Culture, Consent and Confidentiality in Workplace Autoethnography

This paper examines my experiences as a school teacher and a lesbian. It considers the culture and discourses of power in the school and the ethical implications of telling my story. Utilizing autoethnography as a method of inquiry, it draws on a critical incident to explore the incompatibility of my private and professional identities, and reflect on the impact of homophobic and heteronormative discursive practices in the workplace, on health, wellbeing and identity. Conceived of initially as a therapeutic exercise to set my doctoral research in context, the critical incident itself eventually became the focus of the research. In the critical incident, I explore how I prospered as an assistant headteacher at a UK village school for almost ten years by censoring my sexuality and carefully managing the intersection between my private and professional identities. However, when a malicious and homophobic neighbor, and parent of children at the school, exposed my sexuality to the headteacher, I learned the extent to which the rural school community privileged and protected the heteronormative discourse.