READING STUDENTS AS QUEER: DISRUPTING (HETERO)NORMATIVITY FOR AN EQUITABLE FUTURE

David Ruffolo

University of Toronto, Canada

 

The vision of an equitable future inside and outside the academy is critically dependent on reworking what it means to assume a sense of “I” - an agency that is subjectively negotiated.  Reading students as queer uses queer theory to queer (hetero)normative “identity” practices in contemporary classrooms vis-à-vis identificatory practices and performative acts of classroom participants.  This paper works towards disrupting binary discourses of identity — discourses that prohibit the realization of identificatory fluidity and mobility amongst classroom participants.  In doing so, the individual becomes subject and identity becomes identification.  The paper draws on notions of queer theory, subjectivity, identification, performativity, embodiment, and psychoanalysis to disturb the isms (i.e., racism, classism, sexism, ableism) that circulate in and around the academy in order to disrupt normative practices and disturb coherent “identities.”  Reading students as queer supports subjective identifications that exceed normative ideologies and calls for all classroom participants[1], regardless of their positions as subjects, to embrace queer subjectivities that recognize and explore the mobility and fluidity of identifications — not fixed and stable identities — in order to stimulate social change and work towards a future that is equitable, not equal.[2]

Queer(ing ) Binary “Identity/ies”

            An equitable and democratic[3] future in the academy can be envisioned through the appreciation of queer practices in contemporary (hetero)normative classrooms: the reworking of “identity” conceptions of the self is a critical site of disturbance in this paper.[4]  The claiming, purchasing, and adopting of fixed, stable, and concrete identities is highly problematic in classrooms that are considered safe vis-à-vis false assertions of equality.  The complex intersections of sexualities, genders, sexes, social classes, ethnicities, and dis/abilities motivate queer theorists to work towards an equitable future where notions of safety in classrooms are challenged by exposing the interconnections amongst the various identities (or later, identifications) that classroom participants assume.

            In order to read students as queer, it is critical to expose the normative nature of (collective) identity politics.  The claiming of an identity (heterosexual/homosexual; masculine/feminine; black/white; male/female) by classroom participants is more than simply adopting a label.  Assuming an identity position, rather, is a subscription to pre-existing norms and dominant ideologies that continuously police the borders and boundaries that collectively determine and confine what it means to participate in an identity category.  Identity categories, whether they be of sex, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, social class, dis/ability etc., place individuals into collective groupings based on similarities of unity.[5]  For example, the identity category masculine is often reserved for those who are able and willing to purchase[6] that particular identity: heterosexual men.  The maintenance of identity categories exceeds conceptualizations of similarities.  In agreement with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), identities are (primarily) maintained through binary discursive practices where one identity is always subordinate — maintaining an “us” and “them” relationship.  Identities are upheld in binary discourses, where identity x is dependent on its (binary) unequal and subordinate Other y for its validation and existence.  The concern with identities, therefore, is embedded in dominant ideologies that support binary relations.  Binary conceptualizations of identity promote stability and immobility amongst classroom participants, where they are encouraged to continuously purchase and (re)produce identities that may or may not reflect their desires, his/her-stories, interests, inclinations, etc.  The adoption of binary identities discourages mobility across identities and places classroom participants into categories that will always exclude in their attempts to include: the binary relationship shared between x and y will always be unequal.

            The ongoing (re)productions of identities vis-à-vis the continuous purchasing of normative ideologies by individuals results in a dichotomy between majoritized and minoritized classroom participants.  The unequal and codependent relationship between binary identity categories promotes the values of the dominant group through the subordination of the Other (i.e., minoritized group).  Whiteness, for example, is not only an internal privileging that is reproduced amongst majoritarian classroom participants, but is also highly dependent on further othering the Other (i.e., non-white students) for its hierarchical status.  Diana Fuss (1991) is also concerned with binary conceptualizations of identity, where she exposes sexuality through a compulsory lens:

            For heterosexuality to achieve the status of the ‘compulsory,’ it must present itself as a practice governed by some internal necessity…[H]eterosexuality secures its self-identity and shores up its ontological boundaries by protecting itself from         what it sees as the continual predatory encroachments of its contaminated other, homosexuality.  (p. 2)

