Abstract
In this article, we look at educational forms from the point of view of queer theory. We understand educational forms as techno-scientific practices in the sense defined by Donna Haraway (1997, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse. Routledge). We contemplate the eminently subjugating nature of educational institutions in industrial and post-industrial societies. Our work is based on the introduction of queer theory into the social sciences and its influence on pedagogy, promoting the avoidance of normalising and exclusive subjectivities. We propose a use and understanding of queer that goes beyond the strictly sexual, in order to go as deeply as possible into a critique of bodily abnormality as a form of construction and remission. We also analyse the role that technology plays in building normality and/or making subversions possible, as well as its consequences for bodies and subjectivities in our modernised society.
Technology and Pedagogy: Education as a Techno-scientific, Subjectivising the Practice
The appearance of educational institutions as we know them today, coincided with the emergence of a new form of society, which began to forge itself between the 16th and 18th centuries, and which ultimately resulted in the forms of organisation and production, characteristic of the industrial revolution. In this period, the relationship between power and the establishing of subjectivity was based on control mechanisms of a disciplinary nature (Foucault, 1999). New mechanisms of control and surveillance emerged and acquired considerable importance due to the needs imposed by the new social system. The body had to be disciplined to pre-established timetables and routines, a basic requirement for the functioning of an industrial society. Schools played a fundamental role in this process, as Michel Foucault suggests: ‘We see in the army, the colleges, the workshops, the schools, a growing domestication of the body, that is the domestication of the useful body. New processes of surveillance, control, distribution of space, marking, etc. emerge. There is a total investiture of the body by mechanisms of power in an attempt to make it both docile and useful. There is a new anatomy of the body.’ (Foucault, 1999, p. 123)
In this period, various institutions were imposed that functioned as disciplinary devices. These included the school, and the nuclear family itself, both of which inculcated into children the habits necessary to turn them into future ‘good workers’. Nevertheless, in the fields of both politics and social sciences, there seems to be a widespread acceptance of the fact that we currently find ourselves in a new social and historical context, qualitatively different from that of the previous so-called Industrial Society. Many names have been given to this new context: post-industrial society, information or knowledge society, globalisation, post-modernity… these are, however, but symptoms of the many thorny problems that make up the current context: the impact of the New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), new configurations in economic relations, different concepts of the political and the cultural… The different effects of these changes can be seen, to take an example from the economic sphere, in the move from an industrial to a consumer society, or in the labour market, where, owing to technological development, productivity is increasing in inverse relationship to the number of jobs on offer, meaning that employment opportunities in the secondary sector are noticeably reduced. Both the decline of the industrial sector and the growth of the service sector have altered the characteristics required of the workforce.
Educational institutions were not left untouched by these changes. In some societies, there has been a move from discipline in the classroom, the teacher as transmitter of knowledge and the exam as a method of evaluation, to the student as the principal focus of learning, the acquisition of competences and management of resources as a form of control. We no longer need educational itineraries that lead to a professional career, linking identity and work. We need people who are adaptable and capable of taking advantage of different resources in different contexts. In the same way, in this personalised learning, we also find the fundamental individualisation necessary for a society based on consumer capitalism.
ICTs have also played an important role in this series of changes so that in many ways we can talk about a real technological revolution (Castells, 1994). In this sense, while the advent of writing, the printing press, or more recently mass media, revolutionised ways of thinking and processes of human relations, new ICTs have brought about changes, not only at an organisational and cultural level, but also at a symbolic one.
In this sense, ICTs have played a definite role in current changes in educational activity. They make it possible to focus attention on learning and on the student, rather than on teaching and the teacher, and they are tools par excellence when it comes to managing resources. Technology also plays a fundamental role in current discourse about the body and its relationship with normality and abnormality. From a performative and technological perspective, ICTs enable the breaking of the ontologies that place subjects into binary categories of normality/abnormality.
