suit were upheld,
the organization would lose access to federal funds for three years. Despite a
Republican majority in the House, the bill ultimately did not receive a vote
and thus died in Congress. Nonetheless, its significance for civics education
remains.
Illinois’s H.B. 246: Inclusive Curriculum Law
In 2017, a coalition of advocates, including grassroots organizations, lobbyists,
and legislators, formed in support of curriculum legislation that would mandate
teaching the roles and contributions of LGBT people in the history of the country
and the State of Illinois. The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance (a Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago initiative), the Legacy Project, and Equality Illinois
came together to form the Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council of Illinois to
coordinate this legislative effort. Colloquially referred to as the Inclusive Curriculum Law, the bill was first introduced in the 2018 legislative session as Senate
Bill 3249.43
40. Ibid.
41. “Congressman LaMalfa and House Republicans Introduce Legislation to Ensure Taxpayer
Dollars Cannot Fund Sexually Explicit Material for Children,” press release, October 18, 2022,
https://lamalfa.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressman-lamalfa-and-house-republicans
-introduce-legislation-to.
42. Juliette Fairley, “GOP Rep. Joins 33 Others in Supporting the Stop the Sexualization of Children
Act,” St. Louis Record, October 26, 2022, https://stlrecord.com/stories/634116843-gop-rep-joins-33
-others-in-supporting-the-stop-the-sexualization-of-children-act.
43. S.B. 3249, §§ 2-3.155, 27-21, and 27-23.11 (IL 2018), https://legiscan.com/IL/bill/SB3249/2017.
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648
Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
This bill was introduced in the Illinois Senate, where it was first read on
February 16, 2018. Following the initial reading and the addition of a Senate floor
amendment, the bill was assigned to the Education Committee. The committee
voted 9 to 2 to pass the amended bill to the full Senate on March 14. After
a second reading of the bill on April 24, it was sent back to the committee
following the addition of another amendment adopted on the Senate floor. The
Education Committee voted on May 2, again 9 to 2, to send the amended bill
to the full Senate, where S.B. 3249 was passed on the same day by a vote
of 34 to 18.
When the cross-sponsored bill went to the House, however, it became clear
that the House would be unable to confirm enough votes to pass the legislation,44
so S.B. 3249 was not brought to a House vote during the 2018 legislative session.
At this point, the bill’s proponents adjusted their efforts and decided not to
bring the legislation to the House for a vote until after the fall 2018 midterm
election. The new timeline allowed them to work to address legitimate concerns
from the education sector, which was understandably weary from being handed
mandate after mandate with little to no financial support or implementation
guidance.
In 2019, the bill was reintroduced, unchanged, as H.B. 246 (Illinois Public
Act 101-0227). The midterm election proved to be pivotal: in the new legislative session, the bill was cosponsored by 30 members of the House, 12 of
whom were newly elected in fall 2018. In addition to these key votes, 8 representatives who did not cosponsor the original S.B. 3249 cosponsored H.B.
246, including Representative Michelle Mussman, chair of the Elementary and
Secondary Education: School Curriculum and Policies Committee. With these
votes, the bill passed in both the House (60 to 42 on March 13) and the Senate (37 to 17 on May 23). In June 2019, the bill was sent to Governor J. B.
Pritzker, who signed it into law on August 9, 2019, with an effective date of
July 1, 2020.
The legislation mandates that public schools include the study of the roles and
contributions of LGBT people in the history of the United States and of Illinois,
in particular. Although, at the time, Illinois did not prescribe instructional guidelines for the teaching of LGBT-inclusive social studies, instructional leaders were
expected to meld district-level curriculum and state standards (i.e., Illinois Social
Science Standards45 ) with the Illinois Human Rights Act.46 Of the five states
mandating LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum at the time, Illinois was one of the few
that required the introduction of these topics and themes before eighth grade.
44. A coalition of opposition efforts framed the bill as propaganda inappropriate for children.
45. Illinois State Board of Education, “Illinois Social Science Standards” (2017), https://www.isbe.net
/Documents/K-12-SS-Standards.pdf.
46. See State of Illinois Human Rights Commission, “Your Rights under the Illinois Human Rights Act”
(n.d.), https://hrc.illinois.gov/rights.html.