The subordination of minoritized classroom participants is upheld by the dominant discourses of majoritarian (i.e., privileged) classroom participants.  The continuous production and reproduction of dominant ideologies creates cohesions amongst identities that further minoritize the minoritized.  For example, the assumption is that claiming a “male” identity is also a purchasing of “masculine” and “heterosexual” signifiers.  The cohesion amongst fixed identities is what Judith Butler (1990) calls the “matrix of intelligibility” (p. 24).  According to Butler, the strong cohesion amongst particular binary categories supports majoritarian dominant ideologies and further subordinates the minoritized through privileging discourses.  Thus, the “universal subject” (white, able-bodied, heterosexual, masculine, male) becomes tightly knit through majoritarian discourses supported by binary relationships: the heterosexual matrix is “always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of universal rationality” (p. 13).  Consequently, the heterosexual matrix becomes increasingly difficult to disturb as dominant discourses continue to support cohesions amongst privileged identities.  It is this unity amongst identities that is upheld through binary ideologies that queer theory strategically and politically disrupts in order to explore identifications through the body.

Destabilizing “Identity” through the Body

            The body is the primary site that queer theorists use to queer — disturbing, disrupting, decentering, and destabilizing — dominant practices and assumptions that further minoritize the minoritized through binary conceptualizations of identity.  This paper suggests that it is through the body that classroom participants can engage in radical practices that work towards equitable and democratic spaces.  The fixed and stable nature of identities not only supports racial, gendered, sexual, ethnic etc. hierarchies, but also prohibits classroom participants from engaging in identificatory practices that are mobile and fluid — a concept discussed in the latter part of this paper.  Butler (1990) uses the body as a canvas to re-work conceptualizations of identity in order to move forward and explore identifications through performativity:

            [T]he body appears as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning for itself.  In either case, the body is figured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural meanings are only externally related.  (pp. 12-3)

Exposing the nakedness of the body as “instrument” or “medium” displaces the body from coherent and fixed correlations between individual and society.  In doing so, we embrace the subjectivity of the body and the ways the body subjectively works through culture, not by culture.  In Undoing Gender (2004), Butler interrogates the coherent relations amongst identities and explains how gender, for example, is a continuous reproduction with no origin:      

            [O]ne does not ‘do’ one’s gender alone.  One is always ‘doing’ with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary.  What I call my ‘own’ gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own.  But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author.  (p. 1)

The intersubjectivities that the body works through are the sites of identificatory practices that stimulate equitable differences amongst varying genders, social classes, sexualities, ethnicities, and abilities — an intersubjectivity that is outside of binary, dominant, and privileged discourses.

            In addition to exposing the minoritizing effects of binary conceptualizations of identity, it is critical to appreciate the incoherent, unstable, and mobile workings of the self in order to read our students as queer.  In problematizing the notion of identity, Britzman (1997) suggests that “there is more to identity than meets the eye, and individuals do not live their identity as hierarchies, as stereotypes, or in installments” (p. 184).  Rather, classroom participants can appreciate the “kaleidoscopic” intersections amongst the various identities they embody, for no identity “is automatic, authentic, easily assumed, or without negotiation and construction” (p. 186).[7]  In agreement with Britzman, all identities are “constantly being rearranged, stabilized, and undone by the complexities of lived experience, popular culture, and school knowledge and by the multiplicity and shifting histories of such social markers as gender, race, generation, nationality, physicality, and popular style.”  With the vision of reading students as queer, it is critical that classroom participants recognize the subjective nature of “identities” and, consequently, can disturb and rework what it means to have a self outside of dominant ideologies (i.e., collective identity categories).  Classroom participants, therefore, regardless of their un/privileged status in classrooms, can use the political workings of queer theory to explore the subjectivity of selves through identificatory practices.[8]

