“If a (queer) revolt is to come”: Toward a sensuous pedagogy for dis/orienting management learning

Enter the “unhappy” sphere of (queer) provocation

“Moments of disorientation are vital,” writes Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006: 157), even if such moments feel unsettling and painful. I experienced such a moment when reading—on my birthday, to make matters worse—Nick Rumens’ (2018) review of Reinventing Management Education, a companion that I co-edited (Steyaert et al., 2016) and had dedicated years to. Not that anything was wrong with his competent review: Rumens called the companion “a first-rate provocative addition to the canon of critical scholarship on management education” (p. 109). But he also pointed out “some missed opportunities,” when noting, rather dryly, that “For example, queer theory has dominated parts of the humanities and has spread into the social sciences and beyond, but it is missing in this Companion” (p. 109). When facing such an “obvious” omission, I stumbled not “merely” over yet another example of what other contributions we might have commissioned as editors—but also over the hiatus between my academic work and my own sexual orientation, two lines of my life which seem overtly disconnected. I also realized that my co-authored chapter on embodied learning and sensuous playing for the same volume (see Steyaert et al., 2016) made no mention of queer theory, even if this would have been “straightforward” given my interest in queer—read playful—activism (see Steyaert, 2018). Realizing that I had “missed” an opportunity, not once, but twice, I felt nauseous. Lost even. Disappointed. “How could I?,” “How could I not?”—kept echoing in me.

The phenomenology of our lives abounds in such itchy moments, as Ahmed (2006: 4) remarks with reference to Merleau-Ponty, as they involve not only “the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 296). In reiterating these words at the beginning of the final chapter of her Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) further underscores the fact that disorientation, as a bodily feeling, “can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable” (p. 157). Disorientation creates a sensuous uncertainty that we feel viscerally as “the body in losing its support might then be lost, undone, thrown” (p. 157). These are what Ahmed calls “queer moments,” which involve a twofold sensation of loss and strange alertness, of failure and wonder. Although such moments might quickly dissolve or move into our affective background, they can still be haunting, and yet also re-appear as a contingent opening for reorientation. As I felt my academic work being arrested, this disruption not only urged me to ask how on earth I had ended up in this situation, in which I seemed unable to refuse the straight orientation of management education. It also offered me a chance to start wondering how to pursue a different line, a queer orientation.

Embracing Ahmed’s approach, that rejecting the inheritance of (mainstream) management education “is a condition for the arrival of queer” (Ahmed, 2006: 178), what follows outlines a queer orientation toward management pedagogy, one that takes to heart the sensuous conditions and spatial contours of learning and teaching. As the opening account of my “unhappy” feeling of disorientation already insinuates, this essay is as personal as it is political. In making such a provocative connection between the personal and the political, this essay extends what I have learned from how Derek Jarman linked the queer line of his art (in his films, painting, and writing) with his queer gardening practices. For Jarman, that vital connection opened a heterotopic space in which he could not only survive but still live (at least a little bit) while dying of AIDS (Steyaert, 2010). Since that article, I have not persisted with repeating this connection, with a few exceptions (see Steyaert, 2015, 2020). Now, though, I feel that I must, even if this means—yet again—facing the pain of disorientation and engaging with my own vulnerability.

As I am seeking to write this contribution in the genre of “a provocation essay,” I must admit that I feel rather ambivalent because common sense would probably make me associate provocation with argumentative determination, aggression, and masculinity. Yet I would rather echo the feminist sensitivity of Deborah Brewis and Emma Bell in their introduction to the provocation essay: provocation involves “moving and being moved”—and brings into play an affective sensorium that ranges between anger and care (Brewis and Bell, 2020: 533). Thus, the queer version of writing provocatively might be gentle, vulnerable, incomplete, and hesitant. It might even bracket the queer, as queerness possibly ushers in a different form of bracketing, one infused with a sense of openness and wonder, as suggested by Ahmed (2006): “Rather than the bracket functioning as a device that puts aside the familiar, we could describe the bracket as a form of wonder: that is, we feel wonder about what is in the bracket, rather than putting what is in the bracket to one side” (pp. 199–200, my emphasis). But (queer) provocation also involves a political sense as wondering can and should “offer pathways for hopeful exploration” (Brewis and Bell, 2020: 535)—and, as I would add, for illustrating and trying out queer routes of reorientation.

