The messiness of putting queerness to work

Queerness can be messy. Not just as a description of individual people, or as applied to a community, but rather as a way of knowing and being that disrupts binaries, blurs boundaries, and holds contradictions (Campbell & Farrier, 2015; Love, 2016). These are all messy things, as they don’t ascribe to the neat, organized, and disciplined ways of thinking that are prioritized in the academy. While many queer scholars acknowledge and often celebrate the messiness of their subjectivity, which creates new modes of knowledge production and mobilization (Love, 2016, p. 345), education more broadly still struggles with what to do with queerness.

Putting queerness to work means making space for the (im)possibilities, tensions, and complexities of the lived experience of queer and trans people and their communities, honouring their embodied knowledge of navigating a cisheterosexist world. When queerness and its relationship to education is invoked, it is often primarily through the lens of anti-bullying and identity frameworks to support students (Fields et al., 2014). But queering our scholarship is more than advocating for representation of LGBTQ peoples; it is challenging the fundamental assumptions upon which education is built. Youth homelessness is a queer issue, accessibility is a queer issue, the school-to-prison pipeline is a queer issue; education and its intersection with any and every social issue is queer.

As educators, what messy conversations can we have that use queerness beyond the politics of representation? What (im)possibilities might queerness produce? How can we use the messiness of queerness to not only create new approaches to the common issues within education, but also to challenge the norms and assumptions of the academy, as it continues with the historical disenfranchisement of queer and trans people. In a time with increasing attacks against LGBTQ people, both inside and outside of schools, it is important to push back against the ongoing disparaging rhetoric about queer and trans youth, their families, and their communities. Drawing attention to how queer epistemologies, theories, and methodologies are applied across educational contexts, the articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry (CI) put queerness to work in ways that create more inclusive spaces for all young people. These engagements challenge the “neat” ways of organizing queer and trans subjectivity within the logics of the cisheterosexist imagination. The authors move beyond representation to illuminate how queerness produces ways of knowing and being that affirm not just the identities but the embodied knowledges of queer/trans communities. Together, the articles in this issue of CI shed light on some of the messiness of putting queer theories to work: the felt (im)possibilities, complexities, tensions, and contradictions of trying to make curriculum, policies, and practices more intersectional, sustainable, and hospitable in and around schools.

In the first article, titled “Using a Queer of Color Critique to Work Toward a Black LGBTQ + Inclusive K–12 Curriculum,” author Shamari Reid discusses how the lack of mandated LGBTQ + school curricula, along with the pervasive silence in teacher education around gender and sexual diversity, leads to misunderstanding LGBTQ + identities as a white issue. This forecloses the possibility of Black LGBTQ + students seeing themselves reflected in school curricula. Despite these realities, Reid’s article brims with a type of hope—not that schools will get better as such—but that we can learn from community spaces like ballroom dances when imagining curriculum.

Recognizing that LGBTQ + inclusive curriculum is rarely present in formal schools and, when it is, tends to centre whiteness, Reid’s article presents a framework for designing K–12 LGBTQ + inclusive curriculum that foregrounds Black LGBTQ + youth experiences. He uses data from a larger qualitative case study to think through the curricular possibilities around how eight Black LGBTQ + youth participated in ballroom retreats, ball competitions, house practices, and vogue theory courses. While this study is not focused on formal curriculum, Reid was inspired by Cindy Cruz’s (2013) reflexive practice that allowed her to think about “radical curriculum”: how LGBTQ + youth of colour in her study were learning in community spaces through artistic co-creation. Reid is also thinking about his work in relation to community creative spaces, observing that Black LGBTQ + youth’s self-esteem and uses of agency greatly improved when they learned about the history of ballroom legends and icons.

Observing this correlation between self-esteem/agency and learning, Reid pays attention to how ballroom educators (those facilitating ballroom retreats, competitions, house practices, and vogue classes) were sharing knowledge with the youth. Reid distills three key elements of the ballroom educator’s approach: (1) they emphasized the resilience and agency of Black LGBTQ + people, especially Black trans women, instead of pathologizing them; (2) they drew on the experiential knowledge of local intra-historians—that is “members from within the local ballroom community who are called on by others in the community to share the history of the community with other ballroom members” (p. 116); and (3) they shared information from digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and personal websites because ballroom historians and archivists tend to document ballroom histories digitally.

