Discipline, Erasure, and Silenced Subjectivities: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Florida's 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act

Background and Purpose: An unprecedented barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and education censorship laws are occurring in the US political landscape, primarily targeting the voices, visibility, and lived experiences of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities. Despite the acceleration of these legislative agendas, limited research attempts to analyze and interrogate these policy acts that represent grave humanitarian concerns and are inimical to the foundations of a diverse, equitable, and flourishing democracy.

This critical policy analysis addresses this gap by examining the discursive practices and social justice implications surrounding the passage of Florida’s controversial “Parental Rights in Education Act” (PREA). Colloquially dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” by its opponents, this legislation, now enacted into law, places restrictions on gender and sexuality content in public education and has triggered a cascade of similarly angled legislation. By turning to discourse methods, this project brings to the forefront the relevance of discourse, language, and semiotics as crucial objects of inquiry and seeks to examine what norms are in operation in the context of this legislation. What can discourse reveal about the nature of the presumed ‘social problem’ as postulated by this legislation, and what social justice implications might it contain?

Methods: Utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study examined the ways in which power and conditions of inequality are enacted, reproduced, and secured by and through discourse, text, and the use of language as they relate to the processes of policy production. Influenced by seminal CDA frameworks, this research examined textual artifacts encompassing: (a) the PREA legislation; (b) interpretive summaries of the bill developed by legislatures; and (c) public press briefings delivered by the Governor’s office. Moving between these linguistic artifacts and contextual factors—an interpretive analytic process of intertextuality—this project analyzed these data sources to understand what social problem is being constituted through the various discourses surrounding PREA and what implications causally follow for students, educators, and democratizing educational processes.

Findings: This critical discourse analysis reveals a consistent deployment and evocation of: (a) rights-based language framing the legislation as a means to protect parents from the dangers of “woke ideology” threatening their children; (b) war-based metaphorical language evincing high levels of emotional appeals; (c) rhetoric suggesting the dissidence and dangerousness of LGBTQ+ educators and values that challenge hetero-/cis-normativity; and (d) linguistic ambiguity that generates opaque policy enactment, enforcement, and disciplinary mechanisms.

Conclusion and Implications: Findings depict how the Parental Rights in Education Act (PREA) represents a new threshold of educational and queer surveillance, best understood when bracketed by the ideologies of neoliberalism, heteropatriarchy, and the concomitant articulation of transphobia. In our era of intensifying anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and censorship laws targeting people of color, women, and gender and sexuality minorities, social work has a more pivotal role to play in challenging subjugating policies and the hegemonic interests they secure. To do so, social work must strengthen its investment in critical campaigns of thought, inquiry, and pedagogy and deepen its commitments to ‘discourse interventions’ that advance the language of emancipatory social change.