The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. This article argues that the IOC policy on sex reassignment does not operate to guard against discrimination and harassment against transsexual athletes but that it operates to maintain the popular illusion that there are two, binary gender designations. While both transsexual and Olympic bodies have unique histories and vastly different experiences in the social and political realms, using psychoanalysis we contend that the need to test gendered bodies is incited by an anxiety about bodily deterioration, aging, and, ultimately, mortality.

Using feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, this paper analyzes the public commentary and anxious concern about child-welfare in a recent lesbian teacher sex scandal in Vancouver, Canada, involving Jean Robertson. Arguing that the public and professional uproar is not really about child-protectionism so much as it is about the place of white teacher lesbianism in school culture, I ask new questions about how the regulation of teenage sexuality operates to secure heterosexual bifurcations of gender in the school. The idea of the innocent, white 'girl' child is, in this paper, shown to anchor a public and professional worry about the proliferation of queer teenage identifications in the school. Using Judith Butler's formulation of the heterosexual matrix, Lee Edelman's conceptualization of reproductive futurity, Judith Halberstam's investigation of queer time and space, and Mikko Tuhkanen's postcolonial reading of lesbian sexuality in popular film, I underscore societal-based upset about white teacher lesbianism. I argue that the teacher sex scandals in North America are driven by an unspoken societal upset about identifications and desires inhospitable to binary gender positions and heteronormative futures.

[The Romans] created the cult of the Vestal Virgins, high‐minded priestesses of the goddess Vesta, Guardian Angel of Mankind and Keeper of the Hearth. These priestesses were educated in special normal training schools, were forbidden to many, were subjected to drastic moral codes, and were accorded social position of preeminence.1 Spinster teachers were hired so frequently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they eventually became an important part of the cultural landscape.2 Single women seem forever to unnerve, anger and unwittingly scare large swaths of the population, both female and male.3

This paper examines the social construction of white, female, spinster teacher personality profiles in the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the psychological, medical, and psychoanalytic literature, I provide an overview of how white unmarried female teacher personalities were understood in order to provide a historical context for present day queer and transgender identities in North American schools. I identify four main personality profiles of the female teacher in educational historiography which were informed by Freudian psychoanalysis: the masculinity complex; moral masochism; altruistic surrender; and the tyrannical disciplinarian. I conclude that spinster teacher personality profiles can be read as queer and gender-variant and that such readings shed light on gender and sexual regulation in education historiography.