Introduction to the Special Issue: Queers of Color and Anti‐Oppressive Knowledge Production

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Notes

Notes

1. “Queer” is used in this article to denote same‐sex desires and identities, as well as transgender and other gender identities and expressions that are marked in similar fashion as deviant and/or nonconforming by heteronormative power structures. “Queer of color” is used to denote queer subjects who are marked as non‐White and targeted as such under White supremacy; this includes people marked fully or partially as Black, Latino, Asian, or Indigenous/Native American. These uses of “queer” and “queer of color” reflect the deployments of these terms in a queer of color critique, the body of scholarship that is reviewed later in this article.

2. This scholarship will be cited and discussed in the next section of this article.

3. “Anti‐oppressive knowledge production” refers to intellectual discourses that are produced in opposition to material and ideological modes of domination. Scholarship and bodies of knowledge marked as “anti‐oppressive” in this article assume the complicated yet deleterious impact of racism, sexism, classsism, homophobia, and other systemic and asymmetrical arrangements of power and seek to explain, problematize, and subvert these various forms of oppression. For further context, see Kumashiro’s () discussion of anti‐oppressive education.

4. See Cohen () and Reddy () for further discussions of queer studies’ influence on a queer of color critique, and see Ferguson () and Hong and Ferguson () for further discussions of the influence of women of color feminism.

5. Although a queer of color critique overall has yet to develop a sustained analysis of education, Johnson’s () work includes narratives of Black queer male experiences at historically Black colleges, and Alexander’s () work includes an analysis of his pedagogy as a Black queer professor.

6. While the extant scholarly literature has described queer of color negotiations of hostile peer relationships and institutional cultures in K–12 (McCready, ; Ngo, ; Quinn, ; Vaught, ) and postsecondary (Harper & Gasman, ; Harris, ; Patton, ; Patton & Simmons, ) educational institutions, there is a comparative dearth of work in areas like curriculum studies, policy studies, and teacher education that directly examines queer of color educational experiences.

7. A number of examples (Blackburn, ; Goode‐Cross & Tager, ; Harper & Gasman, ; Harris, ; McCready, ; Patton, ; Strayhorn, Blakewood, & DeVita, ; Vaught, ) speak to the focus on Black queer males. While more scholarship is needed on Black queer males, the extant literature offers more on their experiences than Black queer females (Blackburn, ; Patton & Simmons, ; Quinn, ), queer Latinos (Cruz, ; Misa, ), queer Asians (Ngo, ; Varney, ), and trans students of color (Brockenbrough & Boatwright, Forthcoming). Diaz and Kosciw () include specific attention to Native American queers in their work of queer students of color, but attention to them in the literature overall, as with many other queer of color subgroups, remains scant. All of these works on queer students of color outnumber the few works on queer of color educators (Alexander, ; Brockenbrough, ; Lewis, ), and other queer of color stakeholders appear absent from the current research literature.

8. As McCready notes in his conclusion to this special issue, he uses “queer of color analysis” to refer to Ferguson’s () explanation of the mode of analysis deployed in Aberrations in Black. I use “queer of color critique” in this introduction because of this particular phrase’s emergence as a label for the larger body of critical scholarship on queers of color. See Allen (), Hames‐García (), Mitchell (), and Reddy () for examples.

9. Bowleg () raises important concerns about the capacity of quantitative methodologies to facilitate inquiries of the intersectional identities of Black lesbians. These concerns are relevant to the potential application of quantitative methodologies to research on other queer of color populations as well.