Thursday, July 2, 2015

"TV Bullies: How Glee and Anti-Bullying Programs Miss the Mark"

Image result for hands upTeachers, raise your hand if you think bullying is a problem at your school. 

Teachers, raise your hand if you attempt to address issues of bullying in your own classroom.

Teachers, raise your hand if your school has implemented some program to educate about and reduce bullying in your school. 

Teachers with your hand up, keep it up if you think this program has been successful.

Those of you with your hand still up, what are some reasons why this program has or has not been successful?

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If I were to teach Gerald Walton's chapter "TV Bullies: How Glee and Anti-Bullying Programs Miss the Mark," I might start this way. As a presenter, I would assume that the number of hands still up by the final prompt would be much fewer than the number of hands up at the first prompt. All of this would of course imply that teachers recognize bullying as a problem, but the current practices to address it are ineffective and insufficient. 

I would allow the teachers to share out some theories about why this might be. I might even share my own story of an anti-bullying program disappointment. Just days after the school psychologist worked with my sixth grade students on identifying and clarifying myths about bullying (which many of them had already answered correctly), one student's Instagram account was hacked by a fellow student. The hacker left inappropriate and disparaging comments, posted crude pictures, and when the students tried to figure out who it was, the hacker pretended to be several other students. Clearly something in the anti-bullying program was amiss. The students came in to school the next day in a tizzy, wondering who could have done such a thing and we as teachers weren't sure where to go from there.

This would then lead us to a discussion of Walton's argument: the term "bullying" has become so generic and commodified that its use distracts people away from recognizing the perpetuation of social prejudices that is true problem - especially in cases of homophobia.

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The premise of Walton's argument is that media and the public acknowledge that bullying is an issue. He cites the work of Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project where celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and political figures like Hillary Clinton speak up in support of LGBT youth. He then moves into the example of the television show Glee where bullying is a vicious theme for many of the characters, particularly the openly gay character Kurt and "avowedly straight" Finn (216).

However, he uses these examples also to set up his critique which is that "using the term [bullying] to describe acts of homophobia hides the ways in which LGBTQ youth are subjected to unique forms of verbal and physical assaults related to their real or imagined sexual orientation" (216). He goes on to say that "identifying incidents of violence in schools as 'bullying' has become usual practice for behaviors that used to be accurately described as sexual harassment (218). Walton recognizes the way that the language of bullying hides a deeper social issue.

Why has this come to be? Why are things this way?

Image result for dollar sign


Walton points to the political economy. He writes, "bullying as become useful and profitable for corporations, and they have an interest in framing it in the most generic way possible, which in turn strips it of any social critique" (218). He believes that the term bullying (like Disney's Princess line) has been produced and distributed by mass media and other for-profit companies for the purpose of consumption by the general public. Because these groups are trying to appeal to as many people as possible, "bullying" becomes an easy blanket term, limiting a further look at wider (aka systemic) social problems.


He acknowledges that some of this might be "well-meaning work" but so much of what is offered focuses on "the management of behavior," even providing examples from Glee to support his idea. In his eyes, the regulation of behavior is about control "which fails to account for social prejudices, such as homophobia, which inform behaviors that are routinely labeled as bullying" (220). This is such a problem because in Glee and life in general "homophobia is regarded as a personal problem rather than an institutional one that poisons school environments and leaves children emotionally and physically unsafe" (221). Like Allan Johnson, author of Privilege, Power, and Difference, Walton knows that "these [marginalized, targeted] groups [like LGBT youth] can't do it on their own because although they certainly aren't powerless to affect the conditions of their own lives, they do not have the power to understandingly do away with entrenched systems of privilege. If they could do that, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place." By calling everything bullying, the systems of power and privilege are allowed to continue to exist without question or disruption.


As a professor, Walton believes that education is an important step and organizing gay-straight alliances is one concrete way to do this. By gathering people together, it changes homophobia from a personal problem to an institutional one. He also provides a variety of other resources for educators to explore so they can get to work on this issue right away.

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Teachers, raise your hand if you think the word bullying is not enough.


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