Queering Border-Crossing Pedagogy

• In Event: Mujerista Politics at the Borderlands: Embodied Epistemologies and Praxis

Abstract

This paper theorizes queering border-crossing pedagogy grounded in the lived experiences of queer migrants. The theoretical framework combines legitimizing nepantla (Anzaldua, 2002), people occupying spaces between and across boundaries, with border-crossing pedagogy (Giroux, 2005). These theories frame syntheses of socio-political analyses, cultural pedagogies, and critiques of pathologizing, disempowering discourses. Queering border-crossing pedagogy responds to niche, identity-based cultural pedagogies by reorienting all students to think as border-crossers through queer migration’s unknown alterity. It also cultivates agentive empathy to confront assimilationist approaches to difference devalorized through xenophobic current political rhetoric and othered by exclusionary immigration practices. This theoretical exploration offers a novel perspective for empirical inquiry and practice and addresses a current gap in academic discourse.

Authors

• Marina Lambrinou, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Cathryn Bennett, University of North Carolina - Greensboro