Introduction¹

Why teach Shakespeare when aiming to include queer perspectives in our classrooms? This author of some of the most canonized texts might not be the first who comes to mind in the endeavor of establishing a queer pedagogy. Yet, 16-year-old teenagers can engage productively in queer reading and querying heteronormative text reception and reading expectations at the example of Shakespeare’s texts as well as with YA literature - as this paper will show at the example of empirical insights into a German ELF classroom and the theoretical considerations behind them.

To elucidate how this - only at first sight - unlikely connection came about, the project needs to be contextualized in the specific conditions and theoretical as well as curricular developments that have centrally informed and influenced the rationale of the study presented here. First, the German EFL context has an established tradition of using literary texts, and by extension literature pedagogies, in processes of learning and teaching English, ranging from the use of picture books in primary contexts to longer novels and poetic works in secondary classrooms ^{(cf. Delanoy et al., 2015)}. Especially in advanced English classes leading to the German final exams (Abitur), Shakespeare’s literature has long been and continues to be, a mainstay among the literary texts chosen for EFL syllabi ^{(cf. Eisenmann & Lütge 2014)}. Second, a more recent and decidedly transformative strand of EFL research has established a queer perspective within this discipline, leading to more critical pedagogies that seek to affirm and make visible, LGBTIQ+ identities and experiences in teaching while calling into question rigid heteronormativity and bi- or cis-gendered systems as powerful cultural and social norms ^{(cf. Eisenmann & Ludwig, 2018}; ^{König, 2018}; ^{Merse, 2021)}. In the context of literature pedagogy, this may include the reading of texts with visible LGBTIQ+ protagonists, or negotiating how far readers’ engagements with texts could be informed by heteronormative worldviews. Lately, such queer-informed practices have also been endorsed as a cross-curricular mandate in many German educational policies ^{(cf. Merse 2017)}.

The classroom project detailed in this paper - as well as the research that evaluated this project - tie in with these developments. In the classroom project, Shakespeare’s sonnets, in particular Sonnet 18, are focused on. They lend themselves to queer re-readings not only due to their open speech situation and some queer literary references - but also because of their varied reception history which shows numerous examples of explaining away that many of Shakespeare’s romantic sonnets are addressed to a young man. This, in turn, serves as an ideal springboard for the queer-informed EFL literature classroom to explore how readings and interpretations of Shakespeare’s work have been subject to ongoing hetero-normalization - or how learners tend to perceive the ambiguous gender and addressee constellations in Sonnet 18. In the classroom project, these trajectories were coupled with the reading of Patrick ^{Ness’ (2010)} young adult fiction narrative Different for Boys which features and affirms gay and bisexual themes. Here, learners transferred their literary exploration of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 to an imaginative intertext with Different for Boys.

The objective of the study associated with this classroom project was to explore the learning processes of EFL students that unfold when they engage queerly with - and thus, critically query - Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and Patrick Ness’ Different for Boys: What (non)-heteronormative scripts and assumptions do learners bring to these texts? What happens in the classroom if heteronormative assumptions are challenged? What insights do learners generate when taking over LGBTIQ+ perspectives during their engagement in this classroom project? To answer these questions, we reanalyzed data stemming from this particular classroom project that was carried out at a German secondary school (Gymnasium) of a year 11 upper-level class of advanced English. The data set includes transcribed passages of the actual classroom discourse that unfolded during this project and written responses by learners that were collected on worksheets. Methodologically, this study is hence situated between a teacher’s action research and a didactically informed ethnography, coupled with a qualitative analysis of the data set.

