ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on Ahmed's phenomenological project to consider how cisheteronormativity serves as a straightening device – ensuring that schools are orientated around the straight body. It complicates the conversation about gender and sexuality diversity and schooling by tracking how bodies are turned toward the objects around them and how this direction matters. Centering the voices of school managers, teachers, LGBTIQ and straight school attending youth, the chapter tracks how compulsory cisheteronormativity orientates bodies in specific ways and explores what happens when straight lines are crossed. It highlights how cisheteronormativity operates as a mode of directionality and repetition of actions that render LGBTIQ learners as – (1) deviating from the straight line and, therefore in need of discipline, (2) out of view or invisible and, therefore, positioned as out of place and not belonging and (3) turning away from objects that take them off the straight line; to reorientate inward and internalize cisheteronormativity. The chapter concludes that schools are cisheteronormative spaces, where LGBTIQ learners learn their place, which is often invisibility, exclusion and marginalization.