It is pertinent to revisit Haraway’s proposal (1991), as her metaphor of the cyborg shows technology to be the ultimate component of what hybrid identities mean, beyond any category, linking together the body, the material and the semiotic, and showing itself to be a subjectiviser, but also as presenting possibilities for resistance. At the same time, it is interesting to use her definition of technoscience (Haraway, 1997), according to which technology, science and society can no longer be considered separately. According to Haraway, techno-scientific practices create new symbols and ways of understanding science, technology and subjectivity. The relationship between science, technology and society is currently such that it produces a mutation in the historical narrative, in which the symbolic and the material interlink in different ways, creating a techno-bio-power, and with it new forms of subjectivity. These practices and discourses incarnate themselves in complex subjects, hybrids that are ‘subjected’—in that they are direct products of the social order—yet at the same time, present possibilities for transformation and resistance. In the same way, we argue that this hybridisation currently produced between technology and pedagogy turns the latter into a techno-scientific practice, producer and regulator of open and fluid subjectivities that break down the habitual notion of the person to build others that deconstruct the normality/abnormality binomial.
Educational institutions born of this disciplinarian society, have, until recently, been educational agencies enclosed within themselves, establishing themselves as a kind of institutional ankylosis, as social guarantors of the forms of normality, as well as participants in measures of social control, disciplining bodies and excessively perturbing subjectivities. However, this closed-mindedness has led to a certain overflow of styles and ways of assuming and collecting new discourses and pedagogic practices. In this article, we echo and revise the introduction of queer theory into the discourses and pedagogic practices, and we position ourselves with a new emerging form of pedagogy as a technoscience for resistance and subversion.
The Queer in Pedagogy: Pedagogically Deconstructing Bodily Abnormality
Queer pedagogy breaks with the universalist, dualist and heteronormative rules. From the binarisation of reality into hetero- and homosexual, it is easy to deduce that the category heterosexual is complemented with the adjectives good, normal and natural, while the category homosexual goes with the adjectives bad, abnormal and denaturalised. The first group receives benefits and recognised status, while the second is stigmatised and are left with devalued roles and attempts at embodiment regulation.
To speak of queer in terms of pedagogy therefore brings us inherently to refer to the terms normal/abnormal or normality/abnormality. Through a subtle exercise, those subjects that do not fit into the definition of normal are sent to the new ab-normal category. We do not only find subjects with given sexual tendencies. This group also increasingly includes a significant number who “escape” from the definition of normal, because of too many different factors 7. In fact, as Judith Butler (1990) comments, it is not so important to look at the exclusions produced by a given social order, as to look at the exclusions on which our symbolic order is based and which make the production of that symbolic order possible. Apart from gender and its rejection of homosexuality, she herself demonstrates the existence of other vectors and other exclusions, which make up what may or may not be said in a given social order, for example, race, disability… essentially, everything cyborg. The focus we give in this research is not so much determining what specific types of exclusion form the basis of our social order, as becoming aware that the construction of normality involves the repudiation of some aspects, and the restriction of others.
GLBTI Education
The objective of queer pedagogy is not confined to nor exclusively focussed on topics linked to the experiences of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Transsexual, or Intersex identities. It is true that the need and the ways in which pedagogy creates bodily norms, in terms of sexuality, have led pedagogues, teachers and youth workers to rethink what they do, how they do it and what they produce in their praxis, in relation to sexual themes. The publication of Butler’s work Gender Trouble (1990) provided a starting point for reflection and for conceiving of another form of pedagogy of gender and sexuality. The basis for this encounter between pedagogy and queer can be found in a reflection made by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that we should think about the form in which institutional education or the combination of discourses and practices is linked to the self-determination of the world’s subordinate populations and to their subordination (Spivak, 1992). This reflection is supported by the questions posed by Deborah Britzman: ‘Is it possible that the educative project one day becomes a hub of deconstructive revolt? Could pedagogy provoke ethical reactions that were capable of rejecting the normalizing conditions of origin and fundamentalism, reactions that reject submission?’ (Britzman, 1998, p. 62).
However, what queer pedagogy is really looking for is the destabilisation of the normal/abnormal binomial, just as Butler proposes. Britzman clearly confirms this:
‘All these practices awaken our curiosity about the way in which normality becomes an imperceptible element in the classroom and about how pedagogy itself can intervene to make the limits and obstacles of normality perceptible’ (Britzman, 1998, p. 67).
From the constructionist position, queer pedagogy does not allow the definition of ‘normal’ people or situations to which the rest should be able to aspire or imitate. In this sense, Britzman’s work revolves around the concept of normality, and the theories and praxes that can deconstruct it. From queer theory, psychoanalysis and pedagogy, a proposal for a ‘transgressive’ pedagogy emerges. It aims to break with the idea of the ‘other’ as a suspicious, dangerous, frightening, infectious and worrying subject, constantly threatening the rest of the population. There is no ‘pedagogic instruction manual’. It is necessary to base this entirely on hermeneutics, on the interpretation of the discursiveness. Using language, this discursiveness constructs and deconstructs the line that separates normality from abnormality.
Binary Position in Educational Practices
The binary position between the normal and the abnormal needs to be deconstructed. However, this is not done through the reconditioning of the subjects placed in the ‘abnormal’ category, but through what Robyn Wiegman proposes: ‘the exploration of a new political imagination within which diverse alliances can be forged - between people who do not reproduce themselves, the gender eccentrics, the bisexuals, the gays and lesbians, the non-monogamous – alliances that can begin and innovate the forms of social and intellectual discipline of the academy.’ (2002, p. 177)
Queer theory moves away from victimisation and normalisation. As has already been said, despite it appearing paradoxical, winning rights is not the main concern. Rights are, by definition, heteronormative. The main concern is the elimination of the discourses that maintain certain power relations. The desire for normality vigorously rejects subjective particularity itself and reinforces a submissive position. The destruction of certain categories (fundamentally those of identity) and all the practices that go with them (associationism, identity groups, etc.) brings with it a series of risks that should be taken into account. The queer proposal distorts the concept of identity in such a way as to endanger the struggle of the gay and lesbian movement. It questions the homosexual collective itself in a way that takes strength away from the political struggle. Essentially, it calls the political usefulness of sexual identities into question.
It is possible to say that being queer does not require attachment to any label. Queer behaviour confuses the concepts of sex/gender and identity. In fact, under the queer gaze, identities are left completely unhinged: they are fluid and changing. They become kind of ‘non-identities’. The queer proposal is dedicated to continuously deconstructing the traps laid by identity. In this sense, provocative identities work to interrupt the discourses that limit human beings.
Political Bodies
Nevertheless, identities have their usefulness: embodying a political struggle with the aim of achieving legitimate rights. However, this activist logic must come into conflict, as we already said, with one of the central aims of queer theory: that of dissolving identity categories. The argument is that sexual identities are historical and social products, and that fixing these identities is fundamentally linked to social control. For Butler, therefore, politics should be based on provisional coalitions that are not based on an identity assumption:
‘Without the presupposition or the aim of “unity” (…) provisional unities can emerge in the context of specific actions, the purpose of which is not the creation of identity. Without the obligatory perspective that feminist actions should be based on a stable, unified and agreed identity, these provisional unities could form faster and seem more acceptable to some “women” for whom the meaning of the category is always in dispute. (Butler, 1990)’.
The man/woman binomial and obligatory heterosexuality exclude other possibilities and, by definition, deny the constructed nature of sexuality itself. The world, and with it, the institutions, are constructed according to this logic. In this way, the rules, definitions and social organisations are based on this supposed binary. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner remind us, ‘Heterosexuality implies so many non-sexual practices, that a world in which this collection of hegemonic norms is not dominant is currently unimaginable.’ (Berlant & Warner, 1989). We can say that the queer position questions most educational and social resources imposed under this heterosexist logic. To be included or excluded, to be educated or illiterate, to be normal or abnormal: all these dichotomies lose their power under the queer gaze. Fundamentally, they represent repressive situations. In this way, the idea of education itself is a product of that control which perpetuates situations of oppression under fixed categories. In which case, is an idea of institution and education possible using queer parameters?
