A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer

(Paperback)

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A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer offers a startling and original critique of unexamined assumptions and liberal notions about sexuality and education in the United States. Professor and long-time community activist Eric Rofes argues that liberal approaches to gay issues and public schooling are inherently doomed to fail and that a radical approach is needed that addresses core issues of power in education in a meaningful way. Tackling issues ranging from anti-gay harassment in school to children's literature on gay themes, gender performances of teachers to HIV education, graduate school programs in education to gay men's sexual cultures, Rofes presents a compelling argument for the creation of a second generation of activism focused on queers, schools, and education, one that truly empowers young people and educators and one that has the potential to truly transform power relations in our nation.

Reviews

A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling challenges all the cant and clich swirling around the lives of those who 'opt to be otherwise,' living outside and beyond the hetero/patriarchal paradigm. Eric Rofes upends the dogmatic dominant narrative of childhood innocence and its contemporary twin, childhood trauma, exploring the possibility of childhood as much more complex, dynamic, propulsive, conflicted, contradictory, and contested. This revolutionary book will change the way you look at childhood, sexuality, and yourself. -- William Ayers, educational theorist, author, and distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago
A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling reflects the unsurpassed wisdom that the restlessly brilliant Rofes has acquired through his long and multifaceted career. In this highly provocative book, he challenges us to rethink at the most fundamental level what we believe about youth, power, and sexuality. -- Jackie M. Blount, Iowa State University
Woven with rich personal accounts, and mingled with feminist, queer and educational theory, this book is readable, intense, and original. * Myers Book Commentary *
Up front and out front again! Educator, gay liberationist, and HIV/AIDS activist Eric Rofes challenges our assumptions about childhood, teaching, and learning in this excellent book. Whether deconstructing anti-homophobic curricululum in classrooms, HIV/AIDS prevention in the community, or graduate programs in education, Rofes is both provocative and surprising, angry and celebratory, hopeful and visionary. This book is essential reading for progressive educators and activists who want to create an effective agenda for the difficult years to come. -- Jonathan Silin, Bank College of Education

Author Bio

Eric Rofes was one of the first openly gay schoolteachers in the United States and founded one of the first programs for queer youth in Boston in the 1970s. He currently is Associate Professor of Education at Humboldt State University on the coast of Northern California where he teaches a course on queer issues in schools and leads a program that credentials elementary school teachers. A long time gay community activist, he has served as founding chair of the Boston Lesbian & Gay Political Alliance, executive director of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center, and director of Shanti Project, San Francisco's pioneering AIDS service group. He has published twelve books including Socrates, Plato & Guys Like Me: Confessions of a Gay Schoolteacher and, with coeditors Mary Louise Rasmussen and Susan Talburt, Youth and Sexualities: Pleasure, Subversion, and Insubordination In and Out of Schools. He lives in San Francisco and Arcata, California.