Using Critical Literacy to Queer Knowledge Structures

• In Event: Visceral Literacies, Embodied Inquiries: The “Affective Turn” in Critical Research for Social Justice

Abstract

Much work has been done to challenge traditional conceptions of power and knowledge, and queer theory has been increasingly employed to aid in its deconstruction. Queer theory has allowed for the queering of sexuality, gender, and power and knowledge (Foucault, 1978; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Butler, 1990, 2004, Halberstam, 2011), challenges static notions of the human experience and calls for a more inclusive and less confined valuing of human life. In the context of scholarly work employing poststructural and queer theories that pushes on traditional understandings commonly found in school institutions, the proposed paper argues that acknowledgement of “visceral literacies” (Dutro, in press) is a critical shift for not only LGBTQ students and teachers, but for straight teachers, as it demands an entirely new vision of organizing and honoring how lived experience is interpreted in classrooms.
Queer theorists and other poststructuralist scholars charge us to rethink how conceptions of nature, history, and unity function as a means of regulating bodies or knowledge deemed “unfit” and, as I posit, speak to the importance of “visceral literacies” (Dutro, 2013). Schools are sites that possess incredible power in reinforcing (or disrupting) the dissemination of power and knowledge through language. They can function as highly regulatory, disciplinary spaces that reinforce heteronormative practices, thereby regulating every subject, both student and teacher, to behave “normally” in school (e.g., Cruz, 2012; Jones, 2012; Probyn, 2004). As a result, these structures modify and synchronize bodies and beliefs and classrooms become limiting and confining spaces for those that do not fit heteronormative standards. Using Queer Theory to analyze how normative assumptions function in classroom interactions and to suggest alternatives, reframes the way knowledge and power can be legitimated, the ways in which students and teachers can acknowledge, honor and witness one another and disrupt dichotomizing and pathologizing labels that are often given so freely within schools spaces.
This paper presents a conceptual argument for how queer theoretical perspectives point toward the importance of attention to the visceral and virtual (Massumi, 2002) in literacy classrooms. As part of this argument, I use data examples shared in published scholarship in critical literacy, often grounded in sociocultural theories, to analyze the additional layers of challenge to normative conceptions of literacy and identity afforded by those queer theoretical lenses. My argument is not that sociocultural theories are unimportant, quite the contrary. However, I contend that Queer Theory offers crucial lenses on success and failure, literacy, language, communication, as well as reimagined spaces for histories and bodies to be acknowledged and valued.
This paper points to the importance of bringing queer theoretical lenses more centrally to bear on work in critical literacies in the field of literacy education. By queering knowledge structures, histories, and discourses of power, Queer Theory not only provides theoretical justifications for deconstructing the politics of truth, but also powerful tools and strategies that can be used to queer school institutions and classroom practices.

Author

• Ashley Cartun, University of Colorado - Boulder