Queer superheroes: the impossibility of difference, a neoliberal promise of equal (teacher) love

Abstract

This paper troubles the im/possibilities of exploring difference through queer popular culture within the teacher education classroom. This article locates such pedagogical practice as existing in opposition to dominant neoliberal discourses around the marketization of higher education as well as queerness in mainstream popular culture, and the expectation of students that all education coursework should be ‘relevant’ to mainstream marketplace classrooms. In response to previous research and our own empirical evidence that highlights the ways in which students’ (and teacher education courses’) conception of ‘relevance’ is not critically theorized in either pedagogical or curricular ways, this paper problematizes such notions of ‘relevance’ within a changing ecology of teacher education classrooms. Here we argue that the hopes for challenging normativity within teacher education spaces can be at odds with the possibilities that popular culture devices offer, as they are inevitably shaped, informed and foreclosed by governmental policy and social expectations. Such neoliberal influences do not necessarily align well with the high hopes held by critical educators for the use of popular culture as a tool for challenging notions of ‘difference’ within the teacher education classroom.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

^2. See, for example Savage et al.'s (2013) analysis of the BBC's ‘Great British Class Survey’ in which it was found that there exists in Britain an elite class of 6% with education from the most prestigious universities and an ‘precariat’ of 15% with few or no educational qualifications.

^3. While there is insufficient space in this paper to more comprehensively unpack the problematic and hegemonizing side effects of the It Gets Better videos and then extensive ‘offline’ phenomenon, the subject has been treated more fully in two recent articles which may be of interest to readers (Harris and Farrington 2014; Gray 2014, 109).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily M. Gray

Emily M. Gray hails from Walsall, UK and is currently a Lecturer in Education Studies at RMIT's School of Education in Melbourne, Australia. Her publications include refereed journal articles, book chapters and an edited collection entitled Queer Teachers, Identity and Performativity co-edited with Anne Harris and published by Palgrave. Her theoretical interests are interdisciplinary and she draws from the fields of sociology, cultural studies and education primarily to consider questions of social justice. She is particularly interested in interrogating how attempts to teach social justice issues are both enabled and constrained within different pedagogical settings. More recently her work has turned to consider the role of affect in learning and teaching within a range of institutional settings and contexts and to the complexities effect (re)produces in relation to social justice. Emily's work also explores popular culture, public pedagogies and audience studies, in particular the ways in which gender and sexual identities are explored within online fandom and fanfiction. She considers how popular culture is deployed as a pedagogical tool and with the effects that this produces. Some of this work is located within the Gothic and with how Gothic tropes are used within contemporary popular culture to examine the construction of monstrous Others that exist at the margins of the social world.

Anne Harris

Dr Anne Harris is an American-Australian playwright and Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts Education, and publishes in the areas of creative and cultural studies, diasporic and refugee identities, and gender and sexualities diversity. She is an alumna of Young Playwrights Inc in New York City, where she continues to collaborate in playwriting, storytelling and creative pedagogies research. She is a graduate of New York University where she studied with Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner and Maria Irene Fornes, among others. She also continues collaborations begun in Central Australia, where she lived and worked for 7 years.