Analyzing these three elements of their educational practices through a queer of colour critique lens, Reid provides a frame for imagining LGBTQ + curriculum that centres Black genius, community, and wisdom. Specifically, he invites other educators and curriculum workers to ask themselves the following three questions when designing LGBTQ + inclusion curriculum: (1) does the curriculum tell stories to/about Black LGBTQ + youth that resist damage-centred narratives to centre their genius, agency, and resilience?; (2) are members of Black LGBTQ + students’ communities involved in the creation/facilitation of curriculum, and do the assignments/lessons deepen students’ understanding of their own community members?; and (3) does the curriculum feature digital content created by members of Black LGBTQ + students’ communities? While this type of Black LGBTQ + curriculum might feel like a current impossibility within many K–12 schooling contexts, Reid’s article invites us to think about informal ways of learning and how to draw on community wisdom as a form of curricular resistance.

Speaking in its own way to the “overwhelming silence in teacher education around gender and sexual diversity” (Reid, 2023, p. 108), in the next article Sara Staley attempts to bridge the divide between teacher education and Gender and Sexual Diversity (GSD) education literature. In the article titled “Learning Through Practice: Conceptualizing the Demands of Queer-Inclusive Teaching,” Staley explores tensions between disruption and inclusion and how both might be necessary. Drawing on a larger project that observed the practices of 12 teachers who were committed to queer-inclusive practice, Staley focuses on one kindergarten teacher, Gabby, a straight cis educator, to discuss demands, or the tensions of doing what she calls “queer-inclusive” teaching.

Staley imagines that “queer-inclusive” teaching (a combination of words that may seem contradictory to some) has two pedagogical goals: on the one hand, to include LGBTQ + topics in curriculum and, on the other hand, to move beyond inclusion. Queer, in the queer theory sense, strives to disrupt norms. Inclusion, on the other hand, does not inherently disrupt norms. Staley’s invocation of queer next to inclusive and her emphasis on both including and disrupting inclusion signal the complexities of putting queer theory to work in a context like schooling that reproduces norms constantly. Staley theorizes these tensions as demands and focuses on two main challenges: (1) disrupting normativity on a pedagogical level and (2) dealing with learners’ resistances to difficult knowledge as well as emotional discomfort. Overall, her article invites readers to consider the tensions of negotiating queering and inclusion on the instructional level of teaching.

Lee Airton’s article, titled “You Don’t Know Me: Welcoming Gender Diversity in Schools via an Ethic of Hospitality,” exemplifies the messiness of putting queer theories to work in a different way than Reid and Staley. They call for a counter-intuitive approach to supporting gender diverse folx—decentring trans people—that carries “a disconcerting corollary: that we must be willing to give up on the absolute certainty of knowing who we are as currency for transacting our belonging in education” (p. 162).

Drawing on Claudia Ruitenberg’s work, Airton argues that hospitality (in a Derridean way) requires a radical openness wherein the host is not assuming they know (or can ever know) the guest and what the guest would need to feel welcome. In fact, through this lens of hospitality, “getting to know” is a form of violence. Requiring that another is knowable makes welcome conditional, when true hospitality would require the host to receive the stranger “without first ascertaining if they are a worthy recipient of [the host’s] hospitality” (p. XX). According to Airton’s reading of an ethic of hospitality, trans students should not need to disclose their transness, first, because it is invasive; second, because it requires they know their own transness; and third, because it is irrelevant to whether or not someone is capable of welcoming. “Getting to know” transness is also a form of violence within education because so often efforts to define transness are efforts to make cishet people care about trans people by emphasizing their vulnerability. Trans and queer suffering may provoke educators and policy makers to pay attention but this damage-centred (Tuck, 2009) approach deflects attention away from how all people are negatively affected by white colonial patriarchal gender and sexual norms.

Defining trans people in relation to transphobia can also reproduce a victim/bully binary—a perpetually in-distress trans subject versus a transphobe who needs to be punished. When individualization occurs as discipline in schools, queer students of colour are more likely to be heavily surveilled, blamed for their own victimization, punished more frequently, and/or bullied for their race as well as their gender (Roberts & Marx, 2018). Individualization as accommodation may also require that trans students disclose their identities and/or perform transness in ways that have been made legible, which might also make some educators feel they have no responsibility to support trans students if they are unaware of their presence.

