Abstract
Elizabeth McNeil and Joshua O. Lunn examine their relationship—one free and the other incarcerated—and their work as teachers of queer thought in the radical context of prison. As commonplace as incarceration is (the USA has the highest rate of incarceration in the world), and as familiar as it is in our news and creative media, we do not often engage, through academic or other social discourse, what it means to be institutionalized by legal confinement, or how the incarcerated might break free of the dehumanizing constructs of imprisonment. Incarceration inculcates and violently enforces rigid racial, gender, and power binaries, provoking even deeper adherence to US hegemonic social norms that in turn engender the cycle of recidivism funding the nation’s prison-industrial complex. As a place that profoundly delimits aspects of human being, prison is abnormal, ill, obsessive—by (one) definition, “queer.” As such, prison can also be, however, a fractious and creative “third space” of hybridity and synergy, of thoughtful disruption of received and perceived norms and patterns of thought and behavior (Bhabha). In his work on queer studies in education, David V. Ruffolo defines “queer” not as a state of being but as an action, a process (290). Besides identifying, vis-à-vis Judith Butler’s “Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” binary strictures of prison that condemn desire and the self, Lunn and McNeil locate queer pedagogy as intellectual, relational, and social action revealing the potential for liberated thought and being.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The ACLU cites 1 in 31.
- 2.
Though the concept of liminality, interstices, etc. is not new, Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” from The Location of Culture (1994), is that specifically postcolonial meeting place of cultural clash, hybridity, and synergy.
- 3.
At least eight of Josh’s letters sent to me over a three-month span, letters that contained many pages toward our essay, disappeared while he was housed on a yard well known for its lack of accountability in regard to mail delivery. Many of my letters to him during this period likewise vanished. We had to resort to his bringing pages into visitation (a clear violation of DOC policy), or I could not have completed the conference presentation that predated this essay, or the essay itself.
- 4.
In spring 2011, Josh was sent to “the hole” (solitary confinement in a 6’ × 8’ cell) for a week or so for a book I had sent him for the ecofeminism class, science historian Londa Schiebinger’s Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. On the cover is the painting “Nature” (1791), by Hubert-Francois Gravelot, which, as was iconic for the period, depicts Nature as a woman with breasts bared. The property people kept it for a while, as possible contraband, then determined, after numerous tries on his part to explain the text to them, that it was not sexually explicit material and so let him have it. Later, in a routine search of his personal property, the book was confiscated as pornography and Josh was issued a ticket. He appealed, following the usual tiresome process up through all the levels, but was ultimately sent to the hole. Later, the book was approved again and returned to him. The ticket was not removed, however, and certainly no one apologized. More recently, they confiscated as sexually explicit an issue of The New Yorker.
- 5.
Butler is referring to Søren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death 18.
Works Cited
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). n.d. Prison Crisis. American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU Foundation. Web. 25 June 2014.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Print.
Butler, Judith. Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1987). In Salih and Butler, 39–89. Print.
———. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions (1990). In Salih and Butler, 90–118. Print.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Print.
Evans, Nicholas. 1995. The Horse Whisperer. New York: Dell. Print.
Gilbert, Jack. 2001. Tear It Down. In The Great Fires: Poems 1982–1992. New York: Knopf. Print.
Glaze, Lauren E., and Erinn J. Herberman. 2013. Correctional Populations in the United States, 2012 (NCJ 243936). Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice, December 19, 2013. Web. 18 July 2014.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Print.
International Centre for Prison Studies. n.d. World Prison Brief. ICPS. Web. 18 July 2014.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. 1849. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Print.
Lamberton, Ken. 2007. Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Print.
Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Knopf. Print.
———. 1988. Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 7 October 1988. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Rpt. in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, XI, ed. Grethe B. Peterson, 123–163. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990. Print.
Ruffolo, David V. 2012. Educating-Bodies: Dialogism, Speech Genres, and Utterances as the Body. In Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education, ed. John Landreau and Nelson Rodriguez, 289–306. Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. Print.
Salih, Sara, ed., with Judith Butler. 2004. The Judith Butler Reader. Malden/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell. Print.
Schiebinger, Londa. 2004. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. 1993. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. Print.
Walmsley, Roy. 2013. World Prison Population List. 10th ed. London: International Centre for Prison Studies and University of Essex. November 21, 2013. Web. 18 Aug 2014. PDF file.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McNeil, E., Lunn, J.O. (2018). Teaching Desire in Third Space: A Queer Prison Pedagogy for the Unknowing Spirit. In: McNeil, E., Wermers, J., Lunn, J. (eds) Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy. Queer Studies and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64623-7_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64623-7_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64622-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64623-7
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)