Queer(ing) Theory

            The vision of reading students as queer through the appreciation of queer practices in classroom spaces can be highly political and equitably strategic.  Although the conception of queer theory was embedded in discourses of gender and sexuality (Turner, 2000), queer theory can (now) be used as a critical tool to disturb all normative practices through the various isms that circulate in the academy: classism, racism, genderism, ableism, sexism, nationalism, etc.  Turner’s references to Butler, Lauretis, and Sedgwick encourage us to explore “what symbolic and institutional practices contribute to our sense of ourselves as selves, and how th[e]se practices both enable and constrain us” (p. 8).  The notion of “identity” is problematic for queer theorists as it is embedded in normative discourses that claim safety through its fixed and stable signification — it is this safety and stability that motivates minoritization and subjugation through binary relations.  Consequently, it is the aspiration of queer theory to disrupt normative practices in order to expose the subjective identifications that make the self: “Queer Theory proposes to think identities in terms that place as a problem the production of normalcy, and in terms that confound the intelligibility of the apparatuses that produce identity as repetition” (Britzman, 1998, p. 52).  Britzman calls for psychoanalytic reading practices in Queer Pedagogy and its Strange Techniques and recognizes that there are no stable or fixed selves; thus, there are no “normal” identities: 

            My interest is in thinking of reading practices as possibly unhinging the normal    from the self in order to prepare the self to encounter its own conditions of   alterity: reading practices as an imaginary site for multiplying alternative forms of identifications and pleasures not so closely affixed to – but nonetheless   transforming – what one imagines their identity imperatives to be.  (p. 56)

Through the recognition of multiple selves vis-à-vis identifications, classroom participants can engage in radical practices that subvert dominant ideologies and challenge the isms that further minoritize the minoritized.  However, in agreement with Fuss (1989), “we must nonetheless resist attempts to replace identities with something else, especially with a ‘new identity’” (p. 104).  The vision of reading students as queer is not a project that works towards the creation of “new” identities, but is a project that reworks existing identities in order to appreciate and explore subjective (queer) identifications that are mobile and fluid — identifications that are equitable. 

         [Q]ueer is very much a category in the process of formation.  It is not simply that queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather that its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.     (Jagose, 1996, p. 1)

Queer, therefore, can be considered a noun, a verb, and an adjective: reading students as “queer” is not to be considered a new identity, but rather, an entry point into the process of identifications that disturb, disrupt, and decenter normative practices and assumptions.

 

From Identity to (Queer) Subject

            The vision of equitable spaces in the academy is dependent on the appreciation of queer theory by classroom participants.  Alongside the adoption of queer theory in classrooms, reading students as queer recognizes the subjectivity of classroom participants: individuals with identities (now) become subjects through culture.       

            Subjects are always already inscribed by culture even before they are born…queer theory attempts to re-construct the subject in ways that avoid the trappings of identity.  Queer theory teaches that identity is a cultural construction.  Students and teachers construct their identities in complex ways since they are always already immersed in culture.  (Morris, 2000, p. 17)

Recognizing classroom participants as subjects through culture embraces the visions of queer theory, where normalizing identities and normative practices are decentered and disturbed through the realization of intersubjectivities amongst participants.  Morris exposes the normalizing practices in classrooms that are supported by (hetero)normative ideologies: “Schooling tends to produce squashed selves because many teachers and school administrators already have preconceived notions about who kids are, or who they should become when they grow up” (p. 19).  The continuous (re)production of majoritizing ideologies that further minoritize the minoritized is highly problematic when creating spaces for classroom participants to embrace their subjectivity through identificatory practices.  The dominant ideologies that claim to be inclusive result in the exclusion of others through binary relations.  Thus, through the recognition of classroom participants as subjects, where there are ongoing intersubjectivities at work, there are no “insiders” or “outsiders” — all classroom participants are continuously working alongside as subjects through identification.[9]  The movement from “identity” to “identification” is a queer project that works through performativity.  Reading students as queer, therefore, strategically and radically uses performativity to disrupt “identity” practices so as to expose identificatory practices that can stimulate social change in the academy through its commitment to differences and not similarities.  The mobile and fluid identifications of queer subjectivities, as exposed through performativity, create spaces to explore social action as an undeterminable and intangible possibility — a radical possibility that can be realized through reading students as queer.   

