Restorying Queer and Trans Educational Scholarship: Imagining Sites for BITQPOC Resistance

• In Event: Taking Race and Indigeneity Seriously in Queer Educational Research

Abstract

This paper outlines reflections from a duoethnographic counterstorytelling project, where we, two PhD students, designed an independent reading course on critical race, anti-racist, queer and trans theories. Through exploring the presence and absence of BITQPOC perspectives in queer, trans and two-spirit educational scholarship, we encountered two realities: (1) whiteness and coloniality continue to be upheld in queer and trans educational scholarship and (2) some racial identities have become synonymous (and ultimately legible) within gender and sexuality educational scholarship. This discovery is illustrative of the power of whiteness and coloniality to essentialize gender and sexuality. We ultimately propose a set of questions as an invitation for queer and trans educational scholars to decenter whiteness and coloniality.

Authors

• Bishop Owis, The University of British Columbia

• Lindsay Cavanaugh, University of Toronto