In our reality, it is about being something, but being something that adjusts itself to the established categories means being inside or being outside. Queer politics is not only opposed to the idea of normality, but to the very concept of normal behaviour. Queer subjects do not want to be normal, and they do not want to be inside. The dynamic of ‘or this, or that’, the idea that ‘you are gay or you are heterosexual’ is yet another question linked to the heteronormative nature of institutions. Identities are fluid and changing, categories are social and historical. Kate Bornstein reminds us: ‘Do we, perhaps, distinguish a man from a woman by their anatomy?’ (Bornstein, 1995).
Nevertheless, the acceptance of homosexuality is not what concerns us, nor does it interest the queer discourse. Instead, we are concerned with the deconstruction of the hetero/homo code and its relationship to the reconstruction of the normal/abnormal code. The central and transcendental question would be to ask ourselves: Why does this choice of aim create such anxiety? For Butler (1997), the response lies in that it is precisely in the rejection of homosexuality that the possibility of making the subject intelligible is found. The fear of not existing underlies homophobia. Based on a psychoanalytical and Althusserian reformulation of the Foucauldian concept of subjection (‘assujetissement’), Butler demonstrated how, on feeling ourselves questioned by gender categories (categories that are strongly outlined by obligatory heterosexuality) and in responding to this questioning (turning around when the Law calls, as Louis Althusser mentions, 1976) we move towards a founding moment in the creation of subjectivity. It is in this sense that the rejection of homosexuality relates to the fear of not existing; nevertheless, as we have already mentioned, and as Butler herself recognises in an earlier work (1993), there are other exclusions that allow the subject to be understood. Extrapolating from Butler’s conclusions to other dimensions fundamental to the construction of the body and of subjectivity, such as race and disability, as Jacques Derrida proposes, it is in radical otherness, in that which we find socially aberrant, that the fear of not existing is produced: ‘The being and the other are seen as totally external, totally separated, totally other. And when subjects position themselves in the absolute exterior, phobias are born.’ (Morris, 2000).
The Body as an Element of Confluence between Queer Pedagogy and Technoscience
We have seen how pedagogy can be understood as a techno-scientific practice, which produces and regulates subjectivities. We have also seen the different characteristics and elements that make up the essence, discourses and praxes of queer pedagogy. In this relationship between pedagogy, technology and power, the body has become a central theme, and we believe it is necessary to ask ourselves: what brings pedagogy of this sort to base its discourse on corporeity?
As we have deciphered it, the body has been an object of submission, imposition, domestication, quashing, denial, humiliation, ignorance, politicisation, pedagogisation, etc. As we have already commented, the body also emerges as the focus for the exclusion that makes intelligibility possible. It therefore seems logical to start with a pedagogy that understands this role of the body in subjectivities and which is aware of the subject’s bodily experiences. The bodies of ‘normalised’ subjects can easily become ‘cannon fodder’; their flesh is used as ‘bait’ for the rest of the society. Without the existence of the rejected body, there is no possibility for an accepted and meaningful body. However, technology explores new understandings of the bodily concepts that transgress the normal-abnormal binomial and offer new possibilities and meanings to the topic of the body. In tune with this reassignation of meaning to the body in pedagogy, we offer a range of different visions of the body in pedagogy and the ways in which queer can bring a disruptive and transgressive vision to the construction of a diversity of ‘bodies that matter’.
