Berkeley Review of Education

Over the past five years, marriage equality and charter schools have emerged at the forefront of political conversations about equality and rights. Some argue that these policies extend access to certain benefits and opportunities to historically oppressed communities, thus furthering liberalism and egalitarianism. In this article, I engage these arguments by exploring how and why people from dominant cultures come to support marriage equality or charter schools despite not directly benefitting from these policy initiatives. Drawing upon queer theory and critical education policy studies, I utilize two terms—homonormativity and charternormativity—to describe how public arguments supporting marriage equality and charter schools elevate particular identities and normative behaviors for gay people and people of color. I theorize these similarities to reveal a process of policy legitimation that I call the affective-spatio-temporal-fixed—a concept that provides insight into why and how some policies that claim to promote increased equity gain traction in the neoliberal present whereas others do not.