Queer(ing) Identification

            Reading students as queer is founded in the subjectivity of queer classroom participants.  The replacement of individual with subject/ivity creates new spaces for equity through identificatory practices.   The subjectivation — the process of becoming a subject — of classroom participants disturbs (hetero)normative practices that uphold binary ideologies, where the subject is transparent, blurred, and broadened vis-à-vis identificatory practices through culture.  Subjectivity, therefore, is (re)produced through ongoing discursive negotiations amongst classroom participants: discourse, as a result, allows the subject to emerge, while the subject is also subjected to discourse itself.  The unconscious engagements with identifications are upheld through the subjective discursive negotiations that are continuously at work in classrooms.  As such, classroom subjects no longer subscribe to fixed, stable, and concrete collective identities.  Rather, they participate in ongoing identifications that are (re)produced and (re)worked.  Identifications have no real stability or origin: they are continuously laminated over and over again to make a subject. 

            In perhaps its simplest formulation, identification is the detour through the other that defines a self.  This detour through the other follows no predetermined developmental path, nor does it travel outside history and culture.  Identification names the entry of history and culture into the subject, a subject that must bear the traces of each and every encounter with the external world.  Identification is, from the beginning, a question of relation, of self to other, subject to object, inside to outside.  (Fuss, 1995, pp. 2-3)

Fuss, in Identification Papers, suggests that it is through identificatory practices that notions of identity can be disturbed: since identification is “a process defined as the internalization of the other” (p. 4 ), identities, as a result, become disturbed through the ongoing identificatory negotiations that are continuously at work — identifications are produced through the other, not by the other.  Therefore, identifications are never fully owned or adopted.  They are reworked the moment subjects engage in identificatory practices.  Consequently, identities — stable, fixed, and concrete associations — can never be formed as a result of identificatory negotiations as “[i]dentifications are mobile, elastic and volatile” (p. 8).  In other words, multiple negotiations of identifications do not provide the subject with a stable framework to re/enter a conception of the self as an “identity.”  Furthermore, the interactions of identifications with identities create spaces to renegotiate conceptions of the self where identifications and identities are reworked the moment they intersect. Queer subjectivities, therefore, recognize that all classroom participants, regardless of their race, sexuality, sex, gender, class (etc.) are implicated.  If social class, ethnicities, sexualities, and dis/abilities are explored and disrupted in the academy, it is critical that classroom participants: i) appreciate the complex workings of queer theory; ii) embrace subjective identifications; iii) recognize (un)privileged positions and normative implications; and iv) renegotiate queer subjective identifications.[10] 

Queer(ing) Performativity

            The notion of performativity is critical to the vision of reading students as queer.  Performativity recognizes that knowledge is not fixed, but is a process — a becoming.  Rather than exploring the isms through “inner/outer,” “interior/exterior,” or “majoritized/minoritized,” performativity articulates the intersections of these binary associations: the “other” is always within. 

            Performativity, as Butler understands it, is the pre-condition of the subject, the discursive vehicle through which ontological effects are produced.  There is not first an ‘I’ who performs, rather, the ‘I’ is constituted in and through performative processes…the self is constituted in and through action rather than being the origin and cause of action.  (Sullivan, 2003, p. 89)

In reference to Butler, performativity: i) is not just a one-time performance; ii) depends on repetition of norms that precede the performer; and iii) depends on what is not able to be performed and what is not intelligible.  The constitution of the subject (i.e., the queer classroom participant), therefore, is a series of acts — performatives.  There is no pre-existing performer prior to the act: the subject is not behind, nor before actions.  The actions that are performed in classrooms, and the identifications that classroom participants engage with, are what constitute the queer subject — a subjectivity that is outside of dominant discourses that further privilege the privileged and further minoritize the minoritized.  In referencing Phillip Brian Harper, in his analysis of Gender Trouble and Paris Is Burning, Sullivan states that “performance could be thought of as a kind of theatrical production, whereas Butler’s notion of performativity should be understood as a mode of discursive production” (p. 89).  Although performative acts are a “reiteration of a norm or a set of norms” (Butler, 1993, pp. 12-3), it is the process of reworking and renegotiating identifications that queer subjects can disturb normative practices through performativity.[11]  Since performativity is the site where “norms” are reproduced through the unconscious, where the performative act is reworked the moment it is performed, it is this reproduction that should be disturbed.  Through the engagement of queer theory, performative acts have no choice but to rework dominant ideologies.  If classroom participants embrace queer theory and disturb normative identity categories, the performative acts that subjects perform will begin to reflect the identifications of subjects that exist outside of normative discourses.  Performativity, then, becomes a process that creates new spaces where subjects can engage in equitable practices that are committed to disturbing the isms that are upheld in binary ideologies.  Since “there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only, to repeat an earlier phrase, a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability” (p. 225), it is through these reworked reiterations that social change can be stimulated through queer subjects.  Therefore, since the “I” is always subjected to identificatory practices that are reproduced through performative acts, “[t]he task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat” (Butler, 1990, p. 189).