In this paper, we will begin by exploring the theoretical underpinnings of this study and the classroom project. At first, we will draw on literary studies to retrace how the reception history of Shakespeare’s sonnets was marked by a continued hetero-normalization - a finding from scholarship that, in turn, informs the very logic of the whole classroom and research project presented in this paper which sets out to critically examine this dynamic in the context of queer pedagogy. In a second step, we will outline current developments and established concepts in both EFL education research and queer pedagogy to legitimize and explain the literary engagement envisioned for this study. Based on this theoretical and conceptual substance, what follows is an in-depth description of the rationale and actual practical application of the teaching unit focusing on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and Patrick Ness’ Different for Boys - and how these two texts were brought together in an imaginative intertext. The second half of this paper will present the details of the research context and the methodological approach, and go on with detailing the empirical insights of this qualitative study. The findings yield a very differentiated picture of how the EFL learners of this study engage queerly with both pieces of literature - rather than following a unified pattern of literary experience and negotiation. Indeed, the learning processes and classroom dynamics analyzed in this study indicate a continuum in which learners follow or (gradually) discard hetero-normalized readings, call into question norms of sexuality and gender to varying degrees, arrive at nuanced queer-informed literary interpretations while drawing on literary analysis, and unfold a variety of empathetic perspective changes into LGBTIQ+ experiences and identities. As diverse as these types of engagement may be, they do indicate that a queer focus on literature pedagogy can lead to highly committed and deeply critical readings and interpretations in the EFL classroom.

The Sonnets’ reception throughout the Centuries: Heteronormalizing Shakespeare

The reception of Shakespeare’s sonnets represents almost four centuries of silencing - and at the same time revolving around - a controversial fact: 126 out of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a beautiful young man ^{(Stallybrass 1993)}. This has been denied, pathologized, or explained away most of the time. And yet, just because of this dissimulation, this particular point has been queerly present in the history of Shakespeare’s reception - which renders it interesting for foreign or second language teachers interested in literary and cultural learning.

The sonnets were first published in 1609, dedicated to a “Mr. W.H.”, who has since been the cause of much speculation. Biographic readings ^{(for an overview, cf. Grundmann 2004)} have time and again discussed different historic persons as the potential receiver of the sonnets, sometimes with implications about Shakespeare’s sexuality. However, this is not the focus of this article. For us, the question raised is not if Shakespeare was gay or bisexual (and the concepts of homosexuality, bisexuality, or heterosexuality did not exist in his time anyway) but what the readings of his sonnets reveal about the norms and taboos of his readers - and how this can be used in English language teaching (ELT).

A discussion of the sonnets’ reception takes us back to their second edition of 1640, in which some quite strong editing had taken place: not only were the order and structure of the poems changed, but titles were added and some pronouns were changed to more clearly suggest a female addressee only ^{(Stallybrass, 1993)}. The sonnets still seem to have been a cause of irritation, as a reference in Edmond Malone’s edition (with the original pronouns reinstated) in 1780 shows: “Some part of this indignation might have been abated, if it had been considered that such addresses to men, however indelicate, were customary in our author’s time, and neither imported criminality, nor were esteemed indecorous” ^{(qtd. in Stallybrass, 1993, p. 95)}.

However, Malone’s somewhat placating and context-sensitive remark seems to have been of no avail: When George Steevens published Shakespeare’s complete works in 1793, he left out the sonnets altogether. He who read Sonnet 20 with an “equal mixture of disgust and indignation” was sure that his readers should be spared this experience: “We have not reprinted the Sonnets etc. of Shakespeare, because the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed, would fail to compel readers into their service” ^{(qtd. in Stallybrass, 1993, p. 95)}.

Fortunately, the sonnets did not fall into oblivion. Instead, various other ‘explanations’ for the male addressee were crafted to be able to read them: It must have been a reference to Jesus - and the dark lady to the church -, or he could have been Shakespeare’s son; or else, the sonnets were not written by Shakespeare ^{(cf. Grundmann, 2004)}. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1803 does recommend them to his son but not without suggesting a platonic reading to keep a pure image of the admired genius: “if thou wouldst understand these sonnets, thou must read the chapter in Potter’s Antiquities on the Greek lovers[.] This pure love Shakespeare appears to have felt - to have been in no way ashamed of it - or even to have suspected that others could have suspected it” ^{(qtd. in Stallybrass, 1993, p. 98)}.

