Fear of Queer

“If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them after all one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can exist in the same physical atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another…Unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.”
(John Stuart Mill- On Liberty)

“We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment” (Lisa Delpit – The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in educating other people’s children).

Whether you agree or disagree with J.K. Rowling’s decision to ‘out’ Albus Dumbeldore, the late Headmaster of Hogwarts, and one of the most beloved characters from the children’s literary phenomenon and cultural marketing machine that is Harry Potter, the fact remains that she continues to make historical and courageous strides that few educators are capable of making. What Rowling, and the celebrity media circus around all things Potter, have done is interrupt our ‘normal’ unquestioning and uncritical state of being by challenging us to put our beliefs on hold and to think! Though literary and cultural critics point to the absence of explicit text in which the character himself confirms this disposition, there is also no evidence that Dumbeldore was straight. Rowling’s interruption then forces us to ask how and why is it that we automatically assumed that he must have been heterosexual?

Interruption is a common theme/meme in critiques of the privilege given to oppressive narratives in education and society that go by any number of “isms,” such as chauvinism, sexism, racism, nepotism, and elitism. The word ‘interruption’ derives from the Latin interruptus, inter – between and rumpere – to break. Literally, an interruption is a “breaking in between,” a speaking out of turn, a queering/querying of established and entrenched habits of thinking, speaking, doing, and being. Queer here does not represent the identities of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered; rather it marks work, like that of Rowling, Dumbeldore, Delpitt, Freire, Illich Butler, and many others, that refuses “the heterosexual bribe,” that is, the sociocultural rewards of power, prestige, and privilege offered to those who inscribe their behaviours, thinking, products, and performances within the range of normal heterosexual identities.

Dumbeldore’s ‘queerness’ is evident in the different ways that he directly challenges orthodox and oppressive conceptions of masculinity. In the realm of fashion, he flouts the standards of normative masculinity in his ‘gay’ attire. As a leader, his sensitivity, vulnerability, openness, respect, sense of justice and tolerance for the diversity of all creatures, both magical and Muggle, was often juxtaposed and in sharp contrast to the ignorant, intolerant, fearful, spiteful, hateful, cruel, unjust and abusive authority exhibited by characters like Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic or Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher, Dolores Umbridge. His characteristics speak to the embodiment of a standard of Holy humanity founded on the simple yet powerful ideal of Love for difference. A standard that those, like Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, seduced and corrupted in the pursuit of the heterosexual bribe, and psychologically crippled by prescriptive, restrictive and normative forms of masculinity, are incapable of ever fully appreciating or realising.

Schools are notoriously conservative and heteronormative. The (at the time) recent decision by the Jamaican Ministry of Education to advise schools not to adopt a textbook that advocated a wider definition of family, functions as an act of political erasure and silencing that perpetuates a belief that, as Gerald Unks, editor of the Gay Teen writes, “homosexuals do not exist. They are 'non-persons' in the finest Stalinist sense. They have fought no battles, held no offices, explored nowhere, written no literature, built nothing, invented nothing and solved no equations.” Among students, queer and faggot are often labels applied to boys who do not aggressively pursue the opposite sex or spend much of their time alone or studying in order to regulate behaviour. Impugning sexual orientation is a strong form of peer control exerted by adolescents of all ages from primary school to parliament. Such bullying ought to be seen as intolerable as using epithets like {insert racist, sexist, ableist slur here} to position an individual as less than human. Unfortunately it is not.

Betty Anne Blaine writing in the Jamaica Observer (06 Nov) expresses concern about a “marching brigade of homosexual activism” seeking to capitalise on reneged parental responsibilities. She is right in advocating for healthy and balanced discussion and dialogue and for teachers and parents to be better educated on the issues. This will require courage to suspend our belief systems temporarily and to listen to each other with reverence and open hearts and minds. A starting point is to acknowledge the existence and contributions of persons of “difference” within our academic disciplines and societies. This is the road already traveled by women, ethnic and religious minorities and the differently enabled. Though, I might add, with insufficient frequency in the majority of schools’ curricula.

In mathematics for example most learn (hopefully) about the role of binary codes in computers. Fewer have learnt that the device was made possible by the work of English mathematician, Alan Turing, who during World War II played a significant part in deciphering German Enigma messages. Even fewer yet will learn that Alan Turing was gay. He first became aware of his homosexuality during adolescence, and, during the postwar period, suffered the ignominy of having the details of his private life dissected in the press. Forced to undergo hormone treatments to ‘cure’ his homosexual urges, and suffering from relentless public exposure, the shy genius committed suicide at the age of 41. Turing’s case, while not unique, is one of the more tragic, depriving humanity of one of its most beautiful and brilliant minds.

Educators, activists and policy-shapers must also confront homophobic rhetoric courageously armed with credible and trustworthy evidence and research drawn from anthropological, biological, psychological, and sociological sources. For example, the argument that homosexuality is rare or anomalous in nature is called into question by the observation and documentation of same sex couplings in more than 450 different vertebrate species and countless invertebrate species. Joan Roughgarden, a transgendered professor of Biology at Stanford, who conducted the research, argues in Evolution’s Rainbow that sex is not only for passing on genes as every science student learns, rather using co-operative game theory she builds a case that sex is an important aspect of social co-operation and suggests that homosexuality is a feature of advanced animal communities. These and other models in the natural and social sciences attempt to explain why homosexuality as a ‘trait’ occurs and persists in natural populations.

Here in the Caribbean, confronting the consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, homophobia, and socially sanctioned sexual violence, we have interrupting work to do with our children and communities. Sexuality education, it is argued, must move beyond providing mere information about sex and become more involved in probing questions around the production of knowledge about sexuality. Unlike its coital counterpart, ‘curriculum interruptus’ is less concerned with preventing procreative potentialities, interrupting the continuity of life and dependent on patriarchal responsibilities that are often reneged upon in our Caribbean contexts, rather it is more concerned with re-establishing those obscured connections between those acts of disruption that have left individuals and groups with no connection to their futures, pasts or presents. Interrupting our sometimes corrupt and bankrupt visions of Curriculum may cause an eruption. Educators might consider structuring curriculum events that juxtapose ideas, identities, and experiences that are not normally associated with one another to create structures and occasions which facilitate a loosening of language/thinking, “to become more elastic, more able to collect new interpretations and announce new possibilities,” as this piece has attempted to do. Perhaps, by loosening the stranglehold of the singularity of sameness we may become freer to imagine and create newer, more just possibilities of what education and our societies might become.