Constituting an Audience against California State Senate Bill 48

Any situation in which some [people] prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate [people] from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.

—Paulo Freire¹

On April 14, 2011, the California State Senate passed SB 48. Described by media outlets as the LGBTQ History Bill, this law compels the inclusion of political, economic, and social contributions of persons with (dis)abilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into educational textbooks and social studies curriculum in California public schools by amending the California Education Code. In addition, schools are prohibited from sponsoring negative activities or teaching students about these identity characteristics in a negative way. With the approval of this legislation, California became the first state to require public schools to include LGBTQ history.²

Throughout its history U.S. education legislation and policy has been structurally influenced by and perpetuates cisheteronormativity, promoting "a specific normative form of monogamous, marital, middle-class, normatively gendered, and in many implicit and explicit ways, white heterosexuality. In other words, [education in the U.S.] promotes a specific family form—a nuclear family made up of married [cisgender] heterosexual parents with children who are biologically theirs."³ Cisheteronormative educational policy negatively affects all our students and in particular LGBTQ students and educators by demonstrating incongruity towards LGBTQ individuals and families, and recirculates and reproduces racialized, gendered norms about what forms of desire and familial attachment are appropriate and healthy in our society. In addition, it perpetuates and reinforces sexism, racism, homophobia, and creates an unsafe space for LGBTQ students and faculty. As a queer educator of color, who teaches at a community college, which serves underrepresented students, I am interested in unpacking and uncovering how phobias and irrational fears rooted in anti-LGBTQ beliefs are reproduced and reconstituted through discourse surrounding education legislation. To better understand how phobias and irrational fears are rhetorically employed, I examine the discourse surrounding SB 48.

The discourse surrounding SB 48 is significant and should be examined for several reasons. First, California was the first state that would require LGBTQ history to be taught in K–12 education. Second, in 2008, voters in California voted for Proposition 8, which defined marriage between one man and one woman. The Proposition 8 campaign relied on a parental rights argument, which emphasized parents' inability to control what their children would learn about LGBTQ individuals in public schools. With its opposition to inclusion of LGBTQ contributions to California history, the Family Research Council's rhetoric contains the most significant social conservative arguments against SB 48. The Family Research Council (FRC) is an American conservative Christian group and lobbying organization. Its main function is to promote "traditional family values" by advocating and lobbying for socially conservative policies. In particular, the group opposes LGBTQ rights, abortion, divorce, embryonic stem-cell research, and pornography.⁴ This research council funded the biggest campaign against SB 48.

Because the FRC organized major opposition against the legislation, it serves as a case study of the strategies used to reinforce cisheteronormativity in public education. In particular, I examine how YouTube was used as a platform for activists and everyday citizens to oppose the legislation. By employing constitutive rhetoric, the opponents of SB 48 react to the legislation by attempting to transform the issue of LGBTQ education into family values and parental protection, which reinforces patriarchal norms, cisheteronormativity, and whiteness as a strategic rhetoric. I interrogate the discourse from the perspective of constitutive rhetoric with an integrated system of analysis including essential elements of constitutive rhetoric, ideographic analysis, and narrative. Developed by Maurice Charland, constitutive rhetoric brings an audience into being by creating a collective identity.⁵ The speakers in the YouTube video hope to call an audience into being, and attempt to create a collective identity of people who oppose the legislation. Charland notes that persuasive discourse requires a subject as audience who is already constituted with an identity and within an ideology.⁶

Thus, I showcase how the video constitutes their audience in three ways: 1) calling...