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In spring 2023, the Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council of Illinois released a
report entitled “Inclusive Curriculum Implementation Guidance” (hereafter, the
implementation report).47
The Hermeneutical Injustice of the (Queer) Child
In this section, we analyze how the (Queer) Child informs two educational
policies, one dead (the federal H.R. 9197) and one currently undergoing implementation (Illinois’s H.B. 246). Our discussion of H.R. 9197 and H.B. 246 in
the preceding section focused solely on the policies themselves, but in this
section we analyze not only these two policies but also extratextual materials
relevant to their implementation. In taking this approach, our goal is not to
forward a critique that argues one is better than the other; indeed, it is obvious that H.R. 9197 overtly attacks LGBTQ+ individuals and communities and
that H.B. 246 seeks to include LGBT history within curricula under the aegis
of human rights. Rather, our goal is to interrogate the logics of hermeneutical injustice and the illusion of inclusion propelled by these educational policies. Here, we begin by reading H.R. 9197 with an emphasis on the Child
and the Queer Child. We then read H.B. 246 and the 2023 implementation
report with an eye to how the (Queer) Child influences which queer citizens
come to be included within the logics of the bill and, by extension, civic
education.
The Cis-Straight Child in Danger: H.R. 9197
Dovetailing with increased LGBTQ+ educational resources (e.g., curricula)
and programming (e.g., Queer Storytime) for young people, H.R. 9197 (Stop the
Sexualization of Children Act) operates from an assumed need to protect the
cis-straight Child, a figure who is simultaneously white and innocent.48 As detailed
in the bill, this Child exists developmentally between the ages of 0 and 10, which
correspond with elementary schooling in the United States. Shaping constructions
of childhood innocence, the Child in this configuration is uniquely vulnerable to
sexual intervention — or, in the bill’s terminology, “sexual education”49 — prior to
middle school. This vulnerability summons images of cis-straight, white, innocent
children needing protection — an idea established by the bill’s title but one that
has longer histories in American cultural production from the nineteenth century
47. Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council of Illinois, “Inclusive Curriculum Implementation Guidance” (2023), https://phimc.org/initiatives/alliance/inclusive-curriculum-law/.
48. While neither H.R. 9197 nor H.B. 246 mentions race explicitly, we follow Kevin J. Burke, Mary
Juzwik, and Esther Prins in asserting that the racist and patriarchal underpinnings of White Christian
nationalism are shaping policy in this contemporary religiopolitical moment, which seeks to fuse
Christianity with civic life. For more, see Kevin J. Burke, Mary Juzwik, and Esther Prins, “White
Christian Nationalism: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter for Educational Research?,” Educational
Researcher 52, no. 5 (2023): 286–295.
49. Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R. 9197, 117th Cong. (2022).
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650
Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
forward, specifically in relation to race,50 sexuality,51 and gender.52 Furthermore,
this 0 to 10 age distinction positions the Child as qualitatively different from
adults and even adolescents. The Child constructed in H.R. 9197 is asexual,
presexual, less sexual, or, at the very least, differently sexual in state-sanctioned
ways. Moreover, given this qualitative difference, the Child is endangered by
“discussions of sexuality, sexual orientation, transgenderism, and gender ideology
as early as kindergarten”; “sexually oriented literature and materials that target
preadolescent children”; and “sexually oriented events like drag queen story
hours.”53 Targeting discourse, text, and performance, H.R. 9197 names three
perceived dangers that sexualize the Child; however, this potential sexualization
is predicated on the Child’s assumed cis-straight identity and white innocence.
Working within the logics of the bill, let us accept for a moment the premise
that children up to ten years of age are qualitatively distinct and uniquely prone
to the dangers of sexual education. What then falls under that designation? The
bill defines “sexually oriented material” as “any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity, any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of human
genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism,
sexual orientation, or related subjects.”54 Whereas the first two descriptions apply
to any sexual orientation and gender identity, the final topic (e.g., “gender identity” through “sexual orientation, or related subjects”) exposes the bill’s genuine
concern: a sexual education that opens possibilities for gender and sexual identification within civic life. Although cis-straight individuals might address similar
topics, the terms gender identity and sexual orientation are common parlance
within sex education. Accordingly, targeting these terms highlights anxieties
about the possibility that discussions regarding how queer and trans people live,
identify, and operate as citizens may occur in public schools. This possibility, in
turn, pressures the codified organizational logics of the rigid hetero/homo binary.
Moreover, it threatens social and civic reproduction by inviting a citizenry outside
the narrow legibility of acceptable LGBTQ+ identification.