I have divided this essay into four parts. First, starting from Michel Serres’ long-standing provocation that “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!” (Serres, 1995: 71), I ask how his call might be reissued amid today’s understandings of sensuous and embodied learning as the conditions of arrival have changed considerably since its first articulation. Therefore, in a second part, I propose to queer such a sensorial revolt by turning to Ahmed’s queer phenomenology as her understanding of dis/orientation as “the sixth sense” enables us to sensuously reorient management learning and to transform Serres’ idea of revolt into a queer version. In the third part, I zoom in on the pedagogical work of Fabiane Ramos and Laura Roberts (2021) to concretize and illustrate a sensuous pedagogy as a dis/orientation device. As lecturers in Gender Studies, they draw on Ahmed’s work in combination with other feminist and decolonial authors to develop their “pedagogy of wonder.” The epilogue, finally, offers a new angle by revisiting Matthew Lopez’s (2018) play The Inheritance to suggest that my queer attempt to refuse the legacy of heteronormative learning and education also might enable generations of diverse people to learn, in sensuous ways, from each other and from each other’s otherness.

“If a (queer) revolt is to come”

While sensory education and embodied learning have traditionally been suppressed (Thyssen and Grosvenor, 2019), more recently, increasing efforts have been made to enact learning and education while taking into account their sensory and sensuous aspects (Todd et al., 2021), often in relation to the affective turn (Dernikos et al., 2020b). The senses, the body, and the affect have been addressed in organization studies—either in a singular or in an entangled way—in critical reflection (Rigg, 2018) as well as in professional (Antonacopoulou and Taylor, 2019) and entrepreneurial practice (Vogt et al., 2021). According to Gershon (2011: 3), “attention to the senses, as experience and embodiment for example, is always already there,” even if it is often not in the foreground. Similarly, I would argue that in organization studies the senses have been present, albeit mostly implicitly and in the background. Examples include studies on experiential learning, where learning from experience supposedly “begins in the senses, in the body” (Elkjaer, 2004: 426), or practice-based learning, where sensible knowing is considered to reside in and be “furnished by the senses” (Strati, 2007: 66). Since the waning of aesthetics has been halted following the rise of cultural studies and critical and social theory (Bennett, 2012), its renewal opens an important opportunity to engage with sensible and embodied knowledge, as a rule by relying on aesthetic practices, artistic forms, and creative craft traditions (Mack, 2020; Mandelaki et al., 2021).

However, as these, mostly recent, efforts usually do not foreground the senses and are, quite importantly, largely embedded in a Western epistemology of learning (see Ramos and Roberts, 2021), they might not suffice to finally extend interest in the senses beyond its long-lasting simmering point. A call for a special issue on “The senses in management research and education” (Ashcraft et al., 2019) might indeed try to change this in a more concentrated and more definitive manner. I remember feeling excited about this call, as it prompted me to follow a visceral inclination to allow writing to begin with intuitive sensing, as I heard the resounding echo of Michel Serres’ (1993: 71) provocative “la seule révolte viendra des Cinq Sens”—inspiringly translated by Francis Cowper as “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!” (Serres, 1995: 71).

While the editors of the special issue had understandably chosen to introduce their call with Nietzsche’s dictum that language and the ability to find words (Nietzsche, 1911; quoted in Ashcraft et al., 2019) might actually be counterproductive to creating new or different knowledge, they did not refer to Serres. This provided me with the perfect “gap” to reiterate his provocative call for a sensuous revolt. After all, had Serres not published Les Cinq Sens already in 1985, so as to give full attention to the senses (all of them!)? That work, we remember, made him “one of the great theorists of the body and its connection to open ecology” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2013: 38). And did he not repeat his appeal to the senses in La Légende des Anges (Serres, 1993), where he expressed his indignation about the primacy of language as pertinently as Nietzsche? Serres (1995) uttered some vexing words on a revolt of the senses:

Once words came to dominate flesh and matter, which were previously innocent, all we have left is to dream of the paradisiacal times in which the body was free and could run and enjoy sensations at leisure. If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses! (p. 71)

