queer geek theory

A meta-philosophy and some examples

As I entered the academic job market for the first time, the teaching philosophy seemed like the most daunting of the many documents I knew I would have to prepare. I fell hopelessly in love with teaching the first time I stood at the front of a classroom, in the DeCal class I created as an undergraduate exchange student at Berkeley in 2002. It was terrifying and exhilarating and felt like just where I needed to be. But a philosophy?

In my DeCal I taught C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, attempting to share the convergence of love and critique that I felt on returning to a childhood favorite as a politically conscious young adult horrified by Lewis’s representations of gender, race, and colonialism. My class in fact sparked a minor Berkeley tradition, as taking it gave two students the idea to begin BookWorlds, a group that has coordinated student-run classes on fantasy and science fiction ever since. Checking in on the BookWorlds classes over the years, I’ve occasionally been disturbed at how much more celebratory than my initial idea they are. But this also made me realize that my early effort, though it might not have encouraged the kinds of critiques I’d have liked it to, succeeded in what teaching does at its best. It set something in motion that the students could carry forward on their own terms, individually or collectively, transforming concepts and materials in directions a teacher could never predict.

Students who encounter me as a mature scholar and teacher are less likely to escape the critical cultural analysis of gender, sexuality, race, and capitalism that motivates my pedagogy. But their transformations remain their own. And it is that idea of transformation, I realized when I finally sat down to create the dreaded document, that links my research and teaching practice––and, in fact, my approach to many other aspects of life, art, and culture as well.

Some passages from the always-in-progress documentation of how and why I seek to teach:

Transformative learning theory focuses on education as a process of deep mental change, a development of pathways for critical analysis that can be emancipatory. Feminist, antiracist, and queer pedagogies insist that the classroom’s transformations of ways of thinking can, through critical processes of knowledge production and transmission, open onto larger transformations in the social and political world. Strong lines of connection run between amateur creators who transformatively remake media to highlight its faultlines, the political and social transformations imagined in science fiction and enacted by activist movements, and the transformative work of education itself. And the classroom can open spaces for personal and collective transformations well beyond the walls of the university. To teach in a way that does justice to that is the philosophy and the praxis to which I aspire.

My work on subcultural knowledge production and my engagement with Digital Media and Learning have shown me many transformations instigated by extra-institutional participatory learning, and I seek to bring that experience to bear on my university teaching. My students blog, make remixes, develop their assignments through a variety of online tools, and approach new concepts through writing speculative fiction––and I encourage them to draw on these modes of knowledge production to fuel more traditional essays and analyses. The playfulness of forms that students may be more used to encountering outside the classroom can energize their engagement with critical ideas, even while drawing attention to the in-built limitations and biases of the forms through which we think. Yet I would never wish to leave behind close reading, lecture to explicate a difficult concept and to spark off trains of thought in its listeners, or intense and screen-free discussion of the meanings and aesthetics of a text, word, image, or sound. All these are among the diverse forms of engagement that can open up course material’s transformative potential to students with a wide range of learning styles.

One of the student evaluation comments of which I am most proud describes my classroom as a site of “delightful uncomfortable conversations that forced us to unpack the ‘norms’ we so easily take for granted.” It would be too much to hope that every student would find every moment of discomfort, whether talking about race or gender or facing up to a difficult task, delightful. But I work to make sure that discomfort is productive and transformative rather than silencing, especially for students whose backgrounds, identities, or experiences make them less likely to be well served by traditional academic structures.

For a sample of my teaching, you can access the syllabus for my Spring 2011 literature and writing seminar in USC’s Thematic Option undergraduate honors program, Future Generations: Narratives of Reproductive Speculation. There is also a course blog. For this intimate seminar setting I chose to host the class blog at Dreamwidth so that students would have control over who could access their postings, so there are more posts than you will be able to see.

The student work produced in an open, creative assignment in this class was truly wonderful, ranging from dystopian fiction to original theatre. One student made this powerful remix music video , crafting an argument about the use of drugs to obfuscate the possibility of dissent in Brave New World, Children of Men, and the contemporary US. And this rage comic, which was submitted accompanied by a critical meditation on the reproduction of ideas in internet memes, is––at least for the meme-literate––a glorious testimony to the transformative power of encountering new ideas.

As part of my teaching portfolio, I have developed a range of syllabi (always works in progress, which is why I’m not linking) in cultural studies, intersectional queer, feminist, and critical race theory, digital media, speculative fiction, and more. I’m happy to share and discuss them on request––please email me if you’re interested.