Queer Theory in Education

William F. Pinar, PhD

Louisiana State University
Peter Taubman introduced me to queer theory (or the possibility of it) in
1979 when, relying on Foucault, he wrote a doctoral dissertation destabilizing
gender categories. Peters work anticipated much scholarship that followed
concerning essentialism, social constructivism and identity (Jagose 1996;
Taubman 1979). At this time I was becoming gay, and the convergence of in-
tellectual and sexual practice was startling and intoxicating. Also about this
time I discovered Guy Hocquenghems analysis of the phallus and the anus.
Combined with Nancy Chodorows Reproduction of Mother (recommended
by my ex-partner and mother of our son, Denah Joseph), I found myself strad-
dled across contradictory but intensely stimulating traditions. The result was
my first critique of hegemonic masculinity, composed in 1981 (published in
1983, reissued in 1994 and 1998).
It is queer theory that has enabled me to understand that the democratization
of American society cannot proceed without a radical restructuring of hege-
monic white male subjectivity (Savran, 1998; Boyarin, 1997). Indeed, hege-
monic male subjectivity must be brought to ruin, shattered as Kaja Silverman
(1992) and Leo Bersani (1995) have suggested, its narcissistic unity dissolved,
its repressed feminine composition reclaimed, homosexual desire (nowcollec-
Correspondence may be addressed: Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
Louisiana State University, Peabody 223, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (E-mail:
Wpinar@lsu.edu).
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: Queer Theory in Education. Pinar, William F. Co-published simulta-
neously in Journal of Homosexuality (Harrington Park Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 45,
No. 2/3/4, 2003, pp. 357-360; and: Queer Theory and Communication: From Disciplining Queers to Queering
the Discipline(s) (ed: Gust A. Yep, Karen E. Lovaas, and John P. Elia) Harrington Park Press, an imprint of The
Haworth Press, Inc., 2003, pp. 357-360. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from
The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address:
docdelivery@haworthpress.com].
http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J082
2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
10.1300/J082v45n02_21 357
tively sublimated into identification with the oedipal father and a fascistic
fraternalism) re-experienced.
The straight mind valorizes difference, Bersani (1995, p. 39) asserts. The
association of compulsory heterosexuality with a hierarchical view of differ-
encean association elaborated earlier by Monique Wittig (1992)I under-
stand psychoanalytically. Bersani reminds us that Kenneth Lewes (1988)
theorized male heterosexual desire as the complicated consequence of flight
to the father following a horrified retreat from the mother. So conceptualized,
hegemonic male heterosexuality is constructed upon and actively requires a
traumatic privileging of difference. The cultural consolidation of heterosex-
uality, Bersani writes, is grounded in its more fundamental, non-reflec-
tive construction as the compulsive repetition of a traumatic response to
difference (1995, p. 40). In this regard, the straight mind might be
thought of as a sublimation of this privileging of difference (Bersani, 1995,
p. 40).
In addition to psychoanalytically-inspired studies, cross-cultural anthropo-
logical research (see Gilmore, 1990) also underlines the defensive and trau-
matic character of much male heterosexual desire. The compulsory production
of an exclusively heterosexual orientation in men appears to depend upon a
misogynous identification with (and suppression of desire for) the father as
well as a permanent and ongoing disavowal of femininity, associating it with
castration, lack, and loss. In the United States (as well as in other former slave
states and colonial powers, although each differently), this gendered forma-
tion is racialized, and race is gendered. In the social production of hege-
monic (white) masculinity, the fabrication of masculine identification
requires the relocation of repudiated desire onto others who are already fic-
tionalized (constructed as, for instance, stereotypes), that is, whose civic exis-
tence corresponds to their imagined and often sexualized existence in the
white male mind.
The political pedagogical project of this queer theorist in education involves
the ruination of hegemonic white male subjectivity, its regression to
positionalities and subjectivities closer to sites of maternal identification. What
we need today is a nation of mamas boys, men who have declined to repudiate
their maternal identification, men who preserve within themselves their sense of
difference, differentiation, relationality. Perhaps it is only through a conscious
embrace of a rejected maternal identification and the re-experience of homo-
erotic desire, a position of sexualized tension with (not sublimated resistance
to) the father, that the son can eschew the lure of Anglo-American patriar-
chy, of homosociality, of misogyny and racism, of power. An uncritical,
untheorized homosexual positionality is insufficient here. What is necessary
are men who understand and claim their fundamental allegiance and loyalty to
women, male subject positions that probably require a sexualized privileging
of anatomical sameness to avoid the idealization/subjugation of women, who,
especially for many straight men, have become abstract, objects, not
358 QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION
subjectivities in extricable relation to their own. Bersani (1995, p. 59) suggests
as much when he asserts that the privileging of sameness has, as its condition
of possibility, an indeterminate identity. Homosexual desire is desire for the
same fromthe perspective of a self already identified as different fromitself.
