Page 11 - LGBTQI+ ISSUES IN MODERN LANGUAGES AND TRANSLATION EDUCATION

Representation and erasure in the modern foreign languages curriculum – the strange case of queer absence
John Gray (UCL Institute of Education, UK)
BIODATA: John Gray is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Education at UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK. His research interests are in the global spread of English; the ways in which neoliberal ideology plays out in language teaching and language teacher education; language teacher identity; and issues of gender and sexuality in language teaching and beyond. Recent publications include: Education and the Discourse of Global Neoliberalism (2021), published by Routledge and edited with John O’Regan and Cathie Wallace; Social Interaction and English Language Teacher Identity (2018), published by Edinburgh University Press and co-written with Tom Morton; and a special issue of Gender and Language (2018) on intersectionality, language and queer lives, co-edited with Melanie Cooke.
ABSTRACT: Writing at the dawn of this century Alistair Pennycook (2001) noted that one of the 'major silences' in English language teaching, and by extension the teaching of modern foreign languages, is sexual orientation.
Despite several decades of progressive social reform with regard to LGBTQI+ protection in many countries around the world demands that the curriculum address the silence around sexual and gender diversity have fallen largely on deaf ears. Language teaching materials remain firmly focused on the representation of a heteronormative world in which non-normative ways of being are ruthlessly erased. In this talk I will outline what I see as the complex set of reasons as to why such erasure persists in language teaching and educational settings more generally.
In doing I will pay particular attention to the concepts of ‘reproductive futurism’ (Edelman, 2004), ‘hyper-reactionary neoliberalism’ (Fraser,
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