Teaching Queer Theory: Judith Butler, Shakespeare and She’s the Man

Abstract

Teaching English in Higher Education involves encouraging and enabling students to question established assumptions, disrupt the status quo and to account for the complexity of the textualised world in which they participate. Queer theory potentially provides the opportunity to ‘make trouble’ (Butler 1990, vii). Developing as it did through political activism and the need to raise awareness about the existence of lifestyles and identities previously not acknowledged in mainstream culture, it opens up the opportunity for productive alternative and politicised readings of texts. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick eloquently points out, this body of theory owes its productivity to the ‘gorgeous generativity, the speculative generosity and daring, the permeability, and the activism that have long been lodged in the multiple histories of queer reading’ (Sedgwick 1992, viii). This creativity and commitment makes queer theory an invaluable tool for challenging particular strongly held assumptions about identity, subjectivity, personhood and society, which necessarily limit the reading of a text.