On Queer and Its Commentaries
Queer is still a word that denotes any number of thingsâan identity, an aesthetic, a politics, an insult, a pedagogy. With so much going on in and around queer, engaging in a queer project presents certain challenges about who and what is being addressed. Has queer become the stuff of professionals, or does it still hold its radical potential? This is, I believe, more true than ever with the breadth of queer work and the evolving realities of queerness. Queer intersects with gender, race, class, ability, nationality, and more making strange how bodies come to matter and ideas about bodies slide about in the fields of discourse. These realities ask for a certain slowness to recognize the ways queer plays out in and for different people. In our hurried age, however, this grows more and more difficult as tweets, posts, and more fly in and out of our attention, drawing us into flame wars, trolling relationships, and varied forms of cyber-bullying. All of this may cause a certain existential angst around queer as it encounters forms of violence that befall queers at rates still unacceptably high and the historic playfulness attached to queers as they âread,â âslay,â âmock,â âsatirize,â and more to expose the workings of norms and the performance of living.
For Richard Ford (2007), queer is âa political and existential stance, an ideological commitment, a decision to live outside some social norm or otherâ (p. 479, italics in original). âOne could sayâ Ford continued, âthat even if one is born straight or gay, one must decide to be queerâ (p. 479). The ideaâthat âone decides to be queerââis central to this book. To decide to be queer, to become queer, requires certain thingsâlike access to ideas, practices, practitioners, and institutions tied to and rooted in queerness. There is, for me, an educational component to such a process as to decide to be queer should be an informed decision; informed not simply by âschoolsâ or âparents,â but by the diverse things one encounters that inform oneâs daily living. The twentieth century, on reflection, did not look kindly on queerness and its cast of characters. Throughout the twentieth century, there was a concerted effort to deny educating for the possibility of queerness, both in schools and other forms of education (e.g., the media, public health). I suspect, or perhapsâmore accuratelyâspeculate, the twenty-first century offers the space and time to push for educating in ways that allow one to decide to be queer: to take up queer projects and practices rooted in queer traditions and histories that have become more and more accessible in our digital age. There has been a marked growth in attention to queerness in its varied forms, as language has become more accessible and transmittable through digital means. There are attempts to move âbeyond bullyingâ (Fields, Mamo, Gilbert, & Lesko, 2014) and disrupt the victim narratives (Marshall, 2010; Rofes, 2005) while refusing to accept the victory narrative (Signorile, 2015), so queers do not acquiesce to the continued work needing to be done.
Safety, as such, given the arguments put forth by Michael Sadowski (2016), is not enough. âYet, a particular subset of students in the United Statesâlesbian, gay, bisexual transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ*) studentsâare often served by their schools,â Sadowski argued, âas if their mere safety were a sufficient objective in and of itselfâ (p. 2). There have been important inroads in addressing the safety of LGBTQ studentsâfrom anti-bullying policies to gay-straight alliancesâbut it is necessary to move beyond seeing safety as enough to articulate education that allows queerness to thrive. And as I will address throughout this book, âeducationâ is never merely limited to schools given the diversity of agents in the world that educateâfrom print and digital media, to films and television, to community centers and cultural institutions.
Such work is immediately fraught. The very idea that education might work to promote queerness as a viable decision or way of life cuts immediately too close to ideas of recruitment long used against addressing queer issues or allowing queer teachers in schools. Additionally, the idea of promoting queerness, or helping kids become queer, smacks of essentialist ideas that queerness is something that can be taught or has some essential core to its work. Throughout this book, I will strangely embrace these fraught ideasâasserting a belief that youth have a right to see queerness as a way of life and that these ideas are intimately rooted in the histories of queerness. These qualities are by no means naturalâthey are shifting and tied to their own contextsâbut they do provide a sense of queerness as a cultural project and process.
Queernessâdespite its former ability to scandalizeâis in some quarters no longer scandalous, revealing its contingent and contextual nature. Queerness has been commodified and commercialized in any number of ways. âQueer has been,â as Paul Preciado (2013) noted, ârecodified by the dominant discoursesâ (p. 341) so much so that âWe are currently facing,â Preciado continued, âthe risk of turning the term into a description of a neoliberal, free market identity that generates new exclusions and hides the specific conditions of the oppression of transsexual, transgender people, crip, or racialized bodiesâ (p. 341). Queer, at the outset of this project, has, in some regards, lost its subversive appeal, its radical edges. However, I hold onto queerâperhaps stubbornlyâwith a belief that it has much to teach about becoming in the twenty-first century. While queer has been recodified by dominant discourses, to use Preciadoâs term, I suspect that such codification has been overstated, particularly as such issues filter into and are taken up within various educational endeavors. Queer is, after all, contingent on its contexts, and research has aptly illustrated how, for instance, geography impacts accessibility to and tolerance of queer cultures and people (Grey, Gilley, & Johnson, 2016; Tongson, 2011). While taken up by dominant discourses, queers also continue to resist and create dissident practices and subjectivities within diverse contexts.
