"Great Course, but You Didn't Talk About Sexuality Enough!" Queer Battle Fatigue Meets Queer Affirmation

• In Event: 58.076 - From Verbal Aggression to Physical Violence: LGBTQI Experiences, Everyday Oppression, and Queer Battle Fatigue

Abstract

This paper pressures the concept of ‘Queer Battle Fatigue’ (QBF) from a contextualized standpoint: doing initial teacher education in a major Canadian urban centre, where the school board policy climate is LGBTQ-inclusive, the provincial human rights code offers protection on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, and the recent pride parade featured the country’s prime minister, the province’s premier, and the city’s mayor. Taking up Sara Ahmed’s (2012) characterization of the university diversity worker as ‘going against the flow’ of institutional life, the paper considers what happens when ‘diversity work’ – particularly in relation to gender and sexual diversity – becomes the flow itself: where resistance to queer-affirming education has become a blockage or source of friction (Tsing, 2015). In this kind of emerging context, what is QBF? What experiences of queer faculty qualify as QBF, in a climate where queer affirmation has become normalized and even normative?
The paper’s theoretical framework brings together affect theory (e.g., Ahmed, 2012), writing on Racial Battle Fatigue (e.g., Smith, Yosso, & Solórzano, 2006), and recent debates about the place of normativity and anti-normativity in queer theory (see Wiegman & Wilson, 2015). Historically, queer theory has focused on the continual re/production of heteronormativity in everyday life and social texts; however, the increasing safety and privilege accruing to some LGBTQ people has prompted queer theorists (e.g., Duggan, 2002; Puar, 2007) to deploy the concept of homonormativity to critique how the neo-liberal nation-state only recognizes queers who embody normative characteristics like monogamy, parenthood, and whiteness. Recently, however, scholars (Jagose, 2015; Love, 2015; Wiegman & Wilson, 2015) have questioned whether queer theory can function without an inherent critique of normativity: must queer theory be anti-normative to be queer? The paper brings this question to the context under study.
Methods of autoethnography and critical discourse analysis are used to engage affective examples (Maclure, 2010; Massumi, 2002) from the author’s teacher education practice, particularly from teaching on a racialized controversy that unfolded during the city’s above-mentioned annual pride celebrations. The data are used to explore tensions within discourses of Queer Battle Fatigue, contextualizing QBF in order to suggest that it may not exist for some queer people, at all. Where queerness is normative, does ‘QBF’ still index queerness, at all?
Scholarly writing on queer or LGBTQ issues in education makes frequent reference to statistical data on the prevalence of queer and/or transgender youth vicitimization. While the focus in this literature remains on the damage wrought by heteronormativity, this justification for queer work in may be wearing out in some contexts. However, there has been little if any scholarly engagement with emerging queer-affirming contexts, which tend to serve as ‘castles on the hill’: far away, idealized, and under-studied. Overall, the paper provides humanizing complexity (Banks, 2010) to the representation of ‘queer’ people and lives in education by focusing on times and places where queerness may not be non-normative and under erasure, and where queer-affirmation is the unquestioned and unquestionable norm.

Author

• Lee Airton, Queen's University