But can I reinitiate Serres’ inclination almost four decades later by simply repeating it? Probably not. Because, in Ahmed’s (2006) terms, the conditions of emergence and arrival of Serres’ provocation at the time and my repeating it today no longer concur. One reason is that this revolt could not occur, least of all in the academic milieus of management and organization studies, in the mid-1980s. The spread of Serres’ (2008) ideas was somehow hindered by the uncanny situation that Les Cinq Sens was not translated into English as The Five Senses until 2008—thus over 20 years later. In a conversation with Bruno Latour, Serres (1995) observed that “[m]y book Les Cinq Sens cries out at the empire of signs” (p. 132). He thus underlined the fact that he had written the book to counter the sensorial poverty of contemporary theory (Howes, 2020). Yet his outcry—that language stands in the way of a turn to the senses—was not heard, not only because of a “delay” in translation, but also because the time was considered ripe for a linguistic turn than for a sensorial revolt. Long before the linguistic turn could mature in organization studies (Gabriel, 2000; Westwood and Linstead, 2001) and in management learning (Musson et al., 2007), Serres had already anticipated its excess and questioned what he called our addiction to language that would also come to dominate research in our field in the form of metaphors, stories, and discourses. In that sense, the English translation arrived at a “timely” moment: it has made us question our so-called addiction to language and understand “that the development of human language, and subsequently of the sciences, has veiled and militated the glories of our initial sensuous perception of the world” (Sankey and Cowley, 2008: xi).

Nor were social and economic policies in the mid-1980s particularly kind to Serres’ ideas: following the election of Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism took root in all corners of society. One of its consequences was that knowledge became instrumentalized and mercantilized. As Lyotard (1984: 51) so aptly remarked in the Postmodern Condition, the main question about knowledge now became “is it saleable?” Lyotard’s account was first of all “a report on knowledge,” “presented to the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec at the request of its president” (p. xxv), before it became an icon of the intense debates on postmodernism. Published in translation just a year before Serres’ The Five Senses, the Postmodern Condition very well captured the Zeitgeist of the 1980s and the years to come. Neo-liberalism and its affects of masculinist fervency (Anderson, 2016) and of conservative heteronormativism (Vallerand, 2018) incisively reformed universities into business-like corporations (see Taylor, 2017), where learning is constantly performed (Jones et al., 2020) under the tyranny of merit and success (Sandel, 2020). This societal atmosphere probably contributed as strongly to disembodying and desensitizing knowledge as it did to negating the body and affects as part of learning. Instead, the corporatized university turned into a fully quality-controlled knowledge factory (Aronowitz, 2000), which understood learning as a highly linear, rationalistic, and cognitive-individualistic process (Dey and Steyaert, 2007).

Thus, no revolt of the senses followed Serres’ call. Instead, the AIDS pandemic raged ferociously in the mid-1980s. Michel Foucault, one of the epitomes of the linguistic turn, died of AIDS on 25 June 1984. Although his family initially denied the cause of death, Foucault’s long-time partner and his friends later put the record straight. Yet the focus on language did not disappear overnight following Foucault’s death. Quite on the contrary: It became a Serresian addiction in organization studies. And while Foucault’s work occupied center stage, at the time his queer orientation either remained unmentioned (see Burrell, 1988; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998) or was footnoted (Townley, 1994), highlighting the separation of the personal and the political (Steyaert, 2010).

. . . then, a queer dis/orientation

Are the current conditions more favorable for a sensory and sensuous revolt than at the time of Serres’ provocation? While neoliberalism may only have increased its force (Plehwe et al., 2020) and while a different pandemic is raging across the globe today, a contemporary call for a sensuous pedagogy no longer needs to struggle against a prevailing linguistic turn. This, as we know, has been overhauled by materialist, affective, and posthumanist theorizing, and is no longer oriented toward “an overemphasis on signifying regimes” (O’Sullivan, 2006: 6). On the contrary, I would argue that a certain momentum can be gained from how the senses are currently inscribed in the affective turn in the field of (higher) education (Dernikos et al., 2020b; Probyn, 2004), which also embraces the sensuous and affective force of language, stories, and poetry. Importantly, Seigworth (2020) calls pedagogy affect’s first lesson as the question what new affects can be evoked as we understand what bodies can do is fundamentally a pedagogic matter; he therefore argues that “affect and pedagogy are inextricably inseparable,” as affect “arrives at every moment of contact, of body-world encounter, and thus, ‘we’ [. . .] submit ourselves over and over again to experiential-experimental entanglements, habit formation, fleshy intuitions, and other sensorium trainings” (p. 87). To prefigure a sensuous pedagogy, we thus need to explore learning through what bodies (entangled) with their senses and affects can do. Importantly, the affective turn and its allies also refute the neoliberal orientation of our education systems and society at large as it provides different tools and assumptions. These, in turn, can help to “cultivate new resources for conceptualizing and understanding the complexities of teaching and learning within a neoliberal era” (Dernikos et al., 2020a: 11).