Bodies in Technology
The relationship between body and technology is fundamental, given that ICT-based prosthetics, fundamental to fields, such as medical practice and disability call the intelligibility and limits of the body into question. Beyond this approach, and following the proposals made by Haraway (1997), we argue that the new ICTs have formed part of biotechnologies of bodily production and reproduction. Furthermore, we argue that technology can function as a bio-political inclusion and social domestication device within pre-existing normalising categories. However, it can also be a disruptive element in this orthodox construction of bodily normality (Ihde, 2002).
In the relationship between technology, body and (ab)normality, the concept of prosthetics has historically been fundamentally important. We understand this, in the sense given by Beatriz Preciado (2002), as a tool or basic apparatus in the relationships established between body and machine. We argue that these relationships form part of a bio-power that disciplines docile bodies into the service of the status quo at the same time as forging new material natures and spaces for resistance.
ICTs can therefore function as powerful bio-political tools for social inclusion and domestication. The non-standard body is normalised and integrated into a normative order through prosthetics based on ICTs. Thus, we show how in situations of bodily vulnerability, such as disability or acute or chronic illness, the relationship between ICTs and bodily normalisation is clear. In a society of producers (Bauman, 1998), extension prostheses that alleviated the vulnerability of an unproductive or disabled body were a common occurrence. In the information-and knowledge-based society (Berardi, 2003), prostheses are based on the processing of information about the vulnerable body. The screen reader for the visually impaired or the transmission of diagnostic images in medicine, which establish a new geometry of the body and a renaissance of clinical medicine in the sense given by Michel Foucault (1963) provide some examples of this. At the same time, the questioning by technology of the body’s limits also enables strategies of resistance and subversion of normalisation in the dynamic of bodily production generated by biotechnologies. In some ways, prostheses can result in proposals for the appropriation of repudiation, converting rejection into attraction, strangeness into the possibility of seduction and ambiguity into a new form of eroticism.
The Contributions of Queer Pedagogy
Starting from these new concepts of the relationship between technology, biology and the body, we ask ourselves, how has pedagogy been related to the body, the sexual, the normal and the abnormal? Moreover, what contributions can a queer pedagogy of subversion and resistance make? This points us to different pedagogic discourses, which we look at in more detail below:
A first line of discourse comes from the pedagogues, teachers and youth workers who have experienced situations of oppression in their own bodies. Their own experiences are the principal fount of knowledge that allows them to kick-start the production of a queer discourse. A significant number form part of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Transsexual and Intersex collectives, as can be deduced from Kevin Jennings (1994), when he found that approximately 10% of the faculty studied (Boston) were lesbian or gay, and the work of Madiha Didi Khayatt (1992) on the invisible presence of homosexual teachers in the classrooms of education centers in the United States. However, it does not only relate to educators linked to queer positions, but also to people who may have suffered oppression due to their skin colour, or for being a woman, speaking another language, thinking differently, having a disability, etc. A sector of the queer pedagogues is made up of people who are ‘different’ and who openly exercise that difference. A second line is part of the hypothesis that abnormalised subjects have become hyper-embodied subjects (or, if you like, ‘hyperbodies’). The body has taken on an unbridled relevance and the subject has been ‘objectified’ and is now, above all, a body. As Marcel Hénaff shows us: ‘libertine torture advances the logic of anatomic/surgical reduction of the body, postulated by science, and takes it to the extreme’ (Hénaff, 1980, p. 29). It is through the different forms of knowledge (among which we find pedagogy) that the subject becomes nothing more than a body, annulling his or her personality, history and identity. This would include intersexual bodies, some of which have suffered the aggression and violence of normalisation in their flesh. Intersexuality calls the binary situation of man/woman into question. However, the techno-scientific, heteronormative matrix, with its devices of medical power, is responsible for restoring and maintaining those criteria of normality. In this sense, if one does not fit inside the man/woman dichotomy, one is made to fit by