Kevin K. Kumashiro

Publisher description: While several books have discussed the need for anti-oppressive school environments, few have addressed actual research for teachers to turn to as resources for classroom practice. Kumashiro draws on interviews with queer activists as a starting point for discussion of different models of reading and challenging oppression. It is through these personal stories that the complex theory and methodology Kumashiro presents gains particular relevance for creating actual pedagogical practice.

Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy

Troubling Education

Sophie Shrimpton

A problem of resistance, a curriculum of partiality and a pedagogy of crisis.

This book took a long time to read, primarily because it meant working through a series of crises. As I continued, and Kumashiro’s way of reading became familiar, I could move through it faster, but perhaps that was against the entire point. Perhaps I was not reading beyond enough. 

Kumashiro adopts a post-structuralist lens through which he examines how to experience anti-oppressive education. This involves resisting repetitious citations of familiar discourses through reading yourself into and through crisis. Reading involves acknowledging your partial knowledge, identities and ideologies and actively reading against or beyond them – not only reading similarity and difference in narratives but reading paradox and inconsistency. 

It is central to Kumashiro’s thinking that learning means learning things that are uncomfortable because they complicate your frame of thinking. A person must experience crisis in order to learn. Crisis allows a person to change their relationship with normalcy/Otherness. You can’t predict what will induce crisis in a person, therefore, you cannot control what a person learns from what you are “teaching” them. You must work with your student where they are, not where you think they are. You must put uncertainty at the centre of the learning process to address resistances to discomforting knowledges.

Resistance to contradiction in stories can reveal how the reader can desire only certain interpretations and resist others. We may try to read similarity into stories as we are comforted when people are like us, but discomforted when forced to see the Other as different but still equal. We must actively do “homework” – examining our investment in privilege, including our desire to be mainstream. 

I found the feminist critique of objectivity and detachment interesting. They argue bias from personal involvement is not the danger in research – the danger is the detachment that dehumanises the people being researched by denying them humane responses to their emotions, their desires, their insecurities and even their bodies. To not be personally involved is to ignore that personal involvement is the condition under which people come to know each other and to admit others into their lives. This has inspired more egalitarian research practices that reduce the power imbalance between researcher and participant and that acknowledges that the researcher can never be fully detached from or outside of the process. Activists take this further and actively intervene to work against oppression. Queer theorists critique the silences surrounding the researchers’ bodies and sexualities in research which privilege certain bodies and ways of embodying desires, knowledges and identities. 

Post-structuralism is often anti-science. Kumashiro identifies that science is a particular tradition founded in Western thought that can politically and materially benefit some populations more than others depending on what it asks, publicises and finds (or does not).

I liked the idea that writing can be representative (of who someone is) and performative (the process brings about difference in the writer). Writing that is normatively repetitive in content and structure is critiqued. 

“Homosociability and homosexuality are very close in social expression but rigidly differentiated in symbolic meaning and cultural acceptability” – Eve Segdwick. 

“In their quest to defy assimilation, diasporic groups often search for and embrace a sense of tradition, privileging certain cultural elements as their essential culture, the culture that has historically been “of” their group… what is problematic with [this] is that all culture, even in the “homelands”, change over time, and cultural traditions, norms and identities shift in meaning and practice from one era to another and from one place to another. Defining a tradition requires choosing and privileging only certain histories and cultural practices... Defining a tradition is less a process of discovery than it is of imagination and differentiating oneself from others… [this can] help to maintain forms of oppression… and… create new ones…” 

“… competing definitions of who is authentically any of these identities work to normalize those identities, regulate those who can conform, and exclude those who cannot or do not.”

Christopher, an African-American queer man, tells of how he is often used and tossed out “like a Glade Plug-in” by other men. Kumashiro identifies this cites the discourse of slavery - when he is no longer desired, he is gotten rid of “like property”. He is not worthy of loving relationships, he is merely a “treat”.

Kumashiro briefly covers two popular schools of reading historical texts, including the Bible. One is the “literal reading”, often used by Christian fundamentalists who assume the words have always carried the meanings, assumptions, implications and values that they currently carry in society. The other is a “historical-critical reading” which acknowledges that the meanings, assumptions, implications, and values of words change over time and vary from one social situation to the next. Therefore, understanding the Bible requires researching what the words, phrases, metaphors and so on likely meant to the people who wrote and translated it, and then specifying implications for us here and now. 

“I’m not a man born in a woman’s body, I’m a woman born in the wrong society.”

The story of Matthew Shepard hit me hard – not necessarily because of the brutality of the beating but because “there was not much blood on his face because, while tied to the fence post, as if being crucified, Matthew Shephard’s tears had washed away his blood.” The image suggests how alone Matthew Shephard must have been feeling in that moment, and how along many queer youth feel every day of their lives. 

“Perhaps one reason… that so many queer youth attempt and commit suicide is that long before the physical act of suicide, they are already dying, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.”

Activism should be multiple and paradoxical, to experience queerness in various and sometimes contradictory ways. It should also be ongoing, to change harmful identities, practices and social relations, or to prevent unharmful discourses from acquiring harmful associations.

One of the poems was a good reminder that not everyone wants to be an activist – they just want a “normal” life, to blend in, and be happy. Or they are overwhelmed with their own personal issues and have no time or energy.