Embodying the Subjective Body

            The vision of reading students as queer explores the ways classroom participants can engage in radical practices that stimulate social change.  Reading students as queer should not neglect the dynamics that exist in contemporary classrooms: to “claim” queerness[12] in contemporary classrooms without recognizing and appreciating the materiality of the body would not only be radically ineffective, but would be prematurely resisted and challenged.

            It is critical that education in contemporary classrooms appreciate the intersections of the mind and the body when creating equitable spaces.  Reading students as queer embraces the relationship between the mind and the body while focusing on using the body as a site of curriculum.  Bodies in classrooms, however, can never be fully articulated as solid representations of the self: the relationship between bodies and minds are continuously re/negotiated through identificatory practices.  The ongoing intersections of the body and mind vis-à-vis identifications create a necessary relationship that is never stable or whole.  To neglect the body that assumes a space in the classroom is educational naïveté.  Morris (2003) calls for queer pedagogies that use the body as a site of curriculum:

            Do our pedagogies address body-to-body engendered, fleshy sexual sites of difference within the classroom, or ignore, tune out, channel surf, and avoid what is right there in front of the drama of education lived out in real time, with real life stories begging to differ, in-difference within-the-difference making-a-difference. (p. 189)

The body, alongside the mind, can be viewed as a canvas that is worked and reworked through performativity in order to appreciate the subjectivity of queer classroom participants: the mobility and fluidity of queer theoretical practices encourages the classroom participant to (dis)engage normative discourses in order to subvert them.  The body becomes a critical site of identificatory negotiation through its strategic positioning as a queer subject that radically reworks the “curriculum” of the self — the ways in which the self is re/produced as a subject. 

Intersecting Multiple “Identities” for (no) Diversity

            The efforts to create queerness in classrooms risk becoming normalized.  As with the disruption of identities, it is critical for all classroom participants to recognize the normative discourses that are continuously at work in culture.  More specifically, queer classroom participants should not simply reject normative ideologies, but rather, should be committed to exploring the complexities of (hetero)normativity in order to subvert it.  Kumashiro (2001) calls for classroom participants to recognize the various ways “identities” vis-à-vis the isms are interconnected: it is no coincidence that the “norm” of society is a white, middle-class, heterosexual, male.  Our attempts to disturb the isms that circulate in the academy should be a disturbance through the mind and body that recognizes the intersections of ethnicity, social class, sexuality, sex, gender, dis/ability etc.  To (simply) disturb “sexuality”, for example, is ineffective and naïve. 

            [I]n our commitment to change oppression and embrace differences, we often fail to account for the intersections of racism and heterosexism, and of racial and        sexual identities.  Ironically, our efforts to challenge one form of oppression often unintentionally contribute to other forms of oppression, and our efforts to embrace one form of difference often exclude and silence others.  (Kumashiro, 2001, p. 1)

Therefore, in agreement with Kumashiro, any educational project that works towards equity — including reading students as queer — should be committed to exposing the intersections amongst all the isms that further minoritize the minoritized and privilege the privileged.  In addition to interrogating the isms vis-à-vis the collective identity categories that “individuals” purchase, “we need to problematize the ways we already examine intersections, complicate how we already make sense of oppression and identity, [and] rethink our strategies for change” (p. 2).  The notion of diversity is outdated for diversity is often interpreted as an “adding [of] difference” (p. 10).  Continuing to add identities to the already exclusionary pot will not lead to an equitable future.  The vision of reading students as queer does not involve the creation of new identities.  The vision of this project, rather, troubles the notion of “identity” and displaces normative practices and assumptions through identificatory practices in order to appreciate a mobile and fluid sense of self.[13]  I concur with Kumashiro’s questioning of “diversity”:

            What if we acknowledge that we can never have full diversity?  What if we acknowledge that the practice of including more voices masks the real problem?  What if, in other words, we acknowledge that the ‘problem’ is not a lack of diversity, but a resistance to diversity (and an insistence on maintaining certain categories of privilege)?  (p. 11)

Therefore, reading students as queer is not an add-on in contemporary classrooms.  Instead, it is a project that is committed to exposing the various ways that classroom participants and culture are resistant to difference through the interrogation of “identity” assumptions that are maintained through the intersections of the various isms that circulate in and around the academy.

