ABSTRACT
Against the pain of reparation, I think we are more often than not expected to draw a line under all of this hate, waste and force. The perceived ubiquity of queer messaging in ‘schools today’ and the happy circumstance of a decriminalised homosexuality allow the conclusion that terrible things happened in the past, as if coming to such a private and individual view were reparation enough. But when the ruin of homosexual educators was until recently (and, indeed, in some cases remains) official policy for teacher education and educational administration, and when such ruin often involved the cruel public pedagogies of mediatised humiliation and social rejection, then the site of personal opinion falls short as a reparative act, at least in terms of scale. Personalised acknowledgement of the wrongs of the past are also limited as reparative acts because they preclude a focus on the ways in which privilege and profits were structurally distributed based on (real and perceived) sexual orientation and gender presentation. By what measures of justice do we assess the fairness of the privilege and profit people have accrued historically through explicit and implicit marginalisation of homosexual teachers? Lastly, without words for these matters, with what discourse or language might we hope to explore the ways in which these historical hatreds, suspicions, damages and losses percolate today, in perhaps uncertain and uncharted ways? In short, is educational research and teacher education ready to confront its own homophobia?
4. Mobilising reparation