While it indexes genuine social anxieties, H.R. 9197 falters in its assumption
of the Child’s innocence or the belief that cis-straight children require protection because of their presexual innocence. As Edelman argues, “That Child,
immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy
of vulnerability … The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity.”55 By this, he means that adults vigorously imagine the Child to be
50. Bernstein, Racial Innocence.
51. Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century.
52. Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2018).
53. Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R. 9197, 117th Cong. (2022).
54. Ibid.
55. Edelman, No Future, 21.
651
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cis-straight, innocent, and white, and they organize civic life around that fantasy.
Such imaginings highlight a gap in H.R. 9197’s logic, namely, that children are
always already actively sexualized by the cis-straight nation-state. For example,
fictionalized child marriages56 — these being straight, of course — are celebrated
as play in classrooms for our youngest learners.57 Likewise, kitschy pictures of
children dressed in wedding attire and kissing circulate to much approbation
online.58 Although overtly sexualizing children, by furthering the organizational
logic of the cis-straight nation-state and the imagined innocence of the cis-straight
Child, this play and these texts are not considered “sexually oriented.”59 This
suggests that the term “sexually oriented material” operates as a stand-in for
LGBTQ+ topics.
Furthermore, this contrast between what counts as sexually oriented highlights the hermeneutical injustice that motivates such legislation. Including discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, whether through
picture book read-alouds or age-appropriate sexual education, disrupts the binary
logics of the (Queer) Child by expanding the pool of “collective hermeneutical
resources”60 to include sexualities and genders that exist beyond the cis-straight,
white, innocent Child. In particular, H.R. 9197 operates as a form of “willful
hermeneutical ignorance.”61 “To maintain social power,” Posey explains, “it can
be useful to deny, or willfully fail to understand, social concepts that might challenge the legitimacy of that power.”62 With rights for LGBTQ+ citizens at an
all-time high in the United States (e.g., the decriminalization of sodomy, the passage of same-sex marriage) and in schools (e.g., mandated inclusion of LGBTQ+
education in several states), H.R. 9197’s attempted ban of LGBTQ+ discourse, text,
and performance represents a move toward willful hermeneutical ignorance. It is
an active attempt to maintain social power by denying knowledge and interpretive
frameworks constructed beyond the (Queer) Child binary. An epistemic land grab,
barring marginalized knowers from epistemic resources operates to insulate the
cis-straight nation-state from the (Queer) Child, for which the nation-state stands.
This ensures the continued regimentation of collective hermeneutical resources
56. Here, we use the term “child marriage” to refer specifically to fictional approximations of child
marriages, as depicted in venues such as bridal magazines. We are not referring to actual child marriages.
57. Heidi M. Gansen, “Reproducing (and Disrupting) Heteronormativity: Gendered Sexual Socialization
in Preschool Classrooms,” Sociology of Education 90, no. 3 (2017): 255–272, https://doi.org/10.1177
/0038040717720981.
58. See, for example, Gabriella Rello Duffy, “27 Must-Take Photos of the Cutest Kids at Your Wedding,”
Brides, October 21, 2020, https://www.brides.com/gallery/wedding-photography-must-take-photos-of
-kids.
59. Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R.9197, 117th Cong. (2022).
60. Posey, Centering Epistemic Injustice, xiii.
61. Ibid., 60.
62. Ibid., 59.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
in US schools and civic life, which in turn preserves social power around the
cis-straight, white, innocent Child whom lawmakers imagine.
The Queer Child, a Danger: H.R. 9197
Mirroring the hetero/homo binary, the Child undergirding H.R. 9197 stands
in contrast to its opposite, the Queer Child. Whereas the Child represents a
cis-straight, white, innocent future for the United States, the Queer Child, according to this binary logic, represents no future at all.63 The Queer Child negates
the hopeful future promised by the Child and instead signifies the breakdown of
civic life within the cis-straight nation-state. Alone, the Queer Child portends no
future, but when held in proximity to the Child, the resulting binary preserves the
cis-straight nation-state’s organizational logics. Holding the (Queer) Child binary
together, though, demands deft positioning of the Queer Child within civic life and
education. Whether queered by innocence or “Color”64 (i.e., race), transnational
movement,65 or some other means, the Queer Child represents a teleological
outcome for the Child, one that denies reproductive futurism and, by extension,
a future for the country as we know it. Lawmakers then need a mechanism
for persevering the Queer Child as the Child’s threatening opposite within the
national imaginary, and anti-LGBTQ+ education policy that perpetuates willful
hermeneutical ignorance has served that purpose.
