Queer Pedagogies Out of Place and Time: Redrawing the Boundaries of Youth, Sexual and Gender Difference, and Education

ABSTRACT

For this contribution to the “Cartographies” section of the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author focuses on the concept of spatialized time as made material in the location of historical places, in particular as it relates to a reconsideration of approaches to Australian queer/LGBT youth education. Accordingly, the author employs historical maps as illustrative examples of spatialized time, reflecting on the relationships between historical knowledge and queer youth education.

KEYWORDS:

• Bioethics
• gender difference
• geography
• LGBT health
• LGBT youth
• pedagogy
• queer education
• sexual difference
• sexualities education; space; queer history

Acknowledgments

A version of this article was presented as part of the University of Sydney Network for Childhood and Youth Research Seminar Series in 2012, and I thank those who attended the seminar and especially Dorothy Bottrell for inviting me to present my research, and Camilla Pilgrim for assisting with arrangements.

Notes

^1. Please see the lyric sheet from the vinyl release of the album (Anderson).

^2. I want to thank Autumn Fiester, Lance Wahlert and anonymous reviewers, and the Journal of Homosexuality, for their support of this work and for their work in bringing this collection together. Thanks also to Cheryl Zubrzycki, Production Editor at Taylor & Francis. This article was originally written in 2011–2012; many of its concerns are discussed in a number of other publications I have authored, and I have included references to those in this article for the interested reader.

^3. Critiques of the limits of health-based approaches in relation to queer youth education are now longstanding, and my thinking in this regard has been influenced by research in the field from scholars such as Mary Lou Rasmussen and Susan Talburt. Please see my 2014 article, “Queer Contingencies: Bifurcation and the Sexuality of Schooling,” for a discussion of some of this work, as well as references to some relevant work, such as work by Rasmussen (2006) and Talburt (2004).

^4. Clearly, the theoretical and curricular intervention that I am supporting here shares kinship with related activist endeavors such as the LGBT History Month activities in the United States and the UK; this work has also informed my own activist and educational work around the proposition of a queer history month in Australia, coming out of my work with the Queer Youth Education Project that I established at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

^5. See Kalender (2010) for another account, with a different interrogative focus, critiquing the way in which bioethical knowledges and practices (re)produce normativities.

^6. Insofar as my intervention is a queer one, I ought to be clear, though, that by asking what the “correct” place is I am not, in the final analysis, proposing a corrective approach but a conciliatory one that remains alert to the ways in which heightened attention to the historical can generate its own disciplinary regimes of knowledge (for a fuller discussion of my theorization of “methodological reconciliation,” please see Marshall (2013)).

^7. For example, see Waidzunas (2012) for a discussion that relates to my final point here.

^8. This image along with two other cartographic images discussed later in this article—“Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne 1 City” and “Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne 2 North and South”—can be found in the book Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne (Willett et al., 2011). I would like to acknowledge the designers, Lin Tobias / La Bella Design and Lorna Hendry / Text & Type, my co-editors Graham Willett and Wayne Murdoch, and the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives. For another, different reading of this map that shares some of the same observations expressed here, please see my 2015 article “Beating Space and Time: Historical Gay Sex and Queer Cultural Geographies of Masculinities,” (Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20(1), 33–51).

^9. By “LGBT” content I mean not only to refer to content that explicitly addresses lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender knowledge or “issues,” but content that explicitly addresses sexual and gender difference (e.g., often such inclusion is not characterized as “LGBT” but as “same-sex-attracted” or “gender-questioning” and so on).

^10. As Willett writes in his description of a news article covering heightened police activity at the Black Rock beat in 1976: “The Age headline declared breathlessly, ‘Police Go Gay to Lure Homosexuals.’ In its report, senior local police gleefully revealed that officers had been lurking near the Black Rock beat, observing gay men on the beaches and in the tea-tree, teaching themselves to imitate the mannerisms, especially the “particular walk” by which gay men identified each other. Some of the more attractive officers were then despatched [sic] in plain clothes to put this knowledge to work. Within a few days, 68 men had been arrested for soliciting with homosexual intent” (Willett, 2011b, p. 115).

^11. I have altered these titles for clarity for my purposes here. In Willett et al. (2011), they appear as “Melbourne (cbd)” (pp. 12–13) and “North of the river” (p. 14) and “South of the river” (p. 15).