Here, then, is a structure of (white, male) subjectivity that supports differ-
ence within itself, not difference denied, repudiated, relocated, projected onto
those who then become others. Difference does not disappear, of course. But
the difference that remains is not a projected, imagined difference (women
as inferior, black men as rapists or, even, as absolute alterity in Levinas for-
mulation [2000]). The difference that remains is concrete, volunteered not as-
sumed, not imagined, difference which can be expressed and perceived and
appreciated by self-differentiated selves (or, in Bersanis phrase, indetermi-
nate identities), negotiating, through dialogical encounters, modalities of hor-
izontal relation to each other across democratized terrain of race, class, gender,
in historical time.
Queer theory makes clear that mens desire for men does not constitute
some third sex, a genetically based version of left-handedness, as some con-
temporary scientists fantasize. Nor does it have to do with the existence, as
nineteenth-century scientists were so sure, of a womans soul inside a mans
body. But within what might be called the available social field of desiring
subjects, the incorporation of womans otherness may be a major source of de-
siring material for male homosexuals (Bersani, 1995, p. 60). After Kaja
Silverman (1992), Bersani is suggesting here that mens conscious embrace of
the feminine may prove useful in reconfiguring hegemonic male sexuality,
reconfiguring a defensive, compensatory, racialized masculinity into . . . well,
something else. Certainly the intent of reconceptualizing mens sexuality is to
institute forms of masculine desire that do not eroticize displaced elements of
oneself, which then hegemonic men demand others to perform, in various
positionalities of subjugation, political versions of S & M.
My queer progressive dream narrates a reconfiguration of mens sexual
practices, mens psychic structures, and mens relations to women, children,
and to the othered men. If queerness means more than simply taking sexu-
ality into account in our political analyses, Bersani (1995, p. 73) writes, if it
means that modalities of desire are not only effects of social operations but are
at the core of our very imagination of the social and the political, then some-
thing has to be said about how erotic desire for the same might revolutionize
our understanding of how the human subject is, or might be, socially impli-
cated. What that revolution might be, what forms it might take, what its sig-
nificance might be for contemporary political and economic structuresfrom
democracy to capitalismis labor for another day; it is at this point where
some locate queer theorys weakness (see, for instance, Kirsch, 2001).
At present I am working to understand how hegemonic white subjectivity
comes to form in the shadow of the other (Benjamin, 1998). This work has
led me to the curse of Ham, arguably the founding and imprinting mo-
II. Reflections 359
ment of race in the Judaic and Christian imaginations. For manyincluding
for many slaveholders and racial segregationiststhe genesis of race (and,
for them, its implications of racial inferiority) is to be found in one line of that
canonical Christian text, the Bible: Genesis 9:24. It is a passage which locates
the origin of race in an apparently homosexual incestuous assault, a mythic
event that we might say reverberates for centuries, up through nineteenth-cen-
tury lynching, twentieth-century prison rape, and in American schools today
(Pinar 2001). It is a complex puzzle, but one which queer theory might help us
to solve.
REFERENCES
Benjamin, J. (1998). In the shadow of the other. New York: Routledge.
Bersani, L. (1995). Homos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boyarin, D. (1997). Unheroic conduct: The rise of heterosexuality and the invention of
the Jewish man. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Gilmore, D. (1990). Manhood in the making. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hocquenghem, G. (1978). Homosexual desire. London: Allison & Busby.
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduction. New York: New York University
Press.
Kirsch, M. H. (2001). Queer theory and social change. New York: Routledge.
Levinas, E. (2000). Alterity and transcendence. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Lewes, K. (1988). The psychoanalytic theory of male homosexuality. New York: New
American Library.
Pinar, W. F. (1983). Curriculum as gender text: Notes on reproduction, resistance, and
male-male relations. JCT, 5(1), 26-52. [Reprinted in Autobiography, politics, and
sexuality: Essays in curriculum theory 1972-1992, pp. 151-181, by W. F. Pinar,
1994, NewYork: Peter Lang. Reprinted in Queer theory in Education, pp. 221-243,
by W. F. Pinar, Ed.,1998, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.]
Pinar, W. F. (2001). The gender of racial politics and violence in America: Lynching,
prison rape and the crisis of masculinity. New York: Peter Lang.
Savran, D. (1998). Taking it a like a man: White masculinity, masochism, and contem-
porary American culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Silverman, K. (1992). Male subjectivity at the margins. New York & London:
Routledge.
Taubman, P. M. (1979). Gender and curriculum: Discourse and the politics of sexual-
ity. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, Rochester, New
York.
Wittig, M. (1992). The straight mind and other essays. Boston: Beacon Press.
360 QUEER THEORY AND COMMUNICATION