Within the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, the Queer Child surfaces
through acts of narrative legerdemain (such as false parallelism) that position it as
a danger to the Child. For example, Section 2, Item 3 of the act names four concepts
— “masturbation, pornography, sexual acts, and gender transition” — as potential
dangers for “preadolescent children.”66 Indeed, explicit sexual content can forge
dangerous, even traumatic, relationships between children and sex, but paralleling
masturbation, pornography, and sexual acts with gender transition creates a false
equivalency across these concepts. Namely, the first three apply across sexual orientations and gender identities, but gender transition applies uniquely to trans and
gender-nonconforming individuals. Such sleight of hand illuminates the willful
hermeneutical ignorance motivating such policy. Despite decades of scholarship
in feminist, gay and lesbian, queer, and trans studies in education,67 the conflation
of LGBTQ+ experiences across lines of gender and sexuality persists.68 Moreover,
63. Edelman, No Future.
64. Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, 30.
65. Kathryn Bond Stockton, “The Queer Child Now and Its Paradoxical Global Effects,” GLQ 22, no. 4
(2016): 505–539, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3603186.
66. Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R.9197, 117th Cong. (2022).
67. Z Nicolazzo, “‘Just Go in Looking Good’: The Resilience, Resistance, and Kinship-Building of Trans*
College Students,” Journal of College Student Development 57, no. 5 (2016): 538–556, https://doi.org/10
.1353/csd.2016.0057.
68. Elizabeth J. Meyer, “Sex, Gender, and Education Research: The Case for Transgender Studies in Education,” Educational Researcher 51, no. 5 (2022): 315–323, https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211048870.
653
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it is perpetuated by lawmakers who, in writing anti-LGBTQ+ educational policy,
purport some knowledge of the topic or, at the very least, proximity to knowledge about the LGBTQ+ experience. Accordingly, narrative slippages like this one
bring to light the willful hermeneutical ignorance undergirding such policy. In
Posey’s words, by “choos[ing] to misunderstand, or actively not know, the parts of
our collective social experiences that require marginalized epistemic resources,”69
these lawmakers engage in willful hermeneutical ignorance; in this case, such ignorance allows for the Queer Child, particularly the child queered by proximity to
sexuality or gender nonconformity,70 to threaten the cis-straight, white innocence
of America’s future (e.g., the Child).
In turn, this threat positions the Queer Child as a danger, one that incites
adult anxieties about the future, particularly of the US cis-straight nation-state.
Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley described such anxiety as generated by adult
fantasy: “Ultimately, the scandals and panic about children, and the authors who
create them, can, if we recast the conclusions they draw, force us to imagine where
the desire of the adult and the desire of the child might diverge.”71 These authors
emphasize how fear of the Queer Child operates more to satisfy the worries or
desires of adults than those of children. Indeed, scholarship indicates that before
social scripting at home and school, gender play often exceeds binary conceptions
of gender.72 Bills like H.R. 9197 seek to regiment the gender creativity of young
people and calcify both who young people are and who they might become. In
doing so, they draw attention to the adult anxieties motivating such policy and,
furthermore, spotlight the stakes of controlling civic access to LGBTQ+-affirming
curriculum and materials.
An anti-LGBTQ+ policy like H.R. 9197 deploys willful hermeneutical ignorance to maintain the Child’s cis-straight, white, innocent status by positioning the
Queer Child as a threat. This point is further emphasized by H.R 9197’s false comparison of “drag queen story hours” and “drag shows” with “burlesque shows,”73
which occurs twice within the brief text of the bill. Forming a dyadic relationship,
H.R. 9197 invites readers to conflate drag, a culturally specific performance art,
with burlesque. Although drag involves reveals (i.e., the removal of costuming for
artistic effect), these removals are distinct from burlesque, which involves removing clothing to arouse an audience erotically or celebrating sexuality and body
positivity (i.e., a striptease). Notably, although these two art forms can overlap,
69. Posey, Centering Epistemic Injustice, 60 (emphasis in original).
70. Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century.
71. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, “Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children,” in Curiouser: On
the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004), xxxiv.
72. See, for example, Harper Benjamin Keenan, “Unscripting Curriculum: Toward a Critical Trans
Pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 87, no. 4 (2017): 538–556, https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045
-87.4.538.
73. Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R.9197, 117th Cong. (2022).
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
this bill discounts their distinctions and the tailoring of drag to child audiences.
A prime example of such tailoring is “drag queen story hours,” which are also
decried within the bill. Drag Story Hour74 is a child-oriented experience in which
drag queens read LGBTQ+ stories, usually picture books, to young people. As
explained on the Drag Story Hour website, the purpose of these events is to support kids in learning “to love themselves, celebrate the fabulous diversity in their
communities, and stand up for what they believe in and each other.”75 While such
events have been lauded for their pedagogical potential in educational research,76
within H.R. 9197 drag serves an altogether different function: this bill’s coupling
of drag with burlesque positions the Queer Child as a threat to cis-straight, white
innocence by imbuing content for children with false sexual import.
By defining the Queer Child in contradistinction to the Child, the Stop
the Sexualization of Children Act highlights the continued centrality of the
(Queer) Child to the binary logics of the US cis-straight nation-state. Moreover,
it illustrates the role willful hermeneutical ignorance plays in such legislation.
Although Miranda Fricker might characterize the narrative conflations in this
section as “not quite on purpose,”77 we, following Posey, understand such acts
as willful attempts to maintain or, perhaps more accurately, feign ignorance.
Policymakers claim ignorance of the knowledges and needs of LGBTQ+ people in
order to elude culpability and “hold onto versions of history that obscure patterns
of violence and oppression, rewriting and reimagining history absent the role
social power plays in constructing unjust social and epistemic environments.”78 As
H.R. 9197 demonstrates, the (Queer) Child binary preserves the unjust social and
epistemic environment of the cis-straight nation-state by positioning the Queer
Child as a danger to the cis-straight, white innocence of the Child, as well as to
the civic future it promises. Denying the hermeneutical resources of nondominant
knowers — in this case, the LGBTQ+ community — H.R. 9197 maintains the
organizational logics of the hetero/homo binary and the cis-straight nation-state.
The Limits of LGBTQ+-Inclusive Policy and the (Queer) Child: H.B. 246
Unlike the federal Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, Illinois’s H.B. 246,
as a law mandating curricular inclusion, invites all children to be knowers of LGBT
history, albeit within strictly delimited conceptions of citizenship. In Fricker’s
74. Drag Story Hour recently dropped the term Queen from its name to be more inclusive of a wider
variety of drag styles (e.g., drag kings). Drag Story Hour, “About: What Is Drag Story Hour?” (n.d.), https:
//www.dragstoryhour.org/about.
75. Drag Story Hour, “About: Our Vision” (n.d.), https://www.dragstoryhour.org/about.
76. Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess, “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination
in Early Childhood,” Curriculum Inquiry 50, no. 5 (2020): 440–461, https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784
.2020.1864621.
77. Posey, Centering Epistemic Injustice, 60 (emphasis in original), quoting Miranda Fricker, “Evolving
Concepts of Epistemic Justice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd,
José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 55.
78. Posey, Centering Epistemic Injustice, 63.
655
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language, H.B. 246 seeks to challenge epistemic injustice by providing students
with the hermeneutical resources rendered necessary for learning about LGBT
peoples and histories.79 However, such work mobilizes the (Queer) Child binary
to shore up a particular type of LGBT citizen, one that fits within homonationalist
models of civic inclusion.
Take, for instance, the following two bullet points from the implementation
report, which positions LGBTQ+ history as a universal good for all students:
• An LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum benefits all students by promoting acceptance and respect,
and teaching them more about the diverse people and families in the world.
• Anti-LGBTQ+ bias hurts all children, both those directly affected and those who learn in
an atmosphere of fear and tension, afraid to explore their own lives because of worry about
disapproval and rejection.80
These statements premise the cis-straight, white, innocent Child, indicating the
report’s “guidance” follows a developmental logic similar to that of H.B. 246 and
seeks to help educators and school administrators “[i]dentify and comprehend
age-appropriate content.”81 However, unlike H.R. 9197, this report and other
literature supporting H.B. 246’s implementation explicitly name gender identity
and sexual orientation as categories informing how the Child becomes legible
within education curricula. For example, the Legacy Project, an LGBTQ+-focused
organization that has played a central role in promoting H.B. 246 in Illinois,
created a lesson plan series through which teachers might implement this policy
within the K–12 classroom curriculum.82 The bill and its attendant implementation guides demand that dominant knowers (e.g., cis-straight, white educators and
children) engage the hermeneutical resources of minoritized, LGBT knowers and,
in so doing, preclude the hermeneutical injustices integral to the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act. For example, the implementation report specifies that “an
educator’s responsibility is to the learning of their students.”83 Briefly, H.B. 246
prohibits the willful hermeneutical ignorance that H.R. 9197 endeavors to further.