force. Thus, through drastic surgical measures, one is assigned a sex. We are facing systems of surgical removal of those clitorises that are not of the size considered standard. This means that, due to questions of technical difficulty, the majority of sexual assignations end up being feminine. They produce sexed bodies and subjects who are normatively genderised through violent acts. Intersexuality, by definition, short-circuits the heteronormative systems of sex, gender and sexuality. This is why it generates a more than noticeable discomfort among those subjects who subscribe to the rules. Intersexuality or hermaphroditism is conceived as a situation of disorder, of a false, or sexually abnormal nature. In essence, the desire to eliminate this situation of ambiguity is linked to a sexist education and the heteronormative weight of constituting regulated bodies. It is for this reason that if the other has been reduced to a physical body, we should consider a pedagogy that recovers its symbolic dimension. The third line understands the body as a space/territory of subjective resistance. We have seen how technology builds devices that violently mutilate bodies in order to fit them into the normative categories, but also questions the limitations placed on the vulnerable or disabled body. The body in its relationship with technology presents a double perspective: space of imposition of power and space of resistance. From the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Transsexual and Intersex collectives, to many other groups that propose reclaiming bodies as spaces of subjective involvement, there is a call to speak about resistance. Peter McLaren has studied the resistance of the body in terms of pedagogy and he bases his view on the idea that ‘it is important to understand resistance to the dominant modalities of subjectivity, production and desire, especially if that resistance is somatically connected with the shaping of will and the construction of meaning’ (1994). The option is one of understanding ourselves not as simple products, but as producers of subjectivity, and this action necessarily passes through rethinking and revising the space occupied by our bodies in social spaces. The body comes to be understood as a space of struggle (we define ourselves, bodily, by being different from the rest), of conflict (the other does not always appreciate our bodies, our bodies can produce many different reactions in others) and of contradictions (we are not made up of monolithic bodies, but can be interpreted from many different perspective). For McLaren, the task of pedagogy in relation to bodily resistance is to increase our self-awareness, to remove distortion, to discover forms of subjectivity that are consistent with the capitalist body/subject and that assist the subject in his or her historic recreation (1994). The bodies that resist try to find meaning beyond the politics of bodily normalisation and they do this by breaking the structures and binary discourses.
Conclusions: On the Peculiarity of a Pedagogic Proposal and its Ways of De-educating
Queer ideas are positions that go beyond heteronormativity and normality as elements of pedagogic stability. This supposed stability is made up of regulatory declarations that are not made the objects of reflection. In this sense, education maintains a certain attraction to pure truth and stable identities, repeatedly ignoring the contradictions. Outlining a transgressive pedagogy based on technoscience, concerned with its productive nature and with avoiding normality, allows the construction of alternative zones of identification and criticism necessary in order to recognise the dominant structures and to create new desires (Britzman, 1998).
Queer pedagogy distances itself from integration; that is to say, it is a long way from the inclusion of marginalised groups in educational programmes. This type of focus has been fundamentally based on offering information and a change of attitude. For the hegemonic group, the general idea has been to work to promote a certain tolerance of difference, and, for the excluded group, it has been to work to promote their own self-esteem. However, as Britzman points out, the cover up has been: to what extent can people be different, and at the same time be perceived as normal? In fact, this question demonstrates the perversion of the integrationist currents. Essentially, the effects of inclusion are a more obstinate version of uniformity and a more amenable version of otherness (Britzman, 1998).
Queer theory assumes a triadic presumption of sexual identities, a break with the dichotomous modernist notion of exclusion and otherness: a mental and topographic change that places us in a different arena. In this way, ‘the important differences’ acquire more force, in the sense mentioned by Butler (1993). Queer pedagogy, as a techno-scientific practice, can construct itself based on differences and these are in a constant process of invention, tirelessly emerging, constructing and reconstructing bodies.
