Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy

Elizabeth McNeil, James E. Wermers, Joshua O. Lunn, Elizabeth McNeil, James E. Wermers, Joshua O. Lunn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319646220
• eBook ISBN: 9783319646237
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This bookexplores intersections of theory and practice to engage queer theory and education as it happens both in and beyond the university. Furthering work on queer pedagogy, this volume brings together educators and activists who explore how we see, write, read, experience, and, especially, teach through the fluid space of queerness. The editors and contributors are interested in how queer-identified and -influenced people create ideas, works, classrooms, and other spaces that vivify relational and (eco)systems thinking, thus challenging accepted hierarchies, binaries, and hegemonies that have long dominated pedagogy and praxis.

© The Author(s) 2018

Elizabeth McNeil, James E. Wermers and Joshua O. Lunn (eds.)Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and PedagogyQueer Studies and Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64623-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Mapping Queer Space(s)

The Editors¹

(1)

Languages and Cultures, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

End Abstract

Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy explores the linked processes of learning and teaching to break down traditional, and often oppressive, regimes of knowing and being—reconstituting, in their place, potential and possibility. Our project is not a new one—queer pedagogues have been rethinking and reworking learning and teaching for over two decades now. Contributing to this important ongoing project, Mapping Queer Space(s) pushes in intriguing directions the ever-expanding genealogy of queer pedagogy , helping us to consider new avenues of investigation.

Queer Pedagogy

If you are reading this book, then it is more than likely that you have a working understanding of “queer” as it is used in academic circles. As such, a thorough review of the development of queer studies during the last 20 plus years is unnecessary. Further, such a project could be counterproductive, given that each chapter in this collection articulates its own relationship to queer or queerness . However, given the complexity and polysemy of “queer”—especially in academic circles—we consider here some common foundations that inform this volume.

Perhaps the most often-cited definition of queer, and one that is central to all the chapters herein, was put forward by Eve Sedgwick in her Tendencies (1993). As Sedgwick articulates, one possible meaning of queer is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). For us, and for so many others, this deceptively simple definition of queerness captures the paradoxical cutting power and flexible indeterminacy that have made queer theory such a vibrant field during the last quarter century. While the authors in Mapping Queer Space(s) take queerness in new, challenging directions, this uniquely focused pliability remains central to everything in this collection.

If queer theory asks us to consider, as Sedgwick suggests, the “open mesh of possibilities,” we still need to ask what that open mesh has to do with pedagogy . What exactly might a queer pedagogy look like? As with the term queer, a complete retelling of this history of queer pedagogy is beyond the scope of this introduction. However, it will be helpful to consider some key moments in the development of queer pedagogy that have set the stage for this text.

In many ways, the roots of Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy begin with the recognition on the part of queer pedagogues that education has often been a tool of oppression instead of liberation. As William F. Pinar notes in the introduction to his germinal Queer Theory in Education (1998), “Homophobia (not to mention heterosexism) is especially intense in the field of education, a highly conservative and reactionary field” (2). While education, and especially formal education, is often touted as an opportunity to expand minds and horizons, such expansion has too often been curtailed within the strict, and frequently invisible, boundaries of monolithic social and cultural institutions. From the rigidity of educational architecture to the rigidity of canonicity, education has often feigned the promise of intellectual progress as a cover for the reality of the reproduction of normality. For Pinar , queer pedagogy marks the possibility of a response to the systematic and heteronormative structure of education. If the term queer can signify an “open mesh of possibilities,” queer pedagogy , argues Pinar , can signify the possibility of opening education to those possibilities.

Echoing Pinar , Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell , in “Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect ” (1993), assert that the value of queer pedagogy is its potential to disrupt the coercive status quo by rethinking education in terms that run counter to the reproductive telos of dominant ideology. For Bryson and de Castell , queer pedagogy is “a radical form of educative praxis implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in, the production of ‘normalcy’ in schooled subjects” (285). In their view, and ours, queer pedagogy can transform education, changing it from a tool in service to tacitly heteronormative reproduction —which, as Pinar notes, has underpinned so much of Western learning and teaching—to a tool for actively disrupting normalcy.

