For a very long time, LGBTQIA+ identities have been erased –or at best backgrounded- in global (English) foreign language textbooks, construing these as unsafe topics (Gray, 2010) for the global textbook market. More recently, the progressive inclusion of (some) of these identities seem to be regulated by strategies of "tokenization" (Apple, 2004) which implies a shift from previous ontological negation of LGBTQIA+ identities to representing these identities "in passing", i.e. in a rather superficial way so as not to trouble the heteronormative order. However, what happens when a locally designed textbook series explicitly attempts to be gender/sexually inclusive? What are the political, ideological, societal and material affordances they are provided with and what are the constraints they face?
In this presentation we draw on multimodal critical discourse analysis (van Leeuwenm 2005; Machin, 2013) to analyze the strategies for representing LGBTQIA+ identities and contents in a recently published Uruguayan series (#livingUruguay). Our purpose is to discuss the discursive tensions and entanglements that emerge when entertaining both a will to include a wide repertoire of gender/sexuality topics, contents and identities and long-ingrained ideologies of what is "politically correct" (Fairclough, 2009) to be addressed in a foreign language classroom. Our discussion identifies three interrelated representational strategies through which LGBTQIA+ identities are included in textbook discourse: mentioning, ambiguity and intertextual/interdiscursive relations.
Findings point to the fact that the LGBTQIA+ identities and contents are indeed addressed in the series. However, our discussion revolves around the extent to which this type of inclusion opens up potential spaces for criticality or to reproduction in the classroom, since representational strategies can be understood in two ways: 1) as a form of functional regulation of LGBTQIA+ discourses through which their inclusion is discursively regulated by homonormativization (Sunderland & McGlashan, 2015) to make them reproduce the heteronormative order they supposedly come to trouble, or 2) as a form of covert inclusion of critical topics and issues to avoid potential textbook censorship. Findings hope to make us reflect on the extent to which the current politics of identity (Muñoz 2020) in foreign language textbooks obscures the potential disruptive role of LGBTQIA+ and, more broadly, queer identities.
References
Apple, M. W. 2004. Ideology and Curriculum. Nueva York y Londres: Routledge Falmers.
Fairclough, N. 2009. 'Políticamente correcto': La política de la lengua y la cultura. Discurso & Sociedad, v. 3, n. 3, p. 495- 512.
Gray, J. 2010. The Construction of English. Culture, Consumerism and Promotion in the ELT Global Coursebook. Londres: Palgrave Macmillan.
Machin, D. 2013. What is multimodal critical discourse studies? Critical Discourse Studies, v. 10, n. 4. p. 347-355.
Sunderland, J. & McGlashan, M. 2015. Heteronormativity in EFL Textbooks and in Two Genres of Children's Literature (Harry Potter and Same-Sex Parent Family Picturebooks). Language Issues v. 26, n. 2, p. 17-26.
van Leeuwen, T. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. Londres y Nueva York: Routledge.
