Adam J. Greteman

The Problems with the Future: Educational Futurism and the Figural Child.

This article contributes to work on temporality in education. Challenging the future-oriented focus in contemporary education, the authors question how ideas and assumptions regarding the future—centred on the Child—can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman and John Dewey to examine the educational ramifications of the focus on the future, which we call ‘educational futurism’. The argument seeks specifically to explore how educational futurism imposes limits on educational discourse and privileges a certain future—making it unthinkable to imagine ways outside of such a privileged future. Juxtaposing Lee Edelman and John Dewey, we draw out connections and disconnections between their disparate philosophies, illustrating the ways in which educational futurism ignores or overlooks the lived experiences of children. We conclude by briefly noting the queerness of children and the impact of such queerness on broadening discussions of the future of children and their educations.

Dissenting with queer theory: reading Rancière queerly

In this article, the author looks to the work of Jacques Rancière to engage the possibilities in dissensus in queer theory in education. Fatigued of Foucault, bored with Butler, disdainful of Derrida and dumbfounded by Deleuze and Guattari, and just generally tired of feeling bullied into citing particular people and not others, the author attempts to join the growing use of Rancière in queer theory. Questions of queer theorys (or is it theories) relevance, its purpose, its contributions are asked more and more. While some have dissented from queer theory for perhaps queerer pastures, the author dissents with queer theory showing how humor provides a concrete “application” to dissent from educations continued reactionary and conservative approaches. Queer theory may have been institutionalized, but it remains, as the author argues, a necessary and important political framework to intervene in the ongoing process of normalization.

Fashioning a bareback pedagogy: towards a theory of risky (sex) education

In this paper, the author moves to think through the practice of barebacking to investigate the ways in which sex education fashions subjects and vice versa. Using recent scholarship and the emergence of barebacking, the author thinks through the discourses on this sexual culture and how doing so might allow sex education to move beyond merely thinking about sex to a more risky version of sex education. The authors intentions are to counter-intuitively use the figure of the ‘barebacker’ as a lifestyle for thinking through sex education in the twenty-first century to explore potential pedagogical insights where pedagogy is viewed not simply as methods of teaching or the art of teaching but as the process of fashioning the self through relationships with knowledge, the self and other. The phenomenon of the barebacker allows for an exploration of possible ways of coming into presence. This task requires grappling with the risks inherent in sex education to engage how subjects emerge in relationship to other subjects and how sex education edits out particular types of sexual subjects.

Helping Kids Turn Out Queer: Queer Theory in Art Education

This article explores the possibilities of queer theory in art education, and I playfully, perhaps provocatively, ask how art education can help kids turn out queer. Moving away from both victim narratives of queer subjects and the attention on gay artists, who often are the focus of scholarship in art education, I contemplate the ways in which art education researchers address queerness and how those forms of address impact the relations that are (im)possible within the educational dynamic. I ask, “In what ways has queer been addressed in art education research, and how can other scholars push forward with such work to continue queer projects?” I observe a need to challenge fears around queer topics and contemplate how queerness, embedded in theory and practice, disputes and disrupts art education research.

Beyond Intimaphobia: Object lessons from Foucault and Sade

Abstract In this study I suggest ways of thinking through issues of intimacy that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the USA. I propose a state of intimaphobia in education. However, I move beyond exposing this state of intimaphobia to offer particular readings of two philosophers of intimacy: Michel Foucault and the Marquis de Sade. I argue that these two philosophers provide alternative models of thinking through the problems and potentials of and for intimacy. While Foucault has been taken up within education in any number of ways, his concept of the ‘homosexual’ is utilized to offer insights into intimacy. Sade, while the stranger philosopher to engage, offers challenges to contemporary educational practices through the lessons of the libertine. Foucault and Sade offer, to put it simply, promises for pedagogical pleasures that challenge the current fears around intimacy in education.

Safety in Numbers: On the Queerness of Quantification

Adam J. Greteman and Justin N. Thorpe examine how quantification constructs queerness. The landscapes surrounding American schools are littered with numbers, and numbers have become the dominant object used to portray contemporary school experiences. From scores on exams, numbers on a scale, and the quantification of violence against queer bodies, a rather strange safety in numbers has emerged. Numbers have come to illustrate what Jane Gallop calls “logical eroticism.” In contemporary educational discourses, instruments and the data they produce have come to speak and judge the reality of experience in order to make political demands persuasive (see Lorraine Daston, Ian Hacking, Theodore Porter, Nikolas Rose), and quantification promises progress and an end to any given crisis (e.g., obesity, anti-gay bias, achievement gap). Utilizing queer theory and rhetorical studies, Greteman and Thorpe critique the quantification of anti-gay bias violence, looking specifically at the major reports released by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network to explore the queerness of numbers (e.g., their fetishization) and the rhetorical-ness of quantification regarding the queer experience. Their project does not seek simply to negate the use of quantification or numbers, but, rather, critically investigates how such numbers impact and produce the subjective possibilities of queer students.

Queer Pedagogy and Documenting AIDS

This chapter engages the centrality of AIDS in the history of queerness. The emergence of AIDS parallels the development of queer theory. Queer theory, born at the crossroads of street and academic activism, had a stake in articulating queer survival. This history is slowly being lost in the ongoing process of normalization and gentrification. Yet, in the 2010s, Greteman illustrates that there has been a growth in attention to the history of AIDS, particularly via documentaries that have emerged to document and revive the voices of our recent, but dead past. Drawing on the pedagogical force of documentaries to transmit histories, this chapter argues for the centrality of AIDS in becoming queer.

On Reading Practices: Where Pragmatism and Queer Meet

In this chapter, Greteman seriously considers the work of reading. While reading is often taken for granted, this chapter argues that how and what we read matter in the work of becoming queer. In becoming queer, the task of reading is centralized. Greteman comments on reading as it is informed by pragmatism—a form of reading that looks forward to conceivable consequences—and Eve Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading. Drawn together, these two approaches provide a foundation for the remaining chapters of the book and lessons in understanding the art of queer reading.

Generating Queer Generations

In this chapter, Greteman draws on Jane Roland Martin’s (2002) cultural wealth perspective to develop an argument about the assets of queer culture. This chapter explores how queer generations reveal the shifting terrain of sexualities, genders, and politics in order to offer up key lessons in the creation of queer culture. Queer cultures have often been seen as a problem to be solved or assimilated. However, as Greteman argues, there are cultural assets to queerness that teach important lessons about surviving and thriving amidst homophobia. Utilizing Plummer’s (2015) delineation of queer generations, for pedagogical use, the author shows how queer generations create diverse cultures that transmit lessons across one another.

The Idea of Queer Children

In this chapter, Greteman comments on children as they have come to be taken up within queer theory. Investigating contemporary theoretical understandings of the child, as elucidated by Lee Edelman, Cris Mayo, Kevin McDonough, and Lee Airton, Greteman provides a pragmatic intervention to contemplate queer children as thriving. The author argues that queer lessons have filtered their way into childhood. Queer youth may not become gay or lesbian adults, but their queerness helps illustrate both the potential in becoming queer and the institutional limitations currently present.