Queer Subjectivities in Critical Whiteness Studies: The Possibilities and Paradoxes of Antiracist Teaching

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Toward Intersectional Collectivity in Critical Whiteness Studies

Abstract

Deliovsky’s (2010) assertion that “whiteness even appropriates the very criticism that challenges its centrality” (p. 18) is a reminder that the enmeshed hegemonic power formations of whiteness and cisheteromasculinity operate on and within critical whiteness studies discourses. Employing queer and trans epistemologies to generatively disrupt the emerging field of critical whiteness studies in education, the purpose of this paper is to consider the possibilites and paradoxes of antiracist teaching as taken up by white queer postsecondary educators.

Theoretically grounded in Baldwin’s (1963) A Talk to Teachers and hooks’ (1994) conception of desire as a necessary component of liberatory education, this research utilizes narrative inquiry to explore how queer subjectivities shape white educators’ conceptions of and efforts at antiracist teaching. The data analyzed in this paper is a subset of a larger project and includes interviews and classroom observations with five white, queer post-secondary instructors who express a commitment to antiracist teaching. An analytical framework informed by queer theory is utilized to interpret the data, serving to disrupt the insulating effects of cisheteronormativity on critical whiteness studies in education research. Emergent themes suggest that early and ongoing experiences of homophobia and heterosexism significantly informed participants’ understanding of how power operates in society broadly and in education specifically. Without equating the construction of or experiences of race-based and sexuality-based systems of power, analysis of the data suggests that white queer educators’ apply their experiences of homophobia and heterosexism in imagining and striving to enact antiracist teaching in the postsecondary classroom.

This paper is significant in complicating and deepening critical whiteness research in education, which has tended to reify cisheteromasculinity and represent whiteness as a single-axis identity formation. My positionality as a white trans, queer researcher uniquely influences the conceptual, methodological, and analytical contours of this exploration of the experiences of white queer educators striving to enact antiraist teaching. Additionally, this project meaningfully expands critical whiteness studies scholarship by extending beyond the typically studied context of teacher education to consider the experiences of post-secondary instructors in the disciplines of English, gender studies, philosophy, and youth studies.

Author

• finn j. schneider, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities