| Author(s): | Bryson, M. de Castell, S. |
| Date: | 1993 |
| Publication: | Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de l’éducation |
| Citation: | Bryson, M., & de Castell, S. (1993). Queer pedagogy: Praxis makes im/perfect. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de l’éducation, 18(3), 285–305. https://doi.org/10.2307/1495388 |
| Section on webpage: | Queer Pedagogy Literature |
| Tenets: | Considering alternative histories and narratives. Examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information. Honoring diversity and lived experiences through intersectional approaches. |
| Annotation: | (Abstract) This article examines tensions between post-structuralist theories of subjectivity and essentialist constructions of identity in the context of a lesbian studies course co-taught by the authors. We describe the goals, organizing principles, content, and outcomes of this engagement in the production of “queer pedagogy” — a radical form of educative praxis implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in, the production of “normalcy” in schooled subjects. We argue for an explicit “ethics of consumption” in relation to currciular inclusions of marginalized subjects and subjugated knowledges. We conclude with a critical analysis of the way that, despite our explicit interventions, all of our discourses, all of our actions in this course were permeated with the continuous and inescapable backdrop of white heterosexual dominance, such that: (a) any subordinated identity always remained marginal and (b) “lesbian identity” in this institutional context was always fixed and stable, even in a course that explicitly critiqued, challenged, and deconstructed a monolithic “lesbian identity.” |