‘After‐queer’: subjunctive pedagogies

Abstract

This article offers a reading of the 2006 film The History Boys, which depicts eight male working‐class grammar school students preparing for exams to enter Oxford and Cambridge and two teachers who prepare them. I read the film’s subjunctive mood, which gestures to possibility and an ‘otherwise’, as connected to an analytic of ‘after‐queer’ that complicates linear understandings of youth, sexuality, development, and education. I elaborate three intertwined themes: the boys’ multiple relations to school knowledge; the blurring of categories of youth and adult through circulations of sexuality; and the dislocation of desire from predictable categories of identity. I connect the unpredictability and creativity of identities and desires to the need to open the research imagination to a subjunctive methodology that dwells in complicated temporalities, uncertain knowledges, and disorder that underlies seeming orders.

Keywords:

• after‐queer
• subjunctive
• pedagogy

Notes

1. On the problems of ‘after’, see Halley and Parker (2007) as well as the introduction to this volume.

2. For ease of reference, I offer page numbers from the published text of The History Boys (Bennett 2004).

3. In a critique of ‘counterfactual’, or subjunctive, history and the need to discipline the historical imagination, Bunzl (2004) makes an interesting choice of words: ‘In “straight” history, we have what is a straightforward answer, even if it is unfashionable in some quarters – truth’ (847).

4. Mac An Ghaill (2000) discusses this moment in Britain’s educational history, characterizing a context in which ‘during the 1980s in England we witnessed the ascendancy of the New Right agenda occupying the moral high ground with its projected images of a consumer‐based acquisitive individualism, the patriarchal family, the strong state, and a patriarchic British nation’ (165).

5. Another British film that was released the same year as The History Boys, Notes on a Scandal (2006) offers a similar opportunity for analysis of dislocations of age, desire, identity, subject, and order. This film about school and schoolteachers’ lives ‘upsets’ locations of homo‐ and heterosexual desire and appropriate age relations. A ‘quasi‐lesbian’ desire circulates between an older and a younger (married) teacher, who is having a sexual relationship with a 15‐year‐old male student. In the midst of multiple obsessive relationships, the only actor who displays clarity about the nature of the relationships in which he is involved and enjoys a confident sexuality that recognizes pleasure is the teenage boy, whose frankness stands in stark contrast to the adults around him.