We must, however, also look at the conditions under which affect theory arrived as the affective turn is often already straight-lined—dulling feminist sensitivities (Hemmings, 2005) and their intertwining with queer and decolonial genealogies (Ramos and Roberts, 2021). For instance, Hemmings (2005) remarks that affect theory—in ignoring counter-hegemonic contributions of feminist and postcolonial theories—should not miss out on the heteronormative regulation of affect, which can actually strengthen “dominant cultural norms or white, patriarchal ways of knowing, being, and doing” (Dernikos et al., 2020a: 9). After all, we should not ignore that Michael Hardt (2007: ix) early on identified two primary precursors of the affective turn: “the focus on the body, which has most extensively advanced in feminist theory, and the exploration of emotions, conducted predominantly in queer theory.” Therefore, aiming to avoid a “white-washed” affect theory, it is important to activate those queer and feminist genealogies of affect that can be meaningful “for sensing how social, cultural, and political inequalities are also mediated affectively” (Dernikos et al., 2020a: 9) as we inscribe them into queer approaches to learning (Allen, 2015) and to management education (Rumens, 2020).

These critical conditions of arrival for a sensuous-affective understanding of learning are also pertinent to reconsidering whether and how to reactivate the work of Michel Serres. To me, no philosopher has considered the implications of the body, the senses, and our relationship to the world for conceiving learning and education quite as extensively as Serres. His Troubadour of Knowledge (Serres, 1997) and Petite Poucette (Serres, 2012), two core accounts of learning, became my personal guides to enacting and developing my teaching practice (Steyaert, 2014). His Cartesian paraphrase “I think therefore I invent; I invent therefore I think” (Serres, 1997: 93) became my personal motto for designing courses where learning is oriented toward invention (Steyaert et al., 2016), and where students are invited to turn into “troubadours of knowledge” (Dey and Steyaert, 2007).

Prompted by reviewing earlier versions of this text, but also by realizing, acutely in fact, how precious little queer momentum there is in my field, this time I should seize the opportunity to guard myself against Serresian self-reproduction (and to stop referring to quite so many white male middle-class authors as one of the reviewers of an earlier version of this text pointed out). There is actually a passage in The Five Senses that made me realize that Serres could be reread in a queer way. Not that this idea is far-fetched: when reading The Five Senses, Bruno Latour (1987: 89) already called it empiricist, though of “a queer sort.” More recently, queer scholars have enlisted Serres as an ally in lauding, for instance, the queerness of his view on the concept of time (Dinshaw, 2014; Lupton, 2019). The specific passage in The Five Senses occurs when Serres complains that his colleagues preferred to debate rather than to enjoy natural landscapes. He realized that they were merely “screeching and quarrelling at the foot of beautiful mountains, on ocean beaches, in front of Niagara Falls” [. . .with]

the fixed gaze of those with something to say, and I can testify that they saw neither the snow of the glacier, nor the sea, that they heard nothing of the crashing water: they were arguing . . . Dangerous people. I fear those who go through life drugged, less than I fear those under the edict of language (Serres, 2008: 92).

Serres stood among his colleagues, perplexed. He tried to keep out of yet “another” academic debate and instead attempted to listen to the sounds around him: on the one hand, the hullabaloo of his colleagues arguing increasingly louder, at the top of their voices, interrupting each other, listening neither to each other, nor heaven forbid to the range of reverberations emanating from the birds, the wind, or a waterfall. Nor were they aware of their breathing, which was carrying their voices and locking them into ever more heated dispute. Serres (2008) concludes this passage with a pun: “Language dictates. We are addicted” (p. 92). What he left unmentioned, however, is that this group of scholars consisted (most probably) of male, white, middle-aged men and that their embodiment matters.

