No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Starting with queer: An Enigmatic Concept for Higher Education Research and Practice
Abstract
Many people are given pause by the word ‘queer.’ For some it prickles
with discomfort, resonant of a scene of accusation, insult or injury. Others might have overheard the term and are wondering about its meaning. Is it a word of abuse? A sexual identity label? An umbrella term to
describe LGBTI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex) communities? A mode of political activism and intellectual work? This chapter
seeks to address these questions, and begins with the premise that ‘queer’
can encompass all of the meanings listed above, and many more besides
these. Queer is a term that can be used to describe minoritized sexual
subjects (i.e., queer people), as well as a political stance occupied by anyone who wants to interrupt, muddy and otherwise mess with gendered,
sexual and other prevailing social norms. Our goal in writing this chapter
is to offer higher education studies researchers who are ‘starting with
gender’ an orientation to the complex and contested world of ‘queer.’
... Informed by queer theory which "shakes and unsettles sedimented knowledge" (Gowlett & Rasmussen, 2014), this paper seeks to disrupt widely accepted narratives by exploring whether or how these discourses work in the Chinese context. It employs data collected in China to "queer" (Burford & Allen, 2018) the dominant ideas found in Western literature. I use queer, here, in the sense of a turning, bending and twisting of the conventions that structure how the stories of queer teachers and queer students are routinely told. ...
... Guided by queer methodology, which seeks to disturb and unsettle (Burford & Allen, 2018), this research sought to explore conflicting experiences as opposed to expectations and conventions about queer teachers and students. Thus, seven participants' narratives that diverge from conventional accounts were selected to interrogate normative discourses. ...
... Queer theory was used as a lens through which data were selected and interpreted. As a political tool and theoretical framework, queer theory offers methods of critique to mark the repetition of norms and subvert dominant social conventions (Burford & Allen, 2018;Gowlett & Rasmussen, 2014). Thus, queer is often deployed as a verb to deconstruct and interrogate dominant logic and expectations, particularly heterosexual norms. ...
Drawing on interviews with gay academics in China, this article examines their experiences of supporting queer students. Informed by queer theory, this research uses participants' accounts to destabilise dominant discourses about queer teachers and students, i.e., the "coming out imperative", "queer teacher as role model" and "queer student at risk". This article suggests that the pervasive idea that queer teachers are the ones who can best support queer students, by coming out and providing a role model for them, should be interrogated. It is argued that the approach to addressing queer issues requires thinking that moves beyond the predominant framing depicting out queer teachers as the source of support to queer students.
... Halley & Parker, 2011) or even after normativity (Wiegman & Wilson, 2015). More specifically, there have been several attempts to understand the mobility of queer concepts within HE scholarship (Allen, 2015;Burford, 2015;Burford & Allen, 2019;Renn, 2010). Across these studies it has become clear that queer concepts are used in multiple and sometimes disparate ways. ...
... In this study, we position our own use of queer concepts alongside scholars who might describe their work as 'post queer' (Boyle, 2012) or 'after queer' (Talburt & Rasmussen, 2010). This is a body of scholarship that does not wish to be defined by its engagement with sex and sexuality, and increasingly uses queer thought to theorize settings that do not necessarily include people who identify as queer (Ahmed, 2006;Burford, 2015;Burford & Allen, 2019;Rasmussen & Allen, 2014;Talburt & Rasmussen, 2010). This 'post queer' movement in some ways responds to frustrations with "a closed circle created by what have come to be often negatively cast as narrow identitarian concerns" (Boyle, 2012, p. 272), as well as a desire to experiment with the capacities of queer concepts (Rasmussen & Allen, 2014). ...
... In addition to contributing to the literature on 'the idea of the university' via tracking its discursive deployment, this article has also contributed to debates about what queer concepts might do in the field of HE research (Burford & Allen, 2019). Building on work that has been described as 'post queer' (Boyle, 2012) or 'after queer' (Talburt & Rasmussen, 2010), we have used queer concepts to interrogate the expression 'the idea of the university', thus troubling assumptions that the realm of gender and sexuality is where queer 'properly' belongs. ...
