Queering the Curriculum

Integrating queerness into curriculum studies to me has to be done through a variety of ways. Initially as Heather Sykes suggests in Queering Curriculum Studies, I have to recognize my own white privileges, and how I am caught up in it in personal, politcal, and theoretical ways, and how it all affects queerness. I also need to bring awareness to how these stigmas and bias’ against queerness have came as a result of “underlying racist and eugenic logics: visibility-seeing is believing; atavism-fears of transformatio; and miscegenation-fear of mixing,” as Sykes puts it. 

In my future classroom I want to make clear to the students to acknowledge and understand that identities are much more complex that what society has previously led most to believe. I want the classroom to be a safe place where students can express themselves as they please. I plan to use queer perspectives and advocate by using my white privilege and power stance to spread awareness on queerness and speak up to support the community in as many ways as I can so they get a voice and see a perceptive they can relate to. I will also be prepared to disrupt any common misconceptions or rebuttals that students may express in class, and introduce ways to work against those views.

Queer sexual idenity marking can be found to be both similar and different from other forms of sexuality marking. Through the paper and study “As a Sort of Blanket Term: Qualitative Analusis sof Queer Sexual Identity Marking,” we find that the term queer depends on the context and situation in most cases. It can be used as a wide general term in some cases, while a specific term in others. The paper describes queer as being “oftend used as an umbrella term to describe non-cisgender and non-hetersexual individuals or those outside of traditional gender roles or sexual binaries.” An intention of the use of the word queer is to break the tradtional view of ones sexual indentiy acting as a binary system. 

The study found that many people use the general term of queer to avoid explaning their sexiuatily in more detail which commonly brought along more questions and bias’. The term queer is similar to other forms of sexuailty marking in ways that it relates to ones identity, however, it differs from other other forms of sexuality marking as it is a general term that can account for a variety of both gender and sexual orientation that don’t uphold binary constructs, such as other identities do.

Through the article Post-gay, Political, and Pieced Together- Queer Expectations of Straight Allies, we are intoduced to the different expectations some queer students look for in their allies. They have categorized these different views in terms of either post-gay, political, or peiced together expectations. The post-gay expactations of their allies were described to be “uninvolved or only minimally involved in a broader LGBTQ+ rights movement,” and more seen as a friendship, as it was thought to be because their queerness was insignificant in their self-perception. Whereas the political expectations envisioned their “allies to be politically engaged in ways that would benefit the larger queer community,” and to “embrace queerness just as queer people themselves had embraced their own identities.” The pieced together expectations differed in the ways the post-gay and polical expections did, and instead consitsted of a variety of unique expectations. 

Keeping in mind these different expectations for an ally, teachers should consider all perspectives and collaborate methods to express that as such. However there are other perspectives to be mindful of, as some queer individuals would rather their allies not advocating queerness because it draws to much attention to them. This puts teachers in a difficult position when students express different feelings towards what their allyship would look like to them, therefore, a teacher might implement ways of understanding how their students would like them to express their involvement, awareness, and relationship to meet their best needs, and adjust them as needed.