Possibly the most far-fetched ‘explanation’ for the sonnets’ addressee was inspired by a hoax: In the 1790s a forged letter appeared that had supposedly been written by Elizabeth I thanking Shakespeare for his sonnets. The idea was gratefully taken up and supported with scholarly ‘evidence’ by George Chalmers who exclaims against anyone who would ever have thought that “Shakespeare, a husband, a father, a moral man, addressed a hundred and twenty-six Amorous Sonnets to a male object!” He is glad that through the letter and his explanations the actual object of the sonnets, the Queen, is finally known and Shakespeare’s reputation saved: “But I have freed him, I trust, from that stain […] his real object […] being once known, darkness brightens into light, order springs out of confusion, and contradiction settles into sense” ^{(qtd. in Stallybrass, 1993, pp. 96-97)}.

But eventually, with time and cultural values changing, the readings of the sonnets changed, too. While towards the end of the 19th century Oscar Wilde’s quoting Shakespeare as promoting the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ still contributed to putting Wilde in prison, by the turn of the millennium this very fact is a worthy object of literary research influenced by the emergence of gender studies and queer theory. While in the 1930s an entire volume was written: “to express strong and earnest expostulation against the allegation that Shakespeare in his Sonnets or elsewhere confessed moral perversity” ^{(Thomson, 1938, p. i)}, nowadays there is consensus in literary research that the addressee of most of the sonnets is male.

The sonnets in the classroom: Hetero-normalization continued?

When it comes to teaching Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, the questions arise: How common is this knowledge? And is it passed on to learners when they are taught Shakespeare? There is little research on this, but recommendations in teachers’ guides on teaching the sonnets in the ELT classroom suggest that the male addressee is far from being well-established. For example, in the German ELT context - where Shakespeare is still widely taught in the upper grades - ^{Volkmann (2014, p. 31)} references several teaching materials in which the “unmentionable fact” is omitted. How this fact is circumnavigated reads like a continuation of the earlier reception depicted above, rather than modern student-oriented pedagogy that takes into account research findings from its reference disciplines. Indeed, ^{Volkmann (2007)} suggests that there is a gap between how well gender and queer studies have been integrated into literary studies, their lesser influence on didactic research, and their nearly total absence in practical teaching contexts.

One possible explanation for this is that teachers shy away from teaching supposedly controversial topics such as same-sex desire, excluding such perspectives from their classrooms. This could be the result of educational policies that seek to regulate the presence of seemingly deviant sexual orientations and gender expressions in teaching, for example, such as Section 28, which forbade ‘intentionally promoting homosexuality’ in schools up until 2000 in Scotland and until 2003 in the rest of the UK. On the other hand, this could have to do with subjective teacher beliefs. ^{Evripidou (2021)} could show that avoiding queer topics in the classroom is linked with existing self-concepts as English language teachers, i.e., a self-concept that prioritizes the teaching of language aspects rather than issues of sexual and gender diversity - an effect that is also due to shortcomings in teacher education where this nexus is not established. In addition, ^{Nelson (2015)} suggests that some language teachers hesitate to integrate LGBT content into their classrooms because they are concerned that such content might lead to divisiveness and confrontation, or that it is perceived as private or irrelevant to learners’ lives. However, we would argue that the very reasons which may lead teachers to shrink from such an approach could be the reasons why to use it. LGBTIQ+ issues and a critical approach to heteronormativity may evoke different and potentially controversial reactions, but (probably just because of this) they are highly relevant to learners. Sensitizing teachers to this educational potential as an integral part of their profession could be contextualized in the framework of ^{López Pereyra’s (2020)} concept of rethinking teacher education with the empowering and emancipatory lens of critical pedagogy.

To summarize, the hetero-normalization surrounding the reception of Shakespeare’s sonnets seems a constant component of his literary legacy. To counteract this, to pay tribute to the legacy of the sonnets, and to find ways of avoiding further hetero-normalization, we suggest in this chapter that teaching Shakespeare’s sonnets (in particular Sonnet 18), exploring their reception history revolving around norms of gender and sexuality, and combining it with a modern piece of Young Adult (YA) literature, can ideally be located in queer-inclusive language education. We then provide research data from a case study in which this was done.