As queer theory emerged, practices, approaches, methods, and more had to be developed using what was at hand in that time. In particular, however, as Berlant and Warner (1995) noted, âpeople want[ed] to know how it [was] going to solve problems.â What, as the title of their column noted, âdoes queer theory teach about x?â There was an expectation immediately that queer theory would be able to create a program or programs to address issues and explain queer life. This makes sense given such work emerged within the academy, which by the early 1990s had already started to see the demands of neoliberal policies and corporate sensibilities in the university (Brown, 2015; Giroux, 2014). In those early years though, as they noted, âqueer theory [had] not yet undertaken the kind of general description of the world that would allow it to produce practical solutions. People want[ed] to know what costs, risks, and tactics are involved in getting from this order of things to a better oneâ (p. 348). For them, in those inaugural years, âthe question of x [was] both a challenge and a hopeâ (p. 348). To ask the questionââWhat does queer theory teach us about xââmade visible that queer theory had no proper object, but also had demands placed upon it that it âdoâ something, particularly teach. Such teaching is, I sense, tied to the role of the erotic. The âxâ that not only holds open the hopeful and challenging space in their question connects as well to the âxâ that historically marks material that is sexually explicit. With this, what queer theory teaches about x asks us to understand not only that queer theory can be used to teach about a plethora of objects but that such teachings cannot be divorced from the role of âsex,â in its unwieldy forms.
Queer theory as an academic discourse probably taught very little in the immediate moment as far as practical lessons went. Theory, after all, has a different purpose than teaching as theory is less tied to useful strategies about living in the world. Instead, theory brings together and ties up expansive ways of understanding that which captures the theoristâs attention. Theory is, as well, often dismissed as an academic pastime with little to do with the material realities of the twenty-first century. The twenty-first century itself appears to continue to anti-intellectual trends that began decades ago and are part of the general assault on education (Giroux, 2014). I am skeptical of the dismissal of theory, but also sensitive to the ways theory has been used to dispossess and malign non-academics. This was itself an issue Berlant and Warner (1995) noted in the early years of queer theory, arguing that âThe metadiscourse of âqueer theoryâ intends an academic object, but queer commentary has vital precedents and collaborations in aesthetic genres and journalismâ (p. 343). Queer theory, in other words, was (and is) not broad enough to capture the work âqueerâ can describe. Queer commentary, as they proposed, would attend instead to the diverse and perverse work that falls under the banner of queer. There was then as there is now for me no need to reduce queer to a particular object or method. Queer commentary, in its broad appeals, instead, is âanimated by a sense of belongingâ and is aspirational; aspiring âto create publics, publics that can afford sex and intimacy in sustained, unchastening ways; publics that can comprehend their own differences of privilege and struggle; publics whose abstract spaces can also be lived in, remembered, hoped forâ (p. 344). This project takes up queer commentary, inclusive of theory, to aspire for such queer publics and cultures as they teach lessons about becoming and being queer. âQueer culture ,â as Berlant and Warner noted, âcomes into being unevenly, in obliquely cross-referencing publics, and no one scene of importance accounts for its politicsâ (p. 346). This is one of the challenging things about queerness and its culturesâit is never one thing and refuses to be pinned down too easily. It comments on things far and wide. And queerness changes with time while simultaneously refusing to be on time and, at times, being ahead of the times.
To respond to and comment on the possibilities that lie within this question about what queer theory and its commentary teaches will take us into the work of education as it relates to and impacts queers, queerness, and the generation(s) of queers. This is important given it is educationâunderstood specifically to imply schools and broadly to imply a variety of education agentsâis a process where questions of teaching are centralized and where, historically, fears of queerness have manifested themselves quite vehemently and violently (Graves, 2009; Mayo, 2014; Sadowski, 2016). For decades, researchers in education have fought against these fears through various means. However, as Cris Mayo (2007) noted, âmuch work in LGBT issues in education is less interested in the theoretical nuances of queerness than in attempting to make those institutions more accountable to LGBT membersâ (p. 80). I trust Mayoâs assessment, but hope that the division between âtheoryâ and âpracticeâ can be challenged to address both the work of theory and the need for institutional accountability. This may sound queerly pragmatic and I see such work as indicative of the need for queer commentary. Such commentaryâengaging the theoretical and practicalâturns out to be concerned with the conceivable consequences of both forgoing theory for the immediately applicable and forgoing the immediately applicable for theory. Refusing the applicable or theoretical diminishes our abilities to intervene in the immediate lives of queers while also foreclosing the imaginative possibilities queer offers. Theory and practice, we would do well to remember, operate in different temporal registers, but such temporalities are connected by precarious threads, which I hope to comment on throughout this book.
Queer Thriving
My interest in queer thriving is one that looks forwardâfor the imaginable futureâto think about and through what happens alongside and after surviving. As I (2017) argued previously, âto thrive is a thing one does ⌠And when one thrives one grows or develops well or vigorouslyâ (p. 309). Yet, within particular developmental logics...