This paper draws upon poststructuralist theories of gender and nation in order to examine the spectre of the boy in the dress within two international contexts, Sweden and Australia. These two contexts have been chosen because, on the surface, they appear to be very different and yet as our analysis will reveal there are striking similarities around gender conformity and nation, although they play out differently.
We deploy discourse analysis in order to illustrate the how the boy in the dress is drawn upon as a problematic figure within these two different socio-political contexts, and argue that this figure represents a ‘tipping point’ between the tolerance and intolerance of gender diversity within educational spaces.
Two key moments will be analysed. In Australia, the recent (2017) postal survey on Marriage Equality saw a campaign run from a conservative right-wing group, the Coalition for Marriage, that included a television commercial featuring a concerned mother stating that, “School told my son he could wear a dress to school if he likes”. In Sweden, in 2016, the department store Åhléns chose an image of a child of African heritage and indeterminate gender to be the face of their annual Lucia[1] marketing. This caused significant controversy and sparked a ‘Jag är Lucia’ (I am Lucia) campaign featuring notable Swedish celebrities dressed as Lucia, including footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović. These critical incidents act as illustration of how the power of cisgender normativity intersect with notions about the nation within educational spaces and public consciousness.
Our paper traces the contours of the two critical incidents and connects the panics to wider social fears around the learning, teaching and supporting of gender diversity within educational spaces. In Australia the Coalition for Marriage commercial was partly responding to media coverage of Safe Schools, a programme for schools that provided teachers with guidance for supporting same sex attracted and gender diverse young people. In Sweden both the Åhléns image and the ‘Jag är Lucia’ campaign responded to the Ödeshög Primary School that, in 2013, cast a boy as Lucia to the chagrin of traditionalists.
We link the boy in the dress in Sweden and Australia to the rise of the populist right. These movements are evidenced within Australia by reform agendas that position the social justice issues of diversity, difference and inclusion as ostensibly individual ‘problems’ for individual students, rather than as social-economic-political structures that work to disadvantage whole groups of people (Reimers and Martinsson, 2016).
In Sweden equality and tolerance of difference appear to have become ‘national values’. Norm Critical Pedagogy, which has its origins in the work of queer theorists, seeks to promote understanding of difference and diversity by challenging the privilege of the centre (Martinsson and Reimers, 2010; Reimers, 2010). It is considered to be ‘mainstream’ within Swedish education. However, Sweden, too, has seen the recent rise of the nationalist and populist Swedish Democrats, who have likened Islam to Nazism, and argued for a total ban on seeking asylum in Sweden.
The existence of the spectre of the boy in the dress within political, educational and popular discourse in Australia and Sweden challenges our understandings of how gender is able to be lived, understood and presented within nations that understand themselves as tolerant and progressive.
[1] Lucia is an annual Swedish tradition and school-based event that occurs before Christmas. Lucia leads a parade of characters and is traditionally female.