It makes sense to reread this scene of chattering male scholars as sensuously as Karen Ashcraft (2018: 616) has done in proposing “a visceral shortcut” as a way to “tune in to the sensate waves of white heteromasculine professionalism that animate the intellectual sparring at this panel or that colloquium.” The atmosphere, of course, is unmistakably masculinist, and resembles many of the academic spaces on my own university’s campus and at international gatherings. Even if the academic scenes of dominant heteromasculinity have not really changed, we need to reread and receive them differently: Ashcraft’s visceral image of how nowadays academic and other work keeps being gendered within a heteronormative, white and ableist matrix explains why we cannot simply repeat and extend Serres’ provocation, but need to do so with “critical vulnerability” (Ashcraft, 2018: 621) and a queer disorientation (Ahmed, 2006).

To queer a sensuous pedagogy, I propose activating the work of Sara Ahmed (2006, 2010). Chiefly because as a queer woman of color she is particularly sensitive to how affect can privilege what certain bodies can feel and sense in encounters with others, whereas other bodies, often racialized or sexualized or disabled, cannot escape specific affective responses and visceral sensations in public arenas where racism, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia are circulating (Juvonen and Kolehmainen, 2018). In particular, her queer phenomenological take on orientation which, if understood as “bodily spatial awareness,” can guide us to open up the “sixth sense” (Ahmed, 2006: 181) of a sensuous pedagogy that entangles the bodily, social, and spatial sides of learning. Ahmed’s guidance delights me, as she engages with the phenomenological work of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre precisely, patiently, and yet subversively. Her style is very unlike the confrontational outcry and polemical, provocative style deployed by Serres to go after Merleau-Ponty. To queer phenomenology and its focus on the body, the senses and space, implies, as Ahmed puts it, “to offer a queer phenomenology,” one that “might find what is queer within phenomenology and use that queerness to make some rather different points” (p. 4).

According to Ahmed (2006), considering or even adopting a theoretical approach or framework also comes down to espousing an orientation: as we speak of that sexuality that differs from heterosexuality as a sexual orientation, feeling, or being non-heterosexual starts with a sense of disorientation and turns us to queer moments “as moments of disorientation” (p. 4). However, “what is queer might slide between sexual orientation and other kinds of orientation” (p. 172). Thus, theorizing can also become an orientation. It begins with sensuous moments of orientation and disorientation, as a queer moment never becomes “just” a fixing position from which to straightforwardly frame realities, as theory is often supposed to. It instead begins with strangeness toward a familiar reality and remains open to (sensing) less linear understandings, which shape contours of knowing and learning in all their oblique possibilities.

As Ahmed (2006) indicates, “Disorientation could be described here as the ‘becoming oblique’ of the world, a becoming that is at once interior and exterior, as that which is given, or as that which gives what is given its new angle” (p. 62). Theorizing as, and writing through (dis)orientation, aims to understand and defamiliarize how scenes of life come to cohere. And yet, it never can, as there is always a moment when this coherence fails, slips away and becomes oblique: queer theorizing with a slant refuses to straighten objects, bodies, feelings, and relations but “let[s] them go, allowing them to acquire new shapes and directions” (p. 172). Therefore, “a queer phenomenology would function as a disorientation device (. . .), allowing the oblique to open up another angle of the world” (p. 172).

Pedagogy as a dis/orientation device

Consequently, pedagogy has been interpreted as a dis/orientating endeavor (Russell, 2013). A queer orientation to learning engages primarily with how we can sense and feel disorientation, and thus become oriented toward other objects and spaces than those set out by mainstream lines of education. Thus, disorientation involves a twofold sensation of failure and wonder. Moments of disorientation are not easy to live and are often associated with a sense of failure as we are not conforming to the norms of performing life. As Ahmed (2006) observes, “In such moments of failure, when things do not stay in place or cohere as place, disorientation happens” (p. 170). Not that this should surprise us: as we look back and consider what we refuse to inherit, we become immersed in emotional uproar, as “[T]o inherit the past in this world for queers would be to inherit one’s own disappearance” (p. 178); nothing hurts more than to realize the failure of not fitting in as expected or to feel attached to objects of desire that others reject. However, says Ahmed, “[T]he task is to trace the lines for a different genealogy, one that would embrace the failure to inherit the family line as the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world” (p. 178). This task also awakens a sense of wonder to explore how bodies can extend into spaces which no longer feel out of place, and when bodies can occupy spaces they were not intended to inhabit (Ahmed, 2006). If we can halt reproduction from taking an expected course or following a mainstream object, wonder might include hope, “the hope for new impressions, for new lines to emerge, new objects, or even new bodies” (p. 62).

