‘After‐queer’ tendencies in queer research

Abstract

Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an 'after-queer' vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an 'after-queer', we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers' visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research.Why a special issue on 'after-queer' research in education? And why mark an 'after' if the 'queer turn' has constituted a 'hot paradigm' (Green 2002, 521) in the academy? In naming this special issue 'after-queer', we were not signifying that queer theory was dead, or that we were over queer theory. We were interested in how research projects, within and outside education, repeat certain truisms, and how to better understand how these repetitions infuse the research process. Research hailing itself as queer theory has often tethered itself to subjects of gender and sexuality and to narratives of political progress. Despite many creative projects that interrogate pleasures of teaching and learning (McWilliam 1999), imagine queer pedagogies (Britzman 1995; theory has been limited by researchers' imaginings of a need for a 'subject' of queer research and particular ideas of educational and political progress. These limitations of 'queer' are not entirely unique to educational research, though they have some specific manifestations in the field related, perhaps, to its 'pragmatic' location in educational institutions and researchers' desires to recuperate a queer future for youth.

Leave “Those Kids” Alone: On the Conflation of School Homophobia and Suffering Queers

“…While I do not claim to challenge the truth or validity of the studies serving as this narrative's empirical bedrock, in this article I make a conceptual intervention in the idea that queer children and youth have needs that differ from those of other children and youth on the basis of their gender or sexuality alone, and that doing well by them requires adults to act on the basis of this difference. I examine the conflation of “fighting school homophobia” with working on behalf of particular young people who express o r who will express a non‐heterosexual subjectivity: “helping young queers.” This conflation has been previously identified by Susan Talburt and Mary Louise Rasmussen (), who observe that “in queer research in education, ‘our children’ are ubiquitous. These are different children than those portrayed by heteronormative media, a new brand of ‘our kids’, who have a ‘right’ to be gay, to be happy, and to have a better future” (p. 3).…”

How to ‘fail’ in school without really trying: queering pathways to success

“…We recognise the tension noted by other scholars (Talburt and Rasmussen 2010) between using queer as an identity category, given the ways this usage stands to concretise notions of self and subjectivity, alongside using it as a verb, which conversely seeks to trouble, disrupt, and challenge those same concepts. Moreover, developed through a specific set of political tenets that problematise normative assumptions, queer theory works to locate and undo the seemingly smooth façade of what constitutes 'the normal' (Britzman 1995).…”

‘It gets narrower’: creative strategies for re-broadening queer peer education

“…Such ambiguities invite what Talburt and Rasmussen (2010) have called a 'subjunctive methodology that dwells in complicated temporalities' (7) for educational and other research. Performance ethnography and other arts-based methods can provide such malleable approaches, in addition to complex knowledge such as emerging sexualities (Sykes and Goldstein 2004).…”