Mary Lou Rasmussen

‘After‐queer’ tendencies in queer research

Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an ‘after‐queer’ vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an ‘after‐queer’, we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers’ visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research.

Beyond gender identity

This paper focuses on the continuing significance of gender identity as a category of analysis within the field of gender theory and research in education. I begin by considering contemporary discussions of the limitations of research relating to gender theory and research in education. Following on from this, I explore some contemporary theorising on the category of gender within educational research in order to highlight ongoing debates that I perceive in the field. Finally, via a discussion of school toilets and gender performance, I consider how theoretical discourses relating to space and architecture might further develop the utility of gender as a category of analysis within education.

Secularism, religion and ‘progressive’ sex education

This article engages contemporary debates about the notion of secularism, outside of the field of education. I draw on these debates to consider how ‘progressives’ in sex education in the USA draw on and reinscribe religious/secular divides. I will consider the affinities, prejudices and attachments of scholars who advocate a secular worldview, in the context of sex education, and I will consider some of the consequences that ensue from this way of seeing. My aim is to demonstrate how the notion of secularism works to frame debates within the field of sex education.

Play School, Melancholia, and the Politics of Recognition.

This paper draws on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘gender melancholia’ as conceived in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, and Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the face of the Other mobilized in Butler’s more recent work. In particular, I will focus on gender melancholia in order to consider why non‐heteronormative identities might cause such consternation when they appear in a specific pedagogical context. I also consider how the notion of gender melancholia may be useful in gaining a more in‐depth understanding of the prohibitions placed on the production and dissemination of texts that introduce young children to non‐normative representations of sexual and gender identity. In addition, the Levinasian notion of the face, as mobilized by Butler, prompts a consideration of the ethical implications of having certain faces that appear to be unrepresentable in particular pedagogical domains.

What Can a Concept Do? Rethinking Education's Queer Assemblages.

In a discussion of Deleuzes theorization of concepts, Todd May asks “what can a concept do with that which cannot be identified?” Or to put it another way, May writes – “A concept is a way of addressing the difference that lies beneath the identities we experience.” This is not to say that identities, concepts, and experiences are linked in particular ways. The possibility of extending what a concept can do is also brought under scrutiny by Ann Burlein, who draws on the work of Elizabeth Wilson to argue “Feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it [science] takes women as its objects, but also in the neutral zones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place or political purchase.” “Why not feminist critiques of the liver or the stomach, she asks?” Such styles of thought are the inspiration for this paper. We argue that queer concepts in education should not stop at places where education takes queer bodies as its objects, but that queer concepts have an important role to play in places where, at first glance, they appear to have no place or purchase.

The cultural politics of queer theory in education research

This special issue was born from the idea that there are certain habits of thought and boundaries drawn around the use and perceived place of queer theory in education research. Our intention in this special issue is to disrupt these habits of thinking by opening up dialogue about (1) the objects and subjects of queer research; (2) the forms of politics incited by the use of queer theory in education; and (3), the methodological approaches used by scholars when queer(y)ing/queering. As editors, we invited contributions from those who found queer theory problematic, and/or past its use-by date, as well as from those who continue to see a productive place for queer research in education, however that may be defined. The first paper in this issue is an interview we conducted with Raewyn Connell, a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s award for her distinguished contribution to the study of sex and gender. She is also on record as being a critic of queer politics and theory. For instance, in the article entitled Kartini’s Children (2010), she writes:

Crafting the Normative Subject: Queerying the Politics of Race in the New Zealand Health Education Classroom.

This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes, we critically queer how the Māori concept of hauora is deployed in the intended and operational NZ Health curriculum to shape the raced subject. Despite the best intentions of curriculum developers and classroom teachers to utilise Māori ways of knowing to meet their obligations within a bicultural nation, we argue that the notion of hauora is domesticated by being aligned with normalising individualistic notions of well-being that reflect the Eurocentric neoliberal individual enterprise subject. Palatable notions of Māori epistemologies as cultural artefacts and iconography drive that ‘inclusion’. The ‘cunning politic’ of (bicultural) recognition legitimates Māori ways of knowing in ways which privilege whiteness – reproducing rather than disrupting networks of power and dumbing down Māori epistemologies.

Queer conversation in straight spaces: an interview with Mary Lou Rasmussen about queer theory in higher education

This is an interview with Mary Lou Rasmussen who is an Associate Professor, in the Faculty of Education, University of Monash, Melbourne. She is an eminent queer theorist within the field of education, with a special interest in queer subjects as they cohere around sexuality education, gender and sexualities. Her career spans 13 years in which she has written and edited three books, and five journal special issues. She has published extensively in esteemed journals on the subject of queer theory, including Sexualities, Sex Education, Discourse, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Gender and Education. She contributed to a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education on the work of Judith Butler considering the relationship between melancholia and the politics of recognition. Here, Louisa Allen, who is the guest editor for the current special issue, ‘Queering the Academy: New directions in LGBT research in higher education’ talks with her about the place and utility of queer theory within higher education. The conversation aims to explore the edges of ‘queer’ as a concept, as well as thinking through its theoretical and empirical possibilities within the field of higher education.

In Search of Critical Pedagogy in Sexuality Education: Visions, Imaginations, and Paradoxes.

This article is about the purposes and the processes of teaching comprehensive sexuality education to diverse communities. We argue that establishing an educational response to addressing diversity in sexuality education involves challenging and interrupting current dominant forms of authority, subordination, and systems of hegemony prevalent in the teaching practices of this subject. We argue that critical pedagogy (influenced by the Frankfurt school of thought and developed by Freire 1974, 1973; Giroux 1988, 2003; and Kincheloe 2004) is a vehicle to explore and expand existing teaching pedagogies and cultural investments in sexuality education, as well as a way to contribute toward more effective teaching and student learning in this subject area. The turn to critical pedagogy in this article is an acknowledgement that the dilemmas of the secondary classroom and the questions of what becomes of sexual knowledge in that space are too big to ignore. Conservative pedagogies still reign in school-based sexuality education. Educational standards in this subject area are still strictly associated with risk knowledge (McWilliams 1996) and normative ideals of sex, sexuality, and gender are pervasive in the teaching practices of this subject (Allen 2007; Rasmussen 2006).

After dark in the antipodes: pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology

This paper pursues issues of pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology in the context of what might be meant by the term ‘after‐queer’ or ‘what falls outside queer’ as we currently theorise, practice and locate queer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s account of how bodies become oriented by the ways in which they take up time and space, this paper investigates how bodies become oriented within and around the field of a television series that centres Indigenous terms and orientations and thereby, still further, problematises the directions and orientations of desire. The paper explores the narrative and queer and other couplings of an Australian tele‐series, The Circuit. It raises issues of audience, public pedagogy and we refer to guestbook discussion as we strive to foreground a methodology for working with sexuality and race that recognises and disturbs in order to read sexual and racial orientations as mixed and unfixed orientations.