Decentring transness through a Derridean ethic of hospitality is therefore one attempt to put queer theory to work, but what might decentring transness actually look like in practice? How can one decentre transness without avoiding transness? To answer that question, Airton interrupts three common scripts of gender diversity with the logic of a Derridean ethic of hospitality. The first common script is that educators need to be able to identify and know “the transgender student” in order to welcome and support them. Airton instead argues that policies can welcome transness by describing three broad-brush categories: binary, nonbinary, and fluid (with an insistence that experiences and identities never need to be stable—they can change and evolve). Airton also suggests that educators focus on how to receive and encounter anyone’s gender identifications (including those of cishet individuals) as if they expected it. The second script Airton interrupts is that teachers need to be a “good teacher” for transgender students by having specific interventions. They articulate that under an ethic of hospitality, being a “good teacher” simply means having no expectations of who their students are so learners can show up as their whole selves. The third script they interrupt relates to how to include trans representation in the teacher’s own domain—their taught curriculum. Drawing on Ruitenberg again, they envision a “hospitable curriculum” as open-ended. Airton’s article invites readers to grapple with the contradictions of building a framework that supports trans youth without putting the onus on their identities.

Continuing to address the complexities of identification and representation, as Airton does, but taking a different approach, Ryan Schey invites readers to consider the tensions between the demand to know queerness in others and the ethical dimensions of authorial disclosure and the right to remain opaque and perhaps unknown to others. In his article titled “‘Is he Gay? That’s Like, All I Want to Know’: Curiosity, Authenticity, and Epistemology in a GSA Bookclub,” Schey draws on a yearlong literacy ethnography at a comprehensive public school in a Midwestern city in the US. Through an ethnographic telling case (Green et al., 2020; Mitchell, 1984), Schey unpacks questions of epistemic authority and the value of transparency or opacity when it comes to queerness as representation in literature. While Airton underscores that teachers must relinquish their desire to know how their students identify in order to really welcome them, Schey observes how a group of LGBTQ + students within a GSA bookclub make sense of their own curiosity about whether the author of the book they are reading, Dante & Aristotle, is queer.

The students’ desire to know about the author’s sexuality illustrates what studies on the literacies of LGBTQ + people have revealed: that queer and trans people often form kinship networks and develop a greater sense of historical rootedness through reading stories with queer and trans representation. While Schey recognizes this embodied connection, he meditates on the value of authenticity when it comes to works of fiction and on the trappings of self-disclosure when it comes to authorship and the genre of a given text.

Drawing on Keeling (2019) and Snorton (2017), he observes that through a Western Eurocentric lens, transparency is often required for a sense of authenticity: that is, people are expected to define themselves, which according to Glissant (1997) is a reduction. Glissant wrote: “I have to reduce. … I relate [your difference] to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system” (p. 190). This reduction and naming of queerness as stable is in tension with queer theories’ investments in multiplicity, variability, fluidity, and unknowability. Similar to how a Derridean ethic of hospitality sees “getting to know” as a form of violence, requiring that authors announce themselves to be recognizable or authentic in this case poses questions. Is queer transparency in fiction writers necessary? Ultimately, Schey does not come to a conclusion about what makes a literary text authentic or not, but instead tries to illustrate the complexity of our desire to “know” and name queerness. His writing draws attention to divisions within queer theories and queer activisms, where some wish to decentre identification while others do not. Schey’s article ultimately illustrates the complexities of building not just safe but authentic spaces for LGBTQ + youth.

From underscoring the need to centre the specificity of Black trans women and of local experiences and knowledges in order to build a radical curriculum for LGBTQ + youth of colour, as Reid argues, to understanding the oblique ways in which students come to satisfy their need to know the queerness of the authors they read, as illustrated by Schey, the authors in this issue of CI demonstrate the messiness of putting queerness to work in education. Central to this messiness is the tension between the demand to know in order to centre experiences that are otherwise marginalized and the impossibility of knowing—as the “endlessly deferred” nature of all claims to knowledge (Lather, 1993). While both Reid and Staley make strong arguments for centring and including the experiences of LGBTQ + communities that would otherwise remain erased or marginalized, Staley offers the paradoxical notion of queer inclusion, precisely to disrupt the deceivingly neat logic of inclusion, which as Airton suggests, demands that those who are to be “included” can be known in advance of the inclusion. Airton also invites us to consider a kind of “queer inclusion” by inviting educators to suspend their assumptions about how they imagine transness (and queerness) will manifest. Airton asks us to welcome our students as they come, knowing that we cannot know who they are, yet treating them as we know them and as if they are precisely who we were expecting. This approach to (not) knowing our students recognizes their right to opacity as authors of their own identifications and of the many shifting expressions of who they are and how they wish to be seen or not seen. This is indeed messy work, particularly in institutions shaped by a carceral logic that demands knowing and that requires that students (and teachers, for that matter) fit into the neat boxes that we have created for them in order to manage, surveil, and correct their knowing and being. In this sense, queerness, in all its messiness, is also anti-carceral and the authors in this issue give us tools for enacting this logic of “queer inclusion,” one that welcomes without knowing who is welcomed and that reads “the other” expansively without pinning them in place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.