... This study was developed from existing work on queer methodology (McCann 2016), particularly within the field of educational studies (Allen 2011;Burford and Allen 2019;Gowlett and Rasmussen 2014). Building on postmodern theory, queer theory interrogates positivist approaches to research that draw upon notions of neutrality, objectivity and binary systems (McCann and Monaghan 2020). ...
... Notes 1. The concept of queer is used in diverse ways in the existing literature (Burford and Allen 2019). In this article, queer is used as an umbrella term for nonnormative sexual and gender identities, such as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identities (e.g., queer issues, queer teachers). ...
Gay academics in China face multiple risks when addressing queer issues on heteronormative and repressive campuses. Little is known about their experiences of navigating the social and political constraints placed upon them. Drawing on interview data from 40 gay academics in China, this article explores participants' strategies for addressing queer issues in the classroom. It is shown that a number of strategies were adopted by closeted participants to lower potential risks and enhance the legitimacy of engaging with queer concerns. Despite Chinese universities being heteronormative spaces in which teaching about queer issues is constrained, closeted gay academics can exercise pedagogical agency to challenge hetero-normativity in the classroom. Such agency is located between the extremes of conformity and subversion. By unpacking closeted teachers' agency, this research interrogates the normative discourse of the 'coming out imperative' which considers queer tea-chers' coming out the only way to empower students and challenge heteronormativity. ARTICLE HISTORY
... The concept of queer has been used by researchers in diverse ways conveying divergent meanings, which all exist simultaneously, often used by the same individual at different moments. Burford and Allen (2019) outline multiple uses of queer in existing literature, including queer as identity, queer as practice and queer as politics. As an identity marker, queer is often an umbrella term for identities outside heterosexuality and the gender binary such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identities. ...
During Xi Jinping's presidency, the increasingly repressive political control over Chinese universities has had a significant impact on academic research. Yet, little is known about how Chinese academics navigate such a climate. Drawing on interviews with 11 gay academics in China, this article explores their motivations and strategies for conducting queer research. It is shown that participants submit to heteronormativity and the Party authorities by managing their sexual identity, keeping a low profile and practising self-censorship in their research. However, they can also expand the institutional space for queer research by strategically mobilising various forms of power and discourses and highlighting the legitimacy of their research. Through the queer theoretical lens, this article presents gay academics' agency in conducting queer research as involving simultaneous conformity and resistance in relation to hetero-normativity and political control in Chinese academia.
Drawing on interviews with 40 Chinese gay academics, this paper reveals participants' concerns about conducting queer research in China. These include sexual-identity exposure, difficulty in publishing research and receiving funding, as well as marginalisation within university departments. Informed by Irvine's conceptualisation of sexuality research as dirty work, this research examines the operation of heteronormativity in the constitution of queer research as dirty work. It shows that heteronormativity is intrinsic to research censorship by authorities, as repressive politics pursue regime maintenance and regulate difference. It is argued that Chinese academia is a heteronormative space in which queer research is constrained by the institutions and the Party-state. By teasing out the nuances in participants' experiences of research censorship, this paper highlights the complexity of power at play, which is far from a one-way relationship of authorities exerting power over researchers. Institutions exert power over queer researchers and simultaneously submit to the higher-level power of the Chinese Communist Party political system; at the same time, queer researchers who are governed by heteronormativity and political control can express their agency and resist the censorship.
