Femme Pedagogies: Curiosity, Repair, and Survival

• In Event: Butch and Femme Histories, Practices, and Communities: Toward a Critical Intersectional Pedagogy of Love and Repair

Abstract

I explore femme pedagogy as a generative and generous response to the entangled wounds and desires that shape the interests and commitments of queer and trans scholars, teachers, mentors, and lovers.

I draw on my experiences as a white, lesbian, femme scholar who grew up in poverty and who now teaches and mentors students in methods of sociological and sexuality studies research. My students—queer, trans, racialized, and many the first in their families to pursue a university degree—yearn to join a community of intellectuals pursuing consequential research about sexuality, gender, and justice in an insistently heterosexist and racist world. These students also worry that to become scholars is to endorse the exploitative research practices of historically white disciplines and institutions. They struggle also to make sense of the wounds—sexual and gender violence, a racist state, family betrayals, alienation from oneself—that sit at the heart of their intellectual commitments and that seem unspeakable in too many academic settings.

It was in a multi-racial community of femmes and butches in the U.S. South that I first made “the absolutely necessary connections between academic study and antiracist intent” (Segrest 2002, 157) and understood that white antiracism emerges from a fierce love (Hollibaugh 2000; Pratt 1995). This love, bound up with anger and resistance, threads through the long history of femmes honoring—in friendship, across generations, and with lovers—the ways queer and trans wounds and desires are entangled (brown 2017; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2017). Femme scholars, activists, and lovers recognize the damage queer, trans, femme, and butch people suffer as we make sense of that entanglement; we love and learn in the tension so that we can “repair that damage” (Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, 78; see also Holland 2012). This repair work is not the exploitative emotional labor of the feminine educator, friend, or lover. Instead, this repair is butches and femmes, queer and trans teachers, students, mentors, and mentees meeting one another to pursue the desires and interests that paradoxically emerge from “a haunted system of ridicule and attack” (Hollibaugh 2000, 260).

Femme theory and pedagogy leans into the wounds and desires students, teachers, mentors, and mentees bring to our work together; posits emotion and affect as sites of truth and inquiry (Cvetkovich 2003); and fosters intellectual and intimate possibilities marked by love and care. Research interest becomes rooted in desires to resist injustice, to understand the life that is not your own, and to pursue a visceral curiosity. As Joan Nestle reminds us, “curiosity is not trivial; it is the respect one life pays to another. It is the largeness of mind and heart that refuses to be bounded by decorum or by desperation” (1992). Within femme pedagogy, curiosity becomes the grounds of a reparative pedagogical relationship located in a university system that remains rooted in heterosexist, whitely, and settler logics and in intergenerational exchanges among students and faculty so often marked by suspicion and a reluctance to acknowledge how our woundedness and our interests are entangled.

Author

• Jessica Fields, University of Toronto - Scarborough
  Presenting Author