The paradox of education and teaching sexualities with uncertainty

ABSTRACT

Is it ethical to want students to become non-queerphobic as an outcome of our teaching? This question is situated within thinking about teaching for social justice. It takes an event where a student challenges a course’s queer pedagogy and thinks with it to expose ‘the inherent paradox of education’. This is the notion that in its desires for individual and social transformation, education presumes to know how students should behave and how the world should be. The paper considers how educators might approach this paradox more ethically. It argues for a reconceptualisation of education as an ‘uncertain event’ that involves approaching teaching without preconceived agendas about what educational encounters will eventuate. It also involves a reconfiguration of ethics and education, where ethics is understood as implied rather than applied. This rearrangement invites educators to engage in a sensible orientation to teaching where attention is paid to its nuances, textures and complexities..

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• social justice
• higher education pedagogy
• LBGT queer pedagogy
• ethics
• paradox of education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Queerphobia is employed here to describe ‘discrimination experienced by all LGBT+ people, including all people who live outside the constraints of cisheteronormative existences … ’ (Marzetti 2018, 702). Cis gender refers to people whose gender identity matches the biological sex they were assigned at birth. Cisheteronormative describes the way the world is organised to assume gender identity and biological sex always match and that opposite genders are sexually attracted to each other. Cisheteronormativity prescribes this set of gender and sexual relations as ‘normal’.

2. Heteronormativity is a system of practices and structures which work to normalise heterosexuality by producing the assumption that gender is a binary where opposites attract (Warner 1993).