However, such inclusion comes with very clear limits. Although lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender children, youth, and communities are documented in
79. Fricker has argued that epistemic injustice, as a concept and a phenomenon, describes “a family
of epistemic phenomena where knowers are wronged in their capacity as knowers.” Miranda Fricker,
Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20.
80. Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council of Illinois, “Inclusive Curriculum Implementation Guidance,” 7.
81. Ibid., 3.
82. Following James Banks’s multicultural education model, these plans are organized by age and
content, with young children (ages 5 to 9) learning about specific LGBT heroes (e.g., Jane Addams,
Harvey Milk) and holidays (e.g., Pride) and older students (ages 14 to 18) debating social issues. James
A. Banks, “Multicultural Education: Historical Development, Dimensions, and Practice,” in Handbook
of Research on Multicultural Education, ed. James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks (New York:
Macmillan, 1995).
83. Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council of Illinois, “Inclusive Curriculum Implementation
Guidance,” 24.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
H.B. 246, the Queer Child does not explicitly exist within the legislation itself.
Indeed, the implementation report notes that the
two acronyms [LGBT and LGBTQ+] are not interchangeable. While ‘LGBTQ+’ is a more
inclusive descriptor of the queer community and the breadth of identities this work serves, the
term does not appear in the statutory text of Public Act 101-0227. This document uses “LGBT”
to align with the ICL’s [Inclusive Curriculum Law] explicit parameters for what content must
be taught.84
Concerned with identity-based inclusion, such legislation both linguistically and
in practice excludes queer configurations of civic life.85 Abjected, the Queer
Child then becomes a specter haunting even LGBT-inclusive education policy.
As the implementation report specifies, the Child becomes the beneficiary of the
hermeneutical resources of LGBT histories, whereas the Queer Child is erased.
This erasure is important because it
requires us to notice how the stories we are telling about LGBTQ identities do not simply
describe the experiences of queer youth in schools but rather call youth into particular ways
of being and set the terms of recognition. Queer youth then come to recognize themselves
through their proximity to these stories and construct, for themselves, a narrative that is made
always in relation to those norms.86
In H.B. 246, the Queer Child becomes an absent presence, one that holds fast the
(Queer) Child binary and, by extension, the cis-straight nation-state.
Aligned with homonationalist configurations of civic life, H.B. 246 integrates
LGBT histories, peoples, and even childhoods into curricula and public schools.
However, this occurs in a very precise manner. As explained by Michael Kokozos and Maru Gonzalez, homonationalist inclusion “construct[s] and define[s]
the terms of national belonging by extending rights only to the model gay subject or the homonational.”87 Accordingly, while H.B. 246 marks an important
advance for LGBT rights in US education, it simultaneously sets marked limits.88 In fact, such legislation is poised to perpetuate the reproductive futurism
tied to the cis-straight, white, innocent Child by assimilating queer life within a
84. Ibid., 9.
85. Although not central to our argument here, some may question whether H.B. 246, and other
seemingly inclusive legislation in Illinois, such as H.B. 1633 (a recent law requiring instruction on Native
American peoples past and present), treat issues of inclusion and difference as single-axis issues. H.B.
1633, §§ 2–3.191, 2–3.196, 22–95, 27–20.05, 27–20.3, and 27–21 (IL 2023), https://legiscan.com/IL/bill
/HB1633/2023.
86. Gilbert, Sexuality in School, xxi.
87. Michael Kokozos and Maru Gonzalez, “Critical Inclusion: Disrupting LGBTQ Normative Frameworks in School Contexts,” Equity & Excellence in Education 53, no. 1–2 (2020): 152, https://doi.org/10
.1080/10665684.2020.1764881.
88. Although the sample integration opportunities featured in the implementation report advance
LGBT inclusion through partnering and extending the Illinois Social Science Standards, several of
these examples (e.g., spotlighting the Obergefell v. Hodges case in grades 6–8, the focus on the
“American Dream” in grades 9–12) are tied directly to rights, recognition, and responsibilities afforded
by the nation-state (see Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council of Illinois, “Inclusive Curriculum
Implementation Guidance,” 16).