This article is an exploration of the problem of theorizing gender and
sexuality of people who Raewyn Connell might describe as coming from the global periphery, but whose lives and futures are also enmeshed in the politics, policies, and pedagogies of the metropole. Elizabeth Povinelli is a Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University who lives and works in New York City. She also has an appointment as a Professorial Fellow at Charles Darwin University and has done extensive research on Indigenous people in the Belyuen in northern Australia. Raewyn Connell is an educational sociologist from Sydney who, according to her website, “has tried to make social science relevant to social justice, becoming involved with campaigns, teachers and social-movement activists to bring research to bear on public policy and strategies of social change.” I want to
read Povinelli and Connell together because they have both sought to
problematize the proper objects of research on gender and sexualities.
Both have also been critical of identity politics related to gender and sexuality. Both researchers also interrogate gender and sexuality in relation to settler colonialism. Finally, both Connell and Povinelli attend to the ways in which intimate relations are governed by political and economic discourses related to neoliberalism (Connell and Povinelli) and late liberalism (Povinelli).
Higher education (HE) researchers, like their colleagues across the humanities and social sciences, are increasingly tuning in to the political possibilities offered by working with emotion and affect. Reading across this work, it would seem that certain practices, and their associated affects, have achieved an aura of legitimacy, and political recognisability, while others tend to be regarded with suspicion. This article seeks to interrogate the current conceptual framing of affective agency within HE research, and to advance possibilities for viewing it otherwise. It draws upon queer theoretical work, taking Jagose's consideration of complex agency as a platform for an alternative framing. By examining an empirical case of the anxious practices of a doctoral writer, this article illuminates some cracks in assumptions made about what affective agency looks and feels like. As well as opening up discussion about the complexity of affective politics, this article illustrates the benefit of a queer methodology beyond the realms of sex, sexuality and gender in HE research.
International higher education research focused on students who claim same-sex identifications in university residential spaces has tended to prioritise the ‘gay as victim’ discourse, often leading to the pathologising of same-sex identification. While there is emerging research seeking to challenge this dimension of scholarship by offering a more nuanced and ‘queer’ approach to doing research, such research has tended to be thin, often exclusively focusing on Western contexts. This paper responds to this limitation by showcasing the experiences of Black South African same-sex-identifying students residing in student accommodation spaces in one South African university. Ten participants (five men and five women) were selected to participate in the study through snowball sampling. Each participant was interviewed twice using grounded conversations – an interview technique designed to address unequal power relations during the interviewing process. Findings highlight that the experiences of same-sex-identifying students at the university where this study took place are complex, involving the accommodation of homophobia and heteronormativity as well as resist-stancing. This is mainly due to the fact that the university residential space was heterosexualised. The paper, therefore, argues for a ‘queering’ of higher education scholarship given the deeply heterosexualised and misogynistic cultures that exist in such spaces.
In the social imaginary of higher education, there are many mutually constitutive forces shaping academic identities, such as academics’ habitus, dispositions, race, gender and student expectations. Our queer academic identities are furthermore robustly intertwined with, and emerging within, cultural, political and economic histories and realities. In post-apartheid South Africa, our academic identities are constituted in the nexus of historical white privilege on the one hand, and on the other hand, the prevailing heteronormative and homophobic public sentiment on the African continent. In the intersection of race and gender as technologies of power, we perform our identities as academics as process amidst often incommensurable and multiple claims and counterclaims. In the context of being and becoming academics, our identities as nomads provide a particular coherence, continuity and stability, albeit a continually ‘changing core but the sense of a core nonetheless – that at any given moment is enunciated as the “I”’ (Brah, A. 1996. Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 123–124). In this collaborative autoethnographic narrative, we explore becoming and being nomad as one particular lens among many others to describe our personal journeys and map a selection of issues of (dis)location and transitions that constitute our subjective and material experiences and our own trajectories of becoming. Three analytics constructs are explored: namely spaces of becoming, cycles of becoming and negotiating and performing becoming.
