Abstract
Garrett W. Nichols calls for a rethinking of the classroom as space for disrupting heteronormative discourses—discourses that Nichols links to settler colonialism—to open a space where we can hear, or sometimes re-hear, queer voices. Settler colonialism is a heteronormative project that relies on rhetorics of reproductive “inheritance” to naturalize the erasure of indigenous cultures. Pedagogies attuned to the realities of heteronormativity and settler colonialism require a pedagogical commitment to interrupting these discourses, especially in institutional structures whose existence relies on and supports settler ideologies. Queerscapes, per Gordon Brent Ingram, are spaces and planes of queer alliances formed within and overlapping with heteronormative spaces; the university classroom, with its imbricated personal histories, institutional memories, and power dynamics, is always-already a queerscape. Importantly, the classroom is also a “settlerscape,” composed of the multiple subjectivities that constitute modern settler society and made meaningful through histories of indigenous displacement. Recognizing this dynamic opens a space for unheard queer voices, argues Nichols, and lets us “re-hear” how non-queer stories and perspectives are made meaningful through their unspoken proximity to queerness and colonization. Nichols proposes a decolonial queerscape pedagogy that foregrounds the marginalized and oppressed identities that populate every classroom, while also denaturalizing the supposedly “natural” and “inevitable” rhetorics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and settler colonization that inform the American academy.
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Notes
- 1.
“Two-Spirit” is an “intentionally complex” term employed by many Native GLBTQ people. Driskill writes that “ Two-Spirit is a word that itself is a critique…. It claims Native traditions as precedents for understanding gender and sexuality, and asserts that Two-Spirit people are vital to our tribal communities” (“Doubleweaving” 72–73).
- 2.
Decolonial critiques and projects differ from “postcolonial” critiques whose theories and stories reflect a different reality than that faced by Native people who still live on lands occupied by settler colonists. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Smith illustrates this tension when she quotes Aboriginal rights activist Bobbi Sykes’s response to a conference on postcolonialism: “What? Post-colonialism? Have they left?” (24).
- 3.
Michel Foucault traces this practice back to the “Classical Age” of Western culture, which divided all of knowledge, or the episteme, “in terms of the articulated system of a mathesis, a taxinomia, and a genetic analysis” (Order 74). This articulation and division, he argues, informs Western analysis and research. “The sciences always carry within themselves the project, however remote it may be, of an exhaustive ordering of the world; they are always directed, too, towards the discovery of simple elements and their progressive combination; and at their centre they form a table on which knowledge is displayed in a system contemporary with itself” (74).
- 4.
One strategy to centralize power in the hands of settler subjects is by making invisible competing identities, ideologies, and histories without actually removing them, because settler society requires non-settler ways of being to convince itself that it provides a superior alternative. Often, these very categories are created to assert cultural and social divisions, which are then used to justify exclusion from the benefits of the settler state. For example, as Siobhan Somerville has demonstrated in Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, scientific discourses of racism and sexual perversity in the US developed together to make sense of “cultural anxieties about ‘mixed’ bodies, particularly the mulatto, whose symbolic position as a mixture of black and white bodies was literalized in scientific accounts” (37). Further, as Cathy Cohen has noted in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” this development has led to the queering of non-normative bodies and lives, outside of a simple white/non-white binary, that limits “the entitlement and status some receive from obeying a heterosexual imperative” (442). Settler colonialism provides the terms of discourse for these alternatives lest they speak their own realities in a way that threatens to undermine settler society’s supposedly self-evident claims to existence. In essence, settler colonial ideology pulls a bait-and-switch, acknowledging that non-settler forms of socialization threaten the settler state, while describing as threatening the very parts of those alternative forms of socialization that are either nonthreatening or do not even exist.
- 5.
Ingram does make reference to colonialism and empire, though he does so in a way that implies colonialism has ended: “Most of these conditions are regulated in terms of the overlapping vestiges (the societal artifacts) of colonialism and empire, as well as today’s flows of globalizing capital” (36–37).
- 6.
My experiences and tactics are not meant to be generalizable beyond my own classroom. As an able-bodied, white, male teacher, I can access privileges many other instructors, queer and non-queer, may not when identifying and teaching toward marginal spaces. Where I hope this example is useful is in making visible the vectors of power and privilege that converge in my body, the bodies of my students, and the space we call the classroom.
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Nichols, G.W. (2018). Queer Settlers in a One-Room Schoolhouse: A Decolonial Queerscape Pedagogy. 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_3
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