Queer outings: uncomfortable stories about the subjects of post‐structural school ethnography

Abstract

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’.

Keywords:

• subjectivation
• ethnography
• uncanny

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Mary Lou Rasmussen and Susan Talburt as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful considerations of the various versions of this paper. My thanks also to Tamara Bibby, Debbie Epstein and Jessica Ringrose for their insights into projection and the ways in which the unconscious escapes us.