Queer pedagogy

Queer pedagogy (QP) is an academic discipline devoted to exploring the intersection between queer theory and critical pedagogy, which are both grounded in Marxist critical theory. It is also noted for challenging the so-called "compulsory cisheterosexual and normative structures, practices, and curricula" that marginalize or oppress non-heterosexual students and teachers. Practice QP explores and interrogates the student/teacher relationship, the role of identities in the classroom, the role of eroticism in the teaching process, the nature of disciplines and curriculum, and the connection between the classroom and the broader community with a goal of being both a set of theoretical tools for pedagogical critique / critique of pedagogy and/or a set of practical tools for those doing pedagogical work. The pedagogy focuses on the crisis of knowledge production that result from epistemological limits and regimes of power. Particularly, the pedagogy operates in a situation where the desire for knowledge is inhibited by the repetition of the heterosexual and queer normalization. One of the ways that these are addressed in this framework is by drawing attention to the unease and uncertainty regarding what one thinks and knows. History According to William Pinar, a curriculum theorist at the University of British Columbia, homosexuality and pedagogy have been linked as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans. Modern notions of queer theory in education, however, originate around 1981 with Pinar's "Understanding Curriculum as Gender Text," critiquing the way in which machisimo and masculinity plays out in Marxist educational theory. In 1982, Meredith Reiniger wrote about misogyny that had been internalized by her secondary English students. In 1983, James Sears wrote an article entitled "Sexuality: Taking off the Masks" for a journal called Changing Schools.