Pedagogical work, then, focuses on the sensuous refusal and undoing of one’s inheritance, and consequently facing as much disorientation and unease as when we extend into new objects and spaces through wonderous and hopeful exploration. This refusal requires engaging with the many specific forms of complicity we have become associated with and attached to, as well as disrupting their inherent linearity, which we are supposed to follow. Echoing Crowley and Rasmussen (2010), for instance, I can ask how we might no longer follow the linearity of developmentalist narratives of colonialism, bourgeois nationalism, mainstream liberal feminism, and mainstream liberal gay and lesbian politics and theory that crowd our learning spaces and orient our bodies. To interrupt this developmentalism, Crowley and Rasmussen (2010: 16) draw on Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to question “the workings of a western epistemology shaped as profoundly as it is by east and west as routes and roots that [. . .] ‘orient’ one’s position.”

In this regard, Fabiane Ramos and Laura Roberts (2021) offer a pertinent example of how connecting the personal and the political helps to understand how they halt certain dominant genealogies while opening up for what they call “a feminist pedagogy of wonder.” In their pedagogical self-reflection, Ramos and Roberts draw on their experiences of teaching gender studies in a precarious teaching positionality while aiming to question the genealogy of south–north dynamics to enable decolonial disruption. They see their double act of decolonial feminist activism and a feminist pedagogy of wonder as forming a non-linear and incomplete process as “it goes up and down, in circles; it gets tangled and stuck; it screams for air and sometimes flows like a river” (p. 41). In my view, they not only aim to halt their complicity but also refuse to accept that learning is a straightforward process; instead, they offer students the opportunity to explore other angles of themselves and to open for other ways of knowing their worlds.

To enact such a (in my view) queer trajectory, Ramos and Roberts complement Ahmed’s understanding of disorientation, failure, and wonder as I traced it in Queer Phenomenology with some of her other writings (Ahmed, 2004, 2017), so as to connect pain with wonder, and supported by other feminist readings by Luce Irigaray and bell hooks. They place these readings alongside decolonial theory, including that of the late Argentinian feminist philosopher Maria Lugones and her notion of “loving possession,” “in an attempt to challenge the ongoing epistemic and ontological violence of colonial logics in the Academy and in mainstream feminism” (p. 29).

For Ramos and Roberts, knowledge production in Western(ized) universities has played a fundamental role in establishing and upholding the coloniality of knowledge. As mainstream feminist scholarship often fails to account for its (disembodied) positionality within the (Australian) colonial settler state, Fabiane Ramos and Laura Roberts as immigrant women first acknowledge their own personal geopolitical complicity within the system they belong to and wonder how they can interact with their students and the world without appropriating and without reproducing binary colonial logics of knower and known. Reflecting on their embodied experience, they emphasize that “[T]hinking of pedagogy as wonder allows us to explore what it means to teach and know, questioning the difference between the transmission of information and embodied knowledge and affect” (p. 35).

Referring to Ahmed (2004), that wonder implies learning, as it expands our field of vision and touch, and as it makes us experience the world as something that need not be as it is, Ramos and Roberts suggest that learning from one another implies listening attentively, often also by cultivating silence and by refusing to possess the knowledge of others as it is always incomplete and imperfect. Furthermore, they see their syllabus as a plurilogue, that is, as a setting that brings many voices into dialogue in a non-hierarchical way and that respects the complexity of all participants, by not positioning anybody in stereotypical or totalizing ways and by interrupting the linear histories of Anglo and North American feminism. Importantly, their course refuses to reflect on gender as a single-issue struggle, as they decenter a singular-central storyline on gender by underlining that “coloniality, patriarchy, capitalism, racism and heteronormativity are interconnected and depend on each other to exist” (p. 37).