Addressing LGBTIQ+ in the classroom: the potential of literature for challenging heteronormativity

Our approach to engaging queerly with Shakespeare is located in current attempts to update ELT (literature) teaching and learning agendas in the light of gender and queer theory and to integrate LGBTIQ+ content into classrooms ^{(cf. Nelson, 2006}; ^{Merse, 2015}, ²⁰¹⁷, ²⁰²¹, ²⁰²²; ^{König et al., 2015}; ^{König, 2018}; ^{Eisenmann & Ludwig, 2018}; ^{Marks & Merse, 2018}; ^{Queering ESOL website)}.

Firstly, the relevance of a critical reflection on norms of gender and sexuality can be located on a personal level, referring to the everyday life of teenage students. Their school years are the time when norms of femininity and masculinity as well as sexuality and social expectations about relationships become important to them. LGBTIQ+ identities are increasingly more accepted and sometimes teachers find that their students know more about - and are more open towards - gender and sexual diversity than they would expect (or more than themselves, possibly). However, not conforming to heteronormative standards still meets with much discrimination: the European Union Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Survey ^{(European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2013)} found that more than eight in ten respondents had faced negative comments or behavior and that a large majority did not come out during their time at school. This makes gender and sexual diversity a topic of educational relevance, too. If education aims to support students in developing their personality, LGBTIQ+ ways of life must be represented in the school. This does not only include addressing students identifying as LGBTIQ+ but addressing all learners by reflecting on underlying norms of sexuality and gender. This educational view has resulted in curricular foci on representing gender and sexual diversity: In Germany, for example, one federal state after another has introduced addressing sexual diversity as a cross-curricular requirement, though not without polemical public debate ^{(cf. Merse 2017, pp. 178-185)}. In the UK, ^{OFSTED (2012)} identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender learners as a group that might require careful expert teaching. Although we would argue that queer-informed teaching should go beyond addressing the alleged needs of LGBTIQ+ learners, OFSTED certainly contributes to an educational climate in which embracing queer themes and interrogations becomes possible.

The question, then, is how to teach in a queer-informed way in EFL classrooms. The advantage of the personal relevance of the topic is that addressing norms of gender and sexuality is likely to motivate learners to speak in a foreign language. This relevance will almost certainly include some controversy and negotiation of different perspectives - which we welcome. ^{Nelson (2015)} confirms that LGBT content, among other benefits, raises learners’ curiosity, leads to meaningful discussions, and helps to connect socially. However, the personal nature of the topic may also lead to inhibitions or, if not done well, to resistance, especially if students do not feel safe in the classroom community.

Literature (in the widest sense, including cartoons, films, and other texts) in the classroom offers great potential to navigate this pedagogic challenge. Fictional texts can, on the one hand, provide insights into lives unknown to the students and do so in a way that is emotionally accessible. In this case, students get to know and feel an LGBTIQ+ character ^{(Renzi et al., 2012)}. Approaching a character with empathy allows taking over another’s perspective, which may lead to points of identification for some, recognition, or (future) reference for others. Gaining such knowledge or association can be one step towards preventing discrimination, since homo- and transphobia are often strongest with those completely unfamiliar with LGBTIQ+ lives. On the other hand, the lives and stories, problems and privileges of the characters and the effects taking over such perspectives has on the student can be addressed and discussed more easily with the example of a fictional character than by speaking directly about oneself. The fictionality can thus be a safe space for getting to know, empathizing with, and negotiating different concepts of identity ^{(König, 2018)}. Last but not least, a queer perspective when working with literary texts can foster general aims of literature pedagogy, e.g., familiarizing pupils with the characteristics of different genres or analyzing the speech situation of a text when learning about how the characters are represented in the text.