Research with mothers who snowboard generated emotionally rich data. In this article, we make the case for combining diaries and interviews in research concerned with understanding the fluid and complex nature of emotions and subjectivities. The diary-interview method can also enable participants to exert greater influence over the interview agenda than they might if they simply engaged in a one-off interview. In the first part of the article, we provide an overview of the literature about the use of diaries in research before discussing the combination of diary and interview. In the second part of the article, we draw on the data produced by one participant, to illustrate how the diary-interview method can facilitate the sharing and collection of emotional data, and provide a glimpse of the constitution of subjectivity. While we found that the diary-interview method proved insightful, we add a note of caution about the potential for intrusion and/or harm.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.1 (2003) 123-124
Since their emergence in the 1990s, queer theory and queer studies have functioned primarily as denaturalizing discourses, deconstructing power relations by asserting the incoherence and contingency of identity categories and cultural regimes of the normal. However, the rapid emergence of racial, ethnic, colonial/ postcolonial, cross-cultural, and national/transnational engagements and approaches in queer studies has often contested this deconstructive framework (and its unspoken presumptions), arguing instead for a local and global elaboration of queer identities and communities.
In this panel discussion we consider what is at stake in these contemporary multicultural and transnational strains of queer studies. What are the challenges, conflicts, and/or mutual investments of race/ethnicity studies and LGBTQ studies? How does queer theory reconstitute fields such as African American studies, Asian American studies, and Latin American studies? How do these fields in turn reconstitute the strategies and priorities of queer studies? Perhaps most important, what does the project of queer ethnicities look like now?
In my view, work on queer ethnicities is important because it is doing much more than "extending" considerations of race and ethnicity to queer studies, or extending queer theory to ethnic studies; instead, this new scholarship is redefining the terms through which both LGBTQ and ethnic studies are conceptualized.
For our panelists and others in the field (Siobhan B. Somerville, David L. Eng, and Robert Reid-Pharr come to mind), the key analytic question is, how are categories such as "heterosexual," "homosexual," "masculinity," and "femininity" constructed through racial and ethnic formations? For example, we are privileged to have with us here José Quiroga, whose brilliant and influential book Tropics of Desire argues against the universality of the foundational categories and tactics of gay identity politics in the United States, especially the imperative to "come out." Quiroga reconceptualizes queer sexualities, bodies, and desires through the social reality of Latin American and Latino lives, which, he maintains, have been shaped by a broader set of power relations than identity politics and outing encompass—most important, the geopolitical relations of global capital and the nation-state. In Quiroga's work and that of the other panelists, queer identity is itself understood as part of the history of imperialism—as one aspect of the production and regulation of both the colonial subject and the racialized other.
I seek to take up the critical task of theorizing race and sexuality together in black queer studies, where my own work focuses on the African American dandy in the cultural production of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. What is most crucial for me is, first, how to make legible not simply the bifurcation of race and sexuality but their interrelation, and second, how to theorize the emergence of gay and lesbian identity in relation to capitalism's increasing investment in producing and regulating desire.
These concerns seem to me very much shared by others in the field. Since it attends to social inequalities and the contexts of colonialism and capitalism, scholarship in queer ethnicities is moving LGBTQ studies in a more materialist direction. This focus departs from the best-known incarnations of queer theory (e.g., the work of Judith Butler), which have tended to treat everything as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, to dispense with the category of experience, and to disappear the subject. In contrast, the field of race, ethnicity, and queer studies asks us to consider, among other things, the social, political, and economic basis for transformations in our public and personal lives. It is the implications of these transformations for the future of queer studies that we hope to explore here.
Elisa Glick is assistant professor of English and of women's and gender studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She has published articles in Cultural Critique, Feminist Review, and Modern Fiction Studies. Her current book project examines the central but contradictory place of the queer subject in modern, capitalist culture.