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cis-heteronormative citizenry. Put another way, LGBT-inclusive policy that disavows queerness (e.g., anti-normative ways of being) does not extend collective
hermeneutical resources by encompassing the experiences and understandings of
dominant and minoritized knowers; instead, it masks dominant resources tied to
whiteness and veils cis-heteronormativity under a new name: LGBT inclusion.89
The result is that even the mostly seemingly inclusive LGBTQ+ curriculum must
be interrogated for the civic logics that undergird it. For H.B. 246, that logic is the
(Queer) Child.
Conclusion: Toward a Queer Civics Education
Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins,
patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and
elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves … Being queer is “grass roots”
because we know that everyone [sic] of us, every body, every cunt, every heart and ass and
dick is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone [sic] of us is a world of infinite
possibility.90
I will not say gay. I will not say gay. I will not say gay. I will not say gay … 91
The names Dylan Brandt, Allison Poe, Brooke Dennis, Sabrina Jennen, Andraya
Yearwood, Terry Miller, Luc Esquivel, and Becky Pepper-Jackson represent actual
children identifying as LGBTQ+, those currently enmeshed in anti-LGBTQ+
legislation in the United States. These actual citizens are haunted by ghosts from
a queer past — Matthew Shepard, Ryan White, and Lawrence/Latisha King —
queer children whose ontological exclusion from the nation-state (as a gay youth,
an HIV+ child, and a gender-nonconforming person of color) reverberated through
forms of social exclusion. Our goal here in naming these individuals is not to be
histrionic. Indeed, countless queer children and youth are excluded from civic
access every day. Rather, we seek to use these actual children identifying as
LGBTQ+ to personalize our figurative argument that the imagined (Queer) Child,
as refracted through the cis-straight nation-state, constricts civic freedoms within
current political discourse and US legislation. Moreover, as these names suggest,
LGBTQ+ children require a civics education that accounts for the affordances
and limitations of civic inclusion, particularly as organized around the (Queer)
Child. Indeed, as Edelman explains, “[t]hat Child remains the perpetual horizon
of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political
intervention.”92 A figure at once past and present, real and fiction, the (Queer)
89. See, for example, Jon M. Wargo and Alex Katz, “Code-Switching Queer Controversy: Pre-K–8
Educators’ Perceptions of LGBT-Inclusive Policy Framing,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 32, no.
44 (2024): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.32.8503.
90. ACT UP, “Queer Nation Manifesto: Queers Read This” (1990), in Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution, ed. Breanne Fahs (London: Verso, 2020).
91. Adam Maida, “Photo Illustration” New York Magazine (May 8, 2023), Cover, https://nymag.com
/magazine/toc/2023-05-08.html.
92. Edelman, No Future, 3.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
Child underscores the stakes of competing conceptions of civic inclusion and
their impact on the growing LGBTQ+ citizenry within the United States.
In conclusion, we reiterate that our contribution to this symposium aims to
expand conversations surrounding queer civics by emphasizing the potential costs
of reinforcing the binary logics of the cis-straight nation-state through LGBTQ+
inclusive education. Historical and present figurations of the (Queer) Child highlight the importance of an expanded vision of political freedoms within the civics
classroom, one that embraces a queer citizenry unencumbered by the hetero/homo
binary of the cis-straight nation-state (in saying this, we also recognize that mainstream narratives of LGBTQ+ civic life are largely guided by white histories [and
white bodies] of sex and gender).93 If civics functions allegorically, then social relations among persons may transform into binary relations among particular types of
people (e.g., citizen and noncitizen, heterosexual and homosexual). Characteristic
of civic life within this governing fantasy is that LGBTQ+ citizens regulate themselves in relation to social norms of citizenship, and this regulation, in turn, affects
which hermeneutical resources are available for the purposes of a queer civics and
a queerer civics education.
