Aims and Scope of the Book
This book aims to build on recent work within the Palgrave and Macmillan Queer Studies and Education series and address some remaining gaps, particularly around the nature of heteronormativity and homonormativity. It seeks to develop a framework for understanding and interrupting these constructions and point towards a practice that takes these ideas beyond the academy. It is located within the theoretical framework of queer pedagogy , which attempts to draw together some of the traditions of queer theory and critical pedagogy (Britzman, 1995; de Castell & Bryson, 1993; Kumashiro, 2002; Pinar, 1998) and critically examine processes of normalisation and reproduction of power relationships, including in the classroom, problematising presumed binary categories of the heterosexual and the homosexual within the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990). Hickman (2011) sees real potential for the combining of critical pedagogy and queer theory through queer pedagogy. However, there are tensions between these traditions, which this book attempts to examine and address.
In terms of scope, this book will primarily concentrate on a piece of research that explored the construction and interruption of heteronormativity on youth and community work courses within a number of higher education institutions. The empirical work was conducted over 3 years involves interactions with four student cohorts (over 200 people), alongside reflective conversations with ten colleagues across three higher education institutions. However, its ambitions are wider than this in a number of ways. While there is a focus on higher education and youth and community specifically, as a critical project, we aim to illuminate the practice of others (Higgs & Cherry, 2009) and hope our work has resonance and serves as a point of reflection with those working in all educational settings from a critical perspective. I hope that there will be particular resonance for any course that has critical reflective practice at its heart and working with people as its context. The book explores whether a critical queer pedagogy gives us a wider framework for developing the āconscientizationā (Freire, 1973) necessary for practitioners to become adept in critical pedagogy more generally, challenging their received notions of ānormalityā and social construction in other spheres. It will explore whether heteronormativity is a useful concept and site that gives leverage for opening up and deconstructing intersecting issues such as gender, race, class, and faith.
As we shall see more in Chap. 2, explorations of the nature of heteronormativity and how to interrupt it in higher educational settings are common but partial, and this book seeks to address some of this partiality. In the research, heteronormativity was nuanced and contextual but concurred with existing literature that notes its pervasiveness and invisibility, that sexuality can be embedded in unsuspected parts of the curriculum, and focuses in on the importance of considering studentsā experience of homophobia inside and outside the classroom. Reactions to attempts to interrupt it were similarly nuanced and countered both accounts of heteronormativitiesā hegemony, but also overoptimistic post-gay positions. We encountered strategies of contested engagement, strategic adjustment, avoidance, and retreat that represented middle positions between homophobia and acceptance (Orne, 2013), but there was no simple continuum as there was a concurrent intersecting spectrum between fractured- and meta-reflexives (Archer, 2010, 2012). We found many students and practitioners needing to hold multiple and often contradictory heteronormativities, and to a lesser degree homonormativities , but failing, which contributed to this fracturing, and to them having a negative double consciousness (Du Bois, 1906) and a consequent conscious avoidance of examining their heterosexualities. These dynamics allowed and even necessitated the reinscribing of a number of damaging constructions including the fetishisation of jealousy, the normality of jealousy, the myth of soul mates, and an unsustainable focusing on a partial view of respect in relationships.
In terms of interrupting heteronormativity, a number of unique themes are explored, and claims are made that add to the literature to inform a new theoretical framework for examining and interrupting heteronormativity. We found that coming out is a legitimate method of interrupting heteronormativity, but needs to be a pedagogical act carried out co-currently with interrupting other social constructions and binary oppositions. Overall, we found that interrupting heteronormativity is most effective within the context of a whole course and wider team approach. Within a team approach, heterosexual allies are necessary and need to be embraced and utilised. To this end, and to prevent fracturing and the development of negative double consciousness, a vision of transgressive sexualities, especially heterosexualities, needs to be articulated.
Interrupting and reconstructing heteronormativity, and challenging other normalities, places an imperative on developing a critical consciousness. This necessitates an extension of the vision of the reflective practitioner (Schon, 1987) to that of the pedagogical practitioner, a stigma-resistant (Orne, 2013) dedicated meta-reflexive (Archer, 2010, 2012; Scrambler, 2013) with a positive intersubjective consciousness, rather than a negative double consciousness, co-produced and held between students and tutors. Developing pedagogical practitioners necessitates co-created and co-held meta-reflexive liminal spaces that emphasise intersubjectivity, encounter, and working in the moment. These spaces need to be founded on principles of the need to deconstruct and reconstruct pedagogical power and knowledge, and understandings of the public and private in pedagogical space. The consequent aims of the book are:
- 1.To explore the dynamics of heteronormativity within teaching practices on youth and community work courses in a range of HEI institutions.
- 2.To examine how teams and individual pedagogues interrupt and reconstruct heteronormativity in their teaching practice and challenge wider notions of normality and social construction.
- 3.To expand the conception of the critical reflective practitioner into the pedagogical practitioner, a dedicated meta-reflexive with an intersubjective consciousness.
- 4.To develop a set of principles and a method for educating the pedagogical practitioner.
The Context of Its Writing
I have been an educator in higher education for over 20 years. I have taught at four institutions in this time and been an external examiner for another five. My primary subject, youth and community work, aims to enable practitioners to enter into a community of practice (Wenger, 1999) that p...