Transcript Document
The Anatomy of LGBTQ Student Agency Queering Learning in Higher Education? Professor Vicky Gunn A starting point • For some LGBTQ students identity development is experienced with a heightened sense of shame and low self-worth = alienation • For others identity development is experienced with a heightened sense of shame and low selfworth = more mature global identity (Konik & Stewart, 2004) Longing’s preoccupations and learning How does bodily longing, sexually/ erotically charged, play a role in disciplinary learning? Learning as animated via the lover’s affect? Need conscious awareness of the paradox of the erotic force: Coexistence of the erotic as a negative / positive force depending on the power hierarchies in which it materializes Queering’s Educational Ethics? This means we are bound to simultaneously: 1. Excavate the positives in the forces of sexual orientation and how the inner life of the erotic might mobilize us within our learning 1. Control for the potential of sexual abuses that arise where sexuality saturated with power inequalities is materialized in curricular spaces and places Big assumption Sexual desires bound to LGBTQ identities fuel: 1. What we opt to learn 2. How we opt to learn it 3. What we are prepared to ‘make conscious’ http://emotionistic.com/wpcontent/uploads/2010/08/railroad_tracks.jpg Queer Encounters as Embodied Disruption Research methodologies: “universalize from a specific bodily dwelling” (Ahmed, 2006, p.4) BUT: Bodily encounters have the practical power to destabalize all over-simplifying categories of human experience. The Dark Matter of Meta-narratives Ubiquitous intersections with an individual’s experiences through: 1. What academics privilege 2. What the research literature privileges 3. What student clusters privilege http://i.space.com/images/i/000/011/227/i02/supposeddark-matter-distribution-universe.jpg?1311796556 As expressed through the disciplinary learning and teaching regime Key question around research metanarratives How does their materialisation relate to the creation of normative: 1. Logic 2. Aesthetics 3. Moral stances 4. Processes of self-belief which fundamentally intersect with sexuality & its relationship with what we opt: 1. To learn 2. To make conscious Escher’s 1953 ‘Relativity’: Explaining separateness “It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the same floor, because they have different perceptions of what is horizontal and what is vertical…. Queering as method: Gunn & McAllister, 2013, p.170 Material Literalism Performance Incorporeality Performativity Directed by erotically charged desires to inhabit the social imaginary world of metanarratives differently? Understanding diverse states of being? Intersections of disciplinary metanarratives and broader disciplinary cultural manifestations with different LGBTQ states of being = Opportunities for agency (as well as alienation) Queering the anatomy of agency Transgression: Including: • Defiance • Subversion & radical questioning (Sullivan, 2003) • Undoing ‘oppressive heteronormative surveillance’ (Morris, 2003, p. 195) • Reclamation eg Shame • Truce generation (Bettinger, 2007) • Dormancy not latency (McAllister, 2013, pers. comm in supervision) Self enforced hibernation Compartmentalisation • Invention, playfulness, performance & parody (Sullivan, 2003; Stuart, 1998) • Making temporary and not so temporary queer geographies (Luzia, 2013) • Heresy (creating and investing in new ways of understanding which are explicitly prohibited by those in power) • Discursive attribution (beyond essential/constructed binary) to overcome ‘hegemonic material literalism’ (Zimman, 2014) Travelling greater distances The Mechanisms of Originality?