In this paper, I consider the abiding value as well as the limits of queer; navigating the contradictions of a politics and ethnographic practice based on a refutation of an abiding subject; resisting subjectivation and needing recognition; and ‘coming out’ in school ethnography framed by queer theory. The paper moves from the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, borrowing Pillow’s notion of uncomfortable reflexivity and grafting the notion of the uncanny onto post‐structurally informed ethnography via the work of Britzman and Delany. In bringing these ideas together, the paper is an exercise in the discomfort provoked by both telling uncertain stories of the sort that are usually left untold about school ethnography and looking for glimpses of the uncanny in and through these. The paper suggests that attempts to engage what ‘escapes’ from or ‘falls away’ in the telling of uncomfortable stories help us to engage what is unspeakable in the normative framing of the school and adult–student relations within them and are a useful reminder of the impossibility of knowing completely or with certainty. This, I suggest, offers useful insights into ethnography and ethnographic writing and reading that we might characterise as ‘after‐queer’.
Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as ’fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged ’obesity epidemic’, this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment. Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses. A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality.
Lauren Berlant explores individual and collective affective responses to the unraveling of the U.S. and European economies by analzying mass media, literature, television, film, and video.
This article attends to the affective-political dimensions of doctoral aspiration. It considers why doctoral students continue to hope for an ‘academic good life’ in spite of the depressed and precarious features of the academic present. The article emerges from 2013 research with ten doctoral students in the Arts and Social Sciences, at a research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand, and accomplishes two primary objectives. Firstly, it contributes to scholarship that considers how visual methodologies might inform accounts of contemporary doctoral education. And secondly, it extends queer theorizing of affect in higher education studies, with the goal of understanding how doctoral aspiration might be reimagined through an engagement with Lauren Berlant’s ‘Cruel Optimism’ (2011). I propose that Berlant’s analytic framework helps to explain why students retain attachments to even problematic objects, like PhDs. I conclude the article by tarrying with the question of what to do about doctoral aspiration now.
The purpose of this article is to explore how we might understand 'bad feelings' and their place in academic activism. The article begins with a proposition that higher education scholarship reproduces certain habits of thinking about affective practices and their political utility. Often 'strong' feelings such as hope, anger, and frustration are associated with political agency, whereas 'weak' feelings such as depression, numbness and anxiety tend to be written off as political liabilities. This article draws upon queer and feminist debates on affect in order to disrupt these habits of thought. Rather than rushing to pathologise 'bad feelings' as politically useless, this article lingers with them, in order that they might teach us something about the complexity of political practice in the contemporary university. By interrogating affective-political norms, this article hopes to expand the pool of affective resources that may be available for academic activism in the present.
The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist. Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future. In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.
This article proposes that a queer reading of failure might offer opportunities to re-think the affective-political practice of doctoral writing. It examines data from one case in Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate how a doctoral student negotiates ‘failure’ in relation to their writing practice and identity. While higher education researchers have tended to interpret failure as something to avoid, or learn from in the pursuit of normative success, queer research offers us new pathways into analysis. In this article, I argue that we can recognize ‘writing failures’ as possible modes of being and becoming doctoral. Despite being frequently associated with affective practices of guilt, shame, and disappointment, failure might also open onto alternative feelings such as relief, joy, and satisfaction. Ultimately, the article contends that queer concepts might assist higher education researchers to interrogate normative framings of failure, and to glimpse alternative possibilities for understanding ‘success’.
There is a gap in queer theory and higher education literature, regarding how queer university teachers negotiate their sexuality in cross-cultural classrooms. This article moves to address this gap by examining the complex intersection between gay teacher identity and cross-cultural sensitivity, evident in the stories of two queer academics. Robert is an Aboriginal-Australian gay man who coordinates a pre-university enabling programme for Indigenous students – he outs himself to his students; Jane is a White-Australian lesbian who coordinates a pre-university acculturation programme for international postgraduates – she stays in the closet. Critical analysis of their stories finds that whether to, how to and when to ‘come out’ to their students is carefully considered in light of the personal, pedagogical and political implications this revelation might have.