If literature in general is a suitable medium for bringing queer perspectives into ELT, why are Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular suitable? They are linguistically difficult and a challenge to access. Would it not be easier to work with contemporary and possibly narrative texts closer to the lives of the students, especially with an empathic approach? There are a few reasons specifically recommending the sonnets for a program that includes LGBTIQ+ issues and critically interrogating heteronormativity. The first reason is that reading the sonnets in class might contribute to closing the gap between philological research findings and actual classroom practice discussed above. The very history of the sonnets’ reception as outlined above can be used as an example of the dynamics of heteronormative and homophobic repression: The students can reconstruct how homoerotic readings of the sonnets were marginalized or explained away and how the social norms of the readers and critics played into this. The historical - and in the case of a German or Mexican classroom, the cultural - distance to the reception sources might make it easier for pupils to see these norms and dynamics of heteronormativity or homophobia and to speak about them than when talking directly about their everyday life structures. The - unwittingly - satirical effects of these historical sources add to this effect.

Another reason for introducing the sonnets in class is that poetic texts - by their very characteristics which make them ‘difficult’ - lend themselves particularly well to a queer approach. The openness of their language, and the many gaps of meaning that are to be filled, allow for different readings, including fluid ones in terms of gender expressions or diverse sexual identities. Also, the way poetic use of language deviates from everyday usage disrupts the reading experience in a way that lends itself to closer analysis, fostering the students’ symbolic competence ^{(Volkmann, 2014)}. Finally, the sonnets might not be an easy read at first sight but - once accessed - a very worthwhile one and a poetic experience which teenage hearts can warm to.

‘Stop reading straight’ - Queerly engaging with literature: Conceptual considerations

‘Queer’ is often described as a term whose meaning refuses to be fixed, or, put differently, as a term that can have multiple meanings ^{(e.g., Jagose 1996}, ^{Giffney, 2009)}. While this illustrates well the epistemological stakes of the concept, in this section we do specify some aspects of the term to both describe the pedagogic rationale that informed the queer engagement with Shakespeare described here and to provide a framework for analyzing the data collected during the teaching unit we describe later.

The first specification revolves around the adjectival use of queer to describe a person’s non-normative sexual and gender identity ^{(Giffney, 2009)}. What follows is that the critical interrogation of heteronormativity, as described below, is combined with a “determined push for visibility” ^{(Pilcher & Whelehan, 2004, p. 129)} that propels seemingly deviant sexualities and genders into the consciousness of learners to increase the range of identities represented in language education, which has repeatedly been described as informed by an assumed monosexuality ^{(Nelson, 2006)}. While it is certainly an important educational project to include a more diverse range of sexual and gender identities in classrooms to work against their silencing and marginalization, merely including, for example, a gay or bisexual protagonist in literary texts is not in itself enough: achieving representational equality does not necessarily end homophobia or discrimination, as ^{Luhmann (1998)} points out, or it might even worsen stereotypes depending on the choice of literary representations and the way they are negotiated in the classroom. Nor can one instance in the classroom where an LGBTIQ+ person becomes tangible in a text “aim to tell students the ‘accurate’ portrayal of the Other” ^{(Kumashiro, 2002, p. 43)}. What we do stress, however, is that such texts can serve “as both catalysts and resources for students” ^{(Kumashiro, 2002, p. 43)} to learn more about particular LGBTIQ+ experiences and perspectives as mediated through literature. Such texts, combined with carefully designed tasks and questions ^{(for example, in Merse, 2021}, or ^{Eisenmann & Ludwig, 2018)}, invite students to change their perspectives and develop empathy, and explore what they encounter with the alleged Other in a text does to themselves ^{(cf. Kumashiro, 2002, p. 3)}. To achieve this, we suggest reading Patrick ^{Ness’s story Different for Boys (2010)} to bring in gay and bisexual themes, and propose a classroom scenario in which this story intersects with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 to initiate a complex interplay of changing perspectives.

Additionally, we foreground a focus on heteronormativity as a key concept brought forward by queer theory. We understand heteronormativity both as an individual thought pattern and as a social regulatory system that ensures that heterosexuality and a clear-cut male-and-female gender dichotomy are naturalized, privileged, and made to seem ‘normal’, while at the same time creating a hierarchy that marginalizes or silences everyone or everything that falls outside of what ^{Butler (2006)} postulated as the heterosexual matrix ^{(cf. Degele, 2005)}.

