The Possibilities and Disappointments of Queering School for our Younger Selves: Worldbuilding as Educated Hope


Ash Catonio, University of Toronto; Lee Iskander, University of British Columbia

For decades, educational spaces have been critical battlegrounds for both anti-2SLBGTQ+ hate and resistance. As blatant acts of homophobia and transphobia continue to colour the academic terrain, the potential for a queer education fostering joy and creativity often feels beyond reach. The faculty at SSHARC, Sydney’s Social Science and Humanities Research Centre at the University of Sydney, took up this challenge of creating a queer schooling experience that reaches towards more just futures for students and teachers alike. We attended the inaugural Hunt-Simes Institute of Sexuality Studies (HISS) in February 2023. The institute brought together Ph.D. students, postdoctoral fellows, early-career and established researchers in “a queer-led classroom model of embodied learning and knowledge building” to revisit the experience of school from and through a queer perspective. The provocation of HISS was that queerness could be found in the quotidian structures and practices of schooling if queer students and queer teachers were to come together in a reimagined version of the curriculum and rituals of schooling that cultivate creativity, joy, collaboration, and play. Instead of listening to talks and presenting our research, we attended science and drama classes, danced, and ate together, went on field trips and to prom, and posed for school photographs - all while thinking through questions of gender, sexuality, identity, and our positions as sexuality scholars. The institute was also timed to coincide with Sydney’s Mardi Gras and the WorldPride Festival, their spirit of celebration and community weaving into the goals and atmosphere of our HISS classroom. In this paper, we draw on the narrative journal reflections we each wrote before, throughout, and after the institute. We interweave our reflections with queer theory to explore the promise and provocation of HISS alongside its successes, messiness, and disappointments. Thinking with Muñoz (2009) and Love (2007), we explore how HISS’s promise of an opportunity to revisit and re-do the school experiences that might have been harmful, painful, and isolating to our younger selves raised new emotional stakes. What happens to the social hierarchy at queer school, or the distinctions between students and teachers? What roles might a queer school foreclose, and what new ones could it make available? What possibilities emerge when we centre identity, intimacy, and joy in the classroom? What does it mean when we feel the opposite of what was intended - loss instead of joy, vulnerability instead of safety, rejection instead of belonging? Is a queer education really possible? Drawing on Muñoz (2009), we conceptualise HISS as a utopian project that constantly transported us to a “then and there” - the “then” of our past school experiences and “there” to the potentiality of the queer high school education we had never received. In practice, our experiences of HISS were diverse and mixed, often involving a blend of joy, hope, anxiety, loss, and, sometimes, the shame of feeling bad when the intended effect was clearly pride, playfulness and inclusivity - what Love (2007) calls “feeling backward.” We are left with a sense of the messiness that can emerge when the provocations and promises of “queer” meet the routines, emotional terrain and social hierarchies of “school” (Cavenaugh, Alexander, and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2023). Our paper extends the literature on queer pedagogy (Bryson and de Castell, 1993; Britzman, 1995; Luhmann, 1998; Mayo and Rodriguez, 2019; Quinlivan and Town, 1999), queer generations (Morris, Greteman and Westrate, 2022), and sexuality in school (Author, 2014; Greteman, 2018). Conceptualising queer school as a utopian project, we imagine the ways it actively resists current realities of schooling as contentious, isolating, and even dangerous for 2SLBGTQ+ students and teachers. This paper shows how queer pedagogy can offer an “educated hope” for more just schooling experiences and better worlds through its continual evocation of a “then and there” (Muñoz, 2009), even if it also occasionally disappoints in the present.

Non-presenting authors: Hannah Maitland, York University; Jen Gilbert, University of Toronto; Madelaine Coelho, University of Toronto

This paper will be presented at the following session: