From queer theory to academic literacies

In this paper I will outline what a queer approach to pedagogy has been, and might be, conceptualised as, and what this might mean for academic literacies. I will outline how my dedication to queer or the impulse of queering normatizing discourses originally developed in response to thinking about sexed and gendered subjects, but has gone on to motivate and inform my pedagogical thinking. This theory has aided me in articulating my ethical stance, and in developing my methodological practice, in teaching and fostering the capacity of students to engage in the academic conversation. In queer theory the personal and the political, the macro and micro, identity, the self and other, social relations and structures coalesced for me. It has been my academic project to consider the practicability of queer insights regarding subjectivity ever since. I will address queer conceptions of subjectivity, power, and discourse, and how and what it can hope to influence, and (unashamedly normatively) why. I will also outline its continuities and differences from existing strains of pedagogical theory, specifically critical pedagogy. Thus while the agency of queer theory does not allow for the political possibility of completely rejecting the discourses through which subjects become intelligible in society, a significant insight of queer theory is that “Subversive practices … challenge conventions of reading, and demand new possibilities of reading” (Butler, 1993, n.p). It is these conventions of reading which I conceive of as the terrain of my pedagogical work, and their normative underpinnings in need of constant interrogation