Fitting In and Coming Out: Tensions in QTBIPOC Academic Experience

• In Event: Beyond Coursework and Research Projects: Mentorship of and by QTBIPOC Scholars Toward Collective Transformation

Abstract

In the past two decades in the United States, the LGBTQ community has made many civil rights advancements and has seen increased representation in politics, television and music entertainment, and professional sports. As acceptance increases across the nation, the assumption might be that gender and sexual orientation are now similarly celebrated in the university, but as Taylor (2018) reminds us, “being ‘diverse’ for and in the institution can be an awkward premium and a personalised pain,” (p.65). Specific to QTBIPOC experience in academia, diversity is often commodified (Ahmed, 2012) to support a heteropatriarchal reality of elitism and exclusion (Taylor, 2011). This paper centers the consequences of heteropatriarchy in academia for QTBIPOC newcomers and their mentorship.

As a mechanism of settler colonialism, the university is a conservative venture - meant to replace political and personal aspects of identity with a normative, neutral, and thus professional, identity (Hey, 2004; Reay, 2004). Religious universities, guided by the values of the Catholic Church, further occlude academic hierarchies and continue to shape the nature of mentorship practices and its valued outcomes. As a result, fitting in (Taylor, 2012) becomes a required process of assimilation which contradicts the attested commitments to diversity of people and ideas often touted by universities.

In this dialogue the junior LS scholar, a white, lesbian, cis female joins a Black, transgender performance studies scholar who works at the intersection of Blackness, aesthetics, gender and sexuality, and critical theory. We will explore the subtleties of anti-queerness and anti-trans antagonism within the university, sharing our personal journeys to and through the university. Drawing on Miwa Takeuchi’s (Vakil et al., 2020) reminder of the inseparability of our epistemology from our ontology, our dialogue will be grounded in the following questions:

1. As a trans person of color who teaches and mentors at a conservative religious university, how do you negotiate the tensions between fitting in and coming out?
2. How do you create space for transformation (for your students and yourself) within academic structures that privilege and uphold heteropatriarchy and Whiteness?

In our field’s commitment to transformation (of the field itself and in the design of equitable, anti-racist, and humanizing learning environments), we should return to a foundational theory in LS, that of learning as legitimate peripheral participation (LPP; Lave and Wenger, 1991). LPP acknowledges the tension between shifting newcomers practices towards those of the community, but at the same time transforming those practices and the community itself. With respect to mentorship, the potential for transformation is rooted in a willingness to turn the researcher gaze back on ourselves and our practices in an effort to interrogate the structures, values, products, and so-called impacts of our scholarly work. This dialogue contributes a focus on mentorship not as an assimilationist apprenticeship practice, but as an effort to protect and nurture the voices of young QTBIPOC scholars so that we may together transform the valued outcomes and practices of the university and of education research to be actively pro-LGBTQ, anti-racist, and de-colonial.

Authors

• Sarah C. Radke, The Town School

• Shante Paradigm