Christy Carlson, Trent University NACADA Annual Conference, Session # 217 Nashville, October 6, 2012

Queer theory: Defining queer Intersectionality Construction vs. development Michel Foucault Judith Butler Queer advising: Some preliminary thoughts Case studies & discussion

“The word ‘queer’ itself means across”  Sedgwick, Tendencies “As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object.... There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”  Halperin, Saint Foucault

Queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s [identity] aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”  Sedgwick, Tendencies Queer as a political orientation, a critique of identity categories

“With identity thus reconceptualized [through the recognition of intersectionality], it might be easier to understand the need to summon up the courage to challenge groups that are after all, in one sense, ‘home’ to us, in the name of the parts of us that are made not at home.... The most one could expect is that we will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few.”  Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”

“[A]ll the developmental vectors could be classified under ‘identity formation’ ” (p. 173). “The vectors describe major highways for journeying toward individuation—the discovery and refinement of one’s unique way of being” (p. 35). “Developing identity is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle” (p. 48).  Chickering, Education and Identity

“A solid sense of self emerges” (p. 49). “[T]here is an I who coordinates the facets of personality... who ‘owns’ the house of self” (p.49). Developing identity entails “finding roles that are genuine expressions of self” (p. 49).  Chickering, Education and Identity

Discourses are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.”  Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge “The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions.”  Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

“It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than a singular nature.... Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul... [T]he homosexual was now a species.”  Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 “The judges of normality are everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.”  Foucault, Discipline and Punish

“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.” “Gender is a repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulated frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”  Butler, Gender Trouble

Identity is something we ‘do,’ not something we ‘are.’ The repetition of norms produces an illusion of a fixed, inner, essential self—a core ‘doer’ behind the deed. The drive to produce a coherent, intelligible self derives from a cultural demand of coherence and recognizability.

If an identity “is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity, then this is an identity permanently at risk, for what if it fails to repeat or what if the very exercise of repetition is redeployed for a very different performative purpose”?  Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” Selves can be reconstituted differently.

Fluid Multiple Fractured Historically/contextually contingent Discursive Performative Regulatory

Awareness of ways our cultural/professional training may position us as agents of social control Awareness of ways our language may construct (potentially constraining) identities Focus on possibility and meaning-making rather than certainty Facilitate contextualized understanding of individual identity narratives Invite multiple perspectives Invite stories, not simply ‘facts’

Pay attention to temporal dimensions In the face of pressures to claim a fixed identity, ask: Who do these identity categories serve? Who do they include and exclude? Who has the power to define these categories? How are they policed? How do they change over time and across cultures? (Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer) What does your own experience suggest about these categories/rules?

Butler, J. P. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. P. (1991). Imitation and gender insubordination. In D. Fuss (Ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian theories, gay theories (13-31). New York: Routledge. Butler, J. P. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex.’ New York: Routledge. Chickering, A. W., & Reisser, L. (1993). Education and identity (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, Doty, A. (1993). Making things perfectly queer: Interpreting mass culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, vol. 1.: An introduction. (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. London: Routledge. Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.