Towards understanding identity as a queer and political performance: an analytical framework applied in the context of computer science education

Abstract

Decades of research critique science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for maintaining inequalities through its learning content and culture. The notion of (science) identity has increasingly been used to approach this research, understanding and critiquing how the learning content and culture are socially produced and reproduced in education. With the present work, we develop identity as a tool to capture how social structures are also subverted and reconfigured, thereby offering alternative relations and meanings. We develop and illustrate the use of an analytical framework to conceptualise identity as queer and political performance. This framework for analysing identity and processes of identification utilises Morton’s (2016) work on alternative analytical logics and the discourse theoryk by Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001). We illustrate the use of the analytical framework, focusing on the role of the discipline and the object and subject of learning, analysing data collected in computer science education. Interrogating the identity performances of a celebrated teacher in a programming course, we show how binary understandings of the computer and gender are undermined in the classroom. The teacher performs as both subject and object in an affective relationship to the computer, hence undermining masculine accounts of the discipline as one of gaining dominance and control over the machine.