“…each moment of reading [is] a highly situated moment in which readers read and respond differently than they do at other moments.”

“…by saying that I want them to learn or read like this, I am closing off the way that who they are can take my lessons or text in directions appropriate and unique to where they need to go.”

“… challenging oppression must constantly work against the ways that challenging oppression can paradoxically contribute to oppression.”

“… an ongoing encounter with heterosexism and homophobia can be experienced as a series of “deaths,” as when he was repeatedly lying to others, denying who he was, and “stabbing himself in the back”… each failure to challenge heterosexism and homophobia was a moment of crisis that, cumulatively, became a repetitive process that did indeed feel like dying.”

“[Queer activists] were giving traditionally chagrined acts (of same-gender kissing) new representations (of many people doing it at once), new contexts (in public during a political event), new social values (which insist that doing so is acceptable), new purposes (for activism, rather than for romance), and so forth.”

Kumashiro identifies four ways of approaching anti-oppressive education.
(1)	Education for the Other
Wants to improve the experiences of those who are Othered and oppressed. It is concerned with the external ways in which Otherness is marginalized - explicit harm from action and inaction. It is also concerned with assumptions about and expectations for the Other that influence how the Other is treated. 

It wants to address this oppression by creating general spaces that address the needs of the Other and providing separate spaces where the Other can go for support. 

While it acknowledges diversity, it ignores other aspects of oppression such as privileging of the “normal”. It assumes the Other is the problem because without the Other no one would be oppressed. It also needs to define the Other, which is difficult and problematic and often becomes a prescription of what the Other must be. It also assumes the needs of the Other can be accurately assessed by those in power. 

(2)	Education about the Other
Focuses on what people know and should know about the Other. There are two types of oppressive knowledge: knowledge only about what society defines as “normal” and normative (so Otherness only known by inference to the norm) and knowledge that encourages a distorted and misleading understanding of the Other based on stereotypes and myths. Incomplete knowledge of the Other is either incomplete because of exclusion, invisibility, and silence or distorted because of disparagement, denigration and marginalization. This is often taught through an “unofficial” education - indirectly, pervasively and unintentionally, which means it often carries more significance than any official education. 

It wants to address this oppression by integrating specific knowledge on the Other in education.

While it teaches all about different ways of being and attempts to normalise differences there are problems with this approach. Teaching about the Other could present a dominant narrative of their experience as being essential to the Other and it could position them as the “expert” which reinforces space between the norm and the Other. This goal is also based on modernist goals of full knowledge, seeking truth and finding utopia even though only partial knowledge is possible. 

Instead, students should be taught disruptive knowledge that shows the desire for final knowledge is itself problematic. Knowledge is treated as a means towards learning more, not as an end. 

Even if empathy is achieved it may just reinforce the binary of “us” and “them”. It does not remove the sense of self from a sense of normalcy and does not critique the processes by which the Other is differentiated from and subordinated to the norm. 

The roots of oppression do not reside solely in the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of individuals. This approach does not bring about structural and systemic change, redefine normalcy and disrupt oppressive processes. 

(3)	Education that is Critical of Privileging and Othering
Focuses on how some are Othered AND how some are privileged, and how this dual process is legitimised and maintained by social structures and competing ideologies. Schools are apparatuses that transmit ruling ideologies, maintain hegemony, and reproduce existing social order. They do this by privileging certain groups and identities while marginalizing others and legitimise this social order by couching it in the language of “normalcy” and “common sense”.

It wants to critique and transform oppression. This begins with developing a critical consciousness through learning about oppression and unlearning norms. Then, developing skills to enable effective plans of action.

While this enables knowledge-building and action, there are still numerous problems with this approach. The first is that claiming oppression is structural implies it has the same general effect on people which does not account for multiplicity of identity and particularity. Experiences with oppression has many contradictions. Different citations of discourses can gave different meanings to different contexts, and this fluidity cannot be explained by fixed structures. The second is the assumption knowledge and critique leads to personal action and societal transformation. Sometimes crisis can lead to paralysis and entrenched resistance. You cannot control how people react to knowledge – you must teach them to critique and look beyond so one hegemony doesn’t replace another. The third is that critical pedagogy endorses a modernist and rationalist approach that is harmful to marginalized students. It assumes reason leads to understanding even though rational detachment is a myth. 

(4)	Education that Changes Students and Society
Oppression is the repetition, throughout many levels of society, of harmful citational practices. Citations are changed over time through supplementation. Therefore, oppression is multiple, interconnected and ever-changing. 

It wants to alter citational practices through labouring to supplement harmful associations and constituting a reworked history. 

The context-specific and complex nature of oppression makes it hard to articulate a single strategy that works. A post-structural analysis of post-structuralism identifies that many more perspectives need to be brought to bear on the theory to complicate it. There are four concerns with education informed by post-structuralism – is it ethical to continuously lead people into crisis, are all experiences with crisis antioppressive, does crisis invade a person’s privacy and does all repetition constitute oppression while all resignifications constitute antioppressive change. 

Post-structuralism enables three ways of reading
(1)	Difference
How difference is read and has come to be defined
(2)	Normalcy
How privilege and normalcy is defined 
(3)	Intersections

Remember: “…as readers, we cannot be passive, we cannot be voyeuristic, and we cannot do only what feels comforting.”

Troubling Education Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy

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