If this understanding of heteronormativity is transferred to the reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 in the classroom, the following assumptions can be identified. First, learners who encounter this sonnet for the first time likely read heterosexual desire into the sonnet which a male person directs at a female addressee - even though the speech situation is potentially open because of the lack of male/female pronouns. Such a reading validates both heterosexuality and a clear-cut gender binary in which one gender desires the opposite gender. Certainly, such assumptions can be troubling and complicated in the classroom if learners learn who the addressee of the sonnet was. Second, it is not unlikely that teachers also follow a heteronormative script, highlighting the alleged heterosexual desire expressed in this poem, while silencing other interpretations and constellations that the openness of the sonnet allows for. Third - and this is also a central component of the teaching unit sketched out here - a focus on heteronormativity can lead learners to an exploration of how norms of sexuality and gender have been constructed into the sonnet across the centuries, and how certain readings can be silenced and other readings privileged.

In our further understanding of queer, we follow existing lines of argumentation that see queer as a verb, and hence as an activity that leads students to challenge their hidden agendas and uninterrogated assumptions about the naturalness of sexuality and gender ^{(Degele, 2008}; ^{Hall, 2003)}. For the teaching of ^{Shakespeare’s (2010)} Sonnet 18, this means that learners are encouraged to denaturalize and interrogate possible heteronormative assumptions brought to the text, and to decipher Sonnet 18 in ways that bring out its latent and queer content ^{(cf. Giffney, 2009, p. 7)}. This understanding of queer also emerges in Luhmann’s seminal text on queer pedagogy, in which she suggests that such a pedagogy goes beyond incorporating queer content in classrooms and worrying about making such content “more palatable to students” ^{(Luhmann, 1998, p. 141)}. Rather, a queer pedagogy looks at the learning processes that unfold when “idyllic stabilities of normalcy” ^{(Luhmann, 1998, p. 146)} are undermined, and when what is normally known about sexuality and gender is put into crisis: How does a learner take up, or refuse to take up, the positions that a text offers? What do new knowledge and new information do to one’s understanding of a text? Are there any instances that illustrate how learners gradually call into question what is known while at the same time holding on to seemingly secure and preferred positions? Only if we allow for such troubling interventions into heteronormativity, or to speak with ^{Britzman (1995)}, only if we ‘stop reading straight’, can the pedagogic potential of queer play out productively in the EFL classroom and provide supportive environments in which learners can queerly engage in new explorations of sexuality, gender, and the norms that surround them - while learning about Shakespeare. This change in reading and literature practices can thus contribute to reconceptualizing schools and by extension EFL classrooms, as queer transformative spaces as they are envisaged by ^{Kjaran and Sauntson (2020)}.

In the next section, we describe a teaching unit of approximately three 90-minute lessons based on the arguments and pedagogic rationale outlined above. Describing the teaching suggestions serves as a link between illustrating the potential of queer engagements with Shakespeare in the EFL classroom elaborated on so far and the empirical insights into a classroom where this unit was taught which will be provided subsequently.

Practical example: A teaching unit on Sonnet 18 and contemporary YA literature

Shakespeare through the eyes of YA fiction protagonists - Developing empathy, changing perspectives

The last part of the unit is dedicated to further increasing the visibility of LGBTIQ+ characters, moving the focus from the historical to the present and thus inviting a transfer of the reflections on heteronormativity closer to the learners’ lives. To achieve this, a contemporary source is added to the Shakespeare sonnet: Patrick ^{Ness’s 40-page narrative Different for Boys (2010)}.