Increasingly, the importance of reflexivity has been acknowledged in higher education research. In this paper, I reflect on my experience of researching lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) university students in Hong Kong. The focus is not on the findings that emerge from the in-depth interviews conducted per se, but on the methodological reflections of the research process itself. Particularly, I focus on the notion of ‘vulnerability’ in the qualitative research literature which suggests that some study topics are particularly sensitive and some interviewees are especially vulnerable. I argue that because LGBT students in Hong Kong live under the governance of family biopolitics and the colonial legacy of religious dominance in secondary education, they are subjected to enormous social pressure to reject or conceal their LGBT identities. In that sense, they can be conceived as vulnerable interview subjects. However, LGBT students, especially those who are in the closet, redefined the interview as an occasion to ponder their identity struggles, and to release problems and worries that in everyday life they can share with no one. For some LGBT students, knowing of the very existence of the research itself and participating in the research were empowering. The LGBT students had the capacity to shape the meanings of the interview, thus, they were far from being completely vulnerable. Quite unexpectedly, I found myself as a researcher in a relatively vulnerable position, feeling emotionally overwhelmed by the research and feeling guilty of not doing ‘enough’ for the LGBT students. This paper argues that although researchers need to continue to pay attention to the ethics of conducting culturally sensitive research, the vulnerability of some interview subjects should not be overestimated. Otherwise researchers risk further silencing the voices of those who are already socially marginalized. I also contend that qualitative research should acknowledge researchers’ vulnerability.
This is an interview with Mary Lou Rasmussen who is an Associate Professor, in the Faculty of Education, University of Monash, Melbourne. She is an eminent queer theorist within the field of education, with a special interest in queer subjects as they cohere around sexuality education, gender and sexualities. Her career spans 13 years in which she has written and edited three books, and five journal special issues. She has published extensively in esteemed journals on the subject of queer theory, including Sexualities, Sex Education, Discourse, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Gender and Education. She contributed to a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education on the work of Judith Butler considering the relationship between melancholia and the politics of recognition. Here, Louisa Allen, who is the guest editor for the current special issue, ‘Queering the Academy: New directions in LGBT research in higher education’ talks with her about the place and utility of queer theory within higher education. The conversation aims to explore the edges of ‘queer’ as a concept, as well as thinking through its theoretical and empirical possibilities within the field of higher education.
This is a review of two recent gatherings where queer theory and Higher Education (HE) Studies have met: the Queerly theorising higher education and academia: Inter- disciplinary conversations symposium held at the University College London (UCL) Institute of Education (IOE) (London, UK), 8 December 2014, and the Queering higher education symposium held at the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Annual Conference in Newport (Wales, UK), 10–12 December 2014. At the same time as reviewing these two events, this paper responds to the question: how might the genre of the conference review itself be queered?
Supervisors supporting queer individuals engaged in postgraduate research in Visual Arts face a number of issues. Beyond concerns with balancing the autobiographical and the scholarly, a supervisor may also encounter questions relating to safety, identity, tokenism, exoticisation and the pressure candidates feel to develop work that has credibility both within the academy and the queer community with which they identify. With reference to five self-declaring queer Visual Arts graduates, this article unpacks some of the complexities such students face as they navigate the uneven territory of the queer-oriented thesis developed inside the academy.
What are the limits of queer pedagogy's thought [Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy or stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165]? This question is considered in relation to how queer pedagogy unfolds in a first-year university course entitled Learning Sexualities. Examples of how queer pedagogy might operate in university courses on sexuality within the discipline of education are non-existent. This discussion subsequently illuminates one example, not as a template to follow, but as a means of glimpsing something which is characteristically elusive and unrecognisable. Here, the paper joins a conversation about queer research, initiated by Talburt and Rasmussen [(2010). ‘After queer’ tendencies in queer research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(1), 1–14] about ‘after-queer’ tendencies, extending it to teaching in higher education. This is an examination concerned with interrogating queer theory's limits. It attempts a queering of queer pedagogy itself. Not only in terms of what is possible for it to achieve in heteronormative [Warner, M. (1993). Fear of a queer planet: Queer politics and social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] institutions like universities, but also, in relation to deciphering the edges of how queer pedagogy comes to know itself. The author's experiences of teaching the Learning Sexualities course are employed as a way of illuminating some of these boundaries. One of these is identified as student ‘discomfort', a feeling that is antithetical to an institutional setting which demands and rewards student ‘satisfaction’ and ‘happiness’ in courses. This work is undertaken in the spirit of Kumashiro's [(2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and antioppressive pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer] project of ‘rethinking practices’ and ‘looking for new insights’ in our teaching in higher education.
