Education for Transformation? On the Discursive Limits of a Heteronormative Policy Discourse

ABSTRACT Examination of the regulatory pervasiveness of heteronormativity in development policy has remained limited to interventions for the sexed subject. As a result, the epistemic potential of heteronormativity analysis to unearth the discursive regulation of gendered subjects has remained underutilized. Policy discourses on education are rarely posited as an organic context for heteronormative analyses. An absence of such examinations has meant that education has tacitly been falling short of the professed inclusivity or equality agendas with reference to both gender and sexuality. As heteronormativity is discursively constructed, maintained, and perpetuated by education and educational policy, the present paper examines the SDG Education Agenda 2030 and the G7 Declaration on Girls' Education for articulations on sex, sexuality, gender, and their interrelations as effected through language, the resultant constitutive construction of the educand through language, and, finally, the discursive deployment of gender, sex, and sexuality to either challenge promote or leave unaddressed heteronormative agenda. It is argued that by concertedly maintaining a heteronormative status quo, educational policies are doomed to squander the potential of educational sites as spaces of transformational practice for all gender identifications, alike.