DixieQueer: Loving, Telling, and Reconstructing the South

• In Event: Landscapes of Curriculum: Intersections of Place, Sexuality, and Interdisciplinarity in Curriculum Studies

Abstract

This paper presents overarching frameworks and themes from a forthcoming collection of narratives entitled DixieQueer: Essays on Place and Sexuality. Consisting of explorations of Southern queerness in multiple creative and scholarly formats, the collection 1) critically and intensively examines possible mutually-constitutive intersections of sexuality and place by exploring, as Dews and Law (2001, p. 5) suggest, one’s “own relationship to the South and then self-identify in whatever ways seem meaningful,” and 2) considers Southern queerness within larger social, cultural, political, religious, historical, economic, etc., contexts to further conversations of place within curriculum and education. Within such framings, contributors especially ponder: “What might happen if we were to use autobiography to ‘trouble’ the links between acts, categories, representations, desires, and identities?” (Miller, 2005, p. 220).

Within such framing questions and perspectives, this presentation in particular will examine ways in which place might be queered, so that it may be looked upon as a site of the possible by way of these queered voices that hold it accountable. Drawing from the lived experiences narrativized in the essays and referencing Ahmed’s (2006) queer phenomenology, the author considers various dimensions of the self’s situatedness (with)in place.

In Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis: The Significance of Place (1991), Pinar and Kincheloe introduced the notion of “place” into curriculum conversations by observing: “The concept of “place” enabled us to appreciate that even disinterested curriculum inquiry bore some meaningful relation—perhaps “should” bear some meaningful relation—to place where it occurs” (p.2). Place makes a difference in even the most seemingly neutral, objective, innocuous assumptions. The South is not only a distinct regional locale made up of multiple cultures, histories, and people, it is also a place with which many of its natives form deep attachments (of varying degrees and kinds) and identifications. Examining the “one and many Souths” (Cash, 1940) allows researchers to form deeper understandings of ways in which the self might become conscious of itself as social and of its social surroundings. The South as place indeed is a prime example of the “place” where, Pinar notes, “the particularities of history, culture, and subjectivity become entwined” (1991, p. 5). The entwinements of Southern landscapes demand examination, for Kincheloe writes, “Place becomes an important means of linking particularity to social concerns… and ‘generalized socioeconomic structure’” (1991, p. 21-22). Place brings these particulars “into focus” (1991, p. 4), thereby making the “abstract concrete” (p. 4). This presentation theorizes that queered voices interrogating the complexities of contested, entwined places may open spaces to link the self and the social in curriculum as well as educational research, writ large.

Author

• Reta Ugena Whitlock, Kennesaw State University