Link to full article: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/969
This article takes the role of provocateur to 'queer(y)' the rules of intelligibility surrounding new schooling accountabilities. Butler's work is seldom used outside the arena of gender and sexualities research. A 'queer(y)ing' methodology is subsequently applied in a context very different to where it is frequently associated. Empirical data from a case study secondary school in Australia are used to contextualise the use of queer theory in thinking differently about new schooling accountabilities and how they can unfold in ways that are unforeseen and unexpected. By applying Butlerian theory in a manner very different to what is commonly expected, the author also destabilises the use of queer theory as well.
This paper reflects on the im/possibilities and conundrums of researching sexuality education queerly within schooling contexts, and draws on theory to explore the potential of two approaches to analytical ‘messiness’ that may provoke ways of thinking about researching sexuality education and which hold possibilities for more queerly knowing the unexpected. While acknowledging the challenges of researching queerly in schools, it is argued that methodological conundrums that emerge in school-based sexuality education research can push ethnographers' working queerly to develop capacities to think the unthought more fully. Drawing on data from two ethnographic case studies, this paper uses affect theory and the notion of aporias to more fully understand and begin to re-imagine the im/possibilities of researching queerly in schools. It is suggested that in foregrounding analytical conundrums, ethnographers need to cultivate an ongoing uncomfortable reflexivity that can recognise and draw on the generative potential of paradox, uncertainty and ambiguity when researching in schools.
Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an 'after-queer' vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an 'after-queer', we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers' visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research.
In a discussion of Deleuze's theorization of concepts, Todd May asks “what can a concept do with that which cannot be identified?” Or to put it another way, May writes – “A concept is a way of addressing the difference that lies beneath the identities we experience.” This is not to say that identities, concepts, and experiences are linked in particular ways. The possibility of extending what a concept can do is also brought under scrutiny by Ann Burlein, who draws on the work of Elizabeth Wilson to argue “Feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it [science] takes women as its objects, but also in the neutral zones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place or political purchase.” “Why not feminist critiques of the liver or the stomach, she asks?” Such styles of thought are the inspiration for this paper. We argue that queer concepts in education should not stop at places where education takes queer bodies as its objects, but that queer concepts have an important role to play in places where, at first glance, they appear to have no place or purchase.
This paper applies a Butlerian-inspired ‘queer(y)ing’ methodology to disrupt the utility of agency being framed within the binary of escape and coercion. In particular, it uses Butler's concept of performative resignification to analyse how Simon, a 16-year-old white male student, maneouvres his way through the social conventions of senior subject selection at his secondary school which is located in an outer-metropolitan suburb of Queensland in Australia. Queer theory is often caught up in a habit of thinking that positions it predominantly within the field of gender and sexualities research, thus limiting and constraining what it can do and where it can be used. By using a queer(y)ing methodology to explore senior schooling subject selection and participation, this paper also disrupts and expands the parameters of association with queer theory.
This article explores the potential of video diaries in capturing identity performances. Through selected excerpts of video diaries by “queer” subjects, the methodological issues that the video diaries raise and the kinds of data made available through them are explored. This article argues that identities are constructed as a “text” on the surface of bodies and that the participant’s experience of “comfort” or “discomfort” relates to the extent to which they are read with or against authorial intention. Identity reading is complicated in a heterosexist culture structured by “the closet” in which “misreading” has been developed into a powerful normalizing mechanism.
