The messiness of putting queerness to work

Abstract

Queerness can be messy. Not just as a description of individual people, or as applied to a community, but rather as a way of knowing and being that disrupts binaries, blurs boundaries, and holds contradictions (Campbell & Farrier, 2015; love, 2016). these are all messy things, as they don’t ascribe to the neat, organized, and disciplined ways of thinking that are prioritized in the academy. While many queer scholars acknowledge and often celebrate the messiness of their subjectivity, which creates new modes of knowledge production and mobilization (love, 2016, p. 345), education more broadly still struggles with what to do with queerness. Putting queerness to work means making space for the (im)possibilities, tensions, and complexities of the lived experience of queer and trans people and their communities, honouring their embodied knowledge of navigating a cisheterosexist world. When queerness and its relationship to education is invoked, it is often primarily through the lens of anti-bullying and identity frameworks to support students (Fields et al., 2014). But queering our scholarship is more than advocating for representation of lGBtQ peoples; it is challenging the fundamental assumptions upon which education is built. Youth homelessness is a queer issue, accessibility is a queer issue, the school-to-prison pipeline is a queer issue; education and its intersection with any and every social issue is queer. as educators, what messy conversations can we have that use queerness beyond the politics of representation? What (im)possibilities might queerness produce? How can we use the messiness of queerness to not only create new approaches to the common issues within education, but also to challenge the norms and assumptions of the academy, as it continues with the historical disenfranchisement of queer and trans people. in a time with increasing attacks against lGBtQ people, both inside and outside of schools, it is important to push back against the ongoing disparaging rhetoric about queer and trans youth, their families, and their communities. drawing attention to how queer epistemologies, theories, and methodologies are applied across educational contexts, the articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry (CI) put queerness to work in ways that create more inclusive spaces for all young people. these engagements challenge the “neat” ways of organizing queer and trans subjectivity within the logics of the cisheterosexist imagination. the authors move beyond representation to illuminate how queerness produces ways of knowing and being that affirm not just the identities but the embodied knowledges of queer/trans communities. together, the articles in this issue of CI shed light on some of the messiness