Instead, Ramos and Roberts (2021) follow Lugones (1987) in viewing learning as what she calls a “world-travel” based on a shift to other worlds of sense where travel—from the French “travailler”—amounts to taking on a difficult journey of learning as work. Ramos and Roberts’ classrooms can be considered “queer gatherings, where the objects [of learning] we face ‘slip away,’ are disorientating” (Ahmed, 2006: 179), as students are confronted with moments of discomfort as they search to disrupt their own complicities and invest in an “epistemic shift to other worlds of sense” (Lugones, 2003: 18). Therefore, students are invited to become self-reflexive learners as they “work” through their own “arrogant” perceptions and question their privileges and complicities in writing weekly journal entries or in developing contributions on excluded or under-researched topics or people during a collective Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, thus practicing decolonial feminist ways of generating knowledge. While students might feel inclined to disengage, an ethos of wonder is contingent on everyone’s sense of responsibility and vulnerability, that is, on a trusting atmosphere and rare “moments of magic” (p. 41), which can spill over to activisms outside the classroom. Ramos and Roberts’ example of collaborative teaching so passionately enacts what Ahmed (2017) and her sensational feminism so unequivocally conclude in her blog (also quoted in Ramos and Roberts, 2021): “No wonder, wonder is key to feminist pedagogy.”

Illustrations of Ahmed’s queer (phenomenological) work are not limited to the above, telling example. It has also been tried out elsewhere, between ecopedagogy (Russell, 2013) and public pedagogy (Crowley and Rasmussen, 2010), between spatial design education (Vallerand, 2018) and organizing safer, non-capitalist spaces (Vitry, 2021). “If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space,” as Ahmed (2006: 1) notes, “then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence; of how we inhabit spaces as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we inhabit spaces with.”

Thus, we should not limit ourselves to queering the spaces of classrooms, but also those of our campuses and (virtual) communities, in fact all the spaces we inhabit for learning and teaching where different spatial awareness can be explored and embodied. In my understanding, everything is up for trying out and practicing exercises in defamiliarization, disorientation, and disruption, once we open ourselves up to queer wondering, as “[T]o wonder is to remember the forgetting and to see the repetition of form as the ‘taking form’ of the familiar. It is hard to know why it is that we can be ‘shocked’ by what passes by us as familiar” (Ahmed, 2006: 82–83). Indeed, if we wait too long to question our usual orientations and how they connect, we become insensitive toward our self, our body, and the ways in which we inhabit spaces. And our sensuous certainty might feel shattered—as mine was when I read the review of my co-edited companion (mentioned above). And we will feel equally perturbed—by suddenly feeling estranged from our own familiarities.

Epilogue: between undoing inheritance and re-inheriting

In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed (2010) revisits her motto of Queer Phenomenology: “To revolt is to be undone—it is not to reproduce an inheritance” (p. 197). What might be evident from my own account, at least so far, is how much I have struggled not to reproduce my inheritance, let alone pursue a queer revolt. It might also be apparent how I have often continued lines that have been bestowed on me, which I could not abandon, and that I have only occasionally halted my own pattern of reproduction. How to desert a path you are following as if it were meant for others—a halting task that gets under my skin as I try to enact it here and now? I am not a snake that can easily shed its old skin, which mediates its (well, my) relationship with the world. How to interweave my personal skin with a political thrust? How to learn from each other, as we sense and attune to each other’s dis/orientation?

Let me revisit one of the most successful theater plays of 2018 (in London’s West End and, in 2019, on New York’s Broadway, where it was prematurely halted by the Covid crisis). The Inheritance, titled thus coincidentally or not, was written by the American playwright Matthew Lopez and directed by Stephen Daldry (who, coincidentally or not, played a key role in my article on queering time; see Steyaert, 2015). The plot unfolds over two evenings and runs to six and a half hours. In his pedagogical play, Lopez, of Latino descent, unpicks the relationship between neoliberalism, queer politics, and personal trajectories as he explores the relationship between sexuality, class, ethnicity, community, and the legacy of AIDS. In The Inheritance, three generations of gay people discuss how they might learn from each other through various ways of inheriting and dis-inheriting. Lopez has some survivors of the 1980s’ AIDS crisis and contemporary youngsters explore how generations can learn from each other—a question mediated in the play by yet another, earlier generation, Edward Morgan Forster’s novel Howards End, which inspires the unfolding of events in Lopez’s play. Forster appears as a character called Morgan, who conducts “a metatheatrical masterclass” (Jorgensen, 2021: 101) and guides a group of actors and would-be writers through (writing and acting out) their own play. Lopez thus also examines his own literary inheritance as he compares his own conditions of arrival with those of E.M. Forster, whose homosexuality forced him to remain closeted in Victorian England. It also meant that Maurice, a tale on homosexual love that Forster wrote in 1913–1914, and subsequently revised twice, was not published until 1971, a year after his death.