In this condensed version of her book, Sedgwick reflects about the "closet" as a regime of regulation of gay and lesbian lives that is also important to heterosexuals since it guarantees their privileges. Sedgwick affirms the "closet", or the "open secret", has been basic to lesbian/gay life for the last century even after Stonewall (1969). She also states that this regime - with its contradictory and constraining rules and limits about privacy and disclosure, public and private, knowledge and ignorance has served to shape the way in which many questions about values and epistemology were comprehended in the Western Society as a whole.
In this article, the author provides an overview of existing literature addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), and queer issues in higher education. She argues that although colleges and universities are the source of much critical and postmodern writing about LGBT and queer topics, scholarship on LGBT/queer people and organizations in higher education itself lacks theoretical depth. The author points to ways that existing research approaches and theoretical stances benefit higher education practice and suggests areas in which attention to methodological rigor and theoretical advancement is needed.
The issue of whether to ‘come out’ in class has a poignant history in the literature by gay, lesbian and bisexual educators on this topic. By comparison few heterosexuals have publicly written about whether they explicitly reveal their heterosexuality to students. This paper contributes to the enduring debate about whether to ‘come out’ in class from the perspective of a heterosexual. It explores the questions: Should heterosexuals come out in class? Can this serve as a pedagogically effective strategy for those striving to achieve anti‐heteronormative classrooms? The arguments for and against coming out by lesbian, gay and bisexual writers are canvassed to discern which are relevant for heterosexuals. I argue that the question of whether to come out is as pedagogically relevant to heterosexuals as those who are gay, lesbian and bisexual. Failing to identify explicitly as heterosexual can serve to reinforce the homosexual–heterosexual binary, where silence about heterosexual identity maintains its ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ status. I also contend that ‘coming out’ as heterosexual necessitates a strategy that undermines the dominance of this identity (which an assertion of this identity can reinforce). To come out by ‘undoing’ the heterosexual self is offered as one approach to this dilemma. This ‘undoing’ strives to denaturalise and decentre heterosexual identity and the heteronormative practices which sustain its privileged position.
How can we study 'Queer', or indeed, should we? Drawing on fieldwork with people raised in interracial families in Britain and Germany, and reflecting on my own coming out as transgendered/genderqueer during the research, I reflect on the role of difference, similarity, and change in the production of queer knowledges. My entry point is a queer diasporic one. Queers of colour, I argue, have a particular stake in queering racialised heterosexualities; yet differences within diasporic spaces clearly matter. While 'Queer' can open up an alternative methodology of redefining and reframing social differences, the directionality of our queering - 'up' rather than 'down' - is clearly relevant. I suggest the anti-racist feminist principle of positionality as fruitful for such a queer methodology of change. This is explored with regard to a selection of empirical and cultural texts, including the debate around Paris is Burning, Jenny Livingston\'s film about the Harlem house/ball scene; the appeal that a non-white heterosexual artist such as South-Asian pop singer MIA can have for queers of colour; the camp role model which Thai sex work femininity can represent for queer and trans people from the second generation of Thai migration; and the solidarity of a Southeast Asian butch with feminine women in her diasporic collectivity.
Is there a queer pedagogy? Or
- D Britzman
Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, Stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), 151-165.
Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l'éducation
- M Bryson
- S De Castell
Bryson, M., & de Castell, S. (1993). Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect.
Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 18(3), 285-305.
Emerging critical scholarship in education: Navigating the doctoral journey
- J Burford
Burford, J. (2014). Writing affectively: Queering the doctoral writing journey. In J. Rath & C. Mutch (Eds.), Emerging critical scholarship in education: Navigating the doctoral journey (pp. 226-239). Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars.
Uneasy feelings: Queer(y)ing the affective-politics of doctoral education. Doctoral thesis
- J Burford
Burford, J. (2016). Uneasy feelings: Queer(y)ing the affective-politics of doctoral
education. Doctoral thesis, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.