Queer(ing) Psychoanalytic Education

            The appreciation of queer theory, subjectivity, identification, performativity, and embodiment in contemporary classrooms is an overwhelming, yet critical project.  It is a project that is desperately needed in order to move forward and create equitable spaces that disturb intersecting isms that prohibit the creation of equitable (subjective) spaces.  The incorporation of these critical tools can be grounded in psychoanalytic educational practices.  I draw on Britzman’s (1998) Lost Subject, Contested Objects to expose the importance of incorporating psychoanalytic practices in contemporary classrooms. 

            Firstly, classroom participants can acknowledge that learning is not (always) conscious.  According to Britzman, classrooms are still concerned with “incremental knowledge,” as educational studies continue to assume “that learning proceeds by way of direct apprehension, that experience is always conscious experience, and that identity organizes political consciousness” (p. 4).  The unconscious becomes a vital site where identifications are (re)negotiated: since identifications are continuously (re)produced — as explored in the previous sections — learning, therefore, is always (re)produced through both the conscious and unconscious. 

            Secondly, classroom participants can acknowledge that learning is conflict and conflict is learning.  The idea that “education can be made from the proper teacher, the proper curriculum, or the proper pedagogy so that learning will be no problem to the actors involved” (p. 5) creates a false sense of classroom safety.  Education will always have conflict when recognizing the subjectivities of classroom participants, the ongoing identifications amongst students, and the intersections of isms that circulate in the classroom: the “conflicts” that exist in classrooms create unsafe spaces.[14]  However, classroom participants should embrace insecure spaces and expose the injustices in order to work towards an equitable future. 

            Thirdly, classroom participants can acknowledge that learning is never concrete or stable: learning is a continuous notion that reworks itself the moment it is engaged. 

            If learning is a relearning and hence an unlearning of old strategies (as opposed to a repetition of one’s own history of learning in the guise of new strategies), then the questions at stake in educational efforts are simultaneously those that can think the force of history within the force of learning. (p. 5)

As a result, learning can never be owned or mastered.  It is a process, much like identifications, that can never be fully absorbed for its interactions with those it encounters immediately modifies its meaning through subjective relations.  Therefore, education can be viewed along the same discourses as identification, where all classroom participants are implicated and involved in the process of creating and modifying knowledges.  Consequently, education can never be fully determined.  Education is always working and reworking at an (un)conscious level: it is never fixed, stable, and attainable.  Instead, education, like identification, is mobile and continuously at work.  It is through psychoanalytic educational practices that queer classroom participants can engage in identificatory practices that adopt notions of queer theory in order to work towards an equitable future.

The Future is Queer

            Reading students as queer is an equitable project that is committed to disturbing fixed, stable, and concrete identities that are upheld in binary discourses that prohibit the mobility and fluidity of identifications amongst classroom participants.  Classroom participants can embrace the subjective nature of the self through performative acts that rework and renegotiate what it means to assume a sense of “I.”  Through the process of identification vis-à-vis performative acts, queer classroom participants can disturb the isms that further privilege the privileged and further minoritize the minoritized.  Binary discourses will always exclude in their attempts to include.  Consequently, the rejection of binary ideologies through the appreciation of queer theory in contemporary classrooms creates new spaces outside of (hetero)normative practices and assumptions where an equitable future may be appreciated.  Reading students as queer is a project that intersects queer theory, subjectivity, identification, performativity, embodiment, and psychoanalysis in order to challenge and subvert dominant ideologies that prohibit equitable differences.  Queering the queerness of classroom participants is a queer thing to do: reading students as queer is the site for future equitable practices inside and outside the ivory tower.

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