The radical potential of queer pedagogy to destabilize (hetero)normalcy, as explored by Bryson and de Castell , has been further unpacked by Susanne Luhmann , in her “Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy Is a Pretty Queer Thing ” (1998). Luhmann cautions against seeing queer pedagogy as a panacea for all social ills, while suggesting that queer pedagogy —pedagogy that engages students in a “conversation about how … positions are being taken up or refused”—can “take on the problem of how identifications are made and refused in the process of learning” (130). In other words, queer pedagogy can destabilize hegemonic conceptions of the status quo or the normal precisely because it can push both learners and teachers to think about the grounds on which their own identities are constructed.

More recently, Judith Halberstam , in “Reflections on Queer Studies and Queer Pedagogy ” (2003), has made similar observations, noting that queer pedagogy can, by taking on the problem of how identifications are made and refused, help us to “break with the oedipal deadlock that creates and sustains intergenerational conflict…” (363). As way to examine identities, queer pedagogy not only has the potential to break down barriers that have emerged in discussions of queer theory (the central focus of Halberstam’s reflections on queer pedagogy ), but also pushes both teachers and learners to consider how the production of knowledge is culturally situated and thus constantly open to radical revision. As Halberstam points out, queer pedagogy demands that we entertain “flexible and innovative notions of archiving, canonicity, disciplinarity, and intellectual labor…” (364).

A clear line of development runs through the work of each of these thinkers that identifies in queer pedagogy a potential to rethink learning and teaching in ways that force us to reconsider the concepts of knowing and being, as Donald Hall has effectively articulated. Responding to challenges that queer pedagogy was focused merely on disowning knowledge, Hall argues, in “Cluelessness in the Queer Classroom ” (2007), that queer pedagogy goes beyond the need to disown knowledge, and demands the willingness to interrogate the foundations on which education has been built. In doing so, Hall calls for “a project of critical inquiry” that can “link the projects of queer studies , Graffian pedagogy , and Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics” (186). To this end, urges Hall, we “must attend to the presuppositions behind other naturalized positions and opinions” (187). Thus, the story of queer pedagogy we have tracked here is one of the transformation of pedagogy as (tacitly heteronormative ) reproductive tool to an open mesh of possibilities that forces us to rethink how and why we learn.

Queer Landscapes

Featuring both established scholars and new voices, Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy explores intersections of theory and practice to engage queer theory and education as it happens both in and beyond the university. Furthering work on queer pedagogy , this volume brings together educators and activists who explore how we see, write, read, experience, and, especially, teach through the fluid space of queerness . The contributors are interested in how queer-identified and queer-influenced people create ideas, works, classrooms, and other spaces (e.g., digital, activist, interspecies) that vivify relational and (eco)systems thinking, thus challenging accepted hierarchies, binaries, and hegemonies that have long dominated pedagogy and praxis .

SECTION I: Que(e)rying the Academy

The authors in Section I examine seemingly conventional spaces of pedagogy to argue that we might learn to think or to be queer in academe. Beginning this discussion, in Chap. 2, “Queer Acknowledgments ,” Branden Buehler and Roxanne Samer examine a model of academic kinship that supplants the traditional model rooted in the idea of genealogy , thereby suggesting that to be or think queer in academic spaces requires that we rethink the way that scholars and ideas are related in the academy. Academia, including the system of advisors, dissertation committees, peer groups, and the departments to which we belong, is often conceptualized as a family tree. However, the classic tree metaphor—borrowed from heteronormative forms of kinship structures —might not be the best model for a system that is often more circular than linear, more communal than hierarchical. Buehler and Samer explore how scholars become oriented toward the ideas of others and directed by certain lines of thought. Building on Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology and Gérard Genette’s theories of paratexts , Buehler and Samer take up acknowledgments sections as archives chronicling their authors’ intellectual influences and look at the kinship structures traceable within, between, and across them. Their theorizing of queer academic genealogies is further informed by their deployment of social network analysis software, which they use to map the web of queer studies’ thank-yous, anecdotes, and in-jokes that can be found within its acknowledgments sections. In doing so, they identify academic relationships and social bonds that normally go unseen. While they focus their study in terms of sample and critical investment, their approach could be extended to demonstrate in a broader...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Mapping Queer Space(s)
• 1. Que(e)rying the Academy
• 2. Queer Out Here: Public Bodies and Spaces
• 3. Enspiriting, Living, Teaching Queer
• 4. AnimalQueer
• Backmatter