This upcoming study is part of a doctoral project that examines the discourses and discourse variation of Finnish queer, or LGBTQ+, teachers in the workplace. Teachers are professionals in a highly visible and socially relevant occupation who are at the same time part of a population that has historically been stigmatized and whose experiences have been marginalized. Their experiences mirror those of all queer people in our society, but their position as teachers provides a platform of conducting research through the societally significant and relevant context of schools.

The current study constitutes an investigation into the various ways of Finnish queer teachers disclosing or revealing their non-heterosexuality or non-normative gender in their work environment. With this study, I aim to examine how “coming out” as queer occurs at the workplace in the Finnish teacher context, and to explore how the discursive choices teachers make when they discuss and construct their coming out experiences connect to heteronormativity and to the prerequisites of being a teacher. This study also seeks answers to questions such as: how do queer teachers talk about coming out in the workplace and what kind of attitudes and opinions they have on the matter? What elements and factors are shaping the ways in which coming out is performed by queer teachers in the workplace? How do queer teachers disclose or reveal their queerness in different situations and contexts in the workplace? The data for the current study is going to be group interview data, produced in three separate group interviews, with 15 participants in groups consisting of 3-5 teachers. Group interviews are utilized for this study due to the sensitive nature of the topic being researched within a sensitive research population; group setting can reduce the power of the researcher and provide a safe context that allows for higher level of consensus and elaboration on mutual issues (Barbour & Kitzinger 1999).

The premise for this study is that there exists a hegemonic discourse of heteronormativity in society that is reproduced and enforced in schools (e.g., Lehtonen 2021; Ferfolja & Hopkins 2013) which maintains power relations that come into play in discourses related to queer teachers’ language use. The basis of this study also relies on sociolinguistic research, which claims that language use and language use variation can construct social and ideological meanings and establish discourses, identities and speech communities. In reference to many other languages that have been analyzed in terms of gender, sexuality and the teacher context, Finnish language characteristics (e.g., gender neutral third person pronoun) bring an interesting aspect to this research setting. Revealing and disclosing information about non-normative sexuality or gender is a complex and challenging interactional speech act with multiple forces and factors influencing the way it is uttered or performed, especially when considering the intentions behind what the speaker is hoping to achieve (Chirrey 2003). By “coming out”, queer people challenge the existing heteronormative power structures and simultaneously communicate their position as the other in the community, and their resistance to the dominant norms (Llewellyn & Reynolds 2021). Earlier research about coming out in the teacher context points out to a high level of ambivalence and conflict surrounding the individual teacher in their decision-making process about disclosing their sexuality (Connell 2015; Gray 2013; Rasmussen 2004). For example, the norms around teacher professionality and queer visibility are often experienced as contradictory and complex (e.g., Ferfolja & Hopkins 2013; Neary 2013). The various factors behind coming out in educational context may be connected to issues and questions surrounding teacher norms or moral questions.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is utilized as the main research perspective to analyze the transcribed interview data, to best explore the hidden power relations embedded in language (Fairclough 2010). A three-dimensional CDA method is used in this study to examine the discursive indicators and representations of heteronormativity and power relations, as well as potentially identifying social problems and discourses influencing the way queer teachers’ talk about their coming out experiences in the group interview settings. The analysis will first focus on linguistic and semantic features of the text, then continue to seek out contradictory properties and similarities to establish meaningful bundles of discursive processes, guided by what teachers said and how. Finally, the analysis will connect these interpretations and meanings to the larger sociocultural context. CDA allows for the exploration of how heteronormative power dynamics, that are embedded in language, are either challenged or enforced in queer teachers’ interviews while also considering the wider, societal context of how discourses can both mirror queer teachers’ reality but also shape it. CDA favors a multidisciplinary approach in research and enables the researcher to make connections between different fields, making it an ideal perspective in examining a complex phenomenon like heteronormativity and challenging the narrative it creates (Fairclough 2010; Van Dijk 2016).

By examining how queer teachers discursively construct their workplace coming out experiences in group interview settings, we can see the discursive variation around the phenomenon. The results will provide discourse-level information about the interactional strategies that queer teachers use when revealing, disclosing or hiding their sexuality or gender. I argue that this discursive variation will enforce earlier findings which state that heteronormativity is a dominant framework in Finnish schools (Lehtonen 2023), but also reveal its influence to the ways in which queer teachers exist and talk about their personal life, sexuality and gender; this is important because the different ways of coming out can reveal how queer people are disciplined to present themselves in schools and what kind of subject positions are available to them in the contemporary Finnish society. The findings will reflect the hidden, deeper attitudes and values surrounding queer people and queer teachers that are present in the western countries, specifically Finland and other similarly liberal Nordic countries with educational policies that are based largely on socio-democratic values (Lappalainen & Lahelma 2016).

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