Schools and their classrooms operate within a larger social context (Lemke, 2000). In spite of the changes in the broader social context they remain unsettlingly rigid in their masculine, white, middle-class, heteronormative foundations. It is the latter point, heteronormativity, that this article takes up for discussion and to which Queer Theory is proposed as a mechanism through which to subvert the ‘norm’ of current pedagogical/curricular heteronormative processes. Specifically, I argue that Queer Theory calls attention to the heteronormative undercurrent of dietetic education and may evoke a political consciousness of teaching and learning among dietetic educators and students that disrupts heteronormativity. Moreover, I contend that transgressing the current constructs of pedagogy that remain informed by and complicit in maintaining heteronormativity within dietetics demands that as educators and students we “dare to know”—that we risk confronting privilege and oppression in our classrooms in light of the potentially unsettling insight that teaching and learning is an embodied and relational process that takes place in (hetero)sexualized spaces. The aim of this paper is to contemplate the intersection between heteronormativity in dietetic curriculum and an embodied, subjective development of identity. An analysis of heteronormativity in dietetic curriculum and the prospect of introducing Queer Theory as a means for “interrupting heteronormativity” delivers great potential for stimulating dialogue and debate around issues of diversity, difference, the role of bodies as vehicles of regulation and organization and the fluid nature of identity, sexuality and bodies.
Historical amnesia and its consequences: the need to build histories of practice
