Abstract
This chapter serves as the introduction to our edited volume Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education. We organize our discussion of the contributor essays across three spheres of education: the K–12 level, the collegiate level, and within popular culture as “cultural pedagogy.” Thus, we frame the volume as contributing—methodologically, theoretically, and politically—to the fields of critical masculinity studies, educational studies, and queer studies by specifically engaging in knowledge production about the meanings and practices of queer masculinities in education.
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Notes
- 1.
By “masculinity politics,” Beasley refers to what she conceives as a broad range of academic and nonacademic discourse production about masculinity that can be understood as situated on a continuum between backlash/reassertions of masculinity, on the one hand, and profeminist, gender justice–oriented discourse that is concerned with the reform of masculinity, on the other.
- 2.
For an earlier treatment of what an analysis of gay masculinity might offer to critical masculinity studies, see Dowsett (1998).
- 3.
See Rodriguez and Pinar’s (2007) Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in Education for a recent example of a collection of essays that takes up the topic of queering heterosexuality and heterosexual identity within the context of the field of (teacher) education. On a more general level, it should be mentioned that the relationship between queer theory and heterosexuality marks a site of ongoing intellectual and political tension and debate. Indeed, can or should heterosexuality be included within a queer(ing) critical project? For a significant essay representative of the discourse on queering heterosexuality, see Calvin Thomas’s (2000) “Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality.” For a critical response to Thomas’s essay, see Annette Schlichter’s (2004) “Queer at Last? Straight Intellectuals and the Desire for Transgression.” For an essay that takes up both Thomas’s and Schlichter’s work within the context of a discussion of queer theory and pedagogy, see Rodriguez’s (2007) “Queer Theory and the Discourse on Queer(ing) Heterosexuality: Pedagogical Considerations.”
- 4.
Within the field of education, a number of scholars have been introducing a broad range of queer discourse. Earlier treatments, for example, include Deborah Britzman’s (1995) highly influential essay “Is There a Queer Pedagogy?: Or, Stop Reading Straight” and William F. Pinar’s groundbreaking (1998) Queer Theory in Education, the first collection to be published on the topic. Following these two publications, a number of scholars have produced a constellation of works that take up in various ways the relationship between queer theory/studies and education; see, for example, Blaise (2005), Kumashiro (2001), Mayo (2007), Rodriguez and Pinar (2007), and Talburt and Steinberg (2000), among many others.
- 5.
An excellent study that complements Mac an Ghaill and Haywood’s work here is C. J. Pascoe’s (2007) Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Utilizing poststructuralist perspectives, as well as theoretical insights from queer theory, critical masculinity studies, and sociology, Pascoe’s study significantly recasts the meaning and deployment of the fag epithet within homophobic social interactions, mostly among adolescent boys in high school settings.
- 6.
On the topic of straight educational research, Louisa Allen explores the issue of whether straight-identified researchers can produce antinormative knowledge in her (2010) article “Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher: The Relationship(?) between Researcher Identity and Anti-Normative Knowledge.”
- 7.
For examples of recent research that have attempted to illuminate the workings of heteronormativity in educational contexts, see Endo, Reece-Miller, and Santavicca (2010) and Rudoe (2010). Useful studies that utilize popular culture to illustrate the entrenched force of heteronormativity in the school culture include studies by Esposito (2009) and Richardson (2008). For an illuminating study that takes up the topic of heteronormativity by examining the issue within the context of teacher education research, see Stiegler (2008).
- 8.
Such a decrease in cultural homophobia may be understood as connected to, and partially the result of, a broader global trend in what Jeffrey Weeks (2010, p. 102) refers to as the “challenge of ‘detraditionalization,’” whereby “the fixed points which seemed to organize and regulate our sexual beliefs and morals—religious, familial, heterosexual, monogamous—have been radically undermined during the past century.” This has meant, in turn, that a growing number of people are turning to themselves, rather than to tradition, to work out their personal morals and ethics on a range of different issues, including on matters related to sexual and erotic life. According to Weeks (2010), this new individualism has generated “a new pluralism of beliefs and behaviors abroad, going beyond a diversity of sexual activities to a wide range of patterns of relationships reflecting generational, cultural, ethnic, communal and political difference” (p. 102).
- 9.
For a discussion of the topic of “inclusive” masculinity within the context of an analysis of the construction of masculinity among college-age heterosexual male cheerleaders, see Anderson’s (2005) study “Orthodox and Inclusive Masculinity: Competing Masculinities among Heterosexual Men in a Feminized Terrain.” For a more recent and extensive treatment of the topic, see Anderson’s (2009) book Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities.
- 10.
The sense of multiplicity, fluidity, and dynamism associated with a self constituted intersectionally—that is, a self that continually emerges at the intersection of any number of overlapping discursive categories—suggests that any one aspect of social identity, such as gender or sexuality, is, in ongoing fashion, impacted by some other aspect, such as race or class. From this perspective, the intersectional self can be understood within the terms of the category queer. To borrow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known and often-cited queer statement, the intersectional self, defying as it does the notion of unitary and static identity, represents “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (1993, p. 8).
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Landreau, J.C., Rodriguez, N.M. (2012). Queer Masculinities in Education: An Introduction. In: Landreau, J., Rodriguez, N. (eds) Queer Masculinities. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2552-2_1
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