The readings of sexualities have, to date, followed this dichotomous approach. Thus we find what we can call model A, heterosexist, based on the patriarchal system, structured according to the classic model of the family, misogynist and phallocentric. The model B, despite attempting to create new openings, is a negative copy of model A. Sexuality continues to be constructed using the same parameters. Homosexuality is nothing more than the opposite of heterosexuality, maintaining the same heterosexist matrix. Apart from this apparent relationship of opposition and symmetry between A and B, in fact, they subsist in a dynamic in which model B is subordinated to model A. On the other hand, the meaning of model A depends on model B. So, the latter is made internal as well as external to the former, structuring itself in a relationship of mutual subjugation (Sedgwick, 1990). These relationships should therefore be understood as unstable and dependent. Model C, or queer, represents liberation from the binary prison that can lead to a state of infinite expansion. It deals with migratory sexualities, in constant construction, permeable and fluid. This third concept nourishes pedagogy, reconsidering spheres and institutions that are fundamental to education.
From model A, corrective pedagogies have played a leading role with a recurrent insistence on normalising the abnormal. From model B, the informative pedagogies have failed, because knowledge of the facts does not provide any access to reality or truth. This discourse aims to construct compassion and tolerance as the correct subjective position. However, in reality, it ends up reinforcing the binarism of ‘them and us’. Alternatively, a queer pedagogy based on model C should explore the different ways in which the experiences of ‘different’ people are imagined; examine the rules of everyday life, and come back to thinking of this everyday life as providing the basis for surprise and for new forms of ignorance (Britzman, 1998).
As we commented at the beginning of this article, normalising judgements are a constant in pedagogy. Its subjectivation devices sometimes reveal comparisons based on individual actions that are cited as a reference that we should follow. This reference, beginnings of a rule to follow, constitutes the educational act. That is to say, reference to the rules is a common characteristic of pedagogy. The subjects are invited to follow a given rule, which is quoted, announced and repeated incessantly. Nevertheless, a queer pedagogy should not include any sexual examples, or any rules to follow, because the mere existence of a comparative reference point leads to the exclusion of legitimate bodies and practices.
Exclusion represents the dark side of normalisation, the definition of the pathological. Exclusion defines difference, borders and zones. As we have already commented, the techniques of exclusion are constant in pedagogy; individuals, identities, practices and ways of constructing knowledge are all excluded. What reference should guide pedagogy? A pedagogy that does not set limits, that does not normalise or pathologise, is almost unthinkable. However, once we get out of these perverse discourses, we find the possibility of giving all the credit to self-representations of sexual difference. Denying or alienating anyone’s authority to describe or name their own sexual desires is an act with terrible consequences (Sedgwick, 1990). ‘Can pedagogy recognise the impossibility of thinking about normality and the way in which normality is established time and time again?’ (Britzman, 1998, p. 62). It seems there is a limitation to technocratic or critical pedagogic practices to overcoming the exclusion in their discourses. Does the task of educating limit the very possibilities for intervention? Alternatively, perhaps it is a question of redefining or reconfiguring the very notion of education, as a techno-scientific practice that forms part of the production of open, fluid and transgressive subjectivities.
Homosexuals, the mad, the poor, drug addicts, the disabled and immigrants have all circulated, throughout history: labels that are negative and all-encompassing. It is a question of entities with shared origins. The pathologisation of their behaviour and the radicalisation of their bodies as absolutely alien to humanity: as bodies that do not matter.
This pedagogic discourse is precisely about peculiarity: ‘we are strange, here we are’; about surprise, foreigners in their own lands, émigrés from sexuality itself; disturbing differences, silences, appropriations; marginalities and otherness. However, above all, it is about educations, about the de-educating possibility of subjects, of dynamics that de-identify, of constructing another education, or in any case, of definitively forgetting the pedagogising function, that has, to date, been linked to a normalising authority and a dynamic based on binarisms, some of which (nature/culture) are difficult to divorce from the more genocidal networks of thought in relation to different subjects.
To summarise, queer pedagogy allows a re-reading of education. New techno-scientific practices, as well as new queer forms, offer the possibility to epistemologically find a new pedagogy; a pedagogy that we could call peculiar, the function of which is de-education, if we understand education in the classic, disciplinarian sense of the term.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.