Queer pedagogy

Queer pedagogy (QP) is an academic discipline devoted to exploring the intersection between queer theory and critical pedagogy, which are both grounded in Marxist critical theory.

QP explores and interrogates the student/teacher relationship, the role of identities in the classroom, the role of eroticism in the teaching process, the nature of disciplines and curriculum, and the connection between the classroom and the broader community with a goal of being both a set of theoretical tools for pedagogical critique / critique of pedagogy and/or a set of practical tools for those doing pedagogical work.

According to William Pinar, a curriculum theorist at the University of British Columbia, homosexuality and pedagogy have been linked as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans. Modern notions of queer theory in education, however, originate around 1981 with Pinar's "Understanding Curriculum as Gender Text," critiquing the way in which machisimo and masculinity plays out in Marxist educational theory. In 1982, Meredith Reiniger wrote about misogyny that had been internalized by her secondary English students. In 1983, James Sears wrote an article entitled "Sexuality: Taking off the Masks" for a journal called Changing Schools.

The term "queer pedagogy" itself, however, appears to have originated in 1993 with an article in the Canadian Journal of Education. This article was written by two Canadian professors, Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia) and Suzanne de Castell (Simon Fraser University), who were grappling with poststructuralist and essentialist theories of identity in the context of a classroom setting. They present various techniques that they tried, but eventually conclude that the task is both necessary and impossible, concluding: "Queer pedagogy it is indeed, that, after all, in trying to make a difference we seem only able to entrench essentialist boundaries which continue both to define and to divide us."

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