Queer Theory

The aim of queer theory is to destabilize symbolically and materially based notions of normalcy in regards to human relations (sexual and nonsexual) and binaries, such as heterosexual/homosexual, which foster the status quo and deny people the space to fashion their own sexualities. Queer theory is an academic term but has its origins in social movements that took place within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and ally (LGBTA) communities, ones that attempted to remain inclusive by assuming difference as the terms for relationships and also to dissolve the dominate/subjugate hierarchies within sexuality by discomposing the logic that maintains them. Within the U.S. academic scene, queer theory emerged during the mid-1980s as a form of cultural and material criticism and has its intellectual roots in feminist, critical, and post-structural theories. Transferred to the scene of curriculum studies, queer theory has been employed to examine the very possibility of education. That is, the possibility of teaching and learning when difference is read as a disruption to the normalcy and routine of schooling. Earlier work in curriculum studies focused on destabilizing gender and sexual identity categories; examining reproduction of and resistance toward the conventions of male-to-male relations; challenging sanitized representations of LGBTA issues, concerns, and figures; and, of course, homophobia and heterosexism within public education. More recent scholarship has interrelated queer theory with longer-standing discourses in the field, including autobiography, place studies, and questions regarding educational research methodologies, to create innovative and unique forms of curriculum theorizing, ones that attempt to intervene within dominant narratives at the crossroads of sexuality and teaching and learning.

Queer theory has provided curriculum studies with mechanisms to name and make meaning of knowledge deemed unworthy and those thoughts it finds difficult to think. Extending a key question within the field of curriculum studies (Herbert Spencer's question, What knowledge is of most worth?), queer theory has been employed by curriculum scholars to illustrate the ways in which knowledge and ignorance, far from being in opposition, are intricately interrelated with each other. Here, ignorance is not the absence of knowledge but a constitutive force that structures and authorizes what becomes intelligible and what becomes taboo. That is, what is too unsettling or too risky to think about as knowable. Therefore, knowledge (and curriculum content) is examined as an effect of ignorance—always already caught up in the politics of knowledge production—and not merely something that is discovered. To examine the interrelationship between knowledge and ignorance, curriculum scholars have investigated the [Page 716]production of normalcy both within and outside of school-related discourses, and examine the relationship between those productions and cultural, material, political, and educational violence toward those ideas and persons marked abnormal or deviant. Knowledge of most worth is never neutral or natural within queer theory, and it returns us to how bodies are made to practice and the practice of making bodies. That is, it returns us to questions about how certain human relationships and forms of thought become naturalized and mundane while others become abnormal and exotic.

Whereas the terms gay and lesbian have been conceived as nouns or identities, queer theory signifies actions more than actors and the destabilization of both heterosexual and homosexual identity more than the search for an authentic sense of self within a heterosexist world. Similar to the use of curriculum theorizing in place of curriculum theory—to connote teaching and learning as continuously in the making—queer theory can be thought of as a verb that signifies something in excess of its signifier: a politics in the making that subverts and disrupts the hegemonic discourse of normalcy. The aim, however, is not to merely invert the heterosexual/homosexual binary and courageously uphold the latter term, even if only temporarily, but instead to question the stability of categories implicated in the ways curriculum studies organizes its knowledge. Of course, questions about the usefulness of queer for unsettling these frameworks are embedded in curriculum scholarship itself. For this reason, it might be more helpful to think of a multiplicity of queer theories within curriculum studies. Here queer theory is refashioned in relation to global capitalism, participatory democracy, grassroots insurgencies, generational differences, hip-hop culture, contemporary literature, and so on. It is also refashioned in relation to activism within educational communities, including the work of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Alliance and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Whether it is intervention into academic discourse or activism within educational settings, queer theory involves re-signifying practices. That is, it symbolizes attempts by those who have been atomized because of calcified, rigid gender and sexual categories and roles to redeploy the discourse and terms that sought their subjugation.

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