Getting queer: Teacher education, gender studies, and the cross disciplinary quest for queer pedagogies

Queer politics, if it is to remain queer, needs to be able to perform the function of emptying queerness of its referentiality or positivity, guarding against its tendency to concrete embodiment, and thereby preserving queerness as a resistant relation rather than as an op-positional substance. Otherwise, queer culture is likely to suffer, on a larger political scene, the normalizing vicissitudes already undergone by so-called queer theory….“queer theory ” has been…transformed into an unproblematic, substantive designation for a determinate subfield of academic practice, respectable enough to appear in advertisements for academic jobs and in labels on the shelves of bookstores. Signifying little more than what used to be signified by “lesbian and gay studies,” “queer theory ” seems to have forfeited, in this process, much of its po-litical utility. In any case, the more it verges on becoming a normative academic discipline, the less queer “queer theory ” can plausibly claim to be. (David Halperin, 1995, p. 113