Educators Queering Academia
Critical Memoirs
Series:
Edited By sj Miller and Nelson M. Rodriguez
Chapter Eight: Working With and Within: Weaving Queer Spaces With Cycles of Resistance
Extract
← 68 | 69 →
CHAPTER EIGHT
Working With and Within: Weaving Queer Spaces With Cycles of Resistance
JENNY KASSEN AND ALICIA LAPOINTE
INTRODUCTION
This narrative weaves together critical incidents of student-led (hetero/cis)normative1 resistance at a Faculty of Education in Ontario, Canada. Through sharing our individual yet intersecting stories, we analyze the particularities of school-based events to make sense of our experiences as queer2 under/graduate students. We highlight four elements within the cycles of resistance: visibility, antihomophobic/ antitransphobic educational opportunities, impact/change, and reflection as we construct our “experience as story” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 477). Our personal reflections provide a space to explore counternarratives to a Faculty of Education’s cover story—sentiments and actions that embrace safety and inclusion rather than systemic deconstruction. Our work exposes the ragged fabric that is individualized accounts of homophobia and transphobia and reconstructs the threads to make visible systemic issues, such as (hetero/cis)normative pedagogies and practice (see Britzman, 1995; Linville, 2009). In sharing this narrative we attempt to unravel and rework privileged understandings of sexuality and gender, and stitch together how we worked with and within an institution’s (hetero/cis) normative fabric to establish and nurture queer intellectual and physical spaces through cycles of resistance. Overall, it is the master narrative of safety and inclusion that we intended to unravel and refashion. ← 69 | 70 →
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The queer theoretical insights of Britzman (1995, 1998) and Linville provide a lens...
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