The story is about four childhood friends who are discovering how and whom they desire. Whereas one of them, Jack, is more or less out as gay, Ant, the narrator, and Charlie have a secret affair with each other, which they handle very differently: While Ant tries to find out what this means for his sexuality, Charlie declares it to be practicing for future heterosexual encounters and distances himself through homophobic abuse in public. Then there is Freddie who rejoins the old group of childhood friends after some years of absence and unwittingly sets off the events when he tries to win Ant for the rugby team. Charlie’s jealousy leads to a fight in which he violently outs Ant. Afterward, Ant is supported by Freddie and Jack with whom Ant eventually has his first kiss. The story is very well written, funny, and serious at once, with characters that appeal to the students. A stylistic device that recommends the story further for a queer approach is that on the textual level, everything related to first sexual experiences (and sexualized swearing) is hidden by black bars, offering a good opportunity to talk about taboos with the students.

Through the eyes of these protagonists, the class comes back to questions of visibility raised during the critical reflection of heteronormativity in Shakespeare’s reception. This time, they take a look at the dynamics of visibility and heteronormativity from a personal, emotionally accessible perspective, which adds to the analytical exploration carried out before. To link Different for Boys to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, the learners are asked to imagine an English lesson in the life of the protagonists of the story in which the class deals with the poem: Who do the protagonists imagine themselves when reading the sonnet? What do they feel like and how do they act when the teacher mentions or does not mention the male addressee, or even is homophobic when talking about the male addressee? The English lesson imagined is not actually in the text itself but is added to create an imaginative intertext between Sonnet 18 and Different for Boys and to facilitate the complex changes of perspectives. This idea is based on another literary example with intertextual references to Shakespeare’s sonnets: In Zadie ^{Smith’s (2001)} novel White Teeth Irie Bowden, a teenager of Jamaican descent, has a brief moment of feeling recognized when her English class reads sonnet 130 (“My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun”) and she identifies with the dark lady, reading her as a person of color. Her teacher rejects this interpretation and thus reinforces Irie’s feeling of not belonging to or meeting English cultural standards. What this scene illustrates in terms of defining powerful norms of ‘race’ is taken up for similar negotiations about sexuality in our example.

These activities aim to make the pupils aware of the subjective effects on individuals when queer love declarations or interpretations are silenced or explained away. These questions are addressed in small groups organized as a group puzzle (or jigsaw technique): In the first phase, all pupils focusing on the same character meet, then switch to groups with each character represented at least once, and then back again to the character groups. The tasks for each of these phases can be seen on the worksheet (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Sample worksheet 

Empirical investigation: Research context and methodological approach

This teaching unit described above is part of a larger research project designed by the first author ^{(König, 2018)}. The research project was a case study consisting of three gender-related teaching units, with the Shakespeare scenario being the last of the three. The focus of the study was to achieve an understanding of how to foster a reflection of norms of gender and sexuality in the classroom, and what texts and tasks are suitable for doing so. Methodologically, this case study is situated between a teacher’s action research and a didactically informed ethnography. The units were designed by the first author and then taught by a cooperating teacher who always looked at and gave feedback on the lesson plans presented to him, sometimes making small alterations before or spontaneously during the teaching process. During the lessons, the researcher was present as a participant observer taking field notes. The lessons were audio-taped and all worksheets and written assignments were collected and copied and then returned to the pupils.

The observed group was a grade 11 class at a Gymnasium, i.e., an upper-level class of advanced learners of English as a foreign language preparing for their Abitur exam the following year. The teaching unit on Shakespeare took place in July 2014 in three blocks of 90 minutes, with some discussions continuing in another lesson. The class consisted of 19 students, 13 of whom identified as female, six as male, around the ages of 16 and 17. Their teacher estimated that about half of them had at least one parent with a cultural and linguistic background other than German and that about half had parents with an academic degree. The school promotes a liberal image and is situated in a midsized German university town. The teacher was experienced, had 20 years in the profession, open-minded but not formally educated in gender or queer studies.

For this chapter, we reanalyzed data from the teaching unit on Shakespeare. We found that the data, although collected with a different aim in mind, also lent themselves to an in-depth exploration of the queer engagements learners show while going through the lessons of this unit. This analytical lens led us to explore the following issues:

We re-analyzed the data by transcribing selected passages of the classroom discourse and analyzing the written responses on the worksheets. Both the selection of passages and the analysis were carried out by both authors independently to reduce and fill the blind spots that the participating researcher (who conducted the original study) might have, and also to arrive at a ‘fresh’ perspective on the data through involving a second researcher. Both analyses were then combined into a text illustrating the queer engagements learners exhibited. We constantly interweave select data into our interpretation to provide examples of the learners’ and the teacher’s original voices. The pupils’ responses are transcribed including mistakes in grammar, syntax, and orthography. Underlined words represent our added emphasis. As the research presented here is qualitative in nature, we aim to create a rich and complex understanding of the particular research context that was explored ^{(cf. Croker, 2009)}, i.e., how certain learners in a specific classroom engage queerly with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and Patrick Ness’s story Different for Boys.

Empirical Insights into the Learners’ queer engagement with Sonnet 18 and Different for Boys

Conclusion

Our aim in this article was to develop a rich understanding of how learners engage queerly with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 in combination with a contemporary YA fiction story, Patrick Ness’s Different for Boys. We investigated the learning processes and classroom dynamics that unfold when the teaching of literature meets the queer-informed pedagogic rationale of critically interrogating heteronormativity with learners, alongside experiencing and taking over LGBTIQ+ perspectives. The data illustrate the diverse student engagements observed during the teaching unit, ranging from challenging and understanding the heteronormativity surrounding the reception of the sonnet to feeling into the perspectives of the protagonists, themselves with various sexual identifications, via empathetic approaches.

We found that classroom dynamics, at first sight, tend to hetero-normalize the reading of Shakespeare. However, on closer inspection, several instances show that not all readings are per se heteronormative and that spaces exist into which learners gradually insert new information and readings. What is remarkable is that those highly individual (re)negotiations - ranging from students who stopped ‘reading straight’ to students resisting a queer reading - can lead to a committed engagement with the sonnet and Shakespeare: learners put forward textual evidence to argue for personal reading, they refer to and ask for knowledge of cultural context, and use and expand their understanding of the characteristics of a sonnet and differentiate between the author and the speaker of a sonnet. From the point of view of literature pedagogy, therefore, queer engagement can be said to be highly beneficial and sharpen the learners’ analytical and interpretational skills.

The pupils’ engagement with the heteronormative reception history of Shakespeare’s sonnet led to a more distanced and matter-of-fact understanding of the historically contingent and context-bound views on sexual desire and appropriate gender behavior. This led students to recognize that the norms of sexuality and gender are not stable over time and that the meanings people attach to sexuality and gender can change. Indeed, many pupils were surprised by the fact that literary critics went to such great lengths to explain away the fact that Shakespeare could be in any way connected to the ‘love that dare not speak its name’.

Complex and highly affective queer engagements also occurred when pupils worked on the interplay of Sonnet 18 and Different for Boys. By layering a canonical text over a contemporary story, a palimpsest emerges that allows for a markedly empathetic change of perspectives from the individual learners towards literary characters of various sexual identifications, and in turn, these characters’ imagined perceptions of coming into touch with Sonnet 18 in fictitious classroom scenarios. Given a queer-inclusive education, this task aimed at bringing LGBTIQ+ experiences into focus and allowing learners to experience the effects of norms of sexuality and gender. The variety of the students’ answers, and the detailed nuances they interpreted into the different characters, show the productive potential of a learning environment in which students are encouraged to feel into and coordinate complex and new perspectives.

As different as the types of queer learner engagements might be, they do show on a meta-level that a queer focus on teaching Shakespeare can draw learners into committed readings of Sonnet 18 in which they constantly renegotiate and update existing reading habits and the assumptions they initially brought to the text. The combination of ‘queer’ and Shakespeare can catalyze to spark critical discussions that get learners deeply involved, both cognitively and emotionally, in the reading and learning process. We do not, however, want to give the impression that a queer focus is combined with Shakespeare only to give a canonical text some glossy and exotic ‘veneer’. Rather, we include a queer perspective on Shakespeare’s texts to foster deep learning, critical thinking, and committed engagements with literature and as an important way of keeping the teaching of Shakespeare up-to-date and relevant in EFL classrooms of the 21^st century.