Embodying English: Performing and Positioning the White Teacher in a High School English Class

Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient, resistant, naive, and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher’s racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English classroom. Drawing on post-structural performance theories of identity and subjectivity, I pinpoint the material and sociopolitical forces that constrainthe white teaching body and reorient attention to the power of people in daily motion: subverting, making themselves known in multiple ways, always and already becoming. This performative perspective may provide productive lenses for white teachers in antiracist higher education who support teachers living and working in white skin.