Sexualities and Genders in Education

SEXUALITIES AND GENDERS IN EDUCATION Towards Queer Thriving Adam J. Greteman QUEER Series Editors STUDIES & William F. Pinar EDUCATION Nelson M. Rodriguez, & Reta Ugena Whitlock Queer Studies and Education Series editors William F. Pinar Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Nelson M. Rodriguez Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexual Studies The College of New Jersey Ewing, New Jersey, USA Reta Ugena Whitlock Department of Educational Leadership Kennesaw State University Kennesaw, Georgia, USA LGBTQ social, cultural, and political issues have become a defining fea- ture of twenty-first century life, transforming on a global scale any number of institutions, including the institution of education. Situated within the context of these major transformations, this series is home to the most compelling, innovative, and timely scholarship emerging at the intersec- tion of queer studies and education. Across a broad range of educational topics and locations, books in this series incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex categories, as well as scholarship in queer theory arising out of the postmodern turn in sexuality studies. The series is wide- ranging in terms of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives and methodolog- ical approaches, and will include and illuminate much needed intersectional scholarship. Always bold in outlook, the series also welcomes projects that challenge any number of normalizing tendencies within academic scholarship from works that move beyond established frameworks of knowledge production within LGBTQ educational research to works that expand the range of what is institutionally defined within the field of education as relevant queer studies scholarship. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14522 Adam J. Greteman Sexualities and Genders in Education Towards Queer Thriving Adam J. Greteman Department of Art Education School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA Queer Studies and Education ISBN 978-3-319-71128-7 ISBN 978-3-319-71129-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71129-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961554 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Jose A. Bernat Bacete/ gettyimages Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To those fearless queers who paved the road with queer possibilities and to Phillip Weaver who travels those queer roads with me. PREFACE A key lesson I learned while becoming a scholar and writer was that writing is writing what you do not know until it is written. To write is to work toward knowing. The idea for this book was to contemplate and come to know about what I have called queer thriving. I had no clue what exactly such a phrase might mean, but my instinct led me to think there was a need to contemplate what it could mean to thrive queerly, to queerly thrive, particularly given the shifts in the politics and discourses of sexuality. There appeared to be a net gain in the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people alongside growing representations of LGBT lives in the media. At the same time, however, violence against queer people persisted, discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity was still legal in many places, and the global scene pre- sented a host of challenges for global queer bodies and communities. Certain forms of queerness were being folded into the fold of normality while other forms of queerness remained threatened. Queerness, it appeared to me, had survived despite the odds against it—from AIDS to pathological discourses to familial homophobia, and hatred in the hall- ways—and developed an arsenal of tools (and toys) to advocate for itself. So it felt that perhaps there was a need to contemplate what comes upon surviving? Could queer thriving exist alongside surviving, not to cover over the assaults and violence against queers that dispute our survival but to build upon the histories, cultures, practices, and educations of queers to promote queerness, to cultivate a queer present and future? And so I began to write, unsure of what or if such a concept could make sense. And, as I suspect many books do, the concept began to make sense vii viii PREFACE toward the end of its writing. Upon it being written, I came to see a bit more clearly the potential and need for queer thriving, along with its limi- tations. This was helped by the return of a memory that had kept haunting me, annoyingly, in the final weeks before the manuscript was due. I resisted the memory, batting it aside so I could “get on with my work,” until I finally realized the memory was getting at something central to what I was writing. So, I offer that memory—a memory that emerged toward the end of the writing process—here at the beginning. There are a lot of things wrong in the world, particularly when it comes to the experiences of queers—broadly defined, given queerness intersects with the other ways we identify and are identified in the world. We often sense something is wrong before we can name what it is that is wrong. We “feel” before we can name that which we feel. In feeling something wrong, which can also feel right, we work to feel our way into an understanding of what we are feeling by grappling with those feelings and the world giv- ing rise to them. What is wrong and why do I have this niggling feeling? It was in college that I sensed something was wrong, and the wrong I sensed then has directed my thinking and writing in ways I had not expected. In its incessant return to the front of my mind in the summer of 2017, it asked me to look back to see how the “wrong” sensed then has directed me now. I resisted this memory because it was when I was younger, a college undergraduate. It didn’t seem important; it seemed juvenile, particularly since I am now a “professor.” Yet, my experiences then oriented me in ways it took years to understand. Given the rise of and attention to student protests on campuses across the United States that continue to push colleges and universities, for better or worse, in a differ- ent direction, and the innumerous opinion pieces published about the state of college students, I realized this memory of my own student activism helped direct me toward the work I do now. My own activism, looking back on it now, felt mundane and hence unimportant, but as Marilyn Frye (1983) argued, “the mundane experience of the oppressed provides another clue” (p. 2). And this experience provided me a clue as to my aims in and for this book. I was a resident advisor while in college, largely to help pay for school. During my second year as a resident advisor, we were, as a group, tasked with creating a “tunnel of oppression.” This was the early 2000s, when college campuses were seeking to address diversity in ways that built on or extended the previous work on such issues. The Tunnel of Oppression was a program used to illustrate the multiple forms of oppressions that exist PREFACE ix and their intersections. It was a pedagogical exercise that asked students (or other visitors) to encounter representations of oppression. It was an exercise often geared toward privileged students. Yet, in being geared toward the privileged, the intersectional realities of oppression allowed privilege to become conditioned. As the tunnel illustrated the multiplicity of oppressions, so too did it challenge viewers to contemplate the multiple forms of privilege (Carbado, 2005; McIntosh, 1988). A tunnel of oppression is simultaneously a tunnel of privilege asking visitors to encounter their own and others’ complexities as social beings. However, the focus of the tunnel was oppression—privilege went unaddressed explicitly, in part, because our thinking about privilege was still quite underdeveloped. We were undergraduates, remember. Oppression, however, was the concept that we had to grapple with and engage somehow as we ourselves were learning how to put words to the various oppressions. “The root of the word ‘oppression’ is,” as Frye (1983) argued “the ele- ment ‘press’” (p. 2). And, she continued, presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk … Something pressed is something caught between or among forces and bar- riers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict, or prevent the thing’s motion or mobility.

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