When my partner and I went to see The Inheritance, the atmosphere, on both evenings, was one that I have rarely experienced: total concentration and silence, combined with irregular sounds of sobbing and quiet weeping and with salvos of laughter and chuckling. When we left the theater, this combination felt therapeutic, perhaps even life-giving, even if we felt drowned, disorientated, and so queer. Proud to have undergone this lengthy experience, and hurting from reliving such an unhappy past, also because it felt so unprocessed. On the one hand, we felt deeply moved as if we could collectively remember and mourn all the ex-lovers, friends, and relatives we had lost such a long time ago, but also that we could move on, leaving behind some of the itchiness of the multiple traumas and their sedimentation in our bodies and skin, and understanding a bit better how to go on living with each other—as generations, as partners, and as strangers. What we experienced was an affective revolt of goosebumps, blushes, and tears, in short of the senses, as much as a pedagogical encounter between ages, social classes, and ethnicities.

Thematically, The Inheritance seems to gravitate around Ahmed’s idea of undoing inheritances, as it aims to understand how to produce an inheritance between disconnected groups. Paradoxically, however, none of these generations can face the question about what they might mean for each other without revising their own blend of (queer) dis/orientations that infuse their life trajectories.

Set in New York 30 years after the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Inheritance confronts survivors of the AIDS crisis with the queer generation of today. It asks how these generations can meet, live, and learn together and “share” forms of being non-normative in today’s complex social and political stratifications. The AIDS generation, to which I belong, was not only physically decimated. Those who survived also felt arrested in their blossoming emancipation in the wake of the Stonewall uprising, in particular due to the political and social setbacks imposed on my generation’s sexual orientation by the prevailing stigmas which Lopez’s play so incisively illustrates. The AIDS epidemic disconnected my generation from the next one, which was left without intergenerational support or examples of how to become queer. Both generations were separated and deserted, and thus were more vulnerable to being silenced by heteronormative orientations.

In writing this article, I have tried to reconnect myself with my own orientation, one halted or, at least, slowed down somewhere in the 1980s and that has only occasionally surfaced in my academic work (see Steyaert, 2010, 2015, 2020). I have tried to learn from the inspiring work of scholars from more recent generations (as I mentioned Nick Rumens, Fabiane Ramos, and Laura Roberts), and those who I have not cited explicitly but have read and felt moved by in the background while rewriting this essay (e.g. Burford, 2015; Lipton, 2021; Weatherall and Ahuja, 2021). Forming the “younger” generations (in my field), I often find these publications so inspiring, especially in how these early career colleagues visibly queer their thinking and writing, already disrupting their doctoral and postdoctoral trajectories in order to queer the ways in which they write their academic curriculum vitae (Lipton, 2021) and learn to become academics (Weatherall and Ahuja, 2021). Also, my attempt to write in a queer style of provocation has allowed me to join the ever-expanding group of feminist efforts to write differently (Pullen et al., 2020) and to “touch vulnerable flesh” (Gilmore et al., 2019: 3).

These intergenerational connections give me hope for the future, hope that reproduction might increasingly fail. Writing this provocation essay by working through my queer dis/orientation has become a hopeful exploration. By realizing this intergenerational dialogue, and by suggesting a possible legacy of a lost generation, I hope to have revitalized a queer inheritance that might—sooner or later—halt the inheritance that stopped and still stops me and so many others from becoming queer in academia and education. Ultimately, this intergenerational work might orient management learning more easily toward queer forms of sensuous pedagogies. By turning to dis/orientation as core to the spaces of learning we all inhabit, we might encourage the view that learning involves, time and again, feeling out of place as much as wondering how to reorient our life trajectories.