We assert that addressing hermeneutical injustice in civics and civics education lies in addressing the dominant frameworks that naturalize particular ways
of knowing. Such epistemic hegemony, whether tied to the imagined cis-straight,
white innocence of the Child or perpetuated by LGBTQ+-inclusive legislation,
compresses the civic life of queer communities. A queer civics eschews binary logics and turns to marginalized knowers’ hermeneutical resources to explore, in the
words of the Queer Nation Manifesto, “a world of infinite possibility.”94 Informed
by queer theory’s deconstructive origins,95 queer civics does not seek to organize
LGBTQ+ subjects within the hetero/homo binary of the cis-straight nation-state
but instead combats willful hermeneutical ignorance perpetuated through organizational binaries such as the (Queer) Child. For us, then, a queer civics queers. It is
an active and deconstructive mode of inquiry that involves the ongoing disruption
of taken-for-granted binaries, doing so in pursuit of more expansive ways of living
for queer, queered, and LGBTQ+-identifying citizens.
Moreover, a queer civics holds an intersectional perspective as central to the
project of nation-making and queer civics education. It is not enough to provide
learners — LGBT, queer, or otherwise — with hermeneutical resources that cast
LGBTQ+ identities, communities, and histories within singular-axis oppression.
Such an approach renders the queer citizen visible only within the limited framework of the cis-straight nation-state. Tied to whiteness, cisnormativity, settler
colonialism, and more, such visibility perpetuates a hetero/homo binary that interlocks with adjacent, interconnected binary structures and social oppressions, such
93. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
94. ACT UP, “Queer Nation Manifesto,” 29.
95. Jagose, Queer Theory.
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as the Black/white binary of white supremacy, the cis/trans binary of transphobia,
and the Indigenous/settler binary of settler colonialism. A queer civics would call
into question the normative citizen rendered visible within each binary structure
and, moreover, would advocate for expanding the pool of collective hermeneutical
resources for dominant and minoritized knowers.
Challenging willful hermeneutical ignorance, a queer civics explores what
exists for a citizenry beyond the binary and what is possible for the citizen outside
of dyadic structure of civic life. Gesturing toward such possibility, queer theorist
of color José Esteban Muñoz advanced civic configurations rooted in coalition.
He wrote that a queer citizenry would “not [be] an identitarian formulation
but, instead, the invocation of a future collectivity.”96 Queerness, according to
Muñoz, is the “illumination of a horizon of existence”97 and explores the potential
of unfettering civics (and civic education) from singular identities, oppressive
binaries, and the preexisting strictures of the (Queer) Child in the cis-straight
nation-state. Such a perspective on civics dovetails with the more radical origins
of queer theory as an academic field, namely, the AIDS epidemic. As the Queer
Nation Manifesto specifies, “[b]eing queer means leading a different sort of life.”98
Although we do not want to prefigure what “a different sort of life” looks like,
the statement serves as a provocation for imagining what a queer civics education
is and what it might accomplish, particularly in the face of the cis-straight
nation-state and its continued propagation through the (Queer) Child.
Importantly, such potential holds implications for civics education. Suppose
that instead of teaching and tracing LGBTQ+ inclusion solely with regard to questions of rights, recognition, and responsibility, we explore the trajectory of and
shifting relationship between minoritized gender and sexual communities and the
nation-state. This shift — from content to consequence — may foster new kinds
of deliberation and debate, ones that enable us to move beyond common understandings of citizenship and to read broader communities of epistemic resistance as
texts through which to debate and discuss civic action and participation. Consider,
for example, intersectional communities of resistance (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter),
intergenerational queer communities that promote discourse to counter epistemic
injustice,99 and public demonstrations of queer joy (e.g., the May 2023 Trans Youth
Prom on the lawn of the US Capitol100 ). Taken together, these acts and practices
of democracy in action chronicle queer social and civic experiences and coalesce
96. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York
University Press, 2009), 25.
97. Ibid., 22.
98. ACT UP, “Queer Nation Manifesto,” 29.
99. See, for example, Adam J. Greteman, Karen Morris, and Nic M. Weststrate, “Countering Epistemic
Injustice: The Work of Intergenerational LGBTQ+ Dialogues,” Studies in Art Education 62, no. 4 (2021):
408–413, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2021.1975492.
100. Danielle McLean, “A Trans Prom on the Capitol Lawn,” The Atlantic (May 25, 2023), https://www
.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/05/trans-youth-prom-washington-dc/674146/.
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Hermeneutical Injustice and the Cis-Straight Nation-State
these into powerful narratives that can be taken up as part of justice-oriented agendas of civic action. These scenes serve as the cloth from which we could cut new
approaches to supporting children — queer or otherwise — as democratic citizens. Indeed, we believe that these public-facing hermeneutical resources promote
wide-scale epistemic justice for all.
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Coleman and Wargo