Becoming the Loon: Queer Pedagogies and Female Masculinity

Abstract

“Becoming the Loon” is interested in the intersections between the embodied life of the teacher as he or she is understood in relation to students, to departments, and to the larger gendered world. With particular attention to the female masculine (or butch) professor of writing, the chapter weaves together several theoretical questions through narrative (the stories of my classroom, the stories and images of the loon, and the story of my gender) and through some theoretical tenets themselves (primarily work by Kristeva, Bourdieu, Butler and Halberstam). The chapter participates in a larger discussion of queer pedagogy as it is beginning to be defined and explored by scholars in education, philosophy, and composition pedagogy. It explores legitimacy in terms of the ways students might imagine their teacher’s body and moves on to consider the “abjection” (to use Kristeva’s term) and “melancholia” (to use Butler’s) students can experience when both the materials of their courses and the very bodies who are teaching these materials disrupt and confuse their prior notions of one of the most sacred binaries: gender. Finally, the chapter argues for a kind of performance pedagogy as the lens through which all teachers (traditionally gendered and genderqueer alike) might benefit from a discussion of my own particular teaching body. As many have argued about gender, pedagogy also is quite tied to performance; and it is the theoretical and practical nature of that performance that is the final concern of this chapter. How do we teach in an impossible body? Are teaching bodies even possible given the disembodied position of academia? Whose bodies enter this discussion? What can our bodies say or teach? Finally, I will say that this chapter, formally, might be called a collage. And it is my hope that its form communicates a great deal about its content—about the inextricable links between the forms and ideas of the chapter.

The metaphor for the text is still the metaphor of text as body.

Paul de Man from Allegories of Reading

The wild foxes, uncertain, walk across the frozen river, listening beneath for the sound of water. If they hear nothing, they may cross to the other side.

David Rothenburg from The Blue Cliff Records